Final Epidemic (3 page)

My God,
she realized,
he’s cyanotic.

She was just starting forward when the man’s eyes rolled upward and he fell forward. He crashed heavily to the floor and lay motionless. In an instant, Carol was crouched over him, oblivious to the screaming and commotion in the room. Her fingertips were still wet with the juice of the apple now rolling into a far corner, and she pressed them firmly against the man’s carotid. She concentrated hard, only vaguely aware of a figure that was now kneeling beside her. It was one of the nurses, Jerry-something-or-other, who moonlighted at the clinic when not on duty at Eglin Air Force Base hospital.

“There’s no pulse,” she told him, and began chest compressions as Jerry bent to clear the airway. They worked as a team, with Jerry timing his mouth-to-mouth ventilation to Carol’s pace until LaTonya sprinted up with a bag and oxygen mask.

For the next few minutes, the waiting room was chaos. Other physicians and nurses rushed in, some of them herding the waiting-room occupants away from the tableau on the floor. Patients, themselves alarmed by the clamor of the frightened crowd, peered from behind half-opened doors of the treatment rooms; several emerged to see better, adding to the press of humanity in the room.

Carol noticed them only peripherally, all her attention focused on the medical crisis. The portable electroshock kit was up and charging in seconds, but even repeated hits from the paddles caused no change in the unit’s monitors. She heard somebody, a woman, asking loudly for an ambulance; if Carol had not been so fiercely focused she might have laughed.

Ambulance? This is a clinic, lady. He’s already up to his butt in doctors.

She said nothing, except to call for syringes of adrenaline, bicarbonate, TPF—the full arsenal that modern medicine provides to restimulate cardiac activity.

But not even the most sophisticated treatments can reanimate dead tissue. After almost twenty minutes, Carol waved Jerry away from what was now only a bundle of slowly cooling meat. She looked at her wristwatch, trying to ignore the film of tears that blurred the digital numbers.

“Time of death,” she said in a low voice, “nine-fifty-four
A
.
M
.”

Around the room, there was a hushed silence from the medical staff and the patients alike.

But only for a moment.

Then a woman standing wide-eyed amid the other stunned patients began to cough, loudly and painfully. She was bent forward at the waist when Carol looked up, and had it not been for the fresh sea-horse tattoo she would not have known who it was. The paroxysm rocked Ashley Atkins’s body, and she leaned heavily against the young man who held her arm.

There was an instant’s hesitation before one of the clinic staff moved toward her. In that brief moment, the other patients already had begun to shrink back—all but one, whose own sudden racking cough ended in a projectile gush of bright crimson blood.

What the hell?
Carol Mayer asked herself.
What the hell is going on here?

She felt a shiver pass along her spine, and recognized it as fear.

Atlanta, Georgia
July 21

It was clearly not politically correct, but whenever Beck Casey landed in Atlanta there was a part of him that missed the Old South. He would look at the plastic kiosks advertising Japanese laptops, cellular phone services, the ever-changing and still-unmet promises of a dot-com technology, and wonder where the hell Scarlett O’Hara had gone.

At those moments, the historian in Beck would try to envision that world through the eyes of a Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis: vast feudal plantations doomed by the flaws and inequities that defined their agri-economic system but alive with the elegance that the system propped up. Beck saw the aristocratic young bloods, equally at home on horse and behind dueling pistol; and the proud Rebel beauties, as refined as they were fiery in their own varieties of passions. It was a romanticized imagery, and Beck knew it. But in recent years the picture had become increasingly difficult to summon, even though the capital of the New South took pains to remind all comers of its heritage. It had taken Beck several trips to understand what was wrong.

The problem, he had come to see, was in the sanitized version that was now being offered for public consumption.
Hartsfield Airport was now the nation’s busiest; gone were the Confederate battle flags, the faux-lithograph postcards portraying red-clay fields of cotton, even the mural re-creating the Battle of Stone Mountain that had greeted travelers of an earlier year. All these had been replaced by ubiquitous photo-posters of Southern belles carefully posed in hoop-skirted coquettishness on the immaculate lawns of restored antebellum mansions. Today the Stars and Bars had been recast as a racist symbol; the plantations raised only tourist dollars; the coterie of modern Scarletts featured a more or less equal mix of races, skin hues and, presumably, creeds.

