The term here wasn't really mutiny. Okay, it was mutiny. But by then things were going to hell in a handbasket and everyone knew it. Obeying the increasingly shrill bitch at 1600 was the last thing on anyone's mind.
That would be about early April. But that was more than a month after Patient Zero when the Prez finally ordered "staged redeployment" and I got left holding the shit end of the stick. And then there was the whole "Emergency Powers Act" fiasco.
Patient Zero was in Chicago.
Why Chicago you ask. Well, since plenty of people have answered and I obsess on questions like that these days I'll repeat.
Ching Mao Pong had been a peasant as a child. He grew up in central China and became one of the large class of "undocumented workers" who moved into the coastal areas as common laborers. Apparently at some point he convinced a Chinese smuggler, what is called a "snake-head," to get him to the U.S.
How Ching Mao Pong became infected is unsure. All that is known is that he was loaded by the snake-head, along with fifteen others, into a cargo container bound for the States. Its destination was Chicago where an accomplice snake-head would open it and let the immigrants out into the freedom of virtual slavery in the U.S. until they paid off the extortionate price of the transportation. There was sufficient food and water packed into the container to sustain all sixteen. (Twelve males and four females, by the way.) Don't ask about sanitary facilities.
How could a container of immigrant Chinese possibly make it to Chicago you ask?
Uh, ship to Seattle then Great Northern Railway to Chicago. Not that hard.
Oh, customs?
Containers were categorized several ways. At the low end were containers from sources that were both "unrecognized" and known drug smuggling areas/companies. If, say, a container entered the U.S. that was a. from Colombia, b. from a company that did not have special documentation with Customs and Immigration Service and c. did not have a pre-cleared seal on it, it was five percent likely to be checked.
That is, of containers coming from known drug source countries without any indication that they didn't contain drugs, only five out of a hundred actually got opened and inspected.
Oh, there were all sorts of special systems to examine them. Dogs might walk by, X-rays if they weren't something that might get damaged, neutrino systems were even in consideration.
But only five in a hundred from the worst possible source got opened and examined thoroughly.
Why?
Money. Time. Interference in commerce. Call it an iron triangle. Nobody wanted to spend the money on the (huge) number of inspectors that would be necessary to actually check, say, every dodgy container coming into the U.S., much less every container without slowing things down to a crawl. There were containers that never were supposed to get opened in the U.S. There were times when it was smarter and cheaper, if you were shipping something from, say China to France, to ship it via rail across the U.S. It got loaded on a ship in China, dumped off in L.A., put on a train, carried to Jacksonville and loaded on another ship for Nice.
There were a fuckload of containers coming from China in those days. Most of them were to addresses in the U.S. Hell, you couldn't go into a store and not buy something from China. Even the plastic your food was wrapped in came mostly from . . . China.
And China was not considered a threat source. Yes, people got smuggled but not, you know, drugs or bombs. Sometimes it was discovered after a "packet" was found that a highly trained bomb-sniffing dog had walked right past one of these snake-head containers and never even quivered. They were good dogs. They were looking for drugs or bombs. People did not count. Don't bark at People. Good dog.
A snake-head named Chan Twai opened the container when it was dropped off at a rented warehouse. He later said that upon opening it he thought everyone in the container was dead. He knew what was happening in China. He ran, hoping he hadn't caught the Plague.
Ching Mao Pong, though, was alive. Apparently nearly insane but alive. He stumbled out of the container into a country about which he knew virtually nothing with no one he could speak to and nowhere to go.
He did what he'd done in China. He looked for food and work. According to his accounts he ate garbage and drank from bathrooms for two days. He saw people bumming for money from people and the police did not stop them. He bummed money and food and even cigarettes and he was not told to stop once by the police, which he found to be very nearly paradise. Truly America was the land of opportunity.
On the third day he found men that looked somewhat like him standing on a street corner. He was picked to go work on laying sod for a new building in the final stages of completion. He couldn't speak the language of any of the men he worked with but "working with your hands was working with your hands."
He knew he had been exposed to the Plague. He had gotten sick. He had nearly died. Most of the others in the compartment had died, two from when one of them went mad. But he survived, he recovered. He thought he was fine. He was feeling somewhat unwell when he finally found work but he had had little good food recently.
He collapsed while working on the job. The contractor who had hired him cursed, loaded Ching in his pickup truck, dropped him off at the emergency room and made himself scarce.
Ching was semicoherent when dropped off. He was directed to sit in a chair. There were more police and they apparently wanted him to stay. He sat. He collapsed again. The emergency room personnel, who were not masked and had not received their immunizations, put him on a gurney and moved him up the triage list.
The responding doctor saw a slightly emaciated Asian male in his mid thirties who was suffering from high temperature and disorientation. Initial exam determined he was suffering from, among other things, dehydration. He was given an IV. He went into spasms shortly afterwards and dropped into unconsciousness.
A Chinese-speaking nurse was called in when he regained consciousness. By then the possibility of bird flu was considered and Nurse Quan was in Cat Four dress. Ching was questioned closely. He was initially uncooperative until the nurse, who was an immigrant, called in a security guard and, unknown to the doctor or any of the others including the guard, warned that he would be sent to "reeducation" if he did not tell her everything she asked. He spilled his guts.
He went back into febrile disorientation a few hours later, slipped into a coma that night and died before dawn.
CDC, by that time, had over sixteen active quarantines on the West Coast. Specialists got on the still flying planes for Chicago and arrived just as Ching breathed his last. They attempted to get the Illinois and Chicago authorities to override the President's directive against forced immunization. Two problems. Chicago was one of the cities that had screwed up its receipt of vaccine and they weren't even willing to do forced immunizations with what they had.
But the news media got the news that a confirmed case had been detected in Chicago and Katy Bar the Door.
Chapter Five
When the Turbine Blows Up
Now we get to the subject of "trust." Trust, as a society, is something that most people understand poorly. Trust is vital for a society to function. It's not hard to explain, though. Trust means that if you loan your lawn mower to a neighbor, you've got a pretty good chance of getting it back. There's an implied contract. I let you use the lawn mower. You return it in pretty much the same condition you got it.