Flight To Pandemonium

by Murray, Edward

  “Really?”

  “Keeping your mind off the throbbing will help.”

  “Well, I guess throbbing is a small matter. So, please tell me what happened. My story is weird, no doubt about it. I think my family all got sick too.”

  “Let’s start with mine; then you’ll realize that you’re not alone.”

  Christie explained her work at the station and leaving for a brief vacation in Fairbanks to visit her parents. She first learned of the pandemic from television news… “But you already know about news so I’ll go on…”

  “By the time my vacation was over, the epidemic was much worse. The pathogen had spread around the country and authorities were ordering quarantines. My family persuaded me to return to work telling me that the Lord had assigned me to this remote research station for some good reason. I never said good bye…not knowing…”

  “Laz, I have to admit that I feared returning to clinical duty. We do climate and plant research here among other things, but nothing related to human disease. So all I heard from our specialists here was gloomy speculation, not much real information. To this day, I haven’t learned much except one astonishing fact. To acquire this flu is fatal. I’ve heard of no one who became ill and survived. Laz, hundreds of millions of people have died and it’s probably worse by now! Somehow even cadavers vector the disease to people and there are a dozen of them in this very compound. So don’t open any doors. I’ll explain later.

  “When I got back from vacation no one here was sick. I was asked to walk the circuit to check our field monitors and change their flash memory sticks… my favorite duty every year. I take Puppy and enjoy the trails at the height of fall colors. I hoped when I returned more would be known about that virus.

  “There isn’t much to tell about my trek except that I got caught in a terrible storm on the way back. I pitched my tent in the lee of a little hillock with a good stand of brush and waited it out. I’ve never been out camping in such terrible weather in my life. When I awoke one morning, the blizzard had quit but there was a complete whiteout with light snow falling. Drifted snow obscured everything and I didn’t recognize anything. But Puppy seemed to have no trouble navigating her way home. We walked all day with Puppy leading the way until I finally recognized the hillsides and knew where we were. We arrived late afternoon the day before yesterday.

  “When I got to my dormitory, this was taped to the door with a note.” Christie pulled a slip of paper from her pocket and handed it to Lazlo.

  ‘BAT FLU IS HERE- KEEP OUT. CHRISTIE- READ NOTE FIRST.’

  “The note explained the disease had arrived and the station was being evacuated because so many had become sick. But I have to make more tea before I can go on.”

  When Christie stopped talking, aching pain in his feet penetrated Lazlo’s consciousness. He stood up in the pail intending to stretch, but the pain became so severe he nearly fell over.

  “When the pain gets bad, I’ll massage your feet but you mustn’t try to stand yet. Have you ever experienced frost bitten feet?” she asked.

  “No, never, and I guess I’m helpless. But go on…what happened?”

  “I need another cup, and if I cry, please understand that I’ve been lonely here even though I learned the worst of it only yesterday. You’re the first person I’ve talked to since...” She finally rose and prepared more tea, then continued in a voice thick with emotion.

  “Whoever took the trouble to write that note saved my life. The note didn’t have a date, but I think it must have been several days before I got back. I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m pretty emotional so I’ll try to slow down…

  “When I arrived, the place looked deserted. After I found the note, I wandered around the station, shouting for anyone, but no one answered. Every vehicle was gone, except the old snow loader, so I concluded it was as the note said… they evacuated the place and left me behind. I suppose they couldn’t have known where I was. The note told me to stay out of all buildings except for this old winter trailer. This place has been vacant all summer.

  “The note told me that many of the staff had died and that they turned the winter lab into a morgue. This morning, I looked through the windows of other buildings and found more bodies that hadn’t been moved to the morgue.

  “But most upsetting for me personally was Angie, my best friend. She lay on the floor of our dormitory and no one had attended to her. Her face and lab coat were tinged red with bloody phlegm. I was the staff nurse and the person supposed to be of help to them. I’m still troubled about leaving my best friend to waste away on the floor in there… but…”

  Christie paused for a moment, teary eyed again, and Lazlo let her recover, then said gently, “Christie… if you’d been the nurse on duty here, you’d be occupying that morgue along with the others. You just said everyone is dead. I’m very happy that didn’t happen.”

  Still emotionally wrought, Christie only nodded and continued. “After that shock, I avoided all buildings. I got this old stove going when the generator quit last night. I think it probably just ran out of fuel. At least we can have hot food.”

  They both sipped tea silently for awhile, and then Lazlo braved his most troubling questions. “Have any idea how that bug spreads exactly? And are we safe here?”

  “I don’t know, Laz. They say the culprit is a mutated strain of influenza. It happened once before in 1918. A terrible pandemic back then, but this one is far, far worse. Then there was that swine flu about a decade ago, you may remember. That was an H1N1 strain and science learned enough to contain it. If this one is similar, there might be some treatment for it by now. Otherwise, why would they have evacuated this station for somewhere else?”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Lazlo. “Those who were still healthy probably fled out of fright or just wanted to be with family. We might be the only people left alive up here.”

