The Coward's Way of War (10 page)

“Go back into the city and report in to the nearest police station,” he told her.  “They will arrange somewhere for you to stay in New York.  Once we get vaccination programs under way, you will be vaccinated and will be able to return home.”

He watched the girl head back to her car, looking terrified.  He didn't blame her, either. 

***

The CB radio kept bleeping with updates from various travellers as Linda drove her family out of the city.  Jim sat beside her, one hand on the pistol at his
belt, as he struggled to make sense of the endless and contradictory updates.  Some travellers were reporting that shots had been fired at one of the roadblocks; others were claiming that the soldiers had opened fire and killed hundreds of desperate refugees.  One man was even claiming that there were hundreds of smallpox victims staggering after him, moaning with pain or desire.  One of the boys pointed out that they sounded more like zombies to him.  Jim hadn't seen the funny side.

They’d worked through, years ago, just how the military could seal off the city.  The main roads out of the city could be sealed off easily – along with all of Manhattan, which made him grateful that he hadn't made his home on the island – but it would be harder to seal off the smaller roads.  Given time, they would be able to deploy the manpower to do that, which meant that the survivalists had to hurry.  She drove as quickly as she dared, ignoring speed limits and speed cameras, heading out of the city.  Others seemed to have the same idea, but not everyone – thankfully – had thought of the side roads.  That wouldn't last.  He caught sight of a police car moving in behind them and found himself considering, quite seriously, trying to shoot his way out before the policemen let them go.  In the time they would need to stop Jim and his family from escaping, they’d lose hundreds of others.  They drove onwards, risking slipping onto the interstate west of the city and gunned the engine.  Even under the best possible conditions, they would still need over six hours to reach the refuge.  They’d have to stop and refuel the car, if money was still any good.  If not...he forced himself not to think about the possibilities, or about what he might have to do to take care of his family. 

He poked the radio as they drove onwards.  The President’s message was being repeated time and time again, in-between hundreds of different pieces of advice, some of them contradictory or harmful.  The last time the group had considered going to the refuge had been during the bird flu crisis, when they had feared that it might spread to America and out of control.  He couldn't fault the President for restricting travel, even if it was unconstitutional, but he wasn't going to leave his family in New York, not now that it had been infected with smallpox.  He would not allow it to happen.

“Dad,” Robin said suddenly, “what about school?”

Jim found himself laughing hysterically.  He had often considered home-schooling the boys, but the truth was that neither he nor Linda had much aptitude for teaching.  The boys hadn't liked their school or the smarmy teachers, yet now he would give almost anything for things to go back to normal.  The world would never be the same again.  It struck him that he was among those who were best prepared for the crisis, yet he knew now he hadn't prepared enough.  How could he have prepared?

“I think that school is out for the foreseeable future,” he said, ruefully.  The boys didn't look unhappy, he was amused to note.  If they linked up with the others from the group, perhaps they could set up some kind of schooling.  Public schools, with hundreds of children in close proximity, would be a breeding ground for smallpox.  They’d remain closed for a very long time and, even after the crisis had been defeated, if it ever was defeated, no one would place so much faith in them again.  “We’ll see what happens when we get to the farm.”

The sky slowly faded to darkness as the night wore in.  They passed hundreds of other cars and trucks, even though the radio kept repeating warnings about unessential travel.  Many of the service stations and motels seemed to have decided to close early, although he was able to stop at a pump station and buy some gas.  He took the opportunity to splash out and purchase additional supplies for the SUV, knowing that money might soon be worthless.  It wasn't hard to work out what would happen when most of America's workforce refused to come into work.  The entire economy would collapse.  Businesses would go under, banks would fail, tax revenue would end...the entire country would enter an unprecedented economic nightmare from which it might never recover.  Nothing was ever going to be the same again.

“Get some sleep,” he ordered the boys, as they passed an army convoy heading the other way.  He half-expected the soldiers to stop them, but they just let them pass without even waving.  Perhaps, out in the countryside, there would be no attempt to impede traffic.  “We’ll be there tomorrow morning.”

The radio spoke endlessly of the need for calm.

It is important to remember that animals are not, by definition, human.  A medicine tested on an animal
– such as a monkey – may not actually be effective when used on a human, or vice versa.  Even when dealing with diseases that can cross between species – like smallpox – it is still difficult to be sure that one cure will work for all.  This leaves us with the disturbing need to carry out human testing, intentionally or otherwise.

- Doctor Nicolas Awad

Washingto
n DC, USA

Day 7

There was exactly one research facility that belonged solely to Project Wildfire, a former USAF base that had been decommissioned and placed under the care of a small caretaker crew.  The Wildfire experts had converted the base
’s underground facilities into a series of research labs, patient rooms and secure storage facilities, knowing that if the base were ever to be activated, it would be required to study the effects of a biological attack.  No one outside a very small group of select people knew that the base was anything other than what it seemed, a disused airfield far enough from Washington for comfort. 

Cally Henderson lay on a bed within a private room, stripped of all dignity by her disease and the small army of doctors and nurses surrounding her.  Nicolas watched as they bent over her naked body, warped and mutilated by the hundreds of pustules covering her bare skin, taking samples and injecting her with fluids that might help keep her alive for another day or two.  IV lines ran from the ceiling, pumping in liquid food and painkillers, while smaller tubes had been attached to her vagina and anus.  The poor girl would have died by now, were it not for the medical intervention, yet Nicolas held no hope for her recovery. The researchers had been charting the process of the disease – Henderson’s Disease, they’d started to call it – and had concluded that it was systematically wrecking her body.  They weren't even sure if Miss Henderson was still aware of her surroundings.

