by Mara, Wil
Not long after they arrived, he put Nickelodeon on the TV for Billy. The little boy sat there, attention fully trained on the set, scratching his arms and legs absentmindedly as pediatric sedatives and painkillers coursed through his five-year-old body. It wasn’t long before they were all watching. No one said anything about what was on; they simply went with it. When the kids slept, Dennis and Andi switched to PBS for Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—programs they had watched as children. This also seemed like a natural thing to do, as if they were coming full circle in their lives. Back to the beginning …
They talked as they hadn’t talked in years, like in the early days of their relationship. Dennis told her again that she was the love of his life, something he had thought often but, to his regret, felt he had not expressed enough. He said she had made his life worthwhile, gave it real meaning and substance. Andi listened to every word and cried frequently, holding him close and offering her own, similar sentiments. He was the only man she’d ever truly loved, the one who made her realize what love really was. In this one respect, she said, she would die satisfied. Dennis then apologized profusely for anything he ever did to hurt or upset her, and he begged for her forgiveness. She gave it without hesitation.
As the last of the sunlight faded on the second day, and with both kids fast asleep, Andi whispered to Dennis, “When will it start?” The it, as Dennis already knew, was the onset of Stage Three—blurred vision, slurred speech, and general confusion. It would last about six to eight hours, followed by dementia and episodic violence, plus the systemic bleeding from the meltdown of internal organs. You were stripped of everything that mattered—your personality, your identity, and your dignity.
Dennis glanced briefly at the clock on the wall. It was of the basic variety seen in hospitals, classrooms, and police stations all over the world.
“It should be any time,” he said, his voice so dry that the first words came up like embers through a chimney.
“I guess we … we should have Mel start using the sedatives now.”
They looked at each other for a long time, the torment clear on their faces. They knew the sedatives would be, for all practical purposes, the end of the road. As the infection progressed, the drugs would be the only mercy they would receive. By administering them, the kids would be spared most of the suffering. But they would also be close to a vegetative state, drifting through a mindless haze until death finally came for them.
“I suppose,” Dennis said, his voice faltering. He leaned over and stroked Chelsea’s hair, then kissed her gently on the top of the head. “I guess it’s the right … the best thing to do.” Then, his lower lip trembling, he said in a sharp whisper. “Mother of God, she’s only seven.…” He buried his face in a pillow and broke down, his body trembling as the grief took over. Andi put her arm around him and kissed him on the back of the neck.
Mel came into the room thirty minutes later with the syringe. The fluid was clear and loose, almost like water. The Jensens didn’t know what it was, didn’t really care. Andi held Chelsea against her; Dennis continued to stroke her hair with one hand while balling the other into a fist and pressing it against his mouth.
Talking softly to the child even though she was asleep, Mel pulled up the sleeve of her cotton shirt to search for a vein, as she had done with over two dozen other children in the last week alone.
Then she stopped. “What the—?”
Dennis and Andi turned their heads at precisely the same moment, as if they’d rehearsed the move.
“What?” Andi said—then she saw it, too. “Oh my God…”
The pustules had shrunk. The rash had faded.
Dennis gently lifted the sleeve of her other arm. “No way…”
Same thing.
Then, with the excruciating daintiness that any decent father reserves for his daughter, he lifted her gown to just above her knees.
“It’s disappearing!” Andi said, the tiniest of smiles appearing on her face for the first time in weeks. “Mel! It’s disa—”
But Mel had already fled the room to find the nearest doctor.
EIGHTEEN
Beck was in the middle of nowhere, on a sandy trail that slithered through the green wilderness of the Catskills. The rented convertible had not been built for off-road travel, and he prayed it wouldn’t shake apart. He was also praying that he would hold together—pain waves were radiating through his back from the bumping and jostling. He had pulled off Route 88 nearly an hour ago. According to the handwritten notes lying on the passenger seat, he should reach his destination any minute now.
Neither Bob Easton nor any of his three friends survived after their last trip here. That was significant. All three had more of the same hunks of raggedly cut meat in their homes. One had apparently cooked and eaten some the same night he brought it back. The other two put it in their freezers. Sure enough, the mystery virus was present in all of them. The final piece to the puzzle came to Beck when he interviewed a fifth man, a friend of theirs from the local VFW, who was supposed to go on the trip but couldn’t make it due to, of all things, an illness. He was a widower, and he’d left town when the outbreak began to stay with a son in Vermont. Over the phone, he told Beck where the others had been. It was their favorite spot, especially at the start of the season. Beck jotted down the rough directions and hoped he could divine the location. Neither MapQuest nor his GPS would do much good out here.
The trail finally smoothed out and cut through a colorful, flower-filled glade, then led into a hallway of fir and pine trees. A few hundred yards farther on, it terminated abruptly in a sandy, circular clearing: a natural cul-de-sac. He parked and got out, gloves, mask, and goggles in place. He also carried a kit with a variety of instruments and containers, plus a digital camera in a black leather case. Both were small enough to clip onto his belt.
Others had been here recently, as evidenced by the tire tracks printed in the sand. There were footprints, too. Or, more specifically, what appeared to be boot prints. They led down the narrow trail Beck had been told to follow. It seemed that this “favorite spot” wasn’t exclusive to Bob Easton and company after all.
