The Virus

by Steven Spellman

  Either way, the doctor didn’t seem too disconcerted as he said coolly (or at least it sounded cold to Delilah), “Listen, Miss Hanson, I’m going to do my best to explain to you what’s going on, but I need you to promise that you’ll calm down. If I can’t get you to make that promise, then frankly, Miss Hanson, I can’t help you.”

  Delilah glared at the doctor. It wasn’t that she was still under the delusion that she could get her way with loud, harsh words or, as in this case, long, harsh stares, as much as it was simply force of habit. As many overly privileged people just like Delilah already knew, getting what they wanted all the time with just the flick of a credit card or the punch of a button (usually on the phone, to call good ‘ole daddy, so he can flick a credit card) can grow on a person. Just like a well-baited hook in the mouth of a fish, once a person gets a good taste, it’s hard to let go. Once the fruitless staring match had run its course, Delilah reluctantly relented and agreed to ‘play nice.’

  “Great. That’s absolutely fabulous, Ms. Hanson. But one other thing before we get started: I’d prefer that you refer to me as Dr. Crangler. I’m a professional and I’d appreciate being addressed as such.” Delilah gritted her teeth so hard that it was a miracle her gums didn’t touch, but eventually she nodded. It would seem that she had fallen greatly from the high and mighty command giver she had been just a few days ago. Without a doubt, she much preferred her former state, but she was beginning to realize that if she was ever going to get a shot in hell at returning to the way things were, she’d have to cooperate, because her money and looks obviously didn’t give her the upper hand in this strange place.

  “Now, Ms. Hanson,” Dr. Crangler continued “I need to get some machinery set up in here. I need to run some very important tests on you and I need to get it done as quickly as possible. I apologize for my comrades who were here just now. But I promise you that you will not be seeing them again. Only I will attend to you from this point forward.”

  “I want to know what’s going on first.” Delilah said, in a noticeably stressed tone, and through strained lips. She had agreed to cooperate. She hadn’t agreed to like it. The doctor sighed audibly.

  “All right, Miss Hanson,” said he “I think that’s fair. You’ve been snatched from your home, sedated,” thankfully he had enough tact to not add, repeatedly, “and brought to a place that I’m sure is unfamiliar and scary to you. But I must warn you, Miss Hanson, what has happened and the unwitting part you now play in all of it is not easy to explain…or believe.” As the doctor noted, Delilah had been through a hell of a lot already. This past year had awarded her with experiences that were literally out of this world and Dr. Crangler may’ve been surprised at exactly what she would believe at this point.

  Instead of going through all that, Delilah just nodded her head faintly and said, “Okay.”

  “Good, that’s good,” answered the doctor. He pulled a chair out of the hallway and took a seat near the head of Delilah’s bed where he could talk to her face to face. He explained to her that an alien life form had saturated Earth’s atmosphere with a brand new and unique kind of deadly virus that was specifically designed to attack only the female population. The effects of this virus were that, besides the ubiquitous yellow eyes and unnaturally flaking skin, neither mother nor child of any infected person would survive childbirth. From what they had seen already, the virus was permanent and was the first disorder ever to affect every member of the female population on Earth, regardless of age, ethnicity, nationality, way of life, or any other notable difference.

  The virus was designed to spread by something every woman needed to live—oxygen—which turned out to be its greatest and most ingenious strength and simultaneously, its most exploitable and only known weakness. Dr. Crangler explained that this was because of oxygen’s highly-adaptive and corrosive nature. The virus attached itself to oxygen molecules and saturated the world’s entire supply of fresh air within hours, but because oxygen has the ability to change so rapidly, the virus survived only long enough to infect anyone breathing the planet’s air, but not long enough to sustain itself for any extended length of time otherwise. Also, due to the volatile and changing nature of oxygen and the complex way the human body uses it, the virus ceased to be contagious once it had found a female host.

