Hybrid

by Brian O'Grady

  His irritation wiped the smile from her face. “I’m sorry for laughing, Father, but there are some things you just don’t understand.” She hesitated, wondering if she should tell Oliver what Reisch had planned. He’ll overreact and go off half- cocked, she thought. Already, he’s wondering if he should turn me in for killing a few criminals. What would he do if he knew Reisch was planning on killing millions of innocents?

  Something that would probably get him killed, or worse, she answered herself. Despite his willful naiveté, she liked Oliver. He was a good man who had spent his life trying to live his beliefs, and she didn’t want to see him hurt.

  “He’s going to keep killing and infecting people until he’s caught,” Oliver said, filling the void in the conversation.

  “Probably, but who do you think can catch him, our government? Maybe you didn’t know, but he’s a trained assassin, and governments around the world have been trying to catch him for decades. Let’s also not forget the small fact that he has the same abilities that I have. Besides, once they know what he’s capable of, their desire to stop him will be overshadowed by their desire to use him.”

  Oliver looked at her strangely. The animosity she had for the authorities shone brightly.

  “Use him or not,” Oliver said, “he has to be stopped, that’s first and foremost. Besides, I don’t believe ‘they’ exist, Amanda. Once people know what he is and what he has done, he’ll spend the rest of his life in jail.” Oliver’s face was taking on an Irish flush. “I know you don’t trust the government, and after what happened to you, I can’t really blame you. But you have to know that yours was an isolated incident, nothing more. Every institution has a few individuals who will take advantage of their position, and our government is no exception; but like it or not, they are the only ones with the resources to stop Reisch.”

  No, they aren’t, she almost said. Finding Reisch would be easy; catching him might be a little tricky. Killing him would be a pleasure, Mittens had said. “Listen, Oliver,” she said, dropping his title, “forget the government. If Reisch is stopped, it will be because I have stopped him.” Her face hardened, and her eyes took on a cruel light.

  Oliver suddenly saw the Amanda who could kill without remorse.

  She continued, “He is hurt, but he will recover, and when he does, he will not hesitate to kill anyone in his path. Including you . . . especially you.” Amanda bore into Oliver, and he sat transfixed by her sudden metamorphosis. “This is the grown-ups’ table, Father, and we all play by the same rules. You deal with Reisch as cruelly and as violently as he would deal with you. Notions of due process and justice don’t belong here. They will only get more people killed.” Amanda was starting to get aggravated. Why did it have to be a priest? She thought.

  “This argument is giving me an old-fashioned headache.” Oliver said, counting to ten under his breath. “For almost thirty years, I have witnessed some of the most vile, dehumanizing behavior you or anyone else could possibly imagine. In Rwanda, I set up an orphanage for twenty-two small children whose parents had been tortured and then burned alive just because they were in the wrong clan. As a warning to neighboring tribes, each one of those children had had their right arm severed above the elbow. The stumps were cauterized with branding irons. I don’t need a lesson on what people are capable of doing. I believe that given the right set of circumstances, any person, including you, me, and even Reisch, is capable of any act, no matter how heinous. I have accepted that as part of the human condition. Now that doesn’t mean that I condone the behavior. What it means is that I don’t condemn the individual.”

  He stared at her, and she stared back, her face remaining hard.

  Oliver continued, “We voluntarily constrain our behavior through the rule of law so that a society can exist, and we live by that rule, even at the grown-ups’ table—especially at the grown-ups’ table. Otherwise, we create the very conditions that will turn us all into Reisch.”

  “There is no point to this argument,” Amanda said after a suitable pause. She realized that Oliver would probably never accept how the real world worked. The rule of law was for normal people, and neither she nor Reisch were normal people any more. They would do as they pleased because no one could stop them. Again, she found herself identifying with Reisch, only this time it didn’t seem quite as revolting.

  Oliver agreed. “So what do we do about Reisch?”

  Amanda wondered how she and Oliver had suddenly become a we. “I haven’t decided yet,” she said.

