Double Helix

by Sigmund Brouwer

  Paige pulled her hand away.

  His cold stare continued.

  She felt revulsion at how bare of humanity his face was. She loathed her feeling of nakedness as she lay vulnerable beneath that stare, and she swung her legs away from him, out of the bed. The effort brought her nausea, but she swallowed hard and kept moving.

  As she prepared to stand, she discovered she was wearing only a thin hospital gown. She pulled the bed cover with her as she stood and wrapped herself in it. Then she sat on the next bed over and hoped she had hidden her trembling.

  “Are you coherent?” he asked. His eyes passed over her as if she were a specimen at the zoo. “I have no desire to waste time repeating myself to you later.”

  “Who are you.” She said it as a statement.

  He glanced at his watch. “Someone who cares little for idle conversation. Think of me as John Hammond. I return to his identity often enough to make it true.”

  She wanted to scream at him but had no urge to give him satisfaction. Or drive him away. She had too many questions.

  “Where is this?” she said. “Can you at least tell me that?”

  He shrugged. “Think of it as an institute for the advancement of the human species.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will soon enough, even without my explanation. One of my greatest needs has been to nourish and grow embryos. Test tubes, I’m afraid, only have value at the conception stage.”

  Against her will, she gasped.

  “Yes,” he told her, “there is no substitute for a mother’s womb. As you can imagine, under normal circumstances, growth and harvest presents difficulties. Here, however...”

  He pointed around her. “You will find women in here who would be dead unless the Institute had rescued them from situations of war or famine. They lead a pleasant enough life, often better than the village lives they had before in Third World countries.”

  She struggled to comprehend his words. Growth and harvest? Surely this was a savage and mad dream, brought on by the drugs he had used to slide her into unconsciousness.

  “You, too, would be dead,” he was saying, “unless the Institute had found a purpose for you.”

  “You are monstrous.” Paige felt her fingers ball into fists of hatred. “Release me.”

  “Hardly.” He glanced at his watch again. “Listen carefully. You cannot escape from this room. You are welcome to try. Indeed, you will find your attempts a distracting way to pass time. Don’t, however, try to organize the women around you into something as gauche as rebellion. One, you will only succeed in setting yourself apart from them, as most are very content here. Two, you will need them as friends, for you will see no one else in your daily living. Three, Velma – you met her earlier – will report your efforts to me. Keep in mind she is much better as a friend than as a jailer.”

  Paige found herself swallowing with a dry throat. Delivered so casually, his words seemed horrifyingly true. Madman or not, her disbelief or not, she was beginning to understand the implications. This was not a ward, but a prison.

  “Neither is suicide an option,” he told her.

  Suicide? How bad was this going to be, that he foresaw suicide as a way to escape?

  “Velma counts the knives carefully before and after each meal. As for any other means of ending your life, you will not have the privacy.”

  He stood. “That is all.”

  “All,” she repeated.

  “Certainly. I have much more pressing things to do.”

  His arrogance infuriated her. She lashed out the only way she could. “Slater Ellis knows about this. He’ll come looking.”

  He snorted derision. “I’m not the only one who enjoys the convenience of assumed identities. Slater Ellis? In his previous life, he is wanted for attempted murder. And he ran out on his wife.”

  He watched her face and snorted more derision. “Not only that, he’ll be dead by this weekend.”

  He took a half step, then turned and studied her one more time.

  “Much as you have caused me trouble,” he said. “I will admit I do like your spirit.”

  He smiled, and to Paige it felt like he was caressing her with a scalpel. “Yes, you are definitely a suitable mother for my son.”

  Slater had hardly slept. He sat fully clothed on top of the bed sheets, his back propped by pillows leaned against the headboard. Beside him, the boy was sleeping beneath the sheets. One of his small arms was thrown over Slater’s leg, as if he needed to know at all times that he wasn’t alone. The boy’s obvious pain and loneliness tore at Slater’s heart and was all the worse because of his helplessness. How do you comfort someone when you don’t share language or culture?

