This story was begun in late 2017 as a sequel to my first novel; “A Wake of Vultures”. I hit a wall in early 2020 when real life overtook my story.
Here are the first couple of chapters of the book…
Whence Came You?
As harsh as truth sounds to the civilized human ears, it is a fact that nature is centered around survival.
Evolution and food chain being the first examples, it is ingrained in the living system to create space and resources for survival and the only achieve the same as by compromising lives.
Accounts of historical epics picked wars and the massive destruction of lives, be it in the battles of Odyssey and Iliad; the world wars or even the modern-day military sieges of countries and resources, wars have always proven to be a method of purging the earth of massive population as each war erases tons of lives.
As crude as it sounds, every war, stemming from either religious/political conflicts or personal/racial odds, if we open up our minds to the ultimate results and overlook the grotesque details of lives lost, we see the much-needed balance reinforced by nature in the process.
As good and bad takes precedence in the civilized human mind, we often tend to forget our core existence on the planet as basic animal life. It is not a surprise that we are forever attempting to climb up the ladder of existence, erasing weaker forms of life as we go by. It’s no different in practice than a male tiger killing cubs when the forest area is low on prey animals for the predators.
Bioterrorism dates back to 1340 or so, when diseased horse corpses were catapulted over castle walls in France. Human bodies infected with plague were also used as ammunition in central Europe during the 14th and 15th century.
In 1763, a British army general ordered the blankets used on smallpox patients to be sent to American Indian tribes. British Revolutionary war troops would also infect themselves with traces of smallpox, rendering themselves immune, in hopes of passing the disease along to the enemy. During World War I, Germans infected livestock headed for the Allies with anthrax. Even though the attack proved unsuccessful, it led to the creation of the Geneva protocol in 1925. This prohibited the use of biological and chemical agents during wartime, while allowing research and development of these agents to continue.
During World War II British and German armies had small biological warfare programs, but the Japanese had a full and robust program in the years that preceded World War II. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians were killed by biological means at the hands of the Japanese army. One of these attacks included dropping paper bags containing plague infested fleas from low flying airplanes.
Smallpox has been used for millennia to wipe out whole continents. People don’t know the history of smallpox anymore, but it is THE most lethal of all bioterror’s used throughout history. It is effective in decimating and exterminating entire countries and peoples, and entire continents.
But you might ask, hasn’t smallpox been eradicated?
Routine vaccination of the American public against smallpox stopped in 1972 after the disease was declared eradicated in the United States. There is no herd immunity anymore.
“Variola Major” unleashed in the general community would lead to a great culling of the population for which only massive quarantines, around the clock curfews and massive inoculation around disease clusters could stop the spread. Just a reminder the spores are spread airborne from coughing.
Smallpox is the deadliest disease in history, that’s not hyperbole but FACT.
And remember the Dryvax smallpox vaccine in US Center for Disease Control stockpiles has been destroyed. Taking its place is ACAM 2000-an untested synthesized version of one of the cell lines used in the original Dryvax vaccine.
This might sound like a bad apocalyptic “made-for-TV” movie… A plot to destroy our country, and it seems that the deep state politicians are all in on that plot.
The following story is fiction, but fiction based on fact. Our government, or any other number of sovereign state players could unleash anything they wanted on the earth’s population. Our political leaders, institutions of higher learning and multinational corporations have created an environment that is totally conducive to such an action… Heads-up folks, it’s coming. The question is not if, but when…
Chapter 1
The officially unexplained death of octogenarian Gwennie Warren leads attorney Keren Odensdotter to once again partner with the quirky Noble Petris. Their investigation uncovers a part of the Deep State plan to cull the myriads of useless eaters consuming scarce natural resources and create a smaller-much smaller-and better world, or at least their idea of what constitutes a better world.
