Inside, the air was cooler but not by much, and stank. Beneath the cacophony of stench wavered a weak chord of Pine-Sol. Dicken did not pause, though DeWitt held back and coughed under her mask. He had smelled worse; the professional refrain of a virus hunter.
Beyond the security office and the open double gates of the checkpoint, the doors to all the cells stretched down a long corridor. About half, in no particular order, had been opened. No nurses or guards were in sight.
The body of a boy of eight or nine lay on a mattress in the corridor. Dicken knew the boy was dead from several yards away. He put down his bag of specimen kits, knelt with difficulty beside the soiled mattress, examined the boy with what he hoped was clear-eyed respect, then pushed on the floor and one knee and got up again. He shook his head vigorously at DeWitt’s offer of assistance.
“Don’t touch anything,” he warned. “Yolanda said there were nurses.”
“They probably moved the children into the exercise area. The center has its own yard, at the south end.”
They checked each room, peering through the observation slit or pushing open the heavy steel doors. Some of the rooms held bodies. Most were empty. A black line drawn on the floor marked the division between rooms equipped for children who need restraints or protection: the padded rooms. All of the doors to these rooms had been opened.
Two rooms contained bodies lying on cots in restraints, one male, one female, both with abnormally large heads and hands.
“It’s a condition unique to SHEVA children,” DeWitt said. “I’ve only seen three like this.”
“Congenital?”
“Nobody knows.”
Dicken counted twenty dead by the time they reached the door at the end. This door was a rolling wall of steel bars covered with thick sheets of acrylic.
“I think this is where Jurie and Pickman ordered the violent children kept,” DeWitt said.
Someone had jammed a broken cinder block into the track to prevent the door from automatically closing, and a red light and LED display flashed a security warning. Behind thickly shaded glass, the guard booth was empty, and the alarm had been hammered into silence.
“We don’t have to go through here,” DeWitt said. “The yard is that way.” She pointed down a short hall to the right.
“I need to see more,” Dicken said. “Where are the nurses?”
“With the living children, I presume. I hope.”
They squeezed through the narrow opening. All the doors beyond were locked by a double bar system, one lateral, one reaching from the ceiling to the floor and slipping into steel-clad holes. Each room held a lone, unmoving child. One stared in frozen surprise at the ceiling. Some appeared to be asleep. It did not look as if they had received any attention. There were at least eight children in these rooms, and no way to confirm they were all dead.
None of them moved.
Dicken stepped back from the last thick view port, shoved his back against the concrete wall, then, with an effort, pushed off and faced DeWitt. “The yard,” he said.
About ten paces beyond the door, they met two of the treatment center nurses. They were sharing a cigarette and sprawling on plastic chairs in the shade at the end of a broad corridor lined with padded picnic tables. The two women were in their fifties, very large, with beefy arms and large, fat hands. They wore dark green uniforms, almost black in the overhead glare. They looked up listlessly as Dicken and DeWitt came into view.
“We done everything we could,” one of them said, eyes darting.
Dicken nodded, simply acknowledging their presence—and perhaps their courage.
“There are more out there,” said the other nurse, louder, as they walked past. “It’s damned near midnight. We needed a break!”
“I’m sure you did your best,” DeWitt said. Dicken instantly caught the contrast: DeWitt’s voice, precise and academic, educated; the nurses’, pragmatic and blue collar.
The nurses were townies.
“Fuck you,” the first nurse tried to shout, but it came out a wan croak. “Where was everybody? Where’re the doctors?”
Brave townies. They cared. They could have bolted, but they had stayed.
Dicken stood in the yard. A canvas tent had been pulled over a concrete quadrangle about fifty feet on a side and surrounded by tan, stucco-covered walls. The lighting was inadequate, just wall-mounted pathway illumination surrounding the open square. The center was a shadowy pit.
Cots and mattresses had been laid out on the concrete in rows that began with some intention of order and ended in scattered puzzles. There were at least a hundred children under the tent, most of them lying down. Four women, two men, and one child walked between the cots, carrying buckets and ladles, giving the children water if they were strong enough to sit up.
Moonlight and starry sky showed through gaps and vent flaps. The quadrangle was still almost unbearably hot. All the water coolers in the building had been carried here, and a few hoses hung out of plastic barrels surrounded by fading gray rings of water slop.
A hardy few of the children, most of them younger than ten, sat under the pathway lights with their backs against the stucco walls, staring at nothing, shoulders slumped.
A woman in a white uniform approached DeWitt. She was smaller than the others, tiny, actually, with walnut-colored skin and black almond eyes and short black hair pushed up under a baseball cap. “You’re the counselor, Miss DeWitt?” she asked with an accent. Filipino, Dicken guessed.
“Yes,” DeWitt said.
“Are the doctors coming back? Is there more medicine?” she asked.
“We’re under complete quarantine,” DeWitt said.
The woman looked at Dicken and her face creased with helpless anger. As an outsider, he had failed them all; he had brought nothing useful. “Today and last night was a horror. All my children are gone. I work in special needs. Their only fault was slow wisdom. They were my joy.”
“I’m sorry,” Dicken said. He held up his bag of specimen kits. “I’m an epidemiologist. I need samples from all of the nurses working here.”
“Why? They’re afraid it’s going to spread outside?” She shook her head defiantly. “None of us is sick. Only the children.”
“Knowing what happened here, and how it happened, is important to the children who are still alive.”
“Do you justify this, Mister… whoever the hell you are?” the walnut-colored woman hissed.
“You’ve done your best,” Dicken said. “I know that. We have to keep trying. Keep working.” He swallowed. Tonight was already stacking up to be the worst, the most awful he had ever seen. Nightmare bad.
The woman’s arms trembled. She turned away, then turned back slowly, and her eyes were as flat and dark as the windows at the entrance. “Food would help” she said as if speaking to one of her less intelligent charges. Slow wisdom. “We have to feed those who are still alive.”
“I think there’s enough food,” DeWitt said.
“How many, outside?” the woman asked, hand making a helpless, rotating gesture. “How many have died?”
Dicken had seen such a gesture years ago, at the beginning of all this; he had seen a female chimp reach out for solace and Marian Freedman, who now studied Mrs. Rhine, had grasped the hand and tried to comfort her.
DeWitt held the woman’s hand in just that way. “We don’t know, honey,” she said. “Let’s just take of care of our own.”
“I’m going to need the doors to the cells opened,” Dicken said.
The tiny woman covered her mouth with her hand. “We didn’t go in there,” she said, staring at him with huge eyes. “We couldn’t let them out. Some are violent. Oh, God, I’ve been afraid to look.”