The Patron Saint of Plagues

by Barth Anderson

  Like tracking.

  HD and Experiment usually followed the corn fence up into the bluffs, where the hills were like giant eggs, half-buried on end, bristling with pine. You could find all kinds of tracks up there. Mink, stoat, raccoon. Fox, coyote, and wolves. This day, the two trackers came to the road by the cornfield gate, and Experiment aimed his nose at the ground, following a scent across the frozen mud. He sniffed to the gate where the snow lay thick beyond, and looked back at HD, like, “Hey, dork. Over here.”

  It was a small rabbit, HD could tell, its small footprints frozen into the snow, heading straight across the cornfield. They followed it, HD high-stepping through the crunching snow and Experiment bounding with a happy dog grin on his black-and-white face.

  Shooting out of the Torre Cuauhtémoc docking bay, Stark looked down into the burgeoning hive of La Baja Ciudad as he sailed above its network of crumbling neighborhoods. He wasn’t over the hot zone, so vendors hemmed the streets below, and sidewalk restauranteurs made steam and smoke with their grills.

  Feeling snatched and seized in this barco turned paddy wagon, Stark could finally imagine a return to Wisconsin, after all but erasing it from his mind. The discovery of vCaMV on his grandfather’s farm seemed a distant nightmare compared to the relentless horror he’d beheld in this outbreak. It would be June, soon. Summer in Wisconsin. Tomatoes would be bulging green in the house gardens and the north cornfield would be shuddering with shin-high stalks.

  “If we send him back,” said Rosangelica, “we have to arrange getting him across the border.” She was sitting on the other side of the plasceron window in a comfortable nest of velvet cushions, talking to a handsome man seated across from her. The man was rugged with his once-broken nose. His black uniform that made the whole barco smell like leather. An officer, Stark could tell, but not Mexican army. “Doing the right thing doesn’t seem worth the trouble.”

  The officer hadn’t said a word since jumping into the barco just before it soared out of the docking bay. He’d flashed an identification card that made the driver recoil and nod quickly as if threatened. “The ‘right thing’ is irrelevant,” the officer said. “You might have to do it out of necessity, Rosita.”

  “Have to?” she said with a slight shimmy in her seat. It chilled Stark to realize she was flirting with a servicio sagrado officer. “Tell me what I have to do, macho.”

  The man stretched his legs between Rosangelica’s. “The Americans know he’s here.”

  Rosangelica put her hands behind her head and sighed at the ceiling of the barco. “I know.” She unsealed her clamp mask and sipped from her glass. Stark thought the drink looked like tequila. “But this man is a state criminal. We could vox populi him. If I leaked the truth to Ojos de Las Nuevas and Para Ustedes, we could have a trial by pilone tonight. I bet his aggregate numbers would demand immediate action, and the Holy Renaissance would benefit from hanging a high-profile villain.”

  “True, but then,” said the officer, “you’ll have a reinvigorated enemy on the border.”

  “Probably. Probably,” Rosangelica said as she sipped her tequila. “You got all the angles, don’t you, Carriego?”

  “What does the president say?”

  “He hasn’t. He’s leaving it up to me.”

  Carriego laughed. “And you say I have all the angles.”

  “He’s secretly hoping I make the wrong choice. Emil is playing me off of Cazador.” Rosangelica glanced at Stark and dismissed him with a blink. “He’s waiting to see if El Jefe has one last trick up his sleeve before putting his full trust in me.”

  “And the wrong choice,” said Carriego, “is the one that restricts Emil.”

  “Always.”

  Stark didn’t care who Rosangelica was secretly fencing with while Mexico burned in a viral fire. He didn’t care who this Carriego was and how he fit into the behind-the-arras politics. None of it mattered, and Stark couldn’t allow himself to think about what kind of trouble La Alta was in now. It was over, he realized, looking down at the useless push pack of omnivalent vaccine, alcohol, and bleach still in his hand. His help wasn’t needed. Not his problem. No doubt the sims had been called to a halt, and Jarum and Isabel were put on planes home. Pedro would have to handle Big Bonebreaker now, if Cazador and Rosangelica didn’t dispose of him first.

  Stark shook his head and sat back in his seat, soothing himself with thoughts of snow and dogs, recalling how Experiment looked like a shaggy dolphin leaping in and out of that deep snow.

