Chuck Hogan

by The Blood Artists (epub)

  "He moved pretty quickly down those stairs."

  "All the doctors and virologists fighting his disease, all gathered in one place. He learned what he needed to know, then disposed of them.

  The genius of it. So like a virus. He is that much closer to clearing a path for a worldwide epidemic."

  "You're so certain."

  The rods of Stephen's frail neck tensed, and from time to time his eyes narrowed suddenly. He was evidently suffering much pain. "That is why he is here in Atlanta now. He's becoming more desperate. It is like a race between these two concerns: the breakdown of his virus to where it will only infect humans, and the death of his human host."

  Stephen nodded as though to confirm this. "The same race that is being run in'me now."

  She didn't know how to respond to his apparent enthusiasm for Zero.

  "Do you think, then, that Zero has forgotten all about me?"

  The disease had carved Stephen's face of everything except a crimson-eyed curiosity. He answered her regretfully, and yet there was something undeniably bright behind his eyes. "No," he said.

  She shuddered. "It won't ever end. Will it?" She was near tears again. "Only now the creature after my blood is not Maryk, but Zero."

  "You can save him," Stephen said.

  She looked at him. She thought he meant Zero, "Save who?"

  "Peter. There is still time. Has he told you the Meister story?, I She nodded, confused. "The boy. Pasteur's crypt."

  "He wants someone to vouch for him, to stand up for him after he's gone." His eyes lost focus a moment. "You're only seeing the end of a person, the nadir in a long slide from humanity. The first time I met Peter Maryk, he was holding a cheap bouquet of flowers wrapped in pink saran. He was pursuing a girl in our American lit elective, a daughter of one of the big auction house families. She was beautiful; he never had a chance. Still, he pursued her, finding out her schedule and making certain their paths crossed between each class. He made a career out of social failure in those days-he went about it with such verve."

  His lips and tongue got in the way of his strained voice, but sentiment carried the words. "Peter and I graduated the university together, Class of 2001. The millennium change came over our final holiday break. My parents were big political contributors in New York at the time, and we had received four tickets to the ball at the governor's mansion. Having no date myself, I talked my father into mailing Peter a plane ticket to fly out from Washington to attend. It was a gaudy, splashy affair, but boring for the two of us. Borough representatives and old New York money, and there was Peter in a rented tuxedo, standing around like my bodyguard. He said later that that night was the first time he had ever heard the pop of a champagne cork; I'd grown up hearing it. We slipped out early, with no particular plan in mind except to get away and salvage the rest of the night.

  "Champagne was in short supply all around the world, but abundant at the mansion, and we pinched a case of two-hundred-dollar Modt before hopping into my car. I drove an MG then; my parents, they spoiled me.

  "One thing led to another and we found ourselves on the highway driving out to my family's summer house in Amagansett."

  He seemed strangely happy, continuing as though in a trance. "We installed ourselves in the sitting room just before midnight, a glassed-in porch facing the water. I'd not seen Peter drink before, and haven't since. Midnight came and we toasted the television set, then switched it off to hear the cheers from the houses down the street, and went outside and raised our voices to the chorus.

  Fireworks thumped in the distance, unseen, the sky around us so bright and bare. We went down to the water, drinking straight out of our bottles. The sand was cold and hard. We stopped just before the foaming swash to toast the tide and the moon, and that was when Peter told me he was dropping out of school. He said he had decided to become a sculptor, and was trying to get up the courage to tell his parents over the break. Of course, no one sculpts anymore, but that was Peter. He shared this with me like it was some terrible secret-which, I guess, it was. We had only that one last semester left of school. But I was in no condition to talk him out of it, and in fact I'm certain I raised my bottle to his decision. He returned home the next day, and the truth is, I don't know if he ever told them. He was back at school that January, working harder than ever, and I couldn't bring myself to ask. I didn't learn until April that his mother was sick. If Peter was close to anybody, he was close to her."

  Melanie shook her head when he was done. He seemed so happy. "I don't want to know any more," she said.

