by Rick Wayne
The bodies rested at various places around the dark gray space. The three adults were sitting against the wall. The two kids had collapsed together in a fetal position, facing each other. All of them had died in pain and total darkness. I looked at the hole over my head. No door or lock, but it would be easy to seal with one of the box pillars. No one underneath would be able to get enough leverage to push that off, not from that uneven ladder. Whatever it had been originally, the room was now a dungeon.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, then again a moment later as I shuffled forward to the nearest figure. I stepped on something crisp, which snapped underfoot. I bent to pick it up. A twig. There were several more next to it, along with some frayed twine. I stepped over it to examine the first victim, a short man of about 50 with a wide head and a flat nose. His right arm ended in a stub at the elbow. I ran my beam slowly from his head to his hand. His eyes were closed. He wore cargo shorts and an XXL Justin Bieber T-shirt that reached to his knees like a sleeping gown. His legs were so atrophied there was no way he could walk. One of his feet bent oddly to one side, since birth by the looks of it. The skin of his arms, neck, and face was splotchy and swollen in a latticelike web characteristic of some kinds of fungal infection. And there was an ashen pallor on top of that, as if whatever had killed him had also caused his epidermis to turn to powder.
The woman next to him had the same splotching. I ran a single gloved finger over her arm. Pale dust gathered, like from the mantel of a long-abandoned house. The couple’s hands rested a few inches apart on the floor. They’d been holding on to each other before death. I looked between them. His eyes were shut. Hers were open slightly as if in a deep sleep. I imagine he went first and she reached over and closed his lids. There were a pair of dried tear paths down her cheeks, like desert gullies.
Just past the couple, the two kids clung to each other in silence, foreheads together. There was something wrong with them, with their faces—evidence of a disability I couldn’t place. I glanced again at the man’s atrophied legs, and at the wife who refused to leave his side. Or maybe a sister. At the back, a very old woman sat by herself. She had vomited all over her chest. Orangeish liquid crusted her lips and ran in hard streaks down her blouse. Her eyes were open. They stared right through me. And there was a hint of a smirk on her lips, like she knew something I didn’t. It was unnerving, and I looked away.
I traced the corners of the room with my flashlight and found a crumpled white paper bag tossed to one side. Someone had brought them food at some point. Days ago, by the looks of it. They’d finished every last crumb. Nothing left but a slip of wax paper. No marks on the bag except on the bottom: a black circle with the letters CE inside. No receipt. Could’ve been from anywhere. I turned. My legs were stiff from squatting, and my knees were starting to hurt. I looked around the long, sloped space. I looked at the hands of the husband and wife. Fallen. Almost touching. I looked at the glow-in-the-dark symbol. I pulled out my phone to take a picture and ignored the text messages on the screen. I swiped to the camera, waited for it to focus, and snapped. Then I took a second for good measure. I looked again at the man, at his scalp. I ran my gloved fingers through his dark hair. Tufts came free. I shook them and shuffled to the back. I couldn’t take any more of the stench.
I stood at the top of the hole and stretched my knees and made sure the photos I’d taken weren’t blurry. Then I read the messages.
YOUR MOM CALLED SAID IT’S
SERIOUS THIS TIME
TOLD HER U R WORKING BUT
YOUD CALL LATER TONIGHT
“Get what you need?” Rigdon asked as I walked up the stairs. The planks creaked underfoot.
He and Ollie had clearly been chatting. I’d heard a hearty chuckle as I ascended.
I shook my head and stripped the latex from my hands. “I don’t suppose there’s a way to get a rush on stomach contents?” I picked up my bag from where I’d left it.
“Oh sure,” Rigdon said as he patted his pockets. “I think I have a pocketknife around here somewhere.”
I took out my phone and looked at the messages again.
Ollie eyed me a moment. “You okay?”
“Two kids down there.”
“So the man said.” He nodded to the detective. “Kids are tough.”
