Mercy 6 (17 page)

She stole the laser pen from Mullich's pocket. She fired its beam into her cupped palm. Showed him. Six deaths in one second. She aimed the pen toward Dmir. She could put a red dot on his big forehead.

She pulled Mullich's laptop toward her. “I need to use this.”

She only breathed the words, mouthed them carefully. “Yours. Not mine.
Capice
?”

Mullich squinted at her. Dmir's speech became nothing more than a drone, a recap of their cases, a vent sputtering somewhere.

As Dmir went on, she began her research. Mullich did something to his screen, some function she did not understand. The screen changed color, to a kind of dull orange.

Mullich saw everything.

Mendenhall found one site, then another. Mullich reached over to help. Forty thousand tons of cosmic dust falls to Earth every day. Every day. This was the average. She found the most scientific sites, ones full of equations. She eased her eyes on the calculus, felt Mullich doing the same. They saw a photo of three cosmologists from the Kivla Institute crouching over a collection pool, a type of radar dish filled with water, mirroring the sky. They saw microscopic photos of the particles, some globular, some crystalline.

Somewhere in the middle of Dmir's speech, his notes on Albert Cabral, she found a local cosmologist who was somehow connected to the Kivla Institute. A consultant. Not a cosmologist, technically.

An astrochemist. A chemist. Someone who had covered childhood sketch pads with the periodic table while listening to the purple dinosaur sing. Someone crude and molecular.

“Him,” she whispered to Mullich. “I need to go
see
. Him.” She pointed to the name atop the website: Dr. Jude Covey. Below the name was another photo of cosmologists crouched around a collecting pool, two men and a woman. The caption didn't name the scientists, just said
we
. The sky and its reflection in the circle of water appeared Scandinavian, broken clouds with rims of light.

When it became clear that Dmir was not going to discuss the outside possibles, was not going to take them to Iceland, Mendenhall knew she would not be able to stay quiet. If he wasn't going to present bodies, occlusions, scans, she had to leave. She clambered over Mullich, her breasts skimming his forehead. Mullich took hold of her hips and helped ease her over. She struggled through the equipment in the darkness, her coat snagging on an old EKG

monitor, the kind with suction cups. Dmir paused, visored his hand over his eyes. Everyone turned to her.

She found Claiborne's silhouette, scanned the seats, sort of bowed.

“Everything,” she said. She firmed her voice. “Everything on One is ready for you. Whatever you need. I have a call. Sorry. ER, you know?”

She finished her exit, let them see her hop, slide, and stumble through the remaining obstacles.

The Higgs boson used to be called the God Particle, a force predicted by the math of subatomic physics. The math led to an absence, a particle that had to exist due to the behavior of the subatomic sphere, that behavior defined by a weakening.

Mendenhall began reading the math, had to stop herself. She would have liked nothing more than to sip tea and see how far she could follow it, the expression of the Higgs boson.

Thorpe's God Particle was an unseen and unknown virion, submicro, existing outside most definitions of life, not composed of cells but able to reproduce, able to act, those actions defined by hiding, disguise, and opportunistic moving, sliding. Not inanimate but not life. A-life. Thorpe's God Particle was also predicted by absence but not one evidenced in math. It was predicted by history.

Medicine was stacked on history. A correct diagnosis—this man has influenza caused by an RNA virus—can be traced back through medical history, never veering from the text, to a laughable diagnosis: This man is sick from walking the cold, wet heath.

Mullich's God Particle was a hypothetical mass defined by its velocity and its effects on surrounding cells and particles. It would be microscopic. It would be extrasolar, produced by a stellar explosion somewhere in the galaxy. These particles exist, are prevalent. They have been defined by math. They have been collected. They have been photographed. They hide in apathy. No one cares about them except the few scientists who collect and study them. They are pieces of glass or metal. Studying them earns no reward or recognition.

Studying dark matter, antimatter, the Higgs boson, earns reward, money, even makes it to television. Studying Thorpe's virions earns the same.

