Pestilence: A Medical Thriller Read online

  The dog was sizing him up but had determined he was not a threat. Howie saw it in his eyes. He grabbed the knife and pulled it out, holding it tightly.

  He turned and sprinted as barking filled the air, along with a cacophony of snarls, growls, and paws running on hardwood floors. Howie dashed into the kitchen, where gleaming pots and pans hung from the ceiling over an island cabinet. He jumped onto the island as the dog lunged for him and bit into his shoe, ripping it off.

  Howie climbed up while the dog was trying to take a piece of him, leaping into the air and snapping in front of his face. He stood up as the dog got both front legs up onto the island, but it was too large to pull himself up.

  Howie swiped down with the blade, and the dog yelped as the knife cut across its nose. But it only served to enrage him. It jumped again, and Howie screamed as it got over the island and fell into him with all its weight. He flew backward, hitting his head on a cupboard as he landed on the floor with a crash and several pots and pans fell over the island.

  The dog bit into his arm, and he screamed. With his other arm, he thrust the knife as hard as he could into the dog’s neck. But it didn’t let go. He thrust again, and again, and again. The blood sprayed over the kitchen as if it were being shot from a hose, and Howie kept thinking to himself that he couldn’t believe how much blood was coming out of this animal.

  Finally, after coating the kitchen in blood, the dog stopped moving. But its teeth were embedded into his arm, and he couldn’t pull away. He was out of breath and had to lie there, with the weight of the animal on top of him. When he had caught his breath, he reached into the dog’s mouth and lifted its upper jaw, which crinkled like paper. Pulling his arm out, he rolled the dog over and lay there another moment, staring at the ceiling and panting.

  I could leave right now. Nevada wasn’t too far. The trip might take him a few days, depending on what kind of transportation he had, but he could do it. Jessica didn’t want him near her anyway. She’d chosen to live with her mother and only came around when she was forced.

  He took a deep breath, and stood. She’s my daughter, he thought. She’s my daughter.

  As he was leaving the house, he noticed a small rack in the kitchen, containing several sets of keys. He took them all and ran around, checking doors until he came to the garage. Five cars filled the space. He opened the garage’s exterior door and walked to the car at the end: a yellow Ferrari that would stand out far too much. Next to that was a black Mercedes. He stood and admired it a moment before climbing in, then quietly pulled out of the garage, keeping the lights off, and drove down the street at a snail’s pace.

  22

  The medical station was a few long metal trailers set up in rows in the middle of a Walmart parking lot. A few jeeps and Humvees were nearby, as were several groups of men in military uniforms.

  Sam watched them closely. They were laughing and joking, and one of them had a cigarette dangling from his mouth. She watched the dim red glow as it rose and lowered. This was a conquering army celebrating its victory.

  The guardsman got out with them and led them to the trailer at the center, the largest one. She didn’t see a door anywhere, but another guard opened one from the inside to let them in.

  Inside were several scientific workstations, complete with computers, microscopes, and MRI and CAT scan machines. Just behind the six employees at their stations was a clear glass wall that overlooked what appeared to be a surgical room with one hospital bed. The room was clean tile and shining chrome, and it looked untouched.

  “Samantha?”

  She turned to see Lt. General Clyde Olsen walk over to them. He was in full uniform and had grown a mustache that was speckled with gray. He smiled and put out his hand.

  She shook it.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same thing.”

  He smirked. “I think you know. I read your CDC reports on the incident in Oahu.”

  “How did you get access to the CDC reports?”

  “Come on, what do you think all this technology is for? Playing video games? Now what are you doing out here? I didn’t authorize the CDC to come out.”

  “She’s with me,” Duncan said. “Dr. Duncan Adams, General. I’m with USAMRIID.”

  “Well, what exactly are you doing here?”

  “Research, General.”

  “On what?”

  “On the effects of Agent X on a civilian population. And the development of a possible vaccine.”

