by Sue Burke
The woman almost smiled behind her mask. “You’re a lifesaver. Or you will be. Seriously. Come with me and we’ll get you started. We’re starved for resources. We always have been,” she said as she turned to walk down a little hallway. According to the name tag clipped to a businesslike blazer, she was Elena King, the assistant health commissioner. “I won’t lie. This is going to be rough. Only someone clinically insane would try to hold back the tide.”
“Then you recruited the right person.”
She led Berenike past offices where, through the windows in the doors, she saw a couple of people glaring at screens or talking on phones, but most of the desks stood empty. “Some people are working from home,” she said. “Let me tell you what we need.”
The job would be simple: pick up supplies at warehouses or other sites and drop them off at places like clinics, community centers, and participating drug stores. Berenike was pleased to see a major homeless camp and a refugee shelter on the list.
“We have a plan for an epidemic on file. Every public health department does.” She wore her hair in tight gray knots and seemed old enough to retire and too busy to think about it. Her boss, she said quickly and quietly, as if she didn’t want to utter the words, had succumbed to the cold.
“And we were lied to.” Now she had a spark in her voice. “We were told the cold from a few days ago was attenuated and would act like a vaccine. We knew more than we could tell. I was just counting down the hours to let people know they were safe. Then something went horribly wrong, and I still don’t know what.” She paused and looked Berenike in the eyes. “I have never felt more ashamed in my life. I participated in this disaster.” She held her gaze for a long moment, maybe asking for absolution, maybe censure.
Berenike looked away. She had a list of people to blame, and King wasn’t on it. “None of us wanted any of this.” Perhaps that would satisfy her.
After a long pause, King said, “Most of the staff is out in the field. For all that we don’t know, what we do know is enough to tell us what needs to be done now. This is beyond prevention and control and maybe even mitigation. Now we care for the ill and try to protect the well. What we need are resources.” The spark returned to her voice. “This is the worst-case scenario. And we didn’t expect pushback on the federal level for a response. We’re getting nothing from them. We have a good plan. It’s come down to adaptation and implementation, which is the hard part. That’s where you come in.”
Berenike liked the woman’s attitude, urgent but in control, like a military officer in a movie, or like an assistant manager who was competent but not bitter and vindictive as she fielded calls from furious asshole customers.
The office at the end of the corridor contained two people, a man who seemed to be scowling behind his face mask, staring at a big screen and murmuring into a microphone, and a police officer in uniform, calmly studying a heavy-duty police phone. The officer looked up as they entered. Berenike thought she might have met him before, a man around her age with warm brown skin and expressive eyes.
Elena sat at a desk with a wide screen and kept talking, not pausing for introductions. “We have a list of sites for you. I’m afraid we haven’t figured out the best route.”
Berenike raised her phone and aimed its camera. “I can do that. Let me grab the data. I can read it right off your screen. I have software from AutoKar, and we have to do this sometimes for clients. Is there a schedule or appointments?” She had the software, she recalled bitterly, because AutoKar had required her to use her personal phone for work but had never given her a dime for its purchase price or monthly fees.
“We need everything as soon as possible. That’s all. The plan isn’t quite that detailed.”
“That’s fine. That’s what I need to know.” She entered a few more parameters, trying to copy Elena’s calm, controlled, unvindictive urgency.
The officer stood up. “I’m Neal Sacks. I’ll be riding shotgun with you, just in case.” He didn’t extend his hand—no handshakes. Everyone knew the drill.
“Neal…” Now she knew. “Weren’t we in grade school together? Vieau School? I wasn’t there long, but I remember you. You were in school plays, a grade ahead of me. I’m Berenike Woulfe.”
“Yeah, I wanted to be an actor so bad.” His eyes narrowed for a moment. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember you from back then.”
“I was just another little kid.” He had been suave and debonair, two words she had learned solely to describe him for herself. She had tried to be just like him, and she knew at the end of just one year that she would never succeed. “I worked for AutoKar.” That wouldn’t impress him. “I commandeered a nice truck for us to use.”
His eyes narrowed with a smile. “Commandeered. That’s the Vieau spirit: We achieve.” He hadn’t changed much from the boy in her memory.
Her phone dinged: route calculated. She showed it to Elena. “It suggests three loops, starting on the North Side.”
Elena approved. Neal picked up a rifle and a helmet.
“Oh,” he said. “You should wear this.” He handed Berenike a bulletproof police vest. She put it on without comment, trying to maintain her new attitude as they walked out. He carried a spare helmet for her. Would that really be necessary? She didn’t want to ask.
In the truck, he pulled up a map on his screen with three dozen red dots. “We need to avoid these locations, but they change, so we’ll need to keep making adjustments.”
She turned on the truck’s interface, entered the route, and began setting overrides. “What are those dots?”
“Different things.” He buckled himself in, put on his helmet, and lowered the visor. “Reports of gunfire, mostly. And not where you’d think. Maybe countermutiny. We gotta watch out for that. A couple of house fires. There’s a bad traffic accident on Highway 100.”
She looked at the near-empty streets around them. “An accident? How did that happen?” The truck began to move. She took the helmet and put it on.
