Chuck Hogan

by The Blood Artists (epub)

  "Find them," I said. "The hospital will have records. Leave your cart for me."

  He went away and I proceeded to a standing pan of Pheno disinfectant-green-hued, like a bowl of antifreeze-to immerse my gloved hands in the sterilizing solution between patients.

  Plainville held tightly to its secrets. We could study it in only the most secure laboratory setting, and we could not work with it at all.

  The virus ate through laboratory animals, fetal tissue, Vero cells, and blood products-any living matter placed in front of it.

  Only through due diligence on the part of the bureau, as well as some extraordinary good fortune, had the bug failed to achieve amplification beyond the isolated microbreaks since Plainville.

  As I was shaking out my gloves over the pan, I heard a muffled voice call my name. I was startled, but not unnerved, and looked around expecting to see another hopeful face inside a suit hood. There were no suits near me. I saw then a small, thin arm moving within a plastic tent, in bay number twenty-six. I went there, unzipping the tent and drawing Tenney's instrument cart in behind me.

  Patient Twenty-six was a younger man with a gaunt, collapsing face. I guessed he was in his late twenties, although the disease had aged him significantly. He was mostly bald, with a few patches of wispy silver hair streaming off his pate, as light and thin as spider's thread.

  Overall, even as compared to the woman in twenty-five, Twenty-six's convalescent care had been superlative. Only his sclera, the whites of his eyes, which were a bright firehouse red, indicated any significant illness. He bore no observable sores, save his badly scabbed, lips, which were nearly chewed away, as though he had been gnawing at them throughout his prolonged slumber.

  But this man had been in a catatonic state for at least ten years.

  It was inconceivable that he should know my name. "Do you know me?"

  I said to no response or change of expression. Just a hollow stare.

  The wasting man looked at me across a great distance, as though the center of the hospital bed were quite removed from the sides. I felt no recognition myself. I broke from the man's stare and turned to the chart on his bed rail.

  The screen read "Unoccupied." I checked his thin wrists for an admittance bracelet, not finding one. His left arm was as light as a cardboard tube and I rotated it in search of a needle stick from a previous blood draw. The man did not otherwise move. "What is your name?" I asked. "Pearse," he whispered again, in a garbled voice. He was staring at my chest, and I realized that my name tag was there. I turned and surveyed the outer room through the thick plastic tent, where yellow suits moved about hazily. He could not have read my name tag from that distance, and only barely could have made out my face.

  "Who are you?" I said again, but his eyes had retreated into a faraway, blood-sodden gaze. I gave up and printed out an Unoccupied label, then proceeded to swab the man's elbow with alcohol. I was still a bit rusty, and it took me three attempts to locate a viable vein for a blood sample. I released the tourniquet and watched the plastic barrel slowly fill with blood.

  It happened in an instant. One moment I was finishing off the blood draw; the next, the syringe was falling from my hand, and there was a stinging in the center of my left palm. A shudder or a jerk, that by the laws of atrophy the patient should never have been able to make-and somehow his hand had come up and struck mine just as I was withdrawing the needle from his arm.

  Afterward I stood for some time staring at the man beneath me. He had settled back into the mattress, the blood-filled syringe lying alongside his leg. His face was fixed and phlegmatic, his half-open eyes regarding me as though with a blithe red wisdom. All I kept thinking was He should not have been able to move like that.

  Finally I left the staring patient and broke away from twenty-six.

  I threw aside the curtain and rounded the crowded nurses' station, entering the air lock leading back out to the corridor. Lamps of deep blue light came on inside the chamber, and doors on either side of me bolted automatically. I had forgotten about the ultraviolet light shower. I tried the second door anyway with my right hand, a wasted effort. It was locked fast. I drew my left hand into a tight fist, and it felt inconceivably warm and heavy; I imagined my glove filling with blood. I closed my eyes and stood for 120 seconds as the blue light cooked the viruses on my suit.

