Elixr Plague (Episode 3): Pandemic Read online

  “Hey, you hungry?” Ward called over his shoulder. “I could eat the ass end off a dead rhinoceros right about now.”

  Seneca looked at the dark gore that soaked his clothes and dripped off his hands to make a puddle on the floor. He listened to the sounds of the running fight in the street as the locals retreated and the zombies surrounded the house. “Hungry?” he asked. “How can you think of food at a time like this?”

  Ward moved up next to a shattered window that had been partially covered with plywood from the inside. He peered over the top and laughed as he opened a box on the counter stamped MRE: Chicken Ravioli and pulled a pack free.

  “Hell, everybody gets hungry.” He nodded toward the chaos out in the street. “Even zekes!” Laughing at his own joke, he tore open the MRE and started to prep his meal.

  Seneca stood there for a second, then he laughed too. When the world had been turned completely upside and backwards, the dead were left to wander the streets, and one was surrounded by $10,000 of MREs, he supposed there wasn’t much else to do but laugh. And eat. Seneca sighed.

  “Hand me one of those fuckin’ things.”

  2

  Evacuation

  New York City, New York

  Edith burst from the emergency stairwell and immediately diverged from the flow of people heading out of the alley toward the front of the building. She carefully slipped to the side and leaned against the wall of the neighboring structure to catch her breath.

  Her phone buzzed in her pocket and she rested her head against the cool brick wall and closed her eyes for a second. She ripped the phone out and breathlessly answered. “Hello?”

  “Ms. Traviers, my name is Finley Creed—I’m Mr. Martin’s pilot. We’re refueled and on deck at LaGuardia, waiting for—”

  “I know, I know,” she interrupted, wiping the sweat from her forehead. “I’ll be there. We still have a little more time…I just need to get to you.”

  “Very well, Ms. Traviers. But we cannot wait forever—the situation at the airport is deteriorating fast.”

  “Please, wait. I’ll make it—just wait!”

  “We’ll wait as long as we can, Ms. Traviers.”

  “What? Desmond Martin hired you to get me out of here. You’ll wait till I get there or he’ll hear about it!”

  The pilot was silent for a long moment. “Please hurry.” The line went dead.

  She saved the contact and put her phone away, keeping a wary eye out, lest one of the fleeing crowd tried anything. She adjusted the rifle, now slung in front of her chest again. It had gotten her clear of the building, but she didn’t want to be running around New York with an AR just yet. It would draw too much of the wrong kind of attention.

  A gunshot cracked in the distance, followed by two pops in reply. The time for drawing the wrong attention was quickly approaching, but cops would only complicate things now, and she needed a smooth exit from here on out. Not only for her own personal safety, but for the continued operation of Martin Enterprises. She had to get out of New York for there to be any chance at all of finding a cure for the sickness sweeping the globe.

  She pulled her cell phone out again, watching people continue to flood toward the street and gather in dazed clumps, all trying to figure out what the hell had happened. The smart ones immediately took off on foot heading west, not looking back. She could tell by the frightened but determined look in their eyes—they had heard the rumor about the quarantine and wanted nothing to do with it.

  Dialing up a contact she’d used in the past for discrete deliveries for Mr. Martin, she waited for the answer and pulled herself further into the shadows behind a dumpster.

  “Yeah?” an accented voice answered on the fifth ring.

  “Yuri, this is Edith Traviers, with—”

  “Da, I know who you are,” he replied. “What is it?”

  “I need your services.”

  “Cargo?”

  Edith grinned. That was Yuri, blunt to a fault.

  “Me.”

  Yuri snorted. “Destination?”

  “LaGuardia.”

  Yuri paused for a long moment. “It will not be cheap.”

  “I can pay. You know I can.”

  “Da. When is pickup?”

  “Now.” She glanced at her watch. According to Martin’s warning, she had about thirty minutes left to get out of Dodge.

