Pestilence

9

Samantha sat in her office around ten at night, scanning the news sites for any information about California, but she found nothing. She checked Facebook and Twitter and found only one relevant post under the hashtag #UFOSRREAL. A person was saying that she had seen a lot of activity at the military base near her house. They seemed to be preparing for war.

Sam stood and rolled her neck, then raised her arms over her head to stretch her shoulders. She walked to the window looking out over the parking lot and didn’t see anyone out. Pacing her office, she bit her thumbnail.

Screw it, she thought. I’m not doing any good here.

After grabbing her jacket, she went out and got into her car. A bar where most of the people at the CDC hung out wasn’t too far from there, and as she drove, she tried not to think about why her sister wasn’t answering her cell phone.

She parked right out front and went in. The bar was packed with people shooting pool and throwing darts, and she saw a few of her colleagues at a table, nursing some beers. They waved to her, and she waved back but didn’t feel like going over.

She chose a stool at the end of the bar, then ordered an orange soda with ice and sipped it quietly. She tried to resist, but eventually she gave in and texted her sister for the fiftieth time.

Where the hell are you?

No reply.

She tried her husband, and again, no reply.

Thinking of her sister’s husband, Robert, brought back memories of when Sam was nearly married, to another medical student named Isaac Hinckley. He was a warm, intelligent boy, and they dated for so long, they’d grown comfortable together in that way that couples find the comfort better than anything else in the relationship. When he asked her to marry him, she said no. And to this day, she wasn’t sure why. No was the first thing that had popped into her head, and she’d blurted it out. Even if she wanted to change her mind then, she couldn’t. His heart was already broken, and he would have always known that her first answer was no.

Maybe she had turned him down because of her career or the fact that she was only twenty-two and wasn’t ready to settle down. Or maybe her father loomed so large that anyone else seemed to fall short. He was a successful businessman, a rugged former boxer who dominated any room. Samantha idolized him, and she knew that his traits were what she was looking for in a husband, whether consciously or not. So far, in the halls of medical school and laboratories, she hadn’t found them.

A man sat one stool away from her and ordered a beer. He turned to her and smiled. “Hi, I’m Brad.”

“Sam. Nice to meet you.”

“You, too. Haven’t seen you here before.”

“I’m not really a drinker.”

“Who you texting?”

“Excuse me?”

“I saw you texting. Just wondering who.”

“No offense, but I kind of came here to be alone.”

“You picked a helluva place to be by yourself,” he said.

He was right. Why would she come to a bar, of all places, to be alone? She finished her soda, then brushed past him on her way outside. A hiking trail wasn’t far from here, and reaching the summit of a hill overlooking the city took only about fifteen minutes. After driving there, she was pleased to see there were no other people around.

The dirt on the path was smooth, and her hike was quick. She took out her mace and held it in her hand until she reached the summit, where she placed it in her pocket and sat down.

The lights of Atlanta twinkled, and a plane flying by overhead blinked rapidly from the cadre of illuminations along its body. Streetlamps looked like glimmering buttons in the dark, and farther up, past the mountains of steel and glass, were flashing radio towers. She wondered how much longer standard radio would exist with digital available.

The skyline was a mass of buildings pointing skyward, each lighted differently and with diverse company logos stamped over them. She noticed one for a bank, and she remembered that she needed to pay her credit card bill. She had called them earlier, but they’d said their system was down…

Her heart skipped a beat.

She pulled out her cell phone and looked up restaurants in Los Angeles. She called the first result in Google. She got a busy signal. She tried the second result and got the same. She looked up bars in San Francisco-all busy. A clothing store at a mall in Sacramento also had a busy signal, as did television stations, utility companies, and twenty-four-hour pharmacies. She looked up random people in the online phone directories, and their numbers went straight to voice mail. Calling another five, she got the same results each time.

Jane wasn’t avoiding her.