The Scourge (Book 1): Unprepared Read online

  UNPREPARED

  The Scourge Series Book 1

  Tom Abrahams

  A PITON PRESS BOOK

  UNPREPARED

  A Scourge Series Story

  © Tom Abrahams 2020. All Rights Reserved

  Cover Design by Hristo Kovatliev

  Edited by Felicia A. Sullivan

  Proofread by Pauline Nolet

  Formatted by Stef McDaid at WriteIntoPrint.com

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events is purely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

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  WORKS BY TOM ABRAHAMS

  THE SCOURGE POST-APOCALYPTIC SURVIVAL SERIES

  UNPREPARED

  ADRIFT (FORTHCOMING)

  GROUNDED (FORTHCOMING)

  THE WATCHERS DYSTOPIAN SCI-FI SERIES

  THE BAR AT THE END OF THE WORLD

  THE BAR AT THE EDGE OF THE SEA

  THE BAR IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

  THE TRAVELER POST-APOCALYPTIC/DYSTOPIAN SERIES

  HOME

  CANYON

  WALL

  RISING

  BATTLE

  LEGACY

  HERO

  HARBOR

  A DARK WORLD: THE COMPLETE SPACEMAN CHRONICLES

  SPACEMAN

  DESCENT

  RETROGRADE

  THE ALT APOCALYPSE SERIES

  ASH

  LIT

  TORRENT

  AFFLICTION

  POLITICAL CONSPIRACIES

  SEDITION

  INTENTION

  JACKSON QUICK ADVENTURES

  ALLEGIANCE

  ALLEGIANCE BURNED

  HIDDEN ALLEGIANCE

  STAND-ALONE WORKS

  PILGRIMAGE: A POST-APOCALYPTIC ADVENTURE

  EXTINCTION RED LINE (WITH NICHOLAS SANSBURY SMITH)

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  The Scourge series is based on the same plague that altered the world in the eight-book Traveler series featuring Marcus Battle. However, this collection follows the adventures, trials, and perseverance of an entirely different cast of characters.

  Instead of beginning five years after the onset of the disease that killed two-thirds of the world’s population, the Scourge series begins with the plague in its earliest days. Rather than feature a war veteran in Texas, these books are centered on a group of men and women in Florida who have no survival expertise.

  The rules governing the Traveler books apply here. You may even notice some Easter eggs that pay homage to the original series, and if you read carefully enough, you might even notice a familiar character or two whose lives intersect both series in different ways (Gwendolyn and Sally among them).

  I hope you enjoy this exploration of the same world that brought you Marcus Battle, Lou, and the rest of the beloved men and women readers so welcomingly embraced. I expect it will offer a wholly new perspective on those who survived well beyond the eventual confines of the Wall.

  For Courtney

  My forever home

  “Success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure.”

  —Confucius

  PROLOGUE

  AUGUST 14, 1349

  LONDON, ENGLAND

  John Allerton sucked in another painful breath and struggled not to cough it out. He sat on the edge of his bed, his dead wife, Alice, next to him. Her previously hot and moist body was now cold and dry.

  She’d expired in her sleep as he whispered to her, prayed for her, promised her she would be okay. They both knew he was lying. He would not be okay either.

  The black spots she’d found under her arms weeks earlier were now under his. He’d suffered his first seizure. He couldn’t keep anything down, not even the sugar and vinegar intended to heal him.

  His body aching, his lungs protesting, he pushed himself to his feet and wobbled. John balanced himself against the bed until he was steady. Then he shuffled across the room toward the lone window, where gray morning light filtered through the warped glass.

  Sweat soaked his gown, sticking it to his chest and back. It was heavy and felt like chain mail as he shuffled the short distance to the window, almost tripping over the chamber pot not emptied in days. He did notice the stench.

  John looked out onto the muddy street that ran between his home and the row of houses opposite him. His eyes shifted painfully, sweeping across his neighbors’ front doors. Little white crosses were painted on them. All were homes to the sick. The crosses warned visitors not to enter and those inside not to come out.

  He knew the people behind every marked door. They were his friends, his neighbors. They were men and women, boys and girls, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters. Generations of families were gone. The Black Death had seen to that. Nearly everyone John knew was dead.

  He craned his neck and found the edge of a pit. Lines of brick rose from the edge of an otherwise vacant lot. He couldn’t see beyond the brick, but he knew what was inside it. It was one of the many burial pits in and around his part of London.

  There weren’t enough proper places to put the dead. They were dumped into the pits, a mass of Black Death buried together. His eyes were fixed on the brick until two men drew his attention. They held their hands to their mouths, holding their masks in place over their faces.

  John chuckled at their stupidity. Then the laugh turned into a racking cough that doubled him over. He braced himself against the sharp pain that stabbed his chest.

  The now-familiar taste of blood filled his mouth, and he swallowed it before licking his lips. His knees trembled and he leaned hard against the window.

  His watery eyes again found the blurry images of the men trudging along the edge of the muddy street. He shook his head at them.

