The small voice returned: You live the life of a coward, afraid and small. Phil ignored it. He especially hated this voice; it was new and dangerous. It whispered, unlike the others, which raged. He’d learned to deal with the rages, but whispers were harder to ignore.
Admit it, you don’t want to live like this, and the truth is that you don’t have to. Find the courage to free yourself. Phil intentionally walked faster. He’d have to find a way to silence this small, seductive voice. It came at him sideways, not like the usual monsters that preferred a more direct and violent approach. It was so much cleverer than the others, playing on his deepest desires, softly speaking of things like enjoyment, spontaneity, choice—the components of a normal life. A life free of The Routine. Only Phil knew that would never be possible. He could never have a normal life, because he wasn’t normal.
One block to go—ninety seconds left. Phil stepped into the last crosswalk just as the traffic lights changed. Perfectly timed, he told himself, and with this tiny victory, some of his anxiety began to ease.
It’s sad that such a trivial thing can make you feel better. Life doesn’t have to be this inconsequential, and you know it. The small voice again.
If you continue, I’ll—
You’ll what? Start to count? Maybe some derivatives? How about some cube roots? Let’s try the cube root of 7,315,393,542, shall we? And the answer is 1941.24, give or take a few decimalpoints. Math isn’t going to work. You’re going to have to deal with what I say!
The small voice wasn’t so small anymore. Phil knew it was never a good idea to respond to a voice directly; all he had done was empower it.
Seemingly out of nowhere, a man passed Phil on his left and reached the opposite curb a fraction of a second before him. Startled, Phil sidestepped to avoid contact, but the abnormally tall man continued down the sidewalk without taking notice of their near collision. Phil chastised himself. It had been a long time since an internal debate had distracted him to the point of inattention. He resumed his hurried pace, but the tall man was faster. Dressed entirely in black—hat, overcoat, slacks, shoes—he stood at least six foot five and had a stride to match. On an average day, Phil would have found him unusual, but today the clock was ticking, and he still had half a block to go. The video store, the dry cleaner, the bakery, and then the office.
The door to Loeb’s Bakery opened, and a well-dressed woman backed into the sidewalk. Early sixties, Phil guessed, five foot two in high heels. Obviously not a local. She carried a large, ungainly purple box and was thanking the baker as he held the door. Unaware or unconcerned about sidewalk traffic, she tarried several more seconds, chatting away. The tall man was rapidly closing the distance, and in a moment would be forced into the street to avoid running into her, but she gave no sign of moving. Phil watched with interest as the woman had positioned herself directly in front of his office door, and in a moment, he too would be forced into the street. The tall man slowed, and for a moment looked as if he was going to join the conversation, but instead, he suddenly kicked her outstretched leg.
The woman’s leg flew out from beneath her; she fell hard onto her back and right side. Phil was close enough to hear the heavy thud and the whoosh of escaping breath. One of her shoes slid down the sidewalk as the man stepped over her. The box she carried skidded into the slush-filled gutter, where it split open, and the flowing snowmelt washed away a large purple dinosaur cake.
Almost against his will, and completely against his nature, Phil found himself running to her aid. She was less than twenty feet ahead of him, three or four strides, and he covered the distance in a moment. The tall man sensed his approach and turned to face Phil, his black overcoat billowing in the wind. A wave of fear every bit as tangible as a gust of bitter cold struck Phil, and he pulled up short. The man’s face, if one could call it that, was grotesquely deformed. The skin was a mass of twisted gray tissue, with no discernible nose, eyebrows, or ears, and his mouth, partially open to reveal pointed white teeth, was no more than a slit. But it was the eyes that froze Phil in place. Blood-red orbs bulged from malformed sockets, and they bored into Phil.
“You are too late, Phillip,” the slit-mouth said slowly in strangely accented English. Abruptly he turned and walked up the sidewalk. The spell broken, Phil returned to the prostrate woman. Her long fur coat had fallen open, and her sky-blue pleated skirt had worked its way up her thighs. Instead of trying to get up, she was working to regain a degree of modesty.
