TRY AS he may at Kara’s urging, Thomas couldn’t sleep on the flight to Atlanta. Not a wink.
Slowly but surely, Kara was laying aside her disbelief that something very significant was actually happening to Thomas, although she still wasn’t buying the notion that he’d actually stumbled onto the end of the world, so to speak. As she put it, just because he was admittedly experiencing some kind of precognition when he slept, didn’t mean everything his highly active imagination latched onto was real. Who ever heard of fuzzy white bats anyway?
Thomas desperately wanted to convince her that it could easily be the other way around. That there was no real evidence the Boeing 757 they were flying in wasn’t actually part of some crazy dream. Who was to say which reality was more compelling?
“Think about what Dad used to say when we were kids,” he said. “The whole Christian worldview is based on alternate realities. We fight not against flesh and blood but against principalities or whatever. Remember that? In fact, most of the world believes that most of what actually happens, happens without our being able to see it. That’s a religious mainstay.”
“So? I don’t believe that. And neither do you.”
“Well, maybe we should believe that. Not necessarily the Christianity part, but the whole principle. Why not?”
“Because I don’t believe in ghosts,” she said. “If there is a God and he made us with five senses, why wouldn’t he show himself to us through those senses? A dream makes no sense.”
“Maybe he does show himself to us, but we don’t see. Maybe it’s not our senses that are the problem, but our minds.”
She twisted in her seat and looked at him. “Is this the same Thomas who used to tell Dad how crazy his silly faith was?”
“I’m not saying anything’s changed. I’m just saying that it’s something to consider. Like The Matrix. Remember that movie? Everyone thinks it’s one way, when actually it’s another way.”
“Only the real world is a colored forest with fuzzy white bats, and all this is just a dream. I don’t think so.”
“The fuzzy white bats healed my head and told me who will win the Kentucky Derby. And if I’m imagining one reality, it would be more likely that I’m imagining this one. In the other reality, both realities make sense— this one as a history and that one as the present. In this reality, the other reality makes no sense unless this reality isn’t really a reality. Or unless it really is the future.”
“Enough. You’re giving me a headache. Go to sleep and find out how we solve the Middle East crisis.”
“We don’t. The Raison Strain hits us before then. Which is now.”
“Unless the Raison Strain is stopped,” she said. “Is it possible to change the future? Or better yet, change history?”
He didn’t bother to respond.
They landed in Atlanta an hour later and spent thirty minutes on a run of errands. Kara owed the hospital in Denver an explanation and had some banking to do; Thomas checked on the availability of flights to several overseas destinations, just in case. It was half past three before they met up in ground transportation.
“So,” Thomas said, holding the door open that led to the taxi line. “How much do we have?”
“We? About $5,000, and it’s in my account. I don’t recall you depositing any money in my account.”
He’d found a 10:00 p.m. flight to Bangkok through Los Angeles and Singapore, but the short-notice tickets would cost $2,000 apiece. Not good. He frowned.
“You expected more?” she asked.
“I thought you’d saved up over twenty thousand,” he said.
“That was three months ago. I’ve made some purchases since. Five will hold us. As long as we don’t go running off to Manila or Bangkok.” She shut her door.
The yellow cab pulled up to the Centers for Disease Control headquarters on Clifton Road at 4:15, forty-five minutes before the government building presumably closed. Kara paid the driver and faced the front doors with Thomas.
“Okay, exactly what is our primary goal here?” she asked.
“To wake the dead,” Thomas said.
“Let’s be a little more precise.”
“Someone in there has to take us seriously. We don’t leave until someone with the power to do something agrees to look into the Raison Strain.”
Kara glanced at her watch. “Okay.”
They entered the building and approached a counter cordoned off with protective Plexiglas and identified by a black sign as “Reception.” Thomas explained their objective to a red-headed woman named Kathy and, when informed that they would have to see a caseworker, asked to see one immediately. He was handed a stack of forms containing a host of questions that seemed to have nothing to do with infectious diseases: birth date, Social Security number, grade school achievements, shoe size. They retreated to a row of cushioned waiting chairs, filled the forms out quickly, and returned them to Kathy.
“How long will we have to wait?” Thomas asked.
Her phone buzzed and she answered it without offering a response to Thomas. One of her coworkers was evidently having mice problems in her house. Thomas tapped his fingers on the counter and waited patiently.
Kathy set her phone down, but it rang again.
Thomas held up his finger. “Simple question: How long?”
“As soon as someone’s available.”
“It’s already 4:35. When will someone be available?”
“We’ll do our best to get you in today,” she said and picked up the phone. Same party. Another critical question on tactics to hold back swarms of attacking mice. Something about wearing rubber gloves when removing the varmints from traps.
Thomas sighed audibly and walked back to the waiting chairs. “Kathy was raised in an idiot factory,” he said.
“Patience, Thomas. Maybe I should do the talking.” Kara glanced at her watch again.
