Final Epidemic

by Earl Merkel

“No answer,” Beck said, only partly to the woman beside him. “What’s the flying time to get down there?”

  “There is no commercial air traffic in or out of Florida,” Andi reminded him, grateful that Beck was once more addressing comments to her directly. “And don’t start thinking you could get into Fort Walton, anyway. Not without official sanction. I’m sorry, Beck. Montgomery is as close as they’ll let anybody get.”

  He nodded. On the map he had examined, Montgomery, Alabama, was perhaps one hundred fifty miles north of the Gulf Coast; there was no direct interstate route to Fort Walton Beach, which in the current circumstances was probably fortunate for the Alabama capital. He had traced down the various primary routes and two-lane blacktops that spiderwebbed southward from Montgomery.

  Andi read his mind.

  “Use your head, Beck. They’re not at the motel anymore, and there’s been no activity on the credit cards we know the girls have. They may not evenbe in Florida anymore.”

  “If you think I’m going to play spy in Montana when my only child is—”

  “We’ve put out an urgent request to all our CDC teams in the Quarantine Region. They have Katie’s photo and the names of all three girls. You want to locate her, that’s the only way to do it.”

  “Do you know where Deborah is?” He did not turn to look at her.

  “We’ve confirmed she is still in the Arlington area, Beck. We’ve monitored several phone calls she’s made today. There’s no reason to believe she even knows Katie has been in Florida. And as long as Deborah stays in Virginia, she’ll be as safe as anyone else.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate all your . . .efforts. ”

  “Damn it, Beck! I’m sorry we—I—kept you in the dark about your daughter. But you know as well as anybody what it’s like in there right now. If I had told you, you’d have done just what you’re thinking about doing now. And that won’t do Katie, or anybody else, any good.”

  “Don’t,” Beck said with heat. “Don’t pretend you care about my daughter, or anything else that wasn’t in your case orders.”

  “I made a decision, Beck.”

  “What does that mean, Andi?”

  She kept her eyes locked on the terminal window; outside, the CDC aircraft waited.

  “You’re a valuable asset. During this emergency, we need your skills, the things you know how to do. Don’t be so eager to go wandering around in a contagion zone.”

  “My daughter is more important than—”

  “Than working to stop this plague?” Andi’s voice was hard. “Use your head, if you still can. Even if you find Katie in that madhouse down there, what happens next?There’s no cure for this disease, damn it! What does that mean, Beck? Think!”

  In her peripheral vision, she could see the impact her words had on her companion. But her next words were still anything but sympathetic.

  “I want us to save Katie, and all the other Katies out there. I just think you might prefer not to die foolishly trying.”

  “I’ve done enough for my country, for too many years,” Beck said, his voice tight. “Now it’s time to think about—”

  “Unless this virus is stopped damn soon, it will keep spreading,” Andi interrupted. “Your daughter—and millions of other daughters; the whole country, Beck, maybe the whole damnworld —in all likelihood will be dead. Within ten days, maybe less.”

  Beck stared at Andi for a long moment. Then, with a violence that startled her, Beck Casey spun away; his fist hammered against the wall, leaving a pockmark deep in the plasterboard. As she watched, Andi saw him slump as if all strength had drained from his limbs. He leaned his forehead against the wall, his eyes shut tight.

  She resisted the impulse to speak, waiting.

  “What do you expect me to do?” Beck said through gritted teeth.

  “Go to Montana,” Andi said, her words level and without emotion. “Get us whatever information there is, Beck. It’s all you can do right now.”

  Chapter 22

  Fort Walton Beach, Florida

  July 22

  The football stadium was a scene that would have rivaled the best of Dante, or perhaps the worst; certainly, it was as close to the lowest circle of hell as Carol had ever imagined.

  Across the expanse of summer-burned grass, huge tents had been erected; their sidewalls were rolled high for ventilation, leaving the rows of cots open to view. All were occupied, save for those only recently vacated by one of the increasing number who no longer required it. These cots then quickly refilled, the process not unlike some perverse assembly line.