  Slater had chosen to hole up in a cheap Santa Monica hotel – its chief advantage the rusty pre-Depression fire escapes that led from each room down the outside walls to the alley below. With the chain lock in place, a bureau blocking the door, and a chair wedged between the bureau and a closet to complete the barricade, he’d been fairly certain he and the boy would have time to jump out the window and down the fire escape if the nightmare man started to break his way into the room.

  But Slater was only fairly certain.

  He’d never shake the memory of a face mottled with scar and shadow, the puckered skin of that massive skull. And the man’s smile, this while the heavy door of the truck had two of the man’s fingers crushed to pulp and bone.

  Nor would Slater forget the terror of pulling with all his might against the steering wheel, and losing the battle with two good arms against the monster's one.

  Illogical as it was, Slater couldn’t shake visions of a zombie, slowly but with unwavering steps, tracking him down, following his trail, and simply walking through the door.

  Every creak of the hallway steps, every voice in the hallway, every flush of another toilet had brought Ellis from sleep during the night. And with each of Slater’s successive flinches, the boy huddled beside him had moaned and turned in his own nightmares. One of those, no doubt, could be blamed on Slater’s earlier carelessness. At their first stop following the escape, Slater had walked around to the passenger door end opened it to let the kid out. Slater himself lied nearly vomited when he saw the crushed fingers land on the street; he hadn’t been quick enough to keep the sight from the boy’s eyes.

  How could a man endure such pain and still silently, grimly try to take the kid?

  Slater was convinced the man was superhuman. Convinced enough that not even the pistol and pepper mace he’d purchased at a twenty-four-hour pawn shop gave him any degree of confidence. The pistol was beneath his pillow; the small plastic canister of pepper mace would be a backup weapon tucked in his sock. Armed or not, listening for sounds in the hotel all night, Slater had half-expected the sound of twisting steel outside his window, a signal the nightmare man had chosen an alley approach, jumping and pulling down the lowest rungs of the fire escape before climbing up to the window.

  Instead, all that arrived through the window was sunlight, increasing in gradient shades that Slater watched as dawn approached.

  He was grateful for the three-hour time difference between Santa Monica and Florida, It meant he could call Paige Stephens’s realtor almost immediately.

  Yesterday Paige had promised to call at noon her time, nine his. Last night had changed things, however. For starts, she wouldn’t be able to reach him at Ben Austad’s number. Slater didn’t dare return there again, not after the police had entered the situation.

  Slater had driven back to Austad’s house less than an hour after the attack, trying to decide how best to go back in and look for Austad and the other two boys. From blocks away, however, he’d spotted the flashing blue-and-red lights of patrol cars and had turned two intersections early. A pay-phone call to Austad a half-hour later had been answered by a neutral male voice; Ellis had hung up without identifying himself.

  The presence of police – probably called by neighbors following the 4 x 4’s roar
ing on the grass, or perhaps by the woman he’d seen dragged into the house – gave some degree of assurance to Slater. If Austad and the boys had survived the nightmarish attack, they were now safe. But if they had been taken away, Slater could do nothing until he spoke to Paige.

  During his hours of sleeplessness, Slater had thought through as much as possible. He would call her and offer her the boy in exchange for money.

  After all, the obvious possibility was that she had betrayed him. He’d told her about the boys; within hours an attacker had appeared on Austad’s doorstep. Slater could not accept the attack as just another random Los Angeles crime. The monster had run from the house to chase the boy – what would any ordinary criminal hope to gain from such action?

  If Paige Stephens had betrayed him, was she tied in to the evil her husband had helped the boys escape? Her reaction to Slater’s offer of the boy would tip him. If she accepted, she would, of course, never see the boy or hear from Slater again.

  On the other hand, he wanted to believe she was innocent, that the attacker had somehow found him and Austad through another source. Through traced phone calls between Seven Springs and Santa Monica, perhaps. Or maybe through someone at the university. In that case, Slater desperately needed Paige Stephens’s help, and he prayed she would show no interest in taking the boy for herself.

