The Totem 1979 (32 page)

They were silent, staring at each other.

“Oh, my God.” The medical examiner pounded a fist on the table.

Slaughter walked close. “Take it easy.”

“But I-“

“Take it easy. Everything is going to be all right.”

The medical examiner trembled.

“Something else. The mice died,” Owens told them.

“What are you talking about?”

“We have mice down at the lab for doing tests on viruses,” Owens said. “The mice were born and raised in sterile conditions, as the parents were, and those before them, so we know they’re not contaminated. We can study any symptoms they develop from injections we give them and be certain that the injections caused the symptom. It’s a way of isolating what we’re dealing with and finding what will cure it. Anyhow, a standard test for rabies is to inject infected tissue into mice. If they live, then we’re not dealing with the virus we suspected. If they die, then we have perfect samples of the virus to examine. Well, our first tests on this virus weren’t conclusive. Oh, we knew that it was deadly, but the slides we studied looked a little different than they should have, so I did more tests. Instead of looking at the dog’s brain, I injected several mice.”

“And now they’re dead?”

Owens nodded.

“Well, that isn’t news. You said that it was deadly.”

“But the mice don’t normally develop symptoms for at least a week. These mice died in less than four hours. It was like a spedup version of the rabies symptoms. First, a subtle difference in behavior, then hostility, lack of coordination, finally paralysis and death. The hostility was quite pronounced, although they didn’t snap at one another, only at the glass enclosures. But the point is that instead of surviving for seven days, they barely lasted four hours.”

Slaughter’s mind raced, making jumps in logic. “Show me.”

Owens frowned at him.

“I want to see them. Show me where they are,” Slaughter insisted.

“I didn’t have the instruments I needed. An electron microscope for one thing, so I came up here to-“

“Never mind. Just show me.”

“Over there. I brought them with me.”

Slaughter pivoted toward a metal case and reached to lift its clasp. “It’s all right if I open this?”

Owens nodded. “Everything is sterile. You won’t be infected.”

Slaughter pushed the lid up, staring at the specimens in sealed glass containers. He saw the white fur of mice, and something else that he had dreaded but expected, lifting one container, showing it. The medical examiner had turned now, he and Owens staring, and the mouse in there was snarling at them. Slaughter felt the scrape of its claws through the glass.

“But they were dead, I tell you!” Owens insisted. He crossed to Slaughter, pulling out the other glass containers. In them, every mouse was frantic.

“You’re certain?” Slaughter asked him.

“Don’t you think I know when something’s dead?”

The medical examiner added, “As certain as I was when I examined that boy.”

They continued staring at the frantic mice.

“Then I believe you.” Slaughter grimaced. “I didn’t, but I do now. I don’t know what’s going on, but I do know that it’s happening.” He frowned at the farthest table. “What about the boy? The mother and the father won’t believe us when they see him. I can’t think of any way to tell them.”

“Then we won’t.” The medical examiner braced his shoulders, coming toward them, color in his face now. “I’ll continue with the autopsy. I’d have to do it anyway, to learn how the virus works. I’ll fix that slash across his stomach so it looks like it was part of the autopsy, and the three of us will be the only ones who know.”

Suddenly they looked at one another, understanding the significance of their conspiracy, ever after their dependence on each other.

They were silent. Slaughter nodded, Owens with him.

“Owens, did you bring the samples for the microscope?”

“I’ve got them with the mice.”

“Okay then, let’s get started. Slaughter, if you go up to my office, you’ll find a stack of books beside my desk. Search through the master index and read everything that you can find on rabies. That’s not what we’re dealing with. It’s close enough, though, and we can’t waste time from now on, telling you what we’ll be doing.”

Slaughter studied him. “How long till you know?”

“At least a couple of hours.”

Slaughter glanced at his watch and saw that it was three a.m. “I don’t look forward to the morning.”

“For a lot of reasons.”

“They’ll be coming to me with their questions.”

“Well, let’s see if we can find the answers.”

Slaughter nodded. Trying to smile in encouragement but failing, he started toward the doorway.

Chapter Seven.

