Sleepless. Part 9

She looked up at him.

"What the f.u.c.k are you talking about?"

Park touched the top of her hair, where they gray was coming in along the center part.

"The baby, Rose; she's crying. She's alone in the house, and she's crying."

When she changed, it was not so much like a veil was lifted but more like a briefly surfaced diver, perilously short on oxygen, was dragged below again after a moment's respite.

Park watched the memory of his wife submerge and her present self come bobbing to the surface.

"The baby. Christ. f.u.c.k. How long? f.u.c.k, Park, how long were you going to let me?"

She was out of her ergonomic editor's chair, leaving it spinning as she went to the door.

"Was she crying when you got home? I mean, is there a reason you didn't just pick her up, for f.u.c.k sake?"

"I have my gun."

She stopped at the door.

"Of course you do, I mean, of course you can't pick up your crying daughter because you have your gun in your hands."

"I don't like leaving it anywhere but in the safe. And I don't like holding her when I have it on me."

She turned.

"Then get f.u.c.king rid of it. Get rid of the f.u.c.king gun and the f.u.c.king job that goes with it and come home and be with your daughter before the f.u.c.king world blows the f.u.c.k up and you don't have her any f.u.c.king more, you f.u.c.king a.s.shole!"

Park waited, and watched realization come over her, and wished he could do something to keep it at bay, at least stoke her anger further if he could not salve the regrets that always followed it.

She banged her forehead with her fists.

"s.h.i.+t, s.h.i.+t, babe. I'm. I don't f.u.c.king. You know I don't. I just."

She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.

"I'm so f.u.c.king tired."

He came to her, pulled her hands down.

"I know. It's okay. I love you. It doesn't matter."

"It does, it does. It, everything is so hard anyway and I. f.u.c.k."

He shook his head.

"Rose. It doesn't matter. I'm fine. Really."

Her head was turning, pulled to the sound of their crying daughter drifting across the small yard.

"I just. If we could have a little time, the two of us."

He nodded.

"Sure. I'll try and get a night. I'll just do it, get a night. Francine can be here with the baby. We can go stay somewhere for a night."

She was drifting out the door.

"Yeah. That would be. I'm gonna go check on her. She. I love you, babe."

"I love you."

She slipped out, Park standing at the door of the office, listening as she entered the house.

"Hey, kiddo, hey, sweetheart, Mom's here. I know, I know, you're right, yep, I left you alone, I know. I'm sorry, Mom's sorry. My bad. But you know what? Here I am. Yep, that's me. Right here. And I love you. I love you. I love you. Come here, come here, I got you, baby, I got you."

Before leaving the office he glanced at the monitors, seeing no difference at all in the way the skeletons danced.

He crossed the dry yard, back into the house.

In the bedroom where once he and Rose had slept together, before sleep had been taken from her entirely, Park stepped inside the closet, took a key from his pocket, inserted it into the lock of the Patriot Hand-gunner on the shelf above the clothes bar, punched a sequence into the keypad, turned the key, and opened the safe. Inside, a sheaf of birth certificates, pa.s.sports, a marriage license, and various financial doc.u.ments that may or may not have had any remaining value, also a .45 Para Warthog PXT that served as backup for the Walther, ammunition and extra clips for both weapons, an ivory broach that had been his mother's, four plastic-wrapped rolls of troy ounce Krugerrands, a four-gig flash drive that stored all his reports on his current a.s.signment, and, in a.s.sorted baggies, vials, and bottles, his retail stash.

The drugs he'd taken from the car were in a faded olive drab canvas engineer's field bag that Rose had bought for him at an army-navy store on Telegraph when he'd moved to Berkeley to live with her after his Ph.D. was completed. He'd always complained about the number of pockets available in the average messenger bag or backpack, not nearly enough to organize his pens, pencils, student papers, grade books, cellphone, charger, laptop, extra battery, a.s.sorted disks, iPod, headphones, lunch, and miscellaneous. Now the pockets served to organize Ecstasy, ketamine, foxy methoxy, various shades of heroin, crack, crank, and powder cocaine, liquid LSD, squares of dark chocolate hash, gummy buds of medical marijuana, Dexedrine, BZP, Adderall, Ritalin, and two remaining Shabu dragons, carefully wrapped in origami-like complexities of tissue.

