Chuck Hogan

by The Blood Artists (epub)

  They set down upon a local highway on the edge of the refuge and transferred into three waiting Park Services Jeeps. The road deteriorated inside the swampland and ended altogether at a state park, where Freeley was waiting with a BioCon unit. They had matched the license plate of a car in the parking lot to a vehicle missing from the BDC fleet. She was pulling on a contact suit as Maryk approached. "I didn't think he could even walk," she said.

  Maryk said, "He walks fine."

  "What if he had gone to an airport?"

  "He didn't."

  "It's a trap." Maryk was impatient. "Then I guess I'm falling for it." A ranger's assistant warned of swamp vegetation rivaling that of a South American jungle. One recent hiker who violated the No Camping rule had been missing for more than six weeks.

  The terrain was full of sawgrass and cutting underbrush too dangerous for contact suits. Freeley and BioCon had to wait for path-clearing tools.

  The ranger offered to guide Maryk inside but Maryk declined. He did accept the man's offer of a self-inflating Zodiac launch and a small outboard motor but he could not carry them both with his black bag. He saw Melanie standing away from the rest. She was watching him. "You can stay here, or you can help," he said.

  She considered it only a moment. She came forward and took his tablet and his bag.

  They pushed into the dense growth on foot. Melanie took the lead as Maryk ported the heavy marine equipment through the sinking earth.

  The return to a jungle setting struck him as somehow appropriate.

  It took them less than an hour to reach the source of the Hailing signal. Stephen's tablet was set upon an inlet stump at the head of a dead stream that had recently seen passage. A trail of black water split the emerald scum THE BLOOD, ARTISTS 229 crusted along the facing banks. The tablet screen read PETER COME ALONE.

  At the base of the tree stump was a damp rope greened with slime.

  Maryk looked out at the still black path of water. The Zodiac. It self-inflated and he set it afloat and attached the outboard motor. He climbed aboard. The black rubber floor of the launch was soft and sun roughened and Maryk squatted on his knees for balance.

  He turned to start the motor and saw Melanie still waiting on the mud bank. She was watching him accusingly. She was holding his black bag.

  He stopped with the cord in his hand. "You're not going to kill him," she said. "Everybody has a choice," he said. "Containment, or spread. Do you trust Stephen to have chosen correctly?"

  She came forward with his bag and climbed inside. "It's you I don't trust." She squatted down into the bow as he returned to the cord. He pulled it twice and the engine erupted and settled into an even growl.

  He pushed off and piloted the launch away from the bank.

  Melanie picked hair out of her face as they puttered along the course described by the cleaved scum. She seemed content to kneel in front and survey the dense shores of the dead stream. The path of black water veered eastward into the sunlight and she reached up and cleared away vines that dropped like streamers into their path. Maryk cut the engine farther ahead and drifted as he listened to the shore.

  The croaks and bird cries and rustling of legs along the muddy brush had faded. They were entering a strangely quiet part of the swamp.

  He saw the first Plainville plant ahead on their right. Veins burst from the remaining midrib leaf spines like wiry arms and thickened into cordlike spindles. There was another immediately after it along the same dark patch of ground. Its leaf blades had curled and frayed and erupted in color that had since decayed to varied hues of gray and black. Both growths appeared to have once been common ferns.

  They moved past a stunted Plainville tree that had suffered an aberrant surge of growth before dying. He watched Melanie's head turn to a profile as they floated past its outreaching branches. She slid away to the opposite side of the small boat.

  The stream path angled right and ended at a small island. Maryk steered onto a worn dirt slip next to an older Zodiac launch with faded lettering along its scum-ringed sides. They disembarked onto a well-trodden path that had seen heavy things dragged over it.

  They stopped under another savage tree. The wood was barkless and blistered and swirled into inscrutable knots. Its sulfur-yellow roots had erupted and burrowed back down again into the mire like elbows trying to raise the trunk from the earth. "This is the virus?" she said quietly.

