The Coward's Way of War (11 page)

Subject Three, on the other hand, came from a civilian background.  He had raped and murdered four young girls before he had finally been caught and sentenced to death by an outraged jury.  He had been working the appeals process ever since, struggling to remain alive, despite the country’s fury.  His fellow prisoners had taken a dim view of him; his face bore the scars from a brutal beating he’d taken while in the showers, before he’d been placed in solitary confinement for his own protection.  Subject Four, the only woman in the group, had deliberately murdered her own children, for no apparent reason.  She too had been under sentence of death when she’d been pulled out of Death Row and transferred to the base.

Nicolas shook his head as the prisoners paced their room.  They didn't know it, but their compartments were linked to Miss Henderson’s room and smallpox particles were drifting through the air towards them.  The doctors would watch and monitor to see which of the prisoners caught the disease and study how it attacked their system, charting its course from infection to death.  He wondered if the prisoners knew what was going on, or if they would have volunteered for the experiment if they had been told what was going to happen, yet they had to remain unaware.  The medical system in the outside world was already tottering under the weight of people thinking themselves ill, convinced that they were suffering from smallpox and were going to die any second, and the prisoners couldn't be allowed to warp the results in the same way.  The whole experiment disgusted him, yet there was no choice. 

The President hadn't been entirely truthful when she’d addressed the nation.  There wasn’t enough smallpox vaccine to inject everyone in the continental United States.  The various drug companies had been urged to produce more as rapidly as possible, but the most optimistic figures suggested that it would be months before production was re-established and new vaccines started to come off the line.  The immunisation program was proceeding as rapidly as possible, yet it was proving a difficult task.  It didn't help that the internet was already buzzing with rumours that the government intended to withhold the vaccine from certain elements of the public, purely in the hope that those elements would do them the favour of dropping dead.  It was absurd, yet people were starting to panic.  They would believe anything if it offered them the hope of surviving infection. 

He shook his head and walked out of the chamber.  The other doctors would continue to observe the patients, tracking the disease, but he didn't want to even look at them.  Deliberately infecting people – even criminals who deserved to suffer in the most horrific manner possible – was horrific.  It had been so much easier to draw up the protocols when there had been nothing more than an intellectual exercise.  He passed through a secure checkpoint - even within the base, there were areas that were off-limits to half of the base’s personnel – and headed down into the research labs.  In sealed rooms, robotic arms moved small samples of disease around, while doctors studied it through microscopes and compared it to the DNA records of other variants of smallpox.

“I have good news and bad news,” Doctor McCoy said.  “This particular variant of smallpox is behaving very oddly.”

“So it’s smallpox, Jim, but not as we know it,” Nicolas said.  Doctor McCoy scowled at him.  The joke would probably have been funnier if people hadn’t been making it ever since he had qualified as a medical doctor.  “What exactly is it doing?”

McCoy pointed to one of the sample trays.  “For a start, it is multiplying very quickly within the test materials,” he said.  He tapped a key and brought up an image from one of the microscopes, displaying it above the case.  The smallpox was attacking the sample of human flesh terrifyingly quickly.  “I would go so far as to suggest that the incubation period for Henderson’s Disease is less than a week, perhaps as little as four days.  If someone was already ill, the chances are that it would actually bring them down faster.”

Nicolas nodded impatiently.  A person whose immune system was already weakened – either through AIDS or simply through having a minor infection – would be in no state to fight off smallpox, or even resist it for any length of time.  AIDS was not easy to catch – although thousands of doctors and quacks had exaggerated the dangers for years – yet once a person had it, it was very difficult to cure them.  The drug companies were still working on a vaccine for AIDS, but there had been no real progress.

“Worse,” McCoy continued, “it is alarmingly contagious.  I think that a victim actually becomes contagious within two to three days and starts spreading the disease, unaware that there is something badly wrong with them.  The disease seems to be airborne and only a small level of infection is required to spread the disease.  In short, it appears to be the perfect biological weapon.  I would be very surprised to hear that we’d managed to contain it within the cities.”

“I know,” Nicolas said.  The military had thrown up the road blocks as quickly as possible, but he knew that thousands of people had managed to get out of the cities before the road blocks had been put into position, while hundreds more were still trying to sneak out past the military and escape.  The odds were good that most of them hadn't been infected, yet if only one or two of them
had
been infected, they were likely to spread the disease into the countryside as well.  Farmers and their families were on the list of people to be vaccinated as quickly as possible, but what would happen if the disease was already burning through the countryside?  Nothing good, he was sure.  “Is there any good news?”

“It doesn't last long in the open air,” McCoy said, standing up.  “We know that UV light can be used to kill germs, but it seems that even bright sunlight will kill Henderson’s Disease, at least in the air.  It won’t do anything about a dead body – that’s still going to remain a danger until it’s burnt to ashes – yet there will be limits on how far it can spread.”

“Let’s hope so,” Nicolas agreed.  There were already hundreds of cases within New York alone.  If the disease continued to spread, the cities would be turned into charnel houses.   Some irresponsible talking heads were already wondering if the military was planning to nuke American cities, just to prevent the disease from spreading further.  There were times when Nicolas cursed the American media, for talk like that would only spread panic.  It would be every man for himself if panic got out of control.  “Is there anything else?”