  Twelve-year-old HD liked tracking, especially in winter, when he had fewer labor points to work for the cooperative. He liked looking at the footprints of an animal and imagining how its body moved, making those tracks. Rabbits’ front paws always printed just behind the long, back feet, and HD could imagine this one as it darted across the cornfield in stretching leaps, front paws down between its legs, back feet raised but ready to land and launch the rabbit forward again.

  HD looked ahead as he ran. The tracks were making for the border of the farm, the steep hills and slopes of green juniper beyond. Experiment let out a delighted, growling bark as he bounded.

  “I called you, Carriego, because I was so furious, I thought we could just pop him and dump in the Gulf,” Rosangelica said, loud for Stark’s benefit. Her clamp mask dangled around her neck as she drank.

  “Fish food?” said Carriego, leering at the sabihonda. “Just like Colonel Sanjuan?”

  “I wish I could let you do it,” said Rosangelica. “The fucking valemadre liar.”

  “Of course I lied,” Stark said quietly, still looking down into the haze of old Mexico City.

  Carriego flitted his eyes in Stark’s direction, and Rosangelica peered at him down her long nose.

  “You made it impossible for me to work openly,” said Stark, his voice gaining volume now that he was coming clean. “To help Mexico, I had to lie.”

  Rosangelica jerked her thumb in Stark’s direction, like, Get a load of this guy. “To help us, you had to conspire with a bioterrorist, eh?”

  “I wasn’t conspiring with Joaquin, I was tracking him,” said Stark.

  “Tracking him,” said Rosangelica. “Uh-huh.”

  “I knew he would emerge eventually,” Stark said. “I figured that Joaquin would eventually infiltrate one of the clinics and pose as a technician—clinician, computer analyst, phlebotomist—get hired on. I figured he would make his way into La Alta slowly over time, and that we would first hear about him from—”

  “You don’t lie very well,” Carriego cut him off. “Why would you anticipate Joaquin coming to La Alta?”

  Rosangelica raised her glass to Stark. “Because he had advance knowledge, of course.”

  “Because La Alta is—” Stark was about to lie and say because La Alta was where Orbegón lived. But he decided he might as well confess it all if he wanted a plane ride home. “Joaquin Delgado would come to La Alta because I was luring him there.”

  Rosangelica put down her drink.

  Carriego took a slow breath through his nostrils that seemed to fill his body with anger.

  “How,” said Rosangelica, “could you have lured him?”

  Stark met Rosangelica’s eyes. “By conning you into bringing Sister Domenica to La Alta to act as bait.”

  Rosangelica obviously didn’t like hearing this in front of the officer in black leather. She gripped her glass so hard that Stark wondered if it would shatter. “How did you know Joaquin would come for her?”

  “I figured it out from the outbreak patterns,” Stark answered. “Domenica’s prophecies were a little too accurate for Joaquin’s comfort, I figured. Spaniard. Wetcode. Describing the symptoms of hemorrhagic fever before the first patients hit Zapata.”

  Rosangelica and Carriego listened to Stark, rapt as children at a ghost story told by firelight.

  “How could Joaquin let her keep talking in public, saying things like that, while he was in the middle of releasing his viruses?” said Stark. “So he improvised.
He tried to infect Domenica at a church downtown, then at the Basilica, revealing himself to me in the process.”

  “Is he lying?” said Carriego. “Again?”

  Rosangelica shook her head. “I can’t tell what’s real anymore.”

  “I tricked you into getting Domenica on camera in Torre Cuauhtémoc,” said Stark, “but it didn’t go the way I predicted. I messed up.”

  “How did you mess up?” asked Carriego.

  “Joaquin changed my outbreak script, changed the rules of the game. I didn’t anticipate that.” Stark repositioned his helmet on his head, a nervous habit that showed up when he was angry. “I figured he would slip into the cathedral one night and steal his way to her cell, maybe infect her while she slept, like a kissing bandit. All we would know of his presence near Domenica would be the evidence he left in her blood.”

  Though he’d never been to a church, Stark felt relieved to confess his ghastly plan in this very Catholic way, accusing himself of sins, safely separated from his confessor by a partition. Stark had considered the plan clever. Clever to lie to the sabihonda and risk huge infection rates in La Alta. Clever to manipulate the great Joaquin Delgado. Clever to put an innocent woman in harm’s way.

