“You can always show up now, while it’s still generally safe out there, and pull the plug later,” said Peters before bringing his voice to a near whisper. “I’m not the only one here with that plan. I’m sure you wouldn’t be the only one in Westfield. There’s only so much we can do…family has to come first at some point.”
“It might have to come sooner than later,” said David.
“Let’s get you some answers, if we have any,” said Peters. “Get you out of here as quickly as possible. Through the back door this time. I nearly shit my pants when I saw your badge pressed against the glass. That was a ballsy move.”
“Stupid move,” said David. “Not sure what I was thinking.”
He’d have to do way better than that going forward. David got the distinct impression that the margin for error out there would get smaller and smaller as the days passed.
Chapter Fourteen
Dr. Chang turned his black, convertible BMW sedan off the two-lane paved road onto a tight, hard-packed gravel drive that plowed straight into a mature forest of densely packed trees. He drove in the cool shade of the impenetrable canopy of branches and thick leaves for several seconds until he reached a sturdy metal gate blocking the road. His hand extended upward, toward the bank of garage door remote control buttons on the bottom of the rearview mirror, pressing the leftmost button.
The gate slid left along its track, clearing his way a few seconds later. He eased the car forward until he was certain the gate was closing behind him. With the gate in motion again, he accelerated just enough to take the gentle curves of the forest road at a safe speed. A minute later, the BMW emerged from the trees into a two-acre tract of flat, open land surrounded on all sides by dense forest.
A shiny, two-story contemporary home with boxy lines stood in the center of the land, immediately surrounded by a well-manicured, lush green lawn. Beyond the circle of green, wide patches of tall wild grasses sat scattered between a carefully laid out arrangement of small ponds, dirt paths and empty garden beds.
Chang had bought the isolated property after the most recent bioweapons scare to serve as his bug-out hideaway from the city, or any city for that matter. The Indianapolis Executive Airport was just a few miles northwest. He could quickly fly back from a trip if something lethal surfaced, seeking refuge here until things stabilized, and if the chaos of an uncontrolled pandemic poured out of Indianapolis, threatening his safety here, he could fly somewhere else.
Of course, the project morphed from a rustic, survival hideaway to a multimillion-dollar project within a short span of time. Once he started working with an architect that specialized in self-sustainable designs, rustic gave way to modern. There was no slowing down from there. Anyway, solar panel arrays and compact wind turbines looked funny with the log-cabin-style home. That was one of many pseudo-justifications made by Chang to build his dream house.
In the end, it didn’t matter. The house and property looked more suited for the cover of Modern Home magazine than Modern Prepper, but it still served the original intent and purpose—a refuge from the inevitable. A place to hide when—not if—the next global pandemic raged across the land, taking millions of lives. He had no idea if today was that day, but he wasn’t taking any chances. The microscopic bug that had hit Methodist Hospital’s Emergency Department wasn’t fucking around.
He just hoped it wasn’t contagious. His gut told him it wasn’t, but a quiet voice deep in the recesses of the darkest part of his mind whispered that he was wrong. Because that was how he would have designed it. Just the thought of it gave him chills.
The gravel road cut through the center of the open land, leading to the two-car attached garage. The steel and glass garage door rolled upward, making way for a perfectly timed entrance. He edged the vehicle forward until the small green LED light mounted on the garage wall directly in front of him turned red, prompting him to stop. Perfectly situated in the neatly arranged garage, he closed the garage door and got out of the car.
A pristine black Toyota 4Runner sat parked on the shiny concrete floor next to the BMW, another bug-out purchase that kind of exceeded his original needs-based assessment. He barely drove it, preferring the much-easier-to-park-and-maneuver convertible in the city. Despite its rare use, he felt comfortable knowing it was an option. Like his plane, it gave him options. He wouldn’t get far on back roads and jeep trails in the BMW in the unlikely event he had to leave by vehicle instead of his Cessna.
He’d spent a lot of money on these seemingly improbable doomsday thoughts. Amounts that most people would probably find wastefully paranoid. The same people that spent more than a thousand dollars per month for low-deductible, premium health insurance when their total healthcare costs year to year rarely exceeded one month’s premium. The very same people carrying more than the minimum insurance for their automobiles year after year, despite never getting into an accident. Thousands carried concealed firearms to the grocery store in towns that hadn’t seen a public murder in decades. The list went on.
None of them were wrong. It was all just a matter of perspective or, more importantly, focus. Chang had spent the past decade studying deadly pathogens. The kind developed, stockpiled and intentionally inflicted on the world by nation-states and terrorists—often one and the same. Before that, he’d researched pandemic-grade viruses. Two very costly preparedness undertakings if done right, and he had spared no expense.
Chang had long been convinced that he’d see one of these disasters in his lifetime. He just never thought he’d witness both—particularly not at one time. Despite the amount of money he’d spent preparing for these catastrophes, he woke up every day hoping it would ultimately turn out to be money wasted. The opposite, in either case, was unthinkable.