  “This is where you come in, Delilah.” Dr. Crangler said. “You were the only female occupant on your space flight and since there were no women aboard the International Space Station, you were the only female outside of Earth’s atmosphere when the meteor appeared.” Dr. Crangler licked his lips and leaned in. “You were the only female in the entire world who had not contracted the virus.” The doctor’s eyes narrowed, “As far as perpetuation of mankind is concerned, you are now most important person on the face of the planet.” Delilah lay slowly in her bed and was silent and still, her features as blank as if she was in another world. Her mind couldn’t encompass the awesome information that she was just given. Had it not been for all she had experienced, including her current surroundings, as well as the thick leather straps that held her down and constantly reminded her that this was reality and not a horrid nightmare, it was likely she wouldn’t have believed any of the nonsense the doctor just fed her.

  Unfortunately, denial or naiveté were no longer viable options. She believed that all Dr. Crangler was saying, but understanding it…well, that was a completely different animal altogether.

  After a long silence, the doctor spoke up. “I understand this a lot to handle…” he mused to himself for a moment “yeah, a hell of a lot. But as I told you before, the only thing I can offer you is the truth, and right now, the truth is not easy. Not easy at all.” A few more silent moments passed, when the sound of a light tapping from the mirror filled the room. “I really need to get these tests underway. I have a couple of other important gentlemen that I need to attend to soon.” He stood and looked down at Delilah. Her mind was still wandering off in the recesses of space. “Do you have any questions, Miss Hanson?” he asked.

  Surprisingly, she did have a question. Her eyes cleared with an almost alarming quickness, as she turned her face to the doctor’s. “What happens to the women…you know, if they try to have kids?” The question was so sincere and innocent, and the look on Delilah’s confused face so childlike, that, for the first time, the doctor felt a pang of sympathy for the young women. He hadn’t exactly hated her (perhaps he would have if he knew her better) but he certainly wasn’t fond of her. He knew her story, not only from the publicity that had always been lavished upon her, but from classified surveillance documents that were compiled upon her. He knew that disappointment and lack were not words that she was familiar with, that, like most people who didn’t have to earn their own money, she assumed the world revolved around her (how ironic that now it was closer to the truth than it had ever been, and it was nothing like she had expected), and deep down, he resented her for it.

  From the moment she had been brought to the secret underground facility, he vowed that if nothing else, he would show her that she was not the boss here. Now, she could’ve been his own daughter for how plaintively she was reaching out to him for answers. “I don’t think now is the time, Miss Hanson,” he said with sincere angst. Suddenly, he didn’t want to further crush her world by explaining to her the gruesome effects this virus had upon the beauty of childbirth. “Maybe, a little later, when you’ve had time for all this to sink in.”

  “Now.” She answered, simply. This was not one of her usual if you don’t do what I say, I will have you fired! demand. Rather, it was the firm resolution of a woman who felt like she had earned the right to some answers. The doctor looked at her intently. He looked back down at his chair and slowly lowered himself into it again. As delicately as he could, he tried to paint an understandable picture of something that was anything but. In a low voice loaded with gravity, he explained what was already happening to women around the world. Thanks to the ingenuity of properly-functioning hormones, a pregna
nt woman’s body normally alerted her when it was time for the carried child to be introduced to the world. Then, once that precious newborn had been expelled into the harsh world of overly bright lights and overly loud sounds, its own hormones (and maybe a firm tap from a doctor or other) would alert it to begin breathing.

  That was all before The Virus. Now, the bodies of yellowed eyed, scaly skinned, pregnant women did not alert them to the proper time of childbirth. In fact, it was as if their swollen, pregnant bodies didn’t know that there was a time to give birth. The first women to experience the phenomenon after The Virus suffered the worst, since no one yet knew what to expect from this strange and sudden ailment. Perhaps, there was a teenage girl who didn’t want her parents to find out that she was pregnant, or perhaps, she didn’t know herself. The child inside her would grow and move and function normally. The problem was that this continued on indefinitely. Said teenager, anxious to keep her condition a secret, and in addition, unfamiliar with the natural progression of pregnancy, didn’t register alarm as she should have, when ten months, eleven months, perhaps an entire year passed and the overgrown child remained yet in the young womb.

