Pandora - Contagion

by Eric L. Harry

  “Captain Rick Townsend, U.S. Marine Corps.”

  “Dr. Isabel Miller. Neuroscience. UC Santa Barbara.”

  The Mass General surgeon said, “I saw you on CNN. Sorry about your sister.”

  “Dr. Brandon Plante. I teach social psychology at Indiana University.”

  Their greeter escorted them through the busy hospital to the elevators. “Looks like you’ve got all your staff on hand,” Isabel noted.

  But Goldschmidt replied, “We’ve lost quite a few, actually. Most of the people you see here have been cannibalized from other area hospitals that have already closed.” When they crowded into the oversized elevator meant for rolling hospital beds, their host said, “We’re making Mass General our last stand, I guess.”

  He looked at Rick for some confirmation of the military advisability of that course. The normally direct Rick couldn’t return the man’s gaze. Even he had his limits. Mass General, Isabel and Rick knew, didn’t stand a chance. Pressing close to Rick’s side, Isabel snagged his pinky finger with hers for the briefest moment. It was something, but not enough to reassure her that his promise, given to her only minutes earlier on the roof, still stood.

  The elevator doors opened. “They’re gathering for your talk. But I thought first I’d show you what we’re planning.” The floor looked like a warren of cellular membranes with each cot surrounded by plastic, floor-to-ceiling sheeting. The tiny pods lined all the corridors in every direction, leaving only one-lane gurneyways. They filled waiting rooms, whose chairs had been removed and sofas turned into beds. They split private and semi-private rooms into four, each with its own, separate isolation shelters.

  “You’re planning on,” Isabel asked, “receiving patients? Isolating them?”

  “We’re a hospital, Dr. Miller. We’re here to treat the sick as best we can.”

  “You don’t have restraints,” Rick noted. Goldschmidt and his small medical entourage of older doctors and nurses stared back at him. “You need to restrain patients in the late stages of the acute phase. It’ll make them panic, but I wouldn’t wait too long.”

  The surgeon issued orders to prepare restraints. “See how many of those plastic, handcuff ties Boston PD can get us.”

  “What about intake?” Isabel asked. “What’s your protocol?”

  “We triage them in tents in the parking lot. People with ordinary medical issues or casualties of fighting are either turned away after first aid, if their injuries are survivable, or sent to an ordinary ward. People suspected of having been exposed to SED go into these isolation units.” Isabel and Rick exchanged a look. “What?” Goldschmidt inquired.

  Isabel answered for them both, speaking in slow and measured tones to allow her audience the time to change their understanding of the way the world works. “Every…single…person who comes from outside your perimeter is a potential SED carrier. You crowd them all into an enclosed, ordinary ward, and they’ll all get sick. And this plastic in here restricts airflow and keeps high concentrations of the aerosolized pathogen in place to be stirred up into suspension for inhalation with every vitals check.” The entire effort was so obviously doomed to failure. Why were they even trying?

  Rick suggested, “Bust out the windows,” never taking his gaze off Isabel. “It’s breezy this high up. The ventilation will help.”

  “Okay.” Goldschmidt turned to a similarly gray, similarly grim woman. “We isolate everyone we admit, and break out all the windows on this floor. Have maintenance nail some two-by-fours up as railings.”

  “How long will you quarantine patients?” Isabel asked.

  “Eight hours.”

  “Four is probably safe. Symptoms usually arrive in two. I’d turn the beds faster. You won’t be able to sterilize this area. It’s airborne. You’re just going to have to mask up all your patients and hope for the best.”

  The surgeon said, “We’ve set aside the parking garages for morgues. The survivors go into the MOAD.” He pronounced it “mo-add.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s your facility,” Goldschmidt said to Isabel. “Federal. ‘Mass Open-Air Detention.’ Our job ends when we hand them over to the navy corpsmen across the street.” He led them to an amphitheater filled with chattering doctors and nurses in lab coats and scrubs. Unlike the briefings to troops, Rick remained beside the door. A pretty nurse, younger than Isabel and much more recently bathed, asked him questions, pointing at different parts of his rifle, smiling, and saying things like, “Oh! Wow. Really?”

