The Last Centurion: Chapter Four

They Always Forget The Emergency

    Patient Zero, USA, was in Chicago. What the fuck?

    Definitions. Patient Zero. The first detected case of a disease. Generally, that required lots of investigation as the disease was tracked back.

    In this case, Ching Mao Pong was easy to find. Just follow the screaming.

    But Chicago? What the fuck?

    Most of the epidemiologists who were scattering out to try to stop things had headed for the West Coast. Why? Most immigration and movement from China came from that direction. And it wasn't just China anymore. H5N1 was breaking out all over Southeast Asia. Some of it being spread by bird movement but more from people movement. The Chinese had little tendrils all over Asia and people were following those tendrils trying to escape the Plague.

    Outside of China the first reports, by a few minutes, were from Thailand. Then, within a day, every single country in Southeast Asia except Vietnam (which right up until it turned into a wasteland didn't admit any cases) reported cases.

    All of them tried containment. But it was impossible to contain. None of them had the sort of health system that the US did, they were physically connected to China, they had birds migrating from China that carried the Plague, none of which we had, and we couldn't contain it. (Maybe we could have. If, possibly. If wishes were fishes...)

    There was the Plan. Called the Epidemiological Emerency Response Plan (with the unfortuate acronym EERP, which sounds like someone who has just had a very bad practical joke played on them) it had several parts. It probably wouldn't have worked because what every Emergency Plan leaves out is the fucking emergency.

    Example: Hurricane Katrina. Okay, okay, most of the shit about it was urban legend. There were not tens of thousands of dead. There were no riots or rapes in the Superbowl and people were neither starving nor ‘out of water.' They were being rationed, which the fuckers that were complaining thought was starving, but that's not the same thing. But let's look at the evacuation Plan.

    Okay, Nagin was a total fuck-up and never even tried to initiate it. He'd never looked at it, despite a fucking hurricane being headed for his city which, by the way, was below sea level. So calling him a fuck-up is insulting fuck-ups. But there was a Plan.

    The Plan was to use school and city buses to evacuate all those who were ‘transportation challenged.' Whether Nagin used it or not was sort of a moot point, though. People had forgotten little details. Such as, there was no emergency call list for the drivers.

    In any group that does emergency response, from the military to cops and even including child services, there is a call list. Generally it's a call tree. Person at the top gets a call. He or she calls three people then starts getting ready to head in. They call two or three people lower then them and start getting ready. Assuming more or less equal transportation distances, the bosses get to work first, which helps in most cases.

    There was no such phone tree for bus drivers. So there was no real way for anyone to get ahold of them in an emergency.

    Oops.

    Drivers had never been told that they were supposed to drive people out in an emergency. So they weren't exactly sitting by the phone if there had been a phone tree. They had jobs and cars. They were packing to leave or already gone.

    And that was the last point. The order to get out was sent out before any thought was given at all to the ‘transportation challenged' plan and even the evacuation order was more of a bow to reality; the roads out of New Orleans were packed (by among other things the bus drivers) when it was given.

    People who develop emergency plans always seem to leave out the emergency.

    But the EERP wasn't a bad Plan as such things went.

    The first part was the Emergency Vaccination Distribution Plan. Spread the vaccine to health providers. At the same time, spread it to emergency services personnel and the military including National Guard. As time permits, go to nationwide forced immunization if it got that bad.

    Simultaneous with that, call up all the National Guard and Reserves. Mobilize all active units to full combat status. If necessary, start a ‘staged redeployment' of the rest of the military world-wide.

    Second step, shut down the country. It's called ‘zone quarantine'. Close all the borders, not only between the US and other countries but internally. Preferably, close it down to county level where possible. International travel shuts down first. Planes coming from other places are turned back. US citizens and residents can enter the country but go into quarantine, not home. This would probably start before the first vaccine shipped. It was planned (there's that word again) to be total ‘primary' quarantine in three days. I think that's optimistic, but we'll give it that just for shits and giggles.

