The Blood Artists

The Nosebleed

The helicopter ride back to the swamp passed like a dream, clouds drifting across the midday southern sky like smoke. After a brief stop at the ranger’s station, Melanie and Maryk were back in the launch, nosing along the dead stream toward the island lab.

Melanie was beginning to wonder if she had actually survived Plainville at all. Atlanta and swamps, airports and prisons, Pearse and Maryk, and now Oren Ridgeway, perhaps this was all a fantasy spun out of the loneliness of death.

Nothing pulled on her, neither the past nor the future. No youth, no family; she was entirely without label or claim. She thought of her hometown. Two years after the outbreak, a big developer had settled with Plainville’s property heirs, buying up every square foot of the deserted, haunted town, dirt cheap. Each house was razed and each automobile was junked, as there was no other way to get rid of the chemical smell left by the town’s ablution. Landfill was brought in from up and down the East Coast and sculpted into hillocks and rolling fields. Overpopulation and the graying of the so-called baby boomers of generations past had created a bullish death market. Plainville was currently a town without a school or a post office or a police force. Humped stone markers and white crosses laced the fresh sod grafted over the sculpted hillsides like white stitches sewn over a layer of green skin. Eternity Way, the town’s main north-south route, saw more than twenty funeral processions each day. Melanie’s hometown was a thriving necropolis.

She existed now purely as a vessel to be filled up and emptied and filled again. Four years of prolonged limbo had followed the effacement of her life in Plainville, and now she again found herself trapped in yet another bizarre holding pattern, a limbo between limbos. Long-term nonprogressor — no kidding. The virus would not let her go. They had cured her of the disease, but the sickness kept coming back for her.

“He wants to kill me,” she said. “Doesn’t he? Or infect me somehow.”

Maryk nodded, in front of her. “That sounds about right.”

“Life-saving blood,” she said. “Don’t forget. I’m to be protected, no matter the cost.”

“I won’t forget.”

They passed the first Plainville plants again. BioCon agents in yellow suits were uprooting them and hacking them into manageable pieces.

“Oren Ridgeway took me to my senior prom,” Melanie said.

Maryk turned. He looked at her.

“Believe me,” she said, “it wasn’t my idea. I tore up all the photographs in long, thin strips, one of the last things I did before going to college. I was leaving the ‘old me’ behind. It didn’t work.”

He waited for her. She had expected a barrage of questions, but she realized that hers was just one of many shocks he had received that day.

“My parents arranged it,” she said. “He was four years older than I was, and just back from his college graduation. The town outcast type, but a total loser. Oren was a crusader, an environmental nut. My dad took pity on him — my dad liked people with ideals. I had no boyfriends, I was just a fat pudge. And my mother was so excited...” The memory intensified, and she had to shake it off. “He made the corsage himself From his own garden. It looked like a bright pink cabbage on my flabby chest. We danced one dance together. One. He danced like a freak and spent the rest of the night boring his old teachers, the chaperones, while I sat alone at the table feigning interest in my napkin.”

She didn’t tell him about the goodnight kiss at her door: her turning away at the last possible moment, and Oren’s chapped lips — he had an ugly habit of gnawing on them — just glancing the edge of her cheek.

She shuddered. “Oren didn’t like people,” she went on. “He said people were ruining the earth. He said we had been given this great gift, and we were just stomping all over it.” She felt a lopsided smile spread across her face, like maple syrup over a pancake. “I was thinking, maybe, this could remain just between us.”

The island came into view up ahead, and they landed and Dr. Freeley led them along a winding pathway of torch stakes bunting black smoke. Maryk said nothing. They passed one of the gnarled Plainville trees, and Melanie felt like she was walking through one of her own freakish paintings.

Dr. Freeley said, “This ‘Zero’ worked quickly. We just got a stolen car report from Yulee. A white Dodge Auriga, stolen out of somebody’s driveway three streets back from the rest stop. An older model, zero-four. No Automap function or Global Positioning Receiver, and no theft retrieval — nothing traceable. The car is old enough to run under the current technological radar. I got in touch with the state police. They wouldn’t do roadblocks — said they couldn’t risk exposure to their men — but they’re setting up checkpoints, remote cameras to record cars and plates. It’s visible enough. It should at least keep him off the main routes, and pin him to this corner of the country. I put an Infectious Contaminant Bulletin out to every police organization in the southeast. They know what to do if they find the car.”

“Which is — get away, and call us.”

They came to the rear of the black canvas laboratory. Three BioCon agents were kneeling around something half-buried in the swamp floor. “We just found him,” Dr. Freeley said. Melanie made out a torso and part of a head, blistered and blackened with decay. “The missing hiker. Looks like Zero was feeding on him.”

Melanie shook her head. She swooned with the heat and the monstrousness of Zero and backed out to the path lined with burning torches. Suddenly the swamp didn’t seem large enough. The state of Georgia and the entire world didn’t seem large enough. But as much as she hated to admit it, she did feel safe with Maryk; that is, safe from everything except Maryk himself.

He came back out alone and they went to the front of the laboratory. BioCon had cut open the front length of the canvas so that the tents were open to the island. The wooden tables, littered with Plainville remains, resembled a gypsy marketplace cluttered with horribly spoiled produce. Melanie saw a jar containing what must have been the hiker’s left hand, and a wire-bound notebook propped open with Plainville flowers pressed into its pages, malformed petals and leaves that were hideous and yet, at the same time, madly beautiful.

Dr. Pearse tottered around the crude, plant-strewn tables, mumbling excitedly to himself. His gaunt face was glossy with perspiration from the heat, his eyes blinking strangely and fast. He looked even weaker under the hot sun. He teetered around the tables, and beckoned to them with a stiff hand as they approached.

“He’s learning,” he said proudly. “He was learning about himself, his own virus. He wants to know everything. He was curing out his virus through these infected plants, like Stanley with tobacco leaves, purifying it, crystallizing it, and refeeding it to the rats. He was nurturing his disease, crossbreeding it, over and over, hoping to trip a mutation: a strain that would not infect so thoroughly and so abruptly. Zero was trying to extend his latency period.” He limped to another table without his cane, where he had evidently filleted a Plainville plant stalk into hundreds of garish slices. “But of course — what virus wouldn’t, if it could? The longer a host remains viable, the longer it can spread the infection. He wants to become invincible.”

Maryk glanced back at Melanie as Dr. Pearse prattled on.

“He never found one, Peter. In fact, his latency period is growing shorter. This is because the virus is extraordinarily volatile. It is changing more rapidly now than ever before. Wholesale shifts since the prison outbreak. Incredible.”

“Stephen,” Maryk said. “You are talking a mile a minute.”

“It’s all here, Peter, all the answers.” His gnarled hand rested on the pile of notebooks in the manner of a schoolboy taking an oath. “I know what he’s waiting for now. His virus is changing all the time, becoming more refined. It’s all that uranium it was exposed to in the cave, for centuries. Zero’s virus is breaking down to the point where it will no longer infect vegetation and lower animals. Do you understand? Zero will sicken only Homo sapiens.” Dr. Pearse patted the notebooks in wonder. “It’s all happening within him — of him. He’s not there yet, but he’s getting closer, and he knows it. He knows it.”

Maryk nodded but showed him no enthusiasm. “Rest a moment, Stephen,” he said. “You’re exhausted.”

“I came here to kill him, Peter. I admit that. But now I see that we have to understand him first. We have to learn from him. Zero has something to teach us.”

Maryk looked stem. “You say you know things about Zero, Stephen. How?”

Dr. Pearse thought about it. “I’m not sure. I just do.”

“What, then? I need some idea of what I’m up against. Tell me what you know.”

Dr. Pearse held Maryk’s gaze, then accepted his challenge. “A man infected by a deadly virus that has not killed him, but instead combined with him, at some elemental level. A biological model of a man-virus.”

Maryk stared. “That’s right.”

“Viruses like tight, dark places. Sunlight is a virus killer. Given the evolutionary transformation that has taken place, he must prefer night to day. Direct exposure to sunlight should weaken him. Not mortally — this is not Dracula — but ultraviolet light exposure from the sun should have the effect of wearing him down.”

Maryk moved closer, intrigued. “Go on.”

“His thinking process is impaired. The body is resilient, as we know. The body battles for stability, always. The body adjusts to change. But the brain, the brain goes further than that: The brain compensates, sometimes to the point of overcompensation. It is an elastic organ, regenerating damaged tissue, even redrawing neural pathways with minimal impairment, perpetually searching for solutions to the millisecond-by-millisecond problems it is given. We know that Plainville targets the brain. Therefore Zero has, at the very least, suffered a series of shocks or minor strokes. There is physiological damage to the brain, unique psychological damage, and whatever resulting chemical imbalances, all combined with the rudiments of infection. As his higher functions began to fail, the brain’s only alternative for survival would be to simply switch them off. After so many years — I would say he exists in a state where dreaming and waking have become one and the same.”

“A functional dream state,” Maryk said, less encouragingly than provokingly.

“Yes,” Dr. Pearse nodded. He ran on. “As his brain continues to compensate for what it lacks, more primal emotions are tapped, and the mind reverts to the primitive. Survival beyond death means, for man, reproduction: offspring, parent to child. Fertilization and cell division forming another living host where the progenitor’s DNA can thrive. Of course, infection is essentially the same process. Zero is operating on this primal level now. His damaged brain has no choice but to embrace the creature its host has become. Only propagation can ensure survival at the genetic, viral level. This means widespread infection. That is his ultimate goal.”

It was as though Dr. Pearse was almost channeling Zero. He wilted in the heat, but still pressed on. Maryk said, “What about personality?”

“The character of a virus endowed with human traits? Easy. We’re talking about a being uninhibited by any obligations, social or moral. Combine the worst elements of a serial murderer, a rapist, an impulsive arsonist. Hyper-aggressive, hyper-sexual, homicidal, egocentric, pathological. An unqualified sociopath. The ultimate deviant terrorist mentality. All Zero wants to do is infect, infect, infect.”

Maryk moved one more step closer, now facing Dr. Pearse across a wooden table. “One more thing,” he said. “We’ve said that people who contract the virus do one of two things — they either die quickly, or we get to them early with the serum and they survive.”

Dr. Pearse nodded. “Except for Zero. He remained alive, and the virus was given time to integrate itself with his person.”

Maryk nodded slowly. “So this could, theoretically, happen to anyone who contracted the disease, and was kept alive through extraordinary means.”

Dr. Pearse considered it and was about to give his answer when his grin fell. He came to stare at Maryk as Maryk went on.

“How do you know so much about him? How did you find his lab here in the middle of four hundred thousand acres of swamp? You say you could feel him.”

Dr. Pearse said nothing. He continued to stare.

“Stephen, how is it you are so obviously sick, and yet have remained so strong?”

Melanie understood now. She watched the sunlight beat down on Dr. Pearse, and he noticed that he was weaker in it.

Dr. Pearse had nothing to say.

“We’re leaving here right now,” Maryk said. “I want to get another took at you back at the bureau.”

Dr. Pearse’s face changed, and he looked at Maryk as though Maryk were crazy. “There’s too much to do here, Peter. Too much to learn. I’m so—”

“Close to him,” Maryk said. “How close are you, Stephen?”

Dr. Pearse was jittery now. This was the first time Melanie had ever seen him angered. Sweat glistened on the livid sores mottling his face and neck. He looked back and forth at the two of them, and then at the BioCon agents behind.

“I’m staying,” he said. He pointed weakly at the table that separated him and Maryk. “I’m staying right here and working.”

