White Plague (22 page)

“Down there all I’m doing is running cool towels over foreheads, along with Del Grazo and Marietta.”

“Believe me, the people you’re doing it for do not consider it a small thing,” I said.

Eddie was on his laptop, both of our computers having been brought down by the crew. We’d been poring over articles, reports, and speculations on the disease, exploring the reams of information on my thumb drive sticks, replicated onto his.

She said, “Tell me what we’re looking for.”

“Treatments. Old diaries. Any ideas to help,” I said, my eyes burning from staring at the screen.

She rolled her chair beside mine. Knee to knee. “Four eyes beat two,” she said.

More than ten million pages have been written about the Spanish flu since 1918: symptoms, history, speculations, treatments. There were hundreds of photos in here of turn-of-the-century schoolchildren with surgical masks on, terrified kids, patients occupying rows of beds in quarantined Army wards in France, frightened doctors refusing to enter wards, public health notices in newspapers, mayors in radio studios, urging people to stay home. And most recently, results on the reconstituted virus in Atlanta, by the CDC.

The problem wasn’t that we had too little information. The problem was that we had too much.

“Everything but a cure,” Eddie said.

I found a diary written by a doctor working on a South Dakota Sioux Indian reservation in 1918.
Patients sitting up in bed survived at a higher rate
.

Eddie read aloud from a memo written in Philadelphia General Hospital, mid-outbreak. “‘
We’ve had some success inoculating healthy people with blood from survivors. Rate of infection went down.
’”

Karen breathed audibly. “You mean, just shoot blood from one person into another?”

“Yeah,” said Eddie. “That’s what they did a hundred years ago.”

“And that worked?” she said, shocked.

I rubbed my eyes, exhausted, groped for coffee. I stirred in three packs of sugar. Anything to get my attention span up. “Survivors have antibodies in their blood.”

“But what about all those warnings about sharing fluids? Like in AIDS?”

I nodded. “The first blood transfusions happened in the 1700s in France, Karen. Doctors joined hoses to patients, ran a foot pump, circulated blood, one person to another. Crude as it gets, and no disinfectants, and it killed some people, but it also worked sometimes. But we didn’t know about different blood types then.”

Karen made a noise deep in her throat. “You’re suggesting that we collect blood from survivors, and inject it into the sick? It sounds so . . . desperate.”

“It is desperate. And not just the sick. The antibodies would act as a preventative in the healthy, in theory. And we’d also be transferring in lymphocytes, active virus-killing cells. I wonder, Eddie, can we collect blood from survivors, enough to vaccinate a lot of people, if they’re the same blood type? Enough—if the medicines don’t work?”

“Can we pool blood from different donors?”

“Too dangerous. More chance of rejection. One to one. And blood type to blood type.”

It wasn’t exactly the ideal treatment. But we called down to Lieutenant Cullen via ship phone and asked how many hypodermics were on board, just in case. She told us there was a shortage. If we wanted to inoculate, we’d need to reuse hypodermics.

“Great,” I said. “On top of everything else, dirty needles.”

“We could disinfect after each shot,” suggested Eddie. “If it comes to that. Lab sterilizers.”

“We get Chief Apparecio up here, and other survivors. Draw blood. It will have antibodies. We heparinize syringes. Put a couple milliliters of heparin in there so the blood doesn’t clot. Then we’ll give fifty cc’s per patient, make the stuff last. Worst comes to worst . . .”

Eddie finished it. “Worst comes to worst, we try Dr. One’s patented homemade miracle vaccine. Stops hair loss. Stops gout. Builds muscles. Kills flus.”

Morose, I said, “It would help if we had Elisa kits.”

Karen asked, “What’s an Elisa kit?”

“A way to test for the presence of disease-related proteins,” Eddie explained.

“Speak English.”

“You take a microtiter plate and—”

“A what? A what? I said speak English!”

I sighed. “It’s a plastic plate with little wells in it. You put blood samples in each well. You add a reagent. It enables you to isolate proteins. We want to ID viral proteins, or enzymes to try to disable. If we can ID them, if we had computer-aided designing . . .” I cursed. A wave of futility swept over me. “Goddamnit! The goddamn CDC can do this.
They
have equipment. We’re just three people bumbling around on a ship. Why did they fucking cut us off?”

Karen gripped my forearm, clearly to get my mind on business again, “What do these microplates look like, Joe?”

Joe.
We rummaged the wet lab. We found no Elisa kits aboard. Nothing in the dry lab either. That would have been too easy.

Back at the screens I drank more coffee, but even the caffeine was failing to stimulate me now. I said, sighing, “Let’s give the medicines a chance to work before we start injecting people.”

“How long before we know that?”

“Could be fast. A day. Two.”

Karen Vleska got up, stretched, picked at the foods on the table that the cooks had sent over: Chips Ahoy! chocolate chip cookies; red shiny Washington State apples; PowerBars; packs of Nestlé’s cocoa.

She chose an apple, lowered her mask, exposed her mouth, and bit into it. The crackle was like a signal for all of us to take a break.

