The Burning Road
Page 56
So Janie passed her. But even in the darkness, she had seen the vacant, desperate Outbreak look on the child’s face, and it tore at her heart. She slowed the car and glanced into her rearview mirror.
She looked at her fellow fugitives. “What should we do here?” she whispered.
“Keep driving,” Michael said sternly from the passenger seat.
“But she’s a child,” Caroline said, “and it’s the middle of the night, for God’s sake.” She leaned forward and put a hand on the back of the driver’s seat. “Janie, pull over—we can’t just leave her there.”
Janie glanced back over her shoulder. She saw the starkly white bandage on Caroline’s finger and remembered what lay before them still, how very long this night would be.
But it’s a child. She guided the car toward the shoulder, pulled off the road, and killed the engine. The silence seemed huge.
“What are we going to do with her?” Michael said finally. “We can’t take her with us.”
“She might have wandered from her house,” Janie said.
“So we’ll just take her back there and then just be on our way.” Caroline turned to her husband, her eyes pleading. “Michael … some day our child might need someone’s help.”
“Look,” he said gently, “this could be a trap of some sort.”
But Caroline would not be swayed. “Who would put a little girl on the side of the road in the middle of the night? Who could do a thing like that? She must be lost. Please, Michael—we have to help her.”
His voice was full of reservation. “Back it up a little.”
Janie turned the engine back on and put the Volvo in reverse, and the car whined backward; when the child came in sight again, Janie brought it to a full stop. Michael peered out into the darkness indecisively for a moment, his eyes trying to pierce the cover of the roadside brush. “Lock the doors,” he told them. “Don’t open them until I get back.”
He got out of the car, put on his helmet, and headed back toward the little girl.
As instructed, Janie pressed the lock handle down and heard its reassuring thunk. As she watched in the mirror, she could see Michael in the illumination of the backup lights, neon green from head to toe. The child shrank away from him, so he crouched down to her level.
Janie watched carefully as the child pointed into the woods along the side of the road, and when Michael looked in that direction and nodded she felt somehow relieved, as if Caroline had been right about what the child needed from them. He put out his big green hand and the child took it, and together they disappeared into the brush.
“He’s taking her somewhere,” Janie said as her eyes scanned the mirror image.
But then she realized that Michael was no longer visible, and he could therefore no longer see the car.
We are all so paranoid, she said to herself, there is nothing to be afraid of here. And the idea that they’d overreacted, that this was just a little girl in trouble, was very liberating. She turned to Caroline in the backseat. “She probably just lives a—”
She heard Caroline’s cry before the crunch of the safety glass assaulted her ears. She shrieked and turned toward the noise and saw the head of a small wood axe moving, in slow motion as if through water, toward the already cracked window. The flat, blunt end of the metal was pointed forward, but its menace seemed just as sharp as the opposite side when it whizzed toward her. A pair of large hands were wrapped around the wood handle, and beyond that, on the edge of the darkness, was the shadowed and desperate face of a man, only partly visible.
She leaned inward over the stick shift, away from the blow, and as Caroline screamed Janie thrust her arm back into the rear seat for the bag that held V.M. She hauled it forward with one mighty yank as the axe head connected with the glass again. Through some miracle of karma her hand found the gun Tom had given her, and she wrapped her fingers hard around the textured grip with unspeakable gratitude, then pivoted in one sharp motion back toward the window and pointed the gun directly at the shadow man, the sighting point trembling along with her hand as she attempted to aim it.
He had the axe drawn back again, ready to deliver what would probably be the final blow required to break the window completely.
Then he would drag them from the car, render them—
… motionless …
—and leave them on the side of the road while he made his escape with their functioning vehicle, almost full of gasoline.
Their eyes locked for a moment. A clear understanding of what was about to take place passed between them, and everything else stopped. Somewhere in the woods behind this clean-cut thirtyish man there was probably a woman hiding, perhaps with another child or even two. There might be frightened, elderly parents waiting for him down the road a piece, hanging on assurances that their son would come and take them away to some place where things were better. He was only doing what any responsible man might do when forced to revert to the natural state, the condition where the first priority was to keep the genes intact long enough to pass them on.
But it was still unforgivable. A question flashed into Janie’s numbed brain: Would this man have enough adaptive intelligence to realize that she would blow his head off so Caroline could pass on her genes? Would he depart in an act of genetic self-preservation, understanding that she would kill him if she had to? In these freeze-frame seconds of the confrontation, there was no way to tell. On Main Street, Janie would have taken him for an office worker, a newspaper reporter, someone’s next-door neighbor. But here, now, in his eyes, she saw something almost feral, something way out of control.
Those eyes widened even farther as he brought the axe forward. Janie had a brief inner-sight glimpse of a young, dark-haired Myra Ross with her weapon pointed in the face of a turbaned enemy who meant to relieve her of her life if she did not find the chutzpah to take his first.
