Mercy 6

by David Bajo

  “My line,” she said to Covey. “My crush line. Is your crush line.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Don’t give me that. I’m a physician. I say that all the time.”

  “Okay. Yes.”

  “What happens now? What is happening?”

  “Nothing that hasn’t happened before. This city—the world—

  has changed toward it, grown. You know?”

  Mendenhall made a fist.

  Covey shrugged over the wheel, changed lanes to approach the exit. “I’m not being evasive. I’m not sparing you my expertise.

  The molecules are too small to have impact. They wouldn’t really function in the larger world. They wouldn’t be involved. Or we certainly didn’t think so. There were times I imagined them passing through me. As I bent over the collecting dishes.”

  “What about those collecting dishes? The ones in your basement?

  Those splash-looking things you showed.”

  “They look like splashes, but they’re not. Just like constellations look like they’re grouped together, but they’re not. Galaxies are not pinwheels; they’re more like whirlpools, drains. The universe is not dark and limitless. It’s full of light and finite and intricately shaped.

  We design the surfaces of those dishes to indicate the slightest disturbance, the tiniest spark.”

  “Fine, but what about the people? Bodies?”

  “I didn’t know about that until you came.” Covey paused. “ I work in the crush line all the time, believing they pass through me, wanting that. These must be different. There’s a strange amount of sameness in the universe. The periodic table, you know. Everything that’s been gathered fits within the table.”

  “I thought you said velocity was the only factor,” Mendenhall said.

  “A particle and its velocity can’t be divided. The velocity is the particle. And vice versa.” Covey eased onto the exit. “It really isn’t simple. This time. The line is intricate, in flux, more weave than mere stitch. Calling them particles isn’t accurate. For you, maybe, think synapse.”

  Mendenhall felt drained, hopeless. It would always show virus.

  Calling it, predicting it would just make her look the good doctor.

  Her guessing the occlusions for Claiborne. The same population densities that proved her case also proved Thorpe’s. She was right; Thorpe was wrong. But people were still dead; more people were still going to die.

  “So.” Covey eased the car along the base of the hill, choosing an entry, “back or front?”

  Mendenhall pressed her lips together, put the corner of her fist there. She envied Covey’s—what?—coldness, compression, precision. Her perception, the scatter and gather of it, the way she looked certain while on the run, on the loose. The peridot in the V of her blouse rested in the top dimple between her breasts, neat against pale skin, pure.

  “South parking,” replied Mendenhall. “Kill the lights and slide the car into the back corner. By the scrub.”

  “What do you have? A rabbit hole?”

  “Something like that,” said Kae, before Mendenhall could. “But don’t drive on the roads. Use the running trail. We come up that canyon.”

  When they reached the trailhead at the canyon bottom, Mendenhall became disoriented. The near hill obscured Mercy. She saw two sunsets—one to the west, where the canyon opened into housing tracts; one to the east, where it folded into hills. The one in the east had more glow and color. It spread along the horizon, lifted into thicker clouds. She almost told the others to go on without her, to go wherever they wanted to go. Covey got out of the car first. She stood and arched her back as she watched the eastern sky behind the near hills. Her skirt lifted and made her look very young. She let her bare waist and stomach show, cool. Kae climbed out next, tugging the woman along with him.

  “Snow,” said the woman. She held her palm up.

  Mendenhall watched from the passenger side, thought about shooting up some Trapanal and waiting for DC to come get her, claim her. If she got herself back in, they might not claim her. They would at least have to think about it. If they got her outside, she was theirs.

  She saw the snow. It caught in the woman’s brown hair, dusted her palm, clung, stuck, smeared into powder where she rubbed it.

  The horizon reddened; the overhead sky grew dark except where clouds caught edges of light. Distant sirens made whale sounds over the city. They could have been in Reykjavik.

  “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,” someone sang as they climbed the trail.

  58.

