by Glenn Cooper
He banged on it and shouted, “Mandy!” again and again, and soon, Emma and Kyra had joined him in a lusty chorus of “Mandys” they found hysterically funny.
There was a strong whiff of decomposition in the air that further unsettled him. He convinced himself that more than likely, the stench was from laboratory rats that had been left untended in an animal room.
He decided he would try every door on the floor, and every door in the building, but when he turned, he saw it in the bright disc of his flashlight.
It was his name in big bold letters on a folded piece of paper pinned to a cork board. He grabbed it and unfolded it. There was a hand-drawn map with the most joyous message he had ever read.
Here’s where I am. Come get me. I love you, Mandy.
Five short minutes later, Jamie was pulling the Volvo into the driveway of the modest little house at the end of Mandy’s map.
He got the girls out, held his breath, and knocked at the door.
Front-room windows parted.
He heard a male voice call out, “Don’t answer that,” but the door opened anyway.
A small girl looked up at him and said, “I’m Keisha. What’s your name?”
“I’m Jamie.”
She went running back into the house screaming, “Mandy! Mandy! He came! Jamie came!”
A thin young man in a hoodie appeared.
Shaun said, “I’m Shaun. I didn’t think you were going to show.”
“Where’s Mandy?” Jamie said.
“Come on, man, this way.”
With Emma and Kyra on his heels, Jamie followed Shaun into a bedroom, where, in the fading light of the autumn day, he saw her propped on three pillows.
She turned to him, gaunt, too weak to muster a smile. She mouthed his name, but no sound came out.
Keisha told him, “She’s been real sick.”
He found a sliver of mattress to sit on. One of her hands was heavily bandaged. He took the one that wasn’t. It was cold and clammy. The room smelled putrid.
She was trying to talk again. He put his ear to her mouth and heard, “You’re here.”
“I’m sorry I took so long,” he said.
“Long story?” she whispered.
“Yeah, long story.”
Shaun was hovering. Jamie asked what happened to her.
“She got shot in the hand, man. It got infected. I got her a bunch of different antibiotics, but nothing helped.”
“Pills?”
“Yeah, pills. I think she needed stronger shit. She’s been like this for four, five days now.”
“Let me examine you,” he told her.
Shaun held a lamp as Jamie unwrapped her hand. It was foul, gangrenous.
Her pulse was rapid and thready. When he put his ear to her chest, he heard a loud murmur coming from her aortic valve. He heard fluid in her lungs when she exhaled.
The diagnosis was painfully obvious. She had endocarditis. The infection in her hand had spread to her bloodstream and seeded her heart valve. The valve was floppy and her heart was failing.
Mandy looked over his shoulder during his examination.
“Is that her?” she whispered.
Jamie struggled to keep himself together. He reached for Emma and she took a step forward.
“Say it, honey,” he said.
The girl looked at Mandy and smiled, repeating her lesson. “Hello, Mandy, my name is Emma. I want to be your friend.”
Mandy’s eyes were dry as the desert, but somehow a tear formed.
“Hello, Emma.”
“We were working on it,” Jamie said. “She nailed it. This is Kyra, Emma’s best friend. She’s sick too.”
Kyra grinned. “My name is Kyra.”
“Your hands are full,” Mandy said. Then Jamie saw Mandy’s face change, as if she had just remembered something important. “How many days?”
“I’m sorry?” he said.
“Since my power went out. How many days?”
“This is day thirteen,” he said.
She told him she wanted to sit more upright. Shaun came back with sofa cushions to wedge behind her back. “The generator should be okay, but hurry,” she said. “Do you have the CREBs?”
He showed her the vials.
“I’m thirsty.”
Keisha brought her a glass of water with a bendy straw.
Her voice got a little stronger, but speaking made her breathless. “My lab keys are over there. I’m afraid there’re two bodies in my office.”
“Who are they?” Jamie asked.
