Plague of the Manitou

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Really? So what did that tell you?’

  ‘Well – I’d been to a wedding-party that evening, and I could have been dehydrated from too much alcohol. But the dream made me double-check his results again the next morning. I found that he didn’t have MS at all but Sjögren’s syndrome, which of course gives you a really dry mouth and throat. So – yes. Maybe there are times when your subconscious knows better than you do.’

  Anna sipped more of her coffee, and then she said, ‘Listen – I’d better take a shower and get dressed.’

  ‘OK,’ said Jim. ‘I’ll give Sandra a call while you’re doing that. But you’re absolutely sure you don’t need to give yourself a break?’

  She leaned across and gave him a kiss on the cheek. In another life, she thought, if things had worked out differently, she and Jim could have been lovers, or even married. But she was living this life, and they weren’t, and they probably never would be.

  As Anna came out of the shower she heard the phone ring. Jim answered it, and he was still talking when she came out of her bedroom, combing back her wet hair.

  ‘Well, OK, I’ll tell her,’ he was saying. ‘Sure. Absolutely. I’ll call you right back.’

  He hung up. When he turned around to face her, his expression was so serious that she thought he must be putting it on.

  ‘Was that your PA?’ she asked. ‘Has she found those exterminators for me?’

  ‘No … that was Doctor Mulvaney at the Center for Disease Control. I’ve talked to Sandra already; she’s getting in touch with those exterminators for you.’

  ‘You mean Ray Mulvaney – the director? What did he want?’

  ‘It’s the bedbug virus, or something very much like it. He says that the CDC have been receiving notifications of similar outbreaks all across the country – including our report, of course, from Henry Rutgers. In almost every case the victims have been bitten by bedbugs. Unofficially, the CDC are already calling it BV-1, just to give it a name.’

  ‘There, what did I tell you? Maybe my hallucinations weren’t so bizarre after all.’

  ‘By far the highest number of outbreaks has been in Los Angeles,’ said Jim. ‘Sometime yesterday afternoon people started to show up at hospitals suffering from convulsions and hemorrhage – only six or seven to begin with, but by midnight last night they had eighty or ninety, and ever since then they’ve been bringing them in so fast that the emergency rooms are having trouble keeping up.

  ‘They’ve also had sporadic outbreaks in Chicago and Indianapolis and Kansas City, but nothing like so serious as LA. The trouble is, the media have gotten wind of it already, and it’s headline news. Doctor Mulvaney’s worried that it’s going to start a mass panic and make things even worse.’

  ‘So where do I come into it?’

  ‘He’s putting together a team of specialists to isolate it and come up with an antivirus before BV-1 gets beyond our control. He wants you to join them as soon as you can.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Come on, Anna, you’re one of the leading epidemiologists in the country. You cracked that Scalping Disease almost single-handed, didn’t you? Of course he wants you.’

  ‘What about the Meramac School virus?’

  ‘Peter and Rafik and Epiphany can follow up your work on that.’

  ‘I’d like to take Epiphany with me, if I could. I’m going to need an assistant, and she knows exactly how I work.’

  ‘That’s OK by me. Peter and Rafik can keep in touch with you by Skype. So what shall I tell Ray Mulvaney? That you’re going to LA?’

  Anna thought for a moment, and then she nodded. ‘Yes. I’ll go. I think it will do me some good – help me to get my mind straight. Maybe I’ll stop seeing nuns and medicine men.’

  While Anna finished drying her hair, Jim called Ray Mulvaney at the CDC and told him that she would be flying out later that day. At the same time he switched on the TV in the kitchen and tuned in to NBC News, and when he had finished talking on the phone he turned up the sound.

  From Los Angeles, news reporter Kim Baldonado was standing outside St Vincent Medical Center, with crowds of people behind her and at least five ambulances with flashing lights. ‘It’s only a quarter of seven,’ she said, ‘and already this morning the emergency room here at St Vincent’s has taken in fifty-seven patients, all of whom have been vomiting blood and suffering from uncontrollable convulsions. Every other emergency room in Los Angeles County is being overwhelmed by people with the same horrifying symptoms. So far none of the hospitals has been able to provide us with any information as to the cause of this epidemic, although the county health department have issued a statement saying that there have already been fatalities, possibly as many as a hundred.

