But the second mistake—oh, that was the killer, all right. Literally.
He’d put a bit too much solution on the slide, only a half drop over the recommended amount, but it was enough to make what was on the slide squeeze out the edges. And the edge, of course, was exactly what had punctured his skin . . .
He was infected.
The technician barely held in his gasp, then abruptly plunked back onto his stool. His heart was thundering in his chest—he could hear the strong and steady rush of blood in his ears, see his vision throb around the outside edges of his eyes the way it did when he sometimes had a migraine and he didn’t have the migraine-suppressant inhaler handy. But he didn’t want his heart to be doing that right now, because every involuntary contraction of that muscle in his chest pushed the HemoPhagic Virus farther and faster into his system—
Who was he kidding?
He was infected. Period. If they found out . . .
He folded his thumb into the palm of his hand along with the slide and made a loose fist, then slid his hand nonchalantly into the pocket of his lab coat. He had a single, nearly panicked moment when a glance in his supervisor’s direction made him think the hawk-eyed man was staring at him, but no . . . the man’s gaze went back to the general who was yap-yap-yapping at his side. He spent a long, very long, ninety seconds bent over his microscope and acting like he was studying his work; then, when he was sure the bleeding had stopped, he calmly walked to the bathroom and washed his thumb. After that he wrapped the slide in a wad of toilet paper and smashed it under the heel of his shoe. Then, when his hands finally stopped shaking, he flushed the evidence down the toilet, and he and his destructive little secret went back to work.
And that, as they say, was that.
THREE
Things changed even more after the mutated version of the HemoPhagic Virus got out of the lab and insinuated itself among the ranks of the uninfected. The disease established itself so rapidly in a new building that a man who’d gone to work that morning feeling just fine might easily come out at lunchtime to discover that the sunbeams felt like lasers on the surface of his eyes. It went rapidly out of control—common sense and extreme sanitary habits could have gone a long way toward keeping the numbers on the reasonable side—and spiraled rapidly into the realm of panic. Mankind has always leaned toward sensationalism and exaggeration. After all, where’s the excitement in not blowing everything out of proportion?
VAMPIRISM EPIDEMIC!
The words were splashed across the newspaper headlines and the news programs. At first, victims of the contagion were required only to register, the logic being that this would enable medical workers and facilities to easily identify them in case of sickness or accident. After all, hadn’t that same system worked for diabetics and HIV victims before the diseases had been eradicated? But there were different things involved here, different stakes—no pun intended—and then the clerks refused to work unless they were issued nose and mouth masks, and no amount of pointing out that it was a blood-borne pathogen, not airborne, would make them change their minds.
When the news footage showed the long lines of H.P.V. victims being registered by heavily protected admin personnel, the public became even more mistrustful of not only those who had the virus, but the information they were getting from the authorities. The rumors began and grew, and your average Mr. and Mrs. John Doe insisted that they, the carriers, be more readily identifiable. The human rights organizations fought but the government sided with the uninfected—those voters who were the majority and who would live longer—and so the H.P.V. carriers were ordered to wear identifying armbands, bloodred swatches of material bearing an ominous-looking three-syringe symbol. It became a common sight to see entire families traveling together while huddling beneath semi-sheer black veils that protected their oversensitive eyes from the sun. It also became just as familiar to see them pass by shop windows on which signs had been posted showing the three-syringe symbol within a red circle and slash. Human rights activists screamed, but in the end things moved much too quickly for them to even so much as plead their case in court.
Then came the concentration camps.
Publicly the government called them “containment facilities,” but the people forced inside them knew what they really were. History, it seemed, really was doomed to repeat itself, although this time it was much quieter and more insidious. The camps of previous world wars had been tragically honest about their purpose, but these new camps, the ones for H.P.V. victims, started out under the guise of innocence. Despite the governmental promises, it wasn’t long before no one heard from any of the thousands of people who were locked inside. It started with the single people, the men and women whose registration clearly showed there was no one to contact in the event of an emergency, no one to miss them if they weren’t around. Then it spread to the rest of them, entire families and communities, all those men, women, and children who were so expensive to house and feed and clothe and, of course, provide with medical care. Ultimately they, and the pathetic belongings they’d been able to carry with them, simply . . .
Disappeared.
But the soldiers and the barbed wire remained.
Ready.
Waiting.
Because there were still plenty more of the Hemophages—vampires—on the outside. The number of infected had gone from a few thousand to tens of thousands, so they weren’t gathered up all that easily or quickly. As for themselves, the Hemophages saw the proverbial writing on the wall . . . they saw their fate. And when that same fate had seen fit to take your life and reduce it to only ten years, why would any intelligent man or woman simply stand passively and let the government—or anyone else—steal away what little you had left?
The Hemophages had one chance, and they took it. They went underground, melting easily into the darkness their uninfected brothers and sisters now abhorred. It wasn’t as though the night as a subculture didn’t already exist anyway—the goth clubs, the nightclubs, the entire economy of those who had already preferred the starlight to the daylight, who hated the sound of an alarm clock in the morning and the morning to night routine. Besides, they were tired of the looks of loathing, the sneers of aversion, and the snide comments—how easy it was to simply take the H.P.V. armbands off in private and be rid of them. Those same armbands began turning up in waste facilities around the world at the same time the number of newly infected registrations dropped drastically—they would not be singled out anymore. They would not be discriminated against and despised. They would not be secretly . . . or openly . . . exterminated.
