PODs Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by Michelle K. Pickett

  Sale of the paperback edition of this book without its cover is unauthorized.

  Spencer Hill Press

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Contact: Spencer Hill Press, PO Box 247, Contoocook, NH 03229, USA

  Please visit our website at www.spencerhillpress.com

  First Edition: June 2013.

  Pickett, Michelle K. 1971

  PODs: a novel / by Michelle Pickett – 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary:

  Teenage girl survives the virus that destroys civilization only to find that the danger doesn’t stop with the end of the world.

  The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this fiction: Alien, Band-Aid, Barbie/Skipper (Mattel), Bobblehead, Boggle, Coke/Diet Coke/Coca Cola, Dumpster, Humvee, Latex, Plexiglas, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Ritz, Scrabble, Sonic, Superglue, Taser, Tetris, Wal-Mart, Waldorf, Wii/Wii Bowling, Yankees

  Cover design and interior layout: K. Kaynak.

  ISBN 978-1-937053-28-4 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-937053-29-1 (e-book)

  Printed in the United States of America

  PODs

  Michelle Pickett

  SPENCER HILL PRESS

  Also by Michelle Pickett

  Milayna

  March 2014

  The Infected: A PODs Novel

  Fall 2014

  In loving memory of my dad,

  Michael Lewis Hayes

  March 12, 1944 to January 28, 2013

  Before

  Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

  Chapter 1:

  Learning

  I walked in the front door just minutes before dinner to find my parents huddled in front of the television set.

  “Hey.” They either didn’t hear me or decided to ignore me. “I’m home,” I said, louder.

  “Turn it off, turn it off,” my mom whispered.

  “I’m trying…”

  “Change the channel… for cryin’ out loud, give it to me!” My mom grabbed the remote out of my dad’s hand and turned off the television.

  They both jumped away from the TV, my mom smoothing invisible wrinkles out of her clothes.

  “Hey, sweetie, we didn’t hear you come in.” My dad gave me a forced smile.

  “Yeah, I got that. What’s up?”

  “Nothing,” they sai to take deep, cleansing breathsne yttd in unison.

  That was clue number one that something was wrong.

  My mom recovered first. “How was the mall?”

  “Oh, you know, I was with Bridget. She loves dressing me up like an overgrown Barbie doll.” I flipped my blonde hair over my shoulder and rolled my eyes. “I think it’s the hair. The rest of me looks like Skipper—short, skinny and no boobs.”

  My mom laughed, the sound loud in the small room. But even with her piercing laughter, the room seemed quiet—the kind of quiet that buzzes under the surface of the noise everyone makes to hide the huge elephant sitting in the middle of the floor.

  “What’s up?” I watched them look at each other, and then at me.

  “Nothing, Eva. Why?” my dad answered.

  “You’re both acting funny.”

  “Well, don’t all teenagers think their parents act funny?” He put his arm around my shoulders. “We’re having your favorite for dinner tonight.”

  “Ugh. How many times do I need to tell you liver doesn’t taste like chicken? I believed that when I was five. Now I know the difference.”

  “No liver tonight. How does pizza sound?”

  “Truthfully? Pizza on a Tuesday night sounds like something’s wrong. We never have pizza on Tuesdays.”

  Okay, what’s up with these two?

  “We don’t?” Mom asked.

  “No. Dad says it’s a weekend meal.”

  “Your dad says a lot of things us girls should ignore.”

  My dad frowned. “I’m standing right here. I can hear you.”

  “I know.” My mom grabbed the plates out of the cupboard.

  Pizza on a Tuesday—that was clue number two that something was really wrong.

  Clue number three came the next day at school. Everyone was talking about the news report. I didn’t think much of it. There’d always been theories about the end of the world, but we were all still around. So I tried to ignore the gossip and get through the day. But, as usual, nothing happened to anyone under thirty in Sandy Shores, Texas without Bridget knowing.

  Bridget set her Diet Coke down on the lunch table with a thud. “I can’t believe you didn’t see it.”

  “Why?”

  “Hello, like, it’s end-of-the-world stuff!”

  “Lemme guess. Jake told Alexa who told Bryce who told you—”

  “Don’t knock the rumor mill, Eva. Jonathan asked you to prom just like I said he would.”

  “Sorry, sorry. Far be it from me to interrupt the flow of journalistic mediocrity.”

  Actually, Bridget’s rumor mill is pretty accurate. It’s almost like having a psychic on speed-dial.

  “Ha, ha. So how did you manage to stay away from television all night? It was on every channel.”

  “Well, for starters, I actually did my homework.” Bridget rolled her eyes. “And my parents ordered pizza and declared it family game elephant sitting in the middle of w houseou night. We didn’t have the television on last night.”

  “That proves my theory.”

  “What?”

  “Parents of only children are more protective,” Bridget said matter-of-factly, flinging her hand in the air before letting it slap the tabletop.

  “I think others have had the same theory, Bridget.”

  “Yeah, but your parents proved it last night. They were shielding you from the news. That’s why you had family torture night—”

  “Game night, and it wasn’t torture. It was kinda fun.”

