The Burning Road

by Ann Benson

  Alejandro was quick to add, “We could then retire to another room to discuss our findings. If we come up with some other cause for his affliction, we will say that the discovery was yours alone.”

  De Chauliac took on a pained, hurt look. “I do not need such false accolades.”

  “No, of course you do not. What I meant is that I can ill afford the attention.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said contemplatively. Then his look turned dark and threatening. “You will be very sorry if you try to escape.”

  “With the guards you have set upon me? How can one man overpower them?”

  The Frenchman stared at him for a moment, as if he were trying to probe his mind. “I will consider it,” he eventually said. And then with a swish of his silken robe, he rose up and walked to the door. Without looking back he whispered, “Sleep well, my friend,” and then left, closing the door behind him, leaving his prisoner to wonder why, exactly, he had come in the first place.

  18

  Janie no longer assumed it was a benign presence on the other side of the door when the bell sounded, as she had during another phase of her life.

  Was it a good thing, or a bad thing, this new caution of hers? What would her friends say, if they could see her hovering near the peephole?

  Michael and Caroline would discuss it between themselves before giving an opinion, which could not be predicted in advance. Bruce would say good, right away. Tom would think about it for a while, finally concluding bad. Kristina, now standing impatiently outside the door, would not have an opinion beyond open the door.

  “I got your message,” the young woman said. “I assume you meant you have something to show me.”

  “I do,” Janie answered nervously. She motioned for the girl to enter, but as Kristina passed through, Janie looked around outside, her eyes darting from the sidewalk to the bushes to the driveway. Kristina stared at her with genuine concern.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Oh, yeah, I guess—but it’s taking me more time than I thought to shake off the heebie-jeebies from the break-in. I hope it isn’t too long until I stop doing this,” she said.

  “Me too,” Kristina said. She presented Janie with a brown paper bag. “Here, maybe this will help.”

  Janie pulled an ice cream container out of the bag, and with a broad smile she said, “Oh, this will definitely improve my state of mind.” Her door paranoia began to fade. “Now, let’s see, what do we have here.”

  Janie held up the cardboard ice cream carton and read the label, and saw that the flavor was her own esoteric favorite, a gooey concoction of chocolate and butterscotch and nuts, and her grateful expression turned into a sharp stare.

  Some magical coincidence, or …

  “How did you know this is my favorite?”

  The question brought a nervous little flutter of stammering from Kristina, but no specific answer.

  “Look,” Janie said, “you need to be a little more careful about flaunting all this minutiae you somehow seem to know about everybody. I can look beyond it, but someone else might be inclined to punch you out for being an arrogant little know-it-all.”

  Kristina looked stricken and started to gush an apology. “I didn’t mean—”

  Janie turned away so Kristina wouldn’t see the little smile that had arisen on her face, or notice that she was trying to stifle laughter; she was developing a healthy respect for the girl’s obvious competence, and rather liked her. But it was strangely satisfying to see her in a dithered state. Janie wanted to say the same thing to Kristina that her own mother had often said when she was too full of herself: Every time you look back over your shoulder, there’s going to be someone smarter than you back there.

  But I’m not her mother.

  She set the container down on the counter and got out bowls and spoons. “Forget I said anything. Of course I assume you’re all watching me. But this is a wee bit close.” She patted the top of the ice cream container, now dripping its condensation on the kitchen counter. “I forgive you for knowing my favorite flavor because this is my favorite flavor, and I’m glad you were considerate enough to go out and find it.” She laughed quietly as a memory came over her. “For the first three weeks after I left home for college I ate so much ice cream that I couldn’t even look at it until I was about twenty-five. But since I started eating it again, I’ve never been able to get enough.”

  Kristina took off her light jacket and hung it over a kitchen chair. “And during that hiatus you were also a vegetarian.”

  Janie stared in complete disbelief—it had been only a few seconds since she’d complained about this very thing. How quickly they forget! The mother in her wanted to rise up, stern and corrective, but she kept her voice low and delivered a somewhat gentle lecture. “All right, if you don’t stop this right now I’m going to have to ground you.” She pointed toward a section of counter. “There are spoons in that drawer.”

  Janie found the scoop in its usual place and served for both of them. They sat down at the kitchen table and set their bowls on either side of Virtual Memorial. “I didn’t hear from you all day, so I figured I’d better check in,” Kristina said.

  “I was a little busy today, and anyway I assumed you would be coming—I got your message from this afternoon. And you told me yesterday that you would check in tonight, don’t you remember?”

  Janie noticed immediately that Kristina seemed to stiffen. The girl didn’t answer the query, but instead tossed back one of her own that had the feel of a counterpunch to it. “What were you doing that kept you so busy?” she demanded to know.

  Janie tried to sound as casual as possible, though she was bothered by the shape the conversation seemed to be assuming. “I worked at the foundation in the morning, then I had a personal appointment, then I went for a hike with an old friend—”

  “You like to hike?”

  “Oh, you didn’t know? Well, there’s a refreshing change—and I’m not that crazy about it. But someone invited me.”

