Something about this apparition differed from the others, in that something about it was true. The man moved about the room, preternaturally well, dressed in street clothes now and a colorful, brimless cap, his shirt and pants hanging formlessly off his slim hips.
He mumbled to himself as he paced, chewing his lips, thinking.
Deciding something.
He crossed to the bed, and I heard the plastic sheeting crumpling underfoot. I had forgotten about the sheeting, and the sudden memory of it, an icy splash of reality among the humidity of my dreams, commanded my attention. He leaned over me-his face was cheekless almost to the sinewy muscles beneath, eyes wet and large and boiling red-and I realized I was terrified. He looked me up and down with a flat, sluggish grin, like a deranged artist amused by the incoherence of his own incoherent work. "Mine now," he told me. "You are mine."
He was right. Then the room was empty again, and I was waiting for Jacqueline Moutouari. The bed was floating: I was floating.
Blackness shone through the skylight as I burned.
The horse head knocker clanked as the front door was opened downstairs.
Footsteps wandered somewhere on the first floor, and I imagined she was coming to me now, to take my hand and lead me to the others. The room was beginning to drift again, but I held on, I held on.
A creak on the stairs: I knew the exact spot: fifth step, right side: and the creak again as the foot was lifted. The doorway slid away along the wall, circling the room, everything starting to spin and collapse.
The figure rose onto the dark landing outside my door. There was no disappointment on my part, no feelings either way; acceptance was all.
His shadow filled the bedroom doorway, and I saw the zinc shock of hair under the skylight and recalled how in school behind his back they used to call him "Pearse's Lab Rat." Tight pale gloves glowed on his oversized hands. He was like a thing I had created, an ill-considered experiment gone awry and unleashed upon an unsuspecting, unprepared world, now returned to exact revenge upon its master. But like those of the patient from bay twenty-six, Peter Maryk's actions also seemed true, not what I might have fancied or hoped for or feared, but -exactly what I might have expected had he actually walked into the room. There was nothing at all like compassion in the severity of his shadowed face, the heat of his bright, gray eyes, the contemptuous slant of his lips. Only absolute, unforgiving disgust. "You're sick," he said.
Incubation
Maryk
Maryk stood inside the silvered doorway. He looked at the wasting figure of Stephen Pearse lying on the child's mattress.
The odor of decay was thick and distinct. He backed out of the doorway into the shadows of the landing. The shock of the moment left him as quickly as it had come. He looked again at Stephen Pearse lying on his side with his right arm stuck off the bed. Stephen's eyes were sunken and crimson and staring.
Maryk returned downstairs. The house was like a museum with each room a closed exhibit. He walked to a glass-walled sitting room off the kitchen in the rear and rooted himself in the memory of his only previous visit. Lace curtains had been sashed along the walls and leather bindings had lined the low bookshelves under the windows. A mayonnaise jar full of buffalo nickels had sat upon the fall front of the cherry wood desk.
Every piece of furniture that remained in the house was shrouded.
Maryk set his tablet on an upright Steinway covered in thin plastic sheeting. His black bag balanced on the keyboard and pressed out a dull chord that echoed throughout the cloistered first floor. Outside the windows the sloping backyard was silver and the moon was sprayed over the wrinkling ocean.
He opened his tablet and dialed Bobby Chiles. The deputy director's haggard face appeared in a window on the screen. "Found him," Maryk said.
Bobby clapped his hands softly once and sat back in his chair.
His shirt collar was twisted open anxiously. "Where is he?" he said.
"He's sick."
"Sick? What do you mean?"
"Who else is there with you?"
"I'm alone. Stephen is sick with what?"
"Plainville."
Bobby's eyes held fast to the screen as the rest of his face struggled.
"You need to make a decision," Maryk said.
--Get him to a hospital."
"Not here. The New York press. Let me bring him back to Atlanta."
"Plainville? But how?"
"I am the only one who can get near him without a full suit now."
Bobby's hands were up at his face. Maryk said, "Listen. We need to act fast. I need all resources placed at my disposal. No restrictions, and no questions asked."
