A People's History of the Vampire Uprising E-Book

Rayman A. Villareal

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

In this wildly original debut – part social-political satire, part international mystery – a new virus turns people into something inhuman, upending society as we know it. Shortly to be adapted by Netflix into UprisingThe body of a young woman found in an Arizona border town, presumed to be an illegal immigrant, disappears from the town morgue. To the young CDC investigator called in to consult with the local police, it's an impossibility that threatens her understanding of medicine. Then, more bodies, dead from an inexplicable disease that solidified their blood, are brought to the morgue, only to also vanish. Soon, the U.S. government – and eventually biomedical researchers, disgruntled lawmakers, and even an insurgent faction of the Catholic Church – must come to terms with what they're too late to stop: an epidemic of vampirism that will sweep first the United States, and then the world.With heightened strength and beauty and a stead diet of fresh blood, these changed people, or "Gloamings", rapidly rise to prominence in all aspects of modern society. Soon people are beginning to be "re-created", willingly accepting the risk of death if their bodies can't handle the transformation. As new communities of Gloamings arise, society is divided, and popular Gloaming sites come under threat from a secret terrorist organization. But when a charismatic and wealthy businessman, recently turned, runs for political office – well, all hell breaks loose.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Praise for Raymond A. Villareal’s A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Epilogue

Appendix One

Appendix Two

Appendix Three

Acknowledgments

Praise for Raymond A. Villareal’sA People’s History of the Vampire Uprising

“Told in the jumbled, frenetic urgency of a discarded case file, this is the history of both a social movement and a vector for disease. Mr. Villareal’s vampires are not the ones we find most comforting. They are not seductive or beautiful or tormented antiheroes. No, they are more terrifying than anything like that, an infection that will spread throughout our body politic, our institutions, our history, and ourselves.”

—Paul Park, author of The White Tyger and All Those Vanished Engines

“A major document dump—and that’s a good thing! We have it all here: a complete oral history of how our world—our species—changed forever. Raymond Villareal’s sense of fun is palpable as he plays with legal thrillers, good-old dogged police work, international intrigue, hard science, dirty politics, and, yes, classic heart-stopping horror. Somewhere, Dracula himself is sitting up late into the day enjoying the hell out of this.”

—John Griesemer, author of Signal & Noise and filmmaker of the web series Parmalee

“A full-on vampire infestation—or is it a colonization?—hits Earth, as documented in this zippy read via a clever series of narratives, interviews, historical documents, and newspaper reports.”

—Boston Globe

“This page-turner is just shy of being too smart for its own good.”

—Texas Observer

“Villareal uses vampires as stand-ins for those who experience other-ing by the state and as a way to explore growing xenophobia in the United States today”

—Literary Hub

A PEOPLE’S

HISTORY

OF THE

VAMPIRE

UPRISING

A NOVEL BY

RAYMOND A. VILLAREAL

TITANBOOKS

A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising

Print edition ISBN: 978 1 789 09188 5

E-book edition ISBN: 978 1 789 09189 2

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: April 2019

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 2019 by Raymond A. Villareal. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Mom and Dad

“The only hope for the doomed, is no hope at all…”

—Virgil, The Aeneid

FOREWORD

When I was approached to compile a recent history of the Gloamings and their entrance into society, I initially thought, Too soon. Events continue to change at a rapid pace. But it’s exactly these changing conditions—we are still trying to figure out how we got here—that caused me to realize: now is the perfect time to compile the beginning, middle, and…if not the end, then that place that occupied the in medias res of our current conflicts.

Some historians may consider other, more eminent or notorious individuals than the ones I’ve documented here—but I believe the individuals in this text affected the course of events most profoundly. In fact, I view those other accounts of this period with suspicion. Their research is negligent at best, their prose too concerned with the salacious details of irrelevant events.

This book is also for the martyrs who sacrificed their lives to the cause—no matter what side. Other historians have attempted to subvert these deaths to their own cause. It is ironic that the Gloamings’ emergence occurred during what was generally considered our empire’s finest days—“Un grand destin commence, un grand destin s’acheve,” as Corneille stated of the Roman Empire. Those other historians labor under this misconception.

Not I. I decline.

In spite of the great personal sacrifice, I have labored to be impartial. I have been threatened and attacked during my research for this book. As a result, and after frequent hospitalization, my quality of life has been severely, negatively affected. Yet I pass no judgments on those responsible. These pages are compiled for everyone: those who lived through this time, and those who did not survive.

I hope, reader, that they give you meaningful perspective.

[REDACTED SIGNATURE]

April 22

* * *

New York Post — March 131: Last night, the home of wealthy trial attorney John Hatcher in the Flatiron District was robbed by three unknown persons. The house was empty while Mr. Hatcher attended a performance of “Nixon in China.” The thieves stole an undetermined amount of gold rumored to comprise a worth of more than $10 million. Sources with the New York City regional office of the FBI indicate Mr. Hatcher’s extensive and professional surveillance system was not sabotaged, yet the video was not usable to authorities. A spokesman for the FBI stated that the Agency has no current suspects but the investigation continues.

1   Page 2, Metro section.

CHAPTER 1

MAY 15, ORIGIN

DAY ONE OF THE NOBI DISCOVERY

Dr. Lauren Scott

Research Physician, Centers for Disease Control

“Let the dead bury their own dead.” That’s what my dad used to say, when faced with a losing proposition. Of course the blood, which dominated so much discussion during the time of this investigation, was heavily on my mind as well. Strange to admit as a doctor, but since birth I’ve been terrified at the sight of blood. Have you ever seen a bird fly straight into a window and drop to the ground? Kind of like that. As a kid, my heart rate and blood pressure would drop suddenly, and bam! The darkness descended, lights out. I would wake up on my back.

Then, when I was fifteen, a new doctor kindly told me about applied tension, where you tense the muscles in the legs, torso, and arms, raising the blood pressure to the head, thereby counteracting the response to pass out. It was ingenious. I spent years working on the response—tensing all these muscles until it was second nature—since I needed to be able to handle the sight of blood. Even as a child, I already wanted to be a doctor.

