Chapter 04
MCB Camp Pendleton
San Diego, CA
Fall 2004
Three weeks to the day after being splattered with the blood of a man infected with an alien virus Spencer Reid woke up, rolled over, and realized he felt awful.
He sat up slowly. He felt achy all over. His nose was dripping, his eyes were running and itchy, his head was starting to feel stuffed, and there was a faint burbling in his lungs. Viremia, he thought, the virus is loose in me and my immune system is fighting it off. With a groan he flopped back into his bed.
A few minutes later there was a knock on his door. Given that it was just him and JJ they had been moved to adjoining observation rooms in the base hospital. Now JJ slipped into his room, still bundled in her bathrobe. "You too, huh?" She asked.
"I don't think I've ever been so scared in my life." Spencer admitted. "I wonder if we'll end up like Brisco."
"I dunno." JJ replied. "So far no one else has. Maybe it's just him."
"Maybe."
Brisco, meanwhile, was not doing too badly, at least on this particular morning. He'd had a second seizure a few days before. Unlike the first this one was not preceded by several hours of 'aura', or a growing feeling of fear and paranoia. Like the first this one started with him clutching his face and falling to the ground, screaming, where he huddled in a fetal position and twitched. "If I didn't know any better." He said about both of them, "I'd swear someone was beating the crap out of me."
Every other infected Marine in the unit was fine. No adverse symptoms. They'd had a cold, they got over it, that's all. But looking deeper into Brisco led to an interesting observation. "What is it?" Colonel Chatman asked.
"Well, it's interesting." Dr. Marsden said. "In each individual the virus mutates slightly. The RNA, or what we assume is RNA, is identical when it first leaves the endospore, but in the samples we've taken 48 hours later it's different. Except we have two that match."
"Assume is RNA?"
"It doesn't look like RNA, even though it's located like RNA. It looks like something, we just can't figure out what."
"Okay, which two?"
"Brisco and Cargill."
"Get Cargill in for more testing."
Lance Corporal Marissa Cargill was 19. She appeared perfectly poised, calm, even cool during questioning. No, she hadn't had any strange symptoms. No feelings of dread. No missing time. No seizures that she or any of her buddies had noticed. She hadn't found anything at all.
Gideon, watching with the rest of the team from the other side of the glass, noticed something. "She's nervous." He said. "She's controlling it but it's there."
"Yes, she is." Hotch agreed. "But not of anyone here. She's covering something."
"Order her to take her makeup off." Elle said.
"Why?" Gideon asked.
"They were in quarantine a long time. Call it a hunch."
They passed word to the medical personnel. At the order Cargill froze. She got that deer in the headlights look they always got when they were caught out. The order was repeated. Ever so slowly Cargill slid off the exam table and went to the sink. But once there she stopped. "He's a good man, he really is."
"Son of a bitch." Morgan said.
Sure enough, once her makeup was off Cargill had one hell of a shiner. Couple of other bruises as well. When she took her top off more were revealed. "He's just been under so much stress." She said. "With the quarantine and everything. And he didn't know what was going on..."
"Lance Corporal Brisco?" The med tech asked.
"No." Cargill said. "Brisco's a real sweetheart. He's always been nice to me. No...um..." She sighed. "PFC Stevens. It's just that we were apart for so long..."
"Ask her when Stephens beat her." Gideon said.
The question was relayed. "Um, a couple of nights after we got out of quarantine." Cargill said. "He didn't know what had been going on and he thought..."
"When else?" The tech asked.
"Three nights ago. Something happened at work, I wasn't expecting it. Normally he's a real sweet guy..."
"Hello Battered Women's Syndrome." Elle said.
"But how does this relate to the virus?" Morgan asked. "And if Brisco didn't do this how did they end up with the same mutation?"
There was silence for a moment. Then they saw the light of understanding grow on Gideon's face. He looked like he might have seen heaven. "They gave us a gift." He said. "A wonderful gift."
"What gift?" Hotch asked.
"I'll show you."
An hour later Gideon had everyone working on the problem in one conference room. There were two screens up. On one Brisco was sitting on an exam table, wired in to every sensor they could manage. On the other Cargill was the same. "They're in separate rooms." Gideon said. "You can't hear what's going on in one room in the other."
"All right." Chatman said. "So now what."
Gideon opened the line. "Go ahead Morgan."
As they watched Morgan went in with Brisco. "So what's this test?" Brisco asked.
Morgan stepped around behind him. "Take your shirt off, please." He said
Brisco sighed and pulled off his t-shirt. Without warning Morgan pressed the device he was carrying to Brisco's shoulder. It was a miniature stun gun, one set to a level that would cause pain, not disable.
The moment Morgan touched Brisco with it the younger man let out a yell, pulled away and clutched his shoulder in pain.
