Yael Dragwyla and Richard Ransdell First North American rights

email: polaris93@aol.com 4,500 words

The Eris War

Volume 1: The Dragon and the Crown

by Admiral Chaim G. Resh, USN detached

Book 2: This Devastated Land

Part 1: Deep Impact

Chapter 8: Abide With Me

As Tom carefully hung up the receiver and disconnected the rig from the battery in order to avoid
wasting juice, Rachel told Janet, “I’d . . . like to take a nap, now, if I could.”
With concern, Janet noted that Rachel looked a great deal more tired and wan than she had just
minutes ago, as if all the energy were suddenly running out of her body. It couldn’t have been the call to
her husband that had done it – that had brightened her so much that she had seemed almost to glow with her
happiness.
“Sure, Rachel, that would be fine,” she told the other woman. “Uh, Jeanie, I need to talk with Tom for
a few minutes, out in the hall. Can you take care of Rachel while we’re gone?”
Jeanie, who never missed anything, and had also noted the sudden downhill change in Rachel, told,
“Sure, no problem. Want me to get her stats?”
“Yes, I think we need to do that. I’ll check with you on them when I get back in here, okay?”
“Let me know what’s going on when you do,” Jeanie told her, sotto voce in order to avoid disturbing
the patient.
“Right. – Come on, Tom, let’s go talk. Want me to give you a push?”
“Sure, ,” he told her, smiling.
“Here we go,” she said, taking the handles of his chair and wheeling him toward the door of the room.
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Out in the hall, she pushed Tom’s chair up to the wall, next to a bench, then took a seat herself on the
bench, as close to him as possible. “Okay, what’s going on?” she asked him, her voice low to avoid
disturbing patients or passers-by. “How is my mom? And Daddy? And your parents?”
“Adelle’s fine, like I said,” he told her, his voice equally low. “But your dad – darling,” he told her,
suddenly solemn, reaching out to take her hand, “I don’t want to have to tell you this, but maybe better me
than that schmuck Carlson or somebody, Martin is very ill. He’s already had several microstrokes.
They’re giving him that stuff that supposed to keep strokes from getting worse, but it doesn’t seem to have
helped much. They said it’s as if . . . as if the walls of the blood vessels inside his head were becoming a
bit too permeable, letting blood leak out through them for reasons they don’t really understand. And he’s
gone blind. There’s this tremendous pressure behind his eyes. They don’t know what’s causing it, and
they’re thinking of operating, try to relieve the pressure, see what’s really going on in there, because if this
keeps up –”
“He could have a real stroke, then,” she said. “Or something worse.” Looking down at her hands for a
moment or two – they had suddenly developed a tremor so fine that Tom could barely make it out – she
looked back up, meeting his eyes, and said, “I – I’m glad you told me, darling. And yes, better you than
Carlson – I swear that man’s a ghoul! – No, come to think of it, ghouls wouldn’t stoop that low,” she said,
concerning one of the doctors who worked the Critical Care ward. Bob Carlson was wonderful with
patients, but his dealings with their families and loved ones often left much to be desired, bordering on the
cheerfully sadistic at times – and at others, crossing the border into territory that had earned more than one
sharp reprimand from his superiors. “Then . . . how’s your dad? And mom?”
“They’re both very ill,” he said, his expression suddenly bleak as a moonscape, that thousand-yard
stare back in his eyes. As he had taken her hand in his, now she used her free hand to hold his, completing
the circuit, waiting without impatience for whatever he wanted to say or do next. Finally, sighing deeply,
shaking himself a little, he said, his voice rough with unshed tears, “Nobody knows what they’ve got. Just
like they don’t know what Rachel had, or John, or Chloe. Or me, for that matter. (I guess I’m lucky, like
your mom. Let’s hope it holds.)
“My dad . . . about two hours ago he started bleeding from his anus and his mouth. A little from his
eyes, too.”
“What?”
“Like I said, he started bleeding from several orifices. They don’t know what’s causing it. His liver –
it’s swollen up until it’s as if he had a football under the skin of his chest and belly, and there’s blood in his
urine. He started having diarrhea, too. They said some of his symptoms were like those of victims of
radiation sickness from fallout, the body trying to get rid of the stuff via the intestines and skin, but other
symptoms – they just don’t know.”
“My God, that sounds like Ebola!”
Tom hadn’t wanted to say the dreaded word, but now it couldn’t be avoided.
