Dead On Arrival

by Matt Richtel

  Lyle had a habit of watching people’s reactions. In fact, he sometimes watched movies on silent and focused on how characters moved and gestured, what looked human and what looked forced. It was something he even encouraged med students to do to help them understand what is normal. He would tell his students that a good clinical exam could usually predict the outcome of a blood test.

  What’s your game, Dr. Martin?

  Curiously, in another setting, that language might be the seeds of, if not attraction, flirtation, an invitation to fire back. It was the kind of thing Lyle could invite, even if he never fully realized that he had an allure or why. Most basically, he was attractive—even before his business card said doctor. He kept fit, rangy, by rowing a kayak on Lake Merced, where he did hours of thinking, sometimes in pouring rain. He had a movie jaw and a full head of hair that showed no signs of abating. But mostly his magnetism owed to a set of dark brown eyes that had the rare quality of being able to paralyze both in groups and, more so, in intimate conversations. Melanie told him that most people communicated at a frequency that allowed them to captivate one or the other—individuals or groups—but that Lyle could do both. And, especially when he was in one-on-one settings, his potent gaze had the effect of causing people to stutter or even to go on the offensive, make jokes, keep it light. They would start the conversation with a defense mechanism.

  “Jesus, we’re digressing way off course.” The pilot put her hands out, palms down, and pressed on the air. Like Okay, let’s get grounded here. She’s succeeded, though, in letting Lyle know his place on this doomed ship. “Would you mind checking for the medical stuff above the coats? I think that dimwit flight attendant from Montana left it there last time?”

  Lyle wondered if Eleanor was toying with Jerry, creating another common enemy in some dimwit flight attendant from the past, pushing her agenda, using humor and authority, flirtation and fear. Or was Lyle misinterpreting? It filled him with dread. Human beings could be so manipulative, he thought. I have to get out of here. Lyle had an insatiable urge to find the drink cart and down two small plastic bottles —of anything, hell, even gin—and escape. He wasn’t going to die on this airplane, asphyxiate, victimized at last by a syndrome he couldn’t see, or, worse, hit by an errant bullet that Jerry fired at the captain to keep her from going down the hatch; or in a final dying cry of unrequited love.

  Eleanor brought her hands to her head and rubbed her temples. “Jerry, is there an internal ladder—beneath the wheel bay?”

  “Eleanor, please!”

  “Check for an immune response,” Lyle said suddenly.

  He looked out the window, let all their eyes come to him.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When you go out there,” he said, “you’re going to want to look for an immune system response. Even if they’re dead, check for a mucogenic response, a pretty good indicator that T-cells have kicked in. If it’s nerve gas, or something like that, you’re likely to see . . .”

  “What kind of doctor are you again?” Jerry asked.

  “I.D.—infectious disease.” Deliberate with the jargon. “Subspecialty in immunology.”

  “Where?”

  “UCSF.” There was an empty office there now where he used to hang his shingle. Lyle reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet and, from it, an old business card he’d stuffed into his wallet for the conference he was attending.

  Dr. Lyle Martin

  University of California, San Francisco

  Clinical Professor, Infectious Disease

  M.D.; Ph.D., Immunology

  Jerry glanced at it. “Clinical professor,” he said. “Is that a real kind of professor?”

  “Jerry, stop it,” Eleanor said. Like What’s your deal?

  “In any case, look for tachycardia . . .” Lyle said.

  “What?”

  “Accelerated heart rate. Sorry, pardon the terminology.” He wasn’t sorry at all. It was part of his plan to sound complicated. “That could be a sign of any number of things. Should you start feeling faint, strange, any symptoms, try like hell to—”

  “Hold on,” Jerry said.

  “I’ll slow it down,” Lyle said. “The point is, I think you’ll be okay. Jerry, I’m sure, will have things under control in here.”

