Slow Burn (Book 3): Destroyer (5 page)

Dr. Evans shook his head. His face softened. He was troubled. “Mr. Zane, don’t pretend to be naïve. You wouldn’t be alive if you were. I made hard decisions to try to contain the infection and save as many people as I could. I’m not going to ask you to understand. I’m not going to ask you to care how difficult it was. I’m a doctor, Mr. Zane. I’ve dedicated my life to saving people’s lives. Maybe my decisions were wrong. Maybe they were the worst decisions. But maybe there weren’t any good choices. Mr. Zane, I did what I thought was the best, given what I knew at the time. If that caused you harm, then I apologize for that harm, but I can’t change what’s passed.”

“Look, Evans, I’ll be honest. I’m kind of pissed about all of that, but I’m not an idiot. I understand that choices were made for the greater good. I’m pissed because in any kind of greater-good choice, somebody always gets fucked. I was the guy who got fucked this time. But to get back to the point, I’m not here to kill you or anybody else.” Then, as sincerely as I could, given the tension, I added, “But I do respect you for taking responsibility, even though you thought I might be here to kill you for it.”

Dr. Evans exhaled a long breath and said, “That’s a relief. Can I ask you to put the pin back in that grenade?”

“Perhaps, in a minute. Right now, let’s just say that I have trust issues.”

“Mr. Zane, why are you here?”

And that was the question that I didn’t really have an answer to, myself.

“Mr. Zane?”

“Like I said,” I nearly blurted, “I need to see Steph. She told me last night she was going to volunteer for the infection.” I took a deep breath. “She’s my friend. I need to know if she’s dead. Is she?”

Dr. Evans slowly shook his head, sloughing off his anger and exposing his sadness. “I don’t know.”

I relaxed a little. “Where is she?”

“
She’s two floors down. What do you intend to do when you see her?”

I softened. “I don’t know. I…I’ve seen so many people…too many friends die. I guess I just have to know, one way or the other.”

Dr. Evans’ eyes examined my face for an uncomfortably long time after that. “I’m sorry I had you put in that infected ward. I really am.”

With some reluctance, I gave Dr. Evans a nod of acceptance.

“One thing you might want to know is that if I’d let you into the hospital that night, you’d probably be dead now. I’m not trying to find some ex-post justification for my decisions that night, but if you’ve been talking to Nurse Leonard, you know how bad things have been here.”

I nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

Dr. Evans turned to the two soldiers. “You men keep this door secure.” To me, he said, “C’mon, Mr. Zane. I’ll take you down to see Steph.”

“Thank you.” Before following, I took a gamble. I holstered my Glock and fished the grenade pin out of my pocket, then pushed it back into place in the grenade. I turned and handed it to one of the soldiers, noticing as I opened my palm that the grenade was red and sticky with my blood. “I’ve got two more clean ones if you don’t want that one.”

The soldier accepted the bloody grenade with a nod of thanks.

Then I doubled down and gave a grenade to the other guard. I said, “I can probably find some more outside eventually.”

The second guard thanked me, as did Dr. Evans.

We walked together up the hall. “Was that you outside on the parking garage?”

“Yeah,” I answered.

“That was a real Tarzan stunt you pulled getting off of that roof.”

“Thanks,” I shrugged.

“Some of us were watching out the window. None of us thought you’d make it.”

“Me neither,” I half smiled.

“Sliding down that banner, is that how you injured your hands?”

I looked down at one of my still-bleeding hands and nodded.

“How do you even make the decision, to go over the edge of a garage? Are you one of those adrenaline junkies that bungee jumps and does skateboard tricks?”

“Desperation.”

“Oh.” Dr. Evans looked me up and down. “Is it true that you don’t feel pain, Mr. Zane?”

“Call me Zed. That’s what everybody calls me. But yes, it’s true. I get some monster headaches and I feel tired when I should, but mostly things don’t hurt. My hands, I can tell they’re messed up. I can feel that, but they don’t hurt. And I’ve been bitten twice by Whites.” I showed Dr. Evans my arm. “Neither one hurt.”

Dr. Evans’ face grew pensive. “That is interesting. I read something about it on the internet, but there are so many people making guesses out there right now, it’s hard to know what to believe. Listen, do you want me to fix up those hands before we head down?”

That was a very unexpected offer. I nodded enthusiastically, “I’d like that very much.”

“Do you have your insurance card?” Dr. Evans smiled for the first time.

I smiled back, acknowledging his attempt to lighten the situation with a little humor. “Could you look at the bites on my arm, too, if you don’t mind?”

“Sure.”

We sat at the nurse’s station while he patched up my hands and he said, “The volunteers are two floors down. When we’re finished, we’ll have to go to the other stairwell to get down there. We have that one blocked about five floors down. It’s secure for the moment.”