He needed to catalogue the stock. It had been more than two full twenty-four-hour cycles, nearly three, since he'd last done so. Much of what he'd sold and acquired was in his notes, and just as he'd been able to in college and at the academy, he relied on his exceptional memory and recall for details that he didn't have a chance to write down or record. But that memory was beginning to fragment.

No, not beginning to; it was well along in the process.

He needed to keep the record straight. When it came time to make arrests, issue indictments, call witnesses, do justice, he needed a clear record.

Names, dates, amounts. Crimes committed.

Captain Bartolome might not be concerned about anything but Dreamer, but Park didn't know how to approach his work with tunnel vision.

He needed to make a record. But he was too tired.

And the window of opportunity for sleep had swung past, as if he were fixed to a single point on the earth, waiting for the perfect alignment with the heavens that would allow him to ascend into orbit and, having missed that opening, was now forced to wait until it rotated back again.

He slid the engineer's bag onto the bottom shelf of the safe. Popped the clip from the Walther and placed it and the gun next to the Warthog. Snagged the flash drive by its lanyard and closed and locked the safe.

Gun hidden. From anyone who might use it. In desperation.

He buried that thought. There were ample options in the house if Rose ever decided she'd had enough. Locking away the guns eliminated only two of them.

Anyway, that was not the best way to protect her. Or the baby. The best way to protect them was to do what he was doing. That buried world, hidden, frozen beneath the madness outside, he had to dig, find it, and hack at the ice until it was free.

So he walked past the living room where Rose was feeding the baby from a bottle, her own milk having dried up after the first few days of sleeplessness, and did not stop, as he used to, to marvel at them. At the unlikelihood of them. Two people, entirely his, to love.

Back in the office, he switched off his wife's monitors, hiding the skeletons, though he knew they continued to dance invisibly; touched the power b.u.t.ton on his own Gateway UC laptop, took the biohazard-stickered travel drive from his cargo pocket, and plugged in the USB cable.

And watched as Hydo's world appeared on his desktop.

A sickly luminous green mist spreading from the bottom of the screen, erasing Park's familiar wallpaper collage of baby pics, scattered with icons, that Rose had put together for him, leaving, as it crept upward, a hyper-real boneyard of rust.

An auto wrecker, somewhere in the Inland Empire, rendered by Hydo as a high dynamic range photograph. Digitally composited from various light exposures of the same image, HDR photography had been Hydo Chang's only pa.s.sion beyond gaming, drugs, money, and p.u.s.s.y. What he'd referred to as his higher calling.

The wrecking yard on Park's screen, centered on twin rows of flattened cars stacked ten high under a sky tortured by streaks of fast-running cloud and the violent umbers of a doomsday southern California sunset, was photography as Van Gogh might have dreamed it. Thick las.h.i.+ngs of color, layered so deep and in such relief, that it seemed you would feel them in ridges and dimples if you ran your fingertips over the screen.

Park's eye caught on a freeway sign glimpsed over the high barbed wire fence around the yard. No information regarding the next exit ahead, but a list of HDR forums and photo pools. Park ran his finger across the Gateway's touchpad and watched the cursor flicker from arrow to pointing hand and back. Now tuned to the detail, he started to see wrinkled license plates, alphanumerics exchanged for some of the usual names: Google, eBay, Firefox, p.o.r.nocopeia, YouTube, Facebook, Trash. And some not so usual: modblog, tindersnakes, felonyfights, s.h.i.+neyknifecut, riotc.l.i.tshave.

Not just extra storage, a place to preserve and protect sensitive and valuable information away from the gold farm's Internet-linked LAN, the travel drive was a clone of Hydo's own personal machine. A mirror of the dead man's desktop mythology.

Park maneuvered the cursor over the screen, watching it douse icons on peeling b.u.mper stickers, grease-smudged handbills on the side of an office shack, rocks, an airplane, a decapitated street lamp. All of them stamped with either a domain or a file, revealing it as the morphing hand pa.s.sed over. Until it crossed a blackened grate of scaling iron set into a cube of graffitied concrete. The graffiti themselves were surprisingly dead to the cursor's touch, but the grate prompted the transformation into a hand without revealing what was beyond.

