Chuck Hogan

by The Blood Artists (epub)

  "Would you recognize Pearse's voice?"

  Maryk turned the tablet around to Stephen. Stephen was in shock.

  He spoke hesitantly to the virus that had infected him. "Ridgeway?"

  Maryk turned the tablet back to himself. "Pearse lives," he said. "He's right here, standing next to me outside your laboratory. He lives because I've got Milkmaid. It's not enough just to have the blood. It's the serum treatment. She cures you. Milkmaid is viable and I've got her antibodies. Which means I've got youwhatever you are."

  "I am the Messenger. What you call 'Plainville' is the Message."

  Stephen came forward then. "Tell me," he said, "how did you contract this? Was it a girl, a teenage girl?"

  Silence for a moment. Stephen seemed to hang in the air.

  The voice said, "So it was you who sent her to me, Doctor. Perfect." Stephen's gaze slipped to the ground.

  "You don't sound so healthy, Dr. America. And if you were, you would be right back on TV again."

  Stephen's gaze only deepened. Then the voice said, "Hello, Melanie."

  Melanie shivered. She looked at Maryk and shook her head and mouthed a frantic No.

  But a hard grin steeled Maryk's nerves. "She is with me at all times," he said.

  Zero chuckled gurglingly. "Not many public phones these days," he said. "I'll be long gone by the time you arrive. Perhaps I could leave you a little something to remember me by."

  Maryk heard the sound of a telephone cord being twisted. "A man here waiting for the phone. Middle-aged, wearing a beige raincoat.

  His tablet battery must have run down. He's not looking in on me right now because he hates sickness. He hates sick people."

  The metallic cord twisted again. "He is lazy and fat. He's meat to me, understand that, Maryk? The world is full of meat. You cannot stop the Messenger. You cannot stop the Message. The Message will always get through."

  There was the sound of something rubbing against the receiver.

  Then a click and the droning dial tone of a broken connection.

  Stephen stepped backward. He found the bench against his legs again and slumped down upon it.

  Maryk said, "What was that noise at the end?" Stephen's face was blank and drawn. "Him licking the receiver."

  Melanie gasped behind them. Maryk paged Freeley and gave her the telephone number to be traced. He told her to divert BioCon to the caller's location on a Biohazard 4 and to shut down any airports within a thirty-mile radius. Then he dialed the pay phone number. It was busy and he dialed again and this time it rang through.

  A voice answered: "Yeah, hullo?" Winded and annoyed.

  "Get out of there," Maryk said. "Get out of there and get everybody away from this telephone!"

  * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

  Freeley and the BioCon unit moved in and took over the swamp island and Maryk left Stephen at the lab under their protection. He traveled with Melanie by helicopter to the site of the outbreak.

  The public telephone was located in one of a pair of antiquated folding door booths beneath a slowly rotating Waffle House restaurant sign on a highway roadstop in Yulee, Florida. The booths were currently sealed in nylon and the walkway linking the restaurant to the gas station and the public toilets was being foamed. The entire rest area was cordoned off from the highway and bustling with yellow contact suits.

  The man on the telephone had hung up from Maryk and made a second call before moving into the Waffle House for a late breakfast or early lunch. Zero's description was dead-on. BioCon caught up with him before his third cup of coffee. Forty-seven customers and waitstaff to be transported to the federal hospital in Jacksonville.

  Zero was described as "slight" and wearing a sullied white windbreaker, loose brown pants, hiking shoes with dried mud on them, dirty latex gloves, and a snug "African pattern style" toque covering the top of his skull but for a few wild strands of silver-gray hair visible in back. He was about five feet five, one hundred to one hundred ten pounds, and wore a white cotton surgical mask.

  A light blue Ford Prescience in the parking lot matched the make and Vehicle Identification Number of an automobile that had been parked two blocks away from the Penny University that night in Boston.

  Behind the restaurant was an enclosed grass playground of swing sets and trees. Clumps of discolored grass spaced like striding footsteps grew out of the healthy grass in thick looping spirals like a spreading mold. Shrubs lining the swing set were misshapen with overgrowth and already blooming madly. The leaves of a tree branch hanging over the parking lot were alabaster white and shaped uncannily like hands whose fingers had been broken and splayed.

