History Shattered

Pandemic: 1. having widespread effect: existing in the form of a widespread epidemic that affects people in many different countries. 2. very widespread disease: a disease or condition that is found in a large part of the population -- Bing Dictionary

Synonyms: epidemic, plague, contagion, sickness, disease, illness

Pandemic: an epidemic (a sudden outbreak) that becomes very widespread and affects a whole region, a continent, or the world due to a susceptible population – www.medterms.com

As the two teams of scientists were beginning their respective attempts to determine what had triggered the ‘event’ and what might be occurring within Station 28, the facility’s military chief, Colonel Michael James, had no intention of sitting idly by. He had stood quietly in the rear of the room as the scientists had struggled to grasp what had just occurred. He was untroubled by concerns regarding the scientific causes of the anomaly. He and his troops were charged with safeguarding the facility. That responsibility extended to whatever might be occurring inside the bunker on the far end of the circular maze of tunnels. As soon as the meeting amongst the scientists ended and Monica was finally not surrounded by nerds in white lab coats, he approached her.

At six foot three and standing with perfect posture in his fatigues, his presence was impossible for Monica to miss. She looked upward into his steel blue eyes.

“Mike, do I really need to deal with whatever you want to talk to me about right now?”

“At least a little, Director. I’m obligated to send a unit to Station 28 to perform a preliminary inspection. What I need to know from you is the level of danger my soldiers might be facing.”

Whenever Colonel James was joking with her or in a casual conversation, he always called her Monica. If they were in a meeting environment or the topic was serious, he always went with the term ‘Director’ as a sign of respect. She had almost always appreciated the gesture, and it had become a source of personal amusement for her to witness how he appeared to shift between the two modes with such apparent ease.

“Colonel, I don’t know what to tell you. That’s not me being flippant. That’s all I can tell you for the moment. I don’t believe there’s any radiation threat, and I say that because none of our monitoring equipment indicates there’s been any significant leak and the radioactivity readings are within acceptable ranges. As for heat or electrical issues or potential exposure to any of the pathogenic materials housed within the Station’s science lab…, well, all of that’s unknown. Based on our inability to get audio or video out of there and the lack of response from Tyler, it may be a while before we come up with an explanation for what happened that’s more than just a guess.”

“So if I read between the lines, you’d like for me to task a communications maintenance squad as a first step to troubleshoot your communications problems.”

“Yes…, I guess I am telling you that. Look…, I’m sorry Mike. I don’t mean to be kicking your cat. It would be awesome if you could fix our communications links…, any of them.”

“I’ll start there. I’ll keep you informed of our progress, Director.”

He paused for a moment, as he attempted to decide if he should say more. “If Tyler’s alive, we’ll get him out, Monica. He’s a tough kid.”

She lost her composure and began sobbing uncontrollably. She buried her head in his chest, and the big career military man softened his posture and held her. It was the most overt outward sign of emotion he had ever displayed at the facility. When she finally lifted her head, he released her and assumed his typical erect stature.

“Thanks Mike. Oh, I got your uniform wet. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all good, Director. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to task my soldiers.”

