A BREAKERS NOVELLA
Edward W. Robertson
© 2013
1
Across the table, Ellie Colson's bosses laughed what might be the last big laugh of their lives. She forgave them. They didn't know they were joking about the end of the world.
She smiled thinly. Rawlings, her direct superior, chuckled and swabbed his puffy hand across the table, as if he were working at an imaginary water spot. Dr. Armen laughed and clutched his gut, as if he were afraid it might bounce away. Jesper Mason just smiled. Like Ellie, he hadn't been introduced by rank—Rawlings hadn't even mentioned which org he belonged to, which meant he was a field hand, and a useful one. She recognized him vaguely. Might have seen him around the stacks once or twice. Mason had told the joke, something about Spanish flu. Ellie hadn't been listening. She'd been thinking about the transmission rate in Rawlings' printout.
The laughter stopped. Conversation resumed. The room was bare and windowless but their voices carried no echo, dying in the small space like lost moths. It wasn't that these men weren't smart; they had enough degrees between them to paper a den. It wasn't that they lacked dedication; she would soon prove herself least dedicated of any of them.
It was that they lacked imagination.
"Ellie?" Rawlings said. "You're awfully quiet."
"I think," she said, fairly certain it would do no good, "this is going to wind up more serious than Spanish flu."
The old man frowned, hiding the disappointment in his eyes with parental skill. "That was a joke."
She tapped the printout. "Did you see the numbers?"
"The ones I hunt-and-pecked into the report?" Rawlings leaned forward, tie wrinkling. "Hey. What's in your head?"
She met his eyes. "We need to consider closing up shop."
His eyes crinkled, pained. "Ellie."
"Not for good. For the weekend."
"The weekend?"
"Lock everything down for two weeks. Flights. Highways. Schools. Everything. Arrest and quarantine anyone who leaves their homes."
Rawlings drew back his chin, flesh wattling his neck. "You're talking about the M-word."
"I'm talking about containment."
"The United States hasn't declared martial law since the Civil War." Rawlings glanced at his assistant, Gills. "Is that right? The Civil War, yes?"
Gills nodded, light reflecting from his glasses. "Pretty sure, sir."
Rawlings turned back to her. "The Civil War, Ellie."
"Two weeks," she said. "This thing is aggressive. Aggressive like a poked grizzly. If this thing is what it looks like, it needs civilization to spread—otherwise, it will kill its hosts before they have the chance to pass it along. If you keep all the current hosts isolated for two weeks, it might kill itself off."
"And then what? Reevaluation?"
Ellie stared at the table. "Well, yes."
"If you were right, of course, this thing would take a lot longer than two weeks to clear out." Rawlings tapped his thumbs against the table. "Realistically, you're talking months before we begin to get back to normal. You lock the whole country in their houses for three months, six, you usher in a brand-new Great Depression."
"The cure is worse than the disease," Armen said, low.
Rawlings raised a brow at the doctor, apologetic. His head was turned from her, but Ellie had seen him make the gesture too many times to miss it. The old man tapped the table some more.
"We're trying to avert disaster," he said at last. "Got anything along those lines?"
She shrugged. "I'll give it another think."
He smiled. "Do."
They picked up the talk where they'd left off. Small-scale stuff. Likelihood of riots, a vaccine distribution schedule. Automatically, Ellie voiced support for starting in mass transit-oriented urban centers. Anything to decrease the rate of fresh infections. It wouldn't matter. There would be no time for a vaccine. Even if they had months—and she was thinking weeks were more likely—that was no guarantee. They still didn't have a vaccine for herpes.
During a pause, Rawlings mused idly where the illness had come from. Mason leapt on the topical fumble like a lineman and for twenty minutes they discussed the potential signs of whether it had been inflicted from outside, who were the most likely suspects, and what were the implications of such an attack. Ellie found the entire topic academic, masturbatory. It didn't matter where or why. All that mattered was is.
