The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  “I’m going to tour the perimeter clinics after I’m done here,” he lied.

  “Oh? Do you need me with you?”

  “No,” Stark said. “I don’t. But I need to ask you something before I go.”

  Rosangelica sat forward and brushed her hair back from her forehead, revealing the ripples of subcutaneous wiring rooted beneath her hairline and worming toward her eyes.

  Stark unstuck his clamp mask from his face, let it dangle while he sipped his coffee. “I need you to get the classified patient records out of Zapata Hospital.”

  “Me?” She frowned in bewilderment. “You know I can’t get those records until the hot zone is secure.”

  “I heard El Jefe say that, yes. But I’m testing a theory,” Stark said.

  Rosangelica seemed ready to sit back in her chair, then rocked forward again, as if she couldn’t decide whether to take Stark seriously or not. Her eyebrows made a shallow V over the bridge of her long nose. “Those records aren’t accessible by satellite. I couldn’t get them even if I wanted to break the law.”

  “OK.” Stark wiped coffee from his upper lip. “That proves part of my theory.”

  Rosangelica looked at him from under her eyebrows. “What the hell is your theory?”

  Stark took another coy sip of coffee and decided he could now push the sabihonda a little harder. “I didn’t think you could get me the info or you already would have done it.”

  “Oh really? Your theory has a hole in it.” Rosangelica picked up her coffee and set it back down again. “It presumes I would defy a Holy Renaissance imperative.”

  “No. My theory is that you make Holy Renaissance imperatives. Or at least you make your own, which would explain what you were doing in that Bastrop jail cell,” said Stark. Before she could contradict him, he unsnapped his lugall and slipped a memboard out, then hastily shut the valise again. “Here’s the thing, Rosangelica. I’ve done everything I can do to stop this outbreak without a dossier on patient zero. I need someone to go down to Zapata and get it for me.”

  Rosangelica’s head snapped back in surprise. “And you think I’ll volunteer? No way. The riskiest thing I plan to do today is sip this coffee at a sin piel and double my bet on Los Capitalinos down there,” she said, jerking her thumb toward the soccer match below. Then she took a pensive breath, and said, “I won’t go until the black letter on Zapata is lifted, anyway. It’s against the law.”

  “Mexican law is irrelevant to me, Rosangelica. And it doesn’t seem to apply to you at all.”

  “Let me put it another way,” said Rosangelica. “Entering Zapata is against the wishes of those in power.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Stark, setting down his cup, ready to press his case. “Who is in control of this situation, Rosangelica? And what do they want? Their wishes do not include stopping the outbreak, apparently.”

  “Yes, they do, actually.”

  Stark picked up his cup and sipped. “So tell me what’s happening, Rosangelica. Is Orbegón insane? I can’t think of another reason for keeping those records sealed.”

  Rosangelica’s long hair, worn loose today, almost made her look normal as it fell over the distortions on her brow and temples. Her voice, however, was all sabihonda, full of intimidation and venom. “He has kept them sealed in the interests of national security. Cazador explained that to you. I’m not at all pleased that the Task Force coordinator has taken an interest in Mexico’s national security.”

  She wasn’t going to bite on going to Zapata, but Stark kept baiting her for his backup plan. “And you won’t violate national security? Even if I ask you to? Right?”

  “Of course not,” she said with a wary frown.

  “Of course not. Your job is protecting national security, right? And I’m willing to wager that you have a great deal of license in carrying out that job.”

  Rosangelica leaned forward again, ignoring her coffee, eyes drilling into Stark’s. “You know I have an aunt who plays guitar, Doctor?”

  “Pardon me?” said Stark.

  “An idiom. It means, what the fuck does this have to do with anything?” Rosangelica spread her hands. “Where are you going with this moronic theory of yours?”

  “Let me tell you my moronic theory. My theory about how the virus is spreading, that is.”

  She put her fingertips on her mug. “I thought Ahwaz and Khushub already determined how the virus spreads.”

