“So, you won’t let me use my own supplies that I know are effective, but you’ll risk not only my safety, but my patients’ safety with ‘improvisations’?”
“Yes,” another board member confirmed.
“Ok, just let me know what day we’re projected to run out,” he said, looking at his notes.
“I mean, it all depends on shipments and suppliers…” The bald man said, staring hard at Dante’s tall frame.
“Give me a hard date,” he insisted, making notes, “because if you can’t, I have to start diverting patients to other hospitals.”
“You’re talking about shutting down the cardiac unit!” another said with a gasp.
“Absolutely. When it is no longer safe to work on a patient, for them or us, I think it would be foolish for us to take the risk. The liability alone--”
“The shortages don’t affect just our hospital,'' another board member said, the only doctor in the group, Doctor Collins.
“Seriously?” Dante asked quietly as everyone looked to the board member who just spoke.
“Yes, this is about to be a nationwide crisis. You know where a lot of our supplies come from?” he asked softly without a hint of attitude.
“No sir, I just know some of the suppliers around here.”
“The main manufacturing has been done in China for the last decade. Sure, they might build components and final assembly is done here, but things like masks, gowns, rubber gloves… A lot of that is going to be scarce in less than a week or two. It’s not just us, it’s literally everybody since China announced their shutting down their economy and all imports and exports for a month.”
“What about the stuff that’s on the slow boats?” Leah asked.
“Shipping from China can take up to 30 days, more if you count customs. That will be the last of the product that’s sourced from there in the pipeline. For a while.”
“How long of a while?” Andrea asked.
“I wish we knew,” the retired doctor told them.
The meeting broke up not long after that, and a big car crash had the ER scrambling. A school bus had been hit by an overloaded semi. Nobody went home that night. In the end, they lost both drivers and two of the kids, with dozens of injuries to treat and two that had to undergo major surgery. The infected nurse, not knowing she had picked up a hitchhiker, worked in the ER that night, doing everything that she could.
Eleven
“Ok babe, be safe, love you,” Curt said, hanging up his phone.
“They stuck?” Anna asked.
“Yeah, that bad crash with the school kids and the bus,” Curt said. “They’re all hands-on deck and plan on working all night long. The bad thing is, they had a patient in the hospital earlier displaying symptoms of the Wuhan Flu. If that is the case, they will have results of the blood test in the morning. They might have to sit in quarantine.” There was a note of fear in his voice.
“Two weeks?” Goldie asked, working in the kitchen.
“They might. I asked her if she needed me to bring anything up, but she’s got her office packed with stuff so…”
“If I’m not interrupting,” Angelica asked, “but what are the symptoms? The news is pretty vague.”
“Fever, coughing, and difficulty breathing, Some get really sick, some don’t. Some of the infected never get a symptom but can carry the virus and spread it to others,” Curt told her.
“How bad is it?” Rob asked, finishing his lunch off at the kitchen table.
“Early numbers are showing kids and healthy adults under the age of 45 have a really good chance of not having severe symptoms, if they catch it at all. It’s the asthmatics, immune compromised, overweight, smokers, those with heart conditions, and the elderly that they are the most worried about.”
“You know,” Steven said, “most of those symptoms are the same as spring allergy season here.”
“I know… I’ve been trying to stay up on things, but I’ve not been able to keep up,” Curt said.
“It’s a lot. Out here in the sticks, we should be in good shape though, right?” Goldie asked.
“Pretty good, I’m sure,” Curt told them.
“When are we getting the cabins delivered?” Anna asked, suddenly changing the subject.
“Friday,” Steven said. “Then my guys are coming for a long four-day weekend to finish them off.”
“You just poured concrete two weeks ago!” Goldie exclaimed.
“I know,” Steven said with a smirk. “I’m hoping to get started on the medical center the following Monday. If my guys are motivated with the weekend OT they’re getting for finishing the cabins off, they are going to love putting up a big square box and finishing the inside off. I figure we can get the basic structure done and finished on the inside in a week, tops.”
“I think I went into the wrong kind of work,” Rob muttered.
“No dear, you did the work you thought needed doing,” Angelica said. “Not many people want to do or can do what you did.”
“Where’s Harry?” Rob asked suddenly.
“Probably outside with the dogs,” Angelica said. “He finished schoolwork half an hour ago.”
“I saw him come in about twenty minutes ago,” Rob said. “Mom, you see him come through?”
“Give Ranger a shout, he was following him towards the basement.”
“Ranger,” Rob bellowed, making Steven jump in surprise.
Everyone heard a bark from the basement. That set off Roscoe, who was under the table in the dining room. The old fool pup got up fast, almost flipping the table, and went scrabbling across the wood floor towards the basement.
“Guess we know where he is,” Angelica said with a smile.
“But what’s he doing down there, especially for twenty minutes?” Rob asked.
“Looking through things?” Curt suggested.
“Probably looking for more peach preserves,” Goldie said, opening the basement door and stood back as Roscoe went down there snuffling, nose to the ground, “Harry?”
“Coming Grandma,” he said from below.
When he came up the stairs, his doggy entourage preceding him, he was dusty, cobwebby and had two jars of preserves in each hand.
