The Red Lotus

by Chris Bohjalian

  And she was feeling fuzzy, light-headed, and febrile. Weak. Was it the flu?

  Maybe.

  But it was sudden. So damn sudden.

  She rose as Douglas had demanded, wobbly, but she was on her feet. Ken rolled his eyes, took a breath, and used his left hand to start to push himself up. She bent over and wrapped an arm around his back and helped him.

  Which was when it came to her.

  “Did you shoot Austin?” she asked Douglas.

  “God, no,” he said dismissively.

  “Not that night back in March?”

  “No,” he repeated. “Not that night in March.”

  Which was what she believed: there’d been too many witnesses in the bar to blame it on a homeless junkie if that wasn’t what actually had happened. No, the point wasn’t Webber’s answer; it was the question. It was the needed distraction. As she’d asked him and he’d answered, she’d brought her right hand casually beside the rear pocket of her jeans, maintaining eye contact. With a single finger she pushed up the scalpel through the opening there.

  “Not even by accident?” she insisted.

  “Not even by accident,” he replied, but she was already removing the scalpel with two fingers and slipping off the guard with her thumb. Then she shoved the PI back to the ground and heaved her body into Douglas Webber before he could fire, pulling him into her—wrapping herself around him—the way she’d been taught in that self-defense class, her left arm around the man’s lower back and her right hand slashing the scalpel as hard as she could into his neck. They fell together, upright against the wall by the elevators. She’d missed the carotid as well as the jugular, but still he bled and he bled mightily, pounding her in the back and then trying with his free hand to yank the scalpel away from his throat. But it was too late. She had the angle, and on her third swipe she hit the artery and she could see the blood geysering onto her fingers and his chest, and feel it warm and wet against her face. He was coughing, choking, and bucking like a rodeo animal. He fired the pistol, once, twice, wild shots that hit the ceiling and one of the elevator doors, but already his knees were buckling and the two of them were sinking to the floor. He tried to speak, but he was gagging on his own blood, and she could see the splatter all around them and streaking the gleaming metal blade.

  When she looked up, Ken was beside her, pulling his own pistol from Douglas’s coat pocket. He held it in his left hand as he stood above the two of them. He’d curled his wounded right arm against his chest.

  “You always carry a scalpel?” he asked, his tone ironic.

  She knew he’d meant this as a joke, but she couldn’t smile. Not after killing a person. Even this Douglas Webber. The blood had slowed to a small rivulet that was trickling onto the tile floor. His body was still right beside her. “No,” she told him.

  “You should.”

  “You should go to the ER. Right now.”

  “You should, too,” he said. “I’m guessing there’s another way out of here. Another set of stairs on the far side of the floor.”

  “Why?”

  “That scientist.”

  She nodded. Of course. She’d forgotten. She was weak and she was tired and she was aching everywhere. Everywhere. She coughed and her chest hurt. It was unexpectedly hard to breathe. Still, how in the world could she have failed to recall that the last thing Douglas had done was tell Wilbur Sinclair to get the rats? “I’m sure there’s another set of stairs,” she answered, and she tried to get up, but it was proving to be an impossible task. The adrenaline that had kept her vertical—what had turned her into a human projectile and sent her hurtling into the dead man beside her—was gone.

  “You stay here,” he told her, and then he fired at the lock on the door to the labs. He was firing with his left hand and it took three shots, the third at almost point-blank range, before he had shattered the lock and splintered the wood. And then he was gone, and in the sudden quiet—all she could hear was the ever-softening sound of Ken Sarafian’s footsteps—she noticed for the first time what was happening to her arms. The sores. She put down the scalpel and felt her throat where her neck met her jaw. She felt the swelling. The buboes. They were under her arms, too.

  And that’s when she understood the exchange between Douglas and the university scientist. What it meant and what it meant for her. This was the fever she was feeling.

  You gave Harper the pathogen. The red lotus. You put it in an energy gel.

