The Scourge (Book 1): Unprepared Page 10

  The Chernobyl Museum was still open. On Provulok Khoryva, it was opened six years after the disaster and served as both memorial and cautionary tale. Gwendolyn hadn’t had time to visit the exhibition, nor did she think it was a good idea to be in a confined space with other people. Being outdoors was one thing. Spending hours inside with strangers was another altogether.

  She had seen photographs of the museum on Hristo Kovatliev’s phone. He’d swiped through a collection of them as they took a break one day from analyzing epithelial cells.

  The one that stuck with her was the collection of signs with pink slashes through the names of villages that no longer existed. The residents had abandoned them in the wake of the disaster in 1986. Many of the villages were buried under the ground to reduce the latent radiation.

  “I think I’d rather look at the plague under a microscope,” she’d told Hristo.

  He’d put his phone back in his lab coat pocket and glanced at the samples on the other side of the protective glass that separated them from what they were studying. “Why is that?”

  She’d shaken her head. “That was man-made. We could have prevented it. To think that all of those people lost everything because of our own hubris…”

  Kovatliev had studied her for a moment and smiled wryly. “Is it worse?” he’d asked rhetorically. “This plague might be nature’s doing, but its spread is our own fault.”

  “How is that?” Sharp had replied.

  “We created the camps,” he’d said flatly. “We fought in the wars that created them. We forced people from the comfort of their homes and into these crowded, fenced hovels absent clean water, decent food, and plumbing. There were animals. There were rats. There were fleas. All of this is because of us.”

  She hadn’t had an answer for that. As hyperbolic as Kovatliev’s point might have been, it was valid. Ultimately man had always been responsible for his own rise and fall. As she turned southwest again, she considered that word. Man.

  Typically she didn’t like it. She thought it patriarchal and outdated, and as advanced as Americans had become in using more inclusive language, the Europeans lagged. As enlightened as they portrayed themselves to be, especially when it came to human rights and social welfare, they were still antiquated when it came to a woman’s equality with men.

  In this case, though, she didn’t mind it. It was men who’d done this. They’d started the wars. They’d forged the camps.

  She eyed the neon green cross above the pharmacy’s door. The cross, however, wasn’t glowing or strobing as it normally did. It was turned off. So were the lights inside the pharmacy. That was evident as she drew closer. The place was closed.

  Gwendolyn stood there, hoping that if she stared at the space long enough, it would open for business. She cursed under her breath and marched the distance to the front door.

  She tried the handle, and the door rattled when she pulled. It was locked. She cupped her hands around her face and pressed them to the glass so she could look inside. Despite the darkness, the unlit half-empty shelves of pain medicine, vitamins, lipstick, and cheap reading glasses, she saw movement. There was someone in the store. Of course Sergei was there. This was his place.

  Gwendolyn called out, “Dobryj den.” Then, “Hello.”

  Her voice was muffled through the glass. The person in the back of the store, a woman, didn’t react. It didn’t seem she was ignoring Gwendolyn. She hadn’t heard her.

  Gwendolyn drew back from the glass and pounded on the door with the heel of her fist. The glass vibrated and the door rattled. The sound echoed beyond her and toward the fountains to her right and behind her.

  She knocked twice more, this time with her knuckles, and then pressed her face to the glass again. The woman, her shoulders stooped, was moving through the center aisle of the store and toward her. She wore a bright yellow babushka on her head. The closer she got, the older the woman appeared. Gwendolyn recognized her now. She was Sergei’s mother, although she couldn’t remember her name. The woman had been at the store more and more in the past weeks. It was then Gwendolyn realized she hadn’t seen Sergei in a couple of days. Or was it a week? Sergei’s mother reached the door and inserted a key to unlock it from the inside.

  Gwendolyn offered her a smile and less formal greeting. “Pryvit,” she said. Then she added a thank you. “D’akuju.”

  Sergei’s mother pushed on the door and Gwendolyn stepped back. “I know you,” the woman said in English. “You come here many days.”

