Lorraine sensed that her husband was no longer beside her. She stopped and turned to see him staring blankly in the window. She walked back to him and put her hands on his shoulder. She knew what he was thinking. She knew what she was feeling, because deep down, she felt it too. But she knew that this was the way it was supposed to be, that she had been given this child not as a burden, but as an opportunity. A way to show how much love could achieve. She knew that her son would grow up to be a great man someday, in spite of his problems. She was just sure of it. Tom turned and faced her. “Come on, let’s go home,” she said to him in a quiet yet hopeful voice. “Yeah,” said Tom dejectedly, “Let’s get home.” Together they walked out of the maternity ward.
The same day, Washington Square Park, New York City, NY. Under the brush.
The first time the girl knew she was pregnant was when her water broke. She was lying under a tree at the corner of the park, away from the tourists and pigeons. A chill was in the air that morning, the grass was wet with dew. “Winter is coming,” she thought as she pulled her ratty green jacket around her. It wasn’t much to ward off the cold, but it was all she had. Well, that’s not totally true. She also had several slugs of liquor in her, and that was warmer than any blanket. She lay in the grass under the tree, trying to will herself into more of a drunken stupor than she could expect from the amount of alcohol she could actually afford. Her legs felt wet. She looked down. At first she didn’t understand what was happening. “Perhaps it was all a hallucination,” she thought. She tried to ignore it. As with a lot of stuff, if you don’t think about it, it just goes away. But then the cramps started. At 16, she didn’t know much about the process of birth. Her life consisted of running and hiding and searching for food. Of defending herself against attackers, and giving in to them when she thought that she could get something out of it. She staggered to her feet and made it to the public restroom before the cramps overtook her.
The public restrooms in any park leave something to be desired, but in downtown Manhattan, they are exceptionally bad. The smell was something unidentifiable– an amalgam of dozens of other scents, each offensive in its own way. The floor hadn’t been swept in months, if ever. The girl made it to the one stall with a working door and collapsed on the floor. The child began to come out. “No, no, no,” thought the girl. “I don’t need this, I don’t need this.” She tried to stuff the little thing back inside her in a vain attempt to solve the problem, but that obviously didn’t work. The child came. It pushed itself into the world through sheer force of will.
The girl lay on the floor for quite a long time. She could feel the fluids leaking from her. She could feel the wriggling of the newborn. She could hear its faint cries and gurgles as it attempted to clear its lungs. After a time she gathered the strength to stand back up. There was a large puddle of fluid spreading across the floor of the stall, leaking into the corridor. Around here, no one would notice. The girl didn’t know what to do. She looked down to see a complete shock. It wasn’t a real child that she had just borne, it was some kind of freak thing. Its head was big, far larger than normal. The rest of its body was thin and underdeveloped in comparison. The thing looked up at her with its two large, insect-like, black eyes. A cry came from its tiny mouth– familiar sounding at first, but it grew more and inhuman the more you listened to it. The girl stared in disbelief, “What the hell is that?” Living on the streets she had never heard of Handel’s Syndrome. To her it was just some sort of baby monster. “Perhaps I’m just hallucinating again,” she thought. She hadn’t had any hard drugs in almost a week, but maybe it was a flashback or something.
The girl was scared. She didn’t know what to do with the little mess that was wriggling around. She scooped the thing up in her green jacket. She brushed herself off a bit, straightened her hair. She carried the child out of the restroom, and, looking carefully around to make sure that she wasn’t spotted, dropped it into one of the wastebaskets at the bathroom entrance. “Well, that’s over with,” said the girl, as she staggered off through the park. The smell of vendor’s hot dogs and roasted peanuts was starting to fill the air.
The child lay in the swaddling, kicking instinctively. There wasn’t much air. But it had made it this far, it had pushed its way into life, and it wasn’t going to go back to the void so quickly. On some instinctive, fundamental level, it knew that it needed to extricate itself. It pushed and pulled, testing its new limbs. It began to cry. Although muffled, the cries would eventually attract the attention of a passing police officer. The child would survive.
