The Fall: Victim Zero

by Joshua Guess

  Five weeks later, Kell stumbled on the way to the shower. He caught the edge of the door frame and glanced at the ground to see what it was he tripped over, but the floor was clear.

  It wasn't conscious, the understanding that came over him. There was no logic to it, no process his mind followed. More than a month of working with David Markwell made him highly sensitive to the man's symptoms.

  No, Kell thought. No, I just tripped. It can't be.

  Shower forgotten, Kell dove into clothes and exploded out the door. Thankfully Karen had already dropped Jennifer off with his mother for the day on her way to the law firm. He needed to get to work now.

  He fumbled the keys and had to calm himself to get the door open. Kell kept a tight rein on his movements. It wouldn't do to overcompensate on the road and wreck before he could confirm what, in his heart, he already knew.

  He ignored the staff clamoring for his attention as he came into the office. He made his way to the isolation suite where David Markwell waited, as always, behind his plexiglass walls. The shipping container was long removed, of course, and David's suite contained all the equipment Kell would need to study the effects of Chimera on his subject.

  Today, that subject happened to be himself.

  David was sleeping when Kell came in, but his mad dash to power up the mobile MRI and x-ray machines woke the other man.

  “Kell? You're here early. What's going on?”

  Working furiously, Kell ignored his patient. He and his team had developed several fast-and-dirty tests over the years to check for the presence of Chimera in a subject. The easiest required a blood sample, which Kell drew from his forearm.

  A few added reagents later, and his fears were confirmed.

  “Kell,” David said. “Kell, what's happening, man?”

  “Son of a bitch,” Kell spat. “It's airborne.”

  Kell heard the younger man gasp. “You don't mean...I did this?”

  Bent over on his stool, head in his hands, Kell shuddered. “No, David. You didn't do this. I did. This is all my fault.”

  Kell heard a muffled thump and looked up. David had fallen back on his cot, looking dazed. Their eyes met, and every conversation between them over the previous five weeks seemed to rush between them at once.

  “Do you think what happened with the mice is going to start happening to people? How far do you think it's spread?”

  Taking stock, Kell leaned back in his chair. “I don't know, but I everything I've seen while I've been studying you suggests Chimera can't overwhelm a person's brain. It's passive in that respect. The difference between a mouse and a human being is significant enough that I'm not terribly worried about that aspect. What concerns me is that it mutated to become airborne. This thing has been known to become virulent like any disease. The wrong mutation could turn it into something that could make AIDS look like a bad cold.”

  David took that better than he would have a month before. Daily conversations with Kell had given him a decent understanding of what Chimera was capable of.

  “Kell, you have to tell people. If you have it, then other people probably got it from you. It could be all over the place by now, couldn't it?”

  Kell stood. “Yes, it could. I need to make some calls.” He turned to David and crouched by the plexiglass, one hand flat against the plastic. “Please don't talk to anyone about this. Not the techs who'll come in here later, not your father. I need to get this handled through the right channels. If anyone finds out you know this, it could be very bad for you.”

  David's expression hardened. “It sounds a lot like you're threatening me.”

  Kell leaned his forehead against the barrier between them. “No, I'm trying to warn you. I've spent the last month trying to figure out how to reverse what they've done to you without costing you the use of your limbs. I don't want this to come down on you, too.”

  The younger man hesitated, then nodded. “I'll keep quiet.”

  Kell left. He took out his cell phone and started to dial Karen, but stopped. Instead he walked down the street to a deli where he ate lunch regularly, often bringing sandwiches back for David, and asked to use their phone. He dialed his wife's direct line and she picked up on the first ring.

  “Karen McDonald,” she said.

  Mouth dry, it took him a moment to speak. “Karen, you need to go home. Right now.”

  “Kelvin, what's wrong? Is it Jennifer?” she asked with panic in her voice.

  “No, the baby is fine. Listen, don't ask questions. Go home now, pack up food and clothes. Pick up the baby. Call my parents first, have them pack up what they need, and you take all of them out of town. Go somewhere north, get a hotel room, and wait for me to call your cell. I'm probably just overreacting, but I can't take the chance.”

  “Oh, god,” she said. “This has something to do with your work, doesn't it?”

  “Karen, you know I can't tell you anything about that. Just do what I'm asking. I'll call you in a few hours. But you need to go now.”

  “I'll be on my way in ten minutes. Just call me as soon as you can. I love you, baby.”

  Kell choked down the lump in his throat enough to say, “I love you too.”

  He hung up, thanked the man behind the counter, and began the short walk back to his office. He dialed the number Agent Jones had left for an emergency, and was surprised to reach the man directly.

  “Jones,”

  “This is Kell McDonald, from--”

  “I remember you, Doctor McDonald. You're calling my direct line, so I assume there's a problem. Best not to talk about it over an open line. Are you in your office?”

  Kell said he wasn't, but would be in a few minutes.

  “That's fine. I'll be calling in ten minutes. Is there anyone else I should bring in on the call?”

  Kell thought about the possibilities for a moment, and knew he couldn't give specifics without a secure line. But Jones had to understand the potential for disaster.

