by Alan Gold
Doug left the university in Brisbane to take over running the place and he hadn’t regretted it for a single moment. He was a lay preacher at the local Baptist church, and when he eventually retired and handed over to one of his children, he’d finish his study for the ministry and as a venerable gentleman, hopefully would spend whatever time God allowed him to minister to a flock somewhere. Right now, the drought that was devastating farms and stations throughout the Eastern seaboard of Australia was his greatest concern. The land was parched; billabongs and other water holes had dried up long ago; crops had failed on nearby farms. But Doug and his family weren’t too badly affected because twenty years ago, he’d run down the cattle interests to concentrate on breeding fine racers for Middle Eastern potentates, so now his income came mainly from horses, and he had the money and reserves to order in food, grain, and water to ride out the horrors of what God and nature, or more likely industrialized mankind and global warming, had caused the arid land.
He was content to run his stable of horses, make good money in most years from the horse sales, graze other people’s horses, and when there was plentiful rain, grow crops to keep him in ready cash. Other than during the past four years of unremitting drought, it was a good life—hard work but honest and God-fearing work for those who were willing. Had his poor wife Susan not died two years earlier from cancer, life would have been completely perfect. Why on earth the Almighty should have taken such a good woman to His breast at the age of fifty-seven, Doug had no idea, but while his children wailed and said how cruel life was, he was content in the knowledge that he couldn’t understand God’s mind, and so he assured himself that, while the loss of his beloved Susan was truly raw and horrible, there was a higher purpose that he’d find out when he was removed from this earth to God’s bosom.
Lying on his back on the parched earth that once was the bank of a fast-flowing stream of pure rainwater from the distant mountains, Doug looked up at the sky. It was a never-ending powder blue painted with an ethereal luminescence of a transparent cloud, and he could still see the distant moon, even though it was midday. He was at peace.
But his peace was disturbed by a distant scream. Frowning and sitting up, he turned toward what he thought was the direction and saw his eldest son riding like one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse toward him.
As Ben drew closer, Doug could just make out some of his words. It sounded like trouble. A minute later, Ben reigned in his horse and explained why he’d come to take his father back to the homestead. It was trouble.
***
Veterinarian Peter Dobbs tucked his stethoscope back into the pocket of his white laboratory coat and stroked the horse’s neck. The sick animal, breathing in shallow gasps, barely responded. Normally, horses needed to be calmed before he approached them. They were always spooked when they saw him wearing a face mask and rubber gloves in case the animal was infected with the bat-born Hendra virus. But this beautiful animal barely noticed Peter’s approach as it continued to shiver and shake, its massive chest making liquid noises as it struggled to breathe.
Doctor Dobbs stood and walked over to where Doug, Ben, and other members of the Landsdale Horse Stud were waiting in anticipation of the bad news. They’d all been around horses long enough to know that whatever was ailing the stallion was bad—very bad.
“I’m afraid that it’s very bad news, but I won’t know for certain until I get the samples back from the laboratory. I’ve got to assume that it’s a serious case of equine flu or Hendra virus, so I’m afraid I’m going to have to quarantine the stud. No movement in or out until I’ve reported back to the Ministry and I know what I’m dealing with. Equine influenza is seriously contagious, and your other horses could be affected. But if it’s Hendra, then no human being must go near this beast without full protection. And that includes other smaller animals, like your dogs and cats. It’s recently been shown that Hendra can be passed on to other species as well as horses and humans. Just be very cautious, for God’s sake.”
“Is he going to die?” asked Doug. “He’s worth over two million.”
“It’s not looking good, I’m afraid. I’ve given him a massive dose of antibiotics, but if it’s the virus, which it very well could be, then antibiotics are going to be of little use. I don’t have any antiviral medicines with me, so I’ll bring them round this afternoon. But I’m really serious, Doug, no movement of any of your staff in or out, no movement of any animals. Complete isolation. Everybody who’s touched this horse must wash his or her hands with disinfectant. Same with shoes. We have to contain this thing, or it could spread and not only wipe out all the horses in your stud but close down the entire state.”