  She had been eight years old that remarkable night. She stayed up late, spent the evening baking cookies, playing board games, and watching TV with her parents, and promised herself that when she grew up, every night was going to be just like that.

  Stephen's head trembled a bit. His hands grew tremulous in his lap, and he looked at them, as though unable to will them to stop.

  Then his eyes found hers again. "Melanie," he said. "I am dying. But not quickly enough. I am afraid I might become dangerous. I'm afraid I will frighten you."

  "Please," she said. His words forced the tears from her eyes, but she could not tell him to shut up. "He's changing me. I don't know how long I can resist. But I'm afraid the time may come when I would want to harm you." She shook her head, but he went on. "You shouldn't come here alone anymore."

  She sat still and listened to his harsh breathing as her tears blotted one after another upon the glazed white floor.

  Prescription

  The tablet tone woke him and he came to lying flat on his office couch. He felt for his bag on the floor. He opened his tablet screen and concentrated on it. His head felt full of sand.

  "Who is it?"

  "Suzy Lumen, Dr. Maryk, from Cyber. Director Pearse's tablet accessed the central computer net earlier this morning. I'm sorry-we missed it."

  Her words rallied him to consciousness. The head and shoulders of the large blind woman wearing a headset filled his window. "Where did it go?" he said. "They were into the system for just over nineteen seconds, unfortunately not enough time to trace. They went right to the bureau master address list and downloaded sixty-four percent of it, breaking off the connection at the letter Q.Q followed P for Pearse.

  "Is the director's address updated to the Tank?"

  "Let me check," she said. Maryk waited. "Yes, it is. Would you like me to cut the intruder out of the system now? I can delete Director Pearse's tablet code and fence them out of the Genetech."

  "No," Maryk said. "I need to preserve that link. However tenuous."

  He closed his tablet and slumped back against the couch. He remembered his apartment but not the return to the BDC. Melanie must have driven.

  She must have helped him into his office.

  His cascades were growing more and more intense. Zero's virus was inestimably potent.

  He had only two sets of white cotton shirts and black pants inside his office closet. He took one and carried it with him through the parking lot outside to the adjacent laboratory building where he deconned in a UV hold and changed clothes.

  Dr. Carla Smethy was assistant head of pharmacology and yet she sat behind the same desk in the rare-drug clearinghouse of Building Six, Room 161, as she had six years before. Her black hair was tinged with gray and small lines textured her brow and the corners of her lightly painted lips. She was no more pleased to see him than she had been then. "I need a prescription run," he said. "By physician, going back ten days."

  Her chair turned as she crossed her legs beneath her desk.

  "Fine," she said. "All I need is a court order, or proof of authorization from the attending physician."

  "I have neither. Let me give you the AP's name.

  Pearse, Stephen D.She looked at him probingly but the name worked.

  She pulled on a pair of eyeglasses and typed into her keyboard. The desk unit responded in an assertive female voice, "Searching now."

  "How is Stephen?" she asked while th
ey waited.

  Maryk searched his mind for an appropriate answer. He was still searching when the computer spoke again. "Ready." She looked at her desktop screen. "There are three prescriptions."

  "How recent?"

  "Two in a Florida clinic two days ago, and one in Atlanta last night."

  "Last night? The patient's name?"

  "Watson, Robert."

  It was an uninspired pseudonym. "The drugs?"

  "Fentanyl, two days ago, and Baniciclovir, brand name Banix. I believe that is a relatively new varicella zoster treatment."

  Zoster was the virus that caused chicken pox. After infection it retreated into the nerve ganglia at the base of the skull and remained latent until normal aging or a depressed immune system reactivated the virus into what is commonly known as shingles. Symptoms included acute paroxysmal neuralgic pain. Banix was one of the drugs cited in the information distributed at the Plainville conference. "For postherpetic neuralgia," she went on. "It's an NMDA-blocker." NMDA receptors on cell surfaces signaled pain transmission up the spinal cord to the brain. "A painkiller, a comfort drug."

