Darwin's Children

by Greg Bear

  Dicken rubbed his fingers together. “Key?”

  Middleton looked for a newer key on the ring, and held one up for his inspection. It was labeled R1-F, F for Front, presumably—and R for what, Research? They agreed with a look that this was the best choice. As she pushed the key into the lock, Dicken turned his gaze up the face of concrete, pale gray in the morning light. He narrowed his eye, as he had learned over the years, to help the fogged lens focus on the vent covers near the top, a few pipes sticking out, a thick power line going to a pole and across to the junction box near the old barn.

  Middleton pulled the door open. Inside, it was cool enough to make him shiver.

  “The air-conditioner works here, at least,” he said.

  “It's separate from the main plant,” Middleton said. “This building's newer than the rest.”

  Dicken took a deep breath. He felt as if he were on a wild goose chase. There might be medicine in these buildings, but he doubted it. More likely they would find laboratory supplies—unless Trask had conspired with the doctors to sell those, too. Still, the lab might be better equipped than the small medical facility adjacent to the infirmary. But these were just excuses.

  Something else was bringing him here, an instinctive suspicion that had come to him as he walked among the cots in the special treatment center. We're curious monkeys, he thought. We never miss opportunities.

  He found a light switch on the wall inside the door and pushed it. Fluorescents bathed the interior in a cool, sterile glow. The north wall of the room was covered by stainless steel refrigerators, huge lab units equipped with tiny blue temperature displays. Expensive, and very unlike the small, hump-shouldered units outside the infirmary.

  “When did Jurie and Pickman leave?” he asked.

  “I'm not sure.”

  “Did they take anything?”

  Middleton shrugged. “I didn't see them go. I can't be everywhere.”

  “Of course not,” Dicken said. The mask itched. He reached up to rub his nose, then thought better of it.

  “How long will this take?” Middleton asked.

  Dicken ignored her. The refrigerators were locked and equipped with push-button keypads. He ran his fingers across one of the pads and shook his head.

  Middleton found a key on the ring that opened the door across the room. This led to a small pathology lab with a single steel autopsy table, shining clean. All the tools lay neatly in their trays or in cabinets along the far wall. Some tools had been left in an autoclave, but otherwise the lab was beautifully organized and maintained.

  “When was the last autopsy conducted here?” Dicken asked.

  “I don't think there have ever been any,” Middleton said. “I haven't heard of any, at least. Wouldn't we have to get permission from the county?”

  “Not if they refuse responsibility. Maybe Mark will know.” But he was beginning to doubt that Augustine knew anything. It was beginning to look as if his old CDC boss, the putative director of Emergency Action, had finally been hamstrung—perhaps castrated was the better word—by the political wolves in Washington.

  Down a short hall and to the right, they came upon the unexpected mother lode: a fully equipped molecular biology and genetics lab, six hundred square feet of space under a high ceiling, crammed with equipment. Tissue centrifuge sorters provided specimen flow to racked analyzers—matrix and variable-probe sequencers specializing in polynucleotides, RNAs and DNAs; proteomizers capable of discerning complete complements of proteins; glycome and lipidome units for isolating and labeling sugars and fats and related compounds. More racks stood at the ends of broad steel lab benches.

  The sorter and analyzers were connected by steel and white plastic automated specimen tracks, running like a little railroad through diffraction molecular imagers, inoculator/incubators, and a variety of video microscopes—including two up-to-the-minute carbon force counters. All magnificently automated. A one- or at most two-person lab.

  Everything on and around the benches was hooked up to a small, square, bright red Cenomics Ideator, a dedicated computer capable of three-D imaging and real-time gene and protein description and identification.

  There was more than a wealth of equipment here: What Dicken saw as he walked around the room amounted to obscene overkill for a typical school medical facility. He had visited labs in rich biotech firms that wouldn't have been able to compete.

  “Wow,” Dicken said in awe. “This is the whole damned Delta Queen.”

