Darwin's Children

by Greg Bear

  “We don't have to go through here,” DeWitt said. “The yard is that way.” She pointed down a short hall to the right.

  “I need to see more,” Dicken said. “Where are the nurses?”

  “With the living children, I presume. I hope.”

  They squeezed through the narrow opening. All the doors beyond were locked by a double bar system, one lateral, one reaching from the ceiling to the floor and slipping into steel-clad holes. Each room held a lone, unmoving child. One stared in frozen surprise at the ceiling. Some appeared to be asleep. It did not look as if they had received any attention. There were at least eight children in these rooms, and no way to confirm they were all dead.

  None of them moved.

  Dicken stepped back from the last thick view port, shoved his back against the concrete wall, then, with an effort, pushed off and faced DeWitt. “The yard,” he said.

  About ten paces beyond the door, they met two of the treatment center nurses. They were sharing a cigarette and sprawling on plastic chairs in the shade at the end of a broad corridor lined with padded picnic tables. The two women were in their fifties, very large, with beefy arms and large, fat hands. They wore dark green uniforms, almost black in the overhead glare. They looked up listlessly as Dicken and DeWitt came into view.

  “We done everything we could,” one of them said, eyes darting.

  Dicken nodded, simply acknowledging their presence—and perhaps their courage.

  “There are more out there,” said the other nurse, louder, as they walked past. “It's damned near midnight. We needed a break!”

  “I'm sure you did your best,” DeWitt said. Dicken instantly caught the contrast: DeWitt's voice, precise and academic, educated; the nurses', pragmatic and blue collar.

  The nurses were townies.

  “Fuck you,” the first nurse tried to shout, but it came out a wan croak. “Where was everybody? Where're the doctors?”

  Brave townies. They cared. They could have bolted, but they had stayed.

  Dicken stood in the yard. A canvas tent had been pulled over a concrete quadrangle about fifty feet on a side and surrounded by tan, stucco-covered walls. The lighting was inadequate, just wall-mounted pathway illumination surrounding the open square. The center was a shadowy pit.

  Cots and mattresses had been laid out on the concrete in rows that began with some intention of order and ended in scattered puzzles. There were at least a hundred children under the tent, most of them lying down. Four women, two men, and one child walked between the cots, carrying buckets and ladles, giving the children water if they were strong enough to sit up.

  Moonlight and starry sky showed through gaps and vent flaps. The quadrangle was still almost unbearably hot. All the water coolers in the building had been carried here, and a few hoses hung out of plastic barrels surrounded by fading gray rings of water slop.

  A hardy few of the children, most of them younger than ten, sat under the pathway lights with their backs against the stucco walls, staring at nothing, shoulders slumped.

  A woman in a white uniform approached DeWitt. She was smaller than the others, tiny, actually, with walnut-colored skin and black almond eyes and short black hair pushed up under a baseball cap. “You're the counselor, Miss DeWitt?” she asked with an accent. Filipino, Dicken guessed.

  “Yes,” DeWitt said.

  “Are the doctors coming back? Is there more medicine?” she asked.

  “We're under complete quarantine,” DeWitt said.

  The woman looked at Dicken and her face creased with helpless anger. As an outsider, he had failed them all; he had brought nothing useful. “Today and last night was a horror. All my children are gone. I work in special needs. Their only fault was slow wisdom. They were my joy.”

  “I'm sorry,” Dicken said. He held up his bag of specimen kits. “I'm an epidemiologist. I need samples from all of the nurses working here.”

  “Why? They're afraid it's going to spread outside?” She shook her head defiantly. “None of us is sick. Only the children.”

  “Knowing what happened here, and how it happened, is important to the children who are still alive.”

  “Do you justify this, Mister . . . whoever the hell you are?” the walnut-colored woman hissed.

  “You've done your best,” Dicken said. “I know that. We have to keep trying. Keep working.” He swallowed. Tonight was already stacking up to be the worst, the most awful he had ever seen. Nightmare bad.

