by Tosca Lee
“Sorry,” he says, raking back his hair, a tendril snagging in his week-old beard. “You just look so much like—”
“It’s okay,” I say, not sure I can bear to hear him say her name.
He nods toward the carrier tucked beneath my arm. “Is that . . .”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got a generator hooked up in the lab. I can take a look at them right away.”
But these are no longer just samples of some disease. They were purchased with lives to save many more. Lives precious to me. Which might be the reason it feels so hard to let them go.
When I don’t move, he claps a hand to his head. “I have no manners—are you hungry? Can I get you some water? Coffee? I brewed some this morning. It’s still hot.” He moves to a credenza stacked with gallon jugs of water, a European-style kettle, and a corrugated box filled with processed food.
“Water would be great.”
As he searches for a glass, I wander past the plaques jostling for wall space, the electric guitar on the stand in front of his desk. Study the framed photos on his shelves: Ashley, scuba diving underwater. Standing atop a mountain with three other men. Riding a bike down a red dirt path. I’m curious about the man Jackie so clearly loved, collecting details for the day Truly is ready.
I’m anxious, at the thought of her.
“Have you . . . heard from her?” he asks.
I turn, confused, to find him holding a mug, looking lost.
No, distraught.
“Heard from—” And then I realize whom he means.
“No,” I say softly. Nor do I expect to.
“Then it’s true, what they were saying on the news? Not that you killed her but that she’s . . . Is it true?” he demands, his voice rising in pitch.
I swallow. I can’t bring myself to say the words.
He takes a step back, hand going to his head, his expression that of a man sucker punched by grief.
By love.
“He did this, didn’t he? You said that night on the phone Magnus threatened to kill her. I knew he was a fraud,” he says, his voice ragged. But when he looks up, his eyes are dangerous. “I knew he was a narcissist. But what kind of monster does something like this?”
I set the carrier down on his desk.
“The kind you have to stop.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
* * *
By the time Ashley returns from his lab, the office is dark. I push up in alarm, realizing I’ve slept the entire day.
“How’d it go—what happened?” I ask as he sets the LED lantern on the floor and sinks into a chair.
“It’s a prion disease,” he says, his face pale. He’s wearing a lab coat, his hair pulled back in a ponytail. He rubs his face, the lantern accentuating the circles beneath his eyes, and says he’s already been in contact with the CDC.
But all I can think is that Magnus knew. However he came by the samples, he knew what he had and that he had the resources to save hundreds—maybe thousands—of lives.
Like Ken’s. And my sister’s, for whom I hold him doubly responsible.
How many was he willing to let die? And for what? To hold the health of a nation hostage? To force the hand of God?
A monster, Ashley called him.
But he is something worse.
Ashley’s still talking, though whether to himself or to me, I’m uncertain.
“. . . an ancient virus causing prion proteins to misfold faster than any prion disease on record. And now it’s become highly contagious by inserting its DNA into a strain of influenza.”
I have no idea what he’s just said. “Ashley, what does that mean?”
He looks up, his expression stark. “We’re looking at a pandemic. And it’s going to be bad.”
• • •
IN THE LAB down the hall, Ashley opens his laptop and pulls up a group of files I recognize from the flash drive, starting with an obituary.
“The pigs belonged to this man,” he says. An Alaskan farmer named John Coulter. Coulter raised Mangelitsas, an old Hungarian breed of hairy pigs that do well in climates like Siberia or Alaska because of their wool. They were nearly extinct by the 1990s, when an animal geneticist started a program encouraging farmers to protect the breed. The breed made a comeback and eventually arrived in the United States around 2007. Today, it’s a gourmet specialty meat raised mostly by hobby farmers. Unlike commercial pigs, however, heritage breeds are generally free-ranging.
“The thing about pigs is they dig. And eat pretty much anything. In his account given to a grad student from UC Davis, John claimed that one of his boars dug up an old caribou carcass from the woods behind his farm, where the permafrost, frozen in Alaska for ten to—who knows—a hundred thousand years since the last ice age, has been melting. A few days later, all the pigs but one are dead. Discouraged, John decides to give up pig farming. He takes the surviving pig to slaughter but keeps the brains, which he scrambles with eggs for himself and a buddy from the slaughterhouse as a special treat.”
“Gross.”
“I agree. Especially when you see this,” he says, opening a round image that looks like a close-up of a pink sponge. “This is a sample of one of the exhumed pig’s brains. See these proteins here, all clumped together? That’s what a prion disease does over the course of usually years, causing spongiform encephalopathy, a condition that affects the brain and nervous system with these holes. Mad cow disease, if you’ve heard of that, is a bovine form of spongiform encephalopathy. The human variant—usually acquired by eating meat tainted by infected brain or spinal matter—is called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Or, in the case of cannibalism, kuru.”
I make a face.
“It happens.” He toggles to the Baconfest vendor list.
“In August, the farmer mysteriously dies. The pork from his Mangalitsa shows up at the Redmond, Washington, Baconfest in a tasting booth hosted by gourmet meat wholesaler North Woods Farms. Except the meat is tainted with nerve or spinal cord tissue. And now everyone who ate it is carrying the disease.”
