Chuck Hogan

by The Blood Artists (epub)

  "I will," he said. He pushed off the edge and started toward her. "I will take it, if I have to. I will hang you upside down from the ceiling and bleed you-your blood is that important to the world. But it would be easier for you if you cooperate. It's not me you would be helping. I don't require your help." She leaned away from him as he neared. "You have a gift," he said. "You are different."

  "I am not different."

  "You are special."

  She insisted, "I am not special."

  "Your blood is." She veered away as he stood next to her chair. "Stay away from me," she said.

  "My system kills without manufacturing any biological solution. Your system produces antibodies. Your blood stops the virus in others."

  She stood out of the chair but he seized her arm and held her still.

  She twisted in his grip. She looked up from his restraining hand into his face. "I will scream," she said.

  He realized he was hurting her. He released her and she hurried to the door. He did not go after her. The door opened and slammed and she was gone.

  He left the chair for the wall and followed it staggeringly to the couch. He sat heavily with his arms dead in his lap and tipped back his head. His breath came out in short pantlike gasps.

  It had been a mistake to allow her to see him this way. He hadn't realized how depleted he still was.

  Night grayed the ceiling above him as he sat. The regretted encounter swirled in his mind until the words no longer made human sense. The darkness of the ceiling became the dark insides of his heavy eyelids.

  The rhythmic huffing of his chest became the mantra of deep sleep.

  The Language of Disease

  He thought of wide-open spaces. He thought of breezes across acres of pastel tulips and pictured himself in the branches of the oak tree that had cooled the house of his childhood in spring. He conjured up the robin's eggshell of a cloudless sky overhead and started his mother down the long path from their front door to the mailbox. He watched the cross-breeze toss hair around her face. Proudly he watched her hands feel for the mailbox. It was empty and she rested a moment before starting back. She turned so that the tulip breeze washed her hair from her face. She was beautiful and she was blind He dropped down from the tree branch and surprised her at the door with the mail in hand and then followed her inside for lunch.

  "You wouldn't last one night in here."

  Stephen's voice pulled Maryk back into the B4 lab. He was looking out the aquarium window into the larger subterranean basement of Building Seven. The door that led to the stairs that led above ground was six doors away.

  Maryk detested his claustrophobia. He released his grip on the sill and his breathing came back under control. He could at least work through the early strains of a cascade.

  He turned and found Stephen examining his withered W hands.

  Stephen was vigilant for any evidence of further decay. "I must have nodded off," Stephen said. He was sitting up on the gurney. He had requested clothes instead of the hospital gown but all Maryk had for him were scrubs.

  Maryk moved through the assembled lab equipment back to the B4 computer console. Everything had been networked through the central brain of the lab. Stephen had even agreed to Maryk's suggestion that Reilly and Boone be brought in as extra pairs of arms and legs.

  Stephen's blood, saliva, urine, sputum, pleura, and skin samples sat in disposable flasks along the counter like a row of small plastic trophies. "We were talking about the virus," said Maryk. "How it is not acting the way a virus acts."

  "Yes," said Stephen. "Not moving like a virus moves. Not burning as a virus burns. Where was the flint in Orangeburg? The spark at any of the earlier breaks?"

  The language of disease was the language of poetry and the metaphor for viruses was fire. Plainville was smoldering in Stephen.

  He sat on the gurney like a burn victim with darkly bruised patches of skin that looked singed. Ragged patches of hair hung off his flaking scalp. He looked weaker and more ill and yet continued to grow stronger despite medical evidence to the contrary. "Could it be something unusual in the environment?" he continued. "Common to all these places?"

  Maryk said, "We've tested and retested many times. I'd like to think we didn't miss anything."

  "In Africa, it was simple exposure and transmission."

  "But here it doesn't die out with its victims," Maryk said. "We need to know why there aren't any footsteps between outbreaks."

  "Because it's smart. This is a virus that somehow knows what's good for it. An arsonist virus: one that discriminates, that knows what it is doing."

