Chapter 29

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Infection Date 35, 2300 GMT (7:00 p.m. Local)

Patricia Maldonado met Isabel in the White House parking lot and escorted her to the Family Residence Dining Room through four successive Secret Service checkpoints. “It’s just you and the First Family: Angela Stoddard; Bill Junior, sixteen; and Virginia, ‘Ginnie,’ who’s fourteen.”

“Is there any, you know, protocol I should follow?” Isabel asked.

One agent raised what Isabel thought was a gun to her forehead, but it was a non-contact thermometer, which beeped.

“Just stand when the president enters,” Maldonado said.

The ornate dining room had curved, wallpapered, wainscoted walls hiding nearly invisible doors, presumably for servants. Atop gleaming hardwoods were an antique rug, Mahogany table and six upholstered chairs. A mature blaze in the fireplace added ambiance. Heroic portraits and landscapes reminded Isabel of an old-moneyed manor.

A butler in a white jacket seated Isabel before crystal goblets, dinner plates trimmed in gold and heavy silverware. A floral centerpiece dominated the table beneath a glimmering chandelier. “Just like the breakfast nook in my sister’s place.”

Maldonado managed to curl one corner of her mouth. Her wedding band barely fit over doubled, flesh-colored bandages. “I’ll wait outside,” she said, heading for the door.

“Patricia?” The aide halted. “Are you making plans? Personal plans?”

Maldonado knew what she meant. She checked the closed doorways before answering. “My husband is in the air force. A pilot. He’s getting things ready.”

After she left, a butler arrived with ice water and asked if she would like wine. Isabel very much did, but awaited the president and First Lady’s lead. When alone, she extracted her cell phone, turned so the table was the backdrop and took a grinning selfie.

The doors opened. Children’s voices filled the room. “You’re so lame!” a boy said to a girl. The Spaniel that Isabel remembered from campaign commercials did figure eights at their feet. Both kids straightened when they saw they had company. Bill Junior was tall and reedy with keen eyes. Ginnie had long, shining hair with a gentle, natural wave, and braces. A woman—their nanny?—introduced her charges and disappeared with the energetic dog. The kids took apparently familiar seats in silence. The butler served Ginnie ice water with a slice of lemon and a straw. She used the straw to spear the donut-shaped ice, which she chewed noisily. Bill Junior got what appeared to be a negotiated half-glass of Coke, which he guzzled. Both glanced Isabel’s way repeatedly but said nothing.

“Nice place you got here,” Isabel said, smiling.

Bill Junior said, “This isn’t ours. All our stuff is in storage in Maryland.”

“Our real house wasn’t like this,” Ginnie explained. “It was just . . . regular.”

“It must’ve been a big change,” Isabel said, “to go from your family home, in Denver, right, to the White House?”

“That wasn’t our house either,” Bill Junior said. “Boettcher Mansion? The governor’s residence? We haven’t lived in our house for a long time.”

“I don’t even remember it,” Ginnie said, “except for the Christmas tree smell.”

The door opened. The president entered talking to an aide with the First Lady listening intently. “No big stir. I just wanna see who’s on what evac list.” The First Lady touched his arm and nodded at Isabel. They approached the table with a public smile.

The First Lady introduced herself and took Isabel’s hand in both of hers, but said, “I guess we really shouldn’t be shaking hands, right? People aren’t doing that anymore?”

“Dr. Miller,” her husband said, smiling warmly and actually giving Isabel a brief hug. “We’re so glad you could make it.” As Isabel tried to think of some appropriate pleasantry, the president hugged and kissed his children.

“Hey!” Ginnie said, straightening her perfect hair.

“Squirt!” he said, mussing Bill Junior’s head. “How was soccer practice?”

“Cold as hell,” his son replied. “Last one. Season’s canceled.”

“Hell is hot,” his little sister pointed out, “not cold.”

The instant the adults settled into their seats, bread, butter, soup, and wine arrived.

“I got it.” The president waved off the butler and laid a white napkin across his own lap. A waiter placed the First Lady’s black napkin on her dark pants unnoticed.

