“You!” one of them shouted. “Freeze, right there!”
Somewhere, distantly, I thought I heard my phone ringing. I realized the sound was coming from my skull. Things were losing clarity, getting hazy around the edges, and this time it wasn’t from the cracked mask. My brain, which normally worked fine even under stressful situations, was starting to short circuit, and that was when I realized that I wasn’t getting enough oxygen anymore. I was going to suffocate down here, if I wasn’t knocked to pieces first.
“You’re the punk from the hypothalamus,” one of the leukocytes snarled. “You’re the one who started all this!”
“Wait, I can explain—”
I was wasting my breath, and I didn’t have much left. The muscle wall rammed into me again, Zooey’s heart going through its final, spastic kicks, and I realized that this was where it was going to end for both of us.
Unless I did something right now.
Thrusting my head forward, I shoved my way into the rubbery clam-shaped opening of the bicuspid valve. It was tight, but I kept kicking forward, working my shoulders through, pushing, squeezing, almost there—and suddenly felt the horrible, sucking mouth of the valve clamp down around my waist.
Oh no.
Panic grabbed me by the throat and pinched my airway shut, cutting off the remaining flow of oxygen from the tank. That’s when it hit me. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I was stuck halfway through this stupid valve with its individual muscle fibers crushing my hips and spine.
Not cool. No way. This. Isn’t. Happening.
I thought about Zooey, what I’d done to her, and what I had to do to save her.
Get through. Just do it. Get through.
The valve kept tightening, squeezing my insides to jelly. In a second I was going to black out and it would be all over.
Do it.
With a final burst of near-hysteria, I yanked myself through. All at once I was in the left ventricle, my arms and legs flailing freely in the turbulence.
It was total chaos. Everything around me was shaking so hard that my vision was blurring around the edges. The momentary relief I’d felt getting free disappeared with the realization that I’d come this far but could still very easily die here. The pounding noise all around me was louder in here, close to deafening.
I spun around and threw my weight as hard as I could against the ventricle, just as it was getting ready to contract. Wham! The jolt was agony, and I felt something in my shoulder pop. Pain rippled up through my arm, down my spine.
Do it again.
I reared back and hit the wall again. I couldn’t tell what was pounding harder, Zooey’s heart, or my head. Behind me, her leukocytes were staring at me with a combination of amazement and disbelief.
“What?” I asked. “You’ve never seen a guy kickstart a girl’s heart before?”
The heart muscle contracted again, squeezing like a huge, angry fist, and this time the leukocytes all joined me and we all hit it with everything we had. The impact knocked us back across the ventricle, scattering white blood cells like bowling pins, but I held on.
“Again.”
This time nobody argued. They surged around me.
We hit it again.
And again.
And again.
Something was blinking in the corner of my eye, flashing frantically in an attempt to get my attention, and I realized that it was the digital readout blinking 0:00:00.
I was out of time.
FORTY-SIX: HARLAN
Looking back on it now, I have no idea how I even had the presence of mind to do what I did in those few crucial seconds. All I knew was that at some point, I put my hands together over Zooey’s chest, laced my fingers and started pushing on it, counting out loud. Voices were talking behind me, but I didn’t hear them. It was like everything else in that dressing room had just disappeared, and I kept doing chest compressions until a hand touched my shoulder. I looked up to see Zooey’s dad in front of me.
“I’ll take it from here,” he said.
I nodded and slumped back while he took over. Zooey’s mom was next to him, talking on the phone while somebody—I realized that it was Shovelhead himself—ran up and gave her something that looked like an electronic briefcase.
“Here’s the AED,” he said. “You have to turn it on, and—”
“I know how it works,” Zooey’s dad said. He flipped it open, hitting a red button to activate the defibrillator. The thing gave a cheerful electronic beep and a digital voice started talking from somewhere inside the plastic case. It reminded me of the machine that Lenny had used on himself this morning, which seemed like about a million years ago, and a crazy thought went slingshotting through my head—Zooey’s father was going to use Lenny’s technology to shrink himself down and go in to save Zooey from the inside.
“It’s going to measure her heart rate,” Zooey’s dad said, unpacking wires and chest-patches from inside the device. “If we can give her an electric shock, we can get her heart rate back to normal sinus rhythm and—”
“Hold on.” Zooey’s mom felt her pulse again.
“What?”
“She’s coming back.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“Feel for yourself,” she said, and Zooey’s dad pressed his fingers against Zooey’s throat. For a moment he didn’t move, neither of them did...and then a wave of relief passed over his face and Zooey’s mom’s eyes filled with tears.
“Thank God,” she said.
Zooey’s eyelids twitched and she made a gurgling noise in her chest. She shifted a little and tried to sit up.
“Zooey,” her mom said. “Sweetie, it’s all right.”
Zooey’s dad glanced up at me. His face was pale and he didn’t look like ex-military anymore. He just looked like somebody’s father. “Good job, Harlan,” he said.
“Thanks,” I nodded back, and flicked my eyes down at Zooey. I knew the truth.
