Dead On Arrival

by Matt Richtel

  Lyle pushed the sheet up and saw the swelling in the man’s legs. The man tried to withdraw but he coughed. Then he shouted, tried to, his words swallowed by coughing.

  “What’s he say?”

  “The pure breeds did it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  An exchange followed between Michael and the nurse. Michael explained to Lyle that a new theory had emerged among the locals that had to do, of course, with religion. The Iraqw borrowed each from Islam and Christianity. In recent months, Muslim proselytizers had visited and called them heathens, promised plague. Lyle pressed the interpreter. What had the men looked like? What had they said—exactly? These visitors called the Iraqw an abomination—chukizo, in Swahili. Hell’s plague would befall them, inshallah, God willing.

  Lyle saw Melanie standing in the doorway. “Go back to the truck,” he said. She had tears in her eyes.

  “Go back to the truck,” he insisted.

  “Don’t tell me what to do.” But she turned and left.

  Outside, Lyle asked Michael if he had Internet. Yes. On Michael’s big-screen phone, Lyle pulled up an article in Nature. The article was a controversial publication, to say the least. A rare piece of truth that almost didn’t see the light of day; too dangerous. Before delving in, he walked the empty streets of the village. A dozen thatched huts, wood booths, empty, that must’ve served as some kind of market. He asked to see the well and observed it to be clean. He asked Michael about these Muslim proselytizers. Michael said it was the first he’d heard of it. When had they last come? Michael didn’t know. Why?

  Lyle, leaning against a hut, was too lost in the article to answer.

  “Show me the man’s hut, please.”

  There was not much to see. That was the point, Lyle said, without elaborating. A broom in the corner told Lyle much of what he needed to know. The only sign of disarray owed to a glass shattered on the ground near the bed. Where the man must’ve spilled it reaching in his febrile state.

  “What are you thinking, Dr. Martin?”

  No response.

  “You’re frightening me.”

  “Looks like Coxsackie B.” True but he didn’t really believe it.

  They returned to the makeshift hospital hut.

  “When was the last time they were here?” Lyle asked the chieftain’s son. “The pure breeds?”

  “What are you asking?” Michael said.

  “Ask him, please.”

  He doesn’t remember.

  “A few weeks?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did they wear?”

  Lyle listened to the translation of Swahili to the Cushitic tongue and back, then to English.

  “Suits, like he said.”

  “Dark skin?”

  “Not this dark.”

  “Did they leave you anything? A way to get in touch.”

  No.

  Just the warning.

  “Peño, what are you doing?”

  “Taking a nap.”

  “In the truck.”

  “Good a place as any.”

  She stared at him.

  “I’ve never in my life seen you act like this,” she said.

  He half smiled at her, distant. “Lyle,” she said, “say something.”

  He was sitting in the last row of the safari truck. He stared at her. He shook his head, and she could tell he’d traveled to some distant place in his head. He reached behind his head and pulled out a white shirt he’d used as a pillow. He lifted it into the air, like a flag, and he waved it. Surrender.

  A day later, their airplane landed from JFK. Michael had gotten off in New York hardly able to hide his frustration. Lyle had given him nothing, bubkes, well, other than his personal symptoms of emotional withdrawal. Just turned into a fucking log. Except when he shrugged and asked for a beer. Before he’d gone totally dark, he’d also told Michael, cryptically, that the villagers didn’t need a doctor but a better police force.

  “I’m realizing I don’t speak Dr. Martin,” Michael said to Melanie, trying to be as diplomatic as possible.

  She didn’t share Michael’s sense of decorum. “I don’t speak asshole, either,” she said, right in front of Lyle as a taxi driver spitting chew out the window spirited them past looming Kilimanjaro in swirling winds to the airport. “If you want my interpretation, I think Lyle thinks this wasn’t caused organically.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “He thinks it’s a man-made virulence. Someone poisoned these people.”

