by Glenn Cooper
The stronger, more aggressive ones who were uninfected had emptied the grocery stores by now—that much he knew from news reports. Was hunger setting in inside that pretty white house with colorful floral window boxes? What about the two-family house with seven cars jammed into the driveway? Had an extended family joined forces? How many people bereft of memory had caregivers keeping them alive? How many were alone and starving?
It wasn’t raining, but he had to turn on his wipers. The air was heavy with fine particulates, dusting cars and lawns ash gray. Distant plumes of black smoke rose from all the compass points. Fires were raging, and it didn’t look like anyone was putting them out.
His lab was at the old Charlestown Navy Yard at the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease. During normal times, the two-mile weekday drive between the lab and the hospital could take an eternity, but with empty roads, he breezed over the Charlestown Bridge.
The parking lot at the institute was all but empty. He accessed the building with his keycard and walked the empty corridor to the lab marked, Dr. J. Abbott, Molecular Biology of Cognition. It wasn’t all that unusual for him to be in the lab alone on a Sunday or late at night but there was a different vibe today, an eeriness, because who could say if and when his colleagues would be back? He employed three research techs, two post-docs, and a lab manager, none of whom had answered his wellness calls. He couldn’t shake the thought of these smart, vibrant people in dire straits, their faculties hollowed out.
He had a lot to do, so he got down to it. He had planned out the workflow for a series of binding and displacement studies. He began thawing a frozen nerve-cell line studded with memory-gate receptors that naturally bound the CREB-1 molecule. Then he used his Biotage peptide sequencer to make the mutant CREB-like protein the FAS virus was producing, using the sequence data Mandy sent him. With that protein in hand, he could expose his cell line to the mutant CREB, allowing it to bind to the receptors. The third and crucial step would be to flood the nerve cells bound to the mutant CREB, with a number of his banked CREB variants. Some of the CREBs in his library were already peptide-sequenced. Others had not yet been fully characterized—he had a pending government grant to complete the work.
The object of the exercise was to see if any of the normal CREBs had stronger binding affinities than the mutant. The stronger ones, could, in theory, kick the mutants from the receptors and open up the memory retrieval gates. In theory.
By mid-afternoon, he realized he was powerfully hungry and that meant hitting the vending machines. He looted his office manager’s desk for spare change and feasted on candy bars. Once he was able to think straight again, he called home and asked Linda how the girls were doing.
“They’re still playing catch,” she said. “They won’t stop for anything except food.”
He thought her voice was a little slurred and he wrestled with asking if she’d been drinking. He was about to say something like, you know, I’m counting on you to be sharp, when she swore.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“We’re having another brownout.”
“How long?”
“There. It’s over now. The lights dimmed for maybe seven seconds. Anything downtown?”
“Can’t tell here. All our bulbs are LEDs. The generator would have switched on for a complete shutdown. You’ve got to wonder what’s going on with the power grid.”
He ended the call, forgetting to bring up her drinking.
Later, while waiting for the timer on one of his experiments to run to zero, he reached Mandy.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“In the lab.”
“Me too.”
It didn’t take long for him to figure out that she was off kilter. He asked what was wrong.
“I helped kill someone today.”
She didn’t need much coaxing; she was eager to unburden herself.
“Christ, Mandy,” he finally said. “You’ve seen terrible things the last few days. I wish I could—”
She wouldn’t let him finish. “I know you do. You’ve had it bad too. It’s not just us. This is happening everywhere.”
She changed the subject and let him know that so far, none of her antiviral combinations were killing the virus. She had some good suggestions for his experiments, and as he was making some notes, the ceiling lights went off and on and the panels on his lab machinery flickered.
“The generator just powered up,” he said.
“Did you lose anything?”
He told her to hang on while he checked his peptide sequencer.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “The generator we’ve got cycles on fast with a voltage drop.”
“We’ve got a good one here too,” she said.
There was another flicker.
“We’re back on main power,” he said. “Look, we should talk about what-ifs. If there’s a massive blackout for whatever reason, the cell towers are going to go down and we won’t be able to reach each other.”
“I know,” she said quietly.
“If I find a CREB that displaces the mutant, the only way to deploy it is to have you insert it into one of your adenoviral vectors. That means we’re going to have to join up at your lab. I’ll have half the cure, you’ll have half.”
“All my vectors are frozen down. Shouldn’t be a problem,” she said.
It was about a thousand miles from Boston to Indianapolis—an easy drive when all was well with the world, a different kettle of fish without electricity along the way. He mentioned that he didn’t know where her lab was and told her to text him the location.
Mandy dropped him a pin and said, “You’d travel with Emma, right?”
“Of course. With Emma. How long will your generator run if you go down?”
“It’s got two modes. The default mode powers the whole building—lights, HVAC, lab equipment, everything. I think there’s only enough diesel for a couple of days for that. The other mode is just for critical machines like refrigerators and freezers and incubators. That one’s good for two weeks.”
