The Cobra Event (14 page)

“I’m not sure what it is. What’s the mother’s address and phone number?”

Cells

WITH A PENCIL
, Austen marked another X on her map, this one at the St. George Hospital on Staten Island. Now there were three points of death:

1. Times Square. April 16. Harmonica Man. The index case.

2. St. George Hospital, Staten Island. April 21. Penelope Zecker.

3. East Seventy-ninth Street. April 22. Kate Moran.

There was still no obvious connection among them. What had they come into contact with? How were these people connected in a biological sense? The term
stealth virus
came into her mind, but she pushed it out.

She called Walter Mellis. “Walt, I’ve found a third possible case.” She described it to him. “But I think I’m missing something important. There’s a pattern that I’m not seeing.”

“What do your instincts say?”

“It’s something I’ve
seen
, Walt. It’s a visual clue. It’s staring me in the face and I don’t see it.”

BY NOW
, the samples of Kate Moran’s tissue would have been processed and prepared for viewing in a microscope. Austen went to the O.C.M.E. histology lab and collected a set of glass slides. There was no microscope in her office, so she took the slides to Glenn Dudley’s office.

“So how are things going, Dr. Austen? Have you solved the mystery yet?” He was dressed in a scrub suit, sitting at a word processor. He had just finished his day’s autopsies, and he was writing up his reports. She noticed that he looked tired. His usually perfect hair was mussed, his face was sallow.

She described the Zecker case.

“Interesting,” he said. “I’ve got some lab results for the Moran girl.” He pulled out a report. “She had high uric acid in the bloodstream.” He gave the readings. “She had a mildly elevated white-blood-cell count in the spinal fluid.”

“Any toxins?” she asked.

“If we’d found any toxins in her blood I would have
told
you,” he said. He turned away and blew his nose on a laboratory Kimwipe and hurled it into the wastebasket with a gesture of annoyance. Then they sat down, facing each other across the doubleheaded microscope. Dudley chose the slides to look at. First they looked at slices of the girl’s liver and lung. Everything seemed normal. Then they looked at slides of vaginal tissue. Austen found an area of what looked to be a blister, and she examined the cells there. Some of them appeared to have angular shadows or crystalline objects in their centers, but she wasn’t sure.

Austen wanted to look at brain cells. “Yeah, well, the brain was a bitch to prepare after you chopped it up, Doctor,” Dudley said.

Even so, they searched through fields of Kate Moran’s brain cells. Once again, some of the cells—in the nuclei—contained the lumpy shapes.

“Let’s look at some kidney,” Austen said. She was thinking about the golden streaks in Kate’s kidneys.

Together they studied a slide showing tissue of the kidney. The damage was clearly caused by uric acid. Austen saw needlelike shapes.

“Yeah,” Dudley said. “These are uric acid deposits. This kid had very high uric acid.” The finding was consistent with the blood work. She had been undergoing some kind of kidney failure when she died.

“I’d like to get some of this tissue in an electron microscope,” Austen said to him. “Get a better image of the objects in the cell nucleus.” An electron microscope uses a beam of electrons to make highly magnified images of the interior structure of cells. It can make an image of virus particles.

“Why don’t you just take some stuff back to Atlanta?” he said.

“I will. But I want to follow up on a couple of things here in the city.”

Houston Street

BY NOW
, Austen was sure this was an outbreak. The shapes inside the cells were part of the disease. Mental alarms were going off. Back in her office, she stared at the map for a while, pondering what to do. She noticed that her hands were sweaty. The day had practically gone. She opened up the case files and pored over them, looking for details. She was sure there was a detail she’d missed. Harmonica Man was the index case. She had to look more closely at that, although the O.C.M.E. had not been able to establish where he even lived, much less his real name.

There was a knock on the door. It was Ben Kly. “How are you doing, Dr. Austen? I was just checking in on you. You don’t look too good.”

“I’m okay. How are you doing, Ben?”

“Do you think this thing is real?”

“I know it’s real. Can you help me with something? Do you know your way around the city?”

“Pretty well. I used to drive a mortuary van.”