  It was exactly what Lyle thought. This was chemical warfare. Someone had come in here and given this tribe an intensified flu, maybe something even using CRISPR, genetically hacked viruses meant to do an end around immune systems and traditional treatments. It would explain the attack of young, strong members of the tribe, the threat by outside forces, the visitation of this virus absent any clear catalyst or patient zero and in a fairly clean community, well kept. It would explain, most of all, Lyle’s gut feeling. Maybe even some government had supported this experimentation. It would be revelatory, of course, also solvable. He scribbled down several courses of action, one of which would almost surely confine this and put it to rest.

  “It’s absurd,” Michael said before he left Melanie and Lyle in their Air France seats to take his own. “He sounds like one of those nuts in Brazil with Zika.” Conspiracy theorists in Latin America had spread rumors nearly as virulent as the virus itself that the Zika-carrying mosquitoes had been planted by angry British colonialists or one-worlders. “The dean was right,” Michael concluded. He didn’t finish the thought but it was clear enough: he should’ve sought someone else’s counsel. Lyle hadn’t really tried; he’d mailed it. Lyle was just a good storyteller more interested in applause than answers, or maybe something more insidious than that—a malicious fraud. How had he gotten such a reputation? On the flight, Melanie willed herself to go to sleep. She talked again to Lyle when the landing gear came down to touch down in San Francisco.

  “Counseling, Lyle. You’re in or I’m out.”

  He studied her face. The water retained in her rosy cheeks.

  “You’re pregnant, Melanie.”

  “Shut up, Lyle.”

  He looked down so he couldn’t watch the wave of revelation spread over her face. He’d suspected for a week or more. He suspected she didn’t know. How could he know before her? How did he ever understand these things? It started with a sensation, like an itch, and it made its way from his body to his brain to his consciousness.

  “No, Lyle, it’s not . . .” She stopped and her blue eyes turned steely. “I’m pregnant? I’m pregnant!” Her utter disbelief transformed quickly into wonder. Lyle so often was right about things like this. Could he see it before she knew? “Why did you let me go?” she demanded. No words to capture her betrayal.

  “Maybe the better question is why you went.”

  The tears leaked from her crimson-tinged eyes and one dripped off her chin. She had no strength to wipe them away.

  “What’s happened to you, Lyle?”

  Fourteen

  Jackie and Denny hit the Nevada border just after two on a bright Saturday afternoon in Denny’s Tesla. They’d taken the “scenic” route, Denny joked, which meant driving the flatlands east of the Bay Area, skirting the more populated route to the north, and taking two-lane highways where Denny got to test out the “autonomous driver” mode on his Tesla. The car’s new software drove itself while Denny told Jackie more about Lantern, the project they were studying in the desert. With his hands free, he could even show her slides on the seventeen-inch touch screen in the Tesla, which he’d hooked up to his iPad.

  At the Nevada border and truck weigh station, they slowed at the request of a soldier who waved them to the side.

  “An army checkpoint?” Jackie asked.

  “I assume because of what happened last month.”

  Three weeks earlier, the army had raided the home of a family in the Big Smoky Valley to the east. The fa
mily’s ranch was on federal land to be used for military exercises, but the parents had refused multiple requests and legal maneuverings to get them to move. They holed up on the property with a veritable cache of munitions, including a grenade launcher, and declared themselves sovereign. On Instagram, they posted a sign of their twin nine-year-olds, a boy and a girl, draped in the American flag, holding AK-47s. The army assault, pressed by manifold interests, including concerns about the children, used nonlethal gases and took back the house.

  Three days later, in retaliation, two men attacked the guard post at the military base in Hawthorne. They killed a soldier and injured three others, before they were killed.

  At the border, the grim-looking soldier looked into the Tesla’s trunk and waved on Denny and Jackie.

  Martial law, Jackie thought. She said, “You never said why here—in Hawthorne.”

