This one… it was worse, maybe. Nobody had coughed in his face on this case, nor had he had to watch anybody die. But he knew those bloodshot eyes were going to haunt him.
There was nothing there. Nobody home.
The nice thing about the bad ones, of course, was that they didn’t last. Killer pathogens had a way of burning themselves out, wiping out their host populations before they could pass on their genes, or simply mutating out of the killer phase. In the worst cases it just meant somebody had to isolate the pathogen and find a counteragent in a hurry. And he wouldn’t be the one pulling all-nighters for a week to make that happen.
The very best thing about the bad ones was that he got to go home. He wasn’t the one who had to make the decisions about who to quarantine, or who got the actual vaccine and who got the very convincing placebo.
That night, he managed to sleep for nearly seven hours in a row with no one bothering him. When the phone rang, he answered it. Because he knew if he didn’t they would start texting him. And if he ignored the texts they would send someone to knock on his door. He had signed the contract and he knew it said he was always on call.
“I’m on vacation,” he told the phone. “Call me in three days.”
It was Philips. Not a good sign, if the Director was making the call himself. “All vacation time is rescinded, as of now.”
“You’re taking away my days off for—”
Philips’ voice got very, very serious. “Vacation time is rescinded for all CDC personnel until further notice.”
Whitman got out of bed, the cell phone cradled between his ear and his shoulder as he grabbed his pants. The CDC employed 15,000 people. If they were all being called in, that meant one thing.
Epidemic.
“Where am I going?” Whitman asked.
“Flagstaff.”
“Arizona? Seriously?”
All thirteen known cases of the mystery brain disorder had come from the northeast corridor, from Vermont down to Washington, DC. What the hell was it doing out west?
Whitman buttoned his shirt one-handed. “Did 13 tell us something?” he asked.
“Nothing we wanted to hear.”
• • • •
Flagstaff, AZ
Whitman had a welcoming party waiting for him when his plane landed: the local sheriff, a guy in a short-sleeve, button-down shirt from Public Health, and a couple of ranchers in cowboy hats and permanent tans. Whitman might have sent the ranchers away until the sheriff explained the situation.
Subject 14 was alive, and he wasn’t going anywhere. It looked like he might have been some kid, some teenager just out for a long drive in the desert. Now he was stuck in a barbed wire fence. He kept trying to drag himself free, pulling at his clothes and his leg where it was tangled in the wire. The fence marked the divide between two pastures—hence the ranchers, who argued the whole time about who was liable if the kid died on the fence.
“I figure if he just calmed down a second, thought it through, he could get himself free,” the sheriff said. They had parked about two hundred yards from where 14 was stuck. He hadn’t shown any sign of noticing them yet. Whitman was happy to keep his distance. “He’s not firing on all cylinders, is he?” He handed a pair of binoculars to Whitman.
Bloodshot eyes. A lot of open wounds on that leg. This was going to be dicey.
Whitman frowned. “What’s that stuff by his feet? Looks like a torn-up paper bag. Was he carrying that when you found him?”
“We had orders not to approach, but it took you twelve hours to get out here after we called it in,” the guy from Public Health said. “I had a sandwich in my car—it was going to be my lunch. I got as close as I dared and then I tossed it to him.”
“Did he eat it?” Whitman asked.
“The sandwich and part of the wrapper it came in. I was worried he might choke.”
Through the binoculars Whitman watched as 14 pulled and pulled at the wire. A piece of his pantleg tore free, curling down over his knee cap.
No, Whitman thought. That wasn’t his pant leg. It was the skin of his thigh.
Limited pain response, he thought, adding to the catalog of symptoms for this new disease. Maybe some kind of neuropathy?
The immediate problem was that 14 was now one third of the way free of the fence. A couple more tugs and he would be out and running right toward them, looking for someone to bite or scratch.
Whitman made a call to bring in a helicopter that could take 14 away from all this. Then he waded across the pasture, looking out for cow pats, and pulled his Taser from his jacket. 14 went down, slumping across the fence.
“You have any wire cutters?” Whitman asked the sheriff. “I’m going to have to cut him free.”
One of the ranchers took off his cowboy hat and slapped it against his leg. “Who’s gonna pay to fix the damage to my fence?”
• • • •
The helicopter lifted away from the field and carried subject 14 off, and the ranchers dispersed. The sheriff waited in his truck while Whitman made some calls. As he was finishing up, the weedy guy from Public Health came trotting up, a serious look in his eye.
“This, uh… well, anything I should know about this?” he asked.
Whitman switched off his phone and looked up. “What do you mean?”
“Just. You know. Should I tell the local doctors to be on the lookout for anything? Any precautions they should take?”
Whitman frowned.
He could tell the man what they’d discovered from studying subject 13. He could say that it was fluid-borne. They’d traced 13’s history enough to know she once shared needles with subject 8. They’d also found a link between subject 5 and subject 2: 5 had donated blood once, and 2 had received some of it in a transfusion following an appendectomy.
