Pandemic i-3

by Scott Sigler

  She shook her head. “Honey, you don’t—”

  “Stop,” he said sharply, the word a slap that landed in her soul instead of on her face. Then, softer: “You know me. You know I wouldn’t start this unless it was already finished. I love you. I always will. You didn’t kill millions, you saved billions. I tried to help you realize that. But you know what? It’s just not something you want to hear.”

  Margaret spent much of her time hating him, wanting him to go, but now that he’d brought the idea out of the shadows and into a squirming reality, she suddenly, desperately wanted him to stay. She couldn’t have let this slip away.

  “I won’t give you babies, so you’re leaving me,” she said. “That’s all I am to you? Just a breeding factory?”

  She’d used that argument before, and it had always worked. This time, however, his eyes hardened.

  “You’re not a breeding factory,” he said. “You’re not a wife, either. We don’t even make love.”

  This was about his goddamn dick? Her hands clenched into fists. “We just had sex a couple of days ago.”

  “Two weeks ago,” he said. “Only the second time in the last four months.”

  It seemed like more, but she knew better than to argue with him. He probably kept a calendar somewhere, tracked the actual days. That was often the difference between the two of them: Margaret reacted, Clarence planned.

  He weakly waved a hand at the laptop. “You don’t want me because that is your lover. You want the hurt and the misery. You want to read the awful things people say about you.”

  She felt a stinging in the back of her eyes, and a hard piece of iron in her chest where it met her neck. “They despise me,” she said. “I deserve it.”

  The sadness faded from his eyes, replaced by conviction. That look stabbed deeper than his angry stare ever could — it was done.

  “You don’t deserve to be hated,” he said. “But I’m done being your punching bag. If you can’t love yourself, I won’t spend any more time trying to convince you why you should. You’ve given up on life. I haven’t. I need someone who’ll fight by my side, not roll over and wait for death. I need a soldier. That’s what you were, once… but not anymore.”

  She felt her hands gripping her shoulders, felt her body start to shake. Her rage had vanished. The puppeteer that made her say horrible things had fled the field of battle.

  “But Clarence… I love you.”

  He shook his head.

  Margaret wanted to go to him, hold him, have him hold her, but a barrier had sprung up between them, a distance that might as well have been miles.

  His cell phone buzzed. He pulled it out in an automatic motion, so fluid and fast it was more muscle memory than conscious thought.

  “Don’t answer that,” she said. “Please… not now.”

  He looked at the screen, then at her. “It’s Longworth.”

  “I don’t care if it’s Jesus. Not now, Clarence, please.”

  He stared at her for another moment. The phone buzzed again. He answered.

  “Yes sir?”

  Clarence listened. His eyes widened. “Yes sir. Now is fine.”

  He put the phone away.

  She felt numb. Not cold, not hot, not even angry or sad — just numb. “You just told me you’re abandoning me, and now you’re going to go to work?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “Murray will be here in fifteen minutes.”

  The director of the Department of Special Threats was coming to their house. At three-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon. It was important, but she didn’t care.

  “You know I don’t want anyone here,” she said. “Why didn’t he have you drive in?”

  Clarence took a step closer. “Because he’s coming to see you.”

  She felt a cold pinch of fear. There could be only one reason Murray wanted to see her:

  It was starting again.

  GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS

  Such a tough choice: sit in the sun and watch girls in bikinis, or spend the afternoon rolling up forks and knives in napkins? Steve Stanton had opted for the former.

  He’d slipped away from the restaurant earlier that morning while his mother, father, uncle and cousins were prepping the day’s vegetables, pot stickers and egg rolls. Steve held advanced degrees in robotics, artificial intelligence and computational science, yet his family wanted him to snap the stems off green beans and prepare a hundred sets of flatware for the customers who couldn’t figure out how to use chopsticks? He wasn’t doing it, especially on a day like today.

  Instead, Steve had brought a lawn chair out to the narrow, run-down park that ran along the St. Joseph’s River. He’d also brought his laptop. That, connected through his cell, gave him the Internet. His father didn’t know cell phones could do that: if the man came looking for Steve, he’d start in the coffee shops that offered free Wi-Fi.

  Steve gazed up at blue skies, soaking up delicious warmth. For once, the November clouds had failed to appear. Gulls called constantly, both close and distant. He looked at the boats either heading out onto the endless horizon of Lake Michigan, or returning to port. A century-old, black-iron bridge hovered over the river, ready to turn ninety degrees and connect the railroad tracks on either side should a train come along.

  His father would never look for him here, not in the park while an unseasonal sun blazed down. Steve normally avoided the sun. He’d inherited his mother’s light complexion. As she had done back in China, she made a point of staying as pale as possible; dark skin was for laborers, for fieldworkers. Steve didn’t care about his color. He stayed covered up because he had no intention of dying from skin cancer. Shorts and a T-shirt might have been more comfortable than his sweatshirt and jeans, but the long sleeves and hood blocked the sun’s rays.

