H7N9 Penitence, Page 2

  11:11 PM: The doctor who treated Edwin was over an hour late for work. Hospital management couldn’t reach him on his phone. Nobody knew at the time, but if anyone cared enough to pay the man’s upper-Manhattan apartment a visit, they would’ve found the good doctor’s corpse in the middle of the kitchen - wearing a robe that was stained from urine and vomit. His hair was disheveled and his eyes were sunk deep down in his skull.

  OCTOBER 11th

  At 10:00 AM Mariah’s slumlord of a landlord, Big Pete, arrived at her door to address the neighbors’ numerous complaints of an awful stench coming from her apartment. Pete was a tall South African man with dark skin and large blister-covered hands. When he wasn’t busy doing his side job as the bouncer at a local dance club, he pestered the hundred or so tenants who had the misfortune of renting one of his ramshackle buildings. He balled a fist and slammed it against Mariah’s door repeatedly.

  Big Pete sighed and fished a ring of brass keys out of his pocket.

  He unlocked the door and let himself inside. A horde of rats with blood smeared around their whiskers scurried past his feet and disappeared down the hall.

  Big Pete jumped backwards and nearly dropped the keys as the rats ran past him. A heavy stench of decay hit him immediately. He bent over and nearly hurled. As soon as he collected himself he noticed that the bathroom light was on and that the door was cracked open. Using his shirt as a crude mask, he walked across the dimly lit room towards the bathroom, without noticing the dead man lying on the sofa still wrapped up in a blanket. He carefully made his way towards the bathroom walking through a swarm of flies and gnats. He pushed the door open and gasped as soon as he saw Mariah lying face down on the floor.

  He dropped the keys, ran to her side, and rolled her over onto her back with a trembling hand.

  There wasn’t much left of her decaying corpse after the rats had eaten their fill. Her face had been gnawed away and rats were burrowing inside her skull. They squeaked, crawled out of her eye sockets, and darted away as soon as their resting place was desecrated.

  Unable to hold it back any longer, Big Pete stumbled backwards and let his breakfast spill all over the bathroom floor. He rushed out of the apartment without even bothering to pick up his keys.

  A NYPD forensics team arrived at 11:41 AM followed shortly thereafter by the coroner. The corpses were sent to the medical examiner’s office for further testing and all of the emergency responders were gone by 7:16 PM. Almost everyone who stepped inside Mariah’s apartment inadvertently took a small memento home with them to share with their coworkers and loved ones.

  OCTOBER 12th

  Big Pete was the first to fall victim to the microbial souvenir that he had picked up from the apartment. His tendency to touch his face and pick his nose when nobody was looking ended up costing him dearly. What started as a cough became much worse. He was admitted at 9:22 AM in the very same hospital where Edwin Martinez had drawn his last labored breath.

  By 4:46 PM, the four EMS workers who brought Big Pete to the hospital became symptomatic as did the doctor on duty who had treated him. They weren’t the only ones unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the right time; three nurses, an intake clerk, an overweight security guard, and two high school students who were waiting to be seen for relatively minor sport-related injuries all befell similar fates.

  At 7:10 PM the backlogged medical examiner, Andrew Diptych, finally started the autopsies on Mariah and her deceased family members. Given the circumstances, he suspected that they were poisoned. It wasn’t until he had laid Mariah out on a table, cut into her skull, and peeked inside, that he became confused and admittedly worried. He had never seen anything quite like it; whatever it was, it wasn’t poisoning. He finished working on the bodies, hastily washed his hands, and typed up his reports while eating a turkey sandwich his wife had packed for him in the morning. Since he couldn’t pinpoint a cause of death: chronic inflammation? total organ failure? anaphylaxis?... pick a card any card, he faxed his preliminary findings to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and mailed out the bloodwork and tissues samples via overnight courier service to the New York Department of Health for additional testing.

