FBR chapter 4 scene 1

Hi from the sunny skies of Q! Here's the beginning of chapter 4. Enjoy!

Foreign Body Reaction, Alan McNeill
Chapter 4 Scene 1

Despite that rough road and old truck, Ben startled awake when the truck stopped. He had fallen asleep against the passenger door. He tried to stretch out the cramp in his neck but it wouldn't let go.

“More coffee?” said Mark pointed at the thermos jammed between them.

“No thanks. Is this your current camp?”

“I set it up for the couple of days I would be down here. The contract had me going to the high point between here and Malin on the Connector next week, didn't want to get too settled.”

Ben just nodded as he got out of the truck.
“My stuff in the tool box?”

“Yea.” Mark pulled the keys from the ignition and opened up the diamond plate aluminum tool box that spanned the front of the truck bed. He climbed up and handed Ben down everything he had collected as he had followed Ben's trail.

Ben was relieved to see that his PVC cache tube was there along with some clothing and tools that Mark had salvaged from the burnt trailer.

Mark's camp was nearly invisible, even when Ben stood at the truck and looked right at it. They were on the west side of a small hill. Ben could here a stream gurgling further down the hillside in the brush. There was a weathered logging shack that probably had been thrown together before the turn of the previous century that was nearly obscured by the blackberries that had taken advantage of the small clearing. The berries covered the leaning cabin. The grayed and weathered wood of the door was invisible in the shadow of the hillside to their right.

Ben noted that mark must have evicted the mice, skunks, and porcupines that lived here undisturbed, as he had swept out the place, covered the floor with the plastic paper that covered lumber trucks in the Pacific Northwest. He had put his mat on the floor, and his sleeping back hung from the rafters. Despite being able to see sky through the roof, the floor and the interior was dry.

“You really fixed up the place.”

Mark didn't bother to answer.

Ben knew that it would be harder to try and pry information from Mark about what was going on than to just try and find out. While Mark was sure that Global Security was out of the picture now with bigger fish to fry, Ben was not so sure. The oil the fuel storage that he had not told Mark about represented an enormous store of wealth today. But, Mark might be right, if this was as bad as Ben suspected, if FEMA had closed I-5, using Willits as a pretext, then this was very very bad. Maybe bad enough to make Global forget all about him.

Mark had several milk jugs of water along the wall. Ben's thirst seemed unquenchable since the fire, and as Ben unpacked his cache, he sipped the clean cold creek water. Even the slight taste of iodine from the disinfectant didn't erase the simple pleasure of drinking.

Ben unrolled the cache plastic after getting it back out of the tube. Quickly he put back on the belt and two of the Smith and Wesson. He placed the third pistol that had originally been in the truck on Mark's sleeping pad just as Mark walked back in.

“You think we're going to be shooting a lot of people?”

“I don't know about you, but I can still feel the Global chief's pistol pressed against my head. I think it will be a while before I don't carry a pistol.”

“Might get you into more trouble than you want.”

“Might save your ass too. I put the third one on your mat. It's loaded. You decide for you, I'm not selling guns or shooting people. I just want a choice.”

Mark picked up the S&W 9mm and dropped the clip out, pulled the receiver back and ejected the cartridge that had been loaded into the chamber. He took a red shop rag from his back pocket, wiped the gun and the clip clean. He pushed the pin just below the receiver all the way in and brought the receiver up and back and off the gun. He quickly dissembled the spring and floating barrel. He inspected the bore of the barrel, and deeming it clean enough, reassembled the pistol in a few seconds. He jammed the clip back in and ratchet a round back into the chamber, leaving 13 in the clip and one loaded. He set the safety and put the gun under his belt, hidden by the denim jacket.

“Done that before?”

“Once of twice.”

Ben realized that while he trusted Mark as a friend, he new little about his past. Then he thought about his decision not to talk about the fortune in fuel sequestered in the mountain. It bore further consideration another time. Now he needed information.

The little Kaito shortwave radio was a marvel, tiny and very sensitive, but needed a long horizontal antenna made of almost anything. While local news would talk about the road closure the financial crash of 2008 had revealed to even the stubbornest inhabitant of America that our news reporting was not about the news but about controlling the population and telling them what they should think and do.

Starting in 2007 ever quarterly report regarding the housing mortgage mess had managed to post losses that were hugely underestimated. Every time. All of it, it all sunk in finally, even to those most resistant to believe, that the news never told the truth, never the whole truth anyway. Constant spinning and shaping of whatever happened was required. Some items simply never were mentioned. Ben suspected the reason for the closure of I-5 might be one of them.

