Code Orange

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Mitty vaguely recalled pouring dust into an envelope of his own.

  “Did you know that Ottilie Lundgren liked to read mystery novels?” asked Derek. “What do you suppose it was like for her to lie in the hospital, and she's ninety-four years old, and all of a sudden, she realizes she's the murder victim?”

  Mitty finished his carton of chocolate milk, fortifying himself because in about a minute, he was going to be kicked out of advanced biology in front of everybody. “I still don't see how you find the guy on the Internet, Derek.”

  “Google claims to have more than four billion Web pages. There's got to be one where that murderer checks in. Because what's the point if you don't brag? What's the point if you don't get credit?”

  “You think it was one person, not a conspiracy?” asked Mitty.

  Derek nodded. “A single evil person.”

  In New York, the word evil made everybody tense, just like the word terrorist. Everybody knew what the words meant, and nobody liked to use them. New Yorkers wanted total protection against evil and against terrorists, but no New Yorker wanted to admit that either one existed. But every person who had seen the towers collapse and heard the recorded voices of those about to die making their final phone calls to someone they loved knew about evil.

  New York was a big town. At some point Mitty must literally have crossed paths with evil, but he hadn't noticed. That was the scariest part of the anthrax killer: he was still out there, leading the same old life in thesame old place with the same old colleagues, keeping his evil safe.

  “I believe in evil,” said Olivia.“We lived in Battery Park, you know. My mother stood at our window and watched as the Twin Towers came down. I was in school here, uptown, and when we were dismissed, I had to go to Zorah's house and watch it on television, and I didn't know if my parents were all right until eight forty-six that night.” Every New Yorker knew these things to the minute. “We could have gone back to our old apartment when they opened the streets downtown again, but my mother was too upset, so we moved here.”

  Derek, who lived on the East Side and took a crosstown bus to St. Raphael's, didn't care where Olivia lived, then or now.“You pick a topic yet?” he asked Mitty Derek thought Mitty's collapse in school was funny. He followed Mitty's failures as he might follow a good comic strip.

  “Smallpox,” said Mitty firmly, as if he actually knew something about it.

  “A true weapon of mass destruction,” said Derek with approval.

  They tossed their lunch leftovers into the garbage and headed to biology.

  Olivia surged ahead, taking her usual chair in the first row so she could glue her eyes on Mr. Lynch. Mitty sank down in back and studied her hair and shoulders. There were other views of Olivia that were more rewarding, but he did love her hair.

  Mr. Lynch regarded the class with his usual half like, half dislike. “So many of you complained that you didn't have time to get your preliminary work done that I'm giving you another two days.”

  Outstanding, thought Mitty.

  In forty-eight hours, Mitty could probably bring down the government of some small country. He could certainly come up with ten pages of notes and a bibliography, especially since he already had the books at home. He'd take two and a half pages of notes per book and be done.

  “Wednesday without fail,” said Mr. Lynch, “and I will accept no excuses.” He then showed a video, which not surprisingly was about infectious disease. Mitty dozed in the pleasant dark of the classroom. Halfway through the film he woke up to see a sneeze demonstration in a laboratory.

  Droplets, magnified and colored, sprayed from the patient's nose. In slow motion these droplets smashed into the faces of people standing nearby, sailed over their shoulders and into the faces of the people behind them, landed on doorknobs, nestled on countertops, came to rest on forks and spoons.

  Droplet infection was the sort of thing a New Yorker was better off not thinking about, since every subway ride, every visit to Tower Records, every stop at a kiosk for a newspaper, every saunter through the park put you within sneeze range of some of New York's eight million souls.

  Mitty Blake vaguely recalled a sneeze of his own, in his mother's book room.

  Since Olivia had ballet on Mondays, Mitty couldn't hang out with her after school. He spent some time thinking of her in a black leotard and then forced himself to go to the bookstore. To his surprise there were two very current books on this very dead disease: TheDemon in the Freezer (excellent title; Mitty was definitely starting with that) and Smallpox: The Fight to Eradicate a Global Scourge (academic-looking; Mitty would read as little as possible).

  Walking home, Mitty checked in with his parents. The three of them generally IM'd or phoned each other several times a day as if their lives had no meaning until they had reported in. His dad had an evening meeting and was staying at the office. This was nearly always the case, since he got started so late in the morning. His mother was taking clients to dinner. Mitty promised to eat a healthy meal, and so after a satisfying dinner of blue corn chips and sour cream, he headed into his bedroom, which was the same size as his closet in Connecticut. He slept on the top bunk and stored CDs, DVDs, T-shirts, sports equipment, his laptop and really good souvenir programs from Madison Square Garden on the lower bunk. His printer and about ten pairs of sneakers fit under the bunk bed.

  There was no space allocated for doing homework.

  He sat on the floor, his laptop on his lap, where it belonged, and used online encyclopedias, medical sites like the CDC and NIH (the National Institutes of Health, where hundreds of scientists worked on infectious disease), the Livermore National Laboratory (ditto) and his six-book collection. Reading as fast as possible, he blended the sources in his mind. Mr. Lynch wanted notes, but Mitty decided to bypass that. Why do something twice? He'd go straight to his rough draft. (Actually it would be his final draft; Mitty never did anything over.)

