Chapter 20
September 10
Forty Months After the NOBI Discovery
Dr. Lauren Scott
Research Physician, Centers for Disease Control
I finally agreed to marry Hector. We were in the car, on a weekend Target run. We had moved in together a few months after the whole Liza Sole fiasco—and I was rattling off my schedule for the next few months. After the whirlwind of media rounds and Congressional hearings, things were still quite hectic. My work at the CDC continued, and I found numerous colleagues outside the agency and around the country who shared my passion for finding a solution to the virus. I had a few trips coming up, and as I ran down the list of dates with Hector, he blurted out, “We should probably get married?”
This wasn’t the first time he’d asked, but there was something in his voice that made me pause this time. It seemed right. Or maybe I was just getting soft and I let my guard down for a brief moment.
“Sure,” I said.
The car was quiet. We continued down the freeway.
“Good,” he said. “Okay, then.” And just like that, we were engaged.
As the Gloamings assimilated around the world, my work on the NOBI virus was repeatedly challenged by Gloaming organizations who wanted all studies related to counteracting or curing the NOBI virus to cease. Even labeling it a “virus” had become politically charged. Many Gloaming activists resisted this label, arguing that it implied that people who had the NOBI virus were somehow socially disabled. They argued that Gloamings were normally functioning persons in society. Rumors abounded that the American Psychiatric Association was intending to classify Gloamings as uniformly afflicted with a mental illness or disorder. If that wasn’t bad enough, I also continued to be hampered by my own coworkers. Research still went missing. Supplies never arrived. Test results “could not be located.” I could never prove any of it.
Soon another event hijacked my focus and changed my life.
My sister, Jennifer, disappeared.
Jennifer went missing from the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, the world’s largest EDM festival and rave. She was always into the deep beats and hyped-up atmosphere of these raves: from the clothing to the drugs to the people, Jennifer loved everything about a good music festival. And given the nature of raves—late at night, filled with energy—they had become a favorite meeting place for Gloamings.
Jennifer used to tell me about her friendships with a few Gloamings. I didn’t want to be that patronizing or nagging big sister, but I let her know, in no uncertain terms, that Gloamings were not to be trusted. She didn’t want to hear it. I felt her tune me out when I talked about the Gloamings and their agendas. That weary sigh. The shut-down silence. After a while, I simply gave up trying to warn her.
And that’s on me, and I’ll never forgive myself.
When Jennifer’s friend called me from the Vegas police station to let me know Jennifer had gone missing, I dropped everything and flew out there immediately. It was a full day before I could get my emotions together enough to call my dad. He was bedridden following two knee replacement surgeries, and it took threats of law enforcement intervention before he agreed not to leave the house and fly to Las Vegas too. That small victory of course led to a constant stream of calls and texts, with him demanding to be informed of all my movements and demanding updates on the search. Hector checked in a lot too, but he was a bit less insufferable about it. I think he already knew I didn’t respond well to constant demands. He had offered to come to Vegas and was nice enough to understand when I declined.
The police had zero leads. Jennifer had stayed with her group of friends for most of Saturday night, but at some point she slipped away, and when they realized she’d been absent for a few hours, they started looking for her, texting, checking her Instagram. She never returned. Of course, there were numerous and different illegal substances consumed by all, including Jennifer. This didn’t help us confirm a reasonable timeline—or keep the police interested.
I called a friend of mine at the FBI but he was now assigned to the Information and Technology Branch, no longer in the field. He did call a few agents he knew in Nevada and they promised to conduct some preliminary inquiries. I didn’t have time for that. Already, the Las Vegas PD wasn’t returning my calls. My father and I were frantic. I needed something to break soon. I had to get out.
The short flight from Atlanta to Las Vegas was an agony. My right eye twitched, my stomach turned, and I couldn’t concentrate enough to read my reports. The claustrophobic feeling stayed with me until we landed, and then the fresh air wasn’t enough to calm me down.
My first stop was meeting with the detectives investigating the disappearance. From what was explained to me, Jennifer and Mael attended the festival together, accompanied by three friends who separated from them after they entered the grounds. Cameras at the entrance captured their arrival in an Uber at about seven in the evening. Then they merged into the scattered crowd and bewildering lights, and disappeared from view.
It was an impossible task to determine her exact location inside the festival grounds, so we interviewed the persons providing security, as well as the workers who manned the food booths. This proved to be equally futile as Jennifer resembled all the other pretty blondes at the festival.
The following day I met with the FBI agent assigned to the case, Hugo Zumthor. He regarded me with some skepticism, with his hands on his hips. “You must have some stroke, Doctor,” he remarked, reluctantly shaking my hand.
“Why would you say that?” I asked.
“I’m the head of a division at the FBI and I was pulled off by the director to investigate this disappearance. Seems like a weird allocation of resources.” The arms now crossed at his chest told me he wasn’t pleased by this.
“Well, thank you for your help,” I replied.
