The Harvest

  “Lousy hours. Yours and mine. I hope you can make it on Friday.”

  “Friday?”

  “Friday night. A little get-together. I called about it last week.”

  “Yeah, of course. I’m sorry, Matt. Yeah, we’ll try to be here.” Matt said, “You look punch-drunk.” No argument. “Is it that serious?” A nod.

  “Then you better tell me about it. And drink your damn coffee before it gets cold.”

  “Something’s fucked up at the hospital,” Jim said, “and nobody wants to listen to me.”

  * * *

  It had all happened, he said, very quickly.

  It started earlier in the week. He took a couple of complaints from the staff doctors that hematology results were coming back funny. Standard tests: Smack 24s, red counts, white counts. Patients with borderline anemia were showing radically low hemoglobin totals, for instance.

  New blood was drawn, new tests ordered, and he promised to oversee the results personally.

  “Everything was kosher. I made sure of it. But the results… were worse. 7’

  Matt said, “Significantly worse?”

  “I couldn’t go to staff with these numbers. What was I supposed to say? I’m sorry, Doctor, but according to the lab your patient is dead. When the patient is actually sitting in the dayroom watching Days of Our Lives. And the bad thing is, it’s not just a few samples now—now everything is coming up fucked. Hematology, hemostasis, immune response, blood typing. Suddenly we can’t run any kind of blood assay without getting completely Martian numbers out of it.”

  “A lab problem,” Matt said.

  “Can you think of any kind of problem that would screw up all these results? Neither could I. But I thought about it. I talked to the chief resident, and he agreed we should farm out the most urgent tests to other labs until we track down the problem. Okay, we do that. This was a couple of days ago. We start looking at everything. Some weird contamination coming through the air ducts. Bad sterilization. Voltage spikes on the A.C. lines. We clean it all up. We try some basic tests on a sample of whole blood from the freezer. And everything comes out within reasonable limits.”

  “So far so good.”

  “Exactly. But I’m not entirely convinced. So we draw some fresh blood from a healthy donor, and we put it through the cell counts, hemoglobin counts, reticulocyte counts—plasma fibrinogen, platelet counts, one-stage assays—”

  “And it comes up fucked,” Matt guessed.

  “It not only comes up fucked,” Jim said, “it comes up so completely fucked that we might as well have been running tests on a glass of tepid well water.”

  * * *

  Matt felt a touch of fear, as tentative as a cold hand stroking the back of his neck.

  If there was some new pathology out there, and if it was common enough to be manifesting in all of Jim’s blood samples… but why hadn’t anyone else seen it? “What about the tests you farmed out?”

  “They’re not back. We phone the private labs. They’re sorry, but the results don’t seem quite… plausible. They want to know if the samples were damaged in some way, maybe contaminated in transit. Meanwhile, the chief resident gets a call from the hospital in Astoria. Are we having blood-count problems? Because they are. And so is Portland.”

  “Jesus,” Matt said.

  “That’s the situation this morning. Everybody’s going crazy, of course. Phone lines to the CDC are jammed. This afternoon, I take some fresh blood and I put it under a microscope. Has anything changed? Well, yeah. Suddenly there’s foreign bodies there. Like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

  Matt put aside his coffee cup, which had grown cold in his hands. “Foreign bodies? What—viral bodies? Bacteria?”

  “On a slide they look kind of like platelets. Roughly that dimension.”

  “You’re sure you’re not looking at platelets? Maybe deformed in some way?”

  “I’m not that stupid. They don’t aggregate. They stain differently—”

  “I’m not questioning your competence.”

  “Fuck, go ahead. I would, in your place. The weird thing is that these organisms weren’t there the day before. I mean, do they reproduce that fast? Or what, were they hiding?”

  “It’s just so bizarre. If you were looking at blood from patients with a common pathology, okay, but—the patients are healthy?”

  “Far as I can tell, the condition is not making anyone particularly sick.”

  “How could it not? White counts are low?”