Something happened then, and Maryk started to back away from Dr. Pearse. “Stephen,” he said. He held a gloved hand out in front of him. “Stephen. Listen to me.” Melanie did not see it until just then. “Don’t move.”

A spot of dark red had appeared under Dr. Pearse’s nostril. He grew agitated under their staring, like a cornered animal. “You all just stay away from me,” he said.

“Stephen.” Maryk stopped and held his ground. “Your nose is bleeding.”

Dr. Pearse looked at them strangely. He reached up to his face and examined his stiff fingertips. The blood was coming down onto his blistered top lip now. He looked at it on his fingers as though he did not understand.

“Just don’t move,” Maryk said.

Dr. Pearse looked up, confused, his hand still open in front of him. Then he started slowly around the table, as though to explain. Maryk took another step backward, and Melanie found herself doing the same. “Stephen,” Maryk said sharply.

The blood was coming faster now, a dark, heavy red, running out of both nostrils and down over his lips. Melanie sensed movement all around her, the suited BioCon agents, assembling.

Dr. Pearse appeared disoriented suddenly. “You don’t understand, I—”

He came another step forward, but this time Maryk did not give any ground. Maryk stood ready to meet him. Melanie saw the black bag in his right hand.

Melanie said suddenly, “Stephen. Please.”

Maybe it was her use of his first name, or just the softer voice. Whatever it was, he blinked and saw her there as though for the first time, and then looked at the suited BioCon agents around him. He seemed to understand what was going on then. He was leaking biohazardous material, and was a threat to those around him. Dr. Pearse looked down at his own arms and legs as though they were disappearing. Blood flowed thickly down to his gaunt chin.

Stephen Pearse lay sedated in a plastic isolation pod as Maryk wheeled him inside the Level 4 Biocontainment Hospital Unit back at the BDC. The “Tank,” as Maryk referred to it, was not a laboratory but a secure medical suite constructed for the observation and treatment of accidental “hot agent” exposures. It occupied one half of the top floor of Building Nine.

Twin steel pressure doors led inside, with the usual ultraviolet chamber in between. Melanie waited outside. There was a small viewing window on the side wall, and she peeked in once. She saw Maryk lifting Stephen Pearse in his arms and onto a table that looked like a tanning bed, sealing him inside under a clear plastic shell. Maryk appeared to be weakening himself. She realized a cascade was long overdue.

At a table behind her, a BioCon agent operated the steel doors via tablet. Maryk emerged and Melanie went to meet him, but he walked past her without a word. She followed him out to the catwalk leading to the next building, and watched him cross it under barking thunder and lashing rain. He did not look back. She did not follow.

She wasn’t alone long. Dutiful Pasco arrived minutes later to chauffeur her back to her room. The storm was quite violent but barely touched her consciousness. She crawled into bed and slept soundly through its fury. She dreamed that she was visiting her parents’ cemetery plot in the necropolis that was her hometown, laying Plainville flowers at a headstone bearing her name.

Gala Island

Melanie showered and changed the next morning, and Pasco returned her to the BDC and the roof of Building Seven where a BDC helicopter was waiting. She climbed inside next to Maryk, and the helicopter lifted off, climbing away over the building blocks of the BDC and the Emory campus. Only when they were well above everything like treetops and radio antennas did she relax. The roofs and playing fields of rural Georgia slid under them, and the world appeared so orderly from above.

“I give up,” she said. “Where are we going?”

“Gala Island,” he said. “I have an appointment there.”

All she knew about Gala Island was that it was an animal reserve the BDC maintained somewhere off the Georgia coast. It was a habitat for thousands of different animal species.

“Where animals are raised for laboratory experiments?” she said. “No thank you.”

“Popular misconception. Their natural environments are rigorously maintained. Ninety-nine percent of the time, all we need are the living cells.” He spoke distractedly, preoccupied, and she assumed the reason was Dr. Pearse. “However, this is one of those one percent times.”

She turned her attention to the board game of earth sliding beneath her, and at once they flew off the coast of Georgia, over the blue and white Atlantic, still turgid from the storm. She watched for the island, and it breached beneath them like an emerald green whale, spouting trees and short hills, cut smooth with plains, spotted with white roofs of civilization. They curled around its sandy southern coast, and the helicopter set down at the end of a short airfield.

The island glistened after the overnight storm. The calm order of its trees and brush was like Disney compared to the Dall of the Plainville swamp. They got into a waiting Jeep and Maryk drove them along a rising dirt path into dense tree cover, passing a sign that read AVIARY. She began to see birds looping overhead. Like stars appearing after nightfall, the longer she looked, the more appeared: flitting around the high trees, dipping and Rapping high overhead, sleeping with tucked bills on lower branches along the roadside.

She asked Maryk to pull over just for a minute, and he did. She left him in the Jeep and walked into a wide clearing. Birds flew above her and called to one another and cried. She possessed a bird-watcher’s knowledge of the groupings and could tell that many species were not indigenous to the Americas. There were basic sea birds, closer to the coastline, such as cormorants, divers, swans, and grebes. Long-necked herons and cranes. Then the game birds — pigeons, turtledoves, and various taloned birds of prey. Long-legged waders. Small terns, auks. Sharp-beaked gulls laughing and screaming overhead. And the tree birds: swallows and larks and wagtails and woodpeckers. All zipping here and there, or hopping busily along the dirt paths with twigs in their beaks. Twin pipits raced across the road before her. Thrushes and warblers. Flycatchers. Shrikes and swifts. Hummingbirds and tiny, mouselike wrens. Crows and starlings and orioles and sparrows and finches.

She could not help but smile. The beauty of the place was thrilling and strange, the winged life thriving all around her. Growing up in Plainville, she had kept three different seed houses in the trees surrounding her home, two she had made out of milk cartons, and one store-bought wooden perch, a birthday present from her grandmother, which had hung by wire from a tree branch outside her bedroom window, and to whose greedy patrons she had awakened every Plainville morning.

There was a small outpost but she did not see any people. The cottagelike building was set on the bank of a pristine reservoir that must have been man-made, and she was reminded that birds were reservoirs for Plainville, susceptible to the virus and able to transmit it, but themselves immune to the disease. She wondered how many tests had been run on these birds, how many different ways the humans had tried to trick them into giving up their secrets.

She felt safe there, away from Zero and Atlanta, and left reluctantly, the fugitive cries fading as they drove on.

The monkey house was dead center on the island. They went down to the isolation level and were met there by a primate warden in jeans and scrub shirt who led them to a small, square viewing window. “I’m not at all comfortable with having this virus here on Gala,” he told Maryk. “One slip up and the entire island, a decade of work — wiped clean.”

Maryk stared through the bright window. Melanie had no intention of looking herself, but there was something in the warden’s voice when he said, “This is medieval,” Something about the man’s fear compelled her to join Maryk at the window.

They were looking into a small, brightly lit observation room. The floor was streaked with blood and shed hair, and a single female chimpanzee lay slumped in the corner. Her nippled chest was huffing and her red eyes were violent and fevered, regarding Melanie with what could only be described as homicidal intent. Her facial features below were faded into a meek Plainville grin. The dying chimp appeared quite human.

Maryk turned from the window and started away. “Destroy it,” he said to the warden.

Melanie caught up with him outside. Maryk was staring at the swishing island trees from the monkey house porch. “It’s a simulation of the circumstances of Stephen’s infection and treatment,” he said, “but without the work I did to protect his brain. I initiated it a few days ago. I had to see if the Zero paradigm would repeat.”

Melanie remembered the chimp’s eyes, and knew that it had.

“The virus is breaking down too fast,” he said. “The chimp is sustaining the infection but not the genetic mutations. I’ve seen the tests: Over seventy percent of its cells have been converted into viruses. I compared these with tests of Stephen’s blood, and it’s the same. He’s up over ninety percent already. If the virus doesn’t kill Stephen first, it could convert him, and turn him into another Zero.”

Melanie stared at him as he watched the trees. “But it didn’t change me,” she said.

“The virus was purged from your body early on. It was your recovery from the disease that took so long.”

He was quiet the rest of the way back to Atlanta. Melanie had little memory of the trip herself, consumed as she was by the contrasting images of the sacrificial chimp suffering in the small, bright room on that elysian island, and Dr. Pearse sitting and awaiting his end in the hospital unit Tank at the BDC.

Corruption

Plainville was enjoying its rout. My eviscerated immune system was lashing out blindly at the virus, turning on healthy tissue and vital organs in a manic final attempt to survive. I was defenseless against myself, and this was Plainville’s greatest perversion.

The cells that made up my person were expiring in wave after wave of microscopic corporal genocide. Whereas a fit body replenishes itself, cells dividing and reproducing beneficially, my cells were being exploited to breed lethal viral clones. I was a human hive of frenzied bees. My body was being debauched.

When I allowed myself to daydream it was simply this: a hot shower and a long, careful shave, bathed in the warm scent and intimacy of my own bathroom in my own home.

The work in B4 had kept me going. It had disciplined my mind. Now all my time was devoted to rumination. My focus had turned inward.

I opened the glass shell of the hyperbaric chamber that was my bed. The berth saturated my blood with collagen-stimulating oxygen that slowed the meltdown of connective tissue characteristic of Plainville. I sat up, and swung my thin legs over the side.

As director, I had overseen the construction of the Level 4 Biocontainment Tank. I knew, for example, that the steel doors could be operated only from the outside. There was no way out other than complete recovery or death. I looked at the eastern wall, a ten- by thirty-foot video monitor, remembering that we had done a study showing that pastoral scenes were most soothing for patients confined in prolonged clinical isolation. I watched geese flapping across a bleeding orange sunset over a salt marsh of waving spartina.

Floaters in my eyes gave me aquarium vision, hairlike beings and crystalline forms swimming across my view. I imagined they were viruses wriggling and writhing before me.

I was hyper-attuned now to every creak and flutter of my failing body. I could feel the blood slowing and gelling in my veins, the very platelets rupturing. My heart beat lugubriously against newly calcified ribs, and I had developed an odd arrhythmia: Once every fifteen minutes or so, my heart struck a double beat, like a bass player’s finger slipping off a string. The silence that followed would freeze me, a chill fanning out from my spine like a peacock preening mortality, until the stillness of the suspended beat passed and life turned over again within the sordid chamber of my corrupted chest.

I wiped at and probed the sunken ridges around my eyes, the newfound angularity of my cheeks. After thirty seven years: a different face, a lesser face, in place of my own. I was wearing someone else’s eyes, lips, jaw. I looked at my hands, front and back. A stranger’s hands, an older man’s, fingers curling to my command, but reluctantly. Arthritis had commenced its rout. Billions of excess antibody proteins bred by my flailing immune system — that my body had no natural way of expelling — were caking on every joint. I was biologically rusting.

The inside door opened, and Peter entered carrying his black bag. Seeing him again made me feel contrite, and I am certain I avoided his eyes at first. There was no medical reason for him to visit me. He had come only to look at me and see how much I’d changed.

“Anything on Zero yet?” I said.

Maryk shook his head. “We’re on him. Still waiting.”

“He’s planning something,” I said.

Peter looked at me anew. My insights made us both uncomfortable. “What is he planning?” Peter said.

I shook my head, and eventually looked down at the white floor. “But he’s changing, Peter. The genetic core of his virus. You need to protect Melanie.”

“I’m testing her blood all the time.”

“Zero’s virus is breaking down. She could become susceptible.”

