Containment (14 page)

Gary rolled his eyes. Mom and guns.

"Promise me you won't go near the fence again," said Loretta.

"
Everybody was there," said Alicia, "and nobody was getting hurt or shot or anything. Not even the people who were pestering the guards."

Loretta gave her daughter a sharp look.
"Pestering guards? The ones with
guns
?"

"
They weren't really pestering them," said Gary. "More like begging."

Alicia made a face, a grotesque expression of fear and pleading.
"Oh let me out, Mr. Soldier," she said, in a pathetic voice. "I don't got no disease and I don't wanna die in here!"

Gary started to chuckle but he caught his mother
's look.

"
Alicia," said Loretta angrily, "I think you should have better things to do than make fun of people who are worse off than you are."

"
They're not worse off," said Alicia defiantly. "
I'm
here too!"

"
Hey, Mom," said Gary. "You don't think we'll get sick, do you? Nobody knows anybody who's sick."

"
Maybe it's all just a gag," said Alicia.

"
It's not a joke!" cried Loretta. She turned toward the cooker and punched the button. Lights on the panel flickered on.

"
We're all here," she said calmly, turning back to her children. "And we're just going to have to make the best of it. I talked to a woman who lives across the street but she wasn't in the zone when they put up the fences and they won't let her back inside. I promised to take care of her puppy. If the mail carrier doesn't deliver the key by tomorrow, Gary, I'll have to ask you to sneak into her house."

"
Gary's good at that," said Alicia.

"
Shut up, Leesh."

"
We have to look out for each other," said Loretta. "That's what people do in a crisis. That's how you survive."

"
I heard the market's running out of groceries," said Alicia. She opened the refrigerator door and looked inside. "We got a bunch of stuff here, but with all of us staying home this weekend we'll eat through it in no time. Then we might have to go begging for food."

Loretta felt a twinge of fear. Cold, irrational fear. She swept it away.
"They won't let that happen, dear. All the grocery stores will be stocked like normal, that's what they said on WKH."

Montgomery County, Pennsylvania / 7:25 p.m.

In her plastic jumpsuit, Cecily Sunday sat on the floor of the main hallway at Vision Cell Bioceuticals. She was tired, sweaty, uncomfortable, but all of that registered only distantly in her mind.

Gordon and Pradeep walked up. Gordon sat down on the floor beside her.

Pradeep said, "Perhaps I should go get some chairs?"

"
No, that's okay," said Cecily, waving a gloved hand. "I like the floor better."

Pradeep and Gordon exchanged a look.

"Beneath all of that plastic," said Gordon to Cecily, "you have a puzzled expression."

"
You know, there's something I just don't get."

Gordon and Pradeep waited for her to go on, but she just stared into space. She mumbled something but the suit
's microphone slurred it into an incoherent buzz.

"
What don't you get?" asked Gordon.

"
The rules." Cecily glanced at both Gordon and Pradeep. "I talked to a lot of people here over the last few hours. I inspected the labs, I watched the technicians and the scientists. I got a feel about the way things work here."

"
As far as I know," said Gordon, "we pretty much go by the book here. There's no laziness or incompetence."

"
I second that opinion," said Pradeep quickly. "In my career I've worked in several labs, in academia and industry, and this is the cleanest by far."

"
It's a clean lab," agreed Cecily. "I see that."

Gordon kept looking at her.
"And what's the puzzle?" He asked as if he were afraid of the answer.

Cecily sighed and the suit speaker transformed it into something that was almost erotic.
"The puzzle is that I have a gut feeling, and it says this place is the source of the agent. The pathogen."

Pradeep eyes widened and he shook his head vigorously.
"No, no. I don't believe you. Nothing in these labs is dangerous! I swear it!"

"It's the creek," said Gordon. "Isn't it?"

"
I just can't shake it. That conviction still holds me with, like, this awesomely firm grip. A death grip, I guess you'd say. Sorry, guys. If I'm right and it's the creek, then it's got to be you."

"
No, no," said Pradeep, holding up his palms. "That's not scientific reasoning. And besides, we don't pour anything into the creek. We know better than that!"

"
I didn't say you did," said Cecily. "Things get into creeks and rivers in plenty of ways. Pipes leak, storm drains overflow."

"
And other ways too," said Pradeep. "Even if the creek carried the pathogen to Medburg it does not mean we are responsible. It could be anybody. Anybody could have poured something in the water. Kids, terrorists, anybody."

"
But anybody didn't," said Gordon. "I think you're right, Cecily. I've got the same gut feeling. I think I always have, ever since I first heard the news. But I just didn't want to admit it."

Pradeep kept shaking his head, saying
"No. No."

"
I don't mean you did it on purpose," said Cecily. She looked at Pradeep and saw the fear in his eyes. The fear that came with five fatalities, possibly more in the future. The fear that came with being named the next Union Carbide, with Medburg as Bhopal.

Cecily stood up, the sound of creaking joints coming through the suit.
"I'm not accusing anybody, and I sure don't want to frighten anyone."

"
I will cooperate with you," said Pradeep. "We have nothing to hide. We did nothing wrong here." He nodded curtly and walked away.

Gordon accompanied Cecily to the exit.

"So," he said, as he buzzed the door open, "what do we do next?"

Cecily gave him a look when she heard the word
"we." She hesitated in the doorway.

Patiently holding the door open, Gordon said,
"Any thoughts?"

"
What do
you
usually do," said Cecily, "when you run into a problem you can't figure out?"

