Faith was a commodity now. Faith could be bought and sold.
Devotion was something paid to fan clubs, political parties, corporate affiliations, home teams. The cartel of religion had been broken up only recently by the heterodoxy of a man named Darwin. My heart and soul care for worms and nothing else in the worldjust at present. This from a man who had once studied for the clergy. And like dominoes the myths of creation fell. The next day faith began trading on the open market.
Science was the defining knowledge of the time. Science had disproved religion and therefore had become religion. Its temples were third-floor laboratories injaceless glass buildings in industrial parks. Solutions to the mysteries of creation were being discovered under a microscope and not in books or upon an altar. Science had stroked the face of God and not perished. Now it was asking for a sample of His blood.
Maryk recalled the small church on a hill that his parents had taken him to as a boy and the hours spent playing on the wooden floor of the rectory while his mother answered telephones that rang and rang.
All the ancient beliefs had been debunked. But Plainville had ripped away the twenty-first century's veil of human sovereignly and now the questions were once again beginning to outpace the answers.
The world that had consumed its creator suddenlyfound itself revolving frightened and alone.
Maryk surfaced as though from a trance. He looked up and saw servers coming around with salads. Solbin was already well into his speech.
Maryk tried to retrace his thoughts but the thread disappeared.
He shut his eyes a moment. His lids were heavy like theater curtains.
It took some effort to raise them again. He looked at Melanie and the room drifted in his vision. She was two seats away from him.
He could not reach her from where he sat. He pushed back his chair and reached for his bag. He placed his other hand on the table.
He stood unsteadily.
Melanie sat back as a green-gloved waiter slid a small salad down in front of her. She sensed Maryk rising near her as she reached for her knife and fork, but ignored him until his hand gripped the back of her chair. His other hand swept her salad plate to the center of the table with a clatter. "Hey," she said.
He was leaning over her. Maryk had no scent, she noticed, no after-shave or hair spray or food smell, not even sweat. If he wasn't near bleach or some other chemical cleanser, he was entirely odorless.
"He's here," Maryk said.
Melanie did not understand at first. Then she looked out with a start at the hundreds of people seated in the room. At least half of them wore gloves and masks, as did the servers moving table to table.
"How do you --" She saw the languor in Maryk's gray eyes and understood.
He was cascading. It was a bad one, and at once she became crazy with fear. Zero was in the room with them. She tried to stand but Maryk was in her way. "Got to kill him," he said heavily.
She was struggling with her chair. "Get everybody out. Yell fire!"
She was frantic. Maryk let go of her chair but she couldn't get out.
His foot was still in the way. He opened his bag clumsily and dropped his tablet onto the table, opening it, sluggishly working the keys.
His message read ZERO HERE. BLOCK EXITS.
He sent the message to his agents downstairs and collapsed the screen, straightening, wavering as he scanned the crowd. "Do something," she told him, trying to get out.
Maryk licked his lips. "We'll screen them at the door," he said.
"Trap him. You wait here."
"No way," she said. But as he moved off toward the dais, she looked across the large room and saw how many tables she would have to pass, alone, to reach the side exits, and decided to remain where she was.
Zero could be anywhere. Melanie was a statue of a young woman gripping the sides of her chair. She scanned the audience and watched for anyone moving or watching her. As she did, an uncomfortable silence crept over the room.
Maryk was walking stiffly behind the chairs along the dais to the center podium. The speaker sensed the ripple in the audience's attention, then turned and saw Maryk and awkwardly announced him.
Silence fell over the vast room as Maryk stepped to the podium.
He must have struck it with his knee, because the microphone went thud and the noise reverberated wall to wall. Maryk stood there a moment staring, his hair shining platinum in the large image of his face projected behind him. "Sorry to break this up," he said archly.
A thin, inappropriate smile appeared. "But we'll need to cut this short now, due to..."
His voice trailed off. Melanie followed his gaze to the rear of the long room. In the shadows in back, a figure stepped back from one of the tables and began moving away.
It was a man. He was a slow-moving man wearing an oversized waiter's uniform and a standard food server's face mask. He was small and gaunt and gaining speed as he moved across the rear of the room to the side.
He moved like. a man and yet not like a man, striding purposefully, abnormally, and Melanie felt a scream rising in her throat.
A glass pitcher of water shattered behind her. People gasped as Maryk scrambled over the dais onto the floor and rushed toward her, wide-eyed.
She stood out of her chair to get away but Maryk grabbed her arm.
"No," she said, pulling back, but he had his bag in the other hand and was already propelling her through the room. Somebody screamed.
Doctors and scientists leapt out of their chairs, and a table toppled over as people rushed to get out of their way. Somehow she stayed on her feet as they moved.
An alarm pierced the air. They reached the rear of the long room just in time to see, around a sashed curtain, a fire door closing.
Maryk pushed her into the alarm bar of the door. It opened and they were inside a white stairwell and stumbling down white concrete steps.
Maryk was half leaning on her for support, his full weight pulling down on her shoulder, and she was buckling underneath him.
They tripped like that down half a flight of stairs.
She looked fleetingly over the railing down into the vertical shaft.