“Man is of no importance. Look at what happens when you starve him. He begins to eat his dead companions to stay alive. Man is only interested in his own survival. That is all that counts. –Felix Dzerzinski
“Whereas, the United Nations agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of extreme environmentalism, social engineering, and global political control… And,
Whereas, the United Nations agenda 21 is being covertly pushed into local communities throughout the United States of America through the international Council of local environmental initiatives (ICL EI) through local “sustainable development” policies such as smart growth, wildlands project, resilient cities, regional visioning projects, and other “green” or “alternative” projects; and, whereas, this United Nations agenda 21 plan of radical so-called “sustainable development” use the American way of life of private property ownership, single-family homes, private car ownership and individual travel choices, and privately owned farms; all is destructive to the environment…”
The agenda, which grew out of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, is a call for international cooperation to address “poverty”, “hunger”, and a host of other “issues” tied to the unraveling of natural ecosystems. It calls for “the broadest public participation in the active involvement of the nongovernmental organizations.”
Something was wrong, very wrong. In all her 80 plus years Gwennie had not experienced much sickness, apart from an occasional head cold every few years.
This was different. It was more than the average aches and pains experienced by most older people. She had a dull headache, itchy burning eyes, some dizziness, and a general feeling of what she expected was the flu.
Gwennie was quite aggravated with her body for letting her down this way. She wanted to get her current project completed before she left on her next “auntie-Mame” type excursion.
Since Jack’s death a few years ago, she made it a point to keep herself busy by visiting all the exotic places the world had to offer. She was looking forward to the excursion to the Aztec ruins in the Yucatán and hope to return with another addition to what she referred to as her “in-house cultural museum”. Perhaps one of those dumpy little female fertility idols with round belly and droopy breasts. With her off-center sense of humor Gwennie pictured her sister Dee–Dee and her last pregnancy and giggled at the resemblance.
She had decided that it was finally time to get involved in plowing through all the junk that Jack had accumulated in his office before his death. Most of it made little or no sense to her.
Jack had been one of the leading microbiologists at Micro–Tech, a company on the leading edge of vaccine research in just a few months before his death he had inexplicably resigned from his position. The resultant jumble of files and boxes paperwork, slides and strange specimens had been crammed into file cabinets and cluttered the floor of Jack’s office.
After Jack’s sudden and inexplicable death four years ago, she had neither the heart nor the motivation to plow through the mess. But now, realizing that she was getting older, and not wanting to leave it for her children to clean up she decided to go through, organize, and throw out all the strange artifacts Jack had left behind.
She never understood Jack’s work, he was the analytical engineering kind not much into people except Gwennie of course and most of the time their kids. It was a blended family of yours, and mine, but not ours.
They had met at the club, introduced by helpful friends after both had suffered painful divorces. After a surprisingly short courtship they decided to marry but considering that they were both in their 40s they had made the decision not to have any more children.
Gwennie was hell-bent to get through this mess before her scheduled departure for the Yucatán trip next week. She was plowing through more and more piles of paper trying to make heads or tails of the gibberish and gobbledygook written there trying to make sure she didn’t throw away anything important.
The cell phone ringing in her pocket caused her to sigh in exasperation. “Hello, this is Gwennie” she answered the phone.
“Hey girlfriend, it’s Gracie Nuveen, what are you up to today?”
“Trying to get through Jack’s rats’ nest of paperwork before I leave on my trip next week. I hadn’t realized that he was such a pack rat. I hope I can get through all it.”
“Well, I was hoping you could join me for lunch at the Crutch and Cane this afternoon. Chef Bill has made his famous Wild mushroom and Sherry soup and I was looking forward to sharing a little gossip.”
“I’ll meet you Gracie but I don’t have much of an appetite. I seem to be coming down with some damn bug and I can’t taste much of anything, but I will meet you there in about ten minutes.
The lunch was never to happen. That last thing Gwennie remembered before she awoke in the hospital bed was feeling faint as she walked toward the restaurant door and seeing the cement sidewalk rushing up toward her as she fell.
Chapter 2
Karen Odensdotter was frightened, more frightened than she had been during the gun battle in Las Vegas. It didn’t seem possible that aunt Gwennie was dead. She seemed so normal, so full of life just last week when Karen had visited her in the hospital.
She had assured Karen that her hospitalization for the upper respiratory infection was just an overreaction by her doctor based on her age. “It’s just that damn bug that’s had everybody hacking and coughing for the past few months. They’ll shoot me full of antibiotics and in a few days, I’ll be up and around good as new.” 48 hours later Gwennie was gone and with her the last link to Karen’s family.
Karen’s conversation with Dr. Tom Zatorski after the autopsy was performed offered little comfort and, if anything, raised Karen’s stress level to the stratosphere.