I know every doctor says that. But it’s true. My dad fixed refrigerators for a living and I often tagged along during the summer. I was fascinated by the spectacle of him carefully taking apart the back cover to expose the innards of the refrigerator’s engine. He pulled the wires from the adapter and condenser, stripping them with the care of a surgeon. He burned the soldering metal to clean and replace the shattered cords. Even in a bird’s nest of wires, my dad knew exactly which ones to pull out and fix. I considered him a refrigerator doctor, and I daydreamed he was performing surgery on old robots. I wanted to be a doctor like my dad—but to fix humans, not refrigerators.

My mom was similarly precise, although in a decidedly less productive style. She would maniacally rearrange all desk and home objects to get them in order! Between the two of them, I grew up with an extremely disciplined personality, well suited for a medical occupation. My younger sister, Jennifer, was the exact opposite. By the time she was twelve, Jennifer had run away from home more than ten times. But it wasn’t running away to leave home; it was more leaving home to go to the lake or a concert or even the mall. After a while, my parents realized Jenny just wanted to experience life. “Tell us where you want to go next time,” my dad yelled at her the time she vanished for three days to go hiking. “I’ll drive you there myself.” To his credit, until she got her driver’s license—an epic battle in and of itself—he often did.

In medical school I soon realized anything too invasive led to an audience with blood. That led me to a concentration in virology. The first time I became aware of the…the disease, I had just started at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC].

The CDC is a government agency whose goal is to protect public health and safety through the control and prevention of disease, injury, and disability. I had recently graduated from medical school with the intention of becoming a research physician. After my residency, the CDC came to my university to speak about the procedures involved when doctors are confronted with new and unusual symptoms out in the field. I was fascinated by the deductive reasoning involved—like being a detective searching for microbes and living cells. My background in research, plus my experience working in a biosafety level three lab with pathogen and lethal agents, made my résumé a natural fit for the agency. By then, too, I had internships with the World Health Organization in various third world countries, mostly in West Africa. So it was an ideal first job.

Young and inexperienced in the ranks, I was usually sent to cover not-so-dangerous health alerts around the country. Which is why on April second, when we received a strange but vague report from Nogales, Arizona, my older colleagues didn’t even blink. It seemed even less than routine.

So the CDC sent me.

* * *

The request from Arizona was slightly more expedited than usual because Nogales is a border town, and, well, you never know what you’re getting so close to another country. Of course, that was also the week of the solar flare panic, which only added to the tension. Unusual solar flares had been causing disruptions with satellite transmissions, radio signals, and transformer blowouts in the power grid. I mean, it wasn’t as bad as the cable networks made it seem—watching Fox News or CNN, you’d think the entire world had gone dark, when really the country was just experiencing some blinks with some Internet service and GPS providers. My sister Jennifer and I, who texted often, resolved to stay in touch despite the Internet troubles. We took to sending each other the cheesiest postcards we could find—preferably one bought from a gas station or restaurant. But it was enough that, en route to Arizona, I didn’t have much to go on other than a few phone calls with officials in Nogales to discuss the incidents.

I arrived on a scorching Tuesday afternoon, hot air slapping my face as I left the airport to look for a taxi. My contact in Nogales was Dr. Hector Gomez, head of the city’s health department and also its coroner—and we agreed to meet at the coroner’s office complex so that I could view the bodies in question. I lugged three suitcases, two of them holding my equipment, including my hazmat suit and other protective gear. CDC rules stipulated that an investigator conducting an initial on-site review should procure a fully encapsulating chemical-resistant suit. I considered bringing a self-contained breathing apparatus with a level A suit, but I figured that might be overkill. It was also heavy as hell.

The coroner’s office was a small modular office with greenish drab colors, utilitarian furniture, and cheap leaded paint. In the small lobby, I saw a young man who I assumed to be Dr. Gomez, and another man in a police uniform, nervously awaiting my arrival.

I held out my hand, trying to sound older and more experienced than I felt. “Hi, I’m Lauren Scott.”

The man with the dark bushy mustache over pursed lips took my hand. “Dr. Gomez. Pleased to meet you, Dr. Scott. I’m glad you’re finally here. This is Sheriff Wilson.”

The tall figure in the uniform tipped his cowboy hat. The fixed gaze on his lined face told me he was ready to get down to business. “Pleasure.”

“Nice to meet both of you,” I replied. “And please, call me Lauren.”

“We should get started immediately,” Dr. Gomez said as he fidgeted with the small notebook in his right hand. Almost as if he were tempted to take notes on our conversation. “Let’s go to the morgue and we can review our notes and the body.”

I followed them through a long hallway, then down a flight of stairs to the basement. It smelled like formaldehyde and alcohol, and there were fluorescent lights that blinked in the freezing temperature. It was hard not to crack a joke or run away; this old building looked like a scene right out of a TV show. I saw a body already lying on the slab, covered with a green sheet. As Dr. Gomez lifted the sheet, I briefly wondered if I should be wearing a suit or at least protective headgear. I was still new and obsessed with not catching any disease I encountered, unlike the older grizzled veterans who showed up to hot zones with barely any gloves, much less a protective suit.

I stepped closer to the body and noticed there did not appear to be any obvious signs of trauma.

“How long has the body been here?” I asked.

Dr. Gomez paused and glanced at the sheriff with his bottom lip sticking out in a scowl. “Twenty-four hours.”

I should have called for help right then, but I simply turned to Gomez, surprised. “You called three days ago about a body exhibiting unusual hemophilia bruising and intradermal contusions over ninety percent of the body. I thought this was that body. I need to see the other body.”

Sheriff Wilson and Dr. Gomez exchanged another agonized glance. “That body is not here anymore.”

I stared at them for a moment and I’m pretty sure my mouth was open. “What do you mean?”

“Apparently it was stolen from the morgue,” Sheriff Wilson answered, a pained look on his face. “We’re still investigating. Frankly, we have no idea how it got out, or who in their right mind would want to steal it. I hope it’s some damn college students looking for a prank.”

“Oh,” I said. I pointed at the body on the slab. “So who is this?”

