Quarantined

by Joe McKinney

  Ordinarily, we would have had to piece together that timeline through any number of interviews with family and friends. Rarely—actually, never—does a victim leave behind as detailed a picture of their last hours alive as Emma Bradley left for us in her journal. Girly-girl as she may have been, party girl as she certainly was, she was also a scientist, and her journal entries carefully laid out dates and times and locations, as well as what was done and by whom. The only trouble was her shorthand. She seemed to have had her own language when she wrote in her journal, and it made it difficult to understand what she was talking about some times.

  The last day, the most important day, was loaded with shorthand. She recorded checking out the van at five-twenty, which we knew already, and entering the GZ at six o'clock. Next to the time of arrival at the GZ she wrote, “400 Iowa.” That was obviously the four hundred block of Iowa Street, which crosses at Piedmont Street, where I found the van. In the same entry she wrote, “Coll spec cages 440 Iowa. 6 li specs.” Below that, “All pos. Addt'l test for typing.”

  The next time entry was eight forty-five, and what I read there gave me chills. Bradley wrote, “Unbelievable. Must get them all.” Below that, in huge letters that took up the whole bottom third of the page, she wrote, “WE ARE ALL GONERS!”

  From that Chunk and I came up with what we thought was a reasonable enough translation. Bradley and Wade arrived in the GZ at about dawn and stopped at the four hundred block of Iowa. They collected six live specimens, most likely chickens, from cages at 440 Iowa, and tested them. Evidently, the results of those tests scared Bradley to death, and I couldn't help but think of Dr. Cole's theory that there may be two other strains of the flu infecting the chickens in the GZ that are even more dangerous than H2N2.

  I said, “If she did confirm Cole's theory, you think she radioed back to the WHO office about it?”

  “Maybe,” Chunk said.

  “Something else to ask Myers about, don't you think?”

  “And Hippo woman.”

  “Yeah. And Hippo woman.”

  We drove on in silence after that. I stared out the window, at the ragged gray sky, at the debris blown all over the street from the previous night's storm. We passed yet another long line of desperate looking people waiting their turn to cash in their coupons for meager rations, which seemed to be getting fewer, and of lower quality, everyday. The people we passed all looked so sad, so angry, like they'd been beat with a stick and not even told why.

  A kid, no more than 12 or 13, threw a rock at our car and missed. His mother was standing next to him. She watched the rock fly, then looked back to her feet without bothering to scold the boy.

  The city seemed to be pulling itself apart. It had only been a few months since the military sealed us up behind the containment walls, but already our institutions had started to collapse. There was a crazy something in the air, like an electrical charge, like everything was primed to explode in our faces, and it occurred to me then just how many things are held up by human will alone. Buildings, streets, the economy, the government, even our families, stay together simply because we want them to. Without that will, that desire to maintain, things fall apart.

  I closed Bradley's journal with a sigh.

  “You okay?”

  “Mmm hmm.”

  “You sure?”

  “I got a lot on my mind,” I said.

  “More than Bradley, you mean?”

  “Yeah. More than that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Connie mostly.”

  “How's she doing?”

  “She's fine,” I said. “It's me, actually. I made her a promise last night and I'm wondering how I'm going to keep it.”

  “What kind of promise?”

  “The chocolate cake kind.”

  He gave me a sideways glance that said, You know what that's gonna take, don't you?

  But he didn't have to ask the question out loud. “I know what it means.”

  He turned left and drifted down Hamilton. Massive oak trees hung over the street, making it look like a green tunnel. Patches of white sunlight danced over the hood.

  “What do you need?” he asked. Just like that. No preamble, no judgment.

  “Billy and I have scraped together two hundred dollars. We've also got about sixty ration coupons. Do you think that'll be enough?”

  “Don't worry about it,” he said. “You guys keep the money.”

  “No, Chunk. I don't want that.”

  “It's all right. Besides, I owe you and Billy a debt I can't ever pay back.”

  I turned and looked him. It was the first time in weeks we'd talked about his grandmother. “You don't owe us a thing for that, Chunk. You know that.”

  “I know you believe that, Lily. That's why it matters to me.” He said, “Now what do you need?”

  I pressed my lips together, hard.

  “You're a good man, Chunk. A real good man.”

  He smiled. “And I feel good about myself naked, too.”

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Chapter 16

  A large, angry crowd had clustered around the front gate of the Arsenal Station Morgue. Two young patrolmen, neither of them more than 25, watched the crowd apprehensively from inside the gate.

  The crowd surrounded our car and banged on the windows and the hood with their fists. The car rocked. A woman with spit clinging to her lips pressed her face against the passenger side window and screamed something at me that I couldn't understand, though the hate-filled expression in her eyes was plain enough.

  One of the patrolmen swung the gate open, while the other stood to one side, clutching an AR-15 in his hands and looking green around the gills. As we drove by him, he glanced at me, and I could see the fear in his eyes.

  I didn't envy him for his job.

  We found Myers on the main floor of the morgue, cutting a tissue specimen from the lungs of a man about my age. We waited off to one side while he worked. When he was done, we followed him to a hallway where we could talk in private.

