by E. E. Giorgi
“And that’s what we’re doing, Ma’am.”
“It’s going to take days to track down that many people! Precious days we could use working on a cure! Look. Christine can’t possibly have AVP, nobody here at the Lab’s had it since the start of the pandemic. The place is as isolated as it can get. I’m sure that whatever Christine has is just some temporary ailment—”
“We can’t bypass regulations, Ma’am. The CDC issued the highest possible alert level for this pandemic.”
Anu stepped forward and pointed to the red door behind the hazard tape. “Our work is in that building with our samples.”
“Ma’am, the samples could’ve been mishandled. They could be the source of the contamination.”
“That’s not how the virus works.”
“Anu, please.” Jeff tried to pull her away from the discussion, but Anu wouldn’t let go. The samples they’d just gotten were everything to her, all she’d been working for over the past six months. They represented her last hope to defeat the deadly disease. Without them, all her work was lost.
“Why do you not believe me? I’ve studied the virus for months. By the time patients become violent, they’re no longer infectious,” she yelled at the guard, as though repeating the information louder would give her a better chance to get back her data. “The virus has been cleared already, and that’s why we can’t understand how AVP gets transmitted. We can’t understand why it does this to people, why, three weeks after they’ve recovered from the flu they go mad like this. You’ve got to let us do our job.”
Jeff and the other scientists ringed around her, trying to calm her down. But she wouldn’t. She was too outraged. She elbowed her way between them and made a break from the assembly area.
“Ma’am!” the guard yelled.
It was stupid to run like that. Stupid and childish. Yet she didn’t know what else to do. She fled behind the parking garage and the officer ran after her, threatening to take her in for insubordination.
Bite me.
Several MPs joined the chase. She dashed down the underpass, jumped over the containment wall, and scuttled down the canyon.
The sun had vanished behind the mountains, and the lingering dust had veiled the sky with different hues of reds and purples. Scorched by summer fires and almost two years of complete drought, the silhouettes of the dead trees looked like knotty limbs against the sunset.
“Ma’am, stop! You’re required to come back!” the guards called from the top of the canyon.
The trail was steep and the terrain slippery. She had no idea where she was going or why. She had enough of people telling her what to do, enough of her grants getting rejected and her proposals ridiculed by reviewers. For once in her life she had no doubt her ideas would work, yet once again she was facing a wall.
Anu spotted a shadow wobbling up the trail toward her. Caught by surprise, she tripped and fell. “Damn,” she muttered under her breath.
“Everybody freeze!” one of the guards shouted, as five MPs quickly surrounded her, guns unholstered and pointed.
The shadow shaped into a familiar silhouette, framed by the rays of a dying sun. “Anu?”
Anu blinked. The man coming up the trail was David. What the hell was he doing down the canyon? He stared dumbfounded at the five soldiers standing behind her and then at her again, sitting on the ground with a scraped knee.
“Are you—are you ok?”
Boots crunched nervously around them. “Sir! Please step back.”
David’s eyes finally registered the guns pointed at him and raised his hands up in the air. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked.
Anu snorted. “Can’t you guess? I’m contaminated.”
A radio barked from a soldier’s belt. The evening MQ-1 took off from the nearby airport and started circling the sky, its distant hum muting the solitary caw of a raven.
“We have a suspected AVP case on the premises, sir,” the officer who’d chased Anu from the assembly area explained. “Dr. Sharma is among the possibly contaminated subjects that we need to isolate for the time being. I suggest you keep your distance or else you too will have to be quarantined.”
David gaped at the weapons and frowned. Anu exhaled.
Jeez. How did I even think this guy was smart enough to work on my project.
She brushed the dirt off her hands and got back to her feet. Keeping their guns pointed, all the soldiers took a cautionary step backward.
Ignoring them, Anu asked David, “What the hell were you doing down the canyon?”
David pumped a thumb over his shoulder. “I uh—I brought food to the coyotes.”
“You did what?”
“There’s a small pack that comes by the canyon every evening. I finished writing the code and needed a break so I came down to hike.” David’s gaze softened as he looked down the trail. “I miss Max. I thought I could make some new friends.”
“You finished the code? Really?” It was the first good news she’d heard the whole day. For a brief moment, she got so excited that she almost tripped again. David jumped forward and grabbed her arm.
The lead officer ran out of patience. “Ma’am. Sir. I order you to follow us back to the assembly area. Failure to comply will be treated as insubordination.”
David pointed his chin to the barrel of the officer’s gun. “We better obey. They seem to have some compelling arguments.”
Anu sighed and started up the trail. “In case you hadn’t noticed, you just joined the quarantine party,” she whispered as they climbed back.
David shrugged. “You don’t look like a zombie to me. And you haven’t bitten me yet. I figure I’ve got nothing to worry about so long as you keep your teeth away from me. Not that I don’t think you’d be capable of biting.”
There he was, talking zombies again. Yet the comment made her smile and touched her deeper than she was willing to admit.
“Did you really finish the program?”
“Of course. Can’t wait to show you.
