Brendan DuBois - Final Winter

Beside her, the body of Hammerin’ Hank lay still, slumped back in his shoulder straps. She was grateful that at least his bloodied head was turned to the left so she didn’t have to look at his face.

Helen checked the altimeter. She was dropping below one thousand, was now at nine hundred, and when she got to five hundred feet, she leveled off the aircraft. Twenty minutes. She was to fly for twenty minutes.

Which was what she did. She checked the time, watched as each minute slipped by, wondering if this was going to be the minute when an air-to-air missile ripped through her aircraft’s engines.

But the minutes still slipped away, and when the twenty-minute mark had been reached her earphones crackled with a message.

‘AirBox Ten, this is Houston Center. You’re cleared directly to Hutchinson Field, Louisiana. Initial heading zero-one-zero, climb to one-five thousand.’

‘Roger, direct Hutchinson Field, and fifteen thousand,’ Helen said, keeping her voice curt and proper. She’d be goddamned if she was going to be grateful to somebody who was ready to help the Air Force drop her plane and kill her without warning.

She went to her kit bag and pulled out the approach charts that would help guide her into Hutchinson Field, wherever the hell that was. Then she turned her head to the left.

‘Oh, you stupid bastard,’ Helen said to the body of her pilot. ‘Why did you have to be so goddamn impatient?’

Aboard the shrimp boat Flanagan, out of Metairie, Louisiana, Georges Bouchard stepped out of the pilot house as the jet aircraft roared nearby, almost passing right over their heads. His two boys, Henri and Louis, were at the stern, and they looked up as well as the jet circled around, and kept on circ-ling around, at a low altitude.

‘What’s up with that plane, eh, papa?’ Henri called up to him. Henri and his younger brother were shirtless, tanned, and Georges felt such pride, seeing those boys who would carry on the family name and business for years to come.

‘Not sure,’ he said, shading his eyes with his hand. ‘It doesn’t seem to be in trouble…look…it’s going away now.’

The jet flew off to the north, and Georges noticed two things: the first was that it looked like two fighter jets were flying with the larger jet as well, something he hadn’t noticed earlier.

The second was that something was tickling his throat. He swallowed, and then went into the pilot house to drink from a plastic jug of water and clear his throat. The water was kept on a wooden shelf underneath the radio, which had been acting up since they had left port nearly a week ago. The water went down well enough, but something still tickled back there.

By that night, Georges and his boys were ill, very ill, breathing hard, coughing. And by the next morning the Flanagan, named after his wife’s family, was wallowing in the Gulf Stream, crewed only by corpses.

The shrimper was boarded some time later by the Coast Guard. It was burned down to the waterline and sunk, along with its dead crew, as soon as night fell.

Homeland Security Deputy Director Jason Janwick hung the phone up, saw the expectant faces of his crew, sitting there, looking at him for answers. He said, ‘That was the Secretary. Due to time constraints, this emergency is still ours to manage.’

‘Sir?’ one of his people asked.

‘It’s like this,’ he explained. ‘Like the Secretary said, there isn’t time for him or for anybody else to catch up on what’s happening. One way or another, this sick puppy is going to be done with in an hour or so. So it’s ours to solve, or it’s ours to fuck up. Let’s make the right choice. Sam? Status.’

Sam Pope, his IT guy, said, ‘It looks like the AirBox guys and that Tiger Team have taken care of the majority of the AirBox flights. Either they’ve been able to land at airstrips with minimal population density, or some have flown out over the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico. But there’s still a handful up in the air.’

‘Where?’

‘Pennsylvania. Missouri. Kentucky. They’re conserving fuel and holding in orbits but… soon enough, they’re going to be running out of fuel. That means they’re going to come back to earth, and there’s not much unpopulated land where they are. The choice is… the choice is not a good one.’

‘Explain.’

‘Sir, when the fuel is at a certain limit those pilots are going to descend and pick the nearest airfield. There aren’t that many airfields in those areas that don’t have some populated areas around them. The choice, then, is to direct them to those airfields or… or direct them someplace else, where the population density is low, thereby reducing anthrax exposure. Like a federal park or wilderness area. A mountain range, for example.’

Janwick said, ‘And what then, after they’re over a minimally populated area?’

Pope’s voice was just a touched strained. ‘Then, sir, they would have to be shot down. I doubt the pilots will crash into the side of a mountain on anyone’s say-so.’

Janwick nodded. ‘Yeah. I figured that out a while ago. Just wanted to see if anybody else had any better answers. Well, the shoot-down order is out of our hands. But we’ll still be making a recommendation. In the meantime…Gail?’

‘Sir?’ answered Gail Crayson, his Public Health adviser.

‘Two things,’ he said. ‘First, we need to get Public Health resources into those states as of yesterday. Hazmat teams, medical assistance to area hospitals, Cipro stocks moving in… everything and anything that’s needed to nip this anthrax exposure in the bud once it gets sprayed. If we can keep the exposure areas to those three states, we’ll be lucky indeed.’

‘You got it, sir,’ she said. ‘And your second request?’

‘Time is running out,’ he added. ‘Determine the locations of those remaining airborne aircraft, see what areas they’re orbiting, and for those areas I want a seal-and-remain advisory going out, as soon as possible.’

She said, ‘We’ll lose some people, you know. They’ll seal up their rooms too tight with plastic wrap and duct tape. They will suffocate.’

‘Yeah. But if that anthrax gets sprayed out in the next hour or so, we could save thousands. Which is what we’re going to do. Get those advisories out now, Gail.’

‘Yes, sir.’

In her vehicle, still heading north and thankfully away from the chaos unfolding in some parts of this cursed country, Adrianna Scott made it a point to listen to the news at the top of the hour, usually getting a CNN or AP news feed. She knew that she was tired and still had hours of driving ahead of her, but oh, was she pleased at what she was hearing.

She looked at the dashboard clock. It was seven a.m. Pretty soon those AirBox aircraft out there would be falling from the sky, no matter what, and there was no way that this day wouldn’t end with thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, exposed and later dying.

Time for the news. On went the radio, on went the woman announcer from CNN, who seemed like she wanted to cry: . . Homeland Security has issued an advisory to a number of counties in the states of Kentucky, Missouri and Pennsylvania. Residents in these counties are advised to remain indoors and close all doors and windows. Close dampers and flues to fireplaces. If possible, go into a room or basement with no windows. If you do not have a room or basement without windows, remain in a room and tape the windows closed. In any event, the advisory states that people in these counties need to be in a place with no openings to the outside. The counties affected are—’

Adrianna turned off the radio, sighed with satisfaction, and continued driving.