“You see the waitresses?”
“Mmmm-hmm. Whoever does the hiring there, he definitely an ass man.”
“All right, all right. So who gets to go?”
“Well, see, Spider-Man, now there’s a tough-ass decision we got to make.”
* * *
Seven people were waiting for TJ and me out in the hall outside the boiler room. In addition to Hope, Wheelchair was there, along with Corey (the curly haired kid who’d come in on the truck earlier), an old guy whose name I didn’t know, Lenny (a short balding white guy who looked like Vizzini from The Princess Bride) and the two women who heard the commotion and wandered in from the break room.
We told everyone about the tunnel, and the two bodies. Old Guy said casually to TJ, “Which wall is it on, nigger?”
Without blinking TJ said, “North.”
Old Guy nodded thoughtfully and said, “That’s what I thought. Same boiler used to service the other buildings, before they tore down the old hospital and built this one up on top of it. Probably, oh, fifty or sixty years ago. Now back in those days, if a black so much as brushed past a white woman on a sidewalk, they’d have had him hung by torchlight come nightfall, but of course a lot has changed since then. Me and my friends, we had a bluegrass band back in the 1960s—”
“I think Racist Ed is right,” said TJ. “How far to the other end, Ed?”
“Oh … you’re talking about half a mile of tunnel there, Porch Monkey. Long way to crawl. I couldn’t make it, on these knees. You know the workers back then would have a cart they’d lay on, and there was a pulley system and you’d just lay on your back and then down at the end you’d have a big strong nigger turning a crank—”
“Well there’s no pulley system in there now, so we got to make some knee pads, or else all our knees will be hamburger by the time we get out the other end. But if Racist Ed is right, there may be seven- or eight hundred meters of tunnel there; that’s a long stretch to crawl over brick and mud. If you’re in pretty good shape I bet you could make it in twenty minutes, if you’re not, and you got to constantly stop and rest your knees, you could be an hour gettin’ through there. So first question is, who’s up for it? Show of hands.”
Everyone but Racist Ed.
“That’s eight of us, and that’s a pretty big group already. If I could pick the optimal number to take on this mission I’d stop right here—”
“I’m not leavin’ without Terry,” said the bald guy. “If it comes to that I’ll stay behind.”
“I wasn’t finished! What I was sayin’ was I don’t expect any of you to leave loved ones behind, but that’s all you can take.”
Wheelchair said, “We gotta tell Dennis and LeRon.”
Hope said, “Katie and Danni…”
TJ said, “Okay now see we’re getting up to more than a dozen people now, take some time to think about it but you get very much beyond that and it goes from a group sneaking through to get the word out to an all-out prison break that’s going to provoke a full armed response. No way we can go with more than fifteen people—”
“What about the sick people? And the doc?” said Hope.
TJ sighed and rubbed his head. “What about ’em?”
“Katie’s one of the nurses. She said some of the sick are so bad off that they’re not going to last long if they don’t get to a real hospital. The diarrhea is so bad they’re getting dehydrated.”
“Babe, how are they gonna crawl through a half mile of tunnel if they’re that sick? What if they get halfway through and can’t go no farther? We got no way of getting them out and they’re clogging up the tunnel for everybody else. It’s narrow, real narrow. There’s pipes all around. You’ll see.”
“And what about the doc? He’ll have to know.”
“Why does he have to know?”
“Well for one he’s going to notice Katie gone when she doesn’t show up to the second floor to help, and if we don’t tell him where she went, he’s going to waste time looking for her. Two, we’re going to need to take some stuff with us. Bandages, basic first aid. Doc has all that up there. And we’re out of the … mouthwash. We used the last of it today. We need to take some with us and that means we need the doc to make it.”
I said, “Actually she makes a good point with people being noticed gone. Everything is going to fly into turmoil when Owen and the rest notices a bunch of us missing. People will think we got eaten or something. That could turn ugly if it becomes a witch hunt.”
TJ said, “Yeah, we’ll leave a note.”
“Saying what?”
“I’ll think of something. Fuck, man. Look. We come back and we meet out in the hall in one hour. Hope, go get Katie and tell her that if they have sick people up there who can’t last a single more day but are still somehow capable of crawling for a half mile through the freezing mud, then we’ll take them. Dave, go see the doc and get him to make up a jug of mouthwash. But you got to have him put it in something that’s not going to leak when it’s banging around in the tunnel.”
I said, “Okay do you know where the doctor is right now? Or if not, what he looks like so I’ll know when I find him?”
TJ stared at me. “The doc? Marconi?”
“Wait … he’s here?”
“Where else would he—Ah, you’re pulling that unfrozen caveman shit. Yes, he’s here. And he don’t sleep. Didn’t you go talk to him after you got back from the hole? Like I told you?”
“No…”
“You need to go now, man. He’s been asking about you.”
* * *
“The situation is much worse than I had thought,” said Dr. Marconi.
