The Nirvana Plague

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The Nirvana Plague Page 31

by Gary Glass


  No, their eyes were open. They were holding hands.—

  They were dead.—

  No, they weren’t dead.

  He noticed a sweet scent in the air — that strange sugary scent.

  “They’re here,” he said. “They’re catatonic.”

  “The whole family?” Benford said.

  “Ye—”

  The two children had reacted to the sound of his voice. Their eyes moved toward him.

  Then the girl sat up, looking at him — looking through him. Her hands separated from her brother’s and her mother’s. Her lips moved, trembling, and she seemed to pout, but found no words to speak. She looked inexpressibly beautiful.

  Marley turned and ran.

  He bolted down the hall and jumped down the stairs three at a time. Everybody watching the feed from the Humvee’s camera saw him come bursting out of the house.

  The sparrows scattered from the feeder and the grass.

  “What’s wrong!” Benford said.

  He stopped suddenly, caught up short, and looked around the yard. A vibrant green lawn, vivid blue sky, sleepy early morning neighborhood. The drab and clunky military vehicle looked ridiculously out of place.

  “What’s the matter? What happened?”

  Marley stood there blinking at the big-wheeled steel-bodied car.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

  “Are you all right?”

  His heart was still hammering.

  “Yes. I just — I just got — I was startled.”

  “By what?”

  “Nothing. Forget it. I’m fine. They’re unresponsive.”

  He willed himself forward again, and climbed back into the vehicle.

  Adams directed Marley out of the Olsens’ neighborhood to a bridge over the fast-flowing creek that Marley had nearly stumbled into last night, then on down Calhoun Street to the governor’s mansion. As he drove he described for them the scene in the mayor’s bedroom.

  He parked in the governor’s driveway. The white mansion stood on a hill overlooking the city center.

  “The governor lives with his wife,” Adams said. “And there’s a maid.”

  He walked up to the columned porch and rapped the doorknocker loudly. No one came. Not a sound. The door was unlocked. He went inside and immediately discovered the governor and wife and maid sitting in the dining room. They had taken three chairs from the table and were sitting in them side by side, facing the large window, holding hands, the governor in the middle seat. They were also nude.

  They didn’t look up as he came into the room.

  “Hello?” he said.

  No response.

  “My name is Marley,” he said as he approached them.

  No response.

  “Do you hear me?”

  The governor’s wife turned her head very slightly in his direction, but did not speak or look at him. After a few seconds her eyes returned to the window.

  The view from the window was spectacular. Out in the channel the Coast Guard cutter lay watching him looking at it. The surveillance helicopters hovered over the waterfront, like enormous dragonflies, slowly gliding back and forth.

  He left the house quietly, closing the door behind them.

  Out on the lawn, as he listened to the not very distant thump of helicopter rotors, he reported back to Benford.

  “All three of them are sitting in the dining room staring out the window. They’re also catatonic. Also nude. Also holding hands. Gone.”

  “Also nude?” Benford said. “So they don’t just sleep like that.”

  It was an anthropological observation.

  Marley smiled. He thought perhaps it was the only really silly thing he’d ever heard Benford say.

  “No,” he said. “They were probably all in the street last night. So their clothes were cold and wet. So they stripped.”

  His controllers directed Marley to the police station, city hall, the courthouse, state government offices, the federal building. Every office in every building was empty.

  He parked the Humvee downtown and walked from door to door. Restaurants, bars, boutiques, souvenir shops: all empty.

  He saw a noisy gang of crows fighting over the garbage spilled from an overturned trashcan.

  The communications van and several Humvees and police cruisers were still sitting in the street outside the Purple Pony.

  He went back inside the saloon. The military phone was still on the bar beside the bottle of vodka and the dry glass with the ear bug in it. He pocketed the electronics, but left the vodka untouched.

  Next they sent him through the residential neighborhoods, on foot, going from door to door like a canvasser, looking for “survivors.” After a while, he gave up knocking on the doors, and just went inside. Many doors were already standing open anyway. As far as he could make out, only empty houses had locked doors.

  Dogs barked at him from backyards.

  Everyone was catatonic, minimally responsive at best. Everyone in each house was gathered together in the same room. Not everyone was naked, but many were. No one spoke. No one was any more responsive than the mayor’s daughter had been. Sometimes the family pets lay curled up with them.

  The sun cleared the mountains around midmorning and the city warmed under the clear skies. City of light, city of zombies.

  They sent him around to the larger hotels. He found tourists huddled together in the lobby or down a hallway, sitting or lying, side by side, like dogs in a den.

  They sent him onto the cruise ship at the waterfront. He found several large groups gathered together in different great rooms of the ship — the ballroom, the restaurant, the game room. Everyone was gone.

  The ship, at least, running on its own generators, had power. But there was no one at the controls, no one on the bridge or in the engine rooms, kitchens, or communications. Passengers and crew were all mixed together.

  Seagulls waddled along the waterfront streets among the abandoned cars and pickups, like they’d just inherited the whole place and weren’t quite sure what to do with it.

