The Messenger (38 page)

The bottom contains a pool of dust-covered water. Nothing grows around the rim. On the opposite side is the twisted remainder of a school bus. She walks around the rim and investigates the wreckage. Now she sees other craters all around. Bits and pieces of machinery scattered everywhere; she can look at each torn fragment and reconstruct the whole in her mind. This was once the chassis of a truck. That is not a rock, it’s an engine.

Ahead of her is more wreckage. A big block of cast steel with milled surfaces gone rusty, and flaking paint. A twisted artillery tube, half buried in the soil; a length of tank tread.

She starts walking toward the crest, where she has decided to kill herself while she still can. She can look east and try to pray. Once she climbs a little she can see the craters stretching away to infinity. Behind her is the highway but the view is different as she works her way around the hill—it seems much farther away.

And now that she’s gone around the slope, she sees that she’s really ascending the toe of a long ridge. The whole thing climbs higher than she imagined. There is no sense of scale and distances are deceiving. From this height she can see lights down at the end of the valley. There must be something there. A wide spot in the road. A gas station, or a store. More likely a water tank. The sound of the dogs, alarmed by something, their barking floats to her on the wind.

There is a ledge, a long shard of layered rock that has yet to erode under the eternal winds that sweep down the valley, and she
decides to rest for a time. Once hunkered down, she realizes how much better it feels to be out of the wind. And how quiet it is.

She pulls the pack around to use as a pillow. Her fingers are sore and cracked. She finds her digital camera, takes it out and flips through the photographs.

An archive from some other planet. Happy young people lifting glasses in a bar, Burke, one of the advertising copywriters, smiling firefighters, a blurry exterior out the window of the train, a portrait of the soldier she met on the bus, his name forgotten.

She fiddles with the settings, holds the camera at arm’s length and watches the little red light blink until there is a blinding flash.

When her vision clears she looks at the result—some sort of wild Medusa, with great yellow and black circles under her eyes. A last testament. She puts the camera back in its case and holds it in her lap like a doll.

Out of the wind she will sleep now, and in the morning she will be stronger and go farther. She will lose herself out here and they will never find her, and she will hide herself away and then do it.

It’s a little too much like Afghanistan, Acting Deputy Sheriff Lucinda Suárez thinks. Too much like places she’s in the process of trying to forget. Somewhere out in the hills beyond Kandahar district maybe. Dry country. Rocky. Why would people fight so hard for something like this? Well, when it’s all you have …

She is tired from working all day yesterday up on the interstate. Inoculations, arguing with truckers about their paperwork. People pissed once they got into rush hour from Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Having to work backup overtime because everybody—civilian, military, public health, and police—everybody is on edge. The masks only make it worse. You can’t read anyone’s expression.

The news? She doesn’t even listen anymore. Instead she hears the buffeting of the wind, the hum of the tires, her heart’s beat, and her lungs learning how to breathe. How to not think about what could be buried just beside the road, how not to flinch at any loud sound. She is learning how to be a woman safely home from a war.

For the first time in weeks, Luci Suárez’s mother is happy. Well, there will be money coming in. She tells Luci not to worry about the long hours, or shopping, or doing anything around the house. There will be food waiting when she gets home, and even if she has to stay over down in Socorro, or somewhere else, to go ahead. And besides, maybe she’ll meet someone, her mother says. Always pushing.

This road she’s on, tonight 380 heading east past White Sands Missile Range, is almost completely deserted. Occasionally a pair of semis blow by. They’ve given her a magnetized flasher to put on the roof of her truck, which works by plugging it into the cigarette lighter; the radio has enough range to reach back to the office; she has a shotgun that she has put down on the floor, water, some sandwiches, and two new blue bags full of vaccine that might or might not do any good. Still, you have to inject anyone who wants to come across the county line. The law is the law. It’s just another kind of army.

This is what two tours gets you, Luci thinks. Another four weeks of emergency duty and she can qualify for the Forest Service. Get outside. Get on with the adjustment. Move into the city. Put a little something aside.