  “How many game nights have you had?”

  “Truthfully, it’s the first one I can think of,” I admitted.

  “Well, there you go.”

  Yeah. I wasn’t exactly sure where I was going, but Bridget had a point. One of the biggest news events of the year, if not the decade, was on television and I was eating pepperoni pizza and playing Scrabble with my parents. I hadn’t even known we owned a Scrabble board.

  Bridget was right, of course. My parents were shielding me. I guess they didn’t factor in the high school’s raging gossipmongers. I knew not to take things churned out from the rumor mill at face value, but hearing them made me even more curious why everyone was panicking—and why my parents wanted to keep it from me.

  Clue four: A very little thing, with life-changing significance.

  The man on TV was balding. What little hair he had was gray—not a nice-looking silver or even white, but a dull, lifeless gray. Depressing. Ugly. He was the person who told me my life was going to drastically change—the man with the ugly gray hair.

  He read his lines from a teleprompter, his eyes roaming from one end of the screen to the other. He read the words with perfect pitch. The blonde reporter—“eye candy,” my dad called her—sat next to him smiling and nodding.

  Stop bouncing your head. You look like a bobblehead. Aren’t you listening? Don’t you see pgt"/>

  “The virus has no name. Scientists call it HHC6984, or simply ‘the virus.’ A person can be infected for days, perhaps a week or mo
re, before showing symptoms. Once the symptoms surface, it’s already too late. Death is certain and swift. From the onset of the first symptom to the patient’s inevitable death is a span of two to five days.

  “The virus is resistant to every antibiotic and antiviral medication we know of. It is highly contagious, although how it’s transmitted remains a mystery.

  “If a cure isn’t found, it will not only turn into a pandemic, but will likely infect most of the human population by year’s end. Scientists are not optimistic about finding a cure,” the man with the lifeless, gray hair reported. The blonde bimbo beside him still smiled. I sat on the floor in front of the television, a Coke in one hand and the remote in the other, trying to wrap my brain around what I’d just heard.

  A virus? A teeny, tiny virus is going to wipe humans off the face of the earth? Well, why not? toward the bedroom.ed his ">“ou

  Everyone knew it was coming. We just didn’t know how or when. Call it the apocalypse, Armageddon, the end-of-life-as-we-know-it, extinction, whatever you want. Something like it killed the dinosaurs, why not us? Maybe it was our time to go—to hand over the earth to the next wave of inhabitants.

  Several scientists had predicted it would be an asteroid, like the one that’d killed the dinosaurs. Only a few people thought it’d be a tiny bug—something too small for the naked eye to see—a virus so lethal people were dead before they knew they were infected. A virus that was killing people so quickly there was no need to name it something memorable—there’d be no one left to remember it.

  “What are you doing?”

  I jumped up at the sound of my dad’s voice. My Coke sloshed over the rim of the can, the sticky liquid dripping from my hand onto the beige carpet. I spun around, an apology on my lips, when it dawned on me—I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was watching the news.

  “I’m watching pay-per-view porn. Oh, wait, that was yesterday. Today I’m learning of my impending death from the stupid news reporter and the blonde idiot sitting next to him. I mean, it’s not like my parents knew but decided not to tell me themselves. Pizza and game night on a Tuesday—I knew something was wrong.”

  “Eva, I’m sorry. We needed time to process the information ourselves,” my dad told me. “Your mom and I planned to talk with you today.”

  I dropped onto a chair at the kitchen table. The room was decorated in reds and whites—it seemed too cheery now, with my mom’s strawberry knick-knacks everywhere—a strawberry cookie jar, salt and pepper shakers, and placemats. I wrapped one of the placemats around my finger while I sat at the table with my dad.

  “What’s gonna happen, Dad?” I asked, cold fear clutching at my heart.

  “I don’t know. The scientists and doctors are working on a cure. They could find one any day—”

  “But the news said they weren’t hopeful.”

  “I know, but remember, penicillin was discovered by accident. So who knows what they can find in the next few months? We just have to wait and have a little patience.”

  The waiting lasted a week. The dead were piling up in every country—including parts of the U.S.—the bodies burned in an attempt to kill the virus before it could infect anyone else. The sight of burning corpses heaped in large mounds like grotesque firewood filled the cable news channels. I pictured faces of people I knew and loved on the burning bodies and it made my stomach heave and bile rise in my throat. Those lifeless shells had been living, vibrant people. Now they were nothing more than charred bone. My heart skipped painfully in my chest.

  Doctors and scientists were still clueless. They didn’t know the virus’s origin or how it was transmitted, and they weren’t any closer to a cure than they had been a week ago. The only progress they’d made was they were now able to locate the infected cells before symptoms surfaced. So now, people not only were going to die from the virus, they knew a week ahead of time.

  Great.

  In an attempt to contain the virus, most air travel had been suspended, and the sky became empty by Michelle PickettVt lad—an eerie silence. When the sound of jets came, it was usually from small military aircraft. Most countries had closed their borders, and some had declared martial law. The television had played nothing but reports of the virus and its impact since the news had first broken. So it surprised us when the news broadcast was interrupted and the waving American flag, the presidential seal superimposed on it, filled the screen.

