by Greg Bear
Dicken looked at two unmarked brown Fords behind the Chevrolet. “Why the escort?” he asked.
“Secret Service,” the liaison said.
“Not for me, I hope,” Dicken said.
“No, sir.”
As they approached the Chevrolet, a much younger driver in a black suit snapped to military attention, introduced himself as Officer Reed of Ohio Special Needs School Security, and opened the car’s right rear door.
Mark Augustine sat in the backseat.
“Good afternoon, Christopher,” he said. “I hope your flight was pleasant.”
“Not very,” Dicken said. He hunched awkwardly into the staff car and sat on the black leather. The car drove off the base, trailed by the two Fords. Dicken stared at huge billows of clouds piling up over the green hills and suburbs beside the wide gray turnpike. He was glad to be on the ground again. Changes in air pressure bothered his leg.
“How’s the leg?” Augustine asked.
“Okay,” Dicken said.
“Mine’s giving me hell,” Augustine said. “I flew in from Dulles. Flight got bumpy over Pennsylvania.”
“You broke your leg?”
“In a bathtub.”
Dicken conspicuously rotated his torso to face his former boss and looked him over coldly. “Sorry to hear that.”
Augustine met his gaze with tired eyes. “Thank you for coming.”
“I didn’t come at your request,” Dicken said.
“I know. But the person who made the request talked to me.”
“It was an order from HHS.”
“Exactly,” Augustine said, and tapped the armrest on the door. “We’re having a problem at some of our schools.”
“They are not my schools,” Dicken said.
“Have we made clear how much of a pariah I am?” Augustine asked.
“Not nearly clear enough,” Dicken said.
“I know your sympathies, Christopher.”
“I don’t think you do.”
“How’s Mrs. Rhine?”
The goddamned high point of Mark Augustine’s career, Dicken thought, his face flushing. “Tell me why I’m here,” he said.
“A lot of new children are becoming ill, and some of them are dying,” Augustine said. “It appears to be a virus. We’re not sure what kind.”
Dicken took a slow breath. “The CDC isn’t allowed to investigate Emergency Action schools. Turf war, right?”
Augustine tipped his head. “Only in a few states. Ohio reserved control of its schools. Congressional politics,” he said. “Not my wish.”
“I don’t know what I can do. You should be shipping in every doctor and public health worker you can get.”
“Ohio school medical staff by half last year, because the new children were healthier than most kids. No joke.” Augustine leaned forward in the seat. “We’re going to what may be the school most affected.”
“Which one?” Dicken asked, massaging his leg.
“Joseph Goldberger.”
Dicken smiled ruefully. “You’ve named them after public health heroes? That’s sweet, Mark.”
Augustine did not deviate from his course. His eyes looked dead, and not just from being tired. “Last night, all but one of the doctors deserted the school. We don’t yet have accurate records on the sick and the dead. Some of the nurses and teachers have walked, too. But most have stayed, and they’re trying to take up the slack.”
“Warriors,” Dicken said.
“Amen. The director, against my express orders but at the behest of the governor, has instituted a lockdown. Nobody leaves the barracks, and no visitors are allowed in. Most of the schools are in a similar situation. That’s why I asked you to join me, Christopher.”
Dicken watched the highway, the passing cars. It was a lovely afternoon and everything appeared normal. “How are they handling it?”
“Not well.”
“Medical supplies?”
“Low. Some interruption in the state supply chain. As I said, this is a state school, with a state-appointed director. I’ve ordered in federal emergency supplies from EMAC warehouses, but they may not get here until later tomorrow.”
“I thought you put together an iron web,” Dicken said. “I thought you covered your ass when they handed you all this, your little fiefdom.”
Augustine did not react, and that in itself impressed Dicken. “I wasn’t clever enough,” Augustine said. “Please listen and keep your head clear. Only select observers are being allowed into the schools until the situation is better understood. I’d like you to conduct a thorough investigation and take samples, run tests. You have credibility.”
