H10N1 Read online

  Taeya propped her head on her hand, tipped the bottle and dribbled out the last of the wine. Her hopeless situation pushed its way to the front of her mind. Every VIP in the Northeast was heading for the Medical Center with the intentions of bribing Sherman for a room. She scanned her tiny quarters, wondering if some city council member or basketball star would soon occupy it. Until this afternoon, she might have had a chance at one of the remaining nursing positions, but she’d made sure that wouldn’t happen.

  She sucked the last of the wine out of the cup, and banged the plastic down hard. So, that was it, out on the streets with nowhere to go. She snorted at the idea of Sherman doling out Nexinol as their severance package.

  When she stood, the wine went to her head. Gripping the chair back, she steadied herself. Her legs wobbled, but her mind was rolling. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of dismissing her. The words echoed in her head before she even knew they were forming. I’m out of here.

  The thought startled her. Where would she go? Out to Arizona? She squeezed her eyes against bombarding thoughts: vehicles in the parking garage, food supplies in the kitchen, long stretches of deserted highway. Impossible. It would never work. There were too many contingencies. The odds were against her even getting out of the building undetected.

  But there didn’t seem to be an alternative. She doubted Sherman would even let her stay to cook or clean toilets. Not that she could handle that kind of daily humiliation. Fear churned in her stomach once again. Maybe she should just pop a Nexinol and give it up. Absolutely not!

  Taeya checked her watch. 12:45. One thing was certain. If this was going to work, she had to sober up. She headed for the shower.

  Her wet hair dripped down her back. Using the sleeve of her terry cloth robe, Taeya squeezed out more water. She dragged a pair of blue jeans off a hanger and stuffed them into a duffle bag, then surveyed her empty closet. That was everything. Most of her adult life, she’d been traveling light, jumping from hot spot to hot spot all over the world. This trip would be no different than chasing an outbreak in Bangladesh. Okay, so technically, she was fleeing, but still.

  She felt relatively sober when she pulled her door open a crack to check the hallway. Her plan had seemed perfectly clear half an hour ago, as she’d tottered around her room, but now that her head was clear, the mission felt a little muddled. She bolstered her confidence with a mumbled mantra. “This will work. You can do it.”

  Taeya unlocked a supply closet at the end of a small hallway, telling herself that if she hit a snag she would simply return to her room and forget it. But she found everything she needed: a lab coat, a surgical mask, and a bright red carrying case with a big biohazard emblem on the side. She ripped the shrink-wrap off the clean plastic container.

  The mask was a stroke of genius. Not only did it add authenticity to the container, but no one would be able to smell her breath.

  Next stop, the dispensary on third floor. At this time of night, there should only be one staffer on duty. With any luck it would be someone she could intimidate.

  Charlie, the night custodian, leaned over the counter carrying on a one-sided conversation with Brenda, the security officer on duty. Taeya admired the woman. She took her job seriously, but her large breasts, even when tightly harnessed, drew a lot of attention, particularly from night creatures like Charlie.

  Dressed in the lab coat, Taeya strolled up to the counter and slammed the biohazard container down right next to Charlie. He backed away, his eyes bulging as though expecting something to crawl out. Like a skittering rat, he grabbed his cleaning cart and sprinted away.

  “These late night emergencies have to stop.” Taeya turned to Brenda, and spoke through the gauze mask. “My head is killing me and I can’t keep my eyes open.”

  She reached for the key card on the desk and Brenda rolled her chair to the far end. “I’m going to grab a couple ZeeBees. Okay with you?”

  Brenda nodded, never taking her eyes off the biohazard container. With an exaggerated turn, Taeya followed the woman’s gaze.

  “Oh. Sorry.” She hefted the box as though it was heavy, and took it with her into the meds room.

  Her heart raced. She leaned against the door for a second to regroup before she loaded the container with vaccines, pain relievers, broad-spectrum antibiotics, morphine, even anti-depressants. No way she was going out into that madness without a full arsenal of supplies.