“The first case was a homeless man, Ben. He was called Harmonica Man. They don’t know where he lived, but he had a friend who was with him when he died, a man named Lem. The report says that Lem lives ‘under East Houston Street.’ Can you tell me what that means?”

“Sure. He lives under East Houston Street. Like it says.” Kly smiled.

“Can you take me there?”

“Now?”

She nodded.

He shrugged. “I’ll ask the chief.”

“Please, don’t, Ben. He may say no. If you would just take me there—”

“We’re going to get a transit cop to go with us, okay?”

“
I’VE BEEN ALL OVER
this city picking up bodies,” Kly said. “A lot of homeless dead. They call the homeless people skells. The skells die in every crack.”

He and Austen were sitting at a table in Katz’s Deli-eatessen on East Houston Street, on the edge of the Lower East Side. They were eating hot knishes and hot pastrami sandwiches with mild pickles, and drinking coffee. There were two flashlights on the table.

Austen dug into her knish; a knish is a potato turnover. She burned her tongue on the potato. She had not eaten all day again, and she was practically fainting with hunger. The knish seemed to flow into her bones.

Katz’s Delicatessen was founded in 1888, when the Lower East Side was a slum populated by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Katz’s is still owned by the Katz family. It has brown varnished walls and Formica tables, and the place is awash in fluorescent light. It is mostly self-service, but there are some waiter tables along one wall. The walls are decorated with photographs of celebrities, such as the police commissioner and Soupy Sales. Always the celebrities are shaking hands with a Mr. Katz. There is a photo of Harry Houdini shaking hands with a Mr. Katz—Houdini was a regular at Katz’s.

You get a ticket when you go inside, and the men behind the counters hold out little nibs of hot pastrami for a taste before you order, so you can judge whether the pastrami is good that day. On the outside the pastrami is as black as tar and covered with grit. On the inside it is delicate, red, juicy, though sometimes a little fatty, but that is the way Katz’s customers like it. Occasionally the guys behind the counters give you more than you have ordered, such as two beers instead of one, but they mark only one beer on the ticket, and they say to you in a low voice, “You wanted
one
? Speak up next time! Take it, will ya! Don’t tell nobody.” There are racks of dry salamis hanging behind an elderly man who will sell you fifty of them if you want, and there are paper signs dangling from the ceiling that say

Senda salami
To your boy in the Army
.

It rhymes if you say it correctly.

They finished their coffee and carried their tickets over to the cashier, and they went out onto Houston Street and walked westward. Houston Street is a wide, treeless traffic artery. The afternoon was getting along, and traffic was heavy. On the way, Kly used Austen’s cell phone to call the Transit Police. He led Austen into a subway-station entrance at the corner of Second Avenue, a stop for the F train. Once in the station, they waited, and eventually a transit officer showed up.

The station platform was a hundred and fifty yards long, and there were no more than three or four other people standing there. It was not a busy station.

Ben Kly looked up the ceiling. “We’re following Houston Street,” he remarked. “We’re going east.” At the end of the platform there was a metal curtain wall that went from floor to ceiling. There was a strong smell of urine in the air. Kly said that they were facing the East River. “The tracks of the F line turn south from here,” he explained. “We’re not going that way. There’s an abandoned tunnel that goes east.” Kly turned to the transit officer. “How far’s it go?”

The officer was a chunky man with a mustache, and he had a flashlight. “A ways,” he said.

There was a small swinging gate at the end of the platform. They switched on their flashlights and went through the gate and down a set of steps to the tracks. Kly pointed his flashlight at a dark metal bar running parallel to the tracks. “That’s the third rail, Dr. Austen. It’s alive. Don’t touch it.”

The officer turned to her. “If a train comes, stand against the wall, okay? In these little spaces. They’re safety niches. But I’ll stop the train with my light.”

They walked a distance along the tracks. On their left was a wall made of sheet metal. Kly swung his light over it. He found what he was looking for—a hole in the metal—and they bent over and went through. On the other side was a set of abandoned tracks heading east. The rails were rusty, and the crossties were covered with scattered newspapers and trash. They walked along the track bed, casting their lights around. A train rumbled below them, filling the tunnels with a roar.

