Chuck Hogan

by The Blood Artists (epub)

  The ultraviolet vault entrance was surging to full intensity again, the lamps droning, the radiation sensors going off, and Zero turned as though called by it, reminded of his purpose. He staggered across to the console. He ran his bloody hands over the controls.

  She watched him try to captain the steel limb, to command the diseased computer to find the smallpox virus and withdraw it for him.

  But the screens ran mad with information, fraught with his own virus.

  The steel arm flailed wildly against the vault inside the plastic shield like a thing in the throes of death. It would not obey, and Zero pounded the console in vain.

  Melanie searched the entrance for a weapon, anything. The blue lights brightened the entire room, and she saw the shadow of Stephen's wheelchair in the hall. She grabbed it at once and pushed it out, screaming, running the chair from the entrance to the console, straight at Zero. She struck him from the side, pitching him off the console and hard into the flat of the high plastic wall. The wheelchair struck the foot of the console chair and keeled over, clattering, but Zero remained on his feet. He wavered, then turned toward her, starting her way.

  She reeled back. There was blood on the floor before the vault entrance, and she slipped on it, falling hard. She tried to scramble away but could not get any traction, and Zero was coming for her.

  Something stopped him at her feet. Maryk had come into the room behind her. Zero seemed to smile-a momentary, bloody, lipless smile.

  Then all at once, Stephen came at Zero from his blind side and they fell together back against the wall.

  Broken and bleeding, somehow Stephen had gotten to his feet. He wrapped his arms around Zero now, as though in an embrace, leaning against the plastic wall at the vault entrance.

  They grappled there, madly, weakly. Zero reacted to Stephen's weird, sudden affection for him and tried to get his arms free as Stephen slumped against him, tying them both up like two exhausted boxers.

  Maryk remained next to her, incredulous, watching the spectacle of Stephen and Zero entangled. Stephen's face was sagged and expressionless, and seeing him that way, feebly struggling with Zero, Melanie believed she was losing her mind.

  Bashed and spent, Stephen somehow held on, hugging Zero and turning them both slowly around the corner of the shield wall into the open doorway. The blue lamps began whirring again, brightening just behind them, the hum growing louder and louder.

  Melanie pulled herself up off the bloody floor. At once, she understood what Stephen was trying to do. Zero seemed to realize then where they were, and she quivered with tension as Zero too comprehended Stephen's intent.

  Ultraviolet light chambers killed exposed viruses. Zero was a living virus. His skin, tissues, organs, blood, muscles-every cell of his being had been converted. And the light source was raging at ten or twenty times its normal intensity.

  Radiation sensors went off all around them. The lamps gained force and the drone of the humming light intensified as Zero began to bellow, but could not pull himself free. They remained there just inside the doorway, struggling against the side wall, before the scalding blue lamps. Stephen could not haul Zero over the necessary final few feet to his death. Neither man possessed the strength necessary to move the other.

  Maryk went forward then. He went to the open chamber door, but was forced back by the intense heat.

  The cobalt glare radiated behind Stephen as he saw Maryk. Stephen appeared to shake his head, as though to say that he had no more strength. Maryk tried to reach inside, but the heat was too much. The drone was rising to a roar. The alarms screamed and the blue light flared, and Melanie shaded her eyes.

  She could barely see Stephen now. The ultraviolet light was peaking behind him, blurring him. He clutched Zero and stared out of the ethereal blueness, his dead eyes locked with Maryk's, imploring him.

  Something unspoken was exchanged.

  Maryk grasped the frame of the open door with both hands. He raised his right foot and, with a swift, powerful thrust, caught Zero sharply in the small of the back. Maryk reeled backward as Zero fell with Stephen into the roaring oven of burning blue light.

  Zero wailed like an animal. The light raged to its fullest around their collapsed forms as Stephen rolled away from Zero, finally releasing his grip.

  Zero's dark body writhed and shriveled inside the pure blue holocaust.

