Immortality (32 page)

Mark got into a bubble suit and entered the lab without signing the entry log. He hooked up to an air supply line which was dangling just inside. He was alone in the lab. His sample collection was stored inside a vault resembling a meat freezer with a top-opening hatch. He punched in a numeric code and opened the hatch. The temperature was held at just above freezing. Inside were cardboard boxes filled with traps containing raw water samples and bait COBIC. Each test tube trap was the size of his little finger. Each one was hermetically sealed with a Teflon plug and a wire cage much like a champagne cork. He picked up a trap. The label indicated it had been collected from a wetland in Marina Del Rey. He held it up to the light. The liquid looked brackish like bad pond water. The brown-green color was Chromatium Omri.

He felt an insane urge to open the trap and drink it. He could do it. No one could stop him. He could take off his suit in seconds and down the liquid. What would it taste like? In this small glass vial teemed the creatures that had made him famous – and maybe a few of the infected ones that were now well on their way to destroying the world. The sample was probably not infected and wouldn’t kill him, but drinking it was certainly a one-way ticket to a refugee shelter for the duration... and what if it did kill him? Why not finish the job a little quicker? There was poetry in that. Civilization was probably doomed and justifiably so. Our species was really little more than a self-centered mob ravaging the body of Mother Nature. Mark swirled the glass test tube and looked closely at the stirred up sediment in the water. He knew he hadn’t lost all self-control. He knew he wouldn’t really drink it… would he? How many times had he thought about the irony that this lowly bacterium, something little more than a swimming vegetable, was bringing down the most advanced species in the history of the world… then he thought about Mary and Julie and Gracy.

Mark realized he was breathing hard enough to make himself dizzy. It felt like insulin imbalance. His fingers holding the vial were trembling. He set the vial carefully back into the freezer-vault, next to its cousins. He stared at all the traps for a moment longer before sealing the lid. They had been gathered from storm drains, aqueducts, beaches, and thousands of other sites across L.A. County. The fact that virtually the entire county was riddled with sources of unprocessed water was significant. The obvious theory which he’d told Kathy was that the city’s water was one huge reservoir for this microbe and the disease which accompanied it.

Mark leaned against the freezer-vault with both hands. The valiums had lowered his blood pressure, anger only made him feel worse, and now his diabetes did feel like it was stirring. He fought to hold his train of thought. He sensed there was something important in it. The problem with proving the water theory was that the sampling times were random, and no traps had been in place before the kill zone. Tests could prove the presence of infected COBIC if they found it, but they could never prove its absence.

Pushing the uncertainty aside, it was still a logical assumption that people were drinking this water after it was contaminated and then became infected themselves or was it a logical assumption? The water could have been infected at the same time and from the same source as the people. There were hundreds of documented cases where a spouse or roommate had left town just before the event and had survived. In some cases, moments of air travel time separated survival and death. They had one case of a jet with thirty percent mortality on the runway, while the jet in front of it with zero mortality had lifted off moments before. They had found not a single case where a spouse or roommate had died while out of town. All this was statistically impossible if simple exposure to contaminated water was the source of contagion. A critical clue lurked here but Mark could not even get a glimmer of it. He just repeated the facts again and again until his brain was too tangled to think.

The bubble suit Mark had used was being sterilized as he headed back to his office. Thoughts of drinking some of the gin that was hidden in his desk drawer were comforting. He could almost taste it. Images of Gracy and Mary and Julie seemed to float with him down the hall. They were ghosts illuminated by his guilt. He knew their deaths weren’t his fault, but knowing made no difference. He hoped the gin would dull the pain.

The helo was one of the new specially outfitted Blackhawks that were environmentally sealed. Masks and hoods were optional until they landed, but noise cancelling headphones were needed in order to arrive with hearing intact. Kathy was sharing the bumpy ride on this outbound shuttle to Los Angeles. An Army Major sat across from her. He was wearing an unusual NBC suit – it was camouflaged instead of the red and white color coding. The suit was also a different model than what everyone else was using. There was an insignia stenciled on his arm just below the shoulder: a cobra curled around a sword. The emblem was reminiscent of the medical profession’s symbol, the Caduceus. On the bottom of the insignia was the word BARDCOM. His name and rank was stenciled on the suit above his breast.

