THE PANGEA CHRONICLES . BOOK 1.. 107.9°

106.9°

CDC SPECIAL CONTAINMENT

FIELD OFFICE BSL-3

Princeton Baptist Medical Center

Birmingham AL

3 September, 2019

825 am

Been awhile since I've done this.

It had,too. The last time Dr. Crenshaw had been through the full decontamination process was during the Sierra Leone Ebola epidemic in 1995.

Nothing had really changed since then nor was it likely to. Though there was a heightened security protocol, the decontamination itself remained the same. The slow and methodical process was extremely effective, and insured nothing microbial got out of the hospital quarantine.

Watching as the lab tech doused his 'spacesuit' with peroxide, Richard began evaluating the danger they were in.

Overnight, the confirmed fatalities had tripled, but he knew that the real number was a lot higher. The temporary lab was woefully understaffed, and now that it was public, everyone with a cold was coming to the hospital. The chaos was making counting the true number of Pangea cases a nightmare, if not impossible.

Feeling the cold rush of air on his most sensitive parts, Dr. Crenshaw shuddered. In one quick move, he dropped his protective oversuit to the floor, and stepped into the only slightly warmer decontamination shower."You'd think with all the money we spend on these things," he said to the control assistant operating each of the decon steps, "we could afford hot water."

"Dr. Crenshaw, we use whatever water we can, the purp..."

"Jesus, kid, I'm making a joke," Richard spat, partially in anger, but mostly due to the exhausting pace he'd been working in the month and a half since Pangea dropped from the sky. This flu was well on its way to getting out of hand. While the sixteen known cases across the Mobile Bay had been brought to quarantine, what of the unknowns?

The fact was, Herbert Mason died working a security station at an international Airport, and had done so in a way that sprayed trillions of droplets of infected sputum into the crowded airport air. It was only a matter of time before Pangea would start popping up everywhere.

Richard sighed, and picked up the disinfectant soap. Working it into a heavy lather, he scrubbed his hair and face, then slowly worked down. Finally satisfied with the coverage of the disinfectant, he stood under the high pressure shower head. Any virus that may have survived the soap was blasted down the drain by stinging pulses of lukewarm water.

As Richard followed the shower's time guidelines of fifteen minutes, a single thought played on his mind. An observation his new assistant had made the day he'd met her, repeated itself over and over like a nagging wife.The virus, or more so the added protein, was too perfect.

In his gut, he couldn't shake the feeling that they were dealing with some kind of weapon. But none of that made sense. Creating a new virus was far beyond the scope of some rag-tag terrorist cell. Research alone would require vast amounts of funding, and in the post 9-11 world, that kind of thing just couldn't be hidden. For every dollar that changed hands in the world, there was an analyst that knew about it.

The only ones that could pull it off were nations with enough infrastructure - and secrecy to hide it all - to build their bio bomb.

Those were implications far beyond Dr. Richard Crenshaw's paygrade. So for now, he'd keep the idea to himself. All he could do, for the time being, was figure out how a virus that originated miles above the surface of the Earth infected Sammy Kehoe in the first place. That question had always been the key.