  “Greg could help.” Oliver tried to be conciliatory.

  Amanda nodded. “I will talk with him latter, but you worry me. I want you to promise me that you won’t do anything or expose yourself to anyone unnecessarily.”

  Oliver smiled. “I’m going to ignore the double meaning, and I promise not to do anything, including exposing myself unnecessarily.”

  Her comment had been unintentional, but well timed. “I’m sorry, Father, how politically incorrect of me to mention a priest exposing himself.” She smiled as she got up.

  “Be nice,” he said, as he too stood. He almost offered his hand, but instead put both his hands in his pockets.

  Amanda noticed. “How about if I just wave good-bye.” She gave him a small wave and turned to retrieve her coat. “I will call you after Greg and I speak,” she said while slipping into her coat.

  “I’m glad you came,” he said, but he really didn’t know if that was the truth.

  “Cause of death: exsanguination. End dictation.” Phil replaced the microphone and began to strip off his cloth gown and mask. He wasn’t surprised that Mr. Peter Bilsky had bled to death; he had been shot eleven times. Phil had recovered all the bullets, one from the left arm, three from the legs, two from the back, three from the chest, one from the abdomen, and one from the neck. There hadn’t been much left of poor Peter after Phil had finished with him. He checked the clock on the wall and was surprised to find that forty-five minutes had passed since he had sent out the tissue samples, which meant that the slides should be ready for viewing. He had a fairly good idea what they would show. Bilsky’s brain had been swollen, red, and grossly abnormal; he was infected with this new virus. Phil had taken samples from every available organ and tissue. They needed as much information about this infection as soon as possible.

  It took him another two hours to sort through the slides. “Addendum to previous report. Contributing cause of death: viral encephalitis, type unknown. End dictation.” They would have to give this infection a name, but that would have to be done later. Right now, he had a different responsibility: to report this to the CDC. If they cared to give it one of their usual catchy names, then so be it. Actually, that honor belongs to Henry Gorman, Phil thought, surprised that it had slipped his mind. He picked up the phone and dialed the main number for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. It was after hours, and as expected, the operator routed him to the voicemail of Nathan Martin’s Special Pathogens Division. Phil left a brief voicemail and hung up. His next call was to the Colorado Department of Health, and he was annoyed to find that they, too, were closed. He left his second voicemail, which was considerably more terse than the first, and then returned to the slides. He reviewed the nine that showed the clearest signs of infection; all nine came from the brain. The virus was to small to be seen with a light microscope, so he would have to wait for the electron micrographs to confirm that it was Gorman’s virus that was causing the profound inflammatory reaction at the base of the brain. It was curious that the worst parts of Peter Bilsky’s brain were the ones most associated with memory and emotions. His thalamus, hypothalamus, and amygdaloid nuclei, along with both hippocampi, were almost liquefied.

  Phil began to wonder how Bilsky had survived so long. He changed objective lenses to his highest power and began to review the morphology of the individual nerve cell bodies. He started with those closest to the ventricles, but the architecture was so disturbed that he began to scan outward. T
he further he moved away from the fluid-filled cavities, the closer the anatomy conformed to normal.

  Melissa Shay, the department’s senior lab tech, quietly walked into the reading room and placed a tray of slides next to Phil. He felt her presence and looked up.

  “I did a KL-124 stain on some of these,” she said. The KL124 stain was a good multipurpose stain that made inflammatory cells appear blue. “He’s got loads of inflammation, but there’s something strange going on here. You should look at these six slides.”

  Phil took the first of the six slides and held it up to the ceiling light. It was almost entirely blue. “Curious,” he said. He replaced the slide that he had been scanning with the new one.

  Melissa waited. Normally, Phil worked in complete isolation, but she was intrigued enough to violate his workspace, and to her surprise, he allowed it.

  Phil made a preliminary inspection and confirmed that Melissa hadn’t made a mistake during the staining process, and then he focused down to the cells. As expected, the brain tissue was rife with the small blue lymphocytes indicative of a viral infection, but there was something else, something that shouldn’t be there. A thick band of large, blue-stained neurons lined the walls of Peter Bilsky’s ventricles. Phil looked up from the microscope.