Nicolas grimaced as one of the pustules broke, scattering infectious material over the bed.  The woman had become little more than a walking pile of smallpox, so heavily infectious that anyone who went near her without a protective suit would almost certainly wind up infected with the disease.  Even death would bring no relief for the rest of the world, he knew, for smallpox would remain dangerous until her body was burned in a furnace.  When her body finally failed, despite everything they could do to keep her alive, she would be dissected and then, what remained of her body would be destroyed.  Even so, it hardly seemed to matter.  The disease was already loose in America, if not the entire world.

He turned away as the girl moaned in pain and looked towards the FBI’s massive chart of her life.  It would have alarmed any civil liberties campaigner if they had known just how comprehensively a person’s life could be profiled by the government, yet none of it answered the most important question of all; where in the world had Miss Henderson been infected with smallpox?  As an air hostess, she had been around the world, but there was nowhere outside the United States – yet, he reminded himself – that was reporting a smallpox epidemic.  The disease appeared to have come out of nowhere.  The pattern fitted a biological attack, of course, but even so...where had it come from?

Cally Henderson, in the week before she had called in sick, had been to three different countries; Saudi Arabia, France and Mexico.  While on her aircraft, she had met literally thousands of people, from all walks of life.  Depending on when she had actually become contagious, she could have spread the disease all around the world on her own.  She had certainly infected most of her workmates, who had all been in the early stages of Henderson’s Disease when medical personnel had reached their homes.  If she had been the only carrier, it suggested that Henderson’s Disease had an incubation period of just under a week – unlike regular smallpox, which had an incubation period of twelve to fourteen days -  but there was no way to know that for sure.  If there were other carriers, the disease might have a longer incubation period.

He took one last look at Miss Henderson, who was moaning in pain as a needle gently penetrated her arm, and walked away.  It seemed obscene to keep her alive when they could spare her suffering, but there was no choice.  He told himself that they had to know everything they could about the disease, yet it meant prolonging – perhaps even worsening – her suffering.  There were plenty of people in the world who deserved to suffer, he knew, including the perverted doctors who had warped smallpox into Henderson’s Disease, but a doctor was not meant to encourage suffering.  He had known that he would have to play fast and loose with his medical ethics when he joined Wildfire, all in the name of the greater good, yet it was harder now he was facing a real patient.  The only other emergencies he had faced had been in drills, where no one had actually suffered and it had been easy to prescribe harsh and desperate measures.

His Bluetooth phone buzzed.  “Doctor, this is Jack,” a voice said.  “We’re ready for you in Room Three.”

Nicolas grimaced as he passed through a set of airlocks and into a long passage leading down to a second set of secure rooms.  He had always taken his oaths seriously – above all, first do no harm – and what they were about to do broke his oaths, along with hundreds of national and international agreements on just what doctors and researchers could and could not do.  He told himself that there were already hundreds of known cases of Henderson’s Disease – and doubtless thousands of unknown cases, who would begin to show symptoms over the next couple of days – and desperate measures were required, yet the whole concept disgusted him.  It smacked of what the Nazis or the Japanese had done back in the Second World War, or, for that matter, of the perverted genius that had created Henderson’s Disease.

Years ago, in 1796, Doctor Edward Jenner had realised that milkmaids – who caught cowpox as a result of their work – never seemed to catch smallpox, which had roared through England from time to time.  In an experiment that would have horrified his future descendents, Jenner had taken cowpox from a young milkmaid and transferred it to a young boy, who had promptly caught the disease.  When the subject had recovered, Jenner had attempted to infect him with smallpox, an act that could well have killed him.  The boy hadn’t caught the disease.  Jenner had repeated the experiment several times and then started encouraging people to spread the word, using cowpox to immunise people against the far more deadly smallpox.  Jenner had become known as the Father of Immunology for his work, saving the human race from one of the deadliest scourges known to man.  He would have been astonished to discover that, in the future, testing new and experimental cures was so hedged around by rules and regulations that the process had practically ground to a halt and human experimentation was effectively banned.

Nicolas stopped outside the viewing room and pressed his hand against the biometric reader, allowing it to scan his fingerprints before allowing him access.  The viewing room was dominated by a one-way mirror, allowing him to see into the four sealed medical rooms, each one inhabited by a single person.  A handful of other researchers were watching with interest, but no one spoke.  Nicolas knew that they shared the same ambivalence about the experiment that he felt himself, the certain knowledge that they were doing something necessary, matched with the concern that they were doing something inhuman.  If word got out, there would be uproar. 

He glanced down at his notes.  Subject One was a former infantryman who had been caught in the act of raping an Iraqi girl back during the occupation.  The media had made much of the act, but they had largely refrained from noticing that Subject One had been tried, sentenced and bundled off to the toughest prison in the United States.  Subject Two was a former USAF officer who had been convicted of terrorism after planting a bomb in a USAF aircraft, claiming that his religion demanded opposition to his country. The important detail, as far as Project Wildfire was concerned, was that both of the former military personnel had been injected with smallpox vaccine during their induction into the military.