Melanie slipped to her knees. Radiation burns scorched Stephen’s flesh. The virus part of him seemed dead, and his face was pulpy and seared, his red eyes staring crookedly. The hand atop his chest was scorched and bare and she reached for it, touching him now. It burned her, but she held on. Something moved in his mystified eyes, and she imagined then the merest pressure against her palm. He shuddered bodily and she gripped his hand too tightly, feeling the bones collapsing inside. As diseased tears swamped her vision, Stephen Pearse died in the twitching shadow of the vault of Building Thirteen.
Sanctuary
Life viewed from a helicopter is so small. Not small as in “insignificant” or “trivial,” but, small as in “seemingly manageable.” She looked down upon Atlanta and the dots moving again along the sidewalks and thought: It’s all not so mystifying. The inevitable return to earth would blur this perspective, in the same way the twisted logic of a dream dies in the waking world, but for the moment it seemed that everything was answerable from above.
Atlanta was well again, its inhabitants waking into a brand-new day. They had survived the illness, and Melanie hoped this would remind them that they were alive, at least for another day or two, before the frenzy of twenty-first-century life resumed.
She was being spirited away above. Zero and Plainville had been vanquished, and now she was yesterday’s messiah. Her brief career in Atlanta had come to an end. There was nothing she could do for her own species anymore except harm.
The helicopter pilot wore a contact suit, though nothing had been said back at the BDC. Maryk sat in stony silence behind her, still pretending that she was fine.
In fact, this journey had been her idea.
“I’m sick of people,” she had told him back at the BDC, and even managed to appear upbeat saying it. “I think I’d like to get away from it all for a while.”
And he had agreed, which stunned her. She wondered how long he was going to play this out. He had once said: There are no hills remote enough anymore. No oases without roads running through them. House burning is all.
The ride was too brief They broke away from the mainland, and the surface of the ocean reflected the sky, an oily green-blue broken only with white caps, until Gala Island appeared distantly in the morning fog: a wide, verdant mound of trees ringed by tawny sand, and ringed again by the pale azure of the cleansing shore. The beauty of the place glistened and reached out to her, but couldn’t breach her despair.
She grew more prickly as the helicopter began its descent. Her panic surged as they touched down, and she forced open her door and fled out over the landing pad, fleeing Maryk, fleeing death, not stopping until her shoes sank in the soft, sandy, island dirt.
She took in the listless trees of the southern island. Not a human in sight. Her ears rang as the helicopter rotors wound down, and Maryk’s shadow fell over her.
She started up the toughened Jeep path ahead of him, on foot. He followed without a word. She could bear the clinking contents of his reclaimed black bag behind her as the road entered the trees.
They had left the BDC in chaos. The germ vault had maintained its deep freeze, thanks to an auxiliary generator — but once they pulled the plug on the infected computer, the rest of the buildings just lay there, like pieces of a hacked-to-death snake. The entire computer network would require months of rehabilitation, and every square inch of connected hallway and catwalk of the Clifton Road headquarters had to be abluted and sanitized. Biohazard Containment’s greatest challenge would be the cleaning of its own house.
She remembered the hard look on Maryk’s face as they boxed up Stephen’s body and destroyed the rest of Zero’s remains. Dr. Geist’s corpse was also sealed inside a plastic pod, and wheeled down to Maryk’s office alongside Stephen. Suited Special Path agents arrived to help, and Melanie studied their faces as she encountered them, knowing they would be the last human faces she would ever see. There was something elegiac about the whole dreary overnight, and then dawn finally came, and it all seemed to have passed in a moment.
There were two corpses in Maryk’s office, a dismembered BDC, and a dead city of millions reawakening. She didn’t know how Maryk planned to explain it all. She didn’t think he could.
She knew now that she was safe to animals and plants. That was why she had run from the helicopter: If she did have full Plainville, Maryk would have killed her before she could spread it to Gala Island. The ivy had gone uninfected at the Hartsfield airport outbreak, so Zero’s virus had to have been sufficiently diminished by that time. Melanie was death only to human life, then. Her blood and glands were toxic. She was symptomless, but she didn’t think she would become another Zero. The virus had mutated too much by then. Maybe she was the reservoir now, as the birds had once been: a human biological vault of Plainville, infected, but not affected.
She walked on and realized that none of this mattered. She was the last carrier of Plainville on the planet, and she knew the containment rules.
Birds were appearing overhead. She reached the houselike outpost-near the aviary, and a family of mallards squatting in a row on the shore of the man-made pond watched her walk to the door. The outpost was simple inside, a desk, kitchen, bed, bath. The place overall had an air of hasty abandonment.
A map of the island was tacked up on the office wall, along with schedule charts, feeding times. It was cool inside, air-conditioned, and the walls looked as though they could weather a storm. Her possessions were packed in cartons stacked in the middle of the floor.
Maryk remained in the doorway. “Food will be dropped off,” he said. “For the birds, and also for you. It’s all being worked out.”
Just end it, she wanted to tell him. Don’t let this go on. End it now.
“That’s fine,” she said.
He would not step inside. He was standing outside the door like a hired man waiting for a delivery signature. His black bag was in his hand.
She shook her head at the silence between them, and folded her arms, trying to smile. Either walk away or come inside, she thought.
He said, “I visit the island now and again.”
She nodded. “You should look me up sometime.”
He was unstrapping his bag. He pulled out only a tablet. “For you,” he said. “To stay in touch with the world.”
He held it out to her. She broke the knot of her arms, approaching him slowly, watching his face. But he was his normal impassive self as she stopped before him. She took the dark blue box and stepped back. She felt the weight of the tablet and its smoothness in her hands, and tears threatened, and she winced to keep them back. Her cheeks were hot. She was trying so hard to be brave.
“This is crazy,” she said, at once attempting to pierce the formality of their exchange. But he maintained the charade, not willing to crack and give in. He would go on pretending that she was not infected until he killed her.
“I should have been the one to die with Zero,” he said.
It was not over for him yet she realized. Part of him was still stunned.
“It was Stephen’s disease,” she said. “It was right that he perished with it.”
When Melanie thought of Stephen Pearse now, she thought of compassion, the way he appeared to cherish all life, as a counterpoint to Maryk who saved without caring, who cured without need. Some people aren’t so easy to love, she thought. Some people you can’t love at all.
But talking about Stephen appeared to break the spell between them. There was another pregnant moment of silence, and then he was gone. Maryk turned and walked out of the door frame, leaving her staring across at the trees. She turned to the window just in time to watch him stride past. He was leaving, and she was still alive.