12.21: A Novel

by Dustin Thomason

  She took a moment, then said, “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you believe in the Maya gods? The actual gods?”

  “You don’t have to believe in the pantheon to see the wisdom of the design the ancients saw in the universe. Maybe it’s enough to know there’s a force that connects us all.”

  Chel took a breath. “Yeah, maybe. Or maybe not. By the way, I wanted to say thank you for staying here with me and for all your help.”

  “You’re very welcome, Chel.”

  Victor watched her go back toward her office. She was the same young woman who’d shown up at his office door on the first day of her graduate program, telling him she’d read all of his work. Who years later gave him a place to go, when no one else would.

  And as she disappeared from his sight, he fought back tears.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  IT HAD BEEN NEARLY SIX HOURS SINCE DAVIES HAD DROPPED THANE outside the hospital, and Stanton was anxious. He stared out the window, watching the sun creep over the horizon, waiting for his phone to break the silence. For anything to break it. The Venice boardwalk was also too quiet for his taste. He wanted to hear one of the vendors yelling at tourists not to take pictures of his “art,” or the bearded guitarist, the Walk’s honorary mayor, playing as he roller-skated back and forth. Or hear Monster knocking on his door.

  “I’d suggest a nip.”

  Davies held a lowball glass of Jack Daniel’s in Stanton’s direction, but Stanton waved him off. He could use something, though. Why hadn’t Thane called? The injections should be done. He’d tried her cell but had been unable to get through. Cell service in L.A., always spotty, was basically nonexistent now. Still, Thane should’ve found a landline.

  Finally his phone rang. A local number he didn’t know. “Michaela?”

  “It’s Emily.”

  Cavanagh. Shit. “What’s up?” he asked, trying not to raise suspicion.

  “You need to meet me at the command center immediately, Gabe.”

  “I’ve got some denaturing experiments running here,” he lied, glancing over at Davies. “I could get over there in a few hours.”

  “The director’s here in L.A., and he wants to talk to you,” Cavanagh said. “I don’t care what you’re doing. You need to come now.”

  CDC DIRECTOR ADAM KANUTH had been in Washington and Atlanta since the outbreak began, and his absence in L.A. had been noted by nearly everyone, including the press. Advocates said he’d been deftly administrating cases popping up around the country and now the world. Detractors said he’d been avoiding L.A. because he didn’t want to risk infection.

  Ash rained down on Stanton as he stepped out of the car at the CDC’s command center. Wildfire had erupted in the hills above the HOLLYWOOD sign and consumed a hundred acres, hanging smoke clouds from downtown to the ocean. Stanton did his best to gather himself before going in. He had never liked the CDC director. Kanuth had come from the Big Pharma world, and he talked about science as if it were economics—supply following demand. Rare diseases got rare grants. Now, Kanuth would want to talk exclusively about containment. He’d want to talk about how quarantines in other cities should be managed. And Stanton would have to do it with still no word from Thane.

  Inside the old post office, CDC employees worked behind bulletproof-glass windows that once protected against unhinged postal workers. Aging posters advertising Ronald Reagan Forever stamps still hung on the walls. A J-1 officer led Stanton toward the postmaster’s office.

  Cavanagh sat in a chair in front of the desk. Stanton noticed that she wouldn’t look him in the eye. Behind the desk sat Kanuth, a barrel-chested man in his mid-fifties with thinning silver hair and a beard.

  “Mr. Director. Welcome to Los Angeles.”

  There was no chair for Stanton to sit in. Kanuth nodded perfunctorily. “We have a problem, Gabe.”

  “Okay.”

  “Did you send a resident from Presbyterian Hospital in to give injections of murine-based antibodies to a group of patients? Despite our orders not to?”

  Stanton froze. “Excuse me?”

  Cavanagh stood. “We found two dozen syringes, and they were full of murine-based antibody solutions.”

  Had they caught Thane trying to give the injections?

