Chapter Three — "The First Night"

  July 9–10, 1993 — Deer Camp, Knox Country, Knox Exclusion Zone

  Diane had done her best work at night.

  Eleven years in the ER had built her around the rhythms of a hospital after midnight — the way the fluorescent hum took on a different quality, the way a ward at two in the morning told you things a ward at noon wouldn't. She had learned to read the nighttime breathing of a room the way some people read weather — the difference between the sleep of someone healing and the sleep of someone fighting something, between a body at rest and a body working. The skill had been built in hallways and curtained bays and the silence of a nurses' station at three a.m. when the monitors were steady and the building itself seemed to breathe. She had not expected to need it in a deer camp in the woods.

  She lay on her back on the floor with her eyes open and read the room.

  Lily on the cot, the slow deep breath of a child genuinely asleep — the rhythm even, the exhale complete, a looseness in the shoulders that meant she had gone all the way down. Diane counted the respirations out of habit. Twelve a minute. Normal. The first normal number she'd counted all day.

  Gary beside her, one hand on her wrist the way he slept when things were bad — not clutching, just present, a point of contact that said I'm here in the only language sleep allows. Out within minutes of lying down the way men who had spent their whole lives doing physical work went out, sudden and complete, the body taking what the mind wouldn't give it permission to take if it were awake.

  Jesse against the wall with his knees up. Not asleep. Breathing too deliberately, too evenly, the measured cadence of someone performing rest. She had watched him learn to fake sleep when he was nine years old — lying rigid in his bed, eyes shut too tight, breath held on a count — and he had not improved at it in seven years. He was listening. She could feel it the way she felt a patient awake behind closed eyes — the attention in the stillness, the body oriented toward sound.

  The soldiers arranged in the spaces remaining — Cutler and Webb near the door, Shores on his side with his face to the wall, Briggs in the corner opposite Jesse with his jacket across his face. Reyes and Cross still outside on rotation, which she registered by their absence the same way she'd registered a flatlined monitor in a quiet ward — not by what was there but by what wasn't.

  Morrow in the chair by the window. Not pretending.

  And in the far corner, separated from the rest by a few feet of deliberate distance that everybody had understood without discussing — Hicks.

  She had checked him again at half past ten, when the lamp was low enough that the transaction could be quiet. Her hand on his forehead, the skin dry and hot, the heat radiating into her palm the way a stove radiates after the burner's been turned off — residual, deep, coming from somewhere inside the body's architecture that the surface was only beginning to report. The fever was worse. Not critical — not yet — but the trajectory was wrong. She knew that trajectory. She had watched it trace its line across the charts at Cortman Medical on July 2nd, July 3rd, the fever climbing in the stepped pattern the summer flu produced — plateau, spike, plateau, spike — until the plateaus stopped and it was all spike and then the patient coded and then the patient came back as something that didn't have a fever anymore because it didn't have a temperature at all.

  She sat up slowly, careful not to wake Gary, and found Vasquez already awake across the room. The woman was sitting with her back against the wall and her eyes open, watching the room the way Diane was watching the room — reading it, assessing it, the shared discipline of women who had been trained to notice what was wrong before it announced itself.

  They looked at each other in the dark.

  They sat on the porch steps with the door pulled almost shut behind them, close enough to hear the room and far enough to talk. The night was hot and still and thick — the air sitting on the skin like damp cloth, the sulfur smell stronger now than it had been during the day, as if the heat had been cooking it out of the ground and the night was releasing it. The tree line was a deeper black against a sky that held no stars — overcast, or haze, or something else, the purple-gray ceiling that had been hanging over Knox Country for days now, filtering the light in ways that made the familiar wrong.

  "Tell me what you know," Vasquez said. No preamble. Diane had already decided she liked this woman.

  "I worked the ER through the third," Diane said. "I saw the flu come in on the second. Saw it change on the third." She paused. The next part was the part she hadn't said aloud, not to Gary, not to anyone, the words held in the same place she held the things she saw in the ER that she didn't bring home — not because they were secret but because saying them out loud made them real in a different way, gave them weight and shape and permanence. "I saw three patients die of the flu that day. Fever, organ failure, the way a bad flu can kill someone if they're vulnerable. Two of them were older. One was thirty-one." She stopped. "I watched all three of them come back."

  Vasquez was quiet.

