The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  “Go ask a doctor, guero. You’re clear. You’re clear. Move it.”

  Stark and Pedro ran past him into the turmoil of the docking bay, where big-gun tanks were nestling into their air cushions and soldiers marched double time, lining up at the various tunnels leading out into the esplanade of the Federal Cloister. Stark looked at the laboratories and sole clinic where the commotion centered, a hive within the hive. “Oh man,” he said, looking at the swarm of bodies between him and the labs.

  “I’m off to find the reprocessed patients,” Muñoz said. He took out the phone and shook it before Stark. “I’ll call you if I find anything.”

  Stark wished him luck, then forced his way into the throng, making for the blood-draw rooms. As he did, he peered into the face shields of helmets around him, examining eyes, looking for the face of Joaquin Delgado.

  TUESDAY, MAY 24. 1:13 P.M.

  “I’M DR. HENRY DAVID STARK. Where’s Dr. de Verano?”

  The phlebotomy station was a mill of white Racal suits, rifles, and pivoting helmets, but through it emerged a woman who seemed grateful to hear Stark’s voice. “I’m here, Doctor!” A woman in clamp mask and gloves shoved herself through the mass of soldiers. “I can’t get in to see Dr. Garcia! They won’t let me see her!”

  “Good. I asked them not to.” Troops continued to pour into the outer chamber of the phlebotomy station and though they wore military septic uniforms, their presence was a danger to the quarantine’s integrity. “We don’t need all these soldiers here,” Stark said to a wall of backs. “Can someone please get them out of—?”

  But his words were just noise in his own helmet. The soldiers were listening to pilone orders, oblivious to the sound of one doctor talking. The room continued to fill with soldiers.

  Stark cranked up the volume on his suit until it squelched like a bullhorn. “All military personnel, out!”

  Helmets and face shields turned in his direction.

  A tall man strode toward Stark as if he meant to knock him down. “Who the hell are you?”

  He was the only military suit in the room not carrying a gun. Officer, Stark figured. “I’m the Task Force Coordinator, and I am here to—”

  “Identification?” The officer held out his hand.

  Stark’s first reaction was to slap the man’s hand away, he was so impatient to get into Garcia’s cell. The patient was safely quarantined, the phlebotomist was ready, and Isabel or Jarum had speculated that Generation One became Generation Two in a matter of hours. “Look,” Stark said, “we don’t have time to play army. I’m—”

  “Identification,” the officer repeated threateningly.

  Slow down, Stark told himself. The virus was mutating, but it would be hours before it reproduced. The response may have been wrong, but, thanks to the pilone network, it had also been swift. Stark had time. Throw this dog a bone and he gonna get out of your way. Stark reached into his back pouch and pulled out his credentials again.

  Inside the officer’s helmet, Stark could see a wide nose, and the man’s thick black moustache contrasted with the white of his coverall’s hood. Glancing at the ID chip, the officer said, “You’re the American?”

  “Only because Mexico’s best were killed nine days ago in Zapata Hospital,” Stark said, defensive.

  “I know,” the officer said. When Stark held out his hand to retrieve his card, the officer made no move to return it. The officer tilted his head back and looked down his wide nose at Stark. “I was at Zapata that night. I’m Captain Ulises Berenguer. I handle Ascensión’s military response to these outbreaks.”

  Stark was about to make his plea for the captain’s help when another throng, a Holy Renaissance entourage, pushed its way into the clogged room. At the center was a figure of great prominence, Stark could tell, by the way the red-and-black uniforms cut a wake through the soldiers.

  Cazador.

  Stark thought, Like a kids’ soccer game here, players all running to the ball. “Stay close to me, Doctor,” Stark told de Verano. “I don’t want to lose you in this crowd.”

  Francisca de Verano stood behind him and put her hand on his shoulder. Stark appreciated the contact.

  “Jefe Cazador,” Stark shouted. “Is that you in there?”

  A speaker-voice answered, “Dr. Stark?”

  Stark bobbed his head back and forth trying to get a look at Cazador.

  “Doctor? Where are you?” The red-and-black septic suits parted and Cazador emerged from his retinue, belly first. “What the hell is going on, Stark? How did this happen?”

  “A lapse in protocol. That’s all I know.”

