Quarantine

12

“So what's going on outside?" Amy asked. She immediately stuck the oxygen mask back over her nose and mouth.

"Oh, not much," Maria lied. "The whole town is sort of shut down." She tried not to let her mother see how worried she was. Amy looked terrible, thin and pale and tired. Maria had never seen her mother look so tired.

Amy pulled the mask down again. "I've been hearing whispers around here that this all started at the Crashdown," she said.

"Yup. Michaels soup was infected."

Amy just rolled her eyes.

Mom is supposed to be the one worrying about me, Maria thought. I don't like it this way. She had a sudden vision of what it would be like if her mother never got better. Maria felt as if she might hyperventilate. "What's it like inside that thing?" she asked, nodding to the plastic tent that covered Amy's cot. It was strange to be making small talk with your own mother, but glancing around the room,

Maria saw other family members doing the same thing

"It's pretty annoying," Amy admitted. "I can't really see you… you're all distorted by the plastic."

"So are you." Maria grinned. "Your nose looks huge!"

"Shut up!" Amy cried.

They sat in companionable silence for a moment.

"Hey, Mom? Do you need me to do anything?" Maria asked. "For the business, I mean. I know I was being kind of a pain in the butt before…"

"It's okay," Amy replied. "You have your own life and your own job to worry about."

"Yeah, but your alien stuff is the family business," Maria said. "And I'm going to help you with it from now on."

"Oh, Maria, you hate those alien tchotchkes."

"I know," Maria said, "but I love you."

Her mother laughed. "Don't get all morbid on me, honey. I'm not gonna die in here."

"Promise?" Maria asked. "Because I don't know what I'd do without you."

"I think your mom needs to rest now," said the nurse who was taking care of Amy's section of the room. Maria felt a stab of panic… had she tired her mother too much?

"I'm fine," Amy told her, as if she could feel Maria's fear. "I'm just wheezy."

"Okay," Maria said, standing up. "I'll come back and see you as soon as they let me."

Amy nodded tiredly and waved as Maria left. She walked slowly down the row of beds. Because it was visiting day, the nurses weren't paying much attention to security. All the quarantined patients had been put in their own private plastic tent. Maria scanned each bed,

looking for Liz. She was supposed to find out where Liz got the water bottle, that's what Michael had said. But mostly she just wanted to see for herself that her best friend was okay.

Where was Liz? It was hard to see through these thick plastic tents. She reached the end of one row of beds and casually started down the other row.

"Maria!" The voice was muffled, but it was definitely Kyle's. She stopped walking and squinted through the plastic. Kyle lay on the bed inside. Unlike her mother, he had no tubes in him and no oxygen mask.

"Kyle! How are you feeling?"

"Like a freak," he said. "And don't talk so loud, I can't handle loud noises."

"O-kay" she said. "Where's Liz? I'm supposed to… "

"They took her," he interrupted. "And I need to get a message to Max."

Maria blinked in surprise. "From Liz?" She sat down in the chair next to Kyle's bed. Hopefully no one would notice that he wasn't supposed to have visitors today.

"They took Liz because she was the first one sick," Kyle told her. "They're going to do tests, and they're going to find that the virus is mutated alien DNA."

"What?"

"Just listen and tell Max everything I say," Kyle said urgently. "Liz says she and I have alien DNA mixed with our DNA because Max healed us both. And when Liz cleaned up that chemical spill in the lab here… "

"Dr. Sosa's lab."

"Right. She thinks whatever the chemical was, it got into her system and caused a mutation in her alien DNA.

Then she spread it to other people. She and I have one set of symptoms because it activated our alienattributes, our alien genes,"

"And in everyone else it activated whatever genes they had for all these different sicknesses," Maria said.

"Yeah, that's what Liz says. But no one else knows that the virus itself is alien. It comes from Liz's alien DNA. The CDC won't figure that out."

"Because of the whole they-don't-believe-in-aliens thing."

"Exactly. So Max has to figure out how to stop the virus."

"Got it," Maria said, standing up. "How long ago did they take Liz away?"

"Hours and hours," Kyle replied. "She was much sicker than I am. When Max touched her, she got even worse. He was probably putting more alien DNA into her system just by trying to heal her."

"So she's overdosing on alien genes."

"She and I both," Kyle said. He dropped his head back onto his pillow. "I have to sleep now."

