The Anthrax Protocol

by James Thompson

  Honking his car horn, he sped southeast with the Chevrolet’s accelerator pressed to the floor, deciding it was better to go to the hospital. He felt dizzy and his underpants were soaking wet with blood, oozing out over the car’s front seat cover, dribbling down his legs until his socks were damp.

  Gonzalo was traveling at seventy miles per hour when he lost consciousness, slamming into the side of a delivery truck owned by Rosita’s Tortilla Factory, sending the truck careening across Calle Los Petras through the front plate glass window of Miguel Vasquez’s small grocery store, El Mercado. Miguel was crushed by the truck’s front bumper, pinned against a side wall.

  Gonzalo Fuentes’s head struck his steering wheel first, driving the bony septum in his nose into his brain before his sternum cracked like green wood against the steering column, broken bone and slivers of metal passing through his heart and lungs, killing him almost instantly.

  Within half an hour ambulance attendants removed the bloody remains of Assistant Aduanales Inspector Gonzalo Fuentes from the wreckage of his car to take him to a nearby funeral home, where dozens of his family members would pay their last respects, often by means of an old Mexican custom, kissing the dead man’s hand.

  Houston

  At Houston Baptist Hospital, Dr. John Meeker pored over the lab results as glass slides were being prepared for a microscopic examination of Malcolm Fitzhugh’s blood cells while he waited for a return call from the CDC in Atlanta. When he took his first look at the slides he saw nothing out of the ordinary. But there was one strangely shaped organism he couldn’t identify. He had a vague feeling he should have been able to recognize it and yet for the moment, it escaped him.

  “Get me Dr. Birdwell,” he said, wanting the opinion of the chief of hematology before he did any more guessing. He looked into the microscope again, at a spore-like object that did not belong, not a virus but something else, more like a bacterium, although not a recognizable one. Could this be the mysterious killer? he wondered.

  If it were transmittable by human contact, whatever it was, this could be the beginning of an epidemic far more deadly than Ebola or any of the similar resistant viruses. And what was the host? What had Malcolm Fitzhugh come in contact with that could kill him so quickly by means of hemorrhage beyond any form of chemical clotting control? In twenty-three years of internal medicine Meeker had never witnessed anything like the bleeding inside Fitzhugh, bleeding that nothing would stop.

  A team from the city’s Communicable Disease Agency was on the way, but Meeker had a sinking feeling they were going to be way too late—not only for him and the hospital staff, but for the city as well.

  Kansas City

  In Kansas City, Warren Adler collapsed waiting for a taxi in front of the main concourse at the airport. Blood pooled around him, spreading, drawing dozens, then hundreds of curious bystanders. Adler was dead by the time an ambulance arrived. Two young attendants placed Adler’s body on a stretcher and loaded him into the ambulance. One man, David Starnes, had forgotten to wear his protective latex gloves.

  A black janitor by the name of Billy Wells was summoned to mop up the blood on the sidewalk. The wringer on his mop bucket didn’t work and he used his hands to wring blood and soapy water from his mop, wiping his palms dry on his pants when the job was finished.

  Mexico City

  Seventy-six passengers who had been aboard Mexicana Flight 1151 from Mexico City to Houston boarded other airplanes, or went home to their families and friends. Some began experiencing flu-like symptoms almost immediately.

  A microscopic organism began moving across parts of the United States and Mexico, dividing, multiplying inside the host bodies of travelers, conquering immune systems with suddenness previously unknown to modern medical science, causing massive hemorrhaging and sudden death. Doctors did not recognize it when it was found in a victim’s blood, although it was clearly not a virus, the tiny killers everyone in medicine feared. Lying dormant in a tomb for centuries, they reawakened in what was to be called “the summer of the plague.”

  Chapter 18

  Houston

  Maria Gomez lay in bed awaiting the arrival of her priest to perform extreme unction, the last rites to prepare her soul for life after death. She knew she was dying from the same cancer as her brother, Roberto, although he had not bled so heavily, only a small amount in the urine bag below his hospital bed, turning it red the last few days before he died.

  Maria told her children to go down the street to stay with Aunt Esmeralda while she was sick as a way of keeping them from seeing her lying in a blood-soaked bed, nor did she want them there when the priest, Father Hidalgo, gave her the last rites.

  When she called Father Hidalgo she had told him to come in without knocking, for she was too weak now to leave her bed to answer the door. Rodolfo was away driving the gasoline truck to Louisiana, thinking Maria only had a bad case of the flu . . . the bleeding had not started until the day he left and there was no way to reach him on the road when it became all too clear this was no ordinary illness.

  And she did not want to worry him. When he left two days ago he was also complaining of feeling sick and that seemed odd. Rodolfo was never ill.

  Maria knew now she should have gone to the doctor when the bleeding started, yet she feared being told she had the same cancer that killed her brother, preferring to wait and pray for a miracle, that this bleeding might be something else.

  She heard the front door open.

  “Mrs. Gomez?” a distant voice asked, a voice she knew well from attending Mass every Sunday.

  “I am in here,” she called out in a strangled reply, tasting blood, coughing when it thickened her throat.

