The Messenger (20 page)
Authors: Stephen Miller
She’s in pain, but she’s moving. Almost a third of the way across the long state of Kentucky, she calculates.
She gets lunch at a Waffle House at the off ramp closer to the center of Lexington.
“… what is now being called the Berlin Plague. And it’s a disease that was supposed to be extinct. Smallpox rears its deadly head once again.…”
She sits at the counter and eats a burger and fries and stays riveted to the television set. When the commercials are done, a report is presented, an interview with a German bureaucrat; the man is in his sixties, and the crawl beneath his name identifies him as a highlevel representative of the World Health Organization. There is a slight delay, and when he answers, his speech is heavily accented.
“… Yes, it started with one case that was a worker at the Hotel Adlon Kempinski.”
“And that’s in Berlin?”
“In Berlin. Yes—”
“The Adlon, that’s the hotel where Michael Jackson dangled the baby out the window …”
“The same, yes …”
“And, Doctor, isn’t what makes this so dangerous is that smallpox was eradicated from the globe, we never thought we’d see another case of smallpox again, right?”
“Yes, that is correct. Since 1980 we have been working under the assumption that the pathogens were completely eliminated.”
“Wouldn’t that indicate it’s not a naturally occurring outbreak? We know that the Soviets, and perhaps others, Saddam Hussein and maybe even al-Qaeda, had clandestine programs to weaponize these germs and viruses …”
“Well, as far as the Soviets go, that is true. When it was discovered initially that the Soviet government had stocks of smallpox, there was an international effort to disarm—”
“Our president Nixon was very much involved in that.”
“Yes, that is—”
“But clearly, something slipped through the cracks.”
The German expert puts his hand up to his ear, frowns …
“By that, I mean it’s obvious that someone must have had access to these germs.”
“Well, yes. It seems so.”
“Are there any other cases?”
“There may be other cases, but there is a delay—”
“Yes, it takes time, several days for the disease to incubate. Thank you, Doctor. We’re going to turn right now to our panel to see how this is playing out, not just in Berlin, but here at home.…”
The smallpox is already being analyzed, the host reports, in an effort to decode its DNA and discover the exact strain and thereby the lab from which it was presumably stolen. It’s all about finding someone to blame.
“… and we’re being told this strain is from India itself.”
“No, no, not quite. There were samples collected in India in 1967—hence the name
, India-1—
originally by Russian scientists, but where it went after that … frankly, it could be anywhere. We have some of the India-1 smallpox
in our own labs as well as several other strains. We won’t know if this is India-1 or an older strain, or a new strain until it’s decoded—”
“Or a hot strain …”
“That’s right, a hot strain, which means it’s highly transmissible, highly lethal—”
“But doesn’t that confirm exactly what some of our members of Congress are saying? This theory that India is the one behind all this, the anthrax, the smallpox—that all of that is simply a ruse.”
“I’ve heard that. It’s needless, inflammatory speculation. Completely irresponsible.”
“Where can we find the truth in all of this, that’s my real question.…”
Apparently the truth may be found in the next spate of commercials; for whitening strips, for lower prices on mattresses, for something you can plug into your phone line and escape paying for calls to anywhere for as long as you want, for a superknife that can cut vegetables or tin cans thin as paper and never wear out.
She stares at her plate and heaves a painful sigh. It all begins to run together. She killed a man this morning. She’s been shot.
Shock.
She stares around the restaurant. It’s like being in a zoo where they’ve misassigned you to a cage with the wrong species. She marvels at how completely dysfunctional all these people are. Primates, crazy baboons. And the women. The women on the television, the women in real life. Breasts are very big for Americans … well, they are very big for Italians too … but every woman displayed has prominent breasts. What does that say about them? Does America need to be comforted, to be loved? To be nurtured and fed on demand?
Daria breathes again. She is hot. She has a fever. Suddenly her skin is so itchy. She is desperate to take off her clothes.
