Selection Event (2 page)

He recounted the hash marks on a slip of paper. Three hundred seventy-nine. Exactly. He went back to the door and put his hand on the cool enamel knob. It was slick from his sweat.

He thought of Delana and his mother and father and skies and traffic noise and trees, cows in pastures, the green smell of fresh-clipped lawns and the sound of hissing sprinklers. No matter what was going on above ground, he wanted to be there, he wanted to see it and be in it, even if there was no celebration or champagne. A person only had however many years — and he had spent one of those precious years in isolation. Today, he was deciding that his life was more important than the research.

He turned the knob and pushed. The door swung easily open. Just beyond, tacked to the second door that led up to surface, hung a white envelope with his name on it.

Chapter 3

Two months earlier, Ted and Laura had sat upstairs in the monitoring room at a gray metal table.

“What do we tell him?” the woman asked the man. She wore faded jeans, dirty at the knees, and a plaid shirt rolled up to her elbows. Her eyes were glassy and watery and her face a hot-looking pink. Her hair stuck to her temples. Both she and the man slumped in their chairs in front of the small screen where Martin Lake could be seen lying on his cot, reading. “What can we say to him?”

“I don't know,” the man said. He rubbed his hot forehead. “I guess the idea should be to give him some warning. Maybe we could nail one of the doors shut.”

“The hammering might make him suspicious,” she said. They both managed wan smiles. “I don't know if I'd want to be him or not.”

“I don't know how to tell him.” He looked down at the blank paper in front of him. “I can't think straight anymore.” His breathing was labored.

“Maybe we don't have to tell him anything.” The woman looked around the monitoring lab. It had been a neat, tidy place at one time. Now newspapers were heaped in a corner, styrofoam cups, food wrapping and other litter was strewn over the floor, and from the kitchenette came the faint sweet smell of decay.

Through the windows, pale twilight lowered from the top of the sky to the orange and red smears of light at the horizon. The sky, as usual, threatened with storms and the high atmosphere churned violently. Blackbirds rose in a swarm from the peach orchard across the road and turned this way and that, making a pattern with their wings that thinned and thickened. The man put the pen down across the blank sheet of paper. “God, everything's starting to hurt. We have to tell him something. The poor son of a bitch is going to come up expecting a welcoming party. Look at this place.”

With great effort, the woman reached across and rested her hand on the back of his neck. “Maybe you should just tell him to take it easy and stay away from other people. We can gather up some of the newspapers, leave them where he'll see them.”

The man nodded and began writing. When he finished, he folded the note and put it in an envelope but did not lick the glue-strip; he tucked the flap inside. On the front side he wrote
Martin Lake
.

When he returned from the underground corridor, the woman asked him, “Is the generator tank full?”

“If the power goes off, it should last him six to eight days. I reloaded his food cache this morning.” He turned toward her and with effort focused his eyes on her face. “Are you ready?”

"Yes, I think so. The champagne is cold.
His
champagne. He probably won't mind us drinking it." She went into the kitchenette and opened the refrigerator. Beside the green bottle of champagne was a plastic vial of phenobarbital tablets, a hundred and fifty of them. She brought them both out to the man. 

“Let's sit outside,” he said, when she came back, “and watch the birds and the twilight.”  

Months earlier, someone had put several lawn chairs out under a mulberry tree. Tall spring weeds now grew around the chairs, nearly hiding their legs when they sat.

“This is better than ending up in a hospital,” she said, lowering herself into a chair. The nylon webbing hardly creaked under her weight. “I took my parents to a hospital. They'd set up big tents over the parking lots, for all the cots. My parents died in a parking lot with strangers. This is better.”

The man sat holding the champagne bottle between his knees and twisted the cork. It was difficult work for his fevered muscles and sweat ran down the sides of his face. Finally, with both hands steadying the bottle, he filled the two glasses she held out.

“So quiet even the fizzing sounds loud now,” he said. “I wonder what he'll think of all this.” Around them, crickets began to saw and other night bugs clicked and buzzed. In the gathering darkness, they could see a freeway overpass a quarter of a mile away, but there was no traffic, none at all, not the sound of any machine anywhere. The cool air smelled of green things growing.

When they had finished their first glass and a dozen phenobarbs each, he said, “I wish it wasn't always overcast or stormy-looking. I'd like to see a clear sky just one more time.” The red and orange glow at the horizon had darkened to purple and cobalt. “I guess not.”

The woman smiled and reached across and touched the lip of her glass to his. “At least it didn't rain today. In its own way, it's a pretty sky. But a few stars once in a while would have been nice.” She knocked another dozen of the white tablets from the plastic vial into her hand and gave him half.

“I wish I'd sat out here more often and paid attention.” He finished off his second glass and they were quiet for a while. “I hope Martin does all right when he comes out. Poor son of a bitch.... Listen to that.” A mockingbird had begun warbling. It twittered and whistled and chirped and began over, repeating and then interrupting itself with chattering, as though it were telling a joke and then laughing at itself.

“I never heard mockingbirds till I came here,” the woman said. “They don't live in San Francisco. We only had pigeons and gulls there.”

They sat quietly, listening for a while, and finished the champagne and phenobarbital. Through the thick sky, the only light now was from the faint band at the horizon. Their faces seemed to be pale disembodied shapes floating above the lawn chairs.

“My headache's gone,” he said. He clumsily placed his left arm around her shoulders and held her right hand with his. “I've always liked your hair,” he said, his words beginning to slur. “Always liked you. You knew that.”

“I did,” she murmured, letting her cheek rest on his shoulder. “Always the way, isn't it. Always think of the good things when it's too late. Thank you.” She squeezed his hand a little. “Beautiful night,” she said in a whisper.

