Code Orange (5 page)
Authors: Caroline M. Cooney
“Why aren't we using online journals?”
“Because we're going there to study history,” said Olivia gently, “and by definition, history is not current.”
Derek couldn't stand it when Olivia talked like that. He stomped off.
Mitty just enjoyed it.
In English, he was gratified to see the sub again. He promised himself that tonight, he really would dig into
Beowulf
. He'd end up better off than the good students, because they'd read the poem long ago when it was due, but it would be fresh in Mitty's mind and he would ace the test.
The substitute teacher told them to work on anything they wanted. Actually the sub told them to
do
anything they wanted, a dangerous suggestion, but this was a pretty quiet group and they let it pass.
Mitty decided it would do no actual harm to glance at a smallpox book again today. Naturally he hadn't paid attention when he was throwing stuff into his book bag and had neither of his new books, only
A History of Immunology
, published in 1909. Oh well. He could add more useless facts to his paper.
On page 134, Mitty read,
It is practically certain that smallpox, like other acute infectious
disorders, is caused by a living microorganism. Examination of the pustules, however, has failed to find anything bacterial which can be regarded as being responsible for the disease.
Cool, thought Mitty. In 1909 they didn't know what a virus was. Wonder when they did.
This led him to consider microscopes and when the really advanced ones had been invented, and it occurred to him that online he could find an actual picture of an actual smallpox virus, print it out and include it in his report. Exhausted from so much mental labor, Mitty turned on his iPod and listened to the
Ain't Life Grand
album.
Everybody turns hero tonight
, he sang silently.
“You might,” Mr. Lynch suggested to advanced biology, “help your grade by arranging an interview with a scientist or physician who specializes in your disease.”
An interview would be work. Mitty wanted less work, not more. Plus he was going to a college library with Olivia this afternoon, which was all the work anybody could ask of a person.
“Wouldn't interviews make your report awfully long?” said Eve, who was doing yellow fever. “It's already such a burden, Mr. Lynch.”
“I'm teaching you to be thorough,” said Mr. Lynch. “I yearn to discover upon reading your papers that one of you really
was
thorough.”
“Probably Mitty,” said Derek, and the whole class burst into laughter.
When school was over, Mitchell John Blake and Olivia Clark took the subway uptown. It wasn't rush hour and the train was largely empty. They not only got seats, they sat next to each other, and Mitty whose hand was bare, held Olivia's hand, which was encased in a mitten so thick and woolly he couldn't tell it was even in there. Around 125th Street, she took the mitten off and they twined fingers.
When they got off at 168th, Mitty looked around with interest. He had never been up here where New York-Presbyterian Hospital was. In spite of the bitter weather, the streets were packed with food vendors. Every mobile patient, visitor, employee, student and doctor was in line buying every conceivable sidewalk food: bagels and falafel, hot dogs and muffins, lattes and soft pretzels. Mitty wanted to linger and buy some of each, but Olivia strode purposefully toward the Health Sciences Library.
Sure enough, they just walked in and she trotted down the wide, open stairwell to the stacks. Mitty disliked the sight of a jillion books he did not want to read, but Olivia was energized. All study carrels seemed to be for individuals. Mitty said if they had to do this, they were sitting together. By the time he located a double carrel, Olivia had vanished, presumably to accumulate Typhoid Mary material.
Sighing, Mitty went off to find a dedicated terminal. He hit Subject, typed in
smallpox
and began jotting down book numbers. He was startled to find the title
A Handbook for Medical Responders, 2003
listed under smallpox. Why would a book like that even mention smallpox?
Your average ambulance driver didn't need to know what smallpox was like. Your
extraordinary
ambulance driver didn't need to know. Even ambulance drivers in
Sudan
didn't need to know.
He went straight to that book. Or as straight as he could, considering there were a million books and he couldn't figure out what order they were in.
Smallpox, the book announced, had “no known treatment.”
Mitty imagined emergency technicians seeing a rash, whipping out their handbooks, checking
smallpox
in the index. And then the instructions:
Give it up. You're dead
.
He wandered around, collecting his other titles. Now and then he spotted Olivia.
Soon he had even more useless information.
Abe Lincoln in November of 1863 had a light case of smallpox and recovered.
Mozart had smallpox at age 9 and his eyes were swollen shut for more than a week.
Just prior to the Pilgrims' landing at Plymouth Rock, native tribes in Massachusetts caught smallpox from European traders. Nine-tenths of them died between 1616 and 1619, so when the Pilgrims showed up in 1620, only 10 percent of the Indians were left alive to say hello.
Cotton Mather and Ben Franklin were the big movers coaxing Americans to get inoculated after the practice was invented in the 1700s.
In a 1918 epidemic, four hundred thousand people in Russia and Poland died of smallpox.
