Pandora - Contagion

by Eric L. Harry

  The nurse did temperature and pupil checks, then said, “Dr. Isabel Miller?” Isabel nodded. Her stringy, cold hair tickled her face. “I’m going to ask you a few questions.” She seemed tired; the questions rote. “Can you describe this picture?” She held up a glossy, 8.5 by 11 photo of a flattened human in a puddle of viscera with a sickeningly misshapen head.

  Isabel winced and turned away. “Jesus!” The nurse asked her to describe the photo. Isabel took a sidelong peek, cringing. “It’s a body. A dead body. Someone, I don’t know, who jumped off a building, or got run over or something.”

  “And this?” The woman flashed a second photo from her stack.

  Isabel guardedly glanced at it. A little girl sat in the lap of a middle-aged woman. An elderly female stood behind them. All wore loving looks. “It’s a grandmom, mom, and daughter, I’m guessing.” Isabel knew what they were testing for, so she elaborated. “They’re happy. Three generations of women gathered for a birthday, or family reunion, or holiday.”

  “And this?” A deer floated in a swimming pool. Isabel overplayed her revulsion. “Aw, a little baby deer fell into a pool and drowned. Probably lapping at the water and got startled, then couldn’t climb its way out. Poor thing.”

  “And this?”

  “A proud veteran of an old war, crying at a funeral, or maybe the national anthem.”

  “And this?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, an autopsy photo? Seriously?”

  The door opened. Dr. Nielsen entered, wearing no PPE. “It’s okay,” she said. The nurse and soldier departed. “Isabel!” They hugged like old friends. “We’ve done it! A vaccine! Let’s get you dressed and I’ll show you.”

  Isabel climbed into hospital scrubs that Nielsen had brought while they washed her camouflage army uniform and undergarments for her. The former head of the Bethesda NIH hospital asked Isabel if it was bad out there. “Yes,” was all Isabel said. “So how effective is the vaccine?”

  There was enough of a pause in the reply that Isabel sensed a problem. “It’s one hundred percent effective. Total immunity is achieved in less than four hours; partial in less.”

  “Any side effects?”

  Nielsen’s eyes darted away. “Almost everyone gets a lump and itching at the injection site, and suffers from some fatigue. Two out of three get painful inflammation. One-third headaches, joint pain. One in eight fever and diarrhea.”

  “No allergic reactions?”

  “Not in our test group of less than a thousand.” Dr. Nielsen wasn’t making eye contact. “I can’t overstate how hard my team worked on getting to this breakthrough, and how amazed we all are at our success. A vaccine, in weeks, Isabel, not months, not years.”

  “But…?”

  “The Roche and Novartis labs in Switzerland tried deactivation of the virus but got overrun before anything came of it. AstraZeneca in Sweden has tried working with the toxoids—inactivated toxins released on infection—but have gotten nowhere so far. Sanofi tried conjugates—attaching antigens to carrier proteins—but now that the disease is out of control in France they’re in the process of moving their work up to Bayer in Germany. We elected to go with attenuation of the virus.”

  “So, you inject live Pandoravirus into people?”

  “Attenuated Pandoravirus,” Nielsen corrected. “Like the vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, oral polio, rotovirus, yellow fever, and some flu shots. Plus the typhoid and typhus vaccines in the bacteriological arena. Attenuated vaccines engage all phases of the immune response and provide more durable immunity, requiring less frequent boosters. They’re also cheap, and immunity comes in hours, not a week.”

  Isabel was now dressed in scrubs. “Bottom line? What’s the downside?”

  Nielsen took a deep breath. “Six percent of the subjects contract Pandoravirus.”

  Isabel sank into the chair opposite the woman. “Six percent?”

  “Plus or minus a fraction. But it works! For the rest.”

  “And of the six percent, half die and half turn?”

  “In rough numbers, but pretty consistently. Yes.”

  “Can that be reduced? Attenuated further?”

  Nielsen shook her head. “This bug is slippery. High mutation rate. The six percent get sick not because of insufficient attenuation, but because of post-exposure viral mutation.”

  “Is there any way to know who should get the vaccine, and who shouldn’t?”

