The Blood Artists

“I set up triage in a hospital in nearby North Attleboro, spending most of my time there, treating the afflicted, learning what I could about the disease. Traditional treatments were unsuccessful, so I began to look into more experimental procedures, all of which failed, except one. Ten early-stage patients were selected for a trial program, each because their symptomatic development appeared to be lagging behind the norm. The trick with Plainville is to get to the infected host as early as possible. Later we learned that one of the ten happened to be the pediatrician Weir’s twenty-year-old daughter. Her brother was already dead, his immune system weak from a recent bout with Lyme disease.”

As she looked up at him, her stare became harder and harder. Was he dragging her back through all of this just to be cruel?

“Of the original ten, three survived — barely — following extensive surgery, therapy, and subsequent rehabilitation, including massive transfusions of blood. We have tried to repeat this process since, on others, and never succeeded—”

“How?”

Her interruption surprised him. “The blood transfusions were imperative,” he said. “But it was more than that. Something about these three patients. They were different. Certain people are born biologically gifted, in ways that under normal living circumstances usually never come to light. Three such cases out of a pool of only twelve thousand was just extraordinary good fortune on our part. “Suddenly we found ourselves with three survivors of the lethal Plainville virus. Our next step was to determine whether or not they had built up antibodies to the disease, and lab tests proved conclusively that all three had. Cell samples from these ‘long-term nonprogressors’ as they were termed, or LNPs, repelled the Plainville virus. This allowed some hope for development of a vaccine, but two problems persisted. First, Blossom.”

He went to the lectern and opened his tablet. He tapped some keys and a photograph of a middle-aged woman with short, straight, ready-to-go brown hair appeared on the wide wall screen. Melanie saw that the image had been cropped from a larger, family portrait.

“Each LNP was assigned a code name for confidentiality. Blossom was a homemaker, a mother of two, worked mornings in a local craft store. Her family was ‘old Plainville,’ and she lost every relative she had to the disease. Her immune system damage was severe, and compromised the quality of the disease-fighting antibodies in her blood.”

He cleared the image and replaced it with a snapshot of a young man sitting shirtless in a battered lawn chair on a lawn of gray-yellow grass. His image toasted the empty lecture hall with an open can of Old Milwaukee, and Melanie thought she recognized him, vaguely.

“Lancet, you may have known. He graduated from Plainville High School and returned to work there part-time as a janitor. But his bout with the disease had damaged his spleen, impairing its ability to filter impurities out of his blood.”

He changed images a third time, and there on the large screen was a high school yearbook photograph of a chocolate-haired teenager wearing her mother’s gold cross pendant and a hopeful smile. Her chin rested on the back of a pudgy hand holding a small, simple violet, and a cheap photographic effect gave her glass earrings a prismatic glow.

“Milkmaid’s blood, however, emerged undamaged,” Maryk said. “Her blood was optimal.”

Melanie’s jaw trembled as she stared up, low-eyed, at the photograph of the stocky girl in the pale blue dress. She remembered that day and all the outfits she had brought with her to the session, and how pleased she had been with the result.

“Milkmaid,” Maryk said looking up at the screen. “Premed at Brown, following in her father’s footsteps. But then, junior year, she ran out of academic steam. Took a leave of absence from school and moved back home. Worked as an assistant at the local pet hospital.”

He turned back to her, and Melanie felt her fear turning into hostility.

“So Plainville had been contained. Most assumed it was vanquished, but I was unconvinced. There was also the concern that the virus might somehow reactivate itself in these survivors after a period of latency, and render them infectious once again. Yet I could hardly confine all three in the hospital. There was no guarantee that they would even voluntarily comply with the research, and anyway, I don’t favor the closed setting and sterile conditions of a laboratory. Ideal results achieved under ideal conditions are unreal results, and I required a real-world solution. So a campaign was undertaken to monitor the LNPs upon their release. Inducements were made to encourage all three to relocate here, to Atlanta.”