Code Orange (6 page)
Authors: Caroline M. Cooney
“Not tonight,” he told his parents. “I have homework.”
Mitty was going to study? They practically danced out of the apartment.
Of course, normally when Mitty said “I have homework,” that was all he meant. He didn't mean “And now I'm going to do it.” Normally when Mitty had homework, he watched television while his books mellowed in his backpack.
But tonight, he actually itched to be done with this
paper. It was a strange dry-mouthed need. He was fidgeting inside his body, as if his bones wanted to shift some interior burden.
The floor of his bedroom had become a debris field of smallpox papers and books.
He had to get this stuff out of his life. Summoning up everything he'd read during his library imprisonment, he plunged into the next required topic:
The reason anybody cares about smallpox today is that back when it was dangerous, and it was everywhere all the time, the invention of vaccination happened because of smallpox.
In 1796, there was this man in England named Edward Jenner. Back then everybody knew that if you lived through smallpox, you never got it again, but Jenner noticed that some people never got smallpox to start with. Those people were girls who took care of cows. These girls were not called cowgirls but dairymaids. The dairymaids caught a cow sickness called cowpox, which protected them from getting any other pox, including smallpox. Edward Jenner decided to do a test. Nobody would let you do it today. Jenner took this dairymaid who had an open cowpox sore on her hand and it was oozing cowpox yuck. Then he had this little boy, James Phipps, who I haven't found out yet if the mother and father said yes, but anyway, Jenner scraped open this poor little kid's arm, and rubbed cowpox ooze into the wound and watched the kid get sick. He wasn't that worried because it was cowpox, which is not a disease you die of, just one nobody wants.
The weeks go by. If cowpox is going to provide the kid with protection against smallpox, it's happened or it hasn't. Jenner slices open the kid's arm again and rubs real smallpox gunk into the cut and stands around waiting to see if the kid dies. This kind of test is called a challenge. Today it would be called grounds for a lawsuit.
The boy doesn't get smallpox. Since smallpox is the world's most infectious disease, and Jenner has just figured out how to stop it, it's a big deal. The only thing left is to convince everybody in the entire world to get their arms scraped like the kid but people don't believe it works, and they're scared and think maybe God will disapprove if they go and change their bodies, so they won't do it. Or sometimes, an entire country doesn't even get the news about vaccination for a century or two or they can't afford it or whatever. So generations go by and still, even when the procedure is easier, not everybody gets vaccinated. Even today, there are people who won't vaccinate their kids against a disease because they feel the body you were born with shouldn't be changed even if it saves your life. Even if it's your own kid.
The word
vaccination
comes out of the whole thing with the cow. They used Latin for science then, and the Latin word for cow is
vaccus
.
Mitty read what he had written and was satisfied except for one thing. Somehow, he had moved into the present tense. He went back over his paragraphs and made everything past tense.
Now for some television: something that would capture
him completely so he could stop thinking about this rotten disease. Since Mitty did not have one molecule of neatness in his genetic makeup, he was amazed, prior to picking up the remote, to find himself carefully closing and putting away his books, as if also to close the book on the horror of smallpox.
He noticed for the first time that his old books were illustrated. Back then a photograph could be printed just on one side of special paper, so the books had all their photographs at the end. In
Principles
was a grainy black-and-white photo of a cowpox sore on a dairymaid's hand. The sore was an open ulcer the size of a quarter. It was sickening. Mitty could practically smell the rotting flesh, the stench of the pus. It didn't look as if it could heal at all. And it didn't look as if it would leave a scar; it looked as if it would leave a crater.
This was
cowpox?
The boring one? The one that
didn't
kill you?
Infectious Disease
had four photographs of smallpox victims, their bodies so damaged that the patients looked like wizened dolls covered with black marbles. Even their eyelids and the insides of their mouths, the soles of their feet and the palms of their hands were coated with dark oozing pellets. One head was so swollen that Mitty knew it was a head only because it sat on shoulders. A hand consisted of little sticks covered with black blisters, fingers held apart, as if letting the pustules touch would be agonizing.
Mitty could watch any movie with any amount of violence and gore and not flinch. But these creatures who had once been human—he did not want to imagine the suffering they had gone through.
He went online for color photographs. Everything seemed to be from Africa and Southeast Asia, where smallpox had lingered longest. Now he saw his first photographs of people who had survived the disease. The damage to their faces was horrifying. It wasn't as if they'd had a little acne. It was as if their faces had exploded and then sealed over.
How come people called it “small” pox? Was there a disease with bigger, worse pox?
Mitty found nothing online but got the answer in a minute in one of the old books. Syphilis was nicknamed “great” pox. He had a brief moment of scientific curiosity: he would research syphilis and see what
its
poxes looked like. Then he got a grip on himself and went out for hot dogs.
Gray's Papaya was just down the street. This was a very specialized place: weird fruit drinks and great hot dogs, which you bought in pairs. Mitty ate his first standing on the street corner watching fire engines and dog walkers. A little kid had a tantrum because his mother wouldn't buy him something or other, and a grungy old guy fished a discarded
New York Post
out of the trash, and a Beautiful Person, the famous kind with capital letters, the kind somebody who never missed an issue of
People
would recognize, strode by on amazingly high heels.
Mitty had a sudden vision of these people catching smallpox.
It was a while before he could go on to his second hot dog. His throat was all tight or something. He had planned to buy two more dogs to eat later while he watched TV, but his stomach was churning.
He walked home slowly.
