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Scott never seemed panicked, which was a good thing, because Catton was high-strung, and sometimes was.
“All right,” he said. “I need time to think. Where are you right now?”
“We were about to go into Walmart.”
“Forget the food, but go in and buy those camping mattresses we looked at. I will call you back in a few minutes, I want to talk to Randy and Danielle.”
“Call us!” Catton said. “Why did we leave Jane, that was…” She was going to say, “stupid,” but Scott was gone.
The two women got out of Catton’s Lexus and hurried across the parking lot, went straight to camping equipment and bought three plastic-covered foam mattresses, the kind you’d buy if you were camping from your car. They were carrying them out to the Lexus when Scott called back.
“We need a car that isn’t your Lexus—I mean, besides Danielle’s, that’s too small,” he said. “Go over to Enterprise and rent an SUV. Have Rose drive your Lexus to a motel with a back parking lot and leave it there. You follow her in the SUV, and after she’s dropped off your car, drive her over to Western Adventure and rent a recreational vehicle. We’ve already gone through the whole rental process with them, so she should be able to get it quick. We’ll need it to move the sick guys. Then get back here, fast as you can. We’ll start packing up and burning paper. Probably can’t clean up all the fingerprints, but we’ll try to at least make it harder for them.”
“If they know who I am, they’ll probably check my credit history,” Catton blurted.
“Use the Amex card. I’ve noticed it sometimes takes a while to get the charges posted.”
“All right, I can try,” Catton said. “I’m still looking at my phone, the camera, and they haven’t gotten out of my house yet.”
“Then get up here! Get up here!”
They hurried, rented a Cadillac SUV at Enterprise, an RV at Western Adventure, and dropped the Lexus behind a motel. As fast as they were moving, it still took an hour and a half before they got back to Taos Ski Valley. When they got there, they found that they couldn’t get the recreational vehicle all the way up the slope to Catton’s chalet. They left the RV in a lower parking lot, which was mostly empty in the middle of summer, and took the Cadillac up the hill.
—
When Scott beganresearching possible associates for his Gaia cure, he searched Gaia sites of the dark web and began filtering names and personalities. One he found in Los Alamos, less than a mile from his home. Rose Turney was convinced Gaia was dying but hadn’t bought into Scott’s cure until a romance had developed between them. And though it quickly slipped away, she’d been convinced, and was still with him.
Clarice Catton was also close by, one of the more radical Gaia enthusiasts he’d found on a Gaia dark website; she had already been vociferously arguing that the only cure was a drastic reduction of the earth’s population.
The other six were from all over the States: New York, Georgia, twofrom California, one from Minnesota, one from Alaska. The first five to show up in Taos were Danielle Callister, who drove from Portland, Oregon; Randall Foss, who flew in from Indianapolis after liquidating everything he owned that was worth anything; and Morton Carey, from St. Paul, Minnesota. They’d gathered at the Taos Ski Valley, which was mostly deserted in the summer, along with Turney and Catton. The five were given Scott’s improvised vaccine. Four had survived, Carey had not, and had been buried up the mountainside from Catton’s chalet.
Three more volunteers had shown up later and were in the process of recovering from the vaccine. When Foss had asked if Marburg was actually worse than the vaccine, Scott had chuckled and said, “Mmm, let me see if I can remember the American idiom: that vaccine isn’t a patch on the ass of unfiltered Marburg.”
Foss had said, “Lord almighty.”
—
The three recoveringvolunteers were too weak even to sit up, although all three were now talking coherently. Still, they would be difficult to move, and after Catton’s alarm, simply lay on their cots and watched as Scott, Callister, and Foss scrambled around the chalet packing up clothes, medicine, medical equipment they would need later, suitcases they’d need to travel.
Everything that was burnable and not needed was fed into a gas fireplace. The three men were put in adult diapers and re-dressed. They called Catton every fifteen minutes or so for status reports; when she and Turney showed up and told the people in the cabin that they were unable to get the RV up the hill, they improvised hammocks out of bedsheets to move the three men.
When everything was ready Scott, Foss, and Turney moved the men one at a time, first out to the SUV, which they drove down the hill to the parking lot where the RV was, and then into the RV, checking to make sure that they were unobserved.
The men were in pain and groaned and at times cried out as they were moved. Nothing to be done about that. After carrying the men through the back door of the RV, they placed them on the camp mattresses that Catton and Turney had bought at Walmart. Saline racks were set up next to each bed.
As they were doing that, Catton and Callister were spraying Windex on any surface they thought might hold a fingerprint, wiping it down with paper towels, and throwing the towels in the fireplace. When they were finally done, with last-minute touches to doorknobs and locks, they took a last look around.
“No room for the goddamn bike,” Scott said, looking at the mountain bike stacked in a corner.
“I don’t think you’ll be biking much in the near future,” Catton said.
“I wiped it all down,” Callister said. “No prints.”
“Still, it was the most expensive thing I ever bought for myself that wasn’t absolutely necessary,” Scott said wistfully. “Three thousand dollars.”
“Three thousand?” Foss said. “Wow. I never would have guessed.”
“Not that much, really,” Scott said. “You can easily spend nine thousand on a bike and you see them all over the place in Los Alamos and Santa Fe. I felt like a pauper on mine.”
