The Cobra Event (16 page)

6 Ave. flea—black dress—woman—$32 cost $0 found garbg.

It was perhaps the kind of dress Kate had liked to wear. But something else got her attention now: Sixth Avenue. Kate’s father had mentioned that Kate had bought things at the flea markets, and Austen was pretty sure she remembered him mentioning Sixth Avenue. Kate had bought dresses? Her eye went down the ledger:

4/19—6 Ave. flea—box (joke)—$6 traded for postcards

Kate had liked boxes.

Austen felt a chill. What in the hell…?

She reviewed the photographs of Kate’s bedroom again, one by one, on the screen of her laptop.

Then she found it. A little gray wooden box. It was sitting beside the dollhouse. It was small, rectangular, nondescript. Except for one thing. It had a shape painted on the side. The shape was familiar. It was a polygon, an angular, crystalline shape. She had seen it before.

She blew the image up. Blew it up until it was a maze of pixels. She stared at the painted design on the box. Where have I seen this?

It was the shape of the crystals that she had seen inside Kate Moran’s brain. The diagnosis clicked, like a mechanism locking into place.

Kate bought that box from Penny Zecker, at a flea market
.

The box was the pump handle. She thought: It’s sitting in Kate’s bedroom now.

Whirlwind

SATURDAY MORNING

BRAIN VIRUSES
can act fast. A brain virus can take a person from apparent good health to a fatal coma in a matter of hours. Viral agents that grow in the central nervous system spread along nerve cells. You can go to bed healthy and never wake up. By the next morning the agent has amplified itself along the fibers of the central nervous system.

The virus had spent the night amplifying in Peter Talides. His mental state was not good. It was Saturday morning, not a school morning, but he got himself dressed for school and walked to the elevated train station. He took the inbound N train to Manhattan, heading for the Mater School. He rode near the middle of the train, as was his habit. The train clattered over the elevated tracks through Queens, went around a bend, and descended into the tunnels under the East River.

He usually changed trains at the Fifty-ninth Street stop, and from there he would take the Lexington Avenue line uptown. At the Fifty-ninth Street station, he got off the train, as usual. The Lexington Avenue line runs at a lower level, and he walked down a flight of stairs to the mezzanine. The mezzanine is covered with colored mosaics. It is easy to become disoriented there. All the exit doors look alike. The mosaics are of trees and greenery. The tree trunks are red and the leaves are green. On the walls are lines of the poetry of Delmore Schwartz and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Peter Talides should have headed for the door that leads to the uptown train. But he didn’t. He failed to read the signs. The colored mosaics disoriented him. He kept going. He passed by words on the wall that said, “Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”

He passed through a doorway around which shone a huge yellow sun of mosaic tiles. He went down a set of stairs to the downtown side of the Lexington Avenue tracks. A train came along; he stepped aboard. He sat down on a seat, and he was carried away from the Mater School, away from his destination. He sat with his head down almost between his knees. He kept touching his hands to his mouth. His nose was running profusely with clear mucus.

The train carried him along southward, through Manhattan. It dove under the East River and emerged in Brooklyn. At the Borough Hall station in downtown Brooklyn, he seemed to realize he was lost. “I missed it,” he said in a thick voice.

He got off the train. He went up the stairs and down to the other side, looking at the signs. The higher Peter Talides was reading the signs while the lower Peter Talides was screaming in agony and writhing with disease. His midbrain was dying. He sat down on a bench and bent over and put his head between his knees and stayed that way for a long time. He groaned. Eventually a transit officer named James Lindle arrived at the scene. He touched Talides on the shoulder.

Talides uttered a sharp cry, almost like a baby’s cry. It was a startle seizure: a seizure triggered by an intrusion into his world. He fell off the bench to the platform. He curled up on his side and straightened out, his body rigid. The rigidity passed.

A few people stopped and gathered around Peter Talides, but others passed by.

“Stand back, please. Don’t touch him,” Officer Lindle said. He called on his radio for an emergency medical squad from the New York Fire Department.

