Genesis Plague (29 page)

A
few minutes later, Marco knocked on the back window. I opened
the slider and he knelt down.

After a cautious look at
Emma, he said, “Do you think he killed those people?”

The thought seemed to weigh heavily on his mind. His brow
bunched up and he frowned.

I shook my head. “I
don’t know.”

His frown deepened. “Do
you think I should have shot the man in white?”

I looked at him in the
rearview mirror. “Would you have, if you knew he killed them?”

He snapped his fingers.
“Like
that
.” He sighed. “You want me to drive for a little while?”

“No, but thank you. I
think you’re better back there. I’m an okay shot, but not if I’m trying to hit
a moving target
from
a moving target.”

He nodded, then stood.
Conny moved over to sit at the window.

“Hell of a road trip,”
she said.

At the sound of her
voice, Emma turned around and watched her. Conny smiled.

“Do you wish you would
have gone to San Francisco?” I asked.

“That depends on what’s
in Rapid City,” said Conny. “But so far, no.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I might look a little
better, but I still feel the same.”

“And how is that?”

“Like my head is going
to explode.”

She looked away, and
tears welled in her eyes.

“Hey, tell me about
that injection they gave you in Helena.”

“What about it?”

“Are you cured?” I asked
with a grin.

She smiled weakly.
“Hardly. My fever’s rising fast, and it feels like someone is slowly twisting a
knife in my stomach. It’s the virus replicating in the bacterium. All I can
think about is Dan and Roger, and what it was like for them in the last few
hours before they died.”

I also thought about it
a lot, especially when I was trying not to. I kept seeing them in their
observation rooms, wandering aimlessly in their loose hospital gowns, their
flesh scored by deep lesions.

“I’d rather not go out
like that, if I have a choice,” said Conny. “You understand what I’m saying,
Paul?”

“Yeah. Find the cure
fast. We’ll be in Rapid City soon, and then we’ll get you patched up. You and
everyone else.”

“You’re sure about
that?” she asked, a small hint of skepticism in her voice. Or maybe it was
defeat.

“We
have
to find
it,” I said. “It’s our only chance at getting ahead of the virus. So, hey,
about that injection…”

She grinned. “Are you
trying to distract me?”

“Only if it’s working.”

“Hypothetically, the
coagulant will lessen my risk of aneurism, or at least hold it off a while
longer. The doctor wouldn’t tell me how they figured out they should combine it
with a tranquilizer to slow the heart rate of infected patients, but he seemed
to know exactly what he was doing.”

“He must have been good
for you to trust him to inject you with unknown medicines.”

“What do I have to lose
at this point? An extra day or two of suffering? He told me it helped some
people live a little longer, so I gave it a shot.”

“Har har. Good to know
the pun is still unaffected by everything else.”

Conny glanced at Emma,
who had fallen asleep sitting up sometime during our conversation.

“You saw the people in
the car?” she asked.

I nodded.

“It can’t be like this
everywhere, right?”

“If things like
that
are happening this far from big cities like New York or Philadelphia, I can’t
even begin to imagine what’s going on if you get closer.”

“You think Jake was
telling the truth about all the phones being down?”

“I don’t see why he
would lie about it.”

“What if they never
come back up?” asked Conny.

“We’ll get the phones
back after things settle down.”

“What about satellite
phones? Are those down, too?”

“I wouldn’t think so,
since it’s a completely different system. You could even use a cell phone to
call a sat-phone if you—”

My eyes widened as I
realized a possibility that should have been obvious before now.

“What is it?” asked
Conny.

I hit the brakes and
pulled off to the side of the road, next to a long line of abandoned cars.

Conny bumped her
forehead on the window frame when I stopped abruptly.

“Hey!” she said.

“Sorry. We need to find
a cell phone. I have an idea.”

C
onny and I left Emma sleeping in the truck as we spread out and
began searching the abandoned vehicles. Marco stood watch from the bed of the
truck, eyes constantly scanning the dark roads for movement.

I allowed enough time
in each car for a cursory check of the usual hiding spots: center console,
glove box, even under the driver’s seat. The search was a long shot, and I
could only hope that someone was in such a hurry to get away from their car
(for whatever reason) that they forgot their phone.

Conny was working her
way in the other direction, leaving the door open on every car she checked. My
initial enthusiasm faded with each car, until I saw a minivan several cars down
the line.

Someone was inside the
van, sitting in the driver’s seat.

I left all the guns
back at the Tacoma, but the more I stared at the dark silhouette in the
driver’s seat of the minivan, the more I thought I wouldn’t need one. The
driver was sitting perfectly still, and I realized he must be dead.

I paused for a moment,
not wanting to get close to a gruesome scene like I saw when we drove past the
man in white.

No way around it. If
anyone stripping abandoned cars of valuables had the same trepidation as I did
in searching a car with a dead body inside, then there was a better chance of
finding a cell phone than anywhere else.

I walked up to the
minivan slowly, just in case I was wrong and the person inside was still alive.

I wasn’t wrong.

He was about my age,
maybe a couple years younger. His slim business jacket and thin tie were
spattered with blood. He didn’t survive the gunshot wound that entered below
his jaw and exploded from the top of his skull, creating a small hole in the
roof of the van. A folded note sat in his lap, dotted with drops of blood. In
his limp, pale hand rested a small black revolver.

I tried every door
handle, but they were all locked. Looking around on the shoulder nearby, I found
a baseball-sized rock and moved to the side of the minivan. The trick was to
hit the very corner of the window, where the glass sat on top of the frame. I
learned about it when my first car was stolen from a grocery store parking lot.

