Victor Methos - Pestilence

“How ya doing with everything?” he said.

“Good as can be.”

“Do you still get panic attacks sometimes?”

“They’ve been reduced. But I heard a loud crash the other day, just my mom dropping something, and it gave me one. Any time I’m startled. And I can’t go to bed without checking all the doors twenty times.” She glanced out the window again. “I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know how you would react.”

“Sam, someone tried to kill you. Not to mention everything that happened in South America and Oahu. You’ve been through some serious trauma. I would be surprised if you didn’t go to therapy. I went to a shrink for about five years a little bit ago.”

“For what?”

“Depression. It runs in my family. My grandfather and biological mother both committed suicide.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It’s not something I talk about much. But anyway, I’m terrified of that, and so when I get even a hint of the blues coming on, I go to a shrink. Sometimes, talking is enough, but occasionally, I need meds.”

She placed her hand over his. “I’m glad you told me.”

He smiled awkwardly and took a drink of his bottle.

When her plane landed at Los Angeles Air Force Base, Samantha had been on the plane for three and a half hours, which was actually less time than she would have spent on a commercial flight. She and Duncan stepped onto the tarmac, and a warm gust of wind hit her. The sensation was both pleasing and ominous. The last time she was in this city, she was nearly killed.

A national guardsman in a jeep saluted Duncan, not knowing he was a civilian scientist working for the army, and threw their bags in the jeep.

“Sir, I’ll be taking you into the medical station.”

Sam climbed into the backseat, allowing Duncan the passenger, then the jeep started and peeled out from the tarmac, heading toward the city.

“Who’s in charge of the medical station?” Duncan asked.

“Lieutenant General Olsen, sir.”

Samantha asked, “Clyde Olsen?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She thought back to the time she had met Dr. Clyde Olsen. He had joined the army to pay for medical school and had decided that a career in the military suited his temperament better than one in medicine. “Medicine is guesswork,” he told her once, “but the military requires no guesswork. You do what your superiors tell you, and your underlings do what you tell them.”

The last time she had seen him was at a conference in London. He had gotten drunk afterward and invited her to his room, but she turned him down. So he’d picked up one of the other doctors at the conference, and they were arrested for having sex in the hotel pool after hours.

As the driver hopped on the interstate, she sensed something extraordinarily wrong. Not a single car was on the road. She saw no motorcycles or buses-nothing but military vehicles, particularly large trucks with people crammed in back.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

The driver glanced at her and then back to the road. “You’ll have to take that up with General Olsen, ma’am.”

As they got onto the 405, she still didn’t see any cars, but did spot at least five UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters. When they exited the highway, she knew what had happened inside the homes and stores, and it made her stomach churn.

No people were there. Doors on homes were left open. Stores had lights on, but no one was inside. The city was empty.

“Duncan-”

“I know,” he said, reading her thoughts.

Howie stood up. Pain flowed through him as though someone had hooked up a hose of it to his head and let it drizzle down into his body. One of his teeth was loose, and when he tugged on it softly, it came out. He spit out the warm blood that flowed from the hole in his mouth. He walked out of the cage and around the guardsman heaped on the ground. He knelt down and held his breath, not knowing if a body could smell so quickly. He had never seen a dead body up close before.

The only one he could even think of was his grandfather, who had passed away a day short of his seventy-third birthday. He’d gone to the wake, but he wouldn’t go near the casket. He stood on the other side of the room, catching only glances of the pale, mannequin-like face that jutted out of the gleaming box.

His parents kept telling him to go say goodbye, but he knew, even at ten, that there was nothing there to say goodbye to anymore.

Ten.

He thought of Jessica. Reaching into the guardsman’s pockets, he searched for anything he could use-keys, money, cards. But the only two useful things he found were a knife and some matches. The other men had taken the rifle.

He tucked the knife, a good military-issue knife with a serrated edge, into his waistband and put the matches in his pocket. He glanced around. He had thought that fifty other guardsmen would run up once they heard the gunshot, but none came. Why would they only have one person guarding everyone in that cage?

He walked through the thicket of trees and soon came to a hill. He climbed it, each step more painful than the next, and had to stop to check his ribs. Placing his fingers over each one, he pushed on them to see how much pain it caused. When he got to the third one down on his right side, the pain nearly toppled him. The rib was fractured, or at least bruised-it had to be. But he wasn’t sure what he could do about it, so he kept walking.

As he came to the summit of the hill, Los Angeles was below him. But it didn’t look like the Los Angeles he’d grown up in. Lights were on, but far fewer than any other night. At least half the city had gone dark. And over the city were the blinking luminosities of military planes and choppers coming and going.

He tried to orient himself by searching for landmarks, but it was too dark to see much. Glancing behind him, he was surprised to see the Hollywood sign. Dilapidated and small, its reputation gave it gargantuan proportions and a mythical ambience. But, like the city, it was an illusion, and just underneath the glossy exterior lay mold and rust.

I’m in the Hollywood Hills, he thought. How long was I out?

It didn’t matter. He had to get back to Malibu. Jessica was alone.

He turned down the hill. Hearing voices, he stopped and ducked low. He slowly crawled near the trees and peeked out. He saw another cage like the one he’d been in, and another guard sat at a table in front of it. Farther out, maybe two hundred yards, was another cage and another guard. A little farther than that, though hazy in his vision, was yet another one. That’s why each cage had only one guard: they didn’t have enough soldiers to spare more than one.

He slid back into the bushes and then went up the hill a ways, careful to stay underneath the trees and away from the road. The choppers overhead were loud, and they had spotlights, but they didn’t fly over him. He kept walking, passing mansions on the way down, and realized he was still in gym shorts without shoes, and his feet were cut. In this situation, clothes didn’t matter one bit, but he needed shoes.

Palm trees adorned the massive driveway of a particularly beautiful home with a white façade and red Spanish tile roof, just up ahead. Howie crouched and was silent for a moment to make sure he didn’t hear any voices. Then he went up to the house.

The front door was wide open, so he walked inside.

The home was immaculately decorated with imported rugs, white marble busts, and a fountain in the center of the front room. Under normal circumstances, he would have been impressed and even a little jealous, but now the ostentation seemed utterly meaningless. What a waste, he thought.