Stinger

by Nancy Kress

  —Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, in a letter to Dr. Frank B. Jewett, President of the National Acacemy of Sciences, 1942

  * * *

  Six weeks into the epidemic, Melanie Anderson thought as she fried herself an omelet in her Weather Vane Motel kitchen, and they still had shit.

  No, not exactly shit. They had the most complete epidemic curves in disease-control history. People graphs detailing precisely who’d gotten the disease, when and where they’d gotten it, how it had run its course, and how often it had turned fatal. Vector graphs, showing everything about Anopheles except when the little suckers got horny. Time graphs coordinating the spread of malaria reading with Anopheles reproduction rates.

  They also had several thousand infected mosquitoes, dead and alive. They had a complete understanding of the altered genetic mechanisms that let the malaria parasites colonize sickled blood cells, where no malaria parasites had ever been able to boldly go before. They had photographs and computer simulations and tagged exhibits and duplicate files. Finally, they had every epidemiologist specializing in malaria crawling over Maryland and Virginia. You couldn’t walk around without tripping over an epidemiologist from places like the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine, the Microbiology Research Establishment at Porton Down in England, the World Health Organization. The woods around Newburg sounded like the Tower of Babel. Joe Krovetz had found a Brazilian coin and a Danish candy wrapper.

  So many of the CDC’s own malaria people were involved, either here or in Atlanta, that the CDC hadn’t even been able to respond to a call for help from one of their established clients. The Democratic Republic of the Congo was having another outbreak of malaria, but, then, Congo was always having an outbreak of malaria. The CDC couldn’t spare a team. It wasn’t like it was Ebola, after all. Africa was used to malaria. The United States was not.

  Melanie flipped her omelet so viciously it landed half-in, half-out of the frying pan. She scraped it back in and dumped chopped vegetables on top. She didn’t feel like eating with the team again tonight. She was sick of all of them, except young Joe Krovetz. He was the only one who agreed with her that this was an attempt at genocide. Except for the entire FBI, who might or might not believe malaria reading was criminal, but at least they were acting as if they did. The rest of her own team, in contrast, held out for a spontaneous mutation, an accidental introduction from another country (“possibly in larval form in agricultural produce,” Susan Muscato had said, the head-in-the-sand bitch) or—for all Melanie knew—an insectoid immaculate conception. Fools.

  She dumped the omelet onto a plate. The underside, which was now the top side, looked scarred and patchy from her inept flipping. Green vegetables stuck through the half-cooked patches like mold under viscous gauze. Well, hot sauce would help. She searched through the cupboard. She was out of hot sauce.

  Figured. Just one more thing she didn’t have, along with belief from her colleagues. Along with an end to the epidemic. USAMRIID’s mosquito-eradication program was working well, but in this unseasonably hot and wet summer, A. quadrimaculatus still flourished. The epidemic curves projected that they were still weeks away from ending the epidemic.

  She slashed at her omelet. The door opened and Joe Krovetz walked in. He didn’t knock anymore; if she didn’t want company, she kept the chain on. Except that this evening she’d forgotten.

  “Brought you an ice cream cone,” he said. “We stopped on the way back from McDonald’s. Good God, what’s that thing?”

  “My dinner,” Melanie said shortly. “It’s an omelet. You know, healthy egg dish with healthy vegetables?”

  “What’d you do to it?”

  “I cooked it. And I don’t like ice cream.”

  “You don’t even know what flavor it is yet,” Joe said affably. You couldn’t offend him. It was one reason Melanie found him restful. “You’re snapping at everyone,” Farlow had told her. “Act like a professional, damn it.”

  It wasn’t Farlow’s brothers and sisters that somebody was killing off.

  “Okay, Joe, what flavor is the ice cream?”

  “Chocolate swirl.”

  “I don’t like chocolate swirl.”

  “Okay,” Joe said and dumped the cone into her garbage can. He sat opposite her at the tiny table. “You hear what happened today? Big news.”

  Melanie stopped eating. “What happened?”

  “The FBI declared a Terrorist Warning Advisory and got all twenty-five-thousand Bureau people involved. It was on the six o’clock news.”