  Down the corridor and away from the others I found an examining room with a scrub room inside. I locked the inside door and the light over the sink blinked on, harsh and suddenly blue to my eyes. I turned on the sink faucet. I broke open my warmed suit one-handedly and shrugged off the shoulders and hood, freeing my left arm. There was no blood visible through the gloves. I snapped off the first layer, then the second, and withheld my bare left hand. Still no blood, and no visible breach. I gripped it by the wrist, palm up under the light, and searched for a hole, close enough to see the faint mound of beating pulse in the center of the scoop of my palm. With growing relief, I pressed down on the area with the thumb of my right hand. A single drop of blood squeezed out.

  I shoved my hand under the water. It was cold. I needed it hot.

  Friction was imperative and I rubbed and squeezed at my hand as the water scalded and the sink began to smoke. I forced my hand to bleed.

  I pulled and prodded at my flesh, trying to open up the meat of the wound in order to irrigate it. I found a bottle of soap and pumped some clear gel into my palm. There was a lowgrade antiseptic cleanser on the countertop and I pulled the sink trap and sloshed the green solution into the steel bowl. I thrust my hand into it and expected it to burn, hoped that it would burn. But it did not. I found a scrub brush and scraped at my palm until it was raw.

  I pulled out my hand. I slicked away the excess liquid and again held the dripping, reddened palm to the light. In doing so, I caught the reflection of my face in the steamed mirror and was stunned by its look of terror. I moved closer and examined my staring eyes. Wide and unblinking, a thin orbit of blue circling the dilated black. I knew exactly what was happening. The locus ceruleus, a cluster of nerve cells that is the control center of the brain, responds to stress by releasing hormones that activate the hypothalamus, which in turn triggers the pituitary gland to release adrenocorticotrophic hormones into the bloodstream, which then make their way into the kidneys, which respond by spewing out adrenaline-all of which causes the eyes to dilate, the blood vessels to open wider for increased blood flow, and the heart to pump faster.

  It gets into your palm; you could cut off your hand but it's already in your arm; you could cut off your arm but it's already pumping through your shoulder and circulating down into your heart, flooding into the spleen, the liver, the brain. My own body was facilitating the infective process and revolting against me. I felt a gag deep in my throat as though a hand had reached up from my stomach and pulled. I pitched forward with an awful groan and vomited into the sink.

  I cleared the trap with my right hand and the sink basin drained.

  I straightened, choking, one hand gripping the sink edge, the other flat against the wall beside the mirror, holding me up. But then a cooling sensation spread from my spine outward, a sudden, bracing chill of realization, the muscles of my back softening as I faced myself again in the glass of the mirror. I was well acquainted with the horror stories of doctors who imagined themselves into getting sick, and immediately I regained my breath, coughing up a burst of nervous laughter. That passed, and I was sober once again. I washed my face, blotting the sweat from my brow with a paper towel, then wrapped my bleeding hand in a tight gauze cushion. I looked down at the four gloves lying discarded on the floor like pate, strangled birds, and at once disposed of them in biohazard, pulling on two fresh pairs, gathering my suit up around me from the waist and sealing myself back inside. I cleaned the floor and the sink, replaced the soap bottle and the empty jug of antiseptic cleanser, then unlocked the scrub room door and emerged.

  I returned to the green zone. The second door opened onto the trauma unit, and my
anxiety began again immediately. I needed to see the patient in bay twenty-six. I needed to speak with him, for my own sanity, feeling somehow that he had something to say to me. I found the gaudy curtain pulled aside as I had left it, the tent zipper undone, the Unoccupied sticker peeking out from the bed rail chart.

  The bed was empty. The patient was gone. I felt panic welling up, and whirled around to check the adjoining bays. "Dr. Pearse."

  It was Tenney approaching, carrying a printout. "Have they taken any patients out of here?" I asked him.

  He was startled. "I wouldn't know, Dr. Pearse-- "How long was I gone just now?"

  "I wouldn't know, sir. You sent me out." I noticed two patients laid out on gurneys in front of the air lock and hurried over to them. One was an advanced case inside an oxygen tent, a middle-aged woman, her palsied face locked in agony. A black rubber body bag lay on the other gurney. I seized the zipper, pausing a moment for confidence, then quickly drew it down. The seam opened on the wasted, staring corpse of an elderly black man.

