“Just go.”
Carver followed. Behind his surgical mask, his lips were numb. His earlobes and fingertips were tingling.
“What is this?” Carver asked, over his shoulder. The remaining men in the room had fanned out. One of them was kneeling behind the bed; another was pulling drawers from the dresser. “Who called you guys?”
“Down the stairs.”
“You’re walking all over our scene,” Carver said. He could feel a tickle at the corner of his eyes now, like the first touch of hay fever. “You can’t—this is a crime scene.”
“You’ll be part of it if you don’t get to the truck. You want to look like that? Give it half an hour.”
They came into the entry hall. A man in a spacesuit was coating the walls with decontaminant. Orange and yellow hoses snaked through the front door to the pressure sprayer in his hand. He shot a mist of liquid at the Bridget Laurent painting. The paint bubbled up, then melted and ran toward the bottom of the canvas in a blur of wasted color. Carver could only guess what the spray did to fingerprints, to DNA.
He turned to the man behind him.
“There’ll be nothing,” he said. “Nothing left.”
“Out.”
He pushed Carver onto the porch. Houston and Roper were gone, as was their patrol car. His car was gone too. Down the hill, a pair of unmarked semitrailer trucks sat in the middle of the intersection with Grant, the only place in the area level enough for them to park. A black bus idled behind them. Sawhorses blocked both streets, yellow lights blinking in the rain. There were men in white spacesuits setting up lights on tripods, carrying chemical sprayers. Others were bringing out enough plastic sheeting to tent the block. Carver thought again of the Fairmont, all covered up in black silk. The man behind him gave him a push and he nearly stumbled on the stairs going down to the sidewalk.
In the street, a man in a heat-resistant, aluminized biohazard suit was strapping on a backpack frame holding compressed gas cylinders. A hose led over his shoulder to a nozzle gun. He passed Carver, adjusting the belt as he went.
“Carver?” Jenner said. He was rubbing his fingers together, as if they were asleep. His face was puffy. And gray.
“I don’t know,” Carver answered. “I got no idea.”
A set of metal stairs led from the street to an open door in the white truck’s trailer. There was a sign just inside the door, but its letters were washed out by the white light pouring from the truck.
“Up,” the FBI man said. He gave Jenner another push.
Carver watched his partner head up the stairs. Shivering, clutching his arms to his chest. When Jenner was up, Carver climbed the stairs too. Before he went into the trailer, he turned and looked back at the house. Two more men in spacesuits were going through the front door. He looked up toward the bedroom window. The bloody handprints were silhouetted against a blaze of firelight. They were burning it. Burning the man on the floor, and everything in his room. Cleansing with fire.
The man who’d rushed them out of the house reached up and slammed the decontamination unit’s door. Carver turned around. He was looking at a plain white wall, adorned only with a sign pointing men to the left and women to the right. He could still hear the chaos on the street, but it was muted by the trailer’s walls.
“Move to the left.”
A woman’s voice came from above, and Carver looked up. An intercom speaker was mounted in the ceiling next to a surveillance camera.
“Let’s go, Jenner.”
He took his partner’s elbow and led him along the wall to the left. Jenner was hot, and the sleeve of his jacket was wet with sweat. They stepped through the narrow doorway, marked STAGE 1. This room was the size of Carver’s bathroom. A lidded metal bin against the wall was marked with an orange biohazard symbol. One wall held a sliding steel hatch, like the night deposit box at an old bank. When they were all the way into the room, the door closed behind them automatically. Carver felt the air pressure change as it sealed.
“Undress,” the woman’s voice said. “Clothes in the bin.”
Carver looked at the ceiling but wasn’t sure whether to address the camera or the intercom speaker.
“What happens to them?”
“Incinerator,” the speaker said.
“We’ve got our service weapons, our badges. Wallets and phones. What about those?”
“Those go in the wall locker, for sterilization.”
Jenner looked at the bin and the wall locker, and then turned to Carver. His eyes were red and watery.
“This shit’s for real?”
“I think so,” Carver said. “Real as it gets. I think we better hurry.”
They undressed, dumping their clothes into the incinerator bin. Carver saw Roper and Houston’s clothes lying at the bottom. Dark shirts and pants. Rubber-soled shoes. Caps with their plastic rain covers still on.
“That clinches it,” Jenner said, shivering. “They’re definitely a couple.”
“Must’ve moved them through here like a car wash,” Carver said. “Like cattle in a chute.”
“How long were we upstairs?”
“Five minutes.”
Jenner nodded. Unbuttoning his shirt, he had to stop twice to scratch his face.
“Try not to,” Carver said. “You’ll get it in deeper. Whatever it is.”
“It’s like it’s eating me, Ross.”
“I know it,” Carver said. It was too easy to imagine how it would go. The two of them thrashing around the trailer, beating on the locked door with bloody hands. In an hour, they’d be moss-covered lumps, barely recognizable as human beings. The air would shimmer with metallic gray dust, their bodies bursting into full bloom. “Just hurry. Try not to think about it. The guy said there was time.”
