Project 137

by Seth Augenstein

  The dozen or so of us doctors slid into our hazmat gear. We all struggled with the equipment, because we hadn’t done it even once since the last mandatory Bureau training a few years earlier. Betty ran back and forth, yelling through a bullhorn, her hair whipping in the breeze. The physicians were split into four groups of three; the plan was to divide the complex into quadrants, and work our way through each and every apartment, looking for victims and vectors.

  “Jaysis. This’ll take days,” McDermott muttered, voice muffled by the suit. “The fucking knackers.”

  The teams of doctors marched to their assigned destinations in silence. Rothenberg and McDermott and I were ordered to the northwest corner, the quadrant nearest the entrance. We walked slowly, in our awkward NBC suits, the breeze knocking us off-kilter, step by step. Each step felt heavy, and momentous. I was sweating. Finally, we reached the first stoop of the first courtyard: apartment number nine.

  Everything was easy at first. A few patients showed signs of bubonic infection, but they were still in the early stages, and easily treatable. An elderly couple had swollen glands and had progressed a little further, but their lives could still be saved. We gave everybody tetracycline and streptomycin and doled out canned food and water. Then we closed them in their homes with the Bureau regulation sealant we’d been given and moved on.

  But something was off. Pinefield Manor, despite some age and a bit of neglect, was immaculate. The synthetic grass was bright green. The concrete was smooth and fractureless. The breeze blew, but everywhere was silence. No birds sang. The others and I poked in corners and combed through kitchens and closets as we investigated. We didn’t find the slightest hint of vermin or decay or filth. One apartment was a methamphetamine lab—but even that was spick-and-span, nearly spotless. There were no roaches, let alone contagion-carrying rodents, in any of the places they looked. The place was not a normal incubator of infectious disease, by any means.

  I kept an eye out for Wetherspoon. The Old Man lived somewhere in the complex, but I couldn’t remember where. I tried to push it to the back of my mind; no use worrying until we all knew more about what we were dealing with.

  We moved on to the second courtyard. We found an elderly woman complaining of aches and gave her a month’s supply of antibiotics and the special emergency number to call when she needed more food. Then we coated her door with the regulation sealant. In the next apartment we found a middle-aged mom and her young daughter, coughing and wheezing, but who appeared otherwise healthy. The treatments we brought would make them well again, we reassured them. The woman sat on the couch with her child, stroking the girl’s soft blonde tresses. We rummaged through her apartment, picking up everyday objects and turning them over like they were alien artifacts: broom, pan, ketchup bottle, toilet brush.

  “You do know how this all started, don’t you?” the woman said.

  I looked up from the baseboard heating vents. With much effort, I raised to one knee, then hoisted myself up in the massive spacesuit.

  “We don’t know yet,” I said. “Do you?”

  She nodded.

  “It was all in the water,” she said. “A few nights ago, as I was brushing my teeth, this weird sputtering sound came out of the tap. The water had a brownish tinge and it tasted weird. I didn’t even notice until I had the glass on my nightstand, underneath the lamp. I poured it out, got a new glass—thinking I just hadn’t cleaned it in too long—and then looked into the water again. The same brown stuff. It seemed to float, and shimmer. I poured it out. It was fine the next day, the water was clear. But now you’re here, and there’s some kind of outbreak. One has to have something to do with the other.”

  Rothenberg and McDermott and I exchanged glances. We gave the woman extra antibiotics and moved on, carefully sealing her door as the little girl waved to us wistfully from her crystal-clear window.

  Door number seven was left ajar, swaying gently in the breeze. The hinges creaked a bit with each gust. Inside we came upon two doors: one ajar, another closed. A sign on the closed one said, “MAINTENANCE ONLY.” I opened it and peered down a dark staircase. Dust swirled down into the blackness.

  “Alright, let’s split up,” I said. “This one’s a basement. I’ll check it out. You guys take a look in the apartment. Yell if you need any help.”

  “Glad to see the brave man taking the safe route,” McDermott muttered.

  “If it’s nothing, I’ll come right back up and help you get the apartment sorted out,” I added. “Take heart, my dear Paddy.”