  “I can think of a few,” Kell said. “You'll want to find the best epidemiologist you can. Then the director of the CDC. You also might want to get in touch with the president.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “Of the United States?”

  Kell nodded, though the other man couldn't see it. “Yeah, that's the guy.”

  The conference call began with a simple statement from Agent Jones, introducing Kell to the listeners. Then Kell got introductions in turn.

  “Doctor McDonald, on this call you'll be speaking to Rick Jacoby, the director of the CDC, Miguel Pena, the head of epidemiological study with the World Health Organization, and The President of the United States. You have ten minutes.”

  Kell took a drink of water before he began. He couldn't let his voice give out on him, nervous or not.

  “Gentlemen, I won't need ten minutes. It isn't enough time to explain the science behind what I'm going to tell you. Jones and his people working with our lab can do that. What I need you to understand are the consequences of our work here.

  “Early this morning, I confirmed at least one case of an experimental organism known as Chimera having undergone a mutation. This organism has an inordinately high mutation rate and can become fatally pathogenic in a single generation. In the small scale this is uncommon; however, Chimera is now airborne and every host represents the potential for a new instance of mutation. The literature we've collated regarding Chimera over the time we've been studying implies strongly that the organism can and will assume control of the host in some higher-order life forms. I believe this isn't as much a worry for the present. Recent observations of a human test subject suggest Chimera cannot override the consciousness of a human host.

  “That being said, every person infected with the organism now acts as a closed environment in which it can multiply and evolve, cut off from outside factors. The chances of any one person being the catalyst for such a mutation is low—the organism by default parasitically attaches to a host and alters itself
to the host biology—it can't be understated how dangerous a mass outbreak of Chimera infection can be. All it will take is a single person being overrun, and Chimera will go from harmless benign parasite to pandemic of global proportions in a matter of days.”

  The pause was pointed. Kell expected argument or disbelief, but only heard silence. He wondered if the men listening to him had been briefed in the short time before the call. They must have been, not to question his assessment or express outrage.

  It was the president who broke the silence; a voice so well-known that even a simple sentence was enough to identify him to anyone who might have been listening.

  “What do you recommend we do, Doctor McDonald?”

  It was a completely surreal moment for him. Kell was utterly without response for a time. “Mister President,” Kell said. “I'm a researcher. I experiment with genes and record my results. This morning when I woke up, I couldn't have imagined a situation where I would even be having this conversation. I'm a regular guy.

  “But I'm the person who knows this thing better than anyone. I wish I could tell you this will all work out, but the truth is that without some clever solutions and a lot of luck, we're facing a problem more serious than you can imagine. I can start work on a variant strain of Chimera as soon as this phone call is over, one that might be able to stop the threat before it can blow up. But aside from that, there's nothing any of us can do. I am infected. My staff is being tested now, but chances are nearly a hundred percent that this has been spreading from us to other people for weeks. We don't know what the incubation period is between contact and full dispersion of the organism inside a person, but I wouldn't put it at more than a month. That's a lot of time for something that replicates every half an hour or so.

  “My suggestion, Mister President, is to let me get to work and start having the CDC check to see how far this thing has spread.”

  “Doctor McDonald,” the president said, “you'll have whatever resources you need. You're our point man for this. We'll take care of everything else, sir. Just find a solution.”

  There was a click, and Jones came back on the line. “The rest of them have disconnected to speak privately, Doctor. I will be in touch shortly to discuss allocation of resources. Keep close to a land line.”

  “I will,” Kell told him.

  Another sharp click and the line went dead. Kell opened his laptop and started to go over the notes he'd been keeping about David Markwell and the strain of Chimera those morons in Boston had infected him with. He tried to look at the data from new angles, to gain some insight he'd missed, but Kell had spent more than a month looking at the facts and figures. He hadn't told the powers-that-be, but he had tried half a dozen variants on David's version of Chimera. It was too entrenched, too strongly colonized in his various bodily systems.

  Kell suspected whatever happened, he wasn't going to be the one to solve this problem.

  A few hours later he finally remembered to call Karen. She answered her cell before the first ring could even finish, frantic and worried. That alone said volumes; Karen was a trial lawyer. She didn't blink an eye under stress.

  “Baby,” she said. “Your parents wouldn't come with me. I tried, but they wouldn't listen when I told them you wanted all of us to leave. They think it's all going to blow over.”

  Kell sighed but wasn't surprised. His folks had dealt with the unrest of the civil rights era. How bad could a disease sound to them?

  “It's fine, honey,” Kell said. “I'll try to convince them. For now I'm just glad you and the baby are safe. Where are you?”

  Karen told him the name of the hotel; he wrote down the address and directions.

  “I'll be here for a few days at least. Don't come back home. If things go bad, Cincinnati is going to be where it will all start.”

  There was a stressed-out sigh on the other end of the line. “I wish you could tell me what's going on, Kell. I don't like sitting here in the dark.”