She nodded, but he did not wait for a response. He spun on a heel and moved quickly away down the corridor. Monica watched the man’s back until he disappeared around the corner. She was fairly certain that she’d never fully understand the military mindset. She dabbed her eyes, turned, and headed in the opposite direction. A team of scientists was waiting for her in the large meeting room, anxious to begin testing the limits of theoretical physics with their conjecture about why the largest burst of energy ever recorded had somehow become trapped within a three thousand square foot underground bunker.

~~~~o~~~~

Tyler was within about a hundred yards of Caffa’s southwestern gate. His recall of the research he had performed for his thesis was hazy, and it had focused mainly on the communicable disease aspects of the ancient city’s role in serving as the launching point for the worst pandemic in human history. He remembered enough geography to understand the attacking Mongolians would’ve been approaching from the north and east and in that era, the mountainous terrain would’ve been an impediment to attacking from any other direction. That reasoning would suggest that the gate he was approaching would’ve been the exit path for the fleeing Italian merchants unwittingly carrying death along with their stores of goods. The Mongols had begun their attack in the autumn of 1346 A.D. and the siege had lasted all winter, with the merchants’ flight to safety not occurring until the spring thaw in 1347.

This time Tyler offered a greeting in Latin to the guard staring down upon him from a perch atop the protective wall surrounding the settlement. Although it had been referred to as a city in the historical recounting of the period, Tyler could not bring himself to think of this tiny place in such terms. The sentry returned his greeting and inquired as to why he sought to gain entrance to the city, a reasonable question since it was currently under siege from the Mongols. Tyler repressed a chuckle. Either history was repeating itself complete with period appropriate costuming and special effects or this delusion had delivered him to what could best be described as a virologist’s paradise. He responded that he had been travelling a long distance and was merely seeking food and shelter. In his mind he did some quick math and determined this delusion had moved him halfway around the world and almost seven hundred years into the past, and that such a journey would certainly qualify as travelling a long distance, delusion or not. For that matter, walking a few miles over hills while battling what he suspected was the H2N2 virus might qualify as well.

For the sake of amusement, he asked the guard for the date. The man responded without mentioning the year. Well, at least it was definitely late autumn in Caffa. The guard shouted some unintelligible instruction to someone below inside the city wall. Slowly, the massive city gate opened a couple of feet, and Tyler was allowed to enter with the gate closing rapidly behind him. For better or worse, he was now in Caffa. His choice of attire for the day immediately made him a spectacle. He could not take a step without being stared at by everyone he encountered. His first such encounter was with the guard who had opened the gate for him. The man could not take his eyes off Tyler’s blue high-top basketball shoes.

While Monica had shown disdain for Tyler’s wardrobe choice earlier in the day, it made him something of an instant celebrity in Caffa. It was apparent from his stilted use of Latin that the language was not native to him, and that, combined with his attire earned him something akin to foreign dignitary status almost immediately. He was clean and clean shaven, so he must obviously be someone of great import. Tyler opted for the simplest career explanation he thought would be appropriate and indicated to all that he was a doctor. That declaration had him immediately escorted to the town’s equivalent of a local inn, where he was almost immediately pressed into service to provide medical attention to the town’s sick and wounded. They had at least welcomed and fed him first. After a few minutes of rest and some food, Tyler had regained something of a second wind. He had also learned that his delusion had brought him to 1346 A.D. He was at the launching point of a singular historic event. This had to be the greatest delusion of all time.

Tyler had everything he was using, whether it was the crude medical instruments brought to him or the cloth strips serving as bandages, boiled before use. If he did nothing else, he was going to make sure his tools and medical supplies were sanitary. He viewed his efforts at wound repair, which heretofore he had never performed except on either lab animals or cadavers, as extremely crude, but they were viewed with awe and appreciation by the villagers who assisted him. His cough had returned, and there was little he could do to avoid coughing microscopic traces of his bird flu into the air around him. He was sweating again, but it could’ve been as much from the heat triggered by the fire used to boil his medical supplies as by the slight increase in his fever. At least the heat kept him from feeling chilled as he had earlier in the day.

After performing crude surgery on a half dozen of the town’s soldiers, the sick next began to approach. Evidently word had travelled quickly that a physician had come to town. Tyler had actually earned a medical degree before opting to dedicate his career to solving the riddles of infectious diseases and pathogens, so the work he was performing wasn’t completely foreign. He had spent one of his two-month hiatus periods in each of the past two years providing free medical care in remote African villages. He was studying the spread of HIV while there, but it had allowed him to re-sharpen his patient treatment skills. Monica had accompanied him for parts of both trips, and he credited the last trip with triggering or perhaps cementing their love affair. He worked on a couple of open wounds which had become infected. With a lack of antibiotics, he was forced to clean the wounds as best he could and cut away unhealthy tissue. The mortality rate from serious wounds during this period in history was quite high, but being face-to-face with it, Tyler wondered how it wasn’t higher still.

