One in Ten Ch. 08

The housekeeper wasn't even Patient T2 One. That distinction fell to a worker at a large electronics factory close by. On Tuesday night, she and some co-workers went out for some drinks after their shift ended. A good friend was heading out into the countryside for a wedding. A man from a nearby village was marrying into her village and she wanted to attend, much to the ribald teasing of her comrades.

On Wednesday morning, a stewardess with Air China stopped by to see her sister who was home sick with the flu. The woman teased her ill sister about going to 'those places'. The stewardess wanted to make sure her sibling had enough food because the stewardess was going to be gone a while. She had a short hop to Nagasaki, Japan, and then a long one to San Francisco.

There was much she wanted to do in the Federation city, not the least of was spending time with the boyfriend of one of her girlfriends. The first few patients wandered into the doctors' offices and emergency rooms Thursday afternoon and evening. They were treated for the flu outbreak that was currently running its course in the city and sent home.

On Saturday morning, as I was being beaten by Flame at Isobel's party, the first terminal patient was rolled in by ambulance to that very fine hospital. It took them an hour to figure out what was wrong with her. They didn't panic. They called the WHO and Beijing. They went into full quarantine.

As I was plotting out my little 'dowel rebellion', Chinese authorities were hot on the trail of the outbreak. The WHO had just flown a team out of Geneva. The 'community' that ran the brothel was figuring out that the trail led back to them. The housekeeper was dying in her room, alone. Patient T2 Zero had already died and been consumed by the flames per the criminals' protocols.

His ashes went into the river. Along with them went the only known antivirals that had ever killed a T2. That evening, the local precinct raided the brothel and began rounding up the criminal 'communities' members. A third of the policewomen were so sick they wouldn't have come into work if it wasn't for the emergency. In Beijing, the Central government met to discuss the crisis. Containing the outbreak in Shanghai was a pipe dream.

Multiple international ships sailed into and out of the port every hour. There was the river traffic every night and day. Train service linked the entire country with round the clock service. It had an international airport, two regional airports and one military airport. It had a naval base and over a division worth of troops in barracks around the city. Military personnel were always being transferred around.

Their decision was totally logical. They would start shifting 'key personnel' to distant governmental bases slowly as to not attract attention. They would lean on the WHO not make its findings known until they were 'absolutely' certain of what was going on. Once the governmental - restructuring - was underway, they would notify other key communities so they could do like-wise. The word went out of the Security net where one women saw it then decided to go see her brother.

If you were a poor assembly line worker in Hangchow, you were boned. Not that it mattered too much. As I was making my spastic declaration on Monday morning, my time, they rolled in the first reported male case. He was definitely terminal. His community had done everything within their power, and budget, to keep him alive. Only in the final hour did they relent and bring him in for help. Such was the fear that the government would 'take' their man.

The Chief of Staff at the hospital was 66. Across the dying man from her was the head of the WHO mission who was only 52. The Chinese physician started crying inside her protective suit. She'd been a medical student and later a doctor when the Gender Plague first struck. There was no doubt in her heart. The Reaper had come back for them all.

The WHO doctor had lived through the Gender Plague, but only as a child. Her iron-willed Chinese counterpart was losing it and that vanished all her doubts. She raced as quickly as possible to exit the quarantine area. She had to call Geneva. She had to contact the UN. If drastic measures weren't taken right now...she ran into her Chinese 'Communications' officer.

"The government needed a few hours to 'assess' her data before allowing a general announcement," she told the doctor. The WHO doctor was an expert in her field. So, the Communications officer repeated the same statement. This was a global pandemic. Same statement. Millions were going to die. Same statement. The WHO doctor tried to push by then saw the two soldiers calmly waiting for her.