  Father Hidalgo entered the bedroom. He halted a few feet away from the bed, surprise and shock rounding his eyes. “Maria, what has happened to you?” he gasped. “Your sheets are drenched in blood, and your face . . .”

  Tears flooded Maria’s eyes. “I am dying, Father. Please, I beg you. Give me the last rites.” She coughed again, spitting up a mouthful of blood. Please hurry.” In her mind she saw a bright light when her eyelids fluttered.

  “I’ll call an ambulance,” Father Hidalgo said, and his voice seemed farther away.

  She heard him leave the bedroom. Moments later he spoke to someone, giving the address on Water Street. She closed her eyes and prayed for the safety of her children and husband, until she felt the priest touch her forehead, making the sign of the cross as he began reciting extreme unction in Latin, the same words he spoke to her brother when he came to the hospital last year to give Roberto last rites only a few hours before he died.

  Maria kept her eyes tightly shut, gritting her teeth so she would not cry out from the pains in her chest while Father Hidalgo prepared her soul for the journey to eternity.

  Her mind wandered, back to the airplane ride from Mexico City to Houston, remembering the Anglo who sat across from her on the trip, bleeding from his nose and mouth, shivering with the same chills she felt when her fever started, wiping blood off his face with paper towels.

  She saw the strange white light clearly now, and felt the sensation of moving toward it even though she was still lying on the bed. Father Hidalgo’s voice became indistinct, and then there was silence and a feeling of peace as she was drawn ever closer to the circle of light.

  Beaumont, Louisiana

  Rodolfo Gomez was traveling west on Interstate 10 driving an eighteen-wheel tanker truck full of gasoline near Beaumont with a roll of paper towels between his legs. The floor of the cab of his White Freightliner was covered with blood.

  Wiping his face and particularly his bleeding eyes, he knew he had to stop at a Beaumont hospital to find out what was wrong with him—he could not make it home to Houston as he planned when he first noticed the blood pouring from his nose, then his eyelids, and now from his rectum and ears.

  Driving at seventy-five miles an hour, he pushed the Cummins diesel engine as hard as he could despite an increasing dizziness b
lurring everything in front of him. It was like being drunk, he decided, this odd feeling. But what would explain all the blood?

  Rodolfo passed out three hundred yards from a convenience store at a bend in the highway where it entered the city limits of Beaumont. His tanker filled with eighty thousand gallons of gasoline plowed into a row of parked cars in front of the Stop and Go Drive-In, moving at sixty miles an hour until it rammed a blue Pontiac Grand Am, jackknifing truck and trailer at a ninety-degree angle only seconds before the tank trailer ruptured.

  A ball of flame erupted, shooting exploding fuel hundreds of feet into the air that engulfed everything within a six-hundred-yard perimeter with heat so intense it melted automobiles, turning them into unrecognizable heaps of blackened metal.

  Eleven customers of the East Side Stop and Go were incinerated. There were no survivors. Rodolfo Gomez was thrown through the windshield of his White Freightliner. His charred body was later found on what was left of the flat roof of the convenience store, identifiable only by means of dental records.

  Houston

  Walter Simmons died within two hours of entering the emergency room of Ben Taub Hospital in Houston. Emergency room staff handled his body with latex gloves and surgical masks.

  Simmons’s wife, Beatrice, was admitted directly from the ER and her room quarantined while the Chief of Pathology, Dr. Wilson Brewer, began a cautious autopsy of her husband, wearing a fully self-contained space suit in the hospital morgue, suspecting a rare and highly contagious virus, one of the African varieties. He found no viral evidence, only a strange bacterium-like organism in tissues and blood. He called for a staff meeting at two o’clock to show photographs of the microscope’s findings, puzzled, unable to apply routine diagnostics to the evidence he prepared for the staff meeting.

  Beatrice Simmons drifted in and out of consciousness, at times able to remember the sale of the jeweled Aztec artifact to a private collector in Miami who had flown into Houston within hours of being told about the royal symbols on it. He wrote a check for four hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars on the spot without even trying to bargain and took the collar with him back to Florida, delighted with his new acquisition, certain that it once belonged to the Aztec Chieftain Montezuma, an incredible find.

  San Antonio, Texas

  Mexicana Airlines flight attendant Carmen Villarreal died at Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, after her flight to Mexico City had been diverted there due to her ill health.

  She’d been taken directly to the hospital from the airport and the flight had continued on to Mexico City.

  Four hours later the flight landed in Mexico City and three hours after that, Rosa Hernandez, the stewardess who found Carmen in the airplane’s bathroom, went to see a curandera to purchase a special mix of garlic and herbs to quiet the bloody dysentery she’d been experiencing since she got home.

  Her mother told her garlic powder and tincture of rosemary never failed to cure loose bowels. Rosa failed to mention the blood to her mother or the herbal healer since it was an embarrassing subject, and her boyfriend, Victor, had only last week introduced her to anal intercourse and this could be an explanation for the intermittent bleeding.

