The Scourge (Book 1): Unprepared Read online

  He forced a smile, tugged on the door handle, and let the door shut behind him. Mike and Brice sat motionless for a good minute before Brice broke the silence.

  “Two years?”

  Mike wasn’t worried about the length of time the prepper doctor suggested. It could be a minute as much as two years given that at this moment he and Brice had nowhere to go that matched the description of a place “in the middle of nowhere.”

  CHAPTER 13

  OCTOBER 2, 2032

  SCOURGE +/- 0 DAYS

  KIEV, UKRAINE

  It was midnight and Gwendolyn Sharp couldn’t sleep. She sat on the edge of her bed. There was a dim fan of light illuminating the wall-mounted laminate headboard to her right, and the smell of dust burning in the room’s heater was intoxicating.

  Her bare feet rubbed against the worn carpet, and she felt the rough indention of a cigarette burn with the tip of her big toe. It was crusty and ragged underneath the soft skin of her toe, and she rubbed against it like a cat against a scratching post.

  She couldn’t see the burn mark anymore, but she’d noticed it her first morning in the hotel. Gwendolyn slept on her stomach, always on the left side of the bed, her head half hanging off the mattress. Old habits died hard.

  Now sitting in the relative dark, she thought of him. He’d smoked. Too much. He drank too much, and he self-medicated too much.

  Her palms were flat against the bed and she was positioned like a girl sitting on the edge of the pool with her legs dangling into the deep end, toes wiggling to test the water. She stared at the large window opposite the bed. The dim light and the dark, blurry outline of her body reflected in the glass. She was wearing a large sweatshirt and plaid boxer shorts. The curtains were open. They were always open.

  She eyed the digital clock on the nightstand next to her. It was after midnight. A brand-new day was ahead of her.

  Gwendolyn glanced over her shoulder to the untouched pillow on the right side of the bed. She almost expected to see him lying there, hand on his bare chest, a sly smile on his handsome face.

  Tears welled in her eyes and she reminded herself she wasn’t alone. No matter how solitary she felt, she was not alone.

  She stopped rubbing her toe and forgot her loneliness when the phone rang. It was more of a trilling chirp than a ring, and the red message light strobed with each succession of chirps. On the third, extended ring, she picked up the receiver. She glanced at the electric blue digits on the tabletop clock and furrowed her brow.

  “Hello?”

  “Gwendolyn,” said the familiar voice, “this is Charlie. I’m sorry for calling so late.”

  “It’s fine. I wasn’t asleep.” She checked her cell phone, which was charging on the table next to the clock. No missed calls from Dr. Charles Morel, no texts, no messages. “Did you try my cell?” she asked. “I don’t have any missed—”

  “No,” said Dr. Morel. “I didn’t try your cell. I’ve some urgent news best delivered in person.”

  She scooted back on the bed, drawing her knees to her chest. Her legs were suddenly cold despite the warmth of the room. “Where are you?”

  “In the lobby,” he said. “I’m at the front desk. They connected me to your room. Could you come down? The bar is empty. There are tables there. We could have some privacy.”

  “Do you want to come to my room?” she asked without thinking about how the invitation might sound to her colleague.

  “Uh.” He hesitated. “I—well—no. I don’t think that would be appropriate.”

  The chill gave way to a rush of heat. Her face was hot. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by that. I—”

  “It’s fine,” interrupted Morel. “It’s fine. Five minutes? In the lobby bar?”

  She agreed and hung up the phone. Suddenly Gwendolyn felt exhausted. Despite having not been tired enough to sleep, she wanted to lie down and close her eyes.

  Whatever had Morel at her hotel in the middle of the night was urgent enough, serious enough, that it might prevent her from sleeping at all. The thought of that had her wanting what she could not have. Despite that, she was in the lobby bar six minutes after hanging up the phone with Morel. He was sitting in a booth, his thumbs stroking the condensation off the sides of a tall glass.

  “Charlie?” Gwendolyn said, sliding into the booth across from him. “What’s so urgent?”

