“I got a needle stick, Tom.” She stared at him. Surely, he couldn’t be so blind, so completely in denial. Her chances of infection were one hundred percent after a direct inoculation with a bloody needle. He knew that as well as she did.
She pulled her hand away, forced an iron composure that she didn’t feel, and then asked him the question that had been nagging at her all day. “Is it bioengineered?”
He looked troubled. “It doesn’t make sense, if it is. The Russians always engineered in susceptibility to one antibiotic when they developed plague as a biological warfare agent. That way, if one of their scientists got sick while handling it, they always had a cure. But this plague is resistant to all antibiotics. If someone bio-engineered this, they took a helluva risk.”
“What about our government?”
“I don’t think so. Plague was never one of our favorites. The bioengineered plagues always lost their virulence too quickly. It’s hard to keep them infectious.”
“Can’t say that about this one.”
His eyes met hers again, his expression utterly serious. “Susan, it’s not doing you any good staying here. Go home. Call employee health. Go get…” He trailed off.
But she knew what he was about to say. Hodis was about to tell her to get her affairs in order.
Jason’s doctor looked tired, but Brooke didn’t notice. She wanted answers. She had been waiting around all day.
“He’s stabilized, Mrs. Wheeler. That’s all I can tell you. We were able to wean him off some of the blood pressure support medications today. So whatever we’re treating, it looks like it’s responding,” he said, his voice muffled by the respirator mask.
“Have any of the blood culture results come back? You said you might have some lab results by later today.”
The young physician fingered something in his pocket impatiently. “No new results yet, Mrs. Wheeler. I’m sure you can understand. We’re down nearly half the staff today. Many people from the night shift stayed to cover for the no-shows. People are stretched thin.”
“But this is life and death!” cried Brooke. Alan stepped forward and put a cautioning hand on her arm, but she shook it off. “You said it yourself. We have to know what we’re treating. Can’t you go down to the lab and see if the results are back? Surely, a young boy’s life is worth prioritizing.” What she didn’t add hung in the air nevertheless—especially when that boy is Jason Wheeler.
The physician looked pained. “I’ll check, Mrs. Wheeler, but I don’t think we’ll have anything new today.” He glanced at Alan as if to ask for help but looked away again when he saw Alan’s face. He mumbled, “I’ll go check now,” and walked off in defeat.
“Brooke,” Alan said. “Don’t run the staff ragged. Jason isn’t the only one in danger.”
Outrage flared in her face. “For god’s sake, Alan. Don’t you care about your only son?”
“Of course, I do. It’s why I’m still here.” He pulled her toward one of the benches outside the ICU. She sat down with a little plop and looked up at him with tear-filled eyes.
“They’re gone, aren’t they?” she asked, her voice a ragged whisper. “They didn’t wait for us.”
He understood immediately. “No, they didn’t wait for us.”
“But maybe if the doctors had had the lab results earlier, they would have done a better job with Jason’s treatment. We could have gotten out on the corporate jet, if they had just waited a few extra hours. It’s not too much to ask. Is it, Alan?” Her voice began to rise again. “I mean, for god’s sake, you practically fund this damn hospital. You think they might offer better care for your only son!”
“Shhh, Brooke. Let me get you some food. We’ll get another plane and get out of here. Don’t worry.”
She watched him dully. He turned away, trying to force himself to remember where the vending machines were, but all he could think about was Grif Richardson’s voice when he’d said, “It’s incurable, Alan. Tens of thousands of people will die.”
Twenty-One
The new US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases facility at Fort Detrick looked cheery on the outside, but Harry Kincade knew well the terrors within: Anthrax. Ebola. Smallpox. And a whole host of lesser-known microscopic terrors. As the medical wing of the armed services, USAMRIID was home to some of the best infectious disease researchers in the world.
Like Major Jim Heger. The forty-five-year-old veteran of the African Ebola containment campaigns was scrutinizing his computer screen when Harry Kincade walked in.
“Did you run the program again?” Kincade asked.
