by Tosca Lee
I glance at it, uncomprehending.
“You have to give this to Ken,” she says, laying her hands on it. “He’s a doctor, right? I remember that he was. That he studied some kind of—”
“Jackie, you’re not making sense! Why didn’t you bring Truly with you?”
“Because I’m sick!” she cries.
I stare at her. Only then do I note the slump of her thin shoulders, the faint sheen across her forehead.
No.
“I—I’ll get you something,” I hear myself say. “There’s a bin of medicine in the house . . .”
“Wynter,” she says gently, “it’s not going to help. I know the symptoms. What’s happening. I saw it at the center before we shut down last week.”
And Truly?
“Is anyone else—”
“No. I don’t think so. I spent the last four days in Penitence just to be certain I didn’t infect anyone,” she murmurs, her gaze roaming the small apartment in the glow of my flashlight. I reach for the nearest chair but she wards me off, pulls it out herself, and sinks into it.
“Do you have a mask?” she says.
I nod, numbly.
“You should put it on.”
I move to the bed where I’ve laid out my coat, fumble in the pocket for the mask and gloves I wore last time I left the house, over a week ago. Loop the mask over my ears. Struggle with the gloves. My hands are shaking.
Jackie’s saying something about Magnus and Des Moines. But I don’t care about Des Moines, and the last person I want to hear about is Magnus. My sister is sick.
Julie and Lauren will have to go without us. I’ll take care of Jackie here.
And Truly . . .
Jackie’s right. She’s safe, for now.
“Wynter!”
I glance up.
“Listen to me!” she says sharply. Her hands fly to her head as though it hurts. “There are things I have to tell you. Things it’s hard enough already for me to keep straight. Things I worry I’m imagining . . . or that I wish I was.”
I move to the table, set the flashlight down on it, the beam pointed toward the ceiling. “Okay,” I say softly, sliding into the seat across from hers. “I’m listening.”
And I will, for the rest of her life.
She takes a slow breath and begins again. “Two months ago Magnus took me with him to Des Moines . . . remember?”
“I remember.” How could I not?
“Magnus was meeting with someone. I thought it was just another seed acquisition—some ancient kumquat or something . . .” She gestures vaguely. “He’d been short-fused, so tense the months before that. I attributed it to his lack of investors. He didn’t talk to me about the company often, but when he did, he was angry and vindictive, saying that he looked forward to the day that everyone who had shunned him would be wasting in Hell.
“A few weeks before we left, he abruptly changed. He seemed lighter. Excited. I’d seen him that way before, when he’d come and go a lot from town. I used to think he might be seeing someone there, though the one time I dared ask him about it, he called me crazy and asked how I could question him, the Mouthpiece of God, and whether I really believed. I wondered how I could, too. And if I was—crazy.”
“You weren’t,” I say, my gaze falling on the metal carrier in front of her. “He did the same thing to Kestral.”
She looks at me strangely but goes on. “Which is why, when you came to me, told me what was happening . . . I couldn’t accept it. It would have meant all of it was a lie—everything we believed. It was easier to think I was crazy and that you were, too . . . I’m so sorry, Wynter.”
“Jackie, don’t,” I say softly. “Don’t apologize. I know.”
“And when I think of Mom . . .” She lifts her hand to her mask.
I close my eyes. The thought of Mom dying the way she did, believing she was doing the right thing, has haunted me since my first crisis of faith—along with the question of whether she’d still be alive if we’d been anywhere else.
“Des Moines,” Jackie says, straightening.
I nod.
“When Magnus showed up at the counseling center to surprise me with the trip to Des Moines, I just knew it was about you. Some way to sweeten me up and bring me around. But then he didn’t even bring you up until the trip home. All he could talk about was some new acquisition. Not another seed, like I’d assumed, but some strain of three-million-year-old bacteria and how he’d soon be able to do a deal to get it.”
