The Darkness Drops

by Peter Clement

  After offering the man a beer, he’d sat him down on his deck and waited to hear what the hell had motivated him to drop by. It didn’t take long.

  “I never did figure out why they grabbed her,” he’d said to Terry.

  “Grabbed her?”

  “It’s always bugged me, why they’d detain her, then let her go.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, old man?”

  Daikens had proceeded to tell Terry of Anna’s arrest the previous year in Guangzhou. “Something’s going on between her and the Chinese that we don’t get,” he concluded.

  At that moment Terry had at least understood her recent phone call--what she’d meant by asking if Wey Chen had mentioned meeting up with her, and why she’d verified the fate of Wey Chen’s husband. Two plus two still made four in the currency of betrayal, and Anna could add. He also realized that his suspicions prior to her China visit had been justified. But where closer scrutiny of her at that point might have taken history in a different direction, he’d focused on the General. Saw only that he was once more lost to the heat of his recurrent obsession.

  “Will you listen to yourself, Robert?” he’d demanded. “And why wait until now to tell me she’d been detained--”

  “I’m telling you now, because a few weeks ago she recontacted you. So I figured it might be useful to bring you back into the loop, should you be thinking of rekindling the relationship. After all, a few leading questions by you might give me some useful information on her or Yuri’s latest activities.” He’d then leaned back in his chair, its legs creaking under his weight, and grinned.

  Terry had run him out of the house. He couldn’t say which disgusted him more--the General having obviously taken to tapping her personal phone calls, or the invitation to spy on her.

  And yet, there you had it--the moment of synchronicity. The General, despite his twisted motives, had been that close to a link between Wey Chen, Anna, Yuri, and China, all at a time when Terry was puzzling over three little blue pins. Except, the great Dr. Terry Ryder, expert at seeing patterns and despiser of Robert Daikens, saw nothing to pull it all together, and threw it back in his face.

  How did this relate to Yuri and a cottage in the Thousand Islands? Later that year, surprisingly, the General also had backed off his Russians. Not only did his heightened surveillance of Anna fail to turn up anything incriminating, he began to complain that Yuri seemed up to nothing more than his usual mischief with females. “What’s peculiar about him now is how he and Mrs. Yurskovitch are still alive,” he told Terry just before New Year’s Eve, 2003. “They set up a love nest on Hill Island, yet continue to get away with boinking their heads off despite Bori’s usual tight hold on his female property. Hell, the Federal Bureau of Incompetence managed to track them there and bug the place. She has to have bribed Bori’s siloviki to cover for her. I mean, all the pair do is fuck like bunnies, keep house, and ski.”

  Today’s FBI report included a list of items that the State Troopers found in that cottage. Among the cross-country sky equipment were diskettes of conversations between a man and a woman, including sounds of them having sex. The FBI identified the male voice to be Yuri’s, and verified that the recordings were identical to what they’d captured on tape all those years ago.

  “Imagine the audacity, Robert!” Terry needled, having indulged an urge to call the General and blast him. “As Tania plays the tapes for the benefit of electronic eavesdroppers, Yuri skips out of the country under cover of darkness, and probably some body-double skips in, using the same route. Staying away from windows, the look-alike is nevertheless seen moving around inside with Tania, and occasionally the two of them don ski masks to make a cross-country excursion for the sake of the watchers. Meanwhile Yuri wanders the globe, and the FBI’s none the wiser. You gotta’ love it. You also gotta’ hate it. We blew it, both of us.”

  Daikens hung up without uttering a word.

  “You can’t shut this out of your legacy!” Terry yelled at a dial tone.

  “Are you all right, Sir?” his young pilot asked over the intercom.

  “Just stirring up a bit of mischief with a General who deserved it, son. It does wonders for the soul,” Still grimacing, he switched his phone over to the TV feed. Time to recheck how the media were behaving.

  “. . . I’m here at Pearl Harbor with Second Lieutenant ‘Brillo’ Jefferson who commanded the control tower as the Reagan approached its doom,” a well-known, judgmentally-challenged reporter announced, he and his interviewee decked out in camouflage HAZMAT suits. “Will you repeat for our audience what you heard had happened to crew members who’d come down with SHAKES prior to the wreck?”

