Biohazard

9

We were driving.

It was decided that the simplest route out of the city would be the one we took in. Follow I-80 out and head west. I didn’t have the slightest idea where in the west we were going, I only knew that we had to keep heading in that direction. For it was out there somewhere. What I was looking for or what The Shape wanted me to find. In just about every way entering Des Moines seemed like an awful waste of time, yet I knew it had been important. Somehow. Was it Price? Was that it? I couldn’t say for sure, but it seemed likely. The idea of it scared me. For the only real use Price seemed to have was that he was an expert on infectious diseases.

Time would tell.

Carl was driving, complaining about all the wreckage. Mickey was sitting up front with him. I sat in the back with Price and Texas. Janie was in the way back seat with Morse. I turned to say something to her, but she held a finger to her lips. Morse was sleeping and that was a good thing. I started plying Price with questions. Maybe I just wanted to hear somebody talk who knew something about what was going on.

So Price talked. “Even in the old days nobody wanted anything to do with Ebola,” he told us. “Even your veteran biohazard experts were scared of it. It gave virologists the cold sweats. The way a lot of us were thinking was that Ebola was the doomsday machine of germs, the only life form we had encountered thus far that could truly put a serious dent in the human population. Maybe more than a dent, maybe a big ugly hole. The Ebola organism was the most frightening thing we could imagine. We knew too little about it. It popped up along the Ebola River in Africa, wiped out some villages, continued a pattern of sporadic, though minor, outbreaks in the next few decades, but never really broke out. Maybe if it had, we could have nailed the bastard. But it was all sketchy. We couldn’t be sure of the vector. Was it airborne? Waterborne? Both? Neither? Were the corpses of its victims vectors? We tracked it to central Africa and there the trail went cold. We knew it was there somewhere, proliferating, but we never could find the headwater, the reservoir. Yet we knew it existed. And that scared us. We were all envisioning a massive breakthrough into the human race, the virus crashing from one individual to the next. Millions dead within weeks. So it was no wonder that biohazard people wet themselves at the idea of working with this deadly little bug. One little tear in your protective suit…well, that’s it, isn’t it? The virus will flood into your system through any tiny cut or abrasion.”

Price went on to tell us that Ebola was the perfect microbial firestorm. Once it gets inside you the war is over before the first battle is fought. So it was all bad enough on the old Ebola front, he informed us, then Ebola-X showed.

It was even worse, if such a thing is imaginable.

Basically the same bug, just pumped up and with a very bad attitude. It spread faster, it killed quicker. Ebola-X attacks every part of the human body, sparing nothing: nervous tissue, marrow, organs, lymphatics. It goes after everything, absolutely laying waste to the immune system. It begins with massive blood clotting which restricts blood supply to the various systems of the body. Starved of nutrients and oxygen, tissues go necrotic. Connective tissue become mush, the skin is covered with bright red lesions which seem to expand as you watch. The flesh goes to pulp and internal bleeding begins. Your gums go to putty and your teeth fall out. Your eyes fill with blood and blood runs from every available orifice. Black infected vomit comes out in great quantities, tearing the skin off the tongue and bringing up sloughed, dead tissue from the windpipe and stomach while blood flows from your ass thick with macerated chunks of your intestines. The organs bloat as they fill with clotted blood and begin to decay. The testicles swell up like hard blue balls, nipples bleed, and vaginas eject infected tissue and copious amounts of black-red drainage. If the unlucky victim is a woman and she is pregnant, she spontaneously aborts the child who emerges infected with Ebola-X, blood running from it, eyes brilliantly red. The child, like the mother, is toxic biological waste.

“The end result…well it’s horrible, like something thrown together by Hollywood special effects people. The body literally liquefies into fleshy soup hot with virus.” Price stared out the window at the ruin of civilization. “Ebola was bad enough, but we knew with Ebola-X we were looking at the perfect killing machine. The hand of a very angry god. A species threatening event.”

After that little discourse, nobody said a damn thing. Not for quite while. The gruesome details had done their job on us.

“Well, you certainly are a cheerful fellow,” Texas Slim told Price after a time and there was absolutely no humor behind his words.

I was still thinking about The Medusa. I wanted to relay my fears to Price somehow without sounding like some kind of paranoid whacko who couldn’t tell the difference between nightmare and reality. Later I knew, if the chance came and I could get him away from the others, I would tell him. I would make him listen. And if he thought I was raving, so be it.

We drove on and I saw Mickey watching me in the rearview. When I caught her eyes, she smiled. I was glad she was with us and at the same time I saw her as a possibly destructive element. I believed for the most part everything she’d told me that morning, but I wasn’t naive. I knew women like her with all the right stuff in all the right places made a career of manipulating men. I knew I had to be careful.

“If I might ask,” Price said, “what exactly fuels this desire to travel west? You seem to have no clear idea of where you’re going or even why you want to go there. I find that a bit confusing.”

Texas looked over at me and I didn’t dare meet his eyes. I could feel Janie’s eyes on me, too, probably bitter with hate and recrimination. I had to tell him; he was part of this, he deserved to know. But I was hoping for a more intimate chat. I don’t know what I would have said and I never had the chance because there was a sudden impact and the Jeep fishtailed in the street, glanced off a parked car and smashed into a pile of rubble.