Immortality (11 page)

“A chemical leak,” said McKafferty.

“That’s some hell of a leak. What happened? Some war toy blow a fuse and you’re the clean up crew?”

“No, son, I am not the clean up crew. Why don’t you tell me what happened.”

Harold went through his story beginning with birds acting oddly and ending with an NBC squad evacuating him. He went on in detail about how horrifying it was to see all his friends crumpling to the ground. McKafferty wondered what Harold would think if he could see the docks now. The shoreline was littered with dead fish, birds, and marine mammals. After his team had dumped toxin in the water to simulate a chemical weapons leak, everything living there was now dead except Harold. As far as the scientists could ascertain, Harold was the first person to be exposed at the epicenter of a kill zone and survive. He could end up becoming a walking antidote factory.

“Okay, you saw a vehicle run into a stack of crates,” said McKafferty. “Are you sure that happened after everyone started dying? Maybe it happened before? Maybe whatever killed everyone was in the crates?”

“You’re not listening, man!” yelled Harold. “First the fuckin’ birds were butting heads, then Toad and a lot of the other guys dropped like rag dolls. This wasn’t any dock accident. This was a goddamn rerun of the Twilight Zone. Rod fuckin’ Serling was standing down on the docks saying
Consider this if you will
... Get it?”

“Harold, just take it easy.”

“Fuck you!”

“You’re in shock and you’ve got the sequence confused.”

“My story isn’t changing, James. I saw what I saw, and it’s just too bad if that doesn’t fit your official version of lies. What the hell happened here? One of your chemical weapons go off? Huh? You mother fuckers kill all my friends?”

McKafferty’s radio beeped. He turned his back on Harold and listened. The signal was from Lieutenant Rivers with more bad news. CNN had received footage broadcast from that private plane, and they were outside in the police parking lot right now with lights and a mini-cam broadcasting live.

“Shit!”

McKafferty walked out of the infirmary and cornered a deputy.

“You got a TV with cable in this place?’

“In the Captain’s office.”

McKafferty stood in front of the set. This was a disaster. A reporter dressed in an NBC suit was laying out carefully worded rumor and speculation as fact. Their need for “a scoop” was going to cause hysteria.

“
To Repeat: A major incident has occurred in Anchorage Alaska at two p.m. Alaska Standard Time – six p.m. Eastern Standard Time. The incident, which occurred in the Port of Anchorage, may have been the work of terrorists. Nothing has been confirmed or denied yet. Authorities are providing very little information. We have eyewitness accounts that hundreds of people are dead, and that the cause is an airborne chemical of undetermined nature. We have film from a spotter plane that flew over the scene one hour ago at five p.m. local time.”

The television showed an aerial view of bodies lying across the dock, with men in space suits walking around them. McKafferty was beyond anger. He was in that silent place where rage brewed into lethal concentrations. He knew the political opportunists would be sharpening their knives. Those animals were better at sensing wounded prey than a pack of wild hyenas.

The alarm clock buzzed. The time was eight-thirty in the evening. Kathy reached out and deftly hit the snooze button. She yearned to go back to sleep. Her body’s cycle was totally confused. She sat up, draping her legs over the side of the couch. Her mouth was dry. She picked up a can of warm Diet Pepsi and drank some. Slowly, her brain started to grind through the facts. She got up and walked past balled up clothing and books and papers sprawled everywhere. Her office looked like a locker room. She’d been living out of it for eleven days. One dead end after another had kept her grasping to find new leads. Nothing she had learned over the years seemed to apply anymore. This monster evaded every framework for detection that medical science had ever devised.

The BVMC lab had originally been designed to support twenty-four hour operations in case of emergencies. Senior staff offices on the fourth floor were set up for extended stays like small hotel rooms with stall showers, toilets, and sleeper couches. Kathy walked into her tiny private bathroom and flipped on the light. Tolstoy was in the sink, peering over the rim at her. He looked so proud of himself. She smiled then saw her reflection in the mirror. The smile faded. Was that really her? There were deep bags under her eyes. Her T-shirt was wrinkled and the shorts she was wearing hung limp from her thinning body. She removed Tolstoy from his hideout and filled the basin with water. During the next fifteen minutes, she washed her face and put on simple makeup. The results left her feeling human again.

