“You want to go or not?” Astro asked.
“Of course I do.”
“Then let’s go. You can call once we’re inside.”
“Just let me try once more.” Looking around, I saw Lug and the others moving back up toward the capillary bed, heading into the bloodstream. “Wait, where are you going?”
Lug glanced back. “Sorry, man, gotta roll. Caffeine’s got a half-life of four hours. I want to help you, I seriously do, but we don’t have time to wait around forever. You heard the plan. It’s now or never.”
I checked the clock in my dive mask. Lug wasn’t the only one on a deadline. In less than ninety minutes, I was going to start returning to my normal size—if Zooey’s body hadn’t already tagged me as dangerous enough to hunt down and destroy at all costs.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s rock.”
We dove headlong into the brachiocephalic artery and shot upward on a jet of hydrostatic pressure so fast and hard that I felt my eyeballs pop, Lug yelling to me all the way, hollering to make himself heard over the pulsatile roar of Zooey’s circulation. “Now listen—when we hit the barrier, let us handle crowd control. We’re caffeine molecules now, which means to a nerve cell we look just like adenosine. We’ll take out the receptors. You just get yourself into the CSF, and don’t look back.”
“Where’s the—”
“Heads up!”
Then I saw it.
We were rocketing straight at the blood-brain barrier, which from here looked like a massive, impenetrable wall closing down on us from above. It was the color of dark volcanic glass, marbled with thousands of tiny blood vessels and millions of motor neurons flickering up and down like chain lightning through its depths. As its shadow fell over my face, I felt my last survival instincts kick into overdrive. Fear clamped down on my throat, and for a second I was sure this was how I was going to die, smashed to pieces against the underside of Zooey’s brain.
On reflex, I screamed and groped for the vessel wall in a last-ditch attempt to slow myself down and get turned around, but it was too late. Lug grabbed me and wrapped himself around my body until he’d completely enveloped me in his molecular structure. “Hang on!”
I couldn’t let go if I’d wanted to. Alarms were going off now, all along the perimeter, adrenaline spewing from the inside the barrier. Somewhere off in my peripheral vision I was aware of Lug and the other caffeine molecules plowing through ranks of nerve endings, latching on to adenosine receptors and shutting them down. Things had been set into motion now and there was nothing I could do to stop them.
Someone—maybe Astro—was shouting at me to keep going.
I closed my eyes and braced for impact.
And then I was in.
I opened my eyes and looked around.
The sudden burst of turbulence had given way to a smooth expanse of sleek white silence, like the climate-controlled lobby of a very expensive hotel. Listening harder, I heard faint electronic wake-up chimes and whirring noises reverberating across the expanse, all of it surrounded by the steady, reassuring gurgle of cerebrospinal fluid.
My breath caught in my throat.
I did it. I actually made it up here.
Up along the walls, hundreds of plasma screens ran in perfect precision, curving with the natural contours of the neural pathways. On all of them, I saw images—high-definition reflections of neural input of Zooey’s thoughts, memory, dreams, fears—rippling through densely packed miles of circuitry in a continuous flow of input and fiberoptic processing. I saw a math classroom, a football game, a birthday party, flowers, an iPod, a pretty, dark-haired woman that I realized was Zooey’s mother, leaning forward to kiss her good night. The images seemed to go on forever, components and monitors all working flawlessly together. From here, Zooey’s brain looked like an Apple store the size of Manhattan.
“Dude,” Astro’s voice said behind me, “this place is the bob-omb.”
I jumped in surprise and looked around at him. “I didn’t know you were still here.”
“What, are you kidding?” Astro reached up with one of his tendrils, groping for the controls underneath a bank of wide-screen monitors. “You think I’d miss this for the world?”
“Don’t touch it.” I pushed him back. “Don’t touch anything.”
“Chill, bro—I’m cool.”
“What happened to the others?”
“What, you mean Lug and the guys?” Astro shook his head. “Lost ’em at the border.” He shrugged. “They knew the risks.”
I nodded, but something was already starting to feel wrong. “Isn’t there supposed to be more security around here?”
“Lug said the hypothalamus was the easiest way through—”
“I know,” I said, “but there’s nobody around.”
“Yeah,” Astro admitted, “that is weird.” He was staring at a monitor showing Zooey’s face looking back at her in the bathroom mirror, tweezing an eyebrow. “Hey, you think she gets Cinemax on these things?”
I looked up into the open cathedral of the midbrain, along the white sluiceways that stretched off into the distance, listening to the murmur of CSF flowing around us, a clear and colorless stream of currents that cradled the brain and would carry us wherever we wanted to go. I wished that Lug was still here with his map. “This must lead up to the third ventricle.” My voice echoed through the passageways. “If we follow it through the aqueduct...”
Then I stopped.
On the big screen in front of me, underneath a suite of processing equipment, I was staring at a three-story-high image of Harlan’s face.
He looked terrified.