“Bacteria?” New Earth didn’t deal in bacteria. Or believe the earth was even that old.
“Some lunatic Russian scientist found it frozen in Siberia and injected himself with it. Claims he hasn’t had the flu since. I’d heard Magnus mention reading an article about it months before—about how it’s melting into the water from the permafrost and the people nearby supposedly live longer. Now it was all he could talk about.”
She coughs, and an instant later, she’s doubled over, racked by a fit. I get up but she wards me off with an outstretched hand, so I go to the kitchenette and grab a bottle of water from the darkened fridge, unscrew the top, and hold it toward her. She takes it and lifts the mask just enough to sip off the top.
Her voice rasps as she continues, “He left me alone for a while that first night, and I thought he was meeting with his broker or whoever it was. When he came back, he smelled like perfume.”
I exhale a harsh breath. “What’d you say?”
“What could I? I asked how his meeting went, and he told me that the next night he’d be busy up until time to go and that he needed me to pick a friend of his up at the bus station. But that night, I finally opened my eyes and began to see. And I began to see everything in a whole new light. Including all the things that didn’t add up about him.”
The expression on her face is weathered. But there’s steel in her voice.
“The next night—the night we came back so late—Magnus loaded our bags and I left at nine o’clock and drove to the bus station. After about twenty minutes, a man came out to the car, told me to pop the trunk, and put his bag in. And then he got in and made me drive to a nearby hotel. It was terrible, being in the car with that man. He reeked of smoke and kept licking his lips. He was jittery and nervous. I didn’t know what would happen when we got there, if he’d try to get me to go inside or what Magnus had said about me.”
Something she’s just said . . .
“Jittery how? Like a drug addict?”
She cocks her head. “A little like that, yes. He reminded me of some of the people who come to the center.”
“Jackie,” I say quietly. “Was his name Blaine?”
Blaine, whom I had overheard on the phone with Magnus, his former business partner. He’d wanted to sell him something.
She shakes her head. “I never knew his name.”
“Where did he come from? Where had the bus come in from?”
She frowns. “Kansas City, I think.”
It had to be him.
“What happened?”
“The minute we got there, he jumped out of the car, got his bag from the trunk, and left. That was it. I drove back to the restaurant where Magnus had his last meeting and we came home. Except one of the bags we returned with was different. Also, the bag I left with had been filled with money. I know, because I was nervous about picking up a strange man and pulled over on the way to get the pepper spray I take with me to the center out of my backpack. Which I thought was packed in that bag.”
“Why didn’t he send Enzo?” I say angrily. For Magnus to have used Jaclyn for his shady deals . . . Why? But I knew why. She was one of the few Select who knew how to drive. And whereas Enzo was publicly associated with Magnus, Jackie was unknown to anyone but those who visited the counseling center.
“He doesn’t trust him. Not like me,” she says bitterly. “I’ve turned against my own family for him. I’m sorry, Wynter! I did the only thing I could for you!”
Something within me shatters at the sound
of her voice. My arms ache to hold her. My fingers to close around hers.
But right now new alarm is sending frost down my spine.
“Jackie, how did you get here?” I say slowly, glancing at the carrier on the table.
“I drove,” she says, seeming baffled by the question. “I wasn’t sure if I was followed, so I parked a block away.”
“No,” I say more gently. “I mean how did you get out?”
She shakes her head as though to clear it. “Sorry. This afternoon I was working in the office when Magnus got a call. He got up and left right away. I didn’t think much of it until he came back a little while later and told me he needed me to drive some supplies to the center and stay there until someone came to get them. That if I ran or the supplies disappeared—if I failed him in any way . . . he’d kill me.”
“He said that?”
“I passed two black cars I’ve never seen before on my way to the highway. I don’t know if they were police, but they were headed toward the Enclave. Where my daughter is. A daughter I will never see again in this life.” A tear slips down her cheek.
