II. THE FAMILIAR 4 страница

They always moved at night.

The briefing with the Joint Chiefs had not gone well, though Guilder hadn’t expected it to. To begin with, there was the whole “problem” of Special Weapons. The military brass had never been particularly comfortable with, or especially clear on, what DSW did, or why it existed outside any military chain of command, drawing its budget from, of all things, the Department of Agriculture. (Answer: Because nobody gave a shit about agriculture.) The military was all about hierarchies, who urinated highest on the hydrant, and as far as the brass could see, Special Weapons answered to no one, its pieces cobbled together from a dozen other agencies and private contractors. It resembled nothing so much as a game of sidewalk three-card monte, the queen always moving, not quite where you thought it would be. As for what DSW actually did, well, Guilder had heard the nicknames. “Distraction from Serious Warfare.” “Department of Silly Wingnuts.” “Deep-Shit Weirdness.” And his personal favorite: “Discount Shoe Warehouse.” (Even he had started calling it the Warehouse.)

So it was that Deputy Director Horace Guilder (were there any actual directors anymore?) had found himself sitting before the Joint Chiefs (enough stars and bars around the table to start a Girl Scout troop) to offer his official assessment of the situation in Colorado. (Sorry, we made vampires; it seemed like a good idea at the time.) A full thirty seconds of dumbfounded silence ensued, everyone waiting to see who would speak next.

Let me see if I have you right, the chairman intoned. He leaned his folded hands over the table. Guilder felt a bead of sweat drop from his armpit to slither the length of his torso. You decided to reengineer an ancient virus that would transform a dozen death row inmates into indestructible monsters who live on blood, and you didn’t think to tell anybody about this?

Well, not exactly “decided.” Guilder hadn’t been with DSW at the outset. He’d come in at the change of administration, so much money and so many man-hours already down the rat hole that he couldn’t have put the brakes on if he tried. Project NOAH was under a chain of command so obscure, even Guilder didn’t know where it had originated—probably NSA, though he’d gotten the sense it might have gone even higher than that, even to the White House itself. But sitting before the Joint Chiefs, he understood that this distinction was pointless. Guilder had spent three decades working in agencies where so much was a secret that nobody was actually responsible for anything. Ideas seemed to flower of their own accord. We did what? No, we didn’t. And so, off into the shredder it went. Which was exactly what was about to happen to Special Weapons; probably even to Guilder himself.

But in the meantime, there was blame to be doled out. The meeting had quickly devolved into a shouting match, Guilder taking verbal punch after verbal punch. He felt relieved when he was banished from the room, knowing that the situation was out of his hands. Henceforth, the military would deal with this the way they dealt with all problems: by shooting everything in sight.

In hindsight, Guilder might have put the situation more diplomatically. But the CDC’s projections spoke for themselves. Three weeks, four at the outside, and the virus would take out Chicago, St. Louis, Salt Lake. Six weeks and they were looking at the coasts.

Vampires, for Christ’s sake. What had he been thinking?

What had everyone been thinking?

And yet there was no doubt that Lear had been on to something. The great Jonas Lear—even Guilder was intimated by the man, a Harvard biochemist with an IQ of a zillion who had, for all intents and purposes, invented the field of paleovirology, retrieving and resuscitating ancient organisms for modern use. Within his professional circle it was generally assumed that Lear was a shoo-in, someday, for a Nobel Prize. Okay, maybe using death row inmates hadn’t been the smartest move. They’d gotten ahead of themselves there. And certainly Lear wasn’t rowing with his oars entirely in the water. But you had to admit the idea had possibilities. Such as, for instance, not dying. Ever. A matter in which Guilder had lately found himself holding a not-inconsiderable personal stake.

His only hope was the girl.

Amy NLN. The thirteenth test subject, snatched from a convent in Memphis, Tennessee, where her mother had abandoned her. Guilder hadn’t felt exactly comfortable signing off on that. A kid, for the love of God. Somebody was bound to notice, and they had; by the time Wolgast had brought her in, everybody from the Oklahoma Highway Patrol to the U.S. Marshals was scouring the country for her, and Richards, that lunatic, had left a trail of bodies a mile wide. The nuns at the convent, shot in their sleep. A pair of small-town cops. Six people at a coffee shop whose only mistake was coming in for breakfast at the same time as Wolgast and the girl.