Embarrassed, Phil looked up and found that the assailant had disappeared. The sidewalk was empty, and so was the street. Puzzled, Phil jogged the hundred feet to the intersection, but found no six-foot-five-inch man dressed all in black in any direction.
The office! The realization hit Phil. He’s waiting for me in the office! He ran back down the sidewalk and pulled the side door open so abruptly that the guard jumped to his feet.
“Dr. Rucker, are you okay?” José Ortega said, his hand over his holster.
“Did anyone just come through this door?” Phil asked breathlessly.
“No one,” Ortega said definitively.
Phil pushed the door closed, cutting off Ortega’s questions, and turned back to the sidewalk and the fallen woman. The baker and several passersby were helping her back into the store. Phil waited for her to clear the doorway and began to follow her inside. Just as he was crossing the threshold, he hesitated.
I could just go back to work, he thought. She doesn’t need me. The baker was helping her into a chair, while someone else was bringing up a second one for what looked like a sprained right ankle. I don’t need to do this, he thought, but something compelled him forward.
The woman was in obvious pain, and despite excellent cosmetic surgery, her true age was evident. “Excuse me, ma’am,” Phil said, “but I saw what happened and got a look at the man who kicked you.”
She stared up at him blankly. “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t think I understand,” she said with a deep southern drawl.
“The man, dressed all in black. About six-five. I saw him kick your shoe.” Now Phil was confused.
The woman looked at the baker, who returned her quizzical look. Then both looked back at Phil with a mixture of suspicion and confusion. “I think you are mistaken,” she said. “It was my shoe. I probably shouldn’t have worn it in all this snow, but I can assure you no one struck me.”
“She tripped, that’s all,” said the baker, all his confusion gone. “I was right there. She lost her balance and fell. No one kicked her.” His tone suggested that Phil should leave, now.
Phil’s face flushed. He muttered an apology, clumsily left the bakery, and returned to the office.
“Anything I can do, Dr. Rucker?” Ortega asked, sincerely hoping the answer would be no. He didn’t mind helping, but Dr. Rucker scared him a little. Hell, he scared everybody a little; he was strange and creepy. More than once, Jose had taken the stairs just to avoid riding alone with him in the elevator. It was well known, at least in Jose’s circle, that Dr. Rucker talked more to himself than anyone else, and only crazy people did that.
“No,” Phil said darkly. He was angry with himself. He knew better than to involve himself in situations not of his making. Chasing the man up the street had been a reasonable and appropriate response, a moral obligation, and he had to meet moral obligations. But what had possibly compelled him to follow the woman into the bakery?
He walked up the short corridor to his office.
Phillip Rucker, M.D., Chief Medical Examiner, Colorado Springs, Colorado, was stenciled across the frosted glass.
I wonder for how much longer, the small voice whispered into Phil’s brain, and he had to agree. No one had seen an impossibly deformed tall dark man, because he didn’t exist outside of Phil’s increasingly unstable mind.
Nathan Martin stared at the blinking words: Amanda has signed off.
He could have handled that better; he should have handled that better. Amanda Flynn was important. He thought of her o
ften and remembered the entire Honduran affair clearly. Everything about it made him anxious. There had been other cases in his nine-year tenure as director of special pathogens that he and his group hadn’t fully resolved, but none of them bothered him as much as the Honduran affair, as he had come to call it. So many unanswered questions.
He looked for the file on his cluttered desk. It had long ago been digitized and added to the CDC database, but Martin had kept the paper file for himself. About twice a year, he thumbed through it hoping to find something they had missed, or perhaps some new insight. He knew he had taken it out yesterday, after hearing from the long-lost Amanda, but now he couldn’t find it.
“Martha, are you in yet?” he called out. His obsessive-compulsive secretary had a knack for taking the very thing he needed most and “putting it away.”
“No, I’m not,” Martha Hays yelled back through the open door.
“Did you take the EDH1 file?”
“No, it’s on your back desk. I saw you put it there last night.” She appeared in his doorway, feigning frustration.