  ‘Unconfirmed comments from nursing staff suggest that this could be a viral infection, such as bird flu or swine flu. So far, though, the exact nature of the virus remains a mystery. Whatever it is, and whatever its origin, it is obviously highly dangerous and highly infectious. A spokesperson for the Center of Disease Control has recommended that you stay in your home for the time being unless it is absolutely necessary.’

  Anna came in, all ready to go. ‘I heard that,’ she said. ‘There was no mention of bedbugs, though, was there? So it looks like they’ve managed to keep that under wraps – for now, anyhow. But it sounds like the sooner I get out there, the better.’

  Jim tore a sheet out of his notepad and handed her the address of the Department of Public Health laboratory in Downey, about twenty miles south of downtown Los Angeles, where the BV-1 team was hurriedly being assembled. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘be careful. I don’t want you catching this thing, too.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she told him. ‘There hasn’t been a single virus that’s outwitted me yet.’

  She went home mid afternoon to meet the exterminators from A-Z Pest Control, and to pack herself a suitcase. She would have to give the exterminators her keys so that they could fumigate her loft in her absence. She wouldn’t have time herself to wrap up all of the food in her fridge and her freezer in polythene bags, as well as any jar or bottle that had already been opened, and to go around the loft opening every closet and every drawer, so that the gas would disperse once fumigation was over.

  Two men in bright-red overalls were already waiting for her when she arrived – one thin and round-shouldered with a mournful moustache, the other short and swarthy with a belly that made his overalls gape.

  ‘You know something,’ said the short and swarthy one as Anna led them through to her bedroom, ‘I can never for the life of me think why God created bedbugs.’

  ‘Nor termites,’ added his companion sadly. ‘Nor yellow-jackets neither.’

  Anna pointed to the bed and said, ‘There were hundreds of them. And I mean hundreds. By now there are probably three times as many.’

  ‘OK, ma’am. You can leave it to us to wipe ’em out for you,’ said the short and swarthy one. ‘All our fumigation work guaranteed one hundred and ten percent. Fully insured, too. We’ll leave you a leaflet so you’ll know what we’ve done and any precautions you need to take when you get back.’

  Anna left them in the bedroom while she went to the storage closet by the front door to take out her suitcase. When she returned, though, she found that the two exterminators had come back into the living area, and had closed the bedroom door behind them. Both of them looked pale and shocked, as if they had just witnessed some appalling accident.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘You said “bedbugs”,’ said the short and swarthy one. His voice was hoarse and he had to clear his throat before he continued. ‘You said “hundreds of them”.’

  ‘That’s right. What’s the matter? What’s wrong?’

  ‘What you got in there, lady, that’s not bedbugs. Not plural. That’s bedbug, singular.’

  ‘Never saw nothing like it,’ added his companion, shaking his head. ‘Never.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Anna. ‘You mean there’s only one of th
em? How can that be?’

  The short and swarthy one put his hand on the bedroom handle, opened it two or three inches, and peeked inside. ‘Looks like the coast is clear. Why don’t you come check this out for yourself? I don’t have any idea how we’re going to deal with this baby, I swear to God.’

  Anna began to feel alarmed. It had been frightening enough to find a mass of bedbugs seething all over her sheets last night, but she couldn’t understand what the exterminators meant by ‘bedbug, singular’ and why they both seemed so jittery.

  The short and swarthy exterminator beckoned her to follow him across the bedroom. He walked on tiptoe, as if he didn’t want to disturb whatever it was that they had found in the bed. She was surprised to see that they hadn’t yet stripped off the bedcover and the sheets, which she would have assumed was the first thing they’d do.

  She could see that the sheets and the pillowcases were still speckled with rusty-colored bedbug droppings, but she couldn’t see any bedbugs swarming over them. They had probably burrowed their way into the mattress in the hope that, sooner or later, another unsuspecting warm-blooded person would come climbing into the bed.

