The Island
Part 1
by
Michael R. Stark
The Island - Part 1
Copyright © 2012 by Michael R. Stark
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced without the author’s written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Dedications:
To Samantha, Ashley, Emily, Aleah, and Kaleigh--the angels who gave me reason to tell stories at bedtime.
And to Julie who patiently suffers through questions posed by an idiot.
The Island
Prologue
I’m not a doctor. All I can relate is what I heard, saw, and felt in the final days. Some of it came from verifiable news sources, some from rumor, some second-hand. My intent is not to create the defining document that traces the course of a disease, of a nation, even a world falling apart. I am simply telling my part in it.
The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta marked the month of December as the point where the disease mutated and crossed the threshold of human infection. At a time when people scurried through wintry streets farther north, toting packages and planning holiday dinners, the combination of a spring-like climate and dreadful living conditions in Central Mexico had been busy giving birth to a monster. The warm weather conceived the beast. The millions strolling through the streets gave it life.
It came to my attention in the middle of March, in a story that garnered maybe ten seconds on the radio I kept in the back of my shop. The day the story broke, dark clouds raced overhead, driven by an icy wind that whipped down out of the mountains to the north. Rain and sleet took turns spattering against the tin roof, the first in a gentle tick-tock that would have been soothing if it hadn’t been for the wind rattling the windows in their frames. When the ice came to play though, the sound turned hard and brittle, like marbles spilled across a tile floor.
The announcer seemed more interested in the fact that authorities had first believed the death to be a homicide as the corpse was so bloodied and swollen it appeared the man had been beaten to death. After a dramatic pause, he continued with a "Not so!" and relayed that a medical examiner, whose name I cannot remember, had indicated he believed the cause of death to be a type of hemorrhagic fever—potentially a form of Hantavirus.
Case closed.
Hantavirus, we knew. The disease had been exposed to Western science during the Korean War. It had proven itself dangerous at times, deadly at others, but containable. I and the rest of the world moved on, focusing on things closer and more important, like a global economy that still faltered and only seemed to make progress in fitful steps, like the deal of the day on QVC, like which silly celebrity had shown the world her panties again or which had been indicted on a drug charge. To put it bluntly, not many noticed, and even fewer cared.
Over the next six weeks, the disease popped up in the news again and again, claiming victim after victim. By May, no one ignored it. The stories hit the headlines with increasing frequency, with newscasts ticking off names of the dead on a daily basis. The CDC put together a team and shuttled it down at the request of the Mexican government in hopes of containing an infection that still had no official name. A newspaper in Mexico City had coined the term La Fiebre, which in English translated simply as The Fever.
The name stuck. While the medical examiner had initially leaned toward Hantavirus as the agent, rumors exploded not just whispering, but screaming more sinister names in that particular family of pathogens—words like Marburg and Ebola. The reality, as the world would eventually discover, belonged in the box marked “none of the above.” The virus emerging from Mexico behaved like nothing science had ever seen, proving incredibly aggressive in the wild and mutating so rapidly in captivity that potential cures fell useless before they were ever refined. The disease promoted itself at first as a blood-borne agent. Somewhere along a relatively short timeline, however, the virus grew wings and learned to fly. Once airborne, infection rates soared as well, leaving streets eerily empty as residents fled the capital and hospitals rapidly filling with those who remained.
Even then, the rest of the world trundled on, paying bills, going to work, casting cautious gazes south, but mostly ignoring the situation. After all, the problem existed in another country and most still saw that as separate and containable.
Everyone felt sorry for them. Charities picked up steam with people donating to relief efforts everywhere as if the global consciousness recognized the threat and needed to act. Since it couldn’t address the disease directly, the urge vented itself in the organizations that sent doctors, nurses, and medicines.
Oddly enough, tourism didn’t suffer much for a while. Mexico City had never been the greatest of vacation spots anyway. Aside from a couple of world-class museums, the city lacked the pristine beaches of Cozumel and Cancun, the nightlife of Acapulco, or the sterile beauty and lazy villages of the western coastline. Abject poverty lingered a few streets away from glittering riches in the capital as it did in many Mexican cities. The difference boiled down to a lack of insulation. Vacationers could spend their entire holiday in a city like Cozumel, playing in the narrow stretch of white sandy beaches and glittering streets, without ever feeling the need to venture back into the poorer sections. Not so in the capital. With tourist destinations spread throughout the city, simply moving between them exposed visitors to poverty-stricken neighborhoods, horrible pollution, and one of the densest concentrations of humanity on the planet. Even tour guides recommended the capital be taken in small doses with vacation days partitioned between the city itself and outlying communities.
