“I guess you could say that.”
“What do they call you?”
“Uh...L. Cyrus...virus.”
“The El Cyrus virus?” The thing made a shrugging gesture. “Hey, whatever. I guess you’re new to the system, huh? Don’t worry, I’ll show you around. You dig the stream?”
“Not really.”
“Trust me, you will. Especially when you need to get away fast—which you frequently will if you value your life when the NK cells show up.” He paused in thought, a process that seemed to require physical effort. “Whatever you do, steer clear of the heart. It’s nothing but trouble.” It swirled around me a half-dozen times, settling back in front of my face. “Oh, and don’t trust Whitey.”
“Whitey?”
“White blood cells.” The virus nodded grimly. “Those self-righteous pus-bags are complete jerks. Always blabbing about the greater good. Big fish in a small pond. They can’t touch us, though. Not like the NK. Freaking killing machines, those things.” It shuddered. “You see those dudes coming, don’t even bother to run.” Then it brightened. “But hey, you keep your head down, stick to the stream, and keep moving, they won’t even know you’re there.”
“Where are we now?” I asked.
“Now? Shoot, I dunno. Some backwater capillary bed somewhere. Why? You got somewhere you need to be?”
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “yes. I need to get to the brain.”
ELEVEN: HARLAN
I was in Mrs. Frank’s third-period literature class, trying to think of something intelligent to say about The Red Badge of Courage, when the intercom clicked on overhead and the voice of Mr. Cheney, our esteemed vice principal, came through the speaker. The PA made him sound nasal and metallic, like Darth Vader with a chronic sinus infection.
“Mrs. Frank, will you send Harlan Williams to the office, please?”
“He’s on his way.” Mrs. Frank—a tough old bird probably two years from retirement, who claimed to have spent her formative years following a band called the Grateful Dead—didn’t even glance up from the board. “Hit the bricks, Mr. Williams.”
I pushed back my chair and stood up. Of course, everybody turned and looked at me. They all knew about the fight in the lab, and I heard a few people whispering as I walked out the door and down the hall.
I wondered what this was about. As far as I knew, everything had been settled with Mick, and even if it hadn’t, none of it was my fault. My biggest role in the whole thing had been getting punched in the gut. I’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It turned out that was only the beginning of it.
Right away, when I walked into Mr. Cheney’s office and saw Lenny’s mom and dad sitting there opposite Mr. Cheney, I knew it was bad. All three of them looked up and stared at me.
“Oh, hey, Dr. Cyrus,” I said to Lenny’s mom, trying to sound casual, as if this sort of thing happened all the time, and then turned to his dad. “Hey...Dr. Cyrus.” Lenny had told me a long time ago that his parents hated being called Mr. and Mrs., which I guess made sense when you thought about how much time they’d poured into getting multiple doctorates and advanced degrees. I’d been calling them both “doctor” as long as I could remember. It only sounded weird when you said it together, but it was still better than calling them Don and Susan—especially when they both looked like they were prepared to hang me upside down by my toenails.
“Harlan,” Mr. Cheney said, “sit down, please.”
“Sure, okay.” I pulled up the last chair in the office. “What’s up?”
“Actually, Harlan,” Mr. Cheney said, “we were hoping you might tell us.”
I gave them my best confused and innocent look. “Sorry?”
“Mrs. Cyrus called my office this morning,” he began, and I saw Lenny’s mom wince a little at the way he referred to her, “looking for her son. It seems that Lenny forgot his lunch today, and she was worried that he might go hungry.”
“Oh, man,” I muttered under my breath. “Lenny, you idiot.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing, sir.” Of all the people I knew, only Lenny could successfully use cutting-edge nanotechnology to insert himself into the human bloodstream and then tip everybody off by forgetting to pack a lunch. “I just—can’t believe he’d be that absent-minded, is all.”
