The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  The viruses were unstoppable. Wherever they found purchase, dengue-5 and dengue-6 seemed to be killing with bloody abandon, especially where public-health standards were weak. Big Bonebreaker hadn’t spread far and wide, but it was killing the poorest regions of Mexico, wiping out the seasonal Indian refugee camps that cropped up at the end of the coffee harvest in the Guatemalan and Honduras provinces. Nonetheless, class wasn’t the deciding factor: The lone case in North Carolina was a white Anglo-Saxon professor, after all, and reports from the overburdened American British Clinic reported deaths of several African and European businessmen. The viruses had spread rampantly in Ascensión, but hardly at all overseas. One neighborhood in La Baja had been left untouched, while an adjacent barrio was crushed with one hundred percent mortality.

  It was too much. He was accustomed to dragging populations back from this headlong plunge. He wasn’t a mop-up man. He wasn’t a corpse-hauler. And at the moment, he couldn’t picture a path out of the outbreak.

  Stark reached for the sat phone Rosangelica had given him, and, across the Dulce’s coach, they met each other’s eyes. Immediately, her gaze darted back to the ceiling, and out flew her aphasic poetry.

  Stark watched her, phone in hand. He wasn’t fooled. She would be listening to his conversation.

  Slam. One of the backgammon players brought his dice cup down hard. “Got you now, boss,” he said.

  Let her listen, he decided. He needed a reprieve after two hours of this research, after everything that had happened to him this day. He tapped in Nissevalle Cooperative’s main line and let the phone ring seventeen times before someone answered.

  “‘Lo?”

  It was Cretin. His real name was Ben, but he was the hardest-drinking man at Nissevalle, so he’d earned himself a more descriptive tag. “Cretin, this Henry David.”

  “Oh, hey. Where you at, brother?”

  “Timbuktu.”

  “Again? Thought you just got back from there.”

  It sounded like there was a party in the kitchen. Lots of laughter and hilarious yelling. Stark checked the time on one of his memboards. Starting the festivities pretty early. It only six-thirty. “Can I talk to Grandfather? He there, Cretin?”

  “Sure, sure. We just eating some frozen blueberries in the kitchen, actually. Hold up, I get him.”

  Frozen blueberries? Stark wondered. Someone celebrating something.

  “Well, hello, kid,” came Grandfather’s voice. He sounded rested, happy. “Where are you?”

  Grandfather had looked so tired and old when Stark left him—it was soothing to hear him sound so good. He took a sip of whiskey, and said, “In the sky. Somewhere over Mexico.”

  “Made it there no problem, then?”

  Stark had no idea how to answer that question. He stared into his own silence wondering what he would say, when the only thing that came to mind was an unplayed hand of rummy.

  “Hello?”

  “Yeah. No problem. Got to San Antonio, anyway.”

  “You sound weird, kid. What’s wrong?”

  If Grandfather didn’t stop asking questions that he couldn’t answer, Stark feared he might crack apart right there on the phone. All he wanted was to hear something normal. Something about the new farm interns or the bickering between the day crews and the irrigation teams. Something normal.

  Sip.

  Grandfather seemed to hear the weight on his grandson’s end of the line. “Ask me about the spinach, then.”

  “Jesus. The spinach?” Stark didn’t think he could bear such a conversation. Not now. “No. I don’t want—”

  “It died.”

  Of course it did, thought Stark. Gold mold fast as hell. And thorough. “The whole field, then?”

  “No, just the plants of that variety. By sundown, it was all withered. Amazing. Probably already in an advanced state.”

  “The hell you say,” Stark scoffed. “All your spinach should be gone.”

  “I had some bad seed, came from an unknown source. I tracked it back to the purchase and realized it came from a warehouse, not a seed-saver, like I thought. Could have come from anywhere.”

  Stark took a deep pull on his whiskey and set the glass down on the table. He couldn’t stop analyzing diseases no matter which way he turned. “The seed? You think the seed saved you?”

  “Well, I told you my method when you first came home with this project, but you dismissed me out of hand like I was some dumb farmer,” Grandfather said. “Gold mold eats the old genetically modified varieties. That’s my theory. So I don’t use them. This seed came from a seller that I’ve wondered about for years, and those are the ones that got hit. I didn’t do anything special. Gold mold just overate its food supply.”