New to the department, not much more than an intern, Suárez is on the night shift and is driving out to relieve another deputy at the entrance to the rec area. It’s closed off, of course. Everything public is being closed off. Theaters, schools. Anywhere crowds of people are liable to congregate. The idea behind quarantine is to hunker down. Wait this thing out. That’s the big strategy that’s going to defeat the germs, that’s the master plan the powers-that-be have come up with. Nobody really knows if it’s going to work, she knows that. But nobody talks about that part.

And then she sees the car.

She takes her foot off the gas and slows, thinking at first that it’s a wreck.

No movement.

A nice car. Expensive. A white Mercedes. Recent model, beat up, scratched and scraped up like it’s been run off the road.

It’s the plates that wake her up. From Michigan, vanity plates—
PLEH-AHH
.
And then she remembers something about it from the briefing.

She stops there in the middle of 380 and reaches into the blue bag and takes out the clipboard full of bulletins, riffles through the pages and … yeah, there it is.

She’s heard the name, she’s seen the face on television. Terrorist. One of the ones who started this whole mess. The car stolen in … Kansas City, it says.

Armed. Dangerous.

She slips down in the seat behind the door, unsnaps her automatic. Sniper, she is thinking. And then realizes where she is … well, there could be snipers in New Mexico. Sure. Maybe there could be, especially now, with everything coming apart at the seams.

She puts one in the chamber and angles the truck so her bright lights are right on the car. Walks out, keeping back, keeping the gun up. This is the kind of thing they’d do. Wait for you to check it out, wait for you to call for backup, wait for the medics to come. Wait, and then they’d pop it off. Looking for wires, sweat running down the small of her back. But she’s not there anymore. No. She’s back. She’s home.

She circles and then goes right up to the Mercedes. No one. Nothing. Trash, empty water bottles. Clothes. Door left ajar and the battery dead.

In the dust, footprints and tracks all across the shoulder and up the little bank, scuffed up there where she climbed through the barbed-wire fence.

She’s out there somewhere.

She toggles on the radio, and calls it in.

“Roger, seven-six. What you got?”

“Abandoned automobile, Michigan plates, Papa-Lima-Echo-Hotel-hyphen-Alpha-Hotel-Hotel on three-eight-zero before Valley of the Fires. APB suspect Vermiglio, D. H., shows tracks walking south into range at White Sands. Am in pursuit …”

N
ow he rushes. To board an FBI jet that will take him to New Mexico from Kansas City. Another sixteen-seater. There are rows of seats in the front, all first-class-sized. No frills, but nice. In the back is a meeting area where passengers sit facing each other railroad-style. He digs out his secure cell phone and gets Chamai, another nighthawk. He does the time zones: almost four a.m. back at the chicken factory.

“I don’t know if you’re in the right place at the right time or not, Doc.”

“None of us are in the right place,” he says to the young agent.

“As far as people who matter goes, there’s a significant contingent who want to put most of the development bucks on building an antisense patch. I don’t think serum immunity has the votes, Doc. You think you can win this one?”

“I don’t know. I’m not God.” The lights go off and they begin to take off. “I’ll call you back.” He closes up the cell as they move down the runway. His mouth is furry, he needs a shower. He’s constipated from all the travel. His best friend in life is gone, his mind is exhausted, and his entire life has boiled down to toiletries and a cell phone crammed into an indestructible U.S. Customs Service backpack he snatched at the K.C. field office.

He slumps against the jet window. Below, the suburbs give way to the endless fields of Kansas as the FBI jets him into the darkness. He’s not surprised at the news from Chamai, not really. It’s only natural to want a magic bullet, and there’s lots of money on the table if you can tweak a gene here and there and save the world. He digs out the cell phone and calls Chamai back.

“Okay, so what do you think is happening?”

“I don’t know, Doc, I don’t get the political gamesmanship thing. It’s psycho. It’s sexy, but if you’re looking for minimum friction, not much grows on it.”

“Right. Okay, Aldo, sometimes when you talk, I just don’t quite, uh … dig it.”

“Sure, sure, Doc. Sorry. Conventional wisdom says the CDC’s the big dog. They are not just going to bail on their whole vaccination plan because you say so.”

