by Ricky Sides
“I’m so scared, Mom,” she said and then she began to cry.
Maggie held her daughter as she cried and soothed her as she had when she was the broken little girl whom Reggie had almost destroyed. “There now, Sweetheart. Are you and Evan having a fight?”
Lisa sniffed back her tears and said, “No, Mom. Evan has been wonderfully patient and understanding with me. But something’s wrong with me.” Lisa then described her strange bout with nausea that had brought on her fainting spell. As she told her, she saw Maggie’s face blanch, and she hurried to reassure her that Harvey had tested her for the disease and that she didn’t have it.
“You need a full medical exam, dear.”
“I know, but the doctors at the citadel...”
“I understand, Honey,” Maggie said, and she did. Because of her background as a child captive and her subsequent sexual abuse, a male doctor had never examined Lisa. “And that’s why Evan put in the request,” Maggie stated.
“Yes. He did it for me. He hates asking favors.”
“I know dear, but he did so for my little girl, and I love him all the more for it,” Maggie said with a warm smile.
“Well, he did say he didn’t want a male examining me,” Lisa said and giggled.
“That’s only natural. Now let’s get to your examination. No offense to Harvey, but I want to start by repeating his test. It’s just a formality,” she said quickly to reassure Lisa that she didn’t believe she had the plague.
“I understand. There’s too much at stake not to do so.”
“After that, we’ll do the standard pregnancy test and go from there.”
“You said I couldn’t get pregnant, Mom. Don’t you remember?”
“Of course I do, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t have a Fallopian Tube Pregnancy. The damage to the uterus wouldn’t necessarily prevent an ectopic pregnancy, and besides, I never said you couldn’t get pregnant. I said the odds against it were astronomical, and they are.”
Maggie put her hands on her hips and said, “Who’s the doctor here, you or me?”
Lisa giggled again and said, “You are, Mom, and thank you for understanding why I needed to come see you.”
“I’d have been hurt if you hadn’t, dear.”
An hour and a half later, Maggie came to Lisa with a look of wonder on her face. “You are pregnant, Sweetheart,” she said.
“Is it the Fallopian Tube thing?” asked Lisa fearfully.
“No,” said Maggie with a shake of her head. Then with tears of joy in her eyes she said, “I never thought I’d get to say this to you, but, you’re going to have a baby, Sweetheart.”
“We’ve got to get Evan in here,” Lisa stated in excitement.
Chapter 12
New Orleans and the surrounding communities were a mess, but they’d finally stopped the panicked citizenry from burning down the stricken portions of the city. The mayor suspected that by now, the culprits who had initiated the home invasions and arson had probably succumbed to the disease they’d thought to stop with their lawless actions.
By the time the Damroyal arrived, the arsonists had stopped trying to burn the city, which spared Jim and the rest of the council from having to decide whether to send fighters in to protect New Orleans.
The mayor thought that it was the announcement that they now had a supply of vaccine available that had convinced the people that it was senseless to burn the city. For three days, health officials wearing full protective gear had traveled door to door administering the vaccine, which was a liquid that the patient drank. The dosage was small, and it was poured into tiny disposable cups, such as the kind hospitals used to give their patients pills. After each stop, the man who went to the doors was decontaminated by a spray of liquid that would kill the disease if it were present on his protective gear before moving on to the next residence.
Once again, the mayor tried his best to enforce a strict curfew, telling the people of the city in no uncertain terms that the best defense they had was to wait it out in their homes as best they could until the vaccine had time to take affect. Most of the public listened to the warnings, having just seen with their own eyes the extreme measures the health officials took to avoid contamination.
The mayor knew that people would need food to see them through the wait. He organized an emergency delivery system that transported food supplies to residences in the city. The men who delivered the food did so in protective gear. They deposited the parcels near the front door, cautioning residents not to come out until they were clear of the area.
When the doctors discovered that some feral dogs and cats were contaminated, the mayor instructed Police Chief Marshall Green to issue orders to shoot all strays on sight. They were to assume that all the strays were contaminated with the disease and they were to use appropriate precautions.
The twelfth day after the completion of administering of the vaccine, no deaths were reported due to the plague, in the city. The mayor and doctors breathed a collective sigh of relief, although the emergency management director cautioned that many may have succumbed to the disease in their homes and no one knew about it to report the deaths.
By the fifteenth day, there were no new cases of the plague reported in the city. But there was disturbing news from the teams whose job it was to deliver food in the city. An increasingly large number of residents had stopped picking up their food supplies left in front of their homes, and there seemed to be no pattern to it. If a neighborhood were infected, you would expect to see whole sections of the city where recovery of food was stopped, but that wasn’t the case. To the contrary, the failure of residents to pick up their food supplies seemed to affect the entire city and it was even occurring in areas with no known cases of the plague.