It was, he supposed, social progress of a sort—though Beck often wondered if blatant historical revisionism caused more problems than it cured. Better to embrace the past, or at least acknowledge its mistakes, than to remanufacture a homogenized history from random bits and scraps that survived the censor’s scissors. All this was the Disney version of the Old South; and even as an unreconstructed Yankee, Beck felt the poorer for it.

He was jostled from his thoughts, bumped from the front by a woman in a rumpled business suit; then, almost simultaneously, from behind by a man in wilted shirtsleeves whose coat was draped over an arm. Both muttered their automatic pardons, their minds already otherwise occupied, before pushing past in opposite directions.

As always, the airport was chaotic. If you fly anywhere in the South, you change planes in Atlanta. The terminal was packed with throngs of the harried, the overwrought, the perplexed. Beck moved as quickly as possible through the gate area, pressed forward by his fellow arrivals still filing down the jetway behind him. Together they formed one of the countless tributaries that merged into a constant flow of humanity pouring through the airport terminal. Beck spotted an eddy, an empty space along the wall. He claimed it for his own, planting his bag at his feet.

“Dr. Casey!” The voice came from behind, and as Beck
turned he found himself face-to-face with a young woman almost as tall as himself. She was dressed in a light summer suit that was cut severely, almost like a uniform. Dark hair fell just short of her shoulders before curling slightly inward; it framed a face attractive in what Beck considered a serious-scholar sort of way. But her hands were delicate and lovely, not needing the adornment of jewelry and sensibly displaying none, and her eyes were a startling green.

“Dr. Casey?” This time the voice was interrogative. “Dr. Beck Casey?”

“Maybe,” he said. “If I am, do we know each other?”

“Pardon me,” she said, a hint of impatience in her tone. “I’m supposed to meet a Dr. Casey arriving from Chicago on Delta.” She looked over her shoulder at the few Chicago passengers still milling about the gate area.

“Guilty as charged,” Beck said, and grinned. “Let me guess: Larry Krewell sent you here, right?”

She nodded, and held out her hand. “I’m Andrea Wheelwright, Doctor. From CDC. Dr. Krewell had an unexpected schedule conflict, and I volunteered to meet your flight. You, uh . . . fit the description Dr. Krewell provided.”

“And Larry’s description said what, exactly?”

She colored slightly. “Well—tall. Dark hair.” She smiled. “He described your age as—I’m quoting here—‘either a well-preserved forty or a dissipated-looking thirty-five.’And he said you probably wouldn’t be dressed like a doctor.”

Beck looked down at an Iowa State T-shirt that had once been black, tucked into faded denim jeans. On his feet were salt-stained Top-Siders, no socks. On the carpeted floor beside them, an oversized gym bag that had seen better days bulged with Beck’s traveling kit. Only the laptop Power-Book, slung over his shoulder in its spotless black ballistic nylon case, seemed out of place in an appearance that might, with extreme charity, be described as casual.

“Nailed it, didn’t he?” Beck said, laughing.

The crowd jostled them again, and Andrea Wheelwright
scooped up the gym bag with an ease that belied its weight. “I have a car outside,” she said, and—using the bag as a ram—led the way. She pushed through the throngs with enthusiasm, and forced a passage for herself and Beck on the crowded tram to the main terminal. There, she surged ahead to a long escalator that led upward to natural sunlight. He followed in the wake she left, deferring to what he recognized as an expert pathfinder.

Outside, an illegally parked Ford Mustang pressed against the curb under a sign that read
TOWAWAY ZONE
. It drew annoyed glances from the airport traffic police, but little more: a printed card propped inside the windshield said
CDC
/
CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL
—
OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT VEHICLE
in large letters, above an impressive block of smaller type. The woman beeped the door locks and moved quickly to the driver’s side. Tossing the bag in the seat behind her, she slid in and the engine roared to life. Before Beck could completely close the passenger door, she was pulling into the passing stream of vehicles.

