End Time (41 page)

“But then they began to breed with normal mosquito swarms. Replicate. Apparently like all living creatures our Skeeterbugs
liked life,
and wanted more of it. Not content to die or expire when instructed. Another software glitch. The self-destruct button malfunctioned. In turn, the enhanced swarms fed on any creature they could find—rats, rodents, anything with blood—spreading a string of pathogens in unpredictable ways. Spontaneous mutation. Creating what we call the wandering sickness, a myriad of pathogens popping up wherever mosquitoes roam. In New Orleans the sickness may be mosquito-borne West Nile virus; in Kansas City the mosquito gives a rat pneumonic plague.”

The earnest young man's breathing became ragged.

“Some Skeeters may have even been blown across the Atlantic Ocean into West Africa where the smoldering fires of ebola blazed to life. The contagion brought back home again by the jet engine in a jet age. An affliction no longer transmitted by flying insects but by commercial travelers. Now you don't even have to get bit to get sick. Just go to the ER, sit for a while, and wait for somebody to turn their head and cough.”

He paused, gulped air, grasped at a last straw.

“There's a minuscule chance one of our test subjects, known as Chen-L—has a DNA profile that can reverse this wandering sickness. Tests on our samples of her DNA from the national database show the Chen girl possesses an extremely resilient genetic structure infused with a regenerating enzyme called telomeres. The telomerase enzyme keeps a cell from burning out. From dying. Call it the God Protein if you like. But we've been unable to locate her. The surviving Chen girl is one that went missing, the one that never arrived from Van Horn. Originally considered dead—now we've been frantically trying to discover her whereabouts, but so far she's vanished off the grid—no credit card data, no phone calls. It's like somebody just up and kidnapped her—”

The feed broke and the screens went blank.

Lattimore understood. These bio-kooks tried to inoculate mankind against the future. And created a chimera by accident, a combination of disparate, possibly off-world genomes: lethal pathogens that got loose and ran wild in the streets. Now the one girl they needed to fix their fix, whose blood strain might counter their bio-monster—Chen-L—couldn't be found.

Perfect.

Jasper concentrated, trying to make a larger point. “Clem, I don't think the cavalry is going to arrive on time. People inside the CDC are leaking info. Besides being incompentent, careless, and rigid—they're scared.” A report from the Centers for Disease Control flashed onto a screen. Rates of infectious diseases had risen 5% in the last six weeks. “Five percent doesn't sound like much, but it's every disease you can think of. Hit ten percent, you're going to see chaos. Hit fifteen percent and you'll think the whole world is sick.” Another screen showed a drug bust; packets of rainbow whack, a bunch of cops grinning over their haul.

“And all this Dalekto crap is making it worse. Like any narcotic, it wears down your immune system, makes you more vulnerable to infection. They've analyzed the stuff, and it's just high-octane rocket fuel; an alkaloid, amphetamine-opiate mix with a touch of DMT and other hallucinogens as neurotransmitters. In some samples they've found traces of the psilo stuff, psilocin and psilocybin. But nobody knows where the hell they're making it. DEA? FBI?
Nobody
. Maybe in Mexico?”

Well, no big surprise there; half of America's high school graduates couldn't find Mexico on a map.

“They forgot about the Almighty,” Lattimore whispered to no one in particular. “And in the dead of night mixed a hell cocktail. Brains without Faith.”

“What's the matter with these people?” Jasper grumbled between shivers. “Didn't they see
X-Files
season six, episode twenty-two, ‘Biogenesis'?”

You had to wonder if the CTO was still playing with a full pinochle deck.

“I think I missed that one.”

“Great episode,” Jasper said a trifle eagerly. “Tidal pools exposed a crashed UFO off the Ivory Coast, possibly sent to reseed earth with alien DNA.” Then with great gravitas, “Everybody knows you don't mess with genomes from outer space. It just evolves into government programs for partial-birth abortion clinics and super soldiers.”

You had to admit there was a queer sort of logic to that.

Lattimore almost blurted out his brief interlude with the Foos, the Takers, the container ship, and the Tea House of the Hidden Moon. Weather warfare, force multipliers, and bad bugs—they all had to be connected, but Lattimore was damned if he knew how. Just a spilled can of mixed cocktail nuts. To be involved in anything nuttier he'd have to be wearing pink bunny rabbit slippers and tooting a kazoo.

