“ ‘Let experiment be made on a worthless body.’ Touching. And here I thought you and Stephen used to be friends.”
“All I can do is give him a little more time.”
“Pardon the non-Ivy League pronunciation: Corruptio optimi pessima. ‘The corruption of the best is the worst of all.’ And one more I know; and then I want you out of my office and out of my sight. The next time you want some chicken soup, open up the can yourself. Similia similibus curantur. ‘Like is cured by like.’ ”
Maryk took the tube and returned to the subterranean B4. In a sense he admired the small-focus simplicity of Geist’s mind. It reminded him of the half-sad smile of his blind mother when she rumblingly realized some small task.
He injected Stephen with the retroviral antigen. If nothing else his DNA strategy flooded Stephen’s brain with healthy cells that needed killing and this bought Maryk time. Maryk needed time.
He boosted Stephen with another fix of MILKMAID serum and charted an aggressive protocol of the same. He ordered monitoring for hyperkalemia due to the massive transfusions and prescribed strict electrolyte and fluid maintenance. He ordered tube feeding into the small bowel and 10 mg perenteral morphine and trycyclics for the pain.
“He’s going to get worse before he gets better,” Maryk told the nurse, “if he gets better. How long can you stay?”
“As long as you need me, Doctor.”
The speed was already failing him. Stephen was radioactive with Plainville. “Call if there are any sudden changes,” he said.
He dozed in UV. He was a long time changing back into his clothes.
Morning light beat through the windows upstairs as he staggered into an empty break room and dropped onto a bruise-red vinyl sofa. The room ebbed against him as though the entire building had been set to sea. He heard his tablet smack the floor and his breathing became thick and lugubrious. The weight of the cascade fell. He sank heavily away.
The tone did not awaken him. A woman’s voice did. He came to hours later in a room full of people eating lunch.
“Hello?” she was saying. A young woman wearing a lab coat. Small nose and large glasses and curled brown hair looming over him. The room smelled of peanut butter and apples.
“Excuse me?” She knew who he was. He could tell by the way she kept her distance. “Your tablet. You’re being paged.”
He sat up. The others in the room continued to eat and pretended not to notice him. Maryk tasted the roily paste of sleep. His black socks were only half-pulled onto his feet and he realized he had left his shoes behind in the changing room of B4.
The woman backed away. “It’s been going off for a while,” she said.
He righted his overturned tablet on the floor and opened it and the tone ceased. Stage sighs within the room. The header split in his muddled vision and he concentrated until it became clear. The post was from Reilly and Boone. It was uncharacteristically capitalized.
LANCET IS DOWN.
Lancet
Traffic was squeezed into two lanes on the five-lane Peachtree. Police lights flashed against the orange terracotta wall announcing The Groves. Maryk displayed his credentials for a cop wearing lime green gloves and was admitted through the barricade.
Police vehicles outnumbered BDC vans and trucks in the parking lot outside the easternmost condominium building. The structure was fat and frosted with pink stucco and rimmed with Spanish terraces. Evacuated residents sat on a side lawn under trees manicured to look like poodle tails.
Maryk was met by one of his Special Pathogens men wearing a full contact suit at the concierge’s desk in the lobby of Groves East. His name was Reilly and he introduced a waiting Atlanta police lieutenant named Cole. The cops behind Lieutenant Cole all wore gloves and police respirators and stood around anxiously. Law enforcement organizations in general hated dealing with disease.
Reilly huffed inside his suit and led Maryk around rather theatrically. Maryk declined a suit with a sideward glance at Reilly but did pull on a simple respirator for appearance’s sake. Lieutenant Cole thumbed the elevator log button but Maryk walked to the stairwell. Reilly and Lieutenant Cole reluctantly followed. Uniformed police officers in gloves and masks were posted at each landing.
“How bad would you say it all is, the spread?” asked Lieutenant Cole. “We can go wider with the evacuation if it’s warranted.”
“I won’t know what it is until I get in there,” said Maryk.
“Helluva job you people do. Tracking this thing, and keeping my boys out of it. Be nice if we knew where crime was going to emerge as it emerged.”
“It’s like narcotics,” offered Reilly. “From the source to the distributor to dealers to the street. Contact tracing. Chain of infection.”
White viricidal foam lathered the walls beginning with the eleventh-floor landing. Reilly and Lieutenant Cole slowed there.
Reilly said, “We do appreciate your cooperation, Lieutenant.”
“Cooperation, nothing. Damn pleasure. You know I have a son in sixth grade in Conyers who says he wants to be a doctor like Dr. Pearse at the BDC. I tell him he’s crazy. That’s one hell of a public relations department you got going there.”
Maryk was a half flight above. “We can handle next-of-kin notification,” he said. “Disease can be a difficult subject, and we’ve had some experience.”
Lieutenant Cole pointed up from the perceived safety of the lower landing. “Shouldn’t you be in one of them suits?”
Reilly answered for him. “Dr. Maryk’s not so good in confined spaces.”
“Lord,” said Lieutenant Cole genuinely. He tipped his hat to Maryk. “Luck to you.”
The eleventh-floor hallway was foamed wall-to-ceiling. Two suits guarding a door three doors down opened it for Maryk and Reilly. They entered a kitchen area with a larger room beyond. The door closed behind them and they were sufficiently alone.
Maryk stripped off his respirator. Reilly broke open the seal across his chest and with a gasp of relief pushed the hood piece back over his head. The suit collapsed to the carpet and he stepped out of it.
“Seven years of med school,” Reilly said. The tension of the situation had short-circuited his usual midwestern agreeableness. “Seven years of med school — for this? We’ve been going out of our minds here.”
“I was detained.”
“I thought they’d bust in at any moment.”
Maryk moved into the living area. “You should have more faith in their fear. Now what happened?”
Reilly walked inside ahead of him. “Everything’s been preserved, everything recorded on disk. The apartment and the hallway, everything.”
Rattan shades drawn over the windows glowed brown. The main room was arranged around a media center with a monitor and console set into sturdy wire shelving. There was a black leather couch and a floor lamp in one corner and twin black canvas director’s chairs in the other. A large bookcase was built into the near wall. It was full of pop culture memorabilia from the turn of the century — books, posters, glossies, action figures, magnets, mugs, lunch boxes, pins, cels, phone cards, video cassettes. Lancet owned and operated a nostalgia boutique for tourists in the Underground Mail of downtown Atlanta.
“You’ve never been up here,” Reilly said.
Maryk shook his head. “Where is he?”
“The bedroom. We took a liver temp which set death at about midnight, right after he got in from work. Boone’s in there now. Haven’t touched him otherwise.”