“So you’re a doctor?” Bill Junior asked.

“Not a medical doctor. A scientist. A professor.”

“Are you working on the plague?” Ginnie inquired.

The First Lady said, “Is that what they’re calling it at Sidwell Friends?”

“No!” Ginnie whined defensively, as if she’d said something wrong. “Ma’am,” she added when she saw her mother’s expression. “Most kids call it the Chinese flu or the P. But that stands for plague, right?”

Bill Junior said, “It stands for Pandoravirus, dummy. But they did hand out supplemental reading in all the history classes about The Black Death and stuff like that.”

“And in English,” Ginnie added, “we started reading a book called The Plague.”

“By Camus?” President Stoddard said good-naturedly. “Great book.”

“Uh-huh,” Virginia said, face contorted as she poked at her braces with her tongue.

“Well, Ginnie,” her mother said, “it’s really called SED or Pandoravirus.”

The president added, “Dr. Miller is one of the world’s leading neuroscientists.” Isabel was shocked by that description, as would be the tenured professors back at UCSB. “And yes, she’s working on SED. Your mother and I thought you’re hearing rumors at school, on TV, and here, and might want to get the real science from Dr. Miller.”

The girl lowered her voice. “I hear it turns you into a zombie with black eyeballs.”

The First Lady opened her mouth, but the president raised his hand. “Well,” Isabel said, “zombies aren’t real. And their eyeballs don’t turn black. Their pupils widen, like when the optometrist dilates your eyes. But that goes away after a couple of weeks.”

“So . . . what does SED do that’s so bad?” Bill Junior asked.

Isabel looked at the president. “They need to hear the truth,” he said . . . to his wife.

Only in Washington did you call in an outside specialist for things like the truth, Isabel thought as she described the flu-like symptoms. “The virus damages your brain. That’s why some people call them zombies. But they don’t bite, or eat brains or anything.”

She took a sip of wine. Bill Junior said, “So why’s everybody so scared of them?”

“Everyone,” his mother corrected.

“Well,” Isabel replied, “they’re highly contagious for a couple of weeks. Plus,” she drank again, “some are kinda violent. They can’t control their emotions.”

The First Lady said, “I didn’t think they had emotions.”

The waiters replaced their soup bowls and pristine dinner plates with new plates, then laid on them, in unison, an amuse bouche. They also refilled Isabel’s wine glass.

“True. Sorry, I oversimplified. They can’t control their fight-or-flight responses. The part of their brain that inhibits adrenaline production is damaged. They perceive a threat, their sympathetic nervous system fires, the adrenal medulla produces a hormone that triggers secretion of catecholamines—norepinephrine and epinephrine . . .”

“I think you overcorrected on the simplicity,” the president interrupted, smiling. “They’re smart.” He winked at Ginnie. “So give them details, but . . . in simpler words.”

Isabel knew she masked, in science, her own turbulent emotions, which lay in a shallow grave, threatening to reveal an elbow, a knee, a skull. “So, a big gush of adrenaline makes their hearts beat faster, breathing pick up, blood vessels dilate to carry more oxygen, digestion slow to preserve energy, sphincter muscles tighten and blood vessels constrict to reduce . . . fluid loss. Fat is liberated for energy, tunnel vision aids focus, spinal reflexes are disinhibited, allowing for faster-twitch responses. That’s when they’re primed to run . . . or to fight.”

“I heard you can’t kill ‘em,” Ginnie said meekly in her still childish high pitch. Everyone objected. “I heard you can’t hurt them!” she said, defending herself.

“They’re talking about pain,” Isabel replied. “If you pinched them, they would know it, but it wouldn’t hurt. They wouldn’t say, ‘Ow.’ Feeling hurt is an emotion.”

The head butler spurred eavesdropping waiters to serve the pheasant, mixed vegetables, and caramelized risotto. This so beat the food at the NIH cafeteria! Isabel drained her second glass of wine and nodded when offered more. The First Lady genteelly patted her lips with a napkin.

Ginnie said, “I heard they come back to life, and the government is covering it up.”

“L’etat, c’est moi,” her father said with another wink.

