Code Orange

by Caroline B. Cooney

  The bulb was too distant and weak to light up the door; he was still working in the dark. Mitty patted around the handle until he found the keyhole.

  Time to learn lock picking.

  This did not turn out to be a silent activity. The guys upstairs were either sound asleep or out of town, because scratch, poke, twirl and stab though he might, no onecame to stop him. He achieved nothing with his nail. He rammed it hard and it snapped off, filling the keyhole.

  Mitty sighed. He went back down, pulled the chain again and stood in the dark.

  His original plan had been to die prior to getting the disease so that the disease couldn't exist.

  How did a person die on purpose when a person had no weapons? Over the long term, a person could stop drinking. If you didn't take in any water, it would be pretty quick, Mitty thought. You couldn't go forty-eight hours without water, could you? Maybe you could go twice that. He'd be infectious by then.

  Mitty had no desire to die. He had a million hopes for life. He wanted every minute of his life, and in his family, lives were long. His father's father was still running marathons at eighty-eight. Well, entering marathons, at least.

  That was the kind of gene pool Mitty had.

  Plus, of course, his relatives all followed longevity rule number one: don't get smallpox.

  Rule number two would be: answer the right e-mails.

  If only he had more knowledge. If only these guys were talking, so he could guess something about them, figure out who they were and what they stood for. If only he could win them over, or entice them into a trap, or guide them into kinder, gentler lifestyles.

  But far from moving them to a kinder, gentler lifestyle, this little adventure would probably whet their appetites. No doubt they too were having smallpox dreams—but picturing New Yorkers screaming and suffering, scared and dying. As presumably Mohammed Atta and his eighteen cohorts had pictured New Yorkers screaming and suffering, scared and dying.

  It came to Mitty that it didn't matter who these guys were and where they came from. It didn't matter whether Mitty was getting smallpox or not, and it didn't matter whether these two got smallpox either.

  What mattered was this: if they couldn't use Mitty in biological terrorism, they'd move on. They'd plan and carry out some other type of terrorism.

  He thought of the magnificent passengers on the flight over Pennsylvania on 9/11, men and women calling home, getting the terrible news, grasping the full horror of what was happening: they were to be used to bomb the capital. And the passengers said no. Nobody is using us as a bomb. We'll take you down first. We'll die—but you won't win.

  Mitty would follow their example and kill these guys along with himself. The world didn't need them. As Derek had pointed out, though, that wouldn't get rid of the guy in charge, who was safely off in the mountains of wherever. But Mitty couldn't accomplish anything in the mountains of wherever, so he considered what he could accomplish in the basement.

  Gas, fire, water, electricity.

  City people did not tend to know much about their basement, and if they lived in a huge apartment building, like Mitty's, they had never even been in it, because that was the territory of the maintenance staff. Mitty, however, had a country house, and in that house, over the years, anything that could go wrong had gone wrong.

  His father had fixed everything at least once. If he had to hire guys to do the work—like when they put in central air—he would drive out to Roxbury constantly to ask questions and be part of it. But whenever possible, he did the work himself on weekends.

  So Mitty knew more about a basement than your average Manhattan kid.

  He could break the water pipe so that the water supply could not be turned off. There was no sump pump down here to take water back out. He had no idea how quickly the basement would fill with water. Probably hours rather than days, and he didn't have to fill the entire basement. The water just had to enter the electric panel. Once that happened, he was toast.

  Mitty tried to imagine himself standing quietly in water up to his chest, waiting to be electrocuted. No. He'd be hanging from the rafters by his toenails trying to stay out of the water.

  He could blow the place up. The furnace would have a safety device that shut off the gas flow if the pilot went out. If Mitty disabled it and then blew the pilot light out himself, gas would keep pouring into the basement. After a while, all Mitty would need was a spark.

  But for safety reasons, gas had a stinking smell added to it, just so that couldn't happen accidentally. These guys would know what was going on. They'd have plenty of time to drag Mitty out, go into their duct-tape routine, throw him in a vehicle and find another place to hunker down.

  He considered a third possibility. This was the one he had thought of all through the first night, because of course he knew the moment he glanced at the furnace.

  Mitty Blake prayed. God, what I need here is courage. Don't let me wimp out. I hate wimps. Don't let me get scared. I don't have time. Don't let me screw up. I don't have time for that either.

  Neither does New York.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Thursday passed. Friday crawled by.

  Every now and then, they threw hamburgers down the stairs. Mitty tried not to leap up and grab the bags, tried not to rip them open, tried not to gulp each burger in two swallows. But he was starving. The heat of the food, the smell, the taste, even the tiny instant of action were relief from the dark, the monotony and the fear.

  Sometimes Mitty kept the light on and sometimes they turned it off from upstairs.

  Mostly he slept.

  The cot sagged even more under his weight. Sometimes he used his folded T-shirt for a very thin pillow and sometimes he wet it down and used it for an icepack on his cheek, which was now hot and swollen. His headache had returned, but it was different now: heaviness at the base of his skull blunted his ability to think.

  Now and then he heard murmurs upstairs, but he could never distinguish words. Several times he smelled coffee.

