The Virus

by Janelle Diller

  Published by WorldTrek Publishing

  Copyright © 2015 by Janelle Diller

  Printed in the USA

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to WorldTrek Publishing, 121 East Vermijo, Colorado Springs, CO 80903.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher. The exception to this is where names were used with permission.

  ISBNs:

  978-1-936376-14-8 (ePub) / 978-1-936376-13-1 (mobi)

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress.

  DEDICATION

  To my favorite lover of conspiracies.

  You know who you are, sweetheart.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 01

  Chapter 02

  Chapter 03

  Chapter 04

  Chapter 05

  Chapter 06

  Chapter 07

  Chapter 08

  Chapter 09

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Where They Ended Up

  Book Club Questions

  Coming Soon from Janelle Diller…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CHAPTER

  01

  IF YOU CAN BELIEVE THE MEDIA, THIS STORY STARTS WITH ONE DEATH AND ONE SURVIVOR. But if you believe this, you also have to believe that 9/11 started on September 11, 2001.

  Like that first disaster, the initial news blip came on a crisp late summer morning. But it wasn’t the earthshaking, glue-you-to-the-TV explosion like 9/11. Life didn’t unexpectedly freeze into startling memory shards. Since the death occurred just forty miles down the road from us, Channels 5/30, our local NBC affiliate in Colorado Springs, actually reported it first. By one o’clock, it made the news ticker tape that scrolled non-stop on the bottom edge of the Fox News and CNN screens. That evening, the story led on all three major networks.

  Even then, I’m pretty sure most Americans couldn’t have told you the next day what it was they were supposed to be afraid of now. We’d become a nation that shrugged our shoulders through one scare or another every season. Anthrax, SARS, H1N1—too much shouting dulls the hearing. And we were certainly a nation that had been shouted at plenty.

  I would have missed the story entirely except that I happened to be working from home that week, neither of my two current clients desperately needing me at the moment. My high-tech consulting job puts me on the road traveling to client sites at least four or five days a week nearly every week of my working year. I survive the grind because when I’m home, I’m truly at my house and not stuck on a freeway or trapped in a cubicle with ominously appropriate padded walls.

  That morning, the TV was on in the background, but I wasn’t paying attention. I’m not a news junkie. Instead, I was clicking through the forty emails that had bred overnight in the cozy darkness of my inbox and trying not to be irritated by Eddy’s careless breakfast noises in the next room: coffee grinding, coffee bubbling; cereal pouring, cereal crunching; newspaper rattling, newspaper ripping. Even with all the news at his fingertips, he’d be the last man in America to give up the chance to hold an actual newspaper (or in his case three).

  Eddy was an article ripper (never an article clipper) and favored wayward and seemingly random tidbits, his theory being that the media gave us lots of trees to study, but never painted a picture of the forest. Pattern, context, and themes were everything. The individual stories, nothing.

  “Did you hear that, Maggie?” His breakfast noises stopped.

  “What?”

  “The thing about the prisoner.”

  “I’m doing email.” I tried not to sound annoyed. But I was, after all, working and he was, after all, leisurely eating breakfast. “What happened?”

  “I think they said a prisoner down in the maximum security prison in Florence died last night. Looks like smallpox.”

  “Smallpox? Really? I thought smallpox was eradicated decades ago. Anything in the paper about it?”

  “Didn’t see it if there was.”

  Which meant there wasn’t.

  “Sounds like a second prisoner has the same thing but hasn’t died yet.”

  “Weird.”

  I don’t remember if Brian Williams used the word “weird” in his five o’clock story, but it’s the word I kept thinking of all day. It was weird that someone could die of smallpox, weird that someone in prison could contract a dead disease.

  Eddy must have been thinking about it too because late morning he randomly asked, “Isn’t there an incubation period?”

  Fifteen years of marriage gives you a rhythm. You share the same skin. I knew what he meant even though we hadn’t said a word for two hours.

  “I mean, how could you be in a maximum security prison and contract a contagious disease that’s been eradicated?”

  I looked at him, really more at his T-shirt stretched across his muscular arms and back, since our desks sat at right angles to each other in our home office. He had the luxury of the view of Pikes Peak because he camped out at his computer nearly every day of the week doing freelance web design. “It’s like chicken pox isn’t it? At least it’s somehow related to those horrible poxy things that pop up and fester.”

  He pulled up his left T-shirt sleeve to look at his ancient inoculation scar. “Mine’s gone.”

  I checked my upper arm too, but my sun- and age-worn skin didn’t show a trace of the old peanut-shaped ripples. What decade had it disappeared?

  “Think we’re still immune?” Eddy sounded curious, not worried. He swiveled around in his chair and faced me. His blue eyes matched the sky outside. A couple of loose black curls fell across his forehead. Usually, he kept his hair trimmed shorter, but I liked it this length.

