The Darwin Variant

by Kenneth Johnson

  I got to him, breathing hard, shouting, “Joseph, it’s me. Let me check her.” I pressed my fingers on Claire’s left carotid, but already feared the worst as Ronnie hovered over us protectively, her powerhouse strength shoving aside anyone who needed to be, as the tumult swirled around us.

  Joseph cried to me desperately, “Dr. Susan . . . please! . . . Help my girl.”

  I couldn’t find a pulse. “Ronnie—”

  She finished my sentence: “We gotta get ’em outta here.” With one swift move the heroic woman swept up Claire’s fragile, limp body in her strong arms as I helped Joseph to his feet.

  Two more ARPCs swept in overhead, red lights flashing, sirens wailing, El-Stats firing electrical pulses at unarmed protesters. A man next to us took a blistering hit that spun him to the gutter. It was all a horrific blur. Somehow Ronnie steered us through frantic people, some trampling others, into a side alley. At the far end we saw two dozen people, hands on their heads, being shoved into a police van. Ronnie detoured into the back doorway of a restaurant’s kitchen. She eased Claire down to the floor, whispering to me, “I think she’s gone, Sue.”

  She was right, no pulse. Pupils unresponsive. Joseph was beside his daughter, sobbing. I said, “I can’t just leave them!”

  Ronnie was clear eyed, firm. “Listen: there is a world of Fascist cops out there who’d be thrilled to get their hands on you and—”

  “I won’t leave him like this! I—”

  “Dr. Susan.” Joseph grasped my hand, choked with emotion. “You go. Go find a way to stop this . . . madness.” He squeezed my hand tightly.

  I stared at him, then dug quickly into my pocket and handed him one of the cheap cell phones. “Joseph, press number one on the contacts if you need me.”

  “We all need you, Dr. Susan . . .”

  There were intensifying shouts in the alley. Ronnie grabbed my arm, pulled me up and away.

  Simone Frederick. . .

  Clarence came home late again that evening. It was getting to be an every-night thing that had intensified my suspicions. But that night something else was far more troubling. He found me staring at the local TV news with my jaw hanging open. The friendly newscaster was saying, “There was a minor disturbance downtown today: a few dozen drunken, rowdy students created a brief nuisance in front of city hall.” As he spoke, the TV showed some cell phone video of people shouting and waving signs that were mostly unreadable, then some other angles that completely minimized the size of the crowd and the police’s actions. Additional, similar video bites illustrated the story being told. “The Atlanta PD stepped in quickly, quietly, and efficiently to restore order. Police had to take down one female agitator with their new El-Stat weapon. A few vocal dissidents claimed it was a flagrant civil rights violation, but Ronald Abdulla of the watchdog ACLU agreed entirely with police there was no evidence of that. There was, however, evidence that the woman may have been a lone wolf terrorist. Investigators led by senior FBI agent Clive McWilliams recovered the carpetbag purse the agitator had carried and reported it contained seven pounds of C-4 plastic explosive wired with blasting caps. Agent McWilliams pledged a thorough investigation. The governor said his police and FBI had done a tremendous job, giving them all—and himself—an A plus!”

  Then the Eiffel Tower appeared onscreen behind the newsman. “Well, it was a beautiful day in the City of Light today as runners assembled for the Paris Marathon and—” I muted it and angrily threw the remote across the room.

  “Whoa, Simone,” Clarence said in his most patronizing voice. “What’s the problem?”

  “That broadcast was a lie! And the local station gave that same footage to CNN!” I turned hotly to him. “I was looking out a window at city hall. I saw what really happened. There were at least five to six hundred people. Police used water cannons, and those new flying squad cars were firing on unarmed citizens. It was really—”

  Clarence tried to spread calm, as usual. “Simone, Simone, take it easy.”

  “What are they talking about? Minor disturbance!” I paced, fuming. “My God, Clarence, people were panicked, getting trampled! That young nurse was no terrorist. They shot her down in cold blood! I saw some posts come up on Facebook showing the real thing just like I’d seen it happen—but before I could blink the posts were deleted. The same on Instagram. And Twitter. They blame technical difficulties but the truth is being censored by the government while they spread their lies!” I headed for the door. “I’m going into the press office and find out just what the hell is—”

  “Simone . . .” Clarence stopped me firmly, speaking through a very forced smile.

