Voracious (13 page)

Sarai took a deep breath and was surprised to feel tears in her eyes. She reached out and stroked the girl’s forehead. The skin was hot to the touch. She took her hand and gently squeezed. The fingers were gnarled like tree roots, as if afflicted with severe arthritis. They curled inward. The nails had grown long and thick and sharp, more claws than fingers. They were coated with flecks of dried blood. The girl’s other hand was wrapped in bandages. Sarai patted the back of her hand and laid it back on the gurney. She took a deep breath and wiped a tear from her eye. She hoped she hadn’t ruined this girl’s life forever. There was no telling what emotional scars she would have. Sarai could not imagine living with the knowledge that you’d murdered someone for no reason, just to appease your hunger, eaten someone alive. It was going to be hard enough for Sarai to live with the fact that it had been her fault. She looked from the girl’s gruesomely emaciated near-carcass into Dr. Trevor Adam’s bloodshot eyes.

“Are you satisfied?” she asked. Trevor looked away. “You stay right there with her all the way to the clinic, and if she dies, you contact her mother. Understand?”

“She’s behind us,” Trevor answered.

Sarai looked up, and sure enough, she recognized the still amazingly beautiful face of one of the world’s most recognizable actresses, Alexis Mourning. The woman looked perfectly put together, not so much as an eyelash out of place. The streaks of black tears and smeared mascara one would typically expect to see on a woman whose child was dying were nowhere to be found. Alexis was staring into a mirror and liberally applying powder as she tipped along in impossibly high shoes. She looked up, realized she had fallen behind her daughter, tucked the mirror and powder away, tilted her chin skyward, and increased her pace to catch up.

Sarai shook her head. With effort, she wrestled the expression of disgust and disdain from her face, plastered on a smile, and then thought better of it and changed it to something more solemn and compassionate.

She stepped forward and offered her hand to Alexis. “I’m so sorry about all of this. Don’t worry, we’ll do everything we can for her. I have some of the best doctors in the world on their way to help, as you know, we have one of the best medical and research facilities on the planet here at the clinic.”

Alexis nodded. It was obvious to Sarai that Alexis was fighting with something. There was something she wanted to say but couldn’t quite find the right words.

“Yes, Ms. Mourning? You have a question?”

“What-what’s wrong with her? Why did she go crazy like that? She-she ate all the food in the refrigerator. I have a Sub Zero, like the kind they have in restaurants. You can almost walk into it. She emptied it in a couple hours. Then she-oh my God! She ate someone! What did you do to her?”

Sarai maintained her stoic expression. She looked directly into Alexis’s eyes as the woman spoke as if she were hanging on every one of the famous actress’s words. She placed a consoling hand on Alexis’s shoulder. “Mrs. Mourning, your daughter is having a reaction to the treatment. She’s losing too much weight. In essence, she’s starving to death. We’re feeding her intravenously to keep her alive until we can reverse the effects.”

“I don’t understand. How can she be starving after all the food she ate?”

“The calories she’s eating are being burned up faster than she can consume them. Her body is instantly converting the calories into a coenzyme called ATP before it can be stored as fat, and her muscles are using that ATP as fast as it is being produced.”

“So she can never get fat?”

“No. That’s what the treatment was for.”

“Then it worked, right? I mean, if she can’t get fat, then the treatment worked?” Alexis seemed elated. Her daughter was dying right before her eyes, reduced to skin and bones, and her mother only appeared concerned with how much weight she’d lost. The actress paused again, obviously thinking deeply about something.

“Yes?”

“I asked Dr. Adams if-I mean, when they cure Star, will she get fat again?”

Sarai tried and failed to hide her astonishment. She slowly shook her head. “I-I don’t know.”

“If she gets fat again, I want my money back, every penny of it! You understand?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“One more thing,” Alexis said. She looked around and then looked down at the ground in an uncharacteristic show of insecurity. Finally she leaned in close and cupped a hand over her mouth so she could whisper in Sarai’s ear. “If it works. I mean-if you can fix it-I want you to do it to me, okay?”