But—why didn’t the Public Health guy know that already? It was the first break in the case, and it should have gone out to every doctor in the country, every police department, every public health official. So far the CDC had kept the media from finding out about the mystery illness—no need to cause a panic—but the caregivers should already have been notified.
If this guy didn’t know what was going on, that meant Director Philips didn’t want him to know. For reasons Whitman couldn’t imagine.
Still.
“Nope,” Whitman said. “Nothing to worry about. If something comes up, we’ll be sure to let you know.”
• • • •
Atlanta, GA
Back in the observation suite again. A new living subject. Philips sipped at his coffee. He felt like he hadn’t slept in days.
“What’s going on?” Whitman demanded. “Damn it, I have a right to know, at least. You’ve got me out in the field, putting myself at risk. If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have your two live subjects—”
“Six,” Philips interrupted.
“What?”
The director sat back in his chair. Whitman was right, he decided. He should know what was going on. “Did you think you were the only field agent I had working on this? We’ve got six live subjects in the negative pressure rooms.”
He watched Whitman’s jaw fall open. “How many? How many reported cases?”
Philips took a long, deep breath before answering. “Eighty-nine. Confirmed.”
“How long has this been going on?” Whitman asked.
“The first case we’re sure about showed up seven years ago. For a long time then there was nothing. We thought it was just some fluke. But then more of them came to light,” Philips said.
Whitman shook his head. He walked across the room to where a monitor showed the feed from Subject 13’s room. She was still sitting there, rocking back and forth. She’d moved to a different corner of the room but that was the only change.
“What’s going on?” Whitman asked.
“Tell me something, first,” Philips said. “Tell me why you didn’t finish medical school.”
Whitman grimaced. “I wasn’t empath
etic enough, they said. My bedside manner was lousy.”
“When you didn’t know 13’s name, I thought as much,” Philips told him. “Most doctors—we aren’t equipped for this. We take an oath, you see. ‘First, do no harm.’ Even when it could save other lives.”
“What are you getting at?” Whitman demanded.
Philips nodded at the screen. At subject 13.
“The President called me this morning.”
“The President of the United States?” Whitman asked. “He’s been briefed about this case?”
“He’s being updated every twelve hours.”
Philips closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“He called . . . to give me the authorization to find this thing no matter what it takes. You see, we can’t detect anything in her system. No virus. No bacterium, no fungal infection, no parasites. This thing’s invisible.”
“For now,” Whitman pointed out. “We couldn’t find HIV for a long time, either, but we did.”
Philips shook his head. “It isn’t like that. And anyway, we don’t have time to find out. This thing is spreading, and it’s moving fast. We have eighty-nine confirmed cases today. We could have a thousand tomorrow. The President gave me authorization to euthanize her and do an autopsy.”
Whitman was stunned. “But she’s a . . . a living person. A human being. She may be brain dead, but she still has basic rights.”
“Not, apparently, in the face of an epidemic. I was supposed to do it this morning, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to kill her, even in the name of public good. Though maybe it’s not just squeamishness. I have a suspicion I know what it actually is. But oh, Lord, do I want to be wrong this time.”
He looked up at Whitman with pleading eyes. The question went unasked but they both knew it. Philips desperately wanted Whitman to say he would do it. Go down to the negative pressure room and kill Subject 13 so they could cut her open.
But Philips knew it couldn’t be that easy.
• • • •
First thing in the morning, they came for subject 13.
She was in a straitjacket and her facial mask, but they didn’t take any chances. A technician in a bite-proof containment suit stood outside the room and shot her with a massive dose of sedative. Once she was unconscious they strapped her to a gurney and wheeled her into an operating room where three doctors waited. One of them was Philips.
Each of the doctors had a hypodermic needle. Two of them were filled with harmless saline solution. The other had the same chemical cocktail used for lethal injections in prisons. None of the doctors knew which of them had the bad needle.
That was intentional.
One by one they made their injections.
• • • •
Chicago, IL
Whitman wasn’t asleep when the next call came in. Somehow he’d known it was coming. Another mission.
“This one’s a little different,” Philips told him.
He was on a plane an hour later. Fully briefed by the time he set down.
The church had been Catholic once, but it had been sold to some other denomination. Whitman didn’t bother finding out which one. Outside, a dozen policemen stood around looking bored—nobody had told them what was going on. Inside the church was all frothy stonework and stained glass and lanterns hanging from chains. Holy men in severe suits stood around wringing their hands and clutching bibles, unwilling to meet Whitman’s gaze.
A middle-aged woman called his name and told him to come with her. She led him down a flight of stairs into a basement with tan-painted walls that glared in the overhead fluorescents.
“How long has this been going on?” Whitman asked.
The woman wouldn’t make eye contact, either. The church had fought with the CDC, even threatened legal action. A federal judge had slapped that down—the church had no choice but to turn over its parishioners now. “About thirty-nine months,” the woman said. She was in charge of the church’s community outreach. Running homeless shelters and literacy programs. And their hospice.
“The doctors said there was nothing they could do,” she explained. “We kept them fed, gave them clothing, and kept them clean. Was that so wrong?”
