Pestilence

54

Samantha wouldn’t have even noticed the explosion if not for Clyde Olsen sitting across from her on the plane.

“What the hell is that?” He pointed out the window.

From the plane, the detonation appeared only to the passengers sitting next to the window, who had happened to glance outside at the moment of the flash.

A tube of light, almost thirty meters tall, was followed by an explosion that could’ve taken out a soccer field. Like a black hole, the explosion sucked in light, and then after another, smaller explosion, a thin mist descended over the city.

She turned her head. Seated across from her were the man and his young daughter whom she had convinced General Olsen to bring along as they fled the state. They had saved her life, and Samantha was obligated to save theirs.

All of this occurred amidst utter calm and quiet. Neighborhood by neighborhood, the military had rounded up the citizens of Los Angeles and put them into camps. The ones with pull-relatives of federal employees, for example-were taken to the nicer hotels and allowed to stay there of their own recognizance. Everyone else, rich or poor, was stuck in a cage. But the guards were taking bribes to let people go.

Stretched to the brink across Southern California and then Northern, the National Guard didn’t have enough men to police itself. And most of the local law enforcement had been rounded up along with the civilians. Only the ones on duty, who were easily recognizable, had been given a place next to their captors.

In some places, Olsen had told her, guards were apparently letting people out for as little as a thousand dollars cash, jewelry, guns, or cars-anything the guards could get their hands on. The only people truly stuck in the cages were the poor and middle class who couldn’t pay up.

The operation had been a disaster from the get-go. The military only later recognized the contingencies they hadn’t planned for. They had probably thought it would be a simple operation, and that all they had to do was ensure no one left the state. They hadn’t anticipated the bribery or the failing infrastructure. After one day, water and electricity was dwindling in most of the state, including the military bases.

But the mist that had settled over the city after the explosion was something else that no one had ever seen or could have planned for.

Olsen’s cell phone buzzed as they flew over the California-Nevada border.

“Olsen… yes… yes… What other cities? Okay. Okay. Roger that.”

He hung up and stared out the window at the gray dawn, twirling the phone in his fingers before it dropped and hit the metal floor with a ding.

“What’s wrong?” Samantha asked, the pain medication causing her speech to slur and slow.

“Three other explosions. Nashville, Manhattan, and DC.”

“What are they?”

“I don’t know. But they’re all reporting the same thing. A green mist.”

A single horrifying thought gripped her mind. It sent shivers up her back, and though she was numb from the medication, she knew that something had happened that would change the course of society. As soon as the thought was articulated with words, she knew it to be true.

The mist was Agent X.

From the way Olsen was acting, Samantha knew that the military hadn’t had any idea that was going to occur. Life was truly unpredictable, a string of random events interspersed with fleeting glimpses of reason and order. But that was illusory. In the end, the events tying a life together were dictated more by circumstance than people believed. So many unknown variables existed, so many forces pulling in each direction, that it seemed funny to her that she had ever thought order endured along with the anarchy. She was almost embarrassed that she had been so naïve.

The young girl was asleep, but she stirred and cuddled up to her father. He gently pushed her away and then leaned against the window. He was pale and sweating, and he had gone to the bathroom twice on the plane.

He noticed her watching him. Glancing at his daughter, he stood up and walked past Olsen. When he came close to Samantha, he said, “Can I talk to you, Doctor?”

Samantha rose, leaning on the seats for support, and followed him. They stood far enough away that General Olsen couldn’t hear.

“You’re with the Centers for Disease Control, right?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a virus doctor?”

“In a sense, yes.”

“What is this thing?”

“It’s something like a variant of the poxvirus called black pox. But it’s mutated a few times, so we called it Agent X. An intern called it that, and it stuck because we didn’t know what else to call it.”

“It should be called Red Pox. It seems like all it does is make you bleed.”

She nodded. “You know you’re infected, don’t you?”

He glanced at his daughter. “Is there a cure?”

“We don’t even have a cure for the common cold or flu. There are no cures for a virus. You can slow them down or prevent them, but once you have them, they have to run their course.”

“So there’s nothing?”

“There’s an experimental drug that was being developed by a laboratory in Nigeria that I was working with. It’s a type of drug that can identify infected cells and then destroy those cells, essentially halting replication of a virus. It might work with something like this. But the research was taken over by the government and then buried. There’s nothing else I can think of.”

“Is there any way”-he paused to cough-“someone like me could get it. Or maybe someone like you?”

“No. We’d have to fly to Nigeria first and then see how far they got with it. I don’t think it ever got approved for human trials. By the time we got there and it was ready…”

“I’d be dead.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t even know your name.”

“Samantha Bower.”

“Samantha, my name is Harold Burke. I know we’re strangers, and I never thought I would ask this of anyone, much less someone I don’t know, but my daughter is the only thing in the world I have left. If you could… until you find her mother, I mean… I don’t have anybody left that would…”

He said it so genuinely, filled with so much utter humiliation and so much hope that she would accept, that it tore out her heart. She thought of her own mother and the nights she’d spent crying when her father had passed away, bargaining with God that she would do anything if her husband could come back to them. She had three children to look after by herself, and her mother worked two jobs to provide for them. She gave up everything in her life so her children could have a chance at a better one. Children were everyone’s weakness.