I hadn’t done it alone.
FORTY-SEVEN: LENNY
I don’t know how I found my way back to the aorta with everything shaking itself to pieces around me, but by the time I got there, I was already aware that it was an extremely tight squeeze. The vessel wall felt like it was closing in, shrinking around me, but I knew that wasn’t the case—I was getting bigger. Down in the heart, I had still been the size of a virus, but up here I was already growing larger as the miniaturization process wore off, and within a few seconds I was going to be the biggest problem Zooey Andrews had.
“Dude! You’re huge!”
I spun around, caught in the bloodstream, and saw Astro shooting up behind me at top speed. He looked awestruck and terrified at the same time, as if he thought I might decide to squash him for abandoning me down there.
“I have to get out of here,” I said. “Now!”
“Yeah, you think?”
“Exit strategy.”
He nodded. “There’s an opening somewhere on the face, but you’d better hurry before it clots off.”
“Where?”
“Just follow the platelets,” he shouted, “but dude, seriously—go.”
“Astro,” I said, hesitating for a moment, just long enough to catch a final glimpse of his face as it melted back into the formless outline of the viral membrane, “thanks.”
“Don’t mention it, just get moving!”
I jumped into the stream and headed straight up, hurtling through the curves and shooting up the upper vasculature of Zooey’s carotid arteries, riding a wave of steadily building pressure that shot me up like a cork from a bottle. With every second I was getting bigger. I knew what would happen if I didn’t make it in time—I could end up blocking off the whole artery, cutting off oxygen to the brain. Instead of dying from toxic bacteria, she’d die of an embolic stroke.
I hit the mesh of arterioles in her face, saw the platelets swarming up ahead like a school of jellyfish. When they saw me coming, they burst off in a thousand different directions in sheer terror. I
didn’t blame them. I went off in their direction as fast as I could, kicking for the surface until I realized that I was looking out at something I hadn’t seen in what felt like forever.
Daylight.
FORTY-EIGHT: ZOOEY
The first thing I remember is my dad reaching down to dab the blood from my mouth with his handkerchief. “You split your lip when you fell,” he said. “Though right now, that’s the least of your worries.” He threw the bloody hankie behind the curtain and smiled down at me.
I looked around and saw the EMTs loading up equipment, getting ready to transfer me to the ambulance. Someone had started an IV on my right arm, and there was an oxygen tube in my nose. Monitors were beeping and chirping.
“Hey,” I said. “I’ve got rhythm.”
My mom smiled. “You get it from your father.”
“What about the play?” I tried to look around. “Is it still happening?”
Nobody said anything. I tried to listen for singing or dialogue from the stage, but that whole part of the world—where I’d dedicated so many weeks and months of my life—seemed to have fallen absolutely silent. As the EMTs lifted the stretcher, I caught a ripple of movement from behind the changing room curtain. I craned my head back, not quite able to believe what I was seeing, sure that it must have been the shock.
Lenny Cyrus was standing there. He was wearing what looked like a tattered scuba diving suit and a cracked face mask, and I thought, What lake did he crawl out of?
“Hey, Zooey.” He looked as bad as I felt. “Are you all right?”
“I think so.” Was I imagining all this? “What are you doing here?”
“I thought of a virus for you.”
“Oh yeah? Thanks.”
Lenny was saying something else, but I closed my eyes again and let them carry me out.
When I woke up in the hospital that night and saw my mom and dad sitting there by the bed, it all came washing back over me. The fight in the dressing room, the play, the ambulance ride, and the blackness afterward.
“Mom...” My voice was a croak. “Dad.”
“Hey, look who’s awake.” She put her iPad aside, and Dad took my hand. “How are you feeling?”
“A little better.” I tried to sit up in bed. “Mom, what about the play? Did Aria...?”
She shook her head. “Zooey, after what Aria did to you, you know there was no way anyone was going to let her perform. She’s been suspended.”
I nodded and tried not to let the disappointment show in my face. “I know, but—”
“Look,” she said, “you’ve got visitors.”
I turned and saw Lenny and Harlan standing there on the other side of the room. Harlan had a black eye and was holding a bouquet of flowers, and Lenny had a pink-flowered balloon. I was relieved to see that he wasn’t wearing the scuba suit anymore, which maybe meant I’d somehow imagined it all to begin with.
“Sorry.” He held out the balloon. “It was all they had in the gift shop.”
“Thank you,” I said, and looked at Harlan. “Nice shiner, tough guy.”
“Thanks,” Harlan said. “It’s actually gone down a lot in the last hour or so.” He took a step closer to my bed. “So the doctor says you’re going to be okay.”
“That’s good.”
Lenny came forward. “Prognosis for vibrio vulnificus is really very good. It’s actually funny, because estrogen has been shown to have a protective effect against it, and...” He caught himself and stopped.
I looked at him. “Why is that funny?”
“It’s...I mean...it’s just...” He blushed. “You have some pretty rocking estrogen, that’s all.”
“How would you know?”