"But if it's Plainville, what can you-" "I can treat him," Maryk said simply.
Bobby was staring beyond his screen and well beyond Maryk. Maryk told him what he would need and then ended the connection.
He left his tablet glowing atop the piano and took his black bag back upstairs. Stephen lay on the boy-sized bed as before. The things in the bedroom were preserved under plastic except for the bed and a short blond wood dresser with the trophies on it. A cold breath of rot reached Maryk and he looked across at an open,and unscreened window. A car passed the house. A city of twenty-five million people waited at the other end of the highway. Maryk wondered if the self-appointed "Health Ambassador to the World" could have already ignited a lethal chain of transmission in the most populated city in North America.
Maryk pulled on a second pair of gloves and tore off strips of adhesive tape to seal his cuffs above his wrists. He dragged the plastic sheeting away from the bed with the toe of his shoe and set to work under the argent glow raining through the skylight above.
Breath swirled out of Stephen's staring face like smoke under the door of a burning house. His eyes were wide and rheumy with blood and gazed at the doorway and the floor before it with an expression of expired longing. Maryk produced a penlight from his bag. Stephen's pupils reacted slowly to the beam like lazy black moons eclipsing blue suns.
They were soft and fat. Capillaries had burst behind each lens and blood was flooding the clear vitreous jelly and seeping into the sclera and weeping in dry smudges out of the lacrimal ducts onto the pinches of Stephen's nose. Dots of red and purple petechiae bloomed in a sallow mask surrounding his eyes.
Maryk stood and eased Stephen back onto the mattress with both hands.
Stephen's throat gurgled without issue. The mattress was fouled with vomit and excrement and the action of moving Stephen stiffed the stench. His bloody stare settled upon the ceiling. He was semiconscious and perhaps aware of Maryk's presence and perhaps even able to see. Maryk reached over with his gloved thumb and middle finger and shut Stephen's eyelids.
Mucus and slime ran down Stephen's upper lip and chin and Maryk collected some in a vial. He unlaced and discarded Stephen's shoe-boots and socks. With a pair of short-bladed bandage scissors he cut along each soiled pant leg and shirtsleeve and up along the buttons of the shirt placket. The heated fabric peeled back like the outer folds of a thing well cooked. Stephen's flesh had the lucent softness of wax. There were visible lesions. Folds of loose skin were beginning to sag off his waist and neck as though he were melting.
Maryk sampled his blood. The puncture wound bled sluggishly and was slow to clot. With tweezers he collected representative hair samples and deposited them in individual glassine envelopes. The follicles pulled easily from Stephen's flesh like candles from a cake.
Lastly he brought out a metal thermos. There was a whisper of release as he unscrewed the cap and tipped the glass ampule of golden serum labeled MILKMAID into his gloved left fist. He drew the contents into a clean hypodermic even as he knew it was too late for the serum to be 100 percent effective. MILKMAID's success depended upon its administration within the first hours of infection. Maryk boosted the serum into Stephen's external jugular. It was a quick trip from there to his heart.
Maryk stripped off Stephen's gloves and noticed tape marks on Stephen's
bare left hand. He saw a bean-sized bruise in the center of the palm and a tiny dot breach in the center of that.
Maryk unrolled a biohazard pack from inside his bag. He disposed of his contaminated implements and unwound the tape from his forearms and disposed of his outer gloves. He left the orange plastic bag unsealed.
in the center of the floor.
He saw Stephen's tablet set upon a child's writing desk. Maryk opened the screen and accessed Hailing/Receiving and found that the digital pulse modern had been disabled. Then he noticed a data entry in the master file list named "Investigation.Maryk." He opened it and paged through the contents. He stopped when he came to the code names, MILKMAID, BLOSSOM, and LANCET. With a keen frown he closed all applications and collapsed the screen.
A team of four Special Pathogens investigators assigned to Batavia, New York, on an E. coll 0157:H7 outbreak were the first to arrive. Maryk illuminated the open bedroom window with a flashlight and ordered immediate aggressive night spraying. Every potential insect vector in the area had to be exterminated before dawn.
