“And you took the hard drives from the computers inside the van?”
“And the traps too. I didn't want WHO to have partial information. I wanted it to all go public at once. The equipment is in my van.”
I nodded to Chunk, who got on the radio and called in the Crime Scene Unit to process the van and an EMS unit for Cole.
“There's one part I don't understand, Dr. Cole,” I said.
He looked at me with pained, yellow eyes.
“How did you get Dr. Bradley's body onto the death wagon without anybody noticing?”
He looked away. “I won't tell you that.”
“Why not?”
“I had help. Someone who's not involved otherwise.”
I thought about that. I thought: I'm out of here tonight. What does it matter, other than to soothe my own curiosity?
“What if I told you that part was off the record? Just between you and me.”
He turned those yellow eyes on me again, and it was like he saw right through me, like he knew why I wanted to know, and why he could believe me.
“A man named Isaac Hernandez,” he said, and I drew a sharp breath through my teeth. I could taste the rubber smell of the inside of the gas mask I was wearing.
“He lost his entire family to H2N2,” Cole said. “I told him, if I found a cure for the other two strains, I would make sure his two remaining grandchildren got the first dose.”
“You lied to him,” I said. “You're not working on the cure. Just proving the strains exist.”
“True,” he said. “One more crime among many.”
“Is that remorse I hear, Dr. Cole?”
“If I were to feel remorse for anything I've done,” he said, “it would be for that, lying to him like that.”
He let his head fall between his knees and the coughing overtook him once more.
I stood up and looked around, at the trees swaying in the breeze and the birds flying overhead and the motes of light lancing down to the grass, and I felt sick to my stomach. So many lives wasted, and the living have all gone mad.
Chapter 25
We left Cole where he was, sitting on the curb, neither of us wanting to go near him, even in our spacesuits.
His symptoms were that terrifying.
It took an hour for EMS to arrive. All that time we stood there, a short ways off, listening to him cough, watching him turn blue from the cyanosis, watching blood leak out from his nose, his eyes, even his ears. We stood there and watched that, a slow motion train wreck unfolding before our eyes.
I had seen thousands of people die from the mother strain of H2N2. In the early days of the outbreak, when the hospitals were still trying to care for everybody who knocked on their door, the horror was still fresh. My nerves were still raw then. But that had been a long time ago. Or at least it felt like a long time ago. I hadn't felt that way since Chunk's grandmother died. After her, I turned off a switch somewhere in my soul.
I believed that without really articulating it. I believed that until I saw Cole dying from Strain 2. He was going through the ravages of the disease so much faster than the folks who died of Strain 1. They took twenty-four hours or more to die, but Cole was being torn apart right in front of my eyes. All I could think of was that he was a single serving horror show, the best reason yet for wanting to leave San Antonio.
At one point he looked up at me, eyes yellow as egg yolks, and said, “What do you see?”
“What do you mean?” I said, trying to be cool, but still thinking he was terrifying, so willing to die such a horrible death. Put a turban on his head and I'd have believed him capable of blowing himself up in a nightclub in Tel Aviv, or driving a horseshit bomb of fertilizer and ammonia into a Federal building.
“Me,” he said. “What do you see? Other than a pathetic old man.”
“Are you asking me to say I understand why you did this? Why you killed four people?”
The corners of his mouth slumped, like he was disappointed, like I hadn't measured up to the image he had of me in his mind.
“No,” he said, “I don't care what you think about what I did. Even if you could understand my reasons. I'm asking you what you see. What does this look like to you?”
Cole ran his hands down his flanks, like he was modeling some kind of new fashion.
I looked into his eyes and shook my head.
“This is what's coming,” he said. “What you're looking at. Just a taste. Imagine this getting outside the walls.”
He hung his head between his knees and stayed that way for a long time.
“H2N2 scared the crap out of everybody because its numbers were off the charts. Sixty-five percent of the population infected. Eighteen percent mortality rates. That scared people. Eighteen percent. That's nothing compared to what's coming. Strain 2, we're looking at forty percent mortality rates. Add in Strain Three in the same population group, we're all goners.”
“Is that a medical term?”
“What? Goners?”
“Yeah.”
“Fits, doesn't it?” He smiled at something, a memory maybe, and said, “I told Bradley that same thing the first time I saw her out here. She told me I was a doomsayer. That's when I told her we are all goners.”
I studied him, looked deep into his yellow, sick eyes. He studied me back.
“You're thinking about leaving, aren't you?”
“I can't leave here,” I said. “You're under arrest. I'm required to maintain custody of you until you're brought before a magistrate.”
He smiled a creepy, knowing smile. “I don't mean that. I mean you're thinking about leaving this.” He opened his arms wide to include everything around us. “I mean all of this.”
“You mean, leave the city?” I said.
He nodded.
“Can't be done.”
“Of course not,” he said. “Can't be done.”
Cole rattled me. Not much rattles me, but Cole was something else. He had my number.
When Chunk came back from the car I asked him to watch Cole for a while.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I just need a moment.”
I went back to the car, leaned against it, and listened to the silence. It amazed me the difference a few hours made. When we'd driven into the GZ earlier that morning, I was feeling like those streets were a retreat from the rage that kept the threat of riot right there in front of me, like a spring ready to explode. But now, after seeing Cole and the effects of Strain Two, I realized that there could never be any peace in this place, not in this city.
I heard the beating of wings. A flock of birds had set down on a fence across the street, one house to the left of the house where I'd found Bradley's van.
I watched that flock, and their black eyes stared back at me.
A feeling came over me, a need to see Carmenita Jaramillo again. There was something I needed to ask her.
I motioned to Chunk. He came over to me and said, “What's up?”
“There's someone I need to talk to.” I motioned towards Carmenita's house. “Over there. You mind babysitting him for a few minutes?”
Chunk looked at where I pointed, then back at me. He thought it was a bad idea. I could see it in his