Lenny’s mouth just tightened as if it had been buttoned up from inside, and he looked at Harlan, who jumped right in to fill the silence. “Mr. Cheney suspended Mick as well as Aria,” he said. “I don’t think your parents will end up pressing charges, but in my opinion, they totally should. Putting bacteria from that petrie dish into your Diet Coke is attempted murder. I mean, it could’ve been, if we hadn’t gotten to you in time—”
“But you did,” I said. “So, thanks. You know, for the whole CPR thing. I think my dad was pretty impressed.” I sat back a little. “It’s just too bad about the play.”
“What about it?” Harlan asked.
“Well, how we had to cancel our first performance.” Harlan and Lenny looked at each other.
“It wasn’t canceled,” Harlan said.
“I don’t understand.” My head swiveled back to my mom. “You said we didn’t do the play.”
“No,” Mom said, “I just said that Aria wasn’t allowed to perform.”
“Then, I mean, how did we do it? Who played that role? She was in almost every scene. She had dialogue, songs, choreography to learn...Whoever took over would have to have...”
“A photographic memory,” Lenny said from the foot of the bed. “Yeah. It helps.”
I stared at him. “What...?”
“Before we came with you to the hospital,” my mom said, “I left my camera with one of the teachers and asked her to take pictures.” She handed me her camera. “See for yourself.”
I switched it on and stared down at the screen, back up at Lenny, then back down at the screen again. They all gathered around—Harlan, Lenny, and my parents—looking over my shoulder as I started flipping through the pictures. In the first photo, the elves and reindeer were out on stage, performing the opening number. I clicked to the next shot and saw Mrs. Claus coming out into the spotlight in her glittering red gown and boots.
Except this time, the role wasn’t played by Aria Keen.
It was Lenny Cyrus, dressed in Aria’s costume, with a full face of makeup and a wig.
I stared up at him.
“Lenny?”
He blushed. “Somebody had to do it. I was the only one who could memorize everything on such short notice. So, I stepped in.”
“And, actually, he doesn’t have a bad voice,” Mom said. “Here, keep going.”
I clicked through the pictures, through the scenes that I’d written and watched a hundred times in rehearsal. The arrival of the team of scientists and soldiers. The discovery of the elves and reindeer. They all led to the scene that I’d figured out only earlier that day—Harlan’s big entrance.
“They got this part on video,” Mom said. “Here, press Play.”
I stared at the screen, watching as Lenny made his way across the stage in the sequined gown, singing alongside Donnie Delanie as Dr. Henderson and Priscilla Shrewsbury and Tej Singh in their military fatigues, the creepy music swelling, getting more sinister. The canvas set burst open, and Harlan exploded through it into the spotlight in his zombie Santa costume, arms outstretched.
The audience screamed—a huge, loud, totally satisfying scream. Tej and Priscilla swung around and shined their flashlights on Harlan, and the whole scene froze in place.
“Well?” my mom said.
“What can I say?” I reached over and threw my arms around Lenny’s neck, giving him a tight squeeze. “You’re amazing. You both were.”
Lenny blushed again, but he was smiling, and I noticed he still had some eye makeup on that he hadn’t been able to scrub off. “It was short notice, but—”
“Lenny, you saved the play.”
“I didn’t really—”
“Yes, you did. And you...”—I turned to Harlan—“saved me.” I gave him a hug. “So thank you both.”
“No problem.” Harlan nodded, but he was staring expectantly at Lenny.
“Zooey, look,” Lenny said, with difficulty, “there’s something else that we...”—he paused—“that I have to tell you.” He put on a brave smile. “It’s pretty important.”
“Okay,” I said. “What?”
“What is going on here?” a man said from the doorway. “Leonard?”
Lenny looked over, and when he saw who it was, his smile faded.
“Dad?”
FORTY-NINE: LENNY
My dad stood in the doorway in his overcoat and boots. He obviously had no intention of coming any further into the room. “Your mother and I would like to talk to you outside.”
I didn’t move. “You can talk to me right here.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” There was a little quaver in my voice, but I got control over it, at least for the moment. “These are my friends. Anything you want to say to me, you can say in front of them.”
“Fine,” Dad said, straightening up and squaring his shoulders. “We’re driving to Aunt Virginia’s for the holidays and then taking you straight to Connecticut, to Brixton Academy. I’ve already packed your bags. Your mother’s waiting in the car.”
I glanced back at Harlan, then Zooey and her parents as my dad, the world-renowned Nobel Prize-winning scientist Donald Cyrus, stood waiting for his son to obey orders.
“Wait,” I said.
“What?”
“Dad, I did something today, and I need to tell you about it.” I glanced back at Zooey. “All of you.”
“Leonard, this is no time for—”
“Everything I told you this morning was true,” I said. “I really did shrink myself down to the molecular level. Harlan dropped me in Zooey’s Diet Coke, and she swallowed me, and I spent the day traveling around inside her body, trying to get to her brain. At one point I made her say she had chromoblastomycosis.” I looked at Zooey again. “Sorry about that.”
Lenny Cyrus, School Virus (9780547893167) Page 16