by Bobby Adair
Paul said, “I need to go back to Costco and get another load.”
Heidi looked through the guest bedroom window, through its open door, and into the kitchen across the house. “How long will our calories last?”
At first, the question was a joke. After Paul’s second trip to Costco and his explanation of calorie values to Heidi, she’d ask the question whenever the subject came up. He couldn’t tell if she was serious or placating.
“We’ve got six months so far,” answered Paul. “I’m going to get another six months’ worth tonight. I think I’m going to go by Home Depot and see what they have for storing water. I don’t know. Five-gallon buckets or whatever.”
Heidi lightly touched Paul’s hand. “Are we overreacting?”
“You see the news,” said Paul, suspicious of Heidi’s question and immediately on the defensive. She watched CNN all day, nearly every day. “Nearly twenty-five thousand cases in West Africa now. Reported cases. It’s gotten out of hand.”
“This isn’t about prepping for Ebola, Paul. This is about Austin, and we need to talk about it. You need to talk about it. I know you—I can tell when you’re depressed, and I don’t think you’re being rational.”
Paul opened his mouth to rip through a rant but cut himself off. He looked around at nothing in particular while he thought about what he should say.
Heidi took advantage of the silence to repeat her favorite point on the subject. “We don’t know whether Austin is alive, but we have to deal with how we feel about it.”
Paul said nothing for a moment, but went back to work on his salad. “They quarantined the eastern half of Uganda today. That’s why the border with Kenya got closed. Kapchorwa, where Austin was teaching, it’s in Eastern Uganda.”
“Paul, this would be hard for any parent.” Heidi tried her best to force a smile. “Maybe...maybe you should see somebody.”
“A shrink?” Paul scoffed.
“Your doctor?” Heidi suggested. “Maybe he could just give you something to help for the next month or two. You know, until we find out if—”
Paul started to say something until his voice cracked. He blinked over his tears a half dozen times, but still they escaped and rolled down his cheeks.
Heidi reached over and held Paul.
Chapter 8
Neither Paul nor Heidi said much through the rest of dinner. They washed the dishes. They put the salad dressing back in the fridge, and the croutons back in the pantry. Paul was trying to find a way to shoulder the emotional burden of a dead son, telling himself that he shouldn’t give up hope, and at the same time telling himself to be realistic.
Without discussing it further, Paul and Heidi found themselves in his truck on the way to Home Depot and Costco. Paul was driving while Heidi busied herself with her telephone. They were waiting at a long stoplight when Heidi looked up from her phone and said, “We don’t need to go to Home Depot.”
Paul’s raised eyebrows asked the question. Speaking suddenly seemed an onerous and risky exercise—risky for the possibility of losing his emotional control again and crying, like...like...Heidi.
She held up her phone in front of Paul’s face. He reached up and pushed her hand back, feebly smiling. They both knew he needed his reading glasses to see anything up close.
“You’re old.” Heidi smiled. The two always found a way to joke their way through the hard times. Not always at first, but eventually.
Paul returned the smile. “What is it?”
“It’s a waterBOB.”
Paul squinted at the tiny screen. The traffic light turned green, and Paul drove through the intersection.
Heidi said, “You put it in the bathtub and fill it up from the faucet. Made of food-grade vinyl. I just ordered one on Amazon. We can put it in the garden tub in the master bath.”
“So it’s like a big water balloon that fits in your bathtub?” Paul asked.
“Yes,” Heidi answered. “Only sturdier. It even has a little hand pump that comes with it. I got the hundred-gallon size. That’s a big tub.”
Paul said, “We have three bathtubs in the house.”
“You think we should buy more for the other tubs?”
Paul nodded. “Do they make them to fit the smaller bathtubs?”
“Yes.”
“Order a couple more. Okay?”
Heidi looked down at her phone. She touched the screen several times, and Paul mostly didn’t pay attention.
After a few moments, Heidi said, “I ordered two more. I paid for one-day shipping.”
Paul nodded and weakly smiled even though he knew the one-day shipping was just a way to make him think she was on his side with all this prepper stuff. “I know I’m kind of freaking out about Austin, but—”
“It’s okay.” Heidi leaned over and put an arm over Paul’s shoulders. “It’s hard for me, too.”
“I’ve been thinking about some stuff that’s going to sound pretty crazy, but at the same time, it isn’t.”
Heidi sat back, worry all over her face. “What?”
“I may try to contract Ebola on purpose. I know it sounds insane—”
She slowly shook her head. A tear rolled down each of Heidi’s cheeks. It wasn’t the reaction Paul was expecting. He would have bet on yelling.
After a moment, she softly said, “I can’t lose you, Paul. I know...I know you’re—”
“I’m not depressed.”
“You are. It’s affecting you. You’re not thinking clearly. You just can’t see it.”
Paul glanced at her. Here came the yelling.
“You do nothing all day but look at every stupid little rumor-mill website you can find on the Internet. You’ve practically stopped going to work. You don’t sleep at night. Yes, I hear you get out of bed after you think I’m asleep. Paul, you’re depressed. It’s normal for a parent in your situation. Let me help you do something about it.”
