Last Pandemic (Book 3): Escape The Chaos Page 5

  There wasn’t time for relaxing, for meditation, for any of those tricks.

  He had to just push through it.

  He had to think of Jamie.

  Something had happened to her. He was sure of it.

  And there was no one else who was going to help.

  No one.

  6

  Cody

  Cody was thinking that he was done for. He was thinking that the vomiting was because he had the virus himself.

  But when he finally stopped heaving, his stomach feeling like it was in knots, like he was vomiting up a great sewer from deep inside himself, he looked down at the vomit and didn’t see blood.

  But maybe there just wasn’t blood in his vomit.

  Surely he had the virus.

  He turned his head to look at the young woman he’d been talking to.

  At this point, a small crowd had gathered around him. They were leaning down over her, trying to help her.

  “Someone call 911,” someone was saying, a concerned woman who stood a little ways back from the crowd.

  “They’re already on their way,” said someone else. Matt could just see the man’s angular face, which was splattered with blood. Blood from the young woman.

  Suddenly, the realization hit Matt.

  He wasn’t sick from the virus. He was just sick from the sight of the blood.

  It sounded pathetic. But that’s the way he’d always been as a kid. When he’d seen blood at school, like when someone had scraped a knee on the playground, he’d start to feel sick to his stomach. When the blood had been really bad, he’d vomit.

  He’d gotten a lot of flak for it. The school guidance counselor had told him it wasn’t anything he could control. The nurse had told him the same thing.

  He’d beaten himself up about it pretty badly.

  Maybe that was why he hadn’t realized what was happening.

  And it had been years, after all, since it had happened. At least eight years. The last time had been when he was in eighth grade, if he remembered right.

  He’d thought he’d just outgrown it.

  Apparently not.

  Shit. Here it came again. He was feeling sick. His stomach was all torn up.

  There was nothing to do but lean back over and start vomiting again.

  “Hey, you okay, kid?”

  “This one’s sick too!”

  “The ambulance is already on its way,” said someone in a tired voice. “Is he vomiting blood too?”

  “Hey, does this have something to do with that virus on TV?”

  “What virus?”

  “You didn’t see it? I don’t know. Some kind of crazy thing. A virus from the monkeys, I guess.”

  “I thought that was another one.”

  “It was from that movie!”

  “No, this one’s real. From Australia, I think.”

  “No, China. Definitely China. Here, look at my phone.”

  Cody didn’t have much more in his stomach to come out. It was just an off-color liquid.

  Shit. He needed to get a hold of this.

  He managed to stand up as soon as the vomiting had stopped. It seemed almost as if he had managed to get a grip, as if he had managed to control it. But of course he hadn’t. The nausea had just died down.

  If there was any way that he’d controlled it, it was just by keeping his eyes averted from the blood as much as possible.

  More people were around him now.

  “You okay, son?” said an elderly man, taking him by the elbow.

  An ambulance was pulling up, the lights flashing red across the sidewalk.

  Cody was torn. He felt stuck.

  He already knew he couldn’t do anything for the young woman.

  He also knew that their date wasn’t going to happen.

  The ambulance was there. They’d have to take care of her.

  But did they know about the virus?

  There was no point in trying to convince the crowd.

  But Cody couldn’t just leave. He couldn’t do that in good faith.

  On his feet, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve, trying to look presentable, he walked rapidly toward the ambulance.

  An EMT was descending from the back of the ambulance, quickly gathering supplies, checking some type of chart on an electronic device. He moved swiftly, professionally.

  “Sir,” said Cody, grabbing the man’s arm, not knowing how else to get his attention.

  The EMT jumped back, pulling his arm away rapidly.

  “Sorry,” said Cody. “I just thought you should know...” He paused, knowing that what he was about to say was going to sound crazy, but he also knew that he had to say it. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he didn’t try. “I think she has the...the virus?”

  “Step back, kid, we’re trying to work here.”

  “The virus,” repeated Cody. “The one on TV. It’s all over the news. Vomiting blood. That’s one of the signs, isn’t it? This old man explained it to me. He used to work for the government...the...C...D...something.”

  People were gathering around him now. Just a couple. But it was enough. Enough to make him start to sweat. After all, did they have the virus? It seemed as if anyone could potentially be contaminated.

  And Cody was acutely aware that he sounded like a complete lunatic. The EMT wasn’t even looking at him, and he had resumed his preparations.

  “Come on,” said Cody. “This is serious. I’m not crazy.”

  As soon as he said it, he groaned internally. Now he really sounded crazy.

  “I said get out of my way, kid,” said the EMT. Apparently having gotten what he needed from the ambulance, he turned swiftly, his elbow hitting Cody in the stomach.

  It seemed like one of those movements that was half-accident, half-purposeful.

  The blow wasn’t hard enough to knock the wind out of Cody, but his stomach seemed to begin churning again, the nausea becoming stronger once again.

  “Hey, buddy, what’s your problem, eh?” It was a big guy from the crowd. Beefy, with wide shoulders. Squat. Built like a trash can. Spoke with a Jersey accent.

