The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  Domenica barely heard him. Her thoughts were swirling on themselves. So the woman in white was nothing more than the phantom of a broken mind. True? Or was this agent of the Holy Renaissance deliberately trying to misdirect her, encouraging seeds of doubt planted long ago by his Antigua Method? Her hands were trembling in confusion and she felt a quiver in her stomach and throat that said she would either start laughing or crying in a moment. “I can’t help you. I’m not clear. And I—I should go.”

  “No.” Benito stood. He looked at the door where Evangelista had departed. “Wait.” He reached into a pocket beneath his robes, saying, “I’ll go. I came looking for answers about something to which there can be none.” Then he set a small red tube on the wooden table beside his half-eaten bowl of soup and grabbed his memboard. “I’ve upset you and you should rest.”

  She nodded with little tremors of her head, but said nothing, couldn’t look him in the eye. When she heard the door of the refectory shut, Domenica took the red tube, about the length of her finger, and opened it.

  Inside was a hand-rolled cigarette.

  She laughed, astonished, and looked at the door, wanting one last word.

  Old Antonio’s roll, she could tell—no one could roll a cigarette so perfectly—a mate to the one he carried, unlit, always.

  She held the cigarette between her fingers as he did.

  I won’t light this, he’d told the Purépecha elders in council when he first rolled it over a year ago, when the Native Council had decided to seek funds abroad for arming Los Hijos against Orbegón and his Holy Renaissance. But smoking it will be the first thing I do, when the Holy Renaissance falls.

  Unraveling the snarl of implications and possibilities in this situation fueled her to laugh even harder. A turncoat in the ranks of the Holy Renaissance? “I can’t know anything for sure, anymore,” she said through seizing fits. “I just can’t know. Nothing. Anything.”

  Sister Evangelista was suddenly at her side, looking at Domenica, who was laughing hysterically while holding the unlit cigarette.

  Something wet hit Domenica’s hand. She looked down and saw a drop of water. The laughter wasn’t laughter. She was crying fat tears and she hadn’t even realized it.

  Evangelista said, “Come. Let’s get you back to your room, dearest.”

  Domenica could now hear the crowds that overflowed outside the church, hoping to see her. Some were singing Domenica’s favorite hymn, “Go Ye Moneychangers Go.” Some were chanting Aves in unison. Domenica could even hear the snick of flagellants’ whips.

  Domenica watched herself sob in her detached mind’s eye as la jefa led her through rear hallways, away from the crowds hoping to catch a sight of her.

  I am not insane. I know what I know, Domenica told herself, seizing the one thought she could grasp. Hitler. Augmented plague. What the woman in white predicted came true, and I know what I know, she thought, laughing and weeping her way to her dormitory cell.

  Don’t I?

  SUNDAY, MAY 22. 6:21 P.M.

  “HOW LONG WERE YOU stuck in the hot zone, Doctor?” The young woman gave him a concerned frown as she led him toward the labs. With lanky limbs and girly bangs, she had the air of a puppy perpetually glad to be reunited with its owner. “You were really out there, weren’t you? Way out there. I can tell.”

  “Yes, I was out there all right,” the doctor said, following close behind her. They passed doors that looked into old classrooms with desks and chairs cleared out. Chalkboards still bore syllabus adjustments or phrases in Arabic and Chinese. Eight days ago, this was Las Aztecas Community College. Now it was Perimeter Clinic Four.

  “Do you know how long you were ‘out there,’ if you don’t mind me asking?”

  The doctor’s fingertips tingled from the pinpricks given to him in the bloodwork station. “Six or seven days, I think.”

  The orderly flipped her wrist out to the side when she spoke, a little girl’s gesture. “Why were you there?”

  “When the military barriers went up around the hot zone, I was trapped inside,” he said. “I couldn’t get out, so I thought I’d better help the people who were less fortunate than I.”

  “Your tests showed that you’re immune. Did you know that? You couldn’t have known that. I think you’re a very brave man,” the orderly said. She was of indeterminate age—anywhere from eighteen to thirty—though young enough to let awe and attraction mingle without shame. “I could never have done that. Even if I knew I was immune.”