  Exhausted, Andrew Diptych went home late that Friday at 11:05 PM. On his commute, he tried to make up some weekend plans that involved more than taking the wife out to dinner and a cheesy movie. A Broadway show crossed his mind. What didn’t cross his mind was that it probably would’ve been prudent to spend a little extra time on some good hand hygiene back when he was washing up after the autopsies. He yawned as he stared at the road ahead. It was difficult to even keep his bloodshot eyes open, much less drive. He was completely unaware that what he was feeling was only the beginning of something far more sinister than fatigue after a full day’s work.

  OCTOBER 14th

  The culture samples Andrew Diptych mailed out on Friday night were still sitting in the New York Department of Health’s cold storage on Monday morning. Likewise, the facsimiles he sent over to the CDC remained untouched during the weekend.

  When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention held their weekly Monday morning seasonal flu surveillance meeting at 9:00 AM and the facsimiles were brought to their attention, government officials were alarmed by the severity of the reported cases coming in from New York. Additionally, three other states were reporting similar clusters. A decision was made less than an hour later, to send out a team of epidemiologists to investigate the clusters in New York City, Richmond, Baltimore, and Delaney.

  As the meeting continued, facsimiles started to come in from Florida, Kentucky, and even all the way from California.

  Meanwhile, back in New York City, Andrew Diptych collapsed in the shower with the water running, while his coughing wife groggily walked out of the door on her way to work.

  She felt like she was coming down with a cold, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her.

  After all, she had five open houses to show and all of them were in prime locations. She expected lots of foot traffic and, hopefully, a sale or two.

  She smiled and cleared her throat as she fiddled with her BMW’s radio.

  It’s going to be a good day, she thought confidently.

  CHAPTER 1

  UNITED STATES FEDERAL PENITENTIARY

  TUCSON, AZ

  OCTOBER 29TH

  The wristwatch’s alarm beeped steadily but Teddy Sanders was already wide-awake; he had always been an early riser. He turned off the alarm and stared up at the empty iron bunk above him as he mentally prepared himself to start another day. It was 6:00 A.M. and, as scheduled, he heard the guard unlocking the cells along the bottom tier downstairs.

  Teddy gave a heavy sigh and forced himself to sit up. He was wearing his usual sleeping attire which consisted of a t-shirt and wrinkled khaki pants. He sat on the side of the bed and put on his boots. Boots were always the first thing he put on in the morning since they were an integral part of the prison self-defense system; when shit hit the fan, you didn’t want to get caught wearing flip-flops and unable to defend yourself. It was a trick he had learned from an older con back when he first got inside. Time had since passed, and Teddy was now one of the oldest cons on his block.

  He yawned and slowly sauntered over towards his cell’s stainless-steel sink and mirror. He was old and he was tired. He stood a little over six feet tall, had crew-cut brown hair, dull blue eyes, and a stocky frame. After flashing his sentencing paperwork to the gangs and proving himself in a few fights when he first arrived, nobody really messed with him anymore. Nevertheless, time was his enemy. His hairline was thinning, his waistline was growing, and the looks that some of the younger cats gave him didn’t go unnoticed. Pretty soon he figured they’d try testing him just to prove their worth.

  It was a vicious cycle.

  Teddy gazed into the mirror and thought about shaving as he ran his fingertips across his hairy chin. He normally kept himself well-groomed, but lately as he stared at the stranger st
aring back at him he couldn’t help but wonder who he was grooming for. Who was left to impress? The ex-wife who never visited? His old friends who despised the man he had become? Or his parents who were both resting comfortably under the ground well before their son had turned into a felon? He caught himself getting lost in his thoughts and quickly pushed them out of his mind; self-pity never did a con any favors.

  Sure, there was nobody left to impress, but Teddy was a methodical man who found a somber comfort in everyday routine. After spending ten years of his life in custody, routine was all he really had left to get him through the remainder of his life sentence. He’d die behind the walls of USP Tucson, but he had made his peace with that a long time ago.