  Surrounded by a flurry of computer printouts, his books open on the floor around him, he began to compose:

  Smallpox once covered the globe. In Europe alone, 400,000 people a year used to die from it. It used to be extremely infectious.

  Smallpox started with little brown dots on your skin called macules. After a while each little dot raised up into a bump called a papule. Three or four days later, each papule became a blister called a pustule, a hard round bead under the skin. The patient's whole body was covered with these, but especially his face, hands and feet. Sometimes the blisters ran together so there was no regular skin between them and the patient was completely covered with fever pellets. After several days, each pustule burst open and bled and scabbed over. It took a single pustule about six days to dry up, but it could take two or three weeks for all the blisters to dry up. Once it dried up, the scab fell off and left a hole where it had been: the pock. This was like a ditch in the skin. If you had a hundred of those pits in your face, you could look so hideous that if you lived you might decide to wear a mask in public for the rest of your life.

  Mitty got most of this from the old books, because the doctors who wrote those had seen smallpox, whereas nobody entering medicine today ever had or ever would.

  Mitty continued to write:

  The virus traveled in droplets from coughing or breathing and also got spread by contact from the hands of victims.

  When a patient first got infected he didn't feel sickand he didn't have a rash. Twelve to fourteen days went by. The patient still didn't know there was anything wrong. For those twelve to fourteen days, the patient was not infectious to other people.

  It was now nine o'clock. Mitty still had to read Beowulf. He decided to get to the end of symptoms before he quit smallpox.

  When the patient started to feel sick, he felt really sick, really fast. Right away he had a high temperature, chills, rigor, terrible headaches, terrible backaches, pain in his legs and arms, plus a cough. Not to mention the rash.

  Mitty did not know what rigor was. He considered checking his co
mputer dictionary, but he was on a roll and couldn't be interrupted merely to find out what he was talking about.

  Pretty soon the patient was so sick he was all but in a coma and maybe delirious. By then he was so weak, he also had heart problems, bronchitis and pneumonia, and all of that stuff was what really killed him.

  One of Mitty's antique sources had charted the suffering in smallpox: 90 percent of patients had severe headache; 84 percent had intense shivering; 54 percent had intense backache. Nearly all had nausea. Their tongues were covered with white fur and their breath stank. When the pustules burst, out came thick yellow pus. Every patient itched unbearably.

  Good thing it no longer exists, thought Mitty.

  Well, symptoms were a wrap. Moving right along, Mitty picked up Demon in the Freezer in one hand and Beowulf in the other and weighed them. The poem didn't weigh as much.

  Beowulf, open to the crushed page, had Old English on the left and a modern translation on the right. Mitty read a few lines.

  Time and again, foul things attacked me, lurking and stalking, but I lashed out, gave as good as I got with my sword. My flesh was not for feasting on, there would be no monsters gnawing and gloating over their banquet at the bottom of the sea.

  How relaxing.

  He flipped around in Demon instead.

  The pustules began to touch one another, and finally they merged into confluent sheets that covered his body, like a cobblestone street. The skin was torn away from its underlayers across much of his body, and the pustules on his face combined into a bubbled mass filled with fluid, until the skin of his face essentially detached from its underlayers and became a bag surrounding the tissues of his head.

  Smallpox made Old English monsters seem rather tame. Mitty read on. Another patient had had hemorrhagic smallpox, where the skin didn't blister but stayed smooth, while inside him, his organs exploded with smallpox instead. This variety was called black pox because the person looked charred, like wood after a fire. If you got this type of smallpox, you always died.

  “Black pox,” wrote the author, “is more common in teenagers.”

  Mitty frowned. How trustworthy was an author in 2002, the copyright date of Demon, if he thought smallpox still existed?

  Mitty did the first editing of his life. With his pen, he crossed out is and changed it to was.

  More than twenty-four ho urs had passed.

  To Mitty Blake, this had no meaning. But a virus uses every available moment to double and double again.

  Variola major enters a cell by fusing with its membrane. Once inside the cytoplasm, variola causes the cell to give up its own functions. Now the cell must dedicate itself to making variola. Within eight hours of invasion, the process is fully launched. The host cell creates tens of thousands of viral copies, which ooze back out of the cell membrane.

  Every one will be infectious.

  CHAPTER THREE

  On Tuesday, February 3,2004, an envelope filled with white powder was delivered to the United States Senate office building.

  Derek hoped it was his anthrax murderer trying again and could hardly stand it that he was forced to attend school in the midst of such important breaking news. But the powder turned out to be ricin. Ricin could kill, but it was a poison, not an infectious agent. Therefore, who cared? Certainly not the students gathered in the front hall before class began. People talked mostly of television shows and who was following Survivor or The Apprentice or American Idol.

  Olivia, of course, was not watching any of them. “After school, I'm going up to the library at Columbia Medicalto work on my paper, Mitty. Want to come? The history of smallpox is very exciting, you know, especially the eradication brought about by Donald Henderson.”

  “How do you know anything about smallpox?” Derek demanded.

