The Blood Artists

“Just you people. Following me around. Whoever you are.”

“We are your benefactors.” He rested one gloved hand on the lectern. “The other two survivors are dead. Both of them were murdered. It stands that whoever killed them will want to kill you.”

A strange smile floated to Melanie’s face, and she felt it twist there. “I’m not going to remember any of this, am I?” she said. “I’m going to wake up back in my bed, with needle tracks in my arm from whatever you keep injecting me with.”

He stepped away from the lectern. “Those are not injections,” he said. He began pacing back and forth, slowly. “How much do you know about Plainville?”

“I grew up there.”

“I mean in the current vernacular. The virus, the disease that burned through your town.”

She felt herself withdrawing. She realized she didn’t want to know any more. She just wanted to forget. She wanted to wake up and not remember. Melanie looked resolutely at the lectern and not at him.

“Central Africa,” he said. “Many viruses originate there. The prevailing theory behind this is that man himself originated there as well. Six years ago, two doctors, myself and another, were called upon to investigate a purported outbreak of smallpox in the Congo rain forest. Early-stage Plainville, as we now know it, closely resembles smallpox. We traced the path of the virus back to its source, an illegal uranium mine in an underground cavern rife with latent viruses. It was like a poisoned well in the center of a small town; no one drank from it too long.”

Her gaze did not leave the lectern. She refused to look at him.

“The virus the miners brought up had been trapped in that closed system for centuries, its RNA core undergoing constant bombardment from radioactive uranium deposits. It was an ancient agent, in fact the genetic forebear of smallpox. The pathogen was too unstable and too annihilative to combat. We had to cut off the threat at the source. We neutralized the virus above ground and buried the cave in the jungle. The other doctor with me was named Pearse. I assume you’ve heard of him.”

Of course she knew of Dr. Stephen Pearse. “He’s dead,” she said. They had all been talking about it at work.

“Dying,” he corrected her, resuming his slow pacing. “So. The Congo, New Year’s Day, 2011. Plainville, Massachusetts, One Week After Easter, 2012. Viruses respect no human boundaries, no walls or checkpoints or borders, only natural limitations, such as temperature, pH, ultraviolet light, and the availability of viable hosts and mobile vectors. But they do leave footprints: the outbreaks themselves. So how does a virus of unparalleled lethality trek from a buried cave in the equatorial jungles of central Africa to a small town in Massachusetts without any traceable link, no intermediate outbreak, or confirmed human carrier? The answer is that it does not. It is essentially an epidemiological impossibility. Viruses do not fly on gossamer wings and can always be traced back to their source. And yet somehow this virus rose up out of the ashes of the African rain forest and seized a small American town.

“The disease appeared simultaneously in the Plainville public school system, its town hall — whose infected carried it to a town meeting held that same night — and the office of a local pediatrician. The pediatrician, Dr. Joseph Weir, unknowingly passed the infection along to his patients over the following three days before manifesting early-stage symptoms himself. While he declined to be examined professionally by another doctor, he did isolate himself from his two children. His secretary, who was also his wife, was fielding calls at home from patients and neighbors with similar illnesses, and just before leaving to bring her dying husband to the hospital — and already exhibiting symptoms herself — she telephoned the BDC hot line to report the mystery illness. With that one phone call Mrs. Anne Weir saved, at minimum, one hundred million human lives. Because Plainville was about to explode.”

Melanie felt numb. She hadn’t heard another person speak the names of her parents in over four years. “His appointments,” she said.

“We checked. He didn’t contract it from any of his patients. We determined that much. Plainville was a town of just over twelve thousand, and we reconstructed virtually every resident’s whereabouts and movements throughout the town over the days leading up to the outbreak, and still failed to pinpoint the index case: Plainville’s ‘Patient Zero.’ Somehow the virus seemed to have attacked a pediatrician, the town offices, and the public school system all at the same time.

“Plainville is a genetically specialized killer, not just of humans but all animals, reptiles, rodents, and many insects, even and especially plants. Every living thing, except birds; birds in this case are reservoirs, and by that we mean that they can host and transmit the disease but are not sickened by it. Like all viruses, Plainville tries to transform the host by slipping into its cells and shooting them full of genetic material — essentially, an attempt to convert the organism into a virus itself But this conversion is biologically impossible, and so the host sickens and eventually one or the other — the human immune system or the virus — prevails. But Plainville is not a routine DNA virus. It is a retrovirus, an RNA virus, like HIV, infiltrating and disarming the body’s defenses; but unlike HIV, which slowly drips into cells, allowing us time to manage and compensate for the AIDS-related complex over the long term, Plainville works with the greatest efficiency. It is uniquely corruptive, riding the bloodlines to every organ as one after another they begin to fail.”