by Amber Wyatt
Shepard’s jawline tightened. There have been enough experiments. It’s long past time to move on to the next part of the mission. He had agreed with Dr. Indika in the wisdom of delaying trying to locate Patient Zero at the initial outbreak locations until the IDRC had carried out more research. The rationale had been to learn as much as possible about the infected so that his men would be able to fight them more effectively. We are learning nothing new now.
Indika’s team still could not understand the mechanism of how the virus worked. But, Shepard grudgingly admitted, they had produced a lot of helpful information about how it was transmitted and how best to fight the infected. However, they had pretty much reached a plateau with providing new data, and he did not think that they would learn anything more about how to fight them by wasting another day watching Indika stitching one zombie’s head on to the body of another.
“Sergeant Richards!”
“Sir?” The soldier came running from his post outside the detention center.
“Convey my respects to Lieutenant Vockler and tell him that I have changed my mind and decided to cancel the afternoon’s training schedule. Instead, the platoon will draw bite-suits, helmets and armguards from the stores at 1330 hours and prepare for hand to hand combat training with infected specimens at 1430. You will take them to the training hall and supervise warm up exercises at 1400.”
“Yes, Sir!” The sergeant’s eyes were bright with excitement.
“Tell Corporal Avis to take three men after lunch and bring Infected specimen 47 to the hall for training.” Specimen 47 had had its teeth and, in fact, its entire lower mandible removed.
“Specimen 47, roger that sir.”
“Keep the hood and mitts on 47 until you have the specimen in the hall and are ready to commence sparring. Lieutenant Vockler will start off the session if I am not there at 1430. That is all.” Shepard returned the sergeant’s salute and as the man ran off, he took out his phone and quickly messaged Indika asking if he was free for a meeting at 1600 hours. The workaholic IDRC Director replied immediately that he was free, and would see the major in the boardroom. Then Shepard strode off quickly towards the chow hall. He wanted to talk over the details of the training session with Vockler and get some lunch in as early as possible. He intended to take full part in the sparring training against the infected specimen himself, and figured it would probably be wise to give his food some time to settle down a little first.
Indika looked at his phone for a while, thinking about Shepard’s request, and then returned his attention to the spreadsheets on his screen, his diamond hard concentration effortlessly surfing the reams of data while a tiny part of his mind wondered about the commander of the military component of Project Lazarus. Shepard had obviously decided it was time to step up to the next phase and commence field operations. He is probably right. Indika nodded to himself.
They had agreed to postpone the military search operation so that Indika could get as much information from his research as possible to prepare the Lazarus troops for what they might face if they had to fight against the infected. He estimated that they had obtained probably eighty per cent of the data that they were going to gain from laboratory experimentation, and squeezing out the last twenty per cent would probably take several more weeks if not months.
But a mission to the heart of the infected territory now, by the Lazarus teams, might yield large amounts of invaluable information, especially if they were able to trace and capture the origin of the virus, Patient Zero. Indika’s eyes drifted, as they often did, from his laptop to the framed picture of his wife and son on the wall in front of him. Both were dead; early victims of the Lyssavirus. Brad would have been twelve this summer.
Indika was young for his post as director of the IDRC. Long before the appearance of the Lyssavirus and before anyone had even dreamed of a quarantine zone around Fort Lauderdale, he had simply been just another junior doctor at the Broward Health Medical Center. As a lowly internist in Infectious Diseases, Indika ran endless dull and repetitive clinics for sexually transmitted diseases, HIV, tuberculosis and viral hepatitis. The occasional juicy case of Zika, Chagas or Chikungunya were snapped up by the head of the clinic, Francis Cordeiro, who was always pathetically eager for the opportunity to talk to the press. Indika counted himself fortunate that he had once been asked to deal with a routine case of tick-borne, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, when Cordeiro was on holiday in the Bahamas.