“My friend, Stanley. He’s a painter. And the man he shot who was attacking us. The adenovirus samples are frozen.” She was panting. “They’re labeled. I won’t be able to do the molecular biology. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know the techniques,” he said.
“My lab notebooks. Everything’s there. Pack the samples in ice. Find a virologist. Go to the NIH. They’re bound to have power.”
“We’ll go together. I’ll break into the hospital and get some IV antibiotics. We’ll get you better, then we’ll go.”
“You’ve got to go.” Her eyes fluttered. “Jamie, I love—”
Her lids slowly closed and a long breath whistled through her dry lips.
He didn’t need to feel for her pulse. He didn’t need to be a doctor any longer. He simply kissed her and turned to the others.
Keisha was blubbering. “I don’t want her to go,” she said.
Shaun was wiping his face with his sleeve.
Jamie was too numb to cry. There would be time enough for that later. He hugged both of them. He never learned that their name was KeShaun.
“Thank you for taking care of her,” he said. “I wish I had time to hear how you met her. Let me help you—you know—”
“You go, man,” Shaun said. “Mandy told us about your cure. That’s what you gotta do. Don’t you worry about her. I’m going to bury her out back next to my friend, Boris. That way we can visit her all the time. We’ve only got the plastic kind for now, but when the spring comes, we’re gonna get some real flowers to lay on top of them.”
“Pretty ones,” Keisha said, taking Shaun’s hand.
*
When Jamie unlocked the door to Mandy’s lab, the stench hit them hard. The girls had to cover their faces. He left them by the door and used the flashlight to find the freezer.
Something was wrong.
There should have been a glowing light at the base of the unit.
When he pulled the handle, he should have been hit by a blast of frigid air.
He should have seen racks of frozen test tubes and vials.
He should have felt something other than more despair.
The temperature inside the freezer was the same as the room. The generator had probably stopped running days ago. All the adenovirus samples were thawed.
“Oh, God,” he sighed. “Girls, stay there.”
With a sleeve pressed against his nose and mouth, he entered Mandy’s office, stepping over a young man’s body and the body of her friend, Stanley. All her lab notebooks were neatly stacked in a bookshelf. He stuffed five years’ worth into Mandy’s empty backpack that was hanging on the coat tree and slung it over a shoulder.
As he was about to leave, he spotted something and hit it with his beam.
It was a watercolor painting on a makeshift easel, the loveliest portrait he had ever seen, of Mandy fresh-faced and smiling, sitting in an achingly beautiful flower garden.
“Mandy!” Emma said, brightly.
“Yes, it is.”
He rolled up the painting and put it inside his jacket.
“Come on, girls,” he said. “We’re going for another ride in the car.”
They didn’t ask why. They didn’t ask where. He longed for the day those questions would come.
They wouldn’t understand if he told them they were going to a place called the NIH. They wouldn’t understand that Mandy had died trying to preserve her half of the cure. They
wouldn’t understand that the hurt he felt would never go away.
But he knew they sensed they were safe with him, and that he would protect them with every fiber.
He tucked the flashlight under his arm and wiggled his fingers at them.
“Take my hands,” he said. “It’s dark.”
44
It was a quarter-mile away, but the red-brick building, large as it was, filled Jamie’s windshield. It was almost dawn and if his weary eyes weren’t playing tricks, he could see lights in a few windows.
If there was power, there was hope.
His shuddering sigh of relief woke the girls.
Emma stirred under her blanket and said, “I need to pee.”
“Soon.”
“I’m hungry,” Kyra said.
Jamie repeated, “Soon.”
The release of bottled tension had the effect of weakening him. In an instant, his body surrendered to fatigue. During the nighttime journey through four states, he had not let his guard down for a minute. He girded for trouble, but trouble never came. There was the potential for menace around every curve and at every highway junction. Whenever he came alongside another vehicle, he kept one hand on the wheel, another on his pistol, prepared to respond to violence with violence.