“That’s the uptown F train,” Kly remarked over the sound. “It’s going under us. We’re on a bridge.”

The tracks and the ground were covered with black dust.

“Don’t kick up that stuff,” Kly said.

“What is it?” Austen asked.

“It’s steel dust. It comes off the rails. It builds up in these unused tunnels.”

They played their flashlights around. There were steel columns everywhere, and a vaulted ceiling. There were empty, open doors leading to black spaces. Their feet moved through the black dust, which was very soft, almost silky underfoot. It hushed the sound of their feet. The walls were decorated with graffiti. On the floor were scattered heaps of cardboard, and coils of dried feces. They stepped over a ski jacket, torn, blackened, lying between the tracks, and a furry mat or rug. Austen shone her light on the rug. It was a crushed, mummified dog. There was a bad edge to the air that seemed to come from the dog. Austen heard a snapping sound. She glanced over and saw that the policeman had unsnapped the leather flap on his gun holster.

“Lem?” Kly shouted. “Hey, Lem!” His voice echoed down the tunnel.

No answer.

“Anybody home?” Kly called.

“Lem!” Austen called.

They moved slowly back and forth for a long while, shining their lights into grim-looking spaces. At one of the openings in the wall both Austen and Kly noticed the sound of many buzzing flies. This surprised Austen. She didn’t expect to find flies underground.

He was lying on an aluminum-and-plastic folding lawn chair. He could have been anywhere from thirty to sixty years old. He was a white man. His back was arched deeply, his body wrenched backward into the shape of a crescent moon. His abdomen had swollen to a tremendous size. It was distended, as if he were pregnant with something, and it had turned a molten shiny green in the lower quadrant over the intestinal area. Gases of decay had built up inside the body, swelling it. His mouth and beard were wet with green and black fluid. Cadaver liquids had poured from between his legs, staining his pants. Flies rose and skittered in the air. He seemed to have lost his eyes.

The cop pulled his hand-held radio and switched it to the breaker channel. He stepped backward, then he turned away and coughed. He put his hands on his knees. He coughed again. There were splashing sounds and more coughing in the darkness. “I hate these kind of ones,” he said at last, wiping his mouth.

Drawing shallow breaths, Austen moved into the smell. She could feel it touching her skin—she could feel her skin receiving an oily coating from the gases, and a metallic taste appeared in her mouth. She was tasting the smell on her tongue.

She knelt down beside the decedent. She opened her knapsack and put on a protective button mask. She handed another mask to Kly. He did not seem to be particularly bothered by the smell. She put on latex rubber gloves. Very carefully she lifted up the man’s right hand.

His fingers were intact, but the skin of the hand had sloughed off. It hung loosely about the fingers, a soft, semitransparent parchment. Delicately, she pulled open the fingers. His hand enclosed a collapsed eyeball.

“He enucleated himself, Ben. He pulled out his eyes.”

AFTER MAKING
a brief examination of the dead man, Austen stood up and looked around the tunnel, shining her light into corners. Lem and Harmonica Man had been friends. Harmonica Man had sometimes hired Lem as a bodyguard, according to the report. Friends and neighbors?

The transit officer was talking on his hand-held radio, reporting the body.

Austen found a steel door a distance down the tunnel. It was a folding door. There was a padlock on it, and there were heaps of what looked like fresh garbage and food containers scattered around the door. “Ben,” she said.

He came over and looked, and shook the padlock. It opened. The steel loop had been cut with a hacksaw.

“That’s a trick. The homeless do it,” he said, pulling open the door.

Behind the door was a cramped space full of electrical cables. Most of the cables ran along a shelf above the ground. “They sleep up on the shelf,” Kly remarked, playing his light around. “It’s warmer up there.”

Austen stood on a cinder block and looked. There were several empty vodka bottles lined up on the ledge, and more bottles and plastic food containers. And there was a black garbage bag containing something soft.

“Watch out for rats, okay, Dr. Austen?”

She felt the bag with her gloved hands, and pulled it down.

The policeman was asking them what they were doing. “Just a minute,” Austen said.