Kerala, India
Dr. Jossy Sharma sat on the hood of his Mercedes, his laptop computer resting on his propped-up knees, as he typed notes for an article he was writing for the Indian Journal of Ophthalmology. He liked to come here to the Thattekkadu Bird Sanctuary to concentrate. Nestled among a forest of evergreens and home to indigenous and migratory birds, including a few rare species, the sanctuary formed a quiet asylum from his busy office at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Kothamangalam twelve miles away. After several peaceful hours, Sharma felt satisfied with his progress on the article and decided to head home for supper.
As he got in the car he noticed his pager had an urgent message from the hospital. He was needed immediately. Because the message was now three hours old, he attempted to call but was unable to reach anyone. Driving out of the sanctuary toward Kothamangalam, he had gone less than a mile before he came upon the first of many auto accidents in his path. Pulling to the side of the road to help the drivers and passengers, he was met by a bizarre scene. In addition to the two adult male drivers, there were three adult women and five children. Though everyone in both cars was wearing a seat belt and the airbags had apparently functioned properly, they were all dead, and they had been dead for at least a few hours. The damage to the vehicles was extensive but the passenger compartments were basically intact. These people, he told himself, should not be dead. And why had no one stopped to help them? Then he noticed something else. Though there were lacerations on the victims, there was very little blood. It was as though when the accident occurred, they were already dead.
Again he tried to call the hospital, but with the same result. He stopped at two more accident scenes before finding anyone alive. A middle-aged woman, who had survived the disaster and the crash that followed, had pulled the body of her dead husband from the car and was sitting beside him on the side of the road. She had no serious injuries.
Continuing on past six more accidents, Dr. Sharma sped to the top of a hill just outside the city. On the road ahead were more wrecked vehicles than he wanted to count. Abandoning his car when the roads became impassible, he walked the rest of the way. Passing people dead in the street, some of whom he knew, he arrived at the hospital only to find that thirty-six of the forty-two doctors were among the dead.
Four days later
Derwood, Maryland
Hank Asher locked his fingers together, forming a step for his young journalist intern to place her foot into. Sheryl Stanford took the task in stride as she climbed through the kitchen window they had just pried open. As she made her way to open the front door, she spotted Decker’s pale, motionless form slumped in a chair in the living room. Hank Asher entered the house to the now familiar stench of rotting bodies. At first he assumed that Decker had been among the unlucky ones who had died four days earlier in the “Disaster,” as it had come to be known, but Sheryl soon determined he was still alive.
“He seems to be in shock,” she told Asher, as she tried to get Decker to drink some water. Decker stared blankly but swallowed eagerly as she put the glass to his mouth.
Asher surveyed the situation and decided she had things well in hand. “You stay here with Mr. Hawthorne. I’ll check the house to see if anyone else is alive.” Sheryl needed little encouragement to stay among the living. The smell of the house left no doubt what Asher would find. Hank had not known Elizabeth or the Hawthorne children but his heart ached for his friend.
When he returned from the bedrooms a few moments later he directed Sheryl to go around the rest of the house and open up all of the windows. “We need to remove the death from this house. I’ll see if I can find a shovel to bury the bodies.”
Asher made no effort to try to revive Decker. Even if he could rouse him, it seemed to Asher the most humane thing to do was to allow his colleague to “sleep” through the awful tasks that needed to be done.
Sheryl opened as many windows as weren’t stuck shut and then went back to the living room. In small part this was to sit with Decker, but mostly it was to allow her to turn on the television news. Without an answer for the cause of the Disaster and a solid assurance it would not be repeated, the anxiety was nearly debilitating. The only people who seemed to be unaffected were looters and opportunists who burglarized the homes and businesses of Disaster victims. The single reason Sheryl was out was that Hank Asher had come by her house to get her. Most businesses were still closed, but as Hank told her in no uncertain terms, that did not include the news business. In a way, she respected his attitude of getting on with life; she just wished he hadn’t involved her. Most of the NewsWorld staff assigned to the Washington, D.C., office had survived the Disaster, but anyone who had not reported in, Hank called. Decker was the only one he couldn’t either reach or confirm dead, and so he had come to see for himself.
Every conceivable explanation for the Disaster and many inconceivable ones as well, had been put forward. With very few exceptions outside the Arab population, the first words out of the mouths of most was “Arab terrorists,” and to date no reasonable explanation had been found to dissuade those who held that theory. The common wisdom was that it was some new killer strain of virus developed by the terrorists, or more likely developed by either the U.S., Russia, or China and stolen by or sold to the terrorists.
Gas masks of every kind, respirators, and even disposable surgical masks were bought up or stolen from stores that remained closed. Army surplus stores sold out of masks, and Internet stores took hundreds of thousands of orders they could not fill. In some stores there was fierce fighting among customers for paper masks, even though reason dictated that they could not possibly filter out the agent of death.