  “What!” I snapped. He gestured toward the kitchen, where LeBron was drinking milk straight out of the carton. I hate that. Clarence pulled at my sleeve. “What!?” I was bristling with anger. “I can’t speak the truth in my own home?”

  Clarence edged me to the hallway, then spoke quietly to me so LeBron couldn’t hear, “The police and several private organizations are offering large rewards for informing on dissidents.”

  I was incredulous. “Dissidents? Me? Because I want the truth?!” Clarence nodded portentously. I hissed at him, “You think our son would inform on his own mother?!”

  Clarence stared at me, whispering now, “Simone. Our son is talking about joining the police.”

  24

  OPPORTUNITIES

  Jimmy-Joe Hartman. . .

  The prison kept getting worser. Whole new bunch come in after some big bust at city hall. Place wuz crowded before, but now they wuz waaaay too many. Wuzn’t enough food, toilets always plugged up and filthy, and all them two-man cells wuz crammed with at least four. There’d been two riots. Guys killed. Guards, too. Phil paid off this one guard, Wazinski, to let a few of us sleep on the library floor. Phil’d kinda took me under his wing.

  Started back that first day when Phil’d been amazed how fast I caught on to that Dewey shit. Me, too. But them decimal numbers made sense to me like none ever done before. Hadda be my new brain. Same thing happened when I opened a book and discovered I could read like superfast. Phil seen that, too. Trouble was I didn’t understand lotsa the words. Phil gived me a dictionary fer little kids, with lotsa pictures. I blowed through that in about a minute. But when he axed me questions ’bout it, we wuz both surprised that I knowed most of the answers. So he gived me a grown-up dictionary. Took me longer t’get through that one. Maybe an hour. Then Phil axed me stuff again ’bout words and what they def-i-nitions wuz. Same deal. I ’membered most all. Him and me wuz starin’ at each other. Finally Phil said, “You one of them, ain’t you?” He’d run acrost a couple others inside. He axed how it happened. I told him ’bout them tomatoes. I axed ’bout them other guys.

  “One of ’em was a real educated sciency guy. The other was a punk,” he said. “They both got done in by Julio types.”

  I axed how come I reminded Phil of his kid. He shaked his head. Couldn’t put his finger on it. Even though I wuz white, he said there wuz somethin’ ’bout my expressions or me havin’ such a short fuse that almost got Julio to do me in.

  “My boy never got his shit together,” Phil said, lookin’ away, face gettin’ sad. “Never did no studyin’. Never took care o’business. ’Cept his drug dealin’. Got killed by a bunch o’cops. A few months back. When all the po-lice started getting’ hard-ass.”

  I said I wuz sorry. We just sat a minute. Then I told him it wuz weird I put him in mind of his kid, seein’ how his glasses remind me of Poppa.

  Phil looked at me, teasin’ sorta woo-woo, “Why now that’s right cosmic, ain’t it, boy?”

  And boom. I heard myself sayin’, “‘Cosmic, relatin’ to the universe or cosmos, in-con-ceiv-ably vast.’” Then I blinked, looked down at the dictionary in my lap.

  “Yeah. Thas right, Jimmy-Joe. You got the shine. Wish my son had et one of them tomatoes. Had the chance you got.” He looked at me real sharp. “You gonna just piss it away, boy? You for sure ain’t done much studyin’.”
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  “Naw,” I said, grumbly, “I wuzn’t no good at it. Seemed like a waste of time.”

  He drawed in a big breath and stood up, sayin’, “Well, time’s somethin’ you got plenty of now.” He looked around at the shelves, pulled a book out, and gimme it. “There’s a good one t’start with.”

  It look like it was some kinda animal book: Of Mice and Men.

  Dr. Susan Perry. . .

  The people had been gathering for almost an hour. We’d asked them to arrive at intervals in the fewest cars possible and park inside the empty warehouse next door. If any helicopters or ARPCs passed overhead, we wanted to avoid it looking like what it was: a clandestine meeting about underground resistance to the Friends. Ronnie Dodsworth and Crash were the rock-solid gatekeepers. I’d noticed that Crash seemed intrigued by Ronnie’s strong persona, sculpted physique, and particularly those parallel cornrows that ran front to back on her beautiful head. We were just finishing an informal briefing about the CAV-A and -B viruses when Eric and Katie were last to scurry in from the rain.

