Aftermath a-1

by Charles Sheffield

  “What century do you think you’re in, Art Ferrand? You’ve got this poor helpless little female, so the big strong man has to make sure she stays out of danger. Is that it? Well, your way of thinking was old-fashioned before I was born — before you were born. You’re not Sir Galahad, and I’m not the Lady of Shalott.”

  “Sir Lancelot. You’re mixing knights.”

  “Fuck the knights. You know what I mean. I had as much to do with pulling Oliver Guest out of cold storage as you did. If there’s danger ahead, I helped make it.”

  “All right.” Art held up his hands. “I surrender. It’s just that I care what happens to you. I’ve got a personal interest in seeing that parts of you don’t get damaged.”

  “That’s fair. It works both ways. I’m not finished with you, either. But it doesn’t mean you protect me. It means we share dangers, and protect each other.”

  “I think it means we try to avoid danger. When we can’t, you want to be in with me every step of the way. I accept that — even if I don’t really like it. But I still don’t want to head straight to my house. We might find out when it’s too late that Oliver Guest has killed and eaten Seth and has a booby trap waiting so we can be dessert.”

  “So what’s the answer? Do you have one?”

  She was much calmer. Art risked a hand (friendly, not protective) on her knee, and it wasn’t smacked away. “Funnily enough I do have an answer, though I didn’t two minutes ago. We don’t go straight to my house.”

  “Where do we go?”

  “Somewhere close by. And we enlist reinforcements.”

  Joe Vanetti and Ed O’Donnell were surprisingly restrained in their reactions. Joe, at one point in Art’s description of his actions over the past two weeks, said, “You dumb shit.” Ed confined himself to shaking his head and staring at Dana’s calves. They were spattered with mud from the mile walk along a sticky dirt road, but Art didn’t think that the mud was the main object of interest.

  He was almost done with his story — minimizing the dangerous and experimental nature of the telomod therapy itself — when Ed’s wife, Helen, appeared. She greeted Art, was introduced to Dana, and rounded on Ed. “They’ve been here an hour, and you’ve never offered them a bite to eat?”

  “They’ve got a drink.”

  “And you think that’s the same thing, you drunken Irish sot? Come on, dear” — to Dana — “we’ll be through to the back kitchen, and leave these daft devils to talk. They’re worse than animals. When there’s women around the men won’t feed themselves, and if we don’t feed them they turn on us.”

  Ed waited until they were gone, then said, “That’s it. Your friend’s in for the third degree. By the time Helen’s done with her, Dana’s back teeth will be counted and numbered. She won’t have a secret mole or birthmark left.”

  “He knows where those are already.” Joe nodded toward Art. “Look at the man. Did you ever see such a picture of mindless sexual satisfaction?”

  “Ah, don’t be hard on him. It’s been a long time coming.”

  Ed and Joe, not for the first time, spoke as though Art were not in the room.

  “Only he’s trying to make up for it all at once,” Ed went on. “It’s a miracle he’s not gone blind.”

  “She must be the blind one.”

  “Not only that, you can see that it agrees with him. He looks healthier. How long’s it been since you had your leg over, Art?”

  “What do you think of Dana?” Art, with mass murderers half a step behind or maybe ahead of him, interrupted with a more important question.

  “She’s great,” Joe said. “Sweet and sexy and sensible. Just what you need — what you’ve needed for all these years. Though I can’t think what she’s doing hanging around with you.” Ed nodded agreement, and Joe went on, “And why you’d talk a nice, sane woman like that into the maddest scheme I’ve ever heard of, that’s beyond me. Oliver Guest, for God’s sake. And by the sound of it, your friend Seth Parsigian’s as bad or worse. Why didn’t you go the whole way and take Frankenstein along to wake up Dracula?”

  No point in telling Joe and Ed that Dana had been as keen on the idea as he was — or that Seth had pushed both of them. No point in mentioning that nothing in the past couple of weeks had been normal, not even here. On the trek up to the house, Art had noticed three ominous crosses on top of piles of dirt, a few hundred yards off the main road. Catoctin Mountain Park seemed quiet, but Supernova Alpha had left its marks of violence everywhere, not just in the cities.

