The Junkie Quatrain by Peter Clines

Author:Peter Clines
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction.Horror, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
Publisher: Permuted Press
Published: 2012-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

CONFIDENTIALITY

It had been six months since the world ended.

For Sam Clemens it had been six months of non-stop work.

On one level, it was exciting as hell. As a student of diagnostic medicine with a specialty in virology, the China outbreaks had been fascinating. He’d sat around with his friends and classmates examining the reports out of Asia and forming their own theories about the H1B6 virus, sometimes called the Baugh Contagion.

Then it reached North America. He’d been pulled out of his residency in Seattle and flown to Sacramento. There he’d been given an honorary doctorate and told he was now employed by the Centers for Disease Control.

And now, two months after that, he was being driven through Los Angeles in an armored Hummer. Humvee, actually. The driver, a solid man with a square jaw, had corrected Sam twice now on that point. Hummers were civilian, Humvees were military.

They pulled up to the Los Angeles Federal Building just after noon. The structure had been surrounded by concrete barriers and barbed wire. Through the gate he could see a small group of people on bicycles checking in with the guards. He couldn’t imagine being one of the outsiders who ventured out into the wild zones on a regular basis.

As they waited, Sam saw a large pack of Baugh-ridden to the east, maybe twenty or thirty of them. Their clothing was dirty and tattered from weeks of wear. Most of them were thin. They all shook and trembled enough that he could see it almost two blocks away. That and their garbled, slurred attempts at speech were what had earned the infected the casual nickname of junkies.

The pack was focused on something on the ground. He recognized the motions as a fight over food. Each of them was trying to get more than a few mouthfuls of whatever dog or cat they’d managed to corner. As he watched, one of them, a young woman, lifted her prize to the sky and gibbered like an ape. It was an arm, ripped off at the elbow.

Sam stopped looking out the side windows and stared at the hood of the Humvee.

They were waved through the gate by a pair of men in dark body armor. He craned his neck and saw towers with floodlights and even more men with rifles and armor. The Humvee halted in front of a trailer that Sam recognized as a mobile research lab. His door opened and he was gestured out. ‘Right this way, sir,’ said one soldier.

He was guided into the lab. Sam stripped naked in a brightly lit room and a slim brunette examined him for lacerations or severe abrasions. She also swabbed his mouth and took a blood sample. He dressed while they waited for the test results and made small talk about the facility.

His test came back negative and he stepped outside again. It was a major infection zone, but the air in Los Angeles was still wonderfully fresh. He hadn’t been outside much in the past few months.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.