And then, he put both hands on the steering wheel, turned the Bayliner in a hard left, and closed his eyes as he whooshed by the boat and headed out to sea.
Thirty-Six
Health care workers kept hurrying by the isolation room’s window.
Harr noticed this through the dull haziness of Norco. Now that he was eating, the doctors refused to give him IV morphine anymore, which was a shame, because if he had to sit like a trapped prisoner, he sure could have used a buzz to pass the time. He leaned back in a chair one of the nurses had brought in, propped his feet on the bed, and watched the commotion.
A nurse in a floral smock pushed two IV poles by.
Yes, something definitely was happening. The nurse had passed Harr’s double-paned window nearly ten times now, each time rolling IV poles or carrying boxes. An elderly orderly rolled a hospital bed by, then came for another. Harr wasn’t certain, but he thought he saw the director of medical services, Dr. Fisk, rush by as well.
He wondered what was up. The isolation room had no TV, and other than Lola, he’d had few visitors, so he’d been pretty well isolated from the world—which was exactly what they wanted. He frowned. He still didn’t know why he’d agreed to stay here, when he damn well knew he wasn’t sick. Maybe it was Lola’s face, the way her eyes beseeched him.
He felt a wave of restlessness overcome his lassitude.
The door opened. Fisk stood there, his face masked, his body covered by the white bunny suit they all seemed to wear when they visited him. He unceremoniously threw a respirator at Harr.
“Put that on. We need you out of here.”
Harr lifted an eyebrow, which touched off a quick, irritated movement in the medical director.
“We need the bed. You’re obviously not sick.”
“What about the quarantine?”
“You’ve been quarantined enough. Just wear the mask, go to your ranch, lay low for a few days.” Fisk looked over his shoulder out the window at the people passing by. “We can’t have you taking up the one isolation bed anymore. You might not be sick, but now, we’re starting to see people who are.”
“Plague?”
“Don’t know,” the doctor said brusquely as he turned back. “But more than likely.” He eyed Harr’s hospital gown. “I’ll get your clothes.”
The man looked like a bandit. With the bandana wrapped around the lower half of his face, there was no mistaking he was an outlaw. He was tall—six feet, at least—with shabby clothes and dirt visible on his black skin. When he tried to drag Alan out of the dead Econoline, Alan fought him.
“Jesus Christ, man,” the bandit said, dodging Alan’s wildly thrown punches. “You’re going to kill yourself.”
Alan swung again and missed.
“Who done this to you?” the man gasped. “Man, you got to be still. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m trying to help you.”
Alan’s vision pin-holed again. The warm ooze of blood restarted, an exhaustion unlike any he’d ever known suddenly assailing him. The bandit grabbed Alan under his arms and heaved, manhandling him to the pavement next to the van.
Alan stared up at him. The man’s glasses were askew on his face, dark horn-rimmed glasses that reminded Alan, in his shock-induced fuzziness, of Malcolm X. Malcolm X with a bandana over his face and a ratty white t-shirt that hung loosely over dark cotton gym pants. Maybe he wasn’t a bandit?
The man straightened his glasses and peered at the bloody hole in Alan’s bunny suit. He whistled softly. “Oh boy, they done it to you.”
“They shot me,” Alan said, as though it weren’t obvious.
“You’ve lost a lot of blood.”
“I need to find my wife,” said Alan. “My son is dead.”
The man regarded Alan gravely. He was heavyset, and his eyes were bloodshot. He looked to be older than Alan had previously thought—in his forties, maybe.
The man gestured to the Econoline. “You got any gas in that thing?”
“No.”
“The gas stations aren’t open anymore. People are shooting each other for gas.”
The man gazed at Alan for a long moment, and then he shook his head slightly. He straightened, pulling his body upright. Alan watched in dismay as he turned and walked silently away, into the haze.
