H10N1 (8 page)

Sanchez gripped his arm. “Stop it! You can be mad at me all you want, but don’t take it out on these kids.”

She might as well have slapped him. But she was right. His skin was alive with gnawing anger. He wanted to just rip open his chest and crawl out. He wanted to scream at her and Bobby Ray and Lily. Most of all, he wanted to keep the demons in his head from taking back control.

Rick tried to concentrate on Bobby Ray, but his eyes kept drifting back to Lily’s belly.

The nerves in his palm betrayed him, bringing back the sensation of baby kicks through flesh. That rippling and bumping of a child growing inside that made his heart swell. Goddamit.

He pushed Sanchez toward her car.

“How soon can he walk?”

She shrugged. “Hard to say. I need to drain some fluid off the knee to see if its water or blood. That could relieve some of the pressure. But if he puts weight on it, the fluid will probably build up again.”

Crap! He had to get out of here before it all came crashing down on him.

“Give me your keys.”

Her eyebrows cocked like she hadn’t heard him right. She took a step back, her eyes juggling back and forth between his, like she was trying to get the joke.

“Give me the goddamn keys.”

What was he doing? This was insane.

Sanchez reached into her pocket and held them out. He couldn’t see under her mask, but he could tell from her eyes that she was smiling.

He snatched the keys away and dropped them into Lily’s lap. Then he got his map book from the van and sat down next to the girl, ignoring Sanchez when she hovered over his shoulder.

“There’s a colony on Cape Charles, just across the bay from Virginia Beach,” Rick explained. “Everyone there is healthy. They have food, medical facilities, a place to live.”

Sanchez jumped in, giving Lily and Bobby Ray instructions on delivering the baby if they didn’t get to the colony in time.

“Don’t lie down, squat,” she said. “Use gravity. It makes the pushing easier.”

Rick tried not to listen when she told Bobby Ray how to cut the cord and tie it off. “And make sure all of the placenta is delivered.” For a split second, Rick heard a woman cry, heard a doctor urging her to push.

Jumping to his feet, Rick ran to the Doc’s car. He hauled most of her supplies back to the van, leaving Bobby Ray and Lily a case of rations and water. The work eased his panic. And spared him from watching the Doc drain off Bobby Ray’s knee.

Rick twisted his stiff neck, flexed his clenched fingers. After a couple deep breaths, he felt back in control.

Sanchez gushed about how great it was that the fluid she sucked out was only water. Then she wrapped Bobby Ray’s knee, and Rick hefted him into the back of the SUV. Once he was settled, Sanchez asked if Rick thought they should give Bobby Ray a gun.

“Why? So someone can take it away and shoot him with it?”

Finally back in the van, all the tension Rick had been holding back spewed out. “What the hell were you thinking back there? Did you even stop to think it might be a set-up, like the crippled guy with crutches? That maybe the girl wasn’t even pregnant?”

Taeya lashed back. “Did she really look like she’d pull a gun on me? Or that Bobby Ray could wrestle me to the ground?”

“That’s not the point.”

“No, it isn’t. And what exactly is the point?” She twisted in her seat to face him. “You did a good thing. Why are you so embarrassed by that?”

“I’m not embarrassed.”

She choked on a laugh. “For a minute back there, I thought you were going to get all misty-eyed about that girl.”

Shit. The hamster wheel was squeaking in her head.

“Wait a minute.” She lowered her elbows onto her armrest. “You lost your girlfriend.”

“No.”

“Your wife. Was she pregnant?”

“No!”

Sanchez’ voice got all soft. “So you had a child. How old?”

“Shut up!”

Bam. Just like that, little Richie came toddling into the kitchen like he’d never left. “Dad—dy.”

His little arms shot straight into the air, waiting to be picked up and buckled in his high chair. “Feed me.”

Then, like a Chinese fire drill, all these other memories pushed to get out — the doctor gently laying his newborn son in Rick’s arms, Michelle sitting in that second-hand rocker, breast-feeding Richie, Rick standing in the doorway, leaning on the doorjamb for support, dizzy with love, little bitty tennis shoes, stinky diapers, the silky feel of baby hair on his cheek.

