Scourge - A Medical Thriller (The Plague Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  “After resting for a bit, we ran the data. The results were… not anything I expected. The biopsies showed infection in every area of the body we tested, anywhere touched by blood. The virus spread throughout the whole body and assimilated into the cells. We ran antibody tests, viral antigen detection tests, and a viral RNA test. The antibody test tells us a ballpark range of how old an infection is.” Samantha swallowed. “We estimated that Eric had been infected for nearly eight months, about the length of time that had elapsed since the T-zero event, and Ryan not too long after that. But we still couldn’t identify the virus itself. It simply didn’t resemble anything we’d seen before.

  “ ‘Luther,’ I said, as we stood over the terminal staring at the results on the monitor, ‘could you do me a favor and test me for the virus, please?’ He stared at me for a while in silence, and then nodded and went to retrieve the equipment. Once Luther had taken my blood, he hurried back to run the test and I was left with the assistant in the lobby. He was a younger guy, maybe twenties, and looked uncomfortable. ‘You don’t need to stay,’ I said.

  “He couldn’t look me in the eyes and kept glancing between the floor and me. ‘I just… I have to…’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’ The assistant rushed out of the lobby, and I was left alone, staring out the windows onto the street. I sat that way for a long time, but I don’t know if it was minutes or hours. Time didn’t seem to have the same meaning to me just then.

  “Cars could sometimes be seen on the streets, but they were rare. So when I heard the engine, I was curious, and the stress of waiting for the test results, anything that could take my mind off it for a moment, was welcome. I went to the window and stared down into the street. A sedan sped by and then veered to the right as people swarmed into the street. The car attempted to get around them, and then it just decided it would push through them. The car had slowed down enough that it didn’t generate enough force to plow through the crowd, though. One of the bodies got stuck in its passenger-side wheel well, forcing the car to skid to a stop.

  “I don’t know why I watched what happened next—morbid curiosity, I guess. Maybe just that the possibility that I was infected made me want to see, really see, what I had to look forward to. I don’t know. But I watched.

  “The crowd rocked the car for a while, tipping it nearly to the side. The strength they had amazed me. But they couldn’t punch or kick, which is what they needed to break through the windows. Inside, I saw a couple. A man and a woman. They were screaming, helpless, like flies caught in a flytrap.

  “Finally, one of the crowd broke through the back window. Just… forced himself through, pushing with his head against the glass. The screaming grew louder as the infected crawled over the backseat and bit into the neck of the woman, coming away with a chunk of flesh and sinew. The man opened the door and tried to run. He got maybe two steps before they took him down. I couldn’t see what they did to him, but the screaming stopped. The woman in the passenger seat now had several infected on top of her. The only thing I could see was her leg, shifting around like it was bobbing in water.

  “When they were through, the infected wandered around. It seemed random, purposeless. They would run into each other but never attack. Somehow they recognized one another.

  “ ‘Sam?’ I turned to see Luther standing behind me with his arms folded. He wasn’t looking me in the eyes, and I just knew. Without him saying a single word, I knew… I was infected.

  5

  A breeze blew over the roof and Mitchell leaned back in his seat, farther away from Samantha. He didn’t speak for a long time, but neither did she. They both sat while the breeze whipped their hair, pushing a few pieces of debris off the roof.

  “So you’re saying,” Mitchell finally said, “that um… I mean, you’re infected?”

  Samantha nodded.

  “Am I at… I mean, am I…”

  “Chances are, Dr. Southworth, that you’ve been infected for months without knowing it. I wouldn’t worry about catching it from me.” Sam paused. “When I found out, with Luther standing there behind me, my first thought was of Jessica. Had I inadvertently infected her? Had I ended her young life without even knowing it? I’ve been in love, I’ve had friends, found purpose in my life… but she hasn’t experienced anything. The thought of her dying so young filled me with anxiety and sadness, and all I could do was sit down in one of the chairs in the lobby. ‘Luther, we need to test Jessica, too. And you should probably get tested as well.’