“That’s hardly the point, Mr. Williams. Because as it turns out, Lenny isn’t here at all. In fact...nobody has seen him all morning.” l glanced at Lenny’s mom and dad again. “His parents are understandably concerned.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if this had something to do with what happened yesterday,” Lenny’s mother said. “What about that other boy that was bullying him—that Mick Mason?” She glared at Cheney. “What if he’s done something to Lenny?”
“Mrs. Cyrus—”
“Dr. Cyrus,” she corrected him, and turned back to me. “Harlan, I want you to answer me honestly. Have you seen my son?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I really don’t—”
Just then my phone started ringing—“She Blinded Me with Science”—while the screen began flashing Lenny’s name. His parents knew that ringtone: they’d picked it out for him. Some kind of eighties joke that they thought was hilarious, no doubt, but now it didn’t seem funny at all.
“I think you’d better answer that,” Lenny’s mom said.
I brought the phone up to my ear. “Hello?”
“Harlan?” Lenny shouted. In the background, a steady roar blasted through the receiver, distorting into big sizzling blurts of static that sounded like somebody dropping radioactive waste from five stories into a giant vat of pudding. “Are you there?”
“Yeah,” I said, “except...” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Dude, your parents are here.”
“You gotta talk louder. I can’t hear you!”
Lenny’s mom was glaring at me. “Put him on speakerphone.”
“I really don’t think—” I started.
“Now, please, Harlan.”
I hit the speakerphone button and a surge of white noise roared through the tiny speaker. “Harlan!” Now Lenny sounded like he was calling from inside a wind tunnel. “You’re not going to believe where I am!”
Lenny’s dad stood up. “And where is that, son?” There was nothing from Lenny for a long moment. “Wait—Dad?” Lenny’s voice got quieter, but just a little. “Harlan, is my dad with you?”
“I tried to warn you,” I said.
“We’re both here,” his mom cut in. “The question is, Leonard, where are you?”
“Hang on just a second—” All of a sudden there was a huge upsurge of noise, rising and curling like a tidal wave slamming into the beach, and at the very peak of it we all heard Lenny let out a long howl—“whhhoooOOOAAAHH—AIIIIGGGGHHH—OOOOOO!!!”—except this time the howl broke off into what sounded like wild, shrieking laughter. If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve thought he was at our indoor water park, TsunamiLand, or surfing killer waves on a boogie board.
“Oh my goodness—Lenny?” Lenny’s mom turned to her husband. “What on earth has gotten into him?” She stood up and crossed the office, grabbed my phone, and held it in both hands. “Lenny, it’s your mother. Can you hear me? Where are you?”
“Mom? I’m okay—” Now he was panting, sounding out of breath but happier than I’d heard him in a long time. “It’s all right, I’m fine.”
“I—I don’t understand.” She looked back to Lenny’s dad. “Is he laughing?”
“Leonard Albert Cyrus,” his dad said, rising up out of his chair. He was a tall man with a deep voice, and until you heard him use it, you forgot how scary he could be. “You listen to me. You tell me where you are, right now, do you understand? And I mean right now. Or you are going to wish you’d never gotten out of bed today, young man. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”
“Dad...” Lenny said, still sounding like he was catching his breath, “you remember the Von Friedrich experiment
?”
“Von Friedrich,” Dr. Cyrus repeated. “Right, of course I do, but I fail to see—”
“I made it work.”
Dr. Cyrus pursed his lips and scowled. “That’s impossible.”
“No, it’s not,” Lenny said. “Listen to this.” All at once we heard a faint gurgling noise followed by a series of high-pitched metallic pings like submarine sonar. “You hear that? Those are axons and dendrites. Purkinje cells undergoing auto-induced electrochemical stimulation.”
“I’m sorry,” Mr. Cheney said. “What is he talking about?”
“That’s...” Lenny’s dad closed his mouth, frowned, then shot a glance at Cheney’s desk. “Give me a piece of paper.”
Mr. Cheney scowled. “What?”
Lenny’s dad snatched a yellow legal pad and a pencil from under Cheney’s nose, knocking over a pen and pencil caddy in the process, along with Cheney’s 2003 Principal of the District award. The pens and pencils spilled all over the desk and went rolling onto the floor.