“So far, no one with the vaccine has caught it,” McCoy said, flatly.  “I’m due back in New York to check up on the policeman who found Miss Henderson, but so far he shows no sign of smallpox, even in his blood.  I would hesitate to be completely certain, yet I think that that’s a hopeful sign.  Someone who was infected, without being contagious, would still show smallpox in their blood.”

Nicolas nodded.  The real fear was that the smallpox vaccine would prove to be completely useless.  Only someone with an insane mindset would be happy to modify smallpox to the point where there was no known vaccine, but then, only a lunatic would release it into the general population anyway.  Cally Henderson, even assuming that she had been infected six days before she had collapsed, had been outside the country and the people she might have infected had gone further.  Henderson’s Disease could be all around the world by now.  The President had warned the rest of the world, but the odds were that it had already spread into hundreds of other countries. 

He scowled.  There were international protocols for sharing vaccine supplies if necessary, yet there was almost no cooperation from the rest of the world.  It wasn’t entirely surprising either; only a handful of countries kept smallpox vaccine on hand and all of them would need it for their own populations.  If smallpox could be confined to the United States, perhaps it would be possible to get additional supplies from the rest of the world, but it would be a long time before the world was convinced that that was true.  In their place, Nicolas would have made the same decision. 

“Doctor,” Doctor Sally Pagan called.  “I think you need to look at this.”

Nicolas and Doctor McCoy walked over to her station.  “I was comparing Henderson’s Disease to the recorded variants of smallpox that we store here,” Sally explained.  The CDC was twitchy about actually storing live samples of biological weapons, but the computer records could allow them to run comparisons without live samples.  “I found a partial match.”

“Show me,” Nicolas ordered.  The display blinked up in front of him, one showing the increasingly familiar shape of Henderson’s Disease, the other showing a recorded series of images from the past.  It was a nightmare given shape and form.  “Ah.”

Doctor McCoy put it into words.  “Shit,” he said.  “Nicky, if that is accurate we now know where the disease came from...”

“That’s not the important question,” Nicolas said, grimly.  “The real question is how did it get here?”

It is quite likely that, as the biological weapon makes its way through the American population, the medical system will be completely overwhelmed.  Other buildings, from schools to prisons, will have to be pr
essed into service as makeshift hospitals.  It goes without saying that stockpiles of medical supplies will be rapidly exhausted.

- Doctor Nicolas Awad

New York, USA

Day 7

The HAZMAT suit felt cumbersome against her skin, but Mija Cat never even considered taking it off.  The last thing she wanted to do was breathe in smallpox particles and come down with the disease herself.  The entire city seemed to have largely shut down, with the handful of people who had ventured onto the streets wearing facemasks and keeping their distance from other people.  The pharmacies had found themselves completely sold out of masks and other medical supplies, while there had been a run on food stores and other vital supplies.  It would probably grow worse in the next few days, she knew; the average New Yorker didn't keep food on hand for more than a few days.  By then, if the government hadn’t managed to organise food distribution, there would be riots.

She hadn't wanted to go out on the streets herself, but her editor felt that the
New York Times
had a duty to get the word out to the public, even if it was only on the internet rather than the more standard print edition.  The more senior reporters had managed to get out of visiting hospitals and other places where disease victims were likely to gather, forcing the editor to offer her and other junior reporters the chance to shine.  A few days ago, she would have loved the idea of a post that couldn't be taken from her by a senior reporter looking for another scoop, but now she would have happily passed it over to the first asshole who asked.  The HAZMAT suit, issued to the newspaper staff years ago, wasn't much of a confidence booster.  She’d seen enough pictures of infected victims to know that she didn't want it to happen to her.  If she hadn't had to pay the bills, she would have told the editor to go give the post to someone else.

The Brooklyn Hospital Centre was surrounded by a wall of policemen, some glancing sharply at the suit she wore.  Several of New York’s hospitals had been besieged by mobs demanding to be vaccinated at once – if not yesterday – and the police had had to be called in to prevent a riot.  The mobs had only been dispersed when the policemen had pointed out that the longer they stayed together, the greater the chance of catching something nasty from their fellow protesters.  Mija held up her press pass as the guards halted her, running a pair of bright lights over her body.  The UV lights would kill any disease particles clinging to the suit, or so she had been told.  Some of the talking heads on television had questioned that, wondering if anything could be trusted completely when it came to an act of terrorism.  Mija just hoped that they were right.

“You must be Mija,” a voice said.  A middle-aged woman was standing there, looking tired and worn.  She was wearing a nurse’s uniform and a mask that obscured her words and made her sound as if she was deliberately slurring them to annoy the reporters.  Mija was not unfamiliar with how civilians reacted around reporters, showing a mixture of fear, annoyance and disgust.  Even the ones who wanted their names in the papers distrusted reporters, for it was rare for a reporter to be held to account for his or her mistakes.  “I’m Lindsey Mann, one of the nurses at this hospital.”

She didn't offer to shake hands, for which Mija was rather grateful.  The nurse wore heavy gloves as well – indeed, she had covered almost all of her skin – but it was impossible to know if she was infected already.  As Lindsey led her inside the hospital, they passed through a second set of UV lights, followed by a chemical mist that seemed to hang in the air.  A handful of patients looked up at them from the Waiting Room, their gazes defocused and unconcerned with the surrounding world. Mija wondered if they were infected, or if they were merely suffering from ghost symptoms.  If all of the reported infected were actually infected, Olson had confidently pronounced, the entire population of New York would have been wiped out several times over.