“Yes. Or some other hemorrhagic fever. We’ve – love, do you remember what I said about the sick
animals around here? The fox dying on the lawn in front?”
“You think maybe he got it from them?”
“No. I think maybe they and he got it from whatever happened over on the other side of the
mountains,” he told her, waving vaguely toward the east.
“But the symptoms are so different! I mean everyone’s coming down with something different!”
“So? Like we heard from the other hams, when that asteroid came down out there, and that illegal
dump and the Army testing facility got hit by the tidal waves, there could’ve been a hundred or even a
thousand different really exotic bugs let loose by that! Jan – Janet, darling,” he said earnestly, now freeing
his hand from her grip and using it to grasp the hand that had been holding his, leaning close to her, “This
is no time for denial! Something horrible has happened – something that has turned loose a horde of things
every one of which, all by itself, could make the Black Death look like a head-cold!
“I think we’re screwed, love. Maybe you and I will survive it. Mom – if anyone could survive
something like this, I’d bet on Mom,” he told her with a wan grin. “Maybe Rachel will get well. But there
aren’t going to be very damned many survivors, no matter what. Did you know the death-toll out there,” he
said, indicating the town around them with a jerk of his head, “is already over 30%? And this is only the
third day since the war started! People are dying like flies out there, sweetheart, dying of everything from
virulent pneumonia and other nasty but somewhat familiar things to diseases we don’t even have other
diseases to compare them with!
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“Like whatever it was that killed Chloe – I heard about that from a buddy who helps in Pathology. He
was in this morning when they brought Chloe’s body in. They said that her abdomen had, had, well, just
exploded. From the navel down, it was all just rags of skin and rotting organs and the bottom of her pelvis
blown wide open from the gas that had apparently built up there! She must have been in terrible pain when
she died –”
“She was, Tom. I can still hear her screaming – I’ll probably hear her screams in my nightmares for
the rest of my life,” Janet told him, looking down at the floor, closing her eyes against the horror of it.
“She kept begging somebody, anybody, to make it stop. Then there was this, this noise, like a giant belch,
only with a splat! sound in it, too, and the most terrible stench, and she gave one last scream and then she
was gone. That was when –”
“You don’t have to say it, sweetheart, I can imagine,” he said, gently pressing her hands with his own.
“Whatever that was, though, they’ve never seen anything like it before the last couple of days, anywhere.
The Merck manual doesn’t even have a mention of something like that, Jeanie Buckley told me last night,
and nobody can remember reading anything in the medical journals about it, either. Adelle said that from
the time of onset of symptoms it was a half an hour or less until she died. Is that right?”
“That sounds about right. Mom had gotten up to check on Chloe, and was asking her how she felt, and
Chloe was saying she didn’t feel real great, that she had some pain in her bowels, but it was probably
nothing but gas. Then, all of sudden, she got this look on her face, I never want to see anything like it ever
again! And she screamed, screamed so loudly that the walls seemed to ring! She didn’t stop screaming
after that until she died. I checked my watch when it started – I guess it’s gotten to be such a habit with me
I’ll have it to my dying day,” she said, smiling a little, looking up at him. “Anyway, then I checked the
time again right after she died. That first scream was around 4 a.m. She was gone by 4:30.”
“That sounds . . . about right.”
“They’ve seen other cases of it?”
“There was this dog that died that way on the lawn last night. And we got reports of it happening to
some horses.”
“But those are other species!”
“So who says that a disease has to hit just one species?” he said, shrugging. “Think of rabies – that’s
pandemic among all mammals. Different symptoms depending on which types of mammals, maybe, and
there are variants of it that hit any one type of animal, including human beings, different ways – weren’t
you telling me about that yourself?”
“Yes. I know rabies. I know what it can do. But as far as I know it’s the only one.”
“Oh, come on! What about psittacosis? You can get that from birds. And influenza – that can go
from pigs to birds to people and back again! And brucellosis, which we can get from cattle, not to mention
Mad Cow or Jacob-Creutzfeldt Disease. And tuberculosis – ungulates can get that, especially cattle, and
there’s a theory it originated in big cats, and we got it by eating them, and then we gave it to our cattle. We
don’t know everything, sweetheart. We probably don’t know much at all, compared to how much there is
to be learned – especially now, after that disaster out on the coast!
