“This really isn’t a floor, technically. It’s airspace between terra firma and the building. Buildings do not rest on the ground, as most people believe. They are tied to the ground. For us—architects—they are structures wont to float, to rise and shift. The pier posts are drilled deep into the earth. They don’t just stabilize and offer foundation. They fasten. Get it?”
She nodded, still wondering about exit.
“What I’m telling you is that it won’t be clean down there. It will be grim and unoccupied. An empty space, a vacuum. It will drain you.” He glided his finger along that bottom rectangle, settled on a smudge just outside the wall. “This,” he said. “This vague shading is a bomb shelter. Built later. You can guess when. Whoever built it marked the blueprint with this shading. And that’s all.”
“You know it’s there?”
He nodded. “Sure. Right when I saw this shading. It’s what I would have done if asked to build a bomb shelter.”
“But you verified?”
“Of course. I ventured into the airspace and found the metal door. I used penetrating oil to break the galvanization on the handle. It’s a submarine door. I went into the shelter. It’s small. Good for maybe ten people. Maybe they had plans to construct more along the other walls.”
“So you went in,” she said. “It was okay.”
“But I’m used to such spaces. Given what I do. Reconstruction. You’re not.”
She started to speak. He pressed his finger to her lips. The touch felt cool and pleasant.
“There’s more. Listen. The shelter has a sealed vent. The vent is also designed as an escape in the event the building collapses. Obviously it opens from the inside. I didn’t crawl in, but I know that would have to be the case. I did go and find where the exit would be. I guessed the garden first thing and was right. But that door is now sealed from the outside as well. It’s grated over, and there is a bar and lock. And it would have to be dug out some. I left it pretty much intact.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “I suppose I want to keep it hidden. My escape. I always do that with my projects. Things like that. Gains in knowledge. Secret passages are the dreams of architects.”
Mendenhall closed her eyes. “So you would have to go over there and unseal it.”
“That’s not possible. I haven’t figured it out yet.”
She opened her eyes, looked at the city, which was gray and white and beginning to shimmer along its far edges. “I know how to do it. I know of someone. Someone who would want to get in. Someone who might know how to be… clandestine. Someone who would swap. Him in, me out.”
“Who?”
“You’ll like this. It’s just right for you. Your desire for transparency or redemption—or whatever it is. Democracy?” She wanted to kiss his throat. Just that, just there. “He’s a journalist. For the Times. He wants to see, to be in here, to report.”
“You won’t be able to communicate with him without others knowing.”
“I’ll figure out a code. Doctors are great at speaking in code. To patients, to loved ones, to other doctors. We’re great at saying only exactly what needs to be said, to be suggested. And leaving it at that. Trusting that.”
He wouldn’t look at her. “I know you’re right. I know you won’t carry a virus out there. Because there is no virus. I know it better than you do.”
“I’m ER. An eternal carrier. I will sterilize myself and be careful out there. Just in case.”
They stood together, quiet for a moment, watching the horizon, a glance or two toward the ruins. They enjoyed the sunlight, the outside air, the intermittent breeze.
“I’ll help you as far as I can. You can’t take your phone, and even if you can get to your car, you won’t be able to drive it out.”
“Look, Mullich,” she said, “I’m a good doctor. I’m ER. I might be heading out there just to prove myself a fool. But I really believe I can help alleviate misery. Inform triage. I know you think I most want to get out there and run free for a while. But that’s not what I want most. I want to diagnose. I want to treat.”
40.
In Reykjavik, a young man strolling with a group of friends fell dead on the sidewalk. The forum noted that he had been in perfect health, had been a soccer star for his work team. His friends thought he was joking when he fell; he always liked to scare them with little pranks like that, they said. They said he hadn’t taken any drugs. They had all been drinking, but not a lot. They were in between clubs, strolling and laughing as they walked from one to the other. The night was unseasonably warm, and they had all loosened their scarves. He had fallen just after three a.m., Reykjavik time. The ER there had registered him at 0312, unresponsive.
Three twelve. About two hours after Mendenhall’s cases—the Mercy Six. His case had only come up on the forum after the others in his group had been checked for drugs and alcohol.
All of his friends described his fall in the same way: from life to death, from laughing and buoyant to collapse, no gasp or seizure or disorientation or stumble. From alive to dead. Brain scans showed very faint, very mild incipient hemorrhaging in the frontal lobes, nothing near fatal. Pathology still thought it was drugs, was waiting on toxicology.
But Mendenhall’s cases, there in the forum, had Reykjavik looking at Mercy General. They had Pathology on alert, and they had the friends come back to the hospital for observation in containment. Mendenhall could have sent three guesses to Pathology there, three suggested scans. She was afraid one would be right. She sent nothing.
She fought off images of a group of young friends on a night sidewalk, laughing and turning to one another beneath a Nordic sky, steam and false dawn on the horizon. She saw one fall, the tallest and most gangly of the group, the handsome clown. Struck through. Where? Left lung? Kidney? Perhaps across the torso? Was another in the group, a girl with a secret crush strolling close, struck through in the same diagonal at the same microsecond? Through the thigh or calf or foot? Like Cabral, her sudden quiet attributed to circumstance rather than physiology?
Don’t let her sleep, Mendenhall wanted to write. Don’t let any of them fall asleep. But she knew it was already too late for that by the time she heard.
In her cubicle she bypassed the forum and contacted the Reykjavik ER directly. She received an autoreply, bland, suggesting minor technical difficulties. She recalled the flight of the helicopter from last night, Mullich’s laser cutting through the exhaust. And she knew the Reykjavik hospital, a third of the way across the world, was in containment, had two deaths. Hours apart. But not hours apart if they knew what she knew, had seen what she had seen, had someone like Mullich and someone like Claiborne and someone like Silva. If they had all that, they would know that both deaths had happened at once, out on that sidewalk, under that sky.
Delivered from that sky.
41.
She began. She replied to Ben-Curtis. She knew others would read it before he did:
As a doctor I cannot divulge case information.
I can only carefully offer you a sense of what it’s like in here, what it was like when all this began to unfold. But I can only bring you so far.
Metaphorically, only as far as, say, the little patch of ruin just beyond south parking. That odd stone you once asked about.
Metaphor had its place after all. She pushed send. Later she planned to just send him a time, somehow frame it in something that looked fractured, incomplete, and accidentally forwarded.