Code Orange

He did not want to be a specimen. Demon in the Freezer described what happened to an English victim in the 1970s who'd gotten sick from a laboratory accident, and to a German victim in 1969 who'd been traveling through India in an area where smallpox still existed. These patients had become display items, public property; they had been stared at, studied and examined. And furthermore, every person they had come near had been stared at, studied and examined. Those two victims had had no meaning to anybody except that they could kill by breathing.

  Typhoid Mary. Nobody had cared what that poor woman thought or hoped for. Her life didn't matter. She was a threat. Lock her up.

  Mitty thought—as he often did, because it was every athlete's fear—about the most unfortunate ball player in history: Bill Buckner, who let a ground ball roll between his legs and lost game six of the 1986 World Series for the Red Sox. Bill Buckner entered history because of one split second when he goofed.

  Mitty too would find a place in history, but his would be worse. He'd be the one who brought smallpox back.

  If he got smallpox, they would ring-vaccinate Manhattan. There would be immunization stations in Grand Central and at St. Raphael's. The city would go through hell, all because Mitty Blake had done his homework for a change.

  Mitty slept in shorts and an extralarge Old Navy T-shirt. Around two a.m., he went into his bathroom and peeled them off. In front of the mirrors, he examined himself.

  No lesions. But it was too early anyway. This was not yet dawn of day ten.

  He took out his old medical texts again. He didn't care what anybody modern said. He needed guys who knew what they were talking about, who'd been there, done that, buried the victims. Each old source said the same thing. No symptoms and no way to infect anybody else for twelve to fourteen days after exposure.

  He felt like a person who knows perfectly well why he's coughing, bleeding and exhausted—he's got cancer. But still he won't go to the doctor, because as long as the diagnosis isn't definite, it's possible to pretend.

  There was a difference here. If you didn't treat your cancer, it was your problem. But if you didn't treat smallpox, it was the world's problem. If Mitty pretended he was fine, and then he got smallpox and infected other people, Mitty Blake would be a murderer.

  Because he would have known. It would not be an accident.

  What were the chances that he would get sick? A chance in a thousand? A chance in a million? Any chance was still a chance; that was why people bought lottery tickets. Somebody had to win.

  And somebody had to lose.

  Mitty considered the possibilities:

  A. He wouldn't get smallpox, and he'd still have to write that paper comparing monsters to diseases. That alone might kill him.

  B. He wouldn't get smallpox, but he'd be too lazy to write the paper, and he'd flunk English along with every other subject.

  C. He wouldn't get smallpox. He'd write brilliant papers, graduate a year early with high honors and make everybody proud.

  D. He'd get smallpox.

  Mitty was suddenly gripped by a new fear—that he had lost the envelope. Guys in dark suits carrying hidden weapons would descend on him and he'd have nothing. They'd yell, “What envelope? You liar! Wasting government time? Terrifying Manhattan? And you never had anything? You made it up so you could be the center of attention?” They'd toss the apartment, make his mother cry, probably fine Mitty or even jail him for wasting their time. His father would regard him with that sad look, the one that said I want to be proud of you, son, but yet again …

  Mitty's fear was well placed. There was no envelope in the book. He held the book by its spine and shook it upside down and carefully turned every page a second time.

  Mitty's pulse rate would have been just right if he was a hummingbird.

  He'd taken the book to school. Had the envelope fallen out in the library? Was it floating around? Did Olivia have it? His mom? The maid?

  Then Mitty swore, threw the stupid book down and picked up the right one. The envelope was exactly where he'd left it. In a minute, he'd be scared of spiders.

  He checked the contents of the envelope.

  I just proved why I'm at the bottom of the junior class, thought Mitty. The only thing stupider than handling the virus once is to handle it a second time.

  He came to one decision, anyway: he was getting rid of the scabs. If the FBI did show up—which they wouldn't; the whole idea was ridiculous, they had better things to do—but if they did, so what if he didn't have scabs?

