The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  “You’ve been in the hot zone all this time?”

  Muñoz nodded solemnly, pushing his empty glass at him.

  Stark refilled. “How did you get up here?”

  “Let’s just say you have some security holes in your perimeter clinic.”

  “Goddamn hallelujah,” Stark said in English. Then in Spanish, “Thank God.”

  Muñoz cracked a smile finally. “To their credit, Clinic Number Three on your perimeter identified me as immune and asked if I’d be part of a study.”

  “As ordered.”

  “They bought me a ticket upstairs, dosed me with a tet and an omni, then I swooped up,” he said, scotch loosening him a bit, “joined a line of flagellants long enough to get that hood, then risked a boost up into the Cloister.”

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “I asked who was heading up the Task Force and a nurse told me. I already knew where VIPs stayed in Cuauhtémoc.”

  “A nurse?” Stark said. “It was supposed to be highly sensitive info that I was here. Black letter. Top secret.”

  Muñoz laughed at Stark. “Please. The Holy Renaissance? They couldn’t keep Diego Alejandro’s death a secret. I mean, I heard that one down in La Baja.”

  Stark’s joy sputtered and went out, staring at Muñoz and realizing that the young doctor wasn’t kidding. Stark had been sending angry notes to Diego’s address for three days, demanding a meeting, or at the very least an explanation of his behavior at the beginning of the outbreak. “What?” he said. “Diego?”

  “Yeah,” Muñoz said. “I heard he was ‘promoted.’ Everyone in Mexico knows what that means.”

  Stark felt dim and gullible. Maybe he was, but none of the Mexicans working side by side with Stark had bothered to explain it. Too many other deaths to worry about, perhaps. Stark didn’t think he could take any more terrible news this day. He stood and walked into the living room, where the view of La Baja at night showed that grids in distant sections of the city were finally lighting up whole neighborhoods.

  “Oh,” Muñoz said to Stark’s back, “you didn’t know.”

  Stark couldn’t deny it. His first thought had been to call Joaquin to tell him about their friend. He put a finger to his injured lip. “No.”

  “I figured—” Muñoz stood and brought Stark his drink after topping it off. “Sorry, Dr. Stark.”

  “Forget it.” Stark made a hand gesture like he was waving traffic past him, then took the scotch. “Call me Henry David.”

  Muñoz raised his glass. “Here’s to survival.”

  Just twenty minutes ago, he would have sneered if anyone proposed a toast like that. But it sounded like a possibility, now, looking at Muñoz in his filthy trench coat and soot-smeared face. “Absolutely. Salud.”

  “Salud,” Muñoz said. He took in the room for a moment, casting his eyes about, maybe looking for something, or maybe hoping that something he feared wasn’t there. “Look, I’m risking a lot being here. But I came because I have something to tell you,” Muñoz said. “There’s something that I saw in the hot zone.”

  Stark took a long pull on his scotch. He knew he would have to face what was happening in La Baja eventually. The pyres. The street fighting. The complete lack of public health inside the barricaded hot zones. “What did you see?”

  “I’ve been hauling bodies and treating infected people down there for four days. I’m no pathologist or geneticist, but there’s a symptom I haven’t seen since Saturday night,” Muñoz said, “when the first patients started arriving at Zapata. It changed on Sunday, the symptom did. It stopped appearing in new arrivals.”

  Stark’s heart hammered, suddenly aware that he had the doctor who’d been on the dengue case long before Diego Alejandro slapped a quarantine on the hospital’s records. “Tell me. What was it?”

  “I saw mouth pustules on a body just last night.”

  Stark’s lips parted slowly. “I heard about pustules on my flight. Cristóbal wrote about them.”

  “Right.” Muñoz seemed relieved that Stark understood the significance, and he became less wild-eyed. “Your people in the clinics may not note the symptom if they haven’t been told to look for it. All I’m going on is Cristóbal’s speculation that mouth pustules might be a symptom helpful in identifying patient zero.”

  The hell? Stark thought and crossed the room to retrieve his memboard. Why we seeing such early generations now, four days into this thing?

