The Cure

by Glenn Cooper

  “What should I do for her?”

  “Keep her out of harm’s way.”

  “Will this wear off?”

  “We don’t know. I’m sorry, I’m in a hurry.”

  There was no point saying goodbye to her. He sped off and cut over to Route 9. It was only when he was alone that he guiltily thought about what he had done. He’d abandoned his patients on Avenue Q. It was antithetical to anything he had ever done as a physician. And yet. There was Emma.

  He answered his ringing phone on hands-free.

  “Dr. Abbott, this is Dr. Hansen at CDC. Am I catching you at a bad time?”

  The absurdity of the question almost made him laugh.

  “Couldn’t be much worse, actually.”

  “Want to call me back?”

  “No, let’s talk now.”

  “I wanted to compare notes. We’re starting to get an early handle on infectivity rates, but you’ve got the best natural model going with your quarantine situation. According to my notes, you’ve got thirty-two people under observation.”

  “Twenty-six,” Jamie said.

  “I’m sorry, twenty-six what?”

  “Twenty-six developed FAS after thirty-six hours in quarantine.”

  “That’s greater than an eighty-percent infectivity rate!”

  “It could be heading higher,” Jamie said. “In another day, the six negatives could turn positive.”

  “Or there could be some kind of baseline natural immunity that protects twenty percent.”

  “It’s possible,” Jamie said. “Not my field.”

  “An eighty-percent rate is the absolute worst-case scenario we’ve derived from modeling the raw numbers of reported cases. We’re estimating doubling times of about two days, which is almost unheard of in epidemics, but if the infectivity rate is what you say it is, then the data makes sense. You know more about FAS than anyone. What’s your estimate of its mortality rate?”

  Another driver flew past him, cutting him off and Jamie honked.

  “Are you in a car?” Hansen asked incredulously.

  “I had to leave the hospital,” Jamie said. “It’s my daughter.”

  “Christ, I’m sorry. But you’re okay?”

  “I’m one of the six, obviously. Look, there’s nothing intrinsically lethal about the syndrome.”

  “There’s the pneumonia,” Hansen said.

  “It seems mild—at least the cases I’ve seen. If people are going to die from FAS it will be because they can’t manage to feed and hydrate themselves, or it’ll be from accidents.”

  “I’m afraid, from the point of view of an epidemic, that’s terrible news,” Hansen said. “Absent a vaccine, it’s lethality that chokes off epidemics. If you die, you can’t spread the disease to the next guy. An eighty-percent infectivity rate with a low-lethality syndrome leads to some horrifying figures.”

  “How horrifying?”

  “In thirty days, worldwide, we could be looking at almost a billion infected. Of course, that assumes complete population mixing. A lot of people will shelter to avoid the epidemic but they’re going to have to leave their houses eventually.”

  The data was numbing. All Jamie could say was, “I’m almost home. I’m going to have to sign off.”

  “Okay. Look, I don’t know when we’re going to be able to talk again. People on my team are either getting sick or staying at home with their families. Data collection from the field is starting to get spotty. I know our virology people who are still in the labs are working with Dr. Alexander on culturing the FAS virus, but someone just told me she wasn’t answering calls this morning. Do you know if she’s all right?”

  It was another gut punch. “I haven’t spoken to her today.”

  “Well, things appear to be going tits-up.”

  “Is that a technical term?”

  “It is now. Good luck to you, Dr. Abbott. Good luck to us all.”

  *

  Thirteen years ago, he had made the same short, dreadful walk from the driveway to the front door. Thirteen years ago, he had been forced to find the words to say to his two-year-old daughter. He wasn’t going to tell her that Mommy was in heaven, or that she would be Emma’s guardian angel—he and Carolyn weren’t religious. He simply said that Mommy wasn’t coming home from the hospital. While her au pair wept, Emma looked up from her coloring book and asked if she had died. When he told her, yes, and began to cry, she told him not to be sad. Everything will be all right, Daddy, she said sweetly. How many times had he asked himself where that little girl had gone? Now, he would give his right arm to find a snippy and sarcastic teenager on the other side of the door.

