Chapter 3

The Secretary of State stared at his ambassador to the UK with a shocked, stunned look on his face.

“Can you please repeat that? Slowly? I am not sure if I understand what I think I thought you just said.”

“I said, the Chinese have reverted to government-regulated cannibalism of their women between sixteen and fifty years of age as a method of population management and as a food source.” She decided to not say anything else.

He sat back slowly in his chair as he tried to process the ramifications of that statement.

“How do you know this for certain?”

“Because I unknowingly experienced it first-hand in a meeting with Mr. Yin Li, the Chinese ambassador to the UK. Once I found out, of course, my body tried to vomit up everything I had eaten in the last month or so. But they manipulated things so that I was informed some ninety minutes after I had ... By then it was too late for that to work. That was two days ago.”

“I see. Are you alright?” Concern for a subordinate was not a stretch for the Secretary. He truly cared about the people under him. Unlike the previous appointee of this office.

“Yeah, other than the nightmares the first night, I’ll live.” She paused, and he waited to see what she said next. “Other than the guilt and revulsion over it, I physically felt better than I had in years after that meal. I feel guilty about that, as well.”

“I can imagine. No, actually, I can’t. I have no idea what you are going through. You should speak with the departmental psychologist about this. You are an important member of my team, and I need you to be well.”

The office was silent for a while as both occupants were in their thoughts at what had been said.

“I also need you to get a full medical workup. There will be questions about that as this moves forward. People will need to understand what has happened to you, and that will be the first step to compiling everything that will be required for that. You have a priority appointment. It was listed as full blood and chemistry workup due to stress. Really, it is a standard procedure these days when a government employee returns from official business outside the country. Expand it to cover this situation. The doctor you are scheduled with is in the inner circle. He won’t say a word about anything you tell him, since National Security Concerns override his mandatory reporter requirements.”

Sharra nodded.

“Did you get any other information from him on all of this?”

“Oh yes, I sure did. He gave me this tablet,” she said, pulling it out from her tech bag and placing it on her boss’s desk. “Apparently it is full of hundreds of documents related to their situation, along with an extensive amount of social, economic, and political analyses of ours. He said their scientists have determined that we are on the verge of sliding inevitably into another famine, worse than anything we have experienced so far, and that we will be unable to avoid descending into barbarism and going conquistador looking for food sources. Do you know anything about that?”

Secretary Hansen nodded grimly. “Oh yeah, it’s coming. The information so far has been restricted to cabinet members, but the science is very real and very frightening. It is absolutely coming. We do not have a solution yet, so that is the reason for the silence. For most things, leaking info to the press is an old tradition. We leak this without a solution, and the sociologists think the response will tear the country apart. They think that the half the population that doesn’t march on Washington will loot what is left of our country, and probably burn it down.”

“Shit.”

“Well, I want you to go rest and speak with the head doc, and get your physical completed. I guess I am going to look through this.”

“Start with the videos. They are numbered in order you should watch them. I would get them copied up to secure storage, because apparently this is the only place they exist. I will be available to answer questions about it when you are done, as well as my report, here.” She put a binder on the desk next to the tablet on her encounter with the Ambassador inside.

“Sure. I’ll be in touch. Don’t worry about going back to the UK soon. They’ll be fine without you for a bit.”

The next day when Sharra walked into Secretary Keith Hansen’s office, he gave her a look that told her he had watched the videos. She suddenly found she couldn’t look him in the eye as she sat on one of the overstuffed leather chairs opposite his desk.

“Sharra, I have to ask this. How are you feeling right now? Health-wise? Be totally honest with me. There’s going to be a lot of questions up the chain of command, and that is a very important one that will be asked repeatedly over the next few days.”

She looked at him for a moment while she tried to gather her thoughts. Before she could speak, he interjected again.

“Look, what happened to you was unconscionable. You were unknowingly forced to ingest something that is very uncivilized at the least. But that is not where the questions are going to go. The questions are going to go to whether or not this is a viable solution to avert the future everyone on the inside knows is coming. So, take a moment and think about it. How do you feel right now?”

“Honestly, better than I have in a long time. Totally ignoring the source, that meal did wonders for me. I have more energy right now than I have in a while, although that is fading the more time passes from what happened. My body is craving that again as it seems to be recognizing how I benefitted from it. I slept better the last few nights since then than I have in a long time. And my head is not as foggy as it used to be first thing in the morning when I wake up. I can hope this lasts forever, but I know it won’t.”

Hansen looked at her calmly for a while, then nodded.

“We have a meeting at the Oval in an hour with POTUS. Everyone you will be meeting with today is aware of what you experienced in the UK. From what I hear, everyone was up late last night watching the videos from the tablet and reading the documentation, what they could get through. That will be discussed in the meeting also.”

Sharra just nodded. She knew this was going to be a long meeting.

It turned out to be worse than she expected. And better.

No one seemed to judge her. There were no lingering looks of pity or anything else like it, but there were a few glances of sympathy. But that almost made it worse, from the perspective of her guilty conscious. She almost wanted to feel the negative emotions of others to validate what she was feeling.

President Melville started the meeting once she was seated.

“Ms. Anderson, the only thing we will say to you is thank you for your difficult, challenging service to our country.”

She nodded once, not trusting herself to respond.

“Alright, let’s get into this. First, Keith, what is State’s position on this incident?” Tucker Melville was nothing if not direct and to the point. It was a trait that had endeared him to the voters in these times and had won him significant support from all three major political parties.