In August of that year, the first Lyssavirus cases had surfaced in Fort Lauderdale, but they had been overlooked at first, lost against the background of all the other drug-crazed, violent behavior endemic to Miami and South Florida in general. Valuable time had been lost before an ex-cop turned journalist, specializing in homicides, identified the cases as a unique phenomenon separate from the other killings he covered, and attributed it to some type of viral condition. Eyewitness accounts labelled many of the infected as acting crazy, ‘as if they had rabies’, despite the overwhelming amount of evidence showing significant differences to the symptoms of genuine cases of human rabies.
Cordeiro, positively salivating at the chance for glory, quickly issued a ridiculous press release without any supporting evidence at all, declaring that he was carrying out urgent research to identify the condition, and that it was quite possibly a brand-new strain of rabies, to be named Lyssavirus Corderiensis.
The pathology from the lab came back pretty quickly, showing that whatever the new infection was, it was definitely not rabies, but by then the name had stuck and despite worldwide pedantic opposition from the scientific community, the general public and the media invariably referred to the outbreak as ‘the Lyssavirus’.
And then suddenly in mid-September the cases had exploded exponentially into a full outbreak. In Atlanta, at the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, alarmed by the lack of clarity into how the virus was being transmitted and baffled by their inability to even understand the mechanism by which it affected the human body, CDC scientists issued the first ever ‘Category A Outbreak’ alert on US soil.
Public schools and government offices received ill-informed briefings and confusing handouts on what action to take if confronted by someone displaying symptoms of the LC virus. They were also given courses on how to prevent infection, ideally through the totally useless measures of applying plenty of insect repellent and prophylactically cleaning out stagnant drains to prevent breeding grounds for the Aedes mosquito. Cordeiro’s greatly expanded and newly funded Infectious Diseases clinic, was now the national center of Lyssavirus research thanks to his shameless courting of the media. However, despite feverishly analyzing hundreds of samples taken from infected corpses, Cordeiro, Indika and the other scientists were baffled and forced to admit privately that they had no idea what on earth was affecting the victims.
At 4:27pm on September 28th phones rang off the hook around the medical center: they had received a call that there had been a mass casualty incident at the Galleria Mall. All available medical staff headed towards the ER, which was quickly and efficiently cleared out of all of the stabilized patients already there in order to make room for the expected influx of casualties. The switchboard started calling off-duty doctors and nurses to come in, starting with ER and burns specialists, and general surgeons.
Indika rushed from the ID department with his blood turned to ice water in his veins. His wife had taken their son to the Galleria for their joint birthday celebration. As soon as he had been informed of the incident, he had called Jenney’s phone. She had not picked up and after twelve endless, mundane rings, it had gone to voicemail.
The ER was full of every spare surgeon, nurse, anesthesiologist and physician in the hospital and the major incident packs were being unwrapped and positioned down the central aisle between the newly emptied beds. Photographers, journalists and cameramen quickly flooded in as news spread and soon the head of ER was bathed in the constant glare of flashes and spotlights as he strode around the
department making sure everything was ready, trailed by his deputy and the head nurse, both of whom, only minutes before, had been making out with each other in the storage cupboard.
As Indika pushed into the crowd through a side door a reporter squeezed through next to him and caught his eye.
“Any idea what the incident is?” Indika asked him, shouting over the noise.
“No man, I was just going to ask you.” The two of them looked around at the hubbub. Pretty much everyone was asking everyone else the same question. The general consensus seemed to be that it was probably some kind of terrorist incident, or a mass shooting.
“Hey everybody shut up,” someone yelled, “it’s on the TV!”
Everyone turned to look at the screen up above the reception desk. There was an aerial shot of the mall from a helicopter with an inset of a stern-faced anchor recounting the events as they occurred.
“Turn up the volume!” someone called.
“It’s broken,” shouted back the receptionist. “Just shut up!”
The room quietened, with the exception of one doctor still rapping out curt commands as to the final positioning of some of the trauma packs to the ER nurses, while everyone else watched the drama playing out on the silent screen. Indika kept one eye on the screen and tried calling his wife on his cell phone. Again, there was no answer and he fought down a rising feeling of helpless panic.
