Chuck Hogan

by The Blood Artists (epub)

  He had no answer for her immediately, which buoyed her. "What if I got sick again?" she said. "Simple," he said, sitting back now. "I would treat you." I "And if I refused? Resisted?"

  He said again, "I would treat you."

  "What if I ran? I told you before: I will never go through that treatment again."

  He looked at her with more than a glance now. He was taking her seriously. She wanted to be taken seriously. "What if my blood was no longer any good to you," she said, "and you knew that I would refuse treatment? What if I was going to run? Would you kill me too?"

  His gaze was penetrating. "Where would you go?"

  "Away. A remote island somewhere."

  "How would you get there without infecting others?"

  She held her own. "I'd find some way."

  "There is no way. And no safe place to go. Either one contains one's illness, or spreads it.

  There is no running away."

  "Then you would kill me."

  His arm went out as though sweeping a table clean. "My job is to protect the human race. To defend and preserve the species, and I'll do it any way I have to. Because I'm the only one who can. I am the last line of defense."

  That raised her eyebrows. That was the cascade talking. It made him seem vulnerable somehow, and she decided to try to pick his brain while it was soft. "Where does someone like you come from?" she said.

  "The same place everyone comes from."

  "I mean, where in the world?"

  He was gazing ahead now, only half there. "Skagit Valley. Northern Washington State. An hour north of Seattle, near Vancouver."

  "And you were raised there by wolves?"

  He nodded. "My father was a pediatrician," he said. "Like yours."

  She could have done without that information. "And your mother?"

  "She was a part-time church secretary. She called Bingo in the parochial school gymnasium Monday nights. She was blind."

  "She was blind and she called Bingo?"

  "The nun who ran the game was pathologically shy. She would pull the Ping-Pong balls and whisper numbers into my mother's ear, who would then announce them. It came out later that the nun was lying to my mother, routinely rigging the games for the poorest families of the parish to win. Bingo was canceled not long after that."

  "Was she born-you know-blind?"

  "No. She remembered images. Toys, pillows' chair legs. Linoleum floors. The unpainted undersides of tables. It was a childhood illness."

  Melanie's only point of reference was the Little House books, and Mary, the older sister, who went so valiantly blind from scarlet fever, whose god-fearing ways Melanie tried to emulate as a child.

  She thought she had something on him then. "That's why you became a virologist," she said.

  He said nothing at first, looking only bemused. I 'What?" she said.

  "That's something Stephen might have said. No, it was simpler than that. My father also had a tulip farm. One season, when I was eight or nine, the crop came up healthy in every way except the petals: reds and violets and yellows swirled together, similar to what you get when you stir one paint color into another. My mother always liked me to describe things to her, but those colors were one thing I could never get right. My father said a plant virus had caused it. Our crop sold for ten times the usual amount that year. I waited all summer and fall and winter, but next spring the tulips came up normal again. The virus never recurred."

  A nine-year-old Maryk in short pants, standing belt high among acres of psychedelic pastels. She grinned at the image, then remembered who she was dealing with. "No brothers, sisters?"

  He looked oddly bemused again, a look so wrong for his piercing face.

  "Actually, my mother was to have had twins," he said. "Her ultrasound showed two of us until her eighteenth week, when she experienced some complications. Her next test, taken her twenty-first week, showed only one fetus. This always bothered her. For some reason she thought it was significant, and told me this just before she died. All twins battle in the womb for space, nutrition. It starts that early-the pushing, the pulling. From what is now known about reproductive medicine, the most likely theory is that, whatever sibling I was to have, I absorbed in utero."

  He seemed to be not at all aware of how disturbing this bit of information was. "So you're like a twin all by yourself, that's what you're saying?"

  He sat up and pointed to his breast pocket. "Feel." The pocket appeared empty. She reached over, the tips of her fingers tentatively poking his starched white shirt over his heart, and felt nothing, and she was relieved at first. Then she pressed her palm fully against the hard, curved muscle of his left breast, and realized there was nothing there at all. "No heartbeat," she said. "Now here," She pressed against his right breast, and felt something beating inside. She snatched back her hand, feeling the sting of the opposing armrest as she struck it with her elbow.