Tyler had continued to cough throughout the day with some regularity. If it had been his intention to infect the populace of Caffa with the Bird Flu, he would’ve been hard pressed to come up with a more conducive environment from which to deliver it than his makeshift infirmary in the corner of the inn’s great room. It was his intention to offer what medical assistance he could, but the transfer of some viral particulate was unavoidable. He rationalized that all of this was taking place within a delusion anyway, so was he really transmitting an infection? Only for a few fleeting moments did his mind even entertain the possibility that the particle collision could’ve triggered that wormhole notion that seemed to be the stuff of a physicist’s wet dream. As farfetched as this delusion seemed, it was positively tame when compared to that dubious theoretical construct.

Finally, after all of those with wounds or infections had been seen, the inn’s great room emptied somewhat. Three more potential patients arrived, each accompanied by a family member. Tyler took note of the lessened attendance in the room and wondered what it might indicate. He hoped it was a signal that plague symptoms might be about to go on display, and he was forced to simultaneously wonder what that suggested about his frame of mind. Had he not been convinced he was experiencing a delusion, he would’ve chastised himself for such a selfish and uncaring attitude. Even while believing none of this to be real, he felt guilty about his desire to get a look at the plague up close and in person if it was due to the suffering of another.

Bubonic plague earned the nickname ‘The Black Death’ because of the discoloration of the skin that can often be one of the noticeable signs that someone has contracted the disease. The disfiguring gangrene can often occur in the extremities of an ill person, resulting in a blackening of toes, fingers, lips and even the tip of the nose. The disease is bacterial in origin, the Yersinia pestis bacteria carried by rat fleas to be specific. If left untreated, it has a mortality rate between 50 and 90 percent. Tyler was trying to recall other symptoms that might help him spot the disease in its early stages. He remembered that the plague attacked the body’s lymphatic system. The lymph nodes are a major part of the body’s immune system. One of the first outward signs is swelling in the lymph nodes, especially in the groin, armpit and neck areas. The appearance of buboes, which can range in size from one centimeter up to ten centimeters, are the only visible signs early in the disease’s progression, developing between two and six days after contracting the plague. The buboes are also quite painful to the touch. The only way to make a positive diagnosis would be to draw blood and perform lab testing. That option clearly would not be available to Tyler. He would need to rely on spotting other symptoms if there were no visible buboes or signs of acral gangrene.

What were those other symptoms? Tyler tried to remember. There was often vomiting, abdominal pain and diarrhea. None of those symptoms could be even remotely conclusive in diagnosing bubonic plague. Bubonic plague often progressed into either septicemic plague, or in approximately twenty percent of the cases on record, attacked the lungs. That resulted in the diseased person contracting pneumonic plague, which was almost always fatal. Later symptoms were high fever, muscle cramps and then seizures and finally the diseased person could lapse into a coma. Tyler knew that the best cure was prevention. The plague had been so successfully eradicated in modern times that a plague vaccine was no longer even available commercially in the US. Tyler also recalled that the administration of antibiotics within twenty-four hours of infection reduced the disease’s mortality rate to between one and fifteen percent. That particular bit of information was also completely useless in his current situation. Aside from encouraging the consumption of fluids to fight fever and the other related symptoms, he had nothing to offer any of these people medically if they already had the plague.

He was now more acutely aware of his own fever. He should be taking on fluids. Instead, he was avoiding the local water supply. Tyler couldn’t bring himself to drink the water. He could still painfully recall the bout of dysentery he had suffered two years ago while on his first medical mission to Africa. A bit of dehydration was preferable to that misery. He amused himself for a moment by thinking that the trip in question hadn’t been two years ago, but instead, would not be occurring for another six hundred sixty-five years or so. He hoped he could remind his future self to be more careful on that trip. He had not needed to lose the twenty-five pounds the illness stole from him.

All three of the sick villagers had symptoms which might be the plague. All were vomiting and had accompanying abdominal cramping and diarrhea. Unfortunately, those could be symptoms of too many potential illnesses to be conclusive of anything more than they were all legitimately sick. Only the third villager, an older woman, offered more concrete evidence. She had pronounced buboes under her left arm and on her left forearm, which also appeared to be the site of the bite from an infected flea. Both swollen areas were painful when touched. Tyler was as convinced as he could be without performing a lab test that he was getting a firsthand inspection of an actual living case of bubonic plague. While he maintained a professional and subdued demeanor, inwardly he was as excited as a puppy with a new bone. He instructed the woman to keep away from others and to take in as many fluids as she could. That was the same instruction he had offered the two previous patients. As woefully inadequate as this course of treatment was, it was the best he could offer.

His duties as an impromptu physician completed, dinner and a makeshift bed were waiting for him at the inn. Given his weakened condition from the flu and the exhaustion he felt after all the tasks he had completed during this most eventful day in his apparent delusion, Tyler readily accepted the offer of a second meal and overnight accommodations, modest though they might be. He was struck by how exhausted he felt in this delusion, and wondered why that was. The notion seemed almost as bizarre as having a cough in a dream, which of course, he was also still doing. As he drifted off to a fevered sleep, he was once again visited by the notion of time travel through one of Monica’s theoretical wormholes. What if that was what was actually happening? Wouldn’t that be something!

