Three Moments of an Explosion (34 page)

Anna said nothing.

“OK then,” he said. Well. Want to buy a store? It’s floorless.”

She didn’t smile.

Colonel Gomez was hunkered over a display in the briefing and control room with a man Anna did not know.

“Dr. Samson,” Gomez said. “This is Stuart Perry.”

Perry looked up briefly and shook her hand. He had an earphone in one ear. He was perhaps a decade younger than she, handsome, smartly turned out. He would not be wearing that suit for very long, she thought, not here, no matter how well it went down in the capital.

“I’m bringing him up to speed,” the colonel said. “Before she was here Anna was in London.” Perry looked at her again, now with more interest.

The screen showed Nick straight on, standing in the cell between his chair and his small bed. He was gesturing at the opaque window that took up one wall.

“When was this?” Anna said.

“Yesterday,” said the colonel. “After you saw him.” He was a dark, lined, still-muscular man, with stubble on his scalp the color of cigarette ash. His subdued tone always surprised her.

“How long have you been here?” Perry said. He glanced down at something Nick said. Anna, earphoneless, heard nothing. “Damn, he’s bratty.”

“A few weeks,” she said. “I’ve been testing soil samples. I don’t get to talk to him that much. What’s your field?”

“History,” he said. “Does he give anyone the time of day?”

“He’s an angry young man. Misses his friends and his girlfriend and the wind on his face.”

Nick was tall and a little overweight, undignified in the hospital gown they made him wear. They had crew-cut his hair.

“I haven’t seen it yet,” Perry said. “Can you show me from above?” The colonel pressed buttons and switched to the feed from the room’s ceiling camera.

The screen showed the bed, the chair, and the gesturing figure of Nick himself. Surrounding him in a rough circle, its radius about six feet, with him in the center, a trench was gouged in the white ceramic of the floor.

It was more than three feet wide. Its edges and inside sides were rough and irregular. Anna could see mud, clay, stones in layers below the thin top of splintered tile. Between the cut and the walls was a rim of room just wide enough to walk on.

“We can’t stop it,” said Perry.

Anna and the colonel shook their heads, though it was not a question.

“And we can’t speed it up.”

“He special ops?” Anna said. “What’s he here to do?”

“He’s keen,” said the colonel. “He’ll bury me, that’s all I know. You think they still tell me shit? Don’t give him my private number.” Gomez had given it to Anna her third week on the base, telling her to call him if she had a breakthrough, to wake him, whatever the time.

“All I’m doing is accumulating information,” she had said. She knew she should sound embarrassed. “I don’t know that it’s anything we can use, exactly.”

“I’ll take it,” he’d said.

Through the observation window they watched Perry shrugging under the weight of his biohazard suit. A bored soldier, in the same coveralls, stood watching from a corner.

“Do some star jumps for me?” Perry said. “Stars. Stars!” he said. He stood just beyond the trench, looking down into it. Anna would test her scrapings again, but she knew they would register only as the earth they were, indistinguishable from any other earth. “As close to the trench as you can,” he said. “Can you come and stand just across from me?”

From the center, the ground they called the nucleus, Nick watched him with sour dislike. “Please run around your bed,” Perry said.

Nick did so, jogging just at the inside edge of the cut. He ran and ran and sped up and abruptly jumped, clearing it to land by the door.

Instantly the soldier raised his rifle at him. Anna tensed. She had read the files; she knew this was not the first time Nick had done this.

“Come on, Nick,” said Perry. He sounded calm.

The soldier did something and his weapon clicked. The colonel hissed. Beyond the glass Nick made a sulky face and jumped back over to stand by his bed.

“I’m going
crazy,
” he shouted. “You won’t let me out; you won’t let me talk to my friends.”

“It’s only a matter of time before he tries again,” Gomez said. “I don’t blame him, Samson, is the truth.”

“You want to know about it,” Nick was shouting to Perry, “ask them. Or just go down.”

“Have you been down?” said Perry. “What do
you
think it is?”

“Yeah. It’s a hole.”

