Impossible to not believe him. She had never met such a complex person, such a mixture of idealism, ego, and crassness. She hoped to never meet one again. Jonah Stubbins bewildered her.
“Best of luck to you, Marianne,” he said—with genuine feeling, as far as she could tell—and lumbered off the bridge.
She was in the mess, sending e-mails on her laptop, when Judy dropped onto the chair beside her. Judy’s voice was husky and she held, against all rules, a burning cigarette. “Allison is really ill.”
Alarm ran through Marianne; Allison dealt so closely with her pupils. “Not just a stomach virus? Is it a virulent strain of flu? This is flu season. Is anybody else ill?”
“Nobody else, which makes me think it’s not flu. Everybody is supposed to get vaccines immediately. It’ll be on the PA soon.”
“Vaccines for what?”
“They’re not saying.”
“Judy, that’s ridiculous. You can’t vaccinate people without telling them what for. That’s illegal.”
“Oh, they’ll tell us something. But will it be what Allison really has? If it were flu, somebody else would be sick. Especially the kids, since she works with them, and I saw them tearing toward your room just a few minutes ago, healthy as wild pigs. It’s not flu. So what is it?”
Judy’s innate paranoia? Maybe. “How do you know that Allison is that sick? And what are her symptoms?”
“Nurse at the infirmary is a friend of mine. Fever, chills, and nausea to start, now low blood pressure, vascular leakage, kidney problems.”
“Couldn’t that be a lot of different things? And if she were really ill, wouldn’t they move her to a real hospital?”
“Maybe. My friend isn’t nursing Allison, she’s in isolation and the only doctor who’s treating her does everything, including bedpans.”
“Well, for quarantine…” Vivid memories flooded Marianne of her own quarantine aboard the Embassy. But that had been for R. sporii, a truly dangerous microbe. “Or so we thought,” she suddenly heard in Evan’s voice, ghostly across seven years. “But still, a vaccine requires full disclosure.”
“If you say so.” Judy ground the cigarette onto the concrete floor, left it there, and walked off.
Marianne picked up her laptop and went to her room. All four children waited there and Judy was right: They looked healthy in a wild, hectic sort of way. Two parkas lay bunched up on the table. One squeaked.
“Mice!” Jason cried. “Grandma, we got to show you something!”
Six pups of Mus musculus, two of them dead and the other four not looking good. A dead doe with thin and patchy fur lay stiffly in what looked like a convulsive position. No blood or other evidence of predation. She said as calmly as she could, “Did you touch the mice? Any of you?”
“No!” Jason said proudly. “I told everybody to pick them up with their clothes!”
Colin, looking more troubled, said, “Can you make the other babies stay alive?”
“I don’t know, honey. Probably not.” Most diseases did not jump species. But some could: rabies, avian flu, MERS. And rodents could be carriers of human diseases without being affected themselves, although these mice certainly had been. So not hantavirus, not bubonic plague, not a lot of things. Probably just a mouse disease, something else that, if it spread, would again complicate ecological recovery.
“I want you all to go take a good shower, with lots of soap. Wash your hair. Don’t put the same clothes on again. Just in case you might get whatever disease the mice have, okay? Let’s do that now.”
Ava, staring at the mice, said, “I don’t want to die.”
“Nobody’s going to die, honey. I promise.”
Colin, focused on his main concern, said, “But can you make the babies well?”
“I don’t know, Col. We’ll try.”
He stuck out his lower lip. “The other mouse was well. It ran fast.”
“What other mouse?”
“The other one. The striped one.”
There should be no striped mice in this part of Pennsylvania. She said, “You can draw me a picture later. First, a shower.”
Marianne put Ava in her own shower and the three boys, one after the other, in theirs, carefully bagging their clothes in plastic and giving Ava some of Colin’s, which fit her skinny little body well. Who had been looking after Ava since her mother went off-site for plastic surgery? Marianne felt guilty that she hadn’t even asked. Stubbins must have found someone; he always did.
And what of Luke, now that Marianne would be taking her grandchildren away with her?
She pushed that thought aside for now. She didn’t even have a position at the college yet. When the kids were clean and dry, the announcement came over the PA—Lyme disease had stricken a staff member. Everyone would be vaccinated, purely as a precaution.
Allison Blake’s symptoms, as described by Judy, didn’t sound like Lyme disease, which was tick-borne. Marianne examined the mouse pups, dead and alive. None of them carried ticks. And Lyme disease did not kill M. musculus.
Colin brought her the drawing he’d been working on while Ava, Luke, and Jason played something noisy on their Nintendo. Colin had always been an exceptionally good artist for his age. He’d used his colored pencils and worked carefully.
Marianne took the picture and her spine stiffened as if she’d never move again.
“What is it, Grandma? Why do you look like that? Is that a bad mouse? Did it trap those angry people we heard down in the cave under the woods?”
“Marianne, it’s the middle of the night! What’s happened? You look—Come in!”
Harrison stood frowzy and alarmed at the door of his—once their—apartment in the secure enclave near Columbia. She’d insisted that the gate guard phone him, just as she’d insisted that the chopper pilot take her immediately to Ryan’s home because her son had tried to commit suicide. The pilot had of course checked with Stubbins, who’d okayed the trip. Marianne would feel guilty later about using Ryan’s illness like that. The chopper departed and the cab she had waiting at Oakwood Gardens drove at crash-worthy speed south to New York.
“You’re the only one I can trust, Harrison. There’s something going on at the Venture building site and—”
He said sharply, “The kids?”
“Okay. I left them with Judy. This is—”
“Who’s Judy?”
She’d forgotten his methodical, careful way of assessing a situation: dig out all the facts, arrange them in rows, study them. It steadied her. You didn’t win a Nobel Prize with wild assumptions, nor with excesses of either trust or paranoia. She had always admired Harrison’s mind, and now she needed it.
“Judy is a friend, a physicist at the site. I need to tell you all of this, but first let me show you some data points. Dead mice and a picture.”
He looked at both. He said, “That’s Apodemus agrarius, the striped field mouse. It’s not found in the United States.”
“It is now,” she said grimly. Another invasive species. “And it carries Korean hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome. You remember that German scientist did the initial work on HFRS infecting Mus musculus, probably from Apodemus, and then the American team led by Samuel Wolski extended it.” From her bag she drew the six dead, plastic-wrapped pups.