Pestilence

30

The helicopter, a dull green with gray splotches, touched down not far from where Samantha was standing. She watched as two men came out, ducking their heads low, though they couldn’t possibly have touched the rotating blades unless they jumped. One of them was Clyde Olsen.

“Tell me you didn’t go through that entire batch of vaccines?” he said, coming up to them.

“Isn’t that the point?” Duncan asked.

His face contorted as if he’d eaten something sour. “The vaccines were… ineffective. We had inoculated a group about five hours before you’d arrived… They’re beginning to show symptoms.”

“Symptoms?” Sam said angrily.

“It was a risk we had to take, and they were fully informed. They chose to take it.”

“They shouldn’t be displaying symptoms for at least a day,” Duncan said.

“It’s… The damn thing is mutating so fast, we can’t keep up. Its incubation period has gone from seventy-two hours down to four.”

“We have to get these people quarantined,” Sam said.

“Already taken care of. I… uh, about the vaccines… One of the groups… I don’t quite know how to say this.”

Samantha’s stomach was in knots. He didn’t have to say it. She already knew. Her sister had been one of the ones inoculated.

The jeep came not long after Olsen had left. He’d asked that they come with him in the chopper, but Sam had refused, and Duncan stayed with her. She was going to visit her sister, no matter what-even through a plastic barrier.

When the jeep arrived, the driver was a young woman in a beige uniform. Samantha and Duncan climbed in, and she spun it around, then headed through Los Angeles.

“Sorry I was late,” she said. “We were quarantining a new part of the city, and I had to help. It’s chaos that first hour.”

The driver took the interstate and then the back roads. The route took them away from downtown and farther up into the hills, near hiking and biking trails. Trees surrounded them, and the air was cool and crisp. Worry gnawed at Samantha’s guts as Duncan was slowly dozing off. His eyes would shut and then dart open. Sam saw him pinching himself to try to stay awake, sticking his head out the window to let the wind hit him, and shifting positions, but nothing seemed to work.

Soon, Samantha saw what they had come for, and it terrified her.

The fence was about twelve feet high and tipped with looping barbed wire with makeshift towers around the perimeter. At the entrance sat a guard at a desk. Inside were hundreds and hundreds of cots with gray blankets. Men and women were separated by a partition but could still see and talk to one another through it.

As far as she could tell, it was a concentration camp.

“How did you decide who to bring here?” Sam asked.

The woman replied, “They started with certain parts of the city, like Beverly Hills and Malibu, and then we’re kind of getting the rest of the city. We should have everywhere in like a day or something.”

She hopped out of the jeep, but Duncan and Sam didn’t move.

He said, “I’m sorry, Sam.”

Sam didn’t respond. The only thought in her mind was that her sister was in that place, tucked away like some rat waiting to be experimented on in a university laboratory. And on top of that, she had just injected live viruses into over a hundred people. The staggering repercussions made her feel nauseated. But she couldn’t think about that. She had to focus on her sister; she could wallow in guilt later.

She got out of the jeep and followed the woman, who led her to the entrance. All the guards were wearing surgical masks.

The one at the entrance turned to the woman. “Who’s this?”

“They need to see one of the quarantined. What was her name?”

“Jane Bower is her maiden name, but she’d likely be under Jane Gates.”

The man scanned a list on an iPad. “Okay, she’s here. I got a note that says her sister’s coming to visit her. I guess that’s you.”

He stood up and unlocked a gate on the women’s side. He pressed a button on the PA system. “Jane Bower or Jane Gates to the front entrance.”

They waited a few moments, and no one came forward. He repeated into the device, “Jane Bower or Jane Gates to the front entrance now.”

Another few minutes passed, and still, nothing.

“She ain’t here,” the guardsman said.

“General Olsen told me she was.”

The guardsman scanned the iPad again. “Oh, here she is. She’s on my list of people that have been shipped out.”

“Shipped out where?”

“Quarantine.”

“You have people in cages, and you don’t think that’s quarantine?”

“I mean like real quarantine. With no one else around them.”

“Where is that?”

“I can’t tell you. It’s classified.”

“General Olsen gave me specific permission to see my sister, and I want to see her now.”

“Well, that’s fine, but I ain’t gonna be the one to tell you where she is. Go ask General Olsen.”