“This argument is giving me an old-fashioned headache.” Oliver said, counting to ten under his breath. “For almost thirty years, I have witnessed some of the most vile, dehumanizing behavior you or anyone else could possibly imagine. In Rwanda, I set up an orphanage for twenty-two small children whose parents had been tortured and then burned alive just because they were in the wrong clan. As a warning to neighboring tribes, each one of those children had had their right arm severed above the elbow. The stumps were cauterized with branding irons. I don’t need a lesson on what people are capable of doing. I believe that given the right set of circumstances, any person, including you, me, and even Reisch, is capable of any act, no matter how heinous. I have accepted that as part of the human condition. Now that doesn’t mean that I condone the behavior. What it means is that I don’t condemn the individual.”
He stared at her, and she stared back, her face remaining hard.
Oliver continued, “We voluntarily constrain our behavior through the rule of law so that a society can exist, and we live by that rule, even at the grown-ups’ table — especially at the grown-ups’ table. Otherwise, we create the very conditions that will turn us all into Reisch.”
“There is no point to this argument,” Amanda said after a suitable pause. She realized that Oliver would probably never accept how the real world worked. The rule of law was for normal people, and neither she nor Reisch were normal people any more. They would do as they pleased because no one could stop them. Again, she found herself identifying with Reisch, only this time it didn’t seem quite as revolting.
Oliver agreed. “So what do we do about Reisch?”
Amanda wondered how she and Oliver had suddenly become a we. “I haven’t decided yet,” she said.
“Greg could help.” Oliver tried to be conciliatory.
Amanda nodded. “I will talk with him latter, but you worry me. I want you to promise me that you won’t do anything or expose yourself to anyone unnecessarily.”
Oliver smiled. “I’m going to ignore the double meaning, and I promise not to do anything, including exposing myself unnecessarily.”
Her comment had been unintentional, but well timed. “I’m sorry, Father, how politically incorrect of me to mention a priest exposing himself.” She smiled as she got up.
“Be nice,” he said, as he too stood. He almost offered his hand, but instead put both his hands in his pockets.
Amanda noticed. “How about if I just wave good-bye.” She gave him a small wave and turned to retrieve her coat. “I will call you after Greg and I speak,” she said while slipping into her coat.
“I’m glad you came,” he said, but he really didn’t know if that was the truth.
Chapter 24
“Cause of death: exsanguination. End dictation.” Phil replaced the microphone and began to strip off his cloth gown and mask. He wasn’t surprised that Mr. Peter Bilsky had bled to death; he had been shot eleven times. Phil had recovered all the bullets, one from the left arm, three from the legs, two from the back, three from the chest, one from the abdomen, and one from the neck. There hadn’t been much left of poor Peter after Phil had finished with him. He checked the clock on the wall and was surprised to find that forty-five minutes had passed since he had sent out the tissue samples, which meant that the slides should be ready for viewing. He had a fairly good idea what they would show. Bilsky’s brain had been swollen, red, and grossly abnormal; he was infected with this new virus. Phil had taken samples from every available organ and tissue. They needed as much information about this infection as soon as possible.
It took him another two hours to sort through the slides. “Addendum to previous report. Contributing cause of death: viral encephalitis, type unknown. End dictation.” They would have to give this infection a name, but that would have to be done later. Right now, he had a different responsibility: to report this to the CDC. If they cared to give it one of their usual catchy names, then so be it. Actually, that honor belongs to Henry Gorman, Phil thought, surprised that it had slipped his mind. He picked up the phone and dialed the main number for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. It was after hours, and as expected, the operator routed him to the voicemail of Nathan Martin’s Special Pathogens Division. Phil left a brief voicemail and hung up. His next call was to the Colorado Department of Health, and he was annoyed to find that they, too, were closed. He left his second voicemail, which was considerably more terse than the first, and then returned to the slides. He reviewed the nine that showed the clearest signs of infection; all nine came from the brain. The virus was to small to be seen with a light microscope, so he would have to wait for the electron micrographs to confirm that it was Gorman’s virus that was causing the profound inflammatory reaction at the base of the brain. It was curious that the worst parts of Peter Bilsky’s brain were the ones most associated with memory and emotions. His thalamus, hypothalamus, and amygdaloid nuclei, along with both hippocampi, were almost liquefied.
Phil began to wonder how Bilsky had survived so long. He changed objective lenses to his highest power and began to review the morphology of the individual nerve cell bodies. He started with those closest to the ventricles, but the architecture was so disturbed that he began to scan outward. The further he moved away from the fluid-filled cavities, the closer the anatomy conformed to normal.
Melissa Shay, the department’s senior lab tech, quietly walked into the reading room and placed a tray of slides next to Phil. He felt her presence and looked up.
“I did a KL-124 stain on some of these,” she said. The KL124 stain was a good multipurpose stain that made inflammatory cells appear blue. “He’s got loads of inflammation, but there’s something strange going on here. You should look at these six slides.”
Phil took the first of the six slides and held it up to the ceiling light. It was almost entirely blue. “Curious,” he said. He replaced the slide that he had been scanning with the new one.
Melissa waited. Normally, Phil worked in complete isolation, but she was intrigued enough to violate his workspace, and to her surprise, he allowed it.
Phil made a preliminary inspection and confirmed that Melissa hadn’t made a mistake during the staining process, and then he focused down to the cells. As expected, the brain tissue was rife with the small blue lymphocytes indicative of a viral infection, but there was something else, something that shouldn’t be there. A thick band of large, blue-stained neurons lined the walls of Peter Bilsky’s ventricles. Phil looked up from the microscope.
“It doesn’t make any sense, but I think that’s germinal matrix,” Melissa said.
Normally, the brain developed from a thin layer of cells called the germinal matrix. Never more than a few cell layers thick, all the neurons a person would ever have derived from these stem cells. The problem was that the germinal matrix all but disappears in infancy, and yet Peter Bilsky had a thick layer of these very special cells lining the walls of his adult ventricles.
Phil returned to the scope. The stem cells were so densely packed around the ventricles that nothing normal remained, but two to three millimeters away, the inflammation predominated. It was two sides of the same coin. A destructive inflammatory process initiated by an unknown virus, and a regenerative process that had no business being there.
“These are stained as well?” He pointed to the remaining slides in the tray.
“Most of them, but only these six are from the brain.” Melissa was getting excited, sensing that they were on to something new and important.
“Right now, I’m more interested in the rest of the samples.” He made eye contact with her, and she blushed.