  Melanie laid down her fork. “Really? What does that mean?”

  “What do you mean what does it mean?”

  “Well, are they going to do something different? Whatever they’ve been doing so far hasn’t led anyplace.”

  “I don’t know,” Joe said. “The news didn’t go into details.”

  “Of course not. It’s TV. And probably the FBI is just bullshitting anyway. I’ll believe they’re doing something when they actually arrest somebody.”

  For the first time since she’d known him, Joe looked troubled. His downy eyebrows drew together, making an artificial wrinkle across his young skin. “Mel … you’re not saying you believe the FBI is in on this? That our own government is collaborating with killing off blacks … you’re not saying that, are you?”

  “Do I look that paranoid to you, Krovetz? No, I’m not saying that. The government doesn’t have to be collaborating. All they have to be doing is look like they’re investigating when they’re actually doing shit. After all, it’s no secret that our government doesn’t much like blacks.”

  “Mel … you don’t believe that.”

  “Don’t tell me what I believe!” Actually, she didn’t believe the government was condoning genocide. But they weren’t making any progress toward arresting anybody, either, and it made her furious that Joe wouldn’t see that … Joe, the one white person she thought really grasped the full monstrosity of what was happening. Melanie had told him about the Tuskegee Institute experiments on syphilis, where four hundred black men had deliberately been left untreated so the government could study the progress of the disease. She’d told Joe about the deliberate infection of prisoners in the Atlanta Federal Prison with malaria in order to test experimental drugs, a program legitimized by an act of Congress. Supposedly the prisoners were all volunteers and no deals were cut (yeah, right). She’d told Joe … Oh, she was sick of it. Not even the best of them could really see how pervasive and destructive the prejudice was. Especially not the best of them.

  “Mel,” Joe said gently, “you’re losing it.”

  “Thank you so much, Dr. Krovetz.”

  “No, I mean it. You have to—” The phone shrilled.

  Immediately Melanie cried, “Don’t answer it!”

  “I wasn’t going to. But why not?”

  She didn’t respond. Two rings, and the answering machine came on. She picked up her knife, without knowing she did it, and clutched the handle.

  “Hello, Melanie,” the same deep voice said. “Go back to Atlanta, black bitch. You aren’t safe here. If the mosquitoes don’t get you, the white citizens of Maryland will. Clear out while you can.” Click.

  Melanie was abruptly calm. She walked to the machine, pulled out the tape, and recorded the date and time on its label. She dropped it in a drawer with all the others. Then she slipped a fresh tape into the machine.

  Joe was staring at her. “Fucking shit, Melanie. How often does this happen?”

  She said crisply, “I have sixteen tapes. That’s number seventeen.”

  “Have you told Farlow?”

  “No. And you’re not going to either.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I want to stay on this project.” She sat down again and leaned toward him. Her mood changed yet again, and suddenly she wanted to make Joe Krovetz understand. “Don’t you see? Farlow would like to replace me here. Preferably with another black who’s negative for sickle-cell trait. Farlow agrees with you
that I’m losing it,’ only he says it more forcibly and more often. But I’m staying on this epidemic. I have to, Joe. I have to. So don’t you dare tell him about these calls. I mean it. Do I have your word?”

  Krovetz sat thinking. After a minute he said reluctantly, “Okay.”

  “Good. Now let’s go get some ice cream.”

  “I just had ice cream. And you said you don’t like it.”

  “So I lied,” Melanie said. All at once she wanted to get out of the motel room. The ugly sounds of the hate call seemed to hang in the air, dirtying it. She could hardly breathe in here. And she’d be damned if that telephonic slime-monger was going to make her a prisoner in this room. She’d slogged through infested African jungles, looking for dangerous disease vectors or their victims; she wasn’t going to be intimidated by some pathetic maggot-souled small-brained skinhead.

  “Well, I suppose you need to eat something besides that,” Joe said, pointing at her omelet. “Not that you’re eating it anyway.”

  “No, because you’re right. It’s disgusting. I want a hamburger.”

  “Okay. Lock your room. And keep it locked, Mel. It wasn’t when I came in.”