  Cazador raised his hands as if they were little wings ready to carry his big body away from this crowd. “Why did you call for military up here?”

  “I didn’t,” Stark said. He wanted to hide the fact that someone, maybe Joaquin, had changed the script, but he wasn’t sure how long that could possibly remain hidden in a city full of wetwared people. The great machine of Mexico’s pilone culture had come to life and moved with such terrifying unity of purpose that it might prove, ironically, his greatest obstacle. Stark shut his eyes, quickly recalled the true script, and said, “I called for military in the docking bay but not here, not in the labs.”

  “Do you want all these soldiers here?” Cazador asked, cutting through the explanation.

  “Hell, no.”

  Cazador’s face paled as he accessed his pilone node.

  At once Berenguer spun and shouted for his unit to exit and regroup outside the phlebotomy station.

  Cazador thinned his own retinue down to two people, asking the rest to wait outside with Berenguer. Then, Cazador turned to the room’s quarantine cell and looked through the window at Dr. Garcia. “Is she the only one who was infected?”

  “Dr. Mu—Someone is determining that,” Stark said.

  “I heard she has mouth pustules?” Cazador peered into Garcia’s room. “That means Generation One, I hear?”

  Stark said, “That’s de Verano’s job to find out.” Stark lowered his voice to a deep, serious whisper. “My hope is that Garcia can be our volunteer for the genomic recoding procedure. If she has Generation One and if she consents, we’ll have an excellent chance of creating the lymphocyte we need.” He nodded to Dr. de Verano. “Once she has samples, and if all goes well, we could clone a very effective nanophage within twenty-four hours. A vaccine, too.”

  “I want this to happen,” Cazador said. “You have my total support, Dr. Stark. What do you need from me?”

  Smelling the politically promising whiff of cure, Cazador seemed ready to ignore the breach in protocol regarding the outbreak script. “Stand out of the way and allow de Verano to do her work, Jefe.”

  As Dr. de Verano prepared to enter the quarantine cell, the outer chamber’s ALHEPA hissed again, but when Stark turned, ready to shout at anyone he saw, Rosangelica was standing in the particle arrester. She stood looking at Cazador with a strange expression—furious, maybe fearful, but darkly intense. She ignored Stark so pointedly that he felt certain she was staring at him.

  Stark couldn’t tell what passed between the Jefe and the sabihonda but, like a pressure drop, something in the room changed. Cazador’s posture became rigid. He adjusted the oxygen on his suit and stepped backwards as Rosangelica walked into the room. Then, a heartbeat later, the Jefe’s two-person retinue walked out of the phlebotomy chamber without so much as a look from Cazador.

  “Dr. de Verano?” Rosangelica said to the phlebotomist.

  “I’m Francisca de Verano, señorita.” Francisca met the sabihonda’s gaze then lowered her eyes, not out of respect, but shock.

  “Please excuse us a moment,” Rosangelica said with stiff politeness. “Wait outside, till I call for you.”

  “No,” said Stark, holding de Verano’s arm. “She’s not going anywhere. I need her now in order to take—”

  Rosangelica walked over and broke the contact between Stark and de Verano, then led the phlebotomist to the air lo
ck. “Go.”

  Stark, his voice edging into its upper register, said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m cleaning up after myself,” Rosangelica said. After the doctor left, she turned and began shouting. “Why is an infected patient up here? In La Alta?” Rosangelica pointed to Garcia’s cell, still yelling. “Who gave the order to bring an infected patient here, Dr. Stark?”

  The sabihonda was angrier than he’d ever seen her—scary, out of control angry. He’d wondered briefly if Rosangelica could have changed the protocol at Perimeter Clinic Four. Rosangelica’s loyalties were difficult to parse at times, but ultimately, she was a patriot. She’d do nothing to compromise Orbegón. No, it ain’t Rosangelica who changed the script, Stark thought. His eyes drifted to Garcia, thrashing in the quarantine room. She got Generation One straight from the source.

  It was Joaquin.

  But he couldn’t let that detail out just now. Not with a furious cyborg and a partisan assassin breathing down his neck. Stark swallowed his pride, and said, “It’s the standing Retreat Procedure.”