“She’s with me all the time. Bobby Chiles has organized a Plainville conference for tonight, to counter some of the public hysteria. She’ll go with me.”

I looked over at the geese flapping across the orange twilight.

“You know what’s happening to me,” I said.

Peter stared at me a long moment. “I do.”

“Kill me. If I start to turn. Promise me, Peter. You won’t let me become like him.”

As I finished these words, I froze, my addled heart striking a pronounced double beat, then stopping, resting quiet and still, a hunk of fatty meat suspended in my chest. A morose chill embraced me, but the beating resumed moments later, and trembling, I exhaled the foul contents of my eroding lungs.

I opened my eyes. Peter remained standing before me with his black bag in his hand.

The Conference

Maryk had to remind himself as he sat there that evening inside the Georgia World Congress Center that there was nothing more he could be doing at present to hunt Zero. The description of the stolen car was out to every police organization in the southeast with a description of the subject wanted on a “Plainville quarantine violation.” It was inconceivable that a busted taillight and an alert patrolman were all it might take to end the Plainville scourge. He had agents in the lobby ready to take him to any outbreak on a moment’s notice.

The Congress on Plainville convened at five o’clock that afternoon. An emerging disease prompted as much hoopla as it did concern within the world medical community and the scant information the BDC had about the virus and its resultant disease was being disseminated at seminars and public awareness workshops throughout the convention center. It was all a thinly veiled publicity event aimed at renewing public confidence in the disease-fighting talents of the BDC. But the cooperation of the public was essential to successful disease control and that was why Maryk agreed to appear.

He had declined a seat on the long curtained dais and instead commandeered a front row table against the far wall of the second-floor conference room. He and Melanie sat there alone. Fifty round tables behind him sat five hundred members of the world medical community listening to speeches and awaiting a free dinner.

Maryk focused on the stage. Dr. Alex Solbin supported himself against the podium with both forearms as he read from his tablet. Solbin was deputy director for HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis and next in line behind Bobby Chiles for Stephen’s job. His cane stood against his empty chair next to the podium and his face mask hung untied off his shirt collar. Many of those in attendance wore masks and gloves for sanitary reasons but Alex Solbin was in his fourth year of managed clinical AIDS. It was therefore imperative that he protect his HIV-compromised immune system. His visage as projected upon the large screen behind him was thin but hale. A face-filling beard accentuated the features of his Soviet ancestry.

Solbin outlined the goals of the conference in the opening portion of his remarks. Invoking Maryk’s name sent an explicit ripple of disapproval throughout the room. Maryk smiled in the dark. It was easy for the international medical establishment to dismiss one who had never sought their fellowship. Maryk had thought himself peerless ever since his split with Stephen.

He turned toward the doctors and medical scientists sitting reverently before glowing tablets. They were gathered to demonize Plainville at the same time they worshipped the majesty of this preternatural force that reduced healthy human beings to dust. The modern practice of health care had become like a religion. The attendees listened raptly to Solbin’s creed and dreamed of a miracle Plainville cure that would deliver them to everlasting glory. Stephen Pearse was their messiah but he had stumbled and fallen from grace. Maryk wondered what the knowledge of Zero’s existence would do to their piddling faith.

Faith was a commodity now. Faith could be bought and sold. Devotion was something paid to fan clubs, political parties, corporate affiliations, home teams. The cartel of religion had been broken up only recently by the heterodoxy of a man named Darwin. My heart and soul care for worms and nothing else in the world just at present. This from a man who had once studied for the clergy. And like dominoes the myths of creation fell. The next day faith began trading on the open market.

Science was the defining knowledge of the time. Science had disproved religion and therefore had become religion. Its temples were third-floor laboratories in faceless glass buildings in industrial parks. Solutions to the mysteries of creation were being discovered under a microscope and not in books or upon an altar. Science had stroked the face of God and not perished. Now it was asking for a sample of His blood.

Maryk recalled the small church on a hill that his parents had taken him to as a boy and the hours spent playing on the wooden floor of the rectory while his mother answered telephones that rang and rang.

All the ancient beliefs had been debunked. But Plainville had ripped away the twenty-first century’s veil of human sovereignly and now the questions were once again beginning to outpace the answers. The world that had consumed its creator suddenly found itself revolving frightened and alone.

Maryk surfaced as though from a trance. He looked up and saw servers coming around with salads. Solbin was already well into his speech. Maryk tried to retrace his thoughts but the thread disappeared.

He shut his eyes a moment. His lids were heavy like theater curtains. It took some effort to raise them again. He looked at Melanie and the room drifted in his vision. She was two seats away from him.

He could not reach her from where he sat. He pushed back his chair and reached for his bag. He placed his other hand on the table. He stood unsteadily.

Melanie sat back as a green-gloved waiter slid a small salad down in front of her. She sensed Maryk rising near her as she reached for her knife and fork, but ignored him until his hand gripped the back of her chair. His other hand swept her salad plate to the center of the table with a clatter. “Hey,” she said.

He was leaning over her. Maryk had no scent, she noticed, no after-shave or hair spray or food smell, not even sweat. If he wasn’t near bleach or some other chemical cleanser, he was entirely odorless.

“He’s here,” Maryk said.

Melanie did not understand at first. Then she looked out with a start at the hundreds of people seated in the room. At least half of them wore gloves and masks, as did the servers moving table to table.

“How do you—?”

She saw the languor in Maryk’s gray eyes and understood. He was cascading. It was a bad one, and at once she became crazy with fear. Zero was in the room with them. She tried to stand but Maryk was in her way.

“Got to kill him,” he said heavily.

She was struggling with her chair. “Get everybody out. Yell fire!”

She was frantic. Maryk let go of her chair but she couldn’t get out. His foot was still in the way. He opened his bag clumsily and dropped his tablet onto the table, opening it, sluggishly working the keys. His message read ZERO HERE. BLOCK EXITS.

He sent the message to his agents downstairs and collapsed the screen, straightening, wavering as he scanned the crowd.

“Do something,” she told him, trying to get out.

Maryk licked his lips. “We’ll screen them at the door,” he said. “Trap him. You wait here.”

“No way,” she said. But as he moved off toward the dais, she looked across the large room and saw how many tables she would have to pass, alone, to reach the side exits, and decided to remain where she was. Zero could be anywhere. Melanie was a statue of a young woman gripping the sides of her chair. She scanned the audience and watched for anyone moving or watching her. As she did, an uncomfortable silence crept over the room.

Maryk was walking stiffly behind the chairs along the dais to the center podium. The speaker sensed the ripple in the audience’s attention, then turned and saw Maryk and awkwardly announced him. Silence fell over the vast room as Maryk stepped to the podium.

He must have struck it with his knee, because the microphone went thud and the noise reverberated wall to wall. Maryk stood there a moment staring, his hair shining platinum in the large image of his face projected behind him.

“Sorry to break this up,” he said archly. A thin, inappropriate smile appeared. “But we’ll need to cut this short now, due to...”

His voice trailed off. Melanie followed his gaze to the rear of the long room. In the shadows in back, a figure stepped back from one of the tables and began moving away.

It was a man. He was a slow-moving man wearing an oversized waiter’s uniform and a standard food server’s face mask. He was small and gaunt and gaining speed as he moved across the rear of the room to the side. He moved like. a man and yet not like a man, striding purposefully, abnormally, and Melanie felt a scream rising in her throat.

A glass pitcher of water shattered behind her. People gasped as Maryk scrambled over the dais onto the floor and rushed toward her, wide-eyed.

She stood out of her chair to get away but Maryk grabbed her arm. “No,” she said, pulling back, but he had his bag in the other hand and was already propelling her through the room. Somebody screamed. Doctors and scientists leapt out of their chairs, and a table toppled over as people rushed to get out of their way. Somehow she stayed on her feet as they moved.

An alarm pierced the air. They reached the rear of the long room just in time to see, around a sashed curtain, a fire door closing.

Maryk pushed her into the alarm bar of the door. It opened and they were inside a white stairwell and stumbling down white concrete steps. Maryk was half leaning on her for support, his full weight pulling down on her shoulder, and she was buckling underneath him. They tripped like that down half a flight of stairs.

She looked fleetingly over the railing down into the vertical shaft. She saw a hand wearing a dirty latex glove sliding along the railing below.

Zero was right below them. He was getting away. She stopped resisting Maryk then, realizing that if he stopped Zero there, it would all be over. The virus would be stopped, and she would be normal and free again.

“Come on!” she yelled over the keening alarm, thrusting her thin arm around Maryk’s broad back to push him, and they clambered down the stairs along the railing. She looked into the well again but did not see the hand; then they turned onto the last flight, stumbling down two and three steps at a time.

Maryk elbowed through the door at the bottom. It was a short, empty corridor and they rushed along it, turning right as the alarm faded behind. He stumbled through the door at the end, and they were inside a kitchen.

A large dishwasher chugged steam. She followed Maryk past racks of clean dishes, and saw him breaking open his bag. A syringe appeared in his gloved right hand.

They turned past wire shelves stocked with industrial sized cans of tomato paste and wide-mouth jars of pickles and fruit salad. A figure had turned a corner at the left end of the room in front of them. They ran around food carts to follow, reaching the corner, surprising him as he came back. Maryk surged forward suddenly with the syringe raised knifelike in his hand, but it was only a busboy, a Hispanic kid holding a wet rag, and he saw Maryk and whatever homicidal look was on Maryk’s face and flailed backward, knocking a rack of dirty pots to the floor.

Maryk’s hand came straight back down to his side. He turned and scanned the room with tired eyes, his great chest heaving, then Melanie pointed to the most likely passage leading away. He started lumberingly ahead of her and across the long, steamy room.

They emptied into the smoke of a food preparation area, running along a central counter of cooked meals set under heat lamps. The chefs all wore similar green food service gloves and face shields and head coverings.

“Which way did he go?” Maryk said breathlessly.

Most shrugged, watching them run past. One pointed the way.

Melanie followed Maryk around an ice machine and then left into a short supply corridor. The door at the end was half open to the outside and Maryk lunged at it.

The cool night air cut her. They raced searching along the outer wall of the convention center. Every door Maryk tried was locked, and there was no one else in sight.

He loped along the high wall of the building to the front sidewalk, scanning the bright, empty sidewalk and street. Melanie recognized Pasco at the conference center exit, to their right. He showed Maryk an exaggerated, frantic shrug.

“Seal the building,” Maryk gasped to him. “Shut down the city within a four-block radius.”

Melanie stepped back and leaned one hand against the building. Her chest was bursting. She took a hit off her inhaler and felt her lungs expand.

Fire engines wailed in the distance. She went around in front of Maryk. His hands were on his knees and his head was down, and he was heaving great, gusting breaths. “You might want to put that away now,” she said. The loaded syringe was still in his right hand.

The firemen were all kept out of the building. The four-block dragnet was slow to set up, and they failed to find Zero. BioCon arrived at the convention center and placed the entire complex under quarantine.

Zero had served salads to the rearmost four tables. He was described as quiet but attentive, remarkable only for the strong scent of his after-shave, obviously covering up his smell. His tables were among the first to show symptoms: flulike cramps, severe headaches, high fevers. It was like radiation poisoning, in that those closest to Zero got his sickness first.

Maryk had slipped into a side lounge after they returned inside, and from the hallway Melanie watched him inject himself with something from his black bag, which had the effect of immediately reviving his flagging energy. He then saw to the administration of her blood serum, first to those seated at Zero’s tables, and then methodically to the rest of the quarantines.