  The short and swarthy exterminator leaned across the bed and gripped the edge of the white woven throw between finger and thumb. ‘You ready for this?’ he asked her. ‘I don’t want you to get fracashed.’

  ‘Go on,’ she told him.

  He cautiously lifted the throw, tilting his head sideways so that he could see underneath it. At first it seemed as if there was nothing there at all, but as he raised it further, Anna saw two jointed legs. They were definitely insect legs, amber-colored and articulated, but they were as large as the legs of a snow crab.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said and couldn’t stop herself from giving a shiver.

  The exterminator raised the throw higher still, and it was then that she realized what he had meant by ‘bedbug, singular’. Frantically trying to conceal itself in the folds between the sheets was a bedbug the size of an oval casserole-dish, reddish-brown, with an armored shell in seven sections and a shield-shaped head with waving antennae. The higher the exterminator lifted the throw, the more frantically it tried to bury itself out of sight.

  It smelled, too, like crushed cilantro, or old women’s urine, even more strongly than all of those hundreds of bedbugs which had invaded her bed during the night.

  The exterminator let the throw drop back. ‘See what I mean?’ he asked Anna. ‘We can fumigate the place with sulfuryl fluroride for sure, but I don’t know if that’ll be strong enough to kill it. Before I saw that thing, I was going to suggest taking your mattress away with us and treating it off site, which would have cost you a whole lot less – but I don’t know how we’re going to be able to do that now.’

  Anna could see the huge bedbug moving underneath the throw – a lump that struggled diagonally from one side of the bed to the other. ‘I just don’t get it,’ she said. ‘It’s like all of those tiny little bedbugs have joined together to make one giant bedbug.’

  ‘Never saw nothing like it,’ repeated the exterminator with the mournful moustache. ‘Never in my born days.’

  ‘Problem is, ma’am, I won’t be able to give you any kind of a guarantee that we can deal with it,’ said the short and swarthy one. ‘Bug that size, it’s hard to know what kind of resistance it has. Roaches, they can survive an H-bomb, so they say. Don’t know what we’ll have to do to deep-six this sucker.’

  ‘Please – if you can try, at least,’ said Anna. ‘I have to leave for Los Angeles in an hour. If fumigating doesn’t work, call me, and then maybe we can think of some other way of dealing with it. Maybe you could trap it. You trap rats, don’t you? This wouldn’t be so different.’

  The exterminator sucked in his breath. ‘I’m not so sure, ma’am. I think I’ll have to call my office and get some kind of authorization for this. It’s like there are health and safety rules for every kind of extermination procedure, and I couldn’t tell you what the hell this comes under. For all I know, the damn thing’s dangerous. Your regular bedbug can give you a pretty nasty bite … Think what this baby could do.’

  Anna couldn’t take her eyes off the lump under the throw. Again, she found herself wishing that she had a gun in the house. The simplest way of exterminating this bedbug would be to blow it to bits, even though she had the strangest feeling that the bits would go back to being tiny-sized bedbugs again, and simply scatter and hide, and then she would never be able to get rid of them.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You call your office. But tell them you can do whatever it takes, it’s OK by me. I have to pack or else I’m going to miss my flight.’

  Anna quickly took the clothes and the toiletries that she needed, and then they left the bedroom and closed the door. The short and swarthy exterminator called his boss on his cellphone and spent the next ten minutes pacing up and down and saying, ‘Sure, but— Sure, but— Yes, but—’

  Eventually, he hung up and said, ‘He says we can go ahead with fumigation. If that doesn’t work, then we’ll have to contact the city pest control people and ask for their advice. We have to be careful we’re not killing off some rare species of bug, because that could get us into a whole lot of trouble.’

  Anna looked toward the bedroom door and gave another involuntary shiver when she thought of that huge amber insect crawling around in her bed. ‘Here’s my cell number,’ she said, scribbling it down on a notepad for them. ‘Let me know as soon as it’s dead.’

