The Gemini Virus

by Mara, Wil

  She put on her protective gear and stepped inside. The iPod’s volume was maxed out, which was painful enough but better than the alternative. She opened the cage door and lifted out the lifeless body. It was still warm and somewhat pliable, which meant it had died during her shift. Something about this was particularly depressing. She set the body into a plastic bag, zipped it shut, and put it in the freezer at the far end of the room. She’d leave a note outside so they’d know.

  As she closed the empty cage, she noticed that the ferret above it was sticking its little pink nose through the tiny chrome bars. When Porter looked up, the animal sneezed explosively.

  As the moisture sprayed onto her face, a grim realization struck. My goggles aren’t on. Oh my good God …

  She didn’t have to turn around to know where she’d left them—on the table by the electron microscope; she had to remove them to look into the eyepieces. She spent so much time training herself not to look from the workstation to the animal room. Now she was unable to do the reverse.

  She dashed into the decontamination area, stripped off the protective gear with much less delicacy than was recommended, and turned on both faucets at the scrub sink. There was an official eye-washing station in the prep room outside and down the hall, but there was no time for that.

  She took the plastic bottle of sanitizer from its little pedestal above the spigot and squeezed a generous portion into her palm. As the shuffle engine in her iPod followed “Kashmir” with “Black Country Woman,” she rubbed her hands together like a mad scientist, took a deep breath, then forced her eyes to open as wide as they would go and slapped the gel into them. The scream that followed was like something out of a horror movie. Nevertheless, she rubbed the gel in harder, then leaned down and washed it all out with clumsy, frantic movements. She kept splashing water in there long after all the sanitizer was gone, making bovine grunting noises with each shot.

  She found the roll of paper towels and dried her face. Then she willed herself to look into the small mirror hanging on the wall by the garbage can. A doctor might think she had the worst case of pinkeye in history, or maybe she’d been beaten up pretty good by her boyfriend. She began crying, and a part of her thought this was good—maybe the tears would wash out any remaining contagion.

  She returned to the workstation, whispering in a quivering voice. Please, God, please don’t let this happen. Please, I’ll do anything … anything you want.

  Then she picked up her cell phone.

  SIXTEEN

  DAY 16

  MSNBC had the numbers correct thanks to a single sheet of paper handed to Dr. Nancy Snyderman, its chief medical editor, just as a commercial break was ending—roughly 12,700 dead and more than 31,000 infected. This was according to the CDC, which was now updating its dedicated webpage every twenty minutes. The webmaster resisted the urge to put up a counter, feeling it would be a bit too game show–esque, and instead continued to embed all new information within ordinary text.

  The virus had found a home in thirty-seven states, and few had any doubt it would run the table in the continental United States. Alaska and Hawaii were still unaffected, the latter suffering dearly for minimizing all commercial air travel from the mainland. Tourism constituted the bulk of its revenue, and some experts were already predicting the island group would not recover from the losses for at least a decade.

  Deaths were also being reported for the first time in other countries, spreading the fear worldwide and sparking continuing talk of the infection being “the Black Plague of the twenty-first century.”

  Almost all the cases in Mexico were traced back to the Pryce couple and other passengers from the Princess Line cruise. Some, however, likely also came in through Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico, ultimately driving the Mexican government, somewhat ironically, to close the border.

  In China, all commercial flights from the United States were banned after an infected couple from Maine was discovered at the Zhaolong Hotel in Beijing. The hotel was subsequently sealed until all other guests could be screened. In spite of these efforts, cases began appearing almost immediately in the surrounding area, then spreading quickly outward.

  In Japan, commercial airline flights were permitted to continue, but incoming passengers had to submit to a twenty-four-hour quarantine period. While this caused great consternation among travelers, it did also appear to have the desired effect—nineteen infected individuals were identified before they could enter Japan’s greater population, the latter of whom also protected themselves through the use of gloves and masks. Commercial shipping ports were also rigidly monitored in spite of the loss of billions in trade revenue on both sides.

  The first case in Canada involved a single mother and her two-month-old son, who lived in St. Catharines, Ontario, and had recently returned after a brief visit with relatives in Buffalo, New York. They showed up at the local hospital already well into Stage Two, the baby barely able to breathe. He died hours later of cardiac arrest, and the mother passed away the next evening. The Canadian government immediately dispatched hundreds of health-care workers to all border crossings, but within a week, more than fifty new cases had been confirmed.

  The first six victims in England were reported in Guildford, just southwest of London, by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. In typically civilized fashion, little public furor resulted as the patients were quietly removed from the population and kept comfortable. Meanwhile, health officials requested that anyone else exhibiting symptoms of the disease kindly report to the nearest hospital for “interview and treatment.” Seventy-two individuals would do so.

  The American media continued its relentless coverage of all developments, gradually stripping away each layer of editorial integrity until the daily reports seemed more like scenes from a horror movie. Bodies were shown lying in streets in broad daylight, disfigured and decomposed, because no one wanted to go near them. In Mississippi, someone took a blurry cell phone clip of a corpse being torn apart by a pack of coyotes in the wooded stretch behind a convenience store. In the Bronx, the dead body of a black woman lay slumped out the window of her ninth-story apartment all night long. She was noticed early the following morning by a jogger.