  "They hadn't been bitten," Diane said. "None of them had been anywhere near anyone who turned. They caught the flu and they died of the flu and then they got up." She kept her voice even the way she'd kept it even at the nurses' station on July 3rd while the hallways filled with sounds that hallways were never supposed to make. It was an old skill. It was the skill she was most tired of having. "So whatever they're saying about bites spreading it — that's not the whole picture. Maybe not even the main picture."

  "Morrow's arm," Vasquez said.

  "He's afraid of it for the wrong reason."

  Vasquez turned that over. "You're going to tell him."

  "I'm going to tell him when it's useful to tell him. Right now he's functioning. Fear is keeping him sharp and the fear is not entirely misplaced — an infected scratch can kill him six other ways even if that's not how this spreads." She looked at the trees. "When the fear stops being useful I'll tell him."

  Vasquez nodded slowly. The nod of a woman filing information and trusting the source.

  "Hicks," she said.

  "Yes."

  "How long."

  "The fever started — when?"

  "He was off on the seventh," Vasquez said. "I noticed it and didn't say anything because I didn't know what I was looking at yet." A brief pause. Something being set down honestly, the way you set down a tool you'd been carrying too long. "I know what I'm looking at now."

  "If the pattern I saw at Cortman holds, he has a day. Maybe two." Diane paused. "Maybe less. It moves faster in some people. I don't know why."

  Vasquez was quiet for a long moment. Down the logging road, Cross was a shadow at the edge of visibility, motionless the way good sentries were motionless — not the stillness of someone standing still but the stillness of someone who had made stillness into a task.

  "He needs to be told," Vasquez said. "Greer."

  "I know."

  "He won't take it well."

  "Does anyone?"

  Vasquez made the sound again — the one that wasn't quite anything, the one Diane had already started to understand as her version of agreement. A sound that lived in the space between acknowledgment and resignation, closer to the first than the second.

  "He'll do the right thing," Vasquez said. "He always does the right thing. The problem is he figures out what the right thing is by measuring it against his orders, and his orders—"

  "Were written on the sixth."

  "Were written on the sixth," Vasquez agreed.

  They sat in the heat and the dark. The crickets were loud and steady, the one sound that hadn't changed since before any of this — the same sound these woods had made in July for a hundred years, indifferent to the fact that the species listening to it had begun to eat itself. Somewhere in the trees something moved and then was still. Neither of them reacted. That was another thing you learned fast in July 1993 — which sounds you stood up for and which you sat with, and the ratio was changing every day in one direction.

  "In the morning," Diane said. "Before we move."

  "Before we move," Vasquez agreed.

  Diane put her hand on the porch railing and looked at it for a moment — the peeling paint, the soft wood under it, somebody's weekend project from a few years back that was never quite finished. The ordinary evidence of an ordinary life that had been going on here until it stopped. There were coffee cans on this porch and rusted nails and a glider that tilted when you sat on it and none of it was relevant anymore except as a reminder that relevance could change very fast.

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  She went back inside. Stepped over Gary's legs. Lay down beside him and felt his hand find her wrist again, automatic, the reflex of a man whose body knew where she was even when his mind was somewhere else.

  Jesse was still awake. She could feel him across the room, the quality of his attention, the listening. He had heard her get up. He had heard her come back. He had probably heard the murmur of voices on the porch, too low to make out the words but loud enough to know that the adults were talking about something they wouldn't say in daylight. She wondered how much of the week he'd assembled from exactly this — fragments overheard, tones decoded, the architecture of crisis built from the pieces the adults thought they were keeping to themselves.

  She closed her eyes. She did not sleep.

  Morrow heard it first because he hadn't slept.

  He had sat in the chair by the window for four hours, watching the dark through the gap in the shutters where the plywood didn't quite meet the frame. The gap was an inch wide and it showed him a strip of the logging road and the tree line beyond it and the slow patrol of whoever was walking the perimeter — Cross's steady, metronomic circuit, then Reyes' tighter, more watchful pattern, the two men's approaches to the same task as different as their approaches to everything else. He had listened to the room settle behind him, the breathing patterns shifting as exhaustion pulled people under one by one, and he had sat with the knowledge of Hicks in the corner and the scratch on his own arm and the distance between what he'd told Gary on the porch and what he hadn't told anyone.

  A sound in the corner — not dramatic, barely there. Someone's breathing had changed, the body working harder than it had been an hour ago. A low sound that was almost nothing and was not nothing.

