by Ben Mezrich
“We’ve found our microbe,” she said, crossing into the room and dropping heavily onto the edge of Mulder’s cot. She tossed the contact sheet onto his lap. “These are shots of the isolated virus taken by an electron microscope. The sample came from cerebrospinal fluid tapped from a postmortem lumbar puncture on Josh Kemper.”
Mulder looked at the contact sheet. He could see a tiny pill-shaped object multiplied a half dozen times in the different-angled shots. It looked so small, so innocuous.
“They woke me with the results from the lab twenty minutes ago,” Scully continued. “But I went down there myself to check what they were saying. Because it’s pretty hard to believe.”
“What do you mean? Scully, what am I looking at?”
Scully took a deep breath. “Encephalitis lethargica. We’ve matched it up through the CDC’s computer link. They’re sending a specialist here this afternoon to confirm the diagnosis. But the EEGs and CT scans coincide. There isn’t any doubt.”
Mulder wasn’t sure if he had heard of the disease before. “So it’s a form of encephalitis? Isn’t that similar to what you predicted—a disease that could cause brain swelling?”
“It is a strain of encephalitis—but Mulder, it’s not at all what I expected.”
Mulder waited for her to continue. She was staring at the contact sheet in his hands as if the pill-shaped virus might crawl right out into the intern room.
“Mulder,” she finally stated, “there hasn’t been an outbreak of encephalitis lethargica since 1922. The virus you’re looking at has rarely been seen outside a laboratory in over seventy-five years.”
Mulder raised his eyebrows. No wonder he hadn’t recognized the disease. “How does this virus manifest? Does it fit the symptoms we’ve seen?”
Scully shrugged. “The disease starts similarly to the more common strains of encephalitis; causing fever, confusion, sometimes paralysis of one side of the body—and in some cases, convulsions, psychosis, coma, and death. But lethargica also induces incredible fatigue, which is why it’s sometimes called the ‘sleeping sickness’.”
Mulder nodded. He remembered Mike Lifton’s drooping eyelids and glazed eyes. But Scully still hadn’t told him anything that could explain how Stanton could have reacted with such inhuman strength. And there were still other inconsistencies that were not yet explained. “Scully, what about the circular rash on both the John Doe and Perry Stanton? Could that have been caused by encephalitis lethargica? And why wasn’t it present on either of the med students?”
“The rash might be unrelated—perhaps a separate infection, one that’s more difficult to catch. Remember, the med students did not have the same level of contact with the John Doe as Perry Stanton. Stanton got a slab of his skin stapled onto an open burn.”
“That still doesn’t explain Stanton’s violent explosion. Neither of the med students reacted violently—”
Scully waved her hand. “Viruses can affect different people differently—and especially a virus like this. Lethargica attacks areas of the brain, as well as the meninges, the brain’s covering. There’s no way to predict how a specific individual might react. During the 1922 outbreak, forty percent of those infected died. This time, we’re looking at a much worse percentage—but at least the disease has been confined to two people who had close contact with the carrier. That means the virus hasn’t changed its mode of transmission.”
Mulder pushed his feet off the side of the cot, stretching his calves. He was becoming more alert by the second. He hoped Scully was as refreshed as he was—because in his mind, the case was nowhere near over. “You mean it’s blood-borne. Like HIV.”
Scully nodded. “That’s right. It’s transmitted only by blood-to-blood contact. The 1922 version was also sometimes carried by mosquitoes, or biting flies—but that’s extremely rare.”
Mulder reached out and touched one of Scully’s gloved hands. “Scully, both the med students were wearing gloves. How do you explain the blood-to-blood contact? A swarm of mosquitoes in the ER?”
“Latex gloves aren’t a hundred percent protection. And a skin harvest is a messy procedure.”
Mulder still thought it was remarkable that both students had become so sick—so quickly—while the plastic surgery team, which had worked invasively with the harvested skin, had remained healthy. “It doesn’t seem right, Scully. Even if the virus links the med students to the John Doe—we don’t have any proof of a link to Perry Stanton. If Dr. Bernstein was sick, maybe—but he’s not. The only thing that connects the John Doe to Perry Stanton is the circular red rash.”
