“The other side of the river?” she answered in a sleepy voice that sounded childlike.
“Hunters Point South, in Long Island City.” Then he said something about the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, some island, and the mainland before she fell asleep.
The conference room door burst open. Isabel was curled up in Rick’s lap with her knees pulled into a fetal position. The room was dark save the glare from the hallway and the flickering light of a fire bathing the city outside with an orange warning.
Brandon stood in the doorway looking anywhere but at the two new lovers. “We got a call from the Tank,” the Pentagon’s pet name for their operations center. “They want us to head up to Central Park.”
Rick remained quiet for so long that Brandon looked his way, as did Isabel. Rick’s eyes were narrowed and lips pinched. He looked angry. Isabel got off his lap and sat in the adjacent chair. “What is it?”
“You don’t have to go. Either of you. You’ve done enough.”
Brandon said, without enthusiasm, “They apparently want us to see if New York’s more elaborate containment plans work. They said the Port Chester line was holding.”
“The Port Chester line,” Rick said, his contempt betrayed in his tone, “isn’t urban! They can’t contain outbreaks inside the fucking City. They don’t even know where they all are.” Rick’s voice was an uncharacteristic mix of scorn and defeatism.
Brandon added, “There was an attack in the Park…outside the quarantined blocks. Near the boathouse. Three couples—one with an infant in a Babybjörn carrier on the dad—were crossing the park toward the quarantine zone on the west side to do some disaster sightseeing, if you can believe that, when they were attacked by a man with a metal garden stake. Five of the six adults were killed. The only one who survived was the dad with the baby, whose wife yelled for him to run. They never found the killer, but the dad told police that the guy was wearing a business suit and that his eyes were pitch black.”
“Okay,” Isabel said. “So, there are tens of thousands of cops and soldiers out looking for some infected businessman who’s breaking curfew. Someone will see him and…and shoot him.”
“The point is,” Rick responded, “if we go up to the Park, it could break out behind us. All around us. Get us quarantined. There may be no safe way out from there, unlike there is now, from here. Remember Boston?” Isabel shook herself as if to banish that nightmare. “And what did those mathematicians’ models project?”
“The bigger and denser the city,” Isabel replied feebly, “the bigger the boom.”
Isabel knew that, by remaining in Manhattan, of all places, to observe yet another collapse into disease-fueled adrenal atrocities, she was tempting fate in the midst of the worst disaster in human history. This would be worse than the bridge, worse than the woods, worse even than the close call in Boston. The spread of infection in New York City would be the most rapid and explosive of all in North America.
“Dr. Plante,” Rick said, “you could escort Isabel across the East River. Get away from here as fast and as far as you can.”
“Hey!” Isabel snapped. “I don’t need to be escorted, okay? Like my fucking petticoats may get soiled.”
“We’re rolling the dice, Izzy,” Brandon said, using his pet name for her from a decade ago. “One of these times…”
Isabel looked at Rick. “Why don’t you,” she suggested slowly, tentatively, not wanting to offend him, “come with us?”
“Not me,” he said. “Just you two.” She began shaking her head, and continued non-stop through his lecture on risks assumed by soldiers but not civilians, of oaths sworn by the former but not the latter, of training she lacked but that might save him.
Isabel, however, when he ran out of steam, gave him one last shake of her head. “If you stay, I stay.” She rested her fingertips on his lips to prevent further quibbles. “Rick, what the hell do you think my chances are on Long Island, or Staten Island, or whatever island, or on the mainland, if I’m out there wandering around through the fucking apocalypse?” With Brandon, for God’s sake!
“All right, all right,” Rick said, rising and beginning the now familiar routine of climbing into his body armor, webbing, and pack. Isabel followed suit, as did Brandon. They met up with Sgt. Vasquez and his five men for the elevator ride down to street level. They wore so much gear, the nine soldiers and scientists had to take separate elevator cars.
As they piled into Humvees, Brandon said to Isabel, “You know I’m not the total coward you think I am.”