~~~~o~~~~

After the military communications team had been at work for about an hour, Colonel James sent one of his men to interrupt Monica’s scientific meeting. They had fixed the video and audio feeds coming from Station 28, and he wanted her to take a look and a listen. The soldier had whispered the information into Monica’s ear, which she took as a signal that Mike wanted to share the information with just her for the moment. She hoped the confidential approach was just an example of the typical military penchant for secrecy and not an indication that Mike had bad news to pass along. She got up from her chair, asked one of her colleagues to facilitate the discussion for a few minutes, and followed the soldier out of the room.

Colonel James was waiting in front of a video console in a communications monitoring room housed in a military area of the complex. She had never before set foot in this room and didn’t even know it existed. It made sense that it would be there, given the military’s role in security and maintenance for the facility. Monica had just never had occasion to visit this military portion of PD. When she approached the officer, he pointed at the monitor just above him. The screen appeared to be filled with the same snow that had been there just after the particle collision had sent the wave of energy into Station 28.

“OK, I give up. What am I supposed to be seeing, Mike?”

“That’s a live feed from Station 28.”

“I don’t get it. Why are you showing me static? Your soldier indicated you had fixed the video feed.”

“It is fixed. That’s not static you’re looking at. Let me show you…, Corporal, pull up the video feed from the malfunctioning camera at the loading dock for a second.”

“Yes, sir.”

The monitor blinked for a moment, and the digital readout in the bottom right corner indicated a change in cameras. Although the feed was once again populated with a static-filled, snow-like image, the pattern and appearance were noticeably different. Colonel James asked for the Station 28 feed to be brought up on a second monitor. With both images up, it was easy to see the difference between the two. The loading dock image looked like a screen of unmoving static while the video coming from within Station 28 seemed to almost be alive. The snowy image seemed to radiate and roll, almost as if what was on the screen was alive or was some kind of energy wave. Monica reflexively asked a question.

“What is that?”

“I was kinda hoping you could answer that question for us, Director.”

“Can you send this image to the meeting room in five minutes?”

“I believe we can.”

“Then please make arrangements to do that. I’m gonna ask both of my scientific teams to come in there and have a look at this. It almost looks like we’re witnessing some kind of energy wave or field which has somehow developed inside Station 28 as a result of the particle collision. I’ve never seen anything like it. Mike, please join us in the meeting room, would ya?”

“Yes, Director.”

“Thanks! See ya in five.” Monica spun around and exited the room, convinced she was witnessing an anomaly that was the first of its kind. She just hoped it was friendly to human life.