Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller: Book 2 (29 page)

Six days in Amarillo, Texas. It had been six days, and Salim’s money was bleeding away.

That first ride was easy. He’d walked over to the truck stop with Victor and his girlfriend—Salim forgot her name—Victor did the talking, and arranged a ride for Salim in the back of an empty cattle truck. The floor wasn’t
covered
in manure, but there was plenty of it. Still, Salim found himself a relatively clean spot for the six-hour drive to Amarillo. From there, the driver was headed south to Lubbock, and left Salim at a truck stop on Interstate 40.

Salim thanked the driver, went inside, bought himself a microwave burrito for a dollar ninety-nine and a fifty-two ounce soda for eighty-nine cents. He ate alone on an orange bench at a sunshine-yellow Formica table, one of a couple dozen in a dirty lounge that reeked of cigarette smoke. The other customers, two of them, kept their distance from Salim and each other.

He felt good, and seriously thought he’d get a ride in the empty trailer of another truck and be in Denver by midnight.

That didn’t happen.

Each day, as he sat there in the shade of the twenty-five foot high awnings, asking the favor of truckers, none of them admitted to heading north or west. Maybe their first impression of Salim rubbed them the wrong way. Maybe he was too young. Maybe too dirty. Maybe too brown. Maybe they were all liars.

Each day, the traffic out on the highway thinned a little more and Salim wondered if a day would arrive when no cars, no trucks rolled. What would he do then?

In his boredom, he became preoccupied with The Big Texan Steak Ranch, a quarter-mile up the highway from the truck stop. With signs so large and gaudy they might be visible all the way back down the highway to Oklahoma City, Salim couldn’t help but spend too many thoughts on the promise of a free seventy-two ounce steak, under the condition that he eat the entire thing, and the sides, in less than an hour.

Salim, as hungry as he was, convinced himself he could beat that game. He skipped his breakfast, not an uncommon occurrence anyway, waited until lunchtime, left the truck stop, and walked down to the Big Texan Steak Ranch. The parking lot was near empty, but that wasn’t a surprise, given the light traffic and everyone’s fears about going out in public.

He crossed the parking lot and noticed a sign taped to the front door. By order of the governor, along with several lines of legal jibber jabber, the restaurant, like all other restaurants in Texas, was closed until further notice.

Most of the rebels were gone when Austin found the energy to crawl out of the hut around noon. His eyes were swollen and painful, his nose full of crusty blood, his lips split. It hurt to move. He had bruises all over.

Using the hut’s doorframe, he dragged himself upright and looked around the camp. A couple of guards sat in the shade of a tree, one napping, the other staring into the jungle. Their lackadaisical attention shamed Austin. The rebels had beaten him so badly the night before that he couldn’t have run away if he’d wanted to.

He hobbled out into the woods behind the hostage hut and found the latrines. As he relieved himself, he smiled up at the sky and laughed—not too loudly. Given what little power he had to do something to save himself, he’d done it. He paid a price, an affordable price. His bruises would heal. His scars would fade. All he had to do was grovel and smile falsely at his captors for a few more weeks.

That was the hope.

When Austin got back to the hut, he sat down in front where he could feel the sun on his face. Over his shoulder through the hut’s doorway, he saw Sander’s feet but couldn’t see anything above his waist.

“I’m awake,” said Sander.

“What the fuck do I care?” Austin snapped, causing his lower lip to start bleeding from beneath a scab.

“Are you all right?” Sander asked.

“I’ll live.”

For nearly a minute, Sander stayed quiet and Austin wondered if he’d gone back to sleep. “I don’t think I will,” he said.

“Will what?” Austin asked, though not caring whether he heard the answer.

“Live.”

“Just get up,” Austin told him. “Move around. You’ll be fine in a couple a days.”

Sander started to sob. “I hurt.”

“Good.” Austin gave a thought to stomping into the hut to kick Sander a few times. That was only a fantasy. Sander had paid for his mistake, too, and would likely pay a lot more.

Sander got control of his sobs and asked, “Why?”

“Why, what?”

“Why did you tell me you poisoned the meat?”

“Why did you have to say anything?” Austin asked. “If you’d just stayed quiet, none of this would have happened.”

