Silent Hill fic: Outbreak - Chapter 15: Epidemiological Report (cont.)

[mistressofmuses]

In chapter 15: Anna interviews Amber about her experience with the illness, and learns of a possible historical connection.

Anna Garcia’s Epidemiological report on unknown illness (con’t.)

Sunday, September 25, 2016
Official death toll: 50

The only additional death this day was Corey Benson (age 19), the previous day’s alleged attacker against Rebecca Shelredge. Again, there is no evidence of foul play against him, despite being the second patient to (allegedly) kill a nurse on duty. Also despite the fact that he had made statements claiming Rebecca Shelredge had actually been killed by another nurse.

On September 25, I had my first interview with a young woman who had volunteered. Her name was Amber Rosen. (She was mentioned earlier in my report as the source of multiple sets of text messages that hint at the early days of the disease; some between Amber and her girlfriend Kimberly, and some between Amber and her friend Crystal.)

The interview took place in a room set up for just the two of us. I was given the option to conduct it remotely, through a viewing window, but I declined in favor of having us in the same room. We both wore high-filtration masks, and I wore gloves.

Amber was well enough to sit up and speak with me, obviously, though she was clearly, visibly ill. She had been spared the confluent blistering and the worst of the DIC, but still had very blatant skin sores that looked extraordinarily painful. Otherwise, she was extremely pale and thin, the skin around her eyes, nose, and mouth red and irritated-looking. She had to have an IV stand next to her to help keep her hydrated.

[Anna Garcia’s interview with Amber Rosen, transcribed from tape recording:

Anna Garcia: My name is Anna Garcia, epidemiologist for the Maine Department of Health, and it is September 25th, 2016. I am interviewing Amber Rosen. For the record, will you please state your name?

Amber Rosen: Amber Rosen.

AG: Thank you. You’ve volunteered to be interviewed about your experiences with ‘SHIO’, the currently unidentified idiopathic outbreak in Silent Hill, in the interest of helping me to investigate it.

AR: Yes.

AG: You are hospitalized here, in Alchemilla Hospital in Silent Hill for this illness, correct? How long have you been here?

AR: Yes. How long have I been in the hospital, or in Silent Hill? I’ve been hospitalized since September 12th. I’ve lived in the town my whole life.

AG: I meant your hospitalization. I’m sorry, I should have specified. Did you start to show symptoms on the 12th? Or were you sick before that?

AR: I started feeling sick the first weekend after school started. Labor Day weekend. I remember I got sick that Sunday, but my boss still made me go in to work. God, I… I should have refused. What if I got more people sick? I tried to call out, but he said we were understaffed and I had to come in or else he’d cut my hours. But…

AG: There were many chains of transmission. People got sick all over. If anything, it’s the fault of the people who made you go in while ill. What were your symptoms like that weekend and after?

AR: After that, I just stayed sick, like I had the flu. Then my little sister, Jessie, got real bad on the 11th. When my parents figured out just how bad the whole thing was, they brought me in too.

AG: So you had a fairly typical progression of symptoms: flu-like feelings, then to skin spots and bleeding?

AR: That’s right.

AG: About how long did each of the symptoms last before new ones appeared? It’s okay if you don’t have an exact number of days or anything.

AR: I felt like I had the flu for… probably a week or so. I was getting nosebleeds some, too. Then the skin spots showed up, just a day or two before my parents brought me to the hospital. Jessie’s showed up a day or two before that. After I was in the hospital, so sometime after the 12th, the spots got a lot worse, turning into these deep sores, and I started coughing up blood. The doctors say it’s because the lining of my lungs is bleeding. But I haven’t gotten worse than this yet, and I know lots of people have.

AG: Do you have any idea where you got sick?

AR: School, probably. Or from Jessie, if she picked it up at the elementary school. Lots of kids had the sniffles, y’know? One of Jessie’s best friends, a girl named Maddison, was sick way back on the first day of school. Poor kid died a few days ago. Jessie doesn’t know yet.

