by B. C. CHASE
Aubrey said, "Are we going to see these things in China?”
“Yes, that's why we're on our way.”
“Well I hope they do look like freaks. Then you won't buy them.”
“That would depend,” Henry grinned, “on the price.”
CDC
Karen was standing at the head of a huge conference table that had a vast screen built into its surface. An officer in uniform and several other well-dressed people stood around the table with her.
Unlike her usual aggressive stance, she now appeared somber, even defeated, as she said, “You all know the President hasn't had a cabinet meeting in forever. We've all functioned well enough without them, and we all meet individually as we find the time or need. But I think you'd agree, it's long overdue, especially with the situation we're facing. I asked him first. He refused. So that's why I've asked you here.
“As you all know by now, a virus of unknown origin has been on the loose, and it has been kicking us in the balls. I secured an executive order to quarantine Towson as things were heating up. To get that accomplished, I had to pull teeth.
“I will be sending the President a new executive order request. This one goes far beyond what any of us imagined might be required when this thing first began. My next request will have repercussions for the entire nation, perhaps for years to come—regardless of the outcome of our fight against this virus. So I'll need each and every one of you to be on the same page with me when I present the new order.
“Now, before we get into that, I have General Fox here to report on the quarantine situation so far.” She nodded to the uniformed man.
General Fox, a solemn-looking man with thick eyebrows and a large bald head, motioned to the screen where a map of Towson was displayed, “Right now, we've sealed Towson in on I-83 on the west and 695 on the north. We've sealed the south on West/East Northern Parkway. And Route 542 closes off the east. That’s an area of seventeen square miles. We have eyes watching every inch of that perimeter. I guarantee you, if anyone has sneaked through, they're invisible.
“We've had just shy of thirty thousand cases outside the Towson quarantine area. Every new case outside of Towson—all thirty thousand, and anyone who is connected with them by Epidemic Intelligence Services—is brought into Towson.
“Of Towson residents, there have been 12,000 fatalities that appear to be directly from the virus. He paused, seemingly to digest his own words.
Someone said, “You're saying that this virus has killed 12,000 people?”
“No, I said the body count from Towson is 12,000. The body count of those brought into our quarantine zone is 17,500.”
Karen said, “To do the math for those of you who want to turn this into a numbers game, the total is 27,852 . Eighty-five percent of those are female.”
The cabinet members around the table were dumbfounded.
Finally, someone said, “How could twenty-eight thousand people die like that and we haven't even heard there was a major problem? I mean I know I'm only Secretary of Commerce, but. . .”
Karen said, “I think you could ask the President that question. The fact that he isn't even here speaks volumes.”
“But Karen, you could have called us.”
“I am calling you! Right now! This thing has happened in a matter of days. On Monday we discovered it was an unknown virus. On Wednesday we had quarantined the hospital. Then, before we know it, five are dead. Towson is quarantined. All hell broke loose. It's been a week-and-a-half since this thing began. A—” she cursed, “—week-and-a-half and twenty-eight thousand dead.”
Lisa Ching, the Secretary of Agriculture and a close friend of Karen's, said, “We don't need to cast blame here. Karen has clearly done the best she could have with the resources she's had. Let's just see how to move forward, shall we?”
Karen nodded appreciatively. Karen paused to allow them to further digest the information. Then turning to the General, she said, “General Fox, will you please tell them about the camp situation inside Towson.”
General Fox said, “We have a camp established where we're housing and feeding anyone who is homeless as a result of confinement. But the camp is overcrowded and we're running out of room to erect new tents. We are starting a new camp on the golf course at Towson's country club but that's not going to last long. In short, we cannot sustain this. We don't have room in Towson for the scale of this disaster.”
Karen said, “Doctor Compton, fill them in on the hospital situation, will you?”
There was silence. She looked around, but he wasn't there.
Terrific, she thought, my greatest ally has fled the battle.
Doctor Giordano volunteered, “I can tell them.”
She exhaled, “Beggars can’t be chooser. Go ahead.”
Doctor Giordano said, “Every new case that happens outside of Towson is brought in. About sixty-five percent of new cases result in fatality. We have been stacking and cremating the bodies in the stadium across the street from St. Joseph's Medical Center. The hospital originally had 305 beds. Now we have taken over the Center for the Arts and a large portion of the university nearby. Many of the staff from St. Joseph's walked off the job when this first began to get serious, and all around the area word's gotten out. Nurses and doctors are leaving in droves. The U.S. Army doctors are filling in at St. Joseph's, but it's becoming exceedingly impractical. We don't have room, even with the buildings we've taken over, to deal with this.”
Karen said, “Tell them about the geography of the virus, if you can.”
Doctor Giordano said, “The virus has infiltrated the entire Baltimore area, including the suburbs. There have been a couple hundred cases in the D.C. region. Beyond those zones, we haven't traced a single case.”
