Plague

CHAPTER 36

Samantha Bower stepped off the plane onto the tarmac in the cool night air. With two layovers, the flight from Los Angeles to Florida had taken eleven hours. She looked back to the small charter plane that Agent Donner had found and paid for. It was a bucket with wings but Agent Donner had insisted they not fly commercially. Sam thought it odd. Even if Ralph meant to find and quarantine them, why would a special agent of the FBI be worried? She had seen agents stop entire airports and force all the passengers to wait until they arrived for their flight. They had power; Agent Donner had nothing to fear from a bureaucrat at the CDC.

“That was seriously cramped,” Duncan said as he stepped off. “I think my ass fell asleep.”

“Where’d you find that plane?” Benjamin said to Agent Donner.

“Called in a favor to a friend. It’s for the best.” He stretched his neck and his back and twisted his hips in a side-to-side motion. “Well, we’ve got an eight-hour layover. I was thinking I would go for a run and rent a hotel room for a few hours to sleep and shower if anyone would like to join me.”

Cami said, “I would sell my body to anyone that could get me a shower right now.”

Samantha glanced around the small, private airport and realized there were no cabs waiting here for passengers. She googled the local cab company and asked for a large van or two cabs.

“I could use a Diet Coke,” she said to Duncan. “Want to come with?”

“Sure.”

They left the others on the tarmac and went inside. The building was circular with windows that appeared unwashed. It was empty and the humidity and heat from outside filled the building as if the walls didn’t exist.

“Do you think anything’s weird about Agent Donner?” Sam said.

“Like what?”

“Why does he care if Ralph tries to quarantine him? He could get out of it.”

“You don’t know that. We all work for somebody. Maybe Ralph has deeper connections than we think.”

They found the vending machines and Sam checked her pocket for change. She had eighty-eight cents and the bottled drinks were a dollar.

“Do you have any change?” she asked.

“What is this, 1995? Who carries around cash anymore?”

Sam sighed. She sat down on one of the seats that was bolted to the walls and put her face in her hands, rubbing her eyes before leaning back and staring at the ceiling.

“You doing okay?” Duncan asked.

“What am I doing here, Duncan? My mother’s in Atlanta with Alzheimer’s. I don’t know how long she has left and I’m running off to the jungle with some crazy hippie.”

“Hey, I’m not a hippie.”

“Not you,” she said with a grin. “Benjamin. I agree with you: he’s clearly nuts but I really want to go down to Peru. I can’t tell if it’s out of altruism or just curiosity. I mean this thing came out of nowhere and nearly destroyed an entire state. Aren’t you dying to find out what it is?”

“No,” Duncan said, sitting in the seat next to her. “Nature’s a forest of horrors. I don’t need to know what new way it devised to kill me.”

Benjamin and Cami came inside and collapsed onto a sofa in the corridor. They began giggling about something and Benjamin tickled her; only then did Sam realize they were in a relationship, or at least sleeping together.

“You ever been to South America?” Duncan asked.

“No, you?”

“Sort of. I went down to Mexico for a couple of years on my mission. It’s like a Mormon proselytizing campaign. You go on it when you’re nineteen.”

“That must’ve been a wake-up call.”

“Yeah, I didn’t even know how to do my laundry and now I was pretty much on my own with just a few weeks’ Spanish lessons. It was interesting, but it wasn’t like here. There’s no law there, not really. We saw someone flick a cigarette onto the street once and it bounced and hit the tire of this car that was parked at the curb. The driver of the car got out and he was on his cell phone. He stayed on his cell phone the whole time, even when he got the shotgun out of his trunk and shot the other guy in the chest. Never saw anybody die until then.”

Samantha wanted to tell him about the first time she saw someone die, but hesitated. It was when she was seven years old. A friend of hers had been hit by a car when they were playing near the street. The body of the little boy flew up at least twenty feet and landed with a dull thud, a twisted mesh of bones and sinews and organs. Sam had been sprayed with blood and she stood frozen in the street, staring at the body.

“Ladies and gents,” Agent Donner said, “our cabs are here.”

They loaded up into two separate cabs, Sam riding with Duncan as the other three rode together in a separate vehicle. The cabs hopped onto a long stretch of highway. They were surrounded by everglade forest: thick vegetation with swampy land surrounding it. It looked like the kind of place someone could easily get lost in.

There were few other cars on the road as they sped down the highway and turned off an exit that appeared to just lead into the forest. But they veered left and saw a small motel tucked away in a small clearing.

“Wow,” Duncan said, “I’ve seen less creepy motels in horror movies.”

“We won’t be here long.”

They parked and got out of the cabs as Agent Donner paid and then went to the front desk. Sam and Cami were put into one room and Cami said something about taking a piss and ran into the bathroom, stripping down before she was even there. Samantha collapsed on the bed, and closed her eyes.

It was four hours later that Sam was woken by the sensation of her cell phone buzzing in her pocket. She clicked it off without looking at who it was. Turning to the bed next to her, she saw Cami fast asleep, nude with a blanket loosely thrown on her.

Samantha rose and headed for the shower. She was in there so long that the water began to grow cool and she turned it off and stepped out, changing into a fresh pair of jeans and a zip-up Calvin Klein hoodie. When she got out of the shower, Benjamin was in the room and Cami was dressing in shorts and sandals.

“So Billy’s got someone flying us into Mexico and then we’re heading down to Peru with no stops,” Benjamin said, hopping on the bed and maniacally tapping his hand against the nightstand. “Should be a blast.”

“Why don’t we just take a commercial flight straight to Lima?” Sam asked.

“Billy thinks Ralph’s trying to quarantine us and I agree with him.”

Agent Donner poked his head in. “Let’s go, guys. Our ride’s here.”