Scully rose slowly from the cot and took the contact sheet out of Mulder’s hands. “We won’t know for sure until we’ve got Stanton in custody. I’ve explained the precautions to Barrett—gloves, surgical masks, limited contact—and she assures me they’ll have him within the next hour. By then, the investigator from the CDC will be here to confirm the lethargica, and this tragedy will come to a close.”
Mulder ran his hands through his hair. He didn’t say what he was thinking—that this tragedy was nowhere near the final act. Likewise, he doubted even Barrett would have such an easy time bringing in a man who had shoved an IV rack a few feet into a hospital wall. Instead, he pressed his fingers against the side of his jaw, testing the stiffness. Then he rose from the cot. “Personally, Scully, I don’t think the CDC is going to make this case any clearer. You can follow the lethargica angle as far as it’s going to go; in the meantime, I’m going to find out more about our John Doe.”
Scully raised her eyebrows. “Mulder, we’ve already gone through his chart a half dozen times. The interns didn’t know what was wrong with him—and until we’ve got a body and an autopsy, there isn’t much more we can discover about his death.”
Mulder headed toward the door. “I’m not interested in how he died, Scully. I want to know how he ended up in a medical chart in the first place.”
Mulder arrived in the ER just as the trauma team crashed through the double doors. He counted at least six people crowded around the stretcher: the burly chief resident, a surgical consult in green scrubs, two nurses—and at the tail end of the stretcher, two thickset men in dark blue paramedic uniforms. The smaller of the two was holding a bottle of blood above his shoulder as he raced to keep up with an IV tube attached to the patient’s right thigh. The larger paramedic had an object delicately braced in both arms; the object was oddly shaped and wrapped in white gauze.
Mulder remained a few feet away as the stretcher passed through the center of the ER, toward the elevators that led up to the surgical ward. He caught a glimpse of the patient between the shoulders of the two nurses: thin, tall, writhing in obvious pain, tubes running out of every inch of bare skin. At first, Mulder couldn’t tell what was wrong—then his gaze moved to the tourniquet wrapped tightly around the man’s left forearm. He watched as the surgical consult took the gauze-covered object out of the paramedic’s arms and lifted a corner of the white cloth.
“It’s in pretty good shape,” he overheard the paramedic say. “Landed under the track, which protected it from the train. Think you can reattach?”
The consult nodded, then continued on with the stretcher. The two paramedics stood watching as the rest of the group raced toward the elevator. Mulder shivered, then took his cue and stepped forward.
“Luke Canton?” he asked. He had gotten the name from the ER dispatcher. Canton and his partner had brought the John Doe into the hospital on the night of the thirteen-car accident. The dispatcher had described him as one of the best in the city.
Canton turned toward Mulder, looking him over. The paramedic was six feet tall, with wide shoulders, and reddish scruff covering most of his square jaw. He yanked off his bloody gloves and tossed them to the floor. “That’s right. This is my partner, Emory Ross.”
“I’m Agent Mulder from the FBI. That was a hell of a scene. Is he going to be all right?”
Canton shrugged. His face was grim, but there was something br
ight, deep in his blue eyes. This was his high—the adrenaline pump of medicine at its most raw. “Lost a fight with a subway car. But if the surgeon’s any good, he’ll keep his hand.”
Mulder noticed splotches of fresh blood all over Canton’s uniform. “Covered you pretty good. Was it like this with the John Doe you brought in last Friday night?”
Canton shook his head. “I figured that’s what this is about. Heard through the grapevine he might have been carrying some sort of virus.”
“It’s a possibility,” Mulder responded. He knew the CDC would probably be rounding up all of the possible risk candidates by midafternoon. He gestured at the blood on Canton’s uniform. “Most likely something blood-borne.”
Canton shrugged. “Well, then we’re in the clear. The John Doe had no external wounds. No blood at all. Actually, we hardly had any contact with him—other than lifting him into the ambulance and working the Velcro straps. He didn’t crash until he was in the ER. We didn’t even intubate—the two ER kids took over, and we went back into the field.”
