With great relief Pitt and Jonathan shadowed the man out into the sunlight where they shook hands enthusiastically. Sheila followed but seemed irritated over the initial reception. She complained that he’d terrified her.
“Sorry,” Harlan said. “I didn’t mean to scare you, but being careful is a product of the times. But that’s all behind us now. Let’s get you over to where you’ll be working. I’m afraid we don’t have a lot of time if we’re going to have any effect whatsoever.”
“You have a lab or someplace to work?” Sheila questioned. Her mood brightened.
“Yeah,” Harlan said. “I got a little lab. But we need to drive a ways. It’ll take about twenty minutes.” He opened the van’s slider and climbed in. Pitt got behind the wheel. Sheila took the front passenger seat, and Jonathan joined Harlan.
Pitt started the van. “Where to?” he asked.
“Straight on,” Harlan said. “I’ll let you know when to turn.”
“Were you in private practice before all this trouble?” Sheila asked as the van pulled out into the road.
“Yes and no,” Harlan said. “The first part of my professional life was spent at UCLA in an academic position. I was trained in internal medicine with a subspecialty in immunology. But about five years ago I realized I was burned out, so I came out here and started a general practice in a little town called Paswell. It’s just a blip on the map. I worked a lot with Native Americans on the surrounding reservations.”
“Immunology!” Sheila commented. She was impressed. “No wonder you were sending us such interesting stuff.”
“I could say the same to you,” Harlan said. “What’s your training?”
“Unfortunately mostly emergency medicine,” Sheila admitted. “I did do an internal medicine residency, though.”
“Emergency medicine!” Harlan commented. “Then I’m even more impressed with the sophistication of your data. I thought I was communicating with a fellow immunologist.”
“I’m afraid I can’t take the credit,” Sheila said. “Jonathan’s mother was with us then, and she was a virologist. She did most of the work.”
“Sounds like I shouldn’t be asking where she is now,” Harlan said.
“We don’t know where she is,” Jonathan said quickly. “She went to a pharmacy last night to get some drugs and didn’t come back.”
“I’m sorry,” Harlan said.
“She’ll contact me on the Internet,” Jonathan said, not about to give up hope.
They drove for a few minutes in silence. No one wanted to contradict Jonathan.
“Are we heading for Paswell now?” Sheila asked. The idea of being in a town had a lot of appeal. She wanted a shower and a bed.
“Heavens no,” Harlan said. “Everybody’s infected there.”
“How did you manage to avoid being infected yourself?” Pitt asked.
“Dumb luck at first,” Harlan said. “I happened to be with a friend at the moment he got stung by one of those black discs, so I avoided them like the plague. Then when I got an inkling of what was happening and that there wasn’t anything I could do, I took to the desert. I’ve been out here ever since.”
“How does being out here in the desert account for the data you were requesting and sending?” Sheila asked.
“I told you,” Harlan said. “I got a little lab.”
Sheila looked out her side of the van. The featureless desert stretched off toward distant mountains. There weren’t any buildings, much less a biological laboratory. She began to worry about how many marbles Harlan McCay was dealing with beneath his shock of gray hair.
“I do have a bit of encouraging news,” Harlan said. “Once you were able to give me the amino acid sequence of the enabling protein, and I was able to make some, I’ve developed a rather crude monoclonal antibody.”
Sheila’s head spun around. She studied the leathery-faced, blue-eyed, stubbled desert man with disbelief. “Are you sure?” she asked.
“Sure I’m sure,” Harlan said. “But don’t get bent out of shape, because it’s not as specific as I’d like. But it works. The main point is that I’ve proven the protein is antigenic enough to elicit an antibody response in a mouse. I just have to select out a better B lymphocyte to make my hybridoma cell.”
Pitt hazarded a quick glance at Sheila. Despite having had a number of advanced biology courses, Pitt had no idea what Harlan was talking about or even whether he was making sense. Yet Sheila was obviously extraordinarily impressed.
“To make a monoclonal antibody you need sophisticated reagents and materials, like a source of myeloma cells,” Sheila said.
“No doubt,” Harlan said. “Take a right up here, Pitt, just beyond that cactus.”
“But there’s no road,” Pitt said.
“A mere technicality,” Harlan said. “Turn anyway.”
Cassy awoke from a short nap, got up from the bed, and went to the large, multipaned window. She was in a guest room on the second floor of the mansion facing south. To the left she could see a line of pedestrian traffic coming and going on the driveway. Directly ahead, her view of the grounds was limited by a tall, leafy tree. To the right she could see the tip of the terrace that surrounded the pool as well as about a hundred yards of lawn before it butted up against a pine forest.
She looked at her watch. She wondered when she would start feeling ill. She tried to remember the interval that Beau had experienced between being stung and his first symptoms, but she couldn’t. All he’d told her was that he’d been in class. She didn’t know which class.
Returning to the door, she gave the knob another twist. It was still locked as securely as when she’d been put in the room. Turning around, she leaned against the door and surveyed her surroundings. It was a generous bedroom with a high ceiling, but except for the bed, it was completely empty. And the bed itself consisted of a bare mattress on a box spring.
The short nap had revived Cassy to a point. She felt a mixture of depression and anger. She thought about lying back on the bed but didn’t think she could sleep. Instead she returned to the window.
Noticing there was no lock, she tried the sash. To her surprise it opened with ease. Leaning out the window, she looked down. About twenty feet below was a flagstone walkway that connected the back terrace with the front. It was edged with a limestone balustrade. It would be a very hard landing if she tried to jump, but she gave the idea serious thought. Death might be preferable to becoming one of them. The problem was, a twenty-foot fall would probably only maim, not kill.
Cassy raised her eyes and looked more carefully at the tree. One stout branch in particular caught her attention. It grew out of the main trunk, arched directly toward the window, then angled off to the right. Her interest was directed at a short horizontal section that was about six or seven feet away from where she was standing.
The question went through Cassy’s mind whether she could leap from the window, catch the branch, and hold on. She didn’t know. She’d never done anything like it in her life and was surprised the idea even occurred to her. Yet these were hardly normal circumstances, and she quickly became intrigued. After all it seemed possible, especially with all the working out with weights she’d been doing over the last six months with Beau’s encouragement.
Besides, Cassy thought, what if she missed? Her present prospects were dismal. Dashing herself against the balustrade didn’t seem much worse and might do more than injure.
Climbing up on the windowsill, Cassy pushed the sash up to its full height to create an opening about five feet square. From that position the ground looked dramatically farther away.
She closed her eyes. Her heart was pounding, and she was breathing rapidly. Her courage vacillated. She recalled going to a circus as a child and seeing the trapeze artists and thinking she could never do anything like that. But then she thought of Eugene and Jesse and what Beau was becoming. She thought of the horror of losing her identity.