  The masks wouldn’t do any good. He’d used a mask. So had Alice. It didn’t matter. If the Black Death wanted you, it would find you. It would rip apart your insides and make it impossible to breathe. It would give you fits. It would boil you. No mask could prevent that.

  His mind drifted and he thought of his life before the death. He and Alice Pembroke had met at a market. Her father worked the land near a village outside London. He’d courted her, riding his horse the long distance to call on her. Her smile was intoxicating. She was tall and thin, and John knew Alice was more beautiful than any woman he could hope to find. It amazed him every day that she was interested in him.

  He had a job as a blacksmith’s apprentice and earned a good keep. He could provide for her. John told Mr. Pembroke he’d saved his money and rented a nice, if small, house h
alfway between his work and their farm.

  They’d married at her village church. He was seventeen, she was fifteen. Miss Alice Pembroke became Mrs. John Allerton.

  While John worked long hours smithing tools and pots, Alice taught sewing to younger girls. They lived a modest life within their means. The days were long. The nights were short. Every Sunday morning they traveled on horseback to her village and attended her family’s church. They’d eat supper in the village. It was always a meal replete with the vegetables, pork, and poultry grown and raised there. He loved Sundays.

  Then the sickness came. First it was Alice’s mother and grandmother. Then her father and brother fell ill. The trips to the village stopped. The blacksmith died and the business closed. Children stopped coming for sewing lessons. The black spots appeared. Alice’s smile vanished.

  John lowered his head and moved from the window. He shuffled again, this time toward the kitchen. He used a chair and then a table to keep himself upright as he reached a rough-hewn shelf in the kitchen. The shelf was more of a mantelpiece, bolted to the wall above the wide fireplace. There was no fire today. There was no need. And there was no food. He wondered if he might starve to death before the plague took him.

  John tried to remember the last time he’d eaten. His mind was too foggy to remember. Two days? Four?

  He slumped against the mantel and looked back at his wife in their bed. She didn’t look like herself anymore. Her pretty face, cheeks always rosy, was gray. Her open eyes were milky and distant. Her lips were purple.

  Had she died last night? Was it last night? Or was it last week? John couldn’t be sure. The seconds and hours and days blended together.

  From the shelf, John pulled a large wooden cross. He held it against his chest and closed his eyes. He prayed for the soul of his dead wife, thanked his God for the end of her suffering, and prayed for the end of his. Living without Alice was pointless.

  Something brushed against his bare feet and John opened his eyes. He looked down in time to see a large black rat scurry through a crack in the wall next to the fireplace.

  He imagined the rat winding from house to house through gaps in the repurposed Kent ragstone and interleaved gravel that framed the walls of the tightly plotted medieval homes. He saw it searching for crumbs of food, for droplets of water, for anything stuck to the bottoms of boots or tracked across wood and dirt floors.

  Despite its hardships, the rat had freedom to move. It had hope. John had neither. He’d lost them both when Alice became sick.

  They’d denied her illness at first, both content to chalk it up to a passing chest cold she could overcome with horehound mint and confections made of barley water, sugar, and egg whites. It didn’t work. She got worse.

  Now alone, the house had a fetid smell replete with the noxious odors of sweat, blood, and excrement. John couldn’t smell it anymore. He’d become accustomed to it.

  His eyes scanned the room and fell on the fireplace. In it, he saw flames licking at the suspended black cast-iron pot. The imaginary fire, the throbbing heat it cast onto his face, mesmerized John. It was hot. Too hot.

  When had he stoked the fire? Had he done it? Had Alice? Did the rat sneak into the house and spark the flames itself? Was the rat responsible for this?

  It was true. The rat was responsible. The fleas that bit the rat and then the humans were responsible. The cramped conditions of fourteenth-century London were responsible. An anaerobic bacteria called Yersinia pestis was responsible.

  John prayed no others would experience the loss and the pain he’d endured. He prayed this plague might cleanse the Earth.

  He couldn’t know, as he collapsed on the floor, that twenty-five million worldwide were dead from the same disease. He was unaware as he took his final breaths that the rat and flea-borne disease killed thirty percent of Europe.

  As his body convulsed for the last time, John Allerton slipped into history as a nameless, faceless victim of the plague. It wasn’t the first time an invisible disease ended lives and changed the courses of civilizations. Twelve hundred years before the Black Death, the Antonine Plague had lasted fifteen years and, at its peak, killed two thousand Romans a day.

  In 541, the Plague of Justinian killed five thousand people a day. Even the Roman emperor, for whom the plague was named, contracted the disease.

  Three hundred years after John stopped breathing, his body motionless on the floor of his home, the Great Plague of London rekindled the fear and in a short eighteen months killed one hundred thousand people. Four hundred years after that, in 2032, it would begin again. It would not contain itself to a single city, country, or continent. It would be the mother of the plagues and earn a new name. The Scourge.