Dobbs left the farm and drove at top speed back to his office in Toowoomba, where his responsibility was to report first to the local government veterinary official, then to the Ministry in Brisbane, and then return to the stud with antiviral medication. But he knew with certainty that it was too late to save the beautiful creature. Whatever it was that had affected the horse, it was vicious, potent, and dangerous. And if it was the Hendra virus, then it was more rapid and vicious than anything he’d yet experienced. The animal had only shown the first signs of sickness that morning. But just in case, he’d taken sensible personal precautions because other vets had died from underestimating the virus that could jump species from horse to humans. He’d book himself in for tests in a day or two, just to make sure.
Peter spent an hour in his office ensuring the biohazard material was properly handled by his staff before it was sent to the government laboratory, and then he made his phone calls. Before he called the chief veterinary officer for the United States Public Health Service, he had a cup of tea and took some acetaminophen for a headache that had suddenly come on. By the time he left his office with his antiviral injection and reached the outskirts of Toowoomba, he was in a cold sweat, and the headache had reached the point where he felt nauseous and unwell; his vision was blurred and made his driving difficult.
But he had to attend to the horse before he could allow himself the luxury of an early mark to end his day. Must’ve been a delayed reaction from the Cabernet Sauvignon he’d quaffed at last night’s dinner party, though he couldn’t remember drinking more than a couple of glasses. In fact, he could barely remember a thing. Try as he might, his short-term memory seemed to have collapsed. In a cold sweat, he tried to smile, promising himself that there’d be no more drinking midweek.
Later that afternoon, police were called to the scene of a crash in which Doctor Dobb’s car had left the road and crashed at high speed into a telegraph pole, killing him instantly. At the same time as the vet, suddenly blind and screaming in agony from the crushing headache, had lost control of his car, silence descended on the Mauden homestead and the Landsdale stud. The silence of death. The only sound that broke the silence was the coughing and vomiting of three other horses that had shared the dead horse’s paddock and eaten from the same pile of oats.
Until the alarm had been raised and forensic examiners got to work, the police had no idea of the reason the dead vet was speeding or why his face and hands were a hideous patchwork of blue-black blotches. When they arrived at the accident, they didn’t know that the vet was on his way to attend to a beautiful black stallion that was already dead. It took an examination of his office appointments to determine where he had been going.
And it took only four hours for the local police to go to the farm to complete their investigation of the circumstances surrounding the death of the vet. There they discovered the owner, Doug Mauden, his son Ben, his other son Joshua, Joshua’s girlfriend Rosemary, three stable hands, and two other people who had tried to calm a horse going crazy in a paddock, lying dead near the stable. By the following morning, Queensland’s Chief Veterinary Office had ordered a hazmat team to be called in from Canberra. A one hundred square mile quarantine perimeter zone was quickly established around the famous horse stud. When forensic pathologists examined the cadavers, they wondered
what pathogen might have caused the hideous blotches on the skin of the victims that made their faces look as though they’d been painted by some demonic artist.
As the sun descended into the west and dusk gently began to cast long shadows across the land, nobody collecting biological samples of plants, soil, and animal tissue from the stud or examining the dead bodies of the human beings, bothered to look up into the sky. Had they done so, they would have seen a swarm of distressed and famished bats, from a distant roost, flying over acres of sunflowers and other crops grown for human consumption and biofuels, desperately searching for a source of food they could eat—increasingly scarce because of the drought that was gripping Australia.
MUKUBOINA VILLAGE ON THE BANKS OF THE ORINOCO RIVER, VENEZUELA
The woman Danthia, a native of the Warao tribe in Delta Amacuro State, looked up for a moment to watch a canoe, paddled by tribesmen she didn’t know, drift lazily down the Orinoco toward the distant sea. But she only looked away from her child Nanrita for just that moment. She wanted to make her mother’s eyes the very last thing that Nanrita saw before she drifted away into death.
