by Rob Horner
His office was dark, the only light a faint glow coming from his computer screen. A yellow line traced along dips and spikes on a digital audio file, delivered to him by Dr. Riggs just an hour before. Riggs was gone now, off chasing down a potential lead on the cause of the explosion, not that it mattered.
Grabbing the mouse, Dr. Lowman moved the slider back to the start of the audio file. The playback paused automatically whenever it was tampered with, one of the many features of the program that he appreciated. Dr. Riggs had also provided a printed transcript of the conversation, which Lowman needed at first, because two of the voices were similar enough as to be confusing.
It never ceased to amaze him, how people grew to rely more and more on technology, yet could be utterly surprised when the technology did something they weren’t aware it could do. Take this recording, for example. Made in 2016, it contained the voice of the then CMO of the CDC, Dr. Bradley Johnson, ranting about the vocal opposition to routine vaccination from a growing—but still small—minority of people. The diatribe wasn’t given in his home, or in a public location like the cafeteria or a hallway. No, it was done right here, in this very room. One pissed-off man trying to wrap his head around a growing problem and discussing it with like-minded researchers who saw this as a way to earn government money while they got to play in a laboratory. What neither of the three knew was that Johnson’s predecessor, Dr. Cummings, was a paranoid sonuvabitch who had his office and Conference Room 1 wired for audio monitoring, and subsequently refused to discuss anything with anyone if it wasn’t in one of those two places.
Lowman had already placed a call to the Secret Service to have the three scientists brought in for questioning.
Flipping back to the first page of the transcript, Lowman started the audio file again. He had a conference call scheduled with the President and the Joint Chiefs in an hour, and he wanted to make sure he wasn’t missing anything.
Begin Transcript: 1625 03/22/16
Johnson: You ladies have something for me?
Henley: Sir, Yenkai and I have been working on a plan to combat the—
Johnson: The what?
Yen: The growing trend to not vaccinate, sir.
(There’s a loud, long nose inhalation.)
Johnson: You know this is a pet peeve of mine—
Yen: Yes, sir.
Johnson: —and I’ve seen the emails that someone copied me on by accident—
Henley: Sir, we didn’t mean to—
Johnson: —so if this is part of the whole “Go talk to Johnson about anti-vaxxers”—
Yen: It’s not that. This is a serious sugg—
Johnson: I’m going to have to rethink my whole easy-going approach and just start—
Henley: Dr. Johnson, please! This is a serious hypothetical to address a serious problem.
Johnson: You’re damn right it’s serious!
(Another deep inhalation through the nose)
Henley: (softly, barely audible): Oh boy.
Yen: (softly, barely audible): Just let him get it out.
Johnson: The “growing trend” as you call it is bullshit. It’s a product of bogus and debunked research put out by a supposed doctor who wouldn’t know a case of herpes from poison ivy and who’s fallen so far from grace that he’s had his medical license revoked in the United Kingdom! Fuckin’ idiot! And now we’ve got Google-researchers and Facebook scientists who don’t know that 99 degrees is not a fever somehow thinking they’re smarter than the people with the medical degrees deciding not to vaccinate their Ritalin-drugged and smartphone-addicted thumb-twiddlers.
Yen: Yes sir, but—
Johnson: Morons threatening decades of hard work protecting the world from the scourge of Polio, the plague of Smallpox. Their mindless prattling about “Organic this” and “know what you’re putting into your body” that, thinking they can skip gluten and avoid meat and the world will love them for their enlightenment.
Henley: (softly) He’s not done yet.
Johnson: You know who can’t afford to avoid meat and gluten? Children starving in third-world countries, that’s who. The ones who still die from diseases we’ve all-but eradicated here in America. Why the hell does our prosperity breed and incubate this stupidity? Why can’t they just shut the fuck up, stick an arm out, and take a shot and be thankful to the thousands of men and women who gladly lined up to test these vaccines that were nowhere near as safe back then as they are now? You can bet your asses that the Russians have a stockpile of biological agents just waiting to throw at us. But do you know what? They won’t have to use them. We’re going to anti-vax ourselves back into Polio and paralysis, adult-onset Measles and sterility. But it serves them right! Let their nuts rot and their spines turn to jelly. Fewer morons making fewer morons, I say.
