Linda Andrews - The Meltdown

Day 7

After Anthrax Exposure

“Is that where we’re going, Missus S?”

Audra Silvestre checked the rearview mirror of the bus. Snores and raspy breathing came from many of the survivors traveling with her. A pair of wide brown eyes in a chalky, half-covered face stared back at her. Oscar Renault. She’d had the pudgy, pimply-faced twelve-year-old in her class last year. Between his ADHD and his mother’s insistence that he was the perfect child, she’d decided to give up teaching. They had been the last straw in a baleful.

The notion seemed pathetically pitiful now. Thankfully, she hadn’t told anyone.

“You sick, too, Missus S?” Oscar slid off the seat behind her and scooted forward on his knees, seemingly unaware that he’d asked another question without having an answer for the first one. Snot left dark trails down the thighs of his worn, dirty jeans sticking in the aisle. His hand shook and he wrapped it around the pole on her right.

“No, Oscar. I’m fine.” Her words puffed against the bandanna covering the lower half of her face and whispered hot, moist breath back at her. Clammy sweat beaded her forehead and her stomach cramped from the overwhelming odor of excrement. Hopefully it was from the slops bucket in the back and not…anything else. Unfortunately rolling down the window to blow away the stench wasn’t an option.

“You sure?” He wiped his nose on the back of his hand before scraping it off on his jeans.

“I’m sure,” she reiterated for the fourth time in the last five minutes. But God knew how long she’d be healthy. How long anyone of them would be.

She was going to die.

And one of these kids, probably Oscar who now hovered closer than her shadow, would infect her. The steering wheel jerked under her hands and she clamped down. Nails dug into her palms and her fingers cramped as she guided the big yellow bus half on the shoulder and half off the interstate.

“You think you won’t not get sick again?” Oscar perched on the edge of his seat, scabby knees poked through the holes in his pants as he hung practically in the aisle.

Her skull throbbed from the double negative. Proper English didn’t really seem so important at the end of the world. Still… “I’m sure I will get sick this time. Especially since so many are sick again.”

But it hadn’t happened that way the first time. She’d stayed in the school nursing the sick, cooking meals, forcing folks to eat, then recording the dead and handing them over to the military for mass burial. For six months, she never caught the Redaction—the influenza pandemic that had killed thirty-five percent of everyone worldwide. She’d never come down with a sniffle, sneeze or cough.

Surely, she wouldn’t be so lucky this wave.

“Why don’t you rest a bit? We’re still a long way from the soldiers.”

Oscar opened his mouth but no words came out.

Movement in the mirror caught her attention. Faye Eichmann prowled the aisle, heading straight for the front. White hibiscus petals painted the hot pink fabric of her designer dress. The long skirt fluttered around her toothpick legs. Pink and red plastic bangles clinked on her bony wrists while chunks of diamonds winked from her ears, throat and fingers.

The fortune in jewels was meant to ensure she could buy food and shelter. Audra was pretty sure it would get her killed. The influenza wasn’t the only thing out there murdering innocents.

Oscar folded himself into the seat and shrank away from the diamond-encrusted harpy.

Too bad she couldn’t do the same. Audra stared at the dozens of cars abandoned on the blacktop. Maybe she could pretend dodging the vehicles took up all her attention and ignore the middle-aged woman.

In a puff of sour sweat and faded perfume, Faye stopped next to Audra. With her feet apart, she braced her hand on the metal rail. “Why couldn’t people have pulled off to the side of the road when they’d broken down?”

Because they were sick, dying or dead. Audra winced as the stench of the woman’s smelly pits momentarily overrode the odor of the slops bucket. Bad enough she had to wallow in her own stink, why did the woman feel the need to share hers when she asked rhetorical questions? “It certainly has slowed us down.”

Up ahead a black Ford pick-up truck tilted in the dip between the North and Southbound lanes of Interstate Ten. Its driver hung halfway out the open door. The stillness of his body didn’t relate his death as did his hands, swollen like black oven mitts, dangling an inch above the weeds. Of their own volition, her eyes checked the passenger side when she passed. Two dead children lay on their backs in a mat of weeds, their bodies bloated in the weak sun. Flies swarmed around them, laying larvae that would devour the soft tissue with surgical precision.

“We’re up to seventeen.”

Wincing, Audra forced her eyes on the road and jerked on the wheel. Faye wasn’t callous; she just coped differently. Lots of folks didn’t want to get chummy with anyone, especially the sick, because of the risk of loss. It was understandable. It pissed her off.

“Nice driving.”

She shrugged off the sarcasm. Parents weren’t much different than their teenagers—rude, difficult and unwilling to learn. God, she hated being a teacher almost as much as she hated this new world. “I’ve learned a thing or three in the last nine hours.”

Nine hours from Tucson to Phoenix when it used to take only two and a half. Her stomach cramped. And what did it gain her? This place looked no safer than where she’d come from, than where she’d passed through. Add in the intermittent belch of the air-raid sirens plus the lack of people and the creep factor spiked off the charts.

“You’re a cool one, Audrey.”

Taking a deep breath, she let the name slight pass and focused on what was important—surviving until she could dump her busload of sick onto the soldiers and get on with her life. She maneuvered into a lane completely free of vehicles. Maybe she’d be rid of them faster than she thought. Her foot stomped on the gas pedal and the bus picked up speed. “Seventeen sick isn’t that bad. We have nearly forty people on the bus.”

And if this flu worked like the last one, most of those seventeen would survive. She sucked on her bottom lip. But this infection didn’t seem to be playing by the same rules. They’d left quite a few corpses behind in the school cafeteria. Much more than a third.

Faye leaned forward. Her floral bodice gaped open and a strand of pearls dribbled out. They swayed from side to side. “That’s the number of dead on the bus. Not that you care. You’re immune.”

Audra released her bottom lip with a pop. But there’d only been fifteen sick when they’d left last night. She would know. They all crowded around her like she was their personal lucky rabbit’s foot. Ask the rabbit how lucky he felt. No wait, you couldn’t, the rabbit was dead.

“I care, and there’s no telling if I’m immune this go round.”