Chapter Four
Doctor Abraham Priest
Weaponised Disease Control
After a few lengthy flights and two further stops, one at New York, the other along with a change of plane at LA, they finally touched down on the snowfield in Alaska. Far from prying eyes and cold enough to safely store hazardous biological material.
Remote enough to be left untouched and far enough away from settlement to protect people from possible outbreak. Logan had just come from Istanbul and the temperature change was enough to blow him over. He had been given a thick fur lined raincoat but still had his plain shirt and blue jeans on underneath. He felt scruffy after having slept in those same clothes but he wasn’t the sort of man who cared too much about his appearance.
The plane they had changed to in LA was equipped with sleds as its landing gear. It touched down and slid gracefully on the snowdrifts and they were escorted to the facility in the distance by snowmobile. The WDC hadn’t changed that much.
There was a lone man waiting at the doorway to the modern facility. It had been designed with practicality in mind and not style. It was three stories high but the majority of the labs were dug underground. The basement levels numbered four when Logan was last there.
It was grey colored, the stonework, but the building for the most part was encased in snow and ice. It glistened and sparkled in the low level sun over on the horizon. The man that waited by the entrance was cast in shadow. He could only be made out by his silhouette. He was not a tall man by the looks of it as Logan dismounted the still revving snowmobile.
His long coat blew sideways like a cape in the wind that had suddenly picked up. It whipped up more and more snow from the mostly settled airstrip into a bit of a flurry. At the far end of the snowy strip there was a helicopter in wait. It looked like an old Russian gunship. Maybe a Hind D or something similar.
‘General James Logan?’ The man addressed his visitor. He shouted the best he could over the noise of the snowmobile and the wind. Was that a British accent? Logan shielded his eyes from the glare of the setting sun.
‘Yeah.’ He shouted back. His rasping voice echoed around the empty place. The unidentified man held out an arm in greeting as Logan approached closer. His holiday shoes were starting to leak and the snow had numbed both his feet cold as ice.
‘I’m Doctor Abraham Priest.’ His accent had faded a lot. Almost to the point it was barely detectable. ‘It’s good to meet you Sir.’ He held out a hand to shake Logan’s. There was a good vibe from him already. He seemed like a decent man. Hopefully not the pompous prick his file made him seem.
He was young though. His eyes gleamed with youthful vibrancy. He had grown a little messy beard and had a sense of urgency to him. He had bags under his eyes though, right where the crow’s feet had started to form. All this and more gave him the look of a tired and fatigued man. Abraham had a messy ponytail tied low at the back of his head. His hair, despite his youth, had started turning grey. It was almost the same color as Logan’s. He wore thin glasses over his tired eyes and kept having to push them back up his slippery, and a little pointy, nose.
‘Yeah. You too. I hear you took my job?’ He clasped the young man’s hand tight. He had calices and cuts on his fingers. That was good. The General had little time for people who didn’t want to get their hands dirty.
‘I had big shoes to fill Sir. Forgive the melodrama but you are kind of a legend around here…’ Abraham stuttered as he spoke. He might even have been a little star-struck. He, still holding firmly to the General’s hand, led the way inside through two heavy metal doors.
‘Just “Logan” is fine.’ He insisted he call him by his favored name rather than “Sir” or anything like that. He glanced nervously down at his own hand, still clasped inside of Abraham’s grip, and smiled as the nervous Doctor finally let go. Abraham wasted no time and led Logan inside the facility and immediately to an elevator in the back.
There was a security desk in front of the elevator control panel, but no one was manning it. In fact, there were very few people there at all which was definitely a little odd. Logan had never run the facility on a skeleton staff that thin before. Where had they all gone? That was a question that he could save for later. First, he wanted a change of clothes and a good look at the virus. Even that agent, Adrian Frasier, jumped back on the plane and immediately turned it around and took off.
The elevator shutter closed behind them with a quick screech of metal on metal. The Doctor pressed a button for basement level 4. Each icon above the metal chain link shutter glowed as they slowly made their descent. He had taken off his big coat and thrown it aside. It slumped messily into the corner. He still had on a long white coat underneath. It had a few stains on it. One of them was definitely blood. One of the others was coffee or tea. Maybe the odd one a sugary energy drink to add to the mix of patchwork colors. He had been working tirelessly and filling his blood with caffeine to stay on the job. He set about buttoning it right up to the top.