  She pushed the sweatshirt sleeves up to her elbows. She was wearing jeans over the boxer shorts and a pair of Emu sheepskin boots without socks. Her hair was pulled back into her ubiquitous ponytail, but the look wasn’t as severe as when she had time to perfect it. The remnants of makeup not fully washed off colored her cheeks and eyelids.

  Morel was still in a suit. His tie was knotted but loose and haphazardly hung to one side of his open collar. His jacket hung on him, like a father’s would on a much smaller son. His hair was mussed, and deep purple swells underlined his bloodshot eyes. He’d been crying.

  He lifted the glass and downed the rest of the chilled vodka. When he swallowed it, Morel exhaled through clenched teeth. He sat back, slouching against the cracked, tufted leather seatback in the booth. He leaned on his elbows like all of his weight was resting there. His eyes fell to the empty glass. “Kevin Pierce is dead.”

  “From the WHO?”

  He nodded, still looking down. Gwendolyn spotted the beginnings of a bald patch at the crown of his head. Morel sucked in air through his teeth. It sounded like he was slurping dregs through a straw.

  “When? How?”

  “Today,” he said. “The Scourge.”

  This didn’t make sense. She’d seen Pierce two—or was it three?—days earlier. She was working in the lab and went to the break room to get a mug of what passed for coffee. Pierce was already there. He was at the lone table in the room, reading a book aloud.

  “What are you reading?” she’d asked.

  “It’s a western,” he said. “Called Last Ride. By a guy named G. Michael Hopf. Oldie but goodie. Follows a bounty hunter after a murder in Montana. Great stuff. It’s the first in a series.”

  Gwendolyn poured her coffee and listened to Pierce read, his husky voice perfect for the genre. She saw the dust and heard the spin of a revolver’s cylinder. Once she plunked five cubes of brown sugar into the steaming mug, she toasted him. “You could do that for a living,” she said, smiling broadly at him.

  He lifted his eyes from the book but didn’t move his head. “Do what?”

  “Read books aloud,” she said. “Like, narrate them. Don’t people do that?”

  She was flattering him, working him. Men fell for that kind of thing. She’d pump their egos, find out their insecurities, then exploit them. She’d done it her entire life. She’d keep doing it until she was in charge. Then she’d do it some more. There was always another level to climb.

  Pierce shrugged. “I’m sure they do.”

  “You could make good money at it,” Gwendolyn said. “I’m not kidding. You’ve got the gravitas in your voice that makes someone want to stop whatever she’s doing and listen.”

  He looked up again and smiled. “That’s mighty kind of you,” he said, affecting a hint of western twang. “But I’m pretty sure people would just as soon listen to me tell them about the end of the world as they would read a western.”

  “There’s a market for both,” she said. “Especially right now.”

  They laughed. He went back to his book. She slurped her bitter coffee.

  The small team working near ground zero had developed a gallows humor about their work. It was a coping mechanism that, taken out of context, would come off as heartless and crude. It wasn’t either. Though in retrospect, she wished she hadn’t said it. Not to Pierce. Not now that he was dead. A flash of emotion seeped into her and she immediately shoved it deep in the corners of her psyche. Emotion was weakness.

  From Pierce, her mind shifted to the pharmacy she’d visited the previous day. The owner of the pharmacy was the first person she knew pe
rsonally who succumbed to the Scourge. She’d assumed at the time he wouldn’t be the last. She didn’t think the second would come so quickly.

  Sitting in the lobby bar across from Morel, she remembered Pierce had stopped reading a couple of times and coughed. It was a wet cough, something not indicative of the early stages of the disease, so she’d not thought anything of it. She’d forgotten it until now.

  Morel waved a hand in front of her face, and it shook her from her thoughts. She blinked back to focus.

  “Are you listening to me?” asked Morel. “Did you hear what I said?”

  She shook her head. “No. I didn’t. I’m sorry. I was thinking about the last time I saw Pierce. It was only a couple of days ago. Three at most.”

  The days ran together. The longer she was in Kiev, the longer she worked on the disease, the more time condensed. It was difficult to know night from day or week from month. She couldn’t remember what she was doing when Morel called her to the lobby. What had she been doing?

