12.21: A Novel

by Dustin Thomason

  The torch lit, he pressed on. Feeling the odds against him growing, he forced his way deeper into the forest, where the trees thickened, their trunks like airliner fuselages stuck in the ground. In the darkness, Stanton couldn’t begin to estimate their height. It was hard to even stay on a straight path, and he found himself going in circles, seeing the same landmarks again and again.

  When he approached the reverse side of the king’s entombment pyramid, frustration turned to despair.

  He had no idea how he’d ended up where he started. Then another torch failed, and everything went black again. Stanton pawed the ground for branches. His glove touched something sharp and, lighting another match, he looked to see what it was. On the jungle floor, no bigger than the end of his thumb, was a brown lump covered with tiny spines.

  A beechnut.

  He held the nut high in the air, as if to reverse its path to the ground. Here, so close to the king’s tomb, was the smooth-barked tree it had fallen from. Its trunk rose higher than Stanton’s match could throw light.

  And, to his astonishment, it wasn’t the only one.

  A dozen stood in a line. Their branches extended toward the face of the pyramid as if they were reaching out to touch it.

  CHEL FLOATED IN and out of the darkness, bobbing like a bird in a brisk wind at the top of the sky. In those moments when she could still see the light, her tongue felt like sandpaper, and the heat made her whole body painful. The disease crawled like a spider through her thoughts. But in those moments when the light disappeared and the darkness came, she sank gratefully into an ocean of memories.

  The ancient father of her village—Paktul, spirit founder of Kiaqix—lay beside her here, and whatever came next, she felt safe in his presence. If she had to follow him, if she had to join Rolando and her father, then perhaps she would see that place the ancestors always talked about. The place of the gods.

  WHEN HE STEPPED BACK into the tomb, Stanton saw that Chel was in the same spot he had left her, slumped against the wall with a glazed look in her eyes. Then he saw she’d ripped off her biohelmet. The heat must have been driving her crazy, and now she was breathing in air that would almost certainly make things worse. Stanton considered trying to get her back in the suit, but he knew the damage had been done.

  Her only hope lay elsewhere.

  Using what remained of the flashlight’s power, he began to prepare the injection by crushing leaves, bark, wood, and fruit into tiny particles and combining them with a suspension of saline and dissolving enzymes. Finally he drew a syringe of the fluid and pushed the needle into a vein in Chel’s arm. She barely stirred at the prick.

  “You’re going to come out of this,” he told her. “Stay with me.”

  He glanced down at his watch, establishing a baseline against which to time the first signs of reaction. It was 11:15 P.M.

  THERE WAS ONLY one way for Stanton to know if the drug had crossed the brain–blood barrier: a spinal tap that analyzed Chel’s cerebrospinal fluid. If beech was now in that fluid, it had gone from the heart to the brain and crossed over the barrier into the fluid that surrounded it.

  After twenty minutes, he inserted a needle into the space between Chel’s vertebrae, drawing the fluid into another syringe. Stanton had known men to scream during spinal taps. Chel, in her condition, barely made a sound.

  Stanton dropped spinal fluid onto six slides and waited for them to fix. Then he closed his eyes and whispered a single word into the darkness. “Please.”

  Placing the first slide under the microscope, Stanton considered all sides of it. Then he scanned the next slide, and the third.

  After studying the sixth, he leaned back in despair.

  There were no beech molecules on any of the slides. This species, like every other one Stanton had ever tried, like all the ones they’d used to make pentosan, could not pass the barrier into the brain.

  A wave of hopelessness crested inside him. He might have quit right then and just wallowed in the darkness if he hadn’t heard Chel making noises on the other side of the tomb.

  He ran to her. Her legs were kicking wildly.

  She was having a seizure.

  Not only had the drug failed; the conditions in the tomb—the heat, the concentration of prion—had accelerated the disease’s progress. If her fever climbed any higher, it could kill her. “Stay with me,” he whispered to her. “Stay with me.”