“It may be, though, that different microbes are responsible for the same symptoms in different species,
at least in this case,” he conceded. “There are diseases that are very similar but have different pathogens as
agents, aren’t there?”
“Yes, there are.”
“Okay, until they culture the damned things and get a better look at them, we can’t be sure. In the
meantime – Jan, Pathology found something like seven or eight different microbes in Chloe’s abdomen
they’d never seen before. They simply don’t know which one killed her – and they have a hunch that
maybe the microbes live together as a cooperative system, so that she died of the results of their various
interactions. Or they could be like dinoflagellates, one microbe, with one genome, with a whole bunch of
different forms depending on environmental factors. In fact, they think one of them was a dinoflagellate –”
“Sweetheart, that’s ridiculous! How the hell could a dinoflagellate get into her body, unless maybe
from the water supply here? And if that had been the case, we’d have it, too!”
“Hey, I don’t know these things, I just work here, okay?” he said, grinning as he released his hands so
that he could give an even more energetically Gallic shrug. Then, taking her hands in his once more, he
added, “They don’t know. You can bet they’re trying to find out what we’ve got here as quickly as
possible, so we have a chance of dealing with all of it successfully. But it’s going to be hard. One of the
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guys in Path told me that for all of him, some of the bugs he’s been seeing from the autopsies could’ve
come from Mars, or maybe Europa, or Titan. Like, weird.”
“How weird?”
“Well, some of the microbes resemble archaea –”
“ ‘Archaea’?!”
“That’s what I said, sweetheart. And yes, I do know what they are, I had a good education, too, thanks
to you and Mom and Elaine making damned good and sure I avoided the basket-weaving courses and got
the Curriculum!” he told her, smiling again. “According to Margulis and her colleagues, members of Sub-
Kingdom Archaea, which is a member of Kingdom Bacteria, includes the Prokaryotae, the Procaryotae,
and the Monera. The sub-kingdom under that consists of one Division, Mendosicutes (deficient-walled
archaeobacteria), with two Phyla, Euryarchaeota, that is, methanogens and halophils, and Crenarchaeota,
which consists of Sulfolobus and thermoplasma. According to –”
“Yes, yes, yes, Mr. Genius,” she told him with mock irritation, “I know all that myself, remember? –
You say there are microbes in there that could be archaea?” she asked him, returning to her original tack.
“That’s crazy! They go for conditions like you find at thermal vents along mid-ocean ridges, hot springs,
that sort of thing!”
“Well, at this point, they’re not sure at all about what they’ve found – not just in Chloe’s body, but lots
of others, including bodies of stock animals and pets and wild creatures that the vets are autopsying, too. In
fact, they’ve got several vets working in Pathology right now, asked them to come in, bring carcasses of
any animals they wanted to so they could work on them here, because they want to draw on the vets’
knowledge and experience as well as anyone else’s, trying to figure out what’s going on here.
“There’s even a guy doing pathology studies on plants and fungi – there are plants out there dying like,
well, flies in December from diseases they don’t even have names for, and fungi . . . Gaaakkk,” he said,
pursing his mouth. “Like the thing in that old movie, The Blob, growing all over everything, from spiders
and insects to trees and bushes to dogs and cats, and even a cow that somehow got out of the barn and
wandered into a field where the thing was and . . . ecchhh. Anyway, the fungus was dying – it grew all
over everything around it, and was dying when they found it, turning black and falling apart. Ed – that’s
the guy doing pathology studies on plants and fungi, anyway, Ed isn’t sure if it sporulated or not. They
hope not, because if it did . . .” For a moment he sat, wordless, staring off into space. Then, returning his
attention to Janet once more, he said, “What Ed’s worried most about are the things that are starting to hit
food crops. We’ve picked up information from other hams living here in the Northeast about houseplants
and indoor crops getting weird plant diseases – they’re inside, and the cold can’t hurt them, but way too
many of them are getting sick and dying from things nobody’s ever even heard of, and in some cases
nobody can figure out how those pathogens got to them in just three days, but they have. Which may mean
that come Autumn next year, they may be no food being harvested, even in places a long distance from
here.
