They nodded without shaking hands. Fortes was young, not even thirty. Wolgast wondered if he was an MD or something else. Like Sykes, Fortes appeared exhausted, physically spent. His skin was oily, and he needed a haircut and a shave. His glasses looked like they hadn’t been cleaned in a month.
“She has an embedded chip. It transmits vitals to the panel here.” Fortes showed him: heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, temperature. Amy’s was 102.6.
“Where?”
“Where what?” The doctor’s eyes floated with incomprehension.
“Where’s the chip?”
“Oh.” Fortes looked at Sykes, who nodded. Fortes pointed at the back of his own neck. “Subcutaneous, between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. The power source is pretty nifty, actually, a tiny nuclear cell. Like the kind on satellites, only much smaller.”
Nifty. Wolgast shuddered. A nifty nuclear power source in Amy’s neck. He turned to Sykes, who was watching with a look of caution.
“Is this what happened to the others? Carter and the rest.”
“They were … preliminary,” Sykes said.
“Preliminary to what?”
He paused. “To Amy.”
Fortes explained the situation: Amy was in a coma. No one had expected this, and her fever was too high and had gone on too long. Her kidney and liver values were depressed.
“We were hoping you could talk to her,” Sykes said. “This sometimes helps with patients in a prolonged state of unconsciousness. Doyle tells us that she’s pretty … bonded with you.”
A two-stage air lock connected them to Amy’s room. Sykes and Fortes led him into the first chamber. An orange biosuit was hanging on the wall, the empty helmet tipped forward, like a man with a broken neck. Sykes explained how it worked.
“You’ll need to put this on, then wrap all seams with duct tape. The valves at the base of the helmet connect to the hoses in the ceiling. They’re color-coded, so that should be obvious. When you come back through, you need to shower in the suit, then shower again without it. There are instructions on the wall.”
Wolgast sat on the bench to remove his slippers. Then he stopped.
“No,” he said.
Sykes looked at him and frowned. “No what?”
“No, I’m not wearing it.” He turned and faced Sykes squarely. “It’s not going to help if she wakes up and sees me in a space suit. You want me to go in there, I go as I am.”
“That’s not a good idea, Agent,” Sykes warned.
His mind was made up. “No suit or no deal.”
Sykes glanced at Fortes, who shrugged. “It could be … interesting. In theory, the virus should be inert by now. On the other hand, it might not be.”
“The virus?”
“I guess you’ll find out,” Sykes said. “Let him in on my authority. And, Agent, once you’re in, you’re in. I can’t guarantee anything beyond that. Is that clear?”
Wolgast said it was; Sykes and Fortes stepped from the air lock. Wolgast realized he hadn’t expected them to say yes. At the last instant Wolgast called back to them. “Where’s her backpack?”
Fortes and Sykes exchanged another private look. “Wait here,” Sykes said.
He returned a few minutes later with Amy’s knapsack. The Powerpuff Girls: Wolgast had never really looked at it, not closely. Three of them, their images made of a rubbery plastic glued onto the rough canvas of the pack, fists raised and flying. Wolgast unzipped it; some of Amy’s things were missing, such as her hairbrush, but Peter was still inside.
He fixed his gaze on Fortes. “How will I know if it’s not … inert?”
“Oh, you’ll know,” Fortes said.
They sealed the door behind him. Wolgast felt the pressure drop. Above the second door, the light switched from red to green. Wolgast turned the handle and stepped inside.
A second room, longer than the first, with a fat drain in the floor and a sunflower-head shower, activated by a metal chain. The light in here was different; it had a bluish cast, like autumn twilight. A sign on the wall bore the instructions Sykes had indicated: a long list of steps that ended in nakedness, standing above the drain, rinsing the mouth and eyes and then clearing the throat and spitting. A camera peered down at him from a corner of the ceiling.
He paused at the second door. The light above it was red. A keypad was affixed to the wall. How would he go through? Then the light switched from red to green, as the first had done—Sykes, from outside, overriding the system.
