by Ross Pennie
A minute later, Tasha greeted them with her warm smile and radiant dark eyes, and a hint of sandalwood perfume. As always, her presence made him feel a glow deep inside.
Her eyes clouded as she bit her lip. “You just missed the paramedics.”
“Was she breathing on her own?” Hamish asked.
Tasha nodded. “Didn’t need CPR, thankfully.”
Zol let the door close behind them. “What did they say?”
“Not much. They seemed satisfied with her vitals and the reading on their blood oxygen thing.”
“Where did they take her?” Hamish asked.
“Caledonian.”
“Good,” Hamish said. “I’ll check her out when I get back.”
Tasha glanced approvingly at the box in Zol’s arms and led them down the hall and into the closest classroom. Zol set the box on a tiny desk at the back of the room, the last in a row of identical desks with attached chairs. A pervasive sense of déjà vu consumed him. As the tallest kid among his peers, he always sat at the back of the class. Today, the smell of crayons, chalk, and sweaty sneakers had Paul McCartney singing a dozen bars of “Blackbird” inside his head.
Tasha, always quick to sense Zol’s episodes of synesthesia, gave him a moment while she rummaged through the box. “Before we go any further,” she said, “we better put this stuff on.”
Once they’d put on the white hooded Tyvek coveralls and donned shoe covers and vinyl gloves, Tasha led them along an ordinary-looking school hallway to a closed door.
She held up three N-95 masks.
Hamish first tightened the hood of his coverall around his head and tied the drawstring in a neat bow. Then he placed a mask over his nose and mouth and felt around the edges several times to be sure that the fit was absolutely snug. Zol and Tasha did the same with their gear, but with less gusto. Both of them found the claustrophobic feel of an N-95 almost intolerable.
Tasha opened the door and stepped inside. A hoarse voice said, “Come in. Don’t be shy.”
Zol’s heart skipped a beat.
Hamish’s eyes looked like dinner plates. He turned to Zol and gestured toward Tasha. “You said she was the only one here.”
“Be careful. He bites,” said another voice.
Zol looked at Tasha. Her eyes crinkled into a smile.
And then Zol saw the cage. It was sitting on a table by the window on the far side of the classroom.
Hamish saw it too. “They’re alive?”
“Very much so,” Tasha told him.
“What are they?” Hamish said. “Some kind of parrot?”
“Yellow-naped Amazons,” she said. “Pancho and Pedro.”
“Don’t they contravene some sort of school-board regulation?” Hamish said.
“Apparently not,” Zol said, stepping closer to the cage, his gloved hands clasped behind his back.
Inside a barred enclosure almost a metre cubed, two green parrots with prominent beaks were perched on a tree branch. They looked like identical twins bobbing their heads in unison. Each was about the size of a crow. But much prettier. Most of their feathers were the iridescent green of a Granny Smith apple. The tops and backs of their heads shimmered a bright lemon yellow. Their eyes — shiny black pupils surrounded by slim circles of orange — gave the birds a studious air. They resembled a pair of old-world professors, garbed in green robes with yellow hoods, passing judgement on the world around them.
Tasha approached the teacher’s desk at the front of the classroom and pressed a button beside a mug bristling with pencils. The ring of an old-fashioned telephone echoed through the room.
“Mother, it’s for you,” came a voice from the cage.
“Hurry up,” said the other bird.
“Impressive, eh?” Tasha said.
“They are cute,” Zol admitted. “But how can they be responsible for our polio cases?”
“Mrs. Simon’s husband is a vet,” Tasha said. “Pancho and Pedro are rescue parrots. Their elderly owner died and a neighbour brought them to Dr. Simon’s veterinary office.”
“Their owner died of polio?” Zol asked.
“Not that we know of,” Tasha said. “Her obituary in the Spectator says she died suddenly and has been cremated. Mrs. Simon showed it to me in her office.”
Hamish drew closer to the cage and peered into it, a pensive look in his eyes. “How long have they been here?”
“About a month,” Tasha said.
