Containment: The Death of Earth

by Charlee Jacob

  She threw her tissue box, her cup and pitcher, then got out of bed, tore at the bed curtain and threw everything of her roommate’s at the nurse. The roommate pretended to be asleep with the covers over her head.

  “I’m getting your doctor!” the nurse taunted as he ran from the room, the pill tray hit squarely with the roommate’s latest distraction novel of lust on the high seas.

  “Does my doctor have a death wish, too?” Laura threatened.

  What happened that was being censored? And who was e-mailing her to relay (unpleasantly) information about Adam?

  She went to the last blog.

  She saw a mixed-bag video, starting with the bubble, filmed in clips by tourists indulging in an entire nation’s end and put together in a message that curdled her insides.

  People kneeled to pray and wail at an imprint on the bubble that had left a Christ-like image. Shaped like Adam?

  Someone in an asbestos suit used a chainsaw to remove the front of a man, half in France. The half in Italy was nothing now but a shredded, burned icon. The suit itself on the chainsaw operator caught fire, then he exploded like a piñata full of overdone fajita meat and singed red peppers.

  Another man, unconscious, was being lifted into a helicopter.

  “Two-time American Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Adam Grigori, is the only person known to have entered the strange walls surrounding this Italian mega-catastrophe and actually returned,” a voice-over related. “His condition is unknown.”

  Everyone pressed close. Laura saw both Paul Anson and Christina Chang struggling to protect Adam from the crowd.

  “Is he disfigured?”

  “Is he burned?”

  “Move over. Lemme get a shot of his face.”

  “He doesn’t look bad. Bummer. Wait! Is that a chopped baby?”

  “There’s its head. Move, will ya?”

  “Look at that woman.”

  “Wow. She’s got, like, no eyes.”

  The blog also showed clips of jokes told on an Internet humor site.

  “Is the Pope a Catholic?”

  “No, I think he’s a rib roast.”

  “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

  “The other side of the road was in France.”

  “How did St. Peter’s ghost get out of the Vatican?”

  “He was nailed to that chicken.”

  “Why didn’t the chicken make it?”

  “Et tu, barbecue.”

  “Do you like Italian food?”

  “Sure do.”

  “Here, have some chicken.”

  Ah, the international language of the walking brain dead.

  Then screams, shrieks, mass panic as the bubble disappeared. But nothing came out, no streaks of flame, no bubbling lava, no burning sulfuric smoke, and no survivors stricken mute in that land of the Inferno.

  They tried to fly over on charter planes.

  Everything was gone, burned black, the mountains of the Italian Alps and the Pyrenees, flattened. One super mountain rose up, made up of…bones. Bones, fused together, so hard as to support the weight of such a structure. Mount Everest, at 29,000 feet, was dwarfed by the monstrosity which was about 50,000 feet high, at least according to the blogger.

  It had a hole in its top that went down too far inside for anyone to see, too high for anyone to fly over…

  The screen went white.

  Site unavailable.

  Laura grabbed her purse and dug out her phone. The CDC operator answered.

  “How may I transfer your call?”

  “Give me Paul Anson.”

  “Dr. Anson is currently out of the country. If you would like to leave a message with his secretary…”

  “Yes!”

  “Dr. Anson’s office.”

  “Let me speak to him.” Laura chewed a fingernail.

  “He is currently overseas…”

  Laura was curt. “Listen. I am Laura Grigori, the wife of Dr. Adam Grigori. I know Paul’s there and if you don’t put me through, I am going to show up on the CDC’s door step with every reporter I can get my hands on. Hear me? You will wish you were sitting on Bone Mountain. Do it!”

  A buzz.

  “Paul Anson.”

  “It’s Laura. Why the hell didn’t you tell me about Adam?” she demanded, outraged. Damn, he’d been best man at their wedding, for pity’s sake. “I have to see it on the Internet?”

  “Laura.” A pause.

  “That’s me. Glad you remember.”

  “We only just got Adam back here last night. I thought it too late to bother you. We had to arrange for tight security. They almost wouldn’t let us back in the country.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Laura had practically stopped breathing.

  “Not on the phone. Can you come here?”

  “I’m in the hospital. Will you send a car for me?”

  “It’s on its way.”

  “I’ll be ready.”