  “Yes, Geraldo, they turned into staggering homicidal maniacs who bashed people’s brains out . . .”

  More balanced news at the top of the hour.

  “That’ll bring them running to ER,” Terry muttered, ready to strangle the shock-jocks who called themselves journalists these days. His imagination served up images of doctors who, having been on duty since the night before, would be looking out on seas of increasingly panicked new arrivals. Act by act, head down, and I ain’t goin’ home any time soon, they’d be saying through clenched teeth.

  “Not much air traffic tonight, is there, Sir,” the young pilot said, apparently having taken Terry’s show of temper a few minutes ago as an invitation to chat.

  Terry glanced up. All around him the darkening sky was a blank, blue slate. Normally on a Friday they’d see vapor trails crisscrossing it from horizon to horizon. Despite the pristine beauty of the scene, he felt a disquieting emptiness to be in so big a vista with no other traces of human kind in sight. “Get used to it,” he said, rather more curtly than intended, but following the press conference, transportation authorities had ordered the immediate screening of everybody with a critical job in anything that floated, flew, or drove on wheels. So far they’d grounded about a fifth of the country. Though necessary, it angered him.

  Having deep-sixed the small talk, Terry clicked the e-mail icon on his video phone and checked for messages. A thousand hits with questions from doctors who’d monitored the conference call awaited him. He ignored them all, and engaged the FIND feature, searching for any further replies from Anna.

  None.

  He tapped in Carla’s e-mail address, then paused, his fingers poised over the keys. Concerned loving, or make-her-laugh loving? No contest. Make her laugh. Thank-you for last night. I would have sent you a rose, but couldn’t find one that wasn’t irradiated. Didn’t think glow-in-the-dark bouquets would be appreciated at Honolulu General. Here’s the good news. I’m literally sitting on samples that could give us the big break through we need on this thing, the weapon’s bay of this buggy filled with them, so spirits up! Love, ya’.

  Sure, he was peddling his usual there’s still a chance stuff. Why not? He’d promised to face SHAKES with her, not shut down his brain, and the immunoglobulin trackers at least offered some reason to hope.

  He checked again for any messages from Anna.

  Still none.

  So many years after the fact, his heady mix of love, instinct, and guilt that had made it impossible to think wrong of Anna seemed hopelessly naive. If he looked back on their affair, the events were clear and easy to recall, but the passions that drove it resisted memory. Even when summoned through that special imagination of his, the emotions remained faded, insipid ghosts of their former selves, a source of puzzlement as to how they’d ever exerted such sway over his better judgment. Yet she’d had a hammerlock on him--rather on the younger, cock-sure, twelve-moves-ahead-of-every-one-else Terry Ryder--and he’d been blind to the underbelly of her intensity, the extremes to which her darker emotions could go, such as putting her feelings for him permanently on ice. All the more, he couldn’t bring himself to ask whether someone so punitive could be just as unforgiving of a country if she believed it had betrayed her.

  He considered turning his laptop over to the FBI and letting them chase her
down with their super-tracking programs. But if they did nab her--well, he knew first hand how she cut off people who crossed her. Better to keep her talking, albeit from whereabouts unknown. Her startling data about the peculiar spread of this bug had escaped everyone else’s notice, including his own. Yet that might have been just a ploy, to make him trust her. It didn’t matter. Whatever game she was playing, at least she might prove a useful link to Yuri.

  Minutes later he got a reply from Honolulu General.

  Terry, it’s Shelly. Carla asked me to get back to you. She, and everyone else who came through the mist are in reverse quarantine. Their cell counts plummeted this morning, and a lot of them are throwing up. I showed Carla your message through the glass. She loved the roses bit. But said to tell you the next time’s she’s this sick to her stomach, it better be with your baby.

  The words gut-punched him.

  Carla was right. When there’s little hope of a future, and the someone you love conjures up unreal expectations, it rubs your face in what you’ll miss.

  She’d warned him. Now she’d showed him.