  My parents and I were sitting at the table eating dinner together, something we’d started doing after the first reports of the virus. From the TV in the living room, a newscaster announced, “We now go to the White House, where the President has called an emergency press conference.” The three of us exchanged looks as we stood, our chairs scraping against the tiled floor. We moved

  01C;And I’ve got papers to grade,” my dad said. I guess he hadn’t thought about the absurdity of grading papers any more than I had about doing homework.

  Two hours, thirty-seven minutes.

  My phone rang.

  Chapter 3:

  The Call

  My mother bolted off the couch. My dad, who was coming back from the kitchen, stood with his hand poised over the flip top on a Coke can. I looked up from my chemistry homework, my pen dangling from my fingers. The three of us just stared at my cell phone. It rang twice. On the third ring I grabbed it.

  “Hello?” My voice shook. My rational side told me not to get my hopes up. It was probably Bridget. But the side of me that still had hope said maybe, just maybe, it was them. We had a spot.

  “Evangelina Mae Evans?”

  “Y—yes. I’m Evangelina.” by Michelle Pickett">1se in the POD I saw my mom grab Dad’s arm. My dad dropped his Coke can. It hit the floor with a thud, fizz spraying out of the partially opened top. He absently patted my mom’s hand. They both stared at me while the pale-brown foam sprayed across the living room.

  “Your social security number was selected.”

  I was surprised at how calm I was. Maybe the brusque manner of the man on the phone helped me keep my cool. Maybe it was shock.

  “Do you have a pen and paper?”

  “yes.”

  “Write this down. You’ll report to Glendale High School in Glendale, Texas on Wednesday, the twenty-seventh, at eight AM sharp. You’ll leave for your quarantine period at that time. Bring your birth certificate, your social security card, and your belongings. Each occupant is allowed two suitcases—no more. Do you have any questions?”

  “Yes,” I said. “My family? They—”

  “The social security number selected was yours. If anyone else in your family was chosen they will receive a phone call.”

  “Just me?”

  “Yes. Any other questions?”

  “No.” My voice cracked and a lump formed in my throat.

  “Goodbye.” I heard the receiver click and the line go dead. I stood motionless, the phone still at my ear.

  It wasn’t until I heard my mother’s quiet sobs that I put the phone down and looked at her and my father.

  “You were picked?” my dad whispered.

  “Yeah, but—”

  “But nothing, Eva. You were picked!”

  “But I can’t… I can’t…” I started to cry as the reality of what was happening hit me. I’d have to leave my parents. How could I be happy I had been chosen when they hadn’t been?

  I can’t leave them to die.

  “It’s okay, Eva,” my mom murmured, hugging me. She smoothed my hair while I cried against her shoulder. “We know you’d take us if you could; we know. But you have to understand, as parents we’re overjoyed that our child was chosen. We’ll be happy knowing you’ll have a chance at a full life. Don’t cry, Evangelina. This is wonderful news.”

  No, no, no, this isn’t good news at all. How can I leave them knowing…

  Friday

  I only had two weeks to get ready before I left for quarantine. My mom insisted on a shopping spree. “Eva, you need a new wardrobe. You’ll be down the
re a year, maybe more. You’ll need clothes that will last.”

  “Somehow, I don’t think we’ll be having fashion shows down there, Mom. You don’t need to buy me anything.” Besides, going to the mall—or to any public place—was disturbing. Many people wore white surgical masks and latex gloves, and everyone avoided getting to close to other people. Not that there were many people to get close to—the place was nearly deserted, and several of the mall stores had their metal barriers down, their interiors dark. We still hadn’t had any reported cases around Sandy fifteen monthsadhe1 Shores, but we knew it was only a matter of time.

  “You never know,” she said with a flick of her hand. “Stranger things have happened.”

  “Yeah? Name one,” I said.

  “I married your dad, didn’t I?”

  I burst out laughing.

  “How about this?” My mom held up a purple hoodie with a cute design on the front. I loved it, but the logo told me that it was way out of our price range, especially for a hoodie.

  “No, Mom, that’s too much.”

  “Eva, it might be cold down there. You’ll need some warm clothes.”

  “But it’s too expensive—”

  “I want you to have it. Humor me, okay?”

  By the time I was done humoring my mother, she had bought out the mall. Jeans, t-shirts, sweat pants, hoodies, underclothes, shoes… was there anything left? She’d bought me over two dozen outfits, including clothing for both warm and cool weather. So, no matter what the temperature, I had something to wear. I wasn’t sure I could fit everything in the two-suitcase limit.

  When we got home my dad met us at the door. “Here, Eva, take these with you.” He thrust two flashlights into my hands, with two large bags of batteries. “I hope there are enough batteries to last you the year. I got you one of these, too.” He held up a metal case with a lock. It was big enough to fit my batteries, and whatever else I wanted to protect. “Hard telling what type of people you’ll be around.”