The Major looked up and caught her staring at him. Kathy looked away just as he smiled. He was a handsome man with a large frame and sharp blue eyes. The ride was getting rougher. The pilot had explained they’d be hitting shears caused by Santa Ana winds. Kathy had learned on her second day here that Santa Anas were heat-driven winds that came off the Mojave Desert and turned the Southland into a temporary paradise or prickly hell, depending on their mood.

The helicopter shook. Kathy clamped her jaw tight. Some of the bumps were hard enough to jar her tailbone. Her kidneys were beginning to ache. This was like riding in a truck with a bad suspension. She thought about how Mark would have hated this flight. She hoped he would be alright. She’d been torn between leaving him alone and trying to get him to come along and help. He was so depressed and filled with self-anger. Getting out and doing some work might have been good for him, but it was still very early in the grief cycle. In three days he’d lost his daughter, lover, and ex-wife. He was entitled to his emotions; and besides, it was impossible to help someone who didn’t want to be helped. He’d made it clear he wasn’t ready to give up his guilt. He was such an asshole the other day when she was trying to coax him into getting some food into his stomach.

“Hello Miss Morrison, I’m Major Kenny Smith,” the voice came over her headphones.

Kathy was startled but hoped it hadn’t shown. How did he know her name? She keyed the mic on her headphones.

“Have we met?” she asked.

The major smiled and pointed from across the aisle at her gasmask which was in her lap. She looked down. Her last name in block letters was on the faceplate label along with the words ‘Civilian-CDC.’ She looked at his eyes. He was flirting with her. She became terrified.

“I don’t bite,” he said. “Unless of course you like that.”

“I do... I mean I don’t… I’m Kathy.”

Damn it, she could feel herself blushing. She was reacting like a schoolgirl. She thought about her last disastrous date, the one she’d ditched at the restaurant. She tried to calmed herself. Did she find this guy interesting?

“What do you do?” she asked.

“I’m a problem solver.”

“So am I,” she said. “I was wondering earlier what that insignia is for? Boy Scout merit badge? I can’t make the letters work.”

“So that’s what you were looking at. And here I thought you were checking me out.”

“No, I’m just fascinated with merit badges.”

The major unbuckled his seatbelt and moved next to her, but not too close. A pleasant chill tingled over her skin. She was caught off guard by how gentle his eyes looked.

“The insignia is for my unit. We’re specially trained to handle these kinds of situations.”

“These kinds?” said Kathy.

“Chemical attacks.”

“But this isn’t a chemical,” said Kathy. “It’s bacteriological. We know it’s linked to a bacterium called Chromatium Omri.”

“Probably true; but the profile matches the chemical warfare scenarios we’ve been working with, so they activated my unit. But I don’t want to talk shop. Tell me, Kathy Morrison problem solver, where are you from?”

“Atlanta. I’m a doctor with the CDC.”

“The Peach State. I’ve never made it out to Atlanta, but I’ve always heard there are some very nice things in Atlanta.”

“Thank you,” said Kathy. She was starting to enjoy the attention being lavished on her. “Where are you stationed, soldier?”

“Nellis Air Force base in Nevada.”

“Las Vegas, ahuh...”

“And what’s that ‘ahuh’ supposed to mean?” he asked.

“Are you a gambler?”

“Only in love... Would you like to have a drink with me when we get back?”

“ I’ll give you favorable odds.”

“Maybe we can...”

The pilot cut into their conversation over the intercom. Kathy wondered for the first time had people been listening? The pilot announced that they would be landing in ten minutes; time to put on their masks and hoods. Kenny helped her. His fingers touched her cheek and she involuntarily responded with a movement of her chin as if he were going to kiss her. She felt a little embarrassed, but he seemed so natural about it all. It had been a long time since she’d felt the touch of a man like that.

