Genesis Plague (14 page)

S
pasms wracked Dan’s body as he lay on the floor, as if electric
current coursed through his body in waves, turned on and off again by flipping
a switch.

I hurried to his side
and knelt down, trying to keep him from kicking me. The damn floppy helmet on
my suit twisted sideways, blocking my vision. I turned it back into place, my
breath fogging the plastic shield. The heat of my own skin reflected back on me
within the suit. I could have been baking in the tropics given how hot it was
inside.

“Come on, Dan,” I said
loudly as I uncapped the syringe. “Stay with me.”

He bucked hard. His flailing
arm smacked my wrist and the syringe flew across the room. It hit the far wall
and clattered to the hard floor, but it looked miraculously unbroken.

I cursed as I struggled
to my feet. Every movement required more effort than it should in the biosafety
suit. I also didn’t have much of my own air left. Stupid mistake. I only
expected to be in here less than a minute. I could imagine Cass shaking her
head at the rookie blunder, then I forced her from my mind.

My face shield was
completely fogged by the time I reached the syringe. The room outside my suit
looked like a blurred, smeary mess.

I turned back, holding
the syringe, and Dan was standing right in front of me. His red, wet eyes
glared at me. There was no intelligence behind them, just a wild, empty craze.

“Dan—” I said as I
raised the syringe, but he was too fast.

He knocked away the
needle and wrapped his strong hands around my throat. The suit crinkled under
his grip, threatening to rip as he squeezed harder.

“
Dan!
” I managed
to gurgle through the tiny pinhole of a passageway still open in my throat.

His bloodshot eyes
blazed furiously as he lifted me against the wall. My feet kicked in the air a
foot off the floor. Whatever peaceful serenity I had seen in Dan Grayson
earlier this morning was gone.

Right about then, I
realized my other mistake. I hadn’t told anyone I was going into one of the
observation rooms. Of course, there hadn’t exactly been time, but I should have
shouted down the hallway on my way into decontamination. Maybe this was my
version of my life flashing before my eyes right before death: a play-by-play
of all of my mistakes. I found that I was not just terrified of dying, but also
of reliving some of my more embarrassing moments.

With my last bit of
air, I tried to cough out an explanation to Dan of what I was doing in the
room, how he was having a seizure and he needed medicine, but I could no longer
speak. I kicked at his wet shins as he pushed me harder against the wall, but
he either couldn’t feel the kicks or he didn’t care.

My vision blackened at
the edges from a lack of oxygen to my brain. Soon it would go completely black.
It was funny how I had time to analyze everything that was happening in those
terrible moments. It was as if my brain processed events more slowly, torturing
me with the details.

There seemed to be no
rush as I thought,
Okay, this is it. This is how I die.

Dan used one hand to
rip off my helmet with a single pull. The air in the room was sticky and warm,
like a swamp. One of the hundreds of thoughts coursing through my brain at that
moment was that I was glad I couldn’t breathe to smell the stink.

I could feel the warmth
from his skin, though. Dan was radiating heat, as if he were being cooked from
the inside.

He opened his mouth to
scream at me, but no sound came out – there was just a gaping maw of black flesh
leading to the back of his splotchy throat. Swollen gums covered his teeth.

I pictured a dark cloud
of infected air between us. I
knew
the virus wasn’t airborne, but the thought
of breathing his air made my stomach flip over like a writhing octopus.

Then he stopped and
leaned in close. His face softened and his red eyes shifted back and forth
between my own, perhaps finally able to see me without the foggy face mask. He
suddenly released me, and I slumped down to the floor like a severed marionette,
coughing wildly and painfully sucking in air. I looked at the fallen syringe,
then up to Dan. His shoulders slouched and he turned away. I had the distinct
feeling he wouldn’t fight me if I tried to inject him.

Not that I wanted to
sedate him at that point. I would check with Conny to see if she wanted to put
him under to try and figure out why he had the seizure. Until then, I was
content to let Dan be.

I stood up slowly, hand
rubbing my throat, still struggling to catch my breath.

The speaker in the
ceiling screeched static and I nearly jumped out of my biosafety suit.

“Paul!”

