Code Orange (17 page)

The back door of the Town Car began to open.

Mitty knew about the fight-or-flight response. Mitty would have said that he personally was a fighter and would never run.

Mitty was wrong. He ran.

He moved faster than he had known his legs could move, his mind shooting ahead, already deciding he should avoid the apartment. He'd zigzag toward Columbus Circle, lose the car in the crowds, head for Times Square.

Mitty sucked in air, circled a baby carriage, dodged a wheelchair, threaded between a construction crew and their project. He thought, This is how the disease will spread. Me. Running and breathing. Mitty Blake, hot agent. A threat to his country.

Mitty stopped running.

He had not gone half a block.

He turned around and went back to the woman in brown.

Now, in the dark of the cellar, Mitty struggled to free his hands. It wasn't an escape attempt. He needed to examine his skin. If I could get loose, he thought, I could pry
off the front of the furnace and use the light of the fire to check for pox.

He felt permeable, as if anything might penetrate his skin. Or had.

He could not free himself.

Mitty stared upward. It was too dark to see the ceiling. He couldn't guess what was happening. But one thing was clear: these people expected him to get smallpox.

When Mitty had turned around and walked back to the woman in brown, he had been weirdly filled with relief. Whatever came next, he didn't have to make the decisions. All responsibility would lie with the doctors.

In his new relaxed state, Mitty had thought about food.

Other people often talked about priorities. Responsible people were supposed to have these. Mitty hardly ever had a priority, but now that his nightmare belonged to the CDC, he did have one.

Pizza.

Walking back to the Town Car, Mitty was starving to death. He'd have pizza delivered to his hospital room. He could actually picture his hospital room now, and it didn't seem too bad. It would be bright and light with a color television high on the wall, and his parents would be outside in the hall, waving to him through a little window in the door, telling him to be brave.

He had the vague thought that if he had been in charge, he would have sent an ambulance to pick up the millennium's first smallpox victim. In fact, he'd have sent a doctor who'd been vaccinated and didn't have to hold her scarf over her mouth.

There was something wrong with this picture, but
Mitty didn't spend a lot of time on it. He just walked right up to the car and—

They hit me! he thought, lying on his back in the cellar. They hit me in the head! I, Mitty Blake, got mugged.

He was offended to have been mugged but happy to have a good reason for a bad headache. A nonsmallpox reason.

Unless this was the smallpox headache he'd read about, the vicious throb no medication could soothe.

Guess she wasn't with the CDC, he thought. Too bad. I have some symptoms I'd like explained.

It was easy to come up with comforting possibilities. His stomach hurt because he was hungry. His head hurt because he had a concussion. He was shivering because he was cold. His back ached because the thing he was lying on sagged so badly.

Mitty threw up.

It was sudden and unexpected. Because he was on his back, he began to choke on his own vomit. He tried to turn sideways, but the straps of duct tape over his chest prevented it.

Nearly all smallpox victims experienced nausea.

The wave of vomiting stopped. The churning in his stomach continued. He spit, trying to get rid of the taste. The stink of his own vomit was making him gag again.

Every ghastly symptom loomed vivid in his mind, but especially the pox themselves, their pain, itching, pus and stench.

What had it been like to live when smallpox was rampant? When every time you turned around, somebody you knew had the pox? What had it been like to glance at your kid or your parents and see pox bursting out on
their beloved bodies? Back then, you must have lived with fear the way Mitty lived with traffic.

Up above him, Mitty heard an eerie slithering sound, as if viruses, huge and crispy, were coming alive, and then came a series of taps and thuds. Not heating pipes. More like—mugs of coffee clunked down on a counter?

He vomited again. This time he lacked the energy to wrench his face around. He couldn't get the vomit out of his mouth and he had to breathe. He would breathe it in.

He heard scraping then; voices; feet hitting the floor. There was a snick of metal—a handle turning. Then pounding on stairs and light in his eyes.

People loomed over him. They were covered in pale blue garments that rustled. Their hands were gloved and their faces masked. Really masked—not just little white cups over the mouth. Over the eyeholes were goggles.

Because I'm infectious, thought Mitty.

Somebody's gloved hand sliced through the duct tape with a sharp knife. Other hands swung Mitty's feet around and lifted him to a sitting position. He was whacked on the back until he coughed. Something cool and plastic was pressed against his cheek and a sticklike thing was inserted in his mouth.

Mitty sucked on the straw. The cold water took away the worst of the taste. He felt as if he could never swallow enough water to take away his terrible thirst.

The hands holding him were large and very strong, definitely male, and slimy, as if attached to a reptile.

Mitty's head fell to his chest, a position that relieved his headache a little. He closed his eyes for a while. When he opened them again, he found himself sitting six inches off the floor on a camp cot, the cheap aluminum kind
that folds up and gets tossed into the car trunk or the attic.

His jailers straightened up. When the throbbing in his temples was under control, Mitty looked up at them.

The masks were not hospital issue. They were knitted ski masks.

The slimy feeling had been from disposable gloves. The men were now holding their gloved hands in the air. They high-fived each other and laughed deep, satisfied chuckles.

These people were happy that Mitty was sick.

Tentatively he brought his own hands into his lap. He couldn't see well. What had seemed like blinding light was in fact dim. He squinted to be sure there were no blisters on the backs or the palms of his hands. But it was still too early for blisters. First came the little freckles, the macules.

They hauled him to his feet and walked him across the cellar.

Standing cleared Mitty's head, and the cement floor chilled the bottoms of his feet, which also helped. He was glad he'd worn socks today. Or yesterday. Or whenever this had happened. And maybe because he was vertical, not slumped on sagging vinyl, his backache disappeared.

