“Yes, ma’am,” Norah shouted, her posture becoming military-straight. Chase was fascinated by this side of her. In so many ways, Norah was every bit the woman she’d left behind in Providence way back then. But there was this new piece of her—strong, confident, precise. It was almost like the army had taken the beautiful piece of clay that was Norah and, almost impossibly, sculpted her into an even more perfect being.
“Our car broke down a few miles down the road. Do you think we could use your phone?”
The woman eyed Norah’s fatigues, raised a single eyebrow, and then smiled again. “Of course, dear.” She turned to lead theminside, and Chase felt Norah reach over and give her hand one single squeeze.
Business as usual. Norah knew it had to be. A pandemic was raging, and it was Norah’s job to stop it. Or, at least, control it. She didn’t have time to think about the kiss she’d shared with Chase the night before that had taken her clear off this planet and to somewhere else entirely. Now that they were back at the barracks, Chase Durgin was her colleague, and that was it.
“First things first. I want to lay out some new guidelines,” Norah said. John, Jamie, and the others had gathered around their largest folding table (which Chase had dubbedthe Situation Room) later that afternoon. The army’s camp was buzzing as CDC virologists, epidemiologists, and soldiers eagerly shared their theories and data. “This is a respiratory illness. The CDC’s latest data looks like it travels in large droplets. And some of our preliminary work is showing it can travel up to ten feet.”
The group nodded silently in agreement.
“We need to be wearing masks. All the time. The worst thing we can do is get sick ourselves. Masks and handwashing are a must. Oh, and please, for the love of God, no touching each other. No handshakes. No fist bumps. And absolutely no hugging.” Norah felt the heat rising in her cheeks as she remembered all the ways in which she and Chase had broken her own rules the night before.
“Are you for real?” Jamie asked, “I mean, are you for real, ma’am?” She looked at her feet as Norah shot her a scolding glance.
“Yes, Marshall. I am very much ‘for real.’ I know this sounds extreme, but fomites are going to be the death of us. And I don’t want to end up meaning that literally. My job is to protect this country, and the world, from this virus. But my number-onepriority is all of you. So please, follow the rules. Stay safe. Masks. Don’t touch each other. And for Pete’s sake,” she rolled her eyes and smiled, “wash your damn hands.”
“Captain Bishop is absolutely right,” John said. Norah was grateful for his backup and knew his words held an authority hers simply couldn’t yet. “You’re no good to anyone if you’re sick. Also, I just want to say that the CDC has a preliminary PCR test in the works. It’s much better than the ones we’ve been using in the hospitals. It looks like its false-negative rate is only about 3% right now, so if all goes well, we’ll have testing in the next couple of days.”
“That’s great. Isn’t it?” One of the epidemiologists who’d been nervously standing in the back inched his way forward.
“It is.” John gave Norah a small nod, indicating for her to continue for him.
“It is,” she said. “But the difficulty is going to be mass production. We need companies to mass-manufacture the test, and then we need enough lab personnel and equipment to run the tests. We’re going to have to answer the hard questions. Who gets the test, and who doesn’t?”
The small crowd grumbled in unison.
“And that’s what I’m going to be working on,” Chase said. She moved to Norah’s side, bringing Norah a gust of strength she hadn’t known she needed. “The way things are going, we’ll have only enough to test the most vulnerable populations first—the old, the sick. If we’re lucky, we might be able to test health-care workers. But for a while, we’re going to have to depend on mask-wearing and handwashing, and hope to God we can educate the public to follow our lead.”
“I’m not sure God has much to do with it,” John said, a cynical grin on his aging face. “This one’s all up to us, kid.”
