Chuck Hogan Read online

  The Blood Artists

  by Chuck Hogan

  For J.A.H., a survivor.

  "C'est la mort," she said fiercely. It is death.

  "We would like to go into the true reasons that brought you here--" he began, but she interrupted.

  "I am here as a symbol of something. I thought perhaps you would know what it was."

  "You are sick," he said mechanically.

  "Then what was it I had almost found?"

  "A greater sickness."

  -- F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, Tender Is the Night

  The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.

  -- ALBERT CAMUS, The Rebel

  A virus is a bit of genetic acid wrapped in protein.

  It is neither alive nor dead.

  It is small, smaller than bacteria,

  many times smaller than any animal cell.

  A virus has no energy of its own.

  It cannot reproduce.

  A virus without a living cell to plunder is helpless and inert.

  It must steal life by slipping into a congenial cell

  and tricking it into replicating viruses.

  This is the act of infection.

  A virus does not want to kill.

  It does not even want to harm.

  It wants to change.

  It wants that part of it that is missing.

  It wants to become.

  The Strange Case of Dr. Peter Maryk

  Zero

  My Own Story, Half-Told

  Maryk

  Melanie

  Blossom

  The Alley

  The Living Machine

  Plainville, Massachusetts, One Week After Easter, 2012

  Exsanquinanon

  The Language of Disease

  The Human Component

  The Penitentiary

  Pasteur's Crypt

  The Swamp

  The Nosebleed

  Gala Island

  Corruption

  The Conference

  The Tank

  Prescription

  Char

  The Airport

  The Test

  Dawn

  The Fire

  Atlanta

  The Fountain

  Good-bye

  The Message

  The Black Bag Puzzling

  Infection

  The Labyrinth

  Sanctuary

  Coda

  Eclipse (the Barren Early Period of Infection)

  The Strange Case of Dr. Peter Maryk

  Everything that begins, begins with blood.

  We were at work in a B1 blood laboratory on the third floor of the seventh building of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a network of industrial-looking brick-and-mortar structures located just outside the city limits of Atlanta, Georgia. We were both junior virologists on staff at the CDC, myself and Peter Maryk, and both thirty-one years of age. This was the final week of December 2010.

  Peter worked across the lab table from me, standing over a whir-ring centrifuge, spinning down blood serum. His hair was pearl-white and had been since college, and he kept it short and straight, his angular face and slate gray eyes set in a mask of severity. He switched off the centrifuge and like a roulette wheel it slowed, ticking to a stop, silence returning to the lab. He crooked his head at a tinny scratching behind him. "Thirty-seven's going down," he said.

  I looked across at the wire cages. Thirty-seven, a large, white, pink-eyed rat, was digging repetitively at the metal floor and shifting back and forth. His hind legs buckled beneath him, and at once he slumped over onto his side.

  I crossed to the cage. Thirty-seven kicked sideways at the air, his small-toothed mouth opening and closing. Blood dappled his sugar-white chin. His pink eyes fixed on my face as his body twitched, his tail lashing at the cage floor, pang, pang. The jerking became less and less frequent, and Thirty-seven expired staring at me.

  There was still a chill. Death made failure real, something I wished not to repeat.

  Peter appeared at my side. He opened the top door of the cage with a gloved hand and lifted Thirty-seven out by the tail, sealing him inside a numbered plastic bag. "It should work," I said. "We've watched it under slides. We know it works. It's just too potent for rats."

  Peter said nothing. He returned to his station and set the bag down on the table with a light ,thump. "We can't go to primates," I continued.

  "If we go to chimps we'll have to declare our research, and I'm not ready for that."

  Peter and I distinguished each other in our fields of specialization, mine being straight laboratory science, Peter's being field pathology and investigation. I was most at home in a laboratory setting, but Peter was growing restless, and beginning to show his disdain for the project.

  Clean human blood was a precious commodity as the first decade of the twenty-first century drew to a close. An onslaught of viral and bacterial disease had depleted the reliable source pool, and patients around the world were dying, stuck on long lists waiting for transfusions of untainted blood. Lucrative black markets had sprung up in every major population center, from New York to Beijing to Cairo, where illicit blood traded at fifteen to twenty times its weight in gold.

  Like many medical scientists of the day, Peter and I had dedicated ourselves to the great challenge of developing a safe, synthetic human blood substitute. Yet that achievement alone would not have satisfied me. I was seeking to improve on organic human blood by deriving not merely a perfect substitute, but one infused with enhanced virus- and cancer-fighting properties. Peter was questioning the propriety of our work, and fully half my time now was spent appeasing him. His participation in the project was essential. Peter Maryk's immune system was infallible. He possessed innate immunological qualities beyond the natural ability of any human being known to medical science.

  When Peter Maryk claimed never to have been sick a day in his life, he meant it as fact. His gifted blood provided the essence of our project. At that time, my goal of conferring some degree of Peter's enhanced immune system to the ill seemed in reach. The potential benefit to medical science and worldwide human health would be inestimable. I We returned to our stations on opposite sides of the wide stainless steel table, Peter to his centrifuge and I to my binocular microscope. I bent over it and looked down upon a small, bustling, crystalline city.

