She moved back into the
hallway, her camera passing rows of people sitting in chairs. Some
were slumped over on each other, while others just leaned forward
into their own hands or leaned up against the wall. Angela moved into
a room at the end of the corridor and approached a patient lying in
one of the room’s two beds.
“When this virus
first presents itself, it looks very much like the average flu.
Cough. Fever. Aches and pains. Maybe some nausea. That’s what
they told us when they called us in to volunteer,” she said.
“They told us it was some kind of flu and that they needed all
the help they could get. They told us since we’d been
vaccinated against the flu, we’d probably be okay.”
She sniffed and
coughed. Crash winced when she turned the camera back to her own
face. Blood trickled from the side of her mouth and from the tear
duct in the corner of her left eye.
“As you can see,
the vaccine didn’t do shit to help me,” she said, a
crooked smile crossing her face. She coughed again and blood
splattered across the screen. She tried to wipe it away, but it just
smeared across the camera.
“This is what I
wanted to show you,” she said. “On day 1 of the
quarantine, my supervisor, Bill Ross, was healthy and strong. He
showed no sign of the virus. Day 2, he presented with a low-grade
fever and a cough. This morning, Day 3, I came to wake him for his
next shift and found this.” She zoomed in on the face of the
man on the bed and Crash’s eyes grew wide.
The man’s eyes
were rimmed in black bruises streaked with blood. His cheeks looked
hollow, as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks. His hair had fallen out
in chunks. Red sores dotted his face and neck, then continued down
his arms. Many of the sores had broken and a yellowy puss ran out of
them. Crash put his hand over his mouth and turned away.
“I have never
seen a virus or any disease work this quickly,” Angela Burrows
said into the camera.
The woman began to cry.
“When they locked
us in three days ago, we had just over sixteen hundred patients,
nurses and doctors quarantined inside this hospital,” she said.
“Today, only six hundred of those are still alive. By the end
of the week, almost all of us will be dead. Including me.”
The screen went black
and Crash sat in silence, trying to make sense of what he’d
just seen.
Noah stood at the door
to the basement.
He’d reached his
limit. Enough already. His dad must have come out to get food at some
point in the middle of the night because he left his dirty plate in
the sink, but Noah had been asleep and missed it.
His father had also
left a note on the bar telling Noah not to go outside or leave the
house for anything. Not even school.
Noah had gotten similar
messages from his dad in the past when a new strain of the flu would
show up or there was some kind of other virus or threat, but he
usually ignored it. His dad could be really paranoid about this stuff
ever since his mom died.
But between the man who
collapsed and died on their street and seeing Parrish’s mom the
other night, Noah decided he better listen to his dad. He skipped
school on Monday. Tuesday, though, school had been canceled. Too many
students and teachers were sick, they said. It gave Noah the chills
just thinking about it.
How serious was this
thing?
He’d obviously
already been exposed. He’d carried Madelyn Sorrows down the
stairs, his face close to hers when she coughed. If he was going to
get sick from it, how long until symptoms started showing up?
He needed answers.
Being the son of
someone who worked directly for the CDC should mean easy access to
answers. He knew his dad was busy trying to come up with a cure or a
new vaccine or whatever it was he did, but the man should have taken
at least an hour to come talk to his own son about what this sickness
was really all about.
His dad didn’t
know he’d gone out to help with Parrish’s mom the other
night. He was going to be pissed when he found out.
Noah stared at the door
again, then stepped forward and knocked.
He waited, his heart
racing. If his dad didn’t answer the door, then what? Should he
knock it down and go demand some answers? Or just keep waiting? This
whole thing was driving him crazy.
He knocked again.
Louder this time.
Finally, after a couple
of minutes of waiting, the door opened slowly.
Noah’s father
appeared in the crack of an opening, his head down. “I’m
busy, Noah,” he said. He glanced up for only a moment. “Are
you feeling alright?”
“I’m fine,”
Noah said. “I just needed to talk to you. Can you come up for a
minute?”
