Final Epidemic

by Earl Merkel

  “Talk to me, Dr. Krewell. What is the present situation?”

  Krewell rubbed his eyes; for the past fourteen hours he had been monitoring hourly reports from the CDC field teams in New York and Florida.

  “Sir, the first consignments of Russian vaccine have reached the Florida Quarantine Region. Immunization is under way now, focusing on a wide band outside the contagion zone. By tomorrow we project we will have vaccinated a sufficient percentage of the population to have created the herd-immunity situation we need.”

  “And New York?”

  “Essentially the same, sir. It’s a bigger program, but we have a lot of resources working there. CDC reports indicate that the immunization will be complete in the states that border New York by midnight. We’ve already begun a mass program to vaccinate uninfected persons inside the contagion zones of Florida and New York.”

  “We’re sure the vaccine is working?” Carson’s tone was carefully neutral.

  “I have field labs analyzing the antibody counts of the earliest vaccination subjects,” Krewell said. “In each case, we’re getting strong positives. There’s no reason to believe the vaccine is not effective.”

  The President took a deep breath, and Krewell heard the relief in his voice. “Then this nightmare is almost over.”

  Krewell nodded. “The spread of the virus appears to be contained. And with the availability of a vaccine, even if an isolated case appears we should be able to deal with it.” He paused, choosing his words with care. “The general population should be secure, sir.”

  The President looked at Krewell closely. “But?”

  “But the vaccine cannot help those already infected with the flu virus. That’s a core group of perhaps thirty thousand persons, maybe more. Their only hope is the accelerated immune reaction from Agent VIX.”

  Carson, who had listened without comment until then, shook his head vigorously.

  “Mr. President, I see where this is going. It is only by the narrowest of margins that we were able to avoid disaster once. Twice, if you include the crash of the transport in Florida.”

  The President’s face was impassive, but Carson had made a telling point. Had the Hercules not carried a full fuel load, there would not have been the intense fireball on impact. Instead of being incinerated, the VIX that had been on board would have been released, triggering its own plague. As it was, the other aircraft had been recalled only by the narrowest of margins. It was a near miss to a catastrophe.

  Carson’s voice was insistent.

  “We cannot risk a free release of a substance that could spread and kill millions here and abroad.”

  The President eyed his national security advisor narrowly.

  “Billy,” he said, “I’m becoming concerned by your lack of consistency.”

  Carson reddened. “Sir, if the Russian vaccine had not existed—or if it had not been acquired in time—VIX would have been the lesser of two evils. Now it is the greater. My advice remains consistent: as president, you must make decisions based on saving the greatest number of people. However difficult they are.”

  “Yes,” said the President. “And now I must decide if I will kill thirty million, instead of three hundred million. I do not consider that an easier choice.”

  Krewell interrupted.

  “Sir, Ray Porter has been working with the CDC field coordinators on-site in Florida studying the situation during the outbreak,” he said. “He’s come up with an idea based on the containment strategy—”

  “Which was only a contingency plan,” Carson interjected, though with less heat than previously.

  “But now we’re dealing with a far less widespread contagion,” Krewell said. He turned again to the President. “There are risks involved, but I think Dr. Porter has come up with a way to use VIX effectively.Without a free release that could spread. If so, we can save a significant number of the flu victims, sir.”

  Krewell waited silently for several long minutes. Finally, he glanced pointedly at the clock on the wall.

  “What is your decision, Mr. President?”

  Chapter 55

  Florida Quarantine Region

  July 24

  The satellite phone buzzed insistently as Beck pawed through the bags piled on the backseat of Deborah’s Mercedes. They had left in the late-night darkness, Deborah unable to wait any longer. The pair had successfully bluffed their way past the first checkpoint, though Beck realized that the Army sergeant who had finally waved them through did so only because of the direction of their travel. Had they been going north instead, he had no doubt their expedition would have ended at that point, suddenly and without further debate: Beck had seen the two M-60 machine guns that flanked the intersection.

  Deborah was at the wheel, concentrating on her driving. She had said scarcely a word to Beck since he had appeared alongside her car, his own luggage slung over his shoulders and two military-issue exposure masks dangling from one hand. Since then, he had initiated most of the limited conversation, sketching in the details of the past few hours. Only when he told her the VIX release had been aborted did she react visibly.

  Now they were on a two-lane highway twenty miles south of Florala, passing Spanish-moss-covered oaks that competed with rough-looking pine and fir along each side of the road. Fort Walton was still more than a hundred miles distant when the buried sat phone sounded.

  From the corner of her eye, Deborah could see Beck—his features largely concealed by the full mask—awkwardly hold the portable telephone to his head. There was a moment while he listened.

  Then his entire body tensed, and though the words were too muffled to discern, Deborah heard the sudden tight intensity in her ex-husband’s voice. Before she could speak, he clicked the phone closed and began pawing through the road atlas with which they had been navigating.

  “There—take this crossroads east.Now! ” Beck said, and the tires of the Mercedes squealed as she automatically cut hard into the turn. “Tallahassee, Deborah. Larry Krewell says he’ll meet us there. He’s in the air now.”