  “It’s just that there’s a...” began Cody, thinking naively that he was about to get another chance to explain himself to a sympathetic listener. He was young, after all and even he realized that he could be quite ‘innocent’, if that was the right word.

  The man’s arm came at him. An uppercut to the stomach.

  Cody managed to flex his abdominals. But it wasn’t enough. The guy was powerful. A mean little tank of a man, his eyes glaring, spitting on the ground.

  The nausea overcame him, returning beyond full force.

  Pain. A good bit of pain.

  But Cody had already vomited everything from his stomach.

  And pain?

  He could deal with some pain. He’d done enough manual labor in his life to be a little resistant to basic pain. He wasn’t one of those collegiate types who had never used his body or his hands.

  So he staggered back.

  But he didn’t fall.

  The tank-like man looked almost...impressed. It was just something in his eye, maybe a little gleam. He raised his hand, as if he’d strike again.

  But he didn’t.

  “That’ll teach you,” he muttered, turning back and rejoining the spectacle of the young woman who was vomiting blood.

  The EMT was long gone now, already having joined his partner at the young woman’s side.

  Cody looked on, clutching his stomach with one hand. He knew he couldn’t do anything. He knew there was no point now in trying to convince anyone.

  And he also knew, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the man from the CDC was telling the truth.

  This was going to be a big deal.

  Walking away, one hand on his stomach and limping, he got out his flip phone with his free hand and began dialing his parents’ number.

  For some reason, Cody had never liked programming the phone, and it was difficult to d
ial the digits. But he managed.

  His heart was beating faster now as he thought of his parents. What were they doing? Had they gone out? Had they already been exposed? Or were they comfortably staying at home, aware of the danger and taking precautions?

  Well, they couldn’t be aware of the danger. They would have called him.

  And his phone hadn’t rung.

  Maybe they were just at home, blissfully unaware.

  Cody’s stomach still hurt, making it difficult to walk. He was sort of lurching.

  He dialed the last digit.

  There was no answer. The phone just rang and rang, and no one picked up.

  Hoping his parents were okay, Cody continued lurching down the sidewalk. His legs moved in a jumpy way. His stomach was still churning and he didn’t even stop as he, once again, found himself turning his head to the side and vomiting copiously.

  “Shit,” he muttered to himself, wiping his lips. “I’ve got to...” But he trailed off. Even just talking to himself, he realized that he didn’t know what to say, or what to do. He didn’t know what his next steps were.

  It seemed hopeless. It seemed as if the man who’d worked at the CDC was right. And that meant that any attempt Cody made to get home to his parents’ house would also involve exposing himself to the virus.

  If he got into a cab, or if he got onto a bus, there’d be people there. And they were people who might very well have the virus.

  How would it even be remotely possible to avoid contaminating himself?

  Then a thought ran through Cody, adrenaline washing over him like a frigid ice bath. What if he was already infected?

  The thought made him reel mentally.

  It wasn’t just himself that he was worried about, because, as strong as his survival instinct was, the thought of his own personal demise didn’t terrify him nearly as much as the possibility of infecting others, even unintentionally. He was a very conscientious young man.

  “Shit,” he said, wiping his lips again.

  The vomit was gone.

  But his ideas weren’t.

  Ideas began to flood his frightened mind.

  Decontaminate.

  The word seemed to resonate through him, through his mind, repeating itself.

  If he had been exposed to the virus, to some airborne pathogen, it seemed as if it wasn’t necessarily true that he was contaminated himself yet.

  It wasn’t as if Cody had a good understanding of the biology of airborne contaminants. Far from it. He didn’t have so much as a rudimentary understanding of science. Just what he’d gleaned from high school classes and he was pretty sure they’d never covered something like this.

  But it made sense to Cody that he should have a little bit of time between being ‘contaminated’ and being ‘infected’.

  Maybe he could wash off the contamination, whatever it was.

  He’d need some water.

  Cody, despite feeling sick, despite his lurching, had gotten fairly far away from the crowd. But he hadn’t yet made it down to the end of this street. He hadn’t yet made it past the little art galleries.

  Taking stock of his surroundings, Cody realized that he was standing in front of an art gallery now. It was a squat little faux-adobe building, with a cute, wooden hand-carved sign hanging from the front.

  It would have to do. Surely, it would have a bathroom of some sort.

  Cody didn’t give it a second thought.

  He lurched through the little yard full of bric-a-brac and artwork that Cody couldn’t even begin to understand.

  His hands hit the wood door and it swung open. It was one of those painted doors that had somehow been treated artificially in a way to make the paint look distressed and worn, even though it was clear that it wasn’t actually an old door at all.

  If Cody had been in a different mindset, the sight of the particularly worn-out door would have annoyed him to no end.

  But he didn’t have time to think about that now.

  “Hello!” said an older man with long white hair hanging down to his shoulders.