She looks around. The television news is back on. There is a clip of the American president making a speech. He says nothing new or
different. He’s confident that the agencies, the scientists, the hospital workers, all the machinery of this vast, glorious nation will continue to answer the call.… It’s all platitudes. Internationally, he is going to meet with both sides in an effort to arrive at a peaceful solution.
“You want me to top that up for you?” The waitress refills her glass without waiting for an answer. This is a new discovery, iced tea. Sweet and spiked with lemon. She drinks off half the glass at once. She still feels hot.
She has to get out of the Waffle House. Get away from the memory of the officer in the pool of his own blood and urine, the way his fingers were still moving. Like he was trying to scratch the neck of a cat …
She can’t think about it, it’s too much. And she will have to do something about the bullet, and the throbbing pain every time she takes a breath. She just wants to lie down and cry herself to sleep, but she can’t. No … no, she tells herself.
She can’t surrender to these monsters. She won’t give in. She will keep going. She has set her course and she will kill, kill, and kill some more. But somehow she has to find a way to bring this wrecked plan to a pause, and get her head together. She volunteered, she
wanted
to be blown to bits, she wanted to have a fiery instantaneous death, to go out violently and have it over with. Not like this.
She drinks more of the tea, turns away from the television, and fumbles out some of her cash—it’s starting to run low now … a good terrorist should be able to manage her money better and die with a final two pennies to close her eyes.
Daria leaves a tip for the waitress—unfortunately it won’t immunize her—gently shoulders her pack, and heads out to the ramp that will take her away. Anywhere will do. Just away from what she has gone through this morning. And it isn’t long—only a few minutes later and she gets a ride, his name is irrelevant, she forgets his occupation instantly. He asks how far she will go, and she says Denver. She falls asleep leaning against the cool window, and dreams of when she was a little girl and none of this mattered.
When she wakes he has his hand on her thigh, and she slaps it away and screams at him. It comes out in her childhood dialect and
he looks confused. It’s wrong, the wrong thing to do. She doesn’t want to be memorable, doesn’t want to stick out at all. She is careful to stay in the car, pull the seat forward and get her pack before the car stops. For an instant, her hand on the automatic, she thinks about blowing Mr. No-Name into the next world, but instead jumps out onto the grassy shoulder while he gives her the finger and burns rubber down some unknown Kentucky side road.
There is a long stretch where no cars come, and she ends up waiting by the on ramp for a sympathetic or horny soul to finally take her into Louisville. She sits in the grass and tries to count out her money, dividing it into two piles, one to hide in the backpack, another to carry with her. She is dizzy and spots are forming on her field of vision like spitting raindrops. It’s not really raining, but the hallucinations pucker everything she looks at. In the afternoon she finally scores a ride. At first she thinks it’s a school bus, but then realizes that it’s a family of hippies.
She has never actually met any real hippies; a man and woman, both with long hair tied back in ponytails, and two children who are, they brag proudly, homeschooled. They are in the process of blowing this pop stand, fleeing … going back to the farm in the light of all that is happening in the world today. The man has a weathered face, with smile-wrinkles, and a missing bottom tooth that mars his appearance. He smells like wood.
The bus has been converted and has a sleeping loft for the children cut into its roof, and a second bedroom down below. There is a sound system, and Daria is given a seat on a low sofa halfway down the bus, and tries to will the children not to play with her but, starved for human companionship, of course they do.
They have renamed themselves the Trulite family; he is Happy Trulite, or “Hap,” and the wife has kept her original name, Matilda—now shortened to Mattie. The boy is Cosmic (Mick), and Fern, the youngest, is the daughter.
It’s all smiles on their journey off the grid. They don’t try to hit her up for gas money, and gladly share their sunflower seeds and raisins. She can sit there without moving too much and listen as the children show off, singing nursery rhymes and drawing, producing
fantastical pictures of chimeras—spacemen with wings, dogs with three tails in multiple colors, a sky full of whirling stars, fish, and blocky letters of the alphabet. She watches them sadly. It’s too late now. Too late.
She falls asleep with an empty cup of comfrey tea clasped in her lap.