  Melanie locked her door. Walking across the street to the diner, she kept a good distance away from Joe. They’d spent a lot of time together lately. She didn’t want to start any rumors.

  Still, although she hated to admit it, she was glad his solid masculine bulk walked beside her.

  Judy had told the boy no. He’d phoned her right after the call from Robert, and she’d still been numb. Robert, whom she’d hoped to marry. Staying with his ex-wife, telling her he’d be home when he damn well felt like it, treating her just as Ben had. Robert, who’d been her chance to start over, to love again, to this time oh-please-God-get-it-right Robert.

  After she’d hung up on Robert she’d sat staring at the phone as if it were alive. At some level, she couldn’t believe everything was over. Was it over? Did Robert still want her? Did …When the phone rang again, she’d seized it, so grateful she was afraid she’d cry. “Robert?”

  “No, ma’am.” A strange voice, slow and southern. “This is Earl Lester, ma’am. Can I have words with Agent Cavanaugh?” On the last sentence his voice abruptly cracked, and Judy had realized it was a young teen.

  “He’s … not here,” she said, her own voice breaking in a way she hated. Would Robert ever be here again? Was he moving out for good? What was happening?

  “Then can y’all tell me where to find him?”

  “No, I’m sorry. I’m … sorry.” She hung up.

  For ten minutes she didn’t move at all. Then she tried to pull herself together, act normally, do some work. That was it, work. Wasn’t that what feminist movies were always saying? Men came and went, but you always had your work.

  She stared at the computer screen, with the first draft of an article on left-handed molecules for Science Today. Five minutes later, she changed a word. Five minutes after that, another one. The doorbell rang.

  “I’m Earl Lester, ma’am. To talk to Agent Cavanaugh.”

  “I told you he wasn’t here.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But I figured I’d jest wait for him.” The boy blinked twice. He was tall, skeletal, and a uniform pale, washed-out color, like dirty cream: skin, hair, T-shirt. Even his eyes were pale, somewhere between blue and gray. When he blinked like that, he looked like a rabbit.

  Judy said, too harshly—she was talking to a child, for God’s sake—“There’s no point in waiting, Earl. Agent Cavanaugh’s not returning.”

  Two more blinks. “He done left you?”

  “I don’t really think that’s any of your business!”

  “No, ma’am. Just being conversational. My daddy done left my mama four or five tunes. Always comes back though. Sooner or later.”

  The boy was trying to comfort her. This inept weird-looking kid … It was touching. All of a sudden Judy felt much better. Fuck Robert. He’d either come back, or he wouldn’t. She’d be damned if she’d let either one destroy her.

  “Thank you, Earl. I can give you Agent Cavanaugh’s current number if you’d like.”

  “’Preciate it.”

  She gave him not only Marcy’s number but also Marcy’s address. With any luck, the kid would interrupt Robert and Marcy at some critical moment.

  “Thank you, ma’am.” Earl walked unhurriedly—Judy had the impression it was his only mode—down the front path and disappeared behind a clump of trees. There was no bicycle or car. He must have walked.

  She shrugged and went back to her computer. For the rest of the afternoon, she made herself concentrate on left-handed molecules. In the evening she cleaned house, weeded the garden, ironed a skirt, moved some furniture—anything to tire herself out so that she might have a chance of falling quickly asleep. So she wouldn’t have to lie awake alone, wondering where he was and what he was doing. Anything but that.

  UNDERGROUND SOVIET HARDLINERS

  CREATED MALARIA READING, SAYS VETGROUP

  PATRIOTS GROUPS USING MALARIA READING TO

  UNDERMINE GOVERNMENT AUTHORITY,

  SAYS WHITE HOUSE AIDE

  WHITE SUPREMACISTS CREATED MALARIA

  READING, SAYS NAACP

  MALARIA READING ESCAPED PROM BIOTECH LABS—PROOF AVAILABLE, SAYS CITIZEN COALITION

  SAME PEOPLE MADE MALARIA READING

  WHO MADE AIDS, SAYS GAY SPOKESPERSON

  IRAN CREATED MALARIA READING TO GET EVEN

  FOR GULF WAR, SAYS RETIRED COLONEL

  GOD SENT MALARIA READING AS

  PUNISHMENT FOR FAILING FAITH, SAYS

  BLACK MINISTER

  PHARMACEUTICAL FIRMS GUILTY OF CREATING

  MALARIA READING TO BOOST SALES, CLAIMS

  CONSUMER WATCHDOG ORG.