  Maryk nodded. Zero was in significant pain. He had, gone right out after the World Congress Center exposure and used Stephen's name to prescribe himself a patient treatment for the effects of his own virus.

  "No unfilled prescriptions?"

  "No," she said. "But Banix is only two years out of FDA and still strictly regulated. Ten doses maximum per person. This Watson's got only one refill left."

  This explained Zero's inactivity between the Waffle House infection and the World,Congress Center. Fentanyl was a powerful opiate. Zero had narcotized his human side and spent the time holed up in his car somewhere riding out the effects of the drug.

  The human side of Zero was dying.

  Char

  I knew exactly what was happening to me. That was perhaps the most insidious thing of all. I knew exactly what was happening and what was to come.

  I had self-diagnosed shingles. Due to the morphinePeter had tended to me while I slept-there was none of the characteristic ophthalmic pain, described by many sufferers as being like an intense toothache in the eye. There were however telltale dysesthesias, or phantom pains, such as the sensation of cold water running down my face, and I could not ignore the impulse to continually brush imagined water away from my cheeks and chin. My overloaded nerves were transmitting conflicting messages up the spinal cord to the thalamus of my brain, which was doing its best to cope with the information at hand.

  Morphine. It was lovely. Morphine did not eliminate the pain, but rather compartmentalized it, so that pain remained but was a separate issue. Whenever the twinges became too sharp, I self-medicated using a thumb switch attached to my IV tubes and the dose regulator above.

  Then the hand shaking and neck throbbing went away. Peter was taking good care of me. I could only wonder at the degree of pain Zero was experiencing.

  I was weakening. Pharyngeal ulcers were taking root in my throat, and in time I would lose the ability to swallow my saliva. My urine spilled into a catheter bag, an oily, purple drool, portending liver failure, said to be a uniquely painful event. I had accrued so much specialized knowledge in my thirty-seven years, and all of it was now draining away. Memories drifted past me on a kind of farewell tour, not flashing before my eyes but rather swirling together like so many different colors of paint, stirred into dreams. In one, the corridors and offices of Building Sixteen were filled with everyone I had ever known-family and friends, colleagues and patients, all my living and dead-passing me by without a word. I had left the door to my office wide open, but no one stopped in.

  I awoke outside my oxygenated berth, seated on a high-backed wheelchair, tired and groggy. The wall screen played an underwater scene of coral reefs and schools of bright tropical fish, meant to be soothing. In designing the Tank as a place of comfort, I found that to that end I had failed. There were no reflective surfaces inside the Tank, in order that the ill would not despair at the sordid sight of their own disfigured face-, even the stainless steel fixtures were dulled. All communications in and out were monitored for signs of depression, and suicidal tendencies. I was a prisoner in a dungeon of my own design.

  There was a remote keypad built into the arm of my chair, linked to the Tank computer. I instructed it to replace the deep-sea panorama with a prerecorded program from the BDC archives, my documentary, The Disease Dilemma.

  There I was. Facing myself from the wall, sitting on the couch back in my office, legs crossed casually, arm extended over the seat back. I looked relaxed and supremely healthy, my face full again, my skin tight and clear. My old voice filled the Tank, dosing me with nostalgia more powerful than morphine. The sunlight was strong behind me, glowing around my hair-midday in the world of the living, just a few weeks earlier. The vista of downtown Atlanta lay beyond. Image after image swept over me until the sentimentality of the experience began to wear.

  I had different eyes now, and different thoughts. When the person playing the role of "Stephen Pearse," doctor to the world, claimed that he oversaw each serious outbreak investigation personally, I stifled a laugh. The hubris of this strange man tickled me. He was begging Zero to wait for him inside bay twenty-six at Orangeburg.

  I stopped the show and sank back into the cushion of the headrest, closing my eyes on the brightness of the Tank. I triggered the medication switch with a rusted thumb and it worked on my emotions, set adrift into a bright and gauzy silence. I left myself for a while, and in the role of Stephen Pearse, I visited my current self in the chair.

