Howie waited behind a cluster of palm trees. He wasn’t sure exactly what he was going to do. Even though there were only about five guards anywhere near the fence, that was five too many. He was no fighter or soldier.
He tried to spot Jessica through the fence, but the floodlights had been dimmed, and all he saw were indistinct bumps lying on cots.
Howie thought briefly about ramming the jeep through the fence, but the guards might open fire and hit Jessica. Staring at the two entrances again, he was wondering if he could get into the back one when he heard something behind him.
Turning around, he saw a man in a military uniform holding a rifle. He was playing on his phone and not paying attention; he hadn’t seen him.
Howie moved first. He jumped on the guard, taking him down to the ground. They were both around the same weight with similar builds, and neither of them could get an advantage. Howie had his hands wrapped around the rifle, and the man was grunting as he tried to push him off.
Just don’t yell, Howie thought. Please don’t yell.
The guardsman twisted the rifle around, and it smacked Howie in the eye, slamming that eye closed. He tried to swing again, and Howie lurched back. The rifle missed his face by only inches. Howie then got on top of the rifle, his hands spread evenly on it, and pushed his bodyweight down. The rifle pressed against the guardsman’s throat, strangling him.
The guardsman tried yelling, but the rifle was pressed so hard into his windpipe that just a squeak came out of him. He was pushing against the rifle, but didn’t have good leverage, and soon, his hands weren’t a factor. Howie was pressing with everything he had, his shoulders straining, veins sticking out in his forearms.
The guardsman tried kicking up with his legs to get enough momentum to throw Howie off, but he couldn’t do it. He tried one last time to twist the rifle away from his throat. Instead, it got a better angle on the windpipe. Within a few moments, he’d passed out.
Howie lifted the rifle in the air, aiming the butt at the man’s head. He could crush it with enough blows, and the man wouldn’t even feel any pain. Howie pictured himself doing that. But it didn’t happen. As alien as this situation was, he couldn’t do something so out of character.
Moving quickly, he took the guardsman’s uniform and dumped his own clothes in the bushes. The uniform was slightly smaller and was tucked too snugly in the crotch. The name sewn into the uniform over the chest said Sanders. Howie took the rifle and jogged over to the entrance of the cage.
30
The helicopter, a dull green with gray splotches, touched down not far from where Samantha was standing. She watched as two men came out, ducking their heads low, though they couldn’t possibly have touched the rotating blades unless they jumped. One of them was Clyde Olsen.
“Tell me you didn’t go through that entire batch of vaccines?” he said, coming up to them.
“Isn’t that the point?” Duncan asked.
His face contorted as if he’d eaten something sour. “The vaccines were… ineffective. We had inoculated a group about five hours before you’d arrived… They’re beginning to show symptoms.”
“Symptoms?” Sam said angrily.
“It was a risk we had to take, and they were fully informed. They chose to take it.”
“They shouldn’t be displaying symptoms for at least a day,” Duncan said.
“It’s… The damn thing is mutating so fast, we can’t keep up. Its incubation period has gone from seventy-two hours down to four.”
“We have to get these people quarantined,” Sam said.
“Already taken care of. I… uh, about the vaccines… One of the groups… I don’t quite know how to say this.”
Samantha’s stomach was in knots. He didn’t have to say it. She already knew. Her sister had been one of the ones inoculated.
The jeep came not long after Olsen had left. He’d asked that they come with him in the chopper, but Sam had refused, and Duncan stayed with her. She was going to visit her sister, no matter what-even through a plastic barrier.
When the jeep arrived, the driver was a young woman in a beige uniform. Samantha and Duncan climbed in, and she spun it around, then headed through Los Angeles.
“Sorry I was late,” she said. “We were quarantining a new part of the city, and I had to help. It’s chaos that first hour.”
The driver took the interstate and then the back roads. The route took them away from downtown and farther up into the hills, near hiking and biking trails. Trees surrounded them, and the air was cool and crisp. Worry gnawed at Samantha’s guts as Duncan was slowly dozing off. His eyes would shut and then dart open. Sam saw him pinching himself to try to stay awake, sticking his head out the window to let the wind hit him, and shifting positions, but nothing seemed to work.
Soon, Samantha saw what they had come for, and it terrified her.
The fence was about twelve feet high and tipped with looping barbed wire with makeshift towers around the perimeter. At the entrance sat a guard at a desk. Inside were hundreds and hundreds of cots with gray blankets. Men and women were separated by a partition but could still see and talk to one another through it.
As far as she could tell, it was a concentration camp.
“How did you decide who to bring here?” Sam asked.
The woman replied, “They started with certain parts of the city, like Beverly Hills and Malibu, and then we’re kind of getting the rest of the city. We should have everywhere in like a day or something.”
She hopped out of the jeep, but Duncan and Sam didn’t move.
He said, “I’m sorry, Sam.”
Sam didn’t respond. The only thought in her mind was that her sister was in that place, tucked away like some rat waiting to be experimented on in a university laboratory. And on top of that, she had just injected live viruses into over a hundred people. The staggering repercussions made her feel nauseated. But she couldn’t think about that. She had to focus on her sister; she could wallow in guilt later.
She got out of the jeep and followed the woman, who led her to the entrance. All the guards were wearing surgical masks.
The one at the entrance turned to the woman. “Who’s this?”
“They need to see one of the quarantined. What was her name?”
“Jane Bower is her maiden name, but she’d likely be under Jane Gates.”
The man scanned a list on an iPad. “Okay, she’s here. I got a note that says her sister’s coming to visit her. I guess that’s you.”
He stood up and unlocked a gate on the women’s side. He pressed a button on the PA system. “Jane Bower or Jane Gates to the front entrance.”
They waited a few moments, and no one came forward. He repeated into the device, “Jane Bower or Jane Gates to the front entrance now.”
Another few minutes passed, and still, nothing.
“She ain’t here,” the guardsman said.
“General Olsen told me she was.”
The guardsman scanned the iPad again. “Oh, here she is. She’s on my list of people that have been shipped out.”
“Shipped out where?”
“Quarantine.”
“You have people in cages, and you don’t think that’s quarantine?”
“I mean like real quarantine. With no one else around them.”
“Where is that?”
“I can’t tell you. It’s classified.”
“General Olsen gave me specific permission to see my sister, and I want to see her now.”
“Well, that’s fine, but I ain’t gonna be the one to tell you where she is. Go ask General Olsen.”
31
Kyle Levitt had joined the National Guard when he was eighteen years old. The recruiter at his school had been a cool guy named Dave. He drove a Viper and would show up to the school with his sleeves rolled up, revealing muscular arms, and Kyle saw the way the girls stared at him.