“Then what was it?”
“Sam…” Mick paused. “Sam grabbed for attention with suicide attempts. A lot. The first time was when we were sixteen.”
“Sixteen?” Dustin asked shocked. “My dad tried to kill himself when he was sixteen?”
“He didn’t want to. Keep that in mind. He was on the roof of Bailey’s Drugstore. Said if Coach Hawk didn’t get down there and put him back on the football team he was gonna jump. Now, we knew Sam was pissed. He wanted to get attention, and it was only me and your mom looking up at him on that roof. We told him, it was only twenty feet, he wasn’t gonna die, he’d only break his legs and never play again. Don’t you know—”
“He jumped,” Dustin whispered. “I heard about that. He did break both his legs. That’s how he got the limp.”
Mick nodded. “We never said that he was trying to kill himself. But the second time, your mom told.”
“That was the pills, right, because he was seeing that doctor for a while.”
Mick shook his head. “Your dad joined the service, then he changed his mind. Found out he couldn’t get out of it and tried to slice his wrist. But he used a plastic butter knife, never really made it too deep into the flesh, but the stigma was there. And he got out of going.”
“This time he used a gun, and he couldn’t take it back.”
Mick finished the beer. “No… he couldn’t take it back.”
Dustin breathed out sadly as he stared down at his feet tapping the bare spot. “I’m gonna miss him.”
“Me, too. We all will. And we’ll all be affected by this. Especially you guys and your mom, who hates me right now. But your grandmother yelled at her in that Donna Reed way.”
“Bet Mom was mad.”
“Called me a tattletale.”
“You are,” Dustin said.
“True.” Mick tilted his head in acknowledgement.
“Think she’s still mad about it?”
“Maybe not.” Mick shook his head then turned it at the same time as Dustin when the back porch door slammed.
Dylan stood on the porch. Loudly, bitterly, she growled, “Dinner.” then she stormed in the house.
Mick looked back to Dustin who just stared at him. “Then again,” Mick said, “maybe she is.”
Barrow, Alaska
Paul had just finished sending the documents electronically to Henry. He awaited word on Winston Messaging for Henry’s reaction. Paul told him basically what the documents said, but somehow Henry didn’t believe him. Perhaps Henry didn’t want to believe Paul. Maybe he could find something Paul had messed up. And Paul was hoping Henry would. Something—anything—to say the findings were wrong, grossly premature. Inaccurate.
They weren’t.
There were four communities along Northern Alaska’s coast, just four. Their total population was less than that of Barrow. But four scattered communities said a lot more than one isolated northern community.
James Littleton visited each town. He assured Paul he wanted nothing more than to dismiss Paul’s findings, but he couldn’t. He went through each community with a fine toothed comb, wanting, like everyone else, for nothing to be there.
They believed the towns would be infected, and they were correct.
Though each community was a day apart in progress of the infection, they were indeed infected. Fast, too. It was spreading rapidly, like wildfire.
The information sent to Henry was simple. Basically breakdowns, the numbers of victims, the symptoms presented. Nothing Paul hadn’t conveyed over the phone. But still he awaited Henry’s thoughts, reaction, and opinion.
And with the ‘beep’ of Henry’s return, Paul got all those in the form of one, short simple message.
HBK_HENRY: Dear God, what have we started?
THE OUTBREAK
CHAPTER EIGHT
Winston Research Center
Weston, Virginia
August 29th
Although the memo was everything Henry wanted to see and believe, he had as hard a time swallowing the contents as he did any cough medicine.
Classified: CONTAINED.
That was the heading of a memo to Henry issued by the Centers for Disease Control the previous day. The document that Henry had hoped would be a ‘not guilty’ verdict turned into the cause of a night’s lost sleep.
He didn’t understand the classification. How, in one day, could the CDC simply say the flu was contained based solely on the towns infected, location, and initial outbreak? Henry didn’t buy it, not for one second. Perhaps that was the reason he called the emergency meeting; for his own conscience, his own peace of mind, Henry wanted to push the CDC to investigate further. To not let it die. Not yet. He would give his best argument. He had to.
Kurt Wilson from the Centers for Disease Control was the last to arrive at Henry’s meeting, and he arrived with attitude. Irritated that he had to fly in for a meeting that he considered to be unnecessary, he took his seat with six others at the table in the conference room. He flipped through a folder of photos and statistics that he had already seen. It was his call to judge the flu contained, and he wasn’t happy that he was being second-guessed.
“Swine flu, it’ll start out of the blue.” Henry lifted his hands as he spoke to the group. “It disappears just as fast. In 1972 at a small fishing village in Italy, a version of Swine Flu began out of nowhere. Deadly, strong, it was familiar and was tagged ‘Secondo Venire’, meaning, Second Coming. It was given this name by one of the town’s doctors who recognized it all too easily. He had seen it before, or so he thought, sixty years earlier when he was a child during the Spanish Flu pandemic. Because of his discovery, health officials were called in. This doctor was correct, though it was not the Spanish flu; our researchers had it matched down to one strand of eight in the virus that differs. Immediately, health officials closed this town. Quarantined it and surrounding communities. The flu ran its course, no other towns were infected. Case closed.” Henry paused to look at the faces around the table. “Until two weeks later when the flu showed up in a small town in Madagascar, courtesy of ‘fisherman to fisherman’ transfer on a boat making a seven seas journey. What saved the world from another pandemic, deadlier than the Spanish Flu, was the fact that earlier a division of the World Health Organization had set up a lab four miles from this little village. The reason for this little lab being set up there is that Madagascar, as you all know, has been the hot spot of the world for various plagues. The buck stopped there with Secondo Venire.” Henry paced slowly. “But not before it mutated and one teenage boy was hospitalized with a version of plague when he caught this airborne swine flu. The results: Within one week, everyone in that village was dead. Dead.” Henry repeated. “The nearest community was twelve miles away, and since this teenage boy and three others were known to have the plague, travel between the communities had been cut off. Due to those measures Secondo Venire never left Madagascar except in test tubes.”
Slouched to one side, Kurt tapped his pencil on the table. He merely raised his eyes. “Not to sound like, I don’t know, an asshole, but we know this. What’s your point?”