Pandemic: The Beginning (Pandemic Book One) Read online

  Pandemic: The Beginning

  Pandemic Book One

  Christine Kersey

  Contents

  Note to Readers

  Book Description

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Books by Christine Kersey

  About the Author

  Note to Readers

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  Book Description

  If you like The Walking Dead but don’t like zombies, you’ll love PANDEMIC

  When a deadly flu sweeps the globe, the Bronson family hunkers down to wait it out. But when society collapses, surviving neighbors band together, giving them hope. That hope is shattered, however, when a rogue element forms, making rules the Bronsons aren’t willing to follow.

  When the group takes over the neighborhood, they demand the Bronsons join or face deadly consequences. With their lives at stake, they must make a decision: give in or take a stand.

  Chapter One

  Jessica

  The first sign that the world was about to come to an end was when Jessica’s teenaged children informed her that Prom had been cancelled.

  “Cancelled?” Jessica asked as she handed out bag lunches. “What on earth for?”

  “Too many kids have the flu,” Dylan, her fourteen-year-old said.

  Jessica looked at Kayla for confirmation.

  Sixteen and about to attend her first Prom, Kayla frowned. “It sucks.”

  “That’s because you won’t be able to make out with Ethan now.” Dylan made kissing noises to emphasize his point.

  Kayla swatted at him. “Stop it.”

  “Both of you stop it,” Jessica said. “You’re going to make me late for work.” She loved her job as a dental hygienist, but now that she thought about it, a lot of patients had cancelled due to illness. Maybe her family should stay home for a day or two. Let whatever bug that was going around pass them by. None of them could afford to get sick.

  Then she thought about Matt, her husband. He’d gone to work already. He was a software developer and Jessica knew he’d been stressed with all the work he had on his plate. Maybe she could convince him to work from home—something he did from time to time.

  Sighing, she set her purse on the counter. “Okay. Family meeting.”

  “Wait,” Dylan said. “We can’t have a family meeting without Dad.”

  “I know, but this is different. He’s not here and this seems like kind of an emergency.”

  “An emergency that there’s no Prom?” Dylan rolled his eyes.

  “It is an emergency,” Kayla said.

  “No,” Jessica said. “Not because of Prom. Because of this flu. I’ve heard a few news reports that it’s pretty nasty and it sounds like it’s really going around. Maybe…” Was this really the best idea? “Maybe we should all kind of hunker down for a few days until it’s—”

  “Yes!” Dylan said, cutting Jessica off. “No school! Woo hoo!”

  Kayla looked less certain. “What about, you know, missing all the stuff my teachers will be teaching?”

  Dylan laughed. “You just don’t want to miss seeing Ethan.”

  Kayla huffed out a protest, but Jessica knew what Dylan said was probably true.

  “You can keep in touch with your friends,” Jessica said. “Just not in person.”

  Kayla’s lips compressed.

  Jessica smiled. “Let me call Dad and see what he says.”

  Dylan had already set his lunch bag on the counter and dropped his backpack on the floor. “But we’re not going to school today, right?”

  Was Matt going to tell her she was being overly dramatic? Maybe, but in her gut she knew this was the right thing to do. “Yes. No school today.”

  “Woot, woot!” Dylan shouted as he pumped a fist in the air before racing for the stairs.

  “Do you really think we could get sick?” Kayla asked, her forehead furrowed.

  Though Jessica was concerned, she didn’t want her kids to worry. “Not if we stay away from sick people.”

  “Mom,” Kayla said as she rolled her eyes.

  “Let me call Dad, okay?”

  Kayla nodded, then she flopped onto the couch with her phone already in her hand.

  Jessica went upstairs to the master bedroom and closed the door before calling her husband’s cell. He answered on the second ring.

  “What’s up, honey? I’m about to head into a meeting.”

  Jessica pictured her husband—six feet tall, relatively fit, and still as handsome as the day she’d met him. “I was, uh, wondering if you could work from your home office today. And maybe tomorrow.”

  “What?” His tone showed he thought she was nuts. “Why would I do that?”

  “Have any of your co-workers called in sick lately?”’

  He paused. “A few people have, yeah.”

  “More than normal?”

  “I guess so, yeah.”

  “Honey, the kids’ school cancelled Prom because so many kids have that flu that’s going around. Just to be safe I’m, uh, I’m keeping them home for a few days. I’m going to stay home too.”

  “Really?” Shock was evident in his voice. “You never miss work.”