“I’m fine. This isn’t about Austin.” Paul wasn’t sure himself how much he was lying.
Heidi sniffled.
Paul rubbed a hand over his face, took a deep breath, and launched into the set of rationalizations he’d used to convince himself. “You know me. I’m forever the analytical type. This is about the epidemic.”
“You’re lying to yourself.”
Paul ignored her and said, “That doctor and the aid worker they flew into Atlanta from Africa—the ones with Ebola—they lived.”
“And?” Heidi asked.
Trying to shore up his belief in his argument as he spoke, Paul continued, “Only one in ten survive Ebola.”
“That many?” Heidi asked.
“I’ve been looking at the little bit of data available, but it looks like with modern medical care, the chances of survival might be as high as forty percent. That means if you get Ebola and can go to the hospital, your odds of living are four times higher than otherwise.”
Heidi rubbed at her temple as though massaging the tension away.
“Heidi, this thing is blowing out of control.” Paul shook his head. In his inner dialogue, the reasoning had sounded so rational. Out loud, it was another matter. “Ebola is going to spread all over the world. It’s going to come to Denver. Everybody, and I mean everybody, will be exposed. They’ll catch it. They’ll turn symptomatic, and ninety percent or more will die.”
“Besides the fact that you’re sounding nuts, Paul. Why would more die?”
“We don’t have the medical facilities or staff to treat that many. At some point, there won’t even be basic services. We won’t be any better off than the people living in mud huts in Africa. We might even be worse off. We get our food from the grocery store. Our water comes out of the tap. At least those people can take care of themselves, grow their own food, and get their own water. If modern Western society breaks down, we can’t do that. I analyze financial data. You develop professional educational curricula. The most food we’ve ever grown is a handful of tomatoes.”
Paul took a moment to look o
ut the window at the blazing red Costco sign up on the building, and his eyes fixed there while he finished his point. “The people in America who get sick early will be the lucky ones. They’ll get the best care in the world. Forty percent of them will survive. Those are pretty shitty odds, but they’re a hell of a lot better than ten percent. It’s that simple.”
Heidi started shaking her head, drawn into the argument. “What about vaccines and treatments? They’ll develop something—”
“No.” Paul said with a certainty that bothered even him. “That’s just it. The history of humanity is written in epidemics.”
“Paul, the Black Death was—”
“No!” he yelled. “The Black Death is the only plague people ever learn about. They think that’s the only plague that ever killed a bunch of people.”
She felt her own anger rise. “Paul, modern medicine—”
“It’s a joke. It’s a fucking joke, Heidi.” Paul’s anger was running, and he didn’t know why. “Do you know how many people died of the Hong Kong Flu?”
Heidi said nothing.
“A million, and that was in the late sixties. At the end of World War I, the Spanish Flu killed a hundred million people, depending on whose estimates you believe. But a hundred million, Heidi, that’s like seven or eight percent of everybody on the planet. Hell, you’ve got seven hundred Facebook friends. That’s like having fifty of them fall dead.”
Heidi said, “Those epidemics happened a long time ago.”
“How about right now, then?” Paul argued. “Thirty million died of AIDS, and another twenty million have HIV. Ebola comes from the same damn monkeys in the middle of Africa. You don’t hear that much about all these other epidemics, because the truth is that governments don’t want you to know. They don’t want you to know they can’t protect you.”
“Take off your tinfoil hat,” Heidi fought back. “What about SARS, or that H1N1 thing a few years back?”
Nodding, Paul said, “I think the government handled SARS well. H1N1 was a good job, but do you know how many people died worldwide?”
Heidi didn’t say anything.
“Maybe as many as half a million. Maybe a little less. That’s a lot of dead people for something we think we did a good job on.” Paul stared out the window again at the glowing Costco sign.
The two sat in silence for a long, long time, Paul fuming and Heidi refusing to look at him. Finally Paul asked, “How do you shut down half of Uganda in the space of a week? Last week Uganda was fine. Now it’s quarantined. That’s almost like saying half of Uganda got AIDS last week. It doesn’t make sense with what we know about how AIDS spreads. It doesn’t make sense with what we know about how Ebola spreads.”
“Those people over there are just scared. They’re overreacting.” Heidi turned and glared at Paul, clearly implying he was overreacting too.
“Heidi, Ebola is coming. When it gets here, the people with the right kind of immune system will survive. Everybody, and I do mean everybody else, will die. My choice—and this proves I’m not depressed—is to get infected early so I have a chance to live. I think you should, too.”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” Heidi sobbed.
Paul let her cry while he stewed in his anger.
Finally she choked back her tears enough to speak. “You’re scaring me, Paul. It’s like you’re a different person. I know you’ve given up hope. You think Austin is dead. Maybe if you just face up to that, it’ll be a first step.”
It was hard to admit, but Paul nodded. “And that Mitch Peterson guy you talked to, he went to Kapchorwa, so he’s dead, too. That guy you nag—Mitch’s secretary, Art what’s-his-name—he’ll be dead pretty soon. All those people at the embassy in Kampala, they’re going to die. Then Ebola will come here.”