She pulled the trigger.
What remained of the cracked glass blew out, and the man tumbled backward into the night. As soon as she saw he was down, Janie’s eyes went straight to the mirror and she saw Michael rushing out of the woods, the child struggling against his grasp as he attempted to pull her along. Finally, the little girl broke free and disappeared into the night as Michael raced back toward the car. Janie flipped up the locks, and as soon as Michael was in she sped away, showering the fallen body with sand and pebbles as her wheels spun hard on the shoulder.
Caroline was sobbing, and Janie trembled almost violently as she pushed the groaning car to a speed she hadn’t thought it would ever achieve again. Michael looked back through the rear window and screamed obscenities into the night, his fist clenched in anger. She realized, as the distance from the body on the side of the road increased, that she, a physician and healer, had never even considered getting out of the car to see if there was anything she could do for the man. And even beyond her horror at what she had done to him, that notion brought deep and instant shame.
The gun, minus one bullet, was on the floor just below Janie’s seat, within easy reach, where it would remain until she no longer needed its selective advantage.
There was nothing subtle or quiet about their entry into the camp, though it was well into the wee hours when they finally rang the bell at the gate to the courtyard. Tom was waiting outside the main building. He answered the ring by swinging the gate wide open, and then he slammed it firmly shut once the car was through, without regard for the noise it made to do so. And as Caroline and Michael looked on in astonishment, he and Janie rushed toward each other in the courtyard and fell into an almost desperate embrace.
“The gun,” she cried. “Oh, Tom, that gun, thank God you gave it to me, but I shot a man, and I think I may have killed him.”
“I know, I know,” he said as he cradled her, “Please, Janie, you can’t blame—”
She pulled back in surprise. “You know? How could you know—it just happened an hour ago.”
“V.M.,” he admitted. “There’s a transmitter.”
“Stop,” he hushed her. “Do you think you’re the only one who’s gone through something like that? There are a million stories just like that one. You have to leave it out there, it doesn’t belong in here.”
She clung to him fiercely. When they finally pulled apart, Janie whispered, “There’s a problem,” so only he could hear. “I need Kristina.”
Then to his questioning look, she said, “It’s important, Tom.”
“I’ll get her, then.” He gestured with his head toward Michael and Caroline. “But why don’t you bring them inside and we’ll get—”
“No,” she said quickly. “Not yet.”
His look was all piercing accusation. “Janie—is there some reason they shouldn’t come in?”
She bit her lower lip to keep herself from crying again. “There may be. That’s why I need Kristina.”
She stared through the eyepiece at the worst beast in the recorded history of microbiology, a single-celled fire-breathing dragon that all the knights and dames of the biochemical round table had tried to slay in the years since its first appearance, without even a hint of success. So even though she’d been a mere child when drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus mexicalis made its terrifying debut, Kristina recognized DR SAM in her microscope the moment she saw it. She looked up from the eyepiece and nodded at Janie, who leaned, her face full of horror and shame, against the door frame outside the hastily arranged isolation room off the lab, the bare white room in which Caroline was weeping behind the locked door.
Michael stood on the opposite side of the door frame, his face pinched and tight from shock. Left to his own devices, he would have disregarded all the sensible precautions he followed so religiously in his work every day and clawed his way through the door with his bare fingernails. When they’d first closed the door that now separated him from his wife, Tom and John Sandhaus had had to hold him back. As soon as they let go, he tried to attack the steel panel with pounding fists, cursing everything and everyone he could imagine.
An emergency meeting was called. The discussion was heated and often painful, but accord was reached. There was talk of containment, of necessary evil, and of heartless resolve to do what was needed.
“I think you need to come look at this,” Kristina said quietly after a few minutes of looking in the microscope. Her eyes went to Michael for a few seconds, then came back to Janie again.
Janie rose up wearily from the chair and moved across the small lab, one leaden step after another, thinking that what Kristina had to show her would surely be worse than she anticipated, that the bacteria were multiplying, thriving, arrogantly resisting everything that could be thrown in their murderous path.
Why, she asked herself desperately, did I think this was something I could fix?
They would all die, right there in their “safe” place, when DR SAM got loose, which it certainly would because it always did, sooner or later.
She pressed her own face against the eyepiece of the microscope at Kristina’s urging and gazed down at the slide of cells scraped from Caroline’s semiamputated toe. There was another slide, waiting to deliver its own news, with cells taken from her hangnail.
They’ll be swarming and swimming around and dividing, and just having a big old party—
But they weren’t doing any of those things—instead, they were engaged in the bacterial equivalent of gasping for breath.
“Sweet Jesus,” she said in a whisper. She looked up at Kristina. “What is this?”
“I don’t know. But take a look at the other one.”
