The Immortalist

by Scott Britz

  “It’s tragic that your dog had to die, Charles. But his sacrifice won’t mean anything if they find him—even now. I’ll take him to the incinerator in the basement. Meanwhile, clean yourself up. You keep a change of clothes in your office, don’t you?”

  “Don’t touch him!” Gifford hissed. “Don’t you dare come near him.”

  Niedermann clucked and shook his head. He never imagined Gifford could go to pieces like this. He would have to take care of business on his own. Moving the dog would be tough. It weighed at least 150 pounds. He was going to need a hand truck.

  “Wait here.” He got up and headed for the elevator. “I’ll be right back.”

  Within a couple of minutes he was in the waste-disposal room in the basement. In a corner he saw what he had come for—a flatbed dolly. It rattled as he wheeled it back down the hall.

  Once more, the elevator doors opened and closed. Niedermann scanned his badge and pressed 14 to go back up. But when he removed his finger, he saw a red stain on the button pad. On L, in fact—the button for ground level.

  Blood? Anxiously, he checked his hand. A fine spray of droplets on the backside. He would have to wash that off right away. But his fingertips were clean.

  He looked at the keypad more closely. The stain on the button was wet. There were the unmistakable loops and whorls of a fingerprint.

  It couldn’t be Gifford’s. He’s still upstairs. But Niedermann held his breath all the way to the fourteenth floor. The doors couldn’t open fast enough.

  “Charles!” Niedermann shouted as he leaped over the dolly. But there was no answer.

  Eleven

  RAIN DRIBBLED THROUGH THE PINE CANOPY as Gifford made his way down the dark mountain trail. His footing was sure. With the night vision of a cat, he easily picked his way among the stones and exposed tree roots that crisscrossed his path. The first time his pager went off, he ignored it. Niedermann, he supposed. Nothing to say to that bastard. Not after what he did.

  He had left the lab in such a rage that he scarcely remembered his movements. He had vague impressions of the Navigator’s wheels spinning madly on the gravel road, and of the warmth of Hannibal’s body and the coldness of the shovel he carried on his shoulder as he charged up the mountainside. Then he came to his senses to find himself standing over a grave hacked into the soft, clayey earth. His foot, like an automaton, was spreading a loose topping of soil. He wasn’t sure where he was—only that the place was desolate and dark. Were it not for his footprints, he couldn’t have guessed the way back.

  As he approached the spot where he had parked the Navigator, his cell phone began to vibrate a second time. Annoyed, he took it out of his pocket to turn it off. But the message on the screen wasn’t from Niedermann. It was from Hank: BSL-4 lab. Come now. Urgent.

  Although the rain had drenched his clothing, only now, as he read these words, did Gifford feel a chill come over him. He hit the callback button and held his breath until he heard an answering click. “What’s wrong? Is it Emmy? Has she—”

  “I don’t want to discuss it over the phone,” said Hank. “How soon can you get here, Charles?”

  “I . . . I can’t.” Gifford climbed into the cab of the Navigator.

  “Why? Where the hell are you?”

  The question startled him. It was almost an accusation. Did Hank somehow know what he had been doing? Had someone seen him? “All right, I’ll come to you,” he said, rather than answer. “I can be there in five minutes.”

  The rain was coming on full bore when he pulled up at the BSL-4 lab. Dashing out of the Navigator, he threw on a Windbreaker to hide his muddy white dress shirt and combed his rain-soaked hair back with his fingers. In the lobby he ran into Cricket coming out of the air lock. She wore a set of blue scrubs and her hair, like his, was wet.

  “What’s all this about?” he asked gruffly.

  Cricket shrugged. She seemed as mystified as he was.

  At the sound of Gifford’s voice, Hank opened the office door and beckoned them both inside. “Cricket . . . Charles. You both need to hear this.”

  They went in. Gifford was astonished to see little Bonnie Carlson swiveling back and forth in the big executive chair behind the desk. “Hi, Uncle Charles,” she exclaimed.

  Gifford frowned. “What’s she doing here?”

  “I’ve just had an interesting conversation with Bonnie over at the Freibergs’,” said Hank.

  “Children aren’t allowed in the BSL-4 lab,” said Gifford, wary of a setup. “You need to get her out of here at once.”