There were some awful scenes. In the quarantine rooms Melanie watched as the first medical people began to weaken and their colleagues cleared silently away. She saw the look of astonishment on the faces of the sick as they were led off. Others denied the illness rising within them, insisting that their colleagues, who had ratted them out to the BioCon agents, were mistaken. A few collapsed suddenly, to gasps and screams, and the people were soon segregated into many smaller rooms in a bid to slow the transmission of both the virus and the panic.

The fear in the eyes of the waiting was potent. They watched her suspiciously as she passed in and out of the rooms unsuited, and a few begged her to tell them what was happening, even as they knew. Their anxiety became too much for her, and soon she left and found a private space in the outer hallway, where she cried tears that would not fall. She felt as though her eyes, her brain, her entire person were being pickled in sorrow.

She fought back her emotion, and from then on she restricted herself to the isolation rooms where the sick were being attended to. She began by giving blood until she was dizzy. It took so much to derive so little serum, and she saw that there was barely enough of her to go around the World Congress building, never mind the entire world. She started going gurney to gurney, sitting with each sickened person a few moments, talking if they talked, nodding if they cried, or taking their hand if they just stared. She assisted the slow-moving agents in yellow suits as she could, changing IV bags and taking blood pressure readings.

She was doing that when Maryk came to get her. He looked haunted in the doorway, showing none of the confidence he had shown at Lewes Penitentiary. His shoulders sagged and the black bag seemed heavy in his big hand.

They underwent an ultraviolet wand scan before leaving, to kill any surface Plainville. She wished to feel the viruses dying on her skin, falling away like beach sand in the shower. She was tired of the constant cleansing, the empty renewal of dressing and undressing, and the inhumanity of her latex hands. In the car before they left, Maryk PCR-tested her blood. Her forearms were tender and so badly bruised from blood giving that he had to pull an excruciatingly slow cc from between the third and fourth fingers of her left hand. She sat looking up at the darkened convention complex until the tablet declared her clean.

They rolled through the desolate night streets of downtown Atlanta, passing through a depressed area of the city, tired cars parked along the curbs like toys arranged by a careless child. The apartment buildings were sooty and looming, with tenement-tiny windows of the type infants tumble out of on the hottest days of summer. Even the streetlights looked shiftless, bored. Maryk took two or three more turns that didn’t feel right to her. “Where are we going?” she said.

His voice was exhausted, though his eyes remained bright. “I need to stop for fresh clothes.”

She wondered what stores would be open that late at night. Then she realized he meant his home. For some reason the prospect of visiting Maryk’s residence shocked her; she could not picture him in any habitat other than that of the BDC.

He parked outside a security-grated baby apparel store and they entered a numbered door riddled with graffiti, stepping over a splash of accumulated mail to a long, narrow flight of stairs. They walked the length of the doorless hall to a second flight, and then a third. At the top of the fourth flight they came to a clean white door, and Maryk produced a key.

He stopped before inserting it in the lock. He knelt and silently examined the white plate around the doorknob. There was a bit of brown dirt, maybe food, smudged on the metal plate. Maryk picked it off, looking at it on the tip of his gloved finger before flicking it away. The knob turned keylessly under his hand.

The door opened on an apartment dark with night. It was spacious like an artist’s loft, with high ceilings, few furnishings and walls, and large factory windows. Then the smell of decay hit her immediately, and the curious part of her mind shut down.

Maryk moved through the loft with evident alarm. Melanie could sense something on the wall behind her, even before Maryk switched on the high, track lamps, and she turned.

It was a long word smeared in mud and food over the wide wall. It read, drippingly, MESSENGER.

Two steel picture frames hung on the desecrated wall. Each contained a canvas that was now slashed to shreds. What she could make of the tattered images was dark and visceral, yet familiar. She saw three more canvases hanging on another wall, and one standing on a display easel in a corner. All were in ribbons.

The paintings were her own. They were the ones Maryk had purchased anonymously. He had not junked them, as she had assumed. He had designed his living space around them.

She walked to the one set on the easel. A steak knife was jammed dead center through the frame, and something hung from a wide, blue ribbon on its handle. It was a medallion, like a large gold penny, smeared with what looked like shit. She realized it was Maryk’s Nobel.

A breeze swept through the loft and turned her head. She walked toward it, into the kitchen at the rear. Glass and dirt lay on the floor beneath a broken window, and Maryk stood outside on a long fire escape, over an elaborate vegetable garden laid out on the grate, overlooking the city. The clear plastic bubble covering the garden had been kicked in, the muddied soil torn up and the plants trampled, almost as though the dirt had been danced upon. The few vegetables that remained were budding into Plainville atrocities.

“He pissed on it,” Maryk said.

She wondered how he knew this as he climbed over the broken glass back inside. “My paintings,” Melanie said.

But he said nothing, moving past her and looking at his destroyed kitchen with a dazed expression. He reappraised his infected loft from where he stood, hands empty at his sides. A virus had broken into his home and contaminated everything he owned. He looked at her across the kitchen as though she were a stranger.

Whatever he had injected himself with was wearing off, the cascade now enveloping him like a gas. He had trouble locking the white door behind them as they left, and he slumped against the railing on the stairs, depending on her shoulder the rest of the way. On the sidewalk outside, she took his car keys from him, and he did not protest.

The gas tank was three quarters full. The thought of fleeing Atlanta forever was seductive, but fleeting. The seat belt held Maryk upright in the passenger seat, helpless and mumbling words beyond meaning. She got back onto the highway and followed the signs for Emory Hospital, back to the BDC.

The Tank

She listened to the hum of controlled air inside the Tank. Stephen Pearse’s eyes rolled open inside the incubator-like berth. “Melanie,” he said, muffled, like a dead man waking inside a coffin.

She unsealed and rolled back the glass top. His skin was tarnished with lesions and odd, lurid blemishes, and his fingernails had flaked off like his lost hair. He must have weighed less than she did now. His neck looked like thin rods bundled in rice paper. His clavicle was a bar that his head and neck had been set upon to rot, and a dark boil oozed over his right eye. His eyeballs were ghostly red and deep-set, and his pupils — misty, blue — were clouded as though with suspicion.

She brought him water and he sat up slowly and closed his ragged lips around the straw. She pulled over the room’s only chair to sit across from him, and he faced her from the padded bed with an eerie dignity. She began to tell him what had happened. He required every trivial detail, especially where Maryk was concerned.

She noted the slowness of his gray tongue and his fixed lips as he spoke. “Zero is sick,” he said. “He needed that treatment information given at the conference. Peter knows this now. Zero is running out of time.”

“Time for what?”

“Human time. The virus is mutating so wildly now that the human cells can no longer cope. His body functions are already running at minimum capacity. Zero is genetically sick, in a way we don’t yet understand.”

“He moved pretty quickly down those stairs.”

“All the doctors and virologists fighting his disease, all gathered in one place. He learned what he needed to know, then disposed of them. The genius of it. So like a virus. He is that much closer to clearing a path for a worldwide epidemic.”

“You’re so certain.”

The rods of Stephen’s frail neck tensed, and from time to time his eyes narrowed suddenly. He was evidently suffering much pain. “That is why he is here in Atlanta now. He’s becoming more desperate. It is like a race between these two concerns: the breakdown of his virus to where it will only infect humans, and the death of his human host.” Stephen nodded as though to confirm this. “The same race that is being run in me now.”

She didn’t know how to respond to his apparent enthusiasm for Zero. “Do you think, then, that Zero has forgotten all about me?”

The disease had carved Stephen’s face of everything except a crimson-eyed curiosity. He answered her regretfully, and yet there was something undeniably bright behind his eyes. “No,” he said.

She shuddered. “It won’t ever end. Will it?” She was near tears again. “Only now the creature after my blood is not Maryk, but Zero.”

“You can save him,” Stephen said.

She looked at him. She thought he meant Zero, “Save who?”

“Peter. There is still time. Has he told you the Meister story?

She nodded, confused. “The boy. Pasteur’s crypt.”

“He wants someone to vouch for him, to stand up for him after he’s gone.” His eyes lost focus a moment. “You’re only seeing the end of a person, the nadir in a long slide from humanity. The first time I met Peter Maryk, he was holding a cheap bouquet of flowers wrapped in pink saran. He was pursuing a girl in our American lit elective, a daughter of one of the big auction house families. She was beautiful; he never had a chance. Still, he pursued her, finding out her schedule and making certain their paths crossed between each class. He made a career out of social failure in those days-he went about it with such verve.”

His lips and tongue got in the way of his strained voice, but sentiment carried the words.

“Peter and I graduated the university together, Class of 2001. The millennium change came over our final holiday break. My parents were big political contributors in New York at the time, and we had received four tickets to the ball at the governor’s mansion. Having no date myself, I talked my father into mailing Peter a plane ticket to fly out from Washington to attend. It was a gaudy, splashy affair, but boring for the two of us. Borough representatives and old New York money, and there was Peter in a rented tuxedo, standing around like my bodyguard. He said later that that night was the first time he had ever heard the pop of a champagne cork; I’d grown up hearing it. We slipped out early, with no particular plan in mind except to get away and salvage the rest of the night. Champagne was in short supply all around the world, but abundant at the mansion, and we pinched a case of two-hundred-dollar Moët before hopping into my car. I drove an MG then; my parents, they spoiled me. One thing led to another and we found ourselves on the highway driving out to my family’s summer house in Amagansett.”

He seemed strangely happy, continuing as though in a trance.

“We installed ourselves in the sitting room just before midnight, a glassed-in porch facing the water. I’d not seen Peter drink before, and haven’t since. Midnight came and we toasted the television set, then switched it off to hear the cheers from the houses down the street, and went outside and raised our voices to the chorus. Fireworks thumped in the distance, unseen, the sky around us so bright and bare. We went down to the water, drinking straight out of our bottles. The sand was cold and hard. We stopped just before the foaming swash to toast the tide and the moon, and that was when Peter told me he was dropping out of school. He said he had decided to become a sculptor, and was trying to get up the courage to tell his parents over the break. Of course, no one sculpts anymore, but that was Peter. He shared this with me like it was some terrible secret — which, I guess, it was. We had only that one last semester left of school. But I was in no condition to talk him out of it, and in fact I’m certain I raised my bottle to his decision. He returned home the next day, and the truth is, I don’t know if he ever told them. He was back at school that January, working harder than ever, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask. I didn’t learn until April that his mother was sick. If Peter was close to anybody, he was close to her.”

Melanie shook her head when he was done. He seemed so happy. “I don’t want to know any more,” she said.

She had been eight years old that remarkable night. She stayed up late, spent the evening baking cookies, playing board games, and watching TV with her parents, and promised herself that when she grew up, every night was going to be just like that.

Stephen’s head trembled a bit. His hands grew tremulous in his lap, and he looked at them, as though unable to will them to stop. Then his eyes found hers again.

“Melanie,” he said. “I am dying. But not quickly enough. I am afraid I might become dangerous. I’m afraid I will frighten you.”

“Please,” she said. His words forced the tears from her eyes, but she could not tell him to shut up.

“He’s changing me. I don’t know how long I can resist. But I’m afraid the time may come when I would want to harm you.” She shook her head, but he went on. “You shouldn’t come here alone anymore.”

She sat still and listened to his harsh breathing as her tears blotted one after another upon the glazed white floor.

Prescription

The tablet tone woke him and he came to lying flat on his office couch. He felt for his bag on the floor. He opened his tablet screen and concentrated on it. His head felt full of sand. “Who is it?”

