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Chuck Hogan

Page 16

by The Blood Artists (epub)


  Her attention had drifted off, remembering her parents before they were taken away from her. Eventually she realized he had stopped and was waiting for her to notice. "Boring, hmm?" he said. "Tedious? You didn't get this far in your premed courses at Brown?"

  Her indifference fell away, and she looked up at him. "You'll want to pay attention to this, I think," he went on. "The immune system is your body's monitor. I.S. cells stand guard against invading pathogens-bacteria, viruses, cancer cells-any organism that threatens the health of the body, not only by fighting these attackers, but also by repairing any damage, and even afterward, cleaning up the remnants of a battle. It is a complex, interactive network-your body's police force, its protector.

  "Similarly, the Bureau for Disease Control is the immune system of the human species: a vast, interactive network answering distress calls and assigning specialists. to investigate and eliminate microbial threats around the worIcL The disease Mrs. Weir described was one of unknown etiology and therefore assigned to the Special Pathogens Section, which I head. The circumstances were peculiar enough that I traveled to Massachusetts myself to investigate the break. The symptomology was immediately familiar to me, but it was the vegetation about the town, the infected trees and plants, that confirmed my diagnosis. I remember the house-by-house evacuation under the blare of an old civil defense alarm, and our coming upon a luncheon meeting of the Plainville Ladies' Garden Club, and all the old women gathered hysterically, their daffodils and spring lilies-freshly potted, carefully arranged for the affair-all grown leathery and silver-black and wild.

  "I communicated the threat back to Atlanta and the BDC responded in force, doctors, scientists, and BioCon troops converging on the town. You might remember this much. We blocked off highways and clamped all arteries into and out of the county. We closed airports in Boston and Rhode Island and called off school for days, effectively throwing a blanket over the entire region. The magnitude of the outbreak had forced us to go public, so we enlisted the media to help us track down carriers. For a while there in Massachusetts it was biological martial law. "There were more than twelve thousand residents of Plainville, and almost every one of them was wiped out. Another eighty-one hundred satellite cases became infected and also died, most of them residents of surrounding communities. Only four infected people had boarded airplanes before the shutdown; those flare-ups were ultimately contained. Given one more day, the infection would have metastasized exponentially beyond Boston and the East Coast and across the country, and conceivably from there to every neighborhood of the world. A holocaust. To this day, very few people realize just how close we came.

  "I set up triage in a hospital in nearby North Attleboro, spending most of my time there, treating the afflicted, learning what I could about the disease.

  "Traditional treatments were unsuccessful, so I began to look into more experimental procedures, all of which failed, except one. Ten early-stage patients were selected for a trial program, each because their symptomatic development appeared to be lagging behind the norm.

  "The trick with Plainville is to get to the infected host as early as possible. Later we learned that one of the ten happened to be the pediatrician Weir's twenty-year-old daughter. Her brother was already dead, his immune system weak from a recent bout with Lyme disease."

  As she looked up at him, her stare became harder and harder. Was he dragging her back through all of this just to be cruel? "Of the original ten, three survived-barely-following extensive surgery, therapy, and subsequent rehabilitation, including massive transfusions of blood. We have tried to repeat this process since, on others, and never succeeded --"

  "How?"

  Her interruption surprised him. "The blood transfusions were imperative," he said. "But it was more than that. Something about these three patients. They were different. Certain people are born biologically gifted, in ways that under normal living circumstances usually never come to light. Three such cases out of a pool of only twelve thousand was just extraordinary good fortune on our part.

  "Suddenly we found ourselves with three survivors of the lethal Plainville virus. Our next step was to determine whether or not they had built up antibodies to the disease, and lab tests proved conclusively that all three had. Cell samples from these 'long-term nonprogressors' as they were termed, or LNPs, repelled the Plainville virus. This allowed some hope for development of a vaccine, but two problems persisted. First, Blossom."

  He went to the lectern and opened his tablet. He tapped some keys and a photograph of a middle-aged woman with short, straight, ready-to-go brown hair appeared on the wide wall screen. Melanie saw that the image had been cropped from a larger, family portrait. "Each LNP was assigned a code name for confidentiality. Blossom was a homemaker, a mother of two, worked mornings in a local craft store.

  "Her family was 'old Plainville,' and she lost every relative she had to the disease. Her immune system damage was severe, and compromised the quality of the disease-fighting antibodies in her blood."

  He cleared the image and replaced it with a snapshot of a young man sitting shirtless in a battered lawn chair on a lawn of gray-yellow grass. His image toasted the empty lecture hall with an open can of Old Milwaukee, and Melanie thought she recognized him, vaguely.

  "Lancet, you may have known. He graduated from Plainville High School and returned to work there parttime as a janitor. But his bout with the disease had damaged his spleen, impairing its ability to filter impurities out of his blood."