  He yielded to exhaustion and, letting it pour through his veins to put him out of his misery the way some men use drugs, fell asleep.

  Two hours later the plane descended over San Antonio.

  Terry spotted the flood-lit remains of the Alamo where Sam Houston, Jim Bowie, and Davey Crockett, outnumbered and outgunned, fought to the last man against Santa Anna and the Mexican army in 1836. “Now I know how you felt,” he said under his breath.

  Jim Bowie and Davey Crocket looked up from the slaughter. They tipped their hats to him.

  Terry summoned his courage to do what he’d put off for the whole flight, and held out his gloved hands, fingers splayed. Maybe lack of sleep explained mood swings, impulsive behavior, being troubled by open spaces, irritability, and an imagination that had become a little too frisky in supplying images verging on hallucinations. Or maybe it didn’t.

  It was hard to tell through the material, but for now, everything seemed steady as a rock.

  Minutes later the pilot cut into his frequency on the radio. “Listen to this, Doc.” He flipped a switch, and chatter from the control tower filled Terry’s ears.

  “. . . Due to a sudden standing down of staff, all landings are delayed by at least an hour. Please advise us of your fuel status . . .”

  But Terry’s attention was already directed to something else below.

  Tents had not only sprung up in the parking lots of hospitals.

  In nearly every park or open space, columns of army trucks stood at the ready laden with supplies, and teams of soldiers had begun to set up huge canvas canopies marked with Red Cross emblems.

  Even then, it wouldn’t be enough.

  From blocks around, people swarmed toward them like marauding ants.

  Chapter 23

  The next day, Saturday, January 24, 2009, 10:01 P.M. CST

  San Antonio, Texas

  In twenty-four hours, headaches had become the most feared consequence of SHAKES. Headaches of all descriptions. Splitting. Throbbing. Pounding. They could quickly spiral out of control, becoming the “Give me something, or I’ll blow my own head off” kind.

  “I need your input, Ryder,” Betty Houston said over the phone. “Reports about intractable pain are flooding in from all over the country, and no body knows squat about how to treat it.” She’d reached him at the stuffy, hot, low-ceilinged laboratory where, for the last twenty-four hours, he and a small army of frustrated technicians had struggled to coax the mystery invader out of hiding.

  “That bad?”

  “That bad. The media has taken to calling them ‘Screamers.’ Get over to the Alamo Dome. That’s where they’ve taken them in your area. I pray you can come up with something. Like it or not, among researchers, you’re the guy who’s actually seen the most victims of this beast.”

  “Terrific.”

  Terry heard them before he saw them. Their screeches, howls and wails echoed through the bowels of the amphitheater so loudly that he might have been approaching an abattoir, the slaughter of beasts in full swing.

  He braced for the worst, and walked out on the artificial turf into bedlam. Under the lights, from goal line to goal line and across the width of the field, thousands of people writhed on cots, blankets, and stretchers. Erect IV poles gave the scene a precision at odds with the chaos of so many heaving bodies, some bucking under the restraint of leather straps. But the noise--the cries circling a bowl of 50,000 empty seats, feeding one another, the way flames in a bonfire wrap around themselves--staggered him the most.

  A heavy aroma of human waste permeated the air, telling him that the onslaught of patients had left no time to change soiled sheets or empty bedpans. Instead, gaunt-eyed staff rushed from stretcher to stretcher, fiddling with IV lines or verifying that airways were still clear. They wore only standard OR masks, probably more against the reek of feces and urine than from fear of contagion. In recent hours care givers the world over had pretty much abandoned the much thicker, more claustrophobic anti-viral models, once word had spread that there were no hot zones, therefore little chance that barrier methods of isolation would stop the spread of this thing.

  Terry wasn’t so sure that that had been a good idea.