  Marley wandered the ghostly city all day long. He found no one who was unaffected. He saw no one on the streets. He never found Roger or Delacourt.

  Finally, footsore and heart-weary he drove the Humvee back to the barricades at the center of the bridge.

  Tyminksi took the wheel and drove him and Benford back to Abrams.

  Chapter 38

  “IDD is not a disease,” Pritzker said. “It’s a movement.”

  His face, huge on the wallscreen, looked haggard. He said that he’d been up all night meeting with the Security Council, and now he was reporting the result.

  “The government’s position toward this has now officially changed,” he continued. “IDD is, effectively, in every practical sense, an insurgency. If it happened in Juneau, it can happen elsewhere. Elsewhere might be Chicago, or New York, or Washington.”

  Marley listened helplessly. The inevitable was finally happening.

  Pritzker continued his oration. His tone was emotionless, professional, almost bureaucratic: “Of course, there are a number of unusual aspects to the situation. There are some significant ways in which the progress of IDD differs from revolutionary movements. But we have got to decide on some kind of model to guide our response. At this point, the model of popular insurrection serves us better than disease outbreak. It’s not a perfect model, and we’ll depart from it wherever necessary. Our response can be creative without being formless. The model can guide our actions without being restrictive. We are adopting this model because the contagious disease model has failed. Aside from the fact that it is spreading like the plague, so to speak, IDD is in no significant sense similar to any known disease, including all generally accepted psychiatric diagnoses. It appears that the only plausible vector of transmission is simply interpersonal communication. Real diseases are not spread by talking. But real revolutionary movements are. The President is making no official announcement yet, but as of
midnight last night, the government of the United States is effectively operating under martial law. Habeas corpus is suspended. Civilian legal procedures, search and seizure rules, warrants, and so on, shall be, for the time being, inoperative. Military and civilian police units are today establishing control over all national and local media and communications services. Once that is done, the President will address the nation.”

  He stopped and turned to General Harden, beside him on the wall.

  Harden did not begin speaking at once, giving Pritzker’s announcements the space their gravity warranted.

  Marley felt like he was being squeezed in a vice. And he wondered what role he was now going to be expected to play in this strange new world.

  Harden looked down at Benford and the officers around her. “The CDC has also been placed under military authority,” he said. “Colonel Benford, your job is to coordinate with military command there to re-establish control of Juneau. The city will remain under absolute quarantine indefinitely. Army General John Graham is now in general command of all operations in the Juneau sector. Temporary operational HQ will be established at the airport. The Seventh Fleet’s secondary command ship, the USS Auster, is currently en route. It should arrive in two days. If the situation has not been resolved by then, General Graham will relocate joint operations headquarters onboard the Auster.”

  NEWSREADER: Since the imposition of martial law, Newsline has been operating under the oversight of authorities of the federal government. This is true of all the major media. These are temporary measures in a time of national emergency. In a few minutes we’ll be speaking with Secretary of Homeland Security Eliot Pritzker about what all this means. Secretary Pritzker will be discussing curfew, quarantine, and censorship orders, and what you need to do over the next few days to keep yourself and your family safe and healthy …

  Marley was alone in the small glass-walled conference room. He had Newsline on one screen, muted and captioned; on another, the video of the street scene from the day before. But on audio he was reviewing the ear bug recordings from the Purple Pony meeting, looping back and forth through key moments.

  ROGER: The development of mind was as revolutionary as anything that had come before it, but it wasn’t magical. Mind is as natural as anything else. But it seems different because that’s what it is made to do. It’s meant to make things seem.—

  Benford came in, carrying a cup of coffee in one hand, her tablet in the other, and checking her watch. “You’re up early,” she said.

  He was leaning back in his chair, resting his legs on another chair. He punched the tabletop controls to pause the playback. “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “Me either.” She sat down opposite him.

  Marley studied her. She was in uniform, of course. She didn’t look like she hadn’t been sleeping, but she didn’t look fresh either. Like an old suit neatly pressed and folded.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “What I should have been doing two days ago. Should have been doing all along. Maybe I’ve never really done it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Listening. Trying to understand. Not just diagnose.”

  Benford fiddled with her tablet while she talked. “Trying to figure a way out of this situation?”

  “No!” he snapped.

  She looked back at him, across the table.

  “You see, you’re not listening to me either. I’m trying to find a way into it.”

  “All right. Making any progress?”

  “I don’t know. But I do know that the more I listen to Roger’s explanation of IDD, the more sense it makes. It makes more sense than any of our own explanations anyway. We tried calling IDD a disease. That didn’t work. Now it’s an insurrection. But what laws have been broken?”

  “Quarantine orders have—”

  “Which we imposed because we decided IDD was a disease. If we hadn’t made that diagnosis, there wouldn’t have been a quarantine to violate.”

  “I don’t want to have the ‘Is IDD real?’ debate again, Carl. It’s too damn late for that, and too damned early in the morning.”