  Christie replied gently, “If you know something, you can’t leave it there, Laz. I need to know. It might help us both, so it’s your turn and if you know anything about the disease, please, tell me absolutely everything.”

  Lazlo didn’t reply for so long that Christie asked again.

  “I guess I’ll start with the most painful part.” Lazlo swallowed, and then continued. “It has to do with my family. I didn’t try to contact them for days while I was sick. I was just too miserable. Then I got three text messages from them only a day apart. The first was from my wife who said that sick people broke into our cabin. The second was from my daughter who said that my wife was sick. The last said that she died and that everyone else was sick. The last line in the message didn’t give me much hope. When I tried to call them nothing worked. So… I guess I’ll never know.”

  “I’m so sorry Laz… I truly am. If you want to talk some other time…”

  “No… no.” Lazlo sighed. “That’s out, so I might as well go on.”

  “Yes, please do go on.”

  “Where was I…? After I got sick… So after I got better, rather, I talked to my boss, who told me to stay put in the dormitory. By the way, I saw only one other person from the camps. A pickup driver brought me a box of food and left a threatening message. After that I saw just the military, probably more than a hundred of them but none of them looked sick. I saw people after they died, same as you did here. This is the fourth place I’ve stopped and I’ve seen stiffs at three of them. By then I was too spooked to check anything and didn’t go near them, except maybe the one out front.”

  “Laz, you’re rambling; you’ve lost me… start over from the beginning.”

  “All right, but I’m a lousy storyteller. I can’t even remember a good joke ten minutes later.” He took several gulps of tea to fortify the telling.

  “Nearly everyone at the oilfield works on a three week rotation, two on and a week off, sometimes less. Back home, my wife was
panicked by children getting sick at school, so we loaded our daughters and my father in the pickup and she drove to our cabin on Mount Olympia… just to wait it out. My company called and pushed me to come for my next rotation… I know… sounds really stupid now, but that’s what I did.

  “Anyway, after I left Bellingham, I came down with a cold on my flight north which got much worse by the time I got to Prudhoe Bay. They pulled me aside and put me in the infirmary overnight even though I thought it was just a cold…”

  “Laz, may I interrupt with a question?”

  “I guess…sure, I don’t have it in me to rehash it all, so just interrupt. My wife got very frustrated with me over this kind of conversation.”

  “This cold… tell me about it. Did you cough up a lot of phlegm…and was any of it bloody?”

  “Turned into the worst cold of my life…and yes, a hell of a lot of phlegm. But no blood; I’m sure of that.”

  “Did you ever faint or lose consciousness while you were sick?”

  “I don’t think so. Later, I slept in the dormitory through an entire day, but I felt vastly better after another day or so, and my congestion was gone.”

  “Were you given any medication?”

  “Yea, but I don’t remember what it was exactly… z-pack or something like that and I took it all. The doc said it was for a respiratory infection.”

  “Did the examining doctor explain a diagnosis?”

  “Not a word, but I don’t think that they gave me much of an examination, either. I think they stayed out of the room… talked to me through a window.”

  “Sorry… please go on.”

  Lazlo related his isolation, the demands of his boss, his anxiety, the arrival of the military, the storm, the bears, and his departure, but mentioned very little about the central issue of the disease. Christie was frustrated by the omission.

  “Did you see anyone else sick at the infirmary?”

  “No. I couldn’t see much of anything at the infirmary, and then later in the dormitory, I was afraid to go near anyone.”

  “So you don’t know how anyone was treated?”

  “No… just the medicine they gave me.”

  “You mentioned sick bears. You saw them?”

  “I happened to watch Sally and two of her cubs go by. She’s the grizzly who lives around the oilfield… normally the bears do very well for themselves. But that day they looked terrible. When they got close, I watched one of them collapse. When the cub quit choking and got up, there was a bright red spot in the snow. It just staggered away. Even the sow looked awful with her fur covered in bloody ice, especially her face. But the cub looked so bad that I didn’t think it was going to live very…”

  Christie interrupted again with a question, “Were all the bears covered with phlegm from coughing… I mean, it wasn’t just snow?”

  “Yea, all three faces were covered in splotchy ice. I’d never seen that before. The one coughed up bright blood for sure. It was the first time that I realized maybe everyone at the Bay might be sick with the plague.”

  “Did the bears come in contact with people regularly?”

  “Well… not really, most people were afraid of them, but the bears ate any food people left around… and… well, they were scavengers; ate nearly anything…watched them feed on a rotten caribou carcass once.”

  “You think they might have eaten the bodies of some of the victims?”

  “Yea… I suppose they might of. They’d eat damn near anything.” Lazlo took a deep swig of tea. “Anyway… if people were sick… that might explain how the bears got it… and why nothing was happening around the oilfield that should have… why even the military wasn’t moving around before I left. But I guess that wasn’t your question.”

