Resistance: Pandora, Book 3

by Eric L. Harry

  Emma raised her wobbly head. Someone was dissecting Travkin’s brain in the opaque bouncy house. Was hers next? She had to warn her siblings. “I wasn’t told ’bout the risks.”

  “You were here,” the doctor replied, “to determine whether there were any wildlife hosts or amplifiers. You weren’t supposed to be on this side of the isolation barrier.”

  “Then I got attacked! Oops! We’re sure it’s transmiss’ble human-to-human?” A nod. “Also rel’vant. Listen. You owe me. You gotta warn my sister and brother.”

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor replied. “I can’t do that. We have strict orders to keep this totally secret.” He raised a tablet. “For my report, where did you get the pistol?”

  “From Travkin! He knew they turn violent? So he gave me his gun? He was…protective. I thought, you know, he liked me? Pro’lly wanted to make sure I was okay.”

  The distracted doctor said, “Or he came to rape you. Both women on the rig’s catering crew were infected during sexual assaults.” He gave orders in French to his staff. Among the uninfected, life went on. A medic read something off a monitor. The doctor typed something on his tablet. But in Emma’s world, all was ending. She tried to focus. HEPA filtration. “It’s airborne?” The doctor’s silence chilled her worse than the Siberian air. “If it passes that easily, just from breathing, everyone is…doomed! The whole fracking world!” The doctor, medics, and armed Russian soldiers were all listening now.

  They helped Emma rise and ushered her to her very own clear plastic cube. The tall medic held the drip bag over her head. The short medic held out earbuds, “To talk.” The doctor held out a hand, muttering about needing visual observation. They wanted to watch her change into what Travkin had become. She gave him her blankets and covered herself with her hand and forearm. Her skin was streaked red from scrubbing. The doctor droned on and on about ensuring her a high quality of care. In a small act of defiance, Emma turned away to uncover herself and inserted her earbuds. In the silence that followed, however, her fears quickly overcame her defenses.

  A lucky near miss, death or brain damage? Buy a ticket and spin the wheel.

  In the cube, a medic hung the bag from a hook beside a bare, metal-framed cot and plugged more tubes into Emma’s plumbing before leaving her alone. She then curled up on the plastic floor in the fetal position. Breathe. Just breathe. She was trembling. Science. Science. On the uninfected side of the transparent walls, they worked in the open. Air would dilute the pathogen, reducing its concentration and the risk of infection.

  Emma considered whether the two Russian soldiers who stood outside would shoot if she ran for it, and concluded they would. But would they also shoot her even if she didn’t bolt? Should she make a break now before she grew too ill? But to where? Naked in frozen northeastern Siberia? Hunted like the rest of her kind? She tried to focus. Science.

  “Can I have a clock?” When asked if she wanted local, GMT or time since exposure, she chose the last. Lab time. Who cares about local, GMT or time back home?

  Which was where? Her sister had fretted endlessly about rootlessness when their parents died in a car wreck their sophomore year of college. After the funeral, they had packed all their belongings into storage units. A month later, their childhood home was sold, and the three siblings were set adrift. No more shrine to childhood memories. No parents celebrating academic accomplishments or consoling broken hearts. Her sister Isabel had spent her next few summers with their big brother, Noah, and his young wife, clinging to family. Emma got a string of jobs—and boyfriends—to fill her school breaks. But now she wasn’t at home in her apartment in Maryland or in any of the various guys’ places she frequented or in nearby Virginia where Noah lived. Emma had people but no place, she thought, as her incomplete life possibly neared its end.

  On the laptop screen, a digital clock counted up past 0:31:43.

  A new, tall man arrived in full PPE. “Hello?” he said through a mic into her earbuds. “It’s Hermann Lange.” He pronounced his name in German fashion—“Err-mahn Lang-uh”—even though he was French Swiss. Emma did her best to cover herself. He took his hood off briefly to don a headset and extracted files and a laptop from his satchel.

  “Thank God,” she said, glad to see a familiar face. Everything had been a blur. The mobilization call the day before. Throwing cold weather gear into a bag she kept packed for the jungles of Africa, Asia, or the Amazon—nature’s laboratories—where spillovers usually occurred. The huge US military transport, empty save for its crew and its cargo, Emma, departed Joint Base Andrews, refueled in Alaska, and met up with her team, from all around the globe, at a remote Siberian airport.

