DRYP Trilogy | Book 1 | DRYP [The Final Pandemic]

by Scheuring, R. A.

  She moved toward a room service cart. “Tea?”

  That irritated him. “Ann, you know I don’t drink that crap. Why are you here?”

  The Director of the CDC looked unfazed. “To meet with the President. And so are you. Emergency session in two hours.”

  Harry took off his jacket. He crossed the room, pulled a plastic bottle from his travel kit, took out four pills, and swallowed them dry.

  Ann passed him a bottle of water. “That’s a lot of ibuprofen, Harry.”

  He took a swig and looked at her pointedly. “You’re not here to cluck-cluck over my health. What is it?”

  She sat down on one of the couches and crossed her legs. She looked well put-together, especially since she’d most likely just stepped off a plane from Atlanta. But then again, she always looked well put-together. It was part of her image.

  “Well, I believe your projections might be right. In which case, we seem to have a major public health crisis on our hands. We’re going to need a plan,” she said. “A better plan than what we have. Because what we have doesn’t seem to be working so well, does it?”

  I never should have taken the job, he thought. Never should have agreed to work for his wife again, because right now, he wanted to throttle her. Or fuck her. He wasn’t sure which.

  He took another swig of water as he stood above her. “No, it doesn’t. But I’m starting to run out of ideas. We’re looking for a cure. We’re trying for a vaccine. We’ve enacted every tried and true public health measure, and none of it seems to be working. It’s still spreading. And spreading.” His stomach muscles tightened. “But if you’ve got an idea, Ann, I’d just love to hear it.”

  “You don’t need to be sarcastic, Harry.”

  “I’m not being sarcastic. I’m being honest. I’m running out of ideas. You’re the head of the CDC. Don’t you have any ideas?”

  She looked at him steadily. “I’m sure you’re well aware that it’s becoming an international crisis now. There are documented cases in Japan, China, Peru, and Germany. We’ve sharply curtailed international travel and shipments out of California, but now that we’re seeing disease throughout the United States, I’m sure we’ll have to extend restrictions.”

  He didn’t say anything, and she continued, “The stock market is down over four thousand points. They closed the market this morning because the sell-offs were so huge. We’re looking at a potential crash larger than 1929. The President wants a plan, Harry. A new plan.”

  “And we’ve got two hours to come up with one?”

  She nodded.

  He could hear the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of his heartbeat in his ears. Ann was watching him, but her expression was inscrutable. He sat down in the stuffed chair opposite her, dropped his head in his hands, and rested his elbows on his knees.

  “Call Jim Heger. Get Jeremy Nesbitt on the line. Get all the lead agents in the west. It’s time for a conference call.” He didn’t lift his head. He seemed to be talking to the floor.

  Ann picked up the phone, put a call in to Atlanta, and ordered her administrative assistant to arrange the videoconference. She still held the phone cradled against her ear as she peered over at Harry. “Anyone else?”

  “Yes,” he said, not looking up. “You might as well include George Mack.”

  Twenty-Five

  Three thousand miles to the west, Ajay Singh stood in the third floor conference room of Washoe Medical Center and stared out the window at the parking lot below. He’d arrived too early. The first of the hospital administration’s twice daily crisis management meetings had not yet started.

  The patients kept coming, hundreds of them. Mack had promised more PODs to unload the hospitals, but the load had only grown. There were no more beds. The doctors could only admit a patient when another died, and horribly, as the morning stretched into afternoon, more and more beds were becoming available because hundreds were dying per day.

  Singh looked at his watch. The meeting would be an accounting meeting, he knew. How many oxygen masks do we have left? How many IV bags? How many of the millions of little things he had taken for granted in all his years of training and practice?