Five months after Lorraine Miller took her child home from the hospital, inside a BL-4 Laboratory at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Ft. Deitrich, MD
Colin Hayes worked furiously over the samples he had prepared. He was transferring liquid from one vial to another with a pipette. It was slow going, even with all the advanced equipment available. There were a lot of samples to run. He didn’t like working in the BL-4 lab. BL-4 was where the most infectious and dangerous diseases were kept– maximum safety protocols. That meant respirators, full body suits, and other safety equipment that made him uncomfortable. There were no chairs in the room, but you couldn’t sit down in the suit anyway. Strangely, Colin found the discomfort of the safety equipment more distressing than the prospect of catching a deadly disease. He was pretty nonchalant about working with deadly diseases. He had been employed here for almost ten years. He had done work with everything from Marburg to H5N1 influenza to moon dust. Any fear he had about catching something had gone away years ago. The excitement he had when he was just a grad student had also diminished for the most part. The novelty was gone for him. At this point, working with deadly diseases was as routine for him as tightening screws was as routine for the people who work on automobile assembly lines. It was just a job.
He wasn’t even sure exactly what agent he was dealing with. He just knew that it was important and that it was supposed to be dangerous. He had been given this assignment by none other than the head of USAMRIID herself. The task was to figure out what the function of this virus was. Viruses are very specific; they attack only a particular type of cell. Knowing what cells a virus attacks is the first step in finding a vaccine. He looked around to the other side of the lab, where the metal cylinders lay. He hadn’t been given much information, only that there was a virus located in these cylinders and that some important people needed to know the answers. He was used to working in an intelligence vacuum. He often worked with samples that came from “somewhere.” He didn’t need to know where the cylinders came from. What was unusual was the lack of any supporting information on what they suspected the cylinders to contain. He first figured this was some sort of a blind test, to see if he could identify a virus properly with no information.
Colin had already done all of the standard assays and proved that the virus wasn’t similar to any of the well-known bioweapon agents. Whatever this was, it wasn’t something typical enough to have a standard assay procedure made for it. The next step in the process had been to do a DNA breakdown of the virus to see if it was close to any known species. It had actually taken him a while just to isolate the virus DNA. It wasn’t quite like any he had seen. It had a protein coat that was different somehow and that made it hard to detect. It was certainly a new class of virus. It had some similarities to a retrovirus but not quite. It was exciting and frustrating to work with. He was now trying to find out what sort of cell it attacked. He had been told by the person who had brought in the cylinders that it was probably a human phage, and that he should start there, but Colin was having trouble activating it.
He had some suspicions about the bug that he hadn’t shared with anyone yet. He thought that it looked manipulated. He wasn’t a bioweapons expert, but he could guess that from the cylinders he scraped it out of and the hush-hush secrecy of the whole operation that it was some sort of genetically manipulated virus. He had heard of these things before. There were all sorts of rumors about what the Russians had been producing during the Cold War (not to mention what was going on in other parts of this very facility). It was probably something that they had dug up in a field in Kazakhstan. Colin would never know. He had been hired as a researcher, he wasn’t privy to any of the secrets they kept around here, and there were a lot of secrets.
He eludicated the final sample for the day. He was mixing viral samples with different types of human cells to see if he could find a substrate that the virus would grow on. That would give him some idea of what sort of infection it caused. He was anxious to get finished. He didn’t like being in all this protective gear. Besides, his wife was now pregnant, and he needed to get home to help fix up the baby’s room. The child was due in three months.
He looked up at the double reinforced glass window that separated the BL-4 from the rest of the Institute. Looking through the window back at him was a man that he only knew as Ray. A bead of sweat ran down Colin’s temple. He really wanted to be done for the day and get out of that damned suit.
Late morning. The Watley family residence, Tyler, TX
Lorraine watched the wisps of steam rise from the coffee mug. The light streaming from the window made the vapor seem brighter, more three-dimensional. She wasn’t even listening to Joyce’s droning on and on as she fixed the muffins. She just stared as the steam played around in the light. It wasn’t the sound of Joyce’s voice, nor her sitting down at the kitchen table that brought Lorraine out of her self induced oblivion, it was the motion of air that Joyce made as she roughly lowered her bulk into her seat. It disrupted the steam. Lorraine shook her head and looked up.
