Maryk composed the bulletin himself at the vacated BDC. He had flown aboard the first planes seeding the clouds over the city. He had watched the preliminary drops of inspired rain falling away. He had scattered the first of the gel caps into the city’s water system. He had personally compromised the holy water at the Enterprise Church service. But most of the deluge he had orchestrated by tablet from his corner office in Building Fifteen.
He wandered out onto Clifton Road before the rain stopped at midnight, rain that had no effect on him except to soak his shirt and pants and spill off his gloved hands, to be collected in the great sewers below the sleeping city and cleansed and expelled. He stood in the middle of the empty road and looked up at the sky and the rain bleeding out of it, and in that moment Maryk knew what it was to be Zero. The city was his city now. The fever was his fever. The rain was his rain. He stood through wave after soaking wave, and on either side of him the red-clay foundation of Atlanta washed off the roadside, coursing in dark, pulsing ripples down the sloping street, draining away into the open mouths of the sewers.
The Fountain
Melanie applied Vaseline to Stephen’s lips as he slept. There was no more futile act ever performed in the history of human existence, but it was all she could do for him, that and adjust the pillow behind his head. Now and then a stray tear seeped down her face, which she ignored. Her emotions were a china vase shoved to the edge of a high table over a marble floor.
Maryk returned for her, and reluctantly she left Stephen, standing with Maryk in the delousing rays of the ultraviolet light chamber like some wretched thing. He had brought her fresh clothes, and waited while she changed in an employee bathroom. She was desperate to splash cold water on her face but all the sink faucets were dry. He looked her over comprehensively when she emerged, then disposed of her old clothes in a biohazard box. “They weren’t that dirty,” she said numbly.
The halls were empty. The catwalks between buildings were empty too, and in the parking lot outside there was a dead, ringing silence. There was no guard at the gate, nor any traffic as Maryk drove out onto the road, but Melanie was so blitzed at that point that none of this registered. He tried a couple of times to get her to talk, asking how she felt, and she nodded, or didn’t nod, barely responding. Scenery ran past her window in a blur. Her mind was still with Stephen, watching him fade into eternity.
Only when they hit the downtown area did she realize that there were no people outside. The roads and sidewalks were all vacant, and she touched her window as they rolled unbothered through red traffic lights, the city shining oddly clean in the morning sun. “It’s over,” she said. Every skyscraper, every high rise, every hotel and restaurant, every office tower, every side street, every boulevard, every alleyway, every park. It was just she and Maryk now, and there seemed something inevitable about that, something inescapable and fatelike about them ending up together, alone in a vast, silenced world. She didn’t resist it, or even react. She only wondered where all the corpses were.
“It’s not Zero,” Maryk told her.
She ignored this because the truth was right before her eyes. The sun was shining and the buildings sparkled as though from a fresh rain, but the billboards advertised in silence, to silence, and the traffic lights changed for no one, the city working like a clock with precision gears but no hands. There is nothing so emblematic of death as a deserted city.
He said, “It was me.”
She listened then. He told her about the virus and how he had infected the city in order to baffle Zero. He told it as her father used to tell her parables: slowly and patiently, without comment. The only pride evident was in his detailing of the plan’s execution. Sherman had burned Atlanta; Maryk infected it. The entire city and county slept under his spell.
He stopped the car in the middle of one of the wide Peachtree streets, dead center on the double yellow line. She did not move at first.
“The sun has burned off whatever was left,” he said. “It’s clear.”
She got out and stood in the center of the four-lane road, The silence of the concrete and steel city was absolute. Maryk started across a boardwalk mall of stone tiles toward a fountain, and Melanie followed.
Water plumed out of the center of the fountain, joined in its fall by jets flaring from the outer ring of masonry like a serenade of trumpets. She saw coins scattered over the submerged, rusted green tiles and thought of the small fists that had released them, and the big wishes that had gone unfulfilled. Maryk sat on the stone rim of the fountain, and she took her place nearby, two exhausted beings alone under the Atlanta sun, looking at the dead city all around them. Church bells rang somewhere, but other than that, only the running water alleviated the awful silence.
She noticed that Maryk was carrying a first aid kit in place of his black bag. It was set on the stones between his feet.
“Zero is breaking apart,” he said. “He’s holed up somewhere, waiting, but he can’t wait long. He’s dying, and I’ve taken Atlanta from him.”
It was over, or nearly over, and yet Maryk did not appear pleased. There was no sense of victory about him as he sat looking at his shadow on the stones. The kit was open between his black shoes. She could see his eyes, and they were lower and brighter than usual. He was thinking hard about something, deliberating. She wondered what it meant that she knew him so well. She looked around the park, and everything in her field of vision, a hand rail, a scuff mark on a stone step, a bench, shimmered with echoes of humanity.
She looked back at him, and he was reaching down into the kit. He paused when he saw her, his hand remaining inside the bag almost as though she had caught him at something. Then his hand came out holding a syringe. She saw that the barrel was half filled with a clear fluid, and then she cheated a look at his face, and for one crazy instant thought he was going to turn on her and attack her. He had that look in his eyes, the same glare of murderous intent she had seen inside the airport tunnel. He straightened with the syringe in his hand, and stared at her, breathing deeply.
He appeared oddly full of adrenaline. None of this made sense to her.
“Why did you bring me here?” she said. Something was telling her to stand and run away. “What’s wrong with you?”
He was looking at the syringe now. He held it like a pen, staring at it as though in deep deliberation.
“I want to go back,” she said, standing.
He did not rise after her. Her jumpiness turned to frustration, fed by his silence. Stephen Pearse was dying in a hospital cell a few miles away.
“Why are you just sitting there?” she said.
He turned the syringe over in his big right hand. His silver eyes rose only as high as her knee.
“Why won’t you visit Stephen?” she said. She was angry now. Emotions were coming at her randomly, like asteroids, fragments of long-ago eruptions. “He used to be your best friend.”
Her voice faltered and she stopped and breathed through it, and realized she was crying again, though she hadn’t thought that possible. She used her fingers to whisk away the tears.
“It is Stephen, isn’t it?” she said. That explained the syringe. “His fate. It’s different when you know the person who is sick and suffering, know them well, and have some stake in their well-being, A part of you, invested, that withers when they wither. That will die when they die.”