“I didn’t…” Isabel began, but Brandon climbed into a different vehicle.
* * * *
Every storefront and business along the drive to Central Park was closed. Metal shutters or gratings lowered. Windows boarded as if before a storm. There were no cars, taxis, or buses anywhere. Anyone parked on the street had been towed. There were no pedestrians on the sidewalks, but at every apartment building they passed residents crowded stoops and doorways. Some peered left and right down buttoned-up streets and engaged in animated conversations with each other, or arguments with policemen or National Guardsmen, each replete with pointing and animated gesticulations. All had the panicked looks of passengers who’d watched the last lifeboats depart. And all studied the passing three-Humvee convoy as if therein lay some clue critical to their survival. Some secret signal, detected only by them, that now it was time to panic. The machine gunner protruding through the roof of the middle Humvee probably served that purpose for many. Curfew be damned, it was time to flee, or would be soon.
Or maybe not, Isabel thought. Maybe they were stay-put-ers. Dead-enders hunkering down with water, food, and a nine iron by the door. Or deniers, who believed that every catastrophe was overhyped. Or accepters—we’re all gonna get sick, so why not fall ill and turn in the comfort of our own home rather than in some government-run concentration camp? Or fatalists—there were, Isabel feared, lots of them—who kept glancing at their gun, or razor blade, or poison, or rope, or plastic bags from the cleaners. The things that they now always kept by their sides, like security blankets. A less awful way out. They had seen what was coming. They weren’t going to let that happen to them, or their families.
Isabel jammed her eyes shut. “What is it?” Rick asked.
“My parents told me that imagination was a good thing, but I’m paying the price for it now.” Rick cradled the back of her head with his hand. Isabel kissed his warm palm.
At least there was Rick. She tried to smile for him, but it came off every bit as fake as poor Emma’s attempts. Where was Emma now? Surely she had made it down to the Old Place unless she had been shot in some ditch and left to die like a rabid dog.
The convoy slowed to pass three successive checkpoints manned first by cops, then a mix of cops and soldiers, then soldiers only. The fourth line, which was pierced by no visible checkpoints—the innermost ring—was being dug into the park’s soil and bolstered with sandbags along West Fifty-ninth from the Plaza all the way up to Columbus Circle, where the hansom cabs and their nickering horses used to queue.
They climbed out of their Humvees, left their heavy packs behind, and clambered over concrete barriers only just lowered into place across Fifth Avenue by city workers in hardhats and reflective vests working cranes. Vasquez took the lead—the point, Rick called it—and the two scientists trailed roughly midway through their small formation. The last of his men in their single file spun every few steps and walked backwards almost as much as forwards. It was only when Isabel saw the brief brilliance of a flashlight in Central Park—two soldiers, rifles raised, checking the brush—that she recalled that she too had a rifle slung in its now too-familiar place across her chest.
Pull the charging handle all the way back. Press the carbine firmly to your shoulder. Lower your eye to the sight. Flick the safety to Semi. And squeeze. It was really way too much of a gun for her to handle. She should as
k Rick for a pistol instead. It and its ammo also had the benefit of being much lighter.
“Masks on!” Vasquez called out. Isabel, Brandon, and Rick raised their masks and lowered the face shields attached to their helmets by elastic straps. They already wore latex gloves—dark green, not the bright blue of the NIH hospital—issued to them by the army.
They entered an apartment building lobby and joined a man who introduced himself as the Incident Commander. He was a FEMA official, but he wore camouflage combat gear like the troops. The only cops there wore black and had “Emergency Service Unit” patches. “Neighbors next to Apartment 906,” the Incident Commander reported, “heard a loud fight and banging sounds, but no gunfire. EMTs placed orders on 906. We’ve also tagged two suspicious units on the seventh floor and taped their doors too.” Troops and SWAT teams finished climbing into full personal protective equipment in the tight, marbled lobby. “Let’s see what we can do short of having these guys storm those apartments.”