  “He sat down next to me and said, ‘I ran Jessica’s blood while you were down here. She’s infected, too. But I’m not.’

  “ ‘Then you need to leave right now, Luther. As quickly as you can. The next plane.’

  He grinned, his elbows on his knees as he leaned forward. ‘And where would I go? Where could I go that those… things won’t be? Iceland? Antarctica? You think I’m going to die freezing my ass off on an iceberg just to buy myself a few more years of misery? No, I’m staying. And we’re gonna find a cure.’ He said cure, not vaccine. Maybe someone else wouldn’t have caught that, but I knew what it meant. It meant he thought I was going to die. A vaccine is preventive. A cure is postinfection. I was dying, and Luther had just told me that he was going to risk himself to help save my life and the life of the little girl that had come to mean so much to me.

  “ ‘I can’t let you do that,’ I said. ‘You have to save yourself.’ He looked at me in a way that said, What the hell are you talking about? Then realization about something splashed across his face. ‘You don’t know, do you?’

  “ ‘Know what?’ He stood and held out his hand. I took it and he helped me up. It would of course have been customary to let go as he led me down the hall, but the warmth of human touch is… well, it’s something that you need more than you think you do. We held hands as we walked to the front desk in the lobby and Luther pulled up some grainy video that he had downloaded onto his laptop. ‘This is LAX, about two weeks ago.’

  The video showed a plane that had just finished boarding and was getting ready for takeoff. The tarmac appeared clear, but the passenger walkway still attached the plane to the terminal. The plane yanked away, tearing the walkway from the building. Bodies spilled out of the walkway. The infected poured into the plane. The ones that couldn’t make it because the plane pulled away jumped inside, hanging by their hands, clawing their way in. It was difficult to make out what was happening in the cockpit from the angle of the camera, but the pilots were frantically shouting into their radios. One of them rose and got a gun out of a box just as the door broke down. The infected rushed in, jumping on them both like ants over a bit of food. The man with the gun got off two shots, both into the chest of one of the infected, and it didn’t do anything. He still rushed forward as though nothing had happened.

  “Luther opened another file. ‘This is Paris, about a week ago.’ The video was a stadium of people. They huddled together, some of them with rifles or pistols, others clustered together in groups, vacant stares in their eyes. The scene seemed to be a calm one until the steel doors to the stadium burst open and the infected dashed in, the roar of the screams from both predator and prey forcing nothing but a high-pitched static sound to come through the speakers. The scene was… I can’t even describe it. One man was sprinting, and one of the infected grabbed him from behind. It scalped him, ripping the entire top of his head away just like that. A young girl was torn apart in front of her parents. The father ran back to help and was decapitated when several of the infected bit down into his throat and worked their way through. Never in my life did I ever think I would see anything like that.

  “ ‘And this is Tokyo,’ Luther said. Another video, a crowded subway. People ran and screamed, someone recording on their phone as a mob of infected howled and chased them from car to car. When they reached the last car, the infected swarmed inside, and the video died. ‘This is Mecca,’ he said, opening another.

  “ ‘I’ve seen enough,’ I whispered. ‘How was this kept hi
dden? Where were these reports when—’

  Luther interrupted and said, ‘Reports? There’s no reports. The government and companies that own the media don’t want this stuff out. They want you to think they’re in control. If people felt they’d lost control, everyone would rely on themselves. The government would lose authority. They want to keep that authority for as long as possible but… I mean, you saw it.’

  I stared at the still image of an infected. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I asked.

  “He replied, ‘I thought you knew.’

  “I should’ve known. The world fell apart, and I’d had my head in a lab. Partly, it was done on purpose. I couldn’t handle all the negative reports. I couldn’t handle the death and the blood. So I told myself that the best way to focus was to cut myself off from it all and just concentrate on what I actually could influence, the development of a vaccine.

  “Just then, screaming came from outside. We both looked back. They’d seen us. A group of infected were sprinting for the CDC building. The doors were locked, but they were just glass. Several of them screamed from the moment they began running until the moment they slammed into the doors.

