Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller: Book 2 (26 page)

The Safeway by the house was closed. It had a sign on the door promising to reopen in a few days. The Sharpie scrawl on a pink neon-colored poster board taped inside the glass went on to explain the store’s woes over frightened employees after one got sick. Their stock of grocery items was low because delivery drivers were refusing to come to the store.

Paul peeked in through the windows. Shelves were mostly empty. Items were scattered. A few dented cans, mashed boxes, and torn packages lay on the floor.

He left and drove down the road to the King Sooper, where the story was much different. Paul had to wait in a line of cars on the street for a half hour before getting into the parking lot, all the while muttering to himself about the pussies at Safeway who were afraid to open their doors. At least the King Sooper managers had the good sense to keep the doors open and price gouge—he was just guessing on that point not having seen the prices yet.

Once parked, he waited in a line of widely spaced people, all suspicious, most with some kind of facial mask. All wore gloves: some latex, some rubber house cleaning gloves, some wore ski gloves—better than nothing. Not being concerned about Ebola, Paul hadn’t thought to wear gloves of his own. Now he realized that was a mistake. It made him stand out, made him look like a careless danger.

Few people conversed. The grocery store itself was admitting no customers. They had a system. Armed security guards—eight or nine—patrolled around the store entrance, keeping the crowd in order, enforcing the rules. At one door, customers lined up to use unwrapped crayons to write their orders on laminated sheets of white notebook paper. At the head of the line, they dropped their crayons and the plastic-coated paper into a tub of bleach water. Store workers wearing the requisite protective gear used tongs to take sanitized order sheets out of the tub, one worker and one sheet at a time. The worker would take a basket into the store and collect the items, while the customer went to the other entrance, paying upon delivery of the order. All transactions required a credit or debit card—enter your PIN on the keypad at your own risk. A box of bleach-wipes sat beside each keypad for customers to use in sterilizing the pad prior to touching. Cash wasn’t being accepted. Anybody with half a wit was afraid to touch a porous paper bill, home to who-knew-how-many viruses, collected from any number of grubby hands.

Paul stood in that line for over an hour, working his way toward the front, only to be disappointed when it was his turn.

“Write your items on the list, prioritized by which you want first,” the woman draped in plastic said from her station on the other side of the bleach bath. “We pick them from the shelves in the order on the list. If we don’t have something you’ve selected—and we’re out of a lot—we’ll skip to the next item. You can buy a maximum of twenty-five items or spend a maximum of fifty dollars, whichever you reach first.”

Paul, his patience worn to nearly nothing by that time, swore at the woman and told her just how stupid he thought the whole system was. He started to expound. Two guards with guns drawn ejected him from the line.

Paul protested further, telling them that he had every right to stay and shop for his bullshit allotment of fifty dollars’ worth of groceries and if they didn’t like it, he’d just call the police. Through the harsh laughter, one of the guards told him they
were
the police, and that he should get the fuck off the property.

Larry came back in from the garage, muttering and cursing. Jimmy was sitting in a dining room chair in front of Heidi, who was fuming, but unable to do anything with her anger. They’d stuffed her mouth with a mildewed dishrag from the kitchen sink, and they unwound nearly a full roll of duct tape in attaching her to another of the dining room chairs.

Jimmy called across the living room, “What’s wrong?”

Larry pointed back toward the garage. “He cut a hole in the sheetrock and stole his neighbor’s car.”

Jimmy laughed. “You gotta give him credit for that.”

“No, I don’t,” Larry grumbled. “We need to get this done and get out of here.”

“We can be patient,” Jimmy told him.

“If one of the neighbors saw what we did when we came in, the police could be on their way.”

Heidi nodded emphatically.

Jimmy said, “If the police were coming, they’d be here by now.”

“No, no,” Larry protested. “They’re shorthanded, like everybody else. Nobody wants to come to work, with the virus everywhere.”

