Walking around, I found several others that said they had family flown out to different parts of the country. The hospital told several they couldn’t fly until they had a three-day course of Tamiflu because they had been exposed.
Well, I know a nurse at the hospital and went to talk to him. His exact words were, ‘The CDC and Homeland were responsible fortransporting patients to high care centers across the nation’. When I asked about the flu, he told me to avoid the top four floors at all costs. He had been on shift for twelve hours and they had lost nine patients.
Hearing that, I left, but I never asked about the body bags because there were National Guard there acting as security and they were wearing gas masks.
If anyone hears something, let me know. Peace out.’
Highlighting the message, Arthur printed it and then looked over and saw four of the five pictures were open and number five was still downloading. He hit print on the pictures, then clicked to go back to the board.
The next message read ‘Rudolph Flu’. He clicked it and saw a very long post. He highlighted it and hit print. He clicked back to the message board and waited for the page to reload. All four pictures and the text were finished printing before the board filled the screen.
Moving to the next post, Arthur went to click it and the window went blank. “Fuck!” he yelled as a ‘Site Unavailable’ message filled the blank window. He clicked reload and got the same message. Turning to the other screen, he saw the last picture had never downloaded.
Closing them, he headed to the next board and found it unavailable. Heading to Google, he typed in Rudolph Flu and hit search. Watching the little hourglass turning as the page loaded, Arthur was tempted to call the cable company and scream at them.
‘None Found’ appeared in the blank window. There were no links to anything, not even advertisements. “I don’t fucking believe it, I found something Google doesn’t know?” Arthur cried out in shock.
A gray box popped up on his screen.‘Malware detected, leave this site immediately’.
Reaching down, Arthur turned the router off. “Holy shit fuck,” he mumbled.
He tapped the gray box and it opened his virus program. He opened the partial file in view mode and saw it was a Trojan horse program. “Damn, I would like to see the rest of the program. I thought I could write a good program to fuck shit up, but this is first class.”
He erased the file and then bleached it. Grabbing the stuff he had printed, Arthur got up and headed to the kitchen. Turning the timer on the coffee pot off since he was already up, Arthur turned the pot on and leaned back against the large kitchen island.
Studying the pictures, he could see stacks of body bags on a loading dock, but couldn’t tell how many. There were two vans, one white and one black. Looking at another picture that was shot zoomed out, he could see people in hazmat suits holding M4s. Behind them were the two vans, but you couldn’t tell what was going on.
Putting the pictures at the back of the stack, he read the ‘Rudolph Flu’ post.
‘First, I’m not a health care provider, but this is what I’ve found out. Rudolph flu is named because the person has a red nose from all the rubbing they do because their nose is itchy, but this usually doesn’t happen until around day eight with a mild fever. The person is contagious around day three and shows no symptoms until ten days after infection. When the fever starts getting high, a bad cough shortly follows. Can’t find any reference to what type of flu Rudolph is. I’ve found posts that say the death rates are between ten and thirty percent here. In Mexico, the rates are over forty.’
Setting the papers down, Arthur grabbed his coffee cup. “Well, if it’s as high as thirty percent that would suck ass,” he mumbled, filling his cup. Spooning in the creamer and sugar, Arthur shook his head. “I’ve never heard of any influenza with an incubation period that long.”
Knowing his knowledge base was a long way from a virologist, Arthur picked his cup up to take a sip. Leaning over the bar, he read the other post as he sipped his coffee. Reading the post, Arthur could confirm the person had no medical background. “Coma, bloody stools, if it’s the flu, it can’t be H1N1 or anything I’ve studied in nursing school,” he mumbled.
Not finding much else, Arthur looked away from the paper. He walked in the living room and turned on the TV to one of the 24-hour news station. The anchors were talking about the president in closed door sessions with the Security Council, talking about the war in the Middle East.
A grin filled Arthur’s face as he lifted the remote and hit the guide button. “Three hundred channels and for the first time, I’m looking for that Mexico City news station. Been a while since I’ve spoken Spanish,” he mumbled. Finding it, he hit the button to turn to the channel only to see ‘Currently Unavailable’ on the screen.
“Oh, this is bullshit!” he bellowed and tossed the remote on the couch. He heard the pounding footsteps of the dogs as they ran into the living room and looked at him. “Yeah, I’m pissed,” Arthur told them, then headed back to the computer.
Turning the router back on,
