12.21: A Novel

by Dustin Thomason

  She shifted in her seat and felt something catch on the heel of her shoe: a dog’s leash. From the size of the collar, it looked like the dog wasn’t a small one.

  “Throw it in the back,” Stanton said, no warmth discernible in his voice. It was the first he’d spoken on their journey south. Chel watched him as he drove, both hands on the wheel like a driving-school student. Probably he was the type who never broke any rule. Stanton seemed to her to be a stern man, and Chel wondered if he was as lonely as he appeared. At least he had a dog. Chel stared out the windshield at the billboard-dotted Pacific Coast Highway. Maybe she’d get a pet once they fired her from the Getty and she had more time on her hands.

  “Give it to me,” Stanton said.

  Chel glanced over. “What?” Then she realized she was still clutching the dog’s leash, ridiculously. Stanton reached for it and tossed it into the backseat as he accelerated.

  Chel had remembered that Hector Gutierrez lived in Inglewood, north of the airport. As they pulled up in front of the two-story Californian, she didn’t know what to expect. It was still possible the man’s family had no idea what had happened; no one had come forward yet to ID him.

  “Let’s go,” Stanton said, turning off the car engine.

  At the front door, he knocked, and a minute later a light went on inside. A raven-haired Latina woman came to the door in a long navy robe. Her puffy eyes suggested she’d been crying. It was clear to Chel that she already knew. And Chel also realized why she hadn’t gotten in touch with the authorities: Not only had the woman lost her husband, she was in danger of losing everything else. ICE and the FBI were unrelenting in their seizures of black-market profits.

  “Mrs. Gutierrez?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Dr. Stanton from the Centers for Disease Control. This is Chel Manu, who has done business with your husband. We’re here with some very difficult news. Did you know your husband was involved in an accident today?”

  Maria nodded slowly.

  “May we come in?” Stanton asked.

  “Outside is fine,” she said. “My son is trying to sleep.”

  “We’re very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Gutierrez,” Stanton said. “I can only imagine what you and your son must be going through right now, but I have to ask you some questions.” He paused, and when she finally nodded, he continued. “Your husband was very sick, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you been having any trouble sleeping?” Stanton asked.

  “My husband was awake the entire night for the last two nights. Now I have to explain to my son that he’s dead. So, yes, I have had a little trouble sleeping.”

  “Any unusual sweating?” Stanton pressed.

  “No.”

  “Have you heard what’s happening at Presbyterian Hospital?”

  Maria pulled the robe tighter around her. “I’ve seen the news.”

  Stanton said, “Well, another man was very sick and died this morning, and we now know that he and your husband had the same disease. We believe the disease is spreading through some food item that could have been given to your husband by the first patient when he came up from Guatemala. Do you have any idea when or where your husband might’ve done business with a man named Volcy?”

  Maria shook her head. “I didn’t know any of Hector’s business.”

  “We need to search your house, Mrs. Gutierrez, to see if we can find out anything more. And we need to sample everything in your refrigerator.”

  Maria covered her face with her hand, rubbing her eyes, as if she couldn’t bear to look at them anymore.

  “This is an emergency,” Stanton said. “You have to help us.”

  “No,” Maria said, resisting weakly. “Please leave.”

  “Mrs. Gutierrez,” Chel said. “Yesterday morning your husband came to me with a stolen object and asked me to hold it for him. And I did it. I did it, and then I lied about it, and it turns out my lie might mean more people are sick now. I’ll have to live with that. But you won’t if you listen to us. Please let us come in.”

  Stanton turned back to Chel, surprised by the commitment in her voice.

  Maria opened the door.

  THEY FOLLOWED HER DOWN a narrow hallway lined with photographs of soccer games and backyard birthday parties. In the kitchen, Stanton pulled everything out of the refrigerator and had Chel do the same with the pantries. They soon had more than sixty items on the countertop, including many with dairy in them, but none came from Guatemala, and none was unusual or imported. Stanton quickly searched through the trash and found nothing of interest there either.