“Listen to me, Mandy. Stockpile food and water. If things go south and the grid goes down, shelter at your lab and keep everything locked and tight. I’ll know where you are. I will come to you. Will you promise me something?”
He could hardly hear her next word. “What?”
“Promise me if that happens, that you’ll do whatever it takes to survive.”
19
Number of operational power plants in the United States: 6,997
Power generation by fuel type:
Coal: 39%
Natural gas: 28%
Nuclear: 20%
Solar/Wind: 7%
Hydroelectric: 6%
Criterion Natural Gas Power Plant, Groton, Massachusetts
Generating capacity: 360 megawatts
Customers: 80,000
The Criterion plant in Groton went online in 2001. It was built to operate with a fraction of the employees that older, coal-fired plants required, and unlike coal plants, the work was clean and automated, and the employee base was more educated and better paid. Only twenty-seven people were needed to cover three shifts.
Tony Greco had been the assistant general manager since the plant opened. His boss was Skip Bodkin, and since only three years separated them in age, he figured he’d never make GM. But for the last few days, he had gotten a de facto promotion. Bodkin had disappeared, although his whereabouts weren’t all that mysterious. A lot of people had gone missing inside their own homes.
Greco was a bachelor. As attrition started to hit the Criterion plant, he had stepped up and had basically moved there, living out of one of the on-call rooms. At ten in the morning, he was manning the main control panel when he heard someone buzzing in. Ike Kelleher was one of the combined cycle specialists, responsible for turbine maintenance.
“This it?” Kelleher said, surveying the empty control room.
Greco made a face. “You just
increased the headcount by a hundred percent.”
Kelleher adjusted his paper mask and asked if Greco was going to be putting his on.
“Only one of us needs to be wearing one. You’re it. How’s things at home?”
“My wife’s good and the baby’s good, but she’s having trouble reaching her mother and her sister. She’s beside herself. She wanted to drive to Worcester to check on them, but I won’t let her.”
“Yeah, not a good idea,” Greco agreed.
Kelleher asked about plant metrics. When Greco finished the run-down, he said, “We’ve been lucky so far, but I don’t know how long we’ll be able to keep up maintenance with just you and me. I mean the predictive maintenance algorithms are fine for what they do, but you know as well as I that someone’s got to turn a wrench and replace a sensor every so often. That plus the goddamn pipeline.”
“We had three brownouts and one thirty-second outage in Leominster last night,” Kelleher said. “I figured that was the pipeline.”
“It was. Pipeline pressure drops, and the computers shut down the turbines. Not a thing we can do about that. We go down, the Eastern Grid cycles into equilibration mode for a spell. Short spell—brownout. Long spell—nada.”
“What’s the home office saying?”
“What home office? No one’s answering my calls.”
“I don’t mind telling you, I’m scared shitless,” Kelleher said. “If we’ve got these kinds of manpower problems then every other operator in the country—gas, coal, nuclear—you name it—they’ve got the same problems.”
“The way I figure it,” Greco said, “coal’s going down first. It’s the most labor intensive and most plants have only four to five days of coal on hand. We’re next. The gas industry’s dependent on feeding three hundred thousand miles of domestic pipeline with shale-produced gas or from LNG tankers. You need a lot of bodies working to feed that beast. Nuclear’s going to be the last of the big three to go. Those plants are automated as hell, but they’ve got dead-hand controls. Take people completely out of the equation, they’re going into cold shutdown to protect the core.”
Kelleher was off to the side, getting a coffee while Greco was speaking. He came back to the desk and sat beside his boss and slipped his mask up to have a sip. Before he did, he coughed.
“For fuck’s sake, Ike, you’re not getting sick, are you?”
“I’m not sick,” Kelleher said. “Don’t even think a thing like that.”
*
Jamie drove home in the dark after a long day in the lab. He was gunning it down a deserted Storrow Drive when someone dropped a tire off the Bowker Overpass near the Kenmore off-ramp. It narrowly missed his car. In his rearview mirror he saw two men running onto the road to retrieve it. He figured they were working with the tire-thrower to disable vehicles and rob them of whatever supplies people had. He was still rattled when he got back to Brookline, and he got even more agitated at the sight of Linda, asleep on the sofa, with a half-empty bottle of vodka on the coffee table.
She woke unprompted and blinked sheepishly.
“Jeez, look at the time,” she said. “I was only going to close my eyes for a few minutes. I was going to make some supper.”
“I don’t want you to cook for me,” he said angrily. “I want you to look after Emma when I’m not here.”
“She’s fine,” she said, stretching. “I wasn’t down long.”
“I’m going upstairs to check and then we’re going to talk,” he said.
The girls were asleep too, spooning each other. He went to his bedroom, closed the door and sat on the bed, fuming. He hated everything about this new existence. He hated Emma’s sickness. He hated what had happened to Mandy. He hated that some assholes had tried to put a tire through his windshield. He hated his arrangement with Linda.
