Warren Adler, Sales Manager for World Software, walked off his plane at Kansas City Municipal Airport feeling faint, heading for the men’s room as quickly as he could, feeling warning signs of diarrhea, knowing full well he shouldn’t have eaten the plate of enchiladas at La Trinidad last night.
Too spicy, he thought, walking faster, carrying his garment bag and sample case, hoping he could make it to a free toilet since he had no change in his pocket at the moment. He almost ran across the tile floor of the bathroom to a toilet stall and dropped his pants, virtually collapsing on the commode seat before a rush of fluid came from his bowels. At the same time he sneezed, catching it with his hand, closing his eyes when a painful bowel spasm gripped him again.
When he opened his eyes he saw blood in his palm, and the sight of it caused his to gasp. “What the fuck?”
He took a handful of toilet paper to wipe blood off his nose and at the same time he tasted it on his tongue. A curious chill made him shiver. He wiped his hand and took more toilet paper to wipe his buttocks. From the corner of his eye he saw a wad of soggy, bright red paper between his fingers.
“Oh no,” he whispered, experiencing the beginnings of terror. What could cause him to bleed from his nose and ass? How could the enchiladas at La Trinidad in Mexico City have been that bad?
Assistant Aduanales Inspector at Mexico City International Airport Gonzalo Fuentes was driving home, navigating through the impossible traffic in Mexico City toward Laguna Gloria, taking the rest of the day off because he didn’t feel well. It scared him when he urinated in an airport bathroom an hour ago, for he did not pass yellow urine as he expected. First, there was a pinkish tint, then a brighter red, and finally nothing but blood filling the urinal. Fifteen minutes later blood was leaking from his rectum, flow he couldn’t stop with tissue paper. Then he vomited, and now he was sure he was dying. He held his rosary in one hand, fingering each bead, saying prayers, wondering what was wrong with him. Should he stop at the church first to offer his confession?
Honking his car horn, he sped southeast with the Chevrolet’s accelerator pressed to the floor, deciding it was better to go to the hospital. He felt dizzy and his underpants were soaking wet with blood, oozing out over the car’s front seat cover, dribbling down his legs until his socks were damp.
Gonzalo was traveling at seventy miles per hour when he lost consciousness, slamming into the side of a delivery truck owned by Rosita’s Tortilla Factory, sending the truck careening across Calle Los Petras through the front plate glass window of Miguel Vasquez’s small grocery store, El Mercado. Miguel was crushed by the truck’s front bumper, pinned against a side wall.
Gonzalo Fuentes’s head struck his steering wheel first, driving the bony septum in his nose into his brain before his sternum cracked like green wood against the steering column, broken bone and slivers of metal passing through his heart and lungs, killing him almost instantly.
Within half an hour ambulance attendants removed the bloody remains of Assistant Aduanales Inspector Gonzalo Fuentes from the wreckage of his car to take him to a nearby funeral home, where dozens of his family members would pay their last respects, often by means of an old Mexican custom, kissing the dead man’s hand.
At Houston Baptist Hospital, Dr. John Meeker pored over the lab results as glass slides were being prepared for a microscopic examination of Malcolm Fitzhugh’s blood cells while he waited for a return call from the CDC in Atlanta. When he took his first look at the slides he saw nothing out of the ordinary. But there was one strangely shaped organism he couldn’t identify. He had a vague feeling he should have been able to recognize it and yet for the moment, it escaped him.
“Get me Dr. Birdwell,” he said, wanting the opinion of the chief of hematology before he did any more guessing. He looked into the microscope again, at a spore-like object that did not belong, not a virus but something else, more like a bacterium, although not a recognizable one. Could this be the mysterious killer? he wondered.
If it were transmittable by human contact, whatever it was, this could be the beginning of an epidemic far more deadly than Ebola or any of the similar resistant viruses. And what was the host? What had Malcolm Fitzhugh come in contact with that could kill him so quickly by means of hemorrhage beyond any form of chemical clotting control? In twenty-three years of internal medicine Meeker had never witnessed anything like the bleeding inside Fitzhugh, bleeding that nothing would stop.
A team from the city’s Communicable Disease Agency was on the way, but Meeker had a sinking feeling they were going to be way too late — not only for him and the hospital staff, but for the city as well.
In Kansas City, Warren Adler collapsed waiting for a taxi in front of the main concourse at the airport. Blood pooled around him, spreading, drawing dozens, then hundreds of curious bystanders. Adler was dead by the time an ambulance arrived. Two young attendants placed Adler’s body on a stretcher and loaded him into the ambulance. One man, David Starnes, had forgotten to wear his protective latex gloves.
A black janitor by the name of Billy Wells was summoned to mop up the blood on the sidewalk. The wringer on his mop bucket didn’t work and he used his hands to wring blood and soapy water from his mop, wiping his palms dry on his pants when the job was finished.
Seventy-six passengers who had been aboard Mexicana Flight 1151 from Mexico City to Houston boarded other airplanes, or went home to their families and friends. Some began experiencing flu-like symptoms almost immediately.
A microscopic organism began moving across parts of the United States and Mexico, dividing, multiplying inside the host bodies of travelers, conquering immune systems with suddenness previously unknown to modern medical science, causing massive hemorrhaging and sudden death. Doctors did not recognize it when it was found in a victim’s blood, although it was clearly not a virus, the tiny killers everyone in medicine feared. Lying dormant in a tomb for centuries, they reawakened in what was to be called “the summer of the plague.”
Chapter 18
Maria Gomez lay in bed awaiting the arrival of her priest to perform extreme unction, the last rites to prepare her soul for life after death. She knew she was dying from the same cancer as her brother, Roberto, although he had not bled so heavily, only a small amount in the urine bag below his hospital bed, turning it red the last few days before he died.
Maria told her children to go down the street to stay with Aunt Esmeralda while she was sick as a way of keeping them from seeing her lying in a blood-soaked bed, nor did she want them there when the priest, Father Hidalgo, gave her the last rites.
When she called Father Hidalgo she had told him to come in without knocking, for she was too weak now to leave her bed to answer the door. Rodolfo was away driving the gasoline truck to Louisiana, thinking Maria only had a bad case of the flu… the bleeding had not started until the day he left and there was no way to reach him on the road when it became all too clear this was no ordinary illness.
And she did not want to worry him. When he left two days ago he was also complaining of feeling sick and that seemed odd. Rodolfo was never ill.
Maria knew now she should have gone to the doctor when the bleeding started, yet she feared being told she had the same cancer that killed her brother, preferring to wait and pray for a miracle, that this bleeding might be something else.
She heard the front door open.
“Mrs. Gomez?” a distant voice asked, a voice she knew well from attending Mass every Sunday.