Reaper (20 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

Max opened the door to the communications room, stepped in and asked, “So what’s up?  You got something?”

Heidi, who was standing next to Seth with one hand resting on the back of his chair, the other on the counter supporting his laptop said, “Well, we’re not exactly sure.  Something’s happening.”

Max closed the door and stepped closer, looking over Seth’s other shoulder.

Seth turned his head toward him.  “Calhoun sent an email a few minutes ago to who we think is his wife.  Basically, he told her to get the kids, pack up all the food in the house, and drive straight to the cabin.”  Seth looked back at his screen.  “He wrote, ‘
I’m not at liberty to say more than that right now.  Trust me on this.  I’ll call you tomorrow if I can and explain more.’ 
He also said, let’s see here,” Seth searched the text with his finger, “not to tell anyone where she’s going or why.  And here’s the scary part, ‘
if you have to stop for gas, wait until no one is around the pumps, put on rubber gloves before you touch anything, and then get rid of them before you get back in the car.’”

Max frowned and pressed his lips together.  “Hmm.”

The door opened and Will stepped inside.  “Oh, there you are.  Good.  I guess they filled you in, huh?”

Max said, “Yeah, just, and I can’t think of too many explanations other than something contagious; but what?

“A bad flu maybe,” Heidi offered.

“Maybe, but if so, it’s a really, really bad one.”

“How about checking the Center for Disease Control website,” Will suggested.  “They might have something posted.”

Seth banged away on the keys and pulled up the site.  The Outbreak section only showed outbreaks of salmonella in poultry dated two weeks before and for clover sprouts about a week before that.

“You don’t put on gloves and hide out in a cabin because of a localized salmonella outbreak,” Max said.

He picked up one of the handheld radios from its charger and asked the front gate to check their log to see if Dr. Patel had checked out.

“Still here,” was the reply.

He replaced the radio onto the charger, asked Heidi to call the infirmary to see if Dr. Patel was there, and then picked up the handheld again.  He informed the front gate security not to let anyone leave or enter until he gave the go-ahead.

Another idea came to mind.  He got a hold of the front gate again and asked if there were any sworn who were currently working.  The reply was a list of ten, one of whom was Justin Peavey.  Using his cell phone, he looked up Peavey’s number in his contact list and called him.  He had to leave a message.

“She’s there,” Heidi said.  “I asked her to come as soon as possible.”

“I may have no choice but to bring her into our confidence regarding hacking Calhoun’s email.  Maybe Myra, too.”

“Do you think Calhoun figured out we were snooping him and is trying to trick us?” Seth said.

“Any of his other emails seem suspicious in that regard?”

“Kinda hard to tell, but I don’t think so.”

“He has a point, though” Will said.  “Maybe they’re on to us or trying to test us out.  You know, if we start acting like there’s some virus going around, he’ll know we hacked him.  After all, there wasn’t anything on the CDC website.”

“Maybe, but that kind of news is something the feds might censor; at least for a while anyway.”

Seth went back to his keyboard again.

Max’s phone rang.  It was Peavey.

“Hey, Justin, can you swing by the federal courthouse and see if it looks like the DHS is up to anything?

“You mean like gearing up for a raid or something?”

“Yeah, something like that.  In fact, when you get there, call me will you?”

“Sure, I’ll head over in a few.”

Dr. Patel knocked and entered the room, closing the door behind her.

“Okay doc, we need your help with something.  But first, I’m going to insist that you keep the part about
how
we know this information confidential; at least for now anyway.  Can I have your word on this?”

“Sure, I guess so.  What is it?”

“We’ve hacked the email account of one of the management people at the Department of Homeland Security.  That’s the part we need to keep confidential, we’ll talk about the rest after you read the email.  Seth, can you pull it up and let her read it?”

Seth tapped out of the search he was doing and went back into Calhoun’s email, hit the print function, heard the printer come to life, and returned to his search.

After reading the email through a couple of times, she said, “It sounds like he thinks there’s something seriously contagious going around.”

“That’s what it sounds like to us, too.  But there’s another possibility.  He may be aware that we’ve hacked his computer and is trying to confirm it.”

Dr. Patel nodded her head.  “Okay, I guess that’s another explanation.  But I suppose you called me here to see if I could find anything out.”

“Exactly, only through unofficial channels if possible.”

“Now?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Okay, let me see what I can get from the hospital.”

Max’s phone rang.  It was Peavey again.

“So, anything going on?”

“If there is, I sure can’t tell.  They’re just hanging out at their checkpoints, doing their regular thing.”

“What are they wearing?” Max asked.

“Well, okay, maybe that’s a little weird.  It’s not exactly cold out here and they’re wearing those things that cover their faces except for the eyes.  You see the Mexican federal police wearing ‘em in news photos so they can’t be identified.”

“How about their hands; any gloves?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact they’re wearing black gloves; all of them are.  Why?”

“Not sure yet.  It may be nothing.  You can take off anytime but keep your phone with you. I’ll call you back after we have a chance to talk here.”

“Ooookay, a little weird, but I’ll do it.”

“I’ll call you back.”  As soon as he hung up, Max felt guilty for not telling Peavey what was going on.

“They’re wearing masks and gloves,” Max told the others.

“Still could be part of the trick,” Will said.  “Maybe they figured we’d do something like that …check them out.”