  Eleanor’s eyes bored a hole in him and Lyle tried to remain placid and not show that he’d overplayed his hand. Then Eleanor and Jerry exchanged a look, like parents silently communicating about a child, in this case, the unruly Lyle. She nodded, almost imperceptibly, teeth clenched. She could see where this was going, didn’t like it one bit, but was running out of ideas herself. And she couldn’t risk leaving the plane herself and putting Jerry in charge.

  “Captain,” Jerry said, “maybe he’s got a point.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Dr. Martin,” Jerry said. “Would you be able to . . . could you diagnose the guy on the ground—could you tell us something about him?”

  Lyle let the moment wash over him, a feeling of euphoria, trying to hold a poker face so as not to let them know he wanted off the plane, away from these people, all of it.

  “Give us a minute,” Eleanor said.

  “Perfect.”

  “Perfect?”

  “Sorry, I’ll just . . .” Rather than finish the sentence, he moved a step backward while the pilot and first officer put their heads together and whispered. Alex, the fourth wheel, shuffled with him. They glanced at each other, a silent moment of recognition that they’d been sitting in the same row, now fellow travelers in a wholly different journey.

  “Do you . . .” Dr. Martin said. “You have a limp.”

  She looked down.

  “Are you hurt?” he followed up.

  “No. No. It’s nothing. When I was a kid, rheumatoid arthritis and it’s really under control.”

  She said this like she wanted to move on; her clunky right knee embarrassed her. Dr. Martin honored her sensitivity but took the detail deeply inside. That was an autoimmune condition; did that have anything to do with the fact she was standing here and everyone else in the airplane was dead or sick? Might she have some internal protection?

  “What do you do?” Dr. Martin said.

  “Do?”

  “For work.”

  “Technology. Engineer, on the sales side.”

  “Oh yeah?” He studied her. The hard eyes she tried to soften. Deferential but not really. He tried to place her demographic. Her bleach-blond hair suggested she might be part of the punk technology crowd. They could be a logical group, all about looking ahead.

  “Good job these days. Was,” Lyle said.

  “Sorry?”

  “Before the apocalypse. Was a good job.” He tried to ignore the heated whispers coming from the first officer. “Please, Eleanor. Just listen . . .”

  “You’re a doctor?” Alex asked.

  Lyle nodded.

  “Are we sick?” She had her arms crossed.

  “I don’t . . . I don’t know. Do you feel anything?”

  She gritted her teeth. “I was supposed to go on a hike,” she said, shaking her head. “Sponsored by the company. Get out into the air, spend some quiet time. Part of this new Stay Focused regime at work. We’ve got this new manager who . . .” Bitterness in her voice. Lyle stopped listening and experienced a sensation that never ceased to surprise or bother him. It was a feeling that often left him bewildered and yet he couldn’t ignore. It was an awareness that he’d noticed a clue. The moment would leave him paused. From the outside, he looked stunned, like a fish that took a blow to the head. Melanie thought it a kind of mutated version of pattern recognition: he’d hear a sound or see a seemingly random piece of evidence—anything from a medical symptom to the weather at an outbreak site to the presence of a particular government official—and he’d sense it belonged to a relevant pattern. He just didn’t know which pattern. Like seeing a crucial puzzle piece without knowing what picture it fit into. It would send his bra
in into a cascade, a kind of free-association free flow, often leaving him so inwardly focused that whomever he was talking to would wonder if he’d gone mute.

  He looked outside, then at Eleanor and Jerry, back to the tech engineer, down at the door to the hold, slightly ajar, letting in air. What was it about her? Or was it this situation? Something was ringing too familiar.

  He thought back to those last days, searching for some connection: the ill-fated trip to Tanzania, the whimper of an end with Melanie, ignominiously sleeping on his couch at the university, the mounting skepticism about humanity. There was a connection there somewhere, a puzzle piece that fit and he couldn’t grasp it.

  “Okay, Dr. Martin,” he heard. “You win.”

  He almost smiled. All those years, he had devoted himself to ferreting out disease, often risking himself, giving obscene energy, particularly for one fundamentally introverted. But, now, he realized with stunning clarity, he really had no investment anymore in people. He just wanted to be spit out from the belly of this sarcophagus. Maybe left to die, but, at least, left to himself.

