The Scourge (Book 1): Unprepared Read online

  Her longtime friend Ashley Pomerantz lived in Lake Mary. They’d been sorority sisters and roommates in college and kept in touch. Both of them shared a passion for handbags, travel, and nice men. Neither of them subscribed to the stereotypical trope of liking bad boys. They were a waste of time.

  Every time Miriam had extra time in central Florida or Ashley could spare a few days to head north, they’d chill and reminisce. Miriam opened her eyes and picked up her phone. It was charging still, so she left it attached to the cord and opened up Instagram. She found Ashley’s profile and scrolled through it.

  The most recent pictures were shots from a recent trip to Prague. As she swiped through them, she tapped the ones she hadn’t already liked. How had she missed these?

  The most recent was of Ashley in front of the Astronomical Clock. She stood out against the crowd of tourists and onlookers behind her. Her bright purple top complemented the dials of the six-hundred-year-old mechanical clock that adorned the face of city hall. The caption read “Loving my time here.” There was a stopwatch emoji next to the text.

  There was another of her standing on an arched stone bridge. The location information indicated it was the Charles Bridge. She stood near a statue at the bridge’s apex and gazed out onto the water, posed away from the camera. The sky behind her was blue and cloudless. It reflected on the hint of water visible in the picture, the water of the Vltava River that split the old town and new town of Prague. The sky and sliver of water were so blue that it looked fake, put through a filter, but the rest of the colors were true. The stone of the bridge was tan and brown, not saturated as the sky appeared. It was a beautiful photograph in a beautiful place. The caption was three heart emojis.

  Miriam smiled. She loved that her friend traveled the world, that she was living her best life. She tapped another couple of photographs, noticing that Ashley had posted nothing in more than a week. Her thumbs danced across the screen and she opened her messaging application.

  The message she’d sent to Ashley didn’t have a response. It also appeared as though Ashley hadn’t even opened it yet.

  Miriam worried that her friend was still out of town. The girl liked to get on a plane, and her job as a radio sales rep afforded her the opportunities.

  She opened Twitter and found her friend’s profile. Her friend wasn’t much for tweeting herself, but she retweeted famous people a lot. A lot. Sometimes she’d comment on the tweet when she shared it: Same. Me. So true.

  There was, however, a tweet she’d posted the day before. It was a photo of a box of tissues, a bowl of soup, and a digital thermometer with the caption “Not the weekend I planned.”

  Miriam recognized the table and rug in the photograph as being from Ashley’s apartment. She was home, but she was sick. Miriam wondered if she should intrude. An open invitation wasn’t always open if the host was sick.

  She closed the app and hit the phone icon. A second later, Miriam had the phone to her ear and it was ringing. After the fourth ring, Ashley’s voice came on.

  “Hi,” she said with the hint of Georgia twang that drove boys crazy, “it’s me, Ashley. I can’t take your call, but leave your info and I’ll get back to you. You can also text me if this is urgent. Talk soon.”

  An automated voice followed with instructions about how to leave Ashley a message. Miriam waited and then took a breath before deciding what to say.

  “Hey, girl, it’s me. I’m in town for an extra day or two, or whenever these planes get up and flying again. Thought I’d crash with you if that’s okay. But if you’re sick, it’s no big. Let me know. Love you.”

  Miriam was a professional woman pulling in good money. She had a stellar reputation and outstanding, influential clients. She wore thousand-dollar suits and carried handbags that cost twice that. But whenever she got together with Ashley, she was a college girl again. Her voice was an octave higher. Her vocabulary disintegrated into lingo. She texted Ashley a follow-up.

  Hey, girl. In town. Need a place to crash. You around? Let me know. Drinks and dinner on me.

  She watched the screen for a moment, expecting to see text bubbles appear on the lower left of the display. Nothing. She tapped the screen and opened her messaging app again.

