Viral Misery (Book 1)

by Watson, Thomas A

  Each area held certain items and Arthur started racking his brain to remember if Rudy had ever been inside the others. Visiting the three other storage areas around the property, Arthur jumped on the buggy. Driving up to the textile barn, Arthur could only remember Rudy looking inside three of the tool and machine containers.

  The last group and the lone refrigerated container were behind the textile barn. Arthur knew for a fact that Rudy knew where all of the storage containers were located because he had hired him two years ago to help fence off the property.

  Stopping at the meat locker container, Arthur saw the shiny lock untouched. Inside were several machines to process meat, but then Arthur remembered Rudy had seen inside that one just a few months ago. Wendy had been inside processing the chickens they had culled when Arthur had paid Rudy to help him paint the textile barn.

  He drove over to the other four and stomped the brakes. “That motherless cocksucker,” Arthur snarled, getting off the buggy. Two of the locks were twisted and beat to shit, but were still in place. These containers held the cloth, leather, thread, and yarn they produced.

  What they made didn’t compare to what a textile mill could do, but they could make their own clothes and even sell some specially woven cloth. The reason they weren’t taxed was because they made it and sold it for cash. Cash; the item the government hated and loved to take away.

  The textile barn had an alarm system Arthur had salvaged, but he and Wendy had wanted it only because it would tell them if there was a fire. The burglar alarm was just an afterthought. The house didn’t even have a burglar alarm.

  Unlocking the small door, Arthur walked in and turned off the alarm. All the machines to process fibers were on the right side and weaving looms were on the other side. This barn was just as massive as the livestock barn and Arthur had always wondered if the same people had built them. When they had rebuilt this barn, they’d closed it in and put in a ton of lighting and electrical sockets.

  He went upstairs to check on Wendy’s silk area. Seeing the three refrigerators that held her silkworm eggs, Arthur made sure the locks were still in place. Wendy kept them locked so the doors would stay closed without a doubt.

  Turning around, he saw the rows of huge bins that they loaded with mulberry leaves to feed the silkworms. It had taken her awhile but Wendy had finally got her hands on one clutch of domesticated silk moths. Domesticated moths couldn’t survive without human intervention. They had a few wild silk moths in the mulberry orchard, but even Arthur could tell the difference in the amount of silk they got from the wild silkworms and the domesticated ones.

  “Momma will be back soon and you know she likes putting you guys to work during the summer,” Arthur said. It just amazed him that Wendy could put the eggs in the fridge and pull them out when she was ready. The longest she had kept a batch cold was a year and they had survived just fine.

  The lady who Wendy had gotten the eggs from had told them that she had kept a batch in the fridge for five years, but Wendy never wanted to try that long.

  Finding everything all right, Arthur headed back out, turning the alarm on and locking the door. He stopped and looked at the dogs sitting in a line, looking up at him and panting. “Why didn’t you tell me that Rudy stole some of our shit?” he huffed, putting his hands on his hips.

  The dogs didn’t move and just continued panting and looking up at him. “Well, I guess it’s hard when you’re inside,” Arthur grinned and dove down, wrapping his arms around the dogs. The dogs started licking his face as he loved on them.

  Getting up, Arthur headed for the buggy. “Well, time to put up cameras and some alarms,” he said.

  Chapter Nine

  Get mom home, lies abound

  April 30

  Hearing a phone ringing, Arthur swatted over at the nightstand and felt his cellphone. Realizing it wasn’t vibrating, he sat up and crawled over the cats and dogs to Wendy’s nightstand. Grabbing the cordless phone, “Hello,” he yawned.

  “Hey, dad,” Joseph said and Arthur came awake instantly, looking over at the clock.

  “Son, did you leave early?” Arthur asked, seeing it was just after three a.m.

  “No, dad, that’s why I’m calling. My leave was cancelled and I have to fly out to Diego Garcia in an hour,” Joseph told him and Arthur heard the disappointment.

  “Son, what about your fighter school?”