Park double clicked. A box appeared, requesting a pa.s.sword.

He chicken-pecked the keys with his forefingers: XORLAR And a plain file blinked open, one that might be found on any accountant's computer, filled with Excel spreadsheets.

Labeled each with a name. Last, first, middle initial.

He flipped his finger down on the thin black line along the right edge of the touchpad, watched the thumbnails roll up the screen and stop. Then blinked at something subliminal and slowly dragged his finger up the same line, thumbnails rolling down now, eyes scanning left to right, and lifted his finger: AFRONZO, PARSIFAL, K., JR.

In 2007 the chances of having fatal familial insomnia were one in thirty million. In early 2008 those odds tilted fractionally against the players.

Until that point, virtually all cases of FFI had been restricted to about forty family lines, most of them in Italy. And then, quite suddenly, that was not so. A disease that was thought to be contained exclusively in a bit of genetic code, an inherited protein mutation in which aspartic acid was replaced by asparagine-178 and methionine was present at amino acid 129, inexplicably jumped s.h.i.+p.

The initial, and quite reasonable, theory espoused when these oddball cases emerged was that the sufferers must be unlucky distant relations to one of the FFI families. The fact that the number of new cases utterly defied the odds and rendered this theory all but laughable was circ.u.mspectly ignored.

And then there were more.

More people, diverse and dispersed, came stumbling stiff-necked, sweating, squinting from pinp.r.i.c.k pupils, into the light. So many, and so widely distributed, that FFI was discarded entirely as a possible suspect in this mystery, and the true culprit was nabbed red-handed.

Mad cow disease.

Or, as it is more prosaically known, bovine spongiform encephalopathy As enabled by the global expansion of American fast food franchises and the rise of the hamburger.

Already well known as a prion disease with similarities to FFI, BSE was clearly the guilty party. Granted, this was some new mutation of BSE, one almost as communicable as it had been long feared BSE might someday prove to be, but most definitely BSE-related.

And how comforting it was to know what was killing people by stealing their sleep. To have a name to put to the face of misery. To know that these mutated BSE prions, simple proteins that had folded into shapes so baleful and malicious that they spread their geometry to any healthy proteins they came into proximity with, were caused by eating Quarter Pounders.

The fact that several of the infected were avowed vegetarians and vegans seemed to be no impediment to this theory, and the air soon smelled like barbeque. Hairy, s.h.i.+tty barbeque.

PETA and the SPCA lodged protests with the appropriate authorities, but public sentiment was against them. Which is not to say they were without allies. The team-up between animal rights activists and the Cattleman's Beef Board was one of the more amusing juxtapositions that heralded the rapid tilt of the world into a landscape that was less Dali and more Hieronymus Bosch. As evidenced by the vision of vast herds of cattle being machine-gunned from above by helicopters, then coated in napalm and set ablaze. An inferno of beefs, not all of them dead. I summon for you the image of a wounded cow, running, in flames.

How shocking when it turned out that no BSE had been found in the dissected brains of the victims.

But the sheep and chicken ranchers made out well.

A fact that was pointed out by some of the more colorful cable commentators as they began to wax, inevitably, conspiratorial. Not that they were taken seriously. Not by anyone but the cattlemen, anyway. But truly, when the first indications of a deadly pandemic appear, how far does one have to search for a conspiracy?

It was clearly the work of The Terrorists.

Which ones was academic. A virtually simultaneous worldwide outbreak of a never before seen prion disease? Could there be any doubt of what we were dealing with? No, there could not; terrorists were at work. Pretty much all the countries of the world were in agreement and joined in pointing their fingers, or more lethal indicators, at one another.

And perhaps they were all right.

A new viral spongiform encephalopathy, exhibiting all the symptoms of fatal familial insomnia. Perhaps it was born in a lab. Twisted into existence by endless manipulations. Applied nucleation creating self-a.s.sembling systems, designed materials, refined, until a special grotesque was found, the shape of sleeplessness.