AG: I’m sorry about Maddison. I actually spoke to her mother. The loss is heartbreaking.

AR: It is. I don’t know what I’ll do if… if Jessie…

[She doesn’t finish the thought, but it’s clear what she means.]

AG: Do you know many other people who are sick, besides your sister?

AR: Lots of them. One of my best friends, Crystal, died a few days ago. Someone told me my old boss, the one who made me come in when I was sick, was here too, but that he died the day before yesterday. Bet the bastard wished he’d let me stay home, after all.

[She laughs, but it is a bitter, humorless sound.]

AR: And so many other kids from school. Cody Blake, he’s one of my best friends. And… god.

[She rests her face in her hands for a moment, and I realize she’s crying.]

AG: And?

AR: Kim. My friend. My girlfriend. Kimberly Thorne.

AG: She’s here, too?

[Amber slowly nods, sniffing.]

AR: I can’t even see her. Her mom is real… well, she’s not a big fan of the two of us. She came to my room one day and told me that her daughter was sick because of me. That this was God punishing the whole town because I was a sinner making it unclean. That I deserved it. But that I had dragged Kim down with me, and now she was suffering because of me. She won’t let me see her at all.

AG: I’m so sorry that she would have said something like that to you. But… you know that isn’t true, right?

[Ed. Note: I apologize for my lack of objectivity in this instance, but this was a hurt that I had some small hope of soothing.]

AR: I know. They used to say the same thing about AIDS, right? But what if I did get her sick? She snuck over one day when I was home sick, bringing me some homework, and she kissed me.

AG: No one knew what this would turn into. She could have picked it up at school like you did. Or out in the town. Some couples and families have had one member get sick but no one else, despite their proximity to each other. It’s almost impossible to determine the exact transmission pattern.

AR: Thanks.

AG: If you would like, I can attempt to pass a message to her. No guarantees, and I may not have a chance to bring anything in return, but I would be happy to do so.

AR: That would be really nice of you. Just tell her I love her, if you can? They took her phone away from her two days ago, when they found out she’d been texting me. Actually…

[Amber pulls her phone out of a small bag at her side.]

AR: You can borrow my phone if you want to.

AG: To give to Kimberly?

AR: No, just for you. I was talking to a lot of people back when the sickness first started. I could have forgotten some of it. If you want to look through it, you can see what we said about it then. That’s what this kind of interview is about, right?

AG: That’s very kind of you, and could be helpful, but…

AR: Do it. It doesn’t have a lock screen or nothin’. Bring it back in a while, but I know that what I remember happening is kind of… mixed up with what we know about it now, y’know? So maybe it’d be more useful to your interviews and stuff to see what we thought before we knew what was going to happen. If what you need is a history.

AG: Thank you, Amber. I will bring it back. Is there anything else you want to tell me about the illness?

[She hesitates a minute, until I reach for the tape recorder to turn it off.]

AR: This is silly, but… It was something Kim said after I was in the hospital, but before she was. She mentioned that Silent Hill has a history of these kinds of awful, kind of… drastic illnesses.

AG: Oh? I wasn’t aware of anything like this having happened before.

AR: I don’t know for sure or anything. But she’s always been really into local history. She said that way-back-when there were epidemics that wiped out big chunks of the town, back before Maine was even a state. The original settlement that was here was abandoned after an epidemic. Supposedly that’s why the other hospital, Brookhaven, was built.

AG: Those kinds of things happened more in the past. Severe influenza, smallpox, yellow fever…

AR: I know. There is one… well, I don’t know quite what happened. It’s just an old monument that we all always thought was a little weird.

AG: Monument?

AR: Down in Rosewater Park. There’s this big stone statue thing that’s just called ‘the Rosewater Memorial’. No one seems to know just what it’s there for, but it says something about being ‘in memory of those who died of illness.’ Kim was really interested in it, but she always likes spooky stuff like that. It’s probably nothing.