“Something in me snapped. I pulled over on the outskirts of Ames, opened the back of the van. It was filled full of boxes of sermons and two bins of clothing. That”—she glances at the carrier—“was inside one of them, buried beneath some coats. In the same bag as before.”
“This is what you picked up in Des Moines.”
“Yes. And what he planned to trade for the crazy Russian bacteria.”
What could possibly be valuable enough to buy Magnus a fountain of youth?
I stand up, slide the carrier toward me, stare at it for a long instant.
And then abruptly pull it open.
Grabbing the flashlight, I shine it down into the refrigerated case on a set of plastic containers with screw-on lids. A case of glass microscope slides. A plastic bag of what looks like a chunk of dirt. All labeled Porcine and muscle, bone, or brain. All marked Fairbanks, Alaska, and dated last June with an abbreviation I don’t recognize.
“What is all this?” I murmur.
“Tissue samples. Taken from pigs.”
“Okay, but why?” I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this.
She shakes her head. “I don’t know but I’m sure of two things: they’re valuable, and they’re stolen.”
A large envelope, folded in half, has been shoved in along the side. I fish it out, pinch the clasp together at the top, and pull it open. After peering inside, I upend it. A dual-end flash drive drops into my gloved palm.
“What’s that?” Jackie says.
“Thumb drive,” I murmur. Lauren has one like it that she downloads pirated Game of Thrones episodes onto for a friend who isn’t allowed to watch it. I search for my phone, find it on the counter, and connect the drive.
It’s full of files: A blank application form for a summer fellowship. A document with a few dates from June and the names “Walter,” “Petunia,” “Jilly (sow—10),” “Romeo.” A contact for someone in Alaska. Several saved web pages. One of them is an obituary—for the same name as the contact. There’s two more, for two other men. The home page of some gourmet pork supplier. A roster of vendors offering samples at an annual Baconfest somewhere in Washington.
The last item is a news story about the Bellevue 13.
The hair rises on my nape.
I scroll back and through them once more in chronological order, beginning in June with the pigs. Ending with the Bellevue 13.
“You’re right,” I say. “We need Ken.”
I toggle to my contacts. Scroll to Ken’s phone number. He’s sleeping, I’m sure; it’s after midnight in Idaho. I dial anyway.
It rings and rings, and it occurs to me that maybe the call won’t go through. I don’t know if the towers work without power.
He picks up on the fifth ring, voice groggy. “Wynter?” I hear him shift in his bed. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah. Julie and Lauren are sleeping—”
“What?” he says, far more alert. “Why aren’t you on the road? I told you to leave!”
“We will. Soon.”
“No. You have to go now!”
“Ken, Jaclyn’s here.”
“Who?”
“Jackie. My sister.”
For a minute I think the call’s cut out. And then: “Ah, yes. You really need to go.”
“We will. But Jackie brought something to give you that I think may be important.”
“That’s sweet of her—”
“No, not for you. Magnus acquired some tissue samples that I think you need to take with you to the CDC.”
“Samples? What do you mean?”
“Ken . . . is it possible the first Bellevue patient could have gotten the disease from eating bacon?”
He gives a slight laugh. “Wynter . . . no. Are you all right?”
“So the catching crazy couldn’t have come from eating pork.”
“No. That’d be a prion disease. Like mad cow. This rapid-onset dementia is far too fast. Though—” He paused, then said again, “No.”
“Though what?”
“Well, prions can’t be destroyed by normal sterilization techniques. I guess, in theory, if one of the Bellevue 13 had a prion . . . All thirteen had medical procedures. It’s already been established that they shared the same OR.” I can practically hear him frowning. “There’s samples, you said? Are they labeled?”
“Yes.” I move to the carrier with the flashlight.
“Read them to me.”
I do, lifting the containers and slides out one at a time, the baggie with the chunk of dirty flesh last of all.
“Porcine (boar #2) tissue and soil, Fairbanks, AK, PrP.” I turn the baggie in the beam of light. “This one looks like it was dug up or something.”