  He decided on the waterlogged route because he didn't want airborne dust floating around. He went into the kitchen, got a heavy-duty black plastic garbage bag, put the book into the bag, set it in his sink and filled it from the tap. The book did not sop up water, so he riffled the pages to let the water in. Some scientist somewhere would grieve; this scab was never going to be tested by anybody for anything.

  When the book had turned to paste, he tied the bag shut, put it inside a second bag and went to the front door of his apartment. Building rules required carpet so that the people living beneath you didn't hear your footsteps, and the Blakes had very thick padding under very thick carpet. No need to tiptoe. He opened the dead bolt carefully so no metallic snick would disturb his parents' sleep. Leaving the door ajar, he went down the hall to the trash room. He opened the waist-high slot in the wall and dropped his nightmare down the chute. It would hit bottom and join the garbage from all the other apartments; be collected in even larger plastic bags and set out on the sidewalk for the garbage men; get tossed into a truck, driven to the river, emptied onto a scow and barged to a landfill.

  Back in his bedroom, he thought, I could go off to some remote place and tough it out alone. I wouldn't have tostick it out very long. If I bail tomorrow and hide somewhere, by Sunday morning, which is day fifteen, I'll know the score.

  Where could he hide out?

  His aunt Betty had a terrific little retreat in the woods in the Adirondacks, up near Lake Placid. But even if he could get there, which he couldn't, it wasn't heated. The water was turned off for the winter and there was no food. There would be snow, though, and the people looking after the cabin would see Mitty's tracks. And once he found wood and kindling and started a fire in the little stove, they'd see smoke rising and come over. What would Mitty do then? Call out “Hi, don't come in, fatal disease here”?

  But say he did come up with a hiding place.

  If he didn't get smallpox, Sunday afternoon he could phone his parents, who would be a little bent out of shape by then, but that happened when you had a son, and make up some story. It would have to be quite a story.

  If he did get sick, he was looking at five or six weeks of suffering and healing. Every description of smallpox was gruesome, but one really gruesome thing was that you were so sick, you couldn't get out of bed. You not only couldn't nurse yourself, but you got stuck to your own mattress when your pustules oozed and dried up. So if he went to the cabin in the mountains, he'd be too sick to get up, plus he'd freeze to death when the woodstove went out.

  Or … he could call the CDC.

  Anybody else would summon experts, counselors, agencies and advisors. But Mitty wanted to face it alone.He did not want his parents making this decision for him. He did not want doctors making the decision for him. And most certainly, he did not want a government agency doing it.

  It was his life. His body.

  In some book or other, he remembered somebody saying about somebody else “Better if he had never lived.” Did he remember this from church, maybe? The only book in church was generally the Bible. Who had the Bible said that about?

  What if people said of Mitty “Better if he had never lived”?

  It was still dark out when Mitty headed to school. Streetlights illuminated Broadway. The occasional taxi cruised by. Manhattanites didn't have to get up early, since they were already there, but lots of people had stuff to do before work: they were already walking dogs, running a few pre-morning-shower miles, going out t
o buy a paper or fresh bagels. Mitty was cut off by an actual club of young mothers, babies warm and barely visible behind the zipped-up plastic over their strollers, headed to Central Park for a dawn jog.

  He didn't see anybody who deserved to get smallpox.

  He went to a diner at the corner of Sixty-eighth and Columbus and ordered scrambled eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, toast, fresh-squeezed orange juice and coffee. Before it came, he was starving. When it was set in front of him, he had no appetite.

  Mitty's parents always woke up to 1010 WINS, “All News, All the Time; You Give Us Twenty-two Minutes, We'll Give You the World.” Mitty's mother was calm duringtraffic and weather, but she could get anxious about headline news. Would it be bad? Would it be worse?

  It would be worse if smallpox came back.

  His father found the color-coded Homeland Security terror warnings both exhausting and comic. Say it was yellow. Exactly what caution was he supposed to follow? Skip the gym? If it got raised, was he supposed to stay home from work?

  Smallpox would be a reason to stay home.

  Mitty studied his watch, calculating the deadline.