Anu sighed. “You finished the program, yet the additional data from Johns Hopkins is sitting unused in a fridge inside the genomics lab.”
If only.
* * *
All together, they had gathered a group of 25 people: about a dozen technicians Christine had interacted with over the last few days, and another dozen scientists who’d come to help with the new data. And then David, who’d joined the party in spite of himself. Or maybe it had been deliberate so they could continue working on her project?
If that’s true, you’ve got to give him credit for that.
The soldiers parked them in the west wing of the now evacuated administrative building and brought food and computers for them to keep working. They were given blankets and pillows and told to use the offices on the upper floors as temporary bedrooms for the night.
After dinner, they all settled in a large common area on the second floor, equipped with armchairs that looked like they’d come out of a movie from the Seventies, and small metal desks with computer terminals all around the walls. The east side of the hall was made of windowpanes, with French doors that gave out onto a half-covered terrace. David tried one of the doors and found that it wasn’t locked. “Oh look,” he quipped. “We even get our own exercise yard.”
Anu’s colleague Jeff flopped on the blanket and pillow he’d been given and tried one of the terminals. “Looks like we’ve got plenty of time. Might as well work on the database.”
Anu sat at the terminal next to him. “Right. And while you’re at it, you can update it with the new sequences from Johns Hopkins. Oh, wait. We can’t sequence those, can we?”
Jeff forked his reading glasses and squinted at his screen as it prompted a login and password. “Stop being bitter, Anu, and make the best out of what we got. I’m sure by tomorrow they’ll come up with a better solution. Poor Christina’s not having any fun either right now.”
She tapped the mouse and sighed. “I’m ready to bet Christina will c
ome back negative to the H7N7 antibodies. There’s no other explanation. The Lab has been isolated from the pandemic, with extra precautions that ensured the premises would remain virus-free.”
Jeff shot her a skeptical look. “We’ll see,” he mumbled.
David had stepped out on the terrace and was contemplating the night sky, the yellow glow of the dust storm still lingering at the horizon. Anu got up, leaned across the French doors and called him. “I don’t suppose you could show me the program your wrote, from one of the terminals here?”
David turned. “Of course. That’s why I’m here.”
They spent the next two hours going over David’s code. Anu wanted him to explain everything, even programming details that were out of her grasp. She asked him to implement a couple of changes, make the interface more user-friendly, and finally, to test it on a few sequences she already had.
“It’ll take all night to run,” David said.
“That’s ok. So long as it completes the full run.” She was smiling, probably for the first time in days. Weeks, maybe. She felt hopeful again. What happened to Christina was nothing, she told herself. What else could it be? People get sick all the time, especially up here at the Lab. The air is too dry and the altitude is merciless on people who are not used to it.
I bet it was nothing.
I bet they’re going to reopen the genomic center tomorrow.
By the time the main phone in the room rang she was sure it was to announce the end of the nightmare. Jeff picked up and switched the phone to speaker.
“May I have your attention, please. This is Joyce speaking.”
Joyce Warren, the lab director. She had a PhD in applied mathematics and had worked in science communications for years before coming to the Lab and climbing up the management ladder. Anu had never been too fond of her—She doesn’t think like a scientist, she had thought on more than one occasion—but her views had changed in the past two weeks. In the midst of the chaos that followed the nuclear emergency, Joyce had kept the lab functioning during the evacuation and transfer of the military personnel. She had gone out on a limb to ensure that those who were to remain at the Lab to carry one their work would be unaffected by the turmoil. Her own family had left, yet Joyce had remained on the premises to supervise operations and—her own words—“Make things easier for the scientists. I’m a scientist, and I’m representing them and their needs as we all push forward to defend our country.”
If there was one person in the whole Lab who understood what the data secured at the genomic lab meant, it had to be Joyce. Anu swiveled away from the computer terminal and perked her ears, eager to hear what news the lab director had.
“As you all know,” Joyce said over the intercom, “we had an unfortunate incident today at the genomic center. One of our employees, Christine Lutherford, fell ill. She was immediately taken to emergency care and the whole area was secured and quarantined. Unfortunately, you all had to be quarantined, too.”
“I hope you understand that this was a necessary and unavoidable measure. AVP is a nasty condition, often lethal not only for those affected but also for the people around them.”
A loud murmur broke off in the room. Other people listening started rolling their eyes and booing at the speaker.
“Cut to the chase,” a woman said. “Are you letting us go or not?”
From the comfort of her office, Joyce couldn’t hear what they were saying. So she went on with her highly political speech and reviewed all the rules and regulations that had been issued at the Lab since the CDC had officially declared H7N7 a worldwide pandemic.
“My friends and colleagues,” Joyce said. “It is with a heavy heart that I break the news to you: we now have the first confirmed case of AVP on the laboratory premises.”
The news sent a jolt down Anu’s spine. She bolted out of the chair and gaped at the speakers, the feeling of dismay leaving her once again breathless. Joyce went on explaining the consequences, and what this meant in terms of responsibilities, future planning, and all the usual crap management had to spit out under the umbrella of “special circumstances.”
