Final Epidemic (21 page)

Carly’s body again bucked madly, and Carol rode the violent convulsions like a rodeo cowboy. When the seizure finally subsided, Carly’s face was bloated and blue. Her breath came in short, rapid wheezes—not enough, never enough even to partially fill her ravaged lungs.

“Can you help her?” Katie’s voice was a whisper, barely audible over the sobbing of her companion. “Please.”

Carol looked up at Katie. She said nothing, but shook her head once, a hard negative.

The van lurched into movement.

A few minutes into the trip, Carly Holmes had died, mercifully.

Her friends had been too stunned even to cry at first.

That would come later, Carol knew, as she covered the body, tucking the sheet under straps that fought the jouncing of the transport van.
If,
she thought,
there is a later.

By then, of course, it was too late to alter the destination of the other two.

When she arrived at the stadium, Carol discovered she was one of the few doctors in what had become a vast charnel house of the dead and dying. As in most epidemics, physicians and nurses had been among the earliest exposed to the virus; they had died, most of them, only shortly after the patients who had infected them. Among them was LaTonya Ferris, who had so effectively managed operations at Carol’s clinic. She had been delirious, fighting for air
when Carol found her, by accident, among a row of other fevered victims.

It had been a brief reunion.

La Tonya had died, quickly and painfully, despite all of the frantic efforts Carol had thrown against the viral invader. Like the majority of the flu victims, LaTonya had drowned, a victim of her own fluids flooding into lungs torn and damaged by the virus’s onslaught. Neither the oxygen Carol had intubated into LaTonya nor the Lasix with which she had injected her had any but the most temporary of effects; the progress of the disease simply had been too swift and devastating.

It had been the same with other patients over whom Carol had labored. Both O
₂
and Lasix were now in short supply; so too was almost every other basic commodity.

It did not matter, really. There was no effective treatment. As it was, the shortage of nurses was more critical than that of their physician colleagues, since a kind hand wielding a clean handkerchief at least provided a temporary comfort to the stricken.

Carol heard news, in scraps and tiny morsels. Rumors, rather—in the chaos of the outbreak, there was no reliable way to discern fact from fiction.

She heard that the pestilence had spread as far north as Birmingham and as far to the west as New Orleans; nobody really knew for sure. She heard that at Eglin Air Force Base, which occupied an area the size of Rhode Island from Fort Walton almost to Pensacola, the virus had spread like wildfire; she remembered Jerry-the-Moonlighter at the clinic, working alongside her to breathe life back into the victim at the clinic. She even heard that the Russians had come up with some kind of cure, or at least a treatment that kept the disease from spreading; this could not be confirmed either, and Carol was too busy to allow herself the luxury of hope.

She worked throughout the day, losing track of time in the mind-dulling rounds amid the dying. At some point, a
generator chugged to life and the bulbs strung between the tent poles cast their yellow light on the scene. When next she noticed, outside the yellow glow the night was dark and still.

In one of the faded gray tents along the perimeter of the treatment area, Carol had commandeered a corner for herself and her two charges. It was there that she retreated, collecting Katie and J. L. as she passed through the crowded triage area. By the time they arrived at their refuge, the fatigue was acute enough to leave Carol lightheaded, though she felt anything but ready to sleep.

Neither did the two teenage girls, though initially they seemed equally adverse to any kind of discussion. They jury-rigged one of the olive gray blankets over a rope, darkening the corner. It was too warm to sleep covered, though they stretched out on cots Carol hoped had not been recently used.

Still, Carol found sleep elusive.

So she prodded Katie and J. L. to talk, asking them questions until they began to respond. It was the only palliative she could offer two young women who had been thrust deeply into this pact with death.

J. L. was quiet, almost sullen, and spoke mainly in monosyllables. She stayed close to the other, Carol observed, the one named Katie. But she had done her share, even through the tears that had washed tracks down the grime on her cheeks. For her own part, Katie Casey was dealing with the shock of Carly’s death by plunging into the far larger cauldron of suffering she found everywhere around her. She had cried too, if her reddened eyes were any evidence. But when, Carol could not say; each time she had glanced at Katie, the girl had seemed calm and competent—even resourceful. If the teenager was frightened by her situation, she gave no outward sign.