  Vasquez and his men milled about the corridor outside. A hush descended as Isabel and Brandon took to the stage in full combat regalia. She was getting used to her arrival casting palls over rooms. “How much does all that weigh?” asked the grinning young nurse as she squeezed Rick’s ammo pouches.

  Into the stillness boomed, “All right!” from a newly arriving man in a dark windbreaker with a blue emblem on its breast, who strode down the center aisle toward the front. “Let’s start getting this place organized! I’m the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency incident commander! This is the FEMA incident commander!” His thumb introduced his clone, on whose own windbreaker “FEMA” was helpfully inscribed. “We’ve just completed our delineation of jurisdictional authority, which I’d like to review with you all!”

  Dr. Goldschmidt was crimson with anger, presumably having passed the more pastel shades of annoyance without Isabel noticing. “Watch out,” whispered a female doctor who’d been on their tour. The senior surgeon asked to speak to the two bureaucrats alone.

  “I’ve never been to Wisconsin. Are there lots of guys there like you?” The nurse’s giggle was inappropriate to the somber mood of the room. But the shouts of the surgeon and the incident commanders from the corridor became audible to all and elicited a bemused stir among the hospital’s staff.

  The shattering of a window one floor above startled everyone. Tinted shards and stringers of glass plummeted past their view.

  Goldschmidt returned—calm, peach-colored, alone—and introduced Isabel and Brandon both as “Doctor,” but appended “PhD” lest anyone mistake them for an MD. As more glass rained past their view, he informed the gathering of his executive decisions like the ventilation plan, restraining late-stage SED victims, and shortening of the quarantine. Like most egotists, he’d already forgotten the ideas weren’t his. He then motioned toward his PhD guests.

  “We usually,” Isabel said, “go straight to questions.”

  Several hands shot up. Isabel pointed at a man in a white lab coat. “From the abstracts we’ve gotten, the acute phase of the disease results in severe nausea and unconsciousness. If we cuff them to their cots on their backs, they may aspirate bile.”

  Goldschmidt clearly expected her to answer. “Can you cuff them face down and over a bucket?”

  A senior nurse said they’d need more buckets. “A lot more.” They really were going to attempt to handle this unprecedented medical emergency. It was both heartening that people were still trying, and heartbreaking in how, she knew, it would end.

  The questions continued. Each identified a potentially disastrous failure, which in total slowly revealed the true hopelessness of their efforts. Where to do the triage? Whether to separate friends and loved ones from the potentially infected, or to quarantine them all? What about treating potentially infected patients suffering from other maladies? Criteria for discharging the uninfected. Barrier breaches that would require quarantining hospital staff. The importance of self-reporting lapses and reporting lapses by co-workers. Could they wash linens or do they need to be burned after first use? How many body bags do they have in stock and when did they make the call to begin reusing them solely for transport to the morgue? What constitutes “full” in those underground parking garages? In the end, Isabel knew, they would all be overwhelmed, infected, and die on their jobs or in belated attempts to flee their failing systems. Pand
oravirus was a force of nature, as if Infecteds were the preordained successors to the former undisputed masters of the Earth.

  Brandon stared into empty space. She had no idea where his head was. When a question related vaguely to security was asked, Isabel interrupted the pretty, industrious nurse by inviting Rick to answer it. He suggested to the gathering of medical staff that they arm themselves, then broke free of the nurse’s clutches and hosted an off-to-the-side lecture of the private security, police, and military personnel.

  After the briefing, their entire nine-person detail reassembled in the sandbagged, first-floor lobby where most of the armed men and women were located. Their peeps. Rick said to the entire detail, “Our orders are to observe the arrival of the infection from inside the city to see what we can learn about best practices.” Brandon loosed a cynical scoff. “So, we’ve got two choices. We can bunk here for the night, or we can requisition some ground transportation and head up to Medford to observe the outbreak from there before falling back into the city after dark.”

  “I vote we bed down here for the night,” Isabel said.

  “I agree,” Brandon quickly concurred.