  Rosangelica seemed surprised, as if she had expected Stark to shirk responsibility. If it weren’t for her metallic eyes, she might have looked heartbroken. “You asked for this?”

  “Stop it, Rosangelica. Let’s move on to the immune-system-recoding procedure,” he said, staring hard at her, forcing her to look at Dr. Garcia, convulsing in the quarantined room.

  Cazador stepped toward Stark, inserting his belly into the conversation. “Explain yourself and let’s get on with this,” he said. “Why bring Garcia to the last clean refuge of Ascensión? You must have a reason.”

  Stark couldn’t explain the change in the outbreak script, not without also explaining that he had never given the order, not without explaining that he had tricked them into befriending Domenica, that he’d been luring a Typhoid Mary toward La Alta without telling them. “We operate by rules. We have to adhere to a plan,” he said. “Now, if you’ll call Dr. de Verano back, we can—”

  “You changed the script, Dr. Stark,” Rosangelica said.

  He felt as though he could hear the virus seroconverting while they argued. “She has mouth pustules,” Stark pleaded, knowing that his credibility had eroded, that anything he said now was only static and noise. He had lied too many times, and although he had lowered the epidemic’s daily mortality rate from thousands to hundreds, all Rosangelica and Cazador would see were the lies. “If she contracted Generation One,” Stark said, nodding to Garcia, “if she consents, we can use her to recode the necessary immune response.”

  “A maneuver that you sought to delay just this morning,” Rosangelica said. “What changed? Why did you change the outbreak script?”

  Cazador seemed about to defend Stark, then stepped backwards, retreating from Rosangelica’s line of sight. Some unspoken pilone debate was still passing between the two, and by Cazador’s flustered air, Rosangelica was winning.

  Stark trembled so that he couldn’t speak without a slight quiver in his voice. “Look.” This was it. Poor Dr. Garcia, body wracked with seizures in the other room, was the endgame. Stark couldn’t lie or plead or scream his way out of this confrontation with Rosangelica. “I admit changing the outbreak script was risky, but it worked. We have the patient we need. Here. Now,” Stark said, wondering when his lies within lies would stop. “We have an opportunity to wipe out these viruses. If we don’t come up with a cure, we’ll be overwhelmed all over again and the virus will mutate completely out of our control.”

  “I think your concern for Mexico is bullshit,” Rosangelica said, using the English word. “Your code is on the protocol change. You brought her here deliberately” Rosangelica said. “You risked infecting the heart and nerve center of Mexico by bringing her into the Federal Cloister. Where the Holy Renaissance is headquartered. Where Emil Orbegón lives.”

  Cazador’s big body turned toward Stark and he peered blankly at him from under heavy lids, seeping hatred and violence.

  As if a tide were rushing from him, carrying Cazador, Garcia, and Joaquin away, Stark stepped toward Rosangelica with hands raised. “Wait. Wait.”

  “He can’t be trusted,” said the sabihonda, passing her hand in front of Stark’s face, wiping him away. “There’s no way to know for sure if anything he says is true. It’s that simple.”

  “Rosangelica, don’t be a fool,” Stark said. “If I wanted to destroy Mexico, I’d have done it days ago.”

  “You have been doing it! You’re doing it now,” she said, her voice nearing a shrill cry. “This was no accident. You did this. You are working with Joaquin Delgado, who is here, in Ascensión, somewhere.”

  It felt like Stark’s stomach was cracking open. She knows. Oh, no, she knows.

  “And you continue to lie for him. You didn’t change that protocol script. That code was changed from Perimeter Clinic Four while you were in the Joint offices with that Judas Pedro Muñoz.”

  Stark lifted his hands, wanting to bury his face in them, but his face shield was in the way. Lying to a sabihonda? He couldn’t lie without a deck of cards in his hand—never no good at it—and now, confronted with his dim, flat-footed lies, he couldn’t begin to fathom his own folly.

  “Is this true, Dr. Stark?” Cazador asked.

  “Of course it’s true. Dr. Delgado changed the outbreak script. Stark let him, and now he’s covering for him.”

  The walls of the lab seemed to constrict around Stark. “No,” he said. I didn’t let him. I ain’t covering. But he felt a stab of guilt, because the sabihonda was right. That’s exactly what he’d done.