  And where to put the dead bodies? There were so many of them that even the refrigerated trucks the county had ordered didn’t provide enough space. The National Guard now shipped the dead out almost immediately to a cold storage warehouse on the outskirts of town. Singh wasn’t sure how the corpses were disposed of, and in truth, he didn’t want to know. Some remnant of his faith told him that the plague couldn’t go on forever, that the government would find a cure, or at least stop the disease’s spread, so that the hospital could return to being more than a processing plant for the dying.

  His phone rang. Singh started. It had been so quiet in the room, he’d felt as if he were in his own isolation box.

  He answered reluctantly. “Singh.”

  It was his wife. “Ajay, they have disease in the Bay Area now,” she began without preamble. “Six cases in San Francisco.” She sounded breathless, panicked.

  “You’re in Santa Clara.”

  “It’s all one big city, Ajay. You know that. We can’t stay here! The children, Ajay! We can’t let our children die!”

  He could hear the terror in her rising voice. He had to stop it. “Suma, Suma, listen to me,” he said. “Suma, my love, listen to me. Take the kids and go.”

  “Where?” she cried. “It’s everywhere now!”

  “Suma, you’ve got to calm yourself. Go to your cousin, Sunita, in Modesto. There’s no plague in Modesto.”

  “They’re threatening to close down the roads.”

  “Then you must go now.”

  “But we’re not packed. The kids have unpacked everything. It will take hours to get ready.”

  He fought a tiny kernel of irritation. “Pack a change of clothes and a toothbrush. You don’t need much. It shouldn’t take you more than fifteen minutes. Get the kids. Go. They will close the roads, Suma. I guarantee it. Don’t delay, or you’ll never get out.”

  He heard her take a ragged breath, but at least she didn’t sound like she was crying anymore.

  “Sunita will help you.” A thought occurred to him. “Do you have gas for the car? Fill the tank before you go.”

  “Ajay, the lines are hours long. They stretch around the block.”

  “Then forget the gas. A half-tank will get you out of town.”

  She burst into tears again. “Oh, Ajay! This is so awful! So awful!”

  “Suma, no more tears. Pack the car and go!” He didn’t want to be sharp, but he felt powerlessness overwhelm him. She had his children, and she needed to be strong.

  She sniffed again.

  “Go, Suma, now. The children rely on you. Call me when you get to Sunita’s.”

  “I will.”

  “Tell the children I love them.”

  “I will.”

  He said good-bye and hung up. A few minutes later, he returned to the window and stared at the sea of people below in the parking lot. He worried about his wife. He wished that he’d said good-bye to his children, so that he might have heard their voices one more time, but he’d been afraid of delay. He knew that time was running out.

  He felt an odd tightness in his throat and swallowed painfully. He forced himself to breath evenly.

  She hadn’t inquired about him, not one word about him. He stared out the window at the wave of death below.

  His eyes stung for a minute, but it passed. There was work to be done. Too much work with too few resources. He looked at his watch again and wondered where the rest of the staff was. It was time to start the meeting.

  It was so loud in the War Room, George Mack could barely hear himself speak. Every time the lights flickered on, people’s voices rose, and when the lights went off again, tones became hushed. It made for a dizzying and distracting contrast, and when it came to talking with Harry Kincade, Mack wanted to be utterly focused.

  He took the satellite phone outside, bu
t even then, he found himself shouting. Military helicopters raced overhead, their engines shrieking loudly enough to pierce eardrums. “We’re having a lot of power outages here, Harry. It’s crippling the command center.”

  “Where are your back-up generators?”

  The roar of a helicopter cut off Mack’s reply.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Kincade. “What the hell is that?”

  “Helicopters. Something’s going on downtown.” Mack looked toward the tall casino buildings that marked the city center. A small plume of smoke rose above the low buildings that surrounded them. “Looks like another fire. Not big, though.”

  Kincade muttered something unintelligible. He then said, “I got an emergency session with the President in ninety minutes. I don’t need to tell you that there are a lot of people shitting their pants right now about what’s happening out west. And I got zero good, absolutely nada, to tell him. I sure as hell could use some good news right now.”

