Chapter Three
The Under Secretary of Emergency Preparedness and Response has asked that all physicians and medical technicians register with their nearest Emergency Services Provider. [FEMA ListServ Message, 3/30/05]
The hunger swelled inside Dick, turned inside him, threatened to consume him. It was bigger than he was and he lacked any kind of willpower or ego to fight against it. Sometimes it seemed to speak to him in a low, moaning language more primitive than words. It told him what to do. It told him where to go. Up. Up into the mountains, up the winding course of the highway toward the light. What he would find there he couldn’t know, but he couldn’t resist the pull, either.
He lost one of his boots along the way, snagged under a protruding tree root. He pulled and pulled until the laces creaked, until the leather stretched and tore, until his foot came painfully free. He moved on, bouncing up and down with each step, up on the boot, down when his naked white foot hit the gravel, or the concrete, or the loose rocky soil. He didn’t let this hobbling gait slow him down.
The hunger wouldn’t let him.
At ten thousand feet above sea level he saw something white and low ahead—a car that had stalled out in the rarefied air. He moved in with a little caution, unsure if he was wasting his time. He wasn’t. There was someone inside, a woman, a middle-aged woman in pearls and pantsuit. Her hair was like gossamer, like the silken strands of a spider’s web. In Dick’s altered vision her hair glowed like a fine tracery of gold. He wanted her. The hunger had to have her.
She screamed but he could barely hear her through the safety glass. She tried to get the car moving but failed. He came closer and lunged for her. His face smashed against the glass of her window. Pain sang a single high note in his nose and his cheek but the hunger roared louder. He struck again. She bounced across the front seats of the car and pushed her way out of the passenger door, out into the air.
The smell of her hit Dick like a storm of longing. His jaw stretched wide and his eyes rolled back in his head. She tried to run but she’d already made her fatal mistake. She would have been faster than Dick if she’d been wearing tennis shoes instead of high heels. She could have outrun him at sea level where she could catch her breath. That high up in the mountains she could barely run a dozen yards before she got winded. The air was too thin to properly fill her lungs.
Dick didn’t need to breathe at all. He was dead. She would run a ways and have to stop to puff and gasp and wheeze. He just kept coming. It took most of an hour but in the end he closed the gap between them. He got his teeth in her flailing arm and just refused to let go. He couldn’t feel any mercy or compassion anymore. To Dick she was just meat, a meal, something to snack on. He couldn’t understand her pleas for release.
The hunger filled him up. It didn’t leave room for pity.
When he was done with her and her blood had dried on his chin and his vest, when the hunger was sated for a while (just a while, it would come back soon enough) he lay sprawled across her cooling body, his esophagus heaving with peristalsis, and he watched the gold filigree of her hair tarnish and turn dark. When she woke up she joined him, what was left of her. Together they headed up the highway. The hunger pulled her along too, and when they crested the mountain together they saw where it was leading them.
Public transportation is running on a reduced/holiday schedule. It is expected that normal schedules will be resumed shortly. [RTD Denver, CO service announcement, 3/31/05]
The biowarfare people from Fort Detrick called it “the Bag”. The biosecure research facility the 1157th Engineers Company had built on the site of Florence-ADX comprised a series of interlocked conex shipping containers lined inside with several thicknesses of transparent mylar. These envelopes were kept at varying levels of negative air pressure so that if one was punctured pathogens would be blow inward, not out. The Bag qualified as a Class II Biological Safety Cabinet.
To get inside the Bag you had to pass through a series of flaps that had to be unzipped and then resealed behind you. Clark had already been decontaminated and had his clothing (including his underwear and socks) replaced with disposable paper modesty garments. His name and rank were stenciled on the chest and sleeves. He felt humiliated. What Vikram had to tell him didn’t please him either. “What do you mean, gone?” he demanded as they ducked through yet another flap. “The entire town? Not just the sheriff’s office?”
“The town has been officially deserted. The people to a soul evacuated, the roads leading inward sealed and barricaded. It was done on FEMA’s order.”
“That’s not supposed to be possible without my countersignature.” Clark knew what this meant. The incident had grown too large for one lowly Captain to be in charge anymore. Someone upstairs must have relieved him of duty and the papers were still in the mail. It was hardly surprising but he didn’t like it at all. “Did those trigger-happy deputies ever find her? At least tell me they didn’t kill her.”
