CHAPTER 44

When Mark Kellogg came into the control room, the group of three enlisted men at the monitors turned and stared. Word of the phone call has spread already, he thought. They knew. He ignored their looks and stared instead at the bank of monitors in front of them, lost in his own thoughts. They’d know the truth soon enough. The whole base would.

He shook himself. It was getting hard to think straight. The pills he’d been surviving on for the last few days had made things soupy in his head, and there was a crash coming. He could feel it looming on his horizon.

Gradually, the three enlisted men turned back to the monitors.

Behind him, the door closed softly. It was Jane Robeson, one of the civilian doctors they’d picked up from the CDC down in Atlanta. Her team was working on mapping the antigenic shift of the population strains of the infected taken out of the Pennsylvania area by comparing them to the original samples recorded along the Gulf Coast. Kellogg ran down the latest progress reports from her team in his head. They were doing good work, though he was doubtful they were going to turn up any usable leads in the next few weeks. The kind of work they were doing was the stuff of years, and that was time they just didn’t have.

“How’s it going, Jane?”

“Good as can be expected, I guess.” She was a gray, bedraggled woman in her late fifties, with a frizzled mess of hair pulled back in a loose bun behind her head. She seemed anxious. “I was wondering…”

“Yes?”

“Well, we all heard about the call. We were wondering, was it really him?”

In front of him, the three enlisted men stiffened without trying to make it obvious they were listening. Kellogg sighed. It was going to come out sooner or later. This might as well be the time. “Yeah,” he said. “It was him. The president. The slippery bastard said we have the hopes and prayers of a desperate nation riding on our efforts. He said he has the firmest confidence that we will see this thing through to a successful conclusion. He actually talks like that in real life, Jane. Did you know that? The bastard can’t have a simple phone conversation without making it sound like a proclamation.”

“But what about reinforcing us? Additional supplies. Mark, I’m having to share computer time with three other teams. We’ve got equipment here that would be considered inadequate even for a high school chem lab. We can’t be expected to keep up any sort of pace like this.”

“I know what you’re up against, Jane.”

“But did you tell him that? Does he know how bad things are here?”

“He knows.”

“And what did he say?”

Kellogg laced his hands together behind his back. A tension headache was building behind his eyes. He wanted one of his pills, but that would have to wait. On the monitor in front of him, he saw Nate Royal sitting at the edge of his bed, watching TV, a remote control in his hand. The man looked bored out of his head. He hadn’t moved in two days, and the nurses reported that he hadn’t slept, either. He just kept watching Top Gun over and over again. He was depressed. You didn’t need to be a psychiatrist to see that. But what were they going to do about it? They were all prisoners here, of one sort or another. Rosetta stone to this pandemic though he may be, Nate Royal didn’t have a monopoly on depression.

“Mark? What did he say?”

“He quoted Abraham Lincoln to me, Jane. Can you believe that? ‘Endeavor to persevere,’ he said. Lincoln said that to the Indians as he was preparing to send them out to the reservations. Do you get the implication, Jane? Do you know what that means for us?”

“But surely he can’t mean we’re not getting any help at all. Mark, is that what he said?”

Kellogg’s gaze shifted once again over the monitors in front of him. One screen was split into six sections, each section showing a different part of the base’s perimeter. The infected were swarming against the fence. A week earlier, they’d seen a few stragglers from the town of Minot, and the guards had amused themselves with popping off headshots from their Humvees during their patrols. Kellogg had watched them and winced at their sport, but ultimately decided that he didn’t care enough to order them to stop.

Somehow word had spread to Minneapolis that Minot was doing research on the virus. If there was going to be a cure, the rumor went, it was going to come out of Minot. Soon there were streams of refugees descending on the base, and the results were predictable enough. A hundred thousand people had brought their infected friends and family with them, hoping for some kind of miracle cure. They had tried to storm the base and had been repulsed. Now that flood of humanity was essentially an army of the infected, beating on the gates. The guards were no longer shooting them for sport. That had stopped shortly after the first incursions and a sort of besieged mentality had set in among the base’s population. It was just a matter of time now, like it had been in San Antonio and Pennsylvania.

