He was leaning over an unconscious woman and shining a flashlight into her eye. I had actually only seen this man in person once—every other time it was on television or on a book jacket. The neat white beard, the glasses down on his nose. And here he was, standing in front of me, not dressed in a red or green jumpsuit, but in the same style of three-piece suit I’d seen him in on TV. Only now, the man wearing it looked like he hadn’t slept in a decade.
He glanced up at me expectantly and said, “What did you find out?”
“I’m … totally lost here, doctor. My memory of this whole quarantine experience only goes back to earlier today. I remember up to the chaos of the outbreak and then the next thing I remember is waking up over at the asylum with no idea where I was or how I got there. I had no idea you were here and I have no memory of us ever speaking.”
Marconi turned his back on his patient to give me his full attention. “They wiped your memory?”
“I … I don’t know. You think they can do that? Just pick a specific bunch of memories and erase it like files on a hard drive?”
“Oh, I’m sure there’s no method to do such a thing safely. I also do not believe these men give a tinker’s dam about such things.”
“You mean REPER?”
He shrugged. “If that’s what they’re calling themselves now.”
“How did you wind up here again?”
“Your friend John called me the day after the outbreak, after he got your lady friend clear of the danger. I flew down and offered my services to the task force here, who happily gave me a job and sent out a press release declaring such. You see, by then, amateur video had emerged that revealed to the public that this in fact was not a conventional disease outbreak or bioweapon attack. The word ‘zombie’ was being bandied about. Someone very high in the operation was very happy to fan those flames by attaching a name like mine. If you take my meaning.”
I did not.
“When the decision was made to pull the containment staff from quarantine last week, I volunteered to stay behind because otherwise the detained would be left without medical care.”
“Wait, are you that kind of doctor? I thought you just had a doctorate in … ghosts or something.”
Ignoring me, he said, “My instincts turned out to be right because patients that have reported here with seemingly minor symptoms have turned out to in fact be infected with the parasite.”
“Holy shit. Really?”
Marconi nodded to a row of large clear plastic pitchers sitting on a nearby cart, and I recoiled to the point of nearly falling down. Each pitcher contained a spider. Two of them were fully grown, another was no bigger than my thumb, the last was at some stage of growth in between. One of the big ones was badly damaged, half of its body missing.
Calmly he said, “They’re quite dead.”
“You can see them?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes. With great concentration. I do not have your gift, but I know some techniques. Though I should say, and I hope you will not take offense, that I would not accept your ‘gift’ if you offered it to me in a basket along with a bottle of Glenfiddich.”
“And you know how to kill these fuckers, right?” I held up the now-empty bleach jugs I’d brought with me. “You came up with the, uh, mouthwash? The poison? So you’re close.”
“Close to what? A cure? It is no great feat to kill a parasite in a way that also brutally kills the host. No, I am not close to a ‘cure’ for what the parasite does to the human body, in that what it does is rebuild the body from the inside out in a way that violates everything we know about human physiology. At this stage I’m simply trying to perfect a way to detect infection.”
“I still don’t understand how this works. I mean, I’ve watched these things crawl right up to people’s faces and they couldn’t see them, but they can merge with your body in a way that somehow blends in, like it becomes just visible enough to—”
“David, how can you of all people still be surprised when our eyes fail us? The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces, restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can’t see around walls, we can’t see heat or cold, we can’t see electricity or radio signals, we can’t see at a distance. It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it, yet we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied. We have wound up with the utterly mad and often fatal delusion that if we can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Virtually all of civilization’s failures can be traced back to that one ominous sentence: ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ We can’t even convince the public that global warming is dangerous. Why? Because carbon dioxide happens to be invisible.”
“But … we just have to figure out how to detect them, right? Like, somebody will build a machine or something? Once we can detect them, we can kill them.”
“In answer to that, I need only to offer two words: Plasmodium falciparum.”
“Do I even want to know what that is?”
