Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF

Forty-five per cent of Caucasians have A-group blood; five percent have AJB. Thirty per cent of Blacks have A or AJB. Thirty per cent of Amerinds have A or AB… And the virus they created could destroy all of them.

I held him as he wept and the words tumbled incoherently. They would both go to Atlanta, he said that night, he and Greg, and someone would come to oversee the packing of the material, the decontamination of the lab.

“Greg came in while I was on the phone,” he said at some point. “He tried to stop me. I hit him. God, I hit him, knocked him down! I took him home and we talked it over.”

“Does he agree, then?”

“Yes,” he said tiredly. “It was like hitting your father, your god.”

“Why didn’t you stop when you knew what it was?”

“We couldn’t,” he said. He was as pale as death, with red-rimmed eyes, a haunted look. “If we did it, then so will someone else, if they haven’t already. We kept trying to find an out, an antidote, a cure, something.”

We were still on the sofa side by side. He drew away from me and got to his feet, an old man laboriously rising; he staggered when he started to walk. “I need a drink.”

I followed him to the kitchen and watched him pour bourbon into a glass and drink it down. If he and Greg couldn’t find the cure, I was thinking, then who could? They were the best in the field.

I keep thinking of what Greg said that day on the coast: the plague killed off one-third to half the population of Europe, the same numbers that make up the A, the AJB, the AO blood groups. And out of that horror, he thought, had come the Renaissance.

I know so much more about blood groups and complexes now than I did two weeks ago; I put in a period of cramming, as if for an examination. I am in the A group. Mikey is AO. Warren is O. Sandra is A, and Chris is O.

I drove Warren to the lab the next morning, where we were met by a middle-aged man who introduced himself to Warren and ignored me. They went inside without a backward glance. When they were out of sight, Greg appeared, coming from the corner of the brick building, walking toward me. He had a Band-Aid on his jaw; Warren had one on his middle knuckle.

“At the last minute,” Greg said, “I found I didn’t want to see anyone, not Warren, not the hot-shot epidemiologist. Just tell Warren I’m taking off for a few days’ rest, will you?”

I nodded, and he turned and walked away, old, old, defeated, sagging shoulders, slouching walk, his hair down over the collar of a faded gray ski jacket that gleamed with rain, sneakers squishing through puddles.

Such a clear picture of him, I marvel, coming wide awake again. The car is much too warm now; it has a very efficient heater. I want to sink back down into dreams, but instead I force myself up straighter in order to reach the key, to turn off the ignition. My hand feels encased in lead.

I packed for Warren and later that day he dashed in, brushed my cheek with his lips, snatched up his bag, and ran out again. He would call, he said, and he did several times, but never with anything real to say. I was as guarded on the phone as he was. Anything new? I asked, and he said no, same old stuff. I clutched the phone harder and talked about the children, about the rain, about nothing.

I did the things I always did: I braided Sandra’s hair, and made Mikey do his homework; I talked to my own class about The Canterbury Tales; I shopped and made dinners; I washed my hair and shaved my legs… Mikey had a cold and Chris caught it, and I was headachy and dull feeling. Late fall things, I told Warren over the phone. He said it was rather warm in Atlanta and sunny. And, he said tiredly, he would be on the seven-o’clock flight due in Portland on Friday. We made soft thankful noises at each other; I had tears in my eyes when I hung up.

Trish Oldhams called the following evening. She wanted Warren and when I said he was out of town, there was a long pause.

“What is it, Trish? Anything I can do?” I hoped it was nothing; my headache was worse and now I was afraid it was flu, not simply a cold.

“It’s Greg,” she said at last. “I was going to ask Warren to go check on him. He called, and he sounded… I don’t know, just strange.”

“What do you mean, strange?”

“He said he wanted to tell me goodbye,” she said in a low voice. “I… is he sick?”

“Not that I know. I’ll drop in on him and call you back. Okay?”

Time is a muddle for me now. I can’t remember when Trish called but I didn’t call her back. I found Greg loading boxes into his truck that he had backed up partway into the garage. His house was surrounded by unkempt gardens and bushes and a lot of trees, two or three acres that he ignored. Trish used to maintain it all. I remember thinking what a wilderness he had let it become.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded, when I stopped behind his truck and got out of my car.

“Trish called. She’s worried about you.”

“You’re shivering. Come on inside.”

The inside was a shambles, things strewn about, drawers open, boxes everywhere. He led me to the kitchen where it was more of the same. The table was piled high with books and notebooks; others were on the floor, on chairs.

“Sit down,” he said. “You’re shaking, you’re so cold.” He poured us both whiskey with a drop of water, and he sat opposite me, with the piles of stuff between us. “Trish,” he said after a moment. “I shouldn’t have called her, I guess. She was surprised. I made her leave, you know.”

I shook my head. “Why?”

“Because I was dangerous for her and the boys,” he said, gazing past me. “A menace to her. I told her that and she would have hung on, but I told her I was a menace to the boys, too, and she left, just like I knew she would.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.” My glass rattled against the table when I tried to put it down. He took it and refilled it.

“I’m contaminated,” he said. “Four, five years ago I nicked myself in the lab and got some of the viroid material in the cut. We thought I would die, Warren and I thought that, but as you can see…” He drained his glass and put it down hard. “But it’s there, the viroid, waiting to meet up with A-type blood, fulfill its destiny. Trish is A, and the boys are AO. It was just a matter of time before something happened, no matter how careful was. I sent her away.”

It is all muddled. He said he would not be a guinea pig, live in quarantine. No one knew about him yet, but he would tell them soon. He had made Warren promise to let him tell them in his own time, his own way. I was drinking his liquor and having trouble following his words, but I finally had become warm, and even drowsy as he talked on. He couldn’t infect me, he said, driving me home, and Warren was all right. I was safe. He insisted that I couldn’t drive, and he called a cab to return home afterward. Blood contact was necessary he said, between a contaminated O and anyone else. Alone, the viroid was inert. And the virus? I asked. “Oh, that,” he said grimly. “That’s one of the things they’ll be finding out in Atlanta. We, Warren and I, think it might be passed by any contact, or it could be airborne. They’ll find out.”

Today, Friday. I braided Sandra’s hair and made Mikey brush his teeth, and told Chris that he couldn’t go to a football game after school, not with his cold. Sandra was sneezing. I dragged into my one class, and then a committee meeting, and a late lunch with my friend Dora who told me to go home and to bed because I looked like hell. I felt like hell, I admitted, but I had to go to Portland to meet Warren. I wanted to go early enough to miss the traffic rush. I would have a snack in the restaurant and read and wait for his plane.