He was leaning over an unconscious woman and shining a flashlight into her eye. I had actually only seen this man in person once—every other time it was on television or on a book jacket. The neat white beard, the glasses down on his nose. And here he was, standing in front of me, not dressed in a red or green jumpsuit, but in the same style of three-piece suit I’d seen him in on TV. Only now, the man wearing it looked like he hadn’t slept in a decade.
He glanced up at me expectantly and said, “What did you find out?”
“I’m … totally lost here, doctor. My memory of this whole quarantine experience only goes back to earlier today. I remember up to the chaos of the outbreak and then the next thing I remember is waking up over at the asylum with no idea where I was or how I got there. I had no idea you were here and I have no memory of us ever speaking.”
Marconi turned his back on his patient to give me his full attention. “They wiped your memory?”
“I … I don’t know. You think they can do that? Just pick a specific bunch of memories and erase it like files on a hard drive?”
“Oh, I’m sure there’s no method to do such a thing safely. I also do not believe these men give a tinker’s dam about such things.”
“You mean REPER?”
He shrugged. “If that’s what they’re calling themselves now.”
“How did you wind up here again?”
“Your friend John called me the day after the outbreak, after he got your lady friend clear of the danger. I flew down and offered my services to the task force here, who happily gave me a job and sent out a press release declaring such. You see, by then, amateur video had emerged that revealed to the public that this in fact was not a conventional disease outbreak or bioweapon attack. The word ‘zombie’ was being bandied about. Someone very high in the operation was very happy to fan those flames by attaching a name like mine. If you take my meaning.”
I did not.
“When the decision was made to pull the containment staff from quarantine last week, I volunteered to stay behind because otherwise the detained would be left without medical care.”
“Wait, are you that kind of doctor? I thought you just had a doctorate in … ghosts or something.”
Ignoring me, he said, “My instincts turned out to be right because patients that have reported here with seemingly minor sympto
ms have turned out to in fact be infected with the parasite.”
“Holy shit. Really?”
Marconi nodded to a row of large clear plastic pitchers sitting on a nearby cart, and I recoiled to the point of nearly falling down. Each pitcher contained a spider. Two of them were fully grown, another was no bigger than my thumb, the last was at some stage of growth in between. One of the big ones was badly damaged, half of its body missing.
Calmly he said, “They’re quite dead.”
“You can see them?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes. With great concentration. I do not have your gift, but I know some techniques. Though I should say, and I hope you will not take offense, that I would not accept your ‘gift’ if you offered it to me in a basket along with a bottle of Glenfiddich.”
“And you know how to kill these fuckers, right?” I held up the now-empty bleach jugs I’d brought with me. “You came up with the, uh, mouthwash? The poison? So you’re close.”
“Close to what? A cure? It is no great feat to kill a parasite in a way that also brutally kills the host. No, I am not close to a ‘cure’ for what the parasite does to the human body, in that what it does is rebuild the body from the inside out in a way that violates everything we know about human physiology. At this stage I’m simply trying to perfect a way to detect infection.”
“I still don’t understand how this works. I mean, I’ve watched these things crawl right up to people’s faces and they couldn’t see them, but they can merge with your body in a way that somehow blends in, like it becomes just visible enough to—”
“David, how can you of all people still be surprised when our eyes fail us? The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces, restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can’t see around walls, we can’t see heat or cold, we can’t see electricity or radio signals, we can’t see at a distance. It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it, yet we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied. We have wound up with the utterly mad and often fatal delusion that if we can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Virtually all of civilization’s failures can be traced back to that one ominous sentence: ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ We can’t even convince the public that global warming is dangerous. Why? Because carbon dioxide happens to be invisible.”
“But … we just have to figure out how to detect them, right? Like, somebody will build a machine or something? Once we can detect them, we can kill them.”
“In answer to that, I need only to offer two words: Plasmodium falciparum.”
“Do I even want to know what that is?”
“Exactly. It’s a monster that has slain several billion of your fellow man, and you don’t even know its name. It’s the microscopic parasite that causes malaria. Nearly half of all human deaths in recorded history have been caused by this invisible assassin. One could make the argument that Plasmodium falciparum is the dominant life form on the planet, and that human civilization exists purely to give it a breeding ground. Yet, until very, very recently we had no idea what it was. We blamed witchcraft and evil spirits and angry gods, we prayed and performed ceremonies and ritually murdered those we believed were responsible. And meanwhile we died. And died, and died. Yet, to this day, you could have Plasmodium falciparum on your hands right now, and you wouldn’t know. Because after all, if you can’t see it, surely it can’t hurt you.”
Marconi strode out of the room and said, “Follow me.” He walked me down the hall and showed me where six rooms were occupied with a total of nine unconscious patients. “Our ‘flu’ patients. Started showing up forty-eight hours ago with uncontrollable diarrhea. I have a feeling if we still had power to the MRI, we’d find some nasty changes going on inside. Or maybe not. Maybe you have to wait until transformation for that.”
“Jesus Christ, they’re infected?”
