Everything that begins, begins with blood.

We were at work in a B1 blood laboratory on the third floor of the seventh building of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a network of industrial-looking brick-and-mortar structures located just outside the city limits of Atlanta, Georgia. We were both junior virologists on staff at the CDC, myself and Peter Maryk, and both thirty-one years of age. This was the final week of December 2010.

Peter worked across the lab table from me, standing over a whir-ring centrifuge, spinning down blood serum. His hair was pearl-white and had been since college, and he kept it short and straight, his angular face and slate gray eyes set in a mask of severity. He switched off the centrifuge and like a roulette wheel it slowed, ticking to a stop, silence returning to the lab. He crooked his head at a tinny scratching behind him.

“Thirty-seven’s going down,” he said.

I looked across at the wire cages. Thirty-seven, a large, white, pink-eyed rat, was digging repetitively at the metal floor and shifting back and forth. His hind legs buckled beneath him, and at once he slumped over onto his side.

I crossed to the cage. Thirty-seven kicked sideways at the air, his small-toothed mouth opening and closing. Blood dappled his sugar-white chin. His pink eyes fixed on my face as his body twitched, his tail lashing at the cage floor, pang, pang. The jerking became less and less frequent, and Thirty-seven expired staring at me.

There was still a chill. Death made failure real, something I wished not to repeat.

Peter appeared at my side. He opened the top door of the cage with a gloved hand and lifted Thirty-seven out by the tail, sealing him inside a numbered plastic bag.

“It should work,” I said. “We’ve watched it under slides. We know it works. It’s just too potent for rats.”

Peter said nothing. He returned to his station and set the bag down on the table with a light,thump.

“We can’t go to primates,” I continued. “If we go to chimps we’ll have to declare our research, and I’m not ready for that.”

Peter and I distinguished each other in our fields of specialization, mine being straight laboratory science, Peter’s being field pathology and investigation. I was most at home in a laboratory setting, but Peter was growing restless, and beginning to show his disdain for the project.

Clean human blood was a precious commodity as the first decade of the twenty-first century drew to a close. An onslaught of viral and bacterial disease had depleted the reliable source pool, and patients around the world were dying, stuck on long lists waiting for transfusions of untainted blood. Lucrative black markets had sprung up in every major population center, from New York to Beijing to Cairo, where illicit blood traded at fifteen to twenty times its weight in gold.

Like many medical scientists of the day, Peter and I had dedicated ourselves to the great challenge of developing a safe, synthetic human blood substitute. Yet that achievement alone would not have satisfied me. I was seeking to improve on organic human blood by deriving not merely a perfect substitute, but one infused with enhanced virus- and cancer-fighting properties. Peter was questioning the propriety of our work, and fully half my time now was spent appeasing him. His participation in the project was essential. Peter Maryk’s immune system was infallible. He possessed innate immunological qualities beyond the natural ability of any human being known to medical science. When Peter Maryk claimed never to have been sick a day in his life, he meant it as fact. His gifted blood provided the essence of our project. At that time, my goal of conferring some degree of Peter’s enhanced immune system to the ill seemed in reach. The potential benefit to medical science and worldwide human health would be inestimable.

We returned to our stations on opposite sides of the wide stainless steel table, Peter to his centrifuge and I to my binocular microscope. I bent over it and looked down upon a small, bustling, crystalline city.

There was a thick popping splash, and I shot back reflexively. Peter was rising from the table, arms out at his sides, blood splattered over his fleshy latex gloves and paper smock and the small beige refrigerator humming behind him.

Peter glowered at me, and I stood. It was a scare, but fortunately the blood was our own. He picked up the dripping plastic pack labeled MARYK and examined the torn eyelet. The rest of the pocketed units of blood labeled either PEARSE or MARYK hung from a steel rack over the table. My blood was the project’s control. Four small vials labeled PEAMAR4 were the product, to date, of the fourth generation of our efforts.

Peter’s spilled blood was inordinately rich in color, oozing over the steel table top and seeping in dark parabolas down the walls of the sink. He turned on the faucet and ran water over his gloved hands, then wiped down the sink and counter and untied his bloodied smock, stripping off his gloves. He started toward the door with such intensity that I believed he would walk out and keep going, never to return to the lab or the project, but he merely disposed of his soiled gloves in a red biohazard box set into the wall. He was on his way back for a fresh pair when he slowed to read the flip-up screen of his tablet, a portable notebook computer, recharging in a wall socket and therefore wired into the CDc’s central net.

“Stephen,” he said.

Every sentence Peter Maryk spoke, even the most benign of phrases, was infused with urgency. His voice was clear and deep, compelling. I went around the table and joined him, struck by the scent of baby powder coming off his bared hands. Peter’s hands were never without protective gloves, in or outside the lab. They were pallid and smooth-knuckled, and he held them upturned as though awaiting a towel.

The monitor was flashing an EPI-AID mail message. The epidemic assistance request had been posted over the CDC-maintained LifeLink web from a Dr. André Dieudonné Kaunda in the central African Congo for vaccine to treat one unconfirmed case of “variola major,” or smallpox. I reviewed the symptoms detailed in French beneath the description of the patient, a nine-year-old Congolese girl said to be in the poring stage.

“Buboes,” Peter translated, fancying the antiquated term.

“Can’t be.”

“The symptoms match. But no request for assistance. Or investigation.”

“He’s just uncertain,” I said. “As well he should be.”

But Peter was pulling on a fresh pair of gloves and already heading for the door. I followed him out, across to adjoining Building Six via one of the outdoor wire encased catwalks linking each building of the CDC. The center was understaffed that week due to the year-end holidays, and our shoe heels scuffed loudly along the well-worn tile steps to the first floor.

Room 161 in Building Six was, considering its duties, an office of modest size. The three desks inside, and the computers they supported, made up a virtual clearinghouse for rare drug and inoculation requests received from around the world. It was in Room 161 in the early 1980s that a CDC doctor first noted a surge in requests for pentamidine, a drug used to treat a rare pneumonia, from physicians in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas perplexed by an unusual wasting disease afflicting several young, male, homosexual patients.

The door was open. Dr. Carla Smethy stood in relief as I entered. “Stephen,” she said, surprised. “I was beginning to think there was no one here at all.”

Carla Smethy was in her mid-thirties, black-haired, round-cheeked, and smart. She nudged a curl off her forehead. The Christmas carols jingling out of her desktop computer were an unsuccessful attempt to alleviate the gloom of the rare drug request office.

Peter entered behind me, and Dr. Smethy’s smile flickered. In fact, she took one small step back.

“What do you make of it?” I said.

She shook her head. “A first for me. You’re the bug experts.” She looked to me in an interested way. “How did you get stuck working the holiday?”

Peter sat at her computer. “May I?” he said.

She appeared startled. “Yes — sure.”

He ran his gloved hands over the keyboard, first switching off the tinny carols. I kept one eye on the monitor.

“We wanted some lab time,” I said in answer to her question. “Thought it would be nice and quiet around here.”

She plucked a piece of paper off her desk and showed it to me. “Seen this?”

It was a proof of the cover of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the centers’ weekly periodical, featuring the new letterhead logo and initials “BDC.” Following public outcry in the wake of emerging and reemerging diseases worldwide, an act of Congress had redrawn the CDc’s policy mandates and enhanced its federal powers. As of January 1, 2011, the preeminent health agency in the United States and the world leader in disease prevention would be rechristened the Bureau for Disease Control.

“The end of an era,” she said.

Peter had brought up the complete bulletin on the monitor. Delivery of the smallpox vaccine was requested by airdrop west of the city of Dongou on the Ubangi River. A relay trace sourced the sender’s tablet coordinates to a location just a row degrees above the central African equator. Peter pulled up a grid map. The coordinates cross-haired into northern Congo, stopping there and pulsing faintly. The bulletin had been dispatched from deep within the rain forests south of the Sangha Wildlife Reserve, west of the Bumba Zone.

“The Congo,” Peter said, his strange voice leavened with something like romance. He had worked a year in Dares Salaam, the port capital of Tanzania, while I had elected to spend my foreign field residency in Calcutta, in a floating pediatrics hospital on the Hooghly River. Acquaintances since our third year at Yale, roommates in med school at Johns Hopkins and rivals in our virology class at Emory, we were now colleagues and research partners at the CDC; it was the only period of time during the preceding decade in which we had worked apart.

“Must be a mistake,” she said, looking at the screen. “The wrong request class, it has to be.”

I said, “Do we have any variola vaccine in stock?”

“We do, actually. But only because first-year vaccinologists cook it up as part of their training. Otherwise, who cares?”

“But why no medical support?” Peter turned in the chair. He trained his silvery eyes on her. “A call for variola vaccine, but no support?”

She looked stunned. “There’s blood on your shirt,” she said.

I tried to intervene. “It’s all right—”

“It’s mine,” Peter said. He examined the florid stain.

Peter Maryk was different, innately different, apart from his imposing physical presence. People sensed this. Conversations trailed off when he approached. Rooms changed whenever he entered them. Some people even claimed they could feel him walking behind them in the halls. He was in many ways an irregular human being, which at one time had been a source of great consternation for him. I was the politician of the two, and had taken on the role of social intermediary for him since college, explaining him to some, defending him to others, even apologizing to a few. But every attempt to introduce him into the broader culture of the CDC had failed. Increasingly he seemed uninterested in fitting in anywhere.

Dr. Smethy looked again to me. “What do you think, Stephen?”

I looked at the monitor screen. Laboratory space at the CDC was at a premium, and I had been looking forward to Christmas time and the changeover as an opportunity to push ahead on our PeaMar research without interruption.

“We have the lab free and clear for an entire week,” I said.

It was part of the alchemy of our relationship that I would temper Peter’s morbid enthusiasm. Peter had often questioned smallpox’s untimely fate, distrustful as he was of most of mankind’s triumphs, a distrust that now included our PeaMar research. My reluctance here — as there was no question that the distress call required further investigation — was simply an attempt to leverage his renewed participation in the project upon our return.

“Worst case,” I said, “it’s an orphan,” a virus whose symptoms resemble another, more prevalent disease.

“Even so,” Peter said, “there’s a very sick little girl out there.”

I was stunned. The abject insincerity of his words, known only to me, was shocking. Peter’s interest lay exclusively in hunting viruses, and to that end healing people was something of a by-product, the perfume that sweetened and further profited the whale kill. These clumsy words of concern were meant to manipulate me. This was the branch height to which our relationship had evolved.

“How badly do you want this to be smallpox?” I said.

He paged through airline schedules and clicked on a red-eye to Paris. “Our flight leaves in three hours.”

I wish my tale of Africa ended there. There is however one more incident I must relate, a brief sequence of events to which, at the time, I was not privy. Even now, with the keenness of hindsight and every fact of consequence available before me, this singular event remains the most strange.

Seven days following the razing of the camp, the rainy season resumed in earnest. Oren Ridgeway, a botanist with Rainforest Ecology Conservation International, was out on the last night of a five-day field expedition into the rain forests of northern Congo, having circled back to within thirty kilometers of the RECI reserve. The night jungle is a haunted place, as I had found, where no man should venture alone. I can picture Ridgeway stretched out on his back, the rain spattering against the roof of his narrow nylon tent, listening to a BBC World Service broadcast on his radio, reporting on the current political climate in the United States, his home.

The pioneering enthusiasm he had arrived with eight months before was by then gone. He had journeyed to the central African rain forest in order to archive and preserve specimens of the tens of millions of uncharacterized species of tropical flora, before population demands and the big boot of human development stamped them out forever. But that night he was facing the futility of his efforts; millions of rare life forms were being willfully exterminated around him, and he was reexamining the merits of his crusade. What was the use, after all, of trying to salvage a representative sample of a species not strong enough to survive on its own? How much should be left to nature? And what of the senselessness of naming something just as it ceased to exist?

The fact that he was even deigning to entertain these questions must have depressed young Ridgeway all the more. The earth was suffocating worldwide under the weight of advancing Homo sapiens, and that night, as he lay alone in the pounding rain of the jungle, he must have felt himself its only witness.

Case in point: the jets he had heard streaking across the jungle sky seven nights before; he had reported them. And the black rain, which he at first thought was volcanic ash cycling back through the biosphere; he had reported that too. His reports went out over the airwaves among a million bursts of static, answered by no one, slipping the earth’s orbit and pulsing into the galaxies, a lone human voice of protest.

The system had since purged itself, and the rain that night fell again sweet and clear. I see him reaching up and unzipping the tent fold, letting in some of the perfumed forest air, the scent of his smothered cooking fire, its lingering smoke. There would have been faint light from above, threads of silver angling off the waxing moon through the jeweled rain. Perhaps by the light of one of those lunar strands did he notice the branches bobbing in the trees across from his tent. There was nothing unusual about a creature moving through the night jungle — until the creature emerged from the trees on two legs, walking erect. Ridgeway then sat up, repositioning himself to peer through the zipper folds and through the rain.

It was a human figure, too large to be a Pygmy, slipping from the cover of the trees and moving across a muddy path to a tree of surfboard-sized leaves.

Maybe Ridgeway thought it was someone trying to steal something from his camp. Did he turn up the volume on his radio, in hopes of scaring off the intruder? Or did he simply struggle into a plastic poncho and step out into the rain?

“Yes?” he called out. “Hello?”

Not until the silhouette emerged from the cover of the leaves would he have known that it was a female. Ridgeway knew little of the local dialects, and no French, but he was a trusting soul, with plenty of food to share, and would have welcomed friendly company of any sort.

She started across the camp toward him, striding through the strands of silver light, and Ridgeway saw then that she was nude. Her body was young and firm, with branch scratches and other irregular marks covering much of her dark flesh. She walked right up to him, breaching even that radius of personal space generally respected by strangers, breathing deeply, as though after a long run. Her dark nipples brushed against the chest of his poncho with each gust. He opened his mouth to speak then, to ask her what she wanted, and her lips closed on, his in a firm kiss. She kissed him full-mouthed and sensually, without otherwise touching his body, and after the initial shock, Ridgeway’s neck and back relaxed and he accommodated her passion without resistance. Perhaps he opened his eyes just once, buoyed by his raging pulse, and found her eyes were open too, but dark, her pupils flat and staring. Her tongue then swished the enamel of his front teeth — strangely cold, in his limited experience, colder than any other tongue he had ever tasted — and their lips parted and she stood facing him as before.

He saw more clearly then the dull glow behind her eyes, the thick drops of rain breaking upon her nose and cheeks, and the vague discoloration of her flesh. It was vitiligo, though this meant nothing to Ridgeway. And then at once she turned and started away. She walked not quickly, not even purposefully, the bright glints of moonlight illuminating her buttocks, the sheen of her shoulder blades, and the dimpled small of her curved back, crossing through the rain back into the trees.

She would wander the jungle in this same stupor for some ten more hours before sitting down to rest against a dead tree in the middle of a wide clearing and succumbing to a series of swift, violent, massive strokes. Creatures of the jungle came forward to nibble on her corpse, but did not like what they tasted, and none of them made it back out of the clearing before failing dead. The insects that fed upon the dead creatures also died, so many carcasses cooking under the bright, virus-killing sun. The animals deemed it a sacred place, and all stayed away. The girl’s skeleton still sits there, partially intact, slumped next to the rotted tree, its skull fixed in an empty, meaningless grin.

As for Ridgeway, he ran after her that night, but no deeper than the first few forbidding trees. He returned and found her footprints in the soft mud of his camp, small and faint and disappearing in the hard rain — then gasped out a nervous laugh. She had been real enough, though there was precious little consolation in that. A beautiful woman of the jungle, exotic and nude, had walked out of the trees and kissed him once, as though delivering a passionate message dispatched from the heart of the rain forest, then disappeared again without a word. He shook his head underneath his poncho hood, and smiled.

He looked up and found the swelling moon above the thinning canopy. The warm rain washed his face, smelling of the sky and of the fleeting bare feet of summer, and he stood there, the blood rush still tingling in his veins, perhaps dreaming of home.

This was Patient Zero.

Another page turned.

Stockholm, six years later. December tenth, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death, and traditionally the inauguration of Nobel Week, the end of a day that should have been the brightest yet of my thirty-seven years. The diploma and solid gold medal presented me by His Majesty the king of Sweden at the award ceremony at the Stockholms Konserthus lay securely in the safe behind the reception desk in the hotel lobby, while I lay seven floors above, deep in a strange bed like a heavy stone set upon a soft pillow. And for the first time in a long time, I was not alone.

Following clinical trials of varying degrees of success, and in light of Peter Maryk’s increasing disdain for the project, I eventually directed our PeaMar research exclusively toward manufacturing a pure, whole blood alternative. The result, PeaMar23, was a certified disease-free, hemoglobin-based, synthetic blood substitute with a storage shelf life of nearly three times the forty-two-day limit of organic human blood.

Coming at a time when worldwide inventories of clean blood were reaching a critical level, news of the discovery was hailed internationally as a triumph on the level of Salk’s polio vaccine and, unexpectedly, made me something of a celebrity. PeaMar23 was currently in use in every health clinic in every province of every country in the world, all mass-produced in a plant in Chamblee, north of Atlanta, known as BDC Building Twenty, the Blood Services Section.

For this Peter Maryk and I shared the 2016 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. My acceptance speech at that day’s ceremony had been well received (The governing principle of my professional life has been that we at the BDC must never let technology overshadow basic human care... that we continue to reach out to the afflicted, if only with a gloved hand... that we be scientists second, doctors first...), though as I returned to my seat, flushed with relief amid the applause filling the concert hall, I felt that something was missing.

It was not the ignominy of Peter Maryk’s vacant seat next to me. That I could have expected. The breach that first formed between us in Africa had widened during the development of the PeaMar sera, and culminated in the dissolution of our partnership following the unveiling of PeaMar23 four years before. Since our abrupt falling out, Peter had become something of an outlaw among the medical science community, while my professional career had moved in a diametrically opposite direction. For the past thirty months, I had held the dual federal posts of U.S. Surgeon General and Director of the Bureau for Disease Control. Though we both still worked for the BDC, Peter Maryk and I had not spoken to each other for almost four years.

So it was not Peter I was missing as I glanced around at my fellow laureates on the concert hall stage, in chemistry, literature, and economics, all joined on that milestone day by their families. I was unmarried and unattached. Both my parents had passed away that same year, and I found myself alone. When the ceremony ended and I stepped down off the concert stage with one hand in the pocket of my tuxedo pants, making polite conversation with His Majesty who, in an imperial gesture of pity, had seen fit to escort the lone bachelor to the floor, the only familiar face waiting there was Peri Fields’s, head of the BDc’s Public Affairs Section and my public relations liaison. Her congratulatory kiss as she pressed it into my cheek felt genuine rather than perfunctory, and raised my spirits a bit. Even this spin-weary sorceress of worldwide media was swayed by the authenticity of the Nobel.

Following the royal banquet, Peri and I repaired to the hotel bar for a champagne nightcap, the electricity of the day still coursing through us. My excitement I understood, but hers surprised me, and interested me. For two years in Atlanta, we had shared nothing more than a working relationship. I heard her shoes fall to the floor beneath the table, and watched her mouth as she laughed. I had not been drunk in years. The steady, interested blue of her eyes, moistened by the champagne, caught some of the magic of the chandelier. The clumsy embrace that began in the mirrored elevator on the ride up to the top floor continued more gracefully behind the door to my top-floor suite. There was at first the revelatory exhilaration of intimacy with a close associate, like a hunger choking us both, followed by the fumbling of zippers and buttons and the culminate unveiling of each to the other as we stood beside the high bed. My hands found her warm hair, her neck, her crotch. The preliminary sacredness of touch accelerated to bold groping and grasping, and the sheets tangled around us, twisted and grew warm.

Afterward, I had found the release of orgasm to be rousing rather than narcotizing and lay staring at the thickly papered walls by the light of the city, diffuse through the lace-veiled window, as synapses fired within the charged nebula of my brain. The events of the day came flooding back, but the accolades felt empty again, the honor a cheat. It was Africa, still haunting me. Within every doctor’s psyche resides that patient from early in his career, the one who touched him and whom ultimately he failed, and who becomes the secret source of all his healing efforts. I lay there on that strange Nobel night not with Peri Fields, not in a hotel suite, and not even in Stockholm, but a world away, in a camp shanty in deepest Africa, next to the writhing form of a nine-year-old girl corrupted by a pitiless disease.

Maryk stood inside the silvered doorway. He looked at the wasting figure of Stephen Pearse lying on the child’s mattress. The odor of decay was thick and distinct. He backed out of the doorway into the shadows of the landing. The shock of the moment left him as quickly as it had come. He looked again at Stephen Pearse lying on his side with his right arm stuck off the bed. Stephen’s eyes were sunken and crimson and staring.

Maryk returned downstairs. The house was like a museum with each room a closed exhibit. He walked to a glass-walled sitting room off the kitchen in the rear and rooted himself in the memory of his only previous visit. Lace curtains had been sashed along the walls and leather bindings had lined the low bookshelves under the windows. A mayonnaise jar full of buffalo nickels had sat upon the fall front of the cherry wood desk.

Every piece of furniture that remained in the house was shrouded. Maryk set his tablet on an upright Steinway covered in thin plastic sheeting. His black bag balanced on the keyboard and pressed out a dull chord that echoed throughout the cloistered first floor. Outside the windows the sloping backyard was silver and the moon was sprayed over the wrinkling ocean.

He opened his tablet and dialed Bobby Chiles. The deputy director’s haggard face appeared in a window on the screen.

“Found him,” Maryk said.

Bobby clapped his hands softly once and sat back in his chair. His shirt collar was twisted open anxiously. “Where is he?” he said.

“He’s sick.”

“Sick? What do you mean?”

“Who else is there with you?”

“I’m alone. Stephen is sick with what?”

“Plainville.”

Bobby’s eyes held fast to the screen as the rest of his face struggled.

“You need to make a decision,” Maryk said.

“—Get him to a hospital.”

“Not here. The New York press. Let me bring him back to Atlanta.”

“Plainville? But how?”

“I am the only one who can get near him without a full suit now.”

Bobby’s hands were up at his face.

Maryk said, “Listen. We need to act fast. I need all resources placed at my disposal. No restrictions, and no questions asked.”

“But if it’s Plainville, what can you—”

“I can treat him,” Maryk said simply.

Bobby was staring beyond his screen and well beyond Maryk. Maryk told him what he would need and then ended the connection.

He left his tablet glowing atop the piano and took his black bag back upstairs. Stephen lay on the boy-sized bed as before. The things in the bedroom were preserved under plastic except for the bed and a short blond wood dresser with the trophies on it. A cold breath of rot reached Maryk and he looked across at an open,and unscreened window. A car passed the house. A city of twenty-five million people waited at the other end of the highway. Maryk wondered if the self-appointed “Health Ambassador to the World” could have already ignited a lethal chain of transmission in the most populated city in North America.

Maryk pulled on a second pair of gloves and tore off strips of adhesive tape to seal his cuffs above his wrists. He dragged the plastic sheeting away from the bed with the toe of his shoe and set to work under the argent glow raining through the skylight above.

Breath swirled out of Stephen’s staring face like smoke under the door of a burning house. His eyes were wide and rheumy with blood and gazed at the doorway and the floor before it with an expression of expired longing. Maryk produced a penlight from his bag. Stephen’s pupils reacted slowly to the beam like lazy black moons eclipsing blue suns. They were soft and fat. Capillaries had burst behind each lens and blood was flooding the clear vitreous jelly and seeping into the sclera and weeping in dry smudges out of the lacrimal ducts onto the pinches of Stephen’s nose. Dots of red and purple petechiae bloomed in a sallow mask surrounding his eyes.

Maryk stood and eased Stephen back onto the mattress with both hands. Stephen’s throat gurgled without issue. The mattress was fouled with vomit and excrement and the action of moving Stephen stiffed the stench. His bloody stare settled upon the ceiling. He was semiconscious and perhaps aware of Maryk’s presence and perhaps even able to see. Maryk reached over with his gloved thumb and middle finger and shut Stephen’s eyelids.

Mucus and slime ran down Stephen’s upper lip and chin and Maryk collected some in a vial. He unlaced and discarded Stephen’s shoe-boots and socks. With a pair of short-bladed bandage scissors he cut along each soiled pant leg and shirtsleeve and up along the buttons of the shirt placket. The heated fabric peeled back like the outer folds of a thing well cooked. Stephen’s flesh had the lucent softness of wax. There were visible lesions. Folds of loose skin were beginning to sag off his waist and neck as though he were melting.

Maryk sampled his blood. The puncture wound bled sluggishly and was slow to clot. With tweezers he collected representative hair samples and deposited them in individual glassine envelopes. The follicles pulled easily from Stephen’s flesh like candles from a cake.

Lastly he brought out a metal thermos. There was a whisper of release as he unscrewed the cap and tipped the glass ampule of golden serum labeled MILKMAID into his gloved left fist. He drew the contents into a clean hypodermic even as he knew it was too late for the serum to be 100 percent effective. MILKMAId’s success depended upon its administration within the first hours of infection. Maryk boosted the serum into Stephen’s external jugular. It was a quick trip from there to his heart.

Maryk stripped off Stephen’s gloves and noticed tape marks on Stephen’s bare left hand. He saw a bean-sized bruise in the center of the palm and a tiny dot breach in the center of that.

Maryk unrolled a biohazard pack from inside his bag. He disposed of his contaminated implements and unwound the tape from his forearms and disposed of his outer gloves. He left the orange plastic bag unsealed in the center of the floor.

He saw Stephen’s tablet set upon a child’s writing desk. Maryk opened the screen and accessed Hailing/Receiving and found that the digital pulse modern had been disabled. Then he noticed a data entry in the master file list named “Investigation.Maryk.” He opened it and paged through the contents. He stopped when he came to the code names, MILKMAID, BLOSSOM, and LANCET. With a keen frown he closed all applications and collapsed the screen.

A team of four Special Pathogens investigators assigned to Batavia, New York, on an E. coll 0157:H7 outbreak were the first to arrive. Maryk illuminated the open bedroom window with a flashlight and ordered immediate aggressive night spraying. Every potential insect vector in the area had to be exterminated before dawn.

The agents regarded Director Pearse’s wasting body lying unconscious in a child’s bed before filing out.

FEMA Biohazard Containment arrived from Atlanta with more Special Path investigators and Stephen was lifted off the bed and sealed inside a Kurt isolation pod. A Kurt pod was a maintained atmosphere constructed of heavy plastic insulant with two round glove ports on each long side. It was roughly the size and shape of a large box coffin.

Maryk bagged and secured Stephen’s tablet himself. He declared a Biohazard 4 and FEMA BioCon initiated a program of full containment ablution.

Blue nylon was stretched over plastic ribbing outside the front door. One of the BioCon agents was inspecting the car parked in the driveway as Maryk exited. Lights were snapping on in the second-floor windows of surrounding houses and across the street a man marched halfway down his front walk in a red silk bathrobe before seeing the BDC insignia on the trucks and hastily turning back.

Stephen’s pod was loaded into a BioCon ambulance and the convoy wound quietly through the slumbering seaside town. A BDC transport jet was waiting for them at the Fast Hampton airport. Maryk contacted Bobby Chiles again from the air and asked about the old B4 lab inside the basement of BDC Building Seven. A state-of the-art replacement B4 had just come on-line inside the new Bioresearch Building. B4 was a biocontainment research laboratory for safe human manipulation of the most hostile biological agents.

“It’s dark,” Bobby said. “We bombed the place clean after the move to Nineteen.”

“Refit all the fixtures and load in medical and lab research equipment. I need it prepped for surgery as well. You’ll have to move fast.”

“Containment scrubbed B4 dry to the paint, Peter. With all the bugs we harvested in there over the years, it took them four full days to achieve zero habitat. We’re due to turn the space over to Pharmacology.”

“They’ll wait. I need a workspace. Anticipate everything from PCR typing to glassware needs to full barrier autopsy: Stephen’s breeding Plainville now; you don’t want samples being shuttled all over the complex. And choose carefully. The equipment has to be small enough to fit in through the air locks, and whatever gets in there won’t be coming out again clean.”

“But — B4’s not meant to hold humans.”

“Next, Geist in Engineering. He’s the only one there cleared for Plainville. I posted him separately, but he won’t cooperate unless it comes from you, I need him to brew up something for Stephen. Tell him it is of the highest priority. I’ll also need a nurse with minimum fifty hours full-barrier experience and a strong constitution. We’re avoiding Hartsfield International Airport for obvious reasons, so have a medical helicopter ready for transport at DeKalb Peachtree.”

“Peter. What do I tell people?”

“Whatever you want, just so long as it’s not the truth. I don’t want to see anyone when we land on the roof of Building Seven. When we go down through the corridors to B4: no one standing in doorways, no teary spectators. No displays, I don’t want to see anyone inside the lab except a security detail, two of my people to help load Stephen inside, and the nurse. And one last thing.”

Bobby was scribbling frantically. “Yes?”

“Once these orders are issued, you are to surrender to Quarantine Services. I want every visitor to Building Sixteen since Stephen got back from Orangeburg traced and shuttered up. You’re all going to have to sit out at least seventy-two hours.”

Bobby nodded without protest. He may even have seen this coming. Maryk signed off and sat back against the wide hull. He watched Stephen’s gaunt body rocking with the motion of the plane inside the shimmying plastic walls of the pod. Maryk called the pilot and instructed him to remain twenty miles out to sea during the trip down the eastern coast. Stephen Pearse was a biological time bomb. The microbial spread from a plane crash on land would wipe out every organic form of life in North America within a few days’ time.

Maryk never took an indeliberate, step. He collapsed his tablet and closed his eyes and performed a quick self-diagnosis. No cascade. Not yet.

Traffic was squeezed into two lanes on the five-lane Peachtree. Police lights flashed against the orange terracotta wall announcing The Groves. Maryk displayed his credentials for a cop wearing lime green gloves and was admitted through the barricade.

Police vehicles outnumbered BDC vans and trucks in the parking lot outside the easternmost condominium building. The structure was fat and frosted with pink stucco and rimmed with Spanish terraces. Evacuated residents sat on a side lawn under trees manicured to look like poodle tails.

Maryk was met by one of his Special Pathogens men wearing a full contact suit at the concierge’s desk in the lobby of Groves East. His name was Reilly and he introduced a waiting Atlanta police lieutenant named Cole. The cops behind Lieutenant Cole all wore gloves and police respirators and stood around anxiously. Law enforcement organizations in general hated dealing with disease.

Reilly huffed inside his suit and led Maryk around rather theatrically. Maryk declined a suit with a sideward glance at Reilly but did pull on a simple respirator for appearance’s sake. Lieutenant Cole thumbed the elevator log button but Maryk walked to the stairwell. Reilly and Lieutenant Cole reluctantly followed. Uniformed police officers in gloves and masks were posted at each landing.

“How bad would you say it all is, the spread?” asked Lieutenant Cole. “We can go wider with the evacuation if it’s warranted.”

“I won’t know what it is until I get in there,” said Maryk.

“Helluva job you people do. Tracking this thing, and keeping my boys out of it. Be nice if we knew where crime was going to emerge as it emerged.”

“It’s like narcotics,” offered Reilly. “From the source to the distributor to dealers to the street. Contact tracing. Chain of infection.”

White viricidal foam lathered the walls beginning with the eleventh-floor landing. Reilly and Lieutenant Cole slowed there.

Reilly said, “We do appreciate your cooperation, Lieutenant.”

“Cooperation, nothing. Damn pleasure. You know I have a son in sixth grade in Conyers who says he wants to be a doctor like Dr. Pearse at the BDC. I tell him he’s crazy. That’s one hell of a public relations department you got going there.”

Maryk was a half flight above. “We can handle next-of-kin notification,” he said. “Disease can be a difficult subject, and we’ve had some experience.”

Lieutenant Cole pointed up from the perceived safety of the lower landing. “Shouldn’t you be in one of them suits?”

Reilly answered for him. “Dr. Maryk’s not so good in confined spaces.”

“Lord,” said Lieutenant Cole genuinely. He tipped his hat to Maryk. “Luck to you.”

The eleventh-floor hallway was foamed wall-to-ceiling. Two suits guarding a door three doors down opened it for Maryk and Reilly. They entered a kitchen area with a larger room beyond. The door closed behind them and they were sufficiently alone.

Maryk stripped off his respirator. Reilly broke open the seal across his chest and with a gasp of relief pushed the hood piece back over his head. The suit collapsed to the carpet and he stepped out of it.

“Seven years of med school,” Reilly said. The tension of the situation had short-circuited his usual midwestern agreeableness. “Seven years of med school — for this? We’ve been going out of our minds here.”

“I was detained.”

“I thought they’d bust in at any moment.”

Maryk moved into the living area. “You should have more faith in their fear. Now what happened?”

Reilly walked inside ahead of him. “Everything’s been preserved, everything recorded on disk. The apartment and the hallway, everything.”

