The Blood Artists

Maryk

Maryk stood inside the silvered doorway. He looked at the wasting figure of Stephen Pearse lying on the child’s mattress. The odor of decay was thick and distinct. He backed out of the doorway into the shadows of the landing. The shock of the moment left him as quickly as it had come. He looked again at Stephen Pearse lying on his side with his right arm stuck off the bed. Stephen’s eyes were sunken and crimson and staring.

Maryk returned downstairs. The house was like a museum with each room a closed exhibit. He walked to a glass-walled sitting room off the kitchen in the rear and rooted himself in the memory of his only previous visit. Lace curtains had been sashed along the walls and leather bindings had lined the low bookshelves under the windows. A mayonnaise jar full of buffalo nickels had sat upon the fall front of the cherry wood desk.

Every piece of furniture that remained in the house was shrouded. Maryk set his tablet on an upright Steinway covered in thin plastic sheeting. His black bag balanced on the keyboard and pressed out a dull chord that echoed throughout the cloistered first floor. Outside the windows the sloping backyard was silver and the moon was sprayed over the wrinkling ocean.

He opened his tablet and dialed Bobby Chiles. The deputy director’s haggard face appeared in a window on the screen.

“Found him,” Maryk said.

Bobby clapped his hands softly once and sat back in his chair. His shirt collar was twisted open anxiously. “Where is he?” he said.

“He’s sick.”

“Sick? What do you mean?”

“Who else is there with you?”

“I’m alone. Stephen is sick with what?”

“Plainville.”

Bobby’s eyes held fast to the screen as the rest of his face struggled.

“You need to make a decision,” Maryk said.

“—Get him to a hospital.”

“Not here. The New York press. Let me bring him back to Atlanta.”

“Plainville? But how?”

“I am the only one who can get near him without a full suit now.”

Bobby’s hands were up at his face.

Maryk said, “Listen. We need to act fast. I need all resources placed at my disposal. No restrictions, and no questions asked.”

“But if it’s Plainville, what can you—”

“I can treat him,” Maryk said simply.

Bobby was staring beyond his screen and well beyond Maryk. Maryk told him what he would need and then ended the connection.

He left his tablet glowing atop the piano and took his black bag back upstairs. Stephen lay on the boy-sized bed as before. The things in the bedroom were preserved under plastic except for the bed and a short blond wood dresser with the trophies on it. A cold breath of rot reached Maryk and he looked across at an open,and unscreened window. A car passed the house. A city of twenty-five million people waited at the other end of the highway. Maryk wondered if the self-appointed “Health Ambassador to the World” could have already ignited a lethal chain of transmission in the most populated city in North America.

Maryk pulled on a second pair of gloves and tore off strips of adhesive tape to seal his cuffs above his wrists. He dragged the plastic sheeting away from the bed with the toe of his shoe and set to work under the argent glow raining through the skylight above.

Breath swirled out of Stephen’s staring face like smoke under the door of a burning house. His eyes were wide and rheumy with blood and gazed at the doorway and the floor before it with an expression of expired longing. Maryk produced a penlight from his bag. Stephen’s pupils reacted slowly to the beam like lazy black moons eclipsing blue suns. They were soft and fat. Capillaries had burst behind each lens and blood was flooding the clear vitreous jelly and seeping into the sclera and weeping in dry smudges out of the lacrimal ducts onto the pinches of Stephen’s nose. Dots of red and purple petechiae bloomed in a sallow mask surrounding his eyes.

Maryk stood and eased Stephen back onto the mattress with both hands. Stephen’s throat gurgled without issue. The mattress was fouled with vomit and excrement and the action of moving Stephen stiffed the stench. His bloody stare settled upon the ceiling. He was semiconscious and perhaps aware of Maryk’s presence and perhaps even able to see. Maryk reached over with his gloved thumb and middle finger and shut Stephen’s eyelids.

Mucus and slime ran down Stephen’s upper lip and chin and Maryk collected some in a vial. He unlaced and discarded Stephen’s shoe-boots and socks. With a pair of short-bladed bandage scissors he cut along each soiled pant leg and shirtsleeve and up along the buttons of the shirt placket. The heated fabric peeled back like the outer folds of a thing well cooked. Stephen’s flesh had the lucent softness of wax. There were visible lesions. Folds of loose skin were beginning to sag off his waist and neck as though he were melting.

Maryk sampled his blood. The puncture wound bled sluggishly and was slow to clot. With tweezers he collected representative hair samples and deposited them in individual glassine envelopes. The follicles pulled easily from Stephen’s flesh like candles from a cake.

Lastly he brought out a metal thermos. There was a whisper of release as he unscrewed the cap and tipped the glass ampule of golden serum labeled MILKMAID into his gloved left fist. He drew the contents into a clean hypodermic even as he knew it was too late for the serum to be 100 percent effective. MILKMAId’s success depended upon its administration within the first hours of infection. Maryk boosted the serum into Stephen’s external jugular. It was a quick trip from there to his heart.

Maryk stripped off Stephen’s gloves and noticed tape marks on Stephen’s bare left hand. He saw a bean-sized bruise in the center of the palm and a tiny dot breach in the center of that.

Maryk unrolled a biohazard pack from inside his bag. He disposed of his contaminated implements and unwound the tape from his forearms and disposed of his outer gloves. He left the orange plastic bag unsealed in the center of the floor.

He saw Stephen’s tablet set upon a child’s writing desk. Maryk opened the screen and accessed Hailing/Receiving and found that the digital pulse modern had been disabled. Then he noticed a data entry in the master file list named “Investigation.Maryk.” He opened it and paged through the contents. He stopped when he came to the code names, MILKMAID, BLOSSOM, and LANCET. With a keen frown he closed all applications and collapsed the screen.

A team of four Special Pathogens investigators assigned to Batavia, New York, on an E. coll 0157:H7 outbreak were the first to arrive. Maryk illuminated the open bedroom window with a flashlight and ordered immediate aggressive night spraying. Every potential insect vector in the area had to be exterminated before dawn.

The agents regarded Director Pearse’s wasting body lying unconscious in a child’s bed before filing out.

FEMA Biohazard Containment arrived from Atlanta with more Special Path investigators and Stephen was lifted off the bed and sealed inside a Kurt isolation pod. A Kurt pod was a maintained atmosphere constructed of heavy plastic insulant with two round glove ports on each long side. It was roughly the size and shape of a large box coffin.

Maryk bagged and secured Stephen’s tablet himself. He declared a Biohazard 4 and FEMA BioCon initiated a program of full containment ablution.

Blue nylon was stretched over plastic ribbing outside the front door. One of the BioCon agents was inspecting the car parked in the driveway as Maryk exited. Lights were snapping on in the second-floor windows of surrounding houses and across the street a man marched halfway down his front walk in a red silk bathrobe before seeing the BDC insignia on the trucks and hastily turning back.

Stephen’s pod was loaded into a BioCon ambulance and the convoy wound quietly through the slumbering seaside town. A BDC transport jet was waiting for them at the Fast Hampton airport. Maryk contacted Bobby Chiles again from the air and asked about the old B4 lab inside the basement of BDC Building Seven. A state-of the-art replacement B4 had just come on-line inside the new Bioresearch Building. B4 was a biocontainment research laboratory for safe human manipulation of the most hostile biological agents.

“It’s dark,” Bobby said. “We bombed the place clean after the move to Nineteen.”

“Refit all the fixtures and load in medical and lab research equipment. I need it prepped for surgery as well. You’ll have to move fast.”

“Containment scrubbed B4 dry to the paint, Peter. With all the bugs we harvested in there over the years, it took them four full days to achieve zero habitat. We’re due to turn the space over to Pharmacology.”

“They’ll wait. I need a workspace. Anticipate everything from PCR typing to glassware needs to full barrier autopsy: Stephen’s breeding Plainville now; you don’t want samples being shuttled all over the complex. And choose carefully. The equipment has to be small enough to fit in through the air locks, and whatever gets in there won’t be coming out again clean.”

“But — B4’s not meant to hold humans.”

“Next, Geist in Engineering. He’s the only one there cleared for Plainville. I posted him separately, but he won’t cooperate unless it comes from you, I need him to brew up something for Stephen. Tell him it is of the highest priority. I’ll also need a nurse with minimum fifty hours full-barrier experience and a strong constitution. We’re avoiding Hartsfield International Airport for obvious reasons, so have a medical helicopter ready for transport at DeKalb Peachtree.”

“Peter. What do I tell people?”

“Whatever you want, just so long as it’s not the truth. I don’t want to see anyone when we land on the roof of Building Seven. When we go down through the corridors to B4: no one standing in doorways, no teary spectators. No displays, I don’t want to see anyone inside the lab except a security detail, two of my people to help load Stephen inside, and the nurse. And one last thing.”

Bobby was scribbling frantically. “Yes?”

“Once these orders are issued, you are to surrender to Quarantine Services. I want every visitor to Building Sixteen since Stephen got back from Orangeburg traced and shuttered up. You’re all going to have to sit out at least seventy-two hours.”

Bobby nodded without protest. He may even have seen this coming. Maryk signed off and sat back against the wide hull. He watched Stephen’s gaunt body rocking with the motion of the plane inside the shimmying plastic walls of the pod. Maryk called the pilot and instructed him to remain twenty miles out to sea during the trip down the eastern coast. Stephen Pearse was a biological time bomb. The microbial spread from a plane crash on land would wipe out every organic form of life in North America within a few days’ time.

Maryk never took an indeliberate, step. He collapsed his tablet and closed his eyes and performed a quick self-diagnosis. No cascade. Not yet.

Admittance into a B4 laboratory is an exercise in biological humility. It is a passage from the microscopic carnage of the everyday human environment into a vessel of absolute atmospheric control.

Maryk jacked in his tablet and keyed in his code and the steel latch of the first steel door gave way under his hand. The first room was quiet and small inside with colored pipes running overhead. Air moving into B4 was purged through high-efficiency particulate air filters and exposure to ultraviolet light and high heat sources. Each successive room was negatively pressured so that air flowed into the lab and preserved containment.

Maryk glanced at the computer screens monitoring the unit. All indications were green. He moved past two small windows to a facing oval door and the door opened inward with a breathy shush.

He changed into a dull green surgical scrub suit and cap and white cotton socks at the lockers. The third room was small and blue and humming with virus-killing ultraviolet light. The piped ceiling was low and the deep indigo light made Maryk’s white hair glow.

Bright blue biological space suits hung from a steel rack inside the fourth room. Maryk bypassed them for a white metal cabinet and pulled on a simple gauze face mask and a pair of goggles. He changed gloves and taped them sealed as the sound of the rushing air grew louder.

The last room was a chemical shower stall illuminated by one dim ultraviolet bulb. Steel spray nozzles nosed out from the walls and a steel grate covered the floor basin. Biohazard warnings and safety checklists glowed on the last door. Laboratory suits were mandatory for admittance. Maryk wore only surgical scrubs, gloves, light face gear, and cotton socks. He threw the latch and stepped over the threshold into airtight B4.

The lab room was a wide gray rectangle. A central work table of sealed glass cabinets had been removed to make room for Stephen’s gurney. He was laid out flat and unmoving with IV feeds running to both arms and an oxygen mask over his drawn face.

The nurse stood inside a blue lab suit between a tray of instruments and the monitors near Stephen’s head. Her lab suit was hooked to a lime green air coil hanging from tracks that ran along the ceiling, Biological space suits were artificially ventilated for comfort during long stretches in B4.

Her eyes widened inside her hood when she saw Maryk. He had avoided B4 since his first year of training due to his claustrophobia. At that time he had been made to wear a full suit. For decades no human being had freely breathed the air he breathed now. Formaldehyde and bleach tinctured the enclosed atmosphere. Maryk did not smell Stephen yet.

He stepped into a pair of yellow rubber boots inside the doorway. He went past a walk-in freezer around the far left corner to check on the connecting animal room and saw that the monkey cages had all been removed. Biohazard Containment had caulked and gabbed epoxy over the screw holes and scrubbed much of the paint clean off the walls. BioCon was reliably meticulous in its work. The shelves and the wide floor space between were jammed with lab machines and equipment rolled in on movers’ casters. In one corner lay the discarded Kurt pod.

Maryk performed the first and most obvious procedure on the long counter between the freezer and the door. It was a standard presumptive PCR test confirming the presence of the Plainville virus in Stephen Pearse’s blood.

Maryk returned to the gurney and faced the nurse across Stephen. Her face within the bowl of her suit hood was small and serious. She pointed out a stainless steel rack. “Mistake,” she said. Words were at a premium inside her howling suit. “They sent down your blood instead of Director Pearse’s.”

All BDC personnel submitted blood and other bodily fluids to be banked for research. On the rack near Maryk hung chilled plastic packs of blood labeled MARYK.

“There is no mistake,” he said and set about his work.

The biological process of Plainville was a marvel to behold. The virus infiltrated the body’s immune system by flipping certain protective T cells against the body’s own armed forces. It hijacked the cells’ reproductive systems and forced them to breed hundreds of thousands of Plainville viruses. This torrent of new viruses overloaded the immune system and eventually triggered an autoimmune response whereby T cells sent to root out invaders went haywire and turned their attack upon healthy organs. The body’s frenzied defensive reaction to Plainville caused the most symptomatic destruction.

Maryk worked to improve Stephen’s vital functions before going after the disease itself. He put Stephen under and excised kernel-sized vascular growths and two grossly inflamed lymph nodes and deposited them into a steel pan. He pared samples for biopsy. He opened Stephen’s abdomen and the tumors he found were already deeply invasive and metastatic. He went after the most conspicuous masses and scraped away as much as a thimbleful at a time. The largest gripped Stephen’s pancreas like a baby’s fist. His liver was the color of tapioca pudding and his spleen was inflamed and clogged with curdled blood. There were dead spots on his kidneys, lungs, and intestines where his circulation had failed. His appendix was bloated and threatened to rupture and flood the abdominal cavity with bacteria-rich pus. Maryk removed it.

Maryk went after Stephen’s internal bleeding aggressively until the machine choked on the sludge. He repaired abscesses and wrapped damaged arteries and plugged leaking veins with surgical gel before closing. Plum-colored bruising flushed the stitching.

He examined scans of Stephen’s brain. There were visible lesions in the thinking center of the right prefrontal cortex, the cognitive behavior and motor planning region of the prefrontal lobe, and the emotional behavior center of the anterior cingulate. But the virus had not yet blitzed the brain stem. Maryk introduced minimal cytokines locally to the brain to excite the immune cells in a bid to preserve Stephen’s mind. He required more powerful ammunition but had not yet received his from Engineering.

Maryk’s breathing began to deepen and his head and arms grew heavy. The amplitude of Stephen’s infection was reflected in the intensity of Maryk’s cascade. Maryk knew that he had to get away in order to remain on his feet and see this thing through.

Maryk directed the nurse to draw off as much of Stephen’s poisoned blood as she could before transfusing four MARYK blood units. She repeated his orders back to him before Maryk underwent a thorough UV exposure and departed B4.

It was dawn and the aboveground halls of Building Seven were empty. He felt better outside the pressure tank of B4. He found an unlocked office and fell into a chair. He dug a sterile syringe out of his black bag. He drew a measure of clear liquid amphetamine out of a small glass ampule and dosed himself with it. He could not afford the energy drain of a cascade just yet.

The jazz started in his head and he stood and rebuckled his bag. The speed would keep him going a few hours more.

Engineering occupied the bottom three floors of Building Four. There was a bright light shining beneath Geist’s office door and Maryk entered and found the BDc’s chief genetic engineer balancing number two pencils eraser-down on his desk. The overhead halogens paled Geist’s already sallow complexion. Each individual bulb was reflected upon his waxy pate. He had lost every strand of his straw blond hair following a substantial radiation exposure some months before. He previously had suffered degenerative kidney and spleen damage and still occasionally set off sensors in the labs.

Geist looked up at Maryk through round wire-rimmed glasses with the ghosts of his blond eyebrows slightly raised. “Dr. Maryk,” he said.

“You know about Pearse.”

Geist was inordinately sedate. “From Bobby Chiles. An absolute shame. You know how much I admired Stephen.”

“Is that the jizz?”

Between the standing pencils and a photograph of an oily black Doberman sporting a blue show ribbon stood a wire rack containing a single glass tube of clear fluid. Dr. Amory Geist was a pioneer in the field of viral therapy. The retroviral antigen was a genetic smart bomb designed to excite Maryk’s killer T cells now roaming Stephen’s veins. The tube was capped and safety-taped.

“I’m going to need a patient consent,” Geist said. He pulled the tube rack closer to his,forest of pencils. “I need a signed consent before I kill somebody. I’d like to know what you’re up to.”

Maryk said, “Straight viral therapy.”

“V.T. isn’t cleared for late-stage catastrophic and you know it. If it’s Plainville, then Stephen Pearse is dead already.”

“He’s laid out on a table over in Seven. His cells are dying off by the millions every hour. How long do you want to chat?”

“I am not one of your errand boys in Special Pathogens.”

Maryk smiled thinly. “I see,” he said.

“And I’m not afraid of you either. I think you know that. My little laboratory mishap relieved me of two things: hope for an average life expectancy; and fear. I don’t believe I fear anything anymore. And still, there are rules that I follow. In our game, the rules are all we have. Stephen stood for that.”

“Get to the point, Geist.”

“I can’t stop you from doing this. Bobby Chiles said to give you the juice, no questions asked. But you called me — that’s the catch. You called me in here in the middle of the night to do your bartending for you.”

“I could have done it myself.”

“Possibly. I don’t doubt it. You’re very capable, even given your disdain for laboratory science. A few days, a week, maybe longer. Here I have it for you in under four hours. Now I want an audience. I want answers.”

“You’re the top geneticist in the country.”

“Flattery,” Geist remarked. “You are desperate, aren’t you?”

“I thought you might like the challenge of helping him.”

Geist sat back. “When you say things like that, I feel the hair standing up on the back of my neck. And I don’t have any hair. Everyone knows how cold-blooded you are, especially Stephen. I would have expected you to be the first to suggest a quality of life action, to relieve his suffering. Instead you want to prolong it. Why?”

“You wouldn’t want to live, Geist? You wouldn’t want me to keep you going, even just a few more hours?”

“I told you before: I have no fear. But even I am a little afraid of Plainville.”

They regarded each other across the desk under the unnaturally bright office. The pause was long but neither one of them grew uncomfortable.

Maryk said, “You’re wondering why I’m still here.”

“I’m thinking you’re enjoying it. Someone finally standing up to you. Because I know I’m not changing your mind. If you’re expecting the ‘You Can’t Play God’ speech, you won’t get it here. I play God every day in that glass bell across the hall. I could twist DNA helixes into origami if the mood struck me. But I don’t. Because I am a benevolent god. May I offer a theory? I think some doctors love humanity while harboring enormous contempt for actual people. And I think you’re one of those — though I may be mistaken about the ‘loving humanity’ part. Why a retrovirus? Why the brain?”

“I took some pictures. I did a lumbar and a cerebrospinal pull; both were clear. The bug hasn’t fully colonized his brain yet.”

“So you’d like a chance at that yourself. Circle the genetic wagons, as it were. You realize this retrovirus will run rampant — invading at high efficiency, shooting its genes into the cells’ chromosomes.”

“Exactly. Only here, you’ve snipped out the virus gene and recoded it with genetic matter from a beneficial source, fighting bad virus with good virus. I can infect one hundred million cells with good, clean cargo in under two hours.”

Geist said, “Transduce.”

“Transduce, infect — whatever.

“Not ‘whatever.’ Viruses infect people; I don’t. It is not an infection because it produces no new viruses. A payload has been transduced.” He sat forward again. “What is this ‘beneficial source’?”

Maryk held Geist’s gaze without answering.

Geist smiled. “This retroviral antigen will soak him with DNA. It will change him. Not physically, but this is another human being’s genetic material. Soup to his brain’s saltine. It’s dangerous, and it won’t hold.”

“It will over a limited period of time.”

“Which is to say, you expect he’ll die before it has the chance. So Stephen Pearse’s survival is not your ultimate goal.”

“He’s too far gone for that.”

Geist looked at Maryk as one might observe the artistry of a spider consuming a fly. “The beneficial genetic source is you.”

“If it were my DNA, you wouldn’t do it.”

Geist smiled broadly. “I’ll do a lot of things, but plucking the hot stuff out of a live virus and exchanging it for your twisted helix is not one of them. Mengele, in his happiest hour, would still have respected nature enough not to infect an unsuspecting brain with Maryk virus.”

“Transduce,” said Maryk.

“Whatever.”

“Are we through lying to each other yet?”

Geist pointed at the shiny tube. “How do you know this isn’t a saline placebo? By the time you figure out it’s not working, Pearse would be out of his misery — and there is nothing you can do to me.”

“Because I have a theory too. My theory is that you’re that other kind of doctor, the bleeding heart kind, and that so long as there is a million-to-one chance Pearse might pull through this thing, you’ll take that chance, because Stephen Pearse is the patron saint of your cause. Because you gods in the laboratory are content to leave the practical decisions of death and life to the foot soldiers such as myself. You work in a greenhouse, Geist. I live in the jungle. Fiat experimentum in corpore vili.”

“ ‘Let experiment be made on a worthless body.’ Touching. And here I thought you and Stephen used to be friends.”

“All I can do is give him a little more time.”

“Pardon the non-Ivy League pronunciation: Corruptio optimi pessima. ‘The corruption of the best is the worst of all.’ And one more I know; and then I want you out of my office and out of my sight. The next time you want some chicken soup, open up the can yourself. Similia similibus curantur. ‘Like is cured by like.’ ”

Maryk took the tube and returned to the subterranean B4. In a sense he admired the small-focus simplicity of Geist’s mind. It reminded him of the half-sad smile of his blind mother when she rumblingly realized some small task.

He injected Stephen with the retroviral antigen. If nothing else his DNA strategy flooded Stephen’s brain with healthy cells that needed killing and this bought Maryk time. Maryk needed time.

He boosted Stephen with another fix of MILKMAID serum and charted an aggressive protocol of the same. He ordered monitoring for hyperkalemia due to the massive transfusions and prescribed strict electrolyte and fluid maintenance. He ordered tube feeding into the small bowel and 10 mg perenteral morphine and trycyclics for the pain.

“He’s going to get worse before he gets better,” Maryk told the nurse, “if he gets better. How long can you stay?”

“As long as you need me, Doctor.”

The speed was already failing him. Stephen was radioactive with Plainville. “Call if there are any sudden changes,” he said.

He dozed in UV. He was a long time changing back into his clothes.

Morning light beat through the windows upstairs as he staggered into an empty break room and dropped onto a bruise-red vinyl sofa. The room ebbed against him as though the entire building had been set to sea. He heard his tablet smack the floor and his breathing became thick and lugubrious. The weight of the cascade fell. He sank heavily away.

The tone did not awaken him. A woman’s voice did. He came to hours later in a room full of people eating lunch.

“Hello?” she was saying. A young woman wearing a lab coat. Small nose and large glasses and curled brown hair looming over him. The room smelled of peanut butter and apples.

“Excuse me?” She knew who he was. He could tell by the way she kept her distance. “Your tablet. You’re being paged.”

He sat up. The others in the room continued to eat and pretended not to notice him. Maryk tasted the roily paste of sleep. His black socks were only half-pulled onto his feet and he realized he had left his shoes behind in the changing room of B4.

The woman backed away. “It’s been going off for a while,” she said.

He righted his overturned tablet on the floor and opened it and the tone ceased. Stage sighs within the room. The header split in his muddled vision and he concentrated until it became clear. The post was from Reilly and Boone. It was uncharacteristically capitalized.

LANCET IS DOWN.

Lancet

Traffic was squeezed into two lanes on the five-lane Peachtree. Police lights flashed against the orange terracotta wall announcing The Groves. Maryk displayed his credentials for a cop wearing lime green gloves and was admitted through the barricade.

Police vehicles outnumbered BDC vans and trucks in the parking lot outside the easternmost condominium building. The structure was fat and frosted with pink stucco and rimmed with Spanish terraces. Evacuated residents sat on a side lawn under trees manicured to look like poodle tails.

Maryk was met by one of his Special Pathogens men wearing a full contact suit at the concierge’s desk in the lobby of Groves East. His name was Reilly and he introduced a waiting Atlanta police lieutenant named Cole. The cops behind Lieutenant Cole all wore gloves and police respirators and stood around anxiously. Law enforcement organizations in general hated dealing with disease.

Reilly huffed inside his suit and led Maryk around rather theatrically. Maryk declined a suit with a sideward glance at Reilly but did pull on a simple respirator for appearance’s sake. Lieutenant Cole thumbed the elevator log button but Maryk walked to the stairwell. Reilly and Lieutenant Cole reluctantly followed. Uniformed police officers in gloves and masks were posted at each landing.

“How bad would you say it all is, the spread?” asked Lieutenant Cole. “We can go wider with the evacuation if it’s warranted.”

“I won’t know what it is until I get in there,” said Maryk.

“Helluva job you people do. Tracking this thing, and keeping my boys out of it. Be nice if we knew where crime was going to emerge as it emerged.”

“It’s like narcotics,” offered Reilly. “From the source to the distributor to dealers to the street. Contact tracing. Chain of infection.”

White viricidal foam lathered the walls beginning with the eleventh-floor landing. Reilly and Lieutenant Cole slowed there.

Reilly said, “We do appreciate your cooperation, Lieutenant.”

“Cooperation, nothing. Damn pleasure. You know I have a son in sixth grade in Conyers who says he wants to be a doctor like Dr. Pearse at the BDC. I tell him he’s crazy. That’s one hell of a public relations department you got going there.”

Maryk was a half flight above. “We can handle next-of-kin notification,” he said. “Disease can be a difficult subject, and we’ve had some experience.”

Lieutenant Cole pointed up from the perceived safety of the lower landing. “Shouldn’t you be in one of them suits?”

Reilly answered for him. “Dr. Maryk’s not so good in confined spaces.”

“Lord,” said Lieutenant Cole genuinely. He tipped his hat to Maryk. “Luck to you.”

The eleventh-floor hallway was foamed wall-to-ceiling. Two suits guarding a door three doors down opened it for Maryk and Reilly. They entered a kitchen area with a larger room beyond. The door closed behind them and they were sufficiently alone.

Maryk stripped off his respirator. Reilly broke open the seal across his chest and with a gasp of relief pushed the hood piece back over his head. The suit collapsed to the carpet and he stepped out of it.

“Seven years of med school,” Reilly said. The tension of the situation had short-circuited his usual midwestern agreeableness. “Seven years of med school — for this? We’ve been going out of our minds here.”

“I was detained.”

“I thought they’d bust in at any moment.”

Maryk moved into the living area. “You should have more faith in their fear. Now what happened?”

Reilly walked inside ahead of him. “Everything’s been preserved, everything recorded on disk. The apartment and the hallway, everything.”

Rattan shades drawn over the windows glowed brown. The main room was arranged around a media center with a monitor and console set into sturdy wire shelving. There was a black leather couch and a floor lamp in one corner and twin black canvas director’s chairs in the other. A large bookcase was built into the near wall. It was full of pop culture memorabilia from the turn of the century — books, posters, glossies, action figures, magnets, mugs, lunch boxes, pins, cels, phone cards, video cassettes. Lancet owned and operated a nostalgia boutique for tourists in the Underground Mail of downtown Atlanta.

