Plague

by H W Buzz Bernard

Back in his apartment, he reclined in a chair and lit a cigarette. He inhaled deeply, tilted his head back and blew a plume of smoke toward the ceiling. He repeated the action several times until a thin, hazy stratus blanketed his small quarters. Relaxed, he reflected on the fact there was one thing he liked about America, Atlanta in particular: its mild climate, a welcome counterpoint to the ice-bound years he’d spent working at the Koltsovo Institute of Molecular Biology in Siberia.

  But that was far in the past. Now it was time to breathe life into the legacy of Koltsovo. He placed his cigarette in an ashtray and rummaged through a desk drawer. He pulled out a well-worn roadmap of metropolitan Atlanta, opened it and spread it over the top of his desk. He studied the red circles he’d made earlier on the map. With a ruler calibrated in millimeters, he measured the distance between the circles. He retrieved a calculator and tapped in some numbers. Time, speed, distance. He’d done this before, but wanted to make certain. No margin for error. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, would die. He didn’t want to be one of them. He wanted his escape to be clean, and for that his choreography—attack, move; attack, move; attack, flee—had to be perfect.

  He smiled, or at least imagined he did. His face, he knew, rarely betrayed emotion. Perhaps the world would never be aware of his genius, his accomplishment, his lethal bioengineered virus, but Allah would, and Allah would be pleased. Allah understood the scientific acumen, the years of labor, the dedication that had been invested in the effort.

  Satisfaction washed over Barashi. His determination and patience had been rewarded. The prize: a recombinant Ebola virus as easily transmittable as the common cold. It was something known in the field of microbiology as a chimera virus, named after the mythological fire-breathing creature with the head of a lion, body of a goat and tail of a snake.

  The virus had only one more trial to pass, a field test he’d initiated Thursday. He already was convinced the pestilence would prove its lethality, but wanted to be one hundred percent positive. Tomorrow or the next day he’d call area hospitals to see if either, or both, of his targets had been admitted. He expected they had. And was certain there’d be others.

  From his briefcase, he pulled a journal. He scribbled some notes in it, then snapped it shut. It made a sharp but tiny sound—a note of confidence, of celebration, of victory. He reached for his cigarette. Too late. It had burned out, leaving only a skeletal cylinder of ash. He brushed it into the center of the ashtray.

  He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and considered what he was about to unleash. In the 14th century, bubonic plague, the Black Death, swept through Europe claiming more the 25 million lives. Death was excruciating. Victims often endured a week of continuous, bloody vomiting and decomposing skin before gasping their final agonizing breaths.

  Now, Barashi mused, it would be America’s turn. Payment had come due. For its arrogance, for its imperialism, for its brutality. For its dismissal and humiliation of us. For its crusade to project its values onto our culture and our religion.

  But no more. Of that he was certain. He held the power: the Black Death of the 21st century.

  Chapter Two

  NORTH METRO ATLANTA

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 18

  David Gullison awoke into a confused, Kafkaesque world. He had no sense of what time it was. Day or night? He didn’t know. He wasn’t even sure where he was. In a bed, he was certain, but... Images and voices swam through his mind as if in an abstractionist dream. He wondered if this was Thursday, his day to play golf with Alan. They always got an early start. He shifted his head to look for his alarm clock. There. But the numbers didn’t make sense. They constantly changed, blinking on and off, pulsating. And why were there so many of them?

  He endeavored to sit up, but was too weak. Warm liquid dribbled down his chin. He labored to breathe, but there was something covering his mouth. He raised his hand to remove it, but his arm seemed constrained by wires or tiny cables. Smothered. I’m being smothered. He twisted and turned in a brief, futile attempt to free himself, but again his strength abandoned him.

  He tried to scream, but only gagged and coughed. Searing pain lanced through his throat and wrapped itself around his tongue. He inhaled repeatedly, rapidly, but couldn’t gather enough oxygen. It was as though his lungs had turned to moth-eaten lace. Each breath produced no more than a hollow rattle.