  “I don’t think so. With the anthrax scare awhile back, there was lots of stuff about all the other bioterrorist stuff. I think they said the smallpox immunity lasts only several decades.”

  Eddy raised his right eyebrow—his trademark flirting signal and gave me a soft smile. “That puts you in big danger.”

  I laughed and jabbed his ribs. “Only if I end up in the federal pen.”

  He turned back to his web work, which on one of his computer sc
reens looked suspiciously like the Center for Disease Control’s smallpox site, and I went back to entering my travel expenses.

  Mid-afternoon he mused, “Even if our vaccinations are still good, is this the same virus?”

  I turned and stared at his back. He continued to click away at his keyboard. One of his screens still had the CDC partially visible.

  He loved to worry. It gave him a reason to clip all those newspaper bits and pieces.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “What’s the statistic on how many people get the flu every year? Five percent? Ten? I haven’t had the flu for fifteen years and I’ve never had a vaccination. I guess I’m not too worried about the odds.” I come from a long line of optimists, Eddy from an even longer line of pessimists. Our children, if we’d been able to have any, would have been interesting.

  We watched the news that night, popcorn bowl between us, more attentive and curious than usual, but we didn’t learn anything new.

  The national newsmongers insisted that we be nervous. For the next week, they led every evening newscast with a panicked twist on the smallpox crisis, all delivered with solemn authority: the government wasn’t releasing the name of the prisoner until they could investigate further; the prison officials wouldn’t allow an interview with the surviving but apparently heavily scarred other prisoner; the CDC—whose initials the entire nation now recognized as easily as the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s—shut their doors to the cameras when asked about the nonexistent supply of fresh vaccines.

  The Colorado Springs stations gloried in being at the epicenter of all the attention, although their stories didn’t have quite the weight. They interviewed everyone associated—directly, indirectly, and not even remotely connected—with the event: family members of any prisoners, including those in the county jail forty miles away from the incident; any prison guards and family members of any prison guards; doctors who had an opinion about smallpox; local university professors who had opinions about doctors who had opinions about smallpox; someone with an opinion who had a relative who’d died of smallpox decades ago (the opinion ungraciously leaned more towards the long-dead relative than the disease); and even shoppers at the mall who could talk about smallpox as articulately as they could talk about the World Bank’s impact on US coffee prices.

  I called the shopper opinion story a new low in local journalism, but Eddy reassured me that they hadn’t done any pet-related smallpox stories, so the low was yet to come.

  Every story held the same subtext: the disease either dealt a gruesome death or left survivors with grotesquely ravaged skin.

  All the media cautioned us repeatedly about how this explosively contagious virus spread by inhaling a single airborne smallpox virus particle. Simply talking was enough to spread the particles, although coughing—one of the symptoms—hastened the spread even more dramatically. Computer animations showed full progression of emerging blisters, or pustules, that filled with pressurized milky pus. These blisters didn’t break open so much as they tore away from the underlying skin, an extraordinarily painful process. In the final days, the pustules became hard, bloated sacs the size of peas, encasing the body with pus. As the disease progressed, victims lost the ability to speak and grew blinded as the pustules squeezed their eyes shut. Yet they remained alert. Death came from arrested breathing, a heart attack, shock, or an immune-system shutdown.

  We had a new plague.

  As happens with constant nightly news drum-beating, the public’s noise level began to rise. In less than a week, the polls indicated that “sufficient smallpox vaccinations for every citizen” was more important than the quagmire in the Middle East, the deficit, or an inept congress.

  The White House issued a statement saying the CDC was working hard to determine ways to bring vaccines to market faster, but it could be weeks before the first ones were ready and months—maybe a year—before they had sufficient immunizations to vaccinate the entire country.

  Then came the capstone: CBS’s Scott Pelley broke the story first. The prisoner who died was being held without bond while waiting for a hearing. His name: Abdulaziz al-Sherhi.

  In a nation rich in imagination, this name required none at all.

  From that moment on, we were putty.

  CHAPTER

  02

  UNLIKE THE REST OF THE POPULATION, I was too weary to imagine anything, even something obvious.

  I was a firefighter—my business card said communication specialist—for Zaan, a mega tech company that sold and implemented database technology and business software. That’s the geek description. The translation? If your world crossed paths in any way—employee, supplier, or consumer—of a Fortune 50 company, chances were good Zaan had its fingerprints on your life, whether you knew it or not. I wrote memos, created newsletters, led workshops—really anything that helped decode the high-tech world into everyday lives. Along the way I did a lot of handholding. I often felt as much like a corporate therapist as a communication expert. I managed the people directly impacted by the inevitable disruptions and changes the new software brought.

