Pandora - Contagion Read online

  “A contract?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. You give me gas money, and I give you a ride.”

  The order was again wrong. Emma would be making the same mistake as Bert: paying her price of the bargain at the front end and relying on the counterparty to honor the trade they had made. But then again, he would probably expect sex from her at some point. And she could always kill him and take his van then. Good plan, came to her out of nowhere, just like the silent voices Isabel said Uninfecteds heard in their heads.

  “Okay,” she said. “Where’s your van?”

  Chapter 2

  ROUSES POINT BRIDGE, NEW YORK/VERMONT BORDER

  Infection Date 39, 2000 GMT (4:00 p.m. Local)

  Prof. Isabel Miller had thought that the difficult part had been the long walk up the bridge under the weight of the equipment that she bore: body armor, pouches bulging with gear and with a lifetime supply of ammunition, and a small rucksack—her “combat load”—with its goggles, disposable masks, gloves, coveralls, and meals of beef teriyaki and meatloaf in packets called “MREs.” Plus, she had a Kevlar helmet on her head and a loaded rifle strapped across her chest in “patrol carry.” At least they’d left, back at their Black Hawk helicopter, their huge backpacks full of camping accoutrements, which Isabel was convinced she couldn’t lift, much less carry any great distance.

  But when their Pentagon entourage reached the state police and National Guard barricade at the apex of the span, Isabel realized that the hard part was only beginning. She winced at the pleas shouted across the quarantine line established at the border. “For the love of God,” a middle-aged man from the Vermont side yelled, “let us through! We’re Americans!” He held what looked like a Boston Red Sox cap in both hands, straining as he begged from a hundred yards away, the picture of abject supplication. No, that was wrong. There was also undisguised indignation mixed with the man’s visible anguish and fear. “How can you do this? They’re right behind us! Please! We made it this far! We’re almost safe! Just let us cross!”

  Isabel looked up at Marine Capt. Rick Townsend, who shook his head in response.

  “They’re almost here!” The panicking refugee peered over his shoulder toward the bend in the still empty Vermont highway and the earthen causeway behind him that led up onto the bridge.

  Isabel’s nine-person “detail” had been sent by the Pentagon to observe and report on which containment policies worked and which did not. It consisted of Rick, Isabel’s new wartime significant other, Dr. Brandon Plante, her peacetime ex whom she had recruited to study the Infecteds’ crowd violence, and six army soldiers led by a Sgt. Vasquez.

  Blue Dodge Chargers of the New York State Police and green Army Humvees were arranged across the top of the bridge to block passage into New York by potentially infected Vermonters. Opposite their blockade, hundreds of refugees beseeched the cops and troops to let them cross the Richelieu River before thousands of approaching Infecteds arrived.

  Amid the spinning blue lights stood stoic but tense machine gunners gripping long black guns leveled at the increasingly despondent civilians. The refugees’ representative ignored warnings against venturing past a flimsy line of orange traffic barrels connected by fluttering yellow police tape, which defined the beginning of the “killing fields.” Isabel kept asking Rick for definitions of military terms, but killing fields was self-explanatory.

  The chorus of voices confronting them hurled a mix of pleas, with hands clasped in prayer, and insults, with fists shaken in air. And these weren’t all harmless women, children, and the elderly, Isabel realized. Rick scanned the crowd through binoculars and pointed out to a National Guard lieutenant a hunting rifle here, a coughing fit there.

  Isabel’s stomach churned as her sense of dread built. Brandon kept repeating, “This is bad. This is bad.” Although Isabel had seen videos out of Asia of Infected mob rampages, Brandon was the expert. He had modeled dozens of mindless, primal clashes: clawing, stomping, gouging annihilations by Infecteds; grazing sheets of wanton machine gun fire unleashed by terrified troops. “Look,” he said to Isabel, his eyes wide and his pointing frantic as he turned her away from the quarantine line. “They’re setting up more fucking machine guns. At the base of the bridge! Behind us!” He was right. That was worrisome.

