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“If you’re gonna be that way, I’m gonna call this Realtor.”
“So call her.”
Their whole conversation, Lucas thought as he punched the Realtor’s number into his phone, had a little End-of-Times feel to it.
—
He got noanswer. Rae looked her up with the iPad, got an office number, and called that. No answer.
“It’s Sunday,” Rae said. “She might be sleeping in.”
There were no longer phone book listings, those had disappeared in the nineties, so they didn’t have an address for her. They did find an address for her office and went there. The office was closed, but did have two names listed on the window as Realtors, with numbers for work phones. The number they had for Marilyn Wong was a work phone, and possibly the reason she wasn’t answering it.
They called her partner’s phone, and she did answer: “Hello?”
Lucas explained who he was, and that he was trying to get in touch with Wong.
“Is there something wrong?”
“No reason to think so, but we want to talk to her about a house she’s trying to rent…”
They got a personal cell and an address from her partner, called the number, and still got no answer. “We’ll have to go there,” Lucas said. “You think she could be at church?”
“Dunno,” Rae said. “What would Realtors pray for? Lower interest rates?”
—
Clarice Catton calledScott, and when he picked up, asked where he was. “I don’t know exactly geographically, but in terms of dirt, I’m on a mountainside above the High Road, walking very slowly through the piñons.”
He was speaking quietly, so she had to strain to hear, even with the volume turned up on the phone. “I ran into a checkpoint last night. I had to get off the road. I’m probably a half mile above the road right now, and walking parallel to it, pushing the bike. Sometimes, I have to carry it. When I get well past, I’ll go back down, but I won’t be pedaling again until dark, unless I see an…opportunity.”
“Well, I’m up and dressed and about to eat breakfast before I go over to the church. I’m not going to use all five tubes. Three should do it, and I’ll save the other two in case I see something else. They have a public restroom house here in Taos. Lots of toilets. I thought maybe…”
“That would be a target,” Scott agreed. “Dozens of people coming and going on a Sunday. Get doorknobs and door handles…”
“Yes. So, Lionel. It’s been a privilege to be involved in saving Gaia. It seems unlikely that we’ll both make it, that we’ll see each other again. Good luck with…the rest of your life.”
“Good luck, Clarice. Ithasbeen a privilege.”
—
Catton made stovetopoatmeal with sugar and cinnamon and two percent milk, took her time with it, looked at her watch: 8:10. Time to go. Maybe the last time of her life? Maybe not. She opened her suitcase and took out a nice pair of black slacks, with a white blouse and dressy black jacket. She added the Hermes scarf, wrapped around her head with a hint of bare strip of scalp showing, and pinned the pink cancer ribbon to a lapel.
She looked in the mirror: “There,” she said, satisfied. She would take her shoulder bag.
The virus vials had screw tops. She took them out of their safety box, put three in the bottom of the shoulder bag, and the other two inher fanny pack, with the tops sticking up where she could easily reach them. She added a dozen paper towels, carefully folded into absorbent squares. All that done, she thought about opening one of Wong’s bottles of Sonoma Valley wine for a final glass, shook her head: no.
With a last look around, she got Wong’s keys, walked out the front door, locked it behind herself—she might be coming back, if everything broke right—and started off for the church.
Nice day. Most summer days were nice in Taos, and Santa Fe, for that matter. She was only six blocks from the church, but she’d plotted out her route in advance, sticking to the narrowest lanes. The church itself was a modest structure with a rounded roof, overhung in front and back, set in a plaza with an expansive parking lot. Like many of the homes in the neighborhood, it was built of real adobe, with a real mud finish, tan with the slightest tint of orange. A white-painted wooden cross hung under the front roof overhang.
As she walked toward it, a woman went inside ahead of her. At the entrance, she took a quick look around, then pulled the heavy door open and went inside. The church was pretty—impressive—but with the modestly suffocating atmosphere she’d felt in most churches, plus the scent of burnt incense. The altar was straight ahead, perhaps a hundred feet away. She was standing in the part known as the narthex, or entryway, and to her immediate right, under a crucifix, was a holy-water font, and she thought,Hmm.
Moving to one side, as if to take a handkerchief from her bag, she unscrewed the top of one of the vials in the fanny pack, covered its mouth with one of the paper-towel pads, and tipped it upside down until she felt the liquid on her fingertips. She screwed the top back on the vial, then, making sure nobody was close enough to see what she was doing, she pushed the contaminated pad into the holy water font,letting it soak. She heard the door opening behind her, and she took it out and wadded it up in her hand and walked two-thirds of the way to the front of the church, and sat in an empty pew.
The people coming behind her dipped their fingers in the font and walked toward the front of the church. Catton soaked another pad with the remnants of the culture in the first vial, and when it was fully soaked, wiped it across the pew seat. She checked around again, making sure she wasn’t observed, moved over a few places, and did it again.
Over the next ten minutes, she moved backwards, and from side to side, one pew to the next, surreptitiously swiping the pads over the seats. She ran out of viral culture before she got to the back pews. After thinking it over, she dug in the fanny pack and took out a fourth, one she hadn’t intended to use, and continued moving back.