“You’ve never been up here,” Reilly said.

Maryk shook his head. “Where is he?”

“The bedroom. We took a liver temp which set death at about midnight, right after he got in from work. Boone’s in there now. Haven’t touched him otherwise.”

Reilly was calming down now and the eagerness was returning to his moon-shaped face. “We breezed by his shop at the Underground Mail around eleven and everything was fine. Followed him back home here like any other night and watched him go in. All routine. He put on the lamp and the light in the bedroom window as always.”

“That’s it?”

“There’s nothing missing as far as we can see. He draws his salary every other Thursday and of that takes just twenty in paper, so there’s never any hard currency lying around. Everything that isn’t tied up in his store he spends on more of the same collectible junk, and obviously, all of that is still here.”

“How did you find him?”

“He didn’t open the store this morning. We tried a phone call to wake him up. We tried a lot of things before we came in. He was always punctual. Made our part easy. None of it makes any sense.”

“Where’s the bedroom?”

Reilly led him through the connecting hallway. The bed was queen-sized and neatly made. A rattan shade drawn down over the room’s only window lifted and fell against the sill as the bedroom sighed. The breeze stirred the coppery smell of blood.

Lancet was a trim thirty-three-year-old white male with sandy brown hair. He lay facedown across the peach comforter with his head and shoulders falling off the side and the knuckles and backs of his hands curled on the thin white mat covering the floor. He was nude except for athletic socks. Discarded clothes lay in a pile against one wall.

Both wrists had been slit lengthwise. Dry brown blood soaked the white mat and also a wood-handled steak knife lying between Lancet’s curled hands.

Maryk stepped back. The shock of the suicide momentarily eclipsed his anger at seeing four years of work thrown away. The instrument choice seemed particularly crude.

“A steak knife,” he said.

Reilly nodded. “I know.”

The weight of the body upon the mattress had shrugged down the comforter so that the sweat-stained tops of the pillows showed. Maryk went to the heap of clothing across the room and sorted through the pile with his right foot. A vintage pair of black Levi’s jeans lay below a white pair of briefs. Both were turned inside out.

“No sign of a struggle, forced entry?” Maryk said.

Reilly said, “None that we can see.”

“And no one was following him. You’re certain of that.”

“Lancet had no enemies,” Reilly said. “Not that he had any friends either. He didn’t have anybody. Except us, and that he never knew.”

Boone rose before the dresser. He was wire-haired and older than Reilly. “This is too much,” he said. “We’ve moved out of the gray area now. Observation, surveillance: fine, okay.” He pointed to the bed. “That’s a corpse there.”

The loss frustrated Maryk as much as it troubled him. “You were to watch him,” Maryk said. “You were to monitor him and to make certain that he remained in Atlanta, and that he lived comfortably. But above all you were to make certain, absolutely certain, that no harm came to him. That he remained viable and healthy.”

Reilly and Boone looked at each other as men who have worked long hours together will. “What did you expect?” Boone said. “This guy was haunted. He was a ghost, and, he knew it. He lived for the past. Look at this.”

There were display shelves next to the closet doors and Boone began pulling items off them. A sky blue box reading WINDOWS ’95. A Frasier mug. An unopened foil pack of Beavis and Butt-head playing cards. A Lost World lunch box. An Entertainment Weekly guide to The X-Files. Stacks of old VHS video cassettes. A red ribbon pin.

“Pull all the phone taps,” Maryk said. “Unwire his tablet. Then declare a Biohazard 3 and go through all the motions. Bring him out in a covered pod and get BioCon going on the hallway and the rest of the building. We want the neighbors inconvenienced as much as possible; it will lend legitimacy. Write up a death certificate, nothing too exotic, then contact his sister in Louisiana. Make certain she gets anything of value you find here.”

Boone folded open the closet doors and pulled out a vinyl storage bag from among Lancet’s personal effects. He drew the zipper down on a green canvas jacket with white sleeves and white snaps and a twilled green-and white collar. The face of a bulldog was sewn over the right breast and a white capital letter P over the left. Script stitching beneath the dog face read: Plainville Class of ’00.

“How’s this for nostalgia,” said Boone.

Maryk only frowned. “You may dispose of that.”

Quarantine Services had sealed off the auditorium and old cafeteria inside Building One for the sequestration of anyone who may have shared breathing space with Stephen Pearse following his return from Orangeburg. It was a “friendly” quarantine of international health care professionals requiring no ankle monitors and minimal security at each exit.

The shock of the director’s illness was still setting in. A moroseness more eloquent than the usual moroseness of enforced quarantine pervaded the old building. Even the QS administrators in their contact suits sat tiredly on folding chairs or leaned dazed against walls. The administrative staff from Building Sixteen sat solemnly in groups and speculated about the future of the BDC.

Maryk strode through quarantine. No one approached or addressed him and no one spoke. of him until after he was gone.

Bobby Chiles entered the makeshift examining room and sat down before realizing that Maryk was seated across from him. “Peter,” Bobby said anxiously. “How is he?”

Maryk was rearranging the blood-taking supplies on the standing tray between them. “Alive. Blood samples seem to indicate a slowdown.”

Bobby’s eyes brightened in amazement as he rolled up his shirtsleeve. “Why, that’s — that’s remarkable, Peter. That’s truly remarkable. So there’s a chance, then.”

Maryk pulled out a Betadine swab and smeared Bobby’s exposed brown forearm orange-red. “I can slow the process enough to keep him alive for a few more days. A week, maybe more. Depends on how far gone he is, and how much we can learn about the virus in that time.”

“But there’s a chance he’ll make it beyond that. I mean, there’s always that chance.”

Maryk broke the skin of Bobby’s forearm and entered a vein. “No,” he said. “Stephen’s not going to make it.”

Bobby looked at him blankly as the small plastic barrel began to fill.

“When can I see about moving him out of there?” Bobby said. “B4 is a laboratory, Peter. People will want to visit.”

Maryk was firm. “No visitors. Stephen stays where he is. Full rein, Bobby, remember? No distractions.”

Bobby nodded distantly. “How could this happen?” he said.

Maryk raised his left hand. He opened it and pointed to the center of his latex palm.

Bobby said, “But he didn’t report anything. What was he doing up in New York?”

“Running away. The guilt of infection.”

“I knew that, of everyone we had out there, you’d be the one to find him. You two had a history.”

“His parents’ summer house was a long shot, but it paid off. We’re picking apart his tablet now. His bank account shows only one service stop the entire trip.”

“He had one of the government fleet. Eight cylinders of compressed natural gas. He could make it there with just one fill-up.”

Maryk nodded. “It was a full-service CNG station. A bank account debit through his tablet. Never had to roll down the window.”

“No spread, then.”

“None yet.” Maryk switched to a third barrel. “Except for the publicity woman.”

Bobby closed his eyes and nodded.

Maryk said, “And her two dogs. Practically turned them inside out.”

“Peri Fields. Public Affairs. You didn’t know her.”

“A touch, a sneeze, a passed memo, a borrowed pen. It wouldn’t have taken much. If she wasn’t already out with the flu at the start of it, we would have had a catastrophe on our hands.”

“With the bureau at ground zero. We can’t be this lucky much longer. It’s going to get out.”

“That’s why Stephen is so important. That’s why he stays in the lab. I’ve got to study him.”

“They said Peri had a lot of indoor plants, and that it got into them bad.”

“As well as the bacteria in the food. And not just the cupboards — somehow it broke through the refrigerator seal. But the plants were particularly bad. Plainville does something to them, takes longer to kill them. The stalks were growing up through the walls, around pipes, trying to get out. They were even snaking up the birdstand. It was like they were going for her parakeet.”

“You aren’t saying—”

“It was almost as though the virus couldn’t infect it, so it was going to finish off the job by hand. My people have the bird, but it’s just like all the rest. Birds don’t get Plainville. We still don’t know why.”

“The parakeet isn’t talking?”

Bobby burst into a fit of inappropriate laughter. His head dropped and his shoulders shook as he fought to regain his composure. Maryk left a bandage on the table for him and stood to change his gloves. Bobby looked up sniffling and scooping tears out of his eyes.

“Sorry... it’s my first quarantine. All the international liaisons and whatnot from Sixteen — I’ve got plenty of friends here, and at times I’m almost enjoying myself, playing cards to pass the time. But then I remember where I am, and I’m watching these people shuffling the deck and dealing cards in front of me, and all I can think is that, if even just one of them has it...”

Maryk opened the door to leave. “Rules of containment,” he said. “Same for everybody, doctor or patient. That was Stephen’s mistake. No one is exempt.”

“Well,” Bobby said. He was sober now and rolling down his sleeve as he looked at Maryk in the open doorway. “Almost no one.”

The funk was general throughout each building as Maryk moved through the BDC to Building Sixteen. The flags outside were flying at half-mast. He stopped in at the vacant Public Affairs office. He saw an empty box of sterile tissues on one of the assistant’s desks and balled up tissues scattered around a tablet keyed to a news server.

The screen image was that of Stephen delivering his Nobel speech at the Stockholm Concert Hall. The log line listed the article as that day’s third draft.

Maryk left the desk and continued inside through a door marked PERI FIELDS but the office had already been stripped down and cleaned out. There was nothing left of her there.

The office of the director remained sealed off from the rest of the building. Maryk stood at the nylon that lined the doorway and watched the yellow suits working inside. One was removing diplomas and photographs from the walls and disposing of them in a carton marked BIOHAZARDOUS WASTE. Another was foaming the brass inlay of the ceiling. A third BioCon agent lifted a large gold medallion off the desk. He briefly inspected Stephen’s Nobel medal before depositing it with the rest.

Maryk sat across from Ursula Freeley behind the counter of the gloomy admitting room. Orangeburg had burned itself out. Special Path’s biocontainment strategy had denied the arsonist virus the flesh and blood and tissue that was its oxygen. The microbreak had diminished to a few smoldering final-stage terminals.

Freeley sat with her puffed arms relaxed on the arms of the swivel chair and her legs straight out and crossed at the ankles. She appeared more comfortable inside a contact suit than most people appeared outside one. Maryk asked her how Stephen had been when he left the hospital.

“I didn’t see him then,” she said. “He wasn’t here but an hour. Had to see the patients though. Had to touch the sick. I spoke to one of the serologists with him, and he said that when Pearse left he seemed agitated. The hall cameras were all foamed over, so there’s nothing to view on disk.” She shifted unhappily in her padded chair. “I saw the press release. So now the healer of the free world dies a martyr to his cause. I don’t think Plainville victims look too valiant lying in state.”

“Better than the panic the truth would bring. What’s our status here?”

Freeley crossed her baggy arms. “Not with a bang but a whimper. Survival rate is zero, no surprise there. Again, nothing links the virus to the outside world. No less than two substantive genetic drifts in the virus between the beginning of the outbreak and the end. The lethality of this thing is our one saving grace. It kills so, expediently, the infected have little time to infect anyone else.”

“Nothing on the vectors?”

“Food, soil, sewage, pests, rodents, vents, air: Nothing stands out. And the catatonics’ old blood all tested clean. It was nothing lying latent.” She unknotted her arms and stressed her points with a chopping motion on the arm of the chair. “They weren’t infected, then they were infected, and now there’s nothing to tell us how. It’s not nosocomial. This didn’t move doctor-to-patient. So how did it get in here? Bugs don’t just appear and burn in a limited capacity and then disappear again. There’s commonality, footsteps, links. This just doesn’t happen — and yet here it is, happening again. This thing is smart and somehow getting smarter.”

Maryk nodded and looked sternly off to the side.

“And now Lancet is gone,” she, added. “That means there are only two left.”

Lancet’s self-destruction mystified Freeley as well, Maryk was thinking. “Do you ever take off your pants by rolling them down from the waist?” he said.

She looked at him flatly through the mask. “That may be the first personal question you have ever asked me.”

“There was a pair of black jeans in a pile of clothes on Lancet’s bedroom floor. They were pulled all the way through, inside out.”

“You’re thinking someone undressed him?”

“I don’t know. First Pearse gets stuck with Plainville. Then Lancet turns up dead.”

“So? Nothing links the two.”

“What if I told you that Pearse had been investigating me? That he was onto the blood project, Lancet and the others. That he had the files in his computer.”

Her hard-edged face showed suspicion. “How?”

“Stephen Pearse was many things, but he was never stupid.”

She dismissed it. “Who gains by killing Lancet? No one. I don’t see it.”

“I want you on his post. Reilly and Boone insist there’s no sign of forced entry; I need to be certain. We’ve preserved a number of items from his apartment. Closing Lancet down means freeing up some money, so we’ll double security on the others. We’ve got two Survivors left. It is imperative that we protect them.”

She nodded at the hospital. “And this?”

“We wait. We prepare, and anticipate. Each time we tell ourselves we’ve stamped Plainville out for good, and each time we’re proven wrong. I’ll assemble a rapid response team to cut down our reaction time on the next break, to give us a fighting chance.”

“We’ve got to stop chasing this bug’s shadow.

We need a viable sample of the pathogen for study. We can’t grow it in the lab because it eats through anything we put in front of it, and we can’t sustain it safely because of its virulence.”

Maryk stood then. “You forget,” he said. “We are growing Plainville in a lab now. Stephen Pearse is cultivating Plainville in vivo.”

Freeley came close to smiling then. Her cunning eyes brightened behind the Plexiglas of her hood.

Melanie

Breakfast, in a whirlwind. Two slices of broccoli and olive pizza pulled cold from her artfully magneted refrigerator, munched in the bathroom as she pulled on clothes from a pile on the floor and simultaneously willed her chopped hair into order. At that speed, it was easy to ignore the blotchy wall stains and flaking white paint, to shirk the general impression that the tiny bathroom was, like so many other things in Melanie Weir’s life, collapsing in on her. She had willfully overslept. Responsibility was no longer a viable deterrent to sleep. Each morning she could find fewer and fewer reasons to get out of bed.

She had once worked with a girl who had a scandalous habit of waking up in her bedroom with total strangers. Melanie did much the same thing, except that for her, the lingering scent of a regrettable evening was not cologne and other smells of a man, but turpentine and linseed oil, on her hands and her fingers, and rising out of the coffee cans and mayonnaise jars set on her windowsill like cocktails left out overnight.

She had this weird thing about painting: She had no real love for the art, and no training whatsoever, and yet once every few months, always late at night and often when the moon was full, she answered this inexplicable urge to take brush in hand and fill up a blank canvas. They all started out as masterpieces in her mind, as the painting would reveal all the things about herself she could never understand. But then the next morning she awoke to an unfinished landscape of grotesque images that was incomprehensible even to her.

Each was a variation on a theme. All involved blood, such as lakes or waterfalls of blood, set in lurid but desolate landscapes, populated by tiny people wandering around naked or in torn clothes, and bizarre, wolflike beasts with carrion in their grinning teeth, moving through sunless shadows cast by inscrutably deformed trees. These were not Holiday Inn-quality paintings, she knew. One image common to each work was that of a white-haired man whose face was always obscured. Dead center in her latest garish composition, the man was kneeling without reflection over a boiling reservoir of blood.

Dressed in a crushed velvet jersey and loose jeans, she came back into the bedroom and faced the painting. As a glimpse into her subconscious, this bizarre expression of angst was at the very least unsettling. She took the canvas down off her cheap metal easel and set it on the floor, facing the wall, then went to search for her keys.

Melanie lived in a tiny two-room apartment that was a well of voices. The broad windows of her apartment faced the broad windows of the next building of apartments, linked to her building on either side, three planes of windows and bleached bricks rising. Through her open, breezeless windows droned the jumbled voices, television clamor, and slamming doors of various other lives. She could make out only a sliver of sky as she looked up from her windows, though she had a terrific view of the accumulated trash tossed from the windows to the asphalt pen below. The Allston-Brighton neighborhood of Boston was a cat box for university students. Many a night she was awakened by the delicate sound of a person or persons relieving themselves off the roof.

It didn’t have to be this way. Melanie had been taking one of her fearsome canvases out to the trash one morning when a middle-aged man who struck her as a college professor stopped her at the curb. He saw the painting and expressed an interest in purchasing it, but Melanie gave it to him for free. The man insisted on taking her name and address, claiming that if the painting appealed to his “employer,” perhaps some future arrangement could be made. She said sure and gave him a fake address and went on her way. A few days later, a money order drawn on an Atlanta bank in the amount of five hundred dollars was slipped underneath her door, with a note requesting more paintings as they became available. Since that time, whenever she was low on funds and had another canvas lying around, she would contact this gentleman to arrange a sale. Neither he nor his employer ever identified themselves, but if some eccentric wanted to pay for her repulsive paintings — her imagination had conjured a dotty old geezer, like a backwoods Citizen Kane, squirreling her canvases away next to his fishing line collection and carton upon carton of artificial limbs — who was she to turn him down? Twice her secret patron had, in writing, offered to relocate her to Atlanta and install her in an artist’s loft there. But Melanie was not born yesterday. Besides, she had no real control over when she painted, or what her mind told her to draw.

The heat rising through the well obliterated most rain and snow, and the depth of the pit defeated direct sunlight, so that the weather, when she went outside, was always a surprise. She found her keys and ran down four flights of stairs, pizza crust in hand, to the glass front door webbed to obscurity with cracks left from a year-old shooting. It was a cold, early December morning.

She glanced up and down her narrow, curving street before starting to the corner, and saw no one suspicious. But the people who were following her rarely appeared so close to her own building.

Her bag slapped against her side as she ran along the Commonwealth Avenue median after a streetcar, catching it and boarding and moving between two empty seats, choosing instead to stand. No one had followed her inside. The train started and she stood holding the overhead bar, rocking along, pretending not to be scanning the faces of the other riders, and resisting the sleeplike pull of mass transit funk.

The B line trolley below Kenmore Square, the one on which she was traveling, ran between the area’s two largest universities. She was surrounded by students, all unfinished faces and soft hands, knapsacks slumped at their feet and modishly colored tablets tucked under their arms. The most fashionable kids wore hospital shirts or bruise-colored eye shadow, with plastic hospital bracelets dangling off their wrists. “I’ll” was in. “Unhealthy” was the rage. It was evidently a fashion statement about the diseased world they stood to inherit. Melanie had the look herself, in her build and the dark circles under her eyes, only she did not share the sentiment; she came by her disease-chic naturally. One healthy-looking man in the second car, older and well-dressed in a simple suit, stood out from the rest; his only concession was an inconspicuous pair of latex gloves, which, when riding on a public subway, was not a bad idea. The rest all looked like children to her twenty-four-year-old eyes, and she could feel her days of scamming student discounts coming to an end. Four years of being a dedicated dropout, of auditing her life, had earned her no credits, no degrees, no nothing. She was four years’ poorer and on the brink of expulsion from the university of her own making.

At the Brighton Avenue intersection the doors folded open and she stepped down with the others, passing in front of the blunt nose of the train to the rail tracks on the other side. The change in acoustics from the trolley to the outside street amplified the ringing that was constant in her head: a flat, mantric tone sapping 60 percent of the hearing in her right ear. At certain times, such as right now, the blare rose so intensely in her head that nothing short of stopping and pressing a hand to her ear would ease it. Others from the streetcar moved around and away from her as she waited. She felt the rumbling of the tracks, but did not make sense of it in time.

She was struck from behind and thrown forward sprawling onto the cement apron. She had been tackled, knocked off the track median toward the street. As she tumbled, she saw a flurry of arms and knees, most of them her own.

Steel wheels screeched as a B trolley burst behind her. The harsh, sudden noise was deafening to her keening ears, and stunned, she jerked back onto her knees.

The well-dressed man from the second trolley car was behind her now, having rolled from the force of his impact half out onto Commonwealth Avenue. An automobile skidded to a stop, curtseying just inches from his tight shoulder.

Her handbag had slipped to her side. She groped for the snap and thrashed around inside for her mace, pulling it out and thumbing the trigger. A fine steroid mist escaped. It wasn’t her Mace at all: It was her bronchodilator, and with a grunt she flung the inhaler aside.

Then she realized what had actually happened. The well-dressed man hadn’t attacked her at all. He had shoved her out of the path of the inbound streetcar. He had saved her life.

“Hey!” she yelled after him. But the stranger never looked back. She saw the soles of his shoes and his gloved hands pumping as he raced away, and by the time she got to her feet he was down a side street and gone.

Very quickly she had her bag back in hand. People were staring at her, and a college kid wearing a powder blue surgeon’s cap stepped forward and handed Melanie back her inhaler, asking if she was all right. She snatched it out of his blue-bandaged hand and rushed blindly across the street while the traffic was still stopped.

She went a city block with tears stinging her eyes, apartment stoops and storefronts blurring past her. At the corner she ducked into the doorway of a dry cleaners and she faced her frail reflection in the steamed window as she tried to catch her breath. Cranberry, that was the color she had regrettably dyed her hair, short to her jaw on the sides and flat against her small head like sauce poured over an eggshell. She looked like a punked-out corpse. No combination of clothing or patterns could improve upon her implike frame. She was a mess.

She glanced back up the avenue and no one seemed to be following or staring at her any longer. Her damaged lungs heaved and burned. She took out her inhaler and took a deep, soothing hit, and felt her lungs begin to expand.

Just keep moving, she thought. As long as she kept moving forward, the worst they could do was force her sideways.

The appointment she was running late for was at the Allston-Brighton Parish Clinic, a busy, modern brick office building located across from a Middle Eastern restaurant, half a block down Harvard Avenue. Only a gynecology appointment could round out that most enjoyable morning. Dr. Ursula Freeley’s office was not listed in the lobby directory, nor was there a plaque on her second-floor door. But like a horse returning to the corral, Melanie’s reproductive organs knew the way.

The waiting room was always empty. The window was open and the receptionist, a different woman than last time, smiled up at her and spoke with a light southern accent. There was never a wait. Melanie was called immediately and shown into the examining room.

Light choral music playing inside did nothing for her, and she remained fraught with the chaos of the street. Water helped to calm her down. As directed, she was drinking glassfuls from two plastic pitchers in order to fill her bladder and thereby raise her pelvic organs for an impending ultrasound. Melanie suffered from endometriosis, a condition whereby stubborn endometrial tissue clung to her insides rather than being voided by her damaged body each month. It had been described to her as “rust” on her ovaries, and could lead to the development of painful cysts which, if untreated, could then lead to tumors. There was no cure, only a choice of two treatments. The first was pregnancy. Melanie’s laughing jag at Dr. Freeley’s first suggestion of this three years before had prompted a memorable sneezing fit. The other was a laparotomy, a mildly invasive surgical procedure whereby a viewscope was inserted into the navel and a tool was inserted through the abdominal cavity to scrape the uterus clean. Her ovaries were incorrigible and had already demanded the procedure four times. Her pale-as-dough bikini line — “bikini” used in the purest hypothetical sense here — was marked with four slashing pink incision scars facing her indented navel, like the constellation of whatever cursed sign she had been born under. Would the fifth, which she dreaded, cross the first four, thereby completing a set?

She heard the doctor’s footsteps out in the hall, the way a deadbolt must feel when it hears keys jingling. Dr. Freeley was businesslike and tall. She was humorless, but as with any good doctor, she had a quiet, confident air that allowed Melanie to tell her things she told no one else. She was also beautiful, with a cool, perfect elegance about her which struck Melanie as fundamentally unjust. Gynecologists, of all women, should not be someone you might lose your date to at a party.

“No examination,” Melanie reminded her.

Dr. Freeley set down her chart and wheeled over the blue machine, agreeing with a nod. “Just pictures this time.”

Melanie unbuckled her belt and slipped her jeans halfway down over the bony knobs of her waist. She removed her jersey and lay back, sliding her shirt up past her prominent ribs, revealing the scrawny torso of a teenage anorexic.

Dr. Freeley said, “How have you been feeling?”

“Never better,” Melanie answered.

“No weight gain, I see. Ninety-two pounds. You’re eating?”

“Let’s see. Cheeseburgers for dinner last night. Chicken wings for dessert. Pizza for breakfast, and I’m already hungry again. Am I on heroin?”

Dr. Freeley casually touched Melanie’s waist with her latex hands, looking merely interested, not concerned. “Just an overactive metabolism,” she decided.

Dr. Freeley slathered gel on Melanie’s bare stomach and her abdomen bucked against the coolness. Melanie often wondered how much Dr. Freeley knew about her medical past, such as the damage to her lungs. There was something in the way she treated Melanie, much like a child, and in the fact that she had never asked the origin of the other, numerous scars, proud and jagged and slashing Melanie’s belly and chest like surgical graffiti, that had gradually raised Melanie’s suspicions over time.

“Arch your back more.”

The ultrasound examination was mercifully brief. Later, after relieving the swollen balloon of her bladder in the connecting bathroom and toweling off the goop, Melanie noticed dust in the small sink. She ran water which lifted and swirled the grime into dark streaks and whisked them away down the drain, leaving a gray ring. The soap dispenser, she noted, was full; new. That bathroom had not been used in days.

She returned to the greater examining room where Dr. Freeley waited, as always, to take her blood. Melanie’s mind ran on as she watched Dr. Freeley work over her arm. Why the need for so much blood? How much did she need for testing? Melanie studied Dr. Freeley as Dr. Freeley studied her, until the room began to spin. Melanie lost count around the sixth or seventh tube.

“Just one more,” said Dr. Freeley. “You haven’t asked about the ultrasound.”

“Right,” Melanie nodded. Because she knew the answer already.

“The ovarian adhesions are back again. I don’t know why the hormone pills aren’t working. We’re going to have to schedule another procedure.”

Melanie nodded, drifting. “Or else become pregnant. Don’t leave out that option.”

Dr. Freeley finished and bandaged her arm. “I take it you’re between boyfriends?”

“That’s a generous way of putting it. But who needs romance when you’ve got adventure?”

“What about work?”

“A part-time job. With full-time hours. I guess I’m between careers, too. Or between unemployments. Can I ask you a question about these hormone pills?”

Dr. Freeley was placing stickers on the thin tubes of blood. “Yes?”

“Any side effects? Drowsiness, for example? I’m sleeping all the time.”

“There shouldn’t be.”

“Or my inhaler? Confusion, maybe? Paranoia?” The flicker of interest in Dr. Freeley’s eyes made Melanie retreat. “Should I worry about operating any heavy equipment?”

Dr. Freeley said, “You seem concerned.”

“Oh, no. I guess I’m just between lives.”

She held Melanie with a flat, probing gaze. “Sit tight,” she said. “I’ll get you some orange juice.”

She carried off the tray of blood tubes. As soon as the door closed, Melanie grabbed the side of the bed and rolled off. Her shoes clapped against the floor, legs wobbling as she reached out for the examining room counter and pulled herself to it. She swiped the metal basin with her finger. Her fingertip turned gray with cotton-fine dust. An unused examining room sink. No name on the office door. The different receptionist every visit. The always empty waiting room. Melanie turned and reached back for the bed, waveringly, hoisting herself back on top of it just as Dr. Freeley returned.

Melanie slurped the juice rudely. This was after sniffing it.

Dr. Freeley monitored her blood pressure until satisfied. “Two weeks, then,” she said. “For another look. A full examination this time. Then we’ll decide.”

“What if it’s some virus?” Melanie said.

Dr. Freeley looked at her closely. “Some what?”

“A virus. Causing my ovarian rust.”

“We know exactly what it is.”

