Chapter 15
No one came the next day. She turned on the TV but saw only static, heard only the maddening roar of a dead signal. Donna
felt carbonated, bubbling inside with fury, with wild ideas, ready to erupt, to foam over with emotion. She paced desperately,
eight steps down the length of the room, eight steps back. Once she saw Salem walking past her window and she smashed her
mitten against the glass and screamed, What about my brother, what about Van, but he didn’t even look at her. At two in the afternoon she did something she hated. She picked up the phone to speak to
the operator in a hideous personal display of weakness.
“Yes, Ms. McBride, how can I help you?” asked the cheery female voice on the other end.
“I want to know if my fucking brother is alive.”
“Mr. McBride is resting comfortably.”
“I want to see him, you dumb twat. I want to see he’s all right.”
“Is there anything else I can help you with?” she asked.
“Does King Sorrow have your name?” Donna yelled into the receiver. “Because if he doesn’t, he will. Someday he will.”
The phone hissed for the count of ten, and then, in a low voice, curdled with hate, the woman on the other end said, “Don’t
threaten me, you high-toned bitch. Not unless you want your brother to go for another ice-water dip.” Then, suddenly, her
perky tone returned. “Is there anything else? We’ve got hot espresso!”
Donna crashed the phone back into the cradle, collapsed on the edge of her bed, and sobbed—sobbed with dry eyes.
It was a sensation closer to the dry heaves after a long run in the heat, than to grief.
If she was standing over the operator with the bright, manically cheerful voice, she would’ve strangled her with the phone cord.
It wasn’t a wishful notion. Donna knew she could actually do it. Choke her until her face went black.
No one came the next day either. Not Joe Valentine, not his second-in-command, the infernally sunny Dr. Patrick, not Mr. Francis.
She wondered if her brother had been underwater long enough to suffer brain damage.
On the third day, Nurse Lansing entered her room in the midmorning with Salem. She was sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Ready to go, hun?” Lansing asked, taking her by the upper arm. Salem took the other arm.
“I want to see my brother,” she said.
“That’s the plan,” Lansing told her.
They walked her into the wide, brightly lit hallway and marched her to an elevator, one on either side of her. Donna didn’t
remember the elevator, but supposed she had been in it at least once, when they brought her down. There were four floors:
L-2, L-1, 1, and 2. A person needed a physical key to access L-2 and L-1. Lansing wore his around his neck on a lanyard. A
bronze plaque on the wall read:
2: BSL-2, Computer Center
1: Lobby, Conference Rooms, BSL-1
L-1: BSL-3 Restricted Access
L-2: BSL-4 Restricted Access, Red Pass Only
“BSL?” Donna asked.
“Biological Safety Level,” Lansing said.
Salem said, “Level Two is where we keep everything really dangerous. Ebola, smallpox, and you.”
“You don’t know the half of it, bitch,” she said to him. “There’s gonna come a day you wish you drowned both of us when you
had the chance.”
Salem laughed.
The elevator opened on a wide hallway with a glossy marble floor the color of graham cracker. The lobby was to the left and faced a two-story wall of windows. Donna’s eyes were unprepared for daylight, and all that brightness hurt. She flinched from it.
They turned her away from the lobby, walked her through the back of the building and outside. Outside for the first time in
months.
Seagulls screamed. The air was briny and cold and sharp, stung her cheeks, filled her chest with an icy ache, and she thought
she had never smelled anything so good in her life.
She was in a sprawling parking lot, among Quonset huts. The tarmac was old, faded and patched. Beyond the huts she could see
bare trees and high yellow dune grass but not the ocean. The facility had an air of abandonment. There were no cars here except
for a pair of idling jeeps. The drivers were already in them, men in fishermen sweaters and hunting jackets and wool watch
caps. Maybe they were supposed to look casual, but it didn’t really work, not with the walkie-talkies and the rubber truncheons
on their belts. Joe Valentine sat in one of the jeeps, with Donovan perched right behind him, staring at the back of his head.
“Van,” Donna called, but her brother didn’t look around or acknowledge her at all. She didn’t like the look on his face, which
was a stunned blank, as if Valentine had gone through with the lobotomy he had promised at the beginning. She thought again
of brain damage.
Dr. Patrick waited by the other jeep, dressed in a quilted winter jacket, ankle length, buttoned to her throat, hands plunged
into the pockets. As always, she had her face set in a wide, enthusiastic smile. Donna thought that grin made her look deranged
today—like one of the Joker’s victims.
