Haven Days
(February-March 2020)
4. Ominous
Never had Stanford Pines felt so frustrated. No one in official Washington was taking his Agency's advice or even accepting his communications. He had a few connections, but even they could offer no help. "The people at the top don't want to cause a panic," he heard.
Yes, but there was plenty to panic about! "I know there was a pandemic response plan in place," Ford told one old friend. "What about that?"
"It's been discarded. The Administration thinks it would look bad. Anyway, from that they tell me, it's just the flu."
That was exactly what people said back in 1918, when more Americans died of influenza than had perished on both sides in the American Civil War, the deadliest in history.
"This is not influenza," Ford said.
"We're moving on it behind the scenes."
Yes, Ford thought sourly, so far behind the scenes that they were on the other side of town from the theater. He offered help, he offered Fiddleford's best advice, he offered consultation.
"We've got this," they said confidently. No one took him up on the offers.
A dozen people were ill in Washington State—about the last place that Stanford would have predicted for the COVERT-19 outbreak. The term was originally Fiddleford's. Even in its Asian breeding grounds, the new mutation of a basically SARS virus had been kept under wraps, but viruses are small and impossible to wrap up. December of 2019 was already too late to prevent an escape. So Fiddleford suggested 19 for the year of its first appearance, COVERT for the fact that everyone in power wanted to keep it under the radar.
In February, McGucket, who knew his old friend too well, didn't ask permission before trying something crazy. If anything happened to him—
"Where are you?" Stanford asked on the phone that morning.
"Tekonmet, Washington," Fiddleford said. "They have a twenty-four-year-old gal sick with th' virus in intensive care. She's an airline employee out o' Seattle. I got papers from th' Institute authorizin' a emergency-like treatment."
"Fiddleford, no, you're too valuable—"
"Aw, hesh, Ford. I know what I'm a-doin', I reckon. This patient's havin' hallucinations that tell me she's driftin' mentally through some dimensions, one where most people has become insect monsters, other scary ones. Her docs think she's delirious, 'count of fever, but I've read your Journals and recognize images from other dimensions. Anyhow, her condition's critical, and I got permission from her folks. I'm a-gonna inject her with the nanomites. She's right bad off, and this might be her last chance."
"But what if you get infected?"
"I done injectified myself. Iffen my little microscopical gadgets work halfway well, I ought to be some protected. Have to suit up and go, they're wavin' me in. I'll call back with any results."
Which left Stanford Pines to pace the floor for most of a day.
It had taken some pulling of strings on the part of both Stanford and Stanley to persuade Olmsted College of the Arts administrators to approve Mabel's taking her last term of classes remotely. She was living with Stan and Sheila, in what had become her own room, an airy bedroom populated with her stuffed animals and decorated with her own works of art. One corner of it was . . . school.
She had a dedicated laptop and a great Internet connection to join her classes remotely. Techs from the Agency had set up the college with the necessary equipment on that end. Down in the basement, Stanley had put the pool table in storage and had moved in materials for an artist's workshop—easel placed for the best light, sculpting table and tools, chest of art supplies from graphite sticks to acrylics to oil paints, clay, wax, even out on the patio a kiln for firing pottery or statuary.
For Mabel working like this was a challenge, and she threw herself into it. She took copious notes, she kept track of each and every project, she made extra efforts with all assignments. Her abstract design, from sketch to painting to a finished fabric, won a prize for her six weeks into the term. She estimated that she was working for eight to nine hours a day at succeeding in her classes.
But with no distractions, except for long-distance dates with Teek, who planned to return in June, she was doing great.
Mabel did have some spare time left over. She had a couple of hours free every day to play with the dogs and to visit her pigs, Widdles and Waddles, now ensconced in the old pig pen slightly downwind of the Mystery Shack. She pushed herself so hard that she even started to lose a little weight. "Puppy fat," she told Tripper, who seemed to understand.
She saw Dipper and Wendy three or four times a week, often spending a Saturday with them. On Sundays they visited their parents, who were making do with an apartment in McGucket's mansion. Dad was working from home and, he said, outside of the improvement in the commute, nobody could tell the difference. The senior partners had offered him a year's sabbatical, but he counter-offered a reduced workload by telecommunicating, and son of a gun if they didn't learn that he could do the whole job that way. The Corduroys—Dan had remarried on the sly—came over to join in now and then.
In mid-February, though, Alex Pines learned that Dave, one of his assistants, was down with a bug. A week later, he was in intensive care. That same week the virus spread rapidly until the senior partners decreed that until further notice everyone was to work from home.
