Containment (18 page)

Roderick nodded.
"CSF is negative so far in mice, but it's possible that the agent is too diluted. We're continuing to try."

Kraig frowned. Dilution was a common problem in CSF analysis. That, and the molecules and chemicals you
're looking for get lost among the many other substances floating around the fluid. "Give it your best shot. When we discover this bug and its modus operandi, we can open up the barrier and limit our quarantine to the people who are actually infected."

Kraig glanced at the ticker again. Still fourteen.

Medburg, Pennsylvania
/ 12:00 p.m.

For the thousandth time Loretta heard the WKH announcer say, "All Medburg public and parochial schools are closed tomorrow and until further notice...."

Slapping together the slices of bread, Loretta finished making the sandwich and placed it in the waiting palm of her youngest daughter.

"Thank you, Mommy."

"
Enjoy it in good health," said Loretta, watching Yvonne skip happily away.

Nothing bothers kids. Kids, thought Loretta, are much
more resilient than adults. As long as you're not worried, or you don't show them that you're worried, they're fine.

WKH made no mention of any riots, though Cayles, her ex-husband, had called several times with the firm conviction that the containment zone had become no-man
's land, full of minefields, rattling machine guns, and hand grenades tossed as casually as cigarette butts. "First I heard of it," Loretta had said. She'd gone to the window and looked out on a peaceful street. "All quiet on the western front," she told him.

But there
were
rumors. Fighting in the street. That rumor, at least in one relatively mild case, was true enough, Loretta knew. Other rumors were more sinister. Armed robberies and rapes. Beatings. Home invasions by hazard-suited fiends who performed involuntary operations, with or without benefit of anesthesia. Medical personnel insisting on "organ donations." Whole blocks wiped out by the disease.

Nobody in the zone knew for sure what was happening outside of their own little block. Their world had shrunk to a short row of houses or an apartment complex. Travel was discouraged and most people were in hibernation mode, staying in contact with their friends via telephone
or Internet and listening or watching the news.

And waiting. What
was the government doing to solve the problem? "We're working on it" went only so far to allay fears of those caught in the vise grip of an epidemic. A "potential" epidemic, that is, so said government officials, such as that grotesquely-mustached director of something or another that Loretta had never heard of before.

Loretta glanced up, toward the second floor of their modest row home. Thank God there
's no school tomorrow, she thought, so the kids won't be going out.

* * *

Upstairs, Gary was in his bedroom listening to music, headset speakers blasting out rock songs. Alicia, picking absently at the scratch on her arm, sat in the same room. Having evicted their little brother, and with Yvonne eating in the kitchen, the two oldest siblings had the room to themselves.

"
We've got to do something," said Alicia. "I'm frigging bored to death."

Gary took off his headset.
"What?"

"
I'm going stir crazy in here."

"
Shouldn't be too much longer. Bo said they're going to lift the blockade in a few days."

"
How does one of your friends know something like that?"

Gary shrugged.
"His father used to work at a hospital or something."

Alicia rolled her eyes.

"I'll bet he's right," said Gary.

"
You know what I heard?" Alicia's voice dropped into a conspiratorial whisper. "Vickie told me that the government is going let us all get sick and die, because they can't fix the disease and they're afraid to let us out and infect everybody else."

For a few seconds Gary paled. Then he shook his head angrily.
"That's stupid."

"
It's not stupid."

"
It's stupid," said Gary loudly. "And Vickie's stupid too. Isn't she the one whose uncle told her she'd won the lottery? And she believed him, even though she hadn't bought a ticket, and went around telling everybody?"

"
No, that was somebody else."

"
Doesn't matter. It's stupid. All your friends are stupid."

"
What do you know about it, asshole?"

After giving his sister a dirty look Gary put his headset back on.

Alicia came over and grabbed the headset, pulling it off—and not gently. "Listen, barf meat. Didn't that fight teach you anything? We need to go see people who know what's going on. Maybe they'll tell us what we should be doing."

"
I don't know," said Gary, frowning and reaching out for his headset. Unwilling to admit that he'd already gotten a terrible suspicion that Alicia was right. "Mom won't like it."

"
Mom doesn't know her cunt from a hole in the ground."

Gary was shocked into silence. He
'd heard Alicia criticize Mom plenty of times before, and Dad even more often, and most of her teachers too, but rarely in such a crude way. At least not Mom. When he found his voice again, he said, "You just better watch your mouth or so help me I'll...."

