Final Epidemic (2 page)

And then, only a few weeks before, their judges had condemned Aum Asahara—condemned the Divine One to what they, in an unenlightened ignorance, considered the ultimate punishment. And in so doing, unwittingly condemned themselves as well.

They will now learn,
Anji pledged.
If the Truth of Aum is to pass from existence, so too will the unworthy who rejected it. And so too will we all.

Hidden in the erstwhile biogeneticist’s waistband was an American passport that had once belonged to an Aum recruit; the photo likeness was close enough to pass scrutiny, as it had on the previous trips. Again, for safety Anji took the soft route, flying first under his own name to Mexico City. There he would change his plane and his identity for the flight to Denver, while the original flight continued on to Miami.

His mission was not dissimilar to those of his countrymen now filing aboard this aircraft: sent by their corporate masters to do battle with the outside world, to best it on its own turf.

They wage a war of economics,
Anji mused,
and carry as
their weapons briefcases stuffed with contracts, business plans, proposals. So petty, so parochial in their limited aims.

His own war was much more direct; the weapon he carried was not in his briefcase, but inside his body—even now multiplying and girding for the final battle, the Great Apocalypse. He had, Anji knew, done his work well.

There were no symptoms to betray him, not yet; he had, in accordance with the incubation tables he had carefully calculated, waited until just before boarding to use the nasal inhaler. But soon, in a matter of days, he would become the first to take the path the Divine One had dictated for all the world to follow. By then, he would have cast the seed he carried so widely that none would be able to stay its destruction.

On the flight to Mexico, Anji flew tourist class, assigned to the aisle seat.

Despite the close quarters, it was an uneventful trip. Anji slept most of the way, as did his seatmate. To any who might notice, the pair was a study in contrasts: one a middle-aged Japanese with thick dark hair and the studious appearance of a man who had become accustomed to careful, intricate work; the other, an eight-year-old American girl. Her name was Emily Sawyer and she had been visiting her father, an Air Force E-6 stationed at a base in Japan. Emily shifted as she slept, for a while leaning against the snoring man in the seat beside her. Her blond hair moved slightly in the fitful breeze of his breathing.

Under the watchful eye of the flight attendant—a scrutiny that, in the end, was unequal to a danger far too minute to be seen—Emily was returning to her mother’s home in Milton, a small town a few miles from Fort Walton Beach, Florida.

It was an easy landing at Denver International Airport, a smooth glide toward the geometric concrete ribbons and graceful white-tented canopies of the sprawling complex.

The connecting flight from Mexico City had been
uneventful. Around the cabin, a Babel of English and Spanish rose in volume as the plane descended. Through the plastic window, blurred by the crosshatching of the inevitable fine scratches, Anji saw the purple-and-brown majesty of the Rockies jutting into a pale blue summer sky. In comparison, Denver itself—thirty-odd miles in the distance—appeared a jumble of children’s blocks, carelessly strewn.

Denver’s old Stapleton Airport is only a memory now, closed since the mountain metropolis greeted the new millennium with this five-billion-dollar, technology-laden facility. It is a much longer drive to the city now, and the traveler no longer gets a bird’s-eye view of the city’s streets and buildings that Stapleton’s close-in location offered. But landing at Denver International Airport no longer requires visitors to the Mile-High City to endure sharp banking turns and steep descents on final approach, or the often-jolting touchdowns that were the inevitable result.

Neither are they required, as before, to look down upon the industrial expanse of the old airport’s closest neighbor, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal; like Stapleton, the arsenal too is now closed, though spacesuited workmen still swarm over its otherwise idle grounds.

Here, the aggressive remediation program has not removed a stubborn plutonium contamination, the legacy of half a century of nuclear weapons assembly and storage. The radioactive mega-tonnage that passed through the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in its heyday could have exterminated humanity many times over.

Had Anji considered all this—had he not been distracted, first by the bilingual tumult of his fellow passengers, and later by the lengthy delay as he waited in line at the car rental counter—he might have been struck by the irony.