“Suzy Lumen, Dr. Maryk, from Cyber. Director Pearse’s tablet accessed the central computer net earlier this morning. I’m sorry — we missed it.”

Her words rallied him to consciousness. The head and shoulders of the large blind woman wearing a headset filled his window. “Where did it go?” he said.

“They were into the system for just over nineteen seconds, unfortunately not enough time to trace. They went right to the bureau master address list and downloaded sixty-four percent of it, breaking off the connection at the letter Q.”

Q followed P for Pearse. “Is the director’s address updated to the Tank?”

“Let me check,” she said. Maryk waited. “Yes, it is. Would you like me to cut the intruder out of the system now? I can delete Director Pearse’s tablet code and fence them out of the Genetech.”

“No,” Maryk said. “I need to preserve that link. However tenuous.”

He closed his tablet and slumped back against the couch. He remembered his apartment but not the return to the BDC. Melanie must have driven. She must have helped him into his office.

His cascades were growing more and more intense. Zero’s virus was inestimably potent.

He had only two sets of white cotton shirts and black pants inside his office closet. He took one and carried it with him through the parking lot outside to the adjacent laboratory building where he deconned in a UV hold and changed clothes.

Dr. Carla Smethy was assistant head of pharmacology and yet she sat behind the same desk in the rare-drug clearinghouse of Building Six, Room 161, as she had six years before. Her black hair was tinged with gray and small lines textured her brow and the corners of her lightly painted lips. She was no more pleased to see him than she had been then.

“I need a prescription run,” he said. “By physician, going back ten days.”

Her chair turned as she crossed her legs beneath her desk. “Fine,” she said. “All I need is a court order, or proof of authorization from the attending physician.”

“I have neither. Let me give you the Ap’s name. Pearse, Stephen D.”

She looked at him probingly but the name worked. She pulled on a pair of eyeglasses and typed into her keyboard. The desk unit responded in an assertive female voice, “Searching now.”

“How is Stephen?” she asked while they waited.

Maryk searched his mind for an appropriate answer. He was still searching when the computer spoke again. “Ready.”

She looked at her desktop screen. “There are three prescriptions.”

“How recent?”

“Two in a Florida clinic two days ago, and one in Atlanta last night.”

“Last night? The patient’s name?”

“Watson, Robert.”

It was an uninspired pseudonym. “The drugs?”

“Fentanyl, two days ago, and Baniciclovir, brand name Banix. I believe that is a relatively new varicella zoster treatment.”

Zoster was the virus that caused chicken pox. After infection it retreated into the nerve ganglia at the base of the skull and remained latent until normal aging or a depressed immune system reactivated the virus into what is commonly known as shingles. Symptoms included acute paroxysmal neuralgic pain. Banix was one of the drugs cited in the information distributed at the Plainville conference.

“For postherpetic neuralgia,” she went on. “It’s an NMDA-blocker.” NMDA receptors on cell surfaces signaled pain transmission up the spinal cord to the brain. “A painkiller, a comfort drug.”

Maryk nodded. Zero was in significant pain. He had, gone right out after the World Congress Center exposure and used Stephen’s name to prescribe himself a patient treatment for the effects of his own virus.

“No unfilled prescriptions?”

“No,” she said. “But Banix is only two years out of FDA and still strictly regulated. Ten doses maximum per person. This Watson’s got only one refill left.”

This explained Zero’s inactivity between the Waffle House infection and the World,Congress Center. Fentanyl was a powerful opiate. Zero had narcotized his human side and spent the time holed up in his car somewhere riding out the effects of the drug.

The human side of Zero was dying.

Char

I knew exactly what was happening to me. That was perhaps the most insidious thing of all. I knew exactly what was happening and what was to come.

I had self-diagnosed shingles. Due to the morphine — Peter had tended to me while I slept — there was none of the characteristic ophthalmic pain, described by many sufferers as being like an intense toothache in the eye. There were however telltale dysesthesias, or phantom pains, such as the sensation of cold water running down my face, and I could not ignore the impulse to continually brush imagined water away from my cheeks and chin. My overloaded nerves were transmitting conflicting messages up the spinal cord to the thalamus of my brain, which was doing its best to cope with the information at hand.

Morphine. It was lovely. Morphine did not eliminate the pain, but rather compartmentalized it, so that pain remained but was a separate issue. Whenever the twinges became too sharp, I self-medicated using a thumb switch attached to my IV tubes and the dose regulator above. Then the hand shaking and neck throbbing went away. Peter was taking good care of me. I could only wonder at the degree of pain Zero was experiencing.

I was weakening. Pharyngeal ulcers were taking root in my throat, and in time I would lose the ability to swallow my saliva. My urine spilled into a catheter bag, an oily, purple drool, portending liver failure, said to be a uniquely painful event. I had accrued so much specialized knowledge in my thirty-seven years, and all of it was now draining away. Memories drifted past me on a kind of farewell tour, not flashing before my eyes but rather swirling together like so many different colors of paint, stirred into dreams. In one, the corridors and offices of Building Sixteen were filled with everyone I had ever known — family and friends, colleagues and patients, all my living and dead — passing me by without a word. I had left the door to my office wide open, but no one stopped in.

I awoke outside my oxygenated berth, seated on a high-backed wheelchair, tired and groggy. The wall screen played an underwater scene of coral reefs and schools of bright tropical fish, meant to be soothing. In designing the Tank as a place of comfort, I found that to that end I had failed. There were no reflective surfaces inside the Tank, in order that the ill would not despair at the sordid sight of their own disfigured face-, even the stainless steel fixtures were dulled. All communications in and out were monitored for signs of depression, and suicidal tendencies. I was a prisoner in a dungeon of my own design.

There was a remote keypad built into the arm of my chair, linked to the Tank computer. I instructed it to replace the deep-sea panorama with a prerecorded program from the BDC archives, my documentary, The Disease Dilemma.

There I was. Facing myself from the wall, sitting on the couch back in my office, legs crossed casually, arm extended over the seat back. I looked relaxed and supremely healthy, my face full again, my skin tight and clear. My old voice filled the Tank, dosing me with nostalgia more powerful than morphine. The sunlight was strong behind me, glowing around my hair — midday in the world of the living, just a few weeks earlier. The vista of downtown Atlanta lay beyond. Image after image swept over me until the sentimentality of the experience began to wear. I had different eyes now, and different thoughts. When the person playing the role of “Stephen Pearse,” doctor to the world, claimed that he oversaw each serious outbreak investigation personally, I stifled a laugh. The hubris of this strange man tickled me. He was begging Zero to wait for him inside bay twenty-six at Orangeburg.

I stopped the show and sank back into the cushion of the headrest, closing my eyes on the brightness of the Tank. I triggered the medication switch with a rusted thumb and it worked on my emotions, set adrift into a bright and gauzy silence. I left myself for a while, and in the role of Stephen Pearse, I visited my current self in the chair. Be brave, I told that sickly form.

I surfaced to the toning of the Tank computer. I prodded the necessary keys on my armpad to receive the incoming message. It had been posted from “Stephen Pearse” in Zurich, Switzerland. The message read:

Maryk watched in disbelief as the conversation scrolled down his tablet. Stephen and Zero were conversing across a virtual table in a cyber-café halfway around the world.

Audio and visual were both disabled. Each dialogue leader was listed as S. Pearse. Stephen answered

A window opened at the top right corner of Maryk’s tablet. It was Suzy Lumen. “Hailing’s still off,” she said. “He’s plugged in somewhere.”

“You can’t trace?”

“Impossible to track him back through the Internet. He’s routed the signal through five or six sites all across the world, maybe more. The only crumbs left behind would be stored in his own drive cache.”

“All right,” Maryk said. She signed off and he found his place in the scrolling conversation. Zero was speaking.

Stephen did not respond.

The connection ended. Maryk saved the transcript and paged through it again. Zero had contacted Stephen because he was hurting. Zero was getting desperate. Desperation could lead to a critical mistake.

His tablet toned again. This time the window opened on Dr. Smethy. “Another Banix prescription was just filed under Stephen’s name.”

She posted him the electronic receipt. The prescription had been forwarded to a pharmacy just south of downtown Atlanta. Zero was walking into a trap and Maryk would be waiting for him.

The Airport

The country music playing in the aisles made her want to do something drastic. It was one of those electric fiddles, an instrument that clearly should never have been electrified, sawing into her brain like a voice instructing her to burn down the store. The sun was gone outside and soft halogen ceiling lights suffused the wide aisles of the Buy-Rite! Super Drug store with a ghastly, morguelike glow. Only two teenage customers remained inside, goofing off quietly in aisle three. Melanie sat at the front register in her red paper-like Buy-Rite! blazer, after spending the day scanning bar codes and working on her southern accent. The return to the dull routine of customer service was at first comfortable and even kind of fun, and she had amused herself between sales by reading every magazine and tabloid on the racks and most of the greeting cards, until she realized that it was not nostalgia, but in fact all that awaited her back in Boston was the same broken life of half jobs and always just getting by.

She drifted back down the long, warehouse-sized aisle to the pharmacy in the rear. Maryk wore a white Buy-Rite! pharmacist’s coat with the name plate “Dennis” over where most people’s hearts are. The coat was too small for him, the wrist hems coming down only as far as the taped cuffs of his gloves, which made him look even more huge up on the raised counter overlooking the store.

He had needed someone else who could stand in the store without wearing a suit. The common sense assumption was that Zero himself would not come inside, based on the fact that there had been no infections at either of the two previous pharmacies he had patronized. She was there solely in order that everything would appear normal inside. In the event that Zero did enter, she was to usher out any customers so that BioCon could seal off the store and Maryk could do away with him.

She stepped up behind the counter over a carpeted wooden step that sounded hollow. There was a carousel of sunglasses, and she looked into one of the small mirrors, picking-at the lifeless strands of her platinum blond wig. “This isn’t fooling anyone,” she said. The wig looked like one of those awful hairpieces they give free to cancer kids.

She could see the entire store from the raised counter, the two kids having split up, the girl in the makeup aisle and the boy at the snacks. She could see straight down the double-wide center aisle to the glass doors in front.

“Shouldn’t you have a gun or something?” she said. “What about calling in the police? The army, even.”

Maryk slipped his hands into the pockets of his jacket. She thought his shoulder seams would burst. “That would only mean putting more people at risk. They aren’t equipped for this.”

What he didn’t say was that he had a jones for viruses, and that Zero was the ultimate virus and Maryk wanted him all to himself.

“Well, I’d blow a hole in him,” Melanie said. “But that’s just me.”

“Thank you for your input.”

She picked up a TB pamphlet and opened it before putting it back. “I was wondering what’s going to happen to me after all this.”

His eyes remained on the front doors. “What do you mean?”

“Just that, part of me is worried that when this ends, I’ll be sort of expendable. I know I’ve learned a lot here. I’ve seen a lot.” She kept her tone as casual as possible. “Too much, maybe?”

His expression did not change. “What are you saying?”

“Just that I’d hate to see something happen to me. Do you think I need to take any precautions?”

He looked at her then with a gray-eyed glare that made her wish she had remained back at the register. It was anger, clearly, and yet something else. She thought she had been speaking his language, but he looked now as though she had somehow disappointed him.

The door chime sounded. They turned and another teenage kid entered, stopping just inside the doors that slid shut behind him. He looked around at the signs over the aisles, then saw the pharmacy in back and started toward it. Maryk lifted his hands out of his pockets. Melanie moved one step away.