  “White counts are missing.”

  “This is ludicrous.”

  “Obviously! I know that! I’ve been reminded of it at great length. If you want me to make sense of it for you, I can’t.”

  “But it’s harmless?”

  “I’m not saying that. I’m not saying that at all. It’s an ongoing situation. It scares the shit out of me, actually. You know what I notice? Everybody I run into seems to have a case of the sniffles. You see that in your work, Matt? Nothing serious. But everybody, every individual. Walk into a crowded room and count the Kleenex. Check out a drugstore. Big run on OTC decongestants. My pharmacist says he can’t keep aspirin in stock. Is this a coincidence?”

  Matt said, “Well, Christ—I’ve got a bottle of Dristan half-empty in the bathroom cupboard.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jim said. “Me too.”

  Annie had been sniffling at work. And Lillian, come to that. Beth Porter.

  And Rachel. My God, he thought. Rachel.

  * * *

  The two men looked at each other in the sudden silence of shared fears. Matt said, “What do you want?”

  “I just want to talk. Everybody I talk to at the hospital, everybody on staff—either they want a quick fix or they just don’t want to know, period. And I want us to drink. Not this fucking coffee, either.”

  “I’ll break out a bottle,” Matt said.

  “Thank you.” Jim seemed to relax minutely. “You know why I really came here?”

  “Why?”

  “Because there are very few sane people on this planet. And you happen to be one of them.”

  “You got a head start drinking?”

  “I mean it. I always thought that about you. Matt Wheeler, one sane individual. Never said it. Why wait?”

  Why wait? This was more of an admission than he might have intended. Matt did not pause on his way to the liquor cabinet, but he asked, as casually as he could manage, “You think we’re all dying?”

  “It’s a possibility,” Jim Bix said.

  * * *

  They talked it through several rounds of drinks, covering the same territory, deciding nothing, speculating, probing, perhaps, the limits of each other’s credulity. It was Jim, drunk and tired, who first used the word “machines.”

  Matt thought he’d misunderstood. “Machines?”

  “You’ve heard of nanotechnology? They move around atoms, make little gears and levers and things? They can do that now.”

  “You have some reason to think that’s what you’re looking at?”

  “Who knows? It doesn’t look like a machine, but it doesn’t look like a cell, either. Looks kind of like a spiky black ball bearing. There’s no nucleus, no mitochondria, no internal structure I can look at with the equipment at the hospital. I wonder what a good research lab would find if they took one apart.” He showed a thin smile. “Gears and levers. Betcha. Or little computers. Little subatomic integrated circuits. Running algorithms on nucleotides. Or something we can’t even see. Circuits smaller than the orbit of an electron. Machines made out of neutrinos. Held together with gluons.”

  He grinned, not a happy expression. Matt said, “Sounds like Jack Daniel’s talking.”

  “Two advantages to getting drunk. You can say ridiculous things. And you can say the obvious thing.”

  “What’s the obvious thing?”

  “That this is not entirely unconnected with that rucking unnatural object in the sky.”

  Maybe, Matt thought. But he had h
eard everything from hot weather to diaper rash blamed on the Artifact, and he was wary of that line of thinking. “There’s no evidence…”

  “I know what organic disease looks like. This is something altogether else. This didn’t happen over the course of a month, Matt. We’re talking about days. Practically hours. Bacteria can reproduce that quickly. But if these were bacteria they would have killed us all by now.”

  But if that were true—“No,” he said. “Uh-uh. I don’t want to think about that.”

  “You and the rest of the world.”

  “I mean it. It’s too frightening.” He looked into his glass, vaguely ashamed. “I accept what you’re telling me. But if it’s somehow connected with the Artifact—if these things are already inside us—then it’s game over, isn’t it? Whatever they want—it’s theirs. We’re helpless.”

  There was a silence. Then Jim put his glass on the side table and sat up. “I’m sorry, Matt. I did a shitty thing. I came here and dumped my problems in your lap. Not fair.”

