Ultraviolet (3 page)

Did they?

She cooperated as best she could. Again, she didn’t have much of a choice—any at all, as a matter of fact—but she’d always been an optimistic person and she couldn’t let go of the hope that if she did everything they asked, submitted to each and every one of the dizzying and inexplicable array of medical tests without protesting, they—that omnipotent, royal
They
—would let her, and of course her unborn child, go free.

From her, the feds definitely got their money’s worth in terms of interesting information. As it turned out, in some ways the old legends that had grown up around the disease over the years were true . . . well, in a warped, slightly ghoulish sort of way. Most, of course, were not, and more than a few of the government’s scientists looked the fool as a result of their silly assumptions. One of those prime times had been when she’d looked puzzled and clearly sardonic as a team of analysts marched into the examination room and showed her, of all things, a gold crucifix.

The disease was ultimately called Hemophagia, and its primary symptom was detrimental to no one but the carrier—that unfortunate man or woman who soon discovered that he or she possessed an aggressively accelerated metabolism. The medical team was intrigued to find her average body temperature was one hundred seven, even though she insisted she felt fine and her pregnancy was advancing normally. Electrocardiogram tapes consistently recorded a strong and steady resting heart rate of an unheard-of hundred fifty beats a minute.

It all seemed good, but as the old saying went, nothing really good comes without a price. All this cellular activity took an unwanted toll on the carrier’s body. With their metabolisms speeding along at unprecedented rates, the victims of Hemophagia could expect to survive, if they were lucky, no more than ten years after their first exposure to the disease.

Appearance-wise, well, there wasn’t much to see. Yes, they had slightly elongated canines, but certainly not the wolflike teeth of legend, and even these were easily attributed to the massively increased density of bone and dentin throughout the body. On a physical level, they were simply stronger, and if you checked the skeletal X-rays of any carrier, you could see right on the films that Hemophagia accelerated healing. Some of the deeper wounds inflicted on the young woman at the height of her “testing” healed in only a matter of hours.

As the disease progressed, its symptoms became more pronounced. No, its victims didn’t suck blood . . . but it did cripple the body’s ability to regenerate blood platelets. As a result, Hemophages were pale and anemic, and they required frequent blood transfusions to stay alive. The longer they were afflicted with the disease, the more sensitive they became to daylight. The pregnant young woman was a prime example of that—full term in her pregnancy, every time she walked in the hospital gardens she had to use a cane and carry a heavy black umbrella to protect herself against the glare of the noonday sun.

All that stuff about silver bullets and stakes? Total, ridiculous fantasy. Yes, the Hemophages were a little faster and a little stronger than an uninfected human, but they died just like everyone else.

And just to be sure, the feds tried out that theory on their “guests” in a number of unsavory ways.

Her belly was flat now, bisected by a cesarean scar where they’d taken her unborn child out of her belly and disappeared with it—she didn’t even know if it had been a boy or a girl. Were they experimenting on the baby just like they continued to experiment on her? Her mind screamed with need and rage, but physically she was too drained of will to protest, too weak and sedated to fight. Her child was gone and she was outnumbered—she could never escape. There was nothing to do but submit to the straps and the chair and the endless parade of medical personnel and military guards—

—even when they killed her.

She was surrounded by monitors and screens, but she still didn’t know enough to see the inevitable coming, she was still too innocent. The electric shock was . . . unexpected. Indescribably painful. And, of course, utterly lethal. What the smug scientists discovered, adding another interest point to their charts and their records and their graphs, was that Hemophages were like anyone else: if you killed them, they stayed dead. Unless, like this young woman, you needed them for just a little while longer. In that case, a nice pair of paddles, a bit of lubricant, and a portable defibrillator would work just fine, and so they could continue their experiments.

But the world didn’t end at the locked doors of the laboratories. Outside it was chaos, first one—the discovery of the disease—then another transnational conflict. The second one was the more devastating—wars fueled by religion usually are. It wasn’t long before the protests and the marches mutated into full civil war, and the catalyst for
that
was the government, doing what governments have done since the beginning of time: trying to make a bigger, better, faster, stronger weapon.

By the time the federal doctors started withdrawing enough daily vials of her blood to see if they could alter it to make a better and faster soldier, the woman was numb, someone who’d lost everything of value and was now barely anything above a still-breathing zombie. In another part of the medical complex, in a laboratory marked
CLASSIFIED ACCESS ONLY—IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED
, a group of high-ranking men in military uniforms—lots of shoulder stars and bars—were given a detailed tour by a distinguished-looking doctor. Even though the doctor had salt and pepper hair and carried himself well, it wasn’t lost on his guests just how eager he was to please them—after all, federal money was always a boon to any contractor project.

There are some things in the universe that always turn out the same way . . . the
wrong
way. Some folks call it “Murphy’s Law”—whatever can go wrong, will. Others just label it plain old stupidity, the hunt for power, the never-ending greed inherent in the DNA of those mere mortals who can never seem to control or stop their own repetitious mistakes.

They didn’t make a better soldier, or a faster one, or a braver one. As he watched the generals and the lab supervisor move across to the other end of the facility, one of the lab technicians frowned, then pressed his forehead back up to the eyepiece of his microscope. What he was seeing was anything but good—the original strain of virus had been devastating to its victims, yes, but only over time. The virus was just an anomaly, an oddity of nature that could doubtlessly be contracted by some as-yet unknown method, but it wasn’t even contagious—a carrier couldn’t give it to a noninfected person, even with blood-to-blood exposure. And like smallpox, there was a segment of the population—in this instance, most of it—that was simply immune.

But this strain, the new one born of DNA modification and laboratory processing and which they’d dubbed “H.P.V.”—HemoPhagic Virus . . .

