Outcome

by Edward W. Robertson

  But the men with the vans would still be here. Ellie was a student of complexity theory. The offspring of chaos theory, the field remained somewhat obscure, perhaps because Michael Crichton's novel about it was far less popular and good than Jurassic Park, the book and then movie that had vaulted chaos into the collective consciousness. Complexity sat somewhere between chaos—the completely unpredictable—and deterministic—the completely predictable. In periods of relative stability, its math was strong enough to predict potential outcomes. At certain critical points when an environment became unstable, however, the system became truly chaotic, its new outcome beyond the realm of prediction.

  The flu had reached that point. Its conditions were changing faster than any institution could keep up with. The men in the vans were already obsolete. But they might not know that for days. Wind buffeted the tunnel. A train squeaked to a stop. Passengers disgorged from its doors.

  "There," Chip said. She followed his gaze down the platform, appreciating the fact he hadn't pointed. A man in plain clothes walked around a young couple and planted his feet shoulder-width, holding one palm out at waist height. He spoke softly. The couple exchanged glances. The man gestured toward the stairs. After a moment, the couple walked to the staircase, man following them two steps behind.

  "Well?" Chip said.

  She shook her head. "We don't know how they're segregating the infected. Could be by age. We want to follow a kid."

  She wandered to the wall and pretended to examine the subway map set behind a scratched plastic panel. Two more trains came and went. Dressed in their surgical masks, they drew more than one look from the rushing crowds. Ellie wasn't too concerned. There were always freaks on the subway. They'd draw far fewer eyes than the steel drummers and bagpipers just up the line at Union Square.

  Another train pulled in, vomiting a new host of commuters. Ellie spotted the man at the same time as Chip. Heavyset, his buzzcut prematurely gray, he walked up behind a woman, probably a nanny, shepherding two young children down the platform. He wore one of the funny little see-through breathers. As he talked with the nanny, the woman shook her head repeatedly, fingers held to the base of her throat. Soon enough, she gathered up the kids and marched up the stairs, trailed by the anonymous official.

  Ellie detached from the wall and joined the school of passengers climbing up the stairs. On the sidewalk, the man led the nanny and her charges north away from where Ellie was parked.

  "Follow him," she said. "I'll grab the car and pick you up."

  Chip gave her a panicked look, composed himself, and nodded. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and hunched along after the unmarked agent. Ellie waited for a break in traffic and jaywalked toward the lot, glancing over her shoulder to keep tabs on Chip. As she got into her car and pulled into traffic, Chip hung a right and disappeared down 10th St.

  She accelerated up 3rd Ave and took the same turn. Chip was jogging back toward the corner. She pulled over to let him in.

  "Olive-colored van," he said. "Just turned north on 1st."

  Ellie lurched forward before he had the door closed. At 2nd Ave, she stopped for the light, which refused to switch to green for half a minute. She crossed the avenue, blew down to 1st, swung left through a yellow light, and accelerated north.

  "Do you see him?" Chip said.

  "Give me a minute," Ellie said.

  "You're gonna get pulled over."

  She dodged around a white SUV, then swerved to avoid a cab switching into the same lane. The light at 14th was red. After it switched, an olive-tone van grumbled through the intersection.

  She hadn't done much of this stuff, tailing people, but if the van took any notice of her, it didn't show it. It drove north past the park-swaddled apartments at Stuyvesant Town, crossed 23rd St., and entered the VA Hospital complex. Ellie continued past and parked near the corner. She grabbed her compact binoculars from her pack and honed in on the van as it stopped in front of the hospital doors.

  The officer led the nanny out the back doors, closed them, then took her to the door, passing her off to a couple of masked officials—officials with the same straightness of spine and eerily crisp posture as the ones up in Harlem. The man then returned to the van and brought the kids up, too.

  "They just took the kids inside," she said.

  "Do you think Dee's here?"

  "Could be. Bellevue's just across the street, too."

  "So what do we do?"

  She put away her binoculars. "Walk through the front door and ask."

