Independence Day Plague (9 page)

Jeanine broke in, “No. we can’t do that.”

Phelps turned weary eyes towards her. “Why not?”

“
There’s simply not enough room. The hospital only accommodates twenty at the most. Anything larger than that and we’re supposed to notify the Pentagon. Even if we take all the furniture out and put everyone on the floor, it might fit forty—fifty at best. Most of the buildings can't hold any crowd over 150 sitting or standing. Even the auditorium only has seats for about 350.”

Phelps sighed and frowned. “Okay, we’ll shut down power to the labs, the admin building, barracks, and garage. We’ll encourage people to share housing too where possible. That should buy us a few more days of power.”

Jeanine spoke, “What about the product? If you shut down the power to the labs then that means the cryo-units lose power.”

Phelps replied, “I’m not worried about the damn product. The cryo-units sit in a cold building in weather that isn’t suppose to get higher than fifty degrees during the day and below 30 at night. It’ll be okay.”

For the next seven days, Mitchell led the strongest of the men in setting up a routine of moving from building to building, moving people together, making everyone as comfortable as possible with food and lighting fires for warmth. Day by day, fewer volunteers arrived to help until he was on his own. He doled out what little medicine they had in the laboratories, hospital unit, and BX. At first, others of the emergency committee helped too until they succumbed to the fever, cramps, and blood loss brought on by the disease.

By day five, all the children displayed some symptom of Marburg. Those inflicted from the first worsened to agonizing rashes over the body. With the exception of Mitchell, few felt strong enough to leave their beds.

Geller’s four year old and Anna, Albert’s 18-month-old baby, died first. Mitchell tried to dig graves in the semi-frozen clay soil of the small park but the spade couldn't penetrate the frozen ground. Days passed as he waited to feel the fever and the tingling pain in his fingertips so that he too would join the ranks of the dying.

By the end of the seventh day, a third of the base members lay dead by disease or freezing during the night, and another fourth suffered with the delirium that marked the last stage where the virus liquefied sections of brain tissue. A few, two teenage girls, an MP and two waiters were extremely weak but recovering as the disease failed to progress beyond the skin rash stage.

Mitchell watched his wife and daughter entered the second stage of the disease by day four. Katie cried silent blood-tinted tears nonstop and writhed whenever he tried to touch her. The rashes slowly turned to bruises and open tears as blood pooled underneath the skin.

Caroline and Katie shared the same dirty bed, feverishly huddling together under a mountain of blankets to survive the plunging night temperatures. Mitchell brought in a dinner of broth as the setting sun turned the dim bedroom into muted yellow colors. Caroline’s crimson face looked relaxed despite the obvious rose-colored rashes covering her body. Katie slept restlessly, curled up like a baby by her side.

“
Jim,” she whispered, “have they come yet?”

He carried the thin broth to her bedside. The beef smell mingled with the odor of soiled, blood-speckled sheets. “Not yet. We just have to hang on.”

“
Not coming.” The words slipped out as barely a whisper. He sat on the edge and leaned in closer, knowing that each word tortured her raw swollen throat. “Jim, kill us.”

“
No. You have to hold on a little longer.”

“
It wasn’t field tested.” She sighed which led to a fit of coughing. Katie stirred and moaned beside her. “We’re the field test.” She took a deep breath. “They won’t come until it’s over. Don’t want to die in pain. Help me and Katie.”

“
No.” He tried to smile but couldn’t. He stroked the top of her hand lightly with one finger. “Ray predicted survivors. You can still get better.”

“
Please,” she gasped and coughed more, staining the white sheets with bright crimson speckles. “Give mercy.”

Tears rolled down his cheek. His voice cracked as he spoke. “I can’t, Caroline. You might get better. You’re only in stage two. I can’t give up on you now.” He covered her heat-rose hand in his. She gasped and he flinched away. “You and Katie need to eat now. We’ve got to keep your fluids up.”

“
Not yet.” She sighed and turned towards Katie’s head.

