Chuck Hogan
Page 21
She had held each little unsuspecting head as their bodies went limp.
At the hospital, she had waited for death. She was selected from the common room without knowing why, too frightened to ask. She was rolled away on a gurney past the specters of her neighbors and family and friends, the people of her life, laid out like radiation victims in the hospital corridors. She was left naked under a bedsheet in a hospital bay, a white curtain drawn around her. It felt like death.
She hoped the wait would be brief. Her mind left her body for places she had never been, leaving her eyes behind.
Melanie broke out of her reverie as a yellow form brushed past her in a surge of power, toward Maryk on the parapet, prevailing upon him to come away. There was an urgency to their exchange. The person in the suit glanced back at her, and for a moment Melanie struggled to place the face.
It was her gynecologist, Dr. Freeley. There was the sudden shock of recognition, followed by an odd stab of betrayal; but both impulses passed almost immediately. She was becoming conditioned to withstand these broadsides.
It was startling to see Dr. Freeley, a person Melanie had known to be nearly mannequin in her emotions, so alarmed. Maryk stiffened at her words and let go of the rail, and Melanie drew closer, wondering if the news could have something to do with Dr. Pearse, or the sick man they wanted to find. But Dr.. Freeley could not whisper and hope to be heard through her hood. "Broken quarantine," Melanie heard her say.
"Three inmates. One of our vans. Just escaped."
Maryk started away before Dr. Freeley could finish, his rubber soles pounding down to the caged stairwell at the far end of the her.
Dr. Freeley turned and started the other way, back toward Melanie, and Melanie turned then and started moving too, moving away from Dr. Freeley, striding more and more quickly past the cots, the cells, the men-all in a blur. If it was a race, she lost; as Melanie reached the UV chamber door, a black rubber suit hand struck out from behind her and hit the lock release. The door hissed open, and she and Dr. Freeley stepped inside.
Blue lights hummed on. The cobalt glow filled Melanie with a feeling of wordlessness, as though anyplace and anytime might be waiting behind that second door; even Plainville, five years before, and she would be given another chance.
She looked up at Dr. Freeley's flawless blue face. It was sealed within the protective glass like something either incredibly precious or too hazardous to touch. "Is my dentist here too?" Melanie said.
The stranger things became, the easier it was to affect a casual bravado about them. The second door opened on the main corridor, and Dr. Freeley paced Melanie down to the guard station, gripping her arm roughly and presenting her to the suited man there. "Watch her," Dr. Freeley said, pushing her forward. Melanie, stunned, watched her yellow form stride away.
Maryk drove slowly out past the front gate. The lights of the assembled media came on and flooded the entrance but then went off again when they saw that it was just another BDC van. He rolled through the BioCon checkpoint and took his time down the darkened road until he was certain he was not being followed. Two roads later he was on the county route doing eighty.
Freeley sat next to him with her window open. Her glistening suit exuded Pheno and bleach as she replayed the surveillance camera scene for him on her tablet. "They were left alone for less than a minute," she told him. "One cut himself purposefully on the arm. His blood threat was their ticket out."
On the tablet screen he watched a replay of the three inmates breaking through a locked door. He watched them confront a suited BDC technician and force him behind the wheel of a van as they piled into the back. "No one saw them at the gate," Freeley said. "They hid in back until they were cleared through. All three were up for murder," Maryk roared past a yellow pickup truck full of farm kids who cheered the van's speed, "How healthy are they?"
"We had them on Milkmaid's serum, but it was too late. Each was starting to fail." She consulted a grid map on her tablet. "We're six minutes behind them. Less than twenty miles from New Orleans. They'll try to disappear there."
Maryk re-gripped the wheel. He forced the pedal and the van shook as his speed climbed to ninety miles per hour. "They'll try to break off the quarantine anklets first," he said, He felt the tires slide as he veered sharply around a turn. "They need to switch vehicles. They need clothes."
