Dead City

by Sean Platt

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  MECHANISMS OF DISEASE

  “WE NEED ALICE FRANK,” AUGUST said.

  Ian watched him, unable to believe his ears. Hemisphere caused the plague? It was the stuff of paranoid, deep-web theory. Not the sort of thing that happened to loyal, law-abiding employees like Ian Keys.

  Bobby cleared his throat. “Go back, August.”

  But August was pacing. As uncomfortable as Ian had felt moments ago, worrying about Bridget and Ana, August now looked twice as terrible.

  “We need Alice. We need to break this open, and now. Hemisphere is having their family picnic in the park tomorrow.”

  Ian watched August, wondering if the goateed scientist had ever been a part of one of the events. They were more like free concerts than picnics, but at the start, supposedly, the events had been small and intimate as their name implied. A time to get together with the community. A time to give back. A time to quietly lobby for federal funding, like an in-public performance review in front of the world’s eyes … and Panacea’s.

  “Maybe you should explain,” Bobby said, “before slandering the world’s richest company.”

  August settled with effort, perching half-atop one of the low upholstered chairs.

  “You know Hemisphere’s tagline,” he said.

  “‘Upgrading nature,’” Ian recited. He’d been reminded of that one rather recently, and under decidedly intimidating circumstances that made this all just a bit easier to believe.

  August nodded. “And you know the company began life in longevity research. That was my day. Archibald lost his parents young, and it gave him a drive that was close to an obsession. But there’s an expression: ‘Obsession is what lazy people call dedication.’ And so that’s how I always saw that mission: as one we were dedicated to, come hell or high water. It’s something I’m still preoccupied with today.” He tipped a look at Bobby, who Ian surmised must be one of his independent life-extension clients, in August’s post-Hemisphere days.

  “Most of what I do today, I learned as Archibald’s protégé. The man is brilliant, and driven. He has a passion for discovery I’ve never seen matched in anyone else. But the longer I worked with him, the more I wondered what mattered most: reaching the destination, or building a stable foundation. But being stable isn’t exciting, see. So we became yin and yang: he was yin; I was yang. He pushed every boundary in the lab — it was my job to rein him back in. You probably know that Hemisphere’s stem cell operations started in Singapore, for instance. And I can promise you, now that my NDA is pretty much moot, that what his team learned there, he brought back stateside, legal or not.”

  Holly shifted on the opposite couch. She was wearing jeans and a tee, beautiful but not remotely Hollywood. But of course, her speech and manner (so long as she stayed sitting) didn’t seem necrotic at all, either.

  “The BioFuse drug you mentioned, Ian. The one your anonymous source pointed both you and Alice toward. It was a gene therapy treatment for Alzheimer’s disease — a neutered virus that produced a protein in the brain, meant to clear out the neural plaques thought to cause Alzheimer’s symptoms. We wanted to force the brain to adapt and create new pathways in the damaged brain — a way of detouring around the damage caused by Alzheimer’s. And it worked fairly well. Not perfectly, but well. I was there during the initial development and trials. For a while, it looked like Hemisphere was on its way to eradicating one of the world’s most devastating diseases. Becoming the heroes then that they are to most people today.”

  “But you left,” Ian said.

  August nodded. “In the middle of the BioFuse heyday.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was a failure. We saw the writing on the wall early, before the public, and it became apparent we’d need to pull the drug and start over. Our first trials were promising, but then nature — which tends to resist being upgraded, except by its own hand — adapted. The plaque-clearing protein worked okay, but only about half the time did patients’ brains know what to do once the way was clear. The process was slow, and a myriad of other problems plagued the frustrated scientist.”

  August sighed and went on.

