Sector C

by Phoenix Sullivan

  She stepped into the dark house and flipped a light switch, briefly disappointed Alfie wasn’t in the living room to greet her. That was simply selfish, of course, since the dog was probably in the bedroom getting some needed rest on a comfortable bed. She dropped her keys and wallet on the coffee table on her way back to the bedroom.

  “Hey girl, ready for a late supper?” she asked as she turned on the light.

  The bed was wet with saliva at one end, urine at the other. In between, Alfie lay, silent and unresponsive. No thump of a tail or flick of an ear to indicate she’d heard Donna come in. No blink of an eye or lick of a nose as Donna leaned over her. Knowing what she’d find, knowing it would break her heart, the vet still had to lay a trembling hand on the rigid chest, slip her fingers around the ribs and squeeze gently, feeling for the beat of life.

  Her knees gave without her being conscious of them doing so, and she slowly collapsed by the side of the bed, her hand clenched in Alfie’s fur, tears dripping across her cheeks and off her chin, falling on the damp sheets.

  For a time — a long time — her ragged breathing was the only sound in the still of the night.

  CHAPTER 30

  MIKE WAS ALREADY AT THE CLINIC waiting in his SUV when Donna pulled off the road and onto the bit of asphalt that served as the parking lot. Her immediate reaction was irritation seeing him already there. An intrusive presence in a private world that had closed around her during the night as she labored over Alfie’s grave.

  She needed more time to grieve, alone, for Alfie, for Chad, for the ranchers. And she needed more time to accept the realization that had imprinted itself with voracious certitude when she’d given herself a moment to think.

  Irrational as it was, she had put Alfie in the ground whole, unable to even consider laying a scalpel to her, much less ratcheting apart her ribs or sawing her skull open. She didn’t need confirmation that the dog had died of the same disease everything else in the county was dying from.

  It was when she was cleaning the lingering vestiges of death from her bed that the idea edged itself into her consciousness. The sad but simple chore of stripping the bed and placing the fluids-soaked sheets in the washing machine suddenly became a sinister act. She had stared at the naked mattress, studying the stain patterns with the intensity a fortune teller studies tea leaves in the bottom of a cup.

  When the realization hit, it had struck her marrow deep. It wasn’t that she had ever considered herself invulnerable. It was simply that she hadn’t really considered herself at all. But the stained mattress and the wet sheets drove home the point of her vulnerability like nothing else had. If her theory was correct and the tiger had started the spread of this disease through its urine and saliva, then her very bed was now likely prion-infested.

  And not just her bed. How many times had she encouraged a wet-tongued kiss from Alfie? How many sick patients had she touched barehanded, collected blood from without donning gloves first? There just weren’t that many diseases transmissible from her patients to humans to warrant the same precautions that human health workers had to take. In veterinary care, disposable gloves were generally worn to keep the vet clean, such as during a necropsy, not to minimize risk of infection, unless it was to minimize the spread from animal to animal.

  In the midnight hours she had dumped extra bleach in the laundry and dragged her mattress outside with no clear thought as to what to do with it other than get it out of the house. When she finally slept, it was wrapped in a blanket from her closet on the narrow sofa in her living room. It didn’t escape her that it was a barn-door response and that the horses had no doubt left the building weeks ago.

  Wanting nothing more than to be left alone this morning, Donna reluctantly opened the truck door. Physically and emotionally exhausted, unsure how much longer she could continue functioning effectively, she waved Mike to follow her into the clinic to talk.

  CHAPTER 31

  THE WOMAN SHAMBLING OUT OF the pickup hardly resembled the feisty vet Mike had first met. Not that he looked — or felt — much better. It had been a long morning already fielding questions about his reports from Kevin and the others back in Atlanta, who passed the answers up to Washington. He had even sat down to breakfast with the CID team that was staying in his same hotel to discuss the news they’d woken up to. News that would soon change not just this rural community or county or state, but the fabric of America itself. Unlooked for and unprepared, the world was about to be introduced to Variant Trans-species Spongiform Encephalopathy. VTSE would also carry the inelegant scientific notation for the new cross-species prion variant: PrPXs.

  Before the end of the day, Mike was sure the media would dub the disease with a name that might not be as accurate scientifically but would capture its essence much more creatively.

  As he’d been doing compulsively over the last three hours, he checked the time. Barely after 8:00. Time enough to see what Donna had found with the tiger. He followed her into the clinic and to her office.

  Mrs. Rourke had discharged the last of the patients yesterday, sending the healthy ones home and those still needing treatment to Dr. Abroudi. Instead of Mike and Donna being greeted with the usual cacophony of barking dogs, neighing horses and bellowing cows, the building was eerily quiet. Without the background noise, just the act of opening the door and stepping inside felt wrong this morning. Even Mike had developed an expectation of what the clinic should feel like. Strange, he thought, how buildings could have character like that. Hospitals, schools, libraries. The smells, the ambience, the very attitude of the people passing through the doors loudly declaimed each building’s purpose, and any deviation sent a clear message even to the casual observer that something wasn’t right.

