White Plague

by James Abel

The President hung up. He had decided that two days was too long to wait.

  In twenty hours, if there was no definite progress, the ship would be destroyed. Then the surface of the ocean would be sprayed with oil and ignited to cleanse any bodies or debris. Then the President would go on national television, and tell the truth about everything except the old film.

  The President figured this would quite possibly end his career. His enemies would call for his resignation, possibly even prosecution, but he’d weather the second part, and anyway, neither was the point. He had campaigned for office by telling voters he was the man they wanted in office when the eventual 3 A.M. emergency—every President faced one—occurred. Now the moment had come.

  He wondered how he’d live with it.

  He said out loud, “You said it, Daddy.”

  The President looked out at the Rose Garden, beyond the glass, without seeing it. After a while the First Lady came in, having woken, seen his side of the bed empty, and known that his habit, when disturbed, was to sit in his “home office.” She got a wool comforter from a closet and lay down on one of the two couches. It was her custom, when he was troubled, to sleep near him. He liked the company, even if he didn’t talk.

  She was still sleeping when the sun came up. He did not notice the light brightening, though normally the sight of the Rose Garden at dawn was—to the old rancher’s boy, a kid who’d grown up under drought conditions, a kid who’d worked his way up after his family went broke—a dew-drenched delight.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Clinton was in bad shape. He lay wheezing on a cot, in row two, the last cot that had been open. Now there were no more cots left if new people fell ill. Body temperature, 103 plus. He was shivering. Sweat poured from his forehead, drenched his bedding. Janice Cullen had laid a knapsack as a pillow at the head of the cot, as there was no wall or other way to prop him up; and sitting up was better for patients whose lungs filled with fluid.

  “We’re out of IVs,” Cullen told me. Her eyes were clear, her voice steady. She might be afraid of storms, I saw, but not disease outbreaks. She had guts.

  Bending by his bed, mask on, she helped Clinton to drink water from a glass. Keep them hydrated. And thanks to the Chinese, we had plenty of antivirals, at least something good had come from that confrontation, and she stuffed a squeeze-bottle nozzle into each nostril, sprayed, and left the medicine on a makeshift night table, a wooden crate, within Clinton’s reach. Each patient had one. They displayed eyeglasses, pill vials, even, as in a real hospital, donated books or magazines from the crew.

  On Clinton’s crate lay a copy of Outside magazine. The cover showed a happy couple cross-country skiing over a snow field. ADVENTURES IN THE OPENING ARCTIC! the headline read.

  His cough sprayed mucus. His blanket was stained with vomit. Our masks had been coated with disinfectant, so I smelled that mostly, not the effluence of the ill.

  This man had saved our lives and I remembered—ministering to him—what Eddie had told me. In 1918, the death rate from Spanish flu in Eskimo villages had reached 98 percent. Alaska’s indigenous people had been among the worst hit. It made sense. Their numbers, since contact with Westerners, had been decimated by flu and other illnesses that might cause a single week of discomfort in Ohio, but kill in the High North.

  “Swollen,” I said, probing lymph nodes in Clinton’s neck. “Get an extra blanket, he’s practically convulsing.”

  “None left,” said Cullen.

  “Then a parka. Get extra jackets sent in here. Sweaters. Jackets. Anything the crew can donate, to help keep ’em warm. And leave all clothing outside, in the halls. Nobody new comes in here.”

  Cullen looked at DeBlieu for confirmation, and the captain nodded stiffly.

  I told him, standing up, “It’s too late to put anyone off. We don’t know who’s infected, including us. So unless you’re prepared to empty this whole hangar, all hundred-plus people here—you, too—we stay.”

  DeBlieu looked like he was going to hit me. His breath vaporized with each exhalation. The sounds around us seemed magnified: wheezing, coughing. Someone moaned for “Linda.” Someone was throwing up.

  DeBlieu said, in a low voice so people around us would not hear dissension, “Goddamn you.”

  I bent down to the patient. “Clinton?”

  His oval eyes were bloodshot, only vaguely attentive.

