12.21: A Novel

by Dustin Thomason

  In the middle of it all was a green SUV.

  STANTON STOOD WITH Davies in the morgue, deep in the basement of the hospital. The driver’s body lay on one metal table; beside them, on a second table, lay Volcy’s.

  Davies made an incision from ear to ear on the driver’s skull, then draped the flap of skin and removed the skullcap to expose the brain.

  “Ready,” he said.

  Stanton stepped forward, cut the central cortex away from the cranial nerves, and disconnected it from the spinal cord. Reaching inside, he removed the brain from its skull. Hidden in the folds of this organ was his best hope for figuring out VFI. He placed the brain on a sterile table, trying to ignore the fact that it was still warm.

  Stanton and Davies began to slice. During his gross exam of the thalamus, Stanton saw clusters of tiny holes; under the microscope he saw a wasteland of craters and deformed tissue. Textbook FFI. Only much, much more aggressive.

  “Anything?” Davies asked.

  “Give me a second.” Stanton rubbed his eyes.

  “You look knackered,” Davies said.

  “I have no idea what that means.”

  “You look like shit. You need to sleep, Gabe.”

  “We all do.”

  Davies snickered. “I’ll sleep when I’m like these blokes.”

  “Come on.”

  “Too soon?”

  Once they finished with the driver’s brain, they performed the same operation on Volcy’s distended body. When they had sections from both brains ready, Stanton put his eye to the microscope again, upping the background light. The craters in Volcy’s brain ran deeper and the cortex looked more deformed. He had definitely been infected first.

  Stanton had suspected as much, but until now he hadn’t realized what he could do with the information. “Make images of all these sections,” he told Davies. “And I want you to find the MRIs we took of Volcy when he was still alive. Figure out how fast the disease was spreading in his brain, then model everything backward. If we can figure out the rate of progression, then we can estimate when they both got sick.”

  Davies nodded. “A timeline.”

  If they could determine when Volcy took ill, they might be able to figure out where he’d gotten sick. With luck, they could do the same for the driver. The driver was the key: Someone in this city knew him. Once the driver was identified, there’d be bank statements and credit-card receipts showing where he bought his groceries, where he ate. A paper trail leading straight to the source.

  “Cavanagh’s on the line,” Davies said, holding out his cellphone.

  Stanton peeled off his second layer of gloves. Into the phone he said one word: “Confirmed.”

  Cavanagh took a deep breath. “You’re sure?”

  “Same disease, different stages.”

  “I’m getting on a plane right now. Tell me what you need to keep this under control.”

  “An ID on the driver. We have two patients, and they were both John Does when they came in.” The Explorer was unregistered, and its driver, like Volcy, carried nothing to identify him. The worry was that this somehow wasn’t a coincidence. But what would that mean?

  “The police are working on it,” Cavanagh said. “What else?”

  “The public needs to know we found a second case. And they need to know it from us. Not from some blogger who makes half of it up.”

  “If you’re asking for a press conference, the answer is no. Not yet. Everyone in the city will think they’re sick.”

  “Then at least get the grocery stores to put a hold on dairy, and meat too, just to be safe. Get USDA to investigate all possible imports from Guatemala. And tell people they need to throw away the milk and all the rest in their refrigerators.”

  “Not until we confirm the source of the disease.”

  “If you want confirmation, get all of our agents here checking the pupil size of every patient in every hospital,” he said. “And I’m not just talking about L.A. I’m talking about the valley, Long Beach, Anaheim. I need more than two data points.”

  “I’m supervising agents on the ground there already. Let them do their jobs.”

  Stanton pictured Cavanagh’s unflappable stare. She’d become the brightest star at CDC in 2007, when an airplane passenger was suspected of carrying drug-resistant TB. She was one of the few at the center to remain levelheaded until the scare passed and had been a favorite in Washington ever since. But now wasn’t the time to be levelheaded.

  “How can you be so calm?” Stanton asked Cavanagh.