  “They determined tropism, yes, what the virus hunts. I’m doing the epidemiological work. How the epidemic physically communicates from person to person. Look at this.” He laid the memboard on the table and called up the spreadsheet showing admission times for all the infected patients with mouth pustules. “My theory says that Generation One patients form pustules around the mouth. As you can see, all the earliest patients developed this symptom. No others did.”

  Rosangelica read for a moment. Nodded. Then shook her head. “Generation One? What’s that?”

  “Generation One means Joaquin Delgado. It’s like his fingerprint on a dead body. Generation One means that the person caught the disease straight from whatever means Joaquin Delgado used to deliver his viruses.”

  Rosangelica’s face blanched as she read the spreadsheet a second time. “You have a trail to follow?”

  “Yes, I do,” Stark said, then tapped open a searcher saying, “Basilica. Domenica.”

  The spreadsheet filtered out some of the later patients, but the majority remained.

  Rosangelica looked as if Stark had just showed her tea leaves. “I don’t get it. What’s this mean?”

  “All the patients listed here,” Stark said, pointing at the list of earliest Big Bonebreaker patients from Clinica del Norte, “were either at Sister Domenica’s mass on the fourteenth or at her Basilica sermon on the fifteenth. I think it means that not only was Joaquin here, in Mexico, but he was targeting the nun.”

  Rosangelica couldn’t keep her jaw from slackening. “He was here?”

  “That’s my theory.”

  “You and your damn theories,” she said. She looked down at the memboard as if reading, but Stark could see he had played to her outrage perfectly. She had a lingering distrust of Stark, obviously, but the mere mention of Joaquin Delgado was working on her resistance beautifully. Just when he was about to prod her a bit further, Rosangelica said, “OK, Estarque, you have my attention. How do we prove he was following the nun?”

  Stark wasn’t quite convinced he had dazzled her with enough medical statistics to make his pitch, but it was now or never, he figured. “The high, nonvirus mortality rate is messing me up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The fighting between the Holy Renaissance troops and the insurgents.”

  “I see.” He could tell she was struggling to keep up with him.

  “I can’t tell for certain who is dying of what, Rosangelica. We need to clear away the fighting if we’re going to determine where and how Joaquin was spreading the disease.”

  “You need the uprising in the hot zone to stop.”

  He had her by the gills now. “I need the conflict in the hot zone to end, yes. I need you to stop the fighting.”

  Rosangelica’s eyes went cold with disbelief. “What? Me? I have no control over that,” she said. Then she sneered. “Las indígenas have been fighting the Mexican government for decades, centuries. And now they’re backed by cash and clout from abroad. I may have powerful connections, Stark, but I can’t just—”

  “I want to find this Sister Domenica and have her transmit a message of truce to the city,” Stark said, pointing at the terrace floor. “From here. From La Alta where she can show the city her commitment to unity. Once she does that, I want to hit this town with everything we have—empty the supplies of any vaccine that has a prayer of working and flood the streets with every medical worker we have. We have to clear away the dust so that we can find Joaquin’s trail, or this virus is going to keep spreading.” It was such a good plan, Stark
almost believed what he was saying for a moment.

  Rosangelica scrutinized Stark, seemingly impressed with him. “Whose side are you on, Estarque? Tell me true. Los Hijos de Marcos seem more like your match politically than the Holy Renaissance.” She paused and narrowed her eyes at him. “Some say your being here is a security risk. People think you’re here to garner some legitimacy for Los Hijos.”

  With firm anger in his voice, Stark said, “I don’t help anyone wage war. Run a check on my farm sometime. You’ll know what I am by seeing where I come from.”

  “I know. The little co-op towns in the Midwest are little hotbeds of liberalism,” Rosangelica said. “Land Reform and democratic control of capital. Sounds like Los Hijos’s agenda to me.”

  Stark longed for a time when the key cooperative principle of one person, one vote wasn’t considered radical. Democracy was messy and complex, but it was exactly what this paranoid country needed. “You have to overcome that thinking if my plan is going to work, Rosangelica,” he said. “We have to find Domenica, and both she and the Holy Renaissance must come together to create peace in the capital, because peace equals public health for Mexico. It’s that simple.”

