Genesis Plague (31 page)

W
hispers in the dark.

Voices nearby. I opened
my eyes – at least I thought I did – but all I saw was a murky world without
light. My scalp throbbed painfully in a sharp line from my left brow to the
back of my skull.

“I think he’s wakin’
up,” said a man. He was close.

“I’ll get Donna,” said
another.

Someone sparked a
lighter and held it close to my face, burning my short beard.

I tried to reach out for
the lighter, but my wrists were bound to the arms of my chair. My ankles were
tightly secured to the metal legs.

After the man pulled
back the lighter, I could see his blurry form in the flickering light. He was a
colorless blob, holding a light in one hand and a long dark blob in the other –
probably a rifle.

My thoughts came
slowly, tripping over each other, and most didn’t make it to the finish line. I
tried to speak, but it felt as if my mouth was stuffed with cotton. The man
laughed heartily and tossed the lighter on a nearby table.

The room slowly came
into focus. There was a fireplace in one corner, with smoking logs but no
flames. Two beat-up chairs sat around a wooden table. The couch next to the
fireplace looked well-used and comfortable. Maybe I was in someone’s kitchen,
because next to me was a counter with a small stove and sink. The place was
small, and I might have called it cozy if I knew I wasn’t being held against my
will.

My words came out like
mush when I tried to ask the man about Conny, Marco, and Emma. I could see
enough detail to know he had dark brown, stupid eyes.

A door opened and Donna
walked into the room. She was dressed differently than she had been at the bonfire,
but her cheeks still shone rosy-red.

“Thank you, Howard,”
she said.

The man with the gun
nodded and left through the same door.

Howard. The name
sounded familiar. Ah, yes. The man working security when I drove the truck into
Townsend. God, my head hurt. It was hard to put two thoughts together to form a
clear sentence.

“You’re looking
better,” said Donna.

She walked to the
fireplace and picked up an iron poker hanging from a rack on the wall. Embers sparked
as she poked at the smoking logs.

“Wairshuther,” I said.

She grunted in
amusement. “I imagine that’s your injury talking. You got a nasty cut on your
head, and I think it messed with your gear-works.”

I clenched my jaw hard,
concentrating, then managed to slowly say, “Where…are…the others?”

“Bravo!” she said.
“You’ll be back on your feet in no time. You don’t need to concern yourself
with the others just yet. First, we need to have a little chat.”

She picked up a fresh
piece of wood from a stack in front of the fireplace and added it to the pile.
After a few prods with her poker, bright flames ignited along the bottom.

“Where you really
headed?”

I sighed heavily,
finding it hard to muster the strength to speak. “Rapid City.”

“Mm-hm,” she said
slowly. “And you’re really trying to cure this thing?”

I nodded. Donna raised
her eyebrows and stared blankly into the fire.

“I guess you figured
out by now that you’re never gonna get there.” She left the fire and set one of
the chairs in front of me. “I need you tell me everything about the virus,” she
said as she sat down. “How it’s passed along, how it works, and how it kills.
Don’t leave out the scientific stuff even if you don’t think I’ll understand
it. After you tell me what you know, we can talk about getting you out of
here.”

“You lied about the
road.”

“Well, you lied to me
about your friend not being infected. The woman. I guess that makes us about
even.”

“It’s fluid-borne,” I
said weakly.

“Not airborne at all?”

I shook my head.

“How’d all those people
on the west coast get infected in the first place?”

“It was in the volcanic
ash from the eruption in Hawaii.” I paused, catching my breath. “It clung to… particulate
matter in the atmosphere…until it made landfall.”

“What’s it do once it
gets inside you?”

“You must have seen an
example or two by now.”

“Course I have! Doesn’t
mean I don’t want to know what’s causing it.”

“The virus replicates
in the stomach of the host…until the colony grows too large and ruptures the
intestine wall.”

Donna leaned back and
wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Must be about the time you start spewing gunk
everywhere.”

“Yes.” I licked my dry
lips.

“You want some water or
something?” she asked.

I nod.

“Finish talking, then
you’ll get it.”

“The infection enlarges
a section of the brain called the hypothalamus. It causes excess levels of
oxytocin in the blood. It’s the bonding hormone. It makes us want to be close
to others.”