  “Immunocompromised patients shouldn’t take it,” Nielsen replied. “They couldn’t fight off even the attenuated virus. And we haven’t tested children, the elderly, or pregnant women. But we can achieve communal immunity at a ninety percent vaccination rate. There’s no way, however, to predict who’ll get sick from the vaccine. The mutations seem statistical.”

  “Meaning random? So people have to decide whether to take the vaccine, or try to avoid infection ‘in the wild,’ as you people refer to the real world out there?”

  Nielsen looked exhausted. “Assuming we give them that choice.”

  “Have you taken it?” Isabel asked. Nielsen furtively glanced at Isabel, then shook her head. “Has anyone on your team taken the vaccine?”

  “I’ve only got a thousand people at this lab! I can’t lose sixty of them to the virus.”

  “But you’ll provide your vaccine to billions of people? A chance to play Russian roulette with their families?”

  Isabel expected Nielsen to bristle. Instead, she slumped, betraying an even deeper level of exhaustion than was first evident. “The mutagenesis team is trying to identify genes that facilitate reversion to virulence. Genetic modification of the attenuated virus may improve the odds. But that’ll take time, and there’s no guarantee. This vaccine, however, is still a miracle! It could stop the spread of the virus. Save billions.”

  They exited the guardhouse into the pale afternoon. Isabel was instantly freezing. Her hair was wet and her scrubs and slippers were thin. She crossed her arms over her chest as they walked toward the building complex. Rick sat in the open doorway of their Humvee, oblivious to her passing, cleaning his rifle, as always.

  Nielsen led her to the one out-of-place building on the placid green campus. Where previously there had been trees and an expansive lawn, now were freshly cut stumps beside a metal monstrosity. No one had bothered to blend the new facility into the red-brick theme of the older buildings. The only indication of the new facility’s purpose was an already fading poster board mounted beside the door. “Testing.”

  The building was heated, but Isabel strangely felt no warmer as a shiver rippled up her torso. “We’re going in,” Dr. Nielsen said to a soldier at a security desk. He requested no ID and used a magnetic card to unlock a sturdy steel door. Two armed soldiers accompanied them down a long, T-shaped corridor that disappeared in opposite directions at the far end. The floors were concrete. The lighting was industrial. Every other door had a small square window crisscrossed with reinforcing wire, a slot for trays, and a big hole for physical keys. It looked like a prison, not a lab.

  Most of the small windows they passed were lit, but Isabel saw nothing inside. Nielsen led her through one of the unlocked ordinary doors in between. A bleary-eyed woman in a lab coat raised her head from a nap at a desk in front of a large observation window like at the NIH hospital in Bethesda. Nielsen introduced Isabel as being, “from the White House.”

  Isabel’s attention was drawn to the room next door. A man in a hospital gown that barely covered him lay on a bed with one leg crossed over a raised knee, thumbing through a magazine. A woman in scrubs sat in the lone chair—motionless, expressionless, eyes black. The man licked a finger and turned a page.

  “This is Subject One Zero Nine,” Nielsen said. She took a clipboard from its holder and read, snorting in amusement. “Again?” she asked the nurse. “One-Oh-Nine is something of a star. Age twenty-seven. Good hea
lth. Recreational drug and alcohol use. Non-smoker. No major disease or surgical history. He got the vaccine,” she flipped back to page one, “eleven days ago. Fever of 101, nasal congestion, gastric distress, and a headache, which led to an anxiety attack. But all that passed in a day.”

  The guy had short hair, but was unshaven. His left arm was heavily tattooed.

  The girl had thick, dark hair, which when brushed might have been her best feature. It now hung around her face as she sat impassively, hands on her thighs, doing nothing.

  “We introduced her four days after One-Oh-Nine’s inoculation,” Nielsen said, “and less than four hours after she had turned.”

  “She was highly contagious,” said the nurse—beaming member of the victorious team.

  “And One-Oh-Nine didn’t catch it,” explained Nielsen simply. “He’s immune.”

  That announcement of their triumph seemed highly anticlimactic.