  Rosangelica closed her eyes for a moment and thought out loud. “It wouldn’t embarrass the Holy Renaissance to woo Domenica back into the fold, as it were. Maybe you’re onto something there. It might even help Emil internationally.” Rosangelica went aphasic for a moment, whispering “gatos” over and over. Then her eyes cleared and she looked at Stark with new appreciation. “So you think I have the power necessary to convince the President for Life to extend an olive branch to the nun. That’s your theory, eh?” She smiled. “It’s a pretty good theory.”

  Oh my God, Stark thought. I right about her. This woman controlled Mexican war drones on the Guadalupe River, policy regarding political enemies in Ascensión, maybe the Holy Renaissance itself, for all he knew. Was she really going to make this happen? The red herring he was offering her was turning into a real course of action—and maybe a good one. He kept pressing. “But for any of this to work, you have to find Domenica so that I can convince her to come to La Alta.”

  “You? You’ll convince her?” Rosangelica laughed.

  “Yes,” Stark said. “It has to be me. She won’t trust anyone from the Holy Renaissance.”

  “I’m not a public face. She might trust me.”

  Stark swallowed his fear that the sabihonda would simply kill the dissident nun given the chance. “Do you want to try?”

  “No, I think you’re right. I think you and I should try to find the nun together and you should do the talking. The servicio sagrado has a pretty good idea of which neighborhood she’s in, but she keeps moving. Maybe I should find out what they know and pinpoint her.”

  “But if the servicio sagrado finds out—”

  Rosangelica blinked a slow, reassuring blink. “Don’t worry. They’ll never find out what I’m up to.”

  “Then you’ll do it?”

  “It’s better than any plan currently before Emil. With the pilone down, the Blues are massing faster than we are on the Tejas border. The Minister of Defense will support this,” said Rosangelica. “But tell me, did you ask Cazador to offer clemency to Domenica and he turned you down?”

  “No, I didn’t want to waste any more time, so I came straight to the true power source.”

  Rosangelica seemed ready to contradict him, frowning and shaking her head almost shyly. But then she turned the corners of her mouth down and her eyes sparked. “OK, Estarque. OK.” She stood up. “Where can I find you in, say, two hours?”

  Two hours. Perfect. “I’ll be on my way back from the perimeter clinic,” he lied again.

  “I’ll call you on your phone.”

  Stark watched her out of the corner of his eye as she stood, finished her coffee, and got into an elevator.

  Fleetingly he wondered if Rosangelica really could get Sister Domenica into Torre Cuauhtémoc. That would certainly be some sweet icing on the elaborate cake he was baking. But for now, all he needed was this brief time without Rosangelica breathing down his neck.

  And perhaps best of all, she didn’t seem to know about the resurrection of Pedro Muñoz—let alone his new position working the sentry lab in Torre Cuauhtémoc.

  When the elevator doors closed and Rosangelica had disappeared, Stark grabbed his lugall and dashed to the nearest bathroom, located between the decks of two sin piel cafés. He removed his Racal suit from the lugall, fitted the neck ring and hastily shimmied into the legs, and clamped the helmet over his head. Then he grabbed his lugall, filled with memboards and a couple push packs of omnivalent vaccine, and ran as fast as he could in his cumbersome suit to the nearest docking bay.

  He had two hours without fear of Rosangelica’s interference.

  “My ID chip,” Stark said, handing it to the nearest dockworker. “I need a barco.”

  The dockworker scanned Stark’s chip into his memboard. “American? Max clearance. Caramba,” he sneered, leading Stark to a queue of red-and-black skyboats. “You don’t know how to drive one of these, do you?”

  “Um.” Stark glanced down the line of bulbous vehicles, intimidated by the memory of one hitting the Texas highway at high velocity. “Really, I’d rather have a skycycle,” he said. At least his one adventure on a ‘cycle hadn’t ended in a twisted heap. “I just need to get to Torre Juárez.”

  The man pointed to the far end of the docking bay. “There’s one down there beyond the line of barcos. Keep the speed up on that one. It likes to stall in updrafts.”

