Maryk unbuckled his black bag. "Wait with her," he directed.
He started into the alley alone. He passed the door to the coffeehouse and pulled a small syringe from his bag as he rounded the short curve.
The cul-de-sac ended at three high brick walls. A security light was trained down upon the buckled tar. Dumpsters and cracked pallets and flattened cardboard boxes lay in the dull shadows along the slowly weeping walls.
Maryk moved to the center of the light. There was a faint odor of decay distinct from mere waste or spoiled food. The scent was animal.
It smelled as though something had crawled in there to die.
A manhole cover shifted as Maryk stepped over it. The clink reported loudly off the high walls.
Maryk got down on his knees on the wet tar. He worked a gloved finger inside the hole in the iron disk and tugged. It did not budge.
A grunting second effort raised the disk just enough so that he could grip the cover and drag it up and over the lip of the manhole.
It was black space inside and he could just make out an iron ladder leading down. There were scuffs on the top few rusted rungs where shoe bottoms had stepped. Maryk left his bag next to the hole and started down the ladder with the syringe. He had no flashlight.
The clank of the rungs echoed as he descended into darkness. He dropped the last few feet to the bottom with a quiet splash.
The echo told him there were widening tunnels on either side.
Maryk listened to the dripping water without taking a step in either direction. He felt the sensation of being watched but then decided he could not entirely trust his senses. His claustrophobia was already narrowing the dim circle of light above him.
He pulled himself one-handedly back up the rusted ladder and out of the dark mouth of the hole. He stood in the open air of the empty alley with the rain falling straight around him. The syringe remained low at his side like a knife.
The Living Machine
They returned to the BDC that night and Maryk broke off from the rest and made his way alone to Building Seven. He descended to the subbasement and passed through the five staging rooms into the netherworld of B4.
Stephen's gurney was pulled away from the aquarium window to the edge of the work counter. His eyes were closed and the white bedsheet rose and fell between the black straps buckled across his chest, waist, and thighs.
Maryk brought up his chart and inspected the six different intravenous lines. He exchanged bags and feed bottles. Stephen's blood pressure had stabilized and the nitroglycerin drip was no longer warranted.
Maryk wondered at Stephen's unexplainable progress. He prepped a dosage out of an upturned ampule and uncapped a yvalve in Stephen's right forearm.
Stephen's red eyes stopped him. He was watching Maryk and Maryk froze with the hypodermic in his hands. Stephen's eyes were bright.
He appeared to recognize Maryk. "Am I dead?" he said.
These were the first words they had exchanged in years.
"You're in the B4 lab," Maryk said. "At the BDC.Stephen swallowed.
Speech was painful. "The lab?" Maryk nodded. He finished the serum injection. "Safest right now."
Stephen's head turned back and forth on the pillow. His range of movement impressed Maryk. He realized that Stephen was shaking his head. "Not Plainville," Stephen said hollowly. "Still alive."
Maryk held the empty ampule for Stephen to see. The label read MILKMAID. "Only because of this."
"Serum," he recognized. "Code names."
"That's all over now," Maryk said. "Two of them are dead.
Murdered. We don't know why."
The muscles in Stephen's depressed face strained against his flesh.
"Why straps?" he said. His hands clutched emptily at his sides. "To keep you still. I operated."
"In a lab?" Stephen struggled to raise his head off the pillow. He was becoming agitated.
"What have you done to me?" he said.
Maryk located the bottle of morphine over the bed. He followed the feed line down to the dose administrator and doubled the rate of morphine drip. "I saved your life," Maryk said. "What have you done to me?" he said again.
Maryk watched Stephen's breathing deepen and his eyes narrow to slits.
Stephen was struggling valiantly to remain awake. "What have you..."
Maryk remained looking over him until Stephen fell murmuring to sleep.
Maryk felt the first dragging symptoms of the impending cascade as he made his way toward Building Two. His exposure to Stephen had weakened him but he had one more task to perform that night. The Library and Reports Section was empty. He entered a dedicated user station and logged onto the bureau's Genetech 11 mainframe.