  “Clinton, where do you hurt?”

  He focused weakly. “Name a place.”

  “Where’s it the worst?”

  “Take my wife’s phone number, for when you can call out. Give her a message.”

  “No need for that. We’ll get that fever lowered and you’ll call her yourself soon.”

  His tongue was coated with blue. His cough was steady, wet, and hideous.

  Clinton closed his eyes. “Don’t go to Barrow,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Don’t bring us ashore. I have two kids. I have a wife. I know what’s happening, Colonel. The elders told us what happened when their grandparents were kids, and got sick after being around whalers. You’re all whalers.”

  Meaning outsiders. Like me. “Don’t count yourself out, my friend,” I said, the word “friend” bitter in my mouth. “I’m going to take your blood, okay? Check it in the lab.”

  Clinton stared at me blankly. I thought the fever was taking him. Then he said, “We don’t have funeral homes in Barrow, you know. We bury our own dead, Colonel Rush.”

  Major Pettit stepped into my path as we reached the stairway to the labs. Like the other Marines, he wore a medical apron and gloves. I tried to brush past. Pettit kept his voice low. “A moment, sir?”

  Ten feet off, I saw Andrew Sachs mopping the brow of one of the sick. Karen Vleska was applying ice—no shortage of that here—to a feverish head. I kept hearing Clinton’s words in my mind and they seared me. Had I made a mistake, jeopardized everyone here because I felt guilty over what I did in Afghanistan? Had I let personal problems get in the way of professional judgment? That’s what they were thinking. The director. DeBlieu. Clinton. Everyone.

  “I’m in a hurry, Major. If it’s not urgent . . .”

  “Sir, I just wanted to say—”

  “Get it out.”

  He stood straighter, and his words vaporized as they emerged. “Colonel, I was wrong about you. I apologize for what I said before. I’m proud to serve with you and so are the men. They asked me to tell you. Marines don’t leave wounded behind. You don’t leave your people behind.”

  Stunned, I stared at my ex-wife’s lover, and saw, in his eyes, a tough Marine’s respect. He was the last person I would have thought would back me up, on anything.

  I said gruffly, “That’s not urgent, Major.”

  I pushed past, keeping my eyes averted, so no one could see tears I blinked back, stupid tears, I thought, enraged. Stupid, idiot tears.

  The only good thing about the United States having only one icebreaker was that whoever stocked it made sure its labs came with the best equipment—including an electron microscope, used normally, DeBlieu had said, to analyze walrus blood, or southern fish species moving north, or bottom sediment that the ship dredged up, as scientists tried to gather information to support a U.S. claim for undersea territory at the UN.

  Now it would help me look at Clinton’s blood.

  The apparatus had its own room, and looked nothing like the old handheld microscope my parents had given me as a birthday present when I was eleven years old. It was built into a six-foot desk, and consisted of a periscope-shaped tower, dial controls, twin eyepiece, as in a periscope, and two monitor screens on which the produced image would show up.

  I would not see Clinton’s blood directly, as in a normal microscope. I would be looking at a 3-D picture.

  Well, the director was right about one thing, and that’s the quality of my thumb drive
encyclopedia. I found no shortage of electron mike photos of Spanish flu cells. They’ve been widely published since 2005, when doctors at the CDC reconstituted some from a corpse dug up in Alaska. Let’s see if Clinton’s blood looks the same. That would confirm we’re dealing with the 1918 strain.

  I injected some of Clinton’s sample onto a petri dish. I inserted the sample into the vacuum compartment and closed the tiny door, six inches up in the microscope tower. I flipped a switch, heard a hum as power came on. Hitting a second switch, I envisioned a stream of high-voltage electrons—shot by a gun—spraying down from the top, through a condenser lens onto the dish. The electrons would pass through and then widen out in a cone shape, like moving shotgun pellets, to be reconstituted—as in a copy machine—onto a fluorescent screen that I watched, riveted, through the eyepiece.

  The electron beams created a 3-D image of Clinton’s blood, magnified twenty thousand times.