  “It doesn’t make any sense, but I think that’s germinal matrix,” Melissa said.

  Normally, the brain developed from a thin layer of cells called the germinal matrix. Never more than a few cell layers thick, all the neurons a person would ever have derived from these stem cells. The problem was that the germinal matrix all but disappears in infancy, and yet Peter Bilsky had a thick layer of these very special cells lining the walls of his adult ventricles.

  Phil returned to the scope. The stem cells were so densely packed around the ventricles that nothing normal remained, but two to three millimeters away, the inflammation predominated. It was two sides of the same coin. A destructive inflammatory process initiated by an unknown virus, and a regenerative process that had no business being there.

  “These are stained as well?” He pointed to the remaining slides in the tray.

  “Most of them, but only these six are from the brain.” Melissa was getting excited, sensing that they were on to something new and important.

  “Right now, I’m more interested in the rest of the samples.” He made eye contact with her, and she blushed.

  “I’ll have them out in fifteen minutes,” she said, enjoying their tiny moment of closeness.

  Phil spent the next fifteen minutes looking more closely at all the remaining slides, but found nothing of interest. Melissa brought twenty newly stained slides and discreetly took a chair while Phil reviewed them. He was allowing her unprecedented access, and even though it was long after five, she had no interest in relinquishing it.

  An hour passed, and finally he pushed back away from the microscope. “With the exception of a small segment of bone marrow, everything else is normal,” he said to Melissa without looking at her.

  “The marrow is supposed to have some stem cells?” she asked.

  “Not like these, and not clustered so tightly. The virus seems to involve the bone marrow as well as the brain.”

  It was a curious puzzle, and Phil didn’t see any obvious connection. It was true that both the bone marrow, which was responsible for the production of the red and white blood cells, and the germinal matrix, both derived from the same embryonic layer; but beyond that, the brain and bone marrow had little in common. Plus, there were other tissues that also arose from the same embryonic layer, and all of them were normal.

  “Is it neoplastic, maybe some kind of lymphoma of stem cells?” Melissa offered.

  “No, it’s not a tumor. The organization is too complex.” Phil rubbed his eyes. “This is something that I’ve never seen before.”

  “We have slides from two other cases that came in today, both presumed suicides. Dr. Faraday was going to review them in the morning, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you looked at them tonight.”

  “It’s after seven,” Phil said.

  Melissa glanced up at the clock, and it was long after seven. “This is important,” she said. “Besides, I’ve got no one waiting on me at home, except for a very lazy border collie.” She left to get the other slides.

  Phil wondered why she had no one at home. Maybe she was married and her husband was out of town, or working late. Maybe she was a widow. Maybe she had never married at all. Melissa had worked for the coroner’s office for eleven years, longer than he had been there, and he was surprised by how little he knew about her. He should have picked up more about her personal life just through overheard casual conversations. So why didn’t he know even the most basic information about her? He waited for an answer, but none of his Monsters, not even the smart, small voice, responded. He knew the answer, of course, but he shrank from it. Melissa wasn’t important to him; she wasn’t a part of the small and carefully maintained Phillip Rucker universe. She was a functionary, no more critical to him than this microscope. At an abstract level, he knew that she was more important than a microscope, but he didn’t—he couldn’t—live in an abstract world. His behavior and thoughts were ruled by the concrete codes of Personal Responsibility and The Routine.

  Phil stood and stretched his sore, stiff back; at least that hadn’t changed. It dawned on him that this was the second time that day that he had found himself exploring beyond the borders of the Phillip Rucker universe, and he was surprised by how far he could venture beyond the usual narrow range of safe-thought without reprisal.

  Melissa returned. “Here is the first set,” she said and placed a rack of slides next to his microscope. Phil noticed a small stripe of lighter skin on her left fourth finger.