  He dropped his doctor’s coat on the floor and called out a tentative hello.

  Linda Milbane came down the stairs. She wasn’t wearing a mask.

  “I’ve got them up here,” she said by way of greeting.

  She was older than him, maybe fifty, with a no-nonsense appearance—short hair and sparse makeup. He had always seen her in the kind of practical clothes—slacks, polo shirt, and blazer—that he imagined detectives wore. There was a chance she had been quite attractive before a tough life got the better of her, but right now, he hardly noticed her.

  He bounded up the stairs past the barking dog.

  Linda followed and said, “I had them in separate rooms but they’re calmer when they’re together. They’re in Emma’s room.”

  On the landing he said, “Why no mask?”

  “I’ve been in and out of people’s houses since this began,” she said. “I’ve been plenty exposed. You?”

  “Same.”

  There were two girls, but Emma got all of his attention. She didn’t seem to be the same person he had left two days earlier. Gone was the petulant jaw thrust, the angry eyes, the ridiculous confidence of a fifteen-year-old convinced she was right about everything. This Emma was sitting on her bed, knees severely drawn to her chest, staring at him without a trace of recognition. The word unhinged came to him. She looked unhinged, untethered. Her face was flushed, and she had a hacking cough.

  He approached slowly. “It’s Dad, kiddo.”

  A scream, an awful scream, stabbed his ears. He retreated a step. Kyra, who was on the floor half-under Emma’s desk, screamed too. Jamie knew her well. She and Emma had been friends since middle school. He thought of them as bookends, although they could not have looked more different if they tried. Emma was fair and willowy. Kyra was dark and muscular, taller, a good athlete, a tennis player.

  “Oh, baby, it’s okay,” Linda said to her daughter. “Calm yourself.” When the room quieted, she said to Jamie, “When one of them gets worked up, the other one gets worked up.”

  He asked her, “Where were they when you got here?”

  “In the family room. I saw them through the window, but they wouldn’t unlock the door. I had to force a window.” She began to tear up. “They looked so scared and lost.”

  Again, he tried to get close enough to Emma to lay a hand on her, but she shrieked at his approach. There was a little yellow armchair by the window. He slumped into it.

  “Do they know us? Do they know who they are?” Linda asked.

  “I don’t think so. The virus has wiped out their memories.”

  “Is there a treatment?” Her tone was borderline aggressive.

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, how long will it last? Are they going to just snap out of it?”

  “At this point, there’s no way of knowing.”

  She snarled at him, “You’re no help at all, are you?”

  His tears ran down his face onto his collar.

  “What the hell are we supposed to do?” she asked.

  “We’ve got to protect them from themselves. And from others.”

  *

  They took turns sitting in Emma’s bedroom. Jamie was in the kitchen making coffee when Mandy called.

  “I’m sorry,” he said before she could say much. “I was going to call. I heard the CDC people couldn’t rea
ch you in your lab.”

  “I went home to rest. Derek’s sick.”

  He clamped his eyes shut. “Shit. I’m so sorry.”

  “He knew who I was, but he’s losing his memory before my eyes.”

  “Are you protected? A mask, I mean.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She sounded like her tank was just about empty. “Bad things are starting to happen everywhere. I’m not sure I want to know what’s coming.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Stay with him, I guess. What else can I do?”

  “Work on the cure, that’s what. Put a goddamn mask on, that’s what you can do. None of your techs were sick, right? Derek could be your first contact.”

  In little more than a whisper, she said she would.

  “Get some rest, make him as safe as you can and get back to your lab,” he said. “Please. As long as you’ve got your faculties, you’re better positioned than anyone in the world to crack this thing.”

  “You don’t sound too good either.”

  He couldn’t bear to talk about Emma. “I’m tired, that’s all.”

  “You’re still in quarantine?”