Anu couldn’t take it anymore. She left the room and strode through the French doors and onto the terrace. It was past midnight, and despite that the temperatures during the day had reached the 70’s, the desert night was chilly, the air brisk and nippy. The terrace—a wooden deck that followed the side of the building—was covered for about one third and then extended, uncovered, around the corner.
An owl hooted, a handful of stars twinkled above the yellow glow of the dust storm rolling at the horizon. Anu leaned against the railing and covered her face.
“Oh, Christine,” she murmured with a shiver. Beautiful, smart, determined, Christine. What was going to happen to her now? And what about all of them? Were they really contaminated, were they all going to get it? She knew this wasn’t possible. To be manifesting AVP symptoms now, Christine had to be infected with H7N7 weeks ago.
Which meant they were all at risk, the whole laboratory staff, not just the two dozen stuck in this building. Anybody could’ve contracted H7N7 when Christine had it.
But she didn’t report any kind of flu symptoms.
Under CDC directives, anyone experiencing flu-like symptoms was to report immediately to the nearest medical facility. Anu tried to think back at the events of the past few weeks. Christine hadn’t missed a day of work and all she could remember was the shock they’d shared at the news of the nuke explosion in California.
Was this a new phase of the disease? A scarier, darker phase, in which the virus remained latent, its symptoms hidden, until… until it was too late?
But then, who was going to escape something like that?
Anu felt a new surge of frustration. She grabbed the railing and clenched her teeth. “Argh!” she muttered. “Damn!”
She had just obtained the data to make this work. She had David’s program and the data and yet she could no longer access it.
Her eyes welled up with tears. “Damn it,” she yelled, banging the railing with her fist. Behind her, the French doors clicked.
“Hey.”
She jumped, startled. It was David. The same David who just a couple of hours earlier had brought some good news and a smile back to her face.
To what avail?
She brought a hand to her face and looked away. “Leave me alone. I’m not the best of company right now.”
David snorted and leaned against the railing, his hands fiddling with a can of Coke. “You never are, to be honest.”
Anu winced and looked him over. There he was, a can of Coke in his hands, stained jeans, wrinkled Tee—at least it only had a skull this time—and that imperturbable, ethereal look on his face as he stared at the sky and mumbled, “Have you seen clouds like that around here before?”
The dust had receded again, its orange glow breathing in the distance under the artificial lights of the buildings. Yet up in the sky, enormous clouds had rolled in, their fringes silvery as they overcast a pale moon.
Anu inhaled. “They come, sometimes. And then they leave, the promise of a few drops of rain gone with them.”
“The air smells humid, though.”
Anu shook her head. “It won’t rain. It hasn’t rained in so long, we all lost hope.”
David nodded and squinted at the sky, the fat clouds engulfing the last handful of stars blinking at the horizon. “What’s going to happen to Christine now? I mean, how are they going to handle it? This is such a small place, do they even have hospitals out here? Back home all hospitals filled up so quickly it was hard for the medical personnel to keep the situation under control. That’s how the virus spread so quickly, you know? People were ripping one another apart, and there was no time to don protective gear when you had bodies piling up like crazy.” He shook his head. “No time to distinguish the injured from the infected. In the end, they were all both.” He rapped his fingers on the railing, the soft, metal clink echoing in the dead of th
e night. “I lost so many friends. I got lucky, but many didn’t.”
Anu swallowed hard. She’d been isolated up here for months now, so absorbed in her own research she’d lost track of what was happening outside. To her, the virus had become a string of nucleotides, a code to decipher and defeat. Yes, she listened to the news every day, every day a bulletin of deaths, murders and suicides, but somehow she’d managed to detach from all that. The virus was her only focus. Her daily battle.
She’d never known anyone personally affected until now. David asked what would happen to Christine. She’d gone through so many CDC and government issued trainings that she knew exactly what was going to happen. And yet she knew nothing about her colleague’s fate.
“There’s a small hospital facility on the premises. I suspect they’ve declared that contaminated too, and have probably closed off the whole ward where they’re keeping Christine. She is going to be sedated to prevent her from becoming violent. I don’t know for how long. It’s been hard to get real data on treatments. One of the last reports from the CDC stated that even under sedation patients are unable to recover. Once AVP strikes, the brain slowly shuts down.” She grabbed the railing with such anger her knuckles turned white. “I can’t believe what’s happening. If the virus is already in the lab, whatever measures they take now are useless. It’s simply too late. As far as we know, we might all go mad in the next few weeks, and yet they wouldn’t let us work for the last hours of lucidity we’ve got!”
David drained the last of his Coke and then started playing with the can, squeezing it lightly to make it click. “Why are you so—adamant about this? I mean, I get it, or at least I did, up to a few weeks ago. But now… Hell, the world is ending. We can no longer communicate with the rest of the country. I’ve got friends in Northern California I haven’t heard from in days. As far as I know they could be all dead, or worse, even, they could’ve turned into zombies.”
She flinched at the word, but he pretended not to notice and pressed on.