“Someone plowed into cars at an intersection. We think maybe the driver was driving manually and had a seizure. This stuff just hits some people like that.”
“Yeah, it can.” Like Papa. “So, we’re going to get on the freeway, and they’re almost empty, and I’m going to tell the truck to drive as fast as possible.”
“Our cruisers can do that. It’s a fun ride.”
The trip to the freeway was short, and soon they were speeding at more than one hundred miles per hour on straightaways. She leaned back and tried to ignore how the country was speeding faster than she wanted to calculate into what would likely be its biggest disaster in history. A possible disaster for her, too.
Neal consulted his screen. “Now, you should know for some of these pickups, we’re commandeering goods. The owners might get touchy. That’s why I’m here.”
* * *
Confucius spoke of superior and inferior men, of those who were motivated by upright morals contrasted with those who were interested in themselves rather than the greater good. If inferior men governed a kingdom, they would bring it to disorder and a lack of virtue, and they would lose the mandate of heaven to continue their rule. Had that moment come? I hoped so, although inferior men (or people of any gender, of course) could have superior firepower and be willing to abuse it. To those living in a misgoverned kingdom, Confucius urged resistance, and one form of opposition, he said, involved a dedication to truth.
I had time for that twenty-second meditation (some philosophical conflicts have straightforward solutions) as I followed my soldier to speak to Colonel Wilkinson in his office. I had seen three things, one of them capable of damning an inferior man if I could speak the truth at the right moment.
“I’ve found something astonishing,” I told him. “You need to see how people react to it.”
Without a word, he rose. He already knew most of what I did, but I might be able to answer the key question for him: Exactly who had abused their power?
Vita and Tav
is were waiting in the conference room with its metal folding chairs. Others came like moths drawn to the flame of my reputation. Peng had something urgent to say! They settled into place, silent except for lifesaving coughs and sniffles.
“We have three distinct viruses to consider in terms of epidemiological forensics,” I said, a statement that by itself earned a few surprised huffs. I brought up a chart on one screen in the conference room wall. “First, the original deltacoronavirus from Siberia. We have samples generously provided by China and authenticated by Korea and Japan, and they all match. This is the genuine pathogen. Here are some key segments that we’ll return to. You don’t need to understand them, although some of you do, but what you see with your bare eyes will tell you what you need to know.”
My talk felt like a sales presentation, something I had once done frequently, but this time I came with nothing besides vital knowledge to sell.
“This is the attenuated viral vaccine, which is also from China. We’ve received the same data from several locations, so again, this is the genuine pathogen circulating among the public in the United States.”
Some people shifted in their chairs. I knew that would startle them.
“I want to point out one segment. Here is that segment from the original virus, and here is what we see in the attenuated one, a mere cut-and-paste operation from a different common cold. It’s similar to what our team designed here, and leads to very mild symptoms.”
Heads nodded.
“We did fine work, and the Chinese team did even better work. I want to show you one artifact of their genius.”
Colonel Wilkinson seemed to be thinking about something else and hiding it. He had no doubt heard all this before from Node 1, but the good part was yet to come. Vita leaned forward with curiosity. Tavis sat back, not out of relaxation but out of an unconscious desire to escape, trying to put as much distance as possible between me and him. I felt relieved to see that and have my conclusions confirmed. He knew what was coming.
“Notice that these segments in the delta virus and the vaccine virus are not similar. The vaccine will spread faster for several reasons, and one of them is here. It won’t cause macrophages to present antigens as fast as they might. This virus triggers the immune system, but not too much.”
“And you can see all that,” Tavis said, his chin lowered protectively, anticipating my attack.
“I know where to look, and so do you. If we were going to create a vaccine—and as you know, we did—we agreed that including this would lessen the immune system response. We’d walk around feeling fine, sneezing a little bit and breathing normally, still spewing a sufficient number of viruses left and right. Genius, as I said. Few of us have gotten so much as a headache.”
Tavis again leaned as far back as possible, this time with a glance toward the door.
“Finally,” I said, “here’s the virus that’s killing people. It’s based on the original delta virus but it isn’t the so-called Sino cold. This new segment, the one that causes macrophages to present antigens, causes a much more intense response. That’s what makes this so deadly. The body overreacts with a cytokine storm, and people drop like flies. We know it was artificially introduced, and this shows the means by which it was designed to be virulent.”
Colonel Wilkinson was paying strict attention now. Biological warfare—combating it, that is—had been his career.
“But there’s an amateurish flaw,” I said.
Now Tavis leaned forward.
“All viruses need to reproduce because they want to thrive, if we may anthropomorphize them. This one reproduces deep in the lungs, so the moment the infected person stops breathing, the infection stops spreading. Here’s the oldest sample we have. It has the lethal segment. But here’s a newer one. The virus has dropped that segment. As you can see here, the splices for the virulent additions aren’t solid. It still causes a potentially serious illness, but death is not guaranteed.”
Could they see that? Vita and Professor Wicker nodded, but some of the others looked and took it on faith.