  She mumbled a quick thanks to Brenda before lugging the heavy box down the hallway. The two people she passed along the way gave her a wide berth when they saw how she was dressed and what she was carrying. Beneath the mask, she smiled.

  In the food service kitchen, she loaded a stainless steel cart with six cases of military Meals Ready to Eat. It could take days to get to Arizona — if she was lucky. She stacked two cases of bottled water on top of the MREs. On the wall, she spotted a first-aid kit and yanked it off its brackets. As an after thought, she grabbed a case of chocolate chip granola bars.

  She made one last stop at her office to pack her framed pictures into her laptop bag. Those three photographs represented all that remained of her history. She would not leave them behind.

  The service elevator opened to the parking garage. The first thing she saw was the Center’s delivery van, a sleek, windowless fortress the size of Rhode Island. On the front was the signature intake scoop that sucked in water vapor. Sherman had tried to explain hydrogen engines to her. How the hydrogen was separated from oxygen, then liquefied and cooled. The hydrogen was compressed and stored in a tank until something in the engine remixed it with oxygen to cause combustion. Was that right? Taeya shook her wine-addled brain. Close enough. Sherman seemed to think these new engines could travel almost limitlessly if there was enough water vapor in the air. But in the Arizona desert? Best not to worry about that yet.

  The sides of the van were gouged and scraped, but the rows of rivets testified to the amount of reinforcement on the massive vehicle. Everybody said it was impenetrable; it even had its own air filtration system. Her eyelids drooped and a lopsided smile crossed Taeya’s face as she imagined herself steering that monster through the streets of Manhattan.

  She wished there was some way of taking it without the security guard catching her. The elevator door started to close so she eased her utility cart out. Leaning against the cold steel doors, she listened to the elevator whoosh away. A bead of sweat rolled down the side of her cheek and soaked into her surgical mask. She pulled it down and breathed in the cool air. What she wouldn’t do for a couple more sips of wine.

  Overhead, the electronic whirr of the security camera drew her eyes upward. As it panned, she counted off the seconds, calculating how much time she would have between passes. The camera spent a good five seconds just taking in all of the van. Forty-five seconds total from the time the camera stopped at the key compartment on the left wall until it scanned the area and returned. Plenty of time. She counted three more passes, just to be sure. Then once the camera started its swing to the right, she darted over to the key box.

  Her heart rate surged. Would she be able to gain access? Wiping the sweat from her palm, she pressed it against the ID pad. Had Sherman disabled this already? The red glowing light switched to green and she heard the lock pop on the box. Giddy with success, Taeya studied two rows of plastic key cards.

  Now why did she think they would have simple labels, like “Sherman’s Hummer”? All she saw was VIN numbers. Fine. She raked every card off its hook.

  On her dash back to the elevator, she scoped out the cars nestled behind the van. Sherman’s Hummer glistened black in the dim light, along with two government-issue sedans.

  She paused in her safety zone beneath the camera at the elevator to catch her breath. The Hummer was her first choice, its size alone a deciding factor. Plus it had the familiar scoop on the front, the hydrogen converter. No recharging. No gasoline. A heady wave of Pinot swirled in her brain. Taeya Sanchez, the outlaw, the renegade. On the ne
xt pass, she would duck behind the Winnebago-sized van. Then she would have plenty of time to find the right key.

  When the elevator dinged, the sound shot through her like an electric jolt. The doors whisked open and she whirled around to come face to face with Rick DeAngelo.

  “What the hell?” he growled between clenched teeth.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Doc looked like she’d just gotten busted with a couple of Mexicans in her trunk. Her mouth gaped open, her eyes blinked wide. She had on a surgical mask that cupped her chin, the strings still looped over her ears. Was she planning on doing a little surgery down here in the garage?

  Her hair hung in damp rings down the back of her lab coat. When she finally let out her breath, she smelled like a brewery. One quick look at her cart of supplies pretty much summed it up for Rick. She’d gotten canned.

  “So the all-powerful Doctor Sanchez is skulking away in the middle of the night,” Rick taunted.

  Her face puckered into that same ball-busting scowl he’d seen earlier. “I beg your pardon?”

