12.21: A Novel

by Dustin Thomason

  “There’s no definite geography in the first section,” Chel went on. “But it’s such a closely written narrative. We’re very hopeful the scribe will tell us more about his location in the later pages.”

  “How long until you have the rest?” Stanton asked.

  “We’re working on it. It could be a few days.”

  “How long did it take you to do this first section?”

  “About twenty hours.”

  Stanton glanced at the clock. Like him, she’d been going nonstop. “Any trouble sleeping?” he asked her.

  “I drifted off for a few minutes,” she said. “I’ve just been working.”

  “Do you have family in the city? Are they okay?”

  “Only my mother, and she’s fine. What about your family?”

  “Don’t have much of one,” he said. “But my dog and ex-wife are okay.” Stanton noticed that the word ex-wife rolled off his tongue easier than it had in a while.

  Chel sighed, then said, “Ma k’o ta ne jun ka tere’k.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “It’s a prayer indígenas say. It means, Let no one be left behind.” After a pause, Stanton said, “If you have any symptoms, call me first.”

  WAVES CRASHING WERE rarely audible on the Walk, but tonight they were the only sounds Stanton could hear. Gone were the noisy kids usually in front of the marijuana stores, and the whooping from late-night parties in the sand. He parked beneath the massive mural of Abbot Kinney and found the boardwalk empty. The cops had sent everyone home or to one of the local homeless centers.

  But when it came to hiding out, the citizens of Ocean Front were some of the craftiest in the city. Stanton pulled the six boxes of eye shields he’d taken from the lab and put them in his bag. There were a thousand things he had to attend to, but the boardwalk freaks were his friends and neighbors. It was hard not to feel powerless right now, and this was one thing he could actually do, no matter how absurd it was.

  First he checked the public restrooms, where he found a couple huddled inside. After handing them eye shields, Stanton continued on, and in a nook between tattoo shops he found a guy he knew vaguely, who called himself the “World’s Funniest Wino.” His usual song went “Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, let’s get drunk.” Tonight, he just laughed boorishly as Stanton laid a shield in front of him.

  Behind the Jewish senior center, he found four teenagers hiding in a VW bus, smoking weed. “You want?” one of them asked, holding the joint toward him.

  “Put these eye shields on, guys,” Stanton said, waving it off.

  Outside Venice’s only plastic-surgery storefront, he stopped to look at the graffiti stenciled across the face of BOTOX ON THE BEACH. Stanton had seen the symbol before around Venice but had never understood what it had to do with 2012:

  He continued south, baffled by the strange image. He recalled from somewhere that a snake eating its own tail was a Greek symbol, not, as far as he knew, a Maya one. But people were sure to make all kinds of strange connections now.

  The metal gates of Groundwork Coffee were down, and a small sign in the window read: CLOSED UNTIL WE FUCKING SAY SO. The sign reminded Stanton of one person he’d missed. Minutes later Stanton was a few blocks north, climbing the stairs of Monster’s Venice Beach Freak Show, just off the boardwalk. He knocked on the yellow question mark painted on the center of the door. The Freak Show was the closest thing his friend had to a home. “Monster? You in there?”

  The entrance cracked open and a porcelain-skinned woman of indeterminate age in striped stockings and a short skirt stood in the entry. The “Electric Lady” had frizzed black hair, supposedly a result of having been struck by lightning as a child. Stanton once saw her light a gas-covered stick with her tongue while sitting in an electric chair. She was also Monster’s girlfriend. Electrifying.

  “We’re not supposed to let anyone in here,” she said.

  Stanton held the boxes up. “These are for you guys.”

  The Freak Show had one main room and a small stage, where performers swallowed swords and stapled dollar bills to their skin. The Electric Lady waved Stanton toward the back and then returned to feeding the largest menagerie of bicephalic animals on the planet. There were “Siamese” turtles, a double-headed albino snake, a two-headed iguana, and a mini-Doberman with five legs. In preserve jars were corpses of a two-headed chicken, a raccoon, and a squirrel.