“This is what I wanted to tell you about. Several of them passed your mouth inspection upon arrival. It turns out, there is more than one way for the parasite to enter the body.”
“How do they—”
“Did you hear the part about the diarrhea?”
“Oh. Oh, Jesus…”
“Yes.”
“And … you’re just keeping them up here? With the sick people? They could spider out at any time…”
“I don’t think so. The Propofol seems to shut down the process. You see that we have them strapped to the beds as well. It’s the best we can do under the circumstances. When the sedative runs out in a few days, well, we’ll have a decision to make.”
“What decision? Kill the fuckers, doc. Before they get loose.”
He said nothing.
I said, “I can get you out of quarantine. And I mean right now. We found a way out.”
“You did?”
“Old steam tunnel in the basement. REPER—or whoever—didn’t know about it because it had been bricked up. Leads right past the perimeter. We’re keeping it quiet but if you want to go, come with me.”
“To what end? Where else am I going to be allowed to work hands-on with infected patients? No, I’m most effective here.”
“Suit yourself.”
“And what do you hope to accomplish, if I may?”
“Uh, freedom? And I don’t want to sound like a pessimist, but word on the street is the military has declared this whole hunk of land a loss and is about to drop a big goddamned bomb on it.”
“We had a conversation about this, when I first arrived. A conversation that I suppose you now no longer remember. About my book? Titled The Babel Threshold? Ring any bells?”
“No. Sounds like it stars Jason Bourne.”
“I know time is short, but … I think you missed an important point earlier, about these patients. The symptom that brought them up here was diarrhea, not nightmarish spontaneous deformity or propensity for violence. They showed no other symptoms. None. And I’m starting to believe that there are others that show no symptoms at all. And that we may never be able to detect the infection, until it’s too late. I think the parasite is adapting, learning to stay under cover longer, and more effectively. Now what do you think will be the world’s reaction when that fact comes to light?”
My answer wasn’t something I wanted to hear myself say out loud. Finally, I said, “So what you’re saying is, if the military is going to wipe this quarantine off the map, do I really want to stop them?”
“Think about it. Think about whose purpose is served if the bombs fall. Think about whose purpose is served if they don’t.”
“How about you just tell me?”
“That would require me to actually know myself.”
* * *
On the way down, I stopped at the lobby and peeked out of the main doors, to make sure we hadn’t aroused suspicion. What few people were still out in the brisk night were gathered by the south fence, watching the sky like they were expecting a tornado.
I wandered out until I found a green—an older, bearded guy—and asked what was happening.
He shrugged. “Somebody shootin’ flares over at the asylum.”
“Flares? What does that mean?”
“Probably don’t mean shit. Could be a kid with leftover fireworks for all we know. But it took a whole three minutes for the rumor to spread around the yard that it meant a posse was gonna break through the fence and set us all free. Give us all Cadillacs for our trouble. Why not?”
Somebody said, “Look! Look! Another one. Red this time.”
I turned in time to see the ball of magnesium die and fade to earth. Murmuring from the crowd.
I said, “Well I’m going to bed. If it’s a rescue party, throw a rock up at the window or something. And save me a Caddie.”
* * *
By the time I made it back down to the basement, twenty-seven goddamned people were packed in the boiler room, spilling out into t
he hallway. A buzzing, murmuring crowd of people who, even though they had been stripped of all possessions when they entered quarantine, somehow all had luggage. Backpacks and garbage bags and various random shit they thought they would need. The people were knocking around and slamming doors and giggling and asking questions and basically conducting the least stealthy prison escape in history. The reds were asleep, most of them anyway, but it would take exactly one of them to discover the massive conga line of people piling into the boiler room to blow the whole operation.
TJ was so pissed he looked like steam was about to start whistling from his asshole. Hope was trying to calm him down, trying to work through the logistics.
“What about knee pads, huh?” he said, wrapping electrician’s tape around the caps of the two jugs of the binary chemical “mouthwash.” “I suppose we came up with knee pads for two or three dozen people in the last half hour?”
“No, but we have duct tape,” said Hope, reassuringly. “All people got to do is take off their shoes and tape them to their knees. You know, like Dorf.”
“Like who?”
“It works, all right? Katie and I did it and crawled around the floor, from one end of the hall and back again. It’s going to be fine.”
“Well, then that’s one of our nine hundred problems solved.” To me he said, “If we was smart, we would send one guy through by himself to make sure the path is even fuckin’ open. Or that Carlos isn’t waitin’ at the other end. They’d crawl through with the flashlight and signal back that the coast was clear, so if there’s a problem we don’t got to turn this whole ridiculous human centipede around. But we can’t fuckin’ do that because we’d have this huge noisy crowd of people standin’ out here for an hour, waitin’ to get caught.”
“It’s only gonna last until somebody else stumbles across the tunnel anyway.”
He shook his head. “Racist Ed is stayin’ behind, once the last person is through he’s gonna stack up some of them cardboard boxes in front of the hole. I already cleaned up the bricks on the floor, so hopefully that’ll throw off Owen’s dumb ass.”