‘Forgive the urgency Logan and sorry for the lack of proper introductions but I need you to look at something. The sooner I get your eyes on it the better.’ Logan didn’t know whether to feel flattered or under an immense amount of pressure. A lot of eyes were going to be on him to figure this out. As soon as the shutter opened up again the Doctor briskly stepped out and walked with a fast pace and deep stride down another, oddly unpopulated, characterless white hall to an air lock door. He took another white coat from a peg next to the door and handed it to Logan. He took it, a familiar garment to him, and threw it on after tossing his own coat to one side.
‘Why no nurses or assistants?’ He finally asked as he was handed a basic breathing mask that was green in color and had a crinkly paper-plastic texture. He pulled it over his short but firm, silver colored stubble. He looked a right mess. He still had on the same clothes he had been wearing in a dirty bar at the other side of the world and the same black trainers too. It was warm in there though so at least he was starting to feel movement in his toes again and at least his clothes were starting to dry. The cuffs of his jeans were especially uncomfortable.
‘You really have been gone a long time?’ Abraham muttered almost below hearing level and looked at him blankly and unimpressed. ‘You really don’t know do you?’ Logan had to admit he had fluttered so quickly from location to location, mostly in the Far East and Russia, so quickly that he had never even paid any attention to the news. He had never even tried to. That was what he was trying to escape after all.
‘So this is pretty serious then?’ He asked, a little disarmed of his ego, and unintentionally raised his right grayish black eyebrow.
‘The file you read on the plane was horrifically out of date when I printed it off for Adrian to give to you. By the time he found you and brought you back, the number of cases had grown exponentially, to make the file you read not just horrifically out of date, but frankly not worth reading I’m afraid.’ He rose up his arm and pulled open the door of the glass air lock. He stepped inside and Logan followed.
He remembered the lab well and fondly too. This was where Logan had kept samples rather than living specimens and certainly not patients. That was still true. This must have been the Doctor’s lab come home from home by the look of it through the transparent air lock door. Sandwich bags, burger wrappers, and tins of energy drinks littered the dirty tiled floor. A thin mist sprayed them inch by inch but dried on contact. That would be the disinfectant. All this went on to the deafening roar of a siren and an equally deafening roar of the air purifiers in the ceiling.
The door opened automatically and the computers started up unprompted too. So that was where the aides and assistants must have gone. If this contagion was half as big as the Doctor’s harrowing analysis would have had Logan believe, they would have wanted to get to their families. Or had even been infected themselves.
‘The word “Pandemic” does not begin to cover what this is Logan.’ He sat on a sto
ol by the long white bench that ran the length of the sizeable room. Televisions lined every surface of the wall space with every news channel imaginable playing along constantly. Some of them had been taken offline. Some of them displayed a message or an emergency broadcast. Logan was no linguist but he was smart and had travelled a lot. He could read a few of them. None of them were in English. Some urged citizens to stay inside at all costs. Not open the door even for trusted neighbors, friends, or even family under any circumstances. One of them was in French, the others in languages he couldn’t put his finger to. Abraham slumped over his desk.
‘In the time we have been talking, another town or even a city might have become literally unsafe.’ The Doctor brought up a monitor that was linked to the largest TV in the room. It showed a map with blobs of red, white and black dotted all about the western hemisphere. The key showed what those colors meant. Red was an area that had gone dark. Lost contact and not reposted their situation for at least twelve hours. White was an infected area that still had control. Black was simply labeled a no go zone. Those colors remained inconstant and shifted all of the time. Most often from a less serious color to a more serious. New blobs would appear spontaneously.
‘Is this real time?’ Logan demanded with a great deal more urgency in his voice than was usual. He didn’t reply but nodded in confirmation. Though it was hidden by his mask, his jaw had dropped and the seasoned General was stunned into silence. The modern world had never faced a plague on this level. Not since bubonic plague, not since the first Spanish flu, and nothing else had even come close.
Abraham waved Logan over to his bench where there was a small dish held firmly under a powerful microscope all ready for him to assess. He peered into the eyepiece to a red colored mass below. He could make out a single cell that displayed harsh corners and violent spikes along its circumference. That was a flu virus. That was easy to recognize. But it had other qualities too. Strange shapes and ever shifting. It moved and morphed all of the time. Producing more and more cells by splitting at least once per two to three seconds. It had the shape and form of a rabies cell too. Not for long but it was there. He had never seen anything so aggressive going on under the eye of a microscope. It was like nothing he had ever seen before. He looked up but could not yet meet the expecting eyes of the Doctor. He had no idea. He had failed. After a long sigh and with deflated shoulders he turned.
‘Anything?’ Abraham asked almost expecting his disappointing answer.
‘I need to get in the field.’ He didn’t bother letting him down. It was as plain as day that he knew nothing. It wasn’t like anything he had seen before. Nobody would have been able to answer it. Logan continued.