  “Mouth pustules,” he said to his memboard, and like that, he had fifteen pages of notes. “Jesus, I can’t believe it. I had the info right here. I just didn’t know what to ask to find it.” He looked at Muñoz. “I’ve been warring with Cazador for days to let me into Zapata’s records.”

  Muñoz stepped back suddenly, a spooked animal caught in the open. “Cazador?”

  Stark acted casual, hoping to calm Muñoz. “He hired me, Pedro.”

  “How much contact do you have with Cazador?”

  “Pedro,” Stark said, “I’m not going to turn you in. I’m not going to tell him I saw you. Jesus, El Jefe has far bigger things to worry about than what a staff epidemiologist thinks is going on here.”

  This seemed to satisfy Muñoz for a moment, but then his eyes flicked back to Stark, clearly trying to discern if he could trust the American to tell the truth. “Look at Zedillo.”

  “What?”

  “A clinic in the northern part of the city,” Muñoz said, left hand grabbing the right and wringing it. “You don’t need Zapata’s records. Patients were pouring in all over the city. Do you have Zedillo’s records?”

  Stark was glad he finally had a Mexican epidemiologist to speak with, let alone the unique man himself. Stark simply didn’t have the knowledge of Ascensión to dissect the flood of epidemiological data this outbreak was generating. Stark tapped in Muñoz’s suggestion, and there it was. “Jesus, I got info from before noon on Sunday and I didn’t even know it. Look at this. From Clinica del Norte. Patient Father Gasapardo. Age fifty-seven,” Stark read, excited. “Felt sudden sharp pains in his stomach while watching SD. Visibly bloated abdomen. Prob gastritis.” Stark looked at Muñoz. “No, probably massive internal bleeding from DHF onset symptoms. Clinicians.” Then he read the last line. “Mouth pustules.”

  Muñoz spread his hands, There it is.

  “Three patients were admitted to Clinica del Norte in rapid succession, right after Patient Gasapardo was treated. Where is that clinic?”

  “It’s on Calz de los Misterios,” Muñoz said, eyes gazing upward for a second, as though locating the street in his mind, “five blocks south of the Basilica.”

  “The Basilica. Cristóbal’s notes and now these both mention the Basilica.”

  Muñoz stopped wringing his hands. He sat down in the overstuffed burgundy sofa. “Interesting.”

  “Those four appear to be the earliest in the ‘mouth pustule’ category,” Stark read, scanning through his search results. “And yes, two patients expressing mouth pustules had been at the Basilica that morning.”

  “And the other two were at Sister Domenica’s sermon,” Muñoz said.

  Stark stared at Muñoz like he was a magician. “How do you know that?”

  “SD in Gasapardo’s file that you just read.”

  “That schizophrenic nun everyone’s talking about? Sor Demonica?” Stark didn’t understand what Muñoz was getting at. “What’s the connection?”

  “I don’t know,” Muñoz said, walking to Stark’s netmonitor and turning it on. Not surprisingly, there she was—stock footage of her sermon on the slopes of the volcano Popocatépetl. “But that’s Sister Domenica. And she’s connected to everything in this country, it seems. She predicted the volcano’s eruption last year. The flooding in Panama province. Even Big Bonebreaker.”

  Stark recalled watching one of her prophecies on the Dulce jet. She’d given a rather disturbingly accurate description of dengue hemorrhagic fever, though Stark had chalked it up to the coincidence of biblical imag
ery and any calamity. “I saw some of that, yes.”

  “The first patient I saw was a prostitute named Barrientos or Barracon,” Muñoz said, trying to remember. “She was kind of obsessed with Sister Domenica. I presume she must have caught it while attending one of her sermons.”

  Stark watched the nun on-screen—a woman who could have been twenty or fifty. She spoke with charisma, or at least, she obviously had a chemistry with the crowd on that mountainside. Too much Catholic hell and damnation for Stark’s taste.

  Muñoz’s eyes drifted to the netmonitor again. “Did you hear she prophesied that the creator of the virus was a Spaniard?”

  Stark smirked. “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “Hair.” Muñoz laughed at him. “In Mexico we say ‘you’re pulling my hair.’ Anyway, Domenica used the word ‘augmented’ before any medical personnel.”

  “Unbelievable,” Stark said. “That’s Joaquin she’s describing.”