  Hank ignored him. Kneeling down beside Bonnie, he gently turned her chair toward him. “Bonnie, why don’t you tell Uncle Charles and Aunt Cricket about Hannibal.”

  Bonnie’s brown eyes opened wide. “Hannibal was very bad.” She sucked in her cheeks. “I tried to make him feel nice, but he bit Aunt Emmy. She cried and there was blood.”

  “Yesterday, Bonnie?”

  “Oh, yes.” Bonnie nodded emphatically.

  “Where did this happen?”

  Bonnie fidgeted, jerking her chair ever so slightly back and forth. “Uncle Charles’s room.”

  “And where was Uncle Charles?”

  Bonnie scrunched her forehead and looked about the room, as if searching for help with the question. Suddenly she pointed at Gifford. “He’s right here!”

  “That’s enough,” snapped Gifford. “She’s a silly little girl who doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  “Doesn’t she?” Hank poked Bonnie playfully on the tip of her nose. “Bonnie, you’re not a silly little girl, are you? You and I can both see Uncle Charles is standing next to us. What I want to know is, when Emmy was bitten, was Uncle Charles there, too? Did he see it?”

  Bonnie nodded decisively. “Uh-huh.”

  “Thank you, Bonnie.” Hank stood up. “Why don’t you wait here? We grown-ups are going to step out in the hall for a minute. Don’t be afraid. You’ve been very, very good.” Hank patted her on the head and then quietly shut the office door after he, Gifford, and Cricket moved into the lobby.

  Cricket could barely contain herself. “Is this true, Charles? You actually saw Hannibal bite her?”

  Gifford looked away. “I didn’t think it was relevant,” he said stiffly.

  “Not relevant?” Cricket screamed.

  “It’s a red herring. Herpes doesn’t pass from dogs to humans. I didn’t want you to be distracted by misleading information.”

  “What the hell’s going on, Charles? Do you know that Emmy is dying? She’s dying, Charles, and there’s nothing I can do to save her. Look at her! Look at her lying there! Look at her!” Cricket pointed angrily toward Bay 2, where Emmy’s motionless form could be seen through the glass. “Are you really capable of sacrificing the life of a girl who loves you? All for . . . for a drug?”

  Gifford shook his head forcefully. “The Methuselah Vector has nothing to do with Emmy’s illness. She has herpes. That’s all it is. Human herpes, not the canine form. I give you my word.” The harsh light of the lobby hurt his eyes. He began blinking uncontrollably. “Do you want to talk about sacrifice? I’ve already lost more than you can imagine.”

  “No excuses. I want Hannibal brought to this lab immediately!” Cricket shouted. “He infected Emmy and possibly Yolanda, too. He’s dangerous.”

  “No. No, he isn’t.”

  Still blocking Gifford’s path, Cricket called out to Hank. “Hank! Go with Charles and bring that dog back. Wear gloves. Make sure to avoid contact with blood or saliva.”

  “He’ll do no such thing,” shouted Gifford. “I won’t permit it.” He was shaking with emotion. Was it rage he felt? Fear? Grief? Everything inside him seemed confused. Niedermann killed Hannibal to prevent this very moment. Was it all in vain, then?

  “We need that dog,” said Cricket. “We need a sample of his blood. Please, Charles.
We need every chance we can get. Time is running out.”

  Gifford felt trapped. He could do or say nothing. He knew Cricket’s tenacity. Even if he admitted that Hannibal was dead, she wouldn’t rest until she had his body. “If Hank or anyone else touches Hannibal, I’ll have him arrested,” Gifford finally declared.

  “Do I need to beg you? All right, I’ll beg.” Cricket grabbed the collar of Gifford’s jacket. “I’m pleading for the life of my daughter. Help us, Charles. For the love of God.”

  Gifford looked toward Bay 2, where he could see Emmy through a port in the isolation tent. Nothing will save her. If only I could do something . . . But she’s going to die, no matter what. Just like Yolanda. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he muttered. “It’s just . . . it’s just . . . too late.” Suddenly he pushed Cricket aside and ran headlong out the exit. In seconds, he had started his white SUV and was speeding down the road.