  “Is there anywhere your husband worked when he was home?” Stanton asked.

  Maria led them to a study on the far end of the house. A stained white couch, a metal desk, and a few low bookshelves sat on top of an imitation Oriental rug. The small room reeked of cigarette smoke. The rest of the house was a shrine to the family, but there were no pictures inside the office. Whatever he did in here, Gutierrez didn’t want his son or his wife watching him do it.

  Stanton started with the desk drawers. Tearing each one open, he found office supplies, a mess of bills, and other household paperwork: mortgage documents, payroll forms, electronics manuals.

  Chel pulled her glasses out and focused on the computer. “There isn’t a dealer in the world who doesn’t sell online now,” she told Stanton.

  She went on eBay. Log-in HGDealer popped up, asking for a password.

  “Try Ernesto,” Maria said from the doorway.

  A list of items appeared on the screen.

  1. Authentic Pre-Columbian flint $1,472.00 sale completed

  2. Mayan sarcophagus section $1,200.00 auction expired

  3. Authentic Mayan stone planter $904.00 sale completed

  4. Jade Mayan necklace $1,895.00 sale completed

  5. Honduran clay jar artifact $280.00 auction expired

  6. Classic Mayan jaguar bowl $1,400.00 sale completed

  “It stores sold items for sixty days,” Chel said. “This is what he’s unloaded or tried to unload over the last two months.”

  “This is what Gutierrez was selling, right?” Stanton asked. “But he bought the book. Do we have to get into Volcy’s account for that?” Scanning the interface, he asked, “How would Volcy have even known how to use a site like this? Where would he have gotten access?”

  “Everyone down there knows how it works,” Chel said. “People will travel for days to get to a computer if they have items to sell. But he wouldn’t have sold a codex on eBay anyway. It would draw too much attention. The most expensive item here costs less than fifteen hundred dollars; there’s a limit to what people are willing to pay for something online. So sellers with high-end items find a way to make contact on eBay, then do their business in person.”

  She clicked on a tab at the top and up popped an eBay email window, with an in-box full of nearly a thousand messages. Many of them were exchanges about items Gutierrez had listed here. But there were also messages with places and dates and times he was planning to meet people looking to sell items to him.

  “They all use screen names,” Chel said.

  “How can we find out which one could be Volcy?”

  Stanton looked for Maria, but she had left the room.

  “Look,” Chel said. She moved the cursor over a message that had been sent a week ago from screen name Chuyum-thul.

  The hawk.

  FROM: Chuyum-thul

  SENT: Dec. 5, 2012 10:25 A.M.

  SOMETHING VERY VALUABLE I POSSESS, DEFINITELY YOU WILL WANT.

  REACH PHONE +52 553 77038

  “It looks like it was translated for him by the computer,” said Chel. “The way he’s writing is basically Mayan syntax.”

  “Where is country code fifty-two?”

  “Mexico,” Chel said. “And the area code is Mexico City. It’s an antiquities hotbed, and probably Volcy’s best chance south of the border at getting a decent price for the book. If he couldn�
��t get what he wanted there, then he’d have turned to the States.”

  The sound of a child crying came from upstairs. Stanton and Chel exchanged a look of pity, but continued searching. When Chel found an email addressed to Chuyum-thul, the circle started to close:

  FROM: HGDealer

  SENT: Dec. 6, 2012 2:47 P.M.

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2012

  AG FLIGHT 224

  DEPART MEXICO CITY, MEXICO (MEX) 6:05 A.M.

  ARRIVE LOS ANGELES, CA (LAX) 9:12 A.M.

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2012

  AG FLIGHT 126

  DEPART LOS ANGELES, CA (LAX) 7:20 A.M.

  ARRIVE MEXICO CITY, MEXICO (MEX) 12:05 P.M.

  Chel said, “Gutierrez must have bought Volcy this ticket.”

  Stanton pieced together the chronology. Volcy got on a plane from Mexico, sold Gutierrez the codex, then holed up in a Super 8, waiting for his flight back. Only that night the cops were called, and they took him to the hospital. He never got on AG 126 back to Mexico City.