  During their short helicopter flight, Travkin snuck glances at her. Emma couldn’t imagine why, bundled up as she was. When they descended toward the tall oil derrick, Emma should have sensed danger. Apprehensive soldiers loaded rifles. Travkin kissed the Orthodox cross he wore on his gold chain. I killed him! She jammed her eyes shut.

  After landing with a thud, Emma had climbed out, shielding her eyes against soil churned up by the rotors. As the engine wound down, she heard shouts. A half dozen men charged them at the dead run. Full-auto rips from three Kalashnikovs ended the lives of all but one. Soldiers swung their rifles but couldn’t shoot through the scattering scientists. Leskov tackled the attacker fifteen meters from Emma. Travkin stabbed him. Neither were wearing protective gear. A single fountain of blood spurted from his chest. Emma had followed fleeing colleagues. But looking back over her shoulder she was struck by the man’s spooky eyes, wide as the last bit of life drained from him, pupils totally fucking black like Travkin’s.

  “Feel like talking?” asked Hermann. He was a social anthropologist on Surge Team One who studied behaviors that caused diseases to spread, like shaking hands, unprotected sex, or ritual preparation of the dead; or that inhibited their spread like handwashing and social isolation. He was in his late thirties and handsome enough. He had twice hit on Emma, and twice failed. Too much alcohol and pot on his first try, and on the second neither had showered for days in The Congo during a now prosaic seeming Ebola outbreak. Happier times. Would he soon watch her writhe naked in this plastic cage as some parasite, now rapidly reproducing inside her, gnawed away on her brain?

  “Love to chat,” she replied. The haze of narcotics was lifting. “SED has to be more contagious than any pathogen we’ve ever seen. Infection without coughing, sneezing mucal catastrophes? Droplet nuclei in distal airways? Sub-five microns? So it’s viral?”

  “It’s archaic, and we think it was probably highly evolved back when it was frozen,” Hermann said. “It didn’t randomly mutate, spill over into us from some distant species and barely survive. It thrives in us. If you ask me, it evolved specifically to infect humans. It’s perfectly adapted to us. It just needed contact, which it got when the permafrost was disrupted, and boom. It’s off and running.”

  Oh God, oh God, she thought. But she mustered the strength to shout, “So if it had no animal reservoir, why the fuck am I even here?”

  “We collected wildlife specimens for you to examine,” Hermann explained. “Just to be certain. If it turns out there aren’t any intermediate hosts or transmission amplifiers—if humans are the only reservoir—we may still beat this one, like smallpox or polio.”

  “What’s the R-nought?” Emma asked.

  R0, pronounced “R-nought,” was a disease’s basic reproduction rate. How many people in a susceptible population, on average, will one sick person infect? An R0 of less than one meant the pathogen was not very infectious and its outbreaks should burn out. But an R0 greater than one was an epidemic threat, and the higher the R0, the more infectious. Touch a door knob a few minutes after a high-R0 carrier, then rub your eye or brush a crumb from your lips and you auto-inoculate, injecting the pathogen into yourself.

  But Travkin had only breathed on Emma, briefly, from a few feet away.

&
nbsp; “What’s the R-nought, Hermann?” she persisted.

  “High. Higher than the Black Death, smallpox, the Spanish Flu, polio, AIDS. We may have found The Next Big One.”

  Oh-my-God! Heavy chains bound Emma to a dreadful fate. She again curled into a fetal ball. “Or The Next Big One found us,” she muttered.

  At his laptop, Hermann asked, “Emma, could you list the emotions you’re feeling?”

  “Emotions? Seriously? Uhm, well, scared out of my fucking wits would be number one on my list.”

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  “Really!” Emma sat up. “You’re interviewing me?” That really pissed her off! She shook the thermometer from her finger and yanked the blood pressure cuff off. The soldiers at the hatch raised their rifles. The short medic radioed the doctor, who burst out of the autopsy lab as Emma carefully removed her IV just ahead of a rush of euphoria. They had injected a sedative remotely into the tube that led into her veins, but she’d been too quick. Her head spun only once. “What the fuck?” she shouted. “You tried to knock me out?”

  “Dr. Miller,” the French doctor replied, “you need that IV.”

