He released the door. It opened and there was just enough room for two people to stand inside and face another steel door. The first door closed and her shoulder was pressed against his left biceps. She felt him breathing, and she realized she was afraid of him again. "The riots killed any hope for negative airflow containment," he said. "We are working in a Plainville atmosphere here. These ultraviolet light closets are only checkpoints between areas of higher viral intensity and lower viral intensity. When we come back out, these doors will lock down automatically and initiate a two minute UV light shower. You'll stand for that until the second door opens." He rattled all this off as though giving her directions to the bathroom. "Scared?"
She nodded, staring straight ahead, not looking at him. Maryk flexed his black rubber hands. "Good," he said. He hit a switch and the second door released.
The unit beyond was high and long and painfully bright. They stepped onto the middle of three tiers, facing the hollow center of the unit, cells lining the railed parapets in long rows on either side. It was windowless, but high-intensity lamps made the cell block appear artificially as bright as day.
The cell doors were all open and the cells themselves were empty.
Cots lay along the guard walk between the open doors and the low railing along the hollow, and there was a body on every cot. The stagnant smell of the sealed unit hit her immediately, human sickness and spoil and trapped smoke. The sides of the concrete parapets had been licked black by riot fire. There was a footpath cleared through the trash strewn over the floors: toilet paper, burned blankets, feces.
She followed Maryk along the path of debris, starting down the length of the left parapet, finding the red painted rail with her gloved hand and gripping it as she went. He studied computer charts hooked to the cots and stopped now and then to pull back a sheet and examine the progression of some remarkable sore, moving intently from patient to patient, oblivious to the moans and feverish talk, appraising the prisoners' treatments and modifying them or okaying them before moving on, and all the while keeping an eye on Melanie. "This one is a spitter," he warned.
This particular inmate had obviously once been very large. His loose skin now sagged over his wasting frame, obscuring tattoos burned fiercely into his chest and arms. The high-intensity light above sought out every blemish and sore.
There was a strange tranquility about these criminals, a red-eyed curiosity as they lay there dissolving. She could not tell which of the sick were the guards. The disease wore away all distinction.
The few who did look at her or attempted to speak, she could not face.
She tried, but her cheeks and forehead burned and she looked guiltily away. These conscious few terrified her, because they could see what was coming for them.
At one cot, Maryk pulled the sheet off a dead man. The corpse's thinned arms were straight at his sides and his hands and his mouth were open, as though he were holding a musical note just above the human range. BioCon agents with tablets on their arms arrived like census takers, and Melanie pressed back against the railing, out of their way. A few of the agents looked her over: She was suitless; bizarre. She felt like the only person on the moon who could breathe.
The stench was sickening and Melanie turned away. Across the gap lay a facing row of more cots and more dying men, their sickly flesh glowing in the white light. BioCon agents in yellow suits rolled instrument carts past them along the path of riot debris.
When she looked back, they were lifting the dead man off the cot and into, a black bag unzipped on the floor. His arms, crossed awkwardly over his blistered stomach, fell open as they moved him, and at once he looked so withered and empty. They laid him inside the thick black plastic with his red eyes still staring, his mouth still twisted open in silent song. Maryk knelt at his feet and unlocked a black clasp from around his ankle: an electronic quarantine bracelet.
She remembered it all from Plainville.
Men lying on neighboring cots stared at the scorched undersides of the parapets above them with mouths dropped open, as though trying to harmonize with the dead they were soon to join. One man's head rolled to the side, his red eyes loose in their sockets, fixing questioningly on her.
She started moving then. She was rushing away. She pushed past the nearest suit and pulled herself hand by hand along the red railing, away from Maryk, back to the steel doors.