“I’ll take care of her.”

He nodded, tears in his eyes. “Thank you.”

After a moment, he coughed again and then made room so she could get by without having to get near him. Samantha was all the way to her seat when the plane’s side door opened. The vacuum instantly sucked out anything that wasn’t screwed or strapped down, and deafening high-pitched squealing of dropping pressure filled the plane. It flung her off balance, and Olsen had to grab her to keep her in place. Her ears popped, and a terrible sucking sound filled the cabin as things bounced off the metal interior.

By the time she saw what had happened, one of Olsen’s soldiers had grabbed the door and pulled it closed. But Harold Burke wasn’t there. He was already flying through the air to his death.

Kansas City, Kansas

Mark Sheffield walked out of his office to get some fresh air. He’d had a cough and a fever all morning, but his boss, a prick named Ted, had refused to allow him to take a sick day. They had a meeting that afternoon with an investor in their marketing and SEO company, and Mark was the salesman. He went to the meeting and made it through only by stopping to cough about five times. After the last bout, he glanced down and saw that his handkerchief was coated with blood.

Outside the building, he leaned against a tree planted near the sidewalk. The sound of cars whizzing by annoyed him. Someone was running a trimmer along the grass, and the buzz-saw racket was grinding against Mark’s nerves. He would have yelled at the guy, even thrown something at him, but he didn’t have the strength. He had enough energy to know to go to the hospital, and that was it. He texted his wife to come pick him up and then didn’t move from the spot.

Ted texted several times, asking Mark where the hell he was and saying that he needed to come to an early dinner to schmooze the clients. Going home to sleep, he replied.

When his wife arrived, Mark climbed into the car and put on his seat belt. She stared at him without driving.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“You look like crap.”

“Thanks. Just take me to a hospital, will ya?”

“Mark, you look terrible. What’s going on?”

“How the fuck do I know?”

On the way to the hospital, he started vomiting-little globs of blood at first. Then torrents of the stuff came out in long streams and soaked the floor mats. His wife was frantically shouting into her phone at someone, but the pain was so intense that he couldn’t hear her. He couldn’t hear anything, and soon, he couldn’t see either. And he understood, from the amount of the warm fluid that was coming out of him, that his eyes and ears were bleeding.

Before he bled out, he heard his wife screaming in his ear that she couldn’t live without him. He wanted to say, “Yes you can.” But no words came.

Miami, Florida

Jennifer Mills finished her beer and then played absently with her nachos while she looked over her balcony at the people below. All the chips were still on the plate. She had put one chip into her mouth and then spit it back out because even the thought of food was so disgusting that she might have to run to the bathroom and hurl. Instead, she drank ice water, which even alone made her queasy.

Masood, her boyfriend, came out of the bathroom naked, smiling at her. She wanted to protest and tell him that she wasn’t in the mood anymore, but getting it over with seemed easier. They kissed on the balcony, and he took her hand and forced her to play with him as he lifted her and took her to her bed. He pulled down her skirt and then entered her.

She didn’t feel pleasure or pain. She was numb. Her stomach was bloated even though she hadn’t eaten anything since the day before. Small pimply sacs had appeared on her skin, but Masood either didn’t care or didn’t notice. He was grunting and thrusting inside her as though it were the last time he would ever be with a woman again.

He bent down, put his mouth over hers and his tongue down her throat, and before she even knew what was happening, she spewed into his mouth. He had sealed his lips so tightly around hers that the vomit shot right over his tongue, and he swallowed a lot of it.

He jumped off and spit blood over the room as she kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She noticed that his genitals were covered in blood, and when he saw that, he ran into the bathroom, shouting profanity at her about not telling him she was on her period.

She was too weak to respond that she’d had her period the previous week. So instead, she lay back and listened to the water running in the shower as she dozed off.

Kyoto, Japan

Aiki Ito screamed as the doctors told her to push. The baby-a boy-was going to be huge, they said. His father had been large when he was born, too. This pregnancy had been a difficult one, and for the past three days Ito had been so sick that she couldn’t get out of bed. She was going to get this baby out of her, no matter what.

The pain was intense and ran up into her guts, chest, and neck. Even with an epidural, every little needle prick felt like an event that lasted forever. Her skin was extremely sensitive, and she could only keep her eyes open for so long at one time because the pain made her faint. The lights of the hospital room seemed harsh and caused her retinas to ache.

The doctor was yelling at her to push, and she did. The doctor pulled the baby out, and Ito cried when she saw him. She focused on the baby for so long that she didn’t notice the frantic movements of the doctor and nurses. They were running around, shouting to each other. Something was wrong. The bleeding wouldn’t stop.

“We’re doing everything we can,” the doctor kept telling her, in an effort to calm her down, but the bleeding wouldn’t stop.

And then she felt something so mind-numbingly painful that she thought it would kill her. Something inside seemed to detach from everything else, as though a piece of her had come off. The pressure made its way down, almost like a lump heading for the drain in a bathtub. As she reached down to touch where the pain was, the lump slipped out of her, and the nurses screamed.

Her organs were coming out with rivers of blood.