The Dragon Factory jl-2

by Jonathan Maberry

  Shit.

  I only saw him for a second, but it was long enough for his scowl of frustration to blossom into a big smile like a happy bloodhound. He was yelling at the driver as I jagged left and raced down an alley. I heard shouts behind me and Andrews and his buddy were pelting after me with alarming speed.

  Okay, I thought, if you want me bad enough then see if you can keep up.

  I poured it on, leaping over garbage, ducking through a rent in a chain-link fence, vaulting a green Dumpster, and spider-climbing up a fire escape. I’m moderately big, but I can run like a cheetah on speed when I’m motivated.

  Andrews, for all his size, was even faster than me.

  He was less than ten yards behind me as I tore down a garbage-strewn alleyway toward a dead end. If he hadn’t wasted breath yelling at me he might have grabbed me before I could make it to the end of the alley. Mistake. I leaped as high as I could and grabbed the chain-link fence three-quarters of the way up and scrambled up and over like a nervous squirrel. I swung over the top pole and did an ugly somersault, spilling the change and car keys out of my pocket, and landed in a crouch, fell sideways, and used the momentum to get back to my feet. It wasn’t pretty, but I was up and running.

  I didn’t look back. I heard Andrews slam into the fence, but his dress shoes weren’t made for climbing and he fell. I heard him land, and his curses followed me all the way down the alley.

  Andrews yelled at me to stop, but he still hadn’t pulled his piece. Curiouser and curiouser. I didn’t want to know how he’d vent his frustrations if he ever got me cuffed to a D ring in a quiet interrogation room, so I ran and ran and ran.

  The rest of the alley was clear and I poured on the juice, but just as I was about to make a break for daylight a second Crown Vic screeched to a stop in front of me, tires smoking, its bulk entirely blocking the alley. Two agents started opening their doors, but I didn’t stop. I threw myself into the air, hit the hood of the car, and slid on one ass cheek across the hood. As I landed, the agent on the passenger side made a grab for me, but I spun into him, head-butted him, and then threw him onto the hood as the other agent tried to slide across like I’d done. The two agents hit hard and slid off the front of the car into the street.

  I hated messing these guys up, but Mr. Church’s words were banging around inside my head. Don’t get taken, Captain, or you’ll disappear into the system.

  Call it an incentive program.

  A third agent came out of nowhere, jumped over his pals, and pounded after me. Slab-face and the other agent were too far back now, so I let the driver catch up to me two blocks away. I cut diagonally across a basketball court, scattering black teenagers out of my way as I went. They yelled at us the way kids will and then I gave them something to yell about. As I reached the foul line of the far court I angled for the thin metal pole that supported the rusted hoop from which only tattered threads of a net remained. I leaped at the upright, grabbed it with both hands just as the driver caught up, and I flagpoled around it like a vertical version of a spin on a high bar. My sneakers slammed into the driver’s chest and knocked him flying into a row of overflowing trash cans. It wasn’t a dangerous fall for a fit adult, but it was loud and messy. As I ran, I heard the kids behind me cheering. At least someone appreciated me.

  I knew that I’d been lucky, and that was okay. I’d go light a candle in church next chance I had. Right now I had to run the luck as far as it would go.

  I wished I had the time to cut one of these goons out of the pack, drag him into an abandoned room, and see if I could convince him that confession was good for the soul. But I doubted any of the agents would know more than Church could find out, and besides, the possible reward wasn’t worth the risk.

  So I cut left into a low-rise apartment building, ran down hallways and out the back door, vaulted a couple of backyard fences, nearly got my ass bitten off by a startled bull terrier, made my way to another set of alleys, and zigzagged my way through West Baltimore. I was a white guy running through a rough black neighborhood, but I looked crazy and I looked like a cop, and those were two things nobody of any color wants to mess with.

