The Shanxi Virus: An epidemic survival story

  The Shanxi Virus

  By John Winchester

  Copyright 2017 John Winchester

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents, and events are used fictitiously. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher and author.

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Friday, May 22nd

  Chapter 1

  It was dark outside and not much was visible except for the bright white lines defining the center of the rural two-lane blacktop highway. Running on the unbroken yellow stripe at the side of the road, Mike Dunham slowed his pace to a brisk walk. Sweat poured off of every part of his body. Flush with endorphins after a five-mile run, he felt a mild sense of euphoria. The feeling was reward enough even if was fleetingly short. He pushed himself harder than most men his age would. Keeping a seven-minute a mile pace for five miles three times a week at forty-two years old was no mean feat.

  He lifted his arm up, bringing his watch into view, and pressed a button that lit up the display. The glowing digital numbers read four thirty in the morning. Five miles in thirty-five minutes, not counting the five-minute warm up and cool down walk at either end of his run. The run had gone exactly as planned, if a little earlier than usual. He finished the run without fail, rain or shine, sick or well, just as he had every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning.

  Mike ran his life according to a schedule, so everything felt slightly off running this early in the morning. Rounding a sharp bend in the highway, a sign lit up by a small landscaping light advertised the Oak Park neighborhood. He turned right into the development and followed the main road, irritated by the sight of the sign's faux gold lettering. Ten years ago none of this had been here. There was only an unmarked gravel road leading back into the state forest that was easily missed if you were driving by at fifty-five miles per house on the highway. It had been isolated, quiet, and serene.

  Fifty yards from the highway the scenic forest landscape abruptly ended. Aside from a strip of woods twenty feet wide along either side of the development's main road, the land had been bulldozed into submission and carved into flat empty lots waiting to be sold. Sewer pipes stubs, weeds, and for sale signs were all that stood where a forest had once stood.

  Mike passed the lone display house. The only one at this end of the neighborhood, the house was situated close to the highway to lure in potential home owners driving through the countryside on a Sunday drive for a tour. The far end of the development held the more desirable lots. Those lots there were larger and backed up to the Mark Twain National Forest, Missouri's only national forest, and had sold first, but a recession had put the brakes on new home sales, leaving a majority of the lots unsold.

  And that was just fine by him. It was bad enough that the land had been sold and developed in the first place, but there was little he could have done about it. Nobody cared what a loner that lived in a cabin in the woods thought, or not many anyway. He'd been surprised when the construction crew had come up the road offering to replace his ill-maintained gravel drive and extend the development's concrete road all of the way up to his cabin. Needless to say he'd turned them down, content to make do with what he had then to take a chainsaw to the trees lining the narrow road just to make room for the concrete trucks. When it came to developing the land around his house, progress was a four-letter word in his book.

  At the end of the neighborhood the concrete road would give way to gravel, and a bit past that he would be home. His cabin, which he called home, had been here long before the development. Back then, he had really been secluded.

  A half a mile from the highway, homes on either side of him, Mike paused to stretch out a cramp in his shin. This was the worst possible place for the cramp to happen. Usually he picked up the pace and ran past the occupied homes to minimize his time in 'the danger zone'. He was tempted to keep walking and ignore it until he reached the unsightly construction lot off to the side of the gravel road near his home. The lot was filled with storage trailers and heavy machinery, an eyesore for sure, but it was also unoccupied. The construction firm that had developed the neighborhood had gone under during the recession and the older equipment still sat undisturbed.

  Undisturbed is exactly what he wanted to be. The danger zone was where he encountered the others, or as he called them, the sheeple. The sheeple all lived inside of two-story homes. Each one looked alike. Large two car garages, big bay windows, and a modern interpretation of colonial style architecture. The lots were small, with not much yard space in between the homes, and had short concrete driveways that joined up to the main street.

  "Hey Mike! How's it going man?"

  Mike winced internally. The man waving at him from the end of a driveway was a large hairy creature that reminded Mike of a Sasquatch. Tall and broad, the man stood with his shoulders hunched over and his head hanging down. His patchy beard, greasy long hair, and oversized body helped complete the impression.

  "Hi Ted," Mike said shortly. "It's four-thirty in the morning. A little early for you to be up isn't it?"

  Ted McCormick stood barefoot, a cup of coffee in one hand and a cream filled donut in the other. Ted's unkempt hair was pulled back with the bangs tucked behind his ears to keep it out of his face. Wearing a concert t-shirt riddled with cigarette burn holes and baggy cargo shorts, Ted was just about as dressed up for the day as he ever got. He was a thirty-year-old slacker that lived in his mother's basement and had little more ambition than to play video games at all hours of the day and night, and occasionally annoy Mike when he caught him on his morning run.

