The Gemini Virus (27 page)

The trail led Beck through the forest for about a half hour. He liked the wild; under normal circumstances the isolation and quiet would have a calming effect on him. It was a beautiful day, and this was a beautiful place—the kind of place where he might do a little hiking, maybe find a waterway and bring a kayak. Under normal circumstances …

He found one of Easton’s hunting stands; it looked like a tree fort on stilts. It was wide enough to fit several grown men, and there was a ladder leading up to a trapdoor in the bottom. The door was hanging down, the hook darkened with rust. Plastic shotgun shells were scattered in the dried leaves, along with a few beer cans: Miller Lite and Budweiser.

Farther along he found another stand, more basic than the first—a group of two-by-fours nailed together in a tree to create a serviceable single-person platform. He crossed a tiny stream in a lowland area. Then the trail ran up again, meeting a second path that bisected it in perfect right angles, creating a four-way intersection. Beck turned left, never realizing the other way would have taken him to the Jensens’ cabin.

A few minutes later he found himself at the peak of a pebbly ridge. Through the leafy canopy he could see the mountains and valleys beyond. Then the smell hit him, different from the one in Easton’s basement, but just as heavy.

Beck stopped, looked around, saw nothing. The odor disappeared … then it was there again.
The wind,
he realized.

He watched the trees intently for a moment. When another gust rustled through, he left the trail and moved hurriedly in the direction from which it came. The odor became stronger, more invasive. Some characteristics were familiar to him, triggering all sorts of unpleasant memories. The stench of rot and disease and decay.
And death
 …

He found the first deer lying in a shallow, open space among a cluster of trees. It was a whitetail, a young male judging by the relatively small size of its horns. Its eyes were puffed shut, and black eruptions that looked like giant zits mottled most of its face. The mouth was open slightly, frozen that way when the rigor mortis set in. Dried blood was still present, caked onto the animal’s tiny teeth. Flies buzzed noisily around the carcass, so thick by the gutted torso that they formed a scant cloud. Beck doubted this was the one from which Easton and his friends had taken their meat. It hadn’t been cut open—it’d been
ripped
. Clawed by some hungry predator—or, more likely, a pack of them. He took a sample of the dried blood and transferred it to a rubbed-capped vial. He labeled the vial and put it back in the case. Then he took out the camera and clicked a few pictures.

About twenty yards on, he found another corpse. It had been decaying longer than the first, the hair dry-matted to the bones, half the skull exposed. Beck scraped off a few tissue samples into a plastic bag. The third body was at the peak of a small hill to the right, and from there Beck could see four more. Two were lying side by side, as if they’d killed each other in close combat.

By the time he got back to the convertible, he had collected material from more than twenty of them. He took a portable test kit from the trunk and used sterile tweezers to immerse several tissue samples into small reaction tubes of greenish liquid. Within thirty seconds, the viral proteins changed the color of the fluid from green to red—the polymerase chain reaction he was hoping for. He knew it wasn’t conclusive by any means; field kits could be notoriously unreliable. This one in particular, although capable of testing beyond a single-pathogen regime and with an industry reputation for minimal false positives or negatives, was intended to detect common respiratory contagion during cold and flu season. Also, the samples were usually of human origin—nasopharyngeal aspirates and swabs, and bronchoalveolar lavage. So he needed confirmation in a lab setting before he could take the next step.

But still …

This is it. I’d bet my life on it.

He yanked his cell phone from his pocket and was about to dial, but the screen displayed an icon of a phone inside a circle with a line through it, and underneath it read,
SERVICE UNAVAILABLE.

“Damn.”

He packed everything quickly and got back in the car.

