Jacqueline Druga - Immune

The slight snore sound caught Grace’s attention. Macy stood in the kitchen doorway. She was still wearing her soiled pink princess nightgown. Her brown hair was a matted mess and her head tilted to the side. Her face was ghostly white.

She didn’t lunge for Grace, she just stood there.

“Macy,” Grace called her.

The little girl didn’t reply.

“Macy, baby,” Grace walked to her and crouched down. Her eyes were glazed over with some sort of gray film and Macy stared right through her.

Grace reached up. Her skin was on fire and she had developed lesions on her neck, right under the chin. The same lesions were on her arms and around her mouth.

The feel of her body temperature told Grace the child was sick. What was to say she wouldn’t get better? And to think, Grace had planned on leaving her behind.

How cruel. How awful it was of her as a mother to abandon her sick child.

Grace took Macy into her arms and held her up. Macy didn’t move from the embrace, she was emotionless and stone faced.

In the kitchen holding her baby, Grace had to rethink her whole plan.

The eastern rising sun cast through the window of the cockpit, jolting Max Ryker awake. His feet flung forward, smacking into the numerous tiny empty bottles of booze. The barricade he had made with the beverage cart had plenty.

Max Ryker drank them all.

Of course, the pilot, Eugene, kept on giving him the side eyed look of disappointment.

For all Max knew, the plane was going to crash or the bite he received the night before boarding the plane was going to do him in. He was still very much alive and well at the moment. The bite, however, was sore and pulled his skin when he moved.

“Hung over?” Eugene asked.

“Nah, I don’t get hung over.” Max leaned forward to lift his shirt and he realized he was glued to the seat by the dried blood of the co-pilot. He groaned. “That’s just gross.” After a hard pull his shirt released.

“You didn’t mind last night.”

“I was drinking heavily last night.”

“To ward off pain or fear?

Max cringed again and rolled up his tee shirt. “Both.”

Eugene whistled. “Well, I’d say better make your peace with God. Because I’m willing to bet it isn’t long before you turn into one of those things.”

“Do I look that bad?”’

“No, you look fine,” Eugene said. “The wound is bad and, you know, they are all sick. How can you not get sick?”

“Maybe I’m immune.”

Eugene laughed. “I doubt that. You’re infected, that’s why those things don’t come after you.”

“You’re probably right.” Max stood and walked to the cockpit door. “No banging anymore.”

“Stopped some time after you fell asleep.” Eugene pointed to the monitor. “They calmed down. Sick or not, they’re alive and they need rest.”

“How is she alive?” Max pointed to the flight attendant that not long before was strewn across his lap gutted. Yet there she was, walking with a gaping hole in her midsection.

“How is she not?” Eugene asked. “The dead don’t walk.”

“Ever see the movies?”

“Movies don’t count.”

“Then how about Lazarus and Jesus?”

Eugene groaned. “For sure, you better make your peace.”

Max looked at the controls and saw flashing lights. “What’s that?”

“We’re on fumes. We are gonna have to land.”

“Where are we?”

Eugene shrugged. “Lost track. Who cares? Looking for a stretch of highway to land. I’ve been circling for about thirty minutes. I spotted one.”

“Can you land this on a highway?” Max sat down, it was painful and he winced.

“At this point,” Eugene said, “it doesn’t really much matter now does it?”

“Anything I can do?”

“Seeing how you don’t fly, my advice right now to you is, buckle up and…”

Max looked at him. “Make my peace with God?”

“You got it.”

“Somehow I knew you’d say that.” Max grabbed the seatbelt and watching with a high level of anxiety as Eugene prepared to land the plane on a stretch of highway... somewhere.

The two-story, ‘E’ shaped elementary school didn’t sit far from the road. In fact, Paul was worried when he saw the location. The property wasn’t secure, though the building was.

The woman he met at the Public Safety building was Tara. She was not immune to the virus, but two of her pack were. While Paul went his way south, she led the others to initiate a second shelter.

They communicated via radio. Had it not been for Tara, Paul wouldn’t have known that a lot of the reservists that had been activated were seeking where they would be needed.

She ran into a whole group of soldiers and sent half of them to Caramount to assist Paul.

Paul was at a loss as to what to do. He was supposed to be a management expert, yet Tara and her two had located the Emergency Management Storage and had loaded a truck. They were well on their way to establishing a shelter long before Paul set forth his own plan. He went to the school first, knowing there were supplies there. That was his first mistake.

Sergeant Stanton, a middle aged African American man who was a high school principal when he wasn’t serving his country, was a huge help and a life saver.

He picked up right away that Paul was somewhat disorganized.

“Look,” he said. “Shelter first, you have that. Let’s make that secure and the rest will fall into place. There’s a lot of supplies out there we can go get.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“We’ll deal,” Stanton said. “We been beating these things off since the onset. We’ll keep beating them off.”

It was his idea to create a barricade using cars for the front and side of the school property. The back was fine, it had a fence and beyond it a wooded area.

By dawn they had a perimeter set and two armed soldiers on roof watch.

The announcements were made on the EBS, and not long after people started arriving.

More than Paul bargained for, more than he was ready for, and none of them were immune. It frazzled Paul because he had the ‘big idea’ and the binder with information, he just needed to work on coordinating what was actually happening and the plan set forth by the county. Paul knew for a fact Stanton hadn’t slept. Yet, he kept busy.

Stanton had told Paul he was activated and ‘called up’ three days prior, two whole days before everything hit. He wasn’t told anything, only that things could happen.

“Some were sent to roadside checkpoints to look for infected,” Stanton told him. “I was sent to Mercy Hospital. In the snap of a finger it got bad, No one moved and the place sounded like an orchestration of chain saws. Don’t think I’ll ever hear someone snore again without getting freaked out.”

“I hear you,” Paul said. He knew what Stanton was talking about. The obstructed breathing sound they all made. It was worse while they rested and right before they turned.

Paul was tired and his brain was fried. He needed to rest. He desperately searched for where he fit into the equation. His job training, other than being a nurse, was to investigate, document, and report public health emergencies.

He was in over his head.

Staring at the binder as he sat in the corner of the gym, the smell of coffee crept under his nose and he looked over to the cup set next to him.

“Thought you could use that,” Stanton said. “We separated the ones I thought were suspicious. You may want to check them out in case they’re sick.”

“I will. Thank you.” Paul lifted his mug.

“What are you doing?”