Outcome

by Edward W. Robertson

  In that case, Ellie should drive up to the Adirondacks right now. Most agents would. But she had to know.

  Speed had become more important than secrecy. Using one of her disposable cells, she called Vergens. He didn't pick up, but she expected that. She let it ring seven times, then called again, ringing five times, then called again, at which point he picked up.

  "Ellie?" Vergens sounded more curious than worried.

  "I need a cell location," she said. "Precise as you can make it."

  "What's up? Where are you?"

  "Waiting for you to track down that cell."

  "Which will in turn tell me exactly where you are." His tone, as usual, was fundamentally unconcerned. He might have been telling Ellie her shoe was untied. "Since when was this something you couldn't do for yourself?"

  She watched a woman in a long black coat walk a Great Dane down the steps of the apartment across the street. There were going to be a lot of dead dogs, too. Starved behind locked front doors.

  "You're smart enough to figure that one out," she said. "Now will you run my number?"

  "You're off leash!" Vergens sounded positively delighted. She fed him Chip's number. The girl's, too. His keyboard clattered. "Are you in trouble?"

  "No more than anyone else."

  "Listen to you. You leaving us for a new career in philosophy?"

  She came very close to not telling him. If he acted on what she fed him, they could track it right back to her. Anyone else, she'd leave them to dangle. But of everyone, Vergens had always been there for her. She believed, without arrogance, that it was because the man was secretly in love with her, but reasons didn't matter. Actions did.

  "Joe," she said, using his first name for the first time in years. "Listen. My reads. Do you trust them?"

  "No," he said. "I worship them. You take the numbers and you waterboard them until they give up secrets they didn't know they had."

  "Then as soon as you get me this address, leave. If you can help it, don't even go home. Go somewhere safe. Alone. And stay there."

  He clicked more keys. "Ellie."

  She could read his doubt as clear as the Tom Cruise billboard hanging over the corner. "You know the flu that's going around? The cough?"

  "Wait a minute. Is that something of ours?"

  "No. We don't know where it's from. And I don't think we ever will. The Rockies, Death Valley, McMurdo Station—get far out and stay out."

  "You're serious, aren't you?" His tone shifted from cheerful apathy to a six-year-old asking about his cancerous cat. "Then what are you doing in New York?"

  She looked up. "You got my addresses?"

  "It's like an old hospital." He read her the address. "Uptown. Way, way uptown."

  "That's Chip? What about the girl?"

  "Same place."

  "Anything else?"

  "They haven't moved in several hours. Hey Ellie, you want me to keep tabs on 'em?"

  She started the car. "For an hour? Then you have to get out. Promise me."

  "Anything, Ellie."

  She hung up. She felt a pang of guilt, but set it aside like an ornament from the mantel: a nice addition to the atmosphere of her emotional space, but ultimately useless. At the corner, she waited for the light to change before making her turn. New York was a no-right-on-red city. The last thing she needed was to be ticketed, to have her license inspected. It ought to pass the database, but you never knew.

  She entered the stream of northbound traffic, watching every car around her, one eye on the sidewalks and intersections for overeager jaywalkers. Now that she had a specific destination, an endpoint—more accurately, a clear midpoint between now and the drive to the cabin upstate—the entire city took on the dangerous indifference of a bear trap. One ticket, one careless pedestrian, one little fender-bender, one long red light—every extra second between her and Chip was one more second for him to catch the virus. Her whole trip could be negated by a wobbly cyclist.

  Even more carefully than normal, she drove through the glossy shopping centers of Chelsea, the imposing spires of Midtown, the stately peaks of the apartments alongside Central Park, the block housing of Harlem. Near the northern tip of Manhattan, she pulled into a lot fronting the Harlem River and got her binoculars from her bag. Across the street, a hospital stood in the darkness. A number of shiny black Suburbans sat in its lot. The hospital's lights illuminated men standing motionless beside its front and side doors. They wore no official uniforms and displayed no weapons, but through the binoculars, it was a simple thing to make out the bulge of holsters in their armpits.

