The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  Stark and Isabel followed in her wake, stepping out into a cobblestone street lined with live oaks and walls painted flat orange, rose, and terracotta, with wrought-iron gates leading in to neighborhood villas. Isabel touched his arm kindly. “I’m sorry, Henry David.”

  He gave a little shrug at her touch, not wanting kindness from her now. “Rosangelica,” Stark said, “are you carbed and Connected?” The meetings with Ofelio Xultan had left the sabihonda as drained as she was in Bastrop.

  Rosangelica daintily dabbed the corner of her mouth. “Compuesto. Opposite. Foto. Topes. I am now.”

  “I’m giving an order to Isabel that I also want you to give to the World Health Organization, the Central Asia Immunological Society, and any other society remotely associated with the International Congress of Immuno—”

  Isabel turned her body as if she meant to tackle him. “What? No, Henry David.”

  “—Congress of Immunology, anyone who was involved in Dr. Khushub’s—”

  “You can’t be serious. No.”

  Stark made a slashing gesture at her. “Bela!”

  Isabel looked saddened at first, then, as blood suffused her cheeks, angry enough to hit.

  Rosangelica looked back and forth between the two, relishing the tension. “What’s going on here, Doctors?”

  Stark knew that shouting at Isabel had changed everything between them, with the colossus of her guilt still hanging in the air. He tried to lighten the mood. “Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking to my cyborg, Bela.”

  “Talking to your cyborg about what?” Rosangelica said.

  “I want all parties involved with Dr. Khushub’s immunological recoding project to resume work—right now.”

  Rosangelica didn’t say anything, but her eyes, with their metallic glint, shifted to take in Isabel’s reaction.

  Isabel was as tall as Stark, so she could look him in the eye, even look down on him if she summoned herself—as she was doing now. “It never worked. Never, Henry David. Not once. Never.”

  “But, Bela, look at where we are and—”

  “Its chances won’t improve under these conditions.”

  “I’m entertaining all ideas,” Stark shouted at her.

  Again, Isabel looked astonished, whipped. “How dare you—”

  “Wait, wait,” Rosangelica said. “Everyone calm down. What are you proposing, Estarque?”

  “Complete recoding of the immune system so it can identify particular pathogens from a supplied matrix of information,” Isabel said, then sighing through her nose to show her disgust. “That’s what Henry David is proposing. It’s a valemadre red herring on which I piss with all my might, but he’s willing to risk it for—for—I don’t know why he’d risk it.”

  “Bela, you just got done saying we were out of options. We have four days. Listen to—”

  “But I never thought in a thousand shit-covered years that you’d consider that.”

  Rosangelica’s rapacious eyes followed the conversation as if she were looking for an opportunity to pounce. When she found her opening, she said, “And what is immunological recoding?” It was a Biology 101 question, so when neither doctor even looked at her: “You won’t explain it to me? Pues, bien,” and lapsed at once into a spate of Rodriguez’s aphasia. “Uncle. Nunca. Noontime. Nadie. Proposed last year. Anoint. Encomienda.”

  “You never really tried it, Isabel,” Stark said over the aphasic mantra. “You don’t know that it wouldn’t work.”

  “All my sims came up negative, every single foquin one, for months upon months!”

  “Scratch. Hache. Riesgo. Whisk. Wetcoding the immune system to improve its disease-fighting capability, right? Creating a matrix of viruses and nanorecoders that would genetically alter all the various immunological systems in the body simultaneously for the purpose of identifying newly emerged pathogens.” Her eyes focused on Isabel. “My God, you and Joaquin Delgado explored that together.”

  Isabel said, “Exactly.”

  “And you both determined it didn’t work,” said the sabihonda.

  “Thank you,” said Isabel, eyes blazing with triumph at Stark. “That’s right, sabihonda. It didn’t. You read who papered my research? Postlethwaite in Kenya and Wong in Detroit. Wetcoding the immune system doesn’t work. I shit on my own dead theory. Twice.”

  “You wrote that your tests killed simulated patients,” Stark said, still yelling. “You said that’s why you never tried it on human subjects, Bela.”

  Isabel gave an astonished laugh. She looked at Rosangelica for support. “Killing the test subjects means it’s time to move on, wouldn’t you say, sabihonda?”

