12.21 (19 page)

T
HE 10 FREEWAY WAS SHUT DOWN NEAR CLOVERFIELD SO THAT
the National Guard could transport shipments of supplies and food to the west side. Stanton took the side streets, passing abandoned strip malls, elementary schools, and auto-body shops. Traffic moved slowly despite the few cars on the road, with National Guard checkpoints almost every mile. The governor of California had accepted Cavanagh and Stanton’s controversial plan and signed an emergency-powers act, enacting the first citywide quarantine in U.S. history.

The boundaries had been secured by the National Guard: from the San Fernando Valley in the north, east into the San Gabriel, south into Orange County, and west to the ocean. No planes were allowed out of the airports, and the coast guard had deployed nearly two hundred boats to secure the port and coastline. So far most Angelenos had reacted to the quarantine with a calm and cooperation that surprised even the most optimistic in Sacramento and Washington.

Beyond the quarantine, the CDC was testing people who’d visited L.A. or residents who’d traveled out in the last week. They checked manifestos for every plane that left any L.A. airport recently, hunted down Amtrak travelers through credit-card receipts, and tracked many of those who went by road by toll-booth passes and license-plate snapshots.
Thus far they’d found eight cases in New York, four in Chicago, and three in Detroit, in addition to the nearly eleven hundred people now sick with VFI inside the Southland.

Stanton saw devastating patterns as the number of infected grew. All he and the other doctors could do was try to keep patients comfortable. For most victims, partial insomnia and sweating began after a brief latent period, then seizures and fevers and total insomnia followed. Those who’d been awake for three days or more were hardest to watch. They began to have delusions and panic attacks, then the hallucinations and violent outbursts Volcy and Gutierrez had shown. Death was likely within a week. Nearly twenty of the infected had already succumbed.

The sight of camouflage Humvees, and men and women in tan uniforms carrying machine guns on Lincoln Boulevard, was deeply unsettling. Stanton waited to show his ID in a line of cars on his way back to Venice. He glanced down at his phone, to the newest list of names of infected patients. The victims spanned every ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and nearly every age. Glasses had protected some, but plenty who wore them had been infected. The only groups immune to VFI seemed to be blind people, whose optic nerves were severed from their brains, and newborns. The optic nerves were undeveloped in babies, and until the sheath surrounding them matured, the disease couldn’t make its way into the brain. That protection wouldn’t last beyond six months, so it gave him little solace.

Stanton inched his Audi forward in the security line while scanning the patient list. On it were doctors and nurses he’d met at Presbyterian as well as two CDC officers he knew and liked.

Finally he saw Maria Gutierrez and her son, Ernesto.

He was supposed to be able to deal with mortality. And he had seen some bad cases in his time. But nothing had prepared Stanton for this. He needed grounding, and any other time he would’ve called Nina. She’d gone back out onto the water again after leaving his condo. He’d called to tell her VFI was airborne. Technically, Stanton should’ve ordered her
to come ashore and get tested. But she had no symptoms of any kind, so he wanted her to stay far, far away. Buses and public bathrooms and almost every hospital in the city showed evidence of prion now, and even hazmat cleaning agents couldn’t decontaminate them.

His cellphone rang. “This is Stanton.”

“It’s Chel Manu.”

“Dr. Manu. Have you made any progress?”

She described the father–son-glyph revelation and the first section of the codex they’d translated. Though he didn’t follow her entirely, Stanton was impressed by her obvious ingenuity, by her command of the complex language, and by the vast amount of history she had at her disposal. He also heard the passion in her voice. He might not be able to trust this woman, but her energy lifted his spirits.

“There’s no definite geography in the first section,” Chel went on. “But it’s such a closely written narrative. We’re very hopeful the scribe will tell us more about his location in the later pages.”

“How long until you have the rest?” Stanton asked.

“We’re working on it. It could be a few days.”

“How long did it take you to do this first section?”

“About twenty hours.”

Stanton glanced at the clock. Like him, she’d been going nonstop. “Any trouble sleeping?” he asked her.

“I drifted off for a few minutes,” she said. “I’ve just been working.”

“Do you have family in the city? Are they okay?”

“Only my mother, and she’s fine. What about your family?”

“Don’t have much of one,” he said. “But my dog and ex-wife are okay.” Stanton noticed that the word
ex-wife
rolled off his tongue easier than it had in a while.