  Had she the strength or the leisure, Carol Mayer would have been appalled. As it was, she merely filed it deep in her subconscious, displaying only the absent demeanor of those preoccupied with more pressing matters.

  They were dying at a steady pace, almost like the workings of a clock. Carol wondered when she would become numbed to it all. She hoped it would be soon.

  Carol wiped the perspiration from her forehead. The heat rose steadily throughout the day, but aside from the thundershower that rumbled through almost every afternoon during the summer months, the weather, at least, was cooperating. It was a small mercy, and one that was noticed only vaguely by the majority of those whom the virus had felled.

  She was tired—no, exhausted,she corrected herself.

  Aside from herself, there were only a relative handful of health-care personnel attending almost four hundred desperately ill patients. This, despite the presence inside the stadium of a dozen exposure-suited physicians from Ray Porter’s CDC contingent. They moved about purposefully, but their activities were focused not on treatment; rather, they concentrated solely on the larger picture of analyzing the viral outbreak with an eye to containment strategies. Once Carol had even buttonholed Porter and demanded he order his team to help; Porter had listened, curtly refused and moved on.

  What help Carol did have came from a surprising source: the two teenage girls who had carried their friend into the Rossini-Evans Clinic.

  She looked around for the two volunteers and spotted them working in the semishade of the large canvas tent fly that shielded a block of filled cots.

  Right now, Carol noted, the one called Katie was gamely holding the shoulders of a thickset black man. He was convulsing, vomiting violently into a stainless steel pannier being held by her friend, Jay-something.

  The three teenage girls had been the last patients to come to the clinic; the one who had presented with acute symptoms had been, Carol knew immediately, beyond hope. But the other two had refused to leave her with the CDC team, fought off the suggestion they go anywhere but with their friend. Finally, all three had been ordered transported to the Fort Walton Beach High School football stadium.

  Almost as an afterthought, Ray Porter had ordered Carol along.

  It was just as well: throughout the morning, electrical power had become fitful and petulant. Then it had died completely, and did not return. As a medical facility, the clinic had been summarily shuttered.

  It was a short trip to the stadium, scarcely half a mile. But to those who traveled it, the journey took them into a different, terrifying universe. There, several hundred of the most critically ill victims had been sent.

  The sick girl—Carly Holmes was her name,Carol remembered suddenly,just a seventeen-year-old girl who had the bad fortune to vacation in a plague zone —was in agonal convulsions when she was carried to the van. When the spacesuited soldiers lifted the stretcher into fittings that locked it to slots in the floor, Carly’s limbs began to flail; to the uninitiated, it appeared as if she were fending off an assault by unseen demons.

  It took a determined effort on Carol’s part—the soldiers had pulled back, though whether in shock from the violence of the young girl’s seizure or in simple resignation, the physician could not tell—to secure the nylon restraints around Carly’s arms and legs. It did little good; Carly’s entire body was now convulsing madly, thrashing inside the straps. Her eyes were open wide, and her
teeth gnashed and clacked as her jaw muscles went into spasm.

  “What’s happening?” J. L. had screamed. “What’s happening to Carly?”

  Before Carol could answer, Carly’s body arched bowlike inside the embrace of her restraints. A sudden geyser of phlegm and bloody fluids burst from her mouth in an impossible volume. Carol fought, only partly successfully, to keep Carly’s face turned during the paroxysm. The other teenagers looked on in something akin to horror.

  Then J. L. began screaming in hysterics, adding to the chaos.

  “Can you quiet her?” Carol snapped at Katie. Another thick stream of vomit gushed from the thrashing girl whose head she held steady, clamped beneath her arms and body weight.

  Katie Casey reached out to J. L., who turned and clung tightly to the younger girl. She buried her face against Katie’s shoulder, muffling the short screams that her fear and revulsion still wrenched from deep inside.