But the request for the girl, which had come from Lear himself, was nothing Guilder could make himself refuse. Each of the cons had been infected with a slightly altered variant of the virus, though the effects had been the same. Illness, coma, transformation, and the next thing you knew they were hanging upside down from the ceiling, gutting a rabbit. But the Amy variant was different. It hadn’t come from Fanning, the Columbia biochemist who’d been infected on Lear’s misbegotten excursion to Bolivia; it had come from the group of tourists who’d started the whole thing—terminal cancer patients on a lark in the jungle with an ecotour group called Last Wish. They’d all died within a month: stroke, heart attack, aneurysm, their bodies blowing apart. But in the meantime, they’d shown remarkable improvements in their condition—one man had even grown back a full head of hair—and they’d all died cancer-free. Reading Lear’s mind was a fool’s errand, but he’d come to believe this variant was the answer. The trick was keeping the first test subject alive. For this he’d chosen Amy, a young, healthy girl.

And it had worked. Guilder knew it had worked. Because Amy was still alive.

Guilder’s office, on the third floor of an otherwise nondescript low-rise federal office building in Fairfax County—DSW shared space with, among other entities, the Office of Technology Assessment, the Department of Homeland Security Special Energy Task Force, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and a day care—looked out on Interstate 66. Monday of Memorial Day weekend, yet there was almost no traffic. A lot of people had left the city already. Guilder imagined a lot of chits were being called in. A mother-in-law in upstate New York. A friend with a cabin in the mountains. But with all air transportation grounded, people could get only so far, and it wouldn’t make much difference in the end. You couldn’t hide from nature forever. Or so Horace Guilder had been told.

The girl had made it out of Colorado somehow. They’d caught her signature in southern Wyoming in the first few hours. Which meant she was in a vehicle, and not alone—somebody had to be driving. After that, she’d disappeared. The transmitter in her biomonitor was short-range, too weak for the satellites; she had to be within a few miles of a cell tower, and not some rural co-op but one connected to the federal tracking network. Which, in southern Wyoming, as long as you stayed off major highways, would be easy to avoid. She could be anywhere now. Whoever was with her was smart.

A knock at the door broke his train of thought; Guilder swiveled from the window to see Nelson, the department’s chief technical officer, standing in the doorway. Christ, what now?

“I have good news and bad news,” Nelson announced.

Nelson was dressed, as always, in a black T-shirt and jeans, his dirty feet shoved into a pair of flip-flops. A fast-talking Rhodes scholar with not one but two PhDs from MIT—biochemistry and advanced information systems—Nelson was the smartest guy in the building by a mile, a fact that he knew only too well. He still had the young person’s predisposition to regard the world as a series of vaguely irritating problems created by people less cool and smart than he was. Though their relationship was cordial, Nelson had a habit of treating Guilder like a doddering elderly parent, a figure of respect but no longer quite worthy—which was exasperating, coming from a guy who seemed to comb his hair every fourth day, though not, Guilder had to admit, entirely unwarranted. He was twenty-eight to Guilder’s fifty-seven, and everything about Nelson conspired to make him feel old.

“Any sign of her?”

“Nada.” Nelson scratched his scraggly beard. “We’re not getting any of them.”

Guilder rubbed his eyes, which stung of sleeplessness. He needed to go home for a shower and a clean suit. He hadn’t left the office in two days, grabbing only a few winks on the couch and living on junk from the vending machines. He was having trouble with his fingers, too. Numbness, tingling.

“You said something about good news?”

“Depends on how you look at it. From a free-speech point of view, probably it’s not the best, but it looks like somebody finally shut down that lunatic in Denver. My guess would be NSA, or else one of Lear’s little pets finally got to him. Either way, the dude’s off-line in a permanent way.”

Last Stand in Denver: Guilder had watched his videos, like everybody else. You had to hand it to the guy for balls. Theories abounded about his identity, the general consensus being that he was ex-military, Special Forces or SEALs.

“So what’s the bad?”