  “We have Agent X contained.”

  Duncan glanced at the surgical room. “It doesn’t work that way. You can’t contain something like this. It’ll get out, and you’ll need me to try and come up with a vaccine.”

  “Really?” He folded his arms. “You think you can come up with a vaccine?”

  “I can try.”

  The lieutenant held Duncan’s gaze a moment and then said, “Well, I guess we can use all the help we can get. Let me show you what we have.”

  He turned to one of the stations, and Sam and Duncan followed him. Numbers and a map of the state were up on the screen. Various swaths of the map were colored yellow, and red pinpoints marked other areas.

  “Those red markers are known cases of viral infection,” the general said. “We’ve got eighty-nine of them right now. All contained in quarantine. I sent several men to each location, and they’re ensuring that the pathogen doesn’t spread. The yellow is possible areas of infection, should one of the infected get out. Those are the areas where we’ve conducted our operation, containing the citizens so the infection can’t spread. You can see that eighty of those eighty-nine are in southern California, so that’s where we’ve focused.”

  “What about the rest of the state?” Sam asked.

  “They’re contained in their own way. All highways leading out of the state have been closed off, no planes or buses. Nothing. The only way someone can make it out of here is by sneaking through the desert, and we’ve got roving patrols and choppers for that.”

  Duncan shook his head. “Because that works so well on the Mexican border?”

  The general didn’t respond and instead pressed a button, bringing up an image of a young boy in a bed. The bedsheets and his hospital gown were stained black, and he appeared to have been burnt. But Sam had seen that condition enough to know that it wasn’t a burn. The boy was hemorrhaging underneath his skin.

  “Eighty-nine cameras feed into these trailers right here,” he said. “We have someone watching all the infected, twenty-four, seven. As well as the men I have stationed there. No one in or out.”

  Sam stood silently for a long time as Duncan leaned close to the screen, observing the boy.

  “This is monstrous,” she said.

  The general nodded. “It’s… a trade-off. That’s for sure. And no patchouli-smelling hippie was more against it than I was. But I have to follow orders.”

  “And what happens if someone tries to leave the state?” Duncan asked.

  “They’ll be arrested.”

  “Really?” Sam said. “A bunch of young soldiers are going to risk infection of the worst disease we’ve ever seen to stop a person from leaving? They’re going to shoot them, Clyde.”

  “Only if they don’t lie down and do what they’re told. This is the American military, not the Visigoths.”

  “How did this happen?” Duncan finally asked.

  “Someone from your little island in the Pacific got to the mainland. Three of them actually. Two of them died. One was alive for twenty-seven hours before she was…” He looked from one to the other. “Before she was eliminated. In those twenty-seven hours, she infected one other person, which led to this. Luckily, all of the original patients went immediately to the hospital as they’d heard about the symptoms, so we got them quarantined early.”

  She glanced at the boy on the screen. His eyes were halfway open as he slipped in and out of consciousness. “There is no way this agent was contained.”
<
br />   “Why not?”

  “I saw it destroy Hawaii in less than three days. It’s so contagious, just breathing the same air as an infected person could cause inhalation of the virus. I’ve never seen that. Not even with Ebola.”

  Olsen glanced at them both. “We’ve been developing something that could help us. It’s almost ready for use, we think.”

  “What is it?” Duncan said.

  “A vaccine.”

  23

  Katherine Helmond sat in the driver’s seat of her Audi at a red light and glanced at the other cars around her. One was full of twenty-something boys, who smiled at her and motioned for her to roll down the window. She turned and faced forward.

  “Roll it down,” Ian said.

  “Why?”

  “They’ve enough balls to flirt with someone with another man in the car. Let’s see what they say.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  Ian reached across her, leaning his arm against her chest, and his touch sent an icy chill down her spine as the window slowly withdrew into the door.

  “Hey,” one of the boys shouted, “why don’t you come hop in with us?”

