The National Guard commander stepped away, and a suited man with driftwood-colored hair and a five-o’clock shadow approached the microphones.
The army guy was an army guy, exuding can-do coolness.
Even through the pixels I could see that Manpearl was terrified.
“Good evening. I’m David Manpearl, communications director with the CDC. Five days ago, we received the first reports from Frances Mahon Deaconess Hospital regarding an illness of unknown origin. There were five cases, and the patients had all come into the hospital within several hours of one another.
“Symptoms included sudden personality changes, memory loss, impaired cognitive abilities, insomnia, incoordination, body tremors, and vocal outbursts. The patients had first noticed symptoms three weeks prior, and had all experienced a steady mental decline. The next day, eleven people came to the hospital with similar symptoms. The third day, that number grew to thirty. The local hospital has only twenty-five beds, so this became a medical crisis in short order.”
He glanced down at his notes, then looked back into the camera.
“At present, we have 218 active cases. The hospital has been transformed into a triage facility and we’re adding more beds and field hospitals in coordination with the National Guard and FEMA. We’re flying in doctors and nurses from all over the country. As of ten minutes ago, 104 people have died.”
A reporter called out:
“What’s the mortality rate?”
“Well, so far it’s one hundred percent.”
Another reporter asked:
“What’s the cause of death?”
“Patients eventually fall into a coma and then experience variations of organ failure, but aspiration pneumonia is the leading cause of death.”
Someone else asked:
“Have you found patient zero or determined what type of disease you’re dealing with?”
“The short answer is no, but we’re performing a number of autopsies.”
I turned off the television and sat in the silence of the cottage, listening to the rain tick at the windows and the perpetual thunder of crashing waves on the beach below.
In my mind, I replayed every frame of the video I’d watched, and one part in particular: “I think I’m getting sick too. The past three nights, my whole body aches.”
I could feel a theory fighting to emerge out of the fog of possibilities. And I could feel myself subconsciously resisting it. Not because it didn’t have merit.
Because, if it were true, it meant that something awful had happened. Something worse even than all those people dying.
I walked into the small bedroom, pulled my suitcase out of the closet and my clothes from the drawers, and began to quickly pack my things.
It was late and the weather was bad, but I couldn’t waste another second.
I would leave for Montana tonight.
TWO DAYS LATER, I was speeding across Montana under the biggest sky I’d ever seen, a hundred miles west of Glasgow.
It was a landscape of gentle desolation. Out on the plain, I would glimpse the occasional barn or schoolhouse weathering away in a sea of great wide nothing.
Semi–ghost towns whose only infrastructure were a post office and a grain mill.
The ubiquitous wind farms, with their spinning white blades, were the only evidence that I was driving through a mid-twenty-first-century West.
Otherwise, the landscape seemed to exist out of time entirely.
And the distances weren’t just vast. They felt galactic.
I was driving my Mercedes Sprinter 4x4 EV, which I’d modified into a makeshift sleeper and basic molecular biology lab. There’d been times when I couldn’t find a rental, when the walls of this van constituted my home. I’d fold out the built-in bed, kill the motors, and fall asleep to coyote howls in the Sonoran Desert, or the rocking of ferocious winds as a Colorado blizzard erased the world outside.
Fifty miles west of Glasgow, I turned on the radio and surfed until I found a local NPR station.
“…testing cattle at surrounding ranches and meat from grocery stores in Glasgow. Thus far, there is no indication that meat contaminated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease, is responsible for the 177 deaths in Glasgow since last week.”
I passed two digital traffic signs positioned a few hundred yards apart:
HIGHWAY 2 EAST OF HINSDALE CLOSED TO ALL EASTBOUND TRAFFIC
And then:
DETOUR NORTH TO HIGHWAY 5, OR SOUTH TO HIGHWAY 200
I stayed on my eastward heading.
Hinsdale, Montana, population 242, was a blink-and-you-missed-it affair, which stood in the shadow of a one-thousand-meter wind turbine.
As I rolled through the main drag, I saw flashing lights in the distance.
A half mile east of town, a trio of Montana Highway Patrol EVs were parked across the shoulders and both lanes.
As I approached the blockade, a patrolman in khaki slacks, an army green button-down, and a flat-brimmed hat stepped out of his car.
I brought my Sprinter to a stop twenty feet from the cruisers.
During the last year of my nomadic life, miraculously, I had never been pulled over by the police. I felt confident that the self-augmentation I had performed on my face would hold up to scrutiny. And though my identification had never been examined by law enforcement, it had served me well countless other times.
I leveled out my heart rate at 70 bpm.
The lawman made a circle with his finger, telling me to lower the window.
I complied.
He wore aviator sunglasses that reflected an image of me behind the steering wheel. I wondered if they were optical display frames that could transmit relevant information about me and my vehicle onto the inside of the lenses, or simply the old-fashioned kind.
I noticed razor burns on his face and neck from the morning’s shave.
“Do me a favor, shut off your motor.”
I turned off the Sprinter.
I didn’t like that I couldn’t see his eyes. Reading eye movement was far and away the most effective method of decoding a person’s emotional state and intent.
“Where you coming from?” he asked.
My Sprinter had New Mexico plates.
I said, “New Mexico.”
“Okay. Did you see the signs twenty miles back?”
“Sure did.”
“So you know everything around Glasgow is closed due to the outbreak.”
“I’m a cell biologist with Los Alamos National Laboratory. Glasgow is my destination.”
He removed his glasses, stared at me through pale blue eyes.
“What’s your name?”
“Robbie Foster,” I said.
“License and registration.”
I had them ready.
He took them, walked back to his car without a word.
The wind was whipping off the prairie.
The Sprinter shuddered.
After five minutes, he stepped back out of his car and walked over.
“Welcome to Montana, Mr. Foster. You work for the CDC?”
“More of an independent contractor.”
“Well, we’re glad to have you.”
His name tag said D. TRAUTMANN. D as in David.
He was one of 237 state troopers in Montana, and part of District V, based in the town of Glendive. District V covered sixteen counties, including Valley, the one I was currently in. David was twenty-four years old and had graduated from the academy one year ago.
Very green.
He reported to Sergeant Betsy Lane, who reported to Captain Sam Houghton, who reported to Major Tommy Meadows, who reported to Colonel Jenna Swicegood. I’d spent two hours this morning getting up to speed on the Montana Highway Patrol chain of command and how it was currently interacting with the CDC and Montana National Guard vis-à-vis Glasgow.