by Greg Bear
“You’re pregnant again, morning sickness?”
“No, damn it,” Kaye said, poking his arm. “You’re not listening.”
“I’m not hearing anything I can understand. Tell me, straight… did it feel like an episode, a breakdown? We’ve been under a lot of stress.” He stood up by the side of the bed, leaving the short robe behind. Kaye watched him, his forearms and chest and the tops of his shoulders covered with coarse hair, and her gaze dropped to his genitals hanging at postcoital parade rest, waving with the nervous swing of his arms.
She laughed.
This stopped Mitch cold. He stood like a statue, staring down on her. He had not heard Kaye laugh like that, at him, at the ridiculousness of life, in well over a year, maybe two; he couldn’t remember the last time.
“You sound happy,” he said.
“I’m not happy,” Kaye insisted indignantly. “Life’s a bowl of shit, but our daughter…” Her face crumpled. Through her fingers, she sobbed, “She’s going to live, Mitch. That’s a blessing, isn’t it? Is that what I’m feeling—thankfulness, relief?”
“Thankful to what?” Mitch said. “The god who gives little children nasty diseases?”
Kaye spread out her arms, gesturing with her fingers at the bedroom, the lace coverlet, wood-paneled walls, pressed flowers under glass in ornate gold frames, the decorative water pitcher on the little white wicker table by the nightstand. Mitch watched her puffy eyes and red face with real concern. “We are luckier than others,” she said. “We are so lucky our daughter is alive.”
“God didn’t do that,” Mitch said, his voice turning sour. “We did that. God would have killed her. God is killing thousands like Stella right now.”
“Then what am I feeling?” Kaye asked. She held out her hands and Mitch gripped them. A blackbird sang. Mitch’s eyes went to the window.
“You’re bouncing back,” he said, his anger smoothing. “We can’t feel like shit all the time or we’d just give up and die.” He pulled her up on her knees on the bed, and expertly hugged her until her back popped.
“Ow,” she said.
“That did not hurt,” Mitch said. “You feel better now.”
“I do,” Kaye affirmed, arms around his neck.
Stella pushed through the door. “I’ve got this thing on my wrist,” she said, tugging at the medical tape. “My skin hurts.” She stared at them, naked, together. There was no use keeping secrets from her; she could smell everything in the room. Stella had seemed to instinctively understand the whys and wherefores of sex even as a toddler. Nevertheless, Mitch released Kaye, swung his body away, and reached for the robe.
Kaye pulled the coverlet into a wrap and went to her daughter. Stella leaned into her arms and Kaye and Mitch carried her back to her bed.
51
OHIO
“Our last link to the outside world,” Augustine said, holding up a satellite phone. “Secret Service, bless them. But I had to think of it. They’re hiding out in their cars, and they did not volunteer.” He climbed the flight of steps to Trask’s office. Dried vomit—not his own—ran in streaks down his leg.
Dicken sidled up the steps behind Augustine. “The school has a secure server. I have Jurie’s password for the lab computers, but not the password to go outside the school.”
“I know. What are we looking at, anyway?”
“Coxsackie, a new strain,” Dicken said. “The children have hand, foot, and mouth disease.”
Augustine pushed the door to the office open. “Like the cattle?”
Dicken shook his head. “You’re tired. Listen to me. Not foot and mouth, it’s HFMD. Hand, foot, and mouth. Common childhood viral infection.”
“Recombined?” Augustine sat behind the desk and propped the phone on the desk. He punched a number, got a rasping and wheedling noise, then swore and punched another.
“Yes,” Dicken said.
“With old endogenous viruses?”
“Yes.”
“Shit. How is that possible?”
“It’s a mechanism I haven’t seen before.”
“Then why bother to call?” Augustine stopped in mid-dial, disgusted. His fingernails were black with dirt and secretions. “It’s all over.”
“No, it isn’t. The recombined genes can’t possibly be from the children,” Dicken said. “They don’t have them. They were excised and discarded when their chromosomes reformed during supermitosis.”