He paused before opening the door. It looked heavy, made of gleaming steel. Like a bank vault, or something on a submarine. He couldn’t say exactly why he’d insisted on not wearing the biosuit, a decision that now seemed rash. For Amy, as he’d said? Or to tease out some information, however meager, from Sykes? Either way, the decision had felt right to him.
He turned the handle, felt his ears pop as the pressure dropped again. He drew in a lungful of air, holding it in his chest, and stepped through.
Grey had no idea what was happening. Days and days of this: he’d report for his shift, ride the elevator down to L4—nothing had happened after that first night; Davis had covered for him—change in the locker room and do his work, cleaning the halls and bathrooms, then step into Containment, and step out six hours later.
All perfectly normal, except that those six hours were a blank, like an empty drawer in his brain. He’d obviously done the things he was supposed to, filed his reports and backed up the drives, moved the rabbit cages in and out, even exchanged a few words with Pujol or the other techs who came in. And yet he couldn’t remember any of it. He’d slide his card to enter the observation room and the next thing he knew his shift was over and he was coming out the other side.
Except for little things: fleeting things, small but bright somehow, little bits of recorded data that seemed to catch the light like confetti as they fluttered down through his mind throughout the day. They weren’t pictures, nothing as clear and straightforward as that, and nothing he could hold on to. But he’d be sitting in the commissary, or back in his room, or crossing the yard to the Chalet, and a taste would bubble from the back of his throat, and a queer juicy feeling in his teeth. Sometimes it struck him so hard it actually made him freeze in his tracks. And when this happened, he’d think of funny things, unrelated, a lot of which had to do with Brownbear. Like the taste in his mouth would push a button that would start him up thinking about his old dog, who, truth be told, he hadn’t really thought about much at all until recently, not for years and years, until that night he’d had that dream in Containment and tossed all over the floor.
Brownbear and his reeking breath. Brownbear dragging something dead, a possum or raccoon, up the front steps. That time he got into a nest of bunnies under the trailer, tiny little balls of peach-colored skin, not even covered with fur yet, and crunched them one by one, their little skulls popping between his molars, like a kid sitting in the movies with a box of Whoppers.
Funny thing: he couldn’t say for sure Brownbear had actually done that.
He wondered if he was sick. The sign over the sentry station on L3 made him nervous, in a way it hadn’t before. It seemed to be talking right to him. ANY OF THE FOLLOWING SYMPTOMS … One morning, returning from breakfast, he’d felt a tickle in his throat, like maybe he was getting a cold; before he knew it he’d sneezed hard into his hand. His nose had been running a little ever since. Then again, it was spring now, still cold at night but rising into the fifties or even sixties during the afternoon, and all the trees were budding out, a faint haze of green, like a spatter of paint over the mountains. He’d always been allergic.
And then there was the quiet. It took Grey a while to notice what this was. Nobody was saying anything—not just the sweeps, who never spoke much to begin with, but the techs and soldiers and doctors, too. It wasn’t like it happened all at once, in a day or even a week. But slowly, over time, a hush had settled over the place, sealing down on it like a lid. Grey had always been more
of a listener himself—that’s what Wilder, the prison shrink, had said about him: “You’re a good listener, Grey.” He’d meant it as a compliment, but mostly Wilder was just in love with the sound of his own voice and happy to have an audience. Still, Grey missed the sound of human voices. One night in the commissary he counted thirty men hunched over their trays, and not one of them was saying a word. Some weren’t even eating, just sitting in their chairs, maybe nursing a cup of coffee or tea and staring into space. Like they were half asleep.
One thing: Grey was fine in the shut-eye department. He slept and slept and slept, and when his alarm went off at 05:00, or noon if, as likely as not, he’d been on the late shift, he’d roll over in bed, light a smoke from the pack on the nightstand, and stay still for a few minutes, trying to decide if he’d dreamed or not. He didn’t think he had.
