A burst of light greets him. The flare subsides and he finds himself in a hotel lobby. An expensive hotel lobby. The interior is painted in warm oranges and yellows. There are chairs and couches and a grand piano. And there are ferns, as well. Lots of ferns.
He walks over an Asian-inspired rug. Its fibers caress the bottoms of his shoeless feet. The song is much louder here, filling every empty space with its beautiful harmony.
He wanders past the reception desk and down a long hallway that leads to yet another hallway. He walks a straight line that seems to slope downward until the corridor ends at a pair of huge wooden doors. He stops there. ‘Grand Ballroom’, the placard on the left reads. A large white banner hangs above the entryway. Most of the smaller words are smudged and unreadable, but the largest are still there, proclaiming, ‘50 AND COUNTING!’ in thick, black letters.
The doors open without the help of his hand and he steps into the room. The music stops. He looks around. There are more ferns here, as well as palm trees. Crystal chandeliers hang from the ceiling. Empty tables and inverted chairs circle a parquet dance floor.
It is what lies in the center of this dance floor that captures his interest.
A woman sits in a folding chair, her head down. There is a bassinet beside her that she rocks with her right hand. Her foot is tapping, but he can hear no sound. He takes a step forward and tries to call out to her, but his throat will not form words. So he walks up, kneels beside her, and lifts her chin.
He recognizes her. It is the one from his past, the one from his dreams. Marcy. Her lips move listlessly, mimicking the song he can no longer hear. Her eyes look right through him, and there is a frightening dullness in her stare. He stands up, unsure of what to do next.
Without warning or expectation, she is standing now, in front of him. Brightness reflects in eyes that had moments before seemed empty. She gawks at him. Her mouth opens and forms words, but no sound can pass through the vacuum between them. Her right hand grabs him by the elbow. His flesh burns where she touches him. He tries to force himself away from her, but she is too strong. She pulls him close and puts her lips against his ear. They are cold, these lips, so cold. And then she speaks, and this time he listens.
“WAKE UP!”
* * *
Josh felt the misplaced sensation of floating. This directly preceded the back of his head slamming against the floor, followed by the rest of his body. Sharp stabs of pain shot through him. He opened his eyes.
The bed loomed above him like a far-away cliff. “Ow,” he groaned. He felt where he’d struck his head. A fleshy knot had already started to form. That’s gonna be huge tomorrow, he thought.
Another pain emerged. He clenched his teeth and looked at his left arm. There, on the inside of his elbow, were four tiny red lines. In the dark they looked like victory markings on a bar chalkboard. Blood trickled from these lines, blood he wiped away with his finger. The wound stung to the touch, pain that seeped up his forearm and throbbed in the back of his hand.
No way, he thought, and shook his head.
A rustling sound reached his ears, followed by a muffled groan. The bed shook. “Sophia?” asked Josh. When no one replied, he got up as fast as he could on his still-sore, still-weary legs.
It took a moment to understand what he saw when he faced the bed. With the only light being the green glow of the alarm clock, it looked as if Sophia was trying to suffocate herself with one of her stuffed animals. Perhaps she had simply pulled the covers over her head.
“Rascal?” he said, and then reached out.
The bundle of fur where Sophia’s head should’ve been was sodden to the touch. Whatever it was rippled and a high-pitched, buzzing scream filled the air. Josh pulled back and the thing on his sister’s head jerked. A new blast of pain shot up Josh’s wrist.
“Fuck!” he screamed, clutching at the new abrasion. The thing removed itself from his sister’s head—Sophia was gasping for air—and started to make its way to the other side of the mattress. Josh would have none of it. In a fit of anger he clutched the wiggling ball of hair with both hands and lifted it above his head while it writhed and screeched. With all the force he could muster he spun and tossed it against the wall. A horrible thud followed, the thing sticking to the wall for a moment before dropping to the floor.
