Cold Silence

by James Abel

  “You had an accident,” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “You were sick. Or sloppy. You were tired and you infected a sample. Broke a slide maybe. Or sneezed. You were working in a home lab. You were doing something the wrong way. A damn accident.”

  The vulnerable look cleared away. The eyes sharpened. Whatever edge I’d had with him was gone.

  “What is it with you?” he said. “You’re not scared. You don’t care about yourself. You’re just trying to keep me talking here.”

  And trying to figure out how to make you open the cage.

  I shrugged. “I care what happens to them.” He knew who I meant. I meant Eddie and the admiral. Chris and Aya. I meant the people who had ridden with me north in the coal car, the gang members in Washington. I meant the scientists in Somalia, Eddie’s family, the worshippers at the National Cathedral, strangers even, I guess.

  It’s funny how some people who don’t have families or intimate love can care more for strangers. But that doesn’t make the caring less real. Maybe it means you have more caring to spread around. Who am I to judge? I’m a bad judge, but an honest one, and Harlan saw it, and nodded.

  “I care about them, too,” he said. He seemed sad. Maybe he was thinking about the tens of millions of people he cared about that he planned to kill with a disease he’d created.

  When he opened the lab door to go, leaving me in the cage, I heard choral music from up top, coming over a speaker system. I was hearing the same song that I’d heard in Somalia, sung by two men in a tent. But now eighty people were singing it.

  And the Lord sent his prophet . . .

  To walk among the people

  And the prophet smote all evil

  On that great and fearful day . . .

  I tried to stop him with a question. “How did Tahir Khan come up with the cure?”

  When the door shut behind him, the music stopped. All I heard was the scraping of animals against steel mesh. There was no sound from the barrels. No ticking. I could not see the red digits on a timer. I wondered if Harlan Maas would come back at all.

  —

  I was pulling at the bars uselessly when Harlan returned.

  He walked over to a red phone on a table. It was an old scratched-up plastic model, heavy, 1950s style, but had no wires attached. The phone could not possibly work. But he picked up the receiver anyway and put it to his ear. He listened intently. He said something I could not hear. He hung up as if someone had been on the other end. He said, nodding at me, “I can answer your question now.”

  “You do know, don’t you, that phone’s not connected to anything?”

  He smiled. Fine. We wouldn’t discuss that part, if that’s what he wanted.

  “Tahir Khan,” I said.

  “Tahir found the cure. Yes. He went back to my old notes and re-created the strain step by step, but with one difference that allowed us to control it. He added a new technique for controlling gene expression—activation—in transgenic organisms. That means modified ones.”

  “What new technique?”

  “Well! People think that to make a new organism, all you have to do is combine a few genes, little snipping, little splicing, make the pie. Bingo, they express themselves!”

  “That isn’t how it works, though,” I said, thinking that he did not seem so mad when he talked about science. What he did with it was insane. But the man knew of what he spoke.

  He said, with some eagerness, “You need a third part. You need something called a promoter. A trigger. A small genetic element, could be only a few dozen nucleotides . . . or a thousand. You splice it into the hybrid before the new organism can work. Think of the whole thing like a train, Colonel. The chain of cars is the DNA, but railroad cars—the links—can’t move by themselves.”

  “The promoter is the engine, you mean.”

  “Yes!” he said, and smiled. “Some are designed to be active all the time. You can’t turn them off. But others only drive the train under specific conditions.”

  “Like what?”

  “An example? Say you want to try out a new gene in a mouse. But you only want the gene to work in the mouse’s brain cells, its neurons. Well, there’s a promoter that limits your new gene to working in that specific area. Or take recent research on fireflies.”

  “Fireflies?”

  “Do you want examples or not?” he snapped.

  “Sorry.” The Sixth Prophet could be riled, I saw.

  “Fireflies glow with a yellow-green light. Anyone who has been near them on a summer night knows what I’m talking about. That light comes from the insect’s luciferase, a protein. Well, a couple years back, researchers wanted to see if they could make tobacco plants glow, too.”

  “Why?”

  “They just did,” he said. “They wanted the plant to glow when under stress if it was thirsty.”

  “This really happened?” I wanted to scream. I couldn’t care less, at the moment, about fireflies.

  “Too little rain, the glow would be a cry for help! Imagine a thousand plants in the field, calling to their farmer for water.”

  “Doesn’t he know if there’s too little rain anyway?”

  Harlan shook his head impatiently. “That’s not the point. The point is, researchers came up with a promoter to enable tobacco plants to glow!”

  Harlan had apparently forgotten about all the people who might appreciate glowing plants and would—within weeks—expire from his outbreak. I didn’t remind him. He was talking eagerly and I wanted to keep him that way. I said, “You’re saying that Tahir Khan killed your leprosy by going after the promoter that turned it on, not the bacteria itself.”

  “Yes! The promoter. He created a tet-on, tet-off system against it.”

  “And what is tet-on, tet-off?”

  —

  Harlan explained that tet-on, tet-off had been invented recently to control potentially dangerous genetically modified life. “Tet” was the antibiotic tetracycline, or its stronger relative, doxycycline. Scientists at a biotech company created genes that could be turned on or off based on the presence of doxycycline. Tet-off activated genes when doxycycline was missing. Tet-on was the opposite.