  He sighed heavily, the noise overloading the tiny speaker in her phone. “Da. Roads no good, okay? Too much cars. You pay extra.”

  It wasn’t a question. Edith closed her eyes and went through her calming exercises. “If you can get to me, and get me out of this damn city, you can have everything left in my apartment. I’ll give you the keys.”

  “Okay, you want out bad…you are hearing of the news too, da?”

  “Da,” Edith said sarcastically. She glanced at her watch, imagining the tanks and trucks worming their way into place near the tunnels on the mainland. It wouldn’t be too hard for the army to decide to just shut things down that much sooner. The tide of millions of people streaming off the island would not likely slacken in the next thirty minutes, so their job would only get harder as time went by. “Can you do it or not, Yuri? I can call others.”

  “Nyet, nyet! I will be there. Sending me your location.” The phone clicked off.

  She sent her GPS via text and got an immediate reply that he was on the move. Edith leaned her head back against the wall and put her phone back in the pocket.

  “Whatcha got in the pack, honey?” a deep voice asked to her right.

  She’d been so focused on watching the people exit the building and alley, she hadn’t paid any attention at all to the area behind her. That would be something she’d have to rectify in the coming hours. Situational awareness at a time like this was critical to her survival.

  Angered at her own lack of judgment, she turned and brought the AR up to a ready position. “Nothing worth dying over, that’s for damn sure,” she snarled. Her finger slid from the trigger guard to rest on the trigger itself.

  “Fuck!” the shorter of the two men blurted, scrambling back into the shadows and tripping over trash.

  “Whoa, lady, let’s be cool here,” the bigger one said, immediately throwing hands into the air and stepping back. “Okay, no problem, we’ll go the other way. Shit...”

  Her heart only slowed when the two shadowy figures turned the corner and disappeared into the flow of pedestrian traffic. She removed her finger from the trigger and lowered the weapon again. She ground her teeth, mad at the thought that if she weren’t a petite 5’3” people might just leave her the hell alone.

  She adjusted the grip on her rifle and relaxed into a wary state of readiness. Yuri should be there in a few minutes—he lived nearby and knew she lived in an opulent apartment paid for by Desmond Martin. The man was a gutter rat, and likely a fence for stolen goods as well. She smirked, thinking how excited he was about the prospect of getting a hold of whatever he thought she had in her apartment.

  Little did he know, due to the nature of her employment, she was rarely home. Most people would consider her home spartan at best. All her family heirlooms—the few she had from her career army parents—were secured with a distant cousin in Wisconsin. Her photos and all her books, scrapbooks, and papers had long ago been digitized and stored in secure clouds. She was a true digital nomad, able to bring a computer, tablet, and phone to just about anywhere in the world and set up a new home base in minutes. While she considered her Manhattan apartment her true “home,” the only regret she had in leaving it behind were her clothes. She had similar, though not as nice, wardrobes in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami. Once she’d grabbed her Bug Out Bag and her emergency thumb drive, she was completely untethered and ready to leave and not look back.

  Her phone vibrated with an incoming text from the pilot.

  [Creed]: Ms. Traviers, we cannot wait much longer. The control tower says we have about a half hour before local airspace is locked down. We need to
take off soon.

  She grimaced, looking at her watch again. It was the leaving part that worried her, not what she left behind.

  Jillian stood in front of the drugstore and paused, resting against her car. Her head was throbbing and her shirt was drenched in sweat. When did it get so hot? She exhaled and unzipped her lightweight jacket, her skin rippling with gooseflesh as the cool night air caressed her overheating body.

  She took a step and staggered, tripping on the curb. A guy came out of the store and held the door for her, looking her up and down.

  “You okay, lady?” he asked.

  “Fine,” Jillian muttered. “Headache.”

  “That’s some headache,” the guy called over his shoulder as he left.