  Crash caught Katie’s sleeve. “Hey kiddo, we know you and Eric, but there’s a lotta new folks here who don’t, so it’s a rule that everybody gets checked, huh?” He indicated they should put their hands into a battered suitcase-size unit, like the one I’d seen outside the congregational church on that stormy night seven months ago.

  Katie was amazed. “What, you stole one of their screening devices? How?”

  Ronnie winked. “Got friends in low places.” She activated it. “Good news is it works both ways: they use it to keep us out of their groups. We use it—”

  Katie nodded. “To keep them from infiltrating us.” Crash gave her a fist bump.

  Eric slid his hand into the device, saying, “Gives a whole new meaning to Underground Atlanta, huh?” The unit beeped.

  “Okay,” Ronnie confirmed, “you can come to my party.”

  Katie slipped her hand in, and the beep sounded. “How does it work?”

  Chunhua was nearby, studying it. “Trying to figure that out.”

  Nate Balfour called out to them in his rapid-fire manner from the coffee setup where he was getting a plastic stirrer to chew on. “Pull up a stool, gotta get this going.”

  “Yes,” I said, “we don’t want to have this many of us in one place for any longer than necessary.”

  Katie McLane. . .

  About three dozen people had turned to watch Eric and me come in. They were settling onto benches, boxes, stools, or the concrete floor of the warehouse. Many were scientists I’d seen working with us. The rest were a mixture of people from well-off to poor, late teens to eighties. Some were state or local cops. Crash sat down next to a man and woman in Air Cavalry military fatigues.

  Scanning the new faces, I spotted and smiled at my dad’s ex-girlfriend, Tina, who waved to me. There was also a black woman with tortoiseshell glasses sitting next to Nate, who looked familiar, maybe from an Ashton football game. Lilly was sitting to one side, scanning through Aristotle’s Poetics, and Chris was back in the lab area, working quietly with chemistry equipment. He glanced over as Susan sat on a tall stool facing us. She seemed kinda uncomfortable.

  Dr. Susan Perry. . .

  I felt awkward running the meeting with my genius colleague/former lover right behind me, but I pressed on and started with a little gallows humor. “Hi. I’m Susan and I’m not a Friend.”

  Crash and others familiar with 12-step meetings responded, “Hi, Susan.”

  I smiled. “Thanks. Many of us don’t really know each other, except that we’re all dedicated to fighting back against the Friends.” I told about my work at the CDC and what I’d discovered with Katie’s help, then invited the group to quickly introduce themselves and tell who they were. Several were scientists, and all were a cross section of worried, determined people whom we’d carefully vetted and reached out to. Many represented their own clandestine groups from different parts of the city. All expressed encouragement at being among like-minded people. “I think the bottom line is we want to find a way to stop the Friends from dominating everything.”

  “Before they totally trash the planet,” Tina chimed in. Others voiced agreement.

  An acquaintance of Nate’s named Simone Frederick, who worked at the State Capitol, got more specific. “There’ve already been a couple of ugly chemical spills at the plant where my husband works.” She added with annoyance, “Which they quickly hushed up, of course. Just like that minor disturbance at city hall I saw myself.” Many reacted angrily about that and the bravery of Claire, who’d been killed.

  A rugged man named Javier was in an electric wheelchair. He had the upper body of an Olympic swimmer, but no legs. “Friend of mine told me they’d had some radiation problems down at that experimental cold fusion plant, too.”

  “Why are we not surprised?” Crash said grimly.

  Nate quoted the Friends’ doctrine, “‘Let’s rush to be the best, fastest, most profitable—’”

  “And damn the consequences,” Simone added.

  “Right.” I nodded. “So we asked you all here to help formulate a cohesive plan of action against them.”

  Eric moved to make notes on a dry-marker board, but Katie said, “Um, Eric, sometimes your handwriting . . .”

  Eric smiled, handed her the marker. “Go for it, Kate.”

  “Okay,” I said. “First, we’ve got to protect ourselves from getting accidentally infected.” Katie wrote “Protect Ourselves.”