  “Yes,” said Gwendolyn. Her voice was soft, trying to counterbalance the insistence with which she’d demanded attention with her door knock. “I’m a regular customer.”

  “You’re American.” Her hand, swollen at the knuckles, was still on the handle.

  “I am.”

  “We’re closed. Lights out. Door locked. We’re not open.”

  “I know, but—”

  “But”—Sergei’s mother raised her eyebrows such that they almost reached the bottom edge of the babushka—“we’re closed.”

  Gwendolyn looked past her and into the store. What she needed was on the shelf. There were two boxes left. She pointed and motioned toward the shelf. “I just—”

  The woman began to pull the door shut. Gwendolyn stuck her foot across the threshold and blocked the door from closing all the way. The woman looked down and grunted. She pulled on the door, squeezing Gwendolyn’s shoe.

  Gwendolyn reached her hand up to the frame and pulled. The door opened a crack more, relieving the pressure on the side of her foot. “It’s an emergency.”

  Sergei’s mother grimaced. Her eyes darkened and tears pooled above the lower lids. Her chin trembled. The expression on her face was a mixture of frustration, anger, and profound sadness. “Your emergency is not my emergency. We are not open. You go now.”

  Tears rolled down the woman’s cheeks, finding the deep crevices, like water finds dry creeks. It filled them, tracing them to her still-quivering chin.

  She pushed on the door suddenly, shoving Gwendolyn back and off balance. Then she yanked the door closed with a bang and locked it. She stood there for a moment, staring at Gwendolyn through the glass. Without wiping her eyes, Sergei’s mother turned and disappeared into the store. She didn’t look back.

  Gwendolyn crossed her arms over her chest. The chill in the air was instantly acute and she shuddered. Then she noticed the hand scrawled note taped to the facade next to the door. She hadn’t seen it before. It was above the sign that displayed the pharmacy’s regular hours.

  The poster was written in Ukrainian. She couldn’t make out the scribbled Cyrillic lettering, but she understood the message. Her chest tightened and a lump thickened in her throat. She uncrossed her arms and brought her cold hands to her face, covering her mouth and nose. Her vision blurred from the sheen of tears pooling in her eyes.

  On the sign, along with the writing, was a color photograph of Sergei. He was smiling at a dinner party. There was a cigarette in his hand, the smoke curling from its tip. Different bottles of liquor dotted the table with mostly empty dishes. He was smiling and looking at something to the left of the camera lens. It made Gwendolyn smile for an instant through her tears. Under his photograph were the dates of his birth and death and a single word she did understand. Bych. It was Ukrainian and had several English translations: curse, plague, and scourge.

  Gwendolyn stared at the word and then again at Sergei’s photograph. He’d died from the disease she was trying to stop. He’d contracted the viral-enhanced bacterial pneumonia and died. He was gone. Forever.

  She took a couple of steps backward and then started walking hurriedly toward the hotel. The cold air hurt her lungs, even filtered through her mask. Oblivious to her surroundings, she moved. Her mind was focused on Sergei, a man she barely knew but who’d made her time in this place a little more bearable.

  Of all the people who’d died, the seemingly endless lists of names and associated lab numbers, she hadn’t been acquainted with
a single person who’d died from the Scourge. Everyone until now was a stranger, a statistic. The victims, up to this point, might as well have died in 541 or 1350. They meant nothing to her on a personal level.

  She considered the swell of emotion she felt for this man, for his mother, for their family. Did he have a wife or children? Brothers and sisters? Nieces and nephews? Was he the sole source of income for his mother? Did she live alone? Had she contracted the disease caring for her son? How soon before she was dead and there was a poster of her face on the storefront? Was there anyone left to care if she died?

  Was he the only one she’d know, or was he the first of many?

  CHAPTER 8

  OCTOBER 2, 2032

  SCOURGE +/- 0 DAYS

  LAKE MARY, FLORIDA

  Mike swiped a thick sheen of sweat from his forehead and licked droplets from above his upper lip. His unshaven face was coarse. He chuckled sardonically.