Augustine raised his chin. “We helped the virus recombine?”
Dicken nodded. “It may have traveled in us and mutated silently for years. Now it’s making its move—against the children.”
“Proof?”
“Proof enough,” Dicken said. “Most of what we need, anyway. We can send in my results. The CDC just needs to do their own analysis, compare my findings with their own. I’m sure they’ll match. Then, we tell Ohio to back off and get Emergency Action to calm down. This is not a killer plague—not for us.”
“Will anyone listen?” Augustine asked.
“They have to. It’s the truth.”
Augustine did not seem convinced that would be enough to turn the tide. “Who’s the best contact at CDC?”
Dicken thought quickly. “Jane Salter. She’s in charge of statistical analysis at National Center for Infectious Diseases. She never did put in with the Emergency Action people, but they respect her judgment. She’s trusted and objective.” He took the handset from Augustine and dialed Salter’s direct number in Atlanta.
They were in luck, finally. The call went through, and Salter answered in person.
“Jane, it’s Christopher.”
“The famous Christopher Dicken? Long time, Christopher. Forgive me, I’m a little loopy. I’ve been up for days, crunching numbers.”
“I’m in Ohio, at the Goldberger School. I have something important.”
“About a certain recombined Coxsackie virus?”
“That’s the one. Population dynamics, virus flow, analysis,” Dicken said.
“You don’t say.”
“You’ll want my results.”
He heard a click.
“I’m recording, Christopher,” Salter said. “Make it quick. There’s a key meeting in five minutes. Go or no go, if you know what I mean.”
Augustine looked up at a distant roaring noise. He walked to the window and looked across the traffic circle, beyond the main gate. “What the hell is that?” He swung up a pair of binoculars from the windowsill and peered through them. “Helicopters.”
DeWitt stamped up the stairs, screaming, “Helicopters are coming!”
“Troops moving in?” Dicken asked.
“They wouldn’t dare. We’re in quarantine.” Augustine tried to hold the image steady. “They’re civilian. Who in hell would fly them down here?”
“Someone bringing in supplies,” Dicken suggested.
“Is that possible?”
“Someone rich who has a kid here,” Dicken said.
“There’s two of them,” Augustine said. “Not nearly enough.” Then, his voice breaking, “Goddamn. I don’t believe it. They’re shooting. The troops are shooting at them!”
“What’s happening?” Salter asked on the phone.
“Just listen to me,” Dicken said. He could hear the crackle of assault weapons on the school perimeter. “And for God’s sake, work fast.”
He began reading her his results.
52
PENNSYLVANIA
The air was cooling and clouds were sliding in above the trees. Mitch sat on the dock. Kaye was in the house, sleeping beside Stella in the big bed, which Stella preferred now that she was feeling a little better.
It could be days before she could travel, but Mitch knew their time would come sooner than that. Somehow, though, he could not bring himself to roust them and pile them in the back of the Jeep.
It wasn’t just Stella’s health that concerned him.
There was something else, and small as it might seem in retrospect, it d
isturbed him, the way Kaye had looked, talking about what she had felt on the dock. If after all these years, his partner, his wife, was faltering…
Kaye had always been the reservoir of their strength, the rooted tree.
The air was heavy and moist. He watched the overcast move in and felt the first spatters of rain, big drops that changed the air’s taste and smell. His nose twitched. He could smell the forest getting ready for the storm. His sense of smell had been sensitive even before they had had Stella. He had once told Kaye “I think with my nose.” But that ability had been enhanced by being a SHEVA parent, and for two years after Stella’s birth, Mitch had reveled in what it brought into his life. Even now, he smelled things acutely that others could only vaguely detect, if at all.
The lake was not exactly a healthy lake, but sat like a pretty little pocket of green, taking the drainage from the forest during the winter and spring and then drying up and concentrating all the nutrients during the summer, turning ripe with algae. It had no outlet. Still, it was okay; it was pretty. It was probably happy enough, as lakes went, isolated from the big doings of other lakes and rivers, dreaming in its own muted way of the seasons.