The agents regarded Director Pearse's wasting body lying unconscious in a child's bed before filing out.
FEMA Biohazard Containment arrived from Atlanta with more Special Path investigators and Stephen was lifted off the bed and sealed inside a Kurt isolation pod. A Kurt pod was a maintained atmosphere constructed of heavy plastic insulant with two round glove ports on each long side.
It was roughly the size and shape of a large box coffin.
Maryk bagged and secured Stephen's tablet himself. He declared a Biohazard 4 and FFMA BioCon initiated a program of full containment ablution.
Blue nylon was stretched over plastic ribbing outside the front door.
One of the BioCon agents was inspecting the car parked in the driveway as Maryk exited. Lights were snapping on in the second-floor windows of surrounding houses and across the street a man marched halfway down his front walk in a red silk bathrobe before seeing the BDC insignia on the trucks and hastily turning back.
Stephen's pod was loaded into a BioCon ambulance and the convoy wound quietly through the slumbering seaside town. A BDC transport jet was waiting for them at the Fast Hampton airport. Maryk contacted Bobby Chiles again from the air and asked about the old B4 lab inside the basement of BDC Building Seven. A state-of the-art replacement B4 had just come on-line inside the new Bioresearch Building. B4 was a biocontainment research laboratory for safe human manipulation of the most hostile biological agents. "It's dark," Bobby said. "We bombed the place clean after the move to Nineteen."
"Refit all the fixtures and load in medical and lab research equipment.
I need it prepped for surgery as well. You'll have to move fast."
"Containment scrubbed B4 dry to the paint, Peter. With all the bugs we harvested in there over the years, it took them four full days to achieve zero habitat. We're due to turn the space over to Pharmacology."
"They'll wait. I need a workspace. Anticipate everything from PCR typing to glassware needs to full barrier autopsy: Stephen's breeding Plainville now; you don't want samples being shuttled all over the complex. And choose carefully.
The equipment has to be small enough to fit in through the air locks, and whatever gets in there won't be coming out again clean."
"But-134's not meant to hold humans."
"Next, Geist in Engineering.
"He's the only one there cleared for Plainville. I posted him separately, but he won't cooperate unless it comes from you, I need him to brew up something for Stephen. Tell him it is of the highest priority. I'll also need a nurse with minimum fifty hours full-barrier experience and a strong constitution. We're avoiding Hartsfield International Airport for obvious reasons, so have a medical helicopter ready for transport at DeKalb Peachtree."
"Peter. What do I tell people?"
"Whatever you want, just so long as it's not the truth. I don't want to see anyone when we land on the roof of Building Seven.
When we go down through the corridors to B4: no one standing in doorways, no teary spectators. No displays, I don't want to see anyone inside the lab except a security detail, two of my people to help load Stephen inside, and the nurse. And one last thing."
Bobby was scribbling frantically. "Yes?"
"Once these orders are issued, you are to surrender to Quarantine Services. I want every visitor to Building Sixteen since Stephen got back from Orangeburg traced and shuttered up. You're all going to have to sit out at least seventy-two hours."
Bobby nodded without protest. He may even have seen this coming.
Maryk signed off and sat back against the wide hull. He watched Stephen's gaunt body rocking with the motion of the plane inside the shimmying plastic walls of the pod. Maryk called the pilot and instructed him to remain twenty miles out to sea during the trip down the eastern coast. Stephen Pearse was a biological time bomb. The microbial spread from a plane crash on land would wipe out every organic form of life in North America within a few days' time.
Maryk never took an indeliberate, step. He collapsed his tablet and closed his eyes and performed a quick selfdiagnosis. No cascade.
Not yet.
Admittance into a B4 laboratory is an exercise in biological humility.
It is a passage from the microscopic carnage of the everyday human environment into a vessel of absolute atmospheric control.
Maryk jacked in his tablet and keyed in his code and the steel latch of the first steel door gave way under his hand. The first room was quiet and small inside with colored pipes running overhead. Air moving into B4 was purged through high-efficiency particulate air filters and exposure to ultraviolet light and high heat sources. Each successive room was negatively pressured so that air flowed into the lab and preserved containment.
