The Nirvana Plague (36 page)

“I’ll trade you that car for any car on this lot. Straight up. As long as it doesn’t have one of those transponder things in it.”

Jim Dandy tapped his lower lip with the edge of one knuckle while he thought about it. His eyes twinkled under the pressure.

“Now ma’am,” he said, in a professional way, “the law has required every motor vehicle manufactured or imported into this country in the past thirteen years to be equipped with a functional IFF device. And I’m afraid I just don’t have anything quite as old as that on the lot at this particular time.”

Ally pointed at a beat-up old pickup truck near the sales office. “What about that one?”

Jim Dandy’s smile returned with a sly curl. “That old truck, ma’am? Well, that’s
my
truck, you see. I drive that truck, ma’am, cause I can’t sell it.”

“Well, Mr. Dandy, you just did.”

There wasn’t much juice in the old truck. Ally stopped at the next chargepark they came to, just the other side of town, near the interstate.

She took Karen’s money from her, and leaving her in the truck, she went inside and used all the money they had to buy a cashcard. She came back out, plugged the truck in, and pulled Karen out of the cab.

“From now on, it’s cash only,” she said. “We better get rid of our electronics too. Anything that might be trackable. Give me your tablet.”

She took Karen’s tablet and threw it, along with her own tablet and her phone, into a dumpster behind the building.

They needed to kill time while the truck charged, so they went inside and sat down at a booth for lunch.

The waitress brought coffee. They ordered sandwiches.

“We shouldn’t do anything that requires us to identify ourselves,” Ally said. “No credit cards. No staying in hotels. We can sleep in the back of the truck. We’ll stop somewhere and get some sleeping bags.”

“What about when it rains?” Karen said.

“Sleep sitting up in the cab, I guess.”

“You’re really having fun, aren’t you?”

“Aren’t you?”

Karen looked out through the sheet of polarized plastic tint at the truck sitting nose on to the charge meter. “That truck is even a worse piece of junk than my car. Carl is going to kill you.”

“Well, we’re on the lam now. Can’t be too careful.”

“What makes you think they’ll be looking for us? With everything else that is going on, we’re nobody.”

“The highway patrol,” Ally said. “Did you see the camera on the dash? You know, they make a recording every traffic of stop. Besides the officer had plenty of time to run our plates.”

Karen said nothing, looked out the window. Thinking about what had happened between Ally and the police officer made her feel strange.

“There’s no need to be concerned,” Ally said.

She looked back at Ally, her eyes bright with fear and sorrow. “Roger used to say that. After.”

After IDD.

Marley went into Roger’s room without gowning and gloving.

Roger had his clothes back on, though the bed sheets still lay in a heap in a corner of the room. Roger was back in the chair beside the bed, not straddling it, sitting very upright, hands folded in his lap, feet flat on the floor, eyes closed. Very still. He didn’t stir when Marley entered.

Marley sat down in the opposite chair. “Afternoon, Roger.”

Roger did not reply or move.

Marley checked his vital signs on his tablet. He was awake. All biometrics nominal. Had been eating and defecating and passing fluids within acceptable ranges. Though all the IDD’s seemed to eat less than average normals with similar body mass, none of them had insufficient caloric intakes, leaving aside those whose appetites were suppressed due to medication effects.

“Roger?” he said a little louder.

No response.

“Are you ignoring me, Roger?”

No response.

Marley flipped to the next biometric screen. Brainwave activity nominal, but interesting. Both alpha and beta waves showed more regularity than normal for waking states. But other indicators clearly indicated that Roger was wide awake.

“I’m going to touch your arm, Roger. Since you aren’t responding to me, I have to assess you for catatonia.”

Marley leaned forward and took hold of Roger’s left elbow with his right hand and lifted it away from his body.

Roger offered no resistance, nor any assistance.

Marley released his arm. It fell back into place under its own weight.

He took his hand. Flexed and rotated his wrists. No resistance, no waxiness. Reflexes normal.

Marley sat back and scribbled some notes.
Awake but unresponsive. No indications of catatonia.

He sat a while longer, watching to see whether Roger would give any sign he was awake. He brought up his surveillance record and ran it backwards. Roger had been sitting like this for six minutes. Before that he’d used the toilet. Before that he’d been sitting in his bed. Before that he’d eaten some of the lunch that had been put through the zero-barrier chute by an orderly.

