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My name is entirely unimportant. I am who I need to be at any given moment, and at this moment, I am Daniel Spitzer, a concerned newspaper man from San Francisco. The letter I just received from Mary Travis in Four Corners, New Mexico, is disappointing, to say the least.
It’s funny that, of all of them, the one who seems to have the best chance of fixing this disaster is an ex-slave in a backwater town. Well, hardly backwater now, I suppose. Four Corners is fortified, guarded, and—unlike the majority of towns west of Texas and south of Wyoming—growing.
“Captain!”
I look up as Major Merrison walks in. He’s a commanding presence, to be sure, but a man who knows how to let those of us in the trenches do our job. Usually. He only recently took over this project, though I served under him in the war. He doesn’t like uncertainty, so I know he’s as impatient as I am to see a resolution to the current problem. I must afford him the proper patience and handling.
“Good to see you, Major,” I reply, putting Mrs. Travis’s letter down and rising to greet him.
Merrison towers over even me, his blond hair just starting to go gray, though he’s over sixty now. His sharp blue eyes fix on the paper on my desk. “Is that a letter from that Travis woman? Any further developments in New Mexico?” he asks brusquely.
“No,” I reply, making sure I sound long-suffering. “Unfortunately, few survivors make it to a town like Four Corners before they’re killed by well-meaning citizens or die of neglect.” I glance at the letter. “I assure you, Mary Travis will be more than glad to let me know when Jackson gets another patient.”
“Damn shame that negro had to go and kill himself,” Merrison says. It obvious he’s read at least the short file on my duties. It should make things go more quickly. “I wonder what Jackson could have done with him if he’d lived.”
I hold in a sigh at Merrison’s selective bigotry—I’d nearly forgotten it after all these years. He is not a man who condones “the elevation of the black race,” as he calls it, and yet he is always curious about what individual “elevated” negroes might be up to. Endlessly inventive, those black men, he’s said more than once.
When will they all learn that a man’s color means nothing so long as he can be made useful? Slavery was probably the worst use to which we could have put these people. Letting Jackson have free rein to investigate as he sees fit? Far more enlightening for all of us.
“Odds are he’ll have another at some point,” I tell him firmly. “Or Parker will. And perhaps the next one will see fit to survive fully.”
Merrison sniffs at that. “I still don’t believe there is such a thing as a person who could survive this fully,” he says. “Damn fool project to begin with. Creating super men.”
“Even the partial survivors aren’t useless,” I remind him. “And they are proof that the parasites work.” It’s time to lead him on his tour, as I have others since the project started three years ago. Lord, this gets tedious sometimes. “Would you like a demonstration?”
“You have a strong one this time?” he asks disinterestedly. “He’s not going to go feral on us like the last one did, is he?”
I grit my teeth and smile, damning myself for that mistake. “It appears the trick is to make sure there is enough time to recover between injuries,” I tell him. “Time to let the parasites convert enough blood cells into supercells to retard their proliferation.”
“I still don’t see why anyone thought this damn fool thing was going to work,” he grumbles, probably understanding less than half of what I said. “If your negro and his doctor friends don’t find something soon, we’ll have the Mexicans breathing down our necks trying to take over the abandoned areas to the south.”
“The Mexicans don’t want to be attacked by the failures anymore than the rest of us do,” I remind him, gesturing him out into the sunlight. “They’d fall to the disease just as quickly as a white or black or Indian. And if you’ll recall, it did work once.”
He grumbles his agreement.
“Let me introduce you to our newest guest and let you see what he can do.”
I lead him across the yard that makes up the center of Fort Stockton, heading for the barracks we’ve converted to hold our subjects.
“Harvested this one from San Francisco, I hear?” he says, as we walk into the darkness of the building, stopping to let our eyes adjust.
I nod. “He’s proven more resilient than the rest.”
I lead him past three barred cells, all tenanted by partial survivors, sleeping in the midday after their testing last night. The testing went poorly, and I fear at least one of them will succumb completely soon, the ratio of parasite to regular blood cell too high now to recover from. As far as our remaining doctors can tell—those not killed by the first set of test subjects before those people escaped and took the disease into the general population—all survivors will eventually tip the scales permanently in the parasites’ favor if we can’t figure a way to stop this.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Banner,” I greet the man in the fourth cell. The one I’m hoping proves them wrong. David Banner is average in every respect: average height, average build, average musculature, average intelligence. Plain brown hair and muddy brown eyes. He could be anyone.
But he isn’t.
“How long are we going to be held here, Captain?” The question comes, not from Banner, who sits depressed and quiet on his cot, clad only in shorts, but from the diminutive Jew in the next cell. Banner hasn’t said but a few words since coming here, and Cossican’s notes confirm that he’s been gripped by melancholy for weeks.
“As long as it takes for you to come to my way of thinking, Dr. Cossican,” I tell him bluntly. Merrison is looking on interestedly, so I explain. “Dr. Myron Cossican, late of the San Francisco University for Health Science and Surgery.” Cossican bristles. “We had a number of discussions with Dr. Cossican and were unable to reach an agreement regarding his involvement in our research.”