“Hmm,” Hamish said. “Our first polio case was a pupil from this school, right?”
Tasha had the line-by-line details of the eight polio cases firmly in her head. “That’s correct.”
“And presented with weakness of both legs two weeks ago?” Hamish asked.
Tasha’s eyes went skyward as she recalled the date. “Sixteen days ago,” she said. “And a second case from this school a day later, and another two days after that.”
“The first two are pupils?” Zol said. “And the third was a teachers’ assistant?”
“An unpaid volunteer,” Tasha said, “who had hoped to re-certify as a fully qualified teacher.”
“Re-certify?” Zol asked. “Is there something dodgy in her record we should know about?”
She shook her head. “Ms. Asante was from West Africa. To be certified as a teacher here, she had to upgrade the credentials she’d earned in Ghana. Mrs. Simon said that would have been a long road for her.”
Hamish scratched his nose through the mask. “The timing is intriguing.”
“That’s what bothered Mrs. Simon. She found out from her husband only this morning that the lady who owned the parrots died unexpectedly.”
Zol’s mask was getting itchier by the minute. And it was damn hard to talk through it, let alone breathe. “But surely, parrots don’t carry poliovirus? It’s strictly a human pathogen.”
“That’s right,” Hamish said. “But the cause of our epidemic isn’t poliovirus.”
“What?” Zol and Tasha said simultaneously.
For the past two and a half weeks, the identity of the virus responsible for their cluster of polio cases had been a puzzle. The presenting signs and symptoms of the illness resembled those reported during the last North American epidemic back in the 1950s. But the virus causing the current outbreak had been impossible to identify. Like traditional poliovirus, the current virus was particularly small. Detectable only by examination of victims’ stools with an electron microscope. The local virologists had not seen anything like it and had been unable to assign it an identity. Samples of all manner of body fluids from the affected patients had been sent to Canada’s version of Atlanta’s CDC, located in Winnipeg. But there hadn’t been so much as a peep out of the country’s best microbiologic boffins in two long weeks.
“Don’t look at me like that, Zol” Hamish said. “I haven’t been holding anything back. The email from Winnipeg arrived less than five minutes before you called me to come down here. I thought it best to tell you in person.”
Zol felt the calming pressure of Tasha’s hand on his arm. “So . . . what did Winnipeg have to say?”
“They’re calling it a parvovirus.”
“Parvo?” said Tasha. “That’s what puppies get.”
“And humans,” Hamish said. “It manifests most commonly as Fifth Disease in little kids.”
“Fever and . . . and red cheeks that look like they’ve been slapped,” Zol said, proud to have dug those details out of his memory.
Hamish raised his right forefinger as if making a point with a student. “And a red rash that looks like lace.”
“But Fifth Disease is a far cry from our polio cases,” Zol said. “It’s one of the milder infections every kid gets. I remember Max having it when he was a toddler.”
“A far cry from our polio,” croaked one of the parrots. It bobbed its head up and down
as if quite pleased with itself.
Hamish frowned at the bird. “There are dozens of sub-families and genera of parvoviruses. Winnipeg is calling ours Parvo-W until they find a match with one that’s been previously characterized.”
Tasha looked mildly puzzled. “If the offending agent is parvovirus, not poliovirus, do we still have a polio epidemic on our hands? Or do we need a new name for the illness?”
“Polio is short for poliomyelitis,” Hamish explained in his inimitable tone, “which simply means inflammation of the spinal cord’s grey matter. The identity of the offending virus doesn’t change the name of the illness.”
Tasha squeezed Zol’s arm again and threw him a conspiratorial look with her eyes. “Okay then. We’ll continue to call it polio in our press reports.”
Zol gestured towards the cage. “Can parvoviruses infect birds?”
“Certainly,” Hamish said. “And cats and pigs.” His eyes began to sparkle with the exotic factoid he was about to share. “And funnily enough . . . even crickets and starfish.”
Below her mask, Tasha’s throat was aglow in poppy-red blotches. “Oh my God. You’d better see what’s down the hall.”
