DRYP Trilogy | Book 1 | DRYP [The Final Pandemic]

by Scheuring, R. A.

  Susan shook her head in stunned disbelief. A quarantine in a town with only a few more cases than Los Angeles?

  She thought suddenly of the plague cases that had come in last night and the patients now starting to come into other hospitals. She thought of the CDC asking Hodis to map the bacterium, of Hodis’s words: “Haven’t you wondered how we went from never even having a case of Yersinia pestis with single drug resistance, to a Yersinia pestis that is resistant, for all intents and purposes, to all drugs?”

  An odd chill swept down her spine in the hot car. She looked out at the cars, idling in front of her, as far as the eye could see.

  Abruptly, she veered onto the narrow shoulder, threw the Corolla into reverse, and swung around to face traffic. She accelerated along the shoulder—back toward the on-ramp, back to the hospital.

  Susan was now wide awake.

  Hodis was in his office when Susan burst in.

  “Tom, they’re quarantining Reno!”

  The researcher looked up, confused. “Who’s quarantining Reno?”

  “The Government! It’s all over the radio. There’s a mass panic about the plague there, and the military is setting up an enforced quarantine.”

  “My God.” Hodis turned to his computer and pulled up his web browser.

  “The roads out of town are jammed with people trying to flee.” Susan tried to keep her voice even, but she was still breathless from running. “I heard on the radio while I was stuck in traffic. I-5’s a parking lot, not moving at all. I got to thinking, sitting out there, that they’ve had about as many cases of plague in Reno as we’ve had here, and yet they’re enforcing a quarantine there and not here …”

  Hodis stopped typing. “You’re wondering why no quarantine here.”

  “Exactly!” She plopped into a chair. “I think they’re going to spring one on us.”

  “But that makes no sense. The CDC hasn’t said a word to us, and we’re the first people they should’ve told.”

  Susan leaned forward, elbows on knees. “Tom, people started panicking as soon as they found out in Reno. I’m betting the CDC is keeping it under wraps here because quarantining a city like Los Angeles is a gargantuan task.” Her mind spun just considering the challenge of it all: the manpower necessary to enforce roadblocks, the sheer amount of territory that needed to be covered.

  “But there’s no evidence of any preparation here.”

  He was right, of course. Susan hadn’t seen any sign of the military—no increased supplies for the hospitals, nothing to suggest that anything was out of the ordinary. But that didn’t change the certainty she felt in her gut.

  “Tom, it’s coming,” Susan insisted. “I just know it.”

  George Mack climbed to the top of the Washoe County Public Health Building, ostensibly to have a smoke. In reality, he wanted to look at the traffic on Interstate 80. The county building stood five stories high, giving it a bird’s-eye view of the surrounding neighborhood and the interstate less than half a mile away.

  It didn’t look good. The highway was clogged with vehicles, none of which were moving. Long, snaking lines stretched from the on-ramps back to the surface streets, so that even the main boulevards were at a standstill. Mack could hear the distant sound of honking.

  Harry was right, Mack thought glumly. Tyrone Hayden’s report had touched off mass hysteria in a matter of hours.

  Mack looked at his beat up old Casio. Forty-five minutes until the press conference. He took a long drag on his cigarette.

  Colonel Sullivan from the Nevada Army National Guard had reported that they had good roadblocks in place on Interstate 80 at the California state line and east of Reno just outside of Sparks. But the side roads off the interstate were not yet secure, and his personnel were having a hard time traversing the traffic jams to get to the planned block points. They were calling in reinforcements from California to approach from the opposite direction, but it would take hours to get them in place.

  Mack pulled out his cell phone and called Singh.

  The ICU doctor sounded harried. “We’ve got six more. The ICU’s full. We’re on divert.”

  Mack frowned. Washoe County Medical Center wasn’t taking any more patients. And if the biggest hospital in Reno was at capacity, it was only a short while before the other, smaller hospitals were, too. “What about other facilities?”

  “Near full. They’re coming in fast now, George. Thirty-five documented cases in the last twenty-four hours. More suspected cases.”