    When, not if, you have outbreaks you start ‘ring immunization.' That is, when you find someone who has the flu you ensure immunization status of everyone they've come into contact with or anyone they could have come into contact with. You do not ask for permission; unless they can prove they're immunized, you stick them with a damned needle whether they like it or not. You go through the whole neighborhood the person lives in, you go to the stores they've visited, you stick everyone at their workplace. You stick people that just sort of knew them in school or that they sort of remember from seeing across a bar.

    There are leakers. Always. You find them and do the same thing, hopefully quicker. You broadcast that such and such a person had the flu and beg people to go to a doctor and get checked. And anyone who has been in contact with those people

    You hit that motherfucker with a full fucking court press.

    You don't open up the borders, any of them, until you've killed the son-of-a-bitch.

    Fuck the economy. Fuck anything. Shut the fuck down until your population is safe. They can't buy trinkets or gas or groceries if they're mostly dead.

    Nothing. Else. Matters.

    There were some plans for this we knew were going to work. 9/11 had proven we could ground aircraft at will. We'd called up the National Guard enough times to know exactly its predictable response rate. Deploying troops internally had been done enough that most units could do it in their sleep.

    Distribution? Ring immunization? Zone quarantine? Nobody had tried it, ever, in a Western country. We'd never had to, not really.

    As it turned out, we never did, not really. Oh, the words were spouted, but...

    ‘Forced immunization is not an option.'

    That's not really what the bitch said. Look, Presidents get paid to, among other things, handle emergencies. And there are supposed to be emergency drills. Yes, it's a busy job and not every contingency can be covered. But mass epidemic was a scheduled drill. (Congressional Testimony On H5N1 Spiral Event.) One that the President was supposed to attend.

    Seemed she was meeting with, irony of ironies, some Chinese businessmen the day the drill was scheduled. And despite being a lawyer, apparently never took the time to even RTFM (read the fucking manual.)

    So when the meeting finally came around where the Secretary of Homeland Security was explaining the full EERP, it went, apparently, something like this:

    "Mass requisite innoculation program..."

    "You mean forcing people to take the drugs?"

    "Yes, Mrs. President."

    "That is not an option."

    Now, you can't go to school these days without a measles shot. And four or five more, some of which have some good clinical studies showing they are a. not very useful and b. very very fucking nasty. But unless you can prove, with a doctor's test, that you are allergic or something, you can't go to school without the shot.

    But... well... politics.

    Look, there are ‘freedom uber alles' wack-jobs on both sides of the political spectrum. There are the guys who feel very very strongly that the Constitution entitles them to owning an M-1 Abrams with full load. (Okay, okay, that would be me. Love and hate those fuckers depending on if I'm cranking one or killing one, done both...) And Don't Tread On Me and Pry My Gun From My Cold Dead Fingers. Also ‘If I don't want to take a fucking shot, I'm not going to take a fucking shot. And anybody who tries to give me that devil poison, or fluoride, is going to get blasted by my Mark-Four-One Blaster with Puring Optical Sights that I wack off on every single day! End the slavery that is government! With no government, things would be perfect!'

    Blah, blah. Libertarians with a capital L and hand me that rifle, buddy. Ask one some time if their utopia has building inspectors. Or, you know, how much it looks like, say, Somalia. Or Detroit after the Plague.

    Okay, that's the nuts. Let's take a look at the fruits.

    ‘End the cycle of violence. Eating animals is murder. Don't poison your body with pesticides and hormones. My body, my choice...'

    Guess which side contributed about 15% of Warrick's core supporters. Not to mention:

    ‘The Southwestern US was once Mexico's and shall be again!'

    And I did mention Chinese businessmen.

    Warrick had a whole team of people, working in the very crowded and space short for really important shit White House, that did nothing but monitor blogs. Oh, not the ‘Pry it from my cold dead hands' blogs, the other guys. In that she was politically nearly as smart as her husband and a bit more techno-savvy. Her team of nerds were mostly members of the blogs and occasionally passed on juicy news thus increasing the importance of their most crucial supporting blogs. But more importantly they kept the pulse of the fruits.

    And the fruits were not going to be forced to accept innoculations. Some of them were screaming for them, others were explaining how a diet of honey and organic herbs would prevent any flu. AIDs in Africa, after all, was a plot by the free-market world to kill off the black-man, blah, blah...

