Mad World (Book 2): Sanctuary

Mad World:

SANCTUARY

BY SAMAIRE PROVOST

Mad World: EPIDEMIC

Mad World: SANCTUARY

Mad World: DESPERATION
(Coming Fall 2012)

Mad World:

SANCTUARY

Samaire Provost

Copyright
© 2012 Samaire Provost

All rights reserved.

For Stephen, for all his help and support, and for crying at the end.

All myths have a basis in fact

Prologue

It had been a crazy five and a half years since Luke was born. His mother, Holly, had become good friends with us for the week we had known her, and when he was born she had charged me with his care. Holly died less than half an hour after Luke was born into my hands. She had been pregnant nearly nine months when she was unwittingly infected with the strangely virulent strain of the Yersinia Pestis bacterium that had escaped from a laboratory at Stanford University, where researchers had been studying the Black Plague that had killed half of the population of Europe in 1348-1350. We hadn’t known she was infected; she had shown no sign of it. In fact, she had been cleared by doctors at JFK Memorial in Indio, California, the day before Luke was born. She had seemed fine, just a little carsick.

The illness seemed to throw her into labor weeks before she was due. Then Luke was born in the back of our van on the side of the road. Holly had turned during Luke’s birth, but he had seemed fine. Within minutes of his birth, Holly had undergone a wild transformation into something you could only call a zombie, and we had all fled the van, leaving her tied up inside. But Holly escaped her bindings, and had gotten all the way out of the van before a police cruiser pulled up to help us. The policeman had been confronted by the crazed zombie that had been Holly only minutes after giving birth to Luke, and when she had charged him, he had shot her. Several times in the midsection, which had little to no effect, and then several times in the head, which did have an effect. Holly had died in the dirt by the side of the road.

The police had taken us to be questioned and then to the hospital to be checked out. Their concern – and ours – was mostly for Luke, who they could see was a newborn. Jacob had been thinking clearly and had, thankfully, told the authorities that Holly had been pregnant with and had given birth to, his son. Luke hadn’t really been his son, we didn’t even know the name or whereabouts of Luke’s father, but telling them Luke was his allowed him, and us, to keep the baby. Holly had charged us with protecting her baby, and we took that charge seriously. Especially in such a crazy world.

The world was getting crazier by the moment. The plague that had started at Stanford had quickly spread across the entire state of California.

All because those scientists at Stanford, in their curiosity, had decided to reawaken this bacteria in their lab at Palo Alto. They had extracted bone marrow fragments containing intact DNA from the corpses found in mass graves dug more than six centuries ago and brought them back to their
lab. There, they had successfully reawakened the bacteria and had tried – unsuccessfully – to contain it.

One day, the first scientist became infected; the next day, he had turned. Less than a day after that, he had infected dozens on the University campus, and by the end of that second day, the infection had spread beyond to the surrounding cities. Within a week people were infected from north of San Francisco to south of Los Angeles and beyond. Evacuations from the Central Valley to the south only helped spread the disease, authorities realized too late. We had arrived less than a day after the residents of Fresno had evacuated to Los Angeles, and less than a day before L.A. fell to the infection. Luckily we’d gotten out an hour before the U.S. Military quarantined the entire state of California.

That quarantine, however, turned out to be nearly impossible to maintain, what with California encompassing more than 150,000 square miles and was home to 37 million people. They simply didn’t have the resources. And with the panic spreading, people were ignoring the quarantine and trying any way they could to get out.

Before they set up the quarantine, the authorities had first tried to evacuate the hundreds of square miles around Stanford, extending to the San Joaquin Valley and Fresno.

That’s where we had come from. We had been on a school theatre club trip to New York with our teacher, Coach Turner when the outbreak had occurred.
Or I should say when the nimrods at Stanford who had been tried to revive the original Black Plague from 1350 had allowed it to infec
t some of their own scientists,
and thenceforth escape the confines of the University Lab.
When this happened they had pretty much sealed the fate of the world. We had heard about the emergency and following panic in Palo Alto, where Stanford is located, while we were in New York City. We had immediately tried to make it back home with Coach in a rented van. We’d gotten all the way back to Fresno before we’d been faced with the plague infection firsthand and had seen what it could do to a human being.

