Box, sweet box

Davolo just left my temporary home. He sat for a while on the other side of the inch-thick lucite box that lines the back two-thirds of this shipping container, making up the containment box that keeps any germs I might be carrying safely away from the outside world. He read my vitals from the terminal on his side of the box and cheerily proclaimed me “not dead yet.” Yet. At least I have no typical symptoms of infection.

Actually, none of the quarantined guests are showing any signs of an infection, at least not any they did not carry before any of this started. Davolo joked that one of the fishing boat crew -- a surly middle-ager aptly named Fischer -- is near to tears rubbing his crotch and begging for some salve for his “flea bites” as he calls them.

But after the initial pleasantries, Davolo got very solemn, a demeanor he generally only adopts in the lab when we are fighting a particularly bad bug. He explained that “Christian Slater,” whose real name is apparently Brian Phelps, escaped the area and remains at large. The National Guard troops have set up a perimeter one mile from where our patient zero came ashore, but that is a huge area to try to contain completely. There are not as many people in that space as if it had been a residential area, but it’s still enough to fill the containment shelter that has been set up in a warehouse about two blocks up the road from here. If you have never tried to contain a large group of dockworkers, security guards and shift managers, Davolo assures me it's something nobody would ever want to do