91 hours
Ehlers had taken her list and gone off someplace to make it all happen. The meeting was adjourned, at least for the moment, and Fallon sat in a grandstand seat, sun beating down on her, thinking about the last time she had been here. The incessant roar of the cars competing with the din of the crowd must have shaken the angels in heaven. Here in the grandstand, the smells of burning rubber, sunscreen, and beer battled for all-out supremacy. A day at the track was an exercise in extreme overstimulation, causing Fallon to want to spend the next day in dark, quiet isolation. Maybe the next week.
“There you are.”
She twisted in her seat to see Jack Thurman coming down the steps toward her. He had taken off the blazer he’d been wearing inside and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He wore his usual easy smile, and it was only when he got closer that she could see the weariness in his blue eyes. He looked like he’d been chewing on his lips, too. “How are you, Jack?”
“Been better.” A glance toward the fence separating the raceway from the Valley told her why.
“I know what you mean.”
“Pretty impressive bunch of people here,” Thurman said. “And on the ground. Do you have any idea how hard it is to fence in an entire valley of this size in a few days? The logistics involved?”
“Hadn’t really thought about it. Hard, I imagine.”
“And then some. If the place hadn’t already been descending into chaos, it would have caused a panic. As it was, the Valley’s inhabitants barely noticed.”
“A great relief to them, I’m sure.”
Thurman ignored the comment. “Fallon? Who would you say—within a radius of a hundred miles or so—would most closely fit your ‘classic’ psychopath mold, based on your studies? Brain structure and any other genetic criteria included?”
Besides me? she thought. Again, it was not something she dared voice out loud. Beyond that, she had to consider for a long moment. “I guess Randy Wayne Warga,” she said finally. “Randall, officially.”
“Why him?”
“He’s probably committed at least a dozen murders. He’s down at the Arizona State Prison Complex, in Florence. He was convicted on thirteen charges of second-degree homicide and sexual assault, but I’m sure he’s done more than that. He’s a sexual sadist of the first order, and I suspect he’s been raping and killing for years.”
“Warga?” He spelled it out.
“Right.”
Thurman raised his left hand in the air. Immediately, Fallon heard boots hurrying down the concrete steps and turned to see two police officers coming toward them, in full tactical gear. When they were close enough, Thurman said, “Randall Wayne Warga. ASPC-Florence, Central Unit.”
“Got it, sir,” one of the officers said. They about-faced and rushed toward an exit.
“What was that all about?” Fallon asked when they were gone.
“If it is his psychopathy that makes Light immune,” Thurman said, “we need to know if it’s true of other psychopaths, too. Which means we need . . . test subjects.”
“Lab rats.”
“That works, too. Look, Fallon, if we had months or years, we could test on animals, rats or chimps or whatever. We could do a careful, appropriate sequence of tests, working up toward humans, who we’d expose little by little, under controlled conditions. Hell, you’d know more about how that works than me. But we don’t have that much time. We have days. Hours. We’re at the ‘quick and dirty’ stage. We need to know what we need to know, the fastest way possible.”
Fallon mulled for a few moments, fighting back sudden anger that threatened to boil over into rage. “But you know Light’s immune because you saw it on the video. Incontrovertible proof that he was in close contact with Infecteds, traded bodily fluids with them.”
“Right.”
“So if you bring in psychopaths from outside the quarantine zone, how will you . . . Oh, no. No. Jack. With real zombies? Infecteds, whatever.”
“It’s the only way to be certain, Fallon. And we have to know.”
“But—but, what about their rights? Jack, they’ve done bad things, but they’re still human beings. Throwing them to the wolves like that—that’s just not right. What about cruel and unusual punishment? What about the Constitution? How can you countenance—”
“I assure you, Dr. O’Meara,” came another voice. “We’re all supporters of the Constitution.” Ehlers was coming up the stairs toward them. “At DHS, we defend it every day. We defend the freedom it promises. But there are a million and a half people in the city of Phoenix, and more than four million in the entire metro area. As infectious, as dangerous, as Crazy 8s is, if it were allowed to spread beyond the Valley, the whole country would be at risk. The whole world. It’s possible, of course, that it’s already out there—that someone got on an airplane to Atlanta or Tokyo or Paris symptom-free but then spread the virus. We might be too late. But we can’t proceed on that assumption. We have to believe there’s still something we can do, and we have to do it.”
“I suppose,” Fallon said, hardly mollified. “But, still . . .”
“Sometimes the rights of a few have to be infringed upon to guarantee the rights of the many,” Ehlers said.
“And in this case, the few are known killers,” Thurman offered. “Society isn’t losing much if they fail the test.”
Society might not be, Fallon thought. But what about us? What do we lose, when we turn other human beings into unwitting test subjects?
Before she could frame another objection, Thurman and Ehlers excused themselves and walked off. Fallon was almost alone, except for the minder she’d been assigned, Specialist Timothy Briggs. The young soldier was sitting fifteen rows behind her, well out of sight and hearing. She rose from her seat and walked up, past him, high enough to see over the wall to where the quarantine line was still being hardened with razor wire.
As she watched the soldiers at work, she wondered how much of the rage simmering inside her was due to righteous, patriotic fervor, and how much to that trait in her that she didn’t like to acknowledge. According to the scans—repeated several times, to rule out testing errors—she was potentially as psychopathic as Warga, if not more so. Under the unexpected stress of the day, had that tendency pushed to the fore? And how could she possibly tell?
They could ask her to study Light and Warga and whoever else they brought around, give them the information they needed to do whatever had to be done, she decided. She’d do it, but she would also scrutinize herself as closely as she could.
And that information, she would keep to herself.