Pandemic

by Daniel Kalla

  “Please, Khalila, tell me more about Zamil,” Sha’rawi said.

  Jahal shook her head slowly.

  “Is it too painful?” Sha’rawi asked.

  Jahal shrugged, but pain had nothing to do with it. Every waking moment she carried the pain of his loss like a knife in her side, but she had decided not to discuss the memories of their perfect life together with anyone else. She had learned that protecting the privacy of those memories helped maintain their lingering sense of intimacy.

  Sha’rawi groped for Jahal’s hand and squeezed it tight. “I had no right to ask—”

  “Zamil never wanted to go to Afghanistan, but he felt duty bound,” Jahal said calmly. “He was a scholar not a fighter.” She had a vivid mental picture of her scrawny, beautiful husband packing up his heavy books to drag to a dark cave in the middle of a war. “The night he crossed the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan, I found out I was pregnant”

  Only when Jahal heard Sha’rawi’s sobs did she realize that tears had begun to run down her own cheeks. “Ten days later, I miscarried,” Jahal said slowly. “Everyone wondered why I mourned so hard for a baby I had only carried for weeks, but I knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “It was a sign.” Khalila said. “A week later I heard Zamil had been killed by an American bomb that destroyed his cave on the same day I lost my baby.” Her voice went hoarse. “The very same day”

  Sha’rawi squeezed her hand even tighter but said nothing.

  “I accepted the Fate God had chosen for me,” Jahal said, feeling the resolve cement inside her. “I vowed to make myself useful. To commit the way Zamil had. Then Sheikh Hassan introduced me to Abu Lahab. And now here I am beside you.”

  Sha’rawi sniffed several times. “But you will leave in the morning. And without you ...”

  “Listen to me, Sharifa.” Jahal let go of her friend’s hand and placed her hand on Sharifa’s cheek again. “You will be fine without me. Abu Lahab will take care of you.”

  Sha’rawi swallowed. “I will miss you so much.”

  “As I will miss you.” Jahal tapped the woman lightly on her cheek. “Sharifa, I want you to promise me something.”

  “What?”

  “That you will stay away from the Major.”

  “Major Sabri? Why?”

  “He is not like the rest of us.” She paused. “He is no fool but ...”

  “But?”

  “Remember what I said about some men?” Jahal asked.

  Sha’rawi nodded. “That they are full of hate?”

  “And very dangerous,” Jahal said wistfully. “Just like the Major.”

  CHAPTER 11

  COMMUNIST PARTY HEADQUARTERS, JIAYUGUAN CITY

  Like everything else he had seen from the Cultural Revolution era, the box of a boardroom struck Noah Haldane as austere. He decided that if the bank of windows lining the wall behind him were even half the size of the dour black-and-white portraits of the Party functionaries hanging on the other walls, the room might have come across as a little less oppressive.

  Noah sat between Duncan McLeod and Milly Yuen at the large, rectangular board table. Helmut Streicher sat on the other side of the table beside the city’s chief health officer, Yung Se Choy. A blueprint-sized, detailed map of Jiayuguan City covered the tabletop in front of them. In his late forties and skinny to the point of swimming in his navy-blue suit, Yung Choy had a mop of thick hair and a wispy mustache that failed to hide the scar of a repaired cleft lip. Dr. Kai Huang, the regional hospital’s young director, sat on the far side of Choy and fidgeted distractedly with his pen. Both Choy and Huang spoke passable English, but Milly Yuen filled in as translator where necessary.

  Streicher ran a finger over the map. “Here,” he barked in his crisp Germanic accent. “All known cases of viral transmission have occurred among people living in these zones in red.” He pointed to the north corner of the city, where several blocks had been circled in red. “And the blue lines represent the buffer zone,” he said of the single blue rectangle that enclosed all the red zones plus a buffer of several city blocks.

  “Fucking great, Streicher!” McLeod hollered. “No doubt all those potential Typhoid Marys knew better than to walk past the little red and blue lines.”