  You probably know who, she thought.

  “And I—needed to blow off a little steam. And by the way, V.M. was with me all the time. And then this evening I went over some of the demographic evaluations.” She paused. “And ran a genetic one.”

  That revelation changed the look on Kristina’s face. “Did you find anything?” she asked.

  Janie turned the computer’s screen slightly toward Kristina so they both had a clear view. “Take a look,” she said. “I’ll let you decide that for yourself.”

  The display was full of report choices—charts, lists, rankings. She touched a spot on the screen and the whole thing turned into a well-labeled bar chart with an overview of all the data to date, showing the incidence of similarity. “We have this geographical spike here, but we knew about that, and I really think it’s entirely coincidental, just a secondary result based on more important common factors. I think it’s safe to say that there are more Jewish people living on the East Coast than there are in the Bible Belt.” She touched one particular spike on the graph and the details of the data appeared in a side window. “And the major underlying common factor is still Camp Meir, and they were all there, as you can see from this line, in the same year, just before the first Outbreak of DR SAM.”

  There was a twinge of disappointment in Kristina’s voice when she said, “We were sort of expecting all this, though.”

  “I know,” Janie concurred. “None of this surprises me at all. And to tell you the truth, I don’t think we’re going to find much more than that in the demographic data. It feels like a great big dead end. A little something more might come up in the medical histories, since they aren’t all complete yet, but I don’t get the sense that anything earth-shattering is going to reveal itself. But we’ll look, because I could be wrong. It’s happened before.”

  She expected Kristina to laugh, but the girl’s attention remained tightly focused on the screen. So Janie drew in a long breath, and continued. “However … he
re, I think we’re looking in the right place.” She touched the screen again, this time on the icon for the genetic evaluation. Another series of options appeared. “There are a few very interesting things that showed up.”

  Kristina’s face seemed to tighten even more as she read the information on the screen. Unearned wrinkles appeared in her forehead as her eyes darted from line to line. “I always feel like I can’t wait to see these genetic evaluations. Then I remember what they can mean.” She looked at Janie with a worried expression. “I see a few cancers here.” She let her own finger glide down the screen, checking file after file. “Here’s colon cancer, and testicular, nothing so terrible yet, I guess.…” She stopped, with her finger on one particular name. “Oh, shit. This kid’s going to need a pancreas one of these days.” She sighed in distress. “Well, maybe by the time this actuates, there will be a better treatment.”

  “Maybe we’ll figure out how to grow the organs we need,” Janie said in a wishful tone. “But look here—we’ve got a pending case of Lou Gehrig’s disease.” She sat back and looked at Kristina. “Do you have any idea if these boys or their families have been told of these potentialities?”

  “I doubt it. Why would anyone think to look this stuff up in the first place, except insurance companies, I mean … and I don’t know how we’d find out. But we can hardly walk up to a parent and say, ‘Excuse me, has anyone told you yet that your son is going to die a slow and painful death in what should be the prime of his life, and that he’ll end his days drooling and pissing on himself?’ Especially since we obtained this genetic material in a rather questionable way.”

  In a deadly serious tone, Janie said, “None of these problems will matter much if they don’t all recover from their more immediate problems. And while we’re on that subject …” She brought up another page in the program. “Here’s what I think might be the link. I found it in every one of them.”

  It was one particular gene on one particular chromosome, with a simple little flaw, a repetition of an adenine-thymine pair, plopped down in a place where it shouldn’t have been plopped.

  Kristina touched the screen in a few places and brought up a graphic illustration of the gene in question. “Hello, darling,” she said, her expression revealing forbidden, guilty excitement. She touched the symbol that directed the computer to display its proper scientific title. The letters and numbers came up on the screen, and Kristina turned to Janie with an immensely satisfied expression on her face.

  “I knew it,” she said.

  “Knew what?”

  “That we’d find something like this.”

  Janie eyes narrowed; she stared at the young woman beside her. “Then why have I been doing all this searching and evaluating?”

  “I didn’t know we were specifically going to find this gene,” Kristina said, “I just knew in my gut that we would find a gene. Somewhere. With something like this.”

  “Like what?”

  Kristina pointed to the gene’s name on the screen. The letters were red and underlined. “I guess I should explain. You haven’t used this program before. We set it up to recognize certain things and report them back in different colors.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, the program looks for specific qualities in the genes as it reads them, ones that are of potential interest to us.” She drew in a long breath through her nose, and pointed to the image on the screen with her finger. “This particular gene, the one you found in every one of these boys, has what could turn out to be a very interesting quality. It’s patented.”

  “But I don’t understand,” Janie said, “you can’t patent a native gene.”

  Kristina smiled. “I know.”

  “Then—then this gene …”

  “Um-hm,” Kristina said with a nod, “this gene is not native. It must have been introduced.”

  The disturbing revelation sent Janie straight back to the ice cream. Bowl in hand, curled up almost defensively on her couch opposite Kristina, she dipped out small mouthfuls and kept the spoon in her mouth each time until the ice cream melted. She stared out blankly, lost in thought, until the bowl was empty.