  The door closed behind her and nudged her butt, forcing her forward. Jillian blinked in the glare of the bright lights inside the store. Dozens of people milled around, filling up their odd little half-size shopping carts. Most of the crowd had gathered over near the cold and flu medication section. The food mart had already been cleaned out. As Jillian stumbled by the snacks aisle, she saw a handful of wrappers on the floor and little else.

  She wiped sweat from her face and continued down the main aisle to the pharmacy section. People saw her and at first didn’t want to budge for fear of missing out on getting products left on the shelf, then stepped back as she drew near.

  Three fat women fought over a bottle of Tylenol, bickering and shouting, but not quite coming to blows. Jillian didn’t know if it was the last bottle, and she cared less. She needed something to take the edge of the worst headache of her life. It felt like a small animal was trying to crack open her skull from the inside, clawing and biting at her brain. She put a hand on the shelf next to her and cleared her throat.

  “Excuse me,” she said weakly. “Is that the last of the Tylenol?”

  “I saw it first, get lost,” said one woman, without looking up.

  “My baby’s teething, I need this,” the other one said, wringing her hands.

  “I said, I saw it first!”

  Jillian coughed, a wet, phlegmy sound that surprised even her. All three women stopped talking and looked at her.

  “Honey, you look like shit,” the one holding the bottle of medicine said, her eyes wide. She backed up a step. “Here, you can have it—you need it.”

  “T-thank you,” Jillian said, trying to nod. The movement made her nauseous. She took a step forward and staggered into the shelf, reaching for the bottle of pills in the woman’s sausage-like fingers. The woman gasped as Jillian lurched forward and the bottle brushed her fingertips then fell to the floor.

  A sudden rage burst through Jillian’s fever fogged mind. “God dammit, look what you did, you fat fuck!” she roared. She didn’t have the strength to say anything else and collapsed to her knees.

  “What?” the woman quailed, her jaw quivering. “What did you call me?”

  Jillian looked up at the woman and sneezed a string of loopy mucus. The woman recoiled as if struck. She screamed, shoving the next customer out of her way—which started a shouting and shoving match in the aisle as people tried to get away.

  Jillian looked at the bottle of pills in her trembling, sweaty hands. When the hell had they started shaking? Had she been driving like that? And was that blood in her snot?

  Heavy footsteps approached her from behind as Jillian tried to tear the box open and get at the medicine. Her mind was focused so much on this one simple task that she missed the man talking to her until he repeated himself.

  “…said, excuse me, ma’am, but are you the owner of the white Jetta out there in the parking lot?”

  Jillian turned her aching torso and sagged against the empty shelves, the bottle only partially open in her hands. “W-wha-?” she slurred.

  “Jesus, lady, you look like shit.”

  “Why does everyone keep saying that?” she whined.

  She squinted her eyes at the blurry image of the man standing in front of her and caught the glint of something shiny on his chest. He reached up to his shoulder and turned his head to the right.

  “Dispatch, I got a live one at the CVS. Better send a female…with a squad.” He looked down at her, his face shifting and distorted. “Probably an EMT, too—she doesn’t look too hot.”

  Jillian nodded. “Hot, yup.” She went back to worrying at the pill bottle. Why the hell did they make these things so hard to open? The rage that had exposed itself with the fat woman came back. Jillian slammed the bottle over and over again on the floor trying to open it.

  “Whoa, lady, you pay for that yet?” asked the guy who’d been talking, one hand at his hip, the other reaching out to her in a “stop” gesture.

  “No, she hasn’t! I want her out of here!” yelled another voice. “She’s disrupting my store—”

  “Just cool your jets, Marge, I’m handling this,” the cop replied.

  “Handling it, are you? She vomited on Lucy Mifflin—”

  “Liar!” Jillian said, trying to get to her feet. The pill bottle lay abandoned on the floor. Getting to the person who said she’d thrown up on someone had become the most important thing in the world to her, though she couldn’t explain why.

