PATRICIA CORNWELL. Unnatural Exposure

‘So as of now, no one’s leaving,’ Fujitsubo said as his face continued to reign over us from the video screen.

‘That’s right.’

‘Good.’

‘What if people resist?’ I asked the obvious question. ‘What are you going to do with them? You can’t take them into custody and risk exposure.’

Martinez hesitated. He looked up at Fujitsubo on the video screen. ‘Commander, would you like to field this one, sir?’ he asked.

‘We’ve actually already discussed this at great length,’ Fujitsubo said to us. ‘I have spoken to the secretary of the Department of Transportation, to Vice Admiral Perry, and of course, the Secretary of Defense. Basically, this thing is speeding its way up to the White House for authorization.’

‘Authorization for what?’ It was Miles who asked.

‘To use deadly force, if all else fails,’ Martinez said to all of us.

‘Christ,’ Wesley muttered.

I listened in disbelief, staring up at doomsday gods.

‘We have no choice,’ Fujitsubo spoke calmly. ‘If people panic and start fleeing the island and do not heed Coast Guard warnings, they will — not if — but will bring smallpox onto the mainland. And we’re talking about a population which either has not been vaccinated in thirty years. Or an immunization done so long ago it’s no longer effective. Or a disease that has mutated to the extent that our present vaccine is not protective. There isn’t a good scenario, in other words.’

I didn’t know if I felt sick to my stomach because I wasn’t well or because of what I’d just heard. I thought of that weather-beaten fishing village with its leaning headstones and wild, quiet people who just wanted to be left alone. They weren’t the sort to obey anyone, for they answered to a higher power of God and storms.

‘There must be another way,’ I said.

But there wasn’t.

‘By reputation, smallpox is a highly contagious infectious disease. This outbreak must be contained,’ Fujitsubo exclaimed the obvious. ‘We’ve got to worry about houseflies hovering around patients, and crabs headed for the mainland. How do we know we don’t have to worry about the possibility of mosquito transmission, as in Tanapox, for God’s sake? We don’t even know what all we’ve got to worry about since we can’t fully identify the disease yet.’

Martin looked at me. ‘We’ve already got teams out there, nurses, doctors, bed isolators so we can keep these people out of hospitals and leave them in their homes.’

‘What about dead bodies, contamination?’ I asked him.

‘In terms of United States law, this constitutes a Class One public health emergency.’

‘I realize that,’ I said, impatiently, for he was getting bureaucratic on me. ‘Cut to the chase.’

‘Burn all but the patient. Bodies will be cremated. The Pruitt house will be torched.’

Fujitsubo tried to reassure us. ‘USAMRIID’s got a team heading out. We’ll be talking to citizens, trying to make them understand.’

I thought of Davy Crockett and his son, of people and their panic when space-suited scientists took over their island and started burning their homes.

‘And we know for a fact that the smallpox vaccine isn’t going to work?’ Wesley said.

‘We don’t know that for a fact yet.’ Martin answered. ‘Tests on laboratory animals will take days to weeks. And even if vaccination is protective in an animal model, this may not translate into protection for humans.’

‘Since the DNA of the virus has been altered,’ Fujitsubo warned, ‘I am not hopeful that vaccinia virus will be effective.’

‘I’m not a doctor or anything,’ Martinez said, ‘but I’m just wondering if you could vaccinate everyone anyway, just in case it might work.’

‘Too risky,’ Martin said. ‘If it’s not smallpox, why deliberately expose people to smallpox, thereby possibly causing some people to get the disease? And when we develop the new vaccine, we’re not going to want to come back several weeks later and vaccinate people again, this time with a different pox.’

‘In other words,’ Fujitsubo said, ‘we can’t use the people of Tangier like laboratory animals. If we keep them on that island and then get a vaccine out to them as soon as possible, we should be able to contain this thing. The good news about smallpox is it’s a stupid virus, kills its hosts so fast it will burn itself out if you can keep it restricted to one area.’

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *