Code Orange (11 page)

First, the arm-scraping technique of old Turkish slumber parties wasn't what Mitty had pictured. You didn't get a shot and go on with your life. The Turkish technique actually
gave
you smallpox, except it was very mild. And the slumber party had to last for weeks, because the kids had to be quarantined.
They
weren't very sick, but they were just as infectious as if they'd gotten the real thing. And anybody who caught smallpox from these kids
did
get the real thing.

That, of course, was if it worked.

It didn't always work.

Second, insufflation, which the Chinese had practiced, usually did not work.…If it had worked, smallpox would have disappeared.

Mitty's mouth got dry again.

Then he read up on vaccine supply.

The puzzle of why the government wanted vaccines when they weren't going to vaccinate anybody was solved. Mitty should have read this stuff earlier. In fact, he should have read everything earlier, and in order, and paying attention.

His typing was worse than usual. Practically every word on his screen was highlighted because of spelling errors. Mitty didn't correct them. He just typed on.

Mitty hit Print. He checked the date and time.

Sunday, February 8,11:45 p.m.

Subtract Sunday, February 1,4:00 p.m.

A week had passed since Mitty Blake had handled and inhaled smallpox remains.

No vaccine would have an effect.

There was no such thing as insufflation.

At some point during his sleepless night, Mitty turned on the light. He felt an uncontrollable desire to wash his hands. This was pathetic. He had handled those scabs days ago.

His bedroom was too quiet. He opened his window a few inches. Cold air leaped in and he froze, but it was worth it. Garbage trucks lifting and grinding all over the West Side made a welcome racket.

Then he went online, casually, as if just planning to check his mail.

In fact, Mitty and his friends did not e-mail all that much. They didn't phone either. They did a lot of text-messaging. In middle school, Mitty had had fifty-four best friends with whom he had routinely communicated.
Back then, he knew everybody's screen name, even the people who had two or three of them, and if he didn't hear from somebody once a week, he was angry

In ninth grade, his list had diminished, and by tenth, it had narrowed to a handful. But this year, along with everything else he was not doing, he was not keeping in touch. Derek and Olivia were pretty much the extent of his buddy list.

Even when he'd been a pretty decent student, Mitty had never been an Olivia, bursting with questions and answers. It seemed unlikely that he would ever fight for a first-row chair, wave his hand madly and shout out opinions on British literature. But now, a quarter past three on a Monday morning, he was online and he was a person madly shouting out.

He had already been to the sites of NIH, Homeland Security and FEMA (Federal Emergency Management, in charge of the vaccine stockpile). Now he went to his favorite search engine to look for experts. ImmunoQuest turned out to be somebody's personal wellness site; ViroQuest was software; jimmunol. org was the
Journal of Immunology
, where you could read anything for free, and Mitty was excited until he pulled up a title about smallpox: “Targeting Antigen in Mature Dendritic Cells for Simultaneous Stimulation of CD4
⁺
and CD8
⁺
T Cells.”

Right.

The American Association of Immunologists wanted him to be a member before they would tell him anything, and immuno.org was for sale. But the Clinical Immunology Society had a forum on infectious disease. Mitty wrote in the hope that they would post his question:

At ImmunoQuery, he typed in
smallpox
and was taken to a response page where he found a request submitted by a doctor:

Mitty wrote to her:

Mitty had a number of e-mail addresses. Sometimes he used [email protected] or [email protected]. His school address was [email protected]. He rarely used that one, because the only communications were from disappointed teachers. Even more disappointed now, probably, because he had never read their e-mails, never mind their assignments.

To the International Infectious Disease Research Council, he submitted this:

To the science editors of the
Boston Globe
:

To the American Society of Infectious Disease Specialists, he wrote a different message:

This was the question that mattered.

But maybe he wouldn't send it. Mitty had come to a conclusion: when Donald Henderson's team (if you could call ten thousand health workers by the plain old word
team
) had ringed sick guys, they just waited out the illness. Those sick guys must have shed smallpox scabs all over their beds and blankets and houses. There would have been a zillion. But the World Health Organization guys just headed home. If scabs could actually pass on the disease, wouldn't they have had to sweep up the scabs each time?

So it was stupid to worry, and that was why he wasn't writing to the CDC, who were way too official for stupid questions and had better things to do than worry about some kid's high school paper.

Because that was all this was. A high school paper. Nothing more, nothing less.

He was such a loser he'd been scared of light and dark on Roosevelt Island. He was really a loser to be having smallpox nightmares. He'd better not become a doctor. He'd get every symptom of every illness in every textbook.

Of course, with his grades, he wasn't getting into bartender school, never mind medical school.

The best thing, Mitty decided, was to toss both the scabs and the book. This would end their crazy grip on him. He would flush the scab dust down the toilet, throw the book down the garbage shaft and put this behind him. He picked up
Principles of Contagious Disease
to retrieve the envelope. As they had been doing all week, facts leaped up off the pages and attacked.

Prior to vaccination, 400,000 smallpox
deaths
occurred in a routine year in Europe, but only one-third of smallpox patients died, so the actual number getting smallpox was 1.2 million.

And those guys were spread out, thought Mitty, with rivers and mountain ranges in between. They just sat there in their little feudal huts. They weren't catching the subway, thirty thousand here and twenty thousand there. Nothing separates New Yorkers from each other.

Most epidemics, the book informed him next, were in winter. Smallpox spread better in cold weather.

From the window, Mitty felt cold weather.

And then he found the page where the envelope had been resting all those 102 years. It had discolored the page, leaving a rusty two-inch-by-six-inch patch.

In this book written by doctors who knew their smallpox, who had buried its victims, autopsied them, and slid their scabs into envelopes, it said: After a patient got well, not only should every surface in his room be disinfected, not only should his clothing and bedding be burned, not only should his furniture be destroyed—
the wallpaper in that patient's room should be scraped off and burned
.

Mitty was strung out like a guy on his tenth cup of coffee. He put the book down. He forgot about getting rid of the envelope. In the silent dark he padded to the kitchen and ate ice cream out of the carton.

The chocolate felt good going down his sore throat.

Twelve to fourteen days before a person is infectious, thought Mitty. Today is February 9. Only a few safe days left. Unless this is some other strain of variola major. A quick strain. An infect-you-in-ten-days strain.

Mitty took the carton of ice cream into the living room with the fabulous skyline view. They never pulled a shade or a curtain in this room. Night and day, summer and winter, they had Manhattan for their neighbor. He finished the whole carton. At last, he slumped down on the pillows and dozed fitfully.

In his bedroom, on the computer screen, the little flag of incoming mail began blinking.

M
itty never knew why he was in school on Mondays, but he
really
didn't know why he was in school this Monday.

Classes felt like strange rituals devised by some unknown tribe. Desks and pencils, computers and hallways were alien objects. Friends were difficult to recognize and conversation was impossible.

Nobody noticed.

Derek talked about his favorite subjects. Teachers rattled on about their favorite subjects. Olivia chattered about her favorite subject.

Mitty was silent, thinking about his e-mails.

Would anybody answer? If they did, could he trust their answers? What would he do if the answers seemed to indicate that he, Mitty Blake, might actually be getting smallpox?

He didn't feel as if he occupied his flesh in the usual way. His body was a container; he was standing inside it, like a person badly dressed.

At lunch Derek expounded on anthrax. Olivia offered to share her Rice Krispie marshmallow bar, but Mitty didn't want to touch it. He didn't want to touch anything.

“Are you all right?” Olivia asked.

“He's fine!” said Derek irritably.

Olivia flushed.

“I am fine, thanks, Olivia,” Mitty said. How sober his voice was. He could not inject it with his usual—

What is my usual? he thought.

When school ended, Mitty stood in the foyer. He let his backpack slide to the floor. He examined his palms. Lesions started at the extremities: hands, head and feet were first and worst.

“Mitty, what's wrong?” said Olivia, with her little frown of concern.

He shoved his hands into his pockets. “Don't you have to hurry to your ballet class?”

“Yes. But what's the matter?”

He changed the subject.“I wouldn't mind seeing you in tights.”

She beamed at him.“I have a solo in the recital the first Saturday in March.”

He started to say “I wouldn't miss that for anything.”

But this was not true.

At home, in the safety of his bedroom, Mitty turned on his laptop and went online.

He opened [email protected]. Twenty-seven messages were waiting.

He couldn't bring himself to open them. He got up and opened a real window instead. Studied traffic for a while, put on the radio, chose a soda. Then he doubleclicked.

The science reporter just wanted an article; he wasn't nervous, wasn't afraid.