“Actually I never said drop it, and Joe will do whatever he wants, I’m sure.”

“But the new puppy in the window is Serum Security.”

“What do you mean?” Sam is too tired to pick up the subtle stuff. Chamai can do mental loop-de-loops all day long that go right by him.

“Okay, Doc, follow my logic. When you get Vermiglio you’ll be starting from just one sample. Growing cell lines from that is going to take time … we’re talking months at least, right? And people are freaked that things are going to collapse before any solution can get up and running. I’m sorry, Doc. I know you want to get some sleep.”

“I don’t sleep much these days.”

“Yeah, Doc. I’m sorry. Okay, well, FYI, they’re working up a range of options for new triage guidelines as soon as serum becomes available. The slow growth rate is going to make them go very restrictive. At first it’s going to be POTUS—Congress, the Supreme Court—”

“Look, that’s continuity-of-government stuff. Completely out of my control, Aldo …”

“I know that, Doc. I’m just filling you in. Whoever has first dibs on the antidote and by how much, that’s what I’m talking about.
There’s going to be a list, and getting to the top of it is worth a whole lot. And when those names come out it’s going to go viral immediately. There’s going to be a heap of perceived inequities that pushes up the security issue. When you told me these blood products were worth something, I believed you, Doc, but nothing like this, man …”

“Right. That’s realistic. Not pretty, but realistic.”

“Exactly. The value of Vermiglio’s blood products on the black market is going to go through the roof, Doc.”

“We don’t even have it yet, Aldo.”

“Sure, but if you do, and when you do, you can see where I’m going, as far as security, I mean?”

“Weren’t we going to give all this away? I thought that the policy was to share technology. Hasn’t anybody said to Joe or Gordo that this is a
global
public health threat? We need to have four thousand labs working on it all over the world instead of whatever it is, seventy-five, a hundred? Or you could wait for things to completely collapse and then decide to do something, right?”

“Take a deep breath, Sam.”
It’s Barrigar who has come on the line.

“I am, I am …”

“I was in the neighborhood and I caught the last part of that …”

“It’s okay. I would never accuse a special agent of improper eavesdropping.”

“Good man. So, what you’re saying is …?”

“I’m saying a lot of things. But what they should be worried about is flu season. People who have been getting flu shots or smallpox inoculations, anything that would trigger your immune system to go into gear—those people may well be vulnerable to a modified smallpox virus that uses a spliced-in immune system regulator. Paradoxically, all the fast-track vaccination programs might be actually
priming
people for the Berlin Pox.”

“Well, they don’t want to hear that, Sam …”
Barrigar says, and there is a long pause.

“Oh … right. I know,” Sam says, bitterly. The world is full of people who wish they were deaf.

“But look, I’m going to contact some people and get back to you, okay? We’re taking off right behind you.…”

Sam flips the phone closed and looks out the window.

More of the same. Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas … all those places with straight-line borders. Agribusiness and oversalinization. Hormones and antibiotics. Every grazing animal tagged to prevent an outbreak of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Perfectly circular lakes, holding ponds, water holes, and then the rebellious curve of a river, flickering silver in the moonlight.

The world is growing hotter. From now on, all through the development phase of a superpox vaccine, there will be increasing public health issues. The most likely cataclysm would follow an early spring. Warm, wet weather would lead to an epidemic of a vector-borne disease like West Nile virus, dengue fever, or malaria. If and when something like that should occur, it would stress the CDC past the breaking point.

Everything breaking. All over the world. Natural outbreaks combining with multiple biowarfare events. All occurring at more or less the same time, all that hell coming at once.
All-in
.

“All-in” was a joke, a category of simulation that had been branded as implausible, unlikely to occur, and too expensive to practice. You had to budget for time on the computers back in his day. So, why tie everything up and allocate megabucks to rehearse for something almost infinitely catastrophic? He remembered they’d done it once, to scare the shit out of everybody and help justify the funding, and then moved on to more plausible scenarios. After all, the damage in a typical Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear drill was so huge that when you started adding multiple threats, the chaos grew exponentially.