She saw a hand wearing a dirty latex glove sliding along the railing below.
Zero was right below them. He was getting away. She stopped resisting Maryk then, realizing that if he stopped Zero there, it would all be over. The virus would be stopped, and she would be normal and free again. "Come on!" she yelled over the keening alarm, thrusting her thin arm around Maryk's broad back to push him, and they clambered down the stairs along the railing. She looked into the well again but did not see the hand; then they turned onto the last flight, stumbling down two and three steps at a time.
Maryk elbowed through the door at the bottom. It was a short, empty corridor and they rushed along it, turning right as the alarm faded behind. He stumbled through the door at the end, and they were inside a kitchen.
A large dishwasher chugged steam. She followed Maryk past racks of clean dishes, and saw him breaking open his bag. A syringe appeared in his gloved right hand.
They turned past wire shelves stocked with industrial sized cans of tomato paste and wide-mouth jars of pickles and fruit salad. A figure had turned a corner at the left end of the room in front of them. They ran around food carts to follow, reaching the corner, surprising him as he came back. Maryk surged forward suddenly with the syringe raised knifelike in his hand, but it was only a busboy, a Hispanic kid holding a wet rag, and he saw Maryk and whatever homicidal look was on Maryk's face and flailed backward, knocking a rack of dirty pots to the floor.
Maryk's hand came straight back down to his side. He turned and scanned the room with tired eyes, his great chest heaving, then Melanie pointed to the most likely passage leading away. He started lumberingly ahead of her and across the long, steamy room.
They emptied into the smoke of a food preparation area, running along a central counter of cooked meals set under heat lamps. The chefs all wore similar green fo
od service gloves and face shields and head coverings. "Which way did he go?" Maryk said breathlessly.
Most shrugged, watching them run past. One pointed the way.
Melanie followed Maryk around an ice machine and then left into a short supply corridor. The door at the end was half open to the outside and Maryk lunged at it.
The cool night air cut her. They raced searching along the outer wall of the convention center. Every door Maryk tried was locked, and there was no one else in sight.
He loped along the high wall of the building to the front sidewalk, scanning the bright, empty sidewalk and street. Melanie recognized Pasco at the conference center exit, to their right. He showed Maryk an exaggerated, frantic shrug. "Seal the building," Maryk gasped to him. "Shut down the city within a four-block radius."
Melanie stepped back and leaned one hand against the building.
Her chest was bursting. She took a hit off her inhaler and felt her lungs expand.
Fire engines wailed in the distance. She went around in front of Maryk. His hands were on his knees and his head was down, and he was heaving great, gusting breaths. "You might want to put that away now," she said. The loaded syringe was still in his right hand.
The firemen were all kept out of the building. The fourblock dragnet was slow to set up, and they failed to find Zero. BioCon arrived at the convention center and placed the entire complex under quarantine.
Zero had served salads to the rearmost four tables. He was described as quiet but attentive, remarkable only for the strong scent of his after-shave, obviously covering up his smell. His tables were among the first to show symptoms: flulike cramps, severe headaches, high fevers. It was like radiation poisoning, in that those closest to Zero got his sickness first.
Maryk had slipped into a side lounge after they returned inside, and from the hallway Melanie watched him inject himself with something from his black bag, which had the effect of immediately reviving his flagging energy. He then saw to the administration of her blood serum, first to those seated at Zero's tables, and then methodically to the rest of the quarantines.
There were some awful scenes. In the quarantine rooms Melanie watched as the first medical people began to weaken and their colleagues cleared silently away. She saw the look of astonishment on the faces of the sick as they were led off. Others denied the illness rising within them, insisting that their colleagues, who had ratted them out to the BioCon agents, were mistaken. A few collapsed suddenly, to gasps and screams, and the people were soon segregated into many smaller rooms in a bid to slow the transmission of both the virus andthe panic.
The fear in the eyes of the waiting was potent. They watched her suspiciously as she passed in and out of the rooms unsuited, and a few begged her to tell them what was happening, even as they knew. Their anxiety became too much for her, and soon she left and found a private space in the outer hallway, where she cried tears that would not fall.
She felt as though her eyes, her brain, her entire person were being pickled in sorrow.
She fought back her emotion, and from then on she restricted herself to the isolation rooms where the sick were being attended to.
She began by giving blood until she was dizzy. It took so much to derive so little serum, and she saw that there was barely enough of her to go around the World Congress building, never mind the entire world.
She started going gurney to gurney, sitting with each sickened person a few moments, talking if they talked, nodding if they cried, or taking their hand if they just stared. She assisted the slow-moving agents in yellow suits as she could, changing IV bags and taking blood pressure readings.
She was doing that when Maryk came to get her. He looked haunted in the doorway, showing none of the confidence he had shown at Lewes Penitentiary. His shoulders sagged and the black bag seemed heavy in his big hand.
They underwent an ultraviolet wand scan before leaving, to kill any surface Plainville. She wished to feel the viruses dying on her skin, falling away like beach sand in the shower. She was tired of the constant cleansing, the empty renewal of dressing and undressing, and the inhumanity of her latex hands. In the car before they left, Maryk PCR-tested her blood. Her forearms were tender and so badly bruised from blood giving that he had to pull an excruciatingly slow cc from between the third and fourth fingers of her left hand. She sat looking up at the darkened convention complex until the tablet declared her clean.