“This is another body we found at the ravine, which exhibited the identical intradermal bruising over the torso as the previous one,” Dr. Gomez replied.

I leaned over the body. Incisions had been made already on the scalp. I glanced over at Dr. Gomez.

“We sort of felt that we needed to get a jump on everything,” he said. “But then we thought better of it and stopped. Sorry.”

“That’s really not what I anticipated when I emailed the protocol.” I was pissed, but what could I do? I moved on to the external examination. This would have to be a cursory exam for the moment. I placed my iPhone on a small table and clicked on the recording app.

“No obvious signs of trauma that would indicate the cause of death. Appears to be a woman in her thirties in moderate shape. One hundred and forty-five pounds. No distinguishing marks or tattoos. Turning the head of the body I see two circular wounds—openings—of equal-millimeter diameter—maybe a bite—close to the carotid artery and extending an undetermined length into the skin.”

I leaned closer and smelled something faint. A floral scent? Sweet yet strangely not pleasing. Cheap perfume, most likely. I rubbed my nose with the back of my hand. The scent lingered far longer than I was comfortable with. I continued.

“A dissection would need to be performed. However, a cursory glance doesn’t seem to indicate that this would be the cause of death unless a poison was injected. But the wounds do resemble teeth marks at first glance. However, they do not resemble any teeth wounds I am familiar with from either a human or other mammal. I am going to examine the body under magnification. No blood or tissue under the fingernails, although a swab will be performed for further testing. Teeth seem to be in good shape, but two top molars seem to be loose. Can’t speculate on that cause yet. An examination of the full body shows no signs of obvious trauma. A chemical analysis of hair and blood will need to be performed immediately. The eyes show no signs of hemangioma or petechial rash. The dissection and brain examination will proceed tomorrow morning.”

Dr. Gomez handed me the syringe. I took blood and saliva samples and placed them in the biohazard containers. I had some trouble extracting a usable amount of blood. A simple touch indicated that the body was unusually devoid. Premature coagulation, perhaps. “Where can I take these samples for a quick chemical analysis?”

“University of Arizona, Santa Cruz, has a small lab,” Dr. Gomez said. “I can get someone to drive it over tonight, and the lab techs there owe me. They can put in the rush. It won’t be as detailed but it’s a start.”

I stopped in the hallway and turned to the sheriff. “I’m wondering: did you rule out a human cause before calling me?” I asked. “I mean, like a murder or something.”

Sheriff Wilson nodded. “Sure, but the first body—the female—was dead. I mean, it had no vital signs. Then it gets up and leaves! Hector sent a sample of hair to the state crime lab and they told us there were some unidentifiable substances or some sort of thing and they wanted us to call our state board of health. We had to call someone. Someone federal. Hector here—I mean Dr. Gomez—thought we should call the CDC. Next on the list was the FBI.” He smiled. “We may still do that.”

“Thanks,” I said, still trying to gather all the ideas bouncing around in my mind. “I guess I’ll go back to my hotel room to settle in. Then let’s head out to the ravine where the bodies were found.”

Sheriff Wilson and Dr. Gomez just nodded as they each scratched the side of their faces.

* * *

I checked into a dingy La Quinta not too far from the Mexican border. There weren’t many choices in this town. I threw my bags on the bed and attempted to take a nap, even with the window-unit air conditioner growling like a busted muffler. I was going to have to be up for the results of the toxicology—hopefully sooner than later.

Even then, in those early hours, the situation felt weird. Who steals a body from the coroner’s office? I was struck, too, by the bite marks. And where was all the blood? All those years trying to avoid blood, and now I was wishing for it to be there. Always, it was about the blood. I thought of Macbeth: “The near in blood, the nearer bloody.” I think my father taught me that. It seems so apropos in hindsight, as I’ve felt covered in the blood ever since.

I transferred the pictures to my iPad and tried to consider what type of animal could leave that mark. I attempted to find significance in the loose upper molars and what systematic disease could cause this. Diabetes and cancer were obvious ones, but the body looked to be in good health, so I eliminated those possibilities. Another type of autoimmune disease could be a contributing factor, but that would take more tests. I made a mental note to get a tissue sample sent to Atlanta. This was my first solo assignment; I needed to cover all the bases.

I had pretty much just laid my head on the flat pillow when a knock on my door almost caused me to leap out of my skin.

“Dr. Scott? It’s Sheriff Wilson and Dr. Gomez.”

I unlocked and opened the door. They stood there, looking like a mixture of shame and frustration. “Sorry,” the sheriff said. “We tried calling but your phone must be on silent—”

“What happened?” I cut him off. I was probably overtired by this point. “Did we get the results already?”

Wilson glanced at Gomez like neither of them wanted to talk. The sheriff won the silent battle. “The body is—well, it’s not in the morgue anymore,” Dr. Gomez said.

* * *

On the way back to the morgue, Sheriff Wilson tried to explain. “We’ve never been broken into before,” he said. That was an ambiguous accomplishment at best, I thought. “It’s a bit more than that,” the sheriff continued. “The guard at the back door says the woman walked up to him and hit him with a surgical hammer. He doesn’t remember much after that.”

“I’m sorry. What woman?”

“The woman you saw. The corpse on the table.”

I laughed. “What? That can’t be true.”

The car was silent for a moment, until the sheriff said, “He swears it.” I glanced out the window again and it was like a movie on repeat, the identical saguaro cactus every few miles with its crooked arms locked in a permanent wave at random tumbleweeds along for the ride.

When we arrived back at the morgue, a deputy surveyed the scene we had left just hours earlier, as if looking for his keys. I saw the empty table, and then the materials from the shelf strewn across the floor as if an earthquake had hit. My eyes became fixated on a roll of gauze and scissors on the table.

Wilson saw what I was looking at. “The deputy says that the woman’s head was bandaged,” he said.

I exchanged a glance with Dr. Gomez. All he could do was shrug. We walked into the other room and another deputy, who looked all of nineteen years old, sat on the floor, his head bandaged. He recounted the story to us as he held an ice pack to his head. He said, “One minute I was by myself, and in a flash that girl—”

“The presumed corpse,” I said.