Kathy was riding the elevator down to the cafeteria to eat whatever was left over from dinner. Her thoughts were elsewhere. Carl had gotten his way days ago on Chromatium. Kathy had been forced to retest all the victims – with zero results. The Navy diver was the only one with the bug in him. She also had several primate test trials running with Chromatium
.
Before heading down to the cafeteria, she’d received an e-mail on one of those waste-of-time trials. Lab techs had been running twenty-four hour relay shifts to complete the trials. The CDC had obtained a breeding colony of Chromatium Omri from a research center up in Rochester, New York. Living Chromatium had been injected into the blood stream – and even the brainstems – of lab monkeys. The animals’ immune systems ignored the bacterium, not recognizing it as a threat. So far, in every case, the Chromatium had died within forty-eight hours, essentially from starvation. For Chromatium, there was nothing good to eat inside a monkey. None of the lab monkeys were showing symptoms of SAAC. A warm-blooded circulatory system did not appear to be a great environment for this particular bug.

Kathy wandered into the empty cafeteria. The clock on the wall showed it was almost a quarter after nine in the evening. She was exhausted. She put some leftover pizza into a microwave and wondered, not for the first time, if amphetamines might not be such as bad idea. A week ago, she’d been certain they’d have found important pieces to the puzzle by now. Instead, all they had was a growing list of questions. If she could just figure out how to recreate those microscopic cuts in nerve fibers. Maybe the killer was some kind of unknown microbe that moved in straight lines, leaving a trail of nerve tissue-dissolving enzyme that vanished without a trace? Kathy sighed and closed her eyes. Yeah right… and maybe the tooth fairy had turned into a sociopath and was bumping off bad South Americans that didn’t believe in fairies. The microwave beeped.

Not surprisingly, the pizza had been unsatisfying. Kathy turned a corner in the hallway. She heard her phone ringing and ran for it. Her pager started going off. Her skin felt like an electrical current was crawling all over it. Instinctively, she knew something bad had happened. She tripped over a pair of sneakers in the middle of her office floor, but still managed to grab the phone before the caller gave up.

“Hello!” she gasped.

“Switch on CNN.” It was Carl.

“What is it?”

“Just turn it on. You need to see this.”

The television was a twenty inch model sitting on a stand, with a digital recorder below. Using a remote, Kathy switched on the set. It was already tuned to CNN. There was an aerial view of a dockyard with bodies lying all over the ground. Nearby were three military helicopters that had landed on the dock. Their rotors were turning slowly. Men in biohazard gear were examining the scene. Kathy sat down behind her desk. The phone receiver was still pressed to her face. A reporter was in the middle of his story. The title read
Anchorage, Alaska
.

“
...It’s hard to describe what I’ve experienced tonight. I have to keep reminding myself that this is happening. One hundred-six confirmed fatalities, no survivors. Earlier I spoke with a medical worker who said that all the victims’ lips and fingernails had turned blue. I was told this is a symptom of suffocation. The government has issued a statement that this is not a terrorist attack. There are strong rumors that some type of chemical weapons leak has occurred; but whatever has happened, the results are terrifying. Along with the human toll, the shores are littered with thousands upon thousands of marine animals. The Harbor is under martial law. No one is allowed in or out. CNN has attempted several times to again fly over the zone but has been driven off by F16 jets that are now patrolling the area. Orwellian and ominous are the feelings one gets when seeing this horror, as I did from the passenger seat of a small plane. I remember thinking, this can’t be real...”

Kathy was stunned. This incident had to be SAAC, and it had now jumped to North America; but there should have been no dead animals, just people. If this thing was now killing animals, then it was a species jumper. And if that was true, then this was a clear sign of mutation. And chemical agents did not mutate; that little trick was reserved for living things like microbes.

“Carl, who do we have on site?”