Rattan shades drawn over the windows glowed brown. The main room was arranged around a media center with a monitor and console set into sturdy wire shelving. There was a black leather couch and a floor lamp in one corner and twin black canvas director’s chairs in the other. A large bookcase was built into the near wall. It was full of pop culture memorabilia from the turn of the century — books, posters, glossies, action figures, magnets, mugs, lunch boxes, pins, cels, phone cards, video cassettes. Lancet owned and operated a nostalgia boutique for tourists in the Underground Mail of downtown Atlanta.

“You’ve never been up here,” Reilly said.

Maryk shook his head. “Where is he?”

“The bedroom. We took a liver temp which set death at about midnight, right after he got in from work. Boone’s in there now. Haven’t touched him otherwise.”

Reilly was calming down now and the eagerness was returning to his moon-shaped face. “We breezed by his shop at the Underground Mail around eleven and everything was fine. Followed him back home here like any other night and watched him go in. All routine. He put on the lamp and the light in the bedroom window as always.”

“That’s it?”

“There’s nothing missing as far as we can see. He draws his salary every other Thursday and of that takes just twenty in paper, so there’s never any hard currency lying around. Everything that isn’t tied up in his store he spends on more of the same collectible junk, and obviously, all of that is still here.”

“How did you find him?”

“He didn’t open the store this morning. We tried a phone call to wake him up. We tried a lot of things before we came in. He was always punctual. Made our part easy. None of it makes any sense.”

“Where’s the bedroom?”

Reilly led him through the connecting hallway. The bed was queen-sized and neatly made. A rattan shade drawn down over the room’s only window lifted and fell against the sill as the bedroom sighed. The breeze stirred the coppery smell of blood.

Lancet was a trim thirty-three-year-old white male with sandy brown hair. He lay facedown across the peach comforter with his head and shoulders falling off the side and the knuckles and backs of his hands curled on the thin white mat covering the floor. He was nude except for athletic socks. Discarded clothes lay in a pile against one wall.

Both wrists had been slit lengthwise. Dry brown blood soaked the white mat and also a wood-handled steak knife lying between Lancet’s curled hands.

Maryk stepped back. The shock of the suicide momentarily eclipsed his anger at seeing four years of work thrown away. The instrument choice seemed particularly crude.

“A steak knife,” he said.

Reilly nodded. “I know.”

The weight of the body upon the mattress had shrugged down the comforter so that the sweat-stained tops of the pillows showed. Maryk went to the heap of clothing across the room and sorted through the pile with his right foot. A vintage pair of black Levi’s jeans lay below a white pair of briefs. Both were turned inside out.

“No sign of a struggle, forced entry?” Maryk said.

Reilly said, “None that we can see.”

“And no one was following him. You’re certain of that.”

“Lancet had no enemies,” Reilly said. “Not that he had any friends either. He didn’t have anybody. Except us, and that he never knew.”

Boone rose before the dresser. He was wire-haired and older than Reilly. “This is too much,” he said. “We’ve moved out of the gray area now. Observation, surveillance: fine, okay.” He pointed to the bed. “That’s a corpse there.”

The loss frustrated Maryk as much as it troubled him. “You were to watch him,” Maryk said. “You were to monitor him and to make certain that he remained in Atlanta, and that he lived comfortably. But above all you were to make certain, absolutely certain, that no harm came to him. That he remained viable and healthy.”

Reilly and Boone looked at each other as men who have worked long hours together will. “What did you expect?” Boone said. “This guy was haunted. He was a ghost, and, he knew it. He lived for the past. Look at this.”

There were display shelves next to the closet doors and Boone began pulling items off them. A sky blue box reading WINDOWS ’95. A Frasier mug. An unopened foil pack of Beavis and Butt-head playing cards. A Lost World lunch box. An Entertainment Weekly guide to The X-Files. Stacks of old VHS video cassettes. A red ribbon pin.

“Pull all the phone taps,” Maryk said. “Unwire his tablet. Then declare a Biohazard 3 and go through all the motions. Bring him out in a covered pod and get BioCon going on the hallway and the rest of the building. We want the neighbors inconvenienced as much as possible; it will lend legitimacy. Write up a death certificate, nothing too exotic, then contact his sister in Louisiana. Make certain she gets anything of value you find here.”

Boone folded open the closet doors and pulled out a vinyl storage bag from among Lancet’s personal effects. He drew the zipper down on a green canvas jacket with white sleeves and white snaps and a twilled green-and white collar. The face of a bulldog was sewn over the right breast and a white capital letter P over the left. Script stitching beneath the dog face read: Plainville Class of ’00.

“How’s this for nostalgia,” said Boone.

Maryk only frowned. “You may dispose of that.”

Breakfast, in a whirlwind. Two slices of broccoli and olive pizza pulled cold from her artfully magneted refrigerator, munched in the bathroom as she pulled on clothes from a pile on the floor and simultaneously willed her chopped hair into order. At that speed, it was easy to ignore the blotchy wall stains and flaking white paint, to shirk the general impression that the tiny bathroom was, like so many other things in Melanie Weir’s life, collapsing in on her. She had willfully overslept. Responsibility was no longer a viable deterrent to sleep. Each morning she could find fewer and fewer reasons to get out of bed.

She had once worked with a girl who had a scandalous habit of waking up in her bedroom with total strangers. Melanie did much the same thing, except that for her, the lingering scent of a regrettable evening was not cologne and other smells of a man, but turpentine and linseed oil, on her hands and her fingers, and rising out of the coffee cans and mayonnaise jars set on her windowsill like cocktails left out overnight.

She had this weird thing about painting: She had no real love for the art, and no training whatsoever, and yet once every few months, always late at night and often when the moon was full, she answered this inexplicable urge to take brush in hand and fill up a blank canvas. They all started out as masterpieces in her mind, as the painting would reveal all the things about herself she could never understand. But then the next morning she awoke to an unfinished landscape of grotesque images that was incomprehensible even to her.

Each was a variation on a theme. All involved blood, such as lakes or waterfalls of blood, set in lurid but desolate landscapes, populated by tiny people wandering around naked or in torn clothes, and bizarre, wolflike beasts with carrion in their grinning teeth, moving through sunless shadows cast by inscrutably deformed trees. These were not Holiday Inn-quality paintings, she knew. One image common to each work was that of a white-haired man whose face was always obscured. Dead center in her latest garish composition, the man was kneeling without reflection over a boiling reservoir of blood.

Dressed in a crushed velvet jersey and loose jeans, she came back into the bedroom and faced the painting. As a glimpse into her subconscious, this bizarre expression of angst was at the very least unsettling. She took the canvas down off her cheap metal easel and set it on the floor, facing the wall, then went to search for her keys.

Melanie lived in a tiny two-room apartment that was a well of voices. The broad windows of her apartment faced the broad windows of the next building of apartments, linked to her building on either side, three planes of windows and bleached bricks rising. Through her open, breezeless windows droned the jumbled voices, television clamor, and slamming doors of various other lives. She could make out only a sliver of sky as she looked up from her windows, though she had a terrific view of the accumulated trash tossed from the windows to the asphalt pen below. The Allston-Brighton neighborhood of Boston was a cat box for university students. Many a night she was awakened by the delicate sound of a person or persons relieving themselves off the roof.

It didn’t have to be this way. Melanie had been taking one of her fearsome canvases out to the trash one morning when a middle-aged man who struck her as a college professor stopped her at the curb. He saw the painting and expressed an interest in purchasing it, but Melanie gave it to him for free. The man insisted on taking her name and address, claiming that if the painting appealed to his “employer,” perhaps some future arrangement could be made. She said sure and gave him a fake address and went on her way. A few days later, a money order drawn on an Atlanta bank in the amount of five hundred dollars was slipped underneath her door, with a note requesting more paintings as they became available. Since that time, whenever she was low on funds and had another canvas lying around, she would contact this gentleman to arrange a sale. Neither he nor his employer ever identified themselves, but if some eccentric wanted to pay for her repulsive paintings — her imagination had conjured a dotty old geezer, like a backwoods Citizen Kane, squirreling her canvases away next to his fishing line collection and carton upon carton of artificial limbs — who was she to turn him down? Twice her secret patron had, in writing, offered to relocate her to Atlanta and install her in an artist’s loft there. But Melanie was not born yesterday. Besides, she had no real control over when she painted, or what her mind told her to draw.

The heat rising through the well obliterated most rain and snow, and the depth of the pit defeated direct sunlight, so that the weather, when she went outside, was always a surprise. She found her keys and ran down four flights of stairs, pizza crust in hand, to the glass front door webbed to obscurity with cracks left from a year-old shooting. It was a cold, early December morning.

She glanced up and down her narrow, curving street before starting to the corner, and saw no one suspicious. But the people who were following her rarely appeared so close to her own building.

Her bag slapped against her side as she ran along the Commonwealth Avenue median after a streetcar, catching it and boarding and moving between two empty seats, choosing instead to stand. No one had followed her inside. The train started and she stood holding the overhead bar, rocking along, pretending not to be scanning the faces of the other riders, and resisting the sleeplike pull of mass transit funk.

The B line trolley below Kenmore Square, the one on which she was traveling, ran between the area’s two largest universities. She was surrounded by students, all unfinished faces and soft hands, knapsacks slumped at their feet and modishly colored tablets tucked under their arms. The most fashionable kids wore hospital shirts or bruise-colored eye shadow, with plastic hospital bracelets dangling off their wrists. “I’ll” was in. “Unhealthy” was the rage. It was evidently a fashion statement about the diseased world they stood to inherit. Melanie had the look herself, in her build and the dark circles under her eyes, only she did not share the sentiment; she came by her disease-chic naturally. One healthy-looking man in the second car, older and well-dressed in a simple suit, stood out from the rest; his only concession was an inconspicuous pair of latex gloves, which, when riding on a public subway, was not a bad idea. The rest all looked like children to her twenty-four-year-old eyes, and she could feel her days of scamming student discounts coming to an end. Four years of being a dedicated dropout, of auditing her life, had earned her no credits, no degrees, no nothing. She was four years’ poorer and on the brink of expulsion from the university of her own making.

At the Brighton Avenue intersection the doors folded open and she stepped down with the others, passing in front of the blunt nose of the train to the rail tracks on the other side. The change in acoustics from the trolley to the outside street amplified the ringing that was constant in her head: a flat, mantric tone sapping 60 percent of the hearing in her right ear. At certain times, such as right now, the blare rose so intensely in her head that nothing short of stopping and pressing a hand to her ear would ease it. Others from the streetcar moved around and away from her as she waited. She felt the rumbling of the tracks, but did not make sense of it in time.

She was struck from behind and thrown forward sprawling onto the cement apron. She had been tackled, knocked off the track median toward the street. As she tumbled, she saw a flurry of arms and knees, most of them her own.

Steel wheels screeched as a B trolley burst behind her. The harsh, sudden noise was deafening to her keening ears, and stunned, she jerked back onto her knees.

The well-dressed man from the second trolley car was behind her now, having rolled from the force of his impact half out onto Commonwealth Avenue. An automobile skidded to a stop, curtseying just inches from his tight shoulder.

Her handbag had slipped to her side. She groped for the snap and thrashed around inside for her mace, pulling it out and thumbing the trigger. A fine steroid mist escaped. It wasn’t her Mace at all: It was her bronchodilator, and with a grunt she flung the inhaler aside.

Then she realized what had actually happened. The well-dressed man hadn’t attacked her at all. He had shoved her out of the path of the inbound streetcar. He had saved her life.

“Hey!” she yelled after him. But the stranger never looked back. She saw the soles of his shoes and his gloved hands pumping as he raced away, and by the time she got to her feet he was down a side street and gone.

Very quickly she had her bag back in hand. People were staring at her, and a college kid wearing a powder blue surgeon’s cap stepped forward and handed Melanie back her inhaler, asking if she was all right. She snatched it out of his blue-bandaged hand and rushed blindly across the street while the traffic was still stopped.

She went a city block with tears stinging her eyes, apartment stoops and storefronts blurring past her. At the corner she ducked into the doorway of a dry cleaners and she faced her frail reflection in the steamed window as she tried to catch her breath. Cranberry, that was the color she had regrettably dyed her hair, short to her jaw on the sides and flat against her small head like sauce poured over an eggshell. She looked like a punked-out corpse. No combination of clothing or patterns could improve upon her implike frame. She was a mess.

She glanced back up the avenue and no one seemed to be following or staring at her any longer. Her damaged lungs heaved and burned. She took out her inhaler and took a deep, soothing hit, and felt her lungs begin to expand.

Just keep moving, she thought. As long as she kept moving forward, the worst they could do was force her sideways.

The appointment she was running late for was at the Allston-Brighton Parish Clinic, a busy, modern brick office building located across from a Middle Eastern restaurant, half a block down Harvard Avenue. Only a gynecology appointment could round out that most enjoyable morning. Dr. Ursula Freeley’s office was not listed in the lobby directory, nor was there a plaque on her second-floor door. But like a horse returning to the corral, Melanie’s reproductive organs knew the way.

The waiting room was always empty. The window was open and the receptionist, a different woman than last time, smiled up at her and spoke with a light southern accent. There was never a wait. Melanie was called immediately and shown into the examining room.

Light choral music playing inside did nothing for her, and she remained fraught with the chaos of the street. Water helped to calm her down. As directed, she was drinking glassfuls from two plastic pitchers in order to fill her bladder and thereby raise her pelvic organs for an impending ultrasound. Melanie suffered from endometriosis, a condition whereby stubborn endometrial tissue clung to her insides rather than being voided by her damaged body each month. It had been described to her as “rust” on her ovaries, and could lead to the development of painful cysts which, if untreated, could then lead to tumors. There was no cure, only a choice of two treatments. The first was pregnancy. Melanie’s laughing jag at Dr. Freeley’s first suggestion of this three years before had prompted a memorable sneezing fit. The other was a laparotomy, a mildly invasive surgical procedure whereby a viewscope was inserted into the navel and a tool was inserted through the abdominal cavity to scrape the uterus clean. Her ovaries were incorrigible and had already demanded the procedure four times. Her pale-as-dough bikini line — “bikini” used in the purest hypothetical sense here — was marked with four slashing pink incision scars facing her indented navel, like the constellation of whatever cursed sign she had been born under. Would the fifth, which she dreaded, cross the first four, thereby completing a set?

She heard the doctor’s footsteps out in the hall, the way a deadbolt must feel when it hears keys jingling. Dr. Freeley was businesslike and tall. She was humorless, but as with any good doctor, she had a quiet, confident air that allowed Melanie to tell her things she told no one else. She was also beautiful, with a cool, perfect elegance about her which struck Melanie as fundamentally unjust. Gynecologists, of all women, should not be someone you might lose your date to at a party.

“No examination,” Melanie reminded her.

Dr. Freeley set down her chart and wheeled over the blue machine, agreeing with a nod. “Just pictures this time.”

Melanie unbuckled her belt and slipped her jeans halfway down over the bony knobs of her waist. She removed her jersey and lay back, sliding her shirt up past her prominent ribs, revealing the scrawny torso of a teenage anorexic.

Dr. Freeley said, “How have you been feeling?”

“Never better,” Melanie answered.

“No weight gain, I see. Ninety-two pounds. You’re eating?”

“Let’s see. Cheeseburgers for dinner last night. Chicken wings for dessert. Pizza for breakfast, and I’m already hungry again. Am I on heroin?”

Dr. Freeley casually touched Melanie’s waist with her latex hands, looking merely interested, not concerned. “Just an overactive metabolism,” she decided.

Dr. Freeley slathered gel on Melanie’s bare stomach and her abdomen bucked against the coolness. Melanie often wondered how much Dr. Freeley knew about her medical past, such as the damage to her lungs. There was something in the way she treated Melanie, much like a child, and in the fact that she had never asked the origin of the other, numerous scars, proud and jagged and slashing Melanie’s belly and chest like surgical graffiti, that had gradually raised Melanie’s suspicions over time.

“Arch your back more.”

The ultrasound examination was mercifully brief. Later, after relieving the swollen balloon of her bladder in the connecting bathroom and toweling off the goop, Melanie noticed dust in the small sink. She ran water which lifted and swirled the grime into dark streaks and whisked them away down the drain, leaving a gray ring. The soap dispenser, she noted, was full; new. That bathroom had not been used in days.

She returned to the greater examining room where Dr. Freeley waited, as always, to take her blood. Melanie’s mind ran on as she watched Dr. Freeley work over her arm. Why the need for so much blood? How much did she need for testing? Melanie studied Dr. Freeley as Dr. Freeley studied her, until the room began to spin. Melanie lost count around the sixth or seventh tube.

“Just one more,” said Dr. Freeley. “You haven’t asked about the ultrasound.”

“Right,” Melanie nodded. Because she knew the answer already.

“The ovarian adhesions are back again. I don’t know why the hormone pills aren’t working. We’re going to have to schedule another procedure.”

Melanie nodded, drifting. “Or else become pregnant. Don’t leave out that option.”

Dr. Freeley finished and bandaged her arm. “I take it you’re between boyfriends?”

“That’s a generous way of putting it. But who needs romance when you’ve got adventure?”

“What about work?”

“A part-time job. With full-time hours. I guess I’m between careers, too. Or between unemployments. Can I ask you a question about these hormone pills?”

Dr. Freeley was placing stickers on the thin tubes of blood. “Yes?”

“Any side effects? Drowsiness, for example? I’m sleeping all the time.”

“There shouldn’t be.”

“Or my inhaler? Confusion, maybe? Paranoia?” The flicker of interest in Dr. Freeley’s eyes made Melanie retreat. “Should I worry about operating any heavy equipment?”

Dr. Freeley said, “You seem concerned.”

“Oh, no. I guess I’m just between lives.”

She held Melanie with a flat, probing gaze. “Sit tight,” she said. “I’ll get you some orange juice.”

She carried off the tray of blood tubes. As soon as the door closed, Melanie grabbed the side of the bed and rolled off. Her shoes clapped against the floor, legs wobbling as she reached out for the examining room counter and pulled herself to it. She swiped the metal basin with her finger. Her fingertip turned gray with cotton-fine dust. An unused examining room sink. No name on the office door. The different receptionist every visit. The always empty waiting room. Melanie turned and reached back for the bed, waveringly, hoisting herself back on top of it just as Dr. Freeley returned.

Melanie slurped the juice rudely. This was after sniffing it.

Dr. Freeley monitored her blood pressure until satisfied. “Two weeks, then,” she said. “For another look. A full examination this time. Then we’ll decide.”

“What if it’s some virus?” Melanie said.

Dr. Freeley looked at her closely. “Some what?”

“A virus. Causing my ovarian rust.”

“We know exactly what it is.”

There was nothing in Dr. Freeley’s face, but instead of backing off again, this time Melanie pushed forward. “I was reading about this hospital in South Carolina,” she said, “Some outbreak there that killed all the patients.”

Dr. Freeley now seemed impatient. “As I understand it, those patients were diagnosed with Waterhouse-Friderichsen syndrome. Classic acute meningococcal meningitis caused by a bacterium, not a virus. Sudden fevers, neck stiffness, dizziness, a coma within hours, kidney hemorrhaging, and then death. Do you think you have that?”

“You know a lot about viruses.”

“One has to these days.” Dr. Freeley slowly folded her arms. “We’re not heading toward another episode, are we? You trying to check yourself into a clinic, claiming phantom symptoms of some exotic disease?”

These words shamed Melanie. She was much better than that now.

“Things are happening to me,” she said quietly, all at once. “I can’t explain them.”

“What things?”

“People. Watching me. On my way to work. Different places.”

“First of all,” Dr. Freeley said. “Who?”

“I don’t know. My mail too, I think. My phone. I was jumped on my way over here.”

“You were what?”

“No, it was okay. One of the people following me around saved my life.” Then Melanie thrust out her arms for her gynecologist to see. “Pinpricks,” she said. “Small ones, other than yours. None right now, but sometimes I find them — as though I’ve been jabbed, as though...”

The look on Dr. Freeley’s face stopped Melanie.

“I’m not just being paranoid about this,” she insisted. “Honestly — it’s not like my life is so empty that I have to make things up. I mean, my life is empty, but I would never...” She trailed off. As she shook her head, chemically ruined hair shimmied around her ears. “And then, sometimes, after it happens — after I wake up — I feel as though I’ve been handled.”

“Handled?”

“Tampered with. Examined.”

Dr. Freeley watched her with a silent concern that became intimidating. Melanie was starting to feel the table beneath her, and was again aware of the music playing faintly. The blood loss; she couldn’t believe what she had been saying. She recalled the gray dust in the sinks and realized she should shut up.

She had never told anyone about having survived Plainville, and by merely considering turning loose this great secret, Melanie realized how truly desperate she was for help — and she was scared.

She talked her way out of the office somehow, not able to think clearly again until she was on the street outside the clinic and trying to figure out which way to go. She eyed the patients coming and going from the lobby, scanning for familiar faces, but soon gave that up. She watched the sky for falling pianos as she, picked her way along Harvard Avenue toward work. Ninety-eight percent of the time she was so careful. So why was it that these 2-percent screw-ups continued to define her life?

Maryk awoke from his cascade slumber wearing yesterday’s clothes. He felt depleted. The cascade was like the digestive torpor following an unimaginably heavy meal.

He sat up on his office couch with his head in his hands. Freeley entered behind a knock. She was used to his cascades. He had only to tell her the cause.

“Pearse,” he explained. “Most of the night.”

“How bad is he?”

“Improved. But don’t look so disappointed. He’s dying all right.”

Maryk rose and crossed to his desk chair. His office was a small room on the top floor of Special Pathogens Building Fifteen. His black bag rested on a windowsill and his tablet sat alone on big desk. There was no printer. Paper was unsanitary. It was a vector and if handled improperly could break the skin and even breach some gloves.

Freeley’s auburn hair was tied back. She wore a beige blouse and cream pants and there was a quiet strength evident in her confident manner and relaxed hands as she stood between Maryk’s desk and the door.

“You’re here to update me on Lancet,” he guessed.

She began. “First, I went through the possessions we kept from his condo and did trace pulls. Nothing there. I ran a laser over all contact surfaces, such as the knobs on the front door. The outside handle was covered with Lancet’s prints, while the inside appeared to have been wiped clean. Faint prints remain on the inside door face, however, and are Lancet’s.”

Maryk stopped her there. “What do you know about fingerprints?”

“From various texts. Lancet’s fingertips had some very distinct whorls. It’s simple enough if you’ve got an argon-ion laser.”

“Of course,” he said. Nothing Freeley did could surprise him. “So if an unknown got inside the condo, they were invited in.”

“So it would appear. Still, there was no sign of any struggle, and Reilly and Boone did indicate some level of depression on Lancet’s part.”

“That’s their opinion,” Maryk said. “Go on.”

“Bathroom floor mat. One partial sneaker impression, common tread, flat and narrow, unisex brand. Size nine for men, eleven for women. Lancet was a nine, but this is a modem tread and doesn’t match any vintage pairs in his closet. I followed up with a rather unscientific weight experiment, having different people step on the same mat and then measuring their impressions. Best estimate: one hundred ten to one hundred twenty pounds. I ran it a few times to be certain. Lancet weighed one-fifty-seven.”

Maryk was feeling revived now. “What would a one-hundred-and-fifteen-pound person be doing in Lancet’s bathroom?”

“Running hot water. I found an unridged smudge consistent with a gloved palm on the faucet handle. We pulled the traps and treated them with a chemical and it came up as Lancet’s blood. This means nothing — he could have cut himself shaving months ago.”

Maryk said, “You treated the traps with a chemical?”

Freeley shrugged. “Information is the cheapest commodity. You can access everything you need to know about flying to Venus and back. It’s having the resources that counts.”

“I’m impressed,” he said.

“You’re supposed to be. Finally, Lancet himself I believe I’ve found a pinprick in post. A tiny premortem breach along the base of the hairline, just back of the lateral surface of the neck, and well hidden. But, toxicologically, his system is clean.”

“A needle stick.” Maryk’s mind ran back to the footprint. “Medical personnel?”

“Impossible to tell. Consider the wrist lacerations. Two deep, neat incisions without any hesitation marks. Depressed or not, he was serious about destroying himself and causing some pain in the process. And it is a messy procedure for someone else to perform, with the rest of the place showing otherwise clean.”

“But an unmatched sneaker print in the bathroom. A palm print at the sink. A pinprick.”

“These are unexplained. And then there is Blossom.”

“What about her?”

“I had hoped to resolve this before coming to you with it. We lost her yesterday. This is not unusual, as you know. It’s difficult trailing someone who doesn’t seem to know where she’s going herself. But we activated the trace on her car, and late yesterday pinpointed it in a garage across from the CNN Center downtown.”

“Near the church.”

Freeley nodded. “Naturally.”

The Enterprise Church was a cult movement derived from the works of twentieth-century science fiction writer Gene Roddenberry and popular Star Fleet conventions. Its members awaited the coming Rendezvous whereby an alien landing party would arrive on Earth to mete out justice for their murdered comrade, Jesus Christ. Blossom had been a devoted follower ever since her recovery.

Freeley said, “She wasn’t there, but a member said some of them were out recruiting, or whatever they call it, for their church’s ten-year Star Date anniversary gathering here in Atlanta, this New Year’s Eve.”

Maryk frowned. “Then Blossom remains unaccounted for? What about Milkmaid?”

Freeley shrugged dismissively. “Milkmaid is fine, the same.”

“You’re certain?”

“I saw her yesterday. Mystified as ever. Paranoid, hypochondriacal. She nearly walked into a Boston streetcar yesterday morning. But she is accounted for. Nothing going on there.”

Maryk mulled things over. “Tell me exactly how we lost Blossom.”

“Early-morning traffic. She jumped a red by accident and wriggled away from her tail, then didn’t show up where we had expected her to.”

“I’ve told them a dozen times,” he said, “follow the person, not the car.” Maryk stood. “I want Blossom located by sight. I want that immediately. I want an exact position on her until we can get to the bottom of this Lancet situation.”

Freeley nodded. “I’ll get on it myself”

Melanie stood in the doorway to the narrow alley adjacent to the Penny University. It was raining, nighttime, but early still, and too early to be out already on her second cigarette break. Melanie didn’t actually smoke. Her scarred lungs couldn’t take it. But at the Penny University you had to work eight and a half hours in order to be paid for eight: healthy people were assigned their thirty-minute dinner break in one lump sum, meaning four hours of nonstop customers on either side, whereas nicotine junkies were rewarded for their disgusting habit with a fifteen-minute dinner and three floating five-minute smokers. Smoking breaks were impossible for the managers to monitor, so it was far and away worth the artless deception in order to be able to stretch five minutes of peace and quiet into ten or even fifteen minutes of pure customerless joy. These fake breaks were the only thing that kept her going. The alley was thick with exhaust from the cars on the street, and because of that she wound up sucking in some noxious fumes anyway, but as far as Melanie was concerned, sacrificing long-range health for short-range sanity was really no sacrifice at all.

The Penny University was a four-story brick tower that dominated the wide city corner of Commonwealth and Harvard avenues. It served anything brewed — coffee, tea, beer — and the fare that went with it. Melanie had been employed there as a barista — which, she had come to learn, was Spanish for “coffee jerk” — for a record four straight weeks now.

Her foot propped open the heavy door. At least it was only rain, not snow. The hot scent of coffee breathing behind her had seemed pleasant her first week; now it was like the cumulative sigh of a thousand waitresses, rankling the hair on the back of her head. Unseen Harvard Avenue was crowded at the entrance to the alley, and she could hear young voices laughing and tires whispering against the static of the rain, and see the headlights spraying the brick alley walls. Every university student in Boston spent at least one year living in the Allston-Brighton community of trolleys and alleyways and immigrants, and every one of them drifted like chicly-bandaged zombies into the Penny University for a steaming cup of central nervous system stimulant on a drizzling Friday night.

Her breath misted out into the cold alley air as she hugged her chest over her red apron. Her foot had started to cramp, and just as she was repositioning her hip against the heavy black door, she heard a small noise from the other end of the alley. It was a purposeful thump, like a person kicking a wall. A single yellow safety light shone down upon the narrow car path and narrower curbs where the alley veered rightward and out of her view, dead-ending at the dumpsters. She watched the light for shadows, expecting to see some homeless person come stumbling out, zipping up. Something about the noise had sounded human.

Now there was the slightest odor, in itself not peculiar for that alley, but a scent far different from coffee grounds and turned cream. It struck Melanie as oddly familiar, which only magnified her sense of dread. It smelled like sickness. Melanie did something extraordinary then. She went back in from her five-minute nonsmoking break one minute early.

With the fire door closed to the quiet rain and the vats of trendily flavored beer groaning around her, she felt foolish about her fear and shook it off. Cutting short her sanity-preserving break did not bode well for the rest of the night. She wove a path back through the labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling vats to the work area behind the coffee counter, retying her red apron.

Beverly was working to her right, tamping an espresso filter at the rear of the coffee station. Beverly had mousy blond hair and choppy bangs that clung to the lashes of her sleepy eyes. “You’re back early,” she said over the prep chatter.

“Didn’t want to miss anything.” Melanie lingered there in the shadows of the twin vats, surveying the main floor. The motif inside was neo-gloom, all red neon and shiny black wood and moody shadow over each floor spun out from a central spiral stairway, with lots of nooks and crannies on the upper levels and plenty of ports for charging up student tablets. Bottom line the Penny University was a caffeine bordello for the university smart set.

In Melanie’s varied and vast work experience, wearing out jobs like they were nylons, she had found the sole redeeming quality of a retail or service-oriented position to be the camaraderie found among co-suffering, codependent co-workers. The Penny University, however, stood as the exception to this trench-mentality rule. The microbrewers hated the baristas who hated the pastry chefs and so on down the line.

Customers. Constantly customers. If the absentee owners prayed, they prayed to the God of Precipitation on Weekend Nights. Inclemency meant lines out the doors. Melanie watched the kids stamping off street grime onto the spongy entrance mats and could smell, even over the roasted beans, the wet-winter scent of coat sweat and dank wool; fleecy sheep herding together over boysenberry beer, or triple-foam, triple lattes, or super-steeped, hemp-brewed pots of tea.

As she was watching the crowded entrance, a man stepped in from the rain wearing a simple gray suit, standing out from the rest of the young, pained hipsters. The trunk-necked hand-stampers deferred to his flashed ID, and as the man returned his billfold to his pocket, Melanie saw that he wore latex gloves.

She resisted her overactive imagination as she watched from the shadows of the creaking vats. The man proceeded to the center island supply station, rather than straight into the coffee line or up the spiral stairs to the beer floor and beyond, stopping at the recycled napkins and flavored stirrers, eyeing the wide ground floor and allowing Melanie a good, long look.

It was the well-dressed man from the trolley, the one who had pushed her out of the path of the oncoming streetcar. The shoulders and pant cuffs of his cheap suit were dark with rain. She wondered for a moment if it had been him out in the alley, but realized there was no way he could have gotten back to the entrance so fast.

Two other men, whom she recognized as semiregular customers, rose almost simultaneously on opposite ends of the floor and wandered close to the man in the suit. They were dressed like students, though as she now paid attention to them, she saw that they were definitely older.

A wave like a charge of electricity left her motionless and buzzing.

The dark-haired man from the trolley started to move. He crossed from the center island, scanning the vats as he approached the mess counter. He couldn’t see her there in the shadows. The man appeared concerned.

The other two fanned back out from the center island. Kids near them, as though sensing some sort of trouble, moved out of their way.

The dark-haired one from the trolley skipped the line and went straight to the barista well where the drinks were being prepared. Beverly was foaming up some milk when the man caught her eye. Melanie tried to whisper to her to wait, but the man was too close.

Beverly started toward him with the milk-frothing pitcher in hand. Even with wet shoulders and his drowned-puppy hair, the man was dark and blandly attractive and smiling forwardly, which guaranteed that Beverly would be on her way to help.

They met. Melanie could hear none of it, what with the orders being taken, the click and clatter of spoons and saucers, and the piped-in blues overhead. She watched the man produce his billfold — careful, in a conspicuous way, to display his identification only to Beverly, as though letting her in on something. Some sixth sense must have told him he had an easy mark. Beverly set the hot pitcher on the countertop and pulled down her mouth guard without taking her eyes from his credentials.

Melanie never saw them near her apartment or her work, only on the streets. That was how she was able to keep her sanity about being followed.

“Health” something, he seemed to be saying to Beverly, as in “health matter,” or “health emergency.” Beverly evidently shared his concern, as she was nodding slowly. Melanie began her retreat just as Beverly turned and looked back from the cocoa-powdered counter, her ratty blond bangs twitching over blinking mouse eyes. She appeared to be alarmed, searching the vat spaces, at first not seeing Melanie. Then she did see her there. Melanie shook her head, pleadingly, but Beverly jerked back and elbowed the stainless steel pitcher clatteringly to the floor. The blue tile went white with boiling milk.

