The Plague Tales

by Ann Benson

  She looked over at the reflection on the cabinet, and saw that there was now only one green figure reflected in it; the other had gone. That one turned abruptly and walked out of her field of vision. She tapped Bruce’s shoulder and pointed at the reflection.

  “They’re gone,” she said. “I think they may have found the hand.”

  He sat up quickly and got to his feet in a crouching position. “That should keep them busy for a few minutes,” he said. “Maybe we can get out of here.” And when the reflection had been free of green images for a few seconds more, he said, “Follow me.”

  They moved quickly down the central path of the freezer, keeping very low to the floor, passing stack after stack of tubes and a veritable forest of chrome containers. Janie read the labels as they passed, and cringed. She saw a white canister marked Marburg, and thought of the terrible accident that had occurred in a German lab many years before. A sample of an obscure and deadly African virus of the Ebola family had arrived at a lab in Marburg, Germany, in a broken vial, and had turned the internal organs of several lab workers into cream-of-human soup in a matter of days. She held her breath through the mask as they moved past it.

  Bruce was at the air duct already. His stiff, gloved fingers clumsily unfastened layer after layer of clamps and filters, and Janie thought to herself that the burn on his hand must be excruciatingly painful with all of this activity. Each layer of clamps was designed to thwart an intruder trying to enter from the outside. Soon they were surrounded by a pile of filters and screens. Bruce reached inside the vent and pulled out the last thick filter. He went into the opening feet first and kicked away the outside panel when he reached it, hoping there were no observers nearby. But as he slid out into the darkness, he found himself behind a stand of bushes, quite out of sight of anyone, so he turned back and helped Janie squeeze out.

  “Get your gear off and stow it in the shaft,” Bruce said to Janie. “Don’t touch the grate. We’ll have to leave it off.”

  Bruce could hear Janie’s teeth chattering. He wrapped his arms around her. “Here, let me warm you up,” he said. “A few more minutes in there and we would have been in big trouble.”

  “We are in big trouble,” Janie said. “How the hell did we get into this mess?”

  They spent a few minutes behind the bush shivering, their teeth clicking as they tried to warm themselves. When he could move a little more easily, Bruce stood up cautiously and looked around.

  “We’re in the side garden,” he said. “It looks deserted.” Janie stood up and they brushed off their clothing. Hurriedly, she ran her fingers through her hair. They left the safety of the garden and walked out to the street to see what was happening there.

  Trying to blend in, they hung back from the main crowd of people. A rapidly increasing throng of curious onlookers had gathered outside the front entrance of the Institute, held back by a bright green tape barrier, and they eased forward, never pushing enough to raise an objection from any of the other observers. When the view was clear, they stopped and observed from their safe distance as Biocops entered and left the building. Not long after they secured their positions in the crowd, they saw the long, narrow box containing what was probably the body of the guard being brought down the front steps by four not-so-jolly green giants.

  “They’re not taking any chances,” Bruce whispered in her ear. “They’ve got him sealed up tight. They’ll test him later, then he’ll be cremated.”

  Janie’s eyes filled with tears; she wept quietly as she stood there. She sniffled and watched in silence as another Biocop carried a smaller box down the entry stairs without assistance. Probably the hand, she thought to herself.

  Bruce must have read her mind. “It’ll take them about half an hour to figure out who it belongs to. We’d better get away before anyone recognizes me.”

  A few blocks away they found a grocery store with a phone booth. Bruce dialed Biopol’s emergency number and told them anonymously about the unsealed grate outside the lab. He didn’t even mention Caroline or the plague bacterium; their situation had become too complicated. Even considering Biopol’s fancy technology, he knew they would be safely away by the time the Biocops found the gear and traced down the phone booth, so he placed the call without hesitation. But seeing the worried look on Janie’s face, he said, “Too many people use that equipment for trace evidence to be conclusive. We won’t be implicated.”

  Neither one spoke of what they might have done if they could have been identified by reporting the gear’s location. As they slipped off into London’s darkness, Bruce wondered if he could have sacrificed himself for the greater good. He didn’t know. He didn’t want to know.

  Lieutenant Michael Rosow of the London branch of the International Biological Police stood in the decontamination chamber and let the sterilizing fluid pour over the outside surfaces of his green suit. It rolled down the channels and folds of the slick plastic armor in deep aqua rivulets. It reminded him of the antifreeze they used to use in cars, back before solar temperature regulation was introduced.

  This was the part he always hated, this long, slow process of coming away from a contaminated area and reentering the sterile world. When the light finally flashed to signal that the airlock was about to open, he breathed a sigh of relief and turned to face the door, anticipating the whoosh of the pump as it drew the chamber air into the filtration system. He stepped out and stood still over the drip pan as two gloved, masked, and booted technicians began to remove his suit.

  When all the layers were finally peeled off, he stood naked and closed his eyes as one last decontaminating rinse washed over him. The techs used hand-held sprayers to direct the shower of warm liquid into his body’s folds and crevices; this part of the decontamination was more than a little erotic, and he had, so to speak, risen to the occasion more than once, much to his great embarrassment.

