Immortality (29 page)

After a short fifty mile ride in the Blackhawk, they were on the ground in a parking lot. Ahead of them was an old elementary school that had been taken over by the Red Cross. After being given permission by the pilot, Mark peeled off his NBC suit. They were like portable saunas. Kathy was right behind him. They left the suits inside duffel bags on the Blackhawk. The NBC gear would be recycled when the helicopter made its return trip to the quarantine control point. Kathy looked at home in the Army fatigues. Mark felt a little odd that now even the clothes on his back were Government Issue; another layer of personal control had been peeled away.

They had checked in at a front desk and were being guided by a middle-aged, male Red Cross volunteer down a hallway lined with lockers toward the back of the school. There was some kind of meeting going on in a gymnasium as they passed. Most of the classrooms had been converted into field offices and were occupied. In a classroom next to the library was where the Red Cross was collecting digital photographs of the dead; there were over a hundred thousand images and the number was continuously growing. The raw images were on optical disks which were not available to the public yet; copies of the photos were printed for public use on four-inch wide strips of paper that were stored inside shoebox-sized cartons. The boxes were stacked on newly erected metal shelves that reached to the ceiling. Several printers were feeding out fresh images of ghosts. There was a small stepladder next to the shelves. A folding lunch table had been pushed up against one wall. On the table was a coffee maker, ashtrays filled with cigarettes, and plenty of space to view pictures of dead loved ones. The room smelled of smoke and something Mark could only describe as despair.

He walked over to the shelves. The side of every box was labeled with a postal zip code and groups of streets from where the bodies had been removed. The Red Cross volunteer had said there were over two thousand boxes and a new one was added every half hour.

As if the printed strip was soiled, Mark gingerly lifted the first image from the first box. He stared at it and, to his surprise, felt nothing. The anticipation was gone and reality was not as terrible as he’d imagined. The photo was of a middle-aged woman. She was lying on a drab green tarp. There were four images: one full length and then headshots of front, left side, and right side. She was dressed in a skirt and a silk blouse. Her name was printed on the bottom – Ann Martin; below that was her driver’s license number. She looked like a nice woman, someone who hadn’t deserved to die. He picked up the next image, a young woman. She had short blonde hair and was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans: Jane Doe, no driver’s license number.

The room had grown hot. Mark stepped down off the stepladder with another box. After failing to find Mary and Julie on neighborhood streets, he began checking every location they might have been. He’d lost count of how many boxes he’d gone through, and how many faces he’d stared at. The parade was having a dehumanizing effect. Some people looked like they were sleeping while others were disfigured from death. The worst ones had been in auto-accidents. Some of them were charred and barely recognizable as human, but oddly they had become easier to look at than the unmarred. Death was supposed to be unsavory. The photos that disturbed him the most were the ones that looked at peace. How could they have been murdered and only look like they were sleeping? He was becoming haunted with a feeling that something supernatural was working inside this plague.

After almost two hours of searching, Mark felt lost. Mary’s and Julie’s images were not among the ghosts, but he was having difficulty accepting the possibility that they might be alive. With an odd feeling in his chest, Mark climbed up the ladder one last time and pulled out a box for Venice Beach. He had glanced at its label dozens of times while searching the other boxes. This box was the only one with his zip code and street name. He knew what could be inside.

Mark sat down at the table and opened the lid. He wasn’t sure why he was doing this. Maybe he just needed to feel greater pain? Near the top of the stack was Gracy. Her eyes were closed. She was wearing a beat up sweatshirt that she used when hanging out around the house. Her expression was serene. She was one of the peaceful dead. It almost would have been better if she’d appeared upset or pained. He looked closer trying to understand what it was like to die. He started to sob.

Mark didn’t stop sobbing until his body was empty of the pain. His face was slick with tears. His breathing was still ragged. He looked at Gracy once last time. He noticed her arms were oddly positioned and realized the obvious fact that someone had posed her. Someone had touched her. He set the picture back into the box and closed it as if shutting a tomb.