The store seemed choked with stale smoke and strange smells, more than it had before. “I need some air.”
I left them chatting and walked to the street. A handful of residents had returned as if lured by the softly glowing signs. A car pulled out of a pay-by-hour lot on the corner and drove away.
“We’re calling it suspicious,” Detective Rigdon said to Ollie as the pair came up behind me a few moments later. “Uniforms are canvassing and all that. We’ll keep you guys in the loop. Anything on the bodies you’ll have to get from the ME. Stomach contents included,” he said louder, to me.
A shopkeeper three doors down had emerged to sweep the sidewalk in front of his store. He caught my glance and looked down, swinging the broom swiftly as he turned away.
I shook my head without looking at my colleagues. “These people aren’t going to tell you anything.”
“Yeah,” Rigdon said softly. “That’s usually how it goes in these ethnic neighborhoods.”
I caught him studying me. “What?” I asked. “I don’t look like a hood rat? It’s the beard, isn’t it?”
He squinted. “Harlem? Bed-Stuy?”
I shook my head. “A-T-L.”
“Southern brutha, huh? What brings you up here?”
“Three-month appointment,” Ollie answered. “This man works for the federal government.”
“Centers for Disease Control,” I corrected.
“Isn’t that the same thing?” Rigdon asked. Then he put on an accent for me and slapped my shoulder. “Welcome to New Yawk.”
“That symbol mean anything to you?” I asked before he walked away. “The one on the wall?”
“Symbol?” Ollie asked.
Rigdon shook his head. “We’re having the gang unit take a look. Plenty of organized crime out here. Hong Kong Triads. Local tong. Poor folks from the mainland get smuggled here in packed shipping containers, sometimes thirty or forty at a time. They’re promised a job, think they’re getting a new life. The young women are forced to work as prostitutes or housekeepers or whatever. Everyone else is basically slave labor in a sweat shop. Folks downstairs are probably the leftovers.”
“Then why feed them?” I asked. “If you’re just going to leave them to die.”
Rigdon shrugged. “Maybe someone felt guilty?”
“And the paint?”
“Probably just graffiti.”
I wasn’t sure whether he was blowing me off or that’s really what he thought. He was acting—everyone there was acting—as if all of it were somehow routine. Maybe it was for them.
“Isn’t the whole point of graffiti that people will see it?”
“Hey!” Rigdon called over our heads. “About time!”
An Asian woman in a sharp business suit stepped from an unmarked car and he went to greet her. I took out my phone again and fired off an email to the medical examiner’s office requesting a rush on stomach contents. And a blood culture. I sent another to Oliver, even though he was standing right next to me, and asked that someone start the wonderfully exciting process of cataloging samples of all the produce in the shop and sending them to the lab. I copied Dr. Chalmers.
I hear Tucker’s available, I wrote, now that he’s done with outreach.
I looked back at the store, at the old grocer and his wife. They were shaking their heads at whatever the Asian woman was asking. We’d have to shut them down. It would take weeks to process everything.
“I can see you typing,” Ollie said, walking to the car. “You know I have eyes, right?”
“Five dead,” I countered.
He nodded. “And the police are taking it. You heard them. Suspicious deaths, the man said. That means criminal, which means not us.
”
We got in and I pulled the seatbelt down as he started the car. Ollie didn’t wear a seatbelt. He was a big man and it was very uncomfortable for him, or so he claimed. To keep the car from beeping at him, he left the belt in the lock and sat on the strap, which was now pressed permanently to the seat.
“What happens when someone else gets sick?” I asked.
“Hold on there, captain. Who says they will? We should at least get a cause of death before we go emailing everyone under the sun.”
“Emaciation, hair loss, signs of systemic fungal infection,” I counted off the symptoms on my fingers. “This makes three cases in the last month. It’s the same thing, Ollie. And you know it.”