There was nothing in Dr. Freeley’s face, but instead of backing off again, this time Melanie pushed forward. “I was reading about this hospital in South Carolina,” she said, “Some outbreak there that killed all the patients.”

Dr. Freeley now seemed impatient. “As I understand it, those patients were diagnosed with Waterhouse-Friderichsen syndrome. Classic acute meningococcal meningitis caused by a bacterium, not a virus. Sudden fevers, neck stiffness, dizziness, a coma within hours, kidney hemorrhaging, and then death. Do you think you have that?”

“You know a lot about viruses.”

“One has to these days.” Dr. Freeley slowly folded her arms. “We’re not heading toward another episode, are we? You trying to check yourself into a clinic, claiming phantom symptoms of some exotic disease?”

These words shamed Melanie. She was much better than that now.

“Things are happening to me,” she said quietly, all at once. “I can’t explain them.”

“What things?”

“People. Watching me. On my way to work. Different places.”

“First of all,” Dr. Freeley said. “Who?”

“I don’t know. My mail too, I think. My phone. I was jumped on my way over here.”

“You were what?”

“No, it was okay. One of the people following me around saved my life.” Then Melanie thrust out her arms for her gynecologist to see. “Pinpricks,” she said. “Small ones, other than yours. None right now, but sometimes I find them — as though I’ve been jabbed, as though...”

The look on Dr. Freeley’s face stopped Melanie.

“I’m not just being paranoid about this,” she insisted. “Honestly — it’s not like my life is so empty that I have to make things up. I mean, my life is empty, but I would never...” She trailed off. As she shook her head, chemically ruined hair shimmied around her ears. “And then, sometimes, after it happens — after I wake up — I feel as though I’ve been handled.”

“Handled?”

“Tampered with. Examined.”

Dr. Freeley watched her with a silent concern that became intimidating. Melanie was starting to feel the table beneath her, and was again aware of the music playing faintly. The blood loss; she couldn’t believe what she had been saying. She recalled the gray dust in the sinks and realized she should shut up.

She had never told anyone about having survived Plainville, and by merely considering turning loose this great secret, Melanie realized how truly desperate she was for help — and she was scared.

She talked her way out of the office somehow, not able to think clearly again until she was on the street outside the clinic and trying to figure out which way to go. She eyed the patients coming and going from the lobby, scanning for familiar faces, but soon gave that up. She watched the sky for falling pianos as she, picked her way along Harvard Avenue toward work. Ninety-eight percent of the time she was so careful. So why was it that these 2-percent screw-ups continued to define her life?

Blossom

Maryk awoke from his cascade slumber wearing yesterday’s clothes. He felt depleted. The cascade was like the digestive torpor following an unimaginably heavy meal.

He sat up on his office couch with his head in his hands. Freeley entered behind a knock. She was used to his cascades. He had only to tell her the cause.

“Pearse,” he explained. “Most of the night.”

“How bad is he?”

“Improved. But don’t look so disappointed. He’s dying all right.”

Maryk rose and crossed to his desk chair. His office was a small room on the top floor of Special Pathogens Building Fifteen. His black bag rested on a windowsill and his tablet sat alone on big desk. There was no printer. Paper was unsanitary. It was a vector and if handled improperly could break the skin and even breach some gloves.

Freeley’s auburn hair was tied back. She wore a beige blouse and cream pants and there was a quiet strength evident in her confident manner and relaxed hands as she stood between Maryk’s desk and the door.

“You’re here to update me on Lancet,” he guessed.

She began. “First, I went through the possessions we kept from his condo and did trace pulls. Nothing there. I ran a laser over all contact surfaces, such as the knobs on the front door. The outside handle was covered with Lancet’s prints, while the inside appeared to have been wiped clean. Faint prints remain on the inside door face, however, and are Lancet’s.”

Maryk stopped her there. “What do you know about fingerprints?”

“From various texts. Lancet’s fingertips had some very distinct whorls. It’s simple enough if you’ve got an argon-ion laser.”

“Of course,” he said. Nothing Freeley did could surprise him. “So if an unknown got inside the condo, they were invited in.”

“So it would appear. Still, there was no sign of any struggle, and Reilly and Boone did indicate some level of depression on Lancet’s part.”

“That’s their opinion,” Maryk said. “Go on.”

“Bathroom floor mat. One partial sneaker impression, common tread, flat and narrow, unisex brand. Size nine for men, eleven for women. Lancet was a nine, but this is a modem tread and doesn’t match any vintage pairs in his closet. I followed up with a rather unscientific weight experiment, having different people step on the same mat and then measuring their impressions. Best estimate: one hundred ten to one hundred twenty pounds. I ran it a few times to be certain. Lancet weighed one-fifty-seven.”

Maryk was feeling revived now. “What would a one-hundred-and-fifteen-pound person be doing in Lancet’s bathroom?”

“Running hot water. I found an unridged smudge consistent with a gloved palm on the faucet handle. We pulled the traps and treated them with a chemical and it came up as Lancet’s blood. This means nothing — he could have cut himself shaving months ago.”

Maryk said, “You treated the traps with a chemical?”

Freeley shrugged. “Information is the cheapest commodity. You can access everything you need to know about flying to Venus and back. It’s having the resources that counts.”

“I’m impressed,” he said.

“You’re supposed to be. Finally, Lancet himself I believe I’ve found a pinprick in post. A tiny premortem breach along the base of the hairline, just back of the lateral surface of the neck, and well hidden. But, toxicologically, his system is clean.”

“A needle stick.” Maryk’s mind ran back to the footprint. “Medical personnel?”

“Impossible to tell. Consider the wrist lacerations. Two deep, neat incisions without any hesitation marks. Depressed or not, he was serious about destroying himself and causing some pain in the process. And it is a messy procedure for someone else to perform, with the rest of the place showing otherwise clean.”

“But an unmatched sneaker print in the bathroom. A palm print at the sink. A pinprick.”

“These are unexplained. And then there is Blossom.”

“What about her?”

“I had hoped to resolve this before coming to you with it. We lost her yesterday. This is not unusual, as you know. It’s difficult trailing someone who doesn’t seem to know where she’s going herself. But we activated the trace on her car, and late yesterday pinpointed it in a garage across from the CNN Center downtown.”

“Near the church.”

Freeley nodded. “Naturally.”

The Enterprise Church was a cult movement derived from the works of twentieth-century science fiction writer Gene Roddenberry and popular Star Fleet conventions. Its members awaited the coming Rendezvous whereby an alien landing party would arrive on Earth to mete out justice for their murdered comrade, Jesus Christ. Blossom had been a devoted follower ever since her recovery.

Freeley said, “She wasn’t there, but a member said some of them were out recruiting, or whatever they call it, for their church’s ten-year Star Date anniversary gathering here in Atlanta, this New Year’s Eve.”

Maryk frowned. “Then Blossom remains unaccounted for? What about Milkmaid?”

Freeley shrugged dismissively. “Milkmaid is fine, the same.”

“You’re certain?”

“I saw her yesterday. Mystified as ever. Paranoid, hypochondriacal. She nearly walked into a Boston streetcar yesterday morning. But she is accounted for. Nothing going on there.”

Maryk mulled things over. “Tell me exactly how we lost Blossom.”

“Early-morning traffic. She jumped a red by accident and wriggled away from her tail, then didn’t show up where we had expected her to.”

“I’ve told them a dozen times,” he said, “follow the person, not the car.” Maryk stood. “I want Blossom located by sight. I want that immediately. I want an exact position on her until we can get to the bottom of this Lancet situation.”

Freeley nodded. “I’ll get on it myself”

Maryk was alone with Stephen in B4. Stephen’s vitals had crashed overnight but his brain activity never flat-lined and Maryk had successfully revived him. Stephen had been plateau for vitals since then and was starting to retain some IV meal. Pupil response evinced further improvement.

Maryk had prepped another 500 ml dose of Milkmaid serum. He was administering it when Stephen began to speak.

The nurse that morning had detailed occasional moans and a few instances of trembling in each arm. But nothing could have prepared Maryk to see Stephen stirring beneath him. Stephen’s diminished facial features were like the features of a prototype of Stephen Pearse awaiting more cosmetic girth. His hands were the thin speckled hands of a man twice his age. The tube between Stephen’s lips drew his head leftward and formed his dry mouth into an emotionless smirk. His lips opened and his whispered voice broke the controlled silence of B4.

“Bobby.”

Then his eyes opened. Maryk stepped back and nearly dropped the empty glass ampule to the floor. Stephen’s eyes were blood-red around the pale blue irises and distended inside depressed sockets.

Maryk reapproached the side of the gurney. He watched as the word again worked its way up Stephen’s gaunt throat like a cartridge sliding into a rifle chamber.

“Bobby.”

Stephen’s dull eyes reached around the bright lab. He bared his thin lips around the tube as though he were sounding out the letter e. His teeth were yellow-gray like cheap ivory and too large now for his jaw. He was staring at the ceiling.

“Where am I?”

His pupils drifted subtly. He was going to pass out again.

Maryk said, “The BDC.”

Stephen’s throat was raw from the infection and the tubes. The words came out in gasps. “Sick?”

Maryk stood stiffly over him. Stephen’s revival was nothing short of extraordinary. Maryk’s success surprised even himself.

“Peter Maryk is treating you,” Maryk said.

Stephen’s eyelids closed. His brow went slack but his lips around the tube remained tense. He was still conscious. His blind eyes opened again and gazed up at the piped ceiling. There were full breaths between rasps. He still believed he was speaking to Bobby Chiles.

“Don’t. Let. Maryk. Take over. BDC.”

His jaw relaxed then and his lips parted with a sigh. His eyes closed again and he was out.

Maryk stood over him smiling harshly.

The console screen behind him beeped twice. Maryk went away from Stephen and turned to the keyboard.

A window opened on Freeley. She was standing before a cement wall under dusky sulfurous light. She was inside a parking garage. She spoke quickly but was otherwise composed. “Blossom is down,” she said.

Maryk gripped the console. His gray eyes burned.

Freeley went on, “She was in the backseat of the car the entire time, slumped down. A day, at least. Same way: both wrists.”

“Milkmaid,” Maryk said at once.

“At work. Just confirmed it. Should I go?”

Maryk glowered at the console.

“Should I go?” she said again.

“No. You stay on Blossom. Tell them to stick tight to Milkmaid and don’t let her out of their sight. I’m going up to Boston to bring her in myself.”

The Alley

Melanie stood in the doorway to the narrow alley adjacent to the Penny University. It was raining, nighttime, but early still, and too early to be out already on her second cigarette break. Melanie didn’t actually smoke. Her scarred lungs couldn’t take it. But at the Penny University you had to work eight and a half hours in order to be paid for eight: healthy people were assigned their thirty-minute dinner break in one lump sum, meaning four hours of nonstop customers on either side, whereas nicotine junkies were rewarded for their disgusting habit with a fifteen-minute dinner and three floating five-minute smokers. Smoking breaks were impossible for the managers to monitor, so it was far and away worth the artless deception in order to be able to stretch five minutes of peace and quiet into ten or even fifteen minutes of pure customerless joy. These fake breaks were the only thing that kept her going. The alley was thick with exhaust from the cars on the street, and because of that she wound up sucking in some noxious fumes anyway, but as far as Melanie was concerned, sacrificing long-range health for short-range sanity was really no sacrifice at all.

The Penny University was a four-story brick tower that dominated the wide city corner of Commonwealth and Harvard avenues. It served anything brewed — coffee, tea, beer — and the fare that went with it. Melanie had been employed there as a barista — which, she had come to learn, was Spanish for “coffee jerk” — for a record four straight weeks now.

Her foot propped open the heavy door. At least it was only rain, not snow. The hot scent of coffee breathing behind her had seemed pleasant her first week; now it was like the cumulative sigh of a thousand waitresses, rankling the hair on the back of her head. Unseen Harvard Avenue was crowded at the entrance to the alley, and she could hear young voices laughing and tires whispering against the static of the rain, and see the headlights spraying the brick alley walls. Every university student in Boston spent at least one year living in the Allston-Brighton community of trolleys and alleyways and immigrants, and every one of them drifted like chicly-bandaged zombies into the Penny University for a steaming cup of central nervous system stimulant on a drizzling Friday night.

Her breath misted out into the cold alley air as she hugged her chest over her red apron. Her foot had started to cramp, and just as she was repositioning her hip against the heavy black door, she heard a small noise from the other end of the alley. It was a purposeful thump, like a person kicking a wall. A single yellow safety light shone down upon the narrow car path and narrower curbs where the alley veered rightward and out of her view, dead-ending at the dumpsters. She watched the light for shadows, expecting to see some homeless person come stumbling out, zipping up. Something about the noise had sounded human.

Now there was the slightest odor, in itself not peculiar for that alley, but a scent far different from coffee grounds and turned cream. It struck Melanie as oddly familiar, which only magnified her sense of dread. It smelled like sickness. Melanie did something extraordinary then. She went back in from her five-minute nonsmoking break one minute early.

With the fire door closed to the quiet rain and the vats of trendily flavored beer groaning around her, she felt foolish about her fear and shook it off. Cutting short her sanity-preserving break did not bode well for the rest of the night. She wove a path back through the labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling vats to the work area behind the coffee counter, retying her red apron.

Beverly was working to her right, tamping an espresso filter at the rear of the coffee station. Beverly had mousy blond hair and choppy bangs that clung to the lashes of her sleepy eyes. “You’re back early,” she said over the prep chatter.

“Didn’t want to miss anything.” Melanie lingered there in the shadows of the twin vats, surveying the main floor. The motif inside was neo-gloom, all red neon and shiny black wood and moody shadow over each floor spun out from a central spiral stairway, with lots of nooks and crannies on the upper levels and plenty of ports for charging up student tablets. Bottom line the Penny University was a caffeine bordello for the university smart set.

In Melanie’s varied and vast work experience, wearing out jobs like they were nylons, she had found the sole redeeming quality of a retail or service-oriented position to be the camaraderie found among co-suffering, codependent co-workers. The Penny University, however, stood as the exception to this trench-mentality rule. The microbrewers hated the baristas who hated the pastry chefs and so on down the line.

Customers. Constantly customers. If the absentee owners prayed, they prayed to the God of Precipitation on Weekend Nights. Inclemency meant lines out the doors. Melanie watched the kids stamping off street grime onto the spongy entrance mats and could smell, even over the roasted beans, the wet-winter scent of coat sweat and dank wool; fleecy sheep herding together over boysenberry beer, or triple-foam, triple lattes, or super-steeped, hemp-brewed pots of tea.

As she was watching the crowded entrance, a man stepped in from the rain wearing a simple gray suit, standing out from the rest of the young, pained hipsters. The trunk-necked hand-stampers deferred to his flashed ID, and as the man returned his billfold to his pocket, Melanie saw that he wore latex gloves.

She resisted her overactive imagination as she watched from the shadows of the creaking vats. The man proceeded to the center island supply station, rather than straight into the coffee line or up the spiral stairs to the beer floor and beyond, stopping at the recycled napkins and flavored stirrers, eyeing the wide ground floor and allowing Melanie a good, long look.

It was the well-dressed man from the trolley, the one who had pushed her out of the path of the oncoming streetcar. The shoulders and pant cuffs of his cheap suit were dark with rain. She wondered for a moment if it had been him out in the alley, but realized there was no way he could have gotten back to the entrance so fast.

Two other men, whom she recognized as semiregular customers, rose almost simultaneously on opposite ends of the floor and wandered close to the man in the suit. They were dressed like students, though as she now paid attention to them, she saw that they were definitely older.

A wave like a charge of electricity left her motionless and buzzing.

The dark-haired man from the trolley started to move. He crossed from the center island, scanning the vats as he approached the mess counter. He couldn’t see her there in the shadows. The man appeared concerned.

The other two fanned back out from the center island. Kids near them, as though sensing some sort of trouble, moved out of their way.

The dark-haired one from the trolley skipped the line and went straight to the barista well where the drinks were being prepared. Beverly was foaming up some milk when the man caught her eye. Melanie tried to whisper to her to wait, but the man was too close.

Beverly started toward him with the milk-frothing pitcher in hand. Even with wet shoulders and his drowned-puppy hair, the man was dark and blandly attractive and smiling forwardly, which guaranteed that Beverly would be on her way to help.

They met. Melanie could hear none of it, what with the orders being taken, the click and clatter of spoons and saucers, and the piped-in blues overhead. She watched the man produce his billfold — careful, in a conspicuous way, to display his identification only to Beverly, as though letting her in on something. Some sixth sense must have told him he had an easy mark. Beverly set the hot pitcher on the countertop and pulled down her mouth guard without taking her eyes from his credentials.

Melanie never saw them near her apartment or her work, only on the streets. That was how she was able to keep her sanity about being followed.

“Health” something, he seemed to be saying to Beverly, as in “health matter,” or “health emergency.” Beverly evidently shared his concern, as she was nodding slowly. Melanie began her retreat just as Beverly turned and looked back from the cocoa-powdered counter, her ratty blond bangs twitching over blinking mouse eyes. She appeared to be alarmed, searching the vat spaces, at first not seeing Melanie. Then she did see her there. Melanie shook her head, pleadingly, but Beverly jerked back and elbowed the stainless steel pitcher clatteringly to the floor. The blue tile went white with boiling milk.

Panic, unreasoned and immediate, burst within Melanie, and she turned and took off running. She threaded back through the fat shadows, stumbling and misjudging a turn on the wet floor and careening sharply into one of the vats, her bony shoulder prodding a light boom and her bag strap snagging on a gauge. She nearly ripped her arm off freeing herself, lunging between two copper bellies back toward the red EXIT sign over the side door. She hit the disabled alarm bar with both hands and spilled hard into the slick alleyway, flopping over the wet curb outside and almost failing down. Her momentum carried her into the far brick wall, which she pushed off from, fleeing toward the closed end of the alley.

She stopped at the beginning of the turn, seeing the pallid safety light through the rain and realizing she would be trapped in the dead end. She spun and ran back up the alley, fighting the apron tangling between her legs, past the door to the Penny University as it burst open and the dark-haired man from the trolley splashed out.

“Wait!” he said, reaching for her.

But she was past him, running up the alley toward the street. She went ten or twelve steps before headlights swung in front of her, brightly sweeping the slicked walls as a large car bumped over the corner into the alley, bouncing on its suspension, bearing down upon her. She stopped and threw out her hands, and the car skidded to a stop, fishtailing to the brick wall. The passenger door swung open and barred her only exit. The shadow of a large man emerged.

Her bag. She went into it madly, up to her elbow, fumbling for her Mace.

He closed the car door and stepped forward through the headlights. Behind her, the dark-haired man’s footsteps scuffed off the wet curb.

“Mace,” she whispered crazily, jogging the contents of her bag, and her hairbrush and gum wrappers spilled out onto the tar. She backed sideways from the headlights to the wall, her lungs beginning to contract.

The man from the car strode through the rain-filled beams with a thick, quick leg. He appeared impossibly large before her, his face lost in shadow, the headlights catching his white hair and giving it an odd glow.

White hair.

Her breath left her. Something happened to her then, like a thing opening or unfolding inside her.

She found her inhaler again and flung it away desperately, digging deeper, shaking her bag, backing up against the wet alley wall in his shrinking shadow, dizzy with revelation and a lack of air. She trapped the cylinder in the corner of her bag finally and whipped it out. She fooled with the safety guard over the trigger, fooled with it, fooled with it, then got it free as his shadow fell over her.

His hand closed around her hand and the Mace. She looked up and saw his face then, the cool gray eyes, the plunging nose. It was the face that was always missing from her paintings. Something overturned inside her, a revolution of head and stomach. Her neck bucked as her chest contracted, and she pitched forward.

She vomited. She was gasping for breath, sagging, her legs bowing beneath her as his hand remained around hers, the only thing holding her up.

Behind her, breathless:

Where was she? Outside?

Then, from above — deep, strange, stem:

Sloppy. The last thing we needed was a commotion.

Melanie choked on a hollow groan. Her vision swam as her body went limp. The headlights shining on the man’s black shoes drifted and twisted, and then abruptly stopped twisting, and the dark rain stopped falling all at once.

The girl passed out. Maryk held her dangling by her hand. “Psychosomatic,” he explained to the others. “Put her in the car.”

They took her from him. Pasco came off the curb with an explanation. “I lost her inside,” Pasco said. “She was hidden in back behind the counter. I thought something might have happened.”

Maryk held up a gloved hand to stop him, “We have people taking down plates and VIN numbers?”

“Every vehicle within a three-block radius.”

“I want the names and addresses of everyone inside. Then shutter this coffeehouse, or whatever it is, for one week. A health hazard, to cover your blunder. Make it real.”

Another Special Path agent nearby looked up from her tablet. “We’re into her apartment. Everything’s quiet.”

Maryk was kicking the vomit off his shoes. “Start packing it up then. Take special care with any paintings. They are to be delivered directly to me.”

He was looking into the alley as he said this. He saw a shadow flicker across the dim light at the far end where the alley curved.

Maryk turned to Pasco. “Where does the alley go?”

“Nowhere,” Pasco said. “It’s a dead end.”

Maryk unbuckled his black bag. “Wait with her,” he directed.

He started into the alley alone. He passed the door to the coffeehouse and pulled a small syringe from his bag as he rounded the short curve.

The cul-de-sac ended at three high brick walls. A security light was trained down upon the buckled tar. Dumpsters and cracked pallets and flattened cardboard boxes lay in the dull shadows along the slowly weeping walls.

Maryk moved to the center of the light. There was a faint odor of decay distinct from mere waste or spoiled food. The scent was animal. It smelled as though something had crawled in there to die.

A manhole cover shifted as Maryk stepped over it. The clink reported loudly off the high walls.

Maryk got down on his knees on the wet tar. He worked a gloved finger inside the hole in the iron disk and tugged. It did not budge. A grunting second effort raised the disk just enough so that he could grip the cover and drag it up and over the lip of the manhole.

It was black space inside and he could just make out an iron ladder leading down. There were scuffs on the top few rusted rungs where shoe bottoms had stepped. Maryk left his bag next to the hole and started down the ladder with the syringe. He had no flashlight. The clank of the rungs echoed as he descended into darkness. He dropped the last few feet to the bottom with a quiet splash.

The echo told him there were widening tunnels on either side. Maryk listened to the dripping water without taking a step in either direction. He felt the sensation of being watched but then decided he could not entirely trust his senses. His claustrophobia was already narrowing the dim circle of light above him.

He pulled himself one-handedly back up the rusted ladder and out of the dark mouth of the hole. He stood in the open air of the empty alley with the rain falling straight around him. The syringe remained low at his side like a knife.

The Living Machine

They returned to the BDC that night and Maryk broke off from the rest and made his way alone to Building Seven. He descended to the subbasement and passed through the five staging rooms into the netherworld of B4.

Stephen’s gurney was pulled away from the aquarium window to the edge of the work counter. His eyes were closed and the white bedsheet rose and fell between the black straps buckled across his chest, waist, and thighs.

Maryk brought up his chart and inspected the six different intravenous lines. He exchanged bags and feed bottles. Stephen’s blood pressure had stabilized and the nitroglycerin drip was no longer warranted. Maryk wondered at Stephen’s unexplainable progress. He prepped a dosage out of an upturned ampule and uncapped a y-valve in Stephen’s right forearm.

Stephen’s red eyes stopped him. He was watching Maryk and Maryk froze with the hypodermic in his hands. Stephen’s eyes were bright. He appeared to recognize Maryk. “Am I dead?” he said.

These were the first words they had exchanged in years.

“You’re in the B4 lab,” Maryk said. “At the BDC.”

Stephen swallowed. Speech was painful. “The lab?”

Maryk nodded. He finished the serum injection. “Safest right now.”

Stephen’s head turned back and forth on the pillow. His range of movement impressed Maryk. He realized that Stephen was shaking his head.

“Not Plainville,” Stephen said hollowly. “Still alive.”

Maryk held the empty ampule for Stephen to see. The label read MILKMAID. “Only because of this.”

“Serum,” he recognized. “Code names.”

“That’s all over now,” Maryk said. “Two of them are dead. Murdered. We don’t know why.”

The muscles in Stephen’s depressed face strained against his flesh. “Why straps?” he said. His hands clutched emptily at his sides.

“To keep you still. I operated.”

“In a lab?” Stephen struggled to raise his head off the pillow. He was becoming agitated. “What have you done to me?” he said.

Maryk located the bottle of morphine over the bed. He followed the feed line down to the dose administrator and doubled the rate of morphine drip. “I saved your life,” Maryk said.

“What have you done to me?” he said again.

Maryk watched Stephen’s breathing deepen and his eyes narrow to slits. Stephen was struggling valiantly to remain awake.

“What have you...”

Maryk remained looking over him until Stephen fell murmuring to sleep.

Maryk felt the first dragging symptoms of the impending cascade as he made his way toward Building Two. His exposure to Stephen had weakened him but he had one more task to perform that night. The Library and Reports Section was empty. He entered a dedicated user station and logged onto the bureau’s Genetech II mainframe.

The Genetech was a “living machine” molecular-based computer that used DNA goop rather than an electronic chip as its processor. A beaker full of properly managed DNA could crunch more arithmetic than the combined circuitry of every conventional computer on the planet. Human DNA was nature’s microchip and its capabilities had been harnessed to power the machine that powered the BDC.

What the Genetech did was coordinate genetic algorithms: lines of code that acted like living organisms in competition to evolve to beneficial solutions. The codes mated and mutated to form novel combinations in a Darwinian reserve of ones and zeroes. Less optimal remedies fell extinct as only the fittest survived.

The minivan-sized Genetech brain ran bureau life functions at the highest efficiency in everything from coordinating employee schedules to monitoring experiment conditions. It managed the U.S. Genetic Database and international LifeLink epidemic alert networks. It oversaw security in the pathogen vault freezer of Building Thirteen. Each bureau tablet worked as a low-power satellite borrowing off the assets of the high-capacity digital network the Genetech managed.

Maryk called up the code name files. No one had accessed the reports recently except Stephen Pearse. Yet somehow someone had learned of the existence of the only three Plainville survivors. Everything Maryk had now was riding on Milkmaid.

Maryk initiated a preloaded program “worm” designed to wipe the entire network clean of all records and reports relating to Lancet, Blossom, and Milkmaid. The code name project was terminated. Within twenty-three seconds all records of the project’s existence irrevocably ceased to exist.

The Telling

Melanie rolled over and over and finally she broke out of her fitful sleep. She sat up straight in an unfamiliar bed in a small, unfamiliar room. She was alone. She recognized her work apron and black cardigan sweater, but not the wooden chair and desk they were draped over, nor anything else. She threw back the sheets but was otherwise still dressed.

Panic set in. She rushed out of the bed at once, then fell into the wall and grabbed it to keep from collapsing. Her head. She winced against the blinding throb. She was always reeling, always walking into things, always coming to; she was never already there. She tasted acid in her mouth, and the abduction in the alley came back to her at once.

Margarine sunlight poured through the room’s only window. It was not the cool December sun of Boston. With one hand shading her eyes, she pulled herself toward its warmth and squinted out the window. She was three or four stories up from grass that was postcard green. She saw immense white stone buildings with lush trees all around, and young people strolling the grounds, satchels tossed over their shoulders. Students, of course. They haunted her. For one roseate moment she imagined she was back at Brown, getting ready to go to breakfast with friends, and nothing had happened yet to her family or her body.