  Donna was certainly coming across that way, too, this morning. Hair hastily pulled back into a crooked ponytail, untucked shirt tail, and the hollow, blasted look to her eyes told Mike that her night had been even rougher than his.

  “Everything OK?” he asked when they reached her office.

  For a fleeting moment she thought to tell him about Alfie. He had seemed compassionate enough about her reaction to Chad’s death, but she still wasn’t sure where Mike fell on the continuum of understanding when it came to dogs. And right now she didn’t need the added burden of derision from him or anyone. The risk simply wasn’t worth it. So she swallowed her grief, pushing it aside to deal with later when she was alone again. “Sure. It was just a long night. I didn’t get much sleep.”

  Mike frowned. That much was obvious and not any more than he could determine just from looking at her. There was more she wasn’t telling him, but he would respect her privacy and not push. And even as he was deciding that unconsciously, a part of him consciously wished she felt comfortable enough to confide in him. It wasn’t a very reasonable thought since they’d only known each other for three days now. But given the unreasonable circumstances they were living through, normal rules could perhaps be bent. “If it helps, I didn’t get much sleep either.”

  She gave him a weak, conspiratorial smile.

  The little thrill that shivered in his stomach surprised him. He didn’t know sharing secrets with someone could tap into that reaction so easily — and he wondered if she would feel the same when he shared his bit of news. “The president is going to give a speech this morning.”

  “So soon?”

  “Washington is moving fast on this. No one wants to look unprepared, especially given what happened after the earthquake in Prince William Sound, so they’re moving pre-emptively. President Del Campo already has one big strike against him this term, they don’t want this to be another.” He took a deep breath. “They’re calling out the National Guard.”

  Donna’s blank look told him the full ramification was lost on her. No reason, of course, that she should know which containment plan had been launched or what the phases in the plan were. But it would have been easier on him if she somehow just knew because now he would have to explain it to her — and he would
have to watch her reactions to his every word.

  “It’ll be the Guard’s responsibility to carry out the president’s orders. Based on the information at hand, the infectious disease and zoonosis centers of the CDC, along with the Department of Agriculture, recommended to Del Campo that all the livestock in Montana and the Dakotas be slaughtered.”

  Donna staggered back a step, the edge of her desk catching the back of her thighs and bracing her. “All? Do you know how many millions of animals that is?”

  “I’m afraid I do. Roughly ten million. The order will include cows, pigs, sheep and goats. It won’t include horses or exotics. The food supply will be contained first; if necessary, the rest of the farm animals will be targeted, but I wouldn’t suspect that to happen for another ten to fourteen days.”

  Donna tried to absorb the enormity of what was being proposed. “When will it start?”

  “The Guardsmen were put on alert last night and should all be reporting in by now. There’s a lot of gridding out and strategy for coordinating the Armories in the other states that’ll need to be done, but local Armories — like the one in Williston — should be heading out to the ranches by this afternoon.”

  “I want to talk to my clients, then, before the Guard comes.”

  “We were going to head to Triple E this morning.”

  “I have a responsibility to the people I’ve worked with for the past six years. I can’t just ignore them now. Whatever’s going on with Triple E has already affected our area. If we’re just going out there to collect more evidence to shut them down, taking another day to do it won’t hurt anything. Or you could go yourself. I’ve got to see my clients.”

  “Why? I told you last night, it’s out of our hands now. What can you do at this point?”

  “Probably nothing!” The retort rang sharp and loud in the small room. “But by God it’s the decent thing to do, don’t you think?”

  The reminder stung Mike. These people weren’t just Donna’s clients, but people in her community she interacted with on a regular basis. In a service job like hers, it was relationships that counted; what affected them impacted her. And it was highly likely some of these clients had become friends. Whether her own business survived this or not wasn’t nearly as important to her as to whether the community at large survived. Mike knew that, so what was he doing? Protecting her by trying to keep her out of the thick of things? She had a right to choose where she wanted to be. It was his to respect that right, no matter how much his instincts — or was it testosterone — persuaded him otherwise.

  “You’re right. It is the decent thing to do. We’ll talk to the ranchers today and hit Triple E tomorrow. What did you find with the tiger?”

  Mike’s quick agreement gave Donna pause. Did he truly understand she had a responsibility to her clients, or was he merely humoring her? Maybe, she conceded, at another time he could afford to simply humor her, but not now. He was actually going to spend critical time to accompany her on her final rounds. She had to admire him for doing that. And she felt a little flattered by it, too.

