The Gemini Virus (21 page)

“What good is diversity if you don’t have a phenomenal voice?” Cho argued back. “When I’m listening to an album, I don’t care who’s playing the instruments. I care about the person up front. The singer.”

“Debbi Dixon really does have a terrific voice,” said Nick Orton. He was one of two assistants, the youngest son in a medical family and just a few years out of Stanford. Porter thought he was a bit of a wimp, but a very cute wimp. She kept catching him staring at one part of her anatomy or another. Even though she wanted to lose about two dozen pounds, she knew she was still pretty; Orton’s obvious interest confirmed this. He was as straight and clean-cut as they came, which would’ve turned her off in the past. Now, to her surprise, she had a vague sense of why someone would find this appealing. She gave no hint of her interest, however, as it was always better to be on the receiving end of a one-sided flirtation.

Russell made a face. “Ugh, she sounds like a damn bird.”

“You mean melodic and beautiful?” Chi said.

“No, I mean she
squawks
. If her register was any higher, it’d disappear to an imperceptible wavelength.” He then added, “Not that I’d mind.”

“What about you, Cara?” Little asked. “Wanna get in on this?”

All eyes turned to her, and for a fleeting moment her stomach tightened. Then it relaxed again, and she intuitively understood why—she
liked
these people. Yes, Kathy Chi was a little annoying. But not prohibitively so. And the others were actually pretty cool.
My God, am I displaying signs of normal socialization?
she ruminated, stifling the urge to laugh.
Would Michael believe this? Would anyone who knew me?

“I think I’m on shaky diplomatic ground here. Do you guys want me to be politically sensitive, or honest?” The disorganized group response unanimously indicated the latter. “Okay, well, I’m afraid I have to go with Russell and Kevin on this. Sorry, Kathy. Sorry, David. In my mind, the harder the sound, the better. And I’m talking about music when I say that, by the way.” She shot a quick glance at David, whose cheeks, to her great delight, warmed to a bright crimson. The others laughed at this unabashed smuttiness, which also pleased her to no end.
They like me
.

Now that Porter’s position on the issue was established, the debate began rolling again. She returned to the sidelines as an observer rather than a participant, and after a while she shifted her attention to the last person in the room—a young woman named Cherise, who sat curled up in a chair in one corner, reading a virology textbook while absently nibbling on the fingernail of her left pinkie. Like David, she was one of the lab assistants with a freshly minted undergrad degree. And also like David, she was shy almost to the point of paralysis. While Porter suspected this to be feelings of intimidation and inferiority in David’s case, Cherise’s introversion was due more to external factors. According to the others, she’d had a nightmare childhood courtesy of an alcoholic father and an embittered mother. How she managed to work around it and get into college in the first place, much less pay for it, Porter could not fathom. But she quickly came to admire the girl.

She slid down the bench and said, “Hey, whatcha reading? Anything good?”

Cherise looked up briefly, her eyes glazed with concentration. “The chapter on retroviruses. Converting RNA to DNA and so on.”

“Interesting stuff.”

“It is.”

“Do you have any questions about anything?”

“I’m on the part about structural proteins, and I’m not clear on the protein that makes up the capsids. It’s separate from the virus’s main protein, right?”

“Yes, it’s called a ‘gag’ protein. The name comes from the phrase ‘group-specific antigen.’ Some retroviruses, though not all, have capsid proteins that induce cross-reactive antibodies.”

“And these capsids contain critical enzymes?”

“Yes, but only copies of those enzymes. Spares, you might say—protease, integrase, and reverse transcriptase pol. They’re crucial for the virus’s ability to infect the host cells early in the process.”

Cherise nodded. “Okay, thank you.”

“Sure.”

Porter smiled as Cherise went back to the book. Teaching, she’d recently discovered through her interactions with both Cherise and David, was a practice she enjoyed. The notion of becoming an educator had struck her as absurd in years past, when the only image she associated with it was of a roomful of screaming, obstinate children. But when she encountered someone like these two—attentive, driven, eager to learn—such a career seemed very satisfying.

