Code Orange

by Caroline B. Cooney

  He wished he'd paid attention in history and English. If he had actually read his Shakespeare or Homer, if he actually knew the battles of the Revolutionary War or the World Wars, he could tell himself those stories and pretend that he was about to die a warrior's death.

  But he wasn't.

  The guards sat down, one on the second step from the bottom and the other several steps higher. Mitty was used to their ski masks now. He was glad he would never see their faces. It made things easier. He did not sit near the water supply, because eventually these two would want access to it. He needed his own corner of this very small space.

  He headed for the furnace. He did not look at his goal. This was like basketball; you kept your eye on the person guarding you, not the person to whom you were going to pass. He was very close to his captors now. The stair rail was between them, but this was a visual barrier, not a real blockade.

  He took another step.

  The men did not seem to sense anything coming.

  Mitty reached up fast and clapped his hands like cymbals, smashing the single lightbulb between his palms.

  Splinters of glass sliced his palms, meaningless compared to the pain in his jaw. In the dark, Mitty moved fast. These guys knew where they were on the stairs, but they wouldn't be able to find their way in the dark. They shouted pointlessly while Mitty slipped behind the furnace and grabbed the T-shirt he had put there.

  This was a gas furnace. And Mitty knew that when gas combines with oxygen, it burns cleanly and produces colorless, odorless, tasteless carbon dioxide, which goes out a metal pipe and up the chimney. If the chimney is blocked, though, the waste gas does not leave the cellar but instead begins to fill the space left by the burned oxygen. Eventually the proportion of oxygen to gas changes: from then on, as the gas burns, the result is colorless, odorless, tasteless and very poisonous carbon monoxide.

  The furnace in this old cellar was also old. Nobody had been maintaining it. Mitty considered the possibility that he felt this lousy because the flue was in bad shape already and he'd been breathing a low level of carbon monoxide for four days. But in the end, it didn't matter. Because this was the end.

  Ignoring the glass splinters in his hand, Mitty felt along the length of the metal flue pipe. He located the Draft-O-Stat, with its small, round swinging door, shoved his T-shirt into the flue and plugged it.

  By morning, they would all be asleep for good.

  Quickly Mitty moved back to the washtub, his socks silent on the cement. He turned on the faucet again so they'd place him on that side of the room. He kept expecting them to pulverize him, but they didn't come after him. Maybe they still believed they wouldn't get smallpox if they just didn't touch him. Maybe they were afraid of spiders. Who knew?

  Mitty prayed silently, but the wrong prayers came out. He bargained with God. Let me live and I'll be smart, hardworking, useful and generous. Is it a deal? I'll be the best student in the whole world. The best son. The best everything.

  The Blakes went to church maybe four or five Sundays a year. Mitty remembered a lot of those Sundays individually. Different churches, different ministers, different states, but Mitty always felt the same: equal parts insider and outsider. “Don't go begging God for help in tight spots,” one minister had said, “when you didn't bother to thank him for the good ones.”

  Mitty suddenly knew he was an insider after all. I didn't bother, Mitty said to God. But luckily it's you, and you always bother. So here I am and I'll see you around pretty soon.

  Time moved slowly.

  Every now and then, the phone in the kitchen rang.

  The guys had gotten cold. Mitty was used to it down here, but they weren't. They moved the bed next to the furnace. By the burner light, Mitty could see them in a ghostly sort of way. They didn't lie down but sat with their backs together, propping each other up, nice and close to the source of carbon monoxide.

  One of the terrorists had a wristwatch that lit up when he pressed the little knob on the side. He lit it constantly. Mitty checked his own watch. Saturday night, February 14. The outer edge of the catch-smallpox-or-not schedule.

  He stroked his skin, but since the first visible symptoms were not raised, he wouldn't ever know. On the other hand, if carbon monoxide got him first, his complexion would be turning cherry red, the outward sign of that kind of poisoning.