“In some cases, they’ve got bugs on top of bugs on top of bugs, a little bit like bubonic plague, where
the louse is infected with Pastuerella pestis, which is infected with something else – I think that’s how it
goes. In this case, though, the relationships are really strange,” he told her, for a moment the sheer wonder
of it all displacing the horror of their situation. “They said there was this dog somebody brought in that
was just crawling with nematodes – but these were free-living nematodes that normally never go anywhere
near large animals! The nematodes seemed to be infected by something that looked like one of the nastier
incarnations of a fairly common dinoflagellate – I’m not making this up, I swear, sweetheart! – and the
dino was infected by a microbe that very closely resembles a halophil, an archaeon, if that’s the term I want
for a given species of Archaea, that lives in Great Salt Lake, Utah! And that beastie, in turn, may be
infected itself – by a virus. They’re checking that now with the electron microscope.”
“ ‘So, naturalists observe, a flea / Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; / And these have smaller still to
bite ’em; / And so proceed ad infinitum’,” Janet quoted, looking staggered.
“Yes, and ‘Thus every poet, in his kind / Is bit by him that comes behind’,” Tom contributed, grinning.
“I always did like Swift – he has such a pithy way of putting it.”
“Yeth, he pitheth all over everyone, if you wait long enough. – So, your dad may have something like
Ebola, then?”
“Yeah, I’m afraid so. I’d be very, very surprised if he pulled through this,” he told her, his eyes bleak.
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“Oh, Tom . . .” Leaning forward, she put her arms around him, and for awhile they sat there together,
embracing, taking comfort from each other’s presence. Finally, pulling back a little, he asked her, “You
need a tissue or anything?”
Sniffling a little, she said, “Uh, do you have one?”
“Here,” he said, pulling a small, generically-labeled packet of tissues out of a pocket on the lab-coat he
wore over his hospital gown, the sort the hospital stocked by the hundreds because of the countless uses
they were good for. Taking a tissue from the packet, she wiped the tears from her eyes, then blew her nose.
Finally, sitting up, she said, “Thanks. I feel better, I think.”
He looked at her. Eyes red from tears, blotchy cheeks and all, she looked dearer to him than anything
else in the world. “Don’t you dare die on me, Janet!” he suddenly told her in a fierce whisper. “Don’t you
dare!” he hissed, holding her hands tightly.
“Hey, I wasn’t planning to any time soon, that’s for sure!” she said, giving a light, forced laugh to
cover up her apprehension.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said, releasing her arms, then staring at the white blotches which the
pressure of his fingers had left on them. “I just – oh, God, Janet, you are my whole world! Baby, I love
you so much . . .” Once more they embraced for a long time. Finally, as they broke apart, she said, “And
my mom. How is she?”
“Running a high fever – that seems to be par for the course as far as most of these things go. I guess
whatever these new bugs are, they really freak out the body’s immune systems, and it goes all out to attack
the invader. Her skin looks . . . blotchy. There are these grayish areas all over her, the nurse said. The
flesh seems cooler there than where it’s a normal color. They were doing a biopsy to see what the tissue in
those areas is doing when I left the room where she and Mom are staying.”
“Oh, shit.”
“What?”
“I think the dermis is dying in those areas of her body. Maybe already dead. Which would account for
the lower temperature – no blood flow. – Oh, Tom, oh, God, what am I going to do?” she cried, suddenly
realizing what she’d just said, switching at once from the budding expert diagnostician that she truly was to
the young woman who was about to lose her mother. Then, sighing, she added wearily, “Well, darling,
I’ve been preparing myself for that, after what I’ve seen since yesterday. It’s not really a surprise. The guy
who was doing the biopsy. It’s nothing I wasn’t already aware was a real possibility.
“— God, why is this happening to us, Tom!” she suddenly cried, in an agony of bewilderment and
outrage. “What have we done that God is punishing us like this?!”
“I don’t think God was responsible for this, honey, I really don’t,” he told her gently, sounding tired
and disgusted. “God gave us all free will, and what’s happened is that some people used their free will to
make a lot of the rest of us utterly miserable. The sort of thing that you find all through history. Where
God comes in . . . Well, if any of us live through this, and there’s a tomorrow for humanity at all, I’d say
that proves God is real and took a hand in making sure we didn’t become extinct as a result of all this. But
you know, after seeing close at hand just how badly people can fuck up,” he told her, indicating everything
around them with a sweep of his hand, “I’m not sure myself why God would bother.”
“Oh, Tom . . .”
They huddled together in silence for a few more minutes, drawing what comfort they could from each
other’s presence. Finally, Janet, rising to her feet, said, “I’d better get back and see how Rachel’s doing.
Want to come along?”