  Two possibilities, he thought. She’s married and has taken off her wedding ring, probably for safe keeping while she works, or she once wore a ring, but doesn’t now.

  “The second rack needs to be restained. I didn’t like the way it came out,” she said, obviously covering for the shoddy work of one of her junior technicians.

  “Thank you,” Phil said stiffly, trying to reestablish their normal boundaries. He reached for the first slide in the rack as Melissa left to restain the second set of slides. Phil quickly scanned the twenty-eight slides from the two patients, and again found exactly what he had found in Peter Bilsky’s brain: large cells lining both victims’ ventricles. Stem cells, he thought. Somehow, the virus had reactivated the long-dormant process of cellular differentiation. The implications were incredible. If the lethal aspects of the virus could be eliminated, this virus would be a medical miracle. Strokes, brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, leukemia, almost every degenerative process could be reversed. Phil’s powerful mind began to reel with possibilities.

  Melissa had returned with the second rack, and as she was retrieving the original set of slides, her hand accidentally brushed his.

  Phil’s next conscious thought was: Where am I? He was on his back with several faces staring down at him. The ground seemed to be moving, and so was the ceiling. A stretcher, he thought. His arms were tied down, and an oxygen mask covered his face. People were talking to him, but a pain in his head prevented him from hearing them. “My head,” he said through the mask, and his head lolled to the right. He spotted Melissa among the various legs and torsos. She had her own facemask, and some stranger was pushing down on her chest. “What happened?” he asked her, his words slurred. His vision began to blur as well, and then she was gone, along with everything else.

  “Someone will always need to rule, “Pushkin finished.

  “Then it will be the most capable, the most powerful mind.” Reisch answered.

  “And if that turns out to be Amanda, or someone like her, how will you respond?” The car stayed very quiet for a very long time. “Are you leaving or are you going to stay around for the fireworks?” Pushkin wisely changed subjects.

  “I’m leaving,” Reisch finally responded. “The signal i
s not due for another fifty-five hours, and it can be sent from anywhere.”

  “Wake me when we get there,” Pushkin said as he dissolved into passenger seat.

  Reisch checked the satchel again; it was back where he had put it before the Russian had returned. He was glad for the silence and solitude. Pushkin had always been able to twist Klaus’s ideas back on to themselves; it had started out as a lesson in logic, but over the decades it had turned into a game, a game Reisch rarely won.

  As he negotiated the turn south Reisch questioned whether Pushkin was worth the trouble. Probably not he concluded, but he did owe the Russian his life.

  Thirty years earlier, a newly graduated Klaus went to Amsterdam for a weeklong vacation, and then decided to stay permanently. The permissive society was ideal for his sociopathic abilities, and he frequently exercised them. He was content for the first time in his life until he had some bad luck that dramatically altered the course of his young life. Finding himself low on funds, he attempted a simple transaction with an elderly woman and her purse. As it turned out she was quite fond of her purse, and when Klaus tried to run with it, he found that she was still attached. He dragged the screaming woman a full block before being tackled by an American tourist, who beat him into unconsciousness. The entire affair was caught on tape by the American’s wife, and a sanitized version aired repeatedly on CNN for the next week. When Klaus faced the magistrate, he was arguably the most hated man in all the Netherlands. His bandaged face and broken ribs did nothing to lessen the sentence of three years.

  A month later Reisch was back before the same magistrate after killing another inmate. The man, twice the size of Klaus, had been terrorizing the young German since his arrival, seemingly with the tacit approval of the guards. His assailant had every physical advantage, but Reisch had patience and endured, waiting for his opportunity. It came one afternoon when his tormentor lunged for Klaus’s lunch tray; he stepped away from his attacker, swept his legs from beneath him, and then crushed the man’s throat with his boot. He stood over the dying man as he suffocated. In fairness, the guards also watched the man die before intervening and subduing Reisch. His sentence was changed to thirty years in a maximum-security prison. After attempting to kill the magistrate in the courtroom, he once again was subdued and latter hospitalized.