Plague of the Dead (4 page)

    Rebecca could feel the heat off of the fire just a half a mile away. It was moving parallel to their position, but fire crews and soldiers had warned them to be ready to evacuate on a moment’s notice if the winds shifted. The fire and the daily heat of Egypt-even in December-was enough to make her feel dizzy.

    “Becky! We need more gauze from the truck!” yelled a doctor. Rebecca was too beat to look up to see who it was. “Becky! Hurry!”

    She spun slowly towards the surplus deuce-and-a-half that served as the little relief station’s supply depot. Medics were handing out packages of bandages, morphine, and canteens of water to dozens of other volunteers, who were swarming around the back of the truck with outstretched arms. They jostled and shouted at one another as they grabbed at the supplies being tossed out over the small crowd.

    Rebecca elbowed her way through the crowd towards the truck. She reached the vehicle and pulled at the leg of one of the medics inside.

    “Sarah! Sarah! I need gauze! We’re running low on gauze!”

    The medic looked down and rummaged through the supplies. She returned, “Becky, we’re almost out! There’s only three boxes left-and maybe twenty canteens of water! What are we going to do?!”

    “Keep working until we’re out, then make do!” Rebecca shouted back, grabbing the gauze before one of the other volunteers could snag it. “Cut the coats and other gear into bandages! Send some runners to fill the canteens!”

    “The plumbing’s out!” Sarah yelled.

    “Then send them to the river! I’ve got to get these back to the doctors!” Rebecca paused, tucked the gauze under her arm, and looked up at her friend. She added, “Are you going to be alright?!”

    “I’ll be fine!”

    Rebecca fought her way out of the crowd and stumbled back towards her post. Her mouth felt like sandpaper and her vision swam. Unless her eyes were playing tricks on her, the fires seemed to be getting closer. And so did the refugees. An unending stream of them poured down the street toward the Red Cross aid station. Egyptian army soldiers armed with assault rifles pointed them towards the posts that could help them. Some argued with the soldiers or tried to push past them.

    Rebecca saw one man get whipped with the buttstock of a rifle. He collapsed to the ground and a woman screamed, kneeling over his unconscious form. The soldier who had clubbed him was yelling and gesturing towards the fire. Police with riot shields were trying to corral the uninjured from crossing into the aid station, and the uninjured were trying just as desperately to get to their wounded family and friends.

    “Help my baby! Someone help my baby!” sobbed a woman, stumbling towards Rebecca.

    She tossed the package of gauze bandages onto a bloodied and soiled gurney and walked over to the woman, holding out her arms. The woman was carrying a child who looked around five, maybe six. Its face was blackened and cracked, burned almost beyond recognition. The child wasn’t crying.

    “Let me see!” Rebecca yelled over the crowd. The woman handed her child off into Rebecca’s outstretched arms.

    Rebecca laid the girl on the gurney and pressed two of her fingers against the child’s throat. There was no pulse. The child had already died.

    “Doctor!” Rebecca called. One of the three doctors working at her post paused for a moment and fixed her with an inquisitive look. “Have a look at this one!”

    The doctor came running over. Rebecca turned to the mother and put her arm around her shoulders, leading her away from the gurney.

    “Come on, come with me, let’s get you some water, the doctor’s going to take care of your little girl… Don’t worry.”

    The mother was still sobbing, looking over her shoulder at her child, then back at Rebecca. She was confused, hurt, and panicked, but she allowed herself to be led away.

    Behind the pair, the doctor glanced subtly to make sure the mother wasn’t watching, then pulled a sheet over the child’s head. He waved to a pair of local volunteers, who ran over and pushed the gurney swiftly away.

    This was a technique that had evolved over just a few hours. The bereaved were simply causing too much disorganization. The volunteers had started lying to people shortly after the first fight had broken out between a mourning father and a soldier who needed him to make room for new patients.

    Rebecca hated the lying. She hated telling people their loved ones were fine, when in fact they were dying or already dead. She imagined how she would feel if someone told her that, only to find out the truth later. These people were going to be devastated. They were already hurt-and their wounds were only going to get worse.