  “The FDA was preparing to pull our approval. Hemisphere was headed for the shitter, and lawsuits, from the patients who weren’t healed and somehow felt damaged by our treatments, were a given. Archibald was livid. But not just livid — indignant. He said a lot of things like, ‘How dare they?’ He tore up a lab while I watched. He’d worked too hard and had only tried to do what was best for the people Hemisphere wanted to help. And now those people were going to turn on him and ruin his legacy? Destroy the company he’d started in his parents’ memory, to make humanity’s lives better and longer?” August shook his head. “It made him so angry. Reckless.”

  “So you jumped off the sinking ship,” Bobby said. Ian wasn’t sure if it was a judgment or not.

  “It wasn’t the failure that bothered me. We had other lines. We had venture capital and a few angel investors ready to dig us out. To me, failure has always been a stop along the road to success — sometimes, many stops. But Archibald took things personally. He started to talk about ways to save the situation. Options we’d discussed and dismissed. Things like de-neutering the gene therapy virus so it would be self-replicating. Things like injecting into the body as well as the spinal column, finding ways to work around the blood-brain barrier — which keeps stuff from the body from entering the brain and vice-versa — so he could use stem cells from a person’s bone marrow. Tactics we’d considered and rejected because they kept things in the body alive a bit too well.”

  “How can something be kept alive too well?” Holly asked. “More life is good, right?”

  “Cancer,” Ian heard himself saying. “Cancer is just a cell that doesn’t know to die.”

  August nodded. “I’ll have to investigate more to be sure, but once Ian told me what to look for, I found it easily enough and feel confident about what I’m seeing.”

  “Which is?” Bobby asked.

  “I think that Archibald continued BioFuse trials after I left but did so without me being a wet rag on his best ideas. But it still didn’t work, and somewhere along the line he must have realized he could go a different direction with those same game pieces. A direction that would save the company by making something that everyone, everywhere, would want to buy.”

  He looked at Ian, Holly, and Bobby.

  “Sherman Pope is the success BioFuse wasn’t. A few small tweaks to the therapy virus, and it looks to me like suddenly it was replicating everywhere, in and outside of the brain. Not just breaking up plaques that caused Alzheimer’s, but breaking up everything, everywhere — and then replacing them with madly proliferating stem cell counterparts.”

  Holly looked like she wanted to grab her own head, her own arms and legs. August was describing a parasite, and Holly was filled with it.

  “The computer models I’ve run suggest that Necrophage — which contains an artificial cell receptor as one of its components — bonds with the Sherman Pope virus about as well as it does with BioFuse. No wonder it was developed so fast. Hemisphere was creating a biological match to its own creation.”

  Ian leaned forward, feeling uneasy. He put his head in his hands, the weight of the modern world somehow settling unfairly atop his shoulders.”

  “Archibald failed to create a brain that could heal itself,” August’s voice said from above, “but he succeeded in creating a body that healed fast enough, despite the decay, that it couldn’t die.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  KNOCK KNOCK

  BRIDGET TOOK THE STAIRS TO her ground floor as quickly as a girl rushing to the living room on Christmas day. Only halfway down did she remember the black cars and the ferals released at the mall then consider that this might be a mistake.

  She stopped. Analise, four steps behind her, crashed into her back. Bridget swayed, but she’d been holding the banister and stayed in place.

&
nbsp; “Go back upstairs,” Bridget said. She felt foggy. Too much Zen. Her mind wanted to slide into heaven’s abandon while its animal depths were teeming with fear and adrenaline.

  “I’m not going back upstairs!”

  “It could be a trap.”

  “Mom?”

  “Go upstairs, Ana.”

  But the booming on the door continued. And the same voice they’d heard all the way upstairs, shouted in a way that was far too loud, for Lion’s Gate, after dark.

  “Mrs. Keys! Open up, please!”

  “Who is it?” Ana asked.

  “I don’t know,” Bridget answered.

  “We were sent by your husband! We need to talk to you, ma’am!”

  Ana came halfway around Bridget’s body. “Dad sent them.”

  “That’s what abductors always say. Don’t you remember what we taught you about stranger danger?”

  Bridget looked down. Ana was looking up at her, halfway under her armpit.

