The Junkie Quatrain

by Peter Clines

  Barney nodded. He stepped outside and found Chit buttoning her shirt. Monica joined them a beat later. She wore a pale hospital blouse over her jeans. ‘They burned half my clothes,’ she said. ‘Too much blood on them.’

  Barney snorted out a laugh. They grabbed their packs from the clerk, clipped on their VISITOR badges, and headed toward the Federal Building itself.

  ‘At least they let you keep your new pigsticker,’ Barney said as they trotted up the steps. He nodded at the machete on Monica’s thigh.

  She smiled. ‘Yeah. I guess they figure if they’ve got all the automatic weapons there’s not much I can do with an eighteen-inch blade. Or the bozo was too distracted by me not having a bra.’

  ‘I’d keep it to yourself,’ said Chit. ‘You know they’ll go crazy if they find you with a weapon in here. Especially if it was their mistake.’

  Barney swung his pack into his other hand and Chit stumbled off the side. He shifted to look and Monica thought he’d hit the smaller woman with the backpack. Then the shift became a few big, awkward steps toward the big pillar and then he turned abruptly around to face her. The bag slipped from his fingers and he stood straight.

  Chit slumped to the ground. She twitched twice and let out a small whine. It wasn’t much louder than a breath.

  The knife at Barney’s throat kept him standing straight. It was black metal, but Monica could see the gleaming edge even through her boss’s beard. As if it knew where she was looking, the blade adjusted its angle. It bit into Barney’s throat, not quite enough to draw blood but close enough that any move would make it happen.

  Monica let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d taken and raised her palms. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘let’s take it easy.’

  ‘I would like my machete back,’ someone said behind Barney.

  The woman the other day—the lean, ragged woman—she’d had a dry voice. She’d probably gone a whole week without talking before stumbling across her infected girlfriend.

  This voice was hot air out of an Egyptian tomb. It wasn’t the voice of a gun-nut executive. It was the sound of dust, a voice that hadn’t needed people in a long, long time.

  Monica could just see the man in the shadows. He was whip-thin with a bristle of dark hair across his scalp. A pair of round lenses—John Lennon glasses flitted across her mind— covered his eyes. The lower half of his face was hidden by a gray dust mask. It made him look like an evil surgeon.

  ‘Are you serious?’ She looked at the man, then down at the blade strapped to her thigh. ‘That’s what this was all about?’

  The hand with the knife didn’t waver. The other hand reached out, palm up. ‘Please,’ said the man.

  Monica cursed him again, shook her head, and unbuckled her gun belt. She wrestled with the canvas scabbard for a few moments, then held it out.

  The evil doctor didn’t move. He flexed his open fingers once and turned the blade against Barney’s throat just enough to catch the light.

  She leaned forward and set the machete in his hand. The thin man’s fingers closed over the scabbard and pulled it back into the midday shadows.

  A beat passed and Barney let out a deep sigh. Monica realized the blade had vanished from his throat. She turned her head toward the lobby and took in a deep breath to yell.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  She bit back the call for help. ‘That psycho killed most of our crew.’

  Barney took another breath and looked over his shoulder. ‘I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that guy’s killed a lot of people,’ he said. ‘At the moment, I’m focusing on the fact that he didn’t kill us.’

  Monica bit her lip but said nothing. Barney went to help Chit up, and the smaller woman winced. He unbuckled her pack and got her to her feet. ‘You okay?’

  ‘A lot of pain,’ she whispered, ‘but I think I’m okay past that.’ She tried to raise her arm and winced again.

  One of the black-suited guards, a woman, walked by with a young man in a suit. The guard ignored them, the man gave them a glance. Monica felt the urge to say something rise up again but Barney gave her a look.

  ‘So now what?’ she said when they were alone again.

  He slung his pack over his shoulder and picked up Chit’s. ‘We finish the job,’ he said. ‘We deliver the goods and get paid.’

  ‘And then?’

  He shrugged. ‘I’m thinking maybe we should call it quits for a while.’

  ‘You think so?’