  He'd get through the day somehow without saying anything to anybody. (Unless, of course, the FBI showed up, although even in his action-movie-trained mind, Mitty could not picture being called out of class to chat with FBI agents.)

  Tonight he'd tell his parents what was up, because the only thing worse than finding out would be finding out from strangers. Then together they'd call that CDC hotline.

  And he knew—he completely knew—he knew for a fact—the CDC would say,“Hundred-year-old scabs? What a joke! Finish your little school paper, sonny, and don't bother us again.”

  Unless they put him in isolation and hovered over him wearing twenty layers of protective material, while television news showed sobbing St. Ray students getting shots.

  At the diner, Mitty left a full plate and a large tip. He slung his backpack over one shoulder and headed toward school. He was still early. Nobody else would even be dressed yet. He found himself oddly uncomfortable with the press of pedestrians, and instead of walking upColumbus or Amsterdam or Broadway, he shifted over to West End Avenue. But even West End, practically vacant compared to the other streets, felt packed. Mitty shifted even farther west to Riverside Drive. He never walked here. It was boring.

  It was not Mitty's nature to seek solitude. Mitty loved a crowd.

  Strangers often commented on how New Yorkers did not make eye contact; strangers figured that every New Yorker was afraid of every other New Yorker. But that wasn't the reason. If you looked into the eyes of the person coming in your direction, you were drawn toward him, and the two of you bumped into each other. But if your eyes didn't meet, you avoided each other perfectly, even on crowded platforms during rush hour. Only once—New Year's Eve in Times Square—had Mitty been in a crowd too tight for him to move, let alone avoid contact. He had made friends with everybody in the mob.

  He cut past the statue of Eleanor Roosevelt and hardly noticed the fenced-in dog exercise park, where usually he fell in love with at least one dog. He went through a windy pedestrian tunnel under the West Side Highway, already solid with commuter cars, and came out on the stretch of park that ran for miles along the Hudson River. He walked past the marina, empty ball fields and the shut-down restaurants of summer. He could not walk fast enough to escape the thoughts crawling over him.

  I don't want to be near people because the books could be wrong about the twelve days, he thought. What if it's only nine days? What if it's now?

  His cell rang but he didn't look at it. The desire to communicatehad left Mitty. He felt curiously outside of his skin. Or maybe inside it, waiting for his variola to detonate.

  Mitty Blake sat on a bench, facing the Hudson and the low dull buildings of New Jersey on the far side. A red tug pulled a long barge. A traffic helicopter surveyed the George Washington Bridge. He balanced his laptop on his knees and began to write.

  So—Mom, Dad—this is a letter. I'm trying to be intelligent here, even though it goes against a lifetime of training. Nothing you trained me in, I promise. You always did the right thing. I trained myself to be stupid. First, read my science report. Then you'll know what smallpox is. What it is, is a real true weapon of mass destruction.

  Now. You've finished reading that. Here's what happened on Sunday, February 1: in one of the old medical texts you bought from that doctor, Mom, I found an envelope full of scabs from a smallpox epidemic in 1902. I handled them. Breathed in their dust.

  So now what?

  Could I, Mitty Blake, get smallpox from those scabs? I can't tell. I've been doing research all week and I still can't tell. The odds are in my favor that the virus is dead. But print out my e-mails from where I asked around. You'll see what the majority opinion is. It might not be dead.

  I could have called the CDC in Atlanta. They handle AIDS and West Nile virus and SARS and stuff—and they could have given me a vaccine—which might or might not have had an effect—I think they're guessingabout whether it could help—but it's too late. I wasn't paying attention. All I cared about was, Do I need one more sentence for my stupid paper?

  It isn't the paper that's stupid.

  Because here's the thing: suppose inside my body the first live smallpox in two generations is getting ready to burst. Whether I live or die, whether I'm scarred or not, that stuff doesn't matter. What matters is that the virus would exist.

  In only hours I might be infecting people. Me. It's impossible, except it's possible.