  The suicides had also become particularly grisly. A thirty-four-year-old Delaware man rammed the paired prongs of a geared rotisserie wheel into his eyes. A Maine woman of about the same age swallowed every pill in her bathroom cabinet, then got on her knees and drank from the bottles of cleaning fluid under the sink until she went into convulsions. A night watchman in a Tennessee junkyard sat in his beloved ’69 Mustang convertible while the crusher reduced it to the size of a washing machine. No one witnessed the incident, but it took the local fire department nearly an hour to hose away all the blood.

  One Miami newspaper ran what it called a “local interest story” about an elderly widower who, once he realized he had acquired the infection, decided to spend his remaining three days running through a bizarre bucket list—he smoked a joint, wrote an anonymous note to the woman next door telling her about the affair her husband was having, called the IRS to say he had cheated on his taxes more than a dozen times and wished them good luck in getting the money, and recorded a video for YouTube confessing his love for Kirsten Dunst. When the symptoms began, he journaled the illness on his computer until he was no longer able, leaving the message that the information should be sent to the CDC in case it might be useful.

  * * *

  At exactly 3:36 A.M. local time in Tehran, a Saipa 141 sedan—one of thousands seen on Iranian roads every day—pulled into a dimly lit backstreet two blocks from the Presidential Palace. The driver, the only one in the car, got out and didn’t bother to lock it. He walked at a steady, deliberate pace, hunched slightly forward with his hands in his pockets. His appearance was as unremarkable as the vehicle: just another local going about his business. There was no one else around. If there had been, they might have noticed the way his eyes moved about res
tlessly, surveying everything.

  He reached the rear entrance to the palace, where two guards were milling about. When they saw him approach, they paused. They did not, however, demand that he identify himself; they were expecting him. He passed between them wordlessly, continued through the courtyard, and was greeted on the back portico by Sanjar Hejazi, a man he’d known only a few months but had come to like enormously.

  Sanjar brought him up a winding staircase to the second floor, then into an ornately decorated room with tall curtains, gilded chandeliers, and a magnificent silk rug that covered almost the entire floor. President Baraheri was sitting in an antique chair reading a copy of The New York Times.

  The president rose when he saw his guest. “Good evening, Mushir. What have you learned?”

  Mushir Garoussi had spent the first sixteen years of his adult life in the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. He distinguished himself in the Iran–Iraq War through extensive undercover work and was afterward moved to Iran’s Intelligence Ministry. He rose to a midlevel position before internal politics slowed his progress, mostly due to his superiors’ suspicion that he was, at heart, a moderate rather than a fundamentalist. He climbed a few more rungs during President Khatami’s reformist administration, then hit another snag when Khatami was replaced by hardliner Ahmadinejad in 2005. When Baraheri succeeded Ahmadinejad following his startling dark horse victory, he appointed Garoussi head of the Intelligence Ministry. Garoussi had not even heard of Baraheri prior to the election, much less expected anything from him. But he had come to learn there was a great deal more to the man than a cursory examination would suggest. He was, in Garoussi’s opinion, Iran’s only hope for the future.

  “We discovered Shalizeh’s old laboratory, Mr. President. It was an abandoned house on the northern edge of the Darakeh neighborhood. We broke down the front door and found papers strewn about everywhere, mold growing throughout the kitchen, and about a million flies. There were bare mattresses in almost every room, stained and disgusting. There were two computers on the first floor, which we took away for examination.” Garoussi shivered. “Then we went into the basement.…”

  The equipment was still there—the microscopes, syringes, scissors, jars of paraffin and hard resin, a variety of irradiators, a vacuum infiltrator, and a cryostat. In the center of one room, under a light with a huge chrome hood, was a slightly tilted necropsy table. The leather straps were rotted and hanging loose. There were still bloodstains on the surface, the sides, and the floor. A glass-enclosed chamber had rows of animal cages. Some held skeletons lying on their sides, the flesh rotted away or chewed off by maggots that were also long gone.

  “There were also three more computers, as well as a cabinet with dozens of notebooks. What became clear is that they had no idea what they were doing. They were just experimenting, completely at random. Different viruses, different drugs, different effects. And then … then we found some notes that led us to the back of the property.”

  “This is the part you didn’t want to tell me about on the phone?” Hejazi asked.

  Garoussi nodded. “Yes. We found the spot in a clearing. It had become a large depression because the loosened soil had settled back down. We began digging, and it didn’t take long to find the first carcass—a medium-sized dog. Then two more. Finally, we discovered the first human victim—a female, mid-thirties at the oldest, very badly decayed. But … the horror was still visible on her face. No sooner had we removed her corpse than another was found underneath.”

  Baraheri shook his head slowly; Hejazi cursed under his breath.

  “In total, there were seventy-two corpses,” Garoussi said. “Forty-one were animals, the other thirty-one human, including eleven children and fourteen women.”