  Maryk sat back, gazing out into the bustling crowd. "The organs in my body are reversed. The medical term is situs inversus. A mirror image, such as is seen in some separated Siamese twins."

  "You consumed your sibling," she said.

  He nodded. "Something like that." She wiped off her hand on her scrub pants. "Why are you telling me all this?"

  "Why are you asking?"

  "Good point," she said, wondering about that herself She was having trouble reconciling the odd, biologically inebriated man sitting across from her with the monster she knew him to be. "Do you see your father much?"

  "He still practices. Settled right into national health care.

  Staunch middle-class medicine: antibiotics, inoculations, strep throat cultures." This was all said disparagingly. "And you're not married. Except to your job."

  He squinted into the crowd, at nothing. Yet she suspected some part of him was enjoying this. "You think you have me at a disadvantage."

  "You do realize that most people with your biological whatever-it-is would just go wild. Take the worst risks then sleep it off, and the next day be fine and clean."

  She could tell by the puzzled look on his face that this thought had never occurred to him. "What about death?" she said. "If you can't get sick. You will die, won't you?"

  "Of course. The body breaks down, cells break down. We're dying all the time, our tissues disintegrating as we sit here, right now." He waved indolently, at the travelers, at nothing. "Death is constant. The termination event itself is merely an end to a process. Death is a sunset, no more. You don't fear a sunset."

  His bravura fascinated her, as much as she disbelieved it. His contempt was so forthright and unyielding that she found it endearing in a cranky sort of way. It appealed to her own innate pessimism. "I think I prefer you like this," she said. "You seem almost human."

  His gaze remained distant. "I didn't come here to be insulted."

  She watched him for a smile. "Benjamin Something," he said instead.

  Her own smile fell away. "What did you say?"

  "Can't remember his last name. The ticket agency worker. Benjamin Something." He spoke as though of a mutual acquaintance. "He seemed suitable. On paper, anyway."

  He was filling in the last few remaining gaps in her file. Any personal debacles she had tried to put behind her lived still and brightly in Maryk's mind. "I have a few rather disfiguring scars on my body," she said, "which I'm a bit overly sensitive about. This tends to rule out any danger of intimacy with the opposite sex." She heard herself trying to pass off desperation as aloofness, denigrating that which was forbidden her. She was the poor, grumbling about the rich.

  With a shudder she realized that Maryk knew her better than anyone else. It reminded her again how much she resented him. "You know what?" she said. "I think some people are like viruses. Some people just take, and if they give you anything at all, it's something you don't want."

  This seemed to register inside his muddled head, reflected in his eyes, which sharpened in their view over the lounge and held there a moment before retreating aga
in. He hadn't liked that comparison at all.

  A bickering couple passed them, hot coffee dripping off the man's jacket cuff. They thought of sitting nearby, but a shared glance at Maryk made them reconsider. They faded away and Melanie was all business again. "Why 'Milkmaid'?" she said.

  He squinted. "That was about Jenner. Edward Jenner, who discovered the cure for smallpox. Wordplay. The 'milkmaid' who launched his work, the 'lancet' he used to open the boil, the cow named 'Blossom.'"

  "Inelegant. If I had to do it over again, I would use Pasteur instead."

  He glanced at her then, as though having decided something, and leaned forward interrogationally. "I am going to tell you a story that will change your life," he said.

  She doubted that. "I could use a change."

  "Eighteen eighty-five. Alsace, France. A nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister, on his way to school, is mauled savagely by a rabid dog and barely survives.

  "Rabies, what the French call la rage, was well feared in that day. Fever, depression, throat convulsions, progressing to mania, characteristic foaming at the mouth, eventual paralysis, and death.