  Stark got on the ’cycle that the dockworker indicated, then revved it up. He waited for his bay’s green light, then, when no one else departed, he rolled the ’cycle forward with care, down the ramp, and off into the great gulf of air outside Torre Cuauhtémoc.

  FRIDAY, MAY 20. 12:51 P.M.

  STARK SKIMMED OVER the rooftops of La Baja Ciudad on his skycycle, noting that no stoplights were lit below, no business signs blinked with old-fashioned neon charm, and no music (so prevalent in La Alta above) throbbed from street-corner sound pods. The only sound was his bike roaring over the empty desolation of a noncity

  Even without the riot’s destruction, the streets surrounding the National Square, the destroyed cathedral, and Zapata Hospital were in rapid urban decay. Façades of warehouses crumbled, and famous streets—Paseo de la Reforma, San Juan de Letran, and Balderas—coursed through neighborhoods that looked more like third-world slums than the streets of the richest city on the planet.

  But the richest city on the planet, Stark reminded himself, towered overhead. Down here, old Mexico remained.

  Stark eased the ’cycle over Venezuela Avenue in dips and stalls, flying it like a badly made paper airplane. This skycycle, unlike the People’s Army of East Texas’s, had Mexico’s locust-eye override, which kept the rider from making the kinds of fatal navigation errors that Stark was making. Based on the eye-brain connection in locusts, which kept the insects from smacking into each other in a swarm, the skycycle’s “eye” saw and responded to dangers thousands of times more quickly than Stark’s unwieldy brain ever could. So even though Stark should have somersaulted down the avenue in a fiery, disfiguring crash, instead, the ’cycle corrected his landing angle, applied a jet of airbrakes, and a heartbeat later, he was rolling down the empty street toward Zapata Hospital.

  He found an abandoned convenience store near the hospital campus to hide his ’cycle, even though he had seen no one on the streets other than a staggering line of flagellants near the National Square. He killed the engine and collapsed the wings so that they folded neatly against the side of the bike. Then he rolled it into the completely looted store and, after removing his lugall, positioned the cycle behind an overturned shelf.

  Zapata Hospital, a six-story white-concrete cube, was just down the street, glowing in the midday sun like a block of ice refusing to melt. Stark walked toward it beneath the tattered awnings of deserted buildings, not for t
he shade but for the cover. The silence was ominous, he felt naked and obvious, walking down this empty street in his antiviral helmet and suit, and he didn’t like the idea of anyone watching him enter the hospital. As he inched closer to Zapata, he could see that its atrium, a large, open reception area whose glass walls had all been shattered in the rioting, was exposed. Fire had gutted the entrance, and carcasses of furniture and toppled palm trees hunkered in the center. Stark looked up and down Venezuela Avenue, then crossed the street. Peering into the shadowy hospital, he clambered into the atrium, the boots of his Racal suit crunching glass and the bones of burned ceiling tiles.

  He went to the reception desk, which had a counter and an enclosed office behind it, assuming that the records and other data he needed would be accessible from here. But just as he feared, the computer had been immolated. Stark leaned into the little office adjacent to the desk and found another computer, but its monitor was smashed and the main drive had been cracked open. Bullet holes perforated the wall behind it.

  Stark put his lugall on the reception desk and opened it. He took out his map of Zapata’s floor plan, tapping the edge. “Backup computers,” he said. The sound of his own voice, loud in his fishbowl helmet, made him jump. Immediately, a route traced across the surface of the memboard, from the atrium, through the hallways in a red line that bent this way and that in right angles, then ended in a star on the second floor: COMPUTER LABORATORIES, read the memboard. Stark oriented himself. The hallway he needed was on the other side of the burned-furniture mountain. He took one last look at the sunny street and the gutted convenience store where he had hidden his skycycle. Then he turned away and walked into the hospital’s dark hallway.

  Ten steps into Zapata’s darkness, Stark was nearly blind. No windows or open doors offered any light in this hallway nothing but the dim wash of light in the reception area behind him. He’d been foolish not to find a flashlight before fleeing La Alta to come here, and he was reminded of what his grandfather had said to him, leaning out of the milk truck window. Don’t jump into the middle of anything and bullshit your way out, like you usually do.