  He pushed past her to get to the key box. “And she’s drunk on her ass!” Probably on the Pinot he’d bartered last month.

  “Hey!” She grabbed his sleeve. Her eyes flared, but instead of blathering some lame denial, she pointed a finger at the camera above.

  Rick snorted. “There’s no one watching the monitors.”

  Jerking his arm free, he strode over to the key box, but when he opened it, all the keys were missing.

  She straightened, pushing that damn chest of hers out, and jutted her chin. “I’m taking Sherman’s Hummer.”

  Like he was supposed to be impressed.

  He’d spotted her earlier in the staff dining room, sitting alone at a back table. Christ, she’d been drinking a cup of coffee. At ten o’clock at night! The rumor mill had buzzed all evening about her confrontation with Doctor Sherman in the staff meeting. Rick smiled as he imagined those dark Latina eyes boring into Sherman, calling him a Nazi.

  Evidently she hadn’t been too confident about stopping the genocide of green-code patients if she’d spend twenty-five credits on java. And all this time, Rick had thought she was just like every other bureaucrat, willing to wipe out civilization if it meant saving her own ass.

  So there she’d sat, just staring at her coffee, not drinking it. Hell, his credits didn’t even allow for luxuries like coffee. His pay grade bought three meals a day and a bed in the men’s dorm. If he’d chosen to wear the dorky hospital jumpsuit, he could get a clean one every other day from supplies. They refused to launder his jeans and shirts.

  Once she was gone, Rick had moseyed over to her table, and took a gander at her unfinished coffee. She’d left more than half. Christ, he’d traded a pair of Reeboks for a jar of that synthetic crap they called Koffy. It tasted like shit. Even the jellybean people did a better job on coffee flavor. And the caffeine was so over-processed it made him grind his teeth.

  He’d casually picked up her cup, and took a quick look around before he slugged it down in two gulps. The caffeine hit his stomach and coursed out through his veins. He sank into her chair, closed his eyes, and leaned back to enjoy the rush.

  Now here she was, her face locked in that frosty attitude, threatening to royally screw up his plans. She gripped her cart handle and stomped up the ramp to Sherman’s black beast.

  He should have known better than to tell her what was happening in D.C. Domineering women like her never believed anything you told them. And if they did, they always over-reacted. He’d bet dollars-to-donuts she knew someone who’d screwed up at Williamsport.

  At the car’s bumper, she spun on him. “You’ve got a lot of nerve insinuating that I’m taking the coward’s way out, leaving now. You’re doing the same thing!”

  “The hell I am. I’ve still got a job.”

  A roundhouse punch wouldn’t have done a better job. She stood there stunned, her eyelids fluttering as she tried to compute. Good. Somebody needed to bring her down a peg.

  “This is no longer a medical crisis, Doc,” he said. “We switched to survival mode at midnight. And I’m still very much in demand. The only difference now is I’ll be tracking down cappuccino machines and laptop batteries.”

  The perfect finishing uppercut popped into his head. “Hell, they may even give me your quarters.”

  He drew blood on that jab. With her head bowed, she fanned the key cards in her hands, getting them perfectly spaced like he used to do when he was stalling in poker. Any second now her shoulders would be quaking, her boo-hoos echoing in the garage.

  Why was he taking so much pleasure in ripping her apart? Normally, he poured on the charm, and not just to get some babe in bed. He felt women should be treated with care. Mostly because his old man had been such an asshole to his mother, slapping her around, cutting her down. Now he sounded just like that prick.

  Okay, fine. He’d help the Doc pack her supplies into the Hummer and get her on her way. No doubt she was heading up to the Long Island colony. Let her decide how to handle the theft of Sherman’s vehicle once she got there.

  He blew out a sigh as he pinched a thumb and finger on the bridge of his nose.

  “You need to take the Queensboro Bridge to the Long Island Expressway. Don’t even think about the tunnel. You’ll be at Brookhaven in time for—”

  She was shaking her head before he even finished.

  “I’m driving south.”

  What? No way! There was only one open route south and that was his, dammit. If she followed him to D.C., she’d be right on his tail when the feds finally put everything together.

