The work continued without him. The computer processed Zero’s blood sample and compared it to Stephen’s work on the older Zero virus from the Florida phone booth exposure. He examined the computer models side by side. The structural discrepancies of the viral genome were obvious and dramatic.
Zero was desperate and compelled to infect. But he was also perishing. His human host was weakening and in need of repair. He was running out of time.
The plan revealed itself to Maryk all at once. It was as though his distress over Melanie’s fate had subordinated the Zero dilemma in his mind and therefore freed him to think intuitively. But the design as presented was so propitious that he discounted it at first. Atlanta was rising to live out what could be its last healthy day. Nothing less than the survival of the species was at stake.
Moments later he was convinced of the genius of his scheme. It was as radical a treatment as he could envision and his only chance at stopping Zero.
He would need a geneticist’s help. He scheduled a meeting with Geist before rushing back out of B4.
The conference sick were laid out on blankets and mats under shining chandeliers. Some called to Maryk by name but he did not stop for anyone until he found Melanie kneeling on the floor with a shivering man. She was holding his gloved hand gently.
Wheat brown skin sagged off the man’s neck and shoulders. A white bedsheet clung to the ribs of his sunken frame. Tortoiseshell eyeglasses too large for his face exaggerated the ghosting of his eyes and laid bare the fear in his caving face. Every breath seemed a mystery to him.
“No,” Maryk heard Melanie say. “I’m not a doctor.”
The man said, “Then you must be sick too.”
“I used to be.”
The patient’s eyes widened while the rest of his being remained sagged.
“I know how you feel,” Melanie said. “It’s so shameful to be so sick. The disease came up out of nowhere and took you all at once, and all you can think is, why?”
The man’s wristwatch clattered on the heel of his trembling hand. He breathed deeply through bared teeth. His eyes were profound with blood.
“Why?” she said again. “I remember lying in the hospital, before it got really bad, and trying to figure out what terrible thing I had done. Or what thing I had failed to do — some kind act of charity that would have spared me. What terrible thing did I do to deserve to die this way? And now that I’ve survived, all I can think is: What terrible thing did I do to deserve to live?”
She was quiet a moment. She was just coming to this realization herself.
“But we can’t think that way, either of us. You’re scared. You’re just scared. I know, because I was more scared than you are. You have questions that you can’t answer. And even if there’s nothing these doctors can do for you, maybe they can make you more comfortable. Maybe they can answer some of your questions. You have to let them try.” The man’s eyes were ancient with infection as he watched her over the rims of his eyeglasses. It was as though an exchange of some sort had taken place. “Just let them try.”
Illness hung in the room like moisture. The room was humid with disease and Maryk felt it starting to cling. People were dying at his feet. Melanie was administering to the sick while Maryk could not bring himself to move. He remembered her holding his hand as he was coming out of the cascade at the airport. He remembered seeing her face over him as he awoke.
Melanie saw him standing behind her. “We have to go,” Maryk told her.
She looked up at him. “Is it Stephen?” she said.
“He’s weak now. I’ll take you to him.”
The sky was brightening into dawn as he drove the tree-lined roads back to the BDC. He felt suspended between the urgency and audacity of his plan and the nausea of failure. He pulled around to Building Nine as daylight broke around them. The city was waking to what could be its final day.
The building was uninhabited as he had ordered and there was no BioCon guard outside the Tank. Melanie was exhausted and did not notice any of this.
Maryk went to the tablet that controlled the Tank doors. “I won’t be asking any more of you,” he said. “You can stay with him as long as you like.”
She nodded and waited tiredly at the first door. “What are you going to do?”
Maryk just shook his head. “I’ll come back for you,” he said.
He issued the remote admittance command from the nurse’s table and opened the doors that allowed her into the Tank. She moved through the UV shower that killed the viruses on the surface of her body but could not touch the ones changing her inside. He looked through the window and saw her approaching Stephen’s wheelchair. He closed both doors and sealed her inside the Tank.
The hallway elevator dinged down the hall. The BioCon security guard emerged wearing a contact suit and met Maryk at the desk.
“The girl inside,” Maryk told her. “She is not to be let out until I return.”
The Black Heart
Panic welled up ahead of tears as she stood before Stephen Pearse and for a moment thought he was dead. His head was tipped to the side and his lifeless face was gray and broken with hot, black, suppurating sores. His left arm hung straight off his wheelchair as though reaching for the floor, his gaunt fingers blistered and grayed like infested wood. She called his name again. She pushed his armrest and shook the chair gently, and his eyes opened, and he righted his head slowly, in pain. He looked about himself blindly before finding Melanie, and by then she was composed in front of him.
The sore on his right eyelid was seeping reddened pus and threatened to close the eye. He raised his own arm onto his lap, and his mouth contorted in pain. Melanie placed the medication trigger in his hand and watched him thumb it twice.
She blurted out the short version of what had happened at the airport, then pulled over the chair and told it all again, in detail, from beginning to end. It was a relief to sort it all out verbally, and her telling it kept both of them occupied. Stephen’s attention faded at times, but Maryk’s name always succeeded in bringing him back.
He spoke hoarsely, and from the way he swallowed Ye she could tell that some obstruction was growing in the space of his throat. The act of speaking had never before seemed so complicated. What he said at first sounded like gibberish, and she thought his mind was gone. Then came the English translation of the Latin phrase, just above a whisper: “You may drive nature out with a pitchfork,” he said, “but she will keep coming back.”
“Or ‘he,’ ” she said, relieved by his apparent sanity.
“Zero has the pitchfork at Peter’s throat now. Peter must stop trying to fight the man. He must instead fight the virus.”
She said nothing, pitying her faith in Maryk. She offered Stephen a plastic cup of water, and his grinning lips closed on the straw. He swallowed and eased back.
“You should hate me, Melanie. You should strangle me as I sit here. I let the girl with vitiligo go out of the camp. I am the one who brought about your sickness. Your parents. Your town. I caused all this.”
“Stop,” she said.
“Maybe it all should end. You’ve thought so sometimes, Melanie. Who hasn’t? No more suffering, no more struggling.”
“Please stop,” she said, but his eyes had slipped from focus. The IV lines slithered off his trembling arms, and her eyes filled as she looked at the rotting mass of his body.
He came around strong again. It was like standing beside a carousel, watching someone swing past and fade away.