Isolation (Book 1): Shut In Page 28

  In fact, he seemed to recall reading a story about trash starting to pile up in Kansas City, escalating sanitation concerns and giving rise to the very real fear of attracting vermin that would spread Zolos, and perhaps even less common diseases that would further exacerbate the problem. The reason for the trash pileup wasn't fear on the part of sanitation employees when it came to doing their rounds, but an actual outbreak among them that spread to most of the workforce within days.

  Needless to say, the garbage trucks stopped going out after that. Nick had been having his kids toss the messiest of the garbage out the kitchen window, while he'd been collecting his own garbage at the bottom of the fire escape to bury.

  Whatever the scavengers didn't get at, that is; he just hoped he wasn't drawing vermin to the apartment, now that he thought of it.

  He caught hints of light around the doorframe as Ricky returned. “Dad? I got the flashlight, and the power's still out.”

  “Yeah, I don't think we should expect it to come back anytime soon,” Nick called back. He wondered if the power plant employees had gotten sick or if they were staying home to avoid the risk. Either way, until Zolos stopped being a threat electricity was probably a thing of a past.

  If he wanted to way, way indulge his hindsight, he supposed he could've purchased solar panels. Not that he would've been able to install them on the apartment roof.

  “Not ever?” his son asked, sounding fearful but trying to hide it. “It's really dark, even with the flashlight.

  “I know, kiddo,” he replied grimly. “But you should get out the other flashlights and try to find the box of candles in the kitchen cupboard, because we'll probably need them.”

  “Okay.”

  Nick had a sudden thought. “Wait a sec!” he called anxiously. “Before that, actually as quickly as you can, you need to fill up the bathtub.”

  There was a long pause. “You want me to take a bath in the middle of the night? In the dark?” He could just imagine the look his son was giving him as he said that.

  “No!” Nick said, more sharply than he'd meant to. He took a hasty breath. “Listen, Ricky, this is important. You need to fill the tub right up to the top, and you need to make sure you and Tallie don't even touch that water. You'll need to use it for drinking and flushing the toilet.”

  “You want us to drink from the bathtub?” Ricky sounded grossed out.

  “You'll be grateful for it when there's no more water in the pipes.”

  There was another pause as his son mulled that over. “Why would the electricity going out make the water stop? The garbage stopping didn't.”

  They didn't have time for this, but his son would work quicker if he understood the urgency. “The water still works for now because it flows on water pressure. But it needs electricity to run the pumps, so if the electricity stays off the water will stop too. Probably in a few hours. We need to get as much water as we can before then.”

  There was no response. “Ricky, I'm going to wipe down all the empty water containers you've given me so they're clean for you to use. In the meantime you need to fill every other container you can find. Even yours and Tallie's clothes hampers, and that stack of plastic bins from the move in my bedroom closet. Then once you're done plug the sinks and fill them up, too.”

  “That's a ton of water,” his son complained. “Do we really need that much?”

  “Even more than that, probably. If we run out we'll have to go outside and find more, and any water we find might be infected by Zolos.” Actually, this was the first time he'd considered that the water in the pipes might be infected, too.

  Holy cow, that was a terrifying thought.

  “Okay, fine, I'll fill them up,” Ricky called, loud enough that a couple seconds later Nick heard Tallie crying in her room, calling for her mommy in the dark.

  “Get your sister to help you!” he yelled through the door. That should calm her down by keeping her occupied. He hoped. “And be sure she knows not to touch the water in the bathtub!”

  He heard the hollow sound of water running in the tub, and the murmur of his daughter's sleepy voice as Ricky impatiently explained what was going on in full big brother mode. As Nick listened to them, he wracked his brain for anything else that they needed to do sooner rather than later now that the power was out.

  The food in the fridge and freezer would've been a concern, if there'd been much left. Nick hadn't deliberately set out to eat it all up fearing something like this might happen, it had just ended up being how things went. Mostly because the supplies he'd grabbed from the store were less appetizing than what he could make from the fridge.

  Now, however, he was grateful that the only things left in there were a few packs of frozen vegetables, part of an old stick of butter, condiments, and things like that. He'd have to see if he could talk Ricky and Tallie into eating that stuff before it went bad.

  Nick left his kids busy storing water and pulled up the flashlight on his phone. He was about to start cleaning his empty water containers with its light, then realized that he now had no way to charge the device and the flashlight feature drained the batteries ridiculously fast.

  Crap.

  He might be able to figure out some way to charge it in the future, but until then he had to save it to communicate with Ellie, and in the most dire of emergencies so he could try to call for help from the overworked authorities. So he kept the flashlight on just long enough to dig through his camping supplies for a battery powered lantern, then turned his phone off.

  The next hour was a frantic flurry of shouting instructions through the door as his kids worked to store as much water as possible. Judging by the laughter and shouting he heard from them once or twice, he had the feeling they might've been goofing off. But under the circumstances he vastly preferred that to them panicking.

  As best Ricky could judge, the water pressure stayed steady during the entire time. But that might've been because it was the middle of the night, and other people might not have realized the problem and rushed to fill their own containers yet.

