by S. Ganley
Without warning his body convulsed in a sudden violent fit of coughing. Carl flung himself back down onto the seat as he felt his stomach heave and he thought that he may once again be overcome with spasms of dry heaving. The wave of coughing finally passed and Carl settled back into the seat and waited to ensure his body was done. That was when he noticed that he was running a fever, the inside of his mouth was bone dry from his heaving, but by pressing his tongue against the inside of his cheek he could feel that his body temperature was definitely running high. He had thought the coating of sweat he had started to feel had been a result of his puking, but now he was sure it had been the onset of a fever instead. He cursed his damn luck, that clerk back at the gas station must have passed along whatever bug she was carrying, but he was shocked at how quickly it had grabbed hold of him. It had been no longer than thirty minutes since he had pulled out of that town and already he was sick to his stomach and running a fever. He had never heard of an illness that spread so fast.
With this sudden onset of illness and the apparent conditions at the mine, he decided it might not be a good idea to push forward until he had some more information about what he was dealing with. He remembered the satellite phone, it was part of the field kit always stored inside the truck. He had planned to turn it on and check in once he was in place, however now seemed like as good a time as any to call in and at least report this ash cloud that seemed to be spewing out of the mine. Opening the center console he found two satellite phones plugged into a mounted charging station, he picked one up and switched it on. It took almost a full minute before the phone completely turned on and went through the process of connecting with the correct satellite and checking messages, and as soon as that happened it started buzzing and beeping in his hand. Carl scanned the digital readout on the handset and saw that in the last hour there had been eight missed calls and four messages, he was looking for the correct key combination to access the messages when the phone started ringing in his hand.
"Hello," he said as he answered the phone in speaker mode.
A flustered male voice replied, "Hello, yes, who am I speaking with?"
"Ummm, my name is Carl, I'm with the Geological Survey office out of West Trenton, who is this?" Carl wasn't sure of what protocols if any should be used over this phone while in the field so he tried to keep as conversational as possible.
"Carl, this is Dr. Trevor Woods with FEMA here in Washington, I have some questions for you as well as some instructions. First and foremost, my aid has just provided me with a map reference of your position based on the GPS transponder in the phone you are using. From what I am seeing it looks like you are just a little over thirteen miles from the epicenter of the event, is that correct?"
"Yes sir, just about that far right now," Carl replied.
"Carl, I want you listen to me very carefully. I need you to stop your vehicle right now and pull off the road." Carl detected the sense of urgency in the man's voice.
"Actually sir, I have already stopped. I was just about to call in for instructions, there is something strange happening around the area of the earthquake that I was not sure how to deal with."
Carl heard a muffled conversation going on as if Dr. Woods was covering the phone partially with his hand while talking to someone nearby.
"I am going to set this phone down and put you on speaker Carl, there are several department administrators here with me, I want you to describe in detail what it is you are seeing right now." He heard the click as the phone was switched over to speaker mode and then several muted voices talking silently in the background.
"I am not really sure how to describe it, but as I look towards the area where the mine is located, I can see a plume of light colored ash rising into the sky. I am not really sure it is actually ash, but that’s the closest thing I can compare it with. Some of it has already rained down on the windshield of my truck, it must have moisture in it because as soon as it hits the surface it kind of splashes and then evaporates. This entire area already has a low hanging cloud cover that must have come from tons of this stuff being ejected into the sky. Since I stopped and started observing the plume a few minutes ago it now looks like it is losing its intensity some, the impression I have is that whatever it being ejected is running low." Carl was proud of this report, he thought it was comprehensive and accurate. He wasn't exactly sure what they were looking for but at least he didn't come across like some babbling idiot, these were the type of people who could end his career before it ever started.
With his own phone still on speaker he waited patiently for a reply, there was a great deal of discussion occurring following his brief report. Another wave of uncontrolled coughing hit him out of the blue and he tried to hit the mute button on the phone but missed and instead just pressed two or three random number keys sending a series of beeps through the speakers on the other end. When the coughing fit finally subsided Carl put the phone back to his ear.
"Sorry about that sir, I have picked up a little touch of a bug all of a sudden and that nasty cough came along with it."
"Carl I need to know a little bit more about your symptoms right now. When you are coughing, are you expelling any matter along with the cough?" Carl was starting to get a little scared now, it dawned on him that the people he was talking to might actually know something they weren't telling him. Why in the world would a doctor from FEMA sitting in an office in Washington, DC be at all concerned about his cough?
"No sir, nothing like that but I did throw up not long ago. There is an unbelievable odor here, I first noticed it when I stopped for gas back in Browns Mills. The only thing I can compare it to is decomposition. It has really intensified as I have gotten closer to the mine and it hit me to the point of forcing me to vomit. But other than that I have not spit up anything from my cough. For my other symptoms, I am pretty sure I'm running a fever all of a sudden, I have a pretty bad headache, my stomach hurts and I guess I feel generally weak all over at the moment."