  The playground was sick. Zero had fled through there to the residential neighborhood beyond. BioCon was sweeping it but would find nothing. Zero was not looking for more victims. He was looking for a car.

  Maryk opened his tablet and brought up the old Audubon photo of Ridgeway. Pictured was a tweedy-looking young man with curly brown hair wearing short pants and a safari shirt. He was posed with one boot on a mossy rock. Both forearms were crossed on his bent knee and he held a wild fern leaf in one hand as he gazed out proprietarily over the swamp.

  Maryk felt the stirrings of a cascade. His body was systematically executing its own infected cells in order to rid itself of Zero. Maryk would need an amphetamine dose in order to work through the day.

  He returned to the whining helicopter and Melanie. The only way he could guarantee her safety now was to keep her at his side. "He's real," she said as Maryk reached the door. "Isn't he?"

  The threat of a mutant virus gifted with human intellect and cunning posed hazards exceeding Maryk's worst imaginings. But all he envisioned was its one great advantage. Epidemic control had never been simpler. Zero was like a tumor Maryk could go in and surgically remove. This mission seemed somehow worthy of him.

  Contain the spread Eliminate the vector. With one clean stroke Maryk could conclusively terminate the Plainville plague.

  Replication

  The Nosebleed

  The helicopter ride back to the swamp passed like a dream, clouds drifting across the midday southern sky like smoke. After a brief stop at the ranger's station, Melanie and Maryk were back in the launch, nosing along the dead stream toward the island lab.

  Melanie was beginning to wonder if she had actually survived Plainville at all. Atlanta and swamps, airports and prisons, Pearse and Maryk, and now Oren Ridgeway, perhaps this was all a fantasy spun out of the loneliness of death.

  Nothing pulled on her, neither the past nor the future. No youth, no family; she was entirely without label or claim. She thought of her hometown. Two years after the outbreak, a big developer had settled with Plainville's property heirs, buying up every square foot of the deserted, haunted town, dirt cheap. Each house was razed and each automobile was junked, as there was no other way to get rid of the chemical smell left by the town's ablution. Landfill was brought in from up and down the East Coast and sculpted into hillocks and rolling fields. Overpopulation and the graying of the so-called baby boomers of generations past had created a bullish death market. Plainville was currently a town without a school or a post office or a police force.

  Humped stone markers and white crosses laced the fresh sod grafted over the sculpted hillsides like white stitches sewn over a layer of green skin. Eternity Way, the town's main north-south route, saw more than twenty funeral processions each day. Melanie's hometown was a thriving necropolis.

  She existed now purely as a vessel to be filled up and emptied and filled again. Four years of prolonged limbo had followed the effacement of her life in Plainville, and now she again found herself trapped in yet another bizarre holding pattern, a limbo between limbos.

  Long-term nonprogressor -- no kidding. The virus would not let her go.

  They had cured her of the disease, but the sickness kept coming back for her. "He wants to kill me," she said. "Doesn't he? Or infect me somehow."

  Maryk nodded, in front of her. "That so
unds about right."

  "Life-saving blood," she said. "Don't forget. I'm to be protected, no matter the cost."

  "I won't forget."

  They passed the first Plainville plants again. BioCon agents in yellow suits were uprooting them and hacking them into manageable pieces.

  "Oren Ridgeway took me to my senior prom," Melanie said.

  Maryk turned. He looked at her. "Believe me," she said, "it wasn't my idea. I tore up all the photographs in long, thin strips, one of the last things I did before going to college. I was leaving the 'old me' behind. It didn't work."

  He waited for her. She had expected a barrage of questions, but she realized that hers was just one of many shocks he had received that day. "My parents arranged it," she said. "He was four years older than I was, and just back from his college graduation. The town outcast type, but a total loser. Oren was a crusader, an environmental nut. My dad took pity on him-my dad liked people with ideals. I had no boyfriends, I was just a fat pudge. And my mother was so excited..." The memory intensified, and she had to shake it off. "He made the corsage himself From his own garden. It looked like a bright pink cabbage on my flabby chest. We danced one dance together. One.

