by Nancy Smith
the Universal Vaccine
It took all of human history—until around 1800—for the world population to reach one billion. As of this writing in 2017, the world population has reached 7.5 billion. By 2050 the population is expected to rise to 9.7 billion per the World Population Clock at:
Worldometers.http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/.
1
It was a beautiful day in Austin, Texas. The sky was that color of blue that gives azure its name, fading as it moved toward the horizon to a hue so light that it was almost white. Three new black Lincoln Continental SUVs with dark tinted windows attempted to blend in with the decade-old Toyotas and Hondas as well as the bicyclists on Guadalupe. Students and teachers headed toward the University of Texas at Austin.
With the UT tower on their left, the procession slowed and then turned off the main drag onto side streets that would barely support the width of the cars. They pulled into an even narrower alley and stopped the cars blocking any other vehicle’s attempt to navigate the alley.
Four people hopped out of each car, their gender not apparent as each person wore head-to-toe protective white suits. The bulk of the suits indicated that further protection, like a bulletproof vest, might be underneath. The majority of them carried army-issue Beretta 92FS semiautomatic pistols with a silencer, but one of them had a Spencer 1860 repeating rifle, likely of Civil War vintage. They looked like trouble. The crowd parted around them to let them pass.
A student with long blonde hair whose gender wasn’t obvious zipped by on a Priority Classic lightweight aluminum bicycle with a Bevo orange frame. She, for the student was a girl, caught a glimpse of the action in the alley. She stopped a few blocks away and called 911 to report the guns. In ten or fifteen minutes, the university would be on lockdown for the fourth time that year. That was good for her as she had a test in her first class she did not feel prepared to take.
Kolli’s beautiful wife of thirty years flashed him a brilliant smile. He couldn’t see it behind her protective mask, but Kolli knew it was there. Maria’s black eyes shined out of her goggles. In her white Tyvek protective suit in the white clean room, she moved like a flurry in a snowstorm. The clean room was an improvised space in the basement lab of the women’s free clinic just off Guadalupe Street in Austin.
“Did you know,” Maria said, “that some version of the Chicken Little story has been around for twenty-five centuries?
“The sky is falling. The sky is falling,” Kolli replied from behind his own mask.
Dramatically, Maria raised her arm and dropped the small canister she carried. It was meant to be ironic as the canister contained pure air. The canister was part of an advanced aerosol vaccine delivery system that Kolli had developed. The canister was used in combination with a vapor medicine to spread the vaccine over a large population, maybe as many as one hundred people at a time.
Kolli had just put his design specifications on a scientific website that he favored so that whoever might need it would have the information. Kolli strongly believed that this type of information should be freely available.
From the outside, a slit was torn through the white plastic door of the clean room. As Kolli bent to pick up the canister for Maria, he saw feet at the door. He heard the shot and watched in horror as Maria fell to the floor next to him. Kolli saw that the bullet had gone into her skull, into her brilliant brain. She blinked, a startled look on her face as blood seeped down.
The gunman disappeared from the tear in the door.
Kolli rolled under the high stilts of a nearby metal cabinet. The cabinet was new. He had bought it so Maria wouldn’t have to bend for precious supplies. She was getting older and her knees sometimes bothered her. The cabinet was one of just two pieces of furniture in the room, the other being the workbench behind which he had ducked to pick up the canister, the workbench that had hidden him from the gunman’s view.
Maria, barely alive, tried to pull herself to him on her elbows. He took her arm and slid her along the vinyl-sheet flooring. She now blocked the front of the cabinet from view. He saw her eyelids flicker. He held her hand and kissed it, until the life left those smart, funny, sexy eyes.
Someone entered the plastic room. This gunman carried a high-powered repeating rifle and wore a white all-over bunny suit like the one he was wearing over his clothes to prevent contamination. He could see nothing of the assailant but his combat boots.
But, Kolli could hear. He heard scuffling, muffled shots pierced the air and then his friends screamed. He wanted to get up and help them, but then the screaming was replaced with something much more terrible—silence. He wanted to help them, save them, die with them, something, but the weight of the sky on his chest prevented him.
Long after the killing stopped, the rifleman, who had been simply standing in the clean room, pulled his wife’s hand to drag her from the room. The man was facing the opposite direction, making odd sucking noises, so he didn’t immediately see Kolli slide out from under the cabinet.
Kolli was strong and agile for his age soon to be fifty-five—if he lived through this day. He pulled the high-powered weapon from the surprised man’s hands and smashed him on the head. The man fell unconscious. It was only then that Kolli saw the riflemen’s red-rimmed eyes and realized that he had been crying.
A few minutes after that, another man entered the room. He ignored Kolli as he dragged his compatriot by the arm into the other room. Kolli realized then that his white, clean room suit hid him from the murderers. Their camouflage from him was his camouflage from them. Everyone looked the same.
Kolli walked into the main room of the lab. It was large, open, and had a workstation with a computer every five feet around most of the perimeter, broken only by the racks of servers and drives on one wall.
