No Easy Way Out (36 page)

R
yan had long since left the room and yet Mike still held the gun out to where his head had once been. Mike was trembling; his jaw was locked in a snarl.

“He’s gone,” Marco said, eager to forget Ryan’s existence. “Screw him. I’ll be your wingman.”

Mike remained frozen for a few seconds longer. Then he mimed firing the gun. “Bang.” He turned to Marco. Sweat ran in rivulets down his forehead and his eyes were bloodshot. He looked like he hadn’t slept in months. He looked like he and Marco were on the same page.

“We’re thinking of starting a revolution,” Marco said. “I think you could be of some help with that.”

“The senator and her security assholes killed Drew,” Mike growled. “They’ve taken everything.”

Marco needed Mike, or whatever was left of Mike, to focus. “Sure,” he said. “But if you want to beat the senator, we need to take out her eyes and ears. Which means taking out the mall offices.”

One of the flamethrower girls joined the pow-wow. “But we just want to stop them spreading this new flu, right?” she said. “Shouldn’t we go to the med center?”

“They will stop you dead in your tracks,” Marco said, “because they can see you coming. There are cameras covering every inch of the mall. We take out the cameras, we can move without fear of Big Brother.”

Mike clapped a hand on Marco’s shoulder. “I like it. How do we knock them out?”

Marco figured they could just walk in the front door of the mall offices and take out anyone standing in their way. The hallway was short and narrow enough that they could cover the whole thing from the front door, then neutralize anyone in the adjoining rooms as they moved toward the senator.

“We could snag her as a hostage,” Mike said, sounding excited. “Those doctors will have to give us the virus if we have her.”

“See how it’s all coming together?” Marco replied, hefting Shay’s coat. Everything was coming up chaos.

Mike pulled a black ski mask from his pocket and dragged it over his skull. “Let’s move.”

• • •

Marco had determined that a shock-and-awe entrance to the battlefield would best serve their purposes. Thus, Heath hefted a chair through the glass reception window of the mall offices, crawled in, and buzzed open the door. Much to everyone’s surprise, the offices were devoid of people.

“What the hell?” a girl observed.

“Interesting,” Marco mused. Something strange was going on indeed.

He told Mike to cover him as he broke into the monitoring room for the closed-circuit camera system. There was no one in there either. But from that room, they could see the entire mall. There were few people save security in any of the monitored areas of the mall; teams of security seemed to be moving up the escalators toward the third floor; but the most intriguing activity was at the other end of the mall, at the HomeMart.

“They’re done abandoning ship,” Marco said, pointing to the relevant screen. On it was pictured the closed-over front of the HomeMart. “They’ve taken the residents two by two and locked themselves in an ark.”

Mike spat at the screen. “If they’re not here, then they’re not watching. I say we take out the med center.”

Marco pointed to a blinking red light. “Remote access. They must have set up a link inside the HomeMart.”

“Then unlink it,” Mike commanded.

“Why would I know how to do that?” he said.

“So what, then?” Mike was completely relying upon him. It was a delicious feeling.

“We even the playing field.” Marco walked out of the room. “If we can’t see them, then they shouldn’t be able to see us either.”

• • •

They’d divided into two teams. Marco took Heath and one girl, Kaylee, with him on his mission to the parking level. He handed them little strap-on camping headlamps when they reached the door marked
ELECTRICAL
.

“Won’t there be a light?” Kaylee asked.

“Not for long.”

The electrical transformer wasn’t in a cage like the HVAC system. It just sat in a room, four fat cubes with little yellow warning signs depicting a hand and a bolt of electricity. Wires came out the top and ran up the wall and across the ceiling.

“What do we do?” Heath asked.

Marco opened the door on one of the cubes, revealing the curved casing of the transformer. “Take the bat off your back and get to it,” he said, pointing at the thing. Marco had selected these two in particular because they had wooden bats strapped to their backs.

Heath stared at Marco for a second, a dubious expression on his face, then shrugged and unsheathed his bat.

“This one’s for Drew!” he shouted.

The two of them whaled on the thing for a couple of seconds with no result.

“The lights are still on,” Kaylee remarked.

Marco flipped up the collar to his coat and took the hockey stick from his back. “Keep hitting it until they no longer are.”

The three of them took aim at different parts of the thing, but no amount of abuse led to even a shuddering of the lightbulb. More drastic efforts were needed. Kaylee had a climbing ax hanging from her belt.

“Might I borrow this?” he asked, pointing to the weapon.

She unhooked it and passed it to Marco. There were gloves in the coat’s pockets, which Marco slipped on to protect his hands, then he took aim at the center of the nearest cylinder and drove the spike into the transformer’s side.

The explosion knocked Marco across the room. Kaylee was thrown into the adjacent transformer. Sparks flashed. She screamed, then didn’t—her body fell to the floor. The lights flickered, then blinked out.