  “Do you think the military was sent to quarantine the oilfield?”

  “Maybe. They invaded the place in a huge convoy…intimidating with lots of guns. But why there? Can you think of anywhere more isolated than Deadhorse?

  “Last night, I slept in a deserted military truck. Inside were dozens of duffel bags full of white medical suits… hazmat suits, I think. Maybe that was just normal gear for an exercise that didn’t get there on time. Usually a training exercise began by air and didn’t bother anyone… and so did this. Later, I thought it might be some terrorism thing… patrols and checkpoints with machine guns. But none of ‘em wore hazard suits that I could see. So… who knows what was goin’ on?”

  “Tell me about the bodies you saw.”

  “Not much to tell. Checked out several along the way…from a distance. Most looked like they died right on the spot. All were frozen, or covered in snow. Most had that bloody mucus all over ‘em like the bears. I didn’t get close enough to see much else. There’s a military humvee with a body inside right in front of this station near the highway if you want to look through the window. I didn’t open the door to check any further. No one has tended to the bodies, and I don’t think anyone is left to do it. The military doesn’t just abandon their own like that.

  “Christie, this is the most important thing I’m trying to say here. More than two thousand people work at the Bay… not counting the military. They evacuated some… maybe half, but after that only one pickup truck left the oilfield ahead of me, just one… days later. Christie, I think they might all be dead. So I don’t get it. How did it spread so fast? I was living near the center of things… at the Deadhorse Dormitory…and didn’t see anyone sick. Why are you and I the only people still walking around to talk about it? Doesn’t sound like you got sick at all.”

  “No, Laz, I didn’t, but I was far away when everyone else got sick, so I didn’t get exposed. But, that’s an interesting question because I’m trying to make up my mind whether you got a dose yourself. You said you were coughing and very congested. Those were universal symptoms of the disease. If you turn out to have immunity but carry it, you’re a very valuable man to science right now.”

  “If so, does that mean you’ll be sick next?” Lazlo asked with alarm.

  “Maybe. We’ll soon know, but I doubt it. You don’t have symptoms that I can detect. Usually someone is contagious only while sick and recovering. And if you didn’t get sick, the only things we have in common are isolation and cold weather. The cold might actually prevent spreading the disease through the air.”

  “So the storm protected us both.”

  “Dear Laz,” she said with a hint of amusement, “I just have to ask; how did you find yourself standing out in that storm half naked?”

  Somewhat embarrassed, he said, “My clothes were frozen and too stiff to take off inside the tarp. I kept getting myself wet out of stupidity. Thank God you were here.”

  “How are the feet?”

  “Bloody cold and throbbing; maybe better, I think.”

  “Well, let’s try to warm them a little and then you’ll be ready for a massage later.”

  “I could really go for that.”

  Later, Lazlo and Christie returned to the subject of his departure. “Laz, if you’re not planning to leave just now, I hear your snowmobile running outside that we forgot about. You stay here where it’s warm and I’ll put it in the garage where it will start in the morning.” He started to protest, but Christie waived him off. “I’ve had a lifetime of experience with those machines.”

  Once back, she asked, “What did you have in mind with all that gear?”

  “My plan was to get to Fairbanks and then to Seattle any way I could. The gear was in case the trip took longer than I’d hoped. The sled unfolds into a winter shelter… when it isn’t frozen shut. The packets of food and supplies came from the oilfield. That was the extent of my plan. I just wanted out of there.”

  “Have you ever been over Atigun Pass after a good snowstorm?”

  “Not over, just near the top. I he
lped rescue a truck that nearly got pushed over the edge by an avalanche.”

  “But the big snowplows cleared a path for you first, right?”

  “I suppose… long time ago. Where are you going with this?”

  “Well… I’ve been over that pass many times, but never in winter, because I don’t come here then. On the way over, there must be fifty places where avalanche chutes funnel the snow directly down onto the highway. Sometimes it comes down so hard that it destroys the steel guardrail on the far side of the road. Our training book shows amazing photographs of those slides. Each chute has a signpost numbering it across the pass.

  “Our winter people tell us how impassable it gets, especially after a bad storm. You must know… by now, I think the pass will be an obstacle even with that machine of yours.”

  “Maybe so, but I have lots of experience with the Ski Doo at work. It’ll go anywhere.”

  “Laz, I’ve grown up with snowmobiles since I was a little girl. It was the best way to get around in winter, but wasn’t much good in deep powder. Did you ever ride yours anywhere but on the groomed trails?”

  “Yes, definitely. And that machine is specially designed for deep snow.”

  “You’ll run into very steep compacted slides across the road and you’ll have to go around, not over. You’re even pulling a heavy sled. You’ll likely set off the unstable chutes doing that. Surely you remember how steep those surrounding slopes were. That pass is the perfect avalanche making machine.”

  “I’ll admit, I’ve never experienced avalanche country, but I hope you’re not telling me we’re stuck here for the winter.”