The tribe’s leader had told the mother that her eyes must be the last thing the child saw before she died, for then the girl would carry those eyes into the sky as her soul was released and she joined her ancestors in the uplands. With the knowledge and experiences of her mother’s eyes, the little child would wander the home of the gods and understand everything with the mind of an adult.
Somewhere in the distant high mountains, which shielded the river from the setting sun, Danthia knew that the souls of her other children were being taken care of by her mother and father and ancestors, who enjoyed a life of luxury without pain and disease.
Danthia had no tears for her dying Nanrita. There were no more tears left in her body. She’d wailed when her first child, her youngest daughter, had died three months before. She’d cried when one of her sons had died shortly afterward. She’d cried far less—felt far less shocked—when her second and then her third son had died of the same illness. Now her Nanrita was about to die and join her three brothers and her sister in the uplands. She would be left then with no children, and that was good because she wouldn’t feel any further grief.
Danthia was disturbed from her reflections by the appearance of Doctor Judith in her hut. Always a friendly sight, Doctor Judith’s face was haggard, drawn. Danthia doubted that she’d slept very much these past couple of weeks since she’d returned from Caracas, trying to persuade the authorities to take some responsibility for what was happening to the children of the village. The villagers had gathered when they heard Doctor Judith’s boat in the distance coming around one of the massive bends in the river. But as her boat was being tied to the jetty, one look at her face told the villagers that they were not going to be helped by the government people who lived in the city, that they were on their own, and that their children would continue to die. Soon there would be no children left in the village, and in a generation, the village would be no more. Nobody knew when, in the distant past, the ancestors had built the village on the banks of the Orinoco, but soon it would be no more.
“How is she?” asked Doctor Judith.
Danthia shook her head gently so as not to disturb the little girl.
Doctor Judith took her stethoscope out of her pocket and listened to the child’s heartbeat. It was barely discernible. Soon, maybe within the hour, her heart would just give out as the virus, or whatever it was, overwhelmed the little girl’s defenses and she succumbed, as forty-six children had succumbed in the past three weeks.
To hell with those stupid bastards in Caracas, Judith thought. Arrogant, self-righteous, pompous bureaucrats. Even the minister of health had dared to tell her that she was wrong. The man was an engineer, for God’s sake. He knew nothing about medicine. When she’d tried to make him understand the results she got back from the University of Alabama, proving that the virus that was killing the kids was a new strain of rabies, he’d shaken his head and told her that it couldn’t be rabies.
He’d had her escorted from his office when she thumped the test results down on his desk and ordered him to open his fucking eyes and read the fucking facts. Big mistake. Being an American, she was only tolerated in Venezuela solely because she was an academic—especially because her relationship with the country had been so long.
But to see the children of her people die in front of her, to feel so utterly useless, not to fully understand what was causing the destruction of the society, and especially to see it happening only to the children. Nobody believed her when she said that it was the vampire bats. The nearby oil-drilling rigs had uprooted and disturbed the roosts of tens of thousands of vampire bats that, two years ago, had relocated in the jungle along the banks of the Orinoco. The villagers loved to shoot them down from the trees with their bows and arrows. But since that time, the children had begun to fall sick, and it could only be the bats that were causing it. The bats flew down at night and sought out the warm body of a sleeping animal. Often they’d suck the blood of cows or horses. They’d land nearby on the ground and crawl surreptitiously over to the animal and make a small incision on the leg. They’d inject an anticoagulant and suck the blood until they were full—then fly away.
Rabies caused by bats was common in the rural parts of Venezuela; often bats flew in the middle of the night into a village and sucked the blood of sleeping children. Normally, it caused fever, terrible itching, especially in the feet, and could lead to paralysis if not treated. Sure, there were deaths in unvaccinated people, but in these cases, the disease took months to kill. But this latest outbreak was fatal within days—sometimes if the child was undernourished, in hours. She’d contacted her university, alerted them, and sent them samples. The results of the electron microscopy of the blood and brain tissue showed a new and virulent strain of rabies.