“Exactly. It’s a monster that has slain several billion of your fellow man, and you don’t even know its name. It’s the microscopic parasite that causes malaria. Nearly half of all human deaths in recorded history have been caused by this invisible assassin. One could make the argument that Plasmodium falciparum is the dominant life form on the planet, and that human civilization exists purely to give it a breeding ground. Yet, until very, very recently we had no idea what it was. We blamed witchcraft and evil spirits and angry gods, we prayed and performed ceremonies and ritually murdered those we believed were responsible. And meanwhile we died. And died, and died. Yet, to this day, you could have Plasmodium falciparum on your hands right now, and you wouldn’t know. Because after all, if you can’t see it, surely it can’t hurt you.”
Marconi strode out of the room and said, “Follow me.” He walked me down the hall and showed me where six rooms were occupied with a total of nine unconscious patients. “Our ‘flu’ patients. Started showing up forty-eight hours ago with uncontrollable diarrhea. I have a feeling if we still had power to the MRI, we’d find some nasty changes going on inside. Or maybe not. Maybe you have to wait until transformation for that.”
“Jesus Christ, they’re infected?”
“This is what I wanted to tell you about. Several of them passed your mouth inspection upon arrival. It turns out, there is more than one way for the parasite to enter the body.”
“How do they—”
“Did you hear the part about the diarrhea?”
“Oh. Oh, Jesus…”
“Yes.”
“And … you’re just keeping them up here? With the sick people? They could spider out at any time…”
“I don’t think so. The Propofol seems to shut down the process. You see that we have them strapped to the beds as well. It’s the best we can do under the circumstances. When the sedative runs out in a few days, well, we’ll have a decision to make.”
“What decision? Kill the fuckers, doc. Before they get loose.”
He said nothing.
I said, “I can get you out of quarantine. And I mean right now. We found a way out.”
“You did?”
“Old steam tunnel in the basement. REPER—or whoever—didn’t know about it because it had been bricked up. Leads right past the perimeter. We’re keeping it quiet but if you want to go, come with me.”
“To what end? Where else am I going to be allowed to work hands-on with infected patients? No, I’m most effective here.”
“Suit yourself.”
“And what do you hope to accomplish, if I may?”
“Uh, freedom? And I don’t want to sound like a pessimist, but word on the street is the military has declared this whole hunk of land a loss and is about to drop a big goddamned bomb on it.”
“We had a conversation about this, when I first arrived. A conversation that I suppose you now no longer remember. About my book? Titled The Babel Threshold? Ring any bells?”
“No. Sounds like it stars Jason Bourne.”
“I know time is short, but … I think you missed an important point earlier, about these patients. The symptom that brought them up here was diarrhea, not nightmarish spontaneous deformity or propensity for violence. They showed no other symptoms. None. And I’m starting to believe that there are others that show no symptoms at all. And that we may never be able to detect the infection, until it’s too late. I think the parasite is adapting, learning to stay under cover longer, and more effectively. Now what do you think will be the world’s reaction when that fact comes to light?”
My answer wasn’t something I wanted to hear myself say out loud. Finally, I said, “So what you’re saying is, if the military is going to wipe this quarantine off the map, do I really want to stop them?”
“Think about it. Think about whose purpose is served if the bombs fall. Think about whose purpose is served if they don’t.”
“How about you just tell me?”
“That would require me to actually know myself.”
* * *
On the way down, I stopped at the lobby and peeked out of the main doors, to make sure we hadn’t aroused suspicion. What few people were still out in the brisk night were gathered by the south fence, watching the sky like they were expecting a tornado.
I wandered out until I found a green—an older, bearded guy—and asked what was happening.
He shrugged. “Somebody shootin’ flares over at the asylum.”
“Flares? What does that mean?”
“Probably don’t mean shit. Could be a kid with leftover fireworks for all we know. But it took a whole three minutes for the rumor to spread around the yard that it meant a posse was gonna break through the fence and set us all free. Give us all Cadillacs for our trouble. Why not?”