James Tabor: The Deep Zone

No point in putting this back on now . Hallie walked away from Stilwell’s room without resecuring the hood. Presently she came to the nurses’ station. With most of the shift team down in Stilwell’s room, there were only two nurses there, both in biosuits. One was in the dispensary, back turned to Hallie, inventorying the drug stocks. The other was looking down at a stack of paperwork. She heard Hallie approach but did not look up at first. When she did, and saw the tall woman with the white-blond hair and stitched-up, blood-smeared face standing in front of her wearing a biosuit but no hood, she dropped her pen.

“Hey,” Hallie said. “I need a room.”

FOR THIS VISIT, DON BARNARD WAS CLOAKED IN A FULL biosuit. She tried to think of a joke about it, but could not.

“I’m told you saved her life.” The hood and faceplate made him sound like he was talking to her from inside a closet.

“I’m glad to hear that.” Hallie was in a bed herself now in the iso ward. “She deserves to live.”

“How do you feel?”

“I feel fine.” He appeared skeptical. “Really, Don. Look…” She pointed at her lunch tray, where only crumbs remained from the cheeseburger, French fries, and chocolate sundae she had devoured. “Appetite good, no fever, no pains, pulse, BP, respiration, all good.”

He just nodded.

“I know. Incubation period, three to five days. This is just day one.”

He nodded again. Looked at the floor, at the wall, at the ceiling. Through the faceplate, she could see that something was wrong.

“Don, talk to me. Did Lenora die?”

“She’s hanging on. It’s not that.”

“What then?”

He looked directly at her. She could see only his eyes through the faceplate, but they frightened her.

“ What , Don?”

“It isn’t working, Hallie.” Strange voice, dead-sounding, flat.

“What isn’t working?”

“The moonmilk. It isn’t working.”

Her body felt as if it had just taken a hard electric shock. Can’t be. He has to be wrong .

“No way, Don. We gave them my research results. And Lew’s work. With the new moonmilk, they can’t miss. We were this close. They have to…” Her voice trailed off as she watched his face.

“No. Not that. We have seven laboratories working on this. They all got the same response. Either this material is different or the samples were contaminated.”

“Tell me exactly what happened.”

“The protein-sequencing conformations—the ones you developed, as a matter of fact—aren’t aligning properly. There’s nothing wrong with the work you did. It’s the new material. It’s as if the keys you’ve always used in a lock suddenly don’t fit. As I said, every lab has encountered the same problem at the same point in their enzyme transfections. It may be that the moonmilk can mutate just as quickly as ACE.”

“Jesus. If you can’t engineer the transfections, the door stays locked. You can’t get in to arrange the furniture.”

“Exactly.” Barnard sounded devastated. “Given time, we may be able to do resequencing—some kind of work-arounds, the computer guys would call it. But what we don’t have is time.”

Neither of them spoke as Barnard’s news settled in her mind. Hallie was off the meds now, her mind sharper, and she understood instantly that she had just received a death sentence. And then she was not seeing Don, or the room, feeling as though she had been hit by a giant wave and was being washed away, pulled deeper and deeper, light fading, sound dying, until nothing was left but a rushing in her ears.

She came back, pulled herself out of the bed, walked around, utterly dazed. “I wish there were some windows in this goddamned room,” she snapped. “It would be nice to see the sun.”

Barnard could only shake his head. “I’m sorry, Hallie. I am so very sorry .” He hesitated. “I suppose now you’ll be wanting to call your family.”

She dreaded doing that more than she had ever dreaded anything in her life. Barnard walked to her and wrapped her in a hug. The suit made it feel like she was being squeezed by a man made of beach balls, but she could see his face through the plastic and that made it feel good. Something let go deep inside her and suddenly she was sobbing so hard her ribs hurt. Barnard held her tight, letting her cry, tears pouring down his own cheeks. A passing nurse paused by the door, saw what was happening, moved on.

Two hours after Barnard left, Hallie watched the newscasts on the television hanging from the ceiling in her room. Fox broke the story, but by then the other news operations had gotten hold of it as well, so wherever she surfed—CNN, MSNBC, local news bulletins—she heard variations of the same theme:

“…interrupt regular programming to bring you this special report. It appears that the nation may be under threat of an epidemic caused by a dangerous new bacteria. Early indications are that the new pathogen may have been brought here by military personnel returning from Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s not clear whether this resulted from germ warfare by Taliban and Al Qaeda forces. But the infection is said to be highly contagious and drug-resistant. A government source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the president told his closest advisers this could be the worst threat to the nation since Pearl Harbor.

“The White House has announced that President O’Neil will hold a special press conference at three P.M. today. We will provide live coverage.

“We now return you to regular programming.”

It’s a whole new game now . She was not old enough to have witnessed the riots that tore Washington, D.C., apart after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, but she had seen film and photographs and read accounts. It could be like that, she thought. No, worse. And not just in D.C. ACE would respect no borders, spare neither the innocent nor the young, would take no prisoners. Every city would erupt sooner or later. She had seen the images that came out of Haiti after the horrible quake of 2010. Chaos. Horror. It could get that bad here.

Europe’s great cities during the plague years came to her mind, oxcarts filled to overflowing with rotting corpses, neighbors murdering neighbors, royalty fleeing, homes being set on fire with whole families locked in. She had a flash of what the future here could hold: the capital’s sidewalks littered with decaying bodies, entire blocks in flames, hospitals under attack by mobs desperate for medicine. Services breaking down as policemen and firefighters and utility workers fled the city to be with their families. Mass suicides as groups chose a death fast and painless rather than days of lingering agony.

“Stop it.” She pulled herself back to the present. The ward already felt different. There were more people bustling back and forth, more televisions playing with the volume too high, telephones ringing at the nurses’ stations, patients calling out from their rooms.

She switched off the television and wandered out into the hall. How odd it feels to know you’re going to die , she thought, but corrected herself. No, that’s not right. We all know we’re going to die. What’s different is that now I know when, and how. That feels different. But don’t forget, there’s a ten percent chance. Right . Her mind was spinning like a spooked horse in a corral, kicking and striking and looking for some way out of a place that had no exit.

Walk , she thought. Put one foot in front of the other. Be here and now. Whatever time you have left, make the most of every moment. I should call Mom. No, I can’t. Not right now. I need a little time. But, God, what about Mom? She’ll be hearing all these news bulletins and wondering what the hell is going on. I have to tell her to get away. But where to go? She’s probably as good on the farm as anywhere. But I have to call her. Just not yet .