Kevin Little checked his watch—a behemoth waterproof thing with a knobby band—and clapped his hands together. “Okay, everybody,” he said, “time to get back to the salt mines. Remember the new cases we heard about this morning.” Eleven more fatalities in the surrounding area, including a family of four found in their home, strangled to death by the mother, who then hanged herself in the garage. Little had a friend on the police force who gave him daily updates, and he used them to keep his team focused. “The sooner we get to the bottom of this, the sooner it all stops.”

The group rose in unison. Little’s choice of metaphor echoed in Porter’s mind as they filed toward the door.
Back to the salt mines. Sounds like a Michaelism. Old men and their funny sayings …

“Cara,” Little called out as they went down the hallway, “I have wonderful news. You’ve pulled cage duty this evening.”

The others cackled like monkeys—“cage duty” was the unpleasant task of cleaning out the enclosures occupied by the experiment animals. It was disgusting at best, but unavoidable since budgetary constraints precluded the hiring of a lackey. Until now, Porter had been deeply thankful she hadn’t drawn this card.

While the others continued ogling, her stomach tightened into a hard knot, one that would endure and worsen as the day dragged on. She suddenly felt ill, nearly nauseated. She also felt a dim anger toward the man who had burdened her with this grim assignment.

Regardless, she managed to reply with a hoarse, “Okay,” hoping the rage she felt had no presence in her tone.

ELEVEN

If it’s going to rain, I wish it would just do it,
Dennis thought as he stared through the kitchen window again. It had been gray and gloomy for two days, yet not a drop had fallen.

The scrambled eggs sizzled and popped in the grill pan in front of him. He kept prodding them with the spatula, trying to get them evenly cooked and finely chopped. Billy sat in his chair, waiting. He was playing with a pair of little toy trucks, crashing them together in slow motion while adding his own sound effects. Scooter watched him from a sitting position, his tail sweeping the floor every time Billy giggled.

Dennis sang along softly to Dave Matthews’s “Too Much,” which was playing on the under-cabinet stereo.
“Oooh, traffic jam got more cars than a beach got sand.…”
He remembered how much he liked the song, and that he kept a copy of Matthews’s
Crash
CD here, when he spoke with Elaine on the phone about an hour earlier and it was playing in the background on her car system. She was on her way to work after a luxuriant six hours’ sleep and giving him updates. He and Andi had also been following reports via radio and the Internet. Over six thousand dead in twenty-three states, the American economy slowing down, and the possibility of an Iranian connection.
If this keeps up, we’ll be living here forever,
he thought, and shuddered at the prospect of that actually happening.
We’ll also be the only ones left alive
. That was utterly ridiculous, he told himself. Of course it was.
But the fact that you even thought it.…
There was a time when such an idea wouldn’t even have materialized on the most distant edges of his consciousness.

“Daddy…”

“Huh? Oh, sorry. Sorry.”

He dug under the eggs and flipped them one more time. They had browned on the bottom as the last of the butter evaporated, but at least they weren’t burnt. Billy wouldn’t complain either way, as he had a most agreeable attitude toward food for a five-year-old. But Chelsea would—she expected eggs to be
yellow,
not brown. She was that way about everything she ate—if what was on that plate wasn’t precisely what she envisioned, she’d either cut and pick off the parts she didn’t like or wouldn’t eat at all. She didn’t whine, though, and Dennis was grateful for that. She might make a face, but—thank merciful God—she wasn’t much of a whiner compared to the average second-grader. Still, he planned to make her eggs next, so he had to be careful. After that, an omelet for Andi. She loved a good egg-and-cheese omelet.

Andi and Chelsea had apparently decided to sleep in this morning. It was going on seven thirty, and the door to their bedroom still hadn’t opened. Technically, of course, it was Dennis and Andi’s bedroom, but the buddy system had been reworked due to a thunderstorm that began in the middle of the night. One parent slept with one child because neither of the latter was willing to sleep “alone.” So it was Dennis and Billy in the kids’ room, and Andi and Chelsea, along with Scooter most nights, in the adults’ room. It was the first time Dennis had slept without his wife beside him since they were married—and he didn’t have the heart to tell Andi he’d never felt so rested. There were two single beds in there, so he was by himself. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept so deeply or felt so refreshed. He even began having vivid dreams again.