  He crossed the room in the dark with the practiced silence of a man who had spent twenty years moving through spaces where noise was a liability. He crouched beside Hicks and put his hand to the man's forehead the way Diane had done earlier — palm flat, fingers spread, reading the skin — and the heat that came back was wrong. Not warm. Hot. The body had stopped negotiating with whatever was inside it and had started fighting, and the fighting was costing more than it was winning.

  Hicks opened his eyes.

  They looked at each other in the dark.

  "Sergeant," Hicks said. Just that. His voice was flat — worn through panic to something on the other side of it. Not calm, exactly, but leveled, the way a road is level after a grader has been over it.

  "I know," Morrow said.

  "I should've—"

  "I know," Morrow said again. Not unkind. The way you said something when the accounting didn't matter anymore and the only thing left was the present tense.

  Hicks looked at the ceiling. The kerosene lamp had burned down to a blue glow that put no light on anything, just a faint warmth in the corner of the eye that said something is still burning. "Is it—" He stopped. Started again. "Am I going to turn."

  Morrow was quiet for a moment. He thought about what he knew and what he didn't know and the distance between them that was still too large to cross with any honesty. He thought about the four people he'd watched turn and the one who'd been bitten and the three who hadn't and the theory that wasn't a theory yet and wasn't nothing either.

  "I don't know how it works yet," he said. "Nobody does." He paused. "I know it's not just bites."

  Hicks absorbed that. "That's not better."

  "No."

  A long quiet. Somewhere outside, Cross walked his slow perimeter, his boots barely audible on the dry ground — the soft, rhythmic crunch of a man walking a path he'd already walked a dozen times, the sound as steady and meaningless as a clock. Inside, the room breathed around them, eight people in the dark at the end of the first day of what the world had become.

  "Memphis," Hicks said. Unprompted, the way people said things at night when they weren't sure how many nights were left and needed to put something real into the air before the air ran out.

  "Yeah."

  "I've got a girl there. Janet." He stopped. "She doesn't know—" He gestured vaguely at the room, the darkness, the week that had just happened. The gesture cost him something — his arm moved and his face tightened and Morrow saw the effort of a body that was beginning to charge interest on every motion. "She doesn't know any of this yet. The radio, outside the zone, they're saying it's a quarantine. That the Army's handling it."

  Morrow said nothing.

  "She thinks I'm working," Hicks said. "She thinks I'm fine."

  The particular cruelty of the phone lines going dead on July 1st was that it had left people on both sides of the perimeter with whatever version of the truth they'd had at the moment of the cutoff. Janet in Memphis believed something about Tommy Hicks that was wrong in every direction — that he was working, that the Army was handling it, that the world was still the shape it had been the last time she heard his voice. She would keep believing it until she didn't, and there was nothing anyone in this room could do about any of that.

  "She sounds like a smart woman," Morrow said. Because he had to say something, and because the alternative was the truth, which was that Janet would probably never know what happened to Tommy Hicks, and the not-knowing would be its own kind of death, slower than the other kind and in some ways worse.

  Hicks almost smiled. The attempt at it moved across his face and didn't quite land — the muscles remembered the shape but couldn't hold it.

  "You should sleep," Morrow said.

  "Yeah."

  He waited until Hicks' breathing leveled out — whether into sleep or something that was doing its impression of sleep, the body's last courtesy to the mind — and then he straightened and went back to the chair by the window and sat down with the night spread out in front of him and waited for morning.

  The light came in gray and low, the way July mornings came when the day was going to be brutal later — a cool false promise that burned off by eight. Morrow heard the birds before he saw the light and he let himself have that for a minute, the ordinary fact of birds doing what birds did, before the day started doing what days did now.

  He woke Greer at first light. The lieutenant came awake the way military people came awake — fully, immediately, no warm-up between asleep and present. They went outside together without discussion.

  The porch. The coffee can of old nails. The tilted glider. The logging road in the gray light, the trees emerging from the dark the way trees emerge from fog — shapes first, then texture, then the green that meant the world was still the world even if everything in it had changed.

  "Hicks," Morrow said.

  Greer looked at him.

  "He's been running a fever since the seventh. He was hiding it." Morrow paused. "I was aware of it before we stopped here and I should have reported it to you directly, sir. That's on me."

  Greer was quiet. The quality of his quiet was different from Vasquez's quiet, Morrow noted — less patient, more structural, the silence of a man arranging facts against a framework rather than simply receiving them. Vasquez's silence held space. Greer's silence built something.

  "How bad," Greer said.

