16

A Redneck with a Snowplow

KIRA

ATLANTA, GEORGIA

232 Days After Patient Zero

My phone buzzed in the gloom of a stormy January afternoon. During the weekends, I kept it set to night mode so it cast a sepia-toned light upward against the wall behind the desk until I reached to move it. I read the text—from Declan—and video called him back.

He answered on the first ring. Behind him, I recognized the flat white expanse of the headboard of his bed and the edge of a framed violet-hued painting we’d bought together last year from a street artist in Madrid. He was home.

“Surprise,” he said. His hand traced a circular path in the air in front of him, encompassing his bedroom. “Guess who finally got discharged from rehab?”

Wordlessly, I studied him. Tissue and color had fled his face, leaving him wan and drawn, cheekbones too prominent, lips pale. The thready smattering of silver at his temples had increased. But his eyes burned, fully alight. There was no diminishment in the vitality of his gaze or in the emphasis in his movements. Over the last couple of months, he’d been texting me, first from the hospital and then from the rehab facility, but this was the first time I’d seen his face.

He’d survived a prolonged assault from the artiovirus, which, in his case, attacked his lungs and heart with a viciousness so severe he’d hovered on the brink of death for a near-impossible length of time. I’m not one to anthropomorphize critters—especially a nonliving entity like a virus—but you’d have to lack imagination altogether not to wonder if the artiovirus hadn’t somehow perceived the threat he posed to it. It made for an arresting image: a swarm of viral soldiers targeting the human targeting them.

“I’m so relieved you’re home, Dec,” I said finally, and listened as he described the indignities of hospitalization and rehabilitation, glossing over the horrible bits until the experience sounded almost funny. Sponge baths of his groin from people in space suits, IV starts and blood draws from inept student doctors who’d survived the virus and been pressed into premature service, and, once he could eat, presentation of the world’s most unappetizing meals.

“Canned peas,” said Declan with feeling. He placed both hands against his head as if squeezing it. “Nuclear-colored Jell-O. It’s almost like they wanted me to die.”

“Dec,” I said gently. “What happened with the lab?”

“My lab,” said Declan, with no change whatsoever in his positive tone, “is closed. Luckily we didn’t lose anyone, but most of us got sick.”

“What about the clinical trials for the nanobody? Did you get samples to the university before you got sick?”

Silence, then: “No.”

I waited, uncertain what to say.