Then one morning he sat down at a table in the commissary to eat—French toast stamped with butter, a couple of eggs, three sausages, and a bowl of grits on the side; if he was sick it sure hadn’t killed his appetite any—and when he lifted his face to take his first bite, a dripping slab of toast just inches from his lips, he saw Paulson. Sitting there, right across from him, two tables away. Grey had caught sight of him once or twice since their conversation, but not up close, not like this. Paulson was sitting over a plate of eggs he hadn’t touched. He looked like shit, his skin stretched so tight over his face you could see the edges of his bones. For an instant, just one, their eyes met.
Paulson looked away.
That night, checking in for his shift, Grey asked Davis, “You know that guy Paulson?”
Davis wasn’t his usual cheerful self these days. Gone were the jokes and the dirty magazines and the headphones with their buzz saws of leaking music. Grey wondered what in hell Davis did all night at the desk; though it was also true that Grey didn’t know what he himself was doing all night, either.
“What about him?”
But Grey’s question stopped right there; he couldn’t think what else to ask.
“Nothing. Just wondering if you knew him was all.”
“Do yourself a favor. Stay away from that asshole.”
Grey went downstairs and got to work. It wasn’t until later, running a scrub brush around a toilet bowl on L4, that he thought of the question he’d meant to ask.
What is he so afraid of?
What is everyone so afraid of?
They were calling him Number Twelve. Not Carter or Anthony or Tone, though he was so sick now, lying alone in the dark, that those names and the person they referred to seemed like somebody else, not him. A person who had died, leaving only this sick, writhing form in his place.
The sickness felt like forever. That’s the word it made him think of. Not that it would last forever; more that he was sick with time itself. Like the idea of time was inside him, in each cell of his body, and time wasn’t an ocean, like somebody had told him once, but a million tiny wicks of flame that would never be extinguished. The worst feeling in the world. Someone had told him he’d be feeling better soon, much better. He’d held on to those words for a while. But now he knew they were a lie.
He was aware, dimly, of movements around him, the comings and goings, the pokings and prickings of the men in the space suits. He wanted water, just a sip of water, to slake his thirst, but when he asked for this, he heard no sound from his lips, nothing except the roaring and ringing in his ears. They’d taken a lot of his blood. It felt like whole gallons of it. The man named Anthony had sold his blood from time to time; he’d squeeze the ball and watch the bag fill up with it, amazed at its density, its rich red color, how alive it looked. Never more than a pint before they gave him the cookies and the folded bills and sent him on his way. But now the men in the suits filled bag after bag, and the blood was different, though he couldn’t say just how. The blood in his body was alive but he didn’t think it was only his own anymore; it belonged to someone, something, else.
It would have been good to die about now.
Mrs. Wood, she’d known that. And not just about herself but about Anthony too, and when he thought this, for a second he was Anthony again. It was good to die. There was a lightness in it, a letting go, like love.
He tried to hold on to this thought, the thought that made him still Anthony, but bit by bit it slipped away, a rope pulled slowly through his hands. How many days had passed he couldn’t tell; something was happening to him, but it wasn’t happening quick enough for the men in the suits. They were talking and talking about it, poking and prodding and taking more of his blood. And he was hearing something else now, too: a soft murmur, like voices, but it wasn’t coming from the men in the suits. The sounds seemed to come from far away and from inside him all at once. Not words he knew but words nonetheless; it was a language he was hearing, it had order and sense and a mind, and not just one mind: twelve. Yet one was more than the others, not louder but more. The one voice and then behind it the others, twelve in sum. And they were speaking to him, calling to him; they knew he was there. They were in his blood and they were forever, too.
He wanted to say something back.
He opened his eyes.
“Drop the gate!” a voice cried out. “He’s flipping!”
The restraints were nothing, like paper. The rivets popped from the table and shot across the room. First his arms and then his legs. The room was dark but hid nothing from his eyes, because the darkness was part of him now. And inside him, far down, a great, devouring hunger uncoiled itself. To eat the very world. To take it all inside him and be filled by it, made whole. To make the world eternal, as he was.
A man was running for the door.