  The alarm would register, though, when the unbearable pain came. It was not the pain of childbirth. This agony was the pain of her delicate insides being pushed and stretched heinously beyond their limits. There were those who were so desperate to hide the shame of being labeled “loose” that they literally burst from a continually growing baby that their bodies would not birth as nature had dictated. Of course, the mother and child both met a severely slow demise. Pregnancy was always a difficult, and many times, uncomfortable experience for many women, but even the harshest pregnancy paled in comparison to a frightened and pain plagued teenage girl being tortured to death by 44 weeks and twelve to fifteen, or possibly more, pounds of compressed baby crushing her lungs and internal organs like an angry, expanding water balloon.

  Just like a water balloon that is continually being filled beyond its ability, so the unfortunate mother would eventually (but only after an awesomely agonizing and drawn out decline) fall over dead, her internal cavities having torn to bursting. Even those who were not so unfortunate, were no better off. Grown women, married women even, would draw closer to their appointed time of delivery and anxiously await the tell-tale signs of impending labor only to find that days, weeks sometimes, passed, and nature had not taken its course. Many of these women were eventually taken to the hospital only to have their questions of what was wrong answered with the blank faces of trusted medical professionals who were genuinely as confused as they. All the lab tests showed that everything was right on paper and computer screens, so why had women suddenly stopped going into labor…at all?

  Labor could not even be induced due to The Virus, but at least there were still C-Sections to thank God for, right? Wrong. This is where, if anyone doubted that something of biblical proportions had taken place in modern day society, they were converted. When a seemingly healthy woman was cut open to release the child, as soon as her insides were exposed to open air, she began to convulse violently and scream hysterically in pain from her exposed regions. Before the doctor’s eyes, whatever internal flesh of hers that was exposed to the open air, if only for a few brief moments, would instantly undergo a graphic deterioration whereby living flesh would dry to something like a grey paste then into a thick, grey powder and finally, into fine dust. It was something like morticians were used to seeing in fully decayed corpses, only much more quickly.

  If that wasn’t enough, as soon as the freed child would take its first independent breath, it would gag violently. Nothing any doctor tried to do seemed to make a difference as newborns—every single one of them—choked to death off of fresh air. Every procedure or variation thereof in the book, as well as more than a few highly-controversial ones that were not in the book, were performed, but they all ended with the identically ghastly and fatal result. Somehow The Virus had further changed how female bodies reacted to the oxygen in the air. Their virus-saturated lungs and blood streams processed incoming air and changed it so it could be continually propagated within them, but if any unfiltered oxygen was introduced into the body (i.e., through an open wound) the disastrous effects already described would follow. Harsh, considering that a skinned knee or a deep cut could mean an agonizing demise. No one understood why men weren’t affected.

  The same was true for the baby. It, too, was infected with The Virus and so, was fine as long as it was being supplied with oxygen filtered through its mother’s now diseased lungs, but as soon as it took a single breath of its own…There were many questions that had yet to be answered, like, if Doom’s Day had finally come at last, and why did the Grim Reaper only have a thing for women, and especially, pregnant women? No one (at least not the in the general public) had the answers. If there was one thing that there was no lack of, it was sheer, head balding, nerve wracking, panic.

  After Dr. Crangler finished this narrative, he gazed at Delilah, trying to gauge her response to all she had just heard, but she just stared at the ceiling, neither here nor there, vacancy obvious in her eyes. “Miss...” the doctor began.

