Armed guards in full protective clothing stood on one side of a roped-off area. The luggage handlers, also dressed in protective clothing, off-loaded the luggage onto carts, would bring it over, and only after the armed guards gave the all-clear would passengers be allowed to step forward one at a time in an orderly fashion to collect their belongings.
In their delving into various airline servers, Celia and Mike had found documentation showing that most airlines had instituted secret emergency policies to deal with Kite infections on planes. Every plane now carried a kit, which included ten body bags, fifteen syringes, and fifteen potassium chloride boluses that each contained more than three times the lethal dose needed to kill even a very large person. The airlines’ instructions always included warnings to crew to use multiple stick tests on suspected passengers first, to confirm the infection. Then, after certain parameters were met and certain symptoms noted, to restrain and inject the passenger, quickly containing the body after death was confirmed.
Violent, Kite-infected patients on airplanes had already resulted in five known crashes around the world, also spreading the disease as infected survivors of the crashes—when there were any—infected rescue workers and first responders.
As her turn to claim her luggage came up, Celia stepped forward, grabbed her large duffle bag, and followed other passengers through the chilly drizzle toward the airport exit. Thirty minutes later, she had a cranky, older rental car that confounded her for a moment when she realized she’d never driven a right-hand drive vehicle before.
Shit.
Pulling her face mask down around her neck, she stalled as long as she could while consulting the map the rental car clerk had given her. Her hotel was only a few miles away.
I can handle this. I’m from Chicago, for fuck’s sake.
Then again, she didn’t own a car and rarely drove in Chicago because the apartment she shared with her sister and brother-in-law was a block from a train line that dropped her two blocks from work.
Maybe I should have rethought this plan.
As she navigated through the streets of Melbourne and desperately tried to remember not to panic when it felt like she was driving on the wrong side of the road, she realized the few pedestrians she spotted out and about that drizzly day were all wearing surgical face masks.
Post-Kite, medical supply companies were making a fortune in protective wear and hand sanitizer.
In the US, despite stringent containment procedures keeping Kite outbreaks very small and usually confined to less than five patients each, many parents weren’t even allowing their children to go to school anymore for fear of them being infected. Some employers were allowing employees to telecommute in areas and fields where that was still an option.
If the global first-world way of life wasn’t already screwed up enough by the massive economic depressions of 2076 and 2102, and a variety of flu epidemics and increasingly horrific natural disasters triggered by global warming, Kite seemed the final nail in the human race’s coffin.
Celia didn’t even have time to play tourist, too concerned with not killing herself or innocent motorists by driving in the wrong lanes. After white-knuckling it and missing two different turns, she found the hotel and pulled into their parking lot, relieved to be off the road. She remembered to pull her face mask up before grabbing her bags and heading into the lobby.
Two masked desk clerks nodded to her as she walked in.
I miss seeing smiles.
The thought hadn’t really hit Celia before now. In Chicago, while many people were using the masks indoors and in stores or on public transportation, it wasn’t uncommon to see people walking around on city streets without them, or with them down around their necks instead of covering their noses and mouths. It would seem that most people out walking on the streets of Chicago had little to smile about, though. There had been no confirmed cases of Kite in the Chicago area as of yet, although some larger cities on the east and west coasts had dealt with small outbreaks officials rapidly contained to prevent the disease from spreading to the general population.
Celia walked up to the desk, got checked in, and found her room without any problems. It was clean, the bed wasn’t a rock, and she’d have a free Wi-Fi connection.
After hooking up her tablet, laptop, and sat-phone to their chargers, she settled into a tubful of hot water to soak her aching muscles and plot her next steps. She couldn’t waste any time looking for Quong’s family and needed to speak with Mike as soon as possible. Although, if she was doing the time calculation correctly, it was still the middle of the night in Chicago.
They’d made contact with a friend of Mike’s, who lived outside of Melbourne. He’d agreed to help them if he could with local information and research.
Although she couldn’t blame the man for not opening up his home, where he, his wife, and two small children lived, to a stranger from the US who had passed through several international airports on her way to their country.
The official hypothesis for why Kite hadn’t spread like wildfire in the US yet was because of the way air travel had massively declined in recent years due to skyrocketing costs and terrorist threats. It was easy for airports to contain passengers testing positive before they infected an entire planeload of people. Also, Americans in general were very suspicious when it came to health threats after the last avian flu epidemic. When told to avoid gathering in public venues, they did.
Which benefitted companies like Amazon Global, who immediately cashed in by setting up grocery delivery services in several major urban centers.
The rich upper class, depending on their location and occupation, could literally lock themselves away in their homes and compounds and never leave for the duration of the Kite outbreak. As long as there was still a delivery system in place.
Unfortunately, that left countless people like Celia and Carole out in the cold. Neither made nearly enough to be considered anywhere close to rich.