The best lead to follow was Mael. Cameras at the front caught him walking out of the festival through the main entrance at 5:30 a.m. Alone. He caught an Uber and went back to the Airbnb condo off the strip. An interview with the driver indicated nothing unusual about the ride. Another camera showed Mael entering the condo. That was the last time he was seen alive.
Five laptops on the desk in my hotel room stared back at me, each one scrolling surveillance video from any camera within twenty square blocks of where the Electric Daisy Carnival was held: Amazon Stadium—the new home of the Las Vegas Raiders.
The stadium was located at the end of the Las Vegas Strip, close to the Treasure Island hotel and casino. Eight hours of footage from every camera in the immediate area. People walking in every direction like an excavation of an ant colony. So many people and so many faces that resembled Jennifer’s. As my eyes scanned the flickering images I couldn’t even keep my thoughts on the task, and my mind raced with a laundry list of what-ifs. What if I had gone with her? What if I had invited Jennifer to come visit me like I always insisted that I would?
With every face that passed the monitor, I wondered who they were, what their lives were like, and where they were going. What made them so different?
I could have sat there for years, staring at those screens with only my what-ifs for companionship.
Late that night, I nearly slipped off my seat at the image of a girl in a flowing yellow sundress among a crowd of people. That was Jennifer. Others were uncertain, but I knew it.
Each camera and each block traced her movements until the screen flashed to static. I followed the next series of cameras to confirm my suspicions: more static except for two other feeds that were devoid of people and clear as day.
I called over Zumthor to view my progress. He stared at the screen of snow that snapped and stuttered over the monitor. Clear visual, then static over and over.
“I’m not sure,” he said after what seemed like too long.
I must have misunderstood him. It was the last thing I thought I would hear him say, or wanted him to say. “Are you fucking serious?” I replied.
; Hugo didn’t seem surprised by my outburst as he continued to stare at the screen. “It’s like someone is trying to make it seem like a Gloaming passed the camera when it never happened. I’ll send it to our lab and see if it conforms to established norms of Gloaming interference. But I don’t think you’re going to like what they have to say.” He sat down and leaned back in his chair as he cut his eyes at me. Probably wondering if my next outburst was on the way.
I tapped the side of the desk with my finger as if to release steam, like a battered valve attached to a bloated machine.
It wasn’t working.
And sitting in a stuffy hotel room wasn’t going to cut it. I dragged Hugo out with me to walk the path where the cameras began to static. We took off down the strip, starting at the stadium and down close to the MGM Grand, where the video stream had faded out. I flipped through my brain, trying to figure out why Jenny would walk this way when the Airbnb was in the opposite direction. Was she exhausted from the festival and not thinking clearly? She could have consulted the map on her phone to keep from getting lost. Was her intention to go this particular direction?
We took a right down a block of mixed condos and office buildings, nothing taller than four stories. “You sure she went this way?” Hugo asked.
“There’s no other explanation. The cameras on the corresponding streets show nothing.”
Hugo studied the buildings while I scanned the alleys in between. “I mean, there are cameras here,” Hugo remarked, “but nothing seems to indicate—” He stopped in front of a two-story business building with no sign or markings. “Fuck!”
“What?” I grabbed his arm but immediately let go.
Hugo pointed at what looked to be another camera above the doorway.
“The camera?” I asked. It looked as though there were two cameras side by side at various points on the building.
“That’s a camera,” Hugo said, “but the thing next to it isn’t another camera. It’s a radiation portal monitor. It measures and alerts to high radiation readings in the vicinity. They are quite complex and expensive.”
I glanced over at him. “Why would they have that there?”
“One to guard against humans and the other to guard against Gloamings,” he answered as he texted someone on his phone. “I’m asking my office to check ownership on this address.”
We walked around the building, into the alley, and saw more monitors and cameras. Hugo’s phone buzzed and he scanned the messages with a shake of his head and his lips pursed.
“What is it?” I shouted.
“Have to say, I’m kind of surprised,” he stated. “Believe it or not, this building is owned by a shell company for the Claremont Corporation.”
“Gloaming-owned,” I whispered, voicing my thoughts.
“Still doesn’t explain why they’re guarding against their own kind,” Hugo said. “This could be something very interesting.”
I wanted to break into the building and find out something about Jennifer, to drag Zumthor through the front door with his gun drawn, to call in the National Guard. None of these were an option.
Two weeks later, just after I had booked a ticket to return home, a man biking with his family found Jennifer’s body when his dog ran off in search of the source of the scent. The remains were skeletal. The authorities confirmed her identity through dental records.
When the detective called me, I was in my rental car. I felt the tears running down my face before I knew I had started crying. I pulled the car over to the side of the road. I needed to call my parents. I needed to talk to Hector. But I couldn’t do any of that yet.
One more sob and I turned the car off. I slumped over the wheel. I was still such a child in spite of everything. I wanted someone to tell me it was not true and that everything would be put back into place.
The Nevada heat boiled up into the car and was suffocating me as I stared out the window. I could feel my thoughts begin to jumble and the shapes in front of my eyes flutter before I turned on the ignition and the cool air slapped my face. I breathed the cold air deeply. Breathed deeply again. So many memories of her scattered through my mind and I couldn’t seem to grab hold of even one to savor and love.
