Daniel Kalla - Pandemic

Another guard led them into the changing rooms. After gowning and gloving, they passed through two sets of doors that served as a makeshift hermetic seal. On the other side, they changed into yellow biohazard suits before donning particle-filtrating hoods. Lee thought they resembled three misplaced beekeepers, but he kept the thought to himself. He was gripped by sudden foreboding,

Following the soldier, they walked through another set of airtight doors and onto the hospital ward. The similarly garbed staff paid little heed as the three men headed down the dingy corridor, but with each step Lee’s anxiety rose. He struggled to breathe in the suffocating hood. Beads of sweat ran down his face and pooled at his collar. No one had told him that he would have to join the others in the patient’s room!

Their soldier escort stopped at the last door in the hallway. He knocked. A nurse emerged from inside and shut the door behind her. After a brief exchange, she nodded and walked off down the hallway. The soldier held up five fingers to the others.

The tall one entered first. Lee hesitated, but the crisp shove from behind left him little choice but to follow. Inside the cramped room, surrounded by machines and IV drips, a patient lay on the bed. At least, Lee thought he was the patient but wasn’t certain since the form on the bed was entirely swaddled in plastic bundles. The beeping machines and the occasional rustle of the plastic sheets suggested someone might be alive under the sheets. The whirring from the life-support system’s ventilator by his head obscured most other sounds. But the longer he stood, the more aware Lee became of a harsh gurgling sound. Appalled, he realized it emanated from the patient, not the machine.

No one moved. Then both Malays fell to their knees. Lee experienced a fleeting moment of relief. Maybe they had come to pray for their brother after all?

But the relief was short-lived. They weren’t praying. They jumbled at their legs, eventually withdrawing packages from inside their boots.

Lee’s chest thumped. Sweat drenched his neck. He felt unsteady on his feet. Even before the taller man pointed the gun at him, he knew everything was wrong.

The shorter Malay approached the patient. He began to unwrap the protective plastic. Soon the patient’s face appeared. He might have been anywhere from twenty to eighty, but his face was so swollen and bruised Lee couldn’t place his age. His eyes puffed out like apricots. His lips swelled out farther than his nose. The line of his jaw was lost in the unnatural folds of his neck. Between his sausage lips, a clear plastic tube led to the ventilator.

Lee stared transfixed as the Malay leaned over the creature’s neck. With obvious expertise he inserted a needle into the ill-defined skin folds. Then he attached a test tube to the other end. A stream of dark red blood shot into the glass tube. Satisfied, he detached the test tube from the needle, shook it in his gloved hand, and laid it on the bed. He repeated the steps until he’d filled five large test tubes. He pulled the needle out of the patient’s neck and then turned to his partner with a quick nod.

The taller Malay handed the gun over to his partner. Then, almost casually, he unlatched his hood and removed it. He walked over to the other side of the bed and leaned close to the patient’s bloated face. With both hands he uncoupled the ventilator tubing, leaving an unattached endotracheal tube, which looked more like a toilet paper roll, sticking out of the patient’s mouth.

The gurgling amplified, and drool formed at the open end of the tube. The patient writhed on the bed and the plastic covers shook as he struggled to breathe. He coughed in frequent spasms. With each cough, bloody sputum sprayed from the tube’s end.

Out of reflex, Lee took a step back and closer to the door, but the gun waving at his head halted his retreat. Horrified, he watched the taller Malay stoop forward and without hesitating place his mouth over the open end of the tube and suck from it like a snorkel.

Nausea swept over Lee. It was all he could do to stop from vomiting into his hood. He had never believed the sick brother story, but only now did Lee realize what the two maniacs had in mind. For the first time in weeks Lee thought of his daughter and son, My Ling and Man Yee, who were at the state school not ten miles away.

Watching the stranger inhale breathfuls of the deadly saliva Lee realized his own fate had already been sealed. The panic vanished, replaced by calm remorse.

One thought reverberated in his head: what have I done?

The sharp, red point zoomed around the screen, before settling on the spiky gray structure in the center. “Ugly little bastard, isn’t he?” the lecturer said. “Looks like something a junkyard dog ought to wear around his neck.”

The remark was met by scattered laughter in the packed auditorium; Dr. Noah Haldane’s lectures were always a huge draw. Among the medical students, the infectious diseases specialist and world expert on emerging pathogens had a reputation as a hip and irreverent speaker whose lectures managed to cut through the esoteric bullshit and get to the meat of the matter. There was another factor, too. At thirty-nine, without a trace of gray hair in his short uncombed hair, he stood six-two and still fit into his college jeans. His blue-gray eyes, sharp features, and readily amused smile helped pull in several women and even a few men who weren’t even registered for the course.

Haldane ran the laser pointer around the circumference of the structure on the screen, following the spikes of the outer ring. “But this particular virus”—he tapped the crystal with the laser pointer’s light—“he caused us no end of grief the year before,”

“Please, no letters to the dean’s office.” Haldane held up a hand in mock disclaimer. “I refer to all viruses as male.” He shrugged, unapologetically. “Maybe it’s because they’re so basic. So incomplete. So dependent on others to sustain their existence.” He paused. “Like my couch potato of a brother-in-law, it’s unclear whether viruses even represent a true form of life.” He waited for the laughter to subside. “Whereas I think of bacteria, which are far more complex, independent, and beautiful, in the female sense.”

“How about parasites?” someone called out. “What sex are they?”

Haldane squinted through the dimness until he spotted the questioner in the fifth row. “Mr. Philips, I don’t think of parasites in terms of gender.”

“Why not?”

“Because they remind me too much of med students.”

More laughter. Haldane circled the bug on the screen again with his pointer. “Does anyone recognize our ugly friend?”

“SARS-associated coronavirus?” a young, thin woman tentatively ventured from her front row seat, where she hunched over her notebook, scribbling madly even as she spoke.

“Exactly, Ms. Tai.” Haldane nodded. “Or coronavirus TOR2.”

Haldane clicked a button in his hand. The sterile electron microscope’s image disappeared, replaced by a blood-spattered female cadaver whose eyes were blacked out by a solitary bar. Without comment Haldane tapped the button again. A human lung sat perched on a steel gurney. Another click. The screen sprang to life. A pair of gloved hands grasped the lung. One hand steadied the lung, while the other sliced into it with a scalpel. Bloody fluid spurted out as if a wineskin had been slashed open.

As he let his students absorb the images of an anonymous pathologist dissecting the pus- and blood-filled lung, Haldane wondered how lecturers in the age before Power Point and multi-media managed to make any impact. “Four days before the video was shot, this lung belonged to a perfectly healthy forty-two-year-old nurse…”He clicked the button and the black and white viral crystal reappeared. “Then she breathed in a few particles of SARS-associated coronavirus.