The Blood Artists
- Автор: Хоган Чак
- Год: 1998
- Язык: английский
- Год: William Morrow
- ISBN: 978-0-688-15622-0
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «The Blood Artists». Краткое содержание книги:
He thought of wide-open spaces. He thought of breezes across acres of pastel tulips and pictured himself in the branches of the oak tree that had cooled the house of his childhood in spring. He conjured up the robin’s eggshell of a cloudless sky overhead and started his mother down the long path from their front door to the mailbox. He watched the cross-breeze toss hair around her face. Proudly he watched her hands feel for the mailbox. It was empty and she rested a moment before starting back. She turned so that the tulip breeze washed her hair from her face. She was beautiful and she was blind He dropped down from the tree branch and surprised her at the door with the mail in hand and then followed her inside for lunch.
“You wouldn’t last one night in here.”
Stephen’s voice pulled Maryk back into the B4 lab. He was looking out the aquarium window into the larger subterranean basement of Building Seven. The door that led to the stairs that led above ground was six doors away.
Maryk detested his claustrophobia. He released his grip on the sill and his breathing came back under control. He could at least work through the early strains of a cascade.
He turned and found Stephen examining his withered hands. Stephen was vigilant for any evidence of further decay. “I must have nodded off,” Stephen said. He was sitting up on the gurney. He had requested clothes instead of the hospital gown but all Maryk had for him were scrubs.
Maryk moved through the assembled lab equipment back to the B4 computer console. Everything had been networked through the central brain of the lab. Stephen had even agreed to Maryk’s suggestion that Reilly and Boone be brought in as extra pairs of arms and legs.
Stephen’s blood, saliva, urine, sputum, pleura, and skin samples sat in disposable flasks along the counter like a row of small plastic trophies. “We were talking about the virus,” said Maryk. “How it is not acting the way a virus acts.”
“Yes,” said Stephen. “Not moving like a virus moves. Not burning as a virus burns. Where was the flint in Orangeburg? The spark at any of the earlier breaks?”
The language of disease was the language of poetry and the metaphor for viruses was fire. Plainville was smoldering in Stephen. He sat on the gurney like a burn victim with darkly bruised patches of skin that looked singed. Ragged patches of hair hung off his flaking scalp. He looked weaker and more ill and yet continued to grow stronger despite medical evidence to the contrary.
“Could it be something unusual in the environment?” he continued. “Common to all these places?”
Maryk said, “We’ve tested and retested many times. I’d like to think we didn’t miss anything.”
“In Africa, it was simple exposure and transmission.”
“But here it doesn’t die out with its victims,” Maryk said. “We need to know why there aren’t any footsteps between outbreaks.”
“Because it’s smart. This is a virus that somehow knows what’s good for it. An arsonist virus: one that discriminates, that knows what it is doing.”
“Viruses don’t think the way we think. They survive. That’s all.”
“They don’t commit murder either. Your survivors. You agree that was a directed assault against your project.”
Maryk moved away from the console. “I’ve already ruled out bioterTorism,” he said.
“If somebody with a vial of Plainville only wanted to spread terror, they would drop it off the Empire State Building. They would slip it into any major airport and uncork it there.”
“Exactly.”
“Unless.” Here Stephen paused. “Unless terror wasn’t their ultimate goal.”
“A terrorist not satisfied with terror.” Maryk frowned. “What, then?”
“Infection. No politics. No ideology, no religion. Just pure infection. The destruction of the human race.”
“A maniac. Frightening thought, but there is one thing you’re forgetting: Plainville is unmanageable. It is impossible for anyone to handle it without risking infection themselves. If we couldn’t work with it safely here at the BDC, who could?”
“You could.”
Maryk stopped and looked at him.
“I mean only that nothing is impossible,” Stephen continued. “You could, so there could be another. Say you were eyeing a particular target, the destruction of the human race. And you had a weapon: Plainville. What would you need to do first?”
Maryk said, “I would need to test it.”
“A dry run. Each time Plainville emerges again in an outbreak, we hold our breath. And each time it dies out in containment, leaving us with nothing, and we congratulate each other on having dodged another bullet. This virus reemerges in already isolated situations. What I’m saying is: What if this is no accident? What if there is some kind of mind at work behind this Plainville? What if it is depending upon our containing its spread so that it can learn from each outbreak: learn how the mutations are working, learn the most efficient modes of infection, and gather intelligence on how we are working to fight it.”
“Learn how?” Maryk said. “We’ve kept the outbreaks hidden from the public.”
This was not an impediment to Stephen’s theory. “That would only make them angry, and more dedicated.”
Maryk shook his head. “You’re talking about Plainville like it’s something you can get at a drugstore. This is an organic virus, not engineered biowarfare. We know where it came from — a cave in central Africa. No one planted it there. We know we buried it, and burned it out for good.”
Stephen did not respond to that. He was quiet and Maryk watched him and waited for him to speak.
“Maybe we didn’t bury it all,” he said. He was looking red-eyed at the floor. It was difficult to read any emotion on Stephen’s fading face. “You remember the girl with the vitiligo who followed me around the camp?”
Maryk did. “Vaguely.”
“She was healthy, Peter. She was clear at the time; I tested her. She was begging me for help, and the jets were coming. Your jets. I had packed an ampule of the PeaMar serum we were working on at the time. The compound was sound, I knew it was—”
Maryk stiffened in the noisy atmosphere of B4. “Stephen,” he said sharply.
“I transfused it,” he said. “I dosed her and sent her out of the camp.”
Maryk stood staring. He was furious and silent.
“You gave me no choice,” Stephen said. He would not look up. “But now I keep thinking-maybe she contracted the virus somehow, between the time I tested her and the time I injected her.”
“Wait a minute,” Maryk said. “This was six years ago. This was a girl. She never turned up again. This patient in bay twenty-six, the one you think stuck you — he was a man.”
“He was.”
“There was no patient in bay twenty-six at Orangeburg. I checked. Twenty-six was an empty. bed.”
“Then how did he get to my parents’ home in Amagansett?”
“Stephen,” Maryk said.
“He was there. I saw him, he was walking around.”
“You said you saw your parents, too.”
“He was different. He opened the window. I think he was at my tablet.”
Maryk grew impatient. “It can’t be. People don’t last days, never mind months or years, with Plainville. Either they die right away, or we get to them early enough with the Milkmaid serum and they survive.”
“You’ll check on it, Peter?”
“I’ll look into it,” Maryk said. “But this is no phantom. This is no ghost. Someone murdered two of Plainville’s only three survivors — and would have eliminated all three if we hadn’t rolled up Milkmaid just in time.”
“Rolled her up?” Stephen looked up at him. “I thought she came to Atlanta to help.”
Maryk said, “Not exactly.”