  She was dressed in a whirlwind of minutes. The nurse had returned with Laura’s doctor.

  “And just where do you think you’re going?” the doctor asked. “You’re a very sick woman.”

  “Try to stop me and I’ll sue you for kidnapping,” Laura snapped, grabbing her purse.

  “You have to file charges first,” said her roommate. “If that doesn’t work, then you sue.”

  The roommate had hobbled out of bed…when? Now she handed Laura a business card. A lawyer. Did it figure?

  “But you shouldn’t be standing, much less walking,” the doctor protested.

  “Leave her alone. She has good reason,” replied the roommate, expression a bit freaked out. Had she watched Laura’s computer as that final blog mercilessly showed the truth? Laura had been so focused on this unabashed news, she wouldn’t have noticed had her roommate been hanging from the ceiling above her. The lawyer added, “You, nurse. Go get a wheelchair to take her to the front entrance immediately. Satisfied, doctor? Your insurance company will be off the hook.”

  The doctor reluctantly acquiesced with a brief nod.

  “Run, nurse. Lady’s got an appointment,” the lawyer growled, clapping her hands.

  So much for lust on the high seas.

  ««—»»

  Paul had another wheelchair waiting at a back entrance to the CDC. They clipped a special badge on her blouse.

  “Not on the phone, you said. So here I am. Why the men in dark suits and the car with tinted windows? What the hell happened to my husband? Did he go into that bubble?” Laura’s heart made slow progress into her throat.

  “He did,” Paul tried gently to explain. “And something came out with him.”

  Her heart now grazed the edges of her teeth. “What?”

  They took a special elevator. Down. It was the only other floor listed on the panel. The panel read 1, for the first floor, and then 5. Number 5… Paul gave it voice and retinal identification.

  “You won’t actually be able to see him face-to-face and personal,” Paul, a native of rural Georgia, replied laconically. “He is in a Bio-Safety Level 4 Containment, so try not to be alarmed when you get there.”

  What came out with him?

  He hadn’t answered her question.

  “The level where they wear the space suits and respirators?” Laura knew Adam frequently worked under such conditions. Even the tiniest hole in a suit—or even one of the boots—could contaminate him with the worst imaginable disease.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  They exited the elevator, moved down a corridor, and after the same I.D. a door whooshed open for them.

  “Do I suit up, too?” she asked.

  “No. You won’t be going in. You’ll communicate via closed circuit screens, his screen being behind security glass. And I warn you, he isn’t suited up either. We’re only letting you see him because Adam insisted that he needed to talk to you.”

  Laura gasped. “What is he, a specimen? What came out with him?”

  “He has a blister in his palm,” Paul told h
er, finally giving up a bit of information. “Sign these forms, Laura.”

  Now she wished she’d brought her lawyer roommate from the hospital with her.

  “What are they?”

  “Mostly non-disclosure documents and waivers that release the CDC of responsibility if anything should happen,” Paul replied most unhappily.

  “All this for a blister?”

  He nodded and tried to smile with some reassurance.

  “Paul, Adam took me on a CDC tour once. There was no back elevator with only the 1 and 5 on it. He isn’t in level 4 containment, is he? So, what’s level 5? Explain or I’ll make Adam do it.” Her blood pressure inched up. She thought she felt the stitches inside bursting with the strain. She prayed she wouldn’t faint. Fainting in the camp made you a helpless victim. A lot of the folks there had not been nice. But she figured people who were desperate—especially for a long time—just naturally turned that way.

  Loner or bully.

  “Explain,” she repeated, not at all invisible.

  Paul took the papers she’d signed, uncomfortable under her relentless stare. He’d frankly preferred the Italian woman with no eyes. Suddenly he felt afraid of her, as if there were something shadowy over her and even through her.

  “We can’t see what’s inside the blister. We only know it isn’t a burn from either fire or radiation. Can’t cut it with even a laser, not even from the back side of the hand. There’s no way to scrape even the tiniest sample for study. We couldn’t even see into it with an electron microscope, yet Adam’s other tests all came back normal.” He said nothing about level 5.

  Resigned, Laura was wheeled into a room. There she saw her husband on screen. He looked haunted. His face had a queasy tint to it.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” he said.

  “Honey, what happened?” Laura was devastated by how bad he looked. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry.

