His face was dead white. Was he too afraid to enter? Too afraid of feelings that would send a bullet straight through his brain? Or was he too afraid of the emotions that could crush his soul?
Finally, he spoke. “Word on the street is that you’ve worked out a cure.”
Josephine nodded.
“That’s very good news,” he said.
Josephine nodded again.
He groaned and rolled his eyes. “It’s your turn to say something now.”
“I’ve really missed you. I was beginning to think I’d never see you again.”
“Well, here I am.”
Her first instinct was to cross that room and hug him like crazy; to wrap her arms around him and never let him get away again. But she had to be careful, especially now with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. Any sort of arousal could be lethal.
“Come in,” she said, backing up and leading him across the lab with an outstretched arm, as if she was presenting the property to him.
“Nice place you’ve got here,” he said, running a beautiful hand over the equipment on the table.
Josephine looked away. “Uh… Just step in here,” she said, opening her bedroom door and pointing inside. “I have to run a test.”
Leo stopped and his face went whiter still.
“Not that kind of test,” she said nervously. She tried to force a laugh, but it came out hollow.
He coughed and nodded to himself. She could tell he was about to put an arm on her shoulder, but he stopped himself short and instead knocked his fist on the door frame. He nodded to the room. “In here?”
“Yes, please.”
He stepped inside and Josephine pressed the locking button on the door. It beeped and slid shut.
“Uh... was that the lock?” Leo called out from the room. He knocked on the door. “Hello?”
Josephine went to her computer terminal and brought up the camera feed for the bedroom. Leo sat on the corner of her bed. She tapped on a microphone that spoke through the speakers in the room.
“Leo, I need you to be a guinea pig.”
“Alright.”
“Do you see that dispenser on the far wall?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to send in some of the new compound.”
From the refrigerator she grabbed a bottle of the new pills she had just made and sent it through a suction tube to the bedroom.
“Are they safe?” he asked.
“Would I give you something that wasn’t?”
Leo swayed his head back and forth. “You sort of did once before.”
“Well, for your information these are safe. I’ve tested them on myself and I’m fine. Be a good boy now and cooperate.”
Leo went to swallow one.
“You haven’t taken any sort of medications lately?” Josephine added as an afterthought.
“Would that make a difference?” Leo asked with the pill still in his mouth.
“Just kidding.”
Leo shook his head and swallowed. “How long before this takes effect anyway?”
“A month or two.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes I am. You didn’t think it would be an instant cure did you?”
“It’s just there’s a city upstairs that needs its chief of police.”
“You became chief?” Josephine asked in shock.
“For your information, yes.”
“That’s great news.”
“Uh-huh. So I can’t be stuck down here for a month.”
“Or two.”
“Or two!”
“I’m not going to keep you down here Leo.”
“You’re not?”
“No. The city needs its police chief.”
“Yes it does,” Leo said, straightening his tie.
“And you need to get these samples into some other guinea pigs.”
“I do?”
“Yes, you do.”
“So why’d you lock me in here?”
“To protect you from me, and me from you.”
“You don’t think we...”
“I don’t know. But I didn’t want to take that risk. Not now.”
“Makes sense,” said Leo.
“I’ve missed you like hell you know,” Josephine said, finally dropping all formality between them.
Leo went quiet. He stared at the floor with his mouth pressed shut.
“You’re all I’ve thought about everyday,” she continued, trembling the tiniest bit, her palms sweaty, watching his face on the screen, hoping for a smile or a flash of reciprocation in his eyes. Something. Anything.
“I’ve been trying to find a cure myself,” he said as if he were a young boy.
That was the greatest declaration of love she could have ever hoped to hear from him. Especially considering his grasp of science, he may as well have been trying to fly.
“I experimented on the crows,” he continued. “But none of my experiments came close.”
“What did you use?” Josephine asked.
“All sorts of things, viruses, protein stands. I even tried a mini-death compound once. I was basically throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck. I wound up turning most of my subjects into freaks actually.”
“Hmm,” Josephine said. It wasn’t a completely useless experiment, the crows were connected to humankind in a very specific way. And the mini-death pills were as close to the cure that Josephine had ever got. “It’s a moot point now. We’ve got our cure. And we’ve got a backup plan. That girl walking in here was the luckiest thing that’s ever happened to me. I have no idea how, but it happened. And now I’m on the brink of solving this.”
“I’m proud of you,” he said. “I always knew you would fix this, eventually.”
“Be proud of me once we know it works. Get those pills into some other people. And remember you don’t need to take the Enoch Pill anymore.”
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure,” Josephine said, checking her watch. “I haven’t taken one in 75 hours.”
Leo’s jaw dropped.
“And I’m still alive,” she said.
“I see that. Are you sure this isn’t just another mini-death situation?”
“I don’t think so. This one has no effect on the pleasure receptors like that one did.”
“So no one will use this one as a street drug?”
“Not that I can foresee.”
“Sounds great then.”