  He tried to plan. After he discarded ridiculous or hopeless or pointless ideas, not much was left. Every plan he came up with required the cooperation of the guys upstairs, and that was a stupid thing to expect.

  Now and then he chinned himself up to the ceiling to listen to the radio. The Harlem Globetrotters were at Madison Square Garden. The temperature was thirtyeight. The World Trade Center PATH station, which had reopened, was once more the busiest stop on the line, with thirty thousand riders a day.

  Still no mention of a missing teenage boy from the Upper West Side.

  On Friday night, the Blakes would normally drive to the country. Mitty could not begin to imagine how his parents were handling this. There was no way now to retract the letter on the computer, and maybe it was just as well. The letter had become more true than he had anticipated.

  Every terrorism expert Mitty had read said the next attack on America would be soon and would be worse. Mitty was the only person who could make sure this particular bunch of terrorists couldn't carry out their plans. He liked to think that for New York he would do anything.

  But what? What could he actually do?

  At some point he checked his skin for the last time.

  Then he sank back into sleep. It was a deep, heavy sleep, as if his body knew this was its last chance.

  He didn't wake up when the door at the top of the stairs opened.

  He didn't wake up when somebody walked halfway down.

  He didn't wake up when that person changed his mind and went back up the stairs, leaving the door open.

  What woke Mitty later was the smell of hamburgers and fries.

  But even though he could smell them, he could not drag himself up out of sleep.

  The guard did not throw the bag. He came all the way down the stairs.

  Slowly, Mitty turned his head. After a while he opened his eyes. He could sort of see blue paper and the red ski mask, but he couldn't keep his eyes open long enough to know if it was rea
l or a dream. He was cold. He wasn't wearing his T-shirt. He must have hung it up by the furnace to dry. The vinyl of the cot bothered his skin.

  The guard was carrying a small black cylinder. He'll shoot me, thought Mitty, unable to care. But it was a flashlight. The guard played the light over Mitty's bare chest, arms and face. Then he stepped back, calling urgently to his partner, who ran down to look. They screamed at each other in the language Mitty did not know and then the second guy ran back upstairs and rustled into his paper.

  Mitty knew what they were looking at.

  Macules.

  Still flat like freckles at this stage. Little clusters of dotson his chest and arms, thicker on the backs of his hands and probably thickest where Mitty couldn't see and where it mattered most: his face.

  Mitty had seen them last night, standing under the lightbulb for his final exam.

  The men crept closer, hunched down, staring at Mitty as if deciding whether to use wasp spray or rat poison.

  Then the first guy straightened up. He jabbed his arm and closed fist at the ceiling as if he held a rifle. “You will die,” he said to Mitty. It was the first thing he had said out loud. He had the same accent as the woman in brown. “You will die,” he repeated, and now he was laughing, “and then your people will die. We,” he told Mitty, “we will dance in the streets.”

  The men went backward up the stairs, as if the virus could not approach people who dared to look it in the eye, and they kicked the cellar door shut.

  My streets? thought Mitty Blake. My Broadway? My Columbus? My Amsterdam?

  No.

  You will not dance in my streets.

  They had left the bag of hamburgers and fries at the foot of the stairs, directly under the bulb, a dozen feet from Mitty. The smell was nauseating. He didn't want to throw up but he had to.

  He thrashed around on the slick polyethylene. He could not accept that he was never going to be comfortable again. After a long time, he dragged himself to a sitting position. His knees formed a handy rest for his head, which was now too heavy to lift.

  He tried to get up and couldn't. He rested for a while and then slid to his knees and crawled to a lolly column that braced a rafter. He hauled himself upright by the metal post. Walking was harder than he had expected. Even keeping his balance was hard. The journey to the toilet was long. When he got to the toilet he bent over it, gripped its sides and began retching. For a few minutes it was just awful pointless choking, his back curved over and his gut clenched, and then it happened. He really vomited. The acid burned his throat and mouth.

  He tried to turn on the faucet but didn't seem to have the strength. When he finally got a trickle, it hurt to bend, hurt to hold his mouth to it, hurt to swallow. Then he couldn't turn it off.

  He made it back to the camp bed and gagged again, spitting threads of sour vomit right where he had to lie down. It didn't make any difference now. When he dropped on the camp bed, it finally collapsed from his weight. Mitty let out a cry of despair and went down on his knees next to the ruined bed, balling himself up, cradling his head with his hands.

  Mitty Blake was not a shedder of tears. He didn't cry now either. He just whimpered, like a dog whose paw had been run over.

  He might have slept then. He might not. He knew only that he begged God to let it happen faster. He couldn't keep this up. But there were no choices for Mitty now. He had to keep this up.

  After a long time, Mitty heard himself use the last word on earth he ever wanted to use. He hadn't planned it; he didn't want it; he couldn't stop it. Please, he thought.When he realized they could not hear his thoughts, he summoned all his strength and cried out loud,“Please!”

  Nothing happened.

  Eventually he slept on the floor.

  The cellar door opened and he half woke; half remembered where he was and what he was doing.

  They both came down. Maybe they would nurse him. Bring him water. He tried to wet his dry lips but it didn't happen. He framed the word but produced no sound. Water? he begged silently.