  Stanton felt around for the extra shirt in the supply bag, ripped it into rags, and soaked them in the dregs of their water bottles. But before he could even apply the compresses, he felt Chel’s forehead getting cooler. He knew that her body was giving up. He brushed his fingers along the skin of her neck, just under her jaw, and found a thready pulse.

  Her seizure slowly subsided, and, for the first time in a long time, Stanton prayed. To what, he didn’t know. But the god he’d worshipped his entire adult life—science—had failed him. Soon he’d be walking out of this jungle, having failed the thousands, and eventually millions, who would die from VFI. So he prayed for them. He prayed for Davies, Cavanagh, and the rest of CDC. He prayed for Nina. But mostly he prayed for Chel, whose life was no longer in his hands. If she died—when she died—all he would have left would be the knowledge that he hadn’t done enough.

  Stanton glanced at his watch. 11:46 p.m.

  Across the chamber, the ancient skulls seemed to taunt him with the secret they were keeping. Stanton wouldn’t let Chel spend eternity in a staring contest with them. He would take her out of here. He would—

  It was then that he had the horrible realization that he would have to bury Chel in the jungle. He thought back to something she’d said the night before, when they were slumped against another wall, on the outskirts of Kiaqix.

  When a soul is taken, it needs the incense smoke in order to pass from the middleworld to the underworld. Everyone here is stuck between worlds.

  How would he burn incense for her? What could he use?

  Then it occurred to Stanton that Paktul had written about incense too.

  When I set the macaw down and kissed the wretched limestone, the aroma had changed, and I could no longer taste it on the back of my tongue as I once had.

  What if the smell and taste of the incense in the air changed for a reason? Paktul knew the king’s usual incense combination. If the taste was gone from the back of his tongue, maybe it was because it was no longer bitter …

  Stanton stood up and scooped Chel into his arms.

  He had to get her outside.

  Carrying her from the king’s chamber, he bore her weight back down the hallway, then hoisted her over his shoulder and began up the first set of stairs. As difficult as it had been to get down the stairs alone, they seemed even steeper and narrower than before.

  But minutes later they reached the top and tasted the night air. There was a small clearing about ten feet from the north face of the pyramid, with enough room to make a small fire—most likely where Volcy and his partner had pitched their tent.

  Stanton laid Chel down in a small crook between tree roots and sprinted to the reverse side of the pyramid. He frantically gathered more beech, circled back around, and dumped the branches in a pile in front of Chel. A minute later he was lighting the kindling, and soon flames danced up into the sky. The acrid smell of the smoke filled the air.

  Stanton sat close to the fire with Chel’s head in his lap. He placed his hands on her head and opened her eyelids as wide as he could. He forced his own eyes open too, even as the smoke made them begin to tear. If VFI got into the brain through the retina, then maybe the treatment for it had to as well.

  For five silent minutes, as the flames grew, Stanton held Chel in the jungle night, looking for a sign. Any sign at all. He brushed the hair from her face to check her pulse. He didn’t even notice his wristwatch—he was concentrating on Chel’s heartbeat—but the second hand clicked off the last two ticks of the fourth world.

  It was midnight.

  12/21.

>   EPILOGUE

  13.0.0.9.3

  FOR MILLIONS AROUND THE WORLD, IT WAS THE END OF LIFE AS they knew it. As long as anyone alive could remember, the arrow of progress had pointed in the direction of technological innovation, urbanization, and connectivity. In the years leading up to 2012—for the first time in human history—the majority of humans lived in cities, and it had been projected that by 2050 that proportion would rise to more than two-thirds.

  The end of the Long Count cycle changed all that. Some of the largest metropolises in the world had been overrun by Thane’s disease, and there was no way to know if they would ever be completely safe again. Because there was still nothing that could destroy the protein, new contaminated places had to be quarantined every day as they were discovered. In malls, restaurants, schools, offices, and public transportation from America to Asia, the hazmat vehicles and cleanup crews became something to live with—or escape from.