  I said, “You’re saying that Tahir rendered your hybrid inactive with doxycycline? But we tried that drug!”

  “No! Same principle, but different drugs. Tahir found a combination therapy to shut the promoter off.”

  What he was saying sank in. I grew excited. “Existing drugs? You mean, all we have to do is find the right combination that already exists that will stop this whole thing?”

  He sighed and looked at his watch and went to the barrel across the lab. He bent over the top and I saw his hand move. He straightened and regarded me with a look approximating affection.

  “Yes. But it took Tahir years to find it.”

  “But the combination cures it, you’re saying.”

  “Maybe someone else will find it someday. I have it. I have the cure to give. But nobody came, Joe Rush. That truck stop was empty. I can see that my time has not yet come on Earth.”

  How many minutes were left? I remembered the photos of the Jones cult in Guyana, the aerial shots of bodies lying in the open, birds pecking at the eyes. Nine hundred people had poisoned themselves. I remembered the shots we’d seen at Quantico of the Heaven’s Gate cult, forty followers of Marshall Applewaite, who’d dressed in the same style clothes, same colors, same brand of sneakers, and lain down beside each other, feet all facing the same direction. They’d cheerfully consumed poison believing their souls were about to go into outer space and be transformed into something else.

  Jokes. Fools. Gullible but harmless to everyone but themselves.

  Harlan Maas said, opening the door to leave, “Just so you know, we have twenty more minutes. Good-bye, Colonel Rush. Do you pray to anythi
ng or anybody? You should. Now.”

  —

  I needed a lie. I needed a really great lie. I needed a stopper, this second, something so good that it would make him hesitate, delay, stop the count, have my cuffs taken off. Not that I knew what to do if that happened. Just that it was the best place to try to start.

  I called out, “Do you know why I really came? I’m sick.”

  “Oh, Dr. Rush. Up until now you’ve been honest.”

  I held out my hands stubbornly and Harlan Maas hesitated and turned back toward my cage. He stopped at the chair again, a safe distance. He leaned forward, ever the researcher interested in manifestations of his disease.

  I pushed my hands out between a bar. I rotated my palms as much as possible. It was clear where the dead spot lay on my fingers. It was now a white patch.

  “When did you get this?” he asked, like a doctor with a patient. As if he had not just checked a timer on a ticking fertilizer bomb, fifteen feet away.

  “When did it become visible, Harlan? Or when did the dead feeling start?” I asked.

  “Either one.”

  He was turning away, seeking something in the lab. And then he saw it. He retreated and came back with one of those long, probing needles, used usually for pinning some sample down. Thin as a sewing needle, it was three times as long.

  “Go ahead,” I said, as if he needed permission to stick me.

  The needle went into my finger and I felt no pain at all.

  He tried again, watching my face. I didn’t wince. He stuck all the discolored patches. I felt nothing.

  “When?” he asked again.

  Hide the lie. Bury the lie. Bury it in the middle of an explanation. It’s the only chance.

  “The numbness? Actually, back in Africa. I didn’t tell anyone, though. Kept it to myself.”

  He started. And stared at me. Then his eyes narrowed. I knew his thought process. He was thinking that if I’d caught this in Africa, then blood tests should have shown me infected before I even got back to the United States, whether I hid symptoms or not.

  I said, “I know! I figured when the tests showed nothing that I was imagining it. And the tests never came back positive. Even now. So I hid it when it got worse. I didn’t want to be locked up.”

  He asked in a smaller voice, “The blood tests didn’t work?”

  “That’s what I said, isn’t it? Anyway, I tried to figure out how come they didn’t show infection in me but did on everyone else? I went back and tested samples from Africa and confirmed it, see? Most sick people there tested positive. But a few, three or four, again, negative. Even people in bad shape. Like the two guys you sent, the ones singing your song in their tent. So I figured—”

  Harlan broke in, anxious, “What do you mean, my people were sick?”

  “Well, almost everyone was sick, so I—”

  He interrupted again. “They couldn’t have been sick,” he said stubbornly. “They got the cure.”

  “Those two were in as bad a shape as the others . . . look . . . Maybe your strain mutated. It happens. The point is—”

  He stepped closer, but not close enough. He was breathing hard. His eyes had gone small. He barked out, “They took the cure so they weren’t sick!”

  I backed up a step. “Well! You know this thing better than I do. But the rashes on their inside thighs and scrotum . . . those triangular purple marks, they’re the same on me.”

  “On your scrotum? What rashes?”

  “They cleared up now but the skin’s all tough, and under the microscope that scaly purple pattern looks exactly the same as what we saw on them.”

  He said nothing, but he was breathing more audibly.

  Come on. Don’t you want to take a look at a symptom you’ve not seen before? Don’t you want to check whether your strain has morphed into something else?

  I said, “Maybe the cure doesn’t work all the time. Maybe it just works on some people, not others.”

  His face twisted. His head jerked up. He stared at the red telephone on the lab table as if frightened of it. I’d heard nothing, but he tilted his head as if he did. And then he went over to the phone, and picked up the receiver, and listened, and his hand began to shake.