It is late afternoon by the time the Trulites drop Daria off on the outskirts of the city. She walks slowly, painfully, through the sprawl until she discovers a beauty parlor in one of the strip malls and goes in. It’s called Ellevate and the hairdressers are all young, beautiful, and pierced. There is tinkly music playing, and the whole place smells like a mixture of a florist’s and an estrogen factory.
One of the girls looks up. “Hey, how are you today?”
“Can you squeeze me in? It’s a big job, but I’ve had it …” she says.
“In about a half hour we’ve got a space. What were you thinking?”
“Everything off. And I want to go lighter. A lot lighter.”
Emily, the hairdresser, has her doubts about whether going blonde is such a good idea with hair as dark and as thick as hers, so they compromise on red. Tilted backwards, she is shampooed and it feels wonderful—warm, soothing, and completely rejuvenating. Time passes in a blur. It seems like only moments and the floor is littered with her dark curls, and by then she is floating, just listening to the spaced-out music while Emily does the color.
“Let me know if this irritates at all. It looks like you have a little sensitivity …” she says, her soft fingers riffling through the newly shorn hairs at the back of Daria’s neck.
She closes her eyes and lets the morning’s murder dissolve away. With the soft fingers massaging her skull and the ethereal music, she almost achieves something like nirvana. It’s too late now. Too late for feelings or for regrets. What good will it do? Choices? She decided a long, long time ago. Her course was set.
An arrow in flight.
When the job is done, Daria stares at herself in the mirror. She is totally transformed, sassy and hip, and looks more her age as
calculated in American years. Bending is hard, but she manages to get up from the chair without groaning out loud; she adds a tip and pays with most of her remaining cash, smiles all around. She walks out of Ellevate and along the walkway that winds through the mall. Counts her money and decides to splurge on a pair of fashionable sunglasses that work with her new hair.
Then …
Walking along, seeing her reflection in the store windows … it’s not Daria Vermiglio anymore. It’s a stranger.
Someone she does not know.
Watterman is insufficiently important to rate evacuation to the underground bunkers at Mount Weather. That’s for the upper crust like the President and the First Family, the congressional leadership, cabinet secretaries, people with serious clout. Other extremely important persons are being evacuated for temporary residence at Site R in Pennsylvania, or Cheyenne Mountain way out west.
No, for ordinary
apparatchiks
like Watterman there is a chicken farm. Or at least it looks like one from the road. A long steel building nestled among several others spread out across a broad sloping field in what he thinks is Tennessee.
Or it might not be Tennessee. He doesn’t know, because from where he was sitting there was no view out the windows of the helicopter. They land in a pad that’s been cut in the woods. You could get four helicopters in there at a time, Watterman figures. A minivan and a dilapidated school bus are waiting. They drive out of the woods and onto a two-lane highway for a few minutes. It’s like going on a field trip in high school except everyone is texting on secure cell phones.
The cool of the day has made the surrounding fields foggy, the colors are muted, the leaves have started to change.
They turn off the blacktop, go through a cattle-guarded gate and into a huge field upon which have been built a series of … chicken farms. They park around behind so that they will be out of sight of the road.
The doors have seals on them and the whole place is under positive pressure to blow the germs back outside, a comparatively cost-effective place of refuge. Inside, there’s everything you need to sit out the end of the world. Food, clothing. Laundry. A bar with satellite TV. At one end are the sleeping cubicles.
His cell phone is taken away and encased in a Ziploc bag; he gets an orange cuff fastened around his wrist—it’s a cross between a bicycle lock and a house-arrest collar. Then Lansing escorts him down to an open area. It’s industrial seating grouped around coffee tables. Walled off with dividers, bulletin boards on wheels, and portable lighting units. There’s activity all around and Lansing and Chamai drop him to go take care of FBI business. He finds a place to sit and lets his gaze sweep around the great booming shed that looks like it’s going to be home for a while. He wonders how Maggie is, when he’ll be allowed to talk to her again.
