Alexander Death(15)

“The solution to what?”

Radiance shook her head, setting several dreadlocks swinging. “It doesn't make sense now. But it did then.”

“Did you attack her?”

“Everyone did.”

“With your hands?”

Radiance looked down at her infected, swollen hands, and she said nothing.

“Then what happened?” Heather asked.

“It was just craziness. Everybody attacking everybody. One big, violent clusterfuck. For no reason at all.”

“But you say the riot started with everybody attacking her?”

“Yeah. Then it spread into just total insanity. Does any of that make sense to you?”

“I can't say it does,” Heather said.

“It's so not like me,” Radiance said. “Really. I don't believe in violence, ever. You have to use visualization and stuff if you want to make the world better.”

“Were you trying to make the world better by attacking her?”

“In a weird way that totally doesn't make sense when I try to explain it,” Radiance said. “Yeah. It seemed like she was the evil, and everything would be so much better if we just got rid of her.”

“What happened to the girl after you hit her?”

“I don't know. Lost her in the crowd, everybody trying to attack her. Then people were attacking me and I fought back. That's all I really remember. Then I woke up with this shit this morning—” Radiance held up her hands. “So I came to the hospital.”

“You didn't have these symptoms last night?”

“Maybe I did. I was pretty out there, you know? I'm just saying, I really noticed them this morning.”

“Okay. We're going to keep monitoring you, Radiance. The doctors here will keep treating your hands, and we'll see how it goes.”

“The doctors here? What do you mean? Where are you from?”

“The Centers for Disease Control.”

“Oh, fuck.” Radiance touched her hand to her forehead, then looked at her hand, shuddered, and pulled it away from her face. “I'm totally fucked, aren't I?” she whispered.

“There's no reason to think that at this point,” Heather said. “I think if the infection had been fatal, you would have died by now. You look to be in good health, based on your chart here. Hopefully these will heal up soon.” Heather closed her kit and picked it up.

“And what if they don't?” Radiance asked.

“Then we'll treat it more aggressively,” Heather said. “We're monitoring this closely, Radiance. You're in good hands.” Heather wanted to bite back those words the moment she said them.

“Oh, very funny.” The hippie girl looked down at her diseased hands.

“We'll talk again soon,” Heather said. “I'll keep you updated as we learn more information.”

“Thanks, I guess,” Radiance said. She continued staring at her hands while Heather left.

The other patients who'd been isolated in this room fit similar patterns. They were mostly students who'd been caught up in the riot. They had symptoms of Fallen Oak syndrome, almost exclusively on their hands and arms. When pressed, a few of them admitted to attacking a girl meeting Jenny's description. The rest of them fell silent and refused to give Heather solid answers about it, clearly ashamed of themselves.

Heather left with plenty of test tubes of infection samples. She would send them to the lab in Atlanta. If this was truly Fallen Oak syndrome, the lab would find no pathogen at all.

A deadly disease with no identifiable vector. The walking dead. A riot that seemed to have begun with people attacking Jenny Morton, under orders from an unknown person.

Heather was beginning to miss the days she'd spent tracing the cholera epidemic in Haiti. Though politics had forced them to obscure the results of that study, too, at least the basic facts had made sense to Heather and the other researchers.

These events in South Carolina were starting to look more and more like the supernatural, and Heather didn't like that at all.





CHAPTER SIX





Ashleigh and Tommy rode fast through the night, stopping only to refuel the bike and to eat at a Waffle House outside Greensboro, Georgia, since nothing else was open that late at night. They devoured plates of omelets, hash browns and biscuits with gravy, to the amazement of their waitress. Both of them were drained from the massive energy it had taken to incite the riot. They needed sleep, but Ashleigh insisted on putting hours between them and Charleston before they rested.

She clung to his bike as the interstate rolled away beneath them. The road was nearly deserted, except for occasional clusters of eighteen-wheeler trucks ferrying cargo through the early hours of the morning.

Ashleigh tried to imagine what must have happened to Jenny. The mob had closed in around Jenny, attacking her from every direction. Naturally, Jenny would do her thing and unleash a plague on the crowd in order to survive. This time, the CDC and Homeland Security and the National Guard would all be waiting, thanks to that epidemiologist Dr. Reynard, who Ashleigh had played like a mark at a carnival.