“Yes, exactly,” Price told me, studying the man without emotion, almost analytically. “It’s dangerous to be in here with him. He’s burning with virus. Quite literally biological toxic waste. The best we can do is keep our distance and avoid his body fluids, particularly that vomit. It’s loaded with billions of particles of virus, highly infectious, all of which are lethal hot agents.”
“You seem to know a lot about this stuff,” I said.
“Hmmm. Yes. Once upon a time I was a microbiologist, a military biohazard specialist,” he told me, shrugging. “Now I’m just a survivor. Like you. Like us all.”
Price just stood there, staring at Bedecker, watching it happen with the sort of cold detachment that I suppose only a scientist could have. He was mumbling stuff under his breath. I went over to Janie. Morse was standing there with her. He snapped another shot of me.
I motioned Janie over to me, away from our intrepid photojournalist. “That guy’s boiling with fucking Ebola-X over there. We’re all in danger being in this room.”
Janie didn’t seem concerned. “Too bad it’s not the full moon.”
“Yeah, okay, Janie. Point is, we’re all in danger here.”
“There’s nothing we can do about it. Not unless you want to be a hero and throw him to the Scabs.”
“Why don’t you just stop it?”
She looked at me long and hard. There was no warmth in her eyes. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said to me. “You’re thinking you have two new sacrifices for your friend. Which one goes first? Price or Morse?”
“I wasn’t thinking about them, Janie. I was thinking about you.”
“Prick.”
She walked away from me. So that was the state of our relationship. I was beginning to realize that Janie was no longer in my corner and probably could not be trusted. The Shape was the farthest thing from my mind. For the next two weeks I would not allow myself to even think of a selection. It wasn’t until the third week that it began to creep into my mind. By the fourth week it became an obsession, one born not just out of fear of what The Shape might do if we didn’t offer it something, but of what we would do if The Shape abandoned us.
But right now there were bigger fears.
I went back over to Price and smoked a cigarette with badly shaking fingers. “What’s going on?” I said.
“Hmm. We are watching a man die from an infectious organism. And as we do so we are at ground zero of an explosive chain of lethal transmission.” He was very clinical about the entire thing. “You see, Nash, when a hot virus infects its host, what it’s trying to do, essentially, is to convert that host into virus. The process, of course, is not successful and what happens is what we’re seeing here: a man literally turned into a morbid mass of liquefied flesh.”
Price told me he had worked for the U.S. Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland. After the bombs came down, they were still in operation for several months, tracking outbreaks of infectious diseases in conjunction with the CDC. After nuclear winter lifted, one plague after another swept the country. It wasn’t until late January that the first reports of a highly infective hemorrhagic fever appeared. It started in Baltimore, then swept like a firestorm through the northeast, devastating Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and New York before setting its teeth into Ohio. The symptoms were similar to those of Ebola and the Marburg Virus- both of the filoviridae family-only much more virulent. There just wasn’t enough time to completely study this enhanced bug and it was never determined exactly whether the vector was airborne, through interpersonal contact, body fluids, or whether it was all of these things. Price saw enough of it, though, he said, to be certain that it could contaminate in all these ways.
“What happened?” I asked him. “What the hell are you doing in Des Moines?”
“I was born here. When Ebola-X nearly wiped us out in Maryland, a lot of us ran. I came back here. To my family.” He uttered a sarcastic laugh. “I watched them all die, one by one. Not from this organism, Nash, but from radiation sickness, typhoid, cholera. I believe my brother died from Septicemic Plague. My sister’s family was disease free. But the Hatchet Clans took care of that.”
“How the hell did it get here?” I asked. “That virus? I mean, I heard of outbreaks in Africa and that one in the States in Washington DC, but that was just in monkeys.”
He sighed, shook his head. “We needed more time, but we didn’t have it. It was probably brought here by someone from Africa. There was a rumor floating around that the U.S. Army Medical Command had weaponized a strain of Ebola. I suppose it could have been loosed during the turmoil of the final days. Russian virologists apparently weaponized a strain of Marburg at the Vector Institute in Koltsovo. It’s possible this strain could have found its way into the hands of bioterrorists. It’s anybody’s guess.”
I decided to ask a stupid question. “Could…I mean, is it possible that a virus could actually convert an entire body?”
“You mean turn a man into a walking viral body?” He shook his head but I saw uncertainty flash through his eyes. “We’d be giving the virus far too much credit, I’m afraid. It would have to perfectly assimilate the host cells, many of which like neurons are extremely complex.”
I kept thinking about my dream of The Medusa, the Maker of Corpses, an immense disease entity, trailing us, always just behind, turning the devastated country into a graveyard city by city. I had no doubt whatsoever that Ebola and similar pathogenic germs had mutated in the radiation and were continuing to mutate. I imagined them evolving through countless generations every week, becoming something much more complex each time, finally transforming themselves into something diabolically intelligent and unbelievably deadly.
I didn’t mention any of that to Price, though.
He said that viruses are the bridge between the living and non-living, the undead, as it were, of the microscopic world. They only act alive when in contact with living cells. They are parasites, entirely dependent on their hosts for biological processes. They are more or less protein capsules filled with genetic material encoded to replicate the virus itself. That’s it. A virus lays around like its dead until it comes into contact with a compatible cell, then it adheres to it and uses the cell’s machinery to make copies of itself. This goes on until the host cell literally explodes and out come countless baby viruses, each out to do the same thing to infinity unless the host dies or something like antibodies attack them.
“The virus has no lofty, ambitious plans, son,” he told me. “They live only to replicate themselves which ultimately, in the case of Ebola-X, destroys the host. They are cellular predators, but not organized, not thinking. I can’t imagine a line of organic evolution which would allow them to do more than this. They are probably one of the world’s oldest life forms and as such, achieved perfection many, many eons ago.”
I listened and learned, but I was not convinced. And I sure as hell was not about to argue with an expert and particularly when my only evidence was a series of fucking nightmares.
“Ah, now we see the unpleasant results of extreme amplification of the viral body,” Price said, watching Bedecker’s torment. “See how he is now rigid as of a corpse? He is filling with bloodclots. They are forming everywhere. Brain, vitals, organs, skin, bones. Hmm.”
I looked at Price like he was crazy. I didn’t know Bedecker, but he had been a human being once. Possibly a friend of Price’s and here the old man was carrying on with this insane running commentary like this was a sport’s event.
Morse was on the scene, of course, snapping shots of the dying man from every imaginable angle. He even took a telephoto lens from his bag and got some good close-ups. It was insane.
“See, Nash?” Price said. “Bedecker’s not really suffering now. His brain is liquefying. His vitality and humanity have been erased. This is called depersonalization. What you are watching now is no longer a dying man but a biological machine choking on its own poisoned by-products,” he told me. “The vomiting will continue, as will the bleeding…”
He was right. Bedecker was vomiting almost continually now, that same red-black stinking mush. Blood came from his eyes. His ears. His nostrils. He made an obscene farting sound and more drainage ran out from under his ass. Price said that liquefying sections of his stomach and intestines were being passed now, orally and anally. Blood flowed, gushed, poured as the hot agent ran from him, hungry to find a new host.
I was sick to my stomach. I tried to turn away but Price stopped me. “He is about to crash and bleed out.”
Morse made sure this was documented.
I lit another cigarette to get the stink out of my face. I told Price that I had friends over at the dealership, that we should link up with them soon as possible.