"Don't worry, Valenti," Maria said gently. "We'll take it from here."

"Alien DNA." Valenti shook his head. "That's it, the entire virus. It's alien DNA."

"It's my DNA," Max corrected him. "This is all my fault. I always thought I was doing a good thing when I healed people. Turns out I was infecting them with some big time bomb." I should have known better than to think I could do anything to help people, he thought bitterly. Every

time I try to do the right thing, it has awful side effects.

"Max, that's just not true," Isabel said. "This virus came from a chemical spill. Maybe we're lucky it was Liz in that lab. If it had been one of us, the virus would've been much stronger."

"So her DNA mutated," Michael said. "And that's what's swimming around in everyone else now. What do we do about it?"

"It seems they're all sick because their bodies can't handle the alien influence," Max said. "So we have to get rid of the alien DNA in them."

"Not necessarily," Valenti put in. He was pacing around his living room. "Think about it, alien and human DNA can coexist. You guys have both."

"That's true," Isabel said. "And if Liz is right, she and Kyle have both had some alien DNA for a while now and they've been fine."

"So it's not the DNA we need to target," Maria said. "It's the mutation."

"No, it doesn't work that way," Max said, trying to remember his genetics. "There should be a gene that acts as a sort of bridge. It allows the human and the alien to coexist without harming each other. We all must have that gene, and Liz and Kyle should have it too."

"So the chemical spill did something to deactivate that gene in Liz," Michael said. "How do we fix it?"

"I go in again and try to heal her," Max said. "Then the CDC can use a sample of Liz's DNA to make a cure for the others."

"Then half the people in Roswell will have alien DNA," Valenti said. "Seems kind of appropriate."

"But last time you made Liz even worse!" Maria cried.

"Well, this time I know what to look for," Max replied. "Unless anyone has a better idea?"

He looked around the room. No one said anything. "Okay. I'm going to figure out how to do this. You guys figure out how to get me to Liz."

He headed out to Valenti's backyard, needing to be alone. He didn't want to let the others see how frightened he was. Maria had a good point. Last time he'd made Liz's illness worse. This time he could kill her.

I have no choice, he thought. Liz wouldn't be in this situation if I hadn't put her in it. He sighed heavily. If she got through this, he would leave her alone. She wasn't sure she wanted to get back together with him, and maybe she was right to feel that way. It seemed that everything he did put Liz in danger, even though she was the most important thing to him. So if she still wanted him to back off, he would.

But first he would save her life.

Michael pulled on the pant leg of Kyle's Meta-chem jumpsuit. "This is way too short," he complained to Max. "No one will ever believe it's my uniform."

Max shot him an impatient look. "Then fix it," he said.

"I don't know how." Michael tried zapping the fabric with his powers, but he only succeeded in burning a tiny hole in the knee.

Max reached over and grabbed the hem of one leg. He ripped the stitching and pulled the hem down. Now the leg was only about an inch too short. "Oh," Michael said. He pulled down the hem on the other leg.

"If anyone asks, I'm looking for a job and you're taking me in to meet your boss," Max said.

"Right. And my name is Kyle from Housekeeping," Michael said. "Let's go."

They climbed out of Kyle's pickup, which Valenti had lent them, and walked up to the employee entrance of the Meta-chem building. Michael unlocked the door with Kyle's passkey and held the door open for Max to enter.

A bored-looking security guard sat at a small desk inside.

"You mind if I bring my friend in for an interview?" Michael asked gruffly.

The guard shrugged. Michael led Max past him, pretending that he knew where they were going. Once they were around the corner from the guard, they stopped. Michael pulled out the map Isabel had drawn of where the CDC headquarters were. "This way," he said. "It's not far from here."

"I hope that's where Liz is," Max said.

"Only one way to find out. Look sharp." They headed deeper into Meta-chem, and Michael tried not to think about what was waiting for them. Because after this, they had no plan. How to find Liz, how to save her… Max would just have to handle that part.

"Liz? Can you hear me?"

The voice vibrated through Liz's body slowly. It's weird that my metabolism is speeding up when everything else feels so much slower, Liz thought. Light hit her eyes in slow-moving waves, and so did sound. Is this what the aliens feel like all the time? she wondered. It truly was an alien experience.

"Liz?" It was Maris Wheeler's voice. Some part of Liz knew that. She forced her eyelids to open.