He nodded slowly. “Yeah. Her. She was standing next to me. I was eating a Twix bar. The girl, she—”

“The presumed corpse,” I said again.

The deputy paused. He looked nervously at the sheriff, then continued. “Yeah. The presumed corpse. She was wearing pants. Also, a sweatshirt. No shoes.”

Sheriff Wilson said, “There’s a locker down the hall. Used by techs and deputies assigned to the morgue. Broken into—missing those exact clothes.”

“I wanted to ask her what she was doing but it’s like the words wouldn’t come out,” the deputy said with a frown on his thin face. “Then, when I just about found the words, my head caught the end of that hammer.”

I nodded and tried to keep my face from looking disgusted. “Now the other body that disappeared yesterday. Were there any—”

Sheriff Wilson completed my sentence. “Clothes were missing out of the locker also.”

I couldn’t help thinking that the deputy himself looked like someone half dead, and maybe on meth. And it wasn’t the recent hammer to his head. I suppose good help was hard to find. Without anything else to do—no preliminary tests back, no body to examine, and everyone wide awake—we decided to head out to the desert area where the bodies were found.

* * *

The desert was still dark, but I cannot describe how dark the desert gets close to the border. We were only a ten-minute distance from the morgue, and it was like our vehicles’ headlights had led to another world, one closer to the black sky. We ended up on a slight hill near an eight-foot metal fence with barbed wire strewn on top and with concrete bollards every couple of feet. A cold wind blew in from the south with not a bird or animal in sight. I guessed this was the border—it was a bit anticlimactic. Stepping out of the police van, I was surprised to see the ground covered in grass. Not desert sand.

Sheriff Wilson slapped a hand on the fence. “On the other side of this you’d be in Mexico. Doesn’t look much different, does it?”

As far as I could see over the fence, it appeared pretty much the same, albeit farther from our lights. I couldn’t shake the feeling something was staring back at me from somewhere in that murky distance. My eyes strained to see into it. I felt years of nothingness scattered across these plains and it made me shiver and cough.

The headlights from the van illuminated the shallow hole nearest the fence. The cold desert wind tickled a chill down my back. I knelt down in front of the hole but I saw only wet dirt. Dr. Gomez, hunched in a catcher’s position next to me, ran a hand through the dirt.

The corpses had been found by a trucker whose engine had burned out on the side of the road while transporting salvaged computer parts. No one could determine why he took such an indirect route, although the sheriff said suspicion was that he may have been carrying illegal cargo. The trucker was waiting on the side of the road for a wrecker to arrive when he spotted what he said looked like a figure running away at a high rate of speed. Then he noticed a hand, some distance away. When he went out into the field to investigate, he found the body.

“Border Patrol showed up before the wrecker,” Sheriff Wilson said with a voice disembodied from the headlights. “Then they stayed with the body while checking the fence. They called our office. The rest you know.”

I shined my flashlight over the area. I placed some dirt into a plastic bag for testing. I shined the light on the plastic bag. The dirt appeared reddish. I looked over at Sheriff Wilson. “Is that dried blood?”

He took the bag, pushed back his cowboy hat, and studied it with his small flashlight. “Might be.” He handed me back the bag and shined the light onto the ground. He pushed his hand into the ground and put the light on it as he rubbed his index finger and thumb together. “Damn. Looks like wet blood also.”

Wondering about Border Patrol protocol, I poked a finger in the same spot as Wilson. Dried and wet blood mixed on my fingers. In hindsight, of course, the whole area looked like a dug-up shallow grave, but in the moment that early morning it simply looked like loose dirt near a fence. At the time, none of us knew about the mass grave on the other side of the fence.

* * *

I arrived back at my hotel at about five in the morning. I leaned back on the hard pillow and thought about emailing an update to the CDC, but they were wrapped up in another Ebola scare in Africa, and there were potential carriers in Minnesota. No one would read my report for another two weeks, if even then.

I must have slept for an hour before my phone began to buzz. It was Dr. Gomez, and his tone was urgent, although to be honest in the short time I had known him, he always sounded like he was beside himself.

“The lab called,” he said quickly. “They want to see us immediately.”

* * *

At the science lab of the University of Arizona, Santa Cruz—about a thirty-minute drive from Nogales—I grabbed coffee from the cramped office, stirring in lumpy sugar as I introduced myself to the med student and professor waiting for us. Gomez looked like he hadn’t slept in two days. He shook Professor Chen’s hand as if they had met before. Chen was a skinny, animated older man with professor hair and rumpled clothes. His assistant, Jimmy Morton, looked like a hipster out of central casting. He wore a red flannel shirt and a mustache that sprang off his face like a twist tie. He must have left the monocle at home.

Chen waved us over to the computer. “Okay, so we did a preliminary test of the blood. It’s been pretty slow around here so we were able to do it quick, but let me just say, we really need a hematologist to look at this.” His eyes sparkled like fireworks. “Prepare to have your mind blown.” He clicked the mouse on the computer and a 1000x microscopic HD image appeared on the screen in neon green and red looking like an animated video game. “A light microscopy image would be better but we obviously do not have access to that equipment here.” He pointed a bony finger at the red circles on the screen. “See the platelets. At first we thought it was some type of sickle cell anemia—one that we weren’t familiar with—but look over here. It’s like a classic case of leukemia. But even that didn’t register in our further tests. And it has a distinct hypercoagulable state at times, and then it adapts again.”

Sheriff Wilson raised a hand. “What is a hyper…whatever?”

“It means that the blood has a tendency to clot very easily,” Jimmy answered. I secretly prayed he might start twirling his mustache as he talked. “It’s not a good thing because it can cause life-threatening blood clots in a person. A person with blood this advanced would have clots throughout their veins.”

Professor Chen continued as he rubbed his calloused hands together. “Honestly, this is what probably killed the person, I would think.”

“She’s alive,” I told him. I glanced at the sheriff. “Allegedly.”

Chen and Morton stared at us and exchanged a glance. “How? That’s absurd,” Professor Chen said. He didn’t wait for an answer before he continued. “But then you’re not going to believe this, but the blood thins to a level—and what I mean is the blood-clotting cells begin to mutate to a level akin to Ebola. I’m serious.”