She turned from the window. It was a college dormitory room: the empty bookshelves attached to the tawny-colored wood desk, the thumb-sized strips of missing paint scoring the plaster walls where posters once hung. There were two doors, one open and leading to a closet. She rushed to the other door. The knob turned freely under her hand.

The man from the trolley stood quickly out of a small chair across the hallway. Melanie kept a tight grip on the doorknob, blood beating against her head, while he stood awkwardly still. She didn’t think she could make it past him. Even if she did, she had no idea where to go.

“Where am l?” she said.

“Atlanta,” the man said.

She looked up and down the hall. It smelled of socks and hair spray. She said, “No, I’m not,”

He wore an identification tag on his shirt, with his picture and the name PASCO. “There’s a shower down this way,” he pointed. “I’m to take you for a meeting in” — he had a tablet gadget in his hand, and tapped a key — “twenty-five minutes.”

Melanie closed the door on him. She walked back to the foot of the unfamiliar bed and sat down. Sealed moving cartons were stacked near the empty desk, and she was certain, her intuition commingled with despair, that the clothes hanging inside the closet were from her own.

Her right arm felt stiff. She pushed back her shirtsleeve and discovered a small brown bandage taped over the pocket of her elbow. She touched it lightly, then peeled back one adhesive end, pulling up the pad. There was a fresh needle mark over the largest visible vein.

She did not shower, but did emerge from the room at the appropriate time and followed the man named Pasco outside across a university campus to one of the larger white stone buildings. He walked her squeaking down a waxed floor past closed classroom doors and into a deep, steeply set, empty lecture hall. They descended the blue-carpeted aisle past rounded rows of blue-cushioned seats facing a lectern and a viewing screen on the front wall. A breakfast tray was set before the center seat of the first row, and he showed her to it.

“You were out for ten hours,” he said. “We thought you might be hungry.”

“Wait.” He had started to leave. “What am I doing here?”

His apologetic wince kept the rest of her questions at bay.

“He’ll be out in just a minute,” he said.

He walked back up the aisle, and the click of the door closing resounded throughout the hall. She had no taste for the food, but reached for a tall glass of orange juice and drained it. Only after its coolness had coated her raw throat did she think that the drink might have been drugged. She was setting the empty glass back on the tray when the door beneath the wall screen opened and the white-haired man walked through.

The sight of his hair and black shoes made her feel immediately sick again. He crossed to the lectern in front of her and laid a tablet on top of it and a black doctor’s bag underneath. The gloved hands. The pearl-white hair. The white shirt buttoned under the thick neck, the dull black pants. He had walked straight out of one of her paintings.

He was regarding her too, not curiously but clinically, in the manner of an archaeologist coming upon an unusual rock. There was something about the man’s face, the squareness of his block jaw, the pride of his nose, the perfect smoothness of his flesh, that seemed to her truer than true. He did not seem real. He seemed wrong somehow, inactual. She looked at his condomized hands, the latex skin stretched tight over thick fingers. She looked at his stark gray eyes, like cold cement tunnels into which his real pupils had withdrawn.

Her stomach turned over and sent up a belch of orange juice that nearly choked her.

“You remember me,” he said, a stem voice giving her heart a good quick squeeze. It was not a question or a revelation but a statement, a point of understanding between them. “We remember each other.”

His strange voice touched something deep within her, and a memory like a sealed bottle cast not far enough from shore washed back to her. She saw him at the foot of a white-railed bed before a drawn plastic curtain, arms crossed in observation much as he was eyeing her now. She saw his bare, white-haired head as contrasted with the small, silent faces inside the yellow hoods clustered around him. The hospital. She had never forgotten her time in rehab, but he hadn’t been a part of that. He had been a part of the fever. He was that doctor.

His presence filled the lecture well, and Melanie felt trapped. “Where am I?” she said.

“Emory University. The Rollins School of Public Health. Just next door to the Bureau for Disease Control.

Disease Control. The words filled her with fear. “I’m going crazy,” she said, “aren’t I?”

“No, you’re not. You have been brought here for your own protection. We were never properly introduced. My name is Dr. Maryk.”

She felt woozily sick again. She was grateful for the tray and the imaginary space it put between them. His voice seemed to rise out of her subconscious as much as it did his throat. She could feel her mind opening up again to the sickness, the fever.

“It’s” — she didn’t like to say the word, didn’t like to hear it said — “Plainville” — though once uttered, the word had the effect of freeing her, steadying her, like a child’s first, daring curse — “isn’t it?”

He continued to study her, as though everything she said was being memorized for later evaluation. “You experienced some respiratory distress back there in the alley,” he said. He produced her inhaler from his breast pocket. “We’ll have to reevaluate your prescription.”

“I need that,” she said.

His gaze never wavered. She recalled him looming over her face in the hospital, examining her, the pain of the bright light on her eyes.

“I kept quiet,” she said.

He nodded. “Of course you did. Who would have believed you? Closure for the public meant no survivors.”

She waded through the brutality of his words. “I was the only survivor,” she said.

He nodded again. “That was what each of you was told.”

She struggled with this, then turned and scanned the coliseum of empty blue seats.

“Just two others,” he said. “They couldn’t be with us today. We’ve had some trouble.”

Her hands found the hard plastic armrests. She was queasy and scared again. “If I’m sick,” she said, “I won’t go through that again.”

His silver eyes darkened. “You are not sick. Quite the contrary. We need to know if anyone out of the ordinary tried to contact you recently.”

“Just you people. Following me around. Whoever you are.”

“We are your benefactors.” He rested one gloved hand on the lectern. “The other two survivors are dead. Both of them were murdered. It stands that whoever killed them will want to kill you.”

A strange smile floated to Melanie’s face, and she felt it twist there. “I’m not going to remember any of this, am I?” she said. “I’m going to wake up back in my bed, with needle tracks in my arm from whatever you keep injecting me with.”

He stepped away from the lectern. “Those are not injections,” he said. He began pacing back and forth, slowly. “How much do you know about Plainville?”

“I grew up there.”

“I mean in the current vernacular. The virus, the disease that burned through your town.”

She felt herself withdrawing. She realized she didn’t want to know any more. She just wanted to forget. She wanted to wake up and not remember. Melanie looked resolutely at the lectern and not at him.

“Central Africa,” he said. “Many viruses originate there. The prevailing theory behind this is that man himself originated there as well. Six years ago, two doctors, myself and another, were called upon to investigate a purported outbreak of smallpox in the Congo rain forest. Early-stage Plainville, as we now know it, closely resembles smallpox. We traced the path of the virus back to its source, an illegal uranium mine in an underground cavern rife with latent viruses. It was like a poisoned well in the center of a small town; no one drank from it too long.”

Her gaze did not leave the lectern. She refused to look at him.

“The virus the miners brought up had been trapped in that closed system for centuries, its RNA core undergoing constant bombardment from radioactive uranium deposits. It was an ancient agent, in fact the genetic forebear of smallpox. The pathogen was too unstable and too annihilative to combat. We had to cut off the threat at the source. We neutralized the virus above ground and buried the cave in the jungle. The other doctor with me was named Pearse. I assume you’ve heard of him.”

Of course she knew of Dr. Stephen Pearse. “He’s dead,” she said. They had all been talking about it at work.

“Dying,” he corrected her, resuming his slow pacing. “So. The Congo, New Year’s Day, 2011. Plainville, Massachusetts, One Week After Easter, 2012. Viruses respect no human boundaries, no walls or checkpoints or borders, only natural limitations, such as temperature, pH, ultraviolet light, and the availability of viable hosts and mobile vectors. But they do leave footprints: the outbreaks themselves. So how does a virus of unparalleled lethality trek from a buried cave in the equatorial jungles of central Africa to a small town in Massachusetts without any traceable link, no intermediate outbreak, or confirmed human carrier? The answer is that it does not. It is essentially an epidemiological impossibility. Viruses do not fly on gossamer wings and can always be traced back to their source. And yet somehow this virus rose up out of the ashes of the African rain forest and seized a small American town.

“The disease appeared simultaneously in the Plainville public school system, its town hall — whose infected carried it to a town meeting held that same night — and the office of a local pediatrician. The pediatrician, Dr. Joseph Weir, unknowingly passed the infection along to his patients over the following three days before manifesting early-stage symptoms himself. While he declined to be examined professionally by another doctor, he did isolate himself from his two children. His secretary, who was also his wife, was fielding calls at home from patients and neighbors with similar illnesses, and just before leaving to bring her dying husband to the hospital — and already exhibiting symptoms herself — she telephoned the BDC hot line to report the mystery illness. With that one phone call Mrs. Anne Weir saved, at minimum, one hundred million human lives. Because Plainville was about to explode.”

Melanie felt numb. She hadn’t heard another person speak the names of her parents in over four years. “His appointments,” she said.

“We checked. He didn’t contract it from any of his patients. We determined that much. Plainville was a town of just over twelve thousand, and we reconstructed virtually every resident’s whereabouts and movements throughout the town over the days leading up to the outbreak, and still failed to pinpoint the index case: Plainville’s ‘Patient Zero.’ Somehow the virus seemed to have attacked a pediatrician, the town offices, and the public school system all at the same time.

“Plainville is a genetically specialized killer, not just of humans but all animals, reptiles, rodents, and many insects, even and especially plants. Every living thing, except birds; birds in this case are reservoirs, and by that we mean that they can host and transmit the disease but are not sickened by it. Like all viruses, Plainville tries to transform the host by slipping into its cells and shooting them full of genetic material — essentially, an attempt to convert the organism into a virus itself But this conversion is biologically impossible, and so the host sickens and eventually one or the other — the human immune system or the virus — prevails. But Plainville is not a routine DNA virus. It is a retrovirus, an RNA virus, like HIV, infiltrating and disarming the body’s defenses; but unlike HIV, which slowly drips into cells, allowing us time to manage and compensate for the AIDS-related complex over the long term, Plainville works with the greatest efficiency. It is uniquely corruptive, riding the bloodlines to every organ as one after another they begin to fail.”

Her attention had drifted off, remembering her parents before they were taken away from her. Eventually she realized he had stopped and was waiting for her to notice.

“Boring, hmm?” he said. “Tedious? You didn’t get this far in your premed courses at Brown?”

Her indifference fell away, and she looked up at him.

“You’ll want to pay attention to this, I think,” he went on. “The immune system is your body’s monitor. I.S. cells stand guard against invading pathogens — bacteria, viruses, cancer cells — any organism that threatens the health of the body, not only by fighting these attackers, but also by repairing any damage, and even afterward, cleaning up the remnants of a battle. It is a complex, interactive network — your body’s police force, its protector.

“Similarly, the Bureau for Disease Control is the immune system of the human species: a vast, interactive network answering distress calls and assigning specialists. to investigate and eliminate microbial threats around the world. The disease Mrs. Weir described was one of unknown etiology and therefore assigned to the Special Pathogens Section, which I head. The circumstances were peculiar enough that I traveled to Massachusetts myself to investigate the break. The symptomology was immediately familiar to me, but it was the vegetation about the town, the infected trees and plants, that confirmed my diagnosis. I remember the house-by-house evacuation under the blare of an old civil defense alarm, and our coming upon a luncheon meeting of the Plainville Ladies’ Garden Club, and all the old women gathered hysterically, their daffodils and spring lilies — freshly potted, carefully arranged for the affair — all grown leathery and silver-black and wild.

“I communicated the threat back to Atlanta and the BDC responded in force, doctors, scientists, and BioCon troops converging on the town. You might remember this much. We blocked off highways and clamped all arteries into and out of the county. We closed airports in Boston and Rhode Island and called off school for days, effectively throwing a blanket over the entire region. The magnitude of the outbreak had forced us to go public, so we enlisted the media to help us track down carriers. For a while there in Massachusetts it was biological martial law.

“There were more than twelve thousand residents of Plainville, and almost every one of them was wiped out. Another eighty-one hundred satellite cases became infected and also died, most of them residents of surrounding communities. Only four infected people had boarded airplanes before the shutdown; those flare-ups were ultimately contained. Given one more day, the infection would have metastasized exponentially beyond Boston and the East Coast and across the country, and conceivably from there to every neighborhood of the world. A holocaust. To this day, very few people realize just how close we came.

“I set up triage in a hospital in nearby North Attleboro, spending most of my time there, treating the afflicted, learning what I could about the disease. Traditional treatments were unsuccessful, so I began to look into more experimental procedures, all of which failed, except one. Ten early-stage patients were selected for a trial program, each because their symptomatic development appeared to be lagging behind the norm. The trick with Plainville is to get to the infected host as early as possible. Later we learned that one of the ten happened to be the pediatrician Weir’s twenty-year-old daughter. Her brother was already dead, his immune system weak from a recent bout with Lyme disease.”

As she looked up at him, her stare became harder and harder. Was he dragging her back through all of this just to be cruel?

“Of the original ten, three survived — barely — following extensive surgery, therapy, and subsequent rehabilitation, including massive transfusions of blood. We have tried to repeat this process since, on others, and never succeeded—”

“How?”

Her interruption surprised him. “The blood transfusions were imperative,” he said. “But it was more than that. Something about these three patients. They were different. Certain people are born biologically gifted, in ways that under normal living circumstances usually never come to light. Three such cases out of a pool of only twelve thousand was just extraordinary good fortune on our part. “Suddenly we found ourselves with three survivors of the lethal Plainville virus. Our next step was to determine whether or not they had built up antibodies to the disease, and lab tests proved conclusively that all three had. Cell samples from these ‘long-term nonprogressors’ as they were termed, or LNPs, repelled the Plainville virus. This allowed some hope for development of a vaccine, but two problems persisted. First, Blossom.”

He went to the lectern and opened his tablet. He tapped some keys and a photograph of a middle-aged woman with short, straight, ready-to-go brown hair appeared on the wide wall screen. Melanie saw that the image had been cropped from a larger, family portrait.

“Each LNP was assigned a code name for confidentiality. Blossom was a homemaker, a mother of two, worked mornings in a local craft store. Her family was ‘old Plainville,’ and she lost every relative she had to the disease. Her immune system damage was severe, and compromised the quality of the disease-fighting antibodies in her blood.”

He cleared the image and replaced it with a snapshot of a young man sitting shirtless in a battered lawn chair on a lawn of gray-yellow grass. His image toasted the empty lecture hall with an open can of Old Milwaukee, and Melanie thought she recognized him, vaguely.

“Lancet, you may have known. He graduated from Plainville High School and returned to work there part-time as a janitor. But his bout with the disease had damaged his spleen, impairing its ability to filter impurities out of his blood.”

He changed images a third time, and there on the large screen was a high school yearbook photograph of a chocolate-haired teenager wearing her mother’s gold cross pendant and a hopeful smile. Her chin rested on the back of a pudgy hand holding a small, simple violet, and a cheap photographic effect gave her glass earrings a prismatic glow.

“Milkmaid’s blood, however, emerged undamaged,” Maryk said. “Her blood was optimal.”

Melanie’s jaw trembled as she stared up, low-eyed, at the photograph of the stocky girl in the pale blue dress. She remembered that day and all the outfits she had brought with her to the session, and how pleased she had been with the result.

“Milkmaid,” Maryk said looking up at the screen. “Premed at Brown, following in her father’s footsteps. But then, junior year, she ran out of academic steam. Took a leave of absence from school and moved back home. Worked as an assistant at the local pet hospital.”

He turned back to her, and Melanie felt her fear turning into hostility.

“So Plainville had been contained. Most assumed it was vanquished, but I was unconvinced. There was also the concern that the virus might somehow reactivate itself in these survivors after a period of latency, and render them infectious once again. Yet I could hardly confine all three in the hospital. There was no guarantee that they would even voluntarily comply with the research, and anyway, I don’t favor the closed setting and sterile conditions of a laboratory. Ideal results achieved under ideal conditions are unreal results, and I required a real-world solution. So a campaign was undertaken to monitor the LNPs upon their release. Inducements were made to encourage all three to relocate here, to Atlanta.”

He replaced the portrait of the old, forgotten Melanie with a more recent photograph of the woman known as Blossom. She appeared much changed, thinner, harder-looking, handing out leaflets on a street corner. Her hair was cut short and she wore a T-shirt with a small insignia over the breast. Melanie could make out the words on the front of her shirt, “Live Long.”

“As I said, Plainville has a varied and pronounced effect upon the brain. Blossom, after her recovery, was not the same person she had been before her illness. She became preoccupied with the future, joining a fringe religious order. She was not employable, and we doubted she could even survive on her own. She was therefore awarded a sweepstakes prize through the mail: a weekly stipend and free rent in an Atlanta apartment complex. She took this to be a religious sign and relocated immediately.”

He then put up what appeared to be a kind of surveillance photograph of Lancet, now older, cleaner, shaved, and better dressed. He was conversing with a customer from behind a store counter.

“Lancet also emerged from his illness a changed person. But he became fixated on the past, manifested in a preoccupation with the popular culture of his youth. A poor credit rating from his previous life prevented him from opening a nostalgia retail store in the Boston area, but at a franchise fair there he was offered an attractive deal on some prime retail space in the Underground Mall in downtown Atlanta and accepted without question. For whatever reason, Lancet became a merchant of his past.”

Maryk cleared the wall screen.

“But Milkmaid’s change was the most intriguing. She was found to have developed certain remarkable, inexplicable artistic talents, though she had never so much as touched a paintbrush before the disease. She was unschooled and did not attend museums or galleries of any kind. She never bothered to sign her canvases, or even complete many of them. She seemed to have no interest in the business of art, and sold the paintings only as was necessary to pay her rent.”

Melanie went cold. “You,” she said. “You were my so-called patron.”

“Through one of my investigators. But you resisted all entreaties to come to Atlanta. We even tried appealing to your veterinary bent: a letter of invitation from the Emory School of Medicine; the cat hospital in Decatur; an entry-level position with the local ASPCA — all rebuffed or ignored.”

She saw it all now. None of those strange job offers had ever made any sense to her.

“We purchased your paintings to keep you going,” he said, “though on several occasions we wound up funneling money directly into your bank account, and paid bills you forgot to pay. Evidently you never bothered to balance your statements. We watched out for you, took care of you. We even pushed you out of the way of oncoming trolleys. For over four years we have been with you: not every minute, and not every place, but comprehensively enough to ensure that you remained healthy and always within our reach.”

Her stare burned into the vacuum of space between them. “Endometriosis,” she said.

“Just an excuse to get at more of your blood, as well as to sample some other fluids for research. Only rarely did we require a blood pull that could not wait for a regular doctor’s appointment. This was the exception, not the rule. My people would slip into your apartment during the night, but rarely did they need to put you out for more than seven or eight hours at a time.”

“Oh my God.”

“As I said, early on there was hope for a vaccine. The stakes were very high. I tried to give you a life while we did this critical work. But then the outbreaks started.”

She was reeling. “Outbreaks?”

“We had to cover them up, for obvious reasons. Blamed something else each time. There have been five subsequent breaks since Plainville. The first occurred thirteen months later, at an ‘Engaged Encounter’ weekend for prenuptial Catholics in a Franciscan retreat north of Tallahassee, Florida. All fifty-three participants died, including the cafeteria and ministerial staffs. Fortunately for us, the location was isolated, and therefore easily contained. We blamed a rare salmonella. At subsequent outbreaks, we began experimenting with serum derived from your blood, as well as the blood of the others. Only yours has proved consistently successful. There is a time factor involved, as I said. Success requires immediate intervention. The most recent reemergence occurred less than two weeks ago, in South Carolina.”

As she was sorting through all of this, he put up on screen the image of a naked man lying facedown across a bed. There was blood on the floor by the man’s hands. Melanie quickly looked away.

“Lancet,” said Maryk. “Three days ago. It looked like a suicide at first.”

He changed the image to that of a corpse stuffed facedown into the backseat of a car.

“Blossom,” he said. “Very few people know about Plainville, know that it did not die in that small town in southeastern Massachusetts. And no one, save a core group of people working directly under me, knew about the survivors. You are a closely held secret, which is why we are meeting here and not inside the BDC. Are you certain you don’t remember anyone else following you recently? Perhaps something in the alley last night?”

She was staring at the screen. The back of the corpse’s T-shirt was wrinkled and dark, but Melanie could just make out the words “And Prosper.” Then Maryk clicked off the image, and her gaze settled sullenly upon the carpeted floor.

“We had planned to cut you all loose as soon as we derived a vaccine,” he said. “But the Plainville bug is too complex, and constantly changing. It burns bright and fast and then wriggles away somehow, only to pop up in a slightly different form again behind us. There will be no vaccine. The only existing treatment is the antibody remedy of your blood serum.”

She was wondering when the screaming would begin, if it would be soon or much later. Probably very soon. She looked up at Maryk standing before her, the white-haired man of her fever dreams. “You ruined my life,” she said.

He approached her then, enormous and imposing, until only the tray table of untouched food separated them. “On the contrary,” he said, “I believe I saved your life.”

“No.” She nodded at the high school portrait that had long since vanished from the wall screen. “You changed me. You made me into something else.”

The door clicked above her, and Maryk glanced up at the person entering. Then he came around the tray table, to her side. He knew enough to choose her good, left ear. She turned away from him as Pasco descended to the bottom step.

Maryk said, “This had to be done. I could not just cure you and let you walk away. Plainville is catastrophic to every human being on this planet — except you. You alone are immune to it now.”

“If this is all so good,” she said too loudly, “then why does somebody want to kill me?”

She sensed him straightening, pulling back. “That is something I don’t know yet,” he said. “Stephen Pearse: He was not infected in a lab accident. He was infected while treating a room full of patients — in Orangeburg, South Carolina — who inexplicably awoke from chronic, clinical catatonia infected with a newly mutated strain of the Plainville virus. Stephen Pearse has Plainville, and yet he is still alive today — because of the antibodies your immune system generates, which I have nurtured and seeded him with. We were only too late to cure him. But your blood is sustaining Stephen Pearse. You are the only thing keeping him alive.”

This couldn’t be true. Not someone like Dr. Pearse. She sat stunned as Maryk returned to the lectern. He was gathering his things. She realized that the lesson was over.

“You can’t keep me here,” she said.

He stopped on his way out. “It is no longer a question of personal freedom. The reason I have told you all this is because Plainville lives on, and you alone have the blood I need to combat it, to save human lives. You will be safe here. Finals are almost over, and the students will be leaving to begin their Christmas break. You will remain here under my care at least until I know what is happening. Dr. Pasco now will take you to the school cafeteria, and there you will eat.” Maryk had started past her for the stairs. “Above all else,” he said, “we need you to remain healthy.”

Thunderstruck and voiceless, Melanie watched as Maryk climbed the blue steps to the exit.

Exsanguination

Freeley pointed with a capped surgical marker. “See the blunt force injury here, the parietal lobe, right side of the cranium? The intruder rose up from the backseat and brought an object across like this” — she made a right-handed whipping motion across the front of her body — “incapacitating Blossom. Then she was pulled over the seat back and the incisions were made in both wrists.”

Blossom’s bluish corpse lay facedown atop the stainless steel autopsy table. A rubber block beneath her shoulders arched her neck and shaved head. Cellulite pinches pitted her sagging buttocks and thighs. Her fingers were tipped black.

Freeley wore a scrub gown, mask, sleeve protectors, skullcap, and blue rubber gloves. “The keys were in the ignition of the car,” she continued. “All four doors were locked, with both rear windows rolled down. We got no prints off the door handles or inside panels except glove smudges, which we may have left ourselves. Blossom kept plants in the car, two small spider plants — did you know that? For company. In any case, the plastic pots were still glued to either end of the dash but the plants themselves were gone. Most of the soil was still there, some spilled onto the floorboards.”

“Stolen plants?” Maryk said.

“Could be.”

“You say the rear windows were rolled down. The window in Lancet’s bedroom was open too.”

Freeley nodded and positioned the overhead magnifying lens to illuminate the back of Blossom’s neck. Within the bluish ridges of flaking skin below the hairline was a single red dot breach. Maryk examined it.

“Toxicology again clean,” Freeley added.

Maryk straightened. “It’s not an injection,” he said.

Freeley said, “What do you mean?”

He walked around the end of the table to the other side. He was remembering his meeting with the girl. She had thought they were injecting her with something when in reality they had been pulling her blood.

“I mean they were purposefully bled,” he said. He pointed to the deep incisions on Blossom’s upturned wrists. “We assumed these murders were made to resemble suicides. Each, in fact, was an exsanguination.” Maryk pointed to the needle stick magnified on Blossom’s neck. “This is a blood pull. Lancet and Blossom were sampled before their deaths. The bleeding was meant to cover up the crime of the stolen blood: two homicides to mask two petty thefts.”

“But who would want their blood? And why? No one knew about the project.”

“Someone knew.”

“We were watching them all the time.”

“Not all the time. Nor were we watching for other people watching them. We were more worried about being seen ourselves.”

“The only problem with that is: Their blood was good. It was beneficial, life-saving.”

Maryk nodded. “Exactly. And to go to these lengths, to steal these lives from us, implies desperation — not in the act, but the impetus. The motivation. Who would so desperately want a look at their blood? And why?”

“Someone close, you’re thinking. Someone in Special Path.”

“No. I can account for all of my people’s whereabouts at any given time. It’s someone outside the project. Maybe it ties in to Orangeburg somehow, I don’t know.”

Freeley said, “What about the girl?”

“We keep her close, see who comes looking for her.” He was thinking back to the lecture hall again. “I think we may have underestimated her. She may not be as malleable as her psych profile led us to believe.”

He went back around the table near Freeley and set his tablet on top of her cutting board. He opened the screen and brought up the image of the unfinished painting they had recovered from Melanie Weir’s apartment.

“What do you see?” Maryk said.

Freeley looked at it disparagingly over the top hem of her mask. “One of her crazed paintings.”

Maryk was patient. “Look again.”

She crossed her arms within her surgical gown and stood in judgment. “I see a big mess,” she said. “I see garish colors: stormy red, smoky black. A dead, sick yellow.”

Maryk pointed. “What is this?”

“That’s a man. He’s sick. He’s kneeling.”

“He’s praying. And that?”

“A crevasse, or a gorge. But the colors and the shadows are all wrong — the light doesn’t match. It’s either a mistake or an optical illusion. Then that black valley below. A mangy wolf lapping at a lake of blood.”

“And that?”

“That’s the reflection of a man,” she said. “His face is hidden. Except for his white hair.” She stood quietly a moment. She was beginning to see. “It’s you,” she said.

“And here?”

“You’re squeezing a royal purple fist. Dripping blood into the lake of blood.”

“And here?”

“Thin people, naked. Walking with crutches and splints on a dirt road that becomes an oak tree. Those clouds in the sky are like milky eyes.” She nodded grudgingly. “It’s almost like she knew we were running her.”

“She never knew,” Maryk said. “She felt, because she has that extra sensibility. Maybe she remembered a little.”

Freeley picked up a trephine from among the scalpel, forceps, scissors, butcher’s knife, and Stryker saw set out on her cutting board. “She was your favorite,” Freeley said. “Wasn’t she. The artist.”

“She was the most interesting case.”

Freeley steadied Blossom’s bared scalp with a gloved hand. The circular blade of the trephine started with a whine. “She’s just a guinea pig,” Freeley said.

