by Mara, Wil
Porter, her eyes red-rimmed and swollen, studied Beck carefully. They had been in similar situations, and his reaction never ceased to fascinate her—not only was he not crying; he barely appeared affected at all. If anything, he seemed angry. Although she couldn’t see it under his respirator, she knew his jaw had tightened, his lips pressed together. And his eyes took on a blank, distant stare that was a little frightening. He had never once raised his voice to her, never even became mildly irritated—yet there was some type of rage dwelling inside him. She was sure of this. In spite of the kindness and generosity, in spite of his gentle manner and boundless patience, there was a dark side to the man. Hatred, she always thought. He hates human illness more than anyone I’ve ever seen. And she thought she caught a glimpse of it at times like this. What she had not been able to determine, however, was how it got there in the first place.
Gillette’s cell phone twittered. He reached up and pressed the button on his Bluetooth earpiece, which neither Beck nor Porter had noticed because it was covered by the bonnet. The conversation didn’t last long.
“Fourteen more deaths,” he said, “including one in Avenel.”
“Where’s that?” Beck asked.
“About thirty-five miles from here.”
For the first time since Cara Porter had known him, Beck swore out loud.
“This thing could grow, Ben.” He kept his voice low even though there was no one else around. “This could be the one. It has all the traits.”
“I know.”
“It could take millions. And developing a vaccine could take years.”
Gillette nodded gravely.
“I know.”
FOUR
Dennis Jensen leaned against the doorway between the kitchen and the living room of his small Cape Cod. He had the cordless phone pressed to his ear and his blue Arrow shirt pulled out of his cotton trousers. His tie and jacket for work were hung over one of the chairs at the small table where he and his family had just finished breakfast. He would not be using them today, however, as he had already called out sick. It was just after eight thirty, and a beautiful blue day was beginning to form outside. Neither he nor his wife, Andrea, took much notice of this—every shade and blind in the house was shut, as they had been for days.
“Yeah, okay. Sure, sure. I appreciate it, Elaine. Love you, too. I’ll let you know what’s happening. Bye.”
He thumbed the OFF button and turned to Andi, who was standing in the living room with her arms wrapped tight around herself. She had also called out sick and was wearing sweats and a T-shirt.
“What did she say?”
“There are about a hundred and thirty deaths now for sure,” he said. Andi shook her head. “And more cases are coming in all the time. Every hospital has full staffs working around the clock, and they’re still asking for help from other places. But everyone’s scared. No one wants to touch the infected patients. Three doctors and eight nurses have died already. You can hardly blame them.”
They turned back to the TV, which was on the New Jersey Network. NJN had been broadcasting the story with increasing frequency, and yesterday it was asked by the governor to provide information around the clock: the Death Network.
“And they don’t have any idea what it is yet, right?”
“No. But they’re pretty sure it’s not smallpox, anyway.”
“Well, that’s good news, I suppose.”
“Elaine said the Centers for Disease Control is leading the investigation. The World Health Organization is working with them, too.”
“Terrorists?” Andi asked. “Al-Qaeda? Another Bin Laden?”
Dennis shrugged. “She said she hadn’t heard anything about that, either.”
“Do they know goddamn anything?”
Andi rarely used profanity; one of her duties in the marriage, it seemed, was to make sure he didn’t. This was a sign she was nearing a meltdown.
“Not much, it seems.”
Dennis moved alongside her and watched the next report: another five deaths in Long Branch, a shore town about an hour south of them. One of the victims was a twelve-year-old boy who had just made his first honor roll. Andi started sobbing. When the little boy’s school picture flashed on the screen, Dennis lost it, too.
* * *
They first heard about the outbreak three days earlier. While driving to his job as an insurance-claims analyst, Dennis heard something on the radio about the sudden death of two police officers in Ramsey after they found a body hanging in an apartment. The report was mercilessly graphic, talking of giant, weeping pustules and hunks of blackened skin. One of the officers shot himself with an unregistered rifle he kept in a drop-ceiling in his basement. It sounded gross enough to make Dennis want to set down his iced coffee for a moment, but he picked it up again when the broadcaster moved on to stock futures and baseball scores. He dismissed it by the time he pulled into the parking lot—just another scratchy note in the endless dissonance of media symphonics.
He mentioned it casually that evening as he and his family were unwrapping their Wendy’s. Andi hadn’t heard anything about it. She was an HR director at an injection-mold facility and was usually on the move from the moment she walked through the door. She was also more inclined to listen to music during her fifteen-minute commute than the news. She shuddered at the thought of bodies covered in huge, oozing blisters while their organs dissolved; “gross” had never been her thing.
She was going to make a comment when she became distracted by their seven-year-old daughter, Chelsea, who needed help opening a packet of barbecue sauce. Chelsea preferred it over honey mustard when she had chicken nuggets, which made her father proud. Their other child, Billy, was five and hadn’t yet been introduced to the manifold delights of barbecue-flavored anything. The conversation then shifted to Billy’s daily adventures at kindergarten, and the story was forgotten.
