by Jones, K. J.
The Major’s jaw tensed. “Lance Corporal, it is for national security. Loose lips will cause unwarranted panic.”
“Sir, is panic to mean Marines will rogue, sir?”
“Excuse me, Lance Corporal?”
Staring straight ahead, Brandon responded, “I was at Lejeune. I know what happened at Parris.” He added, “Sir.”
“The acting POTUS has determined this talk to be treasonous.”
It was hard for Brandon to keep the sardonic laughter down. His mouth curled slightly up, despite his efforts to hold it in.
Brandon’s cellmate listened from his cot, having been returned just before the officer arrived, telling him he was now gonna be a soldier.
The officer eyed Mackey distrustfully as an outsider civvie.
“Just remember, son, loose lips.”
“Sir, yes, sir,” Brandon responded and saluted.
2.
Mazy’s mouth felt dry. She eyed the USAMRIID Major’s water bottle with envy. And she needed to pee. Would there be an intermission break at some point? Way too much info to process in one sitting. Hopefully, there would not be a test later.
“Unlike other lyssaviruses,” the Major continued, “Mokola is able to replicate inside mosquito cells in vitro, suggesting that insects may be implicated in Mokola transmission. For R140, this has been proven true. R140 was so widespread particularly in the southeast of the United States due to mosquitoes as the transmitters, spreading the virus much like malaria and West Nile.”
Mazy’s focus faded in and out. Her butt had fallen asleep a while ago. Too much sitting for a Zoner.
“A biosafety level four pathogen. Or under the World Health Organization, Risk Group Four. We are in what the W-H-O classifies as a Phase Six pandemic. But never was a Phase Six pandemic expected to occur with such violence. The idea of a lyssavirus causing a global pandemic of now eighteen countries and continuing to grow was unheard of.”
Instead of listening, Mazy observed the Major. She had a nice figure. She wore her fatigues well. She was cute. Intimidating in an overeducated way, but cute.
“With one hundred percent mortality rate once symptomatic and no indication of any immunity in the human or animal populations once exposed, there is no possibility of community or herd immunity.”
The Major wrote R-0 on the whiteboard with a stroke through the zero since she was military and that’s how zeros were done.
“R-naught. The mathematical equation determining how many people will be infected per infected individual. Also known as the spread rate. The calculations of R-naught for R140 had been difficult, due to the various forms of transmission. Asymptomatic carriers transmitting through social contact, primarily through kissing, depends on behavior – how many people the person would kiss. The epidemic of H1N3 influenza strain this winter has probably cut down on the amount of social exposure. Also, when biting is the transmission vehicle, it depends on the aggression levels of the host. Prime age adult males …” She wrote on the board.
“Here it comes,” Ben whispered.
“… have the lowest. Any of you Zoners want to answer why?”
A SEAL sailor raised his hand.
“Lieutenant?” the Major called on him.
“They kill, ma’am.”
“Exactly. They are the most likely to conduct a fatal contact with targets. The reason why goes back to the endocrine system I mentioned earlier. Hormones. The infection of the hypothalamus, which controls the endocrine system, which in turn controls hormonal levels, causes some of the most aggressive hormones to multiple. Adrenaline. Testosterone, which females have as well. Those with the most testosterone will be the most aggressive, often with fatal results. This would be males between the ages of roughly sixteen to forty. Late teens and early twenties males are the most lethal, having the highest amount of testosterone originally before symptoms. For females of the same age, this is the peak time for a female’s level of testosterone levels. They can be extremely violent or just go for the bite. Unpredictable which.”
Bored and restless, Mazy discovered she had deeply embedded dirt under her nails. She wondered if she’d get an opportunity to shave her legs. The last time she did, it was in a shower stall at Parris Camp, no way to put a leg up and she had to move fast. She bled like a stuck pig from all the razor cuts. Band-aids all over her calves. Government-issues ones, so they lacked any superhero or cartoon images. Not even a color variation. A bummer.