“New numbers just came in from the CDC. It seems the original algorithm failed to take into proper account just how much these things like to eat. Which I could have told them if they’d asked. Either that or some summer intern moved a decimal place when he was daydreaming about the last time he boned his girlfriend.”

Sometimes talking with Nelson felt like trying to corral a five-year-old. A genius five-year-old, but still. “Please, just spit it out.”

Nelson shrugged. “As it now stands, based on the most recent projections, it appears we’re looking at a more succinct timeline. Something on the order of thirty-nine days.”

“For the coasts you mean?”

“Um, not exactly.”

“What then?”

“The entire North American continent.”

A gray shadow swooped over Guilder’s vision; he had to sit down.

“A response is already in the works at Central,” Nelson continued. “My guess is they’ll try to burn it out. Major population centers first, then anyone else who gets left behind.”

“Christ almighty.”

Nelson frowned. “Small price to pay, on the whole. I know what I’d do if I were, say, the president of Russia. No way I’d let this jump the pond.”

The man was right, and Guilder knew it. He realized his right hand had begun to tremble. He reached for it with his left, trying to bring the spasms under control while also making the gesticulation seem natural.

“You okay there, boss?”

His right foot had begun to shake as well. He felt the incomprehensible urge to laugh. Probably it was the stress. He swallowed effortfully, a taste of bile in his throat.

“Find that girl.”

Once Nelson was gone, Guilder sat in his office for a few minutes, trying to collect himself. The trembling had passed, but not the impulse to laugh—a symptom euphemistically known as “emotional incontinence.” Finally he just gave in, ejecting a single, cleansing bark. Jesus, he sounded possessed. He hoped nobody outside had heard.

He departed the building, got his car from the garage—a beige Toyota Camry—and drove to his townhouse in Arlington. He wanted to clean himself up, but this suddenly seemed like work; he poured himself a Scotch and flipped on the TV. It hadn’t taken long for each of the networks, right down to the Weather Channel, to brand the emergency with a catchy slogan (“Nation in Crisis,” etc.), and all the broadcasters looked harried and sleep-deprived, especially the ones reporting from beside a highway somewhere—a cornfield in the background, long lines of vehicles creeping past, everybody pointlessly honking. The whole country was seizing up like a bad transmission. He checked his watch: 8:05. In less than an hour, the middle of the country would go dark.

He heaved his disobedient body from the couch and climbed the stairs. Stairs—that had been a concern for the future. What would he do when he could no longer climb the stairs? But it hardly mattered now. In the master bath he turned on the shower and stripped to his shorts, standing before the mirror while the water heated. The funny thing was, he didn’t look especially sick. A little thinner, perhaps. There was a time when he’d thought of himself as athletic—he’d run cross-country at Bowdoin—though those days were long past. His line of work, with its attendant demands for secrecy, had made marriage impossible, but well into his forties Guilder had managed—well, if not to turn heads exactly, then at least to keep himself occupied. A series of discreet affairs, everyone apprised of the facts. He had prided himself on the well-managed quality of these encounters, but then one day it had all simply stopped. Glances that might have been returned slid past him, conversations that before had merely served as elaborate preambles went no place. Inevitable, Guilder supposed, but nothing to cheer about. He surveyed his reflection, taking stock. A square-jawed face that had once looked rugged but had long since sagged at the jowls. A scrim of thinning hair swept back over his scalp, trying not quite successfully to conceal the ghostly white presence of his scalp. Bags of skin beneath his eyes, a rubbery paunch at the waist, legs skinny and insubstantial looking. Not a pretty sight, but nothing he hadn’t accepted as the inescapable degradations of late middle age.

To look at him, you’d never know he was dying.

He showered and changed into a clean suit. His closet contained almost nothing else; an understated two-button—dark navy usually but sometimes gray with a subtle pinstripe, occasionally khaki poplin in summer—paired with a shirt of powder blue or starched white and a tie as neutral as Switzerland was so closely aligned with his sense of himself that he felt naked without one. Minding his balance, he descended the stairs to the living room, where the television was dutifully barking out its parade of bad news. Though he possessed no appetite, he heated up a frozen lasagna in the microwave, standing before it as the seconds ticked away. He sat at the table and did his best to eat, but the diazepam made everything taste bland and vaguely metallic, and the tightness in his throat had not abated, as if he were wearing a collar two sizes too small. His doctor had suggested he try milk shakes, or something soft like macaroni, but resorting to kiddie food was nothing he could face. From there, everything would go downhill.

