White Plague

by James Abel

  An hour later, Eddie and I had twenty men lined up in the lab, sleeves rolled up past their elbows; all Montana crew who had survived the outbreak. We dabbed forearms with alcohol-soaked cotton balls. We inserted needles into blue veins. We measured out blood into test tubes and stoppered the stuff; each container holding antibodies to whatever strain of flu was rampant on this ship.

  But I felt like a medieval doctor, a barber with a knife and slimy leeches, about to do things to patients that would never be permitted in a modern hospital. I knew that if one of the men we’d taken blood from was infected with HIV, I’d be dooming anyone to whom I gave that preventive shot.

  We diluted the collected blood with plasma from sick bay, to help supply other immunity proteins. Then we took the vials downstairs to the hangar, and the needles, about forty of them still in wrappers, and we also carried bottles of rubbing alcohol. We’d flush the needles with saline and autoclave the parts after each shot.

  As we started going cot to cot, administering the shots, Eddie looked up at one of the hangar cameras, but he wasn’t really thinking about watchers on the bridge. “Hey! Hey, Zhou! You! Two orders of kung pao chicken, with an extra container of rice! And no MSG like last time!”

  Elsewhere on the ship, I knew, DeBlieu had ordered sheets laid over computers, in case the cameras were being operated remotely. He’d ordered quadruple duct tape layers and foam padding over computer microphone openings, and all mikes turned off, or at least set that way.

  Still, I had the disembodied feeling, at all times, that foreign eyes watched me, that we were on a TV screen somewhere, maybe with a Shanghai street outside the viewer’s window, maybe a military base near the Vietnamese border, or outside Beijing. Now Lieutenant Colonel Rush is examining another patient. Now Lieutenant Colonel Rush is shaking his head; he looks frustrated, exhausted. Now a man in row number two has died, and two Marines are carrying him out, covered with a blanket.

  Another hour passed.

  And another.

  No change in the patients, I thought. But it’s still too soon. Wait until tomorrow. Give it time.

  Eddie and I took a break, went outside, mugs of strong Maxwell House in hand. The ice was gone now. We were 140 miles, maybe eight more hours, from shore, if we maintained speed. The water had a light chop, a low, early moon sneered at us above, and suddenly I saw in the sky aurora borealis, as luminous streaks of emerald lights began pulsating above. I’d never seen one this clear. I was in another universe. The clarity was beyond comprehension, and all around it, day as night and night as day, earth’s processes all mixed in an Arctic blender, a million stars, each one a hint of more that you could not see, far stars, burned stars, dangerous stars, as many stars as microbes. Each one a private world.

  A shooting star streaked into aurora borealis, seemed to be consumed and burned by it, then reappeared as a smear that dropped below the curve of earth and was gone. And then, to starboard, only a mile off, I saw solid whiteout. The planet was gone.

  Maybe the inoculations will need a little more time.

  The ship’s medical officer Janice Cullen suddenly appeared on deck with us, not even having put on a parka. Her face looked flushed. I thought she was ill at first, but then, for the first time, saw animation instead of fear or exhaustion. She was gripping the hand railing. But the eyes were bright, and I thought I saw—at least for an instant—what to me seemed like hope.

  “Something is happening in the hangar,” she said in a breathy voice. “You better come look.”

  “The serum?” I said. “So fast?”

  “No, not the serum. It’s . . . it’s actually . . . Colonel, I’m not sure just what it is,” she said. “But you have to come see for yourself. See for yourself!”

  She turned without waiting for an answer, and hurried into the hangar.

  Heart slamming against my ribs, I followed, hearing Eddie’s bootfalls behind.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Watching the soldiers refuel the fighter plane was so cool!

  In Barrow, Seth Itta, age nine, and Leo Nuna, also age nine, best friends, peered out the window in the North Slope Rescue Squad office on the second floor of the squad’s hangar at the airport, at the recently lengthened runway and tarmac and the fascinating, gleaming predator-shaped plane that had landed thirty minutes before, and was now parked below.

