Aquarium Quarantine

Chapter 3

Scarlet was extremely pale and breathing hard. "Oh s**t guys..... we really have got to get out of here. This is straight up like a f*****g horror movie."

Charles got back on the phone with his wife again, and we could hear her tell him that she had gotten the kids and made it off of the island.

"Oh no...." We heard him say with more despair I had ever expected to hear from him. His tan skin had taken on a paler shade as the blood drained from his face. He clutched the phone so tightly that his knuckles turned red, and kicked the side of the desk in frustration.

I tried to eavesdrop on the conversation, wondering what news she was giving him that would make him react that way.

He kept his voice calm, as not to scare his poor wife further. I was impressed by his ability to sound so calm despite how upset he was feeling. "Okay. Please be safe. I know we will be able to figure something out. We are completely safe in here and the hurricane barricades are up so no one is going to be able to get in here. We are just going to have to stay in contact and wait it out. Get as far away from here as you can. I love you…"

He finally got off the phone and turned to us solemnly, "They made it out, but she said there were men in uniforms with guns showing up at the bridge as they were driving out. I think they are planning to set up a blockade and quarantine the island. This is bad..... This is extremely bad...."

Now that he was off the phone, he didn’t keep his composure any longer. His hands trembled as he ran them through his short hair.

This made the situation so much more real to me and snapped me out of the strange sort of disassociation that I guess I had fallen into in order to keep from having a mental breakdown. Charles had never let his composure slip in front of any of us before. We had worked together for six years now, and even in the most stressful of situations he kept a calm and relaxed attitude and never showed any fear or panic.

You might think I am exaggerating, but working with animals can be extremely dangerous and high stress situations happen more often than a normal nine to five job. It took time for me to adjust to handling situations and staying calm, but after a while I had learned. Sometimes I honestly wondered if I was just disassociating from the situation to keep from freaking out, but I don’t necessarily know if that is a bad thing.

When I first had started, a rescue situation happened, and Charles handled it with perfect professional composure, which quickly grew my respect for him. A former co-worker was in a dive suit, walking around scrubbing the bottom of large round tank with a few sss river stingrays inside. They were there as part of a species survival project, and they were not mean animals, but they were very skittish. Our coworker stepped a little too close to one of the giant rays, and it stung him. It wasn’t just a minor injury either, and the giant serrated barb went straight through his Achilles tendon. The amount of blood spewing from his leg was excessive and it was spilling all over the tank, the water turning blood red in a matter of seconds. He was screaming so loudly that I could hear him from the parking lot while coming back from lunch. Charles was in the kitchen and got to him immediately, but the venom was causing him so much pain that he was begging Charles to kill him to make it stop. Charles had responded like an emergency medical professional with a completely calm demeanor, calling an ambulance and getting our coworker out of the tank quickly and slowing the bleeding with a tourniquet. He saved his life without a single moment of panic, while I stood on the sidelines with my adrenalin pumping, being a twitchy mess with blurry vision as I tried to help.

That was one of the most bloody and gruesome injury that I had ever witnessed, and it was very traumatic for me at the time, but Charles hardly seemed phased by it at the time. Seeing Charles so upset now made me realize that his usual calmness was a facade to help keep all of us from panicking and worsening a situation. I was staring at him and our eyes met briefly, and there was a fear in his big brown eyes that I had never expected to see.

Sasha had been sitting in the corner of the cramped room on a blue rolling chair. She had been shaking and crying throughout the entire news broadcast and when it was over, she retreated to her usual spot in the cramped stuffy office and curled in on herself. She had been having a difficult time, nearly hyperventilating for a while and we had all been ignoring her, engrossed in our own feelings of fear. She finally composed herself and stopped sobbing long enough to whisper, "We have to go rescue everyone from the aquarium.... They need our help. Then we have to get off the island before they trap us in."

"Don't be stupid." Madeline snapped, unnecessarily taking her frustration out on poor traumatized Sasha. "We aren't in some superhero movie or comic book. This is real life kid. We can't go be heroes without knowing what the f**k we are even dealing with. If you go running out there you are going to die. Even if we all go out there and try to help anyone, we don't know how whatever the hell this thing is, and we are liable to get infected too if it is some kind of virus."

