Last Pandemic (Book 3): Escape The Chaos Read online

  “All of a sudden?”

  She didn’t answer, but sank down to the sidewalk.

  Cody got down on his knees, putting his arm around her shoulder. “What’s going on?” he said. “Nod your head if you are a diabetic.”

  She didn’t speak, but she shook her head.

  “Shit. Are you a....?” Cody struggled to think of what else might be wrong with her. “Do you have some chronic condition?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t feel...stomach...bad...”

  Cody noticed that she appeared to be sweating. All of a sudden, there were huge beads of sweat on her forehead. And he noticed something else as well. It seemed as if the veins on the side of her neck were strangely enlarged. They looked dilated, and a strange shade of blue.

  This wasn’t good. He didn’t know what was going on. But he suddenly knew that he needed to get help.

  “Okay,” he said. “Don’t worry. You’re going to be all right. I’m going to call an ambulance. I think this is serious.”

  He reached into his pocket for his old-fashioned flip phone, got it open with trembling hands, and began punching 911.

  But before he could finish, the young woman had taken a dramatic turn for the worse. She leaned forward and began projectile vomiting blood.

  A lot of blood.

  Cody froze, completely unable to move, finding that even his finger was unable to punch the last 1 of 911. The fear came not from the blood, not from the spectacle, but from the sudden realization that what that retired CDC official had been telling him was true.

  The virus was here. It had spread rapidly. And this young woman had it.

  Cody knew he needed to act. After all, being raised the way he’d been raised, he knew that no one was going to dig him out of this hole. No one was going to really help him, not even 911. There wasn’t anything that the police, the fire department, or even the CDC, no matter how well-intentioned they were, could do to stop the chaos that was about to be unleashed on the country as a whole.

  Thoughts and fears flashed through his mind in rapid succession. His body felt numb and cold, his fingers and toes frozen, as though dipped in ice water.

  If Cody wanted to live, and wanted his parents to live, he’d have to think and act for himself.

  He knew that. He knew it in his mind and he knew it in his bones. It was just his nature.

  The only problem? He was so paralyzed by fear he didn’t know if he’d be able to even move, ever again.

  People were starting to gather around. Other tourists. Concerned citizens. All sorts of people.

  Cody wanted to scream out at them. He wanted to warn them to get back, that they were only putting themselves at risk for contamination and infection.

  But he couldn’t even move his mouth. He just couldn’t. His heart was pounding in fear. It felt like ice water pumped through his veins, rather than blood.

  Suddenly, he was able to move. It was as if the curse had been lifted.

  But the fear remained.

  But instead of pushing the last 1 on the phone, or yelling a warning at the gathering crowd, all he did was lean over to the side and start vomiting.

  4

  McGregor

  “You got her, Rory?” said McGregor, his voice sounding odd through his respirator.

  “Yeah,” said Rory, his voice sounding distant.

  “I wish the radios were working,” said McGregor, as he watched Rory struggling with the unconscious woman.

  Rory grunted as he leaned down and with a tremendous effort, huffing and puffing, managed to get the woman up and over his shoulder.

  “Time to hit the gym, eh, Rory?” said McGregor. “She can’t weigh much more than a buck twenty, right?”

  “You do it next time, then,” said Rory, struggling to walk with the woman over his shoulder. He was leaning over to the side so much that it seemed he might topple over.

  McGregor just laughed, which was somewhat uncomfortable, breathing through the respirator, and then that made him annoyed.

  McGregor had always been subject to mood swings and since the virus, his tendency to snap from laughter to annoyance had only grown. Maybe it was because, in all the excitement and chaos, he’d misplaced the prescription pills he took for bipolar disorder. As a consequence, his mood swung around like a pendulum, and he never seemed to know which side he was going to end up on.

  “Get her in there,” he said, his voice taking on an annoyed tone. “Come on, we don’t have all day.”

  “What’s your problem? I’m going as fast as I can here and I don’t see you helping.”

  “I did the last one, remember? It’s your turn. We agreed.”

  “Man, you’re unpleasant sometimes, you know that? It’s like when you’re not laughing, you’re just...hard to deal with.”

  Rory grunted as with a tremendous effort, he heaved the woman onto the back of the lab’s U-ATV.

  McGregor looked on through the clear visor of his protective helmet. The woman lay there, unconscious, her eyes still open, her face pointing toward the rich blueness of the sky. Sticking out of her shoulder, the dart that Rory had shot her with could be seen.

  “Come on,” snapped McGregor. “Let’s get going. We don’t have all day.”

  Rory muttered something under his breath as he repositioned the lab rifle in the U-ATV and got back into the passenger seat.

  “Anyone see us?” said McGregor.

  “No one else here,” said Rory. “Just corpses. You saw the drone footage.”

  “Wonder what she was doing here by herself.”

  “Probably trying to survive like everyone else.”

  McGregor grumbled an affirmative as he pressed the ignition button and started the engine.

  Soon, they were again bouncing across the high desert landscape. The sky was above them and stretched out in front of them, looking as beautiful as ever, and the road was nowhere to be seen.