They pulled off their latex gloves and their surgical masks, and stood naked in the small white room, beneath the camera’s eye. Carver looked down at his chest. It was prickled with red dots, like a heat rash. On the opposite wall, there was a second air-locked door. STAGE 2. It hissed as it unlocked, and then it swung open.
“We supposed to go in there?” Jenner asked.
“Yeah.”
They went over the threshold and into the second room. It was empty except for a stainless-steel column coming from the middle of the floor. Four shower nozzles pointed down from its top. The door closed behind them and then showers came on, blasting water and steam at the already wet floor.
Carver put his hand into the spray, then smelled his fingers.
“Not just water,” he said. “Bleach, maybe. I don’t know.”
“Shit’s gonna make me look like you,” Jenner said.
“Could be worse.”
They each stepped beneath a nozzle. The liquid coming out stung on Carver’s skin, around his eyes. When he breathed in, the chemical steam burned hot in his nostrils, then inside his chest. He used his hands to scrub himself, checked that Jenner was doing the same. Toward the end of the shower’s cycle, pure water started pouring from the nozzles, a clean rinse unadulterated with disinfectants. Carver held his face close to the showerhead and let the water pummel his eyes and nose. His heart was beating so hard he could feel its pulse behind his clenched eyelids.
When the water switched off, he and Jenner stood across from each other, looking at the locked doors and the swirling steam. A set of dryer vents kicked on above them. They stood beneath the rush of hot air, using the sides of their hands to brush the water off.
Jenner had stopped shaking.
“Think that helped,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“It was getting to me,” Jenner said. “I don’t know what it was.”
“You okay now?” Carver asked.
“I don’t know,” Jenner said. “You saw what was up there.”
The door marked STAGE 3 hissed and swung open. Jenner watched it and shook his head.
“Feds,” Jenner said.
“They hadn’t come, it might’ve been you and me beating on that
window. Same as the guy we saw, trying to get out.”
“But how’d they know?” Jenner asked. “How’d they get here so fast? They were just in the neighborhood—fifty guys with spacesuits and flamethrowers? A decontamination truck? And what is that shit?”
“I don’t know,” Carver said. “I don’t know anything about any of this.”
They went into the third room. There were metal benches there, with plastic-wrapped bundles of hospital clothes lying on top. Carver took a packet and ripped it open. Pajama-style pants and a matching V-neck, short-sleeved shirt fell out. There were paper slippers, the kind you’d get at a teahouse in Japantown. They sat opposite each other and dressed. They had just put on their slippers when the fourth airlock opened. A person wearing a biohazard suit stepped through carrying a tray. The suit’s faceplate was made of reflective glass, a silver-black void.
“Your guns and badges are in the sterilization unit. Your phones, too.”
Carver realized it was the woman from the intercom.
“Are you a doctor?” Carver asked. “Or FBI?”
“Both,” she said.
She set the tray on the bench next to Carver. It held two paper cups, each brimming with a yellow-brown liquid. There was also a hand towel, but Carver couldn’t tell what was under it.
“Here,” she said, handing Carver a paper cup. “Drink it.”
“What is it?”
“You need to boost your immune system.”
“That’s what this does?” Jenner asked.
“Yes.”
Carver sniffed it, then took a sip. It tasted like metal, like water that had spent years inside a dead radiator.
“You drink it all at once, it’s easier.”
“Fine.”
“And you should hurry. The sooner you drink it, the better. You saw what happened to the man in there, didn’t you?”
“We saw.”
“Not many people see that without a suit and live. You’re lucky. So drink.”
This was madness, but there wasn’t anything to do about it. Carver lifted his cup toward Jenner.
“Cleve.”
“Ross.”
Each of them drank. They set their empty cups down. Carver coughed twice; Jenner leaned forward, his hands on his knees and his head down. He shuddered and knocked his empty cup from the bench.
“What’s in that house?” Carver whispered. “What does that to a person? Less than an hour, and he looks like that.”
“A disease.”
“What kind of disease does that?” Carver asked.
“And who called you guys?” Jenner added. His head was still down, and he was speaking through clenched teeth. “Since when does the FBI contain outbreaks?”
“You’ll want to sit on the floor,” the woman said. “Your backs against the bench.”
Carver searched the mirrored faceplate for any clue to her identity. But all he saw was his own face, Jenner huddling against himself as the drink worked into him. She wasn’t going to answer any of their questions. She wouldn’t tell them what was up there, or how they’d gotten here so quickly. He thought of the sparrows again, and that thing that they’d found upstairs. Carver had thought it was a bird until he’d gotten close enough to see its disguise.
“What’d you say?” he asked. “The floor?”
“So you don’t fall,” she said. “Hit your head on something. It’ll be thirty seconds.”
“That stuff up there,” Jenner said. He’d taken his hands off his knees and was holding his clenched fists against his eyes. “We washed it off. Right?”
“Thirty seconds, more or less,” the woman said. “And then you’ll feel it.”