  The lone runway was empty, the brown tundra grass waving behind it, a big white owl there, staring back. Yesterday’s Alaska Air flight to Anchorage had left an hour ago—delayed by mechanical problems—and no private planes were due in, and the wind outside scuffed the tops of high grasses, and blew the red wind sock to the southwest.

  “It’s an F22,” announced Seth.

  “How do you know?” challenged Leo.

  “Because Uncle Elmore showed me pictures. He fixes those things in Anchorage. He says they can go over a thousand miles an hour. He says they’re the fastest thing in the sky.”

  Outside, in early September, it was light again, twenty-seven degrees, but it was one of those rare days when aurora borealis, the northern lights, was so strong that the sky rippled green lines that undulated above the ocean, and tundra to the south, shimmering and snaking and luminescent even during daylight.

  Their third-grade teacher had said that aurora borealis was caused by “sunspots,” huge gas explosions on the sun, and that this year there were “extra strong” sunspots, and that was why the lights could be seen even during the day. He’d said this year’s display was the best the North Slope had seen in twenty years.

  Normally the light show would have captivated the boys, but it paled beside the fighter jet. Flown-in Air Force crew had driven the fuel truck out to it, attached the hose, and were pumping in gas.

  “Where are the bombs?” Leo asked Seth.

  “Inside the plane, dummy!” announced Seth.

  “Why do you think the plane is here?”

  “Why do you think? To blow up bad guys! My grandfather was talking about walrus ivory smugglers last night, over by Wainright. Men from Nome. Maybe the bombs will blow their boats out of the water, like, boom! No more smugglers killing walrus!”

  Seth made an explosion noise and swept some papers into the air, as if the explosion had dislodged them.

  “Dead smugglers!” shouted Leo.

  “Bust ’em to pieces!” cried Seth.

  And then another voice, a male voice, and an unfamiliar one said quietly, “What are you two doing up here?”

  The black man who advanced into the room in an Air Force flight suit had short gray hair and very straight posture and a stern voice, although his face looked friendly, as did his copper-colored eyes, catching overhead light. The rescue squad office was empty. It was large and lit well and broken into partitioned-off cubicles for the pilots, and a side office for the head of the department.

  Just now the pilots were out, one on a rescue mission to pick up a hunter who had broken his leg two hundred miles inland, at a fishing camp; one to ferry a couple of electrical maintenance men three hundred miles west to Point Hope, on the coast, so they could fix that village’s electrical generator.

  The boys had been told by Seth’s uncle, Drew, who ran the rescue squad, that they could hang out here and listen to the emergency radio. If they heard someone calling for aid—maybe the pregnant lady with “complications” in Atqasuk, maybe a fisherman whose engine had died at sea, maybe someone with appendicitis at a hunting camp—they were to call Drew on his cell phone, at the AC Value Center, the big supermarket, where he’d gone to the pickup counter for fried chicken and cheeseburgers and fries and fried onions and a liter of Mountain Dew soda for dinner for them all.

  Drew had a radio in his Outback, but while shopping, even for a few minutes, he preferred to have someone at the office, listening in case something went wrong.

  Uncle Drew had taught Seth to use the radio. Seth w
as to tell whoever was calling to wait, hold on, while he contacted Uncle Drew.

  The boys told the man in the flight suit this, and he just smiled, and shrugged, believing them, and he looked out the window over their shoulders at the jet, and said, “Nice bird, isn’t she?”

  “Terrific,” breathed Seth.

  “She came in so fast,” Leo said. “Whoooooosh!”

  The boys were dressed in mid-weight jackets and T-shirts—New York Giants logo for Seth, Carlsbad Caverns on Leo, and new blue jeans from the AV, and their banana seat bikes were leaning against the hangar outside, not far from where the taxicabs idled during breaks, their Pakistani or Korean drivers chattering away in foreign tongues, waiting for tourists to take to the hotels, or scientists to take up to the research campus.