  “Durable. Durango. Ojalá.”

  “I read the notes on your sims last night,” Stark said. “What you and all your peers ignored was—”

  “Why were you reading those?” Isabel shouted. “That son of a thousand syphilitic whores Delgado wrote them, not me!”

  “I know. That’s why I read them,” Stark shouted back.

  Rosangelica stopped babbling in her satellite language and lowered her silver eyes to Stark. “Dr. Khushub is right. I couldn’t find a single paper suggesting anything worth pursuing in the human immune-system-recoding sims.”

  “But look at what Joaquin says here.” Stark hefted his memboard and brought up Isabel’s own files, then shot them to her memboard. Rosangelica went aphasic again in order to follow along. Stark read, “‘The human-recoding sim subjects died of gross hemorrhaging as the old lymph system was destroyed by the new. Augmented T cells were present in sim blood assays, and the desired nanorecoders may indeed have been created which could have recorded the process of differentiation and used to augment other immune systems, but the process destroyed the simulated autoimmune system and its sim human subject.’”

  “All the sim subjects died,” Rosangelica said, face aimed at the nearest windows, reading. “The matrix was a failure because it couldn’t possibly account for every nuance in the vast array of systems and cells employed in the immune system, according to Khushub and Delgado.” Then, as if trying to get through to a crazy person, she said to Stark, “Why are you being such a stubborn ass?”

  “Because it worked! ‘Augmented T-cells were present in sim blood assays, and the desired nanorecoders may indeed have been created’!” Stark shouted, a little spit on his lips. “You calculated a slim chance that the matrix would be successful, Bela, but stopped your research when the hammer came down from your peer reviews.”

  “Henry David, your brain turned to cow shit on that goddamn farm. We couldn’t foquin do it outside of sim,” Isabel said, calm tone belying her scatology “Immune-system recoding isn’t worth the piss of useless dogs.”

  “You never tried it on a live person.”

  Light through the ceiling of rain-washed windows made the street seem submerged, silent as the bottom of the ocean, even as a herd of schoolkids scampered past.

  Rosangelica raised her eyebrows at him. It was a new expression—neither bemused nor curious. Stark realized he had finally shocked the sabihonda.

  Isabel’s angel face looked hot with anger. She was watching Stark, but he had the distinct impression that she was not seeing him. As if he were wearing a mask, Stark could see how it was to be a stranger in her eyes.

  “So,” the sabihonda said, “you would need a human volunteer in order to create this matrix?”

  Stark nodded his head sadly. “I know.”

  “And who would do such a thing? No one,” Isabel said, a knife-edge slitting through her words. “Besides, we’d still need patient zero for the wet-coded T cells to differentiate effectively.”

  Stark knew she was right about patient zero and differentiation but he pressed, nonetheless. “Who would do it?” Stark asked. “A hundred would do it in this country, right, Rosangelica? For La Patria. For Emil the Damned.”

  Rosangelica looked down the long street, seemingly torn between pride and dismay. She sighed. “Good papist Catholics. Passionate humanist
s. Maybe even radical insurgents,” she muttered. “Yes, you could find a hundred volunteers, Estarque.”

  Isabel’s face turned a pale green as she seemed to sense that her brief alliance with Rosangelica was ebbing away. “You can’t be serious.”

  Stark wanted to list all the people he’d spoken with, all the doctors worldwide he’d consulted, all the roadblocks that had been thrown in his path while looking for anything to smother this prairie fire of an outbreak.

  The biggest? he thought, looking sidelong at Rosangelica and recalling his meeting with her and Cazador Mexico itself.

  “Don’t keep pressing me about the Zapata records,” Roberto Cazador had said yesterday, warning Stark with malice.

  They’d met in the Chief of State’s suite. Rosangelica stood spinning a sixteenth-century globe under her finger, while Cazador sat behind his enormous kidney-shaped desk.

  El Jefe sipped coffee, and a cigar was smoldering in a conch-shaped ashtray. “Give us a little more time to secure the hospital,” he said, trying on a warmer voice.

  Stark demanded, “Why? Why won’t you give the Task Force all the information we need?”