  “Where is Dr. Thane now?” Stanton asked carefully.

  Kanuth looked at Cavanagh. “She was found at the bottom of a stairwell with her neck broken. As far as we can tell, she died on impact.”

  Stanton was in shock. “She fell down the stairs?”

  Cavanagh stared him down. “She was killed by a patient.”

  “Unless you want to tell me that she was carrying on a secret antibody trial on her own,” said Kanuth, “I assume that you are responsible for this.”

  Stanton closed his eyes and saw Thane’s face as he arrived at Presbyterian for the first time, after she’d dragged him in to see a patient he might well have ignored. The look on her face when she saw the lab they’d built inside the condo; her quick willingness to help, with little concern for her own career. He heard the hope in her voice when she left to give the injections to her colleagues.

  “I enlisted her to give the antibodies,” he whispered finally.

  “You wanted permission to test them on a sample group,” Cavanagh said. “We’d already brought it to the FDA chief, and we were less than a day away from clearance. We could’ve done it under controlled conditions. Now a woman is dead because you decided to ignore direct orders.”

  Kanuth said, “Not only that, but when people out there learn what happened—and they will—they’ll say we’re losing internal control. We have a whole fucking city looking for any reason to burst, and you’ve given them another one.”

  “Turn in your ID, and don’t try to go back to the Prion Center or to any other CDC facility,” Cavanagh said. She sounded disgusted.

  “You’re fired, Dr. Stanton,” said Kanuth.

  TWENTY-SIX

  CHEL SAT BENEATH THE APPLE TREES ON THE GETTY’S SOUTH lawn, smoking and gazing down on the maze of azalea in the courtyard below. She needed a moment to rest, to distract herself, to recharge.

  “Chel,” someone called from a distance.

  Through the fog she made out Rolando standing at the top of the stairs leading to the central plaza. Behind him was Stanton. Surprised, Chel wondered why he had come. Had the satellites found something? Whatever brought him here, she was pleased to see him.

  Rolando waved and peeled off, leaving them alone.

  “What’s happening?” Chel asked Stanton at the bottom of the stairs. She immediately noticed how exhausted he looked. It was the first time they’d been physically together since the night she’d come clean and they’d visited the Gutierrez house. Whatever she’d been through the past few days didn’t compare to what was written on his face.

  They moved to one of the chessboard-covered tables on the south-pavilion landing. Stanton told her everything that had led up to Thane’s death, then what had happened after.

  “I should never have let her take that risk,” he said.

  “You were trying to help. If you could get the antibodies to work—”

  “The antibodies are useless.” His voice had a bitter edge to it. “The tests failed, and even if they worked, they’d be considered too risky. She died for nothing.”

  Chel understood only too well what it felt like to be cut off from everything you knew. But she’d had a reprieve—thanks to him. She didn’t know how to give him the second chance he’d given her. So she just took his hand.

  They sat in silence for nearly a minute before she broached the other subject on her mind. “So I guess … nothing on the satellites?”

  “I’m not exactly in the loop anymore,” Stanton said. “I thought maybe you would have heard something from CDC. But I guess not. What’s happening on your end?”

  “We’re close to deciphering the end of the codex. There could still be some kind of a locator
in the final sections, though we’re facing a few significant challenges.”

  “Let me help.”

  “With what?”

  “With your work.”

  “Do you have a PhD in linguistics I don’t know about?”

  “I’m serious,” Stanton said. “Our processes aren’t so different. Diagnose the problem, look for comparables, and then search for solutions from there. Besides, maybe an outside perspective could be useful.”

  Chel studied him. How odd it was that three days after he had held her future in his hands, his career had suffered a similar fate, and now he’d come to her for help. What did she really know about this guy, anyway? Gabe Stanton was clearly whip smart, extremely hardworking, a little too fierce sometimes. Chel didn’t know much else. They hadn’t exactly had the chance to unwind over a glass of wine. Maybe if she looked closer, she wouldn’t like what she saw.