The kid wore an army-style olive-drab jacket with a thin silver chain looped off the shoulder. He was slight and scuzzy with day-old chin growth and brown hair unevenly trimmed, as though by a friend. The bandage on his neck was just him trying to look cool. He came around a bin of New Year’s Eve hats and horns to the counter, nodding at “Dennis” and drumming two dirty fingers.

“Here to pick up a prescription,” he said with a nasty twang.

“Name?”

“Smith.”

He said it confidently enough. Maryk nodded, and Melanie moved another step away. “I’ll get it,” she said suddenly, going around the corner behind Maryk, out of sight into the back. Dr. Freeley and another Special Pathogens agent sat there on folding chairs, inside contact suits. Dr. Freeley handed Melanie a white paper bag with the prescription form taped over the folded top. It read “Banix,” but was in truth ten capsules of cyanide, just in case. Melanie heard Maryk out in front.

“Is this prescription for you?”

“For my daddy.”

“Is he here?”

“He sent me on in alone. He’s sick.”

“He’s at home?”

“Yep.”

“Because there’s a restriction on this medicine. Is there a phone number I can reach him at?”

“Naw. He’s out in the car right now. He’s sick, and he’s waiting out in the car. Sent me in.”

“He’s in the car.”

“Right. Said to say it’s all set.”

“Payment is, through his doctor. But this is a medical issue. Is he right outside?”

Dr. Freeley was waving at Melanie to get back out to the counter. Melanie gave the bag a shake so that the crinkle would precede her, then turned the corner.

The kid’s fingers were hanging on the counter now, no longer drumming. His posture was defensive and he watched the bag as Melanie handed it to Maryk.

“Just down the street a-ways,” said the kid, pointing, then scratching his neck near the bandage. “Uh — he’s real sick, an’ in a real hurry.”

Maryk deliberated, but then handed him the bag. “All right,” he said. “This time.”

The kid took the bag, gracious in victory. “No problem at all.”

He hustled back down the aisle past a pyramid of bottled soda. The dong-ding of the electric eye chimed, and he was gone.

Maryk was already stripping off his jacket. Dr. Freeley emerged and the other agent was speaking into his tablet: “He’s moving. Hold positions and watch him all the way to the car.”

“Some hustler,” Maryk was saying. “Working for a quick fifty. Zero must have killed the first two to stop his disease from spreading.” He pulled his black bag out from under the counter. “Stay with her,” he told Dr. Freeley, who was about to protest, but Maryk was already gone, rushing ahead of the other agent to the exit in back.

Maryk sprinted with his bag at his side. At the end of the back alley he slowed and held up his hand to quiet the other agent’s approaching boot steps. He leaned forward and peered left around the corner. He watched the open end of the connecting alley where it emptied into the brighter street.

The kid appeared with the prescription bag in his hand and shuffled past.

Maryk jogged to that corner. The kid was turning right off the main sidewalk ahead of him and Maryk looked high across the street as he moved into the clear. He saw the yellow sleeves of his spotters’ contact suits moving along the rooftops and he strode past the unmarked vans parked along the street.

The kid disappeared around the corner and Maryk was after him.

Melanie hung by the checkout counter in front. Dr. Freeley stood at the entrance, trying to see down the street outside, then moved too close to the electric eye and set off the chime, and the doors slid open. Dr. Freeley ventured a step out into the night, now a yellow form bright against the black street, looking down the sidewalk. She glanced back into the empty store, and looked at Melanie, who looked quickly away. When Melanie looked back, Dr. Freeley was moving along the front windows outside, and the doors were sliding shut.

Melanie was relieved to be alone. She stepped out from behind the register, and a tension so constant she had forgotten it was there left her small lungs. She breathed free.

Her happiness brought her to the snack aisle, where the two kids were together now. They stifled their giggling when she rounded the corner, and Melanie remembered she had her cashier’s jacket on. She saw that the kids were stoned. The boy was trying to choose between two different bags of cookies, while the girl made fluttering movements with her hands, air-drying her fingernails, each of which she had polished a different color.

Melanie moved to the candy. She was hungry again and craved something sweet. The dong-ding door chime sounded, and she quickly grabbed a Hershey’s bar.

She stepped back from the kids and peeled off the foil, watching over the top of the aisle for Dr. Freeley’s approaching yellow hood. She snapped off a corner piece and the gratification as the milk chocolate sank into her tongue was immediate. She bit fast into another sweet chunk as she listened for Dr. Freeley’s footsteps, the shuffling kind, produced by the suits.

She got up on her toes and peered over the aisle. She did not see a yellow hood, and Dr. Freeley was tall. Another greedy bite, and then Melanie replaced the candy bar half eaten on the shelf and returned to the front, guiltily wiping her mouth with her fingers.

She saw no one at the entrance. She crossed the end of the first aisle and looked to the rear and it was empty, and that made Melanie slow. She heard noises then, like the sound of things dropping to-the floor somewhere in back. She crossed to the second aisle and saw nothing, and then to the third, from which she could see all the way to the pharmacy.

Zero was behind the counter. He was hunched slightly, his back to her, rifling through the shelves and bins of prescriptions.

She stepped back. At first she was too stunned to scream or move or do anything. She turned to the doors leading outside, and thought instantly of the telltale chime. Then she remembered the kids. She turned and ducked back to the snack aisle.

“Get out of here now,” she told them.

But she spoke so quietly and chokingly, they did not hear. The boy turned to her, eyes misty and narrow. “Do you have any pretzel chips?”

“We’re closed. Take what you have and leave right now.”

They looked at the snacks in their hands and at each other. “Sure thing,” they said as though discovering the phrase for the first time.

“There are people outside in yellow suits. Find them and send them here immediately.”

“Sure. Whatever.”

They cruised past her to the exit. She thought to slip out with them. Were they infected now? Her mind raced. Zero had been careful. He had watched to see if the prescription kid was followed. He had seen Dr. Freeley leave, so he knew that there had been a trap. If he knew Melanie was there, he would be killing her now instead of looking for the drugs he needed.

Too late. The chime sounded as the doors parted and the kids ambled out. The rummaging in back stopped.

Melanie ducked quickly to the open lane in the middle of the aisle. She counted to ten, then straightened just enough to see over the shelves and up to the pharmacy.

Zero watched the doors slide shut. He was scanning the store from there, his neck crooked at a curious angle. She could just see his face around the surgical mask, his red eyes. He was gaunt and twitchy. He was in pain. He was searching for Banix, and Melanie knew that there was none in the store.

She crouched and listened, trying to hear over the sound of her own labored breathing. She counted to ten again, and at thirty-seven inched to full height.

Zero was gone. The pharmacy area was empty. She thought at first he was somewhere in the aisles, coming for her, but then saw the light shining through the door behind the counter. He had gone out the rear exit.

She waited in relief and turned and started at once for the entrance. She wanted to get to Maryk, but realized she didn’t know exactly where he was. And once she did find him, it would be too late — Zero would be gone again. She stopped and felt the tightness return to her lungs. This had to end now. She could not let Zero get away.

She shrugged off her paper jacket and hurried back toward the pharmacy. She would find out where he was headed, she decided, then double back and sic Maryk on him. She crept up over the hollow step. His stink lingered behind the counter, and every part of her body was jumping. She listened for footsteps in back. Then she moved to the open door and looked inside.

The stockroom was bright and empty. She slipped past the manager’s office to the delivery bay, and found the door half open to the security lights outside. She pulled back before grasping the knob, and clasped her hands. She was not wearing gloves. She had to protect her glands and her blood.

She peered around the door edge and saw him in the alley, small and thin, half running, half limping away. His gloves, loose white nylon jacket, toque, dirty tan pants, and hiking shoes turned from the light around the corner of the alley, disappearing into a side street.

She shrugged off her wool cardigan, taking a preemptory hit off her inhaler before shoving it into her jeans pocket, then started out after him. She crossed the alley gingerly, careful not to scuff her sneaker soles against the tar.

The only lights on the side streets came from the high windows. There were no other people around. She saw him well ahead of her, turning right, crossing a one-way without looking back. This is crazy, she thought to herself. She was chasing a lethal virus through the streets of Atlanta. She rushed silently to the same corner and watched him move over a broken sidewalk farther away, toward a brighter corner, slowing there to a loping jog, then a hobbled walk. He stopped at a side street opening, and she watched him from a half block away.

His bony shoulders fell under his jacket as he stared down the unseen street. He appeared greatly troubled by what he saw there, and hesitant as to which way to turn now. With a sudden grunt that kicked off the dark, silent buildings, he turned and looked resolutely across to the bright, wide street opposite, and set off limping that way.

She crept along to the corner where he had stood. She looked down the two narrow blocks and saw a number of yellow suits moving about, lit by car headlights. Maryk’s men had converged on Zero’s car. In doing so, they had cut off his only means of escape.

She turned toward the busier street, seeing his skinny, shadowed back against its bright lights as he shuffled off the sidewalk. A large structure of concrete stairs faced him across the street, rising, and there were people crawling all over the steps, and great, elevated train rails running from the building. The bright sign in front read MARTA, and even without understanding the acronym, she knew that it was a mass transit station.

She looked back down the two long blocks to the BioCon agents. Her yell would not be heard. And if she ran to them now, she would not be able to tell them where Zero had gone.

She turned and hurried after him to the bright, busy street, and across it toward the bustling station. Every commuter there was a potential host. Zero’s only form of safe transportation was gone now, and he was desperate, and in pain. He had been forced to flee, and doing so, to infect.

He remained hunched over, head down, moving to the far curb as cars dropped off and picked up passengers around him. No one seemed to notice him at first. He stopped on the sidewalk and looked up at the MARTA station above him as a sleek subway car slid away on an elevated rail like a centipede.

She slowed and waited for cars to pass before reaching the sidewalk, wheezing as she hit the curb. She looked around frantically. She had lost him.

She pushed ahead through the evening commuters, onto the stairs. She hurried up a few more steps, then stopped and looked back, and Zero was right behind her. He was gripping the handrail and climbing the stairs one step at a time. Somehow she had passed him, and she froze now as he moved up to her step, moving right next to her. She could see right into his bleary red eyes, and the pain fluttering his lids.

He moved right past her, pulling himself step by step up the high stairs. She exhaled and looked around her as though she were invisible, then brought her hands up to her face. She felt the odd strands of fiber there. Her wig. Zero hadn’t recognized her without her cranberry hair.

The commuters were now becoming aware of this gaunt, sick-looking figure rising through them, and ceding him ample room. He used the handrail to haul himself over the top step — this sick, hobbling thing — onto the mezzanine, into the Atlanta subway system.

Melanie pushed through to the top. She didn’t see him there, only the turnstiles ahead. She looked back from the landing high above the street, and could see a Mack truck blocking a road two blocks away, part of Maryk’s plan to cut off Zero’s perceived escape. She scanned the street below, but there were no yellow suits from the BDC following her.

She clambered over a turnstile, jumping the fare. She stumbled as she landed but righted herself and pressed along a rising, spiraling brick wall, a walkway leading to twin open-air platforms.

Zero was there. He was standing at the yellow safety line at the edge of the platform, sagging slightly like a drunk. Others were cleared away from him, though not far enough. This was it. They were all being infected. She was witnessing the spark of what would be a catastrophic urban outbreak.

She searched the platform desperately. A sign on the wall told her she was on an outbound track, and she found a wall map and searched madly for a “You Are Here” arrow as the platform began to rumble. A train was coming. She wanted to scream, and finally found her station on the map as the subway cars approached. She was at the second-to-last outbound stop. She traced the line to its next and final destination.

