John Lyman - House of Acerbi

“That’s one tough girl. Did you know she survived an airplane crash in the Mediterranean last year?”

“Really?”

“Yeah. She was involved with that group that discovered the code in the Bible.”

“What’s she doing here?”

“Don’t know. I think she’s a flight attendant or something. She’s still young … I’d really like to see her make it. Has anyone notified her family?”

“Her father called. He’s a pilot for a rich oil man in Texas, but all of the airports in New York are closed right now. We’re keeping him informed by phone.”

The voices faded away as Sarah drifted back to sleep. Outside her room, the doctor crossed the hall, where he would don another yellow gown before seeing his next patient, one not doing as well as Sarah.

Yellow was the international medical color of isolation. From the yellow isolation cart parked outside Sarah’s ICU room, to the masks and gowns worn by the doctors and nurses, the color yellow was a warning to all who entered that the patient was the repository of something contagious. Beyond the curtains lay an invisible, lethal entity that appeared to be viral in nature, and whatever it was, it was proving to be extremely virulent.

Forty-eight hours earlier, the color yellow had begun spreading throughout the hallways of every hospital on the island of Manhattan. To the medical staff, this was a clear indication of the arrival of something deadly that had drifted in on the wind and spread throughout the city, and as thousands of New Yorkers began collapsing in the streets, their homes, and their offices, the city’s hospitals had become overwhelmed to the point of being unable to care for them all.

In only two terror-filled days, thousands had become ill. Some had died almost immediately, while others who had become infected clung to life for only a few short hours before succumbing to this new and horrific microscopic predator. Strangely, it affected only about half of those it came into contact with, but panic still overcame those who, for some reason, had miraculously been left untouched. They found themselves standing on the sidelines watching others die from an invisible airborne pathogen that appeared to be jumping quickly from person to person. No one had a clue as to who would live and who would die. Almost overnight, the strange-behaving epidemic had caused the city to take on the appearance of a metropolitan ghost town as people locked the doors to their apartments and refused to respond to the last cries of their neighbors on the other side of the wall.

Reacting quickly with pre-set emergency management plans, police, medical, and fire department response teams had placed the city on a total lockdown. Nothing moved in or out, especially on the subway. Those who remained behind were now trapped on an island of fear, with no option other than to remain behind locked doors and pray that the invisible menace now circulating outside their windows would not find its way into their place of refuge.

Due to the siege-like atmosphere at every hospital in the city, huge triage tents were erected outside the buildings as rings of police security surrounded the area. Only the truly sick were being allowed to enter, forcing the drug seekers, psych cases, and neurotic attention-seekers that usually clogged the hallways of the ER to flee for their lives. Fueled by coffee and adrenaline, the medical staff who had not fallen to the disease themselves continued caring for the critically ill, but due to the rapid onset and lethal nature of the mystery illness, their efforts appeared to be futile in the face of a bizarre pathogen that mysteriously left half of those exposed totally unaffected, while the other half died a horrible death within hours. All, that is, except for one patient-Sarah Adams, who had become infected but somehow survived.

It usually began with a slight cough, followed by a raging fever and intense body aches. Within hours, the disease progressed to the point where the lungs had filled with fluid, and people who had been feeling fine in the morning were drowning in their own secretions before noon. On the first day, many epidemiologists thought the mystery disease was somehow related to the 1918 flu epidemic that had swept the world and left over fifty million dead, but then the blood began to flow.

After the initial respiratory phase of the disease had taken hold, blotchy, purplish-red patches began to form in random places around the body. In a matter of hours, they had spread under the skin like dark rivers flowing together across a maroon landscape, until finally the entire body was one great lake of pain. The pain was excruciating. Even the pressure of a single sheet was too much for the victims to bear.

Mercifully, most became unconscious at this stage of the disease, and then, to the horror of those watching, the skin began to separate as the entire outer layer fell away in sheets revealing liquefied underlying tissue. Blood was flowing from every orifice of the body until soon, the twitching remnants of what had once been a living, breathing, human being was nothing more than the rapidly disintegrating repository of an alien invader, the likes of which the world had never seen before.

Those not affected huddled and prayed in their apartments, while outside, hundreds of men wearing blue biological protection suits roamed empty streets in an effort to contain and track the origin of the grotesque disease. The blue-suited men swarmed over the city taking samples. They took samples of air, samples of blood, samples of water-they swabbed everything from subway cars to door knobs to family pets, all in an attempt to find anything that might give them a clue as to what kind of pathogen was raging throughout the city and killing thousands.

Then, forty-eight hours after the horror had descended on New York, as the men in blue continued to sample and swab and collect bodies for disposal, a planned event unknown to them was already taking place. The mystery pathogen was now retreating, disappearing almost as rapidly as it had appeared. Within hours, it would vanish completely without infecting anyone else, leaving behind no trace of its identity or place of origin- for that was the way it had been engineered .

The mood inside the papal apartments was somber when Cardinal Leo and Bishop Morelli entered. The old Jesuit secretary led the men to the library, where they found Pope Michael engaged in a serious sounding discussion with a man they both knew well.

“Ah … you’ve found him,” the pope said, rising from his chair.

“Yes, Your Holiness. He was just standing out there in the middle of the square.”

A distinguished-looking man with a full head of curly gray hair and a neatly trimmed beard rose from his seat and rushed over to take Leo’s hand.

“Cardinal! It’s good to see you, my friend.”

“Lev! How are you … and how’s your beautiful daughter, Ariella?”

“She said to tell you she sends her love, as do your other friends back in Israel.”

Leo smiled when he noticed that Professor Lev Wasserman had traded in his usual khaki field shirt and knee-length shorts for a blue dress shirt and a pair of tailored gray slacks-clothes he was definitely not comfortable in. However, this was the Vatican, and shorts were not allowed, even for a world-class mathematician with a doctorate in archaeology.

“Are any of the others coming to Rome?” Leo asked.

“I’m afraid not, Cardinal.” Lev turned toward Morelli and raised an eyebrow in his direction. “He doesn’t know yet, does he, Anthony?”

“He just returned from a sabbatical at my house in the country.”

Leo’s piercing green eyes scanned the room.

“I don’t know what yet?”