    ‘Forced immunization is not an option.'

    Ring Immunization?

    ‘Forced immunization is not an option.'

    So there goes Ring Immunization being any effect at all.

    Then there was sealing the borders.

    Look, I've worked at sealing borders. It ain't easy. You basically have to station people, in groups so they don't get overrun, at close and regular intervals. And you can't be nice to those who are attempting to cross. Not if you really want a sealed border. Part of the military plan for sealing the border with our southern neighbor included shoot-to-kill orders for runners. If they did not stop, you got shot. Ditto people attempting to cross internally. If the car or truck or whatever wasn't willing to stop, light them up.

    ‘Force is not an option. Closing internal borders is not an option.'

    Okay, can we at least cut off international travel?

    Actually...no. Persons who were from ‘affected' countries were to be quarantined, nicely and for no more than three days. ‘Affected' countries were countries which had declared themselves to be ‘widely and endemically infected' by H5N1.

    Look, China, which is now about a quarter of its pre-Plague population and five countries and change in a fourteen way internecine war, never declared themselves   ‘widely and endemically infected'.

    We didn't cut off international travel. Everyone else cut off international travel from us.

 

---

 

    Of course, by then it was too late. There were still planesflying to and from Hong Kong after it had basically ceased to function. They stopped because they couldn't be sure of getting refueled. And they were flying straight from Hong Kong, which was in direct contact with the Mainland, to LAX and San Francisco and Seattle. People would be held for a couple of days in isolation, board another plane and fly on. Some of them to Europe which cut off travel from us before we came closeto shutting down from anyone.

Frankly, the only reason it didn't break out faster waspeople ignoring their orders. Sure, the guys sitting in the room with the Prez arguing til they were blue in the face had to send down suicidal orders. Didn't mean that the guys and gals in the field obeyed them.

    Quarantine in LA was heavy until things started to breakdown in California. Ditto Seattle. Not so much in San Fransisco which is probably one of the reasons they got hit pretty quick. And hard. Lord forgive those fags, they got hit hard.

    Then there were the big order breakers. People still have a hard time codifying the response. It depends on who's writing about it.‘Pseudo-secessionists' is one term. ‘Knee-jerk reactionaries' was a term usedat the time along with ‘racists' (never quite understood that one unless they were talking about Mexican immigrants), ‘fascists', etc. Big litany of ‘you'rebad people.'

    Hawaii was the big winner in the ‘racist/fascist/reactionary' category. Okay, Hawaiians are racists. If you're not native Hawaiian there are laws saying you can't have certain jobs. There are Natives and there are ‘haolis.'   But, strangely enough, nobody was calling them that. In fact, despite their actions at the time, nobody was quite sure how to respond.

    Lemme explain. The news media was filled with liberals. They might not like what the Hawaiians did but, hey, they're our little brown brothers! (Hawaiians, like Samoans and for similar reasons, tend to be motherfucking big little brown brothers. But it's pretty hard to get a liberal off their mental grooves.) Conservatives by and large thought they were about the only smart people in the nation and wished they were in Hawaii.

    Basically, Hawaii cut itself off. No planes were permitted to land to do more than refuel or get fixed if they needed it. Then ‘hi-away with you! No fucking ley for your ass!' Ditto boats from outside Hawaiian waters. They'd give them some food and fuel if they had it but then get the fuck out of here.

    They shut down internal travel as well and required documentation of immunization. And the immunizations that got sent to them a. arrived slower than on the mainland and they could see the Prez' order was fucked up and b. were packed for air-travel so they kept for long enough for everyone to get the fucking clue.

    Hawaii came through the whole damned thing with nothing but a major depression. Racist fuckers. Smart racist fuckers, I'll give you.

    Then there were the ones that did get called racists and fascists and all the rest; the L states.

    I put it that way because it wasn't exactly the states of the Confederacy. Tennessee was a border state in the War Against Slavery. And there were some that weren't near the Old South like Wyoming.

    Why the L states?

    Way back in the 2000 election a map came out of the vote patterns. Back then we'd call it the ‘red and blue' states. Red states went for Bush, blue states went for Al ‘I Invented The Internet' Gore.