He dumped the unfinished lasagna down the disposal and checked his watch again. A little after nine. Well, whatever was happening in the middle of the country was happening. Nelson would call if he needed him.

He left the townhouse and drove to McLean. What lay ahead was a grim duty, but Guilder was the only one to do it. The facility was set back from the road behind a sweeping green lawn; by the driveway a sign read, SHADOWDALE CONVALESCENT CENTER. At the check-in desk, Guilder presented his driver’s license to the nurse, then proceeded down the medicinal-smelling hallway, past its mass-produced paintings of green fields and summer sunsets. The place was quiet, even for the hour; usually there were orderlies around, and patients in the common room, those who still got some benefit from human company. Tonight the place was a tomb.

He came to his father’s room and gently knocked, opening the door without waiting for an answer.

“Pop, it’s me.”

His father was propped in his wheelchair by the window. His jaw drooped open, the muscles of his face as slack as pancake batter. A pendulum of spittle dangled from his mouth to the paper bib around his neck. Somebody had dressed him in a stained sweat suit and orthopedic shoes with Velcro tabs. He gave no sign of recognition as Guilder stepped into the room.

“How you doing, Pop?”

The air around his father tanged of urine. The Alzheimer’s had progressed to a point where he recognized no one, but still one had to go through the motions. How terrifying it was, Guilder thought, the solitude of the mind. Yet his father’s silence, the feeling of absence, was nothing new. In life—as now, in death—he had been a man of almost reptilian coldness. Guilder knew that this was just the way his father had been raised—the son of small-town dairy farmers who’d attended church three times weekly and slaughtered their own hogs—yet still he couldn’t bring himself to put aside his resentments for a boyhood spent hoping to win the attention of a man who was simply incapable. It had been a small thing, a natural thing, what he’d asked of his father, simply by being born: to treat him like a son. A game of catch on a fall afternoon, a word of praise from the sidelines, an expression of interest in his life. Guilder had done everything right. The good grades, the dutiful performances in auditoriums and on athletic fields, the full ride to college and swift ascent into a useful adulthood. Yet his father had had virtually nothing to say about any of this. Guilder could not, in fact, recall a single instance when his father had told him he loved him, or touched him with affection. The man just didn’t care.

Hardest of all had been the toll it had taken on Guilder’s mother, a naturally sociable woman whose loneliness had driven her to the alcoholism that eventually killed her. In later life, Guilder came to believe that his mother had sought comfort elsewhere, that she had had affairs, probably more than one. After his father had been moved to Shadowdale, Guilder had cleaned out the house in Albany—an absolute mess, every drawer and cabinet crammed with stuff—and discovered, in his mother’s dressing table, a velvet Tiffany box. When he’d looked inside he’d found a bracelet—a diamond bracelet. Probably it had cost as much as his father, a civil engineer, had made in a year. It was nothing he could have afforded, and the box’s location—concealed in the back of a drawer beneath a pile of moldering gloves and scarves—had told Guilder what he was looking at: a lover’s gift. Who had it been? His mother had been a legal secretary. One of the lawyers at her firm? Somebody she had met in passing? A rekindled romance of her youth? It had gladdened him to know that his mother had found some happiness to brighten her lonely existence, yet at the same time this discovery had sank him into a depression that had continued unabated for weeks. His mother was the one warm memory of his childhood. But her life, her real life, had been a secret from him.

Always these visits to his father brought these memories to the surface; by the time he left, he was often so dispirited, or else seething with unexpressed rage, that he could barely think straight. Fifty-seven years old, yet still he craved some flicker of acknowledgment.

He positioned the room’s only chair in front of his father. The old man’s head, bald as a baby’s, was tipped at an awkward angle against his shoulder. Guilder retrieved a rag from the bedside table and wiped the spit from his chin. An open container of vanilla pudding sat on a tray with a flimsy metal spoon.