Alan blinked back angry tears. What had he expected? That someone might actually help him? After a minute, he took a painful breath and rolled to his good side. He pushed himself up onto his elbows and waited while a dizzying wave of nausea overtook him. When it subsided, he pushed himself up again until he was seated upright, his good arm supporting him like a tripod. A dark red smear marked the pavement where the man had dragged him from the van.
He waited a moment longer, took the deepest breath he could manage, and forced himself to his feet.
The world spun. Grayness closed around the edges of his vision. He stumbled and righted himself, wondering how in god’s name he’d ever make it to Beverly Hills when he could barely stand.
Distantly he heard the sound of an engine, softer than the roar of the Monte Carlo—the low whine of a smaller car.
He lurched onward, blood dripping onto the pavement.
“My god, you are trying to kill yourself.”
A small Honda pulled up next to him, the driver leaning out the window. It was the not-bandit, his Malcolm X eyes trained on Alan.
Alan stared at him.
The man leaned over and opened the passenger door. “You’ll never make it anywhere walking,” he said roughly. “Come on, get in. I only got a little gas, so don’t waste what little I got.”
Alan hesitated only for a second. He staggered around the hood of the car and collapsed in the passenger seat, which was covered with a wildly printed beach towel. He turned to the man in the driver’s seat, whose enormous body dominated the tiny car.
“My name is Joseph,” the man said. “Now, where did you say your wife was?”
Mack closed the door to his office once the junior CDC office took a seat.
“I didn’t want the others to hear,” Mack said as he crossed back to his desk. “I just got off the phone with Kincade. I thought you should hear what he said alone. They’ve got a preliminary vaccine.”
Nesbitt stared. “For real?”
“Yes, for real, but they’re not giving us any.” He slipped into his chair and fished around in his desk drawer for ibuprofen. “Not right away anyway. They’re vaccinating on the East Coast first, before the main wave of the disease hits there. Then, they’ll ship us later batches.”
“But that will be too late!”
“They already think it’s too late for us.” Mack shrugged. “There’s a twisted logic to it. They’ve got a pathetic attempt at national plague triage going on. It’s why we’re out of drugs and hospital supplies. It isn’t just because that stuff is made overseas. It’s because a lot of it is going to major hospitals on the East Coast, like New York and Washington, places with lots of voters and lots of money. And not a lot of plague. Yet.”
Mack almost felt bad, looking at the outrage and dismay on the younger man’s face. But he had been around government for years, and one thing he had learned as an absolute truth was that politics trumped all. Even public health.
“Where’s that sat phone?” Nesbitt cried.
Mack gestured to the phone on the filing cabinet. “When you’re done, come back here. We need to work on a backup plan.”
Nesbitt looked at Mack, his eyes flashing. “We don’t need a backup plan. We need vaccine. I’ll get us vaccine.”
Mack watched as the fresh-out-of-residency CDC officer stormed out the door of his office. Mack knew he’d be back. Mack had fought similar battles when he had been a young public health officer, and there was one thing years of experience had taught him: you never won.
Nesbitt came back after only ten minutes. Mack had expected the CDC to take Nesbitt’s phone call. After all, he was one of them. But Nesbitt had been passed off with alarming rapidity to the directo
r’s assistant, who had promised a return call as soon as possible.
As a consequence, Nesbitt joined Mack and the rest of the crisis management team in the War Room. The power was out again, and the TV stations had temporarily stopped broadcasting, so they listened to the radio. It gave Mack a creepy World War II feeling, sitting in the half-gloom of the unlit conference room listening to a battery-powered radio.
The news was appalling, so terrible that no one in the room moved. They just listened with carefully expressionless faces to the reports out of Los Angeles.
“They told me they’ve got reports of cholera there,” Nesbitt said.
Mack looked at Nesbitt wordlessly, rose from the chair, crossed the room, and turned off the radio. He’d heard enough.