    I always hated the ‘red/blue' divide. I'm military. Red forces are the bad guys. I'm not a bad guy and I'm a red stater.

    But if you look at the map, it's a big fucking L for the red states. Southeast then up through the midwest with a bit on either side in the southwest and northeast.

    Fly-over country. The Dust-Bowl. Hell, the Bible Belt.

    Not all of them were ‘reactionary.' Missouri followed the President's orders to the letter. See St. Louis.

    Others, however, had a different opinion. I call it‘organized civil disobedience.' They waited for the Prez to announce the Plan, heard the New Plan and went ‘Oh, hellno!'

    A lot of them got some or most of the immunization plan right. When reports from Mississippi started coming in of shipments of vaccine and no-where to store them the word went down, from the Governor not the State Director of Health, that they should store them anywhere. Get cops to help if necessary.

    Short example. County Health in Jefferson County, Mississippi got a bunch of styrofoam boxes from FedEx marked ‘Vital Medical Material: Refrigerate.' They didn't require a truckload, fortunately for them.

    The Director of County Health, a nice old lady I caught on the news one time talking about her response, called the only store in town, Piggly Wiggly, and told them she had a bigproblem. Piggly Wiggly dumped out enough room in their storage room for all the boxes.

    Atlanta? Screwed the pooch. Ditto Mobile, Birmingham, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Savannah... The list is long.

    Small towns? Small counties? Small cities even? Better than 50% by current estimate ‘presented optimal or near optimal distribution response.' They reacted, adapted and overcame.

    Okay, call it ‘red/blue' if you wish. Red got it about 50% right. Blue? About 7%.

    The response expanded from that. ‘Forced immunization is not an option.' Yeah, right, tell it to the people of Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee. There were areas where forced immunization wasn't an option, mostly the big cities, due to lack of vaccine. But the order went out and damn the President or the media wailers. School kids were immunized production line style in every state. Smart or not, those governors went for ‘children first' at the very least. Overtime paramedics, EMTs, cops, nurses, whoever had a clue about sticking a needle, visited work-places. It didn't last long; things went to hell too fast. But the order went out and the process started.

    The president actually ordered the National Guard in those states to be used to stop the forced immunizations. Even when they were as a part of ring immunization responses. (CDC was just outside Atlanta and the guys and gals left there tried. Lord they tried...)

    The term here wasn't really mutiny. Okay, it was mutiny. But by then things were going to hell in a handbasket and everyone knew it. Obeying the increasingly shrill bitch at 1600 was the last thing on anyone'smind.

    That would be about early April. But that was more than a month after Patient Zero when the Prez finally ordered ‘staged redeployment' and I got left holding the shit end of the stick. And then there was the whole ‘Emergency Powers Act' fiasco.

    Patient Zero was in Chicago.

    Why Chicago you ask. Well, since plenty of people have answered and I obsess on questions like that these days I'll repeat.

    Ching Mao Pong had been a peasant as a child. He grew up in central China and became one of the large class of ‘undocumented workers' who moved into the coastal areas as common laborers. Apparently at some point he convinced a Chinese smuggler, what is called a ‘snake-head', to get him to the US.

    How Ching Mao Pong became infected is unsure. All that is known is that he was loaded by the snake-head, along with fifteen others, intoa cargo container bound for the States. Its destination was Chicago where an accomplice snake-head would open it and let the immigrants out into the freedom of virtual slavery in the US until they paid off the extortionate price of the transportation. There was sufficient food and water packed into the container to sustain all sixteen. (Twelve males and four females, by the way.) Don't askabout sanitary facilities.

    How could a container of immigrant Chinese possibly make it to Chicago you ask?

    Uh, ship to Seattle then Great Northern Railway to Chicago. Not that hard.

    Oh, customs?

    Containers were categorized several ways. At the low end were containers from sources that were both ‘unrecognized' and known drug smuggling areas/companies. If, say, a container entered the US that was a. from Colombia, b. from a company that did not have special documentation with Customs and Immigration Service and c. did not have a pre-cleared seal on it, it was five percent likely to be checked.