Heger looked up, faint dark circles beneath his pale eyes. “Yes, and it doesn’t get better. It only gets worse.” Heger leaned toward his computer screen, peered at the display, and then tapped a key. He handed Kincade the resulting printout, which Kincade read without expression.
“I didn’t include the Japanese case or the cases in Chicago and Des Moines,” Heger said. “These are just West Coast numbers.”
“So the actual numbers are probably a lot worse.”
“Yes,” said Heger. “Potentially. PULSE is a theoretical program. It’s never been tested against a real epidemic.”
It was true. The massively complex PULSE model had originally been designed to predict the fallout of a bioweapons attack. “So, it could be better, too. Is that what you’re telling me?” Kincade flipped the printout back onto Heger’s desk.
“It could be. We just don’t know.” Heger sat back in his chair. He was a large man. Kincade had heard Heger had played football at West Point, and the hint of long ago athleticism was still evident in his body. Only his pot belly gave the impression of a man who spent most of his hours behind a desk—or in a biosafety lab. Heger was renowned as one of the most tenacious infectious disease researchers in the world.
Kincade shook his head slowly. “Unbelievable. Out of nowhere. Is the sequencing done?”
“Yes. It’s all plasmid-mediated.”
“Helluva plasmid,” said Kincade. “Is it ours?”
“No, and not the Russians’, either. This bug is pan-drug resistant. The Russians know better than to build that into a bioweapon.”
“Unless they have a vaccine.”
“There’s no known effective human vaccine to pneumonic plague.”
“But maybe there’s an unknown vaccine.”
Heger shook his head. “The Russians may not be entirely forthcoming with us about their bioweapons program, but they wouldn’t unleash an unprovoked biological attack against us. It’d be suicide.”
“Another nation?”
“Not that we can figure out.”
“No one claiming responsibility?”
“No. And I don’t think it’s an individual terrorist, either. The spread pattern doesn’t make sense. Why Reno? And the index cases were bubonic, not pneumonic. Not your classic terrorist approach.”
Kincade didn’t disagree, but provenance was not his main concern. Reining in the current epidemic was. “What about treatment?”
“We’ve had a few hits with some of the private libraries, but this is in vitro effectiveness against plague, Harry. That doesn’t mean they’ll work in vivo. We’re waiting on mice testing.”
Kincade rubbed his forehead. He was well aware efficacy shown in a test tube or Petri dish did not guarantee success in living organisms, but he had a rapidly spreading epidemic to fight. “Jim, we don’t have time for mice studies.”
Heger nodded. “We can probably get the FDA to approve compassionate use studies on sick people, but it will be limited until we can establish safety.”
“It’s not like they’ll survive anyway. We need to ramp this up.”
Heger looked uncomfortable. “Harry, that’s unethical.”
Irritation flared in Kincade. “I don’t think the ethics means a good goddamn to the thousands of people who are dying in Los Angeles right now.”
Their eyes met. Heger looked away first, tension etched on his fe
atures.
“We’ve got good data for an effective vaccine,” Heger said quietly. “At least in mice.”
“Effective against pneumonic plague?”
“Yes, but like I said, it’s effective in mice. We haven’t tried it in humans.”
“Then let’s get going. I’m sure we can get plenty of volunteers.”
Heger sighed impatiently. “Harry, it’s one thing to test an antibiotic in a dying patient with the hopes of maybe saving their lives. But a vaccine is an entirely different story. We’re injecting vaccine into healthy people. If the thing backfires, you could kill them. It’s a whole lot harder to skip the preliminaries when you’re talking healthy patients.”
Frustration flared in Kincade. He leaned toward the military scientist and pinned a finger against the sheet of paper he had thrown onto his desk only minutes ago. “Haven’t you read the numbers, Jim?” He jabbed his finger against the page. “That’s a quarter of a million dead people. And you said so yourself, these are West Coast numbers. Are you waiting for the numbers out of Japan and Chicago and Des Moines? How many dead does it take before you move up the timeline? Five hundred thousand? A million?”