  It was a little over an hour’s drive back to the lab. No one was around. They didn’t have to bother with roads. Plenty of time to think. A luxury that was hard to come by in these days of chaos.

  The U-ATV was a good vehicle. Small and robust, with good shocks. It was made for their type of terrain and it didn’t disappoint. McGregor had never seen anything remotely resembling it on the civilian market and that’s because it was one of those rare military vehicles that rarely, if ever, saw the light of day. Except in emergencies. Like right now.

  McGregor found for a time during the drive that his mood was unusually pleasant and allowed his thoughts to drift here and there, reminiscing about the time twenty years ago when he had moved north of Santa Fe to work at the Los Alamos lab.

  He’d come from the East Coast and he’d never gotten over how beautiful the sky was. And he still wasn’t over it, not even after all these years.

  McGregor had spent just a year at Los Almost before getting transferred to what might be called a secretive biological weapons research center.

  The lab was located not far outside of Santa Fe, because, as McGregor understood it, Santa Fe was considered less at risk than Los Alamos for a nuclear attack. If the US was attacked with a nuclear strike, it was considered important by some higher-ups that biological labs survive. Because, as it was generally said, biological warfare was actually a greater threat to national security than nuclear attacks.

  The way it was typically thought of was that in the event of a nuclear attack, various missiles would hit specific spots in the US. Strategic spots. Likely the population-dense areas, contrary to popular belief, wouldn’t be hit first. It’d be places that the foreign powers had deemed most likely to aid the US in a strategic military response.

  Then the US would retaliate.

  And then the foreign power would retaliate.

  It was a crazy game, one that really no one hoped anyone would ever play.

  Fairly early on in the game, the nuclear subs of various powers would become active. After that, it was basically game over.

>   In almost all nuclear war scenarios, most of the world’s population would be killed, if not in the immediate strike, then in the aftermath by radiation poisoning.

  In these stark scenarios though, there were always some survivors. There would always be pockets in the remote US where people would survive even the most intense radiation poisoning.

  So a nuclear war did not necessarily mean the end of humanity or the United States.

  But biological warfare? That was a different story.

  The strategists and military analysts understood very well the seriousness of the threat of biological warfare.

  No matter how intensely devastating nuclear warfare, there’d still be portions of the military and government that could function.

  But biological warfare?

  Nothing would survive.

  Nothing.

  And now, everyone’s worst fears had come to the surface. Everyone’s nightmare scenario had become reality.

  They didn’t know if the virus had been designed in a lab or not. They didn’t know if it was a quirk of nature, like the bubonic plague, or whether it was highly sophisticated weaponry designed by scientists.

  At this point, it didn’t much matter.

  By all McGregor’s estimates, huge swaths of the US had already been decimated.

  What was left of the population would soon be dead. Those that were naturally immune to the virus didn’t seem as if they were going to live for very long.

  It seemed as if the virus might be leaving about 10 percent of the population alive and healthy. But of course, they’d soon die along with everyone else in the chaos.

  The estimates for the percentage of the population that would survive an all-out nuclear war were far higher than 10 percent. More like 20 percent, which would come as a surprise to many. But then again the number of underground, secret government nuclear bunkers would surprise people as well. As would the number of people who lived in rural out-of-the way areas that would likely survive the fallout.

  McGregor wondered what was going on in Washington at the moment. Were the president and his staff safe?

  One thing McGregor knew was that while you could survive a nuclear blast by being far enough underground, you couldn’t escape something biological.

  Well, you could avoid it. You could take precautions against something incredibly contagious, just like McGregor, Rory, and Lily were doing at the lab. There was a reason McGregor and Rory were wearing these suits, after all.

  But from what McGregor knew, there wasn’t any branch of government that was actually set up to sustain the onslaught of a highly contagious virus that seemed to sometimes have an asymptomatic-yet-contagious period.

  There was just no way much of the infrastructure and government in the rest of the country was intact. No way.

  No way. No way. He repeated the phrase to himself silently over and over in his head.

  “What are you thinking about?” came Rory’s voice. It was very loud. It had to be, to overcome the noise of the open-air vehicle, the shocks as they bounced across the high desert terrain, and the respirators.

  “None of your business,” growled McGregor quite loudly, remembering suddenly that he was annoyed and in a bad mood.

  Fortunately, that was enough to shut Rory up until they got back to the lab.

  The lab was out in the middle of nowhere. Literally. It was on a huge piece of property, thousands of acres, owned by a shell corporation, but of course really owned by the government.

  The building was underground. Completely hidden. No one knew it was there, except those who worked there.

  Normally, there were all sorts of security personnel who worked there. An easy dozen, on most days. A tightly knit group.

  Normally, there were about a half-dozen biologists, a couple strategists, and then people like the lab techs and of course the janitors.

  Rory was one of the biologists, as was Lily.

  McGregor had been a biologist back in the day. That’s what he had his doctorate in. But he hadn’t actually worked as a biologist for over a decade. Instead, he’d gone into what was essentially a managerial position there at the lab, letting his knowledge of biology slide a bit. Unlike the others, he didn’t keep up with the newest journal articles, instead finding pleasure in spreadsheets, metrics, and intra-agency politics.

