by S. Ganley
The last thing she needed right now was to catch whatever funk this couple directly behind her seat were carrying. From the sounds of their anguished moans and groans and the severity of their coughing, she was sure that they had actually gotten sicker as the flight wore on. To make things even worse, at least three other people in the cabin nearby had recently also started sniffling and coughing. She wasn't sure a cold could catch on that quick, but if it was possible, she didn't want to be on the receiving end of it. When the wheels finally touched down and she felt the plane slow and turn as it approached the terminal, she had her seatbelt undone and was ready to jump out of her seat and make a dash down the aisle as fast as the slow moving crush of passengers would allow. He first stop when getting inside the airport would be a restroom where she would seek out one of those dispensers of disinfecting hand wash and scrub herself down with it. There was a small spot on her forearm where she had felt a slash of moisture following one of the woman's long drawn out coughing fits and even though she had rubbed the spot raw with a moist towelette from her purse, she wanted to hit it again with disinfectant just to make sure.
Miranda felt the plane stop as it came to rest in its designated spot alongside the terminal and she watched from her window as the long accordion shaped walkway began to extend outward towards the door at the front of the passenger cabin. The stewardess was just finishing her welcome to Virginia speech and reminding everyone to use caution when checking the storage compartments above their heads as items may have shifted during flight. The two passengers between her and the aisle finally found a break in the crush of people already pushing their way forward towards the exit and slipped out into the crowd pausing for a moment to retrieve belongings from the overhead compartments. She was now able to stand and worm her own way towards the aisle only to find she was blocked with the continuation of movement forward, her seatmates had elected not to wait the extra two seconds before moving forward to allow her a chance to escape the row of seats. While waiting for a brief enough opening to slip into the flow of exiting passengers, she chanced a glance into the seats behind her with the annoyingly sick couple still in their seats. She found it ironic that only now that they were on the ground and in the process of leaving the plane that they had stopped their incessant hacking and spraying of germs and had lapsed into what appeared to be a deep and peaceful sleep with the husbands head pressed into the frame of the window and his wife leaning against the side of his chest. It would be a task for the stewardess to reach over and shake them awake, Miranda had no intention of reaching out to touch either of them and take more chances with their germs. The three additional passengers she that had started to hack a little before landing had now multiplied to over a dozen and so far she had not felt the slightest stirring of a coming cold and wasn't about to push her luck.
After several minutes of stop and go passenger movement, she had just about reached the open door when she stole a look back into the cabin and saw all of the stewardesses from the rear of the plane now bending down over the sleeping forms still in their seats. They appeared to be having some difficulty in waking the slumbering couple and Miranda observed a frightened look come over one of them as she raised a portable radio to her mouth and started frantically speaking into it. Before she could see what happened next, the traffic out of the plane onto the boarding ramp started up again and she was pushed forward with the flow of passengers. She had thought that once clear of the door that the traffic into the terminal would quickly clear up and she could pick up a normal pace instead of this annoying stutter stepping she was currently stuck with. Once she rounded the corner of the passenger walkway she saw what was causing the log jam further up the way. A young man, not much older than herself, was hunched over against one side of the collapsible wall in the midst of a painful sounding round of vomiting. The smell hit her after she had taken another couple of steps towards the unsavory spectacle, she gagged and quickly reached up a hand to cover her nose and mouth as she worked hard to keep her own stomach contents under control. It took another two minutes for the crowd to thin out enough that she was able to break free and force her way out of the ramp and into the open terminal.
After the last couple of minutes on that flight and in that puke filled walkway the open expanse of the main terminal was a welcome relief. It appeared that several planes were loading and unloading at the same time so the end of the terminal she had left her own plane into was very crowded with streams of people swiftly moving to and fro in any number of directions. This was a situation where she found it a real hindrance to be short, she had to join a crowd of people and flow along with them for a ways before she was in a position close enough to a directional sign to realize she was heading the wrong way. To reach the baggage claim area she had to turn around and join yet another swiftly moving flow of commuters. As she passed by the gate she had just left after leaving her plane, she spotted a team of emergency medical personnel rushing into the passenger walkway pushing a pair of elevated gurneys and carrying large red paramedic bags over their shoulders. She had a sudden feeling that the sick couple may have not just been sleeping, a cold shiver rippled through her body.