  “Joaquin?”

  “Joaquin Delgado. One of the best wetcoders alive. We know he’s the one who created the viruses,” Stark said.

  Stark looked back at the image of the nun and didn’t look away for some time. Outside his window, the sun set, a bloodred coin falling behind mountains. Stars ignited in the Mexican sky, and Stark’s calla lily lamps lit themselves. Elsewhere in Torre Cuauhtémoc, Stark could hear a band playing the Holy Renaissance anthem, Land of Milk and Honey, complete with congas and meowing trumpets. Screens shuffled forward on the netmonitor showing more stock footage, this time of Domenica walking upstairs to the Capilla del Cerrito.

  “Holy shit,” Stark said, as the rival pope’s new Basilica came into view behind and below Domenica in the shot.

  “She was there,” Muñoz said, spreading his feet, leaning forward. “She was at the Basilica, too.”

  Stark’s vision went black for just a moment. Then he felt as if someone were lifting him by the shoulders. When his sight came back, he was standing in the middle of the living room with a gloved hand upon his brow.

  Muñoz was staring at him from the couch with a worried, confused look on his face.

  “That woman is everywhere. She’s always on the monitors. Always.” Stark flipped up the volume and tapped the monitor’s screen. Windows shuffled and showed a tight close-up of the wide-smiling nun, sitting in a cramped room, whispering into the camera, cruddy lighting. “Joaquin would have been intrigued by her prophecies.” Then, like the sensation he had when Sanjuan told him that the virus targeted an immune response in Native Mexicans, suddenly Stark felt as though a shaft of light were shining on him, as if he were staring into his old teacher’s study and catching glimpses of his secret, profane work in there. I see. Oh, I see it now.

  There was a second, very strategic reason for Joaquin to wetcode a virus that targeted mestizos. Yes, it would unlock the pilone’s Self status in the body, keyed as it was on the mestizo immune response, and spur the immune system to attack the pilone wetware. But also, as a nonmestizo, Joaquin could carry the virus without fear of contracting it. As a Spaniard, he could walk through the streets of Ascensión, infecting people at will, and no one would look twice at him or presume he was a foreigner.

  And dengue. Sí. Perfecto, maestro, Stark thought. Endemic to this region, the virus would appear to be a native, too. Accomplished liars and masters of disguise, Joaquin and his viruses, both.

  The image on the netmonitor showed the nun in full habit with the blue mantle of the Order of Guadalupe. “A Spaniard created this virus,” she was saying on-screen. “A second Cortés has come to Mexico.”

  Stark couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Somehow she knew. She couldn’t possibly know, but she knew. She would have been too much for him to ignore.

  Standing at the netmonitor, Stark hefted his memboard and thumbed up the Cristóbal report again, searching for the section he had read on his way into Ascensión.

  “Nurses at Zedillo Clinic told me that they admitted a steady number of patients with gastritis, stomach ailments, and mouth pustules yesterday, May 14. All of them had been to see Sister Domenica last night and left feeling nauseous.”

  “I’ve been thinking about this outbreak all wrong,” Stark said. “Big Bonebreaker’s pathology might show that the viruses target pilone wetware, but outbreak patterns show who Joaquin was targeting.” Until now, Stark hadn’t allowed himself to project his image of Joaquin into this abomination and couldn’t picture him doing these terrible things. But now Stark could see his reasoning, his cunning, and even his old friend’s blind spots emerging in the epidemiological data.

  “Joaquin is hunting Sister Domenica,” Stark said.

  “You mean he was hunting her.”

  “I mean he is hunting her,” Stark said. “That’s why you saw mouth pustules, Pedro. You were seeing more patient zeros, not just early generations. Joaquin is down there somewhere. Probably looking for Domenica.”

  Muñoz stood next to Stark, looking back and forth between the netmonitor and Stark’s memboard. “He is still here.”

  Stark tapped in a new searcher to his memboard, this one looking for mouth pustules in Mortuary team reports. When several lit up, he highlighted the most recent one. “Tuesday May 17,” Stark read to Muñoz. “Cleanup crews reported to a compromised field clinic and found eighteen corpses, three, notably, with mouth pustules. They discovered that all the patients and staff within had died the day before.” Stark muttered, “That was Monday, then.”

