Code Orange

by Caroline B. Cooney

He jogged across Central Park, passing the softball diamonds with their tattered winter look and the carousel building, shuttered and sad. He cut across traffic near the Plaza Hotel, where even in this weather a few tough horses were giving carriage rides.

  He had never taken the tram ride to Roosevelt Island even though he always meant to, because in Spider-Man, there was a great scene involving the tram.

  The tram was waiting on its platform. When it was docked, there was nothing exciting about it. Mitty swiped his MetroCard and boarded. Gloomily, he perceived that there was going to be nothing exciting anyway. It was just a box with windows on a cable. Besides, Spider-Man had been filmed at night, when anything could be made mysterious.

  A lot of the other riders knew each other, the population of Roosevelt being pretty small. There were mothers with strollers, shoppers with bags, old guys looking mournful, and four little boys who, if they were with a grown-up, were ignoring that person. There was a dramatic mix of races. Probably because the United Nations building was across the river from the island, so UN people were likely to think of living on Roosevelt Island, whereas regular people cringed at the thought of being forced to live off Manhattan.

  The tram moved slowly and without bumps. For a minute, Mitty had an outstanding view in all directions. He looked down at the rough currents of the East River and the heavy car traffic on the Queensborough Bridge and then they were down. Everyone else got on a little bus, so Mitty did too. Roosevelt Island faced a boring part of Manhattan. Mitty had not known there was such a thing.

  He went into what looked like the only grocery store in town to buy some Advil and a bottle of water. He was beginning to worry about the number of headaches he was having. The clerk told him where to find the smallpox hospital ruins on the southern tip of the island.

  Mitty walked back, passing the tram station and then a long-term hospital still in use, with that hunkered-down look of institutions in winter. Cars were parked everywhere, which puzzled him until he realized that from the other direction, Queens, there must be a car bridge. Roosevelt had exactly one road, the island being too skinny to fit two roads, and not a single car was being driven. Not a single person was walking either, although it was so cold, it might just have been that everybody except Mitty had a brain.

  The pedestrian path along the East River came to a sudden eerie halt at an extraordinarily high chain-link fence topped with rolls of slicing wire. Bolted to the fence were huge NO TRESPASSING signs. There was even a call box in case you needed cops.

  The smallpox hospital ruins were kept behind this? They didn't even want people near the building? After all these years?

  Mitty took another Advil. So the CDC could say what itwanted, but in real life, New York City didn't want human beings touching the very walls where smallpox had once lived.

  The last case in the United States had been in 1949. Was New York City still worried, almost six decades later?

  Then he saw that there was a door in the fence— padlocked open. Mitty was disappointed, having hoped to test his Spider-Man skills by scaling twelve feet of chain link covered with razor wire. He walked between low chain link to keep him safe from the East River and high chain link with more NO TRESPASSING signs.

  Darkness was closing in. The ugly grounds and the rough water, the lowering clouds and the shadows blended into one grim tapestry. Against the dusky sky he saw gothic towers, with windowless arches.

  His pace slowed.

  Trees grew inside the walls. The turrets were separating, trying to collapse, the way patients must have collapsed in smallpox agony.

  The hospital ruins were beyond hope. Like smallpox victims. Mitty felt as if he'd been thinking about smallpox for a century.

  He took two photographs of the gothic remains and a blast of light enveloped him. He was blinded like a deer about to be poached.

  Mitty flung an arm up to shade his eyes and ward off the enemy—but it was just floodlights coming on automatically to silhouette the romantic crumbling stones against the darkening sky.

  It looked like a movie setting.

  It was a movie setting.

  It was where Spider-Man and the Green Goblin fought to the death in the final confrontation.

  Mitty started laughing. He was so glad there had been no witness. Mitty Blake: scared of electricity. So glad he had not said out loud that New York City still had fences to prevent the spread of smallpox when in fact it had fences to keep movie fans from spidering up and down ruins that could fall on top of them and kill them.

