Pestilence: A Medical Thriller (21 page)

63

Samantha rushed to CDC headquarters. She had asked her nurse to come in early and left her mother and Jessica in her care.

The city was buzzing with activity
, and the freeways were packed. Many people had filled their cars to the brim with sleeping bags, clothing, water, and food. A handful of policemen were out, but nowhere near what would be required if all these people decided to start breaking into the closed stores.

Sam listened to NPR
, and they were discussing the detonations. Contact had been cut off to Manhattan, Los Angeles, Nashville, and Washington, D.C. Rumors of multiple blasts in Pakistan, China, and all over Europe were circulating. But communications had been disrupted, and getting information was difficult. The internet, it seemed, was down worldwide.

She cut through a field and
looped around a business park, avoiding the mess of traffic, and arrived at the CDC in about half an hour.

As she was stepping out of her car, she received the phone call she had been waiting for. “This is Samantha.”

“Clyde Olsen, Sam. It’s done. Your sister and her family are in Elko, Nevada.”

She sighed,
all the tension and pain leaving her body. The only remnant was a soft emotional mess. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Figure out how to stop this thing. That’s how you can thank me.”

By the time she arrived at the CDC, the building was on lockdown, and she had to input a security code at the door. The door hissed and locked behind her. The building was nearly empty. She ran up to Freddy’s office but didn’t find anyone there. A conference room next door had four people in it; she stepped inside.

“There she is,” Freddy said. “Dr. Bower, we were just discussing the
potential spread of the pathogen. Please have a seat.”

Samantha sat and waited for Freddy to begin speaking again. Up on the whiteboard was a rough drawing of the world. Small X’s were written on certain spots.

“Reports are few and far between,” Freddy said, taking off his glasses and mopping them with a small white cloth. “But it appears the pathogen can’t be contained. We’re getting reports from people leaving DC that entire city blocks are filled with the dead or dying. Apparently, it’s mutated, and its incubation period has dropped from several days to several hours.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Samantha said.

“Why not?”

“That’s too quick a mutation. Although the pathogen mutates faster than anything I’ve ever seen, it couldn’t mutate
that quickly. This is a different strand. Something we haven’t seen before.”

“How do you know?”

“Just a hunch.”

“Well, I guess
, at this point, we’ll take anything.” Freddy pointed to two men sitting to Samantha’s right. “As far as I know, we don’t have any infected in Atlanta yet. See if you two can get some samples from any of the cities, and let’s test Sam’s theory.”

Freddy turned ba
ck to the whiteboard and discussed contingency plans, spread ratios, and infectious grid patterns. Sam was barely listening. She knew exactly what everyone in that room was already thinking: it was too late. Too many people in a grid that was too wide had been infected.

The virus would spread from city to city
, slowly at first, perhaps over the course of a week. Then the speed of the infections would increase exponentially until it hit a tipping point. The tipping point in an infection pattern was that exact moment when we went from a society
with
infected to a society
of
infected, that point when the death of the species was certain. It takes approximately twelve to fifteen years for a human being to produce an offspring that can then breed—an enormous amount of time, biologically speaking. That was too slow to repopulate the species after the devastation of an extinction-level event.

Most of humanity would be infected
within the first three months, and the only ones who wouldn’t be were the ones who could get out of the cities in time.

Samantha’s head hurt
. She put her hand over her eyes and rubbed her temples. “This is pointless.”

Freddy stopped and turned to her. “
Excuse me?”

“It’s out, Freddy. We can’t slow
it. We can’t plan for it. The only thing we can do is hold on and wait until it runs its course.” She glanced around the room. “We’re not stopping it at this point. We’re trying to survive.”

64

The building was the tallest one in Miami: the Four Seasons Hotel. Hank Kraski had rented the top suite.

The
palatial suite had a bed that appeared to have been made for ten people and a hot tub outside on the massive balcony. Chilled champagne and fresh lobster sat on the table. The suite was exactly the way he had asked.

He sat on the
balcony, viewing the city below and the mass of ocean beyond it. He had loved Miami when he was a kid. He could go there and hock stolen baseball cards, packages of gum, or anything he and his friends could get their hands on. Such a shame that it had to be destroyed.

Though
it wouldn’t be destroyed in the sense that it would be blown apart, but that the people were going to be eliminated. And without the people, there were no maintenance crews to keep the city running smoothly. Nature would need only a few weeks to reclaim what humans had taken.

