Days of the Python (Python Trilogy Book 1)

by David Jurk

  I turned and made my way back downhill as fast as I could go, the trail now almost entirely buried in shadow. My mind was a blur of images of Rachel; as clear to me as the trees and rocks around me. I hurried on, emotions conflicted within me; the vivid memory of Rachel filling me with lightness, the red nova a sense of disquiet.

  And what she’d said – what was all that about, the clear warning? I couldn’t even begin to imagine a set of circumstances that would force me offshore as soon as I put the boat in the water. A new boat needed weeks of sea trials, needed the bugs discovered and fixed. I had no idea how she handled – not the rigging, not the drive system; nothing. Not to mention that my entire ocean sailing resume amounted to a single summer spent years ago in Casco Bay along the Maine coast. And that was only going out in good weather and never getting further away from land than twenty kilometers. No, emphatically no – Rachel or no Rachel, I couldn’t just head straight out into the Pacific. For what – a vague warning of bad things?

  Struggling all the way down the mountain with the nagging sense that I’d overlooked something important, I reached the trailhead. The pickup was still alone in the lot, and I climbed in and took off, retracing my route back to the expressway. As I drove, the surreal clarity of the dream permeated the very air I breathed; it was impossible to let go of it. I was of two minds; one part of me clung to the memory of it, wanted to believe it was more than a dream, that somehow in some fashion some part of her was still in this universe. And the other part scorned the nonsense, warned me of the consequences of this too-lovely fantasy. I drove on, mechanically, my mind at war until I was so tired of it, I stopped thinking at all. Two hours went by, darkness fell, and I passed into Utah.

  I’d not come upon the flatbed. I couldn’t believe they’d managed to get that far ahead of me in the time I’d been at Hanging Lake; perhaps they’d pulled off to fill the truck or to eat dinner, and I had passed by them unknowingly.

  Somewhere near a town called Green River I stopped at a fuel station, equipped with the usual array; charging stands for the Big Four and hydrogen tanks; occasionally, gas and diesel. I filled the pickup with gas, enviously leering at the hydrogen, and idly watched the news display on the pump, though something had killed the sound. CNN this time; someone with a gauzy surgical mask being interviewed. I went inside and bought a sandwich to eat while I drove. The clerk was preoccupied, unable to take her eyes off the screen she was using for a placemat. More China probably. The voices coming from it sounded ragged, hysterical.

  Back in the truck and heading westward in the darkness, I knew I needed to watch for route fifteen for the turn south; from there, little more than an hour to St. George. If I didn’t see the flat bed by then, I’d stop there for the night, call Mitch in the morning and let him know which marina in San Diego they needed to go. I thought of Rachel. Shelter Island sounded reasonable, I thought.

  St. George turned out to be a bigger town than I’d imagined, with multiple exits – the first at the extreme eastern end of town and then two more following to the west. I drove past the first two and took the third, ending up back-tracking along a winding road all the way to the eastern end of town, where I finally spotted a cluster of motels. I drove past a couple of them, looking for the truck, but just gave up, picked one and parked.

  Less sleepy than the night before – I suppose partly due to my nap in the mountains - I pulled out my laptop, unrolled it on the bed, and asked for Shelter Island’s web site, checking their hauling equipment and slip sizes. Rachel had it exactly right; the place would be perfect for me. I sent an email to the general manager, requesting a hoist for tomorrow afternoon and maintenance services’ help in assembling the hulls. Could they accommodate me on such little notice? Was Rachel ever wrong?

  Killing time, I browsed a few news websites, stunned to see the headlines. It was numbing, impossible. Mitch hadn’t been wrong that morning at all – if anything, the numbers he’d mentioned were understated. Most news threads were showing estimates of a million dead in China. It was just incomprehensible; a million people. How could that many be dead, that quickly, from what - the flu? The fucking flu?