‘I need to get in the field and see how the virus affects its hosts. How it kills them and how it passes from victim to victim. If I can draw any parallel when I’m out there it might help us to find a cure.’
Abraham was visibly deflated. His childlike manner upon their first meeting had faded completely. Abraham had built Logan up in his mind to be the savior and had talked himself into believing entirely that he would know the answer. It was unfair of him to place everything on Logan though, no matter how much he thought he might have been able to help, the pandemic that was visibly stretching across the world was an unknown.
He said nothing, slumped down into his arms on the table, and started rubbing his eyes hard. There was a bookshelf in the corner. A tall one with all kinds of interesting works on its shelves. Abraham sprung up to arch his back and take a deep breath. He reached for a small remote control.
He envied, no he hated, how clam Logan looked. He had his arms folded over his pristine white coat. He hated that he could just sink into his own mind. It looked like he could block out the fact that millions were dying as they stood there with no answers and no direction to go in search of them.
But that could not have been further from the truth. It shattered him inside. His calm and collected exterior was just his armor. He had gone over to the bookshelf and had taken out a lengthy book about the ancient world. Abraham turned on some music. Classical and soothing for his much overloaded head.
‘You like the ancient world?’ Logan asked without turning. He was reading the first few pages. It frustrated Abraham but he didn’t have the nerve to voice it. He, instead, just indulged himself in the question.
‘That one is about the world before our own. Before recorded history.’ Abraham began. ’Scholars look back to the ancient Egyptians as the builders of society and don’t question what might have come before them. They don’t seem to get that the civilization we know and revere as the ancient Egyptian world seemed to form without any precedent. There is no evidence, yet discovered, that points to how that civilization came about. There is no evolution in their language development either. Like a fully formed human being just hopping from its mother’s womb. Suddenly they were able to build pyramids that somehow mathematically represented, on scale, a whole hemisphere of the planet. Which means they knew it was spherical and not flat…’ Logan didn’t look up, he was reading page after page but listening to Abraham’s commentary the whole time.
‘Then there is the step pyramid in ancient Maya. Built as a mathematical mirror image of the Great Pyramid at Giza at Chechen Itza half a world away. The author of that book supposes that there was a teacher race.’
Logan was interested for sure but didn’t look up from his reading. Abraham enjoyed the conversation change. Even though it was a bit odd and it frustrated him to not be entirely focused on the virus and how to stop it. He continued regardless.
‘A teacher race that came from the world before ours and before the ancient Egyptians. The author supposes they were wiped out by some kind of global apocalypse. He looks at the myths from ages ago, and eons ago, that point to global floods and blackened skies. Noah and his ark and a handful of identical myths from other cultures passed on from generation to generation are his evidence for this long dead civilization reaching out to us from beyond the grave to tell us who they were. To tell us what happened to them and to try to stop us falling down the same traps. Trying to tell us that there would be an apocalypse again, an extinction level event, and trying to make us know that we must try all we can try to save something of what we are before that happens again.’ His passion for the subject oozed out of him. His hand gestures became inflated and emotive. Logan just let him talk it out but found himself oddly transfixed on the Doctor’s voice.
‘The survivors of the ancient-ancient race, the author supposes, spread out across the globe to teach us how to be human again. They turned humanity back to the humane and tried to stop us feeding on each other and fighting among ourselves. He points to wise men “coming from the sea” in notable ancient worlds to teach the newly risen people how to farm, how to form civilization. They were called “Virracocha” in South American mythology. “Oons” in Mesopotamia and Sumer. And he supposed that the best known of them was the Egyptian God-King Osiris. They came from the sea, from what was left of their own land, to raise humanity up from the ashes.’ Logan closed the book after reading about a chapter and flicking through the rest to try to digest the end. The Doctor had his head in his hands, and sometimes stared down the microscope to the ever changing virus below, then turning away with another frustrated growl and turned his eyes back to the growing blobs of color on the map.
Logan paced back over. Still with his arms folded. Still irritatingly calm. He made a b-line for the screen and took a long hard look at what was left of England. The North East of it was still white. The rest was either black or red or a curious mix of the two.
‘That’s as good a place as any to start.’
An outsider then. A deep and interesting man with knowledge and maturity beyond the youthful flare of his eyes. They would get along just fine. Abraham was not a man consumed by his job or put on a self-elected pedestal over his own achievements. He was consumed instead by the lack of identity he clearly envied in the world he
lived in. He was an idealist and a thinker. His thoughts were transcendental and covered far more than his immediate concerns, stretching through time, and leaping national boundaries too. He was a Citizen and a Doctor of Earth. Helping those he can because he can.