  “How many more?”

  “I don’t know. Twenty? Thirty? Everybody with a cold is coming in now. We’ve had over a hundred people show up in the ER in the last two hours. People are flat out panicking.”

  “Are you getting the antibiotics from the push-packs?”

  “Yeah, they arrived with a bunch of soldiers, but we’re running short of people trained to process all this stuff. We’ve got sick call at twenty percent now. I don’t know how we’ll handle this if it gets any bigger.”

  “One thing I can guarantee you,” said Mack, “is that it’s definitely going to get bigger. At least in the short run.”

  Singh’s voice was low and urgent. “Then the cat’s out of the bag, George. No sense hiding the truth from the public anymore. Get people indoors. Get them masks. The antibiotics aren’t going to do anyone any good. But the masks might.”

  “We don’t have five hundred thousand masks to distribute to the people of Reno.”

  “Tell your buddies from the CDC that. Surely, if they can get us three hundred ventilators, they can get us enough masks.”

  Mack wasn’t so sure. If they were quarantining Reno, Los Angeles, and Sacramento, that was more than twenty million people. He doubted that there were enough masks to supply both the hospitals and the general public. It would take days to import that many, let alone deliver and dispense them. And by that time, it would be too late.

  But Mack didn’t tell Singh that. “I’m working on it, Ajay.”

  Mack stuck the cell phone in his pocket and took one last drag off the cigarette. He looked at the traffic out on Interstate 80, at the parallel streams of cars that hadn’t moved an inch, and then he stubbed out the cigarette, grinding it beneath his shoe.

  He went back inside.

  Ezra Pilpak was wearing scrubs when he entered the lab. He stood outside the biohazard room where Susan and Hodis worked, tapping on the window impatiently.

  Susan looked up, surprised. She realized with a start that she had never seen the ID fellow in anything other than khaki pants, a button-down shirt, and a white coat. He looked terrible. His hair was uncombed, and the oily sheen of his face was broken only by the beginnings of an uneven beard. Like Susan, Ezra had been up all night, and it showed.

  She put down the gel she was working on and moved toward the door, pulling off her gloves and gown as she did so. “Ezra, you look awful,” she said, her voice muffled beneath her respirator.

  “Thanks. You’re a sight, yourself.” He pulled up his sleeve to reveal a small bandage on his upper arm. “You might want to get yourself over to the hospital to get one of these.”

  “What’s that?”

  Hodis emerged from the biohazard lab. “So, they’re vaccinating, huh?”

  “Just started this afternoon.”

  Susan pulled her respirator off, puzzled. “Why, though? It’s only good for the bubonic form, not the pneumonic form. And it takes six months to take effect. Don’t you have to get booster shots or something?”

  Ezra shrugged. “How should I know? Yes, you have to have booster shots for full immunization. And yes, it’s only good for the bubonic form. But I don’t know what Public Health is thinking anymore. They won’t talk to us, and there’s a whole bunch of military guys walking around the hospital right now.”

  Susan quickly crossed to a window overlooking the north side of the hospital. Below, in the driveway entrance to the hospital loading docks, soldiers were busily unloading boxes off large green army trucks
. Hundreds of boxes clogged the driveway.

  Susan strained her eyes. “They’re ventilators, Tom!”

  “Yeah, yeah. That much I do know,” said Ezra. “They’re from the Strategic National Stockpile.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “This afternoon,” Ezra said. “The same time as the vaccines.”

  Susan shot a glance at Hodis, who had quietly joined her at the window. To Ezra she said, “Have you heard the news out of Reno? They’re quarantining the city. Roadblocks. Travel restrictions. All enforced by the military.”

  They all looked out the window at the soldiers on Zonal Avenue down below.

  “They’re going to do the same here,” Ezra said.

  “How many more cases at the hospital, Ezra?” Hodis asked.

  Ezra shook his head. “I don’t know. Five, maybe. Not huge numbers. Not big enough to warrant this.” He gestured down at the piles of boxes.