  His cell phone rang and he answered, still laughing. It was his mother. Mitty didn't tell her that he was exploring little islands alone in the dark. She chattered excitedly about her day and they discussed dinner while Mitty headed back to the tram. She made her phone-kiss sound and Mitty phone-kissed back and boarded.

  Olivia had left him a text message. “Productive afternoon at the library. Am now walking past the nursing school about to get on subway.”

  The tram reached the peak of its short trip, where for one moment there was a spectacular view in each direction as Manhattan lit up for the night.

  Mitty loved Olivia's courage. It was not fashionable to have a productive afternoon at a library. It was not chic to thrive on knowledge. How easily the other girls could turn on Olivia; how readily the guys could scorn her. He thought of how she sat at the front of a classroom, where even Mitty, who liked her, would not go. She was there so she didn't have to see the contempt on the faces of those to whom school was a stupid waste of time, and so was Olivia.

  He hoped that the girl who had once been Bunny would never get tromped on, especially by him. But he didn't know how to say that, so instead, he called her andsaid,“Why'd you mention nursing school? You want to be a nurse?”

  “No. That was geographical detail. I wouldn't be good at nursing. I'm not actually that fond of individual people.”

  Mitty loved people. It was why he loved New York: all those people. He could watch anyone in New York and be satisfied. He loved their expressions and hairstyles and dogs, their tattoos and T-shirt slogans. Mitty's great skill was making friends. He was friends with doormen, janitors, pretzel vendors and police officers. He was friends with the jocks and the zeros, with people standing in line for coffee or movie tickets. He loved listening to other people's cell phone conversations. He loved what people would say out loud. When they spoke some other language and he couldn't listen in, he felt deprived. He was taking Spanish not because colleges required foreign language but so he wouldn't miss out on conversations that didn't include him.

  Spanish! That was his fifth subject! Mitty felt better now that he'd remembered.

  “I want research,” Olivia was saying.“Medical, historical or both. Right now, I'm interested in the concept of quarantine. That was the only medical recourse for thousands of years. But there are moral problems with how they handled Mary Mallon.”

  He could not think of another girl who would dare use disturbing words like moral in conversation with a boy she liked.

  When Olivia descended into the subway, Mitty lost her signal, so he called his father.“I didn't see you this morning,” said his father regretfully, “and I won't get homeuntil you're asleep.” His dad worked for an international firm, where everybody was happy to have one guy willing to hang out in the office at night for calls from the West Coast and Japan.

  “I'll be up working on my term paper,” Mitty told him. “Guess what, Dad. Mr. Lynch thinks the first half is outstanding.”

  His father had wanted to hear these words for a long time. “I want to read it,” he said eagerly.

  Mitty got off the phone. He was shivering again. It was not from cold.

  He had not yet mentioned the scabs to anybody, even Olivia. He had not written about it. He had visualized a clear plastic sleeve into which he would drop the envelope so he could include it with his report, but now he wasn't so sure.

  The thought of his father touching that envelope made Mitty shiv
er again.

  I know it isn't dangerous, he thought.

  But what if it is?

  Koplow, page 49:

  Hostile forces—covertly controlled by unrepentant national authorities or by rogue elements that operate independently of effective centralized governmental direction—may have stashed variola stocks, despite their country's overt acceptance of the Biological Weapons Convention and despite any WHOaction. It is also possible that other laboratories may continue to house variola repositories more by accident than by design … poorly labeled, inadequately inventoried and long forgotten—but still viable.

  If Mitty used language like that, Mr. Lynch would totally know he was copying. So Mitty wrote:

  If your country is run by bad guys or if you have gangs of bad guys who aren't running your country, but they're powerful, they might have smallpox even if their actual government claims they don't. And if your laboratory is second-rate, you could have smallpox around that you forgot about.