  He looked like a typical Santa Fe artist. He wore a leather fanny pack, and his skinny jeans had artful tears around the knees. He wore an old and tattered, black, heavy metal shirt, with an expensive, brand-new collared shirt over it, unbuttoned.

  “Bathroom?” said Cody, the words shooting out of him as if completely unplanned.

  “Oh,” said the man, looking affronted. “I’m sorry. That’s for staff use only.”

  “Emergency,” said Cody. “It’s an emergency.” He was looking around, his eyes traveling across the room looking for the bathroom entrance. His eyes traveled over all the ‘artwork’. Cody, in another time, would have expected that an art gallery be filled with things like pottery, paintings, and photographs.

  But the room was absent of anything like that, of anything resembling anything what Cody would have considered artwork.

  Instead, it was filled with what most people would call trash. Perhaps it was artfully arranged. But it was trash nonetheless.

  “It’s found artwork,” announced the employee, who was likely also the owner and artist. He spoke the words proudly, as if it was something brand new, as if it was something that no one else could have ever thought of, and as if he himself had invented a whole new category of art that was far beyond what anyone else could conceive of.

  Cody’s didn’t care about the artwork. All he could think about was getting to a source of water, stripping down, and washing himself. He hoped it’d work. He hoped that he wasn’t just delusional in thinking that he could somehow wash away what was essentially a plague.

  Thoughts of the Black Death suddenly shot through Cody’s mind. When had that been? Cody didn’t know, except that it had been several hundred years ago in Europe, and something like a third of the population had died. A third! That was quite a lot, and maybe he was just misremembering. Maybe it was more.

  Cody’s eyes finally found the entrance to a back area of the ‘found art’ gallery. Cody had been expecting something akin to a curtain of beads hanging down. Instead, the back entrance was merely a doorway, although it was hard to spot amid all the junk in that corner of the room.

  Cody made a beeline toward the doorway, having to step over all sorts of ‘artwork’ on the way.

  “Hey! You can’t go in there,” shouted the long-haired man, just as Cody stepped on what seemed to be nothing more than a huge pile of tin foil sheeting. “That’s my latest piece! You’ve destroyed my homage to the postmodern Nietzschean ethic!”

  Cody ignored him, made it through the doorway, his head turning left and right.

  The back room was nothing like the front room and Cody could see why the man didn’t want the public coming back here.

  Instead of being full of trash that was passed off as artwork, the back room was full of creature comforts. There was a large, comfortable couch, a large screen TV turned to a sports channel. There appeared to be a fully stocked bar, as well as a pool table.

  It looked every bit the man cave that one might dream of or see on TV. It did not fit with the image of a real artist, especially not one in Santa Fe.

  The artist in question likely made his money peddling trash to tourists and then, in his free time, saw fit to enjoy the profits.

  Whatever, thought Cody. That was his business, not Cody’s.

  Cody’s eyes found the bathroom and he began lurching over to it, his stomach still complete tangled up in knots. On the way to the bathroom, Cody passed the bar and, thinking that alcohol killed germs, grabbed a bottle of top-shelf vodka.

  “Hey!” came the man’s somewhat high-pitched voice, as he tripped over some of his artwork. Cody heard the man falling to the floor heavily, swearing, before resuming his tirade against Cody. “I’m calling the police! You get out of there now! This is a private residence.”

  Cody got into the cramped little bathroom, which wasn’t anything fancy, and locked the door.

  Soon enough, he heard
the man’s footsteps as well as his fist pounding against the bathroom door.

  Cody ignored it all.

  His mind was fixed on just one thing: decontamination.

  He didn’t know if it would work.

  But it seemed like it was worth a try.

  Pulling off his shirt and tossing it in a corner, he turned both hot and cold taps on.

  The first thing to do was strip down, then he’d have to try to wash himself with alcohol, water, and soap, the only things at his disposal.

  And then what?

  “I’m calling the cops now. You hear that? They’re on their way.” The owner’s voice came through the thin wooden door.

  Cody was sure the man was telling the truth.

  But the police were the least of his worries right now.

  What he wanted to know was whether he was going to start vomiting blood. What he wanted to know was whether he’d be dead in the next several hours or not.

  7

  Jamie

  Jamie woke up slowly, as if coming out of a long, strange dream.

  There were images in her mind, as if she’d been dreaming for a long, long time. They were strange images, but they didn’t form any coherent picture or story. They were nothing more than fragments, coupled together in bizarre ways with bits of conversations, with odd sounds and weird sensations.

  Her head was killing her. It was a deep, throbbing headache, as if her brain were being attacked in all directions at once by hot pokers.

  “Shit,” she muttered, her lips moving haphazardly, the single word coming out strangely slurred.

  What was going on? Where was she?

  “Matt?” she said, her words so slurred that she could barely understand them herself. “Judy? Where are you guys? What’s going on? I think I overslept.... I know I was just supposed to get something to eat…”

  As she spoke those words, some memories began to come back to her. Memories of the virus. Memories of leaving Albuquerque. Memories of something happening...she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She definitely had the sensation that there were gaping holes in her memory now.