Bill Junior translated. “The state, it’s me. Dad’s saying he is the government.” He looked at Isabel. “So, do they, technically, die and come back to life?”

“No, of course not,” Isabel replied, feeling warm from the silky wine, which went down like water. She kept forgetting to pull up the front of Emma’s revealing blouse until Bill Junior noticed. “And it doesn’t take anything special to kill them either. No head shots, silver bullets, wooden stakes, crucifixes, or garlic.” She took another long draw of the deliciously full-bodied Malbec, then caught the First Lady’s eye and put the glass down.

“Then what is different about them?” little Ginnie asked.

“Let’s see. Hmm. Well, they can concentrate for hours without getting distracted. And they appear to have a total lack of empathy, which prevents social bonding.”

“What’s empathy?” Ginnie asked, turning to her big brother.

“Uhm, it’s like, caring? About other people?” The First Lady nodded.

The attending waiter refilled Isabel’s wine glass, but the First Lady declined.

“What I don’t get,” young Bill said, “is, if they’ve lost consciousness, if that’s true, how they can still walk around and talk and stuff. Is it like sleepwalking?”

“Oh,” Isabel said, chewing in a hurry to reply. The president had obviously discussed SED with or in front of them before. “It’s a different meaning of the word conscious.” She defined it, then said, “They don’t understand the concept of you, Bill Stoddard, being inside your body, at the controls, making all the decisions like the Great Oz.”

The children were baffled by Isabel’s hopelessly outdated cultural reference.

The president’s son thought for a moment, then asked, “Do they have a soul?”

“That’s a religious question,” his father replied, “not a scientific one.”

“But if they don’t have a soul, the kids at Sidwell say it’s okay to kill them.”

“William!” his mother exclaimed.

“That’s what they’re saying! Are you?” he asked his father. “Gonna kill them?”

It seemed to Isabel like a straightforward question with a simple answer. But the president’s delay in responding presaged a more significant reply. “I don’t know,” he said.

Isabel was shocked. But scrubbed, wide-eyed little Ginnie said, “I saw a YouTube video of a mom throwing her baby off a bridge.” Everyone looked at her. “In China.”

The president tapped the rim of his empty wine glass, which was instantly refilled. He motioned hospitably toward Isabel’s, which was also filled without her objection. No one made any comment at all on Ginnie’s horrible story.

“Are the people who turned,” the boy asked, “like, robots or cyborgs? I mean, do they act like, you know, machines? Or, like, those people who had . . . lobo-ectomies?”

“Lobotomies,” his mother said. “And we talked to you about filler words.”

They awaited Isabel’s reply. She washed the pheasant down with wine and smacked her lips. “Well, so . . .” Were those filler words? “They have brain damage. But they don’t drool, or shamble, or moan. And they would share our perceptions of events we both experience. In fact, they have much more accurate recollections of traumatic events than uninfected people. D’ya know why?”

Bill Junior looked around before saying, “’Cause they don’t freak out in a disaster?”

“Th-tha’ss right!” Isabel replied. She had to pull Emma’s blouse up again, this time because Mrs. Stoddard followed her son’s gaze. “Most have no problem learning, thinking, and reasoning just like us. They’re just . . . different.” That last bit was addressed to the president, who avoided her gaze.

“And a threat,” Mrs. Stoddard noted.

Isabel considered several replies, but her silence ended up just being a long pause.

“Have you ever known anybody who turned Infected?” Ginnie asked.

“Anyone,” the First Lady said. “And Dr. Miller, you don’t have to . . .”

“It’s okay,” Isabel said, clearing her throat. “My sister turned. My twin sister.”

“Oh.” Ginnie shot a look at her brother, who must have kicked her under the table. Ginnie then asked, timidly, “What does your sister do all day?”

“Most recently, before the incident yesterday, she had a map of the four quadrants of the United States: northeast, southeast, northwest and southwest. A little Infected twelve-year-old girl colored the maps with green for arable land, blue for freshwater supplies, purple for industrial base. In the margins they noted the length of growing seasons, climate extremes, sources of energy, military equipment, preexisting population, susceptibility to natural disasters. They seem to be focusing on the southeastern quadrant from Texas to D.C.”