“I’m sorry Karen,” Tom said “but Gwennie’s body will have to be cremated and the cremains handled like the biohazard they are.”
“Biohazard? What the hell do you mean biohazard?”
“Karen, what you don’t understand is that Gwennie didn’t die from garden-variety flu bug. She died of a pathogen that resists almost all the drugs we have developed to treat or kill it. It is moving rapidly across the world and frankly we’re stymied on how to stop it. This pathogen isn’t a bacteria. It’s a yeast/virus mash-up, a new variety of an organism so common that it’s used as one of the basic tools of lab science, transformed into an infection so disturbing that one of my colleagues called it more infectious than Ebola.”
“A yeast infection? My God Doc, Gwennie died of a yeast infection? Are you trying to tell me that my aunt died from a bug that my girlfriends use Monistat to fight off from time to time?”
“It’s a little more serious than that Karen, the name of the yeast is Candida auris. It’s been on the radar of epidemiologists only since 2009, but it’s grown into what is a potential pandemic threat. We don’t know yet where it came from or how to control its spread. We’re being forced back into old hygiene practices-putting patients in isolation, swabbing rooms with bleach-trying to control it. So far we haven’t done a very good job.”
“Doctor Zatorski I just don’t understand why the hospitals can’t seem to control or kill this yeast.”, Keren said.
“The center of the problem Keren is that this yeast isn’t behaving like a yeast. Normally, yeast hangs out in warm, damp spaces in the body, and surges out of that space only when its local ecosystem veers out of balance. That’s what happens in vaginal yeast infections, for instance, and in infections that bloom in the mouth and throat or bloodstream when the immune system breaks down.”
But in that standard scenario the yeast that has gone rogue only infects the person it was residing in. C. Auris breaks that pattern. It has developed the ability to survive on cool external skin and cold inorganic services. That allows it to linger on the hands of hospital staff and on doorknobs, on counters and the computer keys in a hospital room. With that ability, it can travel from its original host to new victims, passing from person-to-person and outbreaks can last for weeks or months.”
Keren looked puzzled. “I still don’t understand Doc. This isn’t the 1800’s. Doesn’t medical science have the know-how to deal with fungal infections… even a yeasty Frankenstein like this one?”
“Yeast is a fungus Keren, but C. Auris is behaving like a bacterium…-in fact, like a bacterial superbug. It’s a cross-species shift as inexplicable as if a grass munching cow hopped the fence and began blood-thirstily chomping on the sheep in the pasture next door.”
“The accepted narrative of new diseases is that they always take us by surprise: science recognizes it after it has begun to move, with the second patient or the 10th or the one hundredth and works its way back to find patient zero.”
“But C. Auris was flagged as troublesome from its first discovery, though its identifiers didn’t understand at the time what it might be able to do. The story began in 2009, when a 70-year-old woman already in a hospital in Tokyo developed a stubborn, oozing ear infection. The infection didn’t respond when doctors administered antibiotics, which made them think the problem might be a fungus instead. A swab of her ear yielded a yeast that appeared to be a new species.”
“Japanese microbiologists named it for the Latin word for “ear”. That story also would’ve ended in 2009 – new species, new nomenclature, another entry in a textbook – except for one unnerving fact.”
Fungal infections have never been a high priority in medical research, and as a result, there are very few drugs approved for treating them – only three classes of several drugs each, compared to a dozen classes and hundreds of antibiotics for bacteria. This yeast was already showing some resistance to the first-choice antifungal’s that would’ve been used against it, a family of compounds called azoles that can be given by mouth.”
“The back-up choice, a drug called amphotericin, is IV-only, and it’s so toxic that it’s severe fever-and-chills reactions have been dubbed “shake and bake”. Doctors try to avoid it whenever possible.”
“That left only one set of drugs available, a new IV-only class called echinocandins. C. Auris entered medical awareness accompanied by the knowledge that, if it blew up into a problem, it would be difficult to treat. Still, at that point it had only caused an ear infection. That might’ve been a random occurrence; there was no reason to assume worse to come.”