For a while they spoke about meaningless subjects, tacitly avoiding the world outside their small corner. Carol told them about her job at the clinic, about the incongruities of living in an area where most people come to play, about the
largely absent social life of a single, overworked physician. She described her infatuation with Choctawatchee Bay in terms that might have embarrassed a human lover, mercifully missing the eye-rolling glance J. L. shot Katie. She mentioned that she had purchased her first vehicle only a few months before, and admitted it was a pickup truck, now parked back in the clinic lot.

“Stick-shift transmission,” she volunteered. “That marks me as a real player, at least down here. Do either of you drive stick?”

“I can,” Katie said. “My father taught me. But I just got my learner’s permit. I’m not supposed to drive without an . . .
adult
supervising me.” She sounded rueful, but to Carol’s ears insufficiently so.

Carol grinned wickedly.
I still remember . . .
“But I’ll bet you do it anyway. Am I right?”

There was a rustling, as if Katie might have shrugged. Silence settled between them.

“You’re doing a good job out there,” Carol said finally. “Both of you.”

Again, there was no response, and Carol was about to abandon the effort when Katie spoke.

“All these people,” Katie said to Carol quietly. “They’re going to die, aren’t they?”

The question took the physician by surprise, and she hesitated for only an instant. But it was answer enough, and all three of them knew it.

“Why don’t we have it?” J. L.’s voice was hard, demanding. “We were around Carly when she was sick—I mean, if she caught it in Florida, we were with her the whole time. So why aren’t Katie and I—”

Her voice caught, broke.

“I don’t know,” Carol said. “I don’t know why I’m not displaying symptoms, either. Possibly the virus takes longer to manifest itself in some people. Or it could have something to do with the way our individual immune systems are working.”

Katie frowned. “You mean, there’s a chance we won’t catch it?”

When she spoke, Carol was careful to keep her voice neutral. “That’s not likely, I’m afraid. We don’t know—
I
don’t know anything about this virus, except that it’s a very contagious variety of the flu. Most people are vulnerable to influenza.”

“But it’s possible?”

“Anything is possible.”

“Not if we stay here,” J. L. interjected. She looked around the football field and shook her head in a hard negative movement. “Not in here.”

“The entire state is quarantined,” Carol said. “There are police and soldiers on all the roads—certainly the main ones, I guess. There’s no place for you to go. They can’t allow the infection to spread.”

“But we don’t have it,” J. L. repeated stubbornly.

“I’m sorry.”

Again, silence. This time it lasted longer.

“Do you have anybody you can call?” Carol asked suddenly, realizing even as she spoke that the question was inane. During processing, she had discovered that all contact with the world outside was ‘temporarily’ out of service. It made sense, from the point of view of those trying to keep the genie in the bottle: had word of the conditions here migrated outside, widespread panic would have been inevitable.

“We kind of—well, sneaked down here,” Carol heard Katie say. “The . . . three of us.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Right now,” Katie said, “nobody even knows where we are.”

There was nothing Carol could think of to say. In a short time, she found herself drifting off, finding sleep at last.

She snored, rhythmically but lightly.

It was then that J. L. and Katie began to talk again, in voices pitched low and secretive.

Fort Detrick, Maryland
July 22

Fort Detrick is forty-eight miles away from the White House, as the crow flies. There was a time when any crow unwise enough to fly over the base ran a substantial chance of falling from the sky, the victim of birdshot from guns wielded by PFCs charged with keeping the skies clear of avian intruders.

This was not because of any particular malice toward crows, or birds in general. Rather, it was the fear that some random feathered interloper might become an inadvertent vector for one or another of the agents undergoing testing at the site.