Which was also why Celia still lived with her sister and brother-in-law, Daryl, in the apartment the sisters had inherited from their parents after their deaths. Pooling their money together, they were able to easily meet monthly expenses and live reasonably well compared to many of their friends.
At least I’m single and don’t have to worry about kids like Carole.
She did worry about her young niece and nephew, Emily and Roger, who were only six and seven.
What kind of world will they grow up in if we don’t stop this? Or will they grow up at all?
That reminded Celia why she’d dedicated herself to this search. This wasn’t just about giving her career a shot in the arm. If she really could find the doctor and put authorities onto him, maybe they had a chance to reverse-engineer the virus and save their freaking race.
She let out a sigh. That was the biggest reason why she wanted to do this, despite her inner fears.
She wanted something better for Emily and Roger. Hell, at this rate, she might never have kids of her own.
That, and the slightly selfish hope that advancing her career might boost her income enough that she could possibly have a chance at a brighter romantic future. An American woman either needed fantastic looks or money to hope to get a man in this ugly new world.
Right now, she had neither.
Men were particularly choosy in the Chicago area. They could well afford to be. One reason was the declining birthrate, as people couldn’t afford to have children. That followed several decades of ongoing conflicts with terrorist groups around the world, thinning the ranks of eligible bachelors through military enlistment due to pay enticements. The ratio in many areas was six eligible women for every one eligible man.
She’d given up trying to find a guy, her heart hardened after several men had courted and then rejected her for greener pastures, prettier or richer women.
Women who had guaranteed futures in more elite professions, or who came from families with money.
Or who had better looks than she d
id.
She was tired of being strung along by guys who ditched her when someone better came along.
She’d been lucky to scrape her way through community college, their parents’ life insurance policy helping pay her tuition when Carole insisted Celia get as good an education as she could.
Carole, who resembled their father, had been blessed with the looks in the family, and had a loving husband who made a living wage as a mechanic. Celia had inherited their mother’s pale skin, freckles, and red hair. She knew she wasn’t ugly but, in modern Chicago at least, being average in anything wasn’t good enough if you wanted to get ahead.
Celia had met Mike while working as a waitress just after graduation. When the older man told her about a job opening he had at CMM in his research department, she’d jumped at the chance. She’d hoped to get in somewhere as a teacher, or at least as a tutor, but any job that paid better than her waitressing gig was a welcomed blessing. And getting in as a researcher at CMM meant she might have a chance to make it even higher up the corporate ladder.
She hoped.
Celia dunked her head under the water and let the warmth sluice over her.
Twenty-six, single, and still no farther along than I was when I graduated four years ago.
She had to make this work.
Had to.
Chapter Six
After shaving her legs and washing her hair, Celia finished by showering off and, wrapped in a towel, pulled down the covers on the bed and grabbed the TV remote. As exhausted as she felt, her body was still wired from all the coffee she’d drank between Los Angeles and Melbourne. She’d napped a little on the longest leg of the flight from the US but wouldn’t call it sleeping.
Not when flying was even more stressful than ever before in the history of commercial aviation. She’d flown twice in the past, when their parents were still alive. But she’d been a kid then, and both instances were long before the outbreak of Kite. Also, this was the first time she’d ever been outside the US.
She remembered her parents telling them stories of how, when they were kids, their grandparents could easily book a flight and take off with the whole family, that same afternoon, if they wanted to. And they didn’t even need to save up for five years to do it.
Hell, she couldn’t have afforded this flight if the network wasn’t paying for it. There’d been a massive round of airline mergers twelve years earlier. Now with there only being three large airline conglomerates in the US who flew international flights, they controlled the prices and directed the rest of the industry. Less people flew, meaning tickets were more expensive. Eight years ago, the airlines had complained to regulators that they couldn’t afford to replace their aging fleets of planes, and had received loosened maintenance and repair regulations.
Meaning more accidents.
Meaning less people flew.
Meaning higher prices.
And then Kite hit, and even the people who could still afford to fly for pleasure didn’t want to be anywhere near an airport. Other than the uber-rich, it was now almost exclusively business and government passengers who flew. You rarely saw average families, unless it was an overseas trip that made any other mode of transportation useless or time-prohibitive.
Maybe I can find passage on a ship back to America instead of taking a plane. At least on a ship she could lock herself in a room. Pay to eat MREs and never leave her stateroom. Have pursers leave toilet paper and fresh towels outside her door and not make contact with another person until they docked again.
The first channel to come up when the set powered on showed that damn, smarmy televangelist, Reverend Silo.
Fark. He’s on over here, too.
She immediately changed the channel. She couldn’t stand listening to him much less watching him.
People are so gullible to fall for that bullshit.
The next channel was an international news network showing a video of a mob of raging Kiters rampaging through a crowded open-air market in Pakistan.
She quickly turned the channel again as her stomach rolled. She’d seen some pretty gruesome coverage of Kite already via CMM’s network satellite feeds, footage that hadn’t yet made it on the air in America, even though it was readily available over the Internet. Their network wonks had deemed it too unsettling for the public to view.
