by Scott Britz
“What about Dr. Gifford?” asked Grasso.
Niedermann threw Cricket a glance.
“Dr. Gifford is incapacitated,” Cricket said. “He’s been infected with the virus and needs to be in isolation. But be very careful if you find him. Avoid physical contact. If he refuses to come along willingly, call me. I’ll bring a biohazard team to deal with him.”
“I have no idea how to set up a quarantine,” said Mike. “What do you expect us to do?”
“Seal off all gates and access roads. No one is to enter or leave the campus without my authorization. Call for backup from the county sheriff’s department. A few real badges will tell people we’re serious. Then make a sweep of each and every person on campus. Go through all apartments, guesthouses, and labs. We’ll set up a screening station in the Commons, right on the Quad. Everyone gets examined for symptoms, everyone gives a blood sample. Dr. Freiberg will supervise. I’ll join him as soon as my daughter’s condition becomes stable.”
Mike scrunched up his eyes. “It’s almost midnight. Do you really want us to drag people out of bed?”
“Mister, I can assure you the Nemesis virus will not be sleeping.”
“You heard the doctor,” said Niedermann, clapping his hands to cut off discussion. As his crew filed out, he stood up and nodded toward Cricket. “Very well, Dr. Rensselaer-Wright. Are you satisfied?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” Niedermann squeezed the last drop of antiserum from his IV bag before yanking the IV needle from his arm. “I’m done here. I’m going to my office now to call Phillip Eden. It’s going to be the worst phone call of Eden’s life.” Niedermann rolled down his sleeve, slid his suit coat back on, and headed down the corridor.
Freiberg and Waggoner bumped shoulders with him as they came in. Freiberg turned on the intercom. “How is she?”
Cricket rechecked the monitors. “We’ve stopped the free fall in her vital signs,” she said, astonished to see the improvement. “Her heart rate is coming down. The oxygen saturation of her blood is almost normal.”
“Is it working?”
“I’m afraid to hope.”
“Well, we know the virus mostly attacks the small blood vessels. That’s the first place the antibodies go. So they could work pretty quickly. Plus, Emmy is young, Cricket. The young have God-given vitality.”
Cricket thought of the two houseboys in Bays 4 and 6. They weren’t as sick as Emmy yet, but they were fast on their way. “Wig, is there any way to extract more antiserum from Hannibal?”
“No, I used the last cubic centimeter of blood.”
Freiberg chided him. “Don’t be so unimaginative, Wig. Think beyond blood.”
Waggoner cocked his head. “Meaning what?”
“Bone marrow. Marrow and spleen. Lymph nodes, too. Plenty of B cells there. Where there are B cells, there are antibodies.”
Waggoner raised his eyebrows. “Theoretically.”
“Make it happen, Wig. Be the hero.”
Waggoner moved hesitantly toward the door, then stopped and looked around as though he had lost something. “Okay, I’ll do it,” he mumbled. “There’ll be so much cellular crap it’ll play hell with the columns. But I can get around that.”
Waggoner appeared to be speaking to himself. Freiberg and Cricket left his train of thought undisturbed as he shuffled away toward the exit.
“Erich, we’re going to need more than Wig can produce that way,” Cricket said. “Lots more if we don’t get Nemesis under control.”
“Ideas?”
“Make new Hannibals. There are a dozen dogs in the animal facility that could be housed in strict isolation. What if we inoculated them with the virus strain we recovered from Hannibal? It wouldn’t kill them, just make them sick enough to mount an immune response. In three or four days they would begin producing antiserum that we could harvest.”
“Good suggestion. I’ll put someone right on it.”
Freiberg was about to say something more when the alarm from Emmy’s monitors began to beep. Cricket anxiously scanned the displays. The oxygen saturation of Emmy’s blood was plummeting. Her pale, swollen body was jerking against the restraints. A seizure? Am I losing her?
Cricket saw a froth of bloody mucus percolating inside the plastic tube taped to the side of Emmy’s mouth. “The airway’s plugged,” she shouted to Jean. “We have to remove it. Get a fresh one stat.”