  With her thumbs she typed the first few letters of a name and then a smiling face appeared at the center of the display. Her date. Well, the guy who was supposed to be her date. She didn’t want to cancel. His cheery disposition, dark skin, and broad shoulders made her not want to cancel. But she had no choice. Not only wasn’t she making it home tonight, she might not make it north of downtown Orlando.

  The Land Rover lurched and stopped. Amir glanced at her over his shoulder. “You want any music?” he asked. “I have satellite radio. Whatever you’d like to listen to is fine with me.”

  Miriam glanced up at Amir. She shook her head and smiled. “No, thank you.”

  Her thumbs hovered over the screen before she decided on the best way to cancel the date. She wasn’t doing this by choice. There were larger forces at play.

  Hey, she typed. Then she deleted it and started again. She wanted something flirtier.

  Hey u. Not much better, but she kept typing. I have bad news. I’m stuck in Florida. Every flight was canceled. I’m stuck.

  She deleted the last sentence. It was repetitive.

  I’m truly sorry and very disappointed. I was looking forward to spending time with u and getting to know u better. Could we reschedule?

  It was a fine line between making sure he didn’t think she’d blown him off and making him think she was desperate. She hoped she’d found the right balance and reread what she’d typed into the messenger. She reread it again and glanced through the front windshield. They’d moved another hundred feet, if that. The smell of exhaust was giving her a headache.

  “Amir, I don’t mean to be rude, but could you please recirculate the air? The fumes from the other cars is too much.”

  He nodded with his broad, amiable smile and tapped the adjustments into the SUV’s climate control system. There was a shift in the whoosh that pushed from the vents, and the air temperature changed. The noxious odor subsided and her phone chimed.

  She looked down to find a response from her date. It was short but promising.

  Understand. How’s next Friday? I’ve got tickets to the Hurricanes’ first home game. Great seats behind the glass at center ice.

  Miriam wasn’t a hockey fan. She wasn’t much into sports, period, despite being heavily involved in the social media marketing for some of the most popular sports video games. Because of that, she knew athletes. That included both of the ’Canes starting defensemen. They were perennial all-stars. One of them, Mark Helms, had won the Norris Trophy twice as the league’s best defensive player.

  She smiled and thumbed a response. Sounds great. I can get Helms to sign a puck for you.

  His response was immediate, and it was typical. He thought she was joking.

  LOL. It’s a date. Travel safe. This sickness thing is no joke.

  Miriam put the phone down and got comfortable in the seat. Its leather was cool and plush. Was she naïve for thinking the date would happen? If the sickness was serious enough to cancel flights, wouldn’t anything that involved travel or crowds be in jeopardy?

  Then again, the news media was always making mountains out of molehills, hurricanes out of sprinkles, and plagues out of common colds. It was their job to get clicks, page views, and engagement. They needed ratings, and what better way to get ratings as an inactive hurricane season wound down than to fabricate the urgency of this thing they were calling the Scourge?

  She chuckled to herself. The sickness even had a name. The first step in getting people’s attention was branding. Now the illness, concentrated half a world away, had a brand. The Scourge. It sounded to her like a B movie on a second-rate streaming service.

  How many times had authorities, and their media mouthpieces, warned of swine flu, avian flu, Ebola, and a half dozen other world-e
nding diseases that never amounted to anything more than a handful of domestic cases? As far as she was concerned, this whole thing was hype, and it had cost her a date with a man she thought was promising. She clenched her jaw and cursed under her breath.

  “If you don’t mind me asking,” said Amir, “what have you heard about the disease?”

  Miriam didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t want to be rude either. Amir seemed like a nice person. She sighed, exhaling audibly. “I don’t know,” she said. “You probably know more than I do. I’ve been in meetings for the last couple of days. What have you heard?”

  Amir’s eyes danced between her reflection in the rearview mirror and the slow road ahead. “The radio says it’s bad,” he said, as if reading her mind. “And they say it’s going to get worse. People are already getting sick here. They’re saying this is the real deal. People are going to die from this, and there’s no cure, no vaccine.”