  Cold, smart man, the young HD said to old Dr. Stark, willing to add Domenica to the trail of bodies behind you. The stack of corpses on the square before the National Museum with that putrid smoke rising up into the bronze face of Carlos IV The thirteen boys in Cairo who died of smallpox. The brain-eating Borna victims, some slain by the virus and some shot with bullets in their madness, and the West Nile virus and cholera, Legionnaire’s, Crimean-Congo, meningitis, yellow fever, Lassa fever, pertussis, EV-71, Japanese encephalitis, flu. HD had stepped off the co-op farm twenty years ago, embraced this life of death, and never stopped grappling with it, not once in the last two decades. With this confession, Stark considered himself finished with corpses and blood. He wanted true life now—whatever that was, wherever it hid.

  “As a result, you let Delgado into La Alta,” said Carriego.

  “We should kill him,” said Rosangelica, looking at Stark with new contempt, “for playing games with the lives of our citizens like this. Had you simply told me, Estarque, we would—”

  “You would have put me in a work ranch the minute I mentioned it,” said Stark. Sarcastically pretending to consult with Rosangelica, he said, “Say, I got it, Rosita! Let’s bring a radical nun to La Alta and allow my former teacher to walk right in and start spreading the virus. Good plan, eh?”

  Rosangelica fell quiet, either lost in thought or the pilone slipstream.

  “You may have just bought yourself a ticket to that work ranch, gringo,” the officer said, watching Rosangelica.

  For a flash, he pictured himself on the roof of Stark Manor at sunset, looking over the river mist in the Kickapoo River Valley. But after what he had just seen Rosangelica do to Dr. Garcia, he couldn’t allow himself to hope for such a thing.

  “Gacetilla. Garganta. Awry. Arguing. Aero,” Rosangelica chanted.

  Then she turned her beaklike face to Stark, silver eyes wide.

  Stark’s heart clenched like a trembling fist. He pressed forward until his nose almost touched the window between them, locking eyes with the sabihonda.

  “What is it?” Carriego asked her. “You got news?”

  “She’s got news all right,” Stark said. “She’s receiving word from Pedro Muñoz.”

  Rosangelica reacted as if Stark were a conjurer making bouquets appear in his open palms. “How did you know that?”

  “Pedro’s in the cloister,” Stark said. “He’s with Domenica. Right?” The brief moment of imagining home, roof, and river valley fled, as Stark eased back in his seat, realizing he wasn’t finished after all. He was about to be thrown back to the virus. “And I bet he knows where Joaquin Delgado is, too.”

  Rosangelica slapped the back of the driver’s seat as if he were disobeying orders. “Forget about the airport, cabron! Turn around! Now! Back to Docking Bay Aztlán!”

  “What is it?” shouted Carriego. “What’s going on?”

  Rosangelica kept shouting: “I’ll clear the bay. Don’t wait in queue for landing orders! If you airbrake for a second, I’ll rip your throat out!”

  They came about, and the giant wall of the sea-green tower seemed to swoop across the windshield. Rosangelica screamed for speed, and Stark sank back in his seat, thinking about what he found at the end of that trail of tracks across the cornfield, so long ago.

  Over a yard of snow stretched between each footfall as the rabbit dug into a fierce race toward the pines at the edge of the field, and HD felt like he was on its heels in hot pursuit.

  But then the tracks came to a sudden end, right in the middle of the field. HD stopped where they stopped, staring down at the snow, eyes wide.

  Experiment spun around to look back at HD, betrayed, wondering why the dumb boy wasn’t running anymore.

  HD caught his breath as if he’d seen blood. Two feathered strokes in the snow terminated the line of tracks like abrupt punctuation. Huge wing-prints like crescent moons were laid end to end in the rabbit’s path. HD looked forward, across the untrammeled field to the distant stand of lonely pines where there would have been cover, safety.

  But here in the cold, empty whiteness, there was just this angelic clap of wings, then nothing.

  TUESDAY, MAY 24. 2:32 P.M.

  DR. DEL NEGRO closed the ALHEPA door shut and turned the spin lock so that it ticked like a metronome, closing it. A gasp of pressure sighed audibly through the particle arrester beyond, and Joaquin was in.