  Thankfully for Teddy, the whole prison ran on a very predictable routine. Of course, prison was prison so something was always going on, but Teddy tried not to get involved and kept himself as isolated as possible. Even though he kept to himself, he never really knew what the day had in store when it came to the other convicts. It amazed him how ignorant the public was about the dangers of a federal prison. Hell, before he got locked up, he was one of the fools who assumed people doing federal time were all white-collar offenders. When he pictured federal inmates, he thought about people like Martha Stewart and Bernie Madoff, not the vicious murderers and rapists that populated the state prisons. Once he got inside the federal system he found out just how wrong his assumptions were.

  As it turned out, inmates were extremely unpredictable no matter how nice their cages were. The dangers of life inside were the main reason most people joined a gang as soon as they arrived.

  Unlike most of the other convicts, he had not joined a gang and was riding solo. He was what the others called an independent or unaffiliated. Since he was unaffiliated, nobody would watch his back if something bad went down.

  Teddy was aware that his situation carried inherent risks. He knew that one day he’d piss off the wrong inmate and end up with a shiv in his neck. He accepted that fact and in some morbid way, almost welcomed it. Call it a release or a reprieve but at least it would be an ending. The fact was, outside of his routine, he was a man with little to live for. Even so, he wasn’t necessarily in a rush to end things. When something started, he went back to his cell, kicked back, and rode out the storm. The prison officials would inevitably lock the joint down for a while but the clouds would eventually pass, and then everything would go back to normal. In prison, even the occasional chaos had a routine.

  Yawning, Teddy opened his small grey locker and took out his hygiene pack, careful not to allow any of the weathered books he had stacked inside his locker to spill out onto the floor. As he took out his razor, toothbrush, and toothpaste, he yawned again and then walked back towards the sink. Given the accommodations, it wasn’t exactly a long walk.

  His cell consisted of an iron bunk bed with two thin mattresses, a sink, a mirror, an industrial toilet, two lockers, a steel desk attached to the wall, an iron stool attached to the floor, and a narrow window covered with bars. The walls, like the floor, were concrete; concrete seemed to surrounded him everywhere he went. The iron cell door had a narrow window running down the center and a locked food trap slot was situated underneath the window.

  Living amenities aside, the accommodations in a federal prison were decent compared to the state facilities. The penitentiary had good recreational programs, provided a fair amount of time outside the cells, and had decent food. To add to that, most of the guards were okay if you stayed out of their way.

  However, Teddy hated the location.

  USP Tucson was located in the middle of the desert sixty miles south of Tucson, Arizona. The city of Tucson had a population of about one million. The prison itself was quite far away from any semblance of Tucson’s metropolitan area, but Teddy knew that they had a tendency to place prisons far away from places where people actually wanted to live. Out of sight, out of mind.

  Teddy was born and raised in suburban Dallas, so he wasn’t exactly accustomed to the hot, arid climate of Arizona. Summers were brutal, but thankfully the heat was starting to subside as the year drew closer to an end.

  If he had it his way, he’d still be kicked back on the front porch of his little country house with a cold beer in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Drinking cold beer and reading the paper while his old lady cooked supper had been his usual evening routine. However, circumstances had forced him to change it. The factory he had been working in ever since he was a teen closed its doors during the millennial recession. Jobless and broke, he had started to get more bills in the mail than newspapers. That had prompted him to take his dad’s old .45 and hold up a local Bank of America branch while his wife was still asleep in bed.

  He made more money on that cool February morning than he had ever done in his entire working life. One security guard was roughed up, but everyone else went unscathed.

  On his way back home along one of Texas’ rural highways, he ran into a little trouble when he came across a roadblock manned by two state troopers and some federal agents. He panicked. He couldn’t remember who fired the first shot, but when it was all said and done, one agent was dead and one of the troopers was wounded.