  Returning was a matter of physical effort, pulling. Mendenhall led. In the vent she used her penlight sparingly, blindness giving them all a single goal. In the bomb shelter she found a note from Ben-Curtis: This place is nuts.

  “Does he mean this?” asked Covey when given the paper. She motioned to the shelter. “Or the whole hospital?”

  “You chose to come.” Mendenhall took back the note. Had he left? Was this warning or resignation?

  She noticed something about Kae. He was still holding hands with the woman. The K-cuff was gone.

  He winked, raised hands with Patient X. “You need me. To get her up there.”

  At the base of the dumbwaiter shaft, he cleared the broken vent and crumpled cubicle, then fashioned himself as a human climbing base, planting his hands against the shaft wall, flexing his knees and spreading his legs.

  “Climb,” he told them. He appeared fragile, a boy.

  “Don’t step on his left shoulder,” said Mendenhall.

  The three women left him alone down there after hoisting themselves into the subbasement.

  “Go home,” Mendenhall whispered into the shaft. No sound returned. She waited, and nothing rose, not one breath or shuffle.

  She wished she had thought of something to say that wasn’t a placebo, something with no prescription to it.

  They set up Mendenhall’s patient in the room Silva had used for napping. Covey made a good nurse. She found an old stand and helped run the IV. Mendenhall fetched a broken EMT cart from subbasement storage, from near the cold cases that held expired saline and glucose kits. The cart still had air function. She recognized the thing from the ER, a heavy roller Pao Pao had named the Beast. Mullich must have decommissioned it. Covey held the patient’s hand, folded fingers together, spoke in a plain voice: “What’s your name?”

  “Julia.”

  When Covey started to press for more, Mendenhall put a hand to her shoulder. Then she started her chart. Julia Doe, thirty-five.

  “What are you—we—doing?” Covey held Julia’s hand, curl to curl, thumb stroking her knuckles.

  Mendenhall continued making chart entries. It felt good to be working. “Treating her for shock. Oxygen and glucose. We won’t really know how she’s doing until the Trapanal wears off some. It wasn’t the best thing to hit her with.”

  “That and the cuffs.” Covey stroked Julia’s wrist.

  “Let’s forget about those.” Mendenhall waited for Covey to look at her. “Okay?”

  Covey considered the green exit sign, its glow exaggerating her pale complexion. The only other lights were those of the Beast, tiny yellows, reds, and blues. “What’s a virus?” she asked.

  “Not this.”

  “Why not this? That colleague I have who defines these particles—my particles—as a-life. He argues that they have destiny, that they’re acting out synapses, that they have molecular structures adapted to carry out both. That they infect solar systems.”

  “That’s just metaphor. Weak, easy metaphor. Following even reasonably accurate metaphors is a fallacy.”

  With her fingertips, Covey brushed Julia Doe’s hairline, fitted a wisp behind her ear. Julia gazed back at her, eyes glistening above the oxygen mask.

  “We give her air, fluids, glucose. We allow her organs to function as best they can. If the shock has already cut off oxygen to the vital organs, then we’re giving her the best chance possible. Sleep will shift bloo
d flow in the hippocampus. The limbic system will operate on a structure of reality, shifting from a structure of defense and delay.”

  “How do you know she has it?”

  Mendenhall gave Covey a hard stare.

  Covey corrected herself. “How do you know she’s been . . .

  struck?”

  “In a little, we get someone here who can verify. With me.”

  She decided to face Claiborne alone. Covey stayed with the patient. Covey’s sympathy for Julia Doe remained suspicious. She had to be fascinated by the path, the trajectory and velocity of the Jude particles and all the effects of being stricken by one. The involvement of cells, of specialized cells. And Mendenhall couldn’t know whether Covey was risking her health because she believed what Mendenhall had shown her or because she was simply fascinated. If she had betrayed Mendenhall and brought the guards to her, had she acted in goodwill, belief in the virus, or only that same scientific fascination? Mendenhall couldn’t read Covey—not the way she could read incoming patients. She was looking into a mirror, trying to see herself, staring and waiting for objectivity, that objectivity staring back.