“So how you feeling, Pop? They treating you okay?”

Silence. And yet Guilder could hear his father’s voice in his head, filling in the spaces.

Are you kidding me? Look at me, for Christ’s sake. I can’t even take a proper shit. Everyone talking to me like I’m a child. How do you think I am, sonny boy?

“I see you didn’t eat your dessert. You want some pudding? How would that be?”

Fucking pudding! That’s all they give me around this place. Pudding for breakfast, pudding for lunch, pudding for dinner. The stuff’s like snot.

Guilder tucked a spoonful between his father’s teeth. Through some autonomic reflex, the old man smacked his lips and swallowed.

Look at me. You think this is a picnic? Drooling on myself, sitting in my own piss?

“Don’t know if you’ve been following the news lately,” Guilder said, delivering a second spoonful into his father’s mouth. “There’s something I thought you should know about.”

So? Say your piece and leave me alone.

But what did Guilder want to say? I’m dying? That everyone was dying, even if they didn’t know it yet? What purpose could this information possibly serve? A chilling thought occurred to him. What would become of his father when everyone was gone, the doctors and nurses and orderlies? With everything that had happened in the last few weeks, Guilder had been too preoccupied to consider this eventuality. Because the city was emptying out; soon, in weeks or even days, everyone would be running for their lives. Guilder remembered what had happened in New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricanes, first Katrina and then Vanessa, the stories of elderly patients left to wallow in their own waste, to perish slowly of hunger and dehydration.

Are you listening to me, sonny boy? Sitting there with that big dumb look on your face. What’s so all-fired important that you came here to tell me?

Guilder shook his head. “It’s nothing, Pop. Nothing important.” He spooned the last of the pudding into his father’s mouth and wiped his lips with the rag. “You get some rest, okay?” he said. “I’ll see you in a few days.”

Your mother was a whore, you know. A whore a whore a whore …

Guilder stepped from the room. In the vacant hallway, he paused to breathe. The voice wasn’t real; he understood that. But still there were times when it felt as if his father’s mind, departed from his bodily person, had taken up residence inside his own.

He returned to the front desk. The nurse, a young Hispanic woman, was penciling in a crossword puzzle.

“My father needs his diaper changed.”

She didn’t look up. “They all need their diaper changed.” When Guilder didn’t move, her eyes darted upward from the page. They were very dark, and heavily lined. “I’ll tell someone.”

“Please do.”

At the door he stopped. The nurse had already resumed working on her puzzle.

“So tell someone, goddamnit.”

“I said I’d get to it.”

A fierce protective urge came over him. Guilder wanted to shove her pencil down her throat. “Pick up the fucking phone if you’re not going to do it yourself.”

With a huff she lifted the phone and dialed. “It’s Mona at the front. Guilder in 126 needs changing. Yes, his son is here. Okay, I’ll tell him.” She hung up. “Happy?”

The question was so absurd he didn’t know where to begin.

Guilder wouldn’t die like his father—just the opposite. ALS: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Major motor function would be the first to go, the muscles spasming and dimming into uselessness, followed by speech and the ability to swallow. The spontaneous laughing and crying were a mystery—nobody knew quite why this happened. Ultimately he would die on a respirator, his body utterly stilled, unable to move or speak. But worst of all was the fact that he would experience no diminishment of his ability to think or reason. Unlike his father, whose mind had failed first, Guilder would live every moment of his decline with full awareness. A living death, no one but some sulky nurse for company.