  “What are you doing to my friend?” Katie asked, her voice unsteady.

  “I’m trying to prevent her from aspirating the discharge,” Carol said, most of her weight now pressing Carly’s head against the stretcher’s edge. She shifted Carly’s position, trying to clear the airway. Then she raised her voice. “Driver! Get this thing rolling, damn it! I can’t do anything for this girl without assistance!”

  Carly’s body again bucked madly, and Carol rode the violent convulsions like a rodeo cowboy. When the seizure finally subsided, Carly’s face was bloated and blue. Her breath came in short, rapid wheezes—not enough, never enough even to partially fill her ravaged lungs.

  “Can you help her?” Katie’s voice was a whisper, barely audible over the sobbing of her companion. “Please.”

  Carol looked up at Katie. She said nothing, but shook her head once, a hard negative.

  The van lurched into movement.

  A few minutes into the trip, Carly Holmes had died, mercifully.

  Her friends had been too stunned even to cry at first.

  That would come later, Carol knew, as she covered the body, tucking the sheet under straps that fought the jouncing of the transport van.If, she thought,there is a later.

  By then, of course, it was too late to alter the destination of the other two.

  When she arrived at the stadium, Carol discovered she was one of the few doctors in what had become a vast charnel house of the dead and dying. As in most epidemics, physicians and nurses had been among the earliest exposed to the virus; they had died, most of them, only shortly after the patients who had infected them. Among them was LaTonya Ferris, who had so effectively managed operations at Carol’s clinic. She had been delirious, fighting for air when Carol found her, by accident, among a row of other fevered victims.

  It had been a brief reunion.

  La Tonya had died, quickly and painfully, despite all of the frantic efforts Carol had thrown against the viral invader. Like the majority of the flu victims, LaTonya had drowned, a victim of her own fluids flooding into lungs torn and damaged by the virus’s onslaught. Neither the oxygen Carol had intubated into LaTonya nor the Lasix with which she had injected her had any but the most temporary of effects; the progress of the disease simply had been too swift and devastating.

  It had been the same with other patients over whom Carol had labored. Both O2and Lasix were now in short supply; so too was almost every other basic commodity.

  It did not matter, really. There was no effective treatment. As it was, the shortage of nurses was more critical than that of their physician colleagues, since a kind hand wielding a clean handkerchief at least provided a temporary comfort to the stricken.

  Carol heard news, in scraps and tiny morsels. Rumors, rather—in the chaos of the outbreak, there was no reliable way to discern fact from fiction.

  She heard that the pestilence had spread as far north as Birmingham and as far to the west as New Orleans; nobody really knew for sure. She heard that at Eglin Air Force Base, which occupied an area the size of Rhode Island from Fort Walton almost to Pensacola, the virus had spread like wildfire; she remembered Jerry-the-Moonlighter at the clinic, working alongside her to breathe life back into the victim at the clinic. She even heard that the Russians had come up with some kind of cure, or at least a treatment that kept the disease from spreading; this could not be confirmed either, and Carol was too busy to allow herself the luxury of hope.

  She worked throughout the day, losing track of time in the mind-dulling rounds amid the dying. At some point, a generator chugged to life and the bulbs strung between the tent poles cast their yellow light on the scene. When next she noticed, outside the yellow glow the night was dark and still.

  In one of the faded gray tents along the perimeter of the treatment area, Carol had commandeered a corner for herself and her two charges. It was there that she retreated, collecting Katie and J. L. as she passed through the crowded triage area. By the time they arrived at their refuge, the fatigue was acute enough to leave Carol lightheaded, though she felt anything but ready to sleep.

  Neither did the two teenage girls, though initially they seemed equally adverse to any kind of discussion. They jury-rigged one of the olive gray blankets over a rope, darkening the corner. It was too warm to sleep covered, though they stretched out on cots Carol hoped had not been recently used.

  Still, Carol found sleep elusive.