Okay, Jennifer, I thought.
I googled “Las Vegas morgue” and punched the address into the GPS.
For a moment, everything was put back in its place.
Already I wasn’t the same person I was a week before. My heart was screaming for vengeance.
I pretty much forced my way into the autopsy.
Since there were only bones left, it was virtually impossible to determine anything substantive. I examined the anterior longitudinal ligament area and the cervical vertebra area close to the neck. I could not find anything that indicated a bite from a Gloaming. However, I’d snuck in my Geiger counter, and sure enough, the bones emitted residual radiation that could be attributed to a Gloaming. It wasn’t a conclusive enough reaction for the coroner.
But it was enough for me.
Meanwhile, as my old man once told me, “You don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blowing.” I knew my time at the CDC was running short. My supervisors had asked me to modify my research to focus less on eradicating certain elements of the virus to make it inert, and focus more on lessening the impact of the virus on the body. I pushed back hard on this: if that’s all we did, I argued, then all my research would amount to nothing!
Soon enough, the assistant director called me into her office to announce that the CDC was terminating my employment.
I didn’t even ask why. When I got home that night, I told Hector. He’d been telling me to leave the CDC for a long time, with all the resistance I had been encountering, but in that moment, he knew I didn’t need to hear about that. He just wrapped me in a tight, silent hug.
Surprisingly—or actually not surprisingly, when dealing with the government—I was offered a new job the very next day. I was sitting in the Starbucks close to my apartment, nursing a large Frappuccino, when a woman in a smart suit walked in. She sat directly across from me.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“You’re Lauren Scott,” she said, more of a statement than a question.
“So?” I thought she may have been a reporter looking for another interview about Liza Sole, but the interest in that period of time had waned to a point where no one cared about the beginning of the Gloamings. In fact, the Gloamings had done an excellent job of wiping out that part of their history, preferring to construct another “beginning” story, with the emergence of a Gloaming community in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as their origin fable. I suppose no one wants their fairy tale to begin with a murderous cannibal.
The woman leaned closer. “I’m Sally Lindsay. I work for a small pharmaceutical company called Atwater Corporation. We’re currently focusing on expanding our research division.”
“Okay,” I replied. “What can I do for you?”
“Well, I know that you recently left your job at the CDC, and Atwater would like to offer you a very prestigious position.”
I was shocked. “Well, it’s kind of soon, given everything that’s happened,” I stated. “I hadn’t really given much thought to my next move.”
She left her card on the table. “Call me and let’s coordinate a meeting. You need to get out of Atlanta, anyway. Come to California.”
And with that she was gone. It took me about a week to call her up and arrange a meeting outside Stockton, California, where Atwater was located. It was a highly secured facility, and the meeting was interesting. The three executives and scientists that I met were young and seemed to have a lot of energy and a sense of fun.
“We want you to concentrate on the work you were doing at the CDC—specifically, the NOBI virus,” said Terrence Davila, director of research.
I’m certain the surprise was all over my face. “Really? I didn’t think many companies or universities were still willing to research the NOBI virus—especially with m
y focus.”
“Well,” Terrence continued, “we don’t advertise it. In fact, we hide it quite well, but it is our primary focus right now. And that’s not going to change, no matter the publicity.”
I flew home to talk over this offer with Hector. I didn’t want to admit it out loud, but the truth was, after the Liza Sole incident and my sister’s murder, I still had it in for the Gloamings. I wanted to continue my research and fight the NOBI virus. Hector knew this. Plus, he was working part-time at a rural health clinic to supplement his income while writing his book about our experiences during those first few months in Arizona. He could do that in California as well as anywhere.
It wasn’t until I’d been at Atwater for five months that I learned it was actually funded in large part by the CIA. My shock wore off pretty quickly. I’d worked for years in government. No matter how public opinion had turned, of course they would still have a vested interest in pursuing options in regard to the Gloamings. And with the abundant Atwater support, my research had progressed to the point where I had developed a working prototype for a postexposure prophylaxis for the NOBI virus infection if administered within forty-eight hours of the bite.
It helped that we were able to overcome many of the technical limitations we faced when studying the radioactive NOBI virus. For example, UC Berkeley had created a proprietary high-resolution electron microscope using the inherent radiation of the virus to reflect back to a beam of accelerated electrons. It was essentially an X-ray with high photon energies modified at a cellular level to reflect the NOBI radiation. But the energy created in the process tended to burn out the microscopes after about twenty viewings. At the CDC, obtaining funding for a disposable $50,000 microscope good for only twenty viewings had been a constant challenge.
At Atwater, my assistant easily took care of the paperwork, and new microscopes appeared as if by magic.
The day I successfully replicated the antiretroviral treatment, which would stop NOBI in its tracks, I remember viewing the enzymes and human DNA on a normal blood slide. As the NOBI cells began to bind to the receptors, I was in shock. My computer had recorded what had unfolded within the microscope, but I needed the verification of a real-life colleague.
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