It was Zero. His mask was still hanging from his scrawny neck and Maryk saw his mouth chewed open to his throat. Zero had wondered why he was not being followed. He had come back for Maryk. He stood there staring. In the yellow light his red eyes blazed.
Maryk tried to make his right hand move toward his bag. But the weight of his bones anchored him to the tunnel floor. He felt as though he was underwater. He felt as though the entire world was underwater.
Zero stepped up near Maryk's feet. He lingered there. He was wary of a trap.
Get up. You can fight. There -- your foot moved. Zero had kicked it.
Maryk's chest heaved as the cascade paralyzed him and he stared up at Zero.
Zero came another step closer. He moved tentatively like an animal suspicious of a human's offer of food.
Maryk had never known such utter exhaustion. He felt dead.
Stop him. Now or never. He will infect the human race. He will infect you.
Zero stiffened suddenly. He sucked in a trembling breath and gripped the base of his neck as a bolt of pain evidently seized him.
His red eyes blazed until it passed.
Maryk managed to force out two words. "You're ... sick," he said.
Zero came forward. He crouched at Maryk's side. He was close enough for Maryk to reach out and touch him if only he could move his arm.
Fetid breath groaned through Zero's disfigured mouth. "You created us," he said.
He bent closer. He was obviously in great pain. His blood-red eyes were gleaming and he was going to infect Maryk. His open mouth formed a gaping smile. He was dangerously close to Maryk's mouth and eyes.
They were face to face. Zero was reaching into the pocket of his windbreaker. He was pulling out something for Maryk to see.
Stay awake. Stay awake. Maryk struck the back of his head against the tunnel wall to keep his eyelids from dropping shut. Zero was holding something small in his dirty gloved hand.
What is it? What is it? He pulled out an inhaler. At first Maryk did not understand. Then he recognized the prescription sticker taped over the barrel.
Melanie's inhaler. He uncapped it. "It is time," Zero slurred.
"She is mine now."
He brought it trembling to his decrepit mouth. His eyes remained fixed on Maryk as he tasted the mouthpiece with his ruby red tongue.
The ground was rolling over and Maryk hung off it. He was blacking out.
Melanie. Zero sucked liplessly on the open end of the inhaler as the echoes of voices and footsteps came from deep within the tunnel.
Zero's moistened eyes narrowed. He removed the inhaler from his mouth and strings of drool clung to his chin. Maryk's bag was open next to him. Zero dropped the inhaler inside. Then he stood and was gone.
The Test
Maryk stirred and felt a hand release his own. He jerked as though to fight and then opened his eyes on the bright grayness of a ceiling. He was on top of a table inside a small room. His neck was weak. His limbs resisted movement as though he were buried in sand.
"Hi." Melanie was looking down at him. Her face was gauzy. He tried to raise his head but she put out a small hand to keep him down.
"Zero," Maryk croaked. "They all thought you were dead."
He got over onto one side. "Zero." Melanie left him and went to the door. She called someone from there as he dropped his legs over the table edge and sat up. The pain was loud and expanding in his head.
Freeley came into the room and looked him over. "Zero's gone," she said. Maryk gripped the table. His head was still too heavy for his neck. "How?"
"He went out through the airfields and must have come back around. There's a yellow cab missing. We've got the police out all over the state pulling over taxis."
Maryk squeezed the sides of his head but could not feel any pressure against his skull. "What happened in there?" Freeley said.
Maryk was trying to remember. A feeling of helplessness lingered.
"How long have I been out?"
Freeley looked at Melanie who was standing against the wall.
Melanie said, "About four hours."
Freeley turned back. "The airport is in full quarantine, and we have Milkmaid serum going around. Primary exposures are already starting to show symptoms. But no planes got off. We blitzed the MARTA station as well, and it looks like we got everyone there too."
Maryk said, "Inside the terminal atrium-there were trees."
"Silk," Freeley said. "But there was ivy, real ivy. All still healthy. The plants show no sign of the disease."
So Zero's virus had succeeded. Stephen had been right. Zero was infective only to humans now. "Then it's starting," Maryk said.
Freeley looked at a clock on the wall. "Three hours until dawn.
This massive quarantine is draining off a lot of manpower." She stepped up to Maryk. "What happened in there?"
Maryk could say nothing. He hung his head and blood rushed to his temples.
Freeley went out again. Melanie came forward. "They carried you out on a stretcher," she told him. "They thought you were dead. They thought maybe he had done something to you."
He looked at his hands and saw that he was wearing fresh gloves.
The skin on his face felt washed. "They cleaned you up," she said.
She was in front of him now and he could see her hand moving nervously at her side. He saw her spinning her inhaler around and around.
Something stabbed at him. "Your inhaler," he said.
She looked at it. "You must have found it on the concourse. They pulled it out of your bag. I could barely breathe."
At once Maryk dropped to his feet. He saw his bag on the floor and fought his dizziness as he picked it up and straightened and unbuckled it on the table. He lifted out his tablet and a sterile syringe.
"Give me your arm," he said. He took the inhaler from her hand. "Hey, I need that."