“The average symptomatic furious-stage female of this age range is R-naught-three. Meaning, she will infect two to three people via her bite. Whereas the average symptomatic furious stage male of this age range is R-naught-one. He’ll infect between zero and one, often depending on his physical size and those uninfected people he targets. The military is typically the one. Civilians or previously untrained people who are unarmed are zero. They usually die in the attack. How do they die? One of two ways. Beaten to death with extreme force blunt trauma. Or, less often, bleed out through a laceration to the carotid artery.” She tapped the side of her neck. “If the infected male attempted to follow the virus-driven urge to bite and went for too soft a spot.”
Mazy caught none of the Naught numbers. It all blurred together. She needed to pee really bad now. Where was the intermission?
The Major moved onto Naught-something from the mosquito-spread.
“Bottom line,” Mazy whispered to Ben. “We are majorly fucked.”
Ben looked like he slept with his eyes open. How did he do that?
Mazy elbowed him. His head jerked alert. If she had to suffer, he did too.
“How do they have such an urge to bite? The same reason classic rabies-infected dogs do. Usually from excessive fear that drives the infected into a fight response. Their adrenal glands are over-activated, pumping out too much epinephrine. You’ll see symptomatic humans screaming and reacting as if they are being attacked by something invisible. They experience terror hallucinations. Their drive is to attack you as the target of their terror. The sensation they experience in their jaws, causing the grinding and breaking of teeth, escalates into an overpowering urge to bite. They may bite inanimate objects. This has never previously been observed by humans infected with a lyssavirus. It was previously believed our brains overpowered this urge. Not anymore.
The word autopsies caught Mazy’s attention.
“Autopsies have shown atrophy of the frontal lobe in humans who died of the infection as the end-stage. Those from the Quarantine Zone may have experienced infected humans who smell of sepsis. They are septic and dying from it. There is nothing human remaining. The frontal lobe of their brains is gone.”
“Huh,” Ben muttered, resting his elbows on his knees and leaning forward to focus.
“At this stage, they are often described as quote ‘living dead zombies,’ referring to zombie apocalypse genre entertainment. The George Romero films. Slow-moving, shuffling, mindless, and they smell like death.”
Ben and Mazy nodded, remembering Carolina Beach before they were forced to leave. The first-wave infected had been as the Major described. Perhaps it was their video interviews conducted earlier from where she got ‘living dead zombies’ since it was a term they had used, taken from the group, mostly from Peter. He watched all of those shows and movies. He even had books.
“Yes,” the Major continued. “A lot of our Zoners use movie and TV references to describe what they observed out there during their debriefs. I had to brush up on it.” A slight smile.
“Guess it wasn’t just us,” Ben whispered.
“Hmm,” responded Mazy. “I don’t feel so unique and special now.” She glanced back at the SEAL sailors.
“Aw. You still are.” Ben turned his face enough to show a small smirk. His eyes sparkled with love; pupils dilated with attraction.
“Thank you, Gunny.” Reminding him of where they were.
“Yes, ma’am.” He turned his face forward and dropped the smirk.
Mazy desired to reach out and gr
asp his hand which lay on his thigh so near her own leg. Unacceptable behavior.
The Major continued with R-0 statistics. It all sounded awfully bad, ending with a huge amount of the global population getting the virus. The wild and domestic animal stats she went into sounded even worse.
“God,” Mazy whispered with a groan. “The freaking world is ending.”
“Hmm,” Ben responded.
The flatscreen showed a chart of all the various R-0 rates of infection. It was too elaborate to understand for a beginner in R-naughts.
Onto current real-time infection rates on a global map. Moans throughout the audience. Little curses said under people’s breaths. A lot of “crap” whispered.
The virus had grown in the past ninety days to hit almost every country. It was present on every continent. Even island nations such as Australia and New Zealand had outbreaks. The UK, where Mazy had friends, was so dotted with red spots, the country looked to have chickenpox. A huge amount of red in a middle, easterly area of England – Yorkshire, Mazy recognized.