I felt kind of bad for agreeing, but Madeline had a point. Sasha had a pure heart for wanting to help, but there was no logical way of helping anyone. The first rule of rescuing someone when diving is to never put yourself in lethal danger when trying to save someone.

I chimed in, "Madeline is right guys. We don't even have any kind of proper weapons to fight these guys off with if they come after us. We don't have any guns. The safest thing we could do is to stay here and wait this out. If they are quarantining the island to try to keep an infection from spreading, they might be able to keep it contained. They probably already have the barricades up by now, and nobody else is getting out."

Charles sat down in a huff in his hard-plastic chair, "I hope this is all over soon, but we need to prepare for this to last for a while just in case. We are honestly in a pretty good position compared to most people for an apocalyptic situation, and we need to use this to our advantage. Sasha, did you fill the fresh water storage tank yesterday?"

I could tell from his determined expression that he had transitioned from panic mode to puzzling out all possible outcomes of the situation that we were in. He had a good mind for that sort of thing, predicting what might happen.

I chimed in again, "I did, and I turned on the water filter before we left last night."

"Good" He said with a small forced smile. "Clean water would be our first priority if we are stuck here for a long time. The bin should be fully filtered by now so we should have enough clean water to last for a while. We also have a freezer full of frozen seafood that will last a long time."

"Wait," Scarlet said cautiously, "We have to keep feeding the animals too. This might all be resolved sooner than we think, and we can't just abandon them to starve."

We all paused for a moment, everyone grimly considering the possibility of having to eat our beloved animals in the future if we ran out of food. Now, to everyone on the outside, this might seem crazy to even consider wasting precious food on the animals in this situation. Nobody could truly understand the importance of these animals to all of us. We spend more time with them than our own families, and many of them had been born and raised by us. We all devoted our lives to the care of these animals, and in a terrifying world were it seemed like everything was going to s**t outside, there was still the hope that we might make it out of this soon and everything could return to normal. None of us could live with the added guilt of letting them starve if we had any other option. "Lets give it time and keep feeding them for now, we just got a food shipment last week and the walk in freezer is full to the brim. There 15 full pallets of food in there right now. There's so much in that freezer that it would last us a long time even if we still fed them all too."

We continued planning and dispersed all over the large animal tank-filled building and gathered up anything we might need.

The types of protective gear we regularly used actually were perfect for a situation like this. We had enough respirator masks for everyone thanks to a recent tank repair project that involved quite a bit of fiberglass sanding. We also had one Scuba dry suit that was used for cold water diving, and one Hazmat suit that was used for working with major tank antibiotic treatments that were extremely hazardous to humans. We had almost enough shoulder length hazmat rubber gloves for cleaning jellyfish tanks to go around. And finally, we had lab goggles to protect our eyes. We all crowded around the long office table in our mis-matched chairs and discussed possible options for what could be causing this and how its being transmitted. Even if there was no way of knowing for sure, we could put our heads together and try to come up with all the ways we could to protect ourselves.

"Whatever this is, it only has a few ways that it could be spreading. If it is a virus it could be spreading from body fluid contact like s****l contact or blood, or saliva, it could be air-born, or it could be contracted from something that was eaten." Scarlet said. She had a determined look on her pretty face that almost masked the fear hiding in her blue eyes. Her curly brown hair was disheveled and messy from crawling around the mildew and rust covered attic area looking for supplies, and she tucked it behind her ear every time it fell into her eyes.

"If it was from fluid contact, then it could be some sort of mutated form of rabies." I said.

"Or something sexually transmitted like HIV? But even if that mutated somehow, the effects of the virus would still take time, and people would have had symptoms way before this broke out in so many places all at once." Charles said.

"It could be prions." Madeline said with a deep scowl.