He brought out a testing dish. He grabbed her wrist and shoved her shirtsleeve back over her elbow. He was clumsy but moving faster and faster. "Okay," she complained. "All right."
Maryk tied the tourniquet. Immediately he inserted the needle.
"I'm fine, you know -- Ow!"
He drew out as much as he needed and began to prep the mixture.
"What's wrong with you?" she said. "I'm fine. I was careful." There was pride in her voice. "I kept him away from my glands."
Maryk stared at the solution as it mixed. His arms and legs felt light. "You were mumbling my name," she said. "In your sleep, over and over. Your medical people, when they put a stethoscope to your chest and felt nothing, they thought you had gone into cardiac arrest. I had to direct them to the other side."
Maryk held the table and implored the mixture with his stare. He connected the Plainville PCR test kit to his tablet and opened his tablet screen away from Melanie. "You're wasting time," she said.
"It's New Year's Eve. He's still out there."
Maryk punched in the command and got it wrong and entered it again. He was gripping the table.
She was standing near him and just waiting. "What are you going to do now?"
The gauge opened on screen and numbers appeared and the red bar began its crawl from zero. It grew strong to 18 percent before slowing. The bar stopped altogether at 24 percent. The screen was still a moment and then the red bar disappeared and a message began to flash.
INFECTED INFECTED INFECTED She was waiting for him. He could not look up. "What are you going to do now?" she said again. He unplugged the box and collapsed the tablet to stop the word from flashing.
Cascade
Dawn
He sat alone in the car in a parking lot of the Georgia World Congress Center staring at the dash and the speedometer needle pointing to zero.
The conference attendees who had responded unsuccessfully to the Milkmaid serum treatment remained inside and he had left Melanie with them under the pretense that she could see to their care. She would be safe there alone. And the suited and the already sick wo
uld be safe from her.
He pulled his eyes from the dash and turned the key and the starter ground. The engine was already running. He pulled out and headed fast for the highway.
Isolate her, Freeley had said. It was not that simple. Melanie had told him twice that she would destroy herself rather than face Plainville again.
Containment, Freeley had said. This point was inarguable.
Cutting off the virus was the only way to keep it from spreading. It had been his creed before it had been Freeley's.
But he had failed the girl. He had promised to protect her.
What if I got sick again?
Simple. I would treat you. And if I refused? Resisted? She would not comply. She was a carrier now and would run or destroy herself if she knew.
Would you kill me? If Zero succeeded, then none of this would matter.
She would be infected like the rest. He needed to stop Zero before he needed to deal with Melanie.
Nothing impeded Zero now. His virus infected humans only. It had shifted so much that Melanie was no longer immune. He had corrupted her blood and now was utterly without cure. Atlanta was about to become the epicenter of a conflagration that would consume the human race.
But then Maryk remembered Zero's pain in the airport tunnel.
Zero's virus was mutating wildly and tearing his genetic makeup apart Zero was sick. At the BDC Maryk went immediately to the B4 sub-subbasement of Building Seven. He stopped before entering and did something he had never done before. Maryk PCR-tested his own blood.
He mixed the blood sample and ran it into his tablet.
The bar expanded steadily to 100 percent. Of course he was still healthy. But his personal victory over the virus seemed hollow now.
He entered the first room and rebooted all the computers and the B4 unit came alive. He carried his bag through to the lab and brought out the sealed biohazard sac containing the syringe from the airport shuttle. The bevel of the needle was still crusted with Zero's blood.
He scraped the blood onto a sterile paper bindle and prepped it for processing.
His thoughts drifted back to Melanie. His failure was so absolute and the loss so needless that he had trouble getting his mind around it.
There was only one remedial course of action. Four years ago he had saved her life. Now he would have to destroy her.
The work continued without him. The computer processed Zero's blood sample and compared it to Stephen's work on the older Zero virus from the Florida phone booth exposure. He examined the computer models side by side. The structural discrepancies of the viral genome were obvious and dramatic.
Zero was desperate and compelled to infect. But he was also perishing.
His human host was weakening and in need of repair. He was running out of time.
The plan revealed itself to Maryk all at once. It was as though his distress over Melanie's fate had subordinated the Zero dilemma in his mind and therefore freed him to think intuitively. But the design as presented was so propitious that he discounted it at first. Atlanta was rising to live out what could be its last healthy day. Nothing less than the survival of the species was at stake.
Moments later he was convinced of the genius of his scheme. It was as radical a treatment as he could envision and his only chance at stopping Zero.
He would need a geneticist's help. He scheduled a meeting with Geist before rushing back out of B4.
The conference sick were laid out on blankets and mats under shining chandeliers. Some called to Maryk by name but he did not stop for anyone until he found Melanie kneeling on the floor with a shivering man. She was holding his gloved hand gently.
Wheat brown skin sagged off the man's neck and shoulders. A white bedsheet clung to the ribs of his sunken frame. Tortoiseshell eyeglasses too large for his face exaggerated the ghosting of his eyes and laid bare the fear in his caving face. Every breath seemed a mystery to him. "No," Maryk heard Melanie say. "I'm not a doctor."
The man said, "Then you must be sick too."