Freeley said, "There's a naval station in the area. We could call ahead, throw roadblocks up around the city. New Orleans and vicinity means over a million people."
Maryk simply shook his head. She monitored the electronic anklet trace on her tablet. Then: "They're turning off. Stopping. A residential road, only three addresses."
"How far outside?"
"Ten miles outside New Orleans. Four minutes ahead of us."
Maryk reached the turnoff in just under three. He cut the engine and rolled in along a thin dirt road until he saw the van parked beside a converted barn-garage next to a house. The house was two stories high with weathered wood siding and a new wraparound porch. It was dark.
The land in back was considerable and neither of the other two houses was in sight.
They slipped out and crossed to the getaway van. Maryk looked in through the parted rear window curtain and saw the technician lying bloodied and motionless over the wheel hump. His suit was shredded around him.
Freeley started around to the rear of the house while Maryk walked to the front. He climbed two steps and crossed the wooden porch to the door. It was unlocked. He opened it and the door swung wide and banged against the jam and swung back rattling. He made no attempt at stealth. He heard the sound of footsteps shuffling inside. Then he heard nothing.
The black spots on the wood landing inside the door were drops of pathogenic blood. He stepped onto the shadowed threshold with his bag in his right hand.
A short hallway ahead of him led to a larger room with windows showing the rear porch and the long backyard. A flight of stairs to his left climbed to the second floor. To his immediate right was a sitting room. He could make out chairs and a fireplace inside. The chain curtain over the mouth of the fireplace was swaying.
Maryk entered the doorway. He stood there and listened. "Come out," he said.
A hefty shadow in an orange prison jumper rose from behind the wide back of a brocaded chair. It was a large man and he kept rising.
He gripped the sides of the broad chair and muscled it across the dark wood floor to show that he didn't usually hide from anyone. The chair toppled over a short bookcase and glass shattered delicately. Then the house was silent again. Maryk listened to the prisoner's breathing and watched his shoulders heave.
The prisoner waggled a finger. "Come on here," he said. "I'll just breath in your face."
Maryk reached down and unfastened the buckles of his bag. He noticed lesions on the man's thick neck and heard the fluttering of his dissolving lung tissue. He saw the characteristic early-stage masking of the face. Standing across the room from him was a hulking virus in an orange prison jumpsuit.
Maryk set his open bag down on an end table. "You made the mistake of killing your only hostage," Maryk said. "Looks like no one is home."
The prisoner shifted and the farmhouse floorboards creaked. His voice was ludicrously low. "You'll do just about fine."
Maryk's right hand went into his bag as his heart rate accelerated comfortably. He pulled out a syringe. "Breaking quarantine is a federal offense."
The prisoner looked at the syringe in Maryk's hand and smiled. He raised his meaty hands into a listless street fighter's stance. "What you gonna do with that?" he said.
Maryk remained still. The syringe remained at his side. The prisoner came at him. He moved lumberingly and raised his big arms to strike as Maryk ducked out of the way. The prisoner lurched past and slipped on a throw rug in the doorway and thundered headlong into the hallway wall. The staircase above him rattled.
The prisoner turned but Maryk was upon him. He braced the prisoner's neck with his f
orearm and forced the man's Adam's apple up into his larynx as he spun the syringe in his hand. He gripped it needle-down and drove it into the prisoner's chest. The needle slipped neatly between the man's ribs and pierced the pericardium sac of his heart.
The prisoner's face burst wide.
Maryk thumbed the plunger and voided the barrel. The prisoner choked on a sucking breath as Maryk broke off the needle in his chest and stepped back. The prisoner's legs buckled and he collapsed on all fours in the night light through the open front door.
Maryk retrieved his bag from the end table in the sitting room.
The prisoner was lying on his side and issuing a series of agonal gasps as Maryk stepped past him into the short hallway.