  Be brave, I told that sickly form.

  I surfaced to the toning of the Tank computer. I prodded the necessary keys on my armpad to receive the incoming message. It had been posted from "Stephen Pearse" in Zurich, Switzerland. The message read: "Won't you join me for a chat?" Maryk watched in disbelief as the conversation scrolled down his tablet. Stephen and Zero were conversing across a virtual table in a cyber-cafe halfway around the world.

  Audio and visual were both disabled. Each dialogue leader was listed as S. Pearse. Stephen answered "I am here.

  "So you are still alive, Doctor."

  "Medical science Is gaining on you."

  "Me -- 1. Medical science: approx.-- 500. Your colleague Maryk sensed my presence, it seems. Intriguing."

  "You are ill. You have contacted me for Information about my treatment."

  "Has he given up yet? Now that I have humiliated him? Zurich is quite pleasant this time of year."

  "Do not underestimate Peter Maryk. And you are not in Zurich."

  "Soon I will be, Doctor. Soon I will be in all places."

  A window opened at the top right corner of Maryk's tablet. It was Suzy Lumen. "Hailing's still off," she said. "He's plugged in somewhere."

  "You can't trace?"

  "How does it feel to be sick yourself?"

  "Impossible to track him back through the Internet. He's routed the signal through five or six sites all across the world, maybe more. The only crumbs left behind would be stored in his own drive cache."

  "All right," Maryk said. She signed off and he found his place in the scrolling conversation. Zero was speaking. "This body is wearing out. Breaking down."

  "You are changing too fast. Out of control."

  "I am only improving. I will spare the sinless fauna and flora. Only man will perish, and the earth will once again turn peacefully."

  "Your human cells can take only so much."

  "Yours too, Doctor. Maybe you think there is still hope for you. Maybe you think salvation is still possible. A vaccine. A cure."

  "I am too far gone to be remedied."

  "True, Doctor. So true."

  "If you are so confident In your abilities, then what are you waiting for?"

  "The right girl to come along. A small-town girl, someone with a similar background, similar interests. I'm carrying a torch, you might say. One that must be exiinguished. Man will be exterminated absolutely. It even
one or two of you beasts are left behind, In a few hundred years you'll be crawling all over the place again. The girl is a detail, nothing more. Maryk, too. My triumph will be a complete one."

  "You will learn nothing of my treatment unless you surrender yourself to our care."

  "How does It feel, Doctor?"

  Stephen did not respond. "It won't be long now. Embrace it, dear Doctor. It will be less excruciating that way."

  "I only wish to outlive you, Ridgeway."

  "Be brave, Doctor. Be brave."

  The connection ended. Maryk saved the transcript and paged through it again. Zero had contacted Stephen because he was hurting.

  Zero was getting desperate. Desperation could lead to a critical mistake.

  His tablet toned again. This time the window opened on Dr. Smethy.

  "Another Banix prescription was just filed under Stephen's name." She posted him the electronic receipt. The prescription had been forwarded to a pharmacy just south of downtown Atlanta. Zero was walking into a trap and Maryk would be waiting for him.

  The Airport

  The country music playing in the aisles made her want to do something drmtit. It was one of those electric fiddles, an instrument that clearly should never have been electrified, sawing into her brain like a voice instructing her to burn down the store. The sun was gone outside and soft halogen ceiling lights suffused the wide aisles of the Buy-Rite! Super Drug store with a ghastly, morguelike glow. Only two teenage customers remained inside, goofing off quietly in aisle three.

  Melanie sat at the front register in her red paper-like Buy-Rite! blazer, after spending the day scanning bar codes and working on her southern accent. The return to the dull routine of customer service was at first comfortable and even kind of fun, and she had amused herself between sales by reading every magazine and tabloid on the racks and most of the greeting cards, until she realized that it was not nostalgia, but in fact all that awaited her back in Boston was the same broken life of half jobs and always just getting by.