Gordon smiled.
"Talk to someone who's smarter than I am."

Cecily winked.
"That's what I do too."

Medburg, Pennsylvania / 7:55 p.m.

Abe turned the steering wheel and the twenty-year-old Chevrolet with missing hub caps and peeling paint squeakily obeyed, wheeling onto Elmhurst Street from Glaser Avenue. The engine sputtered, then caught, and the car accelerated down the road. Streetlamps threw yellowish circles of light onto the pavement.

"
Shoulda kept one of the nicer cars stashed away here," said Jimmy, sitting in the passenger seat.

Abe shook his head and glanced at his long-time partner.
"You drive a Mercedes too often around this neighborhood and people
know
where you got the money."

"
Well, what does it matter now?"

"
It always matters, Jacques."

Jimmy looked up. He hadn
't heard Abe use his real name in a while.

Jacques Simonai was a French-Canadian who had been in trouble with the law as far back as he could remember. Ex
pelled from school and a habitué of juvenile detention centers, the young Jacques decided to try his luck as a logger. Problem was, he couldn't get along with the other men, who didn't want to stay up all night playing poker and didn't care for the newcomer's attitude. When Jacques was caught making some extra money by smuggling prostitutes into camp, he was fired. A short and uninvited trip across the border to the state of Michigan followed, and when union rules—and his lack of identification—prevented him from hiring on as a laborer except for pathetically low wages, Jacques turned to other endeavors: he pimped—Jacques preferred to call it labor relations management—he stole, he sold ice, coke, and when he could get his hands on it, the latest offering of utopian chemistry, luvu.

Jacques did all right for himself, but lived in constant fear of prison and deportation. An unconditional lover of freedom, Jacques Simonai swore they would never take him alive. And they didn
't, but it cost another man his life—a man who turned out to be an undercover cop. Jacques fled, intending to make his way down to Florida and become a beach bum.

He didn
't make it all the way to Florida because along the way, in Philadelphia, he met up with Clarence H. Trammers. They encountered each other in a dark alley, Jimmy having relieved a young punk of his wallet and several teeth, Clarence having made a hasty retreat from a set of flashing blue lights. Big, black, and laconic, Clarence seemed to have the system figured out and they made their escape. He knew how things worked. Jacques was impressed.

They worked together for nearly a year before Jacques understood why Clarence knew the system inside out. Clarence, whose honest face inspired his nickname
"Abe," came from an upper middle class family in New Jersey. His older brother had done well for himself in college and in law school. Presently he was an attorney in the D.A.'s office in Trenton. Clarence was much different; in high school he had played football, enjoyed the game but more than that, enjoyed the fame—and the girls. Recruited by Penn State University, the University of Alabama, the University of Oklahoma, and other schools, Clarence was reveling in the hospitality of the schools' boosters when, his senior year, he blew out his right knee. Bad.

The only offers on the table at the end of
a long and painful rehabilitation were from tiny schools that nobody had ever heard of. Clarence passed on college.

Clarence
's brother tried desperately to keep him straight. But slowly Clarence drifted down a path that led to two arrests and one conviction. Two years in prison did little to convince Clarence of the error of his ways. His only regret was that he was a source of embarrassment to his brother, a ball and chain that would probably limit how far the sharp attorney could rise in his chosen profession. But life's a bitch, acknowledged Clarence. Nothing fair about it.

Clarence settled into a specialty: the pink gritty substance known on the street as luvu, pronounced love-you because once you take it you love everybody, particularly the supplier. The drug was popular among dealers even though it was hard to come by and, unlike ice, impossible to synthesize without a state-of-the-art laboratory and an army of trained technicians. Luvu was exceptionally profitable; your customers wolfed down the tiny pink crystals right out of your hand, and then they felt so good that they loved you, loved you with such a fierce intensity that they gave you anything you wanted in return.

The benefits of its scarcity included the exorbitant price you could charge for it—the profit margins were sweet—and because the drug had yet to enter the public consciousness, nobody was demanding that the Drug Enforcement Agency do something about it. The DEA still classified luvu as a minor threat and devoted virtually no resources to its interdiction. But luvu's scarcity also presented problems. Clarence's perpetual search for new, viable sources took him to research laboratories and big hospitals, where he could occasionally convince a few needy or greedy physicians and chemists to channel some of their resources privately toward the synthesis a certain "special order." It was a proposition fraught with risk on both sides, and if the profit margin wasn't so high it wouldn't be worth it. But sometimes even Benjamins failed to persuade specialists to become partners, so Clarence usually supplemented his income with other activities. Guns, for instance—always a lucrative fall-back. Jacques came in handy for many of the odd jobs that the business entailed. Since Clarence wasn't fond of saying "Jacques" a lot, early on he'd shortened it to Jimmy.

The enterprise was successful. They moved to Medburg as a center of operations to escape the feds in Philly. Not only did they make a ton of green wheat, the joint venture had never been interrupted by the incarceration of either of its two principals since opening their doors for business. Until, that is, the government had raised several miles of fence and caught them, along with some 20,000 other people, in a great big trap.

The car approached the fence. Blue warning lights flashed. Big signs, illuminated with bright lights, told of the barricade ahead. No thoroughfare, no exceptions.

Abe pulled up to the curb and stopped. He checked his watch.
"One hour till curfew."

With a sneer Jimmy said,
"Wonder if they'll tuck us in too?" Then he laughed.