Genesis Plague (24 page)

T
he patch of fur we saw from the highway turned out to be a
golden retriever, standing rigid next to a dense stand of trees fifty feet from
the road. He stared into the dark trees, his legs shuddering. He whimpered a
high-pitched whine between quick breaths.

Conny stood a few feet
behind him, looking into the trees.

“There’s a truck in
there,” she said.

I stood next to her and
squinted into the woods. The sun was near the horizon behind us, and the
highway shoulder was a long slope leading down from the road, so none of the
light hit the shadows between the trees.

Conny approached the
dog slowly and knelt down so he could see her. The dog whimpered loudly and
glanced at her, then back to the trees.

“It’s okay,” said
Conny, inching forward.

“Conny…”

“Shhh,” she said
quietly, more to the dog. “You’re not gonna hurt me, are you boy? No, of course
not. That’s a good boy.” She turned back to me. “Reminds me of my two yellow
labs.” Then she reached out to scratch the dog’s head and stopped short.

“Paul,” she says. “Come
here.”

I walked up slowly,
still worried the dog would snap. It ignored me as I knelt next to Conny.

She spread apart a
patch of the dog’s golden fur with her fingers, revealing thin black veins
tracing jagged lines over pale flesh. The dog whimpered again as Conny patted
its back and muttered soothing words.

“Look at the eyes,” she
said in the same soothing voice.

The dog glanced
nervously at me as I leaned forward, then it looked into the trees, but it was
long enough to see burst capillaries in the whites of its eyes. Bright red was
creeping in from the edges, spreading toward the pupils.

“Poor guy’s infected,”
said Conny, stroking the dog’s back. “Welcome to the club.”

“Do you know what this
means?” I asked, sitting back. “It means the virus can cross the species
barrier. Even if we manage to eradicate the virus in humans, there’s no way we
can kill it in every single animal.”

“Maybe it just affects
canines,” said Conny.

I shook my head. “I bet
it’s the fleas. And those don’t just bite dogs.” I stood up and stepped away
from the dog, shivering at the thought of a thousand infected fleas nibbling at
my skin. “Jesus Christ,” I said, looking up at the darkening sky. “We’re
doomed. Up until today, I thought maybe we had a chance. But now…”

“What about the vaccine
we sent back to San Francisco with Flint? Your lab should be able to derive a
working cure from that.”

“If it only works on
first-generation infected hosts, then that means the virus mutates too quickly
for us to be able to make a new vaccine with each new iteration. We’ll
constantly be playing catch-up. I mean, look at the damned thing,” I said
pointing at the dog. “Cross-species transmission is extremely rare, and a virus
with that ability is always responsible for the worst outbreaks in human history.”

The list swam through
my head: Bird flu, Ebola, HIV, SARS, rabies. Bats carried rabies, and they
could directly transmit the virus to humans with no intermediary via bite or
fluid absorption through our mucus membranes.

“What if it didn’t have
to mutate?” asked Conny.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what if the
virus was ready-made to infect whatever it encountered?”

My mouth moved but no
words come out. Finally I was able to say, “I hadn’t thought of that.”

The implications of a
universal, one-size-fits-all virus hadn’t occurred to
anybody
. Johann,
the virologist at the lab in Seattle, confirmed the virus was ancient,
borderline primordial. Nothing else like it existed. A virus that predated all
others could very well have evolved as a universal building block that adapted
to each individual host. If it attacked each system differently based on the
weaknesses of the host, then there wasn’t any one mechanism we could pin down
to block the infection.

That could have been
the reason the bug mutated so quickly: it was designed that way, plain and
simple. It wasn’t some set-in-stone microbe that took generations to adapt to
its host species. This little bastard found a hole in the system of whatever
species it was infecting, then plugged that hole with whatever shape was
required.

Conny scratched behind
the dog’s ears. Then she put her hand to her mouth and coughed wetly.

“You want a mask?”

“When we get back to
the truck.”

The dog barked sharply.
Conny jumped back as it bolted into the woods.

“Hey!” she called, following
after the dog.

“We should get going,
Conny.”

“Don’t you want to see
if there’s gas in that truck?” she asked, pointing into the woods.

Not really
, I
thought.

The sun had set, and
twilight crept across the sky, casting a soft glow into the dense trees. The
truck was about thirty feet in. Deep tire marks scored the muddy ground leading
up to where it had stopped, and I could dimly see bright splinters of fresh
wood from where the truck hit a tree.

I looked back to the
old, beat-up Chevy. The gas I pulled from the Volvo would only get us another
fifty miles, if we were lucky. If we were unlucky, there were no full gas
stations between here and Rapid City.

Conny didn’t wait for
my answer. She walked into the woods, following the dog. After a moment of hesitation,
I hurried back to the Chevy and grabbed the siphon tube and gas can.

F
our dead bodies sprawled on the ground in the woods, and two
more lay in the bed of the truck. The dog moved between two of the bodies on
the ground, snuffling at their necks and whimpering sadly. One was a man with a
full white beard, matted with blood from the small bullet hole in his temple.
He wore camouflaged pants and a khaki fisherman’s vest. Spent shotgun casings
littered the ground near his body.