In the end, Rawlings and Dr. Armen decided to recommend a standard-aggressive outbreak protocol modified by a suite of draconian transportation restrictions to reflect the reality that the flu had already vectored well beyond its Northern Idaho ground zero. (And had done so with such efficacy Ellie had doubts there had been a true zero-point—which certainly suggested it was no accident. But enough of that.)
Rawlings reached across the table to consolidate his spread of printouts and tablets.
"I'd like to be relocated to New York," she said.
The old man squinted at her with one eye. "Hold your horses. You think this is a potential blank-slate event."
"Yes."
"And you would prefer to hide from the end of the world in remote ol' New York City."
She'd had ample time to prepare her lie. "It will be worst there. If I can see it firsthand, I may be able to convince you to get serious."
Rawlings leaned back, his tight frown settling in for a lengthy stay. "Let me ask you something. Say you're heading up New York. Say you had a whole lot less resources than you'd like and a directive to keep any and all panic gruesomely squashed under your heel. What would you do to stop it?"
"Get it off the streets," Ellie said. "Offer free clinics to bring in the poor and spread a low-level scare about dying children to bring in the rich. Identify the incubators and nullify them—schools, hospitals, airports. Everyone in the subways may as well be kissing. You see someone sick, you pull them off the train. You sequester everyone you pick up until they reach an outcome."
"You mean until they die."
She shrugged. "Or don't."
Armen snorted. "That's not going to stop the sort of outbreak you imagine. The city's too big."
"He said limited resources," Ellie said. "This is about slowing the rate of transmission. Buying time for a vaccine. Worst-case, the uninfected have time to see what's happening and isolate themselves. A fraction survives."
"You're going to yank everyone with the sniffles off the C train?" Mason said. "Where do you plan to hold them all? The Meadowlands?"
Ellie shrugged again. "That's what I'd start with."
Rawlings nodded, still frowning. "Request denied. I need you here. And safe. Not coughing into your falafel in the East Village."
Before she left, she returned to the observation room. Behind the glass, Timothy Rogers, 24, lay face-up on the exam table. They'd cleaned him up very nicely. Pale, sure, and the lividity on the left side of his chest and face wasn't classically attractive, but the blood had been scrubbed away from his mouth and neck. On the next table, Marilyn "Mimi" Rogers, 49, hadn't held up quite as well as her son. She'd been found in the tub. Patches of her skin were stained pink, and now that she'd dried out, her whole body had a shriveled quality that did her middle-aged figure no favors.
In the adjoining room, fifteen others were waiting for or presently in the process of examination. Ellie didn't need to see them again. Mimi Rogers, middle-aged but otherwise healthy. Her son, at the peak of his youth. It was a small sample size, but the fifteen in the next room was a little less small. The still-warm sample waiting in the hospital basement—and the next batch, currently occupying the quarantined hospital's beds, coughing and bleeding—was rather less small yet.
Ellie went home, got her getaway bag and a couple of extra passports, and b
ooked the first flight to New York. She figured she had less than 48 hours to find Chip before he got sick.
2
Some 2300 miles east, and a handful to the south, Chip Billips' phone rang, startling him so badly he knocked his coffee onto the grimy hardwood. Amazingly, the mug didn't break. A pool of coffee spread across the floor. He stripped off his socks and flung them on the puddle—if he didn't get it soon, the milk would soak right into the grain—and checked his phone, expecting it would be Hernandez calling him in for an early day in the bus. The number was an almost-familiar local 212.
"Hello?"
"Mr. Billips?" a woman said, youngish and not particularly enthused.
"Speaking."
"This is Terry Blum at White Peaks," she said. "I'm calling about Dee."
Chip gazed glumly at the creamy brown liquid soaking through his peeled-off socks. "Another fight?"
"Something like that."
"In that yes, Dee's been fighting again? Or are you calling to let me know it was believed she'd been in another fight, but happily, upon investigation, it turned out to be a Goodfellas rehearsal?"
Terry Blum hesitated. "She got in another fight, Mr. Billips."