There was another period of muted discussion before the doctor resumed his questioning, "Carl, you said you made a stop in Browns Mills. Looking at our maps here that would be about eighteen miles from your current location and just around thirty one miles from the sand mine, is that correct?"
Carl thought for a moment and did some quick calculations, "Yes, that sounds about right, but I didn't pay attention to the distance I traveled from town."
"That's ok Carl, not a problem. We are just trying to map out the route you traveled. Now, you said you stopped for gas. Did you have any contact with anyone in that town, other customers, store clerks, anyone at all?"
Carl didn't like where this was going, he remembered Samantha, the poor girl manning the gas station and how she had clearly been suffering from the same illness that appeared to have hit him all of a sudden. Just before this phone call he had thought that was where he had picked up this bug.
"Yes sir, just one person is all, there was a girl working the register at the gas station. Ummm, you see, she was also kind of sick and I did think that it was possible she passed me some germs and that’s what got me sick."
The doctor quizzed him for another few minutes about the symptoms he had witnessed with Samantha, he wanted to hear everything that Carl had seen, smelled and even heard related to that poor girl. When he asked again if there had been anyone else that Carl came in contact with he remembered how Samantha had mentioned two other customers before him that were also sick, but he had not seen them himself. He wasn't sure where all this was going, but the more he thought about it the more unsettling this situation was becoming. For FEMA to be involved in this, it had to be much bigger than he knew. Since they seemed very interested in what he thought was just a severe case of the flu, he was really worried that maybe it was something worse.
"Carl, I am going to put you on hold for a few minutes while I look over some data on this end. Don’t hang up, just stand by for a little while and I will give you instructions on what I want y
ou to do from here. For now, you are to just sit tight and not approach any closer to that mine."
Carl acknowledged the instructions and he heard the phone click over as he was switched to hold.
Chapter 3
Dr. Woods put the call on hold for a moment so Carl could not hear the conversation on this end. The situation was looking bleaker by the minute and the last thing he needed was for some intern who was already in the thick of things to start getting on Facebook and Twitter with sensitive information and cause a panic. In these early stages of a crisis or potential crisis it was important to get in front of it right from the start. They had learned that allowing inconsistent or inaccurate information to be released would quickly turn a bad situation worse. Right now there were still too many questions that needed to be answered before they knew what they were dealing with.
He had been awoken from a sound sleep by an emergency call from his office concerning what was reportedly a minor earthquake in the south central New Jersey area. The quake itself was not worthy of concern from his office, it had occurred in a rural area underneath an idle mining operation. These type of minor quakes were not unusual with some deep mine shafts, more than likely a portion of a deep shaft had collapsed into a fissure or sinkhole and registered as a small earthquake. The reason he was woken up concerning this incident was twofold. Satellite imagery had noted a plume of atmospheric discharge of some kind that was forming directly over the mine. Something was being ejected high into the sky from within the mine complex and that plume was spreading out steadily to cover several square miles from its center. The second and most urgent reason for waking him and concerning his agency in this incident were reports from three major hospitals servicing that region. In the hours following the earthquake, dozens of patients had arrived in emergency rooms with unexplained and severe flu like symptoms. His job was now to determine if there was a connection between the material being ejected from the mine and this outbreak of an unidentified illness in the immediate area.
In response to any potential natural disaster the federal government had set up a system of alerts to immediately form the appropriate response teams. The failure of FEMA to timely and properly deploy their assets prior to and immediately following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 resulted in mandates to insure a similar failure never happened again. The new strategy was to prepare for the worst as early as possible. It was better to over-react and find their efforts were not necessary than to under-react and get caught with their pants down again. The protocol in cases of natural disaster put FEMA immediately in charge as the lead agency. Since this particular incident involved an unknown illness or disease, he would have access to experts from the Centers for Disease Control, a representative of that agency was already on the way to meet him in the crises center of the FEMA building at the 500 block of downtown Washington, DC. All coordination with any other agencies involved from the local sheriff to National Guard response would now be controlled from this room. The building was equipped and centered around a state of the art secure communications center where coordination at multiple levels of disaster response could be carried out.
