by Chuck Wendig
Benji nodded, smiling. “What a life.”
But the smile felt hollow. The posters were funny; Robbie wasn’t wrong. Just the same, cultural practices around the world were tricky—you wanted to be respectful, you wanted to help preserve and protect ways of life, but when they became vectors for emerging diseases, you had to deal with it.
Bushmeat, for instance, in Africa. Poachers and hunters killed Old World primates, elephants, pygmy hippos—and three-quarters of emergent diseases were zoonotic. A clumsy hunter or inelegant butcher found himself covered in an animal’s blood, spinal fluid, spit, shit, semen, and once in a while an infection in the animal found the biological gumption to leapfrog to the person. Then the hope became that the person couldn’t infect others.
So you tried, best as you could, to stop any of that from happening in the first place.
And yet what could you do? Culture was culture, and money was money. Ways of life were hard to change. Benji remembered being on a hunt with a Congolese man who killed so many macaques in a day, he looked like he had a whole extended family of them on his back. That hunter, Mateso, said, “If it moves, we eat it. We learned that in the war. You eat grubs, you eat rats, you eat anything that crawls in the grass or climbs in the trees.” He said he could sell one monkey carcass at the market for seven thousand Congolese francs—around five bucks, American.
It was part of their culture, and people needed to eat. So you did what you could do. You helped to educate. You taught hunters how to be clean. You helped them learn to test the blood of their kills. You tried to steer them away from endangered species or certain primary vectors—and then you hoped that the rest of the system held true: that the economy improved, that farming practices took hold, some fire-eyed dictator or warlord wasn’t in place a year later. You did what you could and held faith that it would get better. Sometimes it did. A lot of times, it didn’t.
And a lot of times, Benji thought, systems stay in place to help make sure that nothing changes, even when it needs to.
His mind drifted momentarily again to Longacre.
Those pigs.
Their stalls.
Sores all over…
No. That was not a productive line of thinking.
“Maybe there’s something to Yemen,” Benji said. “Something cultural that can help us here. Maybe it’s something zoonotic. Do they eat something here? Something they shouldn’t? A local culture of…I don’t know, hunting and killing raccoons, or possum? Could be a niche vector we’re not seeing.”
“Well, you can ask our friends yourself. Because here we go.” Robbie juggled a thumb toward the window. Outside in the line, they saw two cars pull into the diner lot: one white SUV, a Tahoe. The other, a black Town Car.
* * *
—
FROM THE SUV, a man stepped out in state trooper grays—an old white guy with too-tight skin stretched across his skull and a little white mustache like a line of salt on his lip. From the Town Car emerged a woman: tall, lean, heels, red hair in a humid, hurried tangle.
The two walked across the ragged gravel parking lot toward the diner. They came in and the woman introduced herself as Harriet French from the Office of Public Liaison, here at the behest of Governor Randazzo. The older gentleman was Doug Pett, deputy commissioner of operations for the Pennsylvania State Troopers.
With minimal pleasantries, they got right into it.
“We’re pushing for quarantine and isolation,” French said.
“Under what authority?” Benji asked, and realized immediately he was stepping outside the bounds. He winced.
“Disease Prevention and Control Law of 1955, recently re-ratified in 2011 under then-governor Lincoln. Governor Randazzo has the utmost safety of the citizens of Pennsylvania at the top of his mind—”
“Bullshit,” Robbie said. “Excuse my French, Miss French, but Randazzo has politics at the top of his mind, not people—”
“Excuse him, really, apologies,” Benji said, forcing a wan smile. He shot Robbie a look, then turned back to Harriet French. “Harriet, I think what Robbie is trying to say is that he doesn’t quite see your justification as yet—we have not confirmed what this is, and quarantine requires a legal obligation to understand what it is before enacted—”
“I’m sorry, who are you again?” Harriet asked. “You didn’t say you’re with the CDC.”
“I’m with, ahhh—”
Sadie jumped in: “He’s with Benex-Voyager. We’re a technology company whose function is to predict these kinds of outbreaks—”
“Outbreaks? Is that what we’re calling it?” French’s brow darkened. “Doctor Ray, it seems you’re stepping outside your field of knowledge. Trust me when I say, our lawyers interpret the law fairly: If patients are suspected to have a communicable disease like tuberculosis, we can opt them into quarantine—”
“Not without their consent,” Robbie objected.
“We can opt them into quarantine,” she said, her words barging forward, “and in the event that the patient refuses to consent to testing for any of those illnesses, that quarantine can be enforced—”
“They can’t consent,” Benji interjected forcefully. “They’re sleepwalking—”
“Precisely. That gives us legal justification.”
“We’re just trying to get ahead of this thing, boys,” Doug Pett said, staring them down with those deep socket eyes. “Isn’t that what you…doctor-types promote? Preventive medicine? You wouldn’t let Ebola run wild up in here. You’d be on that like maggots on roadkill.”
“This is not Ebola,” Benji said.
“Yeah,” Robbie said. “You know how we know it’s not Ebola? Because nobody is shitting blood out their eyeballs. I’ve been up close and personal with it, and it’s a mess. Bloody gums, loose bowels, rash everywhere. By day ten of that disease, the bleeding inside is so massive it comes out of every part of you. This ain’t that.”