  The boys had had a great summer riding around in broad daylight at all hours of the night, going out to fishing camps, and hunting camps, and now, with autumn coming, they were looking forward to high school football games on the blue Astroturf field by the beach, to ice coming back, and not particularly to schoolwork, especially math lessons.

  The man in the flight suit asked if there was coffee anywhere here, and Seth directed him to the big Krups fourteen-cupper by the Zenith TV, where the pilots relaxed on Sundays and watched cable TV football games. The man poured brew into a ceramic mug, stirred in coffee creamer and sugar, and plopped onto the couch. He seemed friendly, but also worried, Leo thought.

  Leo said, “Are you the whole crew?”

  “Yep.”

  “Like, the only one in there?”

  “That’s me, son.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Anchorage. Elmendorf.”

  “What kind of bombs are inside?”

  The man’s head swung up, and for a moment the boys were frightened by the intense look on his face. At first Seth thought he was angry. But then he saw that the question seemed to have aged the man by ten years. There were furrows by the mouth that had not been there earlier. There were wavy lines on the forehead, and the posture, which had been straight and proud, looked more like an elder’s posture, bent.

  “Who told you I’m carrying bombs?”

  “My uncle said they go inside. He also said the Navy planes have missiles that can sink ships.”

  “Yes, harpoons,” the man said in a low voice.

  Which got the boys giggling, because “harpoons” were what their fathers, uncles, and elders worked on, in garages and toolsheds and in the Heritage Center, all winter, to use on the bowheads during the spring hunt in May, and the upcoming fall hunt in October. The boys were now old enough to go out to the hunting camps with their uncles, at the edge of the ice, where they’d run errands, be quiet, or be sent home, study the way the men waited for the big whales to appear, the way they’d positioned their sealskin-covered umiaqs—open boats—to be ready when the bowheads showed up, coming from their summer feeding grounds in Canada, heading toward their winter grounds to the west.

  The man seemed to understand why the boys were laughing. He smiled. “Oh, right,” he said. “Harpoons.”

  Whale hunts were more exciting than fighter planes, but Seth asked the man in the flight suit, “Are you going to blow up bad guys with your bombs?”

  And the man in the flight suit looked up at them and sighed. Then he looked at his watch. He seemed to be waiting for something, “orders,” Seth would later insist when he told his friends the story.

  The man in the flight suit shook his head and looked sad, just about the saddest man they’d ever seen. He didn’t answer. He stared into space. For a moment he reminded Seth of the scary way his cousin Elliot had looked on the night before he shot himself.

  “No, boys, I’m not going to blow up bad guys,” he said in a dead voice. “Not the bad guys at all.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Clinton’s fever was dropping.

  I stood beside his cot, staring down with hope at the thermometer. There was no doubt about the two-degree change, down from a raging 104 two hours ago, to a dangerous but better 102. Eyes more focused. Chest sounding a trifle clearer. Mucus still clotted and yellow, but the sweat running at a sheen on his broad forehead was not a flood anymore.

  “Clinton?”

  The eyes were red, exhausted, but did I see a spark of interest there that had previously been absent?

  “Don’t land,” he said weakly.

  “How do you feel? Any better?”

  “I’d be better if you stayed away from Barrow.”

  Fevers, of course, wax and wane. The new development could be a temporary abatement. It did not mean he was getting better, and if he was, it did not mean the medicine was responsible. He could be manifesting natural resistance. After all, a majority of the stricken, so far, had recovered. But Janice Cullen took my arm and excitedly pulled me to the next cot in line, this one occupied by a Montana fire control technician, a lean Italian-American from Rhode Island, one of the original sick, who had been gray as death last time I’d come by. The hand-scrawled chart at the foot of the cot read age thirty. Last time I’d checked, he’d looked more like seventy.

  Now I saw a spot of color on his cheeks. I watched the chest moving in and out more regularly—still fitful, but an improvement. I hoped it wasn’t just a coincidence.