It was clear to him that in the aftermath of his diagnosis, he had gone through a period of profound shock. That was the explanation he gave himself for the foolish thing he’d done with Shawna—though, of course, that wasn’t even her real name. For two years Guilder had been visiting her on the second Tuesday of each month, always at the apartment provided by her employers. She was dark-skinned and slim, with subtly Asiatic eyes, and young enough to be his daughter, though this was not the attraction—if anything, he would have preferred that she were older. He had originally found her through a service, but after a probationary period he had been permitted to call her directly. The first time, he had been as nervous as a college boy. It had been a while since he’d been with a woman, and he’d found himself worrying that he wouldn’t measure up—in hindsight, a preposterous concern. But the girl had quickly put him at his ease, taking command of the occasion. Always the ritual was the same. Guilder would ring the bell outside; the buzzer would sound; he would mount the stairs to the apartment, where she would be waiting in the open door, wearing a welcoming smile and dressed in a black cocktail dress beneath which lay an erotic treasure of lace and silk. A few pleasantries, as might be exchanged by any two lovers meeting in the afternoon, followed by the unremarked-on placement of the envelope of cash on the dresser; then on to the thing itself. Always Guilder undressed first, then watched as she did so herself, allowing the cocktail dress to fall to the floor like a curtain before stepping regally away from it. She made love to him with an enthusiasm that seemed neither manufactured nor overly professional, and for those slender minutes, Guilder’s mind found a serenity that nothing else in his life came close to matching. At the moment of his release, Shawna would say his name over and over, her voice losing itself in a wholly persuasive facsimile of womanly satisfaction, and Guilder would find himself floating on these sounds and sensations, riding them like a surfer onto a tranquil shore.

Why don’t I see you more often? she would ask him after. Are you happy with the things I do? There isn’t anybody else, is there? I want to be your only one, Guilder. Very happy, he would say, stroking her velvety hair. I couldn’t be happier than I am with you.

He knew nothing about her at all—at least, nothing real. Yet in the weeks that followed his diagnosis, the only refuge his mind could take was in the absurd idea that he was in love with her. The memory embarrassed him now, and the psychological subtext was obvious—he didn’t want to die alone—but at the time, he’d been utterly convinced. He was madly, hopelessly in love, and wasn’t it possible, likely even, that Shawna shared his feelings? Was that what she meant when she said she wanted to be his only one? Because what they did and said to each other couldn’t be false; those things occurred on a plane that only two people who were truly connected could share.

On and on like this, until he had worked himself into such a state that Shawna was all he thought about. He decided he would give her something—a symbol of his love. Something expensive and worthy of his feelings. Jewelry. It had to be jewelry. And not something new from a store, but something more personal: his mother’s diamond bracelet. Energized by this decision, he wrapped the Tiffany box in silver paper and drove to Shawna’s apartment. It wasn’t Tuesday, but that didn’t matter. What he felt wasn’t anything a person could schedule. He rang the bell and waited. Minutes passed, which was strange; Shawna was always very prompt about the bell. He rang again. This time the speaker made a little burst of static and he heard her voice. “Hello?”

“It’s Horace.”

A pause. “I don’t have you in the book. Do I? Maybe this is my fault. Did you call?”

“I have something for you.”

The speaker seemed to go dead. Then: “Hang on a second.”

A few minutes passed. Guilder heard footsteps descending the stairs. Perhaps the buzzer wasn’t working; Shawna was coming down to open the door. But the figure that turned the corner wasn’t Shawna. It was a man. He looked about sixty, bald and heavyset, with the piggish face of a Russian gangster, wearing a rumpled pin-striped suit, his necktie loosened. The implications were obvious, yet in its agitated state, Guilder’s mind refused them. The man stepped through the door, giving Guilder a cursory glance as he passed.

“Lucky you,” he said, and winked.

Guilder hurried up the stairs. He knocked three times, waiting with buoyant anxiety; at last the door swung open. Shawna wasn’t wearing the dress, just a silk robe cinched at the waist. Her hair was disheveled, her makeup smeary. Perhaps he’d caught her taking a nap.

“Horace, what are you doing here?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, suddenly breathless. “I know I should have called.”

“To tell you the truth, it’s not really the best time.”

“I’ll only be a minute. Please, can I come in?”

She eyed him skeptically, then seemed to soften. “Well, all right. It’ll have to be quick, though.”

She stood aside to let him enter. Something felt different about the apartment, though Guilder couldn’t say exactly what. It seemed dirty, the air unpleasantly dense.

“Now, what’s this I see?” She was eyeing the silver-papered box. “Horace, you shouldn’t have.”

Guilder held it out to her. “This is for you.”

With a warm light dancing in her eyes, she undid the wrapping and removed the bracelet.

“Isn’t that thoughtful. What a pretty thing.”

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14