“Except it’s not, is it?” Perry said. “It’s a trench. Or you could say it’s a hole with a not-hole in the middle. The nucleus. Right where you are.”

“He’s been going through all the subject’s files,” Gomez said. “All his diaries, photos, of Lai, Sharon, Terrell, that fucking Hacky Sack crew he met while he was
finding
himself. And all the photos we have from their accounts too.”

“I did that when I got here,” Anna said. “We had to.”

“Yeah, OK, that’s Perry’s job. He’s been going through my files too. And yours.”

“Ask Lai,” Nick said. “Ask Birgit. They’re the ones who were talking about all weird stuff, before anything even started. You think they don’t know things?”

“You know we can’t, Nick,” Perry said, and Nick’s face scrunched up in pain. “You’ve told us about your girlfriend before.”

Nick had been in hiding when things started to change. He had seen what was happening, and knew he was part of it. It had taken him a little over a week, after he was brought in, to name his erstwhile companions, to mention hints they had made, to talk of Birgit like someone struck by religion.

“She said there were chambers underground,” he said. “She said something would start. She was looking for things. Full of old stories.” He both wanted and did not want to talk about her.

Anna could see the acquisitive and calculating way Perry was staring at the hole. She turned away and made no effort to disguise her distaste from Gomez.

“You still not scared?” he said. “Of being in there with him?”

She gave him a small smile.

The trench in its gradualism, she thought, in its shape and the specifics of its depth and dimensions, in its particularities, would seem to chafe against service to death and the state. That implied something, she thought. That seemed to hold forth some promise. Of what, she could not say.

Anna still communicated with only a very few of her friends. She abided by the injunction not to disclose what she had been seconded to work on, in the details, but given her expertise, her time in London, the fact that she didn’t care, it was not surprising that word spread.

She received an email from an ex from whom she had not heard for years, since he had moved to an out-of-the-way town in Portugal. He wrote to her in a voice that she found curiously flat, as if he was compensating for the millennial mood, wishing her good luck with her research, for all their sakes, telling her he still thought of her often, hoping his coastal home would be isolated for some time to come.

“We were too much,” she wrote back. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, you know it. What I mean is that our sets overlapped too much.

“They came to me after I’d been in London and in Madison. I probably shouldn’t tell you but I want to try to explain.” She typed quickly. “You remember my friend Jana? She’s in San Diego now. I was there last year. That’s what started this whole thing for me. I took her daughter to a reading at a library, some writer she likes, adventure stories. She’s ten. Anyway, on the way back she saw something at the end of an alley and we went to check it out because I knew Jana wouldn’t have done and I always figure that’s my “aunt” job, right?

“Every time I see an adult who’s infected I feel surprised. I don’t know why but it feels to me like this is a condition for children. It should be children who have this. If you’d told someone a few years ago that this would start spreading I bet we would have thought it would be children who’d get it, instead of anyone for reasons we can’t make sense of.

“This was before we knew much about it (as if we do now!) but I’d heard a few things and I suddenly had a terrible feeling because I saw a trench right across the alley, right through the pavement like they’d been laying a pipe, and beyond it was a body.

“It was an old man who had died. A homeless man. He smelled. Later it turned out he’d been there two days.

“I told the kid to come back but I was surprised because she wouldn’t stop. She starts to climb down into the trench to get across and I’m shouting at her and then she slips, just tips out of view.

“The cut was deep. On the other side the poor dead guy looked like he was eyeing me. The kid was freaking out.

“I see her at last, curled up under a little overhang in the wall. I reach down. She looks up at me—there’s dirt all over her face—with this haunted look. I feel like there must be worms all over her.

“She says, ‘I couldn’t climb out.’ I reach down and tell her to take my hand.

“A week later, we’re talking about it. We’d called the cops and everything of course, told them. She wants to know if the man’s OK and in Heaven. So I’m saying all the usual stuff, I don’t know, different people believe different things, etcetera. She says to me, ‘I heard something in the moat. Something moving.’

“She was OK. She didn’t catch it and we don’t know why. Neither did I.” She considered, and discounted, adding something to that.