  “I’ve been assured that I will be reassigned there before the end of the year,” Joseph sighed. “I told them if I wasn’t, I’d be leaving the service.”

  “That’s right! You’re hot stuff and you make them give you what you want,” Arthur snapped, even though a part of him had hoped Joseph wouldn’t get the assignment. And that small part made Arthur feel terrible because that had always been Joseph’s dream. “I’ll call our congressman. Hell, I donate to him like I’m paying the mafia for protection, so that son of a bitch owes me!”

  “My CO thinks he can get me in this class and I will just have to do some makeup work,” Joseph said, sounding better at hearing his dad pissed off. “Please don’t get the politicians involved yet.”

  “Hell, son, you want me to kick someone’s ass?”

  Joseph busted out laughing and Arthur relaxed at hearing the sound. “No, dad. The last time you did that, you and mom almost went to jail,” Joseph howled out.

  When Joseph stopped laughing, Arthur asked. “Why did they cancel your leave?”

  “This flu thing,” Joseph sighed. “Word’s coming down the pipeline that it has gotten stronger and more people are dying.”

  “I’ve heard that, but they haven’t said anything about numbers,” Arthur said. “The hospital in Clarksville called yesterday and asked if I could come in.”

  “You didn’t, did you?!” Joseph shouted.

  Shocked at the outburst, Arthur climbed out of the bed. “No, son, I can’t leave the farm. I just found out that Rudy is a punk-ass bitch and has been breaking into the storage containers.”

  “I never liked that cocksucker.”

  “Well, I’ve been putting in more cameras and even put in two alarm systems. One here and another at the office house,” Arthur said. “I won’t be done with that for several days. Besides, I don’t have a shift at the hospital until June and that’s fine with me.”

  “Um, you heard from mom?” Joseph asked.

  “Yeah, she called yesterday, but son, you talk to her as much as I do on the computer.”

  “Dad, you think you can get mom to fly back at her next stop if there’s an airport?” Joseph asked hesitantly.

  Feeling his heart rate skyrocket, Arthur asked. “Son, is something wrong?”

  Several seconds passed and Arthur could hear the phone moving around. “Dad,” Joseph whispered. “It wasn’t just my leave. All leave throughout the military was cancelled. They are putting all bases on lockdown, keeping all personnel on base.”

  “Whoa,” Arthur mumbled.

  “Yeah, but I talked to an Air Force pilot who flies heavy lifters and he said he was part of a large flight that just flew five thousand troops from South Korea back to the states.”

  “Son, when do you fly out?” Arthur asked.

  “Wheels up in an hour.”

  “You get your ass on that island and call me when you can,” Arthur told him. “Will you have internet there?”

  “Yeah, I was there for a week last year.”

  “If I find out anything, I will e-mail it to you,” Arthur told Joseph and heard jet engines in the background. “Son, where are you at?”

  “I can’t say, but it’s isolated,” Joseph chuckled. “I never knew we had a base here and neither did anyone in my flight.”

  “Son, you call if you need us. I know how to drive a boat.”

  Joseph swallowed a lump in his throat. “Dad, I’ll be fine. I will be sitting in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It’s you and mom I’m worried about.”

  “Love you, son,” Arthur said.

  “Hey, dad, my CO
just waved at me. I have to go. Love you,” Joseph said quickly and hung up.

  Dropping into his chair, Arthur put the phone on his desk and grabbed the mouse. Taking a deep breath, Arthur hit the web. The first thing he noticed was the internet was moving very slowly. “I paid for high speed and I get syrup,” he mumbled.

  A few alternate news sites had articles on the flu and Arthur just started printing them because it took the pages so long to load. Then, he moved to two message boards he liked. When the first board’s home page popped up, his mouth fell open.

  The first discussion was, ‘Dead bodies being taken from hospital in New York’. He clicked the link and the message board opened up and he saw pictures below a typed message. He clicked on the pictures and then moved them to his second screen as they slowly downloaded. Then, he started to read.

