Sealed In (16 page)

“My daughter was here in this town.”

Edward felt his breath leave him. As a father, he could relate to what Del felt. “I am very sorry. So you’re from here?”

Del shook his head. “No. I was on my way to find her. That’s when they got me. At the roadblock. I’m from Lincoln.”

“I see.”

“Is Lincoln okay?” Del asked.

Edward lifted his hands. “I honestly cannot tell you because I don’t know. I will soon, though. That’s where I’m headed.”

“Is there any way you can get word to me?” Del asked. “My son is there. My granddaughter.”

“I’ll get word.” Edward watched Del
lean back and close his eyes in exhaustion and sadness. He excused himself, wished Del luck, and left the trailer. He’d more than likely see Del again when he returned to Atlanta. However, first Edward had a stop to make.

Lincoln, Montana was next on his list.

<><><><>

The home in Hartworth that placed that final call was empty. That’s what Edward was told as he and Harold made their way to Lincoln. It was forty miles north; they were hopeful, but not for long.

Edward knew as soon as they passed the ‘Lincoln Five Miles’ sign. The roads were snow-covered and untouched. Not a single tire track. As they rolled into town that late afternoon, it was a repeat of the nightmare in Hartworth.

Only there was no roadblock with a dead man holding a gun. There was nothing. No lights. No automatic Christmas music chiming in the silence. In fact, the town had no indication of Christmas at all. Nothing
. It was snow-covered, dark, and dismal.

It was a two-block, one-stoplight town, and they barely made it down the first block when Harold hit the brakes.

Edward was too busy looking around to notice. However, Harold did.

At the end of the second block, a man stood by a large truck.

“What the hell?” Edward asked, then opened the car door. He checked his suit connections and stepped out.

Harold joined him.

The man walked further away from the truck and more into view in the center of the street, and as Edward and Harold neared him, he dropped to his knees and his head hung forward. It looked as if he collapsed in emotional exhaustion more than anything else, but Edward couldn’t be sure.

He and Harold raced his way. When he arrived, he expected the man to lift his head and show how sick he was. But when Edward called out,
“I’m Dr. Edward Neil from the Centers for Disease Control. Are you okay?” the man shook his head and looked up.

Edward gasped.

He wasn’t sick. Not at all.

“Are you ill?” Harold asked.

He shook his head again and brought his hand to his face. The man then began to cry. Was it out of relief, sadness, and exhaustion, or all of the above?

Edward asked. “What happened here? Where is everyone?”

The man, without looking, only pointed to the truck.

Edward walked to the large construction dump truck. As he approached, he saw another truck around the corner. He could only assume that truck was the same as the one before him.

The entire back portion as filled with bodies. Edward only needed to look at one victim, just one, to know what killed them.

“It’s ours,” Harold said.

Edward returned to the man. “Everyone?”

He nodded.

“Everyone in town?”

Another nod.

“You handled these bodies, you were around during all of this, and you aren’t sick?”

“No,” he finally spoke.

“Were you ever?”

He shook his head.

After a deep breath, Edward extended his hand to the man. “I need you to come with us. Okay? You’ll have to come with us.”

Slowly the man stood.

“What is your name?”

“An … Andy.”

“Andrew Jenkins?”

Andy gave a surprised look to Edward.

Repeating, “Come with us,” Edward led him toward their SUV.

Andy Jenkins was not sick. Unlike Del, he was out in the open and dealt with the ill and bodies yet did not succumb at all. Why?

Edward immediately put faith in Andy Jenkins, the lone survivor of Lincoln, Montana. Faith that Andy held answers Edward needed. He wasn’t ill; somewhere in his body could be a clue to defeating the deadliest thing Edward ever witnessed. Not only that, but Andy was also the last person to talk to anyone in Hartworth.

Andy Jenkins received that last call.

“See ya next year,” Dr. Chad Walker cheerfully told his wife as he placed the remaining items into his duffle bag and case.

His wife of eighteen years grumbled, lifted her bourbon glass, and said, “Whatever.”

“I’ll call when I can,” Chad said, grabbing his things.

“If I don’t answer, I may be having multiple affairs.”

“I’m sure you will. Enjoy.” Smugly, Chad walked out. Where others would hate the thought of where he was going, Chad looked forward to it. Any time away from Belinda was a vacation.

A car was waiting for him outside. Chad was tall and lanky with a small drinker’s gut. He gave the driver his bags and got inside. While he wasn’t pompous, he spoke as if he was. Educated and brilliant, he had almost an aristocratic dialect.

The driver got in the car. “Shouldn’t take long to get there. Rush hour traffic is light today for some odd reason.”

“It may get lighter.”

“I’m sorry?”

Chad shook his head. “Bad humor. Can we swing by a liquor store, please?”

“Sure thing.”

Not that there wouldn’t be an ample supply of adult beverages, but Chad wanted to make sure he had his own. It was going to be a long stay.

If anyone could be labeled beyond super intelligent, it was Chad. The CDC knew it, which was why they paid him the big bucks and, more so, why they called him in.

Chad was always years beyond the others when
he was growing up, but his parents refused to move him ahead; so Chad tromped the others in intelligence, and then made money off of it by selling answers to homework and doing essays.