“Lordy child, what did you get into?” Goldie asked him.
“I found something cool,” he said. “One of the shelves was pulled back and it looks like there’s a hole in the wall.”
“How did a little old hole get you so filthy?” Goldie asked him.
“It wasn’t little; it was kinda, um … big.”
“How big?” Rob asked, thinking about rodents.
“Big enough for a person to get into,” he said quieter, thinking he was going to get in trouble.
“Can you show me?” Rob asked him.
As it turned out, everybody was curious. Anna and Steven grabbed flashlights, while Angelica cursed the dogs a blue streak to keep them from following them down the stairs. The basement lights were on, but it was dark in the corner that Harry led them to. He pointed at a bookshelf that was made to look like the other shelving downstairs.
“Behind there.” He pointed to the gap in the wall.
Rob walked up and looked in. His eyes got wide and then he backed up, looking at the jars on the shelf.
“I’m going to go slow, make sure I don’t tip anything over,” he told Angel.
“Why don’t we unload the shelves first?” she suggested, her voice sweet, but if you knew her, you would know it was not a question as much as a recommendation or want.
“How about no,” he said, and lifted the end of the six-foot-wide shelf by the side, and slowly walked it away from the wall.
“No way,” Angelica said.
The hole was almost four foot wide and slightly taller, through part of the floor, but most of it in the wall.
“See, I broke nothing,” he said, kissing the top of his wife’s head, who promptly smacked him in the gut with a backhand.
“Just because you’re as big as an ox
doesn’t mean you get to act like one,” she almost pouted.
“How deep is it?” Curt asked.
“I don’t know, but I hear trickling water.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Steven said, knowing that could be any number of things, none of them good.
“Want me to?” Anna asked, clicking on her own light.
“Rock, paper, scissors?” Steven asked.
“No, I figure it’s either me or Angelica, but I don’t know if Angelica has any spelunking experience. I’m not sure I want any of you big guys going down there and getting stuck. I can’t pull your lard asses out if you do.”
Angelica snorted and Harry laughed.
“Do you think it’s a mine shaft?” Goldie asked.
“I don’t know,” Anna said, “Want to get me a length of paracord?”
“We’d cut you in half if we had to pull you with that,” Rob told her.
“More like… so I don’t get turned around and lost?”
The hole in the wall turned out to be a tunnel. It had been roughly hewn out of limestone by hand. The pick marks were evident in the rock, as were the steps that had been painstakingly cut from the stone. The exceptions where surface water had dripped through the limestone wall, eating away portions of the step. Anna did not want anyone else to follow her until she could make sure everything was safe. When she was younger, she had spent a couple years with a spelunking group, learning the ropes, so to speak. Now that she was out of her teen years, she was once again using those skills.
“Maybe this is why I love sports so much,” she muttered to herself, remembering how adventurous she was as a kid had morphed into who she was as an adult.
She slowly went down the steps, pushing cobwebs out of the way. Ten, fifteen… At twenty steps the tunnel opened up enough that she could walk down it upright. Dante or Rob could have made it this far, but she had not been sure until she saw it for herself. Abruptly the stairs ended, and a rough, uneven floor spread out in front of her as far as the flashlight could see. Making sure she had good footing, she slowly shuffled across the floor. The walls were mostly natural, except the far wall. There was a fissure that only a small person could fit through and a larger one where the sound of water could clearly be heard. It was musty, and surprisingly cool.
“You all good down there?” Steven called, and from the echoes, Anna knew he had started down the path.
“Yeah, I’m good. I think it’s safe to come down,” she called back up.
She could hear people coming down the stairs and some muffled curses as the taller guys hit their heads. She was a little worried about the water, wondering if any had eroded the rock under the floor making it unstable, so she met the group as they followed Steven down.
“Holy shit, what is this place?” he asked.
“I’m guessing it was part of a cave they found when the house was built. The steps and the walls are hand hewn from the rock. What this place was for though, I have no idea. It’s just dusty,” she said, kicking some loose stone on the floor.
“Where’s the sound of the water coming from?” Steven asked.
“There’s two fissures on the far wall. The larger one has the sound of water coming out, but there’s a smaller one too. I just don’t know how stable this is, so please move slow.” Anna told them.
“What do you mean stable?” Angelica asked.
“I think this room is carved out of limestone. If there’s running water here, it can sort of eat away the rock quicker than simple erosion. If it’s running underneath the floor here it might not be stable and crumble away beneath…”
“I’ll be careful,” Steven told her, then walked to the far end.
“What do you think?” Rob asked aloud, “fifteen by twenty-ish?”
“That’s my guess,” Curt told him. “Man, I want to get some pictures of this place, the docs are going to freak.”
Angelica and Curt both had cell phones out and, while one used theirs as a flashlight, Curt recorded everything around them, finally working his way over to Steven. Steven had half of his body inside the fissure with the water sounds, his flashlight in the void.
“What are you seeing?” Curt asked.
“A spot where a spring bubbles up from the rock,” Steven said. “It looks like this fissure was opened and widened a bit to give access to it. The water runs away from this room and it looks like the fissure to the left a few feet over would give access to the rest of the cave.”
