The Messenger (34 page)
Authors: Stephen Miller
“I’m sorry, I think it’s important to add that all this is just speculation,”
Norment says, shaking his head.
“Khan let his pals do the heavy lifting; they released the India-1 strain—we still have no accurate idea of the number of sites. That, all by itself, is going to be effective; there will be a big die-off. But right behind it comes a second wave, Khan’s superpox, designed to finish off anyone who is left. It’s betrayal,” Sam insists.
“I can’t read the mind of a terrorist,”
Norment says,
“but I can tell you we had this superpox sampled in thirty-one hours, and AVI BioPharma is the lead contractor working to synthesize an antisense patch. Yes, it will take some time to rule out toxicity. We have fully implemented our experimental vaccination programs, and are fast-tracking inoculation development.…”
With the slightest touch of a finger, Sam enlarges Norment’s face. The CDC director is actually smiling. The final absurdity.
“And meanwhile we have Sam’s serum strategy.”
“Yes, meanwhile …” he says. It’s not much and everybody knows it. The serum strategy is a stopgap. An understudy. The big money and the big push will go into developing an antisense patch—essentially a killer genetic sequence that will neuter Khan’s superpox—but while they wait they can hedge their bets by following Sam’s idea to clone antibodies from plasma taken from any of Khan’s inoculated terrorists.
And right now there is only one terrorist alive who may carry a cure in her bloodstream—Vermiglio.
“You think they stopped with smallpox? Don’t be so fricking naïve. You liberals, you just pull the rose-colored glasses down and imagine everyone is rational. These people are the exterminators of the American Dream. They unleashed the anthrax—that was their shock troops. The smallpox is their tanks. The stem rot is their infantry. Hello to you, Charlotte, North Carolina …”
“Hello?”
“You’re on, Charlotte—”
“I just wanted to know about the possibility of ship-borne bioterroristic activity. I was in the Navy and there’s an awful lot of places to hide things on a boat—”
“Yes, there are, Popeye, and we have been screaming day and night about the criminal laxity of the U.S. Customs Service in our ports.”
“They have scanners …”
“Indeed they do. They have scanners that scan for radioactivity, but have you ever heard of lead?”
“That’s my point.”
“And mine too. Go ahead, Newton, Nebraska. Are you an agriculturalist, Newton?”
“Yes I am, Ray. Proud of it.”
“Go ahead.”
“They told us to plant all these seeds, all these seeds that they had engineered. Then last night the Agriculture Department made the announcement that there’s this rust—”
“Stem rust—It’s a fungus that gets on the wheat. The spores eat into the stem and take over. Vampires, that’s what these spores are. They take over the plant and it turns into a zombie. The zombie takes up all the nutrients. Ug99 that’s what it’s called.”
“And this was developed in South Africa …”
“That’s right, and you know what happened there, remember? They had their own arms industry, they had some very sophisticated technology for sale. And their Best Friend Forever was the Israeli government of the day. Don’t forget. Lotta arms deals and police training going back and forth. Righteous act? Feel free to judge, my friends.…”
“You know, we had a meeting this morning with one of the USDA scientists they sent out. They say we might lose seventy percent of our wheat this next harvest.”
“Seventy percent, ladies and gentlemen. My God … you poor folks. I hope you can pull through. This is a crime. I’ve said it. It’s a crime—”
“That’s right, Ray, it is.”
“If it wasn’t for you, Newton, there wouldn’t be any daily bread to break. Go ahead, Seattle, Washington. Some great Washingtonians down through the years. I’m a George Washingtonian myself. Go ahead, Seattle …”
Staring into the velvet night, she drives. Most of the time she’s the only car on the road. Kansas City fading into a memory with each mile she racks up in Niv-L’s lush Mercedes.
The wind has come up and in the distance there is a thunderstorm and lightning flashing down. It’s not hard to push this car up to autobahn speeds, and for long stretches the highway is smooth. All of the roads in this part of the country extend to eternity, as wide open as you can get. A spray of rain comes and she has to touch the wipers a time or two to get the bugs off, but that’s it.