I turned, heart
pounding, to see Dr. Johann Ehrlich staring at me. The bespectacled virologist
was rail-thin, tall, with unruly white-blond hair. His lab coat was a few sizes
too small, the sleeves only reaching halfway down his forearms.

He tapped his watch and
pointed out to the hallway. Without waiting for me to respond, or even asking
if everything was alright, he rushed out of the room, the tail of his short lab
coat trailing behind him.

Dan lay down on the bed
and turned his back to me. I picked up my torn helmet and tried to imagine what
it would be like to lose your body and your mind to an illness, to have it
slowly eat away at your soul, and the whole time you knew there was nothing you
can do to stop it.

I figured Dan was
handling it pretty well, considering.

I
overrode the auto-complete function in the decontamination
chamber and forced a second cycle, inhaling the burning mists, unable to shake
the creeping feeling that Dan’s infection had wormed its way into my system. I
planned to test my own blood after I saw what crawled up Johann’s nether
regions and put him in one of his moods. But unless the virus had spontaneously
mutated to become airborne while I was in Dan’s room, I knew I’d be fine.

Still, it was a hard
feeling to shake.

Johann was waiting for
me in the hallway when I left the decontamination chamber. He hastily pushed
his wire-rim glasses higher up the bridge of his nose and looked at me with
exasperation.

“Everyone is waiting on
you,” he said in a thick German accent. “Did Flint give you my message?”

“What message?” I asked,
unfazed. After my meeting with Dan, it would have taken a lot more than
Johann’s impatience to stir me up.

He sighed angrily and
shook his head. “Never mind now. Come, come!” he said, waving me forward
quickly. “And try not to say anything to embarrass the team.”

Johann led the way
through a door across the hall and into a small conference room with white,
sterile walls. A round table of dark wood and the four chairs surrounding it were
the only pieces of furniture. On the table was a sleek laptop, with several
wires running out of the back and into a modem in the corner of the room.
Johann turned the laptop so its camera faced our direction as I sat down.

“You might want to
stand for this,” he said primly.

He pressed a button and
a large rectangle of light splashed onto the wall.

The image came into
focus and revealed a spacious conference room. Six gloomy individuals in
business attire sat around a polished black table. Blue sky showed through the
giant glass window behind them.

Johann cleared his
throat. “Sorry to keep you waiting.” He adjusted his glasses and nodded to the
only woman on the screen, a sternly beautiful woman in her early fifties. Her
light brunette hair was cropped conservatively at her shoulders, and she wore
no makeup except for a hint of mascara. “Madame President.”

“Dr. Ehrlich,” she said
politely, and then she looked at me. “Dr. Nassai. Tell me you have good news.”

Johann’s smile came
quick and easy. “We will have the vaccine within the hour.”

I leaned forward to
tell him he might want to temper his eagerness until we looked at the data from
the most recent batch of tests, but he spoke over me.

“We firmly believe,”
said Johann loudly, flashing a look of warning in my direction, “that we have
isolated the mechanism the virus uses to attack our bodies, and we have
tailored our vaccine to render its strategy obsolete. It works by first
identifying—”

“I’m sure the details
are fascinating, Dr. Ehrlich,” said a gruff man sitting beside the President. I
recognized him as Michael Stanz, her Chief of Staff. “What can you tell us
about how the virus affects us directly?”

Johann’s shoulders dropped
a little. “Paul, if you would?”

I scooted closer to the
table and began typing on the laptop’s keyboard. I sent an image to the monitor
in the President’s conference room. There was a smaller version on my laptop’s
screen: a close-up of the underside of a forearm. The patient wore a yellow
wristband with his name printed on it. The name was blurred out, but I knew who
the arm belonged to.

“As you know,” I said,
“we are currently monitoring two patients in advanced stages of infection. One
hour ago marked the beginning of the sixth day since coming into contact with
the virus.”

I hit a key and the
image zoomed in to show faint black veins tracing erratic patterns over Dan
Grayson’s arm.

“This was taken on the
fourth day of infection. Until then, the worst symptom we observed was a minor
cough, no more serious than having a tickle in the back of your throat. What
you’re seeing in this image represents the first visual symptom. It’s a series
of dead capillaries that once carried infected blood throughout the body.”

