Extinction Level Event (19 page)

"Come on Trip, you really think this is
that
bad? We are working to contain it, you know. It's only a few small
cities." Trip answers. "Sofie, a few small cities? We're talking
about LA here. And Guadalajara, Phoenix, aren't that far off. If
you don't stop it now, we could be seeing it hit those cities in a
week, at the rate you said its spreading. Yeah, I think this could
be worse than it looks now."

"Ok. I'll be careful, but so far nothing other than a
re-diversion of the army has occurred here. Kisses." "Kisses".
Buzzzzz.
The phone hangs up, leaving Manjak to sort through
the underlying messages of the conversation. Manjak, being one who
is accustomed to planning agricultural strategies that span for
two, five, or twenty years immediately starts making up various
scenarios in his head, some of them bad and some worse.
Ok, so
what happens if all of North America gets inflicted with this
thing, somehow? Oh God, what happens if their agricultural output,
including that of California, the Midwest, the Breadbasket states,
gets cut in half within six months? They're going to be screaming
for outside food until they find a way to find a way to increase
agricultural output relying less on the soil and more on the
qualities of the plants themselves. More arable land taken, more
modified crops used. And possibly months or even a year of food
shortage. Damn.

Manjak spends the rest of the evening working on the
Yemeni hostage problem, even though he knows he kept thinking about
everything that Sofia had told him. Realizing that the problem in
the Americas might soon
-will soon!-
require his full
attention and possibly many night hours, Trip Manjak decides to
retire at 9:25pm. He exits the mostly-vacant headquarters and makes
his way to the subway station along Rome's crowded streets. Heading
home to his apartment on the Rome metro he decides to drop by the
supermarket to buy food. Like many venues in Rome on a Friday
night, the supermarket is open. Going in through the sliding doors
Manjak walks straight to the canned food aisle and makes sure that
he buys a large amount.

Ensenada, Mexico

A week after McCarthy's arrival in Mexico he finds
himself still stuck in Ensenada, in the middle of a growing
ecological problem, increasingly somber and alarmed population, and
a full scale state-wide alert. In the last seven days a flood of
reports by the biologists and other scientists gathered in Ensenada
told the authorities in the State of Baja California that they were
no longer the only ones to experience worm shortages. Police,
businessmen, local residents, drug dealers, and many others in the
neighboring states of Baja California Sur to the south; Sonora and
Chihuahua to the east, and Sinaloa to the southeast all reported to
their local governments the now-common problem of earthworm deaths.
The local governments had no clue what to do and subsequently
contacted the Federal government in Mexico City, a move supported
by McCarthy, Rodriguez, and even the UN Representative Sofia Flores
Manjak. Authorities in Baja California had managed to keep McCarthy
and Rodriguez from leaving their state, stating that the evidence
of contamination in the other states was irrefutable based on
McCarthy's and Rodriguez's reports from Los Angeles.

Authorities from the Federal District would arrive
soon in Ensenada to talk to the gathered scientists to ask them for
advice in dealing with the situation. McCarthy advocated a very
simple strategy- he told them to quarantine all areas afflicted
with the worm contagion and have no movement of goods, people, or
any objects between the outside world and the affected areas. That
strategy, despite the presence of police and paramilitary police,
did not work out. Now the local governments had no clue what to do,
but were aware of the increasing sense of insecurity amongst the
local population, especially in Ensenada where the outbreak was
first detected a week ago. Here it was obvious the worm deaths were
serious, living worms were a rarity in the soil at this point, and
thousands of dead ones are scattered in parks, alongside gardens,
roads, and surrounding forests. The government continued to run
with the "environmental hazard contamination" storyline, leading
McCarthy amongst others to wonder how long they were going to keep
the cover.
They'll keep it as long as the US keeps saying that
its a herbicide and not a virus
.

