The Blood Artists

Dawn

He sat alone in the car in a parking lot of the Georgia World Congress Center staring at the dash and the speedometer needle pointing to zero.

The conference attendees who had responded unsuccessfully to the Milkmaid serum treatment remained inside and he had left Melanie with them under the pretense that she could see to their care. She would be safe there alone. And the suited and the already sick would be safe from her.

He pulled his eyes from the dash and turned the key and the starter ground. The engine was already running. He pulled out and headed fast for the highway.

Isolate her, Freeley had said.

It was not that simple. Melanie had told him twice that she would destroy herself rather than face Plainville again.

Containment, Freeley had said. This point was inarguable. Cutting off the virus was the only way to keep it from spreading. It had been his creed before it had been Freeley’s.

But he had failed the girl. He had promised to protect her.

What if I got sick again?

Simple. I would treat you.

And if I refused? Resisted?

She would not comply. She was a carrier now and would run or destroy herself if she knew.

Would you kill me?

If Zero succeeded, then none of this would matter. She would be infected like the rest. He needed to stop Zero before he needed to deal with Melanie.

Nothing impeded Zero now. His virus infected humans only. It had shifted so much that Melanie was no longer immune. He had corrupted her blood and now was utterly without cure. Atlanta was about to become the epicenter of a conflagration that would consume the human race.

But then Maryk remembered Zero’s pain in the airport tunnel. Zero’s virus was mutating wildly and tearing his genetic makeup apart.

Zero was sick.

At the BDC Maryk went immediately to the B4 sub-subbasement of Building Seven. He stopped before entering and did something he had never done before. Maryk PCR-tested his own blood. He mixed the blood sample and ran it into his tablet.

The bar expanded steadily to 100 percent. Of course he was still healthy. But his personal victory over the virus seemed hollow now.

He entered the first room and rebooted all the computers and the B4 unit came alive. He carried his bag through to the lab and brought out the sealed biohazard sac containing the syringe from the airport shuttle. The bevel of the needle was still crusted with Zero’s blood. He scraped the blood onto a sterile paper bindle and prepped it for processing.

His thoughts drifted back to Melanie. His failure was so absolute and the loss so needless that he had trouble getting his mind around it. There was only one remedial course of action. Four years ago he had saved her life. Now he would have to destroy her.

The work continued without him. The computer processed Zero’s blood sample and compared it to Stephen’s work on the older Zero virus from the Florida phone booth exposure. He examined the computer models side by side. The structural discrepancies of the viral genome were obvious and dramatic.

Zero was desperate and compelled to infect. But he was also perishing. His human host was weakening and in need of repair. He was running out of time.

The plan revealed itself to Maryk all at once. It was as though his distress over Melanie’s fate had subordinated the Zero dilemma in his mind and therefore freed him to think intuitively. But the design as presented was so propitious that he discounted it at first. Atlanta was rising to live out what could be its last healthy day. Nothing less than the survival of the species was at stake.

Moments later he was convinced of the genius of his scheme. It was as radical a treatment as he could envision and his only chance at stopping Zero.

He would need a geneticist’s help. He scheduled a meeting with Geist before rushing back out of B4.

The conference sick were laid out on blankets and mats under shining chandeliers. Some called to Maryk by name but he did not stop for anyone until he found Melanie kneeling on the floor with a shivering man. She was holding his gloved hand gently.

Wheat brown skin sagged off the man’s neck and shoulders. A white bedsheet clung to the ribs of his sunken frame. Tortoiseshell eyeglasses too large for his face exaggerated the ghosting of his eyes and laid bare the fear in his caving face. Every breath seemed a mystery to him.

“No,” Maryk heard Melanie say. “I’m not a doctor.”

The man said, “Then you must be sick too.”

“I used to be.”

The patient’s eyes widened while the rest of his being remained sagged.

“I know how you feel,” Melanie said. “It’s so shameful to be so sick. The disease came up out of nowhere and took you all at once, and all you can think is, why?”

The man’s wristwatch clattered on the heel of his trembling hand. He breathed deeply through bared teeth. His eyes were profound with blood.

“Why?” she said again. “I remember lying in the hospital, before it got really bad, and trying to figure out what terrible thing I had done. Or what thing I had failed to do — some kind act of charity that would have spared me. What terrible thing did I do to deserve to die this way? And now that I’ve survived, all I can think is: What terrible thing did I do to deserve to live?”

She was quiet a moment. She was just coming to this realization herself.

“But we can’t think that way, either of us. You’re scared. You’re just scared. I know, because I was more scared than you are. You have questions that you can’t answer. And even if there’s nothing these doctors can do for you, maybe they can make you more comfortable. Maybe they can answer some of your questions. You have to let them try.” The man’s eyes were ancient with infection as he watched her over the rims of his eyeglasses. It was as though an exchange of some sort had taken place. “Just let them try.”

Illness hung in the room like moisture. The room was humid with disease and Maryk felt it starting to cling. People were dying at his feet. Melanie was administering to the sick while Maryk could not bring himself to move. He remembered her holding his hand as he was coming out of the cascade at the airport. He remembered seeing her face over him as he awoke.

Melanie saw him standing behind her. “We have to go,” Maryk told her.

She looked up at him. “Is it Stephen?” she said.

“He’s weak now. I’ll take you to him.”

The sky was brightening into dawn as he drove the tree-lined roads back to the BDC. He felt suspended between the urgency and audacity of his plan and the nausea of failure. He pulled around to Building Nine as daylight broke around them. The city was waking to what could be its final day.

The building was uninhabited as he had ordered and there was no BioCon guard outside the Tank. Melanie was exhausted and did not notice any of this.

Maryk went to the tablet that controlled the Tank doors. “I won’t be asking any more of you,” he said. “You can stay with him as long as you like.”

She nodded and waited tiredly at the first door. “What are you going to do?”

Maryk just shook his head. “I’ll come back for you,” he said.

He issued the remote admittance command from the nurse’s table and opened the doors that allowed her into the Tank. She moved through the UV shower that killed the viruses on the surface of her body but could not touch the ones changing her inside. He looked through the window and saw her approaching Stephen’s wheelchair. He closed both doors and sealed her inside the Tank.

The hallway elevator dinged down the hall. The BioCon security guard emerged wearing a contact suit and met Maryk at the desk.

“The girl inside,” Maryk told her. “She is not to be let out until I return.”

The Black Heart

Panic welled up ahead of tears as she stood before Stephen Pearse and for a moment thought he was dead. His head was tipped to the side and his lifeless face was gray and broken with hot, black, suppurating sores. His left arm hung straight off his wheelchair as though reaching for the floor, his gaunt fingers blistered and grayed like infested wood. She called his name again. She pushed his armrest and shook the chair gently, and his eyes opened, and he righted his head slowly, in pain. He looked about himself blindly before finding Melanie, and by then she was composed in front of him.

The sore on his right eyelid was seeping reddened pus and threatened to close the eye. He raised his own arm onto his lap, and his mouth contorted in pain. Melanie placed the medication trigger in his hand and watched him thumb it twice.

She blurted out the short version of what had happened at the airport, then pulled over the chair and told it all again, in detail, from beginning to end. It was a relief to sort it all out verbally, and her telling it kept both of them occupied. Stephen’s attention faded at times, but Maryk’s name always succeeded in bringing him back.

He spoke hoarsely, and from the way he swallowed Ye she could tell that some obstruction was growing in the space of his throat. The act of speaking had never before seemed so complicated. What he said at first sounded like gibberish, and she thought his mind was gone. Then came the English translation of the Latin phrase, just above a whisper: “You may drive nature out with a pitchfork,” he said, “but she will keep coming back.”

“Or ‘he,’ ” she said, relieved by his apparent sanity.

“Zero has the pitchfork at Peter’s throat now. Peter must stop trying to fight the man. He must instead fight the virus.”

She said nothing, pitying her faith in Maryk. She offered Stephen a plastic cup of water, and his grinning lips closed on the straw. He swallowed and eased back.

“You should hate me, Melanie. You should strangle me as I sit here. I let the girl with vitiligo go out of the camp. I am the one who brought about your sickness. Your parents. Your town. I caused all this.”

“Stop,” she said.

“Maybe it all should end. You’ve thought so sometimes, Melanie. Who hasn’t? No more suffering, no more struggling.”

“Please stop,” she said, but his eyes had slipped from focus. The IV lines slithered off his trembling arms, and her eyes filled as she looked at the rotting mass of his body.

He came around strong again. It was like standing beside a carousel, watching someone swing past and fade away.

“He left me his bag,” he said. She looked around and saw Maryk’s black bag there on the counter, watching them, like a cat. “He only visits when I am asleep. It is fear, though he would never admit it. Fear of my sickness. Fear of what I am becoming. Do you know why he left me his wares?”

“I think so,” she said quietly.

