Immortality (31 page)

“I don’t know about you, but this place gives me the creeps.”

Ralph licked her face. Sarah hugged him and then stood up. The forest was getting darker by the minute. How long had she been asleep? She glanced at her watch. It was almost three. She was relieved that she’d only been out for an hour. It had seemed like much longer. Things felt changed as if months had passed. The woods, Ralph, herself – everything felt different. At first Sarah thought it was endorphins mixed with fear affecting her; but the more she thought about how she felt, the more she realized these were not random feelings. She sensed something instinctual was now guiding her; then she thought about her nightmare of Los Angeles.

Sarah’s pace had grown quicker by the hour. She was sweating heavily but wouldn’t let up. A few minutes ago, she’d crested the ridge and was now on the long downward leg of her trip. She’d already made it into New York State.

An hour later, the pine trees opened to reveal a valley nestled between two tree covered mountains. In the distance, a stream and a road paired together and then wandered through the valley like two serpents intertwined in courting ritual. Below her, the forest thickened again. The pine trees were gone; instead there was a mixture of maple, and oak, and walnut.

A quarter of a mile downhill, Sarah almost broke into a dance when she pushed aside some branches and stepped onto a footpath. “Hey, Ralph, I love you!” she yelled. Ralph looked at her and then started barking and bounding down the path to check it out.

The trail appeared to have been abandoned for years. Plants were well on their way to reclaiming it as part of the forest. Leaves and branches scratched against her sides as she walked, but it was a pleasure to be on clear ground again. She counted her strides and found she was going at about three miles per hour. Maybe she wouldn’t have to spend the night in these woods after all?

The world was dark when Sarah emerged from the forest. She stepped onto a dirt road filled with tire tracks. It was ten o’clock. She should have stopped hours ago and camped, but an ember of fear kept her moving. She clicked off her flashlight and walked by the light of the moon. The map showed Boarburg was approximately two miles away. The road she was on led into the back of a gravel pit. She disassembled the M16 and hid it inside her backpack. She had a story ready in case anyone asked, especially local police. She rehearsed it once more in her mind.

Boarburg was a medium size town. A siren wailed as a police car flew past the front of the Boarburg Inn. A second car followed less than a minute later.

“They’ve been going wild around here since the quarantine lines went up. Probably another bunch of trouble makers trying to sneak across...”

The lady at the front desk focused her eyes on Sarah. On a corkboard behind the lady was an official looking set of pages released by the CDC. A second copy was on the counter. The document explained procedures and protocols for maintaining the quarantine. In bold characters was a phone number to call if a citizen saw anything suspicious.

Sarah had learned the lady’s name was Marge, and Marge wasn’t excited about allowing a dog to stay in one of her deluxe rooms. The rate had gone from fifty a night to seventy-five. The lobby was clean but faded. The carpet was worn in a trail from the front door to the stairs.

“I’ll take it,” said Sarah.

Marge looked as if Sarah had just told her that the earth was flat. Her eyes narrowed. She was a heavyset woman but looked strong, not flabby. Please, thought Sarah, don’t let her say no. Sarah was ready to beg. Her entire body was sore. Her left heel was blistered. This was the only place to sleep in town. The idea of being turned out made her eyes water. Ralph curled around her feet. As if on cue, he was playing the role of good dog.

“So honey, you haven’t mentioned what you’re doing traipsing around at night.”

“I was staying out at my uncle’s cabin near Bear Falls.”

Sarah held her breath and then realized that the lady wanted more. Sarah hated lying.

“Me and my boyfriend were planning on staying for a month. The day the plague hit, my boyfriend had taken the car into town. He hasn’t been back since. I don’t know what happened to him. I ran out of food. I was scared. I had no choice except to walk out. I left at nine this morning.”

“Bear Falls is almost twenty miles from here. You walked all that?” Sarah nodded. Marge appeared to be impressed. The skeptical gleam was gone from her eyes.

“Men can be such unreliable heathens,” said Marge.

While shaking her head, Marge turned the guest book around on the counter and handed Sarah a pen.