    She pulled a canteen from the back of the deuce-and-a-half and sat the weeping mother down by one of the truck’s massive tires.

    “Here,” she said, twisting off the cap. “Drink this. You’ll feel better.”

    The woman quieted long enough to take a small sip from the canteen. She sputtered and coughed, then tried again, this time taking a deep drink. When she finished she returned the half-f canteen to Rebecca with a grateful look on her face.

    “There,” Rebecca said. “Better?”

    The woman managed to nod.

    “I’m going to go check on your little girl. Stay here and try to rest, okay?” she said, leaving the canteen by the woman’s side. She stood up and swayed back and forth on her feet for a moment. She became acutely aware of her thirst once more, but reminded herself of the other wounded people still coming in to the station. She turned, running back towards her post. She had lost count of her trips for supplies hours before. Her feet felt like they were tingling as they slapped the pavement and her vision blurred a little, then snapped back into focus.

    She slowed to a stop by her post, leaning on her knees, trying to catch her breath. She’d only run a hundred feet or so. Why was she so tired?

    The world seemed to phase in and out of focus, and Rebecca shot out a hand to steady herself.

    “Rebecca?” asked a voice. It was one of the doctors. “Rebecca, are you alright?”

    She looked up at the source of the voice, but couldn’t make out the face. The doctor was silhouetted, and behind him rose a curtain of fire. Rebecca felt the world spin around her, and then her vision went dark entirely.

    She crumbled, unconscious, to the ground. She’d become one of the victims she had been trying all day to save-a victim of heat stroke and dehydration. The doctor who called to her ran over, then knelt. He called for help.

    “She’s burning up! Get her out of here and back to base camp! And for God’s sake, someone get more gauze up here!”

    Behind the aid stations and refugees and shouting soldiers, Cairo still burned.

Washington, D.C.

December 27, 2006

1342 hrs_

    “Stick to the script! Don’t put in anything that isn’t written on those prompters, or the FCC’ll have our asses,” growled the station supervisor from the control room overlooking the news studio. “And remember to look confident, Julie. America’s watching. On in five, four…”

    In the studio below, news anchor Julie Ortiz straightened her back and cleared her throat. The cameraman in front of her counted down silently with the supervisor, flashing fingers. Two, one…

    The studio silenced, and a backlit sign bearing the words ‘ON AIR’ lit up. The buffer music began to play from the control room.

    A pre-recorded tape announced, “Welcome back to Channel Thirteen News, bringing you around the clock updates on the crisis in Africa. Here’s news anchorwoman Julie Ortiz!”

    Julie smiled into the camera.

    “I’m Julie Ortiz, thanks for joining us. Our top story this afternoon-the biological crisis in Africa has reached new heights of destruction, when earlier today we learned that rescue and relief stations in Cape Town, South Africa were contaminated by carriers of what is now being called the Morningstar Strain by government officials. While many refugees were able to escape by boat, thousands more were left behind on shore.”

    The station supervisor cued footage they had received of the event. The screen beside Julie began flashing images of helpless refugees standing waist-deep in the ocean, waving frantically to the boats at sea. The video footage was grainy and shaky, taken from a home video camera. The image pulled back, showing the railing of the boat the videographer was standing on.

    Cape Town was more or less intact in the background, though here and there plumes of dark, oily smoke rose up from the city.

    Julie continued, “What happened next was captured by amateur photographers. Channel Thirteen has decided to air footage of the fall of Cape Town, and warns viewers that the footage may be considered disturbing. Parents, use discretion.”

    The footage cut to a different cameraman, this one closer to shore on a smaller boat. Voices in the background seemed to be coming from the other passengers, looking at the helpless refugees trying desperately to get to a ship.

    Suddenly, the crowd on shore took up a shout, and the mob almost seemed to boil as the people splashed madly into the water, trampling one another into the sandy bottom.

    “Infected carriers of the Morningstar Strain become violent and homicidal, hostile to the point of actively seeking new targets to attack,” Julie said as the video played. “The Cape Town refugees drew the attention of nearby carriers, and the crowd’s reaction cost many refugees their lives.”