I think back to something Ken said that night on the phone. “But not everyone with the disease even eats meat.”
Like Jackie.
“Right. So one of those prion-infected bacon eaters ends up in the hospital for an emergency appendectomy a few weeks later. Just one problem: you can’t get rid of prions on surgical instruments with normal sterilization techniques.”
“The Bellevue 13 . . .”
“. . . all shared the same OR. So we have transmission from eating infected tissues and transmission through infected surgical instruments. So all of this is completely in line with what we know about prions. Except for one thing.”
He switches to another slide. “This is a tissue sample from the caribou carcass. And you can see the misfolded prion proteins in the spinal tissue, which is what killed it. But there’s something else: a virus. Meanwhile, back in Alaska”—he pulls up a second obituary—“the farmer’s brain-eating buddy starts exhibiting erratic behavior. He dies in a grisly showdown between his head and a band saw.”
He pauses and, with a curse, grabs a nearby notepad and pen to scribble “shut down Alaska slaughterhouse.”
He pulls up a third obituary.
“A second slaughterhouse worker dies four days after that. But this second guy, according to his family, had recently switched to a vegetarian diet to lose weight for his upcoming wedding. He wasn’t even eating meat. But he was diagnosed with influenza A three weeks before he died.”
“Ken said something about the flu,” I say. Was it only three days ago?
Ashley nods. “Right. So when that Mangalitsa boar dug up that caribou carcass, it didn’t just infect itself by eating prion-tainted remains. Rooting around, snout in the carcass, it infected itself with the virus that caused the caribou’s prion disease in the first place. Which means the slaughterhouse workers were also exposed to the virus when they handled the brains. When one of them caught influenza A, the two vir
uses in his cells did what smart viruses do: swapped and shared their DNA in a form of recombination that has created such viruses as the Spanish flu, which didn’t exist before it killed more than three percent of the world’s population.”
But not all of it. I remind myself of that, refusing to give Magnus’s voice volume. Meanwhile, I wish Ken could hear this—that he and his team were right. He deserves to know that. And I think he would have liked Ashley.
“So now our second slaughterhouse worker is infected with a new strain of influenza A that triggers prion proteins to rapidly misfold, causing the spongiform encephalopathy that looks like rapid early-onset dementia. And influenza A is much more contagious than the original caribou virus.”
“Great,” I murmur.
He pulls up the list of concert dates. “A week before he dies, this guy’s friends take him on a bachelor party trip to Portland for a U2 concert. Within a month, new cases of rapid early-onset dementia show up throughout the Pacific Northwest. Except this time they start with the flu. The good news is that we can protect people against the flu. The bad news is that we don’t know how to sterilize surgical instruments against prions. And with prion blood tests still in trials we have no way to monitor the safety of the blood supply.”
Now I remember Ken saying the only way to test for the disease was by examining brain tissue after death.
“Meanwhile,” Ashley says, “the soil those pigs were buried in: infected. No one—human or animal—can eat anything grown on that land for . . . I don’t even know. The infected can’t give blood, and people will continue to need surgery. You see why this is a problem.”
“But now that you have these samples, you can find a cure,” I say.
Ashley shakes his head. “That’s the thing: by the time you’re infected, it’s already too late. No one’s figured out a way to get antibodies past the blood-brain barrier, even by direct injection into the brain. Though a dose beforehand could offer some protection.”
I stare at him. “Then what good are the samples? What was all this for?” For all I know, Chase is in custody, or a hospital with gunshot wounds, or lying in a canyon, dead. “Jackie gave her life for this!”
“Because now, at least, we can create a more accurate vaccine for the flu-borne version, which is the one that will kill the most people.”
“That’s it?”
Wynter, we’ll probably never know how many lives you and Jackie saved.”
“We had help,” I say, feeling numb. “From a man—a Marine—named Chase. And another man named Noah.” And Mel, and Ken, and Farmer Ingold . . . even the DJ on the radio. And I realize she was right: we were never alone.
Ashley closes the laptop and sits back with a sigh.
“The CDC field office across the street from the college’s infectious disease laboratory closed down a few days ago, but I was able to reach Atlanta. The problem now will be manufacturing mass quantities of a new flu vaccine in the middle of a blackout.” He pinches the bridge of his nose as though his head hurts. “Another month without power and lots of people will die of all kinds of complications. Those who survive will just be entering peak flu season. This thing is about to explode.”
I tamp down the old panic. Fight to silence the voice saying that despite Magnus proving himself a fraud, it’s still happening. That the cataclysm can’t be stopped.
“Wynter,” Ashley says quietly, desperation in his eyes. “I have no right to ask this . . .”
He doesn’t need to.
“I will. I’m going to get her,” I whisper. “But I need a favor.”
CHAPTER FORTY
* * *
You wouldn’t have a picture of her by chance, would you? Of Truly?” Ashley asks some time before morning.
I wish.