  “Because I have you to not be,” she said. “Now tell me something. How much sleep have you gotten? I’ll be on the ground in six hours, and I’m going to need you sharp and rested. If you haven’t slept, do it now.”

  “Emily, I don’t—”

  “I wasn’t making a suggestion, Gabe. That was an order.”

  BACK IN VENICE, Stanton was surprised to see that nothing had changed. The evening crowds were in the beer gardens. Homeless drifters sat beneath the retail-shop awnings. Out on the boardwalk, men were still hawking charms to ward off the Maya apocalypse. For a moment, all this life made Stanton feel a bit better.

  Just after eleven P.M., he stood in his kitchen, on the phone with the chief medical officer for the Guatemalan Health Service, Dr. Fernando Sandoval.

  “Mr. Volcy told us that he came across the border after he was already sick,” Stanton said. “He was clear about that. You need to search clinics, facilities on the Pan-American Highway, and every local doctor’s office that serves indigenous people.”

  “We have teams searching the area where he says he got sick,” Sandoval told him. “Despite the fact that it will cost us millions of dollars we don’t have, we’ve got people visiting every farm in the entire Petén and sampling cattle. So far they’ve come up with nothing, of course. Not a single trace of prion of any kind.”

  “Not yet. But you understand how urgent this is, don’t you? From what we’re seeing here, you could have an epidemic soon.”

  “There’s zero evidence that your second patient was ever here, Dr. Stanton.”

  They’d broadcast the second victim’s photograph everywhere on the evening news, but no family or friends of the driver had come forward. “We haven’t ID’d him yet, but—”

  “We have no other cases, and it is irresponsible of you to suggest anything of the kind. Neither of your patients got sick here. Though of course we will do everything we can to aid you in your investigation.”

  The call ended abruptly, leaving Stanton frustrated. With no reported cases, the Guatemalans weren’t scared enough yet to take real action. Until they had a confirmed case of their own, Stanton knew it would be hard to get much at all from them, and, even then, their public-health capabilities were poor.

  Stanton heard a key going into the lock and animal feet scurrying across the floor. He hurried to the living room, where he found Nina in worn jeans, a windbreaker, and still-glistening galoshes. Dogma ran toward him, and Nina followed, looping her arms around Stanton’s neck.

  “Guess you found a place to dock, Captain,” he said, kissing her on the cheek.

  “Should be fine until sunrise. You look like shit.”

  “So everyone keeps telling me.”

  Dogma started to whine, and Stanton rubbed the dog’s ears in circles.

  Nina peeled off her coat. “When was the last time you ate something?”

  “No idea.”

  Nina beckoned him into the kitchen. “Don’t make me use force.”

  There was a half-eaten container of Chinese delivery in the fridge, and she made Stanton eat it but let him listen to NPR updates while he did. The news program’s host was interviewing a CDC communications specialist Stanton had never heard of. They were talking about VFI in a way that made it obvious neither one of them had any real knowledge of prion science. A tightness grew in Stanton’s chest.

  “What’s wrong?” Nina asked.

  He fiddled with his fork, pressing
liquid from the microwaved cubes of tofu. “This is going to get worse.”

  “Good thing they’ve got you, then.”

  “Soon people’ll realize we don’t know how to control a disease like this.”

  “You’ve been warning them about this day forever.”

  “I don’t mean CDC. I mean everyone else who’ll ask why we have no vaccine. Congress will go crazy. They’ll want to know what we’ve been doing since mad cow.”

  “You did everything you could. Always have.”

  Her voice was comforting. He reached out and took her hand. There was so much he wanted to say.

  Nina kissed the back of his hand, led him into the living room, and turned on the TV. She leaned her head on his shoulder. Wolf Blitzer reported from the Situation Room, explaining that the identity of the second patient was still unknown.

  “Do you have enough supplies on the boat?” Stanton asked her.

  “For what?” she said. “Don’t get glass-half-empty on me. It depresses the dog.”

