The Best of Nancy Kress

by Nancy Kress

  “Pulaski. Sean Pulaski.” He doesn’t even know that.

  “Sean Pulaski. Yeah, that one…okay. Get back to me…I told you. Not yet.” He hangs up. “Cam will hunt around and call back. Now will you put that stupid gun away, Elizabeth?”

  “You still don’t say thank you for anything.” The words just come out. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  “To Cam, or to you for not shooting me?” He says it evenly, and the evenness is the only way I finally see how furious he is. People don’t order around Dr. Randy Satler at gun point. A part of my mind wonders why he doesn’t call security.

  I said, “All right, I’m here. Give me a dose of endozine, just in case.”

  He goes on staring at me with that same level, furious gaze. “Too late, Elizabeth.”

  “What do you mean, too late? Haven’t you got endozine?”

  “Of course we do.” Suddenly he staggers slightly, puts out one hand behind him, and holds onto a table covered with glassware and papers.

  “Randy. You’re sick.”

  “I am. And not with anything endozine is going to cure. Ah, Elizabeth, why didn’t you just phone me? I’d have looked for Sean for you.”

  “Oh, right. Like you’ve been so interested and helpful in raising him.”

  “You never asked me.”

  I see that he means it. He really believes his total lack of contact with his son is my fault. I see that Randy gives only what he’s asked to. He waits, lordly, for people to plead for his help, beg for it, and then he gives it. If it suits him.

  I say, “I’ll bet anything your kids with your wife are turning out really scary.”

  The blood rushes to his face, and I know I guessed right. His blue eyes darken and he looks like Jack looks just before Jack explodes. But Randy isn’t Jack. An explosion would be too clean for him. He says instead, “You were stupid to come here. Haven’t you been listening to the news?”

  I haven’t.

  “The CDC publicly announced just last night what medical personnel have seen for weeks. A virulent strain of staphylococcus aureus has incorporated endozine-resistant plasmids from enterococcus.” He pauses to catch his breath. “And pneumococcus may have done the same thing.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, you stupid woman, that now there are highly contagious infections that we have no drugs to cure. No antibiotics at all, not even endozine. This staph is resistant to them all. And it can live everywhere.”

  I lower the gun. The empty parking lot. No security to summon. The man who wouldn’t get on the elevator. And Randy’s face. “And you’ve got it.”

  “We’ve all got it. Everyone…in the hospital. And for forcing your way in here, you probably do, too.”

  “You’re going to die,” I say, and it’s half a hope.

  And he smiles.

  He stands there in his white lab coat, sweating like a horse, barely able to stand up straight, almost shot by a woman he’d once abandoned pregnant, and he smiles. His blue eyes gleam. He looks like a picture I once saw in a book, back when I read a lot. It takes me a minute to remember that it was my high school World History book. A picture of some general.

  “Everybody’s going to die eventually,” Randy says. “But not me right now. At least…I hope not.” Casually he crosses the floor toward me, and I step backward. He smiles again.

  “I’m not going to deliberately infect you, Elizabeth. I’m a doctor. I just want the gun.”

  “No.”

  “Have it your way. Look, how much do you know about the bubonic plague of the fourteenth century?”

  “Nothing,” I say, although I do. Why had I always acted stupider around Randy than I actually am?

  “Then it won’t mean anything to you to say that this mutated staph has at least that much potential—” again he pauses and gulps air “—for rapid and fatal transmission. It flourishes everywhere. Even on doorknobs.”

  “So why the fuck are you smiling?” Alexander. That was the picture of the general. Alexander the Great.

  “Because I…because the CDC distributed…I was on the national team to discover…” His face changes again. Goes even whiter. And he pitches over onto the floor.

  I grab him, roll him face up, and feel his forehead. He’s burning up. I bolt for the door. “Nurse! Doctor! There’s a sick doctor here!”

  Nobody comes.

  I run down the corridors. Respiratory Therapy is empty. So is Support Services. I jab at the elevator button, but before it comes I run back to Randy.

  And stand above him, lying there crumpled on the floor, laboring to breathe.

