He poked the radio as they drove onwards. The President’s message was being repeated time and time again, in-between hundreds of different pieces of advice, some of them contradictory or harmful. The last time the group had considered going to the refuge had been during the bird flu crisis, when they had feared that it might spread to America and out of control. He couldn't fault the President for restricting travel, even if it was unconstitutional, but he wasn't going to leave his family in New York, not now that it had been infected with smallpox. He would not allow it to happen.
“Dad,” Robin said suddenly, “what about school?”
Jim found himself laughing hysterically. He had often considered home-schooling the boys, but the truth was that neither he nor Linda had much aptitude for teaching. The boys hadn't liked their school or the smarmy teachers, yet now he would give almost anything for things to go back to normal. The world would never be the same again. It struck him that he was among those who were best prepared for the crisis, yet he knew now he hadn't prepared enough. How could he have prepared?
“I think that school is out for the foreseeable future,” he said, ruefully. The boys didn't look unhappy, he was amused to note. If they linked up with the others from the group, perhaps they could set up some kind of schooling. Public schools, with hundreds of children in close proximity, would be a breeding ground for smallpox. They’d remain closed for a very long time and, even after the crisis had been defeated, if it ever was defeated, no one would place so much faith in them again. “We’ll see what happens when we get to the farm.”
The sky slowly faded to darkness as the night wore in. They passed hundreds of other cars and trucks, even though the radio kept repeating warnings about unessential travel. Many of the service stations and motels seemed to have decided to close early, although he was able to stop at a pump station and buy some gas. He took the opportunity to splash out and purchase additional supplies for the SUV, knowing that money might soon be worthless. It wasn't hard to work out what would happen when most of America's workforce refused to come into work. The entire economy would collapse. Businesses would go under, banks would fail, tax revenue would end...the entire country would enter an unprecedented economic nightmare from which it might never recover. Nothing was ever going to be the same again.
“Get some sleep,” he ordered the boys, as they passed an army convoy heading the other way. He half-expected the soldiers to stop them, but they just let them pass without even waving. Perhaps, out in the countryside, there would be no attempt to impede traffic. “We’ll be there tomorrow morning.”
The radio spoke endlessly of the need for calm.
Chapter Eight
It is important to remember that animals are not, by definition, human. A medicine tested on an animal – such as a monkey – may not actually be effective when used on a human, or vice versa. Even when dealing with diseases that can cross between species – like smallpox – it is still difficult to be sure that one cure will work for all. This leaves us with the disturbing need to carry out human testing, intentionally or otherwise.
- Doctor Nicolas Awad
Washington DC, USA
Day 7
There was exactly one research facility that belonged solely to Project Wildfire, a former USAF base that had been decommissioned and placed under the care of a small caretaker crew. The Wildfire experts had converted the base’s underground facilities into a series of research labs, patient rooms and secure storage facilities, knowing that if the base were ever to be activated, it would be required to study the effects of a biological attack. No one outside a very small group of select people knew that the base was anything other than what it seemed, a disused airfield far enough from Washington for comfort.
Cally Henderson lay on a bed within a private room, stripped of all dignity by her disease and the small army of doctors and nurses surrounding her. Nicolas watched as they bent over her naked body, warped and mutilated by the hundreds of pustules covering her bare skin, taking samples and injecting her with fluids that might help keep her alive for another day or two. IV lines ran from the ceiling, pumping in liquid food and painkillers, while smaller tubes had been attached to her vagina and anus. The poor girl would have died by now, were it not for the medical intervention, yet Nicolas held no hope for her recovery. The researchers had been charting the process of the disease – Henderson’s Disease, they’d started to call it – and had concluded that it was systematically wrecking her body. They weren't even sure if Miss Henderson was still aware of her surroundings.
Nicolas grimaced as one of the pustules broke, scattering infectious material over the bed. The woman had become little more than a walking pile of smallpox, so heavily infectious that anyone who went near her without a protective suit would almost certainly wind up infected with the disease. Even death would bring no relief for the rest of the world, he knew, for smallpox would remain dangerous until her body was burned in a furnace. When her body finally failed, despite everything they could do to keep her alive, she would be dissected and then, what remained of her body would be destroyed. Even so, it hardly seemed to matter. The disease was already loose in America, if not the entire world.
He turned away as the girl moaned in pain and looked towards the FBI’s massive chart of her life. It would have alarmed any civil liberties campaigner if they had known just how comprehensively a person’s life could be profiled by the government, yet none of it answered the most important question of all; where in the world had Miss Henderson been infected with smallpox? As an air hostess, she had been around the world, but there was nowhere outside the United States – yet, he reminded himself – that was reporting a smallpox epidemic. The disease appeared to have come out of nowhere. The pattern fitted a biological attack, of course, but even so...where had it come from?
