Contagious (22 page)

Why do you think I am God?
“You know, because you can talk in my head and stuff. People can’t do that, mostly.”
What do you think of God, Chelsea?
Chelsea sang. “
Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so
. We go to church most Sundays, except during football season sometimes we don’t. I love God because God loves me.”
The Orbital called up more images. He examined the signals coming from Chelsea’s brain as she talked of God and Jesus. Yes, this was a powerful motivator.
Chelsea, if God told you to do something bad, would you do it?
Chelsea stopped drawing on her Barbie. She looked at the wall, just kind of staring out, tilting her head to the right as she thought.
“Daddy says sometimes God tests us, but God loves us and he wouldn’t ask us to do anything bad. So if
God
asked me to do something, then it
couldn’t
be bad, so I would do it.”
Yes.
“Yes what?”
Yes, I am God.
“Oh,” Chelsea said. “Okay. Can I still call you Chauncey?”
Yes.
Chelsea picked up her doll and started drawing blue triangles.
“Chauncey, do you like Snickers or Twix better?”
The Orbital continued to answer questions.
The door to
her room opened slowly, and Mommy peeked her head inside.
“Chelsea, baby, how are you feeling?”
“Okay,” Chelsea said. She picked up another doll and took off its clothes.
“Chelsea, what are you doing in here?”
“Just drawing triangles on my dolls and talking to Chauncey.”
“Ohhh,” Mommy said. “Your special friend Chauncey?”
“Uh-huh,” Chelsea said. She drew a blue triangle on this doll’s forehead.
Very
pretty.
“What are you talking to him about?”
“Oh, you know,” Chelsea said. “Flowers, and my pink dress, and what’s the best cartoons, and basketball and gravity and ice cream and God and dollies and—”
“Okay, honey,” Mommy said, cutting Chelsea off. Mommy was laughing a little. Chelsea didn’t know what was so funny.
“You keep talking to Chauncey,” Mommy said. “Are you drawing on all your dolls? Is that a permanent marker? Don’t ruin them, honey.”
“I’m not ruining them, Mommy,” Chelsea said. She picked up a blond Barbie with blue triangles on her arms, legs and face. She held it up so Mommy could see. “They’re not ruined. I’m making them better. I’m making them
pretty.”
“Okay, honey,” Mommy said. “You come get me if you need anything, okay?”
“Okay, Mommy.”
Mommy closed the door. Chelsea set the Barbie on the right-hand pile, then grabbed another doll from the pile on the left.
TEEN ANGST
Margaret refused to cry.
She had a job to do. But looking at the flat-panel monitor, looking at that poor girl’s
face . . .
“Let me
go
!” the girl screamed. She pulled weakly against her restraints, but she wasn’t going anywhere. Even if she got out of the restraints, she couldn’t escape the tiny containment chamber’s clear, reinforced walls.
Cameras mounted outside her chamber provided an excellent view. white epoxy walls blazed under the ceiling’s embedded neon lights. Leather cuffs held Betty Jewell’s wrists and ankles tight to the autopsy trolley. A disposable roll of thin foam on top of the cart gave it a little bit of padding, but it was still a steel cart and wasn’t designed with comfort in mind. She wore a blue hospital gown spotted with purple where her oozing sores leaked blood.
“We injected her with the WDE-4-11 formula,” Dan said. “That slowed the apoptosis reaction, but she’s still breaking down, particularly around her facial lesions.”
“We have to operate immediately,” Amos said. “We have to get rid of that compromised tissue, see if we can stop the chain reaction entirely.”
Margaret turned to Dan. “Has she given any indication of when she started showing symptoms? What has she said so far?”
“She just won’t talk to us,” he said. “She believes we’re here to kill her. She keeps asking for her father, but I think she knows her father is dead. She’s asking for her mother, too.”
“Did you contact the mother?” Margaret asked.
Dan shook his head. “We haven’t tried.”
Amos turned on him. “What the hell do you mean, you
haven’t tried
? The girl just lost her father. She needs her family.”
“I have orders to keep any infected victims in isolation,” Dan said. “No contact of any kind until I’ve relinquished custody, which I’m doing now to you, Doctor Montoya.”
“Well, fine,” Margaret said. “We’ve got custody now. Clarence, please call the girl’s mother.”
“No,” Clarence said.
Margaret stared at him, dumbfounded. Dan she could understand, he was military, but Clarence? “We are calling this girl’s family, and
right now.”