THIRTY-FOUR: HARLAN
For a second, Zooey’s dad just stood there glaring at me with a deep line of puzzlement creasing his forehead. Although I’d never actually seen him in person before, I realized that he looked exactly as I’d expected—a big, broad-shouldered, red-blooded American in his late thirties with a bristly crewcut and a squirmy vein running along the side of his head, ticking in time with the last remaining seconds of my life. He was wearing a suit and tie, and I could smell his aftershave, something inexpensive and basic that he’d probably been wearing since the day he’d met Zooey’s mother.
“Who are you?” he asked in a low, ominous voice, taking a step toward me. “And what in God’s name are you doing in my daughter’s bedroom closet?”
I held up my hands. “Sir—”
“Daddy,” Zooey said, “wait. Don’t touch him. He’s—he’s contagious.”
Mr. Andrews stopped and snapped a glance back at her. “He’s what?”
“He’s got chromoblastomycosis,” Zooey said, and blinked in total bewilderment, as if she herself couldn’t believe the sheer size of the word that had just popped out of her mouth. “It’s a fungal infection of the subcutaneous tissue.” Before her dad could say anything, she turned and grabbed a Post-it note from the desk and sketched a diagram, then held it up where her father could see. “See, what typically happens is that an erythematous papule initially appears at the site of inoculation. Although the mycosis slowly spreads, it usually remains localized to the skin and subcutaneous tissue. It’s rarely fatal, but it’s highly infectious, and...”
Mr. Andrews just stared at his daughter as those last words trickled to a halt. I was staring at her too. For a moment we were united, two guys in a state of total confusion.
And then I remembered the code word.
Freaking Lenny, I thought, impressed in spite of myself. You actually made it to her brain.
After what felt like a very long time, Mr. Andrews turned back to me.
“Is this true?” he asked. “You’ve got this chromocyto-whatever-it-is?”
“Yes, sir,” I said gloomily, looking down at the tips of my shoes. “That’s right.”
“Then what exactly are you doing here?”
“I wanted to help him,” Zooey blurted out, and now she actually looked horrified at what she was saying.
“Zooey,
your Christmas play starts very soon. Why in the world would you be back here with—”
“I was the one who gave it to him.” She clapped her hands over her mouth and shook her head, but it was already out there, and the vein in Mr. Andrews head looked like it was about to pop.
“What? You? How?”
“That’s not actually how it happened, sir,” I said. “Zooey—”
“That’s enough out of you.” He turned to her. “I hope you have an explanation for this, missy. And for your sake, it’d better be the truth.”
“We were doing a unit on swimming in gym class,” Zooey said, “and neither one of us was wearing appropriate footwear by the pool...” She shook her head again, harder, her voice coming out in a threadbare whisper. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I don’t even know what I’m saying.”
“You. Mr. Fungus.” Mr. Andrews pointed at me with a finger the size of a Browning nine-millimeter. “I want you out of my daughter’s bedroom and out of this house, right now—do you understand?”
I nodded and stepped out of the closet. Zooey’s dad edged backwards and gave me a wide berth as I made a beeline for her bedroom door. For just a second, Zooey made eye contact with me as I turned to leave, and I glimpsed the pale, freaked out, what-the-heck-is-happening expression on her face. I tried to send her a telepathic message, beaming the words into her mind that it was all going to be okay, that her brain hadn’t been abducted by aliens or anything like that.
Except that it was something like that. Kind of. Almost.
“It’s okay,” I muttered. “I’m really sorry.” I started down the hallway, heading for the stairs, and my phone began ringing again, but before I could answer it, the front door swung open.
I stopped in my tracks and looked up. A tall, darkhaired woman in a business suit and a long coat stepped inside. She was carrying a bouquet of roses and looked at me with a combination of surprise and confusion.
Zooey’s mom was home.
We stood there for a second, staring at each other. My phone was still ringing like crazy.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m Harlan Williams.”
Zooey’s mom blinked. “Nice to meet you.” She craned her neck to look around behind me. “Is my daughter or my husband home?”
“Yes, ma’am. They both are. I was just leaving.”
“That’s right.” She glanced at her watch and frowned a little. “Today is a school day, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. It’s—it’s a long story. I play Santa Claus in your daughter’s play, though, and—”
“That’s why I’m home early from work.” She held up the bouquet of roses. “To see Zooey’s play.” Then she looked at my phone, which was still ringing like crazy. “You probably ought to answer that, Harlan.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Maybe I’ll see you after the performance.”
She nodded, and I slipped out the door and down the sidewalk, hitting Talk on the phone as I made my way outside.
“Harlan?” Lenny was shouting. “Can you hear me?”
“What’s wrong with you?” I yelled back.
“What?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe a little thing called chromoblastomycosis?”
“So you got the signal?”
“I got it, all right.” I picked up my bike and started wheeling it down into the storm. “What, is that supposed to be funny? Of all the code words in the world, you have to give me...”
THIRTY-FIVE: LENNY
“—a chronic fungal infection?”
Harlan’s voice crackled through the cell phone’s earpiece. I’d put him on speakerphone to improve the signal quality, and even with the volume turned down, he sounded like he was ready to rearrange my face. “Seriously, that’s what you got? That’s the best you can do?”
I stood there in the white inner corridor of the hypothalamus, looking around at the array of screens in front of me, and told myself to be patient. “You know what?” I said. “Just for once, a thank-you would be nice.”