  “I jumped to my feet and ran down to the lower levels and my office. Luther ran right behind me, stopping only once to break the glass in an emergency case that contained an axe and a fire extinguisher. He ripped off the axe and caught up to me. Jessica was asleep. I grabbed her shoes and immediately pulled them onto her feet. ‘What’s going on?’ she said, sleep still in her eyes.

  “As I lifted her, I said, ‘We’re leaving.’

  “Only two exits were built into the CDC building: the front parking lot where we had parked, but where our car was now overrun, and the back exit that connected to an underground lot for use by the top administrators. ‘There’s a parking garage on the lower level,’ I blurted as we ran down the hall. Just below us a couple of floors, you could hear the screaming and the thuds from destruction of furniture, windows, and equipment. The screaming was the worst part, high pitched and nonstop, as if they didn’t need to pause for breath.

  “A loud crash echoed in the halls, and I knew they’d stormed the stairwell and gotten through the door onto our floor. I hit the button to call the elevator, and we couldn’t do anything but wait. Jessica clung to me, and Luther gripped the axe so tightly I thought he might break the handle. We knew they were close from the screaming. A door flew open down a long hall, and I saw them flood the corridor. Many of them had died in a hospital and wore hospital gowns, but some had blood-soaked normal clothing: suits and jeans and workout clothes. Some were nude, and those were the worst. Their skin pale as morgue lights, missing breasts or genitals or hunks of flesh, covered with bullet holes or stab wounds or the charred flesh that said they’d made it through a fire.

  “I hit the elevator button again and again. Luther searched the corridor for somewhere else to hide, another office. He found one, but I knew the door wouldn’t hold. The elevator was the only way. I didn’t even hear the ding over the screaming, but I saw the doors open, and we leapt on. I pressed the button for the bottom floor.

  “Those five seconds as we waited for the elevator doors to close was the worst five seconds of my life. I saw their faces, the blood that poured from their mouths and eyes, and the wounds that wouldn’t heal. I looked into those black eyes, sunken back into their heads, and I knew that humanity might not survive this, that maybe Luther had been right, this was Armageddon.

  “One leapt, screaming. It landed a foot away and Luther swung with the axe, splitting its head in two. Blood spattered over the hallway, over Luther’s clothing and face. He pulled back just as the doors began to close. He couldn’t catch his breath, and his hands trembled so much the axe fell from his fingers. Lifting them in front of his face, he watched as the blood dripped down over his palms. ‘We have to wash that off,’ I said. Luther seemingly couldn’t move or speak; his eyes were as wide as golf balls.

  “The elevator stopped on the bottom floor and opened. I stepped out, Jessica still clinging to me. Quiet and dusty, the parking garage hadn’t seen anyone in a long time. No one parked there anymore. I don’t know why. I think it was something about being in confined spaces with other people. A hallway on the south end had another set of elevators, a drinking fountain, and bathrooms. We rushed over, Luther still unable to say anything. I pushed through the door and pulled him over to the sink. After turning the faucet on, I shoved his hands underneath and began wetting paper towels and scrubbing the blood off his face. I took off his jacket, which was spattered with blood, and tossed it on the floor.

  “ ‘I killed him,’ he muttered, his hands still trembling. ‘I… I killed him, Sam. I killed someone.’ I ignored him, focusing instead on cleaning off all the blood. Jessica stood away from us, and I motioned with my head for her to stand even farther back. I thought, I don’t want her to get infected, and then a deep sadness filled me when I remembered. ‘I killed him, Sam. I killed…’

  “I lifted Luther’s face with both hands, ensuring our eyes locked, and said, ‘He was already dead.’ This seemed to calm him, and I finished getting the blood off. When we were through, bloodied paper towels and pink, frothy water coated the sink. The three of us stood there, unable to move, listening to the sound of our breaths. Luther, powerless to hold the emotion back, leaned against the sink, his hand over his eyes, and wept. I placed my hand on his shoulder and allowed him to finish. Jessica folded her arms and stood against the wall, her eyes on the linoleum. Luther finally stopped and looked up. ‘You must think I’m such a pussy.’