Panic, unreasoned and immediate, burst within Melanie, and she turned and took off running. She threaded back through the fat shadows, stumbling and misjudging a turn on the wet floor and careening sharply into one of the vats, her bony shoulder prodding a light boom and her bag strap snagging on a gauge. She nearly ripped her arm off freeing herself, lunging between two copper bellies back toward the red EXIT sign over the side door. She hit the disabled alarm bar with both hands and spilled hard into the slick alleyway, flopping over the wet curb outside and almost failing down. Her momentum carried her into the far brick wall, which she pushed off from, fleeing toward the closed end of the alley.

She stopped at the beginning of the turn, seeing the pallid safety light through the rain and realizing she would be trapped in the dead end. She spun and ran back up the alley, fighting the apron tangling between her legs, past the door to the Penny University as it burst open and the dark-haired man from the trolley splashed out.

“Wait!” he said, reaching for her.

But she was past him, running up the alley toward the street. She went ten or twelve steps before headlights swung in front of her, brightly sweeping the slicked walls as a large car bumped over the corner into the alley, bouncing on its suspension, bearing down upon her. She stopped and threw out her hands, and the car skidded to a stop, fishtailing to the brick wall. The passenger door swung open and barred her only exit. The shadow of a large man emerged.

Her bag. She went into it madly, up to her elbow, fumbling for her Mace.

He closed the car door and stepped forward through the headlights. Behind her, the dark-haired man’s footsteps scuffed off the wet curb.

“Mace,” she whispered crazily, jogging the contents of her bag, and her hairbrush and gum wrappers spilled out onto the tar. She backed sideways from the headlights to the wall, her lungs beginning to contract.

The man from the car strode through the rain-filled beams with a thick, quick leg. He appeared impossibly large before her, his face lost in shadow, the headlights catching his white hair and giving it an odd glow.

White hair.

Her breath left her. Something happened to her then, like a thing opening or unfolding inside her.

She found her inhaler again and flung it away desperately, digging deeper, shaking her bag, backing up against the wet alley wall in his shrinking shadow, dizzy with revelation and a lack of air. She trapped the cylinder in the corner of her bag finally and whipped it out. She fooled with the safety guard over the trigger, fooled with it, fooled with it, then got it free as his shadow fell over her.

His hand closed around her hand and the Mace. She looked up and saw his face then, the cool gray eyes, the plunging nose. It was the face that was always missing from her paintings. Something overturned inside her, a revolution of head and stomach. Her neck bucked as her chest contracted, and she pitched forward.

She vomited. She was gasping for breath, sagging, her legs bowing beneath her as his hand remained around hers, the only thing holding her up.

Behind her, breathless:

Where was she? Outside?

Then, from above — deep, strange, stem:

Sloppy. The last thing we needed was a commotion.

Melanie choked on a hollow groan. Her vision swam as her body went limp. The headlights shining on the man’s black shoes drifted and twisted, and then abruptly stopped twisting, and the dark rain stopped falling all at once.

They returned to the BDC that night and Maryk broke off from the rest and made his way alone to Building Seven. He descended to the subbasement and passed through the five staging rooms into the netherworld of B4.

Stephen’s gurney was pulled away from the aquarium window to the edge of the work counter. His eyes were closed and the white bedsheet rose and fell between the black straps buckled across his chest, waist, and thighs.

Maryk brought up his chart and inspected the six different intravenous lines. He exchanged bags and feed bottles. Stephen’s blood pressure had stabilized and the nitroglycerin drip was no longer warranted. Maryk wondered at Stephen’s unexplainable progress. He prepped a dosage out of an upturned ampule and uncapped a y-valve in Stephen’s right forearm.

Stephen’s red eyes stopped him. He was watching Maryk and Maryk froze with the hypodermic in his hands. Stephen’s eyes were bright. He appeared to recognize Maryk. “Am I dead?” he said.

These were the first words they had exchanged in years.

“You’re in the B4 lab,” Maryk said. “At the BDC.”

Stephen swallowed. Speech was painful. “The lab?”

Maryk nodded. He finished the serum injection. “Safest right now.”

Stephen’s head turned back and forth on the pillow. His range of movement impressed Maryk. He realized that Stephen was shaking his head.

“Not Plainville,” Stephen said hollowly. “Still alive.”

Maryk held the empty ampule for Stephen to see. The label read MILKMAID. “Only because of this.”

“Serum,” he recognized. “Code names.”

“That’s all over now,” Maryk said. “Two of them are dead. Murdered. We don’t know why.”

The muscles in Stephen’s depressed face strained against his flesh. “Why straps?” he said. His hands clutched emptily at his sides.

“To keep you still. I operated.”

“In a lab?” Stephen struggled to raise his head off the pillow. He was becoming agitated. “What have you done to me?” he said.

Maryk located the bottle of morphine over the bed. He followed the feed line down to the dose administrator and doubled the rate of morphine drip. “I saved your life,” Maryk said.

“What have you done to me?” he said again.

Maryk watched Stephen’s breathing deepen and his eyes narrow to slits. Stephen was struggling valiantly to remain awake.

“What have you...”

Maryk remained looking over him until Stephen fell murmuring to sleep.

Melanie rolled over and over and finally she broke out of her fitful sleep. She sat up straight in an unfamiliar bed in a small, unfamiliar room. She was alone. She recognized her work apron and black cardigan sweater, but not the wooden chair and desk they were draped over, nor anything else. She threw back the sheets but was otherwise still dressed.

Panic set in. She rushed out of the bed at once, then fell into the wall and grabbed it to keep from collapsing. Her head. She winced against the blinding throb. She was always reeling, always walking into things, always coming to; she was never already there. She tasted acid in her mouth, and the abduction in the alley came back to her at once.

Margarine sunlight poured through the room’s only window. It was not the cool December sun of Boston. With one hand shading her eyes, she pulled herself toward its warmth and squinted out the window. She was three or four stories up from grass that was postcard green. She saw immense white stone buildings with lush trees all around, and young people strolling the grounds, satchels tossed over their shoulders. Students, of course. They haunted her. For one roseate moment she imagined she was back at Brown, getting ready to go to breakfast with friends, and nothing had happened yet to her family or her body.

She turned from the window. It was a college dormitory room: the empty bookshelves attached to the tawny-colored wood desk, the thumb-sized strips of missing paint scoring the plaster walls where posters once hung. There were two doors, one open and leading to a closet. She rushed to the other door. The knob turned freely under her hand.

The man from the trolley stood quickly out of a small chair across the hallway. Melanie kept a tight grip on the doorknob, blood beating against her head, while he stood awkwardly still. She didn’t think she could make it past him. Even if she did, she had no idea where to go.

“Where am l?” she said.

“Atlanta,” the man said.

She looked up and down the hall. It smelled of socks and hair spray. She said, “No, I’m not,”

He wore an identification tag on his shirt, with his picture and the name PASCO. “There’s a shower down this way,” he pointed. “I’m to take you for a meeting in” — he had a tablet gadget in his hand, and tapped a key — “twenty-five minutes.”

Melanie closed the door on him. She walked back to the foot of the unfamiliar bed and sat down. Sealed moving cartons were stacked near the empty desk, and she was certain, her intuition commingled with despair, that the clothes hanging inside the closet were from her own.

Her right arm felt stiff. She pushed back her shirtsleeve and discovered a small brown bandage taped over the pocket of her elbow. She touched it lightly, then peeled back one adhesive end, pulling up the pad. There was a fresh needle mark over the largest visible vein.

Freeley pointed with a capped surgical marker. “See the blunt force injury here, the parietal lobe, right side of the cranium? The intruder rose up from the backseat and brought an object across like this” — she made a right-handed whipping motion across the front of her body — “incapacitating Blossom. Then she was pulled over the seat back and the incisions were made in both wrists.”

Blossom’s bluish corpse lay facedown atop the stainless steel autopsy table. A rubber block beneath her shoulders arched her neck and shaved head. Cellulite pinches pitted her sagging buttocks and thighs. Her fingers were tipped black.

Freeley wore a scrub gown, mask, sleeve protectors, skullcap, and blue rubber gloves. “The keys were in the ignition of the car,” she continued. “All four doors were locked, with both rear windows rolled down. We got no prints off the door handles or inside panels except glove smudges, which we may have left ourselves. Blossom kept plants in the car, two small spider plants — did you know that? For company. In any case, the plastic pots were still glued to either end of the dash but the plants themselves were gone. Most of the soil was still there, some spilled onto the floorboards.”

“Stolen plants?” Maryk said.

“Could be.”

“You say the rear windows were rolled down. The window in Lancet’s bedroom was open too.”

Freeley nodded and positioned the overhead magnifying lens to illuminate the back of Blossom’s neck. Within the bluish ridges of flaking skin below the hairline was a single red dot breach. Maryk examined it.

“Toxicology again clean,” Freeley added.

Maryk straightened. “It’s not an injection,” he said.

Freeley said, “What do you mean?”

He walked around the end of the table to the other side. He was remembering his meeting with the girl. She had thought they were injecting her with something when in reality they had been pulling her blood.

“I mean they were purposefully bled,” he said. He pointed to the deep incisions on Blossom’s upturned wrists. “We assumed these murders were made to resemble suicides. Each, in fact, was an exsanguination.” Maryk pointed to the needle stick magnified on Blossom’s neck. “This is a blood pull. Lancet and Blossom were sampled before their deaths. The bleeding was meant to cover up the crime of the stolen blood: two homicides to mask two petty thefts.”

“But who would want their blood? And why? No one knew about the project.”

“Someone knew.”

“We were watching them all the time.”

“Not all the time. Nor were we watching for other people watching them. We were more worried about being seen ourselves.”

“The only problem with that is: Their blood was good. It was beneficial, life-saving.”

Maryk nodded. “Exactly. And to go to these lengths, to steal these lives from us, implies desperation — not in the act, but the impetus. The motivation. Who would so desperately want a look at their blood? And why?”

“Someone close, you’re thinking. Someone in Special Path.”

“No. I can account for all of my people’s whereabouts at any given time. It’s someone outside the project. Maybe it ties in to Orangeburg somehow, I don’t know.”

Freeley said, “What about the girl?”

“We keep her close, see who comes looking for her.” He was thinking back to the lecture hall again. “I think we may have underestimated her. She may not be as malleable as her psych profile led us to believe.”

He went back around the table near Freeley and set his tablet on top of her cutting board. He opened the screen and brought up the image of the unfinished painting they had recovered from Melanie Weir’s apartment.

“What do you see?” Maryk said.

Freeley looked at it disparagingly over the top hem of her mask. “One of her crazed paintings.”

Maryk was patient. “Look again.”

She crossed her arms within her surgical gown and stood in judgment. “I see a big mess,” she said. “I see garish colors: stormy red, smoky black. A dead, sick yellow.”

Maryk pointed. “What is this?”

“That’s a man. He’s sick. He’s kneeling.”

“He’s praying. And that?”

“A crevasse, or a gorge. But the colors and the shadows are all wrong — the light doesn’t match. It’s either a mistake or an optical illusion. Then that black valley below. A mangy wolf lapping at a lake of blood.”

“And that?”

“That’s the reflection of a man,” she said. “His face is hidden. Except for his white hair.” She stood quietly a moment. She was beginning to see. “It’s you,” she said.

“And here?”

“You’re squeezing a royal purple fist. Dripping blood into the lake of blood.”

“And here?”

“Thin people, naked. Walking with crutches and splints on a dirt road that becomes an oak tree. Those clouds in the sky are like milky eyes.” She nodded grudgingly. “It’s almost like she knew we were running her.”

“She never knew,” Maryk said. “She felt, because she has that extra sensibility. Maybe she remembered a little.”

Freeley picked up a trephine from among the scalpel, forceps, scissors, butcher’s knife, and Stryker saw set out on her cutting board. “She was your favorite,” Freeley said. “Wasn’t she. The artist.”

“She was the most interesting case.”

Freeley steadied Blossom’s bared scalp with a gloved hand. The circular blade of the trephine started with a whine. “She’s just a guinea pig,” Freeley said.

Her derision surprised him. Maryk collapsed his tablet and returned it to his bag as she began to cut. Freeley was a good doctor and a good investigator but she was not an artist. It limited her.

He thought of wide-open spaces. He thought of breezes across acres of pastel tulips and pictured himself in the branches of the oak tree that had cooled the house of his childhood in spring. He conjured up the robin’s eggshell of a cloudless sky overhead and started his mother down the long path from their front door to the mailbox. He watched the cross-breeze toss hair around her face. Proudly he watched her hands feel for the mailbox. It was empty and she rested a moment before starting back. She turned so that the tulip breeze washed her hair from her face. She was beautiful and she was blind He dropped down from the tree branch and surprised her at the door with the mail in hand and then followed her inside for lunch.

“You wouldn’t last one night in here.”

Stephen’s voice pulled Maryk back into the B4 lab. He was looking out the aquarium window into the larger subterranean basement of Building Seven. The door that led to the stairs that led above ground was six doors away.

Maryk detested his claustrophobia. He released his grip on the sill and his breathing came back under control. He could at least work through the early strains of a cascade.

He turned and found Stephen examining his withered hands. Stephen was vigilant for any evidence of further decay. “I must have nodded off,” Stephen said. He was sitting up on the gurney. He had requested clothes instead of the hospital gown but all Maryk had for him were scrubs.

Maryk moved through the assembled lab equipment back to the B4 computer console. Everything had been networked through the central brain of the lab. Stephen had even agreed to Maryk’s suggestion that Reilly and Boone be brought in as extra pairs of arms and legs.

Stephen’s blood, saliva, urine, sputum, pleura, and skin samples sat in disposable flasks along the counter like a row of small plastic trophies. “We were talking about the virus,” said Maryk. “How it is not acting the way a virus acts.”

“Yes,” said Stephen. “Not moving like a virus moves. Not burning as a virus burns. Where was the flint in Orangeburg? The spark at any of the earlier breaks?”

The language of disease was the language of poetry and the metaphor for viruses was fire. Plainville was smoldering in Stephen. He sat on the gurney like a burn victim with darkly bruised patches of skin that looked singed. Ragged patches of hair hung off his flaking scalp. He looked weaker and more ill and yet continued to grow stronger despite medical evidence to the contrary.

“Could it be something unusual in the environment?” he continued. “Common to all these places?”

Maryk said, “We’ve tested and retested many times. I’d like to think we didn’t miss anything.”

“In Africa, it was simple exposure and transmission.”

“But here it doesn’t die out with its victims,” Maryk said. “We need to know why there aren’t any footsteps between outbreaks.”

“Because it’s smart. This is a virus that somehow knows what’s good for it. An arsonist virus: one that discriminates, that knows what it is doing.”

“Viruses don’t think the way we think. They survive. That’s all.”

“They don’t commit murder either. Your survivors. You agree that was a directed assault against your project.”

Maryk moved away from the console. “I’ve already ruled out bioterTorism,” he said.

“If somebody with a vial of Plainville only wanted to spread terror, they would drop it off the Empire State Building. They would slip it into any major airport and uncork it there.”

“Exactly.”

“Unless.” Here Stephen paused. “Unless terror wasn’t their ultimate goal.”

“A terrorist not satisfied with terror.” Maryk frowned. “What, then?”

“Infection. No politics. No ideology, no religion. Just pure infection. The destruction of the human race.”

“A maniac. Frightening thought, but there is one thing you’re forgetting: Plainville is unmanageable. It is impossible for anyone to handle it without risking infection themselves. If we couldn’t work with it safely here at the BDC, who could?”

“You could.”

Maryk stopped and looked at him.

“I mean only that nothing is impossible,” Stephen continued. “You could, so there could be another. Say you were eyeing a particular target, the destruction of the human race. And you had a weapon: Plainville. What would you need to do first?”

Maryk said, “I would need to test it.”

“A dry run. Each time Plainville emerges again in an outbreak, we hold our breath. And each time it dies out in containment, leaving us with nothing, and we congratulate each other on having dodged another bullet. This virus reemerges in already isolated situations. What I’m saying is: What if this is no accident? What if there is some kind of mind at work behind this Plainville? What if it is depending upon our containing its spread so that it can learn from each outbreak: learn how the mutations are working, learn the most efficient modes of infection, and gather intelligence on how we are working to fight it.”

“Learn how?” Maryk said. “We’ve kept the outbreaks hidden from the public.”

This was not an impediment to Stephen’s theory. “That would only make them angry, and more dedicated.”

Maryk shook his head. “You’re talking about Plainville like it’s something you can get at a drugstore. This is an organic virus, not engineered biowarfare. We know where it came from — a cave in central Africa. No one planted it there. We know we buried it, and burned it out for good.”

Stephen did not respond to that. He was quiet and Maryk watched him and waited for him to speak.

“Maybe we didn’t bury it all,” he said. He was looking red-eyed at the floor. It was difficult to read any emotion on Stephen’s fading face. “You remember the girl with the vitiligo who followed me around the camp?”

Maryk did. “Vaguely.”

“She was healthy, Peter. She was clear at the time; I tested her. She was begging me for help, and the jets were coming. Your jets. I had packed an ampule of the PeaMar serum we were working on at the time. The compound was sound, I knew it was—”

Maryk stiffened in the noisy atmosphere of B4. “Stephen,” he said sharply.

“I transfused it,” he said. “I dosed her and sent her out of the camp.”

Maryk stood staring. He was furious and silent.

“You gave me no choice,” Stephen said. He would not look up. “But now I keep thinking-maybe she contracted the virus somehow, between the time I tested her and the time I injected her.”

“Wait a minute,” Maryk said. “This was six years ago. This was a girl. She never turned up again. This patient in bay twenty-six, the one you think stuck you — he was a man.”

“He was.”

“There was no patient in bay twenty-six at Orangeburg. I checked. Twenty-six was an empty. bed.”

“Then how did he get to my parents’ home in Amagansett?”

“Stephen,” Maryk said.

“He was there. I saw him, he was walking around.”

“You said you saw your parents, too.”

“He was different. He opened the window. I think he was at my tablet.”

Maryk grew impatient. “It can’t be. People don’t last days, never mind months or years, with Plainville. Either they die right away, or we get to them early enough with the Milkmaid serum and they survive.”

“You’ll check on it, Peter?”

“I’ll look into it,” Maryk said. “But this is no phantom. This is no ghost. Someone murdered two of Plainville’s only three survivors — and would have eliminated all three if we hadn’t rolled up Milkmaid just in time.”

“Rolled her up?” Stephen looked up at him. “I thought she came to Atlanta to help.”

Maryk said, “Not exactly.”

“Tell me you haven’t locked her away somewhere, Peter.”

“She is staying in an Emory dormitory room. She eats at the school cafeteria. She has no idea how many people I have watching her everywhere she goes. But she is refusing to help.”

Stephen nodded. “And that is why you finally agreed to bring her here.”

“I need her to see what is at stake. She needs to understand that this is life or death.”

The red light flashing over the submarine door indicated movement into the shower room. The nurse was bringing Melanie through.

“Could you turn down the lights?” Stephen said.

Maryk dimmed the overhead bulbs and the shadows deepened on Stephen’s face. Stephen sat up as straight as his gaunt body was able. He appeared nervous.

“What is she like?” he said.

“She hates me,” Maryk said. “You two should have a lot to talk about.”

But Maryk was relieved not to be facing her alone again after their last encounter. He heard movement behind the door. It was pushed open and the pressure in the room changed. Air rushed in. The nurse stepped through the oval doorway and Melanie followed behind.

Maryk had ordered her sealed inside a suit. He was not taking any chances with her health. She kept her head down inside the hood and remained just to the left of the door. The unsashed fabric bagged around her waist and bunched at her knees until the nurse connected her air feed to the ceiling runner. Then Melanie’s suit inhaled.

Her eyes rose gradually. She looked away immediately after first seeing Stephen on the bed. She worked hard to smother her reaction before looking at him again. The shock of seeing this public figure convalescing was exactly what Maryk had wanted.

“Hello, Melanie,” Stephen said.

Her stare at him was interrupted only by a flickered glance at Maryk.

Stephen said, “I wanted to thank you in person. I know this all must be bewildering to you. You were brave to come.”

Stephen’s voice was ripe with enthusiasm. He was good that way.

“Your life is worth more to the human race than mine or even Dr. Maryk’s,” he went on. “There are ways you could help. You could help us by donating your blood. You could help others by meeting with them, by going out into the field.”

Maryk stopped him. “Stephen.”

“She’s looked it in the face, Peter. She’s survived.”

Maryk tried to silence him. “It’s too hazardous. The bug mutates too fast.”

“You said her hemo screens are sound, even with the mutations. She’s curing it. Think of the effect her presence would have on the ill.”

“Stephen — I do not need her going around holding people’s hands.”

A sharp gasp distracted them. It came from the nurse as she reached out toward the girl.

Melanie had split the diagonal seal across her suit. She broke open the folds and flipped the hood back off her head. Her garish hair sprang loose and her eyes were fierce as she glared at Maryk. She took a deep breath and filled her unprotected lungs.

Cyberviruses Section was located two doors down from the STD unit in BDC Building Eighteen, Most CVs were hacker-engineered although there had been incidences of corrupted files breaking off from legitimate programs and mutating “naturally” file to file. The turn-of-the-century Internet boom had corroborated the epidemiological axiom that any surge in population represents a fertile breeding ground for viral incursion. The new ecology of computer technology had engendered indigenous viral activity.

Suzy Lumen, was the co-section head. She was an obese woman of more than 250 pounds and was legally blind. She sat before a semicircular computer console in her office like a priestess divining at an oracle. She wore a loop earphone connected to a chin mike and the fingertips of her right hand explored a flat blue pad that raised screen characters into Braille. Her thickly soled sneakers worked foot pedals beneath the console that controlled her microphone. Suzy Lumen was the human liaison to the DNA-powered Genetech II computer that ran the BDC.

Maryk pulled over a chair and sat at her side. The cascade from his long visit with Stephen made thoughts sound like voices arguing in his head.

“Here’s what I need,” he told Suzy Lumen. “Assume that the director’s tablet had been compromised by some outside interest.” He was trying to be careful with his wording. “What would that mean?”

“Are you asking about Blue files?”

She had a sultry voice that did not match her appearance. Her face was broad and her drooping eyes thick-lidded.

“I’m asking about any sensitive documents loaded into Stephen Pearse’s tablet.”

“Blue files are any reports or internal memoranda generated by any government agency,” she said. “Blue files crash if tapped into illegally. If an unauthorized user attempts to dupe them to an unauthorized server, the Blue worm encryption fouls the offending drive and disables its microprocessor, but not before instructing the modern to dial the FBI.”

“So there is no way someone could duplicate those files.”

“We-ell.” She turned smiling in his general direction. “The National Security Agency instituted Blue to protect sensitive documents from prying eyes and sticky fingers — White House internals, CIA, DOD. But here at the BDC, prying eyes don’t pose much of a threat. Here, the opposite is true: Access and preservation is vital to operation. So, no, you cannot copy files off a tablet. Nor can you print them. But — you can back them up.”

Maryk understood. “By archiving the entire system.”

“Exactly. I have loaded here a working clone of Director Pearse’s tablet, as you recovered it.” She indicated the monitor displaying a list of file names. “If there were any Blue programs, they would have deleted themselves out within fifteen days, as they are self-timed to do. But...” She called up an index card graphic. “A full backup was performed the day before you recovered the tablet.”

Maryk stared at the screen. “So anyone who copied the drive,” he said, “could walk away with an exact replica stored in their own tablet.”

“And someone did,” She whispered a command into her microphone and slid her hand over the Braille pad and Maryk heard a soft male voice whisper into Suzy Lumen’s ear. Numbers appeared on screen. “Full backup creates a register recording the time, date, and chip address of the receiving system.”

“So you’ve got the internal code of the second tablet.”

“That’s it right there. But I already checked. Hailing has been disabled. This tablet is not on the air.”

“Then what about this: Can whoever owns the clone of Pearse’s tablet still access the BDC?”

“Not coded files. There’s a safeguard built in to the director’s tablet to prevent the skeleton key from being duped. But the Genetech still can be dialed into. In fact, it has.”

She muttered commands and massaged the pad and smiled at the wall as the machine murmured into her ear. Maryk knew from his mother that the smile of the blind indicated achievement at least as often as pleasure.

Words appeared on screen. “Your personnel file,” she said.

Maryk glared.

“Accessed and downloaded six days ago,” she said.

“Could it have anything to do with this?” She switched back to Stephen’s tablet and opened a file. “ ‘Investigation-dot-Maryk,’ ” she hand-read. “Emptied, and irretrievable. All the files were typed over before they were dumped.”

“Personnel files aren’t coded?”

“Not at the BDC. No need. Viruses don’t use computers.”

Stephen was right. Someone had archived his tablet while he was in Amagansett. And later that same someone had dialed into the BDC computers looking specifically for information on Maryk. Whoever it was then knew about his immunological strength.

“Can you bring up Pearse’s bank account?” Maryk said.

She did. The last debit transaction was dated the day before Maryk brought Stephen back to the BDC.

“Fuel,” she said curiously.

Maryk read the register. A tankful had been purchased at a Texaco in Trenton, New Jersey, the day before Maryk froze Stephen’s bank accounts. “But how could someone other than Stephen Pearse sign for a thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise on this tablet?”

Suzy Lumen smiled and scrolled to another file and Stephen’s arched signature appeared on screen. Maryk watched her plump fingertips trace it on her read pad. “Signature imprint,” she said. “For generating prescriptions, signing documents. They had Director Pearse’s tablet sign for them.”

Maryk nodded. “What are my options, then?” he said.

“I could cancel the director’s tablet for you right now. That way, if anyone tried to use the duped code to access the Genetech, they would be refused.”

Maryk deliberated. “What if I wanted to preserve my link to this person?”

“Then I can put a sentinel on the Genetech. That would split the signal and trick the user out to me if he tries to come on-line.”

Maryk nodded and stood. “Keep a trace on that tablet,” he told her. “I want to know the minute it taps back in.”

It had been four meals since she’d seen Maryk. Night and day passed uneventfully with her sulking in front of the TV in her room, waiting for him to come, like a vampire, for her blood. Pasco, her shadow from Boston, appeared three times a day to escort her to the Emory college cafeterias for meals. Being held on a college campus seemed to her like poetic justice. Finals had ended and the campus population was dwindling, though she sensed movement around her wherever she went. She was convinced that Maryk had people everywhere, watching her. Inside the cafeteria, the same red-haired custodian mopped a different section of floor at every meal.

Her boundless appetite had returned. She sat that afternoon before a cheeseburger and a plate of chicken-fried steak, starting instead with a thick wedge of apple cobbler. Pasco sat at the next table over, eating and diligently working on something on his tablet. He was intent on what he was reading, gnawing on a sesame breadstick as though it were a pencil.

It bothered her that she hadn’t seen Maryk. She knew he needed her blood, and had expected him to have taken it by now. Later that second day she asked Pasco to take her to see Dr. Pearse, and to her surprise, he did.

A nurse led her through most of the preliminary rooms, then left her, shutting the steel door on the dark shower room before the lab. The walls creaked until the air flow reached a kind of equilibrium and seemed to rush away from her at all points, yet allowed her to breathe. Warnings glowed fluorescently on the door. She wore a mask, goggles, and gloves, but they had not required her to wear one of the body-condom suits. She nodded to herself and struck the switch and the door popped open, sucking forward the swirling air.

Dr. Pearse was right there. He was standing now and leaning on a metal hospital cane. He was walking. Melanie was stunned. His movement was much improved, though he looked no better. In fact he looked worse.

“Hello again,” he said, taking a few mindful steps toward her with his cane. His red eyes bothered her even more now, as they moved more naturally within his head, making him appear all the more unnatural. She caught herself looking for further signs of corrosion, and stopped. She willed herself not to stare, but to relax, relax.

Two men worked behind him in the submarine-type room, both sealed inside blue air suits. Melanie remembered at once what it was to be so feared, to be the object of such passive disgust. It was as though Dr. Pearse were a glowing rock that could only be handled with tongs.

He was so genuinely pleased to see her, she was scared. Seeing Dr. Pearse that way, a dying man up and walking around in front of her, made her think about the wonder blood coursing through her own skinny veins.

She stammeringly asked him how he was, which was brilliant. Next she’d ask a drowning man if the water temperature was okay. But he was enthusiastic, and suddenly she was the one who felt like dying.

“Getting around better,” he said, his voice stronger than before. “How are you?”

Now he was concerned for her. She broke the knot of her arms and moved to the counter for something to lean on. It was all too much suddenly, him being sick and super-pleasant, the sealed room, the swirling oxygen, and the slow-moving blue suits behind.

“I’m all alone,” she said. She meant that she had no one else to talk to.

“As am I,” he said. “Except, of course, for our mutual friend.”

He wore only the vestiges of a smile. Melanie nodded uncomfortably.

“He scares you,” Dr. Pearse said.

She placed her gloved hand on the counter, then pulled it back, then gripped her fingers as though burned. Maryk had succeeded in making a paranoid wreck out of her.

Dr. Pearse went on, “It is extraordinarily rare that a person excels at the very thing they were uniquely created for. Beyond aptitude or ability or talent — I mean a legitimate predisposition, a person born into... certain faculties who succeeds in exploiting them to their fullest capacity. And when this does happen, it usually creates a monster.”

His words shocked her. “Then why are you helping him?”

“Because Peter is our monster. And in helping him, I am helping others, and in that, perhaps helping myself. He has sent me back some new samples from Louisiana.”

He spoke of the blood samples as though they were sweets purchased at a bake sale. “What’s in Louisiana?” Melanie said.

He looked at her a moment. “They haven’t told you?” he said. He moved to a screen and gently prodded the keys. “The Plainville secret is out now. It’s all over the news.”

He turned the screen toward her, and Melanie forced herself to swallow the bile that had risen in her throat. A news server headline appeared, reading like a shriek over the image of a dark building seen through a chain-link fence and rolls of razor wire:

A sign posted on the fence bore the international biohazard symbol.

“The guards’ families,” said Dr. Pearse. “They were scared, so they went to the press. It means that the fight has progressed to a different level now.”

She was dizzy. “He’s there?”

“I’m told Peter’s team took off for Louisiana at first call.”

Melanie laid her hand over her stomach. For the past day and a half she had sat spitefully in her dormitory room like a little girl. She felt petulant and spoiled and deeply ashamed. She tried to imagine the prison in Louisiana, and instead saw the dead of Plainville, her parents and friends and neighbors, wasted and cadaverous and all watching her with rotting eyes, waiting to see if she would ever make something of the second chance she had been given.

“The virus keeps changing and changing,” Dr. Pearse said. “Look here.”

He changed the image on the computer screen, and after a moment she was able to focus.

Distorted, as though by the magnification of a powerful microscope, a small, spindly creature squirmed and twitched.

“This is the bug that’s eating me,” he said, nearly in wonder. “Look at how it moves. Simple enough to kill a virus with bleach and study it destroyed. This is our first look at live Plainville. Well — magnified one hundred and twenty thousand times.”

He moved closer to the screen and touched it, the distorted green light of the image shading his hand.

“I have made a discovery,” he went on. Melanie tried to pay attention. “Some of the RNA sites on the virus contain strands of human characteristic DNA codes — a human component of the virus. Just as I said it would.” He pulled his thin hand from the viewing screen and looked at it, front and back. “Just as I said it would.” He seemed to forget that she was there, lost in the world of his hands. For a moment, the triumph was gone. “Of course, I could move faster with a chemical gene splicer, but I’m making do. You are well represented here, too. Your cell cultures, anyway. Plainville burns through everything until it hits them. Miraculous, really.” He looked at the equipment surrounding him. “It is good to be back home inside a laboratory again. I was away from it for too long.”

He pondered that a moment. She saw then that his grins were not grins but rather the result of the fading architecture of his face. He turned to the long window, evidently viewing something other than the dim room beyond.

“Illness does have the effect of clarifying things, doesn’t it?” he said. “Life, or death. Sickness, or health. The ruthlessness of existence. I believe this must be how Peter views the world every day—”

She interrupted. “I’m going to give him my blood.”

Dr. Pearse’s red eyes returned to study her face. His grin, perhaps the only expression left available to him, flickered. “Good,” he said, nodding slightly. “Yours to give. But not to him: to the people who need it.”

The immensity of her situation rose up around her again, overwhelming her. She sank against the console. “Why me?” she said. “Out of all those people, why did it have to be me? Look at me.” She looked at herself “Why did I survive?”

“You are proof that the virus is not irremediable. You survived, so there is hope that others might survive.” His knuckled hand went lightly to his chest. “That I might survive.”

“But why me?”

“All that is required of you now is to live, to remain healthy.”

She nodded, agreeing with him at first. Then she stopped nodding. “No,” she said. “You’re wrong. Living’s not enough. I’ve been living for more than four years now, and it’s gotten me nowhere. I’m different, he tells me. He’s right. How can I use that?”