“Oh my God,” said
Donna. She slapped her knee. “So that’s why all those poor sons-a-bitches
wouldn’t stop screaming for their families. Even at the end, when they were
throwing up their insides, they were still trying to claw their way closer to
anything that had a pulse.”

“How many people in
Townsend are infected?”

“None, at the moment.
And I aim to keep it that way. We had our fair share when this whole mess
started, but they’re gone now.”

“Wait a second,” I said,
shaking my head to try and clear my thoughts. “Hold on. The virus only made
landfall four days ago. There hasn’t been enough time for anyone to die from
infection.”

“I told you that was a
nasty cut on your head,” said Donna. “You’ve been out cold for five straight
days, doc. A lot’s happened since you crashed through that house.”

I
was still trying to process what Donna just told me when she
continued.

“Only thing that seems
to be working now is AM radio, so that’s what we rely on for news about what’s
going on out there. Seems you lucked out by getting here at the last minute.
Good luck finding a safe haven anywhere in the States at this point. And you
can forget the big cities. All I’m hearing about is how they’re collapsing, one
after another.”

“Five days?” I asked,
my throat dry as a bone.

“Mm-hm, yep,” said
Donna, solemnly nodding her head.

I twisted my wrists in
the bindings, but there was no getting out.

“It was fine until a
couple days ago, when the first round of infected started to die,” she said.
“Sent people into a frenzy, I can tell you.”

“Where’s Conny? And
Emma? Where’s Marco?”

“I learned something
about this virus while you were asleep, doc. Something I bet even you didn’t
know.”

The cut on my scalp
throbbed. Small pinpoints of pressure that I identified as sutures along the
laceration burned with every heartbeat.

“It turns them into
problem-solvers,” said Donna. “Crafty bastards, oh yes. Well, most of them.
Some just curl up and whimper quietly until they bleed out from the lesions. A
rare few will get violent if they can’t get close to another person.”

I suddenly remembered
Dan Grayson bashing his head against a wall in the Seattle lab to get to the
patient in the next room.

“But with most of ‘em,”
said Donna, “it triggers some kind of Houdini gene, or something. They’re like
an octopus trying to get at a ship in a bottle. Leave them alone for a minute
and pop! They got the cork off and they’re crushing the balsa main-mast. I’ve
heard stories of people locking themselves up so the infected couldn’t get in.
But they always get in, doc. They always find a way.” She laughed softly, then
said, “And all they want is to be close to us. Isn’t that something? They’re
not driven by some crazy idea of infecting us on purpose. Of course, that’s how
it always ends up once they start spraying blood everywhere. Damned clever
little bug, don’t you think?”

“Please,” I croaked.
“Please let us go.”

“You can see now that
you were lucky to find us. I knew from the beginning that those who reacted and
adapted the fastest would survive. That’s why I said no to hospitals taking the
infected and that’s why we wouldn’t let anyone get close who showed any
symptoms. Oh, people raised hell for it, don’t get me wrong. But somebody’s got
to make those tough decisions if you want the species to survive. Just look at
Helena. Those poor bastards are all dead now because they didn’t want to break
a few eggs. And look at us. We only lost about ten percent of the entire town
to the evacuation and cleansing, and we’re stronger than ever.”

She suddenly stood up
and pulled out a pocket knife. With a few swift cuts, my wrists were free,
followed by my ankles.

I reached out to grab her
by the neck, but instead I fell forward out of the chair and hit the floor,
hard. Donna loomed over me, staring down over her full, rosy cheeks.

“Might want to take it
easy for a while, doc. You haven’t had anything to eat in a few days. But get
on up, now, and get some water from the tap. I got something I want to show
you.”

T
he sun was directly overhead when we stepped outside, and the
air was crisp and cool. I had been kept in a small house off of Front Street,
near the main intersection. The road was still scorched from the bonfire the
night we first came to Townsend.

Donna escorted me away
from the house without any backup. Even if I tried to run, I wouldn’t make it
very far. My legs shook like jelly and it felt as if depth charges were
detonating in my skull.

The city gave every
appearance of being what you or I would have called normal. Cars passed on the
street. A farmer had a small produce stand set up on the corner of the intersection.
I watched as a customer gave him a box of corn flakes in exchange for a basket
of fruit.

“We’re on a barter
system now,” said Donna. “Not much choice since all the banks are shut down.
All that money’s worthless.”