The truth was they were dealing with a global pandemic. There were reports coming out of every corner of the globe. Nuclear weapons had been used on refugees along the India-Pakistan border. China was in chaos. U.S. troops in Europe and the Middle East were collapsing as soldiers abandoned their posts and tried to find ways to make it home to their families stateside. Globally, they were past the tipping point. The great crash was already a part of history. Armageddon had come and gone. Now they were just witnessing the wreckage.

“Mark?”

Kellogg started. For a moment, the room had disappeared, but the sound of Jane Robeson’s voice brought him back.

Kellogg’s gaze drifted back to Nate Royal. “That one is our best hope right now,” he said, nodding at the screen.

Standing beside him, she watched Nate sitting at the edge of his bed.

“He’s a tough nut to crack,” she said. “We’ve tried everything.”

“But we’re going to have to crack him. There is an answer there, Jane.”

“I hope you’re right,” she said.

“Me too. God help us, me too.”

Nate Royal sat on the edge of his bed, watching Top Gun. Again. The same scene. Over and over. Maverick and Goose are in Stinger’s office. They’ve just saved Cougar. Stinger is offering Maverick his dream shot, telling him, “Son, your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash.”

Stop.

Backtrack.

Play it again.

Like Kellogg, Nate was looking for answers. The absurdity of his position hit him a week ago. He was sitting here in his bed, eating raspberry Jell-O with his fingers, listening to Tom Cruise saying “I was inverted,” and it struck him. His life was a waste. He was a waste. He had burst into daylight one day during his sophomore year and rather than finding a world that made sense, he had found this world.

Now they were telling him that he was some kind of cure. It was absurd. He had never mattered to anybody, and now they were telling him he mattered to everybody. Nate found it hard to believe, and even harder to stomach. That wasn’t the kind of responsibility he wanted. He remembered Jessica Metcalfe’s husband, the big-shot city attorney who had offered him the job painting his pool house, telling him that he had to take some responsibility and put his life back on the rails. That had seemed like an empty load of shit at the time. How could he really be expected to do that? He was just one man, and the world was so huge. It didn’t make sense.

And that was the problem, really. Nothing made sense. Dr. Kellogg had promised that the lab people would start telling him what tests they were doing on him and why, and they had. They’d been good to their word. But it didn’t help Nate any. He still didn’t understand why it had to be him and not somebody else.

Nate stopped the DVD. Made it go back a track. Son, your ego’s writing checks your body can’t cash.

He didn’t know about his ego, wasn’t even really sure what that was, but he did know his body wasn’t up for cashing any more checks. He’d reached the end of his rope, and he didn’t have anything left. So, really, it boiled down to one simple question: Did he want to go on living? He decided that he didn’t, and it surprised him how easy the decision was to make. Screw what everybody else wanted. It was his life. He wrecked it, so it was up to him to fix it. Maybe Jessica Metcalfe’s husband was right. Maybe it was his responsibility. Running into daylight hadn’t worked. Maybe he’d find better luck with darkness.

Son, your ego’s writing checks your body can’t cash.

He stopped the disk. Looking down at the remote, he found the Eject button and hit it. The disk slid out. Nate took it from the carriage and watched the light dapple off its surface before snapping it cleanly in half. He studied the edge he’d made and decided it would do. It was going to hurt, but that’d be over soon enough.

He pushed himself up to the head of the bed and climbed under the sheets. The cameras Kellogg had told him about picked up the whole room, and it wouldn’t do him any good to get caught before he could make good on this.

Nate spread his legs butterfly fashion, his hands on the bed between his knees, the sheets pulled up around his elbows. Just below the surface of his wrist he could see two green lightning-bolt-shaped veins. Using the corner of the broken disc, he picked at the skin there. He winced at the pain.

He eyes were shut and he couldn’t remember closing them. He forced them open.

His wrists were marked by a pair of deep scratches. There was a smear of blood on the white sheets. The wound was stinging, but it didn’t hurt as bad as he thought it would.

Son, your ego’s writing checks your body can’t cash.

Not this time, he thought.

Nate took a deep breath. And another. Then he put the disk to his wrist and began to cut.