The syringe turned more slowly, and she sensed something building in him, perhaps something like rage. The fountain itself seemed alive with it, as though it were going to explode. He looked up at her then, the fountain pluming behind him, and she expected to see a different face, but it was his own. He did not look murderous anymore. The syringe remained in his hand, but Maryk looked strangely vulnerable.
Something was giving way inside her as well. The frustration she felt, the loneliness, the waiting, stinging her eyes. Her voice was steady and collapsing at the same time. “He told me I needed to save you,” she said. “What does that mean? Save you from what?”
Whatever Maryk had been thinking, it seemed to pass. He set the syringe back inside the kit and closed it and stood. He was a moment balancing himself, looking away, and she recognized at once that low-eyed expression, the slant coming into his face like a ripple across a tableau of water, and the faint slackness in his jaw. The drowsy look that twisted his face in a strange way that made him appear sad.
He was cascading, and trying to hide this from her. She looked up at him wordlessly for an answer.
“The lab,” he explained. “I was looking at Zero’s virus.”
She didn’t believe him, but could not understand why he would lie. She could not understand anything about him anymore.
He turned himself toward the car. “I’ll visit him,” he said, and she knew what that meant. He was going back to the BDC to put to death the only friend he ever had.
Good-bye
I knew then why people fear the ill. Because when health is boiled off the body, like meat off a bone, something elemental is revealed beneath: our pained selves, bombarded from without and within, expiring with every breath. Frightened creatures — small, afraid, and alone.
I was a mere consciousness by then, a brain, a mind, an impaired intelligence existing apart from the body — alone, like a single, struggling cell.
The prenatal human is pristine in nature. The womb is safe, a clean place for a developing organism, and biologically we are all perfect at the instant of birth. But with that first independent breath comes the microbiota, swarming and colonizing the amniotic-mucked newborn who from that flawless primary instant is engaged in a lifelong struggle against his own death. Every touch, every kiss, every cuddle; every word whispered to an unformed face; every new room into which an infant is carried. Every step is an assault of all the natural world upon this new life form struggling moment to moment for survival.
I was not rotting of Plainville. I was rotting of life, of the effluvia of existence, being dragged into eternity by the cumulative disease of a lifetime of exchanges from submicroscopic to tangible, from the most profane to the most pleasing. Existence was my ultimate undoing, not this virus. Not Zero.
Peter and Melanie appeared at the viewing window. Melanie cupped her hands to the glass, looking for my wasted body in the corner, while Peter disappeared behind her. It was dark inside the Tank now, and the most she could have seen of me would have been a vague gray shape in a chair backed into the far corner.
I awaited Peter’s words. Typed from the tablet at the nurse’s table, they appeared in stark, white letters scrolling across the black field of the wall screen.
>Stephen. What are you doing?
I typed: I am waiting now, Peter. I must wait alone.
>Why have you barricaded the door?
I feel close to him, Peter. So close now.
>Stephen. Move the hyperbaric chamber. Let me in.
Do you remember the sick girl, Peter? The one we went to Africa for in the first place? Jacqueline?”
>Yes.
I could not do it then.
>I know that.
You had to do it for me.
>I remember, Stephen.
You are the one who cannot do it now.
His next sentence was slow in coming.
>What happened to the lights, Stephen?
I broke them with the top of my IV stand. I want to suffer in private now. There was no one outside to stop me. The Tank is unguarded, and I notice also that the BDC net is silent. I fear the worst.
Peter then typed in what he had done. The words scrolled slowly before my hungry red eyes. I typed back:
Wonderful.
>That is not the response I would have expected from you.
How does it feel to infect an entire city, Peter? Does it feel good?
>No, Stephen. It feels dirty.
I notice Melanie was unaffected.
>No. She has been affected very greatly. But not by me.
The words glowed before my eyes.
Zero.
>He got to her inhaler. No symptoms yet. But she cascaded me.
Then you have not told her?
>No.
How strange that, even in my incapacitated state, I was still the only one Peter Maryk could talk to. And at once, I understood.
You cannot kill her, can you, Peter?
>The virus must be contained.
You infected an entire U.S. city and the BDC itself so that she could walk about unrestrained, and not know that she is sick.
>The city was shut down to stop Zero.
I am happy for you, Peter. The thought of her suffering plagues you.
>Stephen. Let me in.
It is too late. I am committed now. Go away from here, Peter. Take her with you. While you still can.
>What can you hope to do?
We built this place, Peter. You and I.
>Yes, we did.
Then it is ours to bring down.
He made further attempts at communication, which I ignored. The end was near and it was inevitable. Zero was coming. I had to prepare.
The Message
They made their way back through the empty maze of the BDC to Maryk’s office. Maryk went straight to his desk. He was consumed with the dilemmas of Stephen, Melanie, and Zero.
Melanie saw the cartons stacked in the corner and recognized her belongings there. Maryk had ordered her room packed up by BioCon before the city was put to sleep. Her handbag lay on top of one of the boxes and she picked it up and tried it on her shoulder.
He watched her. He remembered her standing before him at the fountain in the city without eyes. He remembered his failure to carry out her sentence.
She was feeling the slick top flap of the handbag. She made a face. She had noticed that the handbag smelled faintly of bleach.
Maryk’s tablet sounded. He opened it at his desk. Freeley was standing suited on deserted Interstate 285 with the skyline behind her.
“You took out the entire city,” she marveled.
Maryk used his earphone. He was concerned about what Melanie might overhear.
“Nothing on Zero?” he said.
“We’re up on the roofs watching every road out. We’ll see him if he tries to leave the city.”
“Good,” Maryk said.