He looked down the aisle of shelves. The shoeboxes were tiny coffins. The musty air was difficult to breathe. He forced it into his lungs. This stack of miniature coffins was a symbol of a mass grave for all humanity. Someday, would a historian find his picture inside a box like these? Would there be historians? Would anything human survive?

The time was just after 9:00 p.m. when the Blackhawk set down at Camp Pendleton. A full CDC command post was under construction on the base. They had taken over a large warehouse. Two-by-fours and plasterboard were being erected by soldiers into a maze of walls inside the building. The construction was going on around the clock. A lieutenant met them at the entrance and escorted them to a huge central office space which was the command center.

Faces looked up as Mark and Kathy walked into the bullpen full of desks. Kathy seemed to know everyone there. She made an attempt at introductions, but there were too many people. Mark started to forget the names as quickly as they were given. After the greetings, the lieutenant led them toward a wall of doors. The officer stopped at one that had a cardboard name plaque which read ‘Mark Freedman’ and opened it. Inside was a fully equipped prefab office and sleeping quarters.

Mark felt both guilty and important that he had a private room. He and Kathy and four others were the only personnel with that privilege. The rooms were small and completely filled by a large metal desk, chairs, an army cot, and a footlocker but this was pure luxury when compared to the alternative accommodations which included sleeping in a nearby barracks and no private space at all.

Mark was weary as he stood at his office door and looked out at the city of desks that filled the command center. There were no windows. The ceiling extended up to the metal rafters of the roof from which hung lights and air ducts. On the far wall was a large mosaic video screen which showed a computerized world map and several smaller screens which contained what looked like real-time satellite feeds. Kathy was in an open area in the middle of the room conducting an impromptu meeting. A ragtag crowd had formed around her. She was issuing orders and people were taking notes.

“I want at least a four-to-one statistical sampling from both healthy and deceased. That means drawing blood from at least 25 percent of the people in refugee shelters and every, I mean every, cadaver from now on. There’s to be no cremation before we have our blood and tissue samples.

“Also we just heard from Atlanta CDC that COBIC has been isolated in the spinal fluid of one of the New Jersey victims. This is the first time we’ve found COBIC inside the nervous system. I can’t stress enough how significant this is. I want spinal fluid samples from all the cadavers. Harry, I want you to arrange for spinal fluid samples from volunteers at the refugee shelters. I want people who have been exposed and lost at least one close family member. We have to find out if we need to be concerned about COBIC being in the cerebral fluid of any of the refugees.”

“Dr. Morrison,” interrupted a young woman. “What if we can’t get enough volunteers at the shelters to do a reliable statistical sampling?”

“The entire L.A. basin is under martial law,” said Kathy. “We’ll get what we need. We have no choice – they have no choice.”

Mark went back into his office. He was disturbed by what he was hearing. The people in those shelters had suffered enough. They were already third-class citizens that had lost their freedoms and now they were going to become lab animals. Blood and spinal fluid was the order of the day. How many times would they be forced to submit to medical experimentation? How long would it be until every one of them was ordered to give spinal fluid or something even worse? The discovery of COBIC in spinal fluid was an important link between the microbe and the nerve damage that was the cause of death. He knew for scientific rigor this testing had to be done and assumed the same testing was going on in New Jersey. The entire county was in danger but this was not the way a free and open society was supposed to operate. The most basic rights of the defenseless should never be sacrificed for the good of the healthy.

He slumped into his chair. He tried to rid his mind of everything except the job at hand. He might be the best hope the CDC had at understanding what role COBIC played in this crisis. There was nothing he could do about the abuse of refuges and nothing he could do about locating Mary and Julie before some abuse happened to them.

An IBM workstation with a high-resolution flat screen was set up at his desk. The walls weren’t even dry yet, but they had working computers. He logged onto the network and found the BVMC lab online. There seemed to be no delay in accessing data. The government must have leased dozens of dedicate fiber trunks between here and Atlanta.

