He inhaled, and the taste made him gag. The cigarette fell from his fingers and smoldered on the floor. He coughed and hacked. He could swear the smoke made his lungs themselves itch. The sensation spread throughout his chest, as if something had cracked inside and was now leaking. The dreadful sensation seeped out to his skin, and the prickling feeling became unbearable.
Martin cried out and frantically raked his fingernails across his scalp, down his neck, his shoulders. He might as well have been trying to extinguish a volcano with a Slurpee. He clawed deep furrows in his skin. It didn’t help.
He reached up to the shelf of old sponges, toothbrushes, and household chemicals, desperate to find something abrasive like steel wool, something that could match the intensity of the itching, something that didn’t screw around. His gaze slipped past the Lysol spray, the cold-water washing machine detergent, landing on the industrial jug of Drano Max Gel. He knew it was full, because he’d bought it just last week.
His wife pounded on the basement door. “Martin! Martin! If you don’t open this goddamn door right now, I’m taking the boys and leaving for good! I promised you a divorce if you started drinking again and I mean it!”
He unscrewed the cap from the Drano and popped the foil seal with his thumb. The itching grew worse, as if a thousand bees were vibrating under his skin, and they were excited at the sight of the drain cleaner. He upended the jug and held it over his head.
Soothing fire dripped from his skull.
He fell to his knees. Lighting flashed through the bloody furrows in his skin, but it wasn’t enough. The Drano sizzled into his eyes and he gasped in sweet torture. He sank against the cool linoleum and put his palm on the lit cigarette. The burning finally got his attention.
His wife started kicking at the door. The boys kept screaming.
Fire. That was the answer. So elegant. So simple. He dragged the can of Raid from under the sink and crawled over to one of the plastic bins, piled haphazardly with a ton of other cardboard boxes. The bin was stuffed with old baby clothes his wife refused to throw out. He ripped off the lid and soaked the clothes with the insecticide. One click of his lighter and the fabric ignited with a solid pop.
He felt the heat lick his face and almost smiled.
Then he thrust his hands into the fire.
His wife kept kicking the door. The boys howling became even louder.
The sounds drilled into his head and within seconds, they blotted out everything else. It filled him with fury. He scrabbled to his feet, grabbing at the cardboard boxes full of old photos and tax returns and other useless crap his wife had insisted on hanging on to for God knows what reason, spilling them down over the fire.
He shook his head as if to clear the shrieking. The sudden movement made the noise even worse, so he staggered back, searching for something to quiet the sounds from upstairs so he could find some peace and return to the bliss in the flames.
He kicked over a children’s toy box, spilling Tonka trucks, rubber balls, and Thomas the Tank Engine trains across the floor. He spotted a Cubby blue toy souvenir bat, three feet long and solid wood. It felt good in his hand. It felt right.
He carried it up the stairs and unlocked the door.
His wife had enough time to say, “What is wrong—” before the bat came down. She shrieked, “My baby!” as the infant’s wail was silenced with a sudden crunch. He stopped her screaming next, then went upstairs to find his oldest son, stomping and complaining in his room.
In the basement, the flames melted the plastic bin and spread to the discarded can of Raid. It exploded, spreading burning shrapnel into the stacked cardboard boxes. Within minutes, the entire basement was on fire, and the flames rushed up the walls and across the ceiling.
Upstairs, the cries and screaming stopped.
CHAPTER 19
10:41 PM
April 19
Dr. Reischtal found that he was unable to pray. He peered out at the night through the floor-to-ceiling windows on the top floor of the Cook County General Hospital. From dusk until dawn, the stars and sky were extinguished, blown out by the lights of the city, revealing nothing but a dull orange haze and the occasional landing lights of aircraft preparing to land as they approached O’Hare from the east. Light pollution. What an innocuous name for something so subtly sinister.
Without stars, he found the words to his Lord fell uselessly back to earth, unable to bridge the vastness of the universe. He felt trapped, smothered with the sick light. The idea that this may be a sign, that this shroud of false light could herald the end of days had occurred to him more than once.
The body in the freezer two floors down made this idea a frightening possibility.
Viktor’s trail, as far as the bats were concerned, had gone cold in Yekaterinburg. They knew he was a poor student and his father was an unemployed laborer, crippled with debts. The motive for smuggling animals was easy enough to understand. Whether he would have returned to Russia or simply stayed in the U.S. was unclear.
The bats had come from all over the world. The bodies of the bats, including the parasites, had been dissected in the laboratories at Quantico. They had recovered eleven bats, nearly all from the critically endangered list, and thirty-seven internal and external parasites that ranged over four different species, including three from Viktor’s own body.
All showed the beginning stages of the disease.
Eleven bats. One empty pouch.
And so, despite protests from his colleagues in the CDC who were more interested in saving a few pennies for their precious budgets, Dr. Reischtal had convinced the board that Viktor was just the beginning.
The virus would reappear.
And when it did, it would explode with a vengeance.
The special pathogens branch had quietly moved into the top three floors of the Cook County General Hospital, displacing patients and staff alike. It wasn’t difficult. Cook County General had one of the worst reputations of not only Chicago but the country. The big joke in Chicago was that if you were taken to General, you were lucky to leave with all your organs. A few years back, there had been a huge scandal. Several top administrators had been convicted on providing kickback bribes to ambulance companies in return for bringing accident victims to the General, even if other hospitals were closer. The place was crowded, understaffed, and most of all, underfunded.
Other hospitals may have been better suited to Dr. Reischtal’s requirements, but despite better facilities and more specialized doctors, Cook County General had one element that the others did not. Location. The only hospital located near the absolute center of the city, it filled an entire city block between Madison to the north, Wacker to the east, and Monroe to the south. To the west was the Chicago River; it had been built next to the river in the aftermath of the Great Fire in 1871.
The original building had been torn down in the late sixties, and in the same spirit that would echo some of the progressive architecture designed to serve the public throughout Chicago, the building was designed as a squat, segmented cylinder, twelve stories tall. The floors were staggered, spinning out from a central radius, providing decks shaped like stingy slices of pie, like a tight circular staircase, outlined in flowers shrubs, and small trees when the building was young. The trees died within two years, and ivy had taken over. Leafy strings hung from every surface in the summer and fall, as if the pie slices had gone rancid and mold had crept over every surface.
At first, the administrators were reluctant to simply hand over control of their hospital to the CDC. However, a large donation from the federal government had bought enthusiastic cooperation. The top floor consisted primarily of conference rooms and offices. The next two floors contained various oncology wards. The patients had been moved without explanation or warning to either Northwestern Memorial or Rush University Medical Center on the West Side.