Talides was near the yellow line at the edge of the platform. Suddenly he twisted and rolled off the platform, dropping five feet down to the tracks. He landed with a splash in pools of water in the track bed.

At that moment, the station filled with the rumble of an approaching train.

“Aw, no!” Officer Lindle shouted. He ran up along the platform, waving at the train. “Stop!”

People were shouting at the man on the tracks: “Stand up! Get up!”

Talides seemed to hear the people calling to him. His eyes were half open. He was lying in pools of water. He rolled over onto his belly and began to crawl across the tracks—away from help, toward the third rail, the power rail. The train was approaching fast.

The train motorman saw the man crawling on the tracks and dumped his airbrakes on full emergency stop. A subway train can slide five hundred feet along the rails during an emergency stop.

Down on the tracks, a tremor shook Talides, and he flopped over and writhed. His clothing was soaked with water. His body crossed the running rail, and his head wedged itself against the electrified third rail. He grounded the electrical system through his head.

There was a sizzling flash. His body snapped rigid, made rock-hard by ten thousand amps of D.C. electricity running through his head and spine. The circuit breakers did not trip—they almost never trip when a body shorts out the New York subway. Enough electrical current was passing through his skull to accelerate twenty subway cars to full speed. The skin on his face came to an instant boil. A sheet of white blisters passed in a wave over his face. The blisters cratered and turned black.

There was a humming, crackling sound, and his cranial contents boiled. His skull burst with a dull thump, Brain material shot into the air and showered down over the platform. One man was seen wiping his eyes with his hands, then studying his smeared eyeglasses, puzzled by the gray bloody flecks that had seemed to come from nowhere.

An instant later, brakes wailing, the train thudded over the body, cutting it in two, and came to a halt. Smoke began to pour from beneath the car.

Cobra

UNION SQUARE

THE HOUSEKEEPER
, Nanette, answered the door. She said that Mr. and Mrs. Moran were staying with relatives.

“There may be something dangerous in Kate’s room. Has anyone been inside?” Austen asked.

No one had been in the room. Kate’s parents couldn’t bear to go in. Her grandmother was going to go through her things once the worst was over. Mr. and Mrs. Moran were busy arranging the funeral, which was scheduled for tomorrow.

Austen had studied the photographs, and she had almost every object in Kate’s bedroom in her mind’s eye. She sat down at the worktable. There in front of her was the box with the rounded, angular crystal painted on it. She reached her hands toward it, stopped. She hesitated. Then she opened her knapsack and pulled out a cardboard box of latex examination gloves. She found a button mask and snapped the rubber band around the back of her head, fixing the mask over her mouth and nose. She found a pair of protective eyeglasses in her knapsack, and she put them on, too. She turned on a desk lamp.

Now, very delicately, she picked the box up. It was about three inches square and was made of some kind of very hard, dense wood. It was a puzzle. There was a sliding catch or mechanism somewhere that would open the box. One of the sides was loose. That might be the opening mechanism.

Should I try to open this? What will happen if I do? Four people are dead, maybe because of this thing. I may already be exposed anyway.

I’m going to open it. “
Ephaphtha
,” she whispered. Be opened.

She slid her fingers over the box, feeling carefully. There was a click. The box opened and something snapped out of it, fast.

She dropped the box with a yelp. It clattered on the desk.

A snake had popped out. The head and neck of a small wooden snake. It was like a jack-in-the-box. The snake had struck at her fingers, and it had missed. It was a hooded cobra, and its hood was flared open, in the attack stance. It had a red spectacle marking painted across the back of its hood. Its eyes were bright yellow dots with slit irises painted on them. Its tongue was red and forked and stuck out.

The snake was attached to a spring mechanism. When you closed the lid and locked up the puzzle, the spring was cocked. When you pulled on the correct facet, the spring tripped and the snake leaped out and struck at your finger. It was a children’s toy. It had been made by hand, perhaps in India or China, she thought.

Something else had come out of the box. She could just see it in the light of the skylight. It was a grayish dust.

She closed her eyes, jerked her head back, held her mask tight on her face, and ran. She found herself standing on the other side of Kate’s room. She shivered. She was covered with sweat. What was that dust?