  The woman's arms trembled. She turned away, then turned back slowly, and her eyes were as flat and dark as the windows at the entrance. “Food would help” she said as if speaking to one of her less intelligent charges. Slow wisdom. “We have to feed those who are still alive.”

  “I think there's enough food,” DeWitt said.

  “How many, outside?” the woman asked, hand making a helpless, rotating gesture. “How many have died?”

  Dicken had seen such a gesture years ago, at the beginning of all this; he had seen a female chimp reach out for solace and Marian Freedman, who now studied Mrs. Rhine, had grasped the hand and tried to comfort her.

  DeWitt held the woman's hand in just that way. “We don't know, honey,” she said. “Let's just take of care of our own.”

  “I'm going to need the doors to the cells opened,” Dicken said.

  The tiny woman covered her mouth with her hand. “We didn't go in there,” she said, staring at him with huge eyes. “We couldn't let them out. Some are violent. Oh, God, I've been afraid to look.”

  “If they've had no contact with adults, then it's all the more important that I get some specimens,” Dicken said.

  The woman dropped her hand from her mouth—it shook as if with palsy—and stared at DeWitt.

  “Come on,” DeWitt said, taking her elbow and guiding her. “I'll help.”

  “What if some are still alive?” the small woman asked plaintively.

  Some were.

  38

  PENNSYLVANIA

  Mitch glanced down at the digital receiver in the Mackenzies' Jeep. Kaye leaned forward between the seats and touched his arm. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “It appears to be,” Mitch said. “Webcasts. Catches everything for at least an hour back.”

  “We've been married too long,” Kaye said. “You don't even ask what I'm talking about.”

  “Do you think?” Mitch said, with precisely Kaye's tone and phrasing.

  Stella lay quietly beside Kaye in the backseat. She had gone through one more convulsion, but her fever had not spiked again. She was resting under a thin child's blanket, her head in Kaye's lap.

  They had caught less than an hour's nap before leaving the Mackenzie house. Kaye had had a nightmare in which someone very important to her, someone like her father or Mitch, had told her she was a miserable mother, an awful human being, and some shadowy institution was withdrawing all support, which meant life support; she had thought she was running out of oxygen and could not breathe. She had struggled awake and sleep after that was impossible.

  The sun was peeking over the highway behind them.

  “Turn it on,” Kaye said.

  Mitch turned on the receiver. The dashboard display showed a map with a red spot, their position, and the radio tuned automatically to a Philadelphia station, giving stock market news for the morning.

  “Did he—”

  “George turned off the TheftWave years ago,” Mitch said. “I checked. It's unplugged. We're just tracking GPS, not sending.”

  “Good.” Kaye reached forward with a grunt, shifting Stella's head, and pulled out a remote folding keypad. “Fancy,” she said.

  Mitch glanced at her in the rearview mirror. She looked haggard, and her eyes were too bright. He could only see part of the gently breathing, blanketed form beside her.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I'm fine.” She studied the keypad, then experimented with a few buttons. “Looks like HFMD to me.”

  “That's not
a radio station,” Mitch said.

  “Hand, foot, and mouth disease. It's usually a minor viral infection in infants and children. I'm sure she's been exposed before. Something's changed. Whatever, we need to stock up on drugs and fluids.”

  “Drugstore?”

  Kaye shook her head. “I'm sure by now they've made this a reportable illness. Every pharmacy in the country will be on the alert, and the hospitals are refusing to take cases . . . Let's hear what the world is saying.” The broadband sites were full of digital music, digital advertising, Rush Limbaugh thundering and buzzing away from somewhere in Florida, Dick Richelieu on building that new home, rants by evangelicals, and then BBC World News direct from London. They caught the story in progress. Kaye worked the touch pad and backed up several minutes to the beginning.