Maryk glanced at the computer screens monitoring the unit. All indications were green. He moved past two small windows to a facing oval door and the door opened inward with a breathy shush.
He changed into a dull green surgical scrub suit and cap and white cotton socks at the lockers. The third room was small and blue and humming with virus-killing ultraviolet light. The piped ceiling was low and the deep indigo light made Maryk's white hair glow.
Bright blue biological space suits hung from a steel rack inside the fourth room. Maryk bypassed them for a white metal cabinet and pulled on a simple gauze face mask and a pair of goggles. He changed gloves and taped them sealed as the sound of the rushing air grew louder.
The last room was a chemical shower stall illuminated by one dim ultraviolet bulb. Steel spray nozzles nosed out from the walls and a steel grate covered the floor basin. Biohazard warnings and safety checklists glowed on the last door. Laboratory suits were mandatory for admittance. Maryk wore only surgical scrubs, gloves, light face gear, and cotton socks. He threw the latch and stepped over the threshold into airtight B4.
The lab room was a wide gray rectangle. A central work table of sealed glass cabinets had been removed to make room for Stephen's gurney. He was laid out flat and unmoving with IV feeds running to both arms and an oxygen mask over his drawn face.
The nurse stood inside a blue lab suit between a tray of instruments and the monitors near Stephen's head. Her lab suit was hooked to a lime green air coil hanging from tracks that ran along the ceiling, Biological space suits were artificially ventilated for comfort during long stretches in B4.
Her eyes widened inside her hood when she saw Maryk. He had avoided B4 since his first year of training due to his claustrophobia.
At that time he had been made to wear a full suit. For decades no human being had freely breathed the air he breathed now. Formaldehyde and bleach tinctured the enclosed atmosphere. Maryk did not smell Stephen yet.
He stepped into a pair of yellow rubber boots inside the doorway.
He went past a walk-in freezer around the far left corner to check on the connecting animal room and saw that the monkey cages had all been removed. Biohazard Containment had caulked and ga
bbed epoxy over the screw holes and scrubbed much of the paint clean off the walls. BioCon was reliably meticulous in its work. The shelves and the wide floor space between were jammed with lab machines and equipment rolled in on movers' casters. In one corner lay the discarded Kurt pod.
Maryk performed the first and most obvious procedure on the long counter between the freezer and the door. It was a standard presumptive PCR test confirming the presence of the Plainville virus in Stephen Pearse's blood.
Maryk returned to the gurney and faced the nurse across Stephen.
Her face within the bowl of her suit hood was small and serious. She pointed out a stainless steel rack. "Mistake," she said. Words were at a premium inside her howling suit. "They sent down your blood instead of Director Pearse's." All BDC personnel submitted blood and other bodily fluids to be banked for research. On the rack near Maryk hung chilled plastic packs of blood labeled MARYK. "There is no mistake," he said and set about his work.
The biological process of Plainville was a marvel to behold. The virus infiltrated the body's immune system by flipping certain protective T cells against the body's own armed forces. It hijacked the cells' reproductive systems and forced them to breed hundreds of thousands of Plainville viruses. This torrent of new viruses overloaded the immune system and eventually triggered an autoimmune response whereby T cells sent to root out invaders went haywire and turned their attack upon healthy organs. The body's frenzied defensive reaction to Plainville caused the most symptomatic destruction.
Maryk worked to improve Stephen's vital functions before going after the disease itself. He put Stephen under and excised kernel-sized vascular growths and two grossly inflamed lymph nodes and deposited them into a steel pan. He pared samples for biopsy. He opened Stephen's abdomen and the tumors he found were already deeply invasive and metastatic. He went after the most conspicuous masses and scraped away as much as a thimbleful at a time. The largest gripped Stephen's pancreas like a baby's fist. His liver was the color of tapioca pudding and his spleen was inflamed and clogged with curdled blood.
Chuck Hogan Page 10