Dicken felt there was little sense in accusing or tormenting Augustine any more. His shoulders drooped as he relaxed his back muscles. “And you don’t?” he asked.
Augustine looked down at his hands, inspected his perfectly manicured fingernails. “I am perceived as a disappointed warden who wants out of his job, which I am, and a man who would trump up a health crisis to protect his own hide, which I would not. You, on the other hand, are a celebrity. The press would wash your little pink toes to get your side of this story.”
Dicken made a soft nose-blow of dismissal.
Augustine had lost weight since Dicken last saw him. “If I don’t get the facts and plug them into some tight little bureaucratic columns in the next few days, we may have something that goes far beyond sick children.”
“Goddammit, Mark, we know how Shiver works,” Dicken said. “Whatever this is, it is not Shiver.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Augustine said. “But we need more than facts. We need a hero.”
28
PENNSYLVANIA
Grief had been tracking Mitch Rafelson like a hunter. It had him in its eyebeams, painting him like a target, preparing to bring him down and settle in for a long feast.
He felt like stopping the Dodge on the side of the road, getting out, and running. As always, he stuffed these dark thoughts into a little drawer in the basement of his skull. Anything that demonstrated he was other than a loving father, all the emotions that had not been appropriate for eleven years and more, he hid away down there, along with the old dreams about the mummies in the Alps.
All the spooky little guesses about the situation of the long-dead Neandertals, mother and father, and the mummified, modern infant they had made before dying in the cold, in the long deep cave covered with ice.
Mitch no longer had such dreams. He hardly dreamed at all. But then, there wasn’t much else left of the old Mitch, either. He had been burned away, leaving a thin skeleton of steel and stone that was Stella’s daddy. He did not even know anymore whether his wife loved him. They hadn’t made love in months. They didn’t have time to think about such things. Neither complained; that was just the way it was, no energy or passion left after dealing with the stress and worry.
Mitch would have killed Fred Trinket if the police and the van hadn’t been there. He would have broken the man’s neck, then looked into the bastard’s startled eyes as he finished the twist. Mitch ran that image through his head until he felt his stomach jump.
He understood more than ever how the Neandertal papa must have felt.
Seven miles. They were on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. The road was surrounded by blaring ads trying to get him to buy cars, buy tract homes, spend money he did not have. The houses beyond the freeway were packed close, crowded and small, and the big brick industrial buildings were dirty and dark. He hardly noticed a tiny park with bright red swings and plastic picnic tables. He was looking for the right turnoff.
“There it is,” he told Kaye, and took the exit. He glanced into the backseat. Stella was limp. Kaye held her. Together like that, they reminded him of a statue, a Pietà. He hated that metaphor, common enough on the fringe sites on the Internet: the new children as martyrs, as Christ. Hated it with a passion. Martyrs died. Jesus had died horribly, persecuted by a blind state and an ignorant, bloodthirsty rabble, and that was
certainly not going to happen to Stella.
Stella was going to live until long after Mitch Rafelson had rotted down to dry, interesting bones.
The safe house was in the rich suburbs. The tree-filled estates here were nothing like the land around the little frame house in Virginia. Smooth asphalt and concrete roads served big new houses from the last hot run of the economy. Here the streets were lined on both sides with fresh-cut stone walls set behind mature pines and broken only by black iron gates topped with spikes.
He found the number painted on the curb and pulled the Dodge up to a hooded security keypad. The first time, he fumbled the number and the keypad buzzed. A small red light blinked a warning. The second time, the gate rolled open smoothly. Leaves rustled in the maple trees overarching the driveway.
“Almost there,” he said.
“Hurry,” Kaye said quietly.