  After another two blocks I slowed to a walk and paid a teenager fifty bucks for his Orioles cap. Sweat ran down my body and pooled in my shoes; my shirt clung to me, outlining the shape of the pistol clipped to the back of my belt. I could feel the eyes of everyone on the street on me, but I knew that no one was going to drop a dime on someone running from the cops—even if he looked like a cop himself. I went into a convenience store and bought an oversized souvenir Baltimore T-shirt. I squatted in the street and rubbed it against the macadam until it was filthy and torn, then pulled it on over my Orioles shirt. With the hat sitting askew and a baggy shirt that looked like it hadn’t been washed since Clinton was in office, I looked like a homeless person. Every time I turned a corner I dropped a little more into that role, lowering my head, changing my walk into a meandering shuffle, twitching and mumbling to myself in a variety of languages. Eventually anyone who saw me would have sworn I was a junkie looking to score. Somewhere along the way I picked up two actual junkies, and the three of us moved in a haphazard line deeper into West Baltimore until there was no trail at all for the NSA to follow.

  Half an hour later I stole a car and drove out of town.

  Chapter Nine

  The Deck

  Saturday, August 28, 8:35 A.M.

  Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 99 hours, 25 minutes E.S.T.

  Otto and Cyrus strolled through the hallways of the Deck, smiling and nodding at the workers and technicians. Except for three scientists in the laboratory—all Indian—every face was white and every lineage could be traced back to Aryan origins. In some cases, because the worker was particularly valuable, allowances were made for indistinct bloodlines. In the end, as both men knew, it didn’t matter, because no one here, not the workers or lab staff, not the SAMs, and not even Otto and Cyrus themselves, was part of the future. They were the shoulders on which the next evolutionary level of mankind would stand. Otto and Cyrus were content and delighted with that; the others simply did not know.

  “How are things going in Wilmington?” asked Cyrus as they stopped at a viewing stand built to look down on the zoo. There were forty separate cages, and the screams and calls of animals filled the air. The rich scent of earth and animal dung and musk clung to the water vapor in the humid biosphere. The zoo was a hundred yards below the Arizona desert, but it felt like a tropical rain forest.

  “The Russians were able to get the information from the man Gilpin—the computer nerd who used to work for the Twins. He was able to confirm the content of the Haeckel records.”

  “Is Gilpin alive?”

  “I doubt it. The Russian team commander downloaded the information to us just a few minutes ago. However, Gilpin was able to confirm that the Haeckel records are at a storage facility called Deep Iron, near Denver.”

  Cyrus looked pleased. “Who do we have in the area?”

  “In Denver? No one, but I sent a team.”

  “More Russians?”

  Otto shrugged. “Better them than our own.”

  They watched the animals. A juvenile mammoth was trumpeting and banging its massive shoulders against the sides of its cage. The air above them was filled with a flock of passenger pigeons. Cyrus leaned his forearms on the pipe rail and watched as handlers used winches and slings to carefully off-load a sedated dire wolf from an electric cart. The female had received in vitro fertilization but had miscarried twice already. The embryologist—one of the Indians—thought they’d solved the problem. A gene that was coding for the wrong hormone sequence.

  “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

  Otto grunted. He had almost no interest in reclamation genetics. To him it was an expensive hobby that drained time and manpower from more important work, but for Cyrus it was a lifelong passion. To reclaim the past and then improve it so that what went forward was stronger and more evolved.

>   “This is how God must feel,” murmured Cyrus. It was something he said at least three or four times a week. Otto said nothing.

  In the adjoining cage a saber-toothed cat sat and watched the handlers with icy patience. Even from here the cat reminded Cyrus of his daughter, Hecate. The same eyes, the same arctic patience.

  He glanced at his watch, which was not set to real time but synchronized with the Extinction Clock. As the numbers ticked down, second by second, Cyrus felt a great happiness settle over him.

  Chapter Ten

  Baltimore, Maryland

  Saturday, August 28, 8:45 A.M.

  Time Left on the Extinction Clock: 99 hours, 15 minutes

  I was scared. I admit it.