“Planning on seceding again, are they?” the First Lady joked.

Isabel wondered how close that might be to the truth.

“What incident yesterday?” the attentive young Bill Stoddard asked Isabel.

“Oh, an infected man at the hospital got shot and killed when he attacked a Marine.”

“And the Marine died too,” Angela Stoddard said.

“What?” Isabel replied, shocked.

“You hadn’t heard?” The First Lady looked at her husband.

President Stoddard said, “His headgear was displaced. He caught it from blood spatter through fresh nicks on his neck from shaving. They used to require shaving because masks seal better. Now, the new rule is no shaving. Anywhere. Women too.”

Isabel was appalled. That was all it took? A nick from shaving? Poor, poor man.

President Stoddard said, “Also, just so you know, they noticed that your sister had folded the pieces of paper before she tore them up, but they still can’t make sense of them.”

In the silence that followed, Ginnie lowered her voice. “Does your sister go to the bathroom?”

The other Stoddards broke out laughing. Ginnie blushed. Isabel attempted a save by turning it into a real question. “Her autonomic responses—the automatic ones—are intact. Respiratory rate, heart rate, pupillary response—finally—urination, sexual response. They’re all normal.”

The table fell quiet, but Bill Junior’s eyes darted about. Isabel tugged her blouse up. Angela Stoddard turned to her son as if he’d spoken and said, “Yes, William?”

“I heard they,” he hesitated, “Infecteds, rape people?”

Before Isabel could disabuse him of that falsehood, the president said, “Unfortunately that may be true.” What? Isabel thought in distress. His kids find that out at the same time as me? “At least anecdotally,” the president concluded.

Ginnie asked what anecdotally meant. The First Lady said it was an SAT word and had Bill Junior define it, then suggested it was time for homework and SAT prep.

“Dad said I could watch the Pretty Little Liars marathon!” Ginnie whined. “Remember?” Angela Stoddard shot a look at her husband, who could only shrug.

“And why study for SATs?” their son challenged. “Nobody’s going to college. No Harvard. No Yale Law. No Congress. No Senate. Ginnie isn’t marrying some prince she meets at St. Andrews.” A stricken Ginnie, lips quivering over braces, shook crystal goblets when she pushed back from the table and ran from the room. Bill Junior, arms braced stiffly against his chair’s back, said, “You should tell everybody the truth,” and left.

Isabel motioned for a wine refill. “Thank you!” The waiter served dessert and, at the First Lady’s direction, coffee. But Isabel clung to her wineglass. The First Lady thanked the butler for the meal, which appeared to be a signal. The room emptied.

When the door closed, Isabel said, “Rape?”

Bill Stoddard leaned forward. “It truly is anecdotal. The only evidence is drone footage. And how do we know the sex isn’t consensual? It’s in public, but we don’t see men chasing down women. Just brief glimpses during flyovers, and . . .” He hesitated.

After a moment, his wife, herself curious, asked, “And what?”

“In one video, one, the woman was on top, okay? In a park. That’s all we know.”

Isabel downed her wine, which seemed to help. She’d never tried drugs. Now seemed like a good time.

The First Lady cleared her throat, switched to a businesslike tone, and changed topics. “I understand your brother went to federal court and the judge ruled that your sister is still a person under the Constitution?” Isabel remembered now that Angela Stoddard had been a partner at a big law firm before becoming homemaker-in-chief. “And you were certified an expert?” Isabel nodded. “And if you were asked again to testify, someday, whether a Pandoravirus survivor is a person under the US Constitution, understanding that your prior testimony was under oath and is in the record, what would you say?”

“Angela,” the president said. “I’m sure there’s really no reason to . . .”

“I’d like to hear her answer,” his wife interrupted.

They waited. “My professional opinion hasn’t changed,” Isabel said.

“She’s means me,” explained the president. “If I get sick and turn. One of my wife’s aides overheard Browner asking the Chief Justice, hypothetically, whether I’d still be commander-in-chief.” He looked at his wife and tilted his head. “It was just talk.”

