“I know,” Miles said. “I think they’re out of cream.” He hoped the joke would change the look on the girl’s face. He tried smiling at her, but that didn’t work either. The girl in front of him acted as if she hadn’t heard him, her face a blank.
“Are you the reporter, Miles Hunt?” she demanded.
“Guilty,” he said.
“Everyone is getting sick,” the young woman said. Miles noticed that she wasn’t wearing an ID badge, something he knew was required for everyone in the building. The press had been issued security badges just for the press conference.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It must be the speeches.”
“Sick. Everyone is sick. There is something wrong with R19,” she said.
It seemed funny to him. Something wrong with the tomatoes. How are things in Glocca Morra? He saw the headline. REPORTER TRACKS DOWN VEGETABLE MESS.
Miles looked down the well-lit antiseptic hall and wondered how he’d gone from being an A student at University of California’s School of Journalism to this moment. He looked back at the girl. He would excuse himself and leave. He wasn’t in the mood for gene-splicing conspiracy nuts, even attractive tall ones with great legs.
“The colonel’s recipe off?” he asked.
“Goddamn it, this isn’t a joke! People are horribly sick, a lot of them.” They both watched another reporter slip out of the auditorium and head toward the bathroom. The girl waited, not speaking again until the hall was clear. “Will you come with me, please?” she said and walked away.
He watched her rear, the pants suit pressed against some fancy underwear. He decided to follow only because she was pretty and he was bored.
You’re a hopeless sleazebag, he told himself, who is engaged to be married.
“My name is Susan,” she said. “I want you to promise not to use my name.” She picked her name tag up off her desk and pinned it to her jacket. “Susan Crown.”
“Okay, tell me all about it, Ms. Crown,” Miles said. She’d closed the door to her office. Miles looked around. The office was in keeping with the Genesoft collegiate esthetic.
“I called the paper. They said you were going to be here. They told me what you looked like. That’s how I knew who you were,” she explained. Miles picked up a photo of the young woman dressed in a military uniform standing by a mud building somewhere.
“Okay, what’s wrong with the product?” Miles asked.
“We all—” Crown closed her eyes and broke down.
This wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he followed her. He put his cup of coffee down on a file cabinet.
“Susan, why don’t you take a deep breath and then tell me what’s going on, and I’ll try and help you,” Miles said. He tried to sound reassuring.
“We all had some of the new product at a company party a week ago. That’s when they started sending the R19 line out to supermarkets.”
“I thought that they were starting shipping today?” Miles said.
“No. No, they started shipping a week ago. The irradiation unit has been working on R19 for three weeks. The irradiation plant is in Sacramento.”
“But they said this morning that they’d just gotten approval from FDA to ship?”
“No, the FDA approved the line last week.” Crown sat down in her desk chair. “I get dizzy. I’m sorry. The investment bankers were here a month ago—JP Morgan, their top brass showed up here. JP Morgan convinced management to release early. The bank had our IPO to launch. That’s where I work, investor relations. They wanted the next quarter’s report to reflect the R19 line’s earnings. They wanted to ignore the hold-up with the FDA so they got approval, somehow. The bank has people inside the FDA who they said they could use to make sure we got approval and not to worry. And they did.”
“You’re saying they bought an FDA approval?”
“Yes. But something is wrong with the R19 line of products. I’m sure of it now.”
“How do you know all this?” Miles said. He noticed that there was a wash of sweat on the girl’s pretty face.
“My boyfriend works in executive row. He’s sick too. A lot of people who ate R19-treated food are sick. You’ve got to warn people. I can’t. I could lose my job.”
“What do you mean sick?”
“Acting strange. Not normal. That’s why I want you to come with me. I want you to come see my boyfriend. I want you to write about what’s happened to my boyfriend.” She got up from her desk, a little wobbly, and grabbed for her purse. “We can go now. I want to take him to the hospital, but he won’t let me,” she said.
“You said half the people here were sick? How do you know that?” Miles said.
“You didn’t notice? Look outside. It’s Tuesday morning. We are supposedly launching a hundred-million dollar product line all over the U.S.” She went to the window and pulled open the blind back, angrily. “Look! Look at the parking lot. Look!”
Miles walked to the window. The new five hundred-car employee parking lot lay below. It was almost empty.
* * *
A siren wailed in the distance when Dr. Poole came back from lunch at the Copper Penny across the street. The doctor knew his waiting room would be full of one-o’clock appointments, and he felt oddly bored with the predictable afternoon. Looking at schoolboy tonsils and twisted ankles, he thought. You know you love them. If it was predictable sometimes, it was always gratifying to be respected and needed. Coming here to live was your idea, he reminded himself. He had quit the Center for Disease Control to bring up his kids in the mountains, as far away from big cities as he could get them. He and his wife joked that they would be the first black couple in America with children on the U.S. Olympic ski team.
Marvin heard the siren again and realized that it was coming into town and getting louder. Must be a fire. He stepped into his office through a side door and buzzed his receptionist.
“Okay. I’m back, Lisa. Is it full out there?”
“Is this the flu season?” his receptionist asked.
“Let the games begin,” Marvin said.
Two sheriff’s deputies dragged Willis Good by the arms through the waiting room and into Poole’s office. Good’s thigh was bleeding horribly from a laceration that was hemorrhaging badly; the bleeding had soaked his jeans so that the bottom of his right pant leg was saturated. Willis was screaming at the men who were dragging him.
“Let me go, they’re on the way. Let me go!”
The officers were fighting with Good, who was acting like a man possessed by the devil. He kicked out with both feet. He caught Marvin’s receptionist dead in the nose with the heel of his right dress shoe, knocking her into the wall and splattering her face with blood from his leg wound. She screamed in pain as blood began pouring from her nose; she sagged to the floor. Patients in the waiting room were trying to dodge Willis’ feet as he lashed out at them too, like a mechanical devil. A mother holding her toddler tried to run by Willis but he caught her with a vicious kick, sending her and the child into a table, knocking it over and sending magazines spilling across the floor as children and mothers screamed. The two sheriffs, trying desperately to control Good, were losing the battle.