Dr. Pearse was distracted by the monitor image of the wriggling virus. She moved in front of it to regain his attention.

“You said something about helping the ill,” she said.

He regripped his cane and prodded at the smooth cement floor. “That was just a suggestion. This situation rarely presents itself. The immune can go into these breaks. Survivors sometimes make the best investigators.

“But I don’t know a thing about viruses.”

“You could see to the sick. For them just to engage in conversation with someone not sealed inside a suit — you can understand the power of that.”

“But I wouldn’t know what to say.”

“You would. You’re doing it right now.”

She retreated along the counter away from his grin, then stopped. “I want to go there,” she said.

“It is a federal penitentiary. Perhaps you should wait for some other—”

“No more waiting. It’s been four years of waiting. If I agree to give Maryk my blood, then he has to let me go. He has to. You could contact him for me.”

“Ransoming your blood,” said Dr. Pearse. “Peter won’t take kindly to that.”

“I have to help. You’re not sitting here doing nothing.”

She had a valid point, and he knew it. “Then will you do something for me?” he asked. His stiff grin had faded. He leaned both hands upon the curve of his cane now, his blood-filled gaze commanding her attention. “Keep a close eye on him. Peter’s vocation has taken the place of his conscience. You don’t know what he is capable of.”

She had learned to cheat glances at the helicopter pilot’s control stick, anticipating turns and dips and bracing herself accordingly, gripping the soft sides of her seat as they swung around the prison perimeter. They buzzed the guard towers, each one abandoned. High-powered stationary spotlights crisscrossed the prison grounds and made the bales of razor wire stacked against the high chain fences glitter like rolled carpets of diamonds. The central building of Lewes Federal Penitentiary was stage-lit like an alien ship set down in a bayou. There was a black lake to the north, and swamplands all around, with long, spindly roads like black seams leading away, and small police lights clustered in the distance.

They set down on top of the roof of the main building. Two people stood at the roof door, one of whom Melanie recognized immediately as Maryk. The pilot gave her a thumbs-up signal and she unbuckled her seat belt, taking the white medical suitcase from between her legs and pushing open the door.

She ducked out away from the whipping rotors as she’d seen done so many times on TV. She had to stop and balance herself as the helicopter tipped up and blasted her with wind, wasting no time in taking off again. Her hospital shirt rippled and climbed halfway up her back, and for a moment she thought she might blow off the rooftop like a scrap of paper. Then it was gone, running lights rising into the sky over the bayous of southern Louisiana. She straightened and turned.

Maryk, glowing from a spotlight set behind him, reeked of bleach. He probably used it as after-shave, she thought. He said nothing, and she set the medical kit containing packets of her blood down at his feet, rather than hand it to him.

“Weir, Melanie,” he said. “On-site.”

The man holding a plastic-sheathed tablet next to him replied, “Weir, Melanie, on-site, twenty-forty-eight.”

She had to strain to hear them. Both ears were filled with noise in the seashell-like absence of helicopter roar.

They descended three flights of echoing metal-edged concrete stairs to a long, gray hall. Every door was open and several inches thick. But except for that and the cameras watching from every corner, the inside of Lewes looked more like a junior college than her idea of a federal penitentiary.

A third suited man ushered her into a side room and began to dress her as Maryk watched. She was issued a plastic surgical gown to wear over her hospital scrubs, a procedure mask with a wraparound splash visor, a cotton cap, a white cowl covering her head except her eyes and nose, and rubber-soled, elasticized booties that fit over her sneakers. She felt as though she were eight years old again and being bundled up for an afternoon of sledding.

Maryk said from the doorway, “What do you think you can do here?”

She had bartered her blood for Maryk’s acquiescence, but now that she was there and being suited up, she was regretting her decision. The man worked over her with great deference, like a tailor for NASA. She played confidence to Maryk. “I’d like to help,” she said.

“Lewes Penitentiary is an administrative maximum level six. Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

“The Bureau of Prisons uses a one-to-five scale to rank penitentiaries by security level. The men inside here are the worst of the worst.”

“If you’re trying to scare me,” she said, “you should know I’ve had this aversion to prisons all my life.”

“What I’m trying to do is to dispel any Florence Nightingale fantasies Stephen Pearse may have instilled in you.”

The tailor stuck a yellow and red BDC patch to her chest and pointed her to the latex glove dispensers, where she took a petite size five. Maryk went to her and seized her gloved hands, taping them hard around her wrists and checking the seal. She realized then that they were dressed exactly alike.

They left the room and started down the long, gray hall, people in yellow suits brushing busily past them. She had to hustle to keep pace. Her outfit was bulky and everything was moving fast.

“At this point, these men no longer pose any threat to you, or to society,” he said, “except through their infection. Plainville is the warden in this place now.” They passed a high, circular guard station dead center in the hall. “Riots ensued once the disease cycle began. Many of the guards fled when they realized they were cooking in here the same as the inmates, and the prisoners went at each other like animals. Plainville was already well entrenched. A closed environment, with substandard living conditions, poor hygiene: an optimal ecology for an airborne bug like Plainville. But there is nothing more conducive to microbial transmission than a riot, and the disease quickly wore them down. The fight’s gone out of most of them now, and we’re losing nine to ten an hour. This is B unit, all advanced cases.” He stopped at a closed steel door sealed into the wall at the end of the hallway. “Inside, guards lie side by side with inmates.”

She heard noises through the door that were groans.

Maryk faced her. “You will be safe inside so long as you remain with me at all times. Touch no one and nothing, and keep yourself covered. You know that blood contact from a needle stick will overwhelm your resources and infect, antibodies or no antibodies. Same as for me. So if you are considering another self-destructive stunt like the one you pulled in B4, know that I will stop you, and you will be removed. Stay away from needles, and stay away from blood.”

He released the door. It opened and there was just enough room for two people to stand inside and face another steel door. The first door closed and her shoulder was pressed against his left biceps. She felt him breathing, and she realized she was afraid of him again.

“The riots killed any hope for negative airflow containment,” he said. “We are working in a Plainville atmosphere here. These ultraviolet light closets are only checkpoints between areas of higher viral intensity and lower viral intensity. When we come back out, these doors will lock down automatically and initiate a two minute UV light shower. You’ll stand for that until the second door opens.” He rattled all this off as though giving her directions to the bathroom. “Scared?”

She nodded, staring straight ahead, not looking at him.

Maryk flexed his black rubber hands. “Good,” he said. He hit a switch and the second door released.

The unit beyond was high and long and painfully bright. They stepped onto the middle of three tiers, facing the hollow center of the unit, cells lining the railed parapets in long rows on either side. It was windowless, but high-intensity lamps made the cell block appear artificially as bright as day.

The cell doors were all open and the cells themselves were empty. Cots lay along the guard walk between the open doors and the low railing along the hollow, and there was a body on every cot. The stagnant smell of the sealed unit hit her immediately, human sickness and spoil and trapped smoke. The sides of the concrete parapets had been licked black by riot fire. There was a footpath cleared through the trash strewn over the floors: toilet paper, burned blankets, feces.

She followed Maryk along the path of debris, starting down the length of the left parapet, finding the red painted rail with her gloved hand and gripping it as she went. He studied computer charts hooked to the cots and stopped now and then to pull back a sheet and examine the progression of some remarkable sore, moving intently from patient to patient, oblivious to the moans and feverish talk, appraising the prisoners’ treatments and modifying them or okaying them before moving on, and all the while keeping an eye on Melanie.

“This one is a spitter,” he warned.

This particular inmate had obviously once been very large. His loose skin now sagged over his wasting frame, obscuring tattoos burned fiercely into his chest and arms. The high-intensity light above sought out every blemish and sore.

There was a strange tranquility about these criminals, a red-eyed curiosity as they lay there dissolving. She could not tell which of the sick were the guards. The disease wore away all distinction.

The few who did look at her or attempted to speak, she could not face. She tried, but her cheeks and forehead burned and she looked guiltily away. These conscious few terrified her, because they could see what was coming for them.

At one cot, Maryk pulled the sheet off a dead man. The corpse’s thinned arms were straight at his sides and his hands and his mouth were open, as though he were holding a musical note just above the human range. BioCon agents with tablets on their arms arrived like census takers, and Melanie pressed back against the railing, out of their way. A few of the agents looked her over: She was suitless; bizarre. She felt like the only person on the moon who could breathe.

The stench was sickening and Melanie turned away. Across the gap lay a facing row of more cots and more dying men, their sickly flesh glowing in the white light. BioCon agents in yellow suits rolled instrument carts past them along the path of riot debris.

When she looked back, they were lifting the dead man off the cot and into, a black bag unzipped on the floor. His arms, crossed awkwardly over his blistered stomach, fell open as they moved him, and at once he looked so withered and empty. They laid him inside the thick black plastic with his red eyes still staring, his mouth still twisted open in silent song. Maryk knelt at his feet and unlocked a black clasp from around his ankle: an electronic quarantine bracelet. She remembered it all from Plainville.

Men lying on neighboring cots stared at the scorched undersides of the parapets above them with mouths dropped open, as though trying to harmonize with the dead they were soon to join. One man’s head rolled to the side, his red eyes loose in their sockets, fixing questioningly on her.

She started moving then. She was rushing away. She pushed past the nearest suit and pulled herself hand by hand along the red railing, away from Maryk, back to the steel doors.

Inside the first door, deep blue lights came on humming. She brought her hands up around her head as though to wave off the images of the cell block, but was afraid to touch anything, even herself. The blue lights died finally and the humming ended and the door clicked open and she ducked between two suited persons waiting to enter. She pulled at the wrist tape over her gloves, tearing away at her protective coverings as she searched for an empty room to cry in. She found one, and inside ripped the cowl and the layers of cotton and plastic from her face like bandages, dropping them to the floor. She covered her stinging eyes with her bared knuckles as a wave of nausea made her gag, and she started blindly forward, striking the desk with her hip before reaching the chair. She buried her face in her bare, powdered hands and sat like that for a long time, weeping, for the mystified dead and dying, for her own helplessness, and for her family and herself, and how sick she had once been.

When she looked up again, Maryk was standing in the door. He came ahead and set his tablet and black bag on the desk, then plunked down the dead man’s anklet. It was oily with green disinfectant, metal and round with a locking piece that shaped it into a capital Q. Melanie pushed away.

He pulled a chair over next to her without a word and opened up his tablet on the desk. He tapped keys and pulled from his bag a syringe, a sealed dish about the size of a can of tuna, and the small, blood-testing, PCR gadget.

“Arm,” he said.

She swiped at her eyes and complied silently.

“Sleeve,” he said.

She rolled up her sleeve. Her skin was bruised from all the bloodletting.

That was it. There was no I told you so. The abasement of a blood test was humiliation enough. Maryk gripped her arm and fastened a rubber tourniquet tightly around her tender biceps.

A window opened on Maryk’s tablet. She heard Dr. Pearse’s hoarse voice, as distinct as though he were there in the room with them. “Hello, Peter,” he said ghostily. “How goes the battle?”

She could barely see Dr. Pearse, his face long, his shoulders thin and sharp. She saw whiskers growing stubbly along his cheeks, light gray, nearly Maryk-white. He seemed to have aged even in the few hours since Melanie had left him. She felt a sort of confederacy with him since their private meeting, and wished he could see her there.

Maryk answered, “Contained. Another closed setting — same as Orangeburg, same as all the others.”

Dr. Pearse sounded pleased. “It will end as the rest.”

Melanie’s hand had begun to throb. Maryk uncapped the syringe and she looked away, finding a crucifix on the wall. She had stumbled into the prison chaplain’s office. Through the side window she could see out into the main hallway and a corner of the high, round guard station. On the monitors there, yellow suits attended to other sheet-draped bodies in other units in other parts of the penitentiary.

Dr. Pearse sounded enthusiastic. “I’m through scanning for engineering markers — the gamma-amino methionine hydrolase, et cetera. It’s there, Peter. The human component I predicted.”

“A graft,” Maryk said.

“No, Peter. Much more substantial than that. The Plainville RNA payload is insidiously complex, but it is a genetic code like any other, and I’ve broken it. Fascinating virus. It isn’t merely resilient in adapting to changing environments, Peter: It is dictating the terms. It is re-jiggering nature and natural selection in order to ensure its survival. This thing is shuffling its own RNA makeup.”

“I don’t care how fascinating it is, Stephen. I want to know what you’ve found.”

“It’s there,” he said. “As I told you it would be. You know how I wish it were not true. But Plainville contains verifiable complements of your DNA.”

Melanie didn’t know what to make of this, and she wouldn’t, until Maryk explained it to her later. For now, she was just listening.

“Impossible,” Maryk said, but with surprisingly little force.

“I know your genetic makeup pattern better than I know my own. How else could your DNA be in the Plainville virus? It’s the PeaMar transfusion and girl with vitiligo. It has to be.”

Melanie felt the tourniquet release, and the pressure on her forearm eased, warmth returning to her wrist and hand. She hadn’t even felt the needle stick. She looked back as Maryk emptied the tube of her blood into the sealed plastic dish. He mixed it with a few drops of clear fluid.

“Here’s what I have,” Maryk said. “Looks like everything originated with a guard. He had just returned to work from a family camping vacation in the Carolinas. He was too far gone, but someone managed to get to his nine-year-old son who was still coherent. Standard contact tracing Q and A, minus the sexual queries.”

Dr. Pearse was excited. “Yes?”

“A man. The boy said his father pulled over for a motorist stranded on the side of the highway. Which highway, the boy didn’t know; he didn’t even know which state. The father got out alone to offer assistance, and the motorist got out of the car to join him under the hood. The man apparently was ill. Exactly how ill is not clear, but very thin, the boy claimed, dressed in a medical mask, gloves, and what he described as a small, colorful hat without a brim, perhaps Re a toque.”

“Yes! That’s what Twenty-six was wearing in my bedroom.”

Maryk looked at him. “You’re certain?”

“Of course I am. No other description?”

“No, and nothing on the car. But while they were waiting, the nine-year-old asked his mother if he could get out and go to the bathroom. He didn’t really have to go, he admitted to us; he was just bored. She let him go down the highway incline by himself.”

Dr. Pearse sounded excited again. “Of course.”

“The boy saw them standing together over the engine, as men do. He recalled two peculiar things about their conversation. One was that the motorist showed a lot of interest in the father’s employment: what kind of prison it was, what his duties were as a guard. The other was that the sick man asked, twice, how far the father’s penitentiary was from Atlanta.”

There was a pause. “Atlanta,” Dr. Pearse said, sounding as thrilled as his sickened voice would allow. “The virus has avoided Atlanta, Peter, hasn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Florida, South and North Carolina. Now Louisiana. It’s not that much of a stretch. If you were a virus, which state in the union would you most likely avoid?”

“You mean — if the virus was being spread by a human.”

“Or behaving like one. You would want to keep clear of Georgia and the BDC. Now, by that same token, what if you decided you needed to sabotage the BDC? If you were a virus and wanted to go in and destroy the one institution you knew could stop you. What would you do, Peter? If you could discriminate between victims, and wanted to avoid detection. What would you do?”

Even Melanie, who barely knew Dr. Pearse, reacted to the odd cheerfulness in his voice. Maryk’s eyes were dark as he formulated the answer.

“I would go after the director,” Maryk said.

She saw Dr. Pearse nodding. “He watched The Disease Dilemma show,” he said. “And there I was, saying I attended to every outbreak. That led directly to Orangeburg. We frustrated him by denying him his intelligence on the outbreaks, and so he lashed out, whoever he is. He was there. That same man. We represent his only unnatural opposition. Once you start thinking about a motive, a human motive, a viral motive, it all falls into place.”

“Then tell me this: How did he get out of a hospital full of BDC personnel?”

“I don’t know. But I told you I felt like someone had been following me after I got back to Atlanta. I had seen a car driving back and forth outside my house. He followed me all the way to Amagansett, Peter. He waited until he could get into my room. The survivors’ names and addresses were in my tablet. Weren’t they?”

Maryk said nothing. He did not even nod. Dr. Pearse went on enthusiastically.

“You said there were only two possible outcomes for humans with Plainville, Peter. Die quickly, or seek immediate intervention and be cured. But what if there was a third? What if someone didn’t die right away, and the virus had time to act on them? The serum I hit the girl with in Africa, PeaMar4. Back then, PeaMar wasn’t merely a synthetic blood substitute: We began the project with me working to transfuse the disease-fighting properties of your blood. I was out to cure cancer and eradicate all viruses and bacteria all at once. That is why I gave it to the girl — as a preventive measure. But what if there was some sort of reaction? What if the unique viral inhibitors present in your blood — the attenuated killer cells loaded into PeaMar4 — only slowed the viral spread throughout the body, but did not eradicate it?”

“Impossible,” Maryk said.

“A biological stalemate, allowing the virus time to take over the body without killing it.”

“And?”

“And... I don’t know. But I will tell you this: I’m close, Peter. I’m very close. Someone is knowingly spreading this disease. And I’m beginning to think that this someone may not be entirely human.”

She felt a chill in the warm prison chaplain’s office. Maryk’s gray eyes were squinting, and he seemed put off by Dr. Pearse’s inexplicably upbeat mood.

“Reilly and Boone say you’ve been doing some electronic research,” he said.

“I’m close, Peter. Time is of the essence — for me, particularly. I know there’s something out there now. The moment I have anything, I’ll let you know.”

Maryk broke the fold of his arms to keystroke a command.

“How is Melanie?” Dr. Pearse said. “How is she holding up?”

She tried to get a better look at him, remembering that he did not know she was there. As she looked at the screen, a small window opened over Dr. Pearse’s image, a red bar expanding over a gauge growing quickly from zero to one hundred percent. A message flashed beneath it: CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN.

Maryk unplugged the gadget and the red bar went out. “She’s fine,” he said.

She waited with Maryk away from the nighttime travelers streaming through the New Orleans airport, seated alone among a row of hard plastic chairs along a cold wall of windows. Airplanes rolled on the taxiways behind them, and she had that feeling she always had in airports, of being among giants.

Within an hour of his return to Lewes B unit, Maryk decided he was through there; she guessed it had something to do with his cascade, and his concern about Dr. Pearse. A helicopter had ferried them to the airport, and now they were waiting for the flight back to Atlanta.

“Viruses love airports,” Maryk said. “Vital organs, located at every major human population center, catapulting incubators from city to city all over the world. The circulatory system of human civilization.”

He sat too heavily and too large for the chair, his big legs extended clumsily and crossed at the ankles, his eyes low and turned to the bustling terminal beyond. He was deep into one of his funks, and she wanted no part of him.

“Three phases of public response to an epidemic,” he said. “First: Denial. That occurred during the original outbreak in Plainville. The Search for Blame is what we’re into now, with the press. If the epidemiology continues to elude us and the virus strikes again, then the BDC will be made the scapegoat. Phase three is the Demand for Action. The blood response. In previous ages this meant burning down the houses of the sick, and the aristocracy fleeing into the hills. But there are no hills remote enough anymore. No oasis that doesn’t have a road running through it. And no foreigners foreign enough to blame. The ecosystem is sealed and starting to cook. House burning is all.”

This pleased him, of course. She was cold and sat with her bare arms crossed, trying to ignore him. Maryk had changed back into his standard outfit of white shirt and black pants, but she had not brought any clothes other than the hospital scrubs she had been issued back at the BDC. A large monitor suspended from the ceiling broadcast weather reports from various destinations, and she saw footage of snow piling up in Boston.

Standing beneath the monitor flipping through Newsweek magazine was a red-haired man in a brown leather jacket and latex gloves, who looked a lot like the custodian at the Emory cafeteria.

“You’re not doctors,” Melanie said quietly.

Maryk was slow to respond. “Viral containment,” he said. “Halting its spread throughout the species. That is my job.”

She said, “Doctors heal people.”

“A host either contains its illness, or seeks to spread. Those who seek to spread have to be stopped.”

“Killed, you mean.” She felt another airplane — an immense, winged incubator — roll behind them. “I think I understand you now,” she said. “Your perspective. Who you are, where you’re coming from. The prisoners, the other medical people there in suits: We walked among them like gods. I didn’t like it.”

“You felt it, though.”

“They feared you. They feared me.”

“They fear the battle. They fear exposure. Infection is a challenge. It is Nature calling us out. Fight, she says. Fight for your life, your existence. Survive, she dares. Endure.”

“Of course you’d say that. You haven’t the slightest idea what it’s like to be sick.”

Sarcasm, or perhaps amusement, registered on his face. “Tell me, then,” he said.

“I can’t.”

“What it’s like. To be sick.”

“You can’t just say it.” She frowned at his sleepy eyes. “I could list symptoms, but you know symptoms. It has nothing to do with that anyway. Everything changes.”

“Changes.”

“That’s right.”

“Everything.”

“Life, living. Perspective. Priorities.”

“It simplifies things.”

“If that’s what you call it when your options are reduced.”

“Fear, then.”

“Yes, fear. Are you asking for yourself, or for Dr. Pearse?”

That quieted him. He sat up a bit, and the row of chairs rocked.

“Perhaps you’re curious,” she said, pursuing it. “What it must be like for him. Losing control of your own body: That’s the fear. Awareness that you have no control over your own body, really. Nobody does. That’s what changes. You acquire this privileged knowledge about the human condition, and slowly it becomes hysteria. You’ve never even had a head cold. How can you know what health is?”

He had no answer for her immediately, which buoyed her.

“What if I got sick again?” she said.

“Simple,” he said, sitting back now. “I would treat you.”

“And if I refused? Resisted?”

He said again, “I would treat you.”

“What if I ran? I told you before: I will never go through that treatment again.”

He looked at her with more than a glance now. He was taking her seriously. She wanted to be taken seriously.

“What if my blood was no longer any good to you,” she said, “and you knew that I would refuse treatment? What if I was going to run? Would you kill me too?”

His gaze was penetrating. “Where would you go?”

“Away. A remote island somewhere.”

“How would you get there without infecting others?”

She held her own. “I’d find some way.”

“There is no way. And no safe place to go. Either one contains one’s illness, or spreads it. There is no running away.”

“Then you would kill me.”

His arm went out as though sweeping a table clean. “My job is to protect the human race. To defend and preserve the species, and I’ll do it any way I have to. Because I’m the only one who can. I am the last line of defense.”

That raised her eyebrows. That was the cascade talking. It made him seem vulnerable somehow, and she decided to try to pick his brain while it was soft. “Where does someone like you come from?” she said.

“The same place everyone comes from.”

“I mean, where in the world?”

He was gazing ahead now, only half there. “Skagit Valley. Northern Washington State. An hour north of Seattle, near Vancouver.”

“And you were raised there by wolves?”

He nodded. “My father was a pediatrician,” he said. “Like yours.”

She could have done without that information. “And your mother?”

“She was a part-time church secretary. She called Bingo in the parochial school gymnasium Monday nights. She was blind.”

“She was blind and she called Bingo?”

“The nun who ran the game was pathologically shy. She would pull the Ping-Pong balls and whisper numbers into my mother’s ear, who would then announce them. It came out later that the nun was lying to my mother, routinely rigging the games for the poorest families of the parish to win. Bingo was canceled not long after that.”

“Was she born — you know — blind?”

“No. She remembered images. Toys, pillows’ chair legs. Linoleum floors. The unpainted undersides of tables. It was a childhood illness.”

Melanie’s only point of reference was the Little House books, and Mary, the older sister, who went so valiantly blind from scarlet fever, whose god-fearing ways Melanie tried to emulate as a child.

She thought she had something on him then. “That’s why you became a virologist,” she said.

He said nothing at first, looking only bemused.

“What?” she said.

“That’s something Stephen might have said. No, it was simpler than that. My father also had a tulip farm. One season, when I was eight or nine, the crop came up healthy in every way except the petals: reds and violets and yellows swirled together, similar to what you get when you stir one paint color into another. My mother always liked me to describe things to her, but those colors were one thing I could never get right. My father said a plant virus had caused it. Our crop sold for ten times the usual amount that year. I waited all summer and fall and winter, but next spring the tulips came up normal again. The virus never recurred.”

A nine-year-old Maryk in short pants, standing belt high among acres of psychedelic pastels. She grinned at the image, then remembered who she was dealing with. “No brothers, sisters?”

He looked oddly bemused again, a look so wrong for his piercing face. “Actually, my mother was to have had twins,” he said. “Her ultrasound showed two of us until her eighteenth week, when she experienced some complications. Her next test, taken her twenty-first week, showed only one fetus. This always bothered her. For some reason she thought it was significant, and told me this just before she died. All twins battle in the womb for space, nutrition. It starts that early — the pushing, the pulling. From what is now known about reproductive medicine, the most likely theory is that, whatever sibling I was to have, I absorbed in utero.”

He seemed to be not at all aware of how disturbing this bit of information was. “So you’re like a twin all by yourself, that’s what you’re saying?”

He sat up and pointed to his breast pocket. “Feel.”

The pocket appeared empty. She reached over, the tips of her fingers tentatively poking his starched white shirt over his heart, and felt nothing, and she was relieved at first. Then she pressed her palm fully against the hard, curved muscle of his left breast, and realized there was nothing there at all.

“No heartbeat,” she said.

“Now here.”

She pressed against his right breast, and felt something beating inside. She snatched back her hand, feeling the sting of the opposing armrest as she struck it with her elbow.

Maryk sat back, gazing out into the bustling crowd. “The organs in my body are reversed. The medical term is situs inversus. A mirror image, such as is seen in some separated Siamese twins.”

“You consumed your sibling,” she said.

He nodded. “Something like that.”

She wiped off her hand on her scrub pants. “Why are you telling me all this?”

“Why are you asking?”

“Good point,” she said, wondering about that herself She was having trouble reconciling the odd, biologically inebriated man sitting across from her with the monster she knew him to be. “Do you see your father much?”

“He still practices. Settled right into national health care. Staunch middle-class medicine: antibiotics, inoculations, strep throat cultures.” This was all said disparagingly.

“And you’re not married. Except to your job.”

He squinted into the crowd, at nothing. Yet she suspected some part of him was enjoying this. “You think you have me at a disadvantage.”

“You do realize that most people with your biological whatever-it-is would just go wild. Take the worst risks — then sleep it off, and the next day be fine and clean.”

She could tell by the puzzled look on his face that this thought had never occurred to him.

“What about death?” she said. “If you can’t get sick. You will die, won’t you?”

“Of course. The body breaks down, cells break down. We’re dying all the time, our tissues disintegrating as we sit here, right now.” He waved indolently, at the travelers, at nothing. “Death is constant. The termination event itself is merely an end to a process. Death is a sunset, no more. You don’t fear a sunset.”

His bravura fascinated her, as much as she disbelieved it. His contempt was so forthright and unyielding that she found it endearing in a cranky sort of way. It appealed to her own innate pessimism.

“I think I prefer you like this,” she said. “You seem almost human.”

His gaze remained distant. “I didn’t come here to be insulted.”

She watched him for a smile. “Benjamin Something,” he said instead.

Her own smile fell away. “What did you say?”

“Can’t remember his last name. The ticket agency worker. Benjamin Something.” He spoke as though of a mutual acquaintance. “He seemed suitable. On paper, anyway.”

He was filling in the last few remaining gaps in her file. Any personal debacles she had tried to put behind her lived still and brightly in Maryk’s mind.

“I have a few rather disfiguring scars on my body,” she said, “which I’m a bit overly sensitive about. This tends to rule out any danger of intimacy with the opposite sex.”

She heard herself trying to pass off desperation as aloofness, denigrating that which was forbidden her. She was the poor, grumbling about the rich. With a shudder she realized that Maryk knew her better than anyone else. It reminded her again how much she resented him.

“You know what?” she said. “I think some people are like viruses. Some people just take, and if they give you anything at all, it’s something you don’t want.”

This seemed to register inside his muddled head, reflected in his eyes, which sharpened in their view over the lounge and held there a moment before retreating again. He hadn’t liked that comparison at all.

A bickering couple passed them, hot coffee dripping off the man’s jacket cuff. They thought of sitting nearby, but a shared glance at Maryk made them reconsider. They faded away and Melanie was all business again.

“Why ‘Milkmaid’?” she said.

He squinted. “That was about Jenner. Edward Jenner, who discovered the cure for smallpox. Wordplay. The ‘milkmaid’ who launched his work, the ‘lancet’ he used to open the boil, the cow named ‘Blossom.’ Inelegant. If I had to do it over again, I would use Pasteur instead.” He glanced at her then, as though having decided something, and leaned forward interrogationally. “I am going to tell you a story that will change your life,” he said.

She doubted that. “I could use a change.”

“Eighteen eighty-five. Alsace, France. A nine-year-old boy named Joseph Meister, on his way to school, is mauled savagely by a rabid dog and barely survives. Rabies, what the French call la rage, was well feared in that day. Fever, depression, throat convulsions, progressing to mania, characteristic foaming at the mouth, eventual paralysis, and death. There was no cure and no treatment. A local doctor cauterized the worst of the boy’s wounds and, having reached the limits of his abilities, advised Madame Meister to travel to Paris to call upon Dr. Louis Pasteur. Pasteur was not a physician. Pasteur was a chemist, a scientist. The idea of germs fascinated him, and he was experimenting at the time with the germs of dead animals, ones he had weakened in the laboratory. His work would eventually lead to the discovery of viruses, but at that time, the idea of invisible particles causing disease was considered pure fancy. Meister became Pasteur’s first human trial. Pasteur inoculated him with a solution mixed from the spinal cords of rabbits recently dead from rabies. This was only the second human vaccine in history, after Jenner’s, but the first to be manufactured in a laboratory and derived from the same infective agent that caused the disease. The boy survived. He was spared the ravages of la rage. Modem human virology finds its genesis in Pasteur’s pioneering work, and yet he was misunderstood by many of his time. Most of his colleagues could not see the whole of the canvas upon which he was working.

“But that’s all regular history and well enough known. It is at this point that history abandons the boy. Joseph Meister never wavered in his devotion to the man who saved his life and, fittingly, grew up to become the gatekeeper at the Institute Pasteur years after his savior’s death. Joseph Meister was guarding the gate in 1940 when the Nazis marched into Paris. They ordered him to open Pasteur’s crypt, but Meister refused, and instead took his own life in protest.”

Melanie hung in the ensuing silence.

“He killed himself,” she said. “That’s your life changing story?”

For the first time that night, Maryk seemed fully awake. “Meister destroyed himself rather than be part of the desecration of the memory of the artist who had preserved his life. And history gives him nothing. Well — if seventy-six years can be considered history. In truth it is the blink of an eye.” He sat up again, interested. “Think of that. Seventy-six years ago, the first human being ever to be inoculated with a lab-prepared vaccine died. Three quarters of a century; it’s nothing. And penicillin: discovered by accident, less than one hundred years ago. People have already forgotten that strep throat was until only recently a fatal disease. We’ve had a century’s parole from bacterial slaughter — and now our time is running out again. Antibiotics are failing and diseases, are once again outpacing the remedies. Do you know how our time will be remembered?”

Melanie shook her head.

“As a flash of light between great periods of darkness. If our so-called modern age is remembered at all. Earth is something like three and a half billion years old; mankind, a few million. We are infants crawling upon this rock, protozoa from a pond, who crawled out of the oceans, who dropped down from the trees. Dinosaurs presumed the world was theirs as well. We are a fungus spreading over this planet, colonizing, warring, consuming. The Earth is a cell we are infecting. And nature is the Earth’s immune system, just now sensing the threat of our encroachment, and arming itself to fight back. Macro versus micro. Viruses are the Earth’s white blood cells. We are the Earth’s disease.”

Melanie smiled haltingly in defense of the human race. “But nobody could really believe that. Not even you. Look at the environment. The more we learn about the earth, the better we behave.”

He waved it all away. “Folly. Like bees getting together and deciding not to pollinate. Like termites voting whether or not to chew through wood. Man will consume his environment. Every form of life from the smallest to the largest contributes something to the earth’s ecology, repaying the overall system, except for two species: rats and man. Man is a thief, a scavenger, a hunter-gatherer — a survivor. That is all.”

“Then why do you fight for him? Why defend and preserve the species at all if as you say it will endure of its own, I don’t know, villainy?” He said nothing, and she came upon the answer herself. “Because you are the ultimate man. You are the ultimate consumer. You think you’re different, but in fact, you are the ultimate survivor.”

He stared at her, and a glimmer passed across his face — as though he were remembering suddenly that he was impaired and that things might not be necessarily as they seemed. He turned to face the lounge again. He said, “That’s the sort of thing Stephen would have said.”

“You said that before. What does that mean? That I’m like him? Or that I’m not like you? Because I can tell you for a fact: I am not like you.”

But he wasn’t listening to her. Melanie heard their flight being called overhead, and she turned and looked out across the tarmac to the giant airplanes lifting off into the night, chasing the sunset that no one feared. She dreaded their return to Atlanta.

The Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and Wilderness Area ranged more than four hundred thousand acres. It was the largest and most primitive swamp in North America. Maryk’s tablet trace showed that Stephen was six miles in. A road ran most of the way.

He waited next to Melanie while the BDC helicopter rounded the northern tip of the swamp. She still wore scrubs and sneakers and was staring out her window into the Georgia dawn and the vast swamp undulating below.

“Why would he leave,” she said, “knowing he is contagious?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are you going to do if he doesn’t want to come back?”

He found her naiveté no longer amusing and recently declined to respond.

Maryk had received Stephen’s computer searches. Stephen had downloaded forty years of voting registers for the town of Plainville, Massachusetts. He had also downloaded ten years of so-called annual manifestos put out by the Rainforest Ecology Conservation International in Africa. Nothing was highlighted on either document. Stephen had also accessed a January 2012 issue of Audubon Magazine and sent off a request to the MacArthur Foundation for information on the current address of one of its fellowship recipients.

They set down upon a local highway on the edge of the refuge and transferred into three waiting Park Services Jeeps. The road deteriorated inside the swampland and ended altogether at a state park, where Freeley was waiting with a BioCon unit. They had matched the license plate of a car in the parking lot to a vehicle missing from the BDC fleet. She was pulling on a contact suit as Maryk approached.

“I didn’t think he could even walk,” she said.

Maryk said, “He walks fine.”

“What if he had gone to an airport?”

“He didn’t.”

“It’s a trap.”

Maryk was impatient. “Then I guess I’m falling for it.”

A ranger’s assistant warned of swamp vegetation rivaling that of a South American jungle. One recent hiker who violated the No Camping rule had been missing for more than six weeks. The terrain was full of sawgrass and cutting underbrush too dangerous for contact suits. Freeley and BioCon had to wait for path-clearing tools.

The ranger offered to guide Maryk inside but Maryk declined. He did accept the man’s offer of a self-inflating Zodiac launch and a small outboard motor but he could not carry them both with his black bag. He saw Melanie standing away from the rest. She was watching him.

“You can stay here, or you can help,” he said.

She considered it only a moment. She came forward and took his tablet and his bag.

They pushed into the dense growth on foot. Melanie took the lead as Maryk ported the heavy marine equipment through the sinking earth. The return to a jungle setting struck him as somehow appropriate.

It took them less than an hour to reach the source of the Hailing signal. Stephen’s tablet was set upon an inlet stump at the head of a dead stream that had recently seen passage. A trail of black water split the emerald scum crusted along the facing banks. The tablet screen read PETER COME ALONE.

At the base of the tree stump was a damp rope greened with slime. Maryk looked out at the still black path of water. The Zodiac. It self-inflated and he set it afloat and attached the outboard motor. He climbed aboard. The black rubber floor of the launch was soft and sun roughened and Maryk squatted on his knees for balance.

He turned to start the motor and saw Melanie still waiting on the mud bank. She was watching him accusingly. She was holding his black bag. He stopped with the cord in his hand.

“You’re not going to kill him,” she said.

“Everybody has a choice,” he said. “Containment, or spread. Do you trust Stephen to have chosen correctly?”

She came forward with his bag and climbed inside. “It’s you I don’t trust.” She squatted down into the bow as he returned to the cord. He pulled it twice and the engine erupted and settled into an even growl. He pushed off and piloted the launch away from the bank.

Melanie picked hair out of her face as they puttered along the course described by the cleaved scum. She seemed content to kneel in front and survey the dense shores of the dead stream. The path of black water veered eastward into the sunlight and she reached up and cleared away vines that dropped like streamers into their path. Maryk cut the engine farther ahead and drifted as he listened to the shore. The croaks and bird cries and rustling of legs along the muddy brush had faded. They were entering a strangely quiet part of the swamp.

He saw the first Plainville plant ahead on their right. Veins burst from the remaining midrib leaf spines like wiry arms and thickened into cordlike spindles. There was another immediately after it along the same dark patch of ground. Its leaf blades had curled and frayed and erupted in color that had since decayed to varied hues of gray and black. Both growths appeared to have once been common ferns.

They moved past a stunted Plainville tree that had suffered an aberrant surge of growth before dying. He watched Melanie’s head turn to a profile as they floated past its outreaching branches. She slid away to the opposite side of the small boat.

The stream path angled right and ended at a small island. Maryk steered onto a worn dirt slip next to an older Zodiac launch with faded lettering along its scum-ringed sides. They disembarked onto a well-trodden path that had seen heavy things dragged over it.

They stopped under another savage tree. The wood was barkless and blistered and swirled into inscrutable knots. Its sulfur-yellow roots had erupted and burrowed back down again into the mire like elbows trying to raise the trunk from the earth.

“This is the virus?” she said quietly.

Maryk nodded.

“Why isn’t it spreading?”

The Plainville plants and trees lay in dark patches surrounded by healthy flora. Maryk looked up at the wide rifts in the canopy and the morning sunlight beating through.

“Sunlight,” he said. “A natural barrier.” It was the same as it had been in Africa. All viruses fell apart when exposed to the sun’s ultraviolet rays.

She stayed close to him as the footpath led to a long structure draped in canvas. It was some twenty yards in length and appeared to be a series of camping tents stitched together. Camouflaging branches and leaves littered the mismatched roofs.

A door flap had been cut into the near corner. Maryk lifted it from the bottom and listened before entering. The smell that escaped was pungent. Melanie started to gag but Maryk pulled her the rest of the way inside.

Spears of dusty daylight burned down through slashes in the canvas roof. Maryk’s eyes adjusted to wooden workbenches along both walls and a central row of rough-hewn tables. He saw dairy pails nearby, bottles of chemicals, and measuring devices and scales. There was a heavy press, a bucket of dirty syringes, and knives as well as other anatomizing instruments.

Dead Plainville plants sat in heaps of burst pottery and dry soil. They clutched at the tables like ivy. Scores of small dead carcasses lay flayed on the center tables in varying stages of dissection. Maryk guessed they might have been rats.

“Oh my—” Melanie recoiled and grabbed for the door flap behind them.

Maryk gripped her arm and pulled her ahead. They passed a discarded BDC contact suit lying atop a work space. A blistered plant arm had grown over it.

At the end of the rows of worktables stood dozens of small metal cages filled with decomposing rats. As many as eight to a cage were rotted with Plainville. The odor there was as thick as steam. Melanie began to cough and retch and tugged on him. Maryk released her and he went on alone.

Plainville plants in clay pots filled the dark floor space from the middle of the tent to the far canvas wall. The colors were ferocious and thriving as though choked to brilliance. The plants had erupted from their arranged pots and slithered outward along the dirt ground as though dragging themselves forward. Maryk waded in among them. Some lay unmolested in an open space of dirt as though respected or feared. Their bright leaves gleamed as though with perspiration and their tentacular stems and wildly textured leaves scorned nature. Shards of busted pottery lay wound in vinelike branches as though in the grip of florid fists.

Maryk heard a weak voice behind him.

“I came here to kill him, Peter.”

Stephen was standing inside the door flap. A ray of daylight through the torn canvas above lit his surgical skullcap and shadowed the recesses of his face.

“He’s not here,” he continued. “But he knows we are. I set off a silent alarm.”

“Stephen.” Maryk moved past Melanie toward him.

“Outside,” Stephen said. He pushed through the canvas flap and daylight shone in profanely.

Maryk rushed out after him. There was a wooden bench set in front of the tent and Stephen was making his way to it. He moved well with the cane but his physical appearance had further declined. He was drenched in sweat and impossibly thin. The sores about his arms and legs had darkened and massed and bled. He looked like a cadaver. He looked as though he were brittling into wood.

Melanie came gagging through the tent door behind Maryk. One look at Stephen calmed her. She fought down a swallow.

Stephen showed her a much-weakened grin. “Hello, Melanie,” he said.

Maryk said, “What is this, Stephen?”

“A hiding place. He couldn’t spread his virus indiscriminately. He needed a place where he could live freely. He wanted only controlled outbreaks, remember?”

“Who, Stephen?”

“Plainville’s Patient Zero. Something incredible has happened here, Peter. I need you to keep an open mind.”

Maryk’s concerns about Stephen’s mental health were being realized. “Plainville was more than four years ago,” he said. “Just tell me — what is this place?”

Stephen motioned with a wooden hand for patience. “An open mind,” he said. “I was thinking about the girl in Africa, assuming that she had been infected and also gotten the experimental serum. I was thinking what it must have done to her. She would have been like a walking laboratory, Peter, like lightning in a bottle. I decided that there had to be a secondary transmission, even though we knew there had been no other reported cases in that region. So I started to think. The only other people near the camp, aside from the Pygmies, was the RECI group. I called up a list of their scientists, and on a whim cross-referenced it with the Plainville voting register. It was that simple, Peter. One name came up on both lists. Oren Ridgeway, a botanist out of the University of Michigan. He returned to the states from his RECI tour just two weeks after the firebombing of the camp.”

“Oren Ridgeway?” said Melanie.

They both turned to her. Stephen said, “You knew him?”

She retreated somewhat. “The family,” she said. “He worked summers in my dad’s office. He was a few years older than I was.”

“Fascinating,” said Stephen. He returned to Maryk. “Assume Ridgeway came into direct contact with the African girl. It couldn’t have gone any farther than that in Africa, or else we’d have seen it, seen victims.”

Maryk interrupted. “We backtracked after Plainville. We posted the RECI to see if any of their people had gotten sick. The answer was no.”

“Of course. But something tripped the virus into lying latent, some mutation inside the girl. Ridgeway showed no symptoms, and brought it back here unknowingly. Then a year or so later — on a trip to his parents in his hometown, I assume — it erupted. The virus emerged there in three places simultaneously. In the schools: he may have stopped in for a visit with his old teachers. In the pediatrician’s office.” He looked at Melanie. “A ‘hello’ to your father, perhaps. And the town hall: His mother worked for the town clerk.”

Maryk had been trying to break in. “Plainville does not lie latent,” he said. “No one who contracts it survives two weeks, never mind—”

“That was the PeaMar4. The viral inhibitors from your blood reacted with the virus from the girl; By the time it spread to Ridgeway, a sort of symbiosis had been reached. The virus was softened up, but not killed, and attained something like equilibrium with his body. The impossible was then suddenly possible.”

Maryk said, “How do you know all this?”

“I know it, Peter. I know it. The goal of every active virus is to change the host cell — to transform the host into a copy of the virus. Not to kill, but to coexist; to preserve a viable host so that the virus may survive and endure. And this has always been biologically impossible. Until now.” Stephen looked at him fire-eyed. “You’ve got to open your mind to this, Peter. Under normal conditions, either the immune system battles the virus into submission, or the virus continues unabated and consumes the host. But not here. Here communion has been achieved. Rather than plundering and killing Ridgeway’s immune cells, the mutated virus instead began transforming them, successfully, exponentially, into virus cells — exactly as it is supposed to, only this time, it worked. Plainville is the first successful virus. It is not lying dormant in him; it is active, it is thriving. It is one with him. It has transformed this Oren Ridgeway into a human Plainville vector.”

Maryk resisted this at the same time it started to make sense. “First of all,” he said, “how did you find this place?” He needed to understand it all logically.

“A few months before Plainville, Ridgeway won a MacArthur Foundation grant of $345,000 for his work documenting and preserving expiring species of flora here in the Okefenokee Refuge. He gave away every dime to radical environmental groups for the first two years, then dropped out of sight. An article in a back issue of Audubon led me here. Most of these supplies — the boat, the instruments — are pilfered from his original camp, now abandoned, less than a kilometer away. Something drew me from there to this place. It was almost like I could smell the plants, Peter. Right through my suit. I feel close to him.”

Maryk ignored this. “Then, those plants, inside?”

“He was learning. He was planning his infection, but patiently, over four years’ time. He was methodical. A virus must infect — that is all it knows and all it wants to do. But now the virus has taken human form: It has a brain, it has reasoning capacities and an understanding of the way humans work to fight disease. It has the best of both existences, virus and man. The outbreaks were tests. He was taking human samples, the same way we take viral samples, in order to measure his infective progress. Not indiscriminately, because he knew we would trace that. “I think that Plainville was most likely a mistake. It was his first time, he may not have known what was happening to him yet. But we covered up the subsequent outbreaks, which led finally to Orangeburg. He tried to take me out and the entire BDC with me.”

Maryk kept pace. “So then this same man followed you to Amagansett.”

“Virus, Peter. This virus.” Stephen nodded. “Imagine his shock at opening up my tablet and discovering that there were three Plainville survivors generating sera.”

“And then he set about hunting them down,” Maryk said. It was all unfolding in his mind. “The lightweight shoe print in Lancet’s bathroom. The plants missing from Blossom’s car. The open windows at each location to air out the smell. He was sampling their blood before killing them.”

“In order to test it against his own disease. He had to know just how potent their antibodies were, to see how much of a threat they posed to him. Of course this man-virus would kill them. They were his cure, and therefore had to be eliminated.”

Melanie had stood silently listening through this. Now her voice came like a gasp. “The broken-down motorist.”

Stephen nodded. “That was our Patient Zero. He was driving back from Boston. He had just failed to eliminate the third survivor.”

Maryk remembered the shadow in the cul-de-sac outside the Penny University. He remembered the shoe marks on the rusted rungs and the feeling he had of being watched inside the sewer. Patient Zero had been there that night. Only the sewer sanitation mechanisms killed his virus in the water and prevented its spread.

Stephen was still looking at Melanie. “Your death would guarantee his success,” he said.

He seemed unaware of the impropriety of his statement. He seemed only intrigued. Melanie stepped away from him. “Oh my God.”

Maryk said, “Then where is this ‘Zero’ right now?”

“I don’t know. He is extraordinarily contagious, so any form of mass transportation would lead to a prematurely infectious event. He is saving himself for the end. Therefore, he travels cautiously. He must have his own car.”

Maryk searched the swamp in frustration. He looked at the laboratory and at the twisted Plainville trees. He was trying to get his mind around the reality that there was a man out there driving the streets who was no longer a man but a virus.

He knelt down and unbuckled his bag and pulled out his tablet. “I’m calling in BioCon. We’ll preserve some of these plants for examination, then torch the rest and return to the bureau.”

“Wait,” Stephen said. He used his cane to stand. “His work is still here. Written logs, data disks. I need to remain to analyze them.”

“Stay here? You shouldn’t even be out of B4. The bacteria alone will eat you alive.”

“He was expecting to return. We’ve got his research, Peter. Listen to me. Something is troubling him. He would not have panicked over the LNPs otherwise. He would have touched off a chain of transmission and consumed the entire human race by now if there weren’t something keeping him back, something he is waiting for. The secret may be right inside here.” He moved near Maryk. “I feel close to him, Peter. I can’t explain it, but I think I can make sense of his notes, his work here. We’ll not have a chance like this again.”

Maryk stood. “What do you mean, you feel close to him?”

The tablet toned in Maryk’s hand. He stared at Stephen a long moment before opening it.

“Freeley,” he said.

No window opened on the screen. He adjusted the display in the bright sunlight. The video feed had been disabled at the source’s discretion. The modern task bar indicated that he was connected to a call and listed the sender as a land-line public pay phone from an area code outside Georgia.

The voice that answered him was garbled and fluidy. “Dr. Peter Maryk?”

“Who is this?”

The caller made a rumbling noise that failed to clear his throat. “You have found my laboratory.”

Maryk went suddenly cool in the beating sun.

“I saw you in that alley sewer,” the voice went on.

Melanie’s face was bloodless. Her hands were flat against her chest as she backed away. Her fear checked Maryk’s and reminded him who he was. “Then you know I’ve got Milkmaid.”

The groaning voice said, “Did you find my hiker yet? Or what’s left of him. I fed him some of your guinea pigs’ blood before showing him to my garden. His death was merely enhanced. Your blood solution failed.”

“You are wrong. It has not failed Stephen Pearse.”

“Pearse is dead, I saw to that. You’re covering it up like the rest.”

Stephen was staring at Maryk dead-eyed. Maryk’s mind was reeling. His sense of rational balance and the natural order of the world were being challenged. He needed confirmation. “How did you get out of Orangeburg?”

“The hospital?” Another throaty rumbling. “Double doors, foamed walls. All to protect against microscopic viruses escaping. But if a man-sized virus got into a yellow suit from the supply room? No one would even look at his face. He could walk right out the door.”

“Would you recognize Pearse’s voice?”

Maryk turned the tablet around to Stephen. Stephen was in shock. He spoke hesitantly to the virus that had infected him.

“Ridgeway?”

Maryk turned the tablet back to himself. “Pearse lives,” he said. “He’s right here, standing next to me outside your laboratory. He lives because I’ve got Milkmaid. It’s not enough just to have the blood. It’s the serum treatment. She cures you. Milkmaid is viable and I’ve got her antibodies. Which means I’ve got you — whatever you are.”

“I am the Messenger. What you call ‘Plainville’ is the Message.”

Stephen came forward then. “Tell me,” he said, “how did you contract this? Was it a girl, a teenage girl?”

Silence for a moment. Stephen seemed to hang in the air.

The voice said, “So it was you who sent her to me, Doctor. Perfect.” Stephen’s gaze slipped to the ground. “You don’t sound so healthy, Dr. America. And if you were, you would be right back on TV again.”

Stephen’s gaze only deepened.

Then the voice said, “Hello, Melanie.”

Melanie shivered. She looked at Maryk and shook her head and mouthed a frantic No.

But a hard grin steeled Maryk’s nerves. “She is with me at all times,” he said.

Zero chuckled gurglingly. “Not many public phones these days,” he said. “I’ll be long gone by the time you arrive. Perhaps I could leave you a little something to remember me by.”

Maryk heard the sound of a telephone cord being twisted.

“A man here waiting for the phone. Middle-aged, wearing a beige raincoat. His tablet battery must have run down. He’s not looking in on me right now because he hates sickness. He hates sick people.”

The metallic cord twisted again.

“He is lazy and fat. He’s meat to me, understand that, Maryk? The world is full of meat. You cannot stop the Messenger. You cannot stop the Message. The Message will always get through.”

There was the sound of something rubbing against the receiver. Then a click and the droning dial tone of a broken connection.

Stephen stepped backward. He found the bench against his legs again and slumped down upon it.

Maryk said, “What was that noise at the end?”

Stephen’s face was blank and drawn. “Him licking the receiver.”

Melanie gasped behind them.

Maryk paged Freeley and gave her the telephone number to be traced. He told her to divert BioCon to the caller’s location on a Biohazard 4 and to shut down any airports within a thirty-mile radius. Then he dialed the pay phone number. It was busy and he dialed again and this time it rang through.

A voice answered: “Yeah, hullo?” Winded and annoyed.

“Get out of there,” Maryk said. “Get out of there and get everybody away from this telephone—”

The helicopter ride back to the swamp passed like a dream, clouds drifting across the midday southern sky like smoke. After a brief stop at the ranger’s station, Melanie and Maryk were back in the launch, nosing along the dead stream toward the island lab.

Melanie was beginning to wonder if she had actually survived Plainville at all. Atlanta and swamps, airports and prisons, Pearse and Maryk, and now Oren Ridgeway, perhaps this was all a fantasy spun out of the loneliness of death.

Nothing pulled on her, neither the past nor the future. No youth, no family; she was entirely without label or claim. She thought of her hometown. Two years after the outbreak, a big developer had settled with Plainville’s property heirs, buying up every square foot of the deserted, haunted town, dirt cheap. Each house was razed and each automobile was junked, as there was no other way to get rid of the chemical smell left by the town’s ablution. Landfill was brought in from up and down the East Coast and sculpted into hillocks and rolling fields. Overpopulation and the graying of the so-called baby boomers of generations past had created a bullish death market. Plainville was currently a town without a school or a post office or a police force. Humped stone markers and white crosses laced the fresh sod grafted over the sculpted hillsides like white stitches sewn over a layer of green skin. Eternity Way, the town’s main north-south route, saw more than twenty funeral processions each day. Melanie’s hometown was a thriving necropolis.

She existed now purely as a vessel to be filled up and emptied and filled again. Four years of prolonged limbo had followed the effacement of her life in Plainville, and now she again found herself trapped in yet another bizarre holding pattern, a limbo between limbos. Long-term nonprogressor — no kidding. The virus would not let her go. They had cured her of the disease, but the sickness kept coming back for her.

“He wants to kill me,” she said. “Doesn’t he? Or infect me somehow.”

Maryk nodded, in front of her. “That sounds about right.”

“Life-saving blood,” she said. “Don’t forget. I’m to be protected, no matter the cost.”

“I won’t forget.”

They passed the first Plainville plants again. BioCon agents in yellow suits were uprooting them and hacking them into manageable pieces.

“Oren Ridgeway took me to my senior prom,” Melanie said.

Maryk turned. He looked at her.

“Believe me,” she said, “it wasn’t my idea. I tore up all the photographs in long, thin strips, one of the last things I did before going to college. I was leaving the ‘old me’ behind. It didn’t work.”

He waited for her. She had expected a barrage of questions, but she realized that hers was just one of many shocks he had received that day.

“My parents arranged it,” she said. “He was four years older than I was, and just back from his college graduation. The town outcast type, but a total loser. Oren was a crusader, an environmental nut. My dad took pity on him — my dad liked people with ideals. I had no boyfriends, I was just a fat pudge. And my mother was so excited...” The memory intensified, and she had to shake it off. “He made the corsage himself From his own garden. It looked like a bright pink cabbage on my flabby chest. We danced one dance together. One. He danced like a freak and spent the rest of the night boring his old teachers, the chaperones, while I sat alone at the table feigning interest in my napkin.”

She didn’t tell him about the goodnight kiss at her door: her turning away at the last possible moment, and Oren’s chapped lips — he had an ugly habit of gnawing on them — just glancing the edge of her cheek.

She shuddered. “Oren didn’t like people,” she went on. “He said people were ruining the earth. He said we had been given this great gift, and we were just stomping all over it.” She felt a lopsided smile spread across her face, like maple syrup over a pancake. “I was thinking, maybe, this could remain just between us.”

The island came into view up ahead, and they landed and Dr. Freeley led them along a winding pathway of torch stakes bunting black smoke. Maryk said nothing. They passed one of the gnarled Plainville trees, and Melanie felt like she was walking through one of her own freakish paintings.

Dr. Freeley said, “This ‘Zero’ worked quickly. We just got a stolen car report from Yulee. A white Dodge Auriga, stolen out of somebody’s driveway three streets back from the rest stop. An older model, zero-four. No Automap function or Global Positioning Receiver, and no theft retrieval — nothing traceable. The car is old enough to run under the current technological radar. I got in touch with the state police. They wouldn’t do roadblocks — said they couldn’t risk exposure to their men — but they’re setting up checkpoints, remote cameras to record cars and plates. It’s visible enough. It should at least keep him off the main routes, and pin him to this corner of the country. I put an Infectious Contaminant Bulletin out to every police organization in the southeast. They know what to do if they find the car.”

“Which is — get away, and call us.”

They came to the rear of the black canvas laboratory. Three BioCon agents were kneeling around something half-buried in the swamp floor. “We just found him,” Dr. Freeley said. Melanie made out a torso and part of a head, blistered and blackened with decay. “The missing hiker. Looks like Zero was feeding on him.”

Melanie shook her head. She swooned with the heat and the monstrousness of Zero and backed out to the path lined with burning torches. Suddenly the swamp didn’t seem large enough. The state of Georgia and the entire world didn’t seem large enough. But as much as she hated to admit it, she did feel safe with Maryk; that is, safe from everything except Maryk himself.

He came back out alone and they went to the front of the laboratory. BioCon had cut open the front length of the canvas so that the tents were open to the island. The wooden tables, littered with Plainville remains, resembled a gypsy marketplace cluttered with horribly spoiled produce. Melanie saw a jar containing what must have been the hiker’s left hand, and a wire-bound notebook propped open with Plainville flowers pressed into its pages, malformed petals and leaves that were hideous and yet, at the same time, madly beautiful.

Dr. Pearse tottered around the crude, plant-strewn tables, mumbling excitedly to himself. His gaunt face was glossy with perspiration from the heat, his eyes blinking strangely and fast. He looked even weaker under the hot sun. He teetered around the tables, and beckoned to them with a stiff hand as they approached.

“He’s learning,” he said proudly. “He was learning about himself, his own virus. He wants to know everything. He was curing out his virus through these infected plants, like Stanley with tobacco leaves, purifying it, crystallizing it, and refeeding it to the rats. He was nurturing his disease, crossbreeding it, over and over, hoping to trip a mutation: a strain that would not infect so thoroughly and so abruptly. Zero was trying to extend his latency period.” He limped to another table without his cane, where he had evidently filleted a Plainville plant stalk into hundreds of garish slices. “But of course — what virus wouldn’t, if it could? The longer a host remains viable, the longer it can spread the infection. He wants to become invincible.”

Maryk glanced back at Melanie as Dr. Pearse prattled on.

“He never found one, Peter. In fact, his latency period is growing shorter. This is because the virus is extraordinarily volatile. It is changing more rapidly now than ever before. Wholesale shifts since the prison outbreak. Incredible.”

“Stephen,” Maryk said. “You are talking a mile a minute.”

“It’s all here, Peter, all the answers.” His gnarled hand rested on the pile of notebooks in the manner of a schoolboy taking an oath. “I know what he’s waiting for now. His virus is changing all the time, becoming more refined. It’s all that uranium it was exposed to in the cave, for centuries. Zero’s virus is breaking down to the point where it will no longer infect vegetation and lower animals. Do you understand? Zero will sicken only Homo sapiens.” Dr. Pearse patted the notebooks in wonder. “It’s all happening within him — of him. He’s not there yet, but he’s getting closer, and he knows it. He knows it.”

Maryk nodded but showed him no enthusiasm. “Rest a moment, Stephen,” he said. “You’re exhausted.”

“I came here to kill him, Peter. I admit that. But now I see that we have to understand him first. We have to learn from him. Zero has something to teach us.”

Maryk looked stem. “You say you know things about Zero, Stephen. How?”

Dr. Pearse thought about it. “I’m not sure. I just do.”

“What, then? I need some idea of what I’m up against. Tell me what you know.”

Dr. Pearse held Maryk’s gaze, then accepted his challenge. “A man infected by a deadly virus that has not killed him, but instead combined with him, at some elemental level. A biological model of a man-virus.”

Maryk stared. “That’s right.”

“Viruses like tight, dark places. Sunlight is a virus killer. Given the evolutionary transformation that has taken place, he must prefer night to day. Direct exposure to sunlight should weaken him. Not mortally — this is not Dracula — but ultraviolet light exposure from the sun should have the effect of wearing him down.”

Maryk moved closer, intrigued. “Go on.”

“His thinking process is impaired. The body is resilient, as we know. The body battles for stability, always. The body adjusts to change. But the brain, the brain goes further than that: The brain compensates, sometimes to the point of overcompensation. It is an elastic organ, regenerating damaged tissue, even redrawing neural pathways with minimal impairment, perpetually searching for solutions to the millisecond-by-millisecond problems it is given. We know that Plainville targets the brain. Therefore Zero has, at the very least, suffered a series of shocks or minor strokes. There is physiological damage to the brain, unique psychological damage, and whatever resulting chemical imbalances, all combined with the rudiments of infection. As his higher functions began to fail, the brain’s only alternative for survival would be to simply switch them off. After so many years — I would say he exists in a state where dreaming and waking have become one and the same.”

“A functional dream state,” Maryk said, less encouragingly than provokingly.

“Yes,” Dr. Pearse nodded. He ran on. “As his brain continues to compensate for what it lacks, more primal emotions are tapped, and the mind reverts to the primitive. Survival beyond death means, for man, reproduction: offspring, parent to child. Fertilization and cell division forming another living host where the progenitor’s DNA can thrive. Of course, infection is essentially the same process. Zero is operating on this primal level now. His damaged brain has no choice but to embrace the creature its host has become. Only propagation can ensure survival at the genetic, viral level. This means widespread infection. That is his ultimate goal.”

It was as though Dr. Pearse was almost channeling Zero. He wilted in the heat, but still pressed on. Maryk said, “What about personality?”

“The character of a virus endowed with human traits? Easy. We’re talking about a being uninhibited by any obligations, social or moral. Combine the worst elements of a serial murderer, a rapist, an impulsive arsonist. Hyper-aggressive, hyper-sexual, homicidal, egocentric, pathological. An unqualified sociopath. The ultimate deviant terrorist mentality. All Zero wants to do is infect, infect, infect.”

Maryk moved one more step closer, now facing Dr. Pearse across a wooden table. “One more thing,” he said. “We’ve said that people who contract the virus do one of two things — they either die quickly, or we get to them early with the serum and they survive.”

Dr. Pearse nodded. “Except for Zero. He remained alive, and the virus was given time to integrate itself with his person.”

Maryk nodded slowly. “So this could, theoretically, happen to anyone who contracted the disease, and was kept alive through extraordinary means.”

Dr. Pearse considered it and was about to give his answer when his grin fell. He came to stare at Maryk as Maryk went on.

“How do you know so much about him? How did you find his lab here in the middle of four hundred thousand acres of swamp? You say you could feel him.”

Dr. Pearse said nothing. He continued to stare.

“Stephen, how is it you are so obviously sick, and yet have remained so strong?”

Melanie understood now. She watched the sunlight beat down on Dr. Pearse, and he noticed that he was weaker in it.

Dr. Pearse had nothing to say.

“We’re leaving here right now,” Maryk said. “I want to get another took at you back at the bureau.”

Dr. Pearse’s face changed, and he looked at Maryk as though Maryk were crazy. “There’s too much to do here, Peter. Too much to learn. I’m so—”

“Close to him,” Maryk said. “How close are you, Stephen?”

Dr. Pearse was jittery now. This was the first time Melanie had ever seen him angered. Sweat glistened on the livid sores mottling his face and neck. He looked back and forth at the two of them, and then at the BioCon agents behind.

“I’m staying,” he said. He pointed weakly at the table that separated him and Maryk. “I’m staying right here and working.”

Something happened then, and Maryk started to back away from Dr. Pearse. “Stephen,” he said. He held a gloved hand out in front of him. “Stephen. Listen to me.” Melanie did not see it until just then. “Don’t move.”

A spot of dark red had appeared under Dr. Pearse’s nostril. He grew agitated under their staring, like a cornered animal. “You all just stay away from me,” he said.

“Stephen.” Maryk stopped and held his ground. “Your nose is bleeding.”

Dr. Pearse looked at them strangely. He reached up to his face and examined his stiff fingertips. The blood was coming down onto his blistered top lip now. He looked at it on his fingers as though he did not understand.

“Just don’t move,” Maryk said.

Dr. Pearse looked up, confused, his hand still open in front of him. Then he started slowly around the table, as though to explain. Maryk took another step backward, and Melanie found herself doing the same. “Stephen,” Maryk said sharply.

The blood was coming faster now, a dark, heavy red, running out of both nostrils and down over his lips. Melanie sensed movement all around her, the suited BioCon agents, assembling.

Dr. Pearse appeared disoriented suddenly. “You don’t understand, I—”

He came another step forward, but this time Maryk did not give any ground. Maryk stood ready to meet him. Melanie saw the black bag in his right hand.

Melanie said suddenly, “Stephen. Please.”

Maybe it was her use of his first name, or just the softer voice. Whatever it was, he blinked and saw her there as though for the first time, and then looked at the suited BioCon agents around him. He seemed to understand what was going on then. He was leaking biohazardous material, and was a threat to those around him. Dr. Pearse looked down at his own arms and legs as though they were disappearing. Blood flowed thickly down to his gaunt chin.

Melanie showered and changed the next morning, and Pasco returned her to the BDC and the roof of Building Seven where a BDC helicopter was waiting. She climbed inside next to Maryk, and the helicopter lifted off, climbing away over the building blocks of the BDC and the Emory campus. Only when they were well above everything like treetops and radio antennas did she relax. The roofs and playing fields of rural Georgia slid under them, and the world appeared so orderly from above.

“I give up,” she said. “Where are we going?”

“Gala Island,” he said. “I have an appointment there.”

All she knew about Gala Island was that it was an animal reserve the BDC maintained somewhere off the Georgia coast. It was a habitat for thousands of different animal species.

“Where animals are raised for laboratory experiments?” she said. “No thank you.”

“Popular misconception. Their natural environments are rigorously maintained. Ninety-nine percent of the time, all we need are the living cells.” He spoke distractedly, preoccupied, and she assumed the reason was Dr. Pearse. “However, this is one of those one percent times.”

She turned her attention to the board game of earth sliding beneath her, and at once they flew off the coast of Georgia, over the blue and white Atlantic, still turgid from the storm. She watched for the island, and it breached beneath them like an emerald green whale, spouting trees and short hills, cut smooth with plains, spotted with white roofs of civilization. They curled around its sandy southern coast, and the helicopter set down at the end of a short airfield.

