Genesis Plague (21 page)

I
ran down the alley next to the building and emerged on another
street at the back. The street was lined with boutique clothing shops and expensive
electronics stores. Cars sat bumper-to-bumper, horns blaring and drivers
screaming out their windows for everyone to keep it moving.

Conny and Flint ran up
to me, breathing hard. The mob continued to shout from the front of the
building, their voices echoing down the alley. I flinched when a single gunshot
cracked loudly.

“Maybe we should wait
here for the other MPs,” said Conny.

“No,” I said, catching
my breath. “We can’t wait. We have to synthesize more of this.”

I pulled the vaccine
tube out from under my shirt.

Flint slapped my back
and cheered. “How did you get that?!” Then his smile faded as he looked behind
me. “Where’s Nash?”

I shook my head. “I
couldn’t save him.”

Flint’s eyes narrowed
as he studied me. Then he said, “We should get to the lab in San Fran. Maria
will have all the samples we need, just in case something happens to the
vaccine.”

“That keeps us right in
the heart of the infection.”

“It’s global, Paul,”
Flint said. “There is no ‘heart’. How many people do you think hopped on a
plane to fly home and visit their relatives after they were infected? Not to
mention the international flights! Four days with no symptoms.” He shook his
head. “It’s everywhere by now.”

“What kind of lab would
they have at a PharmaCor facility?” I asked, thinking of South Dakota.

“What?” Flint asked,
confused. “What has that got to do with anything?”

I quickly explained my
conversation with Maria and how I saw the image of Xander and Cassidy at a
processing plant in Rapid City.

After I mentioned Cass,
my heart skipped a beat as my hand slapped at my chest, searching for the
engagement ring.

“I left it!”

“Left what?” asked
Conny.

My hands continued to
grab at my chest, gripping my shirt as if I would find the ring hidden in the
cloth. I turned to run back to the building, fully prepared to breathe infected
air to get the ring. Flint’s hand closed around my arm like a vise and he
pulled me back.

It took me a moment to
register the shiny metal chain dangling from his clenched fist. The ring swung
from it like a pendulum.

My panic faded as I
took the chain and slipped it over my head, then I tucked the necklace into my
shirt.

“Thank you,” I said
with relief. “Thought I’d never see it again.”

“Paul,” said Flint
cautiously. “If Cass went there right when we got back from Hawaii, there’s
only a small chance she’s hasn’t moved on.”

“Still a chance,” I
said. “Conny, how about the equipment?”

“It’s a pharmaceutical
production plant,” she said, her voice slightly muffled by her surgical mask.
“They would have everything you need. Analyzing, mass vaccine production
capabilities, the works.”

Flint shook his head
and held up his hands. “Now hold on a second. We need to make as much of this
vaccine as we can, Paul. That takes top priority, over anything and anyone. I
know you want to find Cass, but there’s no way we can be sure the PharmaCor
facility has all the equipment we need. The only place we
know
that has
it is the lab in San Francisco.”

I didn’t want to admit
he was right. Eventually I nodded, hating myself and everything else for being
forced to hold off a search for Cassidy.

Glass shattered nearby,
and we turned as two men hopped through a broken display window of an
electronics store. Farther down the street, a man in a hooded sweatshirt threw
a brick through a shop window and disappeared inside.

“And we sure as hell
can’t stay here,” Flint said. “This place is about to take a nosedive into
anarchy. We’re talking infectious mass psychosis brought on by absolute fear.
We just had a sample of it with the mob in front of the building. Picture that
on a national scale.”

In the distance, sirens
wailed.

“We should find a car,”
Conny said.

“We can’t drive all the
way to San Francisco,” Flint said. “It’s over eight-hundred miles south. That’s
a lot of ground to cover, and the roads will be congested once people realize
there’s an epidemic.”

“They know it already,”
I said, looking at the traffic jam on the street. “Flint’s right. We should
avoid driving if we can.”

“We could fly,” said
Conny.