  He had a feeling that in the morning, as everyone started to wake up and use the plumbing, the water pressure would plummet.

  Speaking of which . . . “Ricky, Tallie?” he called through the door.

  His daughter was too afraid to go back to her bed in the dark, so she'd curled up outside his office's door to talk to him. She'd begged him twice to let her come in so they could cuddle, nearly breaking his heart when he had to explain to the five-year-old yet again why he had to stay quarantined.

  He heard a yawn loud enough to be audible through the door. “Ricky went back to sleep, I think,” she reported.

  “Well if you want to bring your blankets and pillow and sleep in the hall, you can,” he told her. “But before you do, you should use the bathroom while there's still water pressure. It's going to be harder when you have to manually flush it with water.”

  “What?” Tallie said blankly.

  He bit back a sigh. “Go potty, even if you don't think you have to. The water might be off when you wake up in the morning.”

  Another noisy yawn. “Okay.” The faint light around the door frame faded as she took the flashlight her brother had left her down the hall. He heard the door shut, leaving him in darkness, and with a sigh felt his way over to his makeshift bed and wrapped himself in a blanket.

  He knew things could be far worse, and he was glad they weren't, but even so everything looked so bleak right now it was hard not to despair. He wasn't sure how he was going to talk his kids through everything they needed to do to survive when there was no power.

  How would they cook food? Did they have enough that didn't require preparation, stuff in cans or otherwise processed, that his kids could eat it cold, even if they complained? What about hygiene, and water when even the large store they'd prepared ran out?

  Nick mopped sweat off his face and huddled deeper in the blankets, wondering why he'd left the window open since the fan wasn't working
anymore. He hadn't gone to all that effort to repair the broken one with cardboard and duct tape just to shiver in the cold and sweat in the heat of his blanket because he couldn't be bothered to shut it.

  He heard the swishing noise of cloth being dragged from outside, then the rustles as Tallie curled up in her own blanket. He could imagine her burrowing so deep in it that only a few locks of her dark brown hair showed.

  “Night Daddy, love you,” she murmured sleepily.

  “Night sweetie girl, love you,” he said back, wiping his face again. Then he huddled into his own blankets and allowed himself to give in to exhaustion, sinking down into restless sleep again.

  Chapter Seventeen: Colorado Springs

  Nick felt better when he woke up.

  His bedding was soaked with sweat, but the midmorning warm air coming through the window had done wonders, and he felt comfortable again. In fact, he'd slept longer than he had for a long time; exhaustion had finally caught up with him, maybe.

  He climbed out of his sodden blankets, wondering if he should risk wasting water to try to clean them, and stumbled over to the door. “How's it going, kiddos?”

  Tallie's voice drifted back to him, from the kitchen he thought. “We're eating chips and candy for breakfast!” He heard Ricky furiously shushing her.

  Nick slapped his forehead. “Richard Berthold Statton . . .”

  His son's voice came back, tone whiny. “What was I supposed to do? The microwave's not working! Neither is the stove!”

  He immediately forgot about what his kids were eating. “You're not supposed to use the stove without me or your mom supervising you.”

  “Well what was I supposed to do?” Ricky demanded again, sounding sullen. “Mom is who knows where, and you're stuck in your office! How am I supposed to cook anything?”

  “You'll just have to eat food cold, son.” Nick had a sudden thought and opened the door a crack, leaning forward to sniff the air out in the hallway. “Ricky, did you leave the stove on when you discovered it doesn't work?” He didn't smell gas, but that was a real worry.

  “No, I turned it off.” Ricky poked his head out into the hallway, hair disheveled and still wearing his pajamas.

  Nick hastily yanked his head back into his office and shut the door, worried about spreading germs into the rest of the apartment. “If you really need to, you could try turning the stove on and lighting it with matches. You have to be very careful, though, and I'll need to talk you through it. But first I need you to turn the stove on again, all the way, and then sniff near it and see if you smell gas. Then turn it off right away.”

  “Okay.” An agonizing minute or two passed before he heard his son's voice again. “I don't smell anything.”

  So the gas was off, too. Scrud. “You turned it off again?” he pressed. If it suddenly came back on he didn't want to blow up the entire building.

  “Yeah, I turned it off,” Ricky said impatiently.

  “Okay, what about the water? Is there still pressure, or is it off too?”

  “It's off,” his son replied immediately. “Tallie couldn't wash her hands when she went potty, so I had her use some of that hand sanitizer stuff we use for road trips.”

  “Okay, good job. Go ahead and turn on the sink and keep it on.”

  “But with the stove you said-”

  “If the gas turned back on we could all die if the stove is on,” Nick explained patiently. “But if the water comes back on we'll want to know right away, and we will if we have the tap on.”

  “Oh, okay.” Ricky's voice faded away as he spoke, probably back to his breakfast of junk food.

  “And open a can of soup to share for breakfast!” He shouted after the eight-year-old. There was no response; he needed to have a sit down with his son about communicating, which was even more important under the current circumstances.

