Page 36 of The Presidents Shadow

WE ARE OVERWHELMED by the horror of it all.

Only Anna is not shocked by the sight of the tiny downtown area of Bullsbrook.

Two main streets run side by side, one muddy, the other deadly, dusty dry.

The few stores that once existed—a general store, a liquor store, a butcher shop—are shut down.

Anna tells us that Red Cross food delivery is once a week.

This is sometimes supplemented with containers of dehydrated fruits and vegetables, courtesy of the Australian government.

As depressing as the landscape of Bullsbrook is, the condition of the people who live there is even worse.

Everyone walks slowly and carefully, like patients recovering from terrible operations.

Most horrifying are the huge black splotches that cover their skin.

Anna tells us that these wounds are intractable and terribly painful.

She arranges for us to interview a select group of victims. That isn’t the easiest thing to do while wearing full- body negative-pressure biosafety suits with thick plastic hoods, but we do the best we can.

While Hawkeye weighs and evaluates a twenty-year-old mother and her twin four-year-old sons, I ask questions. Unfortunately, I already know the answers to most of them.

“How severe would you rate the pain where the sores are festering?”

The woman’s sunken, vacant eyes take on an unexpected glow.

“I would say it is the pain of hell,” she says. And as if to verify her comments, one of her little boys, his neck and shoulders a field of black and bloody dots, begins to sob.

I turn to Hawkeye. “Hand me the lidocaine,” I say, asking for the strong pain-relief cream designed for severe topical pain.

“You can keep it,” the woman says, shaking her head. “Dr. DaSilva gave us all lidocaine some weeks ago. It does nothing for no one. It was no better than the plum jam my grandmother gives us for our bug bites.”

Who knows why the medication was ineffective.

Perhaps it was from an unreliable pharma manufacturer.

Perhaps it was… hell, who am I kidding? Look at this jungle of screaming, suffering people.

It will not be controlled with a tube of pain cream.

Bleeding black sores. Children stumbling and weeping.

An entire town on the verge of devastation.

More patients, all suffering victims, line up. I consider morphine doses. I consider fentanyl. But Anna told me on our video call that none of the usually reliable painkillers helped against this virus. What we need now is a bigger, better, newer solution.

I try to ignore my own jet lag and nausea.

I do not trust myself to draw blood for testing. I ask Jericho to do that job, and of course, as always, he proceeds with speed and efficiency. I am eternally grateful every time I see him, having thought I’d lost him forever.

I am even more grateful when, later in the day, he reports that a preliminary analysis of blood samples indicates that a faulty gene similar to the one that causes Huntington’s disease may be at work here.

Could it be? Could Jericho be onto something?

Dr. DaSilva seems to think it’s viral in nature, and she is a woman who clearly knows her own business.

I don’t want to discredit anything Jericho believes he may have discovered, either.

The only answer is to keep searching until we don’t have any more questions.

With that in mind, I turn to my next patient.