That 'few hours' turned out to be twenty-four. Tuesday, as valiant, delusional men were getting pummeled all over the Federation, the UN began to meet on the matter. Discreet inquiries were made to the Federation's UN Ambassador about Carabolix-37. An hour after those four men in San Francisco got their asses handed to them over a collection of sticks, six women and one man arrived at a hospital with flu-like symptoms.

All but one knew a certain Chinese stewardess. The last one would later recall she had served the woman at a restaurant. Just over an hour later, the police and paramedics located her in her hotel room. She was too feverish to get out of bed. It wasn't until nightfall in the city that the Federation got the true picture.

The Chinese government was bugging out - jumping ship - getting the hell out of Dodge before the Great Wall fell on their heads. Then the panic in the Capital set in. It wasn't just the Plague. China was a huge 'X' amount of the global economy and in a matter of days they were going belly-up.

Fuck the Plague; dead people didn't eat, work, or vote. Millions of Americans were about to lose their jobs. Any kind of public assistance at this level was a lost cause. Soon there were going to be lots of lonely, hungry, pissed off women looking to lynch somebody. They wouldn't kill doctors and engineers. Doctors were their best hope for staying alive. Engineers kept the lights on.

Lawyers and politicians they could do without, or so it was believed. Pulling a 'China' was no longer possible. Not only would people suspect it after the crowd in Beijing bolted, the Federation didn't have a 'Bunker' strategy anyway. The fact that no one had told the 'little' nations of the Doom on the horizon didn't seem to bother anyone there.

Virtually as an afterthought, the Press Secretary turned to the Presidential Chief of Staff and said, "What about that lunatic on TV this morning?"

It was a clear indicator in the room how bad things were that any of them would consider a man to be the answer to anything that didn't involve stress relief and impregnation.

The President looked to the Attorney General who was thanking her lucky stars that this male idiot had stuck around after making an ass of himself to the Nation.

"I have a team on him right now," she stated confidently.

"Why isn't he in custody?" the Minister of Defense questioned.

"We had him in custody, but let him go," she responded. She was leagues above the city's old Police Commissioner. "There was nothing to hold him on at the time and he's under round the clock surveillance. He's ours when we want him." She looked to the President for the order.

That woman thought about it for a second.

"Ask him," she ordered. "Ask him to come in and help his countrymen and women out in this time of crisis. Be nice."

"If he refuses?" the AG wanted clarification.

"Snatch him, of course," the President directed. "Have Congress declare him a National Treasure as a legal pretext if you must, but bring him in."

"What if this is all a hoax of some kind?" Health and Human Services chimed in.

"Then we claim he is a promising lead, wave him in front of the Europeans so they don't panic too," she smiled. "In two or three days we will have something in place for when the dam bursts, but right now we need calm."

As they were filing out of the room, the AG put the plan in motion. No one liked what they heard.

"Riot? What riot?" the AG blurted out.

"What explosion?"

"Oh my Goddess! Is he among the dead?"

"What do you mean you don't know? Check his bracelet!" The AG gave the President a worried look. "It gave its emergency signal then cut off, did it?" Everyone was looking at the President once more. She was the team's lead striker.

"Well, find him, damn it!" the President snapped. "Find him before his body decomposes - or whatever it is that dead bodies do."

"Madam President," the AG said solemnly. "The men are rioting in the city - hundreds dead including many police officers."

"Hundreds of men? We killed hundreds of men? Oh, shit. Tell me it was a bomb that did it. Please tell me it was the MRA," the President groaned. "How did this happen anyway? How did so many get in one place?"

"It was the MAL rally, Madam President," the National Security Advisor delivered the crushing news.

The MAL was the President's baby. Congress was going to crucify her. Now she started hoping for the Plague to break out soon. That would distract her critics long enough to do...something.

"Madam President, I can have two battalions of air mobile and one battalion of Rangers in the city in three hours," the Minister of Defense pledged.

"We could use this as a pretext to round up the men in the city," the Minister of the Interior suggested. Several voices yelled 'No!'.