AG: That is interesting. If I have a chance, maybe I’ll check it out. Anything else?

AR: I don’t think so, Ms. Garcia. I hope something from my phone can help you.

AG: I’ll bring it back soon, all right? Thank you for your time.]

I was able to get the message to Kimberly, during what was billed as a routine walkthrough that I was accompanying the nurses on, to give me a sense of their day-to-day. Kimberly looks worse than Amber, but was so happy to have heard from her girlfriend, even indirectly… it made me angry at a family who would keep their sick daughter from even that smallest bit of comfort.

I do again apologize for my lack of objectivity, while also offering the reminder that doing favors for and fostering rapport with our sources is a useful strategy, and it can lead to more candor and potentially additional information. This did prove to be the case with Amber. The information from her cell phone records did improve my understanding of the early appearance of the illness, and highlight at least one potential transmission pathway.

It was also a stark reminder—despite it always being in the forefront of my mind, as one aspect of my job—that these victims are painfully human. All the victims we study are, of course, and humanizing them for others and looking at their lives is part of what I do. But seeing a girl’s conversations with her friends, her worries about school, how much she loves her girlfriend, how much she loves her sister… it makes it hurt that much more to see her hooked to an IV, suffering a disease we can’t even name.

Though I will admit that my sympathy for her may have made me more willing to consider an avenue she had suggested toward the end of our interview. However, it is also part of my job here to explore any avenue, no matter how improbable. Historic emergence of disease is sometimes key to determining factors leading to outbreaks or vectors by which it spreads. So if there was something connecting this current outbreak to the event memorialized in the park, it was absolutely my job to investigate the connection. So after I’d studied Amber’s phone, and done some follow-up regarding Crystal Davis’s early-onset illness, I made plans to visit Rosewater Park in South Vale.

Monday, September 26, 2016
Official death toll: 51

The additional fatality on this day was Kadie Carter (age 8).

Early on this day, I largely focused on getting the notes I had taken up until this point in order. I felt my patient interviews were sufficient for the time being, and no new developments had taken place.

I returned Amber’s cell phone, and passed on Kimberly’s return message to her. She looked as well as possible under the circumstances, and I told her about my intent to check out the memorial she’d told me about.

There were a few whispers I heard around the hospital, expressing hope that this was the end of it. Deaths had tapered off for the previous four days, with two each day on Friday and Saturday, and only one on both Sunday and early on Monday.

There was one other noteworthy illness-related event that I learned of through a Toluca Times article:

[Man found dead in home after welfare check (posted on the Toluca Times website in the late morning of September 26.)

by Erika Matheson

Officers responding to a welfare check this morning at a Silent Hill residence tragically found the home’s occupant deceased. The victim has been identified as Jeremy Vick, a 43-year-old Silent Hill man. He appears to have died due to an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound.

His brother, Caleb Vick, had grown concerned after not hearing from Jeremy for several days, and police went to Jeremy’s home today. They found his house boarded up from the inside, with plastic wrap further taped over all potential exits and entrances to the house.

It is believed that he had locked himself in to this extreme extent out of fear of the disease in Silent Hill. It also appears that he was showing early symptoms of the disease. Whether this was the direct cause of his apparent suicide can’t be confirmed.

Responders at the scene stated that he may have died several days ago.

Further information pending investigation.]

After my brief errand to Alchemilla, I went to Rosewater Park, as I had intended.

The monument I found was… different than I expected. The memorial itself is large; a carved, rectangular standing stone, something like a headstone that stands taller than an average person. Carved on the front is one brief epigraph, broken into three lines:

In memory of the sixty seven
who died of illness and now sleep
beneath the lake.

As the park overlooks the southern side of Toluca Lake, that final line doesn’t seem ambiguous.

I’d been hoping for something more to go on… something like a date for the illness it was commemorating.