Chapter 9
Olivia Cooper stepped off the elevator and walked down the empty hall. The night’s dark hadn’t yet surrendered to the morning. Most of the fluorescent ceiling lights were on automatic timers to come to life as normal working hours approached. The few that were on illuminated the long hall in a comforting dusk.
Olivia badged through a door to let herself into the long room housing her department’s rows of cubicles. Fingers clicked softly on keyboards. Some of her coworkers were already at their desks, toiling to plug their allotment of holes in America’s porous security.
The door closed behind her, loudly enough to make her cringe. She was, after all, sneaking into the building. At least she felt that way. Eric had directed her not to come back to work until next week. She subconsciously lowered her head, slinked into an aisle between two rows of cubicles, and hurried down to the one containing her desk.
She stepped in and exhaled her tension away. The cubicle was her second home.
She sat her purse and her overpriced hazelnut coffee down, took her seat, and powered up her computer. Impatiently, she watched it go through its usual series of startup splash screens. It prompted her to log in and the computer kicked into a security scan. She groaned. The routine security scan was normally scheduled to run while she took her lunch, but several days of her absence had put it behind. The scanning software would take over her computer for at least the next thirty minutes, rendering it useless.
Olivia leaned back in her chair, yawned, and watched the progress bar on the screen. Someone nearby sipped loudly at a hot cup of coffee. Somebody whispered a curse at a computer, probably for showing them exactly the information they’d requested, just not what they wanted. The progress bar on the computer, as hurried as it was to inch along when the scan first started, now seemed frozen in place. Never a good sign. The scan might run for an hour.
Knowing the computer would prompt her to log in again after it finished the scan, it was safe to leave it alone. Olivia stood up, looked out into the aisle, saw no one, and started to wander. Someone might be in who could bring her up to speed on the Najid Almasi project.
She walked over to the conference room she and her team had taken over prior to her absence. The lights were off. Through the glass wall, she saw the long conference room table was clear, and all of the rolling chairs were neatly pushed underneath. She stopped and stared at it for a moment, taking another sip of her coffee. She at least expected to see some evidence that someone had been in the conference room late the night before: papers, out-of-place cords, something left written on a white board.
The room looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in days.
“Olivia?”
Jumping at the sound of her name, she turned to see Eric, thirty feet away, leaning out the door of his own dark office. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
Olivia smiled as she shook her head. “I couldn’t stay home anymore. I was going stir crazy.”
Eric scrutinized her for a few uncomfortably long seconds before he waved her over. “Come on in.” He disappeared into his office.
Olivia walked over, stepped into the open door, and leaned on the doorjamb. “Yeah?”
Eric gestured to one of the chairs in front of his desk.
Olivia entered the office and sat down.
“You okay?” Eric asked.
Olivia smiled, but looked away. “I’m fine.”
“Fine isn’t the same as okay,” said Eric. He leaned forward and put his elbows on his desk, smiling. “People who say they’re fine are usually lying.”
Olivia shook her head. “You know me. I can’t sit around my apartment doing nothing.”
“Did you go running?”
“I can only run so far, Eric. I have to stop some time.”
“Yeah.” He leaned back in his chair. “I suppose that’s true.”
“It’s true whether you suppose it is or not.” Olivia was mildly annoyed with the questioning.
Eric said, “At least you’re as feisty as you’ve ever been. Have you heard anything from your brother yet?”
Olivia tried to keep her face blank and said, “No, nothing.”
“Your dad hasn’t heard anyth
ing?”
“No.” Olivia gestured in the direction of the empty conference room that until recently had been her headquarters. “What has the team found out?”
Eric frowned as he twirled his pen and fidgeted with the clip.
“What?” Olivia asked.
“The whole thing got bounced to the CIA.”
She tried to hide a sudden spurt of anger by keeping her mouth shut.
“Olivia.” Eric used a soothing voice. “You know how it works here. We analyze data. We investigate. We draw conclusions. Our significant findings, the ones that need action, end up with the FBI or the CIA.”
Olivia knew he was right. She was, however, disappointed for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was fear of losing the project. With the project gone, she wouldn’t be able to guide the resources of her department in finding out what happened to Austin.
Into the silence, Eric said, “Imagine you work on the production line in the frozen chocolate-covered banana factory—”
Olivia raised a hand to hush Eric. “A: I can already tell this is going to be a stupid analogy. B: I don’t need you to draw me a picture. I understand. I know it’s a success to have the project taken over by the CIA. I can know that and still be disappointed.”
“Kind of bittersweet, like when your kids go off to college,” Eric said.
She shook her head. “Are you drawing bad analogies to see if you can cheer me up? Because you need to know that I don’t need to be cheered up. I just need to work. And if you say anything else about me having college-aged children, I may throw this coffee at you.”
Eric forced a laugh. “Okay.”
“Okay,” Olivia agreed. “What do you want me to work on?”
Eric yawned and stretched dramatically before taking a long hard look across the desk. “We both know that what you want to do is log into your computer and spend as much time as you can trying to figure out what’s going on with your brother, right?”
Olivia involuntarily glanced away. “Umm—”
“It’s okay,” Eric said. “I’d do the same if I was in your shoes.”
She didn’t respond.