  So she prodded Katie and J. L. to talk, asking them questions until they began to respond. It was the only palliative she could offer two young women who had been thrust deeply into this pact with death.

  J. L. was quiet, almost sullen, and spoke mainly in monosyllables. She stayed close to the other, Carol observed, the one named Katie. But she had done her share, even through the tears that had washed tracks down the grime on her cheeks. For her own part, Katie Casey was dealing with the shock of Carly’s death by plunging into the far larger cauldron of suffering she found everywhere around her. She had cried too, if her reddened eyes were any evidence. But when, Carol could not say; each time she had glanced at Katie, the girl had seemed calm and competent—even resourceful. If the teenager was frightened by her situation, she gave no outward sign.

  For a while they spoke about meaningless subjects, tacitly avoiding the world outside their small corner. Carol told them about her job at the clinic, about the incongruities of living in an area where most people come to play, about the largely absent social life of a single, overworked physician. She described her infatuation with Choctawatchee Bay in terms that might have embarrassed a human lover, mercifully missing the eye-rolling glance J. L. shot Katie. She mentioned that she had purchased her first vehicle only a few months before, and admitted it was a pickup truck, now parked back in the clinic lot.

  “Stick-shift transmission,” she volunteered. “That marks me as a real player, at least down here. Do either of you drive stick?”

  “I can,” Katie said. “My father taught me. But I just got my learner’s permit. I’m not supposed to drive without an . . .adult supervising me.” She sounded rueful, but to Carol’s ears insufficiently so.

  Carol grinned wickedly.I still remember . . . “But I’ll bet you do it anyway. Am I right?”

  There was a rustling, as if Katie might have shrugged. Silence settled between them.

  “You’re doing a good job out there,” Carol said finally. “Both of you.”

  Again, there was no response, and Carol was about to abandon the effort when Katie spoke.

  “All these people,” Katie said to Carol quietly. “They’re going to die, aren’t they?”

  The question took the physician by surprise, and she hesitated for only an instant. But it was answer enough, and all three of them knew it.

  “Why don’t we have it?” J. L.’s voice was hard, demanding. “We were around Carly when she was sick—I mean, if she caught it in Florida, we were with her the whole time. So why aren’t Katie and I—”

  Her voice caught, broke.

  “I don’t know,” Carol said. “I don’t know
why I’m not displaying symptoms, either. Possibly the virus takes longer to manifest itself in some people. Or it could have something to do with the way our individual immune systems are working.”

  Katie frowned. “You mean, there’s a chance we won’t catch it?”

  When she spoke, Carol was careful to keep her voice neutral. “That’s not likely, I’m afraid. We don’t know—Idon’t know anything about this virus, except that it’s a very contagious variety of the flu. Most people are vulnerable to influenza.”

  “But it’s possible?”

  “Anything is possible.”

  “Not if we stay here,” J. L. interjected. She looked around the football field and shook her head in a hard negative movement. “Not in here.”

  “The entire state is quarantined,” Carol said. “There are police and soldiers on all the roads—certainly the main ones, I guess. There’s no place for you to go. They can’t allow the infection to spread.”

  “But we don’t have it,” J. L. repeated stubbornly.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Again, silence. This time it lasted longer.

  “Do you have anybody you can call?” Carol asked suddenly, realizing even as she spoke that the question was inane. During processing, she had discovered that all contact with the world outside was ‘temporarily’ out of service. It made sense, from the point of view of those trying to keep the genie in the bottle: had word of the conditions here migrated outside, widespread panic would have been inevitable.

  “We kind of—well, sneaked down here,” Carol heard Katie say. “The . . . three of us.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Right now,” Katie said, “nobody even knows where we are.”

  There was nothing Carol could think of to say. In a short time, she found herself drifting off, finding sleep at last.

  She snored, rhythmically but lightly.

  It was then that J. L. and Katie began to talk again, in voices pitched low and secretive.

  Chapter 23

  Fort Detrick, Maryland

  July 22