“You fools did this!” Cossican rails. Again. “I went to you in good faith— Dr. Tauber. HA! I thought, maybe, the army might have someone with some sort of expertise. Someone who could help when I’d exhausted everything I could think of to create a working vaccine—”
“—Jackson’s idea,” I inform Merrison in an aside that does nothing to slow the little Jew down.
“—and what do I find?” He takes a breath. I thought maybe he’d just keep talking until he passed out from oxygen deprivation, but no such luck. “I find that the army created the contaminant!” He looks over at Banner, then beyond him to the other partials. “How could you do this to your own people?”
I shrug. “To be fair, the original test subjects volunteered. It was unfortunate that they escaped from us.” I turn away from him. Cossican could be very helpful, but he’s not in the right frame of mind. Luckily, I know he’s developed a friendship with his patient and exercising leverage can be a powerful motivator.
“As you’ll recall, Major, the original intent was to create men who would recover from their wounds in minimal time with minimal intervention. Patient Zero also showed increased endurance.”
“Patient Zero is right,” Merrison says coldly. “Other than him, we have zero.”
“There are more,” I tell him staunchly. “There have to be.”
“Says you,” he replies. “You said this one could be useful. How?”
I draw my weapon, and Banner stands, hands in the air, a terrified, resigned look on his face.
“Please,” Cossican whispered. “Please, Tauber, don’t. Just leave him alone. Please!”
Banner says nothing. He knows what he is and he knows his place. I wish Cossican could learn that lesson.
I fire, hitting Banner high on the right side and hearing the round go through him into the bricks behind. Cossican cries out, but Banner just grunts, falling back against the wall and from there to the ground to curl around the injury.
“So he’s a convenient target for shooting practice,” Merrison barks, unimpressed. “What good is that? Cannon fodder, we have aplenty.”
“Give him a moment,” I murmur, watching Banner closely. After a long few minutes of shuddering in pain, he slumps unconscious, rolling on his side and giving Merrison the perfect view of where his injury is rapidly healing, the bleeding already slowing to a stop.
“That really is the damnedest thing,” the major mutters with a smile.
“In two hours, it’ll be fully healed,” I tell him. “By tomorrow, you’d never even know he’d been shot.”
“You are despicable,” Cossican growls impotently. “You people are inhuman. Animals!”
“What about the cough, though?” Merrison asks, ignoring him. “And that deep sleep they go into? I mean, they all seem kind of unhealthy, don’t they?”
I nod my agreement, leading him back out of the barracks, leaving Cossican and his raving behind us. He’ll come around and help us figure out how to stabilize the partials, or we’ll kill him. After the fire at the university, he’s already got a grave. Him and Banner, both.
“They look unhealthy, but they’re amazingly resilient once they get through the initial phase of the disease.” I lead him back to my office and we sit. “Our hope is to find some way of stopping the parasite growth in the current partials—the good people of the United States are finally stepping up to stop the spread of the current infestation, so if we can just stabilize the ones we have, we could still have a viable product. And we’re hoping that the cough and the hibernation can be eliminated at the same time.”
“Except that, as I read it, ninety-five percent of the original test subjects succumbed to the disease—the majority within mere hours.”
I nod. “So we have to work quick. Twenty percent become partial survivors of some sort. The parasite continues to try to convert red blood cells into supercells in these people, but, when that fails, it proliferates instead, until, eventually, any partial survivor would either die or become one of the failures.”
“And you really think that negro is the key?” Merrison asks.
“I think he and Parker and Yao should be left to continue their work,” I tell him. “Tell Iola and Hillerman to keep playing the wishy-washy Eastern doctors and let the three in the trenches figure it out.” I give him a significant look. “It’s worked for you for thirty years, Major,” I remind him. “Minimal interference.”
“Like that damn train?” he says, making me grit my teeth again. “You sure as hell risked exposure with that one.”
“We made a choice to save a train full of people, sir,” I remind him. “I don’t think the president would have liked the press if we had let the failures have their way and even one person had gotten out to tell the tale.”
“And now, even if you want to engage Jackson, you can’t can you?” he points out. “You said the local circuit judge named that Dunne kid to be the sheriff for Four Corners. He’d recognize you right off, wouldn’t he?”
I take a deep breath and nod. “He would. But even if that weren’t the case, going to Four Corners would gain us nothing, sir—you saw with Cossican what happens when we try to get involved.”
Merrison nods reluctantly. “And we’re sure he wasn’t able to get word out to the rest of them?”
“The last letter we let through discussed the vaccine potential. We destroyed the rest. As far as they know, he died in the fire,” I promise. “San Francisco is clean, sir. No one left there knows anything.”
Merrison watches me for a moment before sighing and heaving himself out of his chair. “All right, Captain,” he says finally. “I’ll let you go about your business, then.”
“Thank you, sir,” I reply, rising to see him out.
“Oh,” he asks, turning from the door before he walks through. “Why did Cossican call you Dr. Tauber?”
I smile. “Names are like coats, sir,” I tell him. “You just need to pick the right one for the right environment.”
Merrison chuckles and claps me on the shoulder. “Well said, Captain Michaels. Well said.”
And then he’s gone and I can finally sit down and let Daniel Spitzer reply to his friend in Four Corners.
******
the end