  Intending to finesse her way in, she pocketed her pistol, slipped her badge—one of her real ones—around her neck, and exited the car. She still wore her surgical mask, her gloves. They would only reinforce her claim that she did in fact know what was going on here: a stab at containing the virus.

  Traffic was low. She glanced down the street, then jogged to the sidewalk on the other side. A cold, wet wind blew from the south, all trace of the sea smothered beneath the smell of cars and rain-diluted garbage.

  The men at the hospital doors glanced her way. A car door popped open two doors ahead. A man emerged into the darkness, tall, unsmiling.

  "Hi, Ellie," he waved.

  She'd seen the man less than 48 hour earlier, but removed from the context of the Boise lab, it took her a second to match his face to his identity.

  "Mason," she said dully. "You bugged my car."

  He nodded. "Hardly needed it. After you went AWOL, the city was Rawlings' first guess. I've been waiting for you all day."

  "This is pointless. Run back to Rawlings. Tell him I slipped the net."

  Mason snorted. "He'd never buy it."

  She let her hand drift toward her pocket. "You'll only have to suffer his wrath for a day or two. After that, he'll have much bigger problems to yell at."

  The man considered this, then shook his head and rested his hand on the pistol on his hip. "It's time to go home, Ellie."

  4

  "Where's my daughter?" Chip said again to the man behind the glass. The man didn't look up. He was honed in on a monitor or some damn thing—whatever it was, it was just to the left of the glass, and he was paying far more attention to it than to Chip. Chip's fuse was so long his coworkers had made a sport of calling him by increasingly obscene nicknames until he finally asked them would they please stop, but he wanted to ram his fists through the glass and wring the man's saggy neck. "Where is she?"

  The man smiled vaguely, not at Chip, but at whatever he was staring at. "Mr. Billips, your daughter is fine."

  "Is she here?"

  "She's being seen to by professionals. Just as you are."

  "I haven't consented to any of this."

  "This is for your own safety, Mr. Billips."

  "I'm an EMT. Right here in the city. I know my rights."

  At last, the man looked up, peering over his glasses, mouth half-open. "An EMT? Have you recently come into contact with anyone visibly ill?"

  Chip grimaced at the floor, which shined with a recent swabbing, yet still looked grayed and gritty, as if the dirt were too deeply embedded to ever remove. "No, we've recently switched to a new business model. Healthy people only. You call us up when we're bored, we drive you around the block a few times with the sirens flashing and drop you back on your doorstep. $1200 bucks, but hey, we won't bill you till next month."

  The man stared at him through the glass. "Very helpful, Mr. Billips. With that attitude, we'll have you on your way in no time."

  He disappeared. Chip turned from the window, gazed at the exam table and its stupid paper coverlet, then sat in the plastic chair by the door. God knew how long he'd been here and he still didn't know why. He hadn't asked until they'd separated him from Dee. Not in a meaningful, pressing fashion, anyway. He'd asked the man on the subway platform, of course, but the official had just said something vague about public safety.

  Chip couldn't imagine what the man was talking about,
but it didn't matter. When a man with a badge said "Sir, please come with me," you pretty much had three choices. One, you went with him on the spot. Two, you spent a minute arguing, then went with him after wasting a minute of his time and yours. And three, you spent ten minutes arguing, and went with him after acquiring a large and sudden bump on the head.

  So he'd reached for Dee's hand—amazingly, she hadn't complained—and followed the man up the stairs to an unmarked van. The officer drove him way the hell uptown, passing streets he'd never been down despite living decades in the city. Once they stepped foot inside the hospital, a man in a mouth-only gas mask of some kind led Dee away so fast Chip didn't have time to raise his voice. As the man in the suit led Dee down a hall, she glanced back, and the confusion in her eyes had drilled right through him, made him feel so powerless and small he suffered their first round of tests with the meekness to make a bunny proud.

  But then came the man behind the glass. The man who wouldn't meet his eye. The man who wouldn't even tell him where his daughter was.

  The man returned some twenty minutes later. Behind the glass, he leaned up to the speaker, blinking down at a clipboard.