  “All right, so I was an idiot.” Art refused the offer of another drink. “I can admit that, and it doesn’t help me. Here’s my problem: I don’t know if Seth and Oliver Guest are dead or alive. I don’t know where they are, and I don’t know what they’re doing. What I do know is that Seth has my address. He got that, and the location of my house, from one of the maps I had. I want to go to my place and find out if they’re already there. If they’re not, I’ll stay in my house—”

  “Terrible idea,” Ed said, and Joe nodded agreement. “Suppose Oliver Guest has done away with friend Seth,” Ed continued, “and he arrives in the middle of the night. Don’t you think, to make sure you don’t cause trouble, he’d decide it’s simplest to blow you and your whole house away?”

  “He has no way to do that.” But Art knew that was a poor assumption. He didn’t know what Guest might be able to do. Or Seth, for that matter.

  “You check the place,” Ed went on, “and you keep it under observation. But you don’t leave yourself a sitting duck.”

  “But I have to stay—”

  “Here. You and Dana have to stay here.”

  “No. I don’t want you involved. It could put you in danger.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have come here at all.” Ed stood up. “Let’s go over to your place, see what’s happening there. Joe?”

  “What do you think? Rifles?”

  “I guess so. Shotguns have too much spread. Semiautomatics, I’d say.” Ed turned to Art. “See, we don’t want to spoil your need to look brave and manly to your girlfriend. You can go up to your house by yourself. But we’ll keep you covered.”

  “What about Dana?”

  “She’ll stay here, of course, safe with Helen.”

  “You think so?” Art stood up also. “Fine. I’m going to let the two of you explain that to her.”

  The approach to Art’s cabin revealed no sign of a wheeled vehicle and no footsteps. The ground was drying, but any car or a person of normal weight would have broken through the thin crust of dried mud.

  That was only partial reassurance. You could get to the building a hundred different ways, straight across the fields and up the hill, or down from the mountain park. Art walked cautiously toward his own front door. He had left it just a couple of weeks ago, two weeks going on years.

  Dana was not with him. To Art’s great irritation, when Ed and Joe suggested that she stay behind with Helen, she had meekly agreed. She had also stuck her tongue out at him.

  The door looked exactly as it ought to, locked and with the little red tag on the left side in the I am out position. Art didn’t have his keys. They were in a toolbox on the tractor he had ridden south, which was now God-knows-where. He stooped down to retrieve the spare from under the foot-scraper, aware as he straightened up that two rifles were lined up on the house. He suspected that they were aimed at the door, which meant right at his back.

  He breathed deep, inserted the key into the lock, and pushed the door open. Everything seemed exactly the way that he had left it — even the plate and dirty coffee cup on the table. He took a step inside.

  All quiet.

  He turned and waved. Joe walked slowly toward the house, his finger on the rifle’s trigger and the safety off. Ed came along thirty steps behind, covering him.

  There were few places where anyone or anything could hide. Inside a minute, Art could nod and say with confidence, “I’m sure. They haven’t been here yet.”

  “So what do
we do now?” Ed asked. He held the gun easily, a man who often carried his rifle or shotgun hour after hour, ready to aim and shoot and kill game that might be gone and out of sight in a fraction of a second. Joe was outside again, standing watch.

  “Well, I wish you’d done it before you came in.” Art looked at the trail of mud that the other two had carried in on their boots. “I’ll have to clean this mess up.

  But one thing I’m not going to do is lock the place. I don’t want my door smashed in.”

  “It’s nice to see you have your priorities in order. You don’t mind being turned into chopped chicken liver, so long as your house stays intact and the floor’s not dirty.”

  “I think that you two should go back home, Ed. I’ll stay and keep an eye on this place.”

  “Very rational. So you stay here how long. And you eat when? And you sleep when? And when it rains like mad or gets freezing cold, you do what? You sure as hell can’t stay inside this house and wait for Frank and Drac to arrive.”

