Repairman Jack [05]-Hosts (38 page)

"Just a cold," the girl says, her voice slightly muffled by her surgical mask.

Everyone in the store, including Jack, wears a surgical mask. Jack loves the style—not only keeps out germs but hides the face. And the store is packed. Rumor got out that the place managed to get in a shipment of produce and people are buying up as much as they can carry. Jack left Gia* and Vicky back at his apartment where they're safe from infection and ventured out alone. His cart—and it is truly his because he pushed it to the store from home—is loaded with corn and peaches and tomatoes that look like Jersey beefsteaks. He managed to snag some canned beans and a box of fusilli from the nearly naked shelves as well.

Good haul, he thinks, happy with his finds. Food shipments are so sporadic these days, what with survivalist groups hijacking trucks for themselves, so you take what you can find. Looks like Italian on the menu tonight. Gia can whip of some of her famous red gravy and—

"She's one of them!" cries a heavyset woman in a turquoise sari directly behind the girl with the cold, backing farther away from her. "I saw her pull out the bottom of her mask before she coughed!"

"Just a cold." The girl has wide blue eyes and short black hair. "I swear it's just a cold."

"I saw her too," says the black man behind the saried woman. "Pulled the mask halfway off her face!"

Jack has a feeling he might have seen it too, but only out of the corner of his eye, so he doesn't say anything. The girl's been tagged twice. A third won't change her fate.

Sensing where this could be going he angles his cart out of this particular line and backs it toward the rear of another. But he passes that and keeps on backing away, edging closer to the exit doors.

The checkout girl is signaling to the deputy but he's heard the commotion and is already on his way over. He's a thin little guy, and in any other situation he might be hesitant, but he's wearing the tan uniform of a duly deputized NYC militiaman, he's got a testing kit, and he's armed. And his strut says I'm official so don't mess with me.

"What's up?" His mouth is probably set in a grim line but the surgical mask hides it.

The cashier points to the girl. "They say she coughed outside her mask. On purpose."

"Is that so?" The deputy's eyes narrow as he reaches for the serology tester clipped to his belt. "Okay. Gonna need some of your blood."

"Just a cold," the girl says, backing away.

"If that's all it is, you can go on about your business—after the test."

Jack, who by now has edged into a corner near the furthest checkout counter, notices how the deputy doesn't say what happens if it's not just a cold.

"No!" The girl rips off her mask. "No blood test! We spit on your blood tests!"

Then she charges into the crowd around the cash register and starts spitting—not on the blood test but on people. Terrified shoppers scream and try to flee but there's no room to run. The deputy has his pistol drawn but it's plain if he shoots he's going to crease a load of innocent bystanders.

Suddenly Jack sees something flash in the girl's hand—an old-fashioned straight razor—and knows what's coming next. So does everybody else.

"She's a kamikaze!" someone screams as panic takes charge.

Jack watches the girl ram the point of the blade deep into her throat and rip it sideways. Then she throws her arms wide, tilts her head back, and begins to spin. There's a certain grace to her movements, and it might be a beautiful thing to watch except for the scarlet stream arcing from her throat in a spasming geyser that sprays everyone in a ten-foot circle.

It's a brief dance. Her legs falter, her knees buckle, and she collapses to the floor, a crumpled waxen lump centered in a crimson spin painting.

But though the dance is done, the audience is still reacting: the screamers trapped at the row of checkout counters keep pushing back, deeper into the store; those just entering do a quick about-face and rush back to the relative safety of the streets. Jack, positioned in the no-man's land between, opts for the street and rolls his laden cart though the swinging doors. He'll settle up with the store tomorrow. Could be an hour, maybe two, before the mess is cleaned up in there. He wants to get back home.

Six months ago a scene like that would have blown him away. Now… he feels nothing. Had the dubious distinction of being on hand for two other kamikaze deaths before today's, but never this close. The Hive's MO is pretty much the same all over: find a crowded place and try to spread the infection surreptitiously—the cough, the sneeze, smearing a little saliva on vegetables—but if caught, go down in a glorious spray of body fluids. Pure pragmatism: sacrifice one of their number for the opportunity to infect dozens more.

The Hive is relentlessly pragmatic. That's the key to its success.

Half a block from the store he stops and unties his mask; he pulls off his windbreaker and drapes it over the cart. The November wind slices at him but his flannel shirt blunts its edge. He removes the Glock from the nylon small-of-the-back holster and positions it in plain sight atop the jacket. Then he starts moving again.

This gray, sullen, blustery fall day matches the bleakness Jack feels. He wishes the sun were out—to warm his skin, and maybe even take some of this chill off his soul. But sunlight would bring out more people—maybe they think it's healthier, that the extra UV will kill germs—and Jack prefers the streets damn near deserted like this, especially when he's hauling a load of food. Even so, his senses are
on
full alert.

Ahead he sees a familiar face, a nodding acquaintance coming his way.

"Hey," the guy says with a grin, eyeing Jack's cart. No way he can miss the Glock. "Leave any for me?"

"Plenty," Jack says. "But you might want to wait awhile. A kamikaze did her thing in there."

"Shit!" the guy says. "They don't know when to quit, do they. They know we've got the vaccine. Why do they keep trying?"

"Just because they've got lots of brains doesn't mean they're smart."

The guy doesn't think this is funny. Neither does Jack, but it's better than talking about the rumor that the vaccine isn't what it was cracked up to be, that it's been failing all over the country. What's left of the U.S. government says these are lies spread by the infected to demoralize the uninfected, but no one knows who to believe.

"Guess I'll just go down to the store and wait outside till they clean things up."