Yen: All right, but our plan—
Johnson: But no, we can’t allow that, can we? Outbreak of Measles in California because some stick-up-their-asses Yuppies decide not to vaccinate their kid, go on a plane overseas and bring back—what?—fucking Measles, which they then spread all over a Six Flags amusement park because hey—why not. You were dumb enough not to vaccinate so why should you suddenly have the intelligence to think: hey, maybe my fucking red-spotted, itchy brat is contagious?
Henley: Sir, I really don’t think—
Johnson: Forget the Russians. Hell, the flood of poor aliens over our borders threatens to do what no other nation has ever even attempted. They are unwittingly using the stupidity of our population against us. Entitled, organic tofu munching hippies deciding not to vaccinate their kids based on one made-up reason or another.
Yen: That’s just it, sir, we think—
Johnson: My personal favorite is religion. Oh, my religion is against it. It’s bullshit. The only religion that can make that claim are the Christian Scientists, and most of them vaccinate! Hell, the Amish vaccinate. And now they’re bitching because California passed a law that said the only exemption is a documented allergic reaction. Good for them. It’s probably the only time you’ll ever hear me say something good about California but fucking good for them. You know what it is?
(There’s a moment of silence where perhaps the women think the question rhetorical.)
Henley: What is it, sir?
Johnson: I’ll tell you what it is. Parents today just don’t love their kids as much as their parents did them. That’s what it is! If they did, they wouldn’t put their own misguided morality above the welfare of their children. Well, they’re paying for it now, aren’t they? Measles outbreaks in California and in Asheville-by-God-North Carolina. Whooping cough popping up everywhere. And all because of some fifth-degree Facebook friend—
Yen: Fifth degree?
Johnson: You know, someone’s high-school acquaintance’s sister’s cousin’s third-grade teacher’s brother who read a “research paper” on the Internet with no facts behind it, just a recitation of an editorial to a newspaper written by a guy whose arm ached for ten minutes after he got a flu shot five years ago and is now a “subject-matter expert.” It’s bullshit on top of bullshit. People willfully endangering their kids just to feel like they’re doing some real parenting. It’s just a cover to assuage their guilt over aborting a brother or sending a kid off to daycare for no reason other than so they can continue to shop, get their nails done, and do hot yoga like they did before they had kids.
(A few seconds of panting as Dr. Johnson catches his breath.)
Yen: (softly) Now?
Henley: Sir, we think we’ve found a way to solve the problem of people not getting vaccines.
Johnson: Well, why didn’t you just say so?
Henley: It started with a discussion about the most common vaccine and the most common complaint.
Yen: After last year’s flu epidemic—
(Wordless muttering in a male voice.)
Yen: —after that, I asked if anyone was actually allergic to the inactive flu virus.
Henley: We looked into it, and discovered there
are no allergies to any virus, active, inactive, fragment, or otherwise.
Johnson: Of course not, just like there’s no such thing as an allergy to a smell, for Chrissake. A smell! Smells are pyrazines, not proteins!
Yen: (hissing) Stop him.
Henley: Well, of course they aren’t, sir. Just like no one is allergic to a virus. So that leaves only the carrier elements to create an allergy. So, we thought, what if there was a way to get the inactive flu virus into people without the need for any carrier elements or suspension matrices—
Yen: Or the latex in a multi-dose vial top.
Henley: Or that. Exactly.
Johnson: Well, what’ve you come up with?
(A sharp, in-drawn breath.)
Henley: We thought about making the flu vaccine airborne.
Johnson: (A scoff) Wouldn’t work. We tried.
Yen: We know. We read the research.
Johnson: So then why waste my time with—
Henley: We found a way around the problem, sir.