“Right, I’ve got it. Don’t take it again.”
His secretary flipped him off, making him laugh.
“I could fire you for that!”
“Fat chance. I’m a civil servant. I could set you on fire, and the most I’d get would be a reprimand.”
Martin opened the file, and his handwritten notes spilled out. He picked up the nearest one. Origin? was written across the top. Where did this virus come from? It had always bothered him that nothing like EDH1 had ever been described before. He knew that the majority of viruses in the world had yet to be seen, much less described, but he had never come across one so radically different from everything else. There was no structural analogue or one that killed so efficiently; not even Ebola was this evil, and nowhere near as complex. They had been given a very limited sample to work with, barely enough to culture, but the virus mutated into unstable forms so rapidly that Martin couldn’t trust his own findings.
He shuffled through the notes and found the one labeled Bodies. If he could have examined one of the victims, he would know so much more. But all the U.S, military had been allowed to retrieve were tissue samples. The official story was that the Honduran military had orders to sterilize the entire area, including the corpses. A U.S. colonel had tried to convince a Honduran general that with minimal precautions the bodies posed no substantial risk, but he was overruled and sent packing with samples and the single survivor. Martin supposed it was understandable considering the situation; the general’s nation had just been devastated by a hurricane, and nineteen of his soldiers had died of a mysterious illness. He could hardly fault him for not wanting to risk more lives recovering bodies for scientific reasons.
Then Martin came to his notes labeled Survivor. These were the most detailed. More than three hundred people had died in this outbreak, including the thirty-one at the Red Cross camp. Only Amanda Flynn had survived. How? Why? Even after holding her for thirteen weeks, he couldn’t answer either of these questions. He had lied to her in his e-mail. When she had arrived in Oklahoma, she was dehydrated, in shock, and suffering the effects of exposure, but her life had never really been in danger. He had held her as long as the military would allow, but never got close to any answers. She had no signs of infection, either acute or remote. They couldn’t culture the virus from her blood or even her tissues, but the tissue samples from those that had died grew the virus readily. Martin finally concluded that Amanda had some type of immunity to EDH1. He toyed with the idea of purposefully exposing her to the virus to confirm it. Okay, he thought, maybe I did a little more than toy with the idea. This inexcusably breach of medical ethics and morality had finally caused Martin to realize that he had lost all perspective. Amanda had become a personal obsession.
In the solitude of his office seven years later, Martin was embarrassed by his actions and ashamed of his motivations. How could a man in his position, someone who had accomplished so much still be motivated by petty jealousies and childhood insecurities? He had convinced himself, and told others that they needed to know what made her so special for medical/scientific reasons. It was a reasonable argument, but his personal motivation was much darker. All his life he had known people like Amanda: the popular, the pretty, and the privileged. Why had God selected her above the other three hundred people? When she first arrived at Tellis her past was a mystery, but with her looks and with the way she carried herself, his imagination was able to create one. She was the cheerleader surrounded by friends, floating down the high school hallway on the arm of the football captain; which made Martin the slightly built Jewish kid from the shadows who both loved and hated her. Only later, after she had disappeared and everything had gone to hell, did he find out just how wrong he had been. She wasn’t the stereotype he needed her to be, far from it. Which made his offense all the more difficult to forget, or forgive.
Martin gathered the file and turned back to his computer. He scrolled up to Amanda’s first message and reread it. He’d often thought that the last chapter on EDH1 had yet to be written, but there was nothing to link this virus, or any virus, with what was happening in Colorado, no matter how strange it was. He closed his e-mail file and opened a pathology file. The Colorado Springs medical examiner had asked for help identifying a potential viral encephalitis case two weeks before Amanda had contacted him. It was a routine request, no different from the dozen other requests his office received weekly, but he had never believed in coincidences. He reviewed the report and found nothing suspicious. Both the local pathologist and Martin’s own section found all the requisite abnormalities associated with a viral infection of the brain: heavy lymphocytic infiltration of the gray matter, inflammatory cells around the blood vessels, and macrophages along the linings of the brain’s ventricles. Nothing very interesting. Viral encephalitis was usually caused by an arbovirus, which was carried by mosquitoes. Probably not a lot of mosquitoes in Colorado this time of year, but the victim could have been bitten elsewhere. Electron microscopy had confirmed inclusion bodies consistent with an arbovirus, so that pretty much closed the book.