“Don’t bandage my hands too heavily. I need to be able to handle my rifle and stuff.”

Dr. Evans nodded as he gingerly cleaned one of my hands with a gauze pad and disinfectant. “They look worse than they are. Your injuries are all superficial. If you could feel the pain, I’m sure they’d hurt a lot. I’d probably prescribe a pain killer and tell you not to use your hands for a week or so.”

“Superficial is good.”

“But they can get infected if you don’t keep them clean.”

“I will,” I said, knowing that keeping a wound clean was an easy task in yesterday’s world. Now, with no running water, no corner drugstore, and not even a certain roof over my head every night, that was a much more difficult thing to do.

Dr. Evans said, “I heard that things went bad at the gym. At first I didn’t believe it, but now, well, we’ve all learned something about how violent the infected can be. How did you get out?”

As Dr. Evans treated my wounds, I told him the story of my escape from the gym and everything since. Afterwards, he worked and I stared at the sparklingly waxed vinyl floor tiles, the faux cloth texture of the wallpaper wainscot, the black rubber-wheeled stainless steel medical devices, and I thought a lot about my yesterdays.

“Do you have any idea what’s going on in the rest of the world?” I asked, absently.

“Academically, it’s interesting to see the whole world in a panic,” Dr. Evans replied, without looking up from what he was doing. “If our species makes it through this, I wonder what kind of history from this period will survive.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“In the beginning there’ll be news footage and a trove of personal accounts on the webservers if any of those survive. I wonder if anybody will record any of this on their cell phones, or if it’ll all be handwritten diaries and archeological records eventually.”

“At first,” I agreed, “I’m sure it’ll be cell phones. You know, pictures and video. The virus was probably documented on Facebook better than anywhere before things started to get really bad. You know how people are about posting anything unusual, anything special.”

“I don’t use it,” Dr. Evans said. “But my kids do, so I know what you mean.”

“Your kids?” I asked.

Dr. Evans ignored the question and kept working. “We’ve heard of islands that quarantined early and are infection free. Little places in the Pacific. Grand Cayman in the Caribbean.”

“I’ve always wanted to dive there,” I mused.

“The water is so blue and clear.” Dr. Evans looked up and stared, but not at anything in particular. “We were there a few years back, diving near a wreck. You could see for a hundred feet, maybe two hundred. The water was spectacular that day. A school of tarpon swam by us, five or six feet long at least, close enough to reach out and touch. Their scales were glittering in the sunlight. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”

“I wish I could have gone diving,” I said.

“Who knows?” Dr. Evans finished with my hand and went to work cleaning the wounds on my arm. “Most of Europe isn’t any better than here. There’s sporadic internet traffic, but mostly it’s dying away.”

“I heard it started in Africa,” I added.

“As far as anybody knows, there’s not a single functioning human brain on that continent. Yes, that’s where it started.”

“Somalia? Uganda?” I asked.

Dr. Evans confirmed with a nod. “Israel nuked Iran.”

That was a surprising change. “What?”

Another nod from Dr. Evans. “Who knows why? I don’t imagine it makes any difference anyway.”

“I guess not. What about South America, Australia, New Zealand, places like that?”

“High population densities present very favorable conditions for the virus to spread. South America went quickly. Australia, who knows? The infection is there, but it’s not bad yet. New Zealand quarantined itself and seems to be successful so far.”

“Good for them.” I wished I
was in New Zealand. “How about here?”

“Here?”

“America?”

“What’s not like Austin soon will be. I can’t think of any major city in which the virus hasn’t been found.”

I asked, “Are any of them handling it?”

“None yet.” Dr. Evans shook his head slowly as he said it. “It’s so contagious, it’s nearly impossible to contain. Well, not nearly. It’s proven impossible to contain.”

“So this really is the end.”

“The end?”

“Of us. Of humans.”

Dr. Evans shook his head and looked up at me. “No, I don’t think so. Some will survive. You’ll survive if you can make it out of this hospital.”

I certainly planned to make it out.

“It’ll be the beginning of another dark age. Eventually, we’ll come out if it. Different, I hope. Better.” Dr. Evans taped a last bandage across my arm. He dropped his hands to his knees and exhaled to indicate he was finished.

“Am I in any mortal danger?” I asked. “Am I going to die of an infection?”

“Probably not.” Dr. Evans got up off of his stool and motioned for me to follow. But he looked like he was walking to his own hanging. “Lets go see the volunteers. They’ve got the whole floor down there.”

“So it wasn’t just Steph who volunteered?” I asked as I followed him.

“Did Steph tell you what the mood was like here?”

I nodded. “Hopeless.”

“Yes. That word was all I heard last night. After the first few trials with no survivors, everybody was hopeless. You know, I’ve used that word all my life. I’ve read it in books. I saw it in movies, but I never really knew what it meant until last night. Maybe I learned slowly as the week went along, but now I know in the same way I know what love is.”