Mitch would never have built a cabin on this lake because of the potential for mosquitoes, but was glad the cabin was here, nonetheless. Besides, there were only a few mosquitoes about, he didn’t know why.
The last few years, Kaye’s scent in his nostrils had been perpetually active, sharp, stressed, and concerned; he had smelled other SHEVA mothers, and mothers in general, and had found a similar watchful odor. In bed a few hours ago, there had been a hint of contentment, of confirmation. Or was he just making that up?
Wishful thinking, that his wife would be happy for a little while?
Stella had noticed it, too.
Perhaps their family had become like the lake, isolated, ingrown, not entirely healthy. And that was why Stella had run away. His thoughts scattered like wavelets under the moving finger of a downdraft.
After a few minutes, Mitch just sat and tried to be empty. Gradually, another concern surfaced, about where they would go when the time came, where they would flee next. He did not know the answer, did not want to believe they were anywhere near the end of their rope, so he put the concern away on a shelf with other impossible worries and looked into the emptiness once more.
The emptiness was comfortable but never lasted long.
He had never asked Kaye how he smelled to her. Kaye did not like to discuss such things. He had fallen in love with a sad and outer-facing Kaye, lived with a woman who had not opened herself to him in months or years, until last night.
Mitch held up his hands and stared at the smooth fingers. He could almost feel himself on a site, with a shovel or trowel or brush or toothbrush in his hand, unearthing some bit of bone or pot. He could almost feel the sweat running down the back of his neck under the hot sun, in the shade of his cap and neck flap.
He wondered what the Neandertal father had thought about, at the last, lying in that Alpine cave, freezing beside his already-dead wife and stillborn child. That was where it had all begun for Mitch, finding the mummies. From that point on, his life had corkscrewed; he had met Kaye, had become part of her world. Mitch’s life had acquired tremendous depth but had narrowed in scope and range.
The Neandertal father had never had a chance to feel guilty about the good old lost days of carefree mammoth and bison hunting, cave-bear baiting, swilling fermented berries or bags of honey wine with the boys.
At least once a day, Mitch went through such a sequence of thoughts, interrupting the desired emptiness. Then the thoughts faded and he stared into himself and saw a frightened child hiding among shadows. You never know what it is like to be a child, even as a child. You have to have one of your own, and then it comes to you.
You understand for the first time.
The rain pattered on the dock, leaving dark brown splats. Drops beaded in the blades of grass shooting up from the moldering life vests. His hand walked along the wood and found an interesting chunk of bark, about six inches long, weathered and gray. He ran his fingers over the bark, pinched its corky edge.
Kaye stood behind him. He had not heard her until the dock creaked. She moved quietly; she always had. “Did you see a flash out here?” she asked.
“Lightning?”
“No, over there.” Kaye pointed into the woods. “Like a glint.”
Mitch stared with a frown. “Nothing.”
Kaye sighed. “Come inside,” she said. “Stella’s having some chicken soup. You should eat, too.”
Watching his daughter slurp soup would be a treat. Mitch stood and walked with Kaye, arm in arm, back to the house.
A man in a black baseball cap stepped out of the cabin’s shadows and met them at the porch door. Kaye gasped. He was young, in his late twenties at most, buff, with tanned arms. He wore a bulletproof vest over a black T-shirt and khaki pants and he carried a small black pistol. Silhouettes moved through the cabin. Mitch instinctively pushed Kaye behind him.
The man in the black cap smelled like burned garlic. He rattled off some words. Mitch’s attention was too divided to listen closely.
“Did you hear me? I’m Agent John Allen, Federal Enforcement for Emergency Action. We have an arrest and sequester warrant. Hold out your arms and let me see your hands.” The agent looked left, past Mitch. “Are you Kaye Lang?”
