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:
Melanie stared at him as he watched the trees. “But it didn’t change me,” she said.
“The virus was purged from your body early on. It was your recovery from the disease that took so long.”
He was quiet the rest of the way back to Atlanta. Melanie had little memory of the trip herself, consumed as she was by the contrasting images of the sacrificial chimp suffering in the small, bright room on that elysian island, and Dr. Pearse sitting and awaiting his end in the hospital unit Tank at the BDC.
Corruption
Plainville was enjoying its rout. My eviscerated immune system was lashing out blindly at the virus, turning on healthy tissue and vital organs in a manic final attempt to survive. I was defenseless against myself, and this was Plainville’s greatest perversion.
The cells that made up my person were expiring in wave after wave of microscopic corporal genocide. Whereas a fit body replenishes itself, cells dividing and reproducing beneficially, my cells were being exploited to breed lethal viral clones. I was a human hive of frenzied bees. My body was being debauched.
When I allowed myself to daydream it was simply this: a hot shower and a long, careful shave, bathed in the warm scent and intimacy of my own bathroom in my own home.
The work in B4 had kept me going. It had disciplined my mind. Now all my time was devoted to rumination. My focus had turned inward.
I opened the glass shell of the hyperbaric chamber that was my bed. The berth saturated my blood with collagen-stimulating oxygen that slowed the meltdown of connective tissue characteristic of Plainville. I sat up, and swung my thin legs over the side.
As director, I had overseen the construction of the Level 4 Biocontainment Tank. I knew, for example, that the steel doors could be operated only from the outside. There was no way out other than complete recovery or death. I looked at the eastern wall, a ten- by thirty-foot video monitor, remembering that we had done a study showing that pastoral scenes were most soothing for patients confined in prolonged clinical isolation. I watched geese flapping across a bleeding orange sunset over a salt marsh of waving spartina.
Floaters in my eyes gave me aquarium vision, hairlike beings and crystalline forms swimming across my view. I imagined they were viruses wriggling and writhing before me.
I was hyper-attuned now to every creak and flutter of my failing body. I could feel the blood slowing and gelling in my veins, the very platelets rupturing. My heart beat lugubriously against newly calcified ribs, and I had developed an odd arrhythmia: Once every fifteen minutes or so, my heart struck a double beat, like a bass player’s finger slipping off a string. The silence that followed would freeze me, a chill fanning out from my spine like a peacock preening mortality, until the stillness of the suspended beat passed and life turned over again within the sordid chamber of my corrupted chest.
I wiped at and probed the sunken ridges around my eyes, the newfound angularity of my cheeks. After thirty seven years: a different face, a lesser face, in place of my own. I was wearing someone else’s eyes, lips, jaw. I looked at my hands, front and back. A stranger’s hands, an older man’s, fingers curling to my command, but reluctantly. Arthritis had commenced its rout. Billions of excess antibody proteins bred by my flailing immune system — that my body had no natural way of expelling — were caking on every joint. I was biologically rusting.
The inside door opened, and Peter entered carrying his black bag. Seeing him again made me feel contrite, and I am certain I avoided his eyes at first. There was no medical reason for him to visit me. He had come only to look at me and see how much I’d changed.
“Anything on Zero yet?” I said.
Maryk shook his head. “We’re on him. Still waiting.”
“He’s planning something,” I said.
Peter looked at me anew. My insights made us both uncomfortable. “What is he planning?” Peter said.
I shook my head, and eventually looked down at the white floor. “But he’s changing, Peter. The genetic core of his virus. You need to protect Melanie.”
“I’m testing her blood all the time.”
“Zero’s virus is breaking down. She could become susceptible.”
“She’s with me all the time. Bobby Chiles has organized a Plainville conference for tonight, to counter some of the public hysteria. She’ll go with me.”
I looked over at the geese flapping across the orange twilight.
“You know what’s happening to me,” I said.
Peter stared at me a long moment. “I do.”
“Kill me. If I start to turn. Promise me, Peter. You won’t let me become like him.”
As I finished these words, I froze, my addled heart striking a pronounced double beat, then stopping, resting quiet and still, a hunk of fatty meat suspended in my chest. A morose chill embraced me, but the beating resumed moments later, and trembling, I exhaled the foul contents of my eroding lungs.
I opened my eyes. Peter remained standing before me with his black bag in his hand.
The Conference
Maryk had to remind himself as he sat there that evening inside the Georgia World Congress Center that there was nothing more he could be doing at present to hunt Zero. The description of the stolen car was out to every police organization in the southeast with a description of the subject wanted on a “Plainville quarantine violation.” It was inconceivable that a busted taillight and an alert patrolman were all it might take to end the Plainville scourge. He had agents in the lobby ready to take him to any outbreak on a moment’s notice.
The Congress on Plainville convened at five o’clock that afternoon. An emerging disease prompted as much hoopla as it did concern within the world medical community and the scant information the BDC had about the virus and its resultant disease was being disseminated at seminars and public awareness workshops throughout the convention center. It was all a thinly veiled publicity event aimed at renewing public confidence in the disease-fighting talents of the BDC. But the cooperation of the public was essential to successful disease control and that was why Maryk agreed to appear.
He had declined a seat on the long curtained dais and instead commandeered a front row table against the far wall of the second-floor conference room. He and Melanie sat there alone. Fifty round tables behind him sat five hundred members of the world medical community listening to speeches and awaiting a free dinner.
Maryk focused on the stage. Dr. Alex Solbin supported himself against the podium with both forearms as he read from his tablet. Solbin was deputy director for HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis and next in line behind Bobby Chiles for Stephen’s job. His cane stood against his empty chair next to the podium and his face mask hung untied off his shirt collar. Many of those in attendance wore masks and gloves for sanitary reasons but Alex Solbin was in his fourth year of managed clinical AIDS. It was therefore imperative that he protect his HIV-compromised immune system. His visage as projected upon the large screen behind him was thin but hale. A face-filling beard accentuated the features of his Soviet ancestry.
Solbin outlined the goals of the conference in the opening portion of his remarks. Invoking Maryk’s name sent an explicit ripple of disapproval throughout the room. Maryk smiled in the dark. It was easy for the international medical establishment to dismiss one who had never sought their fellowship. Maryk had thought himself peerless ever since his split with Stephen.
He turned toward the doctors and medical scientists sitting reverently before glowing tablets. They were gathered to demonize Plainville at the same time they worshipped the majesty of this preternatural force that reduced healthy human beings to dust. The modern practice of health care had become like a religion. The attendees listened raptly to Solbin’s creed and dreamed of a miracle Plainville cure that would deliver them to everlasting glory. Stephen Pearse was their messiah but he had stumbled and fallen from grace. Maryk wondered what the knowledge of Zero’s existence would do to their piddling faith.