  “I don’t want you and Joe, or Dana or Helen or Anne-Marie, exposed to danger.”

  “I see no reason why we should be. Seth Parsigian knows about this place, but he doesn’t know where me and Joe live. He doesn’t even know we exist. He’s not going to do a local home survey when he gets here, he has other things on his mind.”

  Art hesitated. What Ed said seemed to make sense, even though he was, in his wife’s words, a drunken Irish sot, and in his best friend Joe’s words, as witless and confused as a freshly fucked owl.

  “We can’t just ignore this house, Ed. Either Seth, or Oliver Guest, or both of them, will be here at some point.”

  “We don’t ignore it. We come here every day — twice a day — and we do what we just did. You inspect it, with plenty of firepower as backup. Your friend and Dr. Guest may be tough customers, and they may get nasty; but I doubt they win many arguments with bullets.”

  It was logical, and Art could suggest nothing better. But it felt wrong. Ed didn’t know Seth, and to all of them here at Catoctin Mountain, Oliver Guest was little more than a name and an unpleasant legend.

  The sense of uneasiness lasted while he cleaned mud from the floor, carefully closed the front door, and walked with the other two back toward Ed’s house. The strong gusts of morning wind had ended. The afternoon had become hot and leaden, depressing Art’s spirits and dulling his mind.

  He comforted himself with the knowledge that no matter what happened, Dana and his friends could not be harmed.

  43

  From the secret diary of Oliver Guest.

  Chance, as Louis Pasteur famously remarked, favors the prepared mind.

  Actually, my hero among nineteenth-century medical researchers is not the Frenchman Pasteur, flamboyant and ebullient, but his methodical, painstaking, physically unprepossessing German contemporary and rival, Robert Koch. Koch it was, not Pasteur, who in rigorous Teutonic fashion established the procedural rules for modern bacteriology and virology, those tunes to which all serious research workers even today must dance.

  However, Pasteur’s well-known comment encourages a converse statement: Chance can transform or undo the most careful planning.

  I had proof of this when Seth Parsigian and I headed for the place where we were to meet his colleagues. He had provided the method of transportation, an ugly box of a car that in its distant heyday must have been a sports utility vehicle. There was something that looked like dried blood on the passenger seat, concerning which I made no comment.

  I loaded into the rear compartment a dozen boxes, complaining of their weight and of my own physical weakness. He offered no sympathy. I expected none, even had the weakness been genuine. As I packed the boxes, I explained what they were. When I said “test kit” I did not mean some tidy package or sealed plastic unit, where the press of a button popped final results up on a display. For that type of innately digital analysis, microchips would be an absolute essential. What I could provide used old-fashioned chemical tests, with reagents and precipitates and the comparison of colors. The work was not difficult, but it could be messy. And as soon as we reached our destination (but not before) I promised that I would reveal to Seth and his colleagues the sequence of tests to be performed, and their interpretations.

  We both knew the other significance of that coming revelation. Once Seth knew how to do the tests, my vulnerability would increase enormously. As the endgame began, I was in danger of losing my queen. I knew — and he knew — that I needed a countermove.

  He stared at me strangely when, with the car loaded and ready to go, I went back into the garden and collected Methuselah. “I won’t have a chance to come back and get him later,” I explained as I placed the box tortoise, appropriately, in with the other boxes in the rear compartment.

  You won’t have much use for turtles where you’ll be going, his look said. But of course, he could not suggest that to me. We were still playing the game of mutual trust and goodwill, assisted on his part by a loaded gun.

  He told me to drive. He would navigate. That was when I learned he had never before visited our destination.

  So whose house was it? As we drove north I became increasingly apprehensive. I saw everything with heightened senses. Remember, this was my first opportunity to observe the effects of Supernova Alpha in a normal setting. My experience to date had been the emergence from the syncope facility, a bizarre river journey, and days of confinement within my own house and garden.