He heard Billy coughing behind him, and in that strange way the human body sometimes responds to the ailments of others, a cough coalesced in his own chest and rose to the surface.

“You can thank your father for that,” he said as he lifted the frypan from the coil, whose orange glow was fading quickly. “I’ve got the allergies in the family. The pollen up here is unbelievable.” He tried to inhale through his nostrils, but they were both clogged. “Mold, too. So I guess we can thank Mother Nature as well.”

He shoveled a portion of the scrambled eggs onto Billy’s Styrofoam plate, then put the rest on his own. The bacon was already done and being sweated of its excess grease in a folded paper towel. He took a test bite of one slice, deemed it suitable, then gave two to his son. Billy looked at him adoringly; he loved bacon. It was hardly nutritional, but today was Sunday—what the Jensens liked to call “Bacon Day.” Everyone got to eat whatever they wanted for breakfast and hang the health considerations. Bacon was a staple because they all loved it, although Chelsea sometimes deviated to hash browns or—best of all, when her parents bought them—pork sausages.

Dennis was halfway through his meal when another coughing jag came over Billy. The little boy’s face twisted with pain as bits of phlegm—pale and tinted green, Dennis noticed with alarm—flew out. Then he began turning an ashy shade of grayish blue. Dennis, thinking he was choking, jumped out of his seat. He knocked his orange juice over in the process.

“Billy? Are you okay? Hey—”

The child was leaning forward with his mouth open, and there was a peculiar expression on his face—more confusion than fear, as if he was puzzled by what was happening and waiting to see what came next. Then a thin string of blood came out, extending from Billy’s mouth to the egg heap with the laziness of a spider on a thread.

Dennis thumped him on the back with his open hand. “Billy?
Billy!
” He tried again, then a third time. What dropped out after the last blow was a revolting package of phlegm, blood, scrambled eggs, and warm milk. The boy gasped for air, refilling his lungs in great and noisy heaves.

“Oh, thank God,” Dennis said, his hand on his chest as his heart rate slowly diminished. “Thank G—”

Then the screams
—“Dennis!
DENNIS
!
”

They were muffled, distant, and he instantly understood why—they were coming from behind a closed door.

Upstairs …

“
DENNIS
!
”

He was up the rough-hewn steps in seconds. The door was just to the right, and he pushed it back roughly. Andi and Chelsea were sitting together with their knees raised, holding each other tight, and crying wildly.

They were covered with rashes.

*   *   *

Porter had waited until everyone else left before she cleaned out the cages that night; it gave her the privacy she needed to fire a line of profanities in the general direction of Kevin Little. If there was one aspect of lab work she had always hated with a passion, it was experimenting on animals. She knew it was necessary to infect them so their physiological reactions could be observed, recorded, and studied … but to see them suffer, even if it was for a greater good, was unbearable. She had a professor in college, handsome like a model in a cologne ad, who grinned with his perfect teeth and told her soothingly that she’d get used to it. But she never did. Even if watching one mouse endure the agonies of cancer led to the finding of an across-the-board cure, she still felt there was something wrong with it. For this alone, she seriously considered joining Beck in the field of epidemiology and leaving virology to those who had the stomach for it.

She kept her focus on the large computer screen, on the ultramagnified images of one sample after another, in the hope that she’d see something significant: some sign that one of the many treatments they were trying would prove effective. Information was flying around the world between the eight labs that were now working nonstop, via computer, fax, and telephone. No one had made any progress, and frustration was mounting. Since this was a new virus, they were having trouble building a foundation upon which to attack it. Exhaustive examination of Ben Gillette’s gene map had gleaned little. One of the CDC people believed there might be an influenza connection, although none of the drugs geared in that direction had made an impact. With the media, the politicians, and the general public putting pressure on the Centers to produce results at any cost, out-of-the-box thinking was now being encouraged, albeit quietly and indirectly. Porter shivered when she’d heard this, as she knew what it meant—
anything goes
. A part of her wanted to lock the animal room and hide the keys. But then she reminded herself of the necessity of it all.…