Pestilence

3

When Samantha’s plane touched down at Thurgood Marshal International Airport outside Baltimore, she had logged fourteen hours of flying time. As she walked into the terminal, her legs hurt, her back hurt, the atrocious food she had eaten sat in her belly like a lump of coal, and she had a migraine that was pounding ceaselessly against her skull.

Her car was back in Atlanta, so she waited on the curb outside for Duncan to pick her up. She felt bad that he had to come to the airport at five in the morning, but he said he was usually up jogging at that time anyway.

Before long, a gray Lincoln pulled to a stop in front of her, and she threw her gym bag into the backseat and climbed into the passenger seat. She kissed him and anticipated that, for a fraction of a second, he would hesitate to kiss her back since she’d just gotten back from an Ebola outbreak, but he didn’t. Both of them worked with hot viruses, and he had grown accustomed to the roulette they played every day.

“How was Africa?”

“Hot. And the insects are the size of my head.”

“Did you call your sister like I asked?”

“Yes, but she didn’t answer. What’s going on, Duncan?”

He was quiet as he pulled out of the airport and made his way to the interstate. “What did they tell you after the last outbreak of black pox?”

Images flooded Samantha’s mind-patients turning to jelly and entire hospital staffs unwilling to treat them, a gymnasium full of patients because the hospitals didn’t have enough room, and a man in her house who had nearly killed her.

She’d spent nearly a week in the hospital after the break-in. Two weeks after her release, she’d returned to her job and had been informed that the outbreak had been contained to Hawaii and South America.

“They told me it’s over.”

“Have you talked to your sister since she went to California?”

“No, she’s been there a week. Her in-laws are there.”

He paused. “Samantha, it was never contained.”

“What do you mean?”

“It got to the mainland. California. We think some of the infected snuck onto flights out of Hawaii and landed at LAX. There’re over a hundred reported cases. The problem is that they’re spread throughout the state and are difficult to contain. Someone higher up than me made the call that California can’t be contained.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means they’ve been closing all the bridges and highways in and out. Shipping’s stopped, and flights were grounded this morning. No travel to or from the state. They’re imposing martial law today.”

“You’re exaggerating,” she said.

“I’m not.”

“They’re going to violate the liberty of thirty-eight million people because of a hundred possibly infected?”

Duncan sped up the onramp onto the interstate. “Someone in the military’s determined that this infection, Agent X, is deadly enough that it’s the prime national security threat… at least for now.”

Agent X. She’d thought she would likely never hear that again in that context. She knew that samples had been taken and stored in the Centers for Disease Control biosafety level four laboratories, which were the most secure laboratories in the world, where everything from Ebola and smallpox to a strand of airborne AIDS virus were contained and studied. The United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases was the only other laboratory stateside that could even compare.

“Why haven’t I heard about it?”

“I only found out because we’ve been issued leave from all other projects to work on a vaccine. This is really top secret stuff. They’re going to shut down the news stations and radio, even the internet. With the flip of a switch, they’re going to shut down all information in an entire state.” He shook his head. “The fact that they can even do that is what’s most frightening for me. But anyway, they worked out some deal with the media outlets. You guys can stay on, but if you report anything about what’s coming, you’re done. They’ve got everything in place now, and they’re going to make it official this morning. No one in or out, under penalty of imprisonment or death.”

“Death?”

“That’s what they said.”

“It’s too big a border to secure. They can’t do it.”

“You haven’t worked in the military, Sam. You don’t know how they think. They know they can’t secure the whole border. They don’t need to. Thomas Edison did an experiment with elephants. He chained them to the ground, and the elephants would try desperately to get away. He did it for a long time, and eventually, the elephants stopped trying to escape. Then Edison replaced the chain with a string. The elephants couldn’t get away. They would feel the string and were paralyzed. They don’t need to prevent everybody from escaping. They just need to make an example out of the first few people that do. Everyone else will be held in place by a string.”

She sat quietly and processed that. All the pain and horror she had experienced during the past couple of months came flooding back to her, making her heart race. Short of breath, she had to close her eyes and take deep breaths to calm herself.

Agent X spread through even casual contact, and its incubation period was far shorter than even a normal strand of smallpox. Most viruses would have to flood the body to cause infection. The HIV virus, when passed through contact with an infected person, floods the new host’s body with millions of viruses. Agent X, from everything they could tell, only needed one virus to enter the body to cause infection. The world, she was convinced, had never seen anything like it.

And the most frightening part was that they weren’t sure where it had come from. They had found the index patient, or patients, in South America. They had been infected through a canister believed to have come from one of only two places in the world that still held diseases as deadly as smallpox: the United States and Russia. The thought that some rogue nation like Iran or North Korea had developed it as a weapon was much more terrifying.

She took out her cell phone and tried her sister again. The call went straight to voice mail.