Yen: A hypothetical one. We haven’t proven it yet.
Henley: The problem lies in the inherent instability of the flu vaccine. Unlike a fully active virus, the virus is deactivated or killed after it’s harvested from either mammalian cells or chicken eggs. For the purpose of our research, and to mitigate the egg-allergy, we want to use the mammalian-grown virus. Anyway, once it’s deactivated, it can no longer survive outside of its carrier matrix, which itself must be maintained at an optimal temperature.
Johnson: Preaching. Choir.
Henley: Yes, well, we propose instead of suspending the inactive virus in a carrier matrix, what if we could bind it to a bacterium?
Johnson: I’m listening.
Yen: The concept is simple really and should be possible. After all, viruses can invade and multiply within bacterial cells as well as within human, plant, etc.
Henley: What if we could infect a bacterium like Staphylococcus epidermidis with the inactivated flu virus?
Johnson: Take a bacterium that is on every person on the planet, that protects the skin from bad bugs, and load it with a flu vaccine?
Yen: Exactly. If we could do that, then devise a dispersal mechanism, we could inoculate entire metropolitan regions without a single person having to stand in line for a Flu Shot.
Johnson: And if you could do it for one vaccine, what about others?
Yen: That’s the idea, sir.
End transcript: 1645 03/22/16
It was the fourth time Dr. Lowman had listened to the recording and this time, as he had the first time, he reflected on the fact that not once was the idea of free will discussed. In being honest with himself, Greg admitted that he might be willing to dodge that aspect in the name of the greater good of the country, but it was not a good sign that the project began with no one voicing a concern about it. And it certainly should not have been undertaken without the express permission of the Executive Branch. Plausible deniability be damned.
There were more recordings, of course. Projects like this had a way of generating brainstorming sessions and bitch-fests almost as prolifically as a politician generated thousand-page bills that could be summed up in one sentence, once all the bureaucratic bullshit and politically correct soft-speech was removed.
In May of 2016, the project was given the green light by the CDC and a new building was procured on the outskirts of Atlanta. The proximity was seen as a blessing that would allow the transmission of ideas and talents back and forth. It also allowed for various bacteria and viruses to be moved a short distance for study.
In late October 2016, the building was finally ready--retrofitted, remodeled, and staffed. In November, Drs. Yen and Henley, now working with renowned molecular biologist Dr. Jeffrey Riggs and viral geneticist Dr. Robert Matthis, reported a successful pairing between an inactive influenza virion and Staphylococcus aureus, a virulent bacterium responsible for numerous infections both in the home and in the hospital setting. It wasn’t the ideal of the project, but it was progress.
By January of 2017, the recordings were becoming decidedly testy. Riggs, after getting his name on the report, divorced himself of the project, taking a cushy job in DC. Dr. Matthis joined the conversation, pushing for the inclusion of a hardier biological agent, something that could resist just about any method of destruction except incineration. To be fair, neither Yen nor Henley were keen on studying prions, but Matthis provided a documented method of deactivating the dangerous particles for study.
Despite his medical background, Dr. Lowman had to Google prion types to remind himself of the dangers posed by the infectious particles. Prions were the hypothetical cause of a set of neurodegenerative diseases known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. They were the cause of scrapie in sheep, bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle (Mad Cow Disease), and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. They caused other wasting diseases like fatal familial insomnia and kuru, which was common among a certain subset of peoples in New Guinea who practiced cannibalism. All prion diseases in mammals attack brain tissue, progress rapidly, have no known cure, and are inevitably fatal.
The research Dr. Matthis drew from involved denaturing the prion so that it could no longer cause abnormal folding of otherwise normal proteins, thus rendering it inert. It made sense to Dr. Lowman, though the idea of playing with something like that caused him to shiver. Certainly Dr. Johnson wouldn’t have countenanced such an action without more proof than the assertions of a single scientist.