“The poison in his needles. The great virus hunter cannot bring himself to kill me.” He faded and came around again. “What did you think when you sat with him in the airport? Did you hold his hand? Did you wish, just for a moment, that he was me dying here, and me him, and healthy?”

He looked so evil suddenly. His cruel words brought tears even though she knew they were not truly spoken by him. “Why are you so obsessed with Maryk?” she said.

He was silent a while, and still; oozing. The redness of his eyes made the tears dammed along the rims appear like blood, and for a moment, just for a moment, he looked like a despairing saint. He looked like Stephen Pearse again. “I thought you would have guessed by now,” he said, with deathly pride in his voice. “I am Peter Maryk’s conscience. I am that black heart he keeps locked away.”

The Fire

The work cubicles of the C complex lab in the Genetic Engineering section of Building Four were constructed of floor-to-ceiling reinforced glass. Geist sat on a wheeled stool inside the immaculate bell of the center work station while Maryk paced in front of him. A row of pencils stood like sentinels in the front pocket of Geist’s lab coat. The photograph on his laminated ID tag had been taken before the laboratory accident that caused his radiation exposure. In it Geist still possessed a mop of straw-colored hair.

Maryk gave him the condensed version of Zero’s creation and evolution and watched the man’s already pale face blanch to distress. What sold Geist on the story were the gaps it filled in the news accounts of the World Congress Center and Hartsfield airport outbreaks. Geist contemplated the structural discrepancies in the Zero virus comparisons Maryk had put up on the station monitors.

“Absurdly active,” said Geist. “Fracturing itself and refracturing, almost like a zipper.”

“It originated from a radiation exposure in a central African cave.”

Geist took another took at the before-and-after scans. “It could conceivably be reinfecting its human host with each genetic shift.”

“Not a host,” Maryk said. “The virus battled the original host’s body to equilibrium. Plainville has infiltrated and converted every one of this man’s cells. Host and virus are one and the same.”

“But the virus has shifted too much for the human half. It must now be consuming its own body.”

“Would you say the virus is mutating out of control?”

“The deviations are dynamic, arrant — like a human going from two arms to one, or three. Mutations are a terrific shock to the system.”

“And enough of them...”

Geist nodded. “This virus is going to mutate itself right out of business. When too much damage has been done to the gene core, it will no longer be able to reproduce.”

“And without the ability to reproduce, a virus is no longer a virus.”

“Dead matter, incapable of infection. But this takes time.

“Yes,” Maryk agreed pointedly. “Time.”

Geist sat back and crossed his arms as slowly as any man Maryk had ever seen. “Why come to me now?” he said. “A man colonized by an iatrogenic mutation of an immunopathic retrovirus. A humanized virus vector poised to infect the world.”

“An artist was once asked, ‘If your studio was burning to the ground, and you could only save one thing, what would it be?’ ”

Geist shook his head impatiently.

“The true artist brings out the fire. I want to bring out the fire here, Geist. I want to isolate this flame by depriving it of oxygen, so I can stamp it out.”

The old distrust had returned. “With what?”

“Time. I need you to brew something for me, and I need it fast.”

Geist crooked his head for a different angle on Maryk. Then he grinned. “A bug,” he said. “You want to counterinfect. You want a bug you can deliver to Zero.”

“No,” Maryk said. “To Atlanta. I want to infect the city before Zero does.”

Geist’s informed grin fell.

Maryk said, “A virus needs hosts. It travels only on the backs of others, through contact and exchange. Tonight is New Year’s Eve — the single biggest night of casual human interaction. We’ve got to break up the party. We’ve got to eliminate Zero’s transmission by keeping people apart.”

Geist said, “You want to give Atlanta a city wide flu?”

“Zero is peaking. He is dying and his virus is failing — in time. He’s gone underground now because he is sick. He is resting somewhere in order to build up his strength for a night of widespread infection. He is ready to touch off a pandemic that will engulf the human race. I need to starve him out so I can find him and eliminate him. I need to shut down the city and its inhabitants for a day or two.”

“So go out over the airwaves. Get Bobby Chiles on the news—”

“Not enough. Even with the public fear of the virus, you know there are some who would still ignore our warnings, and that’s all Zero needs. I need something that will hit the city fast and knock it down hard.”

Geist’s hand went slowly to rub his bald head. “Insane,” he said.

“Drastic. And desperate. And necessary.”

“I’m here to prevent disease.”

Maryk nodded. “Exactly.”

Geist massaged his scalp like a man polishing a brass orb. “I suppose you’d want ninety-eight to one hundred percent infectivity. Say, deliverable in a minute dose, and able to tolerate diverse environments. With no available antidote.”

“That’s right.”

“So would every army of every nation in the world. They call them ‘biological weapons,’ and I’d sooner trust something like this to them than to you.”

“This is what you do here, Geist: You bend nature into your bow. This planet is seething with ignorant hosts, and if we don’t stop Zero here in Atlanta, today, it’s over. It’s all over.”

Geist burned as he rubbed his head. He ruminated and polished and sighed. “There might be something.” Seconds ticked away while Geist studied Maryk warily. “Two years ago. A bug that burned through half the North Korean Army.”

Maryk recalled the news stories. “Came up out of the jungle and went right down again. Half the border went unmanned for two or three days.”

“Incontinence, some variable nausea. But generally, extreme fatigue. Shuts the body down into a deep sleep. Headaches, discomfort, but no real pain and no lingering effects. Nasty but clean. Dedicated. Airborne.”

Maryk said, “It has to be rock solid.”

“It’s a reliable DNA virus. Steady as a halfback, though I’d want another good look to be certain.”

“Fast?”

“Extraordinarily virulent. It gets anything with lungs, yet it burns clean, and exposure confers immunity. Once you get it, you can never get it again.”

“How much do we have?”

“Mere samples. But I could trick it up and replicate it easily enough.”

“And test it against Plainville. Make certain there’s no virus-beneficial cross-reaction. Zero’s mutating fast, and open to change, and I don’t want him to encounter something that would only add to his arsenal.”

“But how will you stop it from spreading beyond Atlanta?”

“Leave that to me. My only concern now is speed.”

“I’d have to pull this thing out of deep freeze in Thirteen. Look it over, shore it up. Engineer copies. But I haven’t said yes yet.”

“I’ll give you one hour.”

Geist shook his head. “You’re talking about the wholesale infection of a U.S. city. There are certain philosophical concerns. I like to be able to sleep at night.”

But Geist clearly was intrigued. Maryk saw in Geist’s face the seditious eyes of a true man of science.

“Just how do you plan on infecting all of metro Atlanta today?” Geist said.

Maryk strode to the glass door. “Leave that to me.”

Maryk posted Freeley from his office and instructed her to stall the BioCon cleanup and keep the airport shut down into the night. She was to establish checkpoints along every highway outside the city and await his instructions.

He called up a map of metro Atlanta His target area extended beyond the metro I-285 loop, from Roswell to Smyrna, down to Union City, through Riverdale and Panthersville and out to Stone Mountain, and back north again through Decatur and Duluth.

He scanned Atlanta for places Zero might seek out as primary targets. He pulled down population distributions by metropolitan district and accessed the departments of public works network. He highlighted every regional waterworks station. He had to think like a virus now. Maryk could get into places Zero could only dream of.

He tapped into the BDc’s Genetech computer and traced the flow of air through all thirteen on-campus buildings back to a below ground central air-conditioning system. The Tank and other negative-air-pressure security labs were supplied independently and could be spared.

He dialed Suzy Lumen and had Zero’s computer trace rerouted directly to his own tablet. He would be paged automatically in the event of any unauthorized access.

He checked the Atlanta Bureau of Tourism home page. The international Star Fleet Convention of the hinge Enterprise Church was due to kick off at noon that day with a service at Turner Stadium.

Eighty-five thousand devotees were expected to attend.

He consulted the National Weather Service last. Heavy rain was forecast for midday over most of the city. Maryk grinned at his great good fortune.

Geist was wearing a contact suit now and dark circles owled his browless eyes inside the hood. Engineers milled about the labs outside the glass walls of the work station and he watched them conspiratorially.

“The Korean virus is lock-solid,” he said, “or as lock-solid as any virus can be. Nasty little spud. A real runt virus. Tenacious.”

Maryk turned the sealed petri dish over and over in his gloved hand and the translucent fluid slid around with the consistency of corn syrup. “I’ll need heavy concentrations, both liquid and crystal.”

“Being worked up now.”

Maryk brimmed with nervous energy. “Did you take a look at the Zero sample?”

“No reaction to plants. Human cells, it infects as before. And I can see the genetic resemblance to smallpox. It’s remarkable.” Geist breathed deeply inside his suit. “The vast, vast majority of the population will survive this. I truly believe that. But there will be ramifications.”

“All area hospitals are being alerted to Biohazard 2 as we speak.”

“What about the BDC?”

“Every potential host must be removed from Zero’s grasp. Air-conditioning gives me a direct pipeline into each building.”

“What about Building Thirteen? Certain things have to be looked after.”