  I'm afraid. I've got an idea now what this disease is. But I'm more afraid of giving it to other people. That would be the bad part. Not getting it, but giving it.

  You're saying to me, Mitty, just go to a hospital.

  That sounds easy, but I don't want to be an exhibit. This girl in biology class—Marcy—her disease is avian flu, which has been in the news all month— chickens in Asia get the flu (which also sounds impossible; it's so human; do the chickens get a fever and a cough?). Anyway, the people handling these chickens also get the flu. Marcy is all proud of this photograph she cut from the Post of sisters in Thailand who died of Asian flu. They're lying in their coffins; the pictures have been printed all over the world.

  You know what? Nobody's going to photograph me lying in my coffin or covered with smallpox. Plus, I don't want to be stupid. Say I rush to the authorities, whimpering and scaring the whole city, and people go berserk and seal their doors and a million plane flights get canceled—and nothing happens. I'm just this low-IQ jerk.

  But if I do get smallpox, aside from the photographs of me in my coffin, they'll do that ring vaccination Dr. Henderson perfected. The problem is, Americans don't stay in their rings like some peasant in a Bangladesh rice field fifty years ago. They get on planes, trains, buses and ferries; they drive SUVs, vans, cars and motorcycles; they leave town, they leave the state, they leave the country…. My virus would hit the world. Read that paragraph on how fast the entire population of the world would get smallpox.

  I know soldiers in Iraq are afraid. I know refugees in Sierra Leone or Rwanda or Afghanistan are afraid. But they can see the thing they're afraid of. I can't see what I'm afraid of. I can't even tell if it's there. I know—the logical thing is to go tell somebody.

  But, Mom, Dad here's the thing: they can't do anything about it if I have smallpox now.

  Derek's favorite topic is, What lunatic sent anthrax through the mail?

  But if I send smallpox through New York, I'm not a lunatic. I'm a mass murderer who knew exactly what was going to happen. I'm no different from those nineteen murderers who drove their planes into us on September 11.

  And even if I got hospitalized in time, and even if nobody else caught smallpox, and even if they kept the virus limited to my body and my room, variola major would exist again. You wouldn't believe these scientists who want to keep smallpox around. They want to combine smallpox with monkeypox, or whatever, just to see what happens.
/>
  I can't do anything about the virus the CDC haslocked up. But I can keep it from existing in actual society.

  I've been thinking about that word, society. It means all of us in New York, every age, race, job, weight and religion. Every time we laugh or sing, ride the elevator, buy a coffee, go to the theater, eat in a restaurant, jog in the park—we're society. I don't want to be the Typhoid Mary of my society. You have all these great plans for my future, but what if my future is to be Smallpox Mitty?

  Don't laugh. I'm not laughing.

  Here's what I'm thinking: if this is a live virus, and it's the only one in the entire world, I should not let it live.

  And if I have it, and if I let the world hospitalize me, I let the virus out into society. I give it life.

  There is only one way to be sure I don't give anybody this disease.

  There is only one way to be sure that no ambulance driver, no doctor, no mother, no father, no classmate, no kid in a stroller, no guy on a bike, no waiter in a diner, not one person in New York gets sick from me.

  That way is to die before I get sick.

  Then the virus dies with me.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Gauess what Mitty has agreed to write about!”

  Mrs. Abrams said to the class. “Monsters—

  mythical and biological. Isn't that brilliant?”

  Actually it seemed weird and maybe even meaningless. But nobody said anything. They all knew Mitty had not agreed; he had been railroaded.

  “Building on your biology project is so wise of you, Mitty,” Mrs. Abrams told him.

  Mitty smiled politely. He could hardly hear her. His thoughts were thundering in his head, like the bass on the stereo turned all the way up.

  It would be easy enough to die.

  He'd just get up in the night and leave the apartment building by the back door and nobody would see him go, because there was nobody on duty at the back during the night; you could always get out of a building, because of fire laws; but you couldn't always get in, because of safety laws. Walk a few blocks up, a few blocks over, and there was the Hudson River.