Booth looked at the other two, at a loss. “What the absolute hell is this? Any ideas?”
Whitman said, “Not a clue, I’m afraid. Drug-induced psychosis would still be my best guess, but we’ll have to test his blood to find out for sure. And we run into a problem there, I’m afraid. Both the men have now been involved in homicidal attacks. I’m not sure it’s legal for us to perform any tests on them without police permission.”
“Oh, balls!” snapped Deevers. Whitman looked at him and shrugged.
Booth thought for a moment. “John, would you gather the staff? Have them round up as many of the people who were in here as they can. Get names and addresses. Load the injured into the van and have one of the staff drive them down to my clinic in Kandul and get them patched up. Have them issued bus fare for wherever they need to go afterwards. We need to contact the police and the Public Health System in Raipur and shut down the clinic; it’s now a crime scene.” He paused. “Jeremy, you’re the expert on infectious diseases. What do you think? Could we be dealing with some form of contagion?”
Whitman shook his head. “It’s remotely possible that there’s a disease vector of some kind here, I suppose, but I highly doubt it. Much more likely it’ll turn out to be chemically induced, or maybe drugs. There’s no disease on Earth that will produce those symptoms.”
South Elgin, Illinois
March 18th
The old man pressed the disconnect button and leaned back in his chair. His call to the FAA hadn’t yielded any more information than it had two days ago. Neither had another follow-up call to O’Hare. No pilots had reported a bird strike, and that landing approach hadn’t been in use the day of the “Sandhill Barrage,” as the old man thought of it. The Illinois DNR had come and picked up what birds they could find; the ones that hit the river were long gone, probably in the bellies of some of the huge catfish that lurked in its depths.
He’d actually hunted sandhills in Kentucky, where they had a season on them. He’d gone out with a bunch of locals, and afterwards they cleaned them and grilled the big breast fillets. They were surprisingly delicious. “The Sirloin of the Sky,” the old-timers called them. He’d briefly considered collecting a couple of these for his freezer, but without knowing how they died, he decided not to chance it.
He had friends in the DNR, and they assured him that the birds were being tested for pathogens, but he didn’t see how a disease could cause twenty or thirty birds to fall out of the sky at the same time. Before anyone had arrived, he’d gone around examining the ones he could find. The carcasses were similar for the most part, some completely intact and some with ruptured abdomens and spilled entrails. It was what you’d expect from the impact of a body being dropped from two miles up. But the damage seemed limited to the fall.
He’d never seen a bird after an airplane hit it, but he Googled it and it wasn’t pretty. In all the photos he saw, the birds were absolutely shredded, not much left other than raw meat and feathers. These, on the other hand, were relatively untouched. He turned to his dogs, who lay on the floor next to him. “It looks like they just died up there,” he told them. They both opened their eyes, wagged their tail-stubs, then went back to sleep.
He tried googling “dead birds” first, but there were far too many results. Then he tried “mass bird deaths” and what he found surprised him. This wasn’t the first time, and it wasn’t anywhere close to the worst incident. Back in 2011, several thousand apparently healthy redwing blackbirds fell out of the sky in Beebe, Arkansas. The same week 500 blackbirds and starlings were found dead around LaBarre, Louisiana, and a couple hundred jackdaws had dropped out of the sky in Falkoping, Sweden. The more he looked, the more he found. There were incidents from the Philippines, Tunisia, Australia, Pakistan and more, going back for at least twenty years. In all the incidents no one could offer a convincing explanation for apparently healthy birds plummeting out of the sky, stone dead.
Hmmm, he thought. Curiouser and curiouser. He leaned back in his chair and ran his hand over his face. Then he typed “unexplained crane deaths.”
The first story came from the Chicago Tribune, and it was about the sandhills. They’d sent a reporter out that afternoon while the DNR guys were still here, and actually interviewed him about it. He declined to be identified for the story, so they quoted him as “a local resident who witnessed the event.” The story had apparently been picked up by a couple of the wire services.
He scrolled down past the various reposts, and then a Reuters entry caught his eye. “Six Rare Siberian Cranes Found Dead.” The story was dated from two months before. A farmer in the Gansu Province in northern China had found six of the birds scattered around the mountainside near his home. He’d spotted their gleaming white carcasses against the rocky soil and hiked up to investigate. Siberian cranes are considered very good luck in China and are endangered, so he contacted authorities and they sent out a team of investigators. Authorities were said to be puzzled over the deaths.
He found another from Turkey. About a month ago, witnesses had seen at least fifteen storks plummet from a clear blue sky. They all said there were no airplanes in the area at the time. That story had tagged a similar one, “Cargo Ship Crew Claims Rain of Ducks,” from the Associated Press. Three weeks ago a container ship passing north of the Canary Islands had reported that “a large number” of mallard ducks had rained down around their ship. No cause known.
He sat back again, deep in thought. He’d spent a lifetime hunting and fishing and had been a member of the Audubon Society since his parents bought him a membership when he was a kid. He knew birds, and the one thing he knew that cranes, storks and mallard ducks had in common; they were all very high fliers. During migrations, they commonly flew at altitudes of two to three miles, probably to avoid predatory birds like hawks and eagles.