Then suddenly, Mitty found his epidemic: 1902 in Boston, just like the label on the envelope. There had been 1,024 cases of variola major and 190 deaths.
But how could there have been an epidemic in either 1902 or 1918? Inoculation had already been invented. Everybody should have been safe. Maybe they just hadn't felt like getting inoculated. Forgot. Were too busy. Didn't like shots.
Mitty imagined some poor dudes in Boston lying on a bed waiting their turn to die in agony, and thinking, Rats. Knew I should've gotten that shot.
Boston's smallpox hospital had been at 112 Southampton Street. If Mitty had lived in Boston, he'd have gone there and photographed the site just to get away from all these books.
Olivia showed up with a backbreaking stack and handed four to Mitty. Glumly, he read up on the topic she'd chosen for him—the eradication of smallpox. Then he plugged in his laptop and wrote:
In 1965, an American guy named Donald Henderson got put in charge of a World Health Organization program to eradicate smallpox. It was the Russians asking for this and it was President Lyndon B. Johnson who funded it. The president told Henderson's team they had ten years to get rid of smallpox. It would be the first time in the history of the world that people actually got rid of a disease for good.
Since smallpox virus lives only in human beings, the team didn't have to worry about controlling rats or mosquitoes or keeping the water supply clean or anything. Henderson had this brilliant idea: every time there was a smallpox outbreak, he and his guys would race there at top speed and start giving everybody shots. They'd immunize every single solitary person in a huge area around the sick guys, making an immunized circle that could be miles around. He called it ring immunization. They wouldn't let anybody leave the ring until the infection time expired. That way the circle would create a sort of wall that the virus would bump into. In India, Henderson's guys—he had ten thousand workers—called at every single solitary house in the entire country once a month to see if anybody had smallpox. They really and truly knocked on the doors of 120 million houses.
By 1974, practically the whole world didn't have smallpox anymore, because ring immunization worked. Only Bangladesh still had smallpox. The team went crazy immunizing people in Bangladesh and by November of 1975, smallpox was whipped. Only one or two cases ever happened after that, and for those, the World Health Organization organized to the max and ringed each case with—no lie—fifty thousand vaccinations. By October 1977, smallpox, the worst scourge known on earth, is gone forever.
He was delighted that he had managed to wedge
scourge
into his report, because it was a big word in smallpox circles.
October 1977. Ages ago. His mother had been in high
school, his dad in college. Seventies music had lasted, though. Sometimes he even listened to it.
Smallpox history did involve a hero—Donald Henderson—and a heroic act—getting rid of smallpox— and Mitty liked heroes, but he didn't want to read another word about anything, never mind this disgusting disease.
Just when he thought she might be ready to leave, Olivia delved into her book bag and pulled out a book of her own. It was thin and early-elementary-school-looking.“It's my beginner virus book,” she said to him. “I know you weren't listening during class. I can always tell when you're listening to your iPod. I don't think our text does a good job of explaining what a virus actually is, so—”
Mitty howled with laughter.
Olivia blushed. “Okay, I'm sorry. This is the kind of pushy thing that makes Derek hate my guts.”
“I love your guts,” said Mitty, still laughing.“Who else at St. Raphael's—who else in New York City?—the world, even?—would give a guy a beginner book on viruses?” He took the book. Inside the cover she had once written her name in big fat little-kid script.
Bunny Clark
. “Your nickname was
Bunny
?” he said incredulously. “You—Olivia? You used to be all floppy-eared and soft and hoppy?”
Olivia snatched the book back. She slammed it shut and flung it into her book bag. “I forgot I wrote in there. Don't even think that word. Don't say it out loud again. Don't remember it.”
Mitty nodded. “Not remembering and not thinking are primo with me.” But he would never forget. It was no small step from Bunny to Olivia. She had reconfigured herself. Maybe the trick to maturity was to scrap the
nickname. If he dropped Mitty and became Mitchell …
Except that as Mitty he had been a pretty decent student up until this year. This year was a serious slump. But it was so much more fun slumping than studying.
Olivia recovered.“Did you write anything?” she asked, nodding her chin at his laptop.
“Some.”
“Mitty, if you don't get a C on this paper, you'll be below the grade level allowed. You'll get put back into regular biology.”
“It wouldn't be a national emergency,” Mitty pointed out.
“It would be for me.”
The study carrels around them were empty.
The whole floor was empty.
Mitty pulled Olivia into his lap.
It was now more than forty-eight hours since Mitty Blake had breathed in the particles of a smallpox scab. And Mitty, like the victims in the smallpox hospitals in 1902, had not been vaccinated.
T
hat evening, Mitty's parents were planning to head over to their gym. They loved to work out. Mitty usually went along, because he loved weight lifting and because afterward they'd go out for great food—or, at least, he and his dad would; his mom usually had nonfood, like a green salad without dressing.