  It wasn’t locked, merely shut, he noted, calming himself. Just shut, that’s all. He stood with his head bowed, knowing that the nun was in here. Sitting on her bed. Sitting in the center of the room.

  Allí está, he thought, without looking at her.

  There she is.

  “Sister, I’ve assigned a doctor to be your new personal physician,” del Negro said, loping into the room. They were casual friends, Joaquin presumed. Beneath his helmet, del Negro had an unruly cowlick that dropped an S shaped curl of black hair in his eyes. “Dr. Reynaldo Cruz.”

  Joaquin lifted his head and looked at the woman sitting on the bed at the center of her cell. She was older than he expected, or perhaps the last week or so had aged her since he saw her at the Capilla. He was relieved that she wasn’t scrutinizing as nuns often were, sizing up men as if for a war of wills. The so-called Saint of Plagues paid him no attention. Sitting cross-legged, she was watching El Quijote, the final act, when Sancho’s aria steps out of the recitative with the Knight of Mirrors, as the squire agrees to betray the Don. The baritone was Carlos Diamante. The performance, April of 2055. Sounded like Al-Shiraz conducting. Not Joaquin’s favorite.

  “My pleasure, Dr. Cruz,” she said.

  The room was light and spare. No accoutrements, no furniture beyond the bed and the chair. No windows. The room’s adjustable sunlight threw the equivalent of late-afternoon sun across the nun’s bed, casting red light and her long shadow across the flower-tiled floor. A proclivity for the dramatic, Joaquin noted. “You enjoy opera?”

  “I’m Mexican. I love El Quijote,” Domenica said. She still had not met his eye. “I keep watching it, hoping that I will feel what I felt when I first heard Sancho sing.”

  Joaquin set down his lugall with the medical equipment del Negro had given him. Characters do not sing, he wanted to inform her. Humans do. Dilettante.

  “I’ll stay and keep you both company,” del Negro said, sitting in a wing chair near the monitor. He did not turn his chair so that he could watch the opera. He faced Joaquin and nodded to him. “But don’t mind me, Doctor.”

  “Hard to re-create that first encounter with a glorious aria, isn’t it?” Joaquin said. He unpacked his stethoscope and blood pressure cuff. “The Don is a magical character, but not that magical, alas.”

  Domenica finally looked at Joaquin and smiled. Then she stood and t
urned off the monitor before Sancho could deliver the aria, the one expressing his anguish over betraying the Don and declaring his belief that Quixote had willingly fought the physician posing as the Knight of Mirrors, a battle that, in the end, would prove fatal to the Don’s imaginary universe. Dilettante though she was, it spoke highly of Domenica that she loved that aria. The layers of meaning were complex, ironic. “‘I believe he conquers my reason, even now,’” Domenica said, quoting it with a sad smile as she sat on the edge of the bed, facing Joaquin.

  “Ah, very good.” Joaquin showed her the blood pressure cuff, and Domenica began rolling up her sleeve. Joaquin stepped forward and made to sit on the bed with her, thought better of it, straightened awkwardly, then finally knelt at her feet on the floor. Their shadows stretched together across the room. He held her arm, so thin he could have snapped it like kindling, and took her pressure. “You are a romantic? You believe in fantasies?”

  “Recently, I’ve been forced to accept unreality as reality,” she said, her dark eyes glittering. “I suppose I am a romantic.”

  Joaquin’s hands hurt he was so nervous, and he stole glances at Domenica while he read her pressure. Domenica kept looking up from his mouth whenever he looked her in the eye, as if she were contemplating a kiss, and her blood pressure was in the high range of normal.

  “Are you anxious about something, Dr. Cruz?” she asked.

  He pulled the cuff from her arm and turned back to his lugall so that she could not see his face. He was being foolhardy, vain. He shouldn’t cat and mouse, he scolded himself as he rummaged through his equipment. He should infect a needle with the tainted cotton swab he’d spat upon, jab her with it, and be done. “You’re the most famous person I’ve ever met,” Joaquin said, trying on a nervous laugh as he knelt at her feet again. “Well, that’s not true. I once danced with Conchita Consuelo, before she became a star. Here in Mexico City. Your pressure was fine by the way.” By her left foot, he placed a little safe-box for used needles and set a clean syringe on top of it. “This first draw is to see if you carry the virus,” he said, cleaning the crook of her arm with alcohol.