The room was dark. They kept it dark and quiet because they knew what Liz's symptoms were. All in all, they'd been pretty nice. Of course, she'd had lots of blood taken, and they did tests frequently. How did they get all the medical equipment to Meta-chem so fast? she wondered. They even had an MRI machine.

"You have an MRI," she murmured, trying to focus on Maris's face.

"Yes. My husband is very ill. We treat him here." The voice swam down to Liz through layers of white noise… the hum of the monitors she was hooked up to, the buzzing of the fluorescent lights out in the hallway, the murmur of voices from the CDC headquarters nearby. If Liz wanted to, she could focus on any one of these sounds and block out the others. But that took a lot of energy, and she felt so weak…,

"Liz, do you know why you're here?" Marts asked.

"Because I cleaned up the spill," Liz murmured. "It mutated me."

"That's right." Marts smiled widely. "That's exactly right."

The lights went out. But Liz barely registered that, because the siren that started to ring was so loud that she thought the sound would burst her eardrums. There was nothing in the world but that piercing sound, and the pain it caused. Pain like nothing Liz had ever felt before; pain she seemed to feel on a molecular level.

"Liz? Can you hear me?" This time the voice was Max's. Liz slowly became aware that the piercing alarm sound was gone. The lights were still off.

"What happened?" she whispered.

"Michael pulled the fire alarm. We had to get everyone out of here. They'll be back in a matter of minutes." Max was talking very fast. Liz listened to the sound of his voice, but she couldn't follow the words.

"I'm going to try to heal you. It won't be like last time. I'm going to look for one specific gene," Max was saying. "This gene turned off, and I need to turn it back on."

Liz was aware of two things: fear and love. She'd never experienced emotions like this before, with her whole body. The fear came from somewhere in her spine, sending tiny tremors up through the muscles of her back. She was afraid for Max to touch her, because last time it had hurt so much. The love came from the pit of her stomach and sent waves of heat radiating through her chest. The love made all the parts of her body call out for Max. "Max," she whispered. "I love you. I feel it in every single cell. I can hardly bear how much I love you."

"I love you the same way," he told her.

"I know you do," Liz murmured. "You told me about it once, about how we loved each other so much that nothing else mattered. We got married and we were happy, but then Tess felt left out… "

"Liz!" Max sounded worried. "Stay with me."

She hated the concern in his voice. She didn't want him to worry. She had to comfort him.

"It's okay, Max," she told him. "I did what you wanted. I made you fall out of love with me, and now the future is different."

"What are you talking about?" Max asked. Then he went on quickly. "Never mind. Just focus on me touching you."

Then his hand was on her cheek. She felt warmth coming from his hand, but this time there was no pain. The warmth traveled throughout her body. It was seeking something, she knew, searching through her cells. And then it stopped and turned suddenly cold. The warmth had found what it was looking for. The new cold feeling spread out from where it started, filling her body and her mind.

To Liz, it seemed that everything went backward. The sounds of her monitors decreased as if someone had turned a giant volume knob in her head. The room, which had been as bright as noon, sunk into darkness. Her heartbeat, which had been filling her ears for almost a day now, suddenly became inaudible.

Liz sat up and looked around a small, dark room. Max was watching her. "Are you back?"

She mentally took stock of herself. Sounds were normal, sight was normal. "I'm back," she said. "I feel completely fine."

Max reached out again and touched her cheek. "Liz…"

Then he collapsed.

"Max!" Liz cried.

The door burst open. Michael rushed in, dressed in a tight-fitting jumpsuit. He looked at Liz, then at Max lying on the floor. "What happened?"

"He healed me," Liz said. "And then… "

"It drained his energy," Michael interrupted. "I've seen him like this before." He bent down and heaved Max onto his shoulder in a fireman's carry.

"Is he okay?" Liz asked anxiously.

Michael nodded impatiently. "They're coming back," he

said. "You have to explain it somehow." He turned and ran, carrying Max.

Liz took a deep breath and waited…

The door flew open again, and about five doctors stopped in astonishment when they saw her sitting up. Liz gave them a smile. Maris Wheeler pushed her way through the doctors and rushed over to Liz. "What happened?" she asked, taking Liz's hand.

"I'm not exactly sure," Liz said. "I think it was a miracle." And she wasn't even lying.