  Stark found himself about to contradict, about to say the very same thing he said last winter when Grandfather spoke to him of the theory that ten years of vCaMV research couldn’t prove, that there was no common DNA in all genetically modified crops that would entice the same virus, even an array of viruses like the variants of Cauliflower Mosaic Virus.

  But Stark didn’t want to argue about this. Somehow, Grandfather’s strategy worked and that warranted breaking out the frozen berries, for sure. By planting different varieties every six feet, gold mold couldn’t find purchase in a heterogeneous crop.

  It was targeted. It was specific about something, but who knew what?

  Didn’t matter to the farmer, but it mattered to the epidemiologist, who looked back at his memboard, wondering if the Holy Renaissance’s data was collated well enough for him to dig in deep. “OK. Thanks for that. Look, I just wanted to make sure you got home all right. Better run.”

  “Just as well. Cretin’s about to tap the spring brew. You stay in touch, then.”

  He clicked off the phone. “Rosangelica?”

  “What did you just figure out?” she asked. She’d been staring at him, as if waiting for him to ask a question.

  “Nothing. But I need to get data on a patient in North Carolina. The lone Big Bonebreaker case there. Can you get that for me?”

  “Don’t insult me. Of course I can,” Rosangelica said. “What do you want to know?”

  Stark stood, walked over to her splash of light and sat in a chair beside her. “Just tell me who he was?”

  “His name?”

  “No, his life. Tell me about him.” He pointed to his memboard. “Here. Give it to me here when you got it.”

  “Elm. Heinous. Galeria. Joven. Flytrap. Academic from Raleigh, it looks like,” she said. She was looking at Stark but not looking at Stark, as if she were sleepwalking. He didn’t like the effect.

  Stark looked away and took a nice long pull on his drink. Waiting. The netmonitor encased in the wall near Stark was bright with pictures of the Ascensión street war, with gunfire bursting in darkness, and young machos wearing gas masks waving rifles in the camera. Stark ignored it, looking out his window and down at the skin of clouds stretching over the Sierra Madres far below.

  But Mexican media was difficult to ignore. Seven overlapping windows on-screen expanded and contracted, shuffled backwards and forwards, and the audio constantly shifted to the foremost screen as the producers showed what they wanted their viewers to see. It simulated, Rosangelica had explained, the sensation of “mundo-interactivity” what it was like to have the pilone hookup.

  The main screen showed a live ojo feed of a firefight on La Reforma Avenue. Gunboats gave air cover above burning barricades, as mobs cresting in the thousands pushed toward the National Square. Other screens flashed more images of fighting. A Holy Renaissance squad in black fired into a crowd of brick throwers. “Holy Renaissance officials painted a bleak picture of the insurgents,” said the commentary accompanying this window. Another window popped up inside this one and showed Mexico’s Chief of State Roberto Cazador, the official who had hired Stark. “They, in essence, express a clear political joining with the radical nun and her proinsurgent agenda,” said the portly Chief of State, reading from handh
eld notes. “Rather than help the sick, they elect to take advantage of this disaster politically.”

  Stark looked at Rosangelica but she was still far away in a trance of satellites. Instead of bothering her, he thumbed his memboard, pulling up the genomic analyses of the two viruses again from Isabel Khushub.

  AGTTGTTAGT CTGTGTGGAC CGACAAGGAC

  AGTTCCAAAT CGGAAGCTTG CTTAACACAG …

  Stark needed to know a little of everything to be a good field epidemiologist—virology and statistics in particular, but bacteriology, languages, and politics helped. Genomics, however, was his weak study. Stark wished he could have Queen Mum run the codon analysis program that Joaquin had written long ago for Stark’s benefit.