Jimmy sighed and looked at Heidi. As much as he wanted to dissuade Larry, he knew Larry could be right. “What do you suggest then? That we just leave?”

Larry was in the dining room by then, glaring down at Heidi, looking at her breasts, and at the constraints keeping her legs and arms from kicking or punching. Larry reached out and put a hand on one of Heidi’s breasts. “Nice.”

“Be careful,” said Jimmy. “If you give yourself a hard-on and decide to rape her, you might catch it.”

Larry dropped a hand and huffed.

Jimmy laughed.

Larry grimaced, he raised a fist to punch Heidi but he hesitated, simmering while he thought about whether to proceed.

“Stop,” Jimmy told him. “There’s no point in that.”

Larry dropped his fist to his side and started to pace. “I don’t want to wait around. I’m getting a bad feeling.”

“We wait, or we go,” said Jimmy. “If we go, we’ve got to start over somewhere else, and we have to do something with her.”

Heidi protested again, as much as she could, through the dishrag in her mouth.

Larry glared at Heidi.

Heidi glared back, daring him with hate in her eyes.

“She’s a feisty one,” said Jimmy.

“You know what I think?” Larry asked.

“Yes,” answered Jimmy, hoping Larry wouldn’t go on to tell him anyway.

Larry shook his head and took his eyes off of Heidi’s breasts. “I think we don’t need to wait for Paul Cooper. Hell, she might be telling the truth. He might not be back until next week, like she said.”

“I don’t know what he’d be doing in Omaha, or how he’d even get a travel pass to cross the state border, but you never know.”

“I think if he came home, he gave her Ebola and she survived, because Paul gave her some of his blood.”

Jimmy looked at Larry and shook his head at the stupidity of what he’d just said.

“No, I’m serious,” said Larry. “Think about it. He was with her, fuckin’ her and stuff, before he went to the hospital. She had to catch all of his germs. I guarantee you he did her when he got home. After being locked up in a hospital isolation room, where you don’t even have the privacy to spank it, you know what he did when he got home, first thing.” Larry nodded at Heidi. “She had to have caught it. And this Paul guy, he’s too smart to take her to the hospital. Hell, he can’t. He knows everybody hates him. I’ll bet he had the same plan we did. If he was smart enough to get himself infected early, so he’d get the good drugs while they were still available, then he was smart enough to make her immune, too.” Larry took a deep breath. He was finished with his theory.

Jimmy looked at Heidi, who was as flabbergasted as he felt, though for different reasons. In all the years Jimmy had known Larry, he’d never once come up with such a complex explanation. As much as Jimmy wanted to discount it out of hand, simply because Larry had spoken it, he couldn’t. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. This Paul Cooper guy was smart. They’d said so on TV. He did infect himself on purpose. Everybody knew that. He was devious, in his own way, as devious as Jimmy and Larry. Jimmy believed Larry’s theory about Heidi. Why would Paul go through all the trouble to infect himself early, unless he had a plan for Heidi too?

Heidi had to be immune.

Angry and empty handed, Paul exited the highway. The only good thing about his day had been the light traffic. People were skipping work. Many were hunkering down at home, praying Ebola would pass them by.

Costco was the last store Paul had the patience to shop. Their employees were decked out in whatever they thought would pass for protection. Some wore military-style gas masks, some wore surgical masks, and more than a few wore something that looked like what the paint and body guy might wear when he was spraying on a coat of lacquer. All wore gloves—thick, heavy, and designed for use in an industrial chemical plant. They’d probably come off the shelf at ten bucks a dozen.

A quarter million dollars worth of flat-screen televisions previously stacked into a tunnel through which customers entered the store in prior weeks had tumbled down to form an obstacle course. Paul pushed his basket back and forth between the TVs.