Yorkshire was a Zone. London had a bad case of the red dots, not surprising if Yorkshire went up, the capital city would too. The red dots slowed going into the rural populated areas. North of England, in the sparse population Highlands of Scotland, the cities could be identified by the dots. A big red dot on Inverness, which was in the middle of nowhere. The Isle of Man, where the people were called the Manx, had no dots, but a thick black circle around it. This was shared by several islands among the Shetland Islands and islands further out into the Atlantic Ocean. The meaning of the black circle was they were protection quarantined. No way in or out. How in the hell were they getting food then?
Alaska and Hawaii had black circles surrounding them. Canada’s red dots ran along the border where the bulk of the population resided. British Columbia had a dot as did Portland and Seattle, but nothing excessive on the west coast of North America, unlike the east coast. All red in the southeast, including the Florida Keys.
Mazy looked away, not wanting to see anymore.
“How the hell did it get everywhere?” the Navy SEAL warrant officer asked.
The Major answered, “We know for a fact the virus was released in the United States and China. However, it remains unclear if it was also released in other nations or if this is the effect of the interconnected plane network. Since human beings can carry the virus without showing symptoms for up to twelve months, while their mucous contains viral cells, the spread is wide and formidable.”
3.
After the seminar finally ended, following a pee and guzzling a bottle of water, Mazy went to the phones that called out of the complex. She waited anxiously for her stepfather to answer his cell.
“Please, Daddy. Please. Mother of God, please.”
“Hello?” His baritone voice. “What crazy number is this?”
She let out her breath. “Daddy?”
“Maze? Baby girl, that you?”
“Hi, Daddy, it is.”
“Oh, thank Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Are you okay, baby?”
“Yeah, Daddy, I am. More importantly, are y’all?”
“We are trying our best. It ain’t easy.” His voice sounded tired.
“Daddy, I am having my paycheck direct deposited into your bank account.”
While in Iraq, she had sent her paycheck to him during post-Katrina, when they were living in a hotel in Texas. Her bank still had the info connected to his account.
“You don’t need money?” he asked.
“Just a little for sundries. Room and board and clothes are taken care of.”
He would know from that statement she was back in uniform.
“Am I allowed to ask where you are?”
“No.”
“As long as you’re safe and taken care of.”
“I am, Daddy. Can you access your bank account? Are there banks operational there? Where are y’all?”
“We’re in northeast Texas, trying to get away from all the craziness best we can. We gotta keep moving.”
Her heart hurt. She imagined how hard it was. “But you can get to a bank and make cash withdrawals?”
“They only do cash nowadays, all these places. I should be able to. Still got electricity and all here.”
She wondered if they were having to sleep in the car. Were they eating? How bad was it? He would just say everything’s fine, even if it wasn’t, just as he had done the last time when they were catastrophe relocated refugees in Texas after Katrina.
She asked instead, “Can I somehow direct pay your cell phone?”
He agreed to this. But to give her the information he had to find it in his luggage, requiring him to go into the hotel bathroom and get away from her mother and sister and other relatives, all of whom wanted to talk to her and hung on his arms. He conveyed the cell phone information and she wrote it down on a pad. A family plan cell service, she’d cover all their cells. She wrote down his quoted price of the monthly bill.
“Any way I can call you?” He knew there was no way. They had been through this before when she was in Iraq.
“Afraid not, Daddy. But I will try and call every Sunday. Y’all going to church?”
“Not so much. We try to have our own when we can, ya know. Jesus hears us no matter the location. The Catholics ain’t getting their mass, though.”
He had a PhD but he still said ain’t.
His voice broke her heart. No longer the booming baritone, ever-confident man, the professor, he had always been before. He sounded beaten down, worse than the post-Katrina days.
“Your mama and sister banging on the bathroom door. They need to talk with ya or they gonna bust.”
“Okay.” She smiled. “Let me talk to those crazy ladies. I love you, Daddy.”
“With all my heart, Mazaline.”
She fought tears.
4.