Shortwave allowed the listeners to hear lies from other countries. Sometimes, between the manipulation of all news in the USA and the similar manipulations in other countries, especially China, Russia, and Pakistan a person could get a drift of what might really be happening. Amateur band was better but the little Kaito KA1102 had some capacity on the long bands for that too. They would be talking about bird flu if this was that bad.

Mark helped Ben find some old rusted fencing. They cut the top strand and pulled the staples out, and finally got enough for the brush untangled from the wire to make an antenna about one hundred feet long. They strung the wire from the side of the shed to a fir that was directly to the south, high enough to clear the truck. Since shortwave broadcasts are done from very big antennas that are horizontal, not vertical like normal FM and AM radio, the horizontal wire would receive better. The wire ran south because almost all the stations Ben wanted to here were in Europe and Asia – which meant the wire antenna should have it's long side towards those continents.

Ben quickly used a metal clip he carried to connect to the small telescoping antenna. He turned on the radio, putting it to scan the common commercial bands in Cuba, China, Russia, only scanning those that broadcast in English. There was nothing received and Ben didn't expect their would be until dark as the sun creates so much noise that it limits reception.

In the next hour, Ben and Mark got the truck pulled up close to the shed, and ran a wire from Mark's inverter, mounted on the inside back of the cab wall. That gave them 120V power for Mark's laptop computer, and recharging the Kaito and Mark's cell phone.

Mark's truck had a CB, and they had that on too but the 40 channels were quiet. Mark's camp was quite a ways from Grant's Pass and I-5 where all the chatter would be.

Mark brought his laptop out of the truck and they tried to get a cellular connection but had only one bar. Ben walked outside with the laptop, and finally found a spot with a little better signal, and began his search.

The World Health Organization website was a wealth of information on H5N1, the deadly form of bird flu which is found mainly in poultry. What Ben was looking for was any information on this latest strain. If Mark was right and there was a level six emergency, it meant that the virus had mutated, making it now easy to be passed from human to human through touching, sneezing, anything that made water born droplets.

Ben found that two vaccines had been produced in quantity so far. One was from GlaxoSmithCline and had the advantage of only needing a tiny bit to immunize, and another from the French company Sanofi Pasteur who made millions of doses in a Swiftwater Pennsylvania. Sanofi's vaccine was based on the blood of a Vietnamese man who died in 2004, and Glaxo's was what was known as a shotgun in the vaccine world. Both were for the H5N1 virus, but early variations. Glaxo's was aimed at the whole family of viruses around H5N1 and thus only gave some immunity to some people for some H5N1 strains. Sanofi's was specific to the Vietnamese strain from 2004 and only had forty five percent protection. Worse the Sanofi's vaccine required two does and both were large. Reportedly eight million doses of that was stored by the federal government.

After 2007, and as the economy had entered what was first called a recession in 2008, the big companies has halted the extremely expensive production. More and more strains of H5N1 had been found world wide, strains that killed humans and were passed in many cases from person to person, with no birds involved, but none had made the leap to easily transmissible, so the big drug companies had moved on to the very real diseases that were coming back after a half century of dormancy. Typhoid, malaria, and all forms of dysentery, that's where the money was now, and the need.

Until today, thought Ben. Now the bird flu, H5N1 had a new slight mutation, and was spreading easily. The WHO had nothing to say about the new strain, but googling the virus brought up a multitude of blogs in California, Washington and Oregon. Bird Flu had arrived and unlike the gentle folk of 1918 when a similar, but less potent killer had been loose in America, the people of 2011 were trapped in cities, hungry, largely out of work and there were so many many more of them.

For a hungry little virus, there was a lot of food available. I-5's closure was just the start. Some blogs were talking about complete closures to the outside world of towns in Washington. Kent Washington was cut off. Seattle had been quarantined.

All the blog information was fractured, but early reports of people who had not been vaccinated for any of the H5N1 strains; those reports spoke of enormous numbers of people becoming ill. The death rate was of course unknown. Rumor on the blogs had the first infection thirty days earlier in Tacoma, Washington.

Mark's laptop battery beeped and Ben could see the charge light flashing. He shut down the computer and walked back into the cabin. He handed the laptop to Mark who plugged in the charger and turned back to the boiling water on his coffee can wood chip stove.