The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  “More national import than—”

  “We very nearly have a quorum now,” Leona interrupted, “and given that there is a quorum, you may begin organizing your remarks among yourselves, if that will aid you in your presentations. I assume some of you have statistical modeling and graphics interfaces that you will need to configure so that you can make remarks to one another. Think of this time as the time in which you make sure that the audiovisual modules here in the meeting room are adequate to your needs. An associate will be along any minute in order to help.”

  Leona hastened off.

  “He’s not coming,” Gibraltar said.

  “I think you’re right,” the nervous gentleman from the medical establishment added. The one with the mange and the burlap. Perhaps they would have pursued their outrage at this point, if lunch had not been wheeled into the room in order to prevent conversation. The bowl of Satisfactor tablets on the table was two-thirds empty now, the remaining doses probably covered with bacteria of a hardy constitution. Gibraltar couldn’t tell who had pocketed the meds, as now the room was full of seven or eight sweating, imminently unemployed federal agents, many of them already drinking heavily, as if the international health emergency located in the American Southwest could be prevented by a highball.

  Lunch consisted of specialties from the president’s childhood that had lately, through the vagaries of culinary fashion, become high-class entrées, viz., the open-faced turkey sandwich, served here with creamed corn, black-eyed peas, and a side of beta-blockers and diuretics, this given to the attendees in order to help them void the nonnutritive portions of the meal as quickly as possible. On the reverse side of the menu card there was text hinting that the president had himself dispatched the turkey in question. The birds were becoming nuisances, ever since they’d been taken off the endangered species list. It was not difficult to run one over in West Virginia. Probably easier than shooting one, because the way the species had evolved, toward a mitigated aeronautics, the turkeys could barely loft themselves above the traffic on the county road. Occasionally the president, Leona conceded, when she looked in again on them, did take one of the armored vehicles of his escort out onto the grounds of the weekend retreat, where he would attempt to run down a turkey. It was just a way of letting off steam, you understand. Naturally, this didn’t conflict with one of the great pleasures of the presidency, according to Leona, which was the annual sparing of a turkey for the Thanksgiving dinner. In fact, that ritual had more meaning to the president than to others. “As you can see, the luncheon certainly has all the trimmings, and we have spared no expense for all of you, some of you having come so far—”

  “We’re going to have to quarantine the entire region” was what the guy from the CDC said, out of nowhere, the one with scrofula. Like he’d come in from the scrub to say just this, shouting above the engorgement of the luncheoneers, shouting above expressions of animal contentment, suppressed belches, and, in one or two cases, a disguised postprandial nap. “There’s no other alternative. And that’s assuming that we haven’t already missed a number of people who have been exposed and who are already on jets heading to other parts of the country or even around the globe. Quarantine is the human approach, the reasonable approach, and it should begin as soon as possible.”

  “What’s the unreasonable approach?”

  It became clear, as always in these high-level meetings, that rumor and innuendo had spawned a range of dire narratives, and it became the job of Leona—as an assortment of melon-flavored sorbets was served—to digest the story as she understood it, for the discussants. In the course of this, she called on Gibraltar to lend a hand with the backstory.

  “Look,” he said, upon breaking into a shame-enriched recital, “I’m aware that there are people in my department who bungled the Mars mission. The Mars mission, in the end, did not do as it was supposed to do, except insofar as it spawned a popular reality-based web program, and I’m aware, in the underfunded present, that we’ve had a number of missions in the last couple of decades that haven’t really displayed us to advantage. But before we get sidetracked talking about how we botched the mission and it’s all our fault, and before I observe that it was business and the military that wanted that onboard bacteria in the first place, I want to remind you, ladies and gentlemen, what the dream of space travel means. The dream of space travel. The dream of the voyage into the heavens. It really isn’t terribly different from our narrative of westward expansion, when you think about it. Manifest Destiny is a blot on our national reputation. How we conducted the westward expansion doesn’t make us any nobler in the eyes of history, and yet the dream of expansion does represent some kind of fervent hope, some kind of very human wish. The movement outward from the past brings with it the capacity to renew and restore a belief in a common purpose. It celebrates our ingenuity, and our capacity to start over. That’s what the dream of space travel is all about. That’s what Mars was all about. I know that there are some of you who think that Mars was just applying a swift kick in the ass to the Chinese and the Indians out at the edge of the universe, or about creating new economic opportunities while things were getting bad for us here, but I think that’s a lot of bunk. Mars was about proving that even in the worst times we could still dream big, and that the big dreams made us better, made us more responsible, more upright, and they brought us back to Earth rededicated to the purpose of human civilization.