  Maryk nodded. "Why isn't it spreading?" The Plainville plants and trees lay in dark patches surrounded by healthy flora. Maryk looked up at the wide rifts in the canopy and the morning sunlight beating through. "Sunlight," he said. "A natural barrier." It was the same as it had been in Africa. All viruses fell apart when exposed to the sun's ultraviolet rays.

  She stayed close to him as the footpath led to a long structure draped in canvas. It was some twenty yards in length and appeared to be a series of camping tents stitched together. Camouflaging branches and leaves littered the mismatched roofs.

  A door flap had been cut into the near corner. Maryk lifted it from the bottom and listened before entering. The smell that escaped was pungent. Melanie started to gag but Maryk pulled her the rest of the way inside.

  Spears of dusty daylight burned down through slashes in the canvas roof. Maryk's eyes adjusted to wooden workbenches along both walls and a central row of rough-hewn tables. He saw dairy pails nearby, bottles of chemicals, and measuring devices and scales. There was a heavy press, a bucket of dirty syringes, and knives as well as other anatomizing instruments.

  Dead Plainville plants sat in heaps of burst pottery and dry soil.

  They clutched at the tables like ivy. Scores of small dead carcasses lay flayed on the center tables in varying stages of dissection. Maryk guessed they might have been rats. "Oh my --" Melanie recoiled and grabbed for the door flap behind them.

  Maryk gripped her arm and pulled her ahead. They passed a discarded BDC contact suit lying atop a work space. A blistered plant arm had grown over it.

  At the end of the rows of worktables stood dozens of small metal cages filled with decomposing rats. As many as eight to a cage were rotted with Plainville. The odor there was as thick as steam. Melanie began to cough and retch and tugged on him. Maryk released her and he went on alone.

  Plainville plants in clay pots filled the dark floor space from the middle of the tent to the far canvas wall. The colors were ferocious and thriving as though choked to brilliance. The plants had erupted from their arranged pots and slithered outward along the dirt ground as though dragging themselves forward. Maryk waded in among them. Some lay unmolested in an -open space of dirt as though respected or feared.

  Their bright leaves gleamed as though with perspiration and their tentacular stems and wildly textured leaves scorned nature. Shards of busted pottery lay wound in vinelike branches as though in the grip of florid fists.

  Maryk heard a weak voice behind him. "I came here to kill him, Peter."

  Stephen was standing inside the door flap. A ray of daylight through the torn canvas above lit his surgical skullcap and shadowed the recesses of his face. "He's not here," he continued. "But he knows we are. I set off a silent alarm."

  "Stephen." Maryk moved past Melanie toward him. "Outside," Stephen said. He pushed through the canvas flap and daylight shone in profanely.

  Maryk rushed out after him. There was a wooden bench set in front of the tent and Stephen was making his way to it. He moved well with the cane but his physical appearance had further declined. He was drenched in sweat and impossibly thin. The sores about his arms and legs had darkened and massed and bled. He looked like a cadaver. He looked as though he were brittling into wood.

  Melanie came gagging through the tent door behind Maryk. One look at Stephen calmed her. She fought down a swallow.

  Stephen showed her a much-weakened grin. "Hello, Melanie," he said.

  Maryk said, "What is this, Stephen?"

  "A hiding place. He couldn't spread his virus indiscriminately. He needed a pla
ce where he could live freely. He wanted only controlled outbreaks, remember?"

  "Who, Stephen?"

  "Plainville's Patient Zero. Something incredible has happened here, Peter. I need you to keep an open mind."

  Maryk's concerns about Stephen's mental health were being realized.

  "Plainville was more than four years ago," he said. "Just tell me-what is this place?"

  Stephen motioned with a wooden hand for patience. "An open mind," he said. "I was thinking about the girl in Africa, assuming that she had been infected and also gotten the experimental serum. I was thinking what it must have done to her. She would have been like a walking laboratory, Peter, like lightning in a bottle. I decided that there had to be a secondary transmission, even though we knew there had been no other reported cases in that region. So I started to think. The only other people near the camp, aside from the Pygmies, was the RECI group. I called up a list of their scientists, and on a whim cross-referenced it with the Plainville voting register. It was that simple, Peter. One name came up on both lists. Oren Ridgeway, a botanist out of the University of Michigan. He returned to the states from his RECI tour just two weeks after the firebombing of the camp."