Karen said, “The gestation period for this seems to be about four or five days. The problem is that, by the time any symptom develops, you are minutes from death if it's going to kill you. Then there's the fact that men are carriers but only one in six even shows a symptom, but most women die within less than a week of contracting it. So, with Towson quarantined, that's 70,000 in isolation. But it's still spreading in Baltimore, as he said. So we quarantine the million in the Baltimore area and we stop this thing dead. We trace anyone who has left the area and we bring them back to Baltimore. If we have to, we shut down air traffic. Everywhere. But if we quarantine Baltimore, we get the facilities we need, the space we need. We bring all the sick into the city. Baltimore dies, but the nation is saved.
“The fact is that all the interviews, all the fact-gathering hasn't done a thing for us. We still don't have a clue who's going to drop dead in the next five minutes. So we have to shut it down here and we have to shut it down now. I need your support on this. Can I count on it?”
There was a moment of silence. General Fox asked, “How do you propose we execute such a quarantine? Confining over a million people to that large an area is not something we are prepared to do. People would get out.”
“You're telling me that with heat-seeking technologies and all the resources of the military we couldn't accomplish this?”
“I'm telling you that we don't have the manpower.”
Lake Vostok
Doctor Ming-Zhen had gained the composure to think of releasing the controls. This eventually stopped the dizzying spinning of the vessel, but he was still hurling into the unknown with the cloud of shrimp.
Oddly, the water had seemed to grow less black: he could detect a source of ambient light somewhere ahead. The current was slowing, but he jumped in the vest that held him when a craggy projection of ice passed right by the view port.
With dismay, he saw the dot on the screen blink one last time before disappearing out of range. He knew the range to be five miles. It was incredible to think he had been carried that far this quickly. He remembered reading somewhere that, because the ice was not the same thickness from west to east over the lake, varying pressures could cause currents. They certainly had never anticipated currents
this strong, however.
It was then that he noticed how warm he was. Looking at the screen, he saw the temperature: 67 degrees—a far cry from the -3 degrees they had anticipated. Indeed, the submersible was equipped to warm him, but nobody would have thought in a million years that a cooling function would be necessary. He tugged at the neck of his wetsuit uncomfortably.
He could tell he was almost free-floating now, and the current was minimal. The shrimp cloud was beginning to disperse away from him (or perhaps he was moving away from the cloud). This led to an increasing clarity in the water.
Fiddling with the controls, he was able to level the submarine and propel forward, through the shrimp. As he neared the edge of the cloud, he saw the outlines of giant ice structures that protruded down into the water from the ceiling.
Looking up to the craggy, inverted mountains of ice, he noticed that the water did not touch the ice everywhere: there were areas where he could see the bottoms of waves. There must be pockets of air.
He engaged a thruster to steer down to avoid one of the structures, and when he leveled the vehicle and looked up again, what he saw made him draw a breath in awe.
Frozen within the next monolithic ice formation was the dark outline of a gigantic creature. A large, tapering tail, four gigantic flippers, a huge body, and an incredibly long neck which extended out of view. He immediately recognized it. This was an elasmosaurus, the ancient Loch-Ness monster. The largest fossil found had been almost fifty feet long.
He could hardly believe what he was seeing. Here he was, witness to a more perfectly preserved ancient species than any paleontologist could dream of, but he was trapped two miles under ice with very remote odds of returning. Frozen as perfectly as it appeared to be, this specimen could surely provide DNA, and answer more questions than science had even thought to ask. He was filled with a surreal sense of wonder, and yet despair quickly overcame him.
He looked down at the screen again. There was no beacon. Naturally, nobody had thought a compass would be necessary, so he did not even know what direction he was facing. How could he possibly get back to the pressure chamber? The submersible had power for no more than fifty-seven hours and could travel at a maximum of five miles per hour. After that, life support wouldn't be possible, let alone propulsion.
He remembered Doctor Toskovic's compass. Where was Doctor Toskovic?
Doctor Ming-Zhen looked up. He froze in immediate terror.
A giant, dead-looking, green eye was outside the viewport. It was certainly not dead, though, because it twitched as it examined his submersible. The eye was part of an eight-foot, flat-shaped head with sharp teeth protruding out from the jaw. The teeth at the end of the snout were especially jagged and long. He traced the head back to a neck, and this neck he followed up and around to the ice. The frozen elasmosaur in the ice was not frozen at all; its body was silhouetted behind the ice, and it was moving. The flippers were sifting very slowly through the water, and now they propelled the body slowly downward.
As he looked at the elasmosaur's head, he was overcome with the impression that this was a terrifying animal; not at all what he, or anyone else, had imagined. The skin was a dull green color, patterned with diamonds. Undulating frills of vibrant crimson flared out from the back of the head and all the way down the neck, from the top of the body, and the tail.
With the flippers paddling slowly to keep the body motionless, the extraordinarily long neck propelled the head around his submersible, coiling like a snake. While horrifying, this was also astonishing to him because he knew that recent research on fossils from the creature had concluded the neck to be about as flexible as a giraffe's. Of course, there was also recent research that had concluded that dinosaur vertebrae were much farther apart than science had long assumed, and although elasmosaurs were not dinosaurs, it could still—he stopped his mind short. What difference did it make now? Here was the animal in the flesh.
He felt his submersible jolt alarmingly as the creature spiraled its neck around it to clench it tight. The head was poised above the viewport bubble, and the mouth slowly opened, revealing the full array of teeth and a long, forked tongue.
