Victor Methos - Pestilence

Trudy looked like her mother.

The drive wasn’t that bad. But along the way were abandoned jeeps and roadblocks with no one tending to them. An uneasiness came over him, but he didn’t know what else to do other than drive.

When he finally admitted to himself that no other cars were on the freeway, as if it had been abandoned, his uneasiness turned to panic.

“Either of you getting reception yet?”

“Not me,” Marcus said.

“Me neither.”

They were back in Los Angeles in five hours. In fact, he had never made the drive in that amount of time.

He parked at a truck stop outside the city and stretched his neck. Trudy was dozing on the bed in the back. He kissed her, then headed outside to the bathroom; hoping to find some other people that could tell him what the hell was going on. He wondered if the freeways had been closed because of some terrorist attack or natural disaster and they just hadn’t gotten the message.

As he stepped outside, he noticed two empty cars in the lot. Rick went to the restroom and pissed at one of the urinals, yawning and stretching his shoulder, which had been injured in a college wrestling bout and never been quite the same.

When he finished and turned toward the sink, he saw something on the wall. Dark and dry, a smear led down into the stall. Spread over an enormous portion of the wall, it looked like blood.

From where he was standing, Rick couldn’t see in. He walked over slowly. “Hello? Is someone there?” No reply. He crouched lower for some reason and felt stupid for doing so. So he stood up, went right over, and pushed the stall door open with his boot.

Inside, a man was huddled over a toilet. He was wearing a suit and fancy Italian leather shoes. His head was hanging over like a wet rag, and the entire stall was caked in dried blood. The walls, the floor, even the ceiling had been spattered.

“Um, hello? Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

Rick glanced to the door of the bathroom and then back to the man. He wondered if he should try to call the police or check on him first. But what did it matter if he was alive or dead? He would call the police, just the same.

He swallowed and took a step forward. Approaching the man from behind, he reached down to grab his hips and flip him over.

The man let out a gurgled, horrifying scream and spun onto his back. Rick jumped, and the man reached for him as more blood shot out of his mouth. But it barely looked like blood.

The man was covered in sores or chicken pox. But Rick had seen chicken pox when Trudy had them, and that wasn’t chicken pox. The man’s skin was bumpy, but it appeared to have been burnt. Some of it was falling off.

Rick ran out of the bathroom to get his phone and call the police. Then he heard his daughter scream.

Samantha’s plane landed at Dobbins Air Force Base, and she waited until it had come to a complete stop before unbuckling herself. She glanced at Jessica. The young girl was sitting in shock, staring out the window. She had asked where her father was twice, and no one told her.

As they stepped off the plane, Sam put her arm around the girl’s shoulders and shuttled her over to an awaiting jeep. They rode in silence, but Jessica didn’t remove Samantha’s arm. In fact, she placed her head on Sam’s ribs, and Sam kept her arm over her, as if she could shield her from what they both knew was coming.

When the jeep stopped in front of Samantha’s home, she debated for an instant. Olsen had given orders for the child to be taken into protective custody. But she knew what that meant-a night at a military base and then into state care. That wasn’t what Sam had promised Harold.

Without so much as a peep from the driver, Samantha helped the young girl out of the jeep, and they walked inside the house. The house was immaculately clean.

Sam checked her watch, and it read 9:00 a.m. The nurse usually came at around ten. The maids came twice a week, and a physical therapist was over twice a week to take her mother out for walks and to exercise on the equipment in the basement.

“There’s a spare room over there,” Samantha said. “You have your own bathroom. We’ll go tomorrow and try and find you some new clothes.”

“Where’s my dad?” she asked.

Samantha locked eyes with her. The girl’s light-blue eyes were full of confusion and fury. She already knew where her father was; she had known it the moment she’d woken on the plane to the awful suction of an open door and didn’t see him there. But Sam guessed she needed to hear it.

“Your father is gone, Jessica. I’m sorry. He passed away to save the rest of us.”

She nodded, glancing down at the floor. “What about my mom?”

“I don’t know. There’s no communication in or out of California, so I don’t know what’s happened to your mom. But we’ll look for her today, okay?”

She turned without saying anything and went into the room Sam had pointed to. Sam waited a few moments and then poked her head in. Jessica was on the futon, curled up in a ball, and staring out the window at the sunlight that was flooding the street. Sam wondered what she could say to make it better, to ease her loss. But she couldn’t come up with anything. Jessica hadn’t just lost her father. Everything she had ever known was gone, and she would never get it back.

None of them would.

Samantha collapsed on the couch in the front room, her face in her hands, and cried. When she finished, no tears were left. She thought of Duncan and the sweet way he would text her with funny photos to make her laugh.

She was grieving, though she didn’t recognize it as such. He would have asked her to marry him soon. Neither one of them had had any doubt about that. It was only a matter of finding the perfect moment. But it had never come. Instead, she was left with memories and a cold, empty feeling that the way her life was supposed to turn out had not materialized. Though she wanted to believe that, to revel in her grief, a part of her told her she would have said no, and it made her feel guilty. At least, she thought, Jane and her family had made it out.

“Are you okay?” Jessica was standing there.

Sam wiped the tears away and said, “Yeah.”

“I don’t think I can sleep.”

Sam patted the cushion on her couch, and Jessica walked over and sat down as Sam put her shirt to her face and cleaned off the salty tears. She wrapped her arm around Jessica, and they leaned back on the couch. Before they had a chance to say anything to each other, both of them were asleep.

Rick burst through the bathroom door and saw a man banging on his RV.

“Hey!” Rick ran over, grabbed him by the shoulders, and flung him away. He went in for a kick as the man was still struggling to get up and stopped.

The man was pale, and his eyes were rimmed so red that they looked painted. His clothes were stained black and wet, and Rick immediately knew it was blood. He jumped back as the man vomited so violently one of his eyes popped out of the socket. The slick, wet cord allowed it to dangle over the pavement as the vomit continued to flow.

Rick ran to the RV and tried to open the door, but it was locked. He banged on it and called out to Trudy. Marcus opened the door, and Rick jumped in, then shut the door behind him before locking it again. He ran up to the front to look out the windshield.

The day was warm and quiet, and with senses newly attuned from fear, he heard everything he had missed before. Or, in this case, he noticed what he hadn’t heard.

No airplanes in the sky. No cars on the interstate. No voices outside. He turned on the radio and got static on every station. Rick pulled out his phone and dialed 9-1-1, but got a busy tone. He tried Googling the nearest police precinct, but the Internet on his phone wasn’t working.