  “What happened to the money Gutierrez paid him? The cops didn’t find any money in the hotel room.”

  Chel said, “He would have known better than to try to fly across the border with that much cash. Probably deposited it into an account of a bank here that has branches in Central America.”

  But then Stanton glanced back at Volcy’s itinerary, and suddenly something else struck him: AG flight 126. It was strangely familiar.

  Then he realized why. “The return flight crashed yesterday morning.”

  Chel looked up. “What are you talking about?”

  Stanton pulled out his smartphone and showed her proof of the impossible: Aero Globale 126 was the flight that ended up in the Pacific Ocean.

  “Is that some kind of coincidence?” Chel asked. “They have to be linked somehow.”

  “Volcy didn’t even get on that plane.”

  “Maybe not,” Stanton said. “But what if he still brought it down?”

  “How?”

  His mind raced as the logic came into focus. Human error was the suggested cause, they’d said again and again on the news.

  “Volcy got on the first flight,” Stanton said. “Pilots fly regular routes back and forth. What if the pilot who crashed also flew the Mexico City-to-L.A. plane Volcy was on? Volcy could have come in contact with him or her on that leg.”

  “You think Volcy gave the pilot whatever was contaminated?” Chel asked.

  Only now Stanton was already considering another possibility—a vastly more terrifying one. These were the kinds of connections seen in clusters of TB. Or Ebola. If two men Volcy came in casual contact with both became infected in two different places, there was only one epidemiological possibility.

  Stanton had a vertiginous feeling. “Volcy gets infected in Guatemala, flies from Mexico City, and crosses paths with the pilot. Maybe they shake hands on his way off the plane and the prion passes. Volcy meets up with Gutierrez. They make a deal, go their separate ways. A day later, the pilot gets sick. Then Gutierrez does too. A few days later, the pilot crashes the plane, then the next day Gutierrez crashes his car.”

  “But what got them sick?” Chel asked.

  “Volcy did,” Stanton said, darting for the door. “Volcy himself.”

  The boy was crying again, and now Stanton hurried for the stairs, yelling to Maria not to touch anything in her home.

  12.19.19.17.12

  DECEMBER 13, 2012

  TWELVE

  EVERYONE WHO CAME IN PROXIMITY WITH ANY OF THE VICTIMS had to be contacted and quarantined. The CDC needed to make an announcement alerting the public, encouraging everyone in Los Angeles to wear masks. Flights had to be grounded, public events shut down. Almost no measure would be too extreme, Stanton believed, if they could prove that this disease with a one hundred percent fatality rate had become infectious.

  Within minutes, the FAA had confirmed that Joseph Zarrow, the pilot who brought down the Aero Globale flight, flew the Mexico City-to-L.A. leg four days earlier. Human error suddenly had new meaning. But the connections were still circumstantial, and before any real action would be taken, before they would cause the public to panic, Stanton needed scientific evidence that VFI spread from person to person through casual contact.

  Shortly after five A.M., he stood gloved, gowned, and masked, working with his researchers beneath a protective hood in the lab. Stanton had woken his entire Prion Center team and summoned them in the middle of the night. He had just finished preparing the solution that he hoped would react with the prion, wherever it was hiding.

  There were only a few ways an infectious agent could spread between humans via casual contact. Stanton suspected the vector was a fluid from the nose or mouth. He had to discover if it was transmitted by saliva, nasal mucus, or sputum from the lungs—and how VFI migrated from the brain into one of these organs.

  With the test solution ready to go, he pipetted drops of secretion samples onto glass slides and added the reactant. Then, beginning with samples of Volcy’s and Gutierrez’s saliva, Stanton searched. He examined every slide, shifting them across left to right, up one half field of view, and finally right to left.

  “Negative,” he told Davies.

  They repeated the process with sputum. Coughed up from the throat and lungs, sputum transmitted a variety of illnesses, including life-threatening fungi like tuberculosis. But just like the saliva, the samples were completely negative.