Hoping against hope that the titanium and acrylic glass would hold against this onslaught, Doctor Ming-Zhen wondered why the beast would, by all appearances, be trying to eat his submersible. By fossil's stomach contents, elasmosaurs were known to eat fish, clams, snails, crabs, and squid. Squid. The submarine looked like a squid.
The giant jaws clamped down on the viewport, and a grating sound erupted as the teeth scraped along the acrylic glass, chiseling long lines on its surface.
What could he do to make the submersible look less like a squid?
Looking puzzled, if that was possible for its hideous face, the elasmosaur pulled back and surveyed its prize. Maybe it would just go away. Cocking its head to peer closely with one of its dead-green eyes, Doctor Ming-Zhen had the distinct impression the creature was looking directly at him.
It knows I'm in here.
He tried to be totally motionless, but it was to no avail, because the mouth came down firmly on the bubble again, this time from a different angle. The teeth scraped horizontally across as the beast seemed to be trying to pry the submersible open by brute force. It's intelligent, Doctor Ming-Zhen thought...and tenacious. He struggled to think of something he could do to stop it, and the only thing that came to mind was to switch off the lights.
Unfortunately, the only way to turn all the lights off, including those in the cabin, was to shut the submersible down.
He hesitated. What if he couldn't get it back on?
A metallic groan from the middle of the vessel made him ignore his reluctance and quickly disengage the power.
Lake Vostok
Totally in the dark and with no sound of the whirring of the thrusters or life support, he could see nothing and hear only his own breathing. Doctor Ming-Zhen waited, but there was no sound.
He didn't know how long he should wait. If the lights flicked back on, would that agitate the giant elasmosaur enough to leave, or entice it further? Should he wait until he was ready to pass out from lack of oxygen in the hopes it would slip away from boredom?
Suddenly, he saw a white light that slowly orbited his submersible, going out of view on one side and then reappearing on the other. The light grew brighter, and he squinted as he tried to make it out. Was this some kind of tiny bioluminecsent creature, he wondered.
Then, as it grew larger, he realized what it was: Doctor Toskovic's submersible, about two thousand feet away. With his own submersible flipping end over end, Doctor Toskovic's appeared to be only an orbiting speck.
He immediately engaged the power. Stabilizing his submersible, he began to search for the light. It took only seconds to spot the other one again, and his outside lights clearly illuminated the form of the elasmosaur as it steadily glided towards this new target.
“Toskovic, do you hear me?” he shouted over the radio. “Can you hear me, Doctor Toskovic?” There was no reply. Not sure what to do, he propelled his vessel forward, after the elasmosaur. As they drew nearer the other submarine, the elasmosaur suddenly swooped downward, away from both of them. Paddling fast, it did not take long for the creature to disappear into darkness. Perplexed, Doctor Ming-Zhen looked back up to the other vessel.
He called over the radio, “Toskovic, do you hear me? Do you hear—”
A broken voice came over the speakers, “Zhou? Are – out—.”
“Toskovic, I am here, Toskovic can you hear me?”
“Ah! There you are sneaky weasel. Can you see me?”
“Yes, I am approaching.”
“I did not know we came to play hide and go to seek.”
Doctor Ming-Zhen smiled. Any relief to the tension was welcome. He said, “You just saved my life.”
“How?”
“Did you see the sea monster?”
“I saw something very large.”
“It was an elasmosaur.”
<
br /> There was a moment of silence, then, “That is amazing. We should follow this monster.”
Doctor Ming-Zhen was surprised by this suggestion, and it immediately confounded him. Having Doctor Toskovic here gave him a new sense of security, but the elasmosaur had already proven to be extremely dangerous. “Is your compass working?” he asked.
“The one on my neck?” Doctor Toskovic asked. “I left it behind.”
The shaft was on the west corner of the lake. Without the compass, they had no way of knowing which way that was.
He didn't think that following the elasmosaur to a deeper depth was the safest thing to do, although if they reached the bottom they might be able to get a feel for which way to go.
Doctor Toskovic said, “Let's follow the elasmosaur. We came here to find life, right?”
“It is very dangerous. It attacked my submarine.”
“These submarines are titanium. There is no way it could cause any damage.”
“It scratched the viewport,” Doctor Ming-Zhen said. He was now nearing the other sub, which was turned away from him so he could not see Doctor Toskovic's head inside the bubble.
“The viewports are five inches thick. Little scratch on exterior is no harm.”
Doctor Ming-Zhen considered his words. Upon close examination, he could see that the teeth had barely scratched the surface. Perhaps he had allowed himself to panic unnecessarily. He had been in no true danger. The idea that the elasmosaur could penetrate this machine was, in all likelihood, ridiculous.
Doctor Toskovic asked, “Have you lost nerves?”
“Perhaps,” Doctor Ming-Zhen said, “But I have a wife and daughter. I have the right to lose my nerve.”
“That is fair, but let me remind you, if we descend to the bottom, we can gauge the depth. If we can gauge the depth, we can determine what part of the lake we are in. So, you are in charge. What do we do?”