  She flared into an anger that was white-hot in its intensity. “I’m not going to—”

  “It’s Katie, Deborah. Larry got word: a CDC team located her in Tallahassee. She’s alive, Deborah. Katie’s very sick, but she’s alive.”

  Chapter 56

  Tallahassee/Florida State University Campus

  July 24

  They had commandeered the Tallahassee-Leon County Civic Center, one of the few buildings both large enough to handle the number of active flu victims, yet sufficiently self-contained to facilitate the modifications and additions needed for the VIX treatment process.

  Beck looked around the vastness of the fieldhouse. He was frantic, preoccupied with concern for his daughter. Still, he marveled at the sheer scope of the work under way here, knowing the same activities were being duplicated elsewhere in northwest Florida and in New York City.

  All involved knew the risks: should the Agent VIX virus escape the containment they were constructing, its virulence would infect anyone it chanced to reach—and thus very likely begin its leapfrog through the outside population with amazing speed. Almost inevitably, they would trigger the very pandemic the vaccine had allowed them to avoid. But without treatment with VIX, anyone infected with the flu virus was doomed to die; current totals—mainly in Florida, but with a significant number now reported in New York—exceeded twenty-six thousand persons.

  A tight hermetic seal was impossible, of course. Instead, technicians had hastily rigged fans and ventilation pumps to create a negative-air-pressure system, ensuring a flow would come only from the outside into the large building. Large-diameter ductwork would move the airflow to an industrial kiln that had been pressed into service; in it, any organic particles the vented air might carry would be incinerated in a twenty-two-hundred-degree inferno.

  As an added safety measure, what was in effect a huge rubberized tent was being erected inside the building, encompassing everything up to t
he third tier of seats. Overhead, the cube of a scoreboard hung suspended, securing the steel cables that uniformed men were even now using to affix the last of the top tenting. At midcourt on the hardwood floor, the Seminole warrior’s impassive visage surveyed the beehive of activity that was now nearing its culmination.

  The olive green rubberized fabric blocked the civic center’s high windows and the majority of the overhead lighting. Instead, a large number of stand-mounted banks of lighting panels had already been wheeled along the perimeter of the tenting. Many were standard halogen lamps—but a substantial number of the panels held banks of longer lighting tubes that, as they were tested by the military electricians, glowed with an odd blue-white intensity.

  “We’re trying to cover every base,” Krewell told Beck, as both men watched from the second row of seats in the cavernous fieldhouse. “Ultraviolet lights will be in alternating banks around the treatment enclosure. The CBW people swear that it will neutralize the VIX even faster than natural sunlight—two hours, three at the most.”

  The physician nodded to a line of soldiers topping off plastic canisters from a green-painted tank trailer that had been pulled in by a Humvee.

  “We’ve also cornered the market on liquid bleach and hand-pump sprayers, Beck. It’s not Level Four containment, but it’s as close to it as we can get in a field situation.”

  He looked at Beck though the full-face exposure masks both of them wore concealed any expressions.

  “How is Katie doing?” Krewell asked.

  “Not good. She’s in and out of consciousness, and her fever is spiking. Deborah won’t leave her side.”

  “It won’t be long now, Beck. Ten minutes. I promise.”

  Krewell had taken pains to ensure Katie and J. L. were in the first bank of flu patients awaiting treatment with the VIX. Their symptoms were advancing ruthlessly; whether their weakened systems could deal with the demands that were about to be placed on them was, the doctors had made clear, an open question.

  As if on cue, a parade of stretchers had begun to wind through the entrance. They were placed in rows on the hardwood floor, and from Beck’s vantage point it looked as if a line of ants, two to a litter, were depositing some hard-won bounty for inspection by the queen. He scanned the lines until his eyes locked on one stretcher, this one accompanied by a third exposure-suited figure that walked at the side, holding the hand of its occupant.

  He turned to see Krewell watching him.

  “Go on,” Beck heard his friend say. “Get the hell down there with her, man.”

  By the time he reached courtside, the treatment had already begun. The infective process was simplicity itself: while an assistant held the face of a patient steady, a green-garbed medic placed the tip of an inhaler tube against a nostril. A squeeze of the bulb, and the team moved on to the next stretcher.

  Beck reached Katie’s stretcher simultaneously with the treatment team. Deborah, sitting on the hardwood floor and white-faced behind the rubber mask, looked up at him once. Then, still holding Katie’s hand in her own gloved one, she waited as the medics performed their ritual. On the stretcher, Katie was only semiconscious, but she had pulled away as the inhalator tip touched her and grimaced at the puff of moist air that followed.

  Beck was staring at his daughter, hot tears on his own cheeks under his mask, when he felt Deborah’s touch. Her hand took his, forming a chain that linked child and parents. Wordlessly, he knelt beside her.

  Together, they waited.

  Aftermath

  Chapter 57

  Washington, D.C.

  July 25

  “You didwhat ?” Beck’s voice was dumbfounded. “He’s a sociopath who killed at least four people in this country alone. Probably more.”

  Carson was unmoved. “Calm down, Beck. It was a direct request from Putin. A demand, actually. What were we supposed to do? Put your friend Ilya on trial for murder?”