  Susan felt it again, a chill coursing up her spine. “There’s got to be something we don’t know. There are eighteen million people in the Los Angeles basin. They honestly can’t mean to quarantine us all. For what? For ten or fifteen cases? What happened to the plan to isolate and quarantine those cases?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Like I said, Public Health’s not talking.”

  Fourteen

  Mack glumly watched the TV screen in the War Room. Channel 6 News showed a split screen, one side showing the anchor in the studio, the other alternating between live shots of a traffic-choked Interstate 80 and Washoe County Medical Center’s ambulance bay, where there appeared to be about a thousand people crowding the doors.

  “Imagine if we went with full disclosure,” Nesbitt said, next to Mack.

  Mack shook his head, disgusted. He’d had enough of the TV. “Look, Nesbitt, we’ve got to get the people off the freeway. The hospitals have supplies for three days. That’s it. If we can’t get trucks in from the distribution centers, then our hospitals are going to be high and dry sooner than you can wipe your fat ass. And I’m telling you, with the roads clogged with panic-stricken people, there ain’t no way a semi-truck full of supplies is going to be able to get in.”

  “What are you suggesting? You want us to tell them it’s pneumonic? That there’s no cure?” Nesbitt laughed harshly. “That sure as hell won’t calm them down.”

  “No, I’m talking about martial law.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “I’m not.” Mack gestured at the TV screen. “Look at that. That’s one short step from chaos, Nesbitt.” Mack walked over and placed his bulk in front of monitor, forcing the younger man to look at him. “Right now, your quarantine isn’t doing shit, because no one is staying in their homes. They’re all out on the freeways and roads, coughing all over each other. If you really want to control this, we have to get people off the road and back in their homes.”

  Nesbitt scoffed. “There’s never been medical martial law in the US. Not once. And besides, even if I wanted to order it, I don’t have the authority.”

  “You don’t, but the governor does. You’ve just got to convince him to do it. He won’t listen to me because I don’t have ‘CDC’ behind my name, but you do. Come on, Nesbitt, look at that!” He stepped aside from the TV monitor. Helicopter video of a multi-car pileup near one of the north Reno roadblocks flashed on the screen. Half a mile back, emergency response vehicles drove on the shoulder or off the road entirely, trying to bypass stopped traffic.

  “They can’t even get to the wreck,” Nesbitt said quietly.

  Mack took a step toward the younger man. “If we get the military to help reestablish order in Reno, we have a fighting chance of saving people. But if we let this chaos continue?” He gestured to the TV monitor which now showed aerial coverage of a warehouse fire somewhere downtown. “The plague’s going to keep on spreading, and we’ll squander our resources responding to car crashes and fires.”

  Nesbitt’s eyes flicked to the TV monitor. Mack watched as reflected flames danced across Nesbitt’s glasses.

  “Call the governor, Nesbitt.” Mack said.

  Nesbitt called.

  Susan rubbed her upper arm as she exited the parking structure elevator. Her deltoid ached where one of the Public Health workers had injected the plague vaccine, but she was grateful for it. It might be useless against pneumonic plague, but it offered some protection against the bubonic form, and she’d take what she could get. Besides, Public Health was already running out.

  The half-empty parking structure was deserted.

  She pulled her cell phone from her back pocket and dialed.

  “Dad?”

  Relief flooded her when she heard a familiar male voice answer the phone. “Well, if it isn’t Lady Jane.”

  “Hi, Dad. What are you doing?”

  “Payroll. Tomorrow is payday for the men.”

  A powerful wave of yearning washed over her. It all sounded so normal: the reassuring pattern of farm life, a weekly payroll, the mechanical whirring of the laser jet printing out checks.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  “In the kitchen. Why?”

  “Dad, there’s big news down here.” Instinctively, she cupped her hand over the phone, even though there wasn’t a soul around. “Have you heard the news out of Reno?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Dad, go turn on the TV.”

  She heard him pause the printer. “Hold on. I’m turning on the TV. What’s going on in Reno?”