  “Just listen, Laura. In my study, you’ll find my journals—and the last one in my personal effects here—about 25 of them. I’ve been writing them since Pacifica. You have to take them and Mariana and get out of the house. Hide somewhere. Try to read them—take your time, not your usual F.T.L. pace—or it will seem like a jumble of nonsense.” He took a rattled breath. “Somebody is…coming after you. He knew your name. He found me on the mountain of flesh… He’s young, muscular, dark-haired, tan. Good-looking. Maybe he is one of those dead Hollywood saints. Make no mistake, baby, he isn’t human. I love you. You’ll survive this.” If anyone other than her darling Adam had said such bizarre things, she’d know they were off their rockers. Him, she believed completely.

  He laughed nervously, running his fingers through the long blond hair and beard. She didn’t ask him about level 5. Secrecy and paranoia.

  The screen went blank. No! She didn’t even have time to tell him she loved him, too.

  Paul gave her the things Adam had taken to Paris, including the journal he mentioned. He then had the car take her home.

  She feared what might be waiting when she arrived there.

  ««—»»

  Laura had left, and Adam couldn’t bear to think of her. Because he couldn’t touch her. He couldn’t hold her. He’d never felt so alone.

  Another flash hit him, he all in darkness and it almost too fast to see. Yet it registered off the scales. Like a satellite image blurred. Disjointed phrases came to his mind.

  Storm’s ‘Eye’

  gouged bloody abstract

  no hollow to torture

  Was it a memory of his life before he had been found in the Painted Desert?

  He tried to think of something else. Like his journal, a pen, The Enantiodromia.

  Euclid: length/longitude

  depth/latitude

  width/altitude

  Mandelbrot: dimension

  spherical/far

  columns/close

  fibers/in between

  fractal

  relativity

  the twist

  Koch: curve

  any connected line

  straight or round

  infinitely long line

  surrounds a finite area

  He hadn’t told Laura—and he hoped fervently that Paul hadn’t told her either—about the treatment being done on his hand: a highly experimental mini-version of the super-collider, body-part focused, intrinsic chemotherapy. And how sick it made him.

  In 1202, Leonardo Fibonacci introduced Arabic numbers, as well as zero, to the art of mathematical calculation. (The Maya already had zero.) Again and again we crash back to nothing. The death of one is deliciously voyeuristic; the demise of all is irresistibly intriguing. Until it is your turn.

  He thought of the man on the mountain of burned bodies. His reference to The Enantiodromia.

  “If I told you that what I said…came from The Enantiodromia, would you get the reference?” the man had asked Adam.

  What Paul said about Adam being obsessive-compulsive… Was it Adam’s way to keep his mind from other, troubling, thoughts? Gedankenexperimenten: thought experiment (Einstein). More random thoughts in his head…

  Adam paced the confines of the containment unit. He knew that in other units, other levels, cages of innocent-eyed primates and cute little mice awaited experimentation, many panicked and miserable—for the sacred benefit of mankind. He often worked with animals himself for comparisons and reactions in epidemiology. Now he felt a kinship with them that had—but partially—eluded him till now. It wasn’t that he’d been cruel to them, only convinced that, when push came to shove, it was the manifest destiny of the human race to have its needs put before all others.

  What is the difference between an angel and demon?

  Their intentions.

  Angels. Good.

  Demons. Bad.

  What was the road to hell paved with?

  Good intentions. So perhaps every angel, every demon had some grace and some damnation.

  “O Devil enthusiastic, why seek the storms of imminent end?”

  Adam found himself speaking aloud.

  “There are numberless bridges between the many mansions in God’s House, each crowded with souls tangled in the primeval rift…”

  He wished he had his journal. A pen something. The words flowed.

  “…slaughtering each other between the gates to earn but one window to preen themselves before immortality. Extermination is humanity’s reformation, scourged by subversive communions they convince themselves no holy power glimpses in ruins so low.”

  His voice ran out, but then…

  Another voice. Behind him? “My, you Enantiodromia here, you Enantiodromia there. This Enantiodrom-iac everywhere!”

  Like the Scarlet Pimpernel?

  Had one of the doctors come in? How could he not have heard them? All those bells and whistles to enter. Machines for doors. chit-click.

