The trouble was that the disease was highly mutative; when it encountered an organism it could not infect, it subtly and swiftly altered its DNA to adjust. This meant that, unlike most outbreaks of this sort, it would not run its course and be done. Instead, it would mutate, returning over and over, in ever-changing strains, until it had run out of host organisms. In other words, it would quite likely wipe out every last human being on the planet.
What was needed was a sample of the original strain of the virus, the unaltered DNA of the plague, with which the mutations could be stopped and the virus thus contained. Unfortunately, the only sample of this sort would have to come from a living host, someone who had survived the original strain and had the virus (and thus the anti-bodies) in their blood. But where to find such a host? Their own records recorded an outbreak of the original strain, but they were incomplete, partially lost in the Fall, and the idea of simply going out and looking for someone with the strain was sheer suicide. It had seemed hopeless.
Then, one day last year, in the fall of 2075, they’d received a most interesting visitor. All the way from San Francisco, Dr. Stanley Bahrara represented a consortium of doctors and researchers who believed that they had found the starting point, at least in theory, and had traveled all the way to New Atlanta to enlist their aid.
Lucky (or resourceful) enough to still have a full set of records and research facilities, the folks in California had managed to locate their Golden Hosts, a very few people who had survived the original strain. The problem was that if any of them were even still alive, they would be very old, probably quiet frail, and, given the general societal breakdown, very hard to locate. In other words, it was a terrible long shot. In the end, Dr. Poole, the latest CDC Director, had decided that it was worth the effort, and five separate missions, one for each host, were readied. By necessity, since the loss of their fleet of planes in the Big Fire and the last of the pilots to the Plague, they would travel by land.
The preparation and planning for the trip and the first parts of the trek itself were not terribly memorable, aside from the varying scenes of death and chaos they’d encountered along the way. Justin tried very hard not to remember those. No, the real trouble had begun in Mr. Lampert’s home town of Minneapolis, where simply finding the right street had taken nearly a week. And when they had finally found the Old Man, alive beyond all expectation, just getting him out of his apartment had been an ordeal. Justin smiled as he recalled the exchange between Lampert and Dr. Poole, just after they’d roused the Old Man enough to speak:
“Who the fuck are you?” the Old Man had rasped belligerently. “And what are you doin’ in my fucking apartment?”
“Are you Howard P. Lampert?” Poole had asked, looking and sounding like a robot in his haz-mat suit.
“Who the fuck wants to know?” the Old Man had demanded.
Poole had tried to explain about the possibility of a cure and Lampert’s part in it, but the Old Man would have none of it. In the end they’d just bundled him up, yelling and thrashing as best he could, and hauled him out of the filthy apartment, down the stairs, and into the waiting MedCenter. And off they’d gone.
Suddenly a crash, loud even through the thick walls of the vehicle, interrupted Justin’s thoughts and, glad of the distraction but fearing the worst, he jumped up and hustled out to see what the problem was. Had the Outlaws finally found them? Were they under attack? Was the vehicle malfunctioning? Some natural disaster?
But it was nothing so dire; instead, when he entered the clean area, he found that it was just the Old Man. Again. This time he’d apparently shown his displeasure with dinner, in that he’d thrown the tray of food against a wall. Bellnick, another of the nurses’ assistants, was wearily cleaning up the mess. Justin heaved a sigh and went over to the bed.
“What is it now, Mr. Lampert?” he asked. “Is the food not to your liking?”
“Food?” scowled Lampert. “You call that food? It’s fucking cat food!”
“I’m afraid that’s the best we have, sir,” Justin explained, as he had several times before. “At least for the time being… and let me assure you, it’s far better fare than we enjoy.”
“Oh yeah?” grimaced the Old Man, adjusting himself in the bed. “So whatta you guys eat? Dirt?”
“Close,” smiled Justin. “We are currently subsisting on soy paste. Would you like to try some?”
“Fuck no,” he snorted. For a long moment, the Old Man sat and seemed to think, then he shook his mottled old head and peered at Justin archly. “Soy paste, huh? No shit? So where’d you get that? Or was that something you could just buy, down at the Piggly-Wiggly?”
“We raised soy beans,” Justin said, “at the Center. They’re very nutritious.”
“Huh…”
Justin waited silently, hoping that the Old Man was through being a pain in the ass for the time being, but apparently it was not to be; Lampert waved him over and gestured to a chair. With an inward groan, knowing what this meant—another of the Old Man’s labored, meandering diatribes—Justin walked over, sat down, and crossed his legs.
“So,” started Lampert, without preamble, as always, “when the shit hit the fan and this plague broke out, didn’t you guys have trouble, there at the CDC? I mean, I figure you musta been fucking overrun with sick folks.”
“Oh, we were,” nodded Justin, suppressing a shudder at the memory. “Hundreds of thousands of patients. We treated all we could, of course, but in the end, well, it wasn’t enough, I suppose.”
“So what? They all died? Every last one?”
“Oh, no,” said Justin. “Not every one. But this is a very virulent strain. The survival rate is something like one tenth of one percent.”
“So the other ninety-nine point nine percent croaked, huh? Man, that is harsh. You musta been up to your eyeballs in corpses.”
“Yes,” said Justin evenly, waiting. The Old Man closed his eyes and lay back on his spotless white sheets (changed three times a day whether necessary or not) and Justin hoped that he was dozing off, but then he stirred and shook his head.
“Jesus…” he said quietly. “I never thought I’d see this, you know? I mean, I always knew that this country would fall apart some day, that some kinda plague or natural catastrophe would happen and things would go bad. Just in the cards, far as I could see. But I thought I’d be long dead by then, you know? I mean, it’s not like I took good care of myself. I smoked, I drank, I ate whatever they hell I wanted. Pretty surprising, ain’t it?”
“I suppose so,” said Justin warily. “You are very long-lived.”
“Phugh!” snorted Lampert. “Cursed is more like it. I mean, you’re a doctor, right? Can you tell me why I don’t just fucking die?”
Maybe you’re just too damned mean to die, thought Justin. To Lampert’s face, though, he smiled and shook his head.
“No one knows that, sir,” he said. “Genetics, environment, the vagaries of the individual immune system, all contribute to longevity. But aging is hardly my specialty.”
“Yeah, yeah,” waved the Old Man, “I know. You’re an epidemiologist, like all the other brainiacs on this little trip. Shit, even the orderlies are some kinda eggheads, right?”
“Students. Most of them, anyway.”
“Yeah,” scowled Lampert. “That explains a lot.”
“About?”
“About how dumb you all are!” Lampert wheezed. “Oh, I don’t mean book dumb. You guys are probably real whiz kids when it comes to diseases and doctor shit, but just look at what happened to Garcia! I mean, shit!”