“You mean, like, the sub is a drive-by?”
Eddie looked at the ship camera, which would be picking up our images, broadcasting them to the bridge. “Hey, Zhou! You listening? You watching right now? You studying us, Zhou? You waiting to see on your monitors how we die? Little research for your guys? What we look like when we get sick? How fast it jumps from person to person? That’s it, isn’t it? Help us? Give me a break! Break out the popcorn over there! Help us! You’re just watching the guinea pigs get sick!”
“Maybe he needs to stay surfaced to watch. Maybe the programs Del Grazo planted won’t work if he’s submerged.”
“Fucking maybes. Fucking goddamn maybes. Maybe he’s from Venus,” Eddie snapped.
We continued our rounds, checked for the twentieth time — in despair — to see if we’d made progress.
We reached Clinton’s cot. The big Iñupiat was worse now, his breathing jagged, bile dripping from the corners of his mouth, a tearing, ripping noise coming from him with each exhalation. Clinton lay beneath the piled parkas and extra sweaters and on sweat-soaked sheets, breaking into shivers so violent that they approached convulsions. Clinton’s fever at 104, hitting possible brain damage level. Clinton hooked to the IV that had been freed up when one of the Montana crew died. Clinton muttering Iñupiat words. I had no idea what they meant.
“How many people in the United States, Eddie.”
“Three… four hundred million?”
“Triage,” I said.
“Don’t go there, amigo. We have no control over what Washington does. Let’s concentrate on us.”
I gave Clinton his prescribed three-hour dose of aerosols. We covered him up and moved down the row. I felt my heart tearing inside me. I was responsible for this scene. I kept hearing Zhou, even though I tried to block it out. Good luck.
Had I misread the tone? It would be easy over distance. Had I misread intent? It would be simple with a translator involved. Was Eddie right? They were just watching and recording us, trying to deal with the disease? Triage. What if Zhou was here to blow us up? What if he was waiting while some high-level negotiations were going on between Washington and Beijing? We can’t blow up our own ship, so you guys do it. My imagination was getting the better of me. I saw a room in Washington. I saw the director meeting with men and women whose faces I knew from the nightly news. I knew the decision that faced them, because wasn’t it the same one I’d faced in Afghanistan, on a smaller scale? Blowing up a truck instead of a ship? Killing eight men to save thousands, instead of hundreds to save millions?
Good luck, Zhou’s translator had told me.
I told Eddie, “Well, we can use luck either way.”
But there was no luck, because what we were seeing was worse than the 1918 strain; that much was evident. The death toll aboard hit twenty-one. Eddie and I went back to the microscope, and saw differences that we’d missed before — minuscule alterations — between the oblong microbes in the photos that the CDC had sent out, and the view of inside Clinton. Reconstituted version versus real-life disease.
“Extra spikes on Clinton’s strain,” said Eddie an hour later, staring at the two pictures. “It’s narrower in the middle, and that tiny hook on top, see the way the two strands entwine? The curl is more pronounced, and the tail.”
Three Marines were down with fevers of over 103, coughing up bile, skin patchy, blotched blue.
“Not getting oxygen,” Eddie said.
Six Wilmington crewmen, who had been stationed elsewhere in the ship when Del Grazo escaped, new patients, had been carried to the hangar, in similar shape.
The cook had gone in one shocking two-hour period from merrily serving breakfast to breaking out coughing, to collapsing in his bunk after throwing up on the man below.
He had then died.
The hangar was a nightmare filled with sick and dying. DeBlieu stayed permanently forward, now that he’d left the quarantined area anyway. He ran the ship from the bridge. I heard his announcements regularly, and my respect for the man grew. He kept the crew busy with a steady stream of jobs: clean decks, check equipment or lifeboats, or do one more drill, or work harder trying to fix the radio room, get the long-range working since the fire. He was trying to snuff out panic before it began. DeBlieu on the intercom saying, “If you want to help the doctors, do your jobs.”
XO Gordon Longstreet lay in row two, close to the sliding door of the hangar. Karen Vleska was one cot over, she and Clinton the patients I had the most trouble viewing. But I sat by her side, put my hand on her forehead. She was ashen, shivering, asleep.
I must have fallen asleep myself, sitting there, and this is what I dreamed. I was in the back of a troop truck with eight Marines, in Afghanistan. There were oil drum bombs lashed to the sides, and I smelled alkaline desert, diesel fuel, unwashed guys, and roast lamb. I felt the hard hum of tires on dirt road, felt the jolt each time we hit a rut. Guys smoking. Guys shutting their eyes to doze. Me filled with dread, knowing that something awful was coming, and opening my mouth to warn them, but I couldn’t talk, and then I could not move, not even a toe.
And then there were two of me, because I was also watching the truck approach from the guard post bomb barrier, and I was yelling into a radio for the truck to pull over and stop. I gripped the handles of the .50-caliber. I felt the weapon buck. Suddenly I was inside the truck again, with the doomed troops, instead of firing at it.
The chassis rocked. The blast seemed to pierce my eardrums. I was pinned. The truck had turned over. I smelled fire. I was on fire myself. I tried to move but still could not.
“Wake up, One. You were having a nightmare.”
I jerked out of it, gasping for breath, and still feeling hot flames licking at my trousers. I was surprised to see the hangar around me. I looked right. There was Karen Vleska, still asleep and looking very white, very small.
“I screwed up, Eddie.”
“No.”
“Zhou was right to shoot Del Grazo.”
“One, keep your mind on the job. You got some shut-eye. You’re a new man, One. You’ll figure it out.”
“We’ll prepare the inoculations, Eddie. Put out a call for anyone who got over the flu to come to the lab. We’ll reuse syringes if we have to. Time to take blood. No more time to wait.”
I looked down and Karen’s eyes were open. They were watery and red but still focused, like her pupils were the only healthy part left. I felt something cold touch my hand. It was Karen’s hand. I took it. I felt the bones of her knuckles, and her tremors, and I heard the creaky whisper of double pneumonia attacking her lungs as she forced air in or out. Perspiration flowed down skin turned gray as death.
“You didn’t make a mistake,” she croaked. “You hear me? You didn’t. You saved the old woman, not the painting.”
“At the moment I prefer the painting. How do you feel?”
“Like I look. Like shit,” she said, smiled weakly, a skull smile, and let go, and then she closed her eyes.
But she kept talking. “My father used to say, when I was little…”
“What did he say, Karen?”
A flicker, at the corner of the mouth, of a smile. “He’d say, things are hard because they aren’t easy. Dumb, huh? He was full of stupid sayings. He was… a great guy. And I think… Colonel, that so… are… you.”
We left Andrew Sachs with her, mopping her brow, mask off; the guy seemed unconcerned for his own safety. I placed my hand on his bony shoulder, saw the watery iron-colored eyes turn up toward me in a question. I guess everyone was thinking of mortality, getting out the good comments while we could.