He held up a hand. “Maybe it is. I’m not arguing with you. Just take my advice. For once. Please. Wait for the coroner’s report before you run this upstairs. Again.”
I shook my head.
“How long I been doing this?” he asked.
“Thirty years, or so you keep telling me.”
“Right. So don’t act like I got no skin in the game. You young guys come out with—”
“I’ve worked in the field.”
“Yeah, so you keep telling me.” He mimicked my words. “Three weeks in Africa. Lotsa dead bodies. It’s not the same. You guys were there with a UN mandate. We don’t have that. Money is not infinite, Alex. I wish it was. Believe me. Every dollar we spend chasing stuff like this is a dollar that doesn’t get spent somewhere else. Somewhere that could really help.”
“Like the Farm-to-Table program?”
He made a disgusted face, like I had just shoved a gob of shit into this mouth. “Look, I’m sorry those people died. It’s a terrible tragedy. But no one forced them into that shipping container or whatever—”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know how they got—”
“And even if they did!” He raised his voice. ”Even if they were forced, how does that change anything? You gonna take on organized crime now?”
The engine idled calmly.
“You didn’t even look,” I said.
“Fuck.” He turned the car off and shifted his girth to face me. “And why do you think that is, huh? Cuz I’m just some callous asshole who doesn’t care about people? Or because I know from experience that all it would do is ruin my day? Because there’s nothing I can do about it. You’re committing the cardinal sin of this job—right now.”
“Which is?”
“You’re taking it home with you.”
When I didn’t answer, he faced front again and started the car. “Maybe it’s not a bad thing your wife didn’t come.”
The morning meeting was a convention. The double doors at the back opened to a busy lecture hall where stepwise rows of long tables faced the white boards at the front. The folks scattered about the chairs looked at their phones or talked to each other in hushed tones while the single speaker, a full-figured black woman in a maroon dress suit, pointed to the writing on the boards, or to the projection overhead, and barked orders. I did what everyone did: came late and took a seat and waited for someone to call my name. Or at least say something interesting.
The speaker was Dr. Angela Chalmers, the head of my unit and my on-site supervisor. She was a formidable woman, despite her stature. Most of the time she didn’t look at you when you spoke. She’d be too busy approving requisitions, or whatever, and nodding along with your plea as if earnestly moved by your argument. But when you said something that warranted a gaze, she’d stop what she was doing and look right to your core. She had eyes like pistols, fingernails like daggers, and a voice like a Howitzer.
“Alex!” she called before my butt hit the seat.
That’s what everyone called me. It was easier than my first name. So Dr. Alexander became Alex.
I stood.
“See me after.”
“But it wasn’t me, Teach,” I objected.
Someone near me snickered and Dr. Chalmers shot me a look over the rim of her glasses.
I was part of a joint program set up by the city, state, and federal governments to test active monitoring in the nation’s largest urban centers—a reaction to several high-profile outbreaks everyone likes to pretend weren’t as scary as they sounded. It’s no accident that the first case of Ebola in the US was in a major city like Dallas, or that adenovirus hit Jersey. If an epidemic ever does come, it’s not gonna start in Des Moines or Tucumcari. It’ll be where people overwhelmingly enter the country: New York, LA, San Fran, Chicago, Boston, Houston, Dallas, Detroit, D.C., and Atlanta. That’s where pretty much every peer-reviewed epidemic model puts Patient Zero. So that’s where you start.
Something something needles and haystacks.
While some guy from the city droned on about the new retirement program, Dr. Chalmers walked up the steps and pointed at me to follow her. There was a small crowd waiting for her in the hall, but she waved them away with those daggerlike fingernails and held up one of the files from the stack in her arms. We walked to her office, where she tossed it on the side table and took a seat.
“Someone actually read your health alert. Color me impressed.”