  He lied. “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  He changed the subject. “Did any of the antivirals have any activity?”

  “None yet. We can try to make a vaccine.”

  “There may be some natural immunity. Maybe twenty percent of the population or thereabouts could be immune.”

  “How do you know that?”

  He didn’t want to burden her with his situation. She was scared and alone. “I’ll tell you later.”

  She didn’t press him. “If that’s true,” she said, “it’s possible some people have neutralizing antibodies from prior adenovirus respiratory infections. Adenoviral infections are ubiquitous. Some specific viral sub-types could be responsible for immunity to FAS. A vaccine’s doable. Definitely.”

  “I talked to Hansen at the CDC. The epidemic’s moving at warp speed. By the time we’re able to make a working vaccine and scale it up for mass use, there may not be many people to vaccinate. I was up late last night thinking. We need to try to reverse this on a molecular level. Maybe find a molecule that’ll displace the altered CREBs sitting on memory gates and allow the gates to functionally stay open.”

  “What molecule?”

  “I’ve got some ideas.”

  He heard some kind of banging coming from her side and then something that sounded like cracking wood.

  “Mandy? What’s happening,” he asked.

  He heard her shout Derek’s name.

  He heard her scream and tell him to stop.

  He heard Derek shout, Who the fuck are you?

  He heard her pleading, Please don’t.

  And then the phone went dead.

  13

  Dillingham, Pennsylvania.

  Founded in 1805 by Thomas Dillingham, a former soldier in George Washington’s Continental Army who uprooted his young family from their comfortable home in Pittsburgh to the wild, forested countryside of Western Pennsylvania to build a lumber mill and find his fortune. Twenty years later, he accidentally cut off his left hand with a circular saw and died of blood loss and sepsis.

  Population at last census: 729

  Racial profile: 97% white

  Religious affiliations: Christian 81%, none 19%

  Median household income: $31,000

  Main industries: farming, retail, light manufacturing

  Blair Edison, his wife, and five children made up one percent of the population of Dillingham. They lived a few miles from the center of town on the Edison Stock Farm, thirty-odd acres of tired pastureland, outbuildings, and a drafty farmhouse built by his grandfather, added onto by his father, and maintained by him on a wing and a prayer.

  When news of the epidemic first broke, Edison jeered at the TV and said to his wife, “How stupid do they think we are to believe this kind of bullcrap? This is how they try to control us, don’t you know? They try to distract us from the real problems we have in this country. You know what they are.”

  Delia Edison showed no interest in hearing her husband sermonize. She was all too familiar with his views. She simply said, “Uh-huh,” and told him she was going up to bed.

  An event two days earlier had failed to register, because it was innocuous and profoundly trivial. Craig Mellon, one of the mayor’s sons, had come by the farm to pick up three fifty-pound packages of dressed Angus beef to restock his freezer. Because of what had happened this past spring, his father and a bunch of other townsfolk had vowed never to buy from Edison again, but Craig’s wife thought that Edison had the best Angus product, and she had forced her husband’s hand. Just don’t tell your father, she said. Before the incident, most of the locals bought meat from him. The consensus was that his beef was the best around. His livestock was grain-fed, he didn’t use hormones or antibiotics on his cows—or so he said—and he claimed the beef was dry-aged for twenty-one days—though the truth was that at most, cuts made it to fourteen days. Still, because of the infamous incident, Edison’s business was way down.

  Craig Mellon, who worked at his father’s bank as a junior assistant manager, had just returned from a financial seminar in Pittsburgh and he was nursing a bug. While he was loading his pickup truck, he pretty much coughed right into the faces of Joe and Brian Edison, Blair’s two oldest boys, who were twenty and twenty-four. Blair Edison saw him do it, but since he was done with the transaction and didn’t want to see Craig’s smug face anymore, he walked away, shaking his head at the fellow’s bad manners.

