Chapter 21

METROPOLITAN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Infection Date 26, 1300 GMT (9:00 a.m. Local)

While waiting for Brandon at the nurse’s station before yet another trip to the White House, Isabel checked Emma’s schedule. She was ending a gray block of military time.

In a rarity, the observation and hospital rooms were both empty. Emma’s roommates were all off being tested, prodded, scanned and probed. But the hospital room door buzzed, and Emma entered, in a robe and slippers, hair dripping wet, which was odd. You showered on departing the Infecteds’ hospital room, not returning to it. Emma looked almost regal in her serenity and self-confidence. Even caged and under constant threat from jumpy guards there was nothing they could do to her, because there was no her.

Isabel cleared the glass. Emma noticed but seemed uninterested. Isabel sat in the observation room day after day. Emma knew she was there but never started a conversation. It was as if she had no need for her sister any more. Isabel pressed the Talk button and tried not to sound upset. “You go for a swim?” Emma nodded. “Wait. Really?”

“Do you want me to describe it in elaborate detail? Stand beside a pool, then sit beside it, then dangle my feet in, then slide in, then tread water, then dunk my head. I have a question. Who is that man who sleeps there?” She pointed at the engineer’s empty bed.

Isabel was embarrassed that she didn’t know Subject Zero Zero Five’s name. “His deficits are more severe than your other roommates’, but nowhere near as bad as others’.”

“He’s dangerous,” Emma said, removing her robe and, naked, heading to the bath.

“Emma, wait!” Her sister was completely uninhibited. Isabel imagined the Marines in the security room at the edges of their seats. “They didn’t give you a bathing suit?” Emma turned to face Isabel. Dark red marks streaked her right forearm. The observation room door burst open. It was Brandon. “No-no-no!” Isabel said, pushing him back into the hall. “One minute!” But when she turned, Emma was already in the shower.

In the car, Isabel felt shaken. “Why would they have Emma go swimming?”

“Sounds like they’re checking for hydrophobia. You know. Like rabies victims.”

“She doesn’t have fucking rabies!” Isabel snapped.

“They’re looking for anything they can use against them. Probably Browner deciding if he should build moats or whatever. Was she? Hydrophobic?”

Isabel shook her head. “And she wasn’t shy either.”

“So I noticed,” Brandon said. Isabel buried her face in her hands.

When they exited at the White House, Brandon said, “Look,” pointing at the roof. Machine guns protruded from sandbagged emplacements manned by black-helmeted troops. All signs screamed the same thing. It’s coming! It’s coming! It’s coming!

They waited for the elevator on the ground floor. The doors opened to reveal Rick Townsend, who emerged in camouflaged gear as if straight from war, or heading to it. Isabel smiled. “Rick?” He looked deeply troubled. “Oh, Dr. Brandon Plante, this is Capt. Rick Townsend. Rick . . . saved my life, I guess, in Khabarovsk.” No one shook hands anymore. “What’s goin’ on down there?” she asked airily. Boys, she had read, liked vivacious girls.

Rick grabbed her elbow and pulled her away. She looked over her shoulder at Brandon. Rick must be a drag-a-girl-off-politely-by-the-elbow kind of alpha male. “They’re talking about North Korea,” Rick said, checking the hallway in both directions. “I’m headed to Vladivostok.” Brandon was watching, so Isabel reached out and gently squeezed Rick’s arm. Habituated physical contact, she had read, helped break down barriers to intimacy.

“Hey,” she said, “could we, like, trade digits?” “Digits”! And she’d said it in an embarrassing way! But Rick nevertheless gave her his number, which she typed into her phone. When she gave Rick hers, he was unprepared and had to retrieve his phone from deep in a cargo pocket.

Rick’s eyes bored into hers. She smiled. “Have you seen a mob attack?” he asked. “Heard it?” Gone was her smile and her attempts at flirtation. “Listen to me.” He grabbed her arms. “If you see a crowd of them, don’t walk, run. Put as much distance as you can between them and you. I’m not talking infection risk. A blue mask won’t save you.” His eyes were wide.

“I’ve seen videos,” she said softly. “But there was no audio.”

“It’s a roar,” he said. “Like a stadium’s cheer, only they’re more . . . shrieks.”

“You’ve been back over there?” she asked, and he nodded. “Why are they sending you to Vladivostok?” she whispered.