Something up there was killing high-flying birds. China, Turkey, the Canaries, Chicago… whatever it was, it seemed to be moving around the world at a steady pace. He charted the incidents, noting the date of each one.
He opened his news feed, scanning for anything else of interest. Mostly the usual crap about the President and Congress, all of whom seemed to have the emotional maturity of preschoolers who skipped their naps. Then an item caught his eye. “Dateline Raipur, India. Dozens Believed Dead in Riots. Troops arrived today to contain the violence that has plagued this city for the past 24 hours. Businesses and homes have burned as residents in the city’s vast southern slums take to the streets. According to local authorities, some of the rioters were seen running naked and attacking passers-by. Authorities believe drugs may be involved.”
His brother Evan still lived in Raipur, running those clinics for Doctors Without Borders. He checked his watch and did some mental math. It would be 10:45 p.m. in Raipur, not too late to call. He scrolled to his brother’s number and hit “call.”
The phone was answered almost immediately. “Owen! Hey, good to hear from you.”
Raipur, India
March 18th
“Hey, Little Brother, are you okay?” The “little brother thing” was kind of a joke between the two of them. Owen was two years older, but also three inches shorter. Evan often teased him about who was really “little” brother. But not today. “I’m reading about the riots. Are you safe?”
“I am, I guess. But I’ve been declared persona non grata by the Indian government, along with two other docs. It’s a total mess here.” He felt exhausted, worn to a frazzle both physically and emotionally. He’d spent three hours in interrogation, five more in a car, and a bumpy hour on a local puddle jumper to Hyderabad, where he now sat in this small room in the US consulate waiting for transport out of the country.
“What the hell happened? I thought they loved you over there!”
“They used to, and that’s probably the only reason we’re not all in a prison cell somewhere. Not any more though.” He looked up at the old watermarks on th
e sagging ceiling tiles. “They’re blaming us for some riots going on near the clinic. Much as I hate to admit, they’re not entirely wrong.”
“You’re kidding!!! What did you do?”
“We had a couple patients in one of our clinics this morning who went apeshit and killed people. They tore off their clothes and started biting everyone around them. One of them killed and ate his own family!”
“What? He ate them?”
“Yeah. Pretty terrible. Someone finally hit one of them in the head with a hammer and killed him. The other, the guy who ate his family, happened a couple hours later. We were able to capture him alive. The police are all over it now.”
“Wow!”
It had taken two hours for the police to arrive at the clinic. A very angry chief investigator started the conversation by putting the three of them and all the remaining staff members in handcuffs, much to their dismay. A lot of aggressive chatter in Urdu, the local language which Booth still struggled to learn, rattled through the building. A forensic team began photographing the corpse on the floor, which the staff had left undisturbed. Two uniformed cops wheeled the naked man on the gurney toward the back doors and the ambulance bay. The hall echoed with a lot more shouting and a lot more commotion when the bodies of the woman and her two children were found.
The police disconnected the clinic’s four desktop computers and carried them out the door despite Booth’s protests, along with all their personal laptops and tablets. A sharp and angry conversation between two police officials and the head duty nurse resulted in her surrendering the keys to the Records room, and a parade of cops carried file cabinets full of patient records out the front door, like ants raiding a picnic. The three doctors were finally marched out to a waiting police car and ordered into the back seat.
Once at the city’s main police station, several stern and angry policemen conducted Booth’s interrogation, making him go over the story again and again. What had they given those people to make them crazy? Who did he work for? The questions made no sense to him. He kept repeating his story until finally the Chief Investigator, a trim man with his shoulders back and his spine straight, as if he were on a parade ground, entered the room. He looked at the other cops and nodded toward the door, and they left. He unlocked the handcuffs and took out his phone and set it on the table. “Doctor,” he finally said, “are you aware of what’s been happening in Lalpur?”
“I gather there’s a riot of some kind going on. I don’t see how that involves me or my people.”
“Do you know why the original patient came to your clinic in Dunda? The one that first became violent and murdered the child?” The policeman leaned across the table.
“No, we hadn’t had time to see him yet. Before your men arrived I had a chance to look at his body. He had a rather serious bite on his shoulder. I assume that’s why he came. The people in the area know we’re a free clinic.”
“That is correct. One of our officers directed him to your clinic. Someone bit him, one of a crowd of people who were running naked through the streets of Lalpur, biting other people. Did you know that at the time, Doctor Booth?” He frowned.
“No, this is the first I’m hearing about it.”
“Their activities triggered a riot. There has been much burning and looting. People have been killed. The number of these naked maniacs continues to rise, and the situation is still not under control.”
“Again, I don’t see how this involves us.” Booth leaned back in his chair, puzzled.
“Among those who have been killed already were a number of these crazy people. Almost all of them suffered from bite wounds themselves. But here is the interesting thing. Four of these people had bite wounds that had clearly been treated at some recent time. According to their families, they received their treatment at your clinic earlier today, and were then released. And then they were all overcome with this madness. What do you say to that, Doctor Booth?”