  Middleton raised an eyebrow. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Nothing.” He walked between the benches, then paused to reach out with his gloved hand and stroke the Ideator. He had his riverboat. He had everything he needed to track the virus back up the river of disease to the far, frozen north—to its sleeping, glacial form.

  If no one else was willing to do it, he was sure he could do it all by himself, right here, and screw the unreasoning outside world. With the help of a few manuals. Some of this equipment he had seen only in catalogs.

  Dicken leaned over to look at steel tags, identifiers, shipping labels. “Who paid for all this?”

  Middleton shook her head. She was as stunned as he, but probably did not fully appreciate the magnitude of their discovery.

  He found what he was searching for on the back of one of the carbon force counters. A steel tag read, “property of americol, inc., u.s.a. federally registered corporate loan equipment.”

  “Marge Cross,” he said. “Large Marge.”

  “What?”

  Dicken murmured a quick explanation. Marge Cross was the CEO and majority shareholder of both Americol and Eurocol, two of the world's largest pharmaceutical and medical equipment manufacturers. He did not add that for a time Marge Cross had employed Kaye Lang.

  Dicken said, “Let's find some way to open those refrigerators. And that.” He pointed to the unmarked stainless steel door—more of a hatch, actually—at the back of the lab.

  Middleton shuddered. “I'm not sure I want to,” she said.

  Dicken scowled. “We're tired, aren't we?”

  Chastened, she handed him the ring of keys. “I'll look for the codes,” she said.

  40

  THE POCONOS, PENNSYLVANIA

  Mitch shifted into four-wheel drive, then pushed the Jeep through a previously broken and mangled section of guardrail—just as George had described it. The Jeep rumbled down the embankment.

  Kaye cradled Stella once more in the backseat. Stella did not react to the bumps and lurches. Kaye stared straight ahead, through the windshield, seeing nothing, really, and thinking furiously. She could not shut down her mind, filled with scenes and plans that did not connect in any useful way. She was at the end of her rope, about to be jerked up hard; she knew it, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  She was more than half convinced they were going to lose Stella. Making plans for a time after Stella certainly seemed appropriate, but she could not bring herself to do so. Her thoughts became jagged and incomplete, painful.

  She could feel her throat starting to constrict, as it had in the nightmare.

  “There,” Mitch said. He pointed.

  “What?” Kaye wheezed.

  “A road.”

  As George had told them, they now straddled an almost overgrown path, just barely deserving to be called a road. He swung the Jeep left. The path wound through scrub forest for a quarter of a mile, then connected to a state highway. This way would avoid quarantine roadblocks on the county line.

  Mitch's intuition had been finely honed over the last ten years. He had sharp criminal instincts. He could almost picture Department of Health or FEMA roadblocks, INS agents, or the Philadelphia National Guard checking each vehicle on the main highway, CDC deputy inspectors waiting in the back of an Emergency Action van . . .

  He had seen it all before, while traveling, looking for a new home, seven years ago. During the panic after the discovery of Mrs. Rhine.

  Kaye crooned to Stella as she had when St
ella was a baby. Stella's lips were cracked and her forehead hot. Her head lolled until Kaye cradled it in her elbow. She brushed back the luxurious, short-cut hair with her fingers, watched her daughter's cheeks, alternately flushing and blanching, like a signal light trying to decide whether to stay on. Stella smelled rank in a particularly disturbing way, a sick offspring smell that made Kaye deeply uneasy.

  Kaye had not entirely lost the enhanced sense of smell she had developed as the mother of a SHEVA infant, even though she could no longer produce her own communicative pheromones. The pores behind her ears had closed up after two years. Mitch's had closed even earlier, and their cheek patches, the variegated melanophores, had faded back to normal as well, though in Kaye's case they had left small, trapped pools of freckles.