Anthony fell on him swiftly, from above. A scream and then the man was silent in wet pieces on the floor. The beautiful warmth of blood! He drank and drank.
The one who’d told him he’d be feeling better soon: he wasn’t wrong, after all.
Anthony Carter had never felt better in his life.
Pujol, that dumb fuck, was dead.
Thirty-six days: that was how long it had taken Carter to flip, the longest since they’d begun. But Carter was supposed to be the meanest of the lot, the last stage before the virus reached its final form. The one the girl had gotten.
Richards personally didn’t care one way or another about the girl. She would survive or she wouldn’t. She would live forever or die in the next five minutes. Somewhere along the way, the girl had become beside the point, as far as Special Weapons was concerned. They had Wolgast in there with her now, talking to her, trying to bring her around. So far he was fine, but if the girl died, this wouldn’t make a lick of difference.
What the hell had Pujol been thinking? They should have dropped the gate days ago. But at least now they knew what these things could do. The report from Bolivia had indicated as much, but it was another thing to see it with your own eyes, to watch the video feed of Carter, this little twig of a man with an IQ not much more than 80 on a good day and scared of his own shadow, launch himself twenty feet through the air, so fast it was as if he were moving not through space but around it, and rip a man from crotch to jowls like a letter he couldn’t wait to open. By the time it was all over—about two seconds—they’d had to blast Carter with the lights, to push him back to the corner so they could drop the gate.
They had the twelve now, thirteen counting Fanning. Richards’s job was done, or nearly. The order had just come through. Project NOAH was graduating to Operation Jumpstart. In a week, they’d be moving the sticks to White Sands. After that, it would be out of Richards’s hands.
The ultimate bunker busters. That’s what Cole had called them, way back when, when it was all just a theory—before Bolivia and Fanning and all the rest. Just imagine what one of these things could do, say, in the mountain caves of northern Pakistan, or the eastern deserts of Iran, or the shot-up buildings of the Chechen Free Zone. Think high colonic, Richards: a good cleaning out from the inside.
Maybe Cole would have wised
up eventually. But in his absence, the idea had acquired a life of its own. Never mind that it violated about half a dozen international treaties that Richards could think of. Never mind that it was just about the stupidest idea he’d ever heard of in his life. A bluff, probably; but bluffs had a way of being called. And did anyone seriously think, for one goddamn second, that you could contain one of these things to the caves of northern Pakistan?
He felt bad for Sykes, and not a little worried. The guy was a wreck, had barely come out of his office since word had come down from Special Weapons. When Richards had asked him if Lear knew, Sykes had given a long, wretched-sounding laugh. Poor guy, he’d said. He still thinks he’s trying to save the world. Which, the way things are playing out, might need saving after all. I can’t believe this is even on the table.
Armored trucks would transport the sticks to Grand Junction; from there, they’d be moved by train to White Sands. As for Richards: once everything had been brought to its proper conclusion, he was giving serious consideration to buying property in, say, northern Canada.
The sweeps would be the first to go. The techs and most of the soldiers, too, starting with the ones who were the most screwed up, like Paulson. After that day on the loading dock, Richards had checked his file. Paulson, Derrick G. Age twenty-two. Enlisted straight out of high school in Glastonbury, Connecticut; a year in the sands, then back stateside. No record, and the guy was smart; he had an IQ of 136. No question he could have gone to college, or OCS. He’d been on-site now for twenty-three months. He’d been disciplined twice for sleeping on watch and once for unauthorized use of email, but that was all.
What bothered him was that Paulson knew, or believed he did; Richards had sensed it right off. Not in anything Paulson had done or said, but in the look on Carter’s face when Richards had opened the van’s door—like the poor guy had seen a ghost, or worse. Nobody except the scientific staff and the sweeps set foot on Level 4. With nothing else to do but stand around in the snow, a certain amount of idle conjecture among the enlisted was inevitable, loose talk around the mess table. But Richards had the feeling in his gut that whatever Paulson had said was more than just gossip.
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