She crossed the room again, breathing as lightly as she could in her mask, holding it tightly down over her face, and she picked up the box in her gloved hand. The top was open. She looked inside. Nothing there, except the mechanism and a bit of dust. The thing was a dust-dispersion device. Not very efficient. Just enough to put a little bit of dust into the air near the person who opened the box.

“Oh, my God. My God,” she said. It’s a bomb. It’s a biological bomb.

She kept her hand on her mask, pushing it down over her nose and mouth, hoping the seal was good. What is the pore size of this mask? Will the mask block these dust particles? The problem was, she didn’t know the size of the dust particles. Well, either the dust is getting through the mask or it isn’t. If it has gone through, it’s too late now.

She turned the box over with her fingertips, rotating it only slightly, so as not to cause any dust to fall out. On the bottom of the box was glued a tiny slip of paper with some words printed on it. The words were very small.

Kate would have had a magnifying glass somewhere around here. She opened a drawer under the table. Then she opened another drawer. There. A magnifying loupe.

She held the box up again, near the desk light, and looked through the loupe at the words. She discerned fine black letters, evidently made by a high-quality laser printer.

Human trial #2, April 12

ARCHIMEDES FECIT

She put the box down and looked around the room. The Twinings tea can would do. She got a Kleenex from a pack on Kate’s bedside table. She noticed wadded Kleenexes on the floor near the bed. She almost screamed. If Kate had been blowing her nose on them, they would be hot. She didn’t touch them. She stuffed a wad of fresh Kleenex into the can, and then gently placed the snake bomb in a nest of Kleenex. She snapped down the can’s lid, tight. She held the tea can in her hands. As soon as possible she would have to transfer it to a biohazard bag or container.

The light from the skylight came down around the scene, a cool light, illuminating Alice Austen’s red hair. She thought of Kate’s red hair, and of the autopsy.

She looked around the room. What is the air-circulation system in this room? She noticed a steam radiator. Good. Forced-air heating ducts might carry the room’s air all over the building. She noticed an air-conditioning vent on the ceiling. She would have to make sure the Morans didn’t turn on the air-conditioning system.

Austen locked Kate’s door from the inside and then went out, and the door clicked behind her. She removed her mask and gloves but didn’t know what to do with them. Finally she just put them in a pocket of her knapsack. She also took the magnifying loupe with her.

She found Nanette and warned her not to let anyone go into Kate’s room. “I think I found something in there that may be extremely dangerous. I’ve locked the door. The authorities are going to investigate. Please keep that door locked until they arrive.”

Nanette promised that she would stay out of the room and would keep people from going in. “Mr. and Mrs. Moran won’t be home until tomorrow,” she said.

“Whatever you do, don’t turn on the air-conditioning.”

AUSTEN WENT OUT
to the street and got a taxi to the medical examiner’s office. There, in her office, beside her desk, she had left the bag of Harmonica Man’s possessions. She put on a clean pair of surgical gloves and a clean button mask. She opened the mouth of the garbage bag and pulled out the black sweatshirt. There was a lump in the front pocket. She reached into the pocket and pulled out a small box. It was nearly identical to the one from Kate’s room. She examined it in the fluorescent light. There was another tiny piece of paper glued to the bottom of this box. With the magnifying loupe, she examined it. This paper contained a picture. It was a very small engineering drawing. A picture of something she had never seen before. It looked like some kind of jar. The jar contained something that looked like a dumbbell or an hourglass. Under the picture was written, in very small print:

Human Trial #1, April 12

ARCHIMEDES FECIT

The boxes reeked of a plan, and a precise mind.

She locked her office, went up to the histology lab, and asked for several sealable plastic biohazard bags. Telling no one what she needed them for, she returned to her office and bagged the two cobra boxes. She didn’t open the tea can. Then she went to the basement and got some large plastic bags, and she triple-bagged Lem’s clothing. She realized that her knapsack had been hopelessly contaminated by the rubber gloves and the mask, and she triple-bagged the whole thing and tied it up.