  “Bullshit!” Emma snapped. “If antibiotics worked, we wouldn’t be here.”

  “You’re also getting antivirals, antiprotozoals, and fluids.” Emma stared with sudden clarity through the walls’ distorted optics like at survivors of some post-apocalyptic hell. She was free. It was the people outside her plastic shelter, from those garbed head-to-toe in PPE, to everyone on Earth beyond, who now needed to cower in fear – not her.

  Emma knew the feeling of spending hours in personal protective equipment. Knock headgear aside, you’re dead. Prick a finger capping a syringe, dead. Tear gloves disrobing, dead. You get antsy. It’s the uninfected who were visitors to this hostile new world.

  “So Hermann,” she said, “parasites follow Darwin’s law. What adaptive advantage do big black pupils give SED’s pathogen?”

  “It could allow the infected to identify each other,” Hermann ventured. He’d obviously already thought that one up.

  “Why? So they,”—or is it we?—“can…build human pyramids to top our walls?”

  “Natural selection doesn’t have a purpose, only results.”

  “Good one. Level with me, Hermann. Did I catch it? I can’t wait hours.”

  “It may be sooner. Leskov had a head cold. His immune system was weakened. His fever appeared at forty-four minutes. Have you been sick recently?”

  “No.” So Hermann wasn’t there as a friend. He’d been with the others too. Interviewed them too. “How can it possibly reproduce so quickly?” she asked.

  “A high reproductive rate is one reason SED seems highly evolved and perfectly adapted to humans. I’m telling you. It evolved to use us, its hosts, to aid its spread. This brain damage isn’t random, it’s…” The doctor chided him in French, pointing at Emma, who cried and shivered in fear. “I’m sorry, Emma,” Hermann said. “I’m very sorry. If you’d allow monitoring, you’d know sooner.”

  “Would you even tell me if the readouts show a temperature spike?” Before he could protest, Emma asked, “What was it like when Travkin went through it?”

  “When you turn, you’ll get… He got very ill.” Hermann’s verbal misstep hit Emma like a body blow. She closed her eyes. She was infected. Of course she was. Look at how they’re fucking treating me! “Physical distress, memory deficits, possibly anterograde amnesia. Deficits in social cognition.” Then he again said, “Sooo, I’ve got some questions?”

  “What, fill in bubbles with a No. 2 pencil? ‘On a scale of one to five, how much do you wanta murder me right now?’ Then some ghoul in there saws open my cranium and takes cross-sections!”

  “Emma, the pathologist in there is Pieter Groenewalt,” pronouncing it, “Gryoo-neh-vahl-t” with a hard German “t” even though the South African Anglicized his name. “You remember him and his wife. He’s bitching that he isn’t allowed on this side of the isolation barrier to see the infected—alive. But all the data is being rigidly compartmentalized.”

  Emma no longer cared about Groenewalt, his petty frustrations or their mission’s data security rules, or felt any part of Hermann’s world. She was Shrödinger’s freakin’ cat—maybe dead, maybe demented. Over the next hour and a half, as Emma monitored every sensation she felt plus many more imagined, Hermann talked a lot, adding small scary details to the important terrifying facts about SED. She spoke very little, mostly silently recalling the milestones of her too short life to date.

  The clock passed two hours. Nothing. But a few minutes later, her head swam as if the world rotated beneath her, then it was gone. Not so the panic. Her chest clutched at her breath, forcing her to inhale deeply to break its hold. A prickly sweat burst out all over. But that was the anxiety. Wait. Wait. Wait.

  Emma threw up without warning. It shocked her. The short medic entered—keeping his distance, eyeing her warily—and cleaned up the mess with a sprayer/vacuum on his pool-boy pole. Emma was shivering. They raised the thermostat. Minutes later, she was sweating. They lowered it. Tears of the inevitable flowed. She was sick. Mommy? Daddy? Help me!

  “Emma? Can I ask you a few…”

  “Why?” she finally shouted, pounding the plastic flooring with both fists. She had tried to deny her churning stomach, waves of dizziness, and deep fatigue. But at 2:13:25, she admitted the worst. Flushed and clammy, she broke down and sobbed.

  “Let us help,” the doctor pled. The tall medic sank to his knees and crossed himself.