A small shadow that was a second prisoner sprang from a closet ahead and crossed the wide living room. He scrambled over the sofa to another fireplace and picked up the largest piece of kindling wood he could find. He weighed it like a baseball bat as Maryk stepped into the room. The carpeting was plush and silent underfoot. The prisoner tried swinging the wood one-handedly before settling on a clublike grip.
He had light brown skin and weblike tattoos that laced his hands.
He did not appear as visibly ill as the first prisoner.
Maryk was laboring under deep intoxicating breaths. His black bag shook slightly in his hand. He remained aware of his back at all times.
Maryk feinted suddenly toward the sofa. The prisoner retreated a quick step and then stopped and brandished the club anew. He uttered a low grunt and gave the weapon a threatening half swing. Maryk countered with another feigned step and the prisoner again jerked back and this time jostled the leg of a small parlor table. Chessmen thumped to the carpet. The prisoner reset himself and brought the wooden club down on the table leg with a solid crack. This seemed to invigorate him.
The blood rush in Maryk's head and the force of his breathing built to a crescendo. At once he reached inside his bag and started forward.
This time the prisoner did not retreat. He did not have the chance. A yellow blur that was Freeley burst out from a side room and brought a syringe down slashing with both gloved hands.
The prisoner screamed. The wood sprang from his hands and he went down hard with the syringe buried in his neck. Freeley did not let go and worked the plunger with a combative wail. The prisoner writhed and gurgled beneath her. His shoe heels kicked adamantly at the wall as Freeley broke off the syringe in his neck and stood.
There was a noise upstairs. Maryk turned to the narrow staircase and mounted it in four strides, There was blood on the handrail at the top.
His shoes whisked over a worn Oriental runner along the length of the open second-floor hall. The closed doors were old with glass knobs and key locks. Flea market reproductions had been hung to cover the textured paper peeling off the walls.
He moved through the open door at the end of the hall into a master bedroom. An afghan was folded at the foot of the quilted bedspread and a glass dish of holy water was screwed next to the door.
There was blood smeared on the glass knob leading to a half bath.
Maryk eased the door open with his foot before entering all at once and throwing aside a frilly shower curtain.
The glazed window inside was open and there was blood on the crank handle and sill. Maryk looked out onto the roof and saw an orange form dropping off the gutter. He looked across the long black yard to the wide swollen Mississippi River moving in the distance.
Maryk walked to the back door downstairs. He strode out alone over the stiff grass. He smelled the salt of the river and could feel it rushing ahead of him like the blood pushing through his veins. The limping prisoner looked back and saw Maryk coming and renewed his efforts. He was running toward the riverbank. "Right," the prisoner said finally. He had fallen exhausted to his knees in the muddy salt grass. "All right." He turned to face Maryk. "I'll go back."
They were twenty yards or so from the great moving river. The prisoner raised his arms toward Maryk and his bloody sleeve billowed in the night breeze. Most of his hair was already gone and his face was spent and fading. This prisoner was the sickest of the three.
Maryk allowed him to struggle to his feet before driving the needle into his chest. The prisoner stiffened and looked at Maryk with flaring red eyes before he fell.
Maryk left him gasping up at the dark night sky and continued the short distance to the river bank. The familiar weight of the cascade thickened his mind and welled behind his eyes like sleep. He shed his cowl, cap, and face mask as he stood exhausted on the hard dirt bank and looked upriver. A broad halo of light glowed against the dark sky.
It was a sleeping city of one million human beings.
Melanie saw their van return on a guard station monitor and was allowed to go to the underground garage. She came upon it bel-rig unloaded in a brightly lit side room. She noticed immediately the dark dirt splashed on its tires.
The van was empty. Dr. Freeley was speaking with some other BioCon agents while Maryk stood at the passenger's door, away from her.
He was looking at his face in the long side mirror. His headgear was gone, his white hair matted back and down.
Dr. Freeley was informing the men about some death certificates she had already written. Melanie heard her update the agents on a house being biocleaned a few miles away.