  She heard nothing from A-Z Pest Control until she and Epiphany arrived at LAX at nine that evening. As they came across the concourse, they were met by a smooth young black professor who Anna had come across at a meeting of disease-control specialists two years ago in Denver, Michael Newton. He was slim and handsome with a shiny shaven head, and he was wearing a very smart cream designer suit and a splashy green-and-orange necktie.

  ‘Professor Grey,’ he said with a grin, taking their suitcases for them. ‘It’s a great honor to meet you again.’

  ‘Pleasure to see you, too, Doctor Newton. Well, it would be, under any other circumstances. This is my colleague Doctor Bechet. Epiphany, this is Michael. Michael, meet Epiphany. She’s been working with me on the Meramac School virus.’

  ‘Yeah. I was reading about that. How’s that progressing?’

  ‘One really cussed bug, I can tell you. Whatever you throw at it, it mutates to become immune to it. I’ve even tried tyranivir on it. All that did was to make it even more aggressive.’

  ‘Well, I guess human beings are much the same, if you challenge them. You know what they say – what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’

  They walked out of the terminal into the warm evening air. Anna said, ‘If the Meramac School virus was a human being, it would be an out-and-out psychopath. It destroys every living thing that’s different from itself, even its own cells – the ones that it replicated before it mutated.’

  ‘So – technically – you have a disease that retrospectively cures itself?’

  ‘Pretty much. The only problem is that we can’t yet cure the disease.’

  As they approached the curb, Michael Newton raised his hand and a gleaming black Escalade left its parking space on the opposite side of the ramp and drew up beside them. Michael Newton opened the doors for them, and Anna and Epiphany climbed in.

  ‘We’ve booked you in at the Embassy Suites,’ said Michael Newton. ‘It’s quiet there, and it’s not too far from the lab. There’s an in-house restaurant, too, the Fireside Grill, so you won’t have to worry about cooking.’

  ‘I love cooking,’ said Epiphany. ‘You should taste my gumbo.’

  How about that, thought Anna. She’s flirting with him.

  Before they had even left the airport, Anna’s cell warbled, and she fished it out of her purse.

  ‘Ms Grey? This is Bill Grearson at A-Z Pest Control. Sorry to bother you, but are my two operatives still with you?’

  ‘I’m not at home,’ said Anna
. ‘I had to leave for Los Angeles as soon as I let your men in.’

  ‘They haven’t called you?’

  ‘No, I’ve heard nothing.’

  ‘Well, that’s real strange, because neither have we. We’re thinking of sending someone around to your place to make sure that everything’s OK. They said you had one whopper of a bedbug there, they weren’t too sure how they were going to deal with it.’

  ‘It was huge, yes. But they promised to call me once they’d killed it. I can only assume that they haven’t managed it yet, but I’m surprised they haven’t even been in touch with you.’

  For all I know, the damn thing’s dangerous. Your regular bedbug can give you a pretty nasty bite … Think what this baby could do.

  ‘I’m surprised, too,’ said Bill Grearson. ‘A single-room fumigation shouldn’t take longer than four hours, tops, and so far it’s taken them nearly six, and not a word. They’re not answering their cells, either.’

  ‘You have me worried now,’ said Anna. ‘Give me a call back, won’t you, and let me know if they’ve had any problems.’

  ‘Will do, Ms Grey.

  ‘What was that about?’ asked Epiphany as Anna dropped her phone back into her purse.

  ‘That enormous horrible bedbug I was telling you about. The two guys who came round to exterminate it were supposed to call me, but they haven’t, and they haven’t called their office, either.’

  ‘That’s creepy.’

  ‘I know. It’s like something out of a science-fiction movie. I hope nothing’s happened to them.’

  ‘Most likely they couldn’t kill it and they simply gave up and went home.’

  ‘Yes, but that would mean it’s still crawling around my loft. It gives me the heebie-jeebies just to think about it!’

  ‘Everything all right, professor?’ asked Michael Newton, turning around from the seat in front of her.

  ‘A little domestic problem, that’s all,’ said Anna. ‘Leastways, I hope it is. And – please – call me Anna.’