“The Genetech runs the bug vault. It will preserve security there and keep all the stored pathogens in deep-freeze. This is all or nothing, Geist. Anything less than the entire metro population means failure.”

Geist nodded inside his hood. “What about Zero? I combined this thing with his virus, and there were no fireworks. But what if it puts him to sleep too?”

“Just as well. His virus will break down while he sleeps. My hunch is that he’s holed up in a car somewhere, hiding in the dark, an underground garage probably, medicating himself and conserving his strength for tonight. I think it will miss him completely.”

“And what about the girl?”

Maryk had been holding the dish up to the ceiling lights. He lowered his arm and returned the solution to the counter. “What girl?”

“The look on your face,” said Geist. “The girl you’ve been taking around with you everywhere, of course. A hostile antisocial such as yourself. Who is she? A patient?”

The chill of failure threatened to envelop Maryk again. He reminded himself that Melanie Weir was a small price to pay for the preservation of the human race. He answered, “Not anymore.”

Geist had more to say but Maryk was no longer listening. He was moving toward the glass door.

Atlanta

The twin-engine planes took off from De Kalb Peachtree Airport around ten o’clock that morning. They flew in shifts, climbing high over the city and punching through the gathering clouds before releasing their payloads. The hired pilots were unaware of the extra cargo they carried, the translucent solution soaking the rainmaking silver iodide crystals. They seeded the thickening clouds in patient box patterns growing wider with every passing hour.

The downtown area was the first to see rain. Umbrellas opened, collars went up, and paces quickened all across the city as raindrops smattered the gold dome of the Georgia State Capitol Building, sprayed the tourists standing in line for the World of Coca-Cola Pavilion, and nourished the trees edging the birth home of Martin Luther King, Jr. The rain tapped at the window panes of the governor’s mansion in Buckhead to the north and blackened the empty airfields of Hartsfield International Airport to the south. At midday the rain turned driving, tropical in force, slashing against the sidewalks and the streets and highways, flooding each of the thirty-two Peachtree streets, and lashing the skyscrapers and high rises like a squall battering ships at sea.

By noon, Maryk’s Special Pathogens agents had gained access to most of the municipal waterworks. Their credentials allowed them past the secured screens, filters, and boilers, the pumping and purifying equipment that ensured the integrity of the city’s running water, into the testing areas, beyond which the out-tanks pushed water through the underground utility system to every business and residence. They released colorless, odorless gel caps the size of human eyeballs, still soft from the mold, in multiples of ten corresponding to population density.

Atlanta drank its water. Atlanta washed its hands. Atlanta splashed in toilets and urinals and used common handles to open and close doors. Atlanta brushed its teeth. Atlanta bathed.

The rain continued to fall outside and crashed against the antebellum homes and plantations of historic Roswell. It shut down attractions at Six Flags Over Georgia and swamped the legendary college gridirons and pelted the Confederate Memorial in Stone Mountain Park.

By two o’clock the infection was raging all across the city. Highways jammed with sick people heading home from work. Downtown streets emptied with the shortened workday, and the first news reports came on, warning of a disease spreading exponentially throughout the metro region. By four o’clock the local news anchors had been lost to illness, and holiday event cancellations were read on air by sallow-eyed stagehands. By six o’clock, the stations put up “technical difficulty” cards, with the official BDC bulletin crawling across the bottom of the screen.

The causative agent was said to be an extremely rare Korean virus causing gastric discomfort, low-grade fever, and languorous fatigue. “Patient Zero” was thought to be an unnamed “Admiral” of the Enterprise Church visiting Atlanta for the Star Fleet Convention, where the illness had ignited and was quickly spread by conventioneers moving throughout the city. There was no known treatment for the disease except bed rest, but the populace was assured that the natural curative processes of the human body would expel the virus within thirty-six hours. Neighboring states were being asked not to attempt assistance, and in order to preclude the spread of the epidemic to the rest of the country, the metro area of Atlanta was effectively quarantined as of seven o’clock that night.

Maryk composed the bulletin himself at the vacated BDC. He had flown aboard the first planes seeding the clouds over the city. He had watched the preliminary drops of inspired rain falling away. He had scattered the first of the gel caps into the city’s water system. He had personally compromised the holy water at the Enterprise Church service. But most of the deluge he had orchestrated by tablet from his corner office in Building Fifteen.

He wandered out onto Clifton Road before the rain stopped at midnight, rain that had no effect on him except to soak his shirt and pants and spill off his gloved hands, to be collected in the great sewers below the sleeping city and cleansed and expelled. He stood in the middle of the empty road and looked up at the sky and the rain bleeding out of it, and in that moment Maryk knew what it was to be Zero. The city was his city now. The fever was his fever. The rain was his rain. He stood through wave after soaking wave, and on either side of him the red-clay foundation of Atlanta washed off the roadside, coursing in dark, pulsing ripples down the sloping street, draining away into the open mouths of the sewers.

The Fountain

Melanie applied Vaseline to Stephen’s lips as he slept. There was no more futile act ever performed in the history of human existence, but it was all she could do for him, that and adjust the pillow behind his head. Now and then a stray tear seeped down her face, which she ignored. Her emotions were a china vase shoved to the edge of a high table over a marble floor.

Maryk returned for her, and reluctantly she left Stephen, standing with Maryk in the delousing rays of the ultraviolet light chamber like some wretched thing. He had brought her fresh clothes, and waited while she changed in an employee bathroom. She was desperate to splash cold water on her face but all the sink faucets were dry. He looked her over comprehensively when she emerged, then disposed of her old clothes in a biohazard box. “They weren’t that dirty,” she said numbly.

The halls were empty. The catwalks between buildings were empty too, and in the parking lot outside there was a dead, ringing silence. There was no guard at the gate, nor any traffic as Maryk drove out onto the road, but Melanie was so blitzed at that point that none of this registered. He tried a couple of times to get her to talk, asking how she felt, and she nodded, or didn’t nod, barely responding. Scenery ran past her window in a blur. Her mind was still with Stephen, watching him fade into eternity.

Only when they hit the downtown area did she realize that there were no people outside. The roads and sidewalks were all vacant, and she touched her window as they rolled unbothered through red traffic lights, the city shining oddly clean in the morning sun. “It’s over,” she said. Every skyscraper, every high rise, every hotel and restaurant, every office tower, every side street, every boulevard, every alleyway, every park. It was just she and Maryk now, and there seemed something inevitable about that, something inescapable and fatelike about them ending up together, alone in a vast, silenced world. She didn’t resist it, or even react. She only wondered where all the corpses were.

“It’s not Zero,” Maryk told her.

She ignored this because the truth was right before her eyes. The sun was shining and the buildings sparkled as though from a fresh rain, but the billboards advertised in silence, to silence, and the traffic lights changed for no one, the city working like a clock with precision gears but no hands. There is nothing so emblematic of death as a deserted city.

He said, “It was me.”

She listened then. He told her about the virus and how he had infected the city in order to baffle Zero. He told it as her father used to tell her parables: slowly and patiently, without comment. The only pride evident was in his detailing of the plan’s execution. Sherman had burned Atlanta; Maryk infected it. The entire city and county slept under his spell.

He stopped the car in the middle of one of the wide Peachtree streets, dead center on the double yellow line. She did not move at first.

“The sun has burned off whatever was left,” he said. “It’s clear.”

She got out and stood in the center of the four-lane road, The silence of the concrete and steel city was absolute. Maryk started across a boardwalk mall of stone tiles toward a fountain, and Melanie followed.

Water plumed out of the center of the fountain, joined in its fall by jets flaring from the outer ring of masonry like a serenade of trumpets. She saw coins scattered over the submerged, rusted green tiles and thought of the small fists that had released them, and the big wishes that had gone unfulfilled. Maryk sat on the stone rim of the fountain, and she took her place nearby, two exhausted beings alone under the Atlanta sun, looking at the dead city all around them. Church bells rang somewhere, but other than that, only the running water alleviated the awful silence.

She noticed that Maryk was carrying a first aid kit in place of his black bag. It was set on the stones between his feet.

“Zero is breaking apart,” he said. “He’s holed up somewhere, waiting, but he can’t wait long. He’s dying, and I’ve taken Atlanta from him.”

It was over, or nearly over, and yet Maryk did not appear pleased. There was no sense of victory about him as he sat looking at his shadow on the stones. The kit was open between his black shoes. She could see his eyes, and they were lower and brighter than usual. He was thinking hard about something, deliberating. She wondered what it meant that she knew him so well. She looked around the park, and everything in her field of vision, a hand rail, a scuff mark on a stone step, a bench, shimmered with echoes of humanity.

She looked back at him, and he was reaching down into the kit. He paused when he saw her, his hand remaining inside the bag almost as though she had caught him at something. Then his hand came out holding a syringe. She saw that the barrel was half filled with a clear fluid, and then she cheated a look at his face, and for one crazy instant thought he was going to turn on her and attack her. He had that look in his eyes, the same glare of murderous intent she had seen inside the airport tunnel. He straightened with the syringe in his hand, and stared at her, breathing deeply.

