Dead Things (25 page)

“Truth be known,” Wright admits, “it’s not really mine.” She tells Creedy of her conversation with Burt.

Creedy has questions, though. “If these creatures are modern-day vampires, why didn’t an outbreak decimate our ancestors? How is it that humanity survived for as long as it did in the face of something so virulent?”

Good questions. “Maybe the pathogen mutated.” Then she thinks again. “Maybe it hasn’t changed much at all.” Wright wishes Dr. Heston was alive. He might have some answers.

Creedy scoffs. “I’m not one for conspiracy theories. And believe me, I’ve heard them all in this place.”

Wright’s not suggesting a government cover-up. God knows the government had enough trouble just getting the garbage collected. “All I’m saying is, there’s a lot we don’t know, and the government has never been particularly helpful in shedding light on dark ambiguities.”

Like?

“Like mass disappearances,” Wright offers. Like the Mayans. Like the colony of Roanoke. Or Hoer-Verde.

Six hundred people disappeared at the latter, the only clue some scribbling in a public school. It said, “There is no salvation.”

“What if those societies were forced to migrate because of this or some similar epidemic?”
Worse
, she thinks,
what if they disappeared from the fossil record because they were consumed?

That reminds Creedy of a story, a biography he read once about a guy named Sir John Franklin. He was an explorer out of England looking for the fabled Northwest Passage, a passage north from Europe to Asia. He left with two ships and 120 men. The ships and the crew disappeared…for the most part.

“What happened to them?” Wright asks.

“No one’s really sure. It became the fixation of Britain, though, and forty plus ships went looking for him.” They found nothing but a trail of death: first, the graves of three soldiers, members of Franklin’s team who died in the first days of the expedition, much too early; then, a life boat containing two more corpses, one badly mutilated; and, finally, in a spot so barren the Inuit did not even name it, the remains of thirty sailors. They hadn’t frozen to death. They had been cannibalized, their only remains piles of skulls, mutilated corpses, and broken long bones. Those deaths struck Creedy. “But it’s a huge logical leap to link
that
to
this
. And if it is a plague, why didn’t it wipe us all out back then?”

“Globalization,” Wright considers out loud. “Those people who disappeared—colonies and outposts and the like—were all fairly isolated.” Sometimes they were cut off by mountains, sometimes by oceans. But 21
^st
century man, despite all of his advances in science and medicine, had one significant disadvantage: a global economy. The global economy finds its roots in international trade and travel. Instead of ships and horses and wagons, commerce moves at high speed via jetliners, passports, and bullet trains. “That, or a recent mutation has allowed it spread more quickly.”

But that doesn’t explain why incidents are documented so intermittently. Creedy offers an idea, something from Haim’s tome. He flips through it hurriedly, stopping and thumping a page entitled, “Vampire Epidemics through the Ages.”

Wright reads a series of dates and locations from a list:

Istria (1642)

East Prussia (1710 and 1721)

Hungary (1725-30)

Austrian Serbia (1731-2)

East Prussia (1750)

Silesia (1755)

Wallachia (1756)

Russia (1772)

Creedy doesn’t twitch. “Don’t worry,” he says, not looking up from the book. “That happens a lot around here. Old periodicals tend to take on a life of their own.”

Great
, Wright thinks.
Zombies, mummies, vampires, and, now, ghosts
.

Creedy has a thought. Maybe they can determine what’s what if they can connect the vampire epidemics to a historical cause.

Wright’s game, but she has no idea what the periods have in common. But what better place than a library to start investigating? “Where are the almanacs?”

Chapter Twenty-One: Ill-Starred Indeed

Wright focuses on natural phenomena—drought, glaciers, earthquakes—while Creedy examines societal changes—colonization, war, population migration, plagues. They work for hours, mapping each event in tidy rows and columns. If the dates match or approximate a vampiric episode, an “X” is placed in the appropriate box of the matrix.

Unfortunately, those marks prove few and far between. Try as Wright and Creedy might, they can’t establish a pattern.

Wright grows frustrated with this exercise. She tosses an almanac on the table. It lands face down, its spine nearly breaking. Wright immediately feels guilty. How could she callously damage something so precious, a book so…rare?

She picks the almanac up, running her fingers along the binding, inspecting it for damage. The book falls open to a page concerning cycles of the moon. There are illustrations of the moon’s phases, a lunar calendar.

A voice whispers in her ear, a memory from the first days of their journey. The little voice is Anne’s, and it says, “As above, so below.”

As above, so below.

She and Creedy looked everywhere. Everywhere but toward the sky. Space, the final frontier. “We haven’t looked at the stars or planets. What if there’s an astrological link?”

So they search, digging into the card catalog, flipping through microfiche, churning through the periodicals. Then Creedy discovers an article printed in 2003 in the
National Geographic News
, “Way Out Theory Ties Comet to Origins of SARS.” He hands it to Wright. “What do you think of this?”

The struggle with the prisoners is short.

Creedy’s trial is even shorter.

The prisoners convict Creedy of heresy after less than five minutes of testimony. Chaplain Cadavori abstains, nervously washing his hands of it like a modern day Pilate.

Creedy calls for Connor’s help. But Connor has outlived his usefulness.

His knowledge proved invaluable to the prison; he maintained the generator, knew when to rotate the crops, and managed the collection and filtration of water. Now the prisoners had learned of another world, a world outside these confines, a world they plan to escape to. And none of Connor’s know-how matters there.