  The light in the room was barely more than gray when Slater dialed the Florida realtor. The boy beside him stirred slightly as Slater spoke.

  “Suzanne,” he said. “Slater Ellis. I’m glad you’re in. More glad than you can know.”

  He visualized the realtor on the other end and was glad he’d thought to pay her a consulting fee for her time and effort the day before. It made it that much easier to expect she’d do her best to help now, even if it didn’t involve a possible commission on a house sale.

  “It’s extremely urgent I speak to Paige,” Slater continued after her reply of greeting. “Could I give you my number and have you pass it on to her?”

  He gave her the information and tried to relax after hanging up the telephone.

  It surprised him when the phone rang. Somehow he’d drifted into sleep.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “This is not Paige,” he heard. “But Suzanne again. And I’m worried. She’s not at the hotel. And she expected me about now for a house viewing.”

  “Maybe she’s having breakfast,” Slater said.

  “No. I’m at the hotel right now. She’s not in her room or the restaurant.” The realtor paused. “What’s really got me scared is that her car is still in the parking lot.”

  “She stayed the night with a friend?” Slater suggested. And hoped, with irrational jealousy, she had not.

  “You’d have to know her,” Suzanne said, “She wasn’t ever the type. Especially not now with her husband so recently passed on.”

  The third possibility hit Slater. Paige hadn’t betrayed him. Nor had the attacker found Austad through another source. No, somehow, all the way across the country to the other coast, she’d been taken because she knew too much.

  “How about you keep looking for her,” Slater said. He felt even more paranoid now and wanted to be on the move. “I’ll call in later and hope for the best.”

  ***

  “Only two?” Van Klees said. “If you only have two of the boys, tell me the third one is dead.”

  Zwaan drew a breath. He considered complaining. To get the van here to the loading dock within the Institute, he’d endured an all-night drive, chewing aspirin like candy in a vain effort to dull the pain of his savaged hand. Yet Van Klees found only fault.

  “The third one is not dead,” Zwaan said. “And you are permitted to help me unload this van.” He pulled his hand from his jacket pocket and showed the bandaged stumps of his fingers. “When we’re Finished, I’ll tell you about this.”

  Van Klees glanced at the blood-stained bandages. He tried not to show surprise. Zwaan’s voice held irritation – he wouldn’t appreciate extra attention to what was obviously a mistake on his part “Of course I’ll help you,” Van Klees said. “We’ll take them down to the sixth floor. I don’t imagine they’ll be awake for several hours.”

  Zwaan grunted assent.

  Beneath the cold fluorescent lights of an enclosed loading dock the size of a small warehouse, they spent a few minutes in silence moving Austad and the two boys from the van onto stretchers.

  When they finished, Zwaan asked, “This van? Do you have any use for it?”

  Van Klees studied the plain white body of the vehicle and the California plates. “It’s clean, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t talk to me as if I am mentally deficient. False name, false papers.”

  Van Klees pretended he had not heard the increased irritation. “Perhaps, then,” Van Klees said, “you will find it convenient to transport one other person.” He paused and smiled. “Your friend Del Silverton. The Institute will Find his services useful in another manner now.”

  Zwaan nodded.

  “After a rest, however. Take him then.” Van Klees said. He definitely wanted oil on these troubled waters. “Your drive must have been punishing.”

  Zwaan shrugged agreement.

  “Slater Ellis?” Van Klees probed.

  The stretchers stood between them. Here at the first level of the Institute, it was hot and, despite the thin air of the mountains, muggy from the exhaust fans that pulled air from the lower levels into this bay.

  There was room for three semi-trailers to back into the docks here, protected from the elements and prying eyes. Aside from the weekly visit from a wholesale grocer based in Sante Fe, it was rare, however, for any other trailer to enter the building.

  Zwaan stared down at the dark tire marks on the smooth concrete dock floor. Then he lifted his damaged hand again.