  The light and the clamor peaked and held, bluing the entire room, then began to decline again. As it did, Melanie could see Zero more clearly, rippling and settling around his scorched clothes into a sinking, black heap. The fading rays consumed the last echoes of his groan, until all that remained was a foul, black lump, shrunken and wasted into the shape of a thing reaching for the vault inside.

  Stephen lay on his back. The light subsided and Maryk slid him out by his ankle, leaving Stephen's dark silhouette behind, etched into the floor of the chamber. , Melanie slipped to her knees. Radiation burns scorched Stephen's flesh. The virus part of him seemed dead, and his face was pulpy and seared, his red eyes staring crookedly. The hand atop his chest was scorched and bare and she reached for it, touching him now. It burned her, but she held on. Something moved in his mystified eyes, and she imagined then the merest pressure against her palm. He shuddered bodily and she gripped his hand too tightly, feeling the bones collapsing inside. As diseased tears swamped her vision, Stephen Pearse died in the twitching shadow of the vault of Building Thirteen.

  Sanctuary

  Life viewed from a helicopter is so small. Not small as in "insignificant" or "trivial," but, small as in "seemingly manageable."

  She looked down upon Atlanta and the dots moving again along the sidewalks and thought: It's all not so mystifying. The inevitable return to earth would blur this perspective, in the same way the twisted logic of a dream dies in the waking world, but for the moment it seemed that everything was answerable from above.

  Atlanta was well again, its inhabitants waking into a brand-new day.

  They had survived the illness, and Melanie hoped this would remind them that they were alive, at least for another day or two, before the frenzy of twenty-first-century life resumed.

  She was being spirited away above. Zero and Plainville had been vanquished, and now she was yesterday's messiah. Her brief career in Atlanta had come to an end. There was nothing she could do for her own species anymore except harm.

  The helicopter pilot wore a contact suit, though nothing had been said back at the BDC. Maryk sat in stony silence behind her, still pretending that she was fine.

  In fact, this journey had been her idea.

  "I'm sick of people," she had told him back at the BDC, and even managed to appear upbeat saying it. "I think I'd like to get away from it all for a while."

  And he had agreed, which stunned her. She wondered how long he was going to play this out. He had once said: There are no hills remote enough anymore. No oases without roads running through them.

  House burning is all.

  The ride was too brief They broke away from the mainland, and the surface of the ocean reflected the sky, an oily green-blue broken only with white caps, until Gala Island appeared distantly in the morning fog: a wide, verdant mound of trees ringed by tawny sand, and ringed again by the pale azure of the cleansing shore. The beauty of the place glistened and reached out to her, but couldn't breach her despair.

  She grew more prickly as the helicopter began its descent. Her panic surged as they touched down, and she forced open her door and fled out over the landing pad, fleeing Maryk, fleeing death, not stopping until her shoes sank in the soft, sandy, island dirt.

  She took in the listless trees of the southern island. Not a human in sight. Her ears rang as the helicopter rotors wound down, and Maryk's shadow fell over her.

  She started up the toughened Jeep path ahead of him, on foot. He followed without a word. She could bear the clinking contents of his reclaimed black bag behind her as the road entered the trees.

  They had left the BDC i
n chaos. The germ vault had maintained its deep freeze, thanks to an auxiliary generator-but once they pulled the plug on the infected computer, the rest of the buildings just lay there, like pieces of a hacked-to-4eath snake. The entire computer network would require months of rehabilitation, and every square inch of connected hallway and catwalk of the Clifton Road headquarters had to be abluted and sanitized. Biohazard Containment's greatest challenge would be the cleaning of its own house.

  She remembered the hard look on Maryk's face as they boxed up Stephen's body and destroyed the rest of Zero's remains. Dr. Geist's corpse was also sealed inside a plastic pod, and wheeled down to Maryk's office alongside Stephen. Suited Special Path agents arrived to help, and Melanie studied their faces as she encountered them, knowing they would be the last human faces she would ever see. There was something elegiac about the whole dreary overnight, and then dawn finally came, and it all seemed to have passed in a moment.