Sander groaned and shuffled on his mat. Austin turned around to see him trying to push himself into a sitting position. Half way up, he clutched at a pain in his belly and fell over with a grunt. The sobs came again. He was in bad shape, much worse than Austin.

Thoughts of empathy and coarse justice flipped through a hundred reversals as Austin listened to Sander’s pained breaths.

“You have a hope to get out of here,” Sander muttered. “Your ransom will come. For me—”

Austin said nothing.

“I told The General because it was my way out,” Sander explained. “He would have let me go.”

“And killed
me
.” Austin’s ambivalence disappeared.

One hundred and eleven thousand cases of Ebola in Denver. So fast. Holy Christ, it was hard to believe.

Addicted to the repetitive speculations and random nuggets of information, Paul couldn’t bring himself to change the channel to anything other than another news station, so he pushed the off button on the remote and watched the TV screen go black. He got up from the couch and paced a path through the first floor, around a dozen circuits, rushing through the dining room each time, not wanting to linger in the space where Heidi had breathed her last. He rounded a quick U-turn in the guest room at the front of the house that faced the patio where Heidi’s body still lay, bundled exactly as described by that fucking website. Why the hell wouldn’t they come and pick her up?

Oh, right. One hundred and eleven thousand cases.

How many bodies lay bundled up on how many patios? How many more were coming?

The whole God-damned world was going to shit.

Paul pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. Well, not
his
phone. That device was a casualty of his Ebola mitigation plan. He had it when the paramedics put him in the ambulance, and like his tainted clothing, it had been destroyed. Now, he had Heidi’s phone. He’d restored it from his computer, so it had all of his application data and contact information, but something was wrong with it. It made barely perceptible chirps when calls came in, and Paul couldn’t figure out how to make the contrary thing ring. Looking at the phone, Paul saw that he’d missed another call from Olivia.

“Damn.”

He called her back, but got no answer.

He tried a second time, with the same result.

Paul climbed the stairs and wandered through the bedrooms, checking the blinds that—of course—were closed. He hadn’t opened them, and no one else lived in the townhouse, not anymore.

He was feeling stir crazy. That, and depressed, the only two things he ever felt anymore. He stared at the ceiling at night until he got tired of the feelings that lurked in the dark corners of his bedroom. He turned on the TV and watched until he passed out. He woke too early every morning, usually before the sun was up. He rolled out of bed and started his day, a repeat of the one before.

He realized he needed to get out of the house. It was that simple.

To leave the house unnecessarily was a violation of one of hundreds of new rules, some contradictory, random, thrown together in a rush by mayors, city councilmen, or state legislators, alarmed and trying to do anything that felt like something. Most of them had ridden a well-financed, mud-slinging campaign into office. They’d spent their time learning how to smear opponents and win elections. Governance? Fuck that! None of them knew how to manage a pandemic. None of them had time to learn.

Paul felt rebellious, the first new
anything
he’d felt in weeks. He went out of the house through the garage. The corpse on the front porch made the front door an undesirable exit path.

Paul crossed over the busy road that ran past his house, the one from which passing assholes threw rocks at his windows, back when enough of them were healthy enough to drive a car. He admitted to himself that was an exaggeration. Still, just a small percentage of citizens had contracted Ebola. All the rest of them were afraid though. That kept most of them in their houses, a great plan until the food ran out. Then what?

God, what a question that was. Paul at least had enough food in the basement.

He stepped onto one of the concrete-paved hike-and-bike trails, one of those he and Heidi had walked on countless evenings, watching the sky turn to hues of orange and red as the sun sank behind the Front Range.

Forty-five minutes passed. The trails were his alone.

Moving his feet along the meandering trail system was doing nothing to quell his dark emotions. He stopped, got his bearings, and found the nearest path back to a road. Cutting back through the residential streets would be the most direct route back home. Once there, he resolved to find an on-demand movie to watch on his giant television—something with no depth and lots of violence—he’d drink a beer, or two, or more, and forget everything, at least for a little while.

As he passed the houses, the parked cars, and the uncollected garbage at the curbs, Paul noticed the homemade flags, strips of black or red cloth, hanging from doors. Red meant sick. Black meant death. As if a body, lying bundled in plastic on the front porch wasn’t enough of a warning. Paul, too, had a black T-shirt tied to the railing on his front porch. The mandate declared it to be so, fines and incarceration for violators.