  “So presumably,” Isabel said, “you’ve had repeated success at achieving immunity. Why is he your star test subject?”

  Nielsen and the nurse smiled each other’s way. “At first, of course, when we introduced her into his room, he reacted like every subject does. Fled to a far corner, shouted obscenities, covered his mouth and nose, threatened her to keep her away. But a day passed. Nothing. Two days. Zip. She was shedding the virus like crazy. We tested her. They were in a closed room. Sealed in tight quarters. No PPE. And…he’s fine.”

  “And that makes him your star?”

  “Hm?” Nielsen said, looking up from the chart. “Oh. She no longer sheds much virus now through respiration, but it still contaminates her biofluids. Intracellular, extracellular, interstitial. Bile, feces, gastric acid, lymph, mucus, tears, saliva—all contagious. Vaginal secretions and female ejaculate too.”

  Slowly, it dawned on Isabel what she was suggesting. “They had sex?”

  “Unprotected. Eight times as of…10:09 to 10:12 this morning.” She put the clipboard back in its rack.

  This was all too much. “Wait a minute, they’re having sex. And you’re…watching, and recording?” Like with my sister in Bethesda!

  “This is science, Dr. Miller,” Nielsen replied icily, “not some peep show. I’m fed up with complaints about the ethics of our testing! We’re trying to save the human fucking race!” She reined herself in. She was biting the hand she wanted to feed her.

  Isabel, however, wanted the truth, so she pressed the buttons Nielsen revealed. “Let’s talk about ethics. How did these people come to be part of your testing program?”

  Her host was visibly angry. Nielsen pressed her lips closed as if to prevent the wrong words escaping. The nurse seemed frightened of her fearsome boss, who said, with forced calm, “One-Zero-Nine is a National Guardsman caught stealing opioids from a medical locker. He was sentenced to the vaccine trials by a three-judge military tribunal.”

  “Sentenced to be a guinea pig? In a potentially fatal medical experiment? I thought they only tested on prisoners sentenced to death or life imprisonment.”

  Nielsen said, “Military punishment is harsher.”

  “And the girl?”

  A look of pain creased the nurse’s face as her gaze darted toward the hospital room.

  “She was a lab tech here,” Nielsen said. Isabel asked if they had intentionally infected her. “Good God, no!” Nielsen replied, happy for the opportunity to be offended. She turned to the young nurse. “You knew her. Want to explain?”

  “She talked a soldier into letting her slip out. She’s a single mom, and her mom called to tell her that her daughter, in town, was sick. They caught her trying to sneak back in to steal antivirals.”

  “So, she tries to help her daughter, gets sick, and ends up being that asshole’s sex slave.”

  Nielsen glared at her, but wouldn’t take the bait.

  “She wants to do it,” the young nurse said. “She has orgasms almost every time; sometimes multiple. There’s been no violence, no coercion. They sleep in the same bed, and he’s been sweet to her.”

  Over the observation room speakers, Subject 109 said to his infected companion, “You wanna look at this?” He held the magazine out to her. She shook her head. He tossed the magazine at the trash can and missed. He sighed, acting bored, and rose to urinate in the stainless steel toilet. “You gettin’ this?” he asked toward the observation room window, which was clearly opaque on his side. “Subject pissed at…what time is it? Morning? Afternoon?”

  “Afternoon,” the infected lab tech replied.

  The observation room door opened. A soldier delivered to Isabel her now clean and disinfected clothes, still warm from the dryer. Her sanitized rifle and other gear had been returned to the convoy except for the proffered satellite phone, which Isabel accepted. After Isabel dressed, the nurse lent her a hairbrush, and Isabel removed tangles from the mess on her head. “What happened to the soldier who let the lab tech sneak out?” she asked. Nielsen and the nurse exchanged a glance. “You know what he did, so he obviously got caught.”

  “One-Thirty-Four,” Nielsen said. “He didn’t make it. Got sick, never pulled out.” Isabel’s heart wasn’t in further harangues, so she let the tragedy pass. “We’ve tested 894 subjects, almost all inmates from Attica, with over a thousand more volunteering for the trials. Fifty-three contracted SED. That’s 5.93, or roughly six percent. Twenty-five died—forty-seven percent. Twenty-eight turned.”