Hartsfield International Airport.

The lead subway car glided in behind her, and she looked frantically for a policeman or subway official, anyone wearing a shirt of authority or carrying a two-way radio, even a custodian. The train doors opened and commuters were bunched up on the platform, waiting for passengers to disembark. All were hosts and carriers, every jostle an exchange. She watched as Zero entered the side doors of one of the central cars.

There would be no stopping him once he got inside the airport. Twenty infected people, boarding twenty different flights, and the human race was dead. Viruses love airports, Maryk had said.

She could go to the token booth and tell them to stop the train, but no one would pay any attention to her. Maryk could make them, but she could not get to him in time. By then Zero would be colonizing the airport and spreading city to city.

Why? Why? Why? she was thinking as she hurried toward the car Zero had entered, slipping aboard just as the doors closed behind her. She immediately turned and faced the opposite end so that she did not have to look at him, and only then realized that it hadn’t been necessary to board the same car he had boarded. But the doors were closed and the train started with a jolt, rising, gaining speed along an incline. She looked out the side window and could see the BDC roadblock on the streets below, small and shrinking away.

They cleared the lights of the station and the car windows darkened into mirrors. In the window of the door at her end she could see the reflection of Zero standing behind her. He was wavering, feet planted evenly, moving with the motion of the train.

People sitting near him began to stir. At first they were merely uncomfortable in the presence of an obviously ill man. Then they noticed the smell. Politeness crumbled as first one young woman rose from her seat and moved toward Melanie’s end, then a professional couple, then an elderly man making a face.

They were all going to die. The distasteful smell was carrying microbes into their lungs to poison their blood. And Melanie was their only antidote, standing right there with them — and there was nothing she could do. These thoughts dizzied her, and squeezed her lungs. Her nerves were jumping. She went to her inhaler again, but using it was like trying to inflate a lead bag.

Some sixth sense of trouble had kicked in, beyond his stink and odd appearance, and the people thrown together on the subway car stared in silence at the quiet marauder facing them. Melanie watched his reflection in the flickering light as he glowered back at his victims, red-eyed and knowing, his head low and bobbing and the mask covering his face dark at the edges, seemingly wet with his own saliva. He was not holding the pole now. He was standing free, his gloved hands trembling at the ends of his hanging arms. She wondered fleetingly why he still bothered to wear the mask and gloves.

The car began to slow and the riders edged around the doors on Melanie’s end, anxious to exit and in doing so spread the disease to the airport and the rest of the world. How long did Melanie have before they were actively infectious? A few hours, perhaps.

The train stopped and the doors opened, and the carriers quickly scattered away.

Melanie was the last to leave, even after Zero. He lurched across the platform ahead of her, people granting him wide berth, and then he was through the revolving doors, inside the airport and into the bloodstream of civilization.

Melanie followed behind. She hoped to see suited BDC agents and airport security people waiting to pounce, but there were only travelers, hundreds of them, rushing this way and that. Parents toting luggage and children, couples with pet kennels and garment bags, business travelers, all moving with quiet, airport determination. She was the only one there who knew what was happening.

The main lobby of Hartsfield airport was a high, ornate, circular glass-roofed atrium surrounded by concessions and decorated with tall trees and an elaborate display of ivy. She shadowed Zero through it, past the baggage carousels, past car rental stalls and a vacant shoe shine stand, waiting for some burst of inspiration. But he just kept pulling himself ahead. He moved beyond the concessions, and she stayed with him, tracking him past the ticket counters, moving deeper and deeper into the airport. He had to be stopped. She kept praying to see Maryk come rushing up behind her.

She saw an information kiosk and hurried toward it in an arc, wide around Zero, keeping him in her sight as she worked to her right. She waited jumpily behind a man asking directions as she watched Zero slouch away.

“Yes?” Bright scarf, dull smile.

“Hi,” Melanie said, gasping. “You need to shut the airport down right now.”

The smile dulled further. “I’m sorry?”

“I know, I know. I need security people. Guns. I’m with the Bureau for Disease Control. There’s a man with a virus — who is a virus—”

“I’m sorry, but you...”

Zero disappeared around a corner, heading for the flight gates. Melanie was getting nowhere. With a slap of her hand on the counter, she took off after him again.

She dashed around rolling luggage. Flights were being called overhead. Zero plodded ahead of her, distracted travelers clearing out of his way. Plainville was germinating in these unknowing hosts as they walked off toward cities throughout the world.

At once she recognized the BDC logo ahead. It was emblazoned upon a booth just before the security checkpoints. U.S. PUBLIC HEALTH STATION it read, and she ran to it.

“Listen to me.” The man behind the counter wrinkled his brow as she refused his offer of an international traveler’s form. She was barely breathing now. “Do you know Maryk?”

“Dr. Maryk?” said the man suspiciously. “I know of him.”

“You must get him this message.”

“I’m sorry, miss, but this is not a message center.”

“The Plainville virus is here. It’s in the airport. Do you understand what that means? They need to shut this entire place down, right now.”

“The what virus?” It was disbelief.

“Get this message to Maryk. Tell him, ‘Zero is at the airport.’ Do you understand? ‘Zero is at the airport.’ ”

The man was nodding, but not at her, at someone behind her, summoning them with a widening of his eyes. She turned and saw a man in a blue uniform coming. It was airport security, but he was weaponless, and useless to her now. He would only detain her.

“Send it,” she commanded, and ran off toward me gates.

Zero was somewhere ahead, nearing the entrance to the concourse. She encountered the least resistance by run-, rung along the right side wall, fighting her way through a large tour group following a woman holding up a small British flag.

Melanie had a brainstorm. She searched the wall for fire alarm boxes — but there weren’t any.

“I need a lighter,” she said, startling the British tour group, and one man produced a matchbook with a picture of a pub on it. She snatched it from his hand and looked about for a trash barrel to set on fire.

But there weren’t any trash barrels. In a flash she realized this was all due to airport security. Trash barrels could be used to hide bombs.

She saw a female custodian gathering soda cups out of armchair holders, standing away from her cleaning cart. Melanie walked right up and grabbed the cart handle and wheeled it away. She scanned the ceilings for a water sprinkler, finding a low one near the Tourist Center. She piled cleaning rags and paper towels on top of the trash bag and lit the matchbook. She touched off the paper and the heated rags began to squirm, grudgingly producing smoke.

A scream from the security area turned her around. Melanie left the burning cart and took off running in the direction of the sound, pushing through people knocking each other over to back away.

An airline representative lay on the floor before a row of metal detectors. Her eyes were wide with horror and there were red marks on her neck in the form of a strangling hand, and her mouth and nose were glistening with something. It was saliva, not her own.

The fire alarm went off. It began honking over the flight calls, and announcements came immediately in English and Spanish and Chinese, stating that the airport must be evacuated immediately.

The screaming had excited the crowd; now the alarm set them in motion. People who had already passed through the metal detectors turned and pushed back, and the jostling overwhelmed the remaining security force, whose nervous shouts in turn triggered a mass exodus. It wasn’t exactly what Melanie had planned, but it was movement, and away from the airplanes. Now all she needed was to stop the flights still boarding.

She burrowed through the fleeing crowd, sliding around the outer edge of an X-ray machine into the panicking concourse. Twin escalators dipped beyond, one coming up and one going down, and between them ran a wide, steep stairway. Zero was stumbling down as the frenetic crowd thrashed all around him. The stairs were not quite full, as people were trying to double-time it up the down escalators. He was away from the handrail, and she saw her chance to shove him down to the bottom. The homicidal urge emboldened her and she fought to the top step, heaving for breath, suitcases and flailing limbs battering her arms and sides. She would not make it without another hit off her inhaler. She brought it out, but before she could even get the cap off, an older man in a Hawaiian print shirt shoved past her and smacked her elbow.

The inhaler popped out of her hand. It fell to the steps and skittered away between tramping feet, out of her view.

She had no breath left to curse the man. She drew in what oxygen she could and fought her way against the tide to the far railing, battling the crush, searching for her inhaler while praying that no one had stepped on it. Wheezing, feeling faint, she managed to pull herself through the onslaught of bodies down to the bottom steps where she was bumped and shoved as she stumbled around searching. She felt something sliding down her neck. She reached up to fix her wig when all at once it disappeared entirely from her head.

“Melanie.”

She twisted back, but her lungs prevented her from running. Zero was right there beside her, holding her platinum blond wig.

“No,” she said, a small noise, a gasp.

She saw him through bursting stars. He might have been smiling beneath his mask. His eyes were terrible and sharp as he grasped her arm.

She tried to scream, but couldn’t get anything behind it.

The skin on his face was gray and spoiling. His pale blue mask sucked deeply before filling with each exhale. His hot red eyes examined her face, an inch or two away, and suddenly he suffered a spasm of some sort, his head shivering madly and the force of his grip increasing. Then he came back out of it, hazy.

She was still looking for her inhaler and saw the floor moving beneath her as he began to pull her away. It was like breathing through a swizzle stick, and all she could do was concentrate on getting air and remaining conscious. She never saw her inhaler. When she looked up again, she was facing a row of silver doors leading to the airport’s shuttle.

“Maryk,” Zero said, his voice gooey with phlegm. He slurred his words. “Thinks he’s clever.”

She worked on filling her lungs while trying not to breathe his air. A dull roar behind the doors, red lights coming on above them.

“Mel-a-nie,” he breathed. His cotton mask filled with her name, savoring it. She tried to kick him in the balls but couldn’t turn around right. She didn’t even know if it would have the desired effect.

He held her over her shirtsleeve. His gloved fingers were like claws around her arms. Eyes, mouth, bare hands: She had to protect them.

The red lights turned green, and the doors all opened. They hadn’t shut down the shuttle train yet. The few passengers on board rushed to get off, stopping when they saw Zero. He made a threatening gesture with his free arm and they all cleared away, to the sides and quickly out the doors on either end.

“Help me,” Melanie croaked, sinking beside him. “Help.”

No one did. They all fell over one another getting away.

He threw her sprawling inside. She hit the far wall, her shoulder and her hip, and the force of it knocked out what little air she had won.

“Welcome to Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport...” The voice on the train was female, stern. She tried to keep from sagging to her knees. She could not breathe at all.

“The jungle,” he said, entering, watching her, eyes glowing. “What did they do to me in the jungle?”

“Caution. Doors will not reopen.”

The doors closed. She staggered and almost went down as the train started forward.

“...A one-and-three-quarter-mile-long underground mall connects the terminal and concourses.”

She reached for a handrail and pulled herself straight, her chest small and empty. She could get nothing into it. She was suffocating.

Zero left his tablet on a seat and started toward her. She moved away blindly down the car, not breathing, like a diver in trouble, scrabbling toward the surface, until all at once something broke inside her chest, like a stuck valve coming free, and she groaned and tasted a gulp of air.

“He’ll kill me,” she choked. She saw stars again as he moved before her. “To get to you. Maryk. He doesn’t care.”

He fondled a pole as she struggled back toward the middle doors.

“Concourse B. Gates B1 through B36 Delta. Delta Crown Room.”

The train was slowing. She was nearing the doors. The train stopped again and the doors slid open and she turned to them, but awkwardly, as he moved in front of her, cutting off her escape route.

She shrank away, gasping. Behind him she saw the last of the travelers hurrying away through the concourse.

“Caution. Doors will not reopen.”