“I’ve been trying to get an EIS team in there, but the Army has a lid on it. They didn’t even alert us. The folks in charge want our help but we’re not allowed any direct contact. They don’t want news leaking out that we’re dealing with an unknown epidemic.”

“That’s crazy. We have to be there. Get Director Shaw involved.”

“It’s already come from the top. The Army’s in control of this. And forget about the dead animals. Apparently some genius decided to kill off a good part of the marine life in Cook Inlet just to support their cover story about a chemical weapons leak.”

Kathy massaged her temple with her free hand. The burgeoning headache lessened a small amount. She wasn’t sure which was worse: the Army killing things to support their lies, or the disappointment that the hot agent was not a species jumper and she had just lost what could have been an important clue. On the other end of the phone, she heard Carl lighting up a cigarette.

“Okay,” said Kathy. “The government wants us to stop an epidemic, then ties our hands by restricting us from going on site. Is there any theory how SAAC ended up in Alaska?”

“A ship registered to Venezuela was in port.”

“Damn it, I told you we needed quarantines!”

“And I told Director Shaw, and he told the President, and look what it got us: nothing. Forget quarantines.”

“Well, tell them all again! Because of no quarantines it’s now on American soil. Where’s this Venezuelan ship? If we can get some blood samples from the crew and test the cargo, I can...”

Carl interrupted her.

“The ship’s a ball of fire. It collided with a vessel carrying highly flammable chemicals.”

“How convenient,” sneered Kathy.

“I’m going to tell you something and I want you to stay calm. An Army liaison officer told me they have a survivor. The man was in the middle of the kill zone and is in perfect health so far. Zero side effects.”

“What! How soon can we get him?”

“We can’t. The Army has him locked up in Anchorage and that’s where he’s staying.”

“I have to examine him. I’ll put on a uniform and pretend to be an Army nurse. I’ll do anything they ask; just get me in there.”

“They won’t let you see him. Believe me, I’ve already jumped through the hoops. They’ve agreed you can interview him over the phone. And they’ll collect blood samples and perform any tests you request.”

“That’s crazy. The entire country’s in danger, and we can’t get quarantines but the Army can. We can’t examine patients, but they can. What’s next? Are they going to take away my magic decoder ring because the Army could use it?”

“I’m sorry, Kathy.”

“What’s happening to you? Whatever happened to fighting for what’s right?”

~

The light from her office window was growing pinker. It looked like in another hour sunrise would be flooding the sky with pastel shades. Kathy had been on the phone several times going through a chain of Army officers, including a doctor who had custody of the survivor. She had not been given the patient’s medical history, travel history, or even his full name. Blood and tissue samples were on their way to her lab by military courier, along with a small square of cloth cut from his shirt, but that was it. Field tests done on Port Anchorage casualties had shown elevated immune responses matching those found in South America. She wished they could have somehow checked for micro-cuts in victims while still at the scene; but with the optical microscopes and the other portable equipment at their disposal, that was impossible.

Major Garvey, an expert on chemical and biological countermeasures was on the phone with her now. Kathy had quickly realized obtaining information from these people was almost as difficult as getting a straight answer from a politician. At least Major Garvey wasn’t trying to insult her with the same propaganda that was being fed to CNN. She apparently had the necessary security clearance to avoid that lie. They discussed the connection to South America and the fact that all the military experts believed the killer was a biological agent. In an attempt to get more out of Major Garvey, Kathy had resorted to baiting him by arguing that the killer-agent had to be a chemical, though she no longer saw how it could be unless someone had figured out how to make it randomly toxic. Completely unaffected survivors were just not found in the middle of a lethal chemical exposure.

“How could anything biological kill all those people at the same instant?” said Kathy. “Even if they were all exposed at the same time, some of them were healthier than others. There were differences in body mass, metabolism, age. Onset times would have to vary. The symptoms I’m seeing are much closer to a chemical agent than a bug. Maybe your cover story inadvertently turns out to be true? That would confuse everyone. Government news leak found to be accurate; story at eleven.”