by Mara, Wil
“Please, don’t.”
They squabbled for a few more seconds—an eternity to the spectators—until, in one startlingly swift motion, Shalizeh struck Ashur in the chin with the butt of his rifle. Ashur collapsed with a groan, blood leaking from his mouth.
Shalizeh stood over him for a moment, his eyes wild. Then he turned to another of his followers and said, “Are you willing to follow my orders?”
The unfortunate soul he had picked, a relatively low-ranking soldier named Kala, nodded quickly. “Then go!” Shalizeh barked, and Kala fled.
Ashur got to his feet slowly. Shalizeh took no notice of this, turning back to the television instead. Now they were showing a night clip of several buildings on fire in the Chicago area. The caption read, WIDESPREAD LOOTING IN MAJOR CITIES AS ILLNESS SPREADS.
A smile returned to Shalizeh’s lips.
SEVEN
It was one of those dreams where you knew you were in it, knew you couldn’t escape it, and—perhaps worst of all—knew what was coming.
Beck was in the rented convertible—the one that should’ve been returned to Avis after the conference in Connecticut but was now costing the CDC $29.95 per day plus gas and mileage—motoring along northern New Jersey’s Route 17. The top was down on another postcard-perfect day, the Appalachians majestic in the distance. Route 17 was a major artery, all the land on either side developed within an inch of its life. Car dealerships, home-improvement centers, anonymous office buildings, health clubs, strip malls. Since this was a dream, most of it was a blur.
Cara wasn’t in the passenger seat; she had decided to spend another day at the lab working on vaccines. He wasn’t sure where he was going; that information had not been included. He had heard once that dreams were, in fact, complete in their chronologies. But the mind protected the soul by blocking out most of the hurtful segments. If they didn’t, many of us would wake with our sanity erased. We’d end up in state institutions, strapped to beds and screaming at the ceiling.
There were a few other vehicles around. He’d been on 17 many times now, and the thickness of traffic had steadily diminished. People went into hiding, or packed their things and moved on. The state had issued warnings not to do so. Roadblocks had been set up, but mostly as a bluff. Unless a federal order was handed down, law-enforcement agencies couldn’t actually stop anyone from traveling. Even if they tried, the locals knew every obscure back road. It was said you could go anywhere in New Jersey without touching a highway. Beck had thought it was a myth, but not anymore. It was the most densely populated state in the nation, and with that swollen population came excessive development. Aside from the Pine Barrens in the southern third, the Garden State was now a landscape of concrete and steel. If you wanted to leave and knew your way around, no one was going to stop you.
The stereo was on, spinning one of his beloved ’70s CDs. Strangely, though, the song playing was Michael Martin Murphey’s “Wildfire.” Released in June of 1975, it ostensibly told the story of a lost horse and its owner but was metaphorically a reference to escaping a miserable life for something better. While melodically stunning, certain lyrical passages had always disturbed him. It was one of the few ’70s classics that, even now, he could not stand to hear. For this alone he wished he could force himself awake.
An eighteen-wheeler roared past him on the left. The driver blew the horn in several frantic bleats, as if trying to communicate a coherent thought. Beck glanced over and saw that the windows were smoked, giving the rig a sinister appearance. As it rattled past, he saw the letters D.O.A. painted huge on the side of the trailer. A chill blew through him, and his heart began drumming. Then, as the rig dropped its clutch and began barreling away, he tried to scream—No!—but only hot air came out. He tried again and again. A distant part of him knew you couldn’t muster any vocal force in a dream, any more than you could stop yourself from falling or outrun the swarm of killer bees that was just behind you, their tiny eyes trained on the soft flesh of your neck. But he kept trying.
The rig swerved into the middle lane, in front of him, the horn still blasting. Beck pressed the gas pedal to the floor, and that helped close the distance somewhat. But it wasn’t enough … wouldn’t be enough.… He kept on blowing hot air with his useless dream-voice.
