In Flew Enza
Rating: PG-13/T
Genre: General/Drama
Summary: Crossover with Contagion. Pestilence has been dealing with government suits for weeks now, but this is the first one he's met that's had anything like common sense.
Author's Note: Okay, confession: I have been actively looking for excuses to write a story with Dr. Orantes in it, because I ADORED her and Marion Cotillard's performance in Contagion.
Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural. It belongs to Eric Kripke. Contagion belongs to Warner Brothers Pictures.
()()
Things were going swimmingly.
According to Lucifer, all was quiet on the Western Front. The Winchesters and their pet angel were losing the war, their support system dropping like flies.
Pestilence chuckled to himself. Dropping, liked people collapsing in the midst of a fever. Like flies, like the bugs that swarmed around the corpses of the dead and gone and prematurely rotting. God, he killed himself sometimes.
Humans meant nothing. He'd been killing them from the moment they'd been created, had killed them with polio, with measles and smallpox and meningitis and typhus and, of course, his prized Bubonic Plague. That had been a collaboration between himself, Death and War: He cooked up the illness, Death reaped the souls, and War made sure the pagans and the Jews were blamed for it all. Famine was the only one who'd missed out on the action.
The little children with their runny noses and their hazy gazes and their terrified parents liked him, smiled at him, shook his hand; then later he would affect the deepest sadness and regret as he told their parents that Jenny or Tommy had succumbed to a most curious mix of West Nile virus, the stomach flu and typhoid fever. And then even later he would be 'treating' the parents for the very same illnesses.
Idiots.
"Dr. Green?" A comely young woman with a distinctly French accent was coming down the hall. She was a suit, a government liaison of some kind; he'd had to deal with a lot of those lately. They were alarmed at the sudden influx of illness-related deaths, and were determined to get to the bottom of it before the public revolted.
Run, run through the maze little rats, Pestilence thought as he forced his smile to be friendly and not wicked. But at the end of the day, it'll be me, Death or Lucifer and Michael that kills you.
He held out a hand to shake, as was human custom. Ironically, the gesture had originated from humans trying to assure one another that they were friend and not foe, to preoccupy their weapon-hand so that they weren't deemed a threat. Lately, Pestilence had been using it as a cover to spread oh so many wonderful little bugs.
She looked at his hand warily, though. "I think perhaps, under the circumstances, that physical contact would be a bad idea." She said.
Well, he'd be damned: A human with brains.
"Good thinking!" He said brightly. "What can I do for you, Miss…?"
"Dr. Leonora Orantes. I'm an epidemiologist with the World Heath Organization, here to-"
"-Investigate the origins of the current epidemic, I have no doubt."
"Precisely."
Pestilence sighed. Humans were control-freaks by nature: They needed to understand and conquer everything. They needed to know how lightning worked so that they could harness it, just like they needed to know where diseases started so that they could pinpoint and vaccinate against them.
Sorry sweetheart: No vaccine against me, I'm afraid.
"I don't know how effective you'll be, doctor. It's an unprecedented cluster of several different kinds of diseases not indigenous to the U.S."
"That is what I have been told."
Pestilence processed that, and the conclusion was almost immediate: The government thought this was a terrorist attack. Once again, the Horseman was forced to hold back a fit of snickering: Whenever something went seriously wrong in this country, you could always blame the terrorists. They couldn't have made his job easier if they'd tried.
()()
Green led Leonora down to the hall where the victims of the varying illnesses were being kept. They weren't overflowing with people yet, but it did look cramped. The hospital was small, but according to reports the first outbreak of the bizarre cocktail of diseases had been reported at this hospital, and so this was where she had to start.
Leonora pulled the paper mask around her neck up to cover her nose and mouth. Curiously, Dr. Green didn't have a mask, nor did he seem overly concerned with putting one on.
"Who was the first patient that presented with… More than one illness?"
"Ah… Eva Noble, a college student from St. Ambrose University. Poor thing: Dengue fever, malaria and smallpox all at once. She developed hemorrhagic fever and died less than twelve hours after she came in."
