Final Epidemic

by Earl Merkel

  It was, for some forgotten but very important reason, an image that shamed her and mocked her desire to rest. She pushed herself through the doorway.

  There was a drop of perhaps two feet, and she was barely able to break her fall with her hands. A concrete block lying on its side scraped her palms, dripping another measure of pain into the already full bucket of her agony.

  The sky was still alive with stars, though on the far horizon a thinning of the darkness implied rather than indicated where the sun would ultimately emerge. Still, it gave April an objective, a direction away from the blackness she was fleeing.

  Her mind was gradually clearing, April realized, at least to a certain degree. She remembered in snatches of clarity, like seeing individual scenes from a movie. She recalled approaching the trailer in the night, kicking through the door. She could picture a man lifting a gun toward her, and the bright flash seen past her gunsights illuminating everything for a frozen moment. She remembered calling back to Dr. Casey to check—

  Casey. She stopped short, suddenly frantic. Ignoring the renewed pain it caused, she swiveled her head in every direction, trying to probe the darkness surrounding her. The historian had been with her, and now he was not. That realization, more than any other factor, cut through the patches of fog that still clouded her mind. It fired April, fueled her to push herself upright on her knees and then, haltingly, to her feet. She stood, swaying, and strained her ears to hear around her.

  There was something, a sound that did not fit with the other sounds of the night. It came from her right, somewhere past the slapping noise of water against rock. April lurched in that direction, unsteady on her feet.

  She had gone only a few yards when she heard it again, much louder this time and with an undercurrent of agony that raised goose bumps on her arms. And, separate from it, a low droning voice that sounded almost conversational. Dimly, she thought she could see the outline of a man standing in front of what looked like a framework scaffold. A shape she could not see clearly twisted against the uprights, arms high, hanging.

  She took another step, stumbled and then fell again to her hands.Help him! her mind screamed, and she scrabbled forward again crabwise in the grass.

  Her hands touched metal, a pipe of some sort, and she seized it, intending to rush forward swinging with all her strength. And then she felt the grooved foregrip beneath the barrel, and the smooth wood of the shotgun’s stock lying in the grass where she had left it. She snatched it up in both hands.

  Still on her knees, April O’Connor racked the pump action, back and forward. Using the butt stock to support her, she pushed to her feet. From her throat burst a wordless scream of fury and challenge and perhaps terror defied. She staggered toward the figures to her front.

  Except now there was only one, hung by the arms from a framework pylon at the edge of a flooded quarry. April stopped next to it, shotgun at her shoulder. She saw Beck Casey’s eyes look at her wildly, and then blink in disbelieving recognition. The sound of something heavy, moving fast, crashed through the underbrush thirty feet away.

  April fired into the sound, worked the action of her shotgun and fired again. The sounds of flight continued, fading with distance. Then she heard a car motor start up, out of shotgun range, and she fired once more. She was answered by the sounds of wheels spinning on a gravel road, speeding away.

  She turned to the hanging figure. He was naked from the waist down, and a trail of blood flowed steadily to the ground down his right thigh.

  Before she could speak, he did.

  “Get me down from here,” Beck said, his words clear through clenched teeth.

  “He’s in treatment now,” Andi Wheelwright said, the strain in her voice evident despite the professional tone she affected. “They’re stitching up the knife wound.”

  She paused, taking a deep breath.

  “I guess we’re lucky the guy was such a sick son of a bitch,” Andi said. “It’s a puncture wound—moderately deep, but not a long slash. Beck said he stuck the knife into his thigh and just left it there. He’d ask a question, and give the blade a twist. Patient guy. He expected to have a long time alone with our boy. I don’t want to think what would have happened if O’Connor hadn’t gotten there.”

  “How’s she doing?” Larry Krewell asked. He had not intended to limit the question to the FBI agent’s physical injuries, but he found that he was relieved when Andi chose to interpret it that way.

  “She has a concussion, the doctors say,” Andi replied. “The X ray didn’t find any skull fracture, but they’re doing an MRI right now. She’ll be in the hospital for a while, but it doesn’t look like anything permanent. Thank God.” There was a pause. “The two of them dragged each other back to their car—a quarter mile over a gravel road. It took an hour, and Beck says then she argued over who’d make the radio call.”

  In her tone was grudging admiration.

  “So what now, Andi?”

  “The second man in the trailer—a local thug, the cops say; probably just beef hired for the occasion—bled to death before the ambulance arrived. That leaves Casey as the only one who even knows what Knife Man looks like. I’ll check with the Bureau to see who they can assign to Casey. With her head injury, I’d guess that O’Connor’s out of the game.”

  “I see.”

  “Look—suddenly, we’re not the only ones who want Trippett, Larry. Who’s the psychopath with the knife? He’s the wild card in all this. He’s looking for Trippett, who is out there somewhere carrying around a bottle full of virus. And I’m sitting here, wasting oxygen. We need to find that filth.”

  “And we need Casey, specifically, to look for it. Does that sum it up?”

  “Casey will be in pain, but the doctors say he’s ambulatory.” Wheelwright frowned at Krewell’s expression. “There is no time to shed tears, Larry. Casey has to do what he has to do.”