Her derision surprised him. Maryk collapsed his tablet and returned it to his bag as she began to cut. Freeley was a good doctor and a good investigator but she was not an artist. It limited her.

The nurse looked up startled from the counter as Maryk entered the B4 lab.

Stephen was sitting up with a cushion of pillows propped behind his back. His nylon restraints hung loose to the cement floor.

“He asked to sit up,” she said quickly through her hood.

“Peter?” The pillows rustled. Stephen could not see him yet.

Maryk went around the raised head of the gurney. Stephen’s thin hands were folded on the sheet in his lap. The nurse had dressed him in a hospital gown. “Peter,” he said. He seemed relieved. He had apparently undergone a change of personality since earlier that morning.

Stephen’s withered face exaggerated expression. He would be Happy or Sad or Content or Angry without degree. Here it seemed he was Embarrassed.

His jaw worked clumsily. “Better now,” he said. “To be sitting up. More balanced, in my thinking. About before—”

“Forget it.”

“She told me everything you did.” Stephen turned his eyes to the tablet open on the counter next to him. The data screen was toplined Pearse, Stephen D. “My charts,” he said. “More T cells even than you now.”

A glance at the chart confirmed this. Maryk could not explain Stephen’s rapid recovery and for that reason it troubled him. Stephen tried to relax as Maryk felt the underside of his jaw and worked his gloved hands along the neck in firm circular strokes. Maryk probed the lymph area around the muscle and felt nodules as hard as acorns.

He was close to Stephen’s face. “If you feel a cough coming,” Maryk said, “let me know.”

Stephen’s eyes were on the ceiling. “You gave me your blood, too.”

“Stop thanking me and raise your arms.”

Stephen raised his arms as high as he could and Maryk massaged his armpits. He felt marbles inside.

“Pain?”

“Not bad.”

Stephen was a poor liar. Maryk guided his arms back down to his lap and explored his chest through the thin gown. “How do you feel overall?”

“Tired. Better.”

“Better than you should be.”

“Only you would sound discouraged by that.”

The nurse appeared with her air hose trailing her along the ceiling track. “Anything else before I go, Doctor?”

Maryk and Stephen both turned to her and at the same time said: “No.”

Maryk paused in his examination. Stephen looked at him. The nurse waited awkwardly.

“Thank you,” Stephen said quietly.

Maryk said nothing. He resumed his examination as soon as the nurse went out.

He worked over the ribs where the gown clung to Stephen’s moist skin. “When are you going to tell me what happened?”

“Orangeburg,” Stephen said. “I was pulling blood—”

“We have an entire serology department for that.”

Maryk could feel the change in Stephen’s breathing and knew he should keep quiet. He would let Stephen talk it through.

“The second patient I saw. He flinched somehow as I withdrew the needle, nudged my arm. I stuck my palm. I went out and cleaned up, flushed out the wound. But when I returned, the bed was empty. The patient was gone.”

“Dead.”

“No. I don’t know. Just gone. I couldn’t find him anywhere, and no one knew anything about him. At first I thought I had imagined the whole thing. That was what I wanted to believe—”

He sucked in breath as Maryk probed his abdomen. “Pain here?” Maryk said.

“—Some.”

Maryk reached under the gown. “Hold on,” he said. Stephen’s right testicle was swollen and soft like a tomato too long on the stem. Maryk saw sweat appear on Stephen’s brow and upper lip. “More than ‘Some,’ ” Maryk said. He straightened and worked hand over hand along each hip and Stephen relaxed in degrees.

“Listen,” Stephen said. He was still regaining his breath. “I don’t think this was an accident.”

Maryk stopped and looked at him. “Those catatonics had been in a dead sleep for twenty years.”

“This patient was different. He was further along the syndrome than the others. He called me over by name. There was no way he could know that. And the way he was looking at me... afterward, I couldn’t get over the feeling that he had bumped me on purpose.”

It was classic physician denial. Maryk said, “Give me one good reason.”

Stephen gave up. “I don’t have a reason. Just a feeling.” He was quiet a while as Maryk continued his examination. He was studying Maryk. “No other cases?” he said. “I mean, in Amagansett?”

Maryk said, “None.”

“And Sixteen?” His voice was different. “The BDC?”

“Contained.”

Stephen was watching him and Maryk felt he was waiting for a more specific answer. “None?”

“There was one case.” Maryk felt tension in Stephen’s legs but kept moving. “Someone from in Public Affairs named Peri Fields.”

Stephen’s breathing shortened. Maryk concentrated on finishing his examination and worked attentively down each kneecap, lower leg, ankle, and foot. He moved to the counter and changed gloves and pulled on a surgeon’s mask and goggles. When he returned, Stephen had collected himself His red eyes were wet and he was swallowing.

Maryk asked him to open his mouth. Stephen held it open shakily. Through strings of bloody phlegm Maryk saw brown sores beneath Stephen’s tongue and along the insides of his gums. He moved to the eyes and thumbed up both lids. Each eyeball was suffused with blood.

“Sight?” he asked.

“Floaters,” said Stephen. He was trying to look at Maryk. “Normal otherwise.”

“Any hearing loss? Ringing in your ears?”

“A steady tone.”

Maryk removed his mask and goggles and set them down on the counter. He changed gloves again as he spoke.

“By all evidence, Stephen, you should not even be awake right now, never mind coherent. You should not be speaking. You should not be able to sit up in bed. You are getting too strong, too fast.”

“It’s known as ‘healing.’ ”

“It’s not. The virus is well entrenched in the lymphatic system. I’ve done all the blood work, I’ve looked at all the scans. Plainville has already colonized some of your organs. All I’ve done is stall the feeding frenzy, primarily in the brain. I don’t know how long that will hold.”

Stephen blinked and played at being strong. “All right,” he said. “When do you go back after it?”

“I don’t. Any more viral therapy and your immune system will collapse. You’d self-destruct, a road you are well along anyway. You’re doing better than I ever could have expected right now, but the revival of your strength can only be explained as a mirage. The virus is everywhere inside of you. The diagnosis remains the same.”

More primary emotions played upon the diminished palette of Stephen’s face. Fear. Then Dismay. His head and neck quivered until his bloodied eyes returned to search Maryk’s.

“You said yourself,” he said, “there were survivors.”

Maryk nodded. “One lives. A girl, ‘Milkmaid.’ She beat the infection at Plainville.”

“Over four years ago?”

“She’s fully recovered, and not only that, she’s immune. Her antibodies resist each Plainville mutation. That’s why I tracked her all this time. But the Plainville survivors were the exception; that treatment has not worked since. That’s why she is so vital to this effort. I’ve since saved others with her blood sera, but you understand the time factor involved. If you had turned yourself in to BioCon at Orangeburg, I could have helped you. But you bid it, you ran off to New York. By then it was too late.”

Stephen looked away and Maryk was quiet and let him stare. But Stephen’s eventual response was not what Maryk expected.

“I want to work again, Peter,” he said. He looked back at Maryk with eyes that were strong. “It’s been a few years — I know. But the equipment is already here for me.” Stephen motioned toward the animal room. “This virus is my virus now. No one else could work with it safely, not even you. Maybe I can find some chink in its armor.”

It was as though the long-dormant scientist part of Stephen had taken over. Maryk nodded to encourage Stephen’s pride. “Good,” he said.

“But I need to meet her. The survivor.”

Maryk realized that he meant the girl. “No,” he said. “That would not be a good idea.”

“I need to speak with her, Peter. That will give me some strength.”

“She’s just a girl,” Maryk said. “She has no special powers. No secret knowledge. Only her blood.”

Stephen’s grimace began to relax. His strength was fading. “Bring her to me,” he said. “And then I will help you.”

Stephen’s eyelids slipped over his eyes. His breathing slowed and Maryk waited by the gurney. Stephen’s eyes opened once more before sleep finally consumed him. “Peri,” he whispered. Then he succumbed.

Maryk sat looking at the blinds turned down over the window and the glowing lines disappearing between the thin white slats. He heard car doors thumping and engines starting up in the parking lot below and realized that it must be four-thirty.

Cascade time was lazy and formless like a summer day. He had been dozing in his office for most of the afternoon. His frequent administerings to Stephen meant sacrificing countless hours to the voice of his cascades.

The BDC at night reminded him of his internships and residencies and the various city hospitals he had patrolled as though they were his. But Stephen was wrong: Maryk had no designs on running the BDC He had already made Special Pathogens over in his own image. An artist must know his place in the world.

He would nap again soon to drain off the remains of this Pearse-induced cascade. Then he could work long into the night.

His office door opened and Melanie Weir entered alone behind the chair he had arranged for her.

“Your inhaler,” Maryk said and waved at it on his desk. It was stickered with a fresh prescription label.

She did not move. She was staring at the blinds and pretending to ignore him. The girl’s posture and the low angle of her resentful eyes spoke for her.

“Take it,” he said.

She came forward without looking at him and took it from his desktop. Then she turned to leave.

“Sit down,” he said.

She slowed at the door. Pasco had brought her there and was waiting beyond to bring her back inside if necessary. She must have sensed this. She came back and sat in the arranged chair.

The girl’s short hair was the deep red color of vine berries. She wore a short black skirt and thick black stockings and a long white T-shirt with the corporate affiliation bleached out. She sat deeply in the chair but was alert and assessing him at every turn.

“Dr. Pasco walked you through a tour of the BDC,” Maryk said. He licked his lips. “This is my office.”

She sat with her arms and legs crossed. She did not respond.

“Let me guess,” he said. “You feel as though you’ve been treated poorly.”

“I feel as though I’ve been raped,” she said. “Repeatedly and routinely, for over four years. Violated. Taken advantage of. How long do you think you can hold me here?”

“Plainville took advantage of you,” Maryk said. “I gave you life.”

She stared in apparent amazement. “You know what? We have nothing more to discuss. I have been drugged and jabbed with needles. I’ve been used like a voodoo doll against some crazed disease. I’ve had experiments performed on me, been followed around, spied upon. I’ve been humiliated. All by you — whoever you really are. You’re warped, all right? And that — that comes as a total relief to me. Because now I know I’m fine. You’re the sick one.”

He nodded after a moment. “Good,” he said.

“What’s good? Don’t you smile at me.”

He had indeed underestimated her. “I can see now how you survived your time in the hospital,” he said.

She did not know how to respond to that. Her expression grew a little less guarded. “Why didn’t you wear one of those suits?” she said.

The question surprised him. “It’s all coming back to you.”

“No. I only remember the others sealed inside a suit in order to survive being in the same room as me. All except you.”

Maryk nodded. He stood then and felt confident on his feet and moved to the front of his desk.

“Natural immunity,” he told her. “A fluke of nature, not unlike yourself. My immune system is exceptionally strong. It detects invading foreign agents immediately and executes the infected host cell itself, thereby expelling both the virus and the infection at once. I require no protection against airborne exposure to Plainville. You and I are the only two people in the world who could withstand it.”

Her eyes seemed to relax and she spoke with the power and authority of revelation. “You’re drunk.”

Maryk half smiled and held on to the edge of the desk. “I was coming to that. Natural killer cells, unlike other immune system cells, don’t wait to be told what to do. They search and destroy on their own. Everybody’s system produces some; mine happens to make billions. But the kill-off from any significant exposure taxes my system to exhaustion — a cellular massacre and leukocyte surge triggering an energy drain, which I call a ‘cascade.’ Makes me drowsy sometimes, slows me down. Depends on the pathogen and the extent of the exposure. You undergo a typical antibody reaction; you feel nothing, unaware of the services being rendered by your immune system. This,” he pointed at himself, “what you see here, is the machine working at maximum efficiency, ridding my body of Plainville. This is human superiority over a virus.”

She looked at him with something like disgust.

Maryk nodded in the general direction of Building Seven. “Stephen Pearse is isolated nearby. I left him some time ago. Pearse is my patient, as are you.”

“Were,” she said.

He ignored that. “Stephen and I used to be research partners. We went to school together, joined the bureau together.”

“So he’s in on this too.”

“Oh no.” Maryk showed a frowning grin. “Not Stephen. Stephen turned his back on creative science some time ago. He thought he could do more good by being more good himself, and abandoned his medical gifts for something like faith. He wanted to heal by example, rather than by practice; to cure purely through the power of his presence. The high priest of world medicine. Now, of course, quite the opposite is true.”

She was still staring. “This makes you happy?”

He realized he was rambling and checked himself Perhaps he was more fatigued than he had realized. He cleared his throat. “Pasco tells me you refused to give your blood.”

She hardened. “Since when do you need my permission?” She thrust out her left arm and pushed back the sleeve. “Here. Take it.”

“I will,” he said. He pushed off the edge and started toward her. “I will take it, if I have to. I will hang you upside down from the ceiling and bleed you — your blood is that important to the world. But it would be easier for you if you cooperate. It’s not me you would be helping. I don’t require your help.” She leaned away from him as he neared. “You have a gift,” he said. “You are different.”

“I am not different.”

“You are special.”

She insisted, “I am not special.”

“Your blood is.”

She veered away as he stood next to her chair. “Stay away from me,” she said.

“My system kills without manufacturing any biological solution. Your system produces antibodies. Your blood stops the virus in others.”

She stood out of the chair but he seized her arm and held her still. She twisted in his grip. She looked up from his restraining hand into his face.

“I will scream,” she said.

He realized he was hurting her. He released her and she hurried to the door. He did not go after her. The door opened and slammed and she was gone.

He left the chair for the wall and followed it staggeringly to the couch. He sat heavily with his arms dead in his lap and tipped back his head. His breath came out in short pantlike gasps.

It had been a mistake to allow her to see him this way. He hadn’t realized how depleted he still was.

Night grayed the ceiling above him as he sat. The regretted encounter swirled in his mind until the words no longer made human sense. The darkness of the ceiling became the dark insides of his heavy eyelids. The rhythmic huffing of his chest became the mantra of deep sleep.

The Language of Disease

He thought of wide-open spaces. He thought of breezes across acres of pastel tulips and pictured himself in the branches of the oak tree that had cooled the house of his childhood in spring. He conjured up the robin’s eggshell of a cloudless sky overhead and started his mother down the long path from their front door to the mailbox. He watched the cross-breeze toss hair around her face. Proudly he watched her hands feel for the mailbox. It was empty and she rested a moment before starting back. She turned so that the tulip breeze washed her hair from her face. She was beautiful and she was blind He dropped down from the tree branch and surprised her at the door with the mail in hand and then followed her inside for lunch.

“You wouldn’t last one night in here.”

Stephen’s voice pulled Maryk back into the B4 lab. He was looking out the aquarium window into the larger subterranean basement of Building Seven. The door that led to the stairs that led above ground was six doors away.

Maryk detested his claustrophobia. He released his grip on the sill and his breathing came back under control. He could at least work through the early strains of a cascade.

He turned and found Stephen examining his withered hands. Stephen was vigilant for any evidence of further decay. “I must have nodded off,” Stephen said. He was sitting up on the gurney. He had requested clothes instead of the hospital gown but all Maryk had for him were scrubs.

Maryk moved through the assembled lab equipment back to the B4 computer console. Everything had been networked through the central brain of the lab. Stephen had even agreed to Maryk’s suggestion that Reilly and Boone be brought in as extra pairs of arms and legs.

Stephen’s blood, saliva, urine, sputum, pleura, and skin samples sat in disposable flasks along the counter like a row of small plastic trophies. “We were talking about the virus,” said Maryk. “How it is not acting the way a virus acts.”

“Yes,” said Stephen. “Not moving like a virus moves. Not burning as a virus burns. Where was the flint in Orangeburg? The spark at any of the earlier breaks?”

The language of disease was the language of poetry and the metaphor for viruses was fire. Plainville was smoldering in Stephen. He sat on the gurney like a burn victim with darkly bruised patches of skin that looked singed. Ragged patches of hair hung off his flaking scalp. He looked weaker and more ill and yet continued to grow stronger despite medical evidence to the contrary.

“Could it be something unusual in the environment?” he continued. “Common to all these places?”

Maryk said, “We’ve tested and retested many times. I’d like to think we didn’t miss anything.”

“In Africa, it was simple exposure and transmission.”

“But here it doesn’t die out with its victims,” Maryk said. “We need to know why there aren’t any footsteps between outbreaks.”

“Because it’s smart. This is a virus that somehow knows what’s good for it. An arsonist virus: one that discriminates, that knows what it is doing.”

“Viruses don’t think the way we think. They survive. That’s all.”

“They don’t commit murder either. Your survivors. You agree that was a directed assault against your project.”

Maryk moved away from the console. “I’ve already ruled out bioterTorism,” he said.

“If somebody with a vial of Plainville only wanted to spread terror, they would drop it off the Empire State Building. They would slip it into any major airport and uncork it there.”

“Exactly.”

“Unless.” Here Stephen paused. “Unless terror wasn’t their ultimate goal.”

“A terrorist not satisfied with terror.” Maryk frowned. “What, then?”

“Infection. No politics. No ideology, no religion. Just pure infection. The destruction of the human race.”

“A maniac. Frightening thought, but there is one thing you’re forgetting: Plainville is unmanageable. It is impossible for anyone to handle it without risking infection themselves. If we couldn’t work with it safely here at the BDC, who could?”

“You could.”

Maryk stopped and looked at him.

“I mean only that nothing is impossible,” Stephen continued. “You could, so there could be another. Say you were eyeing a particular target, the destruction of the human race. And you had a weapon: Plainville. What would you need to do first?”

Maryk said, “I would need to test it.”

“A dry run. Each time Plainville emerges again in an outbreak, we hold our breath. And each time it dies out in containment, leaving us with nothing, and we congratulate each other on having dodged another bullet. This virus reemerges in already isolated situations. What I’m saying is: What if this is no accident? What if there is some kind of mind at work behind this Plainville? What if it is depending upon our containing its spread so that it can learn from each outbreak: learn how the mutations are working, learn the most efficient modes of infection, and gather intelligence on how we are working to fight it.”

“Learn how?” Maryk said. “We’ve kept the outbreaks hidden from the public.”

This was not an impediment to Stephen’s theory. “That would only make them angry, and more dedicated.”

Maryk shook his head. “You’re talking about Plainville like it’s something you can get at a drugstore. This is an organic virus, not engineered biowarfare. We know where it came from — a cave in central Africa. No one planted it there. We know we buried it, and burned it out for good.”

Stephen did not respond to that. He was quiet and Maryk watched him and waited for him to speak.

“Maybe we didn’t bury it all,” he said. He was looking red-eyed at the floor. It was difficult to read any emotion on Stephen’s fading face. “You remember the girl with the vitiligo who followed me around the camp?”

Maryk did. “Vaguely.”

“She was healthy, Peter. She was clear at the time; I tested her. She was begging me for help, and the jets were coming. Your jets. I had packed an ampule of the PeaMar serum we were working on at the time. The compound was sound, I knew it was—”

Maryk stiffened in the noisy atmosphere of B4. “Stephen,” he said sharply.

“I transfused it,” he said. “I dosed her and sent her out of the camp.”

Maryk stood staring. He was furious and silent.

“You gave me no choice,” Stephen said. He would not look up. “But now I keep thinking-maybe she contracted the virus somehow, between the time I tested her and the time I injected her.”

“Wait a minute,” Maryk said. “This was six years ago. This was a girl. She never turned up again. This patient in bay twenty-six, the one you think stuck you — he was a man.”

“He was.”

“There was no patient in bay twenty-six at Orangeburg. I checked. Twenty-six was an empty. bed.”

“Then how did he get to my parents’ home in Amagansett?”

“Stephen,” Maryk said.

“He was there. I saw him, he was walking around.”

“You said you saw your parents, too.”

“He was different. He opened the window. I think he was at my tablet.”

Maryk grew impatient. “It can’t be. People don’t last days, never mind months or years, with Plainville. Either they die right away, or we get to them early enough with the Milkmaid serum and they survive.”

“You’ll check on it, Peter?”

“I’ll look into it,” Maryk said. “But this is no phantom. This is no ghost. Someone murdered two of Plainville’s only three survivors — and would have eliminated all three if we hadn’t rolled up Milkmaid just in time.”

“Rolled her up?” Stephen looked up at him. “I thought she came to Atlanta to help.”

Maryk said, “Not exactly.”

“Tell me you haven’t locked her away somewhere, Peter.”

“She is staying in an Emory dormitory room. She eats at the school cafeteria. She has no idea how many people I have watching her everywhere she goes. But she is refusing to help.”

Stephen nodded. “And that is why you finally agreed to bring her here.”

“I need her to see what is at stake. She needs to understand that this is life or death.”

The red light flashing over the submarine door indicated movement into the shower room. The nurse was bringing Melanie through.

“Could you turn down the lights?” Stephen said.

Maryk dimmed the overhead bulbs and the shadows deepened on Stephen’s face. Stephen sat up as straight as his gaunt body was able. He appeared nervous.

“What is she like?” he said.

“She hates me,” Maryk said. “You two should have a lot to talk about.”

But Maryk was relieved not to be facing her alone again after their last encounter. He heard movement behind the door. It was pushed open and the pressure in the room changed. Air rushed in. The nurse stepped through the oval doorway and Melanie followed behind.

Maryk had ordered her sealed inside a suit. He was not taking any chances with her health. She kept her head down inside the hood and remained just to the left of the door. The unsashed fabric bagged around her waist and bunched at her knees until the nurse connected her air feed to the ceiling runner. Then Melanie’s suit inhaled.

Her eyes rose gradually. She looked away immediately after first seeing Stephen on the bed. She worked hard to smother her reaction before looking at him again. The shock of seeing this public figure convalescing was exactly what Maryk had wanted.

“Hello, Melanie,” Stephen said.

Her stare at him was interrupted only by a flickered glance at Maryk.

Stephen said, “I wanted to thank you in person. I know this all must be bewildering to you. You were brave to come.”

Stephen’s voice was ripe with enthusiasm. He was good that way.

“Your life is worth more to the human race than mine or even Dr. Maryk’s,” he went on. “There are ways you could help. You could help us by donating your blood. You could help others by meeting with them, by going out into the field.”

Maryk stopped him. “Stephen.”

“She’s looked it in the face, Peter. She’s survived.”

Maryk tried to silence him. “It’s too hazardous. The bug mutates too fast.”

“You said her hemo screens are sound, even with the mutations. She’s curing it. Think of the effect her presence would have on the ill.”

“Stephen — I do not need her going around holding people’s hands.”

A sharp gasp distracted them. It came from the nurse as she reached out toward the girl.

Melanie had split the diagonal seal across her suit. She broke open the folds and flipped the hood back off her head. Her garish hair sprang loose and her eyes were fierce as she glared at Maryk. She took a deep breath and filled her unprotected lungs.

Melanie sat on an examining table in another room in the same building, pressing a folded square of gauze to her left elbow and still buzzing from what she had done.

Recollections from her illustrious days in premed: The ecosphere of the human lung absorbs 20,000 liters of air each day. Less than 1/100,000 inch of protection separates the lung air environment from the vast human bloodstream. Viruses need to open a hole of only 1/1,000,000 inch in order to hitch a ride on the sanguineous superhighway.

“Stupid,” Maryk sputtered again. It was all worth it just to have witnessed that moment of impotence on his face, that had preceded the dark, furious frown he now wore. “You are immune to casual airborne exposure to Plainville. But if even a minute amount of infective blood or saliva came into contact with your eyes, your mouth — you would be at risk.”

She remembered similar tablebeds in her father’s office, and how he used to pull tissue paper down from a roller beneath the head cushion, a new strip for each sniffling kid. That had been his generation’s idea of sterile medicine. Her schoolyard version had been a Popsicle stick inoculation to ward off a sudden outbreak of boy cooties.

Pasco paced behind them, and she felt his tension too. Maryk mixed something into her blood and waited while it set in a small container, marked PCR, connected to his tablet. She peeled the cotton pad back from the puncture wound on her arm and looked at the resulting bloodstain still spreading through the gauze webbing like a flower opening in bloom. Miracle Blood! Watch it go! She looked down at her wasted, bruised arms with a renewed sense of anger and potent shame.

“Will you lock me up in the basement now like your friend?” she said.

His eyes burned gray. Everything he did disgusted her now.

“Why would you task yourself like this?” he said.

“I’m special,” she told him. “I’m different.”

Seeing Dr. Pearse like that, fragile and shrunken with those ghostly red eyes, had been shocking; she hadn’t seen anyone that sick in over four years. But as bad as she felt for him, her loathing for Maryk was a hundred times more intense.

He looked up from his little tablet. “Well?” she said, Insistent. Defiant.

He disconnected the contraption. He said: “Clean.”

It was simple enough to disguise her own relief. But when Maryk showed none, she became enraged. She was his number one pin cushion, after all.

She sensed an urgency in his actions as he cleaned up. “It was your blood,” she said. “Your freak blood, transfused into me in the hospital. That’s how I was ‘cured.’ ”

His silence told her she was right. She threw the bloody gauze down onto the table in front of him, and he stopped and looked at it crumpled there before pulling fast the buckle straps on his bag.

“You’re a freak,” she told him. “And you’ve made me into a freak.”

Maryk stopped at the door with his bag. He looked back at the cold table, not at her. “Take her to her room,” he said to Pasco.

“My room?” she laughed, though it came out a bray. Maryk opened the door and started down the hallway, and suddenly Melanie wasn’t laughing anymore. “Why didn’t you let me die in Plainville!” she screamed. But he continued away, and the white door closed on his back and clicked shut.

The Oracle

Cyberviruses Section was located two doors down from the STD unit in BDC Building Eighteen, Most CVs were hacker-engineered although there had been incidences of corrupted files breaking off from legitimate programs and mutating “naturally” file to file. The turn-of-the-century Internet boom had corroborated the epidemiological axiom that any surge in population represents a fertile breeding ground for viral incursion. The new ecology of computer technology had engendered indigenous viral activity.

Suzy Lumen, was the co-section head. She was an obese woman of more than 250 pounds and was legally blind. She sat before a semicircular computer console in her office like a priestess divining at an oracle. She wore a loop earphone connected to a chin mike and the fingertips of her right hand explored a flat blue pad that raised screen characters into Braille. Her thickly soled sneakers worked foot pedals beneath the console that controlled her microphone. Suzy Lumen was the human liaison to the DNA-powered Genetech II computer that ran the BDC.

Maryk pulled over a chair and sat at her side. The cascade from his long visit with Stephen made thoughts sound like voices arguing in his head.

“Here’s what I need,” he told Suzy Lumen. “Assume that the director’s tablet had been compromised by some outside interest.” He was trying to be careful with his wording. “What would that mean?”

“Are you asking about Blue files?”

She had a sultry voice that did not match her appearance. Her face was broad and her drooping eyes thick-lidded.

“I’m asking about any sensitive documents loaded into Stephen Pearse’s tablet.”

“Blue files are any reports or internal memoranda generated by any government agency,” she said. “Blue files crash if tapped into illegally. If an unauthorized user attempts to dupe them to an unauthorized server, the Blue worm encryption fouls the offending drive and disables its microprocessor, but not before instructing the modern to dial the FBI.”

“So there is no way someone could duplicate those files.”

“We-ell.” She turned smiling in his general direction. “The National Security Agency instituted Blue to protect sensitive documents from prying eyes and sticky fingers — White House internals, CIA, DOD. But here at the BDC, prying eyes don’t pose much of a threat. Here, the opposite is true: Access and preservation is vital to operation. So, no, you cannot copy files off a tablet. Nor can you print them. But — you can back them up.”