“There’s still an all points bulletin out for her. They wish to take her to protective custody.” Vikram grabbed his beard in a tight fist. “I am afraid though their description, is not so good. Age eighteen to forty-five. Blonde. Tattoo on the stomach.”
“That describes half the women in southern California,” Clark said, scowling. “They didn’t get a single photograph of her?” Of course they hadn’t. The debacle at the hospital parking lot had been completely FUMTU (Fucked Up More Than Usual). He came up to the final envelope of the Bag and peered in. Through the cloudy mylar he could make out a figure like an obese white grub with stubby arms and legs gliding along a series of instrument trays, touching each tool in turn. That would be First Lieutenant Desiree Sanchez, the woman he’d come to talk to, dressed in a one-piece biological safety ventilated garment. A space suit, in biowarfare lingo. There was another occupant of the innermost reaches of the Bag and he wore nothing at all. Shriveled, grey, mutilated—one of the original victims from the prison. He was held to a gurney by four-point restraints but Clark could see him writhing and jerking even through the translucent wall. “Good afternoon, First Lieutenant,” Clark said into an intercom box dangling by a cable from the ceiling. “I trust you’ve completed your initial assessment.” He let go of the talk button and looked at Vikram. “They just abandoned the town? The entire town? That’s madness.” Vikram opened his mouth to respond but Sanchez’s voice grated out of the speaker first.
“Sir, no, sir.” Sanchez put down the aural thermometer she’d been holding and came closer to the wall so he could see her better. She snapped to attention and they exchanged salutes. “I have not completed my assessment because I was unable to sedate the patient. Sir, your orders clearly stated that no biopsies or invasive procedures were to be performed on a non-anesthetized individual.”
Clark nodded silently. He’d wanted his sufferers to be as comfortable as possible. In their confused state they could hardly agree to medical examination but at least he could manage their pain. “Perhaps you’d care to elaborate, Sanchez,” Clark suggested, gritting his teeth.
“Sir, I applied a narcotic sedative, namely morphine, in increasing doses at four hour intervals. I continued to up the dosage well past the safe human level. No matter how much I injected into him however his behavior and affect remained unchanged. A few minutes ago I applied what would be an instantly lethal dosage and as you can see the patient remains fully motile. I’ll reiterate: that should have killed him. It didn’t.”
Clark tried to thrust his free hand into his pocket so he could reorganize the small change there. Unfortunately he’d left his coins with his uniform back at the entrance to the Bag. “Do you have an explanation for that?”
“I do, sir. The patient is already dead.”
Clark said nothing and eventually she continued.
“The patient demonstrates no vital signs at all. No respiration, no pulse. I can’t measure his blood oxygen levels because from what I can tell his blood has coagulated and dried up in his veins. He’s dead, by pretty much any medical or legal definition I can think of. What we have here is not a human being any more, but a zom-”
Clark stabbed the talk button on the intercom. “That will be enough.”
“Sir, with all due respect, we are no longer dealing with an outbreak of a traditional virus. A virus can’t survive in dead tissue! We need to complete rethink our strategies and—”
Vikram leaned in close to the intercom. “You are under my direct command, Doctor, and I will not have this kind of insubordination! I am shocked and appalled that you would talk back to—”
“He’s dead! He’s not faking it! Sir, I’ve run everything short of an MRI on this man and—”
Clark cleared his throat. The others fell silent and waited while he composed his thoughts. The only sound in the Bag was the crinkling rustle of mylar stirring in a ventilated breeze. He ran a hand across his forehead and then spoke in a soft, low voice he reserved for quieting panicked underlings on the battlefield. He stared hard at Sanchez, trying to find her eyes through all the plastic. “Soldier. What is your official report going to say? Have you thought about that?”
“Sir,” Sanchez began, but Clark merely held up a hand for patience.
“Is it going to say you spent the last thirty-six hours trying to sedate a man who was already dead?”
Burning defiance erupted behind her eyes. It stayed there and didn’t reach her voice. She was, after all, a soldier. She knew when she was receiving an order. “I… no, sir. It won’t.”