He appeared oddly full of adrenaline. None of this made sense to her.

“Why did you bring me here?” she said. Something was telling her to stand and run away. “What’s wrong with you?”

He was looking at the syringe now. He held it like a pen, staring at it as though in deep deliberation.

“I want to go back,” she said, standing.

He did not rise after her. Her jumpiness turned to frustration, fed by his silence. Stephen Pearse was dying in a hospital cell a few miles away.

“Why are you just sitting there?” she said.

He turned the syringe over in his big right hand. His silver eyes rose only as high as her knee.

“Why won’t you visit Stephen?” she said. She was angry now. Emotions were coming at her randomly, like asteroids, fragments of long-ago eruptions. “He used to be your best friend.”

Her voice faltered and she stopped and breathed through it, and realized she was crying again, though she hadn’t thought that possible. She used her fingers to whisk away the tears.

“It is Stephen, isn’t it?” she said. That explained the syringe. “His fate. It’s different when you know the person who is sick and suffering, know them well, and have some stake in their well-being, A part of you, invested, that withers when they wither. That will die when they die.”

The syringe turned more slowly, and she sensed something building in him, perhaps something like rage. The fountain itself seemed alive with it, as though it were going to explode. He looked up at her then, the fountain pluming behind him, and she expected to see a different face, but it was his own. He did not look murderous anymore. The syringe remained in his hand, but Maryk looked strangely vulnerable.

Something was giving way inside her as well. The frustration she felt, the loneliness, the waiting, stinging her eyes. Her voice was steady and collapsing at the same time. “He told me I needed to save you,” she said. “What does that mean? Save you from what?”

Whatever Maryk had been thinking, it seemed to pass. He set the syringe back inside the kit and closed it and stood. He was a moment balancing himself, looking away, and she recognized at once that low-eyed expression, the slant coming into his face like a ripple across a tableau of water, and the faint slackness in his jaw. The drowsy look that twisted his face in a strange way that made him appear sad.

He was cascading, and trying to hide this from her. She looked up at him wordlessly for an answer.

“The lab,” he explained. “I was looking at Zero’s virus.”

She didn’t believe him, but could not understand why he would lie. She could not understand anything about him anymore.

He turned himself toward the car. “I’ll visit him,” he said, and she knew what that meant. He was going back to the BDC to put to death the only friend he ever had.

Good-bye

I knew then why people fear the ill. Because when health is boiled off the body, like meat off a bone, something elemental is revealed beneath: our pained selves, bombarded from without and within, expiring with every breath. Frightened creatures — small, afraid, and alone.

I was a mere consciousness by then, a brain, a mind, an impaired intelligence existing apart from the body — alone, like a single, struggling cell.

The prenatal human is pristine in nature. The womb is safe, a clean place for a developing organism, and biologically we are all perfect at the instant of birth. But with that first independent breath comes the microbiota, swarming and colonizing the amniotic-mucked newborn who from that flawless primary instant is engaged in a lifelong struggle against his own death. Every touch, every kiss, every cuddle; every word whispered to an unformed face; every new room into which an infant is carried. Every step is an assault of all the natural world upon this new life form struggling moment to moment for survival.

I was not rotting of Plainville. I was rotting of life, of the effluvia of existence, being dragged into eternity by the cumulative disease of a lifetime of exchanges from submicroscopic to tangible, from the most profane to the most pleasing. Existence was my ultimate undoing, not this virus. Not Zero.

Peter and Melanie appeared at the viewing window. Melanie cupped her hands to the glass, looking for my wasted body in the corner, while Peter disappeared behind her. It was dark inside the Tank now, and the most she could have seen of me would have been a vague gray shape in a chair backed into the far corner.

I awaited Peter’s words. Typed from the tablet at the nurse’s table, they appeared in stark, white letters scrolling across the black field of the wall screen.

I typed: I am waiting now, Peter. I must wait alone.

I feel close to him, Peter. So close now.

Do you remember the sick girl, Peter? The one we went to Africa for in the first place? Jacqueline?”

I could not do it then.

You had to do it for me.

You are the one who cannot do it now.

His next sentence was slow in coming.

I broke them with the top of my IV stand. I want to suffer in private now. There was no one outside to stop me. The Tank is unguarded, and I notice also that the BDC net is silent. I fear the worst.

Peter then typed in what he had done. The words scrolled slowly before my hungry red eyes. I typed back:

Wonderful.

How does it feel to infect an entire city, Peter? Does it feel good?

I notice Melanie was unaffected.

The words glowed before my eyes.

Zero.

Then you have not told her?

How strange that, even in my incapacitated state, I was still the only one Peter Maryk could talk to. And at once, I understood.

You cannot kill her, can you, Peter?

You infected an entire U.S. city and the BDC itself so that she could walk about unrestrained, and not know that she is sick.

I am happy for you, Peter. The thought of her suffering plagues you.

It is too late. I am committed now. Go away from here, Peter. Take her with you. While you still can.

We built this place, Peter. You and I.

Then it is ours to bring down.

He made further attempts at communication, which I ignored. The end was near and it was inevitable. Zero was coming. I had to prepare.

The Message

They made their way back through the empty maze of the BDC to Maryk’s office. Maryk went straight to his desk. He was consumed with the dilemmas of Stephen, Melanie, and Zero.

Melanie saw the cartons stacked in the corner and recognized her belongings there. Maryk had ordered her room packed up by BioCon before the city was put to sleep. Her handbag lay on top of one of the boxes and she picked it up and tried it on her shoulder.

He watched her. He remembered her standing before him at the fountain in the city without eyes. He remembered his failure to carry out her sentence.

She was feeling the slick top flap of the handbag. She made a face. She had noticed that the handbag smelled faintly of bleach.

Maryk’s tablet sounded. He opened it at his desk. Freeley was standing suited on deserted Interstate 285 with the skyline behind her.

“You took out the entire city,” she marveled.

Maryk used his earphone. He was concerned about what Melanie might overhear.

“Nothing on Zero?” he said.

“We’re up on the roofs watching every road out. We’ll see him if he tries to leave the city.”

“Good,” Maryk said.

“What about the girl?”

Maryk looked at her across the room. Melanie was poking through an open carton of painting supplies and could not hear Freeley. “Yes?” he said.

“Do you need me to finish her?”

Maryk looked back at his tablet screen. He could see the sunny interstate reflected on Freeley’s faceplate. “I’ll handle it,” he said.

He had an incoming page and clicked over to it.

It was the third-party eavesdrop from the Tank line tap. Zero had posted Stephen again for an on-line chat. Maryk pulled the earphone from his ear and read along.

Both dialogue leaders were again listed as S. Pearse.

It ended abruptly. Maryk read back through the transcript. There was another page incoming on his tablet but he remained a moment longer with the current text. His gray eyes lingered over cryptic words like heritage and homecoming. It was as though they had been communicating in code. Maryk’s tablet toned a second time and he finally answered it.

It was a page routed through Cyberviruses Section. Zero had dialed into the Genetech using Stephen’s tablet code. The Hailing trace was successful and Maryk brought up a grid map of greater Atlanta. He waited anxiously as the coordinates cross-haired over the source. They settled there and pulsed faintly.

The location was listed as Clifton Road. Maryk stood suddenly.

“Zero’s here,” he said.

Melanie turned with her handbag still on her shoulder.

Maryk had people all over the city but no one else there at the BDC. The bureau was a maze of catwalks and corridors. Maryk sat back down at his tablet. A security search run through the Genetech computer detected unauthorized movement in Building Two.

Building Two was the Library and Reports building where the Genetech 11 mainframe was located.

“What is it?” Melanie said.

Maryk collapsed his tablet. He reached for the first aid kit containing the syringe he had prepared for Melanie and rushed to the door.

“What about me?” she said.

“Stay here,” he said behind him. He was going to end this once and for all.

The Black Bag Puzzling

My own Genetech security search returned a total of four sources of movement inside the BDC. The one leaving Building Fifteen would have been Peter. The one still inside Peter’s office was certainly Melanie. The third, unknown source, was all the way across the complex, in Engineering, Building Four.

The fourth source, already inside Building Two, I knew.

I dialed back into the Genetech, this time logging on as director, and bypassing the message that I was already on-line. I instructed the mainframe to unsecure its chamber doors within Building Two.

I instructed the Genetech to divulge its core processor, the heart of the heart of the BDC.

I selected Inspection, and then activated the Genetech’s overhead camera.

He was there already.

There he was.

It was time. I rolled to the rear counter, and Peter’s bag. I reached for it, slowly, unfeelingly, pulling the bag awkwardly onto my lap. In doing so, I knocked my medication switch off my chair to the floor, but it was no matter. I needed it no more.