There was a reason the Black Plague had killed so many back in the 14
th
century, even though it was a time when hardly anyone traveled more than a few miles from their birthplace. There was a reason the survivors had hastily dug mass graves and buried the corpses in huge piles. When researchers had exhumed the burial grounds, they had found some signs that people might have been buried alive. Some corpses had been beheaded, or even dismembered. Some seem to have tried to claw their way out. Either way, it should have given those researchers pause.

The particular strain of
Yersinia Pestis
that had infected most of Europe in the 14
th
century made people turn grey, then black – and then die. And then come alive again and attacked anyone they could. Eyes went opaque, skin went grey, fingernails went black, and they all turned into zombies, every last one of them. Scientists researching the problem in the years since the Palo Alto leak had found out these details. The infection did something to the brain and body. The person who had been infected changed. Who they were, their brain, their mind, their personality, was gone. They died. Then the disease reanimated the bodies. If anything, the zombies looking at you and growling could be understood to be personifications of the plague. They WERE the Black Plague.

That’s how it happened with Coach Turner. And with our friends Conner and Emily. Then it had happened to Holly, too. She had been pregnant with Luke at the time.

Luke had been born just inside the Arizona border. The policeman who helped us hadn’t known the Army was enacting a quarantine of the state we’d just left. We had told the hospital we’d come from L.A. and the policeman reported on what had happened with Holly. By the time authorities had examined her corpse, which showed obvious signs of having just given birth, we had already left the hospital and they had no way to find us. Besides, I don’t think they realized Holly’s baby was with us. There might have been some confusion, maybe they thought Child Services had taken him. Either way, we left that hospital with Luke and we fled.

There was a sense of urgency in our flight. We knew what had just happened, although we didn’t realize at the time just how special Luke was. I’d just been relieved that he seemed to have been born in the nick of time, before Holly’s infection could spread to him, and before the zombie Holly became had a chance to injure him.

For a week, none of us had any idea Luke was special. We spent that time moving from one motel in Phoenix to another in Tucson, each time registering under a false name and paying in cash. We dumped our van and bought another one cheap, since the first had been a rental Coach Turner picked up in New York City. That one had been rented out by Coach Turner. This new one was purchased by Jacob, who was 18 and legal, from a guy who was unloading it on Craigslist.

We felt a need to stay under the radar. After all, they had quarantined California less than a day after we had gotten out with a zombie in our car. Holly. The police had been slow in putting two and two together, but we knew that eventually they would probably turn their attention to us, and so we fled.

A week after Luke was born, he was eating well, putting on weight, and losing that reddish skin tone all newborns seemed to be born with. His skin was fading into a normal light pinkish-white color. Holly had been very fair-skinned, and I guess Luke’s father had been, too. Luke had light brown hair and hazel eyes. But one day we noticed that his face, with its smile and chubby cheeks and little button nose … was grey. Just close to his hairline, his neck, part of his torso and down his arms a bit. Not completely. It was like he was frozen halfway between being a normal, alive baby into an infected zombie. He was a hybrid. Half human, half zombie.

He acted completely normal. In fact, the kid never seemed to even get sick. Not so much as a cold, not so much as a sniffle. None of the ear infections so common among toddlers, no teething pain even. He was adorable, a sweet, healthy baby. Who just happened to be half zombie.

His eyes never changed into the milky opaqueness of the zombie’s, and he never went insane, growling or trying to attack us. He acted completely normal. Yeah. Normal. Except he wasn’t.

The quarantine of California couldn’t contain the infection. Phoenix had seen the first outbreaks, because most of the evacuees from infected areas had been taken there. Soon, the entire West Coast had been affected and the President had ordered a quarantine of that whole area. They had tried to keep everything a secret, tried to keep information about the plague from reaching the people, but it hadn’t worked – not with Twitter and social media spreading the panic faster than the contagion itself. News of the epidemic created a flood of people heading east. The military set up roadblocks and perimeters to contain most of the people in the southwest and West Coast, and they had been mostly successful, for a while at least.

We had gotten out of Arizona as fast as we could, heading toward New Mexico and then Texas. We had looked for our families in Phoenix, but had found no sign of them. We got mixed information from authorities over the phone as to where the buses from L.A. had deposited the evacuees, and even with searching bulletin boards for information, we got nowhere. Then we needed to leave.