  “The phrase, for whatever reason, maybe just to have a release, made me chuckle. ‘Well, a twelve-year-old girl went through the same thing and isn’t crying.’

  “Luther laughed, nodding his head as he used a dry paper towel to wipe the last of the moisture off his face. He said, ‘Whoever did this, whoever made this, they needed to start with live Variola.’

  “I nodded. I’d run through this analysis a long time ago. ‘There are only two places in the world to get it,’ I said. ‘Here, in the BS4, and a BS4 laboratory in Siberia where the Soviet Union held their stock.’

  “ ‘Could someone have gotten into the stock here?’

  “I shook my head. While anything was possible, the thought of someone stealing poxvirus from the CDC was insane, so unlikely as to be impossible. ‘No way,’ I said. ‘It’s locked in a steel crate, wrapped with heavy chains, and has two padlocks the size of my head. Only a few people even know about it, much less have the key. And the location changed every week. We had fifty-two different locations we’d cycle through, and only maybe five people knew where it was at any given time. Four of those people are dead. I’m the fifth.’

  “Luther tossed the used paper towel into the garbage. ‘Then it had to have come from Russia. Sam… whoever released this, unless they were suicidal, must’ve prepared for it. They had to have engineered a vaccine and a cure. They’d be insane not to. Otherwise they were signing their death warrants, too.’

  “ ‘There’s plenty of people who would kill themselves to bring about the end of the world.’

  “Luther shook his head and said, ‘Yeah, but not every one of those people would have the money, the knowledge, the facilities, or the patience to engineer a virus like this. This had to be a nation. And if it was a nation, they developed a vaccine and a cure. They wouldn’t condemn their own people to this.’

  “His reasoning was sound except for one thing: human beings weren’t rational, not all the time. That’s why economics could never be a real science. The fundamental basis of all economics is that people act in their rational self-interest. That’s why economists can’t predict anything. They don’t realize how much we really are ruled by emotions. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I disagree. I think they would risk it.’

  “He stood up and walked to the door, peeking outside. ‘We have to try,’ he said.

  “The possibilities of what to do next were limited. I had thought the
best course would be to hide out in my house or maybe somewhere with sunshine. Spend my last days in a place near the ocean where I could watch the surf and lie under a blue sky. But then I looked at Jessica. I saw her youth and the terror in her eyes. She didn’t want to die. She didn’t think it was a way to bypass the horror the world was about to face. For her, the only thing left was to fight. So for her, I had to fight, too. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘We’ll go to the lab.’ ”

  6

  Samantha waited a beat, lost in thought, before continuing. “Sneaking out of the parking garage wasn’t difficult. All the infected were up in the parking lot outside or in the building itself. Under cover of darkness, we ran up the ramp into the open street and then down the sidewalk. Our car was gone, but we thought we might be able to convince a military patrol to give us a ride to the airport.

  “The streets had an eerie calm to them, or maybe they appeared calm because of the chaos we’d just seen. You could hear every piece of trash flutter in the breeze, every cricket, every plane that drifted by overhead, and there were a lot of planes, both military and civilian.

  “As I watched Jessica, I considered telling her about our infection—that the virus was dormant inside us but that when it was triggered, it would turn us into one of those… things. I knew she would want me to—she’d want the truth—but I just couldn’t do it. So little of her childhood remained that I didn’t want to take anything that was left by telling her that, so I didn’t tell her. I didn’t even discuss it with Luther. I didn’t ask him how long the antibody test indicated I’d been infected. In South America, during the initial outbreak, I dealt with a canister that I believed at the time had released the smallpox virus. The canister later showed no Variola. But as we walked down the darkened streets, I knew then what had been in the canister: the real plague, the one meant to bring the world to its knees. That left the question of why I hadn’t displayed symptoms yet but Eric and Ryan had. I wondered if I had received a more docile and slow-moving version of the virus, one that took years to incubate rather than months. And that made me wonder which form Jessica had.