“Wait just a minute,”
said Stanz, holding up his hand and glancing at the President. “You’re saying
these people were infected for
four days
before they showed any
symptoms?”

“That’s exactly what
I’m saying.”

The Chief of Staff
sputtered and looked at the President. “So if this thing gets out, how the hell
do we identify the infected?!”

“It won’t get out,”
said Johann calmly. “Sirs. Madame President. We are taking every precaution to
ensure this virus dies here, in this facility. In less than an hour, the
vaccine will be ready, and there will be nothing to worry about.”

An elderly man in a gray
suit leaned forward. “What about this flu business in Seattle?”

“Unrelated,” said
Johann.

I shook my head. “We’re
still waiting on a blood sample from the hospitalized patients at St.
Christopher’s downtown.”

“So this bug could already
be out in the open,” said Stanz.

“We have determined the
virus can survive up to seventy-two hours outside of the
Loasis
organism, which is where it originated,” I said, “but the virus remains inert
until coming into contact with a desirable host. Since it isn’t an airborne
pathogen, there’s no way for it to spread.”

“Sounds airborne to
me,” said Stanz, “if it can survive outside a host body.”

“It is a purely
fluid-borne bacteriophage. Infected hosts can’t pass it through the air unless their
saliva or blood was clinging to airborne particulate matter, for example.”

“Bottom line?”

“The flu outbreak is
unrelated,” Johann said.

The Chief of Staff
leaned back in his chair, visibly relieved. He turned to the President and softly
whispered, “I mean, Jesus, Madame President, can you imagine if this thing got
out?”

She nodded.

“Help me out here, doctor,”
said the man in the gray suit. “What’s a bacteriophage?”

“A virus that
replicates using bacterium in a host,” Johann said. “In this case, the
Loasis
virus attacks the bacteria in our upper intestine, colonizing and reproducing
until the swollen culture ruptures the intestine wall.”

There were disgusted
groans from the President and her staff.

I hit a key on the
laptop to display a close-up of Dan Grayson’s exposed back. It looked as if large
strips of flesh had been ripped out from both sides of his spine.

“Patient A was infected
roughly twelve hours before Patient B,” I said, hitting a key.

The image of Dan
appeared side-by-side with a picture of Levino’s back, which showed less severe
symptoms. “That’s Patient A on the left. These lesions began to appear toward
the end of the fourth day of infection.”

I hit a key to display
another image: a close-up of a Dan Grayson’s eyes, wet and bloodshot.

“Day five. At this
stage he was experiencing bleeding from the eyes and nose, increased agitation,
and a strong desire for companionship.”

“I’m sorry, doctor,”
Stanz said. “Companionship?”

I sighed, hesitant to
continue. I knew from the beginning it would be a tough pill to swallow.

“When the patients
aren’t complaining about the pain,” I said, “they express a strong desire to be
with others, mostly with close relatives and friends.”

“I’m afraid I don’t
understand,” said the President.

“We don’t either,
Ma’am,” I said. “Not yet, at least. We believe it’s related to an increase in
blood pressure in certain parts of the brain. The virus thins the blood,
hindering coagulation. It seems to be channeling more blood to specific parts
of the body, chiefly the brain and stomach.”

“For what purpose?”

“We don’t know, Ma’am.
Dr. Conny Tate, one of our colleagues, is currently trying to find an answer.”

“Are the patients
isolated?”

“Completely,” said
Johann. “They have no contact with each other whatsoever, nor with the outside
world.”

The President sighed
and leaned back in her chair. For a moment, she appeared ten years older, and
the worry was plainly visible in her eyes. Then her face hardened and she
looked into the camera.

“Does your facility
need anything?” she asked. “How are you on staff? I know you’re working with a
small team.”

“Actually,” I said,
“some of our staff left and we could use some lab tech—”

“Madame President,”
interrupted Johann, “we are operating at equilibrium. Sending more now would be
a waste, since we will have the vaccine in less than an hour.”

The President’s eyes
narrowed. “Dr. Ehrlich, I hope your confidence is not misplaced. Regardless,
I’m ordering more security personnel for the building. Expect them to arrive
within the next few hours.” She looked at me. “Good luck.”

Johann and I answered
in unison. “Thank you, Madame President.”

The screen went blank.