The glass spiderwebbed
when I hit the corner of the window with the rock. A network of jagged cracks
fanned out from the point of impact. With a light push of my fingertips, the
shards fell into the van, and I unlocked the sliding door.

“Everything okay?” called
Marco from the truck.

“Fine,” I said.

The stench was nothing
compared to the bodies Conny and I had found in the woods. I didn’t think this
guy had been dead too long.

I searched the van in
all of the obvious places, avoiding the body until I came up empty-handed. I sat
there for a long moment, staring at the folded note and the revolver in his
lap.

Then I held my breath,
expecting to be sick, and reached forward with shaking hands to pat his
pockets. My hand slipped and I touched something slimy and wet on the seat. I
closed my eyes and fought back a gag reflex.

Focus
.

Wallet in his right
pocket. Roll of breath mints.

Left pocket: something
plastic and hard. Rectangular, buttons on the front.

Bingo
.

I quickly pulled the
cell phone out of his pocket, but I fumbled and dropped it on the floor. I
didn’t know why I kept expecting the dead man to lurch upright and grab for me,
but it was an image I couldn’t get out of my head until I picked up the phone
and stumbled out of the minivan and back into the cool night.

F
resh air never tasted so good. I hurried back to the Tacoma, my
heart rate slowing back down to normal.

“You found one?” asked
Marco.

I held up the phone.

“Hope the battery’s not
dead.”

The thought stopped me
for a second. I hadn’t considered that possibility. I’m tired. I’m making
foolish mistakes, missing the obvious.

Need sleep
, said
a voice deep inside my head.

Later
, said
another.

I pressed the power
button on the phone until the screen lit up. The battery read about thirty
percent full. Should be enough.

Conny walked back to
the truck and shrugged. “Couldn’t find anything,” she said.

“We’ll only get through
if someone happens to have the sat-phones in the San Francisco lab out of their
cases and charging. Flint is Captain Prepared, so hopefully he’s covering all
of his bases.”

I closed my eyes,
trying to remember the phone numbers we used when we were out in the field. There
was a carrier code followed by a nine-digit identifier. Each of the four phones
had the same number except for the very last digit.

I punched in a number,
hesitating in a couple spots, then waited for a connection. Silence. Same story
with the second phone. I was going through the list in order, so there were two
left.

“Third time’s a charm,”
I said doubtfully as I punched in the number. The battery on the cell phone had
dropped ten percent since it powered up.

There was a moment of
silence on the line, then a burst of static. Instead of ringing on the other
end, I heard several long, soft beeps.

Then someone picked up.

“Paul?”

“Flint, you’re
brilliant,” I said with an idiotic grin plastered on my face.

“That’s more than I can
say for you!” he said hotly. “What took you so damn long?!”

“We couldn’t find a
phone. And it’s not like we’ve just been sitting around twiddling our thumbs.
It’s bad out here, man.”

I could hear Flint
breathing into the phone, then he said, “How bad?”

“I had to use a dead
man’s phone to call you.”

“Jesus,” he said
quietly. “Where are you now?”

“Montana, headed east.”

“You’re not in South
Dakota yet?”

“You took the plane,
remember?”

He sighed. “Listen,
Paul. It’s taking too long to synthesize the vaccine. By the time we make
enough of it to give to the first-generation infected, they’ll be well into
their seventh day. No one here seems to know if you can bring someone back that
far into infection. We’re doing what we can in the meantime, but we have a line
of people stretching into the next county waiting for an injection. I was
hoping you’d have some good news.”

“I wish I did. We
should be at the PharmaCor building in Rapid City by morning, so I’ll know more
then. How’s Maria?”

“Scared as hell, just
like the rest of us. The pilots that flew me here weren’t allowed to leave
after we landed.”

“Sherri and Frank?”

“Yeah. This place looks
more like a military compound than a research lab. They’re talking about moving
us to another location.”

“Where?”

“They won’t say. I only
know it’s farther north.”

“What about you?” I asked.
“You holding up?”

“Oh, sure. There’s
nothing like watching the world fall apart. I feel pretty useless here, to be
honest. Not much for a volcanologist to do when you’re trying to find a cure
for a global pandemic.”

“You’re good at getting
people coffee.”

“That
is
one of
my more useful skills.”

I smiled. “Alright, I
better conserve as much battery as I can. I’ll call when we make it to Rapid
City, so keep this sat-phone charged.”

“You got it, partner.
Be safe out there.”

We’re trying,
I
thought as I turned off the phone.

“Everything okay?”
asked Conny.

I gave her a quick
rundown of what Flint told me.

“Why would they move if
they were already at a secure location?” she asked.

“Flint couldn’t say.
Maybe it’s not as secure as they thought, for whatever reason.”

“We should get moving,”
said Marco. “Not good to stay in one place too long.”

I put the phone in the
glove box and pulled back out onto the road after Conny sat down in the back.
There was something about talking with Flint that simply made me feel
better
.
I thought it could be that I was able to get in touch with him halfway across
the country at a time when our society was on the brink of collapse. It made me
realize how much I took for granted, especially connectivity with the world.

Conny’s question still
burned in my mind:
What if the phones never come back?
Beyond that, what
if we lost the rest of our communication? No more email, no more video chats. We
would have to resort back to handwritten letters. Penmanship would experience a
rapid revival, and maybe I would finally learn how to write in legible cursive.

“Hey, guys,” said Marco
from the back.

Conny sat up. “Paul…”

“I see it.”

There was a blue sign
next to the road. Its white letters flashed in the headlights as we drove past:

Now Entering
Townsend. We’re Glad You’re Here!