Sleep Tight

by Jeffrey Jacobson

  Sergeant Reaves remained motionless.

  “Only if you make it necessary.” Dr. Reischtal gave a thin smile.

  The doors swung open. Two soldiers stood at attention. Behind them, the hallway was filled with more soldiers. Dozens and dozens of them. The entire line bristled with the black muzzles of assault rifles, as if the men were a single organism, a spiked, heavy metal caterpillar.

  The two soldiers entered the room, split apart, and came to rest on either side of Dr. Menard. He refused to acknowledge them. Instead, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes, put one between his lips.

  Dr. Reischtal said, “Dr. Menard, I certainly hope you understand there is absolutely no smoking in this facility.”

  Dr. Menard mumbled around the cigarette, “Blow me.” The soldiers walked him out.

  Dr. Reischtal spread his hands, swept his gaze across the room one more time. “I certainly hope everyone can appreciate how crucial our work is here. If the virus spreads any further, this situation could be nothing less then the end of times.”

  CHAPTER 48

  10:29 PM

  August 13

  Sam was just about to say, “Let’s go get a drink,” when the door rolled up on the loading dock once again, and a large man in a white lab coat stepped outside. The door rolled shut behind him. He looked up and down the street for a moment, lit the cigarette clamped between his teeth, and ambled south.

  Ed and Sam exchanged glances. Ed nodded and twisted the key. He hit the gas and pulled up alongside the large, shaggy man. Sam had the door open and his pistol out before Ed had even stopped. “Chicago PD. Get in the car.”

  The man gaped at them, cigarette halfway to his mouth. “I’m sorry, what?”

  Sam said, “Shut the fuck up and get in the car.” He opened the back door.

  The man looked up and down the deserted street as if seeking any witnesses, then climbed in the backseat with Qween. Sam kicked the door shut and jumped back into the front seat. Ed headed south in a short squeal of rubber.

  Sam twisted in his seat to face the big man and found that Qween already had a straight razor buried in the guy’s straggly beard, pressed firmly against his throat. The big man was holding his chin so high the top of his head brushed against the ceiling of the Crown Vic.

  “You just sit still now, you hear?” Qween said.

  Sam had no idea where the hell she’d been hiding a straight razor. “Easy, Qween. He’s not going anywhere, are you, pal?”

  The big man’s stare went from Qween to Sam to Ed, then to the buildings whipping past. Ed hadn’t slowed down yet; the car was approaching fifty miles an hour as it roared through the empty downtown streets.

  “Suit yourself,” Qween said and slipped the razor back into the folds of her cloak.

  The big man swallowed. Sam could tell he wanted to touch his throat to see if it was bleeding or not, but fear kept his hands frozen in his lap.

  Sam said, “What’s your name?”

  “David Menard.”

  “You a doctor?”

  “Yes. Dr. David Menard.”

  “You work at that hospital.”

  “No. Yes, well, I mean, I don’t know how to—”

  Sam tapped him sharply on the forehead with the barrel of his pistol. “I want some straight fucking answers, you got me? You try to lie to me one more time and I’ll let my girl here cut your balls off.”

  “I wasn’t lying! Swear to Christ, I’m not lying.”

  “Let’s hear it then.”

  Dr. Menard talked so fast that at first, it sounded like the babbling of one of the speed freaks they would occasionally confront in an interrogation. “I was working there, yes. Me and others. The CDC brought us in to work with their team. I study viruses, that’s my real job. This, this was something—I got a call in the middle of the night, telling me to pack up. Hopped on a plane in Sacramento, and they flew me out here. Next thing I know, we’re studying a new virus. From the little bit I’ve been allowed to see, parts of three floors, I do know this. There are a large number of seriously ill patients back there and God help us if there’s any more.”

  “Why?”

  “If this spreads, we’re . . . over. I’ve never seen anything like this. Nobody has seen anything like this. This is . . . this virus, they don’t even have a name for it yet.”

  “How do you catch it?”

  “We don’t know exactly. Based on the information we’ve been given, it appears that close proximity to a rat that is carrying the virus can be a source of the infection. It is certainly present in the rat saliva, much like rabies.”