As Jean rifled through the crash cart for an endotracheal air tube of the right size, Cricket disconnected the old one from the ventilator and drew it out of Emmy’s mouth, like a slimy, bloody snake. Emmy erupted in a spasm of coughing. She shouldn’t be doing that. She’s supposed to be heavily sedated.
Jean found a 7.5 mm tube and peeled the plastic wrapper open, holding it so that a loop of the sterile air tube protruded for Cricket to take. By then Cricket should have been ready with the metal laryngoscope in Emmy’s mouth to guide the insertion of the tube. But she had frozen, with her hand in midair and her eyes on the monitor.
“Look! Her oxygen sats are going back up. She’s breathing on her own.”
As Emmy’s coughing subsided, the display moved back into the normal zone. Her body stopped jerking, too. But her eyelids were now twitching.
“She’s seizing,” exclaimed Jean.
“No, Jean. She’s waking up. She’s trying to open her eyes, but the light hurts.”
Jean dimmed the switch. Emmy opened her eyes. For a moment, she looked confusedly about her.
Her lips were moving. Feebly.
“What’s she saying?” asked Jean.
“I don’t know,” said Cricket. “I can’t hear.”
“ ‘Stay’? Is it ‘stay’?”
Cricket leaned up against the isolation tent. In the dimmed light, it was impossible to read Emmy’s lips. Through two layers of plastic all she could hear was a single word:
“Afraid . . . afraid . . .”
Frustration enraged her. Nemesis be damned. Tearing her helmet from its Velcro fastenings, she shoved her head through the vent in the isolation tent. Lowering her ear all the way to Emmy’s lips, she strained to listen.
What she heard was like the voice of a ghost. “Don’t be afraid, Mom,” Emmy gasped. “Don’t be afraid. I can . . . do this.”
“Yes, you can,” Cricket whispered. Then she repeated it, only this time not whispering, but out loud, like the command of a drill sergeant: “Yes, you can!”
Cricket recoiled from the tent and bit her wrist, her incisors slicing through the bitter-tasting latex glove. Her vision went blurry, as if she were underwater. She shook all over. It was like the worst of her panic attacks. For two days, she’d held herself together as always, by steeling herself for the worst, like a boxer anticipating a killer blow to the midsection. What she did not prepare for was the possibility of joy. Now, it came to her like a sucker punch. She was on the point of passing out.
Hank had heard the alarm and came running from the office. “What is it? What’s wrong?” he shouted.
Cricket staggered forward and threw herself against the window, pressing her face against it, tipping a warm flood of tears down her cheeks.
Hank’s eyes were wild. His panicked shouts rumbled through the double sheets of eight-ply polycarbonate and glass.
“Cricket! What’s happening? Your helmet! Is . . . is this it?”
Cricket wiped her eyes with the back of her glove. “It’s over, Hank!” she mumbled. “Th-the worst . . .”
She needed Hank more than she had ever needed him. She needed to fall into his arms.
But the cold glass was between them. She had thrown away her headset. She could barely hear the pounding of his fists. How could he make out what she was trying to say? So she gathered all the air she could into her lungs. One enormous breath.
“The worst is over!” she shouted, h
er lower jaw still quivering.
One more enormous breath. A pause for strength. Then the words she herself could scarcely believe were true.
“Our baby is going to live!”
Fourteen
GIFFORD SWAYED IMPATIENTLY ON HIS FEET as the dented gray door of the service elevator opened. Silently, Loscalzo led him down a long, musty corridor, lit by a row of auxiliary lights. They stopped at a storeroom door, where Gifford scanned his ID badge and heard the lock click. Pushing his way inside, he flicked on the fluorescent light. In the back, behind several ranks of shelving units, he saw what he had come for—a metal box about the height of a refrigerator. A dry-ice machine.
“That’s where you think he put it?” he asked, working hard to restrain his excitement.
“Yeah. But it looks like somebody’s padlocked it. If you wait a sec, I could look for a crowbar—”
“Never mind.” Gifford grabbed the padlock and gave it a sharp twist with his bare hand, shattering it as if it were plastic.
“Yeah. Or we could do that,” said Loscalzo, his mouth agape.