“Hey,” Cheney snapped, “what—”
“Shhh.” Lenny’s dad leaned over the desk with his head cocked slightly, listening to the noises from the phone, the clicks and pings and gurgles, scribbling down equations as he listened, sketching a waveform between them. When he was finished, he glanced back over what he’d written.
“I don’t believe it,” he said, in a small, weak voice. All of sudden he didn’t look so tough anymore. In fact, he looked a little sick. All of the color drained out of his face, making it look kind of pasty and wrinkled on the surface, like a bowl of cream of mushroom soup that you’d pass over at the cafeteria line, and he put the pencil down, turned around very slowly, and stared at Lenny’s mom.
“He’s right,” he said, in a funny little voice. “The frequencies match perfectly.”
“I told you,” Lenny said.
“But that’s—that’s impossible,” Lenny’s dad said. “How did you...how could you possibly—”
“I told you. I made it work.”
“Son...” Lenny’s dad shook his head. “You realize that what you’re describing violates every known law of physics. Why, the electrolytic transport alone would—”
“I thought of that,” Lenny’s voice said. “I read your notes. You gave up too easily. I formulated guanosine into a topical ointment—”
“Guanosine.” Lenny’s dad was already nodding. “Yes. Of course, for the superconductive properties. But—”
“Excuse me,” Mr. Cheney said, still putting the pencils back in their holder. “What are you two talking about? What’s this Von Friedrich experiment? Who’s Purkinje?” Lenny’s dad ignored him. “Son, listen to me—”
“No,” Lenny said, “you listen, Dad. I did this, okay? Me, by myself. While you and Mom were so busy working on your own projects and letting me get beat up at school because you told me to be myself, I actually did this.”
“Lenny, you don’t understand. The hypothesis in my notes isn’t stable—that’s why I abandoned it. Even with the guanosine, you can’t—”
“I love her, Dad. And I’m going to change her mind about me.”
Dr. Cyrus shook his head in total confusion. “What?”
There was a click, and Lenny was gone.
TWELVE: ZOOEY
“Ms. Andrews? Zooey? Are you feeling all right?”
I glanced up with a sense of certain doom. The voice belonged to Mrs. Emeritus, my third-period world history teacher. She was a massive, gray-haired monument of a woman, draped in a faded lavender dress, and she almost never rose out of her seat unless there was a fire alarm. But right now she seemed about ready to jump up and call an ambulance for me.
If I really look that bad, I decided, it must be even worse than I thought.
“I’m fine,” I said, but the words came out sounding hoarse and unsteady. “I just need to sit down.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.” Without taking her eyes off me, she hunched forward, gripping the edges of her desk and hoisting her great purple-clad bulk upward out of the chair. “You look absolutely green.”
“Really, I’m okay.”
“I won’t stand for illness in in my classroom, Ms. Andrews. When you’re my age, you can’t afford to get sick.” To demonstrate this, she reached down to the enormous bottle of hand sanitizer that she kept next to her economy-size box of Kleenex and squirted a glob into her palm, then added another squirt for good measure and began smearing it halfway up her quivering, ham-size forearms. “You march yourself down to the office and have Nurse Fitch take a look at you.”
“Really,” I said, “there’s no reason—”
“Now, please, Ms. Andrews. Before you infect the lot of us.”
“Yes, ma’am.” There was no point arguing any further. Mrs. Emeritus was a germ fanatic. No matter what part of world history we were studying, she always found an opportunity to work in some mention of contagious disease. To hear her talk about it, Western civilization was one endless, sniveling bout of smallpox, tuberculosis, and polio, and it was nothing short of a miracle that we’d survived this long.
I left the classroom and walked down to the little office that Nurse Fitch kept around the corner from the teachers’ lounge. When I got there, the door was half open, and I could already smell the bandages and rubbing alcohol.
“Who’s there?” a voice asked.