  "There was no cure and no treatment. A local doctor cauterized the worst of the boy's wounds and, having reached the limits of his abilities, advised Madame Meister to travel to Paris to call upon Dr. Louis Pasteur. Pasteur was not a physician. Pasteur was a chemist, a scientist. The idea of germs fascinated him, and he was experimenting at the time with the germs of dead animals, ones he had weakened in the laboratory. His work would eventually lead to the discovery of viruses, but at that time, the idea of invisible particles causing disease was considered pure fancy. Meister became Pasteur's first human trial. Pasteur inoculated him with a solution mixed from the spinal cords of rabbits recently dead from rabies. This was only the second human vaccine in history, after Jenner's, but the first to be manufactured in a laboratory and derived from the same infective agent that caused the disease. The boy survived. He was spared the ravages of la rage. Modem human virology finds its genesis in Pasteur's pioneering work, and yet he was misunderstood by many of his time. Most of his colleagues could not see the whole of the canvas upon which he was working.

  "But that's all regular history and well enough known. It is at this point that history abandons the boy. Joseph Meister never wavered in his devotion to the man who saved his life and, fittingly, grew up to become the gatekeeper at the Institute Pasteur years after his savior's death. Joseph Meister was guarding the gate in 1940 when the Nazis marched into Paris. They ordered him to open Pasteur's crypt, but Meister refused, and instead took his own life in protest."

  Melanie hung in the ensuing silence. "He killed himself," she said. "That's your life changing story?"

  For the first time that night, Maryk seemed fully awake. "Meister destroyed himself rather than be part of the desecration of the memory of the artist who had preserved his life. And history gives him nothing. Well-if seventy-six years can be considered history. In truth it is the blink of an eye." He sat up again, interested. "Think of that. Seventy-six years ago, the first human being ever to be inoculated with a lab-prepared vaccine died. Three quarters of a century; it's nothing. And penicillin: discovered by accident, less than one hundred years ago. People have already forgotten that strep throat was until only recently a fatal disease. We've had a century's parole from bacterial slaughter-and now our time is running out again. Antibiotics are failing and diseases, are once again outpacing the remedies. Do you know how our time will be remembered?"

  Melanie shook her head.

  "As a flash of light between great periods of darkness. If our so-called modern age is remembered at all. Earth is something like three and a half billion years old; mankind, a few million. We are infants crawling upon this rock, protozoa from a pond, who crawled out of the oceans, who dropped down from the trees. Dinosaurs presumed the world was theirs as well. We are a fungus spreading over this planet, colonizing, warring, consuming. The Earth is a cell we are infecting. And nature is the Earth's immune system, just now sensing the threat of our encroachment, and arming itself to fight back. Macro versus micro. Viruses are the Earth's white blood cells. We are the Earth's disease."

  Melanie smiled haltingly in defense of the human race. "But nobody could really believe that. Not even you. Look at the environment. The more we learn about the earth, the better we behave."

  He waved it all away. "Folly. Like bees getting together and deciding not to pollinate. Like termites voting whether or not to chew through wood. Man will consume his environment. Every form of life from the smallest to the largest contributes something to the earth's ecology, repaying the overall system, except for two species: rats and man. Man is a thief, a scavenger, a hunter-gatherer, a survivor. That is all."

  "Then why do you fight for him? Why defend and preserve the species at all if as you say it will endure of its own, I don't know, villainy?"

  He said nothing, and she came upon the answer herself.

  "Because you are the ultimate man. You are the ultimate consumer. You think you're different, but in fact, you are the ultimate survivor."

  He stared at her, and a glimmer passed across his face-as though he were remembering suddenly that he was impaired and that things might not be necessarily as they seemed. He turned to face the lounge again.

  He said, "That's the sort of thing Stephen would have said."

  "You said that before. What does that mean? That I'm like him? Or that I'm not like you? Because I can tell you for a fact: I am not like you."

  But he wasn't listening to her. Melanie heard their flight being called overhead, and she turned and looked out across the tarmac to the giant airplanes lifting off into the night, chasing the sunset that no one feared. She dreaded their return to Atlanta.