“Pretty handy, I bet.” Beck nodded at the card. He pulled the seat belt around himself and locked it with a click, just as his driver cut hard into a faster lane. He heard the sound of brakes squealing and involuntarily braced for an impact that did not materialize.

“Are we in a hurry?”

“Actually, Dr. Casey,” she began, “I just assumed—”

“Please, let’s drop the ‘doctor,’ ” Beck interrupted. “Why don’t you call me Beck? Then I can call you Andrea.”

“Andi, if you please. Only my mother uses the other name. Pardon me, but you’re
not
a doctor?” She pulled from the airport ramp onto the expressway and accelerated in a manner that pressed Beck into the seat back.

“My doctorate is in history. And sociology.”

“Ah, a professor.”

“Yes and no. Having dual specialties seems to annoy both the sociology department and the history department at most
universities—at least, it sure pisses off their tenure committees.”

“Really. I had no idea.”

“I’m glad you saw that truck,” Beck said, trying to sound unconcerned. “So I’ve become a professional visiting academic. I’ve worked on four campuses in three years. Right now I’m a guest lecturer at the University of Chicago—or will be when the term starts next month.” He glanced pointedly at the speedometer. “If I live that long.”

“Dr. Krewell seems to know you well. Have you worked together?”

“I met Larry years ago, when I was living in D.C.”

He noticed her eyes flicker toward him momentarily, and he was careful to sound casual. “Georgetown, on a nice little government grant. I was working on my master’s then, and was still afflicted with literary ambitions. So I was trying to research a book.”

“Really? What was the subject?”

Beck flinched as a minivan changed lanes in front of them; Andi’s Mustang swerved around it tightly and expertly.

“Looking back, it was a little pretentious. A history of the impact of pandemic diseases on world history. You know—the Black Death. Cholera. Smallpox. Plague books were considered sexy for a while back then. I thought I’d cash in on the trend and maybe start building a reputation at the same time. I interviewed a lot of people. Larry was sort of the Army’s up-and-coming resident expert.”

“He would have been at USAMRIID—or was it still called Fort Detrick, back then?”

Beck smiled, but said nothing. In the circles he had once traveled, it was considered bad form to mention that someone had been posted to Detrick, despite the new reputation the military installation had spared no effort to build for itself. At least USAMRIID—the acronym for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where today the work focused on vaccines and treatments—carried
fewer connotations of the biological weapons that was once Detrick’s sole reason for existence.

“So, was your book a success?”

Beck made a show of scowling darkly, then grinned in unison with his driver.

“Took too long to write it,” he said. “By the time I finished, public tastes had moved on. But at least I didn’t have to give the grant money back.”

And that’s not exactly a lie,
Beck thought.

In fact, ultimately the book had been published, though distribution had been limited to a small, select audience—all of whom received salaries from the United States government. It had also led to a job offer, then a career, in a profession he had once thought existed only in fiction. But he could think of no reason to proffer this information to Andi Wheelwright, or to anyone else who did not carry the requisite clearance.

After all, he thought with a flash of bitter regret, he had not offered it to Deborah—at least, not during the years when it might have made the difference to both of them. And by the time he might have been ready to do so, the information had already been devaluated, torn from him by violent strangers whose calculated interrogations had been more intimate than anything he had shared with his wife. In the aftermath, Deborah had no longer seemed inclined to know.

He shook off the dark thoughts and turned to his driver.

“So, Andi—is it Dr. Wheelwright, or Ms. Wheelwright?”

She looked at Beck briefly, and—he thought—speculatively.

“I’m not a doctor,” she said, easily, her eyes back on the traffic. “Most of my work involves public information.”

“Aha—we’re both in the same business,” Beck said, and was puzzled at the look she shot him. “Writing and teaching, I mean. Do you always drive this fast?”

“Uh-huh.” Another lane change snapped Beck’s head sideways. “Beck, could we talk when we get to CDC? I’m
sorry, but I kind of need to keep my mind on the road right now.”

“No problem,” Beck assured her, the cars outside a solid blur in his peripheral vision. Unconsciously, he drew his knees closer to his chest. “Absolutely. You go ahead and concentrate. Please.”