A headlamp flashed in Marco’s eyes. Marco saw Heath’s lips move, heard the word “Marco” all thick like they were under water. Heath grabbed Marco’s leg and began dragging him from the room. Marco noticed his arm was on fire. Panicked, he unbuttoned the charred leather coat and let it slip from him. It sunk in that without the coat, he’d have been fried.
Like Kaylee.

Once in the parking garage, Marco kicked his foot loose from Heath’s grasp.

“I can walk,” he rasped. He stripped what remained of the leather gloves from his hands.

“Then let’s get the hell out of here,” Heath said.

As they ran between the cars, headlamp beams bouncing before them, they heard sizzles, saw flashes of light—their lamps bouncing off shattered windshields. But the world was dark now. Marco enjoyed the black.

D
octor Stephen Chen lugged a crate of paper files closer to his worktable in the back of the second-floor stockroom of Harry’s department store. Every time he picked anything up, he was reminded of the foolishness that got him, one of the world’s experts in influenza epidemics, trapped in an outbreak.
Help carry in a box,
one of the FEMA guys had ordered in those last hours before the lockdown. A single box. One of the godforsaken patients had attacked him as he was leaving the PaperClips and ripped his hazmat suit, exposing him to the virus and thus forcing him to be included in the quarantine. Now he was one of his own statistics. The flu was not without a sense of irony.

He was grateful for the little shrine of candles one particularly religious family had left to honor their dead relation. Because of them, he didn’t have to work in the dark. He was close now, he knew it. He looked over the charts once more. The pattern was in there.

Somewhere outside, a person yowled in pain. It was strange having to deal with real people. He hadn’t had a live patient in a decade. As an epidemiologist, he was an expert in computer modeling, calculating the spread of a disease, analyzing how a particular strain of the virus worked to kill a population. Not since residency had he worked with this many actual living, breathing patients.

He was currently examining the charts for those dying or dead from this novel influenza strain. There were some strange anomalies, beyond the obvious only-killing-the-strongest/healthiest/youngest. For example, there were kids who carried dying friends in, kids who’d been completely exposed, and yet they showed no symptoms. What did they have that the others didn’t?

His laptop had a few hours worth of battery—if he conserved it, he was sure he could work out what connected them all.

“I found a lantern,” Rachel said, appearing in the stockroom. Dr. Rachel Kleinman was the only other doctor in the mall. Statistically, this was improbable. Dr. Chen wrote the anomaly off by assuming that the other doctors had all died. After looking at the vast mounds of corpses on the ice above him, it did not take much of a leap to assume such things.

“We should move anyone with a chance of survival back here,” Steve said. “The dark is only going to exacerbate the chaos.”

Dr. Kleinman nodded. “I’ll get Leslie and Jazmine to help.” They were the remaining two nurses. Ms. Ross had ordered him and all healthy staff to abandon the medical center. Rachel and the two nurses wouldn’t leave the patients. Steve himself had stayed to finish his research.

Influenza was a terrible, yet fascinating foe. It was one thing the first time you met it, and something completely different the next. It liked to mutate, was almost designed to do so. Every time it replicated in a cell, there was a slight mutation in the antigens on the surface of the virion. But it was bizarre for the virus to have changed so radically in so short a time. It was almost as if a new strain of the flu had been introduced—from where, though, could it have come?

Steve had become fascinated with the flu early on in his career. He’d been shocked to learn that more people died from the Spanish flu than in all of World War I. In America, whole towns were wiped out; children died in their homes because there was no one alive left to care for them, every adult having been taken by the virus. Carts rolled through the streets of cities collecting corpses piled in the gutters and on the porches of houses. Ordinances were passed forbidding such things as handshaking; and schools, churches, stores, and theaters were closed to try to prevent the spread of the disease. He couldn’t believe he’d never been taught about this pandemic before med school. How could this not be in the consciousness of every American?

Jazmine and Leslie rolled in the first two beds.

“Got some kids who just crawled in,” Leslie remarked, parking the first gurney. “They’re alive at least.”

“I’ll take a look,” Steve said.
When I’m finished.

The initial strain of what had been termed the Stonecliff flu appeared to be some hybrid of an avian flu that was extremely infectious. Steve had hypothesized that the terrorists had infected a sick pig with bird flu, and somehow cooked up a disease with the virulence of the H5N1 avian flu and the transmutability of H1N1 swine flu. A potent and deadly combination if there was one.

In those first days, they’d thrown everything but the kitchen sink at those infected. Vaccination didn’t work to protect people, and antivirals proved useless, as usual. The CDC had ordered him to abandon the willy-nilly disbursement of the drugs for fear of wasting stores when the nation was on the verge of a pandemic. Somehow the senator had finagled a few crates for them, but Steve hadn’t bothered prescribing them. Why throw good medicine after bad?

He flipped through the initial intake forms for everyone in the mall. After Mr. Ross had input all the raw data, he freely parted with the hard copies; for all his work on computers, Steve liked paper. Now that there was no electricity, this peccadillo proved useful.