“This is what a rabies virus looks like.”

Slaughter peered at where the medical examiner was pointing.

‘Yes, I know. I read about it,” Slaughter told him.

“Fine. Now here’s a micrograph from the electron microscope. The virus from the dead dog.”

Slaughter watched the medical examiner put down the micrograph beside the book that they’d been looking at. He studied it.

He thought about it quite a while. “Well, this one’s thinner than the rabies virus.”

“Yes, that’s one of several contrasts. Normally we say a rabies virus has a bullet shape, but this one looks like, I don’t know …”

“A missile,” Owens said.

They glanced at him.

“Why not? All right, then, a missile.” The medical examiner pointed at the micrograph again. “A missile is in keeping with the speed of this thing anyhow. The point is that a lot of viruses are shaped in general like this. Vesicular stomatitis would be one. But this thing isn’t quite like any of them. It’s much sleeker, and while there’s an indentation at the bottom, there’s no sign of an appendage there. What’s more, the nervous system of the boy was not infected.”

Slaughter looked at him. He knew enough from what he’d read that rabies moved along the nervous system, fed off it, and finally destroyed it. He frowned. “But I thought that-“

“Yes, I know. It shouldn’t be. This is unlike any virus I’ve ever studied. It did infect his limbic brain, however.”

Slaughter didn’t understand. He tried to recollect what he had read, but nothing on that subject came to him.

“The limbic brain,” the medical examiner repeated. “It’s the part around which all the other sections of our brain developed. It’s sometimes called reptilian, but I think of it as animal. It causes our survival instincts, our emotions and Aggressions. Infection there would help explain why that boy acted as he did. Put simply, he became an animal.”

“But what about the coma he went into?”

‘Just don’t rush me. Wait until I get to that. It’s my guess that this virus is transmitted through the bloodstream. That explains the quick communication through the body. You should know that when I looked at where the boy said he was cut by glass, I found some evidence that he’d been bitten. When the doctor at the hospital examined him, he had no reason to assume the boy was lying, and besides the wound was jagged as if from a broken bottle. But the boy was bitten, all right. There isn’t any question. Not more than a day ago. The virus travels through the bloodstream. It’s selective. Only certain cells appeal to it.”

“The limbic brain.”

The medical examiner nodded. “It produces the symptoms of rabies very quickly; passes through, let’s say, a twelve-hour phase in humans, paralyzes, and produces a coma. Evidently when the brain shuts down, the virus becomes dormant. When the victim regains consciousness, the virus starts to work again. It’s really quite efficient, feeding until it produces near death and then holding off until the victim can sustain it once again. Because it passes through the bloodstream, it would show up in the salivary glands, infect the spittle, and pass to another victim in a bite. But if you were cut already and you came in contact with its blood, you’d get it just the same.”

The medical examiner pointed toward the scab on Slaughter’s cheek, and Slaughter suddenly was worried, raising one hand to it, frowning.

“It’s too late to worry, Slaughter. If you’d been infected, we’d have known about it yesterday. But next time don’t be so damned cavalier.”

“If what you say is true, there wasn’t anything that you could do about it anyway.”

“That’s right. Our vaccine would be useless.” The medical examiner reached up to touch his own face then, his lips scabbed and swollen. “I got lucky, too. I would have had it by now if this cut had been contaminated. As it is, I gave myself two antirabies shots. Absolutely useless. Christ, I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

“You say you never saw a virus like this? You never even heard about it?” Slaughter asked.

The medical examiner shook his head.

“Well, I did,” Owens told them.

They studied him.

“I read about it,” Owens said. “Nineteen sixty-nine in Ethiopia. A herd of cattle came down with a special form of rabies, little frenzy, just paralysis. They all collapsed. The owner didn’t know exactly what they had. He gave them up for dead, and then they all recovered.”

“What?” The medical examiner looked astonished. “Nothing can survive it. That’s impossible as far as I know.”

“This herd did. The problem is they still retained the virus and in several days they manifested symptoms once again. They had to be destroyed.

“You’re certain it was rabies?”