It reentered their lives the next day when Andi heard two of her coworkers talking about it in the kitchenette. The infection was now in Mahwah, a small town set between Ramsey and the New York border. Someone was found unconscious in a supermarket stockroom, covered with running pustules. It was one of the night-shift employees, a kid recently graduated from high school and working for minimum wage until he figured out what he wanted to do with his life. Andi felt a chill blow through her when one of the people in the conversation said with a laugh, “At least he won’t have to worry about his future anymore.” She knew the guy who said it, privately thought of him as a jerk. So did everyone else in the company. Big surprise.
She mentioned this latest development to Dennis during their lunchtime call. The phone on her desk rang everyday at noon without fail. He would be sitting in their Toyota Camry in the parking lot eating a brown-bag lunch, his cell phone unfolded on the dashboard with the speaker on. He was listening to a Yankees game and hadn’t heard about it. He turned the sound down and asked her to repeat the information. She could tell by his tone that the idea of the infection spreading into another town was beginning to concern him, and it sure as hell concerned her. Although neither of them came out and said it, this was one of those instances where you assumed someone was working on the problem, and surely it would be solved eventually. Andi couldn’t help but think of the infection as some kind of living, breathing entity moving greedily from town to town. This idea struck her the previous night during dinner, too—the infection was a creature, and its plan was to spread itself far and wide with the objective of killing as many people as possible.
“When it lands here, that’s when we move out,” Dennis said with a nervous laugh. After eight years of marriage, she knew him well enough—this was a worry that would fester. It had seeped into whatever level held the highest priorities in his thinking. He would try to be casual about it, try not to burden her with his anxiety or let the kids get a sense of it. This was one of the qualities she loved about him—his determination to maintain as pleasant a life for his family as possible. But it definitely would
fester.
Andi had an acquaintance in Mahwah, a woman she had worked with at her previous job. She planned to give her a call to see what was going on; maybe some of the details would be helpful. But then she got caught up in other things and forgot. Between work, getting the kids to school, helping them with their homework at night, and getting them bathed and ready for bed, it simply drifted off her radar screen.
The nightmare crystallized into reality when two cases showed up in town. Their town. On the other side, yes, but still … This was where they’d bought a home, where their kids went to school and played in the local parks. They knew people, had made friends, and had always felt safe. Things like this didn’t happen here.
The victims were Al and Helen Griffin, an elderly couple living in the condo complex next to the supermarket where the Jensens sometimes did their food shopping. They’d been there the week before, in fact, because Andi liked the produce. They drove right past those condos, too—and now they were on television. Not images from halfway around the world, of starving children in Haiti or military skirmishes in Palestine. It was surreal to watch a news report that was being broadcast a few streets away. A crowd had gathered around the attractive female reporter on the scene for NJN. Dennis and Andi recognized a few people, one of whom was an old man who usually hung around the Salvation Army thrift store. He was kind of a roving vagrant who made everyone uneasy.
According to the report—further confirmed by the local freebie newspaper—the elderly couple caught the virus while visiting family in nearby Glen Rock. Three days later, they were both dead. A UPS delivery man saw the wife through the decorative glass partition by the front door, lying in the hallway. A barbecue fork had been thrust deep into her lower back. The husband was found spread-eagle on their bed, six empty prescription bottles on the nightstand beside him.
The morning after the report, Dennis made a point of driving past the condos. He wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t the type to slow down at a crash site in the hope of seeing a little blood or a hand dangling from beneath a tarp. He supposed he just had to know the situation was real, that Andi’s “creature” had truly made the decision to visit, of all places, their quiet little town of Carlton Lakes.
It was real enough. Yellow police tape had been draped across the condo entrance, and two squad cars were parked in the street. An NBC news van with a satellite dish on the roof was down a little farther, the reporter and his two-man crew having bagels and coffee. A family of four—just like us, Dennis thought with a shudder—was exiting one of the other condos with suitcases in hand. The children looked bewildered, the parents terrified.
The Jensens watched helplessly as their beloved community dissolved. Handmade signs appeared in storefront windows indicating that business was suspended. Extracurricular activities like aerobics classes for seniors and dance lessons for youngsters were canceled until further notice. The two Albanian brothers who owned the Sunoco station by the highway took to wearing cotton gloves and masks. They asked that people who were paying in cash kindly drop the money into a plastic bag, which was then zipped shut. Credit cards were sanitized with isopropyl alcohol on cosmetic pads. Traffic thinned out on Martin Boulevard, the town’s main artery, and everyone stayed inside on the weekends. No one cut their lawn, and there were no joggers or kids on bicycles. At some houses, mail piled up in the boxes because no one wanted to touch it.
Chelsea’s principal sent a note home, assuring parents that the staff was taking all necessary precautions to keep the infection out of the school. He included a sheet from the New Jersey Department of Health that gave tips on how to minimize risk of exposure, and another from the CDC on what they knew about the infection so far. Some parents had already pulled their children out anyway; attendance was down about 15 percent. Dennis and Andi debated whether they should do likewise. They felt strongly that education was crucial in a child’s life. Learning the value of routine was also important. Chelsea seemed to be a natural, always going with the flow. They were hesitant to interrupt that.