The Genetech was a "living machine" molecularbased computer that used DNA gaap rather than an electronic chip as its processor. A beaker full of properly managed DNA could crunch more arithmetic than the combined circuitry of every conventional computer on the planet.
Human DNA was nature's microchip and its capabilities had been harnessed to power the machine that powered the BDC.
What the Genetech did was coordinate genetic algorithms: lines of code that acted like living organisms in competition to evolve to beneficial solutions. The codes mated and mutated to form novel combinations in a Darwinian reserve of ones and zeroes. Less optimal remedies fell extinct as only the fittest survived.
The minivan-sized Genetech brain ran bureau life functions at the highest efficiency in everything from coordinating employee schedules to monitoring experiment conditions. It managed the U.S. Genetic Database and international LifeLink epidemic alert networks. It oversaw security in the pathogen vault freezer of Building Thirteen.
Each bureau tablet worked as a low-power satellite borrowing off the assets of the high-capacity digital network the Genetech managed.
Maryk called up the code name files. No one had accessed the reports recently except Stephen Pearse. Yet somehow someone had learned of the existence of the only three Plainville survivors.
Everything Maryk had now was riding on Milkmaid.
Maryk initiated a preloaded program "worm" designed to wipe the entire network clean of all records and reports relating to Lancet, Blossom, and Milkmaid. The code name project was terminated. Within twenty-three seconds all records of the project's existence irrevocably ceased to exist.
The Telling Melanie rolled over and over and finally she broke out of her fitful sleep. She sat up straight in an unfamiliar bed in a small, unfamiliar room. She was alone. She recognized her work apron and black cardigan sweater, but not the wooden chair and desk they were draped over, nor anything else. She threw back the sheets but was otherwise still dressed.
Panic set in. She rushed out of the bed at once, then fell into the wall and grabbed it to keep from collapsing. Her head. She winced against the blinding throb. She was always reeling, always walking into things, always coming to; she was never already there. She tasted acid in her mouth, and the abduction in the alley came back to her at once.
Margarine sunlight poured through the room's only window. It was not the cool December sun of Boston. With one hand shading her eyes, she pulled herself toward its warmth and squinted out the window. She was three or four stories up from grass that was postcard green. She saw immense white stone buildings with lush trees all around, and young people strolling the grounds, satchels tossed over their shoulders.
Students, of course. They haunted her. For one roseate moment she imagined '48 she was back at Brown, getting ready to go to breakfast with friends, and nothing had happened yet to her family or her body.
She turned from the window. It was a college dormitory room: the empty bookshelves attached to the tawnycolored wood desk, the thumb-sized strips of missing paint scoring the plaster walls where posters once hung. There were two doors, one open and leading to a closet. She rushed to the other door. The knob turned freely under her hand.
The man from the trolley stood quickly out of a small chair ac
ross the hallway. Melanie kept a tight grip on the doorknob, blood beating against her head, while he stood awkwardly still. She didn't think she could make it past him. Even if she did, she had no idea where to go.
"Where am l?" she said. "Atlanta," the man said.
She looked up and down the hall. It smelled of socks and hair spray.
She said, "No, I'm not," He wore an identification tag on his shirt, with his picture and the name PASCO. "There's a shower down this way," he pointed. "I'm to take you for a meeting in"he had a tablet gadget in his hand, and tapped a key- "twenty-five minutes."
Melanie closed the door on him. She walked back to the foot of the unfamiliar bed and sat down. Sealed moving cartons were stacked near the empty desk, and she was certain, her intuition commingled with despair, that the clothes hanging inside the closet were from her own.
Her right arm felt stiff. She pushed back her shirtsleeve and discovered a small brown bandage taped over the pocket of her elbow.
She touched it lightly, then peeled back one adhesive end, pulling up the pad. There was a fresh needle mark over the largest visible vein.
She did not shower, but did emerge from the room at the appropriate time and followed the man named Pasco outside across a university campus to one of the larger white stone buildings. He walked her squeaking down a waxed floor past closed classroom doors and into a deep, steeply set, empty lecture hall. They descended the blue-carpeted aisle past rounded rows of blue-cushioned seats facing a lectern and a viewing screen on the front wall. A breakfast tray was set before the center seat of the first row, and he showed her to it.