He watched as someone dismantled the hard drive from the server. This guy picked up two or three of the laptops including Kolli’s, and tossed them into a duffel. Kolli didn’t care about these machines. He watched as two men pulled the bodies of his coworkers, his friends into a bloody pile.
“What’s the body count?” someone asked.
“Seventy-five. Just as it should be.”
To his horror, the murderers poured accelerant on the bodies. They used chemicals like acetone and benzene and methyl alcohol, volatile chemicals that they found in storage at the lab.
Kolli ran out of the room. He followed the person who stole the only thing that they were likely after—Maria’s universal vaccine. Kolli shadowed that person up the basement stairs and out the back door into the alley.
A guard with a rifle stood in the alley. “Hey,” the guard said. “Get out of that suit as soon as you can. You got blood.”
Kolli looked in surprise at his bloody hands and the spatter on his suit. He looked at the guard and nodded. His expression must have been off because the guard gave him a quizzical look. Kolli asked the only question that he could think of that might raise that veil of suspicion.
“When do we get paid?”
“Tomorrow.”
Kolli nodded and walked down the alley. A block away, he pulled off his bunny suit and put it into a dumpster that was sure to be checked by the police. He patted the pockets of his blue jeans, but had no phone with him to call them.
He hid behind the dumpster when an unmarked black SUV sped away down the alley. Then, he heard an explosion and flames shot up behind him. A cloud of toxic chemicals swept over him.
2
Rory didn’t need the police scanner in his car to hear the explosion that went off just north of downtown Austin. He saw the cloud, a funny shade of yellow, and the flames. He drove his Toyota Avalon Hybrid away from it at top speed. When he reached an intersection where he could not g
o farther, he shut the vents in his car until the cloud completely dispersed.
When it seemed safe, he drove toward the disaster. He was first on the scene. The trouble seemed to be centered at the women’s free clinic located near the university. He had done a story on the great work that this hospital did—the work they had done, past tense, he thought looking at the ruin of the building. The air was still heavy with that yellow smoke. Rory coughed; it irritated his throat and lungs.
He called the station and then immediately began shooting video with his iPhone. He stopped the first person he saw.
“Rory Burke, KNUS. He pronounced it K-news. Can you tell me what happened here?”
“Back it up, bub.” This guy had on an unfamiliar uniform with no insignia on it beyond the word Security on his vest and ball cap, both that olive-green color that they called army green. He sported a gun on his hip. He looked like an extra in a B movie. Rory backed up a bit. When the guard was no longer focused on him, Rory took a picture of the man.
He’d heard the explosion. He’d seen the flames, yet there was a full response team already here. He found that odd. Who were these guys? They had cordoned off the area and were already bringing out full body bags—lots of body bags. Rory counted ten before he stopped.
He saw some activity down the street and went to check it out. More unmarked guards put up barricades at the alley. Rory took a picture of one as he carried boards and a hammer down the alley, probably to board up the back door to the clinic.
“Nothing to see here, bub.” His new name seemed to be bub. Rory walked back toward the front of the clinic.
“I’m a doctor,” a frazzled woman rushed up to him. Rory guessed that she was from the clinic. “I want to help.”
“There’s no need for a doctor here,” a uniform said.
Rory turned to the doctor. “What happened?” he asked.
“Boom and whoosh,” she said. “Just that fast. I was getting out of my car parked over there.” She pointed across the street and halfway down the block to a pay lot. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said in a shocked voice. She coughed and her voice sounded raw. Rory noticed that her skin was red, blistered a little bit.
“Maybe you should have an EMT look at you,” Rory said. “Smoke inhalation can be dangerous.”
“I told you to get out of here,” the uniform told Rory and his new friend. “Degas,” he yelled at someone. “Pull a team. Get these people out of here. No people. You hear me?”
All the hairs were standing up on the back of Rory’s neck. This was so wrong.
“This is so wrong,” the doctor echoed his own thoughts.
Emergency vehicles were just beginning to arrive. Also odd, Rory thought. He walked the doctor over to an ambulance as it pulled up.
Isa threw her heavy art portfolio over her shoulder and pushed out the door of the art department at the University of Texas. She had a long walk across campus and then a good half-mile into the neighborhood in the heat of the day to get home.
She’d left the house that morning to the sound of her parents having their usual morning discussion.
“Hurry up,” Dad said. “Or it will be too late.”
“Too late for what?” Mom countered.
“It’ll be too hot to walk. We’ll have to take the car.”
“What would be the point of that? Once we find parking, we’d have to walk almost as far as from here.”
Isa tsked at the memory.
It was a lovely walk to campus in the early morning. In the neighborhood, the sound of sprinklers on the lawns was accented by the sound of birds singing in the leaves of the trees as the water hit them. Walkers in teams of two or three strolled with their dogs on leashes, each group calling out a friendly hello. Runners, some with jogging strollers, made the bike path their own, much to the vexation of the many bikers, who yelled out “On your left.”
On campus, students hustled from building to building to get to their first class of the day. Some students sat on the wall of the West Mall and chatted with each other. Others lined up at the coffee cart for a little morning jolt.