  I patted his shoulder, turned and went down the steps. It was dank and dark. The stone stairs crumbled underfoot, and as I made the turn at a tiny landing halfway down, I took note of insecticide spray cans on a shelf, along with some strange jars that must have been a hundred years old.

  I was getting close. I could feel it, a creeping along my clammy skin. A sliver of sweat trickled off my brow.

  The bottom was darker still. The only light shone from a streaked windowpane just above the ground outside. Through the shadows and the fogged-up visor, I could see a fridge, a washer and a dryer, and a big old sink at the far corner, a few scattered rusty toys here and there on the concrete floor, and an old oak table right in the center, between two support beams. I felt along the walls, found a switch. But when I flipped it, nothing happened. I walked up to the table, set my satchel down, and pulled out the heavy tongs from the pouch. I went to the fridge, where I found a lidless jar of rancid mayonnaise, one rotting cabbage head, a moldy loaf of bread.

  I glanced in the sink. What I saw there baffled me.

  Set there were two sealed jars, very shiny, glass and metal, with rubber tubes sticking out of their lids. Dregs in the bottom of the container looked off-colored, strange, organic. I gingerly picked it up, turned the thing over in my hands.

  Soft laughter came from behind, and I froze.

  THE TWENTIETH CENTURY IN PICTURES

  U.S.A., 2087

  I wheeled around, nearly dropping the jars. In my other hand I brandished the tongs, ready to strike. Squinting into the shadows, I took one step forward. From the window’s weak light, I saw a human shape sitting on the ground, back against the wall. The figure chuckled, coughing.

  “Don’t drop those jars, man, whatever you do,” the figure said. “That would be seriously bad.”

  I activated the walkie-talkie in the NBC suit.

  “Rothenberg—McDermott. I’ve got a victim and an unknown device down here. Come down ASAP.”

  “I wouldn’t call myself a victim, per se,” the man said, laughing, then coughing.

  I stepped closer. I finally saw him through the gloom. A young man—short brown hair, glasses, slack jawed, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. An elbow balanced on his knee, he was holding his head in his propped-up hand. His face was drawn and pale. A plump wart protruded from the end of his nose. He smiled at me, and he looked so damned familiar.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “We’ve met before,” the man replied. “It’ll come to you. Eventually.”

  “I’m here to help you, my friend. What is this thing?” I asked.

  “Just a little something I whipped up,” the guy said. He snorted. “But I think you found your vector. That’s what you’d call it, right?”

  He laughed again. I placed the jars on the table carefully and stepped closer.

  “Who the hell are you?” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Samuel Lamalade. Nice to meet you,” the man said, trying to rise, extending his hand.

  I didn’t move. The man coughed, a hacking deep within his chest, and staggered back against the wall, sliding back down to the ground.

  “Samuel, there’s a serious contagion in this apartment complex. Do you have a fever, or swelling, or weakness?” I said, stepping forward carefully.

  “All of the above,” Lamalade said. “I’m probably too far gone already, man.”

  He coughed, spitting up a big red blotch of blood on the floor.<
br />
  “I probably deserve this,” Lamalade mumbled. “After killing all those civilians at the stadium the other day, my karma’s probably all sorts of fucked.”

  I didn’t move. But I gripped the tongs tighter. Bootsteps pounded down the stairs. Rothenberg and McDermott were coming. I crept closer to Lamalade.

  “Tell me what the hell you’re talking about,” I said, grabbing the man’s shirt, tugging him up to his feet.

  Lamalade smiled. Blood oozed between his teeth. His eyes lolled in their sockets.

  “Oh man…a little experiment,” he said, wobbling on his feet, tumbling toward the floor. “I would ask…your friend…”

  Lamalade collapsed, dead weight. I tried to haul him back up, but he was too heavy. McDermott and Rothenberg’s footsteps came up behind, and then all three of us were scrambling to attend to the strange young suspect. As we dragged him into the small patch of sunlight from the tiny basement window, I got a better look at this Lamalade person. He wasn’t more than thirty years old, unshaven, acne on his forehead. But he was deathly ill. At his collar were a few swollen nodes—telltale signs of bubonic plague. Rothenberg radioed in the warning, and a minute later several paramedics hustled a stretcher down the stairs, dropped Lamalade onto it, and hauled him up and out toward the isolation tent. McDermott and Rothenberg followed.