  “Like a common cold, then,” Davies said.

  But as Stanton triple-checked every one of the slides he’d prepared from the nasal secretions, his anxiety grew. When he got to the last slide, he closed his eyes, confused. Like the others, the nasal secretions were all clear.

  “How the hell is it spreading?” Davies said.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Jiao Chen said. “Our casual contact theory can’t be wrong.”

  Stanton stood. “Neither can the slides.”

  If they couldn’t prove how the prion spread, he wouldn’t be able to convince Atlanta that serious action must be taken to contain it. Was there a flaw in his logic connecting the men? If the prion was spreading through casual contact, it had to pass through a secretion. But the lab findings were unequivocal: None of the three they tested contained the protein.

  The phone rang.

  “It’s Cavanagh,” said Davies. “What do I tell her?”

  The lab was tense as Stanton’s team of researchers waited for him to respond. They all wore masks over the lower half of their faces, but their eyes conveyed a mix of anxiety and exhaustion. They’d been working on little sleep since the day Volcy was diagnosed.

  Jiao Chen removed her glasses and started to rub her eyes. “Maybe we’re doing something wrong with the preparations,” she said.

  Besides Stanton, Jiao had slept the least of everyone here. And as she rubbed her eyes with her fingertips, something gnawed at him. Exhaustion subsumed his postdoc’s face as she slid her palms down her cheeks.

  Stanton grabbed the phone. “Emily, it’s in the eyes.”

  DISEASES THAT SPREAD through the eyes were so rare that even surgeons sometimes didn’t wear goggles when they operated. But when Stanton and his team sampled the lacrimal fluid—the fluid coating Volcy’s and Gutierrez’s eyes—they found prion concentrated almost as densely there as it was in the brain.

  Contagion began when people with VFI touched their eyes. The prion got on their hands, then they shook someone else’s hand or touched a nearby surface. Humans naturally touched their faces more than a hundred times a day, and insomnia was sure to make things even worse: The more tired victims became, the more they yawned and rubbed their eyes. With victims awake around the clock, their eyes were almost never closed, and the disease had eight extra hours a day to spread. In the same way that common colds caused runny noses and then spread through mucus, and malaria caused drowsiness so more mosquitoes could feed on sleeping victims, VFI had built itself the perfect vector.

  The CDC called
everyone who could’ve come in contact with Volcy, Gutierrez, or Zarrow, and the results were harrowing. A stewardess, two copilots, and two passengers associated with Aero Globale, plus the proprietor of the Super 8 and three guests, were the first of the second wave.

  By midday, they were using the word: epidemic.

  The worst news came out of Presbyterian Hospital. Six nurses, two ER docs, and three orderlies had all been suffering from insomnia for the last two nights. A test for detecting prion in sheep’s blood, developed years before, turned out to be effective as a rough indicator for VFI before the onset of symptoms. Already they were getting multiple positive results.

  Stanton was angry at himself for how long it’d taken him to realize the prion was infectious, and fearful that he might soon be counted among the victims as well. His own test results were pending, and he hadn’t had an opportunity to even try to sleep. He had permission to continue working until he knew for sure, as long as he wore a biohazard suit at all times.

  Throngs of desperate people stood at the ER entrance when he returned to Presbyterian, fighting through the heat, discomfort, and bulkiness of his pressurized yellow suit. More than a hundred possible victims had already been identified by symptoms, and the panic Cavanagh had predicted was unleashed after the CDC’s press conference. In normal times, one in three adults in America had insomnia. Thousands of panicked Angelenos were now flooding every hospital in the city, convinced they were sick.

  “Sorry for the wait,” a CDC officer was telling eighty primary contacts in the emergency room. “The doctors are working as fast as they can, and you will all have your blood tests completed soon. In the meantime, please keep your eye shields and masks fastened, and be careful not to touch your eyes or your faces.”

  Stanton made his way through the ER, trying not to obsess over the idea that he, Thane, and Chel Manu had all been exposed more directly to the disease than anyone waiting here.