  “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” he said aloud. “That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard.”

  It was October, and the early evening air was like a sauna. The sun was low, but somehow the thick Central Florida air managed to maintain its swelter. Mike knew that much of the radiant heat was from the logjam of cars and trucks that sat idle or inched slowly in both directions along Lake Mary Boulevard.

  The road stretched primarily east and west and cut a line through the middle of the bedroom community of Lake Mary. The city clung to the eastern edge I-4 and was nestled between the historic town of Sanford and the upscale enclaves of Heathrow and Alaqua Lakes.

  What had long ago been a sleepy suburb north of Orlando had become a model for suburban growth, complete with strip centers, malls, business parks, and an underdeveloped infrastructure.

  Much like I-4 remained the lone north-south corridor through Central Florida, Lake Mary Boulevard provided a perpendicular service through Lake Mary. On a good day, traffic was sluggish. On a day like this, and Mike couldn’t remember a day like this, it was a parking lot.

  It was dense, tangled, and choking itself. The choking part was the worst. Mike could taste it in his mouth. The exhaust from all of the trucks and cars made for a dense pool of nasty air, and it made it that much hotter.

  Sweat stung his eyes, and he swiped again to clear his vision. He was on the north side of the road, passing a Chick-fil-A that had barely any line in the drive-thru. That was as anomalous as the total gridlock on the road.

  He passed a gas station and considered going inside to buy whatever was left on the shelves, get some cash back, but the line of patrons stretched from the convenience store and wound around the pumps. The gas pumps themselves had yellow bags over the handles. They were out of fuel.

  The entirety of his walk seemed surreal, as if he were walking through someone else’s world. It reminded him of the panic scenes in disaster movies more than the days leading up to an approaching hurricane.

  He wiped sweat from the backs of his forearms like a baseball coach would send in signals to pitchers and catchers. There was an odd symphony to the sounds as he walked. The mix of shouts, engine revs, and honking horns provided the perfect soundtrack to what he witnessed.

  He noticed the strange mixture of focus and reverie on the faces of many people. They were at once present and absent. He wondered if he held the same worried gaze and decided it was the countenance of people who’d resigned themselves to what was happening but couldn’t fully process what it meant.

  A woman carrying canvas bags in both hands approached him on the sidewalk that ran parallel to the boulevard. The bags were low to the ground, the laden bottoms scraping the concrete. They bulged, and the straps, which she white-knuckled, were stretched taut. The white plastic caps of drink bottles poked out the tops of the bags.

  Her face was as strained as the straps. Deep creases rumpled her brow. The woman was relatively young, perhaps in her early forties. The beginnings of gray framed her hairline at her temples.

  Mike stepped to the side and into the healthy St. Augustine grass to let the woman pass. She never made eye contact with him and didn’t thank him for giving way. He wondered if she even saw him given the intensity of her distant, worried glare.

  To his right, a woman in the passenger seat of an aging Honda minivan patted the back of her crying infant. She held the pink-swaddled child in her arms, bouncing her up and down against her shoulder. Their window was down and the woman rested one elbow on the open frame.

  The mother’s red face glistened with sweat and strands of her long dark hair. It was pulled into a ponytail, but the stray damp hairs were matted against her forehead. Her lips were pursed in that shushing way parents used with restless children.

  Behind the wheel, a man sat straight. His window was down too, and Mike wondered if their air conditioning didn’t work. The minivan looked old enough to be in disrepair. The driver was in a bright orange tank top. His face and his arms from the mid-bicep down were deeply tanned, his neck and upper arms pale. He was gripping the wheel with both hands, rubbing his thumbs across it. His seatbelt was off and his eyes were closed. Then he opened them and reached down, doing something at the controls on the minivan’s dash.

  “In New York,” a nasal-intoned voice blared from the minivan’s radio, “panic rules the day. Broadway is dark on a Saturday for the first time since a massive storm closed the iconic theater district in January 2016. Times Square shops and restaurants are either shuttered or absent the regular throngs of midtown tourists who flock to the neon energy of the city’s center.”