  Twelve

  PAST MIDNIGHT, IN BAY 2. CRICKET pushed the chest X-ray film up against the lightbox and scrutinized it, inch by inch. “Emmy has worsening shadows in both lungs,” she told Hank and Jean. “It could be water, blood, or pneumonia—or all three.”

  “Should we give Lasix again?” asked Jean.

  “Yes, of course. We have to. But you and I both know she needs more and more of it each time. Her kidneys are failing, along with everything else.”

  “How long have we got?” asked Hank.

  Cricket held the edge of her hand against the X-ray, about a third of the way down from the top of the lungs. “Until those shadows climb to here. That’s the point of no return.”

  She needed Hannibal, now more than ever. Hannibal could give her a new look at this strange sickness—a chance to find its weak spot, its Achilles’ heel. She had tried everything: aciclovir, interferon, ribavirin, blood transfusions, vitamins C and D. None of it had helped Yolanda, and it wasn’t helping Emmy either. Hannibal was the only lead she had, and Gifford was refusing to hand him over. She found that inexplicable. Gifford loved Emmy, almost like a grandchild. How could he withhold even the slimmest chance to save her? It was as if he were afraid of something. But what?

  Fear made people dangerous. Five minutes after Hank had left in search of Hannibal, Cricket thought better of it and called him back. She was afraid that Gifford would retaliate by doing the unthinkable—banishing her from Emmy’s bedside.

  A functioning CDC officer could have sent the sheriff to seize the dog. But Atlanta was treating her like a psycho case, and thanks to Niedermann, everyone knew it. She was powerless. She didn’t even feel like a doctor anymore. Maybe she really was crazy.

  Suddenly she heard the intercom buzz over her headset. Through the plate-glass window she saw Freiberg and Waggoner standing in the hallway. “We have astonishing new data, Cricket!” exclaimed Freiberg. “You’d better come out here and see for yourself.”

  Leaving Jean with Emmy, Cricket and Hank hurried through the air lock to meet the two visitors in the director’s office. All four stood huddled over the desk as Waggoner flattened out a new gel printout.

  Waggoner spoke in his usual drawling monotone. “Here in lane two is PCR from Sample Number One—”

  “Yolanda,” corrected Cricket. “Say her name, Wig. She was a human being, not a sample.”

  “And this in lane three is from Sample Number Two—”

  “Emmy,” Cricket said even more sharply.

  Waggoner seemed to freeze up for a moment. “Both were made with primers binding to a 257 base pair segment of the kyttaropylin gene,” he finally mumbled.

  “Kyttaropylin? What’s that?”

  “It’s, uh . . . a gene from the Methuselah Vector. You asked me to use it as a negative control.”

  “The Methuselah Vector?” asked Cricket, half in disbelief. She looked carefully at the photo. “It’s not negative, is it? What about these other lanes—four and five?”

  “I did a second round of PCR on the herpes simplex fragment I showed you earlier,” Waggoner replied. “The one that was two thousand base pairs too long. As you can see, for both Sample Number One and Sample Number Two, it’s also positive for kyttaropylin.”

  “So both Emmy and Yolanda were infected by the Methuselah Vector?”

  “Not exactly. You see these blank lanes? These are PCR reactions for aetatin and other parts of the Methuselah Vector. Negative. No reaction. Only kyttaropylin.”

  Freiberg produced a paper of his own, covered with multicolored sawtooth tracings from an automated DNA sequencer. “I analyzed Dr. Waggoner’s mysteriously long PCR product. The extra two thousand base pairs are all kyttaropylin. What’s more, in Emmy’s case, about ten percent of the gene has been lost.”

  “Are you saying they merged—herpes simplex and the Methuselah Vector?”

  “Exactly,” said Freiberg. “We now know what our nemesis is.”

  “Nemesis?” asked Hank.

  “For want of a name,” said Freiberg. “The Nemesis virus. Has a ring to it.”

  “Charles is gonna shit bricks over this,” said Hank.

  Cricket turned to Waggoner. “Excuse me, Wig. What the hell is kyttaropylin?”

  “It’s Greek for the Cell Gate. It’s what that the Methuselah Vector uses to bind to the MHC-1 complex. It’s the main product of the circular form of the Vector. But it’s inactivated in the linear form.”

  “Circular, linear—what are you talking about?”

  “There are actually, uh, two forms of the Methuselah Vector. Two life stages, like caterpillar and butterfly.”