  She tapped the spoon against the side of the bowl without realizing how annoying the sound was. Finally, Kristina reached out and took the spoon out of her hand.

  Janie refocused and looked at her.

  “Too bad there aren’t pennies anymore,” Kristina said, “or I’d offer you one for your thoughts.”

  With a cynical half-smile, Janie said, “These thoughts are probably worth a little more than that.”

  The young woman reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a quarter, which she flipped once on her thumb. She tossed it across the coffee table to Janie. “Think out loud,” she said.

  “I don’t like what I’m thinking. I feel like if I give voice to it, it’ll become real.”

  “We wouldn’t be seeing this thing if it wasn’t already real. So speaking it isn’t going to make any difference.”

  With a grim, firm-set look on her face, Janie said, “A gene can only be patented if it’s been altered. So this particular gene had to have been removed from someone, altered, and then reintroduced to these boys. There’s no other way it could have been done.” She sighed deeply. “We have to find out who did this. But the really fun part”—she rubbed her forehead and closed her eyes—“is going to be figuring out how to fix it.”

  The list of variables seemed to be growing, not shrinking as Janie had expected it would. Each new bit of information, instead of resolving a problem, seemed to present another one. Needing to see it all in front of her, as soon as Kristina left Janie scrawled a list on a lavender-lined steno pad with red ink. It was messy, as her notes had been since medical school. Alejandro was a physician, she chided herself, and he had beautiful handwriting. She tried to relax her grip, and made a conscious effort to form her letters with long strokes and spidery flourishes as had her hero, even in his most desperate hours.

  But it was still a mess, and she came to the conclusion that it was more a matter of what she’d written than how it had been applied to the paper:

  Altered gene starts as a native gene. Whose? Patient Zero.

  Native gene is changed. By whom? And why?

  Altered gene is reproduced and presented for patent. Patent is granted—to whom? And for what potential use?

  It had to have started somewhere. At some point in time, a child with this one genetic anomaly must have landed in the care of an orthopedic surgeon with a strong interest in genetics. The incident had to have been pre-Outbreak, back when patients could still sometimes choose who would give them care, and physicians could use innovative treatments without fear of being undermined or ostracized. Or financially ruined.

  The whole situation smacked of research that had been left unfinished. Perhaps it had gone bad and was abandoned, and then was subsequently picked up by someone else with a different notion of what the outcome should be. In her mind’s eye Janie saw the skeletal image of Abraham Prives’s backbone after the break. It made her furious—the boy’s spine looked like someone had taken a hammer to it, just pounded until there was no piece left larger than a dime. What a tragic, horrible mistake someone had made.

  Because this had to have been a mistake, an originally well-intentioned attempt to do something beneficial that had somehow gone terribly wrong. There was simply no way that a decent human being involved in the care of another human being would allow this sort of thing to happen without reporting it.

  And if it wasn’t just an accident, but instead an intentional act, then when Janie figured out who’d done it, she was going to kick some very serious ass.

  Do you know how much I love you? the e-mail message opened. How much I want to be with you? What you mean to me? I sense that your life is filling up with distractions that will pull you away from me and from the things that are important to us. And though I know I have no right to tell you what to do, I beg you to consider what will happen
to our life if you keep going down this road you’ve taken. I’m so afraid that you’ll miss something important, some signal of impending doom or danger, and that you’ll get hurt.

  Oh, Bruce, she thought sadly, please don’t do this now … please don’t stand in my way.

  His message continued. We need to talk about this, face-to-face, in Iceland.

  Iceland! she thought when she read it. Oh, my God … how am I going to leave this work to go to Iceland?

  She typed out and queued up a frantic message to the travel agent—could the arrangements be changed, the trip delayed, perhaps by a week? Bruce’s visa covered an entire month. Surely her own could be postponed to the end of that month … she would pay more, if that was necessary.

  As that message was flying out, the little mailman appeared on the screen.

  More? I just picked up the messages ten minutes ago.

  It had no return address, no posted sender, no source information at all. It was a prime candidate for unread dumping.

  She read it anyway.

  Now would be a good time for you to back off.

  The message was reply-ready, but address-blind, so if she replied, she would not know where her words were going, as she had not known when she’d answered Wargirl’s first missive. But that incoming note had been friendly, and this new one clearly was not.

  Stop, Bruce had said. Go, Tom had advised her. Proceed with caution, Caroline admonished. It was one big mental traffic light.

  Janie saw only green.

  I don’t think so, she typed in the reply box. She touched the SEND icon.

  Sandhaus would know; he was the answer man. He eschewed computers because he was one.

  “What would be my best source for pre-Outbreak medical records?” Janie asked him.

  “What specifically are you looking for?”

  “A Patient Zero. He would be suffering from some sort of vertebral trauma.”

  John Sandhaus chuckled cynically. “Oh, yeah, that’ll be easy to find.” He thought for a moment. “NIH would be where I’d start. Use the foundation’s spinal regeneration study as your excuse to get in.”