  “Paul?” Adam turned a 360, looking for the source of the voice.

  It was the young dark-haired man. His smile was brutal.

  “Hi! Gimme five!” The man held up his left hand. Like Adam, his palm contained a large blister, black through. Adam’s was red and in the right hand.

  Adam saw movement inside that dark obscenity, then stared into the other man’s eyes. He wished he hadn’t. He was a boy again, falling as large masses of land were shaken from the foundation of a continent. Water rushed at him, as the Biblical Leviathan whose darkness covered the universe before God created light. Then rain, and he, cowering as it came down, storming blood. A woman…falling next to him… Mother! Her skull shattered, only her sad face whole—a mask, a cruel joke, nothing impossible for the vengeful archangel Michael. Then Adam saw his father, a man of an unearthly handsomeness, falling beside her, with her, one arm draped across her hip. They all plunged from the havoc Heaven had become.

  Adam put his hands up.

  “Stop this!”

  The dark-haired man grabbed the doctor’s right hand in the steel of his left. The palms ground together. Whe
n the blisters burst, every alarm in Bio-hazard level 5 went off with a clarion scream, for Adam was the first—and only—resident of level 5.

  The stranger released his grip and sighed in ecstasy, ripping off his clothes, standing there superbly naked.

  The alarm had frozen the locks. They called in through the communication controls. “Adam, are you all right? Can you speak? What’s happening in there? Have you been compromised?”

  Had he been compromised. How intimate that sounded.

  Adam couldn’t reply. He was on the floor, watching the stranger’s skin. Words flowed over it, words Adam used to see from time to time but could not quite read, flowing in gold on the stranger’s skin, then becoming a blinding watercolor incantation, the color of magma, red tide, human blood.

  Demons.

  Baal Agares Vassago Gamigin Marbas Valefor Amon Barbatos Paimon Buer Gusion Sitri Beleth Leraje Eligos Zepar Botis Bathin Sallos Purson Marax Ipos Aim Naberius Glasya-Labolas Bime Ronove Berith Astaroth Forneus Asmoday Gaap Furfur Marchostas Stolas Phenex Malthas Raum Focalor Vepar Sabnock Shax Vine Bifrons Uvall Haagenti Crocell Furcas Balam Alloces Camio Murmur Orobas Gamort Voso Aunas Oriox Naphula Zagan Valu Andras Haures Andrealpha Kimaris Andilkias Belial Decarabia Seere Dantalion Andromalius Leviatan Hemostophile Brufor Laune Betor Lucifer Belzebut Aziel Agiel Enediel Anane Belah Chemor Din Elim Fabas Graphiel Iah Kne Labed Mehod Nebak Odonel pamiel Relah Quedbaschemed Schethalim Tiriel Vabam Wasboga Xoblah Yshiel Zelah Deamiel Dirachiel Diriel Egibiel Amazerack Azaradel Ertrael Jomiael Ramuel Samevel Semyaza Sarakuyal Urakabarameel Dagon Moloch Mammon Sandalphon Mansemot Metatron Mephistopholes Abigor Luridan Solday Boralim Zedex Morborgran Naberius Mahonin Acoroba Madime Panalcarp Orobas Ouraboros Baratron Zemen Marid Actetor Hogos Adnachiel Melchom Sondennath Pagimon Griessmodal Gabreel Pazuzu Adramelach Orgon Ballisargon Iuvart Ballzephon Jefischa Anarazel Deumus Habondia Aiwars Baltazo Wormwood Baphomet Schedbarschemoth Taphthartharoth Satan NemisisOeillet Budarijm Cartagra Khism Dardariel Sarindiel Chamo Abaddon Samael Chadakael Ayporos Susabo Usiel Tartach Tocobatto Veguaniel Tukiphat Vachmiel Cereberus Ukobach Vacabiel Adromelechk Malephar Barginiel Sarindiel Bealphares Vadriel Glauron Nal-Gab Amaimon Amduscias Grismodal Bethage Cozbi Putheus Malakhha-mauet Jerobaal Silvestres Lilith Runwe Salamander Otis Smulkin Sarahiel Cimeries Snulbug Zorasaball Azaziel Carabia Socothbenoth Rahab Ithuriel Phakiel Flauros Bolfry Tap Ribesal.