This was more virulent, extremely fast-moving, highly contagious, and just like its predecessor, incurable.

The technician sighed and looked up again, then rolled his stool away from the lab table. He couldn’t wait any longer—this had to be brought to the attention of not only his supervisor, but those higher up the chain of command. His supervisor was a nobody, a brown-nosing guy who looked more distinguished and intelligent than he actually was. The higher-ups had to know the dangers inherent with this kind of DNA modification, and if the lab tech himself had to take a little bit of heat for being the one to precipitate the closure of the project, then so be it. Med and lab techs were a high-demand field nowadays, and he could always find another job.

He reached forward with his left hand and spun the coarse adjustment knob on his Meiji microscope until the stage lowered, then tugged the glass slide out of the stage clips and lifted it from the stage. He started to turn toward a sterilized petri dish, then realized that for some reason, his thumb was stinging. When he glanced down at his hand, everything he saw registered in his eyes but didn’t want to feed into his brain. Time changed, went into a sort of slow-motion crawl as his knees went weak and his breath stuttered with terror. It was a damned good thing he wasn’t standing far away from his stool.

His first mistake had been not removing the slide more carefully from the stage—he’d cut the pad of his thumb, ever so slightly, on the bottom corner of it. It was nothing, really, no more than a prick, like the tiny wounds that were the result of the glass shards they’d used in blood testing back in the twentieth century. A minute drop of his own blood was smeared across the skin’s surface, barely noticeable. Like sticking your finger with a needle when you try to sew on a button, and hadn’t his mom always said that a button wouldn’t stay on if you didn’t add a little blood?

But the second mistake—oh, that was the killer, all right. Literally.

He’d put a bit too much solution on the slide, only a half drop over the recommended amount, but it was enough to make what was on the slide squeeze out the edges. And the edge, of course, was exactly what had punctured his skin . . .

He was infected.

The technician barely held in his gasp, then abruptly plunked back onto his stool. His heart was thundering in his chest—he could hear the strong and steady rush of blood in his ears, see his vision throb around the outside edges of his eyes the way it did when he sometimes had a migraine and he didn’t have the migraine-suppressant inhaler handy. But he didn’t want his heart to be doing that right now, because every involuntary contraction of that muscle in his chest pushed the HemoPhagic Virus farther and faster into his system—

Who was he kidding?

He was infected. Period. If they found out . . .

He folded his thumb into the palm of his hand along with the slide and made a loose fist, then slid his hand nonchalantly into the pocket of his lab coat. He had a single, nearly panicked moment when a glance in his supervisor’s direction made him think the hawk-eyed man was staring at him, but no . . . the man’s gaze went back to the general who was yap-yap-yapping at his side. He spent a long,
very
long, ninety seconds bent over his microscope and acting like he was studying his work; then, when he was sure the bleeding had stopped, he calmly walked to the bathroom and washed his thumb. After that he wrapped the slide in a wad of toilet paper and smashed it under the heel of his shoe. Then, when his hands finally stopped shaking, he flushed the evidence down the toilet, and he and his destructive little secret went back to work.

And that, as they say, was that.

THREE

Things changed even more after the mutated version of the HemoPhagic Virus got out of the lab and insinuated itself among the ranks of the uninfected. The disease established itself so rapidly in a new building that a man who’d gone to work that morning feeling just fine might easily come out at lunchtime to discover that the sunbeams felt like lasers on the surface of his eyes. It went rapidly out of control—common sense and extreme sanitary habits could have gone a long way toward keeping the numbers on the reasonable side—and spiraled rapidly into the realm of panic. Mankind has always leaned toward sensationalism and exaggeration. After all, where’s the excitement in not blowing everything out of proportion?

VAMPIRISM EPIDEMIC!

The words were splashed across the newspaper headlines and the news programs. At first, victims of the contagion were required only to register, the logic being that this would enable medical workers and facilities to easily identify them in case of sickness or accident. After all, hadn’t that same system worked for diabetics and HIV victims before the diseases had been eradicated? But there were different things involved here, different stakes—no pun intended—and then the clerks refused to work unless they were issued nose and mouth masks, and no amount of pointing out that it was a blood-borne pathogen, not airborne, would make them change their minds.

When the news footage showed the long lines of H.P.V. victims being registered by heavily protected admin personnel, the public became even more mistrustful of not only those who had the virus, but the information they were getting from the authorities. The rumors began and grew, and your average Mr. and Mrs. John Doe insisted that
they,
the carriers, be more readily identifiable. The human rights organizations fought but the government sided with the uninfected—those voters who were the majority and who would live
longer—
and so the H.P.V. carriers were ordered to wear identifying armbands, bloodred swatches of material bearing an ominous-looking three-syringe symbol. It became a common sight to see entire families traveling together while huddling beneath semi-sheer black veils that protected their oversensitive eyes from the sun. It also became just as familiar to see them pass by shop windows on which signs had been posted showing the three-syringe symbol within a red circle and slash. Human rights activists screamed, but in the end things moved much too quickly for them to even so much as plead their case in court.

Then came the concentration camps.

Publicly the government called them “containment facilities,” but the people forced inside them knew what they really were. History, it seemed, really
was
doomed to repeat itself, although this time it was much quieter and more insidious. The camps of previous world wars had been tragically honest about their purpose, but these new camps, the ones for H.P.V. victims, started out under the guise of innocence. Despite the governmental promises, it wasn’t long before no one heard from any of the thousands of people who were locked inside. It started with the single people, the men and women whose registration clearly showed there was no one to contact in the event of an emergency, no one to miss them if they weren’t around. Then it spread to the rest of them, entire families and communities, all those men, women, and children who were so expensive to house and feed and clothe and, of course, provide with medical care. Ultimately they, and the pathetic belongings they’d been able to carry with them, simply . . .