“You gave her water before we left.”
“She peed on the seat. She’s hot. She won’t drink. How do you know? I don’t know she won’t die.”
“I’m the spooky guy,” Mitch said. “Remember?”
“This isn’t a joke, Mitch,” Kaye said, her voice rising.
“Can’t you smell her?” Mitch asked.
“I smell her better than you do,” Kaye said.
“She isn’t dying. I’d know.”
“Please stop arguing,” Stella murmured, and rolled over, kicking feebly at the door. Her bare feet made the weakest little thumps. “My head hurts. Let me out/ I want to get out.”
Kaye held her daughter against her brief struggles. With a discouraged sigh, the girl went limp again. Kaye looked at the back of Mitch’s head, the uneven cut of his nape, a bad haircut. You saved money where you could. Mitch had never enjoyed haircuts anyway. For a moment, she hated her husband. She wanted to bite and scratch and hit him.
No one knew more about her daughter than she did. Nobody. If Mitch spoke one more time, Kaye thought she would scream.
41
OHIO
Trask or someone working for him had shut down the server that handled all the school’s internal and external landline and satellite communications, and it would not start up without a password. None of the teachers or nurses or Kelson knew that password, and Trask of course was no longer available.
Augustine could guess on motives, but it did not matter. Nothing mattered but doing whatever he could to shake loose the needed supplies. Dicken did not carry a phone. The only working phone at the moment was Augustine’s Web phone.
Personally, and through his secretary in the EMAC office in Indiana, he had sent messages—voice and email—to the heads of all the agencies on his list, confirming his previous calls for supplies. Anything. They had told him they would do their best, but the situation was very tight, and it might take a day or two.
Augustine knew they did not have that long.
One intrepid deputy to an undersecretary at Health and Human Services had suggested he call local media and make his case. “Phones are ringing off the hook over here.”
Augustine had declined. He knew how that would go. The beleaguered and unpopular director of Emergency Action would be picked apart by reporters trying to prove him a liar.
He needed facts to avoid panicking the public even further, and Dicken had not yet delivered anything useful.
Now Augustine sat in a worn secretary’s chair at a small desk near the corner, and used his Web phone to call up reports on the internal NIH Web site. At least they had not locked out his personal account; he was not completely persona non grata.
He studied the freshly posted morning statistics, the numerical anatomy of the disaster, on the phone’s small color screen.
The first case had probably occurred in California, at the Pelican Bay school. Three California penal corporations had won the contracts to house SHEVA children in the Golden State; all had been particularly reluctant to work with any Washington-based authority. Augustine had come to hate those administrators, and those schools; the culture of the California penal system had become inbred, defensive, and arrogant during the last decade of the twentieth century, the Drug War years. He was not surprised that Pelican Bay had not reported the spread of the disease until the day before yesterday. First to notice, next to last to report.
The disease had struck almost simultaneously at fifteen other schools, from Oregon to Mississippi. Dicken would be interested in that fact. Where was the reservoir? Where were the vectors? How had the virus spread before it erupted into pandemic?
How and why had it lain dormant for so long?
Pelican Bay had lost twelve hundred students out of six thousand. One in five. San Luis Obispo and Port Hueneme were reporting smaller percentages, but half the students at Kalispell, almost a thousand, were already gone, and more were expected to die within the next twelve hours. El Cajon, fifty-six out of three hundred.
His eye swept east through the maps and charts. Phoenix, two thousand out of eight thousand. Two thirds had fallen ill in Tucson; half of those were dead. Provo had lost half, but with less than one hundred students. Mormons tended not to hand over their kids without a fight, and there were fewer than a thousand SHEVA children in the three schools in Utah.
Augustine wondered how many of the “home-schooled,” as some agencies called them, the underground virus children, had become ill and died. The disease would spread to them soon enough, he guessed.
In Ohio, Iowa, and Indiana, in twelve schools holding sixty-three thousand children gathered from across the Midwest, over thirteen thousand SHEVA children were now dead.
He was looking at the stats for Illinois when the phone beeped. He answered.
It was Rachel Browning from the SRO.
“Hello, Mark. I hear you called. Sad day,” Browning said.
“Rachel, how nice to hear from you,” Augustine said. “We need supplies here immediately—”
“Hold for a sec. Have to take this one.” Light jazz played over the line. That was too much; he almost snapped the phone shut. But he held his palm away from the cover. Patience was the watchword, certainly now, and certainly for a wraith, a wisp whose tenuous authority could simply wink out at any moment.
Browning came back. “One in four, Mark,” she began, as if it were a sports score.
“We’re counting one in five, averaged across the country, Rachel. We need—”
“You’re stuck way out in the middle of it, I hear. Looks like seventy plus percent rate of contagion,” Browning interrupted. “Aerosol vital for at least three hours. Horrendous. It’s outside of anyone’s control.”
“It’s slowing.”
“There aren’t many left to infect, not in the schools.”
“We could cut the losses to almost nothing with proper medical care,” Augustine said. “We need doctors and equipment.”
“The Ohio district director is a corrupt son of a bitch,” Browning said. “At least we can agree on that. He diverted medical supplies from school warehouses because the kids were so healthy. The rumor is some of his staffers sold the supplies for ten cents on the dollar to Russian bosses in Chicago, and now they’re on the black market in Moscow.”
“I did not know that,” Augustine said, tapping his fingernail on the desktop.
“You should have, Mark. Justice is moving in on little leopard feet,” Browning said. “That does not help you or the virus kids. Worse still, there are a lot of brown BVDs in Washington, Mark. They’re scared. So am I.”
“None of the adults here are ill. It is not a threat to us. We know the etiology and nature of the disease.” This was a lie, but he had to show some strength.
“If this illness has anything to do with ancient viruses, and I suspect it does—don’t you?—we’re going to full-blown biological emergency. PDD 298, Mark.”
It had been three years since Augustine had read the details of Presidential Decision Directive 298.
“Hayford has a crisis bill on the House floor now,” Browning continued. “No virus child will be tolerated outside a federal school. None. Not even on the reservations or in Utah. All schools will come under direct EMAC federal control. You’ll like that. The bill increases violation penalties and authorizes tripling the staff for interdiction and arrest. We’ll be hiring every fat security guard with a bigger gun than a dick, and every yahoo who ever failed cop school. They’ll double our budget, Mark.”
Augustine looked at his Rolex. “It’s eleven in the morning there,” he said. “Can anyone in Washington get doctors out here?”