  I stayed behind, looking around the room. I picked up the two jars, turning them in my hands. As I looked over the device, I slowly began to understand it. The longer attachment resembled a suction device; it was clear and long and could create a vacuum. The other attachment was threaded to connect to a faucet, a water source. And then there was the brownish muck. If it was properly connected, the reverse-pressure of the vacuum would cause the contents of the jar to be sucked up into the pipes, creating a backflow into all the faucets and toilets connected to the same system.

  Delivering some substance—poison, germs—directly into the water supply. The design was simple—just basic physics. But for what purpose? I felt a tingle up the back of my neck, underneath the NBC suit.

  I bagged the device in a standard-issue prophylactic sack. I charged back to the medical tent. Lamalade was already gone. The nurses and other doctors had triaged him, taken precautions against the risk of contagion, and then packaged him in an ambulance bound for Saint Almachius. I asked around. No one could tell me why he was evacuated while others were quarantined. I found Betty and showed her the device. I was about to head back to the hospital to question the maniac responsible, I told her. She shook her head, tapping at her Atman for real-time emergency updates.

  “Joe, you can’t go,” she said. “We have too many apartments still to go through. We have people to treat. All-hands-on-deck, as Wetherspoon says.”

  I shook my head, the NBC suit rustling with my movements. But she grabbed my elbow with her gloved hand.

  “Now listen,” she said. “Once we finish this last apartment block, you can go interrogate him all you want. But in the meantime, why don’t you call Lanza? He’s an actual detective. Maybe he can start questioning the guy. If he survives. Give me that thing and let me put it in a hazmat bin.”

  “I don’t know why you’re always in charge,” I said, half-smiling at her. But she only smirked back and continued her rounds, bossing around the other doctors at the scene.

  I used the tent’s emergency Atman. Although Lanza couldn’t hear me so well at first, I managed to convey the basics: about the device, and the suspect, and the confession, and the outbreak. On the other end, Lanza listened in silence. Swearing, he said he’d head to the hospital right away, and hung up.

  Rothenberg and McDermott and I went through the rest of the apartments. The dwellings closest to where we’d found Lamalade had the sickest people in the whole complex. We discovered a dead elderly couple in the apartment right above the basement. In the others we’d opened the doors to eight people just barely breathing in their beds. We did our best with antibiotics and fever medications, and we brought in intravenous fluids and oxygen machines—all to no avail. A middle-aged man died, convulsing, as we tried to move him to a gurney.

  But none were evacuated like Lamalade had been—with that same speed and efficiency.

  We left when a new shift from Clara Maass arrived on the scene. We were all sent to decontamination in yet another isolation tent, and we all took preventative antibiotics to stave off any germs we might have come into contact with. We took off the suits, washed in the small shower stalls, and carefully followed all the protocols.

  “Thank God for Science, right?” Rothenberg said, grinning, throwing a handful of pills in his mouth.

  “Aye,” McDermott said. “It’s a modern miracle we don’t die in our own filth, like mangy dogs, it is.”

  The bus arrived, and we were shuttled back to Saint Almachius. A silence hung over the medical staff. Betty sat next to me this time, and she quickly fell asleep, her head rolling onto my shoulder. Her hand drifted to my thigh, but I pushed it back onto her lap. I rubbed my eyes. Exhaustion had overcome my body, but my mind still raced.

  Black Death—a biological weapons attack, with dozens of victims, by the same crazed mass murderer behind the stadium attack. It was almost unfathomable, even after the Intifada attacks of the last few years. What was the possible connection? What inspired your garden-variety spree killer to develop the kind of ingenuity to spread bubonic plague? And why the hell was a random apartment building in New Jersey the target? It was one thing for the Intifada to attack Newark with a dirty bomb, to try and disrupt another major American city like they had done with Seattle and Austin. It was quite another to target no-name middle-class families from suburbia for no apparent reason.

