Vicit Variola

Be thankful that the plagues of the past are over. Or are they?

Brad Schermer, Senior Chemist at PDM labs, looked pale as he stood before the Board of Governors. It was 2 am. The boardroom was cold, the meeting had been arranged as an emergency and the Board members sat around the table in various stages of disarray. Hemlich, the CEO, was still impeccable in his three-piece suit, but everyone else had appeared in overcoats, mismatched jackets and pyjamas peeping above the waistbands of their pants. Ma Kendall, at 83 years of age the oldest member of the Board, wore a pair of Mukluk boots on her feet. Her mink coat was wrapped carelessly around her pink flowered nightgown and she looked a mess, but she was worth ten billion dollars and didn’t really care whether she was dressed better than the staff or not.

Schermer didn’t waste any time. “You are all aware”, he began, ”that our laboratory was attacked a week ago. “An organisation calling itself “Friends of the Sentient” broke into our facility and released our lab animals. They destroyed files and the records of many unique scientific experiments. We have been trying to assess how critical the damage is to our organisation.

Schermer paused. "You must be wondering why we called you together in he middle of the night." He  shook his head in irritation. "Something important has come up." He turned and strode back to the door of the boardroom, tearing it open. An elderly scientist in a white coat and a whiter face stood trembling behind it.

“Get in!”, Schermer growled.

The man stumbled, rather than walked, into the Boardroom. He seemed terrified.

“This is Johnston, one of our senior chemists.” Schermer almost spat out the words. “We recruited him from the Federal Drug Administration.”

He turned and glared at Johnston. “Tell them!”, he commanded. “Tell them!”

Johnston stood transfixed in front of the group. He opened his mouth. It remained open but no words came out.

Ma Kendall brought her fist down on the table with a thump. The two locked eyes, his wide and frightened, hers glinting and steely. Her words, when they came, were quiet and soothing, but had an unmistakable hint of rattlesnake. She did not earn her billions by tolerating fools.

“Mr Johnston”, she began. “We have been dragged out of bed at two in the morning to hear what you have to say.” Her steady gaze transfixed him like a frightened deer. “So what do you have to say?”

Johnston swallowed hard. He was a pitiful sight, a small white-bearded man in a white coat in front of a dozen cold hard eyes.

“Well”, he began, “As Mr Schermer told you, I worked for the FDA in Bethesda before coming here. What you may not know is that the FDA building was occupied by the National Institute of Health until 1972.” He stopped, and licked his lips nervously.

Ma Kendall prodded him. “Go on.”

Johnston swallowed again. “In the 1960s the Institute of Health stored many viruses in the Bethesda facility. One of these was the variola virus - smallpox.”, he added hastily. “When the facility was transferred to the FDA all the viral samples were transferred to the main CDC facility in Atlanta.”

Ma Kendall felt her blood run cold. “Go on.”, she continued.

“It turned out that not all the samples were transferred. Many years later, in 2014, six samples of smallpox virus were found in the Bethesda facility, apparently left over from 1972.”

Ma Kendall nodded. She had read about it in the newspapers, and the political furore that followed.

Johnston’s mouth worked silently for a moment, then it came out. “There weren’t just six samples. There were seven!”

“What?” Everyone whispered the same exclamation in unison.

Now Johnston’s story came out in a tumbling cascade. “I was working there when the investigating team arrived. Six of the vials were in storage and I had the seventh vial on my desk in the lab. We were all scared. They were shouting at us. We thought we had done something wrong. So .... I hid the vial in my pocket.”

“In your pocket?”, asked Ma Kendall, dazed.

“I took it home.” replied Johnston. “It was stupid, I know, but the vial was sealed. It was safe. When I got home I put it in the fridge, wrapped up in cellophane. I kept it there for over a year.”

“Yes?” Ma Kendall’s eyes were cold and hard.

Johnston’s whole body seemed to relax into one giant sigh. “I couldn't get rid of it. I couldn’t pour it down the toilet. I couldn’t put it in the garbage. When I got the job here in the lab I thought I had the answer. I could place it in cold storage here. I left it without a label so that no-one would ever use it. Also, I thought that if it was unlabeled no-one would dare throw it out.” He looked from person to person around the Board table. “It was a perfect solution.”