  Then again, he’d been the one to let in the crack of daylight keeping her life’s work alive—at a moment when she’d given him every reason not to. So if Stanton wanted to help, Chel wasn’t going to stop him now. She’d just have to make sure that the CDC didn’t find out when they eventually reached out to her again.

  “Okay, fresh eyes, then.” She leaned in closer to him. “The scribe’s referring to a collapse of his city. Or at least to his fear of its collapse. There are harbingers in the central plaza, in the palace, everywhere. But there’s nothing worse to him than the worship of this new god, Akabalam. It’s a god we’ve never seen before, a god of praying mantises. As if this god has just been created at this particular historical moment.”

  “Was it unusual for the Maya to create … new gods?” Stanton asked.

  “There are dozens in the pantheon. And new gods were invented all the time. When Paktul first hears of this one, he wants to learn about him and to worship him. But in this final part of the manuscript, it’s as if he has found a reason to be mortally afraid of him.”

  “What do you mean, mortally afraid?”

  “He uses all the superlatives of the Mayan language to describe his fear—including words that suggest he’s more afraid of this new god than of dying. One thing we’ve been able to translate says: This was something much more terrifying, which no one ever had to teach me to fear.”

  Stanton walked to the railing overlooking the Getty’s sycamore-lined stream, processing. “So maybe we should be looking for a deeply ingrained fear.” He turned back from the railing. “Think about mice.”

  “Mice?”

  “One of a mouse’s most powerful fears is its fear of snakes. But no one had to teach mice to fear snakes. It’s coded into their DNA. We can actually make that fear disappear by altering their genetic structure.”

  Chel pictured Stanton’s years spent in a lab, years spent not so differently from hers. He thought in ways foreign to her, using a vocabulary that was mostly unfamiliar. Yet his constant return to the underlying scientific processes at work was similar to the way she saw language and history.

  Stanton continued, “So the question we have to ask is: What could your scribe’s most powerful fear be?”

  “Fear of his city collapsing forever?”

  “It doesn’t sound like that’s news to him.”

  “Well, I don’t think he’s talking about snakes.”

  “No, I mean, what fears are so powerful for him that they could create this kind of response? It’s got to be something more … primal. Something innate.”

  “You mean like fear of incest,” Chel said.

  “Exactly. Could that be it?”

  “Incest was prohibited,” she told him. “And it wouldn’t make any sense anyway. What would incest have to do with praying mantises?”

  Yet as soon as she said the words, another possibility hit her—an indictment of her people that she’d dismissed her entire career.

  From the beginning, Chel had wanted the codex to prove that her people hadn’t brought the collapse on themselves.

  But what if they had?

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  My fast has lasted forty turns of the sun, sustained only by cornmeal drink and water. No rain has fallen on our milpas or in our forests, and the water stores have receded. Each corner of the city has begun to hoard water and maize and manioc, and it is rumored that men drink their own urine to quench their thirst.

  There are whispers that some have already begun to plan their journey north in search of tillable fields, though Jaguar Imix has decreed that to abandon Kanuataba will be punishable by death or worse. There have been eighteen deaths in the poorest corners of Kanuataba in the last twenty suns, many of them children, starved because they are given lowest priority in the distribution of rations.

  Our city was once a center for the best goods within ten days’ walk. But jade adornments are useless, and artisans no longer flourish. Mother-of-pearl ear flares and varicolored feather mantles have been replaced by tortillas and lime as the greatest desires of the noble women. A mother who cannot feed her children thinks little of gold medallions, no matter how holy.

  At yesterday’s zenith I was called to the palace.

  I left Auxila’s daughters in the cave at the noon sun, knowing my spirit animal would watch over them in my absence. Jaguar Imix, his holiness, newly returned from his distant star war, had called me to the palace to reveal to me the meaning of the god Akabalam, so that I might continue to educate the true prince.