  ‘Stone Hunter here. I live in NY and the hospitals are overflowing. I was walking around and saw this at the hospital near me, guys in hazmat suits loading body bags in vans. I went around front and a woman said her husband was flown to a treatment center in Arizona because the hospital was full. The kicker is; all airports up here only have about a quarter of the flights they normally have. The woman told me the next flight she could get on was ten days from now.

  Walking around, I found several others that said they had family flown out to different parts of the country. The hospital told several they couldn’t fly until they had a three-day course of Tamiflu because they had been exposed.

  Well, I know a nurse at the hospital and went to talk to him. His exact words were, ‘The CDC and Homeland were responsible fortransporting patients to high care centers across the nation’. When I asked about the flu, he told me to avoid the top four floors at all costs. He had been on shift for twelve hours and they had lost nine patients.

  Hearing that, I left, but I never asked about the body bags because there were National Guard there acting as security and they were wearing gas masks.

  If anyone hears something, let me know. Peace out.’

  Highlighting the message, Arthur printed it and then looked over and saw four of the five pictures were open and number five was still downloading. He hit print on the pictures, then clicked to go back to the board.

  The next message read ‘Rudolph Flu’. He clicked it and saw a very long post. He highlighted it and hit print. He clicked back to the message board and waited for the page to reload. All four pictures and the text were finished printing before the board filled the screen.

  Moving to the next post, Arthur went to click it and the window went blank. “Fuck!” he yelled as a ‘Site Unavailable’ message filled the blank window. He clicked reload and got the same message. Turning to the other screen, he saw the last picture had never downloaded.

  Closing them, he headed to the next board and found it unavailable. Heading to Google, he typed in Rudolph Flu and hit search. Watching the little hourglass turning as the page loaded, Arthur was tempted to call the cable company and scream at them.

  ‘None Found’ appeared in the blank window. There were no links to anything, not even advertisements. “I don’t fucking believe it, I found something Google doesn’t know?” Arthur cried out in shock.

  A gray box popped up on his screen.‘Malware detected, leave this site immediately’.

  Reaching down, Arthur turned the router off. “Holy shit fuck,” he mumbled.

  He tapped the gray box and it opened his virus program. He opened the partial file in view mode and saw it was a Trojan horse program. “Damn, I would like to see the rest of the program. I thought I could write a good program to fuck shit up, but this is first class.”

  He erased the file and then bleached it. Grabbing the stuff he had printed, Arthur got up and headed to the kitchen. Turning the timer on the coffee pot off since he was already up, Arthur turned the pot on and leaned back against the large kitchen island.

  Studying the pictures, he could see stacks of body bags on a loading dock, but couldn’t tell how many. There were two vans, one white and one black. Looking at another picture that was shot zoomed out, he could see people in hazmat suits holding M4s. Behind them were the two vans, but you couldn’t tell what was going on.

  Putting the pictures at the back of the stack, he read the ‘Rudolph Flu’ post.

  ‘First, I’m not a health care provider, but this is what I’ve found out. Rudolph flu is named because the person has a red nose from all the rubbing they do because their nose is itchy, but this usually doesn’t happen until around day eight with a mild fever. The person is contagious around day three and shows no symptoms until ten days after infection. When the fever starts getting high, a bad cough shortly follows. Can’t find any reference to what type of flu Rudolph is. I’ve found posts that say the death rates are between ten and thirty percent here. In Mexico, the rates are over forty.’

  Setting the papers down, Arthur grabbed his coffee cup. “Well, if it’s as high as thirty percent that would suck ass,” he mumbled, filling his cup. Spooning in the creamer and sugar, Arthur shook his head. “I’ve never heard of any influenza with an incubation period that long.”

  Knowing his knowledge base was a long way from a virologist, Arthur picked his cup up to take a sip. Leaning over the bar, he read the other post as he sipped his coffee. Reading the post, Arthur could confirm the person had no medical background. “Coma, bloody stools, if it’s the flu, it can’t be H1N1 or anything I’ve studied in nursing school,” he mumbled.