June dawned hot and sticky enough to make the thought of summer scary. Along with the heat came a rising cloud of voices calling for the closing of the border. Like many debates in the US, that one fell along political lines. Conservatives supported the idea, but their liberal-minded critics pointed out the fact that, as yet, no one outside of Mexico had shown symptoms of the disease. The war of words escalated during the summer with the left crying racism and bigotry while those on the right rolled their eyes at people willing to risk the lives of millions simply because the disease had originated in another culture.
Still, the fight expressed itself mostly in words at that point. Even though the medical community had started talking in epidemic and pandemic terms, The Fever was still largely seen as a disease relegated to somewhere else.
By all accounts, the virus went global the last week of July. A Swedish national named Erika Jorgensen boarded a US Airways MD-88 on a return trip to Europe after a tour of Mexico. Newly married, Erika and her American husband, Chris Matheson, booked a honeymoon that began on the Baja side at Ensenada and ended at the Mayan ruins on the Yucatan peninsula. They spent a month in the country, visiting a host of cities on a cross-country jaunt between their arrival and departure. Witnesses aboard the plane later described her as flushed and appearing feverish with a constant cough.
Jorgensen and Matheson changed planes in Atlanta and after a three-hour layover, flew to New York City where they took a shuttle bus to a Marriott. They returned to the airport the following morning for a 7 a.m. flight to London where they again changed planes and flew to Stockholm to visit her parents. Two days after her arrival, Jorgensen checked into a local hospital. She died twenty-two hours later, her symptoms clinically identical to those suffering from The Fever in Mexico. Matheson never made it home to Kansas. Within a week, his fever climbed to 105. He died the follo
wing day, nearly 8000 miles from the laid back Midwestern town where he had been raised.
News outlets hit on the fact that Jorgensen hadn’t even had time to change her last name, repeating the same blurb over and over as if to highlight the speed at which the disease could kill.
Officials downplayed the threat of infection at first. A tally of the flight rosters showed that on her flights alone, Jorgensen came in contact with more than 800 people. Even afterward, with hindsight applied in microscopic detail, no one attempted an official estimate on the total number the pair could have infected in their journey as the air terminals they used processed tens of thousands in the two-day travel period.
The next few weeks saw the disease explode, both in Mexico and around the world. At the point where Jorgensen headed home, fewer than 500 had perished and all of them south of the US border. Over the next two months, nearly 7000 more died.
Mexico no longer bore the stigma of the infected on its own. Adding to the death toll were 938 people spread among fifteen different countries and four continents. Profiles of Jorgensen presented a pretty twenty-three-year-old blonde who spoke halting English in a soft, shy voice. Nothing about her gave clue to the fact that she would become a modern-day version of Typhoid Mary. Nothing spotlighted the reality that Jorgensen would serve as the single vector linking not just countries, but continents, a vector through which more than two-thirds of the world’s population would eventually cease to exist.
The news reports featured doctor after doctor, official after official. Some guessed at contagion rates as high as 80 percent, others as low as 40. Estimated mortality rates swung widely as well. In more developed countries with good hospitals and trained staffs, the death rate fell to as low as 26 percent. Where the quality of care suffered, so did the patients. East Africa reported a mortality rate of 80 percent. As it had in Mexico, the disease once freed, ran rampant. Unlike Mexico, it had found a host of billions. What no one understood was that we would all soon have the same basic quality of care regardless of the country we called home.
Emergency rooms, hospitals, and doctor’s offices could only render effective care when the bulk of the population remained healthy. Once the beds filled, the halls filled, and when they were full, patients were lined outside, first on portable cots and finally turned away and sent home. Care became, at best, triage.
I finally gave up on the radio. The voices offered only gloom and doom. I wanted something that fit the mood of a few weeks sailing from port to port and camping on deserted islands. I wanted music with the feel-good flair of Jimmy Buffett bumming around the Bahamas in his flowered shirt and mirrored sunglasses, something that made me think of rum and fruit blended together in a tall, icy glass with a little umbrella sticking out of the top. The voices were clamoring for me to take notice when all I really wanted was a choice, a place where I might find some peace in the days ahead.
I knew people were scared. What I didn’t know was that, by then, it was too late. The worst was yet to come and the disease only the beginning.
Chapter I - Breaking Points
The Island - Part 1 Page 1