“He is,” Jimmy concurred.

“It’s like a type of essential thrombocytosis that I’m not familiar with at all,” Chen said. “This needs to be sent to the University of Arizona and their lab for more testing. In all honesty we should probably be wearing level A hazmat suits or be looking at this in a level four biosafety lab. I would love to see if Niemann-Pick C1 cholesterol transporter is essential in the transmission as in Ebola.”

“I need to get a sample to the CDC as soon as possible,” I said, entranced by his computer screen. I started to feel the rush of adrenaline. Had this dusty old town actually birthed a new virus?

Sheriff Wilson’s phone rang. He stepped away to answer it.

“Hematology is not my specialty, obviously,” Dr. Gomez said, “but can a body survive long with this particular condition?”

“Not likely,” Professor Chen said. “I suppose there are outliers for every disease, but I wouldn’t think that a body could withstand any of the conditions. I mean, for example, Ebola will kill a body in a short period of time, and this is as bad—if not worse—from all appearances. I can only imagine that was the cause of death. But now you’re telling me this woman isn’t dead? I find that unreal, to be exact.”

“I find it unreal too, but it happened,” Dr. Gomez said with a shrug.

Sheriff Wilson walked back to the computer. “Well, good news, you see. We have an actual lead. A girl named Liza Sole was reported missing by her roommate and she matches the description of our former dead body.”

“Mind if I tag along?” I asked.

“I was just gonna ask you the same thing,” Wilson said.

We ended up at an older apartment complex only three miles away. The sun had come up and I could feel my body drained of energy. I was itching for another cup of coffee but I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. Strangely enough, I used to hate the smell of coffee. Reminded me of going to my aunt’s house in Florida in the summer, which always smelled like coffee, and was so god-awful hot and humid. Coffee used to smell like boredom and mosquitoes to me, but medical school will make you change every habit and attitude you hold dear.

I counted about twenty units in the complex—not big by any means. Two floors and some parking—that was it. We walked up the stairs looking for apartment 221. Sheriff Wilson’s face darkened as we reached the top steps.

“What’s wrong?” Dr. Gomez asked.

“One of my deputies was supposed to meet us here. He should be waiting for us already. He said he was here already.” He frowned and looked around. “You know, we’re a small county here. I expect my deputies to be available when requested.”

Wilson rapped on the door a few times, waited, thought for a moment, then grabbed the handle and twisted. The door swung open. But he didn’t walk inside. We glanced at each other. With a long sigh, Sheriff Wilson stepped into the apartment.

“Thought I heard someone in distress,” he said without much conviction.

We stepped inside and I was struck by the peculiar familiar smell. At the time I couldn’t place it, but of course I now know that it was the same sweet tinge from Nogales not six hours before. And of course we should have been wearing masks before we walked inside. I had violated so many protocols so far this visit, it’s a wonder I still had a job later.

The apartment looked like it had been vacated in an emergency. The television was tuned to some celebrity reality show. Two plates of half-eaten sushi sat on the living room table with two glasses of wine near the edge. Wilson and Gomez looked inside one of the bedrooms while I moved over to the kitchen. Nothing seemed amiss. I saw a piece of floral cardboard tacked to the refrigerator with a SpongeBob SquarePants magnet. In block letters at the top it stated, “LIZA’S THINGS TO DO THIS YEAR!!” Without thinking, I pulled it off the fridge and stuck it in my jacket pocket. The sheriff strode back into the den and looked around again. “No sign of the roommate or the dead girl,” he said. The roommate who made the report was Glenda Jones. Not that it matters now. He looked at me. “The presumed corpse.”

I didn’t even try to hide a smile—and the smile hadn’t left my face when a yell from Dr. Gomez cut through the moment. We both rushed to the hallway and almost ran into Gomez, who was running in the other direction. He pointed behind him, as Sheriff Wilson pulled out his pistol.

“In the bathroom,” Gomez cried.

Wilson took the lead and ordered me to stay back, but I was right behind him as we approached the bathroom. Wilson waved his gun as he stepped inside. It was a small bathroom, so I parked at the doorway.

“No, God, no,” Wilson said. He knelt next to the bathtub and holstered his revolver. I stepped inside and looked over his kneeling figure. A young man in the same uniform as Wilson lay in the bathtub. His face was white. His eyes open.

He was obviously deceased. For now.

* * *

That’s how it really started. A back-from-the-dead girl, a dead deputy, and a missing roommate. Later, I would hate myself for not calling the FBI and ordering a quarantine of the area immediately. But things were moving too quickly. From that moment in Liza Sole’s bathroom, it was a cascade of action from the police and the CDC—meaning myself.

Of course I wanted to take samples in that apartment, but there was nothing to be found. Strangely enough, no blood. An autopsy by Dr. Gomez determined that Deputy Shawn Miller died from exsanguination. Gomez spent hours on that autopsy attempting to find another cause of death, but the only cause could be a draining of all of his blood.

I made my own examination but came to the same conclusion. Two holes in the carotid artery were determined to be the only source of the exsanguination. No trauma, bruising, scratches, or lacerations whatsoever.

Dr. Gomez couldn’t believe it. Not even a butcher knife could have drained the blood in such an efficient manner. I spent that first day with him, trying to hash out how those two holes could have drained an entire body of blood in a matter of minutes. Deputy Miller had arrived at the scene not more than an hour before we did, took his report, called it in, and waited for us. It didn’t seem possible.

The trace amounts of blood Dr. Gomez and I found on the body bore the same indicators as the samples from the escaped body from the morgue. The sample was sent to Galveston, Texas, and the University of Texas with their level four biosafety lab; it indicated the same structure as the previous sample. However, when studied through an electron micrograph, it showed a mutation of what they identified to be the Marburg virus, a hemorrhagic fever virus considered as serious as Ebola. My supervisors still did not recognize the importance of these findings, yet they ordered me to stay in the field, in the event that other persons reported symptoms indicative of the virus. I could only imagine what my apartment back in Atlanta would look like after another month away from home. And as if on cue, my mom called me, hysterical. “Lauren, thank goodness! What’s going on? Why does your apartment look abandoned?” she sputtered. I had asked my sister if she would check on my apartment every few days, but it’s never good to ask a twentysomething girl with a new boyfriend to remember anything important.