The yellow sunlight faded to murky brown darkness while he sat still and hunched, listening to their heavy breathing. Caroline lapsed back into sleep; the broth lay untouched on the bedside. He heard the faint bubbling of the fluids clogging their breathing. Silent tears dripped from his cheeks. Others waited for him to bring their food around too but he couldn’t force himself to stir from the chair. Memories flooded back as he looked at the pictures around the room. In one frame, Katie as a baby looked puckered and angry, then the small child laughing and reaching for a balloon. Caroline and his wedding picture hung in the central spot in a montage of shots of them across the years. The people in the bed were only red shadows of the happy images in the photos.

Finally, the antique clock chimed midnight in its usual tinkle of muted bells, rousing him from his memories. He reached out to stroke Katie’s face but paused fingers above her. He couldn’t even touch her without causing pain. Wiping tears from his face, he rose from the bed, donned a coat, and left the house.

The full moon threw faint light on the ghost-like silent dark houses that made up the bulk of the compound. The pale strip of road twisted ahead, a jagged path between him and the chemical storage area. His breath came out as puffs of smoke in the freezing air as his boots trod the pavement. Once there, he ripped through boxes, dumping contents on the ground searching for the supplies. Eventually he found a handful of wrapped syringes and a small glass vial of clear fluid. Thirty minutes passed in the journey to the lab and back but Mitchell remembered it as only an endless collection of one leaden step in front of another.

Once back, he first stood beside Katie’s side of the bed, white satin pillow stained brown with blood tears. He touched her limp blond hair, whispering, “I love you,” before driving the needle into her arm. Only one cc of clear fluid poison caused her breathing to become shallow then stop. Her last breath came out in little more than a hiss before her limbs lost their rigidity of life. He pressed his lips to her still hot forehead, his tears falling on her closed eyes. “Goodbye.”

Caroline’s eyes fluttered open at his voice. She felt Katie going still next to her and watched him fill the syringe again. Tears blurred his vision while he whispered, “I’m sorry."

She smiled cracked lips and nodded, moving her arm out towards him. “I love you,” he said looking into her brown eyes as he plunged the needle into her arm. Despite the pain, she reached for his hand and held it for the moments it took for the breathing to slow. When her hand lost strength and fell back onto the bed, Mitchell’s body shook with sobs.

A ten-cc vial of botulinum toxin and syringe became a permanent fixture in his coat pocket for the next week. He helped those who retained some hope of recovering and granted mercy to those that desired an end. Most sought the peaceful end.

In the early morning of the eighth day, he banged the steel doors of the lab open again. He found the botulinum toxin in a less secure room than the other horrors they had cooked up in the past. The toxin came from protein harvested from Clostridium stocks but the poison itself was stable at room temperature. The vials sat packed for shipment in metal boxes near the other chemicals. The lid was left askew displaying four empty spots. The fourth vial sat tucked away into Mitchell's pocket.

As he moved through the tiled hallways, he saw into the glass sections of each high security workstation. All the cabinets were closed up tight, glassware stored away in boxes and cages sat stacked and clean since all the animals had been destroyed in preparation for the great move.

The hum of the equipment beckoned him further in. Out of a perverse curiosity, he stripped out of his dirty coat and jeans and pulled on the spaceman-like biohazard suit. He attached the oxygen hose to the suit’s valve once inside the great double glass doors. The gas hissed in, smelling stale and cold. The waist high cryo-units sat packed along the eight-foot wall. Strips of wide, colored tape lined the top of each of the now empty gleaming steel cabinets: red for microbe, blue for vaccine, and white for antidote. Each two-unit freezer had labels of the stored biological agents and their possible vaccines: Marburg and its cousin Ebola, Clostridium, tulemia, haemmeragic fevers, and Q fever. Mitchell pulled each container open, checking each frost encrusted tube, numbered and recorded against the clipboard lists magnetically hooked on each unit. All the glass vials gleamed in their padded white boxes except for two of the ten vials of Marburg, the ones that contaminated them all.

Mitchell mentioned this to Geller that night. One of his children, Melissa showed signs of surviving but Geller suffered from the red glow of pain as his skin cracked and leaked in a dozen small cracks, symptoms of stage two infections. Most of his family was already dead. Mitchell filled him up with the last of the morphine and waited for clarity to peer through the veil of agony in his eyes.