The helo landed and Kenny got out, but not before getting her phone number. Kathy stayed on for the next hop. She was going to a Red Cross facility to interview three specific patients. Something odd and significant had been discovered while sifting data through a computer model. The anomaly was something that might explain why all the deaths had occurred in the space of less than an hour and why not a single additional person had died in days. This contagion hit with a vengeance and then disappeared. At first, Kathy had thought it was possible that survivors of the first hour had built up an immunity of some kind, which would explain why they hadn’t fallen victim to the disease a day or two later. This new computer model had put an end to that line of speculation.

The model showed that kill zones were areas of fatal exposure never more than a few hundred yards in diameter, and that large events were actually clusters of these smaller zones stitched together like the cells of a deadly body. There was even more controversial data from the model that suggested some zones might be almost perfect circles. So what at first had appeared to be a single large kill zone in Los Angeles was in fact a cluster of thousands of small zones. The model also showed that the random killing – or sparing – by this disease was actually purely the result of the geographic pattern of smaller zones. Location was the ultimate arbiter of who lived or died. If someone was unlucky enough to be within one of the small zones, the person had a ninety-nine point nine percent chance of dying. If someone was outside the boundary of a zone even by a few feet, they survived one hundred percent of the time. Kathy had compiled a short list of people who had lost everyone they were living or working with and who had survived while surrounded by their dying companions deep inside a zone. They were the exceptions to the geographic grim reaper. She believed she would find another Harold N. in this short list of haunted souls. She was searching for that one person out of a thousand who survived even though the computer model indicated they should be dead. She had other CDC investigators searching out the same kind of anomalous people in New Jersey.

The prior day, Kathy interviewed two survivors who fit the profile; but after careful questioning, it became clear that both of them had to be disqualified. One had lied on the questionnaire, in hopes of getting out of the refugee camp; another had apparently been a hundred feet outside of the epicenter of death at the critical moment.

The helo lifted off as Kathy walked away from it. The rotor wash blew bits of debris past her feet. This was her second trip here. This refugee camp was far nicer than all others she’d visited and included the only fully rated surgical field hospital and mental ward. Like the other camps, this one was also divided into clean and dirty zones. The difference here was that the clean side was almost unused. This camp was mostly staffed by personnel who had been exposed to COBIC. The tents were set up across a closed municipal airfield. Running water, sewage, and electricity were provided in each barrack sized tent. The people here were better cared for, but they displayed the same detachment as in the other shelters. There was the ever-present vacant look in their eyes and lethargy in their expressions. Kathy found herself thinking a shelter is still a prison, only with a kinder name. A barbed wire fence patrolled by guards with dogs still encircled these people.

As she was escorted to the field hospital, Kathy glanced into the open entrances of some of the tents. Most people were sleeping on cots. Those that were awake were playing cards or eating. The very energetic were treading along the miles of footpaths, brief sprints of energy between long hours of nothing to do. It must have been miserable for them to watch red-suited visitors that could come and go at will, the new upper class born of tragedy. Isolated incidents of violent attacks had occurred at other camps. A doctor had been killed in one attack and several people injured in other incidents, which was the reason a pair of armed marines now escorted her through all of the shelters she visited. She tried not to make eye contact with the people. She told herself it was out of respect, but inside she knew it was guilt.

The field hospital was clean and well staffed. Many of the workers were not clothed in NBC suits. Most were either local volunteers or exposed medical personnel; but a few were outside doctors that had chosen to go without protection, as an act of solidarity and a statement that these people were not dangerous.

A Dr. Estevez greeted her at the entrance to a waiting room and took over for the marine guards who remained outside. Dr. Estevez wore no NBC suit. Kathy wondered if he was one of the doctors that had chosen solidarity. She wanted to ask but, out of respect, kept quiet. He wore a headset with an attached microphone. Clipped to his belt was a transmitter tuned to her intercom frequency. He was two feet away and still needed a radio to talk with her. Without the radio, her noise canceling headphones would have reduced even his loudest yells to an indistinguishable mumble. Society truly had two new classes of people: the clean and the unclean. How was she going to interview these people when she couldn’t even establish the simple rapport of talking directly with them? Their eyes would touch, but they would never know what she looked like or whether she was smiling. Their conversation would be as intimate as a call from a telemarketer.