“What you have just listened to is a prime example of how not to respond to an epidemic.” Mack leaned against the dry erase board, pinning his hands behind him. “There are three critical responses to an epidemic: you must have food and water for people, you must have isolation and quarantine, and above all, you must have order. We may not have a snowball’s chance in hell of saving our city from disaster, but if we lose order, we guarantee annihilation.” He looked at the faces turned to him: Nesbitt, Sparks, Pincher, Colonel Sullivan from the National Guard, the mayor and his aide, and others. The only key person missing was Ajay Singh.
“Order ensures isolation and quarantine,” Mack continued. “I don’t need to tell you that as of right now, isolation and quarantine are our only weapons to slow spread.”
“People are staying in their houses for the most part. I think we’ve conveyed the absolute imperative of that,” Nesbitt said.
“But that will change when they get hungry and thirsty.” Mack looked at Colonel Sullivan. “I know your troops have delivered MREs and bottled water door to door. How long will those last?”
“We delivered all that we had. Twenty-four hours’ supply at best. We left instructions to ration, but I’m not sure how long you can stretch one day’s supply of food.”
Mack rubbed his forehead and winced. He had run out of Norco and taken what little ibuprofen he had left. It wasn’t enough. “Can we get more MREs?”
The soldier looked uncomfortable. “No, sir. I’ve been advised by the Department of Defense that we have received our allocation and that we are not to expect more for the foreseeable future.”
“What about water?” Mack went on. “People may go hungry for a while, but they can’t live without water.”
“We’ve got tanked water, but don’t have a reliable delivery system,” the mayor’s aide said. “We can’t have people come out to water-dispensing locations.”
“What are our chances of getting the city system up and running?”
“We need electricity for that. The water system is pressurized by electrical pumps. There are backup generators, but the diesel supply is nearly exhausted. Right now, we don’t have enough power to pressurize the main lines, and as a consequence, we not only have no water pressure, but what little water we have is contaminated.”
“Contaminated?”
The aide looked unhappy. “The water authority is reporting a backflow event. That means some sort of contaminant leached back into the system, probably because of the low pressure.” The aide looked at the mayor. “We’ve issued a boil water advisory.”
Mack closed his eyes, shook his head. “And people can just fire up those electric ranges to boil it.”
“We need electricity,” said Nesbitt. “It all comes down to power.”
A short, stocky man stood up. “I’ll address that, if I may. I’m Eric Helman, regional power distribution manager for Sierra Power. That means I’m in charge of the power you’re not getting.” He nodded at Mack. “We’ve got sixty-five percent sick call right now—some are sick, some are dead, some are taking care of sick family members. Whatever the case, there’s simply not enough people to keep the system up and running. We’ve got a critical shortage of engineers, and the ones we still have working have been working twenty-four hours a day for days on end.”
For the first time, Mack noticed the man’s reddened eyes and sallow skin. He probably hadn’t slept for days.
“Sit down,” Mack said. “Let’s get this straight. It’s a manpower issue that keeps the power going out?”
“No, it’s a grid issue,” Helman said as he sank into one of the conference room chairs. “Like every other major city, Reno gets a lot of its power from outside the area. Through the grid, if you will. Well, the entire western grid keeps shutting down—we call it “tripping”—because of problems with stability in the system. The infrastructure is set up to protect itself, to keep itself from burning up in the event of power surges or any other imbalance within the system. But that relies on a series of automated sensors and human interactions. Anything that upsets that balance can cause the system to shut itself down.”
“So we keep losing power.”
“Yes, and we’re likely to keep losing power over the next few days to weeks. As long as the pandemic is crippling the western United States.”
“But we don’t have a couple of weeks,” interjected Nesbitt. “The quarantine will break down.”
Mack looked from his agitated colleague to the power man. “Are we entirely dependent on the grid for our power?”
Helman shook his head. “Not entirely. We have geothermal plants. The biggest is probably the Galena geothermal plant just south of Reno.”