  They took food from the cafeteria to cots in the still empty maze of plastic sheeting. Isabel made sure she put herself next to Rick. The cell connection was good. They all typed their reports to the Pentagon. Isabel wondered how long people would be there to read them. “Giving the hospital staff,” she typed with a kernel of guilt, “explicit instructions seems to afford them a glimmer of hope and may account for their continued dedication to their work,” as hopeless as that is. She kept adding to her rambling observations every time she found that Rick was still typing.

  After the Rouses Point Bridge massacre, she had read the report Rick would post to the DoD database, which had subsequently been classified Top Secret. Isabel’s own e-mails back to the National Security Council were free-form and never secret. Rick’s were composed from some sort of rigid template. “Memorandum: For the Joint Chiefs of Staff. From: Capt. Rick Townsend, USMC. Subject: After Action Report.” Location, forces deployed, terrain, description of engagement, and ending in lessons learned. Her own observations seemed insignificant by comparison, like about Infecteds’ migratory impulses and the tendency of crowds, once formed, to wander like sufferers of dissociative fugue, or the odd penchant for individual Infecteds’ cooperativeness. Under lessons learned from fighting in the woods, Rick had typed, “Continuous lines unsustainable. Recommend checkerboard redoubts with interlocking fields of fire, and sallying.”

  “What’s a redoubt?” she had asked him.

  “A strong defensive position.”

  “And a sally?”

  “It’s, um, an attack—outbound—by the garrison of a redoubt.”

  “Like…lowering the drawbridge and charging out on horseback?”

  “Exactly. Now I really need to upload this before the Midnight in the Tank,” the Joint Chiefs’ nickname, she knew, for their nightly meeting at eleven fifty p.m.

  “Please quit bothering me,” Isabel had replied. “I have to finish my report too…about drawbridges and moats and catapults.” That elicited the faintest hint of amusement.

  At around ten p.m., the hospital lights were lowered. After waiting in vain in the darkness for several minutes for the thick plastic to part and Rick’s tall figure to appear, Isabel ended up saying, “Good night?”

  Both Rick and Brandon replied, in unison, “Night.”

  Isabel’s stifled sigh became a personal best exercise in deep breathing. She kept drifting off to sleep, still sort of waiting for Rick even with Brandon so close.

  The next thing she knew—possibly minutes, possibly hours later—the lights were raised and there was a commotion. Orders were barked from behind masks.

  Isabel parted the plastic into Rick’s cot. He was climbing into his body armor and webbing. There were sirens audible through the black openings where the windows had once been. Isabel peered into the corridor. A patient was being rolled into the ward on a narrow gurney like those used by ambulances. The little girl on it was sitting upright holding a fraying teddy bear, eyes wide and pupils green above her mask, not yet black, as they wheeled her past. She stared at Isabel, too young to be in terror, but full of concern, which visibly grew as Isabel raised her own mask to cover her nose and mouth.

  Chapter 9

  THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY, VIRGINIA

  Infection Date 43, 2200 GMT (6:00 p.m. Local)

  Following a long day of work at the compound and a refreshing evening shower, Noah found Natalie in the kitchen pointing at the TV. “A college student at George Mason got sick in the next county over.” On the muted flat-screen mounted to the wall was a boy in a one-piece white suit and hood. Only his black eyes were visible over his mask as he was led, handcuffed, from a patrol car into what looked to be a jail. “They don’t know how he caught it. He has amnesia or something and is confused, but he mentioned some woman he met on the road. A professor.”

  Noah was instantly on alert. He wanted to ask if she was five-four with short, light brown hair and exhibited a special interest in epidemiology. But that would certainly rouse Natalie’s concerns about Emma, who he grew increasingly certain was headed their way.

  Noah found Jacob in the tower, as he and Jake called it. A small set of spiral stairs led to an unfinished attic space that Noah had opened to the outside, thereby creating an architecturally discordant watchtower of sorts with good sight lines over the barn, past the fence, and down the hill toward the distant highway. Jake sat on a built-in bench seat, flying the drone on his iPad, with his rifle propped against the waist-high, crenellated wall. “Jake, could we talk?”

  “Yeah, sure. It’s almost outta juice. I’ll fly it home on autopilot.”