The bag was already unbuckled, the leather finish flesh-smooth like Peter’s own skin, the result of innumerable disinfections. There were loaded hypodermic syringes clipped to the top of the bag, plungers drawn halfway back and stopped with cardboard chokers. I plucked out each one and dropped them to the floor.

I was not interested in the poison. My hand pawed through rolls of tape and gauze and packets of sterile gloves to the foam-cushioned glass ampules at the bottom.

Liquid amphetamine. Enough for multiple injections.

With the stiff hands of a puppet, I unwrapped a fresh syringe. I punctured the foil cap of the small glass bottle and drew the contents in under the plunger as quickly as I was able.

I did not feet the injection. The needle pushed through the pus-stained fabric of my scrub shirt and entered the twitching mass of my left biceps. Plainville does not go for the muscles. It goes for the organs, it goes for the blood. It goes for the bones.

The second injection, into my right arm, took longer. Then one each into the muscles of my thighs, with enough left for just one more, and I jabbed the sag of my right breast, through the brittle cage, directly into my heart. A sensation of warm water washed over my body, and my muscles trembled with life.

The light coming in through the Tank window had begun to flicker. My vital signs display on the rear console was flipping and sputtering like an old analog television set on the blink. I rotated my chair toward the wall screen, and saw that the image of the Genetech computer had begun to warp. The room was empty. Zero was already gone.

It was happening.

I pushed the bag off my lap, spilling it to the floor, amazed at the movement in my arms. I rolled to the hyperbaric chamber blocking the door and released the wheel lock on the control panel. The bed glided away.

The outside lights flared again with even more intensity. The equipment inside the Tank switched on and off by itself.

I heard the lock catch give on the first Tank door. It swung open and blue light fell over my feet. The ultraviolet light source was surging, humming and intensifying to a beautiful, blinding cobalt blue, setting off the radiation sensors in the doors. Then it dimmed and died away.

The second door stood open. I was free. The top floor of Building Nine lay beyond.

Infection

Maryk arrived at Building Two with the syringe ready in his hand. He could smell Zero as he raced past the dedicated user stations and into the room that housed the minivan-sized Genetech mainframe and its core processor. But he was too late. Zero was already gone.

The room glowed dull green. The chamber doors were open like petals of a titanium flower in bloom. For some reason Zero had accessed the Genetech core. Maryk looked inside and saw a well of green goop no larger than a drinking glass. He remembered that the Genetech was a living machine. “The perfect marriage of biology and technology.” Its processor was not electronic chipware but actual human DNA.

He saw a tablet lying on its side across the room. It was dented and dirty and stank of Zero. Maryk picked it up off the floor and righted the screen.

Zero had called up a layout of the BDC. Building Thirteen was highlighted.

Maryk started to see it then.

The Genetech brain powered the BDc’s life functions. It coordinated everything from climate control to employee schedules to internal security — including the security of the dangerous pathogens vault of Building Thirteen.

Maryk stepped back. Suddenly Stephen’s conversation with Zero made sense.

Heritage. A sort of homecoming. We are all who are left here.

Maryk fumbled open his own tablet. All bureau tablets functioned as satellites feeding off the power of the Genetech’s digital network. His screen came on normally and Maryk gripped the sides of the casing in relief. The Genetech was still sound.

Then the screen began to flicker. It flared white until the characters were no longer comprehensible. Icons began blurring and drifting like ice melting off the screen.

Zero’s virus was confounding the DNA core of the Genetech brain. He had infected the BDC.

Maryk dropped the diseased tablet and raced out of the room. Building Thirteen was five buildings away.

The Labyrinth

There was no way she would be a sifting duck in Maryk’s office with Zero on the loose. She ran out into the halls, hoping to find an exit out of the BDC, but quickly became lost in the endless, unnumbered corridors. She was making her way through the labyrinth when the ceiling lights started to fade. The hallway dimmed and the hum of the air-conditioning went dead, as though there had been a power outage. She stood in darkness for a long moment, then the lights began coming back on again, but not all of them, and not all at once. She heard a whisking sound behind her as a fire door at the end of the hall was released from its magnetic clip. It slammed shut. Lights flared brightly here and there inside the empty offices, as though some kid somewhere was fooling with the switches, Then a ceiling sprinkler came on and pinwheeled a cool spray of water onto her waist and legs.

She moved out from under the spray, along the wall and through double doors into another hallway with overhead light filaments crackling, alternately dimming and flaring. A fire alarm bleated two shocking reports, answered by similar honks in the distance, and it was like some sort of short-circuit chain reaction. The hall emptied into a sun-filled, third-floor catwalk. She could see the various connected buildings from there, and lights flashing inside each one.

She held her handbag at her side and continued into the next building, looking for exit signs as she ran past labs with sensors droning on and off and automatic doors sliding open. Some lights flared too brightly and popped, glass tinkling inside the lamps, and she stayed close to the wall as she hurried toward the stairwell, and down two flights of stairs.

She came out into a carpeted side corridor of glass-walled offices and saw a figure in the flashing fight in front of her, moving away. For one crazy moment she thought it was Stephen Pearse. Then the lights changed and she saw the hunched figure and his familiarly dirty nylon jacket.

Zero heard her behind him and turned. His red eyes were wide in the varying light, his decayed mouth open and shadowed inside. Melanie screamed. She pitched back from him and turned to run away down the frenzied hall, but her handbag strap jerked her back, and his hand closed around her right arm. She rocked and fought him but his grip was firm and he pulled her closer to him. She kept fighting. She was trying not to look at him, but his hand was right there on her sleeve, bruised and ungloved.

He forced her around to face him and said something, but the alarm bleated and drowned out his voice. She veered away as far as she could. His head was bare. The dry gray skin of his face was split open with glistening sores, and then the lights flared and she saw the blistered flesh on his neck and chin, slick with sweat, livid and pulsing somehow, as though creeping over his diseased cheeks.

“Nice,” he rasped. She could see deep into his mouth, past his twitching red-black tongue and all the way down into the guttural workings of his throat. Frothy saliva glistened on his chin, and she thrashed even more. The stink of his putrescence appalled her as his abominably blood-soaked eyes roamed over her body.

He jerked her around, and against all her will began forcing her down the hall. He was stooped and frail, dying even, but possessed the strength of the insane.

“Melanie,” he breathed.

She thrashed and flailed, trying to twist out of his clutch. “Get off me—”

He worked his arm up against her shoulder and propelled her forward. She swung back with her heel as they moved and caught him somewhere in the shin, and he grunted and stooped lower, and further wrenched her arm. Her shoe heel found him again, sharply this time, and then with a sudden lurch he jerked her to one side and bashed her against the wall.

She came off it stunned. The disorientation was immediate, and she saw before her now a veering passageway filled with sparkling pastel rain. He shook her and she rattled. Her lungs were seizing up. She used her free hand against the wall to keep from falling and being dragged. The arm he gripped was dead to her now. He moved her down the hall too quickly for her to fight. She heard his pained moans.

“I took Maryk’s friend,” Zero said. “I took his home. Now I take his work.”

They came to a catwalk between buildings. Zero pushed her through the doors and at once pulled her to his side, using her as a shield to block out the deadly sunlight beating down upon the walkway.

“Building Thirteen,” he said. “A vault. Viruses from all over the world, held in limbo. A monument to the myth of human superiority.”

She remembered them talking about it: Building Thirteen, the germ bank. She pulled and struggled, trying somehow to pivot him into the virus-smashing sunlight.

“Smallpox,” he said. “Imprisoned there. My genetic offspring. It can repair me. I will meld with it, and see this to the end.”

They emptied out of the catwalk into the next crazed building. Pain seized him and ripped through his body like a revelation, then passed and let him go.

“And you will lead my charge, Melanie.”

The salacious way in which this obscene, malignant, repellent, gloating freak sucked on her name turned her stomach.

“You’re dying,” she spit out, kicking at him. “Your body’s dying.”

“What I am will live on.”

“You’re” — she struggled — “crazy.”

Zero yanked down on her arm and the sudden pain made her cry out. He stopped and held her there in the manic hallway, a sprinkler raining down on them from above, and he spun her so that she had to look at him. The muscles of his emaciated face crawled and twitched and his open mouth spewed strings of drool. His other bare claw came up to grip her shirt over her shoulder. She thought he was going to touch her face, and there wasn’t anything she could do to stop him. Her lungs were going flat again.

“You don’t know,” he groaned curiously.

“Get off—”

“I already have a new host. I live on in you.”

She heard the words, but it was the satisfaction she saw in his hideous face that stopped her. She hung there in the hallway like a balloon losing air, slowly going limp.

“Inhaler,” he told her. “At the airport. You lost it on the stairs. I put it in Maryk’s bag.”

Melanie remained still, not fighting. She remembered Maryk taking her inhaler away after he regained consciousness. Spasms of nausea and revulsion, self-revulsion, crept like the sickness itself beneath her skin, and she lapsed immediately into the mind-set of the sick. It was a reflex action, like gagging. The repulsion and the self-loathing. It all came back.