  Cazador leaned back in his chair, smoothly revealing the holstered gun beneath his armpit. Roberto was old-style, twentieth-century fascism. He was a fat-cat Chicago ward heeler, a decamisado, a union buster, a Dixiecrat, a neocon, a brown shirt. Cazador, himself, was a one-man outbreak, disappearing indígenas by the thousands. He stared at Stark with a delighted twinkle in his warm, brown eyes. “I absolutely understand how important this is,” he said, still friendly. “The insurgents, Los Hijos de Marcos, own the hot zone around Zapata. They are well armed, they’ve looted the hospital for antiviral protection, and they are emboldened by that radical nun, who has openly joined them. Would you care to organize a mission into the hot zone, Doctor? Hundreds of troops? Equipment? Transporting the wounded and infected?” El Jefe didn’t allow Stark to say yes. “I’ve called up five units from our Ecuadorian army. Dr. Isabel Khushub says that the Ecuadorians cannot contract the disease. Different Indian genetic stock and unConnected to the net. They should arrive within the next three days, and they will secure the centro histórico hot zone and Zapata Hospital for you, Dr. Stark.”

  Stark stepped backward toward the llama-hide chair and lowered his head as he sat, wondering how he could get the Chief of State to see that they didn’t have three days at the rate the viruses were spreading.

  But as he sat, he watched Cazador from beneath his brows, and the Chief of State offered his eyes to the sabihonda, in a questioning, almost beseeching look.

  Jefe Cazador nodded his head once, slightly. See? he seemed to say. It’s taken care of.

  “Henry David,” Isabel was saying, “go ahead. Do it. Maybe you’re right and it’s the only path to pursue. But don’t ask me to do this. Please.”

  The whole situation was surreal to Stark, madly, infuriatingly bizarre. Cazador was deliberately creating a maze that looped Stark back to the same dead ends—no Zapata, no patient zero, no early mutations to work with, no end in sight to the outbreak.

  If I had nothing, that something, but I don’t even got that.

  Stark wondered where Joaquin was right now—a villa in Spain, or maybe he really was in Austria, monitoring his former student’s lack of progress and laughing. Did he pity Stark’s pathetic flailing in the face of the master’s greatest work? “I don’t have time to coddle you, Bela, we need this to start—”

  “Coddle me?” Isabel sneered in revulsion. “You want me to kill? Do you want to sacrifice a human being?”

  All Stark’s disgust for Joaquin, his hatred for being affiliated with the man, came spilling out and spewing over Isabel’s quaint moralism in a gush of sarcasm. “Oh no, I wouldn’t ask you to sacrifice anything, Doctor. I expect you to hang around like a ‘foquin’ lab coat while ten thousand people die. Good? You and Ahwaz can simper and preen over how to name the mutations and whether or not patient zero would help,” Stark said, “and that’s all I’ll ever ask of you again, Bela.”

  Though it was still May, the summer rains had begun, and the high glass windows overhead cast rippling shadows of water over the empty, faux cobblestone street and its line of gates.

  Isabel said in English, “You’re a fucking monster.” She took several long strides, heading toward her rooms down the street, then, over her shoulder she shouted, “Bend yourself over and fuck yourself to death for all I care.”

  They watched her disappear into a gate down the way, as swoop jets and pesero buses sailed past the street’s balcony.

  “Well,” Rosangelica said cheerfully, “I, for one, am impressed, Estarque.”

  Stark ignored her and walked to his apartment, just two gates down from the elevator.

  “Though I think alienating the scientist you need to actually perform the recoding—”

  “Shut up, know-it-all,” Stark said, and subvocalized his password to the gate, sliding inside his apartments, to leave the sabihonda in the dark and silent street outside.

  The apartment that the Ministry of Health provided him was lavish to the extreme. Brandy-colored, seemingly hand-hewn beams of oak. White-marble walls veined with raspberry red. Custom sunlight from any time of day you liked. Stark couldn’t help but gawk when he’d first arrived (“Is that marble? Is that oak?” he’d said in wonder, looking at the ceiling. “It’s plasceron, naco,” Rosangelica had retorted, using the Spanish word for “hick.”) Stark had never been in such a room, let alone while working an outbreak. He was more accustomed to Trexler tents with air pumps breathing jungle heat, or if he was lucky, getting a clean hospital room to sleep in. This apartment had four rooms, a bathroom with a vast Jacuzzi, and a kitchen the size of Nissevalle manor’s—all for one person.