The trail led Beck through the forest for about a half hour. He liked the wild; under normal circumstances the isolation and quiet would have a calming effect on him. It was a beautiful day, and this was a beautiful place—the kind of place where he might do a little hiking, maybe find a waterway and bring a kayak. Under normal circumstances …
He found one of Easton’s hunting stands; it looked like a tree fort on stilts. It was wide enough to fit several grown men, and there was a ladder leading up to a trapdoor in the bottom. The door was hanging down, the hook darkened with rust. Plastic shotgun shells were scattered in the dried leaves, along with a few beer cans: Miller Lite and Budweiser.
Farther along he found another stand, more basic than the first—a group of two-by-fours nailed together in a tree to create a serviceable single-person platform. He crossed a tiny stream in a lowland area. Then the trail ran up again, meeting a second path that bisected it in perfect right angles, creating a four-way intersection. Beck turned left, never realizing the other way would have taken him to the Jensens’ cabin.
A few minutes later he found himself at the peak of a pebbly ridge. Through the leafy canopy he could see the mountains and valleys beyond. Then the smell hit him, different from the one in Easton’s basement, but just as heavy.
Beck stopped, looked around, saw nothing. The odor disappeared … then it was there again. The wind, he realized.
He watched the trees intently for a moment. When another gust rustled through, he left the trail and moved hurriedly in the direction from which it came. The odor became stronger, more invasive. Some characteristics were familiar to him, triggering all sorts of unpleasant memories. The stench of rot and disease and decay. And death …
He found the first deer lying in a shallow, open space among a cluster of trees. It was a whitetail, a young male
judging by the relatively small size of its horns. Its eyes were puffed shut, and black eruptions that looked like giant zits mottled most of its face. The mouth was open slightly, frozen that way when the rigor mortis set in. Dried blood was still present, caked onto the animal’s tiny teeth. Flies buzzed noisily around the carcass, so thick by the gutted torso that they formed a scant cloud. Beck doubted this was the one from which Easton and his friends had taken their meat. It hadn’t been cut open—it’d been ripped. Clawed by some hungry predator—or, more likely, a pack of them. He took a sample of the dried blood and transferred it to a rubbed-capped vial. He labeled the vial and put it back in the case. Then he took out the camera and clicked a few pictures.
About twenty yards on, he found another corpse. It had been decaying longer than the first, the hair dry-matted to the bones, half the skull exposed. Beck scraped off a few tissue samples into a plastic bag. The third body was at the peak of a small hill to the right, and from there Beck could see four more. Two were lying side by side, as if they’d killed each other in close combat.
By the time he got back to the convertible, he had collected material from more than twenty of them. He took a portable test kit from the trunk and used sterile tweezers to immerse several tissue samples into small reaction tubes of greenish liquid. Within thirty seconds, the viral proteins changed the color of the fluid from green to red—the polymerase chain reaction he was hoping for. He knew it wasn’t conclusive by any means; field kits could be notoriously unreliable. This one in particular, although capable of testing beyond a single-pathogen regime and with an industry reputation for minimal false positives or negatives, was intended to detect common respiratory contagion during cold and flu season. Also, the samples were usually of human origin—nasopharyngeal aspirates and swabs, and bronchoalveolar lavage. So he needed confirmation in a lab setting before he could take the next step.
But still …
This is it. I’d bet my life on it.
He yanked his cell phone from his pocket and was about to dial, but the screen displayed an icon of a phone inside a circle with a line through it, and underneath it read, SERVICE UNAVAILABLE.
“Damn.”
He packed everything quickly and got back in the car.
NINETEEN
It was a montage of colorful, soft-edged images. They seemed to be coming randomly now—Dennis sitting in the science lab of his elementary school, watching Mr. Matheson use potassium nitrate to make little smoke bombs … checking himself over in the mirror on the night of his senior prom, looking fairly sharp in his white tuxedo … racing BMX bikes around an impromptu track that had been etched through a local construction site. The tractors responsible for it were sitting idle along the fringes because one of the site owners had been arrested for something called embezzlement. There was also a memory of him and Elaine at the Jersey Shore, crouching down in the wet surf trying to dig up “sandbugs”—opaque, beetle-like creatures that buried themselves a few inches below the surface. His parents—both long dead now—stood nearby. Dad, so gangly-thin that you could count each rib from twenty paces, was puffing on one of the Pall Malls that had contributed to the diminishment of his existence. Mom sat nearby in a beach chair reading a glamour magazine, the cancer in her uterus still a few years away from taking shape.