This is where I feel a bit strange for my decision to continue pursuing this thread. But my interviews had been completed, and I was interested in this the same way I had been interested in the story of the boys who had gone missing on the lake back in August, and I honestly feel that their story led to an excellent point for further investigation. While I don’t prize instinct over all else, I do believe that sometimes the mind picks up on subtle clues that you can’t quite consciously identify, and it manifests as a feeling.

I went to the Silent Hill Historical Society, as it is also in South Vale, and I would pass it on my way back up to my hotel anyway. I half expected it would be closed, considering how many non-vital businesses have shut down until the illness ceases to be a threat.

Fortunately it was open, though staffed only by a single young woman, Tabitha Springer. She was very helpful; she must be used to odd questions. She knew without even looking it up that the Rosewater Memorial was erected in 1920, with donations from the historical society helping to fund it.

I asked her if the illness it referred to had happened that same year, and she said no, it had been the “outbreak of 1916” that had claimed so many lives. Naturally, I asked what illness it had been, and she told me that it was never conclusively proven. It was assumed to be a strain of influenza. This makes sense, given the timeline; that was the most common epidemic in the early 1900s. But I would be lying if I said there was no prickle of anxiety at the idea of an illness that was never conclusively identified.

There was a mild prickle at the coincidence of the illness being exactly one hundred years ago, too.

I asked if she had any more information, and she told me that unfortunately the records going back that far were incomplete and spotty, but that she would be happy to look.

I wandered around the little museum while Tabitha went to a somewhat outdated computer and pulled up a database of files. They were digitizations of old Toluca Times articles, she said. It took her some looking, but she found one from the memorial’s dedication, and she was kind enough to print me a copy of it.

[Memorial unveiled, dedicated to the victims of the 1916 outbreak

There is a very grainy, difficult to see image associated with the article: it displays the poor quality typical of most microfilm copies. While details are entirely obscured, it does appear to show a man, dressed in nice clothing and top hat, standing near the Rosewater Memorial.

It was a somber event today in Rosewater Park, where a dedication was given to the sixty-seven souls departed during the epidemic of four years ago. Several members of local faith branches led prayer to their memory.

Most of the victims’ families were in attendance, including Thomas and Anne Kincall. The once-prominent socialites have all but disappeared from the public eye after their only daughter, Elizabeth Moreland, was claimed by the disease, along with her new husband, William Moreland.

The memorial stands in Rosewater Park, along the southern edge of Toluca Lake, overlooking the resting place of the departed.]

I asked Tabitha if the lake was the literal resting place of the deceased, and she told me yes. That was how the townsfolk at the time had decided to prevent the spread of the disease. I tried not to say anything about what seemed to me to be an obvious concern for water contamination. It would be a moot point, since apparently it worked, as the outbreak had stopped.

I thanked Tabitha for her help and left for the day, returning to my hotel. I had a lot to think about.

Tuesday, September 27, 2016
Official death toll: 57

As if specifically to mock those who had hoped the illness was on the decline, the death count for the day spiked to 6. Including… including both Amber and Kimberly. Getting attached to our contacts is always a risk, especially in situations like this one, where mortality is high. And you could say that growing attached based on only a single interview and a set of phone records is foolish, but… that doesn’t make it easier to see someone one day and find them gone the next.

The list of fatalities for September 27: Darian Toumas (age 33), Grace Johnson (age 25), Amber Rosen (age 17), Kimberly Thorne (age 17), Marcus Rinwald (age 11), and David Templeton (age 9).

All six died overnight, very suddenly, despite most having been marked as stable the day before.

I asked Alma Shorey for any details, but she wasn’t able to tell me much. When I asked her how some of the most relatively healthy patients could have died so suddenly, she gave me platitudes regarding “Never knowing who God would choose.”

She also asked about my own research. I told her that I was looking at the potential for historic emergence of the disease, and that I was still interested in the island on Toluca Lake as a potential origin point. That theory seemed to strike her as odd, though she suggested that maybe I should pay a visit to the island itself, if I thought it was of importance.

Perhaps I should.

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