  Someone poked my shoulder. It was McDermott.

  “You hear? Old Man Wetherspoon’s apartment was empty,” McDermott whispered.

  “I was wondering where he was,” I said. “I was worried, but there was no time to stop and ask anyone.”

  “Your man lives at the back end of that complex,” McDermott said. “One of the other teams said they found his place completely bare. Even the rugs were gone, mate. Pretty dodgy bit of stuff.”

  “I’ll find him,” I said. “But first I have to talk to the guy we found in the basement. I’ll bet he can tell us what happened back there.”

  “If he’s still alive,” Rothenberg said, his head popping up over the seat. “Oy, he looked like he was more than half-dead.”

  * * *

  The bouncy ride ended. As I got off the schoolbus and headed into the hospital with the throng of doctors, I called Mary and told her I was still alive, everything had gone by the book, and I just had to finish up my usual rounds. Her voice was bleary, like she’d just woken up. But she said dinner would be ready when I arrived home.

  I walked down to Old Man Wetherspoon’s office. I knocked, and my heart sank as the seconds passed by without an answer. The door was locked. I cursed and I turned around and went back upstairs. In the middle of the ICU’s main hallway, I saw Lanza standing there, hands on his hips, just staring at a wall. He shook his head.

  “We got here too late,” Lanza said. “Guy was already comatose. The other doctors say he’s got an outside chance to survive. But we’re not supposed to hold our breath.”

  “You think this guy’s responsible for the outbreak, and the stadium shooting?” I said.

  “We’re pretty sure,” Lanza said. “His DNA matched the shell casings at the stadium. And I take your word for it on the outbreak. But we have no motive. And we don’t know whether anyone was working with him. We’re interested in talking with one of your colleagues.”

  “Who?”

  “That mentor of yours, Cornelius Wetherspoon,” he said, cracking his knuckles. “Wetherspoon has access to the electronic records here, and he lives where everyone just got sick. Also, it looks like he cleared out his apartment and vanished right before this attack. Let’s just say it’s suspicious, Joe.”

  I shook my head, reached underne
ath my glasses and scratched at my eyes. Lanza laid a gentle hand my shoulder.

  “Sorry, Joe,” Lanza said. “I know you respect the guy. But it looks like he’s been up to something. Just let us know when you hear from him, so we can talk to him. He may actually be innocent, for all we know.”

  “But you don’t really think that.”

  “Doesn’t matter what I think,” Lanza said. “What matters is the truth. Where the evidence points. You know that, Joe.”

  Lanza patted my shoulder and walked down the hall where a group of cops with serious faces were huddled in conversation. I turned and went the other way, back toward Old Man Wetherspoon’s office. I rattled the doorknob. It was an old-fashioned lock, the only non-electronic one in the entire hospital. I pulled out the stylus for my Atman, and I angled its flimsy shaft in the gap where I thought the bolt might be. I carefully probed, but a few swipes with the tool, it snapped in two. I stared at the door for a second, then turned and went back up the stairs to my office.

  The first patient on my list was MacGruder. I walked in the room, and he greeted me with a cheery voice.

  “Dr. Barnes,” he said. “Long time no see.”

  “How you feeling, George?”

  “Never felt better, doc. I’m actually starting to believe a bit in all your optimism. Since I came back, I feel like I’ve got a new lease on life.”

  I checked the terminal. MacGruder’s vitals were even better than the last check up: heart rate, blood pressure, and radical carcinogen levels were all perfect for a man half his age. He was a paragon of health, and there was absolutely no medical reason to keep him in the hospital.

  “There’s absolutely no medical reason to keep you in the hospital,” I said.

  “But the nurse told me since I got this implant, that I should stay over at least one night, just to make sure.”

  MacGruder pulled aside some of the monitors from his arm, showing his exposed wrist. Shining there in the middle of inflamed, pinkish tissue was the oval of a newly-implanted Atman. It was the Four—a prototype of the version yet to be released. I recognized it from all the advertisements. The screen glinted in the overhead light.