Take me with you when you go.

It was full morning. They stood on the roof, the telescope relic focusing the sun into a hard white circle on the surface between them. The daylight gave her near-vertigo, the way it always did after night shift, her circadian rhythm awry. Below, blocking the roads from Mercy General, white trucks had morphed into white vans. In daylight she could see that the vans had clusters above them, receivers and transmitters and surveillance. Mullich followed her gaze. He pointed to ones she had not seen right away, the ones in camouflage with armored sides. He pointed to the roof of a far building, about a mile away, where that night helicopter roosted.

“The cases in Boston,” she told him. “They're false.”

He nodded.

“The one in Reykjavik.” Her voice faltered. She had to take an extra breath. “There may be something.”

The look he gave her—for him it was a gentle one, the closest to gentle she had seen. An angle of revelation in his expression, a nick of a smile. “Does that break your resolve?”

“It heightens it.” She almost took hold of his hand, wanted to feel the coolness of it, the length of fingers. “It gives me necessary complexity. You know?”

“But,” replied Mullich, “it indicates possible outbreak. It gives Thorpe and Disease Control much more power and license. Now their concerns are global. Their audience global. If you still want to do this, you will be heading into something that just got a lot stronger and a lot more vigilante.”

“You think it's shoot to kill?” She made her hand into the shape of a pistol.

“I wouldn't joke,” he said. He folded his hand over hers and pushed it down. “You really need to see that Kivla person?
See
him?

I could maybe get him messages.”

“I do. I have to see Jude Covey's reactions and I have to have a full exchange. What I'm thinking is new to me. I need to have an exchange with an expert. My expertise with his. Just like you with me.”

He appeared to like this, drew his finger along his jaw.

“Okay, then.”

He pointed to an area just beyond south parking, where the scrub of the foothills met the asphalt of the lot. “See that little protrusion of stone? That stump just poking out of the brush?”

She thought he was demonstrating averted vision again. She felt way beyond that. But she complied, and she looked, and she saw it. Something she had passed a thousand times and never thought about, never bothered to identify as anything more than an oddly large and upended stone.

“I see it.”

“It's a remnant,” he told her. “Most likely a sundial. All around it are other stones and pebble lines, almost hidden beneath decades of scrub and brush and soil. But it's in the original landscape blueprints. A therapy garden. The kind still prominent back then, in the 1930s.”

“For the loonies.” She rubbed her eyes, glanced at the sun for needed sting. “Like me.”

“And for physical therapy. And for the doctors. Like your running trails out there.”

She could kind of see it, a vague impression in the scrub and hardpan surrounding the stone remnant. Shallow, truncated pathways among the sumac, a line here and there too straight for nature.

She nodded.

“It was named for the mother of the doctor who started this place.” Mullich tapped the telescope relic. “The same man who put this here.”

“He wasn't happy. Was looking for a way out.”

“Probably you're right,” replied Mullich.

He straightened his arm, pointed to the sundial ruin, checked her eyes, made sure she followed. He swung his aim slightly and said, “There, two paces left of that stone, is your exit.”

The word struck her, confused and clarified. It verified what he was doing—for her. But she could not see how any exit—any literal exit—could be way out there beyond south parking. She feared he was speaking metaphorically, something that would have hurt her, coming from him. But then she knew he couldn't be. He was Mullich.

He offered her a view of his tablet. On it was an old-looking blueprint of Mercy General, a vertical cut showing only the two bottom floors and three basements. Another basement suddenly new to her. He circled his finger around the very bottom rectangle.

“This really isn't a floor, technically. It's airspace between terra firma and the building. Buildings do not rest on the ground, as most people believe. They are tied to the ground. For us—architects—

they are structures wont to float, to rise and shift. The pier posts are drilled deep into the earth. They don't just stabilize and offer foundation. They fasten. Get it?”

She nodded, still wondering about
exit
.