  Stella's lips moved. She started speaking, babbling really, in two streams at once. Kaye stroked her daughter's chin and lips until they stopped their restless action, and Stella reduced the volume to a whisper:

  “I want to see the woods/

  “There's so little time/ Leave me in the woods/

  “Please./ Please. Please.”

  “We're in the woods, honey,” Kaye told Stella. “We're in the forest.”

  Stella opened her eyes, then, blinded by the light in her face, swung her arm up, nearly knocking Kaye's nose bloody. Kaye pushed the arm down and covered Stella's eyes with her hand.

  “How much longer?” she asked Mitch.

  “Not sure. Maybe an hour.”

  “We might lose her before then.”

  “She's not going to die,” Mitch said. “She's doing better.”

  “She won't drink.”

  “You gave her water before we left.”

  “She peed on the seat. She's hot. She won't drink. How do you know? I don't know she won't die.”

  “I'm the spooky guy,” Mitch said. “Remember?”

  “This isn't a joke, Mitch,” Kaye said, her voice rising.

  “Can't you smell her?” Mitch asked.

  “I smell her better than you do,” Kaye said.

  “She isn't dying. I'd know.”

  “Please stop arguing,” Stella murmured, and rolled over, kicking feebly at the door. Her bare feet made the weakest little thumps. “My head hurts. Let me out/ I want to get out.”

  Kaye held her daughter against her brief struggles. With a discouraged sigh, the girl went limp again. Kaye looked at the back of Mitch's head, the uneven cut of his nape, a bad haircut. You saved money where you could. Mitch had never enjoyed haircuts anyway. For a moment, she hated her husband. She wanted to bite and scratch and hit him.

  No one knew more about her daughter than she did. Nobody. If Mitch spoke one more time, Kaye thought she would scream.

  41

  OHIO

  Trask or someone working for him had shut down the server that handled all the school's internal and external landline and satellite communications, and it would not start up without a password. None of the teachers or nurses or Kelson knew that password, and Trask of course was no longer available.

  Augustine could guess on motives, but it did not matter. Nothing mattered but doing whatever he could to shake loose the needed supplies. Dicken did not carry a phone. The only working phone at the moment was Augustine's Web phone.

  Personally, and through his secretary in the EMAC office in Indiana, he had sent messages—voice and email—to the heads of all the agencies on his list, confirming his previous calls for supplies. Anything. They had told him they would do their best, but the situation was very tight, and it might take a day or two.

  Augustine knew they did not have that long.

  One intrepid deputy to an undersecretary at Health and Human Services had suggested he call local media and make his case. “Phones are ringing off the hook over here.”

  Augustine had declined. He knew how that would go. The beleaguered and unpopular director of Emergency Action would be picked apart by reporters trying to prove him a liar.

  He needed facts to avoid panicking the public even further, and Dicken had not yet delivered anything useful.

  Now Augustine sat in a worn secretary's chair at a small desk near the corner, and used his Web phone to call up reports on the internal NIH Web site. At least they had not locked out his personal account; he was not completely persona non grata.

  He studied the freshly posted morning statistics, the numerical anatomy of the disaster, on the phone's small color screen.

  The first case had probably occurred in California, at the Pelican Bay school. Three California penal corporations had won the contracts to house SHEVA children in the Golden State; all had been particularly reluctant to work with any Washington-based authority. Augustine had come to hate those administrators, and those schools; the culture of the California penal system had become inbred, defensive, and arrogant during the last decade of the twentieth century, the Drug War years. He was not surprised that Pelican Bay had not reported the spread of the disease until the day before yesterday. First to notice, next to last to report.

  The disease had struck almost simultaneously at fifteen other schools, from Oregon to Mississippi. Dicken would be interested in that fact. Where was the reservoir? Where were the vectors? How had the virus spread before it erupted into pandemic?

  How and why had it lain dormant for so long?