  "Oren Ridgeway?" said Melanie.

  They both turned to her. Stephen said, "You knew him?"

  She retreated somewhat. "The family," she said. "He worked summers in my dad's office. He was a few years older than I was."

  "Fascinating," said Stephen. He returned to Maryk. "Assume Ridgeway came into direct contact with the African girl. It couldn't have gone any farther than that in Africa, or else we'd have seen it, seen victims."

  Maryk interrupted. "We backtracked after Plainville. We posted the RECI to see if any of their people had gotten sick. The answer was no."

  "Of course. But something tripped the virus into lying latent, some mutation inside the girl. Ridgeway showed no symptoms, and brought it back here unknowingly. Then a year or so later-on a trip to his parents in his hometown, I assume-it erupted. The virus emerged there in three places simultaneously. In the schools: he may have stopped in for a visit with his old teachers. In the pediatrician's office." He looked at Melanie. "A 'hello' to your father, perhaps. And the town hall: His mother worked for the town clerk."

  Maryk had been trying to break in. "Plainville does not lie latent," he said. "No one who contracts it survives two weeks, never mind-"That was the PeaMar4. The viral inhibitors from your blood reacted with the virus from the girl; By the time it spread to Ridgeway, a sort of symbiosis had been reached. The virus was softened up, but not killed, and attained something like equilibrium with his body. The impossible was then suddenly possible."

  Maryk said, "How do you know all this?"

  "I know it, Peter. I know it. The goal of every active virus is to change the host cell-to transform the host into a copy of the virus.

  Not to kill, but to coexist; to preserve a viable host so that the virus may survive and endure. And this has always been biologically impossible. Until now."

  Stephen looked at him fire-eyed. "You've got to open your mind to this, Peter. Under normal conditions, either the immune system battles the virus into submission, or the virus continues unabated and consumes the host. But not here. Here communion has been achieved. Rather than plundering and killing Ridgeway's immune cells, the mutated virus instead began transforming them, successfully, exponentially, into virus cells, exactly as it is supposed to, only this time, it worked. Plainville is the first successful virus. It is not lying dormant in him; it is active, it is thriving. It is one with him. It has transformed this Oren Ridgeway into a human Plainville vector."

  Maryk resisted this at the same time it started to make sense.

  "First of all," he said, "how did you find this place?" He needed to understand it all logically.

  "A few months before Plainville, Ridgeway won a MacArthur Foundation grant of $345,000 for his work documenting and preserving expiring species of flora here in the Okefenokee Refuge. He gave away every dime to radical environmental groups for the first two years, then dropped out of sight. An article in a back issue of Audubon led me here. Most of these supplies-the boat, the instruments-are pilfered from his original camp, now abandoned, less than a kilometer away. Something drew me from there to this place. It was almost like I could smell the plants, Peter. Right through my suit. I feel close to him."

  Maryk ignored this. "Then, those plants, inside?"

  "He was learning. He was planning his infection, but patiently, over four years' time. He was methodical. A virus must infect-that is all it knows and all it wants to do. But now the virus has taken human form: It has a brain, it has reasoning capacities and an understanding of the way humans work to fight disease. It has the best of both existences, virus and man. The outbreaks were tests. He was taking human samples, the same way we take viral samples, in order to measure his infective progress. Not indiscriminately, because he knew we would trace that. "I think that Plainville was most likely a mistake. It was his first time, he may not have known what was happening to him yet. But we covered up the subsequent outbreaks, which led finally to Orangeburg. He tried to take me out and the entire BDC with me."

  Maryk kept pace. "So then this same man followed you to Amagansett."

  "Virus, Peter. This virus." Stephen nodded. "Imagine his shock at opening up my tablet and discovering that there were three Plainville survivors generating sera."