“Thank you for what?” he spluttered. “Do you have any idea how embarrassing that was for Zooey? I mean, forget about me for a second—”
“Oh, and by the way, thanks for telling my dad this whole thing was just a big joke.”
“What was I supposed to do, Lenny? Huh?”
“Stick with the plan!” I burst out. “This was the one time that I could actually prove to him that I’d done something that nobody else had ever done, and you ruined everything by telling him it was all just some idiotic prank.”
On the big monitor directly in front of me, I was watching Zooey’s mom in the entryway of the house. All the other screens were filling with memories, happy images from childhood matching the mood of the moment. Even Astro seemed to get swept up in it. He was staring at the monitor with a big, ridiculous smile on his face, rocking back and forth and humming happily to himself.
“I did it for you,” Harlan said.
“Gee, thanks.”
“I’m serious, you dope. If your mom and dad really believed you were shrunken down and inside Zooey, they wouldn’t have rested until they got you out. They would’ve pulled her out of school and had her rushed to a hospital and flushed you out of her system. Why did you even have to tell them, anyway?”
I didn’t say anything. We both knew the answer to that one. I couldn’t help myself. I’d needed to prove to them—especially Dad—that I could do something like this on my own. Why had I even bothered?
“How much longer is this gonna take?” Harlan snapped.
I glanced at the digital readout and saw that I had slightly less than an hour. “Not long now.”
“I hope not, for your sake.”
“Look, Harlan—”
“No,” he snapped. “Don’t, Lenny, okay? Just don’t. Don’t even try to explain.”
“Whoa,” I said. “I don’t know why you’re so mad. If anything, I should be the one who’s upset.”
“Why am I mad?” His voice went up what sounded like another whole octave. “Oh, I don’t know, Lenny. Maybe because you so don’t even care about what you’re doing to her?”
“What? That’s completely—”
“Okay, first of all, this whole idea of yours was completely idiotic to begin with.”
“But it totally worked, didn’t it?”
“No,” he shouted, “it totally didn’t!”
“I’m inside, aren’t I?”
“Lenny, you still don’t get it, do you? That doesn’t matter! You don’t understand Zooey from the inside any better than you did on the outside!”
For a second I didn’t know what to say. The silence hung between us awkwardly, and then I looked around the various screens reflecting different moments of Zooey’s past and present. “Oh yeah?” I said feebly. “Well, that’s funny. Because from where I’m standing, it looks like I know everything about her.”
“I’m not talking about her freakin’ heart rate or her internal core temperature or whatever, you stooge, I’m talking about who she really is!”
“What?” I started looking at the screens again, but all I saw was Zooey’s parents standing in the entryway through Zooey’s point of view.
“You might be a genius, Lenny, but you can’t get to know a person by going inside their body any more than you can change how they feel by going inside their brain. All you did was mess things up and humiliate her and make everything worse. You know why? Because you never think about people’s feelings. Just like your parents.”
“You...” I stood there feeling a hot stab of pain across my chest like a couple of staples down my sternum. It started out as a pinch and got worse, sending a spike of metal up into my throat, and for the first time, my breathing difficulty had nothing to do with the amount of oxygen in the bloodstream. “You...seriously believe that?”
“Yeah,” he said, “I do.”
The line crackled between us for a long moment, neither of us saying anything.
&nbs
p; “Okay.” It didn’t sound like I was the one saying it, but I knew it was. “So then I guess I’ll see you around.”
“I guess so.”
“Harlan, wait—there’s something important I need to tell you. It’s about how I’m going to get out of Zooey’s brain without getting caught. Harlan?”
But he was already gone.
“Whoa,” Astro said, having overheard the conversation on speaker. “Dude, that was harsh.”
I ignored him, still trying to process what happened, telling myself I wasn’t going to do anything dumb, like start crying all over Zooey’s axons and dendrites. In all the years we’d been friends, Harlan had never talked to me like that, even when he was completely exasperated with me, which happened a lot. Even when I’d started a fire in his parents’ tool shed by accident, or blacked out the neighborhood with electrical cables, or made half of the school smell like formaldehyde for an entire week, and everybody else had wanted to throttle me within an inch of my life, he’d just shrugged and said, That’s Lenny. Not anymore.
“Well, I guess that’s what you get,” Astro sighed. “These romantic triangles never end well.”
“Wait a second.” I looked at him. “What are you talking about?”
“A triangle. You know. Three sides? Three points?”
“I meant the romantic part.”
“What,” Astro said, “are you kidding me? I mean, I might just be a virus, but even I can see that that guy obviously has it for her bad.”
“That’s...no.” I shook my head. “Harlan knows how I feel about Zooey. He would never—”
“Hey,” Astro said, shrugging, “you can keep your delusions. I just call ’em like I see ’em.”
I was about to keep arguing the point when I looked up at the screens lining the inner walls of Zooey’s brain, at the slipstream of thoughts and ideas pulsing through her consciousness, some of them flickering by at light speed, others lingering long enough that I could make out all kinds of recognizable details.
Lenny Cyrus, School Virus (9780547893167) Page 13