  The doctor noted how the equipment was placed as she led him deeper into the perimeter clinic, analyzing its operation, trying to guess what tasks the administration would ask him to perform. This hallway seemed to be storage for a dormitory. Extra beds were loaded in every classroom. Sheets and pillows. Cleaning supplies. “You would have done it, señorita,” he said. “Your conscience wouldn’t have let you do otherwise.”

  “By the way,” the young woman said, “that ape Santiago back in the bloodwork station didn’t introduce us. My name is Marta Serra.” As they walked, she held out her slim, once-manicured hand. Now the formerly shiny nails were rough and her skin chapped from constant washing.

  The doctor looked down at the bare hand in wonder. “Call me Reynaldo.” He took a deep breath and managed to talk himself out of an irrational urge to slap Marta for not wearing gloves—but there were standards to uphold. “Maybe I’ve been in the hot zone too long, but do orderlies always go without gentex around here?”

  “I know. I’m cheating. But it’s nice to pretend things are back to normal, isn’t it?” said Marta, withdrawing her hand, a sheepish look on her face. “That probably seems horrible after everything you’ve gone through. But we’ve had no new patients this morning. Can you believe it? The Head Epi says we’ll probably stay clean until the next wave hits us in a couple days. We’re lucky. We don’t get it nearly as bad as Perimeter Clinic Eight. What a hellhole that one is. Hey! Listen!”

  Marta stopped walking and turned her face dreamily toward the ceiling. An airy, conjunto tune of accordion and guitars waltzed down the hall from the laboratory.

  “That’s progress,” she said. “¡Radio Bajo!” Marta tapped her temple where Joaquin had noticed the absence of a zigzag scar. “Those of us off the pilone appreciate radio. Someone down on Insurgentes restored the signal. The city is waking up!”

  The conjunto music faded, replaced by a breathy woman’s voice telling Ascensión citizens to avoid the downtown and to attend the inoculation seminars in their neighborhoods. The city is waking up, he thought. But as long as the pilone network stays down, it can’t wake up very quickly. Joaquin folded his gloved hands and followed Marta. His back was healing, sore, but he tried not to let it show as he walked.

  “Here we go. Infirmary Alpha,” she said, opening the door into a gymnasium with four long rows of white beds. “This is where you’ll be working for the next few days. Though, depending on what kind of doctor you are, they might have bigger plans for you.” She smiled at him eagerly. “Have they said?”

  Joaquin paused after entering the infirmary and squinted. Overhead lights lit the room so brightly that he felt as if the crisp, white beds and waxed floors were abrading his eyes. Air conditioners had been removed, and all overhead vents, the seams of the window frames, and various cracks around the room were splattered with a thick, white sealant. It astounded him that this dormitory could exist, just a few blocks from the hot zone where the epidemic reigned in filth and squalor. He pinched his eyes, and they watered under his fingertips.

  Marta let the door swing shut behind them and the radio voice now sounded far away. “What is it?” She put a hand on his shoulder when she noticed his tears.

  Joaquin flinched before he could stop himself.

  “Are you having a reaction to your shots, Doctor?”

  He hated this room but he loved standing here. After smelling nothing but pyre smoke, household bleach, and the stink of his own, self-inflicted wounds for almost a week, this beau
tiful room rendered the very purity he’d wanted from his whip. He’d spent his entire adult life in such order and cleanliness, and he found himself longing for it. “Such a fragile place.”

  “Sit down, Dr. Cruz,” Marta said. “Take it easy for a minute.” She led him to the desk and pulled a chair out for him. “All the beds are made and the lab doesn’t have our materials ready anyway. Please take your mask off. We’re safe in here. Relax.”

  Joaquin sat and peeled off his clamp mask, letting it dangle. He rubbed his brow and brushed back the curly, black locks from his forehead. He hadn’t seen a mirror in days, but he imagined he was grayer than when he arrived in Mexico. Was that plane flight from London just two weeks ago? Joaquin pretended to be emotional, out of sorts. It wasn’t hard. After whipping himself as he had, he was lucky to be alive. He was lucky to have had someone chance across him, the minister who helped him. Joaquin’s back still hurt but he hid the pain and his sore left hand. Joaquin took a measured breath. The desk smelled of coffee in a self-warming cup—stale, slightly burned, and delicious.