  That was what Douglas had said.

  Wilbur Sinclair had denied it, but the meaning and the ramification was clear: Austin had brought some new variant of the plague to Vietnam in those Psych packets, that’s what he’d been doing. He’d been bringing it to the food chemist. And whatever it was, it was airborne, she supposed. Aerosol. Transmitted by breath, as well as by touch and blood. She could feel it in her lungs. And she had actually eaten one before coming here to the hospital. Squeezed it into her mouth. There was, she was quite sure, no antibiotic. After all, that was the point.

  She herself was now one of the doubtfuls. A dead woman walking.

  She certainly couldn’t leave this floor, she certainly couldn’t struggle into the elevator and then crawl to the ER. For all she knew, on the way here, she might already have infected others. Everyone she had breathed near…

  Everything she had touched…

  Ken Sarafian. Poor Ken Sarafian. Any moment now, he’d be feeling the symptoms.

  And spreading the pathogen.

  She had no idea whether she had minutes or hours before she blacked out.

  She felt spent and utterly exhausted—feeble and shaky and sick. But she wasn’t scared. She was resigned to it all. It was done. They’d quarantine her and give her massive doses of antibiotics, which she presumed would be ineffectual, and then they’d give her morphine if she hadn’t already fallen into a coma.

  She reached for her phone. She had to call 911 before she passed out and alert them that this floor was a biohazard. That the corpse beside her probably had some new strain of plague and that she herself was carrying some new strain of plague. That somewhere on this floor there were transgenic rats that had it, too.

  When she spoke to the dispatcher, at first her voice was cracking. She sounded like a child—an utterly terrified child. But it wasn’t fright. She was simply fading. She could feel herself melting. What was the word her mother sometimes used when it was unbearably hot and humid, on those stickiest of days in July and August? Puddling. Well, now she was puddling.

  But she told the dispatcher where she was, and she explained what she could about Wilbur Sinclair, and said to please, please not shoot the older man if they saw him trailing the scientist.

  Then she added that when they came for her they had to be wearing the space suits. “Full-on biocontainment space suits and hoods,” she said. They asked her to stay on the line, and she said fine if she didn’t have to talk anymore. She pressed speaker and put the phone on the tile beside her, and stretched out her legs.

  What was it Ellie had said last night? We always relish the missing.

  Ellie had meant the dead, and missing had been a euphemism. But, in truth, Alexis guessed now that we yearned for the missing far more than the dead. The MIAs, the disappeared, the people who were just…gone. We moved on from the dead. The missing were a whole other level of longing, a great open wound. If they’d never found Austin’s body, she might have taken her longing to her grave.

  There was that beautiful Vietnamese word again in her head: Nhớ.

  N-yo, but as a single, mellifluous syllable. Longing.

  Who, she wondered, would miss the dead man beside her? Or Ken Sarafian?

  In a week or a month, Ellie would be at a bar and missing her. She’d be Ellie’s French bulldog for the night. But then she’d move on. Her mother would move on. After all, that was the only way we could
live. Otherwise? Stasis. Paralysis. Death. It was…self-preservation to move on.

  She turned away from the corpse next to her. Instead she looked at her arms. Then she closed her eyes, sickened by what she saw, and—though she was all alone—shook her head.

  * * *

  . . .

  She thought of how her mother had told her to stay inside. To stay upstairs.

  The phone had woken her up. The landline. They had cell phones then. Well, her parents did, primitive ones, but she was only in elementary school, so she didn’t. This call, however, had come in on the landline—the phone in her parents’ bedroom—and she had suspected even as a child that a call on the landline at this hour of the night was bad news. Terrible news. Inconvenience at best, woe at worst.

  Still, she hadn’t gotten out of bed. She hadn’t been able to hear her mother’s voice because her mother had closed the bedroom door. That fact alone was a further cause for alarm.