Ma Kendall took a deep breath. “And where is the smallpox virus now?”, she breathed.

“I don’t know." Johnston blinked. "It was taken during the break-in”.

The Board broke into an uproar. It lasted for several minutes, then Hemlich called for quiet. He turned to Schermer.

“Tell them what you told me.”

The chief scientist nodded. “Smallpox is one of the few infectious diseases that exists only in humans. Once it is eradicated from the human population it never returns because it can’t be carried back by animals.” He paused for a moment. “We wiped out smallpox in the seventies, one country at a time, and the last cases were found in Somalia in 1977. They were the last natural cases in the world.”

Bob Baker, the Chairman of the Board, stirred. “So why do we still have vials of smallpox virus today? Why weren’t they destroyed in the 1970s?”

Schermer collected his thoughts. “There was a lot of debate among scientists. Many felt that all stocks should be destroyed. Others argued that by preserving the virus we could at some future date learn the secret of why certain viruses were deadly and others were not. In the end the latter group prevailed and in 1988 all known stocks of the virus were transferred to one of two facilities - The CDC in Atlanta or the Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology in Russia. We thought there were no other samples anywhere in the world. Until”, he added, “those six samples turned up in Bethesda.”

“And now there is a sample of smallpox virus somewhere in our city?” Ma Kendall’s voice was chilling.

Bob Baker shifted in his chair. “You said that Somalia had the last ‘natural’ cases in the world. What did you mean?”

Schermer placed his hands on the table. “In 1978 there was a situation similar to this in Birmingham, England. Researchers in a lab were exposed to smallpox virus and two people were infected. One victim survived but a young medical photographer called Janet Parker died. The professor in charge of research, Henry Bedson, committed suicide.”

“So only one person died of smallpox?”, Ma Kendall asked.

“Yes, but that was back in 1978. Almost everyone was vaccinated, so the disease never had a chance to spread.” He looked at Ma Kendall. “Do you have a vaccination scar?”

Ma Kendall, never shy, pulled her arm out of her mink coat and rolled up the sleeve of her pink nightgown. Just below the shoulder was a puckered scar almost one centimetre in diameter.

 Schermer’s lips pursed. “Smallpox vaccination was discontinued in the USA and most of the Western world in 1972”, That means no-one under the age of 45 has a scar like that, and everyone without a scar is vulnerable to smallpox.”

“That’s more than half the population!”, breathed Ma Kendall. “What could happen?”

Schermer hesitated. “I’m a chemist, not a doctor, but I know that symptoms start within one or two weeks after infection. People begin to feel unwell, they spike a fever, then the spots appear on the face and hands. Within a few days the person is covered. Then the pocks blister and break open. One third of those infected die. Another third end up blind. Now that people travel globally, the disease would spread around the world within months.”

Ma Kendall made a quick calculation. “That could be fifty million dead in the USA. And the same number permanently blinded.”

“And over a billion dead or blinded worldwide”, added Hemlich.

There was silence in the room.

“So what do we do?”, asked Hemlich.

There was a long pause.

“Smallpox wins”, replied Ma Kendall bitterly. "Vicit Variola."

She stood up. “We keep quiet. We go home. It’s already too late.”

*************************************************************


Sarah Henderson was in the middle of a satisfying dream. It was one of those flying dreams where you lift up your arms and take off from the surface of the Earth. You rise effortlessly until you can see everything below and you wonder why you couldn’t do this before. It was so easy. You just thought of flying and it happened. Soaring above the world she saw the PDM labs and the murderers scurrying around in their white coats, trying to find the animals that they had tortured in their unforgivable experiments. And away in the distance, the animals that she and the “Friends of the Sentient” had freed, heading for their natural environment. Monkeys, dogs, cats, rats, mice - they all ran happily away from the torture chamber run by the criminals who called themselves scientists.

Then she was awake with a splitting headache. She looked at the clock. 2am. What was happening? She was never sick.

She stumbled out of bed. Her arms and legs ached.

Her forehead itched and without thinking she scratched. Ouch! That was painful! She felt liquid run down her face.

Alarmed, she ran to the bathroom and turned on the light.

In the mirror she saw a face covered in angry red pocks. A river of bloody liquid ran from its forehead down the side of its nose and cheek.

Sarah opened her mouth and began to scream . . .