My hands rose by themselves. I squeezed the trigger. I screamed as bullets made my friends dance and fall back, their furry chests blossoming red.
“Joe! Get up!” Karen was shaking me.
I opened my eyes.
The red digits on the nightstand read 3:50 A.M.
“Christ.” My body was soaked with sweat, and I smelled ammonia. Sweat. Nightmare. Me.
“The dream, right, honey? The monkeys?”
She’d been with me once before when it happened, on a vacation. Now I lay inside a cone of night-table light. I still saw Kelley’s face, blowing apart. I went into the bathroom and washed my face, looked at myself in the mirror. Did the light bother me? Did it hurt? I saw blanched skin, saw a man who had just shot his friends. A man who had not answered his phone when Kelley tried to reach him.
“Why them?” I asked when I came out. Rhetorical question. Either Karen or I uttered these words ten times a day.
“It’s not your fault, Joe. If you’d answered that phone, nothing would be different.”
“People have dreams for reasons.”
“Joe. You take things on. That’s the reason.”
“Maybe. Okay. I do. But maybe there’s more. Maybe we’ve all been trying to figure this out the wrong way.”
Wide awake now, we weren’t going back to sleep. She looked for the coffee in the kitchenette. “Meaning what?”
I sat at our little table and saw the white wall as a blank canvas and filled it with the dream to help me think. Dreams are clues. They’re always clues of something. The problem is figuring out what they mean. You think a dream means you should quit your job. But it means you should divorce your wife. You think a dream means you need to see the dentist. But deep inside, where you don’t want to look, you fear you have cancer.
“Karen, I said it last night. What if Clay Qaqulik was right from the beginning? What if this all goes back to someone trying to stop the Harmons’ work?”
She had a lovely frown, the way it deepened the gray in her eyes, softened it, added amber. Intensity became her. When you’re in love, even musculature becomes mystery, even at moments like these. “Joe, you’re thinking that someone infected them on purpose?”
“I’m just saying, maybe the way to crack this isn’t to track the outbreak, or analyze the bug. We go back to Clay. Restart his investigation. See? And we finish what Ted and Cathy started, do their work, complete their project. Maybe there’s a consequence of their work that no one is seeing. If you understand the consequence, you understand what is going on.”
Her silver hair swooshed back and forth. “Algae? How would algae relate? Anyway, if it was intentional, murder, why kill people in town, too, who had nothing to do with the Harmons? Who didn’t even know the Harmons? Joe, you’re overthinking.”
“If it’s contagious, it got out after.”
“Murder, Joe? Listen to what you’re saying!”
“People have been trying to weaponize rabies for three hundred years.”
“You’re still halfway in your dream, Joe.”
“Good. Helps me think.”
“But why murder someone by using rabies?”
“Because no one would think it was intentional. Look, maybe it’s not contagious. Contagious is logical but it’s also possible that someone wants it to look that way! See what I mean? So many explanations are still possible.”
“You’re doing mind tricks on yourself.”
“All the time.”
“Give yourself time to wake up.”
“I’m up. That’s the point.”
She cocked her head. She smiled, but not with humor. “Well, Colonel, this would be one hell of a time to decide it’s not contagious. Listen!”
I heard the droning — the big engines and propellers overhead — and went still. I moved the curtain aside, looked out. Was someone there, walking toward our hut in the snow?
No. My vision must have played a trick on me. No one was there. Lights flicked on in the Longhorn hut.
I looked up. The C-130 troop carriers, blotting out constellations, looked fearsome. Karen switched on the TV. I saw snow on screen and heard static. The satellite embargo must have begun. Barrow was closed off.
“You don’t look surprised. So you knew, too,” Karen said, and sighed. “I figured you knew. They might need me on the sub. They called last night.”
We stared at each other. I’d been warned not to tell her by Wayne Homza. She’d been warned not to tell me by Electric Boat. So at precisely the moment when man and woman need each other, probably reached for each other across the city, we’d been told to shut out our partners, to link ourselves to duty over love.
We dressed swiftly, warmly. The thermometer outside read twenty-seven degrees. A dusting of snow covered the base, and parachutes bloomed above. We took go-cups filled with hot, sugar-sweetened Folgers.
I started up the Ford, the heater roaring, Karen snug beside me. Our pathetic rebellion against the government. No using seat belts today. Mikael Grandy and Dr. Alan McDougal were exiting their huts, too. They looked up at the sky.
“Someone should have told Merlin. Or the mayor,” Karen said.
At four A.M., a few people were up normally, restaurant owners heading out to prepare breakfasts, hunters getting an early start on the day. More lights flickered in homes as we bounced toward the airport. People emerging from houses, staring at the sky, not yet understanding. Lights glowed inside the police station, where detectives on tonight’s rotation probably stared at corkboards, at results of investigation that had left us helpless; lines of infection stretching from homes to garages to airport; as we interviewed family, friends, and neighbors, filling in schedules, looking for intersection points, checking refrigerators for similar products, testing blood.
“No roads out of Barrow, but anyone could leave by snowmobile or SUV, use their GPS, and hit the tundra,” Karen said. Which was why the Rangers would cordon the town.
The world closing in. We rounded a corner and saw, in an efficient show of force, at sea, the U.S.’s sole working icebreaker, the Coast Guard’s Wilmington. And the nuclear sub, the Virginia, a dark moray eel shape, risen through light slush. Barrow had no harbor. Neither ship would land.
Karen said, “The Wilmington’s got a chopper, and Coast Guard snipers. The Virginia, drones. I’m on call if they have problems. They’re to block offshore.”
“Thirty-six wasted hours,” I said, remembering General Homza telling me on the phone. I’ll head the task force, personally. When we land, I’ll call you. Stay put.
Great. Can’t wait.
An hour later, Karen and I — in the crowd at the airport — watched white parka — clad troops hemming us in, as efficient as hindsight. I thought, A day and a half of passengers scattering from Barrow across Earth, while the CDC people ran tests, gasped over the results. Refused at first to believe that rabies killed five… And now, nine.
Eddie — back from the field — pushed through the crowd, stood beside us, and put it more graphically. “Idiots.”
The Rangers moved efficiently as the crowd grew more agitated. On the tundra, the last few feet of open view was sealed off by concertina wire — a razor wall. Oh, the city had known that rabies was loose. They’d been alerted by the mayor and Ranjay. But they’d been given an impression that the danger was smaller. They’d been told to watch for sick animals, to make sure their pets were inoculated. They’d not been told that rabies may have assumed a new form.