Maryk understood. “By archiving the entire system.”

“Exactly. I have loaded here a working clone of Director Pearse’s tablet, as you recovered it.” She indicated the monitor displaying a list of file names. “If there were any Blue programs, they would have deleted themselves out within fifteen days, as they are self-timed to do. But...” She called up an index card graphic. “A full backup was performed the day before you recovered the tablet.”

Maryk stared at the screen. “So anyone who copied the drive,” he said, “could walk away with an exact replica stored in their own tablet.”

“And someone did,” She whispered a command into her microphone and slid her hand over the Braille pad and Maryk heard a soft male voice whisper into Suzy Lumen’s ear. Numbers appeared on screen. “Full backup creates a register recording the time, date, and chip address of the receiving system.”

“So you’ve got the internal code of the second tablet.”

“That’s it right there. But I already checked. Hailing has been disabled. This tablet is not on the air.”

“Then what about this: Can whoever owns the clone of Pearse’s tablet still access the BDC?”

“Not coded files. There’s a safeguard built in to the director’s tablet to prevent the skeleton key from being duped. But the Genetech still can be dialed into. In fact, it has.”

She muttered commands and massaged the pad and smiled at the wall as the machine murmured into her ear. Maryk knew from his mother that the smile of the blind indicated achievement at least as often as pleasure.

Words appeared on screen. “Your personnel file,” she said.

Maryk glared.

“Accessed and downloaded six days ago,” she said.

“Could it have anything to do with this?” She switched back to Stephen’s tablet and opened a file. “ ‘Investigation-dot-Maryk,’ ” she hand-read. “Emptied, and irretrievable. All the files were typed over before they were dumped.”

“Personnel files aren’t coded?”

“Not at the BDC. No need. Viruses don’t use computers.”

Stephen was right. Someone had archived his tablet while he was in Amagansett. And later that same someone had dialed into the BDC computers looking specifically for information on Maryk. Whoever it was then knew about his immunological strength.

“Can you bring up Pearse’s bank account?” Maryk said.

She did. The last debit transaction was dated the day before Maryk brought Stephen back to the BDC.

“Fuel,” she said curiously.

Maryk read the register. A tankful had been purchased at a Texaco in Trenton, New Jersey, the day before Maryk froze Stephen’s bank accounts. “But how could someone other than Stephen Pearse sign for a thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise on this tablet?”

Suzy Lumen smiled and scrolled to another file and Stephen’s arched signature appeared on screen. Maryk watched her plump fingertips trace it on her read pad. “Signature imprint,” she said. “For generating prescriptions, signing documents. They had Director Pearse’s tablet sign for them.”

Maryk nodded. “What are my options, then?” he said.

“I could cancel the director’s tablet for you right now. That way, if anyone tried to use the duped code to access the Genetech, they would be refused.”

Maryk deliberated. “What if I wanted to preserve my link to this person?”

“Then I can put a sentinel on the Genetech. That would split the signal and trick the user out to me if he tries to come on-line.”

Maryk nodded and stood. “Keep a trace on that tablet,” he told her. “I want to know the minute it taps back in.”

The Human Component

It had been four meals since she’d seen Maryk. Night and day passed uneventfully with her sulking in front of the TV in her room, waiting for him to come, like a vampire, for her blood. Pasco, her shadow from Boston, appeared three times a day to escort her to the Emory college cafeterias for meals. Being held on a college campus seemed to her like poetic justice. Finals had ended and the campus population was dwindling, though she sensed movement around her wherever she went. She was convinced that Maryk had people everywhere, watching her. Inside the cafeteria, the same red-haired custodian mopped a different section of floor at every meal.

Her boundless appetite had returned. She sat that afternoon before a cheeseburger and a plate of chicken-fried steak, starting instead with a thick wedge of apple cobbler. Pasco sat at the next table over, eating and diligently working on something on his tablet. He was intent on what he was reading, gnawing on a sesame breadstick as though it were a pencil.

It bothered her that she hadn’t seen Maryk. She knew he needed her blood, and had expected him to have taken it by now. Later that second day she asked Pasco to take her to see Dr. Pearse, and to her surprise, he did.

A nurse led her through most of the preliminary rooms, then left her, shutting the steel door on the dark shower room before the lab. The walls creaked until the air flow reached a kind of equilibrium and seemed to rush away from her at all points, yet allowed her to breathe. Warnings glowed fluorescently on the door. She wore a mask, goggles, and gloves, but they had not required her to wear one of the body-condom suits. She nodded to herself and struck the switch and the door popped open, sucking forward the swirling air.

Dr. Pearse was right there. He was standing now and leaning on a metal hospital cane. He was walking. Melanie was stunned. His movement was much improved, though he looked no better. In fact he looked worse.

“Hello again,” he said, taking a few mindful steps toward her with his cane. His red eyes bothered her even more now, as they moved more naturally within his head, making him appear all the more unnatural. She caught herself looking for further signs of corrosion, and stopped. She willed herself not to stare, but to relax, relax.

Two men worked behind him in the submarine-type room, both sealed inside blue air suits. Melanie remembered at once what it was to be so feared, to be the object of such passive disgust. It was as though Dr. Pearse were a glowing rock that could only be handled with tongs.

He was so genuinely pleased to see her, she was scared. Seeing Dr. Pearse that way, a dying man up and walking around in front of her, made her think about the wonder blood coursing through her own skinny veins.

She stammeringly asked him how he was, which was brilliant. Next she’d ask a drowning man if the water temperature was okay. But he was enthusiastic, and suddenly she was the one who felt like dying.

“Getting around better,” he said, his voice stronger than before. “How are you?”

Now he was concerned for her. She broke the knot of her arms and moved to the counter for something to lean on. It was all too much suddenly, him being sick and super-pleasant, the sealed room, the swirling oxygen, and the slow-moving blue suits behind.

“I’m all alone,” she said. She meant that she had no one else to talk to.

“As am I,” he said. “Except, of course, for our mutual friend.”

He wore only the vestiges of a smile. Melanie nodded uncomfortably.

“He scares you,” Dr. Pearse said.

She placed her gloved hand on the counter, then pulled it back, then gripped her fingers as though burned. Maryk had succeeded in making a paranoid wreck out of her.

Dr. Pearse went on, “It is extraordinarily rare that a person excels at the very thing they were uniquely created for. Beyond aptitude or ability or talent — I mean a legitimate predisposition, a person born into... certain faculties who succeeds in exploiting them to their fullest capacity. And when this does happen, it usually creates a monster.”

His words shocked her. “Then why are you helping him?”

“Because Peter is our monster. And in helping him, I am helping others, and in that, perhaps helping myself. He has sent me back some new samples from Louisiana.”

He spoke of the blood samples as though they were sweets purchased at a bake sale. “What’s in Louisiana?” Melanie said.

He looked at her a moment. “They haven’t told you?” he said. He moved to a screen and gently prodded the keys. “The Plainville secret is out now. It’s all over the news.”

He turned the screen toward her, and Melanie forced herself to swallow the bile that had risen in her throat. A news server headline appeared, reading like a shriek over the image of a dark building seen through a chain-link fence and rolls of razor wire:

A sign posted on the fence bore the international biohazard symbol.

“The guards’ families,” said Dr. Pearse. “They were scared, so they went to the press. It means that the fight has progressed to a different level now.”

She was dizzy. “He’s there?”

“I’m told Peter’s team took off for Louisiana at first call.”

Melanie laid her hand over her stomach. For the past day and a half she had sat spitefully in her dormitory room like a little girl. She felt petulant and spoiled and deeply ashamed. She tried to imagine the prison in Louisiana, and instead saw the dead of Plainville, her parents and friends and neighbors, wasted and cadaverous and all watching her with rotting eyes, waiting to see if she would ever make something of the second chance she had been given.

“The virus keeps changing and changing,” Dr. Pearse said. “Look here.”

He changed the image on the computer screen, and after a moment she was able to focus.

Distorted, as though by the magnification of a powerful microscope, a small, spindly creature squirmed and twitched.

“This is the bug that’s eating me,” he said, nearly in wonder. “Look at how it moves. Simple enough to kill a virus with bleach and study it destroyed. This is our first look at live Plainville. Well — magnified one hundred and twenty thousand times.”

He moved closer to the screen and touched it, the distorted green light of the image shading his hand.

“I have made a discovery,” he went on. Melanie tried to pay attention. “Some of the RNA sites on the virus contain strands of human characteristic DNA codes — a human component of the virus. Just as I said it would.” He pulled his thin hand from the viewing screen and looked at it, front and back. “Just as I said it would.” He seemed to forget that she was there, lost in the world of his hands. For a moment, the triumph was gone. “Of course, I could move faster with a chemical gene splicer, but I’m making do. You are well represented here, too. Your cell cultures, anyway. Plainville burns through everything until it hits them. Miraculous, really.” He looked at the equipment surrounding him. “It is good to be back home inside a laboratory again. I was away from it for too long.”

He pondered that a moment. She saw then that his grins were not grins but rather the result of the fading architecture of his face. He turned to the long window, evidently viewing something other than the dim room beyond.

“Illness does have the effect of clarifying things, doesn’t it?” he said. “Life, or death. Sickness, or health. The ruthlessness of existence. I believe this must be how Peter views the world every day—”

She interrupted. “I’m going to give him my blood.”

Dr. Pearse’s red eyes returned to study her face. His grin, perhaps the only expression left available to him, flickered. “Good,” he said, nodding slightly. “Yours to give. But not to him: to the people who need it.”

The immensity of her situation rose up around her again, overwhelming her. She sank against the console. “Why me?” she said. “Out of all those people, why did it have to be me? Look at me.” She looked at herself “Why did I survive?”

“You are proof that the virus is not irremediable. You survived, so there is hope that others might survive.” His knuckled hand went lightly to his chest. “That I might survive.”

“But why me?”

“All that is required of you now is to live, to remain healthy.”

She nodded, agreeing with him at first. Then she stopped nodding. “No,” she said. “You’re wrong. Living’s not enough. I’ve been living for more than four years now, and it’s gotten me nowhere. I’m different, he tells me. He’s right. How can I use that?”

Dr. Pearse was distracted by the monitor image of the wriggling virus. She moved in front of it to regain his attention.

“You said something about helping the ill,” she said.

He regripped his cane and prodded at the smooth cement floor. “That was just a suggestion. This situation rarely presents itself. The immune can go into these breaks. Survivors sometimes make the best investigators.

“But I don’t know a thing about viruses.”

“You could see to the sick. For them just to engage in conversation with someone not sealed inside a suit — you can understand the power of that.”

“But I wouldn’t know what to say.”

“You would. You’re doing it right now.”

She retreated along the counter away from his grin, then stopped. “I want to go there,” she said.

“It is a federal penitentiary. Perhaps you should wait for some other—”

“No more waiting. It’s been four years of waiting. If I agree to give Maryk my blood, then he has to let me go. He has to. You could contact him for me.”

“Ransoming your blood,” said Dr. Pearse. “Peter won’t take kindly to that.”

“I have to help. You’re not sitting here doing nothing.”

She had a valid point, and he knew it. “Then will you do something for me?” he asked. His stiff grin had faded. He leaned both hands upon the curve of his cane now, his blood-filled gaze commanding her attention. “Keep a close eye on him. Peter’s vocation has taken the place of his conscience. You don’t know what he is capable of.”

The Penitentiary

She had learned to cheat glances at the helicopter pilot’s control stick, anticipating turns and dips and bracing herself accordingly, gripping the soft sides of her seat as they swung around the prison perimeter. They buzzed the guard towers, each one abandoned. High-powered stationary spotlights crisscrossed the prison grounds and made the bales of razor wire stacked against the high chain fences glitter like rolled carpets of diamonds. The central building of Lewes Federal Penitentiary was stage-lit like an alien ship set down in a bayou. There was a black lake to the north, and swamplands all around, with long, spindly roads like black seams leading away, and small police lights clustered in the distance.

They set down on top of the roof of the main building. Two people stood at the roof door, one of whom Melanie recognized immediately as Maryk. The pilot gave her a thumbs-up signal and she unbuckled her seat belt, taking the white medical suitcase from between her legs and pushing open the door.

She ducked out away from the whipping rotors as she’d seen done so many times on TV. She had to stop and balance herself as the helicopter tipped up and blasted her with wind, wasting no time in taking off again. Her hospital shirt rippled and climbed halfway up her back, and for a moment she thought she might blow off the rooftop like a scrap of paper. Then it was gone, running lights rising into the sky over the bayous of southern Louisiana. She straightened and turned.

Maryk, glowing from a spotlight set behind him, reeked of bleach. He probably used it as after-shave, she thought. He said nothing, and she set the medical kit containing packets of her blood down at his feet, rather than hand it to him.

“Weir, Melanie,” he said. “On-site.”

The man holding a plastic-sheathed tablet next to him replied, “Weir, Melanie, on-site, twenty-forty-eight.”

She had to strain to hear them. Both ears were filled with noise in the seashell-like absence of helicopter roar.

They descended three flights of echoing metal-edged concrete stairs to a long, gray hall. Every door was open and several inches thick. But except for that and the cameras watching from every corner, the inside of Lewes looked more like a junior college than her idea of a federal penitentiary.

A third suited man ushered her into a side room and began to dress her as Maryk watched. She was issued a plastic surgical gown to wear over her hospital scrubs, a procedure mask with a wraparound splash visor, a cotton cap, a white cowl covering her head except her eyes and nose, and rubber-soled, elasticized booties that fit over her sneakers. She felt as though she were eight years old again and being bundled up for an afternoon of sledding.

Maryk said from the doorway, “What do you think you can do here?”

She had bartered her blood for Maryk’s acquiescence, but now that she was there and being suited up, she was regretting her decision. The man worked over her with great deference, like a tailor for NASA. She played confidence to Maryk. “I’d like to help,” she said.

“Lewes Penitentiary is an administrative maximum level six. Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

“The Bureau of Prisons uses a one-to-five scale to rank penitentiaries by security level. The men inside here are the worst of the worst.”

“If you’re trying to scare me,” she said, “you should know I’ve had this aversion to prisons all my life.”

“What I’m trying to do is to dispel any Florence Nightingale fantasies Stephen Pearse may have instilled in you.”

The tailor stuck a yellow and red BDC patch to her chest and pointed her to the latex glove dispensers, where she took a petite size five. Maryk went to her and seized her gloved hands, taping them hard around her wrists and checking the seal. She realized then that they were dressed exactly alike.

They left the room and started down the long, gray hall, people in yellow suits brushing busily past them. She had to hustle to keep pace. Her outfit was bulky and everything was moving fast.

“At this point, these men no longer pose any threat to you, or to society,” he said, “except through their infection. Plainville is the warden in this place now.” They passed a high, circular guard station dead center in the hall. “Riots ensued once the disease cycle began. Many of the guards fled when they realized they were cooking in here the same as the inmates, and the prisoners went at each other like animals. Plainville was already well entrenched. A closed environment, with substandard living conditions, poor hygiene: an optimal ecology for an airborne bug like Plainville. But there is nothing more conducive to microbial transmission than a riot, and the disease quickly wore them down. The fight’s gone out of most of them now, and we’re losing nine to ten an hour. This is B unit, all advanced cases.” He stopped at a closed steel door sealed into the wall at the end of the hallway. “Inside, guards lie side by side with inmates.”

She heard noises through the door that were groans.

Maryk faced her. “You will be safe inside so long as you remain with me at all times. Touch no one and nothing, and keep yourself covered. You know that blood contact from a needle stick will overwhelm your resources and infect, antibodies or no antibodies. Same as for me. So if you are considering another self-destructive stunt like the one you pulled in B4, know that I will stop you, and you will be removed. Stay away from needles, and stay away from blood.”

He released the door. It opened and there was just enough room for two people to stand inside and face another steel door. The first door closed and her shoulder was pressed against his left biceps. She felt him breathing, and she realized she was afraid of him again.

“The riots killed any hope for negative airflow containment,” he said. “We are working in a Plainville atmosphere here. These ultraviolet light closets are only checkpoints between areas of higher viral intensity and lower viral intensity. When we come back out, these doors will lock down automatically and initiate a two minute UV light shower. You’ll stand for that until the second door opens.” He rattled all this off as though giving her directions to the bathroom. “Scared?”

She nodded, staring straight ahead, not looking at him.

Maryk flexed his black rubber hands. “Good,” he said. He hit a switch and the second door released.

The unit beyond was high and long and painfully bright. They stepped onto the middle of three tiers, facing the hollow center of the unit, cells lining the railed parapets in long rows on either side. It was windowless, but high-intensity lamps made the cell block appear artificially as bright as day.

The cell doors were all open and the cells themselves were empty. Cots lay along the guard walk between the open doors and the low railing along the hollow, and there was a body on every cot. The stagnant smell of the sealed unit hit her immediately, human sickness and spoil and trapped smoke. The sides of the concrete parapets had been licked black by riot fire. There was a footpath cleared through the trash strewn over the floors: toilet paper, burned blankets, feces.

She followed Maryk along the path of debris, starting down the length of the left parapet, finding the red painted rail with her gloved hand and gripping it as she went. He studied computer charts hooked to the cots and stopped now and then to pull back a sheet and examine the progression of some remarkable sore, moving intently from patient to patient, oblivious to the moans and feverish talk, appraising the prisoners’ treatments and modifying them or okaying them before moving on, and all the while keeping an eye on Melanie.

“This one is a spitter,” he warned.

This particular inmate had obviously once been very large. His loose skin now sagged over his wasting frame, obscuring tattoos burned fiercely into his chest and arms. The high-intensity light above sought out every blemish and sore.

There was a strange tranquility about these criminals, a red-eyed curiosity as they lay there dissolving. She could not tell which of the sick were the guards. The disease wore away all distinction.

The few who did look at her or attempted to speak, she could not face. She tried, but her cheeks and forehead burned and she looked guiltily away. These conscious few terrified her, because they could see what was coming for them.

At one cot, Maryk pulled the sheet off a dead man. The corpse’s thinned arms were straight at his sides and his hands and his mouth were open, as though he were holding a musical note just above the human range. BioCon agents with tablets on their arms arrived like census takers, and Melanie pressed back against the railing, out of their way. A few of the agents looked her over: She was suitless; bizarre. She felt like the only person on the moon who could breathe.

The stench was sickening and Melanie turned away. Across the gap lay a facing row of more cots and more dying men, their sickly flesh glowing in the white light. BioCon agents in yellow suits rolled instrument carts past them along the path of riot debris.

When she looked back, they were lifting the dead man off the cot and into, a black bag unzipped on the floor. His arms, crossed awkwardly over his blistered stomach, fell open as they moved him, and at once he looked so withered and empty. They laid him inside the thick black plastic with his red eyes still staring, his mouth still twisted open in silent song. Maryk knelt at his feet and unlocked a black clasp from around his ankle: an electronic quarantine bracelet. She remembered it all from Plainville.

Men lying on neighboring cots stared at the scorched undersides of the parapets above them with mouths dropped open, as though trying to harmonize with the dead they were soon to join. One man’s head rolled to the side, his red eyes loose in their sockets, fixing questioningly on her.

She started moving then. She was rushing away. She pushed past the nearest suit and pulled herself hand by hand along the red railing, away from Maryk, back to the steel doors.

Inside the first door, deep blue lights came on humming. She brought her hands up around her head as though to wave off the images of the cell block, but was afraid to touch anything, even herself. The blue lights died finally and the humming ended and the door clicked open and she ducked between two suited persons waiting to enter. She pulled at the wrist tape over her gloves, tearing away at her protective coverings as she searched for an empty room to cry in. She found one, and inside ripped the cowl and the layers of cotton and plastic from her face like bandages, dropping them to the floor. She covered her stinging eyes with her bared knuckles as a wave of nausea made her gag, and she started blindly forward, striking the desk with her hip before reaching the chair. She buried her face in her bare, powdered hands and sat like that for a long time, weeping, for the mystified dead and dying, for her own helplessness, and for her family and herself, and how sick she had once been.

When she looked up again, Maryk was standing in the door. He came ahead and set his tablet and black bag on the desk, then plunked down the dead man’s anklet. It was oily with green disinfectant, metal and round with a locking piece that shaped it into a capital Q. Melanie pushed away.

He pulled a chair over next to her without a word and opened up his tablet on the desk. He tapped keys and pulled from his bag a syringe, a sealed dish about the size of a can of tuna, and the small, blood-testing, PCR gadget.

“Arm,” he said.

She swiped at her eyes and complied silently.

“Sleeve,” he said.

She rolled up her sleeve. Her skin was bruised from all the bloodletting.

That was it. There was no I told you so. The abasement of a blood test was humiliation enough. Maryk gripped her arm and fastened a rubber tourniquet tightly around her tender biceps.

A window opened on Maryk’s tablet. She heard Dr. Pearse’s hoarse voice, as distinct as though he were there in the room with them. “Hello, Peter,” he said ghostily. “How goes the battle?”

She could barely see Dr. Pearse, his face long, his shoulders thin and sharp. She saw whiskers growing stubbly along his cheeks, light gray, nearly Maryk-white. He seemed to have aged even in the few hours since Melanie had left him. She felt a sort of confederacy with him since their private meeting, and wished he could see her there.

Maryk answered, “Contained. Another closed setting — same as Orangeburg, same as all the others.”

Dr. Pearse sounded pleased. “It will end as the rest.”

Melanie’s hand had begun to throb. Maryk uncapped the syringe and she looked away, finding a crucifix on the wall. She had stumbled into the prison chaplain’s office. Through the side window she could see out into the main hallway and a corner of the high, round guard station. On the monitors there, yellow suits attended to other sheet-draped bodies in other units in other parts of the penitentiary.

Dr. Pearse sounded enthusiastic. “I’m through scanning for engineering markers — the gamma-amino methionine hydrolase, et cetera. It’s there, Peter. The human component I predicted.”

“A graft,” Maryk said.

“No, Peter. Much more substantial than that. The Plainville RNA payload is insidiously complex, but it is a genetic code like any other, and I’ve broken it. Fascinating virus. It isn’t merely resilient in adapting to changing environments, Peter: It is dictating the terms. It is re-jiggering nature and natural selection in order to ensure its survival. This thing is shuffling its own RNA makeup.”

“I don’t care how fascinating it is, Stephen. I want to know what you’ve found.”

“It’s there,” he said. “As I told you it would be. You know how I wish it were not true. But Plainville contains verifiable complements of your DNA.”

Melanie didn’t know what to make of this, and she wouldn’t, until Maryk explained it to her later. For now, she was just listening.

“Impossible,” Maryk said, but with surprisingly little force.

“I know your genetic makeup pattern better than I know my own. How else could your DNA be in the Plainville virus? It’s the PeaMar transfusion and girl with vitiligo. It has to be.”

Melanie felt the tourniquet release, and the pressure on her forearm eased, warmth returning to her wrist and hand. She hadn’t even felt the needle stick. She looked back as Maryk emptied the tube of her blood into the sealed plastic dish. He mixed it with a few drops of clear fluid.

“Here’s what I have,” Maryk said. “Looks like everything originated with a guard. He had just returned to work from a family camping vacation in the Carolinas. He was too far gone, but someone managed to get to his nine-year-old son who was still coherent. Standard contact tracing Q and A, minus the sexual queries.”

Dr. Pearse was excited. “Yes?”

“A man. The boy said his father pulled over for a motorist stranded on the side of the highway. Which highway, the boy didn’t know; he didn’t even know which state. The father got out alone to offer assistance, and the motorist got out of the car to join him under the hood. The man apparently was ill. Exactly how ill is not clear, but very thin, the boy claimed, dressed in a medical mask, gloves, and what he described as a small, colorful hat without a brim, perhaps Re a toque.”

“Yes! That’s what Twenty-six was wearing in my bedroom.”

Maryk looked at him. “You’re certain?”

“Of course I am. No other description?”

“No, and nothing on the car. But while they were waiting, the nine-year-old asked his mother if he could get out and go to the bathroom. He didn’t really have to go, he admitted to us; he was just bored. She let him go down the highway incline by himself.”

Dr. Pearse sounded excited again. “Of course.”

“The boy saw them standing together over the engine, as men do. He recalled two peculiar things about their conversation. One was that the motorist showed a lot of interest in the father’s employment: what kind of prison it was, what his duties were as a guard. The other was that the sick man asked, twice, how far the father’s penitentiary was from Atlanta.”

There was a pause. “Atlanta,” Dr. Pearse said, sounding as thrilled as his sickened voice would allow. “The virus has avoided Atlanta, Peter, hasn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Florida, South and North Carolina. Now Louisiana. It’s not that much of a stretch. If you were a virus, which state in the union would you most likely avoid?”

“You mean — if the virus was being spread by a human.”

“Or behaving like one. You would want to keep clear of Georgia and the BDC. Now, by that same token, what if you decided you needed to sabotage the BDC? If you were a virus and wanted to go in and destroy the one institution you knew could stop you. What would you do, Peter? If you could discriminate between victims, and wanted to avoid detection. What would you do?”

Even Melanie, who barely knew Dr. Pearse, reacted to the odd cheerfulness in his voice. Maryk’s eyes were dark as he formulated the answer.

“I would go after the director,” Maryk said.

She saw Dr. Pearse nodding. “He watched The Disease Dilemma show,” he said. “And there I was, saying I attended to every outbreak. That led directly to Orangeburg. We frustrated him by denying him his intelligence on the outbreaks, and so he lashed out, whoever he is. He was there. That same man. We represent his only unnatural opposition. Once you start thinking about a motive, a human motive, a viral motive, it all falls into place.”

“Then tell me this: How did he get out of a hospital full of BDC personnel?”

“I don’t know. But I told you I felt like someone had been following me after I got back to Atlanta. I had seen a car driving back and forth outside my house. He followed me all the way to Amagansett, Peter. He waited until he could get into my room. The survivors’ names and addresses were in my tablet. Weren’t they?”

Maryk said nothing. He did not even nod. Dr. Pearse went on enthusiastically.

“You said there were only two possible outcomes for humans with Plainville, Peter. Die quickly, or seek immediate intervention and be cured. But what if there was a third? What if someone didn’t die right away, and the virus had time to act on them? The serum I hit the girl with in Africa, PeaMar4. Back then, PeaMar wasn’t merely a synthetic blood substitute: We began the project with me working to transfuse the disease-fighting properties of your blood. I was out to cure cancer and eradicate all viruses and bacteria all at once. That is why I gave it to the girl — as a preventive measure. But what if there was some sort of reaction? What if the unique viral inhibitors present in your blood — the attenuated killer cells loaded into PeaMar4 — only slowed the viral spread throughout the body, but did not eradicate it?”

“Impossible,” Maryk said.

“A biological stalemate, allowing the virus time to take over the body without killing it.”

“And?”

“And... I don’t know. But I will tell you this: I’m close, Peter. I’m very close. Someone is knowingly spreading this disease. And I’m beginning to think that this someone may not be entirely human.”

She felt a chill in the warm prison chaplain’s office. Maryk’s gray eyes were squinting, and he seemed put off by Dr. Pearse’s inexplicably upbeat mood.

“Reilly and Boone say you’ve been doing some electronic research,” he said.

“I’m close, Peter. Time is of the essence — for me, particularly. I know there’s something out there now. The moment I have anything, I’ll let you know.”