  I drove slowly and carefully. The antique car would not go fast, and Seth did not need to remind me that police interest in our vehicle, for whatever reason, offered worse dangers for me than for him.

  Our stately progress offered plenty of opportunity for observation. Seth’s occasional descriptions of the past two months had suggested to me a world shattered and shaken by the supernova. I had no reason to doubt what he said, and certainly what I saw on the highway offered much evidence to support his view. Hardly a car or truck was familiar, and the changes were not those that I might have reasonably expected after five years in judicial sleep. The vehicles had a jerry-built look to them, things of rags and patches.

  On the other hand, they moved. And their drivers, except for an air of antiquity that matched the cars, seemed perfectly cheerful. Their manner said, we have faced the worse effects of the supernova; they’re over, and we’re going to beat this thing.

  Some, of course, would not make that statement. I saw burned-out wreckage of old accidents, still uncleared. Someone had placed wreaths at three roadside points, where blackened earth showed the first sprouts of new green. As we progressed farther north, off to the left of the highway I saw the tail of a crashed aircraft, jutting into the red afternoon sky like a giant silver memorial to the dead.

  As we left the finished roads and began to ascend a gravel track, the evidence of death became more immediate. Our car passed three crosses formed from cut saplings. The soil of the graves that they marked was ruddy and newly turned. They could be no more than a few days old.

  I don’t think that Seth even noticed them. His attention was on his map.

  “Turn left at the top,” he said. “And that’s it.”

  That’s what? My apprehension mounted. I drove at a snail’s pace along the rough dirt road, until a small wooden house came into view, set back into the hillside.

  “Stop a few yards short.” Seth was studying the house, but at the same time managed to keep one eye — and his gun — on me. “Then we’ll go take a look.”

  “What about the telomere monitoring materials?”

  “They can stay in the car. They’ll keep awhile, an’ I don’t see raccoons an’ deer takin’ too much interest in ’em.”

  Which meant that Methuselah had to stay there, too. I made sure the doors and windows were closed before at Seth’s bidding I stepped out of the car and walked in front of him toward the house.

  I mentioned that my sense of observation had been heightened from the moment we left my home. Now I
saw Seth in the same super sensitive mood. In front of the house, he made me stop.

  “No car tracks. Nobody has driven this way. But lots of boot marks. Recent. And both ways.” He motioned me forward again.

  I noticed that one set of imprints was identical to those of the boots I had been wearing when I awoke at the syncope facility. That didn’t tell me much, and I did not mention it to Seth. In any case, I could see three different sizes and style of footprint. Not one of them looked like a woman’s shoe.

  It was at this point that, as I remarked, chance seemed ready to undo my plans. I had been prepared for three people: Seth, and his two still-anonymous colleagues. My hope was to dispose of them, and to vanish. No one else would have any idea where to look for me.

  Now I faced an uncertain number of adversaries. At a minimum there were three men and one woman, plus Seth. Disposing of all of them, however desirable, seemed impossibly difficult. That was even more the case since the woman had not been at the house, and she could be anywhere. She would be able to direct others here. My earlier hope, for their death and my disappearance, had been destroyed.

  Chance favors the prepared mind. I looked even more closely at everything. We entered the house, me a step ahead of Seth.

  “This gets a bit annoyin’,” he said, when we were both in the dim interior. He had a gift for understatement. “They’ve been here, sure as shootin’. Door not locked, footprints all over the place outside. But where the hell are they? It’ll be dark in another couple of hours.”

  He did not expect an answer from me, so I was free to form my own impressions of the house. As Seth said, there were footprints outside, and not inside. But in places near the entrance, the wooden boards of the floor were slightly damp. Someone had recently been cleaning there. At the same time, the interior had the clammy, unused feel of a building unoccupied for weeks or months. A plate sat on the table, and the cup next to it contained a dried-out brown material. I bent over and sniffed. “Coffee,” I said to Seth. “But not made today — or yesterday, either.” When I straightened up I held hidden in my hand a little paring knife from the table. It was sharp enough but of no use as a weapon. The blade was barely an inch long.