  “No,” he said into the phone. “I can’t understand it. No, it’s impossible. Yes, yes, find out! Yes, I will.”

  Harlan ran to the barrel and did something to the switch. Then he ran to the door and cried out for help in a wavery voice. After a moment the guards were back.

  I’d stopped the countdown. At least for the moment.

  He told them to unlock the cage door and strap me onto the table and peel my clothes off. Now.

  TWENTY-ONE

  There was only one way for them to get those manacles on the exam table on me, and that was to take off my cuffs. The two guards ordered me out of the cell, telling me to stand still, arms out, eyes forward. Harlan waited across the room as the tall man aimed his carbine at me and the Asian moved close with a key. Harlan turned away to select sharp-looking instruments from a table.

  “I won’t hurt you, Colonel. I just want to run some tests,” Harlan said. “It’s better that you don’t move.”

  In the brief moment when they’d opened the lab door, before they’d shut it, I’d heard hymns coming from above, over their sound system. The same song as in Africa. Now the key, moving toward my handcuffs, seemed to shake slightly.

  The guard was not so confident as he wanted me to think.

  “Hold your hands straighter!”

  I kept my face blank. I could not show intent in my eyes. The Asian man lay his pistol on a table before approaching, and the man with the carbine watched my face, stepping to the side to let the Asian get close. But he didn’t move far enough to the side. It was possible that if I hit the small man at the right angle, I’d spin him into the other man’s line of fire.

  “Don’t move, Colonel!”

  I kept my wrists easy. Rigid would be a signal. The Asian man’s eyes flinched to his key, off my face. Otherwise he’d never get the key in the slot. The key glinted. His nails were clean and evenly cut. I heard the smallest scrape of metal touching metal and moved fast at the exact second that the click sounded. Both men had been looking at my wrists, not at my knees, which I used to launch myself sideways, still keeping my face straight.

  The shot seemed thunderous and I felt the air pressure when the bullet skimmed my ear. I felt my shoulder drive into the Asian man, driving him back, spinning him around.

  With the loudspeakers going up top and the singing, maybe no one had heard the shot. The Asian man’s skull was spraying blood on the left side. He toppled like a truncated statue. The gunman was stunned and that slowed him, and by the time he swung the carbine, I’d reached the pistol on the table. I had the gun in my right hand, the one in which I had full sensation in the fingers.

  Something hard punched into my left side, spinning me back against the wall. Shot. But I kept moving, dropping, as wood shavings and glass splinters flew off tables and beakers shattered and animals screamed. I half fell, half ducked behind one of those blocky lab tables. There was no pain yet. There was adrenaline. M4 carbines fire .223 bullets. They tumble and chew up tissue inside. I’d been hit in the lower left chest, away from the midline but in the rib cage.

  The area under my shoulder was pulsing and sticky and there was a feeling like wasps crawling under the skin. The whole left arm didn’t seem to be working.

  I heard a great rush of loud hymn singing. Someone must have opened the steel door. But when I glanced up, I saw it was Harlan leaving, not someone coming in. Harlan was running. I fired at him and missed and ducked down as more bullets came my way. I crawled behind the side of a freezer as the metal side thudded with pings and whines. I kept away from the oil drum. I didn’t think a fertilizer bomb could be set off by bullets, but what if I was wrong
?

  Crackcrack.

  I popped up and fired and glimpsed two guards there. Double vision. He’d split in two. I had no extra ammunition and there was no way to tell how many bullets remained in my magazine. I heard a snap across the room. The guard had fed fresh ammo into his carbine. Up top, I could imagine the scene. Harlan running into the compound. Harlan shouting for the singers to stop. Some ticking cosmic clock moving a second hand toward his timer.

  I called out to the guard, “He’s crazy, you know.”

  No answer. As if this would have worked. Then I heard a slight shuffling sound from the left, barely audible over the frightened whimpering of the armadillos. The guard was moving.

  “He’s not a prophet,” I called out. But I was as effective as a Roman centurion telling an early Christian that Christ was no more a messiah than the donkey on which he rode. “He’s sick,” I called out. “Don’t destroy the cure. You can save millions of people.”

  The top of the table blew apart above me. I crawled left.

  Ahead, on the floor, I saw a sideways mesh rack for test tubes, half smashed and knocked to the ground by firing. I reached for it and tossed it, below tabletop level, six feet to the left. The moment it struck the ground, the table above it splintered. CRACKCRACKCRACK. I was already rising. He had no chance to turn. My shots took him full in the chest before I ran out of bullets. But I did not need them anymore, at least not here. Not under the ground.

  —

  The red digits on the blast timer read 19. They didn’t move. They didn’t blink. They were jammed or not running. Was it possible that Harlan had not started the timer again? Then I remembered that remote activation was possible from aboveground.

  Maybe he’s waiting to see who comes out of the lab before he starts it up again. Maybe he’s hoping the guard will be the one to survive, and then he can take blood samples from me, see if I was really sick, confirm or disprove that I’ve got the same strain he released, or one that morphed from it.