  “Of course, IDD is real. I keep remembering something Fred Peters said, the first time the team met, that day at the NIH. He said that IDD is an idea disease. It’s a bad idea that has caught on for reasons unknown to us. Maybe unknowable. — But what if it isn’t a bad idea?”

  She was reading her tablet again as he talked. “Well, it certainly caught on with Dr. Peters,” she said without looking up. “Anyway, I have some news for you.”

  “About Ally and Karen?”

  “Yes. FBI office in Wisconsin just forwarded a report to me. Seems they ditched your car a few days ago. — Must have been right after the traffic stop. — They traded it for a thirteen-year-old Hyundai pickup truck. It got flagged by FBI data surveillance when the dealer registered the sale.”

  “She sold my car? What the hell do they think they’re doing?”

  “They’ll never get over the border.”

  Chapter 39

  In the early evening of a mid-April day along Yukon’s Highway 1, the beat-up little electric pickup that had carried Karen and Ally all the way from a used-car lot in Wisconsin finally met its fate — within shouting distance of the Alaskan border.

  Karen was driving.

  As the chill shadow of the Coast Mountains stretched out over the land, the fog had come creeping out of the valleys and slicked the roads with black frost. A moose ambled out of the forest onto the pavement. For an instant the truck’s lights caught it as it lifted and turned its great head unconcernedly toward the oncoming vehicle. Then there was a shocking crunch as the front bumper broke the animal’s knees, followed instantly by the banging crunch of the huge body slamming into the hood and the noble head coming through the windshield into Ally’s lap.

  The skidding truck started to spin, but the extra half-ton of moose on the hood kept it from flipping. The truck slid sideways off the road and the back fender brought hard up against a stout pine tree. The front end flipped round, flinging off the fallen moose, and sending the two women crashing into each other in the front seat.

  A few eternal seconds passed. The airbags, smeared and spattered with moose blood, were already deflating. The cat was yowling. The engine was dead. The left headlight was still working, and in the silvery gleam of its light, the moose lay sprawled on the ground — the windshield wrapped around its neck — kicking its life out.

  “Ally?” Karen muttered, too stiff to look around.

  “Are you all right?” Ally answered from the darkness, her voice a whisper.

  “I think so. Are you?”

  “I’ve been better.”

  “Can you see the cat?”

  “I can’t see anything.”

  It took them some time to extricate themselves from the cab of the truck. The door on Ally’s side was jammed and the window had been cracked by her head.

  They were standing and shivering by the wreck, watching the moose die, when a car appeared from the night, slowed, and stopped beside them, without pulling off the road. An old man in overalls got out with a flashlight and walked toward them. He examined them each in turn.

  The hair on the right side of Ally’s head was damp with blood.

  “You girls all right,” he said. It was a conclusion, not a question.

  They nodded slightly in agreement.

  He scanned his light over the vehicle bent round the tree.

  “Can’t say the same for your truck.”

  Finally, he took a couple of steps toward the prone moose, now barely breathing.

  “Goddamn moose anyhow.”

  He shook his head in disgust and looked back at them again.

  “You girls from the States?”

  They nodded.

  “Well, come on. Get in the back seat. I’ll drive you into town.”

  The old man hurtled down the foggy, frosty road like a luge runner. Absently steering with one hand, he pal
med his phone in the other and called ahead to the doctor’s office.

  They must have recognized his caller ID.

  “Yes!” he barked. “And I have two American women in the back, and one American cat in a box.”

  The cat was reciting a loud mantra of pathetic mewls.

  “Done a bull moose dead as dingo … One of them might need some stitches in her head … Be there in about ten minutes… Yes, why don’t you call Ernie?”

  They pulled up in front of a tiny brick medical clinic across the road from a dilapidated diner. The red neon-lit air of the parking lot smelt strongly of charred beef. The old man led the two women inside. Karen sat in the lobby with the cat box at her feet while Ally was getting her scalp stitched.

  The old man sat with Karen, but didn’t speak.

  A few minutes later, another man came in the front door. He pulled a black cap off his head. His hair was just as black.

  The old man stood up and greeted him. “Ernie.”

  “Sam,” said the other with a nod. “This her?”

  “Other one’s in with the doc. Banged up her head.”

  The other man sat down in the chair beside Karen, loosened his coat, and introduced himself. “Ma’am. My name is Ernie Fredrickson. I’m the local constable. Do you have any identification?”

  Karen looked up at him miserably. “It’s in the truck.”

  “Where’s the truck, ma’am?”

  “It’s out near the road up to Danson’s place,” the old man said. “Twisted up like a plug a’ tobacco.”

  “All right. Well, what’s your name, ma’am?”

  “Karen.”

  He produced a mini-tablet and a stylus, and scribbled. “Last name?”

  She didn’t want to tell him. But she was too muddle-headed to lie. “Hanover.”

  “What’s your friend’s name?”

  “Ally,” she said. “Marley.”

  “Anybody else with you?”

  “No.”

  “Just that noisy cat,” the old man added.

  “Where are you from?” the constable said.

 

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