“What I'm telling you is that it won't be clean down there. It will be grim and unoccupied. An empty space, a vacuum. It will drain you.” He glided his finger along that bottom rectangle, settled on a smudge just outside the wall. “This,” he said. “This vague shading is a bomb shelter. Built later. You can guess when. Whoever built it marked the blueprint with this shading. And that's all.”

“You know it's there?”

He nodded. “Sure. Right when I saw this shading. It's what I would have done if asked to build a bomb shelter.”

“But you verified?”

“Of course. I ventured into the airspace and found the metal door. I used penetrating oil to break the galvanization on the handle. It's a submarine door. I went into the shelter. It's small.

Good for maybe ten people. Maybe they had plans to construct more along the other walls.”

“So you went in,” she said. “It was okay.”

“But I'm used to such spaces. Given what I do. Reconstruction.

You're not.”

She started to speak. He pressed his finger to her lips. The touch felt cool and pleasant.

“There's more. Listen. The shelter has a sealed vent. The vent is also designed as an escape in the event the building collapses.

Obviously it opens from the inside. I didn't crawl in, but I know that would have to be the case. I did go and find where the exit would be. I guessed the garden first thing and was right. But that door is now sealed from the outside as well. It's grated over, and there is a bar and lock. And it would have to be dug out some. I left it pretty much intact.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “I suppose I want to keep it hidden. My escape.

I always do that with my projects. Things like that. Gains in knowledge. Secret passages are the dreams of architects.”

Mendenhall closed her eyes. “So you would have to go over there and unseal it.”

“That's not possible. I haven't figured it out yet.”

She opened her eyes, looked at the city, which was gray and white and beginning to shimmer along its far edges. “I know how to do it. I know of someone. Someone who would want to get in.

Someone who might know how to be . . . clandestine. Someone who would swap. Him in, me out.”

“Who?”

“You'll like this. It's just right for you. Your desire for transparency or redemption—or whatever it is. Democracy?” She wanted to kiss his throat. Just that, just there. “He's a journalist. For the
Times
. He wants to see, to be in here, to report.”

“You won't be able to communicate with him without others knowing.”

“I'll figure out a code. Doctors are great at speaking in code. To patients, to loved ones, to other doctors. We're great at saying only exactly what needs to be said, to be suggested. And leaving it at that. Trusting that.”

He wouldn't look at her. “I know you're right. I know you won't carry a virus out there. Because there is no virus. I know it better than you do.”

“I'm ER. An eternal carrier. I will sterilize myself and be careful out there. Just in case.”

They stood together, quiet for a moment, watching the horizon, a glance or two toward the ruins. They enjoyed the sunlight, the outside air, the intermittent breeze.

“I'll help you as far as I can. You can't take your phone, and even if you can get to your car, you won't be able to drive it out.”

“Look, Mullich,” she said, “I'm a good doctor. I'm ER. I might be heading out there just to prove myself a fool. But I really believe I can help alleviate misery. Inform triage. I know you think I most want to get out there and run free for a while. But that's not what I want most. I want to diagnose. I want to treat.”

In Reykjavik, a young man strolling with a group of friends fell dead on the sidewalk. The forum noted that he had been in perfect health, had been a soccer star for his work team. His friends thought he was joking when he fell; he always liked to scare them with little pranks like that, they said. They said he hadn't taken any drugs. They had all been drinking, but not a lot. They were in between clubs, strolling and laughing as they walked from one to the other. The night was unseasonably warm, and they had all loosened their scarves. He had fallen just after three a.m., Reykjavik time. The ER there had registered him at 0312, unresponsive.

Three twelve. About two hours after Mendenhall's cases—

the Mercy Six. His case had only come up on the forum after the others in his group had been checked for drugs and alcohol.

All of his friends described his fall in the same way: from life to death, from laughing and buoyant to collapse, no gasp or seizure or disorientation or stumble. From alive to dead. Brain scans showed very faint, very mild incipient hemorrhaging in the frontal lobes, nothing near fatal. Pathology still thought it was drugs, was waiting on toxicology.