  Mitty was filthy from his running nose, his vomit and even, by this time, his urine. The guards jeered at him in their own language, but Mitty fell asleep again.

  The next time he woke up—ten seconds later? ten minutes? maybe even another day?—he saw that they had brought a cheap folding guest bed down into the cellar, the metal kind with the blue ticking-striped mattress supported on wire links. It was old-fashioned and institutional looking: as if Typhoid Mary had just stopped using it. It had little wheels, maybe so the corpse could be easily removed from the room.

  He knew they had not brought a bed to give him comfort. They just didn't want to bend down to the floor when they needed to do something for Mitty. And keeping him alive for whatever time they required would take nursing care.

  They crossed their arms across their chests. They weren't holding anything, having used their hands to carry the fold-a-bed. They waited, obviously hoping he would climb into his deathbed on his own. Mitty waswilling. He was desperate to rest his head on something soft. But he couldn't move. He wept instead, and this time real tears came, as hot as what must be boiling within him.

  They got on either side of him, their paper layers scraping against his poor skin. Mitty's body was flaccid and heavy. He fell against the edge of the fold-a-bed, which rolled several feet into the darkness.

  One guard stepped over to retrieve it while the second guy tried to steady Mitty Mitty flung himself sideways with every bit of strength he possessed, and the two of them hit the floor together. Mitty grabbed the guy's head and slammed it down into the cement, rolling away fast to avoid a kick from the other guard. He rolled around the column and leaped to his feet. The second guy's gloved fist caught Mitty in the cheek, splitting open the earlier wound, but Mitty hooked the bed with his foot and rammed it into them, giving himself a barrier and enough time to leap up the stairs.

  They had left the door open. They always left it open.

  Mitty scrambled for the door and they screamed in rage, vaulting on top of him. Fingers closed around his ankles. They weren't letting him get out of here.

  But Mitty didn't want to get out.

  He yanked the door shut, and automatically, it locked.

  Mitty wiped himself down with his palms, smearing the little dots of coal dust he had so carefully put all over his skin. He looked down at the masks of his captors. “Fooled you, didn't I?” he said, grinning.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  They hauled him down the stairs by the feet. His bare chest and wounded cheek whapped against the rough edge of each tread. Then they kicked him aside so they could attack the door. The kick caught Mitty in the jaw, right where he had already taken two blows.

  One of the guys began hitting the door, swearing at it in English. It wouldn't be hard to pull these two over the edge and make this a real fight.

  But Mitty still had things to do, places to go, people to see. He put the furnace between himself and them.

  Suddenly one guy calmed down. He laughed. He lifted his paper packaging, reached into his pants pocket, and took out a heavy, jangling ring of keys. He held it up for Mitty to see.

  Mitty hardly noticed. He was fighting nausea. He had not expected that.

  He had faked being sick. He had planned for two long empty boring days and nights exactly what it would take to convince the guys upstairs that they needed to be down here with him. He had gone on and on displaying one lousy symptom after another, until he thought he would be a lunatic before those two guys took any action.

  To keep up his act, he had told himself lies, hour after hour—and now he didn't know if it had been an act. Had he forced himself to retch and whimper and moan? Or had it been happening anyway? Had he been kidding himself that he was faking it for a higher cause?

  If he were to rest his head on his knees right now, he would never lift it again.

  Because my jaw's broken, he said to himself. Not because I have smallpox.

  He did not kno
w why this mattered to him, under the circumstances.

  At the top of the stairs, they were getting nowhere with their key. Their bodies blocked any ray of light given off by the bulb. Now they were probably yelling at each other because neither of them had brought the flashlight.

  The key chain guy came back down the stairs, held his keys up to the lightbulb, carefully picked out the right key and went back to try again. No go. He yelled at the keys, yelled at the lock, yelled at his friend. Then he tried every key.

  Give it up, thought Mitty. I jammed the keyway with a nail. His jaw was exploding with pain. He spit a tooth into his hand. So much for all that orthodonture.

  They stared down at him, motionless in their blue paper clothes and their red masks, and then “Here Comes the Bride” rang out.

  Mitty had assumed that the clunking sounds that preceded their every move upstairs were the emptying of pockets: the key ring, the cell phone, the whatever. He'd been wrong. They had their keys and they had their phone. Now they'd just summon backup.

  But the phone rang on while the men pounded on the door. They had indeed left it in the kitchen.

  Unfortunately, not answering the phone would also bring assistance. Whoever was calling must want to know how things were going. When they didn't get an answer, they'd try again, and then a third time, and then they'd get in their car and come investigate.

  I have no hope, thought Mitty. My plan won't work.

  He retreated to a corner of the cellar where they could not quite see him from their post at the top of the stairs. They descended a few steps so they could keep their eyes on him.

  “I do have smallpox,” he told them quietly. “I faked the spots with coal dust, but the rest is real. This is day fourteen and I'm infectious. And no paper shirt is going to keep variola major from its work. You're dead men.”

  He made his way to the faucet. He swirled cold water around his mouth and spit out the blood. Then he drank.