It was only a matter of a month before more bodies started to show up in Arizona and then New Mexico. All the exsanguinated bodies were accompanied by another person from the same household disappearing. All the dead bodies either had their blood drained or they exhibited the same blood characteristics that the original dead girl—Liza Sole—had in her system.

Liza Sole was a twenty-eight-year-old woman from Dallas, Texas, who worked various retail jobs and went through a few marriages before she decided to return to school to finish her degree at the University of Arizona. That didn’t last too long: she met another man and moved to Nogales, Arizona, where she worked at a Pizza Hut. As with many of her previous relationships, this one did not last long, and soon she moved out of his house and rented an apartment with various Craigslist roommates who stayed for short periods of time and then moved on.

Clearly, the CDC should have been more involved, given the growing scope of the virus, but the center was still enthralled by Ebola ravaging Africa and then being carried into the United States by returning health-care professionals and tourists. My blood cell disease was getting no attention, no real funds. I was made the head of the Nogales team a month after the initial event, but “team” was a stretch. It was still just me, filing reports back to Atlanta. No support staff.

I started calling it the Nogales organic blood illness on my field reports. NOBI for short. I had Sheriff Wilson send out an addendum to his APB on Liza Sole that the CDC would like to be informed about any leads or similar cases because of the possibility of illness related to the condition of the suspect.

But I still couldn’t get my superiors at the CDC to issue a warning on the disease. A warning would have required the FBI and other federal law enforcement to issue an immediate alert on the spreading disease, and on Liza. A warning would have sent information out to every law enforcement agency in the country. I’m not saying we could have stopped NOBI if that had been the case, but it would have made a huge difference in how far the disease spread before it became a national emergency.

It would have saved lives.

* * *

About a month after the initial Liza Sole event, Dr. Gomez took a leave of absence from the Nogales Department of Health to devote himself to my investigation. At his own expense, he followed me to different cities in the Southwest as we tracked the disease and the wake of bodies and those missing. He soon rode with me in the car I rented on the government’s tab and was a great help in tracking the people and the virus. And in keeping me company.

In the beginning, we followed Liza’s and the disease’s trail through Arizona. It felt like a spur-of-the-moment road trip for two college roommates piling all of our random belongings into a compact car. All we were missing was a cooler of cheap beer. Every small town seemed to blend into another, our files growing, our space for clothing shrinking. Ten miles to the next motel and I could hardly wait.

I was beat up and could only drop my bags to the floor as I stared at the motel’s rumpled bed. Dr. Gomez—Hector—had long since blown through his budget and was sleeping on the floor of my room. He dropped to the ground and puffed up his thin pillow against the torn wallpaper of the motel. I felt sorry that Nogales County would not pay for his research, and he had to front it all from his savings. His dedication to solving this unfolding crisis, like mine, only grew with adversity.

He looked pretty uncomfortable trying to make the hard floor into a bed. “Hey, Dr. Gomez,” I said. He looked up with tired eyes.

“What’s up, Dr. Scott?”

I cocked my head at the bed. “First of all, why don’t I call you Hector and you call me Lauren? Secondly, you look like crap on the floor. Why don’t you sleep on the bed? There’s room enough for both of us and I’m pretty sure I can trust you by now. And if not, I’ll beat the crap out of you. Pretty sure I could.”

He stared for a moment, as if he might not even want to get up from the floor. Maybe he was one of those ascetic individuals, abstaining from any indulgent behavior and preferring to deny himself any comfort.

Hector rose up without a word and flopped down onto the comforter. He flipped onto his side and gripped the pillow like a life preserver. In no time, he was asleep. I lay down on the other side of the bed in all my clothing, and was dreaming of leeches within minutes.

A month in, we had eight confirmed dead, devoid of blood, and ten people missing. The missing people were the most perplexing part of this investigation. I couldn’t come up with a plausible theory as to why some people who came in contact with Liza Sole went missing: if they had acquired this virus, wouldn’t they be dead after a short time? Did she kidnap them? Did they follow her willingly? Did she kill them and bury them somewhere remote?

But then Liza Sole finally made a mistake, became more than a myth, and every bulletin that we’d sent paid off.

At the time, we had seven dead bodies that were autopsied and found to be devoid of blood. It was almost as if all the blood had been drained and the rest incinerated within the body. Therefore, we could autopsy the body but we couldn’t find the most important aspect of the death: the blood, and how it compared to the sample we had from the previously dead Liza Sole.

We received a call from the El Paso police department about an eighth body, found near the border crossing with Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. A police officer was in his car on patrol near a back alley behind some abandoned warehouses when he saw a person crouched over another body lying on the ground. The officer shined his spotlight on them. The crouched figure jumped up and started to sprint away at great speed. The officer couldn’t believe a person could run so fast.

The officer approached the figure on the ground: it was a man with blood spurting from the neck, from his artery. The man on the ground didn’t last long enough for the ambulance, but at the morgue a technician remembered the notice from the Nogales police department. When Hector and I arrived, Hector convinced the coroner, an old medical school classmate of his, to let him sit in on the autopsy. He came to the conclusion, based on the postexposure condition of the body and the internal organs, that the body was probably exposed to the same virus as Liza Sole, but for some reason his body could not handle the physical changes.

Of course, we still hadn’t determined how Liza Sole carried this virus with no obvious ill effects. I had a disease with a mortality rate, albeit unofficial, of about 50 percent, if not more. A disease that presented with bodies disappearing and others coming back to life after being deceased. And a disease that also drained the blood from the truly deceased bodies.

Dr. Gomez and I had been so busy chasing bodies that I really hadn’t had the time to compile thorough statistics. Everything was haphazardly notated in my iPad and Moleskine notebooks, which I lugged to every city, but my notations were weeks behind the current cases. I’m not making excuses for the blame that has been thrust upon me; I’m simply stating facts.

And then. We finally caught a break there in El Paso.