"I used to be." The patient's eyes widened while the rest of his being remained sagged. "I know how you feel," Melanie said. "It's so shameful to be so sick.
The disease came up out of nowhere and took you all at once, and all you can think is, why?"
The man's wristwatch clattered on the heel of his trembling hand.
He breathed deeply through bared teeth. His eyes were profound with blood. "Why?" she said again. "I remember lying in the hospital, before it got really bad, and trying to figure out what terrible thing I had done. Or what thing I had failed to do-some kind act of charity that would have spared me. What terrible thing did I do to deserve to die this way? And now that I've survived, all I can think is: What terrible thing did I do to deserve to live?"
She was quiet a moment. She was just coming to this realization herself. "But we can't think that way, either of us. You're scared.
You're just scared. I know, because I was more scared than you are.
You have questions that you can't answer. And even if there's nothing these doctors can do for you, maybe they can make you more comfortable.
Maybe they can answer some of your questions. You have to let them try." The man's eyes were ancient with infection as he watched her over the rims of his eyeglasses. It was as though an exchange of some sort had taken place. "Just let them try."
Illness hung in the room like moisture. The room was humid with disease and Maryk felt it starting to cling. People were dying at his feet. Melanie was administering to the sick while Maryk could not bring himself to move. He remembered her holding his hand as he was coming out of the cascade at the airport. He remembered seeing her face over him as he awoke.
Melanie saw him standing behind her. "We have to go," Maryk told her.
She looked up at him. "Is it Stephen?" she said.
"He's weak now. I'll take you to him."
The sky was brightening into dawn as he drove the tree-lined roads back to the BDC. He felt suspended between the urgency and audacity of his plan and the nausea of failure. He pulled around to Building Nine as daylight broke around them. The city was waking to what could be its final day.
The building was uninhabited as he had ordered and there was no BioCon guard outside the Tank. Melanie was exhausted and did not notice any of this.
Maryk went to the tablet that controlled the Tank doors. "I won't be asking any more of you," he said. "You can stay with him as long as you like."
She nodded and waited tiredly at the first door. "What are you going to do?"
Maryk just shook his head. "I'll come back for you," he said.
He issued the remote admittance command from the nurse's table and opened the doors that allowed her into the Tank. She moved through the UV shower that killed the viruses on the surface of her body but could not touch the ones changing her inside. He looked through the window and saw her approaching Stephen's wheelchair. He closed both doors and sealed her inside the Tank.
The hallway elevator dinged down the hall. The BioCon security guard emerged wearing a contact suit and met Maryk at the desk. "The girl inside," Maryk told her. "She is not to be let out until I return."
The Black Heart Panic welled up ahead of tears as she stood before Stephen Pearse and for a moment thought he was dead. His head was tipped to the side and his lifeless face was gray and broken with hot, black, suppurating sores. His left arm hung straight off his wheelchair as though reaching for the floor, his gaunt fingers blistered and grayed like infested wood. She called his name again.
She pushed his armrest and shook the chair gently, and his eyes opened, and he righted his head slowly, in pain. He looked about himself blindly before finding Melanie, and by then she was composed in front of him.
The sore on his right eyelid was seeping reddened pus and threatened to close the eye. He raised his own arm onto his lap, and his mouth contorted in pain. Melanie placed the medication trigger in his hand and watched him thumb it twice.
She blurted out the short version of what had happened at the airport, then pulled over the chair and told it all again, in detail, from beginning to end. It was a relief to sort it all out verbally, and her telling it kept both of them occupied. Stephen's attention faded at times, but Maryk's name always succeeded in bringing him back.
He spoke hoarsely, and from the way he swallowed Ye she could tell that some obstruction was growing in the space of his throat. The act of speaking had never before seemed so complicated. What he said at first sounded like gibberish, and she thought his mind was gone. Then came the English translation of the Latin phrase, just above a whisper: "You may drive nature out with a pitchfork," he said, "but she will keep coming back."
"Or 'he,' " she said, relieved by his apparent sanity. "Zero has the pitchfork at Peter's throat now. Peter must stop trying to fight the man. He must instead fight the virus."
She said nothing, pitying her faith in Maryk. She offered Stephen a plastic cup of water, and his grinning lips closed on the straw. He swallowed and eased back. "You should hate me, Melanie. You should strangle me as I sit here. I let the girl with vitiligo go out of the camp. I am the one who brought about your sickness. Your parents. Your town. I caused all this."
"Stop," she said. "Maybe it all should end. You've thought so sometimes, Melanie. Who hasn't? No more suffering, no more struggling."
"Please stop," she said, but his eyes had slipped from focus. The IV lines slithered off his trembling arms, and her eyes filled as she looked at the rotting mass of his body.
He came around strong again. It was like standing beside a carousel, watching someone swing past and fade away. "He left me his bag," he said. She looked around and saw Maryk's black bag there on the counter, watching them, like a cat. "He only visits when I am asleep.
It is fear, though he would never admit it. Fear of my sickness. Fear of what I am becoming. Do you know why he left me his wares?"
"I think so," she said quietly. "The poison in his needles. The great virus hunter cannot bring himself to kill me."
Chuck Hogan Page 30