McCarthy is left in a trailer by the site of the
original contamination scene, working alongside two GIS specialists
putting together every reported outbreak onto a Geographic
Information System. Having worked with GIS before, and having
nothing else to do at the moment, McCarthy busies himself helping
plot the extent of the worm epizootic onto a detailed
two-dimensional map of Mexico. The ARCGIS system can show details
ranging from rivers and interstate political borders to more
obscure facts such as street names and forest type. Different types
of soils and terrain are shaded in different colors to give the
viewer information about the worms' environment. The two GIS
technicians busy themselves imputing shades of red over areas
affected by the epizootic. McCarthy notices the bright red patches
over Ensenada, Tijuana, Mexicali, and other major cities of the
Northwest. The bright red covers all the area in-between and
surrounding the cities, only dissipating to lighter shades around
Ciudad Obregon in before disappearing completely a hundred miles
from Mazatlan on the Western coastline.

McCarthy opens the trailer door, heading outside for
a breath of fresh air. He walks from the camp of several trailers
and vehicles to the sidewalks, walking past small Spanish
townhouses along Ensenada's narrow street lined by three-story row
houses.

Coming along a park after passing a pair of police
officers, McCarthy's vision of fresh air is abruptly transformed
into a nightmarish sensation of pungent decay. The corpses of dead
worms shoveled into heaps in the dirt along the side of the small
park creates an aroma typical of putrified flesh. The authorities,
not knowing what to do with the worms coming out of their burrows,
ordered city workers to shovel them into piles away from pedestrian
traffic. This left piles up to a foot high of worms in some areas,
slowly decomposing while releasing a petrifying odor to passerby.
The cleanup crews, hastily put together in response by the city,
had piled the worms into heaps off the roads and then left them
there. They were supposed to be removed, but that still yet to be
done. Deciding that the air had rapidly lost its appeal, McCarthy
turned away from the park, continued along a few more roads, and
made a turn back towards the camp trailers.
We need to tell them
to remove these decaying critters quickly, and get rid of them in a
proper area.

McCarthy enters a local store to grab a bite before
returning to the GIS lab. After ordering a sandwich he waits for it
to be heated, he spots a stand with a local newspaper by the door
and walks over to take a copy. Picking up the newspaper to scan it,
the
ding-dong
of the door chime next to him prompts McCarthy
to look up from the day's headlines. Rodriguez's face leers back at
him, a knowing smile painted across his face. "So, McCarthy, now
you can read
en Español
? You never
told me, why am I always translating every time we come to a
government meeting?" Rodriguez asks humorously. "Did you really
need to know? It was great having a free translator tag along all
the time. Don't you agree?", asks McCarthy rhetorically. "You here
for a lunch as well?" "Yes". "Good. What news is there from Mexico?
Anything from LA?" "Nothing yet. How is the GIS updating going?"
"Good. Its going fine. By the way, did you tell the Mayor that the
cleanup here isn't complete? They still have worms lying around in
piles, which stink. Not to mention this is a safety hazard having
that compost rot in plain sight." Rodriguez pauses for a moment. "I
did tell them to clean up. They've- for that matter,
we've
also been helping them to clean up when they burrow out of the
ground. They should know keeping them outside is an invite to
carrion birds, stray animals, and the like. Not to mention being
unpleasant." "We should tell them again, and stress it this time.
The worms can't simply be left outside, regardless if they are out
of the way". "You know, there are other detritivores around that
could decompose them. Too bad that will take a really long time, by
which we will probably be dealing with a human-affecting affliction
in addition to an earthworm one." "Exactly my point. Hey, where's
his sandwich?", McCarthy looks around as the two cashiers prepare
Rodriguez's lunch. "You won't get any attention that way", remarks
Rodriguez as he forwards his cash to the cashier. The two men take
their sandwiches outside and sit down on the store's cafe-style
outdoor chairs.

McCarthy takes a big bite out of his
turkey-lettuce-tomato taco-like sandwich before remarking, "Its
been almost ten days since we got our first call, and so far we
have barely gotten any leads to its origins. At this rate, the
epizootic will probably reach New York before we get any clues to
its history. Have you ever encountered anything like this
before?"