  "Not early man. Up late. Getting the down low on the Intertubes, the stuff they don't show you on the mainstream news. That pandemic in China is spreading. The Chinese government is cracking down. Crazy stuff dude," Ted said.

  "How about that," Mike said. He was highly interested and aware of the situation in China himself, but Ted was the last person on earth he wanted to talk about it with. Ted had done nothing to prepare, and would do nothing to prepare for an event like that. He didn't even have a job. If a disaster ever struck this area, Mike knew who would be among the first casualty statistics, the sheeple right next door. He continued walking, slightly annoyed to see Ted keeping pace next to him.

  "Just think man. If China can't keep this contained, I'm thinking, like, we're totally hosed. This is it man, the big one. This shit is going to be here before we know it. All I'm saying is that I'm not leaving the house for the next few weeks. Know what I'm saying?"

  Mike wondered when the last time Ted had left his mother's house. Sherri, his mother, tended to his every need. She was an enabler of the worst sort. A nice enough older
woman that Mike smiled and waved at, but tough love wasn't written anywhere in her book of rules. From what he understood from the other neighbors, after her husband left her years ago when Ted was a child, her golden boy could do no wrong. A grown up man-child, Ted made Mike sick.

  "Yeah, it might be a good idea to sit this one out. Don't go looking for a job or anything else crazy like that for the next few weeks."

  "A job. Yeah right. Good one. Hey, it would be kind of cool if it happened here. Mother nature takes her revenge on all of the suits and corporate types, know what I mean? Kind of like a zombie movie."

  Mike felt a headache coming on. Not amused, he fixed Ted in his glare. "Ted. Are you an idiot? It would not be cool if that happened here. Think it through. It wouldn't just be 'the suits' doing the dying. What about your mother? Do you think she would be immune to the virus? How about you? Who would feed you Ted? This is one bad bug, nothing to joke around about.”

  "Have you heard of the Spanish flu? In 1920 it killed twenty percent of people that were infected. I'm reading the same crap on the internet you are, and if what people are saying is true, Shanxi flu is much worse. Seventy percent of the infected die. Think about it. Out of ten people you know, seven of them would die," Mike said. "We'd better hope the reports are from political dissidents taking advantage of the situation and exaggerating to make the Chinese government look bad."

  "Damn man. I didn't think about it like that. I didn't mean it like that," Ted said, cowed.

  Mike knew most of America thought along the same lines as Ted and didn't take the threat seriously. H7N9, or the Shanxi flu as it was called, named for the Chinese province where the pandemic had originated, was scary. The virus usually caused infections among domestic chickens, geese, and ducks in Asia. Three months ago the virus mutated, making the leap from avian hosts to humans, and spread like wildfire throughout China. If you could believe what you read on underground sites on the internet, ordinary quarantine measures had failed to keep the virus in check and despite the draconian measures taken by the Chinese, within three months the disease had spread to Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia.

  "Ted, I've got to get home. Tell your mother to stock up on food the next time she goes to the grocery store. If this thing does make it here, you'll need to be prepared. It wouldn't kill you to get out of the house and help her get the groceries either. Maybe check out the produce section and skip the cookie aisle too."

  "Ouch man, right in the gut. Ruthless," Ted said, smiling. "All right, I hear you. I'll tell her. Later man."

  Mike shook his head mildly. Ted would never make it if his mother wasn't around. She did all of his shopping and washed all of his clothes. Ted wouldn't have made it in the household he grew up in. His parents had been strict and there was no room for slackers.

  The clean white concrete of the development gave way to a well-worn gravel road and the empty lots transitioned into wooded land. The Mark Twain National Forest was an expanse of hardwood forest that extended for miles in every direction around the neighborhood. As much as Mike like to complain about the sheeple in the neighborhood, the development was still the only turnoff of the main highway for miles in either direction. It was a full twenty-five miles to the nearest big city.

  Navigating by instinct and the sound of gravel crunching under his feet, Mike walked the last two hundred yards up the road to his house. A dim porch light lit up the front of the cabin, dispersing the darkness and outlining the logs that made up the A-frame structure. His father had built it back in the nineteen-sixties as a rustic hunting cabin that he used during the winter. When Mike was a boy, his father updated the cabin, bringing electricity out to the site, had a well dug, and installed modern plumbing so that the entire family could use it during the summer months.

  His parents had died in a house fire several years ago that burned his childhood home to the ground. After a period of grief, Mike let the lease on his apartment run out and moved in to the cabin. He'd spent nearly every summer here until he had moved away, and memories of his parents seemed to be crammed into virtually every nook and cranny of the place. In the still of the night or on a cool spring day with a breeze blowing through the cabin windows, it sometimes felt like they were still present.