  Looking at her, Stanton felt something he’d never expected before tonight. After a decade in the lab, a decade of fighting for funding to improve prion-disease readiness, a decade of warning that an outbreak was always just one accident away, now the unavoidable had come, and all Stanton wanted was to follow Nina back to the dock, get on Plan A with her and Dogma, and forget prion disease forever.

  “What if we left?” Stanton asked.

  Nina lifted her head. “And went where?”

  “Who knows? Hawaii?”

  “Don’t do this, Gabe.”

  “I’m serious,” he said, staring into her eyes. “All I want is to be with you right now. I don’t care about anything else. I love you.”

  She smiled, but there was something sad in it. “I love you too.”

  Stanton leaned forward to kiss her, but before he could plant his lips on hers, Nina turned away.

  “What?” he asked, pulling back.

  “You’re under a lot of pressure, Gabe. You’ll get through this.”

  “I want to get through it with you. Tell me what you want.”

  “Please, Gabe.”

  “Tell me.”

  She didn’t look away as she spoke. “I want someone who doesn’t care if he shows up late to work because we spent too long in bed. Someone who’d actually get on that boat and leave all this behind. You’re the most driven man I’ve ever known, and I love that about you. But even if you came with me, in two days you’d be swimming back to the lab. You wouldn’t really walk away. Especially now.”

  Stanton wanted to prove to her that the man she was describing didn’t exist, that it was a made-up version of him she’d concocted long ago. But at some level he knew she was right. He wasn’t getting on any boat right now.

  Nina laid her head on his shoulder again. They sat in silence, and soon Stanton heard the slow breathing he knew so well. He wasn’t surprised; Nina could sleep anywhere, anytime—on park benches, in theaters, on crowded beaches. Stanton closed his eyes too. The tenseness in his jaw lessened. He thought of calling Davies, to ask how the timeline was going. But the notion floated away in a wave of exhaustion and sadness. He wanted to hide in the comfort of unconsciousness.

  Still, sleep wouldn’t come. As he watched the minutes tick by, he found himself reiterating all the reasons he couldn’t be sick. He hadn’t consumed dairy in months. He hadn’t had meat in years. Yet he found himself appreciating Cavanagh’s concerns about how easy it might be for people to believe they had VFI.

  Stanton picked up Nina and carried her into the bedroom, putting her on her old side of the bed. Dogma wandered in, and although he rarely allowed the dog on the bed, Stanton patted the mattress several times, and Dogma came bounding up and lay next to Nina.

  Stanton was heading to his study to check email again when his cellphone buzzed with a number he didn’t recognize.

  “Dr. Stanton? It’s Chel Manu. Sorry to disturb you so late.”

  “Dr. Manu. Where did you go? We’ve been calling you.”

  “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you.”

  Stanton heard something in her voice. “Are you all right?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  TEN

  THE STREET VENDORS WHO’D WON A LOTTERY SPOT ON THE SEAWARD side of the boardwalk were gone, their African reeds and bird-houses and octopus bongs packed in crates until morning. It was just after midnight, and the police were sweeping the beaches for partyers and the homeless. Stanton opened his front door to find Chel standing on his stoop.

  He motioned her toward two weathered wicker chairs on the porch of his condo. Barefoot men and women poured toward them like newly hatched amphibians crawling onto the land, searching for a place to curl up until the beach reopened at five.

  As Stanton and Chel sat, a hulking Asian man wearing a heavy overcoat and camouflage pants stepped onto the boardwalk, carrying a sign: PARTY LIKE IT’S 2012. He plopped down in the middle of Ocean Front Walk, directly across from them. “It will be completed the thirteenth b’ak’tun,” he chanted.

  Stanton shook his head and turned to Chel, who stared at the man with a look he couldn’t categorize.

  “What can I do for you?” Stanton asked her.

  He listened in disbelief as she told him her story, beginning with the codex, through the real reason for her trip to the hospital. Once she finished, he had trouble resisting the urge to shake her. “Why the hell did you lie to us?”