  How long would it take him to locate the tracker on Sherman’s car? Could he even find it? The only reason he’d been able to remove the homing device from the van was because Jack, the local driver for D.C., had shown him exactly where it was. And it was a tricky son-of-a-bitch. Took him close to an hour, and that was with the right tools and a good halogen lamp.

  Rick checked his watch. Jack would be climbing into his own van right about now, making tracks west. Shit. Time to get moving.

  “While I admire the vast amount of time and effort you’ve put in to your little plan,” Rick said, “you may have overlooked one small detail. There’s a tracker somewhere on this.”

  He smacked his hand on the Hummer for emphasis.

  The Doc didn’t flinch like he’d hoped. She gently folded her fan of key cards into a tidy little deck then rubbed a finger along the smooth edge. Her top teeth raked across her bottom lip as she breathed her liquor breath all over him. Her eyes kind of roamed around in her head, looking for a place to light. Then she made a slow turn toward the van.

  Her face had that prudy, schoolteacher frown. “Looks like I’m riding with you to Washington.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “Either that,” she snipped, “or I go upstairs and find out why no one is watching the monitors.”

  Why, why, why had he let that slip about security? This was all wrong. He had planned for every contingency, routes to take, places he could hide out if he needed to, time charts for each day. But he’d never given this particular scenario a thought.

  “Do you have any idea where all these scrapes on the van came from? Did you think maybe I got stuck in the car wash?” He pointed out the long gash he’d gotten in Jersey City. “These are from gangs out on the highway. They’re just lurking out there, waiting for some dumb shlub to come along. They’ll ram your vehicle, try and run you off the road. Hell, I’ve had them set up blockades.”

  Actually, he hadn’t seen much activity out on the interstate for the last two or three weeks, but she didn’t know that.

  The bitch had the nerve to pat him on the cheek. “Then it’s a good thing you’re driving.”

  He tamped down his frustration knowing he was just wasting valuable time. And she was right. All she had to do was march back upstairs and his whole plan was busted.

  He snatched the stack of keys out of her hand. “Once
we get there, you’re on your own.”

  “Fine,” she snapped.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  What was she thinking? Taeya had just climbed into a vehicle with someone she didn’t know the first thing about, possibly a murderer. He never explained why the security guard was not watching the monitors. Was the man’s body stuffed in a utility closet somewhere?

  She knew for a fact these vans had weapons. Was Rick carrying one now? If he was, why hadn’t he shot her and left her at Level One?

  Well, that was pretty obvious. A dead body in the parking garage might raise questions, and Mr. DeAngelo didn’t seem the type to ride around with a corpse in his vehicle.

  The metal garage door shuddered open and Taeya gripped the arms of the passenger seat as though they were blasting off. Then she scolded herself for letting her nerve slip. She’d been in more alarming situations than this. What about the time in Shenyang, when that old man had attacked, ripping a hole in her bio-suit? Or the Williamsport tragedy? She’d gotten soft this past year at the Medical Center, but she was heading back into the trenches now.

  She took a slow, calming breath. This guy may be a jerk, but he didn’t seem like a cold-blooded killer. After all, he’d warned her about the tracking device in the other vehicles. He didn’t have to do that. In fact, it was kind of foolish of him. If he’d let her drive off in that Hummer, the search team would have come after her, giving Rick more time to make his escape.

  And he was definitely running, regardless of what he said. She was certain he had disabled the van’s tracker. He certainly didn’t want anyone witnessing his early morning departure with the hospital’s van.

  She was about to ask him about his choice of survival supplies when the garage door clanged to a stop and the van lurched left onto 29th Street. She strained to see past the headlights, but it was like looking into a cave. Smoke from all the fires blocked any moonlight that might have illuminated the smoldering city. Rick turned right on First Avenue, heading north. She knew both the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels were impassable. The Brooklyn Bridge was too undependable because of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. She’d heard the BQE compared to a rat maze more than once. The highway ran below street level in places, like a bob-sled run. Drivers caught down there were sitting ducks for an attack.