Brendan DuBois - Final Winter

The silence returned, and it was like no one in the team could bear to look at each other’s eyes. Brian rubbed at his face again and looked at Adrianna, who seemed to be thinking of something. A thought came to him and Brian said, ‘There was another scenario, wasn’t there?’

‘What?’ Adrianna asked.

‘Another scenario. This one involved smallpox. I’m sure there was one involving a nationwide anthrax attack. What was it like? What are we facing?’

Now the mood in the room had changed, as Brian and the three others looked to Adrianna, as though waiting for her to confirm their worst fears. She coughed and said, ‘Yes, Brian. You’re right. There was an anthrax scenario held last winter. Similar to Dark Winter.’

She stopped. Monty said, ‘Go on. Tell us more.’

Adrianna rubbed her hands together for a moment. ‘Started off like Dark Winter. Simultaneous and multiple outbreaks of anthrax. Same challenges, same problems. Vaccine stock small, and what vaccine there was had to be administered in three doses over a period of a week. All the states’ borders sealed, economic collapse…’

Another pause. It had to be said. Brian spoke up and said, ‘Worse than the smallpox scenario, wasn’t it?’

Adrianna pursed her lips. ‘Much worse. Respiratory anthrax is a magnitude more contagious than smallpox. The scenario… it didn’t end well.’

Victor said nothing, as if he knew what was ahead of them. Darren looked around, like a high school student suddenly thrust into a jury for a murder trial, deciding a man’s fate. He said, ‘How did it end, then?’

A slight shake of the head. ‘Major cities depopulated. Refugees spreading out into the suburbs and countryside. Vigilantes setting up roadblocks. Casualties in the millions. Effective collapse of all governing authority, from national levels to state levels, including military. UN peacekeepers sent in to administer what was left alive and functioning. Other UN members setting up relief mandates, seizing oil, grain and other resources.’

Adrianna stopped for just a moment. ‘Dark Winter was the name for the smallpox scenario, because it imagined that as dire as it would be to suffer a smallpox attack, there was room for eventual recovery, that the country and its government and its people could survive.’

She looked at each of them in turn. ‘The anthrax scenario had no such assurance. Hence its name.’

The room was deathly quiet. ‘It was called Final Winter,’ she said.

Aliyah Fulenz was sixteen years old and knew that she was lovely and educated and lucky. Yet with all these good things, she still felt a terrible guilt over keeping a secret from her papa and mama, especially now, with another war being waged in the air above her home in Baghdad.

This was the second war she had lived through, but she’d been just a little girl during the first one. All she recalled from that war were the nights spent in the basement of their home, cuddled up with papa and mama, listening to the ghastly shriek of air-raid sirens and the far-off explosions from the enemy bombs and missiles. She had been too young to know who was fighting or why, and her most vivid memories were just the faces of papa and mama looking up with fear at the ceiling, like they were waiting for some warhead to burst through and kill them all. Even with the loud noises and the way her mama held her close and tight, she hadn’t been that scared. It had been like an adventure, an adventure like that of some princess she had read about in her picture books, and if mama and papa were there, how scared could she be?

Plenty scared, she would learn later, plenty scared indeed.

Now she was sixteen, and a war had come back, and she was older and wiser and oh, so much lovelier, and the fear that came each night with the wail of the sirens and the thudding noises of the bombs was now outweighed by guilt, for she had never kept secrets from her papa and mama, and the secret she had now was one that she wasn’t sure she could keep.

For Aliyah was in love.

His name was Hassan, and he was a nineteen-year-old militiaman who had volunteered as an air-raid warden for their neighborhood, and he was tall and dark and had brown eyes and a wide grin and a mustache that tickled her whenever he kissed her, for he had kissed her exactly twice, and she sometimes daydreamed, wondering what the third kiss would be like. And on this winter evening, mama had noticed her absent-mindedness, scolding her for not drying the supper dishes properly. Not complaining, like the good daughter she was, Aliyah had rewashed and redried each plate and fork and spoon, washing each item mechanically, trying to remember that firm touch of Hassan, the softness of his lips, and the way his sweetness stayed on her lips, minutes later after each kiss.

She closed the cabinet doors, went out to the main room of their house, where papa and mama were resting, sitting on a couch, the television on but the sound off. On the screen a man in a western suit was sitting behind a desk, reading what passed for news these days. She ached for a moment, looking at her parents, knowing she was lucky indeed to have such a man and a woman to raise her. Papa was a doctor and worked in the Ministry of Health, in an office concerned with pediatrics, and he would bring home piles of papers and folders in an old, scuffed leather briefcase. Lately he had been grumbling and examining these papers, late into the night, trying to work with French and German pharmaceutical companies, trying to find some way of importing medicines for the city’s hospitals during the war.

Mama taught French at Baghdad University and had promised Aliyah that this summer, once the war was finally -over, the two of them would fly to Paris and mama would be her own personal tour guide to that magnificent and civilized city. Paris! Aliyah had gotten books from her school library that showed the monuments and museums and the Eiffel Tower, and mama had laughed, gently brushing Aliyah’s hair one night, saying, ‘Paris is a beautiful city, my daughter, but remember this. Your own Baghdad was a center of culture and civilization, for the entire known world, when Paris was nothing more than mud and wattle huts, with peasants who still prayed to the gods of thunder and lightning. Never forget your heritage, Aliyha, never.’

Now she looked at them both, sitting there, her father with the papers in his lap, mama knitting a pair of gloves for her father, who suffered so much in the cold of winter. Mama looked up at her. ‘Are the dishes now done properly, Aliyah?’

‘Yes, they are,’ she said, her chest tightening with the ache of what she was trying to do.

‘Very good,’ her mother said.

Aliyah remained standing. Her mother returned to her knitting and looked up again. ‘Yes, what is it?’

‘I…I’m going for a walk. Is that all right?’

Her father looked up. ‘Now? At dusk? It’s not safe!’

‘Only to the end of the block! Papa, I promise I will be careful!’

He shook his head. ‘Suppose the bombing starts up? Eh? What then?’

‘When the sirens sound, I will run right home.’

Her mother stopped her knitting. ‘No, you will not run home. You will run to the shelter, that’s where you will run.’

Father grumbled and said, ‘I forbid it, wife. It’s too dangerous to go out. Just one bomb, one missile…’

Mama smiled at Aliyah and reached up with a hand, gently rubbed father’s bald spot. ‘Not to worry. Our daughter needs to get some fresh air. That’s all. And I know she will promise to run to the shelter and meet us there, if the sirens sound. Am I right?’

Aliyah nodded, though she hadn’t liked the shelter that had opened up in their neighborhood. It was crowded and dark and children inside the shelter screamed and wept all night long, and she couldn’t sleep. She had much preferred to take shelter here in her own home, in their basement, but her father had forbidden that, and for once her mother had let him have his way. He insisted that the new shelter was strong — ‘built by the Finns and the Swedes, they know their engineering, and living next to the Russians for so long, they know how to build bomb shelters’ — and that was where they had gone, night after night during the past week, when the shelter had been opened up to the neighboring residents.