  He felt awful. He was going to fade before they did. It would be so lame if they got through this and he didn't. If only he could be alive to make sure his plan worked.

  Mitty needed to rest his head on something. Paper rustled as the men turned to watch him, but they didn't get off the mattress. Mitty curled up at the base of the stairs. With the bottom step supporting the weight of his head, he felt marginally less terrible.

  He had not done much to save New York, but he had done something.

  He thought of Olivia. This wasn't the Valentine's Day she had wanted.

  He made his apologies to his parents. You gave me good genes and good rules and good love. I'm sorry this is going to be lousy for you.

  To God he gave thanks. You gave me great parents and a great life, but I shrugged. Thank you for letting me have a few days when I didn't shrug.

  Mitty's eyes closed.

  He slumped down.

  After a while, his head rolled onto the floor and his body blocked the stairs.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The sun was going down on Valentine's Day. As they had on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday Derek and Olivia were walking in Riverside Park. They were going uptown, with the Hudson River on their left and the strip of trees and tennis courts and pretty little stone buildings on their right. It was getting cold and dark, but the sidewalk was still a promenade for lovers. There were old couples and young couples, scary couples and sweet couples.

  Olivia and Mitty had stood on the edge of being a couple. But they hadn't quite become one.

  Olivia stared at the river. She could not imagine the actual act of stepping off this sidewalk and into that water.

  We're never going to know, she thought. He vanished and we won't ever find out where he went or if somebody took him and what they did. How absurd Derek and I were to think we could print out his smallpox paper and come up with some knowledge that would guide us to a rescue plan. Of course we didn't learn a thing, except that Mitty did fine research without me and that smallpox is quite literally the last thing you want on earth.

  The FBI and the CDC were in touch constantly with Mr. and Mrs. Blake, who were in touch constantly with Derek and Olivia. But if they had found out anything or gotten anywhere, they did not tell the Blakes. Everybody was too slow, thought Olivia. Mitty was gone a dozen hours before the search really began. Any scene on a sidewalk, any witness to an event, any clue dropped in the street was already forgotten. Solving a crime is impossible for slow people. It's probably impossible for fast people who get there late.

  Ahead of them was a couple half dancing along as they held hands and leaned on each other with affection. Tied to the woman's wrist was a balloon bouquet and clasped in the man's other hand was their dog's leash. The dog was mutt shape and color: small, ratty and desert yellow. But the couple loved their dog; Olivia could tell because of the crisp Valentine's scarf tied so jauntily around its neck. The couple turned around and were now face to face with Olivia and Derek.

  They were old. Wrinkled and gray and giggling with love.

  Oh, Mitty, thought Olivia. I want you to grow old. Don't don't don't die young.

  “Remember the antiwar poem we read for Mrs. Abrams?” asked Derek.“By Wilfred Owen?” In English, Mrs. Abrams skipped around. You'd be doing tenth-century stuff followed by nineteenth-century stuff, whip back to the sixteenth- and circle around to the early-twentieth. Mrs. Abrams loved World War One literature.

  Don't tell your children the old lie, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, wrote Wilfred Owen, that it is sweet and wonderful to die for your country. Because it isn't. Dying for your country means choking on
poison gas and rotting in a trench. “Mitty didn't think it was an old lie,” said Derek.“He thought it was an old truth: it is pleasing and proper to die for your country. He respected people who died for their country. Mitty wasn't a pacifist. He said our teachers want us to roll over and play dead, but he would go bear hunting with a stick before he let anybody get away with stuff against his city.”

  The previous fall Olivia had not had a crush on Mitty, and since they were in different sections for English, she had not read his essay. She remembered her own, in which she mocked people who died for their country; called them suckers.

  “Mitty loved heroes,” said Derek.

  “What Is a Hero?” had been their next essay topic.

  “Mitty said that a hero,” Derek told her,“is the guy who runs into the burning building to save the baby.”