"Never.", Rodriguez replies, "This is something
entirely new, never seen before. It is not parasitic, none of the
worms we have seen have show symptoms of mites, fungi, any type of
parasite. I've never ever heard, read, or seen a virus that attacks
worms so quickly and so fatally. Total devastation, as I have said
before. As I see it, the only thing we can do now is quarantine,
hope that this slows down the spread, and pray that Dr. Krishnan
and everyone else LaJoy has working in the lab can find some an
aerosol-based antidote quickly enough. Although, there is something
else that should be factored in, which I have already told LaJoy."
"What is that?", asks McCarthy. "Well", starts Rodriguez, "this
virus attacking the worms seems to be similar to something like
Ebola or Tuberculosis in terms of its potency and rate of spread.
I'm counting on this epizootic spreading to areas, such as the
Chihuahuan desert, where the natural worm population is very low.
Relatively speaking, the amount of earthworms per square meter can
range from 1 to 10,000. You follow?" "If I were to guess, you
advised the government to quarantine sporadically until the
epizootic reaches the desert. Now you're assuming that, due to its
own extremely virulent nature, this epizootic will kill itself when
it kills off the earthworm population too quickly to continue
sustaining itself". "Yes. Some deep deserts have less than 1
earthworm per square meter, if they all die quickly enough there
won't be much of a population left to sustain the virus. The virus,
without a living host population present to continue sustaining it,
should quickly die off".

"That's basically how we’ve managed to avoid having
Ebola outbreaks. I don't know if you remember, but I remember
reading about several outbreaks in 2007 in Congo. Of course,
quarantine measures were also used to make sure it didn't spread.",
muses McCarthy, "you already proposed this plan to LaJoy?" "Yes I
did", replies the field biologist, "him first, and then the
authorities in Mexico City. They probably know that they have way
too many stresses right now to be dealing with this crisis, they
seemed very much willing to sit this one out and let it abate.
While they have enough biologists, environmentalists, and troops to
enforce a quarantine zone right now, they hardly have adequate
scientific, intellectual, or financial resources to start looking
for ways to combat this thing. At least not right now." McCarthy
agrees, "They'll never say it, but I'm sure they'll take your idea
to heart, put up a quarantine based adjacent to the desert cities
and wait it out, maybe another week or two at the most. If it works
it works. If it doesn't work, they're hoping we develop a working
response in that time." "You could say that's that". Rodriguez
finishes lunch, cleaning up his plate and napkin and disposing of
them in the trash bin. "You ready to go?" "Sure. I need to get back
to those maps". The two men leave the cafe, walking at a fast pace
back to the trailer camp set up by the city of Ensenada.

"When do you think the maps will be ready?" ,asks
Rodriguez as they walk uphill. "Should be ready in about another
three hours. Then we'll hand them over to the Feds in Mexico and
it'll probably be posted on their website within an hour."
"Hopefully people will start getting the picture." "Yeah. No
movement of worms, no soil movement, no fed of any kind. People
still think its an accident, so that should keep them cooperating."
"So we hope" ,replies Gonzalo. After a short walk uphill the two
walk another three hundred meters across three streets before
arriving at the scientists' and diplomats' temporary refuge.

LA, USDA Office

At the USDA headquarters on the West Coast, LaJoy,
recently promoted thanks to the last two weeks events, hurries over
to his desk after hearing his phone ring for the hundredth time
that day. Stressed out, tired of hearing contradictory reports from
across the state, sick of coffee after being a addict for twenty
years, and in need of a vacation after the past week, LaJoy is not
in the mood for more phone calls. Having spoken to the governor of
California, the LAPD, and even wildlife experts and ecologists at
the San Diego zoo in the past 24 hours, LaJoy briefly considers
putting the call on hold and getting back to the caller later.
However, the screen above the phone reads "Secretary of
Agriculture", precluding any attempts of ignoring the phone call
and claiming ignorance later. LaJoy picks up the receiver and
identifies himself yet again.