Reaching the lower level baggage claim she was starting to feel like the end of this long and troubling trip was finally in sight. Crowded around the claim carousel were many of the same faces she recognized from her flight, she could see a lot of pale and sickly looking faces where she had remembered bright smiles and healthy colors when she last saw each of them. It was alarming at how fast all of these people had started showing signs of being sick, she was surprised that she had yet to feel the first tingles in her throat alerting her to the onset of a cold. She made it a point to keep to the rear of the pack gathered around the carousel marked for her flight. It might take her a little longer to spot her own bags but at least she was out of range of any more flying mucus as more and more of her fellow passengers broke out into fits of coughing and hacking. She had been watching a middle age woman standing just a few feet away from her. Miranda saw her body convulse slightly for the third time and when her hand reached up to cover her mouth she realized the woman was struggling to keep herself from vomiting right there on the carpeted floor in front of the luggage racks. With her hand pressed hard against her mouth she started whipping her head from side to side searching desperately for something. Miranda deduced she must be trying to find the closest bathroom and that she was probably losing the fight to keep her stomach contents down, their eyes met for an instant and Miranda pointed to the woman’s room on the far side of the baggage claims area next to the office for lost luggage. Her eyes expressed her gratitude as she quickly shouldered her way through the crowded area and picked up a hurried shuffle towards the restroom.
Turning back to the luggage area she was grateful to see the crowd thinning as more and more people grabbed their bags and hurried off towards the exits. Through a break in the crowd she spotted her bags with their recognizable Dartmouth stickers making them stand out from the others around them. She slid through the remaining crowd, thrust her carry on back over her shoulder and extended the handles of each bag so she could take advantage of the wheels and more easily navigate back through the milling remains of passengers still waiting for their own bags to make their appearance.
Miranda had just reached the exit when she flinched at the distinct sounds of gunfire echoing down from the terminal area above her on the second floor. Excited shouts and yells of panic reached her as she saw the orderly flow of coming and going travelers breaking into a panicked run in all directions and starting to push each other out of the way as they headed towards the escalators and stairs leading down to her level. She ducked behind a rack of rental luggage carts as she frantically searched in all directions expecting at any second to spot a crowd of machine gun wielding Arab men running along picking off Americans infidels while crying out 'Allah Akbar' to the heavens. The one thing her few friends back at school had joked about with her over her decisi
on to take a job so close to the nation’s capital was the threat of terrorism. That off the cuff joke from her friend was now coming back to haunt her as she imagined herself about to be gunned down in a terrorist attack before she had even left the airport during her first hour in town. More gunfire rang out from further down the upper levels of the terminal and she now saw a group of rifle wielding airport security pushing their way through the crowds rushing towards the distant sounds of screaming and shooting. Even though the crowds near her were worked into a panicked frenzy as they sought cover, she was reasonably sure that whatever was going down was still contained much further into the massive airport and not in her immediate vicinity. She rationalized that the odds of being struck by an errant round were slim enough for her to take the chance of making a rush for the exit only a few feet away. Just outside the glass doors she saw a row of waiting taxi cabs still lined up ready for their next fair, so desperate for the next few dollars to help feed their families that even the panic of gunfire inside the airport had not caused the drivers to flee with their passenger compartments empty. Taking another look around to ensure the coast was clear, Miranda grabbed the handles of both her bags and darted out the sliding glass doors and straight to the first taxi cab she saw. She had just finished dumping her suitcases into the open trunk when the driver came from the front of the car and started blabbering in heavily accented English that she needed to use the taxi in the front of the row first. She was about to argue with him when another louder and more extended blast of gunfire resounded from the open door behind her. The driver decided the first in line rule could be waived in this situation and he slammed the trunk door shut, muttered something in his native language while gesturing wildly towards the rear of the cab and then raced back toward the driver’s door. Miranda had barely got through the door when the cab started wheeling away from the curb, she reached back and grabbed to door handle to pull it shut an instant before it would have otherwise clipped the open door of the cab in line in front of them as they rocketed past.
"Where you go lady?" the driver asked after they had reached what he felt was a safe enough distance from the airport’s main building that he finally slowed to a moderate pace.
"Excuse me?" Miranda questioned when she finally realized the man had spoken to her.
"Go, where you go?" He asked again.
"Oh, yes, I'm sorry." She fumbled in her purse and produced a rumpled computer printout with the addresses of the apartment complexes she had planned on visiting first. She picked the first address she could find and read it off to the driver as he swerved to hit an off ramp and take them in a new direction that she hoped was just a short cut to their destination.
"What happen in airport?" The driver asked as he stumbled for the right words. Miranda imagined that his English vocabulary had been primarily developed to determining a passenger’s destination with little room for small talk.
She made eye contact with him in the rear view mirror and simply shrugged her shoulders in reply to indicate that she didn't know. For the remainder of the ride she kept her gaze fixed steadily out the window and tried to take in her surroundings. Whatever had happened back in the airport was something that she considered herself very lucky to have not been involved with, she would try and listen to the news later in the evening and see if they ran a story about it. For the time being she was starting to calm back down and needed to focus herself back on the task at hand, finding a place to live and getting on with her new life.