I tore open the wrapping of a PowerBar. Apple cinnamon flavor.

Eddie went for the cookies.

Karen said, after a few moments of eating in silence, “You know, my boyfriend, when he was a kid, went to an ethical culture school . . .”

I thought,
Right! The boyfriend. Good. I can stop thinking about her.

Then I thought,
I can’t believe I’m thinking about this now anyway.

“Ethical culture school?” asked Eddie.

“It was a private school for atheists,” she said, leaning back, exposing the long neck vein, the dark small freckles there, a constellation of three, swell of breasts tight on the moose logo sweater. The shiny silver hair was up, pinned. “His parents didn’t believe in religion but still wanted their kids to learn values. My boyfriend—Carl—said they were given a problem in fifth grade. A museum is on fire. You can save one thing. Do you choose an old woman or the hundred-and-fifty-year-old Renoir masterpiece painting?”

Eddie snorted. “I’ll be sure to send my kids to this school when we get back. See what happens when you eliminate God? You kill the people and save the BMWs.”

“Well, we’re at a table at a seafood restaurant. He’s telling me about being in class, arguing.
I’d save the old lady! She’s someone’s grandmother! No! I’d save the painting! The old lady is probably sick anyway!”

DeBlieu’s voice suddenly crackled onto the ship intercom. He was addressing the healthy crew, the people outside the hangar, in the mess, on the bridge, in the cabins, people probably staring up at intercom boxes, hearts beating loud in their chests. “This is the captain. You need to know that the survivors of the
Montana
may be infected with a highly contagious illness. Anyone feeling ill is to report immediately to sick bay. We’re on alert, just like drills. More hand washing. More disinfecting. Double shifts at meals. I want fewer people at each table. Regular disinfection of bathrooms. No more than three people in any cabin at one time. All lounges are closed. This is serious. Please know that our medical personnel are working very hard to . . .”

Eddie watched the intercom. “That’ll go over big.”

Karen’s eyes had gone large, were fixed on mine. Perhaps I imagined it, but it seemed that a new note had entered her voice since the boyfriend came up. It wasn’t affection, or missing the guy. It seemed to be more like distance. She said, “You know, you always hear that saying, there are two kinds of people in the world! People who shut off televisions when they enter a room and people who turn them on! People who follow rules and who don’t! Well, I have one. People who want to save the contagious, and those who want to destroy them. That’s what’s going on, isn’t it, in Washington? That’s why they cut us off? They’re getting ready to do something bad here.”

“Not necessarily,” I said.

“That’s why they don’t want us calling out.”

I said, not really believing it, “They just want to manage the news. Damage control.”

“Uh-huh. You don’t believe that any more than I do. Did they give you any time frame? A deadline to get results? Any idea what they plan exactly, or is that classified, Joe? You’re not supposed to tell us?”

She kept using my name, “Joe,” like a weapon. I flashed back to a hot plain in Afghanistan. I saw the truck coming. I felt the grips of the machine gun on my hands. I heard myself counting down seconds, praying that the oncoming truck would stop. “Nine. Eight.” I remembered thinking that if I fired, if I killed everyone in that truck, I’d save the people on the base. It was math. It was triage. I couldn’t believe it was a choice I’d ever put myself in a position to have to make.

“No deadline that I know of,” I said.

How will they do it? Sink us? Gas? If they use gas, they could keep the ship for later.

“But it’s a whole ship,” she said, as if monitoring my thinking. “It’s over two hundred people. It’s
me
,” she said, and laughed suddenly, loudly, completely self-aware.

“Maybe it won’t come to that,” Eddie said.

Hours passed.

Karen dozed after a while. Then Eddie.

I jolted awake.

I’d been asleep too long.

“Triage,” Karen said, back at work. “Notice how, whenever people want to do something horrible, they invent a sanitized word for it? Like ‘surgical strikes’ for drone attacks?”

Eddie finished up more cookies, which kept coming. He started on a ham and cheddar sandwich. He reached for a can of Dr Pepper. “Ah, we’d probably do the same thing.”

“No!” A fierce look, anger and challenge, animated her features. Her eyes bored into mine. She snapped out, “We
were
them! We
had
the choice back there, and we’re
not
doing the same thing.
We took everyone aboard!
”

I thought, stunned, in wonder,
She said “we.” She wants to be part of that decision.

Eddie burped and sighed. “Hey, forget the cosmic questions, Karen. Let’s get down to the real stuff. What did old boyfriend Carl save in the museum? The old lady? Or the painting?”

Perhaps it was the fluorescent light, or exhaustion, but it seemed for a moment that her expression flickered through her time on Earth: Karen the kid, face unlined; Karen the tough engineer; Karen with the weight of choice on her, like gravity tugging down the corners of her mouth.

“He chose the painting,” she said softly.

“You would have chosen the old lady?” said Eddie.

Instead of answering, quite violently she sneezed.

There was a moment of silence, then she held out her hand, and in her small palm, lay a quivering mass of yellowish bile. Her hand began slightly trembling.