  Isabel turned reflexively back to Rick, who had witnessed the violence firsthand while observing the disease’s advance. He had survived, and Isabel felt confident he would do everything within his power to ensure that she did too. Rick was an Annapolis grad and a Marine infantry officer, and like soldiers, policemen, firemen, and EMTs, he would be in demand by the vulnerable and the weak. She was incredibly lucky even to have met him while on her mission to Siberia to retrieve her infected twin sister.

  The shot of confidence on recalling that good fortune, however, eroded while watching Rick peer over the bridge’s guardrail as if measuring the distance to and depth of the water beneath them. “Can you swim?” he asked almost in a whisper. Isabel couldn’t swallow the lump that formed in her throat. Her helmet flopped forward and backward on her head as she replied that yes, she could. “Dump your webbing and body armor before jumping, but hang onto your M4. It’ll fire for a while even after it gets wet.” Isabel realized that he was referring to her gun. She looked down and memorized where all her buckles and zippers were. “And remember to swim west.” Rick then gave some version of the same instructions to a wide-eyed Brandon and a calm, nodding Vasquez.

  The presumably frigid Richelieu flowed north to the St. Lawrence River and, under the clear skies, was a beautiful brilliant blue. Lake Champlain to the south glistened as late afternoon sunlight struck white spray whipped off wavelets in the brisk wind. The dancing branches of trees along the river’s banks were thick and verdant. The picturesque New England landscape contrasted sharply with the scene on the concrete bridge, with its rending prayers and lacerating curses filling the last minutes before several hundred innocent people’s almost certain doom.

  Isabel turned away and forced the images from her mind. Their helicopter from D.C. to Vermont had diverted at the last minute. “The Vermont LZ is too hot,” Rick had explained. “LZ” stood for “landing zone,” she surmised from the context. When they set down in New York, they met the lieutenant colonel commanding a national guard battalion tasked with blocking the infection’s passage into Clinton County. “I’m less worried about people coming across bridges from Vermont,” he had told Rick in a low voice that Isabel had managed to overhear, “than through the woods straight down from Montreal, which is only about thirty clicks north. I’ve got combat patrols out there probing for contact ’cause the Coast Guard can’t maintain a continuous presence up and down the St. Lawrence.”

  From their elevated vantage, Isabel could see thick woods all around, and they frightened her. Think about something else. Brandon’s attention darted hyperactively from the quarantine line, to the men behind them setting up guns, to the water below. He had abandoned the white lab coat he had worn at the NIH hospital in Maryland, ridiculous attire for a social psychologist who modeled crowd behavior on computers. But he now wore even more absurd-looking camouflage battle dress, like the action figure he most assuredly wasn’t.

  After Isabel’s smirk, eye roll, and scoff on first seeing him fully outfitted, however, she too had been issued her own “kit.” It consisted of a helmet, body armor, pouches for ammo, compass, a first aid kit complete with bulky “quick-clot bandages” and a worrying number of tourniquets, a big backpack and little rucksack, wraparound amber eyewear called “ballistic eye protection”, the water-filled bladder and feeder hose of a “hydration system,” integrated “intra- and inter-team” radio, GPS locator, boots, and her very own camo uniform. When fully “kitted out,” she looked ridiculous, to herself, like she had been miscast for her role. Only Rick wore his equipment naturally, as if he belonged in it.

  Back where their helic
opter had landed and, she hoped, still waited, a National Guard sergeant had handed Isabel a heavy black rifle, which he called a carbine, and she had pretended to understand the difference. He had asked her to read off the serial number stamped into the metal, then made a check mark on his clipboard. “You break it, you buy it,” he had said. Isabel couldn’t tell if he was joking, but hadn’t felt in the mood to laugh.

  When out of earshot, she had confided to Rick, “I don’t really know how to shoot this.” He had led her to the heavily guarded perimeter of the battalion headquarters, which was draped in netting, presumably out of habit and not in fear of an Infected air attack. Rick had stood behind Isabel and wrapped big arms around her as she raised the carbine to her shoulder. For an all-too-brief moment, Isabel had felt warm. Safe. At ease and at home.

  “You’re gonna have to open your eyes.”

  “Sorry!”