Hank thought back to his childhood
in Florida. He’d been happy with his Polish family that owned a restaurant in downtown Miami. The city had been different then, though, and a small-business owner could thrive without having to take massive loans from predatory banks just to stay afloat.
Such a waste of talent,
he thought. The little guys would get swallowed up or have to work for the big guys, and the consumers suffered. He didn’t blame the banks, though. He blamed the government dollars that kept them buoyant when they should have sunk.

But never, in a million years, could he have guessed that he would end up
being one of the few people on earth who would survive to rebuild. The new society would be better. It would be more efficient, and the aristocracy would no longer rule the poor. That was why he had such great admiration for the virus. It saw no race, religion, economic status, or fame. The virus was lethal equally and had no regard for anything or anyone. It was… perfect.

His cell phone rang
, and he answered. “This is Kraski.”

“It’s done. They’ll be arriving within a few hours.”

The line went dead. He placed the phone in his pocket and got the bottle of champagne before returning to the balcony. But, glancing over at the clear waters of the hot tub, he felt the urge to splash around. He stripped down and got in.

He
decided that he would watch the end of the world from there.

65

Ngo Chon stood in the glass corridor at the CDC in Atlanta, observing the parking lot as he sipped tea out of a mug that had a saying on the side: Epidemiologists do it disease free.

The CDC. When he was younger, he had dreamed about working
there. After medical school, he completed a doctorate and then realized he didn’t want to go into the world yet, so he completed another. By the time he got out of school at age thirty-nine, he thought he would be the most educated person at the CDC. He was shocked to find that at least half a dozen people had more degrees than he did, some of them from more prestigious schools.

But he’d outlasted them all. They transferred around, always vying for that position that
would bolster their resumes. No matter how much they protested that they had purer motives, it was always about the resume with career academics and scientists. The CV determined the quality of the person.

Chon knew the opposite was probably true. The more crap on
the CV, the more likely the person had never done anything new or interesting. Anyone who came up with some interesting theory or project devoted all their time to that one thing. Only when people aimlessly drifted did the CV commence building to the sky, like a nerdy Tower of Babel.

He finished his tea and th
en headed up to the level four biosafety labs. They were in the most secure facility in the United States, at least that the public knew about—and with good reason. Over a hundred unknown, absolutely lethal hot viruses were frozen in a refrigerated walk-in room on that level. Every so often, a man or woman working for some unknown military unit or spy agency would be flown in to USAMRIID in Maryland. They were typically dead at that point, but he knew of a few live ones. But once they passed, their blood and tissues were analyzed, and if an unknown hot virus was discovered, it went to a freezer on BS4 in Atlanta—even though most CDC employees didn’t realize it. USAMRIID also kept the unknown pathogens in BS4 freezers. A room of nightmares was right under their noses, and only a handful of doctors knew about it.

He scrubbed down and checked his suit before
negatively pressurizing it and heading into the labs. The room was a cacophony of monkey howls from the twenty or so primates stacked in cages against the wall. Four were lying motionless in pools of blood. They had been injected with black pox—Agent X—less than forty-eight hours ago as a vaccine. The weakened virus husks had flooded their bodies, initiating an immune response that had apparently gone nowhere.

Chon stood
frozen, staring at the corpses.
Clever little bastard.

Samantha thought about staying in her office and finishing up a few of her other cases, but that
seemed so pointless as to almost be laughable. A sample of the new strand of Agent X had been flown in and its identity had been confirmed: black pox with a slight mutation that was likely responsible for its hyper-incubation period.

Instead
of working in the office, she went to the BS4 labs, stripped and showered, and then put on her suit. She spent a good five minutes searching for tears in the suit before filling it with negative pressure from an air hose connected to the wall. She entered the lab through the decontamination chamber.

Ngo Chon stood there
, watching over about twenty specimens of primates, everything from small squirrel monkeys to hundred-and-fifty-pound chimps. Chon didn’t notice her and was standing as still as glass, watching the primates.

“No luck?
” she asked.

H
e shook his head in his suit. “I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s not smallpox. With SP, we could vaccinate within a few days and still have positive effects. This thing takes hold in a day. It shuts down the immune system first, uses it to replicate itself. Then it begins attacking healthy cells.” He turned to her. “It knows where our defenses are and uses them against us. It’s really quite… beautiful in how ferocious it is.”

“What progress have we made on a vaccine?”

“Almost none. The virus destroys itself if it’s weakened or damaged in any way. Like a self-destruct button, I guess.”

She approached one of the cages and stared at a spider monkey
that was lying on its side, its breathing heavy as its hands trembled.