Each new explanation brought panic to someone. Just as many were afraid of what might be in the air, others were afraid to drink the water; still others feared genetically enhanced foods. Most weren’t sure what to fear and so feared everything equally.
Whatever the cause, if it was in the air or water or elsewhere in the environment, it must have been there for weeks or months or even years, a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. Ships at sea and even submarines submerged for weeks reported deaths. Two astronauts who had been aboard the International Space Station for six months also died.
Outside, Asher found a garden shovel and began digging a single large hole for the burial of Elizabeth, Hope, and Louisa Hawthorne. It was not the grave one would have expected before the Disaster, but it was better than the mass graves at the edges of the city. Here at least Decker might someday place a gravestone.
Asher looked around the yard to be sure he wasn’t going to hit any utility lines and went to work. As he was digging, he sensed he was being watched. Turning, he found a boy in his early teens staring at him from the next yard.
“You buryin’ sumbody?” the boy asked, as he jumped the fence and came over to where Asher was working. The boy’s clothes were new but dirty, as though he hadn’t changed or washed in several days.
“Yeah,” Asher replied, as he went back to his work.
“I knew ’em, you know. I used to ride bikes with Louisa. I don’t guess she’ll be needin’ the bike no more.” The boy paused for a second in thought and then continued. “Too bad it’s a girl’s bike.”
Asher continued digging.
“You want some help?” the boy asked.
Asher had already worked up a sweat and the boy’s offer was extremely welcome.
“I’ll help you dig for ten dollars,” the boy added.
Asher was momentarily disgusted by the boy’s profiteering. Instead of offering to help with the burial out of charity or perhaps friendship for Louisa, he looked at the deaths as a way to make some money. But, still, Asher decided it was better to forget about motives and simply get some help. “There’s another shovel and some work gloves that might fit you in the shed over there,” he said.
The boy found the additional shovel and gloves while Asher went to work with a pick.
“They all dead?” the boy asked, as Asher
broke up the ground.
“Everybody but Mr. Hawthorne.”
“I didn’t know him very good. I remember him some from when I was a kid, but then he was kidnapped by the Arabs. He only got free about a week ago.”
Asher continued digging without responding and then stopped and looked up at the boy. “Are you going to dig or just hold up that shovel?”
The boy acted as though he appreciated the reminder and went to work on the hole. “My dad says it was probably Arab terrorists,” he said after a few minutes of digging.
“Yeah, well, that seems to be what most people think,” Asher answered.
“Yeah, I heard on the news that only a few thousand Arabs died.”
“That’s old information. The figures I’ve seen put the number much higher: half a million in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, two hundred thousand in Jordan and Iran, one hundred thousand in Libya, three million in Pakistan, and eight million in Egypt.”
The boy was temporarily caught off guard by Asher’s recitation of figures, but he quickly recovered. “That’s probably just lies to keep us from knowing it was them.”
Asher continued digging while the boy continued talking. Every other sentence or so the boy would throw out a shovel full of dirt, just to keep his hand in.
Inside the house, Sheryl Stanford was watching the Fox News Network.
“In a press conference this morning from Washington,” the news anchor said, “Secretary of Health and Human Services Spencer Collins, issued a statement regarding what measures are being taken to deal with this crisis and answered questions from reporters. Here’s some of what he had to say.”
The picture switched to the secretary of HHS reading a prepared statement. “We want to assure the public that no stone is being left unturned in the search for the cause of this tragedy, determining whether there is further risk, and, if so, what can be done to protect against that risk. Everything, no matter how small or unlikely, is being examined. Emergency funding has been authorized by the president and Congress and we will spend whatever it takes to accomplish this mission. We are working around the clock. Every imaginable kind of environmental test is being conducted: atmospheric, drinking water, soil, chemical, biological, nuclear … Because this is a worldwide event we are also looking closely at cosmic data collected from before the Disaster, such as solar activity.
“Simultaneously, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, have taken the standard protocols used in the investigation of naturally occurring infectious diseases and biological threat agents and have adapted them to the unique circumstances of this event. In coordination with HHS, they are conducting interviews with tens of thousands of relatives of victims. Together with their counterpart agencies in other countries around the world and with the World Health Organization, they are looking for any similarities in the victims’ activities: where they went, what they ate, what they drank, their personal habits, anything they might have received in the mail. As I said, no stone is being left unturned. At the same time, they are looking for similarities in the activities of survivors in a search for anything that may have counteracted the threat agent. This is a huge task and we have enlisted the assistance of thousands of researchers from universities and private institutions around the country.
“We are also asking individuals who lost relatives or close friends to assist in this effort by logging onto our website and answering a comprehensive set of questions for each person lost and also about themselves so we have comparative data from survivors. In this way, we are using the Internet to recruit people from all over America and around the world to help in this effort. Because of the extensive nature of this event, we expect many millions to participate, and we are confident the analysis of all this data will provide us with useful information. In fact, citizen participation in this effort may make the difference between success and failure.