On the sixteenth day after the completion of the administering of the vaccine, the mayor sent in a team of investigators in protective gear to spot check such residences. They began their investigations in what was deemed the safe area of the city with no reported cases of the plague. The investigators soon learned that all members of the first household they checked had succumbed to the disease. House by house, in different sections of the city, the teams continued to check on the residents who had stopped picking up their supplies. By the end of the day, the city officials were forced to conclude that in all probability, everyone in the households they had yet to investigate would also be dead. Not one survivor had been located in the hundreds of homes checked by the teams that day.
By the twentieth day after the completion of the administering of the vaccine, there were no new cases reported of people failing to pick up their food parcels, but by then fully three quarters of the city population had died.
The mayor contacted the peacekeepers aboard the Damroyal.
***
In the remote desert lab, Maggie stared at the dead rats in their sealed containers. “You’re sure they died of the plague?” she asked her subordinates.
“Yes. All blood samples test positive for the presence of the plague,” stated her lead research assistant on the project.
“Then we are forced to conclude that the vaccine will infect twenty percent of the people who receive it,” she said in horror. “What have I done,” she murmured, and then she stood in stunned silence.
“Expose the remaining rats to the disease,” Pol ordered Sam Gray. “Practice elaborate safeguards. Do not risk contamination.”
“Yes, sir,” the assistant said.
When the assistant moved away, Pol approached Maggie who was staring at the eight dead rats in their cages. “Maggie,” he said gently. When she didn’t respond, Pol took her by the arm and turned her to face him. “Stop this,” Pol said in a firm tone of voice.
“I killed them. I killed those people in New Orleans as surely as if I’d shot them in the head,” Maggie stated.
“That’s not true, and if you weren’t so emotionally involved you’d know it. You warned the mayor in no uncertain terms that the vaccine was untested. He kne
w the risks, but he had no choice. If he hadn’t done what he did, the entire population of the city would have been lost. It’s not your fault, nor is it his. He simply had to make a decision and all of the options were bad.”
“You can’t know that the entire city would have been lost,” Maggie stated. “Don’t patronize me, Pol. I won’t have that.”
“Come with me,” Pol instructed, and then he turned and walked away. He walked to a computer set up on a desk and paused to ask, “Is this computer linked to our network?” Pol knew some computers in the facility weren’t tied to the network because they were just there as storage backups.
“Yes, sir, it is,” said the assistant as he prepared to infect the rats.
Pol sat down at the terminal and began to access a file that required a security code to open. He input the password and activated the program. Maggie recognized Pol’s voice doing a voiceover. He said, “This is a map depicting the spread of the disease as we now know it on the night that Mayor Regan requested the vaccine.” The map depicted a sizeable section of the city in red.
“And this is what the computer projects thirty days from now,” Pol’s shaken voice announced. The depicted map changed to a solid red blob.
Pol closed that file and opened another that also required a code to open. A moment later, the New Orleans map was again depicted. This time, there were large sections of the city that had been spared annihilation by the plague. “This is the city as it stands today.”
Shutting down the program, Pol got up and looked Maggie in the eyes. “I’m not lying to you to protect you. I’m telling you the cold, hard truth, my dear. Those people would have died anyway if we’d done nothing to assist them, only there would in all probability have been no survivors.”
Maggie nodded her understanding. “We can’t administer the vaccine with this side affect,” she stated. “We have to try to perfect it.”
But Pol shook his head. “What we have to do is test these animals to see if the vaccine will prevent them from contracting the disease. We don’t dare try that with the people of New Orleans, and we must know the truth so that we can make an informed decision soon.”
“I won’t participate in that, Pol. It’s too dangerous. We have to get the manufacturing facility to halt production, and...”
“They halted production last night when the rioters broke through the fence with a truck,” Pol stated sadly, adding, “Dozens were electrocuted, but they’d gained entry. The enraged crowd beat the guards to death and then they got inside the facility. They took all of the vaccine and began distributing it themselves. When they were finished looting the place, the fools set fire to it,” Pol concluded with a grim expression on his face.
“That was the only facility remaining in America that still had the capability of manufacturing a vaccine,” Maggie stated in shock. “Why weren’t we guarding it?”
“We tried to persuade the owners to permit us to station guards there. We even offered to place a wing of fighters or APCs at the facility. The owners rejected all offers.”
“Why? For the love of God, why!”
“They stated two reasons. First, they feared that we’d try to nationalize the facility and wrest control from them. Second, because they were afraid of the public reaction to our presence.”
“Neither of those makes any sense, Pol. Since when do we nationalize businesses? And since when does the public attack us?”
“They had no reason to think we’d nationalize their business, but I’m afraid they had every reason to fear the public reaction,” Pol admitted. “Yesterday morning in Los Angeles, a group of peacekeepers tried to stop a mob from burning a section of the city where plague victims were known to exist. Someone threw a brick and struck a peacekeeper in the head. The wound killed the man on the spot. As the rest tried to get his body back to their APC, other people in the crowd began to throw bricks. When another man went down, the peacekeepers had had enough. One of them opened fire on the crowd, forcing them back until they could get inside the APC. Two civilians were killed.”