  He explained how Nevada was about the most business-friendly place in the world. Low taxes, lax regulations. Totally hassle free, he said, sounding mostly kidding, but not totally. “In Silicon Valley, we spend more for an hour of a lawyer’s time than we do to rent an office for the month.”

  Jackie listened to Denny on two different levels: on one, she was getting basic information, and on the other she was assessing whether he was being straight with her, if she could still have faith in him, follow his direction. The lines beneath her eyes told how much sleep she’d lost, some nights making lists of the evidence in his favor and against. She’d let him lead her from wilderness, pull her from two decades in shadows—and what if she’d been wrong to do that all along?

  “Jackie?”

  “Huh?”

  “You look like you’ve got something on your mind.”

  “Not really.”

  Another long stretch of road and silence.

  “You spent much time in the hinterlands?” Denny asked.

  “Did some backpacking, after college.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nepal.” She gritted her teeth. Almost didn’t come back.

  “You grew up in . . .”

  “Ohio.”

  “Really?”

  “No, but why’d you ask if you already knew?”

  “Trying not to be presumptuous.”

  “Salt Lake,” she said. How much did he actually know? Who was she kidding; Google knew everything.

  “Family?”

  “Sister.”

  “Oh, yeah, what’s her name?”

  Jackie gripped the leather seat next to her right leg. “Marissa.”

  “Beautiful name. What’s she up—”

  “I’d rather not talk about it, Denny.”

  He nodded. “Were you trekking—when you went to Nepal?”

  She wondered if he knew about that, too.

  “Finding myself, I guess.”

  “What did you find?”

  “A near-death experience—rabies.”

  “Say what again.”

  “I got scratched by a monkey. Not that common, the monkey part. But there are lots of rabies attacks there, mostly from dogs’ bites. You know much about rabies?”

  “I know you don’t want it.”

  “We’ve got a winner. It is a hundred percent fatal once the symptoms set in. The good news is, it’s also preventable during the incubation period if you get the vaccine. The trick is getting it in time.”

  “Which you obviously did or you’d be salivating even more than you already are.”

  She laughed. “The vaccine is available there, if you get to a clinic. And I was on my way to one when there was an earthquake.”

  His eyebrows raised, like Holy shit.

  “Flights canceled, trains down, chaos. Long story short, I was in deep trouble when I was essentially rescued by an American doctor who was over there dealing with a cholera outbreak. He saw me waiting at an airstrip that had ground to a halt due to the earthquake. I’d never have gotten to Kathmandu in time. If not for him, I’m not here to experience”—she focused out the window—“lovely Hawthorne.”

  The town now loomed, just three miles across the border. It was the kind of small highway town where the low-slung building with the red word “Motel” stood out like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. And it seemed even to lean. Another business sign read classic car, which probably meant “Old.” And another, which made Jackie laugh, said wash and referred to a Laundromat but the sign was encrusted in filth.

  “That’s a remarkable story,” Denny said. “Does it explain your interest in infectious disease—that class you’re taking?”

  The insightful nature of the question startled her. She hadn’t even told the whole of it to Denny, and how it really had been the turning point in her life. Truth is, had it not been for the heroism of Dr. Martin—Lyle—she well might’ve let herself just die. Sitting on the ground outside the airstrip, she had actually gotten peaceful with the idea. After so much bullshit in her life, so little faith in herself and people around her, it felt in the moment like a blessing to curl up there on the ground and let the hot wind carry her away.

  “The guy who teaches it is a genius,” Jackie said.

  “High praise coming from you.”

  “I mean the real McCoy, Denny. You ever really want someone to figure something out, Dr. Lyle Martin is the guy . . .”

  “I’m starting to feel jealous,” Denny said, as he slowed at a stoplight. “Okay, it’s decision time. I figured we’d stop at the restaurant, unless you want to go straight to the shop.”

  “The restaurant?”

  “I guess there’s more than one. I’ve never tested the theory.”