It reminded her of the last case of smallpox she had ever seen. Officially, the last known case
had occurred in Africa in 1977, but the World Health Organization and the CDC knew that wasn’t true. Several cases had been reported in western Africa and parts of South America. But the virus had died out so quickly, the organizations didn’t want to raise public alarm.

Sam
had gone to Congo during the last outbreak in 2002. A twelve-year-old boy had infected and killed his entire family. She remembered the boy lying much like the monkey was, on his side, a blank expression over his still face as his hands trembled. His skin was coated with pustules that resembled oatmeal.

Smallpox
.

“Ngo, how genetically similar is Agent X
and its progeny to small pox? Would you say around ninety-nine percent?”

“
Yeah, somewhere around there. Why?”

She took a step back. “Because I think I know how to make a vaccine.”

66

Six days later, the weakened poxvirus sat in a syringe on her desk as Samantha stared out the window. Requests for aid were coming in from all over the country, but the Centers for Disease Control could provide almost none. The impact was so large that the best they could do was send teams of specialists out with military personnel to assess the damage. But the military wasn’t there to heal; they were there to prevent.

In almost every major American city, an order had gone out for isolation. No one was to have contact with anyone else. No school, no work, no church
, and no recreational activities. The only way to prevent infection was to avoid exposure to the virus. The hope was that, eventually, the infected would die off.

But humans were social animals
, and Sam was even aware of studies in which psychosis ensued after prolonged periods of isolation. She had once spent three weeks by herself in the Sahara after her guide had caught malaria and died. She remembered the madness encroaching like a dark cloud that she could see but couldn’t walk away from. It drifted toward her slowly at first, and within two weeks, she was mumbling aloud to herself. The first time she became aware of it, she stopped. But by the second time, she didn’t have the strength to fight it anymore. In fact, in some odd way, speaking to herself was comforting.

By the time another guided party happened by and found her, she was having conversations with herself
, and learning to stop took several weeks.

Taking
up the syringe, she examined the semi-golden fluid within. She tapped it twice to push the bubbles to the top and then placed some pressure on the bottom of the syringe to pop them. Unlike the vast majority of the world’s population, she had once been vaccinated for smallpox—before going out into the field. Thinking back, she wondered if that was why she hadn’t become infected with Agent X and her old boss, Dr. Ralph Wilson, had. He was a lab worker, not a field worker, and there wouldn’t have been a need to vaccinate him.

The chimpanzee she had immunized
with smallpox a week ago had grown ill, but he’d survived and was strong. She then injected it with Agent X, and it had survived. The poxvirus wasn’t genetically dissimilar enough to prevent a powerful immune response to Agent X. The vaccine had worked once… and it needed a human subject.

She blotted alcohol on her left bicep and then lifted the syringe. It touched the tip of her skin
, but before she could push it in, a hand violently jerked it away. Chon stood there, gawking at her. He took the syringe and capped it.

“Come with me.”

Samantha followed him up to the BS4 labs, where they suited up. Mongo, the chimp she had injected with smallpox, lay on his side, twitching. Blood pooled around him and was leaking from every orifice in his body. As was also displayed in the human victims, his organs had liquefied and were coming out in thick strands with his feces. Unable to control his bowel movements, he was coated in bloody flesh.

“He didn’t display any symptoms,” she said.

“Not at first. I took a sample of his blood.”

“And?”

“The poxvirus mutated again. I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see it with my own eyes. But it
sensed
the vaccine, and it mutated.”

Samantha knew
of only one other virus that could have had such an ability: influenza. The common flu virus was the most adaptable life form on the planet and could almost sense its own destruction. That was why vaccines had to be given every year instead of once in a lifetime: it simply mutated too quickly. But even the flu couldn’t mutate within a host after injection of a vaccine.

“Damn,” she muttered.
She began pacing. “This is the key, Ngo. There has to be some way to slow the mutation.”

“How?”

She thought of graduate school. She remembered an experiment in which they slowed ants with liquid nitrogen. When they thawed, they would pick up exactly where they had left off. If they were heading for a piece of food, they would continue there. If they were retreating, that’s what they would continue doing.

“What if we could slow the mutation with liquid nitrogen? After immunization with poxvirus
, we could slow Agent X before injection. Maybe that would give the body enough time to come up with antibodies before the next mutation?”

Ngo thought it over. “
I love it. I’ll get the LN. We have some in Lab Two.”

Samantha bent down in front of Mongo. She placed her thickly gloved hand over his head
, and he didn’t have the strength to respond. Instead, he whimpered and closed his eyes.