  "Viruses don't think the way we think. They survive. That's all."

  "They don't commit murder either. Your survivors.

  You agree that was a directed assault against your project."

  Maryk moved away from the console. "I've already ruled out bioterTorism," he said. "If somebody with a vial of Plainville only wanted to spread terror, they would drop it off the Empire State Building. They would slip it into any major airport and uncork it there."

  "Exactly."

  "Unless." Here Stephen paused. "Unless terror wasn't their ultimate goal."

  "A terrorist not satisfied with terror."

  Maryk frowned. "What, then?"

  "Infection. No politics. No ideology, no religion. Just pure infection. The destruction of the human race."

  "A maniac. Frightening thought, but there is one thing you're forgetting: Plainville is unmanageable. It is impossible for anyone to handle it without risking infection themselves. If we couldn't work with it safely here at the BDC, who could?"

  "You could."

  Maryk stopped and looked at him. "I mean only that nothing is impossible," Stephen continued. "You could, so there could be another.

  Say you were eyeing a particular target, the destruction of the human race. And you had a weapon: Plainville. What would you need to do first?"

  Maryk said, "I would need to test it."

  "A dry run. Each time Plainville emerges again in an outbreak, we hold our breath. And each time it dies out in containment, leaving us with nothing, and we congratulate each other on having dodged another bullet. This virus reemerges in already isolated situations. What I'm saying is: What if this is no accident? What if there is some kind of mind at work behind this Plainville? What if it is depending upon our containing its spread so that it can learn from each outbreak: learn how the mutations are working, learn the most efficient modes of infection, and gather intelligence on how we are working to fight it."

  "Learn how?" Maryk said. "We've kept the outbreaks hidden from the public."

  This was not an impediment to Stephen's theory. "That would only make them angry, and more dedicated."

  Maryk shook his head. "You're talking about Plainville like it's something you can get at a drugstore. This is an organic virus, not engineered biowarfare. We know where it came from-a cave in central Africa. No one planted it there. We know we buried it, and burned it out for good. Stephen did not respond to that. He was quiet and Maryk watched him and waited for him to speak. "Maybe we didn't bury it all," he said. He was looking red-eyed at the floor. It was difficult to read any emotion on Stephen's fading face. "You remember the girl with the vitiligo who followed me around the camp?"

  Maryk did. "Vaguely."

  "She was healthy, Peter. She was clear at the time; I tested her. She was begging me for help, and the jets were coming. Your jets. I had packed an ampule of the PeaMar serum we were working on at the time.

  The compound was sound, I knew it was-" Maryk stiffened in the noisy atmosphere of B4. "Stephen," he said sharply.

  "I transfused it," he said. "I dosed her and sent her out of the camp."

  Maryk stood staring. He was furious and silent. "You gave me no choice," Stephen said. He would not look up. "But now I keep thinking-maybe she contracted the virus somehow, between the time I tested her and the time I injected her."

  "Wait a minute," Maryk said.
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  "This was six years ago. This was a girl. She never turned up again.

  "This patient in bay twenty-six, the one you think stuck you. He was a man."

  "He was."

  "There was no patient in bay twenty-six at Orangeburg. I checked. Twenty-six was an empty. bed."

  "Then how did he get to my parents' home in Amagansett?"

  "Stephen," Maryk said. "He was there. I saw him, he was walking around."

  "You said you saw your parents, too."

  "He was different. He opened the window. I think he was at my tablet."

  Maryk grew impatient. "It can't be. People don't last days, never mind months or years, with Plainville. Either they die right away, or we get to them early enough with the Milkmaid serum and they survive."

  "You'll check on it, Peter?"

  "I'll look into it," Maryk said. "But this is no phantom. This is no ghost. Someone murdered two of Plainville's only three survivors-and would have eliminated all three if we hadn't rolled up Milkmaid just in time."

  "Rolled her up?"

  Stephen looked up at him. "I thought she came to Atlanta to help."

  Maryk said, "Not exactly."