    The video showed the knot of refugees on the shore splitting in two, with half of the group running one direction down the beach, the other half in the opposite direction. A scattered few still tried to swim toward the boats, and a sickening number of bodies floated in the water, drowned or trampled by the mob.

    The mob scattered to reveal hundreds of carriers of Morningstar.

    They had plowed into the group of refugees from behind, and caught them unaware. Several people were down, clutching bloody wounds caused by the scratching, thrashing limbs of the carriers or their bloodied, gnashing teeth.

    A couple of the carriers stumbled about quietly, as if in a daze. Most flicked their heads about, spraying blood and bits of flesh from their mouths as they growled and ran after the surviving refugees with fevered speed. The cameraman zoomed in, trying to capture the action as closely as he could. One refugee was tackled hard by a carrier, and his head was pulled up by the hair as the carrier sank his teeth into the back of his neck. Another’s back was flayed as a carrier dragged her nails across the refugee’s skin.

    “More carriers were coming to the site than the refugees expected. Most were cut off and infected before they made it to safety. The death count is estimated at twelve thousand,” Julie said.

    The video cut to a new angle. The sun in this tape was lower in the sky and the clouds were beginning to turn red in the early evening hours.

    “Four hours later, the destruction was complete,” said Julie.

    On the tape, the survivors on the shore had vanished completely. There was a new mob standing on the beach, waist-deep in the water.

    
Carriers
.

    Thousands upon thousands of them.

    They pawed at the sky and each other, a teeming mass of infected humanity. Here and there, the carriers turned on each other, snarling and grabbing one another, falling into the water and rolling as they hissed, scratched, and bit one another. Most, however, stood fixated by the boats offshore. Their heads turned back and forth as if they were looking for some path that would lead them to the survivors onboard. They seemed reluctant to try their hands at swimming. One or two plunged into the water, but quickly resurfaced and dragged themselves back into the shallows.

    The tape cut out and Julie took over the screen again.

    “U.S. government officials have authorized aid to be sent to the survivors of what is being called the
Cape Town Slaughter
. The USS
Ronald Reagan
left home berth today to set sail for South Africa, acting as the flagship of a task force that will rendezvous east of Bermuda. There is still much to be decided in the matter of containing the Morningstar Strain, and fighters on the aircraft carrier are on standby, waiting for an order to destroy contaminated areas. Joining us now via satellite link to explain the threat of the strain in greater detail is Lieutenant Colonel Anna Demilio from the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease. Colonel, welcome.”

    The studio supervisor split the screen into halves. Julie’s smiling face occupied one half, and the other half showed the grainy image of Anna Demilio. She was in her early forties, still attractive, wearing BDUs. She, unlike Julie, was not smiling.

    “Thanks, Julie.”

    “Colonel, the spread of the disease has reached epidemic proportions. Is the speed of contamination something that could have been predicted, or prevented?” Julie asked, shuffling sheets of notes on the desk in front of her.

    “Well, Morningstar is one sick puppy, if you’ll excuse the expression. It has the potential to transmit itself in an amazingly short period of time, under certain conditions. It is likely, however, that we’ve seen the fastest period of the epidemic already. In nature, the disease would take over a week to incubate within a host before symptoms first appear. The zero case, or the person who originally contracted the disease at the beginning of the outbreak, probably walked around for that entire period of time, spreading the virus to people he or she encountered, before he or she took ill. Then, a week after that, all the carriers that were infected by the zero fell ill. The second generation is probably responsible for the minor outbreaks in Kinshasa and Mombasa we saw earlier this month, but they had already infected numerous others before they developed symptoms, and so on. Now that Morningstar has dominance on most of the African continent, contamination should slow somewhat, as most if not all infected people are still on the continent, and the threat of hidden contamination is reduced significantly. So, to answer your original question-yes, we could and did predict the spread of a virus like Morningstar, but there is no real way to prevent such outbreaks from occurring.”