  Within weeks, this contamination prompted a mass exodus from many of the world’s largest urban centers. Some economic data suggested that a quarter of the populations of New York, San Francisco, Cape Town, London, Atlanta, and Shanghai might leave within a three-year period. Transplants went to smaller cities, to the reaches of suburban sprawl, to the countryside, where self-sustaining agrarian communities popped up.

  L.A. was in a category by itself. Thane’s disease touched every Southland citizen. It was impossible for many to imagine staying, even if it were safe.

  The most famous doctor in the world hadn’t returned either. Along with the international team of scientists now under his command, Stanton was living in a tent that the Guatemalan Health Service had erected in the ruins at Kanuataba. The day after walking out of the jungle with the samples he’d taken in the tomb, and driving the jeep two hours to a working phone, Stanton returned with the Guatemalan Health Department. He hadn’t left the jungle since.

  From trees surrounding the king’s tomb, Stanton and his medical team had synthesized an infusion that could reverse Thane’s disease if taken within three days of infection. The ancient citizens of Kanuataba had overused beech to the verge of extinction. But when they abandoned the city, the trees had returned in full force.

  The question of why they were concentrated right around the tomb remained. Species sometimes evolved together, even those working in direct opposition to one another. Microbes got stronger in reaction to antibiotics. Over hundreds of generations, mice became better at eluding their predators, and snakes became better at hunting their prey. Some scientists argued that the prion and the trees had been co-evolving for centuries, making each other stronger and stronger through mutation, until Volcy opened the tomb. The term the broadcast journalists favored was an evolutionary arms race.

  The Believers, of course, called it fate.

  After successfully convincing the scientific community what VFI should really be called, Stanton had stopped trying to give any of the rest of what had happened a name.

  On a particularly grueling day in late June, he gave instructions in broken Spanish to his team of mostly Guatemalan doctors and headed for the residential tent. Rain soaked his clothing, and mud weighed down his boots as he trudged forward into the shadow of the twin temples and Jaguar Imix’s palace. Jungle living was hard, and he missed the ocean, but he was getting used to the heat and humidity, and drinking a cold beer at the end of a long workday in the ruins felt good.

  Stanton made his way into the living area of the tent, put on dry clothes, cracked a Cerveza Sol, pulled out his laptop, and logged on to the satellite Internet service. He quickly skimmed hundreds of emails. There was an update from Monster: Until the Freak Show was reopened, the menagerie of two-headed animals he and the Electric Lady had rounded up from all corners of the Walk were living with them in Stanton’s condo.

  Continuing to sift through emails, Stanton found the latest from Nina—a picture of Dogma on Plan A, somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. She too was inundated with interview requests, whenever she came to shore. She just laughed and said she had better things to do than lionize her former husband. She sent a picture every week from wherever she and the dog went.

  “Are you on the computer again? Haven’t you heard? Technology’s dead. Timewave Zero and all that.”

  Stanton turned toward the sound of the mellifluous English accent. Alan Davies was removing his safari jacket. He laid it carefully across a chair, treating the garment as if it were the one Stanley had worn when he found Livingston. His white shirt underneath was soaked with sweat, his hair frizzed. The Englishman hadn’t taken well to the humidity, something he reminded Stanton of daily.

  “Can’t believe you’re drinking that pathetic substitute for a beer,” Davies said, settling into a chair. “What I wouldn’t do for a pint of Adnams Broadside.”

  “London’s just a fifty-hour drive through the jungle and four planes away.”

  “You wouldn’t survive a day out here without me.”

  As Davies opened a bottle of wine and poured himself a glass, Stanton dashed off a quick response to Nina, then glanced at the wires and the news sites. Every day now—six months out—the same stories about the disease were recycled, with only tiny details changed, and there was rarely anything of interest. But when he got to the Los Angeles Times website, something stopped him cold. “Holy shit.”

  “What?” Davies said.

  Stanton hit PRINT on the computer screen, stood up, and grabbed the article off the tray. “Did you see this?”