“It’s past supper time, but I’ve got some hamburger macaroni if it interests you?”

Sarah started to tear up again. The food interested her a lot, but having someone show even the smallest kindness touched her deeply. She wished she could have told Marge the truth.

Almost half a week had passed since his arrival in Los Angeles. Mark slept late into the day. It was the first long sleep he’d had and was mostly from drugs prescribed by Kathy. This sleep wasn’t good sleep, but it was better than insomnia. There had been nothing restorative in it other than the absence of nightmares.

The Army provided fatigues and bedding; everything else had to be purchased at the PX. Mark stood in the men’s bathroom, opened a vial of pills, and dry swallowed his first of the morning. Kathy had prescribed the valium two days ago just after he’d gotten the telephone call.

A mirror hung over the basin. Mark leaned closer. His face looked like someone else’s with the dark stubble and bags under his eyes. This life didn’t feel like it belonged to him anymore. It was as if he’d awoken in a stranger’s body and was fighting to hold onto a fading dream of who he used to be. He could pinpoint the exact moment when everything had changed. The moment had been when he’d walked out of the Red Cross building leaving behind those boxes of ghosts. There was a new and horrible world being defined in that classroom commandeered by the Red Cross. Mark stared into his own eyes in the mirror and saw an image of someone dying staring back.

Word had come almost two days ago that Julie’s car had been found at the bottom of a cliff on Mulholland Drive. Mulholland was a treacherous road that snaked through the Hollywood hills. Two bodies were in the car, a woman and a young girl, both badly damaged. The woman’s driver’s license bore the name Julie Freedman. Deputy Red Cross director George Gallo had personally called with the news.

Mark looked at his wristwatch lying next to the basin. It was almost time for lunch. He wondered if it would be canned franks and beans again. It took a conscious effort to continue breathing and eating. He considered going back to sleep. His room was dark. There were no windows. Crawling back into the cot and closing his eyes would have been so easy.

He turned on the water and drenched his face and hair. He retrieved his Army issue shirt from a wall hook and buttoned it while walking toward the bathroom door. The fluorescent lights in the hall hurt his eyes. He put on a pair of sunglasses that had been in his pocket and wandered down the plasterboard tunnels toward food. Every doorway had a very clean military sign identifying the name and function of the room beyond. People had already started using alternate names. The blood chemistry lab had been given the nickname Mosquito Alley. The morgue was called Hotel California. Mark thought about the lyrics from its namesake song by the Eagles.
You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.
He suspected the dark humor was a way of coping with the horrors of a world that was upended and sinking.

The officer’s mess was filled with sounds of silverware tapping on plates, the low murmur of conversations, the creaking of metal chairs. Mark set his tray down at an empty table next to a television. The set was permanently tuned to CNN. Their coverage was providing better global intelligence than the CIA. Eighteen kill zones were now documented across the world; after Los Angels, no more had punished the United States. Overnight, parts of Athens had been heavily hit near the Gulf of Saronikos. Tens of thousands were reported dead. Similar bulletins were coming in from cities along the Loire River in France and from an area just outside of Zagreb near the Sava River. The Los Angeles event still held the record for most killed. Estimates had long ago topped the three hundred thousand mark.

Even through the fuzz of valiums and pain, Mark was still trying to analyze things. It was impossible to completely stop being who he was. He was still a scientist with an insatiable need to understand. He thought about how outbreaks were always near bodies of water: Athens had the Gulf of Saronikos, Los Angeles had the Pacific, there was the Loire River in France, and the Meadowland Swamps in New Jersey. This made sense because COBIC was a waterborne microbe. The CDC should recommend that all water should be boiled throughout the country… or had they already done that? He made a mental note to check on it, a note that he knew would probably be forgotten with many others.