  Barney looked out at the city. ‘There’s some dangerous stuff out there. A person could get killed.’

  CONFIDENTIALITY

  It had been six months since the world ended.

  For Sam Clemens it had been six months of non-stop work.

  On one level, it was exciting as hell. As a student of diagnostic medicine with a specialty in virology, the China outbreaks had been fascinating. He’d sat around with his friends and classmates examining the reports out of Asia and forming their own theories about the H1B6 virus, sometimes called the Baugh Contagion.

  Then it reached North America. He’d been pulled out of his residency in Seattle and flown to Sacramento. There he’d been given an honorary doctorate and told he was now employed by the Centers for Disease Control.

  And now, two months after that, he was being driven through Los Angeles in an armored Hummer. Humvee, actually. The driver, a solid man with a square jaw, had corrected Sam twice now on that point. Hummers were civilian, Humvees were military.

  They pulled up to the Los Angeles Federal Building just after noon. The structure had been surrounded by concrete barriers and barbed wire. Through the gate he could see a small group of people on bicycles checking in with the guards. He couldn’t imagine being one of the outsiders who ventured out into the wild zones on a regular basis.

  As they waited, Sam saw a large pack of Baugh-ridden to the east, maybe twenty or thirty of them. Their clothing was dirty and tattered from weeks of wear. Most of them were thin. They all shook and trembled enough that he could see it almost two blocks away. That and their garbled, slurred attempts at speech were what had earned the infected the casual nickname of junkies.

  The pack was focused on something on the ground. He recognized the motions as a fight over food. Each of them was trying to get more than a few mouthfuls of whatever dog or cat they’d managed to corner. As he watched, one of them, a young woman, lifted her prize to the sky and gibbered like an ape. It was an arm, ripped off at the elbow.

  Sam stopped looking out the side windows and stared at the hood of the Humvee.

  They were waved through the gate by a pair of men in dark body armor. He craned his neck and saw towers with floodlights and even more men with rifles and armor. The Humvee halted in front of a trailer that Sam recognized as a mobile research lab. His door opened and he was gestured out. ‘Right this way, sir,’ said one soldier.

  He was guided into the lab. Sam stripped naked in a brightly lit room and a slim brunette examined him for lacerations or severe abrasions. She also swabbed his mouth and took a blood sample. He dressed while they waited for the test results and made small talk about the facility.

  His test came back negative and he stepped outside again. It was a major infection zone, but the air in Los Angeles was still wonderfully fresh. He hadn’t been outside much in the past few months.

  ‘Sir?’ Another soldier, this one a broad-shouldered woman, was in front of him. She didn’t have the dark body armor on, but there was a pistol on her thigh and a variety of lethal-looking things hooked to her belt. A few short strands of dark hair curled out from under her cap. She gave him a polite nod. ‘Sergeant Hogan, sir,’ she said. ‘I’m to escort you up to Director Bradbury.’ She held out a laminated badge with his name, picture, and the FMF logo on it.

  Sam glanced over at the empty space where the Humvee had been while he clipped the badge to his coat. ‘I had some bags,’ he said. ‘Clothes and some copies of my research.’

  ‘Already on the way to your qua
rters, sir,’ she said. She gestured to the building’s main entrance. ‘If you could come this way, Director Bradbury’s waiting for you.’

  They passed a series of huge pillars where a scruffy trio of outsiders was muttering about some deal that had gone bad, then entered the building’s lobby. There were armed soldiers everywhere, all in black armor. They each gave his escort a salute as they walked to the elevators. He stepped all the way in and put his back against the wall. The sergeant stood almost dead center. She pressed the button marked 6 and placed her fists together behind the small of her back.

  Sam looked at her shoulders again. ‘Excuse me, ummm...’

  ‘Sergeant Hogan, sir.’

  ‘Thanks. What branch are you with, sergeant?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Are you Army or National Guard or what? I don’t recognize any of your insignia.’

  ‘Whitestealth Security, sir. We provide all defense for this facility.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘The Federal Building doesn’t get military protection?’