Her only idea is to put as much space and time between her and the people at Fifty-second Street as possible. She’d had it all set up to leave earlier, but she fell asleep. She’d been too tired, and just crashed, that’s all.
So, was it written? After all, she
was
there to save them from Niv-L and his partner. That was a blessing, wasn’t it? The girls and the infant would surely have been caught, tortured, and killed if she had been able to keep herself awake. So … she was there, there with a gun at the right time, and no one was going to hurt that child, no one.…
Was it a sign?
No. No, she does not believe in signs anymore. All she believes in is getting down the road, speeding across the gut of the great American beast. Two days and she’ll set Niv-L’s car on fire … or just abandon it for someone else to steal.
Then …
She’ll walk. And keep on walking.
“… a total of 124 anthrax fatalities in the United States. Smallpox cases for the entire nation are reported to be greater than twelve thousand, but the incubation rate pushes this much higher.”
Revealed to her by the radio, the statistics of what she has been part of change hourly. She drives. She listens. Peering through her windshield, she sees only a sliver of a world gone mad. At Topeka all exits from the interstate are barricaded. Gas stations are open, but deeper entry into the city is only through ramps guarded by Kansas state troopers.
She had played her part as Pestilence, and now others are playing theirs. Now there is talk about Famine in the winter. Now there is War.
So … even though she can’t see much evidence of victory, as she blazes across the rolling Kansas countryside, once again they are telling her that she has won.
It gives her no pleasure. It doesn’t feel like winning. It’s true insanity to call this winning. The hell that she has helped unleash is busily destroying its perpetrators along with their targets.
“More worrisome, at least two different varieties of the variola virus have been analyzed by laboratories including the Army’s USAMRIID facilities in Frederick, Maryland, whose staff stayed on the job despite suffering a direct biological attack. Their discovery, that one varietal of the pox has a higher resistance to existing vaccinations, is being taken as evidence that at least one strain has been genetically engineered.…”
Armageddon—look how fast they embrace it! This, finally, is the long-promised death-wish fulfillment. Scales are falling from the eyes of Americans with every undulation of the road. The first roadblocks, set up with automated signs and flashers, warning her away if she was even thinking about turning …
ENTERING NEWBERVILLE
QUARANTINE
RESIDENTS ONLY
… a lone patrol car at the top of the ramp.
Scanning and seeking, she lands at
All Things Considered
on KPR, which is reporting that American municipalities are interpreting quarantine regulations differently. It’s a lawyers’ paradise; there are federal, state, and municipal laws, regulations, punishments, penalties, and appeals administered by a forest of government agencies. Jurisdictional disputes have already sparked challenges expected to hit the Supreme Court within hours. Taken all together it’s a net gain for Chaos.
She drives, and listens …
Martial law is to be extended in the District of Columbia, after the president meets with a delegation of both houses urging him to completely quarantine the capital.
Two men have been killed in Springfield, Illinois, where they had been surprised in a cornfield and, instead of surrendering, had run.
Tété has died. Succumbing in a “hot ward” of the special military hospital where he had been quarantined.
Thirty-seven people have died from anthrax inhalation in the Emory University neighborhood near the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Most frightening is the breaking news of the food attacks. Fear of fear itself. It comes out in the jittery voices of the newscasters and in those who are being interviewed.
It is chilly when she fills up outside of Wichita. It’s a city she has never heard of and struggles to pronounce, thinking that
Why-cheetah
sounds best. She purchases half a dozen cans of soda from a vending machine.
The bathroom is locked, and the interior of the station closed. The attendant in her booth looks to be in her late forties, brown skinned, but with the mask she’s wearing Daria can’t begin to guess
her race. She wears sanitary gloves and the money goes through the microwave before she makes change.
By dawn every state has mobilized their National Guard Units to assist with quarantine and triage. Three times she passes through agricultural checkpoints where the highway is funneled down to one lane and men in rubber suits wash down everyone’s tires before they are allowed to proceed.