  I backed away. "How many others have you taken out?" I said to the woman who was attending them. "None, sir," she said through her hood.

  "None myself" "Then there were others?"

  "Maybe, Dr. Pearse. A few."

  I returned to twenty-six. I drew the hanging curtain around the bay, closing myself off from the prying eyes of Tenney and the rest, and looked at the shrouded bed. I tore aside the plastic tent opening near the cart The bed linen had been shucked down to the foot of the mattress and I gathered the sheet and blanket in my hands, but my rubber gloves prevented me from feeling any warmth. I shook each out separately, looking for the blood-filled syringe I had dropped there, then pulled up the mattress. I searched beneath the bed and broke apart the plastic biohazard box. I checked the sheet, the blanket, the mattress, the apple green floor for drops of blood. Nothing.

  He had disappeared. I backed away to the curtain, stopping there to regroup.

  The patient had just awoke from long-term catatonia. He would have had little if any manual coordination, and therefore simply could not have bumped my arm with the intention of infecting me. The entire event was beyond reason. The absence of any admittance records was another mystifying piece of evidence. I had seen people go to pieces inside a contact suit before. Maybe I had imagined the entire thing.

  I managed to convince myself of this, even as I knew it was not true.

  I was trusting that the patient in bay twenty-six was just that, a patient, and not an assassin dispatched in the same way a killer T cell is dispatched to an invading force. Only later would the greater irony be revealed: that this assassin had in fact collected two debts that day, one for Africa, and the other, unwittingly, for himself But for now I turned and drew the curtain open again, baring the bay to the rest of the room, telling myself that there was nothing to hide. I crossed the trauma unit back to the air lock with all eyes on me until the bolts clicked again and I was alone, the blue lamps humming brightly and easing the echoes of panic left in my head. Relieved, concerned, mystified: I didn't know what I felt. All I knew was that I was getting away. I stood waiting with my head hung low in the sterile chamber between death and life.

  The rest is shameful but I shall tell it anyway.

  I returned to Atlanta that evening, traveling home from the airport by taxi. I owned a house in Sandy Springs, just north of the city, a stately five-bedroom brick colonial set upon an incline, overlooking a labyrinthine community of variations upon the same -brick colonial. I disarmed the alarm and went upstairs without switching on any of the lights, sitting down at the foot of my bed, relieved and happy to be finally home. Outside the window, trees shifted against the blue-black sky.

  I had been among the first to buy into the planned community, named Diver Bridge, a family subdivision of swinitning pools and tennis courts, two managed lakes, a shopping center, a Montessori preschool, and twenty-four-hour gated security. The glossy brochure had reminded me of a time and place I was eager to get back to, my parents' seaside retreat in Amagansett and the Long Island summers of my youth, a world away from the fortress of Manhattan. I had bought the house as something to grow into, but three years later remained the only bachelor in a gated neighborhood of families. I had played exactly one set of tennis on the Diver Bridge courts, on a bright Saturday morning two years earlier, and could only recall the pock pock of the soft yellow balls being volleyed on the surrounding courts, back and forth.

  The bureau was my true home.

  I stood tiredly and went to the bathroom to change the bandage on my throbbing palm, casually, so as to preclude any examination.

  Afterward I snapped off the light and stood in the second floor hallway, in the silence and the darkness of the half-empty house.

  I forced myself to cook dinner, then sat down to face it. My chagrin and embarrassment at my actions at'Orangeburg were peaking.

  The entire incident now seemed a blur. I knew that the risk of infection from a needle stick exposure was statistically less than two tenths of one percent.

  My food was still untouched when I stood again and brought the dishes to the sink. I returned to snuff the candle I had lit, and left my sunken thumbprint in the soft white scoop of wax. That night I slept poorly, thrashing beneath the sheets, dreaming repetitively of soft yellow tennis balls being endlessly volleyed.

  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

  Clifton Road began as a leftward fork at Dusty's BBQ restaurant.