"Tell Principal Higgins I'm on my way." He bent down for the coffee-soaked socks. "It'll be a few. I'm taking the train."
"I'll let her know that, Mr. Billips."
He hung up and picked up his socks. Coffee dribbled onto the hardwood. He carried them to his laundry bag, but he hadn't intended to go to the laundromat for another week. They couldn't sit in the bag all that time. Staining his other clothes. Growing sour. Well, whatever. They were socks. He threw them in the trash, swabbed up the mess by his desk, grabbed fresh socks and shoes, and jogged down the musty-smelling stairwell.
Outside, the street smelled like the usual blend of exhaust, springtime marine chill, and sewer-steam, which itself mostly smelled like dryer-steam with just the slightest hint of processed feces. He reached 2nd Ave, crossing at the first break in the late morning traffic, and jogged toward Astor Place. Girls in knit hats and bearded boys sat around the black cube at the tiny plaza, college kids or possibly the young homeless. Their presence bothered him in a deep-down way, needling him with a subdermal splinter of resentment that these useless, sneering people—people who most certainly could not afford even the Manhattan-reasonable rents over in Alphabet City—shared his neighborhood anyway.
He didn't like that Dee walked past them every morning (and good lord, the fight they'd had when she finally convinced him she could make that walk by herself). He didn't like that they could just look at her. And in a smaller, more selfish way, he didn't like that he'd grown old and stodgy enough to be threatened by—which also meant he was afraid of—these unshaven, unmotivated losers who so very closely resembled the friends he'd kept a little more than a decade ago.
He dropped down the gum-spotted steps to the uptown 4-5-6 platform and waited for the 4 to take him express to 86th and Lex. By the time the train squealed to his stop, he no longer felt mad at Dee. The first time he'd been summoned uptown, he'd been skeptical, defensive, aggressive toward the principal. Not his little angel. The second and third times, that was when he'd been been mad with Dee. Now, he was exasperated, disappointed. Well, okay. If she'd just gotten herself expelled back to public school, maybe he could at least afford to move them out of Alphabet City next year.
White Peaks was a converted brownstone on 88th. Spitting distance of the park. The sort of $3-a-slice neighborhood that still made him feel out of place no matter how long he lived in the city or how much the moms fawned over him—wow, an EMT, in this city? Isn't that dangerous? Doesn't that make you just want to scream? Touching his arm, offering to bring him food. Meanwhile he was fighting not to ask them for stock tips.
On his way in, the security guard eyed him hard. Behind the front desk, Terry Blum glanced up and gave him a pinched, apologetic look. Excellent. So she knew him by face now.
"Mrs. Higgins will see you in just a minute," she said in a low tone, glancing across the empty lobby, as if afraid the security guard would hear his shame.
"Where's Dee?" Chip said. "Cooling her heels?"
"Something like that."
He nodded, gritted his teeth, and took a seat. He'd been too wound up about Dee to remember a book. He was a voracious reader—of the heirs of Tolkien, mostly; anything with elves and inns and wizards and stew, although he could get lost just as easily in the word puzzles on the back of a box of Lucky Charms, and had gotten in trouble more than once for staring at the chests of women wearing slogans on their t-shirts—but the lobby was devoid of any reading material besides a few signs about school safety. Chip stared at the wall and tried not to think about what this would mean for Dee.
Fifteen minutes later, Terry directed him down the hall. Principal Higgins rose from her desk to meet him, offering a condoling smile that made him want to turn around and hop the train straight home.
He pushed his palm against his forehead and pulled his hand down his eyes. "Where are we at?"
"Perhaps we should discuss what happened before we turn to outcomes."
"Does it matter?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Does it matter what happened?" he said. "I mean, unless she pulled a gun, or tore out some girl's heart and showed it to her, does it make any difference how things went down?"
Mrs. Higgins was stout in the way a nine-volt battery is stout. Under normal circumstances, she carried the same charge and verve as one, too. As he'd asked whether it mattered, she seemed to power down, her cheeks going slack, her eyes lowering gently toward the surface of her rich brown desk.