  Stanton found his tattooed friend in the Freak Show’s small accounting office. Clothes were strewn across a small cot in the corner. Monster sat at the desk in front of the old laptop he seemed never to be without.

  “Your name’s everywhere, Gabe,” Monster said. “Figured you’d be in Atlanta.”

  “I’m stuck here like everyone else.”

  “Why are you in Venice? Shouldn’t you be at a lab somewhere?”

  “Don’t worry about that.” Stanton held up an eye shield. “Do me a favor and wear one of these. Take some more and pass them out to anyone who doesn’t have one.”

  “Thanks,” Monster said. He pulled the straps behind the rings that lined his upper ear and secured the shield. “You believe this shit from city hall?”

  “What shit?”

  “You haven’t seen it? Broke a few minutes ago. Your name’s mentioned a couple of times even.” He turned the laptop so Stanton could see the screen. “A copy of every internal email from the mayor’s office sent in the eight hours before and after the quarantine decision was made popped up on the Internet. One of the secret-leaking websites. Two million hits already.”

  Stanton’s stomach sank as he scanned the news. There were CDC emails to the mayor’s office that described how quickly VFI cases could escalate, offhand questions from within city hall about how many would be dead within the week, and comments about how, given the indestructibility of the prion, public spaces couldn’t be decontaminated and parts of L.A. might never be inhabitable again.

  “These are wild guesses at worst-case scenarios,” Stanton said. “Not facts.”

  “This is 2012, brother—there ain’t no difference anymore.”

  Another article on Monster’s computer suggested Volcy could have crossed the border knowing that he was sick, intentionally spreading VFI here for some political purpose. “That’s ridiculous,” said Stanton.

  “Won’t stop people from believing it. There are a lotta crazies who don’t bother with the facts. Not only the 2012ers either. Lots of people are panicked, so be careful out there. Your name’s on these pages, dude.”

  Stanton wasn’t worried about himself, but he was afraid of how the public would react when they saw unfiltered fear from people who were supposed to be in charge. The calm on the streets was fragile, and things could go downhill fast.

  “Keep that eye shield on,” Stanton told his friend. “And if you need anything else, you know I’m just down the Walk.”

  STANTON OPENED THE DOOR to his condo to find the entire space upended. The living room sofa and the dining room table were turned on their sides and stuffed into the kitchen. Two rugs, rolled into tubes, stood chest-high on their ends in the corners, and every inch of counter space was stacked with his coffee-table books, lamps, and other bric-a-brac. They needed every available surface.

  “Honey, is that you?”

  He found Alan Davies sitting at a lab bench in the living room. The furniture had been replaced by storage containers, microscopes, and centrifuges. The place reeked of antiseptic solution. They had directly disobeyed orders by setting up this home lab and were only able to sneak out limited equipment. They had to wash and reuse test tubes, beakers, and other glass constantly. On top of the TV console, drying racks held glass equipment waiting for their next round.

  “Like what I’ve done with the place?” Davies asked, glancing up from his microscope. Stanton marveled that his partner was still perfectly dressed in a pink tie, white shirt, and blue slacks.

  The TV was tuned to CNN: “Travel restrictions for American citizens in
eighty-five countries … Bioterrorism explored … mayor’s office emails leaked … YouTube videos show looting at stores in Koreatown and buildings on fire …”

  “Jesus,” Stanton said. “There’s looting?”

  “Rioting in a moment of tension,” Davies said. “It’s practically a way of life in L.A.”

  Stanton headed into his garage. Behind boxes of research journals, Notre Dame memorabilia, and outdated biking equipment was a small safe. Inside he found his self-assembled earthquake/tsunami kit: water-purification tablets, a whistle and signal mirror, a thousand dollars in cash, and a Smith & Wesson 9mm.

  Davies stood at the door, peering in. “I always knew you were a Republican.”

  Stanton ignored him and checked to make sure the gun was loaded. Then he put it back in the safe. “Where are we with the mice?”

