“You’re exaggerating,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“They’re going to violate the liberty of thirty-eight million people because of a hundred possibly infected?”
Duncan sped up the onramp onto the interstate. “Someone in the military’s determined that this infection, Agent X, is deadly enough that it’s the prime national security threat… at least for now.”
Agent X. She’d thought she would likely never hear that again in that context. She knew that samples had been taken and stored in the Centers for Disease Control biosafety level four laboratories, which were the most secure laboratories in the world, where everything from Ebola and smallpox to a strand of airborne AIDS virus were contained and studied. The United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases was the only other laboratory stateside that could even compare.
“Why haven’t I heard about it?”
“I only found out because we’ve been issued leave from all other projects to work on a vaccine. This is really top secret stuff. They’re going to shut down the news stations and radio, even the internet. With the flip of a switch, they’re going to shut down all information in an entire state.” He shook his head. “The fact that they can even do that is what’s most frightening for me. But anyway, they worked out some deal with the media outlets. You guys can stay on, but if you report anything about what’s coming, you’re done. They’ve got everything in place now, and they’re going to make it official this morning. No one in or out, under penalty of imprisonment or death.”
“Death?”
“That’s what they said.”
“It’s too big a border to secure. They can’t do it.”
“You haven’t worked in the military, Sam. You don’t know how they think. They know they can’t secure the whole border. They don’t need to. Thomas Edison did an experiment with elephants. He chained them to the ground, and the elephants would try desperately to get away. He did it for a long time, and eventually, the elephants stopped trying to escape. Then Edison replaced the chain with a string. The elephants couldn’t get away. They would feel the string and were paralyzed. They don’t need to prevent everybody from escaping. They just need to make an example out of the first few people that do. Everyone else will be held in place by a string.”
She sat quietly and processed that. All the pain and horror she had experienced during the past couple of months came flooding back to her, making her heart race. Short of breath, she had to close her eyes and take deep breaths to calm herself.
Agent X spread through even casual contact, and its incubation period was far shorter than even a normal strand of smallpox. Most viruses would have to flood the body to cause infection. The HIV virus, when passed through contact with an infected person, floods the new host’s body with millions of viruses. Agent X, from everything they could tell, only needed one virus to enter the body to cause infection. The world, she was convinced, had never seen anything like it.
And the most frightening part was that they weren’t sure where it had come from. They had found the index patient, or patients, in South America. They had been infected through a canister believed to have come from one of only two places in the world that still held diseases as deadly as smallpox: the United States and Russia. The thought that some rogue nation like Iran or North Korea had developed it as a weapon was much more terrifying.
She took out her cell phone and tried her sister again. The call went straight to voice mail.
4
After spending a day with Duncan, Samantha had to get back to Atlanta. She’d filed her reports on the Ebola outbreak in Kinshasa electronically, and she’d gotten a reply that the assistant director wanted to meet with her in person to go over them.
Duncan drove her to the airport in the morning, where she kissed him and said goodbye. He handed her something before she walked through the metal detectors: a copy of Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life.
“Now?” she said.
“Its subtitle is ‘life is long if you know how to use it.’ It’s a book about overcoming tragedy.”
“Thanks. I don’t know if I can concentrate enough to read, though.”
He hugged her, and she watched him as she went through the metal detectors.
The flight didn’t take long, and after landing and using the bathroom, she retrieved her car from long-term parking. She put the hundred-and-twelve-dollar parking fee on a government-issued expense card.
Atlanta was warm but had a dry heat that didn’t affect her. She rolled down her windows as she drove home and listened to an Enya station on Pandora.
When she arrived at her house, she was struck by how much she had actually missed it. It was really nothing more than a small brown-brick house with three bedrooms-one for her, one for her mother, and a guest bedroom that was never used-but it held a comfort she’d lacked growing up in apartments and condos in Southern California. Samantha went inside and heard someone in the kitchen.
She walked in to find her mother’s nurse, Dana, cooking lunch.
“Back already?” she asked.
“I got done quicker than I thought. How is she?”
“Yesterday was bad. She didn’t remember who I was and kept thinking I was a burglar. She tried to call the police.”
“I’m so sorry, Dana.”
“Hey, that’s why you pay me the big bucks. She’s much better today. She’s watching her soaps if you want to go up.”
Samantha dropped her gym bag by the closet and went upstairs to the bedrooms. She went into her mother’s room and saw her lying on her back, staring blankly at the flat-screen television on the wall.
“How are you, Mom?”
“I didn’t get my medication today. I need my medication for my flu.”
Samantha sat next to her and gently brushed back her hair from her eyes. “You don’t have the flu, Mom. But I’ll check with Dana and make sure she gets your medication to you.”
“I need my medication. It makes my throat feel better.”
Samantha leaned down and kissed her forehead. She sat back up and held her mother’s hand. Placing her back against the wall, she turned toward the television.
“So, what’s going on in this episode?”
Within an hour, her mother was asleep. Samantha quietly rose, turned off the television, and left the room, shutting the door softly behind her. She went downstairs and found a note from Dana saying that lunch was prepared and in the fridge. Tuna fish sandwiches were wrapped in Saran Wrap, with small bags of chips placed next to them. She took hers and went out on the porch. Sitting down on her steps, she unwrapped her sandwich and took a bite, looking out over her neighborhood.
Her community was quiet, without any commotion in the short winters and few calls to the police in the long summers. The neighbors mostly kept to themselves, but they would invite her to summer barbeques and picnics, which she would always take her mother to. She tried to get her mother out as much as possible, but within the last year, that had been getting more difficult. The Alzheimer’s was slowly sucking away the strong, confident person Samantha remembered as a child. It had set in early, while Samantha was still an undergrad at New York University.
Dates were the first to go; she’d started out missing birthdays and holidays. Those were followed by events. Her mother would frequently confuse something that happened to her sister with something that happened to her. Or something she saw on television would become an occurrence that had happened to her. At first, Samantha, her brother, and her sister were in denial. They attributed everything to the natural processes of aging. But when she forgot how to open a soda can, they knew something was wrong.
Samantha placed the sandwich down on her lap. She took out her cell and tried her sister, Jane, again, and then she called her sister’s husband, Robert. Neither of them answered.