  He dried off and dressed in “normal” clothing again, then headed straight for the examination lab. His pace was brisk, reflecting the excitement he felt. As much as he hated the protracted sterilization procedure, he loved what he was about to do, and it more than balanced out his dislike of bathing in antifreeze.

  He had already scanned the hand for DNA identification. Three positives came up—the first being the apparent owner of the hand, one Dr. Theodore Cummings, director of the lab in which it had been found, apparently missing, and, if the condition of the hand was any indication, now probably dead. The second positive was an enterobacterium, of sufficient quantity to read as a “being” on the scanner; he had not yet run an identity on it. And the third was an unknown female who obviously had not been printed because the scan of her DNA compared to all known matches throughout the world was inconclusive. Rosow knew that such a result could mean any one of three things. She might be quite old, enough to grandmother the law requiring that she be ID’d, but he doubted this because of the good condition of the cells in which the identifying pattern was found. Or she might be a Marginal, one who had somehow managed to avoid printing. There was no way to discount this possibility, so he kept it mentally open. Or third, she might be an unprinted citizen of a foreign country, in Britain on a limited visa, in which case she would not have been required to submit to a print until she’d been in the country for four weeks.

  He sat down in the swivel chair in front of the computer and settled himself in. He brought up the DNA interpretation program and stared intently at the screen as he typed in a series of short commands. A gentle sexy female voice spoke reassuringly to him.

  “The operation you have requested will be completed in six minutes. Please wait. Would you like to listen to some music during the processing time?”

  Rosow answered, “Yes.”

  The voice said, “Please choose from the list on the screen. Speak your choice slowly and clearly.”

  He reviewed the choices quickly, comparing the duration times to the expected length of the procedure, then said, “Brahms German Requiem track five.”


  The computer replied, “An excellent choice. One moment please.”

  As the big voice of his favorite soprano soared above the choir, he watched the large screen intently. Bit by bit the picture formed; he was entranced, and could not drag his eyes away. Slowly organizing before his eyes was the image of a woman. As each bit of genetic coding was interpreted from the cells found under the fingernails of Ted Cummings’ severed hand, she changed and reshaped and morphed as he watched.

  “Come on, darlin’,” he said, “let’s have a look at you.”

  As the music crescendoed and climaxed with the rub of the soprano note against the harmony of the choir, the final details of the image fell into place. Red hair, blue or green eyes, about five four, slim if she hadn’t gone to fat. A real beauty; a stunner.

  “Oh, baby, baby, baby!” he whispered as he sharpened the image. Rosow wondered how she would look after living in the real world for however long she had lived here. He’d never had the nerve to bring up his own image, to see how life had beaten him down in comparison to his unsullied potential. He’d done it to a few acquaintances (without their knowledge or consent, he regretted to say) and had been shocked by the way gravity, weather, and worry affected all humans. But this woman had started out with a lot of potential. The cell generational interpreter confirmed his estimate of her age.

  He isolated her facial features and enlarged them on the screen. He brought up a data entry form on the screen and highlighted the bits of data he wanted sent out over the wire. When he was satisfied with the assortment of information, he clicked on the “send” icon and waited a few seconds as the system sent out a facial image and a list of identifying characteristics for this woman to all the Biopol offices and mobile units in England.

  Michael Rosow couldn’t wait for the programs, rumored to be in development at the Institute, that would allow him to make the reconstructed image move as a living, breathing human would.

  The sexy voice returned. “The transmission was successfully completed. Will there be anything else?”

  Rosow laughed and said, “Yes, there will, luv. Show me what you look like.”

  The ragged woman was perhaps the oddest of the hundreds of silhouettes visible against the setting sun as she pushed the cart over the bridge. Cars whizzed by, occasional colored spots in a fast-moving herd of black taxis, carrying fortunate people toward their comfortable suburban homes. Other people, only slightly less fortunate, walked to edge-of-London apartments, so there was still a good deal of foot traffic crossing. And though she knew her companions were once again watching out for her, the woman pushing the cart over the bridge was somewhat frightened. She would have felt far more comfortable being back within the group that could be found under the bridge, in a very different sort of society.

  “I don’t like crowds much,” she said to Caroline, who hadn’t moved in a while, and was well beyond the condition where she might be expected to respond. “Never did have much use for big groups of people.” She slowed her pace and thought about other routes she might take, routes with less exposure to the dreaded masses of civilization. Every route she considered had some problem, and all of them meant a dangerous increase in the amount of time it would take to deliver her ailing cargo. She had to get south of the river somehow, and this bridge offered the fewest obstacles, for like a wheelchair, her purloined shopping cart could not negotiate stairs; on this bridge the sidewalks, like the road, were smooth and level.

  The bridge was all steel girders and beams, sleek and new, a stronger replacement for the original stone-and-concrete bridge that had been destroyed, along with a good deal of history, by a terrorist’s bomb a few years earlier. The woman had liked the old one better; it had been a beautiful, stately coupler for the two sides of the river, and it fit in with the surrounding buildings.

