Victor Methos - Plague

“You’re religious, aren’t you?”

“Mormon, like my parents.”

“You don’t find it odd that almost all children happen to end up the same religion as their parents but claim they’ve independently reached the conclusion that their religion is the correct one?”

“Ouch. Going right for the jugular.”

“Oh, wow, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you. I just meant-”

“No, I’m totally kidding. It’s fine. Well what if children were meant to be part of that faith and that’s why they were born into it? But we don’t need to talk about that. The French say you should never discuss religion or politics at the dinner table because you’ll ruin your appetite.”

She grinned. “Have you been to France?”

“Yeah, several times.”

“I’ve always wanted to go.”

“Well, maybe I can take you some time.”

She smiled and, for the first time since she’d been around him, thought she felt herself blush.

They finished dinner and stayed at the restaurant for over two hours talking, until the wait staff told them they would be closing up for the night. They headed outside and the moon was bright in a cloudless sky. They decided to walk around the block.

Few people were out on the streets and Sam found the quiet peaceful. It was odd how used one could get to the most aggravating sounds: construction, sirens, car horns, shouting…a city was filled with so much noise that it seemed our brains had to go into a trance simply to shut out all the sound so we could function.

They talked about their lives growing up, about why they chose science as the field they wanted to dedicate their lives to. Their reasons were polar opposite: Duncan thought that science, as shown through the recent developments in quantum mechanics and quantum cosmology, ultimately led to God. He believed God had given us the chance to probe his creation and discover secrets that would make our lives better.

Samantha had gone into science because without God, she felt the universe was a cold and lonely place. Science brought order to that loneliness. The fact that the third law of thermodynamics worked on earth the same as it worked on an alien planet a hundred million light years away was comforting. Science showed her that at the core of the chaos was stability.

They came back to where her bike was parked and talked a few more minutes. Duncan came in for a kiss when they heard a man speaking to them. Sam looked over and saw a homeless man sitting with his back against the restaurant’s exterior.

“What was that?” she asked him.

“Can you spare some change?”

He began to cough. It sounded wet and he spit a glob of black fluid onto the pavement.

The next day Sam awoke and saw that she had six voicemails on her phone. She had turned it off to try to get a night’s rest and didn’t think anyone would need her within the five hours of sleep she was going to get. She checked her messages: they were all from a nurse at the rec center. They were running out of space.

She took a quick shower and then headed down there. The streets were completely empty. Every once in a while a car would drive by but that was the only other evidence that anyone inhabited this island at all. Nearly every business was now closed; the only ones she saw open were bars. The grocery stores had already locked their doors.

When she got to the rec center every parking space was taken so she parked her Ducati on the sidewalk next to the building. She went inside, suited up, and went into the gymnasium. She thought she had entered a war zone.

Every cot was taken. The nurses had not turned away anyone and when they’d run out of cots they put patients on blankets in any nook they had available. The sounds were something out of nightmares: a cacophony of vomiting, coughing, groaning…the sounds of people who knew they were dying.

“There you are,” one of the nurses, an older woman with thick glasses said. “I’ve been trying to reach you all night.”

“What happened?”

“What happened? All these people got sick is what happened. Many of ‘em are just kids.”

“How many people did you admit?”

“I don’t know, everyone that wanted in.”

“We had a specific limit for a reason. You won’t be able to take care of all these people.”

“I told her it was okay,” Duncan said, walking up behind them.

“Have you been here all night?”

“Yeah, I just dropped in to check on them and we started getting an influx of patients. I thought I’d stay and help out. Many of the younger kids,” he said, stopping a moment as he choked up, “many of the younger kids don’t have the immune systems to fight very long. No more than a few hours after they’re ill enough to come here. We’re going to need more pain medication to make them comfortable.”

Samantha looked out over the sea of cots and the bodies huddled on the floor. “We need a larger space first. I saw a stadium a few days ago; I’ll look into getting that for us.”

“Okay, I’ll speak to Ralph about ordering some more meds.”

Sam nodded, not taking her eyes off the patients, their eyes empty, many of their faces caked with dried blood. She took out her cell phone and stepped outside. She felt the urge to take a deep breath and exhale furiously to get everything out of her lungs. It was instinctual, nothing based on reason, and she fought the urge and instead dialed Ralph Wilson’s cell.

“What’s going on, Sam?” Wilson said, answering on the second ring.

“We need a bigger space than the rec center. We’ve run out of cots.”

“Already? How many patients are there?”

“I don’t know, the staff didn’t keep track. I would guess somewhere around twelve hundred.”

“I’ll get some more volunteers down there. What else do you need?”

“Duncan’s going to ask you for more pain meds. Just start shipping those now. I saw a stadium on Salt Lake Boulevard.”

“Yeah, it’s Aloha Stadium. They hold the University of Hawaii football games there.”

“We need to take it. I’ll call the stadium people. I haven’t read Pushkin’s report. Is it as bad as I’ve heard?”

“Well, he basically says this agent doesn’t meet the criteria to be identified as any known biological agent. It hit three similarity points for Ebola and four for smallpox, but that’s it. Not enough to classify it as either. And it’s not black pox like we thought, though it has the same symptomology. This is something we haven’t seen before.”

Wilson cleared his throat and didn’t speak for a moment. Sam knew what that meant. She sat down on the curb and waited for him to speak first, but he didn’t.

“What is it, Ralph?”

“The military presented an option last night that is looking more and more viable.”

“What is it?”

“There are a lot of smaller islands in the Hawaiian chain. Easy to clear the populations out and put them on the larger islands.”

“Don’t tell me this is going where I think it’s going.”

“It may come to that.”

“You want to take all the uninfected people to another island and let the infected just die here. Like dogs, Ralph? You’re talking about genocide.”

“That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?”

“And what are you going to do when a mother is infected but her child isn’t, Ralph? Are you going to rip a child away from their mother?”

“We’re not to that point yet and there’s no need for worst cast scenarios. It’s just an option if this thing gets out of control. But we don’t need to talk about it yet. The vaccines have arrived. Pushkin doesn’t know whether they’ll be effective, but it’s worth a shot. I’ll need you to set up locations throughout the island to distribute them.”