JUST AFTER SIX A.M., WHILE DAVIES AND THANE REVIEWED every detail of their plan for a final time, Stanton stepped out onto the empty boardwalk to join a conference call with government officials in L.A., Atlanta, D.C., and around the country. The sun was inching toward the coastline and hadn’t started cooking the ocean air, so in his thin, long-sleeved shirt and jeans, he was underdressed for the chill lingering on the Walk. The only sound competing with the lapping of the waves was an invisible helicopter churning somewhere in the distance.
Tuning out a procedural roll call, Stanton glimpsed a small circle of men sitting in sun chairs right near the shore, all wearing eye shields. At first he couldn’t imagine who was brazen enough to meet right now in violation of the curfew. Then Stanton realized they were sitting in exactly the same spot as the Venice Beach men’s AA meeting always did. They often congregated at dawn, and, however surprising, it was a strange comfort to Stanton to know that some appointments couldn’t be missed.
“The utilities can’t keep up with the demands or the outages,” a FEMA deputy was saying on the phone now. “No electricity means no potable water.”
Los Angeles had been on the brink of an energy crisis for decades. Now, with half of the city suffering from anxiety-related sleeplessness, lights and televisions and computers ran twenty-four hours a day. Blackouts spread. Water consumption had skyrocketed. Taps could run dry within a week.
“What are we doing about bodies?” Stanton broke in, out of turn. “Houses across the city could have decaying corpses inside them.”
“We have to take them to a central location,” somebody replied. He didn’t recognize the voice—there were so many bureaucrats involved in every decision now.
“We could be talking about thousands in a few days,” Stanton said. There were more than eight thousand known victims of VFI citywide. “You don’t have the equipment for that kind of biohazard, and there’d be no way to ensure the safety of the workers.”
“Well, we have to do something,” Cavanagh cut in, “and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m starting to think that means telling people they have to douse the bodies with acid or lye and let them dissolve in bathtubs.”
Stanton’s boss was taking the call from the recession-shuttered post office in East L.A. that had been turned into a CDC command center. From the tone of Cavanagh’s voice, Stanton could feel the toll all this was exacting on her. Already, forty-two CDC investigators and nurses were infected with VFI, and he knew Cavanagh well enough to know that she blamed herself. She’d personally selected many of them to come out from Atlanta to help manage the outbreak.
As the call broke up, Stanton sensed an opening and asked his boss to stay on the line. One way or another, he, Davies, and Thane were going to test the antibodies in the next twenty-four hours. Their plans were in place. But if he could convince Cavanagh that it was the right thing, they’d have access to a much larger sample group and they’d be acting within the law.
“Emily, the quarantine seal is breaking,” he said. “Soon they’re going to be having this conversation about dead bodies and bathtubs in every city in America. We need to discuss treatment options.”
“Gabe, we talked about this.”
“But I have to tell you again. We could have an experimental antibody therapy available soon if we start immediately. In a day or two.” He glanced back over his shoulder at his condo, not wanting to imagine Cavanagh’s reaction if she knew about the antibodies being created inside as they spoke. But he knew that if they could get them to work and could prove it, she’d have no choice but to come around.
The helicopter circled somewhere even closer behind Stanton, getting louder. “I’ll discuss it with the director,” Cavanagh said finally. “Maybe he can get the White House to issue an executive order and suspend normal FDA protocols.”
“FDA’ll drag their feet. They always do.”
“We all want the same thing, Gabe.”
Stanton hung up, frustrated by the resignation in her voice. She’d left him with little choice. Before he got back inside, his phone rang.
He picked up. “Did you find anything?”
“Dr. Stanton? It’s Chel Manu.”
“I know. Did you find something more?”
“Sorry. Yes. We did. It could be… useful. It’s good.”
It was nice to hear someone sounding alive, even hopeful. “Good is good,” Stanton said. “What is it?”
Listening to her story—the ancient city’s latitude line seemed to intersect with that of the village in which she’d been born?—Stanton didn’t know what to think. He had no choice but to trust her at this point: Everyone said she knew what she was doing. Yet every revelation of hers seemed more improbable than the last. Everything in her work and her life seemed to constantly circle back on itself.
“You couldn’t tell if Volcy was from your village?” Stanton asked.
“We knew he was from the Peten,” she said. “But not Kiaqix. And he was afraid—he wouldn’t say anything specific about where he was from.”
“Is there any way for you to confirm this before we take it further?”
“There are no phones in Kiaqix, but I talked to a cousin of mine. He lives in Guatemala City, but he goes back regularly to visit his father. I had him look at a picture on one of the news sites, and he recognized Volcy from the photo you released.”
Now the helicopter buzzed directly overhead. Stanton glanced up and saw not one but two choppers. They were flying low and seemed to be headed directly for the beach. One was large and looked military. The other was smaller—four seats encased in a glass bubble. Seconds later they both dropped toward the ground in lockstep. It was one of the oddest sights Stanton had ever seen on the boardwalk, and that was saying a hell of a lot.
The men from the AA meeting stood up and shielded their faces from the sand tornadoing up into the air. Finally both helicopters had landed about a hundred yards up the beach, and five men in camouflage carrying machine guns poured from the National Guard helicopter. They ran to the other chopper, pulled out a young pilot, a man in his sixties, and a redhead who couldn’t be more than thirty. The older man wore a blazer and slacks, as if headed to a business meeting. The redhead was still wearing her sunglasses and screaming as they were cuffed and arrested. Stanton watched in disbelief: L.A.’s wealthiest were trying to flee the quarantine.
“Dr. Stanton?”
He refocused. “So we need to find out when the last time people in your village saw Volcy and in what direction he might have headed from there to find this… lost city,” Stanton told Chel. A jungle Atlantis as the source of VFI was hardly the answer he’d been hoping for. But it was what they had.
“Like I said, no phones. And mail can take weeks to get there. We’re really talking about the middle of the jungle.”
“Then we’ll send a plane in,” he said.
“I thought the Guatemalans weren’t cooperating.”
With thousands now infected here, it would be very difficult to convince anyone in the States, let alone Guatemala, that sending a team into the jungle in search of vanished ruins was the best move. “Figure out the location and we’ll make them do it,” he told her.
“I’ll do everything I can,” she said.
“I know you will, Chel.” He spoke her name as she had pronounced it to him when they first met—with a soft syllable, as if he was saying “shhhell.” It was the first time he’d said it aloud. For a second he worried he’d screwed it up.
All she said was, “I’ll call soon, Gabe.”
Wind rolled in off the ocean, and the marine layer shielded the rising sun. By the time they hung up, the guardsmen had put the quarantine violators into the army helicopter and taken off. Only the small bubble chopper still sat on the sand. Two of the AA guys were peering inside the empty cockpit, probably trying to assess if they could get into the air again.
As one of them reached a heavily inked arm through the window, Stanton was reminded of someone. He turned and hurried down the boardwalk. Metal gates on stores had been pried open and were curled up like old- fashioned sardine cans. Cars had never been allowed on the Walk, but now he had to navigate around abandoned
