Life moves too fast. That’s what Americans always used to say. They lamented the way their children grew up before their eyes without their being able to spend enough time with them from moment to moment. They decried the fact that the finite number of hours in a given day just wasn’t enough to fit in everything they needed to get done. They bemoaned the lack of relaxation, of leisure, of time to stop and smell roses. At least this is what everyone claimed, though perhaps they were bragging more than complaining. Regardless, things were about to change. The virus that hit America the day we left it would prove to be the antidote to life moving too fast.

It started, of all places, in New York City. People were slowing down. They looked fine, and they weren’t in pain, but they seemed to be lacking energy, losing strength; they could barely walk at first, then barely stand, and then they simply became inert. One morning, literally millions of people called in sick, stayed home, brought the pulse of the city to a barely-there state.

The problem was their pulses were fine. The body’s metabolism wasn’t slowing down in tandem with activity levels. The nearest anyone could figure was that there were some vague similarities to the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome. Their muscles could function, it seemed, but they weren’t able to make them function. And what this meant was that if nobody was providing aid to a given person stricken with the virus, he or she would be too helpless to get water or food and would eventually die of dehydration.

In hospitals those who could still function tried to hook up those worse off with IV units, but after a while, feeling their strength fade, they would hook themselves up, and fall over, and know they weren’t getting up again.

It was the quietest death imaginable, death by simple shut down. Time finally slowed down for them, though their bodies continued to age at a normal rate and their minds were completely intact. They knew what was happening as it happened.

The horror was bloodless. People who have lived safe lives often think images of carnage are enough to send a person into therapy for a good long time. But violent, bloody deaths are less of a shock to the psychic system than you might think. Just because we don’t see it every day doesn’t mean that at some level in our animal brains we know that life is visceral, that the sight of a body having fought to the death far from harming us actually increases our own fight for life. It reminds us that we have bodies and that we are, in fact, alive.

The virus that struck that day made its victims feel like they were already dead.

We learned all of this making our way toward the last known residence of Ruth Baxter. At that point it seemed ridiculous to continue. If Harrigan’s clients hadn’t been affected by the virus yet, they soon would be, as would the killer. We assumed Lindstrom might not be in the States and so might not be affected for a while, if ever, depending on how good his hiding skills were, but that hardly seemed to matter any more.

Ruth Baxter made it matter again, in just a few words.

+

Because we didn’t know what else to do, we went to her anyway. It wasn’t hard. She lived on the outskirts of Toronto and seemed to believe in the concept of hiding in plain sight. She had no alias. Her neighbors knew vaguely who she was. Occasionally people used to come to question her but gave up when they encountered her reticence. She had no contact with Gerald Lindstrom, the other scientists or any of the Lao Babies. She had nothing to say.

At least, she hadn’t before. Now she was talking — to me, anyway.

You, she said when she saw me. I froze when I heard her voice. It was a beautiful voice — one that used to comfort me. I remember that. Thing is, I also remember the feeling of needing to be comforted. That feeling came back and for a moment I was helpless with horror.

“It’s you,” she said again. She couldn’t possibly have recognized me after more than four decades. But her silvery eyes were filling with tears, she was smiling, she brought a trembling hand to my face.

And then pulled back. Straightened up, slipped on a mask of cool English civility, invited us in for tea in a house that was clean, orderly, and completely devoid of personal touches. Ruth Baxter, understandably, did not want to live in the past, and barely seemed interested in the present or future.

When she began to speak, she spoke only to me. Harrigan and Jimmy she seemed to treat like two large, well-trained guard dogs, necessary for my protection but not necessary to include in conversation. Harrigan looked the part, certainly, but Jimmy seemed more along the lines of a friendly spaniel, with maybe a bit of border collie mixed in.

“You were the first successful Lao Baby, and the first one I placed,” she said. The word successful chilled me: I had been successful in staying alive. “This is why your adoptive mother knows me. Most of others went solely through the agency; their adoptive families never heard of me. I always wondered if you’d find me one day.” She sat back in her chair and said nothing for a moment. “And now you want to find Gerald Lindstrom, is that right?”

“That was our original goal, Dr. Baxter,” Harrigan broke in. “Circumstances are a bit different now, though.”

“There’s also some guy killing all the Lao Babies,” added Jimmy.

She continued to ignore Harrigan and looked at Jimmy for the first time, though she didn’t seem to look at him so much as in front of him, as though his last words were floating in the air above the dining table. “I know that,” she said softly.

A strange silence held us. I couldn’t even begin to guess what she was thinking. Though in her 70s she seemed healthy in every way, so there was no question of her lapsing into some kind of mental fog. Finally when she spoke, she acknowledged Harrigan. “Yes, circumstances are different, but not as much as you might think. You’re right to want to find Gerald Lindstrom.”

It was then that she told us: “The virus is an offshoot of the Lao Baby research. He created it, I suspect, as his ace in the hole in case he was discovered, and he can stop it.”

She let that sink in. It sank for a while.

Finally, I asked, “The effects can be reversed?”

“Yes, though not easily. It requires lengthy treatments, not just a pill.”

“Are you saying he’s basically taking us all hostage? First New York, then the U.S., then the world?” asked Harrigan. “Are we going to see him on the news issuing a list of demands?”

“I can’t imagine what he has left to demand,” she said dryly. “Gerald Lindstrom isn’t a mad genius. He’s a desperate man, the same as every other desperate man on earth, and he’s down to his last resource. You think he went into hiding because everyone was after him for the Lao Baby secrets, but that isn’t the real reason. We all know those secrets will be discovered one day. It will be too late for most of us but it’s already too late. Gerald’s fear isn’t that the world will find him; it’s that the world will stop looking for him. That’s the day everyone knows the truth.”

“And what is that truth?” I said quietly.

Her eyes caught mine and wouldn’t let go. “Dr. Gerald Lindstrom wasn’t the real head of research. I was. Everyone in the lab thought he was the brains of the operation, and now everyone in the world does. And that’s exactly how we both wanted it.”