Pett leaned forward. “And yet, sounds like what happened to that teacher, Blamire.”
“That’s not—no, that’s not what happened to him. We don’t know what happened to him.”
“That instills us with little confidence,” French snapped.
Benji offered both hands in a placating gesture. “That is how science and medicine are practiced best, though—we are best when we admit our ignorance up front, and then attempt to fill the darkness of not-knowing with the light of information and knowledge.”
“That was very poetic,” Robbie said.
“It’s also not how politics works,” French bit back. “Politics doesn’t like big question marks. Voters like answers up front, out of the gate.”
“See?” Robbie said, sneering. “Reelection campaign.”
“We are accountable to the people of this state.”
“And those people walking are the people of your state,” Benji said. He felt his frustration rising. His anger, too. He knew he should shut his mouth but he kept on opening it and words kept on coming out of it: “The difficulty in containing them in a proper quarantine is the same difficulty Officer Kyle had containing Mark Blamire.”
“Kyle was one of mine,” Pett said, scowling. “A statie.”
“And I’d like to speak to him when he’s able,” Benji added. This is not your job, he thought, repeating it like a mantra. This is not your job.
“Can’t.” Benji shot him a confused look, and then Pett said: “Kyle died two hours ago in the hospital.”
Benji and Robbie looked to each other. Benji shook his head. “I’m…so sorry. I didn’t know.” His clinical mind quickly pushed past any sense of sorrow or dread and thought: That will make it easier to test him for any infectious agents. But then, following that, a sudden feeling of crushing pressure: There was so much to do, and Benji had little to no authority to do it.
That would be fine if this
were something known.
But whatever they were dealing with had no analog he could see.
It was rare to come upon something truly new in the epidemiological world: Even the manifestation of a “new” disease was something that piggybacked off or mutated from a preexisting one. Flu was flu. A hemorrhagic fever was a hemorrhagic fever. They had no idea what this was, where it began, or what it could do. And thus the true danger of a brand-new pandemic became overwhelmingly clear: Act too slow, it could take over. By the time they figured out what it was, it could have raced through the population. Alternatively, act too fast, too rashly, and there were legal consequences: They did not have broad, sweeping powers, and for good reason. Had to be a balance between measured investigation and swift action, or else they’d be either in a full-blown pandemic or locking people up in camps.
Good news, at least: This disease, if it even was one, seemed to operate slowly, though without sensible, easy-to-discern logistics. Again he thought a chemical origin was likely. Or a parasite.
He kept that one in the back of his mind: parasite. Hm. Something to that. The way parasites hijacked hosts and commanded them to actions that served those parasites more than the hosts…that deserved deeper thought…
Robbie said what Benji was thinking: “We don’t know what’s causing this, so that’s priority one for EIS. My team’s priority—”
“Could be terrorists,” Pett interjected.
“What?”
“Terrorists. Don’t wanna rule them out. I got a buddy in Homeland Security. Once HomeSec catches wind of this—”
“It’s not—it’s not fucking terrorists, with all due respect.”
Pett snarled, “Funny how people always say with all due respect just after they disrespected the hell out of you.”
“It’s not terrorists,” Benji said, trying to keep everyone calm.
Harriet French, now, was on her smartphone, her fingers working to type something in. The phone vibrated now and again. A look of consternation and disgust drew lines on her face.
“Better hope not. We find out it is, then the solution isn’t quarantine. The solution is a bullet for each of those walkers.” Said like they were zombies in zombie films. Said like they weren’t humans, but targets. Benji could not stomach that kind of talk.
“You sonofabitch. These are people,” Benji began, but Robbie interrupted him—suddenly, Robbie was the calm one. A strange, if necessary, reversal.
“Hey, hey, whoa, listen, my team’s priority, like I said, is to control and contain this thing on the ground while EIS plays disease detective. So what I propose is a loose, roving isolation—not too different from what you’ve got set up now. We keep new people from coming close. We keep the sleepwalkers together—and anyone who has been in close proximity to them should submit to hospital isolation. It means I’ll need to work with you and your troopers in close coordination, Commissioner Pett. That sound good? Doug? Harriet? Anybody?”
Harriet set her phone down and looked up from it. Her stare pinned Benji to his seat. “You. I thought I remembered your name. Longacre. North Carolina. You’re the one who conjured that whole witch hunt and based on what? Nothing.” Torchlight flickered in her eyes as she said, “I had stock in that company. I lost money. A lot of people did.”
“I’m sorry,” Benji started to say—
French stood up suddenly, and Pett joined her. To Robbie she said, “I’ll pass your plan to the governor and on through to the Department of Health. It’s a start, but I warn you: If we decide that a forced stationary isolation is necessary, we will overrule you on this.” And they could, Benji knew. The CDC had jurisdiction only when it became a federal matter—and that meant getting the secretary of Health and Human Services involved. They were not there yet, but if they had to rope in Secretary Flores, they would in order to do this right. To Benji she said: “As for you? You’re a disgrace, and I intend to file a complaint. Your presence here is trouble.”
