T Parker - The border Lords

— When it is strong you should let it go. It is a wild animal and won't do well with you.

— Many dogs.

— He fooled you. He can fool them.

Ozburn bought some gum from the woman and gathered up the bouquet and vase and his camera and drove south.

He let himself into suite twenty-four to find Seliah sitting at the small dinette, her back to the sliding glass door of the patio. Daisy bounced to her and put her nose on Seliah's thigh. Ozburn set down the duffel. The curtains were drawn against the afternoon sun but a slant of light caught her shoulder and one side of her face. She wore the cobalt blue satin robe he'd bought her last Christmas and her hair was combed straight and lustrous against it. Her computer was open before her and Ozburn saw the minor play of the monitor light on her beautiful pale face.

"Seliah. These are for you."

Ozburn stepped into the cool room and set the vase of flowers on the kitchen counter. He could see that Seliah's pupils were constricted against all light. She had not touched Daisy. He was in for another argument.

Four days ago she had e-mailed him that Charlie Hood had handcuffed her and forced her to go to a hospital in San Clemente. She was vague on why. She had "escaped" the hospital and quickly packed a few things at home, then driven to Las Vegas. From here she had sent him a series of crazy e-mails about Father Joe and a bat and a maid and the rabies virus. Ozburn realized that she was hysterical and it would be perilous to bring her into his mission. But he loved her. And she was plainly terrified by what Hood had done to her. Ozburn saw no choice but to bring her close to him, where he could protect her.

She arrived distraught, hyperemotional, random. He'd never seen her like that. They had spent much of that time making love. In the quiet moments between, while they devoured room service meals, Seliah had tried to make him believe they were both suffering from advanced rabies infection. She had a Wikipedia entry that described rabies symptoms, and she had the articles about the miracle of the Milwaukee Protocol. She had e-mails from Charlie and Dr. Brennan about the positive antibody test. She had an outlandish story about Father Joe and a bat, told, of course, by Hood. The whole conspiracy theory was interesting on a hypothetical level but Ozburn didn't believe one word of it. He saw no reason why Father Joe would purposefully infect him. What would he or anyone else gain from such a thing? The idea was illogical and preposterous and it angered him that she couldn't see this and it maddened him that Hood had handcuffed her and towed her off to a hospital like some violent lunatic.

But over the last two days Ozburn had also wondered, mostly idly: What if Charlie and Seliah were telling the truth? This idea made him want to bounce Joe Leftwich off the nearest wall and get some answers out of him. What was that in his trash? If it was a bat, why hadn't he maybe just mentioned that he'd found one in his room the same night Sean had passed out on his bed?

"Charlie keeps sending me e-mails that the protocol can work," she said.

His heart fell and his anger rose. How many times had they been through this? "Charlie isn't a doctor."

"Dr. Brennan is a doctor and he's made arrangements for us up in Orange County. We can beat this virus, Sean. We can be the first adults to survive it. Ever."

"There's no virus, Sel. I've told you that."

"It was a bat. A vampire bat. Joe was holding it to your foot. I saw it with my own eyes."

"Yes, you saw something in the dark. But a fly bit my toe just like one bit the owner's son. That happens all the time down there. But the bat is hearsay from a superstitious maid. Wasn't she the one who drank beer all the time?"

"I told you, Sean. She found it in the trash! It was still alive. Charlie interviewed her and put it all together. It explains everything."

"It only explains that Joe found a bat in his room and thought he'd killed it. Most people down there kill vampire bats in their rooms, Seliah. They're vermin and they carry disease. All we can do is be rational, here, Sel. Reason is the only thing that can get us through this."

"But Eduardo had taken Joe to see the bats-Joe wanted to see them. Eduardo took Charlie to the same cave. And that bat in Joe's trash gave you the rabies and you gave it to me. But we have a chance, honey. We have the protocol. Look, I have all these articles about the girl. Please come look at them. She lived, honey. Look, here's a picture of her! A bat bit her in church and she lived, and we can, too."

Ozburn stood behind his wife and placed his hands on the back of her neck and gently kneaded the muscles. He looked down at the screen. It showed a smiling girl with braces on her teeth. The headline said: "Rabies Survivor Off to College." He remembered the story from a few years back. The young teenager began having headaches and blurry vision and couldn't walk straight. The doctors could find nothing and she got worse and worse. Finally her mother remembered she had been bitten by a bat while attending church months earlier. Ozburn had always been bothered by that detail: bitten by a bat in a church. But, armed with this new information, the doctors had quickly tested her for the rabies antibody, which was rampant inside her. Her prognosis was death. They gave her a few days, maybe a week or two. She had not been vaccinated against the virus and she was heavily symptomatic. No unvaccinated person had ever survived the virus after the appearance of symptoms.

Seliah scrolled down and pointed to the screen. "See, Sean? Right here, now, listen-this doctor, Rodney Willoughby, after Jeanna got diagnosed, he thought up this experimental way to treat her. She was going to die, right, so he had to come up with something fast. He knew that rabies viruses get into your nerve cells and go straight up the body into the brain. They crave the brain. The virus is shaped like a bullet and each one has four hundred spikes that help them penetrate the host cells. They go cell to cell. It's called 'viral budding. ' They force their way up the central nervous system and into the brain; then they replicate like crazy. The virus causes paralysis that leads to asphyxiation. That's what kills you. The paralysis starts in your feet and works its way up until you can't breathe. But guess what? Dr. Willoughby also knew that autopsies of human rabies victims showed hardly any brain damage-the whole viral brain invasion didn't really damage the brain cells themselves; it simply caused them to give off fatal commands to paralyze. So he thought, what if you could protect the body against the viral paralysis by knocking the brain unconscious? Would an unconscious victim be less susceptible to the deadly commands of the virus? Could the person simply 'sleep through it'? And, if so, and if this allowed the victim to survive for just a few more days, then the immune system could fight the virus off. Because once in the brain, the virus has almost completed its life cycle. If you can just hang on for a few more days, you can beat it. And it worked! It worked for that girl and it can work for us."

Ozburn continued to look at the screen and massage Seliah's neck and shoulders. "We don't have the virus, Sel."

Her muscles tightened and her tone of voice changed. "What the hell do we have, then?"

"I've had a nervous breakdown from fifteen months of dealing with the scum of the earth. You've had one from fifteen months of dealing with me."

"Bullshit. Wise up. I know about it. We've got the symptoms. The fever and chills. The revulsion to water and light. The aches and pains and throat spasms. The agitation and insomnia and strength. The crazy sex. One guy in the literature went thirty-six hours straight! Biting, growling, anger. Even the aversion to our own reflections-that's a classic symptom. Back in the old days, it was a test for rabies-if you could look at yourself in a mirror, then you didn't have it."