“I’m afraid we can’t do that, Doc,” Clarence said.
“But she doesn’t have triangles,” Margaret said. “She’s got something, sure, but nothing is going to hatch out of her. She’s not a threat.”
Clarence shook his head. “You know we can’t say that for sure, Margaret. How many times have you told me that the disease might shift, might become contagious? You said it’s mutated, right?”
Margaret didn’t know what to say—he was using her own words against her.
Amos jabbed a finger at the monitor. “That is an
American citizen
in that
cage.
Yes,
cage.
She’s got
rights,
goddamit.”
Clarence again shook his head. “Not right now she doesn’t. We contact the mother and the next thing you know, the press is all over it.”
“The
press
?” Amos shouted. “You’re worried about the
press
? Listen up, you goose-stepping assho—”
“Amos, stop,” Margaret said. “He’s right. She could be contagious.”
Amos looked at her like she was crazy. “Well, sure she could be contagious,” he said. “That’s why we have her in a fucking BSL-4 containment cell. It doesn’t change the fact that she’s a scared teenage girl. She needs her family. We can bring in the mother, keep her under surveillance or whatever.”
“He’s right about the media, too,” Margaret said.
“Margaret, what the hell is wrong with you?” Amos said. “You’re a
doctor.
Remember the phrase
primum non nocere
?”
Margaret swallowed. The phrase was Latin for
first, do no harm.
It wasn’t actually part of the Hippocratic Oath, but the words were still drilled into every med student’s head.
“Yes, I remember,” she said. “I also remember another Latin phrase, the one we found painted in Kiet Nguyen’s bedroom. The house with all the dead kids.
E pluribus unum.
You remember that?”
Amos said nothing. He looked away.
“What’s that mean, Amos? Say it.”
“It means ‘out of one, many,’ ” he said quietly.
“So we follow the orders,” Margaret said. “We don’t call the girl’s family. Get suited up. We’re going to go in there and talk to her.”
Fully suited, Margaret
and Amos walked into the autopsy room. An airtight door led into the collapsible walkway that connected Trailer B. Margaret watched the light above that door turn from red to green. Amos pulled up on the latch and swung the door outward to reveal a four-foot-long corridor and a matching door on the other side. They had to close their door to open the other, both because it was an airlock and because there wasn’t enough room in the corridor to open both.
When it came time to move the MargoMobile, built-in nozzles would douse the walkway’s interior with the chlorine/bleach. Gitsh and Marcus would then fold the walkway into its bracket inside Trailer B, shut the seamless outer door, and the MargoMobile would make like Willie Nelson—on the road again.
She stepped into the walkway. Amos shut the door behind her. Above the door to Trailer B, the light turned from red to green. Amos opened that door, and they stepped through. Only four feet away sat Betty’s containment cell.
The girl lifted her head to see them, and Margaret’s heart nearly broke in two.
Three giant black sores soiled the left side of her face. One centered on her cheekbone, one on her jaw where it met the neck, and one up on her temple. The last one undercut dark hair that must have been beautiful once. Now, wet strands clung to her face, her forehead and the table around her.
The decomposing black spots on her face were by far the worst, but they weren’t the only trouble areas. At least two dozen dime-size circles spotted her body. Her hands looked terrible; half the skin there was wrinkled, black and oozing, her fingers like a modern-art sculpture made from wet raisins. Several IV needles ran into veins on her feet—two of the few unblemished areas left on her body.
The girl shook with sobs. Even though she’d been strapped down for something like sixteen hours, she had no shortage of tears.
Margaret and Amos walked up to the clear glass cell. A flat-panel touch-screen controller mounted on the door served as a wireless interface for all systems in the containment cell. It could even be used to trigger a last-ditch emergency sterilization. All someone had to do was type in #-5-4-5-5, and every inch of both trailers would fill with the deadly chlorine/bleach combination.
Margaret hit a button to turn on the intercom system—they would be able to hear Betty on their earpieces, and their voices would be pumped into speakers inside the cell.
“Hello, Betty,” Margaret said.
Betty stopped whimpering for a second, just long enough to draw in a huge, ragged lungful of air.
“Let me go!”
“We can’t,” Margaret said. “You’re very ill.”
“
No fucking shit
I’m ill, you fucking
assholes
! Did you do this to me?
Please,
get my dad. Get my mom.
Please
!”
“Your father is dead,” Amos said.
