WEBSITE SERVER NOT RESPONDING
CNN.com, however, was working. Just below the standard banner at the top was a large, sunlit picture of Times Square. Pax figured it had been taken near midday. The buildings were decked out in holiday fare, and the electronic billboards displayed mainly Christmas ads and messages. Which made the fact that the streets and sidewalks were empty all the more eerie.
Across the picture in red, semi-transparent capital letters was the word PANDEMIC.
“Holy shit,” Faber said.
Frances leaned toward the screen. “This hasn’t been updated in over a week.” She looked back at her boss. “How is that possible?”
“Check the CBC or PCN or Fox or MSNBC. All of them, if you have to.”
She did, but the few that were still up displayed similar messages to CNN’s.
For the first time since they’d been listening to the RCMP message, Darnell looked at Pax. “You were telling the truth.”
“I was.”
Silence.
“They’re all dead? Everyone?”
“Not everyone,” Pax said.
“But most?” Frances asked.
“If not yet, soon.”
The room grew quiet.
Darnell finally broke the silence. “What happens now?”
Before Pax could answer, Faber, barely able to control his emotions, said, “What happens now? Now we’re all going to die is what happens! Either we stay here and freeze to death, or go home and die from the flu.” He looked at Pax. “Right?”
“That’s one option,” Pax said. “But there is another.”
“What?” Faber asked. “Kill ourselves?”
“I mentioned it when I first told you what was going on.”
All three looked at him, dumbfounded for a moment. Frances was the first to snap out of it. “Vaccine,” she said. “You told us you had vaccine.”
“Yes.”
“Enough for everyone here?” she asked.
“More than enough.”
Darnell grew wary. “I’m sure you want something for it.”
“What does it matter what he wants?” Faber said. “There are more of us than them. We can just take it!”
“Unless you’re all trained in combat like my men, I’d advise against trying that,” Pax said.
“You surrendered your weapons the first day you were here,” Faber said.
“Not all of them,” Pax told him. “But we don’t need to get to that point. You see, we don’t want anything for the vaccine. We would like your help getting out of here, but you’ll get inoculated either way.”
“Bullshit,” Faber said.
“Not bullshit. The vaccine is not for sale. It’s for anyone who needs it.”
“How do we even know it will work?” Darnell asked.
“You won’t. Not until you’re exposed, at least.”
“I don’t know if anyone here will want to take that chance.”
“That’s your choice,” Pax said. “But I will say this. Without the vaccine you will catch the flu at some point.”
“I want it,” Frances said quickly.
After a brief hesitation, Faber said, “I’d like it, too.”
“Whoa, now this is cool,” Bobby Lion said, his voice echoing down the hallway.
“Where are you?” Tamara Costello yelled.
“Down here.”
She followed his voice to a large, black door that had been propped open. She stepped inside and immediately stopped.
She and Bobby had both seen plenty of high-tech rooms stuffed with equipment back when they’d both worked for the Prime Cable News network — PCN — she as a field reporter and Bobby as her cameraman. But this room blew away anyplace they had seen before.
It was two stories high, and at least a hundred feet wide in both directions. Taking up over half the floor space were rows of equipment racks mounted with computers and God only knew what else. Several long counters broken up into dozens of individual workstations filled the rest of the room. Perhaps the most impressive thing, however, was the gigantic digital screen that took up most of the wall the stations were facing.
“I take it this is it,” she said.
Bobby grinned. “Oh, yeah. This has got to be it.”
“So, can you get it to work?”
“Hope so. Need to poke around a bit.”
“Don’t let me keep you.”
With a giddy smile, he all but skipped down the aisle leading past the workstations and disappeared into the equipment racks.
Tamara wished she could help him, but knew she’d only be in the way. She’d become more tech savvy over the last year, but the nitty-gritty of the electronics world fell outside her realm of expertise. She wouldn’t have a clue about what was what here.
The room they had found was an NSA monitoring facility. Tamara had known several of them were in the DC area; that had always been the rumor in the news world. She and Bobby had first thought they’d find one at the main NSA facilities at Fort Meade. That didn’t turn out to be the case. But the trip was not in vain, as they were able to dig up information that had led them to this building, a mere 1.2 miles away.
It still felt odd to be roaming around a place where they would have been shot for doing so less than two weeks earlier. Her reporter’s mind couldn’t help wondering about all the secrets they could uncover — not only at the NSA but the Defense Department, the State Department, hell, even the White House. Someday, perhaps, she’d do just that. If for no other reason than to satisfy her own curiosity.
But now they had other work to do.
So far, she knew her and Bobby’s contributions to the Resistance’s efforts had done little to help anything. They had spent months seeding videos on the Internet in an attempt to open people’s eyes about what was coming, but more times than not, Project Eden had pulled the videos down nearly as fast as she and Bobby got them up. Their last attempt, what Matt Hamilton had referred to as their Worse Case video, had gone up when it became clear the virus was being released. Its objective was to help people survive, and it had actually remained up and viewable for several days. Tamara wanted to think it had helped a lot of people, but she knew that was probably not the case.
By that time, she and Bobby had moved to the safety of a beach house in North Carolina, both thinking they may be there for some time. But then the message from a man calling himself UN Secretary General Gustavo Di Sarsina took over the airwaves. The recorded message hadn’t even been playing for an hour before Tamara’s and Bobby’s satellite phone rang, and Matt gave them the assignment that had brought them north to the DC area.
After about forty-five minutes, Bobby popped out from behind the racks and asked, “Any chance of finding something to eat? I’m starving.”
“Are you going to be able to get it to work?”
“Not sure yet. But…I think so.”
Tamara pushed up from the workstation she’d appropriated and said, “I’ll go see what I can find.”
In a break room on the second floor, she scored a couple of burritos from a freezer and zapped them in the microwave. Drinks were a couple sodas out of a machine, courtesy of some change she found in a guy named Fitzer’s desk.
“Come and get it,” she said as she reentered the hub. “I found some—” The words died in her mouth, all thoughts of food momentarily forgotten.
On the wall across the room, the giant monitor had come alive.
5
THE FIRST SIGN of discord occurred the same night the message from the UN had started playing over the radio. It began innocently enough. Martina Gable and the other eight survivors were gathered in the restaurant attached to the Carriage Inn — the hotel they’d decided to turn into their group home.