Victor Methos - Pestilence

By the time she saw what had happened, one of Olsen’s soldiers had grabbed the door and pulled it closed. But Harold Burke wasn’t there. He was already flying through the air to his death.

Kansas City, Kansas

Mark Sheffield walked out of his office to get some fresh air. He’d had a cough and a fever all morning, but his boss, a prick named Ted, had refused to allow him to take a sick day. They had a meeting that afternoon with an investor in their marketing and SEO company, and Mark was the salesman. He went to the meeting and made it through only by stopping to cough about five times. After the last bout, he glanced down and saw that his handkerchief was coated with blood.

Outside the building, he leaned against a tree planted near the sidewalk. The sound of cars whizzing by annoyed him. Someone was running a trimmer along the grass, and the buzz-saw racket was grinding against Mark’s nerves. He would have yelled at the guy, even thrown something at him, but he didn’t have the strength. He had enough energy to know to go to the hospital, and that was it. He texted his wife to come pick him up and then didn’t move from the spot.

Ted texted several times, asking Mark where the hell he was and saying that he needed to come to an early dinner to schmooze the clients. Going home to sleep, he replied.

When his wife arrived, Mark climbed into the car and put on his seat belt. She stared at him without driving.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“You look like crap.”

“Thanks. Just take me to a hospital, will ya?”

“Mark, you look terrible. What’s going on?”

“How the fuck do I know?”

On the way to the hospital, he started vomiting-little globs of blood at first. Then torrents of the stuff came out in long streams and soaked the floor mats. His wife was frantically shouting into her phone at someone, but the pain was so intense that he couldn’t hear her. He couldn’t hear anything, and soon, he couldn’t see either. And he understood, from the amount of the warm fluid that was coming out of him, that his eyes and ears were bleeding.

Before he bled out, he heard his wife screaming in his ear that she couldn’t live without him. He wanted to say, “Yes you can.” But no words came.

Miami, Florida

Jennifer Mills finished her beer and then played absently with her nachos while she looked over her balcony at the people below. All the chips were still on the plate. She had put one chip into her mouth and then spit it back out because even the thought of food was so disgusting that she might have to run to the bathroom and hurl. Instead, she drank ice water, which even alone made her queasy.

Masood, her boyfriend, came out of the bathroom naked, smiling at her. She wanted to protest and tell him that she wasn’t in the mood anymore, but getting it over with seemed easier. They kissed on the balcony, and he took her hand and forced her to play with him as he lifted her and took her to her bed. He pulled down her skirt and then entered her.

She didn’t feel pleasure or pain. She was numb. Her stomach was bloated even though she hadn’t eaten anything since the day before. Small pimply sacs had appeared on her skin, but Masood either didn’t care or didn’t notice. He was grunting and thrusting inside her as though it were the last time he would ever be with a woman again.

He bent down, put his mouth over hers and his tongue down her throat, and before she even knew what was happening, she spewed into his mouth. He had sealed his lips so tightly around hers that the vomit shot right over his tongue, and he swallowed a lot of it.

He jumped off and spit blood over the room as she kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She noticed that his genitals were covered in blood, and when he saw that, he ran into the bathroom, shouting profanity at her about not telling him she was on her period.

She was too weak to respond that she’d had her period the previous week. So instead, she lay back and listened to the water running in the shower as she dozed off.

Kyoto, Japan

Aiki Ito screamed as the doctors told her to push. The baby-a boy-was going to be huge, they said. His father had been large when he was born, too. This pregnancy had been a difficult one, and for the past three days Ito had been so sick that she couldn’t get out of bed. She was going to get this baby out of her, no matter what.

The pain was intense and ran up into her guts, chest, and neck. Even with an epidural, every little needle prick felt like an event that lasted forever. Her skin was extremely sensitive, and she could only keep her eyes open for so long at one time because the pain made her faint. The lights of the hospital room seemed harsh and caused her retinas to ache.

The doctor was yelling at her to push, and she did. The doctor pulled the baby out, and Ito cried when she saw him. She focused on the baby for so long that she didn’t notice the frantic movements of the doctor and nurses. They were running around, shouting to each other. Something was wrong. The bleeding wouldn’t stop.

“We’re doing everything we can,” the doctor kept telling her, in an effort to calm her down, but the bleeding wouldn’t stop.

And then she felt something so mind-numbingly painful that she thought it would kill her. Something inside seemed to detach from everything else, as though a piece of her had come off. The pressure made its way down, almost like a lump heading for the drain in a bathtub. As she reached down to touch where the pain was, the lump slipped out of her, and the nurses screamed.

Her organs were coming out with rivers of blood.

General Kirk Lancaster was in Maine when he found out about the detonation. Even during a time of emergency, the one place he didn’t want to be was at the Pentagon. When he was there, he was checking his phone and his e-mail every minute or two and driving himself insane. So instead, he turned off his phone and drove to his family’s cabin in Eastport. He would eventually call up his wife and three boys, but right then, he needed the solitude, more than he had thought he did.

He was sitting in his small fishing boat with the hook in the water, a beer in his hand, and the sun on his face, when he decided he should probably turn on his phone. He had thirteen unheard messages and even more e-mails-fifty-six. He flipped through some, purely out of curiosity, as his underlings should have been able to cover everything for at least an afternoon.

He saw the subject line in one e-mail, and his heart dropped. He immediately called Martin.

“Where were you?” Martin asked.

“I thought you quit?”

“I’m temporarily back. I called all around for you.”

“That’s not important. What the fuck happened?”

“As to the why or how, I don’t have a clue. Clearly an attack within our borders.”

“What do you have?”

“I got witnesses in all four cities. Same thing everywhere. A man and a suitcase and an explosion. Except for LA. The witness there was a nurse working at a hospital. She saw a man lying injured on the ground in their parking lot, and a woman ran away from him. And that’s when the blast occurred.”

“Did any of them survive?”

“No. But it looks like this explosion wasn’t the primary function of the device. The explosion’s diameter was only about twenty feet. The primary function appears to be the release of the mists.”

Lancaster stayed silent on the phone for a long time. “You’re not telling me-”

“I don’t know yet, sir. We’re having the mist properly tested to see for sure. But preliminary assessments are coming back positive for a type of poxvirus.”

Lancaster put his hand over his forehead and bent down. He felt ill. “Holy shit, Martin. Holy shit…”