The others are definitely not going to believe this! Geoffrey thought as he waited anxiously for their return.
Chapter 5
Lenard Hanson was well used to spoiling the women in his life, partly because he loved them, but mostly because they would accept nothing less. His wife had demanded every convenience and luxury his money offered from day one and had taught his daughter to do likewise. Delilah was used to driving or being chauffeured in the most expensive cars, and, when she didn’t fly private jets, flying only first class. Now, she was right at home as she traveled across the nation under only the best accommodations to receive all the press and attention lavished upon her for being the first non-astronaut American to journey into space from American soil. Extra attention was given her, as her father had predicted, for being the youngest person to venture into outer space at all.
There were welcome parties waiting for her at every airport and hotel; security officials at every place in between. Thousands upon thousands of people were eager to catch a glimpse of what it looked like to be young and ultra-privileged, even if it was only from behind a camera or a restraining rope guarded by armed men that, for all appearances, knew only how to shout, “Stay back, you!” Nothing—absolutely nothing—was going to threaten Delilah’s time in the spotlight. She intended to keep the eyes of the nation glued upon her, and only her, for as long as humanly possible. Imagine her indignation and shock when talk of a possible global epidemic drew everyone’s attention away from her story. She was in New York City when the agent her father had hired called her room to inform her that her interview—the one for which she came to the Big Apple in the first place—the one that was scheduled for the next morning, had been cancelled. She threw a full-fledged tantrum the moment she received the news. This was what she usually did on the extremely rare occasions she didn’t get what she wanted, but this time, it was to no avail.
What could her agent do? Make the station conduct the interview? This was not her pliable father she was dealing with, the agent wanted desperately to remind her (though, of course, in the interest of his professional career, he didn’t). These were people who cared little about her wealth and even less about her tactless temperament. Besides, this rumor of a potential global contagion was possibly a breaking story not to be rivaled, not even by the Delilah’s boundless ego. Filled with her own childish fury, Delilah paced the nearly eleven hundred square feet of her penthouse loft hotel room, incensed that anything, even a potential outbreak of Biblical proportions, would deprive her of something she wanted. She picked up the phone to call her father—she’d give him an earful and he’d do something about all this—but before she could finish dialing the numbers, a chilling realization presented itself. If the people around her were somehow infected with a terrible disease, then she was vulnerable as well.
What if the hotel receptionists who had handed her the card key to her room were infected? What if the guys who had brought up her luggage were infected? What if the hotel’s entire staff was infected? Suddenly, the rumored crisis became very real to the spoiled socialite. In the process, she had forgotten that she was still holding the phone receiver. She let it fall from her hands, now. How could she know that it, too, wasn’t infected? Panic welled up in her breast, and it didn’t matter that she didn’t know what this possible infection was. It also didn’t matter that she as yet hadn’t heard any real news at all about its existence, or lack thereof. All that mattered was that she could potentially be affected by it. Her blind panic mounting by the second, she stripped off her clothes and rushed to the bathroom for a hot, purging shower. She scrubbed the shower head, the water dials, and most of the shower’s walls, with one of the new loofah sponges that had been stocked in the bathroom. To watch her scour things to a glistening shine as she was doing, one might not have guessed that this young woman had never scrubbed a single thing in her life.
Then, she snatched up another brand new loofah and commenced to showering. Once that was finished, she threw on some fresh designer clothes and undergarments, rushed out of the room and to one of the hotel’s elevators. Her intention was to head straight for the reception desk and demand that someone report to her room post haste to sanitize the entire place immediately. The phone in her room had a specially dedicated line to the reception’s desk for such things, but Delilah was loath to touch anything in her room just now. In fact, she had rigged up a series of gloves made from the new towels left in her room, which she fastened to her wrists by strips of bath rags that she had torn to pieces for the purpose. She left one bath cloth whole to hold to her mouth as protection from possible airborne infection. She truly looked a mess, all rigged up as she was, but right now, it didn’t matter to her how she looked, which was another first.
She hit the necessary buttons on the elevator with her unsightly towel-gloved hands and soon descended to the ground floor. She had nearly reached the desk, all but hysterical by this time, when a new and terrifying thought gripped her. If the hotel staff was indeed infected with this nameless pandemic, wasn’t she putting herself at further risk by being in such close proximity to them? And if that was the case, how could she possibly expect them to sanitize her room, as they would certainly bring the infection with them in the first place? Everything was so confusing and Delilah began to fancy that it was becoming more difficult to breath, what with all the pathogens entering her lungs. She struggled to hold her breath, even beneath the cloth, and of course, that didn’t work. She looked down at her exposed arms. Certainly, the horrid disease was attacking her unprotected flesh at that very moment!
She screamed aloud from the crushing frustration and everyone in the lobby, including the receptionist, stared on, bewildered. She screamed again at the people to stop staring at her and pounded on a nearby chair for obedience.
