Chapter 18

"You can't keep us in here!" the woman beside Caroline screamed. She and a hundred other people were pressed against the glass of the security doors that led out of the airport terminal. A row of thirty police officers stood on the other side of the glass, wearing white masks over their noses and mouths. Each officer had an assault rifle ready.

"I have a family!" someone else shouted, beating a fist on the glass. "You're killing us by leaving us here!"

Caroline anxiously studied the officers' faces. Many were impassive, but a few were wide-eyed and shifty-footed with fear. Someone broke through the police ranks and came to the glass walls. It was a woman wearing a navy-blue coat that had CDC printed on the left side.

"Excuse me! Can everyone be quiet?" the woman announced loudly. Most of the people nearest the glass barrier grew silent.

"The man removed earlier today was confirmed infected with a contagious virus. It is fatal if contracted. The symptoms are fever, thirst, and dehydration. You may experience vomiting and diarrhea." The woman searched the faces of the crowd, likely already trying to gauge the symptoms of the people nearest her.

"We will be providing water and food and any assistance possible, but you must be patient. Once we are able to determine the extent of the situation, we can find a way to start releasing you to go home."

Caroline watched the woman speak softly to a policeman behind her, and his look of pity as he glanced at Caroline and the others filled her with dread. They were being quarantined. They weren't going to be allowed to leave. The second the people around her realized that, they were going to cause a riot. She had to get somewhere safe. Now.

She backed up, pushing her way through the crowds until she was free of the mass near the glass security doors. Struggling for air, she slumped down in an empty gate area near the glass windows facing the airport runways. All of the planes had been grounded, and the ground crews were gone. Caroline dug around in her backpack for her phone. She dialed her parents again. Her mother answered on the first ring.

"Honey! Thank God, what's the matter? Natalie said something about you being stuck at the airport?"

"Mom They aren't letting us go home." She tried to keep from crying. "It's bad. Really bad."

Her mother's panicked breathing wasn't a comfort. "Is it the virus from the news?"

"Yeah. A man behind me in line died today. He was infected. He coughed on me. I could be infected with it."

"Oh no," her mother said harshly. "You're not sick, you hear me? You were so ill as a baby when you came a month early, but we got through that. You'll get through this too."

"This isn't the flu, Mom. You don't survive this. The lady from the CDC was just here, and?"

"The CDC? Oh my God!" Her mother's tone turned shrill with panic.

"She said it was fatal. I don't think they have a cure. They aren't letting anyone leave our terminal. It's under quarantine. I don't know how much time I have left. I?"

"Caroline Marie Kelly, you won't die. When you were born prematurely, I held you in my arms, praying for you as you struggled to breathe and fought to live. I knew then that you were special and you were meant to do great things in life. Whatever this is, you will beat it."

Caroline closed her eyes, feeling more hopeless than ever. She talked to her mother for another hour, but then she heard the screams and shouts of an angry mob.

"Mom, I have to go. I love you." She hung up and crouched down.

Dozens of angry passengers were storming the shops in the airport terminal. Men and women fought over neck pillows, bags of chips, bottled water, magazines and expensive travel gear like headphones. Stunned, Caroline watched the violence, the men and women hurting each other. At this rate, they'd kill each other before the virus got them. The thought flitted through her mind on dark wings. No one would survive this.

Six long days later corpses were draped over uncomfortable chairs near airport gates. Bodies slumped against inside shops or restaurants. Dozens more were piled up in the restroom stalls. The thick, cloying smell of death was an invisible cloud in the terminal. Not a single body stirred, not a single chest rose and fell except hers. Caroline knew she had to be immune. She'd encountered the sick and dying hourly in the past week and hadn't been able to avoid their touch, their saliva or breath.

Now she lay alive, exhausted, inside a boarding ramp tunnel. She'd managed to break through the security door that morning, desperate to find one place where she could feel alone and breathe clean air. She used her backpack as a pillow, restlessly turning again and again as she struggled to sleep. She'd tried to read a few books and magazines, but that meant she had to wade through the bodies and feel those glassy, sightless eyes following her wherever she went to find something new to read. It wasn't worth it anymore. Nothing was.

I just want to fall asleep and never wake up.

She prayed nightly, to have her pain and fear taken away so she could just fade into nothing. Dying was easy for everyone but her, it seemed. Her body fought, drawing in breaths, refusing to give in, and she greeted the bleak winter dawn each morning with exhausted eyes and a weary, broken heart.

She was in that twilight place between wakefulness and sleep when suddenly she glimpsed the distant sway of a flashlight in the darkness.

"Anyone alive out there?" The voice seemed to come through a distant tunnel, and for an eternity Caroline lay there, unable to move.

"Anyone alive?" The call was closer now.

"Here!" The word struggled to escape her chapped lips. Her back spasmed from long hours on the hard floor. She was weak with hunger and dehydrationnot from Hydra-1 but because the food and water they had been promised had stopped arriving a full day ago after the last person expired in the terminal.

"Hello!" The call bounced off the walls of the jetway as she crawled on her hands and knees.

"He–here," she tried to shout. A beam swung her way, and she threw her hands up, covering her sensitive eyes in the dark.

"Hands down. Show your face!" the man demanded. He was wearing a hazmat suit, and his voice came through a speaker near his chin.

Caroline lowered her hands, showing him her face. She had no telltale flush, no fever No Hydra-1.

"Step this way," the man commanded.

She followed his voice, stepping around the bodies of passengers. Her gaze drifted south, and she saw a child wrapped in her mother's arms, both dead, their faces sunken and eyes cloudy. Something inside Caroline broke then. Like when she'd once knocked over a favorite vase and the pieces scattered across the ground, too small to ever be put back together again. She could only kneel among the shards, mourning the loss, the permanency of it.

"This way. You need to be tested." The man in the hazmat suit led her through the terminal to the security exit that had once been crowded with people. A few bodies littered the area, and a man was still pressed up against the glass, but he'd been dead for days, Caroline guessed. Beyond him, through the protection of the glass, she saw the woman from the CDC and a few police officers waiting nervously.

"One survivor confirmed," the man leading her reported. "No sign of infection."

"Take her to the quarantine zone," the CDC woman said.

They led her toward a pair of distant doors that had been locked and sealed at the far end of the terminal, past the security exit. She was taken into a room where she was stripped of her clothes and belongings and forced into a chemical bath designed to kill any viruses or bacteria on her skin.

Then she was transported to a research hospital and escorted to a hospital room. A nervous-looking nurse left her a pair of scrubs on the bed before dashing out the door. A man in a hazmat suit drew a blood sample, hair sample, and saliva sample before leaving her alone with a tray of food and a few bottles of water. She ate everything and drank every bottle, to the point where her stomach felt like it would burst. Then she collapsed back on the bed and sank into a sleep so deep that not even the nightmares could chase her.