  Butt in the lawn chair, laptop on his knees, Steve slid his sleeves a little higher so he could type unencumbered. Not that he was typing all that much; three girls were also taking advantage of what might be the year’s last sunny day to stretch themselves out on a blanket laid upon the grass. They all looked to be in their midtwenties, about Steve’s age. His eyes kept flicking away from his screen’s engineering reports and oceanographic research to the girls, to their long hair, to their tan skin gleaming with oil.

  He ached to talk to them. But those kinds of girls didn’t want a guy like him. Girls like that wanted the captain of the football team, not the captain of the chess club. Girls like that didn’t care that he’d earned two doctorates before he’d turned twenty-one, could have earned at least another three if he hadn’t been forced to keep his discoveries secret.

  And anyway, those kind of girls didn’t go for first-generation Chinese American nerds. As smart as he was, talking to women made him feel stupid. It made him feel small.

  The girls back at Berkeley had liked him. Well, not girls who looked like that, but at least they were girls. Here in Benton Harbor, Michigan? Women wouldn’t give him the time of day, let alone their phone numbers.

  For all Steve’s brilliance, he was wasting away in this shit hole of a town in a shit hole of a state, waiting for a moment to serve his people and his country — a moment that was never going to come. He couldn’t use his education, his rather significant set of skills, couldn’t do anything that might draw attention. Not until the Ministry of State Security decided there was nothing in Lake Michigan worth finding.

  His eyes followed the curve of the middle girl’s ass, took in the smooth skin, the way the sun kicked off a soft reflection from the curve’s apex.

  She looked up, caught him staring. He turned away instantly, tapped random keys on his keyboard, focusing on the screen like it was the only thing in the world. He heard the girl laugh. Just her, at first, then the other two.

  He felt smaller than ever.

  A trickle of sweat rolled down his temple, but he knew the heat wouldn’t last. Weather.com said the first big fall storm was on the way in. Early effects were due in about a half an hour. The encroa
ching front would soon chase away the girls with the long legs and tight butts, while Steve would be nice and warm in his heavier clothes. By tonight, everything would be freezing and wet.

  Why did people live in Michigan, anyway? Winters full of cold and snow. Trees shed leaves that turned into a brown paste on the roads. When the summer finally came, it brought with it sweltering, cloying humidity that seemed to suck the sweat right out of your body.

  He wanted out of this washed-up excuse of a small city, wanted to leave this frigid state for good, to go somewhere the sun never hid behind clouds or vanished for weeks on end. He wanted to go back to Cali, to Berkeley. He had friends there, people who understood him. And if he couldn’t go back to California, he wanted to go to his real home.

  He wanted to see China for the first time, experience the nation of his people, see where his parents and ancestors had come from. Even his last name — Stanton — that wasn’t his. The MSS had ordered his parents to change their names when they arrived in America. More for his sake than theirs, as it helped establish their son as just another American boy.

  What Steve wanted never seemed to matter, though. The MSS wouldn’t let him go to China. Not that he ever talked to anyone who was actually from the MSS — just their messengers, their errand boys.

  So warm. Steve’s eyelids drooped. Maybe the girls stopped laughing at him, maybe he just dozed off.

  A shadow fell across his face.

  Steve looked up to see a wrinkled old man looking down at him. Well, if it wasn’t the MMS’s main messenger.

  “Bo Pan,” Steve said. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

  Bo Pan nodded once.

  Steve sighed. “You’re blocking my sun.”

  Bo Pan looked down, realized he was casting a shadow. He quickly stepped to the left.

  “Sorry, sorry,” the man said.

  Bo Pan wore secondhand jeans, secondhand sneakers and a Detroit Lions sweatshirt that was probably third-hand, if not fourth. With wispy hair around the temples of a bald head, and eyes that were deeply slanted even by Chinese standards, Bo Pan didn’t look like a threat to anything but the grass on some rich white dude’s lawn.

  Steve sat up, turned, put his feet on the sparse, cool grass and packed dirt. “There’s nothing new to report. But you know that. Here to check up on me?”

  Bo Pan shook his head. He looked out at the river, squinted at the sun, then took in Steve’s chair.

  The old man frowned. “You look comfortable. Are you enjoying yourself?”

  Steve smiled. “I am, actually. It’s a beautiful day for a pimp like me.”

  Bo Pan’s mouth pursed in confusion. For someone who had spent decades living in America, he understood little of the culture and none of the lingo.

  “Do your mother and father know it’s a beautiful day? I saw them working away in the restaurant.”

  Bo Pan hadn’t come around in, what… three months? Three months without a peep, and the first thing he had to communicate was a guilt trip?

  Steve eased back in his chair. He took his time, milking the motion just to annoy Bo Pan.

