When he was a boy, his father told him a bizarre piece of trivia. If you place a frog in a pot of cold water, and slowly heat the water inside to a boil, the frog will linger, incognizant of the danger until it perishes in the heat. But if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, the frog will jump out immediately — scalded, but alive. During his third month of confinement, it occurred to him that he was the frog, and quarantine the pot of water. His captors were turning up the heat gradually, and he had been oblivious to the change. At that moment of epiphany, he began planning his escape:
He started by shifting his sleeping pattern — forcing himself to nap at every opportunity during the day — so he could be alert at night when the staff was at one-quarter strength. He learned the assignments on the watch bill and memorized the times and routes for the roving personnel. He studied the guards and orderlies, noted their idiosyncrasies, and became familiar with their habits. Eventually, he built up the courage to sneak around Level 4 during the break between the hourly security tours after midnight. Systematically, he scoped out the entire floor including: the laundry room, the server room, the sample room, Laboratory 1, Laboratory 2, the hospital rooms housing other patients, and a room with a label in another language, which he could not read. This room, along with the server room, was always locked. Until one night, he found the door shut, but not latched.
The room was cold, dimly lit, and the back wall was lined with rectangular stainless steel refrigeration modules that bore the nameplate Mopec. Two identical modules sat side by side, each housing nine chambers, arranged three rows high by three columns wide. An empty gurney was parked up against the left wall. A chill ran down his spine. He knew what this place was. He turned to leave, but then stopped. He couldn’t help himself; he had to look. To his surprise, the handles were not locked. He took a deep breath and opened one of the rectangular doors in the middle row. The door hissed as he broke the seal and 39
F chilled air tickled the hair on his forearm. He grabbed the lip on the telescoping stainless steel tray inside and pulled. The tray extended smoothly, despite holding the weight of a full-size adult body inside a black zippered body bag. Two yellow Biological Hazard stickers were affixed to the bag, one at the head and one at the foot. He took the zipper in between his thumb and forefinger, held his breath, and pulled. A wave of rank, putrid air that stank of excrement hit him like a punch in the face. He gagged and reflexively took a step back. Then, he saw it — the face of a monster. The cadaver inside looked like he had been bludgeoned to death, but Will knew otherwise. The tip of the nose and fingertips were blackened and gangrenous. A grotesque, purple bubo bulged on the side of the dead man’s neck, and blue-black plague spots covered his trunk and cheeks. The body was fresh and Will was sickened to see that it had yet to be cleaned. Dried blood and pus stained the skin beneath the dead man’s nostrils and trailed from the corner of his left eye. Fighting the urge to vomit, he covered his nose and mouth and reluctantly stepped closer. He recognized this man. He had seen him the week before, languishing in a hospital room five doors down from his own, hacking and spewing phlegm. Like a bug trapped in a spider’s web, the man was hooked up to a tangled mess of tubes and wires, waiting to die. Will zipped the body bag closed and shoved the corpse back inside its refrigerated tomb. He opened the adjacent door and repeated the process. This time the zipper opened to reveal the cadaver’s feet. He noted the toe tag: P-62. He looked down at his wristband and his heart skipped a beat. P-65. Frantically he checked the other cadaver coolers. P-59, P-47, P-61, P-43… P-64. Fear gripped him as the gravity of his situation took hold. In this hospital, regardless of the treatment, the patients died. All of them.
His mind drifted from that fateful night two weeks ago, back to the present. To his surprise, he suddenly found himself contemplating going back. What if he belonged in quarantine? Maybe he really was infected with a deadly disease, just as they claimed. The last thing he wanted was to hurt people. Better to live in a bubble, than to be responsible for filling Mopec chillers with the bodies of innocent men, women, and children. He was certain he could find his way back to the building from which he had escaped. Within seconds of walking into the lobby, the guards would surround him. Angry yellow-suits would converge from every direction and thrust him back into the familiar nightmare of needles and isolation. It would be horrible, but at least he would avoid hurting more innocent people.
Yet despite the mental anguish he was suffering, physically he was feeling better by the hour. Sure, the fire escape plunge had taken a toll on his body; his joints ached and his muscles throbbed. But the symptoms from the last injection were completely gone. His breathing was strong and steady; his head and sinuses were clear. As much as he wanted to be sick, deserved to be sick — sick like Rutgers and Frankie — his body was on the mend.
He hugged himself against the cold while working to clear his mind and tried not to shiver. He felt like he had a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces that looked like matches on first inspection, but didn’t quite fit when he tried to snap them together.
Puzzle piece number one: The doctors told him he was infected with a deadly virus. This he could not prove or disprove. Months ago, when he was first placed into quarantine he did not feel sick. He did not feel sick now. The only time he ever felt sick was while he was in quarantine. Still, he knew that empirical observations of his health did not rule out the possibility that he was a carrier of a disease. What if he, like Typhoid Mary in the early 1900s, was spreading a disease for which he exhibited no symptoms?
Puzzle piece number two: The doctors told him they were using experimental treatments to eradicate a virus lurking in his system, but every treatment only made him feel worse. The scenario had always been the same: injection, followed by flu symptoms, then rapid recovery. This was why he stole the sample with the cloudy liquid. His intellect told him the injections were not treatments. Far from it. The vial of cloudy liquid had been the key to understanding this puzzle piece, but now that key was lost.
A hint of a smile crept across his face. Even though the vial of cloudy liquid was destroyed, remnants of the substance were coursing through his veins. What if someone could identify the foreign compound using a sample of his blood? He also still had the vial of the clear liquid, another puzzle piece in need of deciphering. To gain access to such analyses, he would need help from the one person in the world with whom he was not on speaking terms. Julie Ponte was an American molecular biologist working in Vienna and his only hope. The trick would be convincing her to listen. It had been ages since they last communicated, and it was he who had ended the romance between them.
He stood abruptly. His legs itched and tingled from sitting for so long. He rubbed the back of his thighs, trying to get the blood flowing. Then, he started to pace. From his front pants pocket, he retrieved a wad of crumpled bills: thirty-one euros. He had spent seven euros on a hot sandwich and a liter of bottled water at a café, his first real meal since breaking out of quarantine. He had spent another twelve on an inexpensive maroon scarf and grey wool cap from a second-hand store — not just for warmth, but also to conceal his face. If they were already casing youth hostels, then it was safe to assume they were looking for him in all obvious places where a half-naked man with no money might try to hide. Homeless shelters, park benches, under bridges — anywhere a vagabond might go. He needed to get out of Prague, away from the dragon’s lair, but without a passport, booking a flight or a train ticket was out of the question. Complicating matters, he still had no idea who “they” were. The most logical assumption was that the people looking for him were the security personnel from the lab. The very guards he had outmaneuvered were now the ones trying to bring him in. Other operatives could also be on his trail. Bounty hunters? Government agents? What about the Czech police? Were they looking for him too? He had no idea how deep this conspiracy ran. Paranoia was the only reason he had not marched right up to the U.S. Embassy in Prague, knocked on the door, and said, “Please take me home.”