Dr. Pearse said nothing. He continued to stare. "Stephen, how is it you are so obviously sick, and yet have remained so strong?"
Melanie understood now. She watched the sunlight beat down on Dr. Pearse, and he noticed that he was weaker in it.
Dr. Pearse had nothing to say. "We're leaving here right now," Maryk said. "I want to get another took at you back at the bureau."
Dr. Pearse's face changed, and he looked at Maryk as though Maryk were crazy. "There's too much to do here, Peter. Too much to learn. I'm so--"
"Close to him," Maryk said. "How close are you, Stephen?"
Dr. Pearse was jittery now. This was the first time Melanie had ever seen him angered. Sweat glistened on the livid sores mottling his face and neck. He looked back and forth at the two of them, and then at the BioCon agents behind. "I'm staying," he said. He pointed weakly at the table that separated him and Maryk. "I'm staying right here and working."
Something happened then, and Maryk started to back away from Dr. Pearse. "Stephen," he said. He held a gloved hand out in front of him. "Stephen. Listen to me." Melanie did not see it until just then. "Don't move."
A spot of dark red had appeared under Dr. Pearse's nostril. He grew agitated under their staring, like a cornered animal. "You all just stay away from me," he said. "Stephen." Maryk stopped and held his ground. "Your nose is bleeding."
Dr. Pearse looked at them strangely. He reached up to his face and examined his stiff fingertips. The blood was coming down onto his blistered top lip now. He looked at it on his fingers as though he did not understand. "Just don't move," Maryk said.
Dr. Pearse looked up, confused, his hand still open in front of him.
Then he started slowly around the table, as though to explain.
Maryk took another step backward, and Melanie found herself doing the same. "Stephen," Maryk said sharply.
The blood was coming faster now, a dark, heavy red, running out of both nostrils and down over his lips. Melanie sensed movement all around her, the suited BioCon agents, assembling.
Dr. Pearse appeared disoriented suddenly. "You don't understand, I-He came another step forward, but this time Maryk did not give any ground.
Maryk stood ready to meet him. Melanie saw the black bag in his right hand.
Melanie said suddenly, "Stephen. Please." Maybe it was her use of his first name, or just the softer voice. Whatever it was, he blinked and saw her there as though for the first time, and then looked at the suited BioCon agents around him. He seemed to understand what was going on then. He was leaking biohazardous material, and was a threat to those around him. Dr. Pearse looked down at his own arms and legs as though they were disappearing. Blood flowed thickly down to his gaunt chin.
Stephen Pearse lay sedated in a plastic isolation pod as Maryk wheeled him inside the Level 4 Biocontainment Hospital Unit back at the BDC.
The "Tank," as Maryk referred to it, was not a laboratory but a secure medical suite constructed for the observation and treatment of accidental "hot agent" exposures. It occupied one half of the top floor of Building Nine.
Twin steel pressure doors led inside, with the usual ultraviolet chamber in between. Melanie waited outside. There was a small viewing window on the side wall, and she peeked in once. She saw Maryk lifting Stephen Pearse in his arms and onto a table that looked like a tanning bed, sealing him inside under a clear plastic shell. Maryk appeared to be weakening himself. She realized a cascade was long overdue.
At a table behind her, a BioCon agent operated the steel doors via tablet. Maryk emerged and Melanie went to meet him, but he walked past her without a word. She followed him out to the catwalk leading to the next building, and watched him cross it under barking thunder and lashing rain. He did not look back. She did not follow.
She wasn't alone long. Dutiful Pasco arrived minutes later to chauffeur her back to her room. The storm was quite violent but barely touched her consciousness. She crawled into bed and slept soundly through its fury. She dreamed that she was visiting her parents' cemetery plot in the necropolis that was her hometown, laying Plainville flowers at a headstone bearing her name.