  “Good news on that front,” said Gerald, the balding, thirtysomething Yale chemist. From a Nike shoebox he pulled out one of numerous matchstick-size strips. “You should each take a few. Just touch it to any food or drink that seems suspicious.”

  The willowy Edinburgh grad, Gwyneth, had joined him. “Aye, and if the strip turns yellow, dump the lot of it.”

  “And make a note of anyone who tries to slip it to you,” Gerald added.

  “Yes. We should create a database of those infected,” Nate advised.

  “We’ve started one,” said a middle-aged businessman wearing a yarmulke, as Katie wrote it down. A much older woman said that her group also had one going. They agreed to coordinate their efforts and get us all access to a secret server. One of Crash’s Air Cav friends cautioned, “But it’s gotta be carefully encrypted.” Then she added, “I can help with that.”

  “Great,” Javier said from his wheelchair. “And add: get weapons. The bigger, the better.” But that brought very negative reactions, particularly from Crash and Ronnie. They felt we were far too outgunned and untrained. We could never succeed in out-and-out warfare. The majority agreed.

  “Okay,” Javier acquiesced. “Then how about: widen the Resistance?”

  “Yes, that’s the most critical thing.” Katie wrote it as I added, “Everyone here and in each of your separate groups should contact at least three other people they can trust.”

  “But reeeeally carefully,” Tina cautioned. “Lots of people are resistant to resistance.”

  “Yeah, I’m married to one,” Simone admitted with frustration.

  “Me, too,” one of the state cops next to Ronnie added. “The world’s gotten pretty cushy for lots of folks. Hard to get people off their asses if they’ve got jobs and are making money.”

  “There is one aspect I think we all agree on,” I said. “Finding an antidote is key.” Katie added it, underlined. “A lot of us here have been working on that for months. And now we’re blessed to have Dr. Christopher Smith with us.” I pointed him out amid the lab equipment. Chris managed a grudging nod. “He’s a Nobel-level research biologist. We hope that together we can find a cure.”

  “But what kind of a cure, Susan?” A woman wearing a Muslim head scarf, Barika, said, disturbed. “What if the only cure is to destroy all the infected ones?”

  One of Crash’s army pals said, “Hey, Barika, if they sucked the damn comet—”

  “But are people gonna be killed just because they made the mistake of becoming in
fected?” Tina said with grave concern.

  “Pretty big mistake, ma’am,” Ronnie huffed.

  Javier turned to face Barika, agreeing, “A lot of us have lost family because of them.”

  “Some of us had family turned into them,” Katie said pointedly.

  Simone supported her. “Right, Katie. And what about all the people who were infected without their permission? I mean, it’s easy to disparage the Friends’ inhumanity, but what about our own ethics?” There was a pause as we considered the dilemma.

  “It’s a very thorny moral issue. No question,” said Eric.

  “But until we have some kind of cure, it’s a moot point,” I said, cutting to the chase to keep them on track. “I suggest we put it aside for now.” The majority nodded uneasy agreement. I noticed Chris watching me with an expression that seemed supportive of my leadership. I drew a breath. “Okay. One other thing we’ve got to try to do is infiltrate the Friends.”

  Katie wrote “Infiltrate” as Nate said, “Yeah. Learn their plans. Get ahead of ’em.”

  Javier raised his eyebrows. “That sounds like the most dangerous game of all.”

  Crash, who’d had experience with covert ops, nodded. “And you’d be exactly right, brother.”

  Dr. R.W. Hutcherson. . .

  I’d been alerted that the head honcho was on the way that evening, so I was waiting in the CDC lobby as his three black SUVs arrived. Mitchell’s gray-suited posse preceded him inside. He was frowning. Abrupt. As usual. “Where’s Lauren?”

  “In her private lab,” I said, moving in lockstep with him across the Building 18 atrium.

  “While I was with the governor just now, he took a call from an old friend asking why our Georgia prisons are so overcrowded. Checking if everything’s okay down here.” Mitchell glanced at me. “It was the president.”

  “That imbecile?”

  Mitchell smirked. “Be nice, Hutcherson. Pretty soon he’ll be our imbecile.” He shrugged off his overcoat and gave it to an aide. “But I don’t like what I’m hearing about the pockets of resistance around the state. Particularly biologists looking to interrupt our flow.”