  I’d been in worse physical danger before. Hell, I’d been in worse physical danger two days ago, so it wasn’t that. But as I drove I started getting a serious case of the shakes because the NSA—the actual National Security frigging Agency—was trying to arrest me. If they hadn’t had just cause beforehand, they certainly did now, and I was beginning to regret how I had played it.

  Sure, Church had warned me not to get taken. Message received and understood; but I know that I did more collateral damage to those guys simply because they braced me at Helen’s grave. If they’d come at me in the parking lot of my apartment building they might have gotten off with a couple of bruises. But I was pretty sure that at least two of them were in the hospital and a couple of others would be carrying around bruises that would be daily reminders of Joe Ledger, world’s oldest adolescent.

  I took a bunch of random turns, double- and triple-checking that I had no tail.

  My best friend, Rudy Sanchez—who’s also my shrink and used to be Helen’s shrink right up until she killed herself—has been working with me for years to control some of my less mature urges. He calls them unrefined primal responses to negative stimulation. I think he gets wood when he can toss out phrases like that.

  My boss may think I’m hot shit and even the guys on Echo Team might think I’m cool and together, but Rudy knows the score. I’ve got enough baggage to start a luggage store, and I have a whole bunch of buttons that I don’t like pushed.

  Disrespecting Helen—even through ignorance of her existence—did not play well with me. If they’d pushed harder I would like to believe that I wouldn’t have gone apeshit on them. There are a lot of things I’d like to believe in.

  I was gripping the steering wheel too hard. The more I thought about it, the more anger rose up to replace the fear. I didn’t want either emotion screwing with my head. It was already a junk pile.

  I dug out my cell and tried to call Rudy, but I got no answer.

  “Shit,” I snarled, and tossed the phone down on the seat.

  And kept driving fast, heading nowhere.

  Chapter Eleven

  Hebron, Louisiana

  Saturday, August 28, 8:55 A.M.

  Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 99 hours, 5 minutes

  Rabbi Scheiner was an old man, but he had bright green eyes and a face well used to smiling. However, as he walked beside his nephew, Dr. David Meyer, the rabbi’s mouth was pulled into a tight line and his eyes were dark with concern.

  “How sure are you about this, David?” the rabbi asked, pitching his voice low enough so that the nurses and patients in the ward could not overhear.

  David Meyer shook the sheaf of papers in his hand. “We ran every test we could, and the lab in Baton Rouge confirmed our findings.”

  “It’s unfortunate, David . . . but it does happen. You know more than I do that there’s no cure for this, and that the best we can do is screen young people and counsel them before marriage. Warn them of the risks.”

  “That’s the point, Rabbi,” insisted Meyer. “We did those screens. We have a very high concentration of Ashkenazi Jews here, most of them from families that fled the Rhine as things were going bad in the late nineteen thirties. Virtually everyone in Hebron, Tefka, and Muellersville has been screened—we still get grants from Israel to run the polymerase chain reaction techniques, and they’re very accurate. We know the carriers, and we have counseled them. If these occurrences were within the group of known carriers, then I wouldn’t have called you.”

  “Then I don’t understand. Haaretz reported that the disease was virtually eradicated. You yourself told me that there had been no babies born to Jewish families here in America with the disease since 2003.”

  Meyer took the rabbi by the arm and led him into a small alcove.

  “I know; I know,” said Meyer. His face was bright with stress, and sweat beaded his forehead. “However, in the last month clinics throughout the area have been reporting many cases of patients presenting with classic symptoms: slurred speech, difficulty swallowing, unsteadiness of gait, spasticity, sharp and sudden cognitive declines, and a variety of psychiatric illnesses that include psychosis typical of schizophrenia. Individually any one or two of those symptoms in an adult would not suggest LOTS, but when five or six symptoms present in virtually every patient . . . then what else could I think? I sent nurses out to take samples for genetic testing and we ran our own enzyme assay tests, but they’re not as precise at genetic testing as PCR tests, so I had the samples shipped to a lab in Baton Rouge.” He shook the sheaf of papers. “These are the results.”