  The man who’d led him into the stadium, Dr. Harvey Jones--he told Terry to call him Hank--wore an ID badge that identified him as Director of Emergency at San Antonio General. But the accompanying photo showed a smiling, smooth-shaven, well-tanned visage, not the pale, grim face sporting a day’s stubble of beard that confronted Terry now. “This isn’t exactly an ICU, but I didn’t know where else to put them,” Harvey yelled above the noise. “Our tents weren’t big enough, and their screams were scaring the shit out of all the other patients. We’re nearly out of morphine, ketamine, fentanyl--all the big guns. They cut the pain, but we kept having to tweak the doses higher, then run around to make sure everyone’s still breathing.” He sounded apologetic, as if the mayhem were his fault. “Our next step is to simply anesthetize them for as long as we can. After that...” He stood without speaking, surveying the thrashing mass of people, no further explanation needed.

  “Their work ups were negative?” Terry responded, falling back on one of the first rules in medicine. When at a loss for words, take a history.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Not exactly?”

  “There were no bleeds or space-occupying lesions, but some of these patients had convinced their doctors to do MRIs when the mild tremors and numbness first began to bother them a little over three weeks ago--”

  “Three weeks!”

  “I know, it’s way ahead of what we thought had been the civilian curve, even predates the first onset of symptoms in the crew of the Reagan. We haven’t had time to look closely at their charts for an explanation, but from what I hear coming out of other centers, its the same story. Everyone who’s progressed to this kind of pain has had the other symptoms for three weeks.”

  Son of a bitch! Just what he needed--another mystery. “I’ll get a team in here from CDC to start reviewing those charts. Anything else?”

  “We compared those previous MRIs with the ones taken today. Our radiologists couldn’t identify any positional changes among the usual landmarks--ventricle size, the pineal, vascular patterns.” he replied, referring to the physical features normally used as markers in the brain--sign posts against which which small shifts in the location of other structures can be measured. “However, when we turned the task over to our computers, they picked up minute changes we missed with the naked eye. In every case, those standard landmarks have been compressed or squeezed, but only by a few millimeters mind you. Whatever is in those brains, it’s expanding enough to raise intracranial pressure, hence the pain, and is diffuse enough that the forces are uniformly distributed, so there’s no measurable shift in any one structure. We had to stop doing spinal taps, for fear of herniations, and some of these people already show si
gns of papilledema, while others are slipping into comas. Again, a few centers have begun to report similar findings . . .”

  Harvey continued to talk about the effects of swelling in the brain. His voice, though loud, remained a flat monotone, the kind that shell-shocked soldiers display after their unit takes a hit. Thinking, emotion, instinct--everything’s blunted. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t thought outside the box and seen the obvious solution. At least Terry saw it as obvious, albeit temporary.

  Compelled to draw nearer, he approached the edge of the crowd. “Why not simply reduce the pressure, the way we would in a bleed or trauma?” he shouted to Harvey.

  The man looked at him, his expression blank.

  “Mannitol,” Terry yelled above the din.

  “What?” Harvey leaned closer, hand behind his ear.

  “IV Mannitol,” Terry repeated, referring to a precursor of the sugar mannose with enough osmotic pull to suck water from a brain and shrink it in seconds. “You know how we use it to temporarily relieve intracranial pressure from head trauma or hemorrhagic strokes. It might do the same for a brain riddled with an enlarging, but unknown entity and buy these people a bit of relief.”

  In a blink, a spark appeared in the darkness of Harvey’s gaze as his flaccid expression shifted from helpless to incredulous. “Son of a bitch! That could work.”

  “Okay, Dr. Jones--”

  “Please, call me Hank.”

  “Okay, Hank, I suggest you rustle us up as much of the stuff as you can,” Terry said, already wading into the rows of stretchers. The wailing engulfed him completely, a cacophony that drowned out all other sounds. Breathing through his mouth to cut the stench of urine soaked clothing and the cloying odors of feces, he turned toward the source of an ear-piercing screech not six feet from him. It came from a middle-aged woman who wrenched her head violently from side to side as if she were trying to shake it off her neck. The movement splayed her long white hair over the end of her stretcher where it swayed to and fro, reminding Terry of sea-grass caught in a current. Focus, he told himself, and leaned over to take her face between his palms. “Ma’am, I’m Dr. Ryder,” he shouted to make himself heard, and forced the woman’s wide-eyed stare to meet his. “I’m going to give you something to stop the pain.”