Gala Island
Melanie showered and changed the next morning, and Pasco returned her to the BDC and the roof of Building Seven where a BDC helicopter was waiting. She climbed inside next to Maryk, and the helicopter lifted off, climbing away over the building blocks of the BDC and the Emory campus. Only when they were well above everything like treetops and radio antennas did she relax. The roofs and playing fields of rural Georgia slid under them, and the world appeared so orderly from above. "I give up," she said. "Where are we going?"
"Gala Island," he said. "I have an appointment there."
All she knew about Gala Island was that it was an animal reserve the BDC maintained somewhere off the Georgia coast. It was a habitat for thousands of different animal species. "Where animals are raised for laboratory experiments?" she said. "No thank you."
"Popular misconception. Their natural environments are rigorously maintained.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, all we need are the living cells." He spoke distractedly, preoccupied, and she assumed the reason was Dr. Pearse. "However, this is one of those one percent times."
She turned her attention to the board game of earth sliding beneath her, and at once they flew off the coast of Georgia, over the blue and white Atlantic, still turgid from the storm. She watched for the island, and it breached beneath them like an emerald green whale, spouting trees and short hills, cut smooth with plains, spotted with white roofs of civilization. They curled around its sandy southern coast, and the helicopter set down at the end of a short airfield.
The island glistened after the overnight storm. The calm order of its trees and brush was like Disney compared to the Dall of the Plainville swamp. They got into a waiting Jeep and Maryk drove them along a rising dirt path into dense tree cover, passing a sign that read AVIARY. She began to see birds looping overhead. Like stars appearing after nightfall, the longer she looked, the more appeared: flitting around the high trees, dipping and Rapping high overhead, sleeping with tucked bills on lower branches along the roadside.
She asked Maryk to pull over just for a minute, and he did. She left him in the Jeep and walked into a wide clearing. Birds flew above her and called to one another and cried. She possessed a bird-watcher's knowledge of the groupings and could tell that many species were not indigenous to the Americas. There were basic sea birds, closer to the coastline, such as cormorants, divers, swans, and grebes. Long-necked herons and cranes. Then the game birds-pigeons, turtledoves, and various taloned birds of prey. Long-legged waders.
Small terns, auks. Sharp-beaked gulls laughing and screaming overhead.
And the tree birds: swallows and larks and wagtails and woodpeckers.
All zipping here and there, or hopping busily along the dirt paths with twigs in their beaks. Twin pipits raced across the road before her.
Thrushes and warblers. Flycatchers. Shrikes and swifts. Hummingbirds and tiny, mouselike wrens. Crows and starlings and orioles and sparrows and finches.
She could not help but smile. The beauty of the place was thrilling and strange, the winged life thriving all around her. Growing up in Plainville, she had kept three different seed houses in the trees surrounding her home, two she had made out of milk cartons, and one storebought wooden perch, a birthday present from her grandmother, which had hung by wire from a tree branch outside her bedroom window, and to whose greedy patrons she had awakened every Plainville morning.
There was a small outpost but she did not see any people. The cottagelike building was set on the bank of a pristine reservoir that must have been man-made, and she was reminded that birds were reservoirs for Plainville, susceptible to the virus and able to transmit it, but themselves immune to the disease. She wondered how many tests had been run on these birds, how many different ways the humans had tried to trick them into giving up their secrets.
She felt saf
e there, away from Zero and Atlanta, and left reluctantly, the fugitive cries fading as they drove on.
The monkey house was dead center on the island. They went down to the isolation level and were met there by a primate warden in jeans and scrub shirt who led them to a small, square viewing window. "I'm not at all comfortable with having this virus here on Gala," he told Maryk.
"One slip up and the entire island, a decade of work -- wiped clean."
Maryk stared through the bright window. Melanie had no intention of looking herself, but there was something in the warden's voice when he said, "This is medieval," Something about the man's fear compelled her to join Maryk at the window.
They were looking into a small, brightly lit observation room.