  “Savages, absolute savages,” Baraheri said. “Men without souls.”

  “The children were all kidnap victims, the women prostitutes. The males … they came from a variety of places. We are contacting the families now. It is a most unpleasant business.”

  “I would imagine.” Baraheri took a deep breath and then let it out slowly. “So, it appears Shalizeh really is behind this. I can’t believe he actually managed to engineer a vir—”

  “No, Mr. President,” Garoussi said, then surprised them by smiling.

  “What?”

  “According to the records we found, he never succeeded in creating a virus that could be used as a weapon.”

  Baraheri’s eyes widened. “Are you certain of this?”

  “Yes, most definitely. All the notes and computer files indicate that none of the experiments produced a virus of appreciable virulency. Also, there was nothing to make us believe he ever obtained samples of the smallpox virus from the Russians. No evidence whatsoever.”

  Baraheri turned to Hejazi, who appeared to be just as bewildered.

  “Then what’s this thing that’s spreading through America?”

  “Impossible to say at this point,” Garoussi replied. “But there is nothing to indicate that it came from Shalizeh.”

  “So we were wrong in assuming he had anything to do with it.”

  “No, that’s not quite true either, sir,” Garoussi said. “He was involved, but in a very different way.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Garoussi told him.

  Baraheri was on the phone within minutes.

  * * *

  In Washington, President Obama was walking down the second-floor hallway of the Executive Mansion carrying a pair of white towels. He was heading for the bathroom, where his younger daughter was about to be told it was time to get out of the tub and get ready for bed. He was still in his suit pants and white shirt, but his tie and jacket had been removed. Just as he reached the door, his BlackBerry trilled and vibrated at the same time.

  “Let’s go, ladies,” he said, setting the towels on the basin and then removing the device from his pocket. It was a text message from his chief of staff. He read it twice to make sure he wasn’t imagining it.

  Calling back immediately, he said, “Is this for real?”

  It was.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Jensen family was given a private room at Catskills Regional shortly after they arrived. A heavyset nurse with her hair twirled up like soft ice cream came down to the receiving area and led them away. An elevator ride and two hallways later, she showed them in. There were two large mechanical beds, which she rolled together, and a HEPA filter already humming away. Her name was Melanie, and she sat with them in her protective gear and patiently filled out their paperwork, sparing them the tedium of doing it in the lobby downstairs.

  This didn’t spare them from a number of ghastly sights, however. Two sheet-covered corpses were wheeled by when they came up, one downstairs and one in the hallway. The sheets were splotched with pus, so heavily in some places that you could vaguely see what was underneath. Relatives in protective gear were coming and going, most of them bawling like babies. In one room, they caught a glimpse of a screaming woman holding a small child in her arms just before the door drifted shut. They would later learn that the woman’s two-year-old son had died the day before, but she refused to let the body go.

  Dennis doubted Andi and Chelsea had taken much note of any of this; they were in their own little world now. But he noticed all of it. He saw and absorbed every detail, and he thought, We’re part of it now. We’re in the middle of it. He hated himself with a seething intensity, hated that he had been unable to protect them from it. It was his job, as a father and husband, to protect his family from harm. Maybe that sounded corny or old-fashioned, but he believed in it. And he’d failed—when it mattered most, he failed. As he watched Andi and Chelsea go down the hallway in front of him, their arms wrapped tight around each other, he felt nothing but guilt and self-loathing. After they’re gone, he thought, I hope it lingers a long time in me. I hope I really suffer.

  They had not left the room since Mel, as they had come to know her, got them settled. The top half
of the beds were raised to a forty-five-degree angle, and she brought them cold drinks and snacks. She told them several other couples and their children were in the same situation, and the hospital administrators had agreed to let them stay in their rooms until the inevitable occurred. Dennis and Andi did not even entertain the idea of seeking out any of these families, to commiserate or offer comfort. There was no comfort to be found here, and they had enough to deal with in their own suffering; the last thing they wanted to do was share someone else’s.

  Dennis called Elaine and gave her the news. She sobbed into the phone and said she was coming up immediately. That was yesterday evening, shortly after they’d arrived. He stayed on the phone with her for a long time, talking about a variety of things. He told her he loved her, which she already knew, and that he would not have wanted anyone else for a sister. It struck him at that moment how natural it seemed to be undertaking final, wrapping-up kinds of things. Calling people to say good-bye (without really saying it), filling out papers to make sure everything would be in order after they were all gone, even thinking final thoughts. It was as if he’d stepped into a previously unseen current of reality. Everything around him was colored by a different meaning now, a different value. The money they had in the bank, for which they had worked so very hard, was as important to him as the pile of used tissues that clogged the little plastic wastebasket. Their home, their two nice cars … irrelevant. Andi said it should be split up evenly between their respective families, and Dennis agreed. Everybody would get something, and everyone would get what they wanted. Because it was material, it was immaterial. Their world was this tiny room now, with the pale green walls and polished tile floor and softly humming fluorescent lights. This is where it ends, he thought. When Mel brought us through that door, she brought us through a gateway—from this world into whichever one is next.