Maryk broke the fold of his arms to keystroke a command.

“How is Melanie?” Dr. Pearse said. “How is she holding up?”

She tried to get a better look at him, remembering that he did not know she was there. As she looked at the screen, a small window opened over Dr. Pearse’s image, a red bar expanding over a gauge growing quickly from zero to one hundred percent. A message flashed beneath it: CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN.

Maryk unplugged the gadget and the red bar went out. “She’s fine,” he said.

There was no night or day inside Lewes, no windows or clocks, only crudely made calendars upon which to X-out the dates. She napped in a chair while Maryk worked in the infirmary operating theater, and while he slept off his cascades she sat at the guard station off B unit and pondered her interrupted life, her interrupted body. She didn’t feel whole anymore. She felt like something salvaged from a junkyard, something that Maryk had stitched together, just to see if he could get it to work.

His attitude toward her had changed since she fled B unit. Properly humbled, she was now taken everywhere by him, in some strange way like a student. She stood by the cots as blankets were drawn off one prisoner after another, the sick continually unveiled. The shock of it was gone by then and each one looked the same to her. As Plainville stripped them of personality, it also seemed to strip them of their faults, their predatory natures, exposing the small, frail souls that live in all creatures. The smell too, like the unwavering tone in her ear, no longer dizzied her. The sounds inside the hermetically sealed prison block — moans, shuffling footsteps, creaking carts — were like the sounds of her dreams. B unit was a tomb constructed of iron and concrete, and every noise was a long time dying away.

She stood inside the vacated cells. She looked out through the iron bars painted dull red, and saw where the paint had been picked away: pitifully pornographic nail scratches to wile away the time. She rested on concrete beds jutting out of concrete walls. She picked through the abandoned belongings: books stacked on the seamless shelf above the toilet, unframed photographs curled from the incessant heat, rolled pairs of clean socks, false teeth. She riffled through Bibles thumbed to twice their original size, the cheap leather spines cracked, pages bookmarked with postcards, letters, photos. In one she found obscenities scratched into the New Testament margins, and reading them, she could hear the prisoner’s perverted voice.

She was an apparition to them. She was a ghost. She wished she had something more to offer them than strangeness, mystery, distraction. Maryk, on the other hand, comforted without caring to or even trying. His manner alone consoled the condemned as he moved from bed to bed, working over each man with the same taciturn precision. Their red, fevered eyes grew tame in his assured presence.

“Magnificent,” he said, standing next to her later at the railing overlooking the unit from the corner of the highest her. She would have answered the incessant moaning with a long, shrill scream; Maryk lauded it. “The decay,” he went on, looking like a man standing at the rail of a steamship leaving a quarantined port. “The utter rot.”

His words were blasphemous to her. She remembered hearing her father downstairs, and knowing from the direction of his groans that he was laid up in the living room, and knowing from their timbre that he was shivering: this man, her father. She and her brother had been forbidden to go downstairs. They had been forbidden even to see him. Her mother brought them food and felt their foreheads and throats with a smooth gloved hand, brave at first, but becoming more and more emaciated with each visit, until finally she stopped coming at all. Melanie held her brother — for the first time, as well as the last — and rocked him as he shivered in her arms, his eyes growing dull and viewing something farther and farther away. The phone still rang with sick, frightened voices that didn’t know yet that her dad was gone away.

She had been among the last to feel anything, and as such, was a witness to it all. The long drive out to the hospital, through the dead town and the familiar, empty intersections, past men and women in yellow space suits pulling instruments across driveways and lawns. The grotesquely overgrown plants and trees. Earlier, she had euthanatized every pet in the kennel, rather than have them sicken and die alone. She had held each little unsuspecting head as their bodies went limp.

At the hospital, she had waited for death. She was selected from the common room without knowing why, too frightened to ask. She was rolled away on a gurney past the specters of her neighbors and family and friends, the people of her life, laid out like radiation victims in the hospital corridors. She was left naked under a bedsheet in a hospital bay, a white curtain drawn around her. It felt like death. She hoped the wait would be brief. Her mind left her body for places she had never been, leaving her eyes behind.

Melanie broke out of her reverie as a yellow form brushed past her in a surge of power, toward Maryk on the parapet, prevailing upon him to come away. There was an urgency to their exchange. The person in the suit glanced back at her, and for a moment Melanie struggled to place the face.

It was her gynecologist, Dr. Freeley. There was the sudden shock of recognition, followed by an odd stab of betrayal; but both impulses passed almost immediately. She was becoming conditioned to withstand these broadsides.

It was startling to see Dr. Freeley, a person Melanie had known to be nearly mannequin in her emotions, so alarmed. Maryk stiffened at her words and let go of the rail, and Melanie drew closer, wondering if the news could have something to do with Dr. Pearse, or the sick man they wanted to find. But Dr. Freeley could not whisper and hope to be heard through her hood.

“Broken quarantine,” Melanie heard her say. “Three inmates. One of our vans. Just escaped.”

Maryk started away before Dr. Freeley could finish, his rubber soles pounding down to the caged stairwell at the far end of the her. Dr. Freeley turned and started the other way, back toward Melanie, and Melanie turned then and started moving too, moving away from Dr. Freeley, striding more and more quickly past the cots, the cells, the men — all in a blur. If it was a race, she lost; as Melanie reached the UV chamber door, a black rubber suit hand struck out from behind her and hit the lock release. The door hissed open, and she and Dr. Freeley stepped inside.

Blue lights hummed on. The cobalt glow filled Melanie with a feeling of wordlessness, as though anyplace and anytime might be waiting behind that second door; even Plainville, five years before, and she would be given another chance.

She looked up at Dr. Freeley’s flawless blue face. It was sealed within the protective glass like something either incredibly precious or too hazardous to touch.

“Is my dentist here too?” Melanie said.

The stranger things became, the easier it was to affect a casual bravado about them. The second door opened on the main corridor, and Dr. Freeley paced Melanie down to the guard station, gripping her arm roughly and presenting her to the suited man there. “Watch her,” Dr. Freeley said, pushing her forward. Melanie, stunned, watched her yellow form stride away.

Maryk drove slowly out past the front gate. The lights of the assembled media came on and flooded the entrance but then went off again when they saw that it was just another BDC van. He rolled through the BioCon checkpoint and took his time down the darkened road until he was certain he was not being followed. Two roads later he was on the county route doing eighty.

Freeley sat next to him with her window open. Her glistening suit exuded Pheno and bleach as she replayed the surveillance camera scene for him on her tablet.

“They were left alone for less than a minute,” she told him. “One cut himself purposefully on the arm. His blood threat was their ticket out.”

On the tablet screen he watched a replay of the three inmates breaking through a locked door. He watched them confront a suited BDC technician and force him behind the wheel of a van as they piled into the back.

“No one saw them at the gate,” Freeley said. “They hid in back until they were cleared through. All three were up for murder.”

Maryk roared past a yellow pickup truck full of farm kids who cheered the van’s speed, “How healthy are they?”

“We had them on Milkmaid’s serum, but it was too late. Each was starting to fail.” She consulted a grid map on her tablet. “We’re six minutes behind them. Less than twenty miles from New Orleans. They’ll try to disappear there.”

Maryk regripped the wheel. He forced the pedal and the van shook as his speed climbed to ninety miles per hour. “They’ll try to break off the quarantine anklets first,” he said, He felt the tires slide as he veered sharply around a turn. “They need to switch vehicles. They need clothes.”

Freeley said, “There’s a naval station in the area. We could call ahead, throw roadblocks up around the city. New Orleans and vicinity means over a million people.”

Maryk simply shook his head.

She monitored the electronic anklet trace on her tablet. Then: “They’re turning off. Stopping. A residential road, only three addresses.”

“How far outside—”

“Ten miles outside New Orleans. Four minutes ahead of us.”

Maryk reached the turnoff in just under three. He cut the engine and rolled in along a thin dirt road until he saw the van parked beside a converted barn-garage next to a house. The house was two stories high with weathered wood siding and a new wraparound porch. It was dark. The land in back was considerable and neither of the other two houses was in sight.

They slipped out and crossed to the getaway van. Maryk looked in through the parted rear window curtain and saw the technician lying bloodied and motionless over the wheel hump. His suit was shredded around him.

Freeley started around to the rear of the house while Maryk walked to the front. He climbed two steps and crossed the wooden porch to the door. It was unlocked. He opened it and the door swung wide and banged against the jam and swung back rattling. He made no attempt at stealth. He heard the sound of footsteps shuffling inside. Then he heard nothing.

The black spots on the wood landing inside the door were drops of pathogenic blood. He stepped onto the shadowed threshold with his bag in his right hand.

A short hallway ahead of him led to a larger room with windows showing the rear porch and the long backyard. A flight of stairs to his left climbed to the second floor. To his immediate right was a sitting room. He could make out chairs and a fireplace inside. The chain curtain over the mouth of the fireplace was swaying.

Maryk entered the doorway. He stood there and listened. “Come out,” he said.

A hefty shadow in an orange prison jumper rose from behind the wide back of a brocaded chair. It was a large man and he kept rising. He gripped the sides of the broad chair and muscled it across the dark wood floor to show that he didn’t usually hide from anyone. The chair toppled over a short bookcase and glass shattered delicately. Then the house was silent again. Maryk listened to the prisoner’s breathing and watched his shoulders heave.

The prisoner waggled a finger. “Come on here,” he said. “I’ll just breath in your face.”

Maryk reached down and unfastened the buckles of his bag. He noticed lesions on the man’s thick neck and heard the fluttering of his dissolving lung tissue. He saw the characteristic early-stage masking of the face. Standing across the room from him was a hulking virus in an orange prison jumpsuit.

Maryk set his open bag down on an end table. “You made the mistake of killing your only hostage,” Maryk said. “Looks like no one is home.”

The prisoner shifted and the farmhouse floorboards creaked. His voice was ludicrously low. “You’ll do just about fine.”

Maryk’s right hand went into his bag as his heart rate accelerated comfortably. He pulled out a syringe. “Breaking quarantine is a federal offense.”

The prisoner looked at the syringe in Maryk’s hand and smiled. He raised his meaty hands into a listless street fighter’s stance. “What you gonna do with that?” he said.

Maryk remained still. The syringe remained at his side.

The prisoner came at him. He moved lumberingly and raised his big arms to strike as Maryk ducked out of the way. The prisoner lurched past and slipped on a throw rug in the doorway and thundered headlong into the hallway wall. The staircase above him rattled.

The prisoner turned but Maryk was upon him. He braced the prisoner’s neck with his forearm and forced the man’s Adam’s apple up into his larynx as he spun the syringe in his hand. He gripped it needle-down and drove it into the prisoner’s chest. The needle slipped neatly between the man’s ribs and pierced the pericardium sac of his heart. The prisoner’s face burst wide.

Maryk thumbed the plunger and voided the barrel. The prisoner choked on a sucking breath as Maryk broke off the needle in his chest and stepped back. The prisoner’s legs buckled and he collapsed on all fours in the night light through the open front door.

Maryk retrieved his bag from the end table in the sitting room. The prisoner was lying on his side and issuing a series of agonal gasps as Maryk stepped past him into the short hallway.

A small shadow that was a second prisoner sprang from a closet ahead and crossed the wide living room. He scrambled over the sofa to another fireplace and picked up the largest piece of kindling wood he could find. He weighed it like a baseball bat as Maryk stepped into the room. The carpeting was plush and silent underfoot. The prisoner tried swinging the wood one-handedly before settling on a clublike grip.

He had light brown skin and weblike tattoos that laced his hands. He did not appear as visibly ill as the first prisoner.

Maryk was laboring under deep intoxicating breaths. His black bag shook slightly in his hand. He remained aware of his back at all times.

Maryk feinted suddenly toward the sofa. The prisoner retreated a quick step and then stopped and brandished the club anew. He uttered a low grunt and gave the weapon a threatening half swing. Maryk countered with another feigned step and the prisoner again jerked back and this time jostled the leg of a small parlor table. Chessmen thumped to the carpet. The prisoner reset himself and brought the wooden club down on the table leg with a solid crack. This seemed to invigorate him.

The blood rush in Maryk’s head and the force of his breathing built to a crescendo. At once he reached inside his bag and started forward.

This time the prisoner did not retreat. He did not have the chance. A yellow blur that was Freeley burst out from a side room and brought a syringe down slashing with both gloved hands.

The prisoner screamed. The wood sprang from his hands and he went down hard with the syringe buried in his neck. Freeley did not let go and worked the plunger with a combative wail. The prisoner writhed and gurgled beneath her. His shoe heels kicked adamantly at the wall as Freeley broke off the syringe in his neck and stood.

There was a noise upstairs. Maryk turned to the narrow staircase and mounted it in four strides, There was blood on the handrail at the top.

His shoes whisked over a worn Oriental runner along the length of the open second-floor hall. The closed doors were old with glass knobs and key locks. Flea market reproductions had been hung to cover the textured paper peeling off the walls.

He moved through the open door at the end of the hall into a master bedroom. An afghan was folded at the foot of the quilted bedspread and a glass dish of holy water was screwed next to the door.

There was blood smeared on the glass knob leading to a half bath. Maryk eased the door open with his foot before entering all at once and throwing aside a frilly shower curtain.

The glazed window inside was open and there was blood on the crank handle and sill. Maryk looked out onto the roof and saw an orange form dropping off the gutter. He looked across the long black yard to the wide swollen Mississippi River moving in the distance.

Maryk walked to the back door downstairs. He strode out alone over the stiff grass. He smelled the salt of the river and could feel it rushing ahead of him like the blood pushing through his veins. The limping prisoner looked back and saw Maryk coming and renewed his efforts. He was running toward the riverbank.

“Right,” the prisoner said finally. He had fallen exhausted to his knees in the muddy salt grass. “All right.” He turned to face Maryk. “I’ll go back.”

They were twenty yards or so from the great moving river. The prisoner raised his arms toward Maryk and his bloody sleeve billowed in the night breeze. Most of his hair was already gone and his face was spent and fading. This prisoner was the sickest of the three.

Maryk allowed him to struggle to his feet before driving the needle into his chest. The prisoner stiffened and looked at Maryk with flaring red eyes before he fell.

Maryk left him gasping up at the dark night sky and continued the short distance to the river bank. The familiar weight of the cascade thickened his mind and welled behind his eyes like sleep. He shed his cowl, cap, and face mask as he stood exhausted on the hard dirt bank and looked upriver. A broad halo of light glowed against the dark sky. It was a sleeping city of one million human beings.

Melanie saw their van return on a guard station monitor and was allowed to go to the underground garage. She came upon it being unloaded in a brightly lit side room. She noticed immediately the dark dirt splashed on its tires.

The van was empty. Dr. Freeley was speaking with some other BioCon agents while Maryk stood at the passenger’s door, away from her. He was looking at his face in the long side mirror. His headgear was gone, his white hair matted back and down.

Dr. Freeley was informing the men about some death certificates she had already written. Melanie heard her update the agents on a house being biocleaned a few miles away.

Maryk turned from the van door. He came forward a few steps before seeing Melanie there. He had a drowsy look in his eyes, and at once she noted the sluggishness of his manner, the guarded way he stood before her, like a practiced drunk. It struck her cold. “You murdered them,” she realized.

Freeley looked up, but Maryk did not answer. He frowned and lurched past her out of the room.

Pasteur’s Crypt

She waited with Maryk away from the nighttime travelers streaming through the New Orleans airport, seated alone among a row of hard plastic chairs along a cold wall of windows. Airplanes rolled on the taxiways behind them, and she had that feeling she always had in airports, of being among giants.

Within an hour of his return to Lewes B unit, Maryk decided he was through there; she guessed it had something to do with his cascade, and his concern about Dr. Pearse. A helicopter had ferried them to the airport, and now they were waiting for the flight back to Atlanta.

“Viruses love airports,” Maryk said. “Vital organs, located at every major human population center, catapulting incubators from city to city all over the world. The circulatory system of human civilization.”

He sat too heavily and too large for the chair, his big legs extended clumsily and crossed at the ankles, his eyes low and turned to the bustling terminal beyond. He was deep into one of his funks, and she wanted no part of him.

“Three phases of public response to an epidemic,” he said. “First: Denial. That occurred during the original outbreak in Plainville. The Search for Blame is what we’re into now, with the press. If the epidemiology continues to elude us and the virus strikes again, then the BDC will be made the scapegoat. Phase three is the Demand for Action. The blood response. In previous ages this meant burning down the houses of the sick, and the aristocracy fleeing into the hills. But there are no hills remote enough anymore. No oasis that doesn’t have a road running through it. And no foreigners foreign enough to blame. The ecosystem is sealed and starting to cook. House burning is all.”

This pleased him, of course. She was cold and sat with her bare arms crossed, trying to ignore him. Maryk had changed back into his standard outfit of white shirt and black pants, but she had not brought any clothes other than the hospital scrubs she had been issued back at the BDC. A large monitor suspended from the ceiling broadcast weather reports from various destinations, and she saw footage of snow piling up in Boston.

Standing beneath the monitor flipping through Newsweek magazine was a red-haired man in a brown leather jacket and latex gloves, who looked a lot like the custodian at the Emory cafeteria.

“You’re not doctors,” Melanie said quietly.

Maryk was slow to respond. “Viral containment,” he said. “Halting its spread throughout the species. That is my job.”

She said, “Doctors heal people.”

“A host either contains its illness, or seeks to spread. Those who seek to spread have to be stopped.”

“Killed, you mean.” She felt another airplane — an immense, winged incubator — roll behind them. “I think I understand you now,” she said. “Your perspective. Who you are, where you’re coming from. The prisoners, the other medical people there in suits: We walked among them like gods. I didn’t like it.”

“You felt it, though.”

“They feared you. They feared me.”

“They fear the battle. They fear exposure. Infection is a challenge. It is Nature calling us out. Fight, she says. Fight for your life, your existence. Survive, she dares. Endure.”

“Of course you’d say that. You haven’t the slightest idea what it’s like to be sick.”

Sarcasm, or perhaps amusement, registered on his face. “Tell me, then,” he said.

“I can’t.”

“What it’s like. To be sick.”

“You can’t just say it.” She frowned at his sleepy eyes. “I could list symptoms, but you know symptoms. It has nothing to do with that anyway. Everything changes.”

“Changes.”

“That’s right.”

“Everything.”

“Life, living. Perspective. Priorities.”

“It simplifies things.”

“If that’s what you call it when your options are reduced.”

“Fear, then.”

“Yes, fear. Are you asking for yourself, or for Dr. Pearse?”

That quieted him. He sat up a bit, and the row of chairs rocked.

“Perhaps you’re curious,” she said, pursuing it. “What it must be like for him. Losing control of your own body: That’s the fear. Awareness that you have no control over your own body, really. Nobody does. That’s what changes. You acquire this privileged knowledge about the human condition, and slowly it becomes hysteria. You’ve never even had a head cold. How can you know what health is?”

He had no answer for her immediately, which buoyed her.

“What if I got sick again?” she said.

“Simple,” he said, sitting back now. “I would treat you.”

“And if I refused? Resisted?”

He said again, “I would treat you.”

“What if I ran? I told you before: I will never go through that treatment again.”

He looked at her with more than a glance now. He was taking her seriously. She wanted to be taken seriously.

“What if my blood was no longer any good to you,” she said, “and you knew that I would refuse treatment? What if I was going to run? Would you kill me too?”

His gaze was penetrating. “Where would you go?”

“Away. A remote island somewhere.”

“How would you get there without infecting others?”

She held her own. “I’d find some way.”

“There is no way. And no safe place to go. Either one contains one’s illness, or spreads it. There is no running away.”

“Then you would kill me.”

His arm went out as though sweeping a table clean. “My job is to protect the human race. To defend and preserve the species, and I’ll do it any way I have to. Because I’m the only one who can. I am the last line of defense.”

That raised her eyebrows. That was the cascade talking. It made him seem vulnerable somehow, and she decided to try to pick his brain while it was soft. “Where does someone like you come from?” she said.

“The same place everyone comes from.”

“I mean, where in the world?”

He was gazing ahead now, only half there. “Skagit Valley. Northern Washington State. An hour north of Seattle, near Vancouver.”

“And you were raised there by wolves?”

He nodded. “My father was a pediatrician,” he said. “Like yours.”

She could have done without that information. “And your mother?”

“She was a part-time church secretary. She called Bingo in the parochial school gymnasium Monday nights. She was blind.”

“She was blind and she called Bingo?”

“The nun who ran the game was pathologically shy. She would pull the Ping-Pong balls and whisper numbers into my mother’s ear, who would then announce them. It came out later that the nun was lying to my mother, routinely rigging the games for the poorest families of the parish to win. Bingo was canceled not long after that.”

“Was she born — you know — blind?”

“No. She remembered images. Toys, pillows’ chair legs. Linoleum floors. The unpainted undersides of tables. It was a childhood illness.”

Melanie’s only point of reference was the Little House books, and Mary, the older sister, who went so valiantly blind from scarlet fever, whose god-fearing ways Melanie tried to emulate as a child.

She thought she had something on him then. “That’s why you became a virologist,” she said.

He said nothing at first, looking only bemused.

“What?” she said.

“That’s something Stephen might have said. No, it was simpler than that. My father also had a tulip farm. One season, when I was eight or nine, the crop came up healthy in every way except the petals: reds and violets and yellows swirled together, similar to what you get when you stir one paint color into another. My mother always liked me to describe things to her, but those colors were one thing I could never get right. My father said a plant virus had caused it. Our crop sold for ten times the usual amount that year. I waited all summer and fall and winter, but next spring the tulips came up normal again. The virus never recurred.”

A nine-year-old Maryk in short pants, standing belt high among acres of psychedelic pastels. She grinned at the image, then remembered who she was dealing with. “No brothers, sisters?”

He looked oddly bemused again, a look so wrong for his piercing face. “Actually, my mother was to have had twins,” he said. “Her ultrasound showed two of us until her eighteenth week, when she experienced some complications. Her next test, taken her twenty-first week, showed only one fetus. This always bothered her. For some reason she thought it was significant, and told me this just before she died. All twins battle in the womb for space, nutrition. It starts that early — the pushing, the pulling. From what is now known about reproductive medicine, the most likely theory is that, whatever sibling I was to have, I absorbed in utero.”

He seemed to be not at all aware of how disturbing this bit of information was. “So you’re like a twin all by yourself, that’s what you’re saying?”

He sat up and pointed to his breast pocket. “Feel.”

The pocket appeared empty. She reached over, the tips of her fingers tentatively poking his starched white shirt over his heart, and felt nothing, and she was relieved at first. Then she pressed her palm fully against the hard, curved muscle of his left breast, and realized there was nothing there at all.

“No heartbeat,” she said.

“Now here.”

She pressed against his right breast, and felt something beating inside. She snatched back her hand, feeling the sting of the opposing armrest as she struck it with her elbow.

Maryk sat back, gazing out into the bustling crowd. “The organs in my body are reversed. The medical term is situs inversus. A mirror image, such as is seen in some separated Siamese twins.”

“You consumed your sibling,” she said.

He nodded. “Something like that.”

She wiped off her hand on her scrub pants. “Why are you telling me all this?”

“Why are you asking?”

“Good point,” she said, wondering about that herself She was having trouble reconciling the odd, biologically inebriated man sitting across from her with the monster she knew him to be. “Do you see your father much?”

“He still practices. Settled right into national health care. Staunch middle-class medicine: antibiotics, inoculations, strep throat cultures.” This was all said disparagingly.

“And you’re not married. Except to your job.”

He squinted into the crowd, at nothing. Yet she suspected some part of him was enjoying this. “You think you have me at a disadvantage.”

“You do realize that most people with your biological whatever-it-is would just go wild. Take the worst risks — then sleep it off, and the next day be fine and clean.”

She could tell by the puzzled look on his face that this thought had never occurred to him.

“What about death?” she said. “If you can’t get sick. You will die, won’t you?”

“Of course. The body breaks down, cells break down. We’re dying all the time, our tissues disintegrating as we sit here, right now.” He waved indolently, at the travelers, at nothing. “Death is constant. The termination event itself is merely an end to a process. Death is a sunset, no more. You don’t fear a sunset.”

His bravura fascinated her, as much as she disbelieved it. His contempt was so forthright and unyielding that she found it endearing in a cranky sort of way. It appealed to her own innate pessimism.

“I think I prefer you like this,” she said. “You seem almost human.”

His gaze remained distant. “I didn’t come here to be insulted.”

She watched him for a smile. “Benjamin Something,” he said instead.

Her own smile fell away. “What did you say?”

“Can’t remember his last name. The ticket agency worker. Benjamin Something.” He spoke as though of a mutual acquaintance. “He seemed suitable. On paper, anyway.”

He was filling in the last few remaining gaps in her file. Any personal debacles she had tried to put behind her lived still and brightly in Maryk’s mind.

“I have a few rather disfiguring scars on my body,” she said, “which I’m a bit overly sensitive about. This tends to rule out any danger of intimacy with the opposite sex.”

She heard herself trying to pass off desperation as aloofness, denigrating that which was forbidden her. She was the poor, grumbling about the rich. With a shudder she realized that Maryk knew her better than anyone else. It reminded her again how much she resented him.

“You know what?” she said. “I think some people are like viruses. Some people just take, and if they give you anything at all, it’s something you don’t want.”

This seemed to register inside his muddled head, reflected in his eyes, which sharpened in their view over the lounge and held there a moment before retreating again. He hadn’t liked that comparison at all.

A bickering couple passed them, hot coffee dripping off the man’s jacket cuff. They thought of sitting nearby, but a shared glance at Maryk made them reconsider. They faded away and Melanie was all business again.

“Why ‘Milkmaid’?” she said.

He squinted. “That was about Jenner. Edward Jenner, who discovered the cure for smallpox. Wordplay. The ‘milkmaid’ who launched his work, the ‘lancet’ he used to open the boil, the cow named ‘Blossom.’ Inelegant. If I had to do it over again, I would use Pasteur instead.” He glanced at her then, as though having decided something, and leaned forward interrogationally. “I am going to tell you a story that will change your life,” he said.

She doubted that. “I could use a change.”

“Eighteen eighty-five. Alsace, France. A nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister, on his way to school, is mauled savagely by a rabid dog and barely survives. Rabies, what the French call la rage, was well feared in that day. Fever, depression, throat convulsions, progressing to mania, characteristic foaming at the mouth, eventual paralysis, and death. There was no cure and no treatment. A local doctor cauterized the worst of the boy’s wounds and, having reached the limits of his abilities, advised Madame Meister to travel to Paris to call upon Dr. Louis Pasteur. Pasteur was not a physician. Pasteur was a chemist, a scientist. The idea of germs fascinated him, and he was experimenting at the time with the germs of dead animals, ones he had weakened in the laboratory. His work would eventually lead to the discovery of viruses, but at that time, the idea of invisible particles causing disease was considered pure fancy. Meister became Pasteur’s first human trial. Pasteur inoculated him with a solution mixed from the spinal cords of rabbits recently dead from rabies. This was only the second human vaccine in history, after Jenner’s, but the first to be manufactured in a laboratory and derived from the same infective agent that caused the disease. The boy survived. He was spared the ravages of la rage. Modem human virology finds its genesis in Pasteur’s pioneering work, and yet he was misunderstood by many of his time. Most of his colleagues could not see the whole of the canvas upon which he was working.