  He'd already heard the news about Ken Wade, and I could tell he was glad Wade was dead, but also a little upset that he was wrong about him.

  “You got that inventory I faxed over to you?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said, very stiffly, very British. “I received it this morning.”

  “Have you gone over it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you notice anything unusual about it? Anything that didn't look right?”

  “Unusual? You mean the very fact that we are standing here at all isn't unusual enough for you?”

  “Doctor,” I said. “Please.”

  He smirked at me from behind his goggles. “Not as such, no. One or two of the items did seem to me a bit curious, but nothing I would call suspicious.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don't have the list in front of me at the moment,” he said. The way he said it made it sound like I was a dumbass for asking.

  I handed him an extra copy I'd brought along. He took it, and gave me another look. This one hard to read, but still unpleasant.

  He had to hold the list up at eye level to read it in his space suit.

  “Here you list one hundred and thirty-seven glass vials, assuming you were able to count them correctly. That is a smaller number than I would expect. Our field vans normally carry about two hundred vials.”

  “What would she have stored in those vials, doc?”

  “They would have been used and reused several times. Of course, some of the tubes break, and some develop a film on the inside that the sterilizers can't clean. In that case, the vial would be destroyed. That's why I said it was curious. Not unusual.”

  “Anything else?”

  That look again. He held the paper up and ran his finger down the list.

  “You don't have any specimen cages listed here. There should have been at least six on board.”

  Chunk and I traded a glance, both of u
s thinking about Bradley's journal. They should have been in the vehicle.

  “What do these cages look like, doc?” Chunk asked.

  “They are simple, white plastic boxes with a perforated clear plastic gate on the front that slides up and down as needed.”

  There was nothing like that in the inventory.

  “What's the standard procedure for storing the cages after they've been used,” I asked.

  “They are stacked in a vertical steam sterilizer near the back door of the van.”

  Then they definitely weren't in the van. Somebody had to have removed them.

  I said, “Dr. Myers, why don't you tell me a little more about what Dr. Bradley was doing out in the GZ.”

  The way he looked at me made me think of this homosexual accountant I'd once questioned, about his relationship with the man he'd just shot in the face nine times. I kept asking the man the same question over and over, but in subtly different ways, and he'd finally blurted out, “We were lovers, all right! God damn it, is that what you want to hear?” I told him “No, I already know you're a queer. I want to know why in the world that guy would sleep around behind your back. I mean, look at you, you have a good job, you dress nice, you even smell nice. Why would somebody blow it with a good catch like you?” The man blinked at me, and then out came his confession.

  It went the same way with Myers. He said, “Detective, I have already gone over this with you several times. She was doing field work on genetic mutations within the virus.”

  “No, no,” I said. “I know that. What I want to know is why she didn't have you with her. I mean, everybody I've talked to says you're sharp as a tack in the laboratory. Why go out there with Wade and not you?”

  He blinked at me, same as the queer accountant. Then I heard him sniffle. “I was told to remain here,” he said. “At Arsenal.”

  “Told? You mean by Dr. Laurent?”

  “Yes.”

  “What for?”

  “I was told Emma was working on a special project for Dr. Laurent.”

  Chunk glanced over at me and I could tell he was smiling, a way-to-go-little-sister look.

  “I see,” I said. I talked to him gently, like I could really appreciate how hurt he was, like I understood. “But you are a smart fellow, Dr. Myers. Surely you had some idea what she was working on?”

  He nodded, a barely perceptible gesture inside his space suit.

  “She was gathering specimens for part of the genetic typing study. The influenza virus is RNA based, and so it reproduces very fast and with a high degree of mutation. The longer the virus is in a given environment, the more opportunity it has to mutate. Her working hypothesis was that the specimens in the GZ would show the most mutation, because the GZ is where the virus was first identified. Origin gene populations generally show greater differentiation than cast off populations.”

  “And so what advantage would those specimens be to you guys?”

  “It might indicate that this outbreak is nearing the end,” he said. “You see, as the virus mutates, so does its virulence. A virus may start out as merely a nuisance, like H2N2 was last year here in San Antonio, and then suddenly mutate into a highly dangerous form. But the process is just as likely to work in reverse. More likely to work in reverse, in fact. That's what ended the 1918 influenza pandemic, and that's what we're hoping will end this outbreak.”

  “So what you're saying is that virus mutation is basically a crap shoot.”

  I saw a flash of disdain in his eyes. “Yes. You Americans have such lovely ways of phrasing things, but I suppose that describes the process accurately enough.”

  “So, if it's just a crap shoot, isn't it possible that one, or even two, additional strains of the virus could form that are just as deadly, if not more so, than the original strain?”

  It took him a second to jump through the mental hoops, but once he did, he saw plainly enough that I'd boxed him in to a discussion of Dr. Cole and his theory.

  But his answer surprised me.

  “I see you've been talking with John the Baptist.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “John the Baptist? The madman in the wilderness talking about what's to come? That's our nickname for Dr. Cole around here.”

  Chunk and I trade another glance. “You know his theory then?”