The overpass was coming up quickly. It was a pedestrian bridge, with an inward-curved cage along the flanks. He saw the woman running up the steps on the right. When she reached the top she looked to the road, to the rig. As it drew closer, she moved toward the middle. There was a gap in the cage for some reason. She stopped there, and Beck could see she was holding a baby in her arms.
The truck driver stopped working the horn. Then all other sounds ceased—no wheels rattling, no Michael Martin Murphey singing “Wildfire,” not even the hoarse whisper of his attempted screams. He had become frozen now and could do nothing but watch. He felt a peculiar pressure on both sides of his head.
The dream went into slow motion. Just before the truck reached the bridge, the woman jumped. Her dress fluttered up behind her, revealing the blackened, vesicle-covered legs. They had been pretty once, the kind of legs that turned heads in bars and on beaches. But that time was long gone.
His vision and perspective somehow zoomed forward, and he saw her and the child clearly for an instant. The face was swollen and disfigured beyond all recognition. Even her loved ones wouldn’t be able to identify her anymore. She still wore a diamond-studded watch, which had become nearly buried in the puffed flesh of her wrist. The baby was wrapped in a blanket, stained from the oozing fluids. All Beck could see of the child was its eyes, which were wide and lifeless, and had turned a deep ruby red from the bleeding.
Then she and the child fell from view, normal speed resumed, and all sounds returned. A scream came up effortlessly now, from the deepest parts of him.
* * *
He jerked awake in the hotel bed, clutching one of the pillows so tight that his fingers ached. His heart was pounding, his breathing rapid and shallow. He sat up and massaged his forehead, waiting for reality to flood in and chase away the last of the fading images. He noticed the morning sunlight trying to reach in beneath the heavy shades and turned to look at the clock on the nightstand—6:45. He also realized his cell phone was ringing.
The incident had occurred three days earlier, as he was heading to a local diner to get some lunch. Most of the details had been the same—the nice weather, the big rig, the fact that Cara had been absent as she worked with the vaccine team. But there were differences, too—the song that had been playing was “Dancing in the Moonlight” by King Harvest, and the three characters on the side of the truck had been G.O.D., the acronym for Newark trucking company, Guaranteed Overnight Delivery.
Also, the woman wore a black dress, not white.
She disappeared from view, having timed the jump perfectly, and the speeding rig connected with a dull thump. From his vantage point about a hundred feet back, Beck saw the explosion of blood and bone as it cascaded from either side of the cab. It was a sight he would not forget if he lived another thousand years.
The driver jammed on his brakes, smoke rising from around the tires as they cooked on the pavement. Beck stopped behind him and jumped out, literally—right over the door like in the movies. He ran down the driver’s side of the rig screaming, “Don’t go near it! Don’t touch the blood!” He realized later, trembling as he drove back to the hotel room with his appetite long gone, that he had used the word it because he didn’t know what else to say. He couldn’t use her or them, because there wasn’t enough left of either victim. The driver, half out of the cab and looking as pale as an autumn moon, obeyed, somehow understanding that Beck was the authority figure here. He climbed down slowly and sidestepped into the highway’s left lane just to satiate his morbid curiosity, then went to the cement median and threw up on the other side.
Beck guarded the site until the police arrived. Route 17 remained closed for nearly nine hours as cleanup crews in hazard suits
meticulously bodybagged all the remains they could find; then a local maintenance team in protective suits scrubbed the road with hot water and bleach. The woman, as it turned out, was a twenty-two-year-old single mother who had recently been laid off from her job as a receptionist in a small private law firm and was drowning in credit card debt. One of her former coworkers would later give the statement that she had been contemplating suicide anyway. The child’s name was Cory.
Beck realized it was the ringing cell phone that had pulled him out of the dream, and he had never been so grateful. He took it from the nightstand and unfolded it.
“Yes?”
“Time to get up, old man.”
“Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, are we?”
“Sure am.”
He smiled. “I still can’t believe you’re a morning person.”