  He changed images a third time, and there on the large screen was a high school yearbook photograph of a chocolate-haired teenager wearing her mother's gold cross pendant and a hopeful smile. Her chin rested on the back of a pudgy hand holding a small, simple violet, and a cheap photographic effect gave her glass earrings a prismatic glow.

  "Milkmaid's blood, however, emerged undamaged," Maryk said. "Her blood was optimal."

  Melanie's jaw trembled as she stared up, low-eyed, at the photograph of the stocky girl in the pale blue dress. She remembered that day and all the outfits she had brought with her to the session, and how pleased she had been with the result. "Milkmaid," Maryk said looking up at the screen. "Premed at Brown, following in her father's footsteps. But then, junior year, she ran out of academic steam. Took a leave of absence from school and moved back home. Worked as an assistant at the local pet hospital."

  He turned back to her, and Melanie felt her fear turning into hostility. "So Plainville had been contained. Most assumed it was vanquished, but I was unconvinced. There was also the concern that the virus might somehow reactivate itself in these survivors after a period of latency, and render them infectious once again. Yet I could hardly confine all three in the hospital. There was no guarantee that they would even voluntarily comply with the research, and anyway, I don't favor the closed setting and sterile conditions of a laboratory. Ideal results achieved under ideal conditions are unreal results, and I required a real-world solution. So a campaign was undertaken to monitor the LNPs upon their release. Inducements were made to encourage all three to relocate here, to Atlanta."

  He replaced the portrait of the old, forgotten Melanie with a more recent photograph of the woman known as Blossom. She appeared much changed, thinner, harderlooking, handing out leaflets on a street corner. Her hair was cut short and she wore a T-shirt with a small insignia over the breast. Melanie could make out the words on the front of her shirt, "Live Long."

  "As I said, Plainville has a varied and pronounced effect upon the brain. Blossom, after her recovery, was not the same person she had been before her illness. She became preoccupied with the future, joining a fringe religious order. She was not employable, and we doubted she could even survive on her own. She was therefore awarded a sweepstakes prize through the mail: a weekly stipend and free rent in an Atlanta apartment complex. She took this to be a religious sign and relocated immediately."

  He then put up what appeared to be a kind of surveillance photograph of Lancet, now older, cleane
r, shaved, and better dressed.

  He was conversing with a customer from behind a store counter. "Lancet also emerged from his illness a changed person. But he became fixated on the past, manifested in a preoccupation with the popular culture of his youth. A poor credit rating from his previous life prevented him from opening a nostalgia retail store in the Boston area, but at a franchise fair there he was offered an attractive deal on some prime retail space in the Underground Mall in downtown Atlanta and accepted without question. For whatever reason, Lancet became a merchant of his past."

  Maryk cleared the wall screen. "But Milkmaid's change was the most intriguing. She was found to have developed certain remarkable, inexplicable artistic talents, though she had never so much as touched a paintbrush before the disease. She was unschooled and did not attend museums or galleries of any kind. She never bothered to sign her canvases, or even complete many of them. She seemed to have no interest in the business of art, and sold the paintings only as was necessary to pay her rent."

  Melanie went cold. "You," she said. "You were my so-called patron."

  "Through one of my investigators. But you resisted all entreaties to come to Atlanta. We even tried appealing to your veterinary bent: a letter of invitation from the Emory School of Medicine; the cat hospital in Decatur; an entrylevel position with the local ASPCA-all rebuffed or ignored."

  She saw it all now. None of those strange job offers had ever made any sense to her. "We purchased your paintings to keep you going," he said, "though on several occasions we wound up funneling money directly into your bank account, and paid bills you forgot to pay. Evidently you never bothered to balance your statements. We watched out for you, took care of you. We even pushed you out of the way of oncoming trolleys. For over four years we have been with you: not every minute, and not every place, but comprehensively enough to ensure that you remained healthy and always within our reach."

  Her stare burned into the vacuum of space between them.

  "Endometriosis," she said. "Just an excuse to get at more of your blood, as well as to sample some other fluids for research. Only rarely did we require a blood pull that could not wait for a regular doctor's appointment. This was the exception, not the rule. My people would slip into your apartment during the night, but rarely did they need to put you out for more than seven or eight hours at a time."

  "Oh my God."

  "As I said, early on there was hope for a vaccine. The stakes were very high. I tried to give you a life while we did this critical work.

  But then the outbreaks started."

  She was reeling. "Outbreaks?"

  "We had to cover them up, for obvious reasons. Blamed something else each time. There have been five subsequent breaks since Plainville.

  "The first occurred thirteen months later, at an 'Engaged Encounter' weekend for prenuptial Catholics in a Franciscan retreat north of Tallahassee, Florida. All fifty-three participants died, including the cafeteria and ministerial staffs. Fortunately for us, the location was isolated, and therefore easily contained. We blamed a rare salmonella.