  “Go ahead,” Ian said.

  “What d’ya mean?”

  “Go get in with them.”

  She glanced at the men, and they were staring awkwardly at her, like adolescent boys who had never seen a girl before. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m telling you to get into the car with them. Go ahead. I won’t stop you.”

  She glanced from him to the car and back.

  “Better hurry before the light turns,” he said.

  She hesitated only a moment before opening the door and stepping out. The boy who had been speaking cheered, and his two friends were laughing. She glanced back at Ian, who was grinning calmly.

  She ran over and jumped into the backseat. As the car pulled away, the boy in the passenger seat flipped Ian off and said, “What’s up, nerd.”

  Katherine glanced back at her Audi. The car wasn’t moving, and Ian was still sitting in the passenger seat. She turned forward, and the boy in the passenger turned around and said, “What’s your name, sugar?”

  “Don’t slow down,” she said. “Keep going.”

  “We’re heading to a party down in West Hol’. You down?”

  She scanned behind her. The Audi wasn’t there.

  Katherine saw only the headlights as they veered out of a side street, barreling toward the car she was in. She barely got out a scream before the Audi impacted against the sedan and sent it spinning into the intersection. Another car came from the other lane, blaring its horn as it tried to swerve, and clipped the sedan. The boy in the passenger seat flew out the window, his legs twisting unnaturally as his body squeezed through the small opening.

  When the motion had stopped, her head hurt from hitting the roof. The boy next to her lay on top of her, unconscious, his head dribbling blood down over his face. She pushed him off, feeling pain in her wrists as she did so. The driver was groaning, and the flesh on the side of his head was exposed, spraying blood.

  Her door opened and she stepped out, dizzy and with blood in her eyes. Someone grabbed her wrist, but she was too disoriented to scream. Only vague images filled her line of sight. Two people were shouting, and the spit from a silenced pistol followed, and then silence. She was forced into the driver’s seat of an unfamiliar car, and someone sat next to her.

  “You okay?” Ian asked.

  “No.”

  “Let me drive.”

  She switched seats, still unsure where she was and what she was doing. Only motion and unclear pictures and colors were in her world, and she laid her head back and went to sleep.

  When she woke, Katherine was in a hospital bed. The sheets were rough against her sensitive skin, and the lighting was too bright. She closed her eyes tightly, then rolled to the side and reopened them. A chubby nurse with blond hair was checking her IV.

  “Where am I?”

  The nurse smiled at her and came to the side of her bed. “You’re in Good Samaritan. How are you feeling?”

  “My head hurts.”

  She adjusted something and pressed a button. “That should help. Do you remember what happened?”

  “I remember a car hitting us… not much else. Somebody in the seat next to me.”

  “It was probably your brother. He left for a bit but said he would be back.”

  “My brother?”

  Images flooded her mind. She remembered a woman’s neck breaking, someone shot to death at his door… and a man who laughed at all of it.

  “You have to call the police,” she said, panic rising in her voice. “I was kidnapped.”

  “Kidnapped by who, dear?”

  “That man who said he was my brother. He kidnapped me. He was the one that caused the car wreck. Please, you have to call the police.” She grabbed the nurse’s hand. “Please. Please!”

  “Okay, sweetheart. Okay, calm down. I’ll call them, okay? You just sit tight. Okay? Can you do that for me?”

  “Don’t leave me alone,” she said, nearly bursting into tears.

  “Sweetheart, there’s twenty people right outside this room. He’s not going to do anything. We’re going to take you down for your MRI in a minute anyway.”

  “Please don’t leave.”

  “Okay, hold on. Hold on.” The nurse lifted the pager strapped to her shoulder. “Amanda, you there?”

  24

  Howie drove so slowly, he wouldn’t have been surprised if someone jogged past him. The streets were empty. The trucks and Humvees were using just the highways. But the choppers were always overhead, like vultures scavenging for a meal. Whenever lights flickered in the sky, he would pull to the curb and duck across the seats until the lights moved on.