    That is, of containers coming from known drug source countries without any indication that they didn't contain drugs, only five out of a hundred actually got opened and inspected.

    Oh, there were all sorts of special systems to examinethem. Dogs might walk by, X-rays if they weren't something that might get damaged, neutrino systems were even in consideration.

    But only five in a hundred from the worst possible source got opened and examined thoroughly.

    Why?

    Money. Time. Interference in commerce. Call it an iron triangle. Nobody wanted to spend the money on the (huge) number of inspectors that would be necessary to actually check, say, every dodgy container coming into the US, much less every container without slowing things down to a crawl. There were containers that never were supposed to get opened inthe US. There were times when it was smarter and cheaper, if you were shipping something from, say China to France, to ship it via rail across the US. It got loaded on a ship in China, dumped off in LA, put on a train, carried to Jacksonville and loaded on another ship for Nice.

    There were a fuckload of containers coming from China in those days. Most of them were to addresses in the US. Hell, you couldn't go into a store and not buy something from China. Even the plastic your food was wrapped in came mostly from... China.

    And China was not considered a threat source. Yes, people got smuggled but not, you know, drugs or bombs. Sometimes it was discovered after a ‘packet' was found that a highly trained bomb-sniffing dog had walked right past one of these snake-head containers and never even quivered. They were good dogs. They were looking for drugs or bombs. People did not count. Don't bark at People. Good dog.

    A snake-head named Chan Twai opened the container when itwas dropped off at a rented warehouse. Upon opening it he later said that he thought everyone in the container was dead. He knew what was happening in China. He ran, hoping he hadn't caught the Plague.

    Ching Mao Pong, though, was alive. Apparently nearly insane but alive. He stumbled out of the container into a country about which he knew virtually nothing with no-one he could speak to and no where to go.

    He did what he'd done in China. He looked for food and work. According to his accounts he ate garbage and drank from bathrooms for two days. He saw people bumming for money from people and the police did not stop them. He bummed money and food and even cigarettes and he was not told to stop once by the police which he found to be very nearly paradise. Truly America was the land of opportunity.

    On the third day he found men that looked somewhat like him standing on a street corner. He was picked to go work on laying sod for a new building in the final stages of completion. He couldn't speak the language of any of the men he worked with but ‘working with your hands was working with your hands.'

    He knew he had been exposed to the plague. He had gotten sick. He had nearly died. Most of the others in the compartment had died, two from when one of them went mad. But he survived, he recovered. He thought he was fine. He was feeling somewhat unwell when he finally found work but he had had little good food recently.

    He collapsed while working on the job. The contractor who had hired him cursed, loaded Ching in his pick-up truck, dropped him off at the emergency room and made himself scarce.

    Ching was semi-coherent when dropped off. He was directed to sit in a chair. There were more police and they apparently wanted him to stay. He sat. He collapsed again. The emergency room personnel, who were not masked and had not received their immunizations, put him on a gurney and moved him up the triage list.

    The responding doctor saw a slightly emaciated Asian male in his mid thirties who was suffering from high temperature and disorientation. Initial exam determined he was suffering from, among other things, dehydration. He was given an IV. He went into spasms shortly afterwards and dropped into unconsciousness.

    A Chinese speaking nurse was called in when he regained consciousness. By then the possibility of bird flu was considered and Nurse Quan was in Cat Four dress. He was questioned closely. When he was initially uncooperative until the nurse, who was an immigrant, called in a security guard and, unknown to the doctor or any of the others including the guard, warned that he would be sent to ‘reeducation' if he did not tell her everything she asked. He spilled his guts.

    He went back into febrile disorientation a few hours later, slipped into a coma that night and died before dawn.

    CDC, by that time, had over sixteen active quarantines on the West Coast. Specialists got on the still flying planes for Chicago and arrived just as Ching breathed his last. They attempted to get the Illinois and Chicago authorities to override the president's directive against forced immunization. Two problems. Chicago was one of the cities which had screwed up its receipt of vaccine and they weren't even willing to do forced immunizations with what they had.

    But the news media got the news that a confirmed case had been detected in Chicago and Katy Bar the Door.