Mark watched as a SEM image of the golf ball object was loaded on the screen. People were starting to follow his terminology by calling it a seed. The name was appropriate. He was more suspicious than ever that this seed was the carrier of the holocaust. He leaned closer and stared at the internal structures made of silica. The object was unearthly. What was this thing? Days ago, in a more paranoid mood, he’d speculated that it could be some doomsday weapon created by the military or even a rogue state. Maybe terrorists had gotten their hands on it and put it to their own unique kind of use? He knew these thoughts were crazy; but when lacking good ideas, even the bad ones started to seem plausible. He checked his e-mail hoping to find a response from at least one of his colleagues to whom he’d sent the classified images. The only e-mail in his box was from Alan Trune, something about the breeding experiments. Another failure, thought Mark as he clicked on the e-mail.

As he read, Mark subconsciously leaned forward in his chair. This was no failure. Alan had completed Mark’s experiments of placing COBIC in various combinations of field water samples. The idea was a shotgun approach to research, sloppy science, but Mark had been running out of ideas. Pond water containing normal Chromatium Omri had done the trick, sort of. COBIC infected with seeds had still failed to reproduce; that was not the success. The success was that Alan had managed to infect normal Chromatium Omri with seeds. This meant the seeds had reproduced even if the bacteria had not! Alan’s e-mail included a link to a video stored on Secure Net.

Mark clicked on the link. The download took almost a minute before the video began to run. He saw a magnified SXM image of COBIC swimming in dirty liquid. The soft x-ray beam’s intensity was dialed just high enough so seeds were clearly visible as voids inside the microbe’s nuclei. Alan narrated the video. He had taken a census count of the normal Chromatium Omri present in the drop of pond water. Mark watched as Alan released a known number of seed-bearing COBIC into the liquid. The video paused, then started again three hours later. Alan had taken a new census count and found only seed-bearing COBIC. In fact the numbers were almost perfect. With only a two percent error, there was one new seed bearing COBIC for every missing normal Chromatium that had originally been in the drop of pond water.

The video was now showing Alan’s method for taking a census of the infected microbes. In superimposed visible and x-ray images, Mark saw Alan herding the light-averse COBIC with a low intensity beam of light. The beam was from a visible laser with no more power than a penlight. The laser was part of the microscope’s auxiliary illuminator setup.

Mark was astounded. The bacteria coaxed by the laser were swimming together in a loosely defined herd; non-infected COBIC were left unmoved by the light. How had Alan come up with an idea to do that? Obviously, not knowing something was impossible was a good way to accomplish the impossible. Mark wasn’t sure which was more amazing: the reproduction of seeds or that COBIC could be herded with a beam of light. Alan was clearly unaware of the ramifications of this herding phenomenon. For COBIC to collectively respond like that, they had to be much more neurologically evolved than what was considered possible for a bacterium. They were displaying behavior equal to that of a primitive multi-celled animal.

Mark rubbed the sides of his head. There was a throbbing ache in his temples. No matter that more questions were raised than answered, this was a break-though. Reproduction was often the first step in understanding how a disease killed. Side effects from reproduction frequently turned out to be critical factors in the progression of a disease. Knowing that seeds were somehow being Xeroxed was a beginning. The unanswered question was how the seeds were multiplied. The most likely theory was that they grew in the same way as kidney stones. To find answers, Mark needed to capture images of seed reproduction and microbe infection while it occurred. It was too early in the morning to get Alan on the phone in Atlanta. Mark began hammering out a priority e-mail with detailed instructions.

The sun was creeping over the mountaintops. The grass was dewy and fresh. In the distance, clouds hinted at an afternoon sprinkle. Then it happened. The kill zone was small and silent. The animals fled in terrified packs as if running from a wildfire. Behind them, the ground was littered with bodies. Some were still moving in the final twitches before death. The epicenter of chaos was a section of forest that had been over-harvested last fall as part of the previous administration’s federal partnership with private industry for woodland preservation. In the midst of a clearing, a squirrel ran in circles, chasing itself until exhausted. The little animal slumped onto its side panting. Some kind of palsy racked its body. In minutes, it was dead. The squirrel joined a legion of dead harmless things – mice and woodchucks and raccoons. There was a pond less than a hundred yards to the South. Extending out from the shoreline, an almost perfect semicircle of water was skimmed with a layer of bloated and dying fish.