  Figure 2. PCR to test for the presence of three different genes from the Methuselah Vector. Lanes 1 and 10: standard DNA size markers. Lanes 2 and 3: both Yolanda and Emmy have the kyttaropylin gene in their blood. Lanes 4 and 5: the kyttaropylin gene is embedded in the abnormal capsid protein of Human herpesvirus, type 1, found in Yolanda’s and Emmy’s blood on the first PCR test (see Figure 1). Although Yolanda has a slightly longer version of the full kyttaropylin gene, the PCR reaction here amplifies only a small part of it; this sequence happens to be the same size for both Yolanda and Emmy. Lanes 6 through 9: neither Yolanda nor Emmy carries the aetatin or insertin genes from the Methuselah Vector in her blood.

  “Life stages?” Cricket frowned. “Wig, the more you talk, the more confused I get.”

  Waggoner sighed condescendingly, then went to the whiteboard and drew a caterpillar eating its own tail. “The first form—what actually gets injected into a patient—is a circle of DNA, surrounded by a shell of kyttaropylin. This is the caterpillar. The only thing it can do is make more kyttaropylin”—he drew a cluster of wavy lines emerging from the caterpillar—“plus a special splicing enzyme called insertin.”

  “And insertin is—what?”

  Waggoner redrew the caterpillar stretched out to full length. Then he added wings to it, turning it into a butterfly.

  “Insertin cuts open the caterpillar circle and splices it into a chromosome of the host cell. There, it becomes the butterfly—the beautiful thing that actually makes aetatin, the gene for immortality.”

  “Why two different forms?” asked Cricket.

  “When the G-man—Dr. Gifford—was designing the Methuselah Vector, he had a couple of Matterhorns to climb—dosage and uniformity.

  “Early experiments made it clear that too much aetatin was not a good thing. The host cells would go into overdrive and burn out. The ideal was about two copies of aetatin gene per cell. Unfortunately, you couldn’t really control how many Vector particles got in. Sometimes a lot did, sometimes only one, or even none. It was a crapshoot.

  “What the G-man did was design the Vector so that it could only make aetatin if it were incorporated at a very specific site on the host cell’s nuclear DNA—a locus called q17.34 on chromosome number six. This was a stretch of noncoding, nonregulatory DNA, part of that ninety-nine percent of all
our genome that we arrogantly call junk DNA, because our puny human minds don’t know what it does. Since every cell has two and only two chromosomes number six, this got the dosage exactly right.”

  “Okay, I follow that,” said Cricket.

  “The second problem—uniformity—goes back to the crapshoot again. Some cells got a lot of Vector particles, others got none. What sucked about that was, if you didn’t get the Vector into nearly all the cells, the Methuselah effect wouldn’t take hold. The untransformed cells went on aging.

  “One way you could make sure all the cells get the Vector was to use brute force—to flood the system with so much Vector that, say, ninety-nine percent of the cells would get at least one copy. The problem was that would take a shitload of Vector—between one and ten grams of something that would cost, using our current methods, one hundred billion dollars a gram to make. And 99.999 percent of this would have been wasted.

  “What the G-man did was absolutely elegant. He designed the Vector so that it only needs to transform one in one hundred thousand cells with the first injection. Only one nanogram—about ten-billionths of an ounce—is needed for that. Each of those transformed cells can make a few new copies of the Methuselah Vector, which it passes on to its neighbors. Those neighbors pass on some more to their neighbors, and so on, until every last cell has been reached. Then the Vector stops reproducing itself.”

  “Stops? How?”

  “Once again, the major player is insertin. Only the caterpillar form of the Vector can reproduce itself and make new Vector particles. Once insertin cuts open the circle, it tries to splice the linear form into chromosome number six. But if another Vector particle is already there, insertin does nothing. The host cell has its own horde of DNA-eating enzymes that will promptly chop the loser DNA into bits. Dead caterpillar.

  “Insertin is a very stable protein, surviving for weeks after it’s made. It continues to attack any excess caterpillars and eventually wipes them out completely. That’s the crucial difference between the Methuselah Vector and a virus. A virus goes on infecting cells forever. The Methuselah Vector can only reproduce itself for a very short window of time—just long enough to solve the uniformity problem.”