  “Conditions in Asia and the United States have quickly deteriorated to what can only be described as panic. The prospect of the so-called virus children producing an unknown pathogen capable of causing a pandemic has haunted world governments for a decade, certainly since the strange and disturbing case of Mrs. Rhine seven years ago. And yet the children have remained healthy, in their schools and camps and with their beleaguered families. Now, this new and so-far unexplained illness—given no official diagnosis—is causing widespread disruption in North America, Japan, and Hong Kong. International and even some local airports are blocking flights from affected areas. In the past forty-eight hours, public and private hospitals in the United States have closed their doors to this new illness for fear of becoming part of a proposed general quarantine. Other hospitals in the UK, France, and Italy, announced that should the disease spread to these shores, which some regard as inevitable, they will accept SHEVA children and their relatives only in isolated wards.”

  “If you see a vet's office, stop,” Kaye told him.

  “Okay,” Mitch said.

  “The illness has not yet spread to Africa, which has the smallest population of SHEVA children, some say because of the prevalence of HIV infection. In Washington, Emergency Action denies that it has begun taking measures based on a top-secret presidential decision directive, a confidential order dating from the early years of Herod's plague. On some widely touched Web sites, the specter of bioterrorism is being invoked with alarming frequency.”

  Kaye turned off the radio and squared her clasped hands in her lap. They were passing through a small town in the middle of fields and grassy plains. “There's a pet hospital,” Kaye said, pointing to a strip mall on their right.

  Mitch swung off the road into the parking lot and parked opposite a square blue-and-gray stucco building. Kaye drew the sun shades in the Jeep's windows, though the sun was still low in the east and the air was actually cool. “Stay in the back with her,” she said as they both got out. Mitch tried to give Kaye a brief, encouraging hug. She squirmed out of his arms like a cat, made a vexed face, and jogged across the asphalt.

  Mitch looked over his shoulder to see if they were being watched, then climbed into the backseat, lifted his daughter's head, and placed it on his lap. Stella drew breath in short jerks. Her face was covered with small red spots. She curled her knees up and flexed her fingers. “Mitch, my head hurts,” she whispered. “My neck hurts. Tell Kaye.”

  “Mom will be back in a few minutes,” Mitch said, feeling a gnawing helplessness. He might as well have been a ghost watching from the land of the dead.

  Kaye peered through the venetian blinds in the glass door and saw lights inside and figures moving in a hallway in the back. She banged on the door until a young woman in a blue medical uniform approached with a puzzled look and opened the door a crack.

  “We're just starting the day,” the woman said. “Is this an emergency?” She was in her midtwenties, plump but not heavyset, with strong arms, bleached blonde hair, and pleasant brown eyes.

  “I'm sorry to bother you, but we have some trouble with our cat,” Kaye said, and smiled with her most ingratiating and harried expression. The woman opened the door and Kaye entered the hospital's small lobby. She turned nervously and looked at the admissions counter, the racks of specialized pet food and other products. The woman walked behind the counter, perked up, and smiled. “Well then, welcome. What can we do for you?” Her pocket tag showed a smiling cartoon puppy and the name Betsy.

  The good caring women of this Earth, Kaye thought. They are hardly ever beautiful, they are the most beautiful of all. She did not know where this came from and shoved it aside, but first used the emotion to put a sympathetic spark into her smile.

  “We're traveling,” Kaye began. “We're taking Shamus with us, poor thing. He's our cat.”

  “What's wrong?” Betsy asked with genuine concern.

  “He's just old,” Kaye said. “Failed kidneys. I thought I brought our supplies with us, but . . . they're back in Brattleboro.”

  “Do you have a doctor's sheet? A phone number, someone we can talk with?”

  “Shamus hasn't seen the doctor in months. We moved recently. We've been taking care of him on our own. We've already been to one pet hospital, up the road a ways . . . They got mad. It's so early, and we've been up all night. They turned me down flat.” She wrung her hands. “I was hoping you could help.”

  Betsy's eyes glinted with the merest shade of suspicion. “We can't supply narcotics or pain killers,” she warned.

  “Nothing like that,” Kaye said, her heart thumping. She smiled and drew a breath. “Oh, forgive me, I'm so worried about the poor thing. We'll need Lactated Ringer's, four or five liters, if you have it, with butterfly clamp, and as many sets of tubes and needles—twenty-five-gauge needles.”