  “Such a shame, the way things change,” she muttered. She leaned closer to Caroline, as if the younger woman could really hear what was being said to her. “Time was I knew my way around this city, but no more. It’s like a foreign country to me now. Too many big buildings. Too many people.”

  Already she was not feeling well, and she was surprised at the speed with which the unseen but expected invader took control of her body. It had been only a short while since she took hold of Caroline’s destiny, and she had already made a long journey, having been forced to double back on more than one occasion when faced with an insurmountable obstacle. She was beginning to grow weary of the constant walking, and would have liked to rest, even if only for a few minutes. The rapidly worsening condition of her passenger, however, did not allow her the luxury of stopping to consider her own. She maintained a slow but steady pace, knowing it was her only hope of arriving at her destination before it was too late to do what needed to be done.

  “Go ahead, you little blighter, be difficult.” Lieutenant Rosow was not having much success identifying the bacterium he’d read on Ted Cummings’ hand, and he was feeling quite frustrated. As he did with many of the objects he examined, he talked to it, sometimes nicely, sometimes with obvious anger, as if by doing so he could cajole the stubborn object into revealing its inner self and all of its secrets.

  He was confused. This bacterium showed similarities to a number of species, but there was no exact match in the database. It had been a very long time since he’d run across something that he simply couldn’t identify. He’d developed a knack for backtracking mutations, then extrapolating those mutations onto existing bacteria, and he’d been very successful in getting matches that way on many different occasions.

  But this little baby, frantic multiplier though it was, did not seem to have evolved out of anything he had on file. He set up ten different mutation options, some of them multigenerational, but nothing registered. Baffled, he instructed the computer to search for a crossmatch with other unidentified samples on file. He did not expect to get any matches.

  How wrong he was. After only ten minutes of searching through millions of samples, there were six positive matches. All currently unidentified.

  All six in the last two days.

  He sat bolt upright and looked intently at the screen. The records for each of the cases were being assembled from the various input sources. Five of the matches had come from different hospitals, and one from a routine Compudoc exam. Three were Londoners and the other three resided in nearby suburbs. The carriers were completely dissimilar; they did not share professions or domiciles or habits or vices. All fell ill at about the same time, and complained of identical symptoms. High fever, swollen glands, dark blotches around the neck and groin; no exact diagnosis had been made. Four had already died when the last data update had been processed, and the other two were gravely ill.

  It took ten unidentified matches to set the computer into automatic action. Rosow knew he would not have discovered this potential epidemic if he had not actually come into contact with Ted Cummings’ hand and subsequently gone hunting for matches. Eventually there would have been enough victims to attract the notice of the system, but by then, whatever he had stumbled upon with his characteristic blind luck might already have been out of control.

  He thought, Maybe now they’ll listen to me. He had tried unsuccessfully several times to get the epidemic threshold changed to four cases, but he was the only one who believed it necessary. The Biocop Workers’ Coalition felt it would increase their workload dramatically, and had blocked the suggested change. Rosow had been furious at the Coalition leadership at the time and still was. He no longer even attended the meetings.

  He continued to search for a pattern among the victims, but none was immediately evident. It was not until he read through all the interviews with the next of kin that he finally found what he needed.

  The first victim to die was the owner of a very chic London restaurant, and three of the others had eaten there on the same night. Rosow immediately called the next of kin for the remaining two, and discovered that one of them had also been there.

  This sugges
ted a food-related toxin to him, and that was his first avenue of inquiry, but one of the victims had not eaten anything, only sipped wine while his companion dined. There was absolutely nothing in his stomach when they’d opened him up. Examination of another bottle of the same wine showed no indication that the wine was contaminated. His dining partner had ordered a different wine.

  “Hope you enjoyed it, being your last glass and all,” he said aloud. “Myself, I would have had a stout.” Then he added, “Had I known.”

  Not the wine, not the food, no professional or residential pattern. Just their presence in the restaurant that bound the victims together. The restaurant had no air conditioning, or he might have considered a form of Legionnaires’ disease. But the symptoms weren’t right for that.

  Rosow was even more baffled than before. He didn’t know how to proceed. But of one thing he was sure: He needed to find that redhead.

  Ahead in the distance the tired woman saw a pair of bright green Biocops standing on the sidewalk near the place where the foot of the bridge met up with the main road. They were, whether they knew it or not, very close to the place where most of the local clan of Marginals entered the under-bridge community. And though that knowledge bothered her on general principle, their presence near the underworld entry had no direct effect. She was not planning to stop for a visit. There wasn’t time.

  She would, however, have to get around them somehow, for they were directly in her path. She stopped pushing her cart and thought about what she should do. She couldn’t see clearly enough to determine the reason for their presence. She would have to keep moving forward until she could make a determination. She looked around nervously for any sign of her furtive companions, knowing she would need their help for this leg of the journey.