Maryk turned from the van door. He came forward a few steps before seeing Melanie there. He had a drowsy look in his eyes, and at once she noted the sluggishness of his manner, the guarded way he stood before her, like a practiced drunk. It struck her cold. "You murdered them," she realized.
Freeley looked up, but Maryk did not answer. He frowned and lurched past her out of the room.
Pasteur's Crypt
She waited with Maryk away from the nighttime travelers streaming through the New Orleans airport, seated alone among a row of hard plastic chairs along a cold wall of windows. Airplanes rolled on the taxiways behind them, and she had that feeling she always had in airports, of being among giants.
Within an hour of his return to Lewes B unit, Maryk decided he was through there; she guessed it had something to do with his cascade, and his concern about Dr. Pearse. A helicopter had ferried them to the airport, and now they were waiting for the flight back to Atlanta.
"Viruses love airports," Maryk said. "Vital organs, located at every major human population center, catapulting incubators from city to city all over the world. The circulatory system of human civilization."
He sat too heavily and too large for the chair, his big legs extended clumsily and crossed at the ankles, his eyes low and turned to the bustling terminal beyond. He was deep into one of his funks, and she wanted no part of him. "Three phases of public response to an epidemic," he said. "First: Denial. That occurred during the original outbreak in Plainville. The Search for Blame is what Ms we're into now, with the press. If the epidemiology continues to elude us and the virus strikes again, then the BDC will be made the scapegoat. Phase three is the Demand for Action. The blood response.
In previous ages this meant burning down the houses of the sick, and the aristocracy fleeing into the hills. But there are no hills remote enough anymore. No oasis that doesn't have a road running through it.
And no foreigners foreign enough to blame. The ecosystem is sealed and starting to cook. House burning is all."
This pleased him, of course. She was cold and sat with her bare arms crossed, trying to ignore him. Maryk had changed back into his standard outfit of white shirt and black pants, but she had not brought any clothes other than the hospital scrubs she had been issued back at the BDC. A large monitor suspended from the ceiling broadcast weather reports from various destinations, and she saw footage of snow piling up in Boston.
Standing beneath the monitor flipping through Newsweek magazine was a red-haired man in a brown leather jacket and latex gloves, who looked a lot like the custodian at the Emory cafeteria. "You're not doctors," Melanie said quietly.
Maryk was slow to respond. "Viral containment," he said.
"Halting its spread throughout the species. That is my job."
She said, "Doctors heal people."
"A host either contains its illness, or seeks to spread. Those who seek to spread have to be stopped."
"Killed, you mean." She felt another airplane-an immense, winged incubator-roll behind them. "I think I understand you now," she said.
"Your perspective. Who you are, where you're coming from. The prisoners, the other medical people there in suits: We walked among them like gods. I didn't like it."
"You felt it, though."
"They feared you. They feared me."
"They fear the battle. They fear exposure. Infection is a challenge. It is Nature calling us out. Fight, she says. Fight for your life, your existence. Survive, she dares. Endure."
"Of course you'd say that. You haven't the slightest idea what it's like to be sick."
Sarcasm, or perhaps amusement, registered on his face. "Tell me, then," he said. "I can't."
"What it's like. To be sick."
"You can't just say it." She frowned at his sleepy eyes. "I could list symptoms, but you know symptoms. It has nothing to do with that anyway.
Everything changes."
"Changes."
"That's right."
"Everything."
"Life, living. Perspective. Priorities."
"It simplifies things."
"If that's what you call it when your options are reduced."
"Fear, then."
"Yes, fear. Are you asking for yourself, or for Dr. Pearse?"
That quieted him. He sat up a bit, and the row of chairs rocked.
"Perhaps you're curious," she said, pursuing it. "What it must be like for him. Losing control of your own body: That's the fear. Awareness that you have no control over your own body, really. Nobody does.
That's what changes. You acquire this privileged knowledge about the human condition, and slowly it becomes hysteria. You've never even had a head cold. How can you know what health is?"