“Chinese Infecteds are reaching the North Korean and Russian borders there,” he said. “Not thousands. Millions.” He looked worried sick.

“Do you have to go?” she asked, barely audible, without thinking.

He focused intently on her and frowned. “Good luck,” he said, then just walked away. She grabbed for him, but caught only empty air. Had she said something wrong?

Brandon hit the down button. “Not a bad-looking guy.”

What a strange thing to say. Isabel mumbled, “He’s a Marine.”

“So I noticed.”

The subterranean corridor was filled with milling civilians conversing quietly. The camo-clad guard stood in front of closed conference room doors.

Isabel saw Maldonado and led Brandon over. “What’s going on?” she asked.

The aide pointed at the phone she held to her ear before turning away and speaking in low but urgent tones. “Steve, what the fuck?” There was no place to escape prying ears. “North Dakota? What am I supposed to do with the kids? Of course, a possibility, but . . . And D.C. is gonna be . . . And thousands here, too!” She glanced over her shoulder. Isabel and Brandon looked anywhere but at her. “Okay. I love you. We’ll see each other again, right? I mean . . .” Her sobs were poorly suppressed. “I love you so much!” The doors opened. “Gotta go. Bye. Bye.” She fixed her face with her back still to the others.

Jesus, Isabel thought.

Everyone filed into the Situation Room. Inside were uniformed military personnel and the president, secretary of defense, national security advisor and CIA director, all tense. Isabel glimpsed a map of the North Korean-Chinese-Russian border, blighted with red splotches, before it disappeared. But the image that stuck in her mind was of all the red built up around Vladivostok.

President Stoddard’s hands were clasped, fingers interlaced, behind his head. His jacket hung on his seat back and his armpits were dark. The secretary of defense and CIA director spoke to him quietly. Stoddard listened and nodded, his eyes shut.

The doors closed, everyone settled, and the room fell unnaturally quiet. “We also might ramp up production of Tamiflu,” the CIA director told the president. “It doesn’t work particularly well on SED, but we might exaggerate to hospital workers how beneficial it is and set aside stocks for their use to induce them to show up for work.”

“Okay,” the beleaguered commander-in-chief finally said. “What in God’s name is next?”

Aggarwal replied, “We received the WHO report we said we’d publicly release.”

The president said, “Dr. Plante?”

Brandon looked at Isabel, stood and said, “Actually, sir, I think Dr. Miller . . .”

President Stoddard frowned and waved impatiently in Isabel’s direction.

She rose. Browner silenced an aide to listen. Isabel summarized the WHO report.

When she got to impulsive-reactive aggression, Browner interrupted. “So any Infected can cook off? Even the calmest?”

“Yes. You may see telltale signs of agitation. Talking excessively, purposeless motions like hand-wringing,” which Isabel willed herself to stop doing, “verbal hostility, an increase in muscular tension, restlessness, pacing. . . .” Stop pacing, too.

“The WHO report?” the ill-tempered president prompted.

“Excuse me, sir,” Browner said, “but is sedation effective in controlling them?”

“We haven’t tried . . .” Isabel began.

“Yes, sir,” Brandon answered. “Benzodiazepines like Valium or Xanax, administered orally, via inhalant or by injection does calm them.” So, Isabel thought, they’re giving them sedatives, I had no idea, but Brandon, my working-group-mate, did.

“What sets them off?” Browner asked. Isabel went down her list from memory: feeling threatened, trapped, crowded, or deceived, and then answered Browner’s general questions about agitation. It acts like a sixth sense and confers an evolutionary advantage. Twitchy people survive. When relaxed, warning signals pass slowly through the facial recognition region of your brain, helping you spot someone in a crowd displaying ill intent. But when anxious, warning signals shoot straight to the motor cortex, the region responsible for action, in under 200 milliseconds. “Like, say, you’re walking through a haunted house, tensed up, and someone leaps out and yells Boo! You jump. Instantly.”

“Or you’re walking point on night patrol,” Browner said, “and the first round of an ambush snaps past your face.” Isabel thought, That’s probably a better example. “You’d think,” Browner said, “that if it helps so much we’d all be jumpy neurotics all the time.”

Isabel explained anxiety’s downside—a surge in the stress hormone cortisol, which damages cells. “To stay healthy, you have to be able to turn anxiety on and off.”