  MALARIA READING RESULT OF ALIEN LANDING—

  CLEAR REVENGE FOR ROSWELL

  SHOCKING SECRET DOCUMENTS TRACE MALARIA

  READING TO IRS!!

  The trouble with investigating an epidemic, Cavanaugh discovered, was that the pace wasn’t set by the investigators. It wasn’t even set by the criminals. It was set by the mosquitoes.

  The breeding cycle of Anopheles, Melanie explained to him, was about eighteen days. That was how long it took for each new generation of mosquitoes to appear—and each new infected area had its own new victims. Fresh information about the epidemic was unlikely to become available until a new generation of victims did.

  So for the next two weeks, Cavanaugh gave his attention to southern Maryland hate groups and their neighbors, which was what Dunbar had assigned him to anyway. None of the groups, in Cavanaugh’s opinion, had the capacity to engineer a one-cell battery, let alone new genes. All of them, in Cavanaugh’s opinion, were nuts. The neighbors ranged from disgusted to admiring.

  “When I received the flyer about a tax-protest meeting, I went,” said one attractive, fortyish white woman in shorts and a tie-dyed T-shirt, whom Cavanaugh approached while she was weeding flowers in her front yard. “But then it turned out to be this separatist group. ‘Arcadia,’ they call themselves, and the leader says he’s the ‘ambassador from Arcadia to the United States.’ They consider that they’ve already seceded, and the taxes being ‘forced’ from them are a form of illegal tribute. Like ‘the Roman Empire levied on Atlantis.’” She hummed the Twilight Zone theme, waving her trowel to the beat.

  “Were there any black people at the meeting?”

  “Oh, yes. The group made a big point of not being discriminatory. It’s just the government they hate, not individuals.”

  “Thank you for your help,” Cavanaugh said.

  “Any time.” She went back to her azaleas.

  The next interviewee was not so cooperative. He lived in a cabin on a dirt road. “You got a warrant?” the man asked, glaring at Cavanaugh through an amazingly worn and battered screen door.

  “Sir, you’re not a suspect. I just want to ask you about a group allegedly headquartered at the place next to yours, the Chris
tian Crusade.”

  “I don’t know nothing about them.” He slammed his inner door.

  Cavanaugh got into his car and drove the quarter mile to the next cabin down. A skinny, elderly black woman dressed in jeans and a faded cotton blouse came to the door. “Yes?”

  “FBI, ma’am. I’m Special Agent Robert Cavanaugh. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “I’m Mrs. Hattie Brown,” she said, from behind a screen door worn as soft and pliable as cheesecloth.

  “About the Christian Crusade group allegedly headquartered at number 487 on this road.”

  Her face changed. She came out from behind her screen door and peered up at him. She was tiny, no more than five-one, maybe a hundred pounds. But Cavanaugh recognized the type. She had lived too long, and too hard, to fear much of anything anymore.

  “You gonna bust their ass?”

  He smiled. “I don’t know yet.”

  “You should. They ain’t no good. They hate black folk, Jew folk, Spanish folk, Catholic folk. Calls ’em ‘seeds of Satan’ and says they ain’t even human and got no right to no respect. One of ’em came right into my church and had the gall to stand up durin’ speakin’ and gush out that shit. Most unchristian thing I ever done heard. Right in my church.”

  Cavanaugh took out his notepad. “Go on.”

  “Ain’t no ‘on.’ I stood up and hollered for him to get his ass out of there, and Sister Walters, she joined in. That made some of the men finally move, and the scum left.”

  “Have there been any retaliatory actions?”

  “’Scuse me?”

  “Has that guy, or anybody else from Christian Crusade, tried to get even with you or Sister Walters? Or even threatened to get even?”

  “Nah,” she said scornfully. “They ain’t that kind. Stand up to ’em and they back down. All talk.”