  Tucker, page 138:

  [In 1992,] a high-ranking Soviet official defected to the United States and gave the U.S. intelligence community some chilling news. He reported that in parallel with the global WHO campaign to eradicate smallpox—an effort in which Soviet virologists, epidemiologists and vaccine manufacturers had played a leading role—the Soviet military had cynically pursued a top-secret program to transform the virus into a doomsdayweapon. [They came up with a way to keep the virus in dried egg powder, which gave it] a significantly longer shelf life. [They also put it in aerosol form, which made it] extremely stable.

  Mitty reflected on this. So a virus was happy (so far as a virus had emotions) in a freezer or in egg powder. How happy was a virus in an envelope? And what did “extremely stable” mean? That it could still infect? And could it still infect just the following day or even a hundred years later?

  As to rogue states, it seemed to Mitty that scientists there would sell their knowledge—or virus—to the highest bidder. That guy in Pakistan just last week admitted he'd been selling nuclear weapons knowledge all over the globe. And what did their president, Musharraf, say? Don't worry about it. What's a little top-secret info between friends? Or even enemies?

  If a government could shrug like that about nuclear weapons, they'd shrug about missing smallpox virus, because it was a disease nobody remembered anyway and thought was just a skin problem.

  That morning, the librarian had been lying in wait for Mitty, holding out yet another book, Smallpox As a Biological Weapon, and several weeks' worth of U.S. News & World Report. Cornered, Mitty had read enough for the current events section of his paper.

  Whether to keep our smallpox stash is a big argument in the science community. Some people want to destroyit all. They say we know the DNA sequences so why risk restarting the disease, and besides, we need to set a good example for rogue countries. But some people want to keep the virus. They say what if smallpox comes back? Then we need our virus supply to make the vaccine again. Plus, the thing about rogue countries is that they don't care about good examples. Rogue states and rogue people want a universal killer to spew over the world. In fact, you don't have to be very rogue. There are plenty of hate-filled half-insane countries who claim to be non-rogue and are still in the United Nations pretending to care about peace. Then finally there's the save-our-smallpox bumper-sticker crowd. They don't think we should extinguish a living creature.

  Mitty certainly had no problem extinguishing the creature that was smallpox.

  He dug out his DVD to watch Spider-Man.

  His father found him sound asleep under a pile of books and papers, his laptop having put itself to sleep too, the remains of a snack spilling gently off a tilted plate while Spider-Man leaped across burning rafters.

  Mitty's father turned off the DVD and tucked a blanket around his sleeping son.

  It had now been four days since Mitchell John Blake had inhaled the particles of a smallpox scab.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  That night Mitty had smallpox dreams.

  He woke up sweating and shivering, unable to catch his breath or slow his heartbeat. He was lying on the bare floor of his bedroom, like a prisoner in a cell. Of course, it was a really well-furnished cell with great electronics.

  In the entire world, he thought, I am the only person dreaming of smallpox.

  The apartment was always hot; the Blakes rarely turned on the heat, even on the coldest days, because the building was so warm from all the apartments that did have their heat on. But even in bed, under blankets, Mitty could not get warm. He lay staring wide-eyed at the ceiling as if he had lockjaw of the eyelids.

  Facts and fears slammed into him like so many tennis balls lobbed into his face.

  He was still awake at three a.m.

  “Mitty Blake!” screamed his mother. “It's nine-forty-four!”

  Mitty dragged himself out of sleep. He hoped it was a Saturday.

  “The school just called! Mitty, you promised you would never cut school again!”

  He huddled under the blankets. “I'm not actually cutting, Mom, I just didn't wake up.” Smallpox, he thought. I had smallpox. Mom had it, Dad had it.

  “Mitty!” she cried. A major rant about his shortcomings was about to begin.

  “Now, Kathleen,” yelled his father from the other end of the apartment,“it wasn't intentional. Mitty didn't—”

  Mitty had to be careful of events like this. His parents had radically different ideas about how to treat Mitty's failures and might battle each other instead of him, so Mitty said quickly, “I was a jerk, Mom. I forgot to set my alarm. I can get dressed in a second and be at school in ten minutes, okay?”