  Dr. Arthur Willand concluded he should stop looking at pictures of himself. These days he was mildly put off by what he saw: a middle-aged man who looked much older than he really was. His close-cropped blond hair was prematurely flecked with gray, and a nascent double chin—too much time in emergency rooms, not enough time in exercise rooms—hung underneath his freckled, Charlie Brown face. And it was days like today that made him a viable candidate for Grecian Formula.

  Because North Georgia Regional Hospital was a Level II Adult Trauma Center, one of four in metro Atlanta, Willand had seen his share of severed limbs and gaping wounds and been splattered by more geysering arterial blood and projectile vomiting than he cared to remember. But what he was dealing with today in the patient by the name of David Gullison was something beyond his ken. Far beyond.

  Gullison seemed to be leaking blood from every orifice in his body, eyes and ears included. Dark, bloody emesis and diarrhea speckled the treatment room, filling it with the fetid stench of putrefaction. The patient’s stare was vacant and distant; his body, puffy and swollen. His testicles had ballooned to the size of a grapefruit and turned black and blue. His blood pressure had plunged.

  Attempts to stabilize him, to give him IV fluids and medicines, proved futile. A needle inserted into his skin would launch additional hemorrhaging. He was a human colander, unable to retain his own blood. Transfusions were attempted, but blood seeped out as fast as it went in. Dabs of gel foam, used by surgeons to stanch bleeding in severed capillaries, were useless. His blood had lost its clotting capability.

  Dr. Willand shook his head in disgust, not at what he was seeing, but at his inability to do anything. He turned to the head ER nurse, a middle-aged slip of a woman with soft, brown eyes who could bark orders like a Marine drill sergeant or soothe a patient with the compassion of Mother Theresa.

  “Doris, are we sure Mr. Gullison doesn’t have a clotting disorder?”

  “Positive.”

  Well, he does now. “Where’d he come from? What’s his background? Who brought him in?”

  “His wife. They live just a few miles from the hospital. She said he’d been sick for a couple of days—vomiting, diarrhea—but that he got a little better yesterday. They thought he might be getting over it. Then he began hemorrhaging this morning. She’s wondering if it isn’t just a bad case of the flu or food poisoning. Like that stuff folks get on cruise ships.”

  “A Norwalk-like virus? Were they on a cruise recently?”

  Doris shook her head. “Mrs. Gullison said they haven’t traveled outside the U.S. in over a year.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s the cruise-ship shits anyhow. This guy is a lot sicker than that. Let’s get a blood sample down to the CDC. They should be able to tell us for sure. In the meantime, get Mr. Gullison started on whole-body type-O blood transfusions. At least we can fight a holding action until we figure out what we’re dealing with and how to treat it. Oh, and have a respirator standing by, too. This stuff is attacking his lungs.”

  “It’s attacking everything.”

  Willand nodded. A small shudder ran through him. “Let’s err on the side of caution. Have people suit up around Mr. Gullison. Masks, gloves, eye protection. No visitors. Isolate him. And Doris?”

  “Yes?”

  “Be really careful.”

  David’s insides felt as if they were being gnawed away, chewed into chunks of raw meat. A hot sword of terror knifed into him. Oh, God, I’m being eaten from the inside out. Something is eating me. Please, God, no. He t
ried to scream again, but no sound came, only a thin dribble of fluid from his mouth.

  His heart quivered, a sack of blubber struggling for life in a dead environment. Shadows hovered over him, a piercing squeal filled his head. He jerked erect, seizing, retching uncontrollably, spewing grainy, coffee-ground-like vomit into whatever covered his mouth. Abruptly, something narcotic surged through his being, and he sank into a netherworld of nightmares.

  It didn’t last. He awoke once more into a world devoid of time and place. A world where only pain existed—excruciating, unending, relentless. Excruciating? Too weak of a word to describe it. The mere touch of something resting on him—a bed sheet, perhaps?—sent waves of agony through his skin. Now, just one thought, one hope, consumed him: death. Merciful God. Let me die. I ask in your Son’s name.