  I’d dreamed about a moment like this for years. Dreamed it waking and asleep, in Emerton and in Bedford Hills and in Jack’s arms. Dreamed it in a thousand ridiculous melodramatic versions. And here it is, Randy helpless and pleading, and me strong, standing over him, free to walk away and let him die. Free.

  I wring out a towel in cold water and put it on his forehead. Then I find ice in the refrigerator in a corner of the lab and substitute that. He watches me, his breathing wheezy as old machinery.

  “Elizabeth. Bring me…syringe in a box on…that table.”

  I do it. “Who should I get for you, Randy? Where?”

  “Nobody. I’m not…as bad…as I sound. Yet. Just the initial…dyspnea.” He picks up the syringe.

  “Is there medicine for you in there? I thought you said endozine wouldn’t work on this new infection.” His color is a little better now.

  “Not medicine. And not for me. For you.”

  He looks at me steadily. And I see that Randy would never plead, never admit to helplessness. Never ever think of himself as helpless.

  He lowers the hand holding the syringe back to the floor. “Listen, Elizabeth. You have…almost certainly have…”

  Somewhere, distantly, a siren starts to wail. Randy ignores it. All of a sudden his voice becomes much firmer, even though he’s sweating again and his eyes burn bright with fever. Or something.

  “This staph is resistant to everything we can throw it. We cultured it and tried. Cephalosporins and aminoglycosides and vancomycin, even endozine…I’ll go into gram-positive septic shock…” His eyes glaze, but after a moment he seems to find his thought again. “We exhausted all points of counterattack. Cell wall, bacterial ribosome, folic acid pathway. Microbes just evolve countermeasures. Like beta-lactamase.”

  I don’t understand this language. Even talking to himself, he’s making me feel stupid again. I ask something I do understand.

  “Why are people killing cows? Are the cows sick, too?”

  He focuses again. “Cows? No, they’re not sick. Farmers use massive doses of antibiotics to increase meat and milk production. Agricultural use of endozine has increased the rate of resistance development by over a thousand percent since—Elizabeth, this is irrelevant! Can’t you pay attention to what I’m saying for three minutes?”

  I stand up and look down at him, lying shivering on the floor. He doesn’t even seem to notice, just keeps on lecturing.

  “But antibiotics weren’t invented by humans. They were invented by the microbes themselves to use…against each other and…they had two billion years of evolution at it before we even showed up…We should have—where are you going?”

  “Home. Have a nice life, Randy.”

  He says quietly, “I probably will. But if…you leave now, you’re probably dead. And your husband and kids, too.”

  “Why? Damn it, stop lecturing and tell me why!”

  “Because you’re infected, and there’s no antibiotic for it, but there is another bacteria that will attack the drug-resistant staph.”

  I look at the syringe in his hand.

  “It’s a Trojan horse plasmid. That’s a…never mind. It can get into the staph in your blood and deliver a lethal gene. One that will kill the staph. It’s an incredible discovery. But the only way to deliver it so far is to deliver the whole bacteria.”

  My knees all of a sudden get shaky
. Randy watches me from his position on the floor. He looks shakier himself. His breathing turns raspier again.

  “No, you’re not sick yet, Elizabeth. But you will be.”

  I snap, “From the staph germs or from the cure?”

  “Both.”

  “You want to make me sicker. With two bacteria. And hope one will kill the other.”

  “Not hope. I know. I actually saw…it on the electromicrograph…” His eyes roll, refocus. “…could package just the lethal plasmid on a transpon if we had time…no time. Has to be the whole bacteria.” And then, stronger, “The CDC team is working on it. But I actually caught it on the electromicrograph!”

  I say, before I know I’m going to, “Stop congratulating yourself and give me the syringe. Before you die.”

  I move across the floor toward him, put my arms around him to prop him in a sitting position against the table leg. His whole body feels on fire. But somehow he keeps his hands steady as he injects the syringe into the inside of my elbow. While it drains sickness into me I say, “You never actually wanted me, did you, Randy? Even before Sean?”