Everything carried a penalty these days.

Even bad choices.

Paul started to count—not flags, but bodies he saw on porches. He’d reached seven when he saw two heavily-taped cardboard boxes, each with its own flag, each labeled according to the law: body inside.

Each box looked new, purchased from a do-it-yourself moving company, and put to use as a makeshift coffin—there were no more real coffins in Denver. Those ran out in the first week. Paul stopped. He stared at the two boxes, not lengthy enough by far to contain a person. Not even long enough for a child. He imagined the tears of the parents in that house as he thought about his own son. He couldn’t imagine how much it pained them to fold their two dead children into packing boxes.

Maybe in their minds it was better than wrapping them in garbage bags. Heavy-duty plastic sold out shortly after the coffins went. Now, duct tape was absent and people were using ropes made of torn cloth to wrap and bind.

The law required so much with the limited resources remaining.

Grandparents couldn’t grieve. No, the law didn’t say that. If any of those two boxed children’s grandparents lived out of state, they’d never get a pass to cross state lines. Only smugglers, out-of-state aliens, and truckers carrying the trickle of the nation’s commerce were moving between states these days.

Neighbors couldn’t help a bereaved parent. They could only send an email or make a phone call. To cross the street and give the neighbor a hug was now illegal. Between the myriad of government agencies, all physical contact between people was banned unless their jobs required it.

Going outside without a mask or gloves now carried a fine and a year in jail.

Spitting on the sidewalk, or anywhere, for that matter—a law from the past that seemed so silly to modern Americans—was illegal again.

Paul hung his head and watched his walking feet. He wanted to see no more.

He crossed the wide road that passed beside his townhouse complex. A car drove by, giving him a wide berth. He passed onto a street just a block over from his townhouse. He didn’t look at the flags on the doors.

He rounded the last corner and was startled by the yap from a tiny mop dog on a leash. Paul looked up. His tattling neighbor stood a handful of steps in front of him, surgical mask over her face, latex gloves on her hands, goggles covering her wide, frightened eyes.

“You stay away from me, Paul Cooper.”

The dog growled. It yapped some more.

Paul pointed up the street and muttered, “I’m going that way.” Maggie could cross the street to get out of his way. Paul had no civility left for her, not after what she’d done by spilling all of his and Heidi’s secrets on the news. “Get out of my way.”

Maggie backed up a step, found her courage and stopped. “No.” She pointed across the street. “You go over there.”

“Fuck you and your stupid rat!” Paul lunged forward, not to attack her, but to frighten her as he pushed past. Maggie screamed. She bolted to her right, dragging her yappy mop thing by its leash.

“Stay away from me!” she shrieked as she squeezed through a gap between two cars parked at the curb.

Paul caught a glimpse of a blur of blue, and heard the revving whine of a tiny engine, followed by a wet thud.

A Prius took Maggie down as she stepped into the street. The dog yelped and its leash flew into the air.

Tires screeched, but the Prius didn’t slow, not at first. The driver had been speeding.

Paul ran out into the street. The Prius came to a halt half a block up. It sat there idling, sitting at an odd angle. A bloody smear ran out from behind, to the spot where Maggie had been just an eye blink before.

The yappy little mop dog, recovered from the shock of seeing its owner taken by the Prius, returned to frantic barking.

The Prius engine whined again. It lurched.

Paul ran up to the car and saw Maggie mashed between the front bumper and the road. He looked at the driver, mouth agape, still in the front seat, stuck in the shock of what had just happened, perhaps stuck in the limbo of having to choose which law to break: the old requirement to render aid after an accident, or the new one, not to touch a stranger.

It was an easy decision for Paul. He slipped his hands into his pockets and had the very black sense that something right—disproportionate, but
right
—had just transpired. God had a very dark sense of humor.

The driver of the car looked at Paul. Paul shrugged and turned away toward his townhouse. He heard the engine rev again. The car’s suspension creaked and it rolled off of Maggie’s body. Tires screeched again as it sped off.

Paul didn’t look back.

He was walking.

He was thinking.

When would his own disproportionate, deserved justice come?