  Though he had little hope of gleaning anything useful, Stark opened the full genomes. He couldn’t gather much from them, but he could see one thing: no natural redundancies. As Muñoz had said, there was no so-called junk DNA. The structures of the new dengue viruses were delicate and far more fragile than natural dengue, twin demons made of crystal. He also saw how the viruses could be mistaken for natural dengue at first, even second glance. Had he not known to look for the absence of junk DNA, Stark would have assumed they were dengue-2 and dengue-4. They were intentionally designed to elicit debate, so that virologists, pathologists, and field epidemiologists would argue over the viruses’ structure and behavior, giving the swift killer a few more precious hours to spread.

  The viruses were weapons, and not just an amateur bioweapon like anthrax or smallpox. Whoever designed them knew all the shortcuts that public-health officials might take in a frightening outbreak. Someone intended to exploit harried doctors who would rely on skimped genomes and initial symptoms for diagnosis. Whoever had let slip these twin dogs of war knew that the ensuing debate would center on vectors and spraying for mosquitoes, because that was the logical response to a dengue outbreak. This wasn’t merely an attack on Mexico. It was an attack on modern medicine.

  Rosangelica turned to Stark, and said from her chair, “Almena. Punditry Rejas. Primp. I got something interesting,” she said. “Sullivan was one of me, Stark.”

  “What?” he said, blinking at her.

  “Your gringo in North Carolina,” she said, excited. “Read.”

  Stark pressed the cool glass to his swollen lip, where the gun had hit him, and read from his memboard.

  Madison Frank Sullivan. Marine biologist who had worked for an oil company out of New Delhi before the Sino-Indian War. The poor fellow had just returned from Ascensión via Havana, and the attending physician who wrote the report figured that’s where he must have contracted the disease—Havana.

  “Sufferer of Rodriguez’s aphasia,” the physician noted in his report. The same disorder as Rosangelica’s.

  When he was young, apparently, Sullivan was an international, looking to work for any oil cartel who would hire him. “Ten years ago,” the physician wrote, “Sullivan traveled to Ascensión, seeking to take part in the illegal petrol market, and was one of the first non-Mexicans to get the Connection.”

  Stark looked at the sabihonda, whose eyes were focused on him, really seeing him. “He had the pilone,” she said. “So did his fellows at the University of International Harmony. And the Euros who contracted Big Bonebreaker in Paris? Also pilonistas. In North Carolina and in Paris, both sets of researchers had built networks and most of the users went down with Big Bonebreaker. Those networks crashed just like ours did.”

  Stark pounced on the Ministry of Health’s collated data to see if there was a pattern, sifting through hundreds of reports as fast he could, using twin searchers combing out references to the word pilone.

  But many of the poorest victims were Native Mexicans who didn’t even have homes, let alone a Connection. After an hour of reading, Stark sat back, exhausted.

  “Anything?” Rosangelica said.

  “No. Hard to believe there ain’t a pattern.”

  He turned to her and found the sabihonda staring at him. Not her vacant, metallic stare, but a scrutinizing and angry distrust in her face. “You looked at the genome, too?”

  Stark frowned at her. “Yes.”

  She said, “You didn’t find a pattern?”

  “No.” Stark suddenly read her tone as accusatory. “What? Did you find one?”

  Rosangelica’s hard stare drilled through him. “Did I make a mistake about you, Dr. Stark? Are you what you seem to be?”

  Stark pivoted in his chair to face her. “The hell you talking about?”

  “Hacer. Addling. Shuck. Dormitorio. Primary Big Bonebreaker hospital, the university, just closed. It redlined,” she said. “Secondary is fine for the moment.”

  Stark was offended, wanted to ask what she meant by her comment, why she would suddenly question him. But he turned his attention to the ship of Ascensión that was suddenly listing again in the water. He rubbed his tired eyes. “What’s the first secondary hospital in line?”

  “San José Nacional. It’s across town in southern Ascensión.”

  “It’ll hit capacity within the next twenty-four hours,” said Stark, looking out the window.

  Rosangelica nodded. “That’s what the hospital’s own report says, too.” When Stark didn’t respond, she said, “Do you want to hear more bad news or some good news?”

  The jet faintly vibrated in a calm, meditative hum—he looked back at Rosangelica, unable to discern if anything she said to him was a veiled barb, a lie, or the truth, and wished he had his brain gear and the ever-clunky Queen Mum. “Bad news first.”