  She sat up and eyed him in the mirror. “In Orlando?”

  He shrugged, his hands still on the vinyl-wrapped wheel. “Everywhere.”

  CHAPTER 10

  OCTOBER 2, 2032

  SCOURGE +/- 0 DAYS

  ORLANDO, FLORIDA

  Mike tugged on the seatbelt across his chest. He considered unbuckling it. The belt was useless. The Jeep wasn’t going anywhere and neither was anyone around him. It had taken him twenty minutes to merge into the eastbound gridlock from the station’s parking lot. It might take him an hour to go the short distance to the clinic.

  Air blasted onto his face and dried the sweat. He was cold, but kept the air on high. The whoosh of the air conditioning was comforting.

  The sun was low behind him, casting shadows in front of him. It was getting close to six o’clock. It felt like midnight. This was one of those days that felt longer than it was. Waking up with a hangover on his couch seemed like yesterday or the day before. So much had happened in the last twenty-four hours, Mike had trouble processing it. He went back over the events in his mind and struggled to rationalize the rapid deterioration of common decency and patience. Despite what the deputy said about it not being an overnight thing, it felt that way to Mike. Yesterday at this time, the worst thing in his life was another rejection. It struck him that some disasters brought societies together while others viciously dissolved them like acid.

  He remembered what his father, the Marine, told him about 9/11. Mike hadn’t been born yet, and his father was dating his mother. They were on again, off again and in the middle of a temporary separation when terrorists hijacked four airplanes, steering three of them into buildings and one of them into the ground.

  He eased off the brake and let the Jeep move forward. He was first in line at a stoplight now. That was progress.

  The 9/11 attacks galvanized the nation, his father told him. Patriotism spiked. Generosity and love of neighbor bloomed. People took stock of what mattered. They held doors for others, volunteered at shelters, and hung large American flags from their front porches and apartment balconies. Mike’s parents went to the courthouse and got married.

  The patriotic afterglow lasted for months. It only waned when the United States went to war in Iraq, and still the love of country and of those who served in the military or as first responders remained.

  The light turned green and he sped up. He reached ten miles per hour before he had to slow and stop again. There were a dozen cars between his Jeep and the next light.

  He wondered if that spike would have happened if the attacks had hit more than the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. What if the attacks took out targets and killed people in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Houston, and even Orlando? Would people have rallied? Would they have been so nice to each other?

  Mike ran his fingers through his hair and scanned the cars and trucks around him. People already looked exasperated and he doubted it was only because of the traffic. His mind drifted from his father to the bag-toting woman who’d passed him on the sidewalk, the mother juggling the baby in the front seat of the Honda minivan, the people he’d seen when walking from the clinic to the station.

  It was as if everyone knew something he had yet to process, like they had information that told them to be frightened. They knew what was coming, the unwinding of civilization in favor of every person protecting himself or herself at the expense of everything and everyone else.

  The car in front of him inched forward and he let off the brake. The Jeep idled forward a few feet and he applied the brake again. The gas gauge told him he had three-quarters of a tank. It was plenty, but would it be in a few days? Already, filling stations were empty.

  He lessened the air conditioning’s output to half. The whoosh of air softened to a hiss. Mike could hear the low tones of the radio. It was on, but the volume was turned down so that he hadn’t been able to hear it over the air conditioning.

  It was talk radio. Mike didn’t usually listen to it, but Brice had been scanning the dial on the way to the station and he’d left it there. He turned up the volume.

  “…for that call. Good point. I’m telling you,” said the host, “there’s something supremely fishy about this. Is it a false flag? I don’t know. The United Nations isn’t the benevolent institution some would have you believe. The World Health Organization, which is the one providing all of the intelligence and guidance on this so-called Scourge, is part of the United Nations. So you be the judge.”