He’s silent for a moment.
“It says ‘PrP.’ You’re sure.”
“I’m looking at it right now.”
“Where’d you say these came from?”
“Magnus got them from some under-the-table deal but there’s an application form on a flash drive that says ‘UC Davis,’ if that means anything to you.” I glance at Jackie, but she’s staring off toward the window.
“Magnus . . . ?”
I close my eyes, squeeze them shut. Say, very calmly, “The leader of New Earth. The . . . cult I came from. He’s been acquiring ancient seeds for years. But I don’t know why he’d have this.”
When I open my eyes I’m startled to find Jaclyn’s staring right at me, her expression stark.
What? I mouth. She doesn’t respond. Doesn’t seem to really see me at all.
I can practically hear Ken rubbing his forehead. “Yeah. No. They ruled out prion disease weeks ago.”
“With tests?”
“The only reliable way to test for it is to study the brain after death.”
I grab one of the slides labeled Porcine (sow) brain, Fairbanks, AK, PrP.
“Ken, I think you need to see this.”
“Even then, it’d have to be a prion we’ve never seen before to misfold that rapidly—”
“There’s notes,” I say swiftly. “There’s one about a Romeo—I assume that’s a pig—digging up a caribou carcass from the permafrost. What if it is something no one’s seen because it’s been frozen?”
He gives a tired sigh. “I mean, sure. Anything’s possible in theory. But it still wouldn’t explain how it’s spreading—especially among populations that don’t eat pork. I know for a fact there are Orthodox Jews, Muslims, and vegetarians with the disease. Which means you and Jackie are equally susceptible. Which is why you need to do what I said and leave town tonight!”
“Ken, Magnus paid a lot of money for these. He planned to trade them to some Russians for some three-million-year-old bacteria—”
I stop. Because now I am starting to sound crazy. I might as well be talking about magic beans.
The silence fills with soft sibilance. It comes from across the ro
om where Jackie’s gazing out the window. Her lips move in the darkness. She’s talking to herself.
“When are you leaving for Atlanta?” I say. “I’ll meet you.”
“No,” Ken says. “That won’t work.”
“I’ll make it work! I’ll leave now. You can—”
“Wynter—absolutely not. Where’s Julie? Get her on the phone.”
I turn away from the table. “Ken, I’ll slash the RV’s tires, I swear to God I will. None of us is going anywhere until you promise to meet me!”
“I can’t meet you!”
“Why?” I demand.
“Because the team’s already back in Atlanta!”
I blink in the darkness. “But . . . you said you’re still in Idaho.”
“They left yesterday morning. They’re already there. I . . . I had to stay behind.” He’s quiet a minute. “Do me a favor—don’t tell Julie. Not yet.”
I grab a fistful of my hair, squeeze shut my eyes.
I’ve already lost my mother. I can’t lose my sister, too. I need her. And the world needs Ken. If there’s even a remote chance the contents of this case can help them . . .
Magnus’s voice returns to me with a vengeance.
The world cannot be saved!
I hear myself say, “Then I’ll go to Atlanta.”
“Wynter. The place is on lockdown. Surrounded by National Guard. After the attack on the—the . . .” He falters, searching for a word, “the lights . . . no one’s getting in or out without high-level clearance.”
“But if you call them—”
“Unless you’re with the military or World Health Organization it won’t matter! Especially with stolen samples. You’ll be taken into custody as a suspected bioterrorist before you get through to anyone who’ll hear you. And that’s if you even make it through the city alive. They’re already looting here—and this is Boise.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I cry.
Ken sighs. “I can try to call UNMC in Omaha, though I won’t be able to get through to anyone until morning. For now, you and Jozlyn go with Julie like I said. Okay? I’ll be in touch when I can.”
I don’t bother to correct him about Jaclyn’s name. Wonder if he’ll remember that I mentioned her at all in a day or two.
He clicks off.