Daniel Kalla - Pandemic

Like a child whose story had been interrupted one time too many, Streicher huffed and raised his voice louder. “Over the ensuing two weeks we see direct spread to neighboring farms. Eighty infected, twenty dead. The notable feature in this pocket of infection is the very short incubation period. Two to three days.”

Streicher tapped the button and a few more Xs appeared in a cluster around the first one. “From these index cases,” he said, using the medical term for the first patient or patients responsible for local outbreaks, “we see spread to the towns north of Jiayuguan. Hundreds more infected. Same rapid incubation.”

“Mortality rate?” Haldane asked.

“The early figures suggest roughly twenty-five percent” Streicher ran a hand through his thick blond hair. “Appar . ently, the young and the healthy are worst affected.”

“Oh…” Haldane muttered. “That sounds familiar.”

Jean Nantal read the recognition on Haldane’s face. “Ah, yes. We’ve been wondering about that, too. Maybe the Spanish Flu has come back to visit, NON?” Nantal grinned in his disarming way. “It’s a bit premature to know.”

“The first case was documented four days ago in Jiayuguan City,” Streicher said. “According to local authorities they’ve only had a handful of cases in the city itself, but it is early.”

“Very.” Haldane nodded. “And the hospitals?”

“Coping quite well.” Nantal clasped his hands and shook them in a victorious gesture. “They’ve been doing better so far than with the SARS outbreak. No documented spread of the infection within hospitals. You see, Noah? There is a silver lining.”

Not much of one, Haldane thought, but he nodded without comment.

Nantal turned to Yuen. “Milly, can you share a little background on the microbiology?”

Yuen shuffled through her notes. Though she wasn’t reading them, she kept her eyes fixed on the pages as she spoke. “We’ve only had the blood samples for under a week, but the bacterial and viral cultures are negative thus far. We’re running standard phenotypical and molecular viral diagnostics. We have run PCR, polymerase chain reaction, to every common viral family… so far nothing conclusive.”

Haldane picked up on her hesitancy. “What, Milly?” he asked.

Yuen looked up from the papers and caught Haldane’s gaze. “It’s not hard science or anything, but some of the RNA probes were weakly positive for influenza.”

“So it’s a strain of the flu?” Haldane asked.

“We can’t say that,” Yuen said and dropped her eyes to her notes again. “All we’re testing for is viral DNA and RNA. The source patients might have all been exposed to an influenza outbreak ten years ago, and we’re just seeing the remnants of the dead virus in their blood.”

“No causality.” Haldane nodded. “I understand, but what does your gut say, Milly? Is this the newest strain of the flut’

“No,” Yuen said, but then her voice wavered. “I can’t say for sure, but it’s more like this microbe cross-reacts with the influenza on testing.”

“Close but no cigar, huh?” Haldane said.

Yuen nodded enthusiastically. “That’s my hypothesis. This isn’t any known influenza A or B, but a closely related virus. Probably one we’ve never seen.”

Haldane wasn’t so sure. He leaned back in his chair and looked over at Nantal. “What do the Chinese expect from us?”

“Noah, they only want what every government that comes to us wants.” Nantal held his arms wide open in front of him and smiled. “To find the cause and wipe out the disease.”

“Right,” McLeod said. “And do it yesterday. And let them take the bloody credit.”

“They can keep the credit,” Haldane said. “This bug sounds a bit too familiar. Short incubation. Related to influenza. Hemorrhagic pneumonia. Targeting the young and the healthy… “He paused and caught the eye of each of his colleagues in turn. “As you know the Spanish Flu—a form of Swine Flu—disappeared in 1919 just as quickly as it came. They’ve only ever found remnants of the actual virus. Thus, only part of the virus’s genome has ever been sequenced. We wouldn’t recognize it for sure if it had resurfaced.”

“Ah, Noah, it’s early to make that leap,” Nantal said.

“Yeah?” Haldane said. “But if it is the Spanish Flu, or some descendent of the same, it would be catastrophic to overlook the possibility.”

“Understood.” Nantal nodded. “But you know the rules, my friend. Until we isolate a pathogen, we only refer to it by the syndrome it produces.”

“Which is?”

“‘Acute Respiratory Collapse Syndrome.’” Nantal pointed proudly to Yuen. “We have Milly to thank for the acronym. ARCS.”

The term sounded to Haldane as innocuous as the other viral acronyms, like SARS and AIDS, which had surfaced in the past few decades. But hearing it spoken aloud sent a chill through him as if he had just stepped out into the cool Geneva air.

He wondered, grimly, if ARCS was going to make the world forget about all other viruses.

With Peter’s possessions gone, their spacious three-bedroom condo felt empty to Gwen Savard. Not in a heartsick, if-only-we-had-one-more-chance way. Just barren. Peter had wanted to divide the furniture equally, but Gwen had insisted he take most of it. Now she regretted it. Guilt, she realized in retrospect, was not a helpful emotion when it came to dividing assets.

What did she have to feel guilty about? she wondered. She hadn’t been unfaithful. She had never treated him with malice or cruelty. She had cooked her share of meals and had done more than her share of the laundry. She even attended most of his firm’s insufferable socials, ever the lawyer’s dutiful wife. Though Peter cited her consuming career as the cause, it was not the reason their relationship had derailed. Neither was the infertility issue. At painfully introspective moments like these, which only came after the breakup, Gwen realized her heart hadn’t been in the marriage from the outset As hard as Peter tried, one person cannot carry a romance. After he finally threw his hands up and walked away from their pleasant but passionless relationship Gwen assumed the lion’s share of the blame.

Unwelcome childhood memories stirred. Gwen could picture her mother’s face. Not the current surgically pulled and heavily painted version, but the youthful stunning face of Gwen’s childhood. How Savard remembered her mother’s pained half smile that failed to conceal her disappointment when the A wasn’t an A+ or when the silver piano prize wasn’t gold or when the state scholarship wasn’t a Rhodes scholarship. Gwen imagined her mother’s youthful face, lips locked in that letdown grin, reassuring her how much better off she would be without Peter. Gwen’s stomach tightened. Like every day since Peter had left, she decided it best to put off telling her mother for another day.

The unadorned walls amplified Savard’s sense of emptiness until it became oppressive. She needed to escape the reminders of her failed marriage, which explained why the country’s Bug Czar packed for a business trip that could have been handled over the phone.

Gwen arrived in the early evening feeling rested. A self-confessed ’70s music addict, she had passed the six-hour drive—which accounted for the longest stress-free stretch in Gwen’s recent memory—listening to her favorite CDs, including Elton John’s Captain Fantastic, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors, and Supertramp’s Breakfast in America.

Driving through New Haven she was flooded with nostalgic memories of her postgraduate days at Yale, especially when she passed by her old apartment block. In sixteen years nothing had changed from the outside. Slowing to a halt at the front door, she could practically smell the exotic flavors that permeated her cramped studio apartment year round thanks to the thick hallway carpets, which absorbed her multi-ethnic neighbors’ cooking, magnified the aromas, and then released them. Gwen wondered if her unit still had the same blue and pink pastel-colored walls, which she and her friends had impulsively slapped on one day and regretted thereafter.