  Streicher adjusted the Lennon-style round eyeglasses, which highlighted his striking blue-gray eyes. “You understand, Dr. McLeod, about sectorizing outbreaks, no?” he asked with a hint of condescension. He circled the red zones with a finger. “There have been no confirmed cases outside of these. Correct, Mr. Choy?”

  Choy nodded vigorously.

  Streicher pointed at the blue line. “As of yesterday, the local authorities have quarantined this entire zone within the blue.”

  “Quarantine, of course,” McLeod said. “I remember the wonderful quarantine in Toronto during SARS. Suspected cases were told to stay at home and wear masks, but some of them went to work anyway.”

  The health officer shook his head. “No one leaves,” Choy said emphatically. “Army guards against it.”

  “Lord love a repressive dictatorship during an epidemic!” McLeod said. “Makes our job so much easier.”

  Streicher nodded as if McLeod were serious. “The quarantine should contain the spread within the city. The incubation period is estimated at three to five days. We will know in seventy-two to ninety-six hours whether there has been spread beyond the blue.”

  “When was the first case seen in Jiayuguan City?” Haldane asked.

  “Five days ago,” Choy squeaked in a high-pitched voice.

  “And how many cases so far?”

  Dr. Huang spoke to Yuen in Mandarin. “Seventy confirmed, forty-five suspected, and twenty-six dead,” she translated for him.

  “Five days and less than two hundred cases,” Haldane thought aloud. “With the short incubation period, I would have expected greater spread by now. It’s a safe bet that this virus does not exhibit airborne spread.”

  Even after the translation, Choy stared blankly at Haldane. With Yuen acting as the go-between, Haldane explained. “For all infections, there are three routes of potential spread. First, direct contact. HIV or Hepatitis B are examples of viruses requiring intimate contact. Second is droplet spread like with the common cold or flu. When an infected person sneezes or coughs, large mucous droplets carry the virus from person to person. However, these droplets are relatively big and fall to the ground quickly so you need close and immediate contact. The final and most feared route of spread is airborne. Smallpox and measles are viral examples. By coughing or sneezing, people aerosolize tiny particles. These particles can linger in the air for hours or spread remotely via ventilation systems and so on. It means that people can be infected without direct contact to a contagious person.”

  “Ja,” agreed Streicher. “Airborne spread is an epidemiological catastrophe. But this ARCS looks only to have droplet spread.”

  Eyes wide, Choy asked in English, “This is very good?”

  “Bloody marvelous,” McLeod said. “As it stands, we might not die for weeks.”

  Haldane glanced sidelong at his colleague. “Not helping, Duncan.”

  Milly Yuen held up a hand tentatively. “I have something to report.”

  “Please, Milly ...” Haldane held out his palm.

  “I heard from the WHO Influenza Surveillance Lab in Hong Kong an hour ago,” she said quietly. “They’ve isolated the virus in the serum samples.”

  Two hands on the table, McLeod pushed himself up out of his seat. “Don’t keep us hanging, Milly!”

  “As we assumed, this virus is closely related to influenza,” Yuen said.

  Haldane folded his arm across his chest. “But it’s not influenza?”

  Yuen shrugged so imperceptibly that her shoulders barely flickered. “It is a subtype, but it is not influenza A or B.”

  “What other kinds of influenza are there?” Streicher asked.

  Kai Huang dropped the pen and looked up at the others. “The Sp
anish Flu,” he said in English.

  Haldane shook his head. “I wondered about that, too, but I don’t think this is the Spanish Flu. At least, not the exact same virus that caused the 1918 pandemic.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Streicher asked.

  “Because that pandemic swept the planet in four months in an age before commercial air travel,” Haldane said. “One billion people were infected. Greater than fifty percent of the world’s population at the time. If we were dealing with the same bug, the genie would already be out of the bottle. Clearly, ARCS is not as contagious.”

  “How do you know that the infection control measures haven’t been better this time?” Streicher asked.

  “Or maybe the last time, the Spanish Flu banged around some remote Chinese province for a few years before going global.” McLeod pointed a bony finger at Haldane. “Could be the same with ARCS? Like some Australian teenager, it might just be chomping at the bit to head out and party around the world.”