NINETEEN

It was a montage of colorful, soft-edged images. They seemed to be coming randomly now—Dennis sitting in the science lab of his elementary school, watching Mr. Matheson use potassium nitrate to make little smoke bombs … checking himself over in the mirror on the night of his senior prom, looking fairly sharp in his white tuxedo … racing BMX bikes around an impromptu track that had been etched through a local construction site. The tractors responsible for it were sitting idle along the fringes because one of the site owners had been arrested for something called embezzlement. There was also a memory of him and Elaine at the Jersey Shore, crouching down in the wet surf trying to dig up “sandbugs”—opaque, beetle-like creatures that buried themselves a few inches below the surface. His parents—both long dead now—stood nearby. Dad, so gangly-thin that you could count each rib from twenty paces, was puffing on one of the Pall Malls that had contributed to the diminishment of his existence. Mom sat nearby in a beach chair reading a glamour magazine, the cancer in her uterus still a few years away from taking shape.

The image that shuddered through the darkness and then brightened to full clarity was of him lying in his bed on a Saturday morning while the comforting scents of summer blew through the half-open windows. He was about ten or eleven and looked every bit of it. He was being slowly awoken by someone who was trying to do it diplomatically. A hand had been set on his bare arm—he always slept without a shirt in the summer—and was now shaking him so gently that it felt like he was on a raft in a swimming pool. The lids of one eye slowly peeled apart. It was Elaine again, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, ready to go. Blond-haired, blue-eyed, pretty like a character in an L. M. Montgomery novel. Those eyes were wide with both excitement and fear. The excitement came from deep within, where she had a natural wellspring of it. She had always been that way—thrilled about life, about
being
alive, and the shiny possibilities each day held. The fear … well, that was Dennis’s fault, and he knew it. He wasn’t a “morning person” as a kid, and he particularly hated getting up on weekends one minute earlier than his Circadian rhythms required. He snapped at her many times for this travesty, and she had become gun-shy about it. Nevertheless … she wanted someone to play with, and she just adored her older brother. So her compromise was to wake him in as inoffensive a manner as possible.

“Den,” she said, her voice echoey in the dream, “come on, wake up. I want to do something, Dennis. Come on…”

Except that she didn’t say
I want to do something
in the dream—what she said was,
You
need
to do something.
And her voice didn’t have that hint of terror in it. It was still soft and delicate, but it wasn’t the voice of a child.

His eyes fluttered open, and he turned to see her hovering nearby. It was the grown-up version of her now. As his mind swam back to the present, some distant part of it took note of the hand that had been carefully set on his bare arm. It was kind of funny, he thought—more than thirty years later, and she still woke him like she was defusing a bomb.

“What’s going on?” he said, or at least tried to—the words crumbled in a dry hiss. He cleared his throat and tried again—“Hey, what’s up?”

“Someone’s here to see you guys,” she said, smiling and looking toward the front of the room. Dennis noticed for the first time that his sister was wearing a surgical mask.

He followed her gaze and found Mel standing there. Her nurse’s scrubs were the color of raspberry sherbet, but her mask was baby blue like Elaine’s.
They don’t match … what would Stacy and Clinton of
What Not to Wear
have to say about that?
This bizarre thought inspired him to make a real effort to get with it.

He turned and found Andi sitting there with her arms crossed, grinning at him.

“It’s about time,” she said. “We’ve been waiting nearly twenty minutes.”

“You were snoring like a hog in a barn,” Mel added, driving the other two into a fit of laughter. The kids lay next to their mother on their sides, snoozing away.

Andi noticed the look of bewilderment on his face and said, “Mel gave them each a sedative. They need the rest.”

Dennis felt a jolt of alarm—
A sedative?…
Then he saw the fading blisters on his daughter’s arms, pinkish now as opposed to the angry red they were twenty-four hours ago. Same with those on Andi’s arms, as well as the swelling around her face. The original features were beginning to reemerge, restoring the simple-but-natural beauty that always stirred him.

“Are you with us now?” Mel asked.

“Yeah, sorry.” He cleared his throat again and repositioned himself. “I’m here. What’s up?”

“Well, I wanted to tell you all that the serum is
working
.”

“That’s wonderful,” Andi said.

“Awesome,” Elaine added.

“Yes. Thirty-two patients have seen reduced symptoms, and I’m sure there will be more.”

“Excellent!”
Andi said with a liveliness Dennis had thought he would never hear again.