They began fighting back.
There were open battles on the street, with H.P.V. victims blatantly ignoring police orders and the police retaliating by trying to take them with force. Seemingly overnight the cities were filled with blood. With infection. The virus went from a blood-borne pathogen to something that could be caught from nearly anything, and the people of the world went from free to prisoners of their own paranoia. Fashion was lost in favor of head-to-toe anticontamination suits, vanity was sacrificed for the sake of breathing masks. Beauty disappeared behind a shield of safety that turned out to be faulty. Everything changed.
It was the age of contagion, and the great uninfected masses weren’t pleased with the new, uncompliant breed of disease carrier. Things went from bad to worse really, really fast. A new unit of governmental and military control was invented almost overnight; called the Special Hazards Teams, they went through the ranks of the registered Hemophages and eliminated them, sometimes at home, sometimes in public—
The middle-aged woman forces herself out of the hospital bed only because her doctor demands she walk daily on the hip he worked so hard at reconstructing four days ago. She used to be a dancer and while the degenerative arthritis took that career, she’s found new purpose in teaching the skills she spent her life learning. The walking hurts, a lot, but she forgets the pain when the door to her hospital room crashes open and four heavily armed m
en clad completely in black stamp inside. They’re wearing a kind of uniform she’s never seen before, with red biohazard symbols on one sleeve and a strange logo with a styled “SH” on the other. Her pulse jumps but there is nowhere to run to, nothing to do but face them and see what happens.
She’s closed the blinds because her eyes are so sensitive, but she can still see the lead man point a weapon at her, something long and dark and heavy. The kids to whom she teaches class are at the elementary school level, first grade, so she has no idea what kind of a gun it is. “Are you Elizabeth P. Watkins?” one of them demands in a voice that’s probably loud enough to be heard all the way down at the nurses’ station. It’s so sadly clear that they know she has H.P.V., but perhaps he thinks her deaf, too.
She blinks and tries to think of a way to stall, a way to reason with the insanity that this soldier represents. “I . . .”
“Are you Elizabeth P. Watkins?” he practically screams.
She swallows. “Well . . . yes. But I—”
Whatever else she was going to say is lost in the thunder of gunfire. The nearly pulverized remains of her body are taken care of by the white-clad members of the Fumigation Team that streams in after the Special Hazards men back out of the room. And, finally, all that’s left of Elizabeth P. Watkins, onetime winner of the Best Yearly Performance award at the Ruth Page Foundation School of Dance, is the slowly dissipating clouds of poison gas used to sanitize the bits of bone and flesh splattered across the walls, floor, and furniture.
And so began the Blood Wars with which Violet was so sadly, bitterly familiar.
The battles were fought in the streets, in homes, in office buildings, even in hospital operating rooms, where the Special Hazard Teams were ordered not to stop at eliminating only the patient. Any person, no matter their rank or position, who had been exposed to the blood of a Hemophage had to be exterminated, no matter the cost. Doctors, lawyers, political leaders—after all, the politicians didn’t rule the day anymore. They’d proved to be helpless in the face of the epidemic, and few people in the private sector had ever believed them to be trustworthy anyway. The newly emerged power was a hybrid, a religious-medical-political structure that would take the drastic countermeasures demanded by the uninfected and clearly necessary to stop the spread of the disease, and it would not be influenced by petty things like human rights and the United States Constitution. Now it was survival of the fittest, and the members of that organization knew without a doubt that only the fittest were H.P.V. free.
FOUR
The armored escort car pulled up in front of the main entrance to the enormous ArchMinistry of Medical Policy complex, and like a cat coming to a halt after a full run, settled back on its tires as the driver braked and cut the engine. The building in front was impressive and heavily fortified—bioterrorism, or blood terrorism as some people were now calling it, had risen dramatically in the last couple of years and they could take no chances here. Just going in and out required sanitation and extreme identification measures, even for the most powerful. The car’s occupants, the Vice-Cardinal and the Chief of Staff, would be no exception.
Even though they were inside the perimeter of the gated compound and had already gone through the first round of identification and the armed entry guards, the driver made a quick, suspicious scan of the surrounding grounds as soon as he stepped out of the car. Only when he felt sure it was safe did the veteran security officer press a lock releasing device that was keyed to his body heat, pulse, and thumbprint—should something happen to alter any one of those things beyond a pre-set range of accepted variables, the only other person who could unlock the armored car’s doors was inside the vehicle itself.
The heavy door opened and the first thing out of the car was an impeccable designer shoe hermetically attached to a suit by one of the world’s more expensive couturiers. A voice floated out of the opened door, slightly muffled by the fortified interior and more than a bit on the high side of anger. “As you’re aware, Doctor, there’s no definitive test for the virus.” The speaker’s words grew louder, clearly following the first occupant as he brought his other foot around. “For all we know, they’ve infected every blood storage facility in the country!”