Josh rushed to the door and turned on the lights. Sophia was sitting up with her knees pulled close to her chest and staring at him with wide, terrified eyes. Her body shook and her breath came in gasps. Grime matted her hair and spots of glistening fluid clung to her forehead and cheeks. Tiny red droplets trickled from what appeared to be a scratch on her neck.
“Josh?” she asked.
“I’m here,” he replied. He went back over to her, sat down, and moved her hair aside. “Let me see that.”
They were scratches, all right: a set of four to match the ones on his forearm and wrist. He licked his fingers and wiped the blood away. Sophia recoiled when he did so.
“What happened?” she asked.
Josh glanced at the wall, where a red and black smear the size of a watermelon stood out in the middle of the yellow paint. His eyes followed the mark downward until they rested on the perpetrator.
He slid off the bed and approached the dead thing. Wet, tan fur streaked with crimson covered its body. Fighting back his gag reflex, he grabbed what he assumed to be the back of its neck and turned the thing to face him.
It was a cat, though one in a horrendous state he’d only seen in movies. Deep sores filled with yellow pus covered the bare spots around its nose and mouth. The sores bubbled, the fluid inside squirting out even though its skull had been crushed upon impact with the wall. Its open eyes were clouded with black ash, making them look like a doll’s eyes. The sliver of pupil couldn’t be seen.
Josh swallowed hard and pried open its mouth. The teeth in front were oversized, brownish, and jagged. He ran his thumb over one. It felt like stone. Intrigued, he leaned in for a closer look, but pulled back with a cry of disgust. The mangy dead thing smelled like Hampton Wharf in the summer, only a hundred times worse.
He looked up at the window as a chilly breeze wafted in, making him shiver. He regretted having opened it, thinking the fresh air would cleanse them as they slept. The strange and frightening cat had obviously scaled the roof and climbed in, seeking shelter for the night. Josh peeked over his shoulder at its moldy corpse and shook his head.
After cleaning Sophia up and bandaging her wounds, Josh laid her back in bed. With his sister snug and silent, he marched down the hall and opened his parents’ bedroom door. They were still asleep with the television blaring, as usual. His parents had certainly been exhausted by the end of their stressful day full of horrible news, and they were deep sleepers to begin with, which suited Josh just fine. He had no desire to explain things such as dead, mutant cats and bloodstained walls.
He went downstairs and washed his hands in the kitchen sink, scrubbing vigorously, cleaning his wounds. Next he grabbed a pair of oven mitts, a garbage bag, paper towels, and a bottle of Windex. After that, it was back upstairs to Sophia’s room. He stuffed the cat into the garbage bag, then snuck back out and tossed the carcass in the trashcan by the side of the road. Thank God garbage collection is tomorrow, he thought.
The next half-hour was spent cleaning up the nastiness in the bedroom. He scoured the wall and floor, using up most of a new roll of paper towels and scrubbing so hard that his elbow barked. When he finished depositing the red, dripping, and foul-smelling towels in the same trashcan as the cat, it was close to three-thirty in the morning.
Sophia’s eyes were wide open when he re-entered her room, watching him as he removed his shoes. The somber expression never left her face. He nodded at her and then walked down the hall to the bathroom.
“You doing okay?” he asked upon returning from brushing his teeth.
“I guess so,” his sister replied.
“Just close your eyes.” He sat down beside her. “I’m
right here, Rascal. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
She craned her neck and stared at him. Her drawn lips gave her face a grave quality. “You said that before we went to sleep.”
Her disappointment disarmed him. He couldn’t find anything to say. His stomach and throat twitched as if he were about to cry.
“But I still love you,” said Sophia, a wry and sad smile crossing her lips.
Josh grinned. “Thanks.”
They stretched out on the bed as before, with Josh wrapping his sister in his arms. A moment of silence followed, until Sophia said, “Oh, by the way, big brother—”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for killing the cat.”
