by Ann Benson
He grinned. “Come to think of it, I do feel pretty achy this morning. Okay, I confess. You did wear me out. I guess I should be trying to build up my reserves.”
“In which case, we should definitely ride.”
They emerged from the elevator on the seventh floor still smiling and glowing, and walked slowly to the door of Janie’s suite. Bruce wrapped his arms around her and started to kiss her good-bye, when they were interrupted by the sound of a latch turning. It broke the rhythm of the kiss. They pulled apart abruptly and looked in the direction of the sound. A few doors down a hand emerged to snatch up the newspaper lying on the carpet, the first concrete evidence that the real world would indeed try to extinguish the afterglow of their one-night idyll. Then the hand disappeared back inside, and the door closed again.
Janie frowned. “Let’s do this inside the room.”
“Good idea,” Bruce said.
She withdrew the key card from her wallet and opened the door, but before entering she looked next door to Caroline’s suite and noticed the DO NOT DISTURB sign still hanging there. She tapped Bruce’s arm and pointed in the direction of the sign.
“Bless my soul,” she said, sounding a bit miffed. “The wanderer seems to have returned, and it looks like she’s sleeping something off.”
“That’s Caroline’s suite?” he said.
“It is. I guess you were right. She must have met someone. There’s probably a message from her waiting for me.” They went in and Janie took off her jacket.
“Wait one minute while I clear up this mystery, and then I’ll kiss you good-bye properly,” she said.
“No problem,” Bruce said. “You’re the one with the tight schedule.”
“Don’t remind me,” Janie said. She went to the phone and called for her voice mail, but there were no messages. She dialed the extension number for Caroline’s room, but got no answer.
She hung up the phone. “She’s either not in there or she’s with someone and not answering. But that doesn’t make any sense. She knows I’m trying to get hold of her, even if she is otherwise occupied.”
“She might have different priorities,” Bruce said, grinning. He walked over to her and took her in his arms.
Suddenly his lips were on hers, and she felt the warmth of his kiss rising up from her toes, spreading through her thighs and belly, the quick tease of his tongue, and his hand on the back of her waist, urging her gently closer to him. She felt her exasperations melting away, her resistance crumbling, and she pressed her body into his.
“Hmm,” he said—light kiss on the tip of her nose—“maybe we should”—soft little peck on the forehead—“put the”—nibble on her cheek—“DO NOT DISTURB sign—”
The DO NOT DISTURB sign, she thought silently.
“—on this door too …”
Janie’s brain-wheels were suddenly spinning. “What did you say?” she said.
He pulled back from her a little. “I said maybe we should put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on this door—”
The DO NOT DISTURB sign …
She pulled away from him abruptly, leaving him empty-armed and wondering. “Bruce, if you weren’t in your room, why would you have a DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging on the door?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I wouldn’t. Maybe she just forgot to remove it before she went out.”
“Not Caroline. She’s a compulsive detail freak. That’s why I asked her to come along to help me on this project. She doesn’t miss a thing.” Janie stared at the floor in a moment of indecision. Then she looked up and resolutely declared, “That’s it, I don’t care if I catch her in the act. I’m going in,” she said.
“How are you going to do that?” Bruce asked.
“We have keys to each other’s suite,” she told him. Her face tightened with worry and she said, “I just hope everything’s all right.”
She quickly went out of the room and left her own door open. She tore off the DO NOT DISTURB sign and slid the plastic key card into the lock. When the lock clicked, she opened the door a crack and said, “Hello?” rather tentatively, hoping that she would find Caroline there but occupied. There was no reply.
She opened the door farther to go in, but the smell that greeted her drove her back into the hallway gasping for breath. She bumped backward into Bruce, who was right behind her, and closed the door again.
They both knew what that smell meant. She looked at Bruce pleadingly. “Do you want me to call the police?” he asked.
She’d seen lots of dead bodies, hundreds perhaps, in various states of wholeness, but Janie had never actually discovered one before, even during the Outbreaks. She stood in the hallway outside Caroline’s room, trembling with fear. “No,” she said, with more decisiveness than she felt. Her voice quivered. “I think I’d rather see what’s there first. But I’m really scared of what we’ll find.”
Bruce pulled her close to him and held her for a few seconds. “I’m with you, Janie. We’re here together.”
Comforted by his presence, she took a deep breath of clean air and reopened the door, and together they entered the room. When she flipped on the light switch, a swarm of flies rose up from the floor area on the other side of the bed.
“Oh, God, Bruce, what if she’s dead.…” They rushed to that side of the room and saw the stiff body of Ted Cummings lying there on the floor, just as it had landed when Caroline pushed him off her own body.
Janie stood there slack-jawed, staring in disbelief at the sight before them. Bruce turned aside and vomited into a wastebasket, then wiped his mouth with his hand.
Gagging from the vile smell, he said, “My God, what happened here?”
Janie rushed to the window and opened it as wide as it would go. “I don’t begin to know,” she said frantically. “Why on earth would Ted be in Caroline’s room? And where the hell is Caroline?”
