The Last Human (a novel)

normal communication of research data, and normal manufacture of apparatus and reagents were vital to the effort to halt the spread of the pandemic.

But time had been bought at an awful political and social cost. And time was running out. Life went on with some of what Warren Harding would have called "normalcy" as long as the awful fatal disease did not touch many American lives. Lionel knew that when it did begin to kill more than a few scattered people in North America, his stopgap program would begin to fail. Panic would set in. Cooperation would diminish exponentially. The cool deliberate pace of anti-virus research would start to come undone, then would become increasingly frenzied, and in the end would increasingly look to bizarre theories and unsound stopgap solutions.

He had an unsought and unwanted opportunity to glimpse its demise when Idris and he took Clara to see a house in Georgetown that she had lived in when she was too young to remember. It began as a normal drive on a normal day in a normal if very anxious city to show a child a home that she had grown up in before she was old enough to remember it.

Idris drove Lionel's government-provided new car with some bullet-proofing and security locks. She came to a halt outside a typical upscale Georgetown house. She, Clara, and Lionel got out and gathered together as a small family group. Lionel bent down toward Clara and pointed at the house.

"It's where you lived when you were a baby," he told her.

"It looks just like in the pictures," she said. It caused her to remember her dead mother and father and she pursed her lips and tried not to show emotion. "Mom showed me a long time ago."

Idris crouched to eye level with Clara and pointed to an upstairs window. "That was your room. Up there."

She had hardly finished say it, however, when there was a noisy commotion of several car and truck motors and a screeching of tires around a corner and an additional screeching to a halt. When they looked up the street there were two improvised paddywagon vans pulling up and screeching to a halt on the next block. Emergency lights atop them were flashing.

Two additional Humvees deployed themselves at even distances from each other and the vans, also with emergency lights atop flashing. The Humvees had stenciled lettering: EMERGENCY BV CONTAINMENT FORCE. Four suited containment personnel carrying two stretchers, piled out of the back of the two vans and ran to the house. Two more unsuited containment personnel in military fatigues leapt out of the other van carrying automatic rifles and deployed themselves at both ends of the convoy.