  “I’d rather be scared than ignorant.” But it was late. They had gone beyond productive conversation. Matt was afraid to check his watch; he had office hours to keep in the morning. Plague or no plague. “I need to sleep.”

  “I can let myself out.”

  “You can sleep on the sofa, you asshole. Is Lillian waiting up?”

  “I told her I might spend the night at the office.”

  “Spend some time with her tomorrow.” Jim nodded.

  Matt gave him a blanket from the closet in the hall. “We’re in some pretty deep shit here, aren’t we?”

  “Pretty deep.” Jim stretched out on the sofa. He put his glasses on the table and closed his eyes. His unhandsome face looked pale. “Matt—?”

  “Hm?”

  “The blood I took? The fresh sample? The blood I looked at under the microscope?”

  “What about it?”

  “It was mine.”

  * * *

  Matt allowed his alarm clock to wake him—savoring a long moment of twilight sleep, when the things Jim had told him were still submerged, a presence felt but not explicit. Then woke to a raw headache and terrible knowledge.

  It was a fine, sunlit morning. He forced himself through a shower and put on clothes that felt like 100-grit sandpaper. Rachel was in the kitchen fixing breakfast. Fried eggs. Matt looked at his plate. Only looked.

  “Are you sick?” his daughter asked.

  “No.” Unless we all are.

  She sniffled. “Dr. Bix is asleep on the sofa.”

  “He’s not due at the hospital until noon. We should let him sleep. He needs it.”

  She shot him a quizzical look but let the subject rest.

  Rachel believed in the power of a home-cooked breakfast, and she insisted on cooking it herself. The pattern had been established during Celeste’s illness and continued after her death, when Matt had been inclined to leave breakfast and dinner in the hands of McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, respectively. Matt had supposed it was Rachel’s way of mourning, packaging her grief in these daily rituals. By now it had become simply habit. But she did the work solemnly and always had. More than solemnly. Sadly.

  Since last year, that sadness had seemed to infect all the other aspects of her life—the way she walked, the way she dressed, the mournful music she played on the stereo Matt had given her for Christmas. In her final year of high school, she had pulled a perfunctory B average—her aptitude for schoolwork tempered by a blossoming despair.

  He picked at the eggs while she dressed for the day. When he saw Rachel again she was heading out the door, meeting some friends, she said, at the mall. She smiled distantly. “Dinner the usual time?”

  “Maybe we’ll go out,” Matt said. “Dos Aguilas. Or maybe the Golden Lotus.”

  She nodded.

  “I love you,” he said. He told her so often. Today, it came out sounding awkward and ineffectual.

  She gave him a curious look. “You too, Daddy,” she said. And smiled again.

  It wasn’t a happy smile. It said, Are things really as bad as that? Matt tried to smile back. He guessed it was an appropriate answer. A brave but unconvincing grin. Yes, Rachel. Things are at least as bad as that.

  Chapter 4

  Headlines

  COUP ATTEMPT RUMORS DENIED

  White House sources and a spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a statement today denying that a military coup d’etat against the administration was in the making.

  Unusual movements of airborne and infantry battalions around Washington, D.C., had roused speculation in some quarters. Publication in The Washington Post of a document allegedly leaked from the office of Air Force General Robert Osmond fueled rumors earlier in the week.

  Asked whether the President would address these developments in his Friday speech to the nation, a White House spokesman suggested the topic didn’t warrant further comment.

  VANDALISM AT BROOKSIDE

  Police are investigating extensive acts of vandalism that occurred last night at Brookside Cemetery.

  Vandals apparently entered the cemetery after dark and left several monuments defaced with spray paint. Swastikas and skulls were among the crude emblems left behind.

  Cemetery Director William Spung told the Observer that cleaning the headstones will take at least a week and will be “very costly.”

  Police Chief Terence McKenna admits such cases are often difficult to solve. “Acts like this are usually committed by adolescents,” McKenna said. Police are considering a “Vandalism Awareness” program for local public schools.