  What was most disconcerting was the thought that today would be the last time she would see some of these men and women. Which of them might rebuild and which might simply abandon ranching for good, she didn’t know, but there would be a few at least who wouldn’t be able to weather the loss of their herds even if the government came through with some sort of subsidy.

  There was, she knew, the national crisis that was about to unfold. But thinking in terms larger than her single county right now was just too overwhelming. She had to keep focused on what she could affect and the things that could affect her here and now. Otherwise, she knew how easily she could be lost to despair.

  So she focused on Mike’s question and tried to keep at bay the visions of a crumbling world with millions of animals dying and a vast economical depression sucking the hope out of every person across the globe.

  “I got some sedimentation from the BSE test. Nothing conclusive, unfortunately. But it’s the same reaction I was getting with the other inconclusive samples that the lab’s finding the new prions in now. So it’s maybe a positive by inference. I put in a rush request for the lab to process, but who knows when they’ll get to it after today? I did, however, find this.” She reached out to touch an icon on her Pad-L screen to expand it, but found her hand was shaking too badly for her forefinger to connect. Events catching up with me, she thought, as she wrapped her fingers around the screen and pressed her thumb to the icon instead.

  Mike looked over her shoulder at the image that appeared, but couldn’t make heads or tails of it. “What is it?”

  “Some of the brain tissue I was looking at under the microscope. The right side of the screen shows fairly healthy tissue. On the left though, there’s some evidence of the patterning you see with prionic disease. In typical BSE or scrapie, the whole slide would look like the area on the left, except even worse. But the lab indicated that this disease causes localized degeneration, which would be consistent with what we’re seeing here. So, again, nothing I can point to conclusively to say the tiger was infected, but based on the lab results we got yesterday, the evidence is strong that it was. I don’t know how positive we need to be before we approach Triple E with our results, though.”

  “After the president’s speech — which should be starting in just a couple of minutes — I would say suspicion alone would be enough to get us back in the door.”

  Donna nodded, satisfied, then clicked on a CNN newsfeed. An anchorman was speculating on what the president would be talking about, filling time as Del Campo made his way to the podium centered in the camera’s field of view. That the media seemed to have only been told there would be a press conference and not what it would be about was significant, Donna knew. She just wasn’t sure what the significance was. Were the president’s advisors simply trying to position the president as being ahead of the crisis in an effort to gain back the popularity votes he’d lost during the earthquake response in Anchorage? Or was the CDC in effect making the president the spokesperson for their agency to give the crisis the extra weight of authority? Or was what the president was about to say so grave that only the highest authority in the land could deliver the message? Donna remembered the last time a president had made such an announcement — eight years ago it had been left to President Van Allen to announce that America had gone to war with Iran. Now, perhaps, it was being left to President Del Campo to inform the American people that the U.S. was going to war with the prions.

  Onscreen, the president had reached the podium and was carefully arranging the papers in front of him. No doubt his speech had been written in haste and he’d had little — if any — time to rehearse it. The camera zoomed to a closeup of his face: grim, composed, properly concerned, setting the mood of the news conference. Donna approved.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we wake up today to a global crisis with its roots deep in American soil. You are bound to hear many theories and much speculation in the coming days. What I am here to discuss today are the facts. Facts that will impact your lives no matter where in this great country you live. Facts that will impact your businesses, your commerce and your trade both domestically and internationally. I want to be very clear that your government recognizes the magnitude of the repercussions of the actions we are taking now and will no doubt take in the future to handle and contain this crisis. And I know personally what sacrifices each of us will need to make in order that we emerge strong and healthy, both individually and as a nation.

  “Yesterday, the Centers for Disease Control working alongside researchers, doctors and laboratories identified a new disease. They have named it Variant Trans-species Spongiform Encephalopathy, or VTSE for short. This disease is aggressive and highly contagious. It affects the nervous system, causing memory loss, muscle spasms and seizures. In the past week, VTSE has contributed to the deaths of 343 people across three states.

  “Today, the CDC issued a pandemic alert. Pandemi
c, meaning they believe this disease will spread beyond our borders, and that it will spread rapidly.

  “Here is what we know about VTSE. One, it is prionic in nature. That means it is not caused by a virus or a bacterium or any other living organism. It is caused by the same kind of protein particle that is responsible for diseases such as scrapie in sheep and goats, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in people, and probably its most notoriously known form, BSE — what many of you know as “mad cow” disease. Like its counterparts, there is yet no effective cure or preventive. That means there is no vaccine available nor is there a vaccine in production.

  “Secondly, we know that VTSE can be transmitted between species. You can catch VTSE by eating the meat or drinking the milk of an infected animal. Coming in contact with the blood, saliva or urine of an infected animal puts you at risk. VTSE has been positively identified in cows, and positive identification is expected soon in pigs, sheep, goats and other livestock animals. As of this morning, chickens, turkeys and other poultry are not suspect in the transmission of this disease. Nor is any type of fish or seafood.