Pandemic Page 84

Neutrophils detected contact, reversed their grip, letting go of Bo Pan and clinging to Madha instead. In two days, she would kill her husband by driving the point of a clothes iron into the back of his skull.

“Would you like a bag, sir?”

Bo Pan shook his head. “No, thank you. I am fine.”

She offered him his change. “Thank you for shopping at Hudson News.”

He took his money, moved to the magazine rack. Bo Pan pretended to look at the covers showing bright cars, men with too much muscle or women showing too much skin. Americans certainly loved big breasts.

He tried hard to stay calm — his contact was late. His plane boarded in ten minutes.

What if Ling didn’t show?

He unwrapped a Sucret and popped it into his mouth. Cherry flavor. He liked that. His throat was scratchy, and it felt like he had a fever coming on.

Bo Pan heard the rattling of wheels rolling along the concourse’s tile floor. He looked up just as Ling rolled a dolly into Hudson News. The dolly held five blue plastic trays, each loaded with soft drinks. Ling met Bo Pan’s eyes but didn’t acknowledge him in any way.

Ling rolled his dolly of drinks toward the glass refrigerator.

Bo Pan turned quickly to follow; when he did, he bumped into Paulette Duchovny from Minneapolis. Bo Pan’s hand came up immediately, reactively touching Paulette’s bare forearm.

“Oh!” he said. “Sorry, sorry.”

Three hours from that moment, Paulette would be back in Minneapolis. Two days after that, she would infect seven other people, including her son, Mark, and her daughter, Cindy. Mark and Cindy would lock up the house and stand guard as Paulette transformed into something that was not fully human. Before the sun set on the fourth day, Paulette Duchovny would do what a voice in her head told her to do — she would murder a family of five in their home, ending the slaughter by gutting a three-month-old baby.

Paulette smiled at Bo Pan. “That’s okay, no problem.”

He nodded again, then walked to the refrigerator. Ling was already there, the glass door pinned open by his dolly. He was pulling bottles of Coke out of the plastic bins, then reaching into the refrigerator to place them behind the bottles that were already there.

Ling saw Bo Pan, then took a step back and gestured at the open refrigerator. “Go ahead, sir.”

“Thank you,” Bo Pan said. He grabbed a Coke.

“Oh,” Ling said, then reached down to the floor and picked up a black fanny pack. The pack’s pouch looked like it held something cylindrical, perhaps about the size of a travel mug.

He offered it to Bo Pan. “You dropped this.”

Bo Pan’s heart hammered in his chest. It couldn’t be this easy to get an object past the TSA. It simply could not. The CIA was here, somewhere, they were watching, waiting for him to take it. They would start shooting at any moment.

Bo Pan took the fanny pack. As he did, his left pinkie touched Ling’s right thumb.

In three days, Ling would be dead, a leaking bag of fluid slowly sloughing off of a prone skeleton. The infection would not properly work with his particular physiology, and he would slowly dissolve in a chain reaction of apoptosis. But before he died — and after he became contagious — Ling would stock a total of twenty-two airport refrigerators. He would leave mutated neutrophils on over three hundred bottles, neutrophils that would be nicely refrigerated until a hand touched them, or a pair of lips brushed against them.

Bo Pan turned and walked away, waiting to hear screams of get down on the floor! But all he heard were the normal sounds of an airport. He walked to his gate just as his group was boarding.

The last thing Bo Pan did before getting on the plane was to hand his ticket to Enrique Calderone, who lived in the Boystown area of Chicago.

In three days Enrique would grab a kitchen knife and chase his lover through their apartment building, slashing him on the shoulder, the forearm and the temple. His lover would run, leaving a long trail of blood, before finding a fire axe, which he would swing at Enrique’s stomach, burying the blade in Enrique’s ribs just under his left arm. Enrique would bleed to death a few feet away from his building’s laundry room.

As for the people on Flight 245, some of them would prove to be unlucky as well. By the end of the two-hour flight to Newark, seven of them would have touched a surface previously touched by Bo Pan. His neutrophils would already have penetrated their new hosts’ skin, would already be cutting open stem cells, rewriting DNA and starting the cycle anew.

Two of those people were on their way home to New York City. They would take the PATH train to Penn Station, then get on the F-train, one of them headed to the Upper East Side and the other to Queens.

Another passenger would transfer to a flight to North Carolina.

Another would board an El Al flight to Morocco.

A fifth was catching a red-eye to London.

The final two, like Bo Pan, were heading to Beijing.

He took his seat, almost giddy with success. He wore Ling’s fanny pack in the front. The pack would never be out of his sight or his touch.

After twenty-two years in America, he was finally going home. In fourteen hours, he would land as a national hero.

Unfortunately for Bo Pan, his body would not be able to handle the infection’s final transformation changes. He would not become one of the “Converted.” The process was already weakening an artery in his right temple, creating an aneurysm. In fourteen hours, yes, he would land as a hero of the people. In fifteen hours, that artery in his head would rupture, causing a stroke — he would die of a hemorrhage.

Chapter end