  But now she was moving from this to Claiborne. She was guessing he knew.

  He didn’t know. When she entered his lab, he nodded a greeting.

  His tie was loose, his lab coat off, his sleeves rolled above his elbows.

  “Thanks for the last text. I haven’t had the chance to reply.” He wiped his eye with his shoulder, his hands remaining above the keyboard. The overhead screens showed six scans: three occlusions and three incipient kidney hemorrhages. The laptop showed an MRI of a hippocampus. “Good to see you’ve changed clothes. At least.”

  She looked down at herself, dusted the hem of her skirt. “A little dirty. But different.” Her feet appeared not hers, the Mary Janes surprising.

  “Thorpe forwarded the new cases to us.”

  “‘Us’?”

  “Five not far from County. All outside the same office building.

  The building’s under quarantine. Three from inside the Marriot by the park, packed with conventions. Also quarantined.”

  “The five?” she asked. “Were from the building?”

  He nodded. “All five collapsed within the same hour. Close together.”

  “No.” Mendenhall felt for the necklace that was no longer there.

  “All together. They all fell together. They weren’t necessarily from the same building. They were just walking. In the crowd.”

  Claiborne was distracted by something on the laptop. He double-tapped a key. “You got the same message. Unless there’s a new one.” He motioned to the overhead screens. She didn’t know what she was supposed to see.

  Fatigue had her nauseated. She steadied herself, fingertips to desktop.

  “You don’t look like you just took a nap. You look like you need one.”

  She pushed her hair back, felt how dirty it was.

  He nodded to a far door. “You’re welcome to the shower in the chem lab. It’s pretty good, but you have to keep the chain pulled down. It’ll wake you, at least.”

  Claiborne returned to his task, not shutting her out but, rather, comfortable in her presence. She thought about keeping it like this, living under whatever Silva had constructed between them, operating under Thorpe’s construction as well, forgetting what she had seen, what Covey seemed to know. But she knew she had eliminated all those possibilities when she had touched Julia Doe, taken her, injected her. In those few minutes she had committed herself to a split world of truth and lie.

  “You’re not as happy as you appear,” she said.

  Claiborne went still, fingers hovering above the keyboard. After a moment he turned his head to face her, looked at her shoes.

  “I mean,” she curled one foot, “you’re still trying to convince yourself.”

  “I’m trying to get back to my wife. As soon as possible. I thought you were down with this.”

  “You should go to her. Right now.”

  He scowled, did not look away, let his expression soften a bit, brow still furrowed, chin lowered to a more thoughtful angle.

  “You’re different.”

  “It’s not contagious, Claiborne. For now, anyone could fall. For those two reasons, you should go. You probably could find your own way out, you down here in your domain.” She began a step toward him, one foot, one Mary Jane, then held it. “There are probably a lot of others like Cabral out there. Right now.”

  “What kind of nap did you take?”

  She opened her hands, held them near her hips. “I brought one to you.”

  “One what?”

  “Just go.” She closed her eyes and pictured him on the trail, that way he passed her, shoulders angry, waist thin and balanced. “I can do the scans. From here, I can do everything.”

  59.

  Claiborne tapped his keyboard twice, vaguely looked at the overheads.

  “You’ve changed. Why?”

  “I went out.”

  Claiborne closed his eyes, clenched his jaw.

  “I needed to see a specialist. Then I followed the sirens.” One truth, one lie. “At the site. Where the five fell. I saw others who looked struck. Like Cabral.”

  “You brought one?”

  “Her name is Julia. I have her down here. Oxygen and fluids.

  Stabilizing. Awake. Alive. I believe she’ll make it.”

  He blinked, tightened his lips, chewed thoughts.