Mel was nodding. “There are a lot of people in this hospital who have put you on their Christmas list, that’s for sure. If it wasn’t for Dr. Petti’s strict orders that you should all be left alone to rest, there’d be a stampede to this room, believe me.”

Andi looked to her sister-in-law, then back to Mel. “How is the serum being made so fast, and in enough quantities for so many people?” she asked. “There hasn’t been that much blood taken from us, and you couldn’t use it on everyone anyway.”

“They’re taking your immune system cells and growing them in a culture,” Elaine said. “They’re the ones producing the protective antibodies.”

“The ones neutralizing the effect of the virus,” Mel said.

“That’s right. Once they’re cultured, the antibodies are ready for injection into other patients. Some are also left behind to grow more cultures, and then production becomes exponential.”

“That’s fantastic,” Andi said. “And it all sounds relatively simple, too.”

“Well … there are some snags,” Mel said. “It’s not
that
simple.”

“Such as?”

“Like human cells in a culture divide only every twenty hours or so, so it takes time to produce more antibodies. We can’t make nature go faster.”

It didn’t take a mathematician to figure out what this meant. “So some people who can be saved simply won’t get the serum in time?”

“That’s right,” Mel said. “It’s like the day they find a cure for cancer. Even if they get it to every person in the world who needs it, some will die while it’s in the mail.”

“Is there any way to make serum faster?”

“There’s an experimental approach that’s been discussed,” Elaine said, “and I think the government might try it. It goes like this—a high-tech company that specializes in rapid sequencing may be able to quickly map out the DNA that encodes the antibody’s dual chains. Then the DNA is placed in a bacterial expression system, where it could then, theoretically, be replicated in large quantities.”

Mel chuckled. “Did anyone in the room understand that besides the two of us?”

“Synthesis,” Andi said. This made Dennis suddenly remember her fascination for all things science. It had always been a mystery why she didn’t choose a scientific discipline for a career.

“That’s right.”

“It sounds unstable, though. Unpredictable. A lot of variables that can fall the wrong way.”

“That’s why it’s experimental,” Elaine told her. “Plus, the legalities if someone is injected and it doesn’t work, or their condition worsens.…”

“So then the best approach is the one they’re already doing?” Andi asked. “Based on our cells?”

“That’s right,” Mel said. “The good stuff floating around in your body is not only going to be made into a serum, but the attenuated virus will be used to create a vaccine.”

“And they’re optimistic it’ll work, too,” Elaine added. “It’s just like the cowpox relationship to smallpox. Once someone was injected with cowpox, smallpox did not have as dramatic an effect on them. That’s where the original vaccine for smallpox came from—the cowpox virus. Now, the attenuated virus in the four of you will be the basis for the vaccine for this new virus.”

“Attenuated?” Andi repeated. “You mean weakened?”

“That’s right. You have a weakened form of the poxvirus that’s affecting everyone else.”

“Where did we get it from?” Dennis asked. “We were in the middle of nowhere.”

Elaine’s smile widened. She looked to Mel and said, “Do you want to tell them or can I?”

“Go ahead.”

She turned back to her brother. “From Scooter,” she said.

“What?”

“Your dog saved your life,” Elaine replied. “Somehow he caught the original—they’re still trying to figure out where and when—and his system produced a weaker version.”

“That’s unbelievable,” Andi said.

“Actually, it isn’t. It’s not unusual for a virus to become attenuated after it has passed through a different species.”

“Not unusual at all,” Mel said, shaking her head.

“Viruses that are dangerous to one animal are very often harmless to another. The one that’s been claiming so many human lives apparently has no effect on dogs. But dogs have a very interesting effect on the virus. When the virus adopts to their system, its virulency toward the human system is significantly weakened.”

“So, is that another way people can save themselves?” Andi said. “By having their dogs get it?”

“It’s possible,” Elaine told her. “It worked for you, so it could work for others. But I don’t know how many people want to become infected through their dogs just for the sake of finding out.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you get Scooter back?” Dennis asked. “Was he all right?”

“He was just fine,” Elaine said. “Happy to see me, that’s for sure. But he was fine.”