A few miles later she passes a group of obvious refugees—a laden-down camper van, followed by a pickup truck. Both vehicles are crammed with possessions. Leaving the rest behind and getting out of the … out of the
Rust Bowl
.
That’s what they are calling it. She punches her way across the radio bands and listens to the sounds.
The arrows have struck home and now the beast is dying.
“… the FBI is investigating more than two hundred and fifty people who may have had some connection to the attacks.… Omar Sofiane, Abu Yassin Ismail, Daria Vermiglio, Marina Koslova, along with Prana Gil and Delmos Gil, are still being sought. Angela Motosi and her son were apprehended on Wednesday at the border outpost of Del Rio, Texas
.
“Rioting has broken out in Mexico City. For the latest, here is Janine Cathcart of the BBC.…”
Daria slows the car and takes refuge under an overpass, opens the door and squats down and pees. A dozen semis rumble by along the interstate. Then nothing. She stands for a moment looking down the endless highway. It’s so quiet she can hear birds singing.
She turns and surveys the length of the highway. What is she doing here? What chain of logic brought her to this horribly artificial landscape? She is as out of place here as she would be on Mars.
Lost and alone.
All she wants, all she really wants, is to be home. Even with all its squalor and its poverty, it would be better than this dying highway.
She remembers stoned conversations with schoolmates in Florence. Some said there were different dimensions, that everyone had an infinite number of alternative lives, that the rules of physics did not apply universally. There are realities in which she is still back in her house, realities where her family is alive and happy. In such variations maybe she could teach her mother how to laugh again. She suddenly tears up and grinds her fists into her eyes until she can see.
The wind has risen, and she decides that she will just stay under the overpass. She knows that’s what they do in this part of the world when the storms come. How she knows it, she can’t remember. Something from a movie probably.
She will wait. Until tomorrow sometime, until she is dying, and then she’ll surrender. Surrender and then … die. Hopefully faster than Tété did, so they can’t torture her and trace her back to the sisters. To little Daniel.
She knows what the prosecutors would say: Nadja took care of her, Nadja had harbored her. There would be no getting around it, because she had.
It would fall on Monica too. And Brutus, who would have loved her if she only had let him.
No, she can’t stay here, regardless of how tired she is. Some well-meaning trooper will come along, and then it will be all over too soon. Tormented, she climbs in the car and pumps up the volume.
It is a howl, the sound that comes out of her.
It conflates and expands, from a sob to a shriek, as she lets her voice climb over the early-morning Wichita country-rock radio, which is when she learns how to say the name.
It’s the West she’s heading for, and she blows along the interstate, rejecting the turnoff for Oklahoma, putting the rising sun over her shoulder; and she keens along with the steel guitars and violins. Singing to the commercials, and even with the backup singers as they do their lead-in station identifications.
Probably lots of people have been crazy in Niv-L’s car and she’s not the first.
She pounds the leather steering wheel and sings: a list of her friends’ names, all the people she will never see again, a cry from the heart for little Daniel, who only deserves happiness, a long hymn for Tété, an angry rant for Ali, whom she loved, or at least thought she loved. But he used her, didn’t he? So why should he escape? The announcer on the radio says something and she yells back, correcting the news, refuting their points. Mocking their accents and intonations, debating, and crooning to the radio, to the car itself, to the people who built it, to Niv-L … She’s her own private DJ and she’s broadcasting to everyone in Kansas, to the solitary birds, the distant water tanks, the phone poles, and road signs and billboards that warn her what to expect ahead.…
When she comes to her senses, she has lost herself down some broken and patched state highway, way out in the amber waves of stubble, and it’s been more than an hour since she has seen another human being. She can’t stop thinking about Daniel, that beautiful new child. His face is like a knot in her chest that turns tighter, tighter …
She’s running. She has to run. Running away is all she knows and she races down the cracked pavement, accelerating to insanely criminal speeds, wanting to let everything go, to breathe and let all of it wash away in the wind—herself, her past, every stupid decision, every foolish dream, all her second-guessed delusions, her very being—and wash it all away behind.
