The Virus (4 page)

She screamed aloud from the crushing
frustration and everyone in the lobby, including the receptionist,
stared on, bewildered. She screamed again at the people to stop
staring at her and pounded on a nearby chair for
obedience.

“Please calm down, Ma’am.” Advised the
receptionist. “What seems to be the problem?” Delilah looked at the
women in simultaneous fear and disgust. Part of her was looking for
signs of decay that she was sure would be the result of the
spreading disease. Much to her alarm she noticed that the whites of
the woman’s eyes were, indeed, noticeably yellowed. She looked
quickly over the rest of the receptionist and also noticed that the
woman was feverishly scratching her arm, and what looked like dead
skin was falling from the spot in the process. Immediately, Delilah
wished that she had not seen the proof she was looking for, but it
was right there before her eyes. It would’ve been better had it
been all in her head (even though that alone had already scared her
to hysteria), but it wasn’t. It was real…and she was
next.

Not caring anymore about the shocked
and staring faces, Delilah sprinted to the elevator and back to her
room. She nearly broke down her room door rushing into it, and
locked every lock once she was in. She wanted to yell for her
father. She snatched up the phone with her awkward gloves and
pressed the numbers to her father’s cell phone furiously. The bulky
towels wrapped around her hands pressed three and four numbers at a
time and made it impossible to make a call this way. She grunted in
anger. She wanted her father desperately. Somehow, his money would
make things better. It always did. But in order to make the call,
she’d have to unwrap her hands and risk contamination. She threw
herself onto the bed and squealed in the ear shattering tone of a
frustrated newborn, unable to think of anything else to do. All of
her fancy clothes, her thousand dollar hairdo, not even this $2,800
a night luxury hotel room—none of it was effecting its usual magic
whereby everything in life, no matter how unpleasant for everyone
else, was cool and comfortable for her, and thus, she was left lost
and afraid.

Just like a small, abandoned child who
screams in tantrum until she’s sore from exertion, only to find
that her tirade has failed to produce what was sought after,
Delilah found that her outburst meant absolutely nothing here. If
she wanted to talk with her father, she’d have to pick up the phone
like any other human being and dial the numbers…and, yes, risk
infection in the process. Filling incredibly sorry for herself for
how cruel reality was treating her, she did just that. Lenard
answered on the first ring. One of the things his wife had taught
him before her passing was to answer promptly whenever the women in
his life beckoned.

“Oh, Daddy!” Delilah shouted, before
again bursting into panic-stricken sobs. For the next forty-five
minutes, she unloaded all of her angst upon his shoulders (or
rather, into his ear). She had no idea that at the very moment she
had called, her father was in a meeting with some of his colleagues
discussing the very thing that had her upset. She hadn’t been
watching the news. In fact, she hadn’t been doing anything except
engaging in raging fits—but if she had been, she would’ve known
that the possible infection was no longer a rumor, but a
substantiated reality. Seemingly within the last few hours, women
of every age, color, and nationality all across the planet, began
displaying the jaundiced yellow eyes and itchy, flaking skin just
like the receptionist Delilah had seen earlier. In reality, though,
the phenomenon had been taking place and spreading slowly amongst
the collective female population since the meteor incident. It was
just recently that these unusual symptoms had spread to enough
people to make things truly alarming.

Lenard’s business partners had called
the meeting with him because, as they spent most of their time at
luxury hotel locations owned by the company, they mistakenly
thought that perhaps whatever was happening to their wives and
daughters had something to do with their hotel buildings. It was
during the meeting, an hour or so before Delilah’s frantic call,
that Lenard’s secretary informed him that he may want to turn on
the news in the conference room where he and the associates sat.
All of them were blaring the same headlines.

“Well, at least we know it has nothing
to do with our hotels,” one of Lenard’s professional partners joked
dryly, as every news station available informed the public that
something, nobody yet knew what, was affecting the female
population of the world.

Lenard stepped out of the meeting and
did his best to calm his shaken daughter. He assured her that he
would be on one of his private jets to New York as soon as possible
to personally pick her up. True to his word, he adjourned the
meeting and was in New York City within hours. He picked up his
daughter and they returned to their mansion straightaway. As soon
as they made it home, Delilah demanded that all the help, the
butler, the driver, the maids, etc., be instructed to return to the
modest apartments on the mansion’s property where they lived when
they weren’t working. As much as she wanted to be waited on, she
didn’t want anyone in the house to spread the infection, especially
since the female hired help were all showing the same yellow eyes
and scaling skin.

After the place had been vacated,
Delilah again rushed to her room and locked her door. Her room was
typical of wealth; fully equipped with plenty of square feet, a
huge adjoining bathroom, large, flat screen T.V., a king sized
heart-shaped bed, even a fridge. She basically had everything she
would need to survive comfortably for many days, so Lenard
understood that he may not see her for some time. Meanwhile, he
phoned a few of his friends in high places—many of them on the
payroll—to get whatever information he could about what the hell
was going on.

Among these friends were
some prominent doctors and scientists, many of whom Lenard had made
handsome contributions to their causes and establishments (like
financing the trip of the son of a globally renowned plastic
surgeon to intern under a notable, albeit pompous, scientist
somewhere in the middle of Antarctica, in exchange for that surgeon
performing some controversial plastic
surgery for Lenard’s wife in the comfort of their home).
Lenard learned that the affected women were showing signs of what
looked like a completely new form of cancer, as well a specific
kind of anemia. Lenard wasn’t familiar with many of the terms some
of his contacts were using, so he asked them to explain what they
were trying to say in laymen’s terms. The information that he was
eventually left with was that basically, the woman had somehow
recently undergone a complicated change in their systems that was
causing their skin to reproduce unnaturally fast—hence the
scratching and subsequent shedding, and that one of the only things
medical professionals knew of that caused
cells
 to
display uncontrolled growth like this, was
cancer.