Browner said, “My analysts commented that your sister’s nurse had noted in her logbook that your sister no longer grabbed wads of bed linens when she got worked up. She just clutches her notebook as if her life depended on it. The nurse asked for permission to go give her a manicure, or whatever, because she was tearing up her nails. But that would mean taking a nail file in there so they decided against it. But is that behavior some kind of coping mechanism that might also be a warning sign?”

Before Isabel could answer, the president said, “The report?” Browner nodded at her, instructing her to ignore his question and return to the WHO report, as requested. Isabel switched to an explanation of the damage that caused deficits in social cognition, adherence to social norms, moral decision-making, and high-risk behavior: the Phineas Gage Effect. “Gage was a mild-mannered, pre-Civil War railroad foreman, who had an iron rod driven through his head, destroying his frontal lobe and turning him into a profane misfit ruled by animal passions.”

“Oddly,” Brandon interrupted, “it also jump-started Gage’s career. Brain injuries often unleash new potentials that are positive changes, like Dr. Miller’s math scores.”

“So,” Isabel continued after a glance at Brandon confirmed he was done, “a small percentage of Infecteds suffer TGA, transient global amnesia. They go about routine business in a mechanical way like sleepwalkers, but underneath their fluency of function lies profound amnesia. Every sentence they utter is forgotten as soon as it’s spoken. Every experience gone in minutes. Ultimately, the only question is whether they become an indirect fatality from exposure, dehydration or violence.”

Isabel next explained how Infecteds see trees, not forests, serially, not holistically, resulting in obsessiveness. Browner noted, “That might explain their single-mindedness in pursuing victims. Your source at the WHO, Dr. Lange,” how did he know that, “and his compadre, Dr. Groenewalt, who, by the way, last night was caught stowing away on one of our aircraft headed for Europe, got chased into an electrical substation a couple of days ago. They holed up there for a full day while attackers smashed at doors, vents, conduits. The whole area was awash in violence, but their attackers kept trying to kill them and them only until a helicopter plucked ‘em off the roof.”

Isabel shuddered. Poor Groenewalt just wanted to get home to his wife and daughter.

“What else?” croaked the president, whose strength and voice were ebbing. Isabel glossed over the previously discussed lack of pain and described how some Infecteds believed acquaintances and loved ones to be dangerous imposters. Browner supplied another story from the erstwhile WHO field team, of a mom who leaned over to check her eight-year-old boy’s temperature and had a chopstick driven into her sinuses.

Isabel surveyed the room. Everyone wanted to be somewhere else, with someone else. But Isabel had nowhere else to be. Like an unmarried, childless employee on Christmas Day, Isabel would probably end up working the apocalypse shift. She moved on to disruption of social bonding and destruction of empathy. “There are plenty of reasons an Infected won’t kill you, but any sense of magnanimity, honor, integrity, charity, or fairness isn’t among them.”

President Stoddard’s cheek was propped heavily on his hand. “That all?”

Last but not least, she covered the obliteration of Infecteds’ sense of self, and sat.

Everyone waited on the president. “Isn’t life better,” he asked, “when you don’t have a pesky self demanding more possessions and more stimulating entertainment, or pointing out your flaws and inadequacies, mostly imagined?” Brandon and Isabel’s gazes met. That was Brandon’s question, too. “Haven’t Infecteds achieved contentment? A life spent wanting only satisfaction of their basic needs? I just can’t shake the feeling that they haven’t fallen rungs on the evolutionary ladder, but ascended. I mean, to never again be frustrated or unhappy?”

Heads turned, thank God, to Browner. “No towering achievements, brilliant insights, scientific breakthroughs, engineering marvels, displays of genius? No art, literature, music, or film? You get the bad with the good. The suffering with the solace.”

But the president again sought deeper meaning. “Professor Miller? Any chance Thomas Hobbes said anything about the society we can expect Infecteds to create?”

Really? she thought, and frowned. “Well, sir, he did note, in Leviathan, that ants live sociably with one another even though individuals have no goals or objectives, just judgment and appetite.”

Browner said, “No high-functioning queen like your sister organizing the morning calisthenics?” Isabel’s mental image was of his boot blotting out the sun above the mound.

“Sir,” Dr. Aggarwal said, “are we authorized to release the WHO report to the public?”

“Good God no!” replied Stoddard, roused from his reverie. “The Security Council vote was unanimous. It stays secret. We need to return to executive session. Everyone but the principals please clear the room.” His eyes never left Browner’s.