They eschewed the elevators and headed for the stairs. “The doorman reported,” the Incident Commander explained as they climbed, “that the couple in 906—an older man and a young blond woman in sunglasses that the media has taken to calling an au pair or nanny—took the elevator to the ninth floor. One of the families in an apartment on the seventh floor that’s been quarantined rode up in that car with them. They talked to their neighbors, who also called 9-1-1. We’ve quarantined them too.”
Isabel carried her rifle and other gear, and wore heavy ceramic plates in her body armor. Her legs ached by the third floor. Her lungs caught fire by the sixth. Rick offered to help her with her load, but she declined. She was perspiring and breathing heavily by the time they entered the carpeted hallway on the ninth floor.
Neighbors peered out of doorways up and down the corridor with all manner of fabric covering their faces. One man in ski goggles and ski mask accosted them in muffled tones. “When can we leave?”
“Building’s quarantined,” the Incident Commander replied. “Nobody’s leaving.”
Sgt. Vasquez ordered the man to take his goggles off. He raised the amber lenses to his forehead, revealing green irises. Satisfied, Vasquez posted one soldier at the entrance to the stairwell—their escape route—and joined the others outside Apartment 906.
A red sticker was affixed diagonally to the door. Isabel tilted her head to read it. “Do not enter. QUARANTINE NOTICE. No entry, exit, or removal of items without permission of local authorities.” Two prickly biohazard symbols formed bookends to the warning. Fine print cited FEMA regulations.
Thick red tape stretched from the doorframe to the door. It wasn’t there as a seal. It was there to signal by a tear if the door had been opened. The NYPD SWAT team was arrayed around it. On either side, men with stubby machine pistols pressed their backs to the wall. Across the corridor and at an angle, a man in a black helmet and gas mask knelt with the telescoping stock of a short rifle resting on his shoulder. His goggled eyes were lowered to the weapon’s sights, which were aimed at the closed door.
The Incident Commander rapped loudly: a cop’s knock. “Federal Emergency Management Agency!” he announced. “Open up!”
On hearing that, timid neighbors leaning into the hallway disappeared behind doors that were bolted and chained with metal rattles. Isabel could hear the scraping sounds of heavy furniture being shoved back into place. The Incident Commander stepped back. Someone was working the locks from inside 906.
The door opened six inches, tearing the red tape. A lithe blond girl in her late teens or early twenties stared out with black eyes at their menacing weapons.
Isabel said, “Could you, maybe, point your guns somewhere else?”
When the cops and soldiers complied, the infected woman opened the door wider. Her blue jeans, everyone noticed, were covered in dried blood. She blinked in the bright light of the corridor, which poured through her gaping pupils.
The Incident Commander turned to Isabel and waited. What? she thought. What am I supposed to do? But she stepped forward and drew the infected woman’s attention. “What’s your name?” Isabel asked, smiling pleasantly—and pointlessly—behind her mask.
“Name? Klara, with a K,” the girl replied with a foreign pronunciation. Klara with two ahs. She was so light-skinned, Isabel thought, her eyes were probably blue.
“Klara, so, you got sick?” The girl took a look around at the dozen or so armed men, then nodded. “Can I ask where you think you might’ve caught it?”
“In Boston. Cambridge. At school.”
“I hear an accent, but I can’t place it.”
“It’s German. Stuttgart.” Like Emma when she had first turned, Klara eschewed the confusing first person pronouns. There was no “I” in there anymore. Her body had survived, but her self had not.
“Klara, why is there blood on your jeans?”
The dark pits of Klara’s eyes sank to survey her soiled pants. Her blue irises should reappear in a couple of weeks…if she survives. Then she would pose a new risk to the Uninfected. To men, anyway. She was pretty. When she looked up, she said, “Mr. Jorgensen had to be killed.”
“O-o-okay,” Isabel replied as looks were exchanged all around her. “Maybe you oughta explain that?”