Finally, his suitbag over a shoulder, Anji struggled across the tarmac of the massive parking lot. He studied the numbers on the rental agreement he held, scrutinizing the rows of freshly washed autos through which he passed. He also
wondered if his shortness of breath was the result of the thin mountain air or a first symptom of the lethal destiny he carried.

Thus distracted, the Japanese did not notice the figure that followed him, moving quietly without appearing to do so.

Anji stopped short, and dropped his suitbag to the pavement.

It was a Lexus, a pale gray mount for his final ride. As he fumbled with the keyring, Anji glanced over his shoulder in the direction from which he had come. There was no one to be seen.

He turned the key in the lock, and the trunk popped open. It was, he noted idly, surprisingly spacious.

“Excuse, please,” a voice said from behind.

Anji spun, startled as much by the trace of a Slavic accent as by the interruption itself. For a split second, what might have been a smile of beatific delight flashed across his Asian features.

My Sensei!
his mind cried out, knowing at the same instant it could not be.

And it was not.

He did not know the man who stood carefully outside Anji’s attack radius with a genial smile on his cleanshaven face.

Anji’s eyes dropped to an object the stranger held, waist-high. It was oddly shaped—an awkward black metal protuberance, vented on the sides and with what looked like a strip of masking tape affixed across the front of the tube. He had just recognized it as a weapon when the tape abruptly blew apart, leaving its edges frayed and tinged with black.

There was no sound, but Anji felt the shock of impact against his sternum. He staggered, catching himself for an instant; then his knees gave way and he felt himself tumble backward. He crashed onto metal, his head bouncing hard against what felt like thin carpet. There was still no pain, but
when he willed his hand to touch his chest, it came away warm and dripping.

The world swam redly for a moment; when his eyes cleared again, he was looking up the pale blue sky framed by the inside of the open trunk lid. A face moved into his vision, peered down at him without apparent interest. Then it disappeared, and he felt his legs being lifted and folded into the trunk where he lay. They seemed very far away, no longer a part of his body.

Then the trunk lid slammed shut, plunging Anji into a semidarkness that, a few seconds later, became final and complete.

Fort Walton Beach, Florida
July 21

Breakfast today was an apple, a bright red Macintosh, and Dr. Carol Mayer bit into it with the aggrieved attitude of a hungry woman deprived of a decent meal. It made a satisfying crunching sound and tasted delicious and sweet. But it was still an apple, and as such, a woefully insufficient substitute for a real meal.

Her jaw working busily, Carol popped another chart from the ready-rack behind the reception counter and scanned it quickly. She frowned, pursing her lips.

Another upper-rez complaint?
the young physician said to herself.
Third one I’ve fielded this morning.

It was shaping up into a busy day, and the non-physician side of Carol sighed in disappointment. It was a beautiful day outside, and the waters of Choctawatchee Bay—
her
bay: the expanse of living waters that she had first seen on the incoming flight when she interviewed for the job here, the bay with which she had fallen into thrall from that instant onward—would be blue and inviting.

The emergency room at the Rossini-Evans Clinic was crowded—not unusual for a Tuesday during the summer season, when it seemed that every other tourist, traveler or
random visitor to the Emerald Coast ran afoul of the perils of vacation. It might be sunburn, cherry red on newly arrived flesh unaccustomed to the searing rays of the Redneck Riviera. It might be jellyfish stings, or fishhook impalements. It might be cracked bones or abrasions on visiting skateboarders, whose chronic attitude of terminal teenage boredom was at least temporarily on hold.

But it’s not often summer colds,
Carol told herself.
At least, not this many.

“Room Three,” LaTonya Ferris said, interrupting the physician’s musings. She was a large black woman in nurse’s garb who ruled the clinic’s immediate care operations with an iron hand. “But when you’re finished there, honey, take a look at the boy in Five. He’s wearing a cast that’s past due the time to come off.” She chuckled. “And the fragrance is something else, I want to tell you.”

Carol Mayer checked to make sure no patients were watching. Then she stuck her tongue out at LaTonya. Both women laughed at the same time, and Carol was still grinning as she strode down the hallway to the examining room. She took a final bite of her apple, dropped it in the side pocket of her lab coat, and knocked once on the closed door.

