AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Ah. Then I guess we won’t know how sick she was.”
Letty nodded. “We’ve now got three people watching another site up the hill, which we think they were using as a hospital before they evacuated. Doesn’t look like anybody’s inside. It’s possible that some of them made a run for it and got out before we could close the roads.”
“That’s not good,” one of the men said. To the woman, he said, “Marta, get your bag on and check the people in the bus.” And to Letty: “You better do something to find the people who got out.”
“We’re doing that now, DHS is. I’ve recommended that the state police and local cops set up checkpoints on all the roads out of Taos. We’ve got photos of two of them. Don’t know how that is going. We were told they left in a big American SUV, could be a Tahoe. If the cops encounter any resistance, they’ve been told to kill them.”
The man nodded: “Yes. If this is real. And it looks like it is, from what we could see at that lab.”
“The woman we shot…We don’t know what to do about the body. We’ve got a cop watching it from a distance, so nobody getsclose,” Letty said. “This other site, that might have been a hospital—what do we do about that? I mean, we got guns, but we don’t know what to do about the viruses.”
“If the body’s being watched from a distance, that’s about the best we can do for a while,” the man said. “We’ve got more people coming from the Los Alamos lab site, we’ll handle the body later. About this other site, the hospital site…”
“I can take you up to it…”
He said to the other man, “Danny, let’s get the stuff out and get up there.”
—
Five large duffelbags and three hard-sided cases were unloaded from the helicopter, and the men took one bag each, while the woman unzipped another, and began taking out what looked to Letty like the large dry-bags she’d used at a Minnesota canoe camp as a teenager.
The men picked up their bags and said, “Let’s go—lead on.”
“We should take our other car…”
They loaded into the SUV Letty had been driving, Letty looking back at the woman, who was mostly inside what looked like a white plastic suit. On the way, the men introduced themselves as David Underwood and Danny Moscowitz. Underwood was tall and gaunt, like a serious runner. Moscowitz was square and muscular, maybe a wrestler. Letty sketched in what they’d done since Los Alamos that morning, and Underwood said, “You’ve been busy. This car’s got…bullet holes.”
“Yeah.” She told them about the shoot-out. “A rough day. We’ve been scared. We don’t know what the heck we’re doing.”
“If what we’re being told is correct, being scared is the right reaction,” Underwood said. “Marta has actually worked in a hospital in Guinea with Marburg, but not this hybrid that people are talking about. I hope to hell the people in that RV are willing to talk. If they’ve got Marburg and nothing else, we can deal with it. If it’s this hybrid…then I don’t know.”
“My boss back in D.C. has suggested the best thing to do with the house, the hospital house, is throw a Molotov cocktail through a window and burn it to the ground.”
“If there’s nothing in there that we need, I’d agree,” Underwood said.
Moscowitz was looking up the mountainside to the left: “That would take out the virus, but that’s a hell of a mountainside. This place is drier than dust and the fire would run up there in two minutes. Those pine trees would go up like napalm.”
“You could burn down this whole goddamn forest, from Taos to the Colorado line, and it would be better than turning that hybrid loose,” Underwood said. “If there is a hybrid.”
They rode along for a little while, then Letty said, “I gotta remember to check if there’s a fire department.”
—
Lucas, Rae, andHawkins hadn’t seen anything moving around the house. Letty introduced Underwood and Moscowitz, and Underwood told Lucas, “We’ve got an extra-large for you. Self-contained air, and lets you breathe, but not for long.”
“There could be virus all over the suit,” Lucas said. “Are you going to spray me?”
“Yes. How’d you know about that?”
“We sprayed Packer up in Los Alamos.”
“Okay. You’ll have a half hour inside if you don’t get excited and start breathing too hard. Danny will be with you, taking samples and bagging them.”
“What will you be doing?” Lucas asked.
“I’ll be out here hiding behind a tree, in case one of these marshals needs instructions about whether to shoot you or not.”
Moscowitz deadpanned to Lucas: “Dr. Dave’s too high up the bureaucratic chain to risk. Of course, if we screw this up, hecouldget crucified.”