Cally Henderson, in the week before she had called in sick, had been to three different countries; Saudi Arabia, France and Mexico. While on her aircraft, she had met literally thousands of people, from all walks of life. Depending on when she had actually become contagious, she could have spread the disease all around the world on her own. She had certainly infected most of her workmates, who had all been in the early stages of Henderson’s Disease when medical personnel had reached their homes. If she had been the only carrier, it suggested that Henderson’s Disease had an incubation period of just under a week – unlike regular smallpox, which had an incubation period of twelve to fourteen days - but there was no way to know that for sure. If there were other carriers, the disease might have a longer incubation period.
He took one last look at Miss Henderson, who was moaning in pain as a needle gently penetrated her arm, and walked away. It seemed obscene to keep her alive when they could spare her suffering, but there was no choice. He told himself that they had to know everything they could about the disease, yet it meant prolonging – perhaps even worsening – her suffering. There were plenty of people in the world who deserved to suffer, he knew, including the perverted doctors who had warped smallpox into Henderson’s Disease, but a doctor was not meant to encourage suffering. He had known that he would have to play fast and loose with his medical ethics when he joined Wildfire, all in the name of the greater good, yet it was harder now he was facing a real patient. The only other emergencies he had faced had been in drills, where no one had actually suffered and it had been easy to prescribe harsh and desperate measures.
His Bluetooth phone buzzed. “Doctor, this is Jack,” a voice said. “We’re ready for you in Room Three.”
Nicolas grimaced as he passed through a set of airlocks and into a long passage leading down to a second set of secure rooms. He had always taken his oaths seriously – above all, first do no harm – and what they were about to do broke his oaths, along with hundreds of national and international agreements on just what doctors and researchers could and could not do. He told himself that there were already hundreds of known cases of Henderson’s Disease – and doubtless thousands of
unknown cases, who would begin to show symptoms over the next couple of days – and desperate measures were required, yet the whole concept disgusted him. It smacked of what the Nazis or the Japanese had done back in the Second World War, or, for that matter, of the perverted genius that had created Henderson’s Disease.
Years ago, in 1796, Doctor Edward Jenner had realised that milkmaids – who caught cowpox as a result of their work – never seemed to catch smallpox, which had roared through England from time to time. In an experiment that would have horrified his future descendents, Jenner had taken cowpox from a young milkmaid and transferred it to a young boy, who had promptly caught the disease. When the subject had recovered, Jenner had attempted to infect him with smallpox, an act that could well have killed him. The boy hadn’t caught the disease. Jenner had repeated the experiment several times and then started encouraging people to spread the word, using cowpox to immunise people against the far more deadly smallpox. Jenner had become known as the Father of Immunology for his work, saving the human race from one of the deadliest scourges known to man. He would have been astonished to discover that, in the future, testing new and experimental cures was so hedged around by rules and regulations that the process had practically ground to a halt and human experimentation was effectively banned.
Nicolas stopped outside the viewing room and pressed his hand against the biometric reader, allowing it to scan his fingerprints before allowing him access. The viewing room was dominated by a one-way mirror, allowing him to see into the four sealed medical rooms, each one inhabited by a single person. A handful of other researchers were watching with interest, but no one spoke. Nicolas knew that they shared the same ambivalence about the experiment that he felt himself, the certain knowledge that they were doing something necessary, matched with the concern that they were doing something inhuman. If word got out, there would be uproar.
He glanced down at his notes. Subject One was a former infantryman who had been caught in the act of raping an Iraqi girl back during the occupation. The media had made much of the act, but they had largely refrained from noticing that Subject One had been tried, sentenced and bundled off to the toughest prison in the United States. Subject Two was a former USAF officer who had been convicted of terrorism after planting a bomb in a USAF aircraft, claiming that his religion demanded opposition to his country. The important detail, as far as Project Wildfire was concerned, was that both of the former military personnel had been injected with smallpox vaccine during their induction into the military.
Subject Three, on the other hand, came from a civilian background. He had raped and murdered four young girls before he had finally been caught and sentenced to death by an outraged jury. He had been working the appeals process ever since, struggling to remain alive, despite the country’s fury. His fellow prisoners had taken a dim view of him; his face bore the scars from a brutal beating he’d taken while in the showers, before he’d been placed in solitary confinement for his own protection. Subject Four, the only woman in the group, had deliberately murdered her own children, for no apparent reason. She too had been under sentence of death when she’d been pulled out of Death Row and transferred to the base.