  Cullen whispered, “Everyone in this row is getting better. But, um, only people in this row. No one else.”

  I blinked, uncomprehending. “Repeat that, please.”

  She nodded. “Nineteen of them, all improving. I don’t understand it either. Why just this row?”

  I gazed in puzzlement around our makeshift hospital, the rows of cots, three for the sick, and the other, separated section for quarantined people—the rest of us—who showed no signs of illness yet.

  Clinton lay in the second row over from the hull. His row contained a mix of patients: a twenty-two-year-old female yeoman from the Montana, a twenty-nine-year-old male electronics technician from the Wilmington, a nineteen-year-old machinist from the Montana, a forty-two-year-old chief from the Wilmington.

  “Coincidence?” said Eddie, frowning, leaning close.

  I didn’t answer in words, just a disbelieving look.

  “Then why?”

  Something clear and sweet moved into my throat and caught there. It was the taste of hope, replacing the sour flavor of despair. Oh, I knew the old saying: When hope is hungry, everything feeds it. So I tried to think dispassionately, to lock away pure hope, to be the scientist fathoming intellectually what this medical officer was telling me, because it made no sense yet, none at all. Row two was getting better but everyone else remained as sick as before.

  “Go ahead, check it out,” challenged Cullen.

  I took a walk between rows two and three, trying to contain the excitement. On my right, in row three, patient after patient continued showing the debilitating effects of disease. But on the left, only feet away, all down row two, violent heartbeats had slowed, fevers were less, eyes seemed more focused, and patients more animated, as if collectively they sensed the change not only in themselves, but in others, too.

  Eddie said, “What the hell?”

  Okay, what is happening? What’s the reason?

  My eyes ran over the walls, vents, carts of medicines, rolling steel door. Overconfidence is a killer, and there was no proof that what we saw meant anything more than a temporary and coincidental upswing.

  “Eddie, what is different about people in this row? They got the same medicine. They got the same food. They’re adjacent to two other rows, so it’s not environmental. They’re cared for by the same people.”

  “The venting system?”

  We looked up. A huge vent lay directly overhead, but air spewing from it would spread over the entire hangar.

  “No.”

  “The time when they got here!”


  “Eddie, most of these people arrived at approximately the same time.”

  I double-checked with Janice Cullen to make sure that Clinton’s row had received the same medicines as other patients, and she affirmed that was the case. Same dosages of zanamivir and xapaxin. Two snorts into each nostril, every few hours.

  “Well, something’s not the same.”

  I tried to clear my mind of preconceptions, although, when it comes to preconceptions, you never know that you have one until it’s too late. I walked to the front of the row and started back again slowly, glancing back and forth at the deathly gray faces on one side, the slightly more alert ones on the other. I let my eyes rove over blankets, parkas, makeshift night tables. Eddie walked beside me, doing the same thing, hoping some difference would jump out.

  “Huh!” Eddie exclaimed.

  We turned back, guards on patrol, started up the row in the opposite direction. My guts were grinding. A spike drove into my right eye. My fists clenched, as if I felt the presence of an unknown vulnerability in our enemy. My ankle, where I’d been hurt, was swollen, bandaged, on fire. I could feel the steady hum of the powerful engines of the icebreaker, driving us south, and wished we would leave international waters and reach the border of the United States.

  I halted midway down the line, concentrating on the array of items on top of the crate night tables: pill vials and plastic aerosol containers, trinkets, books.

  “You’re sure they got the same medicines, Lieutenant Cullen?”

  “I administered them myself.”

  “You’re sure nobody came along and did something special, different to people in row two?”

  “Not to my knowledge. And I’ve pretty much been here the whole time, except for bathroom breaks.”

  I bent down at a crate, stenciled U.S. COAST GUARD PROPERTY, let my gloved fingers hover above a Timex watch, a plastic mug of water, a dog-eared copy of The Sun Also Rises, the white plastic aerosol container that . . .

  I froze.