Seth spun around in his chair.  “Okay, there’s something about a flu virus on a website called British Colombia Center for Disease Control.  It simply says that there are reports from hospitals of an increased number of persons complaining about flu-like symptoms and lists the usual, wash your hands, stay indoors, get rest, and so forth.  If you want, I can also see what some of my friends in other cities can find out,” Seth said.

A Canadian report? The flu?  I don’t know, Max thought.  “What do you mean, your friends?  How?”

“Encrypted email.  No way the government spies are gonna read it.”

“Okay, go for it,” Max said.  “See if you can find out what the DHS is wearing.”

“May take a while,” Seth replied, once again pounding away on his keyboard.

Dr. Patel hung up the phone.  “Well that was interesting.”

“Find something out?” Will asked.

“I spoke with one of the physicians in the ER.  He said there’s been a slight increase of persons complaining of fever, headaches, muscle pain, and in some cases, nausea.  A few of them have been admitted for dehydration and because they’ve presented what they are calling fever blisters.”

“Do they know what it is?  A flu?” Max said.

“That’s what they think it is.  They’re following the standard protocol of notifying the proper people, Department of Health and so forth.”

A chill ran through Max’s body.  “Is it anywhere else in the country?”

“I don’t know.  They didn’t mention anything.”

“Hey, Seth, were you able to tell where Calhoun’s wife lived?”

Seth didn’t even turn around.  He just shook his head no and kept on typing.

“Is there a way you can check and see if other hospitals are experiencing an increase of flu-like cases?” Max asked Dr. Patel.

“I can try.  I have some classmates I can call.”

“Okay, do it.”

“Uh, oh,” Seth said.  “This isn’t about people getting sick, but this guy I know in San Diego says there’s some serious shit going on; his words not mine, Dad.  He says that the National Guard is in a big old battle near the border with a group that is comprised mostly of drug cartel people who are declaring San Diego and all points south to be part of Mexico.  A lot of people are getting out of the city because of it; freeways are packed.”

“If there’s any doubt that the feds are censoring the news, this certainly proves it,” Will said.  “There wasn’t’ a word about that on the morning news channels.”

“What about the DHS?”

“Nothing yet.”

The problem now was, Max thought, do we start taking precautions?  The presence of a highly contagious flu, or whatever, was more likely true than not true, and he had an obligation to protect the people inside the fence.  With everyone living so close together, any strain of flu getting loose here would be a nightmare.  Some would leave.  Others, if they stayed and got sick, would present some difficulty in terms of care.  And a bunch of sick cops wouldn’t be going to work.  Then there was the question of what precautions
could
he take?  There might be people here who already had it.

Dr. Patel, who was talking on her phone, asked the person she was speaking with to hold on, and took a waiting call.  After a couple of minutes she disconnected with the new caller and went back to the one she had first been speaking to.  “Okay, the main thing is can you find out if your hospital has been experiencing any increase in people with those symptoms.”

Listening.

“Oh, that would be great.  Yeah, just call me back.”

She hung up the phone and turned to Max and the others.  “So one of those calls was from a friend in New York.  She says they’ve also been receiving a slight to moderate increase in people complaining about flu-like symptoms.  She also mentions blisters, but she doesn’t describe them as fever blisters.  She says they’re more like blood blisters.  One of their patients with these blisters is critical and as a precaution is in isolation.  They don’t know what the virus is yet, but think it’s probably a new strain of the flu or maybe even measles.”

“Okay, what can we do to keep it out of
here
?” Max asked.

“Well, unfortunately, it may already be here.  There’s usually an incubation period of a few days where people aren’t contagious, but it’s inside their bodies, replicating and getting stronger.  Eventually, it presents itself, and that’s typically when someone becomes contagious.  If it’s like most viruses, at first you might think you’ve just got a cold or maybe strained your muscles a little.  At that point, because you don’t feel too bad, you’re still doing things, interacting with others, and of course at the same time infecting them.”

“How long’s the incubation period?”

“It’s slightly different for different viruses; as a general rule of thumb, seven to fourteen days.  From a contagion standpoint, the longer the incubation period, the longer it is before you know you have a problem, especially when you don’t know what the virus is.  If it’s highly contagious and misdiagnosed at first as something like the flu, infectious patients are sent home to self-treat.  Because they
aren’t that sick
,” she made quote marks with her fingers, “they still go to the grocery store, the drug store, maybe their favorite restaurant, and so forth, so they’re infecting more people.  Studies indicate that anywhere from ten to twenty people are infected by just one contagious patient not kept in isolation.  So if you have, say, one hundred sick people, and each of them infects twenty others, and each of those, twenty more, and so on, if I’m doing my math right, you could have eight hundred thousand people infected within a month to a month and a half.”

“Jesus.”

“In theory.”

“Okay, so we may have infected people living here.  But we may not, too.  Or we may have only one or two who have been exposed and haven’t passed it on yet.  So the question is still, what do we do?”

“Well, I’ll have to do some research, but it’s pretty basic.  First off, most everyone here hasn’t been outside the gate in what, at least seven or eight days.  There are probably even people who haven’t been outside the gate in two weeks.  That’s a big help.  Find out who those people are.

If you want to do it right, you start by masking everyone and making sure they either wear disposable gloves or keep their hands away from their face.  The masks help with that.  Then you check everyone to see if they have any symptoms.  If nobody is showing any symptoms, they’re probably not contagious even if they’ve been exposed.  Now you can be reasonably sure those who haven’t been outside the gate in a couple of weeks are disease free.  As a precaution, maybe they still continue to wear a mask for a few days, but they should be safe.  So we put them in one part of the building.”