Once past the television graveyard, Paul faced the second obstacle between him and the food shelves. A grid of folding tables covered a rectangle the size of a football field in the center of the store. The tables had been stacked high with jeans, sweatshirts, t-shirts, underwear, and the like. All those neatly folded piles of clothing, organized by color, style, and size, now formed a carpet of undulating soft mounds—some waist-high—that could only be crossed on foot.

Orange, painted pallet shelving forty feet tall was visible across the clothing quagmire. Empty wooden and fiberglass pallets sat on the shelves with long sheets of torn shipping plastic draping down. Pallets hung precariously halfway off a shelf, half on. Giant cardboard boxes had been torn open, spilling their economy portion packages, family-sized plastic bins, and one-gallon glass jars. An army of the afraid—seeing starvation in their future for the first time—had attacked the store with oversized baskets and overdrawn debit cards. The store lost the battle. The stock had been massacred.

Paul worked his way to the far side of the store to search the processed, pre-packaged, HFCS-laden, no-salt-added, carrion for edible remains.

The only other customers in the store were scavengers, sorting through the trash on the floor, looking for survivors with inner packages intact, unbroken seals, food that could be purchased, taken home, and added to a hoard like the one in Paul’s basement.

Paul found himself staring at a woman picking crushed granola bars out of a pile of smashed boxes, checking each individually wrapped bar and tossing away those that spilled crumbs. Paul wondered how long it would be before the next person came through that aisle and collected even the packages that were open, but still contained something. It wouldn’t be today, but he knew the day would come. That would mark the beginning of humanity’s most desperate times.

Paul shivered.

After more than an hour of searching, Paul drove out of the parking lot with three bottles of soy sauce, a fat jar of brilliant red maraschino cherries—what the fuck do people use those for—some severely dented cans with missing labels containing mystery vegetables, a torn, half-full bag of dog food he planned to give to one of the neighbors, and a surprise treasure, a bottle of wine.

The sun was down behind the mountains and it was dark enough for headlights when Paul drove Barb’s Camry past his townhouse on the way around to the alley entrance to the garage. He noticed no glow of light seeping past the closed blinds in his townhouse’s windows. With all that was going on, it put Paul on edge. The unusual and surprising so often these days were wrappers hiding bad tidings within.

Paul pulled into Barb’s garage and used the remote to close the door behind him. He took a moment to get his items transferred from Barb’s car in through the hole in the wall to his garage. Once finished, Paul took the bottle of wine in one hand and held it like a club, torn between his probably-pointless fear that something was wrong inside the house, and the possibility of looking like a fool storming into the house brandishing his wine bottle club.

Paul put a hand on the garage door handle, and muttered to himself, “Don’t be a fool, Paul.” He took a deep breath to calm his nerves and went through. Heidi must have fallen asleep on the couch or foolishly gone stir crazy in the house with no one to talk to. It would be just like her to sneak out and go talk to one of the neighbors when Paul was out.

Paul cautiously turned the knob on the back door and let it swing into the house. He gripped the neck of his wine bottle, listened, and wished he’d brought his new AR-15 shopping with him, wished he was brandishing
that
instead of the stupidly inadequate bottle. The rifle was in the closet upstairs, exactly where it had been since he shot it that one time after purchasing it a month or so back.

Paul called, “Heidi?”

The house was quiet.

He raised his wine bottle high and reached inside the door to flip up a light switch. The porch light illuminated the courtyard and a little of the living room. Everything seemed to be in its place.

Paul entered the house, and crossed into the shadows of the kitchen, where he flipped the first switch for an interior light. All sixteen decorative bulbs in lines across the kitchen ceiling lit up the kitchen and the living room. Paul spotted feet just inside the dining room. His heart skipped. “Heidi?”

He bounded into the dining room, flipping the light switch as he entered.

Heidi was on the floor, blood on her arms and around her neck. Her eyes were wide and staring. Her mouth hung open. Her skin was hoary pale.

Paul dropped to her side, howling out. He put his fingers on her cool neck to check for a pulse he already knew wasn’t there.