  Maryk stiffed himself awake just after takeoff, as sour jet air coursed through the cabin. The wider seats of first class did little to ease his claustrophobia but the cascade had passed and his thinking was again clear.

  A flash outside drew his eye to the window. He watched as a flutter of light suffused the dark membrane of clouds below. A similar burst throbbed miles away and was answered by another closer to the airplane.

  Then it was as though a fuse had been lit. A succession of eruptions like flashbulbs beat all.along the silent plain of the sky.

  Maryk leaned into the window and watched as the atmosphere below him erupted. They were flying over a fierce electrical storm. He looked down and thought of synapses pulsing over the one-celled earth.

  He felt the need to share this with someone. He looked back to Melanie on the other side of the empty seat separating them. She was wrapped shoulders to feet in a thin blue blanket. He could see the outline of her crossed arms rising and falling steadily. She was asleep. He instead reached over and eased her chair into a reclining position.

  She mumbled and turned over to face him but did not wake.

  He looked back out the window and the sky beneath the airplane was only intermittently bright as the last silent bursts of light faded behind the tail.

  His tablet toned on the empty seat. He opened it and Reilly appeared in a window from somewhere inside the BDC. His image was distorted by the electrical activity. He said something and Maryk asked him to repeat it. "Director Pearse escaped B4,- Reilly said.

  Maryk was a long moment digesting this. "How?" he said.

  Stephen had requested a contact suit earlier in the day. It was one of a half dozen items Reilly and Boone had imported into B4 for him. He walked out wearing it one hour after their shift ended and surprised the BioCon agent posted at the elevator. He was wearing the contact suit and walking with his cane. He asked her to step away before he took her tablet. The guard at the gate recalled a suited man driving a light green car but had not recorded the license plate.

  Seeing a man in a contact suit leave the BDC was like seeing a man in uniform leave an army base. "He took nothing else?" Maryk said.

  "We've been through B4 top to bottom."
r />   "Neither one of you thought to ask him what he wanted a suit for?"

  "Our instructions were clear: Anything Director Pearse wants, Director Pearse gets. We told you he was getting weird. I thought it was maybe his mind starting to go.

  "Now I think he was onto something."

  "Tap into the B4 drives. I want a rundown of anything he was looking into."

  Reilly said, "Already started that. I'll post it as soon as it's done."

  Maryk's thoughts ran wild. Stephen had taken the extraordinary precaution of putting on a suit. But a suit is only meant to protect the person inside. He was a walking viral bomb and still toxic to anyone unprotected in a confined space.

  He had walked off in violation of federal quarantine and had recently been acting suspiciously. Maryk knew the bizarre things that Plainville could do to the mind.

  All this came to a head as his tablet toned again with another incoming message. This one was text only and the sender was Stephen Pearse.

  The message had been posted from a location one hundred and eighty miles south of Atlanta. It read PETER COME AT ONCE.

  The Swamp

  The Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and Wilderness Area ranged more than four hundred thousand acres. It was the largest and most primitive swamp in North America. Maryk's tablet trace showed that Stephen was six miles in. A road ran most of the way.

  He waited next to Melanie while the BDC helicopter rounded the northern tip of the swamp. She still wore scrubs and sneakers and was staring out her window into the Georgia dawn and the vast swamp undulating below. "Why would he leave," she said, "knowing he is contagious?"

  "I don't know."

  "What are you going to do if he doesn't want to come back?"

  He found her naiveté no longer amusing and recently declined to respond.

  Maryk had received Stephen's computer searches. Stephen had downloaded forty years of voting registers for the town of Plainville, Massachusetts. He had also downloaded ten years of so-called annual manifestos put out by the Rainforest Ecology Conservation International in Africa. Nothing was highlighted on either document. Stephen had also accessed a January 2012 issue of Audubon Magazine and sent off a request to the MacArthur Foundation for information on the current address of one of its fellowship recipients.