“Stop, Harry.”
But Kincade wouldn’t stop. He was livid. “This is a fucking pandemic in the making, Jim! Are you going to let thousands of people die because you insist on following stepwise clinical trials?”
Tension crackled in the room. “Of course not, Harry. You know that.”
Harry felt his fury drain out of him suddenly, like the air out of a balloon. He knew there was no use fighting with Heger. Heger, of all people, realized the danger of the plague. Hell, he had given Harry the numbers.
But convincing the FDA of these dangers was the key to circumventing the government’s strict experimental protocols—the orderly progression from animal experiments to phased human clinical trials in a system designed to protect people from harmful new drugs and vaccines. Looking down at the military researcher who now refused to meet his eye, Harry realized that Heger grasped these realities better than he did.
Mack took one last drag on his cigarette, dropped it on the roof of the public health building, and ground it into the pile of cigarette butts there. The small mountain of brown-tinged filters were all Mack’s brand.
He focused on downtown, where twin plumes of black smoke rose into the sky. New fires, thought Mack. And by the looks of the billowing fumes, nowhere near under control.
He felt a little tinge of anxiety. Every fire, every traffic jam, every picture of looting on television, was renewed evidence of the overwhelming proximity of chaos, and with chaos, Mack knew, disease ran free. He watched the plumes grow until they joined together high off the ground, a black cloud that spread horizontally across the city.
He heard the sounds of distant sirens, but he could see no fire trucks. Around him, closer, the streets were empty, except for the occasional rumbling of a military personnel carrier. Overhead, a new sound echoed, the near deafening wop-wop-wop of a military helicopter racing across the darkening Reno sky to the fires that now seemed to have merged entirely.
Mack turned away and walked inside. Downstairs, the War Room was packed with people. A series of folding tables had been set up along one wall, where several CDC agents and Harold Pincher worked on laptops. Nesbitt sat at another, entering data.
Mack squeezed between the conference table and the public health workers to get to Nesbitt.
Nesbitt looked up. “Had your smoke?”
“Almost out.” Mack tapped his breast pocket, then added when he saw Nesbitt’s expression, “You think I’m worried about lung cancer, Nesbitt? Come on.” He gestured to the computer stations. “What are you working on?”
Nesbitt swung around in his chair. “It’s the CDC’s pandemic surveillance system, or PiSS, as we like to call it. It’s state-of-the-art surveillance software. We enter pertinent data on each case, like contacts, home address, demographic information, and you can track spread patterns. Like this.” He punched in a command, and the screen suddenly filled with a garbled map of Reno, each quadrant lit up in a different color.
Mack peered at the screen. “Is there a pattern?”
Nesbitt frowned. “Not so far, but half the data isn’t in yet. We only got it up and running an hour ago. The PODs have been sucking up man-hours.”
Despite himself, Mack yawned. “We need more personnel.”
“It’s got to be state. The CDC’s maxed. Between Los Angeles, Reno, and Sacramento—"
“I know, I know. Everybody’s maxed, Nesbitt.” He rubbed his eyes.
“George, you should go home. You’ve been up nearly forty-eight hours.”
Nesbitt was right. Mack had hardly slept in days, and now his thoughts were sluggish. He considered another cup of coffee but rejected the idea. He wasn’t sure his stomach could take it.
“What about you? You haven’t slept much yourself.” Mack eyed the young CDC officer’s rumpled, untucked shirt and fingerprint-smudged eyeglasses. “You look like hell.”
Nesbitt turned away to enter data again. “You obviously haven’t looked in the mirror yourself.”
“I’m not kidding, Jeremy. You’ll wear yourself out.”
Nesbitt didn’t look up. “I’ll get some sleep, don’t worry. I just need to finish the data entry.”
He was still typing when Mack left the room.
They must have targeted the county car, Mack would think later.
He left the public health building shortly after his conversation with Nesbitt, climbed in his Chevy, and pulled out onto the deserted surface streets surrounding the cluster of county buildings.