They flipped out the toe slide, clamped in the finger slide. The view was virtually identical.
“Something is making them—shrivel up,” Kristina said. “I can’t even begin to think what—usually they just eat everything they come in contact with and then find a new meal ticket.” She looked back into the eyepiece again. “Is she taking medication of any kind?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
When she looked up again, Kristina’s face was full of taut excitement and hopeful disbelief. “Either that or she has a strain of DR SAM that’s mutated to a self-destructive state.”
“It usually goes the other way—that’s how DR SAM became DR SAM in the first place. Mutated to invincibility. I’ve never heard of any bacterium taking itself out of the picture.”
“Neither have I.”
“But DR SAM has always had this knack for doing things we don’t expect it to do,” Janie said.
Expect the unexpected, Alejandro whispered in her ear.
She was thinking aloud now. “Maybe there’s something we wouldn’t expect going on here.”
Kristina looked at her. “What wouldn’t we expect? I don’t even know where to start thinking about that.”
Janie began listing the possibilities. “Like we said, we wouldn’t expect the bacteria to mutate for negative traits. So they’re probably not doing that.”
“That’s not it, though.”
“I know.” She pressed one hand against her forehead as if it would help her to think more clearly. “We wouldn’t expect all of them to die at once, even if there were an effective antibiotic.”
“Well, they are, but that’s not it. Damn.” She looked back into the microscope. “Come on,” the girl whispered, “speak to us.”
And while her young cohort was thus absorbed, Janie glanced away—sometimes just to look at something else was enough of a stimulus to set an idea or a realization in motion. She looked back toward the room where Caroline was being held and saw Michael leaning against the door with his hands and forehead pressed flat on the painted surface, as if he might be able to reach right through it.
Such terrible pain for anyone to go through, she thought with sympathy. She pitied him for the uncertainty he was going through, and recalled for a moment the hours that she and Bruce had spent hovered over Caroline, before Michael even knew her. He would have collapsed if he’d seen her when she had plague.
She had plague.…
“Kristina,” she said softly.
The girl looked up from the microscope.
“She had plague.”
“What?” Kristina said.
“Caroline had plague. She survived it.”
“Well, I know,” the girl started to say, “but—”
And then Janie’s meaning became clear to her. “Oh, my God. People who survived plague have a natural resistance to HIV.”
“Yes, they do. The viral docking ports get blocked.”
“So why couldn’t something similar happen with DR SAM?”
“It could,” Janie whispered. “If the docking ports were similar.” She looked back into the microscope again, then pulled away from the eyepiece, a look of intense concentration on her face. Muttering to herself, she adjusted the focus and enlarged the magnification. “Okay, I’ve got a view of them.” She looked up at Kristina and nodded toward V.M., which was sitting on a nearby counter. “In the imaging program—can you bring up one of the stock images of HIV at the same level of depth as these bacteria are?”
“Sure,” Kristina said. She started tapping keys immediately. She brought V.M. closer as it searched for the proper image and drew it on the screen.
They both looked back and forth a few times. “What do you think?” Janie said after a few glances.
“I think there’s reason to think that what we’re seeing is plague-based resistance to DR SAM. Genetic in nature,” Kristina said with quiet excitement. “It actually makes complete sense, total sense, that a person who’d had plague could be resistant to DR SAM. But—why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? Or noticed a pattern?”
“Do you know anyone other than Caroline who’s survived plague? I”—Alejandro, Janie thought in mid-sentence. That little girl.—“don�
�t.”
“There can’t be many,” Kristina said.
“We’ll have to find out how many there are, then test them.”
“Yes—but we’ll have to get inside Big Dattie.”
In the bag where V.M. was usually stored, Janie still had the corneal identification program she had lifted from the French hacker. Big Dattie would be one of the last government services to break down—the military and Biopol depended heavily on it. “I know how we can do it,” she said.
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not.”
“But—this is incredible—think what this means! We can find a way to deal with DR SAM by isolating the gene that affords resistance, then we can do a gene wash, just like we did for those boys.”
Kristina took on the pulsing glow that was proprietary to young people in the act of discovery. “Oh, this is so huge, I’ve got to go find my fath—”
She stopped and went completely silent.
For a few stunned seconds, Kristina and Janie just stared at each other. A silent understanding was passed, and Janie was flooded with unexpected relief. Finally, when she felt she could breathe again, she said quietly, “How about if I tell him?”
Tom was contrite, almost dazed when Janie confronted him.
“Why did you keep this a secret from me? A beautiful child like she must have been, and now such a wonderful young woman—oh, Tom, it must have been torture to keep this to yourself. I would love to have known her when she was little.”
“I don’t know how I did it. There just never seemed to be a right time to tell you.”
“You never married her mother.”
He hesitated a moment, then said, “I didn’t love her mother.”