Bruce knelt down to take a closer look at the body. “We’d better not touch anything. We might be disturbing evidence.”
Janie looked at him in shock. “Evidence of what? Are you implying that you think Caroline did this?”
He looked at her intently and said, “Janie, it’s her room, and he’s dead, and she’s not here. What else am I supposed to think?”
Fighting off her anger, she knelt down beside him. “We don’t know a thing about how he died.” She leaned closer and looked at Ted’s face. “I don’t see any signs of trauma, and there’s nothing to indicate that they might have struggled.” She leaned closer, holding her breath, and looked carefully at the body.
“Damn,” she said. “I need to get closer.” She stood up and wiped her hands on the fabric of her pants, though she hadn’t touched the body at all. “I’ve got some gloves and masks in my room. Let’s go get them.” She gave him a pointed stare as he rose up. “Caroline did not do this, you know,” she said heatedly.
As he followed her out of the room, Bruce was not convinced.
The envelope from London had been staring at him from the corner of his desk for way too long, John Sandhaus thought. They grow eyes after a while if you don’t pay attention to them, he thought, and picked it up. Right. The printout that Janie Crowe had sent him. The cacophonous noise of children playing drifted into his office from another part of the house. He yelled to his wife, “Cathy, can you please keep those kids quiet so I can do some work?”
Cathy promptly invited him to engage in self-copulation, so he shut the door to his study in an effort to block out the din of family, and then felt guilty because he knew there would come a time when he would miss the comfortable noise of his children playing. He knew that someday, way too soon, its absence would seem far more disturbing than its presence.
As he waited for his computer to log on to the university database, he looked out the window at the beautiful New England countryside. Soon enough, he thought, the colors would be magnificent, but then, of course, there would be the inevitable and never-ending leaves to rake, and all thoughts of magnificence would fade.
>
The computer said to him in a soothing, calm voice, “Welcome to Biocom. Please enter your password.”
He typed in a few digits, then said back to the computer in a sarcastic voice, “Here’s your bleeping password, you big pile of plastic! And stop talking to me! You are not human.”
As if in direct contradiction to his edict the computer replied, “You may enter. Thank you for using Biocom.”
And what else am I supposed to use? he thought. You guys run everything. There’s nothing else to use.
In a few seconds he was on-line to the CDC’s Atlanta database and the computer was searching for a match to the graphic image Janie Crowe had sent him. The program came back and asked for further information, but he had none to give it. She’d only sent a print; there had been none of the usual accompanying chemistry or genetic information. He made a mental note to speak to her about incomplete data when she returned, then wondered if such a chastisement might not be worth an international phone call right at the moment. But the note she’d attached to the print had said, “Have fun!” so he doubted that this piece would wind up being part of her final data. He decided against calling.
Reverting to the original file, he ran it through three different filters, hoping to sharpen the image so it would be more readable. His efforts were successful, because the next time he ran it through the program a new screen came up and told him it had identified his mystery bug as Yersinia pestis.
Yersinia. Enterobacteria, he thought. Pestis didn’t ring a bell. “Have we met?” he said to the image on the screen. “No, I didn’t think so. Not recently, anyway. Okay, then, let’s see what else they have on you.” He called up a list of options from the database, then scanned through the list and selected “Pathology.” The file came up on the screen and he began to read it. It wasn’t long before his eyes widened and his heart began to beat faster.
Holy shit, he said under his breath. He closed the file when he finished reading it and reverted quickly to the graphic image of the microbe. “Yersinia fucking pestis,” he said aloud. “Holy shit. You are not supposed to be loose in London.”
She sent a print, he thought, his mind suddenly racing. But what did she make the print from, and where was that object now? Does she know what this is?
Of course not, idiot! That’s why she sent it to you in the first place!
Wishing with all his heart that he hadn’t left the envelope sitting on the corner of his desk for more than one minute, he searched around in his file on Janie’s project for the phone number of the hotel she’d booked. As soon as he found it, he reached for the telephone.
He heard his teenage daughter on the line talking to several of her friends in a conference call. Without even saying hello, he ordered, “Get off. I need the phone now.”
“But, Daddy …”
John borrowed a phrase from his father. “But nothing!” he thundered, and everyone hung up without another word. As soon as he had a dial tone, he punched in the number, and waited impatiently for her to pick up on the other end. “Oh, Christ, Janie, answer the phone, please.…”
As she crossed the threshold into her own room, Janie’s phone began to ring. She almost leapt on it.
She yanked the handset off the receiver. “Caroline?” she said, a little too quickly.
But it wasn’t Caroline. “Janie? Is this Janie Crowe?”
Janie was disappointed. “Yes,” she said. “Who is this, please?”
“It’s John Sandhaus. From Amherst.”
“Oh, John, oh my God … Hello. Listen, I’m afraid you’re calling at a bad time—”
“It’s pretty important. I’m calling about that graphic image you sent me.”
It took her a moment to remember that she’d sent him a print and another moment to remember what had been on it. That microbe, she thought. And in view of what she faced in the next room, it seemed glaringly trivial. “I’m sorry, John. I appreciate your getting back to me about that. But I can’t talk right now. Can I call you back later? I’ve got a problem here and it can’t wait.”