  He danced like a freak and spent the rest of the night boring his old teachers, the chaperones, while I sat alone at the table feigning interest in my napkin."

  She didn't tell him about the goodnight kiss at her door: her turning away at the last possible moment, and Oren's chapped lips-he had an ugly habit of gnawing on them-just glancing the edge of her cheek.

  She shuddered. "Oren didn't like people," she went on. "He said people were ruining the earth. He said we had been given this great gift, and we were just stomping all over it." She felt a lopsided smile spread across her face, like maple syrup over a pancake. "I was thinking, maybe, this could remain just between us."

  The island came into view up ahead, and they landed and Dr. Freeley led them along a winding pathway of torch stakes bunting black smoke.

  Maryk said nothing. They passed one of the gnarled Plainville trees, and Melanie felt like she was walking through one of her own freakish paintings.

  Dr. Freeley said, "This 'Zero' worked quickly. We just got a stolen car report from Yulee. A white Dodge Auriga, stolen out of somebody's driveway three streets back from the rest stop. An older model, zero-four. No Automap function or Global Positioning Receiver, and no theft retrieval-nothing traceable. The car is old enough to run under the current technological radar. I got in touch with the state police.

  They wouldn't do roadblocks-said they couldn't risk exposure to their men-but they're setting up checkpoints, remote cameras to record cars and plates. It's visible enough. It should at least keep him off the main routes, and pin him to this corner of the country. I put an Infectious Contaminant Bulletin out to every police organization in the southeast. They know what to do if they find the car."

  "Which is -- get away, and call us."

  They came to the rear of the black -canvas laboratory.

  Three BioCon agents were kneeling around something half-buried in the swamp floor. "We just found him," Dr. Freeley said. Melanie made out a torso and part of a head, blistered and blackened with decay.

  "The missing hiker. Looks like Zero was feeding on him."

  Melanie shook her head. She swooned with the heat and the monstrousness of Zero and backed out to the path lined with burning torches. Suddenly the swamp didn't seem large enough. The state of Georgia and the entire world didn't seem large enough. But as much as she hated to admit it, she did feel safe with Maryk; that is, safe from everything except Maryk himself.

  He came back out alone and they went to the front of the laboratory.

  BioCon had cut open the front length of the canvas so that the tents were open to the island. The wooden tables, littered with Plainville remains, resembled a gypsy marketplace cluttered with horribly spoiled produce. Melanie saw a jar containing what must have been the hiker's left hand, and a wire-bound notebook propped open with Plainville flowers pressed into its pages, malformed petals and leaves that were hideous and yet, at the same time, madly beautiful.

  Dr. Pearse tottered around the crude, plant-strewn tables, mumbling excitedly to himself. His gaunt face was glossy with perspiration from the heat, his eyes blinking strangely and fast. He looked even weaker under the hot sun. He teetered around the tables, and beckoned to them with a stiff hand as they approached. "He's learning," he said proudly. "He was learning about himself, his own virus. He wants to know everything. He was curing out his virus through these infected plants, like Stanley with tobacco leaves, purifying it, crystallizing it, and refeeding it to the rats. He was nurturing his disease, crossbreeding it, over and over, hoping to trip a mutation: a strain that would not infect so thoroughly and so abruptly. Zero was trying to extend his latency period." He limped to another table without his cane, where he had evidently filleted a Plainville plant stalk into hundreds of garish slices. "But of course-what virus wouldn't, if it could? The longer a host remains viable, the longer it can spread the infection. He wants to become invincible." Maryk glanced back at Melanie as Dr. Pearse prattled on. "He never found one, Peter. In fact, his latency period is growing shorter. This is because the virus is extraordinarily volatile. It is changing more rapidly now than ever before. Wholesale shifts since the prison outbreak. Incredible."

  "Stephen," Maryk said.

  "You are talking a mile a minute."