The Crow Patrol is a legend of the distant past at Detrick now, ever since chemical and biological weapon development was officially ended by Richard Nixon in the late sixties. Today it is the home of USAMRIID, the Army’s infectious disease research branch. As such, Fort Detrick has been officially rehabilitated. The research there now focuses on studying antidotes, vaccines and other treatments or preventatives involving CBW. Officially, its former black arts are no longer practiced there.

Officially, they are practiced nowhere in the U.S. military.

It was late, even for a military operation, but few at
Detrick had left their research stations since word of the first case in Florida.

It was almost midnight when a figure in a Class IV exposure system—the staff called them “Mr. Bubble” suits, for the obvious reason—had torn her eyes from the blue glow of a computer screen at which she had been staring intently. She clicked the mouse with an awkwardly gloved hand, toggling between two not dissimilar displays that she studied with equal intensity.

“I’ll be damned,” breathed Barbara Jones, who in addition to carrying a Ph.D. in biogenetics from Johns Hopkins was a major in the United States Army. She was “Dr. Jones” to the rare outside visitor, “Major Jones” to the enlisted personnel, and “B. J.” to her close colleagues. But never, never was she “Major Barbara.”

She reached around the controls of the electron microscope and pressed an oversized switch. Immediately, a voice rasped from the intercom speaker.

“What’s up, B. J.?”

It was the voice of the man who had, almost single-handedly, overseen the biowarfare research at Fort Detrick, Maryland, for the past three decades. For the past two and a half of them, the program’s very existence had been classified “Ultra D”—an infinity above the merely “top” secret.

“I’ve been playing around with a sample of Agent VIX,” Barbara answered.

For a moment, her supervisor was dumbstruck.

“Good God. Why are you even handling that stuff?”

B. J. screwed her face into an expression that would have been better suited to a much younger female; she did not like her work questioned, even by someone she respected as much as she did this man.

“The genome is pretty close to the killer flu. So I kind of played a hunch.”

B. J. was famous for her hunches, and wore the idiosyncrasy as a badge.

“And?”

“I think I found something,” she said, and this time her mentor heard the edge in her voice. “I think maybe I found something important.”

Arlington, Virginia
July 22

Deborah Stepanovich stared at the television screen, appalled by the events of the past twenty-four hours, by the sequence of shocks that threatened now to spin completely out of control.

When she had left her law offices in the District yesterday evening, all had been well—at least, as well as they could be when one’s teenage daughter had taken French leave to a still-indeterminate location.

But Deborah had awakened today to find the capital in complete chaos. Things were still reasonably quiet here, across the river; but Deborah had decided that she wanted Katie home, immediately.

Not for the first time this morning, she wondered why Beck had not returned any of her calls from the previous afternoon. Whatever his faults or failings, Deborah did not doubt Beck’s love for his daughter. For a long moment, she eyed the telephone, debating whether to try him in Chicago one more time.

Instead, she reached for her bag and removed the Palm Pilot in which she kept her records, notes and the telephone numbers she seldom felt inclined to call.

Deborah Stepanovich squeezed the telephone handset hard enough to feel the plastic flex beneath her fingers. Had the other woman been present in the room, instead of at the other end of a long-distance connection, Deborah was sure that by now she would have throttled Carly Holmes’s mother.

“Joyce,” she said, careful to keep her voice level. “Just tell me.”

She could hear Joyce Holmes’s sigh of exasperation, and seethed silently while she waited for a response.

“Mah Gawd. Theah’ just out havin’ some fun, Debbie. Ah’m sure theah’ just fine.”

Joyce Holmes’s Southern accent was a relatively recent acquisition, Deborah realized; not too many years ago, when Katie and Carly had played on the same soccer team, Joyce’s pronunciation had been the more clipped tones that reflected her upbringing in a Cleveland suburb.

Around the time that Carly’s father had moved in with a real estate agent from Silver Springs, Joyce’s almost-severe suburban-mom persona had begun a marked evolution to that of flirtatious Southern belle. Now she sounded as if she had never ventured north of the Mason-Dixon line and that her worst fear was the dreaded return of Sherman’s raiders.