  “No,” he says. “Not really.” He drops the syringe.

  I bend my arm. “You’re a rotten human being. All you care about is yourself and your work.”

  He smiles the same cold smile. “So? My work is what matters. In a larger sense than you could possibly imagine. You were always a weak sentimentalist, Elizabeth. Now, go home.”

  “Go home? But you said…”

  “I said you’d infect everyone. And you will—with the bacteria that attacks staph. It should cause only a fairly mild illness. Jenner…smallpox…”

  “But you said I have the mutated staph, too!”

  “You almost certainly do. Yes…And so will everyone else, before long. Deaths…in New York State alone…passed one million this morning. Six and a half percent of the…the population…Did you really think you could hide on your side of…the…river…”

  “Randy!”

  “Go…home.”

  I strip off his lab coat and wad it up for a pillow, bring more ice from the refrigerator, try to get him to drink some water.

  “Go…home. Kiss everybody.” He smiles to himself, and starts to shake with fever. His eyes close.

  I stand up again. Should I go? Stay? If I could find someone in the hospital to take care of him —

  The phone rings. I seize it. “Hello? Hello?”

  “Randy? Excuse me, can I talk to Dr. Satler? This is Cameron Witt.”

  I try to sound professional. “Dr. Satler can’t come to the phone right now. But if you’re calling about Sean Pulaski, Dr. Satler asked me to take the message.”

  “I don’t…oh, all right. Just tell Randy the Pulaski boy is with Richard and Sylvia James. He’ll understand.” The line clicks.

  I replace the receiver and stare at Randy, fighting for breath on the floor, his face as gray as Sean’s when Sean realized it was murder he’d gotten involved with. No, not as gray. Because Sean had been terrified, and Randy is only sick.

  My work is what matters.

  But how had Sean known to go to Sylvia? Even if he knew from Ceci who was on the other side, how did he know which people would hide him, would protect him when I could not, Jack could not? Sylvia-and-Elizabeth. How much did Sean actually know about the past I’d tried so hard to keep from touching him?

  I reach the elevator, my finger almost touching the button, when the first explosion rocks the hospital.

  It’s in the west wing. Through the windows opposite the elevator banks I see windows in the far end of the building explode outward. Thick greasy black smoke billows out the holes. Alarms begin to screech.

  Don’t touch the elevators. Instructions remembered from high school, from grade-school fire drills. I race along the hall to the fire stairs. What if they put a bomb in the stairwell? What if who put a bomb in the stairwell? A lot of people in dark clothing cross the back lawn and quietly enter Dan and Ceci’s house next door, carrying bulky packages wrapped in black cloth.

  A last glimpse through a window by the door to the fire stairs. People are running out of the building, not many, but the ones I see are pushing gurneys. A nurse staggers outside, three small children in her arms, on her hip, clinging to her back.

  They aren’t setting off any more bombs until people have a chance to get out.

  I let the fire door close. Alarms scream. I run back to Pathology and shove open the heavy door.

  Randy lies on the floor, sweating and shivering. His lips move but if he’s muttering aloud, I can’t hear it over the alarm. I tug on his arm. He doesn’t resist and he doesn’t help, just lies like a heavy dead cow.

  There are no gurneys in Pathology. I slap him across the face, yelling “Randy! Randy! Get up!” Even now, even here, a small part of my mind thrills at hitting him.

  His eyes open. For a second, I think he knows me. It goes away, then returns. He tries to get up. The effort is enough to let me hoist him over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry. I could never have carried Jack, but Randy is much slighter, and I’m very strong.

  But I can’t carry him down three flights of stairs. I get him to the top, prop him up on his ass, and shove. He slides down one flight, bumping and flailing, and glares at me for a minute. “For…God’s sake…Janet!”

  His wife’s name. I don’t think about this tiny glimpse of his marriage. I give him another shove, but he grabs the railing and refuses to fall. He hauls himself—I’ll never know how—back to a sitting position, and I sit next to him. Together, my arm around his waist, tugging and pulling, we both descend the stairs the way two-year-olds do, on our asses. Every second I’m waiting for the stairwell to blow up. Sean’s gray face at dinner: Fucking vigilantes’ll get us all.