In front of him, barely visible because of the shadows he and the two men cast, was a sort of wooden stage or ledge with an old-fashioned washtub and a faucet. One of the men turned on the faucet for Mitty. The splash of water was beautiful, but Mitty had spotted an ancient rusty toilet. It was not exactly in a closet but sort of behind a board. It looked connected to plumbing, so he used it. They watched.

Mitty stumbled back to the washtub, put his face under the faucet, gasped at how cold the water was and sluiced the vomit off his face and neck. The icy water diminished his headache.

The men were whispering, but he couldn't understand what they were saying. Either they weren't speaking English or his brain wasn't functioning.

So … if these guys aren't the CDC, he thought … and if I'm not a patient but a prisoner … and if they're wearing ski masks … and celebrating because their prisoner has smallpox …

An ancient cake of soap, withered and split, lay in a little hollow on the rim of the washtub. Mitty picked the soap up, thinking that since his shirt was soaked with vomit, he'd peel it off and wash it under this faucet, and then he thought, I'm in a basement with bioterrorists and I'm doing laundry?

He whipped around, throwing soap and water into their faces. He had the one-step-up advantage of the little stage, and he used it. He jumped one guy with his entire weight and knocked him down, kicked the other guy between the legs, and just as the first one got to his feet, socked him in the face. Their grunts of pain were satisfying. But they recovered immediately, encasing him in arms so strong, Mitty figured these men had been in prison for years, spending every waking minute lifting weights.

They actually tossed him through the air into the remains of workshop shelving. A sharp edge caught his face and ripped open his cheek. He hit the floor, cracking his kneecap, and lost a second staggering to his feet. Then he was up and after them to fight on, but they were leaving. Not just leaving: they were tearing up the cellar stairs.

They reached the top before Mitty could get to the bottom, and then they slammed the door on him. He took the stairs two at a time, hoping to grab the knob before they could lock it. But the door had locked automatically the moment they shut it. They hadn't needed to find a key or even flip a dead bolt.

Mitty tried to turn the knob about a hundred times before he accepted that this wasn't going to accomplish anything. He felt along the edges of the doorframe. There weren't hinges on his side, so he couldn't dismantle it, and since the door was metal, he wasn't putting a fist through it anytime soon. There was a keyhole, but Mitty had a real shortage of keys. Through the door he heard that slithering rustle. Then footsteps. Then nothing.

They didn't even talk about it! thought Mitty. They didn't swear or kick the door or anything.

The rustling could be from that blue paper clothing, which must be disposable protective gowns of some kind.

Mitty put his hand up to his cheek. The wound was, in fact, the kind Mr. Lynch said gave you lockjaw. Mitty figured he had more to worry about than needing a tetanus booster.

He sat down on the top step and leaned against the door, hoping to hear something through the crack.

The light was a single bulb in a single socket screwed to a wooden rafter. It had a short metal pull chain. The bulb was probably about twenty-five watts. Why would anybody even manufacture a twenty-five-watt bulb? It didn't actually light the cellar. It just made the shadows less thick.

Mitty peeled duct tape off his watch. It was now 10 a.m. on Wednesday, February 11. He would have been in the park with Olivia around 4 p.m. the day before. His
parents must be crazy with worry. Mitty was a little worried himself. Eighteen hours, even for a sleep lover like Mitty was a bunch of time to be out cold.

The stairs were open wooden treads, never painted, and the cement floor was cracked and stained. Cement had been roughly troweled onto the walls, which were covered with active spiderwebs. The old gas furnace was close to the far wall, with the stairs coming down the middle of the one-room cellar and the washtub ledge at the other end. There were black pipes, copper pipes, wiring, the water heater, the electrical panel, a few vertical two-by-fours that had once held shelves. No window, not even the little eyebrow kind sunk in a pit below the pavement. No bulkhead door.

Mitty had been stored in an empty room with no window, no exit, no phone, no food, no weapon, no tool.

He eased himself down the stairs and circled the furnace. Then he walked back and forth, staring up between every set of rafters. There was nothing to use as a weapon. No hammer had been carelessly left hanging by its claws from a nail. There were no shelves to rip off and have himself a nice splintery sword.

One end of the cellar had been remodeled, and something had been cemented over. The walls and floor here were filthy. Mitty dragged his hand through the filth and rubbed it between his fingers. Black dust. Long ago, had this place been heated by coal, and had a coal chute? He didn't have a pickaxe, so he couldn't smash the layer of cement and crawl out the old chute.

He recognized with satisfaction the fat black cable of television. He hung on the wire until it snapped, and then he hauled it in.

Nobody yelled when they lost their show. Nobody came storming down the stairs.

Mitty spooled the cord into a neat circle. He found a nice dark place to hang it, and it looked good there; he could tie people up with that. Assuming they came downstairs one at a time and lay still.

I could break a pipe, he thought. Use that for a weapon.

Copper broke easily.

Mitty started swinging like an ape from the copper pipe nearest him. Nothing happened right away, but it would work eventually.

The lightbulb went out.

It was not the flickering finish of a burning-out bulb. Somebody had flipped a switch, presumably upstairs. He considered pulling the little chain to see if he could control the light from down here but decided to stay in the dark. They surely were watching him, though he hadn't figured out how. The ceiling was open—rafters pierced by electric wires and the pipes for heat and waste and water—so there was a lot of stuff hanging around and threaded through beams. There could be some high-tech minicam, and he supposed they might even be able to see him in the dark. But they couldn't see him everywhere, from every angle.