“I’ll say you’ve got a problem.” His voice was full of exasperation. “I don’t know what your problem is there, but your problem here is pretty enormous. I think you’d better listen.” Without waiting for her to agree he launched right into his explanation. “I got a firm ID on that bacterium from the CDC database.”
Big fucking deal, she thought angrily. How dare he think his opinion is more important than my problem here.… I’ve got a dead man in the next room. Top that, John Sandhaus.…
Incredibly, he did top it. “That microbe you dug up was not your ordinary household bacterium. It’s Yersinia pestis. It causes bubonic plague.”
She gasped and put her hand to her mouth. Then she pulled it away just as quickly and stared at it.
“And Janie, there’s something else very strange about it. The CDC files show that the last known case of plague in all of England occurred in 1927. There were some slight but significant differences between the sample of Y. pestis in the database and the print you sent me. Where did you get it?”
The sense of dread she’d felt on that field that night returned in full force. She said quietly, “I dug it up from about a foot and a half down.”
“There you have it, then,” he said triumphantly, and issued his opinion. “You’ve got a very old bug on your hands. It’s obviously the archaic strain. I should probably be congratulating you for such a major find, but I think I should console you for major trouble instead. That bug is probably far more virulent than what’s around today, just based on the differences in the symptoms we see in modern plague and the symptoms described in history books. Right now it looks like it’s still in a sporified state, but if the right conditions occur, say it gets wet or it’s warmed up just right, it could desporulate and revert to its active state.”
“Dear God” was all she could say.
“You can say that again. It would be a very big problem. You have to call the proper authorities in London and notify them right away if there’s any possibility that it might have gotten loose. We can cure modern plague, but I don’t know about the old version.”
She was silent.
“Janie?” he said again, but got no answer.
He said very calmly to the silent phone, “You have to do the right thing here. Don’t think about whether or not you’re going to get into trouble. This is bigger and more important than you. And, Janie? Do yourself and the rest of the world a favor. Wash your hands before you get on the plane home. This bug is just different enough that it might not make the sensors react.”
He hung up.
“What was that all about?” Bruce asked anxiously.
She swallowed hard as she replaced the receiver. “Do you remember that fabric sample I dug up? Frank found it in one of our tubes just before he died.”
He nodded. “I remember. What about it?”
“I sent off one of the prints Frank made for me to my reeducation advisor back in the States, thinking he might enjoy looking at it. He’s a forensic pathologist, but he specializes in bacteria, and he’s one of the best in his field. Well, that was just him on the phone.” She looked into his eyes, her own eyes full of fear. “It seems that I’ve managed to dig up the archaic form of the bacterium that causes bubonic plague.”
Bruce sat down, stunned. “Where is that sample now?”
She nodded her head in the direction of her small refrigerator. “Right over there.”
“It’s here in this room?”
“Right here. Don’t worry, it’s sealed up tight. But I’m not worried about the sample contaminating anything while it’s in the refrigerator. What worries me is that Caroline’s been handling it. And did you get a good look at Ted while we were in Caroline’s room? He didn’t look so good. And why on earth would he be wearing a turtleneck in such warm weather?”
“I don’t know,” Bruce said. “In all the years we’ve worked together, I don’t ever recall seeing him we
ar anything like that.”
Without another word they both got up and headed toward the door. Just before they went out, Janie grabbed Bruce by the arm. “Let’s not forget these,” she said, and went to her briefcase for two masks and two pairs of gloves.
Properly protected, they crouched down next to Ted’s odoriferous corpse and examined it visually.
“He’s very pale,” Janie said.
“He’s very dead,” Bruce pointed out.
“But still, he’s paler than he should be.” She pointed to the back of his hand. “Look at the difference. His face is much paler than his hand, and his position wouldn’t account for it. His pallor could be the result of some illness.”
She searched her memory for the symptoms of plague. “The one thing I remember about plague is the dark swellings in the lymphatic areas. I don’t think they taught us much else.”
“There wasn’t much need. It was basically a dead disease by then.”
“Let’s hope it’s not dead like tuberculosis,” she said cynically.
“But that bacterium evolved into drug resistance. Plague is still treatable.”
“Modern plague is treatable. It’s my advisor’s opinion that what we dug up is archaic plague.”
“Shit.”
“Very shit.”
“But we don’t know if that’s what killed Ted.”
Janie reached over and with one finger pulled the cowl of the turtleneck shirt away from Ted’s neck. Beneath it were dark bruises and lumpy swellings. “Look at this,” she said. “Dark swellings in the lymphatic areas.”
Bruce looked and swallowed hard. “We still can’t be sure. We need to verify the presence of the bacteria. And there’s something else too. I agree that it looks like he had plague, but it doesn’t look like the disease was advanced enough to cause his death.” He pointed to Ted’s exposed neck. “I mean, I agree that the signs of infection are there. But look at these buboes. They’re just beginning to resolve. I’m certainly no expert, but I just don’t see this stage of disease as being fatal.”