  “Bring it all back,” Emma mumbled. The medics entered and reinserted the IV and reattached the blood pressure cuff and thermometer. “I have a brother,” Emma said to Hermann as they worked on her. “Noah Miller, a lawyer in McLean, Virginia. And a twin sister, Isabel, a professor at UCSB. I want them notified.” Hermann suggested she relax and keep calm. “I want them warned! You tell them what’s coming and to get ready, get ready, you understand, and I’ll answer anything. I’ll cooperate. Noah and Isabel Miller!” Emma shouted, sobbing. “They’re all I’ve got! They’re all I’ve…”

  Hermann gave her a single nod, unnoticed by the others. She didn’t trust him, but it would have to do. Calmness flowed into her veins. She closed her throbbing eyes.

  “We’re all in this together,” Hermann had the gall to say.

  “Spare me!” Emma replied. But on reflection, he was fucking right. This thing was incredibly rapacious. You can run, Hermann, but you can’t hide. Stomach cramps elicited a grunt. Hermann asked if she needed more painkillers. “Yes!” she replied. A wave of peace followed. Let’s just get this over with. Come on you little piece of shit virus! Give it your best shot!

  The doctor returned from the opaque morgue. Emma latched onto the spinning Earth, sat up, and asked him for news. “Groenewalt found brain damage unrelated to the trauma from the gunshot. Bleeding. Loss of neuronal mass, particularly in Travkin’s right hemisphere. The damage was remarkably similar to the earlier victims.”

  Emma pressed on her eyelids as pain split her forehead. It’s happening! I was kidding! Please stop!

  “Emma?” she heard Hermann say. “Can you look up at the camera?” She stared into the bullet-shaped cylinder. “Thanks. So, these questions might sound odd, but humor me, okay? When we were in The Congo last year, you told me about having lunch at your country club after tennis, and the busboy was one of your classmates?” Emma was too tired to fight him and nodded. “You remember how you told me you felt?”

  “Embarr’ssed,” Emma said, slurring.

  “Right,” Hermann replied. “And do you know why you were embarrassed?”

  “’Cause I was rich. And when he bussed our table, I was whispering to a girl and she laughed. He thought I’d said something about him. Izzy, my sister, said I’d been rude. But we weren’t talking about the boy. I’d invited Izzy along to play d
oubles ‘cause she didn’t have any friends and our parents made me. We were laughing about Isabel dying a virgin ‘cause she was so uptight. She pro’lly knew, and that was why she got mad.”

  “The busboy was poor and had to work cleaning tables,” Hermann said, clarifying his point for the record. “And you were rich and playing tennis over the school break. That fact made you feel embarrassed in front of your classmate?” She nodded. “And forgive me, but when you shot Sgt. Travkin, the man who’d saved your life, how did you feel?”

  That burned through the painkilling haze. “Fuck you! He wouldn’t stop!” Tears welled up. She began to cry, but Hermann persisted. “I felt terr’ble! Okay?”

  Before she drifted off, Hermann asked, “Why’d you feel terrible killing Travkin?”

  “Why the hell do you think? He saved my life, then I shot him…with his own gun! He gave me his…his…” She drifted in and out of consciousness. “Remember our deal!” was the last thing she recalled saying. “Remember…!”

  * * * *

  “Emma? Emma? Emma?”

  A penlight streaked across her vision, leaving red smears in her view of the French doctor holding it. Her wrists and ankles were zip-tied to her cot’s frame. Coiled plastic IV tubing and her blood pressure cuff and thermometer lay in a pile. When two armed soldiers entered the unit, her heart raced and the plastic ties cut into her skin.

  The doctor argued with a Russian officer in English. “She’s American! W-H-O! I don’t care about your orders! We take full responsibility!” Everyone turned toward the sound of a gunshot outside. Emma’s tensed muscles began to quiver.

  The doctor said to Emma. “We have to go. Feel up to it?” Another gunshot.

  She rose, naked, when cut free. Five men, two armed, stood between her and freedom, and she felt dizzy and unsteady on her feet. The tall medic handed her an impermeable coverall, which she held until he directed her to step into it. He put plastic booties on her feet, latex gloves on her hands, a mask and goggles on her face, and a hood over her wet hair. He then taped her sleeves to her gloves and her pants cuffs to her boots. A heavy, gray wool overcoat was hung on her shoulders. It smelled of body odor.