Peter wouldn’t be able to sleep even if there weren’t constant noises of a large group of humanity surrounding him. His leg hurt, radiating pain throughout his body from several nucleus locations. Laying down and trying to sleep had a knack for focusing the mind on the pain, and the pain behaving tenaciously until it wore a person down into desperation to stop it.
Three bullets had hit his left leg, two of which hit his thigh, one top, the other bottom, and the third in his calf. Titanium rods and screws held bones together. Nerve damage extensive, and whole areas of his skin remained numb to the touch, producing a bizarre sensation since the nerves beneath still functioned. When he’d been bit by a bug, his skin didn’t sense it, but the nerves beneath caught it. Very weird.
Though his hip hadn’t been hit, the whole process threw off his hip, as well as his knee and ankle. Somehow, since it hadn’t been made clear how one area affected another, he suspected it was like a car’s tire misalignment, but one that couldn’t be rotated and balanced.
Doctors had warned he’d suffer massive arthritis early in years to come. Oh, joy. Things would be even less comfortable in the future. Sometimes he wondered if it would have been better if the leg had been amputated. Except there was something known as phantom pain – pain from a limb that no longer existed. He figured his mind would somehow make phantom pain worse than the actual pain he endured. Somehow. Or at least he tried to reassure himself he was better off this way than the alternative. It made him feel slightly better.
In all the years since being thrice shot, he had been on opioids painkillers, and he had not tried alternative pain management methods. During his long years in martial arts training, he had learned discipline and control over his body. Yet he had not used such for the pain, since pills felt so much better in so many ways.
Now, he had absolutely nothing. Not even a Tylenol. The only thing left in his bag of tricks was meditation. To put one’s mind somewhere else, and have the mind overpower the brain where the pain signals came in. This additionally helped to keep his mind from whirling, gnawing, and stewing over the situation. He tried every waking moment t
o firewall thoughts on Phebe in particular. He could not help his pregnant wife. Couldn’t provide for her, which in this circumstance would provide a lawyer for her. It ate at him, but he was powerless.
More feelings of uselessness and powerlessness. Not that he hadn’t experienced this before. Not like it had been years of uselessness and powerlessness. Old feelings tried to rear their ugly heads. Dragons lurked in the shadows, threatening to burn him alive.
Peter had only the tool of his conscious mind to lift him from a terrible place within himself. Controlled breathing, in and out, the first step to meditation. The pain in his leg mocked him. He saw it as an Adult Swim cartoon villain, taunting him with, “You think you can tune me out, asshole? Not on your life. I’m here to stay and you are my bitch.”
“Fuck you.”
He realized he said it aloud. No one stirred abnormally in reaction.
At least a few dozen people had sinus issues and snored. Several more had sleep apnea. This he could tune out, since it happened from day one in the Army, sleeping in barracks with a bunch of guys. Soldiers could sleep anywhere, on any surface, and in any situation … except one. A hostile situation was not a sleepy time. Whenever he did drift off in the hangar, he experienced a sensation of someone creeping out of the dark to suddenly rise up next to his cot and either bite him if a zom or punch him if a healthy. He’d jerk awake, ready to fight, only for no one to be there. He even looked under his cot like a small child searching for the monster under his bed. The dreams felt so vivid and real, but no one hid near him. Except for that one time with Igloo Man.
Peter knew this paranoia-nightmare thing was a broad experience occurring in the hangar, including among his kids. Jayce kept falling out of his cot from it. The cot would shoot several feet from his rolling-off thrust, startling everyone else into a fight posture. Peter, ever nurturing towards another male, laughed so hard he nearly rolled out of his cot.
Tyler’s smaller size aided in not falling out so dramatically. He usually fought in his sleep and cursed wildly – probably how someone with Tourette syndrome dreamt. Tyler’s nightmares posed great amusement to listen to in the dark when unable to sleep. Sometimes, Peter heard Tyler talking to him. Peter liked to answer. The kid would engage him in conversation, entirely asleep.