  They got turkey sandwiches with canned cranberry chunks on white bread to go and Denny drove them a half mile east of town and down a dirt road. Jackie noticed the preponderance of army trucks driving both directions. The army base here was a large munitions storage facility, located outside of town, and essentially was this place’s raison d’être. The Rocky Mountains loomed to the east. Two miles down a dirt road, and then a few serpentine turns later Denny parked his Tesla in front of a place that looked, appropriately, like a scientific outpost but one you might find in a frozen tundra. Two corrugated metal buildings with a generator by the side and a horizontal unit Jackie recognized as housing cooling equipment.

  “Not much to look at,” Jackie said.

  And, simultaneously, she and Denny said, “I guess that’s the idea.” The idea being: don’t draw attention to this operation.

  Denny smiled. “Great minds . . .”

  “What about that?” Jackie said. She was looking out the left side of the Tesla window, noticing that farther down the road sat another building, this one concrete, almost bunker-looking. Next to it a long stretch of paved road, like a runway. And looming over the whole thing a giant metal dish, very clearly a powerful antenna.

  “Have you ever seen anything so subtle?” Denny said, and laughed. “The supersecret Google space project. Not so supersecret, right?”

  It was well known that Google was playing around with low-cost ways to get into space. They weren’t alone in this respect. Amazon, too, was getting into the act, and Facebook, Elon Musk, Richard Branson. The stated reason was that these companies wanted to explore the future of space travel, even for tourists. But Jackie was no dope; she and others who liked to read tea leaves suspected it had more to do with the future of much more immediate businesses, like telecommunications and even Internet commerce. If the companies could get low-cost, high-power satellites into orbit, they could become hubs to control Internet access, information, drones, who knew what else.

  “Are they launching rockets?” she asked Denny.

  “Satellites, I suspect,” he said. “Most of that is done in Florida.”

  “But you’re not sure.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. Keep it between us. That’s not my area; this is, and I try to keep my nose out of stuff that could fuck with my ability to cash in my stock options.”

  She felt relieved again. She’d asked about the
rockets as a test, hoping he’d be frank with her. Opening the car door, she brushed bread crumbs off her lap onto the dusty ground and felt a wave of satisfaction. She was getting let into the inner sanctum at Google, though that was secondary to the bond she was solidifying with Denny.

  She stepped out of the car and felt a gust of desert wind and she shivered. She hated wind. It reminded her of uncertainty, self-doubt, the feeling that little things could throw you off if you weren’t anchored. She pictured an invasive memory: her mother shouting at her father, her father shouting back, the pair nose to nose on the balcony, little Jackie sitting on the couch, looking over its back, feeling the breeze through the sliding door. Marissa sucking on a bottle Jackie had made for her. Wind brought memories, guilt. Wind smelled like sweat and shampoo, it sounded like anger. Jackie put her hand to her face and wiped.

  For an instant, she thought about the fateful day in Nepal, nearly dying, being saved, becoming determined to live a more directed life, to not just do the right thing but figure out how to do the right thing. She thought of these moments as the yin and yang of her life: her terror, paralysis, impotence in dealing with her parents, years of self-doubt, and then a salvation and a determination to figure it out.

  “Everything okay?” Denny asked.

  “Bad cranberry burp.”

  “Let’s go inside.”

  Denny used a card key to gain them entrance to the larger of the two metal-framed buildings. Cool air greeted them, the refrigerated feel of a server farm. Inside, not racks of powerful computers. Just a few desks and a Ping-Pong table. A dartboard hung against a far wall. To Jackie’s right, a kitchenette. An industrial-size case of Red Bull still in the Costco shrink wrap sat on top of the refrigerator. It all looked like Silicon Valley lite.

  Only two of the cubicles were occupied. From one of them, a man looked up. He had a scruffy goatee poking out from his hoodie. From the other cubicle stood a petite woman in a too-tight white shirt and dark pants and short-cropped hair. She looked to Jackie like a waiter—in the marines.

  “These are our two Alexes,” Denny said. “Alex 1 and Alex 2, say hello to Jackie.”