And so did Cargill. Even though she was alone in the room.
"What the hell was that?" Brisco asked.
"Let you know in a minute." Morgan said. Then he left the room.
A minute later Elle went in with Cargill. "I just felt this awful pain." Cargill told her.
"Oh? Where?"
"In my shoulder."
"Here?" With that Elle hit her with a stun gun.
As before Cargill screamed out, jumped away, and grabbed her shoulder.
So did Brisco. But he was alone in his room.
"What are we seeing?" Chatman asked.
"Oh my god." One of the scientists said. They turned to find scans of the virus going up on other screens in the room. "That's what it is. They're transmitters. Ultra-miniaturized transmitters lodged in their brain tissue."
"Transmitters?" Chatman asked.
"Ever hear of the ACE study?" Gideon asked in reply.
"No."
"The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study is a research study conducted by the Kaiser Permanente HMO and the CDC. It demonstrated an association of adverse childhood experiences, ACEs, with health and social problems as an adult. They interviewed about 26,000 consecutive Kaiser members. The study was notable because so many of us equate childhood abuse with poor, uneducated, let's admit it, brown people. Kaiser is an HMO that works with the IT industry, as a result they were able to control for those assumptions. About half were female; 75% were white; the average age was 57; 75% had attended college; all had jobs and good health care. Participants were asked about 10 types of childhood trauma that had been identified in earlier research literature: physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical neglect, emotional neglect, mother treated violently, household substance abuse, household mental illness, parental separation or divorce, and incarcerated household member. Each trauma in your childhood got you an ACE point. The number of ACEs was strongly associated with adulthood high-risk health behaviors such as smoking, alcohol and drug abuse, promiscuity, and severe obesity, and correlated with ill-health including depression, heart disease, cancer, chronic lung disease and shortened lifespan. Compared to an ACE score of zero, having four adverse childhood experiences was associated with a seven-fold increase in alcoholism, a doubling of risk of being diagnosed with cancer, and a four-fold increase in emphysema; an ACE score above six was associated with a 30-fold increase in attempted suicide"
"So?" Chatman asked.
Gideon smiled. "They gave us a gift. Watch." He turned to the staff. "Get them in here. Stevens too."
A few minutes later Brisco, Cargill and Stevens were brought in, with Stevens under guard. "We figured it out." Gideon said. "We know what's going on."
"Great." Brisco said. "What?"
Gideon pointed to him and Cargill. "You two are linked somehow. The virus is acting as a transmitter. It's transmitting your emotional states and even some physical sensations to the other. Look." He played back the recording of the experiment they just performed.
When he was done Brisco and Cargill looked at each other. You didn't have to be a profiler to see the wonder in their eyes. "Okay, but what caused those seizures?" Brisco asked.
"Stevens over here was beating Cargill." Gideon told him. "You were feeling the beating along with her, the fear of the approaching assault, the actual attack, all of it."
It took a minute for it to sink in. But then Brisco's reaction was quick once it did. "You son of a bitch!" He said. Then he threw the first punch.
The fight was short, Brisco had a good five inches and forty pounds on Stevens, and there were enough people there to pry him apart, not that anyone moved as fast as they could. "You lay a hand on her again and I will fucking kill you!" Brisco told him.
"She's my girlfriend!" Stevens replied. "Back the fuck off!"
"That doesn't make her your fucking punching bag you piece of shit!" Brisco looked at Cargill, their eyes meeting once more. "She deserves better than you."
"Hey! Hey!" Gideon broke it up. "Get them out in the hall, let them finish it there." The cluster of Marines pulled the trio out of the room. Gideon watched them go. "That is the gift they gave us."
"I don't..." Chatman started
But Gideon stopped him. "Cargill is nineteen." He said. "Imagine Brisco's reaction if she was nine."
"Abusers want privacy." Hotch said. "They don't want anyone else to know what they're doing."
"You know your son is linked to Mary Sue down the street." Elle said. "One night your son starts acting like he's being beaten. Or complains that he feels hungry all the time because Mary is hungry. Or says that Mary Sue hurts down there. What do you do?"
Chatman only thought for a moment. "Call the police. Have them get an abuse investigation started. My son is a witness."
"Exactly. When this thing spreads there won't be anywhere to hide." Gideon replied. "Every child will be linked to their...their life mate. Which means another household of adults will be able to follow every child's move. No more privacy for abusers. And within those five generations no more abused children. Drug addiction, alcoholism, obesity, diabetes, cancer, emphysema, stroke, depression, suicide, hell even serial killers, the rates of everything holding us back as a species will drop like a stone. By removing the veil of secrecy in the nuclear family they have given future generations of humans the greatest gift, the gift of happy, safe childhoods. And without that pain around our collective necks we will reach the stars."