  “The national union of nurses and health care workers is demanding that the military turn over its stockpile of omnivalent vaccines.”

  “A military stockpile? Do we have one?” Stark frowned at her.

  “We do, but those stockpiles are for troops in Tejas.”

  “I doubt that’s my call to make, but send my recommendation to meet the union’s demand.”

  The sabihonda swore. “Typical leftist knee-jerk—”

  “What else?” Stark said loudly over her muttering. “That can’t be all the bad news.”

  “It may be, for now. Nanophages that were built upon your Ghana design were dusted over the hot zones an hour ago. No report on efficacy yet, obviously.” Rosangelica took a big bite of tortilla and, with a full mouth, said, “That brings you to the good news. We finally have pathology reports.”

  That was good news but he didn’t like Rosangelica using the first-person plural. “They from Dr. Khushub?”

  “Khushub and Ahwaz,” Rosangelica read. “Sounds like a Muslim comedy act.”

  “They are. Give it to me.”

  She tossed him the memboard with the prelims. Stark thumbed through Isabel’s report, looking for signs of discrimination in the 150 patients whose bloodwork she had analyzed, but he couldn’t spot anything that Bela hadn’t already fingered. All of the patients whose records she studied were capitalinos from various neighborhoods in downtown Ascensión: la zona rosa and el centro histórico, mainly. They ran the spectrum of occupations from priests to photographers to musicians. Various ages. Some Euros and transplanted Americans, even. Some were pilonistas, some weren’t.

  Just as Stark had determined: no pattern. The only thing they had in common was they all tested positive for both dengue-5 and dengue-6 and had died from massive hemorrhaging.

  Pedro Muñoz’s assertion that virologists all toyed with the idea of creating the “perfect virus” had Stark trying to guess what sort of bioweapon this really was. In the abstract, it made sense to wetcode two dengue serotypes—one to prime the population, the next to wipe it out fast—but there were easier ways to do it.

  Maybe the attacker ain’t really concerned with killing lots of people. Maybe that just a by-product of another aim altogether. If that was true, then maybe this wasn’t a strictly military maneuver, or an act of terrorism, at all.

  Stark stood and walked to the wet bar for a refill, following that thought for a drink. Attacking innocents was chaotic and
unstrategic. Not exactly the profile of a military attack. A random bomb in a market would kill everyone within a certain radius, but this wasn’t like that, either. Some people seemingly within Big Bonebreaker’s radius survived: UnConnected Mexicans had died of Big Bonebreaker, as had Euros and other non-Mexicans. Stark uncapped the whiskey and poured himself a tall one, dropping ice in after the liquor.

  Stark was an epidemiologist, a numbers man, but he figured he had to start thinking like a sleuth, because this was proving to be a nuanced and well-plotted homicide. Stark had the murder weapon: two strains of stripped-down dengue, and he assumed that Isabel Khushub or Jarum Ahwaz would eventually find a fingerprint on them, a genetic marker of some kind that would lead them to a specific lab or corporation. But for Stark, despite the fact that he had nearly three thousand bodies, the question was: Who is the killer after?

  Stark looked out the window. The pilone, perhaps, figured in, but he couldn’t see how at the moment, and so did an as-yet-unknown factor of being Mexican, since the disease raged here, but guttered everywhere else on the planet. But what could it be? Mexico was one of the most heterogeneous populations in the world. With no immediate plan for this outbreak visible—something that had never happened to him as an epidemiologist—Stark now felt like the absurd squire Sancho at the end of the great Mexican opera El Quijote, trying to find his way in the mad knight’s upside-down world of distorted mirrors and no exits.

  In the far pool of light, Stark could see the jagged pilone scars on the temples of the backgammon players. The cyborg sat stuffing her gaunt face with tortillas, whispering her nonsensical satellite language, her silver stare glinting in the overhead light. The screen before Stark flashed images of a skytank covering troops along the Guadalupe River.

  The dice fell. The player, a gun bulging beneath his jacket, counted out his move in deliberate taps. Triumphant, he doubled up his opponent.

  “Uva. This. Rejuvenate. On,” said the cyborg.

  MONDAY, MAY 16. 8:16 P.M.