Chris F. Holm's CHILD ZERO

Dirty faces peered at Jake and Amy around flimsy doors and dangling tent flaps as they passed. Some looked stricken. Others, suspicious. One woman appeared to Jake as if she were wearing war paint until he realized the lines of white from cheek to jaw were made by falling tears.

William Gibson has contributed a lot to contemporary discourse over the years -- he coined the term "cyberspace" for one -- but the term that serves as our most valuable rhetorical currency these days is The Jackpot, or The Jackpot Years, his vividly descriptive term for humanity's collective experience of multiple existential threats simultaneously, like when a slot machine's wheels (or, nowadays, algorithm- driven simulation of wheels) all come up with the display for the really big prize and an avalanche of coins pours out of the bottom. I guess that's probably virtual now, too? I've never gotten the appeal of gambling so I might be way out of date.

Gibson, anyway, used it as a slang term in dialogue, what characters say to each other as shorthand for a period in their past that Gibson wasn't interested in actually depicting for us. 

In Child Zero, Chris "The Collector" Holm has depicted a version of The Jackpot Years for us, one skewed toward biomedical catastrophe but hey, we still know that things like antibiotic resistance and whatnot are not unrelated to threats that aren't directly biomedical, like anthropogenic climate change and peak oil and good old fashioned pollution. 

In the world of Child Zero, the relationship between drug-resistant disease organisms and climate change gets a direct link in the form of a bacteriophage (basically a virus that attacks bacteria, but also tends to transfer genetic material from other bacteria to its targets, occasionally allowing the rapid spread of, say, a mutation that has allowed one bacterial cell to survive a medical treatment) that was dormant in Siberian permafrost until -- doh! -- we took the "perma" out of the frost and let the phage go on a global gene-swapping spree. This means that suddenly long-ago-defeated diseases like gonorrhea are back with a vengeance, and even a papercut can turn into a septic mess that ends in amputation. We're not quite in the world of The Sheep Look Up, here, but we're definitely Sheep-adjacent. Just, imagine if Austin Train was Elon Musk, greedy egotistical billionaire-on-paper, instead of the gentle scholar who wilfully went into obscurity. 

Also there's a bit of Children of Men mixed in here for good measure, the film more than the novel. In that there is a MacGuffin that is also a person.

Anyway. Making matters much worse for everybody was a bioterror attack in which a madman rigged two major New York City subway stations homemade aerosol devices loaded with the bacteria that causes bubonic, septicemic and pneumonic plague, Aum Shinrikyu style, infecting hundreds with the deadly disease and sending New York into lockdown. The scene described in the pulled quote above takes place in Central Park's Sheep Meadow, renamed "Park City" after it has become a semi-permanent field hospital-cum-internment camp, originally set up as temporary shelter for people who found themselves stranded in NYC without places to sleep, now a grim third world shantytown.

The aformentioned Jake is one of our point of view characters, an NYPD detective whose wife died of the plague and whose daughter, Zoe, is gravely ill and in danger of being swept up by the United States Department of Biological Security, a new bureaucracy straight out of conspiracist fever dreams that purportedly monitors even the most seemingly private communications for any hint of "unreported" illness. Since the death of his wife, Jake has had and broken up with an amazing girlfriend, whom he dumped because she wouldn't succumb to his emotional blackmail and chuck her career as a brilliant surgeon "for the little girl's sake" so he's not the greatest guy ever, but who is in this dirty old world these days (ours or the novel's)? Anyway, lickety split, he and his amazing partner Ameera (aka Amy, the same Amy mentioned in the pulled quote) quickly catch a big bloody massacre of a case and Jake has no choice but to call his ex, Hannah, who's just had the Worst Day Ever at her job trying to Save Lives and Do Surgery without antibiotics, to come babysit and maybe keep Zoe from dying? Pretty please?

For what it's worth, Jake knows he's the asshole here.

While Hannah takes on the task of trying to save Zoe, Jake and Amy have to go to the Sheep Meadow where a massacre has taken place! Over 100 people have been murdered and their bodies burnt, not so much to prevent their being identified because Who Cares but to conceal the fact that all of them were in perfect health. Before long we get a hazy idea of how this came to be -- a hundred internees in a camp full of incurable infection and disease and not so much as a head cold -- and that it relates to a 12 year old El Salvadoran immigrant named Mateo, our human MacGuffin.

From here on out it becomes mostly an escort mission, with Jake's progress hijacked by the need to keep this invaluable kid from falling into the wrong hands; he, Amy, Hannah and by extension Zoe, are now responsible for the safety of the Most Important Person in the World and need to get him to the Good Guys Who Can Help while keeping him safe from, well, everybody else in New York City. This could get hackneyed as hell but Chris Holm is no hack; there are surprises and twists around every corner and everything is expertly handled except...

Well, there's this one thing. Probably just for texture, episodes of the story are intercut with news clippings giving us glimpses of the story of a small band of Above the Law-type desperados who have decided to outfit a fishing boat for deep sea travel (badly) and attempt to sail from Australia to New Zealand to demand "biological asylum." It's a premise that would make a fine whole 'nother novel but its presence in Child Zero didn't quite work for me, because it has nothing to do with Child Zero's story. I kept expecting it to tie in to the larger narrative somehow but nope, it's just there for color. This may irritate other readers less than it did me, but I think most of my readers (who have made my still-incomplete Suns Suns Suns series the most read pages on this blog by a very significant margin; i.e., Gene Wolfe fans or wannabe fans or almost-fans) are the sort who will be annoyed by this at least as much as I, if not more so.

But really, just as Jake's mistake with Hannah makes him as a character and their relationship as it evolves much more interesting, this flaw in Child Zero must stand as a minor one. After all, it does point to the larger world and the plight of everybody else who isn't a New Yorker. And that's not nothing.