While he was waiting for their CDC liaison to arrive, he pulled up a chat window on his secure computer and fired off a message to the duty office at the NSA monitoring station who had been providing them with real time satellite imagery of the region affected by the earthquake and the expanding plume of material. What he was interested in now was an infrared shot directly down into the mine. This would show him the depth from which the material was originating. His hope was that it would give them an early indicator of what they may be dealing with. The initial opinion he received from the director of the Geological Survey department was that a pocket of methane gas was involved. Since this was a sand mine the director had reasoned that loose sand was the major component in the growing cloud and that methane particles were being formed together with sand particles and dispersed onto the surface as the plume expanded outward. While this was only a theory, the reported symptoms of patients being admitted to local hospitals was inconsistent with methane exposure. Determining the depth of the collapse and size of the underground pocket where this material was originating would narrow the list of suspects and also give them an idea of how much more of this plume they could expect. Since methane was only known to be found in shallow pockets of no more than three hundred to one thousand feet below the surface, anything deeper would exclude methane and maybe identify another possible culprit.
He didn't have to wait long for a response and in a moment the high definition image started to materialize on his screen. The infrared imagery depicted the target area in a range of colors from red and yellow to gray and black, the density of the colors in this case indicated different depth measurements as well as concentrations of heat sources. The image he was looking at now had already been vetted by NSA analysts and a rough measurement guide had been included to the side of the image. Dr. Woods studied the imagery and was surprised by the findings, there had been a collapse in the deepest shaft of the mine as they had suspected. The primary theory was that a fissure of some type may have existed underneath one of the shafts. These fissures can be hundreds or thousands of years old and range in size and depth. Water buildup in the mine shaft above the fissure from recent bouts of heavy storms probably resulted in the collapse of the shaft into the fissure. The imagery confirmed what they had already suspected, the source of the plume was a gas of some type that was being released from the fissure. Something that had been trapped below the surface under great pressure was now being vented into the atmosphere and would continue to do so until enough pressure was finally released to allow it to settle back down. He was already sure that this was not a methane pocket that was being released, it was too deep underground and was registering as a cooler temperature than the surrounding rock. In contrast, methane was typically found much closer to the surface and would present itself as much warmer on an infrared slide. What really surprised him was the depth of this particular fissure, if the measurements he was looking at were correct the pocket of gas that had been exposed by the mine collapse ran to a depth of four point two miles beneath the surface. The deepest drilling operation in the world under the Gulf of Mexico only ran down to a little over two miles. Whatever was coming out of that hole was a substance that had never been discovered before.
Sharing the NSA imagery with the rest of the assembled crisis team, Dr. Woods listened patiently as theories were discussed. The growing consensus was that no matter what it was that was erupting up into the atmosphere above the mine, they needed to obtain samples of it as soon as possible and have them analyzed. The latest satellite readings of the area showed that the plume of material had already radiated out to cover an area of fifteen square miles out from the mine shaft. The good news from the last imagery was that the eruption of material did seem to be abating, so it was a possibility the underground pressure was already starting to wane. That should limit the exposure area of any toxic substance to the south central portion of the state. Even though it was a very large area that was effected, most of it was relatively rural, only two or three mid-size population centers were at risk of exposure at this time. Chances were that most of the victims showing up at local hospitals were suffering from a respiratory condition as a result of fine sand particles mixed with whatever gaseous substance had been trapped in that fissure. It was a similar condition to areas surrounding volcanic activity. Following a volcanic event ash and sulfur were released into the atmosphere, when breathed in they created a sludge like lining in the lungs that would cause respiratory problems. For most people it was treatable and they would fully recover in a few days, the very old and very young were the ones at the highest risk and it was common for some fatalities to result in these events.
What was really troubling were the reports of flu like symptoms being exhibited by victims, high fever, vomiting and general weakness were not expected symptoms of a respiratory related incident. He
had personally listened to that intern with the Geological Survey office describe his own symptoms and those that he had personally observed from another victim in a town within the affected area.
Right on cue the door to the crisis center flew open and a haggard looking gentleman that Dr. Woods recognized immediately as his counterpart at the CDC and their resident adviser from that agency, Dr. Kyle Martin, stormed into the room. Dr. Woods could already see by the expression on his face and how he nearly sprinted to the front of the room with a folder of paper in his hand that he was bringing them less than encouraging news.
"It’s bad," Dr. Martin said without preamble as soon as he had everyone's attention, "I just got off the phone with administrators from two of the three hospitals servicing the effected region in New Jersey. They have already reported multiple and I mean dozens of fatalities. Preliminary tests are showing that it is a viral infection and is airborne."
This revelation caused an excited murmur to spread through the small crowd in the crisis center.
"Could this be some type of terrorism? A biological attack of some sort?" asked the representative from Homeland security.
"Possible, of course, but unlikely. Considering the rural area and the randomness of the earthquake and resulting discharge from underground. Staging such an event is beyond my area of expertise but I would not think it possible. Also, the symptoms being reported closely resemble the H2N2 Asian Flu, but the rate of infection and speed with which the victims are advancing through the stages of illness are staggering. No known engineered element could possibly reproduce those effects."