As far as anyone knew right now,
this ubiquitous cancer, if it was, in fact, cancer, was accompanied
and possibly even caused by a marked change in the way the women’s
blood was using and transporting oxygen. Every woman studied showed
a marked decrease in red blood cells. This was what was probably
responsible for the yellowed eyes. All this wasn’t exactly laymen’s
terms, Lenard noted, but it all boiled down to the fact that, for
some reason, women’s bodies were suddenly handling oxygen very
differently than normal (or perhaps, struggling to handle a
different kind of oxygen) and their bodies were not transitioning
well. The other consensus was that it had all started with the
first sighting of that mysterious ‘meteor’.

Chapter 6

Mr. Reynolds was now lying safely back
in the emergency room of the research station. The room was about
the size of an extra-large living room and was equipped with an
operating table, a few pieces of medical equipment, and two
stainless-steel chests of medical supplies. Large halogen lights
loomed high in the ceiling alongside moderately-sized vents
attached to powerful vacuums that were responsible for the
emergency room’s ventilation. The powerful system sucked air from
the room through these vents while other vents closer to the floor
resupplied the room with fresh air from the outside. The glacial
Antarctic air was highly inhospitable to germs and airborne
pathogens, so this special ventilation system ensured that the air
in the emergency room was as clean, probably more so, than any
other hospital in the world. Unfortunately, it also meant that the
air in the room was ridiculously cold.

Sure, there was a small
separate system that heated the incoming air, but it was working in
semi-permanent nighttime in a land where
0
°F
is considered unseasonably
hot during the daytime. There was only so much it could do to warm
the air. Naturally, everyone kept on thick layers of clothing as
they stood around Scientist Reynolds now. They had checked him for
any obvious wounds, but having found none, they left him thickly
clothed as well. Geoffrey had already relayed what had taken place
to everyone at least three or four times, but these were scientists
he was talking to. By definition they didn’t believe in miracles,
and if nothing else, this was a miracle of horror. What
really
happened was what
every one of the other scientists wanted to know. Geoffrey was
surrounded by professionals whose minds were steeped in logic via
years and years of practice, and his claim of why Mr. Reynolds was
lying here totally unconscious was anything but logical.

Though no one spoke the
idea out loud, the possibility that Geoffrey had actually assaulted
Mr. Reynolds crossed everyone’s mind. Other than a dark and raised
patch on the scientist’s shoulder, there was no bruising or other
sign of struggle on either Geoffrey or Mr. Reynolds. All of Mr.
Reynolds’s vital signs were normal, and, except for him
periodically moving his lips and rapidly moving his eyes that would
suggest the scientist was not unconscious, but merely sleeping, he
seemed fine. Someone suggested that perhaps he should be moved out
of the station and back to the States to a better equipped facility
in case something more was wrong with him that they couldn’t see.
After all, the emergency room of the station was, as its name
implied, only designed and stocked for absolute emergencies. It was
far from an extensive operating theater and if any extra medical
attention was needed, it would certainly not be given in this
hocked-up first aid center.

The problem with having Mr.
Reynolds escorted out, however, was that the only quick
transportation off the station was by helicopter, and the station
was as far from anything resembling a commercial airport as the
emergency room was from a full hospital, so calling for a
helicopter to be dispatched was, by no means, a trivial thing.
Anyone calling for one of the special, and extremely expensive,
helicopters that were on standby for such a trip, would have to
answer with their career should the situation turn out to be
anything other than an absolutely dire one. There was no way to
tell if the current situation
was
dire. Mr. Reynolds was breathing normally, and
there was no sign of life-threatening trauma. For all appearances,
he was simply unconscious. On the other hand, every person in the
room would readily agree that the meteorite fragment was something
new, something the likes of which none of them had ever experienced
before, and if the account Geoffrey had given was true, then the
proper authorities would have someone’s head if it wasn’t reported
right away.

No one was sure what call
to make, so they decided that Mr. Reynolds would remain under
observation for the equivalent of a normal night, eight hours, upon
the completion of which, if he was not awake to answer for his own
well-being, then the difficult phone calls would have to be made.
Shifts were allocated so the comatose scientist could be watched
round the clock while the others slept and everyone returned to
their bunk-filled sleeping quarters. For all their efforts, no one
seemed to be able to sleep. These were minds of people whose
profession required that they delve deeply into the unknown, and
there was much that was unknown here. Something big,
something
huge
,
was amiss, this much was certain, and no one could resist summoning
his deductive reasoning to try to unravel the one question that
plagued them all: What was the rock and what happened?

When the eight hours were
up and Mr. Reynolds was still not among the lucid, the scientists
were exhausted and not completely coherent, themselves. It was
difficult enough to sustain a healthy circadian rhythm with no
daylight, but to also be forced awake by overreaching
imaginations…well, the stumbling feet and drooping faces of Mr.
Reynolds’s peers would strongly suggest that such a mixture was in
direct opposition to alertness.

Once everyone had shuffled
to the coffee maker for that sweet, brown gold of caffeine, they
each took a chair and began discussing a plan. Everyone knew what
must be done. They had, in fact, already agreed upon it, but still
no one wanted to assume the potentially unlucky responsibility. The
fact that everyone’s constitution was half-mast at best wasn’t
helping things. Geoffrey decided he had had enough and that he
would make the dreaded phone call. His career had yet to really
begin, but more importantly, he had seen with his own eyes what
happened to Mr. Reynolds. If the others were undecided on whether
or not to believe his account,
he
wasn’t. Just like everyone else at the station,
Geoffrey had been briefed rigorously on the protocols of how to
call for help in just such an event.