The tape
of Beowulf was
still in the VCR. He rewound it, since he'd slept through it the last time, and decided to read along with the movie from his classroom copy of the book.
He fanned
Beowulf's
pages and caught a line about Grendel, the monster Beowulf must destroy. “Greedy and grim, he grabbed thirty men from their resting places and rushed to his lair, flushed up and inflamed from the raid, blundering back with the butchered corpses.”
Mitty loved when they ran around with butchered corpses.
But once again, the movie played to itself, while Mitty actually continued to read.
The insane monsters and valiant princes of
Beowulf
and the strange rhythms and words of the poem gripped even Mitty.
But the monster in Mitty Blake's life was not Grendel.
W
ednesday morning, February 4.
Mitty hadn't slept well. This had never happened to him before. No wonder drug companies made big money treating insomnia. Who wanted to lose sleep more than one night in a lifetime?
For breakfast he went to a diner for freshly squeezed orange juice. Then he ran all the way to school so the orange juice would slosh around inside and wake him up.
The first person he saw in the foyer was Olivia. He barely had time to smile before she thrust yet another book into his face. She was as pleased with her gift as if she'd gotten him tickets for the NCAA playoffs. On the cover of this fat paperback was a cartoon of Revolutionary War soldiers marching away from an
armed skeleton. Even Mitty recognized the Grim Reaper. The title was
Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82
.
“Don't look so panicky,” said Olivia. “I put Post-its on the good pages. Skip the rest.” She gave him the beautiful smile that always made him reconsider everything in life and trotted off to her first class.
“How can you stand her?” muttered Derek. “She's out buying your books for you and pasting them full of little re-minders. Think about this, Mitty. What's next? Marriage?”
Mitty just laughed. “So how's anthrax?” he asked, opening to Olivia's first Post-it. She had highlighted a sentence that read: “Variola consumes its human host as a fire consumes its fuel.” Nice. Your skin bubbled up on the outside while you boiled to death on the inside. In spite of the orange juice, Mitty's mouth felt dry and uncomfortable. While Derek talked, Mitty drank from the hall water-cooler. Maybe he should start carrying water bottles with him, like some kind of nerd.
In English, Mrs. Abrams was back, so at last they had their
Beowulf quiz
. Mitty generally finished English tests quickly because he had so little to say. This time he finished quickly because he had so much to say. It flowed from his pen as if he had known the questions last night; as if, in his failure to sleep, he'd been composing essays about monsters.
When he handed in the quiz, he was startled to receive a library pass in exchange.
Mrs. Abrams was used to blank looks on boys.“To work on your research paper,” she reminded him.
Mitty had not realized that Mr. Lynch and Mrs. Abrams were working together. How depressing.
And then when he reached the school library, didn't the librarian trot up with
her
book offering?
Scourge: the Once and Future Threat of Smallpox
, by Jonathan B. Tucker.
These were the opening lines:
In a maximum-security facility in Atlanta, the world's most dangerous prisoner sits in solitary confinement, awaiting execution. Wanted for the torture and death of millions of people, this mass murderer was captured in a global dragnet lasting more than a decade.…The world's most dangerous prisoner is the smallpox virus, and it is held inside two padlocked freezers in a secure room at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Some 450 samples of the virus in neatly labeled, half-inch plastic vials are arrayed on metal racks and immersed in a steaming bath of liquid nitrogen that keeps them deep-frozen. Access to the smallpox repository requires two keys controlled by different people, and armed security guards, closed-circuit television cameras, and electronic alarm systems maintain continuous surveillance. A second set of smallpox virus stocks lie in a similar secure vault at a Russian laboratory in Siberia.
And in spite of all that, the author actually titled his book the
future
threat of smallpox? What future? A bioterrorist future?
Did this guy actually picture nineteen crazy Al Qaeda thugs (having been foiled from boarding a plane) storming the CDC deep-freeze (bypassing keys, armed guards and alarm systems), sticking their little hands into liquid nitrogen and rushing triumphantly away with their little vials of virus?
Who exactly would agree to do that chore? It was one thing to be a suicide airplane hijacker and die in seconds. It was quite another to say, Please can I come down with smallpox?
Your clever operational mastermind might try to convince his volunteers that smallpox was like chicken pox—another annoying little rash, not to worry; plunge your hand right in. But even your stupidest volunteer would wonder how a little rash and a little fever added up to a Weapon of Mass Destruction.
Mrs. Abrams sat down next to Mitty
A paragraph from one of his antique books spun in front of his mind. It was an observation by some famous old English guy named Macaulay Smallpox, wrote Macaulay was always present in England. Church graveyards were full of smallpox corpses. Anybody who hadn't already gotten sick was tormented with the constant fear of getting sick. Anybody who had survived was marked forever. A mother shuddered at the sight of her own darling baby. The face of an adored girlfriend was an object of horror to her lover.
A viral mist seemed to fall between Mitty and Mrs.
Abrams. Her face seemed to spurt pustules, as the virus boiling beneath her skin made her bubble.
“Mitty,” she said, as if from a great distance,“what topic have you chosen?”
“Smallpox,” he said thickly.
“Mitty, wake up! I am your
English
teacher. Do not tell me what your
biology
project is. What topic have you chosen for your term paper for
me?
”
Mitty chose not to think about the fact that he had yet another paper to worry about. He strolled into biology and handed his smallpox report to Mr. Lynch.
“You've
written
it?” said Mr. Lynch suspiciously. “You're
done?
You did it
early?
” Even eager academic types like Olivia never did anything early. Early was weird. Or cheating.