  Noah sank to the cushions on the floor. “First off, son, how many times…”

  “Yeah! I know.” Jacob slid off his perch and sat on the floor so that no one beyond the fence could see him there. Or, more importantly, shoot him. That was the whole point of the drones—to do recon without exposing themselves to any danger.

  On the iPad, a video procession of trees and rocky outcroppings gave way to the fence line, barn, and main house. Its buzzing motor sounded like an angry bee as it grew louder. Jacob craned his neck to peer through the vertical slits in the tower’s walls like in a medieval battlement, whose design, in fact, Noah had copied.

  “Keep your head down,” Noah again reminded. “You can watch it on the iPad.” When the camera pointed—motionless—at a random copse of trees beside the relatively flat and open landing pad they had cleared of branches, the rotors fell silent and the iPad went black.

  “So, Jake, I’m headed down to that town meeting this evening. Every night before sunset I walk the perimeter to make sure the fence is intact and the little gate leading up to the cabin is locked.”

  “You want me to do it tonight?”

  “Yes. Take your rifle with you and chamber a round, but keep the safety on and your ears open. If anything appears off or different, or if you feel uncomfortable in any way, don’t go check it out. Get back to the house, tell your Mom, lock up, and wait.”

  The soon-to-be fourteen-year-old boy agreed while wearing his serious look.

  “If something goes really wrong—if there’s big trouble up here—don’t try to defend the house. You, your sister, and your mother go down into the basement, head out through the tunnel, and hike up to the cabin. Quietly. If you’re not here, I’ll look for you there. Okay?” Jake bobbed his head. Noah concluded yet again that he needed to make it back to his family. They would be far less safe if anything happened to him.

  * * * *

  The parking lot at the firehouse was nearly full. Noah walked up to the commotion at the door, where a crowd was arguing with a deputy. “You really oughta rethink this,” a spokesman for the group was saying. His accent was definitely
not local. Everyone wore some form of mask—an old-fashioned cloth surgical mask, a respirator like the ones used by house painters, various forms and thicknesses of bandanas, even a ghoulish-looking army surplus gas mask. Noah extracted an N95 mask and Latex gloves from the rucksack he carried.

  The deputy, arms crossed, ignored the crowd. “Who are you?” he challenged as Noah edged his way forward.

  “Name’s Miller.”

  “Noah Miller?” The deputy waved him through without even checking his pack.

  “What the fuck is that about?” the group’s angry spokesman objected.

  “Like I said, residents and landowners only.”

  Inside, several dozen locals were packed into the empty central hall where the fire truck, banished to the outside, was normally parked. Several people—by their attire farmers or not far removed from farming—acknowledged his arrival. Noah scanned the crowd. No one appeared visibly ill. Most carried sidearms; a few had shotguns. Noah decided to make a quick run back out to get his pistol.

  One of the people from the crowd at the door fell into step alongside him. “Hey.” The man’s red-white-and-blue bandanna over his nose and mouth puffed outward with his greeting. “Alexei Kozlov,” he said, pronouncing his surname “Kos-LOFF.” He gave Noah his business card. Senior salesman, AAA Jacuzzi Tubs, Hoboken, New Jersey. “Look, we may not be from ’round these here parts,” he said, sounding like an old cowboy in a B-grade western, but with a faint Russian accent, “but we’re good people. We wanna join up. Be useful members of society.” Like if anyone needs a Jacuzzi.

  “You’re talking to the wrong guy.” Noah opened the SUV door, strapped his pistol belt around his waist, locked the truck, and turned to see the man heading off, checking Noah over his shoulder.

  Back inside, armed, Noah felt more at ease and received additional silent greetings.

  “Okay folks,” announced the cowboy-hat wearing Sheriff whom Noah and Jacob had met on the state highway two days earlier. A pair of men joined Walcott atop one of several shrink-wrapped pallets of supplies. Behind them hung a huge American flag. “Now you all know me, and the mayor, and the fire chief. We called this meetin’ to talk about organizin’ a… Well, I guess I’d call it a militia. Y’all know I only got three deputies, and two auxiliaries. That’s six of us for a county that used to have a population of about five thousand. But as you can see from outside, that’s now swole to near double with refugees from up North.”