[The next chapters are here! As always, many thanks to Corrupting Power for letting me play in his plague ridden sandbox. This would simply not have been possible without the help and inspiration of the other QT authors (in absolutely no particular order): The Licentious Laureate, OtterlyMindblowing, lokisluck, Julius Drake, Agathon, Discert, Ronan, BreakTheBar, SilverRyden, JustAGuy, 32inch, BirchesLoveBooks, and James MacCragges. Go read 'em!
-BtL]
Chapter Nineteen
September 17th, 2020
-o0o-
Colin slumped back in the office chair, staring at the ceiling. The last few weeks had drained him. His project to try to track survivors through utility records and drones had been getting an unexpected stress test in his own town. The Guard troops and emergency services were able to verify their results, letting them refine and observe in real time. The results were enough to crack the group that he had been assigned. He had just sent them all home after their update. He was in the middle of trying to write an email discussing their findings.
He had gotten stumped trying to come up with other words for 'catastrophe.'
The original numbers for the lethality for DuoHalo had been low. Where they had been expecting 20% of women and up to 70% of the men infected to die, it turned out that one out of every three infected women died. More than 9 out of every 10 men were keeling over without the vaccine. Colin's heart was pounding. There had been almost 30,000 high schoolers in Spokane a year before and now... now not a single one of them could be confirmed alive. Many of them seemed to have passed months prior, mostly during the weeks he had spent in the cabin before meeting Grace.
The overall quarantine and lockdown had kept things more or less stable. Enough of the population had taken it seriously that the death rates had
officially
been around a thousand a month, though there was plenty of suspicion that people were dying quietly at home without being noticed. The riots had changed both the numbers and the quiet. Colin's team had three drones that they were using to try and track houses which had AC running or where the lights were left on or off for more than 24 hours straight. The idea demanded attention to detail and each house had to be logged so that the next pass would have accurate data.
That data was grim. The first two weeks had been hot and dry, the roads even more deserted than usual except for military and police all wrapped up in hazmat gear no matter how they sweated. With martial law in effect people were convinced, sometimes roughly, to go home when they tried to come out for any reason at all. MREs, pasta, and rice were being delivered door to door by volunteers, the people dropping them off trying to get a head count and do welfare checks as they went. Most of them were either refugees from the fire or from local church groups. In a city the size of Spokane it took a full week just to go from the east to the west, even with a chunk of town destroyed by the fire. As the weather cooled down there would have been some relief if it hadn't been when the first wave of deaths had started.
Grace and Issa had seen this happen up close in Deer Park two months earlier. Neither of them were running around like they had been before, but the crews trying to deliver food were finding more and more houses that either stank of death or simply had no one answering the door. The Guard and law enforcement were trying to do welfare checks but other than collecting surviving orphans and marking houses where they found only bodies there was very little that anyone could do beyond turning out the lights as they left. Little kids who had survived losing their parents were being sent to the Gonzaga campus next to downtown. It had become a walled compound and the kids were allowed to be free out on the grass that would have had crowds of underclassmen roaming between classes in simpler times. The sick were being transported to one of two temporary hospitals. The one for patients who had a chance to recover was in Riverfront Park, next to the downtown district. The far larger camp for hospice level patients was on the west end of town where the small stadium had been demolished just before the lockdowns. The open area was next to a cemetery... not that it was big enough to handle the sheer volume of death.
Mass graves were being dug, each person identified and lowered in batches of 100. Victims from the field hospital were being joined by lines of trucks bringing in the dead from the door to door checks. Some of the local rabbis and priests were on site 24/7 and performing short services each time one of the trenches filled up before being buried using construction equipment. The moment that one of the drones had seen the scale of the misery there was the moment when Colin told everyone to go home. From the way that everyone there had a thousand yard stare he was already planning to tell them to take the next day off as well. The scale of it all was making it impossible to really process.
Colin wiped his eyes and went back to his email. Trying to keep it short and clinical he described the findings so far and attached the excel sheets that his team had been making to show the accuracy of their method. CC'ing some General Quinn over in Seattle who Colin had been told to 'keep in the loop' he sent it. Sending out another quick message to the rest of his team to tell them to take a long weekend was at least faster. The base intranet was working but the connections to the wider 'net were still cut off. Issa had been tasked with investigating a booming black market of fresh produce, DVDs, and BluRay disks that had appeared from somewhere and represented the only major distraction for pretty much everyone on the base.
Turning off his laptop, he stood with a groan as he stretched. His feet were healed enough for him to walk again as long as he stepped carefully. He just wanted to get home. Grace had been quiet through everything over the last few weeks, almost completely keeping to herself, while it turned out that Issa dealt with boredom and stress by becoming incredibly chatty and listening to heavy metal. Colin had overpaid for a pair of headphones which reduced the noise and helped his ongoing tinnitus... but also meant that Issa would be heard roaming their small on-base apartment singing along off key without the music to help figure out what the song was supposed to sound like. It was a bit adorable, if he was honest.
Walking out of the office he had been assigned he slowly shuffled out into the warm afternoon. It was the end of summer, the heat having finally broken a bit but not enough for any of the leaves to start turning or the rains to come. It was enough to make him suffer from cabin fever almost as much as the end of his time in the actual cabin at the start of summer. Thinking of that, and how it had led to being with Grace, dampened his mood even further. It seemed petty to worry about his relationship in the midst of everything but he couldn't help it. Grace had come to him to get dosed several times since his return, each time almost desperately clinging to him. Something was clearly on her mind but she didn't want to talk about it, denying that anything was wrong when anyone with eyes could see that she was in her own head.
Colin had tried to ask Issa what was wrong and she had talked to Grace on his behalf. Hell, they had spent almost an hour sitting outside with their heads together. But when Issa had come back up all she would say was to be patient with Grace and let her have time. He had tried to let that happen but the number of things that could be bothering her swirled through his head repeatedly. His real fear was that she was regretting pairing with him, in spite of being sure that she loved him. It wasn't logical... but his mind wouldn't stop spinning scenarios where she resented him or Hayes had ruined it all. Shaking his head he walked up to the apartment he shared with the other two.
As he was reaching out to open the door it swung open and he was confronted with a bulky woman wearing a charcoal gray suit who looked at him in surprise. "Oh, so it
is
you, Mr Sullivan. Have you been keeping out of trouble?"
One of the Agents Johnson that had interrogated him was standing in front of him. His brain locked up for a moment as he processed seeing 'Brick' again. "Uh... yes? Mostly? What are you doing here, Agent?"
She seemed gratified that he remembered her as she tucked a clipboard with some kind of densely packed legal document under her arm. She looked him up and down with an approving nod. "It's nice to see that you're getting in shape. I wasn't impressed with you when we met the first time, not that you care."
Blinking at the complete non sequitur to the rest of his day, Colin's mouth moved as he tried to find any words that would fit to reply to her. "I... ah... yeah. Ok. So are you here for me or....?"
Johnson gave a knowing grin and raised a thick eyebrow. "Why, Mr Sullivan, have you been involved in something that needs the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation?"
It took about 5 seconds of Colin gaping like a fish for her to let out a shockingly girlish giggle. "Just fucking with you Sullivan, my partner is wrapping up the 'care and instructions' portion with your ladies upstairs."