  Ed and Sam glanced at Qween. She ignored them.

  “But that doesn’t explain all of the cases,” Dr. Menard said. “Many of the initial patients were homeless individuals, and therefore, we had to assume that because of their lifestyle, contact with a rat was certainly possible, if not likely, since the infected rats have shown to be quite aggressive. But within the last twelve hours, the number of patients that presumably would have no reason to be near a rat skyrocketed.”

  Sam interrupted, “Just exactly how many patients are in there now?”

  Dr. Menard shook his head. “I don’t know. Fifty. A hundred. Two hundred? I’m sorry. Dr. Reischtal, he’s in charge, and he kept all records classified.”

  “Why?” Ed asked.

  “I have no idea. Look, I don’t know what to say. We just started two days ago. Nobody has had any sleep.” Dr. Menard rubbed his face. “All we know is that it appears to be fatal in every case of infection.”

  “What are the symptoms?” Ed asked.

  “At first, apparently nothing. The patients sometimes fall into a deep sleep, when they awake, they often suffer extreme discomfort on the surface of the skin.”

  “What kind of discomfort?” Ed asked.

  Dr. Menard gave a heavy sigh. “They itch,” he said, meeting Ed’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “It must be awful. We have been observing patient after patient claw at their skin until they bleed. Back in my grad school days, I worked with addicts going through withdrawal, serious stuff, and I never encountered anything like this. And then, at some point, they begin to act . . . irrationally.”

  “They get violent as fuck,” Ed said.

  Sam glanced at Qween again, hearing the screams from the homeless shelter.

  Dr. Menard nodded slowly. “Yes. Postmortem examinations of some of the bodies, people that had been shot and killed by the police—after the attacks, you know—they have revealed some clues about the damage the virus causes, but not nearly enough. The problem is, we have gotten so few specimens with undamaged tissue, it’s been impossible to tell what the effects of the virus actually are.” He gave a hollow laugh. “One guy got hit by an SUV. All that was left fit into a box this big.” He held his hands about two feet apart. “What little we do know is that it appears to attack the amygdala. You’re familiar with the term, ‘amygdala hijack’?” He caught the blank looks of the other three. “Okay. ‘Road Rage.’ I’m sure you have encountered this in your jobs. There’s an overwhelming sense of fury, when someone just snaps.”

  “Sounds like a few domestic disputes I’ve seen.”

  “I would imagine so, yes. But this, this is something else. Increase that fury by tenfold. Maybe fifty, a hundred. This is all such guesswork at this point. We need literally years of research before we’ll know anything for sure. Anyway, as far as we can tell, the virus seems to travel along the peripheral nervous system and it shoots straight into the limbic system of our brains, specifically the amygdala. They’re two little buds, tucked away deep inside your head. If you were to drill straight through here and here”—Dr. Menard pointed at his right eye and right ear—“you’d find it at the intersection of those lines. The amygdala is one of the oldest parts of the brain. It controls emotions like fear and anger. You’ve heard of ‘fight or flight,’ right?”

  Ed and Sam nod.

  “The lizard part,” Sam said.

  “No. You’re
thinking of stuff like keeping your heart going, breathing, blood in your brain, that kind of thing. This is a step higher on the evolutionary ladder. The amygdala dumps tons of adrenaline and cortisone into your system, so you can run. Fight. Take action, whatever. The thing is, there’s no direct connection between the prefrontal lobe”—Dr. Menard tapped his forehead—“and the amygdala. The body doesn’t want to waste any time thinking about what it should do when it’s in danger. It has to react. Immediately. And that’s the problem here. The virus attacks the prefrontal lobe. We don’t know why. Maybe it likes the taste. It multiplies astonishingly fast, wiping out your ability to think with any reasoning or logic. Meanwhile, while it is destroying the prefrontal lobe, it is attaching itself to the amygdala, causing the body to go into overdrive.”

  “So it’s driving people crazy,” Ed said.