“I’ve been trying to figure that out. Drawing diagrams, sets, the details of anyone who gets infected. Trying to work out a common factor.

“In the end I’m a soil scientist. I’ve been thinking about it as if it’s the ground that’s the vector, not the people. Like if it’s not a sickness at all.”

She didn’t send what she’d written. She saved that message to a private folder. Instead she sent her ex a brief reply full of anodyne melancholia, and received nothing in reply.

As soon as she entered his room Nick began to complain, though in an almost dutiful manner as if he was decreasingly invested in his own anger.

“Can you hush?” she said. “I’m here to take you somewhere. Over you come.”

He bit his lip and jumped over the trench.

Anna walked behind him and Gomez and the soldiers who escorted him. Perry came back for her.

“Did you even put your helmet on?” he said.

“I don’t get that close.”

“Well, I guess after London you’re not that worried.” She said nothing. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

“No, but I’m sick of him moaning.”

“I hear that. I’ve been reading over his story. You’ve seen the way he talks about his traveling crew, right?”

“Yes,” she said. “They’re the ones who got him into castles.”

“You know what a star fortress is?”

“Yes,” she said. She walked away from him.

The soldiers took Nick past notice boards and the entrances of lifts, up several flights of stairs, through double doors. He gasped and threw his hands wide and turned slowly on the spot.

They were in an irregular triangular yard about fifty yards on its longest face. It was enclosed by high wire-topped concrete walls, each punctuated with irregularly spaced windows, from several of which leaned young soldiers. They were relaxed but their weapons were visible. The floor was overlaid with the remains of paint markings, guides and touchlines for various sports, each in a different color. A rusting netless basket was bolted to one wall.

“Couldn’t arrange the sun,” Anna called. The cloud cover was flat and unvarying gray. The yard was too enclosed to feel the wind.

A soldier watching from above shouted, “Keep moving, homeboy.” Nick looked up at his audience and could not stop smiling. “Keep moving.”

Nick waved in what might have been dismissal or a greeting. He started to pace the perimeter.

“Heads up!” someone shouted. A basketball dropped from one of the windows. It landed with a
thwack
and began to wander the pitch in a series of decreasing bounces.

Nick kept walking in the shadow of the walls. Anna went to meet the ball and caught it one-handed. She stopped a distance from the basket and threw the ball casually. She scored.

The soldiers whooped and cheered. She waited for the ball to come back to her and did it again, to more applause.

“Holy fucking shit, Doc!” someone shouted.

“Nick,” the colonel said.

Nick was watching her.

“Nick, please keep moving?”

He did. He walked slowly to the center of the yard, keeping his eyes on Anna, and stopped there again. “No?” Nick called. “This wouldn’t be OK? You don’t want to fuck up your basketball court?”

“Nick,” the colonel said, “come on.”

“Was this you?” Nick said to Anna. “Arranging this? You want me to say thanks? Is that it?”

“I don’t want you to say anything,” she said. She walked past him to the far side of the court. She could feel nothing unusual about the surface close to him when she passed.

“Nick, I know you’re enjoying yourself with this shit,” the colonel said, “but please don’t put me in this position, you know I need you to move now.”

The caution was extreme. Based on everything they knew it would take at least an hour of immobility for Nick’s presence to start to have a measurable effect on the ground.

Alone in Nick’s room she knelt by the trench. It felt shocking, indecent, to see the moat empty of him. She gripped the cracking edge of the tiles. She looked down through layers of broken floor into dense, almost black earth.

Computers kept a micrometrically precise record of all fluctuations of the trench. The ground had started to crumble, to sink into a gouge, seventy-three minutes after they had brought Nick here and ordered him into his bed, and had seemingly completed its change two hundred and twenty-five minutes after that. The ground had eaten into a widening hole.

It was one of Anna’s jobs to find out where the matter had gone.

The sensors insisted there was no change but for the random pattering of loose earth in gravity, now, but Anna always felt as if she could see the moat growing, spreading inward unevenly so that the nucleus, the solid ground at its center was eaten away by emptiness.