Within ten minutes they had reached motorway D1 heading south out of Prague. At two thirty in the morning, traffic was light.
“God, this is so surreal… you being here,” Julie said.
“Surreal for you. The end of a nightmare for me.” He looked over his shoulder and out the rear window for the third time in as many minutes.
“Why do you keep doing that?”
“To see if we’re being followed.”
“We’re not being followed.”
“The only way to know if we’re being followed is to watch and see if we’re being followed. Those same headlights have been behind us for a while now.”
Julie sighed. “That car was already on the motorway when we got on. I merged in front of him. Relax. No one is following us.”
“Easy for you to say. You don’t know what they’re capable of,” he grumbled.
Julie was silent for a moment. It was as good of an opportunity as she was going to get. Enough small talk, it was time to learn what she was dealing with.
“Will, tell me what happened to you.”
He nodded but didn’t answer. He wanted to talk to her; he wanted to tell her everything. He also desperately wanted to sleep. His aching body reminded him that he still had not fully recovered from his four-story plummet in the stairwell. He rubbed his eyes, trying to organize his thoughts.
“Start at the beginning. I’m here to help, not to judge,” she pressed.
He exhaled a deeply. “It started with Natalie. No, actually it started when I lost my job.”
“You were fired?”
“Yeah. The recession hit my firm pretty hard. I made it through the first round of cuts, but not the second. Then, not even a month after I was axed, Natalie dumped me. Things sort of spiraled out of control from there.”
“That sounds like Natalie. What did you ever see in her anyway?” Julie said, with a hint of wry satisfaction.
He sighed. “You never even met Natalie.”
“I’m sorry, go on.”
“Anyway, things got rough for me. Try living in Manhattan without a job — that equation doesn’t factor very well. Plus, Natalie spent money like a fiend, so my cash situation was shit.”
“Did you get severance?”
“Three months, but I used it to pay the rent, the bills, and to eat. I was freaking out. I needed a job desperately, but there was nothing. Nuh — thing. Nobody was hiring. I couldn’t even land an interview.”
“What happened?”
“A buddy told me about this gig he did in college to earn extra cash. He signed up for a clinical trial to test a drug that stimulates melatonin, or something like that. He said all he had to do was take these pills and show up twice a week for blood draws. He said they paid him three thousand bucks for it. He must have been in the placebo group, he said, because nothing ever happened to him. Er, nothing he knows about anyway.”
“Tell me you didn’t,” she groaned.
“I did. I signed up for a fast-track swine flu vaccine trial. Five hundred bucks to be a guinea pig for the vaccine. I figured it was something the doctors would probably recommend I get anyway, so why not get paid for it?”
“Whose vaccine were you testing?”
“What do you mean whose vaccine? It was an H1N1 vaccine.”
“No, I mean who was the manufacturer running the trial? Glaxo, Baxter, Novartis?
“None of those. It was a company called Leighton-Harris Pharmaceuticals.”
“Never heard of them.”
“Apparently the vaccine I was a test subject for was a live virus variant.”
“Okay, so what happened?”
He fiddled with his hands. “At first, nothing. They gave me two shots, a couple weeks apart. They also took some blood samples and cheek swabs. Then, out of the blue, they called me back. I met with a new guy, a doctor, not just the regular admin weenies. The doctor told me I was infected with a mutated strain of the H1N1 virus.”
“That’s virtually impossible. Did you tell him that’s impossible, Will?”
He raised an eyebrow. “You do know what my previous job was, right? I was the account manager for those annoying singing chicken ads. Cluckers Fried Chicken was my biggest client.”
She shot him a quizzical look.
“Oh, come on. You know the jingle:
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, that’s terrible. Did you write that?”
“Of course not, I was the ad program manager. I’m the guy who puts it on TV to torment everyone in the country during prime-time. Anyway, my point is: Do you really expect me to banter with a virologist about the minutiae of the H1N1 virus?”
She made a conciliatory grunting sound. “They told you you were infected?”
“Yes, and that I needed to be quarantined for public safety.”
“What! Quarantined? Were you symptomatic?”
“Keep your eyes on the road,” Will said clutching the armrest as the car drifted dangerously onto the shoulder. Julie jerked the wheel, piloting the sedan back into its lane. After a deep, calming breath, he continued. “Anyway, what was so strange is that I felt completely fine.”
“Did you tell the doctor that?”
“Of course, that was the first thing I told him. He said that was part of the reason I needed to be quarantined. The mutated version of the virus was something they had never seen before, and it had unprecedented concentration levels in my blood. He said that he had no idea what the virus was going to do to me and how contagious or virulent the strain was.”
“Will, this doesn’t make any sense at all to me. It’s completely unorthodox. Do you remember the name of the doctor who told you this nonsense?” Julie said, her ire rising.
“Xavier Pope. Shit, how could anyone forget a name like Xavier Pope.”
“Xavier Pope was the doctor who quarantined you?”
“Have you heard of him?”
“Of course. He’s famous, well, in the medical community he is. But Xavier Pope is not a doctor. He’s a research scientist, like me.”
“Wait a minute, are you telling me this guy Pope lied about being a doctor?”
“No, he’s a doctor, but not an MD. He’s a PhD. Pope is a micro-biologist who specializes in infectious diseases.”
Will’s mind began to race. The events of the past five months had never made sense to him, but he had grown comfortable with certain basic assumptions, like the fact that Dr. Xavier Pope was a real doctor. Now everything he saw, heard, and believed had to be called into question. The deception was growing more complex at every turn.
“Julie, what exactly does Xavier Pope do?”
“He does the same kind of work I do, except while I specialize in finding cures for cancer, he focuses on finding cures for pandemic viruses and bacteria. Of course he’s much more famous, and published, and brilliant than I am, but in theory we’re colleagues.”
“Why would he be working on my case?” he asked.
“H1N1 is a hot bug right now. The CDC is worried about a resurgent pandemic. It makes sense that he would have been called in,” she said, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel rhythmically. “What happened next?”
“After my meeting with Pope, things happened very quickly. They told me they were placing me in quarantine. I was kept in virtual isolation, completely cut off from the outside world. I call those days the ‘bubble boy days’ because they kept me in a glass room, and everyone I interacted with wore protective masks and gloves. A lot of poking and prodding, but not much two-way communication. That lasted about three weeks or so, then their lawyer came to see me.”
She stiffened. “Please tell me you didn’t sign anything, Will.”