Inside the first door, deep blue lights came on humming. She brought her hands up around her head as though to wave off the images of the cell block, but was afraid to touch anything, even herself. The blue lights died finally and the humming ended and the door clicked open and she ducked between two suited persons waiting to enter. She pulled at the wrist tape over her gloves, tearing away at her protective coverings as she searched for an empty room to cry in. She found one, and inside ripped the cowl and the layers of cotton and plastic from her face like bandages, dropping them to the floor. She covered her stinging eyes with her bared knuckles as a wave of nausea made her gag, and she started blindly forward, striking the desk with her hip before reaching the chair. She buried her face in her bare, powdered hands and sat like that for a long time, weeping, for the mystified dead and dying, for her own helplessness, and for her family and herself, and how sick she had once been.
When she looked up again, Maryk was standing in the door. He came ahead and set his tablet and black bag on the desk, then plunked down the dead man's anklet. It was oily with green disinfectant, metal and round with a locking piece that shaped it into a capital Q. Melanie pushed away.
He pulled a chair over next to her without a word and opened up his tablet on the desk. He tapped keys and pulled from his bag a syringe, a sealed dish about the size of a can of tuna, and the small, blood-testing, PCR gadget. "Arm," he said.
She swiped at her eyes and complied silently. "Sleeve," he said.
She rolled up her sleeve. Her skin was bruised from all the bloodletting.
That was it. There was no I told you so. The abasement of a blood test was humiliation enough. Maryk gripped her arm and fastened a rubber tourniquet tightly around her tender biceps.
A window opened on Maryk's tablet. She heard Dr. Pearse's hoarse voice, as distinct as though he were there in the room with them.
"Hello, Peter," he said ghostily. "How goes the battle?"
She could barely see Dr. Pearse, his face long, his shoulders thin and sharp. She saw whiskers growing stubbly along his cheeks, light gray, nearly Maryk-white. He seemed to have aged even in the few hours since Melanie had left him. She felt a sort of confederacy with him since their private meeting, and wished he could see her there.
Maryk answered, "Contained. Another closed setting, same as Orangeburg, same as all the others."
Dr. Pearse sounded pleased. "It will end as the rest."
Melanie's hand had begun to throb. Maryk uncapped the syringe and she looked away, finding a crucifix on the wall. She had stumbled into the prison chaplain's office. Through the side window she could see out into the main hallway and a corner of the high, round guard station.
On the monitors there, yellow suits attended to other sheet-draped bodies in other units in other parts of the penitentiary.
Dr. Pearse sounded enthusiastic. "I'm through scanning for engineering markers-the gamma-ammo methionine hydrolase, et cetera. It's there, Peter. The human component I predicted."
"A graft," Maryk said. "No, Peter. Much more substantial than that. The Plainville RNA payload is insidiously complex, but it is a genetic code like any other, and I've broken it. Fascinating virus. It isn't merely resilient in adapting to changing environments, Peter: It is dictating the terms. It is re-jiggering nature and natural selection in order to ensure its survival. This thing is shuffling its own RNA makeup."
"I don't care how fascinating it is, Stephen. I want to know what you've found."
"It's there," he said. "As I told you it would be. You know how I wish it were not true. But Plainville contains verifiable complements o
f your DNA."
Melanie didn't know what to make of this, and she wouldn't, until Maryk explained it to her later. For now, she was just listening.
"Impossible," Maryk said, but with surprisingly little force. "I know your genetic makeup pattern better than I know my own. How else could your DNA be in the Plainville virus? It's the PeaMar transfusion and girl with vitiligo. It has to be."
Melanie felt the tourniquet release, and the pressure on her forearm eased, warmth returning to her wrist and hand. She hadn't even felt the needle stick. She looked back as Maryk emptied the tube of her blood into the sealed plastic dish. He mixed it with a few drops of clear fluid. "Here's what I have," Maryk said. "Looks like everything originated with a guard. He had just returned to work from a family camping vacation in the Carolinas. He was too far gone, but someone managed to get to his nine-year-old son who was still coherent. Standard contact tracing Q and A, minus the sexual queries."