“I have a bad feeling we’re wasting our time here,” he said. “Even if we do report this, how long will it take for the bureaucracy to work? It takes months, sometimes years, to get FDA approval for a drug. How long does it take to reverse that? Probably months and years. I’m telling you, we have to go to Bangkok. They’re making the announcement in two days. All we have to do is explain the problem to them—to this Monique de Raison. They’ll check out our concerns, find the problem, and deal with it.”
Kara looked at her watch and stood. “I doubt it would be that simple. I have to check something. Be right back.”
Thomas let his steam gather for another ten minutes before approaching Kathy for another round. This time she stopped him before he could ask the obvious question.
“Excuse me, sir, are you hard of hearing, or just stubborn? I thought I said I’d call you when a caseworker was available.”
He stopped, shocked by her rudeness. No one else was within earshot— a fact obviously not lost on Kathy, or she wouldn’t dare offer this verbal abuse.
“Excuse me?” he stammered.
“You heard me,” she snapped. “I’ll call you if we have a caseworker available before we close.”
Thomas stepped up to the counter and glared through the Plexiglas. “This can’t wait until tomorrow.”
“You should’ve thought about that earlier.”
“Listen, lady, we flew all the way from Denver to see you! What if something dead serious was wrong with me? How do you know I don’t have a disease that could wipe out the world?”
She sat back, clearly smug in a certainty that she had won with this last absurdity of his. “This isn’t a clinic. I don’t think you have—”
“You don’t know that! What if I had polio?” Wrong disease. “What if I had Ebola or something?”
“It says Raison something.” She lazily pulled out his form. “Not Ebola. Sit down, Mr. Hunter.”
Heat flared up his neck. “And what is the Raison Strain?” he demanded. “Do you even know? As a matter of fact, the Raison Strain makes the Ebola virus look like a common cold. Did you know that? The virus may just have broken out in—”
“Sit down!” Kathy rose to her feet, fists clenched by her hips. She pointed dramatically to the waiting chairs. “Sit down immediately.”
Thomas could never be sure if it was his martial arts instincts or his generous intelligence that took over in the next moment—either way, at least his courage couldn’t be faulted.
He locked stares with the woman behind the Plexiglas for a full five seconds. The sight of her quivering jowls was the last straw. He suddenly grabbed his own neck with both hands and began to choke himself.
“Ahhhh! I think I might have been infected,” he gasped. He stumbled forward and smashed his head into the Plexiglas. “Help!” he screamed. “Help, I’m infected with the Raison Strain!”
The woman stood rigid and shaking with fury, still pointing at the chairs. “Sit down!”
Thomas smashed his cheek against the glass, tightened his choke hold, and stuck out his tongue. “I’m dying! Help, help!”
“Thomas!” Kara ran toward him from the hall.
He started to sag and rolled his eyes.
A half-dozen workers ran into the cubicles behind the receptionist.
“Stop it!” Kathy shrieked. “Stop it!”
“Thomas, what are you doing?” Kara demanded frantically.
He winked at her discreetly and then banged his head against the glass, this time hard enough to give himself a headache.
“Excuse me!” A man dressed in a gray suit had materialized behind the receptionist. “What seems to be the problem here?”
“He . . . he wants to see a caseworker,” she said.
Thomas lowered his hands and stood up. “Are you in charge here?”
“Can I help you?”
“Forgive me for the antics, but I’m a bit desperate and a junior-high fit was the only thing that came to mind,” Thomas said. “It’s absolutely criti-cal that we speak to someone from the infectious diseases department immediately.”
The man glanced at Kathy’s red face. “We have procedures for a reason, Mr. . . .”
“Hunter. Thomas Hunter. Trust me, you’ll be very interested in what I have to say.”
The man hesitated and then stepped through a door in the Plexiglas. “Why don’t you come into my office?” He extended his hand. “My name is Aaron Olsen. Please excuse our delay. It gets a bit hectic around here at times.”
Thomas shook the man’s hand and followed him, escorting Kara.
“Next time you’re going to lose your hearing, warn me, will you?” Kara whispered.
“Sorry.”
Kara couldn’t hide a grin.
“What?” Thomas asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “I’ll tell you later.”
Aaron Olsen stared at Thomas from behind a large cherry-wood desk, elbows propped on the surface, face stoic and impossible to read in the wake of Thomas’s detailed explanation of the fuzzy white bats.
Thomas sat back and let out a long breath. A gold placard on Aaron’s desk said he was the assistant director, and he explained that his department was indeed infectious diseases. And, although he’d started by explaining that the World Health Organization’s rapid response unit was the right party to contact, he had agreed to listen to their story and had done so without emotion.
They were finally getting somewhere.
“So,” Aaron said, and for the first time a slight grin nudged his lips.
“I know it sounds strange,” Thomas said. “But you have to consider the facts here.”
“I am, Mr. Hunter, and that’s what’s troubling me. Am I missing something here, or are you actually telling me that this information came from a dream?”