  “I don’t have any for you.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No. We’re running out of supplies. We’ve distributed all the masks we had and are enforcing a quarantine, but the numbers are still rising.”

  There was silence on the other end. “The numbers should be plateauing,” said Kincade.

  “They should, but I can tell you, they’re not. We have absolutely no fucking clue why the numbers are still rising. The spread pattern makes no sense. If it were strictly person to person, quarantine and masks should slow it down.”

  “Some other vector?”

  “You mean rats or squirrels?”

  “Yeah, it all started with them in the first place, right?”

  “Sure, but this is a pneumonic epidemic. It’s not flea-mediated, so far as I can tell.”

  “Kill all the rodents.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Kill all the rodents. I want every fucking rodent in Reno dead. And then tell me about the spread pattern.”

  Mack was appalled. “It’s not the rodents, Harry.”

  But Kincade was adamant. “Just do it, George. I want them dead. Every single fucking one of them.”

  “Harry, for god’s sake—”

  But it was too late. Kincade had already hung up.

  Harry Kincade had never met the President. Oddly, he had never wanted to. In the best of circumstances, Kincade was an undiplomatic man. In a crisis, he was practically dictatorial, but he was stellar in an emergency, and this track record led all the people in the room to look at him with hope in their eyes.

  Including the President. The President was a tall man, lean, with the haggard lines of stress prematurely aging the granite planes of his face. He looked at Harry intently. “How many sick now?”

  Harry shrugged. “Hard to say. We’ve got at least five thousand dead between Reno, Sacramento, and Los Angeles, but the number of sick? I couldn’t tell you exactly, because it’s such a dynamic number.”

  They sat in the Situation Room—the wood-paneled conference room in the basement of the White House where national and international crises were dealt with. The room was crowded with people. Some Kincade recognized: the Secretary of State. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The National Security Advisor. The Secretary of Homeland Security. And amazingly, Senator Elizabeth Orenson, a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, as well as a longtime friend of the President.

  Kincade had no idea who the others were, but he was barely aware of their presence. His eyes were fixed on the President’s.

  Orenson said coldly, “Dr. Kincade, we all recognize the dynamic nature of the current situation. But we do need numbers, best-guess estimates, if we are to deal with this crisis. How many sick?”

  “I would guess fifty thousand.” There was an audible gasp in the room, and Harry went on, “But that’s a broad guess. We’ve got at least twenty thousand entered into the pandemic surveillance system, our data-tracking program. As you can guess, most of that number is coming out of Los Angeles, but Sacramento and Reno are very hot right now.”

  “Other cities?”

  Harry looked at his ex-wife, who sat next to him. “Ann?”

  “We have documented cases in at least ten other American cities.” She spoke soberly, her stylish reading glasses perched halfway down her nose. She pushed the readers into place as she pulled a sheet from the stack in front of her. “Ten cases in San Francisco, three cases in Chicago, six cases in Philadelphia.” She looked up from the sheet. “An entire family returning from visiting Universal Studios in Los Angeles.” She turned her face to the page again. “Two cases each in New York, Seattle, and Portland. There have also been isolated cases in Des Moines, Boise, and St. Louis.”

  “That’s only nine cities. What’s the tenth?”

  Ann looked briefly at Harry before answering, “The tenth is Washington, D.C. Here. The surgeon general died two hours ago. He was infected at the World Scientific Conference on Infectious Disease by one of the presenters.”

  “I see,” said the President, his voice unchanged, but Harry thought he saw him glance at the Secretary of State. “And the overseas numbers?”

  “The WHO estimates are likely an underestimation, but right now, we believe there are cases in Japan, China, Peru, Mexico, and Malaysia. There are also documented cases in Germany and England.”

  “My god,” uttered someone down the table.