  Krewell nodded.

  A slow flush colored Andi Wheelwright’s face. “I’ve read his files, Larry. Of course I have—look, they brought him out to the Farm to lecture a class of trainees. He obviously doesn’t remember it, but I was one of them. He wasgood, Larry. Even after what happened in Russia, he still is. He knows biological weaponry; he understands terrorists. We need his mind on this.All of his mind.”

  “It’s a fine plan,” Krewell said, watching her closely. “But what about his daughter? Are you going to tell him?”

  “He can’t help her,” Andi Wheelwright said. “Nobody can.”

  Chapter 30

  The White House Washington, D.C.

  July 23

  The President was in his shirtsleeves when Krewell and Carson were ushered into the Oval Office.

  They were not alone. A constant flow of people moved through doors normally closed, carrying folders, individual sheets of paper, even what appeared to be rolled-up charts. At the far end of the room, a cadre of advisors were intent, their faces reflecting the flicker of computer screens and television monitors around which they worked.

  The President waved the two newest visitors to the sofa that covered the right corner of a large, deep-blue carpet on which was centered the presidential seal; he sat, with obvious weariness, in the red leather wingback chair nearby.

  The chief executive wasted no time.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”

  Carson spoke first. “Mr. President, are you familiar with the acronym VIX?”

  “No. What is it?”

  Carson nodded to Krewell, sitting stiffly beside him.

  Krewell said, “Yes, sir. VIX stands for Viral Influenza/Experimental. It is a prototype bioweapon that was developed in the mid-sixties, only a few years before President Nixon officially shut down our CBW program. Agent VIX, as we call it, was—is—a viral weapon based on the same general viral strain that is today being used against us.”

  “The United States developed a weapon based on the Spanish flu?” The President’s voice was incredulous and tinged at the edges with fury.<
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  “Not as a lethal agent, Mr. President,” Krewell said. “VIX was intentionally—well, dumbed down, so to speak. Genetically moderated.”

  “Exactly what is that supposed to mean?” the President demanded.

  “As a weapon, VIX was designed solely as an incapacitating agent,” Carson said. “It was not intended to kill.”

  “Exactly, Mr. President,” Krewell said. “Our scientists used the 1918 virus, yes. But that was largely because, unlike other influenza strains, it did not lend itself easily to a vaccine. Also because the target population—combatant soldiers—generally had no acquired immunity to the strain. They were too young to have been around in 1918.”

  “Unbelievable,” the President said, his lips tight. “Un-fucking -believable.”

  “Sir, VIX conformed to our standing bio-agent development orders in place at the time,” Krewell protested. “It is not persistent: the virus was engineered so that ultraviolet radiation from sunlight destroys it within three to five hours. Most important, it a self-correcting agent. It acts to trigger an aggressive immune response in those exposed to it. With VIX, you’re sick as hell for a day or so—but then the symptoms generally subside. By design, it’s merely a very bad twenty-four-hour flu.”

  “Which the United States of America turned into a weapon,” the President said bitterly. “And which we have apparently maintained, in violation of international treaties that we as a country proposed and signed!”

  “As a weapon, VIX has some very attractive features,” Carson said. “It has an extremely high contagion factor. Physiologically, it spreads through the human body with an impressive speed. The onset of symptoms is within a twenty-minute time frame—that’s comparable to some of the slower-acting chemical warfare agents. The psychological impact adds to the effectiveness of VIX. You can imagine the demoralizing impact of seeing the disease spread almost before your eyes.”

  “Billy, the last thing I want to hear right now is how great any of this . . .filth is,” the President said. “I simply cannot understand the reasoning behind this kind of insanity—particularly now, when it looks as if it may well destroy all of us.”

  He gestured at the far end of the room. “See those people down there? That’s the United States government, helpless to stop this country from disintegrating. Since the news from Russia got out, all hell has broken loose. We have major riots in New York and Chicago, and martial law has been completely ineffective. Civilians are taking the law into their own hands, and we can’t stop them. Barricades are up around Salt Lake City to keep ‘plague carriers’ out, manned by regular citizens carrying shotguns and rifles. They’ve fired on police who ordered them to disperse. Los Angeles is being patrolled by the National Guard. There are all kinds of rumors going around about the Florida outbreak, and it’s got people acting insane. An hour ago, a crowd in Detroit surrounded a tractor trailer with Florida plates; they set it on fire and shot the driver when he tried to get out of the cab. It is getting worse by the minute. God help us if—when—flu cases start showing up in New York.”

  The President’s voice had risen throughout the tirade, and now it fell abruptly. “We need a vaccine, dammit—acure, not another weapon.”

  “That is the point,” Carson said. “VIX and the new virus come from the same root. They’re related—cousins, if you will. But notkissing cousins.”

  “I’m too tired for riddles, Billy.”

  “An hour ago, I received information that an Army researcher had found something that may be vital. She was comparing VIX with H1N1-Florida—the lethal one.”

  “And?”

  “There may be a way to use VIX to fight it. It’s theoretical, but possible. Dr. Krewell can explain the details better than I.”