“Oh my God!”
“Since then, the crowds in Los Angeles have attacked peacekeepers on two other occasions. This time, they used guns. Their armor saved them, but Cliff Barnes has ordered all peacekeepers out of the city until the council gives him orders.”
“What are you going to do?”
“We’ve already done it. We ordered the peacekeepers to stay out of LA. We can’t help people who are trying to kill us. We won’t ask our men to face that. Besides, they have destroyed the one reason we had for maintaining a presence. With the loss of the vaccine manufacturing facility, there is no reason to ask our troops to risk infection.”
“So we have no supply of vaccine?”
“No, that isn’t the case. The California and several APCs have been making runs to ferry the vaccine. We have approximately three million doses. The questions that remain to be answered are whether or not it will prevent the spread of the disease, and whether or not we should deploy it at all.”
“We can’t!” Maggie stated adamantly.
“My dear, we may have no choice if anyone is to survive,” Pol disagreed. He then sat down at the terminal again and pulled up another file. Before he activated it, Pol looked around the room to ensure that no one but he and Maggie would see the monitor. Satisfied that he could proceed without revealing secret information to everyone in the room, he activated the program.
Maggie stared at a map of the North American continent. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the current extent of the spread of the disease,” Pol said quietly so that only Maggie would hear him.
Maggie stared at the map, aghast that so much of the lower half of the continent was already depicted in red, and there were fingers of red spreading into the northern regions all across the map.
“This is the projected spread thirty days from now,” Pol said in a whisper. He manipulated the program and another map appeared. This time, almost the entire North American continent was red, but there were pockets of unaffected territories all across the map, and the north still had large areas that were unaffected.
“And this,” he said in a voice that was barely above the faintest of whispers, “is sixty days out.”
Maggie felt a queasy sensation in the pit of her stomach as the map changed once more. This time, the entire map of the continental United States was in red, as were some small portions of Canada.
“Pol, we can’t know how accurate these projections really are.”
“I almost wish that were true, love. Alas, it isn’t. Permit me to explain.”
Maggie nodded numbly. She knew that if Pol said something was true, it probably was. He was one of the most inherently honest people she had ever met.
“When we first learned that the plague had returned to America, we asked Patricia to develop the software to accurately predict the spread of the disease. At first, like you, Patricia stated that there were too many variables to create an accurate model. She left us with the impression that it was an impossible task, but she promised to keep working on the problem, and so she did. Two days later, she returned and said she had thought of a solution. She had developed a set of mathematical formulae that would serve to introduce unknown variables into the model. The question then becomes, which version would be most accurate. Therefore, she created multiple models, set them to running, each using one of the various formulae, and then we tracked their accuracy. Within ten days, one of the models proved to be the most accurate. That model is the one you just saw. Since the tenth day, it has proven to be uncannily accurate. None of the rest even comes in as a close second.”
Maggie lowered her voice and asked, “Have you run the model to see what happens if we introduce the vaccine?”
“No,” Pol said looking around to ensure that no one could overhear him. “We can’t do that until you conclude your experiment. And that, my dear, is why I ordered your assistant to do so.”
“Lieutenant Bleak
man,” said the assistant, as if on cue.
“Yes?” Pol asked.
“I am ready to expose the test animals to the disease. May I suggest that all nonessential personnel leave the lab before I begin?”
“That’s a sound idea, but you won’t be the one doing it. I will,” Maggie stated authoritatively. “Everyone out. That includes you, Pol,” she stated quietly.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, love,” Pol stated.
“I’m not leaving you alone in here. It’s against protocol. Everyone else, get out, now,” the assistant said. The other lab technicians stopped what they were doing and began to walk out in an orderly manner.
“I want you out too, Sam. There’s no reason for you to take this risk,” Maggie stated.
“Yes there is. It’s my job. Look, you can fire me later, but I plan to stay. I mean no disrespect to Mr. Bleakman, but I know more about containing an accidental contamination than he does. I can ensure that nothing outside this lab is contaminated.”
“Thank you. Please inform me when the rest of the personnel are out of the lab, and then contact the peacekeeper guards. Tell them I said to get everyone aboard the APC and go to maximum altitude. If they see the contamination alarm go off, they are to call in a demolition team with a fuel bomb to ensure that no contamination leaves this lab.”
The assistant nodded soberly.
“Still want to stay, Sam? It’s not too late to change your mind.”
“I’ll be right back,” the assistant said as he turned to walk away.
“You didn’t ask me that question,” Pol observed with a wry smile.
“Would it have done any good?”
“No. Nothing would have changed. Now that I have you in my life, I will never go back to that terrible loneliness again. I’d rather die.”
“Pol, dear, you say the sweetest things,” Maggie said and touched his cheek tenderly.
Pol kissed her then. He was still kissing her when the assistant cleared his throat to announce his presence and said, “The guards have been informed of your orders. Now what can I do to help?”