“I apologize for bringing you a report that still requires epidemiological proof, but such good news couldn’t wait. I believe that the deadly strain of the illness is just going to fizzle out, perhaps even without interventions like major quarantines, although that would certainly accelerate the process. People will still get sick with a cough and a cold, and for some people a cold can still lead to very dangerous secondary infections like pneumonia, but the people infected by the new strain will generally survive without intensive care, and they’ll spread the new, milder disease.”
Tavis was drumming his fingers on the table, his eyes staring into space—at an unpleasant future. Other faces relaxed. There was the light of life at the end of the tunnel of death. But Tavis was trapped. I knew enough about salesmanship to wait for him.
“How is that amateurish?” he protested desperately. “Viruses always evolve into different strains. We’re seeing it with our own eyes. Where was the mistake?”
“The mistake,” I said, “was including that segment in the first place. We’ve seen it before—in an early version you proposed. This segment does not occur naturally, but you’d know where it came from.”
After a moment, he said, “What if that was the plan?”
“Limited mass murder as opposed to uncontrolled mass murder? That sounds like an excellent plan.”
Colonel Wilkinson rose to his feet with an expression on his face that could have launched missiles.
Tavis looked around, but not at me. “I can check my notes and figure out where I got that. It wasn’t my design.”
“It was someone’s,” I said with a smile. And then I turned back to my presentation, ignoring the drama of two men walking out, one of them in the custody of the other. The one in custody left wide-eyed, sweating, thinking as fast as he could about lawyers and confession and turning state’s evidence. (Or at least that’s how I wanted to imagine it.)
“As we all understand,” I said, “this has implications for fighting the disease. The lethal cold will quickly become less dangerous. Field observations will establish the speed, but we can predict the eventual outcome. This is great good news that we can spread gladly.”
My vicious smile had become benevolent, and Confucius would have viewed it with approval. A superior man does not practice rancor.
* * *
Irene, pacing next to Nimkii’s pen, got a phone call from Ruby.
“Come back to Berry Farm.”
That was the last thing she wanted to do. She tried to think of a way to say no.
“I’ll tell you what to do about Will,” Ruby said. “And you can take the truck and get food for Nimkii. You’d better act now before everything’s in chaos.”
When had she suddenly become a decent human being? Probably not yet, but Nimkii would need food.
“I’ll leave now,” Irene said. Ruby hung up without answering. No, not decent yet.
Irene held her breath, went into the kitchen, gathered up a snack, found the eye drops, and gave herself another dose. She’d bring the tiny bottle with her. No one was going to take care of her besides herself.
She went to the pen and threw her hat over the fence. Nimkii hurried to pick it up. “I’ll be back soon, pedazo!” she promised. “With food!” He knew a lot was going wrong. He had better be patient, because she had nothing else to offer him but promises.
She began walking. Maybe, when she got the truck, she’d just go home and stop pretending she cared about Nimkii. Except that she did. But he needed a new home anyway. If they walked to Madison together, where could he stay? The university had a forest.
She checked for news. Through her mother’s artist network, she’d found a kind of broadcast, and it was all about the cold and the mutiny. People were advised to stay home. The list of cities and institutions and people who had mutinied kept growing—a lot of hospitals and medical suppliers, tired of being puppets to profit rather than serving their
patients. She tried to find out what was happening in Wausau. A fight seemed to be under way. Maybe when she had the truck she could go see for herself.
Or she could go get herself some medical care. She felt fine, but people could get very sick very fast. She needed to take care of herself—and she needed to take that fact seriously.
She ate the snack she’d grabbed, an almost-empty box of cereal, a juice box without a straw, and a package of crackers. She dropped the empty packages and crumbs as she went. The world could just deal with her mess. She’d had enough of cleaning up its messes.
Berry Farm came into sight. Fewer cars and trucks were parked around it, whatever that meant. Highway traffic seemed lighter. The centaurs were still there.
She raised her hands as she stepped onto the driveway. No one rushed out with a gun. She kept walking slowly, ready to duck or act even more submissive. A centaur approached.
At the sound of a gunshot, she dropped to the ground, covering her head with her hands. She wasn’t hurt. Maybe she wasn’t the target. She didn’t move. Nothing happened. Maybe it was a warning shot. Footsteps crunched in the gravel and stopped next to her. She stayed still, held her breath, and played dead until she couldn’t hold her breath anymore.
Whatever was next to her had not moved. Only a machine could stand that still for that long. She turned her head to peek, and saw a centaur pointing a long, ugly weapon at her.
“Identify yourself,” the robot said in a much-too-human voice.
“Irene Ruiz. I’m here to see Ruby Hobbard. She called me and told me to come.”
“Remain where you are. Do not move.”
She lay there perfectly still, taking shallow breaths, and felt like a target. Just like the other farm, this place, the ground beneath her body, and everything she could see when she raised her head was enemy territory. Yes, it was time to go home, back to Madison, as soon as she could, with or without Nimkii.
Someone in full police armor came out of the farmhouse: helmet, body armor, and a gun, which was pointed at her. Ruby, judging from the physique and walk. She came close but didn’t shift her aim.
