The Hammer of God

“Here wait; let me make it official.” He slid off the couch, got down on one knee, grabbed her hand, kissed it, and said, “Janice, I lost you once. I never want to lose you again. I love you. I love you more than I love myself and I need to be with you every day. Janice, if you’ll have me again, will you marry me, again?”

“Oh, Bill,” she hugged him so hard that she slid from the couch and joined him on the floor. He held her tight and he felt her begin to cry. He continued to hold her with his eyes closed until her breathing settled.

A few minutes later, she spoke softly, “When we were almost killed, looking into your eyes gave me courage. It gave me the strength to come through that horrible time. I knew then how much I loved you and that I always had. Yes, yes, let’s get married — sooner rather than later.”

They kissed and rolled on the floor. Bill was on top when he broke off the kiss, smoothed her hair, and looked into Janice’s eyes. “We are going to make this a wonderful life. Just you and me.” They kissed again.

The teapot attempted to disturb the moment. They let it boil.

For no particular reason, Bill’s eyes sprung open at 4:30 a.m., an hour before the alarm was set to go off. He rolled over and saw Janice in a restless sleep. He put his hand on her shoulder and that seemed to calm her somewhat. He kept his hand on her for a moment, thinking about how their lives had changed last night. Then he rose from bed and made his way into the den.

Might as well get a jump on the day, he thought, hitting the startup key on his secure home computer and then going into the kitchen to make coffee. When he returned, he checked his inbox, finding the usual array of mail and memos. He spent some time answering and redirecting some of it, then decided to look in on SCIAD, using his home-based retinal scan device. His inquiry of the previous day created a torrent of activity. Three, however, came with Element priority. According to his own rules, he’d open those.

The first response was a thoughtful dissertation on nefarious forces masking a biological attack under the haze of an influenza outbreak caused by the lack of vaccine. The gist of the piece was that public health authorities would have been slow to ferret out the biological attack agent from the thousands who would fall victim in the normal course of time. In biological attacks, time is the enemy. Contaminants and agents must be identified, then quarantined, and then eradicated. The longer it took to realize an attack was taking place, the bigger the attack got. He bookmarked this message and used the comment tool to highlight “time is the enemy” in yellow. He’d go back to his one later.

The second message dealt with the need to harden the notification network of first responders. Here the emphasis was on preventing outside forces from affecting or skewing our biologic reporting system, blinding us from the severity of the outbreak and having the same effect as giving a natural virus more time to spread throughout the population. Bill decided to have that one redacted and released back to the outer compound rings for further comment.

The last position paper was a bone chiller. It was a short list of known viral strains, both natural and synthetic, that could wreak havoc in a poorly inoculated population. Lots of nasty little bugs nestled in labs and in arms factories all over the world. They were all deadly but, thank God, all very delicate. Some would die in direct sunlight. Others had no tolerance for temperature swings. Some hated smog while rain rendered a few strains impotent. The fragile nature of most of these viruses eliminated their possible use as weapons. But a few were robust enough to scare the bejesus out of anti-biological response teams.

One particularly nasty little bugger was HCD Complex 33, a synthetic strain that needed to be incubated right up until its time of release. The heat of the human body was incubation enough, but the Complex 33 had to get into the body from a warm source to begin with and that wasn’t that easy. Sunlight killed it. UV actually. So you couldn’t just release it in a warm climate. However, once it was inside a person, it spread by the simple act of breathing. Then the next victim’s internal heat incubated it for the next migration through the new host’s breathing patterns.

Bill read the blurb again to make sure he understood that in order to start the chain of infection you’d have had to set it inside a body from an incubated environment intentionally. Then he put the message at the top of the list. He wanted everyone’s thoughts on this. Pronto.