Scourge - A Medical Thriller (The Plague Trilogy Book 3) (4 page)

Mitchell knew the scene well. He’d seen a thousand just like
it. “And you didn’t investigate an attack like that further? The CDC didn’t look into it at all?”

“How could we? Smallpox is the deadliest virus in human history, and this particular strain is the most adaptive and unusual we’ve ever seen. We felt
—
I
felt—that our only mission was to develop a vaccine. The world could go to hell around us, we could always rebuild, but someone had to be around to do the rebuilding. And I felt developing a vaccine was the way to do that.”

Samantha folded her arms and looked down
at the table. “When Luther arrived, he excised portions of Eric and Ryan’s brains and ran tests for almost a week. That week was… unusual. I’d go home every night and come to work the next day just like every other day, but something was different, almost like the air had changed. The days got darker… something.

“The reports kept coming in
, mobs of people killing anyone they could find. It wasn’t entirely unexpected. Whenever law enforcement breaks down, you can expect most men to satisfy their more wicked urges. Say what you will about Freud, he predicted that, at least. When a society loses the protections of law, like in Iraq after the American invasion when we dismantled the police and military, there’s still an order behind the chaos. In Iraq, people were trying to get as much material gain as they could. If that meant killing people, they did it, but it was never purposeless. Even when it seemed like it was, we found out that the killing occurred because of feuds between tribes that went back centuries. The killing had an explanation, but the killings taking place here, they had no explanations, no reason behind them.”

She paused, unfolding her arms and
putting her hands in her lap. Mitchell glanced down at the digital recorder to ensure it was still on.

“
I was driving to work one morning, and there was a jogger by my house,” she said. “I don’t know what possessed this woman to go out jogging during martial law, but she did. Maybe she thought that little bit of normality would help get her through the rest of the insanity during the day. I don’t know, but she was attacked by two men. I saw it. They chased her down like lions after a gazelle. And this woman was in shape, skinny and fit, and the men were not. One was so overweight his stomach bounced over his belt, but they ran her down. It was like they were possessed and didn’t care if they gave themselves heart attacks.

“I swung the car over to the curb and opened the passenger door for her to jump in. She was screaming
, and I could see the look on her face, her eyes like marbles, completely devoid of the capacity to think. She got to the door before the first man reached her. He hit her like an NFL linebacker and took her down. I think even the impact might have killed her, but they didn’t stop. They… they…”

Mitchell said, “
If you need a second, you don’t have to…”

“No, I want to
.” Sam swallowed. “They pulled her legs off. The strength they must’ve had to do that… now we know that it’s because of the near-toxic levels of adrenaline pumping through them, but at the time, all I could think was that it looked like pulling the legs off a fly. Just snap, a few tears, and they came off. The woman lived only a few moments after that, in shock as she bled to death. The men began… tearing her apart.”

Mitchell’s throat felt dry. He swal
lowed. “Do you mean… eating her?”

“I don’t know if I’d call it eating. Anything they swallowed
was instantly vomited back up, along with a torrent of blood. I got to see it from up close. They weren’t even paying attention to me. They were just focused on the legs. There was nothing I could do. I wasn’t armed, and no one was around to help, so I drove away. I thought that I would call the military patrols and have them go by when they could. At least she would get a proper burial, and maybe they could even catch the two men that killed her.”

Mitchell nodded. “That must’ve been traumatic to see. Surely by now you knew something new was going on? Not just a poxvirus
, something much more violent?”

“Yes, I did. That’s why I wanted to speak to Luther as quickly as I could. Those men were infected, but unlike most infected, they were faster and stronger. When infected with
Variola
, after the incubation period has passed, people are bedridden. They can’t even go to the bathroom by themselves, much less chase down a runner and tear her limbs off. I suspected we either had a new strain of virus, or the old strain was doing something new. The lesions were of course my top concern, and I hoped Luther had something.

“When I got in
to work, I found Luther in the general labs, the unsecured labs we took tour groups through, on the main floor. He was sitting at a terminal looking at DNA matrices. I came up behind him, standing quietly a few moments before saying, ‘That bad, huh?’ I knew that when he got a result, he liked to email me, or whoever he was doing the analysis for, right away. He wanted us to know what he found so that he could get the inevitable questions out of the way. The only time he didn’t email with updates and reports was when the news was going to be something we didn’t want to hear.

“ ‘It’s not good,’ he said. ‘The lesions.
They’re not lesions at all.’ He took off his glasses and placed them on the table. His eyes were rimmed red, and I saw the black circles underneath them that hadn’t been there when I picked him up from the airport.

“
‘What are they?’ I said, sitting on the desk.

“
He rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger and said, ‘They’re rotting brain tissue. The brains of that young man and his father were rotting from the inside out.’ ”

Sam hesitated. “
And just like that, everything was different.”

4

“It seemed like one of those things,” Samantha continued, “that once you know about it, it starts popping up everywhere. The CDC that day started getting more and more requests for autopsies, blood work-ups, biopsies
, everything that could be tested, primarily from the military. They were the de facto police force, and the number of arrests and shootings to maintain order had skyrocketed. They thought something new had been introduced, but they knew even less than we did. Military intelligence thought that a radical terrorist group had infiltrated all facets of society and was attacking in large numbers. That’s silly to even think about now. Why would a terrorist group use their bare hands, when weapons that could kill a hundred times more people were available? That was just one example of the flaw in their logic, but they had even deeper problems. Soldiers were not immune, and the biohazard suits barely seemed to help. They were exposing themselves to the infected and, in turn, becoming infected themselves.