  “Are you still hungry, Dr. Cruz? I don’t think the commissary will close for another few minutes, so if you need more to eat, I could—”

  “No, I’m full, thank you, señorita. The fresh bread you gave me was—it was—” Joaquin couldn’t speak as he remembered the warmth of the crust dissolving in his mouth. “Is there coffee?”

  She opened the filing cabinet and pulled out a capped mug for him. The mug was slightly warm and he cupped his hands around it. He pried off the lid with his good hand and sipped. His first coffee in many days. A bitter, plunging taste. He shut his eyes.

  “Hard to believe what this place might look like if a new wave of infections hits,” Marta said, glancing around the dormitory. “Hope the lab certifies us soon.”

  Joaquin opened his eyes. The infirmary did have the air of calm before battle. Ten-gallon water dispensers sat by each bed. A phalanx of stainless-steel carts was loaded down with swabs, alcohol, antiviral wipes, red-lined plastic garbage cans for bio-waste, blue spray guns of tetravalent vaccines and painkillers. And every bed sat neatly made with folded corners and black restraining straps dangling on the floor. Joaquin said, “What is the laboratory bringing us that we don’t already have?”

  “These are going to be early, stage-one patients,” said Marta, nodding toward the beds. “No bloody patients at first, just those with fever and seizures. They’ll move our team out and bring in a hazardous-waste team once the unit advances to stage-two—hemorrhaging.” Marta shuddered. “Then Mortuary comes in after that. We rotate with three other infirmaries in this Clinic. Hard to believe this was a mortuary two days ago, huh?” She let the clean silence speak for itself. “Our job is to tend to patients and look for the ones with mouth pustules.”

  Joaquin stiffened. “Why?”

  “I guess that’s a sign of Generation One dengue-5. We’ll use those blood spinners to isolate the virus if we find mouth pustules.” She pointed to a bank of pheresis machines, not unlike standard viral assays, though Joaquin did not recognize the model. “The lab is bringing us a new kind of genosorbent that can help us—I mean, you—take instant DNA readings.”

  Though he was mostly angry and frightened hearing all this, Joaquin had to admit he was impressed, too. This was not the response he was expecting to see once he’d weaseled into a perimeter clinic. This was much more innovative, much riskier—tailoring new tools for the outbreak. Genetic analyzers right in the clinics? A cunning breakthrough. This wasn’t the steady, stalwart approach Cristóbal might have taken, nor would the Mexican National Institute approve using untested gadgetry No, this was way too radical for Mexico, which expected immediate and incontrovertible results for its solid peso.

  If Henry David weren’t literally attached to the Central Command in Wisconsin, Joaquin might have thought it was Stark. But that wasn’t likely. Mexico ain’t inviting me, Stark had said. Won’t neither.

  “I’m not familiar with those,” Joaquin said, indicating the new pheresis machines with a nod.

  She glanced at the cleft in his chin as she spoke. “You wouldn’t be. They’re new.”

  “Really? How new?”

  “They just came in two days ago.” Marta beamed, as if she had thrown them together herself. “Dr. Ahwaz and Dr. Khushub refitted them. It makes their work of creating virus hunters a lot easier. They can wetcode one in a single day, thanks to those dogs. Can you believe that?”

  They’re wetcoding nanophages in a single day? A single day? A single day? Joaquin’s eyes burned with fury and envy as he stared at the assays beneath the raised basketball backboard, each with a pair of circular spin chambers, making them look like a line of giant mechanical owls staring back at him. He forced himself to stop thinking about smashing the machines and destroying this clinic. “Isn’t that just amazing?” Joaquin whispered. When he was an undergraduate, it sometimes took months, years to isolate viruses effectively. Now dingbat Marta can do it in minutes. “Will they use that on my blood test, too?”

  “No, they didn’t find measurable antibodies, remember?” She laughed. “You’re white as the rest of us.”

  “Oh right, of course,” Joaquin said. Despite this advance, public health officials would always be reliant on old-fashioned immune-system assays to detect the actual, initial presence of a virus. And since he was immune to his own disease, they’d found only traces of antidengue white cells—circumstantial evidence of the army hidden in his blood.