Sarai leaned away. She practically recoiled. This time there was no disguising her contempt, but Alexis appeared either to not care or not notice. Sarai regained her composure.

“Yes, of course. Whatever you wish, ma’am.”

The EMTs lifted Star into the ambulance, and Trevor climbed inside with her. Sarai began walking back toward the limousine. She heard heels clicking behind her. She turned and was surprised to see Alexis keeping pace with her.

“Don’t you want to ride with your daughter in the ambulance?”

“You didn’t bring a limo for me?”

Sarai smiled wide, a big, artificial widening of the lips to hide her increasing revulsion toward the woman. “Yes, of course. You can take mine.”

24 

At the clinic, more bad news awaited Dr. Sarai Mahendru. Her staff had located the other twelve patients, and the news wasn’t good. Three of their patients were in the news this morning, causing a firestorm of rumor and speculation. Was it a new drug with a lethal side-effect? Bath salts? A satanic cult? Zombie virus? Star Mourning’s mauling of the two guys from the psychiatric hospital had not gone unnoticed by the media. The survivor was telling a reporter about Alexis Mourning running off with her daughter and some mysterious man without waiting for the police. Now there was a warrant out for both of them.

Earlier that day there had been replays of the now-infamous on-air attack of Samuel “Big Easy” Saldeine upon his producer. Sarai watched it once, just long enough to see Big Easy munching on his producer’s entrails like links of Polish sausage. The attack had been broadcast live into tens of millions of households. He had eaten the man alive. The police were launching an investigation, starting with a thorough autopsy. The autopsy worried Sarai the most. If they noticed the genetic changes, it wouldn’t be long before they traced it back to the clinic.

The worst of the reports involved Nathan Gingred, a former US congressman and one-time presidential candidate who now stood accused of cannibalizing his own children, including his eight-month-old son.

Sarai knew she had to keep that last detail from Professor Vivaan. If he found out about it, he would bolt, wash his hands of all of this, and they needed his expertise in order to find a cure. They had located most of the other patients. Three of them were already dead, six more were on their way to the clinic, Big Easy was in police custody pending trial for eating his producer, and Star Mourning and Lelani Simms were already at the clinic. Only the congressman was missing. He had taken off after eating his kids, and no one could find him. Then there was the matter of the transplant recipients. That had been bugging Sarai.

There had been other bizarre incidents of spontaneous cannibalism in the news. A basketball player had eaten an orderly at a hospital in Austin. A little girl had eaten both her parents in the same city, and there had been random attacks at several gay clubs in the area. All in the same city where the chef, one of their patients, had died in a car accident and his organs had been harvested for transplant.

“Shit.” Sarai punched her desk, cutting the skin on her knuckles and drawing blood but not appearing to notice as she stared out the window at the waves crashing against the beach and all the happy beachgoers splashing about in the water or sunbathing on the beach.
My life should be so simple
, she thought.

Initial tests of the two patients they’d brought in yesterday revealed startling physiological changes. Their bodies were burning calories at an extraordinary rate, thousands of calories an hour, and there were more than ten times the normal levels of adrenaline in their bloodstream. Trevor had done more than accelerated their metabolism, he’d set off a firestorm in the rage centers of their brains.

PET scans of Star Mourning’s amygdala showed increased blood flow to the frontal lobe. Blood tests revealed infinitesimal levels of acetylcholine, a hormone that tempers the more severe effects of adrenalin, and monoamine oxidase A, a hormone that breaks down dopamine and other monoamine neurotransmitters such as serotonin and norepinephrine, critical for impulse control and modulating emotional responses. What the tests revealed was someone with a raging appetite, a nervous system excited by an overdose of adrenaline mimicking extreme rage, and no impulse control, no ability to regulate or suppress this hormonal onslaught.

Like a pubescent teenager on crack.

Even more startling were the physical changes. The entire structure of Star’s jaw had changed. It had elongated and thickened. The incisors had lengthened and shifted forward, and a red coloring on the tips had been caused by the accumulation of some kind of iron ore. Samples of Star’s saliva contained a neurotoxin that blocks the interaction of neurons with neurotransmitters, making it impossible for them to receive signals, impairing nerve function and causing painful paralysis of the muscles and even destroying neurons and causing permanent cell damage. It was an effective weapon. It would render victims helpless with one bite, immobilizing them while they were eaten alive.