“Photos are anathema in the Enclave,” I say, gazing out his office window. Dawn has tinged the horizon the color of denim. I wonder if Chase is out there. If he’s even alive. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve stared down at the campus, tracking movement, listening for the shout of my name. The hope of his showing up is the one thing that has mitigated my impatience to get on the road these two days while Ashley works on the antibody doses for me and Truly.
“It’s not perfect,” he said yesterday. “But it’ll at least offer you a level of protection, even if you do get the flu. You might get sick, but you won’t go crazy and die.”
“Her eyes look like yours,” I say softly. “She’s got curly hair, like you. Jackie’s ears and nose.”
He looks up, searches my reflection in the window, though I know it isn’t for me. And I understand, having seen Jackie from the corner of my eye in it more than once tonight.
“She loves kittens and puzzles. She’s so smart—already learning to read. And she gives the best hugs in the world.” I trail off.
He looks away, swipes a forearm across his eyes. “So,” he says at last. “Tell me about this silo.”
I eat even though I’m not hungry. Let him inject me in one arm and then draw blood from the other. Trade off sharing the couch with Ashley, who sleeps only a few hours at a time, insisting I have to keep my immunity high.
• • •
“WYNTER, WAKE UP.”
I startle upright, instantly alert, to find Ashley gathering several things into a tub—including a thick envelope from his desk.
“Is it ready?” I ask, looking for my shoes.
“Yes. It’s here. But there’s something you need to know. There’s been an attack on the CDC.”
I glance up. “What?”
It’s the cataclysm. The coming Final Day.
Shut up.
He straightens and rakes back his hair. “I don’t have details. I contacted them earlier to let them know the sequencing was almost complete. When I didn’t hear back I managed to get hold of a colleague at the University of Georgia. He told me what happened.”
“So what now?”
“I contacted the University of Nebraska Medical Center. It turns out your friend—Ken?—talked to someone there several days ago. Unfortunately, he either wasn’t well enough to remember or couldn’t reach you. They did confirm that the CDC’s been compromised, if only because it’s no longer safe for us or the samples here. They’re arranging with the National Guard to send a helicopter. There’s just one thing.”
Isn’t there always?
He comes to sit on the low table in front of me. Only then do I notice that the tub is filled with food and the rest of the water.
“You’re still wanted for Jackie’s murder. If you come with me, you’ll be taken into custody. With everything shut down, you could be detained for months.”
“That’s not going to work,” I say. Though it would have been cool to have taken that helicopter ride.
He leans forward to take my hands. “I will get this cleared up,” he says, lifting his gaze to mine. “I swear to you, I won’t stop till I do. But I can’t get into the Enclave. So I’m begging you. Please go back for Truly and get her to that silo.”
I squeeze his hands, eyes intent on his. “I promise you. Nothing is going to stop me.”
He sits back and releases a long breath. “Thank you.”
“I am going to need some things.”
“Name it.”
“A car and whatever gas you can find.”
“Anything else?”
“Can you get me into the theater building?”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
* * *
Speeding from Fort Collins as the sun ducks behind the mountains, I pull the baseball cap lower over my cropped blond wig, my shoulder sore from the last injection Ashley gave me.
I check and then, unable to help it, pick at the beard glued to my jaw. Wink at the skinny guy staring back from the rearview mirror. Decide I wouldn’t date me.
The world I left five days ago has changed once more in the space of hours. It’s too quiet and strangely feral. Bright eyes of buildings gone dark. Entire towns closed off like feud
al villages without walls.
There’s nothing but static on the radio now, my name mercifully erased from the waves. Silence feels like its own form of insanity.
I thought traffic would decrease with the supply of fuel, but I was wrong; it’s only lessened on the eastbound side of the interstate, which seems to be the same direction most of the military vehicles are traveling as well.
I’d planned to cut south to Kansas, keep to county roads. But the police cars so prevalent before have apparently retreated, gone off to calm cities on the verge of eruption. For as wary as I am about crazy people behind the wheel, I crane to catch sight of other drivers, wondering who they are, where they’re going. The mission worth burning their last gallon of fuel.
Four hours into my drive and just past North Platte, Nebraska, a helicopter whirs overhead. I gaze up through the driver’s side window. Wonder if Ashley can see me speeding in his black Camaro below. It’s filled with my belongings and gas siphoned from Noah’s truck, half a container from Ashley’s garage, and another from a university maintenance shed. The tub of food, water, and cash sits in back, a square, soft-sided carrier bag in front.
It’s dark by the time I rejoin the interstate after passing south of Omaha. Even from the outskirts I could see the police lights vying for order. I can only imagine what it must be like in Chicago.
I wonder if Julie and Lauren are all right. If they stayed at Julie’s mother’s. But Julie’s strong, resourceful, and I have faith I’ll see both of them again. One way or another.
I leave I-80 before reaching Des Moines, the lights of the city gone, replaced by an ambient glow, and then turn north at 169 on my last gallon of gas.
By the time the car dies a mile outside Story City, that song is back, playing at the forefront of my mind.
The car dies a mile outside Story City. As I get out, I can smell it. Smoke, traveling from the south . . .
Des Moines is burning.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