  Strong hands steadied her as she stood. “Whoa, there ma’am…damn, you’re burning up, I can feel it through your clothes. Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” Jillian mumbled. She sneezed again, right in the cop’s face, which caused two things: first, he let her go and jumped back in alarm, and second, she fell over and hit the shelves again, starting a coughing fit. More merchandise tumbled to the floor in a cascade of little rattling cardboard boxes.

  “Christ, she’s sick!” the new voice said. “She’s got the Elixr bug! Get out of my way!”

  Several shouts went up throughout the store and Jillian heard the sound of rushing feet. A baby started crying in the distance, or maybe that was her own sobs? She couldn’t tell. Everything hurt, everything was on fire, everything was cold. She slid to the ground and curled up in a ball, clutching her stomach. Sleep, she just wanted to sleep. Why was everyone being so loud? She cracked open one eye and saw the cop shoving one of the workers. Someone had a white cloth they were trying to give to the cop and other people were trying to keep him away, all of them shouting. It didn’t make any sense.

  “I just wanted some Tylenol,” she whispered. Her eyes fell on the pill bottle laying on the floor amid the broken retail packages and spilled cough drops. She smiled with cracked lips and reached out with a quivering, fever-aching hand.

  Relief was just a few inches away. When the gunshot shattered the front window of the store, Jillian hardly noticed.

  3

  The Storm

  Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan

  After the obligatory three—or six rounds—of beer for the crew that had unearthed the viking longboat, Darren and the others staggered out into the street, laughing and slapping each other on the back, singing a Norse war song. The last call had gone out, and they’d paid up and left with most of the other patrons.

  They stopped abruptly upon spotting a line of cars in the street. The honking horns and shouts from angry drivers drowned out their ballad of Valhalla.

  “What the hell is going on?” asked Darren, eventually. He belched and chuckled, pushing hair out of his eyes again. The leather tie had come off somewhere near round three and he couldn’t find it.

  “Wow…Turgin was right!” replied Amanda, wiping her face. Horns honked and the line of cars chugged slowly along. People clogged the sidewalks, some with backpacks, while others carried children.

  “Holy shit,” added Brandon, running a hand through his mud-streaked hair. “What do we do?”

  “We gotta get out of here,” said Carl. He hiccuped, then laughed, then grew serious. “You got the keys, Dee?”

  “Yeah, but…hey, what’s going on?” Darren asked a man carrying an external frame backpack on the sidewalk.

  “The cops’re setting up roadblocks and shutting down th
e border crossing,” he fired back over a shoulder, still walking away. “Better get south while you can, man—I hear the army is gonna quarantine the whole city!”

  “Jesus,” Brandon whispered.

  Darren grabbed him and Carl by their shirts and started walking south. “Come on, we gotta get to the van and get the hell out of here.”

  “Dude, and go where?” demanded Carl. He shrugged out of Darren’s grip. “Look around us, man, nobody’s going anywhere!”

  “So what the hell do we do? We can’t stay here…” Brandon countered.

  “We gotta find a place to hole up for the night…” Darren said, rubbing his face. “I’m too drunk to handle this shit.”

  “Well, I’m sobering up pretty fast,” Amanda said, looking at the pandemonium around them.

  Across the intersection, two cars moved at the same time and crunched bumpers. To Darren’s amazement, no one got out, no one pulled over, they just stayed with the traffic and left a trail of broken plastic and glass on the ground in their wake.

  “Daaaamn,” Brandon muttered. “Shit’s getting real, guys.”

  “C’mon, think—where the hell can we go?” asked Darren.

  “Which way is the hotel?” Carl asked, looking around. “I am so lost right now.”

  “He’s right—we just need to get back to our rooms for the night, you know? Maybe all this will blow over by tomorrow…” Amanda suggested.

  Thunder rumbled in the distance.

  “Really?” muttered Darren. “A thunderstorm, too?” Darren called out to the heavens.

  Two drivers yelled at each other out their windows, but didn’t stop their cars to take the altercation to the next level. No one wanted to stop. For anything.