The threat was empty and both of them knew it.

Alicia let him take the headset. "If you don't have the guts, I'll go alone."

Gary knew he was beat. He hung his head.

"We'll slip out in a few hours," announced Alicia.

* * *

At noon, a half-mile from the Winters home and in a dark garage that had seen much better days, Abe and Jimmy were working up a sweat.

Abe, muscles glistening with a thin sheen of moisture, gripped a sledgehammer near the heavy end and pounded a piece of chrome that had once proudly adorned a Camaro. Jimmy leaned over the front end of the old jalopy they
'd been driving and examined the hole he'd just drilled near the grill.

Abe stopped hammering, wiped the sweat from his brow, and looked up.
"How about this?"

Jimmy stared at the battered and flattened chrome, then glanced at the jalopy
's rounded front. He shook his head. "We can try it, but I don't think it'll work. Needs a different shape."

"
This smithing's no fun," said Abe. "No fun at all."

Still squatting, Jimmy duck-walked a few steps to the chrome and bent over it. His paunch protruded through the thin u-neck undershirt he wore. Flabby but strong arms lifted the chrome. Abe helped carry it to the old car.

It didn't fit. Not even close.

Abe gave a big sigh. They dropped the chrome and Jimmy sat down heavily on the filthy garage floor.

"What we need," said Jimmy, "is better transportation."

Abe frowned.
"Unless we can swipe a tank, it won't do us any good."

"
Something fast," suggested Jimmy.

"
Ain't nothing on wheels faster than their bullets, Jimmy."

Jimmy glanced up and grinned, showing a mouth surprisingly full of reasonably white teeth.
"I got an idea."

Abe looked at him. Jimmy
's ideas were usually worth listening to, although more often than not fundamentally flawed—and dangerous.

"
Forget the armored car," said Jimmy.

"
I like it so far."

"
Forget shooting our way outta here."

"
Even better," said Abe. "Wasn't looking forward to that."

"
We need to protect ourselves from the bullets, right?"

Abe nodded, unsure where Jimmy was headed.

"But we're getting old."

"
Speak for yourself." Abe said it with a smile.

Jimmy rubbed the back of his neck and grinned. He glanced at the metal.
"We'll need this stuff, but not in the way we planned. And we need something else—what we need most of all is some youth. Fast on their feet type, strong backs, strong legs, weak minds. Now where do you think we can rustle us up some young daredevils?"

19 April, Monday

Bethesda, Maryland
/ 6:10 a.m.

The news was as bad as it could possibly be. Roderick's thin face showed little outward emotion as he scanned the latest lab reports, though his aquiline nose wrinkled from time to time.

The lab technicians were working in shifts and had been extremely busy. Thus far their efforts had been exemplary, as productive as one could have wished. One could have wished for more pleasant results, but not any faster or, in all likelihood, any more accurate.

Roderick Halkin and a few of the other senior Micro investigators had spent the whole weekend in the office, analyzing the eruption of data that spewed out of the labs. They were all tired and irritable, except Roderick, who was merely tired. Roderick's office was located adjacent to the labs, where he could provide instant advice, supervision, and on occasion a helping hand to operate the machines—many of which had been designed by Roderick himself earlier in his illustrious career.

Roderick leaned back and began to reread the summaries, methods, procedures, results, hypotheses, and conclusions. Second readings often picked up important details missed in the first reading.

The call from Kraig—the call Roderick had been expecting at any time—came a few moments later.

Roderick
's screen framed a red-eyed, bleary man, sipping coffee. "Sorry I'm late," said Kraig. "I overslept." He adjusted his tie and patted down the unwashed and unruly blond hair that tentacled out from his scalp.

"
Perhaps you should get some more rest," suggested Roderick respectfully.

"
One, two hours a night does me fine. Latest news?"

Roderick pressed his fingers together.

"Uh-oh," said Kraig. "Don't tell me, let me guess. We haven't isolated the bug yet."

"
Correct. But it's worse than that."

"
Worse than that?" Kraig stared. "What can be worse than that?"

Roderick glanced at Kraig
's image on the screen, then went back to studying his fingertips. A touch of pity came over him; the Micro-Investigation Unit's assistant director looked almost comatose. His face and jaw were so slack from exhaustion that if he closed his eyes he'd look exactly like something you'd see in an autopsy room.