Mack felt comatose with fatigue, but still slowed at the stop sign two blocks away, forty years of driving laws drilled into him like second nature.
In the split second before he pressed the accelerator, four young men surrounded the car. Mack wasn’t sure where they came from, only that one was tapping on the driver’s side door with the butt of what looked like a nine-mm handgun. Another positioned himself directly in front of the car’s hood.
“Roll down the window,” the one with the gun ordered. He was young, with a scattering of pimples poking through a patchy beard.
At first, Mack’s brain had trouble believing what was happening. He hit the window button and said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, what do you want?”
The pimply one pointed the gun at Mack’s forehead and said in a patient voice that still managed to sound furious, “Where are the masks?”
Maybe I was stupid with fatigue, Mack thought later. Maybe that’s why he had looked at the pimply one and repeated blankly, “The masks?”
The pimply one sucked in an angry breath. “Stop fucking around! I know you county people have them.” And then, incomprehensibly, the kid jabbed the barrel of the gun straight into Mack’s forehead.
An arrow of pain shot straight into Mack’s brain and ricocheted around his skull. “What the hell are you talking about?” he exclaimed, unbidden tears stinging his eyes.
The pimply one’s face flushed. Rage burned beneath his words. “Your mailmen aren’t delivering them to my neighborhood. Why is that?”
Mack reached a stunned hand to his forehead. “They haven’t gotten to your neighborhoods, yet. They’re coming.”
“But that’s not soon enough with this DRYP, is it?” The pimply one’s eyes shot to the empty backseat and then to Mack. “Open the trunk.”
In retrospect, Mack thought he should have opened the trunk. If he’d done that, maybe he could have avoided the next part. But his brain had been highjacked by pain, and he wasn’t thinking straight, so he blurted out the truth instead of demonstrating it. “There’s nothing back there,” he said. “I don’t have any masks.”
A shudder ran through the pimply kid. Mack heard the others shout, “He’s lying!”, but that was only background noise, because Mack was registering in a sort of slow-motion horror that the pimply one had pulled his arm back again. The next
second Mack’s face exploded in a black miasma of pain.
In some parallel universe, Mack wondered why his face was wet, why a shower of warm water had pooled in his eyes and blinded him. He wondered why this kid was beating the shit out of him.
But then, he stopped wondering. His brainstem kicked in, and he spasmodically stomped on the accelerator. He only half-connected. A thud and a cry sounded a second later, but the noise was eclipsed immediately by the sharp crack of gunfire and the panicked realization that the pimply kid was emptying his clip at the car. Sharp stones tore at Mack’s neck. The car bucked and roared.
He couldn’t see where he was going. He guessed that the Chevy had jumped the curb and was now on the sidewalk, but the blood and tears in Mack’s eyes blinded him. He tried to steer back toward the street, but his direction was off. The Impala collided with something hard, the steering wheel exploded, and everything went instantaneously black.
He came to in a battle zone. There was shouting and gunfire and more shouting. A cloud of white powder filled the car. Frantically, Mack grabbed at the seatbelt, trying to free himself from the driver’s seat and the detonated airbag, when a hand reached through the window to grab him. He went blindly for the gas pedal again. Someone shouted, “Stop! Fuck! Stop! It’s the Army National Guard!”
A young soldier had his hand across Mack’s chest, trying to restrain him. “Are you all right?” he said breathlessly. Mack realized the soldier had just run across the intersection with a mask on. He was probably suffocating.
“They’ve got guns,” gasped Mack. He dragged his sleeve across his eyes. He felt nauseated by all the blood.
“They’re gone,” said the soldier.
“Gone?”
“Yeah, they shot at us and then ran. All except that one.” He gestured at the lone body lying in the middle of the intersection.
It was the boy Mack had run over. “Is he dead?”
“I don’t think so.”
Mack reached a hand to his throbbing cheek. He could feel the skin swelling already. He’d be unrecognizable by morning.
DRYP Trilogy | Book 1 | DRYP [The Final Pandemic] Page 18