When he was fourteen, his school bus passed a dog hit by a car. The female dog was pregnant, and Chad pulled out his pocketknife and did an emergency caesar
ean on the dog right there on the side of the road, while his classmates watched. He saved two of the puppies, but unfortunately, authorities didn’t see his heroics; he spent six months in a juvenile delinquent center for animal mutilation. It didn’t hurt him; Chad was so likable he defeated the odds inside the center.

He wasn’t a target, so he wasn’t beat up. When threatened
, he outsmarted and learned how to deal with all kinds of people.

Those skills helped him, and they would help him in his next endeavor.

It wasn’t the first time Chad was going into what he like to call the ‘Doomsday’ lab, a biological protection facility that ran on an old fashion color-coded level system. Aside from security, maintenance, and food workers, the staff was four men and four women. A couple of doctors, nurses, scientists such as Chad, and, of course, the subjects who donated their blood and time for the cause.

In the event of a biological incident or pandemic threat, those in the facility would live there under lockdown, work on the virus, attempt to find a possible cure or solution until the threat was over and the level dropped to yellow, or the designated ‘burnout’ time frame of 160 days ha
d passed, and then the facility would be unlocked. Until then, there was no way out.

Only a couple of times in his career had it gotten to a level red, but the longest Chad was sealed in was thirty-three days. He didn’t suspect
that would be the case with the current bug.

It went from green to yellow to orange in eight hours.

Eight hours. From the arrival time at Hartworth to the lift off of the survivors, eight hours had passed. In a matter of days, four states had been affected, and Chad expected more.

His job wasn’t only to beat it, stop it, but find out how it got that far that fast. If it moved in a few days to that many areas, it was only a matter of weeks before it went global.

To say it hadn’t left the West Coast, although nothing was confirmed on the East Coast or anywhere else for that matter, was insane. It hadn’t been that long; Chad was certain it was out.

Level red or code red wasn’t days away, but hours.

He just hoped that Edward Neil was moved to the facility before it automatically shut down.

Ed was fun to work with.

There were a few things arriving from Montana: two survivors, the journal, and ‘live’ samples. Chad wanted to be at ‘Doomsday’ before they arrived, be there and set up, but he only had a short period of time before that happened.

During the car ride to the liquor store and then the facility, Chad reviewed his notes and pictures again about the virus on his computer pad.

Ebolapox, as they called it, was baffling and sickening. Someone created it, yet he didn’t think anyone would step forward. He hoped they would.

During
any of the times in lockdown, never was it a question of what it meant if time ran out.

The burnout time didn’t just mean the threat of the virus burned out, it meant humanity did, too.
So many people lost their lives that there weren’t enough hosts left to carry it. In that situation, society surely was done. Life outside the facility would have changed, and not for the better.

Chad never really gave much thought to that scenario, because he never really saw that as an option. A cure would be found, or the virus would lose power.

However, the current one worried Chad. Ebolapox very well could be unbeatable. It moved too fast and spread too widely for it to be trapped, caught, and cured before too much damage was done. It was like being in a Dodge in a race against a Ferrari. That’s how Chad felt, and it was the first time ever that he honestly saw the burnout as a real possibility.

<><><><>

Edward was just about to rub his eyes, but he stopped. He resisted because he didn’t want to take a chance that even something miniscule would make it through the mucus membrane of the eyes.

It was pushing evening, and they sat in a makeshift meeting room two miles outside of Hartworth in a CDC mobile.

“Where are we?” Edward asked.

Goldman spoke first. “Bodies are being gathered. Be done tomorrow. Town is scheduled for demolition day after Christmas. Preliminary autopsy and testing are done on the doctor and sheriff. Both had the same immunities to the virus. Interestingly enough, not only did both of them have the standard smallpox vaccine scar, they both had an inoculation site which looked similar to the smallpox scar, only dark.”

Edward lifted his head. “So it’s pretty much confirmed there was an inoculation. But why the sheriff? Were they able to determine how long ago he was inoculated?”

Goldman shook his head. “Not exactly, but it wasn’t recent. It was before the release.”

“Martha,” Edward said. “Numbers.”

“Not good. Billings alone has over two hundred confirmed cases; death total has also increased. Reported cases in Washington, Iowa, North Dakota, California, and Nevada. Interestingly enough, we haven’t found a single person that went to that concert.”

“That’s because the ones exposed at the concert are dead,” Edward said. “Air samples.”

“You’ll like this,” Martha replied with a hint of sarcasm. “
There is a small concentration of the virus in 80% of the bio air samples taken in town. In Lincoln, the virus shows up in five out of every ten. Billings, even outside of the concert area, we are getting four out of ten. The good news is that in Lincoln, the virus in the samples is dead. So it died out shortly after the people.”

“Billings?”

“Alive,” Martha replied. “Because people are still sick there. It is not a safe area.”

“Christ.” Edward exhaled. “Hartworth.”

“Alive.”

“How can that be?” Edward asked. “Everyone is dead.”

“Because it’s still leaking from somewhere. It is the highest concentration out of all locations. In addition, the doctor’s house is a hot zone. Alive and thriving.”

“So it’s there,” Edward pointed. “We have to find it before we bulldoze this town. We don’t need the weapon buried for a future generation to find and open this Pandora’s Box all over again.”

“We’re on it.”

Edward looked over to Harold. “You’re being quiet. What’s up?”

“Studying our patient zero. I think I theoretically know how this thing got out of control.”

Edward gave a sarcastic scoff. “The concert.”