“I’m stunned. The implication is clearly that we’re looking at some kind of contagion here, but I don’t know of any disease in the world that could act that quickly or would produce those symptoms. It’s not possible!” Booth ran his hand over his head and rubbed the back of his neck in frustration. “Look,” he said, “For those people to have been infected at our clinic, presumably by a bite, we would be talking about a pathogen that would transform a healthy individual into a violent psychotic in a few hours. Infections don’t work that way!”
The investigators eyes narrowed. “And you have not given out any foreign substance, any experimental medicine, perhaps at the behest of a large pharmaceutical company? For testing? We are checking your records against other people who have succumbed to whatever this is, to see if they too have been treated by you.”
“Absolutely not! That’s ridiculous!!!” Booth exclaimed.
“And yet it would not be the first time such a thing has happened, eh? These incidents are not uncommon in Africa, I hear, and unauthorized tests such as this have been carried out previously in my own country. By ‘Big Pharma,’ as the papers call it.”
An officer leaned into the room and said, “Chief Investigator, I have your call.”
He nodded and picked up his cell phone. “This is Chief Investigator Vikram Saha.” He listened for a moment. “Yes sir, I have him here.” He pressed a button and set the phone on the table.
“Dr. Evan Booth, you are now on speakerphone with Prime Minister Bimala Vasudevan, Governor Jitendra Mukherjee, and Dr. Chandra Pawar, Secretary, National Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Tell them what you’ve been telling my men.”
Evan repeated the story with surprisingly few interruptions. When he finished there was a long pause.
“Dr Booth, this is Chandra Pawar.” They had met a number of times over the past two years. Dr. Pawar had struck him as warm and good-natured. Now he was all business. “Do you have any idea what we’re dealing with here?”
Finally, Evan thought, someone asks me an intelligent question.
“No. At first we assumed the incident must have been either drug-related, or possibly some kind of chemical poisoning, like mercury. I’m still open to that idea. A foreign substance can affect the body much more quickly than a pathogen. Upon examination of both patients we also considered the possibility of an infective agent of some kind, perhaps transmitted through biting, but, given the behavioral symptoms and the speed at which the second patient exhibited those symptoms, that didn’t seem possible. What I’ve heard just now from the Chief Investigator here seems to strongly suggest that there is, in fact, an infective agent.”
“Doctor Booth!” Mukherjee’s voice sounded strained and angry “If you knew it was an infection, why did your doctors release those victims into my city? Do you have any idea what you’ve done!”
“I’m sorry, Governor, but they had no way of knowing at the time. There isn’t a disease anywhere that presents as a naked man biting people. That’s the sort of behavior you see with a drug- or chemical-induced psychosis or a complete schizophrenic breakdown. We simply had no reason to believe we were dealing with an infective agent at first.”
“You fool! I will have you locked up a—” Another voice cut him off, the calm, reassuring voice of the prime minister. Booth had seen her on TV often since the last election, and even met her once at a reception. “That’s enough, Governor Mukherjee. Dr Booth, what else can you tell us?”
“Ma’am, we had time to make some observations of the patient strapped to the gurney before the police arrived, and we noticed some very disturbing physical symptoms. There were blue-gray patches around his eyes and on the sclera, that is, the whites of the eyes. Also on the hands and feet and other places. Like heavy bruising, but paler. We found it in the Meissner’s corpuscles areas especially.”
“What are Meissner’s corpuscles, Dr Booth?”
“They’re specialized bundles of nerves, ma’a
m. They’re present just under the surface of the skin in areas where you’re extremely sensitive to touch. Fingertips, places like that.”
“I see,” she said. “Please continue.”
“We saw this blue discoloration anywhere there were heavy concentrations of nerves near the surface of the skin. The eyes, as I said, the genitals, the rectum. We also noticed veins of it going up his arms and legs, but they weren’t following blood vessels. Neurology is not my field, but I know the nervous system pretty well. The blue veins were following the nervous system throughout the body.”
Doctor Pawar broke in. “Did you observe those same blue patches on the man who was killed? Your Patient Zero.”
“Not at first. He had very dark skin, so the patches didn’t stand out. We examined him more closely later and they became apparent.
“But the discoloration was far from the most peculiar symptom we saw. When we first examined the patient, we tried to take his blood pressure, but he had no blood pressure at all. He also had no pulse. When we tried to draw blood, what little came out was gummy and clotted. As far as we could tell, the man was clinically dead! But the bizarre thing is, he continued to move, to snap his jaws at us, to struggle against his straps. There is simply no way this could have been happening, but it was!
“Doctor Pawar, you asked me before if I knew what this is, and I don’t, but I’ve had time to do some thinking. There is a parasitic protozoon, toxoplasma gondii, which starts its life as eggs in cat feces. The feces is eaten by rats, and the gondii grows in the rat’s system. At a certain point, the gondii takes over a portion of the rat’s brain and makes the scent of cats sexually attractive, so the rats openly approach the cats and of course they’re eaten, along with the parasite. Eventually the cat defecates more eggs, and the cycle continues.
The Old Man & the End of the World | Book 1 | Things Fall Apart Page 3