His dad looked away and
cleared his throat. “I don’t think that’s such a
good idea,” he said. “You aren’t sick or anything
right? You’re staying home like I asked you to?”
“Yes,” Noah
said.
His throat tightened.
Something was definitely off here. Why wouldn’t his dad look at
him? Why wouldn’t he at least come up into the kitchen for a
minute to talk to him?
“I should get
back downstairs,” his father said, already beginning to close
the door.
Noah stuck his hand
between the door and the frame, then pushed it open a little further.
“Dad? What’s wrong?”
“Don’t come
in here, Noah, I mean it,” he said. “I don’t want
you to be exposed to this.”
Noah pushed the door
open more. “What’s going on?”
His dad pushed against
the door, but Noah wouldn’t give up.
“Dammit, Dad,
I’ve already been exposed,” he said.
“What?” his
dad asked. There was such sadness in his tone. “When? You
didn’t get too close to that man the other night, did you?”
“No,” Noah
said. “But I helped Parrish carry her mom to the car in the
middle of the night a couple days ago, so you can stop trying to
protect me. Whatever this is, I’ve already been exposed to it.”
His father let go of
the door and it slammed against the back wall. He turned away, hiding
his face. Noah’s stomach twisted and he clenched his jaw.
“Dad?”
He placed his hand on
his father’s shoulder, expecting his dad to yell at him or tell
him to go back upstairs.
Instead, he began to
cry. His father’s shoulders moved up and down as sobs shook his
body. He sat down on the steps and laid his head in his hands.
“What’s
wrong?” Noah asked again. The last time he saw his father cry
was at his mom’s funeral. That was the only time, really. He
moved beside his dad and sat down on the steps. “You’ve
got to talk to me.”
After a moment, his
father finally wiped the tears from his face and sniffed. “I’m
sorry, Noah,” he said. “I did everything I could to keep
you safe, but it’s becoming more and more clear that none of us
are safe. Not ever again.”
His father sat up and
slowly, painfully, turned toward him.
Noah’s eyes grew
wide, then filled with tears. His father’s eyes were bloodshot,
purple bruise-like bags under them. His skin had lost a lot of its
color and his lips were dry and white.
“How long have
you been sick?” he asked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t
know,” he said. “I guess I kept hoping if I worked hard
enough, I would find some kind of answer to this whole thing.”
“What is this,
Dad? It’s not the flu, is it?”
“Is that what
they’re calling it on the news?”
Noah nodded. “They
keep saying it’s some kind of super-flu, but I don’t
think anyone’s really buying that anymore.”
His father ran his
hands through his hair and sniffed again. “No, it’s
definitely not the flu. In fact, it’s not like anything we’ve
ever seen before,” he said. He stood and motioned for Noah to
follow him. “Most illnesses like this are either viral or
bacterial. We can usually isolate it inside the blood and study it,
but we can’t seem to figure this one out.”
Noah paused at the
bottom of the stairs. He’d never seen his father’s lab
before. He’d never been allowed down here. The room was bright
with stark white walls and metal countertops. There were all types of
lab equipment from microscopes to glass vials and everything you
would expect to see in a lab. But it was the containment cell along
the back wall that caught his attention.
“What’s
that for?” he asked, pointing.
His father turned to
look, then his shoulders slumped. “It’s a quarantine
cell,” he said.
“Okay. So what’s
it doing in our house?”
“I had it
installed as a precaution,” he said. “In case I
accidentally exposed myself to a deadly virus and needed to be
quarantined.”
His words hung in the
air between them.
“I thought of
using it as soon as my symptoms began yesterday,” he said. “But
the truth is that we’re way past the point of quarantines
helping to contain this disease. It spreads too quickly and by the
time any symptoms appear, you’ve already exposed everyone
around you.”
“So what is it,
then? If you can’t find evidence of it inside the blood, what
is it?”