Chapter 6
Zol followed Tasha and Hamish out of the classroom and into the hallway. He ripped off his mask and threw back the hood as soon as the door shut behind him. Hamish, too, loosened his suit then wiped his sweaty face with a polka-dot handkerchief. Tasha, her mask dangling around her neck, looked as fresh as ever.
“Give us five, okay, Tasha,” Zol said, eyeing the water fountain down the hall. “I need a drink.”
“Forget the fountain,” Hamish told him. “We’re not eating or drinking a thing in this building.”
“But —”
Hamish narrowed his eyes. “Come on, Zol, everything inside this school is a potential biohazard. You know that perfectly well. The only thing we’re going to consume in here is air.” He mopped his face again and took a deep breath. “And that’s only because we have no other choice.”
Zol caught Tasha’s knowing smile. Hamish’s approach to life and work was often pedantic. But he was so often right about so many things that they’d agreed long ago they had to forgive — and celebrate — their friend’s eccentricities.
They suited up again without the benefit of a drink and let Tasha guide them into a classroom two doors down from the one they’d been in.
“Something’s bubbling in here,” Hamish said, “and it’s not a kettle.”
Tasha pointed to a large glass tank at the back of the room. It was three-quarters full of water and seemed to be glowing from the inside. A steady stream of bubbles was breaking the surface.
“I had one of these as a kid,” Hamish said, his eyes brightening for the second time. He turned to Tasha. “Fresh or salt?”
She hesitated for a moment. “Um . . . I’m not sure.”
“Must be salt,” Hamish said, his mask-covered nose almost touching the tank. “As in seawater.” He pointed to what looked like a massive white flower waving its petals at the bottom of the aquarium. “That’s an anemone holding court with its colony of clownfish.”
“Nemo?” Tasha said.
Hamish waved his hands dismissively. “If you must. Nemo and his pals survive only in seawater.”
“When was this aquarium installed, Tasha?” Zol asked.
“Several years ago. Mrs. Simon couldn’t remember exactly when.”
“Hmm,” Hamish said. “It looks well established. Lots of interdependent species.” He pulled his mask off his face and threw back his hood. “We don’t need these in here.”
Tasha put her gloved hand on Hamish’s forearm. “The starfish are new.”
“How new?” Hamish said, pulling up his mask and hood.
“About a month. Mrs. Simon told me a pet store donated two of them. She said the kids love their bright colour. They’re called orange bat stars.”
Zol didn’t like the look of the fine spray coming off the breaking bubbles. He adjusted his mask and stepped back. “Hamish, a few minutes ago you mentioned parvovirus and starfish in the same breath. Should we be worried?”
Hamish wasn’t taking his eyes off the tank. “Maybe.” Something other than Nemo was engrossing him. “About a year ago I read a fascinating story in National Geographic. A newly recognized parvovirus has been killing millions of starfish.”
“Where?” Zol asked.
“Along the West Coast, from Mexico up into B.C.”
Zol looked at Tasha. “We have to get Winnipeg to test them ASAP.” A dark thought struck him. “And find out what pet store they came from.” He pictured parvovirus-infected starfish lurking in families’ aquariums throughout the city. Was that how the epidemic had extended its reach from the city centre to the outer suburbs? Was ground zero not this school but the pet store?
“Winnipeg will be awfully surprised,” Hamish said. “I don’t imagine they often get starfish.”
“We’ll have to talk to them first,” Zol said, wondering silently what the protocol might be for shipping starfish, potentially infected with a deadly virus, halfway across the country.
“And if these starfish do test positive for our Parvovirus-W?” Tasha said.
“That’s easy,” Hamish said, backing away from the tank. “We’ll find ourselves in the middle of the biggest public health circus we’ve faced since that mad cow debacle. Remember that guy? He was one crazed butcher.”
Zol could never forget that Dumpster fire. And this one had the makings of something even worse.
Chapter 7
Hosam strode the eight short blocks from his regular bus stop at King and James to the tiny, two-bedroom townhouse that was now their home. The irony was, it was an end unit with a garage for cars they might never afford. A double-car affair, the garage was attached on the left.
