Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

The camera turns to the audience. Everyone is clapping; some enthusiastically, others with more reserve. One scientist stands up. Then another. Soon the group is giving Scopes a standing ovation. Another nurse comes onstage, wheeling two large IV racks, each holding two dozen or so pints of blood.

Nye strides up to the stage. He shakes Scopes’s hand and rolls up his left sleeve. The nurse inserts an IV into his arm and starts a unit of blood.

Another scientist comes forward, then a maintenance worker. Then Singer himself begins to approach the stage, and the audience breaks into another round of applause. The camera focuses on Singer’s plump face. It is white, and beads of sweat stand out on his brow. Yet he, too, sits down on a cot and rolls up his sleeve, and soon the blood is flowing into his veins.

After that, the audience stands in unison. Within moments, a line has formed from the stage, snaking back toward the rows of chairs.

“Look,” de Vaca whispered. “There’s Brandon-Smith. There’s Vanderwagon and Pavel what’s-his-name. And there’s—oh, my God.”

Abruptly, Carson halted the video, logged off the network, and cut the terminal’s power. ,

“Let’s take a walk,” he said.

“They were the beta testers,” said de Vaca, as they walked slowly around the inner perimeter fence. “They all got it, didn’t they?”

“Every single one,” said Carson. “From the custodians to Singer himself. Everybody except us. We’re the only new arrivals since February 27th, the date of that file.”

“How exactly did you figure this out?” de Vaca was hugging herself tightly as she walked, seemingly chilled despite the late-afternoon heat.

“When I went to see Singer this morning, I saw him lining up the objects on his coffee table. There was something very obsessive about his movements that struck me as unusual, out of character. I remembered how Vanderwagon had acted just before he put his eye out, and Brandon-Smith’s obsessive habits in the last days. And then I noticed Singer’s bloodshot eyes, with the yellow cast in the whites. It was just what Vanderwagon’s eyes looked like. And Nye. Think about it. Don’t a lot of the people here seem to have bloodshot eyes these days? I assumed it was the stress.” He shrugged. “So I spent the day in the library, looking through the research files.”

“And found that tape,” de Vaca said.

“Yes. It must have been Scopes’s brainchild, having the rest of the Mount Dragon team be the beta test subjects for PurBlood. It’s a common enough thing in certain pharmaceutical companies, you know, to draw the volunteer pool from the company itself. They must have filmed it, thinking it would make good press later on.”

“Only some of the volunteers didn’t look too pleased about it,” de Vaca said wryly.

Carson nodded. “Scopes is a brilliant speaker. Between him, Burt, and peer pressure, sure, it’s not hard to see why everyone fell in line.”

“But what the hell is happening to them now?” De Vaca struggled to keep the sound of panic out of her voice.

“Obviously, the PurBlood is breaking down in their bodies, having a toxic effect. Perhaps impurities got into the phospholipid capsule, DNA mutations occurred. We don’t have the time to find out exactly. As the capsule decays, it’s all released.”

“How can you be sure it’s PurBlood?” De Vaca frowned.

“What else could it be? They all received transfusions. And they’re all beginning to show the same symptoms.”

De Vaca was murmuring to herself. “Dopamine. What was it Teece told you about dopamine?”

“He said that Burt and Vanderwagon were suffering from overdrives of dopamine and serotonin. Brandon-Smith, too, to a lesser degree.” Carson turned to her. “He told me that too much of those neurotransmitters in the brain can cause paranoia, delusions, psychotic behavior. You took two years of med school. Is he right?”

De Vaca stopped.

“Keep walking. Is he right?”

“Yes,” she replied at last. “The production of bodily chemicals is very carefully balanced. If mutated DNA in PurBlood is instructing the body to pump out large amounts of ...” She paused, thinking, then began again. “Mental distress and disorientation would develop, perhaps combined with obsessive-compulsive behavior. If the overdrives were sufficiently great, the result would be extreme paranoia and fulminant psychosis.”

“And the leaky blood vessels Teece described must be another symptom,” Carson added.

“Naked hemoglobin, permeating through the capillary walls, would just make a bad situation worse. Poison the whole body. Bloodshot eyes would be the least of the problems.”

They walked for several minutes in silence. “Burt was the alpha test subject,” Carson said at last. “It makes sense he would be the first one affected. Then, last week, he was followed by Vanderwagon. Have you noticed any other odd behaviors?”

De Vaca thought. Then she nodded. “Yesterday at breakfast, that technician from the sequencing lab yelled at me for sitting in her chair. I got up and moved, but she wouldn’t let up. She’s normally such a mousy thing. I thought the pressure was getting to her.”

“Obviously, people are affected at different rates. But it’s only a matter of time until—”

He stopped. It wasn’t necessary to finish the sentence. Until the entire staff of this laboratory—this remote laboratory, in the middle of the desert, guardians of a virus that could destroy the human race—goes insane.

Suddenly, another thought struck him. He turned to de Vaca. “Susana, do you know when PurBlood is scheduled for general distribution?”

She shook her head.

“I read several memos about it in the library this morning. GeneDyne marketing has organized a massive media event. There’s going to be a big rollout, with all sorts of fanfare. They’ve chosen four wards across the country. One hundred hemophiliacs and children undergoing operations will be the first to receive PurBlood.”

“When is this scheduled to happen?” de Vaca asked.

“August third.”

De Vaca’s hands flew to her mouth. “But that’s this Friday!”

Carson nodded. “We have to warn the authorities. Get them to stop the PurBlood rollout, and get help for the people here.”

“And how the hell are we supposed to do that? The only long-distance phone lines out of here are the dedicated network leased lines to Boston. Even if we could get to those, who’d believe us?”

Carson thought. “Maybe Scopes is already suffering the effects.”

De Vaca snorted. “Even if he was, nobody would connect that with anything happening here.”

He turned to her. “Maybe we’re worrying unnecessarily. If there’s a developing paranoia among all the Mount Dragon residents, wouldn’t it turn them against each other, canceling the threat?”

She shook her head. “In this atmosphere? Not likely. Especially with someone as charismatic as Scopes’” running things. It’s a textbook setting for folie à deux.”

“What?”

“Shared insanity. Everyone acting out the same twisted fantasy. Or, as we called it in med school, a double-nut fruitcake.”

Carson grimaced. “Great. That leaves us only one option. Get the hell out of here.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

De Vaca smirked, started to speak. Then she stopped and nudged his elbow. “Look over there.”

Carson looked. Ahead of them lay the motor pool: half a dozen white Hummers in a gleaming row, standing like sentries and casting long shadows across the graveled lot.

They walked closer to the vehicles with feigned nonchalance. “First,” Carson whispered, “we’d have to find the keys. Then, we’d have to drive out of the compound without anyone noticing.”