“Only until we get back
on top.”

“Let me lay down some
numbers for you, doc,” she said as we walked across the intersection. “More
than fifty million people live on the west coast of the States. Conservative
estimates put the number of infected from the initial ash cloud at twenty
million.
Twenty million
. Four days later, that number has doubled, but
not just along the west coast. People have hopped on airplanes and zipped
halfway around the world to infect their buddies and their lovers and everyone
else who was unfortunate enough to be in the same room when the wrong person
sneezed. So then news of the infection gets out, and people go crazy. They haul
ass to every corner of the globe, trying to find somewhere to hide, and they
end up dragging the bug with them. We’re ten days in, and you know how many
people they’re saying are infected? Thirty percent. Of the
entire
planet
,
doc. Does that sound like something we can bounce back from?”

I didn’t have an answer
for her. I was scanning the street for Emma or Marco…or Conny. And yes, it
occurred to me she was probably dead. She had been in the early stages of infection
when we came to Townsend.

“Nursery’s this way,”
said Donna, turning away from the intersection.

No one looked at me as
we walked down the street, but they called to Donna and waved. She laughed when
they joked about something that happened at a barbecue last night.

“Takes folks around
here a while to warm up to newcomers. They’ll get used to you before too long.
And I know what you’re thinking. First chance you get, you’re outta here. Well,
before you do something stupid like that, you just think of that sweet little
girl you brought from Helena.”

Just off the road was a
blue sign that reads
Bulldog Country
, and beneath that,
Broadwater
High School
. Donna walked up a grassy hill, huffing with the climb, and I
followed her slowly, my ankles feeling like rubber.

When we reached the top
of the hill, the cut on my scalp stung so bad I thought they might have used
fire ants to close the wound instead of sutures.

There was a small
playground in a park behind the school. Children played on brightly-colored
swings, scooted down a twisty slide, and climbed on an intricate grid of monkey
bars. They were watched over by several women, who laughed and clapped encouragement
at the kids.

Emma sat in the sand,
slightly apart from the rest of the children, except one. She dug into the sand
with a red plastic trowel. It was a mechanical action, without purpose. She
poured out the sand after each scoop, then repeated.

The only child close to
her was a small red-haired boy about Emma’s age. He used a green trowel to fill
a bucket with sand.

“That’s my boy,” said
Donna. “Good, strong kid. He’s taken quite a liking to your Emma. I couldn’t
stand to separate them, not since they’ve become such close friends.”

“Is she talking yet?”

“Nope. I thought she
was a mute.”

“She saw her mother
murdered in front of her, and she lost her father not long after.”

Donna shook her head.
“What a world, I’m telling you. Nothing a little therapy won’t fix. You’re a
doctor. Maybe you could talk her through it.”

“I’m not that kind of
doctor.” I watched as Donna’s son offered Emma the bucket. She took it, set it
down, then continued her robotic digging. “You don’t want anyone to find a
cure, do you?” I asked.

Donna grinned. “Now, what
gave you that idea? I don’t
like
the fact that everyone’s dying, but
we’re getting a fresh start here, doc. Let’s not waste it by chasing a fantasy.
In a month from now, the world is going to be a completely different place, and
I want to be ready.”

“Your people are okay
with the fact that you poisoned the three of us and kidnapped a little girl?”

She laughed. “Honey,
what ‘my people’ don’t know could fill a book bigger than the Bible, and then
some. All they saw was a handful of crazies point a gun at me and then drive a
truck through a house. I’m the sympathetic one here, giving you another chance
in society.”

“
Your
society,”
I said.

She shrugged. “It has
to be someone’s, doc.”

We watched the children
in silence, until she added, “So if you get to thinking about high-jacking a
car and heading for the hills, you just remember that little girl down there. I
doubt you’re the type of guy who could leave a kid behind to save himself, but
I don’t know. This is a weird time, doc, and it makes people crazy.”

Donna was right about
that.

She slapped me on the
back. “We got a town meeting in an hour. I think you should be there. Until
then, take some time to get know your new neighbors. Oh, and before I forget, I
wanted to thank you for the information you gave me earlier. Fascinating stuff,
doc. I look forward to hearing more. Just don’t go outliving your usefulness.”
She smiled and winked, then strolled down the hill, calling and waving goodbye to
her son.