We all shuddered a bit. I'm sure everyone reading this has probably already heard about the chronic wasting syndrome that was affecting deer all over the US. The news channels tried to downplay it as much as possible to keep people from panicking over it, but it was a seriously dangerous threat that could kill a lot of people if it ended up being possible to transmit it to humans. If you have never heard of it before, prions are proteins that cause mis-folding proteins in the brain and essentially cause severe brain damage and neurological wasting until the person or animal dies. There is no cure once it is contracted. The symptoms include aggressive and unhinged behavior and a lack of fear.

"The aggressive behavior and other symptoms do fit this situation...." Sasha squeaked out in a shaky voice. She was a small and mousy girl, and the blue rolling chair seemed so swallow her up because she was sitting so folded up on herself.

"No, I don't think it could be that." Scarlet said, shaking her head hard enough that it freed the curls she had tucked behind her ears, "There isn't any concrete evidence right now that it is transmittable to humans. Plus, that type of disease can only be contracted by eating infected meat. The timeline wouldn't make sense because there's no way this could be spreading to this many people unless a healthy person started eating an infected one. Even if a ton of people had contracted that disease from eating deer meat, the outbreak wouldn't have happened all at once and people would've been dying all over the country instead of just on our island."

She definitely had a point, the transmission could never happen that quickly with something like that. I must have been unknowingly biting my lip with some ferocity at this point, because I felt a warm trickled of blood seep down my chin and I promptly swiped my hand across my mouth.

"What if it was air born and through saliva like the flu?" Charles asked. "I mean, there's no virus we know of right now that is capable of producing these kinds of symptoms in people, but maybe something common mutated into something devastating. That would explain why it progressed so rapidly and is spreading so fast."

"That's the problem though," Scarlet said. "There has never been any virus in history that simultaneously produces cannibalistic behaviors and aggression while being contracted through the air. This would not have happened naturally. Something of this nature would have to be bioengineered to do exactly what is happening."

Charles’s tan face took on a tint of red at her words. "So its biological warfare?...…"

"Did some other country do this to us as an attack? Or is this just an experiment gone wrong?" Sasha said with a sharp intake of breath. I was grateful that she was back to being coherent. I cared about her dearly, but it was difficult to help with someone else’s panic attack when you were trying to prevent your own.

Charles shook his head gravely. "You would have to be one hell of a dumbass to f**k up so badly that you somehow accidentally released a deadly virus into an island with a million people."

"Well disasters of human error have happened before." Madeline scoffed. "Think of all the chemical plant fires?"

I shuddered at the thought, remembering how a few years ago, some idiots managed to blow up a chemical plant tower on accident and cause a mass evacuation on the closest state to our island. You could smell the smoke for weeks and it burned your throat just to be outside for too long.

I started to feel paranoid and panic rose in my voice. "What if this was some kind of test? What if our own government did this to test out a biological weapon????"

"That would mean they were planning on killing everyone on the island....." Sasha said, "Why would our government do something like that? They are suppose to be here to protect us."

Charles rolled his eyes at her. "They don't give a flying f**k about any of us. They would sacrifice anyone's lives if it meant they could all continue to get richer. If there was some great chunk of cash in it for them, I bet they wouldn't feel a shred of guilt over killing off a whole island and then covering it up like we never existed." He got the desired response from poor Sasha, who’s eyes widened in fear at his words.

I rolled my eyes and shot him a warning look, conveying my desire for him to not say anything that would make her cry again by touting his government conspiracy theory beliefs. He looked back at me a little sheepishly and it almost made me smile.

Scarlet sighed, leaning her head back on the medicine cabinet behind her with a light thud. "That's being a little grim don't you think Charles? It's all speculation at this point. Plus, I think killing a whole island and then covering it up seems a little difficult and far fetched."

I nodded. I was not quite sure if I believed Charles' government conspiracy ideas, but I wasn't able to say with certainty that it couldn't be true. I didn’t have very much trust in the government either if I was honest but maybe I was not quite as distrustful as he was.

Once we had a list of all the ways that it could be spreading, we got started with a plan to ensure we could avoid all of those ways of transmission. We sat down, and started making the rules that we would be living by in the uncertain future.