  There were many clips of the Chinese military, faces covered with surgical masks, wearing gloves. Images of hundreds of trucks carrying the dead, and shots of huge trenches surrounded by mounds and mounds of dirt, enormous mag-lev bulldozers being driven by men wearing O2 tanks with full-face respirators, white suits flapping.

  The media seemed to have begun calling the disease the ‘Python’, apparently because of the nature of the death it brought. There was very little hard medical information; it was apparently a variation of avian flu, but an extraordinarily unusual one that harbored deep in the lungs, killing by suffocation. I just couldn’t grasp this; how was something like that possible? Why wouldn’t they have quarantined people from the start?

  I fell asleep with the laptop next to me, images of graves and masked soldiers following me into sleep. In the morning, I woke up to a dead laptop and rolled out the solar panel on the window sill and left it to charge.

  There was a coffee packet in the room, and I opened it and poured it into the cup left wrapped in plastic on the dresser. As it heated itself, I sat in the arm chair looking out the window. The sun was bright, and I saw people moving about in the parking lot with shorts and t-shirts. It didn’t fit my sense of February until I considered how far south I was; it occurred to me I’d found summer. San Diego began feeling much less like a fantasy.

  I called the cell number Mitch had given me and he answered before the second ring.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Owen,” I said. He grunted something I couldn’t make out.

  “Where are you guys at?”

  “St. George Ramada,” he said. I checked my phone – they were half a kilometer from me.

  “What time do you think you guys are going to make it to San Diego?”

  “Probably three, maybe four, this afternoon.” He paused, then asked about the marina; he wanted all the logistics.

  “We’ll have the boat unloaded at a marina called Shelter Island,” I told him and suddenly my words seemed to be an echo in my mind; I’ve been here, said this before, and knew what I’d say next.

  I’ll make sure they’re ready get it unloaded by the time you get there.

  “I’ll make sure they’re ready get it unloaded by the time you get there.”

  Good. We’ve got to move out pretty quick once we unload.

  “Good,” he replied. “We’ve got to move out pretty quick once we unload.”

  Yeah? What’s next?

  “Yeah?” I asked. “What’s next?”

  San Francisco.

  “San Francisco.” He said it the same way someone would’ve said Paris.

  Well, no worries. Should have you on your way in no time.

  “Well, no worries. Should have you on your way in no time.”

  He grunted something unintelligible, his mouth apparently far from the phone, and hung up.

  What in the flying fuck? Maybe I was losing my grip on reality. Yesterday I chat with my dead wife and today I have not just a vague feeling of déjà vu, but a word-for-word forecast of a conversation. I sat for a few minutes, fighting anxiousness and uncertainty about what was happening to me. But in the end, what was there to do about it? Get up and keep going.

  Downstairs in the breakfast area, CNN was on, and the talk was about nothing but the Chinese situation. They had a reporter in Shanghai, speaking on camera through a surgical mask; if he weren’t standing there amidst dead bodies it would be funny. He seemed openly nervous, frightened even. There were outbreaks in every major city in China, and in some of the rural communities armed groups were setting up blockades at the borders of their villages to keep strangers from entering. Despite a massive military presence throughout the country, riots in the larger cities were spreading as people heard rumors about vaccines being hoarded, or whispers of safe zones being established. The reporter a
ssured us that no vaccines existed; the virus apparently mutated much too rapidly to make one easy to create.

  Around me, several groups of people were watching, an odd mixture of fear and belligerence filling the room toward the events in China, and I heard a loud voice - a man’s voice, deep and bellicose – berating the U.S. government for not immediately closing our borders, including the cessation of all international flights. I could imagine Trump gloating from his prison cell.

  A woman asked, “How can they do that? There are Americans there that want to come home.”

  He responded immediately, intense and angry. “If they’re there, let ‘em stay there. What do I give two shits about the goddamn Chinese?”

  She tried to shush him; I got up and started to leave, my eyes still on the screen. When I saw the CNN moderator move on to a doctor from the CDC, I stopped, leaned against the doorway, and watched.