“Oh, yes, all the later tests confirmed it. And I read about another case in India two years ago, but this time it was water buffalo.”

“But this thing isn’t rabies. Any vaccine they developed wouldn’t be of use here. Even if it would, there isn’t any time to get it.”

“What would cause a brand new kind of virus?” Slaughter asked.

“You tell me,” the medical examiner responded. “You want to know the truth? I wonder why it doesn’t happen all the time. Never mind a thing like legionnaires’ disease, which evidently was around for quite a while, but no one diagnosed it. Never mind a thing like staph or gonorrhea which mutated into forms resistant to a drug like penicillin. Let’s just go along with my contention that this virus is a new one. Asking what would cause it is like asking why our ancestors developed a big brain from their limbic system and turned into humans. There’s no ready answer. Evolution is an accident. A cell develops in an unusual fashion. Something happens to the DNA. We like to think that everything is fixed and ordered. But it isn’t. Things are changing all around us, not so quickly that we recognize the change, but it’s occurring, people growing taller, dogs whose breeds are now defective, dying out. We recognize extremes, of course. We call them monsters. But the really startling changes are occurring in those simple life forms that we hardly ever notice. Cells. Their time scale is much different from our own, much faster. Evolution has sped up for them, the chance for random variants. But evolution doesn’t even have to be in stages. Quantum leaps can happen in an instant. Every time a person gets an X ray, tiny bullets zinging past those chromosomes. You want a model? Let’s try this one. Let’s assume we’ve got a dog. The dog has rabies, but the symptoms haven’t shown up yet. The dog is hurt, though. Let’s say that it’s got a broken leg or some internal swelling so the owner takes it in for X rays, and the dog is treated and gets better. But the damage has been done. The rabies virus has by chance been struck by just one X ray. Hell, it only takes one mutant cell that lodges in the limbic brain and starts to reproduce. Now the owner goes on holiday. He takes the dog up into the mountains. The dog goes crazy, and it runs away. Contagion starts.”

“What you said about these dogs up in the hills. Psychopathic animal behavior,” Slaughter told him.

“Sure. Just two roads from the valley,” Owens said. “The mountains are around us, so the virus has been localized. But why did no one ever recognize it until now?”

“Because, so far as I remember, no one ever tested for it,” the medical examiner said. “Ranchers maybe shot a few dogs and then buried them, but did you ever have a look at one?”

Owens shook his head.

“Well, there you have it.”

“But you told me Friday night that people have been bitten by them,” Slaughter said. “They would have come in for the rabies treatment but, in spite of that, have developed symptoms.”

“And they did come in for treatment, and there wasn’t any problem. So the dog that bit them didn’t have the virus, or the virus didn’t mutate until later. That’s no argument against the model.”

“But the virus is so virulent that everything would have it by now,” Slaughter insisted.

“I don’t think so. The attacks we’ve seen were plainly murderous. I doubt too many animals or people would survive them. Plus, the victims must be weakened by the virus. When the winter comes, it likely kills them. That’s a natural control. We haven’t studied any long term consequences of the virus. Maybe there’s a calming process. I don’t know at this point.”

“So why now would the virus show up suddenly in town?”

“You know why as well as I do. All it takes is just one dog to wander in. But I think there’s another reason. Don’t forget the winter was a hard one. It drives victims down from where their normal hunting routes are in the mountains. That’s one version of a model anyhow. I might be wrong. At least, it’s something. What we do know, in addition to our tests, is that the victims are nocturnal.”

The medical examiner pointed toward the case that contained the jars of supposedly dead mice that Owens had brought from the veterinary clinic. Owens had discovered that the mice were peaceful if concealed in darkness, that their rage was manifested only when their eyes were aggravated by light.

“That’s another symptom this virus has in common with the rabies virus,” the medical examiner continued. “Intense sensitivity to light. That was why the dead boy snarled the way he did. The moon was shining through the upper windows of the mansion. And that helps explain why so much trouble has occurred at night. The victims hide and sleep in daylight. Then they come out after dark, but now the moon is almost full, and they’re reacting to it.”