His father looked up at
him, his eyes full of fear and frustration. “That’s
exactly the problem,” he said. “No one knows. We’ve
got everyone looking at this. We’re talking global cooperation
here. No one has been able to identify the source of the sickness. We
can see its effects on the body, but not the virus or bacteria
itself. It’s like a ghost in the system.”
Noah shook his head.
How could this be happening? For most of his life, he’d
listened to his father’s paranoid talk about a super-flu or
virus that might someday wipe out millions—even billions—of
people within a matter of months. If everything he was saying now was
true, this was the modern-day equivalent of something like the Black
Death. Or worse.
“So what exactly
do you know?” Noah asked. He sat down, ready to listen.
His dad grabbed his
laptop from the workspace and came to sit down beside him. He propped
it open and logged in through the backdoor of the CDC’s
website. He worked fast, bringing up a series of files labeled
““Unidentified Virus”.
“Everything we
know so far is in these files,” he said. “These are
classified and I’m not supposed to be showing them to you, but
I need for you to understand what’s going on.”
He stopped to cough,
leaning far away from Noah. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket
and Noah noticed a smear of blood as he tucked it back in his lab
coat.
Noah felt short of
breath. Coughing up blood couldn’t be good. And with no
official treatment, what exactly did that mean for his dad? Fear shot
through him, but he swallowed it down. He didn’t want to panic.
His dad would figure this out.
“The disease is
airborne,” his father said. “This is one of the main
reasons why it’s simply too late for a quarantine to work.
Anyone who has come close to someone who was infected or touched
anything they’ve touched is probably already infected.”
Noah wrinkled his
forehead. His mind was spinning.
“But with the
massive amounts of people they are saying are already sick, that
would mean almost everyone on the planet has probably been exposed by
now.”
His father met his eyes
and slowly nodded. The truth of what was really happening started to
sink in and Noah’s jaw dropped slightly. His breath hitched in
his throat.
“God, Dad, what’s
going on?”
“It’s
really bad, Noah. Never in my worst nightmares had I envisioned
something this deadly ever finding its way to us,” he said.
“Deadly?”
Noah asked. “So a lot of the people who are sick are actually
dying from this?”
His father took in a
deep breath, then let it out in a ragged sigh. “No, not a lot
of them, Noah.” He paused and shook his head. “All of
them.”
“What do you
mean, you can’t get home?” Karmen asked.
Her parents had gone to
one of their inspirational retreats in the mountains for a long
three-day weekend, but they were supposed to be back by Monday night.
It was already Wednesday now and they were still in the mountains.
“I’m so
sorry, honey,” her mother said. “Rick asked us to stay an
extra day or two to help out after the conference was over, and you
know your father. He hated to say no to a friend in need.”
Karmen rolled her eyes
and had to press her lips tight to keep from saying something she’d
regret.
“We changed our
flights to today, but now we’re at the airport and they’re
telling us all flights have been completely grounded,” she
said.
Karmen wrinkled her
nose. “Grounded? For what? Is the weather bad there?”
“No, not at all,”
her mom said. “They won’t tell us why. It’s
complete chaos.”
She held the phone to
her ear and walked into the living room to turn on the TV. Had there
been some kind of terrorist attack? Or a plane crash?
“I’ve been
trying to get your brother on the phone, but no one’s picking
up at his house,” she said. “As soon as I reach him, I’ll
have him come pick you up and take you over to his house.”
Karmen groaned. She
hated her older brother and his perfect little family. He was eight
years older than she was and married to a bitch of a wife. They had
twin baby girls who were absolute terrors.
“I’ll be
fine, Mom,” she said. “I can take care of myself.”
She quickly scanned
through the TV channels, searching for news.
“Hang on, I’ll
have to call you back, sweetheart,” her mom said. “Love
you. And we’ll discuss staying with your brother when I call
you back.”
Her mom clicked off and
Karmen set the phone down and turned the TV up.
The local news station
was showing footage of airports across the country, packed with
people whose flights had been canceled. She listened for a minute,
but the stupid reporter never said what they’d been canceled
for. As usual, the news was completely useless.