“Except, at about the same time, physicians in South Korea were called on to treat two hospital patients, a one-year-old boy with a blood cell disorder and a 74-year-old man with throat cancer. They both had developed sepsis… bloodstream infections caused by the newly discovered yeast. And in both their cases, the organism was resistant to azoles, amphotericin and frighteningly to the last-ditch echinocandins.”
Keren’s eyes widened; “What happened?”
“Both died.”
“The same new bug, occurring in unrelated patients, in different body systems, simultaneously in two countries, made epidemiologists wonder whether there might be more to come. There were. In just a few years, C. Auris infections were recognized in India, South Africa, Kenya, Brazil, Israel, Kuwait and Spain. As with the Korean and Japanese cases, there was no connection between the different countries’ patients. In fact, the strains were genetically different on different continents – suggesting that C. Auris had not begun in one place and then spread by transmission, but had arisen simultaneously everywhere, for reasons no one could discern.
But the slightly different strains had the same impact on patients: they were deadly. Depending on the country and the location of the illness in their bodies, up to 60% of infected patients died.”
“So is aunt Gwennie the first casualty of this bug in the US?”
“No Keren, there have been several hundred cases recorded in the United States, and 11 states – and the behavior of the bug in this country is teaching microbiologists more about how the new yeast behaves.”
“It seems that not every continent develops its own strain. Instead, the US is playing host to several micro-epidemics, each of which was sparked by one or several travelers from somewhere else cases found in New York, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Connecticut and Maryland bear the genetic pattern of South Asia. Illinois, Massachusetts and Florida cases show South America’s genetic pattern. And randomly, the few cases recorded in Indiana seem to be linked to a South African strain. Wherever they came from, the subtle variance of C. Auris share important characteristics: they are highly drug resistant.”
“Then why haven’t I heard about this on the news? Not telling the public about this is downright criminal.”; Keren fumed.
“The Center for disease control disclosed that analysis of isolates from the US in the 26 other countries where C. Auris has surfaced show that more than 90% were resistant to azoles; 30% were resistant to the class that contains amphotericin; and globally, up to 20% were resistant to the last-ditch echinocandins.”
“They also pose another challenge: long-lasting hospital outbreaks. To try to stop it spread, hospitals put patients into isolation; regularly swabbed any other patient who had been in the same room as the infected persons, and all of the staff who had any contact with them; required every healthcare worker, janitor, or visitor to wear gowns, gloves, and aprons; they’d swab the patient twice a day with disinfectant, administered disinfectant mouthwash and dental gel, and wash the room three times per day with diluted bleach. When the patients moved out, the rooms they had stayed in and any equipment that had been used on them were bombed with hydrogen peroxide vapor.”
“Despite all those precautions, the yeast caused a 50-person outbreak that lasted more than a year. It survived the disinfectant baths and found places to hide from the bleach. And it stubbornly persisted on bodies. One patient tested negative for the bug three times, and then, on a fourth screen, tested positive again.”
“Last year, an Oklahoma hospital discovered that a single patient was carrying C. Auris. To keep it from spreading, the hospital slammed the patient into isolation and enforced strict infection control. It also called an AC/DC team, which took 73 samples from the patient, his room, other rooms where he had stayed, and other patients he might have been in contact with and hauled them back to Atlanta for genomic analysis. Their quick action kept the deadly yeast from spreading elsewhere in the hospital – but it represented an emergency expenditure of resources and time that no hospital could make routine.”
“The government, mostly through the CDC has tried to keep a lid on this. Their thinking is that until they have some viable method to treat this bug that there is little positive to be gained by panicking the public. There aren’t many bright spots in the looming battle against C. Auris.”
“One may be this: most of the patient so far, and all of those who have died, have been hospitalized because they were already somehow ill – with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancers, and other illnesses. They were on ventilators, treated with IVs and catheters, and receiving multiple drugs that undermine their immune systems competence.”
“Well that’s just ducky Doc… wonderful news.”; Keren said, sarcastically.
“I’m afraid that’s just the way it is for now Keren. The medical community, the public health organizations and the government are doing their level best to come to terms with this. I don’t know what else we can do.”
“Well it seems to me that there should be something… or someone who can attack this thing from a direction that hasn’t been tried yet. Thanks for the explanation Doc, even though you’ve left me with more questions than answers.”
(As I said, this story was started in late 2017 as a follow up to Wake of Vultures)