  The doctor was a young black woman, answering a question I hadn’t heard, glancing occasionally at her notes.

  “…that’s right, we’re monitoring the situation there closely, and are receiving full cooperation and communication from our Chinese counterparts. We believe this is a particularly virulent form of the Influenza A subtype – in other words an Avian Flu virus – that has some frightening properties. For instance, it appears that this virus not only transmits stably through the air, but it does so with what we call casual proximity; in other words, one could be infected just being in a room with an infected person.”

  She was interrupted by the CNN lead at this point. “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “It means that this virus is showing absolutely amazing virility. It’s rare enough to encounter an Avian Flu virus that transmits by air; to find one that does so with this level of stability and longevity, well, it’s just unprecedented.” She paused, looking directly into the camera.

  “But that’s not the worst of it,” she continued. She pushed her glasses up with a long, elegant finger and cleared her throat. “We believe – well, we’re working on the assumption, I should say – that the incubation period of this virus is on the order of a month or more.” She hesitated, glancing at something or someone to one side of her, off-camera. “There is reason to believe that an infected person is contagious throughout this entire time.”

  “Wait,” interrupted the CNN lead again, “Practically speaking, what does that imply?”

  The doctor frowned, cleared her throat again. “Normal flu has an incubation period of two days or so. You kiss your ill wife on Friday, and Sunday night you get sick. You’ve stayed home over the weekend, so you haven’t made anyone else sick in those two days.”

  “OK,” said CNN, “and you’re saying this virus doesn’t make anyone sick for a month?”

  “No. What I’m saying first of all is that with this virus, you only need to be in the kitchen with your wife, and you’re infected – you don’t even need to touch her. You’re sick and you can make others sick. But now, you feel fine for an entire month, let’s say. So, Monday morning you go back to work. And you keep going about your life as normal for four more weeks, maybe more. And in that time, you’re in casual proximity with hundreds of people, probably thousands of people. Then, finally, you start showing symptoms and now you know – and everyone else knows - you’re sick. And having encountered all those people over all that length of time, how do you know for sure who you’ve infected? Remember, all that’s needed is to be in the same room with someone for a few minutes. And think of all those people, all going about their own lives for a month, and all the people they’re infecting. And on and on.”

  She paused, and suddenly looked tired and nervous. She let her arm holding the notes drop to her side.

  “From a virology standpoint,” she said weakly, “it’s a perfect storm.”

  CNN moved on to something else, but I’d had enough and took my backpack and went out to the pickup. It was warm and sunny, a light breeze stirring, and I let the beautiful weather and the warmth push away the dark news of China and this fearsome flu.

  About to start up the pickup and leave, the phone rang, and I stopped. The phone popped up a display of the marina and I said, ‘Answer.’

  “Hello,” I said, “This is Owen.”

  A woman’s voice filled the cab, she had a vague accent – German maybe? She was polite and friendly, but crisp and all business. She knew my situation from the message I’d left and wasted no time with chit chat. I just sat and listened.

  “Hi, this is Tina from Shelter island. Got the message about your boat. Frankly, your timing was perfect; we’ve had a cancellation, meaning the big lift you need is available today. You’re very fortunate – it normally gets scheduled out weeks in advance.”

  I smiled. It was like having a conversation with a machine gun.

  “That’s great. And the help with the assembly of the boat?”

  “Same thing – we can use the guys that were scheduled for the cancelled work. They handle big cats all the time. Your trimaran will not be a problem to them.”

  We talked a bit about boat details; she sounded confident and knowledgeable. I was reassured. But when I brought up the possibility of a slip, she was adamant.

  “No, that isn’t possible,” she said flatly. “There are absolutely no openings for a boat with your beam – not in a slip, and there are no monthly or seasonal moorings available at all. We can probably find a transient mooring for you temporarily, but the rule is a stay of no more than seven days. We are firm about it. Still, it gives you time to find something.”