  “Slater Ellis is a lucky man,” he said, rotating his wrist and staring at his bandaged stumps in wonder that a mere mortal could have accomplished the damage. Zwaan’s whisper was magnified in the echoing emptiness around them.

  Zwaan explained the premature visitor who had given Ellis and the boy warning.

  “We’ll find him,” Van Klees said. “I’ll alert General Stanley to push whatever buttons he needs to at military intelligence. Slater will use a credit card. Or move some stocks. That’s all it will take for a trail we can follow.”

  “In the meantime...”

  “What’s there to worry about?” Van Klees said. “He can’t find us. If he didn’t go public when he first found the boys, he certainly won’t go now that he’s down to one and responsible for losing the other two.”

  Zwaan nodded.

  Van Klees smiled arrogance. “Yes, my friend, for a few days there, we did have some worries. Chemicals make interrogation a wonderful convenience, however, and I have confirmed that the Florida sow told no one about Ellis. Neither does she have the computer disks or know where Darby hid them. When this professor wakes, we’ll use the same prescription to see how much he knows or told. You’ll bring Silverton in and we’ll dispose of him. And when we do get Ellis – soon of course – all possible leaks will have been plugged. I believe, in fact, it will be back to business as usual.”

  Zwaan had frowned at the mention of Silverton.

  “By the way,” Van Klees added, ever quick to sense opportunity to manipulate, “with your friend Silverton, you are permitted to show him the operating room. I know how much you will enjoy letting him taste the fear of knowing his fate.”

  Chapter 12

  Saturday, May 25

  "Two breakfast sandwiches and..." From behind the wheel of the compact rental, Slater looked across at Caesar in the passenger seat. A human vacuum cleaner. Until the kids, Slater had forgotten how much boys eat. He turned his voice toward the speaker outside the car. “Make it four breakfast sandwiches, two hash browns, two orange juices, coffee, and whatever the gadget of the week is.”

  The kid looked back at Slater and grinned. Shy, but more at ease. He’d ob
viously appointed Slater as his guardian. He watched every move Slater made. He followed close behind, so close that when Slater stopped, the kid often bumped into him, When he wasn’t watching Slater, he was soaking in all the sights and sounds of the world.

  Which was why Slater wanted whatever plastic gadget would arrive with their breakfast. Just to enjoy the expression on the kid’s face as he explored it.

  It’d be nice if they could talk.

  Slater would have given a grand to be able to understand Caesar’s low, excited babble as the 727 had left LAX. At first, the roar of the jets had scared him, and he’d closed his eyes and put his hand in Slater’s. As the jet had burst forward on the runway, the kid had peeked. And then the Christmas morning expression on his face as they’d left the concrete and risen into the air.

  “...have your money ready at the first window, sir.”

  Slater brought himself back into the present. Which consisted of a drive-through just off the interstate. They’d eat on the move – Slater didn’t want to chance sitting in a restaurant and having some kindly mother stop to chat, followed by the awkward explanations when the kid didn’t respond to English.

  They were going back to Los Alamos because Slater did not know what else to do.

  In Santa Monica, Austad and the boys were gone – Slater had not been able to reach Austad at home all day and could only assume the worst. In Clearwater, Paige Stephens had yet to return Suzanne’s messages. Slater couldn’t even consider quitting now with the stakes increased. If he wasn’t looking for Austad, Stephens, and the other two boys, who was?

  Here in Los Alamos, where it had all started, Slater figured he had two choices. Take the kid on a hike and hope he might show Slater where the three boys began their trek away from their prison.

  Or trace that prison through the big cop who had appeared at his Seven Springs home.

  The cop had visited for more than he’d let on – Slater felt sure enough of that to risk wasting a day or two following him. If the cop was tied into this, he just might lead Slater to where the boys had been held. From there, Slater could only pray he’d figure a way inside. By himself. Because if the cop was involved, there was no way to trust anyone up here in the mountains. And once inside, he could only pray he’d find Austad or Paige or both.