Kara leaned forward. “You say that like it’s preposterous.” Her defensive tone was striking. “Did you hear a word of what he just told you? He knows about the Raison Vaccine! He knew about it before it was made public.”
“The Raison Vaccine has been touted in private circles for a few months now—”
“Not in his private circles.”
Thomas held up a hand. “It’s okay, Kara.” What had come over her? She was suddenly his ardent advocate. He faced Olsen. “Okay, let’s go over this again. What exactly is confusing you?”
The man smiled, incredulous. “You’re saying this came from a dream—”
“Not exactly,” Thomas said. “An alternate reality. But let’s forget that for a minute. Regardless of how I know, I do have specific knowledge of things that haven’t happened yet. I knew that a French company was going to announce a vaccine called the Raison Vaccine before it was public knowledge. I also know that the Raison Vaccine will mutate under extreme heat and become quite deadly. It will infect the world’s population in less than three weeks. All we’re asking you to do is check it out. What’s so complicated about that?”
Olsen looked from Thomas to Kara and back. “So let me summarize here. A man walks into the building, begins to scream for help while choking himself, and then claims some bats have visited him in a dream and told him that the world is about to end—in what, three weeks?—when a vaccine overheats and turns into a deadly virus. Is that about it?”
“Three weeks after the virus is released,” Thomas clarified. Olsen ignored him.
“Are you aware that intense heat kills things like viruses, Mr. Hunter? Your warning is flawed on the surface, regardless of the source.”
Kara came to his defense again. “Maybe that’s why Raison Pharmaceutical is ignorant of the problem, assuming they are. Maybe drugs aren’t tested under extreme heat.”
“You’re a nurse,” Olsen said. “You’re buying all this dream nonsense?”
“Like Thomas said, it’s not necessarily dream nonsense. Just check it out, for goodness’ sake!”
“How do you propose I do that? Send out a bulletin that announces the fuzzy white bats have issued a warning about the Raison Vaccine? Pretty clear case of defamation, don’t you think?”
“Then explain to me how I knew that Joy Flyer was going to run in the Kentucky Derby,” Thomas said.
Olsen shrugged. “Public information.”
“But it wasn’t public that Joy Flyer was going to win,” Kara said. “Not two hours ago when I placed my bet.”
Thomas faced her. “What bet?”
“Joy Flyer won?” Olsen said. He glanced at his watch. “You’re right, the results should be in. You sure Joy Flyer won? He was a long shot.”
“You bet on Joy Flyer?” Thomas demanded. “How much?”
“Yes, Thomas, I did. And yes, he did win, long shot or not.”
“Bummer.” Olsen shook his head and looked out the window. “I had a thousand bucks on Winner’s Circle.”
“You’re missing the point,” Kara said. “Thomas learned that Joy Flyer was going to win from the same source that gave him these details about the Raison Vaccine.”
“How much?” Thomas asked again.
Olsen sighed. “None of this can be substantiated. For all I know, you didn’t even bet on Joy Flyer. And if you did, you could be claiming to have been tipped off by some angel to substantiate this other story. For all I know, you have stock in Raison Pharmaceutical’s competitor and are looking to trash Raison. I can’t do a thing with this information except put it through the normal channels.”
“So you’re dismissing it? Just like that?” Kara demanded.
“No, I said I’d report it.” Olsen sat up and straightened some papers. “You’ve made your report—I suggest you go collect your winnings.” He smiled condescendingly.
Kara stood abruptly. “You’re a fool, Olsen. Don’t you dare toss that report. If there’s even a small chance that we’re right, you could be messing with a very dangerous situation here. I just bet $15,000, most of my life savings, on a long shot named Joy Flyer because of what my brother knows. There’s $345,000 sitting in an account with my name on it right now because I listened to him. I suggest you do the same.”
She marched to the door.
“Exactly!” Thomas said, standing. Three hundred forty-five thousand?
The cab had waited as instructed.
“That’s true? You really won that much?”
“If we paid off your debt to the boys in New York, do you think they’d leave us alone?”
“With a little interest, sure. You’re serious?”
“You’ve bailed me out more than once.” She shrugged. “Now it’s my turn. Besides, it’s as much your money as mine.”
“Where to?” the driver asked.
Thomas searched his sister’s eyes. “Airport,” he said. Then to Kara, “Okay?”
“Where?” she asked.
“Bangkok. A flight leaves at ten. We no longer need visas, I checked.”
She stared at the back of the driver’s seat. “Why not? Airport.”
“Airport it is.” The cab pulled out.
Thomas nodded. “Okay, good. We don’t have a choice, right?”
“Of course we don’t,” she said quietly. “We never have a choice with you, Thomas. Staying put isn’t in your vocabulary.”
“This is different. We can’t pretend this isn’t happening.”
She looked out her window. “We need more information.”
“We will. I promise. As soon as I can fall asleep.”
“That should be when? Somewhere over the Pacific?”