“Zooey Andrews,” I said, and stepped inside. It was a narrow rectangular space just big enough for a padded table and a counter with jars of cotton balls, Band-Aids, and gauze. A diagram of the human spine hung on the wall, illustrating the various ways that you could ruin your life by not standing up straight. Nurse Fitch herself stood in front of me, her hands on her hips.
“Well?” She was pale and skinny, with a beaklike nose and a lot of white-blond hair that she kept clamped in a bun so tight that it pulled her eyes back at the corners. “What is it?”
“Mrs. Emeritus sent me down,” I said. “She told me I looked sick.”
“I see.” She put one hand on my forehead. “How do you feel?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“Just okay?” She snapped on a rubber glove and pointed at the table behind me. “Take a seat.”
“I’m really—”
“Say ahh.” She peered into my mouth, listened to my lungs with a stethoscope, and wrapped a blood pressure cuff around my arm, pumping it up until my hand went numb. When she was finished, she released the pressure in a long, slow hiss, took off her stethoscope, and sat back on the stool.
“Well,” she said, “it’s probably just a virus. Who have you been kissing?”
“What?” I stared at her, feeling my cheeks burn. “Nobody!”
“Of course not.” She picked up a pad of paper and started writing something. “Take this to the principal’s office and call your parents to come pick you up.” “Wait,” I said. “I can’t go home.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”
“My play starts this afternoon. I need to be there.”
“Take the note.” She held it out, waiting. “I’ve done my job. Now you do yours.”
“Nurse Fitch,” I said, struggling to keep my voice steady, “please.” I looked at her closely, searching her narrow face for some trace of humanity. “I’ve been working on this play for the last two years. This afternoon’s our first performance. I really need to be there. When it’s over, I’ll go straight home, I promise.”
“Do you know what AMA stands for, Miss Andrews?”
I felt the shadow of hopeless dread come over me in a solid wave. “No, ma’am.”
“Against medical advice.” She pronounced it slowly, savoring every syllable. “When I worked at Chicago Memorial, we had a little girl just like you who came into the ER one night with symptoms like yours—nothing severe, mind you, just normal flu symptoms. The doctors wanted to keep her overnight for observation. But that little girl’s parents felt it was more important that she make it to a ski trip that weeken
d, so they took her home —against medical advice.” She waited, pursing her lips. “And do you know what happened to her?”
“She was fine?” I asked hopefully.
“She died. One week later.”
I stared at her. “What?”
“One week.” Nurse Fitch nodded. “To the day.”
“How?” My stomach was starting to churn again, and I felt the color draining out of my face. The lights seemed to be dimming, fading to black. “I mean, how did it happen?”
“The infection went systemic—took over her bodily functions and shut them down one at a time.” Her eyes slipped downward as if she could see an x-ray of my own body coming undone from the inside. “First her kidneys, then her liver, then when it finally reached her heart—”
“Nurse Fitch...” I tried to step away, but she put one hand on my shoulder, gripping me tightly.
“What’s the matter, dear?” she asked, leaning in close. “I thought you felt fine.”
“I think you’d better—”
“Better what?”
“I think you should—”
“Yes?”
“Watch out,” I croaked. But it was too late. I felt everything in my stomach coming up all at once in a hot, stinging splash. Nurse Fitch let out a startled squawk and jerked away, tripping over the stool and hitting the floor with a thud, then scrambling back up again, the heels of her shoes skidding through the mess on the floor.
I clapped both hands over my mouth and stared at her, horrified. I wanted to say that I was sorry—I really did—but the words were locked in my throat. I just shook my head and blinked at her in shock. “I didn’t—I mean—”
“Get out!” she shouted. “Take your note and get out of here!”
I picked up the note from the floor and backed out of the office.
THIRTEEN: LENNY
“What was that?” I asked when the aftershocks had faded.
The astrovirus looked at me suspiciously. We’d left the bloodstream and were now floating somewhere in a lymph node in Zooey’s left axillary area when the impact of whatever just happened had ripped through the tranquility like an earthquake.
Lenny Cyrus, School Virus (9780547893167) Page 6