“
Ray, can you hear me?”

He nodded the smallest of movements.

“
Our stocks, everything we’ve developed is still here. What do I do when they come?”

Geller whispered, each word coming slow and with great effort. “We’re embarrassment…know too much.” He paused and gestured with one finger towards a cup on the side table.

Mitchell took an ice chip from the Styrofoam cup by the bed stand and carefully placed it between the man’s cracked lips before Geller continued. “They’ll kill all they find alive.”

Mitchell sat stunned next to the bed. Geller’s eyes closed and it seemed like the morphine had pushed him into sleep. After a few minutes, his eyes slit open and he whispered, “Don’t know about you…kept your accident out of reports.” He began to smile but the movement made his lips crack and ooze again. Mitchell placed another chip of ice in his mouth. “Afraid to lose our jobs. Only reason you’re alive.”

Mitchell nodded. His accidental contamination of weakened Marburg years ago might have lead to the whole Bio Lab-4 shutdown back then. The potential disaster had been averted. Instead, it pushed the vaccine research ahead by months. Vaccines in the animals simply didn’t work.

Geller gestured again for ice. The shadows from dusk crept several inches across the room before he regained enough strength to speak again. “They’ll be back. You be prepared.”

“
I don’t understand, Ray. Be prepared for what?”

“
Escape… tell others.”

“
It’s not just me. Five others are getting better. One's your daughter, Missy. They won’t kill us.” Nevertheless, as he spoke, the cold realization dawned on him that everyone was dead, still breathing or not. No government that poisoned their scientists for the sake of secrecy would gladly welcome back the survivors. No witnesses could survive to tell others. They may be taken somewhere else for examination and dissection but they all died the night of that party.

“
Ray, I don’t know what to do. Where would I go? I don’t have an identity anymore.”

“
Look for box in closet.” A thin finger pointed towards the wardrobe behind Mitchell. “Key in desk. Money… contacts … people who’ll help.” Ray rasped for breath and the arm dropped. Mitchell began to move away when the bony hand grabbed his arm with surprising strength. “Others have stash too… look for them… old money… IDs. Escape and tell others.” The hand fell off, flopping back to the bed as Ray’s eyes closed.

Within a few minutes, his breathing stilled and he passed into oblivion.

It took little effort to find the attaché-size black fire safe that blended into the stacks of shoeboxes in the closet. Although one blow with a hammer could disabled the lock, Mitchell hunted down the silver key in the study. The room displayed typical Geller personality, disarrayed order of filed piles here and there. The wood and leather antique desk sat quite at odds with the flowery overstuffed chairs.

Mitchell placed the box on the desk, but its key proved elusive until his probing fingers touched some cold metal taped just inside the bottom section on the center drawer. With a little pull, the tape gave way easily and a set of keys dropped down.

Inside, the box was compartmentalized into top and bottom sections by a plastic tray. Ray’s marriage certificate as well as birth certificates for all his family members filled the top tray. Using a letter opener as a wedge, the tray popped up and out of the way. Underneath were fourteen small blue books: two sets of seven passports, one for the Geller family and the other using identical photos referred to the Mike Chisholm family.

Mitchell pulled out a clear zippered pouch with five sets of IDs: social security cards, driver’s license, food cards, and credit cards, each with five different names but all with Ray’s and his family’s photos. The rest of the compartment was occupied with hundred, fifty, and twenty-dollar bills, old greenbacks minted more than fifteen years ago. Such a treasure was useless in the stores but precious for the thriving tax-free and largely unrecorded black market transactions. The bundles of cash added up to $20,000 in neat little groups.

Finally, Mitchell found the last item, a sheet of yellowing paper listing the names, phone numbers, and Internet connections of twelve people. The typed names had notations here and there in Ray’s cramped handwriting, “Rory Benson – over priced electronics” or “Tabitha – food cards.” Overwhelmed, Mitchell slumped back into the deep padding of the leather chair. Why had Ray planned all this? Was he a spy or black marketer planning to disappear some day? His head throbbed while thinking through the implications. Ray said others owned stashes of cash too. Had they known that this day was coming?