Sanchez reached over and touched Rick’s shoulder, and he realized he had slowed almost to a stop.

“Tell me,” she said.

His happy memories drowned in a tidal wave of rage. He squinted his eyes in anger. “Ever hear of Williamsport, Pennsylvania?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Williamsport. The name hit Taeya like a punch.

“Every summer,” Rick said, “kids gathered there to play their annual World Series Little League Championship. Four teams from the U.S. competed against teams from Canada, Japan, Latin America and Europe.”

Cupping her hands, Taeya pressed them to her lips. She never heard the name Williamsport without getting a nauseous roil in her stomach. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

“Yeah. Everyone was, the officials of the league, the city council, the state government, the feds. Hell, the bastard who wasn’t paying attention to the scumbags hanging around his airplanes even shot himself. Course, he had to before somebody else did. He’s the one who let those pricks fly the banners around the stadium during the tournament. Claimed he never saw the tanks of that shit.”

Lycoming County, the source of one of Taeya’s most frequent nightmares.

“Well, we were unfortunate enough to live in that town. My two-year-old son died in the first twenty-four hours.” Rick spoke between gritted teeth. “My wife survived three days.”

Sounds bombarded Taeya. Wailing mothers, hysterical children writhing in pain, angry confrontations, accusations, death threats, makeshift tents, biohazard suits, doctors and nurses screaming at each other.

Dear God, had she treated Rick’s wife or son? Had she taken the time to console the woman or had she rushed by, treating her like all the other faceless victims?

It was months before Taeya stopped smelling the stench of rotting flesh, decaying corpses. How many disinfecting showers had it taken before she felt safe again?

Rick eased up on the stranglehold he had on the steering wheel. “Well, screw it. It’s been so long, sometimes I can’t even remember his face.”

“I’m not over it yet,” she said without looking at him.

“You knew someone there?”

The fleeting thought that she might need her Beretta ran through her mind. “I was on the first team called in to investigate.”

Rick’s eyes widened. His lips pinched. Taeya’s hand edged toward the gun stuck in the pouch on the door. “It seems so obvious now,” she said. “But at the time, we just couldn’t figure out what was happening. We recognized the black skin lesions immediately. But then other symptoms occurred that weren’t consistent with anthrax. Some victims had blisters that looked like smallpox. Others got high fever and internal bleeding.” She sighed. Even the retelling of the story was exhausting. “Every time we thought we had a handle on what we were dealing with, another disease, with a longer incubation, popped up. We could hardly keep up, much less figure out why they were all occurring in Lycoming County.”

His jaw flexed and she watched the muscles in his arms twitch. Was he thinking of pulling over and putting her out?

She hurried on. “Then we discovered groups in other states—in other countries—with similar outbreaks. Someone finally found the tanks used to spray the toxic virus over the ball fields. The CDC discovered five different pathogens in the mix.”

Slowly, Rick leaned his head back against the headrest. He was too caught up in memories to fight.

“By that time,” she said, “it was too late.”

Televised broadcasts from around the world condemned the terrorist attack. Everyone voiced the same incredulity. Who would target children? It was months before the assault was linked to Al Qaeda.

There had been speculation in the past year that the North Koreans had used Williamsport as a model for their own pandemic. They’d learned that even a biologically enhanced virus could not be sufficiently spread from a single location. That’s why they’d gone global.

She braced herself for more lambasting from Rick. Why didn’t our government act sooner? What good was the CDC if they couldn’t stop an outbreak like Williamsport?

But Rick had nothing to say. He just drove with his dead eyes staring straight ahead.

Once Williamsport returned to some semblance of order, a memorial service was held for all who had died. In an act of pure cowardice, Taeya decided not to attend. Had Rick been there? Would he have been one of an angry mob just waiting to tear into her?

The only consolation to Williamsport was the assurance that after that disaster the CDC was ready for anything. What a joke. No one in the world had been prepared for this Korean flu.

Rick’s face lost the rigid lines of anger. His eyes showed no pain or sadness, his lips were still. She didn’t kid herself that perhaps he understood how hard she had tried, that he might absolve her of the guilt. He had merely learned how to block his emotions, just like she had.