The helicopter camera tracked two large black police trucks as they hurtled down East Sunrise Boulevard, blue lights flashing, and pulled into the driveway at the main entrance to the mall. Their doors popped open and black clad SWAT officers poured out, advancing with aimed weapons towards the main doors of the mall, past an ambulance and two sheriffs’ department cars. Inside the ER, the tension spiked amongst the watching reporters and hospital staff, as they saw that there were already bodies lying around the vehicles in pools of blood.
Small flashes and puffs of smoke erupted soundlessly from their weapon muzzles as unidentified attackers erupted out of the mall and charged bare-handed towards the SWAT team. More bodies fell to the floor. The drama on the screen was made even more horrific by the complete lack of sound of what was happening. Seemingly dead or unconscious bodies from behind the assault team stood up and pulled down unsuspecting officers from the rear. SWAT operators stood back to back now, firing in all directions.
One SWAT team member ran over to a stretcher at the back of the ambulance, where a strapped down woman thrashed in panic. A receptionist gasped loudly in the tense silence of the ER as the police officer quite clearly put his weapon to the woman’s head and shot her several times. Indika flinched backwards in horror. The woman on screen had looked nothing like Jen, but still he realized that his fingernails were digging hard into his whitened palms. What the fuck do the cops think they are doing? A frantic hubbub broke out in the ER amongst the assembled staff and reporters.
The camera angle switched to the serious face of the network anchor back in the studio before almost immediately returning back to the Galleria. This time it was from the car park outside Macy’s where a news team stood amidst a sea of police cars, strobed with red and blue lights. The tense reporter, an attractive redhead, held her mike close to her mouth and spoke to the camera, pointing behind her at the dozens of civilians flooding out from the car park exits underneath the department store. A few police officers directed the crowd out into the car park, while others ran into the mall past the fleeing shoppers.
Indika’s heart was in his mouth and he inwardly cursed the poor quality of the footage as he squinted his eyes to try and see if he could identify his wife and son amongst them. Then an inset frame popped up showing a live feed from a security camera inside the mall. Police officers and a couple of armed civilians stood behind a makeshift barrier of tables and chairs and fired pistols and shotguns at charging figures. The attackers took no notice at all of the devastating fusillade and charged right up to the barrier even as bullets ploughed into their bodies and plucked at their clothes. Only when shot in the head at close range did they finally drop. A ticker tape popped up at the bottom of the screen announcing ‘LIVE NOW - LYSSAVIRUS OUTBREAK AT GALLERIA MALL’.
“Oh my god, it’s the Lyssavirus,” one of the journalists said. She immediately turned to Francis Cordeiro who was right next to her. “Doctor Cordeiro, did you anticipate an outbreak of this size? How many people do you think are infected? Is the Infectious Diseases Department ready to deal with a situation of this magnitude?”
Cordeiro’s winning smile snapped on in an automatic reflex as the camera pointed at him, but unprepared and without an autocue to read from, his usual smooth soundbites and dramatic flair were sadly absent. He faltered slightly and gaped at her for a second, before ignoring her questions completely, and instead fell back on to a series of well-worn and exaggerated claims about his ongoing research.
Indika was not there to see it. He had left the ER and was in the corridor, sprinting towards the Infectious Diseases clinic. Once there he ran straight through the clinic to the research office and laboratory section at the back. He fumbled his access card twice as he tried to swipe it and then, wrenching the too slow door aside, he grabbed up his rucksack from his desk and ran to the fridges at the back. Although lab pathology had failed to show that Lyssavirus Corderiensis was rabies of any type, it had not managed to show that it was anything else either, and therefore the research group had been developing more concentrated rabies vaccines, which the World Health Organization still recommended as the only available treatment, until further research turned up anything better.