Before making the announcement, the two of them asked for Alex's advice. "Have everyone isolate as much as they can," he said. "Stock up on necessities to reduce exposure in stores. Advise everyone to wear surgical masks . . . wait a second, I've written the type down here somewhere . . . N-95 rated facial masks. Wear the masks when out of your homes. Sanitize surfaces in the home, including counters, sinks, doorknobs, toilets, everything that you touch a lot, using EPA list-N disinfectants. Wash your hands frequently and thoroughly. This is nothing to take chances with."
Two days later, they called to say that Dave had died. Another employee had the virus but a milder case.
"God help us," murmured Alex, not a man much given to prayer.
But Alex and Wanda put on a brave face every Sunday when the kids (and dogs) visited. And so far, thanks to the isolation practices put into place by the Mayor's order, Gravity Falls remained safe.
They had built a warehouse and delivery yard just outside the Valley, off the main road in. Trucks bringing in supplies offloaded in the warehouse. The rotating crews from the Falls that worked the warehouses wore hazmat suits. The goods were sanitized by UV and other means and remained in a secure, closed bay for two days until they were taken into the Valley, where they were carefully distributed.
The working parties stayed in one of the quarantine houses for two weeks after their one-week shift in the warehouse. Then another week in their own homes,, and then back to the warehouse. In a way it was grueling, but in another way—no one in the Valley came down with the virus.
By the end of February, the virus had arrived both at Western Alliance University and at Olmsted College of the Arts.
Mabel didn't know any of the three students who tested positive for the infection at Olmsted. At WAU, a Poly Sci teacher came down with it.
Fiddleford had come back from Washington, isolated for ten days while he tested himself once every day, and then finally in a face-to-face meeting with Ford, he said, "The nanomites help. They ain't curin' the infection clean the way I hoped, but they do neutralize the rogue subatomics that create the mini-portals."
"Thank Heaven you didn't come down with it," Ford said, his hand on his friend's shoulder.
"Well, fact is, I did get a mild infection, but the nanomites I'd done took neutralized them right fast. Tested positive, positive, next day negative, still negative now. Scared me, though. Three days of bad headaches, the kind people useta git back in Tennessee when they swallered more'n a dab of Old Man Cotty's popskull corn liquor. Funny thing, though, is that not all the viruses carry the molecules fer th' dimensional complication."
They sat at a table and worked out a graph. So far, about one hundred cases of COVERT-19 had shown up in the U.S. "Now, 'bout eighty per cent of them don't go to the critical stage," Fiddleford said. "Rest an' treatment of symptoms gits most people through. And none o' them, so far, reports any hallucibillations about dimensional whim-whammery."
"It's the other twenty per cent I worry about," Ford said.
"Well, look-a here. The mortality rate so far is somewheres between five an' seven per cent. Out of the, round it to a hundred, cases that doctors have treated, so far six was fatal. More of 'em's critical right now, though. Out of the casualties I reckon two, mebbe three, had the dimensional whammy."
"Far too many," Ford said gloomily. "Aside from announcing a public health crisis, the government's done next to nothing. People everywhere should be wearing masks—especially those who've developed symptoms, but really everyone who's having regular exposure to other people. Testing should be available everywhere."
"We done formulated a test that takes half a minute to administer and shows results in half an hour," Fiddleford said. "It's gittin' 'em manufactured and distributed that's the hold-up. We jest don't have th' capacity, an' so far no pharma companies want to git involved with us."
The radio was on, but turned low, in the background. Suddenly Ford held up his hand. "Shh. Listen."
A voice on the radio said, " . . . stresses there is no great cause for alarm." Another voice took over: "We have almost no cases in America, very few. Today, they say there may be eighty. Next week, as people get over this, we'll have half that. This germ, it's serious, I don't say it's not serious, but it will burn itself out fast. By April this will go away."
With a groan, Ford covered his face with his hands. "No, no, no."
"Lissen," Fiddleford said. "I don't like to meddlify in your private business, you know, Ford, but what about the old retired professor who useta have yore job with th' Agency? Ain't he in Washington?"
"Close to it," Ford said. "Arlington. He's retired and having mobility issues these days. Why?"
"Seems to me, since he run th' Agency fer thirty-some years, he jest might have developed some contacts that could help to jump-start efforts to let people know what to do. Shucks, it ain't complicated—wash yore hands like you was a raccoon with OCD, mask up, clean everything in th' whole dang house, stick at home—people can do that, if they realize it's important. Maybe the professor knows some folks who could bypass all th' danged red tape."
"I'll call him," Ford said. "The young lady is out of the hospital?"
"Huh? Oh, my patient. Yeah, she's not in intensive care, but she's still havin' some lingering symptoms, body aches, bad sleep, an' so on, but she's outa danger an' testing negative for active infection. She's been in th' hospital for nigh on three weeks, but they're thinking she kin go home in another few days. I'm hopin' she's developed some immunity. You know the nanomites break down and get eliminated after three weeks or a month, so they're jest temporary."