“I’m going to let you out Leo. Promise me you’ll go.”
“I promise,” Leo said.
“Straight out the door.”
“I won’t even stop to use the bathroom.”
“I’ll see you in two months,” Josephine said.
“Two months,” he responded with a nod.
“Or maybe one,” Josephine added. “We don’t have much time, Leo. The beans are running out and the pills are in short supply. If we can’t make the change we won’t survive until the next harvest. So I need to hear from you.”
“Don’t worry, you’ll hear from me.”
Josephine unlocked his room from the terminal and faced away to make the parting easier.
Leo began to leave, then stopped just short of the door. “Josephine,” he asked, his voice low and serious. “What if this doesn’t work?”
She glanced at the two-way radio at the far end of the room. “Then that girl will be our only hope.”
She sat there staring at her keyboard, hoping he would just leave quietly and make it easy for the both of them. He went and left something on the lab table before finally walking out. The door closed and he was gone.
Josephine let out a long sigh. It was done. She went straight to the lab table to see what he had left behind. There sat a photo of the two of them holding each other in front of the ocean. Written in black permanent marker it said, “You’re my heroin”.
4
There was a protest on the street outside the police station.
/> “Banshee! Banshee! Banshee!” the crowd chanted over and over, as if they were at one of his concerts. Almost as if, if they chanted long enough they might just be able to bring him back from the dead. They held posters, some of the man living, some from his latest photograph, face down in a pool of his own blood. All of them had some form of the words ‘Banshee Shall be Avenged’.
Leo looked out from his third story office and groaned. That crowd wanted blood. His to be exact.
All they knew was that their newly appointed police chief had aided in the escape of the girl who had murdered their favorite rock star. And now there was an injustice that needed to be paid. But these men didn’t know the details, the true nature of how the rock star had died. The fact that the girl acted in self-defense and that Banshee was an attempted rapist.
These men didn’t know the massive, world-changing developments that were about to happen right beneath their feet, the changes that were happening at that very moment in his own veins. The world was about be turned right-side-up.
Leo walked to his desk and put his face down in his arms. He should have gone into hiding. Coming to work was possibly one of the dumbest things he had ever done, if not the dumbest. He took the new Enoch Pill bottle from his pocket. Going into hiding wasn’t an option. Getting new guinea pigs was the only thing that mattered.
But in the meantime he had a disciplinary meeting with the Yanloo City Committee. Things could go south real quick. Fortunately, he held a get out of jail free card with the news of the cure.
There was a knock at the door and one of his deputies, Tommy Henderson, entered.
“You alright?” Tommy asked.
“I’ve got a headache,” Leo said.
“As usual?”
“As usual.”
“The Committee’s ready for you now.”
“How’d they seem to you?” Leo asked.
“Pissed off at you,” Tommy said.
“As usual,” Leo said as he stood up.
In the board room sat a large, square wooden table. A screen showing a video feed of Henry Sparrow, a member of the Committee, sat at the one end of the table. He didn’t look so hot. A terrorist attack at the Enoch Pill distribution center had blown the bottom half of his body to smithereens and now he was just half a man. The doctors had stitched him back together the best they could, which wasn’t very good, if you asked Leo.
“How you doing pal?” Leo asked as he sat down.
“I’ve been better, to be honest with you,” Henry said with a wave and a weak smile. He must have been on some pretty groovy painkillers to be awake for this meeting.
Dr. Patel sat on the far end between two windows overlooking the main street. He was a small bespectacled man in a brown wool suit. Leo had liked him a week ago, before half the Committee had died and Patel swooped in to fill the power vacuum. His family had immigrated from India back before the plague and he became a respected biologist in the field of Human Genetics, even helping Josephine in the development of the Enoch Pill. Now, he ran the Yanloo City Hospital and was the de facto science authority in the city. Between his brains and Henry Sparrow’s mechanical know-how they had scrapped together this city and its factories. Father Morrigan had designed the canals and the computer systems back before he went insane and Chip, the previous police chief, had been the city’s financial mind. He was a banker before the disaster and used his experience to build this brave new world’s economy. Unfortunately, he used his body for police work and wound up under the wheels of a runaway car. Leo thought back to his splattered remains. He missed that guy.
There were two new faces Leo had never seen before sitting at the table opposite of him. One was in a police uniform, with a serious, muscular jaw. The other, a skinny blonde guy in glasses and a black turtleneck, looked as if he was in a bad mood.
“Who are these guys, doc?” Leo asked Patel.
“In lieu of the circumstances I’ve taken the liberty of adding two auxillary members to the Committee. Peter McGrady is the latest recruit from the police training network. The other is Steven Lawrence. He’s an art teacher.”
Patel took a stack of papers from a folder and slid them across the table to Leo. It was the founder’s Committee charter for Yanloo City. On the bottom were five signatures: Father Devon Morrigan, Henry Sparrow, Dr. Bryson Patel, Chip, and Dr. Josephine Yanloo. They had drawn it up on the tails of the plague as a makeshift constitution to last until they came up with something better. But here they were, 18 years later, and there it still was.