  Stark set his memboard on the kitchen counter. Bela, he thought, already regretting how cold he’d been with her. At least she had sworn at him as she stormed off. It was when Isabel stopped swearing that you knew she’d written you off. Stark poured himself a fat scotch from the fully stocked liquor cabinet. Three days and he was already on his second bottle.

  Just when he’d dropped into the overstuffed chair by the windows looking out at the Valley of Mexico, the gate said to him through the house speaker, “Visitor.”

  “Tell Rosangelica I’m not interested,” Stark told the gate, voice echoing in his glass.

  “The visitor says it is an emergency,” the gate said.

  The monitor, which had been showing images of that nun, Sister Domenica—apparently the only thing that Mexican television showed—flashed a picture of his caller.

  “The hell?” Stark said, sitting forward.

  THURSDAY, MAY 19. 7:19 P.M.

  “WHO ARE YOU?”

  The hooded figure bent close to the gate. “Dr. Stark, please. I’m an old friend. Let me in.”

  His visitor’s face was unidentifiable under the flagellant’s leather mask he or she wore, and the person’s mouth was so close to the gate that the voice squelched in the speaker. If this really was an old friend, Stark couldn’t recognize who it was.

  “Open,” Stark told the outside gate.

  He stood and opened his front door with its noisy particle arrester in place. A moment later, the flagellant appeared—a man he guessed, watching him on his memboard. “Come in.”

  The man walked inside, pausing in the particle arrester. “Thank you, Doctor,” he said, his elbows lifting, letting the vacuum get a good pull on his whole body. “I’ve been looking forward to this moment.”

  Stark stood several feet from the flagellant, but, good God, the smell of him. Soot, gas, and the horrific sweetness of burning flesh. The smell drilled through Stark’s sinuses, right into his memory.

  Sudan.

  The skid-37 outbreak, the smell put him right there again, when he’d built his one and only funeral pyre. Fourteen bodies had needed disposal, but the ground was rock-hard from drought. The sun, relentless. So while flop-eared goats watched from a pen
, Stark and three volunteers piled the corpses and doused them with gas.

  “What do you want?”

  The man reached up and pinched the zipper at his chin and drew it up over his nose and between his eyes.

  Laughter kicked up in Stark, a galloping hysterical roil. “Oh my God.”

  The man tossed the hood-mask onto Stark’s kitchen table. “Is that scotch?”

  Still laughing, Stark handed Pedro Muñoz the glass in his hand.

  Muñoz, dour as winter, looked down at the drink. “Pour me a fresh one, Doctor.”

  Stark couldn’t stop laughing as he pulled the bottle out of the liquor cabinet again, and clinked ice into a clean glass. “Oh, my God.”

  He put the glass down in front of Muñoz as the younger man sat at the kitchen table. The delight and wonder that Stark felt wasn’t mirrored in Muñoz’s haunted expression, though. Something terrible had happened to Muñoz, too terrible for a happy reunion over drinks. The young doctor, urbane yet earnest in their conversations four days ago, now seemed slightly feral, his eyes skittered anxiously and he had the air of prey. Muñoz held the glass of scotch with grave seriousness, pressing his lips together, wary gratitude on his grimy face.

  Nonetheless, Stark felt like a long-lost brother had finally come home, and for a moment, the scaling mortality rate of Big Bonebreaker, Isabel’s betrayal, Joaquin’s phone call fell away. He tried to staunch his laughter, but couldn’t, as he dropped into a chair across from Muñoz. “How,” Stark said, “in the world …?”

  Muñoz ignored him and drank deep. He let out a whoof of air, savoring the burn. “Boy.”

  Stark had a hundred questions, and wanted to loose them all, but if he’d needed a drink after his day, he imagined Muñoz must feel like a man in a desert. He could let the man enjoy his scotch without yapping at him like a hysterical puppy.

  After a few more sips, Muñoz let out a shaky sigh. “Well, that’s a little better.”

  “You were listed as dead, Pedro.”

  Muñoz seemed struck by that thought, amazed. “Good. That’s good,” he said. “You know, the last four days were scary, but nothing like trying to sneak into La Alta just now.” He tilted the glass back until he was kissing ice and closed his eyes in rapture as the cubes touched his mouth.