When he went back downstairs, the vodka bottle had been stashed and Linda was boiling water.
“If we’re going to continue this relationship of ours,” Jamie said, “you’re going to have to talk to me about your drinking problem.”
She seemed to buy a slice of time by re-clipping her hair to catch some errant strands. “I don’t have a problem, Jamie. I’m not a teetotaler, but I’m no alcoholic either, if that’s what you’re trying to say.”
“I don’t give a shit about labels. I do give a shit about being irresponsible with two vulnerable girls in the house.”
She showed him the length of her fuse.
“Don’t you dare lecture me like some kind of fucking minister,” she shouted. “If you want me to leave, just say it, but if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have enough food in the house to last more than a couple of days, and if it weren’t for me, you couldn’t run off to fart around in your lab.”
“Damn it, Linda, I’m happy the girls have each other right now and frankly, it’s worth sacrificing my privacy for that to happen. We’re not partners, we’re not even friends. But I need to trust you, okay?”
“I’m a police officer,” she yelled. “People trust me. Okay? If you’re such a fucking Puritan, I won’t pour myself a drink during the day. Will that make you happy?”
“Nothing short of Emma remembering who she is, is going to make me happy.”
Later, he took food to Emma’s room and spent time trying to teach them how to eat spaghetti with a fork, before working on some new vocabulary: spoon, fork, knife, bowl. Neither of them was all that receptive to lessons, and when Emma suddenly pointed and said, “Play ball,” that was the end of it. Kyra scooped up one of the tennis balls and another interminable game of catch was on.
Linda was in the living room, her arms and legs tightly crossed.
“I did the dishes,” she said.
“Are we good?” he asked.
“We’re good.”
“There was a bulletin on the TV,” she said. “That wimp who’s the new president’s going to be making an address at nine.”
Oliver Perkins, who only a week ago had been Speaker of the House of Representatives, sat stiffly behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office that seemed too large for him. He glanced at his notes before looking up, seemingly startled by the camera.
“My fellow Americans, I did not plan to become the president of the United States. I did not want this. No one wanted this. But here we are. The Constitution dictated that I assume this office upon the incapacitation of the president and vice president, and in these past several days, I have been working tirelessly with a depleted Congress and decimated cabinet departments to deal with this unprecedented crisis. Many in our country are sick; all are fearful. Up until two days ago, I believed that FEMA personnel, assisted by the military, were making strides in moving emergency supplies of food, water, fuel, and medicine to regional and local distribution centers. However, I must be honest with you. Because of the widening outbreak, the attrition rate among first responders has all but paralyzed our command and control and distribution efforts.
“Tonight, I urge able-bodied state and local disaster-relief officials to do whatever you can to get vital supplies from federal and state warehouses to people in need. I must also pass along my grave concerns about our power-production network and the stability of our electric grid. Power production is a people-intensive enterprise and without adequate personnel, getting coal to coal-burning plants, getting natural gas from production facilities into pipelines, keeping our hydro, solar, and nuclear plants functioning, is an ever-increasing challenge. I believe you should be stockpiling candles, batteries, gasoline for generators, and firewood as cold weather will be upon much of the country in the coming months. I want to appeal to able-bodied nurses, doctors, and emergency medical technicians to take the proper precautions, and I urge you to return to your hospitals and clinics and provide the vital services that only you can.”
“That means you,” Linda said with a snort.
“And I appeal to all able-bodied first responders—law enforcement officers and fire fighters, and all members of the National Guard
and the military, please return to your stations and bases.”
“That’s you,” Jamie said.
“Furthermore,” the president said, “you should know that scientists at the National Institutes of Health and the Center for Disease Control, up until a few days ago, were working on finding a cure for the virus. Unfortunately, their ranks have also been critically thinned by illness among themselves and their families. So, I am making a direct appeal to any independent medical researchers out there who have expertise in the relevant medical fields and access to their laboratories. Please call this Department of Health and Human Services number that should be at the bottom of your screens and leave details on the nature of your work and your contact information.”
“That means me,” Jamie said, jotting down the number.
The president looked up from his notes and stared into the camera with what could only be described as sorrowful eyes. “Let me say this in closing. We cannot expect help from other countries. I have been assured that the entire world is in the same boat as we are. We must rely on our own indomitable—”
The lights suddenly dimmed for a couple of seconds, then cut out completely.
*
Tony Greco had been alone at the Criterion plant for the entire day.
Ike Kelleher had failed to show up in the morning and wasn’t reachable. At noon, Greco was microwaving a frozen meal when he began to feel unwell. It was only a tension headache, he told himself, and he popped a couple of aspirins. He was sure that the cough that came on later that afternoon was only a chest cold. By the evening, he was having trouble remembering protocols on dealing with low-pressure conditions in the pipeline that supplied gas to his combustion chambers and turbines that should have been second nature to him. He found himself reliant on checklists that he hadn’t looked at in years. Around the time of the new president’s address to the nation, he lost the ability to comprehend the checklists.