  He had “chambered” a “round”—i.e., loaded a bullet—and shown her how to hold the ugly black gun. Flick the “selector switch”—the little lever beside the trigger—straight up with her thumb. Check that it was on “Semi,” never “Auto.” Aim. Pull the trigger. Pull it harder. Bam! The M4 had kicked. The shot had splashed the dirt on the riverbank into the air.

  With Rick’s face close, she had stolen a kiss from the corner of his mouth, apparently annoying him as he was going over how to clear jams and reload, which Isabel thought unnecessary. He’d always been so sweet. She’d never seen him irritated, or nervous…until then. And then again now, there, on the bridge.

  “This is your final warning!” boomed from a patrol car’s loudspeaker. “Clear this bridge immediately or risk grievous bodily harm or death!”

  Isabel had trouble filling her lungs deeply enough. And the acoustics under the heavy helmet made everything seem surreal. This wasn’t her standing on a windy New England bridge in full army combat gear. Maybe this was what an out-of-body experience felt like.

  She tried to focus on her job. The Uninfecteds confronting their blockade from the Vermont side had isolated themselves into dozens and dozens of invisible little bubbles. They feared infection from anyone not an accepted member of whatever group to which they belonged. “I advise you to exit this bridge immediately!” boomed the voice from amid the patrol cars’ flashing lights. “Before it’s too late!” The little bubbles of people shifted this way and that, but none of them burst. They were staying together to the end.

  “Look,” the battalion commander said, “here they come.” The front edge of a huge, trudging throng rounded the bend of the Vermont highway leading to the bridge. “Are we absolutely sure they’re infected?” Even at over half a mile, it was clear there was something off about their behavior, though it was hard to describe what it was.

  Brandon borrowed Rick’s binoculars. “I don’t see any subgroups. No families, or couples, or people who look like coworkers, or fellow students, or buddies. Just a random, heterogeneous collection of individuals.”

  Isabel copied Rick and several soldiers by peering at the approaching mass through her rifle’s magnified sight. She added, “And they don’t seem to be taking any precaution against infection. No masks. No gloves. They aren’t avoiding each other.”

  “Why are they all coming this way?” the lieutenant colonel asked in a tone of desperation, not curiosity. “Can’t they see what’s about to happen?”

  When no one else bothered to answer, Isabel tried to explain. “They all started out with some individual objective—find food, flee the same violence and chaos as the Uninfecteds down there, follow through on some old evacuation plan, whatever. When they somehow ended up at the same place and time, and the density of the crowd rose above some threshold, their individuality got submerged into that crowd. They then marched down the road, presumably recoiling from the chaos behind them, and they’ll keep going in that semi-trancelike state till they either thin out and the hypnotic effect of the crowd is broken, or they reach an obstacle and their instinct of struggle compels them to overcome it.”

  “Give me an example of an obstacle,” the colonel requested.

  “Us,” Isabel replied.

  “And there’s no way to reason with them? Or scare them off, at least?” The colonel was running out of alternatives other than the obvious one.

  Brandon said, in a drained monotone, “No way. They’re packed forty to fifty-plus per ten square meters. They’re totally immersed in that crowd.” He was transfixed by the sight through Rick’s binoculars. Gunshots rang out from the rear ranks of the refugees. Several of the approaching Infecteds fell. “That didn’t set them off,” Brandon said. “But they’re charged. Any second now…”

  “Please! They’re almost here!” shouted the man now crushing his baseball cap in his clutches.

  A skirmish line of uninfected men at the Vermont base of the bridge fired scattered shots, retreated, fired again, and felled more Infecteds as they funneled onto the narrow causeway, which compressed the crowd even further and more dangerously. The Infecteds didn’t cower or seek cover. It was as if they were completely indifferent to the deaths of a few from their ranks given the thousands more among their number.

  But without any warning, an unearthly roar rose in volume and in pitch from the previously silent Infected horde. Isabel had been waiting for some trigger, but still she was unprepared for the deafening, demonic outcry, which marked the onset of the huge crowd’s terrifying lurch, en masse, straight toward the few uninfected civilians’ guns.

  “Good God!” blurted out an astonished Guardsman from behind sunglasses.