Dr. Pearse was excited. "Yes?"
"A man. The boy said his father pulled over for a motorist stranded on the side of the highway. Which highway, the boy didn't know; he didn't even know which state. The father got out alone to offer assistance, and the motorist got out of the car to join him under the hood. The man apparently was ill. Exactly how ill is not clear, but very thin, the boy claimed, dressed in a medical mask, gloves, and what he described as a small, colorful hat without a brim, perhaps Re a toque."
"Yes! That's what Twenty-six was wearing in my bedroom." Maryk looked at him. "You're certain?"
"Of course I am. No other description?"
"No, and nothing on the car.
But while they were waiting, the nine-year-old asked his mother if he could get out and go to the bathroom. He didn't really have to go, he admitted to us; he was just bored. She let him go down the highway incline by himself."
Dr. Pearse sounded excited again. "Of course."
"The boy saw them standing together over the engine, as men do. He recalled two peculiar things about their conversation. One was that the motorist showed a lot of interest in the father's employment: what kind of prison it was, what his duties were as a guard. The other was that the sick man asked, twice, how far the father's penitentiary was from Atlanta."
There was a pause. "Atlanta," Dr. Pearse said, sounding as thrilled as his sickened voice would allow. "The virus has avoided Atlanta, Peter, hasn't it?"
"What do you mean?"
"Florida, South and North Carolina. Now Louisiana. It's not that much of a stretch. If you were a virus, which state in the union would you most likely avoid?"
"You mean -- if the virus was being spread by a human."
"Or behaving like one. You would want to keep clear of Georgia and the BDC. Now, by that same token, what if you decided you needed to sabotage the BDC? If you were a virus and wanted to go in and destroy the one institution you knew could stop you. What would you do, Peter? If you could discriminate between victims, and wanted to avoid detection. What would you do?"
Even Melanie, who barely knew Dr. Pearse, reacted to the odd cheerfulness in his voice. Maryk's eyes were dark as he formulated the answer. "I would go after the director," Maryk said.
She saw Dr. Pearse nodding. "He watched The Disease Dilemma show," he said. "And there I was, saying I attended to every outbreak.
That led directly to Orangeburg. We frustrated him by denying him his intelligence on the outbreaks, and so he lashed out, whoever he is. He was there. That same man. We represent his only unnatural opposition.
Once you start thinking about a motive, a human motive, a viral motive, it all falls into place."
"Then tell me this: How did he get out of a hospital full of BDC personnel?"
"I don't know. But I told you I felt like someone had been following me after I got back to Atlanta. I had seen a car driving back and forth outside my house. He followed me all the way to Arnagansett, Peter. He waited until he could get into my room. The survivors' names and addresses were in my tablet. Weren't they?"
Maryk said nothing. He did not even nod. Dr. Pearse went on enthusiastically. "You said there were only two possible outcomes for humans with Plainville, Peter. Die quickly, or seek immediate intervention and be cured. But what if there was a third? What if someone didn't die right away, and the virus had time to act on them?
The serum I hit the girl with in Africa, PeaMar4. Back then, PeaMar wasn't merely a synthetic blood substitute: We began the project with me working to transfuse the disease-fighting properties of your blood.
I was out to cure cancer and eradicate all viruses and bacteria all at once. That is why I gave it to the girl-as a preventive measure. But what if there was some sort of reaction? What if the unique viral inhibitors present in your blood-the attenuated killer cells loaded into PeaMar4-only slowed the viral spread throughout the body, but did not eradicate it?"
"Impossible," Maryk said. "A biological stalemate, allowing the virus time to take over the body without killing it."
"And?--"
"And -- I don't know. But I will tell you this: I'm close, Peter. I'm very close. Someone is knowingly spreading this disease. And I'm beginning to think that this someone may not be entirely human."
