Year One (Chronicles of The One #1)(39)

“Bob Barrett? He’s the anchor—the main guy,” Max said.

“Yeah, well, the main guy was skunk drunk, and pulls out a freaking gun.”

“Oh my God!” Lana turned around as far as she could. “What happened?”

“Well, like this.” Shifting, Eddie got comfortable for the story. “He’s waving the freaking gun around, spouting off a bunch of crap, threatens to shoot the hot chick. Gloom about the Doom, you know what I’m saying? It’s like watching a damn movie now, scary shit, but you can’t not watch, right? She lets him bullshit on—chick’s got balls—and it looks like maybe she’s going to talk him down, maybe. Then he puts the gun…” Eddie stuck his index finger under his scraggly beard. “And bam. Right on the air. Guy shoots half his face off right on TV.”

Snow began to drift down, slithering over the windshield. Max turned on the wipers.

“That ain’t the worst,” Eddie continued. “The hot chick—Arlys? She says to, you know, keep it rolling, to put the camera on her. I guess so people who can watch won’t be looking at the dead guy. She’s got blood on her face where it splattered like, but she starts talking. She’s talking about how she hasn’t been telling the whole truth, but now she will. How she has this—what do you call it—this source? And how it’s not like a billion dead, it’s more than two.”

“‘More than two’?” As it jumped, Lana pressed a fist to her heart. “But that can’t be true.”

“If you’da been watching her, you’d believe it. More than two, she said, and how there’s no vaccine coming because it—the Doom—it keeps, like, mutating. And how the guy who was president after the other guy died? He’s dead, too, and some woman—like, the agriculture woman—is president now. How they’re starting to round up people like, well, I gotta figure like us.”

Max’s eyes narrowed in the mirror. “What do you mean ‘like us’?”

“Who aren’t sick. Who aren’t getting sick. They’re rounding us up, taking us places to test us and shit. Whether or not we’re okay with it. Martial law and all that happy shit, man. Hell, I saw that for myself a couple times the last week or two. Freaking tanks heading east, big convoys of military trucks and shit. It’s why I started going west. Anyway, she said all that, and how it would probably be the last broadcast, ’cause they’d get shut down for her saying all this, letting it all out. And when she finished, the station went blank.

“I don’t know if the people still working shut it down or if the military or whatever did. But it was still off the air when I tried later. I thought about staying there, hiding out there, but I got antsy. Me and Joe got antsy and headed out early this morning. Started walking and walked into you guys.”

“Two billion people.” Lana’s voice came out in a shaky whisper. “How could anything kill so many so fast?”

“It’s global,” Max said flatly. “We’re global. People travel—or did—all over the world every day. It passes from person to person, and the next person spreads it wherever he goes. A handful of infected—maybe not knowing they’re sick—get on a plane to China or Rio or Kansas fucking City, and the rest of the passengers are exposed, the flight crew, the people at security, in the airport gift shops, bars. And they all spread it. It wouldn’t take long.”

“You’re saying … We’re saying,” Lana corrected, “that it’s going to keep spreading, keep killing until … Until there’s no one left but people like us. Immune.”

“That’s the word I couldn’t pull out,” Eddie said. “Immune. I have to figure I am because I was with Bud the whole time. Before he got sick and after. And where I took him, the hospital? A lot of sick people there. But I didn’t get sick. Yet.”

“From what I’ve read, and heard,” Max told him, “you start showing symptoms between twelve and twenty-four hours after exposure.”

“I guess I should feel good about that. I guess I do,” Eddie continued. “Even though it all sucks out loud.”

“What happens next?” Lana turned to Max. “You’re good at figuring out what happens next.”

“Not fiction but real this time.”

“You’re good at what happens next,” she repeated. “I haven’t been prepared for the worst. I imagined we’d spend a few weeks in the mountains until things got back to normal, or as normal as they could be. But now … There isn’t going to be anything resembling normal, and I need to know what to expect.”

“If it keeps on spreading, there could be two billion more,” Max said flatly. “It’s impossible to say how many will be left. Half the world population? A quarter? Ten percent? But it’s possible to speculate that, as we’ve already seen beginning, the infrastructure will collapse. Communications, power, roads. Medical facilities overrun with virus patients will struggle to treat them, and other patients. People with injuries, with cancer or other conditions. More of the looting and the killings we saw ourselves in New York. The government collapses or reforms into something we don’t know.”

He took a hand off the wheel to squeeze hers. “Getting out of the city was the right call. Cities will fall first. More people spreading the virus, more people looting or reverting to violence. More infrastructure to collapse. More people to panic, the military coming in to try to keep order. And that chain of command frays as those in authority fall to the virus.”