Christopher Cartwright
The Holy Grail
Prologue
Ben Gellie held his breath as the needle went into his right arm.
He exhaled, and blood ran freely into a little specimen container. It was the seventh such blood test the small team of doctors in their white coats had taken in the past twenty-four hours. The doctors had told him that they’d found something unusual and that he needed to wait until they ran more tests. Outside of that, they had ignored him.
He was tall, clean-shaven, and wore a suit and tie on most days. A junior law graduate from Harvard, he was currently interning at the State Department. With his handsome boyish good looks and thick, wavy hair, he had no trouble getting girls. It was deciding to keep them that he’d struggled with over the years. Despite his lazy, carefree lifestyle, and capricious morals, he had naturally succeeded in all aspects of his life. An A-grade student and a natural athlete, he excelled at academia and sports, and had been offered full academic and sports scholarships to study at Harvard.
Some might say he squandered it the first time round. He wouldn’t, but it’s all about perspective, isn’t it? He’d lived like a jock-rock star — his life was about fun and picking up chicks. After completing a bachelor of science and a semester of pre-med, he decided to turn toward pro football. In his mid-twenties, he was the NFL’s first pick at the drafts. But something went wrong before the season even started. Life was good. He was moving quickly toward the goals everyone seemed to have — wealth, fame, women… if he stayed, he could have had anything he wanted.
But he didn’t want any of it.
Except, maybe the women.
He broke his contract, which the media had a bit of a field day with for a while. Wherever he went, people recognized him. They asked about what happened and why he quit. He got sick of telling the story that he just didn’t feel like playing the game anymore.
Things died down once the main season started, and once more he returned to the anonymous life of mere mortals.
Ben did odd jobs for a few years around the country. Nothing exciting and nothing difficult. He just wanted to get away from it all for a bit and clear his head. In the fourth year, he returned to Harvard. He was right back where he started, only this time he intended to set his sights somewhere else.
He had loftier goals than the mere creation of money.
His eyes were set on the White House. No, not as a president — he knew he was too lazy and had had too much fun in life to ever be granted such a high office. Rather, his goal was setting up a future as one of the powerful people working to develop the laws and improve the country. In many ways, a successful lawmaker had more freedom and power to do some good for the country than the president.
His recent position as an intern at the State Department was the first step in that direction, and as with everything else in his life, it was turning out just how he expected — perfect.
His mind returned to his problem at hand.
Could all of his good luck have finally caught up with him?
Ben had come in to donate blood. He’d been inspired by the motorcycle accident of a friend, who had received excellent care from the hospital. Ben had wanted to help. He reflected that, in some ways, his life had always seemed unbalanced.
Was it all just too easy?
Something was wrong with his blood results, and he was worried he was about to see the universe set things right.
At first, he’d asked questions, but the doctors merely went about their business as though he were nothing more than a guinea pig. Maybe it was some kind of bureaucratic mix-up, where everyone assumed everyone else had explained things to him.
Then, as the time went on, he became agitated and worried.
His mind raced across a number of possibilities he’d never previously given any thought to — heart disease, genetic disorders, multiple sclerosis, mental illness, and the big one, cancer.
Am I going to die?
He thought about that possibility for a moment and then dismissed it out of habit. Did cancer even show up in the blood? He didn’t know. He knew very little about modern medicine, but somehow, he doubted that so many doctors would have been concerned if he had something that was going to inevitably kill him.
And why should that bother them?
They’re doctors; they’ve been trained to treat sick and dying people. There were more than a dozen doctors. A dozen! Why did they look so worried?
No, they had found something else in his blood.
Something much worse.
What’s worse than death?
Ben swallowed hard, refusing to let the fear take control of him. The answer came to him swiftly.
The death of millions of people.
He wasn’t isolated, so if he had some horrible disease, it wasn’t airborne. He wracked his mind, trying to remember any type of blood-borne disease that might infect millions of people. All he could think of was HIV, but that didn’t fit the picture. There were too many resources dedicated to him, and this certainly wouldn’t be the first case of HIV the hospital had seen.
Hell, any number of his friends, family, or colleagues at the State Department might have the infection, and he wouldn’t have even known about it. Besides, they weren’t in the eighties anymore. There wasn’t as much stigma associated with HIV. With access to modern immunotherapies, people were living full lives with the disease, so there was no reason for all of the subdued panic he was seeing. But the doctors worked frantically, their faces tensed with fear.
What were they afraid of?
If he was sick, he certainly didn’t feel it.
Maybe the results showed him to be a carrier of the disease, but not infected. They had those types of diseases, didn’t they? Even that didn’t make any sense. Apart from gloves, the doctors weren’t wearing personal protective equipment. No masks, no impervious gowns — just their medical scrubs and nitrile gloves.
He’d watched enough movies to know that if he was indeed patient zero in some new, horrible strain of virus, he would have been quarantined in a negative airflow, sealed room, designed to keep any viruses from getting out. Anyone who came in to visit him or treat him would have been wearing a fully encapsulated hazardous material suit like the ones you see on all those disaster, end-of-the world-movies.
Ben shook his head. None of it made any sense.
He’d heard of some doctors trying to avoid telling the patient hard truths until it became unavoidable. But he couldn’t even begin to imagine what they might have possibly found. He tried to imagine the worst possible case scenario, but none of those would have been out of the norm for anyone who worked in an emergency department.
The friend who had been involved in a motorcycle accident had gone out riding on a warm day in February, thinking that the roads were clear. He’d hit a patch of black ice under some trees. The hospitals in the area were running short on Ray’s blood type, AB-negative — the same as his own and the rarest type. Ben did not hesitate — he came in immediately to donate his blood. Before they’d let him do that, he needed to have a blood test to make sure he didn’t have any pathogens that could be spread to the next recipient. Ben had quickly signed all the forms they shoved in front of him, even though he knew it meant the needles would be next. Ben hated needles.
An hour after the tests, another doctor had come in and asked to take a second blood sample, telling him that it was a routine follow up to the first one. It wasn’t long after that he was visited by a small army of doctors, none of whom would tell him what was going on.