  He glanced across the car at her. "That sounds..."

  "Risky? It is. Because it's fast. Which is just what we need."

  Chip scratched the back of his head, puffing his cheeks with a sigh. "If that's what you think."

  "Bring your kit," she said. "My name's Jennifer Brown and I'm with the FBI. You're an EMT attached to me."

  "What's my name?" he smiled.

  "No one will care." She exited the car into the breezy morning, waited for a couple cars to pass, and jogged across the street. Chip's feet scuffed behind her. At the doorway, the pair of soldiers in street clothes moved to intercept her. She flipped out her badge. They radioed in, got clearance, and ushered Ellie and Chip inside.

  The woman behind the counter filed a bundle of papers. Ellie showed her badge again.

  "Deanna Billips," she said. "Is she here?"

  The woman scooted her chair to her keyboard. "Spell that?"

  Ellie did so. The woman typed, paused, typed more. She frowned at her monitor.

  "Deanna Billips," she said. "Not here, no."

  Ellie stared at the wall past the woman's head. "Can you check elsewhere? This is vital."

  "What's going on?"

  "We're tracking down possible immunities," Ellie said. "That's as much as I can say."

  The woman nodded and pulled away from her computer. "The state of our records is less than ideal. I'll be right back."

  She walked through the door at the back of the room behind the counter. Ellie glanced at the front doors.

  Chip followed her look. "What if they don't know?"

  "I don't know," Ellie said, distracted, forgetting those were the three least-acceptable words in the English language.

  "Do we follow another van? Try another hospital?"

  "Be quiet."

  "Don't tell me to be quiet. We're talking about—"

  "I know what we're talking about," Ellie said. "And I would prefer the two of us remain the only ones who know that. So shut up and look pretty."

  "About twenty years too late for that," he muttered.

  She made her mind go quiet and listened to the ticking of the clock at the back wall. Past the door the receptionist had gone down, two pairs of male shoes echoed closer. Ellie's heart froze.

  "Time to go."

  Chip's face went slack. "What?"

  "Our cover," she said. "It's been blown."

  8

  Ellie grabbed his coat sleeve and pulled him toward the front doors. He stumbled after her, grabbing her wrist. Behind them, a door clicked open.

  "Hey!" a man called.

  Chip slowed. She yanked him forward and he broke into a run, matching her.

  "Ma'am! Stop!"

  The doors slid open. The two out-of-uniform soldiers frowned at Chip as he ran past. He was suddenly quite conscious of the extra pounds he'd stashed around his middle in the years they'd been apart—she looked as lean as ever—but he managed to match her stride for stride. Ellie juked to put a row of cars between them and the two uniformed security officers following them out the door.

  "What's going on?" he said.

  "They recognized me."

  "Shit!"

  "That's my tactical assessment of the situation, yes."

  She sprinted to the street, crossing despite an oncoming cab. It screeched to a stop, tires smoking. She vaulted the curb to the lot where she'd parked her car. Back across the street, one of the guards pulled his gun.

  Chip yelled. Ell
ie ducked and kept running, fumbling for her keychain, clicking open the car doors. The security turned and rushed back the way they'd come. Chip piled into the car. Ellie roared out of the lot into the street. She opened a three-block head start before the guards pulled out behind her.

  "They're chasing us!" he said.

  "How observant," Ellie said. "You should have my job."

  "What did we do?"

  "You didn't do anything. I assaulted one man and shot another." Ahead, the light turned red. She slowed, then barreled through. Tires screeched to her right.

  He flinched, covering his head. "Where are you going?"

  "Away. You're the one who lives here. Got any more specific suggestions?"

  He craned his neck, watching for pursuit. "Will you slow down? What's your plan, lose them by escaping to the afterlife?"

  She tore down 2nd Ave, narrowly making another light. A couple blocks back, a patrol car flipped on its siren, stalling traffic in an intersection, and weaved through the stopped cars.

  "Doing my best to not crash," she said. "Stop watching the rearview and tell me where to go."