  When I came within a few hundred paces of the city center, less than a thousand paces from the king’s newly ordained burial temple, I could not believe what I saw. Thick black smoke rose above the tops of the towers of the minor temple, our sacred catacomb. And as I turned the corner, I saw the largest gathering of the men and women of Kanuataba I had seen in six hundred suns.

  I knew a large gathering was called for this day, but I could not have imagined its size and splendor. There are no words to describe the feeling I had upon seeing Kanuataba alive again then, as it was in the days of my youth, when my father would walk me through the merchant causeways atop his mighty shoulders. There were whispers among the people gathered that Jaguar Imix had brought a miracle, that he would feed the masses with this mighty feast, that there would be enough to sustain us until the harvest.

  I watched men carry large offerings of spice and wood and jade toward the south stairs to the palace. Others carried salt and allspice and cilantro, combined with burn-dried chilis to make the seasoning for turkey and deer meat. Even my stomach growled with hunger. There are no deer or turkey or agouti within two days’ walk, of that I was certain. Had Jaguar Imix and his mighty army plundered stores of meat during their star war?

  The royal dwarf approached me. I will recount his words to reveal what machinations he was capable of. He spoke:

  —If people knew you as I do, scribe, knew that you would never touch those girls, you would lose those concubines you’ve taken. Your life could be cut short by ten thousand suns and with it the lives of those girls. So I suggest you never displease me again.—

  Never have I felt a greater urge to drain the blood from a man’s body and rip his heart out. I longed for some commotion in the causeways, loud enough that I might muffle Jacomo’s screams. I would tear him into pieces and bury them in unmarked graves.

  Before I could raise my hand, a boisterous sound filled the plaza. A line of blue-painted captives, fifteen in number, were dragged into the causeways. Each captive was tied together to a long pole, lashed by both hands and neck to the man in front of him. Several men were stumbling. Many appeared half dead already.

  Tattoos on his torso proved one of the prisoners was of high standing, and I have never seen a noble so afraid of sacrifice. He screamed and writhed as the captors of Kanuataba ushered him along, dragging his feet across the dirt, exciting dust everywhere. From the look on the captors’ faces, I knew that even they had never seen anything like it. Such indignity! Only a sickness of the mind could have damaged this nobleman’s soul so that he would not accept
his fate!

  I went into the palace, and navigated past the housekeepers, tailors, and concubines. The sweat house is on the top floor, a domed room in the tower, a most holy place for divination and communication with the overworld. As with the secret meals and other rituals, it is most often restricted to the king’s retinue.

  When I arrived in the sweat bath, I found the king alone, an event I cannot remember in a thousand suns. His face was gaunt and looked less holy than I had ever before seen. There was not even a slave or lower-rank wife in the room, ready to satisfy his urges.

  The king spoke:

  —I have brought you here to see the creation of the great feast, Paktul, so that you may record it in the great books for all posterity.—

  I bent down on both knees beside the hot coals, and the heat was unbearable. But to be inside the sweat house was considered a great honor, and I would show no sign of suffering. I spoke:

  —Highness, we must record the great feast, yes, but I would ask you again to explain how the gods have blessed us with this feast but have shown us no mercy elsewhere. So that I may record it in the great books with proper care, may I understand why we feast today, when all other days there is famine?—

  The king’s jaw clenched. His crossed eyes looked beyond me, as if he was trying to control his anger. His grasp on the royal scepter was rigid. When I finished, he did not rise or bellow; he did not call for the guards to take me away. He only looked down at my hand and pointed at my ring, symbol of the great monkey scribes who came before me. And he spoke again:

  —This ring you wear, the monkey-scribe ring, symbol of your station, how do you think it compares to the crown of the gods I wear upon my head? There is nothing I desire more than to be able to share this burden with my people and to explain the compromises I make to ensure the gods are at peace. This burden is not one that can be learned through books but only by those who came before me, my fathers, who once ruled over our terraced city. It is hardly a burden one who wears the monkey-scribe ring can fathom.—