"If the circumstances were extenuating, and this weren't part of a larger pattern of behavior, it could matter. Our protocols aren't entirely inflexible."
"But the circumstances are tired old schoolyard BS," Chip said. "And the pattern's the pattern."
"Unfortunately."
"So let's skip the past and get to the future."
"Are you sure you wouldn't rather yell at me for a while first?" Mrs. Higgins smiled wryly. "It's what most parents do."
"She's my girl. My responsibility."
"How refreshing. In that case, assuming your lawyer has no complaints—"
Chip scrunched his brow. "My lawyer?"
Mrs. Higgins glanced up from the paperwork she'd been gathering, mouth pursed, then laughed lightly. "Sorry. More habit. Mr. Billips..."
"Chip."
"Chip, we're looking at a one-week suspension, applicable immediately. This will be accompanied by emergency probation, which will last the rest of the school year, along with mandatory counseling, which Dee may receive from either our school psychologist or the therapist of your choice."
"And if she messes up again?"
Her mouth became a regretful line. "Then her enrollment at White Peaks ends."
Chip tugged the hem of his shirt, failing to smooth out the wrinkles. "Got it."
"Most students wouldn't get a fifth chance at all."
"I know. You don't owe me anything, Principal Higgins."
She smiled, eyes creasing. He believed she was genuinely sympathetic. "Mary."
"Mary." He stood, grimacing at the old twinge in his knee. "Now where's this reprobate daughter of mine? Am I going to need to buy my own straitjacket, or will the school provide me with one?"
She laughed and stood. "Right next door. Follow me."
Mary Higgins showed him to an unmarked door beside her office, gave him another smile, and touched his shoulder. Inside, Dee sat on a chair by the wall, arms barred over her stomach, gazing at nothing. Chip was taken aback once again by her hair—shoulder-length on the right side, clipped goatee-short on the left. For once, she didn't have her iPod earbuds in, but she still didn't look up.
"Well, come on," he said. "School's out early today."
Dee dislodged herself from the chair and picked up her graffitied backpack. With low-level exasperation, Chip noted he could still make out
the swear word whited out beneath the pack's logo. He walked in silence down the hallway's shiny floor. He no longer had a strategy with her. Wherever their arguments started out, if they lasted long enough, they always wound up on the adoption.
He opened the door for her. The day had grown warm by the standards of March in New York, which meant the marine wind was minimal, carrying no hint of snow. Almost warm enough to start sweating. Well, that would be one more thing, wouldn't it. The return of that miserable, smothering, ball-stickying New York heat. Heat that seemed to drive all five boroughs mad. Heat that kept the ambulance busier than any taxi. Out on a call in the full flush of summer—siren howling, lights splashing the clifflike towers, a man bleeding and gutted in the back of Chip's bus—no relief at night, when the heat baked off the asphalt just as hot as day—well, it felt like something out of actual hell, like driving around in the devil's own hot and drunken mouth.
"I'm sorry," Dee said, unprompted.
"You're sorry?"
"That's what I said."
"Well, I don't know what I'm supposed to say," Chip said.
"I know."
"Is that a dig?"
"No." She glared at the gum-spotted sidewalk. A streamer of what was no doubt dog urine striped the sidewalk, trickling from the black iron grille around a tree. "I mean I know there's nothing more to say."
Chip rubbed his mouth. "I don't get how you know that but you don't know it's not okay to fight the other girls."
"It wasn't a girl," Dee said.
He grabbed her shoulder and scanned her face. "You fought a boy? Did he hurt you?"
She grinned, sheepishly at first, then impish, prideful. Her defiance was one of those double-edged swords. If she could keep out of trouble, he knew it would make her a hell of an adult, but the way she was going, she might not make it through high school.
"I'm totally fine, Dad," she said. "He hit me first. I didn't give him the chance to hit me twice."
"That's my girl." He instantly regretted the encouragement. "Dee. No fighting. Do it again, and it's back to P.S. 34."
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