"Maybe the drug companies aren't ready to manufacture them yet, either," Ford said. "But get your team on that. Can you manufacture and stabilize the nanomites on any kind of basis?"
"Shore, at th' Institute. The stuff is inert until injected, you know. Th' bloodstream activates it. I reckon it'll have a shelf life of at least a year." Fiddleford adjusted his spectacles. "We've jest created about a liter of th' stuff, about two hundred doses. It takes time, that's all. Took us a month fer that many."
"Get a team on it and make as many doses of it as you can," Ford said. "I forget, how many did you keep on staff?"
"Thirty-six, includin' yores truly."
"Designate a team of six to work on the nanomites, then. Your people are all isolating, right?"
Fiddleford nodded. "Yeah, they took over Dorm 1 and they live with one empty unit betwixt every two. Everybody does a virus check first thing in th' morning. We sanitize everything once a day, nobody goes out without a mask, and if they do go out with one, when they come back, they isolate in the guest house until the test clears 'em four days runnin'. An' we got plenty of food in th' big freezers. We won't starve."
Ford had been doodling on a piece of paper. "Not good," he said. "Not good."
Fiddleford bent forward to see. "What?"
"If nothing is done at the highest levels immediately, my projection is for a hundred and twenty-five thousand cases by mid-April. Let's be pessimists. Seven per cent mortality rate. That means close to nine thousand deaths, and of those we can project maybe six thousand will have the dimension-disrupting complication. It's bad enough that innocent people will die. What if one of the dying patients inadvertently opens a rift?"
Fiddleford stroked his beard and blinked. "A rift? Didn't think o' that. I jest don't know," he said. "I wish I did, but I don't."
Nobody knew.
By the first week of March, the government assured everyone that there had been only 120 cases of COVERT-19 in the whole country and fewer than a dozen deaths.
This despite the medical community's statistics on March 15 that 4,000 people had come down with it, more than a hundred had perished. The virus was more contagious than previously believed.
A counter-current to official advisories had begun, through a network of doctors and hospitals. Mostly it repeated the steps Ford had urged: Handwashing, isolation, keeping one's house sterilized, wearing masks—supplies of which were running short. Worse, some places were selling rip-offs, masks that gave no protection at all from viruses. And more than masks were in short supply.
"Toilet paper," Stan said. "Who knew?" But he was grinning.
He and Soos had known, that's who. They'd worked back in December and January to stockpile enough rolls of the stuff to keep everybody in the Valley supplied—and lots of those folks had gone out in a panic to buy more on their own. The big Toilet Paper Rush of 2020 was on.
On the brighter side, Mabel made solid A's in her telecommunication senior-level art classes. Two colleges in Washington State had gone completely to online classes, and Dipper predicted more would join in.
As for him, he turned his next Granite Rapids novel in ahead of deadline—the eighth in the series, the one in which Alexa took over running the Mystery Mansion on a bet—and he heard that the cartoon show had almost all the next season's shows in the can. Four more were in the animation house, in Korea, but for those the voice tracks and sound effects were done. And the network had offered a contract for yet another series of thirteen shows, but for only a little more money than they'd paid for the second series, about a five per cent raise.
"Take it," Dipper told his agent.
"Darling, I think we can hold out for about twenty per cent more," she said on the phone.
"Right now at this moment," Dipper told her, "I think it's more important that the TV people have some shows up to entertain kids. Lots of them will be stuck at home, and they may need cheering up."
After a moment of silence, his agent said, "You're a nice guy, Dipper. I'll get the contracts to you by the end of the month."
He told Wendy what he'd done.
She hugged him.
"I just got off the phone," she said, but with their touch-telepathy, he already knew what she had to say.
"When is he coming?" he asked
In two weeks. I hope his sisters and parents will come too.
—We'll let them know they're welcome.
Dip. I have a feeling that it won't be long until schools all over start closing. Dr. Sheaffer and his family know they can come here and spend the summer, at least. Pretty sure they will, for the sake of the girls and Billy. I hope that's enough.
—I'm glad we're in this together, Wen. I haven't been this scared in a long time.
So. Billy Sheaffer would be up in two weeks. Dipper knew the boy, now a young teen, might not be crazy about the rules—before moving in with Stanley and Sheila, he'd have to isolate for seven days (Fiddleford had recently nailed the incubation period at that). And then—
Well, in the end, Gravity Falls had not been a wonderful experience for Bill Cipher. And now that Bill was not only inside Billy, but was self-aware and Billy Sheaffer was absorbing all of his memories—
Could get rough, man. Could get rough.