  There were two corpses in Maryk's office, a dismembered BDC, and a dead city of millions reawakening. She didn't know how Maryk planned to explain it all. She didn't think he could.

  She knew now that she was safe to animals and plants. That was why she had run from the helicopter: If she did have full Plainville, Maryk would have killed her before she could spread it to Gala Island.

  The ivy had gone uninfected at the Hartsfield airport outbreak, so Zero's virus had to have been sufficiently diminished by that time.

  Melanie was death only to human life, then. Her blood and glands were toxic. She was symptomless, but she didn't think she would become another Zero. The virus had mutated too much by then. Maybe she was the reservoir now, as the birds had once been: a human biological vault of Plainville, infected, but not affected.

  She walked on and realized that none of this mattered. She was the last carrier of Plainville on the planet, and she knew the containment rules.

  Birds were appearing-6v-erhead. She reached the houselike ouqx)st-near the aviary, and a family of mallards squatting in a row on the shore of the man-made pond watched her walk to the door. The outpost was simple inside, a desk, kitchen, bed, bath. The place overall had an air of hasty abandonment.

  A map of the island was tacked up on the office wall, along with schedule charts, feeding times. It was cool inside, air-conditioned, and the walls looked as though they could weather a storm. Her possessions were packed in cartons stacked in the middle of the floor.

  Maryk remained in the doorway. "Food will be dropped off," he said.

  "For the birds, and also for you. It's all being worked out."

  Just end it, she wanted to tell him. Don't let this go on. End it now. "That's fine," she said.

  He would not step inside. He was standing outside the door like a hired man waiting for a delivery signature. His black bag was in his hand.

  She shook her head at the silence between them, and folded her arms, trying to smile. Either walk away or come inside, she thought.

  He said, "I visit the island now and again." She nodded. "You should look me up sometime." He was unstrapping his bag. He pulled out only a tablet. "For you," he said. "To stay in touch with the world."

  He held it out to her. She broke the knot of her arms, approaching him slowly, watching his face. But he was his normal impassive self as she stopped before him. She took the dark blue box and stepped back. She felt the weight of the tablet and its smoothness in her hands, and tears threatened, and she winced to keep them back.

  Her cheeks were hot. She was trying so hard to be brave. "This is crazy," she said, at once attempting to pierce the formality of their exchange. But he maintained the charade, not willing to crack and give in. He would go on pretending that she was not infected until he killed her. "I should have been the one to die with Zero," he said.

  It was not over for him yet she realized. Part of him was still stunned. "It was Stephen's disease," she said. "It was right that he perished with it."

  When Melanie thought of Stephen Pearse now, she thought of compassion, the way he appeared to cherish all life, as a counterpoint to Maryk who saved without caring, who cured without need. Some people aren't so easy to love, she thought. Some people you can't love at all.

  But talking about Stephen appeared to break the spell between them.

  There was another pregnant moment of silence, and then he was gone.

  Maryk turned and walked out of the door frame, leaving her staring across at the trees. She turned to the window just in time to watch him stride past. He was leaving, and she was still alive.

  She did not understand. She looked around the outpost, seeing her painting supplies stacked next to the boxes, her easel set in the corner. She put down the tablet and ran out after him. He hadn't gotten far. He stopped when she appeared at his side. "Tell me what you're feeling," she said. "Please. Anything."

  Maryk's gray eyes were full of thought, like pieces of glass catching the light. "Guilt," he said.

  She was weak with relief from the truth of his response. "Don't," she told him. She knew enough about guilt and loss to know that she had to absolve him there and then, and mean it. "I'll be fine here."

  She smiled and brushed away a tear, stepping back from him to take in the pristine aviary. "It's like heaven, isn't it?"