The television continued to babble in the background. Mark tried to eat but couldn’t. The bologna sandwich was dry. The coffee tasted like sewer water. He dumped the contents of his tray into a garbage can and left. He wandered the halls in the general direction of his office. Kathy was on her way to the Los Angeles kill zone for the third time this week. He thought about how she’d tried to get him to eat something for breakfast the other day. Her concern reminded him of how Gracy would come down to the lab and drag him out to some restaurant to make him eat. Gracy was gone. He would never see her face or hear her voice again. His eyes burned as if he was about to cry, but nothing came out. He opened the door to his office and went inside.

Mark hadn’t heard anything from Alan Trune today. So far, all of Alan’s attempts at capturing seed reproduction or infestation on video had failed. Mark was staring at the video of COBIC being herded. The recording had been running all night in an endless loop. With nothing else that he was capable of doing in his limited mental state, Mark started working through the test logs for water samples. The endless lines of numbers made the work tedious and repetitious, but it kept his mind off other things. Every source of water in Southern California was now being tested using COBIC traps that Mark had designed. The idea had come to him while he was writing Alan that first e-mail with instructions for capturing seed reproduction. The trap was elegant and simple. Infected COBIC appeared indifferent to all food items that normally interested it. So the standard technique of setting traps with food didn’t work; but since infected COBIC were drawn to non-infected Chromatium Omri, the non-infected bacteria could be used as bait. Tens of thousands of bacterium traps filled with non-infected COBIC, along with sulfide food, to keep them viable, were placed throughout all the local bodies of water including the beaches. The traps were small test tubes plugged with a microscopically porous membrane, through which bacteria can easily swim
in
but have a difficult time swimming
out
. So far, even though thousands of traps had been collected and replaced, only the results of a few had been tested and they had all checked negative. Testing was a slow process; and the data group was currently so small, the results meant nothing. The experiment itself was too new to even have a baseline for what to expect. The traps might need to be in place for weeks or even months before useful results were obtained.

The building began to sway. Reflexively, Mark looked up at the ceiling to be sure nothing would fall on him. The earthquake was mild. He’d been through dozens over the years. The intensity increased. His computer display started to jiggle. He thought about getting under the metal desk. The sounds of rattling increased from every direction. A coffee mug used as a pencil holder walked off his desk and shattered. The overhead lights flickered.

“Stop it,” he yelled.

The motion settled down almost on cue. His breathing slowed but the tension lingered in his body. His legs felt wobbly as he stood. His equilibrium was off. He knew he had a mild case of earthquake sickness. He began checking for damage caused by the quake. His office looked fine except for the pencil holder. He left his office and headed toward a shipping dock to check his samples which were packed for delivery to CDC Atlanta for testing. The thousands of samples were the fruits of a second round of large scale collection from his baited traps.

The dock was empty except for six stainless steel drums large enough to hold twenty-five gallons of liquid each. The drums were stenciled with biohazard emblems. The lids were padlocked. Mark had been present when they’d been packed. The drums were filled with a potent solution of hypochlorite. Immersed in the liquid and suspended within each drum in a nylon cradle was a cylindrical twenty gallon thermos container. The hypochlorite served as a self-destruct mechanism in case anything ruptured or leaked from the thermos. Within the thermos were stacked slabs of dry ice. Each slab was drilled to hold hundreds of small pointed glass tubes called micropipettes. Each micropipette was two inches long, an eighth of an inch wide, and sealed on both ends. The slabs were like beds of deadly hypodermic glass needles. Each pipette was filled with a frozen slurry of sample water, non-infected bait COBIC, and possibly infected COBIC. The hypochlorite was mixed with a florescent dye which made leaks easy to spot. Mark inspected the outer drums for leaks using a handheld ultraviolet light. All the drums checked out. He had no way of knowing if any of the micropipettes were broken without unpacking all the containers, which was impossible unless he delayed shipment. He didn’t feel checking inside was worth the effort or the delay.

Without any real purpose, Mark wandered toward the lab where the original test tube traps were kept. The lab had a Level-4 containment classification, which was as high as any place in the country handling deadly pathogens except the BVMC facility. The lab was built from prefab units brought in by the military. A pair of soldiers had just finished inspecting for earthquake damage when he walked into the prep room.