His last act, before being replaced by Dr. Lowman, was to demand a safety feature be included in the testing, a way to protect a percentage of the population in case the unthinkable happened.
The reports stopped after that.
Dr. Lowman had no idea what the safety valve was, or if it had even been incorporated into the research. Dr. Riggs didn’t know either.
It would be the second question the president asked. The first one would be: what bugs were they working with when the explosion happened.
Dr. Lowman didn’t know the answer to either.
But those scientists would.
And they were going to tell him.
Chapter 13
A lot can happen in an emergency department in thirty minutes, which was how long it took Buck and Danny to retrieve the sick Derek Butler (and his loving wife, Tyana.)
During that time, the initial work on Austin Wallace was completed. His urine, a dark red complement to the bloody stool seeping out of his rectum, was collected via catheter. A second IV was placed in the crook of his right elbow, and the blood tubes sat in the lab, awaiting their turn in the centrifuge. Fluids were running at close to a liter per hour, with a second liter already ordered for when the first completed. Though Tina didn’t yet know what was wrong with the young man, the obvious fluid and blood loss in his diarrhea made rehydration a priority. He was unconscious and might remain so for a while, given that one of Bentyl’s less-subtle side effects was sedation. At least his temperature was normal, though Josh complained bitterly about having to take it rectally, concerned that the stimulation might prompt another explosion of diarrhea.
Also, during that time, the dynamic duo of James and Tiffany discharged both the young woman with the urinary tract infection and the teenager with a sprained ankle, while triaging five more patients. Three were treated and streeted (one toothache, one young girl who just wanted to know if she was pregnant, and one middle-aged man who needed his blood pressure medicine refilled.) The other two patients came in with complaints similar to Mr. Butler’s (though neither Tiffany nor James were aware of it): sudden onset abdominal pain with diarrhea. The mother of the first patient, who was a sixteen-year-old type 1 diabetic, brought a sample of the stool retrieved from the toilet showing a considerable amount of blood. The second patient, a thirty-something year old itinerant man who often manufactured illnesses in winter just to get a few hours of warmth and rest in the emergency department, experienced a sudden attack of debilitating stomach cram
ps resulting in a bowel movement right there in the triage room. Both patients were admitted to rooms in the back.
Fifteen minutes before Buck and Danny returned, Ms. Amy Cumberland rolled out of the ED in a wheelchair, bound for the ultrasound room and a date with a long, silver wand covered with a horse condom and a generous smear of ultrasound lube.
Right around that same time, Brian Wentz, he of the unshaven face so vividly reminiscent of a woman’s genitals to Mr. Sprugg, and also a member of the nearly-famous Wentz clan of malingerers, was discharged by Tina with a prescription for ibuprofen and a note to return to work the next day. Although the odds of him showing up for his job were small, it wouldn’t be because of the illness about to take over the emergency department. They say God looks out for drunks and fools. Mr. Wentz was doubly blessed, though to hear his language as he stormed out the front door, he certainly didn’t see it that way.
At 6:30, just as Joseph “Buck” Davis pulled Truck One into the ambulance bay of CURMC for the last time, the night shift “huddle” began in the ED break room. Five nurses, one CNA, and the secretary reviewed the room assignments, how many beds were available upstairs in case any admissions were necessary, and a brief rundown of the patients currently in the department.
Also at 6:30, after returning from stocking the chucks, trundling the “nothing wrong with her that having to pay a hospital bill for once in her life wouldn’t cure” Ms. Cumberland to ultrasound, and stopping for a brief squat in the employee bathroom just outside the ultrasound room, Kenja Brown discovered Randy Sprugg missing from room sixteen.
The bedsheets were puddled at the foot of the bed, trailing onto the floor. The IV line dangled at the left side of the bed, feeding a good-sized puddle of clear saline. Randy hadn’t been hooked up to an IV pump, so no alarm sounded when he’d removed his line. Fat drops of blood like glistening cookie crumbs in a macabre retelling of Hansel and Gretel led out of the room and to the left.