Wrenching open the fridge door, Indika grabbed two large boxes of vials of post-exposure, human rabies immunoglobulin (Cordeiro version 2.3) and two boxes of pre-exposure, standard rabies immunization vaccine and stuffed them into a bright orange, emergency responder’s first aid bag. Then he went to the stores cupboard and grabbed a double handful of syringes and disposable needles which went straight into the bag as well. He emptied out his gym clothes from the backpack unceremoniously straight onto the floor, shoved in the medical bag, pulled a containment suit off the shelf and stuffed that in on top of the vaccines.
Then he started to run towards the staff carpark, heart in his mouth, heedless of the shouts of people around him with their meaningless questions. Jenney and Brad are still alive, Indika told himself firmly, and he was going to save them, even if it was the last thing he did.
Chapter Nine
The Galleria
Two minutes later Indika was speeding up the US 1 on his motorcycle, weaving in and out of traffic, ignoring the indignant horns of other motorists, and running red lights where he could. The flashing lights and siren of an ambulance driving the opposite way sent a surge of adrenalin through his body. Was that his wife or son in the back on their way to the ER? He revved the throttle and increased his speed. Indika understood that he would be of no use to his family if he crashed his motorcycle and killed himself, but he could not help the sense of urgency urging him to drive faster and faster, and get there as soon as he could.
Twelve minutes later, while Cordeiro pompously strode outside the ER, under the watchful lenses of half a dozen news cameras, to greet the first ambulances to arrive from the mall, Indika was parked up behind the line of police cruisers in Macy’s car park, pulling on his containment suit. He stopped halfway as he caught sight of the syringes in his bag, and after a second’s hesitation, he quickly broke open the boxes and, just to be safe, injected himself in one thigh with the pre-exposure vaccine, and in the other thigh with the post-exposure immunoglobulin. Then he tried to call Jenney’s phone again. No reply. He finished sealing up the suit, leaving the hood hanging off his shoulders, grabbed the orange medical bag and threaded his way through the police vehicles towards the mall.
One of the policemen from the group ahead of Indika caught sight of the movement in the corner of his eye and turned around with a hand already up to stop him coming any closer, but as his eyes took in th
e containment suit and then dropped down to see the big red cross on the first aid bag, his face relaxed with an expression of happy relief.
“Thank God,” the cop said, “you look like you know what the hell you’re doing. That was quick, are you from the CDC or something?”
“No, I’m from Broward Medical,” Indika replied, “Doctor Indika, Infectious Diseases.” He looked around at the police officers and ambulance crews slowly making order out of the chaotic and panicked crowd of shoppers. “Can you tell me what’s going on? Who’s in charge?”
“Nobody’s in charge yet. Our captain and the mobile command unit are stuck on West Broward, they got T-boned by a school bus coming out of the Museum of Discovery and Science. We got units coming down from Wilton Manors and the Broward County Sheriff’s tactical team are on the northern side of the Galleria on East Sunrise.”
The police officer looked young and totally overwhelmed, and probably had been too busy to have caught up with the latest news. Indika decided not to tell him that the story had not ended well for the SWAT team he had seen on TV at the northern entrance to the mall.
“Are you from the CDC?” A harried looking, blonde paramedic was jogging towards them, eyeing up Indika’s containment suit.
“No, I’m from Broward Medical, Infectious Diseases.” Indika saw that she had a clipboard in one hand. “Have you got an up-to-date list of casualties?”
“Yup, we have been checking them for ID and trying to keep family groups together. The first few ambulances we already sent back with about a dozen casualties. But to be honest…” the woman broke off, trying to work out what to say. “It’s this Lyssavirus thing, like an outbreak or something, but it’s not like any virus I’ve ever seen before. The effects are pretty much immediate. You get bit, and in seconds you go psychotic and crazy.” The medic threw up her hands in exasperation. “So actually, the injuries we are seeing are pretty minor. You know, bruises, scratching, that kind of thing. People are either getting minor injuries or they are getting killed. Almost nothing in between.” She puffed out her cheeks and blew out a breath through pursed lips as she calmed down. Then she looked sideways at Indika as a thought occurred to her. “Hey you work with that Doctor Cordeiro, right? Is he single?”