  “Of course I know it. He tells everybody he meets his theory.”

  “And you what? You think he's nuts?”

  “I didn't say that. Some of his ideas are rather far out there. Did you know he actually wants there to be a law making it a felony not to get a flu shot each year?”

  “No, I didn't.”

  “He does. He told me about his theory of multiple influenza strains two weeks ago.”

  “And what do you think of that theory, doc?”

  “I thought it was intriguing enough that I went to Dr. Laurent with it.”

  “And what did—” I stopped myself before the words ‘Hippo woman’ came out. “What did Dr. Laurent say?”

  His eyes smiled. “She thinks, to borrow one of your colorful American phrases, that he is full of shit.”

  I nodded, but didn't answer him. Let him think he wasn't finished explaining it to me.

  He looked away and sighed. Then he said, “Dr. Laurent believes that Dr. Cole's theory is unnecessarily inflammatory. There are two objectives, here. The first is to develop a vaccine to mitigate the damage of H2N2. The other is to reduce the level of fear among the populace. Dr. Cole's theory, if not properly refuted with the highest caliber of research and testing, could start a chain reaction of fear that will be unstoppable.”

  I thought back to Dr. Bradley's journal, and the final entry: WE ARE ALL GONERS!

  “But what if he's right, Dr. Myers?”

  Myers scoffed at that. “He isn't.”

  “But you will be looking through Dr. Bradley's research, won't you?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Sometime later this morning either myself or another member of the staff will transfer the information from the van's computers to the computers in our lab. I assure you, it will be analyzed in exhaustive detail.”

  “Will there be some kind of preliminary analysis done of that material?”

  “Of course. Right after we download it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Doctor, I wonder if you would do me a favor and call me when that's done? I'd like to know what those results are.”

  “Fine,” he said. Then he cocked his head inside his space suit, like a strange thought had just occurred to him. “Are those results important to your investigation?”

  “Maybe,” I said, though a strong personal interest would have been a better description of my motives.

  He said, “I'll call you this afternoon.”

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Chapter 17

  We went through decontamination and changed into street clothes. Chunk was in a blue t-shirt and jeans. The t-shirt, skin tight, looked like it was about to split open across his biceps and at the huge wads of muscle packed onto his shoulders. I was in jeans, a ratty old red blouse, and white tennis shoes. By the end of that summer, Homicide detectives had stopped dressing for success.

  We waited around for Dr. Laurent. Myers told us she was in a meeting with her counterpart at the Lockhill Station Morgue and wouldn't be back till at least eleven-thirty.

  That was still an hour away.

  “Okay,” Chunk said while we waited, “what about Cole?”

  “Cole, eh?” I thought about him for a second. He had a lot of easy fits in our equation. “Okay,” I said, trying to get myself started, “Cole is upset because the WHO people won't take him seriously.”

  “Right.”

  “And then he comes across Bradley in the GZ, working on the same thing he's working on.”

  “But that by itself wouldn't make him mad enough to kill her,” Chunk pointed out. “Wouldn't he feel vindicated they were looking into his theory?”

  �
�Yeah, maybe.”

  “And wouldn't Bradley have mentioned him in her journal if she saw him?”

  “Yeah.”

  Chunk drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, thinking. “Okay, Cole comes across Bradley the morning she's killed, which we know is some time around eight forty-five. From that bit she wrote, we know she felt like she was on to something bad. Maybe she tells Cole about it, and he gets upset because he thinks she's going to steal his big discovery.”

  I paused before I answered, adding it up in my head. “Okay.”

  “And then he kills her.”

  “No,” I said. “That doesn't work. She was shot with Wade's gun, remember? Cole carries that twenty-two.”

  “So he kills Wade first, then Bradley.”

  “That's the trouble, though. Wade was beat to death. How's a seventy year old man going to beat a thirty year old cop to death? A cop who nearly tore you up. And on top of that, why would Bradley talk to Cole about what she'd found in the first place? From everything Myers told us, it doesn't sound like anybody at WHO thinks very highly of him.”

  Chunk's mouth worked under his mask. He looked like he was chewing on a big wad of gum, though I knew he was thinking about that fight with Wade all those years ago. Chunk doesn't let stuff like that go easily.

  “I don't know,” Chunk said. “But let's say he does somehow. The rest of it fits, doesn't it?”

  Most of it does fit. Though it doesn't make sense.

  I said, “Let me see. There's a fight between Cole and Bradley. Wade jumps in. Cole kills Wade. Then Cole takes Wade's gun and shoots Bradley.”

  “Right.”

  “And then Cole does what?”

  “He hides the van, strips Bradley naked, and dumps her onto Isaac Hernandez’ truck at the morgue while he's there to pick up more specimen samples from Myers.”

  I mulled that over, not liking it.

  “Why not?” Chunk asked.

  “Why does he only strip Bradley? Why take only her back to the morgue? If he wanted to dispose of the bodies, why risk bringing even one of them onto the loading docks at Arsenal where any number of people could have seen him? An old man carrying a naked pretty girl is going to cause some eyebrows to go up, even in this place.”