Mulder moved his gaze from Canton to his partner, Emory Ross. Neither one looked the least bit ill. “And you’re feeling all right? No signs of fatigue or fever?”
Canton smiled. “I worked out for two hours this morning. Hit two-fifty-five on the bench. What about you, Ross?”
Ross laughed. He seemed much younger than Canton, and it was obvious from his eyes that he looked up to his wide-shouldered partner. “I played pickup basketball for forty minutes before our shift started. Didn’t score very many, but I got a handful of rebounds.”
Mulder felt relief, and a tinge of excitement. He wasn’t a doctor, but it sounded as though the two paramedics were not going to be felled by lethargy. Mulder walked with the two men toward the changing rooms located in the corner of the ER, just beyond the admissions desk. “I was told the John Doe was brought in from the scene of a car accident on the FDR Drive?”
“That’s right,” Canton answered. “Found him unconscious but stable in the breakdown lane, maybe twenty feet from the lead car. We already had one of the drivers in our wagon—a woman with a pretty severe impact wound to her chest—but we decided to risk a second scoop. There were other ambulances on the scene, but the accident was as bad as it gets. Many more bodies than wagons.”
Mulder watched as Canton grabbed a passing nurse by the waist. The young woman laughed, wriggling free. Mulder could tell that Luke Canton was well liked. “And he remained stable en route to the hospital?”
“Unresponsive,” Canton answered. “But certainly stable. We doubted he was even involved in the accident itself; there were no exterior wounds you would expect from someone thrown from a crash, no bruises or cuts or anything—”
“Except the slight scratch,” Ross chimed in as they reached the curtain that led to the changing room. “A circular little thing on the back of his neck. But it didn’t look like much—I don’t remember if we even bothered to tell the interns when we brought him in.”
Canton tossed a glance at his partner, who quickly looked at the floor. Canton looked at Mulder. “It was a crazy night. We had to get right back to the accident for the walking wounded. I’m sure the kids spotted the little scratch on their own. Anyway, I doubt it had anything to do with why the guy died.”
They pushed into the small changing room. There was a row of metal lockers on one side, three parallel wooden benches, a closet full of hangers, and a door that led to a shower room. Canton and his partner moved to their adjacent lockers. As they changed into clean uniforms, Mulder contemplated what Canton had just told him. His thoughts kept coming back to the scene of the accident, where the John Doe had been picked up. If he wasn’t thrown from one of the cars—why was he unconscious in the breakdown lane, twenty yards away?
When the paramedics had finished changing, Mulder turned to Luke Canton. “I’ve already spoken to the dispatcher, and if it’s all right with you, I’d like to borrow an hour of your time.”
Canton raised his eyebrows. Then he glanced at his partner and shrugged. “If you’ve got the authority, I’ve got the hour.”
Mulder grinned. He liked Luke Canton’s attitude.
8
The ambulance seemed to float through the three lanes of New York traffic as Luke Canton navigated between the moving bumpers with an expert’s grace. Only twice did he have to reach above the dashboard and flick on the colored lights. Mulder watched the chain-link snakes of traffic slither by beneath the high side windows, amazed at how the cars stayed so close together at such high speeds. Coordinated chaos.
“It’s not surprising when they crash,” Canton said, reading his mind. “It’s surprising when they don’t. You know how many people die every year in cars?”
Mulder had an idea, but said nothing. Canton pointed to a dented pickup truck weaving through the lanes two cars away. “More than fifty thousand. About the same number as die from AIDS. Funny thing. We’re quite willing to give up casual sex. But give up casual driving? No way.”
Mulder felt his seatbelt tighten as Canton punched the brake, and the ambulance suddenly veered to the right. Mulder watched the guardrail grow closer as they rolled to a stop in the breakdown lane. The lane was actually more like a gully, stretching fifty yards along a curved section of rail. It was half the size of a regular lane, a few bare feet wider than the ambulance itself. Mulder saw a glimmer of broken glass a dozen yards ahead and the twisted remains of a rear bumper in the grass just on the other side of the railing. Other than the bumper and the glass, there were no visible signs of the accident. “Looks like it’s been cleaned up pretty well.”