  Sighing, Nick scrubbed a hand through his hair, still damp from sweat, and shambled over to the window, staring out at the city. It had been oddly quiet for days now, but now he actually saw people out and about. They were dressed up in masks and gloves, moving cautiously to avoid touching anything, and giving everyone around them a wide berth. Most were carrying containers of some kind, obviously searching for sources of water.

  They were probably among those who'd tried to turn on the tap after waking up in the morning, only to discover the pressure was gone and they hadn't taken any precautions to have water stored for an emergency. He was glad he'd thought of it, and had pounded his head against the wall last night talking his children through getting as much water as possible.

  They'd need it in the coming weeks.

  Would this Zolos crisis ever end? How had the plagues of the past finally died out? Nick seriously hoped it wasn't from literally dying out, as in anyone capable of carrying the disease succumbed to it and everyone else developed an immunity. That would spell the deaths of billions of people before things settled down.

  In spite of the need to preserve his phone's battery, he risked turning it on, relieved to find he still had a signal. Unfortunately, Ellie's phone was still going straight to voicemail with the box full as well. He cursed quietly to himself; his ex-wife miraculously showing up to whisk the kids away to her house would solve a lot of problems right now.

  He got online, searching for any local news about the power outage, and ideally an official response about when it would be back up. There was none, which he supposed wasn't surprising, although he did find mentions on the city's website about the water being out. There were even instructions for how to safely draw water from the Missouri River and purify it to avoid exposure to waterborne Zolos. Including the step by step process for building a purifier using crushed charcoal and sand, then boiling that purified water as a last precaution.

  All valuable instructions, which Nick resolved to write down for future reference after he turned off his phone.

  Before doing that, though, he searched for news of any breakthroughs in the effort to develop a vaccine or some other cure. There was no good news he could find there, although he saw plenty of bad news about just about everything else.

  KC wasn't the only place where utilities were shutting down, and lack of water especially was forcing people to head outside, further exacerbating the spread of Zolos. The most pessimistic estimates had as much as a third of the population of the United States now infected or already dead, with that number projected to climb drastically as people ran out of resources and were forced to leave the safety of their homes in search of them.

  There were plenty of those resources, since so many people dying so quickly wasn't exactly putting a strain on food supplies that would otherwise be critical at this point. The main problem was that food and other necessities were often stockpiled in warehouses somewhere, and truckers weren't available to distribute them. Federal emergency services was doing their best to gather the available resources into safe, sanitary hubs where people could go get them, but their efforts were hitting one roadblock after another as their people, more exposed to the infected than anyone else, fell ill in alarming numbers.

  Including the nation's Armed Forces and law enforcement officers, stymying efforts to cut down on robbery and looting as desperate people took what they needed.

  Nick felt his nose starting to run and shut off his phone so he could absently wipe it. He'd always suffered allergies in the spring and fall, and the last few days had been especially rough since he'd been keeping the window open with the fan on to hopefully blow any Zolos from the intruders outside, if they'd even been carrying it. Letting all that pollen and other junk in where it could irritate his sinuses.

  He almost had a heart attack when his hand came away from his nose bloody.

  For a moment he just stared at it in blank disbelief, pulse pounding in his ears. No. No no no. This couldn't be happening. This wasn't happening. It was just a nosebleed from dry air. He got them all the time.

  Even though Nick knew the symptoms of Zolos by heart at this poin
t, he still fumbled to turn his phone back on to check the CDC website: dizziness, chills, excessive sweating-

  Holy cow! His eyes darted frantically to his blankets, still damp and stinking with his sweat, then back to the screen.

  -bleeding from all orifices, debilitating weakness, nausea and cramping, finally severe internal bleeding leading to death.

  Nick scrambled for the small mirror from the camping supplies, which he'd been planning to use when he got around to shaving. With it he carefully checked his eyes, mouth, ears, and lower orifices. Then he did a few exploratory jumping jacks and held his gut, trying to feel any discomfort there. His stomach churned and he felt like he was going to be sick, but that was from dread, not any actual problems.

  Wasn't it?

  No, of course it was. He didn't and hadn't felt dizzy, he'd stopped sweating as soon as he got out from beneath the thick blankets he'd been huddling in to ward off the night's chill, and it wasn't as if he hadn't sweated under heavy blankets once it got warm before. As for chills, he'd been chilly when he climbed into bed because he'd been cold, but then he warmed up and was fine.

  He just had a nosebleed, from dry air probably . . . all of his other orifices were fine. He also felt strong as a horse, no hint of weakness whatsoever. No cramping, no nausea other than from that spike of fear over whether he might be sick, which was fading as he calmed down.

  Whew. He'd almost driven himself into a panic over allergies.

  There! It said right on the website that by the bleeding from the orifices stage the chills and sweating would be severe, and the illness would swiftly progress to debilitating weakness and the other symptoms. He should monitor himself over the next few hours, see what was up, but most likely everything was fine.

  Grabbing some toilet paper to wad up and stuff into his nose, he headed to the door to call through instructions for what his kids needed to get done that day. Then he needed to figure out how to crap in a bucket, since he was finally reaching the point where he couldn't put the unpleasant experience off any longer. And then he'd want to think about digging another hole for waste.