“They won’t let anything
off the ground now,” said Flint.

“Commercial airports
are shut down,” I said, “but we might have a chance with a private airfield.”

“We would get stuck the
second we merged onto the freeway,” Conny said.

Flint snapped his
fingers. “We don’t need a car. We need a boat.”

F
lint explained it to us as we ran down the street, past yelling
drivers and men carrying boxes of electronics from a store. The looters paid us
no attention as they looked around constantly for any sign of the police.

I saw the beginnings of
red lesions on some of their faces.

“Tacoma Narrows Airport
is about forty miles south,” Flint said over his shoulder. Conny and I stayed
close on his heels as he led us east. “We’re two block from Lake Union.”

“Union feeds into Puget
Sound,” I said.

“Exactly. And the Sound
runs all the way down to Tacoma. A little past that is the airport.”

“How do we get a boat?”

Flint grinned. “Money.”

“You want to
buy
a boat?”

“I was saving for
retirement, but this might be more important at the moment.”

He turned down a side
street and we left the traffic jam behind.

In the end, we rented a
fourteen-foot skiff from a small fishing excursion company on the shore of Lake
Union. The old man running the place demanded three times the rental price since
he was about to close and he wanted a deposit in case we didn’t bring the boat
back by tomorrow morning. Flint gave him double what he asked and told him to
watch the news. The old man said all news was garbage and tossed us the keys to
the boat.

The water was calm as
Flint took us out of Lake Union and into Puget Sound. A few boats passed us,
engines screaming as they raced for shore, then all was calm again.

“Did you get in touch
with your brothers?” he asked me after a long silence.

The man who rented the
boat to us had agreed to let me use his phone while he prepped the engine.

“Answering machines,” I
said. “All three of them. One lives in Miami and the rest are in
Charlottesville.”

“Hopefully they tucked
tail and headed to the hills.”

“Hopefully,” I said,
but deep down I knew they wouldn’t leave until they had a reason to go.

My brothers were
bull-headed, and they married women who were just as strong-minded. It was my
little niece Tara I was most worried about. She was three years old and she
still called me Unka Pow.

I left a message for my
brother Tom to get the hell out of Miami, to grab a satellite phone and hop on
a boat with his wife and Tara, and to drop anchor off-shore. I told him to
bring enough supplies to feed the three of them for as long as possible, and I
would send word when I could.

Tom had a bad habit of
never returning my calls. My only hope was that he at least listened to the
entire message and took it to heart.

“Did you call anyone?”
I asked.

Flint looked ahead without
answering. His ex-wife had a new husband, a new life. And like my parents, his
died years ago.

“How about you, Conny?”

She sat at the bow of
the boat, huddled down out of the wind, hair whipping against her surgical
mask.

“My parents and my brother
live in Tucson,” she said. “They wouldn’t go anywhere unless a boulder fell on
their roof. And even then it would be a tough sell. You just have to promise to
stop me before I try to go home.”

“And you can stop me
before I try to find my brothers,” I said. “Sort of an accountability club for
the infected.”

“You’re clean, Paul. I
saw the results before I went into Dan’s room.”

I turned back to the
engine because, for a few brief moments, I was too sad to look Conny in the
eyes.

“We have enough gas to
get there?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah,” said Flint.

“What’s the shelf life
on the vaccine?” asked Conny.

I held the plastic tube
to the sunlight as I studied the orange liquid within.

“Each one is
different,” I said, “but definitely more than seven days. Plenty of time,
Conny.”

She looked away and
hugged herself tightly.

The air was chill on
the open water, but my blood was still running hot from earlier. My stomach
turned sour when I thought of Nash being pulled back into the mob of people, as
if being sucked into the maw of some terrible beast.

“You look a little
green, Paul,” Flint said from behind the wheel. “Seasick?”

“I’m fine,” I said,
rubbing my eyes. “But we should get ourselves tested as soon as we can. Between
those soldiers and the smoke, we had a lot of opportunities for infection in
the lab.”