  JULY 18, 2032

  KIEV, UKRAINE

  Gwendolyn Sharp gagged with the back of her hand against her nose and held her breath. The strong odor of death was nearly overwhelming. It reeked and hung in the hallway. She steeled her resolve and stepped into the room. She didn’t want to be here. She wanted to be in charge of the operation, calling the shots over video chat from a cushy office in Atlanta. She was ambitious, playing the game. This was too far from Atlanta. And to her it meant she hadn’t done enough to convey to her superiors that she was above the grunt work of toiling in a lab.

  Inside the room, to her right, was a man in a white biohazard safety suit, the hood cinched around the edges of his pink face. Tendrils of blond hair peeked from underneath and across his forehead.

  She flashed her badge at him. He squinted at it.

  “Okay,” he said. A badge on his suit read BABYAK A.

  Babyak nodded at her, puckered his lips, and eyed her from toe to head. Then he clucked his tongue on the roof of his mouth. “I think a medium?”

  Sharp wasn’t sure whether he was telling her or asking her. She glanced around the room, taking stock. It was sparsely decorated. There were cabinets along the windowless walls, running floor to ceiling with chrome handles and accompanying circular locks.

  There were two large tables at the room’s center. On one table, there were identical cardboard boxes of gloves. Sharp noticed the sizes marked in permanent marker on the sides of the boxes. Larger containers held full-face respirators. Stacks of plastic-encased biohazard suits filled much of the second table. It reminded Sharp of the tables she’d find at Red Cross shelters, with hurriedly collected supplies for those in sudden need.

  They were in sudden need. And this was hurried.

  “I think I’m a small,” she said. “I’m a size two.”

  “If you want to leave clothing on underneath,” he said, “you want medium.”

  Babyak’s English was thick with his native tongue. She shrugged. His English was better than her Ukrainian.

  “Medium, then.”

  Babyak spun and ran his ungloved fingers along the plastic-covered suits. The packaging crinkled as he moved from one to the next. “Medium,” he said, plucking one of the suits from the stacks and handing it to her. “Try it.”

  Sharp glanced past him, then over her shoulder. She furrowed her brow. “Where do I change?”

  Babyak looked at her expressionlessly. She noticed his nose was redder than pink. Thin capillaries webbed across the bridge, nostrils, and onto his cheeks.

  “You change here,” he said. “I gave you medium. It fits with clothes.”

  Five minutes later, Babyak was wearing gloves and the respirator. So was she. They moved from the glorified storage closet toward a solid door with a large yellow and black biohazard symbol on it. The sticker appeared recently applied. Bubbles of air warped the letters at the bottom of it that cautioned all who entered.

  Babyak worked his gloved fingers to enter a code into an electronic keypad. A red light changed to green, and an electronic hum indicated that the door was unlocked.

  “You have one hour with the respirator cartridge,” said Babyak. “You have asthma?”

  “No.”

  “You smoke?”

  “No
.”

  “Okay, you have hour. Then change cartridge.”

  He pushed open the door. Sharp sucked in a deep breath. The strong odor of off-gassing rubber from the mask filled her nostrils. She could taste it. Moisture fogged her visor then cleared.

  Inside the room, a man glanced over at her, taking his attention away from one of the bodies lying atop a row of long examination tables. Only his eyes were visible from behind the biohazard mask that covered his face.

  “Dr. Charles Morel?” she asked and took a confident step deeper into the room. Her boots made a peeling sound on the concrete floor, which she noticed sloped toward a metal drain at the center.

  The man nodded. Then he waved at her with a gloved hand, motioning her toward him and the two other men in matching biohazard suits.

  Sharp reached up with a hand to run her fingers along her black hair, which was pulled into a tight bun at the top of her head, a nervous habit. Her hand grazed the helmet and she flushed with embarrassment. Without acknowledging his invitation, she moved to him, the shoes announcing her approach. She enjoyed owning a room when she entered. The rookie mistake made her feel like she was renting it.

  “We should get started,” said Morel. “You’ve got an hour with your respirator, but we’re at about forty-five minutes.”

  Sharp took a shallow breath, maneuvered past three other body-adorned tables, and joined the men. She did everything she could to avoid looking at the dead. It was a macabre tableau bathed in the bright, unforgiving light found in operating rooms.

  Morel’s eyes found hers and softened into what she imagined was part of his smile. He introduced the other two men with juts of his chin from behind the mask. “This is Kevin Pierce,” said Morel. “He’s from WHO. And this is Hristo Kovatliev. He’s with the Ministry of Health.”

  Sharp eyed each of them. “Hello. I’m Gwendolyn Sharp. I’m new with the CDC. This is my first field assignment.”

  Morel chuckled. The first hints of crow’s feet flashed at the corners of his eyes. “Quite an initiation,” he said. “I am sorry about the odor. It’s pungent. Even with these regulators, there’s a hint. But there’s nothing we can do. Power is spotty, so it’s not good to run the air conditioning or fans. They could pop the circuits during surges or restarts.”