"
Talk to me, Rod," pleaded Kraig. "Did you filter the sample and retest the isolates?"

Roderick nodded. A simple procedure: the brainstem samples that were known to contain the pathogen were squeezed through filters of various sizes. Technicians arranged the filters so that they trapped particles of decreasing diameter, and the particles on each filter were then dissolved in saline solution. These solutions, along with the filtered sample
—which contained only water and the tiny particles that made it past the finest filter—were injected into mice in the now standard test to determine virulence.

"
The agent made it all the way through the filters," said Roderick. "The filtered sample continued to cause the disease, but the particles trapped in the filters did not."

Kraig uttered a curse.
"It's a virus, then. A virus we haven't seen before. That explains why those inexpensive surgical masks aren't doing the people in the zone any good—several of the victims have been found wearing masks."

"
Certainly there are conclusions to be drawn from this data," said Roderick. "But let us not be too hasty."

Viruses were first discovered in the late 19th century in just such a test. Tobacco
—an important crop back then—suffered from the attack of some disease which biologists figured was bacterial in nature. Hoping to trap the culprit, researchers passed solutions containing a substance known to cause the disease through filters. To the dismay of the experimenters, the substance slipped past even the finest sieve; apparently it was much smaller than a bacterium could possibly be. Scientists called it a virus, after the Latin word for poison.

"
It has to be a virus," grumbled Kraig. "The last stage of filter trapped everything bigger than, what, a hundred-fifty nanometers?"

"
Correct."

"
Show me a bacterium that size."

"
There are a few species, admittedly quite rare, whose image has shown up in electron microscopes."

"
Little bacteria, you're talking about. But they've never been found to cause any trouble before. They're too small. Bacteria need to be big enough to carry around hundreds of genes and to have their own metabolism. It's the toxin-producing ones that we need to worry about."

"
Normally I might agree with you. But this is, after all, a special case."

Out of long habit Kraig
's gaze fell. Roderick knew what he was glancing at.

"
Fifteen," said Kraig softly. "Only one fatality during Sunday. You don't suppose this thing could die out on its own, do you?"

Roderick shook his head.

"Neither do I." Kraig sipped his coffee and made a face. "We should be so lucky."

"
According to the epidemiologists, the incubation periods and statistics suggest the victim count will form a bell-shaped curve."

"
I've heard," said Kraig softly. The infection rate would be slow to rise, then there would come an avalanche of victims, peaking at some ghastly rate before falling at some merciful but unspecified later date.

"
Still no signs of symptoms in the human patients?" asked Roderick.

"
No. As I understand it, doctors believe it's the same as with the mice. They just quit breathing."

"
If you watch an infected mouse," said Roderick grimly, "as I have, you will observe some respiratory distress for a few minutes before death occurs."

"
Big deal. Minutes."

"
Indeed," admitted Roderick. "Whatever the pathogen is doing—presumably to the respiratory neurons in the brainstem—it seems to reach a critical mass and then suddenly the respiratory rhythm ceases, almost at once."

"
We need antibodies to this virus," said Kraig. "We've got to pull it out of those samples, otherwise we'll have a hell of a time finding out how it works, how it gets into the brain."

Stiffly, Roderick said,
"We've not yet established that it's a virus."

"
I think it's too small to be a bacterium, and I don't think we're dealing with any kind of nanotech thingy here, because nobody's working on anything like that in the area. This bug, whatever it is, replicates, we presume, so it must be a virus instead of a chemical. All a virus needs is nucleic acid and a protein coat. They can be tiny. It has to be a virus."

Roderick was slow to agree. Kraig was trained in medicine and a good physiologist as well, yet Roderick did not want to jump to a false conclusion
—even though the conclusion made sense. A virus does not have its own metabolism and can only reproduce by infecting a cell and pirating its various enzymes. Viruses contain only a handful of genes, coded in DNA or RNA, protected by a shell made of protein. Once inside a cell the virus tricks the cell into making the proteins encoded by the viral DNA or RNA, making many copies of itself. This was precisely what Kraig assumed must be happening in this disease: cells in the brainstem were being infected by a virus and dying en masse.

"
As a working hypothesis, it will do," said Roderick. "But I reserve judgment."

"
Fine. But that won't stop you from looking for antibodies in the mice and human victims, now that we've got the agent isolated. Just find a molecule that binds to something in the isolate."

"
Of course. But you see the problem, don't you?"