Leonora penned down the information in her notebook. "Had she traveled outside of the country within the past week?"
"She said she hadn't."
"Anyone in her family?"
"She lived alone."
"I will interview her classmates and see if they might have anymore information. Have any of the patients that have come to you traveled out of the country recently?"
"A few, not enough for me to think they all got it from somewhere outside the U.S."
"Did any of them have contact with Miss Noble?"
"Not that I'm aware of."
Leonora sighed quietly, unnoticeably. This was strange: Normally it was reasonably simple to pinpoint a possible cause for a disease. The fact that Noble had presented with multiple diseases, two of which were rare in the U.S. and one that had barely been a threat since the vaccine was introduced, was the cherry that topped it all off.
The only plausible explanation was that someone had deliberately exposed Eva Noble to a variety of diseases that ended up being lethal when mixed together; for what purpose, Leonora had no idea.
"Which diseases have you identified since the cases began?"
Dr. Green huffed a laugh. "Ask me which ones I haven't identified." He began to tick off his fingers. "Malaria, dengue fever, smallpox, meningitis, encephalitis, herpes, hepatitis, yellow fever, West Nile virus, tuberculosis, bird flu, swine flu- Hell, one guy is starting to present symptoms of rabies, and I have another under particularly strict quarantine until the CDC rules if he has the Ebola virus or not."
Leonora's eyes popped. "Is that all?"
"There's more, but again: We've seen pretty much every infectious disease that exists in the past week."
If anything, that strengthened Leonora's theory that this was an attack of some sort, be it foreign or domestic. It could be as big as terrorists or as small as some mad scientist or med student using live test subjects.
"Does St. Ambrose University have a biomedical department?"
"That it does- Half of our employees graduated from there." He turned back to look through the window at a hacking patient being treated by one of the nurses as Leonora scribbled that note down on the pad.
"I don't suppose they have access to samples of infectious diseases?"
"If they do, I don't imagine Ebola would be on the list." Leonora nodded, but was still intent on checking; it was her only lead at this point. "I don't mean to be rude, but my shift at Serenity Valley starts in an hour, and I really do need to get ready."
"Serenity Valley?"
"A convalescent home about twenty minutes away. I'm getting concerned that one of my patients there is starting to present some troubling symptoms."
"I see." Leonora silently questioned why he hadn't moved her to the hospital, but before she could broach the question out loud, he sighed.
"So strange how devastating one small, insignificant speck of a germ can be to the human body, isn't it?" Dr. Green's voice was almost dreamy, and his eyes were directed back through the window, where the patient from before was now hacking up drops of blood into a small metal dish. "How it unwinds the delicate human biology like a snag in a sweater. How it can so swiftly and silently or rudely and loudly claim that which we cannot retrieve."
Leonora felt a hard, pervasive chill run down her spine. She was a doctor; she understood the fascination at illness and its effect on humans and society. But Dr. Green sounded beyond fascination, beyond scientific interest; he sounded… Euphoric. Subtly, granted, but euphoric nevertheless. Like a virus forcing someone to hack out their own lungs was a thing of beauty.
She sudden felt a lot less comfortable being so close in proximity to him.
"Indeed," She agreed, and Leonora regretted speaking out loud almost immediately because the way he looked at her said he'd heard the note of discontent in her voice. Dr. Green gave her a moderate, slightly toothy smile, and Leonora thought that the look in his eyes was oddly blank, foreboding.
"Have a good night, Dr. Orantes. If you need anything, the nurses would be more than happy to assist you."
And then, in a tuneless, eerie voice, he began to softly sing:
"I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza.
I opened up the window,
And in flew Enza."
He chuckled and hummed that little rhyme again, and Leonora could still hear it echoing down the hall even after he'd gotten some distance away.
When she was finally able to regain enough of her senses, Leonora made a note to do a thorough, thorough background check on Dr. Green, and then left to interview some of the patients.
-End