"There are 300,000 men in the city. Where do you plan to hold them?" the National Security Advisor reminded them.

"We use Army troops to round them up with support from the police," the DM stated. "We train for this kind of mission all the time."

"There are also 3.8 million women in the city," the National Security Advisor asked. "What do you plan to do about them?"

"We will call out the reserves," the Defense Minister answered confidently.

"Should we call out the reserves in all the MAL cities - just in case?" the NSA persisted.

"Do it," the President said. "This can be a good deception plan for preparing for the Plague outbreaks when they hit." The NSA took a quiet, deep breath. It had taken her twenty long years of crawling through the grime and slime of capital politics to get to this place and time, but with the help of her co-conspirators, she'd made it.

The noose was closing on her. They couldn't put her in the room with that initial research group, but they could put her sister there. She had been a naïve congressional staffer when her sister sat her down and gave the bad news. It had taken her weeks to agree. Once she had, there was no looking back. It was treason without an exit plan.

Putting the Reserves on the streets wasn't to maintain order. It was meant to put as many guns in as many hands as possible when the Big Lie came tumbling down. The NSA was guilty of treason, but the rest of the Cabinet was guilty of genocide. In a way, the genocide bothered her less than the callous disregard it was approached with by the guardians of the public welfare.

Why had it taken weeks for her to decide to join? It wasn't the risk to her career, or the thought of the punishment upon getting caught. It was that they weren't planning to save everyone, or even the majority. No, from the outset, the plan was to save a tiny few. They weren't elitist or supremacist; they were brutally practical.

At a critical point in a population, people stopped being doers and became 'consumers' and in the 'Vanisher' model, they couldn't afford anyone who couldn't pull their own weight. They predicted the world economy would collapse violently without hope of recovery. All their needs and requirement would be met by the group alone.

There were no bulging bank accounts or massive stockpiles of goods and food. Cash would be useless and neither food nor goods in the amount to be useful could be hidden for long. They were avoiding as many traditional human and fugitive models as possible. That being said, they knew this was a long shot. A mythical gamble, but the only shot mankind had left.

Twenty years ago, they had been called romantic idealists and their science ignored. Twenty years ago boys born of husband/wife duos had an infinitesimal greater chance of surviving than boys born of convict (drugged) fathers. It was a tiny enough fraction to ignore. In twenty years of study since then, that fraction had grown noticeably.

Capri had called it a 'love conquers all' plan. It was and it wasn't. The conspirators had gone over all the data, even the WHO study in Kwaziristan. They had found nothing to explain it. Nothing at all. Yet men were living despite all the science that said they shouldn't. At that moment, it became an act of faith.

They weren't abandoning science. Science was telling them the men were making it. The scientists just couldn't see why. The hope became that if they followed through with this project the 'why' would present itself finally, after years of failure to find a cure. They didn't know what they had, but they knew it worked.

It was simply too late to save global society. There were too few men left. The whole marriage thing was about to be moot anyway; rendered obsolete by act of Congress. The National Security Advisor had obtained a lethal dose of muscle relaxants. She had to figure what the last moment of her utility would be.

She had an idea what her captors would do to her before they believed she had nothing worthwhile to tell them and she had already decided to forgo that experience.

Across the globe, GNN was already showing the footage of several Metropolitan policewomen in the Blazer Arena finding a suspicious piece of equipment in the catwalks.

They then put it back after a member of the arena's technical staff told them what it was. It wasn't lost on the commentator that this device was off camera for a minute or that the device was the origin of the explosion as witnessed on multiple live feeds. It also proved that the explosive device didn't actually kill anybody.

Oh, it had started the stampede alright which ended up delivering a thousand casualties, but the bomb itself killed no one. That was left to the men trampling each other and the policewomen turning to deadly force after the struggle for containment became a fight for survival. There were twenty MAL rallies across the nation. Only one was a disaster but it was the only one that mattered as the sun rose the next day.