Daisy sniffed around the bed and promptly sat down.
“Get that dog out of here. Now.” Mr. Ullman was on the phone with the CEO’s secretary. “Tell him that we have an emergency situation, and he needs to call me back immediately. I will be contacting Benny Weisman myself.”
The sound of sirens from the street reached them.
Roger went to snap Daisy’s leash onto her collar and froze.
A single, tiny bedbug trundled out from under the sheet and headed for the bottom of the mattress.
“Good girl, good girl.” He patted Daisy’s head and gave her a treat.
Mr. Ullman hadn’t noticed, phone still glued to his ear. “Benny? Benny! Drop everything and get here now. I need you ten minutes ago. What? No, no. Drop it. I don’t care. This is an emergency, I—” He broke off, those detail-oriented eyes zeroing in on the bug as it wound its way down the side of the mattress and disappeared underneath. “What? Benny, listen to me. Get here now.” Mr. Ullman hit END CALL.
Roger lifted the mattress and followed the bug with the beam of his flashlight.
The Mr. Ullman ran a shaking hand through his thinning hair. “Please tell me that is not what I think it is. Please.”
Roger shook his head. “I hate to make your day worse, but somehow, they got back inside.”
“I don’t understand. We spent thousands.... How is this possible?”
Roger knelt and flashed the beam at the carpet, then the molding, following it to the corner. He fished out his pocketknife and picked at the painted silicone strip. He pinched the end between his thumb and forefinger and pulled, ripping it away from the trim along the floor for about a foot or so.
Bedbugs spilled out like clotted, reddish-black oil. Hundreds of them.
“Oh dear me,” Mr. Ullman muttered.
Roger snapped his pocketknife shut and pulled a canister of bug spray from his bag. He hit the bugs with a short burst. The effect was almost instantaneous. The bugs shuddered to a stop, then slowly curled their legs around themselves and stopped moving forever. More bugs seeped from the crack, so Roger gave them another blast. If there were any more inside the wall, they got the message.
Mr. Ullman’s wingtip nudged the silicone strip back into place. He scattered the bugs under the bed, so they almost looked like flecks of pepper from a distance. He stared down at Roger. “This stays between us, do you understand?”
Roger shrugged, and got to his feet. “This is very unusual behavior for bedbugs, I have to say. But if this is what you want, then I—”
“This is absolutely what I want. This cannot get out. You do whatever you have to do, and I will deal with the police. Find out where these godforsaken bugs are coming from and kill them. Kill them all.”
“When he was first brought in, we thought he might be a suitable candidate for . . . testing.” It was clear to Dr. Reischtal that the tech was having trouble facing certain realities about the homeless and indigent people the soldiers had been rounding up to use as guinea pigs. The tech pulled off his glasses and cleaned them with his tie. His hands shook. “The . . . subject collapsed during intake.”
“Before the dosage was administered?” Dr. Reischtal asked.
“Yes, sir,” the tech said, hurrying to keep up as they barreled through the busy corridor. “The decision was made to quarantine the subject until tests results could confirm infection.”
“And what have these results revealed?”
The tech nodded, flustered. “That yes, he is indeed infected with the virus.”
“I still fail to see why I was summoned. The man is homeless. It is reasonable to assume that he was bitten by a rat.”
“Uh, that’s the thing, sir. We have been unable to locate any rat bites, any significant scratches of any kind.”
Dr. Reischtal stopped suddenly and the tech nearly collided with him. The doctor whirled, eyes laser sharp behind the tiny lenses. “If I understand this correctly, you are telling me that we now have an infected patient that does not bear any evidence of virus transmitted by a rodent?”
“Yes, sir. Uh.” The tech studied his shoes, unsure of how to phrase the next piece of information. “The attending found . . . something else.” He felt the cold glare from Dr. Reischtal and refused to look up. “It might be best, sir, if you were to see for yourself.”
Dr. Reischtal gritted his teeth, biting back a savage response. With this unprecedented level of incompetence, it was little wonder the virus was still spreading out in the streets. “Very well,” he managed. “Where is the subject?”
The tech led him farther down the corridor. Dr. Reischtal followed without another question. The tech pointed to a door that, despite the urgency in the hustle of the passing techs, nurses, doctors, and soldiers, everyone still managed to avoid any close contact with, instead choosing to walk along the far side of the corridor. This created a bottleneck, which further enraged Dr. Reischtal. Even the tech wouldn’t get any closer than fifteen feet.
Dr. Reischtal stopped outside the closed door and willed himself to ignore the ineptitude and downright superstitious nature of the personnel, letting them squeeze along the wall behind him. Without any further ceremony, he opened the door and stepped inside.
An old, naked, black man was strapped to the bed. A bundle of ragged clothes had been piled over a sharp pair of wingtips in the corner. Dr. Reischtal took in the long, stiff hair, the dirt under the fingernails, the grime of the streets that had settled in the lines that shaped the man’s oddly beautiful face. Clearly, he was homeless scum and nothing more. Dr. Reischtal felt his anger building. This was a waste of time. Someone had lost their nerve, and had failed to locate a bite mark. Or, at the very least, a scratch. Whoever was responsible was about to find themselves permanent guests on the sixth floor. And he would start with the tech outside.
But then he saw the tiniest hint of movement in the man’s long hair. A bug, so small it might have been a slow moving freckle, crawled from the top of the man’s ear over to hide in his wiry eyebrows. Dr. Reischtal cocked his head.
Another bug crawled out of the man’s surprisingly thick patch of pubic hair and disappeared over his hip. And still another wandered out from the man’s armpit, appeared to test the air, and retreated back the way it had come.
The old man moaned once and shivered. He did not awaken.
More bugs scurried across the dark, cracked skin.
Dr. Reischtal took a step backwards, eyes suddenly flicking around the room, the ceiling, the walls, the floor, tuned to any tiny movement. A storm of understanding gathered behind his eyes, threatening the feeble dam that he and the rest of the team had erected in their rush to understand and explain the virus. He left the old man alone in his room and shut the door securely behind him.
The tech was waiting with wide eyes. “You saw them?”
Dr. Reischtal did not respond at first. He was too busy reorganizing the information that he had believed, up until thirty seconds ago, to be reliable. The new pieces fell into place, revealing the inescapable path of the virus. Several parasites had been found on the animal smuggler’s body, as well as the bats themselves. Except, of course, for the missing bat. He had read reports that detailed how bat bugs and bedbugs were nearly identical, and would invariably mate if one colony came into contact with another, since both used traumatized insemination. Only one in sixty would produce living offspring. However, the offspring of that mutation had been known to be eighty-six percent successful when producing offspring of their own.
He was no arbovirologist, but as far as he understood, the supposedly established fact within the scientific community that bedbugs could not transmit diseases was hypothetical, nothing more. In fact, bedbugs had been discovered to be infected with MRSA. It was entirely possible that the mutant offspring of bat bugs and bedbugs could carry a new virus.