7 Sykos

by Marsheila Rockwell

  “It’s far too widespread for that,” Thurman said. “And it’s incredibly infectious. You can’t go nuts by being attacked by somebody using something like bath salts or gravel or some other new ‘insanity drug.’ ”

  Of course not, Fallon knew. She had blurted it out, an immediate gut response, without thinking it through. The whole situation—­the government ­people, the chopper ride, the fence around the Valley—­was all too bizarre, like a dream that seems to make sense until you wake up and realize it was disjointed chaos. It was getting in the way of rational thought. “They’re . . . they’re zombies.”

  “We don’t use that word around here,” Robbins corrected. “We call them ‘Infecteds.’ In the movies, zombies are reanimated corpses, but the Infecteds aren’t dead. They’re just, well, changed. We don’t know yet, obviously, but it could be that with treatment, they can be changed back.”

  “They present very few outward symptoms,” the woman from the CDC added. “Flushed, mottled cheeks. Puffy, bloodshot eyes. And an insatiable desire to consume human brains.”

  “And the savagery needed to kill ­people to get them,” Robbins said.

  “You said it’s really contagious?” Fallon asked.

  “More so than any virus we’ve ever seen,” the woman said.

  Fallon sat for a moment, trying to digest what she was seeing and hearing. There had been mention of a plan. Surely this whole setup was prelude to something. “What’s going to happen?”

  “We’re going to nuke the place,” Robbins replied.

  “You can’t just drop nuclear bombs on a major American city!”

  “Watch me.”

  “There might be another answer,” Thurman said, cutting off Fallon’s retort. “Which is where you come in.”

  “This is all pretty far outside my area of expertise,” Fallon said. Anyone’s expertise.

  “Not necessarily.” Thurman crossed to the one monitor that still held a frozen image. On the screen, a short-­haired, wiry guy in the uniform of a paramedic was looking almost right toward the camera. Blood had splashed his face, and his eyes looked a little mad. “See this guy?”

  “Yes . . .”

  “His name is Light. Hank Light.”

  “So?”

  “We think he’s immune. We’ve looked at hundreds of hours of video, collected eyewitness accounts, intercepted phone calls and texts by the score. This is the only person we’ve seen or heard about who’s been exposed but not infected.”

  “Okay, that is intriguing. Still, not my field. You want to find out why he’s immune? You need a geneticist, not a neuroscientist.”

  “We have a whole team of geneticists, studying every chromosome the guy’s got. We’re examining his blood, his urine, his skin and hair and teeth. That’s not why we brought you here.”

  “What, then?” she asked.

  “We think he’s immune, Fallon. And we need his help. But he’s not exactly cooperating.”

  “You’re the guys with the guns,” she said, not sure where he was going with this. “I’m a scientist, not a . . . I don’t even know. Some kind of enforcer. Where do I fit in?”

  “Actually,” Thurman said, smiling slightly, “we think you’re the perfect person to deal with him.”

  Alice in Wonderland must have felt this way at that tea party, she thought. None of this made any sense. “Why me?”

  “Because we think he’s a psychopath. And that’s right up your alley.”

  CHAPTER 5

  95 hours

  Booker Eisenstadt—­“Book” to everyone he worked with at the NSA, whether he liked it or not—­hugged the thick files he carried to his chest like they were armor against whatever he was about to face. He was a data analyst, and he guessed he probably looked the part, with his thick glasses and hair that Einstein might have envied. And he was damned good at what he did but still not the kind of essential personnel who normally got invited to attend meetings with three-­star generals and higher-­ups from other assorted alphabet agencies.

  Well, “invited” probably wasn’t the right word. More like “ordered.” The kind of order whose refusal was usually met with the barrel of a gun.

  Which in itself was surreal. He worked with computers—­numbers, information, patterns. Gun-­toting soldiers and nuke-­dropping generals were way out of his purview.

  Science, however, was not, and that’s what he tried to focus on as he took a deep breath and entered the ersatz conference room.

  There were only three ­people waiting for him when he stepped inside, which was something of a relief. General Robbins, Jack Thurman—­to whom Book’s ser­vices were temporarily “on loan”—­and a slim, auburn-­haired woman in a dress suit. She seemed outwardly calm, as though tête-­à-­têtes with ­people who could order surgical missile strikes were a common occurrence for her. But her eyes were constantly moving, from the men seated across from her, to the door, to a laptop on the conference table that was paused at the beginning of the Hank Light video, and finally to him.

  She reminded him of a quiescent volcano, and while he would normally have considered her pretty, if a little too stressed-­out for his tastes—­maybe not surprising, given the circumstances—­the wildness he sensed just beneath the surface gave him pause.

  “Dr. O’Meara, this is Book Eisenstadt, our resident whiz kid,” General Robbins said, as all three of them rose from their seats.

  “Book?” she asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

  “Booker, actually, but you know how it is with nicknames,” he replied, sticking out his hand.

  “Like gum on shoes,” she said with a rueful twist of her lips as she shook his hand. “And you can call me Fallon,” she added, earning her a side eye from the general. In that instant, Book decided he liked her, high-­strung and restless or not.

