Bat out of Hell

by Alan Gold

  “Ma’am, please show me your passport,” said one of the officers.

  She fished in her bag while the ground staff tried to encourage the other passengers to board the aircraft, but they were both fascinated and concerned by this sudden security interchange. Was she a terrorist, a criminal . . . what? They waited breathlessly.

  “What the hell do you want?” asked Debra, frightened and embarrassed as she struggled to find her documents in the depths of her hand luggage.

  “Ma’am, please identify yourself. You’re wanted back urgently.”

  She fished in the bottom of her hand luggage for her passport, eventually finding it. When the Secret Service men were satisfied that this was, indeed, Debra Hart, they escorted her from the gate lounge, leaving her fellow passengers in a state of confusion and panic. A few refused to board the flight, saying that they wouldn’t travel across the Atlantic with her luggage on board.

  “Sir,” said the ground controller, “that lady had no luggage.”

  “Then I’m definitely not getting on board. That’s just how terrorists kill innocent passengers.”

  His panic spread through the rest of the passengers. The flight to London was eventually canceled.

  In the car on the way to the White House, Debra stopped asking her sentinels why she’d been dragged from the airport back to the center of Washington when she realized that they simply didn’t know.

  At the White House, she was greeted by the president’s personal assistant, who escorted her into the Red Room. She’d given up asking why she’d been forced to return and sat for ten minutes in a state of confusion, concern, and anger.

  Suddenly, the door opened, and the president of the United States, followed by DeAnne Harper, the secretary of health and her deputy secretary, Doctor Jonathan Bailey walked solemnly into the room. They sat on the opposite side of the table to where she sat and looked as though the end of the world was nigh.

  “Debra, I’m afraid I have some very worrying news. Overnight, twenty-five children have died in upstate New Jersey. They’d all been to some kid’s zoo near to where they live. A pig is thought to have been the source of the infection. And the hellish thing is that early analysis shows it to be the H5N1 virus,” said the president. “It’s arrived, Debra. The nightmare is here, in our towns; it’s killing our people.”

  “H5N1?” she said. “But that can’t be. It’s bird flu. An influenza virus only found in Asia, China and Vietnam.”

  “And a variant caused seven hundred and fifty thousand human beings to be infected in Hong Kong in the late sixties,” said Doctor Bailey. “Debra, you’d be the first to know that these viruses can combine by exchanging homologous genome subunits by genetic reassortment and pass mutated variants onto people. Only a relatively small number of people died from the Hong Kong flu and from other influenza attacks in recent years. But from very early reports we’re getting from the virology people at New York University, where the tests are being conducted, they think that the H5N1 strain has mutated and is much more dangerous, far more virulent.

  “We think that what’s happened is that the pig who died harbored influenza and that it mutated into some deadly variant that has killed these poor kids. And it might not just be the very young and the old who are in danger of fatal consequences. We’re just now getting reports that some of the parents of the dead kids have shown symptoms and are in the hospital. We’re quarantining the entire town . . . no entry or exit. We’ll clamp down on the area. If this breaks out, all hell will descend,” said Doctor Bailey.

  “But where did this come from?” asked Debra, feeling horrified and shell-shocked.

  “That’s what we want you to find out,” said the president. “That’s why we can’t allow you to return to the United Kingdom. Now that this problem is on our doorstep, we need you here. You’ll have access to every resource imaginable. I’ll invoke emergency powers to co-opt every virologist, scientist, medical practitioner that you need for your assistance. But we have to find the source of this damnable thing before it kills more children.”

  She remained silent, staring at the three people opposite her. Never in all her career had she imagined a moment like this, when three of the most important people in the United States looked at her for answers to a problem of such breathtaking magnitude. She never had much faith in herself and was always surprised at the way people respected her for her achievements. But to have the president and the secretary of health and . . . one thing she knew. The next thing she said must set their minds at ease.

  So she did everything in her power to make her voice sound stable, solid, and professional. If only they knew that she was quivering on the inside. “I don’t understand something. Doctor Bailey, perhaps you could tell me. I assume that the parents of this piglet, the one that died, were tested for diseases before they were admitted to the zoo?”

  Bailey nodded. “I guess so.”

  “That’s standard procedure these days,” she said to the president and the secretary of state. “Which means that the piglet must have been born relatively disease-free, or at worst acting as a reservoir for viruses that pigs normally carry in their bodies and that generally don’t do much harm. So the virus must have got into the pig since birth. In other words, it could have been a virus that the piglet ingested and that acted as a co-host or initiator or accelerant of a normal virus in the pig’s body and created the deadly mutation that crossed species into the poor children. Because it was a new strain of virus, the pig didn’t have any resistance to it, and so it caused the animal’s death. On that assumption, the disease must have been airborne or carried through a vector like this bat-born virus in North London. Are there any reports of bats in the vicinity? Doctor Bailey?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. We’ve only just been made aware of the situation. We haven’t even begun to think about what could have been the vector. Look, it’s only just happened; we have a lot of work still to do.”

