Dr. Justin Kaes of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sighed, kicked an empty food can across the dusty road, and wished, for maybe the fiftieth time, that he’d never volunteered for this mission. It was hopeless, for one thing, an utter fool’s errand, and besides, he was hardly the adventurous type; out of shape and soft from easy living and long hours of sedentary lab work, he simply wasn’t fit for all of this chasing around and danger. And now Poole and Gonzalez were gone, off on another fool’s errand, and he was in charge.
All he was supposed to do was to stay put, make sure nothing happened to their vehicles or the Old Man, and wait, but he still felt very nervous. After all, here they were, stuck out in the middle of the wasteland once known as Oklahoma, totally lost, with no fuel and little food or water, surrounded by who knew how many potentially violent survies, and charged with keeping safe the meanest, crankiest and oldest man that he or any of the others had ever met. Yes, he thought, and sighed again, I should have just stayed in New Atlanta.
Suddenly the noise of yelling from the big MedCenter truck cut through the hiss of the wind, and Justin swore under his breath. Another bust-up with the Old Man. For a moment he considered ignoring the noise and letting Cass and the others deal with it, but then he reminded himself that he was in charge and shuffled over to the truck.
Within the converted RV, it was much cooler and more humid, but nothing like what it should be; running on backup power would do that. Back in the clean room Cass, the head nurse, and one of her three assistants, a large, handsome man named Greg, were busy arguing with their charge, the reason for this whole adventure and all of their high-tech medical gear, the old man named Howard Lampert. From the sound of it, it seemed as if the Old Man was giving as good as he was getting. As usual. Cass gave him an exasperated look as he came up.
“You worm-headed jerks!” the Old Man was yelling, in that reedy, thin voice that cut through Justin like a power drill. “You’re all gonna starve to death out here! You think Dr. Poole and what’s-his-face are comin’ back? Ha! It’s been a week already, you stupid bastards! And he probably got jumped by some of the locals the first god-damn day!”
“Now, Mr. Lampert,” said Greg, clinging to what was left of his bedside manner, “don’t you worry about that. You’ll be just fine.”
Cocooned in his railed hospital bed, surrounded by blinking, beeping machines connected to his frail, wizened body, the Old Man scowled and slapped his forehead with one hand. Justin winced a little at the violence of the gesture; at 102, the Old Man shouldn’t be getting slapped on the head like that.
“Jesus H. Chrysler!” Lampert spat. “It’s like talking to a fuckin’ bag of hammers!” Shaking his head, he noticed Justin’s entrance and waved the younger man over. “Doc, come here a minute. Talk some sense into these blithering morons, wouldya?”
“What’s the trouble, sir?” asked Justin. “Do you lack for anything?”
“Well, no, no,” said Lampert, slumping back. “Not at the moment, no, other than the obvious. But here’s the deal, Doc: I know that you have to be low on water and food. These trucks aren’t big enough for that. Plus, you’re out of gas and, from what I’ve heard, this whole part of the country is just crawling with survies. So, unless you do something, and pretty damned soon, you’re either gonna get slaughtered—or worse—or you’re gonna starve to death. Shit, maybe both! Who knows?”
“But Mr. Lampert,” said Justin mildly, “what do you care about that? No offense, but you’ve been telling us from the first day that all you want to do is to die. Wouldn’t this… scenario furnish just that result?”
“Oh, hell yeah,” said the Old Man wryly. “It’d work just fine. But why did you have to drag me out into the middle of fucking nowhere to do it?! I could have starved to death back in Minneapolis just as easily, you know!”
“Well, of course,” Justin smiled, “but then you wouldn’t have the chance to save a great many lives. Don’t forget what this is all about.”
“Yeah, yeah. You and your god-damn plague. I’ve told you a hundred times already, I don’t give a flying fuck about that. As far as I’m concerned, humanity can just as well—”
“Go fuck itself,” finished Justin, “as you so colorfully put it. Yes, I know, but I’m afraid that is as may be. Our mission is clear and, unfortunately, as we explained, it does not necessarily require your cooperation.”
“OK, so why don’t you just keep me doped-up or in a coma or something? All you really want is my blood, right? So take it! Be done with it already!”
“Now, we’ve been through this,” said Justin, a headache beginning in his temples. “We need you alive and healthy. The amount of serum would be insufficient otherwise. Remember?”
“Remember?” mimicked the Old Man nastily. “Of course I remember, ya dumb jerk. You’ve told me over and over about saving humanity and all that bullshit. Whatever. But that’s my freakin’ point, what I was tryin’ to tell these dipshits: you ain’t gonna get the chance! Any minute now some god-awful bunch of crazed bikers are gonna sweep down outta the desert and turn your fancy RVs into Swiss cheese and microchips!”
“Well, you just let me worry about that,” said Justin, much more confidently than he felt. “You just relax and try not to exert yourself, alright?”
“Fuck off,” said the Old Man.
“Yes, well…” said Justin. “I’ll check in on you a little later.”
After checking the Old Man’s vitals and a recent scan of the withered old heart beating away in the withered old chest, Justin gave Cass some unneeded instructions and took himself off to his tiny lab at the front of the vehicle. Closing the airtight hatch, he slumped at his desk, held his head in one hand, and thought back to the events that had brought him to this place.
In New Atlanta, Justin’s home town, things had been pretty bad; gangs of hungry, often crazy people roamed the streets and it was thanks only to their loyal security staff that the great hospitals and labs had been able to keep running. But every day, every week, every year, some new sign of the Fall had descended. Packs of wild dogs appeared in the winter of 2062. Roving gangs took and held the downtown area the next year, and by 2064, Justin and everyone else in New Atlanta had become accustomed to seeing bodies—sometimes great mounds of bodies—in the streets. And when the corpses began to cause even more health problems, like cholera and typhus, they were witness to great grills made of railroad tracks that were set up to burn the remains.
The last couple of years had seen trees buckling the pavers in Margaret Mitchell Square, more—and more violent—gangs, killing each other and anyone else weaker than themselves they could find, and the CDC cafeteria featuring dog and cat food on the lunch menu.
Unlike many of the CDC staff, he thankfully had no wife, kids, or other close relatives in town, but, like most of them, his house had burned to the ground in the Big Fire of 2068. After that he and much of the staff and their families, what was left of them, had simply moved into their offices and made do as best they could.
Out of either desperation or because they didn’t know what else to do, those few remaining had kept at it, plugging away at a cure, despite having virtually no clue as to how to proceed. The problem was that they had no starting point; with all viruses, there were anti-bodies, small samples of the virus itself which formed the basis of a vaccine. But in this case, as they soon discovered, the customary methods were simply not going to work.