At some point, everyone had been asked whether they had gotten the flu vaccine. Those who were vaccinated had a
V
marked beside their names. Steve cross-referenced the answers on the paper intake forms with the names of the sick kids. All were unvaccinated. He checked the names of the healthy kids who’d brought in their sick friends. They’d all reported getting a flu shot.

Could it be that, however the flu had mutated, the strain that was currently making its way through the population was in some critical way similar to one of the strains in this year’s flu vaccine? If so, these kids were dying from a very different virus than what had been injected into the air by the bomb. And if that was true, might there be some chance that the antivirals would at least slow the rampage of this incarnation of the disease?

Dr. Chen figured that it might be worth a try. At this point, what was there to lose?

He dug around in the corner where they’d been storing supplies they weren’t using and found a crate marked
TAMIFLU
. He flipped open the plastic top and grabbed a package of the oral suspension dose. The two beds contained girls, one older than the other. Steve recognized the older girl.
Dixit?
Her grandmother had died. She’d fainted in his arms.

He would try her first.

“Miss Dixit?” he said, pulling on gloves.

She groaned.

He took a syringe of the oral suspension with the dose for an adult—she was close enough. He shook her shoulder. “Miss Dixit, I need you to wake up.”

The girl rolled her head toward him. She was pale and her breathing was labored. Her skin was burning hot. She coughed, then opened her eyes, which were bloodshot. He hoped he wasn’t too late.

“I’m going to give you some medicine.”

She blinked. He took that as consent.

He slipped the plastic cylinder into her mouth and pressed the plunger. She swallowed, then drifted back into the haze of her fever. Dr. Chen dosed the other girl, and then each of the other patients as they were rolled into the stockroom.

Rachel pushed in a gurney carrying an older patient. Dr. Chen waved the old man past.

Rachel raised her eyebrows. “We only trying to save the young?”

Steve shrugged. “He has the original flu. If he’s going to die, he’s going to die. Why waste the medicine?”

Rachel nodded and rolled the man to the corner opposite the kids.

The women went back out to examine more patients. Steve and Rachel had argued early on about his role in the med center, Dr. Chen insisting he was of more use continuing his research. After seeing him attempt to get a case history from a woman, Rachel had agreed and told him to stay in the back. He was only brought out to examine unusual outlier cases or when Dr. Kleinman was busy. He wondered if he should offer to help at this point; he decided he’d wait for Rachel to ask.

Returning to his desk, he bent over his notebook and began to make notes on this new treatment experiment. Just as he was finishing up, he heard a gunshot. Then women screaming.

The chaos had reached the medical center.

Dr. Chen pulled together all of his notes and his laptop and looked for somewhere to hide them. He wasn’t sure why he thought anyone in the mall would want his scribblings, but they were his life, his legacy. He wanted at least to keep them from getting ruined in a scuffle.

Marauders would most likely avoid the sick. He crept over to the gurney containing Miss Dixit and slipped everything under her bedcovers. Her body would guard his work. As he patted the blanket back down over her legs, she fluttered her eyes. He could have sworn they were no longer red.

Before he could examine her more closely, a gentleman bearing a handgun appeared in the doorway, the barrel of his weapon pointed at Jazmine’s temple. She was weeping.

“Where’s the virus?” the gentleman snarled.

Dr. Chen’s first reaction was one of bewilderment. “Virus?”

The boy tightened his grip on Jazmine. “Don’t screw with me. You have a new flu weapon and I want it.”

The boy’s ignorance would have been amusing if not for Jazmine’s obvious distress. “I’m sorry,” Dr. Chen said, “but there is no new flu weapon.”

The kid pointed the gun at Steve. “You think I’m kidding?” He did not give Steve a chance to argue. “I am not screwing around here. Give me the goddamned weapon!”

The boy replaced the gun against Jazmine’s temple and shot her.

For all the death he’d seen, Dr. Chen had never seen someone shot. Watched a person just fall away dead, like a sack of meat. “What have you done?” he asked, eyes filling with tears. Jazmine was a good woman. She’d been wonderful with the children.

“I’ll find it myself.” The kid aimed at Dr. Chen and fired.

The bullet ripped into his gut. Steve slid down the footboard of the gurney to the floor. Pain seared through his insides. For the briefest moment, he viewed the pain with clinical interest—he’d never before had a serious injury.

The kid riffled through the papers on the desk, tossed around some boxes. Dr. Chen thought how wonderfully clever and entirely inadvertent it’d been to hide the antivirals in with the extra bed pads and catheterization kits. The pirate kid rummaged through the first few crates, then gave up.

Another marauder appeared. “Find anything?”

Dr. Chen wondered what had happened to Dr. Kleinman and Leslie. Surely they were dead. They were martyrs; they would have died before letting a patient come to harm.

“Nothing,” the pirate kid said, throwing handfuls of plastic catheter bags at the wall. He holstered his gun and loped out of the room.

Steve’s last thoughts were of the virus. He saw the spikey orbs bouncing in front of his eyes. How lovely they were. Vicious and lovely.

• END OF BOOK TWO •