  ‘We are military, sir,’ she said. ‘Just privately contracted by the Freedom Medical Foundation.’

  Sam gave a slow nod and took a second look at her uniform. He studied the different items on her belt. She gave him a look and he realized studying her belt probably looked a lot like checking out her ass. He cleared his throat and made a show of pointing at one item. ‘Is that a... what do you call it, a taser?’

  She shook her head. ‘Technically it’s a stun gun. Tasers shoot electrified darts. Same principal, different delivery system.’

  ‘Is that standard?’

  She nodded. ‘They’re great against the junk—sorry, sir, the Baugh-ridden. They don’t even know enough to block it. You just hit them and they drop.’ She cleared her own throat. ‘Keep it up and I’ll be glad to demonstrate.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t like that. I was just...’ He decided to stop talking. It seemed like the wiser path of action.

  The elevator doors opened and she guided him to the left. Sam realized he could see little traces of his breath, the air conditioning was set so high. They opened a set of double doors and he stopped in his tracks. Then a junkie threw herself at him and let out a silent howl as she clawed the air.

  A huge wall of plexiglas stretched in front of him, like an aquarium. Sections of the clear wall were streaked with dark material. Some of it was dried blood.

  There were dozens of junkies in the aquarium. They wore blue hospital smocks with large numbers painted on them. Two or three clumps cowered in the different corners of the pen. A few dashed from one end of the tennis court-sized space to another, while others slammed into the walls, confused by their imprisonment. Right in front of him, a dark haired woman threw herself against the plexiglas again and again. She had a bloody nose. While he was watching she knocked one of her front teeth loose.

  ‘Kind of takes your breath away, doesn’t it?’

  The speaker was an older man. He had the long gray beard, gleaming scalp, and pleasant smile of a college professor. The man strode down the narrow hall in front of the aquarium. He ignored the junkie concussing herself on the huge window and held out his hand. ‘You must be Doctor Sam Clemens.’

  ‘No relation to the writer,’ Sam said as he took the hand. ‘Doctor Bradbury, I presume?’

  ‘You presume correctly, although it’s been a while since anyone called me doctor.’ He gave a sly wink to Hogan. ‘They’re all pretty hooked on ‘director’ around here.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Sam. ‘I didn’t mean any offense.’

  Bradbury shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about it at all. To be honest, these days I almost wish I was just a doctor. It would mean a lot less paperwork.’

  They shared a smile at the joke and then the junkie lunged at them again. Another one joined her, a black man, and they continued to beat themselves senseless against the plexi. It sounded like a muffled drum solo.

  The older man glanced at them ‘Sad, isn’t it? I come down here now and then to remind myself what we’re up against. These were all regular people once. American citizens who didn’t deserve this kind of fate.’

  Sam nodded. ‘These are your test subjects?’

  ‘We started out with fifty-five,’ said Bradbury, ‘but a lot of them attacked each other. Part of their mental makeup we can’t figure out. Some are welcomed into the pack, some aren’t. We’re down to thirty-nine, I believe.’ He looked at Hogan and she gave a quick nod.

  ‘If I may ask, sir,’ said Sam after a few moments, ‘I’m not entirely sure why I’m here.’

  The director blinked. ‘The middle of a devastating pandemic and one of the brightest young virologists in America can’t figure out why he’s been brought onto a project?’ He clicked his tongue and gave another wink. ‘Doesn’t say much for you, young man.’

  Sam smiled. ‘No, I understand that. I’m just not sure why I was pulled from my CDC group and transferred here.’

  Bradbury’s head moved up and down again. ‘A lot of the work we’re doing here parallels the CDC,’ he said, ‘but we’re reporting up a different chain of command. Someone much further up asked who I thought might be able to help us here. I thought of some of your reports I’d read. After that...’ He shrugged. ‘More paperwork. And now here you are.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Why don’t we go up to my office,’ said Bradbury. ‘We can have some coffee and go over the work we’re doing here.’

  ‘That sounds great.’