“I’ve been up for a while now. I’ve already gone down and bought us breakfast. A yummy cinnamon roll for me. And for you, a bland and tasteless bran muffin so you’ll crap better.”
“Appreciated.”
“Get your sorry butt out of bed. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“Right.”
She made good on her promise and knocked on the door exactly ten minutes later. They ate quietly at the small circular table while he stared into the screen on his laptop, studying for what seemed like the hundredth time the information he’d collected over the last six days. With the help of a software application that had been written specifically for epidemiological utility, he was able to sort and compare quantitative data in a mind-boggling variety of ways. On the current table, he was trying to detect any patterns on the basis of the victims’ ages.
Porter leaned over and gave it a quick glance. “Anything?”
He shook his head. “No, nothing unusual. The virus doesn’t seem to discriminate on the basis of age. Not age, race, gender, weight, or even profession.”
“Except doctors and nurses,” Porter said.
“Yeah.”
Beck had a natural genius for detecting trends and patterns within what appeared to be an otherwise meaningless jumble of information. “Finding the underlying order within the chaos,” as he said. He was so good at it, in fact, that he had been approached by the CIA while an undergraduate student for possible employment. The ease with which he exercised this talent was even a source of mild guilt for him, particularly when he watched his peers struggle under the same circumstances.
He hit ALT and TAB buttons simultaneously and toggled to a map. It was a simple line drawing of northern New Jersey, segmented and color-coded by county. Red dots represented known cases of the infection. The greatest concentration, like a large drop of paint with spatter marks around it, was in the Ramsey–Mahwah area. As Beck increased the magnification, the paint drop became more particulate.
“We’re certainly in the epicenter, at least in terms of the outbreak. That much is clear. But it doesn’t mean this is where it began.”
“Someone could’ve contracted it in China,” Porter said, “then taken a plane back here while it was incubating in their body, right?”
“Yes. The origin of the contagion could be anywhere. Happens all the time. This is what’s called a common-source epidemic in the sense that the outbreak is attributable to a common noxious influence that’s been shared by all persons within a sample group. But that doesn’t automatically mean this is the virus’s point of origin. I could produce pie charts and bar graphs until my fingers froze, but an epidemic curve isn’t going to reveal that. That’s where the real detective work comes in.”
Porter leaned down to get a better look at the data. Beck marveled inwardly at the intensity with which she studied it. There was a time when he would’ve bet anything the empirical side of epidemiology would’ve bored her to death. But she always seemed absorbed by it.
“You’re using all standard metrics, of course?”
“Of course.” He smiled. “You’ve been doing some homework?”
“I have indeed.”
“Tell me what you’re looking at. Impress me.”
“Well, overall, you’ve collected many simple counts. Number of men, number of women, number of adults, number of children. Stuff like that.”
“Of course. This helps reveal both regularities and irregularities.”
“And based on this information here—” She pointed to a small rectangle at the left side of the screen with the number 15,622. “—I believe you’re trying to determine an incidence rate.”
“Which is—?”
“The occurrence of a disease within a time frame.”
“And how do we get that?”
“By dividing the number of known cases that occur within that time frame by the fixed population of an area.”
“Bingo.”
“The fifteen K is the total population in question.”
“Yep, in this case the town of Ramsey. What else?”
“By listing the number of deaths in the same region in relation to when they occurred, you can determine what’s called prevalence. Once you have enough of that data, you can extrapolate a long-term number. For example, you can come up with a prevalence rate of three-point-five percent within a given population during the course of, say, one year.”
“Very, very good.”
“And once you have enough data amassed, you can start building statistical pictures of everything from case fatality rates and proportional mortality ratios to cause-specific rates based on age, gender, and other factors.”
Beck sat back in his chair, hands clutching the armrests, and beamed. “Bravo, my young apprentice, bravo. I am most pleased.”
“Ha.”
“And here I didn’t think you like the mathematical side of epi.”