  “So instead you put him on a plane for Moscow.”

  “We haven’t forgotten what he tried to do to you. But perhapsyou should. It’s history, man. Move past it.” He smiled, but not as if his heart was in it. “Concentrate on the bright side. The President wants to make you a national hero.”

  “Thank him for me. I’d rather he didn’t.”

  “You may not have a choice. He feels strongly that you were the reason he is not facing an impeachment hearing—or worse—this very minute.”

  “I still don’t want it. There would too many bodies draped over any medal he could give me. I know how we got the vaccine in time—what the President asked Putin to do over there to get the information.”

  “There was no choice, Beck. Not with what was at stake.”

  “I understand that too. That’s what bothers me: Ido understand it. I’m a historian, remember? I know that the same choice has been made before, countless times. And will be made again, the next time.”

  Beck’s eyes looked steadily at Carson. “We’re the good guys. But we still act on our sense of expediency. We make our decisions, compromise what we are—whowe are. All in the name of the greater good. I’ve been on both sides of that line now, and I don’t know if I can straddle it ever again.”

  Carson nodded, and shrugged.

  “I’ll pass that along,” he said, and something in his voice made Beck look up.

  “The President and I have come to a mutual decision,” Carson said. “I will tender my resignation within the next few weeks. He will accept, with regrets.” He looked at Beck from under an arched eyebrow. “That’s still confidential, by the way.”

  “What are your plans?”

  “I have not yet decided,” Carson said. Then he smiled thinly, at an unspoken but shared jest. “Perhaps something in the defense industry. Selling shoes to the Army, maybe.”

  He stood, his hand outstretched awkwardly enough so that even if Beck had not known him, it would have been obvious the friendly gesture was an unfamiliar exercise.

  “You could write your own ticket at the Company, you know,” Carson said, making it sound like an afterthought. “Or even here, in my old office. The President would be open to the suggestion. National security advisor isn’t abad job, you know.”

  “Thanks,” said Beck. “I already have a job, in Arlington. I just have to start doing it again. If they’ll take me back, that is.”

  Chapter 58

  Fort Walton Beach, Florida

  July 29

  The balcony looked out over Choctawatchee Bay and beyond, a vista that stretched so wide and so open that it could leave those unaccustomed to it delightfully dizzy.

  Far to the east was the arch of the Destin Bridge, its simple lines carved sharp against the slate blue sky. Southward, just over the low swell of Okaloosa Island’s sugar white dunes, was the Gulf of Mexico, an unimpeded expanse of emerald greens and white-flecked cobalt. In the distance, its single sharp horizon bisected the world into two distinct realms.

  But it was the bay to which her eyes always returned, whether to watch the timeless grace of sails filling like the wings of a gull, or simply to gaze upon a surface in ceaseless, soothing movement. The bay was a living thing, an underappreciated artist who worked in wind and wave and current—crafting an unending series of intricate patterns, never duplicating the same one twice.

  Carol Mayer sat unmoving, the salt breeze stirring her hair. It felt cool and fresh against her scalp, and she savored the way it fenced with the morning sun’s warmth.

  To her, it felt like life restored.

  For a moment, she tilted her head back to take the full measure of the elements in conflict. Had there been anyone to see, the hollows under her eyes and the residual sallowness of her skin would have signaled a woman whose convalescence was not yet complete. The hand that held the china mug still shook, though less than in previous days, whenever she lifted it to her lips.

  But she was alive. It was a still-surprising knowledge that now made her smile, but which had rocked her only a few days before. Then, s
he had just swum to the surface of her consciousness; through fever-blurred eyes, she had stared in confusion at the olive canopy far overhead. Panic began to flood her when a figure in fatigues and gas mask bent close.

  “It’s all right, ma’am,” a soft Southern voice had said. “This here’s a hangar at Eglin we fixed up special. You’re pretty sick right now, but it’s gonna be okay soon.”

  It was the voice of an angel, and she had believed it without question. She had drifted away again, this time with a sense of peace.

  Carol opened her eyes again, drinking in the panorama and feeling the same peace flood into her now. The angel had spoken the truth, though as a physician Carol knew it would be some time before her recovery would be complete. Someday, even the memories that regularly plagued her dreams might begin to fade.

  So many had died—the figures were still uncertain, she had read, but in Florida they were sure to exceed twenty thousand persons. New York had escaped the worst of it; but before the vaccine and the VIX treatment facilities had stemmed the virus, more than eleven thousand deaths had occurred on the densely packed island of Manhattan.

  As for Russia—well, nobody knew the mortality figures. The Russian government simply would not release the numbers, though that had not stopped the commentators in the Western press from speculating in the mid-six-figure range. That, not including those who had been killed in the nerve-gas cauterization of the outbreak.

  It was a ghastly tally, the most devastating terrorist attack in history. What made it all the more horrifying was a knowledge all the world now shared: it could happen again at any time.

  The thought made Carol shiver, and she fought it down to the deepest recesses of her mind.

  What was it Scarlett O’Hara said?she mused.Oh yes—“I’ll think about that tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day.”