  “I know.”

  She heard noise in the background. It sounded like Matt had shifted the phone away from his mouth. “Hey,” he said, “I’ve got to go. I’ll call you after my meeting.”

  “All right, but think about it. Working from home, I mean.”

  “Okay. Bye.”

  Next, she called the dentist’s office where she worked to let them know she wasn’t coming in.

  “Are you sick too?” Rochelle, her co-worker, asked.

  “Too? Who else is sick?”

  Rochelle named several others who worked there. Hearing the names of so many people she knew who were sick sent a beat of concern through her.

  “No,” Jessica said, “I’m not sick. Just trying to stay that way.”

  “Maybe you’re on to something there.”

  Jessica thought about her co-worker and friend. Rochelle was sixteen weeks pregnant with her first baby. If she caught this flu, could it put her
baby in jeopardy? “Maybe you ought to head home, Rochelle. Just in case.”

  Sighing heavily, she said, “I can’t afford to take any more time off. You know how much time I took off when I was so sick at the beginning of my pregnancy. I used all my sick days.”

  Jessica bit her lip. “Just, I don’t know, be safe. Okay?”

  Rochelle chuckled. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

  They disconnected and Jessica set her phone on her bedside table before turning on the news.

  “…concerned about how quickly this flu is spreading,” the news reporter was saying. Jessica turned up the volume. “The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that this strain has resulted in higher than average fatalities and they remind people to take sanitary measures after being around other people. Wash your hands frequently, cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze, and if you or a family member has any symptoms, stay home for at least seventy-two hours after the symptoms have ended. This looks like a nasty one, folks.”

  The anchor went on to another story and Jessica shut off the TV, then used her phone to look up more information. She spent a good hour reading articles about the flu, each one making her concern notch up higher than the last.

  She hoped Rochelle would change her mind and go home.

  An image of her mom popped into her head. Recently diagnosed with breast cancer, her mom lived out of state. Alone. Jessica had already arranged to take time off the following week to fly out for a visit. She hadn’t seen her mom in several months and wanted to spend time with her. She and her mom had always been close—being the only child of a single mother did that sometimes. It was important to her to be able to give her mom the support she needed.

  Briefly wondering if this flu would affect her plans, Jessica shook her head. Surely by the next week the whole thing would have blown over. It had to.

  “Mom?” Kayla said as she knocked.

  “Come in, sweetie.”

  Kayla opened the door and sat on the bed. “What did Dad say?”

  “He’s in a meeting. He’ll call me when he’s done.”

  “But you told him about the flu?” Kayla’s eyebrows tugged together. She seemed much more worried than she’d been earlier.

  “What’s wrong, honey?”

  “Nothing. I mean, I just…” She frowned. “I looked some stuff up. Just now? About the flu? Yeah. So. It sounds like it’s not the regular flu.”

  That was the same conclusion Jessica was beginning to reach, but she wasn’t about to share her worries. Not yet. Not when there wasn’t a whole lot they could do about it. “People are working on it.”

  “What people?” Kayla asked, her eyebrows tugging together. “What are they doing to fix it?”

  Jessica struggled to come up with an answer.

  Her phone rang, saving her from having to make something up. “It’s Dad,” she said as she looked at her phone.

  Kayla frowned, then left the room.

  Chapter 2

  Matt

  The moment Matt finished his meeting, he went to his cubicle and did some quick online research into the flu that Jessica had called him about. When she’d asked him if he would work from home, his first instinct had been to brush her off. He had a lot of work to do and he much preferred working in the office where he could chat with other developers. Three things made him reconsider. First, Jessica wasn’t one to overreact, so the fact that she was staying home from work gave him pause. Especially since she was planning on taking time off to visit her mom the next week. Second, in the meeting he’d just gotten out of, half of the people who should have been there had called in sick. And finally, despite the fact that the media outlets were making a huge deal about this flu, he got the sense that maybe, for a change, they might not be exaggerating.

  Decision made, he picked up his phone and called Jessica, his mind in task mode as he mentally listed all of the things they should do to prepare for the possibility that they would need to hunker down at home for an unspecified period of time.

  “Hello?” Jessica said a moment later.

  “Hi, babe.”

  Without greeting him, she said, “The news is saying this flu is pretty nasty. Some people have even died. More than is typical for a flu.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you going to come home?”

  He could hear the worry in her voice. “Yes.”