“I don’t,” she said quickly, taking a bite of her cinnamon roll and glancing at the latest CNN report on TV. “It’s boring as shit. But I also know it’s necessary, so I’m going to learn it. Hardly fun, though.”
“I disagree. Hunting through stats is like hunting for buried treasure. That’s a real thrill.”
“Right. All you need now is a bow tie, a pocket protector, and to be stuffed into your own locker.” Beck laughed. “So what if the contagion really was produced by a terror organization, like a lot of the media outlets are implying?”
“Sheila and I talked about that yesterday. Until we get confirmation of terrorist involvement—and so far there is none—part of my job is to continue focusing on the origin. I can’t afford to be as blasé as the media. I have to find out where this thing started. Sometimes that isn’t possible, by the by.”
“You wrote about that in your book, about the E. coli outbreak in 2006. How investigators traced it to that food company in California, and how it was delivered to consumers through bagged spinach. But they never determined how the spinach got contaminated in the first place.”
“Right. Sometimes we never figure it out. But it always helps when we do. It helps not just for the current situation, but to obviate future outbreaks as well.”
“So you keep digging for clues?”
He nodded once, his attention still focused on the screen. “We keep digging for clues.”
Porter marveled at his calm persistence. The Nancy Drew side of epidemiology, as she thought of it, was slow and tedious and sometimes required hours of work that produced little or no reward. He’d been at it almost nonstop since they arrived. More than a hundred interviews of relatives and family members, and nearly another hundred from Ben, who was in constant contact either by phone or email. Some of the interviewees were infected themselves, others so distraught, they were barely able to communicate. Beck was thrown out of one home for being “ghoulish,” while the crying mother of a deceased teenager clung to him so hard that her fingernails drew blood from his arm. Of the 1,322 cases they recorded, both in morbidity (illness) and mortality (death), there didn’t seem to be any trends or patterns. Six hundred sixty-eight were male, 654 female. Ages ranged from three months to
ninety-two years. Some had blue-collar professions, others white, and the rest were either unemployed or retired. Caucasian, African, Asian, European … heterosexual, homosexual, asexual … Christian, Jewish, Muslim, atheist … The virus truly was, as Porter called it, “an equal-opportunity killer.” In times like this, she really thought she’d end up with a career in lab work rather than out in the field like Beck. At least the information he was gathering was being fed into the CDC’s data bank back in Atlanta: a massive pool of empirical information, augmented almost daily, then shared with health-care professionals around the world.
“So I assume by the tone of your voice that I’ll be alone again today?” Beck said, turning off the laptop and shutting the lid. This was a sign he was ready to go. He would tuck it into his bag and be out the door within minutes. Porter actually worried about him, about how hard he was pushing himself. Even though she was in the hotel room a few doors down, she had determined that he was sleeping only about five hours a night, eating on the fly, and taking few breaks.
“Yeah, I’ll keep working, trying to come up with an effective antiviral.”
“Fieldwork is where it’s at.”
“Finding an antiviral could stop this thing dead in its tracks. That’s important, too, y’know.”
“I certainly do, and I’m sure they appreciate the help.”
Antiviral drugs were relatively new in the field of health care, the first having been developed in the 1960s to treat social diseases. Methods of development at the time were primitive to say the least, featuring viruses in cell cultures that were bombarded with an array of chemicals until the contagion showed some decrease in virulency. Even if effective drugs could be developed, this approach did not provide information on the how or why. The first significant breakthrough came in the 1980s, when gene sequencing became more common. Once researchers were able to understand a virus’s invasive process step by step, it was easier to find “target chemicals” to inhibit it at some point along the way. Over the next twenty years, many antiviral medications were developed, each aimed at a different virus. Some attacked the initial attachment and entry into the healthy host cell, others focused on the genomic replication, and a few hit the virion assembly toward the end of the cycle. The difficulty came with the fact that each virus needed its own custom-made chemical cocktail, and simply stumbling upon the correct recipe could take weeks, months, or years … or might never be discovered at all.