“How about that sea air? Who needs coffee this morning! That breeze will wake you right up.” Dr. Patrick stepped toward Donna
and hung a loop of wire around her neck, a microphone hanging from it. She fiddled with it, adjusting it, patting it to make
it rest smooth against Donna’s sweater. “I’ve been arguing to let you out of the facility for weeks.
A person would go crazy stuck in that basement for two months.
I’ve been telling them, we need to reframe the conversation.
It’s all been too adversarial. We need to let you know we aren’t the enemy here.
We want to help. We want to understand this—thing—you’ve had to live with for years.
We want to know how it all works. How you bring him to our world and, also, how you make
him go away.” She had stopped playing with the wire and began patting Donna’s shoulder in a very peculiar way. “I can’t imagine
what it’s been like, carrying this secret around. The psychological weight of it must be awful.”
“It’s not all bad,” Donna said. “But—Dr. Patrick—if you do want to help me out—maybe you could tell me something. What day
is it?”
Patrick looked into Donna’s eyes and looked away. She was scared too.
“March third.”
“Wow,” Donna said, nodding. “So you’ll be dead in six weeks. All of you. Huh. Now you want to talk about carrying around a
psychological weight . . . that’s gotta be a burden.”
Patrick took a step away from her. She wasn’t smiling anymore.
“No one has to die,” she said.
“Everyone dies,” Donna said. “It’s just a question of when and how ugly.”
“Help her into the jeep,” Patrick told Salem and Lansing, then she turned her back and climbed into the jeep herself.
When the jeep was moving, the wind roared, and had an especially icy bite. Donna didn’t mind, liked the sharpness of it, the
way it tore at her hair. As they raced across the vast expanses of blacktop, she saw that the compound was not quite desolate
after all. There was an airfield with Apache attack helicopters—two of them—behind a line of hangars. In another open hangar
she glimpsed a Humvee, with a big machine gun mounted on a turret in the back.
She sat in back between Salem and Lansing, Dr. Patrick up front with the driver.
Lansing’s eyes were bloodshot and he rocked with the jeep, staring straight ahead.
She didn’t see him blink once. He had a faint smile on his face, but after a while, Donna decided it was the kind of automatic smile a person produced out of habit.
She spotted a gray cold sore, glistening with pus, at the corner of his mouth, and decided King Sorrow was after Lansing too.
Fear started a person rotting before they were even dead.
If the dragon was coming for Salem, Salem wasn’t troubled by it. He held his chin up, face turned into the wind, enjoying
the blast of air the way a dog would. If he wasn’t her kidnapper, he’d be an ideal fuck. A little rough, a little thoughtless,
thoughtless enough to hurt her the way she liked and be hurt the way she liked even more.
“What is this place?” she asked Salem.
“Fuck’s it matter?”
“Right. Because I’m never leaving.”
He glanced at her sidelong, with a little humor. “Cherokee Island.”
“Where’s that?”
“North Carolina. Not really an island at all. It’s connected to the mainland by a causeway. There’s a bird sanctuary out here—the
bird people need a special permit to visit the north side of the island, where it’s marshy. I guess there’s a heron that only
nests here and the bird people get real excited to see it. Down this side, that’s where we’ve got the Cherokee Island Federal
Virology Research and Response Center. Only they haven’t studied viruses here for years. Our people got it for a song.”
“Did the government throw in the helicopters, or was that extra?”
“We already had the helicopters. They threw in the tank.”
She nodded and said, “It won’t be enough.”
He laughed again.
They let them out of the jeeps at the top of a sandy path between the dunes, leading down to the water. Joe Valentine hopped
out of his jeep and addressed them with his hands clasped in front of him and his face blank. The yellow-haired punk named
Little Rock stood a step behind him at parade rest.
“Your hands will stay in your gloves,” Valentine said. “Mr. Little Rock and Mr. Salem will follow behind you at a discreet distance. You’re miked, and we’ll hear everything you say. If one of you tries to run, the other will be shot.”
“You expect me to believe you’re going to kill one of us?” Donna said. “You need us. Isn’t that exactly what you found out
two days ago, when Mr. Francis wouldn’t let you drown my brother?”
“They don’t have to shoot to kill, Donna,” Valentine said. He had lost weight, and his eyes glittered at the bottom of dark
hollows. “If we have to maim one of you, I promise you’ll get excellent treatment from Nurse Lansing and Nurse Dover. Be aware