  Six

  The soupy emotions left Lyle in an eyeblink, and there he stood again on the flight deck, tuned in to the voices.

  “I’m prepared to allow you to go out there, Dr. Martin,” Eleanor said. “Dr. Martin!”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “We’re going to run out of heat. We need to know if we can go inside the terminal or inside the plane. I can’t make that call without knowing what’s out there. My personal preference is for me to go but Jerry makes a firm and fair case. So I want to ask you: Are you truly prepared to go out there and examine that man on the ground?”

  “Yes.”

  “You understand there could be a huge risk. We don’t know what’s out there.”

  “Yes.”

  “Jerry will go with you into the hold.”

  “And cover you,” Jerry added, meaning: with the gun.

  Now Lyle thought he understood Jerry’s motivations in allowing him to go outside. The first officer wanted to do something. He wanted to attack. This guy unnerved Lyle, and he’d already been in the hold, doing who knows what.

  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” Lyle said. “Viruses or toxins don’t respond to gunplay.”

  “So now this is a virus or toxin?” Eleanor said.

  “I don’t see blood. No obvious violence.”

  Eleanor handed him a yellow poncho, matching one that he noticed now that Jerry already was wearing.

  “It’s not much,” she said.

  “Good for visibility.”

  “You read my mind. What else would be useful?”

  “Not the slicker.”

  “I thought you just—”

  “Yes, it is good for visibility. You can see me better out there. But so could someone else, if someone is watching. Like I said, I personally doubt this is an armed attack though I’m not an expert on that front. Regardless, surely, you and Jerry talked about this and realized it is a potential suicide mission. That’s why I’ll be out there with the body and he’ll be below with his”—he looked for the word—“weapon. In case.”

  She laughed bitterly. “This was your idea and don’t pretend it wasn’t.”

  Lyle smiled but the meaning was unclear. Was he saying she read his manipulations correctly or that he accidentally made this bed himself?

  “So what else do you need, Dr. Martin?”

  Lyle looked out the window and made a show of thinking. Truth was, he wasn’t really consumed with the idea of figuring out what was going on. Most likely, these people were dead and he just wanted to get off the plane. He hadn’t particularly been approaching this as doctor, so much as escapee; not that he’d just start running. He was at least curious. If something killed these people, what was it? He’d like to feel for a pulse. He just wasn’t determined the way he once had been, not even close. He listed a few items: flashlight; face masks; rubber gloves from the medical kit; antiseptic wipes.

  “Can we bring the defibrillator—below? Have it ready—in the hold.”

  Eleanor shrugged. “It’s kept just beyond first class, in the overhead.”

  “Well, let’s get to it,” Lyle said. “Down through there?” He looked below the observer’s seat.

  Lyle nodded thoughtfully; made sense.

  Lyle lifted the latch under the observer’s seat.

  “Whoa, there, cowboy,” Eleanor said. “We have no plan.”

  Lyle laid out how he saw it. He and Jerry would drop into the hold. They’d close the door behind them. Jerry would help lower Lyle to the ground and then wait while Lyle checked out the body of the guy in the jumpsuit. Lyle said he would use basic hand signals. Thumbs-up, thumbs-down.

  “Thumbs-down means he’s dead?”

  “Let’s not worry about him. Thumbs-up means I’m okay and forget about thumbs-down. I’ll either give a thumbs-up or ask you to join me. You can relay what I’m saying to them and we’ll go from there.”

  Lyle didn’t wait for an answer. He started down to the hatch.

  Eleanor grabbed his arm. She used just enough force to turn him around and let go. She locked on to his eyes. For the slightest moment, everything around them swept away and he felt her magnetism, connection’s seeds, and he blinked and looked down.

  “You don’t have to do this, Dr. Martin.” Earnest.

  He nodded.

  “You need to stay low and be careful.”