Silently, Jasper looked over the bank of screens and across the rows of power towers blinking green, red, and blue lights. He waved a shaky but expansive arm across the field of RAM. “There's nothing to do here, Clem. Our servers are okay, they're swell, they're fine. Every tower, every stinking gigabit ethernet cable.”

“All right, if you say so,” Lattimore said warily. “Then you won't object to us taking you to the emergency room.”

Jasper sighed, clicked a few keys to power down his workstation, and rose from his seat. Speaking idly, “Y'know there's something else. I have the strangest feeling Wen Chen's HAARP file means something. There's a weather array up in Alaska called the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. I meant to tell you that. The enhanced insects, the container ship, weather warfare may be all part of the same—”

Jasper never finished. His legs turned to jelly, and he passed out standing up. Luckily Lattimore was right there to catch the man's heavy body. “Hey!” he called to Walter Nash.

But the security chief was not paying attention, otherwise preoccupied. Nash abruptly snuffed some rainbow powder off his nostril with the back of his hand. A glass nasal atomizer vanished into a pocket. “Sorry.”

But what shocked Lattimore the most wasn't that he'd come down off a Foo Fighter trip or that his tech officer had contracted malaria in a subbasement, not even that his security guy might be a Dalekto addict. But that Walter Nash doped up in public and
couldn't care less whether anyone knew
.

 

22

The Wandering Sickness

The pursuers left the plaster people back in Nebraska but with every mile Lila Chen seemed to recede in their minds as in a dream. Crossing the Missouri River, Bhakti's yellow Toyota 4Runner spawned a mysterious ailment and sputtered to a halt in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where the search for the surviving Chen girl ground to a halt, leaving the three trackers lost in the Marriott hotel doldrums.

The local Toyota dealership seemed to be limping along on half-staff, like every other business in the Midwest. Most everywhere, they'd seen a lot of dirty plate glass and empty storefronts. And the damn 4Runner had conked out again as Bhakti tried to drive it off the lot just
now
. Already a week over the grease pits, hooked up to the diagnostic computer, and nobody could figure out what was wrong with the dang SUV. So back inside he went ready to throttle the first available service representative.

Generally, he liked car dealerships, the showroom lights full of glamour and new car smell. Nevertheless, the Punjabi scientist was getting extremely sick of this Toyota store. The place had the feel of an empty bottle. Vacant workstations with knickknacks left behind: a Love Bear from Valentine's Day, a Post-it note:
Dentist Tuesday.

A framed photo of a Marine Corps graduation caught his eye. A young man in his dress blues stared soberly into the camera with a look of quiet resolve; a triangle of black crepe covered the corner of a gold-plated CVS photo frame. That made Bhakti want to turn away; a parent, a child. He knew about that.

This might be a good time to try Eleanor again. Generally, they touched base for a few minutes every day, but the last couple of times the coverage was spotty, no bars or his e-mails blocked for no reason. He clicked through. Her cell phone came back
Customer Not Available.
And her Yahoo account bumped him.
MAILER-DAEMON: This user doesn't have a Yahoo.com account—

Frustrated, he stared out into the street at the passing scene. Gazing out the broad dealership plate-glass window had become something of a cleansing ritual. Good air in, bad air out … Then Bhakti saw the stricken man.

He looked to be a wage slave, a worker-drone VP at the First National. The man walked awkwardly down the grassy highway divider with jerky movements like a puppet on strings, every other step threatening to pitch him off the median. Cars honked and swerved. Suddenly Bhakti recognized what he was looking at.

Huntington's Chorea. Now called Huntington's disease.

Also, the poor fellow seemed to have a very itchy face. But every time he tried to scratch his cheek he missed, one time poking himself in the eye, making him turn round and round on the median like a wobbly top. He stamped his feet to stop his spinning; then lurched forward again.