  I loved the work since it gave me a window into pockets of countless organizations, which ranged from public school systems to jet engine manufacturers. I got to work with everyone from the Chief Executive Officer to third-shift punch press operators. And I made a difference in their lives, or at least their lives as they dealt with the misery of changing software and the way they were used to doing their jobs.

  But I hated the travel.

  I hated leaving Eddy week after week. I hated airports. I hated driving a strange car in a strange place. I hated going to Detroit in January and Phoenix in July, and I’d done both too many times. I hated adjusting to multiple time zones within a few days. I hated sleeping in a different bed every week. I was even beginning to hate room service, if you can imagine hating having a pick of the menu, having someone deliver it to your door, and not having to do the dishes.

  But I truly did love the work, so I suffered with the rest of it and collected hotel points that upgraded me to suite level in every major hotel chain and air miles I was too tired to use except for the yearly exotic vacations Eddy and I spent our airmiles on. The job took me to off-the-beaten-path places: Strother, Kansas; Keene, New Hampshire; Avery Island, Louisiana. Normal places, too. I just never had a chance to have fun when I got there.

  The day Scott Pelley broke his story I was in the Bay Area working with Baja Breeze, a trendy retail clothing chain, in the throes of a very messy software implementation. The shipping software wasn’t working in the test phase. If we couldn’t get it to work, shipping from factories to stores would stop overnight. Not a good thing, regardless of the upcoming Christmas season. My job was more complicated with this client because the CEO was sixty-five. Everyone else was under thirty, and too many of them had exposed navels, cleavage, and unexplained facial metal for my corporate world experience. I could have easily lived with that except that most of their project team, especially their project lead, seemed to be hiring mistakes. They never, ever arrived anywhere on time: for work, for meetings, for individual appointments. And deadlines? Only a suggestion for these folks. It all had an ugly ripple effect on everything else.

  They required three times as much effort from the Zaan team and delivered half as much as my previously most miserable client. And frankly, every day they made me rethink whether I really did love my job.

  Mid-afternoon, Eddy pinged me on Google Talk. Long before Edward Snowden’s revelations about the creepy invasiveness of the National Security Agency, Eddy had insisted enabling the off-the record function on gtalk. Our chats still weren’t encrypted, but at least they weren’t logged for NSA perusing.

  EddytheWebMan: hey mz m.

  MRiderZAAN: Eddio... Whassup?

  EddytheWebMan: did you watch the news?

  He knew better.

  MRiderZAAN: Nope. What’d I miss?

  EddytheWebMan: more stuff is surfacing on this whole thing.

&n
bsp; I had no idea what “whole thing” he was talking about. My head wasn’t anywhere but whether I could calm the masses long enough for the Zaan consultants to work their voodoo with the shipping software—and what I would have to do to finesse the ugly message if they couldn’t.

  MRiderZAAN: What happened?

  EddytheWebMan: two more cases of smallpox surfaced in salida.

  Salida was one of our favorite little Colorado towns because it somehow managed to navigate that ever-shifting thin line between normal and mountain artsy. As an added bonus, it rivaled any place in New Mexico for its fabulous green chili choices, and we’d tried them all. Numerous natural hot springs also dotted the area. Over the years, we’d soaked away countless weekends there as we recovered from weeks that made us weary.

  MRiderZAAN: You’re kidding.

  MRiderZAAN: Locals? Or do they have Mideast names, too?

  EddytheWebMan: locals.

  MRiderZAAN: Weird. Truly weird. So is it a terrorist thing or not?

  EddytheWebMan: dunno. the talking heads say yes.

  MRiderZAAN: In Salida? What’s next? A terrorist cell in Mattoon, IL?

  EddytheWebMan: you read my mind.

  EddytheWebMan: anyway, they’re trying to quarantine the town.

  MRiderZAAN: How are they ever going to q a whole town?

  EddytheWebMan: dunno. nobody in/nobody out i guess.

  MRiderZAAN: Ugh. Aspen season. It’ll kill ‘em if they miss a season of those tourist $$.

  EddytheWebMan: they’re trying to track who all these guys have been in contact with.

  MRiderZAAN: Long time to track contacts.

  EddytheWebMan: no kidding. if you were exposed, how many people did you come into contact with last week?

  EddytheWebMan: …and how would you let them know they’d been exposed.

  MRiderZAAN: .

  He didn’t say it, but he could have added, “or how many times were you exposed?” I don’t let fear govern my life, but a little seed planted itself in my stomach anyway. Who could help that?

  EddytheWebMan: BTW, 7-17 days incubation period. average is 12.

  MRiderZAAN: So they could’ve been exposed before or after the dead guy went to prison.