He grabbed his leather satchel from the backseat and walked in front of the SUV to reach the door leading into the house. A biometric scanner next to the door read his thumb, allowing him to punch in a seven-digit code that unlocked the sealed door. He turned the knob and pushed the door open, a current of air rushing past him as he stepped inside.
The home’s forced-air heating and cooling system maintained a positive pressure environment that constantly pushed air out of the structure. It was a feature used in military vehicles and ships to prevent contamination by chemical or biological agents. Overkill for a private home, but why stop short when you were already in for a ludicrous sum of money. Aerial delivery had long been one of the preferred methods of spreading chemical and biological agents. He pulled the door shut, which required a little more effort due to the air pressure.
He now stood in a short hallway leading to what New Englanders would call a mudroom, a small separate room usually connecting the garage or side entrance to the main house. Like its name suggested, it was a place to leave muddy boots and dirt-caked outer garments before heading inside. While Chang’s mudroom contained the typical arrangement of oversized shoe cubbies, numerous coat hooks and long, wide benches, it contained a feature that allowed it to serve an altogether different purpose if necessary.
The first door to the left in the hallway was a bathroom with a shower, which could function as a decontamination station in the event of a nuclear, biological or chemical (NBC) attack. He also thought it might come in handy after a long day getting dirty in the garden that would sustain him if the world collapsed, but the shower had never been used in the three years he’d built the home. The garden was still in the planning phase.
Chang removed his shoes and opened the pocket door to a kitchen gleaming with black granite counters and stainless steel appliances. He placed his leather satchel next to a small digital tablet on the oversized granite-topped island that dominated the kitchen, and flipped open the tablet. The device welcomed him with a password screen, which he bypassed with several quick keystrokes to access the home security system’s control center.
At a glance he could tell that nothing notable had occurred on the property while he had been gone. The forest-based sensors had
no human incursions to report. Combined input from motion and thermal sensors had confirmed a dozen or so deer passages. Nothing out of the ordinary at all. He often woke up to the sight of deer in the clearing. He’d calibrated the system to account for them.
Likewise, the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree sensor and camera feeds covering the open field indicated that nothing had approached the house from the forest. Sensors inside told a similar story. He suspected as much, since any indication of a home breakin or human breach of the forest perimeter would have been remotely reported to his phone immediately upon detection. Another warning would have been provided when he pressed his thumb to the biometric scanner in the garage. Opening the tablet and checking the specifics was more a habit than necessity.
He highly doubted it would ever become a necessity. In three years the system had registered one human breach of his property. A group of teenagers had cut a hole in the livestock fence surrounding the forest and partied for a few hours, leaving behind a mess of beer bottles and cigarette butts. He’d mended the fence and posted a NO TRESPASSING sign at the point of the breach the next day, leaving the kids to wonder how he’d discovered their secret. His message must have been received. The midnight parties didn’t continue.
Chang closed the tablet and opened the mostly empty refrigerator behind him, removing a bottle of sparkling water. He’d order a same-day delivery of produce and other grocery items from one of the local supermarkets. If he placed the order soon, the groceries would arrive in time for him to prepare dinner. If not, he’d be putting together a freezer meal. With that thought in mind, he made his way to a spacious office toward the front of the house.
Floor-to-ceiling windows gave him a view of the forest and clearing northwest of the house when seated at his desk. Part of the driveway had been visible when he walked into the office. The office was noticeably devoid of personal pictures or knickknacks, beyond the diplomas on the wall behind his desk and the select landscape pictures he’d enlarged and framed for the walls flanking the windows. Galapagos Islands. Machu Picchu. Patagonia. The few exquisite places he’d taken the time out of his hectic professional career to see. As stark and beautiful as the photos looked on his walls, they were a constant, ironic reminder of what he’d sacrificed for his career—a family of his own to share these beautiful memories. One of these days, he kept telling himself.
He activated his desktop computer and waited a few moments for the system to boot up. After he ordered the groceries, he’d do a little digging through a few of the classified archives he could access through his confidential arrangement with Edgewood and the CDC. He’d remembered something from a hushed conversation with a few of his Edgewood colleagues over dinner. He vaguely knew what they were talking about, but the topic must have been highly classified. The discussion ended just as abruptly as it had started, leaving him with nothing more than the scattered information he’d previously assembled about the thwarted U.S. bioweapons attack in 2008 and its link to a far more nefarious attack in Russia.
He still hadn’t heard from any of his trusted contacts at either organization, which struck him as odd. He’d reach out to them again. Chang found it hard to believe that they didn’t already know about the growing problem in Indianapolis. Checking his phone again, he confirmed that he hadn’t missed a call in all of the excitement of getting out of the city. Highly unusual. He was at ground zero of something clearly significant.
Was it possible Indianapolis had somehow remained below the CDC’s radar? He couldn’t see how. The government had spent billions of dollars on sophisticated detection and reporting systems over the past decade, for the sole purpose of giving disease response teams the critical jump needed to identify and prevent a possible infectious disease outbreak.
On top of that, several private initiatives had emerged in the wake of recent disease scares to augment detection efforts. Given what Dr. Owens and Dr. Hale had reported, CDC headquarters should be at code red. Even the World Health Organization should be well aware of the problem by this point, even if they didn’t advertise it.