  “Antibodies should be ready tomorrow if we’re lucky,” Davies said.

  Despite his orders, Stanton couldn’t accept doing nothing to search for a treatment, so they’d set up the secret lab here, away from prying eyes. In the dining room, a dozen cages sat on the wood floor, each containing a knockout mouse.

  Only these mice weren’t paired with snakes—they were being exposed to VFI. Stanton’s hope was that they would soon produce antibodies that could fight the disease. It was the same process they’d had some success with in the lab, and ordinarily it would take weeks. But Davies had come up with an inventive way of creating an ultrahigh concentration of purified VFI prion that they could use to spur a reaction more quickly. Several mice had already begun producing.

  A loud knock on the front door pulled Stanton up from the cages.

  Michaela Thane looked exhausted. Her hair was tousled and her face gaunt. With Presbyterian quarantined and virtually all patients transferred out, doctors were no longer taking shifts. So Stanton had arranged for her to work full-time with his team.

  “Glad to see you made it okay,” he said.

  “Had to wait at the checkpoint for about a hundred cop cars and fire trucks heading in the opposite direction. I assume they were on their way down to where those jackholes are setting buildings on fire.”

  She stepped inside, saw all the equipment, and looked at Stanton as if he were stitching together Frankenstein’s monster.

  “We’ll get you an escort on the way back,” Stanton said.

  “Tell me you brought my tea,” Davies called. “Please, God, tell me there is some dignity left in this godforsaken world.”

  Thane held up a grocery bag. “What the hell is going on in here?”

  Davies smiled. “Welcome to the end of our careers.”

  TEN MINUTES LATER, Thane was still absorbing the makeshift lab—and the fact that Stanton and Davies were having to do it secretly. “I don’t get it. If we can make antibodies, why won’t the CDC let us try them?”

  “They could prompt an allergic response,” Stanton told her. “As much as thirty percent of people can react negatively to them.”

  Davies seemed to be inhaling his large mug of PG Tips. “It’ll take years before the FDA approves mouse antibodies as therapy in prion disease.”

  Thane said, “But the victims are going to die anyway.”

  “It won’t be CDC or FDA who kills them, though,” Stanton said.

  “We don’t make the rules,” Davies said. “We just break them. Unfortunately, Deputy Cavanagh is monitoring every move we make, and we’ll have someone looking over our shoulders every time we’re in a patient room.”

  “But they won’t be watching me,” said Thane, now understanding why she’d been summoned. “I have patients in the ICU still. I could still get in there.”

  Merely setting up this lab could get all of their medical licenses suspended, but a helo-medic knew all about taking chances for her patients. Stanton had watched Thane interact with her patients and with the other staff. He sensed he could trust her.

  “You can’t tell a soul,” Davies told her. “Believe me when I tell you I wouldn’t fare well in an American prison.”

  “The test can be any group of patients we can access, right?” she asked.

  “As long as they haven’t progressed too far,” Stanton told her. “Once the disease goes beyond two or three days, nothing will work.”

  “Then I have one condition.”

  “We all have it,” Davies said. “I believe the medical term is professional suicide.”

  Stanton looked at Thane. “What’s your one condition?”

  SIXTEEN

  THE GETTY DOUBLED THEIR SECURITY TEAM AS LOOTING AND ARSON spread across the city. The Baghdad Museum had lost irreplaceable treasures during its siege in 2003, and no one wanted to see that happen if L.A. really fell apart. Fortunately, the Getty was perched in the Santa Monica Mountains, almost a thousand feet above the 405 freeway, and the only way up was through the security gates at the bottom of the hill. So the museum where Chel and her team had been holed up for two days was one of the safest places in the city.

  Chel was more worried about the safety of the local indígenas. According to the news on the TV she’d carted into the lab, 2012 New Agers and Apocalypticists were convening across the city, in violation of the mandate to stay home. Before VFI, “Believer” gatherings focused on renewed consciousness or apocalypse readiness; CNN now claimed that many meetings had taken a different tone in the shadow of the quarantine. People were desperate, and searching for scapegoats. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that right before 12/21 a Maya man had brought this disease to America.