The other body the dog
was interested in was a young man, no older than twenty. His chest was opened
by a close-range shotgun blast, and he lay looking up at the canopy with dead
eyes.

Next to the two
bullet-riddled bodies in the bed of the truck were stacks of canned food and
bottled water, boxes of blankets, and a shopping basket full of batteries.

Conny stood silently,
looking down at the other two dead men on the ground. One had a shotgun with a
walnut stock in his pale hand, and the other carried two 9mm Berettas with
chrome barrels and pearl grips.

“They killed each other
over the supplies,” I said. “There’s nothing we can do for them.”

I tried to ignore the
charnel stench as I quickly unscrewed the truck’s gas cap and fed in the siphon
tube. Judging by the lividity of the corpses that didn’t bleed out, I guessed
they died about two days ago.

I managed to get the
fuel flowing into the gas can through the siphon hose without having to spit
any out. I was thankful for the noxious fumes, because anything was better than
the alternative.

“They were infected,”
Conny said, turning one of their heads with the tip of her shoe. “Look.”

A deep red lesion
gouged the man’s pale neck, running down beneath his shirt collar. Conny knelt
down and held open his eyelids. I looked away, feeling sick to my stomach.

God, why did they stink
so bad? Was it because they were infected? What did the bug do to your insides
to make such a stench?

In my effort to ignore
what Conny was doing, I looked down into the truck bed. For the first time, I
saw the five dead crows next to the two corpses. Their beaks were covered in
congealed blood from when they had been feeding on the bodies. Their eyes had liquefied
after death.

I promptly turned away
and vomited, losing the only bit of food I had eaten in almost two days.

“We should take
whatever we can carry,” said Conny.

“Agreed,” I said,
wiping my mouth. “I’ll start making trips.”

Conny stayed to examine
the corpses as I hauled supplies to the Chevy. Turned out there were a good
three gallons of fuel left in the tank of the crashed truck, which was probably
enough to get us at least as far as Bozeman. From there it was just a short hop
to Rapid City, provided the roads weren’t clogged with empty cars.

“This is the last of
it,” I said as I lifted a box of blankets from the bed of the truck. I started
to walk back to the Chevy when I realized that Conny wasn’t following me.

Instead, she crouched
next to one of the bodies and lifted the dead man’s shirt to expose his pale
belly. Red lesions scored his flesh, like deep claw marks. I swallowed hard to
choke down a gag reflex.

“Come on, Conny. We
should really get going.”

“I’ll be there in a
minute. I need to check something.”

I was about to argue
when she pulled a hunting knife out of a sheath on the man’s belt and poked the
flesh above his belly button, probing.

I headed back to the
Chevy before I started to dry-heave.

Only a narrow swath
near the horizon was still clinging to daylight. A gradient of faint blue to
deep purple-black spread across the rest of the sky as night finally set in. I
would have preferred to be off the interstate when it got dark, but then again,
I would have preferred it if a deadly virus weren’t infecting the planet.

I tried to avoid quiet
moments like the one I was experiencing as I waited for Conny to finish up
whatever she was doing to that corpse. I avoided those moments because I couldn’t
help but think of Cassidy. I was simultaneously filled with hope at the
possibility of seeing her again in Rapid City, and dread at the thought that
the only thing I would find was her lifeless body.

The rational part of my
mind told me she was infected when she abandoned me in Hawaii. If that was the
case, then the virus had already killed her, just like it did Roger Levino and
Dan Grayson. But I tried not to listen to the rational part of my brain when it
came to Cassidy. Love could be irrational after all, couldn’t it? Yet I don’t
know what was worse: her being infected and abandoning me to keep me safe, or
her not being infected and leaving because she was severing our relationship.

Goddamn those quiet
moments. You could see why I didn’t like being left alone with my thoughts.
That was why I wanted to get back on the road, so I could have something to
focus on instead of what was or wasn’t waiting for me in Rapid City.

Conny offered no relief
to my situation as she stepped out of the woods, her arms bloody up to her
elbows. She climbed into the bed of the truck next to the supplies without
saying a word.

“Um…” I said, trying to
prompt her to explain. “You want to tell me what that was about?”

“It’s nothing,” she said,
prying a bottle of water loose from the crate. She twisted off the cap and
doused her arms over the side of the truck. “I just had to check something. I
was wrong.”

“What were you checking?”

“It was
nothing
,
Paul!” she snapped.

“Alright,” I said,
putting up my hands. “Alright. Sorry to press. It’s just…you’re half-covered in
blood.”

She sighed as she
rinsed her arms. “No,
I’m
sorry. Can we talk about it later? I’d like to
try and get some rest.”

“Sure. Of course. You
know where I’ll be if you need me.”

“What looks good in
here?” she asked, poking around the supplies.

“Saw some canned black
beans with easy-open tops.”

“Mmm,” she said
sarcastically. “Delicious.”

I pried loose two cans
of beans and tossed one to Conny. I didn’t know if I would be able to eat them,
because the stench from the woods wouldn’t leave my nostrils.

“You ready?” I asked.

Conny settled down
against the tailgate and popped open her can of beans. “Take me to Rapid City,
Jeeves.”