But one thing she understood now—he hated her and he hated the CDC.

Why should he be different from anyone else? All over the world, people united against the CDC, the World Health Organization, any medical entity that had tried to arrest this current pandemic and failed. Cell phone towers shorted out from overload. Tweets spewed rumors 140 characters at a time. Blogs spread hysteria faster than the virus itself. In the end, the Internet crashed. According to one of the techs at the hospital, the problem was routers. They directed the flow of information traffic to the right address or destination, and they diverted data when a connection broke. But there was so much information traveling along the superhighway that the routers couldn’t redirect the data fast enough. Traffic backed up into jams so big that data was just electronically discarded.

It wasn’t overload that killed television. It was simply a lack of manpower. As cameramen, floor crews, and even on-air personalities succumbed to the virus, stations cut back on broadcast time, and eventually just faded to black. Underground radio stations grew popular, with anarchists spewing hate, like that shock jock in New York who incited the riot in Central Park. And the clown in Geneva who told listeners on his shortwave radio that he was going to the World Health Organization headquarters and set himself on fire. He became an instant cult hero. For what?

Rick drove on autopilot, going through the motions of zigzagging around the few cars on the highway. Sooner or later, Taeya believed, he would put her out. Hopefully, near a car with keys.

He passed a sign for the Skyline Parkway, and it seemed to snap him out of his preoccupation with the tragedy. He hit the brakes and backed up. She actually unbuckled her belt so he wouldn’t have to order her out of the van.

To her amazement, he turned onto the Parkway and kept on driving. A big brown road sign welcomed them to Shenandoah National Park. They were immersed in forest almost immediately. And she couldn’t help noticing there were absolutely no other cars on the scenic two-lane road. Was Rick going to put her out in the wilderness?

She reached for the map book he’d reviewed with Lily, and looked up Virginia. The Skyline Parkway wove down the state, linking up with the Blue Ridge Parkway in Waynesboro. She followed the line on the map to the southern border and had to flip to North Carolina. The Blue Ridge Parkway went all the way to Asheville.

Taeya hated to admit that Rick’s plan was brilliant. The military had limited resources, so if they decided to pursue him to recover their van, they would probably concentrate on major highways. Who would think of searching a scenic parkway along the top of a mountain range?

She wanted to compliment Rick on his strategy, but he was busy compartmentalizing his grief into manageable sections. She remembered how much effort that took.

When Randall was killed, she learned how to divide and conquer all those feelings. Rage was simple enough. She let it out whenever she felt frustration. She snapped at co-workers, she turned a deaf ear to patients who whined too much, she beat herself up for letting Randall get into that van. She even delivered elaborate tirades to his ghost for his stupidity. After a while, she just got weary from the rage and it went away.

Loneliness wasn’t that difficult either. Before Randall came into her life, she’d always been on her own.

But the pain, the memories—those were the toughest. They’d come at you from out of nowhere. She’d be standing in line to buy a bagel, and suddenly Randall would pop up, complaining that people didn’t wash their hands before they handled food. Or she’d see a silver-haired man up ahead, and catch herself walking faster, trying to catch up.

Memories hurt the most, and they were the hardest to contain. It took determination to tuck them deep down, and vigilance to keep them there. Rick’s memories had gotten loose, and he was fighting a terrific battle to get them back in their cages. She left him to his task.

They’d been riding along in silence when Taeya saw an old stone tunnel through what was called Mary’s Rock. Rick pulled up to the opening and stopped. The clearance marker read twelve feet, eight inches.

“How high is the van?” she asked.

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Twelve feet, four inches.”

She knew the clearance was for the top of the arched tunnel; the sides were lower. Could Rick squeeze through the middle? Probably not. She shot a glance in her rearview mirror to see where he could back up.

“We’re not turning around,” he snapped.

As he eased closer to the tunnel entrance, Taeya held her breath, waiting to hear the crunch when the van hit the rock arch. Rick rolled down his window, then opened his door and made a point of sticking a gun in his belt before stepping onto the open windowsill to get a closer look.