  Haldane shook his head slowly. “It’s already been in this city for almost a week and they’ve seen fewer than two hundred cases. The Spanish Flu would have swept the city like wildfire by now.” He tapped the table. “What’s more, even in 1918 the mortality rate for the Spanish Flu was only two percent. Whereas ARCS is far deadlier. It’s killing twenty-five percent of its young, healthy victims.” He shook his head. “Twenty-five percent!”

  “So ARCS is not the Spanish Flu?” Streicher asked.

  “Could be closely related, though.” Haldane shrugged.

  McLeod nodded. “Maybe this is the Spanish Flu’s long-lost meaner but antisocial sister.”

  “I think we can find out,” Yuen said quietly.

  “How so?” Haldane asked.

  She looked down and shuffled the papers in front of her, needlessly. “The U.S. military pathology labs have saved tissue samples from the 1918 Spanish Flu victims. We have a partially sequenced genome for the virus. Now that we know ARCS is a member of the influenza family, we will be able to sequence this virus with DNA probes. Then we can compare the two.”

  “All good and bloody well, Milly,” McLeod said with a sympathetic smile to her. “But sequencing the virus doesn’t help the people who are dying of it today, or those who will acquire it tomorrow.”

  People around the table nodded.

  Haldane snapped his fingers. He whirled to face the two Chinese health officials. “How are you controlling the spread in the countryside?”

  Huang looked away. He picked up his pen and started twirling again.

  With Yuen translating, Choy answered for them. “We have the same strict quarantines in place in all the towns and farms for two hundred miles around the city. There is no travel allowed into or out of any areas that have had an active case within the last ten days.”

  “But the livestock!” Haldane said.

  Choy shrugged, confused.

  “As with the Spanish Flu, ARCS is almost certainly a product of zoonosis, or species intermixing.” Haldane leaned forward in his chair, tapped the table, and spoke so urgently that Yuen had difficulty keeping up with the translation. “The pig is the usual mixing vessel. Inside the porcine bloodstream, viruses from birds like chickens meet their human equivalent and mutate. We call it a ‘massive reassortment of genetic code.’ Since pigs are the usual intermediary, most of these mutated viruses are forms of swine flus.”

  “I see.” Choy nodded. “But what does that mean in terms of our quarantine?”

  “It means,” Haldane said, “that you have to slaughter the livestock. Like they did last year in Vietnam and Korea for the Avian Influenza outbreaks.”

  “Just the pigs?”

  Haldane shook his head. “No. Birds are the natural carriers of influenza. They develop the most profound viremia, or highest blood levels, without becoming sick. The chickens—in fact, all the livestock—must be sacrificed.”

  Choy glared at Haldane and his face crumpled in dire concern. Yuen translated Choy’s frantic, squeaky response. “But farming is one of the province’s essential industries. Gansu’s economy would be devastated if we slaughtered all the livestock.”

  “And the alternative?” Haldane held his hands out in front of him. “Imagine what would happen to the economy if ARCS broke free of here and stormed across China and beyond, killing one in four of the healthy people who stood in its path?”

  Haldane glanced around the table. The others, even Choy, nodded in agreement, but Dr. Kai Huang refused to meet his gaze. Instead, he stared at the table and frantically twirled the pen in his hand. Haldane wondered why the youthful hospital director looked more fearful than anyone else at the table.

  Haldane grappled with the door to his small hotel room. Once opened, he took two strides and lunged for the ringing phone. “Hello?” he said, hearing his breathless anticipation echo back in his ear.

  “Noah?”

  He felt a pang of disappointment, recognizing that it wasn’t his wife’s voice. “Oh, Karen, hi,” he said.

  “Well, hello to you too, stranger,” said his secretary, Karen Jackson.

  “What’s going on, Karen?”

  “Tell me everything,” she said excitedly. “How’s China? What’s the Great Wall like?”

  “I don’t have a clue,” Haldane said irritably. “I’m not over here on the AAA’s Great Chinese Bus Tour. We’re kind of working against the clock.”