  “Look, Claiborne. You need to wake up. Thorpe’s sending you crap. You know that. He’s giving you the lab work but not the context. He doesn’t need to give any of us the context. Because the context was predetermined a long time ago. Everyone’s blind to anything outside it, especially him. Anything outside virus. But not you. You saw. You drew it. You know. It’s trauma. It’s ballistic. Those five fell at once. I saw. They came right to me.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “The woman I went to traces the path. She sent me to a bar right near where the others were struck. She predicted it. Government people followed me there. They know there’s something to my diagnosis.”

  “She sent you? How?”

  “She has mapped it all. That’s one thing she does. She sent me to the thickest part.”

  “Thickest part of what?”

  “This.” She jerked her arms outward, opened her hands.

  “This city.”

  Claiborne’s eyes lulled.

  “You’re searching for a virus,” she said. “You see its work and its aftermath. You can’t find it. You operate under the premise that it exists, that it reproduces, that it spreads vertically, fast, synchronized, then hides. You consider nothing else.” She moved in close and pointed at his brow. “Nothing else. That’s insane.”

  She looked at her pointed fist, pulled it back. Claiborne eyed her fingers, her lips. She tried to hide any tremor but felt a bundle of pathologies. He seemed unconvinced.

  “I went out and found something,” she said, close to a whisper.

  “Something that threatens Thorpe and the wider stratagem.”

  “So what’s he do with you?”

  “They will isolate me, Claiborne. They will silence me.”

  “I’m not so sure that would be a bad thing. For you or them.”

  She took a tight breath. She wanted to join him fully to her sense of danger, threat.

  “Tell me. Where’s Pao Pao?” Her lips were thick and dry.

  Quarantine. She had to think it before she could let herself hear it.

  “Quarantine.”

  If she let herself imagine this, she would break. She thought of pacing him on the trail, pushing a challenge. “And Silva, too, right?

  Although my guess is she was too quick and less trusting. My guess she’s moving around, mostly down here but cut off from you.”

  “She’s left a note or two.”

  “And Mullich,” she said. “Mullich you can’t figure.”

  “Sometimes,” replied Cla
iborne. “Sometimes he’s here.” He motioned to the room. “Sometimes he disappears. Sometimes—”

  Claiborne lowered a shoulder. “He got you out. Didn’t he?”

  “He showed me a way. I got myself out.” She pointed back to the lab door. “Julia. I had to bring her in. None of the EMTs were going to take her. Were even going to consider her. She’s here. With maybe a chance. That’s what I have to give her. So go. You should just go.”

  “I can’t go.”

  She grabbed a nearby glove box and threw it across the lab. She searched for something heavier. “You Path people. Down here in your holy basement. Why are you the only one down here? The others ran. Whoever was on shift down here with you. Tehmul ran on me when he got the chance. Who ran on you? Gonzales?

  Stuart? Both? Thorpe left a long time ago. Dmir came in. Disease Control came in.”

  “And it spread. Out there. And it went where you were.”

  Mendenhall shook her head, bit her lip. “It struck. In a line predicted by a specialist. A specialist like us. It traveled vertically in a packed hotel, like this place. It presented itself in the thickest crowds. Like outside that bar.”

  “That shows virus.”

  “They all fell in the same second.”

  “Then they were all exposed in the same second, and the virus has a precise incubation.”

  “Despite different metabolisms, different immune systems, different diets, different life paths?”

  “Virus works.”

  “It will always work. We say, ‘Go viral. It went viral.’ What the hell does that mean? It’s just how we see things. It’s lazy and inaccurate. It’s handy. Common. And powerful.”

  “You honestly think Thorpe and DC are disregarding evidence?”

  “Even manipulating it. Forced observation. It’s willful misinformation designed to gain power and control. The stratagem.”

  “And yours? You breach containment. Go into the public sphere.

  Bring someone in?”

  “If you thought I was wrong, we wouldn’t be standing here.”