#
Dr. Woods request to the White House for amended orders for the National Guard checkpoints in dealing with refuges suspected of being infected had not been received with the same seriousness he had hoped. General Page had intercepted his call and refused his request to confer with the President on this issue. He had the impression that at this point the President was likely starting to move into a position where he was distancing himself from this situation. The political ramifications of an out of control epidemic on his watch was a political nightmare. If action taken on his direct orders resulted in civilian casualties whether necessary or not, it was something his administration would not be able to recover from. The clear message was that Dr. Woods, Dr. Martin and their CDC teams were running the show on their own. They would be the ones hung out to dry with any blow back that came as a result of this outbreak. The immediate problem he faced was that without support from the White House and Joint Chiefs, the soldiers manning those check points were also being left on their own. The Captain in charge had already made it clear to him that he was not willing to go outside of his orders in dealing with the people closing in on his position.
"What options does this leave us?" Dr. Martin asked.
Dr. Woods shook his head and turned to look at the computerized map showing confirmed reports of outbreaks beyond the quarantine zone. Right now a single red dot was positioned over a hospital in downtown Camden, New Jersey marking at least one or more confirmed cases and two other hospitals in that same area had yellow ones to mark likely cases.
Dr. Woods was now imagining what this same map would look like in the next twenty four hours. At the rate the virus was known to spread, it wouldn't be long before it reached epidemic proportions.
"Not many I'm afraid. We need our field unit to press ahead with blood and tissue tests on the known survivor and compare the results against what we already have for the virus. The cure has got to be somewhere in that data, we just have to find it."
#
Tristan Gant was had grown weary of just sitting there and watching the two corpses, it was morbid and boring and not exactly what he had signed on for. Three years earlier he had completed a criminal justice degree at a local community college which he had started with aspirations of joining the FBI or at least a police department. After six months of applying for openings and either receiving rejections or just no reply at all, a friend of his wife had directed him to a Government web site for jobs where there were several openings for security specialists. This particular job had been advertised as being a security contractor responsible for site security in fixed and mobile locations. It called for someone with a degree in the same field he had just received his in and it paid at the high end of what he had seen for other security positions. The job came with education, medical and retirement benefits and bonuses for extended assignments in the field. He applied on-line and within two days had undergone a phone interview and was invited in for a personal one on one follow up interview. He had a job offer within two weeks and with his wife's blessing had accepted the terms and started back to work at a full time job for the first time in five years. For the most part the work was not that exciting, but it was a guaranteed pay check and in another year he would be qualified to sit for the supervisor's exam and possible advancement. This was his first actual deployment with the field unit, they had told all of them to prepare for an extended stay in the field but that the duty would be routine security and bonuses would apply for being away from home and possible hazardous duty.
Sitting in this surgical room dressed from head to toe in a biological protective suit and babysitting a pair of mangled corpses was not at all what he considered routine duty. The team of doctors who had been working in here all day had shifted their focus to the girl in the other wing and an autopsy they needed to perform, but they needed someone to maintain a vigil with these two. All they had really told him was that he was to observe and report anything unusual with either body. For the life of him he could not imagine what they expected for him to possibly see and he had spent the last hour and a half imagining scenarios that now had him jumping at shadows. There were only a handful of them for the security detail at this mobile site so all of them were working twelve hour shifts at a minimum. That left Tristan with ten and a half hours of just sitting here alone with two dead bodies. Normally when he was manning a boring post he could at least get on his cell phone and play a game, text home or read one of the many books he had loaded onto the phone. W
hile wrapped from head to toe in this oversized condom there was no way he could reach the phone attached to his belt. This room was equipped with a computer system that he could get on and at least goof around on the Internet or try and beat his best time on the hardest level of minesweeper. But he knew that the computers in here were directly linked to the command centers in DC and back in Atlanta and he didn't think the big bosses would take kindly to seeing him playing games on their expensive computers. He looked through the window on the pressure sealed door at the technician’s station in the short corridor between this wing and the next. There was a desk with a computer and phone sitting there beckoning to him, he also knew that this particular station, while it was on the network, it was not directly monitored in ether DC or Atlanta. This room was supposed to remain pressurized which would prevent the doors between the two sections from opening and an alarm would sound when the pressure was equalized. The purpose of the pressurization was to segregate the air in each section from contaminating any other sections of the mobile center. In this case Tristan thought it was a pretty useless precaution since there were only dead bodies in here and no samples from any virus victims in the contaminated zone. The bodies he was guarding had been members of the team here and had never entered the zone so he was pretty confident there was no danger in contamination from them. One of the first things most security guards learn on the job from the older hands is how to disable alarms and other forms of security within their area of concern. In this case, Tristan knew just how to turn off the alarms that would sound when the room was depressurized. He toyed with the idea for a few minutes as he continued looking back and forth at the tempting sight of that unmanned computer station just on the other side of the door. He convinced himself that as long as he was sitting at the desk out there he was still fully capable of doing his job, from the desk he could still keep an eye on this room which was all they needed him to do anyways.