CHAPTER 16

From the helicopter, Major Mark Kellogg looked down on what was undoubtedly the most tragically stupid scene he’d ever witnessed.

And he’d been in San Antonio during the first days of the original outbreak eighteen months ago.

He’d seen stupid.

It was a bleak, gray, drizzly day, and the sky looked like an endless sheet of cooled lead. Below him was a line of vehicles that stretched off into the distance as far as he could see. There were a lot of cars that had broken down and were now abandoned. Most had been pushed off to the side of the road, into the grassy ditch to the right of the roadway. Silvered pools of water gathered in the runoff ditches. It was a three-lane highway, every inch of it covered by cars and trucks and anything else that would move. From a distance of three hundred feet, the vehicles all looked the same color. They all looked the same.

People were riding on the roofs of the cars and in the beds of trucks, but none of them seemed to speak or point or show any kind of emotion at all. The helicopter raced over their heads and only a few of them made any effort to look up. They seemed morose, waylaid by some awful sense of ennui, like a drenched marching band walking off the parade route.

Every few minutes, they flew over some activity, a fight or group of the infected attacking those stuck in their cars in the frozen stream of traffic.

What seemed so tragically stupid to Mark Kellogg was the herd mentality he saw in the refugees. He’d witnessed scenes just like it in San Antonio, when everyone there was trying their damnedest to get out of town ahead of the riots and the spreading infection. Below him, the freeway ran north–south. There were three northbound lanes and three southbound lanes, divided by a wide grassy median. All that traffic was in the northbound lanes. The southbound lanes were completely empty. All those people had to do was cross over and go the wrong way up the freeway, and they could cover the next thirty miles in a matter of minutes.

But not one of them was doing that.

What’s wrong with them, he thought. Why don’t they see what’s right in front of their faces?

We’re nothing but lemmings, he thought.

“What highway is this?” he said, calling forward to the pilot.

“This is Eighty-five, sir,” answered the pilot. “You look up ahead there, those skyscrapers in the distance, that’s Atlanta.”

Almost there, Kellogg thought. Stop off at the CDC, pick up the last member of the team, some civilian doctor with the CDC, then head up to Pennsylvania.

“What’s bugging you, Mark?”

Kellogg looked at the man on the jumpseat across from him, Colonel Jim Budlong, their team leader. He was a lean, fit-looking man in his early fifties, a career military doctor. His cheeks were deeply lined, and when he smiled, as he was doing now, the lines formed wide parentheses around his mouth. His blue eyes were thin slits beneath small blond eyebrows and a high, smooth, intelligent-looking forehead.

Kellogg managed a wan smile in return.

He said, “I was thinking about getting out of San Antonio.”

Budlong nodded.

“I remember when I finally got off base,” Kellogg said. He started to go on, but found he couldn’t. The words caught in his throat.

He’d been trapped inside the hospital at Ft. Sam Houston’s Brooke Army Medical Center for nearly fifty hours, the infected everywhere, the hallways covered in blood, dead bodies and those that only looked dead piled knee deep no matter where you turned. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he could still hear the screams echoing through the halls.

He let his head fall back against the headrest, then slowly turned to the open side door and looked down.

“Survivor’s guilt,” Budlong said. “Your job was to save lives, but hundreds of thousands died and you lived. It’s natural to feel the way you’re feeling now. I’d be worried about you if you didn’t feel this way.”

“It’s not survivor’s guilt,” Kellogg said.

Budlong waited. The helicopter blades thropped loudly against the air.

Kellogg just shook his head.

“Tell me,” Budlong said.

Kellogg took a deep breath. Let it out again. He said, “The image that’s burned into my mind is what I saw when I finally made it off base. You know the exit there at George Beach Avenue, over by the helipad?”

“Sure.”

“I came out there. I was in this car I’d found running in the parking lot, blood smeared all over the hood. I don’t know whose it was. When I finally got through the gate, I was right there at I-35, looking down at the traffic. Jim, there were cars everywhere. Every single one of them was jammed up in the outgoing lanes, nobody moving. Those people, they were being pulled out of their cars by the zombies coming out of the shopping centers along the freeway.”

He broke off there, his chin sagging to his chest.

“Mark, I was there when they stabilized the quarantine line. I know you had it bad.”

Kellogg shook his head.

“That’s not it, Jim. It wasn’t the…the people dying so much as why they died. That’s what got to me. You should have seen them. Everybody just lined up and took it. You know? They stood in line and waited for death to come to them.”

He was faltering again, struggling for the words.

“It’s the same thing down there. Look at them. They’re all packed in there in the northbound lanes. Not one of them has thought to cross over, go up the wrong way.”

They were old friends, he and Budlong. They went back to Kellogg’s first days at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, almost seven years ago. Budlong had just made full bird. He’d impressed Kellogg as a conscientious, careful officer, the kind who thrives in the military, and that impression hadn’t changed after all the years they’d known each other.

“I’m counting on that to help us,” Budlong said.

Kellogg looked at him, confused. “Counting on what?”

“Get yourself back on the clock, Mark.” The genial smile had left Budlong’s face. He was all military now.

Kellogg nodded. He straightened his spine against the back of the seat.

Budlong said, “I’m counting on your ability to think outside of the box to help us on this. You can see how bad it is down there. My orders are to find a way to stop this. I’m counting on you to help me with that. I need that unconventional thinking you’re so famous for to make something good happen.”

“Jim, I…”

He trailed off. Kellogg had been working on exactly that problem ever since the initial outbreak; how to stop the necrosis filovirus. He had the feeling he was standing at the foot of a cliff, looking up at a smooth stone wall that stretched to the sky and that he was expected to climb. The problem was that huge.

“The medical solution is—”

“The medical solution,” Budlong said, “may not be the only solution.”

That stopped Kellogg cold. What did that mean?

“You know what it means,” Budlong said. “My orders are to stop this plague any way we can. Maybe that doesn’t mean finding a cure.” He paused there, just for a moment. Then he said, “Think about it.”

Kellogg did, and at first the implications made him want to vomit. And then, something happened. The nausea brought on by his offended moral sensibilities dimmed.

Then flickered out, like a guttering candle flame.

The feeling was surprisingly liberating.

For the first time in months his brain felt alive with new ideas.

All options were on the table. A clean slate.

Neither man spoke. Kellogg looked away, out the open door. Off in the distance, the Atlanta skyline loomed.