  “Okay then, that’s my first port of call. Madam Secretary, Mr. President, I’ll need you to get the coast guard and air force to examine their flight logs for the previous forty-eight hours in order to see if they’ve been monitoring swarms of bats or birds in the immediate vicinity. I know it’s dangerous to jump to conclusions, but if this is a variant of H5N1, then it has suddenly mutated from a common bat or bird virus in the body of the piglet, and that’s why our people are dying.”

  “What do you need?” asked the president.

  She told him. The secretary of health made notes, as did Doctor Bailey. It dawned on her that she had suddenly taken control of the meeting. She was giving instructions to the president of the United States of America and his senior cabinet secretary. If it weren’t so serious, she’d have smiled.

  ***

  By the time the morning news shows began to cover the tragic events in upstate New Jersey, the doomsayers were already on the airwaves, thumping their tubs. Tom Pollard, president of CHAT, Citizens for Humane Animal Treatment, was savvy enough to keep a low profile and tell his staff not to talk to the media under any circumstances. The death of people in the United Kingdom was one thing, but twenty-five kids in New Jersey and God knows how many moms and dads and uncles and aunts would follow was too close to home to make political capital.

  But that wasn’t the case for the Reverend Jeremiah Jesus Higgins, pastor to a congregation of fundamentalist Christians called the “Brothers and Sisters of Eternal Salvation in the New Jerusalem,” headquartered in Lower Manhattan. He demanded and was given time on Radio Station KVVX, broadcasting through syndication to seven hundred radio stations throughout the East Coast of the United States.

  Speaking to the host of the show, Marty Ziller, the Reverend Higgins said, “I knew this was going to happen. I have been predicting this occurrence for ten, fifteen years. I tell you, Marty, that it was revealed to me by the good Lord himself. He came to me in a revelation and told me that salvation was at hand. But that at the beginning of this awakening of hu
manity to the Second Coming, we would have to suffer the death of the innocents to bring mankind to his senses. Twenty-five beautiful little children, God’s children, have been taken from us, and all because the American people have strayed from the word of God, from the very Bible itself. The only way to stop this plague in its tracks, Marty, is for every single American man, woman, and child, to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from the Lord Almighty Himself. Beg, I say to you. Because this plague can be cured immediately and overnight by the flick of the good Lord’s finger. But He won’t do it, no He won’t unless Americans repent and beg forgiveness and go to church and prostrate themselves in the sight of the Lord, and . . .”

  The Reverend Jeremiah Higgins continued in this vein for the next five minutes, continuing to blame the tragedy on the moral laxity of the American people until the show’s host interrupted him. “Reverend. I have to stop you. I’ve just been told by my producer that the president of the United States himself has phoned in to speak with you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  To the utter astonishment of every one of the twenty million syndicated listeners to the radio station throughout the United States, a familiar voice came on the line.

  “Reverend Higgins. This is President Thomas. I don’t usually do this, phone in to radio stations, but I decided to in your case, because my communications staff alerted me to what you’ve just been telling the American people to do, and so I’ve spent the past few minutes listening myself to your comments about the tragedy unfolding in New Jersey.”

  Trying to recover from the shock, Reverend Higgins said, “Well, Mr. President, I hope that you’ll join me in telling the American people how we can go about curing this . . .”

  “Mr. Higgins. On behalf of the American people, let me tell you some home truths. You’re an ass. A buffoon. You’re a know-nothing bag of hot air. How dare you come on public radio blaming the American people and pontificate about matters of which you know absolutely nothing! You’re a disgrace, sir. You dare tell the American people that this problem can be cured by asking the Almighty for forgiveness. You moron. This is a virus, a lump of inanimate chemicals that only comes to life in the body of a living thing. A virus, Mr. Higgins, that is caused by some agency that we’re desperately trying to understand. This is a global problem that affects Christians and Jews and Muslims and those who believe in many gods and no gods at all. This is a medical problem, you idiot, and scaring people into believing that there’s a divine agency causing it can only do great harm to those of us who truly have the welfare of the world’s population in our hands. Now, Mr. Higgins, get off the radio, stop scaring our citizens, and beg forgiveness from the great American people for your self-serving hypocrisy.”

  The president slammed down the phone. Reverend Higgins was, for the first time in his life, speechless. The producer of Radio KVVX’s The Marty Ziller Hour, frozen into immobility because of what had just happened, didn’t have a clue how to react, cut to a commercial break, and in doing so, missed the immediate follow-through that would have given him the biggest scoop of his career.

  But even though the president’s intemperate intervention, compared by commentators to the type of caustic observations that an often frustrated Harry S. Truman made in public, was the second lead item on all news programs—an item that producers broadcast to follow their lead item dealing with the outbreak of the viral disease in New Jersey, that didn’t end the professional Bible-thumpers from using the children’s deaths as an excuse to promote their causes.