Before putting the key into the front-door lock, Hosam took a good look around. None of Leila’s clients was hanging around the garage’s side entrance. No one was sitting in the battered Honda Civic across the street. The street was empty except for a middle-aged woman hefting a bag from the Beer Store farther up the street at the traffic light on Barton. He had been watching since alighting from the bus but had seen no sign of anyone following him. It seemed he was in the clear. For now. But the Caliph would know where he lived. Ibrahim would have told him. He would have had no choice.
He turned the key, slipped inside, and breathed in the comforting aroma of cumin, coriander, and sesame. He refused to let today’s events and Ibrahim’s tacit revelations get him down. After everything they had been through, Leila and Omar needed him to be strong. And positive. Even if he had to fake it.
He was getting used to taking the Route 34 Upper Paradise bus to and from the barbershop on Mohawk Road West. He was even getting used to working there and taking direction from an Iraqi Christian with only four years of schooling. In Aleppo, as the chief surgeon at a well-respected hospital, he’d had a chauffeur and an E-Class Mercedes. Once the civil war hit, many roads became impassable and the chauffeur fled to the relative safety of the countryside. He had expected to wake up one day and find his hospital replaced by a pile of rubble, his colleagues dead. The government and the rebel groups targeted hospitals with the same cynical dictum: When you murdered a surgeon, you killed the hundred wounded soldiers he could have patched together.
Hosam set his lunchbox on the kitchen table, grabbed a can of Moosehead lager from the refrigerator, and climbed the stairs leading to the home’s two small bedrooms. He and Leila had the larger one, of course. And the three of them shared the single bathroom. But more important than anything else, the bedrooms were safe. A bomb was not going to drop through the roof. A thug was not going to throw a Molotov cocktail through the window. And despite Hosam’s ongoing nightmares to the contrary, the police were not going to roust him at gunpoint in the middle of the night. I
t had taken a long time to get used to the quiet here in Beasley. No mortar fire, no rocket-propelled grenades, no low-flying fighter jets. Just the occasional young guy roaring down the street on his Harley, overdosed on the androgens he bought from the guy running an informal boxing gym in his garage in the next block.
“Hello, son,” he said, as he opened Omar’s bedroom door. “I came home early. Going to do a little studying.”
The lanky fifteen-year-old lifted a dark eyebrow, gave a quick wave, and returned his attention to his laptop. His face gave no acknowledgement that it was unusual for his father to be home this early from work. But it was a relief to see the hints of sparkle returning to Omar’s eyes after so many months of despair.
When he was not at school, Omar was in his room with the door closed. He wanted a lock for it, but Hosam told him definitely not. The boy was almost always at his desk, headphones covering his ears, a microphone at his lips, and his laptop opened in front of him.
The gear was not for his studies but for Fortnite, the interactive online game he played to the point of obsession. The game’s saving grace was the wonder it was doing for Omar’s self-confidence and his English. Or, at least the kind of English spoken by Canadian teenagers amongst themselves. At first, Hosam and Leila had worried their son was spending far too much time gaming. But they had to admit, he had become less sullen lately. Perhaps the online comradeship fostered by Fortnite was coaxing him out of his shell. He had encased himself in a carapace the moment the family traded their villa in Aleppo for a refugee shack in southern Turkey. Lately, he had befriended a couple of boys his age online, fellow Fortnite players. One boy’s mother was said to be a chaplain, the other boy’s father a government official. If the boys were telling the truth about their parents, Hosam was prepared to keep an open mind about Fortnite. As long as Omar made a solid effort on his schoolwork. He glanced at the below-knee prosthesis lying on Omar’s bed and felt a spark of the anger that lurked, day and night, below the surface of his psyche. His cheeks burned. No version of Call of Duty, or anything like it, would ever be allowed in this house. Wargame videos were far too real, too close to what had destroyed Omar’s lower leg, their cherished Farah, and their happy lives in Aleppo.