The island glistened after the overnight storm. The calm order of its trees and brush was like Disney compared to the Dall of the Plainville swamp. They got into a waiting Jeep and Maryk drove them along a rising dirt path into dense tree cover, passing a sign that read AVIARY. She began to see birds looping overhead. Like stars appearing after nightfall, the longer she looked, the more appeared: flitting around the high trees, dipping and Rapping high overhead, sleeping with tucked bills on lower branches along the roadside.

She asked Maryk to pull over just for a minute, and he did. She left him in the Jeep and walked into a wide clearing. Birds flew above her and called to one another and cried. She possessed a bird-watcher’s knowledge of the groupings and could tell that many species were not indigenous to the Americas. There were basic sea birds, closer to the coastline, such as cormorants, divers, swans, and grebes. Long-necked herons and cranes. Then the game birds — pigeons, turtledoves, and various taloned birds of prey. Long-legged waders. Small terns, auks. Sharp-beaked gulls laughing and screaming overhead. And the tree birds: swallows and larks and wagtails and woodpeckers. All zipping here and there, or hopping busily along the dirt paths with twigs in their beaks. Twin pipits raced across the road before her. Thrushes and warblers. Flycatchers. Shrikes and swifts. Hummingbirds and tiny, mouselike wrens. Crows and starlings and orioles and sparrows and finches.

She could not help but smile. The beauty of the place was thrilling and strange, the winged life thriving all around her. Growing up in Plainville, she had kept three different seed houses in the trees surrounding her home, two she had made out of milk cartons, and one store-bought wooden perch, a birthday present from her grandmother, which had hung by wire from a tree branch outside her bedroom window, and to whose greedy patrons she had awakened every Plainville morning.

There was a small outpost but she did not see any people. The cottagelike building was set on the bank of a pristine reservoir that must have been man-made, and she was reminded that birds were reservoirs for Plainville, susceptible to the virus and able to transmit it, but themselves immune to the disease. She wondered how many tests had been run on these birds, how many different ways the humans had tried to trick them into giving up their secrets.

She felt safe there, away from Zero and Atlanta, and left reluctantly, the fugitive cries fading as they drove on.

The monkey house was dead center on the island. They went down to the isolation level and were met there by a primate warden in jeans and scrub shirt who led them to a small, square viewing window. “I’m not at all comfortable with having this virus here on Gala,” he told Maryk. “One slip up and the entire island, a decade of work — wiped clean.”

Maryk stared through the bright window. Melanie had no intention of looking herself, but there was something in the warden’s voice when he said, “This is medieval,” Something about the man’s fear compelled her to join Maryk at the window.

They were looking into a small, brightly lit observation room. The floor was streaked with blood and shed hair, and a single female chimpanzee lay slumped in the corner. Her nippled chest was huffing and her red eyes were violent and fevered, regarding Melanie with what could only be described as homicidal intent. Her facial features below were faded into a meek Plainville grin. The dying chimp appeared quite human.

Maryk turned from the window and started away. “Destroy it,” he said to the warden.

Melanie caught up with him outside. Maryk was staring at the swishing island trees from the monkey house porch. “It’s a simulation of the circumstances of Stephen’s infection and treatment,” he said, “but without the work I did to protect his brain. I initiated it a few days ago. I had to see if the Zero paradigm would repeat.”

Melanie remembered the chimp’s eyes, and knew that it had.

“The virus is breaking down too fast,” he said. “The chimp is sustaining the infection but not the genetic mutations. I’ve seen the tests: Over seventy percent of its cells have been converted into viruses. I compared these with tests of Stephen’s blood, and it’s the same. He’s up over ninety percent already. If the virus doesn’t kill Stephen first, it could convert him, and turn him into another Zero.”

Melanie stared at him as he watched the trees. “But it didn’t change me,” she said.

“The virus was purged from your body early on. It was your recovery from the disease that took so long.”

He was quiet the rest of the way back to Atlanta. Melanie had little memory of the trip herself, consumed as she was by the contrasting images of the sacrificial chimp suffering in the small, bright room on that elysian island, and Dr. Pearse sitting and awaiting his end in the hospital unit Tank at the BDC.

Plainville was enjoying its rout. My eviscerated immune system was lashing out blindly at the virus, turning on healthy tissue and vital organs in a manic final attempt to survive. I was defenseless against myself, and this was Plainville’s greatest perversion.

The cells that made up my person were expiring in wave after wave of microscopic corporal genocide. Whereas a fit body replenishes itself, cells dividing and reproducing beneficially, my cells were being exploited to breed lethal viral clones. I was a human hive of frenzied bees. My body was being debauched.

When I allowed myself to daydream it was simply this: a hot shower and a long, careful shave, bathed in the warm scent and intimacy of my own bathroom in my own home.

The work in B4 had kept me going. It had disciplined my mind. Now all my time was devoted to rumination. My focus had turned inward.

I opened the glass shell of the hyperbaric chamber that was my bed. The berth saturated my blood with collagen-stimulating oxygen that slowed the meltdown of connective tissue characteristic of Plainville. I sat up, and swung my thin legs over the side.

As director, I had overseen the construction of the Level 4 Biocontainment Tank. I knew, for example, that the steel doors could be operated only from the outside. There was no way out other than complete recovery or death. I looked at the eastern wall, a ten- by thirty-foot video monitor, remembering that we had done a study showing that pastoral scenes were most soothing for patients confined in prolonged clinical isolation. I watched geese flapping across a bleeding orange sunset over a salt marsh of waving spartina.

Floaters in my eyes gave me aquarium vision, hairlike beings and crystalline forms swimming across my view. I imagined they were viruses wriggling and writhing before me.

I was hyper-attuned now to every creak and flutter of my failing body. I could feel the blood slowing and gelling in my veins, the very platelets rupturing. My heart beat lugubriously against newly calcified ribs, and I had developed an odd arrhythmia: Once every fifteen minutes or so, my heart struck a double beat, like a bass player’s finger slipping off a string. The silence that followed would freeze me, a chill fanning out from my spine like a peacock preening mortality, until the stillness of the suspended beat passed and life turned over again within the sordid chamber of my corrupted chest.

I wiped at and probed the sunken ridges around my eyes, the newfound angularity of my cheeks. After thirty seven years: a different face, a lesser face, in place of my own. I was wearing someone else’s eyes, lips, jaw. I looked at my hands, front and back. A stranger’s hands, an older man’s, fingers curling to my command, but reluctantly. Arthritis had commenced its rout. Billions of excess antibody proteins bred by my flailing immune system — that my body had no natural way of expelling — were caking on every joint. I was biologically rusting.

The inside door opened, and Peter entered carrying his black bag. Seeing him again made me feel contrite, and I am certain I avoided his eyes at first. There was no medical reason for him to visit me. He had come only to look at me and see how much I’d changed.

“Anything on Zero yet?” I said.

Maryk shook his head. “We’re on him. Still waiting.”

“He’s planning something,” I said.

Peter looked at me anew. My insights made us both uncomfortable. “What is he planning?” Peter said.

I shook my head, and eventually looked down at the white floor. “But he’s changing, Peter. The genetic core of his virus. You need to protect Melanie.”

“I’m testing her blood all the time.”

“Zero’s virus is breaking down. She could become susceptible.”

“She’s with me all the time. Bobby Chiles has organized a Plainville conference for tonight, to counter some of the public hysteria. She’ll go with me.”

I looked over at the geese flapping across the orange twilight.

“You know what’s happening to me,” I said.

Peter stared at me a long moment. “I do.”

“Kill me. If I start to turn. Promise me, Peter. You won’t let me become like him.”

As I finished these words, I froze, my addled heart striking a pronounced double beat, then stopping, resting quiet and still, a hunk of fatty meat suspended in my chest. A morose chill embraced me, but the beating resumed moments later, and trembling, I exhaled the foul contents of my eroding lungs.

I opened my eyes. Peter remained standing before me with his black bag in his hand.

Maryk had to remind himself as he sat there that evening inside the Georgia World Congress Center that there was nothing more he could be doing at present to hunt Zero. The description of the stolen car was out to every police organization in the southeast with a description of the subject wanted on a “Plainville quarantine violation.” It was inconceivable that a busted taillight and an alert patrolman were all it might take to end the Plainville scourge. He had agents in the lobby ready to take him to any outbreak on a moment’s notice.

The Congress on Plainville convened at five o’clock that afternoon. An emerging disease prompted as much hoopla as it did concern within the world medical community and the scant information the BDC had about the virus and its resultant disease was being disseminated at seminars and public awareness workshops throughout the convention center. It was all a thinly veiled publicity event aimed at renewing public confidence in the disease-fighting talents of the BDC. But the cooperation of the public was essential to successful disease control and that was why Maryk agreed to appear.

He had declined a seat on the long curtained dais and instead commandeered a front row table against the far wall of the second-floor conference room. He and Melanie sat there alone. Fifty round tables behind him sat five hundred members of the world medical community listening to speeches and awaiting a free dinner.

Maryk focused on the stage. Dr. Alex Solbin supported himself against the podium with both forearms as he read from his tablet. Solbin was deputy director for HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis and next in line behind Bobby Chiles for Stephen’s job. His cane stood against his empty chair next to the podium and his face mask hung untied off his shirt collar. Many of those in attendance wore masks and gloves for sanitary reasons but Alex Solbin was in his fourth year of managed clinical AIDS. It was therefore imperative that he protect his HIV-compromised immune system. His visage as projected upon the large screen behind him was thin but hale. A face-filling beard accentuated the features of his Soviet ancestry.

Solbin outlined the goals of the conference in the opening portion of his remarks. Invoking Maryk’s name sent an explicit ripple of disapproval throughout the room. Maryk smiled in the dark. It was easy for the international medical establishment to dismiss one who had never sought their fellowship. Maryk had thought himself peerless ever since his split with Stephen.

He turned toward the doctors and medical scientists sitting reverently before glowing tablets. They were gathered to demonize Plainville at the same time they worshipped the majesty of this preternatural force that reduced healthy human beings to dust. The modern practice of health care had become like a religion. The attendees listened raptly to Solbin’s creed and dreamed of a miracle Plainville cure that would deliver them to everlasting glory. Stephen Pearse was their messiah but he had stumbled and fallen from grace. Maryk wondered what the knowledge of Zero’s existence would do to their piddling faith.

Faith was a commodity now. Faith could be bought and sold. Devotion was something paid to fan clubs, political parties, corporate affiliations, home teams. The cartel of religion had been broken up only recently by the heterodoxy of a man named Darwin. My heart and soul care for worms and nothing else in the world just at present. This from a man who had once studied for the clergy. And like dominoes the myths of creation fell. The next day faith began trading on the open market.

Science was the defining knowledge of the time. Science had disproved religion and therefore had become religion. Its temples were third-floor laboratories in faceless glass buildings in industrial parks. Solutions to the mysteries of creation were being discovered under a microscope and not in books or upon an altar. Science had stroked the face of God and not perished. Now it was asking for a sample of His blood.

Maryk recalled the small church on a hill that his parents had taken him to as a boy and the hours spent playing on the wooden floor of the rectory while his mother answered telephones that rang and rang.

All the ancient beliefs had been debunked. But Plainville had ripped away the twenty-first century’s veil of human sovereignly and now the questions were once again beginning to outpace the answers. The world that had consumed its creator suddenly found itself revolving frightened and alone.

Maryk surfaced as though from a trance. He looked up and saw servers coming around with salads. Solbin was already well into his speech. Maryk tried to retrace his thoughts but the thread disappeared.

He shut his eyes a moment. His lids were heavy like theater curtains. It took some effort to raise them again. He looked at Melanie and the room drifted in his vision. She was two seats away from him.

He could not reach her from where he sat. He pushed back his chair and reached for his bag. He placed his other hand on the table. He stood unsteadily.

She listened to the hum of controlled air inside the Tank. Stephen Pearse’s eyes rolled open inside the incubator-like berth. “Melanie,” he said, muffled, like a dead man waking inside a coffin.

She unsealed and rolled back the glass top. His skin was tarnished with lesions and odd, lurid blemishes, and his fingernails had flaked off like his lost hair. He must have weighed less than she did now. His neck looked like thin rods bundled in rice paper. His clavicle was a bar that his head and neck had been set upon to rot, and a dark boil oozed over his right eye. His eyeballs were ghostly red and deep-set, and his pupils — misty, blue — were clouded as though with suspicion.

She brought him water and he sat up slowly and closed his ragged lips around the straw. She pulled over the room’s only chair to sit across from him, and he faced her from the padded bed with an eerie dignity. She began to tell him what had happened. He required every trivial detail, especially where Maryk was concerned.

She noted the slowness of his gray tongue and his fixed lips as he spoke. “Zero is sick,” he said. “He needed that treatment information given at the conference. Peter knows this now. Zero is running out of time.”

“Time for what?”

“Human time. The virus is mutating so wildly now that the human cells can no longer cope. His body functions are already running at minimum capacity. Zero is genetically sick, in a way we don’t yet understand.”

“He moved pretty quickly down those stairs.”

“All the doctors and virologists fighting his disease, all gathered in one place. He learned what he needed to know, then disposed of them. The genius of it. So like a virus. He is that much closer to clearing a path for a worldwide epidemic.”

“You’re so certain.”

The rods of Stephen’s frail neck tensed, and from time to time his eyes narrowed suddenly. He was evidently suffering much pain. “That is why he is here in Atlanta now. He’s becoming more desperate. It is like a race between these two concerns: the breakdown of his virus to where it will only infect humans, and the death of his human host.” Stephen nodded as though to confirm this. “The same race that is being run in me now.”

She didn’t know how to respond to his apparent enthusiasm for Zero. “Do you think, then, that Zero has forgotten all about me?”

The disease had carved Stephen’s face of everything except a crimson-eyed curiosity. He answered her regretfully, and yet there was something undeniably bright behind his eyes. “No,” he said.

She shuddered. “It won’t ever end. Will it?” She was near tears again. “Only now the creature after my blood is not Maryk, but Zero.”

“You can save him,” Stephen said.

She looked at him. She thought he meant Zero, “Save who?”

“Peter. There is still time. Has he told you the Meister story?

She nodded, confused. “The boy. Pasteur’s crypt.”

“He wants someone to vouch for him, to stand up for him after he’s gone.” His eyes lost focus a moment. “You’re only seeing the end of a person, the nadir in a long slide from humanity. The first time I met Peter Maryk, he was holding a cheap bouquet of flowers wrapped in pink saran. He was pursuing a girl in our American lit elective, a daughter of one of the big auction house families. She was beautiful; he never had a chance. Still, he pursued her, finding out her schedule and making certain their paths crossed between each class. He made a career out of social failure in those days-he went about it with such verve.”

His lips and tongue got in the way of his strained voice, but sentiment carried the words.

“Peter and I graduated the university together, Class of 2001. The millennium change came over our final holiday break. My parents were big political contributors in New York at the time, and we had received four tickets to the ball at the governor’s mansion. Having no date myself, I talked my father into mailing Peter a plane ticket to fly out from Washington to attend. It was a gaudy, splashy affair, but boring for the two of us. Borough representatives and old New York money, and there was Peter in a rented tuxedo, standing around like my bodyguard. He said later that that night was the first time he had ever heard the pop of a champagne cork; I’d grown up hearing it. We slipped out early, with no particular plan in mind except to get away and salvage the rest of the night. Champagne was in short supply all around the world, but abundant at the mansion, and we pinched a case of two-hundred-dollar Moët before hopping into my car. I drove an MG then; my parents, they spoiled me. One thing led to another and we found ourselves on the highway driving out to my family’s summer house in Amagansett.”

He seemed strangely happy, continuing as though in a trance.

“We installed ourselves in the sitting room just before midnight, a glassed-in porch facing the water. I’d not seen Peter drink before, and haven’t since. Midnight came and we toasted the television set, then switched it off to hear the cheers from the houses down the street, and went outside and raised our voices to the chorus. Fireworks thumped in the distance, unseen, the sky around us so bright and bare. We went down to the water, drinking straight out of our bottles. The sand was cold and hard. We stopped just before the foaming swash to toast the tide and the moon, and that was when Peter told me he was dropping out of school. He said he had decided to become a sculptor, and was trying to get up the courage to tell his parents over the break. Of course, no one sculpts anymore, but that was Peter. He shared this with me like it was some terrible secret — which, I guess, it was. We had only that one last semester left of school. But I was in no condition to talk him out of it, and in fact I’m certain I raised my bottle to his decision. He returned home the next day, and the truth is, I don’t know if he ever told them. He was back at school that January, working harder than ever, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask. I didn’t learn until April that his mother was sick. If Peter was close to anybody, he was close to her.”

Melanie shook her head when he was done. He seemed so happy. “I don’t want to know any more,” she said.

She had been eight years old that remarkable night. She stayed up late, spent the evening baking cookies, playing board games, and watching TV with her parents, and promised herself that when she grew up, every night was going to be just like that.

Stephen’s head trembled a bit. His hands grew tremulous in his lap, and he looked at them, as though unable to will them to stop. Then his eyes found hers again.

“Melanie,” he said. “I am dying. But not quickly enough. I am afraid I might become dangerous. I’m afraid I will frighten you.”

“Please,” she said. His words forced the tears from her eyes, but she could not tell him to shut up.

“He’s changing me. I don’t know how long I can resist. But I’m afraid the time may come when I would want to harm you.” She shook her head, but he went on. “You shouldn’t come here alone anymore.”

She sat still and listened to his harsh breathing as her tears blotted one after another upon the glazed white floor.

The tablet tone woke him and he came to lying flat on his office couch. He felt for his bag on the floor. He opened his tablet screen and concentrated on it. His head felt full of sand. “Who is it?”

“Suzy Lumen, Dr. Maryk, from Cyber. Director Pearse’s tablet accessed the central computer net earlier this morning. I’m sorry — we missed it.”

Her words rallied him to consciousness. The head and shoulders of the large blind woman wearing a headset filled his window. “Where did it go?” he said.

“They were into the system for just over nineteen seconds, unfortunately not enough time to trace. They went right to the bureau master address list and downloaded sixty-four percent of it, breaking off the connection at the letter Q.”

Q followed P for Pearse. “Is the director’s address updated to the Tank?”

“Let me check,” she said. Maryk waited. “Yes, it is. Would you like me to cut the intruder out of the system now? I can delete Director Pearse’s tablet code and fence them out of the Genetech.”

“No,” Maryk said. “I need to preserve that link. However tenuous.”

He closed his tablet and slumped back against the couch. He remembered his apartment but not the return to the BDC. Melanie must have driven. She must have helped him into his office.

His cascades were growing more and more intense. Zero’s virus was inestimably potent.

He had only two sets of white cotton shirts and black pants inside his office closet. He took one and carried it with him through the parking lot outside to the adjacent laboratory building where he deconned in a UV hold and changed clothes.

Dr. Carla Smethy was assistant head of pharmacology and yet she sat behind the same desk in the rare-drug clearinghouse of Building Six, Room 161, as she had six years before. Her black hair was tinged with gray and small lines textured her brow and the corners of her lightly painted lips. She was no more pleased to see him than she had been then.

“I need a prescription run,” he said. “By physician, going back ten days.”

Her chair turned as she crossed her legs beneath her desk. “Fine,” she said. “All I need is a court order, or proof of authorization from the attending physician.”

“I have neither. Let me give you the Ap’s name. Pearse, Stephen D.”

She looked at him probingly but the name worked. She pulled on a pair of eyeglasses and typed into her keyboard. The desk unit responded in an assertive female voice, “Searching now.”

“How is Stephen?” she asked while they waited.

Maryk searched his mind for an appropriate answer. He was still searching when the computer spoke again. “Ready.”

She looked at her desktop screen. “There are three prescriptions.”

“How recent?”

“Two in a Florida clinic two days ago, and one in Atlanta last night.”

“Last night? The patient’s name?”

“Watson, Robert.”

It was an uninspired pseudonym. “The drugs?”

“Fentanyl, two days ago, and Baniciclovir, brand name Banix. I believe that is a relatively new varicella zoster treatment.”

Zoster was the virus that caused chicken pox. After infection it retreated into the nerve ganglia at the base of the skull and remained latent until normal aging or a depressed immune system reactivated the virus into what is commonly known as shingles. Symptoms included acute paroxysmal neuralgic pain. Banix was one of the drugs cited in the information distributed at the Plainville conference.

“For postherpetic neuralgia,” she went on. “It’s an NMDA-blocker.” NMDA receptors on cell surfaces signaled pain transmission up the spinal cord to the brain. “A painkiller, a comfort drug.”

Maryk nodded. Zero was in significant pain. He had, gone right out after the World Congress Center exposure and used Stephen’s name to prescribe himself a patient treatment for the effects of his own virus.

“No unfilled prescriptions?”

“No,” she said. “But Banix is only two years out of FDA and still strictly regulated. Ten doses maximum per person. This Watson’s got only one refill left.”

This explained Zero’s inactivity between the Waffle House infection and the World,Congress Center. Fentanyl was a powerful opiate. Zero had narcotized his human side and spent the time holed up in his car somewhere riding out the effects of the drug.

The human side of Zero was dying.

I knew exactly what was happening to me. That was perhaps the most insidious thing of all. I knew exactly what was happening and what was to come.

I had self-diagnosed shingles. Due to the morphine — Peter had tended to me while I slept — there was none of the characteristic ophthalmic pain, described by many sufferers as being like an intense toothache in the eye. There were however telltale dysesthesias, or phantom pains, such as the sensation of cold water running down my face, and I could not ignore the impulse to continually brush imagined water away from my cheeks and chin. My overloaded nerves were transmitting conflicting messages up the spinal cord to the thalamus of my brain, which was doing its best to cope with the information at hand.

Morphine. It was lovely. Morphine did not eliminate the pain, but rather compartmentalized it, so that pain remained but was a separate issue. Whenever the twinges became too sharp, I self-medicated using a thumb switch attached to my IV tubes and the dose regulator above. Then the hand shaking and neck throbbing went away. Peter was taking good care of me. I could only wonder at the degree of pain Zero was experiencing.

I was weakening. Pharyngeal ulcers were taking root in my throat, and in time I would lose the ability to swallow my saliva. My urine spilled into a catheter bag, an oily, purple drool, portending liver failure, said to be a uniquely painful event. I had accrued so much specialized knowledge in my thirty-seven years, and all of it was now draining away. Memories drifted past me on a kind of farewell tour, not flashing before my eyes but rather swirling together like so many different colors of paint, stirred into dreams. In one, the corridors and offices of Building Sixteen were filled with everyone I had ever known — family and friends, colleagues and patients, all my living and dead — passing me by without a word. I had left the door to my office wide open, but no one stopped in.

I awoke outside my oxygenated berth, seated on a high-backed wheelchair, tired and groggy. The wall screen played an underwater scene of coral reefs and schools of bright tropical fish, meant to be soothing. In designing the Tank as a place of comfort, I found that to that end I had failed. There were no reflective surfaces inside the Tank, in order that the ill would not despair at the sordid sight of their own disfigured face-, even the stainless steel fixtures were dulled. All communications in and out were monitored for signs of depression, and suicidal tendencies. I was a prisoner in a dungeon of my own design.

There was a remote keypad built into the arm of my chair, linked to the Tank computer. I instructed it to replace the deep-sea panorama with a prerecorded program from the BDC archives, my documentary, The Disease Dilemma.

There I was. Facing myself from the wall, sitting on the couch back in my office, legs crossed casually, arm extended over the seat back. I looked relaxed and supremely healthy, my face full again, my skin tight and clear. My old voice filled the Tank, dosing me with nostalgia more powerful than morphine. The sunlight was strong behind me, glowing around my hair — midday in the world of the living, just a few weeks earlier. The vista of downtown Atlanta lay beyond. Image after image swept over me until the sentimentality of the experience began to wear. I had different eyes now, and different thoughts. When the person playing the role of “Stephen Pearse,” doctor to the world, claimed that he oversaw each serious outbreak investigation personally, I stifled a laugh. The hubris of this strange man tickled me. He was begging Zero to wait for him inside bay twenty-six at Orangeburg.

I stopped the show and sank back into the cushion of the headrest, closing my eyes on the brightness of the Tank. I triggered the medication switch with a rusted thumb and it worked on my emotions, set adrift into a bright and gauzy silence. I left myself for a while, and in the role of Stephen Pearse, I visited my current self in the chair. Be brave, I told that sickly form.

I surfaced to the toning of the Tank computer. I prodded the necessary keys on my armpad to receive the incoming message. It had been posted from “Stephen Pearse” in Zurich, Switzerland. The message read:

Maryk watched in disbelief as the conversation scrolled down his tablet. Stephen and Zero were conversing across a virtual table in a cyber-café halfway around the world.

Audio and visual were both disabled. Each dialogue leader was listed as S. Pearse. Stephen answered

A window opened at the top right corner of Maryk’s tablet. It was Suzy Lumen. “Hailing’s still off,” she said. “He’s plugged in somewhere.”

“You can’t trace?”

“Impossible to track him back through the Internet. He’s routed the signal through five or six sites all across the world, maybe more. The only crumbs left behind would be stored in his own drive cache.”

“All right,” Maryk said. She signed off and he found his place in the scrolling conversation. Zero was speaking.

Stephen did not respond.

The connection ended. Maryk saved the transcript and paged through it again. Zero had contacted Stephen because he was hurting. Zero was getting desperate. Desperation could lead to a critical mistake.

His tablet toned again. This time the window opened on Dr. Smethy. “Another Banix prescription was just filed under Stephen’s name.”

She posted him the electronic receipt. The prescription had been forwarded to a pharmacy just south of downtown Atlanta. Zero was walking into a trap and Maryk would be waiting for him.

The country music playing in the aisles made her want to do something drastic. It was one of those electric fiddles, an instrument that clearly should never have been electrified, sawing into her brain like a voice instructing her to burn down the store. The sun was gone outside and soft halogen ceiling lights suffused the wide aisles of the Buy-Rite! Super Drug store with a ghastly, morguelike glow. Only two teenage customers remained inside, goofing off quietly in aisle three. Melanie sat at the front register in her red paper-like Buy-Rite! blazer, after spending the day scanning bar codes and working on her southern accent. The return to the dull routine of customer service was at first comfortable and even kind of fun, and she had amused herself between sales by reading every magazine and tabloid on the racks and most of the greeting cards, until she realized that it was not nostalgia, but in fact all that awaited her back in Boston was the same broken life of half jobs and always just getting by.

She drifted back down the long, warehouse-sized aisle to the pharmacy in the rear. Maryk wore a white Buy-Rite! pharmacist’s coat with the name plate “Dennis” over where most people’s hearts are. The coat was too small for him, the wrist hems coming down only as far as the taped cuffs of his gloves, which made him look even more huge up on the raised counter overlooking the store.

He had needed someone else who could stand in the store without wearing a suit. The common sense assumption was that Zero himself would not come inside, based on the fact that there had been no infections at either of the two previous pharmacies he had patronized. She was there solely in order that everything would appear normal inside. In the event that Zero did enter, she was to usher out any customers so that BioCon could seal off the store and Maryk could do away with him.

She stepped up behind the counter over a carpeted wooden step that sounded hollow. There was a carousel of sunglasses, and she looked into one of the small mirrors, picking-at the lifeless strands of her platinum blond wig. “This isn’t fooling anyone,” she said. The wig looked like one of those awful hairpieces they give free to cancer kids.

She could see the entire store from the raised counter, the two kids having split up, the girl in the makeup aisle and the boy at the snacks. She could see straight down the double-wide center aisle to the glass doors in front.

“Shouldn’t you have a gun or something?” she said. “What about calling in the police? The army, even.”

Maryk slipped his hands into the pockets of his jacket. She thought his shoulder seams would burst. “That would only mean putting more people at risk. They aren’t equipped for this.”

What he didn’t say was that he had a jones for viruses, and that Zero was the ultimate virus and Maryk wanted him all to himself.

“Well, I’d blow a hole in him,” Melanie said. “But that’s just me.”

“Thank you for your input.”

She picked up a TB pamphlet and opened it before putting it back. “I was wondering what’s going to happen to me after all this.”

His eyes remained on the front doors. “What do you mean?”

“Just that, part of me is worried that when this ends, I’ll be sort of expendable. I know I’ve learned a lot here. I’ve seen a lot.” She kept her tone as casual as possible. “Too much, maybe?”

His expression did not change. “What are you saying?”

“Just that I’d hate to see something happen to me. Do you think I need to take any precautions?”

He looked at her then with a gray-eyed glare that made her wish she had remained back at the register. It was anger, clearly, and yet something else. She thought she had been speaking his language, but he looked now as though she had somehow disappointed him.

The door chime sounded. They turned and another teenage kid entered, stopping just inside the doors that slid shut behind him. He looked around at the signs over the aisles, then saw the pharmacy in back and started toward it. Maryk lifted his hands out of his pockets. Melanie moved one step away.

The kid wore an army-style olive-drab jacket with a thin silver chain looped off the shoulder. He was slight and scuzzy with day-old chin growth and brown hair unevenly trimmed, as though by a friend. The bandage on his neck was just him trying to look cool. He came around a bin of New Year’s Eve hats and horns to the counter, nodding at “Dennis” and drumming two dirty fingers.

“Here to pick up a prescription,” he said with a nasty twang.

“Name?”

“Smith.”

He said it confidently enough. Maryk nodded, and Melanie moved another step away. “I’ll get it,” she said suddenly, going around the corner behind Maryk, out of sight into the back. Dr. Freeley and another Special Pathogens agent sat there on folding chairs, inside contact suits. Dr. Freeley handed Melanie a white paper bag with the prescription form taped over the folded top. It read “Banix,” but was in truth ten capsules of cyanide, just in case. Melanie heard Maryk out in front.

“Is this prescription for you?”

“For my daddy.”

“Is he here?”

“He sent me on in alone. He’s sick.”

“He’s at home?”

“Yep.”

“Because there’s a restriction on this medicine. Is there a phone number I can reach him at?”

“Naw. He’s out in the car right now. He’s sick, and he’s waiting out in the car. Sent me in.”

“He’s in the car.”

“Right. Said to say it’s all set.”

“Payment is, through his doctor. But this is a medical issue. Is he right outside?”

Dr. Freeley was waving at Melanie to get back out to the counter. Melanie gave the bag a shake so that the crinkle would precede her, then turned the corner.

The kid’s fingers were hanging on the counter now, no longer drumming. His posture was defensive and he watched the bag as Melanie handed it to Maryk.

“Just down the street a-ways,” said the kid, pointing, then scratching his neck near the bandage. “Uh — he’s real sick, an’ in a real hurry.”

Maryk deliberated, but then handed him the bag. “All right,” he said. “This time.”

The kid took the bag, gracious in victory. “No problem at all.”

He hustled back down the aisle past a pyramid of bottled soda. The dong-ding of the electric eye chimed, and he was gone.

Maryk was already stripping off his jacket. Dr. Freeley emerged and the other agent was speaking into his tablet: “He’s moving. Hold positions and watch him all the way to the car.”

“Some hustler,” Maryk was saying. “Working for a quick fifty. Zero must have killed the first two to stop his disease from spreading.” He pulled his black bag out from under the counter. “Stay with her,” he told Dr. Freeley, who was about to protest, but Maryk was already gone, rushing ahead of the other agent to the exit in back.

Maryk stirred and felt a hand release his own. He jerked as though to fight and then opened his eyes on the bright grayness of a ceiling. He was on top of a table inside a small room. His neck was weak. His limbs resisted movement as though he were buried in sand.

“Hi.”

Melanie was looking down at him. Her face was gauzy. He tried to raise his head but she put out a small hand to keep him down. “Zero,” Maryk croaked.

“They all thought you were dead.”

He got over onto one side. “Zero.”

Melanie left him and went to the door. She called someone from there as he dropped his legs over the table edge and sat up. The pain was loud and expanding in his head.

Freeley came into the room and looked him over. “Zero’s gone,” she said.

Maryk gripped the table. His head was still too heavy for his neck. “How?”

“He went out through the airfields and must have come back around. There’s a yellow cab missing. We’ve got the police out all over the state pulling over taxis.”

Maryk squeezed the sides of his head but could not feel any pressure against his skull.

“What happened in there?” Freeley said.

Maryk was trying to remember. A feeling of helplessness lingered. “How long have I been out?”

Freeley looked at Melanie who was standing against the wall. Melanie said, “About four hours.”

Freeley turned back. “The airport is in full quarantine, and we have Milkmaid serum going around. Primary exposures are already starting to show symptoms. But no planes got off. We blitzed the MARTA station as well, and it looks like we got everyone there too.”

Maryk said, “Inside the terminal atrium — there were trees.”

“Silk,” Freeley said. “But there was ivy, real ivy. All still healthy. The plants show no sign of the disease.”