The floor was streaked with blood and shed hair, and a single female chimpanzee lay slumped in the corner. Her nippled chest was huffing and her red eyes were violent and fevered, regarding Melanie with what could only be described as homicidal intent. Her facial features below were faded into a meek Plainville grin. The dying chimp appeared quite human.
Maryk turned from the window and started away. "Destroy it," he said to the warden.
Melanie caught up with him outside. Maryk was staring at the swishing island trees from the monkey house porch. "It's a simulation of the circumstances of Stephen's infection and treatment," he said, "but without the work I did to protect his brain. I initiated it a few days ago. I had to see if the Zero paradigm would repeat." Melanie remembered the chimp's eyes, and knew that it had. "The virus is breaking down too fast," he said. "The chimp is sustaining the infection but not the genetic mutations. I've seen the tests: Over seventy percent of its cells have been converted into viruses. I compared these with tests of Stephen's blood, and it's the same. He's up over ninety percent already. If the virus doesn't kill Stephen first, it could convert him, and turn him into another Zero."
Melanie stared at him as he watched the trees. "But it didn't change me," she said. "The virus was purged from your body early on. It was your recovery from the disease that took so long."
He was quiet the rest of the way back to Atlanta. Melanie had little memory of the trip herself, consumed as she was by the contrasting images of the sacrificial chimp suffering in the small, bright room on that elysian island, and Dr. Pearse sitting and awaiting his end in the hospital unit Tank at the BDC.
Corruption
Plainville was enjoying its rout. My eviscerated immune system was lashing out blindly at the virus, turning on healthy tissue and vital organs in a manic final attempt to survive. I was defenseless against myself, and this was Plainville's greatest perversion.
The cells that made up my person were expiring in wave after wave of microscopic corporal genocide. Whereas a fit body replenishes itself, cells dividing and reproducing beneficially, my cells were being exploited to breed lethal viral clones. I was a human hive of frenzied bees. My body was being debauched.
When I allowed myself to daydream it was simply this: a hot shower and a long, careful shave, bathed in the warm scent and intimacy of my own bathroom in my own home.
The work in B4 had kept me going. It had disciplined my mind.
Now all my time was devoted to rumination. My focus had turned inward.
I opened the glass shell of the hyperbaric chamber that was my bed.
The berth saturated my blood with collagenstimulating oxygen that slowed the meltdown of connective tissue characteristic of Plainville.
I sat up, and swung my thin legs over the side.
As director, I had overseen the construction of the Level 4 Biocontainment Tank. I knew, for example, that the steel doors could be operated only from the outside. There was no way out other than complete recovery or death. I looked at the eastern wall, a ten- by thirty-foot video monitor, remembering that we had done a study showing that pastoral scenes were most soothing for patients confined in prolonged clinical isolation. I watched geese flapping across a bleeding orange sunset over a salt marsh of waving spartina.
Floaters in my eyes gave me aquarium vision, hairlike beings and crystalline forms swimming across my view. I imagined they were viruses wriggling and writhing before me.
I was hyper-attuned now to every creak and flutter of my failing body.
I could feel the blood slowing and gelling in my veins, the very platelets rupturing. My heart beat lugubriously against newly calcified ribs, and I had developed an odd arrhythmia: Once every fifteen minutes or so, my heart struck a double beat, like a bass player's finger slipping off a string. The silence that followed would freeze me, a chill fanning out from my spine like a peacock preening mortality, until the stillness of the suspended beat passed and life turned over again within the sordid chamber of my corrupted chest.
I wiped at and probed the sunken ridges around my eyes, the newfound angularity of my cheeks. After thirty seven years: a different face, a lesser face, in place of my own. I was wearing someone else's eyes, lips, jaw. I looked at my hands, front and back. A stranger's hands, an older man's, fingers curling to my command, but reluctantly.
Arthritis had commenced its rout. Billions of excess antibody proteins bred by my flailing immune system-that my body had no natural way of expelling were caking on every joint. I was biologically rusting.