He had taken an extra step by calling the Colorado Health Service and asking them to forward their report on this unusual blip in violence south of Denver. They had done a reasonably good, if somewhat bureaucratic, job of chasing this down to its logical dead end. He also asked if there had been any cases of hemorrhagic fever that had gone unreported to the CDC. Not surprisingly, there hadn’t been. An inordinate number of deaths from a particularly nasty flu, that was also giving them a little trouble in typing, he was told, but certainly nothing as exotic as hemorrhagic fever.
“Excellent, you’re already here,” said a voice, startling Martin. Adam Sabritas rushed into the room. Thirty-six, dark, and pudgy, Adam was constantly in motion. When he sat, one or both of his legs would bounce. When standing, he was constantly shifting his weight, giving everyone the impression of a six-year-old needing to pee. When he talked, it was in a torrent, a loud torrent. Martin had recognized the talent beneath the frenetic activity when Adam had taken three months off from his infectious disease fellowship at Johns Hopkins to intern at the CDC. That had been four years ago. Now Adam had his own research lab and a dozen journal articles to his credit and was fast becoming the world expert on the Hanta virus.
“We finished the sequencing of the R2 serotype last night and found eleven base-pair changes.”
“That’s good news. So we don’t expect R2 to ever become a significant player.” Martin had always expected that the Hanta virus would develop less virulent subtypes, and it was Adam’s job to prove it.
“Nope. Whatcha got there?” Adam seemed to vibrate.
“Oh, you wouldn’t be interested in a case of encephalitis in Colorado.” Nathan dangled the word “Colorado” before the bouncing Adam. Hanta was especially active in neighboring New Mexico.
“In March?” Adam’s bouncing increased in frequency.
&
nbsp; “No, February. Dick Fernung took a look at the case.” Martin enjoyed winding Adam a little tighter; only, Adam stopped his incessant leg bouncing. “What’s wrong?”
“Dr. Martin, Dick Fernung is in Africa. He’s been there since January. Uganda, I think.”
“Damn, how did I forget that?” Martin said. He needed a break, or an assistant, probably both. He returned to his computer, but the report was unsigned. “Martha, can you get me file . . .” He donned bifocals to read the case number from the computer. “434-w90?”
“No,” she shouted back.
Both men were surprised by her response. “And why the hell not?” asked Martin.
“Because I got you that very file yesterday, and you haven’t returned it. Did you look on your desk, O organized one?” She didn’t even bother to get out of her chair.
Nathan began rustling around his desk, and just before he was going to shout that it wasn’t there, Adam found it on a chair next to him.
“Found it,” he said, handing over the thin manila folder. “Dr. Fernung has a post-doc working for him. It’s, ah . . . Larry Strickland,” he said sheepishly. His left leg began to bounce.
Martin sneered as he thumbed through the file, looking for the signature page.
“Great! Guess who signed it out?” he said sarcastically. Larry Strickland was a post-doc who would never rise above research assistant if Martin had anything to say about it. He was as much of a mistake as Adam had been a find. “He’s lazy, sloppy, and stupid.” The words slipped out, and immediately both were embarrassed, especially Adam, who was just two years older than Strickland. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Said what?” Adam popped to his feet. “Well, I’ve got some time on my hands. I’ll be happy to review it.”
“I don’t know. How are you with arbovirus? They can be tricky,” Martin said with mock concern, handing him the file.
“Well, I do know that they’re not nearly as sexy as the Sin Nombre virus. If I need to know anything else about them, I can always look it up in a book.” Adam was back in full motion as he thumbed through the file. “This shouldn’t . . .” Adam stopped moving again.
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