The Blood Artists

All she knew about Gala Island was that it was an animal reserve the BDC maintained somewhere off the Georgia coast. It was a habitat for thousands of different animal species.

“Where animals are raised for laboratory experiments?” she said. “No thank you.”

“Popular misconception. Their natural environments are rigorously maintained. Ninety-nine percent of the time, all we need are the living cells.” He spoke distractedly, preoccupied, and she assumed the reason was Dr. Pearse. “However, this is one of those one percent times.”

She turned her attention to the board game of earth sliding beneath her, and at once they flew off the coast of Georgia, over the blue and white Atlantic, still turgid from the storm. She watched for the island, and it breached beneath them like an emerald green whale, spouting trees and short hills, cut smooth with plains, spotted with white roofs of civilization. They curled around its sandy southern coast, and the helicopter set down at the end of a short airfield.

The island glistened after the overnight storm. The calm order of its trees and brush was like Disney compared to the Dall of the Plainville swamp. They got into a waiting Jeep and Maryk drove them along a rising dirt path into dense tree cover, passing a sign that read AVIARY. She began to see birds looping overhead. Like stars appearing after nightfall, the longer she looked, the more appeared: flitting around the high trees, dipping and Rapping high overhead, sleeping with tucked bills on lower branches along the roadside.

She asked Maryk to pull over just for a minute, and he did. She left him in the Jeep and walked into a wide clearing. Birds flew above her and called to one another and cried. She possessed a bird-watcher’s knowledge of the groupings and could tell that many species were not indigenous to the Americas. There were basic sea birds, closer to the coastline, such as cormorants, divers, swans, and grebes. Long-necked herons and cranes. Then the game birds — pigeons, turtledoves, and various taloned birds of prey. Long-legged waders. Small terns, auks. Sharp-beaked gulls laughing and screaming overhead. And the tree birds: swallows and larks and wagtails and woodpeckers. All zipping here and there, or hopping busily along the dirt paths with twigs in their beaks. Twin pipits raced across the road before her. Thrushes and warblers. Flycatchers. Shrikes and swifts. Hummingbirds and tiny, mouselike wrens. Crows and starlings and orioles and sparrows and finches.

She could not help but smile. The beauty of the place was thrilling and strange, the winged life thriving all around her. Growing up in Plainville, she had kept three different seed houses in the trees surrounding her home, two she had made out of milk cartons, and one store-bought wooden perch, a birthday present from her grandmother, which had hung by wire from a tree branch outside her bedroom window, and to whose greedy patrons she had awakened every Plainville morning.

There was a small outpost but she did not see any people. The cottagelike building was set on the bank of a pristine reservoir that must have been man-made, and she was reminded that birds were reservoirs for Plainville, susceptible to the virus and able to transmit it, but themselves immune to the disease. She wondered how many tests had been run on these birds, how many different ways the humans had tried to trick them into giving up their secrets.

She felt safe there, away from Zero and Atlanta, and left reluctantly, the fugitive cries fading as they drove on.

The monkey house was dead center on the island. They went down to the isolation level and were met there by a primate warden in jeans and scrub shirt who led them to a small, square viewing window. “I’m not at all comfortable with having this virus here on Gala,” he told Maryk. “One slip up and the entire island, a decade of work — wiped clean.”

Maryk stared through the bright window. Melanie had no intention of looking herself, but there was something in the warden’s voice when he said, “This is medieval,” Something about the man’s fear compelled her to join Maryk at the window.

They were looking into a small, brightly lit observation room. The floor was streaked with blood and shed hair, and a single female chimpanzee lay slumped in the corner. Her nippled chest was huffing and her red eyes were violent and fevered, regarding Melanie with what could only be described as homicidal intent. Her facial features below were faded into a meek Plainville grin. The dying chimp appeared quite human.

Maryk turned from the window and started away. “Destroy it,” he said to the warden.

Melanie caught up with him outside. Maryk was staring at the swishing island trees from the monkey house porch. “It’s a simulation of the circumstances of Stephen’s infection and treatment,” he said, “but without the work I did to protect his brain. I initiated it a few days ago. I had to see if the Zero paradigm would repeat.”

Melanie remembered the chimp’s eyes, and knew that it had.

“The virus is breaking down too fast,” he said. “The chimp is sustaining the infection but not the genetic mutations. I’ve seen the tests: Over seventy percent of its cells have been converted into viruses. I compared these with tests of Stephen’s blood, and it’s the same. He’s up over ninety percent already. If the virus doesn’t kill Stephen first, it could convert him, and turn him into another Zero.”