  “That's a little thin for a cat. Take forever to fill her up.”

  “It's a he,” Kaye said. “It's all he'll put up with.”

  “All right,” Betsy said doubtfully.

  “Methyl prednisone,” Kaye said. “To calm him while he's traveling.”

  “We have Depo-Medrol.”

  “That's fine. Do you have vidarabine?”

  “Not for cats,” the young woman said, frowning. “I'll have to check all this with the doctor.”

  “He's at the cabin—our cat. He's doing poorly, and it's all my fault. I should have known better.”

  “You've handled this before . . . haven't you?”

  “I'm an expert,” Kaye said, and put on a brave, tearful grin.

  The young woman entered the list onto a flat-screen monitor. “I'm not sure I even know what vidarabine is.”

  Kaye searched her memory, trying to remember the long hours she had spent searching PediaServe, MediSHEVA, and a hundred other sites and databases, years ago, preparing for some unknown disaster. “There's a new one we use sometimes. It's called picornavene, enterovene, something like that?”

  “We have equine picornavene. Surely that's not what you're looking for.”

  “Sounds familiar.”

  “It comes in quite large doses.”

  “Fine. Famicyclovir?”

  “No,” Betsy said, very suspicious now. “Drugstore might have that. What kind of life has your cat lived?”

  “He was a wild one,” Kaye said.

  “If he's that sick . . .”

  “He means so much to us.”

  “You should wait for the vet. He'll be back in an hour.”

  “I'm not sure we have that long,” Kaye said, looking at her watch with a desperate expression she did not have to fake.

  “You're positive you've done all this before, you know how it works?”

  “We've kept him alive for a year. I've had him for eighteen years. He's a brave old tom. I don't know what I'd do without him.”

  The assistant shook her head, dubious but sympathetic. “I could get in trouble.”

  Kaye felt no guilt whatsoever. If she had had a gun, she would have held them up, right now, for everything she needed. “I wouldn't want that,” she said, staring right at the woman.

  The assistant waggled her head. “What the hell,” she said. “O
ld cats. Pain in the butt, huh?”

  “You know it,” Kaye said.

  “And it's not like we're in the big city. Five liters Ringer's, two hundred mils equine picornavene—that's the smallest we've got—and the Depo-Medrol—” Betsy picked up the printed list. “Credit or debit?”

  “Cash,” Kaye said.

  39

  OHIO

  Yolanda Middleton followed Dicken through the school trailers to the old farm buildings. She caught up with him easily and shook out a ring of keys. “We ransacked Trask's office,” she said. “Found master keys to all the buildings. There's a tag from when this was a prison. Some of the nurses say there could still be supplies out here, but nobody knows.”

  “Great. Did Kelson ever come out here?”

  “I don't think so. This was Dr. Jurie's lab,” Middleton said. “Dr. Pickman was his assistant. Both were authorized to do research. They stayed away from the rest of us.”

  “What sort of research?” Dicken asked.

  Middleton shook her head.

  Dicken stood on the asphalt path and tapped his shoe lightly on the curb, thinking. He looked over his shoulder at the converted barn, the old business education building, and the three blank-faced concrete cubes between. Then he set off. Middleton followed.

  A double steel door marked one side of the closest cube. This was labeled “no admittance” in white letters on the door's blue enamel.

  “What's in here?”

  “Well, among other things, a temporary morgue,” she said. “That's what they told me. I don't know that it was ever used.”

  “Why here?”

  “Dr. Jurie told us we had to keep the bodies of any children who died. The county coroner wouldn't take them, even though she was supposed to.”

  “Were the parents notified?”

  “We tried,” Middleton said. “Sometimes they move without giving any forwarding address. They just leave the children behind.”

  “Is there a graveyard for the school?”

  “Not that I ever heard of. Honestly, Dr. Jurie took care of all that.” Middleton looked distinctly uncomfortable. “We assumed they went to a potter's field somewhere outside of town. There weren't that many, really. Two or three, maybe, since the school opened, and only one since I've been here. Trask didn't let word about deaths circulate very far. He called it a private matter.”