  "At subsequent outbreaks, we began experimenting with serum derived from your blood, as well as the blood of the others. Only yours has proved consistently successful. There is a time factor involved, as I said. Success requires immediate intervention. The most recent reemergence occurred less than two weeks ago, in South Carolina."

  As she was sorting through all of this, he put up on screen the image of a naked man lying facedown across a bed. There was blood on the floor by the man's hands. Melanie quickly looked away. "Lancet," said Maryk. "Three days ago. It looked like a suicide at first."

  He changed the image to that of a corpse stuffed facedown into the backseat of a car. "Blossom," he said. "Very few people know about Plainville, know that it did not die in that small town in southeastern Massachusetts. And no one, save a core group of people working directly under me, knew about the survivors. You are a closely held secret, which is why we are meeting here and not inside the BDC. Are you certain you don't remember anyone else following you recently? Perhaps something in the alley last night?"

  She was staring at the screen. The back of the corpse's T-shirt was wrinkled and dark, but Melanie could just make out the words "And Prosper." Then Maryk clicked off the image, and her gaze settled sullenly upon the carpeted floor. "We had planned to cut you all loose as soon as we derived a vaccine," he said. "But the Plainville bug is too complex, and constantly changing. It burns bright and fast and then wriggles away somehow, only to pop up in a slightly different form again behind us. There will be no vaccine. The only existing treatment is the antibody remedy of your blood serum."

  She was wondering when the screaming would begin, if it would be soon or much later. Probably very soon. She looked up at Maryk standing before her, the whitehaired man of her fever dreams. "You ruined my life," she said.

  He approached her then, enormous and imposing, until only the tray table of untouched food separated them. "On the contrary," he said, "I believe I saved your life."

  "No." She nodded at the high school portrait that had long since vanished from the wall screen. "You changed me. You made me into something else."

  The door clicked above her, and Maryk glanced up at the person entering. Then he came around the tray table, to her side. He knew enough to choose her good, left ear. She turned away from him as Pasco descended to the bottom step.

  Maryk said, "This had to be done. I could not just cure you and let you walk away. Plainville is catastrophic to every human being on this planet-except you. You alone are immune to it now."

  "If this is all so good," she said too loudly, "then why does somebody want to kill me?"

  She sensed him straightening, pulling back. "That is something I don't know yet," he said. "Stephen Pearse: He was not infected in a lab accident. He was infected while treating a room full of patients-in Orangeburg, South Carolina-who inexplicably awoke from chronic, clinical catatonia infected with a newly mutated strain of the Plainville virus. Stephen Pearse has Plainville, and yet he is still alive today-because of the antibodies your immune system generates, which I have nurtured and seeded him with. We were only too late to cure him. But your blood is sustaining Stephen Pearse. You are the only thing keeping him alive."

  This couldn't be true. Not someone like Dr. Pearse. She sat stunned as Maryk returned to the lectern. He was gathering his things.

  She realized that the lesson was over. "You can't keep me here," she said.

  He stopped on his way out. "It is no longer a question of personal freedom. The reason I have told you all this is because Plainville lives on, and you alone have the blood I need to combat it, to save human lives. You will be safe here. Finals are almost over, and the students will be leaving to begin their Christmas break. You will remain here under my care at least until I know what is happening. Dr. Pasco now will take you to the school cafeteria, and there you will eat." Maryk had started past her for the stairs. "Above all else," he said, "we need you to remain healthy."

  Thunderstruck and voiceless, Melanie watched as Maryk climbed the blue steps to the exit.

  Exsanquinanon

  Freeley pointed with a capped surgical marker.

  "See the blunt force injury here, the parietal lobe, right side of the cranium? The intruder rose up from the backseat and brought an object across like this"-she made a right-handed whipping motion across the front of her body-"incapacitating Blossom. Then she was pulled over the seat back and the incisions were made in both wrists."

  Blossom's bluish corpse lay facedown atop the stainless steel autopsy table. A rubber block beneath her shoulders arched her neck and shaved head. Cellulite pinches pitted her sagging buttocks and thighs. Her fingers were tipped black.

  Freeley wore a scrub gown, mask, sleeve protectors, skullcap, and blue rubber gloves. "The keys were in the ignition of the car," she continued. "All four doors were locked, with both rear windows rolled down. We got no prints off the door handles or in
side panels except glove smudges, which we may have left ourselves. Blossom kept plants in the car, two small spider plants-did you know that? For company.

  In any case, the plastic pots were still glued to either end of the dash but the plants themselves were gone. Most of the soil was still there, some spilled onto the floorboards."

  "Stolen plants?" Maryk said. "Could be."

  "You say the rear windows were rolled down. The window in Lancet's bedroom was open too."

  Freeley nodded and positioned the overhead magnifying lens to illuminate the back of Blossom's neck. Within the bluish ridges of flaking skin below the hairline was a single red dot breach. Maryk examined it. "Toxicology again clean," Freeley added.

 

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