  "Chinatown," Chip blurted. "That place is all messed up. I can't find Little Italy no matter how many times I go there."

  Ellie yanked hard left, swerving around a puttering old station wagon. "Directions."

  "Take a right to Bowery. You can take that all the way to Canal."

  She nodded, weaving again. Sunlight bounced from the faces of the downtown diners. An onion-domed Eastern Orthodox church loomed over the walkups. Ellie hung a sudden right, slowed, and made an unprotected left turn that was greeted by the screaming tires of an approaching taxi. It hurtled straight toward Chip, then jerked right, scraping their rear fender.

  "Stop it, you us-killing maniac!"

  She laughed coldly. "I want you to imagine something: us being taken to jail, where the guards sudden begin to fall sick and die. What happens to us behind the bars?"

  "I don't know," he said. "They bring us pizza?"

  The engine thrummed. Sirens howled behind them. Ellie powered down Bowery, switching from one lane to the other.

  "Get ready to run," she said.

  "Do you do this a lot?"

  "I took a class once."

  Another siren twirled three blocks down the broad avenue. Ellie turned hard right, swaying Chip off center. She passed a northbound one-way, then turned sharply left down a narrow street fronted by a mixture of thrift stores, espresso bars, and restaurants advertised in an Asian language Chip didn't recognize. Ahead, the light went red. Chip braced himself, expecting her to blast straight through the light and the other drivers be damned, but she yanked the car to the curb, killed the engine, and rushed out the door. He grabbed his kit and followed.

  She turned down Grand on foot, streaking by a street festooned with red, white, and green pennants—they'd managed to find Little Italy after all. Sirens whooped down the block. Ellie took the next left, sprinting past sidewalks littered optimistically with outdoor seating, the few patrons bundled against the winter chill. The smell of garlic and pan-fried pork drifted from the doors and vents.

  A cop car blared behind them, speeding west, out of range. Ellie hit Canal and swung right, taking them toward the dense crowds browsing the strange shoulder-to-shoulder mixture of diamond brokers, cafes, vegetable stands, seafood markets, and sidewalk stalls of wallets and sunglasses. Hundreds of faces bobbed down the sidewalks, Asian and white and Latino and black, children holding hands with parents, elderly men in shapeless caps sitting on stools waiting to make a sale. Chip grinned, pleased with himself. If there was one place to get lost in the city, this was it.

  A woman coughed, wiped her hands on her jeans. A young man spit a heavy wad into the gutter. Chip ran by a seafood market, its buckets of crabs and mussels, whole fish stretched out on ice with their beady little eyes staring at the world. He smelled the sharp tang of brine and ocean-flesh, some of it too old, gone foul. Conditioned by clean, gleaming supermarkets with pretty pink slabs of salmon, he often found these stalls disgusting—that old-guts smell, whole creatures just tossed on the ice, tiny tentacles curled, puckered with suckers—but he knew some of this stuff had been caught that day, too, yanked out of the ocean at dawn and sitting on the Canal Street sidewalks before noon, fresh in a way you'd never tasted. He had always meant to come down here and buy the day's catch, whatever it was, bring it home and cook it that same day, but he'd never got around to it. Just one of those things. He'd never been to the Statue of Liberty, either. His grin withered. If Ellie was right, these staring fish were the last fresh ones he'd ever see here.

  A man shouted behind them. Back on the corner, a cop in a hat elbowed through the crowd. Ellie grabbed Chip's sleeve and pulled him into a dense shop filled floor to ceiling with racks of coats and shirts and jeans. Wonderful. A dead end. Shouts rang from outside. Ellie vanished between two puffy blue coats. Chip brushed after her, smelling dust and fabric. He pushed a coat from his face. Ellie sank down a staircase, feet pounding the steps. He followed her into the basement, an overfilled mess of piled t-shirts, unlabeled jeans, and unpacked boxes. An old man sat on a stool, eyeing them without expression.

  "We were never here," Ellie said. She produced three twenty dollar bills. The man accepted them, folding them away without looking, his face unchanged from its pensive stare. He pointed over his shoulder to a curtain. Ellie smiled. "Thank you."