  Morel rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, squeezed them with his thumb and forefinger, and exhaled again. The strong odor of Nemerov Honey Pepper wafted toward her.

  She wanted a drink and glanced over her shoulder, trying to spot a server. There was none.

  “She’ll be back around,” said Morel. “I think. You want what I’m having?”

  Gwendolyn tried to smile. She was sure it looked forced. It was. “Thank you.”

  Morel returned the fake smile and cleared his throat. He looked back down at the empty glass on the table as if it held cue cards. He wasn’t as strong as she’d thought he was. This was weakness. She saw it, and though she too wanted a drink, she imagined it wasn’t for the same reasons as Morel.

  “I was saying that he went fast,” said Morel. “He was working on one of the new variations and there was an accident. We thought he was okay. He wasn’t.”

  They sat in silence for a moment. A tall, thin woman in tuxedo pants and a silk blouse appeared from nowhere. She held a tray in her hand and silently took the empty glass from the table.

  “Two more, please,” Morel requested. The server nodded and disappeared again.

  “What now?” asked Gwendolyn.

  Morel looked her in the eyes. He held her gaze. His nose twitched and his eyebrows knitted. “What do you mean?”

  “As tragic is this is,” she said, “I don’t think you’d call me in the middle of the night to talk about Pierce. He was a good man, a great scientist. But you could have waited until morning to tell me.”

  Morel’s mouth pressed into a flat line. He looked away. “You’re right, it’s not about Pierce. Not entirely.”

  The server returned with two identical glasses filled with vodka, no ice. She set down a pair of cardboard coasters and put the glasses on top of them.

  Morel didn’t wait for the server to stand up straight before he was drinking. Gwendolyn asked the woman to charge her room for the drinks. She gave the server her name and room number, and the woman left with a nod.

  “We’re done,” said Morel, the glass in his hand. “They’ve shut us down. You and I head back to the States later today.”

  “Today?”

  “Today.”

  “Back to Atlanta?”

  “Not technically, but yes,” said Morel. He took another healthy swig and wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “Dobbins Air Reserve Base. It’s in Marietta. Twenty minutes by car. It’s about the same distance as Hartsfield.”

  “Why?”

  “Commercial is shut down,” he said. “We have to fly military. It’s the—”

  “No,” said Gwendolyn, “why are they shutting us down? I thought we were making incremental progress. Kovatliev said last week we might be a month from the first iteration of a testable vaccine.”

  She was irritated. Not only had her superiors sent her here against her wishes, now they were diminishing her work by bringing her home. Gwendolyn had the sense that she was not only out of the loop, but unsure if the loop existed at all. That told her she wasn’t doing a good enough job of doing what she did so well: achieve at such a level that her bosses couldn’t help but cede power to her.

  “That’s true,” said Morel. “I had a briefing with Hristo this morning. We were on a video conference with the School of Public Health in Albany.”

  “The Center For Global Health?”

  “The very one,” said Morel. “Everything was very encouraging. You know they partner with twenty-two countries, including Ukraine. They’ve been in the loop on this since we first understood the breadth of the outbreak.”

  “So what happened?” she asked. “Why now? Why today?”

  Morel held the glass between both hands. “I don’t know. It’s like someone figured out we could be close and they don’t want us to be.”

  Gwendolyn folded her arms across her chest. She still hadn’t touched her drink. “That’s absurd,” she said sharply. It sounded harsher than she’d intended, like she was condescending to Morel. He didn’t react. “Isn’t it absurd?” she said, rounding the edges to her tone. “Why would anyone want to stop our progress? All that does is prolong the spread of the disease. It means more die, more suffer. That’s counter to our mission.”

  Morel sighed and shifted his weight in the booth. The tufted leather squeaked and he moved his glass on the table. The ring of condensation dragged with the bottom of the glass. “Officially,” he said, “the word is that they’re concerned for our safety. They want us in a more controlled environment.”