Chang opened the search browser’s favorites folder and navigated to the CDC website, first checking the Flu Activity and Surveillance page. Based on his examination of the spinal tap sample delivered by Dr. Hale, this certainly wasn’t the flu, but initial reports from area hospitals would more than likely be filed as suspected influenza due to the rapid nature of the outbreak. He didn’t find anything fitting the pattern of an influenza outbreak centered on Indianapolis.
A few minutes later, after searching every other possible location for signs of an outbreak and finding nothing, he leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. Something didn’t add up, or maybe the CDC had already discovered what they were truly up against and had decided to delay the release of any information until they could muster an appropriate response. That was entirely possible, especially given the public panic that would ensue at the first hint of the word bioweapon.
A quick check of the World Health Organization’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network surveillance page yielded similar results, which didn’t surprise him. If the CDC wanted to keep a lid on this for public safety reasons, the WHO would cooperate—at least temporarily. It was very possible that the WHO had detected the outbreak anomaly first, through their Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN).
GPHIN utilized a sophisticated, Internet-based data collection system to check publically available media sources for reports of disease outbreaks. Very often, informal sources of information provided the first hints of a new outbreak, prompting the immediate deployment of WHO response teams. A simple mention of overrun emergency rooms on any of the Indianapolis area’s news station websites should trigger an alarm, prompting CDC notification.
Chang clicked on the link for the International Scientific Pandemic Awareness Collaborative (ISPAC) website, wondering if they would follow the CDC’s lead. By far the most generously funded private organization dedicated to outbreak detection, the ISPAC had developed an epidemic intelligence network rivaling, if not exceeding, the capability of the CDC and World Health Organization.
They fielded their own investigative teams and had developed a comprehensive social media and news network crawling system to identify disease outbreaks at the grass roots level. The information collected was shared with the CDC through a standing, reciprocal agreement, with the one caveat being that the ISPAC remained independent. That said, when ISPAC leadership didn’t see a conflict jeopardizing public safety, they cooperated across the board with the CDC. He wondered if this would be one of those cases.
HTTP ERROR 500 (INTERNAL SERVER ERROR)
He hit the link again, getting the same result. The site was probably overloaded. Something big was definitely going on, possibly in more than one city. He tried the University of Minnesota-based CIDRAP (Center for Infectious Disease and Research Policy) website.
HTTP ERROR 500 (INTERNAL SERVER ERROR)
“Wow,” he muttered, clicking the mouse again and receiving the same message on the screen.
Chang spent the next minute cycling through a half-dozen different private or university-sponsored sites reporting live disease surveillance, coming up with the same internal server error message. Unconsciously, he clicked on the CDC site again, and the screen displayed the Atlanta-based agency’s homepage. Shaking his head, he restarted the computer, convinced something was wrong on his end. He knew better, but he did it anyway. Slightly panicked, he checked his phone while the computer whirred. Nothing. Not even a text.
When the web browser loaded, he checked each of the sites saved in his “Outbreak Surveillance” favorites folder, coming up with the same result. As a scientist, he couldn’t rule out the remote possibility that exceedingly high traffic had simultaneously overwhelmed every private and university-sponsored site. He navigated to a site that assesses website activity and typed each website’s domain name, verifying that the sites were down. Not busy, but down—hard. What
were the odds that every private site was crashed, but the CDC site was up and running without a glitch? Chang shook his head, knowing the answer.
He dug through his top desk drawer for the remote control to the flat-screen TV mounted next to the office door. Chang wasn’t sure the batteries in the remote were still good. He hadn’t used this TV in over a year. Clicking the power button on the slim remote, he was rewarded with a red light in the bottom right corner of the TV, followed by a source input screen. A few more button pushes got him to a national cable news network. He stared at the screen long enough to determine that the situation in Indianapolis hadn’t made the headlines.
His next stop was a twenty-four-hour local news channel feed, where he suffered through an extended weather forecast and a north suburb school referendum story before finally catching a previously recorded segment about the impending catastrophe. The caption at the bottom of the screen read INDIANAPOLIS AREA HOSPITALS HIT WITH LATE SEASON FLU OUTBREAK.
A reporter stood a considerable distance from what Chang recognized as the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Hospital, a modern steel and glass structure near the Indiana University-Purdue University city campus. A few police cars with flashing lights sat parked in front of the main entrance, superimposed in front of a thick crowd of people.
“We just learned this morning that Eskenazi Hospital has joined the long list of hospitals and urgent care clinics to close their doors to new arrivals, a situation likely to fuel the growing unrest that has gripped the city. Little is known at this point, but an anonymous source at Methodist Hospital has confirmed that their hospital has been struggling to keep up with the rapidly rising number of sick patients for close to forty-eight hours. City and state representatives have pressed the mayor’s office for alternative options, but so far, Indiana Department of Health officials have not responded. Hospital administrators across the city have been similarly quiet, making no public statements.”
HOT ZONE: A Post-Apocalyptic Pandemic Thriller (The Zulu Virus Chronicles Book 1) Page 9