  “Thank you.” Delilah answered before he could finish. Her voice was as distant as her gaze, as if she was yet far away on her space flight and was talking from the International Space Station orbiting the planet. Dr. Crangler couldn’t tell if she knew what she was saying, but it didn’t matter. The information he had just given her would’ve been overload for anyone’s circuitry. All things considered, he figured she was handling things as well as could be expected. She continued to stare blankly at the ceiling directly above her and the doctor decided to take the opportunity to run those tests he had mentioned. While he did, Delilah showed no further notice of him or his lightly-whirring machines, or the cold attaching leads and needles that came from them, but just continued to stare silently at the ceiling, her gaze as uniformly empty as the white walls surrounding her.

  Chapter 10

  After about five hours of deep, unbroken sleep Geoffrey sat up, yawned, and stretched his limbs until the bones in his jaw, shoulders, and fingers cracked and popped like a symphony of ill-used elderly joints. Geoffrey felt anything but old. In fact, this little rest of his had infused him with new life. This entire roller coaster ride of unexpected events had drained his physical and mental aptitude to the point of bare boned exhaustion. He had slept harder than he could ever remember sleeping before. Now, however, his returned energy infused him like a tall frosty glass of cold water to a man who had been stranded in the desert for days. The irony of all this was that he had, in fact, recently come from a desert—a desert of ice. But for all his replenishment, the all-encompassing white of the sheets, blanket, and even the mattress on which he was now sitting—as well as everything else in the room—reminded him of the unfathomable reality at hand that he briefly escaped in slumber. That alone seemed to tire him again, though in a very different way.

  Welcomed with this strange dichotomy, he rubbed his temples, yawned again (this time with no popping), and stood. He was still fully clothed, which meant that he went to sleep like that (something he never did) and as he thought about it, he didn’t remember going to sleep in the first place. A thought crossed his mind and he took a look at the creases of his arms. Just as he vaguely expected, there were small, nearly unnoticeable imprints in his flesh that signified needles had recently broken through his skin. He had obviously been drugged. He lifted his shirt so he could see his chest, and when he did, he noticed the second thing he already expected; small round areas of fine, sticky grains left behind by the adhesion portion of chest leads.

  Things were so crazy already that he wasn’t as alarmed by the fact that he was drugged and tested as he would’ve been on any other occasion. He was still not comfortable knowing that he was completely at the mercy of people who were, for all intents and purposes, complete strangers. The next thought that entered his head was, where was Mr. Reynolds, and if anythi
ng had changed with him since he’d seen him last. He turned his head this way, then that, searching for the large, recessed wall mirror. He remembered how he, Lieutenant Dan, and the doctor had observed the astronomer through the one way glass, but now there was no mirror in this room. There were, however, two large windows that looked out onto a hallway, but Geoffrey could easily see through those so he was sure they were not for surveillance. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway if anyone had been keeping tabs on him while he slept. Judgment Day had apparently come for mankind and somehow the loss of privacy didn’t matter much anymore.

  He stretched his limbs a third time, not from a need to work out the sleep, as much as a lame attempt to postpone dealing with the inevitable. As he already knew, the inevitable, by its very definition must be dealt with, so he stood and headed toward the windows, looking out onto an equally white hallway. He had never seen everything so universally white in his life. There must be a special reason for it, he thought. As much as he could, considering his limited vantage point, he looked this way and that, but there seemed to be no one in sight.

  “Hey…someone?” he yelled. Somehow, he was certain that, though he saw no obvious surveillance equipment, he had not just been placed in this room and forgotten about. “Hey…someone?” he yelled again. No answer.

  He turned and took a more thorough look around the room, searching the walls and ceiling until he found what he was looking for. At the very top of the room’s far western corner, where the ceiling and the wall meet was a small, off-white spot on the wall, a large dot about the size of a camera lens, in an otherwise snow colored room. The only way Geoffrey could even tell it from its surroundings was that it was raised away from the corner. He walked casually to it, raising his hands and waving. Before he even walked all the way to the corner, the doctor from earlier opened the door and stepped in.