Was anyone alive to take care of you people? Dianne choked down more water, fighting the urge to vomit again as she closed the door. She checked several more rooms along the hall, finding similar scenes in each of them. In some the patients had been in their beds when they died. In others the doors had been jammed from the inside, but she could see through the window on the door that a few patients had crawled out of their beds and died near the door, either trying to keep it closed to keep out the looters or because they had been trying to escape.
The more rooms Dianne checked the more she grew used to the sights and smells and by the time she reached the end of the hall she was convinced she knew what had happened. “They couldn’t get out of the city after the fires broke out, so they hunkered down here. Probably their best move at the time but they couldn’t have accounted for the looters. A few cops happened to show up and fought with the looters but it looks like most everyone involved died. With no doctors or nurses to take care of the patients they died too.” Dianne tried not to think about what life must have been like for the staff and patients at the facility in the final few days and focused instead on the job at hand.
“Jason’s still alive and still needs help. I need to see if I can find anything that the looters didn’t manage to carry off before all of this went down.” Dianne continued talking to herself as she headed back to the nurses station. She searched through the notebooks, folders and paperwork there until she found a laminated sheet that had a list of floor and room numbers along with some names that looked familiar. After rolling up her sleeve and comparing some of what was listed on the sheet to the names of the medications Dianne had written on her arm she headed back towards the stairwell, ready to ascend to the next floor. She didn’t know if what someone had written in the logbook about running out of medications applied to what she was looking for but she finally had a good lead on where to potentially find them.
Dianne stopped on the landing of the staircase briefly, taking a moment to savor the relatively fresh air and try to clear her mind of the images she had seen on the second floor. She looked out into the city, finding a measure of peace in the stillness of the devastation when a hint of movement caught her eye. She looked down the hill, near where she had last seen the hatchback, and saw—passing behind a cluster of buildings—the glint of red, silver and green. She froze in place as she watched the area until she finally located the source of the movement.
Three vehicles stopped along the street behind the hatchback and a dozen people got out of the SUV and two sedans. Most of them milled around while two went up to the hatchback. Dianne scrambled to get her rifle up to her shoulder and she focused her scope on the hatchback. Two men—the same two that had been chasing her—stood near the hatchback talking to a woman and a man who had arrived in the new vehicles.
Their conversation was animated and one of the men from the hatchback pointed at the LTAC facility. The other three turned and looked at it, nodding in some sort of agreement. The pairs broke up after that and the entire group of people began moving through the city, fanning out as they approached the building.
“Oh, come on!” Dianne shook her head in frustration, shouting at no one in particular. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
Chapter 15
Somewhere in Northern Virginia
Rick peeked out from beneath the overpass, grimacing at the dark clouds still roiling overhead. “When on earth is this going to let up?” He sighed, walked back over to the car and sat down on the hood next to Jane. Dr. Evans was sprawled out on a small rise in the concrete, a rolled-up jacket tucked under his head as he tried to catch a few minutes of sleep. Thunder boomed, rain crashed and hail thudded against the overpass above, but the trio and their vehicle were safe and dry under its protection.
After crossing over the Ohio River they had driven through the night and the rest of the next day, stopping only for a few hours in the evening to rest and warm up some food over a fire. The rest of the night was spent driving again as they took turns making their way across wide highways and single-lane backwoods roads. The storm had rolled in from the west in the late morning, as they were crossing over the state line between West Virginia and Virginia.
Rick took charge of the driving at that point, keeping them going at a steady clip through the rain and lighting until the hail started to get dense and forceful enough to force them to pull over and find shelter. The car’s rooftop solar panels were designed to stand up to the harshest weather conditions but Rick knew full well that they wouldn’t be able to last long in a hailstorm no matter how well they were designed.
Finding the overpass had been a stroke of luck given that none of the group wanted to travel any farther into a city than necessary. With nothing around except for open fields and winding highways, the spot provided safety and security while simultaneously ensuring that they couldn’t easily be snuck up on.
The storm continued raging on for a full hour before it began to die down. As soon as the hail gave way to rain Rick was back behind the wheel, ready to get them going again. Jane and Dr. Evans were less enthusiastic about resuming their trip given that they had spent more hours than they wanted to think about crammed together in what felt like a shoebox on wheels.
“Have I mentioned,” Jane said as she squirmed in the back seat. “That I hate this car? Because I do. I really do.”
“I think you’ve brought it up once or twice, yeah.” Rick laughed as he pulled out from beneath the overpass and accelerated along the highway. “Look on the bright side, though. We’re almost to Washington. Once we get there we’ll be out of the car. Of course we’ll be digging through what very well may be the rubble of the USA’s foremost spy agency trying to find a way into their systems to get the access key that will let us issue a shutdown command to the most sophisticated cyberweapon ever developed.”
“I’d rather stay in the car, if that’s an option.” Dr. Evans deadpanned his response and Jane couldn’t help but shake her head and chuckle.
“Boy, you two really know how to show a girl a good time. Do we get to have more gunfights, too?”
Rick shook his head, his response more serious than not. “I sure hope not. We’ve barely got any firepower.”
“Rick?” Dr. Evans was leaning forward, staring intently at the sky through the windshield. “I may be hallucinating. Can you look up at the sky and tell me what you see?”
Rick lifted his foot off the accelerator and leaned forward as well. He scanned the sky for a moment, not immediately seeing what Dr. Evans was talking about. When he did, though, he gasped in shock. “Is that…”
“A plane? Yes. Yes it is. A Russian plane. A Tupolev Tu-95, if I’m not terribly mistaken.”
“Dr. Evans?” Rick brought the car to a halt and they all stared at the silver plane soaring through the sky. “Why is there a Russian plane flying over Washington?”
“It’s more than a Russian plane. It’s actually a bomber. A long-range bomber.”
“Sweet mother of mercy.” Rick whispered, swallowing hard to push down the lump in his throat. “How do you know?”
“I used to be obsessed with model aircraft. The Bear—that’s the ninety-five’s NATO reporting name—is an older bomber, originally flown in the fifties.”
“Is it… going down?” Jane watched the aircraft tilt slightly to the side as it continue heading from east to west, somehow growing larger the farther it traveled.
“Holy crap, yes it is.” The tires of the car squealed in protest as Rick pulled the vehicle around to head west and follow the plane’s path.
“You want to chase it?!” Jane shouted from the back seat. “It’s crashing!”
“Maybe!” Rick replied, dividing his attention between the road and the plane. “Or maybe they’re trying to land it nearby! It’s people, though, possibly from a government agency.”