  Rabbi Scheiner reluctantly took the papers from Meyer and quickly read through them. In the comment notes he read: “Late Onset Tay-Sachs (LOTS) disease is a rare form of the disorder, typically occurring in patients in their twenties and early thirties. This disease is frequently misdiagnosed and usually nonfatal.”

  He looked up.

  “So you have several patients who have become sick?”

  Meyer shook his head slowly. “Rabbi . . . I’ve had eleven patients here in Hebron, and there were nine in Tefka and six in Muellersville.”

  The rabbi caught the phrasing. “You say you ‘had’ eleven patients. . . .”

  Meyer gave him a bleak stare. “Three have already died. Two more are . . . well, they have lapsed into comas. The others are getting sicker almost as I watch. The muscles needed to swallow become atrophic and paralyzed. We’ve intubated them, and I’ve even trached a few, but the paralysis spreads so fast. I don’t know how to treat any of them.”

  “There’s no cure. . . .” The rabbi said it as a statement. “God help us.”

  “Researchers have been looking into gene therapy and other treatments, but even if we had a genetic option in hand, these people don’t have the time for it.”

  “These are all children?”

  Meyer shook his head. “No, and that’s what scares me the most. Infantile and Juvenile TSD are both fatal, but not LOTS. And yet every one of these patients is over twenty. Some are in their forties and fifties. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Could . . . could the disease have mutated?”

  “It apparently has,” said Meyer, “but how? It was nearly eradicated. We’d beaten it. We’ve never had a single case here in Hebron, or in the other towns, and most of the people here are second- and even third-generation American born. We haven’t married strictly within the communities of Ashkenazi Jews, which means statistics should be on our side.”

  Rabbi Scheiner put his hand on the young doctor’s arm. “Be strong, David. Tell me . . . what will you do?”

  “I’ll have to report this. Now that I have the results from the genetic tests I can reach out to the major university hospitals.”

  “What about the disease people?” asked the rabbi. “What about the Centers for Disease Control up in Atlanta? You went to them with the botulism problem a few years ago—”

  “No,” said Meyer, “this is a genetic mutation, not a pathogen. It’s not contagious in any way that could cause an epidemic.”

  Rabbi Scheiner’s eyes were intense, probing. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course,” said Meyer. “It’s an inherited disorder. You can’t just catch it.”

  The rabbi nodded and turned to l
ook out of the alcove at the patients in the ward. “Are you sure?” he asked again.

  Chapter Twelve

  Baltimore, Maryland

  Saturday, August 28, 9:05 A.M.

  Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 98 hours, 55 minutes

  After I drove around for twenty minutes I switched on my scramble and tried to make some calls. Church’s line rang through to voice mail. His voice message was: “Speak!” I was tempted to bark, but instead I left a simple request for callback.

  Next I called Grace, but she got on the line long enough to tell me that she got outside to “take a butcher’s at a bunch of dodgy blokes with federal badges who have me totally hacked off, so I’d better sort them out.” The more pissed off Grace gets, the more British she becomes. There are times I can’t understand one word in three, and English is my mother tongue.

  Finally I got Rudy Sanchez on the phone. A few years ago my dad—who was Baltimore’s police commissioner until a couple of months ago—got Rudy a job as a police therapist, and Rudy’s association with me got him hornswaggled into the DMS. It’s a bit of a sordid soap opera. Rudy still did a couple of days with BPD, and today he’d be at his office near the Aquarium. He was very low profile, so maybe he’d be off the NSA sweep.

  “Joe!” he answered, and from his tone of voice I knew that he was already aware of what was going on. “Thank God!”

  “You heard?”

  “Of course I heard!” he snapped, and said something about the Vice President in back-alley Spanish that was too fast for me to catch anything except vague references to fornication with livestock. When he finally slowed to a crawl, he asked, “Dios mio, Cowboy—are you all right?”

  “I’m wearing filthy clothes, I’ve been hanging out with junkies and I’m driving a stolen car that I’m pretty sure someone peed in—”