One minute the chicken, though a bit rheumy in the eyes, had been jerking around the pen, pecking at the feed in the tray. The next minute it had looked up, turned its head almost all the way around, looked at another pecking chicken. Then it had fallen over dead.

            Six more died inside of 24 hours.

            Cole Younger Smith wondered, but not much. He had more than 80 chickens on his property five miles east of I-75 on a dirt road off of Fruitville. So six were dead. Who knew why? Chickens died. It was the Lord’s way. It wasn’t as if he were dependent on the stupid birds to make a living. He had his handyman business. He didn’t make much from it, but he had no need or desire for more. The chickens brought in some extra money.

            Cole stood outside the pen after he removed the dead birds and wheeled them in the barrow on the dirt road past the house. He blew his nose as he buried them in The Pit of Dead Clucks. Who knew how deep the pit was. His grandfather had dug it when there wasn’t another human being residing within 10 miles. He had dug it deep, dumped the carcases of bird and beast, even a horse or two, into it and covered it over, leaving lots of room for future Smiths to rid themselves of the dead, fertilize the land and have room to grow and prosper. Only they didn’t prosper. They survived.

            Cole was 54, grizzled, lean, in need of a cutting of his wild white hair and a shaving of his stubbled face. There were other things he needed even more, including a visit to a dentist, but there was no money for it.

            He coughed, blew his nose and went back to the house—the same house his grandfather and father had lived in. It was in need of mending more than Cole was in need of dental work.

            A man and a woman had come out a month ago. They were dressed in suits, pressed suits, with fresh hair cuts, smelling of soap or shampoo. They had offered to represent him, to sell the property. They told him that they could easily get over a million dollars, maybe two million, for the 60 acres.

            Sure you could, Cole had said. For a bit of that, Cole could get his teeth fixed, rent a house, buy a new pickup, but thank you, he wasn’t selling. No need. Not yet. Cole lived alone since his wife died of cancer and his son Jim left to get married and live in Oregon. There was nothing to hold him to this place but bad memories and family pride, but that was enough.

            Cole went in the house and turned on the television, partly because it was time for the re-run of The World Poker Tour and partly because it drowned out the damned, endless clucking and cackling of the chickens.

            He felt sick to his stomach. He ignored it, or tried to. It was something that happened. You lived with it. Somewhere in the kitchen he had that pink generic stuff.

If his stomach got worse, he’d find it. Twenty minutes later he had to get to the toilet, had to get there quick.

            When he was done, Cole went to his knees next to the sink. It wasn’t a cold. It was something else, probably the flu or a bad can of tuna. Cole practically lived on tuna drenched in Miracle Whip. He bought date-expired cans in a discount store on Tuttle.

            This was a bad one. Damn. He couldn’t afford a trip to the emergency room at Sarasota Memorial. Coleen had died there. He had bad memories. She had been a good woman, a bit stringy, but so was he. He tried to stand and made it, but it was a struggle on shaking legs. Damn.

No choice. Now he just hoped he could make it either to his ‘94 Ford pickup or to the bedroom. He took four staggering steps, using the wall and furniture to keep himself upright. Cole could be fooled, but he was no fool. He was going to the ER. He headed for the front door, taking forever to make it, went out and, pausing once to vomit almost nothing, he lurched to the truck and managed to get into it.

            It had come quickly. You don’t get this sick this fast, he thought as he whipped around, almost hitting a tree. He drove past the mesh-wired pen and saw more dead chickens, lots more.

            No, said Barney Fried to himself, can’t be. But maybe it was. Barney was one of two emergency room physicians on duty the morning Cole Younger Smith plowed into the rear of a perfectly appointed white Cadillac. The Caddy had been parked long enough to let out a woman and child in front of the ER door.

            The driver of the Caddy, a big man who had to be at least 70, came out mad as hell, shouting, “You could have killed my daughter and granddaughter, you...”

            He opened the door of the pickup and stepped back fast as Cole coughed in his direction, leaned over and managed to vomit whatever remained in his stomach.

            Barney Fried was 36. He had tried obstetrics and decided that he liked the action of the ER. He was good, but good didn’t prepare him for what he half expected he was about to see and deal with. He asked a nurse to find Dr. McMillan, and he called for a battery of blood tests and a swabbing of the throat of Cole Younger Smith, who lay in one of the small rooms in the ER corridor.

            “Patient says it came on fast, from start to acute pulmonary distress in an hour,” said Barney. “He says he’s had a cold for a few days and started to feel a little queasy yesterday. The cough sounds deep, very deep, not typical upper respiratory.”

            Steve McMillan was 48. He thought he had seen it all. But he hadn’t seen anything quite like the man gasping for air in spite of the oxygen flowing through the mask over his face.

            “You know what this looks like?” whispered Barney.

            “Lots of things,” said McMillan calmly.

            “Lots of things, Mac,” Barney agreed, “but not lots of things we’ve seen.”

            “You’ve got a hurry-up call on the swab?”

            “Damn right.”