  He pondered that for a moment, acutely aware that the cell phone he was talking on was probably being monitored. “You're smart, Karen. You know the kind of work I do. It's not quite worst-case scenario, but it has the potential. Stay at the hotel, but if I call you and tell you to run, be ready to do it. Not in an hour, but right then.”

  “When will you be able to join us?” Karen asked.

  Biting back tears, Kell tried to put a smile in his voice. “You know I want to be there with both of you, but they need me here. I might be the only one who can fix this. I just need to know you're both safe. And I need to get to it.”

  “All right. Just finish this soon, okay? I love you, stretch.”

  Kell laughed. “Love you too, little bit. Kiss her goodnight for me.”

  “I will.”

  Chapter Four

  Kell stared at the computer screen, at what he had written. The words weren't enough—couldn't be enough—but they were the best he could do. Three days of constant work, barely sleeping, had confirmed what he'd suspected from the start; Chimera was completely off the leash. He couldn't even begin to figure out how to slow down the organism, much less eradicate it completely. There was talk among the staff that perhaps the outbreak, which was now common knowledge within the office, wasn't a bad thing. After all, when you left it alone, Chimera ended up being a boon to whatever host it attached to.

  Kell remembered the mice, however, and knew the potential was there. Though he had some hope. Leibowitz pointed out that with so many positive results for carriers of the thing, they should have seen a mutation occur by now. If the whole outbreak was going to pivot into a nightmare, it should have happened already. At least thousands of people in the local area were infected, yet none of them had gone mad and attacked anyone else.

  The data seemed to bear out John Leibowitz's hypothesis that the variant strain introduced in David Markwell was unusually stable, but Kell still worried.

  Which was what drove him to write the note on his computer screen.

  My name is Kelvin McDonald, it began. Whoever is reading this is doing so in a worst-case scenario. If this message is found, it will only be because the organism that most of you have no idea you're carrying has mutated, turned into something destructive. I take full responsibility for this: it was my research that led other, less cautious men to take risks they shouldn't have.

  I've spent a lot of time trying to solve this thing, but I haven't had any luck. With the hope that someone else might be able to do the job, I have attached to this note all the research I have access to. Which is almost everything known about the organism.

  Kell read over that short introduction and decided it would need more work before it was final. There was so much he could say and probably should, but if Chimera hit the far end of the terror bell-curve and mutated in the same way it had in the mice, his guilty admissions would mean nothing. Anyone looking at his research would be aiming for a cure, not absolving him.

  He saved the file and shut down his computer. Three days of sleeping on the sofa in his office—not at all designed for someone of his size—was enough. Sitting there and pondering the same data sets wouldn't magically bring a solution.

  So he packed up for the day and left, calling Jones on his way out to let him know he'd be heading to see his family.

  “I'll have a car pick you up at your house in the morning, then, Doctor McDonald,” Jones said after Kell told him he was leaving.

  “No, that's fine. I'll just drive back in. I'm not going to the house anyway.”

  Jones cleared his throat. “Actually, I think you are. Your wife and daughter have left the hotel and returned home.”

  The room went cold, but after a moment Kell realized it was him. A ball of ice sat in his middle, fear and anger crushing against each other. “Interesting thing for you to know, Agent Jones,” Kell said. “Why do you think my wife would do a thing like that without telling me?”

  Jones replied in an equally cool tone. “Because we told her to less than three ho
urs ago. We also informed her any outside communications, especially to you, would result in heavy penalties for both of you.”

  The cell phone creaked in his hand, a spurt of static fell across the call. Kell stood in the lab's parking lot, shouting.

  “What the fuck, Jones? What gives you the right? You know how bad this thing can go. You know the risks! You think I'm going to let my family stay here?”

  “No, Doctor, I don't think you would if it were up to you,” Jones replied, his voice now glacial. “But it isn't. I'm in charge of your life in the foreseeable future. You wanted to get them out of danger, not worry about their safety so you could work on a solution. Why should you get to send your family away when so many others don't even know there's a problem? No, McDonald, they're staying close. Because I do know how bad this can go. I want you to think about that as you're working. You need to have that motivation. You and I both know this thing needs a solution as soon as possible. This is how we're going to get results.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Kell said. “If anything happens to them, I'm going to fucking kill you.”

  Jones grunted. “If anything happens to them, I think I'll have bigger problems than worrying about you. You should know I've been in town for the last day. For better or worse, I'm running this show. Get results, Doctor, and everyone walks away happy.”

  Just before he pulled into the driveway, his phone rang. Kell saw on the caller ID that it was Jones again, but he let it go to voice mail. Ten minutes with his wife and daughter wasn't too much to ask after three days of solid work.

  Kell smelled homemade tacos when he walked in, a favorite. Karen was usually home too late to make cooking something she did on a regular basis, so most of the time the task fell to him. Years of bachelorhood and college life built strong cooking skills if you wanted to eat well.

  “I'm home,” he said as he threw his coat over the back of the recliner and made his way toward the kitchen. “Karen?”

  In the kitchen he found his wife feeding his daughter between stirring the hamburger cooking on the stove. There were also two men who looked suspiciously like federal agents of some kind.