“But that’s all regular history and well enough known. It is at this point that history abandons the boy. Joseph Meister never wavered in his devotion to the man who saved his life and, fittingly, grew up to become the gatekeeper at the Institute Pasteur years after his savior’s death. Joseph Meister was guarding the gate in 1940 when the Nazis marched into Paris. They ordered him to open Pasteur’s crypt, but Meister refused, and instead took his own life in protest.”

Melanie hung in the ensuing silence.

“He killed himself,” she said. “That’s your life changing story?”

For the first time that night, Maryk seemed fully awake. “Meister destroyed himself rather than be part of the desecration of the memory of the artist who had preserved his life. And history gives him nothing. Well — if seventy-six years can be considered history. In truth it is the blink of an eye.” He sat up again, interested. “Think of that. Seventy-six years ago, the first human being ever to be inoculated with a lab-prepared vaccine died. Three quarters of a century; it’s nothing. And penicillin: discovered by accident, less than one hundred years ago. People have already forgotten that strep throat was until only recently a fatal disease. We’ve had a century’s parole from bacterial slaughter — and now our time is running out again. Antibiotics are failing and diseases, are once again outpacing the remedies. Do you know how our time will be remembered?”

Melanie shook her head.

“As a flash of light between great periods of darkness. If our so-called modern age is remembered at all. Earth is something like three and a half billion years old; mankind, a few million. We are infants crawling upon this rock, protozoa from a pond, who crawled out of the oceans, who dropped down from the trees. Dinosaurs presumed the world was theirs as well. We are a fungus spreading over this planet, colonizing, warring, consuming. The Earth is a cell we are infecting. And nature is the Earth’s immune system, just now sensing the threat of our encroachment, and arming itself to fight back. Macro versus micro. Viruses are the Earth’s white blood cells. We are the Earth’s disease.”

Melanie smiled haltingly in defense of the human race. “But nobody could really believe that. Not even you. Look at the environment. The more we learn about the earth, the better we behave.”

He waved it all away. “Folly. Like bees getting together and deciding not to pollinate. Like termites voting whether or not to chew through wood. Man will consume his environment. Every form of life from the smallest to the largest contributes something to the earth’s ecology, repaying the overall system, except for two species: rats and man. Man is a thief, a scavenger, a hunter-gatherer — a survivor. That is all.”

“Then why do you fight for him? Why defend and preserve the species at all if as you say it will endure of its own, I don’t know, villainy?” He said nothing, and she came upon the answer herself. “Because you are the ultimate man. You are the ultimate consumer. You think you’re different, but in fact, you are the ultimate survivor.”

He stared at her, and a glimmer passed across his face — as though he were remembering suddenly that he was impaired and that things might not be necessarily as they seemed. He turned to face the lounge again. He said, “That’s the sort of thing Stephen would have said.”

“You said that before. What does that mean? That I’m like him? Or that I’m not like you? Because I can tell you for a fact: I am not like you.”

But he wasn’t listening to her. Melanie heard their flight being called overhead, and she turned and looked out across the tarmac to the giant airplanes lifting off into the night, chasing the sunset that no one feared. She dreaded their return to Atlanta.

Maryk stiffed himself awake just after takeoff, as sour jet air coursed through the cabin. The wider seats of first class did little to ease his claustrophobia but the cascade had passed and his thinking was again clear.

A flash outside drew his eye to the window. He watched as a flutter of light suffused the dark membrane of clouds below. A similar burst throbbed miles away and was answered by another closer to the airplane. Then it was as though a fuse had been lit. A succession of eruptions like flashbulbs beat all.along the silent plain of the sky. Maryk leaned into the window and watched as the atmosphere below him erupted. They were flying over a fierce electrical storm. He looked down and thought of synapses pulsing over the one-celled earth.

He felt the need to share this with someone. He looked back to Melanie on the other side of the empty seat separating them. She was wrapped shoulders to feet in a thin blue blanket. He could see the outline of her crossed arms rising and falling steadily. She was asleep. He instead reached over and eased her chair into a reclining position. She mumbled and turned over to face him but did not wake. He looked back out the window and the sky beneath the airplane was only intermittently bright as the last silent bursts of light faded behind the tail.

His tablet toned on the empty seat. He opened it and Reilly appeared in a window from somewhere inside the BDC. His image was distorted by the electrical activity. He said something and Maryk asked him to repeat it.

“Director Pearse escaped B4,” Reilly said.

Maryk was a long moment digesting this. “How?” he said.

Stephen had requested a contact suit earlier in the day. It was one of a half dozen items Reilly and Boone had imported into B4 for him. He walked out wearing it one hour after their shift ended and surprised the BioCon agent posted at the elevator. He was wearing the contact suit and walking with his cane. He asked her to step away before he took her tablet. The guard at the gate recalled a suited man driving a light green car but had not recorded the license plate. Seeing a man in a contact suit leave the BDC was like seeing a man in uniform leave an army base.

“He took nothing else?” Maryk said.

“We’ve been through B4 top to bottom.”

“Neither one of you thought to ask him what he wanted a suit for?”

“Our instructions were clear: Anything Director Pearse wants, Director Pearse gets. We told you he was getting weird. I thought it was maybe his mind starting to go. Now I think he was onto something.”

“Tap into the B4 drives. I want a rundown of anything he was looking into.”

Reilly said, “Already started that. I’ll post it as soon as it’s done.”

Maryk’s thoughts ran wild. Stephen had taken the extraordinary precaution of putting on a suit. But a suit is only meant to protect the person inside. He was a walking viral bomb and still toxic to anyone unprotected in a confined space.

He had walked off in violation of federal quarantine and had recently been acting suspiciously. Maryk knew the bizarre things that Plainville could do to the mind.

All this came to a head as his tablet toned again with another incoming message. This one was text only and the sender was Stephen Pearse. The message had been posted from a location one hundred and eighty miles south of Atlanta. It read PETER COME AT ONCE.

The Swamp

The Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and Wilderness Area ranged more than four hundred thousand acres. It was the largest and most primitive swamp in North America. Maryk’s tablet trace showed that Stephen was six miles in. A road ran most of the way.

He waited next to Melanie while the BDC helicopter rounded the northern tip of the swamp. She still wore scrubs and sneakers and was staring out her window into the Georgia dawn and the vast swamp undulating below.

“Why would he leave,” she said, “knowing he is contagious?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you going to do if he doesn’t want to come back?”

He found her naiveté no longer amusing and recently declined to respond.

Maryk had received Stephen’s computer searches. Stephen had downloaded forty years of voting registers for the town of Plainville, Massachusetts. He had also downloaded ten years of so-called annual manifestos put out by the Rainforest Ecology Conservation International in Africa. Nothing was highlighted on either document. Stephen had also accessed a January 2012 issue of Audubon Magazine and sent off a request to the MacArthur Foundation for information on the current address of one of its fellowship recipients.

They set down upon a local highway on the edge of the refuge and transferred into three waiting Park Services Jeeps. The road deteriorated inside the swampland and ended altogether at a state park, where Freeley was waiting with a BioCon unit. They had matched the license plate of a car in the parking lot to a vehicle missing from the BDC fleet. She was pulling on a contact suit as Maryk approached.

“I didn’t think he could even walk,” she said.

Maryk said, “He walks fine.”

“What if he had gone to an airport?”

“He didn’t.”

“It’s a trap.”

Maryk was impatient. “Then I guess I’m falling for it.”

A ranger’s assistant warned of swamp vegetation rivaling that of a South American jungle. One recent hiker who violated the No Camping rule had been missing for more than six weeks. The terrain was full of sawgrass and cutting underbrush too dangerous for contact suits. Freeley and BioCon had to wait for path-clearing tools.

The ranger offered to guide Maryk inside but Maryk declined. He did accept the man’s offer of a self-inflating Zodiac launch and a small outboard motor but he could not carry them both with his black bag. He saw Melanie standing away from the rest. She was watching him.

“You can stay here, or you can help,” he said.

She considered it only a moment. She came forward and took his tablet and his bag.

They pushed into the dense growth on foot. Melanie took the lead as Maryk ported the heavy marine equipment through the sinking earth. The return to a jungle setting struck him as somehow appropriate.

It took them less than an hour to reach the source of the Hailing signal. Stephen’s tablet was set upon an inlet stump at the head of a dead stream that had recently seen passage. A trail of black water split the emerald scum crusted along the facing banks. The tablet screen read PETER COME ALONE.

At the base of the tree stump was a damp rope greened with slime. Maryk looked out at the still black path of water. The Zodiac. It self-inflated and he set it afloat and attached the outboard motor. He climbed aboard. The black rubber floor of the launch was soft and sun roughened and Maryk squatted on his knees for balance.

He turned to start the motor and saw Melanie still waiting on the mud bank. She was watching him accusingly. She was holding his black bag. He stopped with the cord in his hand.

“You’re not going to kill him,” she said.

“Everybody has a choice,” he said. “Containment, or spread. Do you trust Stephen to have chosen correctly?”

She came forward with his bag and climbed inside. “It’s you I don’t trust.” She squatted down into the bow as he returned to the cord. He pulled it twice and the engine erupted and settled into an even growl. He pushed off and piloted the launch away from the bank.

Melanie picked hair out of her face as they puttered along the course described by the cleaved scum. She seemed content to kneel in front and survey the dense shores of the dead stream. The path of black water veered eastward into the sunlight and she reached up and cleared away vines that dropped like streamers into their path. Maryk cut the engine farther ahead and drifted as he listened to the shore. The croaks and bird cries and rustling of legs along the muddy brush had faded. They were entering a strangely quiet part of the swamp.

He saw the first Plainville plant ahead on their right. Veins burst from the remaining midrib leaf spines like wiry arms and thickened into cordlike spindles. There was another immediately after it along the same dark patch of ground. Its leaf blades had curled and frayed and erupted in color that had since decayed to varied hues of gray and black. Both growths appeared to have once been common ferns.

They moved past a stunted Plainville tree that had suffered an aberrant surge of growth before dying. He watched Melanie’s head turn to a profile as they floated past its outreaching branches. She slid away to the opposite side of the small boat.

The stream path angled right and ended at a small island. Maryk steered onto a worn dirt slip next to an older Zodiac launch with faded lettering along its scum-ringed sides. They disembarked onto a well-trodden path that had seen heavy things dragged over it.

They stopped under another savage tree. The wood was barkless and blistered and swirled into inscrutable knots. Its sulfur-yellow roots had erupted and burrowed back down again into the mire like elbows trying to raise the trunk from the earth.

“This is the virus?” she said quietly.

Maryk nodded.

“Why isn’t it spreading?”

The Plainville plants and trees lay in dark patches surrounded by healthy flora. Maryk looked up at the wide rifts in the canopy and the morning sunlight beating through.

“Sunlight,” he said. “A natural barrier.” It was the same as it had been in Africa. All viruses fell apart when exposed to the sun’s ultraviolet rays.

She stayed close to him as the footpath led to a long structure draped in canvas. It was some twenty yards in length and appeared to be a series of camping tents stitched together. Camouflaging branches and leaves littered the mismatched roofs.

A door flap had been cut into the near corner. Maryk lifted it from the bottom and listened before entering. The smell that escaped was pungent. Melanie started to gag but Maryk pulled her the rest of the way inside.

Spears of dusty daylight burned down through slashes in the canvas roof. Maryk’s eyes adjusted to wooden workbenches along both walls and a central row of rough-hewn tables. He saw dairy pails nearby, bottles of chemicals, and measuring devices and scales. There was a heavy press, a bucket of dirty syringes, and knives as well as other anatomizing instruments.

Dead Plainville plants sat in heaps of burst pottery and dry soil. They clutched at the tables like ivy. Scores of small dead carcasses lay flayed on the center tables in varying stages of dissection. Maryk guessed they might have been rats.

“Oh my—” Melanie recoiled and grabbed for the door flap behind them.

Maryk gripped her arm and pulled her ahead. They passed a discarded BDC contact suit lying atop a work space. A blistered plant arm had grown over it.

At the end of the rows of worktables stood dozens of small metal cages filled with decomposing rats. As many as eight to a cage were rotted with Plainville. The odor there was as thick as steam. Melanie began to cough and retch and tugged on him. Maryk released her and he went on alone.

Plainville plants in clay pots filled the dark floor space from the middle of the tent to the far canvas wall. The colors were ferocious and thriving as though choked to brilliance. The plants had erupted from their arranged pots and slithered outward along the dirt ground as though dragging themselves forward. Maryk waded in among them. Some lay unmolested in an open space of dirt as though respected or feared. Their bright leaves gleamed as though with perspiration and their tentacular stems and wildly textured leaves scorned nature. Shards of busted pottery lay wound in vinelike branches as though in the grip of florid fists.

Maryk heard a weak voice behind him.

“I came here to kill him, Peter.”

Stephen was standing inside the door flap. A ray of daylight through the torn canvas above lit his surgical skullcap and shadowed the recesses of his face.

“He’s not here,” he continued. “But he knows we are. I set off a silent alarm.”

“Stephen.” Maryk moved past Melanie toward him.

“Outside,” Stephen said. He pushed through the canvas flap and daylight shone in profanely.

Maryk rushed out after him. There was a wooden bench set in front of the tent and Stephen was making his way to it. He moved well with the cane but his physical appearance had further declined. He was drenched in sweat and impossibly thin. The sores about his arms and legs had darkened and massed and bled. He looked like a cadaver. He looked as though he were brittling into wood.

Melanie came gagging through the tent door behind Maryk. One look at Stephen calmed her. She fought down a swallow.

Stephen showed her a much-weakened grin. “Hello, Melanie,” he said.

Maryk said, “What is this, Stephen?”

“A hiding place. He couldn’t spread his virus indiscriminately. He needed a place where he could live freely. He wanted only controlled outbreaks, remember?”

“Who, Stephen?”

“Plainville’s Patient Zero. Something incredible has happened here, Peter. I need you to keep an open mind.”

Maryk’s concerns about Stephen’s mental health were being realized. “Plainville was more than four years ago,” he said. “Just tell me — what is this place?”

Stephen motioned with a wooden hand for patience. “An open mind,” he said. “I was thinking about the girl in Africa, assuming that she had been infected and also gotten the experimental serum. I was thinking what it must have done to her. She would have been like a walking laboratory, Peter, like lightning in a bottle. I decided that there had to be a secondary transmission, even though we knew there had been no other reported cases in that region. So I started to think. The only other people near the camp, aside from the Pygmies, was the RECI group. I called up a list of their scientists, and on a whim cross-referenced it with the Plainville voting register. It was that simple, Peter. One name came up on both lists. Oren Ridgeway, a botanist out of the University of Michigan. He returned to the states from his RECI tour just two weeks after the firebombing of the camp.”

“Oren Ridgeway?” said Melanie.

They both turned to her. Stephen said, “You knew him?”

She retreated somewhat. “The family,” she said. “He worked summers in my dad’s office. He was a few years older than I was.”

“Fascinating,” said Stephen. He returned to Maryk. “Assume Ridgeway came into direct contact with the African girl. It couldn’t have gone any farther than that in Africa, or else we’d have seen it, seen victims.”

Maryk interrupted. “We backtracked after Plainville. We posted the RECI to see if any of their people had gotten sick. The answer was no.”

“Of course. But something tripped the virus into lying latent, some mutation inside the girl. Ridgeway showed no symptoms, and brought it back here unknowingly. Then a year or so later — on a trip to his parents in his hometown, I assume — it erupted. The virus emerged there in three places simultaneously. In the schools: he may have stopped in for a visit with his old teachers. In the pediatrician’s office.” He looked at Melanie. “A ‘hello’ to your father, perhaps. And the town hall: His mother worked for the town clerk.”

Maryk had been trying to break in. “Plainville does not lie latent,” he said. “No one who contracts it survives two weeks, never mind—”

“That was the PeaMar4. The viral inhibitors from your blood reacted with the virus from the girl; By the time it spread to Ridgeway, a sort of symbiosis had been reached. The virus was softened up, but not killed, and attained something like equilibrium with his body. The impossible was then suddenly possible.”

Maryk said, “How do you know all this?”

“I know it, Peter. I know it. The goal of every active virus is to change the host cell — to transform the host into a copy of the virus. Not to kill, but to coexist; to preserve a viable host so that the virus may survive and endure. And this has always been biologically impossible. Until now.” Stephen looked at him fire-eyed. “You’ve got to open your mind to this, Peter. Under normal conditions, either the immune system battles the virus into submission, or the virus continues unabated and consumes the host. But not here. Here communion has been achieved. Rather than plundering and killing Ridgeway’s immune cells, the mutated virus instead began transforming them, successfully, exponentially, into virus cells — exactly as it is supposed to, only this time, it worked. Plainville is the first successful virus. It is not lying dormant in him; it is active, it is thriving. It is one with him. It has transformed this Oren Ridgeway into a human Plainville vector.”

Maryk resisted this at the same time it started to make sense. “First of all,” he said, “how did you find this place?” He needed to understand it all logically.

“A few months before Plainville, Ridgeway won a MacArthur Foundation grant of $345,000 for his work documenting and preserving expiring species of flora here in the Okefenokee Refuge. He gave away every dime to radical environmental groups for the first two years, then dropped out of sight. An article in a back issue of Audubon led me here. Most of these supplies — the boat, the instruments — are pilfered from his original camp, now abandoned, less than a kilometer away. Something drew me from there to this place. It was almost like I could smell the plants, Peter. Right through my suit. I feel close to him.”

Maryk ignored this. “Then, those plants, inside?”

“He was learning. He was planning his infection, but patiently, over four years’ time. He was methodical. A virus must infect — that is all it knows and all it wants to do. But now the virus has taken human form: It has a brain, it has reasoning capacities and an understanding of the way humans work to fight disease. It has the best of both existences, virus and man. The outbreaks were tests. He was taking human samples, the same way we take viral samples, in order to measure his infective progress. Not indiscriminately, because he knew we would trace that. “I think that Plainville was most likely a mistake. It was his first time, he may not have known what was happening to him yet. But we covered up the subsequent outbreaks, which led finally to Orangeburg. He tried to take me out and the entire BDC with me.”

Maryk kept pace. “So then this same man followed you to Amagansett.”

“Virus, Peter. This virus.” Stephen nodded. “Imagine his shock at opening up my tablet and discovering that there were three Plainville survivors generating sera.”

“And then he set about hunting them down,” Maryk said. It was all unfolding in his mind. “The lightweight shoe print in Lancet’s bathroom. The plants missing from Blossom’s car. The open windows at each location to air out the smell. He was sampling their blood before killing them.”

“In order to test it against his own disease. He had to know just how potent their antibodies were, to see how much of a threat they posed to him. Of course this man-virus would kill them. They were his cure, and therefore had to be eliminated.”

Melanie had stood silently listening through this. Now her voice came like a gasp. “The broken-down motorist.”

Stephen nodded. “That was our Patient Zero. He was driving back from Boston. He had just failed to eliminate the third survivor.”

Maryk remembered the shadow in the cul-de-sac outside the Penny University. He remembered the shoe marks on the rusted rungs and the feeling he had of being watched inside the sewer. Patient Zero had been there that night. Only the sewer sanitation mechanisms killed his virus in the water and prevented its spread.

Stephen was still looking at Melanie. “Your death would guarantee his success,” he said.

He seemed unaware of the impropriety of his statement. He seemed only intrigued. Melanie stepped away from him. “Oh my God.”

Maryk said, “Then where is this ‘Zero’ right now?”

“I don’t know. He is extraordinarily contagious, so any form of mass transportation would lead to a prematurely infectious event. He is saving himself for the end. Therefore, he travels cautiously. He must have his own car.”

Maryk searched the swamp in frustration. He looked at the laboratory and at the twisted Plainville trees. He was trying to get his mind around the reality that there was a man out there driving the streets who was no longer a man but a virus.

He knelt down and unbuckled his bag and pulled out his tablet. “I’m calling in BioCon. We’ll preserve some of these plants for examination, then torch the rest and return to the bureau.”

“Wait,” Stephen said. He used his cane to stand. “His work is still here. Written logs, data disks. I need to remain to analyze them.”

“Stay here? You shouldn’t even be out of B4. The bacteria alone will eat you alive.”

“He was expecting to return. We’ve got his research, Peter. Listen to me. Something is troubling him. He would not have panicked over the LNPs otherwise. He would have touched off a chain of transmission and consumed the entire human race by now if there weren’t something keeping him back, something he is waiting for. The secret may be right inside here.” He moved near Maryk. “I feel close to him, Peter. I can’t explain it, but I think I can make sense of his notes, his work here. We’ll not have a chance like this again.”

Maryk stood. “What do you mean, you feel close to him?”

The tablet toned in Maryk’s hand. He stared at Stephen a long moment before opening it.

“Freeley,” he said.

No window opened on the screen. He adjusted the display in the bright sunlight. The video feed had been disabled at the source’s discretion. The modern task bar indicated that he was connected to a call and listed the sender as a land-line public pay phone from an area code outside Georgia.

The voice that answered him was garbled and fluidy. “Dr. Peter Maryk?”

“Who is this?”

The caller made a rumbling noise that failed to clear his throat. “You have found my laboratory.”

Maryk went suddenly cool in the beating sun.

“I saw you in that alley sewer,” the voice went on.

Melanie’s face was bloodless. Her hands were flat against her chest as she backed away. Her fear checked Maryk’s and reminded him who he was. “Then you know I’ve got Milkmaid.”

The groaning voice said, “Did you find my hiker yet? Or what’s left of him. I fed him some of your guinea pigs’ blood before showing him to my garden. His death was merely enhanced. Your blood solution failed.”

“You are wrong. It has not failed Stephen Pearse.”

“Pearse is dead, I saw to that. You’re covering it up like the rest.”

Stephen was staring at Maryk dead-eyed. Maryk’s mind was reeling. His sense of rational balance and the natural order of the world were being challenged. He needed confirmation. “How did you get out of Orangeburg?”

“The hospital?” Another throaty rumbling. “Double doors, foamed walls. All to protect against microscopic viruses escaping. But if a man-sized virus got into a yellow suit from the supply room? No one would even look at his face. He could walk right out the door.”

“Would you recognize Pearse’s voice?”

Maryk turned the tablet around to Stephen. Stephen was in shock. He spoke hesitantly to the virus that had infected him.

“Ridgeway?”

Maryk turned the tablet back to himself. “Pearse lives,” he said. “He’s right here, standing next to me outside your laboratory. He lives because I’ve got Milkmaid. It’s not enough just to have the blood. It’s the serum treatment. She cures you. Milkmaid is viable and I’ve got her antibodies. Which means I’ve got you — whatever you are.”

“I am the Messenger. What you call ‘Plainville’ is the Message.”

Stephen came forward then. “Tell me,” he said, “how did you contract this? Was it a girl, a teenage girl?”

Silence for a moment. Stephen seemed to hang in the air.

The voice said, “So it was you who sent her to me, Doctor. Perfect.” Stephen’s gaze slipped to the ground. “You don’t sound so healthy, Dr. America. And if you were, you would be right back on TV again.”

Stephen’s gaze only deepened.

Then the voice said, “Hello, Melanie.”

Melanie shivered. She looked at Maryk and shook her head and mouthed a frantic No.

But a hard grin steeled Maryk’s nerves. “She is with me at all times,” he said.

Zero chuckled gurglingly. “Not many public phones these days,” he said. “I’ll be long gone by the time you arrive. Perhaps I could leave you a little something to remember me by.”

Maryk heard the sound of a telephone cord being twisted.

“A man here waiting for the phone. Middle-aged, wearing a beige raincoat. His tablet battery must have run down. He’s not looking in on me right now because he hates sickness. He hates sick people.”

The metallic cord twisted again.

“He is lazy and fat. He’s meat to me, understand that, Maryk? The world is full of meat. You cannot stop the Messenger. You cannot stop the Message. The Message will always get through.”

There was the sound of something rubbing against the receiver. Then a click and the droning dial tone of a broken connection.

Stephen stepped backward. He found the bench against his legs again and slumped down upon it.

Maryk said, “What was that noise at the end?”

Stephen’s face was blank and drawn. “Him licking the receiver.”

Melanie gasped behind them.

Maryk paged Freeley and gave her the telephone number to be traced. He told her to divert BioCon to the caller’s location on a Biohazard 4 and to shut down any airports within a thirty-mile radius. Then he dialed the pay phone number. It was busy and he dialed again and this time it rang through.

A voice answered: “Yeah, hullo?” Winded and annoyed.

“Get out of there,” Maryk said. “Get out of there and get everybody away from this telephone—”

Freeley and the BioCon unit moved in and took over the swamp island and Maryk left Stephen at the lab under their protection. He traveled with Melanie by helicopter to the site of the outbreak.

The public telephone was located in one of a pair of antiquated folding door booths beneath a slowly rotating Waffle House restaurant sign on a highway roadstop in Yulee, Florida. The booths were currently sealed in nylon and the walkway linking the restaurant to the gas station and the public toilets was being foamed. The entire rest area was cordoned off from the highway and bustling with yellow contact suits.

The man on the telephone had hung up from Maryk and made a second call before moving into the Waffle House for a late breakfast or early lunch. Zero’s description was dead-on. BioCon caught up with him before his third cup of coffee. Forty-seven customers and waitstaff to be transported to the federal hospital in Jacksonville.

Zero was described as “slight” and wearing a sullied white windbreaker, loose brown pants, hiking shoes with dried mud on them, dirty latex gloves, and a snug “African pattern style” toque covering the top of his skull but for a few wild strands of silver-gray hair visible in back. He was about five feet five, one hundred to one hundred ten pounds, and wore a white cotton surgical mask.

A light blue Ford Prescience in the parking lot matched the make and Vehicle Identification Number of an automobile that had been parked two blocks away from the Penny University that night in Boston.

Behind the restaurant was an enclosed grass playground of swing sets and trees. Clumps of discolored grass spaced like striding footsteps grew out of the healthy grass in thick looping spirals like a spreading mold. Shrubs lining the swing set were misshapen with overgrowth and already blooming madly. The leaves of a tree branch hanging over the parking lot were alabaster white and shaped uncannily like hands whose fingers had been broken and splayed.

The playground was sick. Zero had fled through there to the residential neighborhood beyond. BioCon was sweeping it but would find nothing. Zero was not looking for more victims. He was looking for a car.

Maryk opened his tablet and brought up the old Audubon photo of Ridgeway. Pictured was a tweedy-looking young man with curly brown hair wearing short pants and a safari shirt. He was posed with one boot on a mossy rock. Both forearms were crossed on his bent knee and he held a wild fern leaf in one hand as he gazed out proprietarily over the swamp.

Maryk felt the stirrings of a cascade. His body was systematically executing its own infected cells in order to rid itself of Zero. Maryk would need an amphetamine dose in order to work through the day.

He returned to the whining helicopter and Melanie. The only way he could guarantee her safety now was to keep her at his side.

“He’s real,” she said as Maryk reached the door. “Isn’t he?”

The threat of a mutant virus gifted with human intellect and cunning posed hazards exceeding Maryk’s worst imaginings. But all he envisioned was its one great advantage. Epidemic control had never been simpler. Zero was like a tumor Maryk could go in and surgically remove. This mission seemed somehow worthy of him.

Contain the spread Eliminate the vector.

With one clean stroke Maryk could conclusively terminate the Plainville plague.