  “The medicos? Dead in their own clinic?” Muñoz said. Then he spread his hands when he got the answer. “Ah. The medicos were the ones with mouth pustules. Right?”

  “Right.” It fits, Stark thought. It all fits Joaquin just so. There were two aspects to the man: the scientist and the Catholic. The attack on this field clinic fit Joaquin’s scientific approach: Disable any medical personnel that get in the way and the hospital where the Dengue Conference takes place; design the virus to look like dengue under the ‘scope and take advantage of the misdiagnosis. All were reflections of Joaquin’s nimble and maneuvering mind. But the other half of the outbreak fit Joaquin the good Catholic: infecting loyal followers of the Holy Renaissance at the rival pope’s Basilica and at the sermons of the disturbingly prophetic nun. She would have perplexed Joaquin deeply, and maybe confounded both the measured and passionate halves of him, set them one against the other.

  Muñoz said, “He was here as recently as yesterday, in the hot zone near the National Square.”

  “A perfect place to hide,” Stark said, looking down at the spray of lights below, “down there, immune among his viruses.”

  “If he’s still here, Stark, you can still capture unmutated virus,” he said. “You can get Generation One.”

  Pedro, you right, Stark thought, looking at him, feeling grateful for the first time in days. “But we can’t just wait around for the right patient to show up.” He could see, clear as an open highway, what the next course of action had to be. He didn’t know what Muñoz had planned for himself now that he’d left the hot zone, but it would be better if he didn’t know what Stark planned to do next.

  “Joaquin might be after Domenica. But I’m more worried about the street fighting,” Stark said, trying to throw Muñoz off the previous train of thought.

  Muñoz smirked. “What’s that got to do with—?”

  “It’s interfering with a decent survey of the viruses’ morbidity rates,” Stark said, letting his voice go cold and brittle. “We’ll have an easier time finding another patient zero if we can quell the uprising in the hot zones.”

  “You didn’t mention that as a concern before,” Muñoz said.

  “This plague is a test for Mexico,” Sister Domenica was saying on-screen, arms spread in a gesture of pleading. “And only a precious few will pass.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Stark could tell that Muñoz was watching him. The skin on Stark’s face felt like a cold, stiff mask as he avoided looking directly at Muñoz. If he met his eyes right now
, Stark would feel too guilty for lying to him—and there was no time for that. I gonna tell you everything later, buddy. Right now, I got to keep some things to myself.

  FRIDAY, MAY 20. 12:16 P.M.

  STARK ASKED ROSANGELICA to meet him at a sin piel café on the Cuauhtémoc rotunda, overlooking the tower’s main shopping district and sports center.

  Sin piels were “no skin” establishments, certified by the Ministry of Health, assuring customers that meals and beverages sold here had been prepared by workers wearing level-four antiviral suits. On the rotunda, there were at least ten such cafés and restaurants. Their balcony-side decks were dotted with expatriated Americans and Persian men in turbans. These days, Mexico had a slightly more foreign look, Stark noted, as he walked from the elevator.

  The sabihonda was seated near the railing of the rotunda’s balcony. Below, a soccer match was under way on a shockingly green field, all the players wearing gloves, faces covered with skintight clamp masks. White sunlight slanted down from frosted-glass ceilings overhead, a pleasant breeze trimmed the air, and the boyishly slim Rosangelica, in her narrow duster and boots, sat in a pool of cool light, sipping espresso, watching the game.

  “Let me get a drink, then I’ll join you,” Stark said, glancing at the field as a cry came up from the thin crowd below. He placed a lugall under her table.

  Stark went to the bar, situated in the middle of the café’s deck. He asked the counter worker for a cappuccino, selected his bottle of water for the coffee and a packet of grounds, then signed the café memboard stating he accepted responsibility for the risk of drinking this coffee. When the cappuccino was prepared, he carried it over to Rosangelica’s table. “Like trying to get data out of Zapata Hospital, ordering a drink in this town.”

  “Very funny.” Rosangelica sipped her espresso. Her clamp mask hung around her neck like an ugly scarf. “What’s with the luggage?”