He didn't answer.

She wouldn't have heard.

The night grew slowly cooler, and after a while the mockingbird was silent. In the morning, when the sun suddenly flared red through the thick clouds in the east, light sparkled in the dew on their hair and eyelashes. They looked as if they had slept in each other's arms.

Chapter 4

The note in the envelope was only two lines long, written in smeary, shaky pencil.

Stay away from other people till you know what's going on. We hope you are well. Good luck.
 

It was signed by Ted — one of the six people working on the project. He re-read the letter and studied the irregular, child-like handwriting. Was this another part of the experiment? Wait for him to come out on his own and then give him puzzling messages — to measure his reactions?

Martin pushed open the second door and looked up the slanting corridor. The irregularity of the arched walls and ceiling reflected the distant white light that came through the double glass doors at the end. Here, the walls were rough-cut, but beyond the hospital-like doors he remembered there were white walls and tile floors.

At least he had come up in daylight, he thought. The air in the corridor was cool and plaster-smelling, and for a moment, his eyes felt strange, trying to focus on something further than the thirty feet across his room.

“Hello?” he said. His voice echoed loudly around him. “Is this a test?”

There was no response.

He walked the twenty yards to the end of the corridor and pushed through the glass doors, into the office where the monitoring equipment was kept, expecting Ted, Laura, or some of the others to welcome or chide him for coming out — a little party maybe. But there was no one.

In fact, it didn't look like anyone had been there in quite a while. The video monitor was turned off. The computer was inoperative. Miscellaneous forms, wadded note papers, and food wrappers littered the counter. Everything had a dry, dusty look. At the far end of the counter was a foot-high stack of newspapers.

Was everyone out to lunch? Had he been abandoned, down there for months with no one caring enough to tell him? Had they just all walked away? This
had
to be some kind of test. 

He ran his finger across the seat of one of the swivel chairs. It came away with an oval of gray dust on the tip.

A quick iciness radiated through his blood. For the first time in more than a year, he was afraid.

 He did a quick check of the adjoining kitchenette, sleeping room, and the restroom. He was definitely alone. Everything was littered, messy, and dusty — it looked as if the people who were supposed to watch him had simply walked away. Everyone was gone, and it was starting to not look like a test.

Martin turned from the counter and went to the door leading to the outside. He had almost forgotten his anticipation of walking outside, under the open sky. When he opened it, the air washed over him like water — cool, unfiltered, unprocessed air, with all the smells of earth and weeds and orchards — and certainly some of the crew would be out there, smoking cigarettes or playing chess or reading. Holding open the heavy glass door, he started to inhale to the bottom of his lungs, but his breath caught in his throat.

Twenty yards away, standing in the middle of the facility's driveway, was a giraffe — a slow-moving, immense giraffe — an actual giraffe with angular spots of brown, eating cherries from the top of a cherry tree. Its soft flat lips moved rhythmically as it chewed, and after a moment it turned and gazed at Martin. Then it went back to its foraging.

It was then that he noticed the silence. There was no noise from the freeway. When he looked over in its direction, he could see a short strip of the four lanes — and they were empty. The only sounds were the whistles of red-wing blackbirds, the chortling of a mockingbird, and across the driveway, the occasional whisking sound of the giraffe moving its muzzle through the top of the cherry tree.

And the air, for all its newness to him, had a strangeness in its smell: not only was there no trace of car odors, there seemed to be no trace of anything other than the smell of thick green weeds and wet gravel in the driveway.

Martin stepped out of the doorway and took a few steps onto the cement slab landing. Around the corner, under the mulberry tree, he saw the two lawn chairs, weeds growing high around them, and the two people there. On a small table, the green neck of an opened wine bottle rose above the weeds.

They sat together in lawn chairs, their heads propped awkwardly together, their hands touching, but from the side of one of their faces, he knew they had been dead for some time. The skin had fallen away and he could see teeth showing through one of their cheeks.

He wanted to see who they were, suspecting it was Ted and Laura, but he remembered their warning — “Stay away from other people till you know what's going on.” Maybe that included dead people.

Now the shaky handwriting began to make some sense, the silence around him began to fit into an ominous pattern, and if Ted and Laura had been dying when they wrote him the note, he would obey it to the letter. He would even stay away from them.

He didn't give the giraffe a second glance as he hurried back inside the office.

He began with the newspapers. The disease, a new and lethal form of influenza, had apparently begun in the Far East, in Central Asia or, some thought, in Mongolia, though no one knew for sure, so by the time it was identified and given the arbitrary name of Mongolian Influenza Virus, it had established itself throughout China, Southeast Asia, and had begun to spill over into India and the Middle East. With the hundreds of thousands of international travelers around the world and the thousands of airline flights crossing borders every day, the world never had a chance.

MIV seemed to be everywhere at once. Its incubation period was long, twelve days, during the last days of which the infected person might only feel the mildest discomfort and was at his most contagious. With the immune system ravaged, when distinct symptoms did begin, they were overwhelming. Most fell into unconsciousness within twenty-four hours and death came two or three days later. For those strong enough to withstand the pneumonia, secondary infections would set in and the infected would die a week later. Strength and resistance were mercilessly punished by the virus.

Several articles that Martin read expressed disbelief that the earth could be subject to a disease more horrifying than AIDS and made reference to what was apparently a popular belief — that MIV was caused by the interaction between AIDS medications and the AIDS virus itself. There were many instances in the last days of homosexuals being hunted down and murdered. IV drug users were also thought to be responsible and were also exterminated by vigilante groups. Eastern Europe saw the return of the pogrom, and in the end, everyone was blamed by someone. Only those with apocalyptic religious beliefs seemed delighted.