Klara complied innocently. “Mr. Jorgensen and his wife, Marta,” she looked over her shoulder back into the apartment, “are friends of…of Klara’s parents. Another student had a car and got all the way to Fairfield, in Connecticut, before the sickness started and he drove off. Mr. Jorgensen had a boat that he brought to Manhattan in case he needed to escape in it. But he took it to the Connecticut coast instead. By the time he docked back here, the sickness was very bad.”
The damage to her brain wasn’t as severe as the worst Isabel had seen at the NIH lab. Like Emma, Klara might soon relearn how to use self-references. Or how to fake their use, Isabel thought, since her “self” had been totally destroyed by Pandoravirus. Or had it? Could it be that some small part of her self had survived? Or been regenerated, perhaps, with the promise of a more fulsome recovery over time? They still knew so little.
“And so,” Isabel asked, “Mr. Jorgensen got sick too?”
“Yes. And his wife Marta.”
“Okay. So how did you end up, you know, killing Mr. Jorgensen?”
“Mr. Jorgensen turned, and then he raped me.”
Isabel tried not to let the pause that followed linger. “And then you killed him?”
“There was a big knife in the kitchen. That killed him.”
Isabel looked around to determine whether the officials wanted anything else. When no one reacted, she said, “And Mrs. Jorgensen? Did you kill her, too?” Klara shook her head. “Can we, maybe, talk to her?”
“No. She doesn’t talk.” Klara stepped back into the apartment, then returned with a middle-aged woman in a housecoat.
Isabel said, “Mrs. Jorgensen? Marta?” When the woman’s head rose and her creepy black eyes focused, Isabel had to force herself not to take a step backward. “Mrs. Jorgensen, I, uhm, understand there was some trouble with your husband.”
“It’s Dr. Jorgensen. MD in Psychiatry. He raped Klara. He’d always wanted to. He had an appetite for younger girls. At some level, he was happy about the pandemic. It allowed him to act out his fantasies. And knowing what I know about them…He needed to be killed.”
Klara said, “She is doing much better now. Before, she couldn’t talk.”
“It was pretending,” Dr. Jorgensen said. “To not get killed, too.”
Klara nodded. That made perfect sense to her.
Isabel turned to the Incident Commander. Enough with this hallway trial. They had the two infected women don clear plastic coveralls complete with a hood and snorkel-like mouthpiece, zipped them up, and led them down the hall. A few doors slammed closed after getting brief looks at what might be their future: people in plastic
bags being marched away by armed men in HazMat gear.
“Let’s go down to the seventh floor,” the Incident Commander said as Mr. Jorgensen’s remains were collected.
In the first apartment two floors below, an adult son of the elderly couple, moaning from a back bedroom, was in the acute phase of illness. As the gurney rolled him out, he writhed, held his head in both hands, and pleaded for painkillers from inside his baggie. His parents both swore they felt fine, but the woman looked peaked, with a narrow band of perspiration along the exposed silver roots at her hairline. They were both escorted out at gunpoint in plastic bags, and a red quarantine sticker was affixed to their door.
The last apartment check down the hall initially appeared uneventful. No one responded to the knocks. The apartment superintendent unlocked the door, but it was barricaded from the inside. The SWAT team and Vasquez’s army detail pushed. There was a crash, and the door opened.
A screeching sound preceded the sudden attack by a child, who leapt off the fallen armoire and onto a policeman in the hallway, ripping his helmet and gas mask off as everyone else recoiled.
The NYPD officer tumbled onto his back and flung the berserk girl onto the carpet beside him. A half dozen shots rang out. Isabel cringed but forced herself to look. The wild-haired infected girl, maybe seven or eight years old and in a soiled nightgown, was spurting amazing volumes of blood through the multiple holes in her small torso.
The officer on whom she had pounced stared at his attacker—his face uncovered and eyes wide—before he scrambled away repeating, “I’m okay! I’m okay! I’m okay!” and returned his gas mask to his face. Everyone shied away from him even though it would be at least forty-five minutes before he was contagious. Two hours before he started throwing up. Five or six before he was either dead, or one of them.
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