  He thought someone called his name, but wasn’t sure. His brain, suddenly infused with bright yellow and red light, seemed to explode. Then nothing. Only blackness. His sense of being slid into an infinite, limitless void. And the pain ceased.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Gullison, I’m truly sorry. We did everything we could, but he was just too far gone. We tried to defibrillate him, but there was zero response, absolutely nothing. It was as if his heart had disintegrated. All his other organs had failed, too, kidneys, liver, lungs, everything.” Dr. Willand shook his head, partly in sympathy, partly in disbelief. He didn’t like this part of his job; didn’t like telling spouses or parents or children they had lost someone they loved. Someone who had loved them. He didn’t like failing. He especially didn’t like not knowing what he was dealing with.

  Mrs. Gullison, seated next to him in an anteroom near the ICU, sobbed in great, gasping bursts, her head buried in her hands, her body shaking with the trauma of sudden grief. Dr. Willand rested his hand on her shoulder, cold comfort in her agony.

  “What was it?” she choked out between sobs. “What killed him? He always...” the words wouldn’t come. Dr. Willand waited while she composed herself. She did finally, but kept her head bowed. She held her hands together, but they were in constant motion, writhing like a tiny, knotted ball of snakes.

  “He was always so healthy,” she said at last, finishing her statement. “He exercised. He didn’t smoke. He ate right. He had a checkup every year. There was nothing wrong with him, doctor, nothing. How could he have died like that? It was so... ugly.” The tears came again.

  He patted her shoulder. Ugly wasn’t the word for it. Agonizing. Cruel. Excruciating. Calamitous. Ugly didn’t begin to describe it. It was as if AIDS had ransacked Gullison’s body in a matter of days. From a standing start to the speed of sound in metaphorical seconds.

  “I’ll be honest with you, Mrs. Gullison. We don’t know. Sometimes we come up against that. A rare illness. An emerging disease. A new virus or bacterium. But we’ll find out. I promise you. We’ve notified the state health department, and we’ve sent a sample to the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control. They’ll find out what this was.”

  Mrs. Gullison nodded, then began sobbing again, this time silently, softly. She appeared to be an attractive, middle-aged woman, but the ordeal with her husband had taken its toll. Her short, henna-hued hair was disheveled, and her clothes, wrinkled—casualties of long hours of vigilance at the hospital; hours without sleep.

  “Is there somebody I can call for you?” Dr. Willand asked. “Family? Friend?”

  She shrugged.

  “I could have the hospital chaplain come sit with you for a while. Would you like that?”

  “That would be nice.”

  He rose. “I’ll have him paged.”

  She lifted her head and said, “Thank you for trying, doctor. I know it wasn’t your fault.”

  He took an involuntary step back. She stared at him with bloodshot eyes. Not merely bloodshot, but bathed in crimson as though all the tiny veins in her eyeballs had shattered.

  “Mrs. Gullison, perhaps we should have a look at you, just to make sure—”

  She raised her hand in protest. “I’m fine,” she said. “I just need some rest.” As if to punctuate her lie, she broke into a spasm of coughing, watery hacking coming from deep within her lungs.

  “No,” he said. “You’re sick.” My God, what is this?

  DRUID HILLS, ATLANTA

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 18

  Dwight Butler, a virologist in the Viral Special Pathogens Branch of the CDC sat sequestered in his office. He’d been called in on an emergency. Now he remained there late in the day because he was—he could think of no other way of putting it—scared shitless.

  Outside, lightning illuminated the darkness in almost continuous high-voltage brilliance. An artillery barrage of thunder rumbled steadily. “It’s the angels bowling,” his grandmother used to tell him as a child. Adjacent to the cluster of tightly-packed brick and concrete structures that comprised the CDC, a dark river of rainwater streamed down Clifton Road.

  “No angels tonight,” he muttered as he stared out at the storm without really seeing it. His thoughts were elsewhere, wrestling with something far less visible: metastasizing fear. He realized he didn’t look like a man who should be frightened of anything. Truth be told, there were people frightened of him. In the parking lot at night, he’d witnessed coworkers who didn’t know him take the Great Circle Route of avoidance if he approached them.