We caught up with Liza Sole.

* * *

Dr. Gomez and I decided to go eat some real Texas Mexican food. Yelp brought us to a place called El Capitan. Supposedly it “didn’t get any better!” Of course, it took all my persuasive powers to get Hector out of his room given his monk-like devotion to figuring out Liza Sole’s path.

“It’s good Mexican food,” I said, pushing the door to our motel room open.

“I have work to do,” he replied.

I glanced around at the hurricane of files around him. Hector had a pretty thick beard now and he looked to have lost about ten pounds since we started this journey. He sat in his boxers and a dingy T-shirt.

“You seriously want to eat Dairy Queen or McDonald’s again? Or maybe there are some new items on the menu at the vending machine.” I did the best thing I knew to scare a man: I crossed my arms and channeled my mother. “Seriously: get your fucking clothes on and let’s get some Mexican food!”

He stared at me for a moment.

Then he walked over to the bed and grabbed his pants.

Soon enough, we were sitting in a corner booth sipping margaritas and working on chips and salsa. The restaurant was pretty old and worn, with red lights above the tables casting an eerie glow over the booth. The seats’ vinyl covers were old and ripped from end to end. We sat in silence, left to our own thoughts while we nursed our drinks and ate greasy chips. My phone buzzed and I answered it before the second vibration. I didn’t get a word out before—

“Where have you been?” It was Jennifer. I should have checked the caller ID. I could tell she was looking for an argument.

“I’m on the road, Jenny,” I replied. My irritation vanished when I heard her raspy voice. It had been far too long…

“Are you still chasing that bug?”

“Virus,” I corrected. “So what’s up?” Although I already knew the answer.

“Well…I’m gonna be a little short this month and I was wondering…”

“What was it this month? Music festival?”

Silence on the other end. “Stuff. You know.”

“Okay. I’ll send you five hundred.”

I heard a sigh on the other end. “Thanks. And call Dad. He always complains he never knows where you are.”

“I will,” I replied. When she hung up, I regretted not calling her more often. I had so much to ask her but never had the time.

Hector looked at me but didn’t ask. And I didn’t answer. “I wonder when they’ll call us with another body,” he said.

I thought for a moment while I savored an especially salty chip. “If the pattern proceeds to schedule…probably in two days. That seems to be the routine.” I laughed to myself. My dad would be appalled at all the sitting around and thinking. He would demand that I get my hands dirty and grab something real!

“I agree.”

“Where do you think it’ll be?”

Hector shook his head. “Who knows? Could be anywhere.”

My mind raced. “Not anywhere. Somewhere. Has to be somewhere. I mean, all of this is proceeding like a pattern. Let’s see if we can figure it out.”

Hector ignored his enchilada plate as he tapped his fork on the table. “She doesn’t go very far from the last city. Probably hitchhiking or by some other means—God help us if she has a car.”

“Exactly. I think we can safely say she’s not in El Paso anymore,” I declared as I took a big bite of my flauta. The grease dribbled off my chin. Heaven.

“We need a map,” he said.

Instinctively we each took out our cell phone and hit Google Maps. “She’s not going to Mexico or she would have gone there from Nogales,” I said. “I think she’s going to stay in the Southwest.”

“She’s going to stick to towns off major highways. She doesn’t have a choice. Carlsbad, Las Cruces, Van Horn. Has to be one of those. But which one?”

I thought for a moment as I sipped on my second margarita. I tried to remember the inventory of Liza Sole’s apartment. Papers, receipts, notebooks…The search of her computer history. I slammed my hand on the table. “She’s an artist! Or someone interested in art.”

Dr. Gomez gave me a sideways look. “So what?”

I leaned over the table toward Hector. “Listen. She’s going to a city or area where she feels familiar or interested in…the type of people she wants to meet. She had a list of things she wanted to do that I found on the refrigerator! One of them was to check out the art scene in Marfa, Texas.”

“Hmm. Seems tenuous. Very.” He stared at the map on his phone as he pointed his finger at the various cities spread out from El Paso. He shook his head before biting off almost half of his enchilada. “But damn. It would be easy for her to get there with minimal effort, and it’s off a highway but not a major highway, so it lessens the opportunity to be seen.”

Hector looked up and we held our stare for a moment.

* * *

We reached the Marfa Motor Inn as the sun came up. It was cheap enough for Dr. Gomez to have his own room, and we decided to grab some much-needed sleep until noon and then get to work. Of course, noon rolled into three in the afternoon. Angry and muttering to myself, I knocked on his door. He answered with sleep covering his face.

“Seriously. We need to get moving.”

Hector nodded. “I know. Sorry. I needed it, though. And I’ll bet you did too.”

From there we stopped by the local sheriff’s office—Sheriff Langston Lamar—to present our credentials and discuss the current situation. He looked to be in his forties and was built like a linebacker. There had not been any suspicious activity or injuries in the past couple of months other than a few bar fights. He told us he did not have the manpower to assign any deputies to the investigation, but if anything came up he would certainly take it seriously. He gave us his cell phone number.

Back at the hotel, we brainstormed various options in Marfa that night. Hector searched his phone. “Okay, so there’s an art show, a live country band, and a couple of dinner events in the center of town,” he said.

“I think we should start at the art gallery. And then move on to the others if we have the time. She could be at any of them.”

We changed our clothes, although neither of us had anything even resembling art opening–wear. Jeans and sweatshirts it would have to be. I put the hazmat suit in the trunk just in case. We walked in the cool night air to the end of the long main street block to the Hi-Times Gallery, a converted gas station from another era, now captive to hipster art patrons. The sun had already fallen away and the gallery was full—I bet the town population doubled at this gallery. The crowd flaunted their beards, flannel, and black garb—cowboy chic—and mingled with drinks in their hands, all but ignoring the art on the walls.

Hector and I kept to ourselves near the door. Every so often we checked a picture of Liza Sole on our phones, as a reminder. The lead was solid—I could feel it. This had to be the place and town. But after an hour and three glasses of wine I began to lose hope. I looked over at Hector. Was he having the same doubts? I saw him glance over at the people and the art, almost ignoring the front door. I knew his doubts were starting to surface. Had we made a huge mistake? What the hell was I still doing on this wild-goose chase…

Then a woman walked in by herself.