  "Tell me you haven't locked her away somewhere, Peter."

  "She is staying in an Emory dormitory room. She eats at the school cafeteria. She has no idea how many people I have watching her everywhere she goes. But she is refusing to help."

  Stephen nodded. "And that is why you finally agreed to bring her here."

  "I need her to see what is at stake. She needs to understand that this is life or death."

  The red light flashing over the submarine door indicated movement into the shower room. The nurse was bringing Melanie through. "Could you turn down the lights?" Stephen said.

  Maryk dimmed the overhead bulbs and the shadows deepened on Stephen's face. Stephen sat up as straight as his gaunt body was able.

  He appeared nervous. "What is she like?" he said. "She hates me," Maryk said. "You two should have a lot to talk about."

  But Maryk was relieved not to be facing her alone again after their last encounter. He heard movement behind the door. It was pushed open and the pressure in the room changed. Air rushed in. The nurse stepped through the oval doorway and Melanie followed behind.

  Maryk had ordered her sealed inside a suit. He was not taking any chances with her health. She kept her head down inside the hood and remained just to the left of the door. The unsashed fabric bagged around her waist and bunched at her knees until the nurse connected her air feed to the ceiling runner. Then Melanie's suit inhaled.

  Her eyes rose gradually. She looked away immediately after first seeing Stephen on the bed. She worked hard to smother her reaction before looking at him again. The shock of seeing this public figure convalescing was exactly what Maryk had wanted. "Hello, Melanie," Stephen said.

  Her stare at him was interrupted only by a flickered glance at Maryk.

  Stephen said, "I wanted to thank you in person. I know this all must be bewildering to you. You were brave to come."

  Stephen's voice was ripe with enthusiasm. He was good that way.

  "Your life is worth more to the human race than mine or even Dr. Maryk's," he went on. "There are ways you could help. You could help us by donating your blood. You could help others by meeting with them, by going out into the field."

  Maryk stopped him. "Stephen."

  "She's looked it in the face, Peter. She's survived." Maryk tried to silence him. "It's too hazardous. The bug mutates too fast."

  "You said her hemo screens are sound, even with the mutations. She's curing it. Think of the effect her presence would have on the ill."

  "Stephen, I do not need her going around holding people's hands."

  A sharp gasp distracted them. It came from the nurse as she reached out toward the girl.

  Melanie had split the diagonal seal across her suit. She broke open the folds and flipped the hood back off her head. Her garish hair sprang loose and her eyes were fierce as she glared at Maryk. She took a deep breath and filled her unprotected lungs.

  Melanie sat on an examining table in another room in the same building, pressing a folded square of gauze to her left elbow and still buzzing from what she had done.

  Recollections from her illustrious days in premed: The ecosphere of the human lung absorbs 20,000 liters of air each day. Less than 1/100,000 inch of protection separates the lung air environment from the vast human bloodstream. Viruses need to open a hole of only 1/1,000,000 inch in order to hitch a ride on the sanguineous superhighway.

  "Stupid," Maryk sputtered again. It was all worth it just to have witnessed that moment of impotence on his face, that had preceded the dark, furious frown he now wore. "You are immune to casual airborne exposure to Plainville. But if even a minute amount of infective blood or saliva came into contact with your eyes, your mouth, you would be at risk."

  She remembered similar tablebeds in her father's office, and how he used to pull tissue paper down from a roller beneath the head cushion, a new strip for each sniffling kid. That had been his generation's idea of sterile medicine. Her schoolyard version had been a Popsicle stick inoculation to ward off a sudden outbreak of boy cooties.

  Pasco paced behind them, and she felt his tension too. Maryk mixed something into her blood and waited while it set in a small container, marked PCR, connected to his tablet. She peeled the cotton pad back from the puncture wound on her arm and looked at the resulting bloodstain still spreading through the gauze webbing like a flower opening in bloom. Miracle Blood! Watch it go! She looked down at her wasted, bruised arms with a renewed sense of anger and potent shame.