Carol was all efficiency when she opened the door and stepped in.

Seated on the exam table was a woman who could not have been far out of her teens. She was wearing a multicolored tubetop and white shorts, and on her feet were bright red canvas Keds. Like so many of the girls who found their way to the sugar white beaches here, she had long blond hair and the body of a dancer. A sea-horse tattoo, acquired recently enough to still look raw on the margins of the ink lines, decorated the inside of her left thigh.

A young man in a faded Auburn T-shirt and cutoff Levi’s sat on the table beside her, holding her hand and looking uncertain.

“How are we doing today”—Carol glanced at the name on the insurance form—“Ms. Atkins, is it?”

Ashley Atkins, whose sophomore year at Ole Miss had ended three weeks before she had informed her parents of the plan to summer on the beach, blew her nose in the handkerchief she held. Her eyes were red and puffy.

“Not so good. I truly feel like hell.”

“She’s been throwin’ up all morning, Doctor,” the young man interjected. His voice was worried. “I think she’s running a fever, too.”

“Let’s take a look.” Carol snapped on fresh latex gloves from a box on the countertop. She slipped a plastic sleeve over the sensor of an electronic thermometer and placed the tip in the younger woman’s ear canal.

“Yep. You’re elevated, a bit. I want to look at your throat, please.”

There was inflammation. It was not major, and certainly fit the diagnostic profile Carol was building. Northwest Florida in July was an oven, which meant that air conditioners were working overtime in every motel room, beach house and condo. That kept the inside air dry, which dried out throat and nasal membranes; viruses tended to thrive in that kind of environment. Add to that the closed-circuit recirculated air in movie theaters, restaurants, rave halls and barrooms—
well,
Carol reasoned,
it’s a wonder everybody isn’t nursing the summer sniffles.

She scribbled a note on the form. “About how long have you been feeling ill, Ms. Atkins?” she asked, without looking up.

“Day ’fore yesterday, she started sounding all clogged up,” the young man said. “I don’t think she got much sleep last night, either.”

“It wasn’t bad until this morning, Bobby,” Ashley protested. “Doctor, you got something I can take to feel better?” She blew her nose again. “Penicillin or something? I tried Contac, but it didn’t do any good.”

Carol shook her head sympathetically.

“I’m afraid you’ve picked up a bad cold,” she said. “Antibiotics don’t work on a virus. I’m going to take some swabs and have a nurse draw a blood sample—don’t worry, Ms. Atkins, you’ll hardly feel it. We’ll run some tests. There are a few medications that can help with the symptoms, and we’ll write you up a prescription.” She stood, peeled the latex gloves from her hands and tossed them into a wastebasket. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Carol closed the door behind her. It was a routine case, a summer cold, and Ashley Atkins was an otherwise healthy young woman. Strictly speaking, Carol could prescribe two antivirals, amantadine and rimantadine, though it was probably too late in the cycle to do much good. In addition, the medical journals were all agog about neuraminidase inhibitors like zanamivir and oseltamivir, though the results were still less than predictable. There were also even newer formulations, most of them still in the pre-brand-name stage and tagged only by alphanumeric identifiers; sometimes they worked, usually they did not. Worse, the cost was horrendous; few HMOs or insurance companies would pay for what they termed such “experimental” treatment.

All you could really do was wait it out. A week, ten days at the most, and Ashley Atkins would be back on the beach without a care in the world. Carol fished the apple from her pocket and nibbled at it.

She was approaching the reception counter to order the tests when she heard a loud hacking from the waiting room. It rose above what suddenly seemed to her a cacophony of lesser coughs and a chorus of snuffling noses.

On a hunch, she walked around the counter and looked out at the waiting room. Of perhaps fifteen people there, she estimated a dozen were exhibiting the sniffling, flushed-face presentation she had already seen three times today.

As she watched, one of the waiting patients began to cough again. It was loud and phlegmy and extended, racking
the middle-aged man’s beefy body. It was also evidently painful, bending him forward from the waist as he sat. When the man finally regained control, his eyes were watering profusely. He wiped at his mouth with a handful of paper tissues, and Carol saw the bluish cast of his lips.