THE CALLS
Boise, Idaho
Mara Vance spent twenty-two years as an emergency communications dispatcher. She retired six years after the Crisis. We meet in a county administration building that was converted into temporary housing during the evacuations and never converted back. She still calls it “the new building,” although portions of it are now old enough to need renovation.
You have to understand that strange calls weren't strange.
People think dispatchers sit around all night waiting for murders.
Most of it was nonsense.
Not nonsense to the person calling, obviously. If your husband falls down the stairs, that's the most important thing happening in the universe. But from our end? Falls. Domestic disputes. Drunks. Car accidents. Somebody smells gas. Somebody's neighbor is playing music. Somebody thinks somebody's trying to break into their garage.
Animal bites were common.
Dogs mostly.
You'd occasionally get somebody bitten by a cat, raccoon, whatever.
So when we got the first one, there was nothing memorable about it.
It was February 11th.
I know that because I've looked it up since.
Woman calls from Meridian. Says her husband bit her.
Domestic.
That's how it came in.
I asked whether there were weapons in the house.
She said no.
I asked whether he had been drinking.
She said she didn't know.
Then she said something that made me change the code.
She said, "He's not talking."
You hear that kind of thing in domestic calls too. Somebody's having a breakdown, drugs, stroke, diabetic emergency. I asked if he was conscious.
"Yes."
Breathing?
"Yes."
Responding to you?
"No."
Then she screams.
Not horror-movie screaming. People always get that wrong.
Real screaming is ugly. There's no performance to it.
She drops the phone.
I hear banging.
Then silence.
You follow procedure.
You don't sit there interpreting.
Police, fire, EMS.
Next call.
That's the job.
About forty minutes later, ambulance requests law enforcement backup at Saint Luke's.
Combative patient.
Nothing unusual about that either.
Then another ambulance requests backup.
Different patient.
Same hospital.
Then the emergency department calls directly and asks whether police can station someone in the lobby.
That was unusual.
Hospitals don't like uniformed officers standing around unless there's a reason.
I asked why.
The charge nurse said, "We've had three assaults."
Three patients?
She said, "No. Three by patients."
The first thing people imagine is that someone somewhere recognizes the pattern immediately.
That isn't how systems work.
Systems are designed to prevent people from inventing patterns.
That's usually a good thing.
Imagine if every dispatcher could declare a plague because she got three weird calls.
Imagine if every cop could close an interstate because he had a feeling.
You'd have chaos every Tuesday.
So information stays in boxes until there's enough evidence to justify moving it out of the box.
The problem was that these particular boxes were killing us.
At 11:18 p.m. we received a call from a convenience store.
Clerk said a man had collapsed outside.
Then he got up.
Then he attacked somebody trying to help him.
We coded it as an assault with possible intoxication.
11:31.
Residential call.
Elderly woman says her son is "having another episode."
He'd had problems with methamphetamine in the past.
Police response.
11:47.
Motor vehicle collision.
One driver wandering in traffic.
Would not respond to verbal commands.
State police.
11:53.
Dog bite.
Midnight.
Domestic.
12:07.
Possible overdose.
12:14.
Assault.
12:19.
Another assault.
Different jurisdiction.
I remember looking at the board.
We had colors for call types.
It wasn't sophisticated. Just enough to tell you where resources were going.
And I remember thinking there was too much red.
That was all.
Too much red.
I asked one of the other dispatchers, Luis, whether he thought we were having a bad night.
He said, "Full moon?"
It wasn't.
We actually checked.
That's embarrassing now.
Human civilization was starting to come apart and two highly trained emergency professionals checked the phase of the moon.
But that's exactly what people do.
You reach for explanations you already own.
Super Bowl weekend.
Bad batch of drugs.
Weather.
Full moon.
Payday.
Anything you've seen before.
Around one in the morning, we received our first officer-down call.
Ada County deputy.
Traffic stop.
He'd responded to a report of a woman walking barefoot along Chinden Boulevard.
Body camera footage came out years later.
I've watched it once.
She looked drunk.
That's what everybody said afterward.
Drunk or hypothermic.
She had blood down the front of her shirt, but apparently she'd been in an accident earlier.
Deputy tells her to stop.
She keeps walking.
He approaches.
She turns around.
She grabs him.
The part everyone remembers is the bite.
I remember something else.
The deputy keeps trying to arrest her.
That's what his brain knows how to do.
He tells her to put her hands behind her back.
She's chewing through his cheek and he's still shouting commands.
"Ma'am, stop resisting."
That recording stayed with me.
Not because he did anything wrong.
Because it showed you how powerful training is.
And how dangerous training becomes when reality changes faster than doctrine.
After the officer-down call, things accelerated.
Not the disease.
Our awareness.
There's a difference.
Disease might have been accelerating for weeks.
We simply started looking.
Somebody called Canyon County.
They'd had unusual assaults.
We called Nampa.
Same thing.
State police had several.
Hospitals were reporting violent patients who appeared unresponsive to pain compliance.
That phrase started appearing everywhere.
"Unresponsive to pain compliance."
Later it became obvious.
At the time it sounded impossible.
Pepper spray wasn't working reliably.
Tasers weren't stopping some of them.
Broken fingers weren't stopping them.
Gunshots—
That took longer.
People think the authorities immediately figured out you had to destroy the brain.
No.
Why would they?
Police officers aren't trained to deliberately shoot people in the head.
They're trained to stop a threat.
Center mass.
That's where you shoot.
So officers were doing exactly what they had been trained to do.
And sometimes the person went down.
Sometimes they didn't.