  Brian Edison had gone to high school with Craig and there was no love lost. Craig had been the quarterback of the football team and Brian had been a second-stringer. Craig drove a new red Camaro in high school, Brian a rusted-out Nissan. Growing up, Craig’s house had a swimming pool, Brian’s a muddy pond shared with the livestock. Craig went off to college, Brian stayed on the farm.

  “Jesus, Craig, watch it!” Brian said, wiping his face with a dirty handkerchief.

  “Sorry, man. I partied way too hard the last few days. I must’ve caught something.”

  Joe Edison was younger than Brian but more aggressive. He always had his big brother’s back.

  “Probably the clap,” Joe said.

  “That’s something you’ll never have to worry about,” Craig said by way of a comeback.

  “Oh yeah, why’s that?”

  “’Cause virgins don’t generally get the clap, that’s why.”

  Joe was a lit firecracker. “Come down off the truck and say that again.”

  “Settle down,” Brian said to his brother. “Is that going to be cash or check, Craig?”

  Now, Edison was cursing at the TV. When he heard his wife calling for him, he shouted back, “What the hell’s the matter?”

  “Come upstairs! It’s Seth.”

  Seth was fourteen and shared a room with his twelve-year-old brother, Benjamin. When Edison came up, everyone was crowded in, including his two older sons, who both still lived at home, and his eight-year-old daughter, Brittany.

  “What’s wrong?” Edison demanded.

  “He don’t know his ass from a table,” Benjamin said.

  Seth was sitting up in bed, clutching handfuls of blond hair.

  “What’s the matter with you, boy?” Edison asked.

  “My head’s not right.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know where I am.”

  “You’re in your damn room, that’s where you are.”

  “I think he’s got a fever,” his mother said. “Could this be what’s on the news?”

  “What’s on the news?” Benjamin asked.

  “Some foolishness,” Edison said.

  “There’s a sickness that robs your memory,” his mother said.

  Joe leaned over his brother’s bed. “What’s the name of your homeroom teacher?”

  Seth looked up
and said he didn’t know.

  “What kind of truck do I drive?” Brian asked him.

  Seth sounded mournful. “I don’t know.”

  “What’s my favorite color?” Brittany asked helpfully.

  “Red?” Seth said.

  “That’s right!” the girl said. “See? He’s all right.”

  “What’s your girlfriend’s name?” Joe asked.

  Again, a sorrowful, “I can’t remember.”

  “He should forget her,” Benjamin said. “She’s a bow-wow.”

  Delia put her foot down. “That’s it, Blair. I’m taking him to the emergency.”

  “How much is that going to cost?” Edison asked.

  His eldest son said, “I went for four stitches. Cost me two-fifty.”

  “We can’t afford that,” Edison cried. “Why not take him to the urgent care in Clarkson?”

  “You know who owns that place, don’t you?” Brian asked.

  “Shit,” Edison said. “Ed Villa’s not getting a cent of mine. Take him to the goddamned hospital then.”

  *

  Brian volunteered to take Seth to the ER, but afterwards, Delia wished she had gone too. She lay awake for hours beside her snoring husband listening for his car to return. At three, she woke him up and told him she was worried.

  He was unsympathetic. “What do you want me to do? Go call Brian on his cell phone. Don’t wake me up again. I gotta butcher two head in the morning.”

  She got up and called her son from the kitchen phone. It went straight to voice mail. She looked out the window for headlights for another half hour, then went upstairs to Joe’s room. He awoke to the creaking door.

  “They’re not back yet and I can’t get Brian on his phone. I’m worried.”

  Joe put his feet on the floor. “I’ll run over to the hospital.”

  “You’re a good boy.”

  It was a twenty-minute drive to Clarkson, the county seat. Joe parked his truck in the ER lot, tried to get inside, but the automatic doors weren’t opening. He banged on them with the heels of his hand until a uniformed security guard wearing a surgical mask appeared and told him through the glass that the ER was closed.

  “What do you mean, closed?”

  “It’s on account of the virus. Public health department said so.”