Чак Хоган - The Blood Artists

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.