They rolled through the desolate night streets of downtown Atlanta, passing through a depressed area of the city, tired cars parked along the curbs like toys arranged by a careless child. The apartment buildings were sooty and looming, with tenement-tiny windows of the type infants tumble out of on the hottest days of summer. Even the streetlights looked shiftless, bored. Maryk took two or three more turns that didn't feel right to her. "Where are we going?" she said.
His voice was exhausted, though his eyes remained bright. "I need to stop for fresh clothes."
She wondered what stores would be open that late at night. Then she realized he meant his home. For some reason the prospect of visiting Maryk's residence shocked her; she could not picture him in any habitat other than that of the BDC.
He parked outside a security-grated baby apparel store and they entered a numbered door riddled with graffiti, stepping over a splash of accumulated mail to a long, narrow flight of stairs. They walked the length of the doorless hall to a second flight, and then a third.
At the top of the fourth flight they came to a clean white door, and Maryk produced a key.
He stopped before inserting it in the lock. He knelt and silently examined the white plate around the doorknob. There was a bit of brown dirt, maybe food, smudged on the metal plate. Maryk picked it off, looking at it on the tip of his gloved finger before flicking it away.
The knob turned keylessly under his hand.
The door opened on an apartment dark with night. It was spacious like an artist's loft, with high ceilings, few furnishings and walls, and large factory windows. Then the smell of decay hit her immediately, and the curious part of her mind shut down.
Maryk moved through the loft with evident alarm. Melanie could sense something on the wall behind her, even before Maryk switched on the high, track lamps, and she turned.
It was a long word smeared in mud and food over the wide wall. It read, drippingly, MESSENGER.
Two steel picture frames hung on the desecrated wall. Each contained a canvas that was now slashed to shreds. What she could make of the tattered images was dark and visceral, yet familiar. She saw three more canvases hanging on another wall, and one standing on a display easel in a corner. All were in ribbons.
The paintings were her own. They were the ones Maryk had purchased anonymously. He had not junked them, as she had assumed. He had designed his living space around them.
She walked to the one set on the easel. A steak knife was jammed dead center through the frame, and something hung from a wide, blue ribbon on its handle. It was a medallion, like a large gold penny, smeared with what looked like shit. She realized it was Maryk's Nobel.
A breeze swept through the loft and turned her head. She walked toward it, into the kitchen at the rear. Glass and dirt lay on the floor beneath a broken window, and Maryk stood outside on a long fire escape, over an elaborate vegetable garden laid out on the grate, overlooking the city. The clear plastic bubble covering the garden had been kicked in, the muddied soil torn up and the plants trampled, almost as though the dirt had been danced upon. The few vegetables that remained were budding into Plainville atrocities. "He pissed on it," Maryk said.
She wondered how he knew this as he climbed over the broken glass back inside. "My paintings," Melanie said.
But he said nothing, moving past her and looking at his destroyed kitchen with a dazed expression. He reappraised his infected loft from where he stood, hands empty at his sides. A virus had broken into his home and contaminated everything he owned. He looked at her across the kitchen as though she
were a stranger.
Whatever he had injected himself with was wearing off, the cascade now enveloping him like a gas. He had trouble locking the white door behind them as they left, and he slumped against the railing on the stairs, depending on her shoulder the rest of the way. On the sidewalk outside, she took his car keys from him, and he did not protest.
The gas tank was three quarters full. The thought of fleeing Atlanta forever was seductive, but fleeting. The seat belt held Maryk upright in the passenger seat, helpless and mumbling words beyond meaning. She got back onto the highway and followed the signs for Emory Hospital, back to the BDC.
The Tank
She listened to the hum of controlled air inside the Tank.
Stephen Pearse's eyes rolled open inside the incubator-like berth.
"Melanie," he said, muffled, like a dead man waking inside a coffin.
She unsealed and rolled back the glass top. His skin was tarnished with lesions and odd, lurid blemishes, and his fingernails had flaked off like his lost hair. He must have weighed less than she did now.
His neck looked like thin rods bundled in rice paper. His clavicle was a bar that his head and neck had been set upon to rot, and a dark boil oozed over his right eye. His eyeballs were ghostly red and deep-set, and his pupils-- misty, blue -- were clouded as though with suspicion.
She brought him water and he sat up slowly and closed his ragged lips around the straw. She pulled over the room's only chair to sit across from him, and he faced her from the padded bed with an eerie dignity.
She began to tell him what had happened. He required every trivial detail, especially where Maryk was concerned.
She noted the slowness of his gray tongue and his fixed lips as he spoke. "Zero is sick," he said. "He needed that treatment information given at the conference. Peter knows this now. Zero is running out of time."
"Time for what?"
"Human time. The virus is mutating so wildly now that the human cells can no longer cope. His body functions are already running at minimum capacity. Zero is genetically sick, in a way we don't yet understand."
Chuck Hogan Page 26