  “Abductors?”

  “We don’t know who’s out there,” Bridget said.

  “Someone Dad sent.” Ana skipped past and moved toward the door.

  It seemed like a terrible idea to Bridget. Aware she felt a little high and was perhaps not reacting in the most sensible manner, she called after Ana.

  “There’s stuff going on you don’t know,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  Like the fact that someone has been watching the house. Like the fact that I was almost killed by three ferals that — and I don’t think I’m being crazy here — sure seemed to have been deliberately sicced on me. Like your father’s strange behavior, as if this wasn’t as surprising to him as it was to me. Like the way he’s been running around with strange women, doing odd deals, getting us all in a lot of trouble with people who are willing to fight dirty. Like the fact that the world, dear daughter, isn’t quite what we thought it was yesterday.

  But she couldn’t say any of that. So instead, numb, she watched Ana touch the doorknob and impotently said, “Don’t.”

  “Relax, Mom.”

  Ana opened the door.

  Bridget braced herself, eyes searching for something she could use to brain late-night intruders. But instead of facing men and women with guns or rabid necrotics, she found herself looking at a pair of rather ordinary-looking men in camouflage hats standing beside a tidy woman in a no-bullshit pantsuit despite the hour. There was a new vehicle on the street with its dome light on and door ajar. A man in an open-throated dress shirt was being held in the group’s middle.

  The restrained man was tall, lanky, and had a messy head of brown hair. Despite the harsh shadows of the Keys family porch light, the man struck Bridget as overly friendly, with a wide smile on his face.

  “Sorry to bother you, ma’am,” said one of the men. “We saw this guy creeping around outside your house.”

  Bridget looked again at the man. If he’d been creeping around outside, it looked like he must have been doing so in an attempt to covertly sell her a vacuum cleaner. If he’d shown up alone, Bridget wouldn’t have flinched. He was one of those people who, no matter what they did, looked harmless.

  “Who are you?” Bridget asked.

  Everyone answered at once: the man who’d spoken, the tall captive, the woman in the pantsuit. A mishmash emerged, so the woman glared at the others until they were quiet, then addressed Bridget.

  She extended a hand.

  “I know this must look strange. My name is Cindy Benson. I work with network personality Bobby Baltimore, and — ”

  Ana interrupted. Judging by the way Cindy’s head flicked down to her, her presence had thus far gone unnoticed.

  “You know Bobby Baltimore?” Ana asked, eager.

  “And he asked us to keep an eye on your house.”

  Bridget felt like her mouth must be hanging open. She looked at each of the people in turn. The tall man smiled again, looking sheepish.

  The famous YouTube zombie hunter guy sent us here to keep an eye on you. Made sense.

  “Okay.”

  “Bobby is with your husband.”

  “Sure.”

  The tall man must have decided the situation was strange enough that he couldn’t make it worse. He stuck out a hand, which Bridget ignored.

  “Hi, Mrs. Keys. My name is Danny Almond. I work with Ian.”

  Bridget still couldn’t say anything.

  “This is all just a big misunderstanding. I needed to talk to Ian, and these … these people just came rushing at me out of the shadows like Rambo.”

  “At eleven o’clock at night,” said one of the men.

  “Prowling around the entire house,” said the other.

  “I wanted to see if any lights were on before knocking. I didn’t want to disturb you if you were asleep.”

  “Good job with that,” said the first man.

  “Hey. Nobody asked you,” Danny said, turning as far as he could in the man’s grip. “Who are you anyway?”

  “We’re the neighborhood watch.”

  Cindy spoke up. “I’m sure this is strange. I can explain it all. May we come in?”

  “Maybe you can explain it all right where you are.”

  “I’d rather be in or out. There’s another car of our people out there, but there’s also reason to believe you might be in danger, and … ”

  Bridget’s arm went around Ana, automatically pulling her back, her hand going to close the door in her visitors’ faces.

  “Wait!”