  I heard myself breathing. On monitor one was the original Spanish flu; enlarged into a small armada of brown ovoid submarine shapes floating toward a wildly exotic-looking sprouting of long green undersea leaves. I was in a nano-world, and the rounded surfaces of the attackers were covered with sharp spikes, like mines.

  The magnified leaves were actually cilia, microscopic hairs lining the lungs of a pig infected with reconstituted virus. The brown floaters were flu microbes, incoming to infect.

  Enlarged to 100,000 magnification, the undersea landscape disappeared to be replaced by clusters of cells, rod or ovoid shaped, red with dye, looking like massed versions of what you see in a lava lamp, stretching and contracting and dividing into new cells, as they attacked the healthy cells of the pig. Each invading cell contained a jellylike center, its nucleic acid, surrounded by a protective layer, a thin capsid.

  I compared the two images, one on each screen.

  I heard Eddie’s sharp intake of breath behind me as a 3-D image hummed, complete with grooves and spikes and striations, good as a microbe identity card.

  Eddie said, unsurprised but still horrified, “They’re the same.”

  Air in the hangar downstairs would be saturated with the exact same particles, with more being sprayed out each time anyone coughed. My thumb drive had told me that the Spanish flu manifested itself in patients after an incubation period of between one and three days. We’d been in contact with the Montana for over twenty-four hours.

  “Prime infection time, Uno,” Eddie said.

  “Do we have enough antiviral spray for everyone, even the healthy ones?”

  “Thanks to our good buddy, Zhou, yeah.”

  “Then everyone’s to start taking it, as a preventative. If there’s enough left after that, we supply the rest of the ship.”

  “That stuff slows regular flus from replicating. But every flu is different.”

  “I’d really like to talk to the CDC.”

  “Hey, we’re in better shape than in 1918, One.”

  He was Mr. Positive. I thought, Yeah, better. Instead of eighty million dead, only ten million this time.

  I said, “Let’s see what else we can come up with.”

  The only medicine that definitely worked so far was coffee. We’d plugged in a huge Coast Guard percolator—it made gallons of dark, strong brew—and the smell of Maxwell House permeated the wet lab. Thick sandwiches—slabs of pot roast on rye—lay on the desk and table counters, sent over by the mess, and left by cooks in a passageway outside. No contact was allowed between crew outside the hangar, and inside.

  One thing the ship was overstocked with was food.

  “Can I help?” asked the voice of Karen Vleska.

  Advancing into the lab, she seemed more vulnerable, more tentative. The small, agile persona that had marked her originally was gone. I saw a blue vein fluttering in the side of her neck, a tiny freckle on the jaw as she pulled up a chair beside me. She wore corduroy trousers and a thick wool ski sweater with a moose logo on it, in brown. She wore black Merrell boots and she smelled, like we all did, of unlaundered clothes and shipboard chemical showers. In epidemic country, we wore masks all the time.

  “Down there all I’m doing is running cool towels over foreheads, along with Del Grazo and Marietta.”

  “Believe me, the people you’re doing it for do not consider it a small thing,” I said.

  Eddie was on his laptop, both of our computers having been brought down by the crew. We’d been poring over articles, reports, and speculations on the disease, exploring the reams of information on my thumb drive sticks, replicated onto his.

  She said, “Tell me what we’re looking for.”

  “Treatments. Old diaries. Any ideas to help,” I said, my eyes burning from staring at the screen.

  She rolled her chair beside mine. Knee to knee. “Four eyes beat two,” she said.

  More than ten million pages have been written about the Spanish flu since 1918: symptoms, history, speculations, treatments. There were hundreds of photos in here of turn-of-the-century schoolchildren with surgical masks on, terrified kids, patients occupying rows of beds in quarantined Army wards in France, frightened doctors refusing to enter wards, public health notices in newspapers, mayors in radio studios, urging people to stay home. And most recently, results on the reconstituted virus in Atlanta, by the CDC.

  The problem wasn’t that we had too little information. The problem was that we had too much.

  “Everything but a cure,” Eddie said.