So Zero’s virus had succeeded. Stephen had been right. Zero was infective only to humans now.

“Then it’s starting,” Maryk said.

Freeley looked at a clock on the wall. “Three hours until dawn. This massive quarantine is draining off a lot of manpower.” She stepped up to Maryk. “What happened in there?”

Maryk could say nothing. He hung his head and blood rushed to his temples.

Freeley went out again. Melanie came forward. “They carried you out on a stretcher,” she told him. “They thought you were dead. They thought maybe he had done something to you.”

He looked at his hands and saw that he was wearing fresh gloves. The skin on his face felt washed. “They cleaned you up,” she said.

She was in front of him now and he could see her hand moving nervously at her side. He saw her spinning her inhaler around and around. Something stabbed at him.

“Your inhaler,” he said.

She looked at it. “You must have found it on the concourse. They pulled it out of your bag. I could barely breathe.”

At once Maryk dropped to his feet. He saw his bag on the floor and fought his dizziness as he picked it up and straightened and unbuckled it on the table. He lifted out his tablet and a sterile syringe.

“Give me your arm,” he said. He took the inhaler from her hand.

“Hey, I need that.”

He brought out a testing dish. He grabbed her wrist and shoved her shirtsleeve back over her elbow. He was clumsy but moving faster and faster.

“Okay,” she complained. “All right.”

Maryk tied the tourniquet. Immediately he inserted the needle.

“I’m fine, you know— Ow!”

He drew out as much as he needed and began to prep the mixture.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said. “I’m fine. I was careful.” There was pride in her voice. “I kept him away from my glands.”

Maryk stared at the solution as it mixed. His arms and legs felt light.

“You were mumbling my name,” she said. “In your sleep, over and over. Your medical people, when they put a stethoscope to your chest and felt nothing, they thought you had gone into cardiac arrest. I had to direct them to the other side.”

Maryk held the table and implored the mixture with his stare. He connected the Plainville PCR test kit to his tablet and opened his tablet screen away from Melanie.

“You’re wasting time,” she said. “It’s New Year’s Eve. He’s still out there.”

Maryk punched in the command and got it wrong and entered it again. He was gripping the table.

She was standing near him and just waiting. “What are you going to do now?”

The gauge opened on screen and numbers appeared and the red bar began its crawl from zero. It grew strong to 18 percent before slowing. The bar stopped altogether at 24 percent. The screen was still a moment and then the red bar disappeared and a message began to flash.

She was waiting for him. He could not look up.

“What are you going to do now?” she said again. He unplugged the box and collapsed the tablet to stop the word from flashing.

He sat alone in the car in a parking lot of the Georgia World Congress Center staring at the dash and the speedometer needle pointing to zero.

The conference attendees who had responded unsuccessfully to the Milkmaid serum treatment remained inside and he had left Melanie with them under the pretense that she could see to their care. She would be safe there alone. And the suited and the already sick would be safe from her.

He pulled his eyes from the dash and turned the key and the starter ground. The engine was already running. He pulled out and headed fast for the highway.

Isolate her, Freeley had said.

It was not that simple. Melanie had told him twice that she would destroy herself rather than face Plainville again.

Containment, Freeley had said. This point was inarguable. Cutting off the virus was the only way to keep it from spreading. It had been his creed before it had been Freeley’s.

But he had failed the girl. He had promised to protect her.

What if I got sick again?

Simple. I would treat you.

And if I refused? Resisted?

She would not comply. She was a carrier now and would run or destroy herself if she knew.

Would you kill me?

If Zero succeeded, then none of this would matter. She would be infected like the rest. He needed to stop Zero before he needed to deal with Melanie.

Nothing impeded Zero now. His virus infected humans only. It had shifted so much that Melanie was no longer immune. He had corrupted her blood and now was utterly without cure. Atlanta was about to become the epicenter of a conflagration that would consume the human race.

But then Maryk remembered Zero’s pain in the airport tunnel. Zero’s virus was mutating wildly and tearing his genetic makeup apart.

Zero was sick.

At the BDC Maryk went immediately to the B4 sub-subbasement of Building Seven. He stopped before entering and did something he had never done before. Maryk PCR-tested his own blood. He mixed the blood sample and ran it into his tablet.

The bar expanded steadily to 100 percent. Of course he was still healthy. But his personal victory over the virus seemed hollow now.

He entered the first room and rebooted all the computers and the B4 unit came alive. He carried his bag through to the lab and brought out the sealed biohazard sac containing the syringe from the airport shuttle. The bevel of the needle was still crusted with Zero’s blood. He scraped the blood onto a sterile paper bindle and prepped it for processing.

His thoughts drifted back to Melanie. His failure was so absolute and the loss so needless that he had trouble getting his mind around it. There was only one remedial course of action. Four years ago he had saved her life. Now he would have to destroy her.

The work continued without him. The computer processed Zero’s blood sample and compared it to Stephen’s work on the older Zero virus from the Florida phone booth exposure. He examined the computer models side by side. The structural discrepancies of the viral genome were obvious and dramatic.

Zero was desperate and compelled to infect. But he was also perishing. His human host was weakening and in need of repair. He was running out of time.

The plan revealed itself to Maryk all at once. It was as though his distress over Melanie’s fate had subordinated the Zero dilemma in his mind and therefore freed him to think intuitively. But the design as presented was so propitious that he discounted it at first. Atlanta was rising to live out what could be its last healthy day. Nothing less than the survival of the species was at stake.

Moments later he was convinced of the genius of his scheme. It was as radical a treatment as he could envision and his only chance at stopping Zero.

He would need a geneticist’s help. He scheduled a meeting with Geist before rushing back out of B4.

Panic welled up ahead of tears as she stood before Stephen Pearse and for a moment thought he was dead. His head was tipped to the side and his lifeless face was gray and broken with hot, black, suppurating sores. His left arm hung straight off his wheelchair as though reaching for the floor, his gaunt fingers blistered and grayed like infested wood. She called his name again. She pushed his armrest and shook the chair gently, and his eyes opened, and he righted his head slowly, in pain. He looked about himself blindly before finding Melanie, and by then she was composed in front of him.

The sore on his right eyelid was seeping reddened pus and threatened to close the eye. He raised his own arm onto his lap, and his mouth contorted in pain. Melanie placed the medication trigger in his hand and watched him thumb it twice.

She blurted out the short version of what had happened at the airport, then pulled over the chair and told it all again, in detail, from beginning to end. It was a relief to sort it all out verbally, and her telling it kept both of them occupied. Stephen’s attention faded at times, but Maryk’s name always succeeded in bringing him back.

He spoke hoarsely, and from the way he swallowed Ye she could tell that some obstruction was growing in the space of his throat. The act of speaking had never before seemed so complicated. What he said at first sounded like gibberish, and she thought his mind was gone. Then came the English translation of the Latin phrase, just above a whisper: “You may drive nature out with a pitchfork,” he said, “but she will keep coming back.”

“Or ‘he,’ ” she said, relieved by his apparent sanity.

“Zero has the pitchfork at Peter’s throat now. Peter must stop trying to fight the man. He must instead fight the virus.”

She said nothing, pitying her faith in Maryk. She offered Stephen a plastic cup of water, and his grinning lips closed on the straw. He swallowed and eased back.

“You should hate me, Melanie. You should strangle me as I sit here. I let the girl with vitiligo go out of the camp. I am the one who brought about your sickness. Your parents. Your town. I caused all this.”

“Stop,” she said.

“Maybe it all should end. You’ve thought so sometimes, Melanie. Who hasn’t? No more suffering, no more struggling.”

“Please stop,” she said, but his eyes had slipped from focus. The IV lines slithered off his trembling arms, and her eyes filled as she looked at the rotting mass of his body.

He came around strong again. It was like standing beside a carousel, watching someone swing past and fade away.

“He left me his bag,” he said. She looked around and saw Maryk’s black bag there on the counter, watching them, like a cat. “He only visits when I am asleep. It is fear, though he would never admit it. Fear of my sickness. Fear of what I am becoming. Do you know why he left me his wares?”

“I think so,” she said quietly.

“The poison in his needles. The great virus hunter cannot bring himself to kill me.” He faded and came around again. “What did you think when you sat with him in the airport? Did you hold his hand? Did you wish, just for a moment, that he was me dying here, and me him, and healthy?”

He looked so evil suddenly. His cruel words brought tears even though she knew they were not truly spoken by him. “Why are you so obsessed with Maryk?” she said.

He was silent a while, and still; oozing. The redness of his eyes made the tears dammed along the rims appear like blood, and for a moment, just for a moment, he looked like a despairing saint. He looked like Stephen Pearse again. “I thought you would have guessed by now,” he said, with deathly pride in his voice. “I am Peter Maryk’s conscience. I am that black heart he keeps locked away.”

The work cubicles of the C complex lab in the Genetic Engineering section of Building Four were constructed of floor-to-ceiling reinforced glass. Geist sat on a wheeled stool inside the immaculate bell of the center work station while Maryk paced in front of him. A row of pencils stood like sentinels in the front pocket of Geist’s lab coat. The photograph on his laminated ID tag had been taken before the laboratory accident that caused his radiation exposure. In it Geist still possessed a mop of straw-colored hair.

Maryk gave him the condensed version of Zero’s creation and evolution and watched the man’s already pale face blanch to distress. What sold Geist on the story were the gaps it filled in the news accounts of the World Congress Center and Hartsfield airport outbreaks. Geist contemplated the structural discrepancies in the Zero virus comparisons Maryk had put up on the station monitors.

“Absurdly active,” said Geist. “Fracturing itself and refracturing, almost like a zipper.”

“It originated from a radiation exposure in a central African cave.”

Geist took another took at the before-and-after scans. “It could conceivably be reinfecting its human host with each genetic shift.”

“Not a host,” Maryk said. “The virus battled the original host’s body to equilibrium. Plainville has infiltrated and converted every one of this man’s cells. Host and virus are one and the same.”

“But the virus has shifted too much for the human half. It must now be consuming its own body.”

“Would you say the virus is mutating out of control?”

“The deviations are dynamic, arrant — like a human going from two arms to one, or three. Mutations are a terrific shock to the system.”

“And enough of them...”

Geist nodded. “This virus is going to mutate itself right out of business. When too much damage has been done to the gene core, it will no longer be able to reproduce.”

“And without the ability to reproduce, a virus is no longer a virus.”

“Dead matter, incapable of infection. But this takes time.

“Yes,” Maryk agreed pointedly. “Time.”

Geist sat back and crossed his arms as slowly as any man Maryk had ever seen. “Why come to me now?” he said. “A man colonized by an iatrogenic mutation of an immunopathic retrovirus. A humanized virus vector poised to infect the world.”

“An artist was once asked, ‘If your studio was burning to the ground, and you could only save one thing, what would it be?’ ”

Geist shook his head impatiently.

“The true artist brings out the fire. I want to bring out the fire here, Geist. I want to isolate this flame by depriving it of oxygen, so I can stamp it out.”

The old distrust had returned. “With what?”

“Time. I need you to brew something for me, and I need it fast.”

Geist crooked his head for a different angle on Maryk. Then he grinned. “A bug,” he said. “You want to counterinfect. You want a bug you can deliver to Zero.”

“No,” Maryk said. “To Atlanta. I want to infect the city before Zero does.”

Geist’s informed grin fell.

Maryk said, “A virus needs hosts. It travels only on the backs of others, through contact and exchange. Tonight is New Year’s Eve — the single biggest night of casual human interaction. We’ve got to break up the party. We’ve got to eliminate Zero’s transmission by keeping people apart.”

Geist said, “You want to give Atlanta a city wide flu?”

“Zero is peaking. He is dying and his virus is failing — in time. He’s gone underground now because he is sick. He is resting somewhere in order to build up his strength for a night of widespread infection. He is ready to touch off a pandemic that will engulf the human race. I need to starve him out so I can find him and eliminate him. I need to shut down the city and its inhabitants for a day or two.”

“So go out over the airwaves. Get Bobby Chiles on the news—”

“Not enough. Even with the public fear of the virus, you know there are some who would still ignore our warnings, and that’s all Zero needs. I need something that will hit the city fast and knock it down hard.”

Geist’s hand went slowly to rub his bald head. “Insane,” he said.

“Drastic. And desperate. And necessary.”

“I’m here to prevent disease.”

Maryk nodded. “Exactly.”

Geist massaged his scalp like a man polishing a brass orb. “I suppose you’d want ninety-eight to one hundred percent infectivity. Say, deliverable in a minute dose, and able to tolerate diverse environments. With no available antidote.”

“That’s right.”

“So would every army of every nation in the world. They call them ‘biological weapons,’ and I’d sooner trust something like this to them than to you.”

“This is what you do here, Geist: You bend nature into your bow. This planet is seething with ignorant hosts, and if we don’t stop Zero here in Atlanta, today, it’s over. It’s all over.”

Geist burned as he rubbed his head. He ruminated and polished and sighed. “There might be something.” Seconds ticked away while Geist studied Maryk warily. “Two years ago. A bug that burned through half the North Korean Army.”

Maryk recalled the news stories. “Came up out of the jungle and went right down again. Half the border went unmanned for two or three days.”

“Incontinence, some variable nausea. But generally, extreme fatigue. Shuts the body down into a deep sleep. Headaches, discomfort, but no real pain and no lingering effects. Nasty but clean. Dedicated. Airborne.”

Maryk said, “It has to be rock solid.”

“It’s a reliable DNA virus. Steady as a halfback, though I’d want another good look to be certain.”

“Fast?”

“Extraordinarily virulent. It gets anything with lungs, yet it burns clean, and exposure confers immunity. Once you get it, you can never get it again.”

“How much do we have?”

“Mere samples. But I could trick it up and replicate it easily enough.”

“And test it against Plainville. Make certain there’s no virus-beneficial cross-reaction. Zero’s mutating fast, and open to change, and I don’t want him to encounter something that would only add to his arsenal.”

“But how will you stop it from spreading beyond Atlanta?”

“Leave that to me. My only concern now is speed.”

“I’d have to pull this thing out of deep freeze in Thirteen. Look it over, shore it up. Engineer copies. But I haven’t said yes yet.”

“I’ll give you one hour.”

Geist shook his head. “You’re talking about the wholesale infection of a U.S. city. There are certain philosophical concerns. I like to be able to sleep at night.”

But Geist clearly was intrigued. Maryk saw in Geist’s face the seditious eyes of a true man of science.

“Just how do you plan on infecting all of metro Atlanta today?” Geist said.

Maryk strode to the glass door. “Leave that to me.”

The twin-engine planes took off from De Kalb Peachtree Airport around ten o’clock that morning. They flew in shifts, climbing high over the city and punching through the gathering clouds before releasing their payloads. The hired pilots were unaware of the extra cargo they carried, the translucent solution soaking the rainmaking silver iodide crystals. They seeded the thickening clouds in patient box patterns growing wider with every passing hour.

The downtown area was the first to see rain. Umbrellas opened, collars went up, and paces quickened all across the city as raindrops smattered the gold dome of the Georgia State Capitol Building, sprayed the tourists standing in line for the World of Coca-Cola Pavilion, and nourished the trees edging the birth home of Martin Luther King, Jr. The rain tapped at the window panes of the governor’s mansion in Buckhead to the north and blackened the empty airfields of Hartsfield International Airport to the south. At midday the rain turned driving, tropical in force, slashing against the sidewalks and the streets and highways, flooding each of the thirty-two Peachtree streets, and lashing the skyscrapers and high rises like a squall battering ships at sea.

By noon, Maryk’s Special Pathogens agents had gained access to most of the municipal waterworks. Their credentials allowed them past the secured screens, filters, and boilers, the pumping and purifying equipment that ensured the integrity of the city’s running water, into the testing areas, beyond which the out-tanks pushed water through the underground utility system to every business and residence. They released colorless, odorless gel caps the size of human eyeballs, still soft from the mold, in multiples of ten corresponding to population density.

Atlanta drank its water. Atlanta washed its hands. Atlanta splashed in toilets and urinals and used common handles to open and close doors. Atlanta brushed its teeth. Atlanta bathed.

The rain continued to fall outside and crashed against the antebellum homes and plantations of historic Roswell. It shut down attractions at Six Flags Over Georgia and swamped the legendary college gridirons and pelted the Confederate Memorial in Stone Mountain Park.

By two o’clock the infection was raging all across the city. Highways jammed with sick people heading home from work. Downtown streets emptied with the shortened workday, and the first news reports came on, warning of a disease spreading exponentially throughout the metro region. By four o’clock the local news anchors had been lost to illness, and holiday event cancellations were read on air by sallow-eyed stagehands. By six o’clock, the stations put up “technical difficulty” cards, with the official BDC bulletin crawling across the bottom of the screen.

The causative agent was said to be an extremely rare Korean virus causing gastric discomfort, low-grade fever, and languorous fatigue. “Patient Zero” was thought to be an unnamed “Admiral” of the Enterprise Church visiting Atlanta for the Star Fleet Convention, where the illness had ignited and was quickly spread by conventioneers moving throughout the city. There was no known treatment for the disease except bed rest, but the populace was assured that the natural curative processes of the human body would expel the virus within thirty-six hours. Neighboring states were being asked not to attempt assistance, and in order to preclude the spread of the epidemic to the rest of the country, the metro area of Atlanta was effectively quarantined as of seven o’clock that night.

Maryk composed the bulletin himself at the vacated BDC. He had flown aboard the first planes seeding the clouds over the city. He had watched the preliminary drops of inspired rain falling away. He had scattered the first of the gel caps into the city’s water system. He had personally compromised the holy water at the Enterprise Church service. But most of the deluge he had orchestrated by tablet from his corner office in Building Fifteen.

He wandered out onto Clifton Road before the rain stopped at midnight, rain that had no effect on him except to soak his shirt and pants and spill off his gloved hands, to be collected in the great sewers below the sleeping city and cleansed and expelled. He stood in the middle of the empty road and looked up at the sky and the rain bleeding out of it, and in that moment Maryk knew what it was to be Zero. The city was his city now. The fever was his fever. The rain was his rain. He stood through wave after soaking wave, and on either side of him the red-clay foundation of Atlanta washed off the roadside, coursing in dark, pulsing ripples down the sloping street, draining away into the open mouths of the sewers.

Melanie applied Vaseline to Stephen’s lips as he slept. There was no more futile act ever performed in the history of human existence, but it was all she could do for him, that and adjust the pillow behind his head. Now and then a stray tear seeped down her face, which she ignored. Her emotions were a china vase shoved to the edge of a high table over a marble floor.

Maryk returned for her, and reluctantly she left Stephen, standing with Maryk in the delousing rays of the ultraviolet light chamber like some wretched thing. He had brought her fresh clothes, and waited while she changed in an employee bathroom. She was desperate to splash cold water on her face but all the sink faucets were dry. He looked her over comprehensively when she emerged, then disposed of her old clothes in a biohazard box. “They weren’t that dirty,” she said numbly.

The halls were empty. The catwalks between buildings were empty too, and in the parking lot outside there was a dead, ringing silence. There was no guard at the gate, nor any traffic as Maryk drove out onto the road, but Melanie was so blitzed at that point that none of this registered. He tried a couple of times to get her to talk, asking how she felt, and she nodded, or didn’t nod, barely responding. Scenery ran past her window in a blur. Her mind was still with Stephen, watching him fade into eternity.

Only when they hit the downtown area did she realize that there were no people outside. The roads and sidewalks were all vacant, and she touched her window as they rolled unbothered through red traffic lights, the city shining oddly clean in the morning sun. “It’s over,” she said. Every skyscraper, every high rise, every hotel and restaurant, every office tower, every side street, every boulevard, every alleyway, every park. It was just she and Maryk now, and there seemed something inevitable about that, something inescapable and fatelike about them ending up together, alone in a vast, silenced world. She didn’t resist it, or even react. She only wondered where all the corpses were.

“It’s not Zero,” Maryk told her.

She ignored this because the truth was right before her eyes. The sun was shining and the buildings sparkled as though from a fresh rain, but the billboards advertised in silence, to silence, and the traffic lights changed for no one, the city working like a clock with precision gears but no hands. There is nothing so emblematic of death as a deserted city.

He said, “It was me.”

She listened then. He told her about the virus and how he had infected the city in order to baffle Zero. He told it as her father used to tell her parables: slowly and patiently, without comment. The only pride evident was in his detailing of the plan’s execution. Sherman had burned Atlanta; Maryk infected it. The entire city and county slept under his spell.

He stopped the car in the middle of one of the wide Peachtree streets, dead center on the double yellow line. She did not move at first.

“The sun has burned off whatever was left,” he said. “It’s clear.”

She got out and stood in the center of the four-lane road, The silence of the concrete and steel city was absolute. Maryk started across a boardwalk mall of stone tiles toward a fountain, and Melanie followed.

Water plumed out of the center of the fountain, joined in its fall by jets flaring from the outer ring of masonry like a serenade of trumpets. She saw coins scattered over the submerged, rusted green tiles and thought of the small fists that had released them, and the big wishes that had gone unfulfilled. Maryk sat on the stone rim of the fountain, and she took her place nearby, two exhausted beings alone under the Atlanta sun, looking at the dead city all around them. Church bells rang somewhere, but other than that, only the running water alleviated the awful silence.

She noticed that Maryk was carrying a first aid kit in place of his black bag. It was set on the stones between his feet.

“Zero is breaking apart,” he said. “He’s holed up somewhere, waiting, but he can’t wait long. He’s dying, and I’ve taken Atlanta from him.”

It was over, or nearly over, and yet Maryk did not appear pleased. There was no sense of victory about him as he sat looking at his shadow on the stones. The kit was open between his black shoes. She could see his eyes, and they were lower and brighter than usual. He was thinking hard about something, deliberating. She wondered what it meant that she knew him so well. She looked around the park, and everything in her field of vision, a hand rail, a scuff mark on a stone step, a bench, shimmered with echoes of humanity.

She looked back at him, and he was reaching down into the kit. He paused when he saw her, his hand remaining inside the bag almost as though she had caught him at something. Then his hand came out holding a syringe. She saw that the barrel was half filled with a clear fluid, and then she cheated a look at his face, and for one crazy instant thought he was going to turn on her and attack her. He had that look in his eyes, the same glare of murderous intent she had seen inside the airport tunnel. He straightened with the syringe in his hand, and stared at her, breathing deeply.

He appeared oddly full of adrenaline. None of this made sense to her.

“Why did you bring me here?” she said. Something was telling her to stand and run away. “What’s wrong with you?”

He was looking at the syringe now. He held it like a pen, staring at it as though in deep deliberation.

“I want to go back,” she said, standing.

He did not rise after her. Her jumpiness turned to frustration, fed by his silence. Stephen Pearse was dying in a hospital cell a few miles away.

“Why are you just sitting there?” she said.

He turned the syringe over in his big right hand. His silver eyes rose only as high as her knee.

“Why won’t you visit Stephen?” she said. She was angry now. Emotions were coming at her randomly, like asteroids, fragments of long-ago eruptions. “He used to be your best friend.”

Her voice faltered and she stopped and breathed through it, and realized she was crying again, though she hadn’t thought that possible. She used her fingers to whisk away the tears.

“It is Stephen, isn’t it?” she said. That explained the syringe. “His fate. It’s different when you know the person who is sick and suffering, know them well, and have some stake in their well-being, A part of you, invested, that withers when they wither. That will die when they die.”

The syringe turned more slowly, and she sensed something building in him, perhaps something like rage. The fountain itself seemed alive with it, as though it were going to explode. He looked up at her then, the fountain pluming behind him, and she expected to see a different face, but it was his own. He did not look murderous anymore. The syringe remained in his hand, but Maryk looked strangely vulnerable.

Something was giving way inside her as well. The frustration she felt, the loneliness, the waiting, stinging her eyes. Her voice was steady and collapsing at the same time. “He told me I needed to save you,” she said. “What does that mean? Save you from what?”

Whatever Maryk had been thinking, it seemed to pass. He set the syringe back inside the kit and closed it and stood. He was a moment balancing himself, looking away, and she recognized at once that low-eyed expression, the slant coming into his face like a ripple across a tableau of water, and the faint slackness in his jaw. The drowsy look that twisted his face in a strange way that made him appear sad.

He was cascading, and trying to hide this from her. She looked up at him wordlessly for an answer.

“The lab,” he explained. “I was looking at Zero’s virus.”

She didn’t believe him, but could not understand why he would lie. She could not understand anything about him anymore.

He turned himself toward the car. “I’ll visit him,” he said, and she knew what that meant. He was going back to the BDC to put to death the only friend he ever had.

I knew then why people fear the ill. Because when health is boiled off the body, like meat off a bone, something elemental is revealed beneath: our pained selves, bombarded from without and within, expiring with every breath. Frightened creatures — small, afraid, and alone.

I was a mere consciousness by then, a brain, a mind, an impaired intelligence existing apart from the body — alone, like a single, struggling cell.

The prenatal human is pristine in nature. The womb is safe, a clean place for a developing organism, and biologically we are all perfect at the instant of birth. But with that first independent breath comes the microbiota, swarming and colonizing the amniotic-mucked newborn who from that flawless primary instant is engaged in a lifelong struggle against his own death. Every touch, every kiss, every cuddle; every word whispered to an unformed face; every new room into which an infant is carried. Every step is an assault of all the natural world upon this new life form struggling moment to moment for survival.

I was not rotting of Plainville. I was rotting of life, of the effluvia of existence, being dragged into eternity by the cumulative disease of a lifetime of exchanges from submicroscopic to tangible, from the most profane to the most pleasing. Existence was my ultimate undoing, not this virus. Not Zero.

Peter and Melanie appeared at the viewing window. Melanie cupped her hands to the glass, looking for my wasted body in the corner, while Peter disappeared behind her. It was dark inside the Tank now, and the most she could have seen of me would have been a vague gray shape in a chair backed into the far corner.

I awaited Peter’s words. Typed from the tablet at the nurse’s table, they appeared in stark, white letters scrolling across the black field of the wall screen.

I typed: I am waiting now, Peter. I must wait alone.

I feel close to him, Peter. So close now.

Do you remember the sick girl, Peter? The one we went to Africa for in the first place? Jacqueline?”

I could not do it then.

You had to do it for me.

You are the one who cannot do it now.

His next sentence was slow in coming.

I broke them with the top of my IV stand. I want to suffer in private now. There was no one outside to stop me. The Tank is unguarded, and I notice also that the BDC net is silent. I fear the worst.

Peter then typed in what he had done. The words scrolled slowly before my hungry red eyes. I typed back:

Wonderful.

How does it feel to infect an entire city, Peter? Does it feel good?

I notice Melanie was unaffected.

The words glowed before my eyes.

Zero.

Then you have not told her?

How strange that, even in my incapacitated state, I was still the only one Peter Maryk could talk to. And at once, I understood.

You cannot kill her, can you, Peter?

You infected an entire U.S. city and the BDC itself so that she could walk about unrestrained, and not know that she is sick.

I am happy for you, Peter. The thought of her suffering plagues you.

It is too late. I am committed now. Go away from here, Peter. Take her with you. While you still can.

We built this place, Peter. You and I.

Then it is ours to bring down.

He made further attempts at communication, which I ignored. The end was near and it was inevitable. Zero was coming. I had to prepare.

They made their way back through the empty maze of the BDC to Maryk’s office. Maryk went straight to his desk. He was consumed with the dilemmas of Stephen, Melanie, and Zero.

Melanie saw the cartons stacked in the corner and recognized her belongings there. Maryk had ordered her room packed up by BioCon before the city was put to sleep. Her handbag lay on top of one of the boxes and she picked it up and tried it on her shoulder.

He watched her. He remembered her standing before him at the fountain in the city without eyes. He remembered his failure to carry out her sentence.

She was feeling the slick top flap of the handbag. She made a face. She had noticed that the handbag smelled faintly of bleach.

Maryk’s tablet sounded. He opened it at his desk. Freeley was standing suited on deserted Interstate 285 with the skyline behind her.

“You took out the entire city,” she marveled.

Maryk used his earphone. He was concerned about what Melanie might overhear.

“Nothing on Zero?” he said.

“We’re up on the roofs watching every road out. We’ll see him if he tries to leave the city.”

“Good,” Maryk said.

“What about the girl?”

Maryk looked at her across the room. Melanie was poking through an open carton of painting supplies and could not hear Freeley. “Yes?” he said.

“Do you need me to finish her?”

Maryk looked back at his tablet screen. He could see the sunny interstate reflected on Freeley’s faceplate. “I’ll handle it,” he said.

He had an incoming page and clicked over to it.

It was the third-party eavesdrop from the Tank line tap. Zero had posted Stephen again for an on-line chat. Maryk pulled the earphone from his ear and read along.

Both dialogue leaders were again listed as S. Pearse.

It ended abruptly. Maryk read back through the transcript. There was another page incoming on his tablet but he remained a moment longer with the current text. His gray eyes lingered over cryptic words like heritage and homecoming. It was as though they had been communicating in code. Maryk’s tablet toned a second time and he finally answered it.

It was a page routed through Cyberviruses Section. Zero had dialed into the Genetech using Stephen’s tablet code. The Hailing trace was successful and Maryk brought up a grid map of greater Atlanta. He waited anxiously as the coordinates cross-haired over the source. They settled there and pulsed faintly.

The location was listed as Clifton Road. Maryk stood suddenly.

“Zero’s here,” he said.

Melanie turned with her handbag still on her shoulder.

Maryk had people all over the city but no one else there at the BDC. The bureau was a maze of catwalks and corridors. Maryk sat back down at his tablet. A security search run through the Genetech computer detected unauthorized movement in Building Two.

Building Two was the Library and Reports building where the Genetech 11 mainframe was located.

“What is it?” Melanie said.

Maryk collapsed his tablet. He reached for the first aid kit containing the syringe he had prepared for Melanie and rushed to the door.

“What about me?” she said.

“Stay here,” he said behind him. He was going to end this once and for all.

My own Genetech security search returned a total of four sources of movement inside the BDC. The one leaving Building Fifteen would have been Peter. The one still inside Peter’s office was certainly Melanie. The third, unknown source, was all the way across the complex, in Engineering, Building Four.

The fourth source, already inside Building Two, I knew.

I dialed back into the Genetech, this time logging on as director, and bypassing the message that I was already on-line. I instructed the mainframe to unsecure its chamber doors within Building Two.

I instructed the Genetech to divulge its core processor, the heart of the heart of the BDC.

I selected Inspection, and then activated the Genetech’s overhead camera.

He was there already.

There he was.

It was time. I rolled to the rear counter, and Peter’s bag. I reached for it, slowly, unfeelingly, pulling the bag awkwardly onto my lap. In doing so, I knocked my medication switch off my chair to the floor, but it was no matter. I needed it no more.

The bag was already unbuckled, the leather finish flesh-smooth like Peter’s own skin, the result of innumerable disinfections. There were loaded hypodermic syringes clipped to the top of the bag, plungers drawn halfway back and stopped with cardboard chokers. I plucked out each one and dropped them to the floor.

I was not interested in the poison. My hand pawed through rolls of tape and gauze and packets of sterile gloves to the foam-cushioned glass ampules at the bottom.

Liquid amphetamine. Enough for multiple injections.

With the stiff hands of a puppet, I unwrapped a fresh syringe. I punctured the foil cap of the small glass bottle and drew the contents in under the plunger as quickly as I was able.

I did not feet the injection. The needle pushed through the pus-stained fabric of my scrub shirt and entered the twitching mass of my left biceps. Plainville does not go for the muscles. It goes for the organs, it goes for the blood. It goes for the bones.

The second injection, into my right arm, took longer. Then one each into the muscles of my thighs, with enough left for just one more, and I jabbed the sag of my right breast, through the brittle cage, directly into my heart. A sensation of warm water washed over my body, and my muscles trembled with life.

The light coming in through the Tank window had begun to flicker. My vital signs display on the rear console was flipping and sputtering like an old analog television set on the blink. I rotated my chair toward the wall screen, and saw that the image of the Genetech computer had begun to warp. The room was empty. Zero was already gone.

It was happening.

I pushed the bag off my lap, spilling it to the floor, amazed at the movement in my arms. I rolled to the hyperbaric chamber blocking the door and released the wheel lock on the control panel. The bed glided away.

The outside lights flared again with even more intensity. The equipment inside the Tank switched on and off by itself.

I heard the lock catch give on the first Tank door. It swung open and blue light fell over my feet. The ultraviolet light source was surging, humming and intensifying to a beautiful, blinding cobalt blue, setting off the radiation sensors in the doors. Then it dimmed and died away.

The second door stood open. I was free. The top floor of Building Nine lay beyond.

Maryk arrived at Building Two with the syringe ready in his hand. He could smell Zero as he raced past the dedicated user stations and into the room that housed the minivan-sized Genetech mainframe and its core processor. But he was too late. Zero was already gone.