  Confronted with his own lies as if he were a microbe on a slide to be analyzed, Stark was exposed even to himself. For there, in the smallest recesses of his hopes, Stark had actually been secretly wishing that Joaquin would get past him and infect this rotten government from the feet of that ridiculous Jesus statue to the crown, Emil the Damned.

  The sabihonda walked over to the outer chamber’s bank of windows and polarized them with a touch, blocking out the view of the barcos, ’cycles, and swarming militarios in the bay. Warm noon sunlight rose in the chamber automatically. She held out her hand. “Give me your gun, Jefe.”

  Another exchange passed silently between them on slow subcortical pilone waves, and Cazador, posture straightening like a man before a firing squad, raised his hand to a pocket in his suit and produced the gun that he had threatened Stark with last week.

  “No. You can’t. You can’t,” Stark said.

  Rosangelica took the gun from Cazador and walked to the antechamber outside Dr. Garcia’s cell. Cazador and Stark had their hands raised as if the sabihonda were robbing them.

  When Stark made a move to stop Rosangelica from opening the door, she aimed the gun in his face until he stepped back. “Rosangelica,” said Stark, wincing with the gun barrel in his eyes. “Yes, I admit it, I lured Joaquin here, but I did it so we could get his blood, so that we could clone a vaccine, so that—”

  “Everything you say is a lie,” Rosangelica said, gun still trained on him as she made sure her suit’s various locks were fastened. “I was wrong to bring you to Ascensión, so I’m correcting my mistake. As of now, you are finished, Estarque. I just erased your security codes.”

  Cazador gasped. “You haven’t the authority. I’m the only—”

  “Quiet. I also just dissolved the Task Force,” the sabihonda said. “I’ve determined that its decision-making process has been influenced by Joaquin Delgado himself. The new Minister of Health will have his hands full tonight.”

  “Wait, Rosangelica, wait!” pleaded Stark.

  Ignoring him, Rosangelica passed through the two air locks and into the quarantined room where Dr. Garcia lay. Stark watched in horror as the sabihonda raised Cazador’s gun, aimed it at Garcia’s face, and pulled the trigger. The contorting woman was forced down into the bed in a bouncing jolt, and then she sagged and went limp, her arms still jerking akimbo.

  Stark
’s mouth drooped open as his gaze lowered to the floor, unable to look through the cell window at that vicious tableau, the precious blood sprayed uselessly against the cell wall. Stark felt grateful for his whirring, clicking air-controlled suit. The silence might have crushed him as he waited for this retreating tide to carry all of Ascensión and Mexico away from him.

  Codes erased.

  Title stripped.

  Nada.

  Stark felt upended and emptied, like his knees might unlock beneath him. As he watched the sabihonda standing over Dr. Garcia in that little cell, a veil inside him unfastened itself and fluttered away, exposing someone far different than the man who had flown to Mexico a week ago.

  From this moment forward, all deaths my fault, Stark thought.

  Henry David, HD, the boy who’d grown up on the quop farm, couldn’t comprehend the gigantic folly of Dr. Stark. Stark, the Special Pathogens agent, the CDC man, always had the finest intentions available, but they rendered him cold and calculating at best—a liar, cheat, and murderer at worst. He’d killed Howell for nothing. Garcia’s death was pointless, too. And now he couldn’t be trusted to help when needed most.

  All that HD could think in this moment was, it didn’t have to happen like this.

  Cazador watched the sabihonda as if she were a vampire that had just fed on Garcia’s corpse. “Will Rosangelica have the disease?” he muttered to Stark.

  He hoped so, but Rosangelica didn’t actually touch Garcia. Besides, Stark thought, nothin alive could live in that thing.

  Rosangelica hit the speaker in the quarantine, and said, “Jefe, get me a new Racal-plus. I’ll have de Verano examine me in the particle arrester.” She turned back to the corpse, saying, “Get a Mortuary detail to destroy Garcia’s body—do it in this cell. Don’t remove anything but ash.” She looked at them through the window and pointed at Stark. “Don’t let the American leave. I’m taking him to the airport. He’ll be on a jet within the hour.”

  “You’re sending him back?” Cazador said.

  “No,” Rosangelica said, “I’m promoting him.”