  Gwendolyn huffed. She took a drink from her glass and put it on the table in the exact spot from which she’d lifted it. “That’s absurd.” She couldn’t think of another word at the moment, at least not one she was comfortable uttering aloud to Morel. “More controlled? Our safety?”

  “I know,” said Morel. “It’s…hogwash.”

  Clearly he didn’t want to use foul language either, even if it was appropriate for the situation. He slid his glass back to the thin ring of condensation on the table.

  “We’ve been exposed to this thing for months,” said Gwendolyn. “If we’re going to die from it, we’re going to die from it.”

  Morel shrugged and shifted again. The leather squeaked.

  “Did you fight back at all?” asked Gwendolyn.

  His eyes met hers. He narrowed them as if to search for the meaning of what she’d asked, like she’d spoken in a foreign tongue. “Fight back?”

  Gwendolyn stiffened. Her voice sharpened again. “Yes,” she said. “Did you protest? Did you tell them you didn’t want to abandon the progress we’d made here, that leaving would hamper our efforts? At the very least we lose access to live subjects, to the ongoing metamorphosis of the disease. If you didn’t say those things, if you didn’t fight for us, then what good are you?”

  Morel looked away from her as she chastised him. He winced at the last jab. His shoulders slumped, his lower lip pouted, and he dropped his hands into his lap.

  The man was brilliant. But his physical reaction to her interrogation confirmed for her what she’d suspected for weeks. He was not a leader. She didn’t wait for him to respond.

  “That’s what I would have done,” said Gwendolyn. “I would fought to keep us here, to keep the work moving forward. We owe that to the people who’ve died. We owe that to Pierce.”

  Morel’s face reddened and he lifted his chin. His body tensed. He picked up his hands from his lap and dropped an elbow on the table to stab an angry finger at her. He exploded angrily, spitting as he spoke. “You don’t know what you would have done,” he seethed through clenched teeth. “You’re not in my position. You haven’t had the conversations I’ve had, wading through the mire of politics I’ve survived to get to where I am. You’re new to this. You’re blind to the reality of what it is we do. It’s not all about the science of keeping people safe.”

  A nervous chill ran through Gwendolyn’s body. Her throat tightened and her pulse quickened. The buzz of the vodka swam in
her head. She pushed back from the table and swallowed hard. She’d never seen Dr. Charles Morel on the verge of becoming unhinged. His face was crimson as he visibly fought to keep himself from screaming at her.

  “You want to run things? Run things,” he said, his finger jabbing at the air. “Tell me how that works for you. Tell me what choices you make when you’re up against it.”

  Gwendolyn felt a lump building in her throat. Her eyes moistened, but she held back the tears. It confused her. She wasn’t emotional because his outburst attacked her sensibilities; that would have been a sign of weakness. Perhaps it was because she was beginning to understand how much time she’d wasted eating salo or borsht and drinking vodka.

  Morel balled his hand into a fist and pulled his arm from the table. He cleared his throat and closed his eyes. His nostrils pinched as he inhaled deeply. He exhaled through his mouth and twisted his neck to one side. The red faded from his face and neck. When he spoke, the anger was gone. “There are trade-offs, Dr. Sharp. And until you’ve walked a mile in my shoes, don’t tell me what you would have done. Don’t preach to me from your pulpit of infallible wisdom.”

  The sarcasm oozed and he glared at her. If nothing else, her judgment served to purge Morel of his sadness. He used the table to push himself to his feet. He straightened his tie and adjusted his jacket. “I’ll see you out front in three hours,” he said. “If you’re late, I’m leaving you.”

  Morel left her there with two unfinished vodkas, her thoughts, and the ghost of Kevin Pierce. But as he walked through the lobby and out the revolving door of the hotel’s main entrance, her own confusion waned. An idea bloomed.

  If he was challenging her to take the lead, she would do it. She would walk in his shoes. She would find a way to lead the effort without cowing to superiors. When they returned to the United States, she would make it her mission to take charge. So what if she was relatively new? Gwendolyn Sharp had guts. It was time to use them. She picked up her vodka and downed it. The burn in her throat and the lightness in her head put a smile on her face.