  “Now, we lost a number of our people up there, and we recently made the decision that we were going to stand by our returning guy as he tried to reunite with his friends and family. We had no real intel about that strain of bacteria on Mars, the one that took so many of our people, and we had no way of knowing that it could outlast the very high temperatures of reentry and the explosion of the capsule. We’re not in the bioweapons business. But because we weaponized the bacteria in the course of our mission, it became our problem first, and so we’re the lead agency, at least for the moment. Indeed, what we found that we were dealing with was unpredictable, dangerous, even lethal,” Gibraltar said, warming to his rhetorical flights, as he always did when the stakes were highest, “but doesn’t that give us an opportunity? Just a year or so ago, people had all these ideas about terraforming Mars, as if that were something we could do in the near term, not something that would take hundreds of years. Now, I want to believe that terraforming can be accomplished, and more, but what I really think is that the challenge we face before us, one that we didn’t think we would face, and one we didn’t even particularly want, why, it’s even more of an opportunity. We can bring ingenuity to this crisis, and we can understand it as a challenge, and we can show that it’s precisely when we are down, as a people, as a nation, as a species, that we find in ourselves the strongest urge to equip ourselves and to prevail. We can right the craft, we can move into the deeper water, we can ride out the swells. It’s just a microorganism. We can educate people. We can treat people. We can beat the bug. And we can emerge from this combat a leaner, more responsive federal government, whose agencies know how to deal with the worst that the contemporary moment can bring us.”

  Gibraltar turned to face one of the cameras in the corner of the room as he completed his remarks. If the meeting was to be a sequence of turf wars, a bunch of guys flexing their muscles, nothing more, he was going to set the agenda.

  “Very nice,” said the fellow from Central Intelligence, a late addition to the guest list, “and we agree with the moral principles just expressed, which are attractive, but what do we do with the unruly population in the borderlands while we try to contain the outbreak? How, for example, do we keep insurgent elements from exploiting the panic? Does the space administration, as lead agency, have any advice here?”

  “Quarantine,” said the CDC, “as I’ve been saying, is really the only rational approach. Look at how, for example, the Ebola outbreaks have gone in Africa, how the problems with containment create security issues and economic ripples in the aftermath.”
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  “How to maintain a quarantine that we know has been breached? How are you going to protect the soldiers who are ordered to protect against escape?” said another voice. “There are problems that—”

  “We believe there are kinds of antibiotics that will still be useful against this bacillus. After all, it has never been on Earth before, not in this strain.”

  “New antibiotics in the pipeline every day, some very promising new medications, and the FDA is prepared to fast-track the—”

  “And we have been monitoring housing stock in the Rio Blanco area, and we believe, because of the net loss in population in recent years, that there are plenty of available industrial lots that can be used as quarantine centers for treatment and/or detention.”

  “Doesn’t that amount to domestic internment?”

  “Depends on how you—”

  “Gentlemen, could you try to—”

  Gibraltar said, “From what I’ve heard the goal is to try to neutralize the already-infected, because—”

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which was represented by the guy with the patch over one eye, had historical enmity with regard to Central Intelligence, even when the two of them seemed to agree on policy, and the man with the patch, while gulping down the last of his mint julep, hotly suggested, “A fence can be used as an outflow valve. We build a temporary perimeter around the north end of the city. Uh, could you please plug this drive in here? Bring up the first map? Obliged. Now, as you can see from the data we’ve collected, on the north the city is bounded by mountains here, easily policed, and it might be possible, on the far side of the range, to quietly erect a perimeter that will effectively create a no-man’s-land of the sort that was used after that reactor accident in—”

  “Indonesia.”

  “And then we can use the southerly fence, the one currently keeping in the unlawful emigrants, and we can just open that fence to expel the problem in a southerly direction. Under cover of night. This is just exploiting some permeability that may or may not already be present in our border. Still another option: we can organize detention facilities on or just south of the southerly fence, in a kind of international zone, and we can probably hold the infected there legally, at least for a time, until we discover the treatment options.”

  “Isn’t that going to create problems with our cosignatory to the south?”

  “We’ve got a transient population in this region, and they come and go from the one signatory to the other, sometimes even including much farther-flung Central American districts; these people migrate like birds, like a vulture that just comes and goes from Chihuahua to the Sonoran Desert without ever worrying about sovereignty.”

  “Well, it’s true that the most transient elements, the migrants, the mentally ill homeless, are likely to be struck hardest by the epidemic, or the pandemic, if you accept the computer models, and it makes sense to try to find a way to organize these people so that we can count, monitor, and treat them.”

  “If the president can’t even be bothered to attend the meeting, what kind of incentive is there for us to resolve these issues?”

  “Does the president even know what’s happening out there?”

  “Does someone want to recap the route of transmission of the contagion?”

  The anxious and irritable CDC fellow and Gibraltar attempted to respond to this question, though in the rough-and-tumble of the meeting, in which for example one guy, from Housing and Urban Development, got up abruptly from the table and ran for the bathroom with his hand over his mouth, it required sheer doggedness to hold the floor.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Gibraltar said to the others. “I’m just going from what we have from the ship’s log, but the problem is that the infected patient doesn’t develop genuine symptoms until late in the course of the illness, while he or she is able to communicate the disease from the moment of infection.”

  “What about the… what were they calling it, the… disassembly of the body, what exactly does that mean?” someone demanded to know.