  By any conventional standards, he certainly didn’t look like a doctor, which he was, courtesy of Johns Hopkins University. With a polished ebony head, bulging muscles and a gold earring dangling from his right earlobe, he came across as an African-American Mr. Clean. But unlike Mr. Clean, he sported a bushy, black mustache that drooped over the corners his mouth like the horns of a Cape Buffalo.

  His boss, J. W. Zambit, Chief of Special Pathogens, had been appalled by Dwight’s appearance the first time they’d met. Not by his mustache or earring, but by his casual manner of dress: khaki shorts, a flowered Caribbean shirt and gnarly leather sandals. “You can’t come to work looking like you’re going to a Jimmy Buffet concert,” Zambit snapped. “People will think I’ve hired a Parrot Head.”

  “What you’ve hired,” Dwight fired back, “is the best damned virologist on the East Coast. Bugs don’t care what I wear.”

  He had backed up his boast, and Zambit never raised the issue again. Still, a low level of tension festered between the two. Zambit from time to time would mumble under his breath about decorum in the pathogens branch “going to hell in a hand basket,” words clearly directed at Dwight. Dwight, for his part, never passed up a chance to poke a stick in Zambit’s eye, usually by arriving late for meetings and then walking in humming “Margaritaville” to the beat of his clip-clopping sandals.

  Once, they’d almost reached a level of détente. Several of the staff had been in a Buckhead bar kicking back on a Friday evening after a particularly arduous week, and Zambit, after a couple of belts, had asked Dwight in a non-adversarial manner, “So why flip-flops and not hip-hop?”

  Dwight crushed a tiny orange drink-umbrella between his thumb and forefinger. “I grew up in Newark. My father was killed in the riots there in the late 1960s, and my mother wasn’t really interested in being a mother. I was raised by my grandmother, bless her soul, but I survived by being a street punk. I discovered my appearance helped; it intimidated people.” He tossed the crumpled paper umbrella onto the table.

  “Still does, I hear.” Zambit took a swig of his Dewars.

  “Yeah. Well, that’s part of the reason I’ve gone Key West.” He spread his arms in a insouciant gesture. “What you see here is the kinder, gentler ‘Dee Butt.’”

  “Dee what?”

  “Dee Butt. Street name. Long ago. A life I escaped. It never was me. Give me a pair of cheap sandals, a sunset, and a rum and Coke, and I’m a happy man.” A grin on his face, he leaned toward Zambit. “How about you, boss. What makes you happy? Any
thing? Or are you always going to be a stiff with pipette up his ass?”

  Dwight regretted almost immediately saying the words, but he knew you couldn’t un-ring a bell. The opportunity for peaceful coexistence spiraled into history.

  This evening, Dwight had no thought of peaceful coexistence with anything. His laid-back nature and professionalism had been pushed to limits he’d never imagined. He recalled only once before being this terrified: in an SCCA sports car race. He’d lost the brakes on a Porsche Carrera screaming into a sharp right-hander at Watkins Glen and could only hang on and try to grip the seat with his butt cheeks as the car ripped through a fence and hurtled into heavy underbrush at over 100 mph. He still loved fine cars, but his high-speed excursion into the Upstate New York woods had ended his career as an amateur competition driver.

  When he picked up the phone to call Zambit, he discovered he was back in the Porsche on an out-of-control ride. “Calm down,” he said out loud. He punched in the number of his boss’s home phone.

  “Dr. Zambit,” a voice on the other end of the line said.

  “Zamby, this is Dwight.”

  “The hell you calling in the middle of a storm for? You’ll get us both electrocuted. Or was that your plan?”

  “Actually it wasn’t. But you may feel like you’ve been electrocuted after this call is over.”

  The phone line popped and crackled as a lightning bolt lanced onto the roof of an adjacent building. Zambit yelled for his wife to bring him a portable handset. There was a pause, then Zambit said, “I gather you’re about to lay some serious shit on me.”

  “Think of it as an elephant dump.”

  “You’d never pass up an opportunity like that, would you?”

  “We’ve got Ebola in Atlanta.”

  Chapter Three

  DRUID HILLS, ATLANTA

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 18

  Brief silence ensued on Zambit’s end of the line before he said, “I think lightning fried our connection for a moment. What did you say?”