  No motive has been suggested for the crime.

  “TAIWAN FLU” ON MARCH

  According to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the nation is in the grip of a flu epidemic.

  Cases of the so-called “Taiwan Flu” have been reported from all over the country.

  The disease is a mild strain of influenza and is not considered dangerous.

  “You might consider stocking up on Kleenex,” a spokesman said.

  Chapter 5

  D.C.

  The President adopted a posture of calm repose—elbows on desk, fingers steepled beneath his chin—as the Secretary of Defense was admitted into the Oval Office. “You’re looking well, Charlie,” the President said.

  “And yourself, sir,” Charles Atwater Boyle responded… perhaps, the President thought, with just a touch of genuine surprise.

  The truth was that Charlie Boyle did not, in fact, look remotely well. His cheeks were patchy red, as if he were running a mild fever—no doubt he was. And he appeared to be nervous about this nighttime meeting, to which the President had summoned him without explanation. Charlie Boyle had matriculated through two bastions of poker-faced reserve, the Marine Corps and the banking industry, and had kept his political balance as well as any member of the Cabinet—at least until now—but the blank exterior was itself a clue to the struggle beneath. His notoriously chilly blue eyes darted periodically to the left, as if he was consulting some presence in the air—a cue card, perhaps. Or wishing for one.

  The question becomes, the President thought, of whom is he afraid? Of me—or his dubious allies in this conspiracy?

  “Charlie,” the President said, “I want to talk to you about your coup d’etat.”

  To his credit, the Secretary of Defense did not so much as blink. “Sir?” Charlie said mildly. “Sit down,” the President said. Charlie sat.

  “I shouldn’t call it your coup, should I? I know your position is ambiguous. And I don’t expect you to admit complicity in a plot to overthrow the civilian government. It was General Chafee, wasn’t it, who approached you with the idea that you might act as President pro tern? A Cabinet member, a civilian—an ideal front man. You’d lend them an air of legitimacy in a country where the words ‘military junta’ still have a nasty ring to them.” The President put his palms flat on the desk and leaned forward. The gesture, he knew, was aggressive, imperial. “Quite honestly, C
harlie, my sources don’t know how you responded to the offer—only that it was made. And that General Chafee was smiling when he shook your hand.”

  “For the record,” Charlie Boyle said, “I deny all this.”

  “Noted. But that’s beside the point. Your loyalty is in question, but it’s also immaterial.”

  “ The Secretary of Defense frowned. He can’t decide, the President thought, whether he’s been insulted. But he’s curious, too.

  “In that case,” Charlie said stiffly, “what is the purpose of this meeting?”

  “It’s late,” the President admitted. “You probably want to be home with Evelyn and the kids. I can’t say I blame you. But in times like these I think we can be forgiven for some long hours.” He tapped his desk with the point of a fountain pen while Charlie squirmed. “I’ve known you for five years and I’ve studied your career. You were the Cabinet appointment I was most proud of, Charlie, did you know that? I’m not suggesting you’re a scoundrel. Only that your loyalties may be divided. Is that so far off the mark?”

  “You’re asking for a statement I can’t make. For the record, I resent the implication.”

  “Forget the record. There is no record. This is in camera.”

  “I’m supposed to believe that?”

  “You’re supposed to listen.” The President allowed an edge into his voice. The essential fact about Charlie Boyle was that he recognized authority. His life was a long hymn to authority: recognizing it, respecting it, acquiring it. I know you, the President thought. I know your poor-boy Tidewater roots, and I know what the Marine Corps must have meant to the rootless child you once were. More than a stepping-stone into civilian respectability, though it had been that too. All the old totems retained their magic. Charlie may have decided the man in the President’s office was expendable, but the office itself, the idea of the office, the Commander in Chief, still carried a ponderous symbolic weight. And for the moment, at least, the President thought, that weight is mine to wield.