Chapter Eight
The CDC had done its best to get the word out to the public about H7J1. There were daily press briefings back in Atlanta, television ads complete with Susan Sarandon showing people how to properly wear a mask in a way that resembled a flight attendant’s cheerful safety demonstration on a soon-to-be-crashing plane for Chase’s liking far too much, and she’d heard douche-bag Justin Pitman had even met with the vice president and his newly formed “task force.” None of it seemed to be doing much good. It was idealistic to think they could contain the virus to one small town in Louisiana. But now cities all over the country were reporting cases. St. Louis, in particular, seemed to be getting hit hard, its governor very unimpressed with the virus’s high mortality rate. Fortunately, H7J1 was similar to Ebola in that it seemed to be lethal enough to kill its hosts prematurely, making it harder to transmit from person to person. Less fortunately, this trait made conservative government officials dismiss it, even when the highest of high-ups at the CDC and the WHO began to recommend mask mandates.
Things were escalating. And ninety-two days after the first reported case of H7J1, there were now 20,000 reported cases nationwide, and over 6,000 of those people were already dead. Nay-sayers were comparing it to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, which had a fraction of the mortality rate of this virus. Chase was frustrated. She was scared. And so was everyone around her.
It was deep into the evening when Chase sat at a nearby picnic table in what was formerly the army barracks. Norah had recommended that both the army and the CDC staff deployed to the area be “quarantined.” This meant no one came or went without Norah, John, and Chase knowing about it. This also meant absorbing the CDC’s campsite into the army’s, so no one could get too far. The privates all grumbled about not being able to leave the grounds to go to the local bars and shack up with the townies, but Chase was thrilled to have her bunk moved so near Norah’s. And she wasn’t entirely sure it was a coincidence when John, who had coordinated the move, placed her new tent only a few feet from Norah’s.
Still, their new proximity made it even more important for Chase to give Norah the space she needed. This decision felt a little bit counterintuitive, since space was essentially what had killed them all those years earlier. But Chase knew Norah, that she needed to focus on the job at hand, and probably on processing everything that was going on between them. It was a lot to take in, and Chase wasn’t sure which was harder to grasp—a global pandemic with a 60+% mortality rate or accidentally reuniting with the ghost of her lost love. Time and space felt like the right things to give Norah in that moment. But that didn’t keep Chase from stopping outside Norah’s tent every time she passed by.
Chase didn’t see anyone else around that evening, assuming the young guys were off playing beer pong somewhere and Norah and John were in their respective tents crunching numbers and cringing at all the projection graphs showing things would get a lot worse if people didn’t start listening. She was thinking about her parents, back home in Chicago. She was thinking about her father’s ailing heart and her mother’s never-ending battle with the darkness of her mental illness that often left her impulsive and dangerous. And Chase did something she didn’t usually do. She worried about them. That worry grew into a spark, which seemed to evolve into a wildfire of anxiety, until she was worrying aboutnot just her own family, but the families of everyone across the country. Everyone across the world. She felt the burden of it all so physically in her skull that it became heavy, until she could no longer hold her own head up, allowing it to fall into her hands. It was only at the sound of muffled sobs coming from somewhere behind her in the darkness that she was able to pick it back up.
Following the sounds of the cries, Chase stood and turned, walking into the night. Only fifty feet away, but cloaked in blackness, a petite figure crouched against an enormous oak tree. A few feet away now, Chase could see it was Jamie, who was now batting at her eyes, desperately trying to discard the tears.
“Hey.” Jamie stifled one last sniffle and offered Chase a very forced smile.
“Hey. Do you mind if I sit?”
In spite of all the work she’d done over the years, Chase was still uncomfortable with most forms of confrontation, in particular the awkwardness of someone crying next to her. She wasn’t at all sure why she felt compelled to kneel next to Jamie and put her arm around her.
“No. But you’re definitely breaking the captain’s rules by being this close.” Jamie chuckled, and Chase removed her arm from around Jamie’s shoulder.
“Right.” She slid a foot or so away. Chase wasn’t big on physical touch, except in the right circumstances (like, for example, with Norah), but this new decree of distance felt impersonal, inhumane almost—especially when someone was hurting right in front of her.
“Are you okay?” Chase finally asked. It was a stupid question, but she didn’t know what else to say.
“Yes.” Jamie nodded but stared into the dark for a long time before finally turning to Chase. “No. Not really.”