“Please calm down, Ma’am.” Advised the receptionist. “What seems to be the problem?” Delilah looked at the women in simultaneous fear and disgust. Part of her was looking for signs of decay that she was sure would be the result of the spreading disease. Much to her alarm she noticed that the whites of the woman’s eyes were, indeed, noticeably yellowed. She looked quickly over the rest of the receptionist and also noticed that the woman was feverishly scratching her arm, and what looked like dead skin was falling from the spot in the process. Immediately, Delilah wished that she had not seen the proof she was looking for, but it was right there before her eyes. It would’ve been better had it been all in her head (even though that alone had already scared her to hysteria), but it wasn’t. It was real…and she was next.
Not caring anymore about the shocked and staring faces, Delilah sprinted to the elevator and back to her room. She nearly broke down her room door rushing into it, and locked every lock once she was in. She wanted to yell for her father. She snatched up the phone with her awkward gloves and pressed the numbers to her father’s cell phone furiously. The bulky towels wrapped around her hands pressed three and four numbers at a time and made it impossible to make a call this way. She grunted in anger. She wanted her father desperately. Somehow, his money would make things better. It always did. But in order to make the call, she’d have to unwrap her hands and risk contamination. She threw herself onto the bed and squealed in the ear shattering tone of a frustrated newborn, unable to think of anything else to do. All of her fancy clothes, her thousand dollar hairdo, not even this $2,800 a night luxury hotel room—none of it was effecting its usual magic whereby everything in life, no matter how unpleasant for everyone else, was cool and comfortable for her, and thus, she was left lost and afraid.
Just like a small, abandoned child who screams in tantrum until she’s sore from exertion, only to find that her tirade has failed to produce what was sought after, Delilah found that her outburst meant absolutely nothing here. If she wanted to talk with her father, she’d have to pick up the phone like any other human being and dial the numbers…and, yes, risk infection in the process. Filling incredibly sorry for herself for how cruel realit
y was treating her, she did just that. Lenard answered on the first ring. One of the things his wife had taught him before her passing was to answer promptly whenever the women in his life beckoned.
“Oh, Daddy!” Delilah shouted, before again bursting into panic-stricken sobs. For the next forty-five minutes, she unloaded all of her angst upon his shoulders (or rather, into his ear). She had no idea that at the very moment she had called, her father was in a meeting with some of his colleagues discussing the very thing that had her upset. She hadn’t been watching the news. In fact, she hadn’t been doing anything except engaging in raging fits—but if she had been, she would’ve known that the possible infection was no longer a rumor, but a substantiated reality. Seemingly within the last few hours, women of every age, color, and nationality all across the planet, began displaying the jaundiced yellow eyes and itchy, flaking skin just like the receptionist Delilah had seen earlier. In reality, though, the phenomenon had been taking place and spreading slowly amongst the collective female population since the meteor incident. It was just recently that these unusual symptoms had spread to enough people to make things truly alarming.
Lenard’s business partners had called the meeting with him because, as they spent most of their time at luxury hotel locations owned by the company, they mistakenly thought that perhaps whatever was happening to their wives and daughters had something to do with their hotel buildings. It was during the meeting, an hour or so before Delilah’s frantic call, that Lenard’s secretary informed him that he may want to turn on the news in the conference room where he and the associates sat. All of them were blaring the same headlines.
“Well, at least we know it has nothing to do with our hotels,” one of Lenard’s professional partners joked dryly, as every news station available informed the public that something, nobody yet knew what, was affecting the female population of the world.
Lenard stepped out of the meeting and did his best to calm his shaken daughter. He assured her that he would be on one of his private jets to New York as soon as possible to personally pick her up. True to his word, he adjourned the meeting and was in New York City within hours. He picked up his daughter and they returned to their mansion straightaway. As soon as they made it home, Delilah demanded that all the help, the butler, the driver, the maids, etc., be instructed to return to the modest apartments on the mansion’s property where they lived when they weren’t working. As much as she wanted to be waited on, she didn’t want anyone in the house to spread the infection, especially since the female hired help were all showing the same yellow eyes and scaling skin.
After the place had been vacated, Delilah again rushed to her room and locked her door. Her room was typical of wealth; fully equipped with plenty of square feet, a huge adjoining bathroom, large, flat screen T.V., a king sized heart-shaped bed, even a fridge. She basically had everything she would need to survive comfortably for many days, so Lenard understood that he may not see her for some time. Meanwhile, he phoned a few of his friends in high places—many of them on the payroll—to get whatever information he could about what the hell was going on.
Among these friends were some prominent doctors and scientists, many of whom Lenard had made handsome contributions to their causes and establishments (like financing the trip of the son of a globally renowned plastic surgeon to intern under a notable, albeit pompous, scientist somewhere in the middle of Antarctica, in exchange for that surgeon performing some controversial plastic surgery for Lenard’s wife in the comfort of their home). Lenard learned that the affected women were showing signs of what looked like a completely new form of cancer, as well a specific kind of anemia. Lenard wasn’t familiar with many of the terms some of his contacts were using, so he asked them to explain what they were trying to say in laymen’s terms. The information that he was eventually left with was that basically, the woman had somehow recently undergone a complicated change in their systems that was causing their skin to reproduce unnaturally fast—hence the scratching and subsequent shedding, and that one of the only things medical professionals knew of that caused cells to display uncontrolled growth like this, was cancer.
