Case:Black - 19. Chapter 19

FEMA Regional Command Post

Denver, CO

1820 CST

Agent McGrath found himself at a conference table surrounded by people from an alphabet soup of federal agencies. None had been briefed in about Pandora and as he told the long, sad tale of woe associated with the accursed virus, their faces showed many different stages of shock, horror and disbelief.

When he finally finished, the local FBI representative asked, “McGrath, is this something that you are cleared to be telling us?”

He answered, “The Director brought me in to brief you. I’m the one person in the country that has had the most experience with Pandora. All of your commands need to know as much as possible if we have a chance at containing this mess. At this point secrecy works against us. We have to let the first responders know what they are getting into. We’ve got to get past the culture of secrecy or it’s going to be a meat grinder out there.”

The station chief at Denver was an older gentleman named Stanton that had made his spurs fighting wild fires and the occasional earthquake. Killer viruses were not his bailiwick and he knew it.

Stanton said, “Homeland unlocked the Pandora files a few hours ago. I’m sorry to say that everything Agent McGrath has told us is true. I’ve brought in Doctor Ross here from the Air Force Academy. His specialty is epidemiology. He has seen the data and I’m going turn the floor over to him.”

Ross was a sturdy looking man in his fifties. He was certainly one of the best known epidemiologists in the country. McGrath remembered him from White Sands and he had media recognition for his work chasing diseases on five continents.

“I’ve never seen a more lethal virus. As far as we know, it’s 100% terminal and in two thirds of the cases, the victims get up pissed off and try their best to spread it around. It’s a nightmare scenario. The only upside of it is that it's not airborn. I’m worried about the possibility of vector based spread via mosquitoes but that’s nothing compared to what has already happened. We’ve got thousands, maybe millions of citizens infected in our largest cities, we’re going to lose them all and there’s not a damn thing that we can do about it.”

Stanton asked, “What can we do?”

Ross laughed bitterly and said, “The only thing you can do is to try to contain it and think about it: they hit us on interstates during rush hour. It took hours to get the cordons in place. You can bet the ranch that it is already on both sides of our lines.”

Stanton paled and smacked his forehead, “He’s right. The interstates! This bug could be all over the country by now.”