Then one of the other students in the school caught it. A fourth-grader: Peter Something-or-other. They’d heard the name before but couldn’t recall it. The family was fairly well known around town, had lived in Carlton through several generations. Because Peter had it, his parents got it. And then some of the others in his class began showing early signs.
That’s when Dennis and Andi decided to pull Chelsea out. They tried calling the school several times to leave a message on the absentee hotline the following morning, but the line was always busy. In the end the school did the right thing anyway and closed down pending further notice. There was more information on the website, and a prerecorded call was made to every home. There were no more letters, though, because no one wanted to touch a piece of paper that came from inside that building.
The Jensens prayed hard that Chelsea hadn’t caught it, promising God absolutely anything. They were both Christian, and Andi still went to church fairly regularly. Dennis’s attendance had dwindled to holidays and family occasions such as weddings and christenings. He still believed in a supreme being, but he felt organized religion had become too much of a business to be trusted. Now he was fearful that he would be punished for his position. If so, punish me and not her, he pleaded.
They packed Chelsea and Billy into their minivan and sped two hours south to see Dennis’s sister, Elaine. She was a nurse at Point Pleasant Hospital and knew exactly what to do and whom to see. The doctor was a friend of hers, a large and jovial Russian man in his mid-fifties. Wearing rubber gloves and a cotton mask, he took a vial of blood from a fat vein in the crook of Chelsea’s right arm and promised to get back to them as soon as possible. On the way home, Chelsea asked if she was sick, which caused Andi to start crying. Dennis said no, it was just a checkup, and they wanted to see her aunt.
The night that followed was the worst of their lives. They held each other and cried until there were no tears left. They drifted in and out of sleep and felt even worse in the morning. They both took off work and played with Chelsea and Billy in their “messy room” upstairs—a controlled disaster zone where the kids were allowed to do as they pleased. The cordless phone was kept nearby. It rang once around ten thirty and turned out to be a window-treatment salesman. Andi, unable to maintain her usually civil demeanor under the circumstances, went into Billy’s bedroom and tore the guy a new one. It rang again a half hour later—it was Elaine calling to tell them that Chelsea was fine. Andi wiped tears away and laughed as she thanked her. Dennis sat on the floor with his legs crossed and pulled Chelsea into his lap, then wrapped his arms around her and gently rocked back and forth as she read her favorite book to him. It was one of the most joyous moments of their lives.
But that was yesterday.
* * *
“We can work from home until the whole thing blows over,” Andi said from the driver’s seat of the van a few hours later. It was late afternoon, and the bright blue day had evolved into one of the sunniest and prettiest of the season. “I can do most of my stuff on the laptop. You can, too, right?”
Dennis nodded as they cruised through the center of town. “I guess so.”
“Okay, then it’s a plan.”
She now seemed to be harboring a peculiar kind of optimism, Dennis decided—a Pollyanna belief that the outbreak would evaporate in the not-too-distant future, as if simply regarding it in an offhanded manner were the key. He wished he could share the sentiment, but something held him back: a “certain uncertainty,” as he sometimes called it. He subscribed to the common adage that preparing for the worst was always best. Something bigger is going on. We’re not seeing the whole picture, and we may not for some time. This is far from over. He noticed that many of the stores were shuttered, their shades drawn and the signs in the windows turned around to read CLOSED. There was no one on the sidewalks, which was unnerving in itself—he had never seen this thoroughfare devoid of pedestrians before. Certainly there was life out there, somew
here. But what kind of life was it when every moment was colored by fear? When you were too afraid to perform an act as simple as stepping outside and taking a deep breath?
“… brought the list along?”
“Hmm? What?”
“Did you bring the list along?”
“Oh, yeah.” He took it from the pocket of his shirt and unfolded it. “Got it right here.”
“Is there anything else you can think of?”
He scanned it—bananas, cereal, milk, whole wheat bread … All the normal stuff. That appeared to be the operative word at the moment—normal. He thought, That’s what she’s trying to get back to—some sense of normalcy. She thinks if we act like everything’s okay, then everything will be okay. They had been together too long for him not to know what was going on in her head. The moment Chelsea received a clean bill of health, Andi saw an opportunity to re-center ourselves. That’s what we’re doing right now—taking the path back to our center.
“Do you have ice pops on the list?” Chelsea asked from the backseat. She had the headphones on, and Dennis was surprised she could overhear their conversation. Billy was reading a Richard Scarry book and paying no attention to them.
“Sure do,” Andi said.
“Cool.”
They bumped over the railroad tracks, followed the curve by the butcher shop, and made a right into the parking lot. The strip mall that spread out like a sleeping monster at the other end was less than three years old. It featured a Baskin-Robbins, a Subway, a women’s gym, an Italian restaurant, a dollar store, and a one-hour dry cleaners that Dennis had scratched off his list after they lost two buttons on the first shirt he brought them. The anchor was a massive A&P supermarket.
There were only six other vehicles in sight, all near the front door in a tight group. The lot’s full capacity was 420, and on any given Sunday it would be full. Dennis had even driven by in the dead of night and seen more cars than this; those that belonged to the stock boys, the inventory clerks, and the custodians who made up the graveyard shift.