Gifford flung open the lid, releasing a cloud of carbon dioxide vapor. Putting on a padded thermal mitten, he reached inside and rummaged through a trough of dry-ice pellets. After a moment, he fished out a Ziploc bag sealed with duct tape. Inside was a seven-inch-long conical tube with an orange cap. On the frosted label, three neat lines were inscribed:
VECTOR aet791homosapiens
Batches 28–31, 33–38, 46 5 ng/ml
STERILE/CERTIFIED PURITY
Gifford almost wept. Eleven batches. There had to be at least fifty nanograms of Vector—enough to carry on the Lottery as planned.
“So are we cool, Doc?”
“Yes, Dom. You have no idea what you’ve accomplished. Mankind itself is in your debt.”
“And my ma?”
“She’ll be the very first.”
Too excited to say more, Gifford rushed back to the elevator with Loscalzo at his heels. A moment later, they were in Gifford’s lab. He hastily peeled away the duct tape from the bag and drew out a fraction of a drop to check the DNA concentration in an ultraviolet spectrophotometer. After satisfying himself with a few calculations, he pulled up a stool in front of the biological safety cabinet, rolled up his sleeves, and began transfering the contents of the big orange-capped tube into smaller plastic tubes. He held a pistol-grip micropipetter in his left hand, with a thumb-operated trigger on top. Over and over, he repeated the same movements, with unvarying, almost robotic precision. He would depress the trigger, then release it to draw a bit of clear liquid from the big tube. Then he’d pop open the flap-top of one of the little tubes and push the trigger up and down to mix it well with some more clear liquid already inside it. Finally, he’d pop the flap-top shut and stick the tube for safekeeping in an orange Styrofoam tray.
“Whatcha doin’, Doc?” asked Loscalzo as he paced back and forth across the black and white tiles, trying to work out the pain in his knee.
“Dividing it up into single injections.”
“That’s it, huh? That’s the Methuselah Vector? It sure doesn’t look like much.”
“It’s the future of the world, Dom,” said Gifford without altering his rhythm. “Cricket came close to ruining it all. But you’ve saved it. By lowering the dose to five hundred picograms instead of a full nanogram, I can stretch out the reserve to one hundred and one injections—exactly enough for tomorrow’s Lottery, plus one for your mother.”
“Isn’t that bad—cuttin’ it down like that?”
“Not at all. The Vector will replenish itself to full strength within a few hours after it’s injected. It’s almost a living thing. The result might not be perfect. There could be some minor uniformity problems. But the end result should be almost exactly the same.”
Gifford asked Loscalzo to fill a small ice chest with dry ice from a box in back of the lab. “Doc, what do you wanna do about Jack and that Cricket dame?” Loscalzo asked, when he returned with the ice chest and set it on a stool. “They’re in cahoots, you know. Jack bailed her out at the sheriff’s. That’s what got my blood boiling against him back on the highway.”
“Leave Acadia Springs to them.” Gifford began planting the little plastic tubes in the dry ice. “They don’t realize it, but it’s already too late. Almost midnight, Dom. Almost Lottery Day. We’ve won.”
“S’that a fact?”
“In a few hours we’ll have a hundred and one new Subject Adams. Each one a miracle. The media and the politicians will go into a collective orgasm. Everyone will want in. Doubting will seem like a crime against humanity.” Gifford finished with the last of the tubes and slid the top of the ice chest shut. “There—a hundred and one samples. All we need.”
“That’s swell, Doc.”
Gifford stood up, rolled down his sleeves, and pulled the bib of his necktie out from under his shirt. He was just about to pick up the ice chest when the elevator dinged. There were footsteps—hard Italian leather slapping against the floor tiles. Then Jack Niedermann came into view.
“You son of a bitch!” shouted Niedermann at his first glimpse of Loscalzo.
“What are you doing here, Jack?” asked Gifford calmly.
“I’ve come to escort you to the BSL-4 lab. You’re under quarantine.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I talked to Phillip Eden. The Lottery’s off. There’ll be an official announcement first thing in the morning. They’re shutting down work on the Methuselah Vector—period—pending an investigation.”
