The methodology was simple. Escalating reports of a blood-borne pathogen carried by insects, high fatality rate, drug-resistant. The government had been frightened of pandemic. They had pushed immunization, pushed it hard, and in the end, they got their pandemic, all right. A vector that began at vaccination and exploded outward, extravagant. Uncontainable.
It had begun on the West Coast, vaccination facilities popping up in grocery stores and shopping centers. And everyone lined up. It had taken approximately six hours to ascertain that something was wrong, but in that time, the event had affected nearly half a million people. And it spread like fire. In a way, it was good the infection came on fast. Otherwise, they might have all had the shot, every last one of them, offering their arms to the needle without the slightest indication that anything was amiss.
“What if it’s a signature,” Jacobs said, turning to her.
“I don’t follow.”
“A carbon dioxide signature. Blood-seekers—they know to come after you. They follow a trail of chemicals, a stamp. Mosquitoes can sense living blood from almost forty meters.”
Grace nodded as he spoke, not comprehending his train of thought exactly, but not needing to. The words sounded round, fat, reassuring.
“We could verify it,” he said. “All we’d need is a controlled environment, some preliminary tests. We could keep going, get to Rosewood. They’ll have everything we need. It would only take a few trials. I mean, then we’d know. And Rosewood’s only four miles out. If we run—”
“If there’s any still in the woods, they’ll be on us in two seconds, sir. I don’t see much chance.”
Jacobs stood up, brushing impatiently at his fatigues. “There’s a way, though. There’s always a way.”
He started down the ladder, his boots clattering on the wooden rungs. There was a smear of blood on the back of his shirt. Grace squashed the cigarette under her toe and wondered again if they were only prolonging something inevitable.
It didn’t matter. With a purpose, a mission, the blackness of recent days did not seem so close. They would go to Rosewood and test his theory. Jacobs was not Whitaker, but he was capable. He knew things. And a short-term itinerary was better than none at all. They would go to Rosewood and find a brilliant solution. After a minute, Grace rose and followed Jacobs down.
In the bathroom, she found him standing over the body of Knotts, legs splayed to avoid the mess. He had opened the medicine cabinet and was rummaging along the shelves.
“What are you after?”
“DEET,” he said, flinging bottles and tubes from cabinet haphazardly. “Why don’t these rednecks have any fucking DEET?”
“You said it before, sir. There’s no bugs up here.”
The floor at his feet was littered with adhesive bandages, aspirin, a topical antibiotic.
“Knotts was up from Florida,” she said.
Jacobs gave her a distracted look, then turned back to the cabinet.
“They got bugs in Florida like you wouldn’t believe. I bet he carries it in with his personal effects. A thing like that, it just gets to be a habit.”
“Check him then, check his things if you think he’s got it.” Another bottle hit the floor. The cap flew off and a cascade of white pills rattled across the linoleum, washed up against the motionless form of Knotts, got stuck in the congealing blood.
“And you think we could keep them off us? With mosquito repellent, sir?”
“It doesn’t repel, it interferes. It corrupts receptors.”
The logic was mysterious. Grace was not much in the way of parsing scientific theories, but he seemed to be missing a vital link, some key component. A person is not a mosquito, she thought of saying, but in the end, she knelt over Knotts’s body and began to pick through his satchel. The bottle of bug spray was very small.
“Give it to me,” Jacobs said, peeling his shirt over his head.
“Is this enough?”
“It’ll have to be, won’t it? It doesn’t last more than an hour, hour and a half, anyway. We just need to get beyond them.” He was already smearing the stuff down his arms. “Take off your vest.”
“I’m sorry, sir?”
“Take it off. And your shirt. We need it thick, all over. Put it in your hair.”
“What if it doesn’t work?”
“Does it matter, then? We’re dead anyway. Everyone’s dead eventually.”
And that was logic she couldn’t argue with.
They reached the Rosewood complex shortly after midnight. The moon was pale and heavy in the sky, fat as a dogtick. Their progress went undetected, although Grace had no position as to whether it was due at all to the DEET.
They crossed the perimeter of the complex. The west entrance already stood open, a dark gaping maw. Jacobs lit his xenon lamp, holding it to the doorway. Somewhere beyond the halo of light, a shape was moving.
Grace loosened her gun in its holster. “Something’s there.”
“Good,” Jacobs said. “We just need one. I want one alone in the lab for fifteen minutes.”
Grace nodded and didn’t answer. There was never just one.
From far away, a shrill giggle rose. It echoed back and forth in the corridor, trickling down the walls. Another came from somewhere in the northern sector.