  Lyle looked down. He couldn’t handle this much sincerity, not now, and not for years. People who cared left him wondering whether or not to trust. The memories jagged in and out: Tanzania, Dean Jane Thomas, Melanie, all of it somehow leading here.

  “Get a quick reading, make your best guess, and then get your ass back here,” she said. “I very much appreciate this.”

  Lyle barely heard the last of this. He refused to let himself listen. He plopped down into the cold belly of the plane and wiped a tear from his cheek.

  Cold seized him. The frigidity reminded him of when he used to walk into the refrigerated part of the lab. One time, early on in his relationship with Melanie, they stole into one of the Mortech units and tore off each other’s clothes and got after it. In walked a grad student who, in fierce backpedal, spilled incubating disease in test tubes that, thankfully, weren’t yet airborne. Truly, Melanie had joked, their first shared STD.

  Lyle probed with his foot for a landing spot and caught the bottom rung of a rope ladder. He tested the footing, then allowed himself to rest on the rope ladder. He dipped his head into the plane’s belly. He let go of the last handle in the cockpit and, presto, dropped into a new world.

  “Flashlight,” he yelled. He held his hand up again, waving blindly. A hand put the cylindrical light into his palm. He felt Eleanor give him a squeeze.

  He heard Jerry say, “I should’ve gone first. This is the worst idea.”

  “Get down there then. Lyle, wait at the bottom for Jerry.”

  Lyle dropped to the floor of the hold and crouched. The light, already turned on by Eleanor, danced about, a wayward laser. Lyle steadied it dead ahead and found himself face-to-face with a crate. He listened to Jerry descend, holding a second dancing light. He dropped, scraping Lyle’s leg with a loafer. Lyle could see only the crate ahead and their breath.

  “Okay?” asked a muffled voice from above.

  “Okay.”

  Jerry pointed the light to his left, revealing an opening between the crates. He walked that way and Lyle followed. He couldn’t tell if the first officer’s silence reflected his distaste for Lyle or a business-like approach. Seconds later, skirting crates, they arrived near the nose. Lyle flooded his light upward but felt Jerry push the tip of the light down.

  “I got grounded once taking supplies into Baghdad. It was just before dawn and we had to sit for two fucking hours at the edge of this shithole village controlled by the other guys. We crouched the whole time. My point being that it’s good to keep visibility low.” Jerry
focused his light on the floor. “Tricky latch. Can you hold the light?”

  Lyle did as asked. Jerry tinkered and unlatched. Lyle noticed the frayed skin on the first officer’s cuticles. Could mean nothing? When it happened to Lyle, it meant he hadn’t been sleeping. A gasp of even colder air seeped out of the plane.

  “We have time, Dr. Martin. There’s no urgency.”

  Lyle responded, “I know. I appreciate it.” He cleared his throat. “I honestly don’t think this is all that risky. Medically speaking.”

  Jerry opened the hatch. Lyle pointed the light toward the ground. He could see damp tarmac, way down there, and wisps of snow in the air, and the wheel base. Big drop, leg-breaking distance. He brought the flashlight angle back inside and looked for a handhold. Next to the door, a rope handle. Lyle tested it with his right hand. Jerry took his point.

  “We should look for a ladder.”

  “We should,” Lyle said. Then he undercut his meaning by dropping from his knees to his butt, letting his rear touch the cold metal underbelly. “Let’s do the old human ladder. You hold my arms and I’ll drop down.”

  “I’ve never seen someone so anxious to walk into a bear cave,” Jerry said. He scoped around, looking for a ladder or tool, rope, or other bit of technology to help the drop. That’s when Lyle saw a box of booze. It was rectangular, with a flap open and those cheap little bottles showing. It was within arm’s reach. Lyle reached. Saliva gathered on his lips. He pulled as gently as he might to keep the bottles from tumbling and getting the attention of Jerry, who was shining a light on the floor to the left, and pushing things around with his toe.

  “Rope,” he said.

  “I’ll help you,” Lyle said, but only to cover the sound of him groping and succeeding. He got three little bottle necks into his hand and stuffed them into his pocket.