  He nodded, a small nod. It was the best he could do. He was not ready yet. Perhaps neither was she. "You'll come by," she told him.

  Only then could she let him go. He walked away down the road into the trees with his bag at his side, and around the sharp bend under the circling birds, and was gone.

  She stood there a while catching her breath. She let the clean ocean air work on her as birds darted overhead, then she started back along the path to the outpost. The birds appeared to be checking her out, this new human in their midst. Then all at once they fled out of the trees.

  The rotor noise had spooked them. She looked up as the helicopter appeared over the trees, Maryk in the front seat, looking down at her.

  A glint of sunlight off the plastic bubble made her raise a hand to shield her eyes, which she hoped did not look like a good-bye wave.

  The glare faded and the helicopter was gone.

  The aviary chatter resumed, birds reclaiming the sky above. They swooped and dove exploratorily, lower and lower, at times buzzing her head. She hoped she had brought enough hats. Either he will kill me or he will save me, she thought-and until then, I might as well keep busy. She walked back to the outpost and began unpacking.

  Coda

  Stephen's memorial service was held two mornings later on the quadrangle of the central campus of Emory University. It was combined with an observance for the multinational Plainville dead, and with the U.S. president and other heads of state in attendance, became a worldwide media event. Many of the details of the Plainville epidemic and Oren Ridgeway had since come to light, and the ceremony was seen as a chance to provide some of that overrated human emotional commodity, closure.

  I suppose my request to speak at the top of the program must have come as a surprise to Bobby Chiles and the rest. There had been a movement afoot, ever since the truth about Zero had gotten out, to present me to the world as its latest savior, to fit me for the robes Stephen had so recently worn. The medical papacy was mine for the taking, and my request to open the program was viewed by some as tacit acceptance of this. But I did not want to become the next Stephen Pearse. To declare this would have meant my being misunderstood, as usual: They would think that 1, Peter Maryk, was asserting once and for all my dislike for my former partner. The truth was, I loved him like the brother I never had. But I would learn from his mistakes. The live on-line television broadcast afforded me a unique pulpit, instant electronic access to as much as 98 percent of the species, and I had something to say.

  I took the podium and told the world that I had seen in Zero the end of all man. I said that, as Zero had been overcome by the destructive virus that had created him, so too would man ultimately fall victim to his own devastation. Man, I decl
ared, would consume his host earth.

  My words were greeted with a polite, uncomfortable silence, observed across the crowded campus and perhaps repeated billions of times before viewing screens in living rooms and workplaces all over the doomed planet. Then I stepped down from the podium and went home.

  I had done my part. Now it was up to them.

  My loft had been abluted ceiling to floor by BioCon after Zero's break-in. The walls were bare and the floors empty. I packed my few remaining articles of clothing into soft canvas traveling bags, then took one last look around the place before locking the door behind me.

  Inside the BDC helicopter, I opened my new tablet and brought up my daily postcard from Gala Island. Beneath a small, artfully drawn "Bird of the Day--a Little Egret (Egretta garzetta)-the message read: They sing and call all day and night here. I have to scold myself for thinking I am sick of it. The music is beautiful, even when it keeps me awake. Soon it will become like crickets sawing their legs, or a long long rainfall, something I won't even hear anymore. That will be a sad day.

  Mel read it over and over. Each time her words told me something different. She was depressed or elated or lonely or fine.

  The helicopter left me at the Gala Island landing strip. Freeley was waiting there, just outside the boundaries of the quarantined bird sanctuary, wearing a plain white ball cap that dropped a shadow over her face. The helicopter remained on the pad behind us while the trees above drifted with the ocean breeze. "It's been two days," she said.

  "I was beginning to think you were avoiding me."

  "Meetings," I said.

  "Questions, lots of them."

  "Everything is set here. All we need to do is disable the cameras over the aviary. She's alone."

  "She is," I said.

  Something in the way I said this worried Freeley, and her shadowed gaze sharpened. "We need to end this now," she said. "While we still can."