The Flu

FOREWORD

Blood thick enough to choke on. Black, like tar, it will seep forth from every orifice in the human body, a ramification of internal organs literally melting from the infection and heat of the fever. Your glands swell to the point of black bruising and eventual strangulation. Severe gangrene settles into limbs where circulation has ceased. Suffocation on body fluids, delirium, agonizing pain ... death.

The plague.

To wake up one morning physically on top of the world, and be buried beneath every nightmare symptom imaginable, isn’t unthinkable.

When was the last incident of Bubonic Plague? To answer ‘hundreds of years ago’, would be incorrect. On average, every year thirty-five people in the United States die of the plague. Close to two thousand world wide. Frightening? Hardly.

What of the flu? Every single fall it starts. Annually we are invaded with several strains. You hear about it, you get it. Coughing, sneezing, fever - the whole works. You’re sluggish a few days, you go on and think nothing about it.

In March 1918, neither did Private Albert Mitchell of Kansas. He went to work as a cook in an Army camp just before dawn. Under the weather, Albert went to the infirmary and was diagnosed with the ordinary flu.

By midday, 522 other soldiers in that camp were symptomatic as well. Within two days, the infection had spread across Kansas, by the week’s end not a state in the union wasn’t infected.

Spanish flu.

It took two months to make it across the Atlantic, and before a year had been complete, nearly forty million people had succumbed to the Spanish Flu. Researchers say the reason it didn’t take more lives was because the flu lost luster the longer it was in circulation. But had the Spanish Flu reached the continent of Europe within one week of the first outbreak in the States, the human race could have easily faced extinction.

In 1918 that feat of traveling from Kansas to Moscow in less than one week was impossible. Yet, today, a man can stand in Chicago and before his day is over, he will be in London. And should that same man, a-symptomatic in a quiet incubation stage, harbor a deadly airborne virus, in his simple transcontinental flight, he just started the next pandemic.

Needless to say, put all fear aside, after its wrath, the Spanish Flu vanished. Or did it? Nothing can be considered eradicated as long as it exists in laboratories throughout the world. However, we do not need for a lab accident to occur. Nor do we need for man to distribute it in the form of biological weaponry. Nature does quite well on its own.

The Spanish Flu appeared out of nowhere.

It happened before ... it can happen again.


CHAPTER ONE

Winston Research Station
16 Miles South Deadhorse, Alaska
August, 17th

There was something just a bit odd about the odor that flowed with the smoke that lifted high in the sky. Not only a signal of direction for Inez Johnson, it was also a sign of warmth.

Nobody else would have noticed the change in smell. Nobody else ever went out to the remote scientific research institute sixteen miles from his village. Inez was the only one. How long had he been doing the biweekly barter visits? Two years, three? Inez prided himself on coming up with the idea. It gave a little extra money that forty-year old Inez needed for his wife and three young children.

Every other week he would load up with items. Fish, baskets, furs, purses, things neighbors donated to get in on the trade. He would take them on his sled, trudging the distance across the wilderness, no matter what the weather, alone, except for his dogs.
The people at the station expected him, welcomed, and fed him. Usually someone would even be looking out for him. But something was wrong, Inez could tell. Not only the slightly tainted smell to the smoke, but there were no sounds.

The satellite dish that set atop of the building didn’t turn as it always did. It was buried beneath the snow that had fallen three days earlier. Inez even worried that the scientist had left. There was no movement, no footprints. Nothing.

He left his sled where he always did and made his way to the front entrance. He used his foot to clear away the snow enough for him to open the door. The second Inez stepped inside he knew something far worse than the fear of an empty station.

The putrid odor made his eyes water. The darkened building reeked of it, and seemed to be absorbed in it. Removing his hood, the silence was more prevalent.

A little fearful, Inez called out. No one answered. He listened closer, perhaps he had missed it. Someone had to be there, Inez knew it. Not only was the building semi warm, but the soft sound of a crackling fire carried to him.

The smoke. A fireplace.

Inez went to the recreation room right off the entranceway where the fireplace was located.

Inez was an intelligent man. He could see there wasn’t any power, and without power those in the station probably couldn’t run the heating unit. In order to stay warm, they probably gathered together in one room.
Inez was right.

The moment he stepped inside the room the smell worsened. It hit him hard along with the vision.

All sixteen workers were indeed there. They laid about, some on the sofa, most on blankets on the floor. All of them motionless, visually appearing the same.

White faces, their necks blackened and swollen. A substance, thick and brown seeped from their mouths.

Inez trembled. Slowly, he walked in further. Removing the glove from his hand, he reached down and touched the body of a woman.

Cold. Hard. Dead.

He retracted quickly, and he stumbled back. His views shifted left to right around that room. All of them were dead. A fire smoldered rather than blazed. It hadn’t been long since it was ignited. And Inez saw the reason for the new smell that accompanied the outdoor smoke. By the fireplace laid a man, half his body slumped in to the fire; he obviously tried with diligence to keep alive.

Taking in his last vision of the horror, seeing all he wanted to see, Inez ran from the station and never looked back.