  “It's an okay definition if you save the baby,” said Olivia. “But what if you see the burning building and hear the baby crying and run as fast as you can, but you're not fast enough, and you can't get through the flames?”

  “You could die trying. And that would count.”

  “You can't be a hero unless people know,” said Olivia.

  “He'd know,” said Derek. I think that would be enough for Mitty.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Mitty could no longer move his eyelids or his toes.

  Not his fingers or even his tongue. The end was almost here.

  He heard voices shouting; feet smashing on the stair treads. He felt himself turned over. Patted. Examined.

  “Not enough light,” said someone clearly.

  Mitty was hoisted into the air and carried like the sack of limp flesh that he was. The person going up first held Mitty around the chest and under the arms, and that person was strong. The person holding Mitty's feet was not strong and let his heels catch on the steps.

  He was dropped. His skull clunked against the floor. He managed to open his eyes. His cheek was pressed on old speckled linoleum. The door to the outside had been left open. Icy wind filled the kitchen above his prison.

  Air. Blessed air.

  But oxygen did not bring strength. Mitty could not lift his head or even pull his hands from under his twisted body.

  A car had been backed up to that kitchen door. All its doors had also been left open. Ready, Mitty supposed, for everybody to leap in and drive on to their next destination. A destination, presumably, that Mitty would not like any better than this one.

  He had thought that, like the passengers in the plane over Pennsylvania, he could bring down the murderers with their own weapon.

  Well, he couldn't.

  The people hovering over him now were dressed in street clothes. He knew the woman in brown by her boots. But she was not the one who spoke.

  Since Mitty could not lift his head, the other person knelt beside him. Gloved hands patted Mitty's face and gloved hands pressed upward on his eyelids, forcing them open. From behind a mask, this time a surgical mask, white and clean, a man said, “So. You have it, the smallpox.”

  Should've done your research, thought Mitty.

  “I am impressed that you overcame your guards. But your victory lasts only a minute. You will kill your own people for us and we will dance in your streets.” He stood up. He was laughing.

  The woman in brown and the man in the mask went back down into the cellar to get the guards.

  No, thought Mitty Blake.

  You will not dance in my streets.

  Mitty Blake rolled over.

  He kicked the cellar door shut.

  The recorded low temperature on the night of February 14 and the dawn of February 15 in New York City was fifteen degrees.

  The boy with no shirt on slept by an open door, the poison seeping out of his body.

  His 911 call took place on Sunday, February 15, at 2:22 p.m.

  Later, it was announced that the accidental deaths of four illegal aliens from carbon monoxide poisoning were due to a malfunctioning furnace.

  Two laptops and three cellular phones were confiscated by the NYPD. Work began to find a money trail, a paper trail and links to terrorist groups. Fearing a general panic, the authorities did not publicize a terrorist attempt to acquire smallpox. The CDC made changes to their Web site, stating clearly and frequently that it was not possible to become infected with smallpox from old smallpox scabs and that if such a scab were found, viable virus could not be recovered from that scab.

  Mitty Blake did not get smallpox.

  His injuries did, however, require a hospital stay. Not many people received permission to visit. The few people who did visit were shaken to find guards at the door of Mitty's room; to find themselves asked to produce identification and to have the contents of their bags examined. His parents told most people—classmates and neighbors and friends from the building and friends from the gym and friends from who knew where—that Mitty had been in a car accident, but he would be fine; right now he needed quiet.

  Mitty personally hated quiet and was glad to have the FBI and the NYPD and his parents and his sister around, debriefing him.

  Everybody wanted every detail. There were some details Mitty did not plan to share. He was pretty sure his father knew this and pretty sure his mother never suspected.

  Emily had flown home from college and spent twenty-four hours a day—since they were all three sleepless with fear—promising their parents that Mitty would be found alive. All she said now was, “Mitty Blake, how could you make that many stupid decisions all in a row?”

