Page 14 of A Wilderness Within

“But seriously, I’m not sleeping with you.” The light, almost playful petulance in her tone cracked a smile on his face.

He chuckled. He suspected that in time instincts would take over. It was all humanity had left. Drives and hungers. The chemistry was there. He had seen it burning in her eyes when he’d come down in a towel after his shower. She’d looked at him with that ancient animal magnetism reflected in her gaze. He would wait as long as it took, but he knew she would succumb sooner rather than later. They might well be the last two people on earth someday. And it would be awfully lonely if she denied her body what it wanted, what itcraved.

He closed the bedroom door and returned to the kitchen to collect one of his lanterns. Then he checked the locks on all the doors, and finally, only then did he trust himself to sleep. He didn’t want to tell Caroline that he had seen fires on the horizon tonight. They weren’t campfires—they had been the fires of burning houses. Those kinds of fires meant men were nearby. Dangerous men. They’d have to move if he saw fires any closer. And they would keep moving until he found a safe place for her to rest and recover.

But they would never be truly safe, never again.

5

@CDC: We have received thousands of messages asking us to explain how viruses like Hydra-1 mutate. When humans reproduce, we share genetic material vertically from parents to children. Microbes share genetic material horizontally. They exchanged genes laterally when they bump against other viruses. These exchanges or mutations happen in microbe-rich, fecally contaminated environments. The Hydra-1 virus developed in a wet market in China where horseshoe bats and civet cats defecated in the shared space. Their fecal matter merged, and the microbes of different viruses were able to mutate using each other’s genetic material. The WHO has cleared the area and quarantined all individuals connected in any way to the market.

—Centers for Disease Control Twitter Feed

November 24, 2019

January 2020

Lincoln and his team strode down the boarding ramp of the military transport plane in a private airfield just outside of Washington, DC. Adam Caine was waiting for him. Despite his role as vice president, he never hid from his duties. Once Delta Force, always Delta Force, he would say. Whenever he said that, the Secret Service team hovering behind him would roll their eyes before returning to their duty of scanning for danger.

“How was your flight?” Adam asked as they embraced in a brief hug and a back slap.

“Dull. Horowitz spent the whole flight telling everyone about his new kid. Man has a phone full of pictures.”

Horowitz, one of Lincoln’s men, shot Lincoln a dirty look. “Fuck you, Atwood. My kid’s amazing.”

“I’m sure he is,” Adam said, grinning as he waved the team forward. “Come on, let’s get you inside.” Adam gestured to three black SUVs. Lincoln nodded at his men, and they divided up between the vehicles. Adam and Lincoln rode together in the middle SUV.

“Dare I ask how Turkey was?” Adam asked once they were in the car and the driver was pulling out of the airfield.

“Bloody. Everyone wanted a piece of us. The Russians, the Syrians, you name it.”

“He who controls Turkey controls the gates to the Western world,” Adam muttered as he looked out the window. “I miss it. I wish I was back in field.”

Lincoln smiled. “You are where you need to be. Whitaker needed someone like you. No bullshit, no politics, just someone who gets shit done. That’s what the country needs right now.”

“I hope so. No one believes in us anymore. It’s easy to criticize the system when you’re seeing only one side of it. But if people looked at the big picture, they would see…” He sighed, as if collecting his thoughts. “We fight for what’s right, for the betterment of everyone. At least, we try. But everyone’s got an agenda, including us. Like this damned virus in China and India. We’ve been trying to work with a network of foreign governments and health organizations. China thinksweplanted the virus, and they won’t let our teams into the infected areas without putting up a hell of a fight. Russia’s using it as a bargaining chip, hinting they’ll make things difficult if we don’t make some concessions on nuclear disarmament in Syria. Our second team of CDC specialists was stuck in an immigration hellhole for over a week before we twisted China’s arm to get them released. By that point, the virus was already devastating several of the villages outside where we think it originated.”

Lincoln had heard the rumblings of discord while he and his team had waited for their transport plane to arrive.

“Adam, what is this thing, really?” He hadn’t forgotten the 2014 Ebola scare, the way the world had overreacted. Ebola, as far as anyone knew, could only be transmitted by exchanging bodily fluids with a victim or somehow consuming infected vomit. Bottom line, it didn’t transmit easily. Yet individuals were forced into quarantine just for having been in the samecityas a victim being treated for Ebola.

“Hydra-1, as the CDC is officially calling the virus in their memos, dehydrates the victims. All soft tissue eventually dries out, and the cell walls break down. The usual process of decay doesn’t seem to occur, and the normal preservation you’d expect to find on a desiccated corpse doesn’t either. The cells are so devastated by the virus that they literally turn into dust. It’s the scariest thing. Eventually, you have nothing but a damn skeleton where a body once was.”

“Jesus,” Lincoln said. “No wonder people are talking about it being a bioweapon. It sure as fuck sounds like one.”

Adam nodded. “It’s part of the reason China is so paranoid. But that’s not the worst part. It’s airborne. The strands, as far as we can tell, can be turned into an aerosol when someone coughs. If you’re too close to a victim or you’re in a place where airflow is strong, you can catch it. We haven’t had a new airborne pathogen with a mortality rate like this in a long time.” Adam met Lincoln’s gaze. “If we can’t control it, the r-naught rate is high. Too high.”

“The r-naught rate?” Lincoln had heard the term, but he didn’t really know what it meant.

“If you have the virus and you infect, say, two people, the r-naught rate is two. Ebola has a typical r-naught rate of two, but something like measles is much higher, however, less fatal.”

“What’s the Hydra-1 r-naught rate?”

Adam swallowed hard, fear showing in his blue eyes, and Lincoln felt his skin ripple with his pulse.

“Hydra-1 has an r-naught of six. Six victims for every single infected person. Combine that with the projected mortality rate, and the CDC says it has the potential to wipe out the world. The virus is a ‘race killer.’ Unless we can find a cure or create a lasting vaccine…”

Adam didn’t have to finish. Lincoln knew what he wasn’t saying. The end would come. Humanity would die out.

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