Jack waves good-bye and watches him go. Once he's sure the guy's not going to do a spin and jump him from behind, he resumes his walk home. Knows he's always been a bit paranoid, but six months ago he'd have kept the Glock holstered and wouldn't be worried about being jumped for his food. As the saying goes, you're not paranoid if they're really out to get you. And they are. Oh yes, they are.

As Jack walks along he can feel the threads of the social fabric tearing, parting one by one.

Trust is gone, because anyone, your best and oldest friend, your dearest, closest relative, could be carrying the virus. Bad enough they're infected—that's not their fault—but less than a week after their inoculation they become someone else, someone dead set on infecting you.

Compassion is a memory. Sure, feel sorry for the victims of the virus—
after
they're dead.

Jack doesn't know about the rest of the country, but the tenuous sense of community that existed around the Upper West Side is atrophying. You'd think it would be the other way around, a community of the uninfected linking arms and closing ranks against the contaminated. But not when yesterday's uninfected ally could be today's infected enemy.

Jack figures he can extrapolate the local to the national, even to the international, and that means the whole world's going in the toilet—old social orders fragmenting while a new world order expands, relentlessly, irresistibly, geometrically, a rolling snowball of humanity with an unquestioned singleness of purpose.

Strange mix of feelings roiling through him these days. He's spent most of his adult life hiding from the social order, rejecting it, damning it. But despite its toxicity, now that it's on the brink of ruin he finds himself rooting for it, hoping it will find a way to hang on. Because the Hive is even more toxic than the world order it hopes to replace.

Not so much worried about himself—being a ghost in the Hive machine will be more of a challenge than his existence in the American social engine, but he'll manage it. His piercing concern is for Gia and Vicky and the jeopardy they face. They're not cut out to live in the cracks, and the Hive is too vast and pervasive for Jack ever to defeat on his own. Hates to admit it, but he needs help to protect the two people he cherishes. He knows he can't expect it from Democrats and Republicans, but maybe some genius in the medical establishment will come up with a killer app.

And most daunting is that deterioration to the current state has taken a mere five months.

First the virus mutated into an airborne form, then the original tiny nucleus of the Hive fanned out to all the New York travel hubs—LaGuardia and JFK airports, Penn and Grand Central Stations—to spread the virus. From there the bug raced across the country and around the world. Tens of millions were incorporated into the Hive before hardly anyone even realized it existed. Initially the two parties in Congress saw the Hive as a potential constituency and vied with each other to see who could grant it more special rights and entitlements. But after a majority of the politicians became infected, debate stopped.

By the time most people began to appreciate the enormity of the threat, it was too late.

The CDC's initial approach to containment was an influenza model, which proved ineffective. First off, folks with influenza know they're sick and so do the people around them; secondly, flu victims feel lousy and just want to get better. For Hive folk the infection's a party and the more the merrier.

And they were everywhere, contaminating water supplies, infiltrating food processing plants and dairy farms. People became afraid to eat anything they hadn't heated to a boil or prepared themselves.

As he pushes along the sidewalks, Jack wonders as he often does about his sister. Kate exited his life as quickly as she'd entered it. He searched for her but she stayed on the move, spreading the virus with the rest of the Hive vanguard, and he never caught up with her. But just last week he tried calling her office in Trenton and learned she was back in practice. She'd refused to take his call and he'd hung up sick at heart. He thinks of Kate as a pediatrician, with trusting parents, fearing their children might become infected, bringing them to her to be vaccinated against the virus. And Kate making sure if they aren't infected when they enter her office they damn sure are when they leave. All it takes is plain saline in the vaccine syringes and a little of the virus on the tongue depressors…

The thought of Kate betraying those children, breaking her oath to do no harm, negating the decent caring person she once was fills Jack with impotent rage. He wants to hurt, maim, kill, make someone pay, but how do you even a score with a virus?

He wonders if he should take a ride down to Trenton and… do something. But what? Put down the fouled thing that used to be his sister? The old Kate, the real Kate would want him to do that. Beg him to.

But can he? Take a bead on his own sister—even if she's not really his sister anymore—and pull the trigger? Can't imagine that.

Jack picks up his pace as he nears his block. Two old cars are parked nose to nose, blocking the near end of the street; he knows two more junkers are similarly situated at the far end—knows because the whole setup was his idea. Sometime last month he went door to brown-stone door talking—usually at a safe distance through windows or from the sidewalk—to neighbors he'd never bothered to meet despite years on the block, planting the idea of the block sealing itself off. Someone with better people skills picked up the ball and organized the residents, breaking the watch into shifts. Now no outsider enters the block unless accompanied by a resident.

Jack nods to a guy he knows only as George, standing behind one of the cars with a sawed off twelve gauge resting against a thigh. As George waves him through, an NYPD blue-and-white goes by, two cops in the front. Passenger cop's gaze lingers on Jack and George, then slides by. Can't miss the Glock or the sawed-off, but he doesn't react. The tattered remnants of officialdom are no longer worried about armed citizenry—the unseen danger of the virus is a far greater threat to the city. And besides, not enough police to go around as it is. They were the Hive's first target: call the cops out to a domestic dispute, infect them, then form a fifth column within the ranks to infect the rest. Uninfected cops stayed home until the blood tests were developed.

The vaccine and the blood tests—cheap little home kits, like pregnancy tests—are the final fingers in the dam against rising tide of the Hive. If they should fail…

Jack drag-bounces the cart to his third-floor apartment—his fortress islet within the atoll of his closed-off block—and knocks on the door; he has a key but Gia's so edgy these days he figures it'll go easier on her nerves if he doesn't just barge in.

"Oh, Jack!" he hears her say through the door, and he knows she's got her eye to the peep lens, but he detects a strange note in her voice. Something's up.