  There was a thick popping splash, and I shot back reflexively.

  Peter was rising from the table, arms out at his sides, blood splattered over his fleshy latex gloves and paper smock and the small beige refrigerator humming behind him.

  Peter glowered at me, and I stood. It was a scare, but fortunately the blood was our own. He picked up the dripping plastic pack labeled MARYK and examined the torn eyelet. The rest of the pocketed units of blood labeled either PEARSE or MARYK hung from a steel rack over the table. My blood was the project's control. Four small vials labeled PEAMAR4 were the product, to date, of the fourth generation of our efforts.

  Peter's spilled blood was inordinately rich in color, oozing over the steel table top and seeping in dark parabolas down the walls of the sink. He turned on the faucet and ran water over his gloved hands, then wiped down the sink and counter and untied his bloodied smock, stripping off his gloves. He started toward the door with such intensity that I believed he would walk out and keep going, never to return to the lab or the project, but he merely disposed of his soiled gloves in a red biohazard box set into the wall. He was on his way back for a fresh pair when he slowed to read the flip-up screen of his tablet, a portable notebook computer, recharging in a wall socket and therefore wired into the CDC's central net.


  "Stephen," he said. Every sentence Peter Maryk spoke, even the most benign of phrases, was infused with urgency. His voice was clear and deep, compelling. I went around the table and joined him, struck by the scent of baby powder coming off his bared hands. Peter's hands were never without protective gloves, in or outside the lab. They were pallid and smooth-knuckled, and he held them upturned as though awaiting a towel.

  The monitor was flashing an EPIAll) mail message. The epidemic assistance request had been posted over the CDC-maintained LifeLink web from a Dr. Andr& Dieudonn6 Kaunda in the central African Congo for vaccine to treat one unconfirmed case of "variola major," or smallpox.

  I reviewed the symptoms detailed in French beneath the description of the patient, a nine-year-old Congolese girl said to be in the poring stage. "Buboes," Peter translated, fancying the antiquated term.

  "Can't be."

  "The symptoms match. But no request for assistance. Or investigation."

  "He's just uncertain," I said. "As well he should be."

  But Peter was pulling on a fresh pair of gloves and already heading for the door. I followed him out, across to adjoining Building Six via one of the outdoor wire encased catwalks linking each building of the CDC.

  The center was understaffed that week due to the year-end holidays, and our shoe heels scuffed loudly along the well-worn tile steps to the first floor.

  Room 161 in Building Six was, considering its duties, an office of modest size. The three desks inside, and the computers they supported, made up a virtual clearinghouse for rare drug and inoculation requests received from around the world. It was in Room 161 in the early 1980s that a CDC doctor first noted a surge in requests for pentamidine, a drug used to treat a rare pneumonia, from physicians in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas perplexed by an unusual wasting disease afflicting several young, male, homosexual patients.

  The door was open. Dr. Carla Smethy stood in relief as I entered.

  "Stephen," she said, surprised. "I was beginning to think there was no one here at all."

  Carla Smethy was in her mid-thirties, black-haired, round-cheeked, and smart. She nudged a curl off her forehead. The Christmas carols jingling out of her desktop computer were an unsuccessful attempt to alleviate the gloom of the rare drug request office.

  Peter entered behind me, and Dr. Smethy's smile flickered. In fact, she took one small step back. "What do you make of it?" I said.

  She shook her head. "A first for me. You're the bug experts."

  She looked to me in an interested way. "How did you get stuck working the holiday?"

  Peter sat at her computer. "May IT' he said. She appeared startled.

  "Yes-sure." He ran his gloved hands over the keyboard, first switching off the tinny carols. I kept one eye on the monitor.

  "We wanted some lab time," I said in answer to her question. "Thought it would be nice and quiet around here." She plucked a piece of paper off her desk and showed it to me. "Seen this?"

  It was a proof of the cover of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the centers' weekly periodical, featuring the new letterhead logo and initials "BDC." Following public outcry in the wake of emerging and reemerging diseases worldwide, an act of Congress had redrawn the CDC's policy mandates and enhanced its federal powers. As of January 1, 2011, the preeminent health agency in the United States and the world leader in disease prevention would be rechristened the Bureau for Disease Control. "The end of an era," she said.

  Peter had brought up the complete bulletin on the monitor.

  Delivery of the smallpox vaccine was requested by airdrop west of the city of Dongou on the Ubangi River. A relay trace sourced the sender's tablet coordinates to a location just a row degrees above the central African equator. Peter pulled up a grid map. The coordinates cross-haired into northern Congo, stopping there and pulsing faintly.

  The bulletin had been dispatched from deep within the rain forests south of the Sangha Wildlife Reserve, west of the Bumba Zone. "The Congo," Peter said, his strange voice leavened with something like romance. He had worked a year in Dares Salaam, the port capital of Tanzania, while I had elected to spend my foreign field residency in Calcutta, in a floating pediatrics hospital on the Hooghly River.