And with that, they got up and stormed out.
* * *
—
“SO, THAT WENT well,” Robbie said.
The two of them stood out in front of the diner. Sadie was still inside, paying the bill.
“I shouldn’t have come,” Benji said. “It was a mistake. It just felt like…like old times, like settling into an old chair. Far too comfortable. I’ve compromised everything and I only just got here. Longacre. Damnit.”
“Real-talk? What you did with Longacre was fucking stupid. And it was wrong. But I get it, too. You weren’t right, but also…nnyeah, you were kinda right. I don’t blame you. Others might; I’m not them. But I won’t crucify you for that lapse in judgment.”
“It wasn’t just a lapse in judgment.”
It was, Benji knew, premeditated. It was nothing short of a conspiracy. A small conspiracy, really, shared by one man and with no other. But what he saw there at Longacre that day…
He could pinpoint the moment, even now, that it had happened. Standing there, smelling the smell of piss and shit and sickness, the urine brining the hay under his feet, the animals crammed together in stalls too small for one or two pigs much less the dozen they held. Then there were the gestation crates where the sows were held, and the farrowing crates where piglets fed at the mothers—before being taken away and thrown in with their brothers and sisters. It wasn’t just that the animals weren’t treated well—Benji recognized that though one could bring some humaneness to killing an animal, killing was still killing, and doing so to feed the hungers of a massive, meat-eating civilization meant it became a tireless, never-ending slaughter. Mechanized and soulless. That was bad enough.
Worse was the potential for disease.
Already the pigs there were overfed using food supplemented with antibiotics, and still their sores and abscesses remained. Already there were strong causal links between antibiotic-resistant MRSA and factory pig farms. Already there were signs of evolving leptospirosis infections…
And this was the biggest factory farm in the nation.
It was a cauldron of disease waiting to spill over.
Something would emerge from this slurry of malnutrition and ill treatment, he knew. A superbug without bounds. An unstoppable flu. A pandemic would rise.
It was one line between two dots: This was a prediction a child could make.
Only problem: He had nothing actionable. Benji could make some recommendations, and Longacre would follow them or they wouldn’t, and it would take years to follow up—and they would get their lobbyists to curry protection from the politicians, and the system would defend them while they were quietly, unwittingly, brewing the next pandemic.
Benji made a choice.
He submitted a report. He leaked it to the public.
And that report contained made-up numbers.
It contained evidence of MRSA in far larger quantities, using data stolen from a WHO report on Canadian hog farms ten years ago.
This act was, he told himself at the time, for the greater good. Forcing the pig farm to be accountable meant potentially heading off a major disaster. It was the only way anyone would listen. And they did listen, to his surprise. Longacre’s stock prices plummeted. People stopped buying their pork from stores—and pork from other brands. Pork stopped being the other white meat and became the way we all die.
And then the industry hired investigators. And lawyers. And together they found out what Benji had done. They found the cribbed numbers, the data, the replicated samples.
He was lucky, in a way, that the worst that happened was his firing. The CDC took the brunt of it. He still got a severance package.
But his name became synonymous with a special kind of governmental overreach—a sense that the government would twist the numbers and force the data to tell a different story than the truth in order to fulfill some hazy agenda. The blame went up from hi
m to the CDC to President Hunt herself (already a magnet attracting responsibility for problems that were not her fault). It gave the government less agency, not more. He did more harm to the mission than to anything else.
“Whatever with that shit,” Robbie said. “You’re here. We’ll figure it out. Just, uhh. Stay more in the background, would you?”
With that, Sadie came out of the restaurant. She was wearing her best smile, like none of what had happened in there fazed her one little bit.
“Any sense of the reception I’m going to get from the rest of EIS?” Benji asked his old friend.
Robbie shrugged. “Can’t say, Benj. That is a bandage you’re just gonna have to rip off to see how badly it bleeds. Speaking of which: You wanna get a first look at the sleepwalkers?”
“Let’s,” Sadie said, jingling her keys.
Sleepwalking—also known as somnambulism—is a sleep disorder that often arises during deep sleep and results in a display of motor skills, which can include walking, but may also involve other behaviors, from the simple (sitting up in bed and looking around) to the complex (going to the bathroom, and using a dry razor to shave one’s face). Use of certain drugs can increase the likelihood of somnambulism (Ambien is a known cause). Most sleepwalkers remember nothing about the events during their actions, as they are in deep sleep. This also makes them difficult to wake, but contrary to popular myth, sleepwalkers should be woken during any somnambulist activity to prevent potential injury or embarrassment.
—from an NSDC (National Sleep Disorder Center) pamphlet
JUNE 4
Pine Grove, Pennsylvania
ROUTE 443 WAS A RICKETY, crater-marked two-lane road with a faded line down the center. Across the street was an open, fallow field and a long gravel parking lot for a nursery and greenhouse, which had been closed up since the CDC took over. Behind Benji a tent and a mobile laboratory orbited a flurry of activity: police officers, Robbie’s ORT team, some lab techs. But that wasn’t what Benji was watching.