“The National Institutes of Health are conducting DNA studies of large numbers of both victims and survivors, looking for distinguishing genetic markers in the two groups. E-mail requests are going out to local hospitals and health care professionals requesting collection of DNA samples from victims and their close surviving relatives. Again, this is an area where citizen participation is imperative if we are going to succeed.
“The Centers for Disease Control are coordinating the data gathering from autopsies. To date, we have data from the autopsies of more than a thousand victims and more reports are coming in by the minute. These procedures have been conducted by medical examiners and pathologists from around the world. We have some data from autopsies that were conducted within an hour of the Disaster by astute MEs who recognized the importance of their findings to uncovering the cause of this tragedy.”
Secretary Collins finished his statement and then took questions from reporters. The first two questions sought some assurance from the secretary on behalf of viewers that the Disaster would not be repeated. Though he attempted to be upbeat, he could offer no assurances. The third reporter asked a more direct question, but the secretary’s answer was neither more helpful nor reassuring: “Based on the autopsies, what can you tell us about the actual cause of death of the victims?”
Secretary Collins adjusted his glasses. He knew his answer would only raise more questions that he could not answer. “Normally,” he began, considering his words carefully, “whatever the cause of death, we would expect that during the autopsy, we’d find indications of how the agent of death had acted. It may, for example, have caused the failure of normal functions of the heart, lungs, liver, kidney, brain, blood … something. Whatever we are dealing with here,” Collins said, “appears to be entirely asymptomatic. Or, rather, having only the one symptom: death. Nearly all of the common markers we would expect to find in an autopsy of someone who went through the normal death process are missing in these victims. The evidence strongly indicates that death occurred extremely quickly and with an almost instantaneous shutdown of all the body’s organs. This has made it impossible, so far, to say exactly how the agent worked or even why the victims died.”
This statement brought the expected flurry of questions, but in the end, Collins was able to provide no more information than he had already offered.
Finally a reporter pursued a different matter. “In the U.S. the number of deaths in rural areas appears to be higher, on a percentage basis, than it is in the cities. This seems counterintuitive. Is there some explanation for this?” she asked.
“We are aware of this anomaly,” the secretary answered, “and it is being factored into our investigation. There are a number of bacteriological agents that can remain dormant for years in soil, and perhaps the higher percentage of rural deaths would indicate that contact with the soil is involved. We are investigating that possibility. On the other hand, this hypothesis certainly cannot account for the deaths of the two astronauts aboard the space station.
“But let me point out that there are a number of other anomalous patterns that are beginning to emerge as well, some of which are conflicting from country to country or from region to region. We must stress that this analysis is based on very preliminary figures of the number of victims, but clearly there is evidence that the death toll was not evenly distributed worldwide. We hope that together this information will provide some clues, but right now we are still gathering data.”
“What other anomalous patterns have been identified?” the reporter asked in follow up.
“Well, for example, losses in the U.S. are currently estimated at between 15 and 20 percent. Some European countries, on the other hand, lost as few as one or two people for every one thousand of their population. As a result, the logistical impact of the Disaster in these countries is almost negligible and their governments have been able to finish what they believe are nearly complete counts. Largest among these is Greece, which lost approximately ten thousand out of a population of more than ten million. Als
o in this group are Albania, Monaco, Andorra, Luxembourg, Macedonia, and Malta. Other European countries with losses of one percent or less include France, Austria, and Belgium.
“Another example,” continued the secretary, “is India, which estimates say lost as many as twenty-five million, or about two percent of their population. This is not a high percentage, but what makes India unusual is that as many as 90 percent of the victims lived on India’s southwest coast, on the Arabian Sea.”
“What information do you have on the death toll in Arab countries?” another reporter asked.
“As you may know, it is not always easy to get accurate information from some Islamic countries. Additionally, in most cases, their ability to gather data is not as advanced or accurate as it is in the Western world. Based on what we have been able to gather on these countries, however, this may be the most surprising information so far.”
The secretary paused for a moment and then corrected the possible misperception of his statement. “I don’t mean that it is particularly surprising from a medical standpoint, but rather because it poses some serious challenges to theories that the Disaster was caused by Arab terrorists. It seems that several Islamic countries have lost a larger percentage of their population than did the European countries I just listed. These include Saudi Arabia, Oman, Iraq, Jordan, and most notably Egypt, which may have lost as much as 10 percent of its population. Indonesia, which is not Arab but is predominantly Islamic, also suffered significant losses. With the exception of Egypt, those percentage numbers are still low as compared to many other countries, but it raises doubts in my mind that Islamic terrorists would develop a weapon and then kill a greater percentage of their own population than that in many of the countries of the European Union. It also begs the question of why the death toll in Israel was not greater.”
In His Image Page 15