The TV ended up on a crowded rugby match. Which she thought was odd, until she realized it was a replay of a championship match from nearly a year earlier.
She left it on that channel. The guys were hot and hunky. Wasn’t like any organized sports were being played right now. At least in America they weren’t, large gatherings like that having been banned for the duration of the Kite pandemic.
Well, it wasn’t labeled a pandemic yet, officially. But that was just a matter of semantics.
Unless or until an effective vaccine was found, it was a pandemic, and only an idiot with their head in the sand thought otherwise.
Closing her eyes, she tried to draw in a few slow, deep breaths. When she next opened her eyes what felt like a few seconds later, it was dark outside and a news show played on the TV.
Feeling groggy and disoriented, she swore as she sat up and looked at her sat-phone to confirm the time. She’d been asleep for over six hours. It was after nine o’clock in the evening local time.
Well, at least Mike will be awake now.
She went back to the bathroom, pulled the towel off her long red hair, and ran a comb through it. It was still a little damp close to her scalp, but had dried wonky.
Dammit.
It took her a few minutes to comb her hair out. Finally, she gave up, put it into a braid, and grabbed some clothes. Then she started the room’s coffeemaker. She’d need it since her body wasn’t anywhere close to adapting to the time difference yet.
Mike picked up her Skype call immediately. “There you are.” He smiled at her through the webcam. “You get some sleep, girlie?” At sixty-seven, only a little grey dusted his close-cropped hair, and his ebony skin seemed immune from wrinkles. Despite looking decades younger than his age, she still thought of him as a father figure, not just a mentor or boss.
“Yeah. Too much, sorry. Did you find out anything else?”
“You are in luck, lady. I got a buddy over at CapOne Global who owed me a favor. He was able to work some digital voodoo and got me a back door into an Aussie bank. And guess what I found?”
“Just tell me, please.”
“Aww, you’re no fun.” He turned his laptop a little so he had a better angle at the camera. He leaned slightly in his wheelchair.
He never talked about how he ended up in it, and she got the distinct impression he didn’t want to, although she suspected maybe he’d been in the military at one point.
“A bunch of prepaid credit cards, refillable ones, were loaded up the same day all those Quongs arrived in Melbourne. And they’ve been used repeatedly ever since.”
“You don’t have a name attached to them?”
“No, because they’re prepaid. Filled from an account based in Geneva. And, anyway, I got you better than a name. I got you a location.”
She rooted through her bag for a notepad and pen. “Hold on.”
“Don’t be old school.” He grinned. “It’s all in your e-mail.”
“You could have just told me that.”
“Aww, then I would have missed the fun of seeing your face when I told you.”
“But no idea if they’re still using the same name or not?”
“Nope. Again, check your e-mail. Finally hacked into the passport system. Got duplicates of the credentials they used. You have copies of those in your e-mail, too.”
“How the hell did you get into South Korea’s passport system?” As far as she knew, the country was practically dark in terms of technology. Hell, more than half the country wasn’t inhabitable due to radiation and Kite, and only people too poor to find a way off the peninsula were still crammed in the southern end, trying to stay as far away
from the fallout as possible. The South Korean government was practically nonexistent at this point.
“Not South Korea, babe. Oz. They scan every passport that comes in. Been doing that for over fifty years now. After the series of bombings in 2087.
“Oh.” She was only twenty-six. Those were old history to her. “Okay. Anything else, or should I just check my e-mail?”
“You brought your tablet with you like I told you, right?”
“Yeah, but it’s wireless. Don’t know what kind of reception I’ll have if I end up in the middle of the Outback or something.”
“Well, the sat-phone they gave you has a sat-link hotspot on it. If you have to, you can use it for wireless.”
“Really?”
“Again, check your—”
“I got it. E-mail.” She scrubbed her face with her hands. “You’re a lifesaver, dude.”
“I know, I know.” His smile faded. “You be careful over there, okay? You have that rad counter I got you?”
She held it up. “Got it.” The small, clip-on device wasn’t much larger than a pedometer. She already knew Australia was more than safe, but just in case, she’d keep it with her.
“Keep that on you at all times. It’s not worth going where it’s hot just to get a story.”
“I don’t want just a story, Mike. I want to find this guy. He’s alive. I’d bet my life on it.”
“Considering that you are sort of betting your life on it, I hope you’re right. “Stay safe, sweetie.” He kissed his fingers and touched them to the screen.
She did the same. “I will, Mike. Thank you.”
“I’ll keep my laptop on at night, volume up. You hit the Skype connection if you need me, ’kay?”
“Will do.”
She ended the connection and sat back, her stomach growling over the smell of the fresh-brewed coffee now filling her room.
It didn’t taste exactly like what she was used to in the States, but she’d drink it and not complain.