Isa sat on the wall for a few minutes each day before her first class. Isa had wanted to be one of the popular kids in high school, but she wasn’t. She wanted to be one of the smart kids, but she hadn’t pulled that off either. She wanted to date in high school, but she never had. Her first boyfriend, her only boyfriend, Wilder, she had met on a beautiful morning on this wall.
What her parents never seemed to remember— or at least comment on—is the fact that Isa had to walk home in the afternoon. She would have loved to stop and buy a bottle of water or an iced drink, but the coffee cart was gone. People retreated indoors and shut the windows and doors tightly. They sat in air conditioning until the sun went down and it was safe to go outside again. Austin’s outdoor world was essentially over by 10:00 a.m. at the latest.
Isa wore shorts and a ball cap. She had two shirts—a tank top covered by a button-down covered in splotches of still-wet paint. The second shirt served both as a paint apron and to keep her warm in the unnaturally cold, air-conditioned classrooms. She took it off.
Isa was a graduate student and worked part-time as a teaching assistant in the art department. That meant she had to carry a heavy art portfolio of student work. It was large and awkward and could easily be replaced with digital images if the professor would allow it, but he wouldn’t.
Isa plodded toward her house in one hundred and five degree heat. She shuffled her portfolio, her backpack with books and art supplies, and her paint shirt in her hands. The only liquid around was coming from her pores. The only singing was the hum of one air-conditioning unit and then the next. By the time she reached the trees of the neighborhood, she needed to spot and rest.
She sat down on the top of three steps overhung by lush tree branches. The steps led to a two-story four-square. An architect used this traditional home as her office. Sometimes the architect’s assistant came out and brought her a glass of ice water, but not today. The only way to get water was to get home. Isa stuffed her hopefully dry paint shirt into her backpack and began walking again.
Isa would finish art school in a month. She was twenty-four, living with her parents, and looking for a nonexistent job in art history in Austin, Texas. She had no idea what she was going to do next.
Halfway up the sidewalk to her parents’ traditional-style, two-story house, two men in suits blocked her progress. One wore a JCPenny special in blue. The other wore a slick-cut, tailored black suit with a white shirt and skinny black tie. Black Suit was cool as a cucumber, but Blue Suit had a thick sheen on his forehead and a slightly rancid smell. They had been waiting for a while.
“Isabel Vedkka?” Black Suit spoke but both flashed badges. She didn’t have time to read them.
“Yes.”
“We need you to come with us.”
“Who are you? What do you want?”
They said nothing.
“Let me see those badges again.”
Reluctantly, they handed over their badges. The one who spoke was from some private security firm that only used initials—DSG. The other, Blue Suit, was with the Austin Police Department.
“Look,” she glanced at Black Suit’s badge, “Mr. John Williams. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know this company and I’m not getting into,” she looked toward the street, “an unmarked black SUV with you. I’m just not. Why can’t we just talk here and now?” She knew the answer to that. They wanted complete control over her. They were going to find out that that wasn’t too easy to do.
Blue Suit spoke for the first time.
“I could send for a police car if you like, if that would make you feel more comfortable.” He’d meant it sarcastically.
She looked at his badge. “Actually, it would, “Detective Victor Jimenez. Thank you.”
Isa noticed a third man hanging out at the bushes near the corner of the house. His head, covered in bright strawberry-blond curls po
pped around the corner like a jack-in-the-box. She almost laughed, but she had been trained too well to do that in front of the police. Blank face always.
He was maybe a tiny bit older than her, nice-looking in a goofy sort of way. Red wore navy cargo shorts with stuffed pockets and a rumpled button-down short-sleeve shirt. She couldn’t imagine that he was with these two. She and Red looked at each other for a minute. He smiled at her showing all his straight, white teeth.
“Better yet,” Isa said. “I’ll drive my own car and meet you at the station. Which one?”
As she made this pronouncement, the marked police car pulled up to the curb. Two Austin Police Department officers stepped out. Between the four of them, they manhandled her into the back seat.
As they pulled out, Isa looked at Red in the bushes. He raised one finger to his lips. She wasn’t sure if he was suggesting that she shouldn’t talk to the police or that she shouldn’t mention him, but it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to do either.
Isa had been in this ugly interrogation room with its peeling green paint for over an hour.
“Can I please have a glass of water?”
They were withholding.
There was a spot on the two-way mirror where the backing had flaked off and she could see the shadows of maybe four people beyond the two in this room. They ran an ancient camera on a tripod that used mini-tapes that had to be regularly replaced. It was attached to a monitor in the next room via a cable that went through a drilled hole in the wall.
Detective Jimenez did most of the talking while the private security guy, Williams, glared at her. Williams was one of the four most common last names in America: Smith, Jones, Williams and Johnson. Isa didn’t think that was a coincidence. She thought he knew that. They asked her the same questions over and over.
“Is your father Kolli Vedkka?”
“I’m not answering any more questions until I get water.”
“Is you mother Maria Sonia Sanchez Vedkka?”