  Mike went into the cabin and closed the front door behind him. This Shanxi virus had been increasingly on his mind recently. If sheeple like Ted were becoming aware of the danger, then it was time for him to do something, namely be prepared to bug out.

  In the main room of the cabin, he picked up his coffee table, moved it several feet to the side, and then pulled up the rug on the floor. He felt along the floorboards until his fingernail caught on a piece of the flooring. Mike pried the piece up, which popped out and revealed a metal handle underneath. He pulled the handle and an entire section of the floor came up. A trap door that led to his cellar, which was stocked with everything and anything a man would want or need in the event of a disaster.

  As he descended the metal steps leading down into the cellar, he picked up a checklist hanging off of a hook in the wall, and began to run down the long list of items he would need. If the Shanxi flu did make it to the shores of the United States, Mike Dunham wasn't going to be caught with his pants down. He examined the checklist a second time and began to remove items from the shelves. He was going to load his truck up with everything he needed to bug out for a nice long camping trip somewhere in the middle of nowhere, far from civilization. Once packed, all he would have to do is put the key in the ignition, punch in a location on his GPS, and go.

  Mike knew he could stay in the cabin and ride nearly anything out, but it just didn't feel right. This was his home. His only link to his parents. He had boxes of photos, old movie reels, the antlers from his first buck hanging above the fireplace. If something were to happen to this cabin, he would have nothing left. That was something he wasn't willing to risk. Far better to lock the place up and be prepared to weather out any storm somewhere else. Besides, the internet rumors about the extent of the epidemic were highly controversial. Mainstream news outlets claimed that the reports were exaggerated and that the Chinese nearly had everything under control. But still, he would pack his truck and be prepared. Just in case.

  Friday, May 22nd

  Chapter 2

  Jen Pruitt closed her lab notebook and placed it in her backpack alongside of two heavy textbooks and her laptop. She slung the backpack over her shoulder and joined the other third-year medical students bottlenecked in the doorway, anxious to get to the parking lot and make their getaway. It was the last day of spring semester before the summer break, and this was the last class of the day. Unlike the other students, her anxious intention wasn't to get to the parking lot and flee school for the summer. After three years of medical school, and only one year left, her intention was to leave medical school for good.

  As she waited in line, Jen opened her backpack and counted the number of textbooks in her bag, giving each one a light touch to reassure herself that they were still there, and then pulled the zipper shut and slung the bag back over her shoulder. As soon as the bag was slung over her shoulder, she had an irresistible urge to open the bag and count the books again and to check to make sure that her backpack was zipped all the way. Frustrated with the urges, she slowly counted to twenty, forcing herself to delay giving in to her obsessive compulsive compulsions. She had suffered from OCD for as long as she could remember. While the condition disrupted her everyday life, during the last three years it had become a secondary issue to a more serious mental disease?

  "Excuse me. Just a moment if you please, Ms. Pruitt," her professor said.

  Dr. Sbuka was the professor of epidemiology at the institution, and had been one of Jen's favorite instructors, even if the topic had turned out to be much more than she was emotionally able to cope with. Dr. Sbuka was highly regarded by faculty and students because of her intense passion for the field, and even though Jen planned on never coming back and couldn't wait to get through
the door, she respected the woman enough to hear her out.

  "Yes?"

  "Ms. Pruitt, I am putting together a response team of epidemiologists and researchers to travel to China this summer. The Chinese government has asked the World Health Organization to bring in medical assistance with a viral pandemic, which I'm sure you've heard about. I wanted to extend the offer to you first; frankly, not only for your academic ability, but the gravity with which you treated the pathogens we handled in the labs. Some of our students are lax with protection protocols, but you stood out. You were always a tenacious stickler that never once handled materials improperly. I could use someone with that kind of attention to detail and cautious nature on my team," Dr. Sbuka said. "What do you think?"

  Jen was floored. How could she tell Dr. Sbuka that this was the last thing in the world she wanted to do? What would the doctor say if Jen told her that during the last three years of medical school, she had developed germaphobia? And not just a garden-variety I don't like to touch doorknobs germaphobia, but a truly life altering, terrifying fear of pathogens. Because of her medical school education, Jen knew just how many types of germs, viruses, and parasites existed. She knew the names of hundreds of these terrible microbial life forms that the average person had never heard of. She envied their blissful ignorance.

  "I'm flattered that you thought of me, but I don't think my parents would like me going to China," Jen said, cringing inwardly at her awkward excuse.

  "Are you sure? This is a rare opportunity for an undergraduate to gain valuable field experience. You will be able to see the hot zone firsthand and participate in the frontline defense of a novel virus. This is something that will really stand out in your dossier after you graduate."