  I found a diary written by a doctor working on a South Dakota Sioux Indian reservation in 1918. Patients sitting up in bed survived at a higher rate.

  Eddie read aloud from a memo written in Philadelphia General Hospital, mid-outbreak. “‘We’ve had some success inoculating healthy people with blood from survivors. Rate of infection went down.’”

  Karen breathed audibly. “You mean, just shoot blood from one person into another?”

  “Yeah,” said Eddie. “That’s what they did a hundred years ago.”

  “And that worked?” she said, shocked.

  I rubbed my eyes, exhausted, groped for coffee. I stirred in three packs of sugar. Anything to get my attention span up. “Survivors have antibodies in their blood.”

  “But what about all those warnings about sharing fluids? Like in AIDS?”

  I nodded. “The first blood transfusions happened in the 1700s in France, Karen. Doctors joined hoses to patients, ran a foot pump, circulated blood, one person to another. Crude as it gets, and no disinfectants, and it killed some people, but it also worked sometimes. But we didn’t know about different blood types then.”

  Karen made a noise deep in her throat. “You’re suggesting that we collect blood from survivors, and inject it into the sick? It sounds so . . . desperate.”

  “It is desperate. And not just the sick. The antibodies would act as a preventative in the healthy, in theory. And we’d also be transferring in lymphocytes, active virus-killing cells. I wonder, Eddie, can we collect blood from survivors, enough to vaccinate a lot of people, if they’re the same blood type? Enough—if the medicines don’t work?”

  “Can we pool blood from different donors?”

  “Too dangerous. More chance of rejection. One to one. And blood type to blood type.”

  It wasn’t exactly the ideal treatment. But we called down to Lieutenant Cullen via ship phone and asked how many hypodermics were on board, just in case. She told us there was a shortage. If we wanted to inoculate, we’d need to reuse hypodermics.

  “Great,” I said. “On top of everything else, dirty needles.”

  “We could disinfect after each shot,” suggested Eddie. “If it comes to that. Lab sterilizers.”

  “We get Chief Apparecio up here, and other survivors. Draw blood. It will have antibodies. We heparinize syringes. Put a couple milliliters of heparin in there so the blood doesn’t clot. Then we’ll give fifty cc�
�s per patient, make the stuff last. Worst comes to worst . . .”

  Eddie finished it. “Worst comes to worst, we try Dr. One’s patented homemade miracle vaccine. Stops hair loss. Stops gout. Builds muscles. Kills flus.”

  Morose, I said, “It would help if we had Elisa kits.”

  Karen asked, “What’s an Elisa kit?”

  “A way to test for the presence of disease-related proteins,” Eddie explained.

  “Speak English.”

  “You take a microtiter plate and—”

  “A what? A what? I said speak English!”

  I sighed. “It’s a plastic plate with little wells in it. You put blood samples in each well. You add a reagent. It enables you to isolate proteins. We want to ID viral proteins, or enzymes to try to disable. If we can ID them, if we had computer-aided designing . . .” I cursed. A wave of futility swept over me. “Goddamnit! The goddamn CDC can do this. They have equipment. We’re just three people bumbling around on a ship. Why did they fucking cut us off?”

  Karen gripped my forearm, clearly to get my mind on business again, “What do these microplates look like, Joe?”

  Joe. We rummaged the wet lab. We found no Elisa kits aboard. Nothing in the dry lab either. That would have been too easy.

  Back at the screens I drank more coffee, but even the caffeine was failing to stimulate me now. I said, sighing, “Let’s give the medicines a chance to work before we start injecting people.”

  “How long before we know that?”

  “Could be fast. A day. Two.”

  Karen Vleska got up, stretched, picked at the foods on the table that the cooks had sent over: Chips Ahoy! chocolate chip cookies; red shiny Washington State apples; PowerBars; packs of Nestlé’s cocoa.

  She chose an apple, lowered her mask, exposed her mouth, and bit into it. The crackle was like a signal for all of us to take a break.

  I tore open the wrapping of a PowerBar. Apple cinnamon flavor.

  Eddie went for the cookies.