“Outside of the lab,
too,” Flint said.

He looked at me
accusingly.

“I almost had Nash,” I
shouted hotly, “then I let him go so I could grab the vaccine!” I glared at Flint,
my face red. My heart pounded in my chest as he stared back at me.

Then he looked away.

“Sounds like you made
the right choice.”

“Who were the
soldiers?” asked Conny.

My blood pressure slowly
returned to normal, and I sighed. “Probably ex-military, or even current
military who went AWOL once they found out they were infected.”

“Could have been your
standard home-grown backwoods militia,” Flint said. “Conspiracy theorist types
who stockpile weapons and supplies in some mountain bunker, waiting for the
world to end.”

“It was like they knew
exactly what they were doing,” said Conny.

I thought about what
their leader had said to me, about how they were just a group of men with the
ability to change their fate. I wondered if the three of us could change ours,
too.

T
he wind was in our favor. It took just shy of two hours to
reach the shore east of Tacoma Narrows Airport. Flint drove the boat up onto a
stretch of grass that ran right down to the water’s edge. There was a sign
nearby that stated we were in Tacoma Narrows Park, reminding us we couldn’t
throw beer cans into the water.

Flint didn’t bother
tying off the boat as we walked away. He left the keys next to the wheel with a
business card for the address of the old man’s fishing excursion company on the
off-chance someone was heading back the way we came.

He shrugged and said,
“Stranger things have happened.”

We were walking down a
straight dirt road, the airport several hundred yards ahead, when Flint tugged
on my sleeve. I dropped back to walk alongside him, letting Conny pull ahead.

He watched her intently
as he whispered, “How long do you think it will take to distill the vaccine
once we get it to the lab?”

“Not long. Why?”

“Less than four days?”

“If we make it.”

“We don’t know when the
infection becomes irreversible, Paul, if it does at all. Levino and Grayson had
lesions by day four, and they went psycho on day six.”

“I don’t think they
went crazy,” I said. Flint looked at me like I was stupid. “Just hear me out,
would you? Both of them had been saying for days, even before the lesions began
to appear, that they wanted to be with family and friends. Somehow the
conversations always came back around to their desire for companionship. I
don’t think they went crazy. I think their infection heightened the desire to
be with someone else,
anyone
else, to such a point that they had to
achieve that goal however they could.”

“You’re saying Grayson
attacked Conny because he wanted to be close to her?”

“I think so.”

“So why didn’t Levino
go berserk as well?”

“I saw his eyes before
he pulled the pin on that grenade. He was sharp and focused. Grayson was
different. He was detached, unresponsive. He had no control over his actions.
But Levino had control.”

Flint was silent for a
moment as he watched Conny. “Look, Paul,” he said. “You did what you had to
when it came to Nash. The vaccine is more important than any of us, and you had
no choice, but Conny—”

“I’m not leaving her
behind, Flint,” I said. “I’m not leaving anyone else. I wouldn’t leave you. Not
if there was still a chance.”

His face turned red,
but he nodded and stared his feet. I could tell he was stewing, but it didn’t
seem like he was willing to fight me on the issue. I imagined he thought he
would feel too guilty to leave Conny to fend for herself, which was exactly how
I felt about what I did to Nash.

The dirt road terminated
on a wide grassy field. A long, flat airstrip cut through the grass. Hangar
buildings lined the runway, most of their doors closed. Halfway down the strip,
four military trucks formed a barricade across the tarmac, blocking all
landings and takeoffs.

“Well, shit,” Flint
said.

“My thoughts exactly,”
said Conny.

“You should lose the
mask,” I told her. “They’d never let us go if they saw it.”

Conny pulled off her
mask and stuffed it into her pocket.

“And try not to sneeze
on us,” I added lightly.

She grinned.

“We’re not still going
in there,” Flint said in disbelief.

“We don’t have a
choice,” I said. “Follow me, and stay close.”