  Not finding much else, Arthur looked away from the paper. He walked in the living room and turned on the TV to one of the 24-hour news station. The anchors were talking about the president in closed door sessions with the Security Council, talking about the war in the Middle East.

  A grin filled Arthur’s face as he lifted the remote and hit the guide button. “Three hundred channels and for the first time, I’m looking for that Mexico City news station. Been a while since I’ve spoken Spanish,” he mumbled. Finding it, he hit the button to turn to the channel only to see ‘Currently Unavailable’ on the screen.

  “Oh, this is bullshit!” he bellowed and tossed the remote on the couch. He heard the pounding footsteps of the dogs as they ran into the living room and looked at him. “Yeah, I’m pissed,” Arthur told them, then headed back to the computer.

  Turning the router back on, he sat back down. This time, he only went to the major news sites and besides telling him about the war in the Middle East, protests in Paris, and a Hollywood actress giving birth to a baby girl, he didn’t learn shit.

  Searching for an hour, Arthur finally gave up and tried his message boards and found they were still down. He opened his e-mail and typed ‘Call home’ and sent it to Wendy.

  Getting another idea, Arthur typed the website of a hospital he used to work at in Little Rock that had ER wait times posted on the website. To him, that was the stupidest shit in the world. You only go to the ER for an emergency, but he was an ER nurse and knew eighty percent of who they saw could’ve been seen in a doctor’s office.

  When the site popped up, he leaned back in his chair. “Seventy-one hours and twenty minutes?!” Arthur gasped.

  Knowing a few more hospitals that did that, he searched for their websites as his internet speed seemed to crawl. One in Dallas had a wait time of sixty hours and the other three were unavailable. “There is no fucking way any organization or government could blanket out this much information.”

  ‘Ring’ sounded from the phone and Arthur jumped in the chair, spilling his coffee on his bare legs. “Fuck!” he shouted, putting his cup down and wiping the coffee off, then grabbed the phone and saw the international number.

  “Hello,” he answered.

  “Hey, Hun, what ‘cha need?” Wendy asked and he could hear music and cheering behind her.

  “Have you heard anything about the flu?”

  “Yeah, the captain came over the intercom yesterday and said a flu outbreak was in the states and China and if anyone felt sick, they should rep
ort to medical. Five or six people were taken off at the last stop at St. Kit and sent to the hospital,” Wendy told him.

  “What about when you went ashore?”

  “Yeah, flights to Mexico City were cancelled at our last stop. The couple next to me and Gloria tried to fly home,” Wendy told him. “They couldn’t reach their family, but that’s not unusual. I tried three times to get through to you this time.”

  “Wendy, you think you can catch a flight home at your next stop?”

  There was a pause before Wendy spoke. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know, but this is weird. I can’t find any information on this flu,” Arthur said.

  “Hun, there are long delays on airplanes. They are screening passengers to make sure they don’t have this flu. The ship’s doctor spoke last night at supper and said the information he got was that this was a nasty one, putting people in bed for over a week. He said many needed care while they were sick. That’s why he offloaded the ones on the ship,” Wendy explained.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I feel great,” Wendy laughed. “How are things there?”

  “Just running the farm,” Arthur said, not wanting her to worry about him. “But Joseph won’t be coming home.”

  “What?” Wendy snapped.

  “His leave was cancelled,” Arthur said, then lowered his voice, “because of the flu.”

  He could hear Wendy’s breathing increase into the phone. “Did he say anything else?” Wendy asked with a shaking voice.

  “He couldn’t,” Arthur told her. “He’s the one who told me to get you to fly home.”

  “Arthur, I would have to stay on the island to catch the plane and that’s if the flight isn’t cancelled. I really feel this boat will get me back the fastest way,” Wendy confessed and Arthur noticed all the cheer was now out of her voice.

  Giving a long groan, Arthur held the phone tight as he spoke. “Babe, you keep safe.”

  “I will, Arthur,” Wendy said. “There is a line to use the sat phones but I got lucky, and you wouldn’t believe what they charge the credit card!”