  And so Alexis hadn’t fallen back to sleep when their neighbors arrived. Not her parents’ closest friends, but their nearest friends. The McKennas, who lived but five blocks away. She heard all their voices and she heard the hushed crying. A woman’s hushed crying. It was almost melodious, the way it rose and fell. And so Alexis climbed from her bed and went to the top of the stairs, and her mother was already dressed. She was just starting out the front door in her winter parka.

  Which was when she saw that her mother was upset and Mrs. McKenna was sobbing now—it was worse than before—and Mr. McKenna just looked sad. No, it was at once different and worse than that: he looked stunned. He had his winter coat on, too, a puffy, down-filled ski jacket the color of copper. His car keys were in his hand, his finger through the ring. Mrs. McKenna had hung her coat on the rack by the front door. It was clear what was happening: her mother and Mr. McKenna were leaving the house, and Mrs. McKenna was going to babysit her.

  That was when her mother turned and spotted her, and ordered—ordered!—her to stay upstairs. To stay inside.

  But then she came back to herself when Alexis’s face must have fallen. Even though she already had her boots on, even though she was halfway out the door, her mother ran up the stairs to Alexis and knelt before her, and she was fighting back tears. (And she was, as always, winning. Once there had been a discussion in med school about cryobiology, the exploration of how very cold temperatures impact living things, and Alexis had volunteered that her mother, whose blood clearly ran cold for a mammal, would be an interesting part of a control group.) But Alexis nevertheless began to weep as her mother started to speak. “Oh, my little girl,” she murmured, her voice as soft as Alexis ever would hear it in her entire life, “my little, little girl.” Her mother told her what had happened—most of it, but not all of it. Not the most important part. She’d said only there had been an accident. A car accident. It would be years before Alexis would understand that while her mother was going to the hospital, she had known then that her husband was already dead. “I’m going to need you to be a big girl now. So big from now on. I’m going to need to be so big, too.”

  Yes, in hindsight, her mother was scared. She was scared of what loomed—not that night, but forever. Forever. Raising her daughter on her own. Raising her daughter in a world in which she was a single parent with a job that demanded a long commute and a lot of travel, and raising a daughter in a world that never made it easy for a woman. Raising a daughter as a woman who was many, many marvelous things—she had to know that, she had to—but maternal was not among them. She must have known that her husband had always been more nurturing than she was. Which didn’t make her a bad person, not at all, but in hindsight that awareness, too, must have been tragic and almost too much to bear. She knew the mistakes she would make and she knew the failures that loomed and she knew that while it might not in fact take a village to raise a child, it took more than just her, but she herself was all that she had.

  She was it.

  And it really was such a big world. Big and dangerous and oblivious.

  And her daughter was so little. As little as the world was big.

  She was going away that night, she told Alexis, but otherwise she would always be there. Always be there—she repeated, emphasizing each and every word. She would always be there, even when she wasn’t.

  Which was the case.

  The next night, when Alexis had finally gone upstairs to her own bedroom, when all the shell-shocked neighbors had left and inside the eerily quiet house were just a young widow and a young girl without a father, she had considered asking her mother if she could spend the night in her parents’ bed in her parents’ bedroom with her. She wanted to sleep beside her, she didn’t want to be alone. She had almost opened her mouth to say that, to admit how afraid she was, the words forming in her mind, when her mother told her as she tucked her in, “My big girl. I am so proud of how you got through today. How together we’ll get through tomorrow. And the day after that.”

  And so she hadn’t asked. She’d nodded. She would be brave. Her mother kissed her and turned off the light, and in the dark, Alexis had pulled the sheet and the comforter over her head and folded herself into the smallest ball that she possibly could, her arms around her shins as she brought her thighs to her chest—a pose she’d know well when she finally stopped cutting, a pose that she would replicate in the stalls of showers or in the wombs of bathtubs as the water rained down upon her—and eventually cried herself to sleep.