Where in heaven's name was he going? Perhaps the man himself didn't know. The curious scene reminded him of H. G. Wells' wandering sickness in the movie
Things to Come
: doomed people lurching about until they expired, others fleeing at the very sight of—

Another car nearly sideswiped the poor fellow, the horn blaring. Bhakti slapped the plate glass and almost bolted outside before the poor wretch became roadkill.

“Hello again, Mr. Singh. Really sorry about all this.”

Bhakti tore his eyes from the street.

Lester, the service rep, was an amiable dork of about thirty-five, with a gap between his two front teeth. You knew his name was Lester because of the nameplate on the lapel of his Century 21 knockoff gold blazer. He gave off a whiff of Polo aftershave and all the persistence of the Energizer Bunny, the very model of a modern polyester man.

“Of course we're going to diagnose again. I can't tell you exactly when it's going to be ready. Is there a number where I can reach you?”

Bhakti had given it every time, to the billing department, to Lester, to anyone who would take it. “I'm at the Marriott.”

“That's right.” Lester Polyester knew all along, but double-checked the papers just for show. “Okay, great.”

Something had been troubling Bhakti since they came to Omaha and Council Bluffs: why in hell nobody seemed to know about the weirdness back in Lexington. Stalled trucks and cars on the cloverleaf, passengers turned into crash dummies. A mess of stick figures at a cornpone medicine show as though ripped from their shoes. You'd think something like that would get some reaction in the land of a thousand psalms, at least an item on the local news. But nope. Not a word. So what exactly would you ask?
Heard from Nebraska lately?

Lester's face twitched. He scratched a perfectly normal spot on his cheek and twitched once more. His hand jerked to his face again. “Can I get you a ride back across the river? Call you a cab?” Lester picked up the phone. “We have a special discount with Council B's Cab Company.” He dialed before Bhakti could say yes.

*   *   *

Cheryl had barely thought of Rachel all summer, never mind calling—which was bad, divorce or no divorce, breakup or no breakup. The two of them, once a couple of peas in a pod, had been popped from their shell and rolled away from each other. When she watched Bhakti lose his mind outside the Stuka trailer, a part of her cracked too. Feeling the Punjabi scientist blubber in her arms made Rachel's presence fill her head. As though Cheryl had been holding herself together in bits and pieces too, but just didn't know it.

Now she sat in the lounge of the Springhill Suites Marriott across the Missouri River in Council Bluffs. A new laptop lay on her knees, but she didn't mess with it. She'd picked it up at a downtown RadioShack so she wouldn't have to borrow anyone else's and tried to work up the guts to Skype LA. It took more than she expected.

Imagining Rachel sitting at the glass dinner table with a cup of tea, under that kitsch cowboy chandelier, was incredibly daunting. No, better in a lounge chair staring out over their horizon pool at the cactus, the tequila bottle at her elbow.…

Her laptop webcam link connected to home.
Their
home? No, not really anymore. Rachel's PC responded automatically to the video request, Rachel's prerecorded voice saying, “Hi, sorry I'm not logged on right now. Try me at the firm or leave a message.”

Cheryl stumbled over what she wanted to say. “I didn't want to disturb you at work. Thought maybe I'd get you at home,” finishing lamely, “I've just been thinking about you.”

At the firm, Rachel's paralegal accepted Cheryl's video session request. Brit, a young man in his mid-twenties, starched white shirt, gold braces, nervously cinched up his red paisley tie. His eyes were red and weepy, and he seemed to have a terrible cold.

“Cheryl! We've been trying to find you.”

“I'm sorry, Brit. I've been bad about getting online the last couple of weeks. And I lost my cell phone charger.” This all sounded so stupid. “Can I talk to Rachel?”

Brit paused, looking incredibly uncomfortable. “I'm going to give you to Boedeker.”

Boedeker, one of the top partners, “Just tell me, Brit—”

The video image shifted to standby. Two very long minutes. Boedeker came on; the dark circles under his eyes and thick jowls made him look miserable, not the confident Big Shot he always projected. Cheryl felt a dump truck of bad news coming.

“Arthur Boedeker here, Cheryl.” He paused for a breath but didn't hem or haw. “Rachel passed away two days ago. Car accident, up in the hills. There were drugs involved with the driver of the other vehicle. That rainbow stuff that's going around. I can't tell you how sorry I am.”