The image that shuddered through the darkness and then brightened to full clarity was of him lying in his bed on a Saturday morning while the comforting scents of summer blew through the half-open windows. He was about ten or eleven and looked every bit of it. He was being slowly awoken by someone who was trying to do it diplomatically. A hand had been set on his bare arm—he always slept without a shirt in the summer—and was now shaking him so gently that it felt like he was on a raft in a swimming pool. The lids of one eye slowly peeled apart. It was Elaine again, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, ready to go. Blond-haired, blue-eyed, pretty like a character in an L. M. Montgomery novel. Those eyes were wide with both excitement and fear. The excitement came from deep within, where she had a natural wellspring of it. She had always been that way—thrilled about life, about being alive, and the shiny possibilities each day held. The fear … well, that was Dennis’s fault, and he knew it. He wasn’t a “morning person” as a kid, and he particularly hated getting up on weekends one minute earlier than his Circadian rhythms required. He snapped at her many times for this travesty, and she had become gun-shy about it. Nevertheless … she wanted someone to play with, and she just adored her older brother. So her compromise was to wake him in as inoffensive a manner as possible.
“Den,” she said, her voice echoey in the dream, “come on, wake up. I want to do something, Dennis. Come on…”
Except that she didn’t say I want to do something in the dream—what she said was, You need to do something. And her voice didn’t have that hint of terror in it. It was still soft and delicate, but it wasn’t the voice of a child.
His eyes fluttered open, and he turned to see her hovering nearby. It was the grown-up version of her now. As his mind swam back to the present, some distant part of it took note of the hand that had been carefully set on his bare arm. It was kind of funny, he thought—more than thirty years later, and she still woke him like she was defusing a bomb.
“What’s going on?” he said, or at least tried to—the words crumbled in a dry hiss. He cleared his throat and tried again—“Hey, what’s up?”
“Someone’s here to see you guys,” she said, smiling and looking toward the front of the room. Dennis noticed for the first time that his sister was wearing a surgical mask.
He followed her gaze and found Mel standing there. Her nurse’s scrubs were the color of raspberry sherbet, but her mask was baby blue like Elaine’s. They don’t match … what would Stacy and Clinton of What Not to Wear have to say about that? This bizarre thought inspired him to make a real effort to get with it.
He turned and found Andi sitting there with her arms crossed, grinning at him.
“It’s about time,” she said. “We’ve been waiting nearly twenty minutes.”
“You were snoring like a hog in a barn,” Mel added, driving the other two into a fit of laughter. The kids lay next to their mother on their sides, snoozing away.
Andi noticed the look of bewilderment on his face and said, “Mel gave them each a sedative. They need the rest.”
Dennis felt a jolt of alarm—A sedative?… Then he saw the fading blisters on his daughter’s arms, pinkish now as opposed to the angry red they were twenty-four hours ago. Same with those on Andi’s arms, as well as the swelling around her face. The original features were beginning to reemerge, restoring the simple-but-natural beauty that always stirred him.
“Are you with us now?” Mel asked.
“Yeah, sorry.” He cleared his throat again and repositioned himself. “I’m here. What’s up?”
“Well, I wanted to tell you all that the serum is working.”
“That’s wonderful,” Andi said.
“Awesome,” Elaine added.
“Yes. Thirty-two patients have seen reduced symptoms, and I’m sure there will be more.”
“Excellent!” Andi said with a liveliness Dennis had thought he would never hear again.
Mel was nodding. “There are a lot of people in this hospital who have put you on their Christmas list, that’s for sure. If it wasn’t for Dr. Petti’s strict orders that you should all be left alone to rest, there’d be a stampede to this room, believe me.”
Andi looked to her sister-in-law, then back to Mel. “How is the serum being made so fast, and in enough quantities for so many people?” she asked. “There hasn’t been that much blood taken from us, and you couldn’t use it on everyone anyway.”
“They’re taking your immune system cells and growing them in a culture,” Elaine said. “They’re the ones producing the protective antibodies.”
“The ones neutralizing the effect of the virus,” Mel said.
“That’s right. Once they’re cultured, th
e antibodies are ready for injection into other patients. Some are also left behind to grow more cultures, and then production becomes exponential.”
“That’s fantastic,” Andi said. “And it all sounds relatively simple, too.”
“Well … there are some snags,” Mel said. “It’s not that simple.”
“Such as?”
“Like human cells in a culture divide only every twenty hours or so, so it takes time to produce more antibodies. We can’t make nature go faster.”
It didn’t take a mathematician to figure out what this meant. “So some people who can be saved simply won’t get the serum in time?”
“That’s right,” Mel said. “It’s like the day they find a cure for cancer. Even if they get it to every person in the world who needs it, some will die while it’s in the mail.”
“Is there any way to make serum faster?”
“There’s an experimental approach that’s been discussed,” Elaine said, “and I think the government might try it. It goes like this—a high-tech company that specializes in rapid sequencing may be able to quickly map out the DNA that encodes the antibody’s dual chains. Then the DNA is placed in a bacterial expression system, where it could then, theoretically, be replicated in large quantities.”
Mel chuckled. “Did anyone in the room understand that besides the two of us?”
“Synthesis,” Andi said. This made Dennis suddenly remember her fascination for all things science. It had always been a mystery why she didn’t choose a scientific discipline for a career.
“That’s right.”
“It sounds unstable, though. Unpredictable. A lot of variables that can fall the wrong way.”
“That’s why it’s experimental,” Elaine told her. “Plus, the legalities if someone is injected and it doesn’t work, or their condition worsens.…”
“So then the best approach is the one they’re already doing?” Andi asked. “Based on our cells?”