“So you’ve talked to Eden, have you? Too late. I don’t need him or you or anyone else. Have you seen the evening news? Over ten thousand people are already camped out at Rockefeller Center. By dawn, another twenty thousand will join them. By noon . . . who knows? Do you think these people will just turn around and go home? Because Phillip Eden said so? Because you say so?”
“You’ve got nothing, Charles. No Vector. Adam’s locked up in the BSL-4 lab.”
Gifford laughed and pointed toward the ice chest on the stool. “There’s the Vector, Jack. The stuff you stole from me. It’s all I need. And as for Subject Adam—I am the real Subject Adam. Cricket was right. I injected myself with it. Everything Adam is, I am—and more. Stronger. More virile. More intelligent. I am the one who will lead mankind down the road to immortality. I am the herald of the coming race of gods.”
“I can’t let you go, Charles,” Niedermann said.
“You’re going to stop me? You?”
A bulge in Niedermann’s pants pocket showed the source of his courage. “He’s got a gun!” Loscalzo shouted.
Out it came—small, dull gray, and square looking. When Niedermann pointed it, the muzzle barely extended beyond his fingers.
Gifford hardly gave it a glance. “That’s your little Sig Sauer, isn’t it, Jack? The same gun you killed Hannibal with?”
Niedermann waved the gun back and forth. “Dom, move back. Keep your hands where I can see ’em.”
Loscalzo gladly slunk back to the rear of the lab. Gifford, however, stood his ground.
“Charles, you’re coming with me,” Niedermann declared.
“No.”
“You look like shit, you know. You’re whiter than chalk. The blood’s gone to your eyes or something. Fucking red eyes. You’re sick, Charles. Really, really sick.”
“Jack, have you ever shot a man? Not just a dog?”
“Don’t make me.”
“Do you have the courage to use that?” Gifford sneered. Then he turned toward the sink beside him. Tentatively, almost voluptuously, he ran his fingers up and down the main water pipe that came down from the ceiling. Suddenly he clenched the pipe. A bell-like clang sounded as a huge section was ripped away from its socket joints. A geyser began spraying over the bench and floor. Gifford moved toward Niedermann, slappi
ng the pipe against his palm.
“Stay back!” Niedermann gasped. “Please, Charles—”
“Please? You’ve got a pistol in your hand, and you’re begging? Give it up, Jack. You’re out of your league. Put the gun on the counter and get out.”
Niedermann’s hand was shaking. He seemed on the point of dropping the gun.
Loscalzo ducked for cover. Bang! Glass rained down as a bottle exploded inches above his head. Gifford lunged forward, slashing downward with the pipe. A second shot rang out, the bullet piercing Gifford’s side like a red-hot poker. His arm continued its downward swing. Thunk! The gun went flying, leaving a white piece of wristbone jutting out from Niedermann’s starched white cuff.
Gifford erupted in a frenzy. Again and again he swung the pipe. There was a pflinckkk! as it mowed through Niedermann’s fingers. A ggrrrck! as it snapped his collarbone. A whoompff! as it smashed his rib cage. Niedermann dropped to the floor, screaming and sobbing.
“Kill him!” shouted Loscalzo. “Smash his fuckin’ brains in!”
Niedermann writhed on the floor, groping for his gun. Gifford kicked it away, then threw the pipe after it. Bending down, he clutched Niedermann’s throat. With one hand, he lifted him, gurgling and kicking, into the air.
“You’ll stop me, will you?” Gifford shouted. “With your mean little gun?”
With a burst of power, Gifford hurled Niedermann across a countertop, scattering steel racks, water baths, and centrifuges like bowling pins. Niedermann screamed. He made a few weak kicks with his pointed and polished, brown Bruno Magli shoes, but as Gifford’s shadow closed again over him, he contracted into a fetal position, shielding his face with his forearms. “Please . . . please . . . ,” he whimpered.
Gifford took him again by the throat—this time with both hands—and lifted him into the air. “You of all people, Jack . . . You should have known. Nothing . . . nothing on this earth will stand in the way of the Methuselah Vector.”
Niedermann’s face was purple, his eyes red. Gifford’s arm trembled as he squeezed so hard that the flesh of Niedermann’s neck bulged between his fingers. Niedermann’s head swelled. It seemed about to pop like a grape.