  Thanking her, I closed the call. I was very worried about finding a slip. What if there were none available, what then? Rachel’s words came to me; Just go. Nope, can’t do it. Impossible.

  Underway at last, the windows down for the fresh warm air, it was hard to think of anything but the China situation; after listening to the CDC, I couldn’t help but wonder what it all implied. This thing, this python virus – if people are dying now, that meant the infection has already been around for what, a month? Didn’t that mean it could already be here?

  Was it real? I tried to imagine an outbreak in, say, New York, and I just couldn’t. It was impossible to conceive of a million people dead, of the National Guard holding back panicked crowds, trying to quarantine a virus that didn’t sound containable. What would they do – dig the mass graves in Central Park? It was just insanity to contemplate it, a morbid exercise that couldn’t possibly happen. But still; it tickled at the back of my mind – what if one of those people in Shanghai, a week ago, became infected and climbed on a plane for New York the next day? How would anyone know to stop them? They’d arrive and walk around the city for a month before they had outward signs of illness, then one day, just like that, they’d die. And the people they’ve met as they toured the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the Guggenheim; as they took in a show, as they travelled the subway? No, not possible, not here. We’d find a way to test for the virus, find a vaccine. This wasn’t some third-world country; we had technology.

  What was happening in China was a Chinese problem. It couldn’t happen here.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I MADE IT back onto the highway, and once I was beyond St. George it took just a few minutes to leave Utah for Arizona, and for a while I was able to leave the horror of China behind as well, overcome with the beauty of the land as I passed through the Virgin River Gorge. It filled my mind like music, driving out the dark thoughts of plague and death. All around rose spires of rainbow-hued sandstone and striated butte walls with colors as vivid as anything I’d ever seen in the great mountains of the west. The sheer immensity of it, the depth of color and otherworldly contours were, in fact, reminiscent of the Grand Canyon; eons of water and wind carving something so magically transcendent it was difficult for the eye and mind to grasp.

  But I was past it all too quickly, and soon I was crossing into the new state of Southern California. From the moment I hit the border, traffic exploded as if
by decree and the serenity of the Virgin River Gorge was replaced by an insane, relentless torrent of metal, plastic and carbon fiber fleeing southward, everyone vying to get ahead of the car in front of them. It was as if the flow of cars and trucks had sprung up out of the desert like an underground river rising to the surface, and I was caught up in the flood, swirled and whirled in the flotsam and left battered. I was surrounded, hemmed in, trapped; every manner of vehicle that mankind produced swarmed around me - electrics, hydrogen fuel cells, the latest incarnation of steam and even the new solar - using the same battery technology that I had installed on Windswept. My old gasoline beater was nothing less than a complete anachronism, drawing frequent stares – and even a few raised fists. Get off our roads, you fucking oil-eater!

  I passed more and more ‘gas stations’ not selling gas at all. The prices when I did see actual gas pumps were astronomical. What did I care? I’m about to live on a boat with solar and water-powered electric drive, and sails that use the wind. In theory, I wouldn’t be needing gasoline for quite some time. But for now, with no more than a 400 km range, I had to be mindful.

  By two in the afternoon, I had to start paying careful attention to the heads-up map my phone displayed on the windshield, listening carefully to the directions as I wound my way into San Diego, struggling through early afternoon commuter traffic towards the marina. Once I left the insanely congested highway it became easier, and I worked the pickup past the airport, got on Harbor Drive and from there, Shelter Island was no chore to find at all. The appendage that was Point Loma, poking southward into San Diego Bay, was a nexus for boats; I passed three enormous marinas, then reached Shelter Island, its uncountable numbers of sailboats creating a vast forest of masts, consuming acres. Beyond the land, the endlessness of the ocean overwhelmed the horizon. I felt as if I were engaging in some great test, a magnum opus upon which the course of my life would be determined. There was fear, yes – I expected to feel very nervous; but what surprised me was the sense of excitement I felt, the anticipation. Despite myself, I was being drawn in.