  Acquaintances since our third year at Yale, roommates in med school at Johns Hopkins and rivals in our virology class at Emory, we were now colleagues and research partners at the CDC; it was the only period of time during the preceding decade in which we had worked apart. "Must be a mistake," she said, looking at the screen. "The wrong request class, it has to be."

  I said, "Do we have any variola vaccine in stock?"

  "We do, actually. But only because first-year vaccinologists cook it up as part of their training. Otherwise, who cares?"

  "But why no medical support?" Peter turned in the chair. He trained his silvery eyes on her. "A call for variola vaccine, but no support?"

  She looked stunned. "There's blood on your shirt," she said.

  I tried to intervene. "It's all right-" "It's mine," Peter said.

  He examined the florid stain. Peter Maryk was different, innately different, apart from his imposing physical presence. People sensed this. Conversations trailed off -when he approached. Rooms changed whenever he entered them. Some people even claimed they could feel him walking behind them in the halls. He was in many ways an irregular human being, which at one time had been a source of great consternation for him. I was the politician of the two, and had taken on the role of social intermediary for him since college, explaining him to some, defending him to others, even apologizing to a few. But every attempt to introduce him into the broader culture of the CDC had failed.

  Increasingly he seemed uninterested in fitting in anywhere.

  Dr. Smethy looked again to me. "What do you think, Stephen?"

  I looked at the monitor screen. Laboratory space at the CDC was at a premium, and I had been looking forward to Christmas time and the changeover as an opportunity to push ahead on our PeaMar research without interruption. "We have the lab free and clear for an entire week," I said.

  It was part of the alchemy of our relationship that I would temper Peter's morbid enthusiasm. Peter had often questioned smallpox's untimely fate, distrustful as he was of most of mankind's triumphs, a distrust that now included our PeaMar research. My reluctance here-as there was no question that the distress call required further investigation-was simply an attempt to leverage his renewed participation in the project upon our return. "Worst case," I said, "it's an orphan," a virus whose symptoms resemble another, more prevalent disease. "Even so," Peter said, "there's a very sick little girl out there." I was stunned. The abject insincerity of his words, known only to me, was shocking. Peter's interest lay exclusively in hunting viruses, and to that end healing people was something of a by-product, the perfume that sweetened and further profited the whale kill. These clumsy words of concern were meant to manipulate me. This was the branch height to which our relationship had evolved. "How badly do you want this to be smallpox?" I said.

  He paged through airline schedules and clicked on a red-eye to Paris.

  "Our flight leaves in three hours."

  In the mid- 1760s, a young apprentice surgeon named Edward Jenner was examining a milkmaid suffering from cowpox, an occupational febrile illness characterized by nausea and painful pustular sores on the forearms, when the milkmaid proclaimed that, according to lore, she was now no longer at risk for the dread smallpox. Intrigued, Jenner pursued the milkmaid's agrarian remedy, and on May 14, 1796, came to perform mankind's first vaccination, lancing a sore on the wrist of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes and subsequently scratching the arm of eight-year-old James Phipps with the same instrument. The mild case of cowpox this produced in Phipps successfully rendered him immune to future smallpox exposures.

  But smallpox continued its wrath, killing sixty million people that century, disfiguring and blinding many millions more. Into the 1950s, the scourge still claimed more than two million deaths ea
ch year, a testament to the extraordinary virulence of the microbe, which was transmitted by respiration as well as casual contact. Inspired by the virus's seeming preference for young children and the availability of a secure vaccine, an ambitious multinational campaign to eradicate smallpox was launched in 1967. In September 1976, a three-year-old Bangladeshi girl named Rahima Banu was cured of the last naturally occurring case of variola major, the more severe strain. A twenty-three-year-old Somalian cook, All Maow MaaIin, cast off the final case of variola minor on October 26, 1977.

  Smallpox is the only virus ever to succumb to the efforts of mankind.

  The sole extant strain remains frozen and archived among tens of thousands of high-risk biological agents in the security containment vault of BDC Building Thirteen.

  Edward Jenner deservedly achieved the eminence to which all medical scientists aspire. His contribution to the human species was significant, and in 1823 Jenner died arguably the first global hero.

  1, certainly, would not die the last.

  I spent our brief Paris layover out on the tarmac at de Gaulle, wrapped in a borrowed orange parka, overseeing the transfer of a hundred pounds.of equipment and supplies onto a Swissair jet. The flight to Gabon passed uneventfully. I drifted in and out of sleep while Peter busied himself with his tablet, most likely tapping out some obscure virological missive that would never see publication. We changed planes again and split four matches of computer chess during the final leg of the journey, from Libreville, Gabon, to the sprawling RECI reserve east of Bomassa.

  The head of the Rainforest Ecology Conservation International camp was a rangy ex-Californian named Todd. He sported a floppy bush hat and greeted us at the plane with a surfer's smile and a strange look at Peter. "Merry Christmas," he said.

  I shook his hand, but Peter was busy watching our Cameroonian pilot, a hajji, kneeling beside the T-tail of the eighteen-seat turboprop, praying his salat. The orange light of the dawning sun warmed the pilot's face and felled a shadow of reverence on the runway behind him.