She felt a chill in the warm prison chaplain's office. Maryk's gray eyes were squinting, and he seemed put off by Dr. Pearse's inexplicably upbeat mood. "Reilly and Boone say you've been doing some electronic research," he said. "I'm close, Peter. Time is of the essence-for me, particularly. I know there's something out there now.
The moment I have anything, I'll let you know."
Maryk broke the fold of his arms to keystroke a command. "How is Melanie?" Dr. Pearse said. "How is she holding up?"
She tried to get a better look at him, remembering that he did not know she was there. As she looked at the screen, a small window opened over Dr. Pearse's image, a red bar expanding over a gauge growing quickly from zero to one hundred percent. A message flashed beneath it: CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN. Maryk unplugged the gadget and the red bar went out.
"She's fine," he said.
There was no night or day inside Lewes, no windows or clocks, only crudely made calendars upon which to Xout the dates. She napped in a chair while Maryk worked in the infirmary operating theater, and while he slept off his cascades she sat at the guard station off B unit and pondered her interrupted life, her interrupted body. She didn't feel whole anymore. She felt like something salvaged from a junkyard, something that Maryk had stitched together, just to see if he could get it to work.
His attitude toward her had changed since she fled B unit.
Properly humbled, she was now taken everywhere by him, in some strange way like a student. She stood by the cots as blankets were drawn off one prisoner after another, the sick continually unveiled. The shock of it was gone by then and each one looked the same to her. As Plainville stripped them of personality, it also seemed to strip them of their faults, their predatory natures, exposing the small, frail souls that live in all creatures. The smell too, like the unwavering tone in her ear, no longer dizzied her. The sounds inside the hermetically sealed prison block-moans, shuffling footsteps, creaking carts were like the sounds of her dreams. B unit was a tomb constructed of iron and concrete, and every noise was a long time dying away.
She stood inside the vacated cells. She looked out through the iron bars painted dull red, and saw where the paint had been picked away: pitifully pornographic nail scratches to wile away the time. She rested on concrete beds jutting out of concrete walls. She picked through the abandoned belongings: books stacked on the sean-Jess shelf above the toilet, unframed photographs curled from the incessant heat, rolled pairs of clean socks, false teeth. She riffled through Bibles thumbed to twice their original size, the cheap leather spines cracked, pages bookmarked with postcards, letters, photos. In one she found obscenities scratched into the New Testament margins, and reading them, she could hear the prisoner's perverted voice.
She was an apparition to them. She was a ghost. Sh
e wished she had something more to offer them than strangeness, mystery, distraction.
Maryk, on the other hand, comforted without caring to or even trying.
His manner alone consoled the condemned as he moved from bed to bed, working over each man with the same taciturn precision.
Their red, fevered eyes grew tame in his assured presence.
"Magnificent," he said, standing next to her later at the railing overlooking the unit from the corner of the highest her. She would have answered the incessant moaning with a long, shrill scream; Maryk lauded it. "The decay," he went on, looking like a man standing at the rail of a steamship leaving a quarantined port. "The utter rot." His words were blasphemous to her. She remembered hearing her father downstairs, and knowing from the direction of his groans that he was laid up in the living room, and knowing from their timbre that he was shivering: this man, her father. She and her brother had been forbidden to go downstairs. They had been forbidden even to see him.
Her mother brought them food and felt their foreheads and throats with a smooth gloved hand, brave at first, but becoming more and more emaciated with each visit, until finally she stopped coming at all.
Melanie held her brother -- for the first time, as well as the last -- and rocked him as he shivered in her arms, his eyes growing dull and viewing something farther and farther away. The phone still rang with sick, frightened voices that didn't know yet that her dad was gone away.
She had been among the last to feel anything, and as such, was a witness to it all. The long drive out to the hospital, through the dead town and the familiar, empty intersections, past men and women in yellow space suits pulling instruments across driveways and lawns. The grotesquely overgrown plants and trees. Earlier, she had euthanatized every pet in the kennel, rather than have them sicken and die alone.
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