by Frank Perry
was sick almost as soon as the engine started. He groaned, throwing his head back, feeling the bile rising, seeking relief that could only come after emptying his stomach … damn, this thing doesn’t have any windows that open … stifling a purge, he yelled from the back, above the engine noise, “Pilot! I need a bar…” It came up without further warning. All John could do was lean forward and try to concentrate the mess in one area on the floor.
The pilot’s response was hardly discernable, “Oh, shit!” The plane bucked a little harder as he momentarily looked rearward. “Hey pal, you gonna clean up that mess?” It was a rhetorical question. Sick passengers never cleaned a thing. It was just another duty of the pilot. In this case, he was also the owner of the plane and sensitive to any abuse. If the guy had only asked earlier, he’d find plastic bags stuffed under the seat! Thank God there aren’t any other passengers to follow his lead.
John was mortified. He hadn’t puked in years and then hadn’t wrecked someone’s airplane doing it. For the hundred bucks it took to buy the ticket, the air service would regret this day. The pilot was speaking into his headset microphone in a familiar syntax when the engine slowed noticeably. John felt relieved, but was careful placing his feet in front of his miniscule seat. The pilot shouted toward the front window without turning his head rearward, “Make sure your seat belt is tight. It’s gonna be rough near the ground.”
Great, rougher than this! The plane tipped forward, and the edge of the island was sometimes in view through both sides as it jostled left and right. It buffeted badly in the stormy air, but John didn’t have any more to offer the vomit gods. He was good to go for landing, as good as he was going to be. As the pilot wrestled with the controls, it was hard to tell if the constant heaving of the cabin was caused by maneuvering or by the extreme turbulence. The flying weather wasn’t too bad if he’d been in a Boeing 777, but this plane was like a kite by comparison.
They were still over the ocean as the pilot banked left into a sliding turn to align with the runway on final approach. There wasn’t any air traffic controller to give clearance to land; there wasn’t a tower on the island. Landings were done by pilot’s visual inspection of the runway before entering the landing pattern. John couldn’t see the airstrip from the back of the plane and sat stiffly in his seat with his eyes closed. He could sense the pilot fighting to keep the plane aligned with the narrow grass strip, which was barely two thousand feet long. It was cut into the highest plateau on the island and could be approached from the northeast or southwest, depending on the wind direction; but the wind was swirling based on the sea spray that seemed to blow in all directions at once. John braced for a hard landing. He glanced out the window and could only see the jagged white-capped waves below as the wind fought the current, offering a frothy grave if the plane got much lower. They descended like a stone closer and closer to the ocean. Where’s the damn runway!
The plane rocked violently to the right then leveled as the pilot compensated for wind gusts. John hoped that the guy up front had enough sense to fly around if they were blown off line for the runway. Then the engine seemed to die completely and the plane floated above the ground. The ground! The runway was now below them. The plane seemed to hang suspended, then drifted to the right just as the landing gear sent shockwaves through the fuselage. They were finally down. The wind was strong, so the pilot increased power to control his landing rollout, heading toward the little shack at the end. The plane did a slight jog to the right as it cleared the runway for any other unlucky souls who might be landing, but never changed course completely as it slowed and finally stopped. After shutting the engine down and pausing momentarily, the pilot said, “We’re here sir. I hope you’re feeling better.”
John felt relief, just being alive. It took him a moment to move, guilty about the mess he was stepping around as he bent over to exit through the single forward door, held by the pilot. He had a hard time looking at the pilot, realizing that the only cleaning crew on the island was now holding the door for him and was likely going to return home through the storm. With practiced courtesy, the pilot said, “Please watch your step, sir.”
John looked at him, “Look, I’m sorry about the mess.”
“Not a problem, sir. The weather today was as bad as it ever gets when we fly. Any worse and we’d have been grounded. You did fine.”
John didn’t have anything to say. They walked together to the small luggage door on the side where John recovered his sports bag and computer. As he said goodbye, it occurred to him how desperate he really was to come out here, away from some unknown threat.
Honored
Dr. Jules Redinger sat on the dais just to the right of the podium as Dr. Miriam Stein recounted his vast achievements, vaguely hinting that a Nobel Prize wouldn’t be too much to expect in the future. Dr. Redinger was there to be honored. He looked around the audience and felt immense pride and something akin to humbleness facing some of the leading physicians and scientists of the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control. These people had undoubtedly read most or all of his publications and knew more about him than Dr. Stein needed to expound. But that was the process, the ritual, of being honored by this group. She continued, “Dr. Redinger and his fellows at the GHI have saved the world from possible extinction.” Raising a hand, she looked around the auditorium for any doubtful faces then continued, “It’s not too strong an assertion to say this, because it is true. Filoviridae have ravaged whole populations, and each outbreak has only been contained in the past by isolating the area’s citizenry and, essentially, allowing the plague to die out – literally killing off the population within the contained areas. In many cases, this has resulted in mortality rates approaching eighty percent. Who can forget the recent Ebola virus catastrophe in Liberia? As I look across this body, I know … you know … I know you know that the only reason the threat of these diseases hasn’t received greater attention in the developed world is because it can be contained in poor African villages and kept from spreading outward. Our collective governments have the ability to isolate, by force, whole regions on the continent.
“But what about the African villagers dying because it’s more practical than funding the research necessary to find a cure? It is curable. We cured polio! It’s simply a matter of priority. Now, we’ve all heard the feared rumors that certain radicals are attempting to weaponize a Hemorrhagic virus. This is a real scare! But, will our governments take this threat seriously; will they act in time? One man, with the assistance of his small cadre of colleagues at GHI, hasn’t waited, he’s acted. How often in our professions have we seen personal initiative to this degree? Dr. Redinger and his team has acted selflessly using their personal time and resources to attack the threat of the latest global hemorrhagic outbreak, often facing direct exposure in the villages ravaged in Western Africa. They alone have found a cure for the most virulent form of the genome yet to threaten humanity. I dare say: they stopped it in its tracks! This is nothing short of a global war won by one man and his team.”
The Intern
Kelly Egan wasn’t really thinking about anything except work ahead. Some of it was time-sensitive. Preparations for her shift inside the BSL-4A lab were complete, and she wouldn’t be able to eat or even pee now. It had taken over three months of indoctrination before she was certified to enter the containment unit, housing the most deadly viruses known to mankind. She had been referred to a colleague of Dr. Redinger by her advisor at Johns Hopkins in her final year of a post-doctoral fellowship in microbiology, specializing in Filovirus. She wanted to help find cures for the world’s deadliest diseases.
Kelly had spent most of her graduate years in college working in cleanrooms designed specifically to protect against the dangerous diseases, especially, Hemorrhagic Fevers. Yet when she came to GHI, she began indoctrination all over again. It had taken three months, working up from the BSL-1 level to the highest protective envi
ronment. She hadn’t minded and understood the drill, but had nevertheless been anxious to start meaningful work. The universities did important research, but it only went so far. The real benefits to society began at the private research laboratories and drug companies that actually commercialized cures available to everyone.
She was fully dressed in her positive-pressure suit, feeling like an astronaut going on a spacewalk, as a technician did a final safety inspection, walking around her, checking on the respirator connection and feeling all quadrants of the suit to be sure she was completely sealed inside. It would have been awkward with the male tech feeling her all over if there weren’t layers of stiff material and air shields surrounding her entire body. She would be working in the suit for almost four hours, in artificially controlled conditions as in space, except she would have gravity to aid her. The sealed containment door opened, and she stepped into the pressure lock leading to the next door; all personal thoughts were temporarily