  Pelican Bay had lost twelve hundred students out of six thousand. One in five. San Luis Obispo and Port Hueneme were reporting smaller percentages, but half the students at Kalispell, almost a thousand, were already gone, and more were expected to die within the next twelve hours. El Cajon, fifty-six out of three hundred.

  His eye swept east through the maps and charts. Phoenix, two thousand out of eight thousand. Two thirds had fallen ill in Tucson; half of those were dead. Provo had lost half, but with less than one hundred students. Mormons tended not to hand over their kids without a fight, and there were fewer than a thousand SHEVA children in the three schools in Utah.

  Augustine wondered how many of the “home-schooled,” as some agencies called them, the underground virus children, had become ill and died. The disease would spread to them soon enough, he guessed.

  In Ohio, Iowa, and Indiana, in twelve schools holding sixty-three thousand children gathered from across the Midwest, over thirteen thousand SHEVA children were now dead.

  He was looking at the stats for Illinois when the phone beeped. He answered.

  It was Rachel Browning from the SRO.

  “Hello, Mark. I hear you called. Sad day,” Browning said.

  “Rachel, how nice to hear from you,” Augustine said. “We need supplies here immediately—”

  “Hold for a sec. Have to take this one.” Light jazz played over the line. That was too much; he almost snapped the phone shut. But he held his palm away from the cover. Patience was the watchword, certainly now, and certainly for a wraith, a wisp whose tenuous authority could simply wink out at any moment.

  Browning came back. “One in four, Mark,” she began, as if it were a sports score.

  “We're counting one in five, averaged across the country, Rachel. We need—”

  “You're stuck way out in the middle of it, I hear. Looks like seventy plus percent rate of contagion,” Browning interrupted. “Aerosol vital for at least three hours. Horrendous. It's outside of anyone's control.”

  “It's slowing.”

  “There aren't many left to infect, not in the schools.”

  “We could cut the losses to almost nothing with proper medical care,” Augustine said. “We need doctors and equipment.”

  “The Ohio district director is a corrupt son of a bitch,” Browning said. “At least we can agree on that. He diverted medical supplies from school warehouses because the kids were so healthy. The rumor is some of his staffers sold the supplies for ten cents on the dollar to Russian bosses in Chicago, and now they're on the black market in Moscow.”

  “I did not know that,” Augustine said, tapping his fingernail on the desktop.r />
  “You should have, Mark. Justice is moving in on little leopard feet,” Browning said. “That does not help you or the virus kids. Worse still, there are a lot of brown BVDs in Washington, Mark. They're scared. So am I.”

  “None of the adults here are ill. It is not a threat to us. We know the etiology and nature of the disease.” This was a lie, but he had to show some strength.

  “If this illness has anything to do with ancient viruses, and I suspect it does—don't you?—we're going to full-blown biological emergency. PDD 298, Mark.”

  It had been three years since Augustine had read the details of Presidential Decision Directive 298.

  “Hayford has a crisis bill on the House floor now,” Browning continued. “No virus child will be tolerated outside a federal school. None. Not even on the reservations or in Utah. All schools will come under direct EMAC federal control. You'll like that. The bill increases violation penalties and authorizes tripling the staff for interdiction and arrest. We'll be hiring every fat security guard with a bigger gun than a dick, and every yahoo who ever failed cop school. They'll double our budget, Mark.”

  Augustine looked at his Rolex. “It's eleven in the morning there,” he said. “Can anyone in Washington get doctors out here?”

  “Not for a day, at least,” Browning said. “Everyone's taking care of their own, and the governor of Ohio hasn't asked yet. And, frankly, why should I trust you? You'll help me best where you are—screwing everything up royally. But I don't hold grudges. I'm here to offer some charity. I know where Kaye Lang will be hiding in a couple of hours. Do you?”

  “No. I've been busy, Rachel.”

  “I think you're telling the truth.”

  Augustine worked quickly through the possible ways Rachel Browning could have discovered such a thing as Kaye's whereabouts. “You squeezed someone?”