She looked at her hands. This ungodly thing lived within her now, was breeding inside her.

Zero pawed at her shirt, though she did not feel it. “No fear now,” he said.

She sagged there in the hallway, envisioning the illness that awaited her. His grip eased on her dead arm but she did not move. She looked into his staring eyes, inches from her own, and the blood that boiled within them, and saw what she might become. His bloated tongue writhed, gums bleeding black, lugubriously, as he stared with carnal satisfaction.

Her throat bucked and she began to wheeze. She was getting air, but only in the form of shallow, strangled gasps. He reached up to the back of her neck and was going to touch her skin now, and it no longer mattered. He wanted to pull her face closer. His mouth and throat yawned open.

She heaved suddenly and doubled over, as though trying to draw breath from the carpet. “Inhaler,” she gasped.

Her handbag still dangled off her elbow. She twisted open the catch with her good arm and felt around inside as he waited over her, his filthy hand tousling the hair on the back of her head.

“Yesss,” he groaned.

Her fingers closed tightly around the cylinder of Mace. She brought it out and up to her mouth, hidden from him, as though she were about to inhale.

She turned her hand and aimed the white stream at his face. It spattered off his nose and gums before finding its way through his obscene, gaping mouth into his unprotected throat. Zero wailed and thrashed backward but Melanie kept at him, the stream splashing off the mouth he could not close, steaming into his eyes and searing the open sores on his cheeks.

He hit the wall wildly and went down, keening and scrabbling away. Melanie dropped the Mace and felt her way backward into a side passage, away from Zero, then sensed movement behind her. Two yellow arms wrapped her in a bear hug before she could turn, lifting her off the floor.

She was carried kicking down the side corridor away from Zero. It was not Maryk. She screamed and got off an elbow before the arms released her and she could turn.

It was a bespectacled man sealed inside a contact suit. His head was round and perfectly bald, with no eyebrows, no follicles even on his eyelids, his face hairless and sallow inside the hood.

“Maryk’s patient,” he guessed, coming forward breathlessly. “My name is Geist.” The lights along the ceiling flickered and attracted his round eyes. “What is happening?”

“It’s him — Zero.”

There was a thump and a wail from the connecting hallway, and Geist’s black rubber hands pulled at her shoulders to keep her from fleeing. “Building Thirteen,” she said, pushing at him. “Smallpox. He says he can fix himself ”

Geist’s face went wide. “Of course,” he said. His frightened eyes frightened her. “But where is Maryk?”

Her chin was quivering and she shook her head to stop it. “I don’t know.”

Geist’s chest heaved inside his suit. His eyes were bright and devout as he stared down the length of the flashing hall. He pointed her the other way, to a pair of doors behind them, “Building Thirteen,” he said.

“We’ll block it somehow. You’ll show me...”

Melanie followed Geist’s stare then and saw that Zero had turned into the corridor. He was hunched and seething, groping along the wall toward them.

Geist’s hand reached out and found her shoulder. He gripped it as though he was going to pull her near, then instead pushed her toward the doors. “Go,” he said.

He moved to head off Zero as the creature came slumping and spitting down the hall. The last thing Melanie saw was Geist standing and waiting with his black rubber hands empty and open at his sides, like a gunfighter who knew he was overmatched. Then she turned and ran down the short hallway into Building Thirteen.

Grand Mal Seizure

Maryk raced from building to building as the lights in the corridors convulsed around him. He charged through Engineering and could smell Zero there. The spasms of light and sound were intensifying. He rushed under streaming sprinklers into a side corridor that served as a shortcut to Building Thirteen.

A body inside a yellow suit lay twisted at the end of the hall. Splashes of blood dripped down the side walls and darker drops led away from the contorted body to closed double doors beyond.

It was Geist. The yellow fabric of his suit had been rent apart in long ragged slashes and his hood was ripped off and tossed aside. Zero had torn open Geist’s neck.

Geist’s eyes moved within his battered head. Blood pushed faintly out of his throat, His mouth opened and Maryk knelt by him in the frenzied light.

“With her,” Geist whispered.

Zero was with Melanie. She knew then that she was infected.

Geist’s eyes fixed in his bald head. “I hurt him,” he said. “Thirteen...”

Geist died staring at the flashing lights. Maryk straightened in the paroxysmal corridor and lunged at the bloodied door.

Building Thirteen

She tried to outpace the sick stench of Zero that enveloped her, racing dizzied and headlong under the yellow-and-black warning signs — CAUTION RESTRICTED AREA — announcing Building Thirteen.

An ocular scanner ran continuously under a monitor flashing alternately “ACCESS CONFIRMED” and “ACCESS DENIED.” Bolts twitched in the open doors as she rushed inside, down a short, dim hallway into a vast room of throbbing lights.

The vault was an immense block of black steel filling the entire three-story building. It was surrounded by a wide hexagonal casing of thick, transparent plastic that ran from the floor up to the high ceiling. Heavy corrugated tubes ran out of the top of the vault, which must have provided the deep freeze. There was only one way in through the protective shield, and of course it was an ultraviolet light chamber, a pulsating gateway of glowing blue light. Twin steel doors stood open on either end.

Silver, barcoded disks studded the high front face of the monolith. She assumed that each disk was the top cap of a thermos-like canister housing frozen viruses or bacteria. Roving yellow lights lit up long, double-hinged robotic arms jerking and sliding on runners inside the shield. The arm nearest her flexed outward, steel fingers opening wide, then it pivoted and at once struck the face of the vault, rapping its bolt knuckles against the black steel, before careening back along the runner and whamming against the plastic shield just over her head, wham wham wham! Melanie ducked and backed off, though the dense plastic barely shuddered. The arm turned and formed an impassioned fist and continued thrashing.

There was a desk console just outside the UV chamber entrance, a control station for retrieving banked thermoses. Strings of nonsense code ran down its twin monitors.

The lock mechanisms of the steel doors kept popping madly. She had to defend the entrance to the vault. She looked around for a weapon, something to wield. The ultraviolet lamps began heating up inside, humming fiercely, and she blocked the intense blue glow with her arms as sensors went off blaring inside the entrance chamber. She felt the heat until the lights dimmed again and the humming eased. The alarms died away, and she heard a noise behind her like a grunt, and turned.

Zero’s hunched form moved through the hallway, and Melanie staggered back in fear. She had to figure out some way to stop him. She needed to find some solution that would kill them both.

He emerged into the mad light of the room and the mammoth vault awed him. His eyes were bleary and entranced. She saw blood on the side of his neck and a long cut along the back of one hand and a deep slash over one of his knees.

He came toward her, his Mace-swollen eyelids heavy over his raw eyes. He was hurt now. He was weak.

“Melanie,” he gasped.

She set herself between him and the entrance to the vault. As repelled as she was by the oily blood basting his wounded neck, that had to be her target. The blue light of the UV chamber flared again behind her, and its energy somehow steadied Melanie. She made fists of her small, trembling hands.

A figure had moved out of the dim hallway behind Zero. Melanie thought at first that it was Maryk, but the blazing blue light distorted her view. Not until the figure was right behind Zero did Melanie see that it was Stephen Pearse. He was racked with disease, suffering incredibly, his face drawn of all being — and yet somehow he was staggering forward with his cane through the roaring blueness. Somewhere he had found the strength to stand and move toward them.

Zero stopped in front of her. He saw the recognition dawning in her eyes and watched dumbly, twitching, as she took one step back from him and out of the way. Stephen raised the cane behind Zero’s shoulder as the drone of the lamps became deafening. Zero began to turn just as Stephen brought the cane around. He caught Zero over the ear with the flat of the handle.

The crack was awful. Zero coughed a spray of blood and stumbled foot over foot to the side, then at once collapsed to the floor. Stephen, reeling from his own momentum and the force of the impact, swayed the other way, but did not fall.

Melanie circled blindly around them, screaming through her hands. “Stephen!”

His red eyes lolled in their orbits as he steadied himself. He gripped the cane by its long end and started back toward Zero. Zero had risen to one knee, threads of gore falling from his rotted mouth. Stephen sagged toward him and he brought the cane around and up again, but with less force this time, striking Zero on the shoulder. He tried a third time, and Zero raised a forearm and batted the cane away. It spun out of Stephen’s hands and went clattering away along the floor.

Stephen reached out as though to grasp him, but Zero got to his feet and lashed out first, striking Stephen in the center of the chest, and Stephen crumpled. Melanie heard his frail ribs snap like stalks of celery. Zero staggered over him, reaching down, and Melanie could see the outline, through shirt and skin, of Stephen’s protruding ribs. Zero pressed against the exposed bones. Stephen’s head flopped in soundless agony.

“Stop!” screamed Melanie, but no command could touch Zero’s savagery. Stephen’s head flailed and struck the floor, and she heard a soft crunch as his fragile cheekbone gave. Zero straightened, pulling back his foot to kick Stephen, and Stephen watched this with no expression on his smashed face. Zero kicked him in the stomach and Stephen expelled a bubble of blood, and sagged, and Melanie thought that breath was his last.