Chel sighed, then said,
“Ma k’o ta ne jun ka tere’k.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“It’s a prayer
indígenas
say. It means,
Let no one be left behind
.” After a pause, Stanton said, “If you have any symptoms, call me first.”

WAVES CRASHING WERE
rarely audible on the Walk, but tonight they were the only sounds Stanton could hear. Gone were the noisy kids usually in front of the marijuana stores, and the whooping from late-night parties in the sand. He parked beneath the massive mural of Abbot Kinney and found the boardwalk empty. The cops had sent everyone home or to one of the local homeless centers.

But when it came to hiding out, the citizens of Ocean Front were some of the craftiest in the city. Stanton pulled the six boxes of eye shields he’d taken from the lab and put them in his bag. There were a thousand things he had to attend to, but the boardwalk freaks were his friends and neighbors. It was hard not to feel powerless right now, and this was one thing he could actually do, no matter how absurd it was.

First he checked the public restrooms, where he found a couple huddled inside. After handing them eye shields, Stanton continued on, and in a nook between tattoo shops he found a guy he knew vaguely, who called himself the “World’s Funniest Wino.” His usual song went “Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, let’s get drunk.” Tonight, he just laughed boorishly as Stanton laid a shield in front of him.

Behind the Jewish senior center, he found four teenagers hiding in a VW bus, smoking weed. “You want?” one of them asked, holding the joint toward him.

“Put these eye shields on, guys,” Stanton said, waving it off.

Outside Venice’s only plastic-surgery storefront, he stopped to look at the graffiti stenciled across the face of
BOTOX ON THE BEACH
. Stanton had seen the symbol before around Venice but had never understood what it had to do with 2012:

He continued south, baffled by the strange image. He recalled from somewhere that a snake eating its own tail was a Greek symbol, not, as far as he knew, a Maya one. But people were sure to make all kinds of strange connections now.

The metal gates of Groundwork Coffee were down, and a small sign in the window read:
CLOSED UNTIL WE FUCKING SAY SO
. The sign reminded Stanton of one person he’d missed. Minutes later Stanton was a few blocks north, climbing the stairs of Monster’s Venice Beach Freak Show, just off the boardwalk. He knocked on the yellow question mark painted on the center of the door. The Freak Show was the closest thing his friend had to a home. “Monster? You in there?”

The entrance cracked open and a porcelain-skinned woman of indeterminate age in striped stockings and a short skirt stood in the entry. The “Electric Lady” had frizzed black hair, supposedly a result of having been struck by lightning as a child. Stanton once saw her light a gas-covered stick with her tongue while sitting in an electric chair. She was also Monster’s girlfriend.
Electrifying
.

“We’re not supposed to let anyone in here,” she said.

Stanton held the boxes up. “These are for you guys.”

The Freak Show had one main room and a small stage, where performers swallowed swords and stapled dollar bills to their skin. The Electric Lady waved Stanton toward the back and then returned to feeding the largest menagerie of bicephalic animals on the planet. There were “Siamese” turtles, a double-headed albino snake, a two-headed iguana, and a mini-Doberman with five legs. In preserve jars were corpses of a two-headed chicken, a raccoon, and a squirrel.

Stanton found his tattooed friend in the Freak Show’s small accounting office. Clothes were strewn across a small cot in the corner. Monster sat at the desk in front of the old laptop he seemed never to be without.

“Your name’s everywhere, Gabe,” Monster said. “Figured you’d be in Atlanta.”

“I’m stuck here like everyone else.”

“Why are you in Venice? Shouldn’t you be at a lab somewhere?”

“Don’t worry about that.” Stanton held up an eye shield. “Do me a favor and wear one of these. Take some more and pass them out to anyone who doesn’t have one.”

“Thanks,” Monster said. He pulled the straps behind the rings that lined his upper ear and secured the shield. “You believe this shit from city hall?”

“What shit?”

“You haven’t seen it? Broke a few minutes ago. Your name’s mentioned a couple of times even.” He turned the laptop so Stanton could see the screen. “A copy of every internal email from the mayor’s office sent in the eight hours before and after the quarantine decision was made popped up on the Internet. One of the secret-leaking websites. Two million hits already.”

Stanton’s stomach sank as he scanned the news. There were CDC emails to the mayor’s office that described how quickly VFI cases could escalate, offhand questions from within city hall about how many would be dead within the week, and comments about how, given the indestructibility of the prion, public spaces couldn’t be decontaminated and parts of L.A. might never be inhabitable again.