Linda Andrews - Extinction Level Event

David tapped on her shoulder before handing her the lantern. “You don’t strike me as the kind to be afraid of rats, D—Mavis.”

“It’s not the rats.” Holding the lantern high, she crossed the patio to the RV pad taking up most of her backyard. “It’s the diseases they facilitate.”

“They can’t be as bad as the Redaction.”

“Think again, Sergeant Major.” Mavis skirted the charred metal garbage cans arranged on the concrete slab to reach the double-wide gates. “You can get the Hanta Virus and a kind of typhoid from rat waste and let’s not forget Plague from their fleas.”

“Plague? As in the Plague?”

She unlocked the gates, lifted the drop rods, and then pushed them open. “Yes, the very Plague that wiped out a third of Europe in the Middle ages.”

Metal rattled as he lifted a garbage can in each hand. “But isn’t that Europe?”

“It’s indigenous to Northern Arizona.” Pocketing the lock and key, she hung the lantern from the orange tree limb, grabbed two cans and followed him out to the middle of the cul-de-sac. “There were only a few cases in the last decade, but with the rat population explosion…”

The cans clattered to the ground. “So how can I protect my men?”

“Wear the bunny suits, keep the masks on, and isolate the sick.” God that sounded so callous. Here he was risking his men for her safety and she just basically told them they were doomed. “Prayer might help.”

She dusted her hands on her slacks before returning for another couple of cans.

Fabric swished as he raced to her side. “What about antivirals?”

“Yersina pestis causes the plague. It’s a bacterium, so you’ll need antibiotics.” She latched onto two more cans. Should she add the possible outbreak to her equations and watch the numbers reach a hundred percent? “You should know that antibiotics don’t always cure the disease.”

David stacked the remaining four cans then lifted them and followed her. “How effective are they?”

“If it’s caught early enough, usually only one in seven will die, but that was when our health care system worked.” Mavis dropped her cans and stepped back so he could set his next to hers.

“So the Redaction’s return might be the least of our problems.” He set his hands on his hips.

“No, the influenza is still our biggest problem.” She threaded her hand through his crooked arm and dragged him toward the house. God, this was a depressing topic. But unavoidable if they wanted to survive. “It’s just not our only problem.”

“So what are our chances?”

“In total?” She squeezed his arm. “One in a thousand.”

Shoving his hands into his pockets, David followed Mavis back into her house. Only one in a thousand would survive? He jingled the Humvee’s keys. Of the two million people remaining in Phoenix that meant only two thousand would survive. “How can that be? I thought the new Redaction only had a seventy percent mortality rate.”

Like seven in ten people dying wasn’t bad enough. He dropped the keys and set his hands on his hips. He might not be good at math, but even he knew those numbers didn’t add up. Somewhere in there was something he could do, people he could save.

Mavis slid the arcadia door closed behind them, shutting out the chirp of crickets. Sighing, she dragged her fingers through her loose hair. “Seventy percent will die from the new strain of influenza, but nearly everyone will get sick. We’re already surpassed our infrastructure’s tensile strength.” Her hands flopped to her sides and her shoulders bowed. “Now it will break.”

Tensile strength? He scratched his chin; stubble rasped against his fingers. What exactly did that mean? And, how did it affect keeping his men alive? Pausing inside the great room, he clasped his hands behind his back. Ignorance was a death sentence. “English, Mavis. Small words. One or two syllables for the enlisted men.”

She smiled and shook her head. “I’m sure you’ve gotten the concept, but I’ll break it down. Knowing what’s coming might keep you and your men on the front lines alive.”

Finally, someone understood. Colonel Asshole seemed to think he and the rest of the enlisted men were nothing but monkeys to be directed. Power hummed through the house as electricity once more flowed through its copper veins. Lights blinked on along the bottom of the forty-two inch flat screen television and the black Blu-Ray player on the shelf underneath it. Soft white light diffused through the open kitchen from the recessed CFL above the sink.

Turning off the lantern, she crossed the great room and flicked the switch so the modern brushed chrome and frosted glass chandelier came to life. Returning to the dining table, she sat down before the laptop and pulled out the seat next to her. “Let me show you what we’re up against.”

We. Two little letters, but put together they had a profound meaning.

“Much obliged.” David quickly joined her. Nice to know he’d gotten the right bead on her character. With her keeping him in the loop, his men had a chance to survive the coming shit storm.

Brushing her hair off her shoulder, Mavis angled the screen so they could both see it.

Black covered the entire map of the United States, the Hawaiian Islands and most of Alaska. Ninety-nine-point-nine flashed on the screen. Obviously that was the death rate, but surely there was some wiggle room involved in the calculations.

“The first influenza took out the young and healthy.” Mavis cleared the map and brought up two colored pie graphs and pointed to a large blue slice. “This wedge here represents those Americans age fifteen to sixty-five before the Rattling Death. This one is after.”

David inhaled cool air between his teeth. Christ Almighty. He’d been there—picking up bodies off the curb, emptying houses of corpses, and filling truck bed after truck bed. Yet to see the nation-wide impact…

“The wedge shrunk.” Big time. Yeah, dip shit, any moron could see that. Still. About a third of the blue slice was gone. A third. Nationwide. That had to translate into millions of people. Millions of corpses.

“Exactly.” She clicked on the pie to break it down into age groups. The bars for those over forty dwarfed the ones for the people between fifteen and thirty-nine. “This demographic went from sixty-seven percent of the population to about forty-six. And the only reason it’s still so big is because most people over forty survived.”

“At least, the old folks and kids are intact.” That was good. And not just because he was among that number. The younger generation was the future, and there were enough of his age group to raise them up. The right way.

“They took a hit as well, just not as big so their numbers appear larger.” She backed out of the screen and the post-Redaction pie filled the screen. One more click and the black map of the US emerged like a pesky ink spot. “No one will be safe when the new strain of the Rattling Death reaches our shores.”

What he wouldn’t give for a bottle of white-out. Too bad it wouldn’t change anything. David curled his hands into fists and stuffed them between his thighs. Still, there had to be something he could do to nudge the odds in his favor. “What can we expect?”

She zoomed in on the map until the state of Arizona supplanted the continental US. Blue dots marked Luke Air Force Base, Fort Huachuca, Davis-Monthan, Camp Navajo and the Yuma Proving Grounds.

“First, containment measures will quarantine the infected areas.” Red dots popped up in Phoenix, Tucson, and Flagstaff, shortly thereafter scarlet circled the cities and black lines crossed the interstates. “Given that other states will be experiencing their own outbreaks, we can rely only on stocks we currently have on hand.”