The ultraviolet vault entrance was surging to full intensity again, the lamps droning, the radiation sensors going off, and Zero turned as though called by it, reminded of his purpose. He staggered across to the console. He ran his bloody hands over the controls.

She watched him try to captain the steel limb, to command the diseased computer to find the smallpox virus and withdraw it for him. But the screens ran mad with information, fraught with his own virus. The steel arm flailed wildly against the vault inside the plastic shield like a thing in the throes of death. It would not obey, and Zero pounded the console in vain.

Melanie searched the entrance for a weapon, anything. The blue lights brightened the entire room, and she saw the shadow of Stephen’s wheelchair in the hall. She grabbed it at once and pushed it out, screaming, running the chair from the entrance to the console, straight at Zero. She struck him from the side, pitching him off the console and hard into the flat of the high plastic wall. The wheelchair struck the foot of the console chair and keeled over, clattering, but Zero remained on his feet. He wavered, then turned toward her, starting her way.

She reeled back. There was blood on the floor before the vault entrance, and she slipped on it, falling hard. She tried to scramble away but could not get any traction, and Zero was coming for her.

Something stopped him at her feet. Maryk had come into the room behind her. Zero seemed to smile — a momentary, bloody, lipless smile. Then all at once, Stephen came at Zero from his blind side and they fell together back against the wall.

Broken and bleeding, somehow Stephen had gotten to his feet. He wrapped his arms around Zero now, as though in an embrace, leaning against the plastic wall at the vault entrance.

They grappled there, madly, weakly. Zero reacted to Stephen’s weird, sudden affection for him and tried to get his arms free as Stephen slumped against him, tying them both up like two exhausted boxers.

Maryk remained next to her, incredulous, watching the spectacle of Stephen and Zero entangled. Stephen’s face was sagged and expressionless, and seeing him that way, feebly struggling with Zero, Melanie believed she was losing her mind.

Bashed and spent, Stephen somehow held on, hugging Zero and turning them both slowly around the corner of the shield wall into the open doorway. The blue lamps began whirring again, brightening just behind them, the hum growing louder and louder.

Melanie pulled herself up off the bloody floor. At once, she understood what Stephen was trying to do. Zero seemed to realize then where they were, and she quivered with tension as Zero too comprehended Stephen’s intent.

Ultraviolet light chambers killed exposed viruses. Zero was a living virus. His skin, tissues, organs, blood, muscles — every cell of his being had been converted. And the light source was raging at ten or twenty times its normal intensity.

Radiation sensors went off all around them. The lamps gained force and the drone of the humming light intensified as Zero began to bellow, but could not pull himself free. They remained there just inside the doorway, struggling against the side wall, before the scalding blue lamps. Stephen could not haul Zero over the necessary final few feet to his death. Neither man possessed the strength necessary to move the other.

Maryk went forward then. He went to the open chamber door, but was forced back by the intense heat.

The cobalt glare radiated behind Stephen as he saw Maryk. Stephen appeared to shake his head, as though to say that he had no more strength. Maryk tried to reach inside, but the heat was too much. The drone was rising to a roar. The alarms screamed and the blue light flared, and Melanie shaded her eyes.

She could barely see Stephen now. The ultraviolet light was peaking behind him, blurring him. He clutched Zero and stared out of the ethereal blueness, his dead eyes locked with Maryk’s, imploring him. Something unspoken was exchanged.

Maryk grasped the frame of the open door with both hands. He raised his right foot and, with a swift, powerful thrust, caught Zero sharply in the small of the back. Maryk reeled backward as Zero fell with Stephen into the roaring oven of burning blue light.

Zero wailed like an animal. The light raged to its fullest around their collapsed forms as Stephen rolled away from Zero, finally releasing his grip.

Zero’s dark body writhed and shriveled inside the pure blue holocaust. The light and the clamor peaked and held, bluing the entire room, then began to decline again. As it did, Melanie could see Zero more clearly, rippling and settling around his scorched clothes into a sinking, black heap. The fading rays consumed the last echoes of his groan, until all that remained was a foul, black lump, shrunken and wasted into the shape of a thing reaching for the vault inside.

Stephen lay on his back. The light subsided and Maryk slid him out by his ankle, leaving Stephen’s dark silhouette behind, etched into the floor of the chamber.

Melanie slipped to her knees. Radiation burns scorched Stephen’s flesh. The virus part of him seemed dead, and his face was pulpy and seared, his red eyes staring crookedly. The hand atop his chest was scorched and bare and she reached for it, touching him now. It burned her, but she held on. Something moved in his mystified eyes, and she imagined then the merest pressure against her palm. He shuddered bodily and she gripped his hand too tightly, feeling the bones collapsing inside. As diseased tears swamped her vision, Stephen Pearse died in the twitching shadow of the vault of Building Thirteen.

Sanctuary

Life viewed from a helicopter is so small. Not small as in “insignificant” or “trivial,” but, small as in “seemingly manageable.” She looked down upon Atlanta and the dots moving again along the sidewalks and thought: It’s all not so mystifying. The inevitable return to earth would blur this perspective, in the same way the twisted logic of a dream dies in the waking world, but for the moment it seemed that everything was answerable from above.

Atlanta was well again, its inhabitants waking into a brand-new day. They had survived the illness, and Melanie hoped this would remind them that they were alive, at least for another day or two, before the frenzy of twenty-first-century life resumed.

She was being spirited away above. Zero and Plainville had been vanquished, and now she was yesterday’s messiah. Her brief career in Atlanta had come to an end. There was nothing she could do for her own species anymore except harm.

The helicopter pilot wore a contact suit, though nothing had been said back at the BDC. Maryk sat in stony silence behind her, still pretending that she was fine.

In fact, this journey had been her idea.

“I’m sick of people,” she had told him back at the BDC, and even managed to appear upbeat saying it. “I think I’d like to get away from it all for a while.”

And he had agreed, which stunned her. She wondered how long he was going to play this out. He had once said: There are no hills remote enough anymore. No oases without roads running through them. House burning is all.

The ride was too brief They broke away from the mainland, and the surface of the ocean reflected the sky, an oily green-blue broken only with white caps, until Gala Island appeared distantly in the morning fog: a wide, verdant mound of trees ringed by tawny sand, and ringed again by the pale azure of the cleansing shore. The beauty of the place glistened and reached out to her, but couldn’t breach her despair.

She grew more prickly as the helicopter began its descent. Her panic surged as they touched down, and she forced open her door and fled out over the landing pad, fleeing Maryk, fleeing death, not stopping until her shoes sank in the soft, sandy, island dirt.

She took in the listless trees of the southern island. Not a human in sight. Her ears rang as the helicopter rotors wound down, and Maryk’s shadow fell over her.

She started up the toughened Jeep path ahead of him, on foot. He followed without a word. She could bear the clinking contents of his reclaimed black bag behind her as the road entered the trees.

They had left the BDC in chaos. The germ vault had maintained its deep freeze, thanks to an auxiliary generator — but once they pulled the plug on the infected computer, the rest of the buildings just lay there, like pieces of a hacked-to-death snake. The entire computer network would require months of rehabilitation, and every square inch of connected hallway and catwalk of the Clifton Road headquarters had to be abluted and sanitized. Biohazard Containment’s greatest challenge would be the cleaning of its own house.

She remembered the hard look on Maryk’s face as they boxed up Stephen’s body and destroyed the rest of Zero’s remains. Dr. Geist’s corpse was also sealed inside a plastic pod, and wheeled down to Maryk’s office alongside Stephen. Suited Special Path agents arrived to help, and Melanie studied their faces as she encountered them, knowing they would be the last human faces she would ever see. There was something elegiac about the whole dreary overnight, and then dawn finally came, and it all seemed to have passed in a moment.

There were two corpses in Maryk’s office, a dismembered BDC, and a dead city of millions reawakening. She didn’t know how Maryk planned to explain it all. She didn’t think he could.

She knew now that she was safe to animals and plants. That was why she had run from the helicopter: If she did have full Plainville, Maryk would have killed her before she could spread it to Gala Island. The ivy had gone uninfected at the Hartsfield airport outbreak, so Zero’s virus had to have been sufficiently diminished by that time. Melanie was death only to human life, then. Her blood and glands were toxic. She was symptomless, but she didn’t think she would become another Zero. The virus had mutated too much by then. Maybe she was the reservoir now, as the birds had once been: a human biological vault of Plainville, infected, but not affected.

She walked on and realized that none of this mattered. She was the last carrier of Plainville on the planet, and she knew the containment rules.

Birds were appearing overhead. She reached the houselike outpost-near the aviary, and a family of mallards squatting in a row on the shore of the man-made pond watched her walk to the door. The outpost was simple inside, a desk, kitchen, bed, bath. The place overall had an air of hasty abandonment.