“Love?” What an odd analogy.

“Not just in my head, Zed. I felt it down to the marrow of my bones, with every beat of my heart, and with every blink of my eye. I felt it with the same all-inclusive intensity that I’ve felt love. You’re a young man; have you ever been in love?”

I shook my head. Lust, certainly. Infatuation, yes. Love, no. “But I know the hopelessness you’re talking about.”

“Yet here you are?”

“Here we both are,” I countered. “Dr. Evans, how many are down there?”

“Call me Paul. Formalities are for the past, I think.”

“Okay, Paul.”

Paul came to a stop and turned to face me. “When Steph volunteered last night, it was like she was the catalyst for everyone’s courage. Maybe she’s a natural leader. Or maybe she was everyone’s hope, and when she gave up, everybody else did, too.”

“What do you mean, everybody else?”

“Look around, Zed. Do you see anybody up here?”

It occurred to me as I looked around, I’d seen almost no one since coming onto the floor.

“Nearly everybody volunteered for infection, Zed. There are only seventeen of us left who are keeping the place secure in case anyone comes out of the experiment with immunity.”

“How many are immune so far?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been able to bring myself to go downstairs to watch. You see, there
are one hundred and fifty-three people down there, Zed. All infected. And if the first trials are any indicator, half of them are dead already, and we’ll shoot the other half by midnight.”

“You
have
lost hope,” I observed.

“Hopelessness,” Paul reiterated, “is an emotion with so many ugly faces. You know, I was in the Army before I came here. I was a doctor in Iraq in both wars. I’ve seen my share of things that would make most people weep. I’ve had boys younger than you bleed to death right there on my table. Boys in uniform, who looked me in the eye, sometimes holding my hand, in that moment when they gave their lives for something they believed in
.”

Dr. Evans’ eyes looked down the hall at something that wasn’t there. “You do your best, but sometimes it doesn’t matter. Sometimes, they die anyway. When I thought of infecting us all to save a few, intellectually it was the right thing to do, the only logical thing.”

Dr. Evans seemed at a loss for words, so I said, “I think Steph felt the same way about it, Paul.”

“Everything about it feels wrong.”

I wrestled with a tactful way to express a harsh thought. “Maybe you’d feel better about it if you’d volunteered to go first.”

“I couldn’t.” Dr. Evans’ wide, sad eyes fell back on me.

“Why?” I asked, expecting to hear some bullshit about how the whole place would fall apart without him at the helm.

“Because I’m immune.”

“What?”

“I was exposed the Saturday before everything got bad.” Dr. Evans started to pull up the lab coat sleeve on his left arm.

“How?”

“I was bitten by a violent patient.” Dr. Evans showed me a bandaged wound on his forearm. “He was infected with the virus. His skin was pale. His temperature was elevated. His pupils were dilated. His behavior was deranged.”

I said, “I got it on that Sunday. Obviously, I wasn’t as lucky you.”

“Or perhaps, I wasn’t as lucky as you,” Dr. Evans suggested. “You can walk among them. You’ll survive if you’re careful. I’m a prey animal now.”

“Is anyone else here immune?”

“There’s Sergeant Dalhover downstairs. He got bitten early on. Tuesday or Wednesday, I think. He never turned. Like me, he never showed any symptoms. He and I are the only two here who are immune that we know of.”

“So naturally, you assumed there had to be more?” I asked.

Dr. Evans nodded. “Like I said, it was the logical conclusion.”

“Is Sergeant Dalhover the one in charge of shooting of the infected downstairs?” I asked, trying to mask the urgency I felt at the thought of finally arriving at Steph’s location, only to get there one bullet too late.

Dr. Evans confirmed with a nod. We arrived at the door to the stairwell that would take us down. He looked through the window to confirm that there was no movement on the landing. In a new habit of all the living, Dr. Evans very quietly pushed the door open.

I followed him into the stairwell, carefully and quietly. As much as I wanted to hurry, hurrying led to mistakes, and mistakes were paid for in blood. I stopped when he did. We listened to the sounds from far below. The infected were down there, and they were pissed.

Dr. Evans looked down the center gap between the stairs.

“Anything?” I softly asked, leaning over to look myself. The pungent smell of their unwashed bodies, thick enough to taste, wafted up in the confined space.

“We’re clear for now,” he whispered. “Let’s go. They're trying to get at the soldiers behind the barrier down there. They never give up."

“Can they see the soldiers through the barrier?”

“Yes, of course.”

“They won't give up as long as they can see your guys.”

Evans stopped halfway down the first flight of stairs and gave me his attention.

“Look,” I said to him, “if they can't see you or hear you, they eventually lose interest and go away.”