  In the end, her mother had been a parent whose most obvious attributes were drive and relentlessness, but there was more to her than that. Far more. Alexis had never doubted—despite the distance and occasional downright chilliness that were as much a part of Dina Remnick as her eyes and her hair—that her mother had loved her. Her mother had loved her and saved her and helped make her who she was. And though she was never the sort of mom who would take her little girl to her first manicure or dress up in a matching Halloween costume, she was the kind who would always have her daughter’s back. Always.

  And now with her last breaths, Alexis wanted the woman to know that. She wanted her to know that she loved her and was grateful for her. She reached for her phone and pressed the red dot, cutting her connection with the dispatcher, and called her. She called her to say good-bye.

  No, we weren’t working with Wilbur Sinclair. We had Sara Edens. We didn’t need someone to design the pathogen. We just needed someone to harvest it. Wilbur introduced Douglas and me—a hospital function, a fund-raiser—but we had no idea we were both trying to work the same side of the street. None. I honestly believed he was a travel writer. He honestly believed my imagination was insufficient to see the commercial potential in the new plague.

  I guess it all fell apart when I, in turn, introduced Austin to Douglas. Austin betrayed me, but it was Douglas who stole my salesman. He saw in Austin exactly what I did. And Austin? I have no idea what he saw in us. Two scores, maybe. Twice the lucre. Maybe he just had to have two of everything. I am quite sure—positive—he was sleeping with my Vietnamese food chemist at the same time he was sleeping with the ER doctor.

  In hindsight, he was a man-child too boyish to recognize either the utter unscrupulousness of what he was doing or the danger.

  I have no idea how many of the knockout rats Wilbur injected with the bacteria that afternoon. Eight? Nine?

  No, I didn’t think you could tell me. But I had to ask.

  I gather he thought Douglas was going to kill him when he heard the gunshots. He figured Alexis and the PI were dead, and he must have been terrified. And so he made a run for the emergency exit in the labs. The stairs.

  Reassure me one more time: this—everything I’m telling you—is all covered under attorney-client privilege, right?

  36

  Ken could hear the echoing footsteps of the scientist on the treads on the stairwell below him, but he couldn’t yet see him. He was gaining
, however, that was clear, and then he spotted the fluttering white tails of a lab coat two floors below him, but it was the most fleeting of glances, and then he heard the stairwell door opening. The guy was exiting into the lobby on the first floor. Thank God, this was an administrative wing, not the main entrance to the hospital that patients and staffers used. It was a Saturday afternoon, and so it had been empty when he and Alexis had arrived here a few minutes ago. He supposed it was now.

  Still, it was probably connected somehow to that vast and crowded main lobby, and Sinclair would know the labyrinth if that’s where he wanted to go. Likewise, he would know the exits, and he would know the places where he might disappear into the bowels of the building or through rabbit holes that led, eventually, out onto the street.

  Ken had absolutely no idea what the guy was going to do with the rats. He didn’t know what the word transgenic meant, but he sure as hell understood plague. He presumed Sinclair was taking them to another lab or a safe house, but he guessed there was also a chance that he might use them as a bargaining chip of some kind. And then, if the scientist didn’t get what he wanted? Release them. Of course.

  But if he released them…where? And just how virulent were these rats? How lethal?

  When Ken emerged from the stairwell, he saw that Sinclair was just nearing the corner that led toward some other section of the hospital, and so he yelled for him to stop. He yelled that he had a gun, though he feared this was a bluff if ever there was one. Upstairs, it had taken him three shots with his left hand to shoot out a door lock. Three. Pathetic. To drop a moving son of a bitch at this distance with his left? Unlikely. His aim was going to be suspect because he was firing with the wrong hand, because his right arm was still throbbing with eye-wincing daggers of pain, and because he was coming down with whatever the hell the ER doctor had. How in the name of God had it come on so fast? Shock, maybe. Blood loss. Didn’t matter. He felt weedy and decrepit, and all he wanted was this scientist down on the ground, so he could collapse, too.