But Carver could already feel it. The drink had tasted like liquid steel, but it wasn’t any kind of metal. It was epilepsy in a cup. Spasms and chattering teeth. He slid off the bench onto the floor. Jenner had beat him there, was now bringing his knees up to his chest and opening his mouth in a silent scream as his body began to shake. Carver watched his own hands jerk against his chest, felt his jaw pop as his teeth snapped together and released, a dozen cycles in the space of a few seconds. The woman lifted the towel from the tray and picked up a jet injector inoculation gun.
“Nothing to it,” she said.
She stepped behind Carver and pushed his head forward. His muscles were locked in a fight against themselves, his body a conduit for an electric charge that came from nowhere and went back to nothing. When he felt the muzzle of the inoculator against the back of his neck, he couldn’t do anything.
“Really, it’s just a little sting.”
She hit the trigger three times.
3
CARVER LAY UNDER a blanket and listened to the voice.
He’d been aware of her for an hour, maybe two. She’d been reading aloud to him for most of that time. He was unmoored, adrift just above the rippling surface of a dream. Her voice was throaty and calm, beautiful in the pauses, when she breathed between sentences. He didn’t recognize it, this voice, but was glad for it.
“The purpose is simple,” she read. She drew a slow breath and turned the page. “And it is this: to make a man do that which he would not otherwise do. To change his course; to alter his mind; to realign the world as he sees it, so that it is no longer his course, his mind, or his world—but ours.”
Behind her voice, there were other sounds, and with them, Carver placed himself. There was the steady whir of a space heater, the rattle of cables and wheels as an elevator moved unseen between floors. Fingertips of rain tapped against the window. He was in his own bedroom. The only thing out of place was the voice. The last woman who’d had a key to this apartment had slipped it under the front door on her way out. That was eight months ago.
“With some minds, and for some subjects, accomplishing the task is as simple as presenting the opportunity. But we need not concern ourselves with easy cases. This is a study of persuasion in extremis. Think of a young bride, seduced by a stranger in the apse of the chapel where, a minute hence, she is to be married. Forget whether this is a moral goal—obviously it is not—the question is one of tactics.”
Carver opened his eyes and looked at her without turning his head. She’d rolled the leather armchair over from his desk, and angled the reading lamp on his bedside table so that it lit the pages of the book in her lap. He couldn’t see her face in the shadows above the lamp, but he could tell by the shape of her silhouette that she was lovely. Behind her, through the slits in the wooden blinds, he could see the neon sign of the hotel across the street.
“How is the seduction accomplished, by what measures do we ensure success with each new bride —”
She looked up, then closed the book, keeping her thumb inside it to mark her place.
“You’re awake.”
“What’s that you’re reading?”
He’d never felt his mouth so dry.
“Letessier,” she said. “The essays on persuasion.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Her.”
“Her, then,” Carver said. “Should I know you?”
“We’re neighbors?”
He still couldn’t see her face, but now he understood. She’d moved into the apartment directly across the hall from his three months ago. A week later, he’d gotten a letter meant for her box. Just a piece of junk mail. A catalog from a grocery subscription service. But it was hers, and he’d slid it beneath her door.
“You’re Mia,” he said. “Mia Westcott. You live in six fifteen.”
“That’s right.”
She glanced toward the window and he saw her eyes narrow in focus. There was a bird on the ledge outside. Mia reached across and flicked the glass with her fingertip; the bird disappeared into the rain. She took the wooden rod and twisted it to close the blinds.
“What are you doing here?”
“I saw them carrying you in,” she said. “When they brought you back. You didn’t look good, and they were just leaving you—dumping you
off, really—so when they came out, I asked if you were all right.”
“You asked who?”
“The people who brought you back. I thought they were with the police too.”
He nodded. The motion hurt. He’d been a boxer in high school and college. There were good fights and bad ones, and then, toward the end, there were fights he should have stayed out of altogether. This was like the morning he woke up and knew he’d never put on his gloves again.
“They were cops?”
“I don’t know. They weren’t in uniforms. I just figured, since you’re a detective, and since they had you . . . You understand.”
He didn’t ask how she knew he was a detective. Maybe she’d seen a piece of his mail; maybe she’d caught a glimpse of his holstered gun. He pushed himself until he was leaning against the headboard. Under the covers, he touched his hip and leg. He was wearing pants. That was it.
“They say what happened?”
“You don’t know?” she asked.
“I’m just waking up. Coming to, and seeing you here. You know what’s going on, say it.”
“You were poisoned. But I heard them say you’d be okay.”
“Poisoned how? And with what?”
“That’s all I heard. I heard them say it, in the hall.”
“Nothing else? Was there an accident?”
“They didn’t say. When I first saw you with them in the hall, I thought maybe you were drunk. But when I got close to you, later, you didn’t smell like you’d been drinking. You smelled like chemicals. Not on your breath, but coming right out of your skin. Like metal, when it gets hot.”
Carver wondered how close she’d been to notice a thing like that. He let it go.
“They told you to watch me?”
“They didn’t tell me to do anything,” she said. “I came out and asked if you were okay. They said you were fine and they left. But they left your door unlocked. So I went in, to check on you. And then I decided it’d be best to stay.”
“When was this?”
“Friday morning. Around seven. That’s when I heard them with you. I came out to see what was going on.”
The Night Market Page 3