She wore a pair of faded and torn Levi’s 501 jeans that hugged her hips and legs—and a black turtleneck. It was as if she didn’t care that no one wore turtlenecks like that in Texas. An old beat-up tan Stetson cowboy hat was perched on her skull like she had grabbed it off her lover’s head as he lay in bed. Scuffed old black punk rock boots completed the image. She looked like a young Patti Smith busking in front of the Chelsea Hotel in seventy-three, screaming mad at society for not conforming to her vision. The hat tilted down about to her nose so it covered her face. My eyes were automatically drawn to her and I saw others in the gallery staring in the same manner.

She had a presence. A tingling in the back of my neck made me shudder. A sweet smell drifted into my nose and only made my thoughts scramble and bounce around in my head. It was like a car accident where you see your life as if in a flip-book of pictures scrolling too fast for you to even catch a memory. It only made me sad.

There was a magnetism I couldn’t put into words.

Temptation in human form.

She took measured strides over to the first wall aisle of paintings. The woman made no eye contact with any person, but her gaze—shaded as it was—cut across every occupant as if each were prey. I looked over at Hector and he was transfixed. I mean, he looked like he wanted to devour her. “Take a picture—it’ll last longer,” I told him with an elbow to his ribs.

He about jumped out of his skin. “Damn! Sorry. I mean, she’s a pretty girl. Although I can’t really see her face.”

I don’t know if it was the hat or the face or the fact that the hat covered her face—or simply a vibe. But it clicked. My picture of Liza Sole and this girl were not an exact match—this girl in the gallery was a bit thinner—but I felt my heart beating faster and faster.

I leaned in to Hector. “I think that might be her.”

He looked over at me. “Her?” He raised his arm to point. I yanked it down.

“Look at your picture. The nose on down.”

Hector clicked on his phone and studied it before leaning over to me. “Fuck!”

I was still distracted but I concentrated. “I’m going to stay here. You go outside and call the sheriff.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s her. I’m certain.”

“No, I mean are you sure you want to stay here instead of waiting outside?” Hector asked.

I gave him a hard look. He walked outside to call the sheriff.

With the studied focus of a professor, the woman was considering the painting of a white bird in an oak tree with its roots spreading out everywhere under the ground. I was so engrossed trying to see what she found so interesting about the painting…that I didn’t notice she had turned away.

She was staring at me.

I caught my breath, even from across the room. All I wanted to do was look into her eyes. It was as if she knew the reason I was there and that I was looking for her.

She moved like a cat. She was lurching toward me before I even realized it. I stepped back but she had already sprinted toward the back of the gallery, to a back room.

The gallery was almost empty save for a few stragglers trying to convince the bartender to open back up. I screamed for Hector as I chased Liza Sole toward the back door. I reached for the handle to the back room, and the door blew open and knocked me to the floor. Liza leapt over me as Sheriff Lamar sprinted inside and drew his Taser. He yelled at her to stop and she did for a moment, baring her teeth like an animal, then she lunged toward the front door of the gallery.

She made it to the front door just as the sheriff yelled a second time for her to stop. Surprisingly, she did, bared her teeth again, and then surged through the doorway.

The Taser wires made contact with her back just as Hector tackled her waist. In a single swiping movement, she swept loose the Taser darts and Hector both, but as she made it outside she was tackled again, now by the sheriff and three deputies.

She scratched and swung, but quickly they were able to cuff her wrists. The sheriff screamed for leg-irons but Liza kicked her heel into his face. All of a sudden, Liza jumped up and spread her legs. The handcuffs snapped off like wet paper. She took off in a sprint into the street, where a large pickup truck immediately hit her head-on.

She bounced off as the truck screeched to a halt, rubber smoke hovering in the air.

We all stood there in shock.

“Another day at the office,” the third deputy grumbled.

* * *

“Are you taking her to jail?” I asked.

“No, honey, I thought I might take her back to the art gallery,” Lamar said.

More of this bullshit. “I meant—”

“I know what you meant,” Sheriff Lamar replied. “We have a holding facility in the office until we can get her transferred to Alpine, which has a proper jail, and maybe to El Paso. Pretty sure Arizona will come for her in record time.”

“Is it okay if I come with you? I need to make a determination about whether there is a danger from any virus.”

Sheriff Lamar shrugged. “You started the show. Feel free to play it out.”

The trip to the sheriff’s office only took about two minutes. I rode in the front of the police car, with Liza Sole in the back behind the bars. When I glanced back at her, she stared at me with sparkling blue eyes and pale skin. Her lips were bright red even in the darkness of the vehicle, and as she moved her body in and out of the shadows it was almost as if she disappeared and reappeared.

Liza allowed the deputies to walk her into the police station. She showed no signs of violent behavior or resistance. They placed her in a small cell with bars—like from an old western movie. I think Sheriff Lamar sensed my amazement. “Original forged steel,” he said. “They don’t make them secure like this anymore.” Let’s hope it’s as secure as he claims. A window to the outside sat on the wall opposite the cell, moonlight streaming inside.

Years later, when I was debriefed extensively by a multitude of federal authorities, I would sometimes question my own recollections from that night. For example, I don’t know how long I watched Liza in that cell, or when Hector joined me, but I held her eyes for what felt like hours. Liza stared silently back out at us. There was something hypnotic in her movements and eyes. A strange gracefulness in her manner, like a gentle migration from one space to another.

A distinct sense of hopelessness enveloped me in those minutes or hours. But I had to get through all these psychological flashes in my brain—I felt a certain responsibility to understand this person, in spite of my fear. I felt that the prison bars were a mere curtain that Liza could push aside with a wave of her hand. An hour, maybe more, passed.

“How do you feel?” I asked her with a cracking voice.

Silence.

Then: “I feel awesome.”

I didn’t expect that answer with such a blank face.

“I only ask because I believe you have acquired a new type of virus into your system and you may begin to exhibit symptoms.”

Silence.

And she never said another word to me.