Another man, older, walked through the double door. He held out a piece of paper in a blue folder. Mitch glanced at the paper, then focused again on the cabin. Over the young man’s shoulder, through the patio doors and past the couch, Mitch saw two men taking Stella out the front door. They had wrapped his daughter in a plastic sheet.
She mewed like a weak kitten.
Mitch raised his hand. Too late, he remembered the piece of bark from the dock, still clenched in his fingers.
The young man jerked up his pistol.
Mitch heard the report and the forest and house spun. The slug felt like a Major League batter connecting with Mitch’s arm. The chunk of bark sailed. He landed on his face and chest. A big man sat on him and others planted their running shoes around his head and someone lifted Kaye’s feet off the ground. Mitch tried to look up and the big man shoved his face into the pebbled concrete of the walkway. He could not breathe—the whack of the slug and then the fall had pushed out all his air. They twisted his hands behind him. Something parted in his shoulder. That hurt like hell. They were all talking at once, and a couple of people were shouting. He heard Kaye scream. The rain hadn’t been so bad. The lake had been fine, and so had the house. He should have known better. Mitch smelled his own blood and started to choke.
53
PENNSYLVANIA-ARIZONA
Stella Nova Rafelson stood on wobbly legs in the long steaming shower stall and watched pink disinfectant swirl down the tile drain. Men and women wearing masks and plastic hoods and rubber gloves walked along the line with clipboards and cameras, recording the children as they stood naked.
“Name,” asked a stout young woman with a husky voice.
“Stella,” she answered. Her joints ached.
In a clinic somewhere, humans gave her injections and strapped her onto a bed surrounded by curtains. They kept her there for at least a day as she worked through the last obvious signs of her illness. Once, when she was released to use a bedpan, she tried to get up and walk away. A nurse and a police officer stopped her. They did not want to touch her. They used long plastic pipes to prod her back into bed.
The next day, she was tied to a gurney and rolled into the back of a white van. The van took her to a big warehouse. There, she saw hundreds of children lying on rows of camp beds. Crushed and dusty crates had been pushed into a pile at the back of the warehouse. The floor blackened her bare feet. The whole building smelled of old wood and dust and disinfectant.
They gave her soup in a squeeze bottle, cold soup. It tasted awful. All that night she cried out for Kaye and for Mitch in a voic
e so hoarse and weak she could barely hear it herself.
The next trip—in a bus across the desert and through many towns and cities—took a day and a night. She rode with other boys and girls, sitting upright and even sleeping on a bench seat.
She heard the guard and driver talking about the nearest city, Flagstaff, and understood she was in Arizona. As the bus slowed and jolted off the two-lane highway, Stella saw shiny metallic letters cemented into a brick arch over a heavy steel gate: Sable Mountain Emergency Action School.
Time came in confused jerks. Memory and smell mingled and it seemed that her past, her life with Kaye and Mitch, had gone down the drain with the disinfectant.
After they finished taking pictures again and recording their names, the attendants segregated the boys and girls and gave them hospital robes that flapped open at the back and moved the girls in a line across a concrete walkway, under the open evening air, into a mobile trailer unit, twelve new kids in all.
The trailer already held fourteen girls.
One of the girls stood by the bed where Stella lay and said, “Hello/Sorry.”
Stella looked up. The girl was tall and black-haired and had wide, deep brown eyes flecked with green.
“How are you feeling-KUK?” the girl asked her. She seemed to have a speech problem.
“Where am I?”
“It’s kind of like-KUK home,” the girl said.
“Where are my parents?” Stella asked, before she could stop herself. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment and fear.
“I don’t know,” the girl answered.
The fourteen gathered around the new girls and held out their hands. “Touch palms,” the black-haired girl told them. “It’ll make you feel better.”
Stella tucked her hands into her armpits. “I want to know where my parents are,” she said. “I heard guns.”
The black-haired girl shook her head slowly and touched Stella under the nose with the tip of her finger. Stella jerked her head back.
“You’re with us now,” she said. “Don’t be afraid.”