  “Because the manuscript was looted, so it’s illegal for me to have it,” she said. “But there’s something else you should know too.”

  “What?”

  “I think the man who caused the accident on the 101 is the man who gave me the codex in the first place. His name’s Hector Gutierrez. He’s an antiquities dealer.”

  “How do you know it was him?”

  “I watched him drive away from my church in that same car.”

  “Jesus. Was Gutierrez sick when you saw him?”

  “He just seemed anxious to me. I’m not sure.”

  Stanton processed this. “Did Gutierrez ever travel to Guatemala?”

  “I don’t know. He may well have.”

  “Wait a second. Were you lying about Volcy being sick before he came here?”

  “No, that was what he told me. The only thing I didn’t tell you was that he started having trouble sleeping near the temple he looted the book from. He wasn’t out there meditating. But he really hadn’t been eating meat for a year.”

  Stanton was furious. “The Guatemalans have teams on the ground searching every dairy farm in the Petén because of the information you gave us. And they already think we’re wasting their time and money. Now we have to tell them our translator lied, and they should be searching for ruins in the jungle?”

  A skateboarder rolled down the boardwalk and called out, “Chill, bro.”

  “I’ll tell immigration everything,” Chel whispered after the kid had passed.

  “You think I give a shit about immigration? This is about public safety. If you hadn’t lied, we could have asked him more questions, and we could already be searching the jungle for the real source.”

  Chel ran a shaky hand through her hair. “I know that now.”

  “What else did he tell you?”

  “He said the temple where he got the book was three days’ walk from his village in the Petén,” she said. “Less than a hundred miles, probably.”

  “Where’s his village?”

  Hair strands blew across Chel’s face in the ocean wind. “He wouldn’t say.”

  “So somewhere in the vicinity of those ruins,” Stanton said, “could be VFI’s original source. Some sick cow putting off milk that’s being shipped all over the world. Hell, for all we know, the runoff could be going into the water supply down there. Did he tell you anything that could point us toward it? Anything at all?”

  Chel shook her head. “The only other things he told me were that his spirit an
imal was a hawk and that he had a wife and daughter.”

  “What’s a spirit animal?”

  “It’s an animal every Maya gets paired with at birth. He said his was Chuyum-thul. The hawk.”

  Stanton was pulled back to the ER, where he’d watched the other victim die. “Gutierrez said, The birdman did this to me,” he told Chel. “He was blaming Volcy for getting him sick.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Maybe Volcy brought some kind of food across the border with him, not realizing it was what got him sick in the first place.”

  “And what could that be?”

  “You tell me,” Stanton said. “What would a Maya man give to someone he does business with? Something Gutierrez could’ve eaten or drunk with dairy in it?”

  “There are a lot of possibilities,” Chel said.

  Suddenly Stanton turned for his door. “Meet me at my car,” he told her, his voice full of purpose. “Around back.”

  “Why?”

  “Because before you turn yourself in to the police, we’re going to find out.”

  ELEVEN

  WHAT DID IT SAY ABOUT HER, CHEL WONDERED, THAT EVEN now she was fixated on the codex and the fact that she’d probably never be allowed to see it again? That she might never get a chance to find out who the writer was and why he risked his life to go against his king? What did it say about her that even now, as she and the doctor drove toward Gutierrez’s house, she was still focused on all the wrong things? To Stanton, sitting silently in the driver’s seat, Chel knew she was beneath contempt. He’d spent his life trying to stop disease from spreading, and her little academic exercise had put the whole city at risk.

  Strangely, it was Patrick’s voice she now heard in her head. They were in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a meeting about the Mayan Epigraphic Database Project, and they were planning to hike the Appalachian Trail after it was over. When Chel told him she’d agreed to head another committee and couldn’t go, Patrick gave it to her. “Someday you’ll realize you’ve sacrificed too much for your work, and you can’t get it back,” he’d said. Chel thought he was speaking out of spite, and that it would blow over like all the other times. He’d moved out a month later.