Whitman ignored her and went to the door she indicated. A small glass panel reinforced with chicken wire looked into what might have been a classroom once. There were cots lined up inside, though nobody was using them. Instead, the room’s inhabitants sat on the floor, rocking back and forth, hugging themselves. They were mostly naked and they looked filthy.
“We did what we could,” the woman said in a quiet voice.
There were twenty-five people in that room, at least. Every one of them a living subject. A sufferer of the new pathogen.
“Jesus,” Whitman said.
“Please, in this place, don’t take His name in vain,” the woman said.
Whitman stared at her. “You just herded them in there, together, and… and warehoused them? These people need medical care.”
“Their families couldn’t afford to look after them. Neither can we. When it was just one or two of them at a time, maybe… but there are more every day.”
Whitman shook his head. He didn’t even know how to proceed.
• • • •
Atlanta, GA
Subject 13 died with a long, sustained breath that just . . . stopped. In the observation suite, Philips covered his eyes and wept for a moment. Then he pulled on a level four containment suit and headed down to the surgery. He plugged in the various hoses for his air supply. Checked the seals on his gloves. Picked up a bone saw and got to work.
The top of subject 13’s skull came away in one neat, clean piece. Philips had been a very good surgeon, once.
With a scalpel he cut away her brain and lifted it into a waiting pan. A nurse took it away to the microtome room, where it would be cut down into exceedingly thin slices. The slices would then be prepared on microscope slides.
Philips closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see what came next.
But it was his job. And nobody else was volunteering to do it for him.
• • • •
Chicago, IL
“Keep it moving, don’t let them get up if you can,” Whitman called through the door. Inside the room, a dozen cops were squeezed in with the subjects, outnumbered but at least they had all the advantages he could give them. They’d waited for proper gear to come in—riot armor, face shields, heavy bite-proof gloves. One by one they got the subjects ready for transport. In contrast with the cops’ high-tech gear, they’d gone primitive for the restraints—plastic self-locking loops for handcuffs and thick canvas bags to put over the subjects’ heads. A fleet of ambulances stood outside, waiting to take the subjects away.
Whitman turned to the woman who had been caring for the subjects all this time. She was weeping openly, now. “You said you cleaned them—I assume that means you hosed them off once a week. Did you or your staff have any direct contact with them?”
The woman stared at him through her tears. “Of course,” she said. “We didn’t treat them like animals.”
Whitman lifted one hand in perfunctory apology. It didn’t give him pleasure to be mean to people. He just didn’t have time for bullshit. “Were any of you bitten?”
“It . . . happens,” the woman said, with a shrug.
Crap. Whitman had a feeling he was going to have to bring the church staff in as well, if just for observation.
“No one ever got sick from a bite, so we assumed it wasn’t contagious,” the woman explained.
Inside the room someone shouted. Whitman couldn’t make out the words. He stepped toward the doorway, just in time to see a cop smash a subject’s teeth out with his baton. Another cop waded through the subjects to try to help, but three of the infected grabbed him and pulled him off his feet.
One of them started tearing the cop’s face shield off.
“Out now!” Whitman shouted, but it was too late. The cops all drew t
heir batons and started laying into the subjects around them. But there was no order to it, no discipline. They were just scared.
Whitman reached for the nearest cop and grabbed his shoulder. The man whirled around and smacked Whitman right in the gut with his baton. Whitman fell backwards, out of the doorway, clutching his stomach.
That was when everything went to shit.
• • • •
Atlanta, GA
Philips adjusted the focus on the microscope. It didn’t help. The tiny holes were there and couldn’t be ignored. It was exactly what he’d expected to see.
“Give me sample 39a,” he said, and a technician changed the slide. Philips didn’t even lift his head from the eyepieces. Pink and white ovals filled the view, looking a great deal like a close-up of a slice of salami. That was normal, it was what healthy brain tissue looked like. But subject 13 hadn’t been healthy. This slice of her brain, like all the others, was riddled with thousands of microscopic holes. Like it had been eaten away by tiny mice working at random.
“Sample 40a,” Philips said.
• • • •
Chicago, IL
A man in a black suit ran screaming from the church, his face torn open and blood soaking into his collar. The stained glass windows lit up from inside with the bright flashes of gunshots. Whitman stumbled out of the church, one arm wrapped around the screaming woman who had run the hospice program. She was unhurt but inconsolable. He pushed her away from him and turned around to look back inside. A subject in a torn sweatshirt was stomping up the pews, blood slicking the front of his jaw. A cop was down by the pulpit, not moving.
Whitman grabbed his Taser from inside his jacket. He fired it into the subject’s chest and the subject went down, at least momentarily. Whitman ran over to the cop and checked his pulse. The cop was alive and breathing but he wasn’t getting up. Shock, Whitman thought. The man had succumbed to shock after getting three of his fingers bitten off.
Whitman had enough medical training to know what to do. He took off his belt and wrapped it around the cop’s wrist, pulling it as tight as he could to make a tourniquet.
The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych) Page 35