Several weeks earlier, I’d been allowed to include a “Health Alert”—four sentences of white text in a red box—in the department’s monthly blast email, which went to just about every hospital, clinic, lab, doctor, dentist, podiatrist, chiropractor, and nursing home in the Tri-State area, as well as most of the relevant governmental and non-governmental agencies.
She looked at me like she was waiting for me to gloat. I didn’t.
“As of this morning, your undocumented have officially gotten case numbers. We’re opening a file. Congratulations.”
“Should that really be a cause for celebration, boss?”
“You’re doing an excellent job, Alex. Are you sure you want this one?”
The question surprised me. “I found it.”
“And you’d keep credit for that.”
“Are you saying you’re giving it to someone else?”
“I’m saying that I’m giving you the option the passing on it in lieu of other work. You’ve been one of our more successful appointees and I’d hate to see anything jeopardize that.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. “What makes you think I can’t handle it?”
“It’s not the science I’m worried about.” She sat back. “I read the file. You have nothing. These people have no names, no identification. Anyone they might’ve had contact with almost certainly works for whatever criminal group smuggled them here. They’re not exactly going to open up to you, even if you could find them. And you won’t get anything out of the Chinese. They won’t admit—on record, to an American governmental agency—that they have an organized crime problem. Or that their poor are dying to leave the country. Literally.”
“So we see what the police turn up.”
“And in the meantime?” It was a test.
“I take another line of attack.”
“I’m not sure you’ve really thought this one through. Where do you think this will end? You’re eager. Energetic. I appreciate that.” She said it earnestly. “But the decisions we make have repercussions.”
“Ollie gave me the lecture yesterday, boss.”
“Don’t get smart.”
“Look, I get why we didn’t open a case before. I didn’t have anything. A hunch, basically. But now there are five dead people in a basement. How can we just let that go?”
“I wasn’t suggesting that. So tell me, what are going to do first?”
“Well.” I thought for a moment. “We need to identify cause. When the autopsy—”
“On five dead? Will take a week. At least.”
I paused. “A week?”
She nodded sagely.
“Okay. So.” I paced. “We start with the other two cases. It’s not contagious. Frankly, it almost seems random. So whatever this is, it’s unusual, not something people run into in daily life. We look for exposures. Wha
t did these people have in common? What did they eat or inject or put on their skin?”
“You’ll need medical histories first. Have you started a database?”
“Not yet. I was told I wasn’t allowed to work on it.”
“But that hasn’t kept you from sniffing around, has it?”
She jumped in before I could object. “It’s alright. It’s the sign of a good investigator. I wish we had more like you, I really do. So now you wanna tell me why this one’s so important to you?”
I went for honesty. “Not really.”
“Fair enough. Talk to Ollie. Tell him it’s official.” Then she pointed stiffly to the door with a turquoise fingernail and returned to her work.
I didn’t find Ollie at his desk. I didn’t wait. I had exactly one solid lead, and it had come from the closest thing in the city I had to a friend. I stood on a sidewalk and watched her sort the stacks of plastic trays that filled the back of the delivery van. Meals on Wheels. The trays were empty. Sanitized. Just returned from the commercial wash.
I nodded to the load. “I thought you were a real doctor,” I joked.
To an MD, us PhDs aren’t “real” doctors.
She let out a single sarcastic laugh. “Yeah, well, we do it all here.”
Amber Massey had sandy brown hair that she tucked behind her ears, a pert nose, and a once-athletic build that now hovered, like so many of ours, on the unhealthy side of fit. She was originally from Waco but had gone to school on the East Coast. Shortly after completing her residency, she joined the Urban Outreach Center in the Bronx with the idea of spending a few years giving back to the poor and unfortunate before settling into a career as a general practitioner back in her native Texas. That was five-going-on-six years ago. I knew her because she was the first physician to report a live case. A man named Alonso White, a colleague of hers—of sorts—had approached her after work complaining of fatigue and hair loss, but when she was suggested it was serious, he waved off her objections and left the clinic. No one had seen him since.