“What about the parents?” DeWitt asked.
“Sentiment must be considered,” Augustine said. “Medical ethics should prevail even in an emergency. But we've never faced this kind of problem before.”
Dicken took Augustine's arm and lifted him to his feet. “One last bit of evidence,” he said.
Augustine walked slowly through the benches in the molecular biology lab, taking in the collection of expensive machinery with impassivity, long past the possibility of surprise. Dicken opened the hatch at the back of the lab and switched on the fluorescent lights, revealing a long, narrow room. All hesitated before entering.
Steel shelves reaching to the ceiling held hundreds of long cardboard boxes. Dicken pulled out one and opened the hinged lid. Within were bones: femurs, tagged and arranged according to size. Another box held phalanges. Bigger boxes on the lower right, none more than four feet in length, held complete skeletons.
Augustine leaned against the edge of the frame. “There's nothing I can do here,” he said. “Nothing any of us can do.”
“This isn't all,” Dicken said. “There's an upper floor. It's still locked.”
“What do you think they keep up there?” DeWitt asked, her face ashen.
“No excuses, Christopher,” Augustine said. “We should not forget this, but what in hell does anger do for us, now? For the sick children?”
“Not a goddamned thing,” Dicken admitted. “Let's go.”
44
THE POCONOS, PENNSYLVANIA
Eleven in the morning, the dashboard display said. Mitch looked left on the two-lane asphalt road and saw, about a hundred feet ahead, the red plastic strip hanging on a big old pine. He slowed and rolled down the window.
The signpost was still standing, though it had been knocked askew. The wooden plaque read:
MACKENZIE
George and Iris and Kelly
Mitch got out, unlocked the pipe, and pushed it back through its iron hoop. He took the plaque down from the signpost and stashed it in the back of the Jeep.
The cabin was made of whole stripped logs just beginning to gray with exposure. It sat on the shore of a private half-acre lake, alone in the pines. The air was scented by pine needles and dry dirt. Mitch could smell the moisture from the lake, the greenness of shallows filled with reeds. Sunlight slanted down through the trees onto the Jeep, illuminating Kaye in the backseat.
Mitch walked up onto the porch, his heavy shoes clomping on the wood. He unlocked the door, deactivated the burglar alarm with the six-number code, then returned to the Jeep.
Kaye was already halfway up the walk from the driveway, carrying Stella.
“Get a bag of Ringer's and set up an IV,” she said. “A lamp hook, flowerpot hook, anything. I'll spread some blankets.” She carried Stella into the cabin. The air inside was cool and sweetly stuffy.
Mitch spread a sleeping bag on the floor behind a big leather couch and took down an empty hanging pot, then slung the bag of Ringer's solution, inserted the long, clear plastic tube into the bag, opened the butterfly clamp, let the clear fluid push through the tube and drip from the needle. Kaye lay Stella on the bag, tapped her arm to bring up a vein, poked in the needle, strapped it to the girl's arm with medical tape.
Stella could barely move.
“She should be in a hospital,” Kaye said, kneeling beside her daughter.
Mitch looked down on them both, hands opening and closing helplessly. “In a better world,” he said.
“There is no goddamned better world,” Kaye said. “Never has been, never will be. There's just ‘suffer the little children.’ ”
“That's not what that means,” Mitch said.
“Screw it, then,” Kaye said. “I hope I know what the hell I'm doing.”
“Her head hurts,” Mitch said.
“She has aseptic meningitis. I'm going to bring the swelling down with prednisone, treat those mouth sores with famicyclovir.”
They had found the famicyclovir, medical tape, and other supplies in a small drugstore near the pet hospital. Kaye had also managed to score a box of disposable syringes. Her excuses had worn thin at the last. She had told the pharmacist, perched in his little elevated booth in the back of the store, that she was using the needles for a cloth dyeing project.
That would not have gone over well in the big city.
She prepared to give Stella an injection.
“I'm not even sure about the dose,” she murmured.
Mitch was half convinced he could walk out the door, drive off, and Kaye would never notice he was gone. He looked at his hands, smooth from lack of digging. How had this happened? He knew, he remembered, but none of it seemed real. Even the shadow of grief—was that what he had felt in the Jeep?—even that seemed unimportant.
Mitch could feel his soul winking down to nothing.
The drip of lactated Ringer's slid down the long plastic tube.
“I'll watch her,” he said.
“Get some sleep,” Kaye said. She slipped the used syringe needle into its plastic cap for disposal.
“You first,” he said.
“Get some sleep, damn it,” Kaye said, and her glance up at him was like the slap of a flat, dull knife.
45
OHIO
“It begins,” Augustine said. “I've dreaded this day for years.”
Standing in the number two tower, surrounded by stacked boxes, dusty old desks, and outdated desktop computers, Augustine and Dicken—and Augustine's ever-vigilant agent—watched the Ohio National Guard troops set up their perimeter and cut off the school's entrance. Their view encompassed the main road, the water tower to the west, a barren gravel field broken by lozenges of bare concrete, a line of scrub oaks beyond that, and a state highway slicing through low grassy hills.
DeWitt climbed up the last flight of steps and leaned against the wall, out of breath. DeWitt nodded. “Governor's office called . . . the director's line. The governor is jumping ahead . . . of the feds and declaring,” she sucked in her breath with a small whoop, “a stage five public health emergency. We're under complete quarantine. Nobody in or out . . . Not even you, Dr. Augustine.” She nailed him with a glare. “Main gate reports twenty more . . . National Guard trucks . . . moving in. They're surrounding the school.”
Augustine turned to the Secret Service agent, who tapped his earpiece and made a wry face. “We're in for the duration,” the agent affirmed.
“What about the supplies?” DeWitt asked.
“They can drop them off at the entrance and we can send someone to pick them up, no contact,” Dicken said. “But they have to get here first.”
Augustine seemed less hopeful. “Not difficult to isolate us,” he said dryly. “It's a prison to start with. As for supplies—they'll have to go through state lines, state inspection. The state can intercept them and hold them. The governor will try to protect his votes, act ignorant, and shift our supplies to the big cities, the rich neighborhoods, the most visible and well-funded hospitals with the loudest administrators. Stockpile against a potential plague.”
“Leave us with nothing? I can't believe they'll be that stupid,” DeWitt said. “They'll have a revolt.”
“By whom? The parents?” Dicken asked. “They'll hunker down and hope for the best. Dr. Augustine made sure of that years ago.”
Augustine looked through the tower window and did not take Dicken's bait. “All it takes to get elected in twenty-first-century America is a mob of frightened sheep and a wolf with a nice smile,” he said softly. “We have plenty of sheep. Ms. DeWitt, could I speak with Christopher in private, please? But stay close.”
DeWitt looked between them, not knowing what to think, and then left, closing the door behind her.
“It's worse than any of them can imagine,” Augustine said, his voice low. “I think the starting pistol has been fired.”