CHAPTER 6
WRATHCHILD
MAGNIFIED, THE BODY IN THE TRAY revealed itself to be a cylinder lined with tiny hairs. The bottom consisted of a long, skinny thread, which looped around and connected in the middle, like a lasso or a teardrop on a string. This was all very interesting, but nothing when compared to the head. Its shape was that of a mushroom, and this mushroom enveloped a spiked ball twice the size of the body connected to it. Tiny hooks protruded from the mushroom, eighteen in total. They were perfectly symmetrical, like rays of light projecting from an animated sun.
This was equally the most amazing and threatening phenomenon Dr. Horace Struder had ever witnessed—a microbe flawlessly constructed to spread its wings in every way imaginable, a frightening illustration of perfection in an imperfect world.
Horace lifted his head, removed his glasses, and rubbed his eyes, his sinuses aching from the strain of staring at the microscope’s six-inch viewing monitor for seemingly every moment over the past week. The buzz of the fluorescent lights burned into his inner ear and the tightness in his chest made it difficult to breathe.
The quitter in him wanted to give up, to go back to Cambridge where he belonged, and continue his treatments. I cannot stop now, he told himself, and it was the truth. They needed him here. This was where he belonged. There would be time to eradicate the poison coursing through his body later. He took the pencil out of his breast pocket, bent over his notepad, and wrote: “The path we’ve chosen is the path we must follow,” before continuing his notes. He could almost see God in the words.
An hour later he had filled fourteen pages. He returned the pencil to its resting place and leaned against the table. His stomach rumbled and he licked his lips, wondering where he’d left his lunch. His eyes scanned the empty room and he suddenly felt very alone. Desks, chairs, empty cages, and research equipment were all he could see. He sympathized with these compliant pieces of furniture and dutiful, expensive machines. The truth, he realized, was that he had a lot in common with all those inanimate objects. They were all there for the same reasons: fill the void, answer the questions, complete the objective, and nothing more.
Horace grabbed his cane and limped across the tile floor. At the door to the adjacent lab, he peered through the window into the “Clean Room”, which, in reality, was a place that was anything but. The woman inside looked like an astronaut from a fifties science fiction movie in her bright yellow biohazard suit. An air tube ran from the plate on her back up to the ceiling, where a sterilized oxygen mixture was being delivered. Cages filled with mice, guinea pigs, monkeys, and snakes encircled her. She lifted a syringe and, after luring one of the monkeys over to her, plunged the needle into the animal’s hindquarters. It let loose a high-pitched squeal. The intrusive, pain-giving hands of the woman switched gears and became kind, petting the monkey’s head to calm it down.
A smile came over Horace’s lips. He loved watching his understudy work. It amazed him that they’d worked together for five years now—five years of labor-intensive and often demoralizing research—and yet still she demonstrated compassion while performing the most uncompassionate duties. Whereas he had felt himself grow cold over the last half of his sixty-three years, she still seemed to hold on to those precarious threads of humanity. He almost worshiped her for it, though worship wasn’t quite the word for what he felt.
He pressed the button on the intercom. “Kelly, it’s time for lunch.”
His assistant turned and waved. Her features were unnaturally enhanced behind the Plexiglas face shield. She motioned to her nonexistent watch and twirled her finger, then stuck out her tongue. Horace laughed and his heart swelled. The brilliant young thing sure did make him proud, even with her goofiness. No, worship wasn’t the word at all.
The word he was looking for was love, the love one might feel for a daughter.
* * *
“Where do we go from here, Doc?” asked Kelly between bites of her sandwich.
“I’m not sure,” replied Horace, tapping his fork on the plastic bowl before him. His food—blackened chicken salad with ranch dressing—was virtually untouched. Two bites in and he already felt full. He cursed his stomach for its deceit.
“Hell,” he continued, “I’m not sure if we even started in the right place.”
Kelly half-smiled back. The expression seemed odd. She had an unremarkable face, with smooth lines and vague features that made it difficult for those who didn’t know the particulars of her life her to guess her age. He’d heard every presumption from eighteen to forty-five, though all in question would inevitably nod their heads in an ah-ha when they discovered she was twenty-eight. Her eyes were the darkest of brown and so large that in the wrong lighting they appeared to be popping out of her head. These things weren’t what gave Horace pause, however. These were usual. It was the smile, the one that only left her face during moments of extreme concentration, when her lips would become a thin line of puzzlement. Now, it was nowhere to be found. Not only that, but huge black circles puffed out around her eyes and she seemed paler than usual.