As far as anyone knew right now, this ubiquitous cancer, if it was, in fact, cancer, was accompanied and possibly even caused by a marked change in the way the women’s blood was using and transporting oxygen. Every woman studied showed a marked decrease in red blood cells. This was what was probably responsible for the yellowed eyes. All this wasn’t exactly laymen’s terms, Lenard noted, but it all boiled down to the fact that, for some reason, women’s bodies were suddenly handling oxygen very differently than normal (or perhaps, struggling to handle a different kind of oxygen) and their bodies were not transitioning well. The other consensus was that it had all started with the first sighting of that mysterious ‘meteor’.
Chapter 6
Mr. Reynolds was now lying safely back in the emergency room of the research station. The room was about the size of an extra-large living room and was equipped with an operating table, a few pieces of medical equipment, and two stainless-steel chests of medical supplies. Large halogen lights loomed high in the ceiling alongside moderately-sized vents attached to powerful vacuums that were responsible for the emergency room’s ventilation. The powerful system sucked air from the room through these vents while other vents closer to the floor resupplied the room with fresh air from the outside. The glacial Antarctic air was highly inhospitable to germs and airborne pathogens, so this special ventilation system ensured that the air in the emergency room was as clean, probably more so, than any other hospital in the world. Unfortunately, it also meant that the air in the room was ridiculously cold.
Sure, there was a small separate system that heated the incoming air, but it was working in semi-permanent nighttime in a land where 0°F is considered unseasonably hot during the daytime. There was only so much it could do to warm the air. Naturally, everyone kept on thick layers of clothing as they stood around Scientist Reynolds now. They had checked him for any obvious wounds, but having found none, they left him thickly clothed as well. Geoffrey had already relayed what had taken place to everyone at least three or four times, but these were scientists he was talking to. By definition they didn’t believe in miracles, and if nothing else, this was a miracle of horror. What really happened was what every one of the other scientists wanted to know. Geoffrey was surrounded by professionals whose minds were steeped in logic via years and years of practice, and his claim of why Mr. Reynolds was lying here totally unconscious was anything but logical.
Though no one spoke the idea out loud, the possibility that Geoffrey had actually assaulted Mr. Reynolds crossed everyone’s mind. Other than a dark and raised patch on the scientist’s shoulder, there was no bruising or other sign of struggle on either Geoffrey or Mr. Reynolds. All of Mr. Reynolds’s vital signs were normal, and, except for him periodically moving his lips and rapidly moving his eyes that would suggest the scientist was not unconscious, but merely sleeping, he seemed fine. Someone suggested that perhaps he should be moved out of the station and back to the States to a better equipped facility in case something more was wrong with him that they couldn’t see. After all, the emergency room of the station was, as its name implied, only designed and stocked for absolute emergencies. It was far from an extensive operating theater and if any extra medical attention was needed, it would certainly not be given in this hocked-up first aid center.
The problem with having Mr. Reynolds escorted out, however, was that the only quick transportation off the station was by helicopter, and the station was as far from anything resembling a commercial airport as the emergency room was from a full hospital, so calling for a helicopter to be dispatched was, by no means, a trivial thing. Anyone calling for one of the special, and extremely expensive, helicopters that were on standby for such a trip, would have to answer with their career should the situation turn out to be anything other than an absolutely dire one. There was no way to tell if the current situation was dire. Mr
. Reynolds was breathing normally, and there was no sign of life-threatening trauma. For all appearances, he was simply unconscious. On the other hand, every person in the room would readily agree that the meteorite fragment was something new, something the likes of which none of them had ever experienced before, and if the account Geoffrey had given was true, then the proper authorities would have someone’s head if it wasn’t reported right away.
No one was sure what call to make, so they decided that Mr. Reynolds would remain under observation for the equivalent of a normal night, eight hours, upon the completion of which, if he was not awake to answer for his own well-being, then the difficult phone calls would have to be made. Shifts were allocated so the comatose scientist could be watched round the clock while the others slept and everyone returned to their bunk-filled sleeping quarters. For all their efforts, no one seemed to be able to sleep. These were minds of people whose profession required that they delve deeply into the unknown, and there was much that was unknown here. Something big, something huge, was amiss, this much was certain, and no one could resist summoning his deductive reasoning to try to unravel the one question that plagued them all: What was the rock and what happened?
When the eight hours were up and Mr. Reynolds was still not among the lucid, the scientists were exhausted and not completely coherent, themselves. It was difficult enough to sustain a healthy circadian rhythm with no daylight, but to also be forced awake by overreaching imaginations…well, the stumbling feet and drooping faces of Mr. Reynolds’s peers would strongly suggest that such a mixture was in direct opposition to alertness.
The Virus Page 3