Then you get this completely predictable argument.
Was the officer missing?
Was the ammunition defective?
Was the suspect wearing armor?
Were drugs involved?
Different departments reached different conclusions.
There wasn't some national zombie manual sitting in a drawer.
People had to manufacture reality from reports arriving one at a time.
At 2:26, a man called from a subdivision outside Eagle.
He whispered the entire time.
That was the call that did it for me.
Not the officer.
Not the hospital.
Him.
He said there were people in his yard.
I asked how many.
He said six or seven.
I asked what they were doing.
"Standing."
Did he know them?
"No."
Were they trying to get inside?
"No."
Weapons?
"No."
Then he says:
"They keep walking toward my generator."
Generator?
Power hadn't gone out.
He had one of those permanent backup generators. It ran a weekly self-test automatically.
Started every Tuesday at two-thirty in the morning.
They were walking toward the sound.
I asked him to turn it off.
He said he didn't know how.
I could hear it through the phone.
Then I could hear something hitting his fence.
Not pounding.
More like bodies leaning against it.
He whispered, "There are more now."
That was when I stopped thinking drugs.
Drugs don't make seven strangers synchronize around a generator.
I stood up.
Dispatchers don't stand up much.
Luis looked at me.
I said, "Put all the bite calls on one screen."
He thought I meant dog bites.
I said, "People."
We weren't actually supposed to do that.
The software wasn't designed for it.
We searched notes manually.
"Bit."
"Biting."
"Teeth."
"Human bite."
"Attempted bite."
Then we widened it.
"Combative."
"Unresponsive."
"Altered."
"Violent patient."
"Doesn't respond."
Suddenly the night looked completely different.
That's another thing people misunderstand about disasters.
Information can exist without knowledge.
We had the data.
Every individual fact was already inside the system.
What we didn't have was the query.
There were forty-three incidents.
Forty-three.
Some were probably unrelated.
Maybe ten were drunks. Maybe five were domestic violence. Maybe somebody really had been bitten by a dog.
Didn't matter.
Forty-three was too many.
I called my supervisor.
He told me to contact the duty officer.
The duty officer contacted county emergency management.
Emergency management wanted confirmation from public health.
Public health wanted hospital numbers.
Hospitals wanted to know what criteria we were using.
Nobody was being stupid.
That's important.
I've spent twenty years listening to people say the government failed because bureaucrats were idiots.
They weren't idiots.
Everyone asked reasonable questions.
Every question cost time.
At 3:12, one of the hospitals called.
Not through the normal channel.
A doctor took the phone.
He said, "Do you have law enforcement available?"
I said yes.
He said, "Send everybody you can."
I asked what was happening.
There was noise behind him.
Glass breaking.
People yelling.
Then he said something I still remember exactly.
"We have deceased patients attacking staff."
I thought I'd misheard him.
I said, "Say again?"
"Deceased patients."
I asked whether he meant clinically deceased.
Stupid question.
Necessary question.
He said, "No pulse. No spontaneous respiration. Confirmed dead."
Then there was another crash.
He said:
"They're moving."
And the line went dead.
Nobody said zombie.
Not once.
Not that night.
The word would have sounded ridiculous.
We said infected.
Combative.
Unknown medical event.
Mass casualty incident.
Neurological symptoms.
Possible toxic exposure.
The language changed slowly because language is permission.
Once you name something, you allow yourself to believe it exists.
We weren't ready.
At 3:40 the county activated its emergency operations center.
At 4:05 we started getting reports from outside the metro area.
At 4:17 state police asked for clarification on use-of-force guidance.
At 4:22 someone from public health told us to start documenting bites separately.
That was probably the first official acknowledgment that bites mattered.
At 4:51 a school superintendent called asking whether schools should open.
Think about that.
That's my favorite detail when people ask me when civilization knew.
At 4:51 in the morning we had dead people attacking nurses, cops getting bitten, hospitals locking doors, and forty-something related emergency calls.
And somebody still needed to decide whether kids should catch the bus in two hours.
Because until somebody says otherwise, Wednesday is still Wednesday.
That's civilization.
Not tanks.
Not presidents.
A woman somewhere has to decide whether to cancel algebra.
The emergency alert went out after six.
By then people were already posting videos.
Some were real.
Some weren't.
Someone recycled footage from a horror movie.
Someone claimed it was rabies.
Someone said the Russians had poisoned the water.
Someone else said hospitals were murdering homeless people and inventing the attacks to cover it up.
There were videos explaining that infected people could smell fear.
That one caused problems for months.
Absolute nonsense.
But it sounded plausible enough.
That's all misinformation needs.
You want to know when I knew?
Not suspected.
Knew.
Seven thirteen in the morning.
Shift change.
I'd been there all night.
Sun was coming up.
My replacement, Denise, walked in carrying two coffees.
Same as always.
She put one on my desk.
Then she said traffic was horrible because everybody was leaving town.
I asked what she meant.
She said the interstate was backed up westbound.
Westbound.
Away from the city.
There had been no evacuation order.
Nobody told people to leave.
They just did.
Hundreds, then thousands of people independently looked at what they were seeing and reached the same conclusion before the government had found language for it.
That's when I knew.
Because emergencies have instructions.
Fires have instructions.
Floods have instructions.
Chemical spills have instructions.
You tell people where to go.
That morning there were no instructions.
And they were going anyway.
I looked at the call board.
Everything was red.
Then Denise's phone rang.
She answered it.
Listened for maybe three seconds.
Looked at me.
Covered the microphone.
And said:
"Human bite."
And somehow that was the first time it sounded normal.