  The sound was familiar to Isabel from classified Pentagon videos, but unprecedented in her personal experience. The hair-raising screech chilled her spine and started her limbs shaking even before the Infected mob first set upon the outnumbered Uninfecteds. The quiver soon spread to her torso, and she could no longer hold the rifle’s scope steady enough. A thick knot rose to a boil in her stomach, and she kept finding herself out of breath.

  Rick caught Isabel’s eye. The Infected crowd’s wail was the sound he had warned her to flee if she ever heard it. The uninfected skirmishers at the foot of the causeway were quickly overwhelmed by the clamorous melee a few hundred yards distant in what was now, for Rick, Brandon, and Isabel, a familiar sight of flailing, gouging, clawing mutilation. But the sickening bloodshed hit the National Guardsmen and cops like body blows. Jaws agape. Eyes wide. “Christ Almighty,” came one state policewoman’s quivering comment.

  “Everybody lock and load!” It was Rick’s voice even though Rick, like Isabel and Brandon, was only supposed to be an observer. There were dozens of mechanical clacks from all around.

  “What are my rules of engagement?” the National Guard lieutenant colonel demanded.

  Rick, a Marine Corps captain, was craning his neck to count, Isabel realized, the number of guns under the colonel’s command. Not the rifles of the individual soldiers, or the shotguns and pistols of the agitated state policemen, but the machine guns. There were three huge black weapons atop the Humvees, and another four Isabel saw—smaller machine guns whose bipods rested atop hoods or whose foregrips lay across the windowsills of open Humvee doors. Long belts studded with brass bullets dangled, ready to feed the fearsome beasts.

  “What are my rules of engagement?” repeated the colonel. With his brow furrowed, Rick now scanned not the Uninfecteds, who crouched, some permanently on their knees with gazes lifted skyward, but the much larger and denser crowd of howling Infecteds, which approached the Uninfecteds from behind. “Captain!” snapped the National Guard colonel. “My-rules-of-engagement?” he demanded.

  “What are your orders, sir?” Rick replied testily even though he knew the answer.

  “Hold this bridge. Let no one pass.” They almost had to shout at each other over the mass roar of the Infecteds and the frequent piercing screams of their victims.

  “And you were authoriz
ed to use deadly force?” Again, Rick’s question was rhetorical. Hurry up! Isabel urged silently. They’re coming!

  “If necessary,” the colonel answered.

  “It’s gonna be necessary, sir. When the Infecteds reach the foot of the raised span, they’re gonna be canalized between the guardrails.” Rick stared into the colonel’s ashen face. “Pour…it…on, sir,” he enunciated slowly and unequivocally.

  The colonel seemed sickened. He shook his head as he stared at the few hundred helpless civilians who recoiled past the orange barrels from the frenzied attack behind them. Infecteds ten or twenty times their number were tackling and ripping to shreds the scattering Uninfecteds farther down the bridge. The National Guard commander shouted into the patrol car’s microphone, “Run! It’s your last chance! Jump into the water! Now!”

  Some people easily made it over the low rails of the causeway, but many were tackled short of the cold water and others were followed straight into it. Leave them alone! Isabel raged before closing her eyes to shut out the sights and sounds of the maulings, which in the water mimicked the splashing, flailing imagery of a shark attack.

  But she had to watch. It was her only job. The railings along the raised portion of the bridge gave people time for internal debate. Some sat atop them, feet dangling in empty air. Their choice was often made for them right before the outstretched grasp of berserk Infecteds swallowed them whole. But if the jumper was a child, or elderly, or infirm, and they hesitated, they ended up being pulled backwards and disappearing under the fast-forming killing mounds.

  “I’m gonna be sick,” she said, but no one heard her over the clamor.

  Each jump, sometimes by people in pairs holding hands, sometimes with mothers or fathers holding or first pushing or tossing their children, was followed by a dozen or more splashes as Infecteds, locked in on their intended victims, knew no limits in their zeal to kill. The sounds of splashes, however, were quickly overwhelmed by the sports stadium-like crescendo of the two main crowds merging with unrestrained violence.