  Dr. Menard gave a slow shrug. “I guess you could say that, yes. It is literally driving them mad with fear. With the amygdala going berserk, and the prefrontal lobes being chewed up and spit out . . . the infected are unable to stop themselves. They’re unable to think logically. And so they lash out. Violently. A lot of times, it’s sound that triggers the rage. Like with rabies. In the later stages, the virus attacks the rest of the body, causing massive internal bleeding. You’ve heard of the Ebola virus? It literally liquefies your insides. Ebola and rabies are similar, in many respects.”

  “Where did it come from?” Sam asked. “Why did it show up in the rats?”

  Dr. Menard shook his head and shrugged again. “It is believed that an infected bat escaped from an animal smuggler at O’Hare and somehow passed the virus along to the rats.”

  Sam and Ed exchanged a look.

  “All we know is that it appears to move slower in rats. They can survive for a month or two, sometimes three. We don’t know why it takes more time with them. Humans . . . it takes only three, four days.”

  Ed whipped through streets, unusually quiet in the night hours, heading north. Dr. Menard, still anxious and unable to stop talking, said, “I can’t get the beginning from Poe’s story out of my head.”

  Nobody said anything for a moment. “I don’t know about you two,” Sam said, nodding at Ed and Qween, “but I’m a proud product of the American public school system and I don’t have a goddamn clue what you’re talking about.”

  Dr. Menard said, “Poe. Edgar Allan. You know him. The Tell-Tale Heart. Surely you read it in high school.”

  Sam shrugged.

  Dr. Menard cleared his throat. “‘True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?’” He quoted haltingly from his memory. “‘The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?’”

  For a long time, nobody said anything else.

  Eventually, Sam stared out the window, chewing on a new piece of gum, said, “I still say sooner or later it all comes down to the lizard part.”

  CHAPTER 49

  10:33 PM

  August 13

  Dr. Reischtal held his phone up, listening to it ring, as he double-checked his suit for any rips or tears. He had a roll of duct tape ready, in case.

  A click. “Yeah?” The voice was dry as smoke.

  Dr. Reischtal said, “Good evening, Mr. Evans. I have a job for you.”

  The voice at the other end was quiet for a moment.

  Dr. Reischtal was patient. He understood his call was not good news. “I need you to gather a team of drivers and pick up a special cargo from our mutual friends out in Denver, and arrange transportation to Chicago.”

  “How large is the cargo?”

  “You will need at least thirty rigs.”

  “Where the hell am I gonna get thirty drivers right now?”

  Dr. Reischtal said, “That, Mr. Evans, is your problem. I will expect the entirety of this cargo on its way to Chicago within six hours.”

  Tommy sat in his wheelchair, facing the corpse, and waited. Waited for someone to notice that Don was dead. Waited for someone to come get him. Waited to get sick. The fluorescents hummed and flickered almost imperceptibly, casting a twitching glare throughout the room. Air hissed from the filters. Blood dripped from Don’s bed.

  Tommy watched the puddle on the right side grow larger. He winced at the spatter when each drop hit the puddle. He couldn’t stop imagining what happened when the drops hit the plastic, sending microscopic slivers of voracious organisms, tiny explosions of death, naked to the human eye, as it scattered the virus into the air of the room.

  Maybe he was already infected. Maybe that was why the drops of blood splashing against the plastic sounded so loud in the stillness of the room.

  The other side of Don’s bed started to leak, creating a new puddle.

  A speck of movement, down near Don’s bare feet. Tommy squinted, but saw nothing else. Maybe it was simply the maddening stuttering of the fluorescent tubes, creating buzzing, shadowy static among the tufts of hair along the top of Don’s feet.

  Tommy wondered if the virus was already in his system, wondering if he was about to face the long sleep, followed by the horrible itching, until finally the rage rocketed through his system, and he had to endure the agony of spending his last days, screaming hoarsely, pathetic, weak, strapped to a goddamn hospital bed.

  Something definitely moved on Don’s skin. Tommy blinked, squinted again. There. It was a bug. Something reddish-brown, creeping along like a crab, although it wasn’t any bigger than one of the spatters of blood on the floor. He wondered if Don had lice. The bug scurried across the mattress and disappeared behind the rails.