  The CDC representative found an opening: “It’s like a rapid leprosy in that way. Skin goes bad, and the limbs, the extremities no longer have any of the connective tissue to require them to adhere to the body. The extremities are shed in this way, and then the problem is that not only do they remain contagious—”

  Gibraltar: “But for a while they still have movement.”

  General incredulity on this point. Gasps, choked laughs.

  “How is that possible?”

  Gibraltar: “We—”

  CDC: “—don’t know.”

  “So you’re saying these limbs flop around like the catch on a trawler’s deck—”

  “Worse, really, because depending on the extremity in question, they can crawl around some and get into all kinds of trouble, especially if the population into which they are released doesn’t know anything about the course of the disease.”

  To which Gibraltar added, “Gentlemen, the situation that we have developing in the area around Rio Blanco is all the result of one arm. One forearm. The forearm belonging to Colonel Jed Richards. A piece of his spacecraft, as I was saying, touched down right outside of Rio Blanco. It’s likely that some undesirables who were the first on the scene attempted to spirit away the arm before we were able to get the security detail from base over to the crash site. That arm, that dead man’s arm, managed to migrate from the crash site into the town of Rio Blanco within six hours, maybe even less. According to what we know through the cooperation of state agencies and others on the ground, the arm managed in that time to pass through a number of crowded areas. While we aren’t sure that everyone who came in contact with the arm was infected, we are sure that some have been—they’re in the hospitals already—and that they are showing signs of progression on a scale that is, well, quite a bit faster than what we experienced on Mars.”

  “Probably,” the fellow from the CDC added, “the march through the family of symptoms is stepped up in this much warmer climate.”

  “How many people would you estimate are infected?”

  “And do you have an idea about how many people are liable to come in contact with each asymptomatic case?”

  “Are there pieces of the craft and of… the body of the astronaut… elsewhere? Across the border, for instance?”

  “I’d say,” Gibraltar admitted, “that there’s a likelihood—”

  At this point Leona, scheduling flunky, interrupted the proceedings, and it took her a long time to do so, a long time to silence the short-tempered, pudgy, middle-aged men, the Caucasian men, the anxious men. Finally, Leona managed to make herself heard, in order to say, “Gentlemen, please rise for the president.”

  All eyes on the door, which didn’t close on its hinges entirely, it being of an antique design. If even the sketchiest account of what transpired at the weekend residence were leaked through that cracked door to the instant news resources on the web, it would have meant the end of the administration, its party, perhaps even the NAFTA political establishment as it was known then. And yet the door didn’t close, and various members of the catering staff were coming through routinely to top off a beverage here and there, and to offer another bowl of sorbet.

  There’s always an instant when your time is over, Gibraltar would say later, looking back on that momentous entrance. All the bravado that you once displayed, your fearlessness, suddenly vanishes, because of the sheer scale of history. This was it; this was the moment, and Gibraltar experienced it physically, as a sudden gnawing pain in his midsection, as if something were trying to chew its way out. Gibraltar was no stranger to physical discomfort, but there was something new about this particular kind of pain. It was the novelty part that got his attention, as the woodchuck chewing its way out radiated up his esophagus and flared down his flanks. There was nothing to do about it then, because all the men rose, and then the wall-mounted screen at the end of the room flickered on, and the face of the president, mostly shrouded in
shadow, appeared on it. He was wearing a shirt and tie, that much was obvious, but there was a way in which he didn’t look like the president for whom they labored, not as he was seen in the press. There was the crackling of the audio portion of the signal beginning, a faint hum that was probably some kind of security apparatus in the room where the filming was taking place, and then the tinny second-generation sound of digital playback.

  “Gentlemen, very good of you to come, and I’m really sorry that I’m not able to venture downstairs right now. Please accept my apologies. It’s possible that I might make it down before the end of the meeting. In case you’re wondering, this is a full teleconferencing program we’re running here, so I have been able to participate in the meeting so far. Leona is also taking notes for posterity. We’ll have the typed account as well as the video record. And I trust each of you will be preparing memoranda for your departments. So that we all know what we’re saving here.”

  There was a murmuring of the conferees. Various discussants floated the theory that this was a recording of the president and not a live broadcast at all. But this was belied by the specificity of his next remarks.

  “The way I see it, we have discussed two options so far, the first option being a general quarantine for the affected population in Rio Blanco. As I understand it, the problem here is that we can’t identify the affected population in order to quarantine them, which makes that proposal ineffective. Correct? The second option is the blockade, at least that’s how I’m interpreting it—the idea that we seal off the town of Rio Blanco. Then we either open the border to the south, or we just wait out the infection. Is that an adequate summary of that proposal, Major Beauforte?”

  “Sir, we could easily air-drop food supplies into the town—”

  “The blockade, option two. You know, gentlemen, I have spent a lot of time in the Southwest. It’s really one of the most attractive parts of the nation. I mean, before we go in there and do something drastic to the place, we should pause to remember what a beautiful part of the country it is. In fact, I was there last year or so, and I saw my first dust storm. Leona, have I told you about the dust storm?”