  "Will you lock me up in the basement now like your friend?" she said.

  His eyes burned gray. Everything he did disgusted her now. "Why would you task yourself like this?" he said. "I'm special," she told him.

  "I'm different."

  Seeing Dr. Pearse like that, fragile and shrunken with those ghostly red eyes, had been shocking; she hadn't seen anyone that sick in over four years. But as bad as she felt for him, her loathing for Maryk was a hundred times more intense.

  He looked up from his little tablet. "Well?" she said, Insistent. Defiant.

  He disconnected the contraption. He said: "Clean." It was simple enough to disguise her own relief. But when Maryk showed none, she became enraged. She was his number one pin cushion, after all.

  She sensed an urgency in his actions as he cleaned up. "It was your blood," she said. "Your freak blood, transfused into me in the hospital. That's how I was 'cured."

  His silence told her she was right. She threw the bloody gauze down onto the table in front of him, and he stopped and looked at it crumpled there before pulling fast the buckle straps on his bag.

  "You're a freak," she told him. "And you've made me into a freak."

  Maryk stopped at the door with his bag. He looked back at the cold table, not at her. "Take her to her room," he said to Pasco.

  "My room?" she laughed, though it came out a bray. Maryk opened the door and started down the hallway, and suddenly Melanie wasn't laughing anymore. "Why didn't you let me die in Plainville!" she screamed.

  But he continued away, and the white door closed on his back and clicked shut.

  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

  The Oracle Cyberviruses Section was located two doors down from the STD unit in BDC Building Eighteen, Most CVs were hacker-engineered although there had been incidences of corrupted files breaking off from legitimate programs and mutating "naturally" file to file. The turnof-the-century Internet boom had corroborated the epidemiological axiom that any surge in population represents a fertile breeding ground for viral incursion. The new ecology of computer technology had engendered indigenous viral activity.

  Suzy Lumen, was the co-section head. She was an obese woman of more than 250 pounds and was legally blind. She sat before a semicircular computer console in her office like a priestess divining at an oracle.

  She
wore a loop earphone connected to a chin mike and the fingertips of her right hand explored a flat blue pad that raised screen characters into Braille. Her thickly soled sneakers worked foot pedals beneath the console that controlled her microphone. Suzy Lumen was the human liaison to the DNA-powered Genetech 11 computer that ran the BDC.

  Maryk pulled over a chair and sat at her side. The cascade from his long visit with Stephen made thoughts sound like voices arguing in his head. "Here's what I need," he told Suzy Lumen. "Assume that the director's tablet had been compromised by some outside interest." He was trying to be careful with his wording. "What would that mean?"

  "Are you asking about Blue files?"

  She had a sultry voice that did not match her appearance. Her face was broad and her drooping eyes thicklidded. "I'm asking about any sensitive documents loaded into Stephen Pearse's tablet."

  "Blue files are any reports or internal memoranda generated by any government agency," she said. "Blue files crash if tapped into illegally. If an unauthorized user attempts to dupe them to an unauthorized server, the Blue worm encryption fouls the offending drive and disables its microprocessor, but not before instructing the modern to dial the FBI."

  "So there is no way someone could duplicate those files."

  "We--ell."

  She turned smiling in his general direction. "The National Security Agency instituted Blue to protect sensitive documents from prying eyes and sticky fingers, White House internals, CIA, DOD. But here at the BDC, prying eyes don't pose much of a threat. Here, the opposite is true: Access and preservation is vital to operation. So, no, you cannot copy files off a tablet. Nor can you print them. But-you can back them up."

  Maryk understood. "By archiving the entire system."

  "Exactly. I have loaded here a working clone of Director Pearse's tablet, as you recovered it." She indicated the monitor displaying a list of file names. "If there were any Blue programs, they would have deleted themselves out within fifteen days, as they are self-timed to do. But..." She called up an index card graphic. "A full backup was performed the day before you recovered the tablet." Maryk stared at the screen.