The room glowed dull green. The chamber doors were open like petals of a titanium flower in bloom. For some reason Zero had accessed the Genetech core. Maryk looked inside and saw a well of green goop no larger than a drinking glass. He remembered that the Genetech was a living machine. “The perfect marriage of biology and technology.” Its processor was not electronic chipware but actual human DNA.

He saw a tablet lying on its side across the room. It was dented and dirty and stank of Zero. Maryk picked it up off the floor and righted the screen.

Zero had called up a layout of the BDC. Building Thirteen was highlighted.

Maryk started to see it then.

The Genetech brain powered the BDc’s life functions. It coordinated everything from climate control to employee schedules to internal security — including the security of the dangerous pathogens vault of Building Thirteen.

Maryk stepped back. Suddenly Stephen’s conversation with Zero made sense.

Heritage. A sort of homecoming. We are all who are left here.

Maryk fumbled open his own tablet. All bureau tablets functioned as satellites feeding off the power of the Genetech’s digital network. His screen came on normally and Maryk gripped the sides of the casing in relief. The Genetech was still sound.

Then the screen began to flicker. It flared white until the characters were no longer comprehensible. Icons began blurring and drifting like ice melting off the screen.

Zero’s virus was confounding the DNA core of the Genetech brain. He had infected the BDC.

Maryk dropped the diseased tablet and raced out of the room. Building Thirteen was five buildings away.

There was no way she would be a sifting duck in Maryk’s office with Zero on the loose. She ran out into the halls, hoping to find an exit out of the BDC, but quickly became lost in the endless, unnumbered corridors. She was making her way through the labyrinth when the ceiling lights started to fade. The hallway dimmed and the hum of the air-conditioning went dead, as though there had been a power outage. She stood in darkness for a long moment, then the lights began coming back on again, but not all of them, and not all at once. She heard a whisking sound behind her as a fire door at the end of the hall was released from its magnetic clip. It slammed shut. Lights flared brightly here and there inside the empty offices, as though some kid somewhere was fooling with the switches, Then a ceiling sprinkler came on and pinwheeled a cool spray of water onto her waist and legs.

She moved out from under the spray, along the wall and through double doors into another hallway with overhead light filaments crackling, alternately dimming and flaring. A fire alarm bleated two shocking reports, answered by similar honks in the distance, and it was like some sort of short-circuit chain reaction. The hall emptied into a sun-filled, third-floor catwalk. She could see the various connected buildings from there, and lights flashing inside each one.

She held her handbag at her side and continued into the next building, looking for exit signs as she ran past labs with sensors droning on and off and automatic doors sliding open. Some lights flared too brightly and popped, glass tinkling inside the lamps, and she stayed close to the wall as she hurried toward the stairwell, and down two flights of stairs.

She came out into a carpeted side corridor of glass-walled offices and saw a figure in the flashing fight in front of her, moving away. For one crazy moment she thought it was Stephen Pearse. Then the lights changed and she saw the hunched figure and his familiarly dirty nylon jacket.

Zero heard her behind him and turned. His red eyes were wide in the varying light, his decayed mouth open and shadowed inside. Melanie screamed. She pitched back from him and turned to run away down the frenzied hall, but her handbag strap jerked her back, and his hand closed around her right arm. She rocked and fought him but his grip was firm and he pulled her closer to him. She kept fighting. She was trying not to look at him, but his hand was right there on her sleeve, bruised and ungloved.

He forced her around to face him and said something, but the alarm bleated and drowned out his voice. She veered away as far as she could. His head was bare. The dry gray skin of his face was split open with glistening sores, and then the lights flared and she saw the blistered flesh on his neck and chin, slick with sweat, livid and pulsing somehow, as though creeping over his diseased cheeks.

“Nice,” he rasped. She could see deep into his mouth, past his twitching red-black tongue and all the way down into the guttural workings of his throat. Frothy saliva glistened on his chin, and she thrashed even more. The stink of his putrescence appalled her as his abominably blood-soaked eyes roamed over her body.

He jerked her around, and against all her will began forcing her down the hall. He was stooped and frail, dying even, but possessed the strength of the insane.

“Melanie,” he breathed.

She thrashed and flailed, trying to twist out of his clutch. “Get off me—”

He worked his arm up against her shoulder and propelled her forward. She swung back with her heel as they moved and caught him somewhere in the shin, and he grunted and stooped lower, and further wrenched her arm. Her shoe heel found him again, sharply this time, and then with a sudden lurch he jerked her to one side and bashed her against the wall.

She came off it stunned. The disorientation was immediate, and she saw before her now a veering passageway filled with sparkling pastel rain. He shook her and she rattled. Her lungs were seizing up. She used her free hand against the wall to keep from falling and being dragged. The arm he gripped was dead to her now. He moved her down the hall too quickly for her to fight. She heard his pained moans.

“I took Maryk’s friend,” Zero said. “I took his home. Now I take his work.”

They came to a catwalk between buildings. Zero pushed her through the doors and at once pulled her to his side, using her as a shield to block out the deadly sunlight beating down upon the walkway.

“Building Thirteen,” he said. “A vault. Viruses from all over the world, held in limbo. A monument to the myth of human superiority.”

She remembered them talking about it: Building Thirteen, the germ bank. She pulled and struggled, trying somehow to pivot him into the virus-smashing sunlight.

“Smallpox,” he said. “Imprisoned there. My genetic offspring. It can repair me. I will meld with it, and see this to the end.”

They emptied out of the catwalk into the next crazed building. Pain seized him and ripped through his body like a revelation, then passed and let him go.

“And you will lead my charge, Melanie.”

The salacious way in which this obscene, malignant, repellent, gloating freak sucked on her name turned her stomach.

“You’re dying,” she spit out, kicking at him. “Your body’s dying.”

“What I am will live on.”

“You’re” — she struggled — “crazy.”

Zero yanked down on her arm and the sudden pain made her cry out. He stopped and held her there in the manic hallway, a sprinkler raining down on them from above, and he spun her so that she had to look at him. The muscles of his emaciated face crawled and twitched and his open mouth spewed strings of drool. His other bare claw came up to grip her shirt over her shoulder. She thought he was going to touch her face, and there wasn’t anything she could do to stop him. Her lungs were going flat again.

“You don’t know,” he groaned curiously.

“Get off—”

“I already have a new host. I live on in you.”

She heard the words, but it was the satisfaction she saw in his hideous face that stopped her. She hung there in the hallway like a balloon losing air, slowly going limp.

“Inhaler,” he told her. “At the airport. You lost it on the stairs. I put it in Maryk’s bag.”

Melanie remained still, not fighting. She remembered Maryk taking her inhaler away after he regained consciousness. Spasms of nausea and revulsion, self-revulsion, crept like the sickness itself beneath her skin, and she lapsed immediately into the mind-set of the sick. It was a reflex action, like gagging. The repulsion and the self-loathing. It all came back.

She looked at her hands. This ungodly thing lived within her now, was breeding inside her.

Zero pawed at her shirt, though she did not feel it. “No fear now,” he said.

She sagged there in the hallway, envisioning the illness that awaited her. His grip eased on her dead arm but she did not move. She looked into his staring eyes, inches from her own, and the blood that boiled within them, and saw what she might become. His bloated tongue writhed, gums bleeding black, lugubriously, as he stared with carnal satisfaction.

Her throat bucked and she began to wheeze. She was getting air, but only in the form of shallow, strangled gasps. He reached up to the back of her neck and was going to touch her skin now, and it no longer mattered. He wanted to pull her face closer. His mouth and throat yawned open.

She heaved suddenly and doubled over, as though trying to draw breath from the carpet. “Inhaler,” she gasped.

Her handbag still dangled off her elbow. She twisted open the catch with her good arm and felt around inside as he waited over her, his filthy hand tousling the hair on the back of her head.

“Yesss,” he groaned.

Her fingers closed tightly around the cylinder of Mace. She brought it out and up to her mouth, hidden from him, as though she were about to inhale.

She turned her hand and aimed the white stream at his face. It spattered off his nose and gums before finding its way through his obscene, gaping mouth into his unprotected throat. Zero wailed and thrashed backward but Melanie kept at him, the stream splashing off the mouth he could not close, steaming into his eyes and searing the open sores on his cheeks.

He hit the wall wildly and went down, keening and scrabbling away. Melanie dropped the Mace and felt her way backward into a side passage, away from Zero, then sensed movement behind her. Two yellow arms wrapped her in a bear hug before she could turn, lifting her off the floor.

She was carried kicking down the side corridor away from Zero. It was not Maryk. She screamed and got off an elbow before the arms released her and she could turn.

It was a bespectacled man sealed inside a contact suit. His head was round and perfectly bald, with no eyebrows, no follicles even on his eyelids, his face hairless and sallow inside the hood.

“Maryk’s patient,” he guessed, coming forward breathlessly. “My name is Geist.” The lights along the ceiling flickered and attracted his round eyes. “What is happening?”

“It’s him — Zero.”

There was a thump and a wail from the connecting hallway, and Geist’s black rubber hands pulled at her shoulders to keep her from fleeing. “Building Thirteen,” she said, pushing at him. “Smallpox. He says he can fix himself ”

Geist’s face went wide. “Of course,” he said. His frightened eyes frightened her. “But where is Maryk?”

Her chin was quivering and she shook her head to stop it. “I don’t know.”

Geist’s chest heaved inside his suit. His eyes were bright and devout as he stared down the length of the flashing hall. He pointed her the other way, to a pair of doors behind them, “Building Thirteen,” he said.

“We’ll block it somehow. You’ll show me...”

Melanie followed Geist’s stare then and saw that Zero had turned into the corridor. He was hunched and seething, groping along the wall toward them.

Geist’s hand reached out and found her shoulder. He gripped it as though he was going to pull her near, then instead pushed her toward the doors. “Go,” he said.

He moved to head off Zero as the creature came slumping and spitting down the hall. The last thing Melanie saw was Geist standing and waiting with his black rubber hands empty and open at his sides, like a gunfighter who knew he was overmatched. Then she turned and ran down the short hallway into Building Thirteen.

Maryk raced from building to building as the lights in the corridors convulsed around him. He charged through Engineering and could smell Zero there. The spasms of light and sound were intensifying. He rushed under streaming sprinklers into a side corridor that served as a shortcut to Building Thirteen.

A body inside a yellow suit lay twisted at the end of the hall. Splashes of blood dripped down the side walls and darker drops led away from the contorted body to closed double doors beyond.

It was Geist. The yellow fabric of his suit had been rent apart in long ragged slashes and his hood was ripped off and tossed aside. Zero had torn open Geist’s neck.

Geist’s eyes moved within his battered head. Blood pushed faintly out of his throat, His mouth opened and Maryk knelt by him in the frenzied light.

“With her,” Geist whispered.

Zero was with Melanie. She knew then that she was infected.

Geist’s eyes fixed in his bald head. “I hurt him,” he said. “Thirteen...”

Geist died staring at the flashing lights. Maryk straightened in the paroxysmal corridor and lunged at the bloodied door.

She tried to outpace the sick stench of Zero that enveloped her, racing dizzied and headlong under the yellow-and-black warning signs — CAUTION RESTRICTED AREA — announcing Building Thirteen.

An ocular scanner ran continuously under a monitor flashing alternately “ACCESS CONFIRMED” and “ACCESS DENIED.” Bolts twitched in the open doors as she rushed inside, down a short, dim hallway into a vast room of throbbing lights.

The vault was an immense block of black steel filling the entire three-story building. It was surrounded by a wide hexagonal casing of thick, transparent plastic that ran from the floor up to the high ceiling. Heavy corrugated tubes ran out of the top of the vault, which must have provided the deep freeze. There was only one way in through the protective shield, and of course it was an ultraviolet light chamber, a pulsating gateway of glowing blue light. Twin steel doors stood open on either end.

Silver, barcoded disks studded the high front face of the monolith. She assumed that each disk was the top cap of a thermos-like canister housing frozen viruses or bacteria. Roving yellow lights lit up long, double-hinged robotic arms jerking and sliding on runners inside the shield. The arm nearest her flexed outward, steel fingers opening wide, then it pivoted and at once struck the face of the vault, rapping its bolt knuckles against the black steel, before careening back along the runner and whamming against the plastic shield just over her head, wham wham wham! Melanie ducked and backed off, though the dense plastic barely shuddered. The arm turned and formed an impassioned fist and continued thrashing.

There was a desk console just outside the UV chamber entrance, a control station for retrieving banked thermoses. Strings of nonsense code ran down its twin monitors.

The lock mechanisms of the steel doors kept popping madly. She had to defend the entrance to the vault. She looked around for a weapon, something to wield. The ultraviolet lamps began heating up inside, humming fiercely, and she blocked the intense blue glow with her arms as sensors went off blaring inside the entrance chamber. She felt the heat until the lights dimmed again and the humming eased. The alarms died away, and she heard a noise behind her like a grunt, and turned.

Zero’s hunched form moved through the hallway, and Melanie staggered back in fear. She had to figure out some way to stop him. She needed to find some solution that would kill them both.

He emerged into the mad light of the room and the mammoth vault awed him. His eyes were bleary and entranced. She saw blood on the side of his neck and a long cut along the back of one hand and a deep slash over one of his knees.

He came toward her, his Mace-swollen eyelids heavy over his raw eyes. He was hurt now. He was weak.

“Melanie,” he gasped.

She set herself between him and the entrance to the vault. As repelled as she was by the oily blood basting his wounded neck, that had to be her target. The blue light of the UV chamber flared again behind her, and its energy somehow steadied Melanie. She made fists of her small, trembling hands.

A figure had moved out of the dim hallway behind Zero. Melanie thought at first that it was Maryk, but the blazing blue light distorted her view. Not until the figure was right behind Zero did Melanie see that it was Stephen Pearse. He was racked with disease, suffering incredibly, his face drawn of all being — and yet somehow he was staggering forward with his cane through the roaring blueness. Somewhere he had found the strength to stand and move toward them.

Zero stopped in front of her. He saw the recognition dawning in her eyes and watched dumbly, twitching, as she took one step back from him and out of the way. Stephen raised the cane behind Zero’s shoulder as the drone of the lamps became deafening. Zero began to turn just as Stephen brought the cane around. He caught Zero over the ear with the flat of the handle.

The crack was awful. Zero coughed a spray of blood and stumbled foot over foot to the side, then at once collapsed to the floor. Stephen, reeling from his own momentum and the force of the impact, swayed the other way, but did not fall.

Melanie circled blindly around them, screaming through her hands. “Stephen!”

His red eyes lolled in their orbits as he steadied himself. He gripped the cane by its long end and started back toward Zero. Zero had risen to one knee, threads of gore falling from his rotted mouth. Stephen sagged toward him and he brought the cane around and up again, but with less force this time, striking Zero on the shoulder. He tried a third time, and Zero raised a forearm and batted the cane away. It spun out of Stephen’s hands and went clattering away along the floor.

Stephen reached out as though to grasp him, but Zero got to his feet and lashed out first, striking Stephen in the center of the chest, and Stephen crumpled. Melanie heard his frail ribs snap like stalks of celery. Zero staggered over him, reaching down, and Melanie could see the outline, through shirt and skin, of Stephen’s protruding ribs. Zero pressed against the exposed bones. Stephen’s head flopped in soundless agony.

“Stop!” screamed Melanie, but no command could touch Zero’s savagery. Stephen’s head flailed and struck the floor, and she heard a soft crunch as his fragile cheekbone gave. Zero straightened, pulling back his foot to kick Stephen, and Stephen watched this with no expression on his smashed face. Zero kicked him in the stomach and Stephen expelled a bubble of blood, and sagged, and Melanie thought that breath was his last.

The ultraviolet vault entrance was surging to full intensity again, the lamps droning, the radiation sensors going off, and Zero turned as though called by it, reminded of his purpose. He staggered across to the console. He ran his bloody hands over the controls.

She watched him try to captain the steel limb, to command the diseased computer to find the smallpox virus and withdraw it for him. But the screens ran mad with information, fraught with his own virus. The steel arm flailed wildly against the vault inside the plastic shield like a thing in the throes of death. It would not obey, and Zero pounded the console in vain.

Melanie searched the entrance for a weapon, anything. The blue lights brightened the entire room, and she saw the shadow of Stephen’s wheelchair in the hall. She grabbed it at once and pushed it out, screaming, running the chair from the entrance to the console, straight at Zero. She struck him from the side, pitching him off the console and hard into the flat of the high plastic wall. The wheelchair struck the foot of the console chair and keeled over, clattering, but Zero remained on his feet. He wavered, then turned toward her, starting her way.

She reeled back. There was blood on the floor before the vault entrance, and she slipped on it, falling hard. She tried to scramble away but could not get any traction, and Zero was coming for her.

Something stopped him at her feet. Maryk had come into the room behind her. Zero seemed to smile — a momentary, bloody, lipless smile. Then all at once, Stephen came at Zero from his blind side and they fell together back against the wall.

Broken and bleeding, somehow Stephen had gotten to his feet. He wrapped his arms around Zero now, as though in an embrace, leaning against the plastic wall at the vault entrance.

They grappled there, madly, weakly. Zero reacted to Stephen’s weird, sudden affection for him and tried to get his arms free as Stephen slumped against him, tying them both up like two exhausted boxers.

Maryk remained next to her, incredulous, watching the spectacle of Stephen and Zero entangled. Stephen’s face was sagged and expressionless, and seeing him that way, feebly struggling with Zero, Melanie believed she was losing her mind.

Bashed and spent, Stephen somehow held on, hugging Zero and turning them both slowly around the corner of the shield wall into the open doorway. The blue lamps began whirring again, brightening just behind them, the hum growing louder and louder.

Melanie pulled herself up off the bloody floor. At once, she understood what Stephen was trying to do. Zero seemed to realize then where they were, and she quivered with tension as Zero too comprehended Stephen’s intent.

Ultraviolet light chambers killed exposed viruses. Zero was a living virus. His skin, tissues, organs, blood, muscles — every cell of his being had been converted. And the light source was raging at ten or twenty times its normal intensity.

Radiation sensors went off all around them. The lamps gained force and the drone of the humming light intensified as Zero began to bellow, but could not pull himself free. They remained there just inside the doorway, struggling against the side wall, before the scalding blue lamps. Stephen could not haul Zero over the necessary final few feet to his death. Neither man possessed the strength necessary to move the other.

Maryk went forward then. He went to the open chamber door, but was forced back by the intense heat.

The cobalt glare radiated behind Stephen as he saw Maryk. Stephen appeared to shake his head, as though to say that he had no more strength. Maryk tried to reach inside, but the heat was too much. The drone was rising to a roar. The alarms screamed and the blue light flared, and Melanie shaded her eyes.

She could barely see Stephen now. The ultraviolet light was peaking behind him, blurring him. He clutched Zero and stared out of the ethereal blueness, his dead eyes locked with Maryk’s, imploring him. Something unspoken was exchanged.

Maryk grasped the frame of the open door with both hands. He raised his right foot and, with a swift, powerful thrust, caught Zero sharply in the small of the back. Maryk reeled backward as Zero fell with Stephen into the roaring oven of burning blue light.

Zero wailed like an animal. The light raged to its fullest around their collapsed forms as Stephen rolled away from Zero, finally releasing his grip.

Zero’s dark body writhed and shriveled inside the pure blue holocaust. The light and the clamor peaked and held, bluing the entire room, then began to decline again. As it did, Melanie could see Zero more clearly, rippling and settling around his scorched clothes into a sinking, black heap. The fading rays consumed the last echoes of his groan, until all that remained was a foul, black lump, shrunken and wasted into the shape of a thing reaching for the vault inside.

Stephen lay on his back. The light subsided and Maryk slid him out by his ankle, leaving Stephen’s dark silhouette behind, etched into the floor of the chamber.

Melanie slipped to her knees. Radiation burns scorched Stephen’s flesh. The virus part of him seemed dead, and his face was pulpy and seared, his red eyes staring crookedly. The hand atop his chest was scorched and bare and she reached for it, touching him now. It burned her, but she held on. Something moved in his mystified eyes, and she imagined then the merest pressure against her palm. He shuddered bodily and she gripped his hand too tightly, feeling the bones collapsing inside. As diseased tears swamped her vision, Stephen Pearse died in the twitching shadow of the vault of Building Thirteen.

Life viewed from a helicopter is so small. Not small as in “insignificant” or “trivial,” but, small as in “seemingly manageable.” She looked down upon Atlanta and the dots moving again along the sidewalks and thought: It’s all not so mystifying. The inevitable return to earth would blur this perspective, in the same way the twisted logic of a dream dies in the waking world, but for the moment it seemed that everything was answerable from above.

Atlanta was well again, its inhabitants waking into a brand-new day. They had survived the illness, and Melanie hoped this would remind them that they were alive, at least for another day or two, before the frenzy of twenty-first-century life resumed.

She was being spirited away above. Zero and Plainville had been vanquished, and now she was yesterday’s messiah. Her brief career in Atlanta had come to an end. There was nothing she could do for her own species anymore except harm.

The helicopter pilot wore a contact suit, though nothing had been said back at the BDC. Maryk sat in stony silence behind her, still pretending that she was fine.

In fact, this journey had been her idea.

“I’m sick of people,” she had told him back at the BDC, and even managed to appear upbeat saying it. “I think I’d like to get away from it all for a while.”

And he had agreed, which stunned her. She wondered how long he was going to play this out. He had once said: There are no hills remote enough anymore. No oases without roads running through them. House burning is all.

The ride was too brief They broke away from the mainland, and the surface of the ocean reflected the sky, an oily green-blue broken only with white caps, until Gala Island appeared distantly in the morning fog: a wide, verdant mound of trees ringed by tawny sand, and ringed again by the pale azure of the cleansing shore. The beauty of the place glistened and reached out to her, but couldn’t breach her despair.

She grew more prickly as the helicopter began its descent. Her panic surged as they touched down, and she forced open her door and fled out over the landing pad, fleeing Maryk, fleeing death, not stopping until her shoes sank in the soft, sandy, island dirt.

She took in the listless trees of the southern island. Not a human in sight. Her ears rang as the helicopter rotors wound down, and Maryk’s shadow fell over her.

She started up the toughened Jeep path ahead of him, on foot. He followed without a word. She could bear the clinking contents of his reclaimed black bag behind her as the road entered the trees.

They had left the BDC in chaos. The germ vault had maintained its deep freeze, thanks to an auxiliary generator — but once they pulled the plug on the infected computer, the rest of the buildings just lay there, like pieces of a hacked-to-death snake. The entire computer network would require months of rehabilitation, and every square inch of connected hallway and catwalk of the Clifton Road headquarters had to be abluted and sanitized. Biohazard Containment’s greatest challenge would be the cleaning of its own house.

She remembered the hard look on Maryk’s face as they boxed up Stephen’s body and destroyed the rest of Zero’s remains. Dr. Geist’s corpse was also sealed inside a plastic pod, and wheeled down to Maryk’s office alongside Stephen. Suited Special Path agents arrived to help, and Melanie studied their faces as she encountered them, knowing they would be the last human faces she would ever see. There was something elegiac about the whole dreary overnight, and then dawn finally came, and it all seemed to have passed in a moment.

There were two corpses in Maryk’s office, a dismembered BDC, and a dead city of millions reawakening. She didn’t know how Maryk planned to explain it all. She didn’t think he could.

She knew now that she was safe to animals and plants. That was why she had run from the helicopter: If she did have full Plainville, Maryk would have killed her before she could spread it to Gala Island. The ivy had gone uninfected at the Hartsfield airport outbreak, so Zero’s virus had to have been sufficiently diminished by that time. Melanie was death only to human life, then. Her blood and glands were toxic. She was symptomless, but she didn’t think she would become another Zero. The virus had mutated too much by then. Maybe she was the reservoir now, as the birds had once been: a human biological vault of Plainville, infected, but not affected.

She walked on and realized that none of this mattered. She was the last carrier of Plainville on the planet, and she knew the containment rules.

Birds were appearing overhead. She reached the houselike outpost-near the aviary, and a family of mallards squatting in a row on the shore of the man-made pond watched her walk to the door. The outpost was simple inside, a desk, kitchen, bed, bath. The place overall had an air of hasty abandonment.

A map of the island was tacked up on the office wall, along with schedule charts, feeding times. It was cool inside, air-conditioned, and the walls looked as though they could weather a storm. Her possessions were packed in cartons stacked in the middle of the floor.

Maryk remained in the doorway. “Food will be dropped off,” he said. “For the birds, and also for you. It’s all being worked out.”

Just end it, she wanted to tell him. Don’t let this go on. End it now.

“That’s fine,” she said.

He would not step inside. He was standing outside the door like a hired man waiting for a delivery signature. His black bag was in his hand.

She shook her head at the silence between them, and folded her arms, trying to smile. Either walk away or come inside, she thought.

He said, “I visit the island now and again.”

She nodded. “You should look me up sometime.”

He was unstrapping his bag. He pulled out only a tablet. “For you,” he said. “To stay in touch with the world.”

He held it out to her. She broke the knot of her arms, approaching him slowly, watching his face. But he was his normal impassive self as she stopped before him. She took the dark blue box and stepped back. She felt the weight of the tablet and its smoothness in her hands, and tears threatened, and she winced to keep them back. Her cheeks were hot. She was trying so hard to be brave.

“This is crazy,” she said, at once attempting to pierce the formality of their exchange. But he maintained the charade, not willing to crack and give in. He would go on pretending that she was not infected until he killed her.

“I should have been the one to die with Zero,” he said.

It was not over for him yet she realized. Part of him was still stunned.

“It was Stephen’s disease,” she said. “It was right that he perished with it.”

When Melanie thought of Stephen Pearse now, she thought of compassion, the way he appeared to cherish all life, as a counterpoint to Maryk who saved without caring, who cured without need. Some people aren’t so easy to love, she thought. Some people you can’t love at all.

But talking about Stephen appeared to break the spell between them. There was another pregnant moment of silence, and then he was gone. Maryk turned and walked out of the door frame, leaving her staring across at the trees. She turned to the window just in time to watch him stride past. He was leaving, and she was still alive.

She did not understand. She looked around the outpost, seeing her painting supplies stacked next to the boxes, her easel set in the corner. She put down the tablet and ran out after him. He hadn’t gotten far. He stopped when she appeared at his side.

“Tell me what you’re feeling,” she said. “Please. Anything.”

Maryk’s gray eyes were full of thought, like pieces of glass catching the light. “Guilt,” he said.

She was weak with relief from the truth of his response.

“Don’t,” she told him. She knew enough about guilt and loss to know that she had to absolve him there and then, and mean it. “I’ll be fine here.” She smiled and brushed away a tear, stepping back from him to take in the pristine aviary. “It’s like heaven, isn’t it?”

He nodded, a small nod. It was the best he could do. He was not ready yet. Perhaps neither was she.

“You’ll come by,” she told him.

Only then could she let him go. He walked away down the road into the trees with his bag at his side, and around the sharp bend under the circling birds, and was gone.

She stood there a while catching her breath. She let the clean ocean air work on her as birds darted overhead, then she started back along the path to the outpost. The birds appeared to be checking her out, this new human in their midst. Then all at once they fled out of the trees.

The rotor noise had spooked them. She looked up as the helicopter appeared over the trees, Maryk in the front seat, looking down at her. A glint of sunlight off the plastic bubble made her raise a hand to shield her eyes, which she hoped did not look like a good-bye wave. The glare faded and the helicopter was gone.

The aviary chatter resumed, birds reclaiming the sky above. They swooped and dove exploratorily, lower and lower, at times buzzing her head. She hoped she had brought enough hats. Either he will kill me or he will save me, she thought — and until then, I might as well keep busy. She walked back to the outpost and began unpacking.

Stephen’s memorial service was held two mornings later on the quadrangle of the central campus of Emory University. It was combined with an observance for the multinational Plainville dead, and with the U.S. president and other heads of state in attendance, became a worldwide media event. Many of the details of the Plainville epidemic and Oren Ridgeway had since come to light, and the ceremony was seen as a chance to provide some of that overrated human emotional commodity, closure.

I suppose my request to speak at the top of the program must have come as a surprise to Bobby Chiles and the rest. There had been a movement afoot, ever since the truth about Zero had gotten out, to present me to the world as its latest savior, to fit me for the robes Stephen had so recently worn. The medical papacy was mine for the taking, and my request to open the program was viewed by some as tacit acceptance of this. But I did not want to become the next Stephen Pearse. To declare this would have meant my being misunderstood, as usual: They would think that I, Peter Maryk, was asserting once and for all my dislike for my former partner. The truth was, I loved him like the brother I never had. But I would learn from his mistakes. The live on-line television broadcast afforded me a unique pulpit, instant electronic access to as much as 98 percent of the species, and I had something to say.

I took the podium and told the world that I had seen in Zero the end of all man. I said that, as Zero had been overcome by the destructive virus that had created him, so too would man ultimately fall victim to his own devastation. Man, I declared, would consume his host earth.

My words were greeted with a polite, uncomfortable silence, observed across the crowded campus and perhaps repeated billions of times before viewing screens in living rooms and workplaces all over the doomed planet. Then I stepped down from the podium and went home. I had done my part. Now it was up to them.

My loft had been abluted ceiling to floor by BioCon after Zero’s break-in. The walls were bare and the floors empty. I packed my few remaining articles of clothing into soft canvas traveling bags, then took one last look around the place before locking the door behind me.

Inside the BDC helicopter, I opened my new tablet and brought up my daily postcard from Gala Island. Beneath a small, artfully drawn “Bird of the Day” — a Little Egret (Egretta garzetta) — the message read:

I read it over and over. Each time her words told me something different. She was depressed or elated or lonely or fine.

The helicopter left me at the Gala Island landing strip. Freeley was waiting there, just outside the boundaries of the quarantined bird sanctuary, wearing a plain white ball cap that dropped a shadow over her face. The helicopter remained on the pad behind us while the trees above drifted with the ocean breeze.

“It’s been two days,” she said. “I was beginning to think you were avoiding me.”

“Meetings,” I said. “Questions, lots of them.”

“Everything is set here. All we need to do is disable the cameras over the aviary. She’s alone.”

“She is,” I said.

Something in the way I said this worried Freeley, and her shadowed gaze sharpened. “We need to end this now,” she said. “While we still can.”

“It is ended. Stephen Pearse ended it. Zero is dead, and Plainville is extinct.”

“But not on Gala. It still lives here.”

I tried to sound spontaneous. “I think we are sufficiently contained here. I think she understands the situation and will abide by it.”

Freeley stared. “It’s been only two days. What happens when she gets restless? A meeting, a conversation, a touch — she can never so much as breathe near another human being without spreading the disease.”

“Except me.”

Freeley looked at me, and I recognized that it was the same expression she used to reserve for Stephen Pearse. “What’s that?” she said, now looking at my hands.

“Luggage,” I said.

She grew more and more anxious. “A means to an end,” she said. “Useful to us at one time. But a liability now. A carrier. A threat to the species.” Anxiety turned to anger. “What if it re-ignites inside her? She could become another Zero.”

“I’ve run the tests. I know it will not sicken her. The virus is too weak to take her, but neither does she have the resources to expel it. It’s a biological draw. She is the reservoir now. In any event, I will be monitoring her myself.”

“It’s against the law,” Freeley said. “It’s against your law. We cannot walk away with this left open. Not after all we’ve worked for. She is the last carrier. You cannot declare Plainville conquered so long as she is alive.”

“I can, and I have,” I said impatiently. “The helicopter is waiting to take you back. They’ve set up temporary headquarters in Chamblee, and you are to report there within the hour. Bobby Chiles needs to speak with you, to tie up some loose ends. He’s being sworn in as the BDC director tomorrow. I assured him of your full cooperation.”

She was stunned. “But we need to get our stories straight.”

“I told them everything,” I said, “with the exception of the girl. You will do the same. The code name project never existed.”

“You’re leaving the bureau,” she said.

“A sabbatical. A long one. I’ll be living and doing my research here on the island.”

I was devoting myself now to developing Melanie’s cure. My research was in the most preliminary stages, and the formulas were still quite elaborate. But I had saved her once before, and I saw no reason why I could not save her again.

Freeley looked betrayed. Vain confidence returned to her voice. “She’s a freak,” she said.

Freeley could have said the same for me. I waited until she was inside the helicopter and on her way before turning and starting up the dirt path with my bags in hand, crossing the quarantine boundary toward the outpost. The first bird I saw was a great blue heron, prehistoric in size, squatting on the grassy side of the road and watching me, piercingly, through one small eye over its pterodactylian beak. I stopped, facing the bird and it waited fearlessly, as though wanting to tell me something. Then at once it fanned open its great, heavy-fingered wings and lifted off, stirring the dust of the road. I watched it go, then continued along the rising path to the sanctuary under the shade of the trees and the fugitive cries from above. I was remembering a veil of dark clouds lit up from below, and synapses pulsing over the one-celled earth.