  “I looked it up, of course,” said Olivia, “as soon as I knew Mitty's topic.”

  “It's his topic,” Derek pointed out. “Anyway, how are you getting into a university library? You don't have a Columbia ID.”

  “I have my father's card. I hold it up, they figure I'm a medical student and they wave me in. I've already been twice this month.”

  “Your dad has a beard,” Mitty said.

  “They never check photos. And if it looks as if they're going to, I put my thumb over the beard.”

  This was a whole new view of Olivia. Mitty himself loved getting around security. His parents wouldn't let him try this in airports, so he was limited to buildings in New York whose lobbies were public but whose elevators were not. If he got caught, he just tried to look young and stupid, two skills Mitty never ran out of. All that ever happened was, security officers told him to get lost. “Okay, so you can get in on your father's card,” Mitty said to Olivia,“but how do I get in?”

  “Same card. The library foyer is small and crowded. Hordes of medical students and nursing students and researchers and who knows what. I show my card, play with my bootlaces or something, hand it to you and we're both in.”

  “What if we get caught?” asked Mitty, hoping they would. It would be so much more interesting than studying.

  “We won't get caught. We're dressed like medical students, which is to say badly, so we'll fit in. Librarians worry about people stealing rare books or maps, but there aren't any of those in the medical library. We'll be the only people in the whole library using books anyway. Everybody else will be using online journals.”

  “Why aren't we using online journals?”

  “Because we're going there to study history,” said Olivia gently, “and by definition, history is not current.”

  Derek couldn't stand it when Olivia talked like that. He stomped off.

  Mitty just enjoyed it.

  In English, he was gratified to see the sub again. He promised himself that tonight, he really would dig into Beowulf. He'd end up better off than the good students, because they'd read the poem long ago when it was due, but it would be fresh in Mitty's mind and he would ace the test.

  The substitute teacher told them to work on anything they wanted. Actually the sub told them to do anything they wanted, a dangerous suggestion, but this was a pretty quiet group and they let it pass.

  Mitty decided it would do no actual harm to glance at a smallpox book again today. Naturally he hadn't paid attention when he was throwing stuff into his book bag and had neither of his new books, only A History of Immunology, published in 1909. Oh well. He could add more useless facts to his paper.

  On page 134, Mitty read,

  It is practically certain that smallpox, like other acute infectiousdisorders, is caused by a living microorganism. Examination of the pustules, however, has failed to find anything bacterial which can be regarded as being responsible for the disease.

  Cool, thought Mitty. In 1909 they didn't know what a virus was. Wonder when they did.

  This led him to consider microscopes and when the really advanced ones had been invented, and it occurred to him that online he could find an actual picture of an actual smallpox virus, print it out and include it in his report. Exhausted from so much mental labor, Mitty turned on his iPod and listened to the Ain't Life Grand album. Everybody turns hero tonight, he sang silently.

  “You might,” Mr. Lynch suggested to advanced biology, “help your grade by arranging an interview with a scientist or physician who specializes in your disease.”

  An interview would be work. Mitty wanted less work, not more. Plus he was going to a college library with Olivia this afternoon, which was all the work anybody could ask of a person.

  “Wouldn't interviews make your report awfully long?” said Eve, who was doing yellow fever. “It's already such a burden, Mr. Lynch.”

  “I'm teaching you to be thorough,” said Mr. Lynch. “I yearn to discover upon reading your papers that one of you really was thorough.”

  “Probably Mitty,” said Derek, and the whole class burst into laughter.

  When school was over, Mitchell John Blake and Olivia Clark took the subway uptow
n. It wasn't rush hour and the train was largely empty. They not only got seats, they sat next to each other, and Mitty whose hand was bare, held Olivia's hand, which was encased in a mitten so thick and woolly he couldn't tell it was even in there. Around 125th Street, she took the mitten off and they twined fingers.

  When they got off at 168th, Mitty looked around with interest. He had never been up here where New York-Presbyterian Hospital was. In spite of the bitter weather, the streets were packed with food vendors. Every mobile patient, visitor, employee, student and doctor was in line buying every conceivable sidewalk food: bagels and falafel, hot dogs and muffins, lattes and soft pretzels. Mitty wanted to linger and buy some of each, but Olivia strode purposefully toward the Health Sciences Library.

  Sure enough, they just walked in and she trotted down the wide, open stairwell to the stacks. Mitty disliked the sight of a jillion books he did not want to read, but Olivia was energized. All study carrels seemed to be for individuals. Mitty said if they had to do this, they were sitting together. By the time he located a double carrel, Olivia had vanished, presumably to accumulate Typhoid Mary material.

  Sighing, Mitty went off to find a dedicated terminal. He hit Subject, typed in smallpox and began jotting down book numbers. He was startled to find the title A Handbook for Medical Responders, 2003 listed under smallpox. Why would a book like that even mention smallpox?Your average ambulance driver didn't need to know what smallpox was like. Your extraordinary ambulance driver didn't need to know. Even ambulance drivers in Sudan didn't need to know.

  He went straight to that book. Or as straight as he could, considering there were a million books and he couldn't figure out what order they were in.

  Smallpox, the book announced, had “no known treatment.”