  A thought struck him, and he forgot about the bug. This thought was something that he deeply understood to be true, but had never dived deep to examine. Now, faced with the icy, stark recognition, Tommy knew he was going to die. This was something most people held off at a distance. It fades into the background. Nobody but the suicidal and teenage goths linger intentionally in that part of the mind.

  There was no pushing it away. He was going to die. One way or another, sooner or later, he was going to die. It might be the virus now, it might be some organ or another falling apart when he was an old man, seventy or eighty. He would’ve preferred to live to old age, but he started to understand that either way, quick or painful, he wanted to die having lived his life as best he could, taking care of himself and his family.

  He remembered the tune, and a couple of words, to an old Monty Python song that his old man used to listen to once in a while. He couldn’t remember much of the words so much as the intent, to remind you that you live in a universe hell bent on reaching for infinity, and you were but a speck of nothing.... However, the simple fact of your birth amid such vastness told the math to go to hell.

  He understood the universe was entirely indifferent to his existence. He could not look to anyone for help. His parents? God bless ’em, but they couldn’t make it to Dominick’s for the weekly groceries without getting lost. Kimmy had stopped caring where he was at least four years ago.

  His partner was dead.

  And his boss wanted him here.

  There was no one else. No one but Grace.

  Tommy slumped in the wheelchair, fighting to slow his galloping heart. The panic fed at his consciousness like a fast-moving fungus, crawling underneath his sanity, tugging gently, looking for weak spots.

  He tested the straps again, listening for that elusive sound of leather or thread ripping. Nothing. The restraints might as well have been made of steel. He pulled harder, harder. There was no give, no tearing noise, no nothing. Had he imagined the sound earlier?

  He struggled to slow his breathing. Tried to refocus. Tried to think of anything except the fact that he was strapped to a wheelchair and locked in a room with a corpse. He found himself staring at the figure on the bed.

  There should have been some sort of peace, now
that Don was dead. His partner wasn’t screaming anymore. He wasn’t thrashing around, he was simply motionless.

  Tommy decided the silence was worse. The stillness was worse. He tried to remind himself of how tortured Don had sounded, but already the memory was beginning to fade, that sound of utter hopelessness was gone, and all that was left was complete fucking silence and so all Tommy could focus on was his own hope, his own faith, that somehow it would all somehow work out in the end, and that the universe or God or whatever would recognize that he had been a decent, caring human being.

  There wasn’t much left of that feeling.

  God did not care.

  The universe did not care.

  There was nothing left inside.

  It was either fight or die.

  And fighting was futile.

  PHASE 5

  CHAPTER 50

  7:43 AM

  August 14

  OMG. Mr. Ullman could be such a bitch.

  No, Janelle decided as she rubbed her temples, bitch wasn’t strong enough. He was a cocksucker, that’s what he was. The city was half deserted, and hardly anybody was left in the whole damn Fin, but he wanted her here right at the crack of dawn. Didn’t he know that she had a life outside of this friggin’ job?

  Apparently not. He met her at the employee entrance, all looming angles and aggressive cologne. Yes. Yes, Mr. Ullman. Of course she would give today everything she had. Oh, yes, you cocksucker.

  It’s your own fault, a voice said inside her throbbing head. The voice belonged to her roommate, Brandi. Now Brandi, she was a bitch; that was for sure. Yes. Brandi was a bitch, and Mr. Ullman was a cocksucker. That declaration felt right, but it didn’t ease Janelle’s hangover.

  She sat by herself behind the desk in the grand lobby for ten minutes, and quickly realized that if she didn’t make it to the restroom, there was going to be a mess that she didn’t want to explain. Instead of using the more convenient restroom on the first floor, she decided it was imperative that she reach the employees-only bathroom downstairs. She hated going number two at work, and would avoid it if at all possible, but this morning was an emergency. She knew that very few employees would be around at this time of the day, and she could probably slip in and get out before anybody came in and smelled what she’d left.