The shape of the sleepless prion, SLP, as it was dubbed, when isolated and revealed. That shape became a familiar thing. Part of the evening news graphic for every SLP-related story. Which meant pretty much every story. As what was not related to SLP?

An icon on protest signs. For. Against. Up. Down. Applied as needed. Defined as desired.

A T-s.h.i.+rt decal, endlessly riffed upon. Twisted and elongated for a Coca-Cola can. Blunted and squared for an MTV name check. Quadrupled in calligraphy over a burning Hindenburg in obtuse tribute to Led Zeppelin.

An endlessly repeated graffito. Black spray-over showing where the edges of a stencil had been. The absent portions of a negative image, applied to every surface. Recalling, somehow poignantly, the similarly sprayed aspect of Andre the Giant. Resonating, I guess, with the looming specter of his death, brought about, as it was, by a mysteriously mutating condition.

The tattooed insignia of an especially virulent strain of ultranationalistic fascism that seemed to manifest globally in much the same way as the disease itself. Spontaneously and without reason.

A spray-painted word on the front doors of homes, informing SL response teams that there was work to be done inside, decapitating the dead so that slides of their brains could be added to the CDC registry, the bodies added to the pyres.

The lone sigil of a thousand suicide notes.

A replacement, in the lexicon of Armageddon, for the number of the beast.

So much meaning and poetry in one squiggle of tissue.

Until, finally, it appeared in a slightly but significantly modified form: broken in two, pierced, in a brief corporate animation, by the chemical shape of DR33M3R.

One can imagine it, the shape of the SL prion, reflected in the eyes of the sales staff, breaking open like a pinata, dollar signs spilling out and heaping on the ground beneath it.

Those dollars were almost not scooped up. When word got out that there was a cure for SLP, an immunization, a salve that would bring the dead back to life, the labs where the drug was being perfected, the office where the packaging was being focus-grouped, the factories that were being geared for production, were all stormed.

Bloodshed was minimized. The military and police having had nearly a year of experience by then with quelling the madness of crowds. The traditional fire hoses, Tasers, tear gas, beanbag guns, and riot batons augmented with DARPA favorites such as microwave emitters, nausea-inducing lights, and focused-volume sound projectors that literally rattled metal fillings out of teeth.

The labs and offices and factories withstood the onslaught. And the story clarified. There was no cure, no panacea. Only relief. For the suffering millions upon millions, some relief.

A chance to dream. No more than that. A chemical plug to fit shorted sockets of the brain, a patch to allow the sleepless to sleep and to dream. An ease to suffering, but death just as a.s.sured at the end. With no other relief at hand, nothing short of a bullet, arms were outstretched, palms cupped. Dreams of sleep.

Dreams of Dreamer.

A chemical needle to knit the raveled sleeve of care.

Only, not enough.

Not enough Dreamer to go around. Not enough to bring rest to every mother, father, brother, sister, daughter, son, uncle, aunt, cousin, friend. A taste for sleep, a craving for it the world over, and only one curb for the general appet.i.te.

So yes, the dollars rained down. A year or two earlier and it would have been raining Euro and yuan. But the initial SLP hysteria had put paid to the European Union and the might of that combined economy. Once Italy had been quarantined as the suspected ground zero of the disease, it had taken less than a month for all the countries of the union to seal their borders. Trade and travel faltered, xenophobia and nationalism flourished, and pounds, lira, francs, deutschmarks, and various other quaint relics were soon being dug out from beneath rocks in the gardens and put back into circulation. As for China, the world had seen the relative quality of the dragon's infrastructure when the earth shook in 2008. Tens of millions of sleepless leaving the workforce, burdening the health-care system, combined with the effective end of economic globalization and the contraction of markets clamoring for inexpensive goods, hexed the Chinese Miracle. The engine of their economy shuddered, lurched, and crashed to the ground, soon to be followed by the thrown-together factories of manufacturing cities like Shenzhen, as the inhabitants returned to the countryside, fleeing the plague, leaving the buildings and roads to deteriorate and begin crumbling in scant months. When the great droughts struck and wiped out the rice crops, it was an almost unnecessary grace note to the collapse.