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manager, in on the act. Apparently, several senior executives from headquarters would be there to listen to Dr. Wright’s lecture, and the possibility existed that they might stick around for Alex’s presentation. All of his slides started to filter through Michelle’s desk, and before he knew it, he had two sets of revisions to process, each set often contradicting the other. He seriously considered sending a letter bomb to each of them. Despite the nonsense, his talk was hailed as a success by both Michelle and Ted, though it paled in comparison to Dr. Wright’s talk, which any speaker would have found a hard act to follow. He had smiled and shook their hands after the talk, cringing inside as they patted him on the shoulder. He silently promised himself that he would never volunteer for anything at Biosphere again. Fortunately, the experience hadn’t been a total loss.
    The most important result of the regional lecture stemmed from his research. Alex had combed the internet for a variety of sources and had found a broad continuum of opinions, speculations and predictions about the future of pandemics. Most articles and international disease control agencies agreed that the 2008–2009 avian flu served as the best model of a worst-case scenario. Despite over twenty million deaths worldwide, casualties in the United States, Europe and most other modernized nations were minimal. Close to twenty thousand deaths in the United States were attributed to the avian flu, which was still far below the forty to fifty thousand deaths annually attributed to the regular seasonal flu. The overall impact on society was minimal.
    However, the deeper he dug into the topic, the more he began to believe that most of these articles and reports were a little too optimistic. When he stumbled upon the International Scientific Pandemic Awareness Collaborative (ISPAC) website, he found all of the decidedly less optimistic opinions and research condensed into one convenient location. ISPAC had been privately founded, on the heels of the avian flu pandemic, to counter the prevailing optimism and spur the international community to strengthen pandemic response planning and resource allocation.
    Alex spent countless hours studying document after document, until he was convinced that avian flu was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of pandemic potential. He had a hard time condensing all of the available information and research into a thirty-minute talk, but when he was finished and the final revision had been approved by his regional manager, his slide presentation could have fueled the next blockbuster Hollywood disaster movie. He shook himself free of the reverie as the elevator door opened.
    We might end up needing our basement stockpile after all.
     

 
    Chapter Six
     
     
     
    Friday, November 1, 2013
     
    Alex walked out of Hannigan’s with his second shopping cart full of groceries. He had made two separate trips into the store, the first one to buy nonperishable items, which nearly overflowed from the cart, and the second to buy refrigerator items. He felt pretty strange going in for the second time, but managed to stand in a checkout line far enough away from the first one to avoid any uncomfortable glances, not sure why he even cared.
    The store was about as crowded as he would expect for a Friday afternoon which, despite the looming threat, didn’t really surprise him. He knew the public would wait too long, and one electrifying news report would send everyone into the stores at once, effectively crippling the food supply system. Most of the grocery stores, just like the big retail stores, had become so efficient that they carried little additional stock on hand to meet even the slightest increase in demand.
    He scanned the parking lot, noting mostly empty spaces.
    This store is one bad news report away from mayhem.
    Alex decided to call his family and friends to urge them to hit the stores now. He jammed the groceries into his