  “But I heard things aren’t going well,” Marta said. “We’re at sixty-nine hundred dead, but the Task Force is expecting an even bigger spike tomorrow or the day after.”

  Joaquin studied Marta closely. “How do you know that?”

  Marta said, “Dr. Khushub said so when she showed us how the spinners work. She’s trying to create a ’phage that will stop the next wave of infections.”

  Isabel? Joaquin couldn’t picture her here, not in the field clinics he saw down in La Baja. No. She wouldn’t be in La Baja, that was for certain. She must feel very safe wherever she is, or that obnoxious diva would have fled town days ago. Isabel was most certainly high above, in the paradise of La Alta, in Torre Cuauhtémoc and the Federal Cloister. Along with the Ministry of Health. Along with that Malinche Domenica.

  At the thought of the nun, Joaquin glanced around the infirmary looking for a netmonitor, as if Domenica might be here, looking over his shoulder. The nun. The insidious nun. “So why are we taking instant genomic reads, Marta, if mouth pustules tell us all we need to know?”

  She shrugged. “They want genetic prints of the oldest viruses they can find.” Marta put her feet up, resting them on the corner of a white bed. “The first ones. That’s what they want. The generation closest to the terrorist’s blood. They say there’s a reward for the person who isolates the generation of virus that he needs.” She winked at Joaquin. “Want to bet that I’m the one who puts it into a blood spinner first?”

  Joaquin smiled at her cuttingly. They know the virus’s primary source is here, he thought. I can’t let my children loose haphazardly anymore. He tugged at his gloves, grateful for the first time for their protection. They may even know it’s me.

  Just then, the infirmary doors swung open, and Marta immediately turned her back so that she could scoop on gloves from the desk’s dispenser. A tiny woman strode into the infirmary, wearing an abbreviated Racal suit—particle-arresting clamp mask, small tanks on her back, and a plastic shirt with belt lock. Behind her were two men and two women carrying ALHEPAs for the gymnasium doors. Joaquin stood as if he’d been caught picking a lock.

  “Ai, Marta,” the woman wearing the Racalito suit said. “You’re on report. If I see you without gloves again, I’m knocking you down to Mortuary. Now get down to the blood station for a full round.”

  Marta spun and showed the woman her gloved hands. “I’ve got them on, Dr. Garcia!”

  “Go. And get back up here as soon as they pass you,” Garcia
said. She gave Joaquin such a stiff look, he almost stepped backwards. “What are you doing in here?”

  “I’m—” He had to catch himself. This woman with heavy eyebrows and a faint moustache had the presence of a nun, and Joaquin’s first reaction was to tell her his full Catholic name. “I’m Dr. Reynaldo Cruz, ma’am.”

  For such a stern woman, her smile was rewarding and bright. “Oh, Dr. Hot Zone, yes. I’m the head physician, Dr. Filomena Garcia de la Costa,” Garcia said. “We don’t shake hands in Perimeter Clinic Four, but allow me to say, I’m proud to have you on my team, sir.”

  Joaquin’s breath came back to him. “Thank you. That’s kind of you.”

  She barely paused for him to speak before continuing. “When I found out that you had survived in there a week, I told Central Staffing, ‘I want Dr. Cruz.’” She turned to the four men and women lounging in the doorway. “Get the locks in place, niños. Let’s start pumping all this polluted air out of here.” She waved Joaquin to follow her out of the infirmary, back into the hallway where Radio Bajo was playing more old time conjunto. They stood in the hallway and spoke while the team of “niños” secured the first particle arrester. “There’s some dissent on the Task Force. First they wanted us to withdraw and bring our team up to La Alta. Then they changed their minds because the other Clinics are starting to fill up again. I want to be ready just in case they ask us to close up shop. What’s your background, Dr. Cruz? They tell me you worked in Zapata but that an army officer saved you.”

  “I didn’t have to ask him or anything. He just—”

  At that moment, the door leading back to the bloodwork station opened and another woman stepped through, wearing a full Racal suit in Holy Renaissance black. “Garcia,” the woman said through the suit’s speaker, “we have patients. Is the infirmary ready?”