  Howie grew discouraged, knowing that Malibu was forty-two miles away and that the only way to get there was the Pacific Coast Highway. How was he going to dodge choppers on the PCH?

  As he drove, he observed the empty houses, and a creeping feeling of melancholy and dread overtook him. It had taken so little to tear apart his entire world. The government had just decided to act, and he would never be the same. The most frightening part was imagining how far the government was going with this. Was the entire state shut down? Had they closed the whole country?

  A chopper angled overhead, and he pulled into a driveway, parked, and turned off the car. The chopper banked left, sending the light down around him and flooding the car before disappearing over the tops of the trees. He didn’t move for a long time. As he sat back up, he realized getting to Malibu like this was impossible. At this rate, he would need at least a day, and he certainly didn’t want to be driving during daylight.

  As he was debating what to do, something caught his attention—the outline of headlights. He ducked again, and a rattling engine rolled past him a bit, then stopped. He looked up over the door. A military jeep was parked in front of a house a few doors down. The brake lights were on, illuminating the darkness around the jeep with a bright red. They shut off, and a single uniformed man stepped out.

  He glanced around slowly, all through the neighborhood. Then he turned to the house and went inside through the front door.

  A few minutes later, he came out carrying a suitcase. He stuffed it in the back of the jeep and then went inside and came out maybe five minutes later with armfuls of electronics and silver.

  When the man went back inside, Howie sat up. He saw himself in the rearview mirror and took a deep breath. He thought of Jessica and about the day she was born. The sound she made, her first sound, had never left him. He heard it in his dreams, and sometimes when he was newly divorced and living in an empty house, he swore he heard it in the house.

  Nighttime was harder, and he remembered when she would run to him when he got home and say, “I missed you, Daddy.” He couldn’t remember the last time she’d called him Daddy.

  He closed his eyes, then opened the door.

  Th
e night air was warm and still. For the first time he could remember, Los Angeles was quiet. The only noise was the sound of chopper blades, but they were far off.

  Howie walked quickly to the front door and heard someone throwing drawers on the floor. He peeked inside and didn’t see anything, so he took a few steps in. Another drawer crashed somewhere, and he followed the sound to where the man was standing in the kitchen, sifting through a cabinet that held various mementos and crystal.

  Howie swallowed hard. The man’s back was to him, and he was oblivious of everything around him. He assumed he was alone and didn’t think twice about it. Howie glanced about… and spotted a rolling pin hanging on a hook. A golden thread strung through one end looped around the hook. He grabbed it and pulled it off.

  Taking a deep breath, he stepped forward.

  Only five feet or so separated him and the soldier. He was close enough to see the small hairs on the man’s neck. He took another step, his foot coming down softly on the linoleum as he gently shifted his weight and brought his other leg in front of him. Sweat was dripping down his forehead into his eyes, but he didn’t wipe it away.

  The man was glaring at a silver bowl. He was about to toss it when he felt something and glanced back.

  Their eyes met, but neither of them moved. They were like two men who shared a secret, and neither wanted to be the first to acknowledge that it existed.

  The man’s eyes went down to the rolling pin, and Howie’s did, too. A grown man holding a rolling pin appeared so ridiculous, so cartoonish that he thought the soldier might burst out laughing. But he didn’t. He stared at the rolling pin and then up to Howie.

  The men stood there for what seemed like a long time, but was surely no more than a few seconds. The soldier reached for the pistol in a holster at his hip.

  “No!” Howie shouted.

  But it was too late. The pistol was coming out. Howie swung with all his strength and knocked the other man on the side of the head. He thought it would be like in the movies—a hard thump, like a baseball bat knocking against wood. Instead, the man’s head was soft. And the blow was more like a fist hitting a melon, and he thought he could feel the side of the man’s skull crack.