“Why Lorraine, I don’t think that you’ve heard a word I’ve been saying. This whole thing really has you torn up.” Joyce was Lorraine’s neighbor. Their houses sat reasonably close together, nestled between the fields of corn. Joyce’s husband was also a farmer, and the two men were out on their tractors, preparing the fields for the spring planting. Joyce was a big, wild Texan of a woman. She had always lived in Tyler. She couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. She couldn’t survive anywhere else.
“I’m sorry Joyce,” Lorraine said apologetically, “It’s just kinda sad, you know. I thought that having a baby would give me what I wanted in life. It’s what I’ve been talking about ever since I was a little kid. But it’s not working out to be what I thought it would be.” Lorraine didn’t have many friends. She lived outside of town and had given up most of her previous world to helping her husband. She didn’t resent that her life turned out that way; in fact, it was what she wanted, but sometimes it got a little lonely, especially during planting season. She was glad that Joyce was just down the road to talk to. She came over here a lot, and not just for the fresh muffins.
Joyce sipped her coffee. “That’s just new mother’s syndrome. All women get depressed after having a baby. It’s natural. Hell, you should have seen me after I spit Harry out. I didn’t want to have nothing to do with nobody. It gets better though.” She stopped talking momentarily to pick a bit of blueberry from between her teeth. “I can only guess how you feel having a deformed kid like that. I don’t know what I’d do if any of my kids turned out that way. I truly don’t.”
“It’s not that. I mean, Jim isn’t that much more work than a normal baby.” She looked down at the child, sleeping in its tote. He still had the bottle of juice hanging out of his mouth. “I can deal with the HS. I’m worried about Tom though. Things have been so... strained since the baby.”
“What do you mean sugar?” Joyce shifted her bulk around in the chair.
“Well, he puts on a good front, but I don’t think that he is happy with Jim. It’s like he doesn’t even acknowledge him. I thought that having a child would bring us closer together, but it hasn’t done that at all. I hardly even see Tom anymore, he spends so much time out in the fields.”
“Well, it is planting season. He’s probably just busy. You’re just feeling oversensitive because there’s so much extra work to do around the house.”
“No, there’s more to it than that. It’s like he’s ignoring me. It’s like he doesn’t want to be around the baby. He doesn’t want to face up to the HS. Ever since he got out of high school Tom has been talking about some football-star fantasy that he was going to live out through his child. Now that isn’t going to happen, and I don’t think that he knows how to react. I mean, he is doing his job as a parent and a husband, but it seems that he’s only staying around because he has a sense of duty, not because he wants to be a part of the family.”
“Oh, stop talking like that. Tom’s a good man. He won’t turn his back on you because of this. It’s just going to take him a while to get used to the idea. I mean, look at him.” She pointed to Jim. “It takes a while to get used to that. The first time I came over after the birth I almost fainted dead away. I don’t think that you have anything to worry about.”
“I guess you’re right Joyce.” Lorraine halfheartedly took a bite of muffin. “I just don’t know how to talk to him. You know how Tom is. I don’t want to make it seem like I’m accusing him of anything.”
“Just give him time, he’ll come around on his own. And if he doesn’t, just slap him around some. That’s what I always do with Larry. You’ve got to make him understand who’s the boss. Man, I just put up a fist and he does whatever I say.” She held up a hammy, balled fist. “The little wimp. I love him.”
There was a loud crash from the other room. Joyce turned her head and shouted, “What the hell was that!” She turned back to Lorraine. “Hold on a sec Lor, I got to go deal with my brats.” She got up creakily and began walking down the hall. “What the hell are you kids doing in there, don’t you know I got company. I’m gonna beat you kids stupid. Where the hell did you go....” Her voice faded as she left the kitchen, chasing after the children. Lorraine put down the coffee and reached into the bassinet. She touched Jim lightly on the forehead. His skin was soft. If she closed her eyes she could almost imagine that he was normal.