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

Goldberg in Tel Aviv, Dr. Gam in Paris, and Dr. Arcand at the WHO. None of them could tell me anything. It was Luther who said something that broke it open, casually, as we ate pasta at my house with Jessica gulping chocolate milk, a treat Luther had arranged for her. ‘What if it’s the initial infection, but this trait is dormant for a certain time?’ My mind reeled. How perfect that would be. Distract us with smallpox while infecting us with a virus we wouldn’t be screening for, one that wouldn’t cause symptoms for months or years.
    “I had Jessica get a sleeping bag , and the three of us drove down to the CDC immediately. Darkness had fallen and few city lights were on. The government attempted to conserve resources wherever possible, and streetlights were not considered a necessity. But you could see them . Not swarms of them, not yet, but you could see a few of them just out in the piles of refuse or wandering aimlessly in the darkened streets. One man stepped in front of our car and screamed at us, bloody spittle spattering over the hood of my car, before he jumped onto the hood with both feet.
    “ ‘Go!’ Luther shouted. I hit the gas. The man flipped forward, his face against the windshield, leaving a smear of blood and bits of ragged flesh. Jessica had her eyes closed and was chanting something to herself. I looked at Luther, who appeared as if he wanted to pass out and was gripping the dashboard so tightly his fingernails were cutting into it. Luckily, the CDC wasn’t far. I parked and, feeling as though I had a lead weight in my stomach, got out and hurried inside with the two of them. It was just like that, overnight. One night we didn’t feel entirely unsafe, and the next night we couldn’t drive down the street, but we didn’t realize how much worse it was going to get, not then. My only concern then was to test Luther’s theory that the infection had occurred months or years ago in Eric and Ryan and had lain dormant.
    “Few staff were there at that hour, but I did find an assistant willing to help me. I set Jessica up in my office on the couch and was about to leave when she said, ‘Sam?’ I turned and saw the look of… resignation on her face. Not fear, not confusion, more like the acceptance of a belief she didn’t want to believe. ‘We’re going to die, aren’t we?’
    “ I sat down near her feet. ‘No, we’re not going to die. Epidemics have lifespans—that means they only last for so long. Then they stop spreading and begin shrinking.’
    “ ‘They stop spreading because they’ve killed so many people, don’t they?’ I could’ve lied to her, but if I’d learned anything about her , it was that her ability to look at her circumstances without flinching exceeded that of any adult I knew. She would know I was lying.
    “ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The virus kills until there aren’t enough people to spread it farther. I think this virus is near the end.’ I leaned down and kissed her forehead. ‘Now get some rest.’
    “Luther, the assistant, and I all went up to the BS4 labs. The analysis would take hours. I got some Diet Cokes for us, which was saying a lot because anything like that was a luxury at this point. When the data had been collected, we all sat out in the waiting room and drank our sodas and waited a good twenty minutes, just decompressing, I guess. We talked about mundane things. The weather, how much Luther missed professional baseball, where we got our shoes from. That was one of the first things that hit you when resources were scarce, but it was something you never thought about before: What if you needed new shoes? The stores were closed, and ordering online was impossible because so few mail carriers existed anymore, it being one of the jobs that interacted with the public so much that the government regulated who could deliver the mail to slow the spread of the virus, so what would you do? That hadn’t been a problem for me, but the assistant said he had