  "It's all here, Peter, all the answers." His gnarled hand rested on the pile of notebooks in the manner of a schoolboy taking an oath. "I know what he's waiting for now. His virus is changing all the time, becoming more refined. It's all that uranium it was exposed to in the cave, for centuries. Zero's virus is breaking down to the point where it will no longer infect vegetation and lower animals. Do you understand? Zero will sicken only Homo sapiens." Dr. Pearse patted the notebooks in wonder. "It's all happening within him-of him. He's not there yet, but he's getting closer, and he knows it. He knows it."

  Maryk nodded but showed him no enthusiasm. "Rest a moment, Stephen," he said. "You're exhausted."

  "I came here to kill him, Peter. I admit that. But now I see that we have to understand him first. We have to learn from him. Zero has something to teach us."

  Maryk looked stem. "You say you know things about Zero, Stephen.

  How?"

  Dr. Pearse thought about it. "I'm not sure. I just do."

  "What, then? I need some idea of what I'm up against. Tell me what you know."

  Dr. Pearse held Maryk's gaze, then accepted his challenge. "A man infected by a deadly virus that has not killed him, but instead combined with him, at some elemental level. A biological model of a man-virus."

  Maryk stared. "That's right."

  "Viruses like tight, dark places. Sunlight is a virus killer. Given the evolutionary transformation that has taken place, he must prefer night to day. Direct exposure to sunlight should weaken him. Not mortally-this is not Dracula-but ultraviolet light exposure from the sun should have the effect of wearing him down."

  Maryk moved closer, intrigued. "Go on."

  "His thinking process is impaired. The body is resilient, as we know. The body battles for stability, always. The body adjusts to change.

  "But the brain, the brain goes further than that: The brain compensates, sometimes to the point of overcompensation. It is an elastic organ, regenerating damaged tissue, even redrawing neural pathways with minimal impairment, perpetually searching for solutions to the millisecond-by-millisecond problems it is given. We know that Plainville targets the brain.

  "Therefore Zero has, at the very least, suffered a series of shocks or minor strokes. There is physiological damage to the brain, unique psychological damage, and whatever resulting chemical imbalances, all combined with the rudiments of infection. As his higher functions began to fail, the brain's only alternative for survival would be to simply switch them off. After so many years-I would say he exists in a state where dr
eaming and waking have become one and the same."

  "A functional dream state," Maryk said, less encouragingly than provokingly. "Yes," Dr. Pearse nodded. He ran on. "As his brain continues to compensate for what it lacks, more primal emotions are tapped, and the mind reverts to the primitive. Survival beyond death means, for man, reproduction: offspring, parent to child.

  Fertilization and cell division forming another living host where the progenitor's DNA can thrive. Of course, infection is essentially the same process. Zero is operating on this primal level now. His damaged brain has no choice but to embrace the creature its host has become.

  Only propagation can ensure survival at the genetic, viral level. This means widespread infection. That is his ultimate goal."

  It was as though Dr. Pearse was almost channeling Zero. He wilted in the heat, but still pressed on. Maryk said, "What about personality?"

  "The character of a virus endowed with human traits? Easy. We're talking about a being uninhibited by any obligations, social or moral. Combine the worst elements of a serial murderer, a rapist, an impulsive arsonist. Hyper-aggressive, hyper-sexual, homicidal, egocentric, pathological. An unqualified sociopath. The ultimate deviant terrorist mentality. All Zero wants to do is infect, infect, infect."

  Maryk moved one more step closer, now facing Dr. Pearse across a wooden table. "One more thing," he said. "We've said that people who contract the virus do one of two things-they either die quickly, or we get to them early with the serum and they survive."

  Dr. Pearse nodded. "Except for Zero. He remained alive, and the virus was given time to integrate itself with his person." Maryk nodded slowly. "So this could, theoretically, happen to anyone who contracted the disease, and was kept alive through extraordinary means."

  Dr. Pearse considered it and was about to give his answer when his grin fell. He came to stare at Maryk as Maryk went on. "How do you know so much about him? How did you find his lab here in the middle of four hundred thousand acres of swamp? You say you could feel him."