“That’s an oldie,” said Henry, leaning up to the screen to get a look.
“Adding the two new members fits legally within the framework of the constitution,” Patel announced as he squinted through his spectacles at the other papers that sat before him. “Technically we should have had five Committee members this whole time.”
“Huh, go figure,” Leo thought aloud.
“Yes,” Patel said flatly. “You’ll also find that you still have a vote on any Committee ruling, even though you’re involved.”
“That’s pretty lucky,” Leo said.
“We’ll see,” Patel said.
Into the room walked the hot-shot DA for the city, Andre Cole. He winked at Leo and nodded to Patel and the rest of the Committee as he entered. This was bad news for Leo. He was often present for Cole’s prosecution and he had never seen the guy lose a case. As a police officer he had loved it. He never imagined he’d be on the receiving end of the prosecution.
“Welcome Andre,” Patel said. “You can begin when you’re ready.”
“Members of Yanloo City Committee,” Andre Cole began without even sitting down. “Today we’ll be discussing the case of Leo Cartwright and his actions over the past few days. I would like to ask those present to remember the fact that he was a police officer and was acting as chief of police for Yanloo City at the time of these offenses, entrusted by the men of this city to uphold law and order. Patel, these murders were the first in how long?”
“I had to look it up in the database. Seven years.”
“Seven years. That’s quite a long time. So onto the first order of business, in regards to the murder of Mr. Francis Feracci, known more commonly as Banshee. The girl that was wanted for this murder, a Miss Kizzy Cartwright, is she a relative of yours Leo?
“Not to my knowledge,” Leo said.
“Alright, and what happened with the female fugitive?”
“I let her go.”
“Security cameras caught Mr. Cartwright giving the girl a ride, in a police car no less, to the canal door and releasing her. I’m sure all members of the Committee have seen the footage on the news. Do you care to elaborate Mr. Cartwright?”
Leo looked over to Patel. Did he really have to speak to this slick bastard? Patel must have read his mind and nodded ‘yes.’
“Well, it turns out she acted in self-defense with Banshee,” Leo said. “She had been attacked. In a sexual manner.”
“And?” Cole asked, flipping through the papers that were stacked in front of him.
“And that changed things.”
“In what way is that?”
“She wasn’t guilty in my opinion.”
“In your opinion. Does your opinion change due process? Does it make our entire criminal justice system irrelevant?”
Leo looked back to Patel. He hated rhetorical questions.
“These are reasonable questions, Leo,” Patel said.
Leo looked back to Cole. “No... I guess not.”
“You guess not. What caused you to think something of this nature was acceptable then?”
“Well,” Leo said. This may have been a little too early to bring out the news, but he was up against the ropes and Patel was no help at all. “The girl had been down to see Josephine and she said she had some good news. I guess that put me in a charitable mood.”
“What’s the good news?” Patel asked, perking up, looking to Leo as if he held the secret of life in his pocket.
> “What are the other items on the agenda?” Leo asked leaning back in his chair. It was best to get all the nasty items out in the air first.
“You shot Father Morrigan right outside his own church,” Cole said, a sense of disbelief in his voice. “His body was never retrieved, presumed to be eaten by the crows. Do you have an explanation for that one too?”
“It was an execution,” Leo said. “He was in control of the crows, and in so doing he had killed countless civilians and done millions of dollars of property damage.”
“You’re aware that all executions have to be approved by the Committee and the city judge?” Cole asked.
“And it goes against all the guidelines in the police handbook,” McGrady spoke up in a nasal voice.
“Take it easy Ranger Rick,” Leo said. “Henry was unconscious and Morrigan was disqualified. I figured I had at least fifty percent of the vote. Last I checked that counts as a majority.”
Henry laughed in shock on the video feed. Leo winked at him.
“Mr. Cartwright,” said Cole. “To be completely honest with you, I don’t see how we can get out of this without executing you. What you did was as good as murder.”
“Both these guys had it coming.”
“Care to explain?”
“I stand by what I did.”
“Well that’s the problem,” said Cole. “If we let you off we are basically saying to everyone in the entire city they are free to act as judge, jury and executioner whenever they so please. Call me old-fashioned but I say men have a right to a trial. Otherwise we might as well start handing out guns.”
“Andre. please,” Patel said.
“Yes?” Cole asked.
“That’s a straw man argument at best.”
“Have you seen the men out there? They’re half a step away from an all-out rebellion. A straw man argument is all they need.”
“What’s a straw man?” Leo asked, looking around.
“It’s an argument that...” Steven the art teacher began to speak up, but Andre Cole spoke over him.
“As a police officer, let alone the chief of police, the city needs someone who will uphold the law above all else. Otherwise the entire framework of our society will fall apart.”
The Enoch Plague (The Enoch Pill Book 2) Page 3