Before him was the campus of the National Institutes of Health, a huge complex of facilities, a small city. The looming brick building was the Clinical Center where desperate patients from around the country had come to receive experimental treatments. Jamie had been to the campus many times. He knew his way around, but getting onto the facility was his next challenge.
The main entrance gate was closed, and behind it, a pair of Army Humvees blocked the road. Three soldiers in desert camo fatigues and surgical masks manned the gate, weapons at the ready. Jamie slowly approached and then, in the mists of the morning, he noticed the pitched tents and cars parked on the grass along Cedar Lane, on both sides of the entrance. A few ghostly figures, shrouded in the gloam, seemed to take notice of his car and began walking toward the gate.
One of the soldiers put up his hand and when Jamie rolled forward a few more feet, he raised his rifle. Jamie braked and put the Volvo into park.
He lowered the window, but before he could speak, the young sergeant called out in a husky voice, “This is a restricted facility. Back up and leave.”
“I need to get in. My name is Dr. Jamie Abbott. I’m a medical researcher from Boston. I’ve been working on a cure for the epidemic.”
“We’re not letting anyone in, sir. Strict orders.”
“I’ve got critical biological samples with me.”
“There’s no entry. Period.”
Jamie lost it; his volcanic shouting set the girls off.
“Do you understand what I’m telling you! I’ve got the fucking cure inside this car! You call someone to authorize letting me in or take personal responsibility for flushing this country down the toilet!”
Hearing the tirade, the other guards lifted their weapons, but the soldier on the receiving end told them that he had the situation under control. That was up to the moment he spotted the handgun on the console and the rifle leaning against the passenger seat.
“Gun!” he shouted.
The other two guards, both privates, rushed forward and opened the passenger door. At rifle-point, Jamie was ordered to step out of the car and lie face-down on the pavement. He complied and apologized for shouting, but the situation was out of his control, and the girls were shrieking. His pistol and AR rifle were confiscated.
“Tell them to shut up,” the sergeant said, zip-tying Jamie’s wrists behind his back.
“Emma, Kyra, it’s okay. I’m not hurt. I’m good.”
Tent flaps and car doors opened and more people gravitated toward the gate. One of the privates lost his temper at them.
“I told you assholes to stay the fuck away from here! Come any closer and I will shoot.”
The early risers stopped advancing.
“You got any more weapons in your car?” the sergeant asked Jamie.
“There’s a knife in the center console. That’s it.”
“What about them? They got anything?”
“The girls are infected. They’re harmless.”
The sergeant went through his pockets and found his wallet with his Mass General ID and the plastic vials of powder.
“What’s this?” he said, bending down and holding the vials in front of Jamie’s face.
This time, Jamie controlled himself. “That’s the cure I was yelling about,” he said calmly. “You really need to call someone.”
*
The army command post was in the admissions office on the ground floor of the Clinical Center. There was no heat, so everyone kept coats on against the autumn chill. A clean-cut lieutenant with buzzed hair listened to Jamie’s story with an off-putting silence. It was hard to gauge his demeanor since Jamie couldn’t convince him his surgical mask was unnecessary. By his eyes alone, Jamie thought he was more interested in Emma and Kyra, seated behind him, stuck into a plate of cookies and cans of soda.
When Jamie was done, Lieutenant Walker drawled out his take.
“You know, Dr. Abbott, there’s no way to verify any of your story besides your name and your hospital ID badge. In the old days—you know, a month ago—I’d just make a few calls or fire up Google, and I’d know if you were on the up and up. Now what am I supposed to do?” Jamie wasn’t sure if the question was rhetorical, but before he offered a helpful suggestion, Walker pointed to the plastic vials on his desk and said, “These powders are a cure, you say?”
“Half the cure. I’m hoping the other half is here.”
The soldier looked for guidance among the oatmeal-colored acoustic tiles of the drop ceiling and said, “I don’t think you’re a threat to my mission, Dr. Abbott. I don’t begrudge you having weapons in your car. It’s dangerous out there.”