The sturdily built Vice-Cardinal was out of the vehicle now and the Chief of Staff came out behind him in quick, jerky movements that made him look like a small, worried dog. He opened his mouth to continue but the Vice-Cardinal held up his hand, waving it impatiently in the air. Even though the Chief wasn’t sure whether it meant he should shut up or it was just the prelude to sanitization, just that movement was enough to silence him—at least for now.
Richard Daxus, the Vice-Cardinal, was only forty-eight, but he had made a good name and position for himself. He carried himself well, dressed well, exuded the confidence of a wealthy and successful executive. He was an out-of-the-ashes kind of man who’d parlayed his humble beginnings as a young veterinarian first into marketing, then marketing medicine, then eventually into medical management. It had been a long highway—or at least it had seemed like it at the time—from obtaining his animal husbandry license to Chief of Staff at Chicago’s foremost teaching hospital and then, finally, to his position here at the ArchMinistry, but he’d made it.
Daxus brought up his other hand and held it next to the first; his fingers wavered in the air for only a moment before a pair of attendants, themselves wearing protective gear, hurried out of the sliding glass and metal entrance and quickly stripped off the pair of rings Daxus had slipped over the surgical gloves covering his skin. The first set of attendants were followed by a second pair whose job it was to peel away the gloves themselves and reveal the second set of gloves beneath, these hermetically sealed to the cuff of his suit in the same fashion as his shoes. With their hands contaminated by the dirty gloves, the four attendants stepped back respectfully as the third and final pair arrived with a pair of fresh gloves and snapped these over the Vice-Cardinal’s already surgically gloved hands. In this day and age, layers did more than just keep a person warm.
It took another five minutes to get through the pre-sanitization and pre-identification areas, but finally the two men were walking rapidly down the hallway that led to Daxus’s office deep in the heart of the building. Actually, walking didn’t quite cover it—Daxus was striding, and the Chief of Staff was struggling to keep his pudgy body from falling more than three steps behind. Daxus had neither patience nor sympathy for the other man; he had a public image to maintain and it was necessary that he look good and radiate health. Everything in his daily life was engineered to ensure that he did just that; he needed to look sleek and fashionable and so he had his hair done at the same salon that handled the Mayor’s family and visiting Washington dignitaries. He was a model for the people, the embodiment of everything that American life should be, of everything they wanted to be.
His Chief of Staff was outright puffing now, and his face was turning purple at the edges from exertion. That would teach him to overindulge in the bagels, lox, and cream cheese in the mornings. From the looks of the gut around his middle, the man had probably been following his daily breakfasts with a coffee and double Danish. “Doctor, sir—” The man coughed, then managed to make his legs move faster so he could at least be at Daxus’s side. “What I’m trying to say is that these circumstances leave us with no choice but to destroy all standing blood supplies.” He paused and Daxus wasn’t sure if it was for effect or just because it was a little amazing that the situation had actually come to this. “And anyone who may have been transfused or come in contact with it.”
Daxus stopped in midstride and turned to stare at his Chief of Staff. He sucked in his breath, then let it out. His mind tried to do the calculation but the numbers didn’t want to display in his brain. All he came up with was a mental image of blackness with way too many zeros added. “So how many deaths are we looking at?” he finally asked.
The plump man’s mouth thinned out as he ground his teeth. The muscles i
n his jaw ticked. “We don’t have a final number yet,” he admitted. “In the thousands . . . at least.”
Daxus shook his head in disgust, then pulled off the heavy ring he always wore on the outside of his gloves. It was a black and yellow diamond rendition of the hazard symbol; at its centerpiece was a drop of his blood, pristine and uninfected, encased in polyurethane. “What we don’t understand,” the Chief continued, “is why now? Why are they escalating all of a sudden?”
Daxus shrugged as he passed the ring beneath a DNA scanner. “It’s simply population geometics,” he finally answered. An instant later he was finally stepping through the hermetic doors that separated his office from the rest of the building. The other man stayed respectfully back as Daxus walked through a bath of green gamma rays that killed the last of any microbes he might have picked up during his travels outside the building. The heavy glass doors slid shut behind him; now the Chief, as well as the aide who had come up to join them, would have to communicate via the speakers embedded here and there in the barrier. On the surface it was an annoyance, but there were added benefits. Every time he came in here and left someone behind, psychologically this placed him in the ultimate position of power: he was a man who was so important that he did not have to breathe the same air as those around him.
It had other effects, too. In here, Daxus felt that he was finally safe, and now the Vice-Cardinal stripped off the outer gloves with a pleased expression. “There’s a minimum critical number that any population must maintain in order to propagate and survive,” he explained. “Very plainly, we’ve been so effective in exterminating them that we’ve reduced them past that number.” Daxus walked behind his desk, then settled comfortably on his chair and let his gaze scan the desktop critically. Nice and clean, dust-free—the cleaning crew had done their job, right on schedule. “They’re on the verge of extinction and they know it.”
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