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Letty hit bottomon the ninth day after the onset, and Hawkins, a day later. Everything in their bodies ached; they burned up with fever; they were barely aware of people around them, barely aware ofthe needles going in and out of their arms and legs. They knew that some of it was antiviral drugs, some experimental; barely aware that almost all of it was being recorded by video cameras for later review in the Level 4 labs the world around.
On the thirteenth day—she’d lost track of time, had no idea of passing days—Letty thought she recognized the woman standing over her, changing her diaper. There wasn’t much in the diaper but liquid—she’d been urinating the saline and nutritive solutions being fed into her arm—because she hadn’t been able to eat anything.
Looking up, she asked, weakly, “Alec Hawkins?”
“He’s asking about you,” the woman said. “He started to pull up yesterday.”
“So he’ll make it.”
“Yes. So will you.”
“How bad is it?” Letty whispered. “Overall.”
The woman leaned close. “We’re not supposed to talk about it until people are actually up…but I know who you are, and what you did. We’ve had sixty-four deaths—forty-seven percent. All the children under thirteen died. We think the dying is mostly over. Two more are on the bubble, the rest should be okay.”
Letty tried to cry over the number, but was too weak, and all she could do was shake. The medic said, “Easy there…we’re going to give you a very mild sedative to help you sleep now…”
And she slept.
—
She was immobilefor the next two days; on the third day, she found Hawkins leaning over her. He was gaunt, with waxy skin, and hair that looked like it had died, all lank and greasy.
She smiled: “You look like shit.”
“If I look like shit, you look like double shit. I’ve been talking to Lucas. He’s been waiting for you to call.” Hawkins held up a phone.
“Hold it for me,” Letty said.
Lucas answered instantly: “You’re alive.”
“Yes. Alec and I are just leaving for the Bahamas, where we plan to have a lot of wild sex and get rum drinks with mimosa flowers in them.”
“Ah, Jesus…” And Lucas began to laugh. He sounded drunk, Letty thought, out of control.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“We’ve been out for six days…no antibodies in our bloodstreams, so we were never infected. We can’t find anyone outside the containment area, you know, the church and the school, who has symptoms. So we pulled it off. By the way, your girlfriend, Barb, went on a rampage in that airport garage after you left. She shot up something like forty cars and set them on fire. I’m told you could see the smoke in Santa Fe. Then she got quarantined.”
“The government can afford forty cars…Is Barb okay?”
“She’s fine. They quarantined her, but she never got it. She’s fine.”
—
That was itfor Letty and Hawkins, except for the waiting. A month after onset, they walked out of the containment area with another survivor. They were first taken into a specially prepared clean room, washed with embarrassing thoroughness with antivirals, packed into isolation suits, and then marched out through the compound’s front gate, where they were hosed down with more antivirals.
Three days later, the entire compound, including the school andthe church, was filled with jellied gasoline, and the parking lot sprayed with the same compound, and set afire. The church and school and everything in it, including all the medical equipment, the microwaves, the pews and crucifixes—everything—burned for three days, and was reduced to rubble. The parking lot melted, and the rubble was sprayed with the same compound—napalm—and set afire again.
The men captured in the bus at Taos Ski Valley recovered from Scott’s vaccine and were indicted and charged with sixty-five counts of premeditated homicide (one of the victims on the bubble died, the other survived), and a long list of additional and essentially irrelevant charges. The U.S. Attorney for New Mexico announced that he would seek the death penalty for all three.
Underwood and his crew stayed in Taos, probing for any sign of a continuing problem, but they found nothing. Extensive blood and tissue samples from the victims, both living and dead, were sent to Fort Detrick and disappeared behind a security wall.
The victims who died were cremated on site in specially prepared kilns that reached more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The kilns were hit with napalm when the buildings were destroyed. The refractory cores survived and were later crushed and buried.
A Taos cop meeting a visiting friend at the Hampton Inn spotted Catton’s Lexus in the far corner of the Hampton Inn—the same hotel that Lucas and Rae and the other marshals were staying at. None of them were parking in that part of the lot, and nobody had looked at hotel lots.
—
