Sam interrupted, “Just exactly how many patients are in there now?”
Dr. Menard shook his head. “I don’t know. Fifty. A hundred. Two hundred? I’m sorry. Dr. Reischtal, he’s in charge, and he kept all records classified.”
“Why?” Ed asked.
“I have no idea. Look, I don’t know what to say. We just started two days ago. Nobody has had any sleep.” Dr. Menard rubbed his face. “All we know is that it appears to be fatal in every case of infection.”
“What are the symptoms?” Ed asked.
“At first, apparently nothing. The patients sometimes fall into a deep sleep, when they awake, they often suffer extreme discomfort on the surface of the skin.”
“What kind of discomfort?” Ed asked.
Dr. Menard gave a heavy sigh. “They itch,” he said, meeting Ed’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “It must be awful. We have been observing patient after patient claw at their skin until they bleed. Back in my grad school days, I worked with addicts going through withdrawal, serious stuff, and I never encountered anything like this. And then, at some point, they begin to act . . . irrationally.”
“They get violent as fuck,” Ed said.
Sam glanced at Qween again, hearing the screams from the homeless shelter.
Dr. Menard nodded slowly. “Yes. Postmortem examinations of some of the bodies, people that had been shot and killed by the police—after the attacks, you know—they have revealed some clues about the damage the virus causes, but not nearly enough. The problem is, we have gotten so few specimens with undamaged tissue, it’s been impossible to tell what the effects of the virus actually are.” He gave a hollow laugh. “One guy got hit by an SUV. All that was left fit into a box this big.” He held his hands about two feet apart. “What little we do know is that it appears to attack the amygdala. You’re familiar with the term, ‘amygdala hijack’?” He caught the blank looks of the other three. “Okay. ‘Road Rage.’ I’m sure you have encountered this in your jobs. There’s an overwhelming sense of fury, when someone just snaps.”
“Sounds like a few domestic disputes I’ve seen.”
“I would imagine so, yes. But this, this is something else. Increase that fury by tenfold. Maybe fifty, a hundred. This is all such guesswork at this point. We need literally years of research before we’ll know anything for sure. Anyway, as far as we can tell, the virus seems to travel along the peripheral nervous system and it shoots straight into the limbic system of our brains, specifically the amygdala. They’re two little buds, tucked away deep inside your head. If you were to drill straight through here and here”—Dr. Menard pointed at his right eye and right ear—“you’d find it at the intersection of those lines. The amygdala is one of the oldest parts of the brain. It controls emotions like fear and anger. You’ve heard of ‘fight or flight,’ right?”
Ed and Sam nod.
“The lizard part,” Sam said.
“No. You’re thinking of stuff like keeping your heart going, breathing, blood in your brain, that kind of thing. This is a step higher on the evolutionary ladder. The amygdala dumps tons of adrenaline and cortisone into your system, so you can run. Fight. Take action, whatever. The thing is, there’s no direct connection between the prefrontal lobe”—Dr. Menard tapped his forehead—“and the amygdala. The body doesn’t want to waste any time thinking about what it should do when it’s in danger. It has to react. Immediately. And that’s the problem here. The virus attacks the prefrontal lobe. We don’t know why. Maybe it likes the taste. It multiplies astonishingly fast, wiping out your ability to think with any reasoning or logic. Meanwhile, while it is destroying the prefrontal lobe, it is attaching itself to the amygdala, causing the body to go into overdrive.”
“So it’s driving people crazy,” Ed said.
Dr. Menard gave a slow shrug. “I guess you could say that, yes. It is literally driving them mad with fear. With the amygdala going berserk, and the prefrontal lobes being chewed up and spit out . . . the infected are unable to stop themselves. They’re unable to think logically. And so they lash out. Violently. A lot of times, it’s sound that triggers the rage. Like with rabies. In the later stages, the virus attacks the rest of the body, causing massive internal bleeding. You’ve heard of the Ebola virus? It literally liquefies your insides. Ebola and rabies are similar, in many respects.”
“Where did it come from?” Sam asked. “Why did it show up in the rats?”
Dr. Menard shook his head and shrugged again. “It is believed that an infected bat escaped from an animal smuggler at O’Hare and somehow passed the virus along to the rats.”
Sam and Ed exchanged a look.
“All we know is that it appears to move slower in rats. They can survive for a month or two, sometimes three. We don’t know why it takes more time with them. Humans . . . it takes only three, four days.”
Ed whipped through streets, unusually quiet in the night hours, heading north. Dr. Menard, still anxious and unable to stop talking, said, “I can’t get the beginning from Poe’s story out of my head.”
Nobody said anything for a moment. “I don’t know about you two,” Sam said, nodding at Ed and Qween, “but I’m a proud product of the American public school system and I don’t have a goddamn clue what you’re talking about.”
Dr. Menard said, “Poe. Edgar Allan. You know him. The Tell-Tale Heart. Surely you read it in high school.”
Sam shrugged.
Dr. Menard cleared his throat. “‘True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?’” He quoted haltingly from his memory. “‘The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?’”
For a long time, nobody said anything else.
Eventually, Sam stared out the window, chewing on a new piece of gum, said, “I still say sooner or later it all comes down to the lizard part.”
CHAPTER 49
10:33 PM
August 13
Dr. Reischtal held his phone up, listening to it ring, as he double-checked his suit for any rips or tears. He had a roll of duct tape ready, in case.
A click. “Yeah?” The voice was dry as smoke.
Dr. Reischtal said, “Good evening, Mr. Evans. I have a job for you.”
The voice at the other end was quiet for a moment.
Dr. Reischtal was patient. He understood his call was not good news. “I need you to gather a team of drivers and pick up a special cargo from our mutual friends out in Denver, and arrange transportation to Chicago.”
“How large is the cargo?”
“You will need at least thirty rigs.”
“Where the hell am I gonna get thirty drivers right now?”
Dr. Reischtal said, “That, Mr. Evans, is your problem. I will expect the entirety of this cargo on its way to Chicago within six hours.”
Tommy sat in his wheelchair, facing the corpse, and waited. Waited for someone to notice that Don was dead. Waited for someone to come get him. Waited to get sick. The fluorescents hummed and flickered almost imperceptibly, casting a twitching glare throughout the room. Air hissed from the filters. Blood dripped from Don’s bed.
Tommy watched the puddle on the right side grow larger. He winced at the spatter when each drop hit the puddle. He couldn’t stop imagining what happened when the drops hit the plastic, sending microscopic slivers of voracious organisms, tiny explosions of death, naked to the human eye, as it scattered the virus into the air of the room.