  The stairs don’t blow up. The fire door at the bottom gives out on a sidewalk on the side of the hospital away from both street and parking lot. As soon as we’re outside, Randy blacks out.

  This time I do what I should have done upstairs and grab him under the armpits. I drag him over the grass as far as I can. Sweat and hair fall in my eyes, and my vision keeps blurring. Dimly I’m aware of someone running toward us.

  “It’s Dr. Satler! Oh my God!”

  A man. A large man. He grabs Randy and hoists him over his shoulder, a fireman’s carry a lot smoother than mine, barely glancing at me. I stay behind them and, at the first buildings, run in a wide loop away from the hospital.

  My car is still in the deserted driveway across the street. Fire trucks add their sirens to the noise. When they’ve torn past, I back my car out of the driveway and push my foot to the floor, just as a second bomb blows in the east wing of the hospital, and then another, and the air is full of flying debris as thick and sharp as the noise that goes on and on and on.

  Three miles along the East River Road, it suddenly catches up with me. All of it. I pull the car off the road and I can’t stop shaking. Only a few trucks pass me, and nobody stops. It’s twenty minutes before I can start the engine again, and there has never been a twenty minutes like them in my life, not even in Bedford. At the end of them, I pray that there never will be again.

  I turn on the radio as soon as I’ve started the engine.

  “—in another hospital bombing in New York City, St. Clare’s Hospital in the heart of Manhattan. Beleaguered police officials say that a shortage of available officers make impossible the kind of protection called for by Mayor Thomas Flanagan. No group has claimed credit for the bombing, which caused fires that spread to nearby businesses and at least one apartment house.

  “Since the Centers for Disease Control’s announcement last night of a widespread staphylococcus resistant to endozine, and its simultaneous release of an emergency counterbacteria in twenty-five metropolitan areas around the country, the violence has worsened in every city transmitting reliable reports to Atlanta. A spokesperson for the national team of pathologists and scientists responsible for the drastic countermeasure released an additio
nal set of guidelines for its use. The spokesperson declined to be identified, or to identify any of the doctors on the team, citing fear of reprisals if—”

  A burst of static. The voice disappears, replaced by a shrill hum.

  I turn the dial carefully, looking for another station with news.

  By the time I reach the west side of Emerton, the streets are deserted. Everyone has retreated inside. It looks like the neighborhoods around the hospital look. Had looked. My body still doesn’t feel sick.

  Instead of going straight home, I drive the deserted streets to the Food Mart.

  The parking lot is as empty as everywhere else. But the basket is still there, weighted with stones. Now the stones hold down a pile of letters. The top one is addressed in blue Magic Marker: To DR. BENNETT. The half-buried wine bottle holds a fresh bouquet, chrysanthemums from somebody’s garden. Nearby a foot-high American flag sticks in the ground, beside a white candle on a Styrofoam plate, a stone crucifix, and a Barbie doll dressed like an angel. Saran Wrap covers a leather-bound copy of The Prophet. There are also five anti-NRA stickers, a pile of seashells, and a battered peace sign on a gold chain like a necklace. The peace sign looks older than I am.

  When I get home, Jack is still asleep.

  I stand over him, as a few hours ago I stood over Randy Satler. I think about how Jack visited me in prison, week after week, making the long drive from Emerton even in the bad winter weather. About how he’d sit smiling at me through the thick glass in the visitors’ room, his hands with their grease-stained fingers resting on his knees, smiling even when we couldn’t think of anything to say to each other. About how he clutched my hand in the delivery room when Jackie was born, and the look on his face when he first held her. About the look on his face when I told him Sean was missing: the sly, secret, not-my-kid triumph. And I think about the two sets of germs in my body, readying for war.

  I bend over and kiss Jack full on the lips.

  He stirs a little, half wakes, reaches for me. I pull away and go into the bathroom, where I use his toothbrush. I don’t rinse it. When I return, he’s asleep again.