Nicolas shook his head as the prisoners paced their room. They didn't know it, but their compartments were linked to Miss Henderson’s room and smallpox particles were drifting through the air towards them. The doctors would watch and monitor to see which of the prisoners caught the disease and study how it attacked their system, charting its course from infection to death. He wondered if the prisoners knew what was going on, or if they would have volunteered for the experiment if they had been told what was going to happen, yet they had to remain unaware. The medical system in the outside world was already tottering under the weight of people thinking themselves ill, convinced that they were suffering from smallpox and were going to die any second, and the prisoners couldn't be allowed to warp the results in the same way. The whole experiment disgusted him, yet there was no choice.
The President hadn't been entirely truthful when she’d addressed the nation. There wasn’t enough smallpox vaccine to inject everyone in the continental United States. The various drug companies had been urged to produce more as rapidly as possible, but the most optimistic figures suggested that it would be months before production was re-established and new vaccines started to come off the line. The immunisation program was proceeding as rapidly as possible, yet it was proving a difficult task. It didn't help that the internet was already buzzing with rumours that the government intended to withhold the vaccine from certain elements of the public, purely in the hope that those elements would do them the favour of dropping dead. It was absurd, yet people were starting to panic. They would believe anything if it offered them the hope of surviving infection.
He shook his head and walked out of the chamber. The other doctors would continue to observe the patients, tracking the disease, but he didn't want to even look at them. Deliberately infecting people – even criminals who deserved to suffer in the most horrific manner possible – was horrific. It had been so much easier to draw up the protocols when there had been nothing more than an intellectual exercise. He passed through a secure checkpoint - even within the base, there were areas that were off-limits to half of the base’s personnel – and headed down into the research labs. In sealed rooms, robotic arms moved small samples of disease around, while doctors studied it through microscopes and compared it to the DNA records of other variants of smallpox.
“I have good news and bad news,” Doctor McCoy said. “This particular variant of smallpox is behaving very oddly.”
“So it’s smallpox, Jim, but not as we know it,” Nicolas said. Doctor McCoy scowled at him. The joke would probably have been funnier if people hadn’t been making it ever since he had qualified as a medical doctor. “What exactly is it doing?”
McCoy pointed to one of the sample trays. “For a start, it is multiplying very quickly within the test materials,” he said. He tapped a key and brought up an image from one of the microscopes, displaying it above the case. The smallpox was attacking the sample of human flesh terrifyingly quickly. “I would go so far as to suggest that the incubation period for Henderson’s Disease is less than a week, perhaps as little as four days. If someone was already ill, the chances are that it would actually bring them down faster.”
Nicolas nodded impatiently. A person whose immune system was already weakened – either through AIDS or simply through having a minor infection – would be in no state to fight off smallpox, or even resist it for any length of time. AIDS was not easy to catch – although thousands of doctors and quacks had exaggerated the dangers for years – yet once a person had it, it was very difficult to cure them. The drug companies were still working on a vaccine for AIDS, but there had been no real progress.
“Worse,” McCoy continued, “it is alarmingly contagious. I think that a victim actually becomes contagious within two to three days and starts spreading the disease, unaware that there is something badly wrong with them. The disease seems to be airborne and only a small level of infection is required to spread the disease. In short, it appears to be the perfect biological weapon. I would be very surprised to hear that we’d managed to contain it within the cities.”
“I know,” Nicolas said. The military had thrown up the road blocks as quickly as possible, but he knew that thousands of people had managed to get out of the cities before the road blocks had been put into position, while hundreds more were still trying to sneak out past the military and escape. The odds were good that most of them hadn't been infected, yet if only one or two of them had been infected, they were likely to spread the disease into the countryside as well. Farmers and their families were on the list of people to be vaccinated as quickly as possible, but what would happen if the disease was already burning through the countryside? Nothing good, he was sure. “Is there any good news?”
“It doesn't last long in the open air,” McCoy said, standing up. “
We know that UV light can be used to kill germs, but it seems that even bright sunlight will kill Henderson’s Disease, at least in the air. It won’t do anything about a dead body – that’s still going to remain a danger until it’s burnt to ashes – yet there will be limits on how far it can spread.”
“Let’s hope so,” Nicolas agreed. There were already hundreds of cases within New York alone. If the disease continued to spread, the cities would be turned into charnel houses. Some irresponsible talking heads were already wondering if the military was planning to nuke American cities, just to prevent the disease from spreading further. There were times when Nicolas cursed the American media, for talk like that would only spread panic. It would be every man for himself if panic got out of control. “Is there anything else?”
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