  The President ignored this. “The media are having a field day with this.” He gestured at three TV monitors set into one of the walls of the conference room. Video of white-shrouded health care workers wading through a sea of ill people was intercut with pictures of a faceless mob burning an American flag. “By the pictures, it would appear that anti-American sentiment has soared, but the State Department informs me that actual demonstrations in other nations are minimal. Unfortunately, with these sorts of pictures, the average citizen has no idea that we’re addressing the situation with all resources at our disposal.”

  “Not to mention other governments,” Senator Orenson added.

  Harry knew well where they were going with this. The media-relations aspect of their pandemic control program had been a disaster. Now, the CDC would have the President’s public relations people breathing down its back. It would be another layer of distraction to keep Harry from doing a job that already wasn’t going well.

  The President picked up a piece of paper and gazed at it. Harry recognized the briefing report he had hastily prepared just hours before. “Where do we stand exactly with our pandemic countermeasures?” the President asked.

  Harry launched in on the rodent-kill program, trying for a somewhat optimistic tone. He reiterated the standard public health disease-containment measures that had been failing so abysmally in California and Reno. He spoke about the accelerated antibiotic development program taking place both at Fort Detrick and several of the nation’s top universities, as well as in the private sector. He discussed the promise of a working vaccine.

  Through it all, everyone in the room listened raptly. Harry tried hard to maintain a neutral, dispassionate tone, but his gut told a different story, and he wondered if he should give voice to the pessimism he felt. Because maybe that’s what they really should be planning for, a pandemic of disastrous proportions not seen since the Flu Pandemic of 1918.

  Fifty million died in that one, Harry thought bleakly. Why would this be any different?

  He mentally shook himself. There were 5000 dead now, a far cry from 50 million. And this was the 21st Century. They had modern medicine. They had laboratory and pharmaceutical capabilities never even dreamed of in 1918.

  No way could a pandemic like 1918 happen again. Ann certainly didn’t think it was possible.

  Harry only wished he felt as sure.

  Twenty-Six

  Ezra Pilpak waited for the sun to go down before he set out. Darkness had fallen over the city of Los Angeles, but you couldn’t tell that from the Infectious Disease department. Lig
ht from several powerful portable construction lamps lit the sky above the plaza, so that the hospital glowed like a lighthouse beacon in an endless sea of black.

  It was time to get the hell out.

  Minutes earlier, he’d returned from the plaza, appalled. Infection control had broken down entirely. The nurses couldn’t put masks on coughing patients, because there were not enough masks, and even if the nurses did manage to get a mask on someone, half the time, the delirious patient pulled it off.

  Ezra pitied the remaining health care workers. The residents slaved away in bunny suits and N95s, but Ezra could see the terror in their eyes.

  He closed the door to the Infectious Disease office without locking it. There was nothing valuable in there anyway, just some old editions of Mandell’s Infectious Disease, and what good were those? Nothing in them about DRYP. Nothing anywhere, really, about DRYP, except down there in the plaza where DRYP reigned king, wiping out lives with lethal efficiency.

  Ezra took the back staircase on the opposite side of the hospital, praying that no one would see him. He carried boxes of respirator masks and gloves. If anyone saw him with these things, when shortages were so bad, he would be forced into surrendering them. But thankfully, no one came. He slipped into a side hallway, near the Doctors’ Dining Room, and then dropped into a second stairwell that descended into the hospital’s basement.

  The subterranean corridors were deserted. Ezra knew that central supply had been particularly hard hit by absenteeism, but still, it surprised him to see County’s colossal washing machines silenced and unmanned. Likewise, the eerie emptiness of sterile processing struck him as particularly unnerving. As far as Ezra could tell, the core underlying functions of the hospital had broken down as completely as infection control had in the plaza overhead.

  He slipped through a large roll-down gate into the enormous dugout lot next to the hospital. Only weeks earlier, the construction site had been filled with noisy excavators preparing the site for a new, more modern hospital, but now, the abandoned dump trucks and digging equipment loomed in the semi-darkness like massive prehistoric beasts.