  His parents took turns sleeping in the chair next to Mitty's bed, and only when his sister or the FBI intervened would his mom and dad actually leave the room. Even then, his mother grilled the guard to make sure Mitty would be protected in her absence.

  On the third day, Derek and Olivia were allowed in. Since Mitty's mother and father and sister and the guard and a stray CDC official were there too, greetings were stilted and conversation was awkward. Finally Emily took control and herded everybody out.

  When the door shut behind them, Derek came right to the point. “So are you brain damaged? I read up on carbon monoxide poisoning. Are you functioning or are you a vegetable?”

  “I am functioning at such a high level,” said Mitty, hurling his dinner tray at Derek,“that you will never attain it.”

  Derek caught the tray like a Frisbee, slung it back and then whipped Mitty with a thermal blanket, accidentally scattering dozens of get-well cards. Mitty reached for a heavy pottery vase of flowers.

  “Stop it, Mitty,” commanded Olivia, “or this hospital room is going to look as awful as your bedroom.”

  “You've been in my bedroom?” said Mitty, grinning in spite of his wired jaw. “What have I missed?”

  “Me,” said Olivia. “You've missed me.”

  That night, his father helped him get ready for sleep, and his mother actually agreed not to spend the night in the chair but to go on home and see him in the morning. Mitty knew it took courage for her to walk away. He knew his sister had worked to make it happen.

  He didn't have to tell Emily that he owed her and she didn't have to tell him that it was okay. She just said, “I won't see you at breakfast, Mitty. I'm flying back to school.”

  His eyes teared up, one of the many annoyances of being ill.

  They all hugged, wordlessly exchanging farewells, except for his mother, who was never wordless, and at last Mitty was alone.

  Mitty sat up in bed and looked out his window at New York City.

  He couldn't see much. It was kind of a boring view, actually. It could have been any city.

  But it's my city, thought Mitty Blake. And no bad guys are dancing in my streets.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  So many friends helped with Code Orange. Thanks to all of them.

  Jeanne D. Breen, MD, infectious disease physician, sent me an article from the online publication of the International Society for Infectious Disease, which had been edited from an article in the Washington Post,
December 26, 2003. A librarian in Santa Fe had found smallpox scabs in a book and immediately had the FBI on her doorstep. What a story! Not only did Jeanne provide me with this great idea, she was also a line editor and baseball expert.

  My son-in-law, Mark Zanardi, came up with ways to disable people in cellars and provided mechanical knowledge.

  Peter Smith added furnace details.

  Lee M. David explained locks.

  David Slivinski did online research and provided rock music suggestions.

  Lynn Blevins, MD, MPH, medical epidemiologist, corrected a number of points.

  Widespread Panic was my nephew Ben Bruce's favorite band at a time when he had the job Mitty wants: rock reviewer.

  I'm grateful to Eileen Monroe's students at EasternMiddle School and Kathie Cietanno's at East Lyme Middle School for their help with iPods and Instant Messaging.

  Ottilie Lundgren was a real person, victim of the still unknown anthrax murderer. All descriptions of her are from newspaper accounts.

  Some facts cited here about Typhoid Mary can be found in Kenneth Jackson's outstanding Encyclopedia of New York City.

  The news that nine countries in Africa now have polio cases is from the Washington Post, June 16,2004, so it is not properly something Mitty's classmates could have known about in February, but I wanted a graphic reminder of the vital importance of vaccinating.

  The statistic on the number of Google sites comes from Google's own site.

  The statistic that black pox is more common in teenagers is from The Demon in the Freezer, page 51.

  Ain't Life Grand is an album by Widespread Panic; song quotes are from “Heroes.”

  Beowulf quotes are from the Seamus Heaney translation, bilingual edition, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 2000.

  The Bible quote Mitty remembers refers to Judas.

  The hundreds of letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) can be found in various editions.

  There is no St. Raphael's school in Manhattan.