  He spent many nights in county lockup wishing that they shot him dead instead of taking him in alive. Hardly a night went by when that dead agent’s face didn’t haunt his dreams. Guilt is a heavy burden for a man to carry and no matter how much time passed, it only seemed to get worse. Even if he could manage to tell the man’s family how remorseful he felt, he knew they wouldn’t give two shits about his condolences. The damage was already done. Hell, he couldn’t blame them; he figured that he deserved to rot away in that hellhole for his ignorant and selfish actions. The way Teddy saw it, he was getting better than he deserved. He knew that he had put himself in that cell and thrown away the key, the moment he pulled that trigger.

  It hurt to dwell on the mistakes of the past and it was futile to look towards the future.

  All Teddy could do was take things one day at a time.

  He heard the guard climb the iron steps towards the second tier. The guard’s keys jingled loudly, signaling his approach.

  As Teddy ran the cheap razor across his stubble, the guard unlocked the cell door.

  Teddy glanced over at the door’s narrow window and found Officer Stephenson working the graveyard shift as usual.

  Stephenson was a portly middle-aged man whose face had more lines than an old pair of leathery boots. He was bald, short, wore cheap gold reading glasses, and had the strangest cluster of red chest hair poking out from the top of his shirt like a retired porn star from the seventies. He never shook down cells and was a soft-spoken mild-mannered guard that nobody really took seriously. People like him, Teddy noticed, usually stayed on the graveyard shift. Out of sight out of mind. He gave off an apathetic and depressing vibe, but Teddy didn’t pay the man any attention because the man never bothered him.

  “Morning, Sanders,” Stephenson said as he cracked open the cell door. He started to waddle away as he adjusted his duty belt.

  “Hey boss,” Teddy said as he finished shaving and reached for his toothbrush.

  Stephenson stopped, caught in mid-thought, and turned back around towards Teddy’s cell, opening the door just a bit more.

  “Oh,” Stephenson said with a blank expression as if the thought had just dawned on him. “You’re getting a roommate. He just stepped off of the bus this morning.”

  “Says who?”

  “Counselor Johannes.”

  Teddy laughed and shook his head. Johannes, or Jo-Jo as he was called by the inmates, was almost as big of a joke as Stephenson. The only difference between the two was that Jo-Jo could make your life a living hell if he put his limited mental capacity to it. Sadly for Teddy, he was the counselor in charge of the unit and subjected everyone inside to his draconian rule.

  “Johannes knows I don’t take cellies,” Teddy said.

  Stephenson shrugged.

  “
Don’t shoot the messenger,” Stephenson said. “Take it up with him after my shift.”

  Stephenson walked away and continued unlocking cells.

  Teddy looked in the mirror. He was confused and admittedly a little worried. Having a cellie would cause complications if they were affiliated with a gang. He vigorously brushed his teeth, splashed some water on his face, and finished getting dressed in the rest of his khaki prisoner uniform. Rather than chasing Stephenson and pressing a fountain of useless information he decided to go find out for himself. He ironed the front of his pants and emerged from his cell like a lurching giant on a mission.

  He slammed the iron cell door shut behind him and looked around the pod with a grimace.

  Every housing unit inside USP Tucson looked exactly the same.

  Each unit had two tiers of cells that ran the expanse of the entire unit with the exception of one section on the bottom floor, where communal showers and laundry rooms dominated the entire wall. The floors and the walls were all solid concrete. All of the cell doors, hand railings, and stairs were painted a pale blue color, although it still left everything feeling cold and grey. The entire building had a musky, moldy smell mixed in with the wafting aroma of chemicals that were used to clean the grimy showers and the scuffed floors. A single sally port located underneath the stairwell served as the only way to enter or leave the building. The sally port’s doors were controlled by a distant control center that Teddy never saw.

  A row of inmate telephones were lined-up next to the sally port and they looked like the old fashioned payphones Teddy was used to seeing on the streets. The phones didn’t require a quarter, just a PIN number that Jo-Jo gave you when you came in.

  The phones had been down for over a week, so everybody aside from Teddy was agitated given everything that was happening in the outside world.