            “I think we should call the county health department and get that swab up to Tampa before we even think about giving this a name,” said Barney. “And...”

            “Isolation,” said McMillan. “Masks, gloves, gowns for everyone who comes in this room.”

            “Goggles?”

            “Goggles, too,” McMillan agreed.

            Fifteen minutes later a Department of Health driver was at the ER entrance. She was handed a tightly sealed box and was on her way.

            Mixed with Barney’s fear was the guilty spark of a hope that his suspicion might be right, that he might be the first physician to identify a case of avian flu in the United States. It wasn’t likely. They had determined that Cole Younger Smith hadn’t recently been out of the country, not even out of the county. In fact, he had never been outside of Florida.

            A team from the health department rushed to Smith’s home and found a scattering of dead chickens.

They bagged two of the dead birds and, taking no chances, killed all of the remaining birds and then headed to Smith’s neighbors to check on whether they had chickens or pigs that might be infected, if, indeed, they were dealing with avian flu.

            By the time the call came from the lab in Tampa, two more people had been found with the same symptoms as Cole Younger Smith. One was a Home Depot clerk who two days earlier had helped Cole find a replacement for a drill head. The other was a woman whose front steps Cole had repaired last week. All three were in isolation at Sarasota Memorial when the lab report came in from Tampa. Eleanor Wosniak at the Sarasota County Health Department got the report. Eleanor, 33, thin, dark-haired and a recent transplant from Chicago, brought the bad news to the hospital.

            “They ran a PCR, polymerase chain reaction,” she said.

            Both Barney and Mac were familiar with the molecular bio test. What they weren’t familiar with was what it had revealed.

            “H5N1 virus, avian flu,” Eleanor said, “but it doesn’t fit the profile, which shouldn’t surprise us. It’s mutated.”

            “None of the three in isolation have been out of the country or in contact with anyone who...,” Barney began, and then stopped.

            “So the bird or birds that did this came through here,” Eleanor said. “We’re on a migratory bird path from Canada. Primarily ducks.”

            “We can’t kill all the migratory ducks,” said Mac.

            “No, we can’t,” Eleanor agreed.

            “So?” asked Mac.

            “State Health has a team on the way,” she said. “We’ve got an inventory on all the Tamiflu available in Sarasota and surrounding counties. More can be brought in

from all over the state.”

            All three knew that Tamiflu helped treat most known varieties of influenza, but it was no cure. There was no cure. There had been only 253 confirmed cases of H5N1 bird flu in the world. A total of 148 of them had resulted in death—a 58 percent mortality rate.

The Spanish Flu of 1918, H1N1, which resulted in the death of an estimated 20 million people, had only a 2.5 percent death rate for those infected.

            They were standing in the corridor where no one could hear them.

            “We’ve got bird flu,” said Barney.

            “All flu is technically bird flu,” said Eleanor. “All flu viruses originated in birds, some maybe thousands of years ago. A bird can be absolutely normal and carry more than 200 different flu viruses, viruses that keep changing and sometimes get passed on to humans who...sorry. I’m not telling you something you don’t already know.”

            Neither Barney nor Mac responded.

            Eleanor considered telling them that the samples of the tissue of victims of the 1918 Spanish flu were misunderstood by the public and the press. The H1N1 Spanish flu virus was only a far, far distant cousin of the present H5N1 strain. The century-old samples offered no hope of a treatment for today’s strain, though a study of all aspects of that pandemic was yielding information on how to contain what might now be happening.

            Cole Younger Smith died.

            And Sal Pangione came into the ER, gave his name and said he thought he was “all of a sudden coming down with the flu,” as if having that stupid sonofabitch rear end him outside the ER and cough in his face hadn’t been enough.

            Within five minutes, Salina King and her boyfriend, Wallace Beatts, were feeling the first effects of the flu.

They had been sitting across from Sal in the waiting room. Wallace had a broken ankle.

            “It can’t spread this fast,” said Barney Fried. “And it can’t manifest itself this fast.”

            “Tell that to the virus. It can do whatever it wants to do,” said Eleanor Wosniak.

            They were drinking dank coffee from styrofoam cups in the ER office. They had been joined by August Turner, 43.  Tall and wide, he looked more like the college linebacker for Florida State University that he once was than the state epidemiologist he was now. He was also a lawyer.

            “So what do we do?” asked McMillan. “We’ve got seven cases now.”

            “Normally, we’d call for a voluntary quarantine of people who might be infected,” said Turner. “It worked in Canada for the SARS outbreak.”

            “This isn’t ‘normally,’” said Eleanor.

            “It is not,” Turner agreed. “I think we need approval from the governor’s office for me to go to a judge and get a mandatory quarantine order. Agreed?”

            “Agreed,” said Eleanor.

            “Agreed,” said Barney.

            Mac nodded.

            “Call security, lock down the ER. Everybody in it is quarantined, including you two, me, everyone. I’ll call the police. They’ve got an emergency plan for things like this. You say Smith vomited outside?”