“Should have seen it right after the accident. The whole Drive was cluttered with metal and glass. All three of these lanes were closed. The cars looked like crumpled socks. You couldn’t even tell the front few apart. Found one woman sitting in the driver seat of the car ahead of her.”
Mulder opened his door and stepped down onto the asphalt. The noise from the cars whizzing by was nearly deafening. A warm breeze pulled at his jacket, and the heavy smell of exhaust filled his nostrils. Canton came around the front of the ambulance and pointed to the area directly ahead of them. “The accident scene started here, with the last car up against the railing just ahead. A few more were piled together in the center of the highway, then the bulk of the accident was about thirty yards up. The lead car—a BMW roadster—was upside down and crumpled pretty flat, right in the center of the road.”
Mulder slowly walked forward, his eyes moving back and forth across the pavement. He knew that natural exposure to the elements, and the sheer passage of time, had probably erased most of the evidence left behind by the thirteen-car accident. But he also knew that investigative work relied heavily on luck. “Was it possible to determine what caused the lead car to spin out?”
Canton nodded as they continued forward down the breakdown lane. “According to a witness from five cars back, a white van was careening wildly back and forth between lanes, just ahead of the BMW. The back doors of the van popped open, and the driver of the BMW panicked. She bounced off the guardrail, then flipped over. The next car—a Volvo—hit her head-on at sixty-five miles per hour. Then the others just piled on.”
They reached the spot Canton had described as the rough area where the first car had spun out. Mulder turned to the guardrail and saw a huge, jagged tear in the heavy horizontal iron bars. Two dark tire tracks led up to the tear, and Mulder could imagine the driver’s frantic efforts to stop the BMW. Obviously, those efforts had been too late. “Did the lead driver get a good look at the van?”
“Maybe”—Canton sighed, leaning against an unmarred section of the guardrail—“but she was decapitated by the front axle of the Volvo. Like I said, the only good witness was five cars back. All the police know was that the van was white, some sort of American model, and the back doors were open. There’s an APB out on it now, but there are a lot of vans like that in this city.”
Mulder nodded. He would tal
k to the police after he returned to the hospital, but he didn’t expect them to have any answers. If the van ran from the scene of the accident, chances are the driver didn’t want to be found.
“And the John Doe?” Mulder asked. “He was unconscious somewhere up here?”
Canton walked a few more paces, then pointed to a spot in the breakdown lane. Mulder stopped at his side. The spot was only ten yards ahead of where the lead car had gone out of control. Roughly where the van had been weaving back and forth. With the back doors hanging open.
Mulder knelt, looking at the pavement. Of course, there was nothing remarkable. It had been a week. Mulder moved his eyes along the ground, imagining the body sprawled out. “Facedown? Or faceup?”
“Sort of a fetal position,” Canton said. “Lying on his side. His head was away from the road.”
Mulder felt the pavement rumble beneath his knees as a heavy Jeep roared by in the closest lane. There was a clattering sound, and Mulder watched a foam cup bounce toward the guardrail. His thoughts solidified as the cup disappeared down the grassy slope on the other side. He rose and walked to the edge of the breakdown lane. He moved slowly along the guardrail—and paused at a spot a few feet away from where Canton was standing.
There was a small dent in the guardrail, just above knee level. Mulder bent down and peered at the dent. Then he looked back toward the highway. “Mr. Canton, how fast did you say the lead car was moving?”
“Probably around sixty-five miles per hour. That’s my best estimate, from the damage.”
“And the van was traveling at around the same speed when its back doors popped open?”
“That’s right.”
Mulder nodded. The positioning of the dent seemed about right. If the John Doe’s body had fallen out of the back of the van, hit the pavement, rolled into the guardrail, then bounced back a few yards into the breakdown lane—it would have landed right where Canton was standing. The only problem with the theory was the condition of the John Doe’s body. Both the paramedics and the medical student had corroborated what the interns had written in the chart: The John Doe had shown no signs of external trauma. Mulder could hear the question Scully would ask the minute he told her his theory: How could a man fall out of a van moving at sixty-five miles per hour, dent a guardrail—and receive no external injuries?