  They walked back to the elevators. The junkies followed them as well, and slammed their bodies against the aquarium window again and again until Bradbury led Sam past an oversized airlock door and moved into another hall. Sergeant Hogan stayed a few steps behind them the whole way.

  Bradbury’s office was large and surprisingly un-Spartan. He’d set his own rug down over the institutional pebbled-brown carpet, and the walls of his office were covered with notes and pictures. A large-leafed plant stood in the corner by the window. His desk had numerous papers and a well-used laptop, but also a small collection of family photos and what looked like a collection of Lego people. Near the center, on a disk of granite, was a small golden statue the size and rough shape of a football. Its oversized head had wide eyes and a mouth opened in a silent shout. Right behind the cluttered desk was a black-outlined inspirational poster showing a skydiver and the word DARE.

  The director waved him to one of the chairs in front of the desk. Hogan stood by the door. She rested her fists behind her back again.

  ‘You’ve got some remarkable recommendations,’ Bradbury said. He dropped into the chair behind the desk the way someone sat down to watch the big game. ‘An exceptionally bright, logical young man. To be honest, I’m surprised someone else didn’t scoop you up ages ago.’

  Sam shifted in his chair. ‘Well, someone did,’ he said. ‘One of the crisis directors at the CDC saw some of my papers on pandemics. Based on that, they pulled me for the duration. It’s a dream job, really.’

  The director looked confused for a moment, then smiled. ‘Right, he said. ‘I just meant someone big.’

  An aide came in with coffee for each of them. It was made just the way Sam liked—two sugars, no milk. In the past two months of government work, he’d learned not to question how such things happened. He took a sip and let the mug rest on his thigh. It made a warm circle against the air conditioning. ‘So, sir,’ he asked, ‘what angle are you working on here?’

  The older man sipped his own coffee. ‘If you don’t mind,’ he said, ‘why don’t we start with you. Talk to me about H1B6.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I want to hear it in your terms, see what kind of a grasp you’ve got on it.’

  ‘Are you looking for case histories or—’

  ‘I want,’ said Bradbury, ‘to see if you understand what’s going on right now. Not in some clinical, by the numbers way. Tell me what the virus does. Tell me what it’s doing to the world.’

>   Sam fiddled with the coffee cup’s handle for a moment. It was too loose for two fingers, too tight for three. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘H1B6 is a complex virus which attacks the nervous system, primarily the brain. After incubating, it affects the amygdala and the medial orbitofrontal cortex, reducing inhibitions. The two most common results are increased bouts of violence and-or sexual proclivity, both of which allow the virus to spread further.

  ‘Once it becomes fully symptomatic, it compromises the Broca’s area. The afflicted can’t process language and lose their ability to communicate in any way. Their adrenal glands are also affected and result in a pretty much constant flow of epinephrine into the blood.’

  Sam paused for a sip of coffee, cleared his throat, and continued.

  ‘The virus also causes a hyperphagic condition similar to Prader-Willi syndrome. Infected individuals suffer from insatiable, often ravenous hunger. Combined with the damage to the amygdala and the continual fight-or-flight state caused by the epinephrine, the afflicted will do whatever they can to feed. There’ve been reports of them gnawing on trees, eating pets and other animals, and of course...’

  He paused again and took another sip. A longer one.

  ‘Cannibalism,’ said Bradbury. ‘Just say the word. What’s the CDC predicting as a mortality rate?’

  ‘It’s hard to be sure. A large percentage of the infected die from secondary causes. Malnutrition, mostly, or they tax themselves to the point of cardiac arrest or stroke.’ He studied his mug again. ‘A fair number of them have been killed by the National Guard in self defense.

  ‘However, in the subjects we’ve managed to isolate, brain damage continues to progress. It hasn’t been a statistically viable number of cases, but at the moment it looks like the initial reports out of China and India were correct. Mortality rate is one hundred percent. Once it goes symptomatic, the average victim has five weeks or less to live.’

  Bradbury drummed his fingers on the desktop. ‘And how many victims is the CDC talking about.’