29
Joseph Goldberger School for Children With Special Needs,
Emergency Action Ohio, Central District Authority
A small contingent of Ohio National Guard trucks—Dicken counted six, and about a hundred troops—had drawn up at the crossroads. A perennial around the school, blooming every spring and summer, dying back in the winter, protesters stood in clumps away from the troops and the alarm trip wires. Dicken guessed that today they numbered three or four hundred today, more than usual and more energetic as well. Most of the protesters were younger than thirty, many younger than twenty. Some wore brightly tie-dyed T-shirts and baggy slacks and had felted their hair in long bleached dreadlocks. They sang and shouted and waved signs denouncing “Virus Abominations” genetically engineered by corporate mad scientists. Two news trucks poked their white dish antennae at the sky. Reporters were out interviewing the protesters, feeding the hungry broadband predigested opinion and some visuals. Dicken had seen all this many times.
On the news, the protesters’ standard line was that the new children were artificial monsters designed to help corporations take over the world. GM Kids, they called them, or Lab Brats, or Monsanto’s Future Toadies.
Pushed back almost into the grass and gravel of a makeshift parking lot were a few dozen parents. Dicken could easily tell them apart from the protesters. The parents were older, conservatively dressed, worn down and nervous. For them, this was no game, no bright ritual of youthful passage into a dull and torpid maturity.
The staff car and its two escorts approached the first perimeter gate through a weave of concrete barricades. Protesters swarmed the fence, swinging their signs in the direction of the protected road. The largest sign out front, scrawled in red marker and brandished by a skinny boy with prominent bad teeth, read, hey hey usa/ don’t fuck with nature’s dna!
“Just shoot them,” Dicken muttered.
Augustine nodded his tight-lipped concurrence.
Damn, we agree on something, Dicken thought.
In the beginning, the protesters had nearly all been parents, arriving at the schools by the thousands, some hangdog and guilty, some grim and defiant, all pleading that their children be allowed to go home. Back then, the nursery buildings had been filled and the dorms under construction or empty. The parents had mounted their vigils year-round, even in the dead of winter, for more than five years. They had been the best of citizens. They had surrendered their children willingly, trusting government promises that they would eventually be returned.
Mark Augustine had been unable to fulfill that promise, at first because of what he thought he knew, but in later years because of grim political reality.
Americans by and large believed they were safer with the virus children put away. Sealed up, out of sight. Out of range of contagion.
Dicken watched Augustine’s expression change from studied indifference to steely impassivity as the staff car climbed the sloping road to the plateau. There the massive complex sat flat and ugly like a spill of children’s blocks on the Ohio green.
The car maneuvered around the barricades and pulled up to the dazzling concrete gatehouse, whiter even than the clouds. As the guards checked their schedule of appointments and consulted with the Secret Service agents, Augustine stared east through the car window at a row of four long, ocher-colored dormitories.
It had been a year since Augustine had last inspected Goldberger. Back then, lines of kids had moved between classrooms, dormitories, and cafeteria halls, attended by teachers, interns, security personnel. Now, the dormitories seemed deserted. An ambulance had been parked by the inner gate to the barracks compound. It, too, was unattended.
“Where are the kids?” Dicken asked. “Are they all sick?”
30
PENNSYLVANIA
Stella saw and felt everything in ragged jerks. Being moved was an agony and she cried out, but still, the shadows insisted on hurting her. She saw asphalt and stone and gray bricks, then a big upside-down tree, and finally a bed with tight pink sheets. She saw and heard adults talking in the light of an open door. Everything else was dark, so she turned toward the darkness—it hurt less—and listened with huge ears to voices in another room. For a moment, she thought these were the voices of the dead, they were saying such incredible things, harmonizing with a weird joy. They were discussing fire and hell and who was going to be eaten next, and a mad woman laughed in a way that made her flesh crawl.
The flesh did not stop crawling. It just kept on going, and she lay in the bed with no skin, staring up at cobwebs or ghostly arms or just floaters inside her eyeballs, tiny chains of cells magnified to the size of balloons. She knew they were not balloons. It did not matter.