  “Is this going to happen again?” his mother demanded, as if Mitty had chosen strip-mining national parks for a career.

  “It happened once last fall, Mom,” he said, “and once now. Therefore my failure-to-wake-up rate is actually one morning per semester. So, yeah, it might well happen again. Possibly as early as May, probably not till next September.”

  She didn't laugh as she left his room. Mitty slid down from the top bunk and landed on an annoying assortmentof books and papers. He put only his laptop into his backpack.

  “Orange juice!” shouted his mother from the other end of the apartment. “Socks!”

  Mitty surrendered on both fronts. “Love you, Mom,” he said, kissing her good-bye. She melted. She always did. He hugged her again for good measure and tore out of the apartment.

  He was halfway to school when he realized he had not said good-bye to his father.

  He felt an odd tearing at his heart. He paused at the corner of Broadway and Seventy-fourth and half turned to catch his dad before he left for the office—then shook his head to clear it and bought a bagel from a street vendor.

  “Beowulf really spoke to you, Mitty!” cried Mrs. Abrams joyfully. “As a topic for your paper for me, I suggest monsters in literature, to capitalize on that brilliant thinking.”

  Mitty debated saying “Huh? What?”or “I'm not sufficiently acquainted with literature to find the requisite number of monsters for a fair analysis.” He went with “Huh?”

  “Mr. Lynch tells me you're off and running on an outstanding report on smallpox,” said Mrs. Abrams. “Supposing you were to compare Grendel and the other monsters in Beowulf to the monsters of infectious disease?” Mrs. Abrams clapped her hands with excitement. “Smallpox!” she clarified.“Typhoid! Plague!”

  Mitty was horrified. He couldn't imagine the work such a paper would take. He wanted a topic that required no work. Most of all he wanted a topic with no fatal diseases.

  “Good,” said Mrs. Abrams.“That's settled.”

  Olivia IM'd. She was going to the girls' basketball game after school. Julianna was point guard. Zorah might be a starter. Did Mitty want to go?

  Mitty was not a big fan of girls' high school basketball. He wasn't a big fan of Julianna and Zorah either. He would have to think about this. “Tell you at lunch,” he wrote back.
<
br />   He didn't actually want to have lunch with anybody. He felt as if he had a new companion now, a very thoroughly lodged companion that would be with him until death. Variola major.

  At lunch, he was cornered by Derek, who would not shut up. Derek had decided it was not a crazy individual who had murdered poor old Ottilie Lundgren before she could finish reading her mystery novel, but a crazy country. “There's North Korea,” Derek began.“Talk about insanity.”

  There were whole continents that didn't interest Mitty, and North Korea was in one of them. Derek moved on to the Middle East, where the list of potential anthrax lovers was long: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt. He named groups and causes, leaders and fanatics. Then he forged into Africa, where Sudan and Ethiopia were filled with crazed persons with appalling histories, where funding might come from diamonds in Sierra Leone, and where mercenaries were available from anyplace where there'd been a recent civil war, which was every place.

  Olivia began discussing how AIDS had invaded many African countries.

  Derek was annoyed. “I'm into terrorism, not sexually transmitted disease. My theory is that a rogue country is endlessly surfing the Net, looking for opportunities. Like investors endlessly researching profitable companies. The terrorists wouldn't specifically care what they found, anymore than you care whether your stock is in farm tractors or casinos—you just want to earn money. The terrorists don't care if they find anthrax or smallpox—they just want to kill people. So they get their anthrax or whatever, pick a place like Grand Central Station, send a million commuters into such a panic they never take a train into New York again, and that destroys the economy and brings down a mayor and a governor and a president, and of course you'd have plenty of Americans who'll be glad to see that mayor, governor and president brought down, so even though you're a terrorist and you're killing people, you'll have people on your side.”

  “No, you won't,” said Olivia sharply. “No matter how much people don't like the party in office—”