Desolate The Complete Trilogy

6



Ten Days Earlier

Hermes Quijada International Airport

City of Rio Grande

Tierra del Fuego Province

Argentina



Ron pulled Lisa aside as the medics carefully loaded the prisoner into the back of the ambulance. “Hey, if you want to ride with Liz, I can take a cab and catch up with you at the hospital,” he told her.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’ll need to gas up the bird anyway. Go ahead. Thanks to all these extra trips, we’re going to burn up all the grant money this year just on fuel alone.”

“For a hero, you sure do a lot of bellyaching, old man,” Lisa joked. “You probably saved that guy’s life by flying him in, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m a real Boy Scout. Just keep an eye on Liz, okay? I’m worried about her.”

Lisa jogged back to the ambulance and Ron gave Liz a little wave before the ambulance doors closed.

Ron arranged to have the helicopter’s fuel tank topped off. In order to sign the sale order, he borrowed a pen from the man behind the desk. Ron handed the pen back and the man absently put it in his mouth as he ripped a copy of the receipt out of the ledger and handed it to Ron.

What the man behind the desk didn’t know was that Ron’s hand was covered with an extraterrestrial pathogen. This very hardy and aggressive microorganism was already thriving on Ron Baker’s palm. It really flourished when it made the journey from the pen to the fuel jockey’s warm, moist mouth.

In a few hours this man would finish his shift, go home, kiss his wife on the mouth, and his five-year-old daughter on the cheek. He’d help his bride prepare dinner, and by the end of the night all three of them would be contagious. They’d spread the bug the next day as the girl went to school, the wife back to her job in a produce market, and the man back to the airport.

Meanwhile, Ron Baker pulled up to the front of the local hospital in a taxi and handed the driver his fare. He headed inside to look for Lisa and Liz.

The exposed taxi, along with its driver, who had just tucked the germ-covered bills into his money pouch, went to the Gran Hotel Lassere to pick up Bill Richardson of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Bill had just closed a deal an hour earlier and was looking forward to telling his boss the good news. Synko Medical Products, Inc. would soon be the exclusive provider of alcohol prep pads and disinfecting wet wipes in every medical facility in Rio Grande. After a two-week trip of flying all over Argentina, Bill was more than ready to go home. He was running late, but if he made it to the airport on time he’d be home in Tulsa to see his kids before they headed off to school.

Bill made it to the terminal only to find out his flight was delayed two hours. He fed his disappointment with a few Jack and Cokes at the bar. In the meantime, he infected Maria and Armando Covas of Madrid who sat next to him. They would transfer flights in Rio de Janeiro and board a flight to Spain with two hundred and eighty-seven other passengers. By the time their plane touched down at Barajas Airport nine hours later, almost all of their fellow passengers and the flight crew would be infected. The crew would board new planes the next day and infect those passengers as they flew out of the international airport to destinations all over the globe.

Bill Richardson didn’t get to see his kids before they left for school. By the time he got home he no longer cared. After using up three tissues to staunch a nose bleed in the cab, he felt so miserable that he just wanted to go to bed. Bill never made it to work to report to his boss on his successful trip, but it didn’t really matter. By the end of the week, so many of Bill’s coworkers called in sick that the management at Synko decided to shut down the company until things got back to normal.