  It was a country road like any other outside the city limits of Atlanta, winding lazily and buffeted with leafy trees and founded upon a clay dirt tinged red as though mixed with rust or Tabasco or old blood. Emory University climbs out of the roadside like a city growing out of sand, a sprawling southern school of old homes and towering white stone buildings. It was the university's donation of fifteen acres in the early 1940s for the establishment of a government agency to battle malaria that planted the seed of what was now the Bureau for Disease Control.

  The main BDC campus sloped down from the roadside halfway along Clifton like a fortress founded upon one square block. Old Building One, the brick-and-mortar former entrance, was dwarfed on the right by the bureau's flagship, Building Sixteen, formed of smooth concrete and mirrored glass, its six-story face broadly curved and sky-reflecting.

  A jumble of smaller, ill-fitting buildings led down to the rear perimeter fence and its posted warnings U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY, NO TRESPASSING abutting the pristine university playing fields and exhausted southern houses of Emory's fraternity row.

  Sixteen was the main administrative building of the BDC. Its twenty-first-century face, the horizontal bands of sky-reflecting windows familiar to news viewers, stood out along winding rural Clifton Road like a temple materializing in a field of wheat. Just across the street from Sixteen was the small DeKalb County Firehouse, which was how I always thought of us at the bureau, as firefighters, responding to alarms from around the world and dousing incipient threats.

  The BDC had for years been the largest federal agency headquartered outside greater Washington, D.C and Building Sixteen was its executive seat. Its laboratories were conference rooms, its remedies financial and political. Attaches from other international disease-fighting organizations such as Parton Down, the Pasteur Institute, the Tropeninstitut in Germany, and the University of Anvers in Belgium, convened there regularly.

  The office of the director was the largest in the building, a corner suite, second-floor rear, with a sweeping view across miles of treetops-a lazy current of green leaves in summertime-to the downtown Atlanta skyline. The push of a button activated vertical blinds, and a shadow, like a theater curtain rising, crawled across the room.

  It was from there that I oversaw the Orangeburg investigation.

  Every scrap of information generated on-site was routed through the notebook tablet on my desk, from individual patient case histories and specific treatments prescribed, to hospital ventilation contractor's records and regional d
isease statistics going back twenty years. All my regular duties were postponed as I consumed each scrap of information, hungrily, drawn in by the devastation of the outbreak as well as its peculiarities. Such as: An asterisk from a footnoted chart on page seventeen of a poorly written thirty-page report, noting that four of the early-stage afflicted catatonics were on different treatment protocols from the rest. Each had been receiving five hundred milliliters every eight hours of one of three different types of blood sera, code-named, and therefore still in the research stage, MILKMAID, BLOSSOM, and LANCET, with MILKMAID being administered to two patients simultaneously. The names were strange but meant nothing to me, and I posted inquiries on the codes and ran an open search of the BDC net, yielding no answers. None of the sera was registered with the Laboratory Branch, and therefore none had been submitted to or approved by the FDA. This was irregular. I began with Special Pathogens and traced the code names to its Epidemic Intelligence Service under development by a "Dr. Christian," the same pseudonym we had used in the medical journal article detailing the attributes of Peter's immune system nearly a decade ago. Whether he had anticipated my investigation and was flaunting his disregard for procedure, or simply thought I would not bother to pursue the matter, I took his derisive alias for an-insult. The case scientist for these irregular blood serum projects was none other than Peter Maryk.

  I punched up Bobby Chiles's office down the hall. Bobby was that rare breed of public servant, the brilliant bureaucrat. He had come into the BDC relatively late in his medical career following a brief period of specialization in the family practice of podiatry. He loved medicine and loved science, but was better suited to administration than administering. Bobby was a trusted confidant. "The Special Pathogens budget," I said. "Did you ever break through those numbers?"

  He shrugged a shrug that was a nonanswer. "They balanced."

  I did not like what Special Path had become. It was a clandestine service operating within and yet apart from the bureau, accountable to no one except Peter Maryk. Peter did A the hiring and firing and captained every investigation himself, and the loyalty of his people, such as Freeley, was fierce. I had allowed him too much free rein.