“Is it big enough to power the city?”
The power man looked thoughtful. “Probably not big enough to supply the whole city, but we could probably power water and sewer, the hospitals, emergency management…if we routed the plant’s entire output this way.”
Nesbitt shot forward in his chair. “We could get water and power back up!”
Helman smiled faintly. “Maybe. Our problem is manpower. We’re still working with less than half our normal staff. Even routine maintenance issues can overload the system.”
“Can the National Guard help?” asked Mack.
“With some things,” said Helman. “But our engineers have very specific expertise. We had a shortage of trained engineers going into this thing, and now the heavy absenteeism is practically crippling us. We’ve got our senior management out at the plants; we’ve got eighty-year old retired engineers back in the booth.”
“But you can get at least some power in the next few days with the staffing you have.”
“We can try. Relying on one source of energy makes for an unstable system.”
Mack didn’t try to understand. To him, it all boiled down to one issue: power. Power would allow the hospitals to run. Power would get water to people. Power was protection against chaos, even if it meant only part of the city functioned, even if there still were so many problems that you felt drowned by it. “How long?” he asked.
Helman shrugged. “A day or two, at least. Assuming we can get the system reconfigured at all.”
“You sound doubtful.”
The power man stood up. “I’m not doubtful, but I’d be lying to you if I said it was going to be easy.”
Mack eyed Helman’s wrinkled clothes and sweat-stained armpits. He looked like he could topple over at any second. “I don’t need to tell you that lives are depending on you.”
Helman let out a ghost of a laugh. “Well, then, I guess I could use another cup of that coffee.”
Joseph drove the car down Olympic Boulevard, his shoulders hunched as he peered out the windshield. Alan could see the lines of stress in his face.
“They’ll kill us for the car,” Joseph said.
“Who’ll kill us?” Alan asked.
“Anyone. Everyone. They’re all trying to get out. They know to stay in LA means death.”
“But there are cars everywhere.”
“Not with gas in them.” Joseph suddenly stomped on the gas pedal, accelerating past a group of young people who were methodically walking down the street and knocking out windows. “
See? They’re looking for cars that work.”
“But what good will it do them? The roads out are blocked.”
“Not all of them.” He decelerated again. “Besides, they can barter with gas.”
Alan looked at him in confusion. “Barter for what?”
“Food. Water.” Joseph suddenly accelerated again, throwing Alan back against the seat. The car swerved wildly, barely missing two men standing in the middle of the street. “There’s no water and there’s no food in this part of town. People are desperate. Desperate people do desperate things.”
Alan thought of the tattooed man who had stolen his mask. “There was no mask disbursement?”
Joseph laughed bitterly. “Mask disbursement? In South LA? You’ve got to be kidding me. The public health people were all too scared to come into the neighborhood.” He slowed the car again, peering intently out the window.
They had left the main street. Now, they snaked down a series of side streets dotted with little post-World War II cottages. The once-tidy homes had bars on the windows. Alan looked for signs of life, but the street was deserted.
“Where are the people?” Alan asked.
“Dead, probably.” Joseph turned the little car down another small, straight street. The houses were neater here, the lawns in better repair, the windows less frequently barred, but the piles of garbage in the gutter were the same, rotting in the hot, still air.
“Where’s your house?” Joseph asked.
Alan looked out the window and tried to figure out where they were. “Can you get to the 10?”
Joseph’s face was skeptical. “I thought the interstate was closed.”
“It’s supposed to be, but I think the military is having a hard time securing it. I drove from County through downtown on it.” He looked at the cars that lined either side of the street. Their windows were all broken. “I think it might be safer.”
Joseph pulled down another side street, the little houses now interspersed with newer, more modern apartment buildings. He was driving fast, his eyes intent on the street ahead. “There’s an on-ramp up ahead. We can try it there.”
DRYP Trilogy | Book 1 | DRYP [The Final Pandemic] Page 28