  “Thank you for saving me from this nice young man,” Bridget said.

  Danny turned then wrenched free with malice. He put a hand on the door, keeping Bridget from closing it.

  “Ian knows me. He’ll understand. I know it’s late, but this is important. Can I talk to him?”

  Bridget wasn’t sure how to respond. Somehow (and this was sublimely creepy), most of the gathering knew Ian was gone. Still, she was hesitant to confirm that she was a woman home alone with her eleven-year-old daughter.

  “Please. I wouldn’t come if it wasn’t important.”

  “Shut your mouth, creep,” said one of the camo-hat guys, grabbing Danny’s arm.

  Danny shook him off, appealing to Bridget. “Please. It will be quick.”

  “Ian’s not home.”

  Danny sighed. “He left something at me for work that I really, really need. I just … did he leave his key card?”

  “That’s enough,” said the other man, pulling Danny back.

  Cindy stepped forward. Her eyes ticked to Ana, apparently trying to decide if she should continue. She noted the way Bridget still held the door’s edge and met her eyes.

  “I’m sure this is all very strange.” She held up something that looked, on a fast glance, to be a press ID. Then she flipped to the next card, which was imprinted with her photograph and the logo from The Bobby Baltimore Show. “I can call Ian for you, and he can confirm.”

  Bridget had her husband’s damned phone number and very much didn’t want to call it. But he’d texted something a while back that she’d mostly ignored, and now that the haze was clearing, it struck her as the oddity that it had seemed on arrival. Something about August Maughan, from the news. And Bobby Baltimore, from the small screen. And … someone else? Someone famous?

  “Why are you here?”

  “Ian believes you may be in danger.”

  “And he didn’t call the cops?”

  “It’s complicated, Mrs. Keys.”

  Bridget stared out into the black night. Her fears had returned with interest once darkness descended, and now they were creeping back at the thought of sending these people away.

  Bridget reached for her phone. Keeping a wary eye on her visitors, she texted Ian one-handed.

  He replied almost immediately.

  Bridget looked down at her daughter. “Baby, go get dressed.”

  “Why?”

  She looked at Cindy. “Because these nice people are going to take us to your father, whether the
y want to or not.”

  Five minutes later, a slow procession of vehicles left Lion’s Gate, bound for places unknown.

  A black vehicle followed, headlights off.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  VISITING HOURS

  ALICE PACED HER CELL. SHE was apparently in custody, but there had been little ceremony about any of it. As a boundary pusher, Alice had been arrested before. There were always certain touchstones to the process: the reading of rights, fingerprinting, a single call on a station phone. But she hadn’t been read her rights — something Alice was holding close to the vest like a literal get-out-of-jail-free card. She hadn’t been fingerprinted. And the phone call (first to Ian then to August when Ian hadn’t answered) had been conducted on her phone, right from her pocket, before its confiscation.

  Since then, she’d been left alone. Entirely, silently alone.

  This wasn’t police. This was Panacea. And the minute Alice got out of here, she had one hell of a damning exposé to write about them.

  She heard a lock turn. The door at the room’s far end opened, past the only other cell in the small space. A man came forward who looked nothing like an agent. He was maybe fifty, slightly overweight, with blond hair and soft, intelligent eyes.

  He stood in front of Alice’s cell then reached up and unplugged something on the overhead security camera. The red light went dead.

  “So you’re Alice Frank,” he said. “You seem taller in person.”

  Alice’s eyes went to the camera. Was he planning to beat her up? Kill her? What didn’t he want surveillance to see, and would they simply not notice the missing feed?

  There was no reason for timidity. She’d done nothing wrong. She’d been well within her rights as a member of the free press right up until the moment someone had released ferals in front of her. If they meant to silence her as extraneous to Ian Keys’s too important, she wasn’t about to die on her knees.

  “And who the hell are you?”

  “My name is Raymond Smyth.”

  Alice’s forehead wrinkled. “I know that name.”