  "Mr. Billips, we're going to need to go over a few more questions," he said. "I need to know, in as much detail as you can provide, whether you've had any contact with anyone visibly ill within the last week."

  Chip didn't look up.

  "Even the smallest, run-of-the-mill symptom. A cough. The sniffles."

  Chip frowned, hesitated, and toed a streak of rubber on the floor, which hadn't been cleaned so well after all. The streak rubbed away, shrinking into little gray curls, like bugs dying on the top of a wood stove.

  "Mr. Billips?" The man tapped his speaker, producing a baffled, clunky sound. "Can you hear me?"

  Chip continued to toe the rubber from the tile. The man swore, which Chip heard quite clearly, then disappeared. A minute later, the door clicked open, and the man entered, wearing one of those ridiculous contraptions over his mouth, a device like two pepper grinders glued together under his nose.

  "Apparently we're having a little trouble with our intercom," the man said, words tinged with a particular tone of practiced regret Chip had only heard used by a professionally distant doctors. The man paused inside the doorway, clipboard held in both of his latex gloved hands, and smiled in that same distant, professional way. "Unless it's your ears that could use a little maintenance."

  "Neither," Chip said, gratified to see the man jump. "I'm not answering any more questions until you answer mine."

  "Mr. Billips, we'll get to any and all of your—"

  Chip shook his head. "Then these are my last words you get to hear."

  The man waited, leaning forward, as if already anticipating Chip would crack. An analog clock hung from the wall. Chip counted twelve clicks before the man hissed a sigh through his teeth and lowered his clipboard.

  "Mr. Billips, the sooner you help us, the sooner we'll get you back with your daughter."

  Chip couldn't help himself. He snorted.

  The doctor's face reddened. "This is a humorous proposition to you?"

  Chip glanced around the room for something to read, but there wasn't the standard magazine rack beside the door. Not even a single copy of Highlights for Children, which he'd always thought came mandatory with every doctor's office.

  The man circled to force his way back into Chip's line of sight. "We're concerned you have the flu."

  "You pulled me in here because you think I might have the flu?" Chip said, breaking his vow. He gestured at the walls. "You know you're in New York City, right? I think you're gonna need a bigger hospital."

  "This is a new strain of flu. One we fear might be more problematic."

  "Problematic?"

  "I'm sure you're aware the flu isn't always benign."

  "Sure," Chip said. "But when you got the swine flu going around, you don't yank guys off the subway to ask if any of their buddies got the sniffles." His brows contracted. "You think we got something a whole lot worse."

  The doctor held up a palm. "What we know is this strain has an unusually high transmission rate. What we're attempting to rule out is the chance that anything else is different, too."

  "Where's Dee? Where's my daughter?"

  "Mr. Billips, I've already exceeded what I'm expressly authorized to tell you."

  "And I've exceeded the amount of bullshit I'm authorized to swallow. I want my daughter, and I want out."

  He took a step toward the man. The doctor whitened, jerked back, and bolted out the door, slamming it behind him. He locked it before Chip's hand reached the knob. Chip turned around. The doctor reappeared behind the glass.

  "I think we can talk just as comfortably from here," the man said. "I'm going to ask you nicely one last time: in the last week, have you been in contact with anyone with flu-like symptoms?"

  "Where's my daughter?"

  "If so, what are their names?"

  He was by nature a calm man. Long-fused. As slow to panic as he was to anger. That made him well-suited to his job handling the sick, the wounded, and the dying, if not as ably-equipped for relationships, where his girlfriends eventually grew tired of him, mistaking (so he felt) his lack of wrath and easy passion for a lack of substance. So the feeling that washed over him while the man hid behind the glass was all the more terrifying for being so rare.

  "Let me out of here!" Chip whaled his fists against the glass, shivering it, the edges of his palms stinging. "I'm a citizen! I'm not sick. Let me out!"

  The doctor sighed—right into the intercom, deliberately so—and slipped away.