  “Excuse me,” Jackson murmured. “I forgot how busy saving the world must keep you.”

  Haldane chuckled. “Sorry, Karen, I haven’t caught up from my jet lag yet. But in all honesty, all I’ve seen so far is the hotel, the hospital, and city hall. None of which are anything to write home about.”

  “No, it was a boneheaded question.” She laughed. “Of course, you’re too busy for all that.” Then she asked in a hushed voice: “What is it like over there, Noah? Scary?”

  “Yeah. A little.”

  “You keeping safe?” Jackson demanded with her usual maternal protectiveness.

  “It’s not me I’m worried about,” he said, sitting down on the bed and resting his back against the headboard. “This virus is some piece of work.”

  “That’s what they say,” Jackson said.

  “Who’s they?” Haldane asked.

  “The news folk,” she said.

  He hit the bed with a fist. “Damn it. This has made the news?”

  “Small print, back page stuff so far,” she said. “I came across a small article in the Post. Wouldn’t have even seen it if I wasn’t looking for the crossword.”

  “That’s better, I guess,” he said. “Is that what you called to tell me?”

  “No,” she said. “Someone is looking for you. She said it was important.”

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Gwen Savard”

  “Why is that name so familiar?”

  “She sounds like a bigwig,” Jackson said. “Her title’s a mouthful, anyway. Director of Counter-Bioterrorism for the Department of Homeland Security.”

  “Sure. I met her at a conference.” He remembered her fiery intensity as much as her California-girl good looks. “What does she want?”

  “She wouldn’t tell little old me,” Jackson said. “But she left about forty numbers for you to call her at.”

  Haldane patted around the nightstand until he found a pen and a pad. “Give me the first two,” he said.

  After she recited the numbers, she asked, “When are you coming home?”

  “Soon as I can, Karen.”

  “Good,” Jackson said. “I know that little girl of yours is missing her daddy.”

  Not as much as her dad is missing her, Haldane thought as he hung up. With the phone still in his hand, he dialed the operator.

  On the second ring, someone answered. “Hello, Haldane residence.”

  He experienced another rush of disappointment as he realized he was talking to his mother-in-law, Shirley Dolman, not his wife. “Hi, Shirley, it’s Noah.”

  �
��Oh, my goodness, I’m talking to China,” Dolman said as if the entire country had called her. “How are you, Noah?”

  “Fine,” he said. “How is everything back home?”

  “Things are well,” Dolman said in her syrupy tone. “Chloe is asleep. And I’m afraid Anna is out with a friend.”

  “With a friend,” Haldane repeated. He checked his watch, and recalculated. It was after 10:00 P.M. in Maryland. “Did she say whom?” he asked.

  “No, matter of fact she didn’t,” Dolman said. “But she said she wouldn’t be home until after midnight. They were going to a late movie, you see.”

  “Oh.”

  “She left her cell phone on in case of something with Chloe. I’m sure you can reach her on that, Noah.”

  “Great, thanks, Shirley. You take care.”

  Haldane dropped the phone back on the cradle. He had no intention of trying his wife’s cell. Why interrupt her movie? he thought. Not that he believed she was at the theater, but movie or not, Haldane couldn’t shake his absolute conviction that Anna was with her.

  It was near dusk by the time the officials arranged for a car to take Haldane and McLeod out to the site of quarantine in the northeast section of Jiayuguan City.

  Staring out the window of the car, images of Tiananmen Square from the student uprising in 1989 popped to Haldane’s mind. The sight turned his stomach. He had once dabbled in student activism during his undergrad days. While the students at Tiananmen had to face firing squads or the caterpillar tracks of tanks rolling toward them, all Haldane got out of his activism was a security escort back to his dorm.

  There were no tanks in Jiayuguan, but trucks and military vehicles were plentiful. Masked soldiers patrolled the streets, rifles slung prominently over their shoulders. Several muscular German shepherds strained at leashes. A barbed-wire fence snaked around the far side of the street, isolating an entire section of the city.