“Wait, there’s more?” Curt asked.
“I mean, it’s not Mammoth Cave, but the next wall is further away than I can see.”
“Who could have built this?” Goldie asked, holding the hand of a very silent Harry.
“I’m guessing Dewayne’s grandparents,” Rob said. “This is an old farmhouse here, probably added on and remodeled a few times. I know the upstairs is newer than the main floor.”
“How would they have dug the basement way back then?” Angelica asked her husband, “It’s taking a bunch of equipment and some blasting to do their big basement.”
“Probably a lot of the same way, but by hand. It probably took a long time unless…”
“Unless what?” Curt asked.
“This was a spot where an old cave made something like a sinkhole, and they stacked and mortared the rocks to make the foundation?”
“The digging would be pretty minimal if that’s the case,” Steven said. “Only way to know for sure is to take out part of the stacked walls and see.”
“We don’t need to know that badly,” Curt told him.
“Think about this though; while the farmhouse was being built, the land worked, the family could have lived down here. It wouldn’t take much to block the entrance to the tunnel and it probably stays a constant temperature that you could dress for and not need a fire, the humidity is just about perfect for storing food, and if I’m not mistaken, there would be fresh air coming from the rest of the cave behind the fissures. There’s running water, though it probably tastes funky going through all this rock.”
“I wonder if we should call somebody in…?” Goldie asked.
“No,” almost everybody said at once.
“This is so cool I could just about pee myself,” Harry said in a small voice.
“I think I already did, a little,” Anna said with a giggle.
“Clean the place up, get some lights, hang some pictures and you could have a great rumpus room,” Rob said with a rare smile.
“Talk about a natural man-made fallout shelter,” Steven said, turning from them and heading to the next fissure to look. “You know, I can sort of hear the machinery outside, but the sound of the water overpowers it.”
“Get some video in there,” Curt said.
“Already did, brosky,” he said with a grin. “Let's go upstairs, it’s musty down here.”
Twelve
“Two weeks of quarantine?! Are you sick? Do you have any symptoms?” Curt’s voice came loudly out of the handset, and Andrea held it away from her head.
“No symptoms, but several doctors and nurses here have tested positive and, although the hospital is keeping it quiet, the news is starting to catch on. The good news is that they’re going to let me quarantine at home. Look at it this way, I can start loading up the trailer and drive some loads out if the basements are almost done.”
“I… but you’re in quarantine,” Curt said.
“Yeah, but I can just drop and hook if Steven’s trailer is empty and out there.”
“You know, that’s not a bad idea. Do we need to let the stuff in the trailers sit? How long does the virus last outside of the body?”
“I’m not going to do this right away,” Andrea told him. “Besides, I’ll be doing nasal swabs after a few days. It wouldn’t be until after day 10 that I’d feel comfortable doing some of the shuffling of supplies, but I could drop and hook twice a day, we could clean out our garage…”
“What happens if I have to come back for a deal? I ha
ve to write checks up there next week at the West Memphis office.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Andrea said. “If I have to, I’ll stay in the spare bedroom…”
“This is bullshit,” Curt ranted.
“Honey, I’ve seen people die from this. I didn’t know it at the time for sure, but some of the people I worked on were infected. Let’s just play this safe. I’ll be ok, please believe me.”
“It’s just that… ugh. You know how you feel, and you’re the doc,” he said after a moment. “But if you get feeling sick, you call me the minute you cough!”
“I’m not in the demographic that seems to be getting hit hard. If anything, you and I are in the demographic that if we caught this it would only hit us like a bad cold. We’re both young-ish, in shape, and nonsmokers.”
“Kind of glad I quit last year,” he said, his voice sulky.
“I’m glad you did too,” Andrea said. “Now I have to get enough of my stuff out of my office before they bleach bomb the place, and I’m headed home. I’ll call you later.”
“Ok baby, love you,” Curt said.
“Love ya,” Andrea said, wiping a tear from her cheek.
She had hidden how scared she was rather well, and she was not proud of it. She hoped that if Curt ever found out, he would forgive her. There was a lot of panic and hysteria over this Wuhan Flu that was not really a flu, but she did not know if it was all deserved. The cases where the patients had died clearly had something unexpectedly wrong, and it was obvious now they knew more about the symptoms. What scared her was nobody knew what long term effects the virus would have once the survivors’ body recovered.
Was there going to be heart, liver, or lung damage? Nobody knew. That was why, despite orders from above, Andrea had started sneaking in her own PPE into work.
Since the weekend when they had found the cave room under the house, the construction projects were going at an alarming rate. She just hoped they could keep it up.
Dante reassured his wife that he would be safe. She had gotten the same quarantine notice, and any moment now Dante expected to get his, because he was living with a doctor who had been exposed by a patient and a nurse at least. Sure enough, he got a page and masked up before leaving his office. He squeezed the sanitizing foam onto his hands, rubbing it in before and after he touched any hard surface, and made his way to the administration wing. Funny that they would call him up for a face to face instead of letting him know over the phone. Sort of defeated the whole idea of quarantine.
Behind The Curve-The Farm | Book 1 | The Farm Page 7