  “Mr. President,” Larry Krewell began, “the human immune system uses three lines of defense against viruses: macrophages, antibodies and killer T-cells. The first two go after the virus itself; they’re like bodyguards, sir. But when the virus gets inside a human cell and takes it over, macrophages and antibodies are helpless. T-cells are not; they are ruthless and kill the infected cells. But if the virus spreads in the body too quickly, T-cells can cause a path of destruction while never catching up to the disease itself.”

  “That’s what happens with H1N1-Florida,” Carson added. “Most victims die of respiratory failure or secondary infections due to the massive tissue damage. But VIX has been engineered to accelerate the immune process. In essence, it shortstops the virus before it can cause extensive tissue and organ damage.”

  “What does this have to do with the Florida virus?”

  Carson took a deep breath, and wished he could light a cigarette here. “In humans, Mr. President, VIX triggers a sharplyaccelerated immune response. Specifically, it combats the infective process with hyperproduction of macrophages and antibodies. Essentially, VIX stimulates the body to successfully fight its own infection—for the most part,before T-cells go into action and cause further damage.”

  Carson took a deep breath to add emphasis. “And that response, Mr. President, also appears to effectively act against the H1N1-Florida virus.”

  The President looked at Carson with unblinking eyes. When he spoke, there was a new inflection in his voice.

  “Do I hear you right? You’re saying this VIXcures people who have this new disease?”

  Krewell answered first, shaking his head firmly. “Mr. President, we don’t know that,” he said. “There has been no clinical testing—and, sir, there is not time for anything that would give us a conclusive answer to that. People already infected with the killer virus may be beyond any help. But VIX may give you a chance to save those who are not yet infected.”

  “It does appear likely that the two strains cannot exist in the same body,” Carson added. “Not simultaneously. VIX appears to overwhelm the flu—to crowd it out, as it were.”

  “Can we use it as—I don’t know, as a kind of vaccine?”

  “It may confer some degree of subsequent immunity,” Krewell said cautiously. “Certainly, antibodies are generated, in prodigious volume, during an acute VIX infection. H1N1 is an engineered virus. It’s been artificially enhanced and modified, but some of the VIX antibodies might act against it.” He made a gesture that conveyed, for an instant, his own frustration. “At least, that’s one theory. The research simply isn’t there, Mr. President.”

  “It may not be a cure or a vaccine, but Agent VIX might work as a firebreak,” Carson insisted. “Herd immunity isn’t a theory.” The national security director turned toward the President. “We think VIX gives a fighting chance. Perhaps our only chance.”

  “You have a recommendation.” It was not a question.

  Carson nodded. “You order an intentional, widespread release of VIX—as a first priority, in a broad, concentric ring moving into the Florida Quarantine Region. We would then do likewise around New York, in both cases using existing VIX stocks.” He looked at the President with steady eyes and admitted to the violation of international law. “There are limited supplies available for this purpose—here and at Porton Down, in England. Enough to initiate the VIX infection, at least. If successful, it will then begin to spread on its own.”

  “Explain to me—precisely—how this will stop the epidemic.”

  “Sir, a virus cannot live outside a host—in the case of the killer virus, an unprotected human,” Krewell reminded him. “Unless it finds new hosts to infect, it burns out and is gone. That’s what vaccination does. It takes people out of the pool of vulnerable hosts, which breaks the chain of contagion. Even if you can’t immunize everybody, it makes it much harder for the virus to get to the unprotected ones. That’s the herd immunity Mr. Carson referred to.”

  “If we release Agent VIX,” Carson said, “we believe it will, at the very least, slow down the wildfire we’re facing in Florida. The way you contain a forest fire is with backfires, and that’s what we can do with VIX.”

  “It’s a race, Mr. President,” Krewell added.
“If we can get enough people infected with Agent VIX, in a broad enough band around the foci of contagion, we believe that we can set up a herd immunity scenario.”

  “If they are infected with VIX,” the President said, “they can’t get the influenza.”

  “In a nutshell, Mr. President, that’s it.”

  The President thought for a moment. “Forest fires can jump over backfire zones. What if the virus jumps past our band?”

  “Very quickly,” Carson said, “there would be no such band, sir. Agent VIX is highly contagious, Mr. President. That was the major reason it was considered experimental. No vaccine or antidote was successfully developed to prevent it from spreading to our own troops, which made it impractical as an operational weapon. If we release it, we must assume it will spread very quickly throughout the United States. On its own.”

  “In essence, you’re recommending we use VIX to infect the entire country?”

  Krewell and Carson exchanged glances.

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Carson said. “If it is going to be done, it has to be done quickly, before the killer virus spreads further. As Dr. Krewell said, we cannot know for certain that VIX will save people who are already infected. Plus, there’s reason to believe the flu virus has the ability to jump species, into pigs and migratory waterfowl. If we don’t act, they could form a reservoir of contagion from which we may never escape.”

  “How quickly can this be done?” the President asked. “IfI concur.”

  “We’re making the arrangements now,” Krewell said. “Contingent on your authorization.”

  “My authorization,” the President repeated. “Give me the downside. What haven’t you told me?”