  Davies scanned it. “Does she know?”

  THE GUATEMALANS HAD bulldozed a path back to the major roads so they could ship supplies in and out by truck. In a health department Land Rover, Stanton reached the entrance, which was manned by the security detail now watching the entire perimeter of Kanuataba. Once they let him by, he found himself in the middle of the circus that the surrounding area had become.

  Hundreds of people were camped out in tents, trucks, and motor homes just beyond the border. Early on they’d been able to keep the location of Kanuataba a secret, but now dozens of news trucks were parked along the side of the road, and helicopters circled constantly, taking aerial shots of the city and broadcasting them all over the world. It wasn’t only journalists who’d come down here; the area had become a kind of religious outpost in the post-2012 age. Even though the Believers couldn’t get inside the ruins, Kanuataba was slowly becoming their Mecca.

  Stanton passed the sea of tents where men, women, and children of all colors and ages and nationalities now lived, bound by their strange, heterogeneous faith. That the world hadn’t been completely destroyed hadn’t hurt their cause at all.

  Indeed, the events leading up to 12/21 and the discovery of the cure here had ignited a fervor for all things Maya. More than a third of people in the Americas said they believed that a prion outbreak happening at the time of the calendar turn wasn’t coincidence. In L.A., thousands attended Fraternidad meetings, and vegetarianism, Ludditism, and “spiritual Mayanism” gathered more and more followers, especially in the communities to which city-dwellers had fled. They argued that prions—from VFI to mad cow—were the ultimate result of manipulating life in ways that nature never intended.

  Two hours later, Stanton made it to Kiaqix. So much of the village had been destroyed, and, along with its connection to the outbreak and patient zero, that meant very few gawkers were inclined to make the trek. A dedicated group of NGOs and villagers who’d escaped the plague were rebuilding here, with the help of foreign donations flowing in from around the world. But, as with everything in the jungle, it was a slow and painstaking process.

  Like the hospitals in Los Angeles, the old medical clinic had been leveled, by a team sent from the States, and a new temporary one constructed in its place. Stanton parked the Land Rover and headed inside, waving at now familiar faces. Some were members of Fraternidad who’d volunteered to come down and help rebuild. In all there were almost four hundred people living in the village now, and everyone had take
n on a role in the reconstruction.

  In the pediatric area in back of the clinic, Stanton found Initia tending to the babies orphaned by the outbreak. Most were in hammocks, and a few others were in tiny cribs constructed out of small pieces of wood and thatch.

  “Jasmächá, Initia,” Stanton said.

  “Hello, Gabe,” she replied.

  Stanton quickly checked the babies’ eyes. Even the youngest were now six months, which meant their optic nerves would be fully developed soon, and he was vigilantly watching them for any signs of Thane’s disease.

  “Welcome back, Doctor.”

  Stanton turned. Ha’ana Manu stood in the entryway, carrying the eight-month-old they had named Rolando, who was screaming in her arms.

  “Are you ever going to call me Gabe?”

  “You went to medical school for four years to be called Gabe?”

  CHEL CROUCHED BENEATH the A-frame of a new structure in the eastern housing group with four other Fraternidad members, preparing to lift another tree trunk upright. Before she could start counting, she heard a whimper.

  “Hold on,” she told them. She hurried over to the small bassinet hidden in the shade beneath a nearby cedar tree. Volcy’s daughter, Sama, now almost seven months, lay inside with her eyes wide open and alert.

  “Chel, look what I found.”

  She turned back to see her mother standing with Gabe.

  For weeks, Ha’ana had continued to deny she’d written the prison letters or that she’d ever been a revolutionary. Even now she clung to the story that she and Chel’s father had written the letters together. Still, Chel considered it a victory when she’d convinced Ha’ana to come down to Kiaqix with her for the first time in more than thirty years. Ha’ana claimed she had every intention of returning to America soon and complained about not having TV or a proper stove. But Chel knew her mother would stay as long as she did.