“Fucking Browner,” Angela said, refilling her own wineglass from a crystal decanter.

The president said to Isabel, “He wants to use nukes . . . in America. All his maps show outbreak simulations in red. They look like . . . tumors to be excised. An irregularly shaped blob sprouting little crimson veins extending outward along roads and rivers. But after a surgical strike, poof, the blob is gone, and its edges are all rosy. One showed the effects of hitting a city that was obviously Miami, you could tell from the bays, with twenty-two, dialed-down warheads. Little bitty twenty-kiloton strikes, not big, bad multi-megaton detonations. And great news! We’ve got enough warheads to service all our medium to large cities, with plenty to spare! And the best news? It buys us another few miserable years of existence, according to ‘The Model.’”

Isabel stared at the table in silence. What could she possibly say?

“Dr. Miller,” President Stoddard said, “Isabel, the security council decided today it’s time to come clean about Pandoravirus with a coordinated, worldwide public information campaign while communications are still intact. I’d like you to go on television and tell the American people what you told our kids. My press office will set up the interviews.”

Despite the alcohol, Isabel felt ice coat her veins. “Not Dr. Stavros or Aggarwal?”

The president shook his head. “The docs are punch lines these days. Their credibility is shot. Focus groups viewed video of you from Bethesda. You’ve got a high ‘Q-Rating.’ Plus, there’s the human interest angle. Your sister. Just keep it sub-apocalyptic, please. They’ll try to get you to say Armageddon or extinction or whatever. Stick to what we know. That’s scary enough. And try to use simple language.”

“Can someone brief me?” Isabel asked. “I hadn’t heard about rape.”

“What you know,” said the First Lady, cryptically, from the opposite end of the table, “is what we want the American people to hear.”

Isabel turned to the president. Petrified, she could only manage a nod of agreement.

“And we’ll stay in touch on the other thing,” the First Lady said, rising.

What other thing? Isabel wondered. She shook hands with the departing power couple, hearing fucking-Browner-this and fucking-Browner-that from the First Lady.

Maldonado paced the corridor in spike heels and returned her phone to her purse.

“Have you been waiting out here this whole time?” Isabel asked gushingly.

“So, you enjoyed dinner,” Maldonado said, linking arms with the wobbly Isabel.

“That was really nice of them to invite me,” Isabel said. “To get to meet their kids!”

Maldonado snorted. “Nobody does anything just to be nice in this town. Everybody always wants something, especially her.”

Whoa! Isabel thought. Me-ow. Outside, Isabel took a deep, refreshing breath of the brisk night air. On the walk to Isabel’s car, Maldonado stopped. “Have you heard the latest?” Isabel shook her head. “It’s in Vietnam now. They think, you know, this is it.”

“Oh, sh-shit,” Isabel replied, slurring.

“The Vietnamese aren’t even treating the sick,” Maldonado almost whispered. “Their military went through wards not only shooting people in their beds, but in waiting rooms. Even family members who brought the sick in. Now, no one’s going to hospitals. Everything is leaking, my husband got sent to fucking North Dakota, my housekeeper just walked out!” The final straw. Maldonado checked her phone again but found no new messages.

“So you’re alone, with your kids!” Isabel realized and simultaneously said.

“Can I ask an off-the-wall question?” Maldonado said. “If you ever, God forbid, got caught by a mob of them and just went fetal, would they maybe leave you alone?”

“That’s not the way . . .” Isabel tried to say.

“Don’t antagonize them. Talk to them. Calm them down, like your sister does.”

“Sorry, but no. Mobs feed off each other’s agitation, not their victims’.”

Maldonado heaved a sigh. “You should know, I’m walking back in and quitting.”

“Quitting? Your job?”

The bright illumination of the White House left half of Maldonado’s worried face in shadow. To Isabel’s surprise, Maldonado hugged her. Her hard back heaved with sobs as she whispered, “You don’t know what I’ve heard! You should get out while you can!” With those words, Maldonado did just that, heels clicking all the way back inside.