“What is your mission?” Jamie asked.
“We are tasked with securing this facility. There are stockpiles of critical medicines and vaccines here. There are a small number of uninfected scientists remaining on the campus—what they’re doing is above my pay grade. My job is to keep the fuel flowing to critical generators so these scientists can do what they’re doing and to maintain refrigeration for the stockpiles. And I’m also here to deny entry to members of the public who want what we have: electricity and food. I’m sure you saw the barbarians at our gates. They’re getting increasingly aggressive. There’s an armed element who’ve made a number of incursions, testing our perimeter. We have put those incursions down. So far. If you think you’ve got a shot at curing the plague, then I suppose I will roll the dice and give you access to the facility. Where do you need to go?”
“I think my best bet is the Vaccine Research Center.”
Walker looked at his site map. “That’s Building 40. Welcome to the NIH, Doctor. You’re going to have a chaperone, at least for a while. Trust but verify—that’s my motto.”
The chaperone was an African-American corporal named Deakins who immediately established a rapport with the girls by flashing a friendly smile and doing a magic trick with a silver dollar. After he loaded them into his Humvee, he asked Jamie where he was from.
“Boston but we’ve just come from Indianapolis.”
“Expect it’s a long story,” Deakins said.
“Yes, it is.”
“Well, I’m from Jacksonville,” the soldier said. “It doesn’t bear thinking what’s going on down there.”
“Family there?”
He started to drive. “Parents, brothers, sisters, an ex-wife, and two children. The last time I spoke to them was the day before Florida lost its power. It’s weeks now and I’m telling you, the worry doesn’t lessen. I know my mother’s got the disease and both my sisters. But now—hell, I don’t have a clue what’s going on. It’s good you got your daughters with you. That’s a blessing.”
Jamie didn’t correct him about Kyra. He supposed
she was every bit his daughter now. “You mind if I ask you something, Corporal?”
“Shoot.”
“What keeps you from taking this Humvee—”
Deakins finished the sentence: “—and hitting I-95 to be with my people? What keeps me is my oath. I’m a soldier. I don’t desert my post, not for family, not for friends, not for anybody. We’ve had deserters. Plenty of them. Most get away clean. The ones that don’t? Let me tell you. Lieutenant Walker’s got a firing-squad detail that’s a well-oiled machine.”
Jamie asked him if he was serious. He said he was, and Jamie believed him.
Building 40 was an ultra-modern glass and concrete structure with a discoid atrium that looked like a flying saucer had landed on the roof. Deakins pulled up and asked Jamie who he was looking for.
“Anyone who can help me make a vaccine.”
Deakins had a clipboard. “Let’s see now. Building 40. Who we got in here?” Jamie saw a lot of names crossed off. “Guess what?” Deakins declared. “In this whole gigantic building we got just one fellow still in attendance. Rest of them bugged out. Let’s see if we can locate Dr. Jonas Bigelow.”
45
They found Jonas Bigelow in a duty room on the third floor. There was a sign on the door—Do Not Enter Without a Mask. Deakins was wearing one so he opened the door partway and shined his flashlight in. The blinds were drawn and a lump began moving on the narrow bed.
Deakins said, “Wakey-wakey.”
In his beam, he saw a few dozen toppled wine bottles on the floor. The small room smelled rank.
The lump said, “What?”
“Dr. Bigelow,” Deakins boomed. “This is Corporal Deakins, United States Army. You’ve got a visitor, sir.”
A head of silver hair appeared, and a hand blocked the light. “What do you mean, a visitor?” Through the crack in the door, Jamie heard the British accent.
Deakins patted Jamie’s shoulder. “Why don’t you introduce yourself?”
Jamie peered into the room. “Dr. Bigelow, my name is Dr. Jamie Abbott from the Massachusetts General Hospital.”
Bigelow sat up and dangled his scrawny legs. He was in his fifties, skin-and-bones lanky, disheveled, with the makings of a gray beard.