"You were out for ten hours," he said. "We thought you might be hungry."
"Wait." He had started to leave. "What am I doing here?"
His apologetic wince kept the rest of her questions at bay.
"He'll be out in just a minute," he said.
He walked back up the aisle, and the click of the door closing resounded throughout the hall. She had no taste for the food, but reached for a tall glass of orange juice and drained it. Only after its coolness had coated her raw throat did she think that the drink might have been drugged. She was setting the empty glass back on the tray when the door beneath the wall screen opened and the white-haired man walked through.
The sight of his hair and black shoes made her feel immediately sick again. He crossed to the lectern in front of her and laid a tablet on top of it and a black doctor's bag underneath. The gloved hands. The pearl-white hair. The white shirt buttoned under the thick neck, the dull black pants. He had walked straight out of one of her paintings.
He was regarding her too, not curiously but clinically, in the manner of an archaeologist coming upon an unusual rock. There was something about the man's face, the squareness of his block jaw, the pride of his nose, the perfect smoothness of his flesh, that seemed to her truer than true. He did not seem real. He seemed wrong somehow, inactual.
She looked at his condomized hands, the latex skin stretched tight over thick fingers. She looked at his stark gray eyes, like cold cement tunnels into which his real pupils had withdrawn.
Her stomach turned over and sent up a belch of orange juice that nearly choked her. "You remember me," he said, a stem voice giving her heart a good quick squeeze. It was not a question or a revelation but a statement, a point of understanding between them. "We remember each other."
His strange voice touched something deep within her, and a memory like a sealed bottle cast not far enough from shore washed back to her.
She saw him at the foot of a white-railed bed before a drawn plastic curtain, arms crossed in observation much as he was eyeing her now.
She saw his bare, white-haired head as contrasted with the small, silent faces inside the yellow hoods clustered around him. The hospital. She had never forgotten her time in rehab, but he hadn't been a part of that. He had been a part of the fever. He was that doctor.
His presence filled the lecture well, and Melanie felt trapped.
"Where am I?" she said. "Emory University. The Rollins School of Public Health. Just next door to the Bureau for Disease Control. Disease Control. The words filled her with fear. "I'm going crazy," she said, "aren't I?"
"No, you're not. You have been brought here for your own protection. We were never properly introduced. My name is Dr. Maryk."
She felt woozily sick again. She was grateful for the tray and the imaginary space it put between them. His voice seemed to rise out of her subconscious as much as it did his throat. She could feel her mind opening up again to the sickness, the fever. "It's"-she didn't like to say the word, didn't like to hear it said- "Plainville "-though once uttered, the word had the effect of freeing her, steadying her, like a child's first, daring curse-"isn't it?"
He continued to study her, as though everything she said was being memorized for later evaluation. "You experienced some respiratory distress back there in the alley," he said. He produced her inhaler from his breast pocket. "We'll have to reevaluate your prescription."
"I need that," she said.
His gaze never wavered. She recalled him looming over her face in the hospital, examining her, the pain of the bright light on her eyes.
"I kept quiet," she said. He nodded. "Of course you did. Who would have believed you? Closure for the public meant no survivors."
She waded through the brutality of his words. "I was the only survivor," she said.
He nodded again. "That was what each of you was told."
She struggled with this, then turned and scanned the coliseum of empty blue seats. "Just two others," he said. "They couldn't be with us today. We've had some trouble."
Her hands found the hard plastic armrests. She was queasy and scared again. "If I'm sick," she said, "I won't go through that again."
His silver eyes darkened. "You are not sick. Quite the contrary.
We need to know if anyone out of the ordinary tried to contact you recently."
"Just you people. Following me around. Whoever you are."
"We are your benefactors." He rested one gloved hand on the lectern. "The other two survivors are dead. Both of them were murdered. It stands that whoever killed them will want to kill you."
A strange smile floated to Melanie's face, and she felt it twist there.
"I'm not going to remember any of this, am I?" she said. "I'm going to wake up back in my bed, with needle tracks in my arm from whatever you keep injecting me with."
He stepped away from the lectern. "Those are not injections," he said.
He began pacing back and forth, slowly. "How much do you know about Plainville?"