  Except now they had a president who didn’t pander to the religious right in middle America and who, to the voluminous cheers of East and West Coast America, had told a fundamentalist preacher to go jump. The liberal media loved it. After electing president after president who had shown themselves to be neutered by the God-fearing angel-believers in the middle of the nation, Americans at long last had a twenty-first century president who wasn’t afraid to call religious hypocrisy by its true name. It became a cause célèbre and threatened to dominate the more hysterical media outlets with instant listener and viewer polls springing up to determine whether or not the president had been right to speak that way to a man of the cloth. Possibly because he was reacting to the terrible deaths of these children, a huge majority of the population thought that the president was spot-on and applauded him.

  But Higgins, and the other religious leaders using the tragedy to increase their profiles and donations to their churches, were only a sideshow to the problems that President Thomas and the American people were facing. In the town of Newton in northern New Jersey, an impregnable quarantine cordon had been placed around the town, as it had been placed around the Wantage County Petting Zoo and an area of 100 square miles in the vicinity. Terrified residents begged for information from the police and men in white hazmat suits. Information officers, sent by the president to brief residents, media, and officials, told everybody everything they knew. The president’s instructions were to hold nothing back, provided it was based on fact and not speculation or rumor.

  Debra Hart flew to the affected area in Marine One. Her first port of call was to the zoo, where she spoke at length with officials. She had discussions with the county medical officer and then, when she realized that the veterinarians had things well in hand, asked to speak to wildlife officers from the nearby Ramapo Mountain National Park. Too far to drive in the haste of her trip, the pilot of Marine One said he’d happily fly her there. It took him only ten minutes to arrange a new flight plan with the local air traffic control, and they took off for the twenty-minute journey. The White House telephoned ahead to expect a visitor, but when the astonished rangers left their cabin at the approach of the famous helicopter, they simply didn’t know what to expect.

  In amazement, they watched the marine colonel land the helicopter on a flat area of the empty parking lot one hundred feet from the visitor’s center, and as the doors opened, the first out was the copilot who ostentatiously and facetiously saluted as he would the president as Debra stepped down onto the ground. She walked toward the four rangers, who didn’t know who she was and weren’t sure whether or not to salute as well.

  “Hi,” she said and introduced herself, explaining quickly what she was doing there.

  Ranger Will Saville invited her and the crew of the helicopter inside the empty visitor’s center for a cup of coffee, apologizing as they walked through the door for their lack of preparation, but they’d only just been phoned by the White House.

  “Mr. Saville,” Debra said, “I’m here because I think that a rural area might be the source of this horrible outbreak of disease that claimed the lives of so many little kids in Newton, west of here. There are quite a few national parks in New Jersey, and we’re looking at each one.”

  Will Saville shook his head. “Doctor Hart, we’ve got the cleanest drinking water in the area. There’re no diseases in the park. We keep a special eye on what’s going on because we have so many visitors from New York.”

  “Do you have bats in the park?” she asked.

  “Sure do. They’re in a cave up on the heights, close to where the new visitor’s center is being built. You get a great view of New York City from up there. This visitor center is too small for the number of tourists we get every month, especially in summer, and so this here visitor’s center is being converted into the ranger’s hut because it’s close to the entry from Interstate 287 so we can keep our eye on who’s coming into our park.”

  She nodded. “Will it take us long to get up to the cave?”

  Will shook his head. “No, it’s ten minutes to the park. If you want to see the bats, I’ll take you up in the SUV, but you gotta remember that it’s a bit noisy up there because of all the construction and all . . .”

  As they drove further up into the park’s heights, Will asked, “What’s your interest in bats?”

  “Just interested. We think there’s a possibility that they might be the source of the infection that killed the childre
n.”

  “But the cave is just a maternity center for them. The entire colony uses the cave in winter when they go into torpor, but the rest of the year when it’s warm, they use the park’s trees to roost. Only the pregnant mothers use the cave when they’re breeding at this time of year. Their body temperatures raise the temperature inside the cave so that it’s a nice, cozy environment for when their young are born,” Will told her.

  “How many bats are in your colony?”

  “Years ago, when I first came here, there were thousands of bats. But the numbers have crashed. We had some people from New York University up here, some years back, doing a count and they figured that there were less than two hundred. Today, I think there are even fewer,” he said.

  Fifteen minutes later, Debra was standing at the entryway to the bats’ cave. It stank of guano and was fetid, rank, and squalid. An environment ideally suited to bats, if everything she’d learned from Daniel Todd was correct. She also noticed that there were old food wrappers from the construction workers laying about on the floor, thrown down casually, thoughtlessly.

  “How many people are working up here?” she asked.

  Will shook his head. “Dunno. Maybe sixty; maybe eighty. Depends on what they’re doing. If they’re dynamiting rock, it’ll be a lot more because they have to have safety inspectors and all sorts of experts. If they’re bulldozing or jackhammering, they’ll be fewer because it’s largely mechanical. If they’re building and constructing . . . I don’t know, ma’am. Upward of one hundred.”

  “And do the men eat in here?”

  Will laughed. “Not inside the cave. It stinks. And the floor is crawling with beetles which live off the bats’ shit. So the men only take shelter from the sun in the shade of the cave mouth. I’ve taken coffee with them when I’ve been up here. They’re rough diamonds, but they’re okay. Why? You really think that . . .”