  Mike slowed his walk so he could hear more of the report. He didn’t want to stop and appear obvious about his interest. The child’s wails made it difficult to hear some of the words from the radio reporter, but he could easily fill in the gaps.

  “Museums are closed,” said the reporter, “as is the Statue of Liberty. The Staten Island Ferry is running a limited schedule, as is the city-owned subway system. There aren’t enough operators to run the thirty-six lines that make up the network of transportation leased to the transit authority. It’s a major inconvenience for the more than three million people who typically use the subway on Saturdays.”

  The report continued, but Mike was too far ahead of the minivan to hear the rest of it. He held a snapshot of the family in his mind as he walked. If this was the beginning of the end, what would the middle of it look like, the long term? That baby in the woman’s arms; in what kind of world would she grow up? She might never know what things were like before. Today was the inflection point. Mike sensed it. This was that demarcation between then and now, between the past and the future, the before and the after.

  Sweat stuck his shirt to the small of his back. He swallowed against the sharp dryness of his mouth and raked his teeth across his lower lip. His legs were heavier with each step, but it wasn’t only from the weight of the heat and humidity. It was from the weight of what Mike knew was coming, about the struggles ahead, about the things he imagined he would have to do that would obliterate the walls of his proverbial comfort zone.

  He checked the traffic to his right and stepped from the curb between two trucks. He held up his hand in an appreciative wave to the drivers who let him pass in front of them as he made his way to the center line. He then turned to his right and did the same. Nobody seemed to mind. They weren’t going anywhere anyhow. Mike stepped up on the curb that rose from the eastbound lanes and moved toward the parking lot of his building. His heart skipped and anxiety tingled through his body. He didn’t want to go back inside. But there was no choice. This was the first of many things he would have to do despite his desire to avoid them. He sucked in a deep breath, filling his lungs with the heavy, damp air, and marched to the building’s entrance, one step at a time.

  CHAPTER 9

  OCTOBER 2, 2032

  SCOURGE +/- 0 DAYS

  ORLANDO, FLORIDA

  “Are you getting enough air?”

  Miriam looked up from her phone to see t
he driver, Amir, looking at her in his rearview mirror. She faked a smile and nodded. “Yes, thank you.”

  “I’m sorry about the traffic,” he said. “There’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “It’s fine,” said Miriam. “It’s not your fault.”

  She looked out the window. They’d barely left the airport property and she’d been in the back of the Land Rover for more than forty-five minutes. Her phone battery was low.

  “Do you mind if I plug in my phone?” she asked.

  “Not a problem,” said Amir. “I can charge it wireless here in the cupholder next to me, or you can plug it in there in the back seat.”

  Although his English was excellent, the accent made it clear he wasn’t native to the United States.

  “Which is faster?” she asked.

  Amir smiled. His cheeks dimpled. He took a hand from the steering wheel and motioned toward the endless sea of red taillights ahead of them. “I don’t think it matters,” he said. “You’ll have plenty of time for either. It will take some time to get to Lake Mary.”

  Miriam sighed. Amir was right. There was no rush. “I’ll plug it in back here,” she said. “That way, if I get a text or a call, I can answer it without bothering you.”

  Amir gripped the wheel with both hands, twisting his fingers on the vinyl wheel cover. He shrugged and glanced in the rearview mirror at her. “No bother. The choice is yours.”

  Miriam plugged the phone into the charger in front of her and sank into her seat. She yanked on the seatbelt and let go, adjusting it against her chest. The cool air from the vents blew onto her face. It smelled clean. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. It might take a while, but she’d be out of this car and out of her linen suit soon enough. Miriam could already taste the frozen margaritas she and her friend always had at a Tex-Mex place near her apartment. They were good with an extra shot of Herradura Reposado floated on the top of the icy beverage. Her mouth watered. This diversion wasn’t such a bad thing.