"I grew up there."
"I mean in the current vernacular. The virus, the disease that burned through your town."
She felt herself withdrawing. She realized she didn't want to know any more. She just wanted to forget. She wanted to wake up and not remember. Melanie looked resolutely at the lectern and not at him.
"Central Africa," he said. "Many viruses originate there. The prevailing theory behind this is that man himself originated there as well. Six years ago, two doctors, myself and another, were called upon to investigate a purported outbreak of smallpox in the Congo rain forest. Early-stage Plainville, as we now know it, closely resembles smallpox. We traced the path of the virus back to its source, an illegal uranium mine in an underground cavern rife with latent viruses.
It was like a poisoned well in the center of a small town; no one drank from it too long Her gaze did not leave the lectern. She refused to look at him. "The virus the miners brought up had been trapped in that closed system for centuries, its RNA core undergoing constant bombardment from radioactive uranium deposits. It was an ancient agent, in fact the genetic forebear of smallpox. The pathogen was too unstable and too annihilative to combat. We had to cut off the threat at the source. We neutralized the virus above ground and buried the cave in the jungle. The other doctor with me was named Pearse."
"I assume you've heard of him."
; Of course she knew of Dr. Stephen Pearse. "He's dead," she said.
They had all been talking about it at work. "Dying," he corrected her, resuming his slow pacing. "So. The Congo, New Year's Day, 2011."
Plainville, Massachusetts, One Week After Easter, 2012
Viruses respect no human boundaries, no walls or checkpoints or borders, only natural limitations, such as temperature, pH, ultraviolet light, and the availability of viable hosts and mobile vectors. But they do leave footprints: the outbreaks themselves. So how does a virus of unparalleled lethality trek from a buried cave in the equatorial jungles of central Africa to a small town in Massachusetts without any traceable link, no intermediate outbreak, or confirmed human carrier?
The answer is that it does not. It is essentially an epidemiological impossibility. Viruses do not fly on gossamer wings and can always be traced back to their source. And yet somehow this virus rose up out of the ashes of the African rain forest and seized a small American town.
The disease appeared simultaneously in the Plainville public school system, its town hall-whose infected carried it to a town meeting held that same night-and the office of a local pediatrician.
The pediatrician, Dr. Joseph Weir, unknowingly passed the infection along to his patients over the following three days before manifesting early-stage symptoms himself. While he declined to be examined professionally by another doctor, he did isolate himself from his two children. His secretary, who was also his wife, was fielding calls at home from patients and neighbors with similar illnesses, and just before leaving to bring her dying husband to the hospital-and already exhibiting symptoms herself-she telephoned the BDC hot line to report the mystery illness. With that one phone call Mrs. Anne Weir saved, at minimum, one hundred million human lives. Because Plainville was about to explode."
Melanie felt numb. She hadn't heard another person speak the names of her parents in over four years. "His appointments," she said.
"We checked. He didn't contract it from any of his patients. We determined that much. Plainville was a town of just over twelve thousand, and we reconstructed virtually every resident's whereabouts and movements throughout the town over the days leading up to the outbreak, and still failed to pinpoint the index case: Plainville's 'Patient Zero." Somehow the virus seemed to have attacked a pediatrician, the town offices, and the public school system all at the same time. "Plainville is a genetically specialized killer, not just of humans but all animals, reptiles, rodents, and many insects, even and especially plants. Every living thing, except birds; birds in this case are reservoirs, and by that we mean that they can host and transmit the disease but are not sickened by it. Like all viruses, Plainville tries to transform the host by slipping into its cells and shooting them full of genetic material-essentially, an attempt to convert the organism into a virus itself But this conversion is biologically impossible, and so the host sickens and eventually one or the other-the human immune system or the virus-prevails. But Plainville is not a routine DNA virus. It is a retrovirus, an RNA virus, like HIV, infiltrating and disarming the body's defenses; but unlike HIV, which slowly drips into cells, allowing us time to manage and compensate for the AIDS-related complex over the long term, Plainville works with the greatest efficiency. It is uniquely corruptive, riding the bloodlines to every organ as one after another they begin to fail."
Chuck Hogan Page 15