The inside door opened, and Peter entered carrying his black bag.
Seeing him again made me feel contrite, and I am certain I avoided his eyes at first. There was no medical reason for him to visit me. He had come only to look at me and see how much I'd changed.
"Anything on Zero yet?" I said. Maryk shook his head. "We're on him.
Still waiting."
"He's planning something," I said. Peter looked at me anew. My insights made us both uncomfortable. "What is he planning?" Peter said.
I shook my head, and eventually looked down at the white floor.
"But he's changing, Peter. The genetic core of his virus. You need to protect Melanie."
"I'm testing her blood all the time."
"Zero's virus is breaking down. She could become susceptible. "She's with me all the time. Bobby Chiles has organized a Plainville conference for tonight, to counter some of the public hysteria. She'll go with me."
I looked over at the geese flapping across the orange twilight.
"You know what's happening to me," I said.
Peter stared at me a long moment. "I do."
"Kill me. If I start to turn. Promise me, Peter. You won't let me become like him."
As I finished these words, I froze, my addled heart striking a pronounced double beat, then stopping, resting quiet and still, a hunk of fatty meat suspended in my chest. A morose chill embraced me, but the beating resumed moments later, and trembling, I exhaled the foul contents of my eroding lungs.
I opened my eyes. Peter remained standing before me with his black bag in his hand.
The Conference
Maryk had to remind himself as he sat there that evening inside the Georgia World Congress Center that there was nothing more he could be doing at present to hunt Zero. The description of the stolen car was out to every police organization in the southeast with a description of the subject wanted on a "Plainville quarantine violation." It was inconceivable that a busted taillight and an alert patrolman were all it might take to end the Plainville scourge. He had agents in the lobby ready to take him to any outbreak on a moment's notice.
The Congress on Plainville convened at five o'clock that afternoon. An emerging disease prompted as much hoopla as it did concern within the world medical community and the scant information the BDC had about the virus and its resultant disease was being disseminated at seminars and public awareness workshops throughout the convention center. It was all a thinly veiled publicity event aimed at renewing public confidence in the diseasefighting talents of the BDC.
But the cooperation of the public was essential to successful disease control and that was why Maryk agreed to appear.
He had declined a seat on the long cur
tained dais and instead commandeered a front row table against the far wall of the second-floor conference room. He and Melanie sat there alone. Fifty round tables behind him sat five hundred members of the world medical community listening to speeches and awaiting a free dinner.
Maryk focused on the stage. Dr. Alex Solhin supported himself against the podium with both forearms as he read from his tablet.
Solbin was deputy director for HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis and next in line behind Bobby Chiles for Stephen's job. His cane stood against his empty chair next to the podium and his face mask hung untied off his shirt collar. Many of those in attendance wore masks and gloves for sanitary reasons but Alex Solbin was in his fourth year of managed clinical AIDS. It was therefore imperative that he protect his HIV-compromised immune system. His visage as projected upon the large screen behind him was thin but hale. A face-filling beard accentuated the features of his Soviet ancestry.
Solbin outlined the goals of the conference in the opening portion of his remarks. Invoking Maryk's name sent an explicit ripple of disapproval throughout the room. Maryk smiled in the dark. It was easy for the international medical establishment to dismiss one who had never sought their fellowship. Maryk had thought himself peerless ever since his split with Stephen.
He turned toward the doctors and medical scientists sitting reverently before glowing tablets. They were gathered to demonize Plainville at the same time they worshipped the majesty of this preternatural force that reduced healthy human beings to dust. The modern practice of health care had become like a religion. The attendees listened raptly to Solbin's creed and dreamed of a miracle Plainville cure that would deliver them to everlasting glory. Stephen Pearse was their messiah but he had stumbled and fallen from grace.
Maryk wondered what the knowledge of Zero's existence would do to their piddling faith.
Chuck Hogan Page 25