  "The nurse says a day. Maybe two."

  The word nurse — Diane, her assessment, the weight behind it — landed on Greer's face and he did not move it away. He had seen Diane work the room last night, Morrow knew. He had watched her check Hicks with the casual authority of someone who had done it ten thousand times. The word carried her credibility and her verdict in the same breath.

  "She's certain."

  "She worked the ER through the outbreak. She's seen this before." He paused. "She's as certain as the situation allows."

  Greer put his hands on the porch railing and looked at the logging road in the gray morning light. A muscle moved in his jaw. Working through it in the way he worked through things — methodical, honest, unwilling to skip steps even when skipping steps would have been easier, even when the destination was visible from where he stood and the steps between here and there were just the cost of arriving at it with his process intact.

  "He can't march," Greer said.

  "No, sir."

  "We can't carry him and move at pace and protect this many people."

  "No, sir."

  "And if he turns while we're moving—" He stopped. The sentence was its own answer. He straightened. "What are the options."

  Morrow had thought about this in the chair by the window for most of the night. The options had arranged themselves in the dark the way options did when you sat with them long enough — not as a list but as a set of costs, each one with a price tag that nobody wanted to read. He laid them out the way he'd arranged them, in order of what they cost.

  "We wait here. Give him whatever time he has. See if it breaks the other way — some people came through it. Not many, but some." He let that land. "Or we move without him. Leave him with supplies, a weapon, the option to—" He stopped. The sentence required a completion that neither of them wanted to say in the gray morning light, with the birds still going and the trees still emerging from the dark and the world still pretending, for another few minutes, that sentences like that didn't need finishing. "Or we find a vehicle. Something closer to rolling than the truck we lost. Cutler says there may be something on this road — he heard an engine two days ago east of where we stalled. We go find it and we take it and we move everyone."

  Greer turned that over. His face was doing the thing it did — readable, processing, not yet blank. The blankness would come later, Morrow thought. When the decisions got harder and the options got fewer and the cost of being readable exceeded the cost of being closed. But that was later. For now the lieutenant's face was still a face that showed you what it was doing.

  "The vehicle," he said. "How long."

  "Cutler would need to see it first. Could be nothing. Could be something he can get running."

  "And in the meantime Hicks is here."

  "In the meantime Hicks is here."

  The gray morning sat on everything. Down the logging road, Cross was handing off the perimeter walk to Reyes, who had materialized from somewhere in the tree line looking like a man who had been awake for days and had simply stopped registering that fact as relevant to anything. Behind them the deer camp was beginning to wake — sounds from inside, someone moving, the rustle and creak of a group at the end of a first night in a new place, the restlessness of people remembering where they were.

  Greer turned from the railing.

  "We stay through the morning," he said. "Cutler takes Webb and looks for the vehicle. If he finds something workable, we prep to move by early afternoon." He paused. "If he doesn't—" He looked at the door. At the room inside. At the weight of the decision he was going to have to make if the morning came back empty. "We deal with that when we know."

  "Yes, sir."

  Greer held the railing. Something moving in his face that was going to be the first crack in the clean surface of the institutional framework, small enough right now to miss if you weren't watching for it — a hairline fracture in the architecture of command, the place where the orders and the reality met and the joint didn't quite hold.

  "He didn't tell me," Greer said. Not angry. Working. "Hicks. He was sick and he didn't tell me."

  "No, sir."

  "Because he thought I'd leave him."

  Morrow said nothing. The answer was yes, and they both knew it, and saying it out loud would require Greer to address the question of whether Hicks had been wrong, and that was not a question that had a clean answer in the gray morning light of July 10th.

  "I wouldn't have left him," Greer said.

  "I know, sir."

  "He should have known that."

  "He should have," Morrow said. "He was scared. Scared people make that calculation wrong."

  Greer looked at him. Something passing between them that was about Hicks and about something else entirely — the scratch under the sleeve, the information Morrow had been sitting on since yesterday morning, the pattern of what people hid from the people responsible for them and why. The question Greer had just asked — he should have known that — pressing against the question Morrow had not yet answered, the question of what else the sergeant was carrying that the lieutenant didn't know about.

  Morrow held the look.

  "Is there anything else I should know," Greer said.

  The morning was gray and the birds were doing what birds did and inside the deer camp Tommy Hicks was breathing the heavy, effortful breath of a body that had taken on more than it could carry.

  "Yes, sir," Morrow said.

  He started from the beginning.