Mikaela unloaded a flight from Salt Lake City. There was a dog show at Minute Maid Park scheduled this weekend, and the animals coming down the ramp shivered with fear. Mikaela felt awful each time she had to unload a caged animal. She had grown up with four Labradors, and anyone who would lock up an animal in a loud, vibrating luggage bin had her contempt. The cages were filled with piss and shit. The howling was pitiful. She didn’t mind engine noise, but wore earplugs to keep out the suffering of poor, dumb animals.
Something about the callousness of pet owners — and travelers in general — made her feel justified in what she thought next.
I’ll just open that parcel and get a better look at what’s there.
Mikaela went into the lost luggage room. A flush lit her face, and she felt a quickening in the blood, just like the one she experienced at age eleven when she stole Snickers bars from a local candy store, in Galveston.
She made sure that the green light was off on the “broken” security camera. Last month ten baggage handlers in Tulsa had been caught in a sting, breaking open luggage, unaware that “broken” cameras recorded them. Mikaela carried the luggage to a corner that the camera didn’t cover for some reason even when it was on.
But when she pried open the package she cursed. The pot had broken. There were shards of pottery in there and bits of wood and lots of plastic and paper wrapping and… shit… all this fretting for no payoff. She rummaged quickly among the debris and—
Ouch!
Something had bitten her, goddamnit! An insect or spider must be in there and ouch—it came again and she yanked out her hand. There was a little red bump on her wrist. Two bumps. She peered into the mass of wrapping. She wondered what had bitten her.
She stuffed the paper back in and put the parcel on a shelf.
By the time her shift was over, three hours later, the bumps had reddened and swelled and kept itching. When she got home she smeared calamine lotion on the bumps. Almost instantly, the itching stopped. She felt better. Maybe, she thought wryly, the bites were a warning for me to stay on the straight and narrow and not steal anything anymore.
By the time Glenn got home from another day of failed job hunting, she’d forgotten about the bites, and she certainly wasn’t going to tell him about breaking into the parcel. They ate a low-budget spaghetti dinner. In the morning the bites were down.
That afternoon, she felt slight pain in her knees and elbows when she went to work, and attributed the throbbing to the strain of carrying luggage. Perhaps she had twisted the wrong way.
By that evening, there was a tight bandlike sensation in her abdomen, pressing in, like fists pushing her intestines together. As if the muscles were coiling, sending bile back up into her belly, and making her nauseous from pain in her chest.
She must have twisted her neck, too, while carrying luggage, because it throbbed. Eva, another baggage handler, gave her a massage in the locker room. A couple of the guys offered massages also, but she called them perverts and they laughed and went back to work.
The pains got worse that night.
Summer flu, she thought.
The apartment got cold. The air-conditioning system must be turned down low, she figured, but when she looked, it was set to the usual seventy-two degrees. So she took her temperature. It was down to ninety-six. That’s why she was cold. So cold that she’d begun shivering. Mikaela piled on more blankets. But the blankets did no good. The cold seemed to be working its way into her knees and elbows. Man, this is the flu.
At 3 A.M. she went into convulsions, bouncing on the bed, heels slamming mattress, arms flailing. She had never been so cold in her life. Glenn woke, frightened, and he made her hot tea. She couldn’t hold it in. Her stomach seemed to close in on itself. She felt twisting knives in there. As she lurched toward the bathroom she was losing vision at the edges, and she had to use the wall for balance. She made it to the toilet, at least, and for a long time, whatever she had eaten over the last day seemed to come out everywhere it could.
By 4 A.M. everything had switched and she was hot, drenched with sweat, like she was a human rag and gigantic fists squeezed liquid from her forehead, face, armpits. Sweat soaked the blankets. She threw them off. She tried to stand and fell. She was going to be sick again.
“I’m turning yellow,” she said in horror, looking at her shaking hands.
That did it. Glenn got her to the car and drove fast to Houston Methodist Hospital. He told her not to worry when she’d voided her bowels on the way. He’d clean the car. But she was horrified in the emergency room when they got her clothes off and her urine was red, dripping on the floor. The nurse looked hazy. Mikaela’s throat was hot and the pain was in her spine now, flowing up and down, like razor blades skimming nerves.
She screamed when a doctor touched her.
The doctor looked small and tiny, and she saw him from far off through a tube.
It was now thirty-eight hours after the threat had been made to the Deputy Assistant National Security Advisor, outside the New Post Pub, in the capital. Mikaela’s accidental infection might have given authorities time to prepare for what was coming had they connected it to the threat, but no one did.
Mikaela was passing out.
A voice above her was saying, “The disease doesn’t happen this fast. It doesn’t! It’s impossible!”
“Yeah? Then you tell me what this is, Doctor. It’s bad. I’ve never seen it this bad, but it’s not impossible.”
Glenn was screaming, “That monitor! Look at the lines! What’s wrong with her heart!”
Later, blood tests confirmed the cause of death, and a notation was made beside the name of Mikaela Dehlman and forwarded to the city health department. Under the national security advisory, suspicious outbreaks were to be reported immediately to Homeland Security and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta. But this case was not considered related to the advisory, so officials were not notified.
After all, Houston is a tropical city. It lies near many bodies of fresh water that can breed insects. In the summer, Houston is rife with mosquitoes. Over 30 percent of the city is foreign-born, many from tropical countries, and Mikaela worked at an airport, exposing her to foreign travelers. So what she had contracted was considered, quite logically, to be extremely rare but natural, conceivable, in this warm, humid place.
The parcel was transported to Alabama and locked away in a dark corner. Ninety days would have to pass before, by law, it could be opened or sold.
Mikaela’s death, doctors thought, was a tragic rarity. They certainly did not regard it as a harbinger of things to come.
In their reports, notations read, “Hemolysis, burst blood vessels in the urine. Acute kidney failure. Death from a lethal, unusual malaria.”
FIVE
“You know what you need? A woman,” Anasasio said.
We were in the mining union Land Cruiser, heading back to town on the Amazon highway, the air-conditioning cranked up to arctic level, the world fractured and nonsensical.
Four more hours until eleven, and the secret meeting. I never even felt Rooster shove that note in my pocket, I thought.
The highway extended across a continent from Brazil’s megalopolis of São Paulo over a thousand miles east, to Peru and the Pacific Ocean, over a thousand miles west. Porto Velho was in the middle. The two-lane road was new but already crumbling. We passed a new fifteen-foot-high overpass, except it was unconnected to the road, just plopped down as if from a spaceship, in the jungle.