It’s the stress, he reasoned. This much tension isn’t good for her. It’s not good for the soul. It’s not good for me.
Horace leaned back in his chair and stroked his beard. He wanted more than anything to ask what was wrong, but they had more pressing matters at hand. He glanced at the grease board that hung against the wall opposite them. A map of the Americas had been stenciled onto it. A red splotch covered the area near the border between Central and South America, and then the red shot outward in every direction like veins, thick at first and thinning out once they reached the center of the United States and the cusp of Argentina. The thinning continued until there were nothing but stray tracers leading north into Canada and south into Peru. He thought the map resembled a lifeline, or perhaps the branches of a family tree. Both concepts made him shudder.
“So,” he said after clearing his throat, “let’s start with what we know. From the beginning.”
Kelly coughed and glanced at the diagram, then at Horace. “Okay, you first.”
He stood up and limped around the room. “The virus begins in the Yucatan Peninsula. Nicaragua, perhaps Honduras. It spreads through every country down there in a week. The incubation period seemed very small at the time, only seventy-two hours at most, which made containment seem possible—”
“But now we know that’s not the case.”
“That’s right. The local authorities thought they had it quarantined. For two days there’s nothing, and then cases start popping up in Mexico City. Then Panama, then Brazil, then Tijuana, and subsequently Texas.” He paused and glanced at Kelly. “And why did this happen?”
“It happened because the virus has both a lysogenic and non-lysogenic cycle. It can lie dormant for weeks—maybe even months or years, for all we know—before the major symptoms of infection begin.”
“Exactly. And yet that’s not the most unusual thing.”
“A bit of an understatement, Doc.”
Horace stopped pacing and sat back down. He grabbed his notebook and flipped through the pages, reading its inventory like a grocery list. “Virus is of unknown origin. Initially believed to spread through the saliva and droppings of rats due to the population boom in the numerous deprived region
s where it first appeared. Virus contains aspects of many major diseases currently on file. Like Retroviridae, it attacks the immune system, only instead of breaking it down, it can, in certain cases, actually enhance it. The body shape is pleomorphic, similar to those in the Filoviridae family—branched, u-shaped, or spherical. In some instances, much like Ebola and infections of similar origin, the vital organs are broken down and liquefied. The smooth upper shell resembles Herpesviridae. The spikes lining the surface of the head are consistent with most every form of Orthomyxoviridae on record.”
Kelly picked up where he left off, without the assistance of notes. “Virus contains both RNA and DNA strands, which has never been seen before. Virus is zoonotic, and infects virtually every multi-celled organism the same way, attacking the cell nucleus, overtaking it, assimilating it, reproducing it. A triple coat of protein protects its genetic information and a thick lipid membrane surrounds that.” She paused, and her face grew even more serious. The half-smile disappeared. “It is spread every way imaginable: through the air, through exchange of bodily fluids, through ingesting microscopic flecks of tissue. And so on and so forth. In other words, we know now what we knew two weeks ago. We can go over this again and again, Doc. But I think we’re looking in the wrong place, from the wrong point of view.”
“How so?”
“This disorder doesn’t kill, Doc. At least not directly. In fact, from everything we’ve seen, it can strengthen the host…with the exception of some unfortunate mental side-effects.”
“Yes,” he replied, “but that’s the cost, isn’t it? You have to take into account those ‘unfortunate mental side-effects’. Those becoming ill are developing some sort of dementia, Kelly. Almost like schizophrenia. You know this. Not to mention the new cellular structure brought on by prolonged illness requires massive amounts of protein to stay viable. They’re violent, and they kill without prejudice as a result. They become animals—though animals that can think their way around corners as well as we do. If that’s not a direct link to mortality rate, I don’t know what is.”