  In Century City, local indígenas had been threatened and their homes had been vandalized with graffiti. In East L.A., one man brutally attacked his Maya neighbor following an argument about the end of the Long Count cycle. The elderly Honduran was in a coma from the beating. So now Fraternidad leaders had decided that the city’s indígenas needed a place to congregate for mutual protection. The archbishop had offered them shelter, and there were more than 160 Maya living indefinitely at Our Lady of the Angels.

  Chel’s mother wasn’t among them. “They say we’re supposed to stay home to keep from getting sick,” she’d replied when Chel called to urge her to join the others at the cathedral. Ha’ana’s factory had closed, and she hadn’t left her bungalow in West Hollywood, declaring she was staying put.

  “There’s a doctor checking people for VFI before they let anyone through the doors, Mom. The church is the safest place you can be right now.”

  “I’ve lived in this house thirty-three years, and no one has ever bothered me.”

  “Then just do it for me,” said Chel. “And where will you be?”

  “At work. I have no choice. There’s a project that’s extremely time sensitive. It’s totally safe here with the museum in lockdown mode.”

  “Only you’d be working now, Chel. How long are you going to stay there?”

  Chel had gone home and packed a suitcase full of clothes. She’d be here for as long as it took. “I’d feel a lot better knowing you were at the church, Mom.”

  Neither woman was satisfied when they hung up, and Chel allowed herself a frustrated smoke break by the Getty’s reflecting pool. There, her phone alerted her to an incoming email from Stanton. His red exclamation point seemed a little superfluous, under the circumstances. All the message said was:

  anything?

  She started typing a long response, explaining where they were in the decipherment, but thought better of it midway through. He didn’t need a thousand unnecessary details. He had enough details of his own to worry about.

  Progress on the translation. No location yet. Won’t stop till we have it.

  Without thinking, she added, How are you? and sent it off, then immediately felt absurd. It was a ridiculous question to ask the man in charge of the disease investigation. She knew exactly how he was.

  But, to her surprise, she had a response within seconds:

  working hard to keep up. please keep me posted. take care. need you and your team healthy. call if there’s
anything you need. Gabe

  It didn’t say much, but something about it was both calming and empowering for Chel. Maybe he was starting to see her as part of the solution to this crisis. Maybe she would be. She stubbed out her cigarette and went back inside.

  Rolando was carefully tweezing more tiny fragments of the codex onto the reconstruction table. They’d gotten everything out of the box and taken a complete set of photographs of every piece of the manuscript so they would have it in perpetuity. And once they’d made their breakthrough on the father–son glyph pair, Chel, Rolando, and Victor had reconstructed the first eight pages of the codex.

  Even with most of the document still left to reconstruct and decipher, they knew that their findings would change Maya scholarship forever. So much more than just the personal thoughts of a scribe, Paktul’s codex was a political protest—an indictment of a king’s rule and an unprecedented questioning of a god. Chel took comfort in the fact that, no matter what happened to her or her career, the world would eventually see this strange gift of history. It was the work of a moral, learned man willing to risk his own life for what he believed in, which illustrated beyond a doubt the humanity of her ancestors.

  But there was still a more pressing issue: finding out where the codex was written, so they could help the CDC identify the source of the disease. Neither Chel nor anyone else in her lab had ever heard the name before, but the scribe called his home Kanuataba and referred to it several times as the terraced city. Terracing was an agricultural practice whereby the ancients created new patches of farmable land by cutting stairlike plots into the sides of hills. But the practice was used all over the Maya empire, so without more detail, the name gave little evidence of the city’s location.

  “Anything come up in the databases about Akabalam?” Rolando asked.

  Chel shook her head. “Sent it to Yasee at Berkeley and Francis at Tulane too,” she said. “But they had no idea.”