“In one episode, a soldier had turned on his comrades in the middle of a patrol. Patrols went out in parties of six, and a single soldier had killed all
five other men. When they found him, he was riddled with at least ten bullets. They shot him everywhere—the head, heart, kidneys, legs—but he hadn’t given up. All he cared about was killing those soldiers, and he did it before he bled to death. So the military was thinking they would make great weapons. We’re in the middle of the worst epidemic in history, it’s not even close to over, and they’re thinking, ‘Gee, we can turn these monsters into weapons to fight the North Koreans.’ So now the military has an interest in figuring out what’s going on, and that’s when the numbers hit, the numbers of all the people who had attacked others and were required to be killed. The FBI’s Hazardous Material Response Unit had at least four thousand samples taken from around the country. They had known about this effect for five weeks and kept it to themselves. They said they didn’t want panic. But I don’t think that’s the truth.

“The truth
was that only a handful of giant corporations own the media and dominate the markets. When there’s a crash, they’re the hardest hit. They were just trying to prevent another crash, hoping this new behavior induced by the virus just went away on its own.” She shook her head. “They were willing to let people die if they could just prevent losing any more money, as though money meant anything anymore.

“Anyway, once we determined what it was
, a degenerative disorder of some kind brought about by the infection of
Variola
, where only certain regions of the brain were affected, we could see what was happening, the sheer destruction of it. Even in Atlanta, you’d see people dashing from place to place on the sides of the roads, screaming, blood raining out of them. But they wouldn’t really attack each other. I noticed that almost immediately. Luther decided to stay and help at the CDC. One night we were running samples through the spectrometer and he said, ‘This isn’t found in nature. This is engineered.’ The statement took me by surprise. I’d considered it, of course, but Luther had never intimated that his thinking was going down that path. ‘That’s the problem with man’s arrogance,’ he said. ‘It destroys itself, too.’

“I didn’t know what he meant at the time, but I do now. Whoever engineered the virus didn’t
prepare for its devastation. Maybe they had an antidote they thought would save them, or they just didn’t realize how quickly it would spread, I don’t know, but a biological attack is not like a nuclear attack. A nuclear attack is a precision instrument by comparison. A virus, once released, spreads everywhere. The country of origin isn’t immune. I think the engineers just didn’t realize it would come back to haunt them so soon.

“One thing we couldn’t figure out
, though: Why was the violence showing up now? Was it a new strain or a different virus entirely? Once we had completed a full analysis of Ryan and Eric’s blood, we sent the results to Dr. Goldberg in Tel Aviv, Dr. Gam in Paris, and Dr. Arcand at the WHO. None of them could tell me anything. It was Luther who said something that broke it open, casually, as we ate pasta at my house with Jessica gulping chocolate milk, a treat Luther had arranged for her. ‘What if it’s the initial infection, but this trait is dormant for a certain time?’ My mind reeled. How perfect that would be. Distract us with smallpox while infecting us with a virus we wouldn’t be screening for, one that wouldn’t cause symptoms for months or years.

“I had Jessica get a sleeping bag
, and the three of us drove down to the CDC immediately. Darkness had fallen and few city lights were on. The government attempted to conserve resources wherever possible, and streetlights were not considered a necessity. But you could see
them
. Not swarms of them, not yet, but you could see a few of them just out in the piles of refuse or wandering aimlessly in the darkened streets. One man stepped in front of our car and screamed at us, bloody spittle spattering over the hood of my car, before he jumped onto the hood with both feet.

“ ‘Go!’ Luther shouted. I hit the gas. The man flipped forward, his face against the windshield,
leaving a smear of blood and bits of ragged flesh. Jessica had her eyes closed and was chanting something to herself. I looked at Luther, who appeared as if he wanted to pass out and was gripping the dashboard so tightly his fingernails were cutting into it. Luckily, the CDC wasn’t far. I parked and, feeling as though I had a lead weight in my stomach, got out and hurried inside with the two of them. It was just like that, overnight. One night we didn’t feel entirely unsafe, and the next night we couldn’t drive down the street, but we didn’t realize how much worse it was going to get, not then. My only concern then was to test Luther’s theory that the infection had occurred months or years ago in Eric and Ryan and had lain dormant.

“Few staff were there at that hour, but I did find an assistant willing to help me. I set Jessica up in my office on the couch and was about to leave when she said, ‘Sam?’ I turned and saw the look of…
resignation
on her face. Not fear, not confusion, more like the acceptance of a belief she didn’t want to believe. ‘We’re going to die, aren’t we?’

“
I sat down near her feet. ‘No, we’re not going to die. Epidemics have lifespans—that means they only last for so long. Then they stop spreading and begin shrinking.’

“ ‘They stop spreading because they’ve killed so many people, don’t they?’ I could’ve lied to her, but if I’d learned anything about her
, it was that her ability to look at her circumstances without flinching exceeded that of any adult I knew. She would know I was lying.

“
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The virus kills until there aren’t enough people to spread it farther. I think this virus is near the end.’ I leaned down and kissed her forehead. ‘Now get some rest.’

“Luther,
the assistant, and I all went up to the BS4 labs. The analysis would take hours. I got some Diet Cokes for us, which was saying a lot because anything like that was a luxury at this point. When the data had been collected, we all sat out in the waiting room and drank our sodas and waited a good twenty minutes, just decompressing, I guess. We talked about mundane things. The weather, how much Luther missed professional baseball, where we got our shoes from. That was one of the first things that hit you when resources were scarce, but it was something you never thought about before: What if you needed new shoes? The stores were closed, and ordering online was impossible because so few mail carriers existed anymore, it being one of the jobs that interacted with the public so much that the government regulated who could deliver the mail to slow the spread of the virus, so what would you do? That hadn’t been a problem for me, but the assistant said he had to trade a box of candy bars with neighbors for some new sneakers. That seemed to be how most people got the goods they needed, barter. Money was almost worthless now with hyperinflation, even though people were still fighting and killing for it.

“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.