  “There’s a quarantine there for plague.”

  “A quarantine? Really? Let me get to CNN. Ah, here it is.” He was silent for a minute. “That doesn’t look good. Look at that. The roads are packed. What’s this got to do with you?”

  “We’ve got the same disease down here.”

  He paused for several seconds. “Susan, you better get out of there.”

  “I can’t, Dad. I’m a doctor. Besides, there’s no quarantine down here yet. We’ve only had a few cases. Reno’s had a lot more than us.”

  She could imagine what he was thinking. As a farmer, he was well aware plague existed in rural rodent populations, but in a city like Los Angeles? She tried to explain. “The first case came out of Arrowhead, but now we have local spread. Look, I just wanted to tell you that I’m being safe—"

  Her father interrupted. “Holy smokes. CNN’s reporting cases in Sacramento. They’re showing shots of the University Medical Center. They say they’ve had ten cases—"

  Susan nearly dropped the phone. “Dad, where’s Steven?”

  “In Sacramento. Why?” For the first time, her father sounded alarmed. “Do you think he’s at risk?”

  Susan wanted to tell him that the risk to her brother, who lived with his family in north Sacramento, was low, but the images of the soldiers and boxes at her own hospital kept ricocheting through her head. If Sacramento had ten cases already, then the city was no different than LA, which meant Sacramento would be quarantined, too. And if Sacramento and Los Angeles were both quarantined, that meant the CDC was way more worried about the plague than they were letting on.

  “Dad, you’ve got to call Steven right away,” Susan said with renewed urgency. “Tell him to take the kids and get out of Sacramento immediately.”

  The doctors transferred Jason to University Hospital at dinner time. Several hours later, Alan Wheeler stood at the window of the intensive care isolation room, watching his son die. He couldn’t believe it.

  It’s just a fever, the doctors had said, not uncommon in an immunocompromised host. Nothing that antibiotics won’t take care of.

  But antibiotics had done nothing. In just twenty-four hours, Jason’s fever had blossomed into a raging sepsis, turning Alan’s beloved son into a pale, waxy ghost, whose breathing required a ventilator, whose blood pressure depended on two bags of medicine that slowly dripped into the large IV placed in his neck.

  Life support, Alan thought. Jason’s on life support.

  Brooke stood near the cent
ral island of desks, her back ramrod straight, talking in hushed tones with one of Jason’s doctors. Alan knew the news wasn’t good just by the look of her. She’d stopped talking and was now listening intently.

  She glanced up as he approached. Her eyes were dry and a little hard. He didn’t touch her. After nearly twenty-five years of marriage, he knew that touch was the last thing she wanted at a time like this. Instead, he stood next to her as she turned her eyes back to the doctor.

  “It’s a little unusual for him to be this sick at this stage,” the doctor continued. “We’re not sure what the cause is, but it’s likely bacterial. We’ve got him on broad-spectrum antibiotics and also anti-fungals. But frankly, we’re a little stumped by what’s going on here.”

  “Is it treatable?” Brooke asked.

  The doctor lifted his white-coated shoulders slightly. “I should think so, but like I said, we don’t really know what it is yet, so that makes it impossible to say for certain whether we’re treating it correctly.”

  “When do you find out?”

  “Soon, I hope. It’s a matter of waiting for the blood cultures to grow out whatever’s causing this.” He said it kindly, and Alan suddenly imagined the doctor having this same conversation with hundreds of other families, all with that same gentle, patient voice.

  “You’ll tell us as soon as you know?” Brooke said.

  “Of course, Mrs. Wheeler. We’ll let you know the minute we find anything out.” The doctor looked at Alan. “I’m so sorry about all of this. I know how devastating this is.”

  “Thank you.”

  “If there’s anything else I can do…”

  Grief, ugly and tearing, welled up in Alan. It was only the years of training in civility, in the mechanical social graces of his privileged upbringing, that enabled Alan to reply, with a dignity he didn’t feel at all, “Thank you, Doctor. It’s obvious that you’re doing all you can.”