Kraig stared blankly.
"If the lab workers can find these antibodies, then we can yank the virus out of a sample by using antibodies labeled with some sort of marker, or attached to a surface. The agent would bind to the antibodies and then we'd have our bug."

Roderick sighed. Kraig was tired, dead tired.
"The problem is that it takes a while for the immune system to make specific antibodies to any sort of infectious agent, and this disease acts so quickly—or so sneakily—that it doesn't seem to raise much of an immune system alarm."

"
You're right," said Kraig. "I forgot." He shook his head, as if to clear it. "But I assume that even though you're not sure it's a virus, you're searching for DNA in the isolate?"

"
Naturally. If it's a virus, we'll have it soon. Currently we are combing through the filtered sample. We're treating it with enzymes to tear apart any protein, then we'll pull out the exposed nucleic acid. Whether it's RNA or DNA, we'll find it."

"
We need the protein coat too. That's how we'll make some kind of vaccine."

"
Yes. But the protein that forms the coat will be one of the genes carried by the virus. All we have to do is sequence its genes and find the right motifs. If it's a virus."

"
How soon?"

"
That all depends on our luck. And other intangible factors." Seeing that Kraig was not satisfied with that answer, Roderick added, "Noon would be a good estimate."

Kraig seemed to relax a bit.
"This isn't too bad. The ticker isn't climbing too fast—yet—and we're bearing down on our bug."

"
I'm afraid I haven't told you the bad news yet."

Kraig goggled.
"The
bad
news, Rod? What we've been talking about isn't bad enough?"

"
It's bad but not as bad as it gets. We've conducted other experiments."

"
You haven't got that many brainstem samples—oh, you've got the mice, haven't you?"

Roderick replied dryly,
"We've taken brainstem samples from the infected mice, yes."

"
And?"

"
Epidemiology indicates the agent is infectious, but no one knows how fast or how it might occur. So we've performed experiments to test the manner and speed of infection in mice, which should at least give us some clue how it might spread in humans. In one experiment, we placed an infected mouse in a cage that was divided by a filtered membrane. In the other compartment is a healthy mouse—which is soon infected." Roderick paused, glanced at Kraig's image on the screen. Kraig quickly understood the implications, as shown by his bowed head.

"
No physical contact required," muttered Kraig. "Airborne spread. But how does it get from mouse to mouse? It's in the brainstem!"

"
A good question," said Roderick. He smiled without humor. "It's a Houdini, this little bug of ours. And that's not all. Most pathogens that spread through the air travel in water droplets—an uncovered cough or a sneeze from an infected person wafts huge quantities of pathogens into the air. Our agent evidently needs no such help. I doubt it's carried by water. It passes through the filtered membrane with exquisite ease, almost as if it were air itself."

"
I hope this thing doesn't drift in the wind," said Kraig with a look of sheer horror, "or we've really had it."

Medburg, Pennsylvania / 5:00 p.m.

With key in hand, Loretta walked outside and down the street to the house of her neighbor, Marta. Marta's key had been delivered a few days ago, and a quick check revealed a hungry and thirsty puppy, but otherwise no problems. Loretta had fed and watered the grateful beagle Saturday and again on Sunday, and had promised to return every evening. But with neither of her jobs to keep her busy—both of her employers had gone on hiatus—she decided to go a little early on Monday.

The walk would do her good. Get out of the house, get away from WKH for a while. Clear her thoughts. She couldn
't remember the last time she was home during the weekday and wasn't laid up in bed with a Dayquil-resistant cold.

She
'd just stepped onto Marta's porch when a child ran screaming from the house next door.

"
Help! Help!"

Alarmed, Loretta ran across the small lawn. A wild-eyed girl greeted her. She was Yvonne
's age.

Loretta tried to be calm. And to calm the child. She grabbed the little girl
's hands and held them gently. She recognized the girl, had seen the girl playing with her two youngest children, though she couldn't remember the name. Loretta thought hard—she knew the name, it was on the tip of her tongue. This was such a bad time to forget it!

"
What is it, sweetheart?"

"
My mother, please, my mother! Please come quick!"

Loretta let herself be dragged into the house.

It was like all the row houses on the block; same layout, same cramped living room, stairs near the door, right smack in everyone's way. There was even a sofa that looked the same as Loretta's, probably bought from the same store. Could be anyone's house, anyone in the neighborhood.