Kaye was beyond exhaustion. Iris Mackenzie sat her down in a chair with a cup of coffee and a cookie. The house was huge and bright inside with the colors and tones rich folks choose: creams and pale grays, Wedgwood blues and deep, earthy greens.
“You have to eat something and rest,” Iris told her.
“Mitch…” Kaye began.
“He and George are with your girl.”
“I should be with her.”
“Until the doctor arrives, there’s nothing you can do.”
“A sponge bath, get that temperature down.”
“Yes, in a minute. Now rest, Kaye, please. You nearly fainted on the front porch.”
“She should be in a hospital,” Kaye said, her eyes going a little wild. She managed to stand, pushing past Iris’s gentle hands.
“No hospital will take her,” Iris said, turning restraint into a hug and sitting her down again. Iris pressed her cheek against Kaye’s and there were tears on it. “We called everyone on the phone tree. Lots of the new children have it. It’s on the news already, hospitals are refusing admissions. We’re frantic. We don’t know about our son. We can’t get through to Iowa.”
“He’s in a camp?” Kaye was confused. “We thought the network was just active parents.”
“We are very active parents,” Iris said with iron in her tone. “It’s been two months. We’re still listed, and we will stay listed as long as we can help. They can’t hurt us any more than they already have, right?”
Iris had the brightest green eyes, set like jewels in a face that was farmer’s daughter pretty, with light, florid Irish cheeks and dark brown hair, a slender physique, thin, strong fingers that moved rapidly, touching her hair, her blouse, the tray, and the kettle, pouring hot water into the bone china cups and stirring in instant coffee.
“Does the disease have a name?” Kaye asked.
“No name yet. It’s in the schools—the camps, I mean. Nobody knows how serious it is.”
Kaye knew. “We saw a girl. She was dead. Stella may have got it from her.”
“God damn it,” Iris said, teeth clenched. It was a real curse, not just an exclamation.
“I’m sorry I’m so scattered,” Kaye said. “I need to be with Stella.”
“We don’t know it isn’t catching… for us. Do we?”
“Does it matter?” Kaye said.
“No. Of course not,” Iris said. She wipe
d her face. “It absolutely does not matter.” The coffee was being ignored. Kaye had not taken a sip. Iris walked off. Turning, she said, “I’ll get some alcohol and a bath sponge. Let’s get her temperature down.”
31
OHIO
The director greeted the staff car at the tangent where the wide circular drive met the steps to the colonnade of the administration building. He wore a brown suit and stood six feet tall, with wheat-colored hair thinning at the crown, a bulbous nose, and almost no cheek bones. Two women, one large and one short, dressed in green medical scrubs, stood at the top of the steps. Their features were obscured by the shadow of a side wall that blocked the low sun.
Augustine opened the door and got out without waiting for the driver. The director dried his hands on his pants leg, then offered one to shake. “Dr. Augustine, it’s an honor.”
Augustine gave the man’s hand a quick grip. Dicken pushed his leg out, grasped the handle over the door, and climbed from the car. “Christopher Dicken, this is Geoffrey Trask,” Augustine introduced him.
Behind them, the two Secret Service cars made a V, blocking the drive. Two men stepped out and stood by the open car doors.
Trask mopped his brow with a handkerchief. “We’re certainly glad to have both of you,” he said. At six thirty in the evening, the heat was slowly retreating from a high of eighty-five degrees.
Trask flicked his head to one side and the two women descended the steps. “This is Yolanda Middleton, senior nurse and paramedic for the pediatric care center.”
Middleton was in her late forties, heavy-set, with classic Congolese features, short-cut wild hair, immense, sad eyes, and a bulldog expression. Her uniform was wrinkled and stained. She nodded at Dicken, then examined Augustine with blunt suspicion.
“And this is Diana DeWitt,” Trask continued. DeWitt was small and plump-faced with narrow gray eyes. Her green pants hung around her ankles and she had rolled up her sleeves. “A school counselor.”