Even Star’s hands had changed. They were thick and knobby with knife-like claws extending from the fingertips. The claws were deadly sharp. Sarai shuddered, imagining those claws ripping open someone’s chest.

Sarai called Drs. Adams, Ebersol, and Vivaan into her office. She stared out the window again before turning on her computer. The first thing she saw was a headline about a sexually transmitted virus that was turning people into cannibals.

Sexually transmitted?
The virus had mutated, become infectious. Everything had just become a little more complicated. Doctors from the Centers for Disease Control linked the virus to several gay clubs in downtown Austin. The virus had taken on a street name-“Skinny”-and once the media reported it, the disease became a craze. People were deliberately getting themselves infected in order to lose weight. The CDC named the illness AHMS (Acquired Hyper-Metabolism Syndrome), and they were hard at work tracking down the disease’s origin, looking for “Patient Zero.” So far, they had identified a young bisexual man who’d recently died of the disease. He was HIV positive and they were proceeding under the hypothesis that the HIV virus had somehow mutated.

Despite reports of shut-ins cooking and eating their pets, people robbing supermarkets for food, gorging themselves at buffets and fast food restaurants, and even resorting to cannibalizing their young and elderly, all anyone in the public heard was that those afflicted with the virus had achieved the ideal American aesthetic. They were skinny. No exercise. No diet. It was the perfect weight-loss miracle. It just happened to turn people into psychopaths.

Facebook and Twitter were abuzz with talk of the disease:

“I would totally love to get that disease. My cousin got it and lost seventy pounds in one week!”

“Didn’t she eat her grandma though?”

“Yeah, but it was totally worth it if you ask me. Her grandma was old anyway and that bitch was fat as hell!”

“Did you hear about that new disease that makes people skinny? I wish I had it. I could stand to lose a few pounds. LOL.”

“Stock your fridge and then go out and get your fat ass infected! Quick and easy cure for the epidemic of American obesity. LMAO!”

“It would fix the economy too. I’m buying stock in McDonald’s! ROFL!”

Sarai clicked on a news article about a prostitute who’d been burned in a fire and received a skin graft. She’d been caught with the cannibalized bodies of a dozen tricks in her basement. Below that was a story about a cab driver in Austin who’d been placed in police custody after his employers found the remains of a local businessman in the trunk of his car. All the flesh had been gnawed from the man’s bones. The cab driver died of starvation after one night in jail.

She scrolled through news report after news report, each more ghastly than the next, and below each were hundreds of comments from people speculating about a zombie apocalypse to wondering how they could get infected themselves.

“What have we done?” Sarai whispered. She looked up from the computer just as Dr. Trevor Adams walked in. She wanted to strangle him. Behind him, Dr. Vivaan stood, looking like he wanted to strangle her.

“Where’s Ebersol?”

Trevor looked at Dr. Vivaan, who gave him a stern, unsympathetic glare. “He’s handling a little problem. We had to chain down our two special patients. They kept breaking through their restraints. Their overactive adrenal glands have made them unusually strong. I’m afraid one of the nurses was severely bitten,” Trevor said.

“She’s dead. Her throat was ripped out by the model, Lelani Simms,” Dr. Vivaan added, sweeping the room with his baleful gaze.

Sarai felt her stomach drop like she’d just fallen off a cliff. She swallowed hard, sucking down bile that scalded the back of her throat. “Where is she now?”

“On her way to the morgue, and I’m going back to India.”

Sarai sighed and shook her head. “You may want to wait. I have something to say that may change your mind.”

“What could you possibly say to me that would make me want to be a part of this insanity you’ve created here?”

“The virus has mutated. It’s infectious.”

The room fell silent.

“A-are you sure?” Trevor asked.

“Has anyone even bothered to look at the news today? It’s everywhere,” Sarai answered.

“Have they-have they traced it back to us?” Trevor asked.

“Not yet, but they will. Right now, they think it has something to do with AIDS.”