The doors closed again and the train jumped forward. “The girl in the jungle,” he said, insistently.

She retreated, using all her breath to stall him, telling him what Maryk had told her.

“Outbreak. Stephen Pearse tried to save her. But the girl was already sick. The serum was from Maryk’s blood.”

He was pacing her, step by step, pole by pole, back through the shuttle car. “How did you survive my virus in Plainville?”

“His blood. Maryk’s. He put me back together again.”

She moved past more poles, the shuttle rocking, the lights flashing, the overhead voice droning on and on.

Zero’s eyes flamed. “Then his blood runs through us both.”

She felt something solid behind her. It was the door to the next car. She had run out of space.

“Marries us,” he said.

She reached frantically back for the door handle but it did not turn at all. She looked back again and his eyes were lascivious over the breathing mask. She sank down as far as she could.

He reached with one hand behind his own head. She did not understand the gesture at first. Then she saw that he was untying his mask.

Melanie was making herself smaller and smaller against the door.

The mask came down off his face, and she saw his mouth. His lips were gone. The skin there was blackened and decayed. He had gnawed off his own lips and his teeth were rotted and his mouth inside was crimson red, like excited flesh, his tongue small and bright and swishing, the top coating having sloughed away. She could see clear to his tonsils, the soft parts of his mouth scarlet and writhing.

“Concourse C. Gates C1 through C36. Air South. Midwest Express...”

He was all throat, and she watched it undulate as he slurred: “You should have died in Plainville.”

He was reaching down. His dirty glove was reaching around for the nape of her neck. She was low and practically lying on the floor. There was nowhere else to go. He gripped the back of her head, the tongue and throat of his mouth yawning toward her, finally claiming his good night kiss.

The train stopped. The doors began to open and a form, a blur, only partially realized over Zero’s shoulder, hurtled through the doors nearest her. She saw Maryk’s face and its expression of pure homicidal rage as his fist came down driving from behind his head, burying a syringe needle deep into the base of Zero’s slender neck.

Zero keened and fell back and away from the force of Maryk’s blow, and Maryk crashed into her on the floor of the train, his bag skidding across to the wall.

Maryk rolled off her. Zero was sitting up, twisting his head to look at the syringe jutting out of the top of his shoulder as though inspecting his collar for lint. With his opposite hand he wrapped his thin fingers around the barrel, and in one motion jerked it out.

Doing so kicked loose pellets of his blood which lolled through the air of the train. They fell like bullets at the floor near Melanie’s feet.

The syringe in Zero’s hand was still loaded, the plunger fully extended. Maryk hadn’t yet forced it. The poison had not been delivered.

Zero looked at her, his open mouth howling. He jumped to his feet and held the syringe out like a sword as he lunged at her.

Maryk was on his side by then, crouching. His left shoe came up strong and flat against Zero’s thin chest, and Maryk extended his knee and Zero sailed flailing four or five seats back through the car. The syringe jerked out of Zero’s hand and landed dancing in the center of the aisle. He fell sprawling behind it.

Zero cried out, or giggled, then flipped over and grabbed his tablet off the nearby seat. The doors were still open and he fled crawling out of the car. Melanie saw him slide between the corner of the platform and the end of the train. He was escaping into the tunnel itself.

Maryk stood and lifted her to her feet. “Did he get you?” he said.

“I’m all right.”

“Did he get you?” His eyes were murderously bright.

“No!”

He stood staring and panting wide-eyed as though he didn’t believe her.

“Caution. Doors will not reopen...”

Maryk looked to the rear of the car. “I’m going after him,” he said.

He grabbed the bloody syringe and his bag and rushed out, clearing the doors just as they slid shut. The train started ahead again automatically and Melanie stood and stumbled against its motion, moving to the rear window of the car. Maryk’s shadow emerged into the dark light of the tunnel, bag in hand, and as his silhouette faded away, she sagged to the floor, safe finally, fighting for a mouthful of air.

Maryk sprinted after Zero’s shadow lurching between the rails as the tunnel began collapsing around him. Loose stones shifted beneath his feet. He stumbled and felt the sensation of a tremendous weight shifting inside his head. His claustrophobia only amplified the debilitating force of the cascade.

He tried to follow the echoing footfalls but lost track of Zero ahead. What he thought was the end of the tunnel turned out to be a yellow safety lamp on the wall and this disappointment drained the last of his energy. He wandered off the twisting rails into a wall recess. He slid to the grimy ground there with his legs out flat in front of him.

Zero is close and ready to infect. Get up.

Maryk could not. He was spent. The full force of the cascade was pressing on him.

He pulled his tablet from his bag. He opened the screen and hoped the signal would carry through the tunnel. He posted Zero’s location to Freeley just as the tablet slid off his lap to the floor. His breath was coming in gusts and his chin rode the pitching of his chest. The ground lifted and drifted like a loosely moored dock. He had speed in his bag but it was too far for him to reach now. He could not move at all.

Zero will escape onto the airfield and the runways beyond.

Maryk saw a shadow standing out on the dark tracks. The shadow was small and crooked and it moved a step closer and caught some of the sulfurous light from the wall.

It was Zero. His mask was still hanging from his scrawny neck and Maryk saw his mouth chewed open to his throat. Zero had wondered why he was not being followed. He had come back for Maryk. He stood there staring. In the yellow light his red eyes blazed.

Maryk tried to make his right hand move toward his bag. But the weight of his bones anchored him to the tunnel floor. He felt as though he was underwater. He felt as though the entire world was underwater.

Zero stepped up near Maryk’s feet. He lingered there. He was wary of a trap.

Get up. You can fight. There — your foot moved.

Zero had kicked it. Maryk’s chest heaved as the cascade paralyzed him and he stared up at Zero.

Zero came another step closer. He moved tentatively like an animal suspicious of a human’s offer of food.

Maryk had never known such utter exhaustion. He felt dead.

Stop him. Now or never. He will infect the human race. He will infect you.

Zero stiffened suddenly. He sucked in a trembling breath and gripped the base of his neck as a bolt of pain evidently seized him. His red eyes blazed until it passed.

Maryk managed to force out two words. “You’re... sick,” he said.

Zero came forward. He crouched at Maryk’s side. He was close enough for Maryk to reach out and touch him if only he could move his arm. Fetid breath groaned through Zero’s disfigured mouth.

“You created us,” he said.

He bent closer. He was obviously in great pain. His blood-red eyes were gleaming and he was going to infect Maryk. His open mouth formed a gaping smile. He was dangerously close to Maryk’s mouth and eyes.

They were face to face. Zero was reaching into the pocket of his windbreaker. He was pulling out something for Maryk to see.

Stay awake. Stay awake.

Maryk struck the back of his head against the tunnel wall to keep his eyelids from dropping shut. Zero was holding something small in his dirty gloved hand.

What is it? What is it?

He pulled out an inhaler. At first Maryk did not understand. Then he recognized the prescription sticker taped over the barrel.

Melanie’s inhaler.

He uncapped it. “It is time,” Zero slurred. “She is mine now.”

He brought it trembling to his decrepit mouth. His eyes remained fixed on Maryk as he tasted the mouthpiece with his ruby red tongue.

The ground was rolling over and Maryk hung off it. He was blacking out.

Melanie.

Zero sucked liplessly on the open end of the inhaler as the echoes of voices and footsteps came from deep within the tunnel. Zero’s moistened eyes narrowed. He removed the inhaler from his mouth and strings of drool clung to his chin. Maryk’s bag was open next to him. Zero dropped the inhaler inside. Then he stood and was gone.

The Test

Maryk stirred and felt a hand release his own. He jerked as though to fight and then opened his eyes on the bright grayness of a ceiling. He was on top of a table inside a small room. His neck was weak. His limbs resisted movement as though he were buried in sand.

“Hi.”

Melanie was looking down at him. Her face was gauzy. He tried to raise his head but she put out a small hand to keep him down. “Zero,” Maryk croaked.

“They all thought you were dead.”

He got over onto one side. “Zero.”

Melanie left him and went to the door. She called someone from there as he dropped his legs over the table edge and sat up. The pain was loud and expanding in his head.

Freeley came into the room and looked him over. “Zero’s gone,” she said.

Maryk gripped the table. His head was still too heavy for his neck. “How?”

“He went out through the airfields and must have come back around. There’s a yellow cab missing. We’ve got the police out all over the state pulling over taxis.”

Maryk squeezed the sides of his head but could not feel any pressure against his skull.

“What happened in there?” Freeley said.

Maryk was trying to remember. A feeling of helplessness lingered. “How long have I been out?”

Freeley looked at Melanie who was standing against the wall. Melanie said, “About four hours.”

Freeley turned back. “The airport is in full quarantine, and we have Milkmaid serum going around. Primary exposures are already starting to show symptoms. But no planes got off. We blitzed the MARTA station as well, and it looks like we got everyone there too.”

Maryk said, “Inside the terminal atrium — there were trees.”

“Silk,” Freeley said. “But there was ivy, real ivy. All still healthy. The plants show no sign of the disease.”

So Zero’s virus had succeeded. Stephen had been right. Zero was infective only to humans now.

“Then it’s starting,” Maryk said.

Freeley looked at a clock on the wall. “Three hours until dawn. This massive quarantine is draining off a lot of manpower.” She stepped up to Maryk. “What happened in there?”

Maryk could say nothing. He hung his head and blood rushed to his temples.

Freeley went out again. Melanie came forward. “They carried you out on a stretcher,” she told him. “They thought you were dead. They thought maybe he had done something to you.”

He looked at his hands and saw that he was wearing fresh gloves. The skin on his face felt washed. “They cleaned you up,” she said.

She was in front of him now and he could see her hand moving nervously at her side. He saw her spinning her inhaler around and around. Something stabbed at him.

“Your inhaler,” he said.

She looked at it. “You must have found it on the concourse. They pulled it out of your bag. I could barely breathe.”

At once Maryk dropped to his feet. He saw his bag on the floor and fought his dizziness as he picked it up and straightened and unbuckled it on the table. He lifted out his tablet and a sterile syringe.

“Give me your arm,” he said. He took the inhaler from her hand.

“Hey, I need that.”

He brought out a testing dish. He grabbed her wrist and shoved her shirtsleeve back over her elbow. He was clumsy but moving faster and faster.

“Okay,” she complained. “All right.”

Maryk tied the tourniquet. Immediately he inserted the needle.

“I’m fine, you know— Ow!”

He drew out as much as he needed and began to prep the mixture.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said. “I’m fine. I was careful.” There was pride in her voice. “I kept him away from my glands.”

Maryk stared at the solution as it mixed. His arms and legs felt light.

“You were mumbling my name,” she said. “In your sleep, over and over. Your medical people, when they put a stethoscope to your chest and felt nothing, they thought you had gone into cardiac arrest. I had to direct them to the other side.”

Maryk held the table and implored the mixture with his stare. He connected the Plainville PCR test kit to his tablet and opened his tablet screen away from Melanie.

“You’re wasting time,” she said. “It’s New Year’s Eve. He’s still out there.”

Maryk punched in the command and got it wrong and entered it again. He was gripping the table.

She was standing near him and just waiting. “What are you going to do now?”

The gauge opened on screen and numbers appeared and the red bar began its crawl from zero. It grew strong to 18 percent before slowing. The bar stopped altogether at 24 percent. The screen was still a moment and then the red bar disappeared and a message began to flash.

She was waiting for him. He could not look up.

“What are you going to do now?” she said again. He unplugged the box and collapsed the tablet to stop the word from flashing.