  They sedated him to the brink of unconsciousness. He remembered he was supposed to be mad about something—Dee, they had his daughter, they had Dee and they wouldn't tell him where—but his awareness of his anger slipped away each time he reached for it.

  The doctor returned to the glass. Chip answered his questions until he could no longer stay awake.

  5

  One of the guards at the hospital doors was watching them, peering through the dimness of the city lights bouncing from the low clouds. New York was never really dark in the way other places were dark. Strangest of all were the winters, when snow lay on the ground and the lights reflected from it like ghostly magma, giving the streets a fairytale glow. Ellie would miss it when it was gone.

  "Home it is," she said.

  "Excuse the reach," Mason said, and patted her down, quickly finding her compact pistol. He gave it a clinical eye, slipped it into his waistband, and walked to the car. Ellie took the passenger seat. She closed the door, stifling the constant wash of traffic. In the cold quiet, Mason locked the doors and turned to her. "You really believe this, don't you?"

  "Believe what?"

  "That this is it. The end. The closing days."

  She regarded him blankly. "Because I have a gun?"

  He swabbed fog from the windshield with his sleeve. "Because you broke leash to rescue an ex-husband you haven't seen in years."

  "Ex-fiance."

  "Even worse."

  "Why don't you start the car already?" she said.

  He reached for the key, then paused and examined her with an expression close to anger. "I thought you were supposed to know your shit. That's all I ever head. 'That Ellie, she really knows her shit.'"

  "I've disappointed better men."

  "You get that it's impossible, right? Sickness just can't spread like that. The higher the kill rate, and the faster it goes, the less chance it has to spread. This is basic stuff. Entry-level. The nastiest diseases water themselves down—if you kill the host before he spreads you to his friend, your strain never has the chance to pass itself on."

  "Yeah. It's almost as basic as starting a car."

  "In a few minutes, we're going to be on a plane, and then they'll stash you someplace safe until this whole thing blows over. Before I start this car, I want to hear why you're so sure."

  She shook her head at the light glinting
from the windshields of the parked cars. "You've made two assumptions. First, that the initial vectors were natural. Second—that the disease itself is natural."

  Mason snorted and turned over the engine. "You're suggesting what—China? Iran? They can't even put together usable uranium."

  "I don't know," she said. He backed up, headed for the exit. Ellie considered the grimy sidewalks. "But I answered yours. Now you answer mine—has anyone you've brought in sick walked out well?"

  "Way too premature. We first got wind of this what, last week? Most of our cases haven't had the chance for an outcome yet. Anyway, you're looking at a small and self-selecting sample. Of course it's going to be skewed toward the worst cases. The ones who shrug it off aren't coming to see us in the first place."

  He hung a left, putting the hospital behind them. Projects rose from the cloud-deflected glow. He stopped for a red light. He'd be on the highway in another minute.

  "Anyway," he said, "that's not to mention cases like the Hook kid. Intense, direct exposure, yet completely asymptomatic."

  "And then he disappeared."

  "Yes, but he didn't disappear disappear. Ran away or some damn thing. Sounds like he had help from his brother."

  Without intending to, Mason had thoroughly answered her question. He stopped for another light. Ellie checked the mirrors, made her right hand into a fist, knuckles extended, leopard-style, and drove it into his throat. He caught the motion in the corner of his eye and shrugged his shoulder tight to his neck, deflecting half the blow. He flicked his fingers at her eyes; she ducked her head, his nails scraping her forehead, and snaked her left hand into his waistband. He dropped his elbow, pinning her hand. She shot him in the leg instead.

  He gasped, stiffening, pulling his elbow so tight to his side it slipped over the gun. She pulled it loose and shot him in the head.

  The light turned green. Behind her, a blue sedan honked its horn.

  Blood and thicker substances glooped from the ceiling. Her left hand was spraypainted with fine red dots. At least she was still wearing gloves. Mason lolled, bleeding all over the seat. His foot fell off the brake and the car drifted forward. Ellie reached over him, took the wheel, and turned right. The blue sedan swerved around her bumper and accelerated down the dark street, giving her another honk for good measure.