Spiral

“Three labs independently ran the samples, all with different protocols. I personally supervised the tests at CDC. Toloff at USDA. Arvenick’s people at USAMRIID. Every assay came back positive, three sigma. It’s the Uzumaki.”

The room was quiet except for the background clatter from the displays on the walls.

The President called upon the commander at Detrick, Anthony Arvenick. He was in charge of the operational response in case of a large-scale outbreak. “There’s no doubt, Mr. President,” the general said, his voice grave. “She’s got the Uzumaki. And thousands of those Crawlers. The scenarios range from bad to worse to nightmare.”

“Start with bad.”

“She’s already shown us bad. She leaves the Crawlers in a public place, they bite whoever happens by. But at least we know we’ve been hit. It’s bad, but in this scenario, at least we know. We can do our best to contain it, have a shot at limiting the damage to a small geographic area. The difference between a few deaths and a few thousand might boil down to the direction the wind is blowing.

“Worse, she releases it in a major population center but quietly. Say, sending in a Crawler to expel spores in the ventilation ducts of a building. The unsuspecting occupants come and go, and a whole city could be infected within days. If we picked it up in time, we might be able to shut it down. But to quarantine a city would be hell. It would start a panic like you can’t imagine.”

“Give me nightmare.”

“She hits us a thousand places simultaneously. She cultures enough Uzumaki to load up all those Crawlers, disperses them across the country any number of ways. Hell, she could mail them to every major city, have them pop out of ten thousand envelopes all at once. She does something like that, we don’t have a chance.”

The room was silent. “Lay out our options.”

“Other than giving her what she wants, not much. Our best chance is to stop her before she releases it.”

“And if we don’t catch it?”

Arvenick said, “Antifungals don’t seem to work. A private company, Genesys, has a prototype vaccine. It’s not ready, but we’re going to run human tests. It’s a vaccine, not a cure. It does no good if the fungus has already spread. Maybe we could prevent a second wave, but that’s it.”

The President nodded, his hands on the table before him. Dunne tried to read his face. “Mr. President,” Dunne said, standing.

“Lawrence.”

“The health consequences are only the start. However bad they are, they pale in comparison to the broader implications. The entire country would be cut off, isolated. No airline flights. No one would get in or out. The stock market would crash in a way that would make 1929 look like a walk in the park. Within days, we would have shortages of all kinds-food, medicine, water-as trade shut down. We would become a Third World nation. The financial center of the world would move to London, or more likely Hong Kong. The United Nations would-”

“I’m aware of what would happen,” the President snapped. Then to Arvenick, “We’ve got nothing else?”

Arvenick shook his head. “Nothing good. We know that antibiotics make you vulnerable. We could ban antibiotic use, but in doing so we’d be signing thousands of death sentences. Not to mention we’d have a whole series of bacteriological epidemics sweeping the country. And even after all that, it might not help.”

“Why not?”

“We’ve assumed that those people who’d taken broad-spectrum antibiotics within the last few weeks would be at risk. That gives a maximum number of dead in the hundreds of thousands. But it might be much, much worse. If you believe Sadie Toloff at the USDA.”

Dunne jumped to attention at this. He’d heard nothing about revised estimates.

“Toloff’s piecing together what Liam Connor knew. She’s got a team of over forty scientists-fungal biologists, epidemiologists, gastrointestinal specialists-going through his notebooks. His published papers. It’s clear he was looking to find a cure for the Uzumaki.”

Dunne lost his patience. “Get to it.”

“Mr. President,” Arvenick said, pointedly ignoring Dunne. “We’ve known a long time that the Uzumaki infects humans after an antibiotic regimen. After the bacterial populations in the digestive tract are knocked down. But-and this is what Sadie Toloff is piecing together from Connor’s notebooks-he maintained we have in our appendix a specific bacterium that feeds on the Uzumaki. Like a parasite, the bacterium knocks the Uzumaki out, almost like a natural bacterial immune system.”

“And most people have this bacterium?” asked the President.

“Not quite, sir. Most people had it. But we’ve been using antibiotics for decades now. The bacterium might well be nearly wiped out in the human population. Once it gets killed by a course of antibiotics, it looks like it’s slow to come back.”

No one spoke. No one moved.

“General Arvenick, give me your best guess on casualties. How high?”