  "And then he set about hunting them down," Maryk said. It was all unfolding in his mind. "The lightweight shoe print in Lancet's bathroom. The plants missing from Blossom's car. The open windows at each location to air out the smell.

  He was sampling their blood before killing them."

  "In order to test it against his own disease. He had to know just how potent their antibodies were, to see how much of a threat they posed to him. Of course this manvirus would kill them. They were his cure, and therefore had to be eliminated."

  Melanie had stood silently listening through this. Now her voice came like a gasp. "The broken-down motorist."

  Stephen nodded. "That was our Patient Zero. He was driving back from Boston. He had just failed to eliminate the third survivor."

  Maryk remembered the shadow in the cul-de-sac outside the Penny University. He remembered the shoe marks on the rusted rungs and the feeling he had of being watched inside the sewer. Patient Zero had been there that night. Only the sewer sanitation mechanisms killed his virus in the water and prevented its spread.

  Stephen was still looking at Melanie. "Your death would guarantee his success," he said.

  He seemed unaware of the impropriety of his statement. He seemed only intrigued. Melanie stepped away from him. "Oh my God."

  Maryk said, "Then where is this 'Zero' right now?"

  "I don't know. He is extraordinarily contagious, so any form of mass transportation would lead to a prematurely infectious event. He is saving himself for the end. Therefore, he travels cautiously. He must have his own car."

  Maryk searched the swamp in frustration. He looked at the laboratory and at the twisted Plainville trees. He was trying to get his mind around the reality that there was a man out there driving the streets who was no longer a man but a virus.

  He knelt down and unbuckled his bag and pulled out his tablet.

  "I'm calling in BioCon. We'll preserve some of these plants for examination, then torch the rest and return to the bureau."

  "Wait," Stephen said. He used his cane to stand. "His work is still here. Written logs, data disks. I need to remain to analyze them."

  "Stay here? You shouldn't even be out of B4. The bacteria alone will eat you alive."

  "He was expecting to return. We've got his research, Peter. Listen to me. Something is troubling him. He would not have panicked over the LNPs otherwise. He would have touched off a chain of transmission and consumed the entire human race by now if there weren't something keeping him back, something he is waiting for. The secret may be right inside here." He moved
near Maryk. "I feel close to him, Peter. I can't explain it, but I think I can make sense of his notes, his work here. We'll not have a chance like this again."

  Maryk stood. "What do you mean, you feel close to him?"

  The tablet toned in Maryk's hand. He stared at Stephen a long moment before opening it. "Freeley," he said.

  No window opened on the screen. He adjusted the display in the bright sunlight. The video feed had been disabled at the source's discretion.

  The modern task bar indicated that he was connected to a call and listed the sender as a land-line public pay phone from an area code outside Georgia.

  The voice that answered him was garbled and fluidy. "Dr. Peter Maryk?"

  "Who is this?" The caller made a rumbling noise that failed to clear his throat. "You have found my laboratory."

  Maryk went suddenly cool in the beating sun. "I saw you in that alley sewer," the voice went on. Melanie's face was bloodless. Her hands were flat against her chest as she backed away. Her fear checked Maryk's and reminded him who he was. "Then you know I've got Milkmaid."

  The groaning voice said, "Did you find my hiker yet? Or what's left of him. I fed him some of your guinea pigs' blood before showing him to my garden. His death was merely enhanced. Your blood solution failed."

  "You are wrong. It has not failed Stephen Pearse."

  "Pearse is dead, I saw to that. You're covering it up like the rest."

  Stephen was staring at Maryk dead-eyed. Maryk's mind was reeling.

  His sense of rational balance and the natural order of the world were being challenged. He needed confirmation. "How did you get out of Orangeburg?"

  "The hospital?" Another throaty rumbling. "Double doors, foamed walls. All to protect against microscopic viruses escaping. But if a man-sized virus got into a yellow suit from the supply room? No one would even look at his face. He could walk right out the door."