  He gestured toward the laptop.

  “They show you that yet?”

  She shook her head. “I guess they were waiting for you.”

  “Well, I’m here now, so let’s get started.”

  As the others sat, Book set his stack of files on the table and leaned over to push PLAY.

  The video had been queued up right to the point where Light was being attacked in St. Luke’s ER by two of the Infecteds, a man and a woman. He stomped on the man’s foot and swung him into the woman, then moved on as the two began to claw at each other over something she couldn’t see.

  The angle switched as Light moved out of view of the camera, and this time it was his reflection in an array of glass windows they watched as Light knelt beside a woman on the floor. She was bleeding from several head wounds and looked half-­dead already. After a quick glance to ensure he wasn’t in direct view of the camera, Light covered her mouth and pinched her nose. The woman jerked involuntarily, as though trying to fight for that last breath he was stealing, but after a moment, she lay still, and Light was on his feet again, his reflection moving away from the windows and out of view.

  Book stopped the video.

  “So you think he’s a psychopath because he ended some poor woman’s suffering?” Fallon’s tone was skeptical. “Is that all you’ve got?”

  “Not by a long shot,” Book answered.

  He pulled out a sheaf of papers and handed them over to the doctor.

  “Light’s work history. He’s had half a dozen EMT jobs and one as an orderly. You’ll notice that at each, there were at least eight to ten unexplained deaths. All patients Light had access to, either in the ambulance or the hospital. All ­people who were seriously injured or extremely ill. Some were definitely terminal cases, but there were others doctors believed might have recovered if not for Light.

  “He always left before anyone could start putting the pattern together, but it’s right there once you have his complete employment records.”

  “Angels of death are hard cases
to prove,” Fallon said as she leafed through the file. “Their victims are already on death’s door, and determining if someone gave them a shove over the threshold is no easy thing.”

  “There’s more,” Thurman said. “When he was picked up at the quarantine blockade, he was too calm, too collected. Other ­people who made it that far were screaming, terrified, begging to be let through. Not him.”

  Fallon shrugged. “He’s a first responder. It’s his job to stay cool in a crisis.”

  General Robbins spoke up. “Not like this. I’ve seen soldiers in war zones with gunfire and mortars going off all around them who’ve stayed steady and taken their targets down without batting an eye, but he made them look like scared little girls.” At Fallon’s frown, he held up his hands, palms out. “Sorry. Point is, he wasn’t just cool. He was ice-­cold. Until he realized my men had noticed, then he tried to fake being frightened, but they weren’t buying it. They’re trained to spot liars. That’s why they held on to him.”

  Fallon’s frown deepened, turning the worry lines on her forehead into rolling hills.

  “Show me.”

  Book hurried to comply, typing at lightning speed on the laptop’s keyboard and bringing up footage from cameras at the security checkpoints along the blockade.

  The video showed an ambulance rolling up to the gate. There was blood all over the grille, a broken headlight, and the fender was dented. Stuck to the grille was a hank of hair. As one of the soldiers flagged the vehicle to a stop, another approached and peeled the hair off. It was attached to what could only be part of a human scalp.

  Light climbed out of the cab as a third soldier covered him with a machine gun. Fallon started in her seat as his voice came from the laptop speakers.

  “You have to let me out of here. I just came from St. Luke’s. Everyone has gone crazy there, attacking each other—­I barely made it to my rig. Then they were all over the parking lot, in the streets, coming at me like some kind of mob. I had no choice but to drive through them.”

  He sounded convincing to Book, but Fallon’s lips quirked, and she leaned closer to the screen.

  “Can you back it up and zoom in on his face?”

  Book did as she requested, wondering what it was she’d seen. He didn’t have to wait long.

  “See his eyes? He looks right at the soldier the whole time, never glancing away.”

  “So?”

  “So, when ­people are remembering details, they tend to look up and to the right. When they’re making stuff up or embellishing, they look to the left. Well,” she amended quickly, “right-­handed ­people. It’s the opposite for lefties. But his don’t move in either direction. That usually means the liar’s aware of the tell and trying to compensate for it.

  “Of course,” she added, sitting back, “you can’t base an assessment of truthfulness on eye movement alone. But he also didn’t use a contraction there, where most ­people would have. That can be another tell, being overly precise when lying.”

  She looked at Book.

  “Anything else?”

  He nodded, hit a few more keys, and called up the footage from the ambulance’s dash cam.

  They watched as the vehicle pulled out of the bay, the scene much as Light had described—­­people attacking each other in the parking lot, swarming around a cab, a group converging on the front of the ambulance. As Light jerked the wheel to one side to get past them, the video caught another ambulance crashing through the ER doors, the back opening up as an EMT fled from a woman with bloody fingers, trailing an IV bag.

  Light made it past the mob, hands and arms slapping against the windshield, leaving red streaks. Once he was clear of the press, the vehicle lurched forward, narrowly missing another cab as Light hit the gas.

  Out on the street, there were fewer ­people, and most of them seemed to be running. The ambulance shot through an intersection as cars careened into each other, Infected passengers and drivers turning their interiors into mobile charnel houses.