  Mike rolled his eyes. False flag? Like this was some government conspiracy? To do what? To accomplish what?

  The light turned green up ahead, and slowly the line of traffic unwound. Mike moved the Jeep another few feet closer to the clinic.

  “I’ll tell you why it could be,” said the host, as if reading Mike’s mind. “And it’s not that much of a stretch. This whole climate change thing has been at us for, what, a couple of decades? There were the Paris Accords and the Helsinki Pact and the Tokyo Summit. These things were designed to lessen our carbon footprint and slow the damage we’re doing to the environment, right?”

  The taillights on the car ahead of the Jeep flashed red and Mike pressed the brake. In the distance was the edge of the clinic’s parking lot. It was encouraging. The radio host was not.

  “What’s the biggest problem for the environment? Is it cars? Is it airplanes? Is it raping the Earth of its minerals and fossil fuels? Is it defoliating our landscape to develop housing and industry? No. It’s not. It’s population. The more people we have on this planet, the more of those other things we demand. In my mind, the root of the climate crisis is population.”

  The host made sense even if he didn’t make sense. Mike couldn’t reconcile that governments would have anything to do with letting a disease ease the population burden. That was too far-fetched, regardless of the reasonable argument that population was the single biggest threat to the planet. He lifted his foot and the Jeep moved closer to the car in front of it. He congratulated himself for not having purchased the manual transmission. Sure, it would be more fun in off-road situations or in regular traffic, but shifting gears in something like this would drive him nuts. He ran a hand across his forehead, the remnants of dried sweat gritty under his fingertips.

  “Why wouldn’t it make sense,” opined the radio host in his cigarette-cured voice, “that the United Nations and its ‘one world’ philosophy would seize an opportunity like this? I’m not saying they started the disease. That’s next level, illuminati-type conspiracy talk. I’m not going there.”

  The host chuckled and cleared his throat. He said something about needing to take a break soon, that the top of the hour was close.

  “Suffice it to say, this is an opportunity for those who’d like to see the world a little less insecure. Aid the spread of the disease, let it run its course, be slow in the efforts to find a cure or a vaccine. Any or all of those courses of action mean more people die. It thins the herd. The strongest survive. A new world order commences.”

  Mike inhal
ed deeply and sighed. The host’s suggestions and theories made him uneasy. The traffic ahead of him moved a car at a time and he surged forward. The Jeep made it to the light before it turned yellow. He swung the wheel to the left and made the turn across oncoming traffic.

  A man in a large black SUV laid on his horn and flipped the bird, shouting expletives. His head turned and his eyes fixed on Mike as he squeezed past him. Mike waved and smiled, trying to diffuse the man’s anger. It didn’t work. He laid on the horn again, holding it for several seconds.

  Mike swung the wheel again, this time to the right, and drove into the clinic’s parking lot. There were no available parking spaces, so he rolled the Jeep onto the grass. He wasn’t worried about getting towed. Nobody from the clinic would have time to worry about it, and no tow truck would make it before he was gone anyhow.

  He slid the Jeep into park and looked at the clock. It was six o’clock. Mike hoped Brice was in good shape and ready to go. He didn’t want to spend any more time than needed around sick people. It was like Russian roulette. The more he was around people potentially infected with the Scourge, the more likely he was to contract the illness. Mike didn’t know what was coming other than that it was bad. The world, his world, was changing, and not for the better. All signs pointed to a short-term hell on Earth. It might be better to die now.

  Mike thought about that, his seatbelt still buckled and tight across his chest. Did he want to die? Did he want the easy way out?

  No. He decided life was worth living. It was worth conflict and trial. It was worth whatever might come his way. He wanted to fight. He wanted to live. He unsnapped the latch on the belt and eased his way from the Jeep.

  A philosophy professor in college had once explained the idea that one could not know light without darkness, joy without despair, life without death. Mike had always understood that concept. He got the yin and yang of things, that all things required weights on both sides of the scale to provide balance.