Matt said, “Well, Christ—I’ve got a bottle of Dristan half-empty in the bathroom cupboard.”
“Uh-huh,” Jim said. “Me too.”
Annie had been sniffling at work. And Lillian, come to that. Beth Porter.
And Rachel. My God, he thought. Rachel.
The two men looked at each other in the sudden silence of shared fears. Matt said, “What do you want?”
“I just want to talk. Everybody I talk to at the hospital, everybody on staff—either they want a quick fix or they just don’t want to know, period. And I want us to drink. Not this fucking coffee, either.”
“I’ll break out a bottle,” Matt said.
“Thank you.” Jim seemed to relax minutely. “You know why I really came here?”
“Why?”
“Because there are very few sane people on this planet. And you happen to be one of them.”
“You got a head start drinking?”
“I mean it. I always thought that about you. Matt Wheeler, one sane individual. Never said it. Why wait?”
Why wait? This was more of an admission than he might have intended. Matt did not pause on his way to the liquor cabinet, but he asked, as casually as he could manage, “You think we’re all dying?”
“It’s a possibility,” Jim Bix said.
They talked it through several rounds of drinks, covering the same territory, deciding nothing, speculating, probing, perhaps, the limits of each other’s credulity. It was Jim, drunk and tired, who first used the word “machines.”
Matt thought he’d misunderstood. “Machines?”
“You’ve heard of nanotechnology? They move around atoms, make little gears and levers and things? They can do that now.”
“You have some reason to think that’s what you’re looking at?”
“Who knows? It doesn’t look like a machine, but it doesn’t look like a cell, either. Looks kind of like a spiky black ball bearing. There’s no nucleus, no mitochondria, no internal structure I can look at with the equipment at the hospital. I wonder what a good research lab would find if they took one apart.” He showed a thin smile. “Gears and levers. Betcha. Or little computers. Little subatomic integrated circuits. Running algorithms on nucleotides. Or something we can’t even see. Circuits smaller than the orbit of an electron. Machines made out of neutrinos. Held together with gluons.”
He grinned, not a happy expression. Matt said, “Sounds like Jack Daniel’s talking.”
“Two advantages to getting drunk. You can say ridiculous things. And you can say the obvious thing.”
“What’s the obvious thing?”
“That this is not entirely unconnected with that rucking unnatural object in the sky.”
Maybe, Matt thought. But he had heard everything from hot weather to diaper rash blamed on the Artifact, and he was wary of that line of thinking. “There’s no evidence…”
“I know what organic disease looks like. This is something altogether else. This didn’t happen over the course of a month, Matt. We’re talking about days. Practically hours. Bacteria can reproduce that quickly. But if these were bacteria they would have killed us all by now.”
But if that were true—“No,” he said. “Uh-uh. I don’t want to think about that.”
“You and the rest of the world.”
“I mean it. It’s too frightening.” He looked into his glass, vaguely ashamed. “I accept what you’re telling me. But if it’s somehow connected with the Artifact—if these things are already inside us—then it’s game over, isn’t it? Whatever they want—it’s theirs. We’re helpless.”
There was a silence. Then Jim put his glass on the side table and sat up. “I’m sorry, Matt. I did a shitty thing. I came here and dumped my problems in your lap. Not fair.”
“I’d rather be scared than ignorant.” But it was late. They had gone beyond productive conversation. Matt was afraid to check his watch; he had office hours to keep in the morning. Plague or no plague. “I need to sleep.”
“I can let myself out.”
“You can sleep on the sofa, you asshole. Is Lillian waiting up?”
“I told her I might spend the night at the office.”
“Spend some time with her tomorrow.” Jim nodded.
Matt gave him a blanket from the closet in the hall. “We’re in some pretty deep shit here, aren’t we?”
“Pretty deep.” Jim stretched out on the sofa. He put his glasses on the table and closed his eyes. His unhandsome face looked pale. “Matt—?”
“Hm?”
“The blood I took? The fresh sample? The blood I looked at under the microscope?”
“What about it?”
“It was mine.”
Matt allowed his alarm clock to wake him—savoring a long moment of twilight sleep, when the things Jim had told him were still submerged, a presence felt but not explicit. Then woke to a raw headache and terrible knowledge.
It was a fine, sunlit morning. He forced himself through a shower and put on clothes that felt like 100-grit sandpaper. Rachel was in the kitchen fixing breakfast. Fried eggs. Matt looked at his plate. Only looked.
“Are you sick?” his daughter asked.
“No.” Unless we all are.
She sniffled. “Dr. Bix is asleep on the sofa.”
“He’s not due at the hospital until noon. We should let him sleep. He needs it.”
She shot him a quizzical look but let the subject rest.
Rachel believed in the power of a home-cooked breakfast, and she insisted on cooking it herself. The pattern had been established during Celeste’s illness and continued after her death, when Matt had been inclined to leave breakfast and dinner in the hands of McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, respectively. Matt had supposed it was Rachel’s way of mourning, packaging her grief in these daily rituals. By now it had become simply habit. But she did the work solemnly and always had. More than solemnly. Sadly.
Since last year, that sadness had seemed to infect all the other aspects of her life—the way she walked, the way she dressed, the mournful music she played on the stereo Matt had given her for Christmas. In her final year of high school, she had pulled a perfunctory B average—her aptitude for schoolwork tempered by a blossoming despair.
He picked at the eggs while she dressed for the day. When he saw Rachel again she was heading out the door, meeting some friends, she said, at the mall. She smiled distantly. “Dinner the usual time?”
“Maybe we’ll go out,” Matt said. “Dos Aguilas. Or maybe the Golden Lotus.”
She nodded.
“I love you,” he said. He told her so often. Today, it came out sounding awkward and ineffectual.
She gave him a curious look. “You too, Daddy,” she said. And smiled again.
It wasn’t a happy smile. It said, Are things really as bad as that? Matt tried to smile back. He guessed it was an appropriate answer. A brave but unconvincing grin. Yes, Rachel. Things are at least as bad as that.
Chapter 4
Headlines
COUP ATTEMPT RUMORS DENIED
White House sources and a spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a statement today denying that a military coup d’etat against the administration was in the making.