  As Light plowed down a stretch of road, a woman could be seen kneeling beside the body of a child. She stood, headlights illuminating the hopeful expression on her face as she tried to wave him down to get help for her boy.

  The ambulance lurched again. Instead of slowing, Light had hit the gas. He ran the woman down without hesitation, the video taking in the moment—­too late—­when her hope turned to terror. Then her face disappeared beneath the hood, and the video shook for a moment as the ambulance’s wheels bumped over the two bodies, and Light raced on.

  Book hit PAUSE and looked at Fallon.

  “Okay,” she said, clearly shaken by what she’d seen. “He could be a psychopath, but that’s not something that can be determined by watching videos. And while that’s obviously interesting to me, in an academic sense, I’m still not sure what it has to do with—­with whatever it is you’re doing here?”

  Thurman brushed a hand through his short, blond hair. “We have a theory,” he began. “The Crazy 8s virus, as we’ve described, is incredibly contagious. Light was right there in the middle of it all, in contact with Infected blood and fluids, but he didn’t catch it. He seems to be immune, and so far, he’s the only person we know of who is. We’ve been investigating different physiological aspects to see what exactly in him gives him that immunity, but have been drawing a blank. Then I remembered your work on psychopathic brain structure. If he’s immune because of that—­if somehow, that structure is resistant to a virus that strikes at the brain and causes its victims to want to ingest other, unaffected brains—­we need to know. Which means we need to find out if other psychopaths share that immunity.”

  Fallon took a moment to consider the question. A heretofore unknown virus that homed in on grey matter? Could brain structure confer immunity to that?

  It was possible, she thought, if the virus targeted a specific region. In psychopaths, the limbic system was often underdeveloped, experiencing less blood flow and less neural activity than a “normal” brain. A virus that attacked the areas of the brain that were typically impaired in psychopaths might not be able to gain a foothold.

  And now her professional curiosity was engaged; even if the fate of the Valley—­and maybe the world—­wasn’t at stake, she wanted to know more.

  “Can I talk to him?”

  Robbins smiled.

  “Thought you’d never ask.”

  CHAPTER 6

  94 hours

  A green jeep that looked like something from the set of M*A*S*H took Fallon and Robbins out across the track and pulled up in front of the infield garage. Thurman and Book had stayed behind, though Book had provided her with an iPad that contained the video clips and all of his files on Light. Of course, it wasn’t connected to the Internet, and even if it had been, it wouldn’t have mattered since the only ­people in the Phoenix metropolitan area who were able to access the web were back in the room she’d just left. She already knew she wouldn’t be able to take it away from the track, for the same reason they’d confiscated her phone.

  “He’s in there?” she asked, a little surprised. The low-­lying building was just a long collection of bays for cars to lounge in until the race began. Sure, they had electricity, but that was about it. From what she’d read, Gitmo had better accommodations.

  Then again, the Crazy 8s virus made 9/11 look like a road-­rage incident, so she imagined prisoner comfort was not high on the government’s priorities list at the moment.

  She wondered if they were even taking prisoners.

  “For now,” Robbins answered. “Until you tell us if he is what we think he is.”

  Of course, Fallon was almost a hundred percent sure he was just that: a psychopath. But . . . if he really was immune to the virus that had taken out one of the largest urban centers in America in a matter of days, he wouldn’t just be an angel of death. He’d be the country’s savior.

 
First things first, though.

  “I want to talk to him alone.”

  Robbins frowned, but he nodded. “ ‘Alone’ is a relative term. The place is wired. Someone’s always watching him.”

  Fallon didn’t know if that was an observation or a threat. She supposed it didn’t really matter, either way. “Noted.”

  One of the bays had been repurposed into a holding area, and Light was inside, in a barred, freestanding cell that Fallon was able to walk around as she made her observations.

  He wore handcuffs and ankle bracelets, both connected to a chain around his waist. There was a chair in the cage, which had been bolted to the floor; Light had been sitting, but he stood when she entered the bay.

  Polite, probably charming one-­on-­one. That would help explain how he was able to go from job to job without raising eyebrows—­a silver tongue was a classic hallmark of psychopathy.

  He watched her curiously as she walked around the cage, not making notes on the tablet, just taking him in. He turned his head to track her progress as she went around behind him, not giving her the satisfaction of moving his body to follow but obviously uncomfortable with her being out of his sight. She stopped directly behind him, just out of his peripheral vision unless he really strained his neck, which she knew he wouldn’t do.

  She waited. If he spoke first, he’d be giving up a measure of control, however slight, and that would tell her much about him.

  His not speaking would tell her even more.

  Fallon watched as a single bead of sweat rolled down from his blond hair, down his ear, hanging from the lobe like a crystal on a chandelier before crashing down to the bloody collar of the EMT uniform he still wore. And that told her something, too.

  She resumed her stroll, tapping at the screen of the iPad as though she were taking notes now, but more interested in his response to her assessing him than in recording it for posterity. Besides, Robbins said the place was wired, which meant he was watching her watch Light. Plenty of time to review the video later.