Death's Awakening

Chapter Sixteen: Noah

His father let go of the door and it slammed against the back wall. He turned away, hiding his face. Noah's stomach twisted and he clenched his jaw.

"Dad?"

He placed his hand on his father's shoulder, expecting his dad to yell at him or tell him to go back upstairs.

Instead, he began to cry. His father's shoulders moved up and down as sobs shook his body. He sat down on the steps and laid his head in his hands.

"What's wrong?" Noah asked again. The last time he saw his father cry was at his mom's funeral. That was the only time, really. He moved beside his dad and sat down on the steps. "You've got to talk to me."

After a moment, his father finally wiped the tears from his face and sniffed. "I'm sorry, Noah," he said. "I did everything I could to keep you safe, but it's becoming more and more clear that none of us are safe. Not ever again."

His father sat up and slowly, painfully, turned toward him.

Noah's eyes grew wide, then filled with tears. His father's eyes were bloodshot, purple bruise-like bags under them. His skin had lost a lot of its color and his lips were dry and white.

"How long have you been sick?" he asked. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I don't know," he said. "I guess I kept hoping if I worked hard enough, I would find some kind of answer to this whole thing."

"What is this, Dad? It's not the flu, is it?"

"Is that what they're calling it on the news?"

Noah nodded. "They keep saying it's some kind of super-flu, but I don't think anyone's really buying that anymore."

His father ran his hands through his hair and sniffed again. "No, it's definitely not the flu. In fact, it's not like anything we've ever seen before," he said. He stood and motioned for Noah to follow him. "Most illnesses like this are either viral or bacterial. We can usually isolate it inside the blood and study it, but we can't seem to figure this one out."

Noah paused at the bottom of the stairs. He'd never seen his father's lab before. He'd never been allowed down here. The room was bright with stark white walls and metal countertops. There were all types of lab equipment from microscopes to glass vials and everything you would expect to see in a lab. But it was the containment cell along the back wall that caught his attention.

"What's that for?" he asked, pointing.

His father turned to look, then his shoulders slumped. "It's a quarantine cell," he said.

"Okay. So what's it doing in our house?"

"I had it installed as a precaution," he said. "In case I accidentally exposed myself to a deadly virus and needed to be quarantined."

His words hung in the air between them.

"I thought of using it as soon as my symptoms began yesterday," he said. "But the truth is that we're way past the point of quarantines helping to contain this disease. It spreads too quickly and by the time any symptoms appear, you've already exposed everyone around you."

"So what is it, then? If you can't find evidence of it inside the blood, what is it?"

His father looked up at him, his eyes full of fear and frustration. "That's exactly the problem," he said. "No one knows. We've got everyone looking at this. We're talking global cooperation here. No one has been able to identify the source of the sickness. We can see its effects on the body, but not the virus or bacteria itself. It's like a ghost in the system."

Noah shook his head. How could this be happening? For most of his life, he'd listened to his father's paranoid talk about a super-flu or virus that might someday wipe out millions—even billions—of people within a matter of months. If everything he was saying now was true, this was the modern-day equivalent of something like the Black Death. Or worse.

"So what, exactly, do you know?" Noah asked. He sat down, ready to listen.

His dad grabbed his laptop from the workspace and came to sit down beside him. He propped it open and logged in through the backdoor of the CDC's website. He worked fast, bringing up a series of files labeled "Unidentified Virus".

"Everything we know so far is in these files," he said. "These are classified and I'm not supposed to be showing them to you, but I need for you to understand what's going on."

He stopped to cough, leaning far away from Noah. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and Noah noticed a smear of blood as he tucked it back in his lab coat.

Noah felt short of breath. Coughing up blood couldn't be good. And with no official treatment, what exactly did that mean for his dad? Fear shot through him, but he swallowed it down. He didn't want to panic. His dad would figure this out.

"The disease is airborne," his father said. "This is one of the main reasons why it's simply too late for a quarantine to work. Anyone who has come close to someone who was infected or touched anything they've touched is probably already infected."

Noah wrinkled his forehead. His mind was spinning.

"But with the massive number of people they are saying are already sick, that would mean almost everyone on the planet has probably been exposed by now."

His father met his eyes and slowly nodded. The truth of what was really happening started to sink in and Noah's jaw dropped slightly. His breath hitched in his throat.

"God, Dad, what's going on?"

"It's really bad, Noah. Never in my worst nightmares had I envisioned something this deadly ever finding its way to us," he said.

"Deadly?" Noah asked. "So a lot of the people who are sick are actually dying from this?"

His father took in a deep breath, then let it out in a ragged sigh. "No, not a lot of them, Noah."

He paused and shook his head.

"All of them."

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