“I’m gonna go use one of the other rigs to check around, see what other hams report,” he told her. “I’ll
be okay – if I need any help, there are plenty of people here to do it. I’ll probably be back in our room
before you get back. Want me to order dinner for both of us later?”
“Yes. Lobster, with sauce Bernaise. And a magnum of champagne,” she told him archly. Then,
unable to keep the straight face any longer, she grinned and said, “Whatever you’re having will be fine.
“Oh – Tom?”
“What, sweetheart?”
“Remember we were talking earlier with Rachel and Jeanie about supplements? They should be
giving everyone a lot of vitamin C! That, and colloidal silver and hydrogen peroxide solution, too! Why
aren’t they?”
“How’d you know they aren’t?”
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“Because if they were, the hydrogen peroxide alone would’ve kept most of it at bay, at least for the
human patients here. So what’s going on?”
“Most of the supplements are gone, babe,” he told her bluntly, no humor left in him at all. “They’ve
gone through all of them so fast you wouldn’t believe it. I managed to score some powdered C out of
Supplies for Rachel to give her last night and today – I swear that’s why she’s looking as good as she does
now. But that didn’t last long at all – it was like it was going through her body like water through a
colander. Would you believe a thousand grams in six hours!”
“That’s – that’s not possible,” she whispered, horrified.
“Yes, it is. Not only possible, but that is how much I gave her, and even then she’s still a very sick
lady, just not quite as sick as she was yesterday. And now there’s none of it left. Nor much left in Supplies
– I don’t think I can manage to steal any more out of there. They’re keeping a pretty close watch on it.
Everything that’s left is going to children and pregnant women and medical personnel first, everyone else
second, which means nobody else, because there’s so little available now. That’s how fast they’ve gone
through the C, the minerals, and the colloidal silver.”
“What about the hydrogen peroxide then?”
“The machine’s busted. And the parts needed to fix it aren’t available any closer to here than Portland
– which is in the wrong side of the mountains from here, anyway.”
“Oh, my God! Oh, dear Lord – we are so screwed!”
“Maybe, maybe not. All we can do is keep trying. They’ve got people out scouting for more, going to
people’s homes, seeing who’s got any to donate – or is dead and won’t care what we take. Sounds
ghoulish, Jan, but that’s too bad – it’s that or do without.”
“I’m not complaining, Tom. Believe me, if they can find a store of vitamin C inside the house of
somebody who has died and can’t use it anyway, it could save the lives of my family and yours, and
Rachel, and – and you.”
“And you, too, Amber Eyes,” he told her, smiling. “Okay, I’ll go do my ham thing. I’ll look in on
Mom and Elaine somewhere in there, too. You go check on Rachel, sweetheart. I’ll see you later,
probably back in our room.”
“O – okay, Tom,” she told him, trying to smile for his sake as she headed back to Rachel’s room. Our
room, she thought as she went back to check on her patient. The phrase felt strange – and wonderful, too.
As if they had just gotten married, and were on their honeymoon, maybe. She giggled to herself a little,
thinking, Maybe tonight it will be, if we’re both up to it. I hope so – whatever time the two of us have, now,
let us be together, as close together as possible.
Then she was back in Rachel’s room again. The cart on which the radio and battery sat had been
pushed against the wall by the door. The curtains on the window were tightly closed. Rachel was asleep,
snoring lightly, and Jeanie was sitting on one of the chairs, looking very thoughtful, almost pensive, as she
made notes on the patient’s chart.
“Oh! You scared me for a minute there!” Jeanie gasped as Janet came into the room.
“Seems to have been a day for that,” Janet told her, laughing a little. “Hey, why are the curtains
closed?”
“Because it’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, that’s why,” said the other woman,
who often shocked people with the contrast between her sweet-little-girl appearance and the gritty
earthiness she occasionally displayed in her speech and behavior. “Windows leak heat like crazy, and it
can’t be over minus ten out there, as it is. Plus it was so . . . so fucking depressing,” she added bitterly.
“It’s like the middle of the worst part of February, and it’s fucking July!” she exclaimed.
“Hey, hey, you really are bugged, aren’t you?” Janet told her gently, pulling up a chair to join her.
“What’s wrong?”
“Besides everything, you mean? Well, for starters, you might take a look at Mrs. Yeats’ stats,” the
older woman told her, fuming, thrusting Rachel’s chart into her hands so hard that Janet winced.