  He’d liked it. He’d liked being in charge. He’d liked telling people what to do. Making sure things got done. Most importantly, he’d liked working alone in an office, rather than out in the lab with the others. And, after a couple of brief flare-ups, he’d gotten onto the medication he’d needed to remain stable for many years.

  And now? Now that he couldn’t find his medication? Well, he realized that he hadn’t really needed it all that much anyway.

  Basically all it seemed to have done was keep him a little more even-keeled.

  It wasn’t as if he’d been psychotic or anything like that. Far from it. After all, they didn’t let psychotics hold important government positions at secret laboratories.

  “Not unless they’re medicated,” said a little voice in his head, which he quickly squashed, stuffing it behind the rest of his thoughts.

  To someone unfamiliar with the secret lab and how it worked, it may have surprised them to learn that actually most of the workers had either died or gone missing in the recent explosion of chaos that the virus had created. After all, it was a lab devoted to finding a cure for various viruses and biological weapons.

  But to McGregor, it all made perfect sense. In fact, he wouldn’t have expected anything else. The security force at the lab wasn’t actually prepared for a virus. Maybe they’d had some basic biological weapons training, but that was about it. That’s just the way government worked sometimes, even on the most secretive levels. That’s the way bureaucracy was.

  And the biologists and others? They were humans just like anyone else. They had homes. Wives. Husbands. Girlfriends. Boyfriends. Family. Plenty of people to contract the virus from. They weren’t immune just because they worked in a top-secret lab.

  Some of them McGregor knew were dead. He’d seen them die. They’d shown up for work and died there.

  The others? He hadn’t heard from them, for the most part.

  And now there was no way to contact them. No way to contact anyone.

  No way to contact his superiors. No way to contact anyone higher up in the chain of command.

  That was the surprising thing to McGregor. Sure, he knew how ineffective bureaucracy could be, even at the top-secret levels. But to have the communications networks go down? That was something he hadn’t expected.

  Sure, he could see how the commercial telephone carriers got overwhelmed, how the TV stations would shut down. Hell, he could even imagine that the phones in the lab would work but there wouldn’t be anyone to talk to.

  But to have the phones actually not work at all? That was surprising, given how much redundancy had apparently been built into the system.

  “Not enough, apparently,” he muttered to himself, his voice not audible to Rory over the hum of the respirator.

  It was a lot easier to get into the lab now than before. No longer did they have to go through the security systems, the multiple pat-downs, the body scanners and X-ray machines.

  After all, it was just McGregor, Rory, and Lily there. They could do as they pleased.

  McGregor drove the U-ATV right up to one of the main access doors, one that had never been used much before now. He got out and hit the right combination on the keypad and the door began to open.

  The whole lab was still powered. It was as if the power had never gone off for them, since the whole place was run on massive generators. Those who’d constructed it didn’t want to risk a power outage allowing for the escape of deadly biological weapons that were being tested.

  McGregor got back into the vehicle and drove them right through the gate, into the large sterile space with a high ceiling.

  There were various pieces
of equipment around. A set of metal stairs led up to the rest of the lab.

  This was the room they’d decided to use as the contaminated room. That meant that every time they went in there, they had to be suited up. It was a ‘high-risk’ area, as they would have said in the past.

  The massive steel door behind them was already closing and McGregor switched off the U-ATV. It was electric, but he still didn’t like the idea of a vehicle running in an enclosed space.

  “There’s Lily,” said Rory, pointing up to the top of the stairs, where a door had opened.

  Lily was in the process of closing the door. She was, of course, suited up and the glare on her helmet’s visor obscured even her eyes. The baggy suit obscured her figure, which McGregor thought was a shame, because he’d always considered her an attractive woman.

  She’d stayed single well into her fifties, but McGregor, being her boss, had never thought it appropriate to approach her in any sort of romantic way.

  “Got another one, eh?” came Lily’s voice through her suit’s respirator as she marched down the stairs, craning to see the unconscious body they’d brought back.

  “Give me a hand, won’t you, Lily?” said Rory. “McGregor refused to help me. I guess it’s ’cause he thinks he’s still the boss.”

  Embarrassed in front of Lily, McGregor grumbled something about misrepresenting the facts, climbed out of the U-ATV and began helping Rory lift up the woman’s body.

  They walked slowly, their feet shuffling, as they carried the woman over to something that resembled a hospital bed with straps on it to secure her.

  Rory worked the Velcro straps, McGregor checked the woman’s pulse with a pulsometer on her finger, and Lily stood there, arms crossed in front of her, observing.

  “You sure she’s one of the immune?” said Lily.

  “Positive,” said McGregor.

  “Pretty sure,” said Rory.

  “Pretty sure?”

  “We’re sure,” snapped McGregor, annoyed once again at Rory’s nonsense. “We scoped the place out with the drone first, which needs to be recharged by the way. There were bodies everywhere. You should have seen it.”