  Mexico City

  Jesus Contreras, an employee of Mexicana Airlines on the janitorial staff, collapsed at home in Colonia Santa Maria two days after cleaning blood from a bathroom of a 737. He had been coughing up blood for several hours and called in sick at work that day, wondering if he had contracted tuberculosis, for his lungs burned fiercely the night before and he’d been unable to sleep. His wife went screaming though the neighborhood asking for someone to call an ambulance, since she and Jesus were unable to afford a telephone.

  Chapter 19

  Tlateloco

  Mason was conferring with Suzanne and Lauren in the dining area of the lab and had just checked Jimmy Walker’s name off the list of students on the dig the university had given Lauren. It had been the last name without a checkmark.

  He looked at her with warm, sympathetic eyes. “That’s it, then, Lauren. All of the members of the expedition are accounted for. Now we’ve got to see about getting you off-site and back to Texas so you can get back to your life.”

  She smiled at him, her face a strange mixture of sadness and anticipation. “So many dead, and for what? To unearth some old bones and artifacts that no one except dried-up old museum curators will ever see.”

  He reached over and placed his hand on her arm. “They died doing what they loved, Lauren.” He sighed and looked around at the cramped quarters of the laboratory. “And that’s about all any of us can wish for.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. “I’ll get Joel to see if he can schedule a chopper to come pick you up for the trip back to Mexico City.”

  “Are you in such a hurry to get rid of me, then?” she asked in a quiet voice, her eyes looking shyly down at her feet.

  Mason glanced at Suzanne as his face flamed red in a deep blush. “Why . . . er . . . um . . . no, not at all,” he said, wondering if she felt the same smoldering attraction for him that he felt for her.

  He was saved from further embarrassment when the door to the communications room burst open and a wild-eyed Joel Schumacher rushed into the room, his yarmulke askew on his head for the first time in Mason’s memory.

  “Boss, you’ve got to see this!” he exclaimed, holding out his iPad.

  The device was connected wirelessly to the Internet via Joel’s satellite hookup and a newscast from Mexico City was playing. It was a cable news outlet and even though it originated in Mexico City, the newscaster was speaking in English.

  The four of them watched as news of a major outbreak of an unknown illness was credited with killing over two hundred people and sickening thousands more in just the last twenty-four hours. Reports of hundreds of people staggering into emergency rooms and clinics showing massive hemorrhaging, high temperatures, and pneumonia-like symptoms filled the screen.

  “Jesus!” Suzanne whispered, her hand to her mouth.

  “Damn!” Mason said. “The damned bug has escaped the jungle into one of the most densely populated areas in this hemisphere.”

  Lauren put her hand on Mason’s arm. “Are you sure this is our plague?”

  “It has to be,” Suzanne said grimly. “The symptoms are too close to our bug for it to be anything else.”

  Mason nodded grimly. “And if it’s gotten to Mexico City, then it is probably well on its way across the entire world.”

  He handed the iPad back to Joel. “Get me the Battleship on the sat-phone . . . right now!”

  “The Battleship?” Lauren asked Suzanne.

  The corner of Suzanne’s lip curled in a half-smile, but her eyes remained grim. “That would be Dr. Grant Battersee, the head of CDC and our boss of bosses.”

  Mason added almost as an afterthought, “We call him the Battleship ’cause once he gets started on a project he’s as hard to stop as a battleship is under full steam.”

  “I’ll gather all of the others here where we can make some contingency plans about what the spread of this pathogen is going to mean and how we’re gonna deal with it,” Suzanne said, pulling the handheld radio off her belt and moving over to a corner to alert the other team members of the new development.

  Mason turned to Lauren, putting a hand on her shoulder. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to endure our company for a while longer, Lauren.”

  “You mean I won’t be able to return home?”

  Mason shook his head. “If they haven’t already done it, once I talk to Battersee, he’ll make sure all international airports are shut down tight with no further travel between countries. Though I’m afraid it’s much like locking the stall door after the horse has escaped, it’s protocol in the event of a major outbreak like this is almost certainly going to be.”

  “Be careful what you wish for . . .” Lauren mumbled under her breath as she turned to look out the window of the lab.

  “What’s tha
t?” Mason asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” she answered. “It’s just that I’d been kinda hoping to get to see you again when . . . all this was over,” she said, and now it was her face turning red.

  Mason gently turned her back around to face him. “Lauren,” he started, and then he glanced over his shoulder at Suzanne, who was standing with her back to them talking rapidly into her radio. He placed his palm against her cheek and pulled her to him for a gentle kiss on the lips, and then he leaned back and took a deep breath, as if he’d been deep underwater and had just surfaced. “Lauren, now is not the time to get into it, but believe me when I say I feel the same way, and I hope we get the chance to talk about it when, like you say, all this is over.”

  Before Lauren could suppress her surprise at his actions and reply, Suzanne turned around and headed toward them. “The others are on the way here for a C-O-W,” she said.

  Lauren looked from Suzanne to Mason with a puzzled expression until Mason said, “Council of War. It’s what we call a conference where we all get together to decide how to handle various emergencies on our field trips.”

  Joel stuck his head out of the door and said, “I’ve got Dr. Battersee holding on the secure sat-phone that’s encrypted. I figured you’d want some privacy for your talk.”