Victor Methos - Pestilence

The jeep came not long after Olsen had left. He’d asked that they come with him in the chopper, but Sam had refused, and Duncan stayed with her. She was going to visit her sister, no matter what-even through a plastic barrier.

When the jeep arrived, the driver was a young woman in a beige uniform. Samantha and Duncan climbed in, and she spun it around, then headed through Los Angeles.

“Sorry I was late,” she said. “We were quarantining a new part of the city, and I had to help. It’s chaos that first hour.”

The driver took the interstate and then the back roads. The route took them away from downtown and farther up into the hills, near hiking and biking trails. Trees surrounded them, and the air was cool and crisp. Worry gnawed at Samantha’s guts as Duncan was slowly dozing off. His eyes would shut and then dart open. Sam saw him pinching himself to try to stay awake, sticking his head out the window to let the wind hit him, and shifting positions, but nothing seemed to work.

Soon, Samantha saw what they had come for, and it terrified her.

The fence was about twelve feet high and tipped with looping barbed wire with makeshift towers around the perimeter. At the entrance sat a guard at a desk. Inside were hundreds and hundreds of cots with gray blankets. Men and women were separated by a partition but could still see and talk to one another through it.

As far as she could tell, it was a concentration camp.

“How did you decide who to bring here?” Sam asked.

The woman replied, “They started with certain parts of the city, like Beverly Hills and Malibu, and then we’re kind of getting the rest of the city. We should have everywhere in like a day or something.”

She hopped out of the jeep, but Duncan and Sam didn’t move.

He said, “I’m sorry, Sam.”

Sam didn’t respond. The only thought in her mind was that her sister was in that place, tucked away like some rat waiting to be experimented on in a university laboratory. And on top of that, she had just injected live viruses into over a hundred people. The staggering repercussions made her feel nauseated. But she couldn’t think about that. She had to focus on her sister; she could wallow in guilt later.

She got out of the jeep and followed the woman, who led her to the entrance. All the guards were wearing surgical masks.

The one at the entrance turned to the woman. “Who’s this?”

“They need to see one of the quarantined. What was her name?”

“Jane Bower is her maiden name, but she’d likely be under Jane Gates.”

The man scanned a list on an iPad. “Okay, she’s here. I got a note that says her sister’s coming to visit her. I guess that’s you.”

He stood up and unlocked a gate on the women’s side. He pressed a button on the PA system. “Jane Bower or Jane Gates to the front entrance.”

They waited a few moments, and no one came forward. He repeated into the device, “Jane Bower or Jane Gates to the front entrance now.”

Another few minutes passed, and still, nothing.

“She ain’t here,” the guardsman said.

“General Olsen told me she was.”

The guardsman scanned the iPad again. “Oh, here she is. She’s on my list of people that have been shipped out.”

“Shipped out where?”

“Quarantine.”

“You have people in cages, and you don’t think that’s quarantine?”

“I mean like real quarantine. With no one else around them.”

“Where is that?”

“I can’t tell you. It’s classified.”

“General Olsen gave me specific permission to see my sister, and I want to see her now.”

“Well, that’s fine, but I ain’t gonna be the one to tell you where she is. Go ask General Olsen.”

Kyle Levitt had joined the National Guard when he was eighteen years old. The recruiter at his school had been a cool guy named Dave. He drove a Viper and would show up to the school with his sleeves rolled up, revealing muscular arms, and Kyle saw the way the girls stared at him.

Kyle had planned on becoming a veterinarian, but one meeting with Dave had changed his mind.

“Vets don’t get no pussy,” Dave had told him.

Instead of discussing it with his parents, Kyle had prayed about it and decided that the Lord wanted him to join the National Guard. He had even had a dream telling him something like that. He thought, as Dave had promised, he would be fighting for God and country against Bin Laden. But when he was shipped off to Iraq for his first tour in 2006, he didn’t see Bin Laden. He saw peasants fighting not only the terrorists, but the coalition soldiers, as well.

He’d had several close calls in Iraq. One stuck more than the others; an IED had gone off about four feet from the vehicle he was riding in. The Humvee in front of them was blown to hell, and so much shrapnel flew off that some of it burst through their windshield and hit him in the face. Luckily, he hadn’t taken any permanent damage other than a scar on his cheek.

As Kyle walked the perimeter of the huge fence, what the guardsmen had named the Cage, he felt as though he were back in Iraq, on patrol, ensuring the enemy combatants weren’t attempting to escape from custody.

But he wasn’t in Iraq. He was twenty-five miles from where he had grown up in Santa Monica. And the people inside the cage weren’t enemy combatants; they were Americans.

Some of the other soldiers fell into their roles perfectly and treated the Americans no differently from the Iraqis they had dealt with. As far as they were concerned, they followed orders, and nothing else mattered. But for Kyle, it was more complicated. He felt for these people, and his entire family was in this city. Would they be rounded up, too? Would he be expected to guard his own family with a rifle pointed at their heads?

Fuck that, he thought. He would go AWOL first and take his family with him.

But something more concerning was beginning to happen. He’d been coughing for about a day, and the night before, he’d had a fever and diarrhea. He was still hot and couldn’t stop sweating. He had dumped ice water over his head, but that didn’t feel like it did anything. A few minutes later, he would be burning up again.

His stomach convulsed, and he felt his bowels let loose. He ran to a row of nearby bushes and vomited. The vomit was clear and black, but something like dark oatmeal came up with it. The fluid spattered over the bushes and didn’t seem to stop until it decided it was done.

The vomiting alleviated the pain in his guts for a few minutes, and then the tight, aching pain returned and he had to vomit again.

He walked to the front entrance, where his buddy Mark was stationed.

“You all right, man?” Mark asked.

“No. I gotta go.”

“Where?”

“Barracks, man. I’m not feelin’ hot. Flu or somethin’.”

Mark glanced around to make sure no one else was listening. “That ain’t no damn flu, you fucking idiot. Tell me you didn’t take off your mask when you was dealin’ with these folks.”

He shook his head. “No. I don’t think so… I can’t remember.”

Mark peered at a group of other soldiers near a tower. “Get outta here, now. I’ll cover for you. Just take a jeep and go, and don’t come back until you feel better. And you ain’t goin’ near the barracks, you hear me? You go straight to the med tent.”

“Thanks.”

He found a jeep with the keys in the ignition. He wasn’t supposed to commandeer a vehicle without permission, but Mark, who was his superior, had just given him what sounded like permission. Even though Mark probably didn’t rank high enough to give permission like that, it didn’t matter. Kyle could barely stand.

He drove off the camp and took the side streets rather than the 405 or the PCH. The streets were empty, and it felt eerie, like the zombie apocalypse he was always afraid of as a child.