Marley gave him five long minutes to drop the act, then he stood up, and, carefully controlling his tone, said goodbye and went out.

He wanted to know what Delacourt thought about that, so instead of moving on to Peters, he went straight up to the video room. Benford was there too. The three of them retired to the little glass meeting room as soon as he arrived.

“What do you mean going into an isolation room without gowning?” Benford said.

“Come on, colonel. What’s the point?”

“The point is protocol, doctor. By rights I should slap you into isolation now.”

“In fact, per protocol, you shouldn’t have let me exit the room at all. But you did because you know as well as I do that there is no microbial vector for IDD.”

“Until we find some other vector we’re going to assume—”

He turned to Delacourt: “What did you make of it? Talk about not playing the game. And he’s wide awake too.”

Delacourt nodded. “Yes. Interesting. If I didn’t know better I’d say he didn’t want to talk to you.”

“If you didn’t know better.”

“So how are you feeling now? What is your emotional state?”

“Pissed off.”

“What about?”

“Because he’s wasting my time. We don’t have time for this bullshit.”

“No,” Benford said, “we certainly don’t.”

Delacourt grinned. “I bet Roger feels the same way.”

“I think we need to get back on track here,” Benford said.

Marley tapped the tabletop irritably. “You said I could have ten days.”

“Do you really want to spend the next week talking to the wall? The man is dysfunctional, Carl. Peters and Reynolds are even worse.”

“Are you sure about that? I mean we’ve got them locked up in empty plastic rooms with nothing to do. What
would
be functional in that situation? It’s a wonder they’re not all screaming and hallucinating twenty-four hours a day.”

“A week from now,” Benford said, “there are going to be twice as many cases in the wild as there are now. Ten-thousand more cases.”

“We’ve got a hundred other cases to experiment on in the meantime.”

“I need to start seeing some progress. The time you’re spending on this experiment, you could be spending on something that actually has some likelihood of making a difference.”

Karen and Ally idled away three hours in the coffee shop while the pickup charged. They didn’t talk much. Karen felt disoriented, and slightly fearful. Ally again offered to let her take the truck and continue without her. In response, Karen just shook her head.

They hit the road again once the truck was charged and drove on the rest of the day and into the night.

Toward nightfall, they stopped at an anonymous strip mall in an anonymous town, and Ally, leaving Karen in the truck, paid cash at an outfitters for a couple of cheap sleeping bags.

They finally stopped around midnight at an overnight chargepark outside Minneapolis, plugged in the truck, and climbed into the back to get some sleep.

It was good to lie down. Karen had continued to feel queasy and panicked all day long — ever since the traffic stop. She hadn’t taken another turn at the wheel the whole day. Ally hadn’t asked her to, and she wouldn’t have been able to drive. She couldn’t get the images out of her mind: the officer’s handgun pointed at her, the way that his face contorted as he screamed at her, the way that Ally’s face, pinned against the hood of the car, had
not
looked contorted.

She lay there in the cold truck bed, shoulder to shoulder with Ally staring up at the minute stars and listening to the sounds of other travelers and haul drivers coming and going — door slams, mumbled chatter, engines whining up and down. Now, at last, the flashing images began to fade. Her racing heart began to slow.

Then she heard Ally say, quietly: “It will be all right, Karen.”

For a long time Karen didn’t reply, and didn’t plan to, but then, rather suddenly, she wanted to. “When did you get it?” she said.

Ally answered as if the question was of little significance. “I don’t know.”

“Was it today?”

“No.”

“Yesterday?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But definitely not last week?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could it have been last week?”

“It could have been.”

“Could it have been last month?”

“I don’t think so.”

Aside from everything else that happened today, it frightened Karen that Ally had
it
. She told herself that it was no different than Roger having it — but it
was
different. In Roger’s case, IDD had begun to bring him back to her. It had given her hope that they could be together again. In Roger’s case, it offered her a way out of her loneliness. But Ally was
normal
. Or she had been. And Ally had
done
it to someone else. So IDD was not how you recovered from a psychotic disease. It was something else. Something that could happen to anyone.

After a moment she said: “What is it like?”

It took a while for Ally to answer, and Karen wondered if she’d gone to sleep, but then she said, in her deep voice in the darkness: “It’s not like anything, Karen.”

The conversation continued slowly — each question, each answer, coming after a thoughtful pause.