  “You are?” Now hopeful disbelief.

  Matt scrolled through the long list of software bugs he was assigned to fix and tried not to feel overwhelmed. His family’s safety had to come first. “Don’t sound so surprised.”

  “Okay,” Jessica said with a laugh. “When are you leaving?”

  Matt turned away from his computer screen and glanced toward his boss’s office. “In a few minutes. I need to clear it with Dan first.”

  “At least traffic shouldn’t be too heavy.”

  One side of his mouth quirked up. “True.” He paused a beat. “I’m thinking of stopping by Costco on the way home to stock up on a few things. And fuel up my truck.”

  “Is that a good idea? I mean, what if sick people are there? Besides, we have that freeze-dried stuff we bought a few years ago.”

  Several years earlier Matt had gotten interested in emergency preparedness so he and Jessica had splurged on a six-month supply of freeze-dried meals for their family of four. It still had more than twenty years of shelf life left, and it had been expensive. He really didn’t want to use it if they didn’t need to.

  “I’d rather not dip into that,” he said. “Not when I can go to the store and buy what we need.”

  Jessica was silent. “Okay. Just, please…be careful.”

  Matt laughed. “Oh, I will be.”

  They discussed what he should buy, and after he disconnected, he talked to his boss and got clearance to work from home for a while.

  The drive from his job in Salt Lake City to the suburb where he lived in the southern part of Salt Lake County usually took thirty to forty minutes. Of course, that was during commute time in the late afternoons. Right now it was mid-morning so traffic was relatively light. Was that because of the time of day or because so many people had stayed home from work?

  Shaking his head at the idea that enough people were sick that traffic would be affected, Matt took the exit that would take him to Costco. First, he went to their gas station, and after filling the regular tank on his truck with diesel fuel, he folded back a corner of the material that covered the bed of his truck before opening the cap on his auxiliary tank. He and his family had a thirty-three foot fifth wheel RV, and when they’d looked for a truck to pull it with, they’d found one that already had a forty-gallon auxiliary tank installed. Matt loved the convenience of carrying over sixty gallons of fuel when pulling the RV. It really cut down on the need to pull the RV into gas stations not equipped to handle such a large rig. The only drawback was the cost. Dropping a couple hundred bucks on one fill-up was hard, but right now filling the auxiliary tank seemed like the prudent thing to do.

  Once he’d finished filling both tanks, he parked his truck in the main parking lot. He was surprised at how busy Costco was at this time of day. Maybe it was always this busy—he’d never been there in the morning in the middle of the week. Besides, was Costco ever not busy?

  Wanting a flatbed cart to haul his purchases, he looked around but didn’t see any near the entrance. He had to walk back out to the parking lot to find one, and once he did, he went inside and started shopping.

  Right away he noticed something unusual. Where the shelves typically had plenty of every item, now the supplies seemed to be depleted. And there were a lot of people with entire cases of canned goods in their shopping carts or on flatbed carts. More people getting cases of food than he’d ever seen before. It looked like everyone had the same idea he did. Ignoring the spark of alarm that lit inside his chest, he focused on loading whatever cases he could get onto his cart, as well as batteries and toilet paper. On one
aisle, a woman began coughing. Everyone backed away from her, including Matt. He not only backed away, he went to a different aisle entirely.

  Once he’d stacked all that would fit onto his cart, he made his way to the register. Long lines had formed—more like the lines he saw just before Christmas. And it was April.

  Squashing the trepidation that kept pushing to the surface, he worked to stay patient until it was his turn to check out. Once he reached his truck, he began unloading everything into the back seat.

  “Hey,” a man said to him.

  Matt turned to see what the guy wanted.

  “I’ll take that cart off of your hands when you’re done.”

  Matt had other plans. “Thanks, but I have a few more things to get so I’ll need to hang on to it.”

  The man scowled but walked away without incident.

  Matt managed to fit everything inside the cab of the truck, and after locking the doors, he went back inside the store. To his surprise, it looked like the crowd had nearly doubled. And more than one person appeared to be sick.

  Hurrying forward anyway, Matt avoided anyone who looked the slightest bit sick and loaded his cart with more canned goods and water, then he went to the area where vitamins and other health items were stocked. That section seemed less busy so he had no trouble getting what he wanted before adding boxes of protein shakes, protein bars, and two large first-aid kits. Then he noticed a shelf with three boxes of face masks. He set all of the boxes onto his stack of goods.