Margaret quickly pressed a button on the touch screen to turn off the intercom.
“Amos, what are you doing?”
“Telling her the truth.”
Margaret wanted to smack him right in the mouth. “Amos, we need to get this girl to talk, not put her further into hysterics.”
“Margaret, I’ve got a teenage daughter,” he said. “You do not. So shut the fuck up.”
He had a cold look on his face, an expression Margaret hadn’t seen on him before. Amos was personalizing this, projecting Betty’s situation onto his own child. He reached for the button and turned on the chamber’s speakers. “It’s true, Betty,” Amos said. “You father is dead. I’m very sorry.”
Margaret realized that Betty wasn’t screaming anymore. The girl still had tears streaming down her ruined face, but there was also a hard lucidity in those eyes.
“Daddy’s . . . dead? You
killed
him?”
“He died in the parking lot before anyone could get to him,” Amos said. “Before anyone could help him.”
A single sob hit her body like a big cough, and then she lay still.
“But I’ve been here for like hours,” Betty said, fighting back sobs. “Why didn’t anyone just fucking
tell
me?”
“Because they didn’t think you could handle it,” Amos said. “They treated you like a child. I’m sorry about that, but Doctor Montoya and I are in charge now. My name is Doctor Amos Braun.”
“What’s . . . what’s happening to me?”
“You are very sick,” Amos said. “You have whatever killed your father. We don’t know why it’s developing more slowly in you.”
“Why are you doing this to me?”
“We’re trying to save you,” Amos said. “We need to ask some important questions first. Where were you and your father coming from?”
“Just let me go,” Betty said in a low voice. “I’m not one of the ones you want, I swear. Don’t kill me,
please
don’t kill me.”
“Betty, we’re not trying to ki—”
“I will fucking slash your throat, you needle-dick motherfucker!”
She yanked at her restraints so hard the heavy trolley wobbled.
“Lemmego-lemmegolemmego!”
“Amos, we need to put her under,” Margaret said. “She’s paranoid.”
Amos ignored Margaret. His face showed anguish, his deep need to see Betty calm down and cooperate. Was it Betty Jewell he saw in there or his own daughter—rotting, terrified and strapped to an autopsy trolley?
“Where were you coming from?” he asked. “We need to know where you were.”
Betty stared at them, wide eyes full of hate and terror. She screamed, one long, ragged note. She stopped only to draw a deep breath, then hit the ragged note again.
“Please,” Amos said. “Stop this. We’re trying to help you.”
“Amos, that’s enough,” Margaret said. She reached to the control panel and hit a button, sending fifty milligrams of propofol through one of the IV needles taped to Betty’s feet. Amos put both of his gloved hands on the glass. He and Margaret silently watched as Betty’s screams slowed, faded and stopped.
“She’s out,” Margaret said.
“Then let’s get her wheeled into Trailer A,” Amos said. “I want to operate immediately.”
MIXED MESSAGES
The neural net stretched through Betty’s frontal lobe, but it was still very thin.
Too
thin to send the signal. It needed more connections.
For hours Betty’s crawlers had fought the dissolving chain reaction, struggling to reach her brain. The WDE-4-11 injection turned out to be a lifeline for the crawlers—combined with their own apoptosis antidote secretions, it stalled the chain reaction before it grew so bad that they couldn’t even move.
As Margaret and Amos wheeled Betty through the collapsible walkway and into the autopsy room, some of the muscle fibers coalesced at the center of her brain, tore themselves to bits and formed a ball. Where Chelsea’s ball of fibers was a thousand microns wide, Betty’s was closer to six hundred, just over half the size.
It was enough to send a weak signal.
And enough to receive a response.
That response signal wasn’t for the crawlers. It was meant for the host.
The remaining crawlers stopped producing the apoptosis antidote and started flooding Betty’s brain with neurotransmitters.
They had to wake her up, wake her up so she could receive the signal.
CHEFFIE’S OPEN DOOR
Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
The phrase is attributed to Herodotus and refers to the courier service of the ancient Persian Empire. Many people incorrectly think this is the motto of the United States Postal Service. The phrase
is
inscribed over the James A. Farley post office in New York City, but it’s not an official slogan.
Official or not, John Burkle figured it was a pretty dead-nuts on-target description for driving a white postal truck in weather fifteen goddamn degrees below freezing, complemented by goddamn thirty-mile-per-hour winds that were blowing thin sheets of snow right across the goddamn back roads. Who drives in this weather?