A map of the island was tacked up on the office wall, along with schedule charts, feeding times. It was cool inside, air-conditioned, and the walls looked as though they could weather a storm. Her possessions were packed in cartons stacked in the middle of the floor.

Maryk remained in the doorway. “Food will be dropped off,” he said. “For the birds, and also for you. It’s all being worked out.”

Just end it, she wanted to tell him. Don’t let this go on. End it now.

“That’s fine,” she said.

He would not step inside. He was standing outside the door like a hired man waiting for a delivery signature. His black bag was in his hand.

She shook her head at the silence between them, and folded her arms, trying to smile. Either walk away or come inside, she thought.

He said, “I visit the island now and again.”

She nodded. “You should look me up sometime.”

He was unstrapping his bag. He pulled out only a tablet. “For you,” he said. “To stay in touch with the world.”

He held it out to her. She broke the knot of her arms, approaching him slowly, watching his face. But he was his normal impassive self as she stopped before him. She took the dark blue box and stepped back. She felt the weight of the tablet and its smoothness in her hands, and tears threatened, and she winced to keep them back. Her cheeks were hot. She was trying so hard to be brave.

“This is crazy,” she said, at once attempting to pierce the formality of their exchange. But he maintained the charade, not willing to crack and give in. He would go on pretending that she was not infected until he killed her.

“I should have been the one to die with Zero,” he said.

It was not over for him yet she realized. Part of him was still stunned.

“It was Stephen’s disease,” she said. “It was right that he perished with it.”

When Melanie thought of Stephen Pearse now, she thought of compassion, the way he appeared to cherish all life, as a counterpoint to Maryk who saved without caring, who cured without need. Some people aren’t so easy to love, she thought. Some people you can’t love at all.

But talking about Stephen appeared to break the spell between them. There was another pregnant moment of silence, and then he was gone. Maryk turned and walked out of the door frame, leaving her staring across at the trees. She turned to the window just in time to watch him stride past. He was leaving, and she was still alive.

She did not understand. She looked around the outpost, seeing her painting supplies stacked next to the boxes, her easel set in the corner. She put down the tablet and ran out after him. He hadn’t gotten far. He stopped when she appeared at his side.

“Tell me what you’re feeling,” she said. “Please. Anything.”

Maryk’s gray eyes were full of thought, like pieces of glass catching the light. “Guilt,” he said.

She was weak with relief from the truth of his response.

“Don’t,” she told him. She knew enough about guilt and loss to know that she had to absolve him there and then, and mean it. “I’ll be fine here.” She smiled and brushed away a tear, stepping back from him to take in the pristine aviary. “It’s like heaven, isn’t it?”

He nodded, a small nod. It was the best he could do. He was not ready yet. Perhaps neither was she.

“You’ll come by,” she told him.

Only then could she let him go. He walked away down the road into the trees with his bag at his side, and around the sharp bend under the circling birds, and was gone.

She stood there a while catching her breath. She let the clean ocean air work on her as birds darted overhead, then she started back along the path to the outpost. The birds appeared to be checking her out, this new human in their midst. Then all at once they fled out of the trees.

The rotor noise had spooked them. She looked up as the helicopter appeared over the trees, Maryk in the front seat, looking down at her. A glint of sunlight off the plastic bubble made her raise a hand to shield her eyes, which she hoped did not look like a good-bye wave. The glare faded and the helicopter was gone.

The aviary chatter resumed, birds reclaiming the sky above. They swooped and dove exploratorily, lower and lower, at times buzzing her head. She hoped she had brought enough hats. Either he will kill me or he will save me, she thought — and until then, I might as well keep busy. She walked back to the outpost and began unpacking.

Coda

Stephen’s memorial service was held two mornings later on the quadrangle of the central campus of Emory University. It was combined with an observance for the multinational Plainville dead, and with the U.S. president and other heads of state in attendance, became a worldwide media event. Many of the details of the Plainville epidemic and Oren Ridgeway had since come to light, and the ceremony was seen as a chance to provide some of that overrated human emotional commodity, closure.

I suppose my request to speak at the top of the program must have come as a surprise to Bobby Chiles and the rest. There had been a movement afoot, ever since the truth about Zero had gotten out, to present me to the world as its latest savior, to fit me for the robes Stephen had so recently worn. The medical papacy was mine for the taking, and my request to open the program was viewed by some as tacit acceptance of this. But I did not want to become the next Stephen Pearse. To declare this would have meant my being misunderstood, as usual: They would think that I, Peter Maryk, was asserting once and for all my dislike for my former partner. The truth was, I loved him like the brother I never had. But I would learn from his mistakes. The live on-line television broadcast afforded me a unique pulpit, instant electronic access to as much as 98 percent of the species, and I had something to say.

I took the podium and told the world that I had seen in Zero the end of all man. I said that, as Zero had been overcome by the destructive virus that had created him, so too would man ultimately fall victim to his own devastation. Man, I declared, would consume his host earth.

My words were greeted with a polite, uncomfortable silence, observed across the crowded campus and perhaps repeated billions of times before viewing screens in living rooms and workplaces all over the doomed planet. Then I stepped down from the podium and went home. I had done my part. Now it was up to them.

My loft had been abluted ceiling to floor by BioCon after Zero’s break-in. The walls were bare and the floors empty. I packed my few remaining articles of clothing into soft canvas traveling bags, then took one last look around the place before locking the door behind me.

Inside the BDC helicopter, I opened my new tablet and brought up my daily postcard from Gala Island. Beneath a small, artfully drawn “Bird of the Day” — a Little Egret (Egretta garzetta) — the message read:

I read it over and over. Each time her words told me something different. She was depressed or elated or lonely or fine.

The helicopter left me at the Gala Island landing strip. Freeley was waiting there, just outside the boundaries of the quarantined bird sanctuary, wearing a plain white ball cap that dropped a shadow over her face. The helicopter remained on the pad behind us while the trees above drifted with the ocean breeze.

“It’s been two days,” she said. “I was beginning to think you were avoiding me.”

“Meetings,” I said. “Questions, lots of them.”

“Everything is set here. All we need to do is disable the cameras over the aviary. She’s alone.”

“She is,” I said.

Something in the way I said this worried Freeley, and her shadowed gaze sharpened. “We need to end this now,” she said. “While we still can.”

“It is ended. Stephen Pearse ended it. Zero is dead, and Plainville is extinct.”

“But not on Gala. It still lives here.”

I tried to sound spontaneous. “I think we are sufficiently contained here. I think she understands the situation and will abide by it.”

Freeley stared. “It’s been only two days. What happens when she gets restless? A meeting, a conversation, a touch — she can never so much as breathe near another human being without spreading the disease.”

“Except me.”

Freeley looked at me, and I recognized that it was the same expression she used to reserve for Stephen Pearse. “What’s that?” she said, now looking at my hands.

“Luggage,” I said.

She grew more and more anxious. “A means to an end,” she said. “Useful to us at one time. But a liability now. A carrier. A threat to the species.” Anxiety turned to anger. “What if it re-ignites inside her? She could become another Zero.”

“I’ve run the tests. I know it will not sicken her. The virus is too weak to take her, but neither does she have the resources to expel it. It’s a biological draw. She is the reservoir now. In any event, I will be monitoring her myself.”

“It’s against the law,” Freeley said. “It’s against your law. We cannot walk away with this left open. Not after all we’ve worked for. She is the last carrier. You cannot declare Plainville conquered so long as she is alive.”

“I can, and I have,” I said impatiently. “The helicopter is waiting to take you back. They’ve set up temporary headquarters in Chamblee, and you are to report there within the hour. Bobby Chiles needs to speak with you, to tie up some loose ends. He’s being sworn in as the BDC director tomorrow. I assured him of your full cooperation.”

She was stunned. “But we need to get our stories straight.”

“I told them everything,” I said, “with the exception of the girl. You will do the same. The code name project never existed.”

“You’re leaving the bureau,” she said.

“A sabbatical. A long one. I’ll be living and doing my research here on the island.”

I was devoting myself now to developing Melanie’s cure. My research was in the most preliminary stages, and the formulas were still quite elaborate. But I had saved her once before, and I saw no reason why I could not save her again.

Freeley looked betrayed. Vain confidence returned to her voice. “She’s a freak,” she said.

Freeley could have said the same for me. I waited until she was inside the helicopter and on her way before turning and starting up the dirt path with my bags in hand, crossing the quarantine boundary toward the outpost. The first bird I saw was a great blue heron, prehistoric in size, squatting on the grassy side of the road and watching me, piercingly, through one small eye over its pterodactylian beak. I stopped, facing the bird and it waited fearlessly, as though wanting to tell me something. Then at once it fanned open its great, heavy-fingered wings and lifted off, stirring the dust of the road. I watched it go, then continued along the rising path to the sanctuary under the shade of the trees and the fugitive cries from above. I was remembering a veil of dark clouds lit up from below, and synapses pulsing over the one-celled earth.