It had surprised the scientists. One of her colleagues had told her when he’d phoned to give her the results, “this is supercharged rabies. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
But nobody in Caracas believed her.
TEATRO DI POPULI ROME, ITALY
Perhaps it was meant to be thus. Perhaps she’d been born to achieve this moment. Since she’d graduated top of her class from high school and became valedictorian, since she’d left Vassar with the university’s and regents’ medals for most outstanding scholar, and since her doctoral thesis had been picked up by Harvard University Press to be reworked into an academic textbook, Debra Hart had come to realize that what people said about her was true—that she was brilliant, quirky, and an intellectual who lived on the edge constantly seeking answers to questions others didn’t think to ask.
She sat before a vast audience in the theater, which had been creatively rebuilt in the middle of the nineteenth century on Roman ruins, and tried to concentrate on what the president of the United States was saying. Did he know that she hadn’t voted for him? Was there a way for him to find out? She really should pinch herself to stop smiling at such a ridiculous notion.
But the moment, the location, the event . . . were all threatening to overwhelm her. She was so far out of her comfort zone of laboratories and scientific conferences and meetings with other professionals that she seemed to be split into two people . . . one who was in Rome sitting near the US president as he addressed a global health conference, the other was a young and unconfident girl, distant from these surroundings, listening from elsewhere and wondering what Debra Hart was doing on a stage in Rome with all these important people.
Yes, she’d addressed many conferences before; no, she didn’t suffer stage fright. Yes, she was scared as hell, and she wouldn’t even be speaking today. She was there to support her president as he told the world of the US initiative that was supported by all of the ninety-seven governments that the United Nations and the United States had approached, whose lands were liable to sudden and devastating outbreaks of deadly viral diseases. And sitting beside he
r on the platform in front of an audience of staggeringly important world health professional bureaucrats and frontline doctors and scientists, was the director-general of the World Health Organization, the deputy secretary-general of the United Nations, a director of the World Bank that would manage the funds donated by the United States and Europe for the enterprise, and the prime minister of Italy. And she was placed fifth from the president of the United States, alongside the secretary of health. She! Debra Hart. Fifth in line. Yes, she thought . . . yes, I’ll pinch myself and will wake up in Atlanta because this can’t be happening to me.
As though sensing the thoughts running through Debra’s mind, the president turned to her from the lectern and said, “And leading the high-impact team will be a scientist with whom I know you’re all familiar, one of the world’s leading virologists who heads up the biological crisis unit of the Center for Communicable Diseases in Atlanta, Georgia, Doctor Debra Hart.”
The audience applauded. She smiled but didn’t know what to do. Nathanial Jefferson Thomas, President of the United States, turned toward her and nodded in appreciation, encouraging her to stand to receive the acknowledgement of the audience.
“I know with absolute confidence that Doctor Hart will lead one of the finest international teams of biohazard fighters in the world, available to any country anywhere that suffers any outbreak of a deadly, yet previously unknown viral or bacteriological contagious disease at any time. Our friends and allies, as well as those who don’t see eye to eye with us, all will be helped. The requests for frontline assistance will come to the biohazard team through urgent applications for assistance to the World Health Organization or the United Nations. They will pass on any request directly to Doctor Hart’s secretariat who will react immediately.
“As I’ve been saying, the sudden eruption of these dangerous, deadly viruses could be a factor of man-made global warming, could be because of increased urbanization, could be because of a sudden insect plume caused by changed climatic conditions, or because much of our food production areas have been converted to growing biofuels . . . could be due to things that are happening in nature that we simply don’t understand. But we have to fight them, in our own nations when they affect our population, and especially at the source of the infection,” said the president, who took a moment for the import of his concept to sheet home to the health professionals.