  She parted the curtain to a back room with a stove and a kettle and a cot. Another set of stairs rose to iron delivery doors set into the ceiling.

  "What, you know that guy?" Chip said.

  "Sure," Ellie said, climbing the stairs and unlatching the doors. "We go way back to three seconds ago."

  "Kind of him to direct you to the back door, then."

  "A lot of these guys don't like cops." She opened the door with a metallic squeal, splashing them both with late morning sunlight. "Especially the older guys."

  Chip snorted. "You're a cop."

  "Not really. And not anymore."

  Ellie glanced both ways, then emerged to street level. They stood on a side street next to another clothing shop and across from a Chase lettered in both English and Chinese. Ellie led the way north at a fast walk. Chip glanced back several times, scanning the thinned pedestrians for uniforms. Chinatown ceased within blocks, replaced by the pleasantly shabby shops and apartments of Greenwich Village. Ellie entered the first hotel she saw and booked them for three days. It wasn't quite check-in time, but Ellie smiled for once and talked the balding clerk into letting them up anyway. Their room was small and dim and smelled like laundry left too long in the washer. Ellie stood at the window, eyes glossy with exhaustion, gnawing absently at her cuticle—she used to bite them until they bled.

  "So what does that mean, that they didn't have Dee at the hospital?" Chip said. "Do we go check another?"

  "They've got an alert for me." She paused to nip another piece of the skin around her thumb. "We can't go to another hospital unless we're sure it's the right one."

  "I thought you had like fifty IDs in that bag."

  "That was my last one."

  "Well, then how do we find her?" he said. "Should I go find a phone? Start calling around?"

  "They won't tell you if she's there." Ellie reached out to touch the brittle curtain. It was sun-worn, dry flakes cracking from its yellowed liner. "I want you to think seriously about the idea of leaving."

  "We've been through this."

  "Yesterday. When there was a chance."

  At once, he was angry, resentment sloshing up from his guts like an overtaxed storm drain. "This is ridiculous. Why are you here? You don't care about her. You never did."

  "That's not true."

  "That's why you left! You weren't about to have kids. Not when it would compromise your career."

  She laughed coldly. "And you couldn't have waited a few years?"

  "It's not like you even had to carry a kid around, to change diapers," he s
aid. "Dee was practically taking care of herself already."

  "So why did you have to take her? Someone else would have been just as glad to adopt her."

  "You don't know that!" He stalked toward the window, grabbing her shoulder and spinning her around, forcing her to look him in the eye. "So what, you weren't ready then, but you are now? That's why you're here? You're about six years too late, Ellie."

  Her eyes flashed. "I'm not here to start a family. I'm here to save your life."

  "Without her, I don't want it."

  She closed her eyes, breath escaping her nostrils in a long hiss. "Would she want her father to die for no reason?"

  "No reason?" It was his turn to laugh, bitter jags that hurt his throat. "You don't care. You didn't then and you don't now."

  "I'm here, aren't I?"

  "And all you want is to get out. Just like always."

  "We tried," she said. "I could have left yesterday. I didn't have to come here. I didn't have to shoot a man. I care—but I'm not delusional. I know when to cut my losses."

  He laughed again. "You sure do."

  "That's not fair."

  Chip shook his head and sank to the bed. "And what if we do go? And it all falls apart? How do we not fall with it?"

  A siren droned in the distance. Ellie turned back to the window. "I have a cabin."

  "A cabin?"

  "Upstate. Adirondacks. It's supplied. It's on the lakes—water, fish, irrigation."

  He scuffed his foot against the well-worn carpet. "Sounds like paradise."

  She glanced over her shoulder. "Compared to the hell on its way? It is."

  "Great. I hope you enjoy it."

  They were both silent a while. She started to say something, then went to the table between the twin beds and got out the hotel pad and pen. "This is the address. If something happens to me, and you find Dee, you take her there."

  She passed him the paper. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, refusing. "We'll find her."