“I’m sorry, Creedy,” Ridge says. “Connor can’t hear you. He’s outside the walls, making some new friends.”

It’s a coup, a power grab. Creedy’s sentence is death. He will go to the gallows the next morning.

Wright, Van, Burt, and Anne are prodded from their individual cells into a larger pen. “Where’s Ian?”

Wright gets her answer hours later. Ian is tossed into the cell unceremoniously. The prisoners found him in the mess hall. He takes a seat across from Wright and Burt and waits for their captors to clear the cell block before speaking. “What’s SARS?” he asks.

Wright is puzzled. “Why?”

From the pocket of his jeans Ian pulls several folded pages. He casually tosses them towards Wright’s feet.

She eyes Ian curiously before picking up the documents. She unfolds them. Her jaw drops. It’s the article about SARS and space and her handwritten timeline of the vampire epidemics. “How did you get these?” she asks, holding the documents before Ian’s face.

Then she remembers the noise of the falling book. “You were in the library? Why?”

Ian is shamefaced. “I thought you might need some help.”

Wright feels her face go hot. “And what makes you think I would ever need
your
help?”

It’s Ian’s turn to get mad. “Let’s just say I’m questioning your decision-making skills lately.”

“What?”

He will not be intimidated. “You heard me,” he seethes. Wright taught them to never wander from the party. She taught them to never go anywhere by themselves. “And I don’t think departing with a convicted felon who (a) is bigger than a mountain gorilla and (b) hasn’t seen a woman in two decades constitutes prudent judgment.”

Wright passes the article around. They read in turn.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, inflicted thousands of people at the beginning of the millennium. It’s source remained cloaked in mystery—some thought it evolved naturally, while others said it jumped from another species—until a group of British scientists determined its evolution was completely independent. It did not share an evolutionary history with other coronaviruses, leading the researchers to speculate SARS found its origins in space. It fell to Earth, along with the hundred tons of space debris that fall each year, landing in China. Carried in the debris trail of a comet, the virus entered the stratosphere as Earth passed through the particles. The fallout likely occurred east of the Himalayas where the stratosphere is the thinnest.

Extraterrestrial origins would explain why epidemics occur so randomly; why infection rates cannot be easily modeled, and why, bombarded by radiation, mutations occur so suddenly.

Wright doesn’t remember much about SARS, just Jay Leno joking about it on the Tonight Show.

Burt rubs his beard. In the end, SARS infected tens of thousands of people. In the end, SARS didn’t matter. Burt groans, “Geez, comets and meteors.”

“Technically,” Anne says, “comets and meteors are not the same. Meteors come from comets.”

Anne notices Wright staring at her. Staring at her like she’s daft, like she’s grown a second head. Then Wright says, “Anne, what else do you know about comets?”

When clouds of interstellar material collapse, heavy under their own gravity, suns are born. Rocks, dust, and gases swirl, eventually pooling together as planets and satellites. But, in the far outreaches of space, bits and pieces of the new solar system sit, discarded and forgotten like broken toys. In the blackness in the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt at the fringes of the Milky Way, these outcasts are interned for eternity.

Usually.

The solar system is a “system” after all, and an order dictates the movement of its celestial members. But sometimes in a patent challenge to that stability, a rock breaks free of its inky confinement. Urged and whipped by gravity, the comet has one of two fates: it is either expelled from the solar system, doomed to roam interstellar space, or, it moves into the inner solar system. Comets that remain in the solar system are caught in the jealous pull of the sun and the planets, eventually settling into a predictable orbit.

“It’s like a beautiful cosmic dance,” Anne gushes. Some dances, it seems, are longer than others. If the orbital path takes less than two hundred years, the comet is classified as a short-period comet. More than 200 years, the comet is deemed to be long-term.

Away from the sun, a comet is generally just ice and rock (solidified carbon, organic material, nitrogen, oxygen, and water) several miles wide. The ice and rock forms a nucleus. As the comet approaches the sun, the surface ice starts to melt. Gases and dust are expelled, creating a large, glowing aura. This, the head or coma, can grow thousands of miles, surpassing the width of most of the solar system’s planets. Solar winds rake the comet, dislodging gas and dust and forming two distinct tails. The longer of the two, the blue gas tail, can reach several million miles in length.

The material that is blown from the comet follows in its parent’s orbit. The orbits of planets intersect with the comet’s path. The rocks and dust, now called meteors, slam into the atmosphere, creating brilliant displays, meteor showers. The heat destroys most before they can reach the Earth’s surface.

Those meteorites that survive are interstellar shuttles, carrying a whole suite of organic materials, amino acids, and even living cells safely to the Earth. Large meteors usually explode before impact, 600 to 15,000 miles above the surface, their precious cargo protected within the debris, within a cosmic rain.

Isaac Newton theorized comets played a role in creating life. Earth’s early oceans were full of organic molecules carried by comets and primitive meteorites. These organisms would eventually evolve into multi-cellular creatures.

The admission strikes Wright. Anne is fearless. Astrology borders on heresy for two reasons: it is predictive and only God has that power, and it borders on hard science, on astronomy. Yet here this young woman sits, a testimony to the fact that the tighter the church clenches the more freedoms slip through its iron grip.

All of them are testimonials to this freedom in their own ways, really: Dr. Heston’s stubborn reluctance to let go of science; Burt’s escape into his banned comics; Van’s bad-boy image and his love of illicit books and movies; and Ian’s freedom of thought, his hunger for knowledge. She asks herself, just how much freedom has the church seized? Just how much freedom can they ever really seize?