Чак Хоган - The Blood Artists

“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:

They sing and call all day and night here. I have to scold myself for thinking I am sick of it. The music is beautiful, even when it keeps me awake. Soon it will become like crickets sawing their legs, or a long long rainfall, something I won’t even hear anymore. That will be a sad day.

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.”