Scourge - A Medical Thriller (The Plague Trilogy Book 3) by Victor Methos Read Free Book Online

I don’t know, but she was attacked by two men. I saw it. They chased her down like lions after a gazelle. And this woman was in shape, skinny and fit, and the men were not. One was so overweight his stomach bounced over his belt, but they ran her down. It was like they were possessed and didn’t care if they gave themselves heart attacks.
    “I swung the car over to the curb and opened the passenger door for her to jump in. She was screaming , and I could see the look on her face, her eyes like marbles, completely devoid of the capacity to think. She got to the door before the first man reached her. He hit her like an NFL linebacker and took her down. I think even the impact might have killed her, but they didn’t stop. They… they…”
    Mitchell said, “ If you need a second, you don’t have to…”
    “No, I want to .” Sam swallowed. “They pulled her legs off. The strength they must’ve had to do that… now we know that it’s because of the near-toxic levels of adrenaline pumping through them, but at the time, all I could think was that it looked like pulling the legs off a fly. Just snap, a few tears, and they came off. The woman lived only a few moments after that, in shock as she bled to death. The men began… tearing her apart.”
    Mitchell’s throat felt dry. He swal lowed. “Do you mean… eating her?”
    “I don’t know if I’d call it eating. Anything they swallowed was instantly vomited back up, along with a torrent of blood. I got to see it from up close. They weren’t even paying attention to me. They were just focused on the legs. There was nothing I could do. I wasn’t armed, and no one was around to help, so I drove away. I thought that I would call the military patrols and have them go by when they could. At least she would get a proper burial, and maybe they could even catch the two men that killed her.”
    Mitchell nodded. “That must’ve been traumatic to see. Surely by now you knew something new was going on? Not just a poxvirus , something much more violent?”
    “Yes, I did. That’s why I wanted to speak to Luther as quickly as I could. Those men were infected, but unlike most infected, they were faster and stronger. When infected with Variola , after the incubation period has passed, people are bedridden. They can’t even go to the bathroom by themselves, much less chase down a runner and tear her limbs off. I suspected we either had a new strain of virus, or the old strain was doing something new. The lesions were of course my top concern, and I hoped Luther had something.
    “When I got in to work, I found Luther in the general labs, the unsecured labs we took tour groups through, on the main floor. He was sitting at a terminal looking at DNA matrices. I came up behind him, standing quietly a few moments before saying, ‘That bad, huh?’ I knew that when he got a result, he liked to email me, or whoever he was doing the analysis for, right away. He wanted us to know what he found so that he could get the inevitable questions out of the way. The only time he didn’t email with updates and reports was when the news was going to be something we didn’t want to hear.
    “ ‘It’s not good,’ he said. ‘The lesions. They’re not lesions at all.’ He took off his glasses and placed them on the table. His eyes were rimmed red, and I saw the black circles underneath them that hadn’t been there when I picked him up from the airport.
    “ ‘What are they?’ I said, sitting on the desk.
    “ He rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger and said, ‘They’re rotting brain tissue. The brains of that young man and his father were rotting from the inside out.’ ”
    Sam hesitated. “ And just like that, everything was different.”

4
     
     
     
     
     
    “It seemed like one of those things,” Samantha continued, “that once you know about it, it starts popping up everywhere. The CDC that day started getting more and more requests for autopsies,