Нора Робертс - Year One

He’d worked in his family’s sports equipment store since childhood—managed the main branch now. He knew how to read people.

“No.”

“I’m so sorry, Tony.” She took his arm, guided him to the chairs. “I told Dr. Gerson I’d come down, but I can have him paged, have him come talk to you.”

“No, I don’t know him, I don’t need that.” He dropped down, lowered his head into his hands. “What’s happening? I don’t understand what’s happening. Why did they die?”

“We’re running tests, looking for the nature of the infection. We believe they contracted it in Scotland, as your father-in-law had symptoms before he left. Katie said they stayed on a farm, in Dumfries?”

“Yeah, the family farm—a cousin’s farm. It’s a great place.”

“A cousin?”

“Yeah, Hugh, Hugh MacLeod. And Millie. God, I need to tell them. Tell Rob, tell Ian. What do I tell Katie?”

“Can I get you some coffee?”

“No, thanks. What I could use is a good, stiff drink, but…” He had to be strong, he remembered, and wiped at his tears with the heels of his hands. “I’ll settle for a Coke.”

When he started to get up, Rachel put a hand on his arm. “I’ll get it. Regular?”

“Yeah.”

She walked over to the vending machines, dug out change. A farm, she thought. Pigs, chickens. A possible strain of swine or bird flu?

Not her area, but she’d get the information, pass it on.

She brought Tony the Coke. “If you’d give me the contact information on Hugh MacLeod and for Ross MacLeod’s brother, it may help us.”

She took it all, keyed them into her phone. The cousin, the twin brother, the son, even the nephews, as Tony offered them.

“Take my number.” She took his phone, added it to his contacts list. “Call me if there’s something I can do. Are you planning on staying with Katie tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll set that up for you. I’m sorry, Tony. Very sorry.”

He let out a long breath. “Ross and Angie, they were … I loved them like my own ma and pop. It helps to know they were with somebody good, somebody, you know, caring, at the end. It’ll help Katie knowing that, too.”

He walked back to Katie’s room, walked slowly, even deliberately taking a wrong turn once to give himself more time.

When he went in, saw her lying there, staring up at the ceiling, her hands protectively cradling the babies inside her, he knew what he had to do.

For the first time since he’d met her, he lied to her.

“Mom?”

“She’s sleeping. You need to do the same.” Leaning over the bed, he kissed her. “I’m going to run home, pack us some things. Since the food probably sucks in here, I’ll pick us up some lasagna from Carmines. Kids gotta eat.” He patted her belly. “And need some meat.”

“Okay, you’re right. You’re my rock, Tone.”

“You’ve always been mine. Be back before you know it. No wild parties while I’m gone.”

Her eyes glimmered, her smile wobbled. But his Katie had always been game. “I already ordered the strippers.”

“Tell them to keep it on till I get back.”

He walked out, trudged to his car. It started to snow in anemic wisps he barely felt. He slid into the minivan they’d bought only two weeks before, in anticipation of the twins.

Lowering his head to the wheel, he wept out his broken heart.

CHAPTER THREE

By the end of the first week of January, the reported death count topped a million. The World Health Organization declared a pandemic spreading with unprecedented speed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified it as a new strain of avian influenza, one that spread with human-to-human contact.

But no one could explain why the birds tested showed no signs of infection. None of the chickens, turkeys, geese, pheasants, or quail—confiscated or captured within a hundred-kilometer radius of the MacLeod farm—revealed any infection.

But the people—the MacLeod family in Scotland, their neighbors, the villagers—died in droves.

That detail the WHO, the CDC, and the NIH kept under tight wraps.

In the scramble for vaccines, distribution ran through complex and maddening loops. Delays incited rioting, looting, violence.

It didn’t matter, as the vaccines proved as ineffective as the fraudulent cures selling briskly on the Internet.

Across the globe, heads of state urged calm and called for order, promised assistance, spoke of policies.

Schools closed, countless businesses locked their doors as people were urged to limit contact with others. The sale of surgical masks, gloves, over-the-counter and prescription flu remedies, bleach, and disinfectants soared.

It wouldn’t help. Tony Parsoni could’ve told them, but he died in the same hospital bed as his mother-in-law less than seventy-two hours after her.

Plastic barriers, latex gloves, surgical masks? The Doom scoffed at all and gleefully spread its poisons.

In the second week of the New Year, the death toll topped ten million and showed no sign of abating. Though his illness went unreported, and his death was kept secret for nearly two days, the President of the United States succumbed.

Those heads of state fell like dominoes. Despite extreme precautions, they proved just as susceptible as the homeless, the panicked, the churchgoer, the atheist, the priest, and the sinner.

In its wave through D.C. in the third week of the Doom, more than sixty percent of Congress lay dead or dying, along with more than a billion others worldwide.

With the government in chaos, new fears of terrorist attacks lit fires. But terrorists were as busy dying as the rest.

Urban areas became war zones, with thinning police forces fighting against survivors who looked at the end of humanity as an opportunity for blood and brutality. Or profit.

Rumors abounded about odd dancing lights, about people with strange abilities healing burns without salve, lighting fires in barrels for warmth without fuel. Or lighting them for the thrill of watching the flames rise. Some claimed to have seen a woman walk through a wall, others swore they’d seen a man lift a car with one hand. And another who had danced a jig a full foot off the ground.

Commercial air travel shut down in week two in the vain hope of stopping or slowing the spread. Most who fled before the travel bans, leaving their homes, their cities, even their countries, died elsewhere.

Others opted to ride it out, stockpiling supplies in homes and apartments—even office buildings—locking doors and windows, often posting armed guards.

And had the comfort of dying in their own beds.

Those who locked themselves in and lived clung to the increasingly sporadic news coverage, hoping for a miracle.

By week three, news was as precious as diamonds, and much more rare.

Arlys Reid didn’t believe in miracles, but she believed in the public’s right to know. She’d worked her way from a predawn newsreader in Ohio, doing mostly farm reports and a few remotes at local fairs and festivals, to a fluff reporter at a local affiliate in New York.

She gained popularity, if not many opportunities for hard news.

At thirty-two, she’d still had her eye on national news. She hadn’t expected to get it by default. The star of The Evening Spotlight , a steady, sober voice through two decades of world crises, went missing before the end of the first week of the pandemic. One by one, in the pecking order of replacements, came death, flight, or, in the case of her immediate predecessor, a sobbing breakdown on air.

Every morning when Arlys woke—in her nearly empty low-rise only a few blocks from the studio—she took stock.

No fever, no nausea, no cramping, no cough, no delusions. No—though she didn’t actually believe the rumors—strange abilities.