  The Guardsman wandered his prison cell/hospital room, putting the splayed magazine into the trash, inspecting a pimple in the mirror, ending up at the desk, where he began to massage the infected lab tech’s shoulders. She straightened her back. He whispered into her ear. She tilted her head. He kissed her neck. His tattooed forearm pressed on her breasts.

  Unbidden, she rose, trailing her hand, and towed him to the bed.

  The nurse got out the clipboard.

  “Okay, I’ve seen enough,” said Isabel. She and Nielsen spent the next few hours touring the limited manufacturing facilities of the lab and meeting a dozen scientists, physicians, and medical engineers. Isabel then went outside onto the lawn, alone, and auto-dialed the only number stored on the phone—“POTUS.”

  “And?” was the president’s greeting.

  “It works.” A chorus of cheers from his end surprised her. “There are negatives. Six percent contract Pandoravirus, with the usual results.”

  “Six percent?” came the president’s reply. His questions about improving the odds led to the same dead ends as Isabel’s queries of Nielsen had.

  She heard the deep voice of Gen. Browner, who must have joined the president while his plane was grounded. “We’ll have to make inoculations mandatory, sir. To get high enough vaccination rates for herd immunity.”

  “I’m not about to condemn,” Pres. Stoddard said, “six percent of the healthy population of this country to Pandoravirus infection.”

  “What about the ninety-four percent you’ll save, sir?”

  “Give it up, General. This is America, not North Korea. We’ve got time for a public information campaign as we ramp up production.”

  “Public information…!” Browner choked off his reply. “Sir, you heard those reports. New York City, eighty-five percent infected. Chicago, seventy. Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, all over fifty. Like we said when you turned down our request for special measures, we’re losing this war!”

  “Let’s call your special measures what they are, General. Genocide. Which is what, General, I’m hearing that your men are already doing!”

  There was silence. The rupture, long in coming, appeared complete.

  The president tried to walk it back through a change in tone. “I’ll take the vaccine myself. Go on national TV, report our success, and roll up my sleeve. Dr. Miller, please bring back with you as many doses as they can spare. We’ll inoculate everyone on the plane who volunteers.
Because, General, that’s the American way.”

  After a pause, Browner said, “Sir, you’ve got a 112 people on the flight manifest. That’s about three or four, if everyone volunteers, who’re gonna turn.”

  They discussed creating isolation space, which satisfied the president.

  It took the lab hours to prepare a large enough batch of the vaccine. Isabel napped fitfully, alone, in the Humvee while Rick went from vehicle to vehicle, talking to soldiers.

  Just after midnight, Nielsen delivered an ice chest filled with two hundred doses of vaccine and said good-bye. “You’ll be getting all the support you need,” Isabel informed the ecstatic scientist. “And I imagine your testing is fully documented? If I were you, I’d destroy all that in case there are investigations and trials…by whichever side wins.”

  Chapter 32

  THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY

  Infection Date 59, 2000 GMT (4:00 p.m. Local)

  “Whatta we do?” Chloe asked her dad.

  Her father counted heads along the highway. “I see thirteen people between the camper on the left and those two cars—the SUV and the coupe—on the right.”

  “Okay. They’re over the fence. They’re on our property. Your rules, and those signs you nailed up, say we start shooting, right?”

  “No they don’t.”

  “Something like that. And isn’t that why you made me bring six magazines, plus the one that’s in my rifle. That’s, like, almost 200 rounds, Dad. They’re freakin’ heavy.”

  “We fired twice as much in a day at the Big Jimmy’s tactical course.”

  “Okay. So, do we start shooting? I can take left. You take right. I’ll have a lot fewer rounds to lug back home, uphill I’ll remind you. And leaving all their bodies down there would be a better warning to trespassers than a few signs that say Postal or whatever.”

  “Are you high?”

  “What?”

  “Chloe, let me see your eyes.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Seriously! You go out on patrol carrying a rifle! Stoned?”

  “Shhhhh. They could hear you,” Chloe whispered.