Sometime after the end of the Trump presidency and the investigations a criminal trials that resulted, the Republican Party had separated into two groups, the original Republican Party headed by Trump loyalists, and the New Conservative Party headed by the former leaders of the Lincoln Project, the political subversive group headed by George Conway and others who felt that Trump was a danger to the country. It made for an interesting political dynamic, since both parties combined were somewhat smaller than the still-unified Democratic party, of which every President since Trump had been a member.

The two conservative groups in US politics needed to work together to accomplish anything, which was by far easier said than done these days. Still, it helped in some circles that Trump had been one of the first to die in the initial phases of the Reaper pandemic. After all, the New Conservatives could afford to be magnanimous as members of the Republican Party fled their old party in search of a new spiritual home.

Then again, once Trump was gone and could no longer agitate in politics, many saw the chance to head back to the Republican Party in search of power and control in the vacuum left by Trump’s passing.

But too much political blood had been spilled inside the two groups to think about unification in any of their lifetimes. The only people who truly benefitted from all this infighting was the late-night talk show hosts. They had years of material to work from. Until several of them on all three ends of the political spectrum got Reaped. Then, it was still funny, just not to as many people.

“State feels that while what was done to Ms. Anderson was a gross breach of etiquette and well established behaviors in the treatment of a diplomat with full diplomatic immunity, in this case the situation is not clear at all, since Ms. Anderson was not and continues to not be an envoy to the Chinese government.” Keith Hansen, Sharra’s boss, was clear, plain-spoken person, and his message was coming through now.

“Additionally, we feel that the UK Prime Minister should lodge a formal protest with the Chinese government, and threaten to expel their diplomatic mission entirely, and end relations with them. However, a lot will depend on what actions are taken from this incident, and how we move forward on the domestic front. We do not feel that hasty action is required, but some form of action needs to be taken to show that this kind of disgusting, cavalier treatment of a highly valued diplomat and citizen of our country will never be tolerated.”

“Madam Vice President, what is the position of the senior members of the Senate that have been read in on this?”

“The party leadership groups are all pretty much ... lost in space and spinning fast, I think is the best way to put it. None of them want to take any formal position on what the Chinese did. Empty pontification seems to be the covering of the day for them.”

“Okay, I guess we table any political response to Ms. Anderson’s treatment for the moment, with the proviso that I reserve the right to bring it back at any point I so choose in the future.”

Melville processed his thoughts for a moment, then turned to the Surgeon General, Dr. T’Challa Korimba (it was well known that his parents were major fans of The Black Panther and the lead character in it; it couldn’t have been fun to go through life with that name, but the highly successful surgeon looked something like Chadwick Boseman, the actor who passed away from colon cancer within a few years of the movie being released).

“Surgeon General Korimba, will you please go into the medical report on Ms. Anderson. And I apologize for this, Sharra, but we need to understand what happened to you because of this, and whether or not this is a solution. No matter how repugnant it might be now, what is coming would be far, far worse.”

“Understood, Mr. President. I am also curious. I haven’t been able to read copy of the report yet myself, so this will be enlightening for me as well.” She was surprised she sounded so calm and collected. She was nothing of the sort inside.

“Really? That’s unfortunate. I apologize for this being the first chance for you to hear it. This is not how things are normally done around here. Please forgive me, but we do not have time to delay this at this point.”

“No, it’s alright. Everything will come out at least in limited release eventually,” Sharra said with some grace that she certainly didn’t feel. “Please, continue.”

Dr. Korimba turned to Sharra and said, “Are you certain? I will gladly suffer the wrath of my President if you wish to review this in private while he fires me.”

“No, no, you are needed in your position, Sir. And, seriously, I am perfectly okay with this happening this way.”

“Alright. Mr. President, Secretary of State Hansen ordered a full workup with highest priority over everything else for Ms. Anderson. The last of the results came in around four o’clock early this morning, and I have been up reviewing them and doing research in preparation for this meeting. I also brought in a research fellow from Harvard Medical School, Doctor Reyna Gleason, who was flown down last night when it was revealed that we had a medical incident with one of our highly regarded diplomats concerning what they had been fed without their knowledge. She reviewed the results, and I feel that she is better able to go into the details after I address the summary report.”

“Go on,” President Melville stated after Korimba paused for comment.

“Very well. Ms. Anderson, like everyone else in the country and pretty much the known world right now, shows the effects of long-term low- to mid-level malnutrition due to the scarcity of proper foods with adequate nutrition available in the national food supply. There is evidence of this in her kidneys, her liver function, and other areas. All this is known to us.

“What is new in Ms. Anderson’s case is a clear indication of a very recent infusion of food containing moderately above average levels of the missing nutrition into Ms. Anderson’s diet. While the markers are there in her urine to indicate that low levels of kidney malfunction have been present in her physiology for years, there is indication that Ms. Anderson’s systems were bolstered by this nutritional infusion, and it had a somewhat healing effect.

“Think of it as a slightly wilted flower that was just given additional water above the slow trickle it has been receiving for years. The old amount was enough to keep it alive, but not enough to bring out its full potential. With the additional hydration, the flower is perking up a bit. If it gets more water at the new rate, it will continue to thrive. If not, it will continue to exist, but never reach its full potential.”

Silence swept the oval office as the words hit home.

“Any evidence of harm to Ms. Anderson from what she ingested?” Melville wanted to know.

“None. We ran a full tox screen for all chemical, viral, bacterial, or biological foreign substances. Ms. Yin Xiulan the source of the ... she was in excellent health. The Chinese sent a report along from a Geo 100 machine that was time and date-stamped for that morning. She was clean and healthy before her untimely passing and resulting disposition.”

Sharra didn’t let it show, but she was very relieved to hear that she had not gotten poisoned or anything else from her experience. She was of two minds regarding whether or not she regretted the experience, though.