  “My mother and father don’t need me today.”

  “You are lazy,” Bo Pan said. “You have grown up like them.”

  Like them: like an American.

  Steve glanced over at the girls. He couldn’t help it. As if being a semi-heliophobic nerd sitting with a laptop wasn’t enough of a turnoff, now he was hanging out with a hunched-over, fiftysomething old man.

  The girls were pulling on sweatshirts of their own, stepping into form-fitting jeans. The temperature was dropping.

  “I’m not lazy,” Steve said to Bo Pan. “I’m efficient — my work is done, remember?”

  The old man shook his head. “No longer. We have a search location.”

  Steve sat up. He forgot about the girls, forgot about the sun.

  “A location?”

  The older man smiled, showing the space where his front right incisor once resided.

  A location. Five years of effort, millions of dollars spent — Steve didn’t know exactly how much, but it was a lot — the whole reason his family and the People’s Party had hidden him away in this inflamed hemorrhoid of a town, and now it was finally his moment to shine. He didn’t know what to think, how to feel. Afraid? Excited? After all this time, was it finally his turn?

  “A location,” Steve repeated. “How did we get it?”

  Bo Pan shrugged. “The American love of money knows no bounds.”

  “No, I mean how did we, or they — or whatever — get the location? Satellite? Did someone properly model the entry angle? Did someone find…” His voice trailed off.

  Did he dare to hope?

  Gutierrez’s green men. The story of the century. Steve’s task: build a machine that could dive, undetected, to the bottom of Lake Michigan. Could there be actual pieces of an alien spacecraft?

  “Wreckage,” he said. “Did someone find wreckage?”

  Bo Pan shook his head. “You don’t need that information.”

  Steve nodded automatically, acquiescing to Bo Pan as if the man was something more than a simple go-between.

  Wreckage. It had to be. Steve had finished work on the Platypus three months earlier. His baby was more a piece of art than a cutting-edge unmanned underwater vehicle. It sat in a crate like a caged animal, unable to move, unable to fulfill its purpose. Other than midnight test runs, there had been no point in putting the UUV to work. Unless Steve knew where to look, he couldn’t have the machine go out and explore 22,400 square miles of Lake Michigan.

  But now, they had a location.

  The old man cleared his throat, dug his left pointer finger into the folds of flesh below his left eye, rubbed there. “When I last spoke with you, you said you had researched a local vessel that could take your machine far out on the water?”

  Steve nodded. “JBS Salvage.”

  “A small operation, as I asked? Not a big fleet of ships?”

  “Just two men,” Steve said. “Only one boat.”

  “Good. And you check on them frequently?”

  “Every week.” A lie; a lie fueled by a stab of fear that maybe JBS had finally landed a job, that they wouldn’t be available. It had been three weeks since he’d even bothered to see if their boat was still in port.

  Bo Pan cleared his throat again. This time, he spit phlegm onto the dirt. “Can you talk to them right now?”

  “Of course,” Steve said, that feeling of foolishness growing. Why hadn’t he checked every week? Bo Pan was right — Steve had been lazy. If they had to find another company to carry the Platypus to the target area, how long would that take? Days? Weeks?

  Bo Pan’s eyes narrowed. “You seem unsure.”

  “It’s fine,” Steve said. “I got this.”

  “And your strange machine… it is ready? There is nothing you need to tell me?”

  Steve smiled: that was something he didn’t have to lie about.

  “My gear is ready to rock, playa.”

  Bo Pan nodded. “Good, good. They will be happy to hear that. If you hire the boat company today, how soon do you think we can leave?”

  Steve felt a small burning in his chest. “We?”

  Bo Pan looked away, embarrassed. “They want me to go with you.”

  Of course. There had to be something to diminish the moment. Steve would be stuck on a boat with this old man for days, maybe even weeks. Well, that was a small price to pay to finally put the Platypus to work.

  And, at the very least, it was better than rolling up forks and knives in napkins.

  “I’ll go see JBS right now,” Steve said. “Maybe we can leave in a day or two.”

  Bo Pan slid both of his hands into his sweatshirt’s front pocket. He pulled out a thick envelope and a cell phone.

  He handed the envelope over. “Tonight,” he said. “Make them leave tonight.”

  Steve took the envelope. It felt solid, heavy, a brick of money.

  Bo Pan
then handed Steve the cell.

  “Call me when you know,” Bo Pan said. “Use this phone only. I am already prepared for the trip.”

  The old man turned and walked across the park grass, headed for his rust-spotted, ten-year-old Chevy pickup.

  Steve turned back to face the water. The girls were gone. The wind was already growing from a stiff breeze into shirt-pulling gusts. November was supposed to be the worst time to be out on Lake Michigan.

  Five years preparing for this day. No, more like nine considering that they’d recognized his intelligence early and sent him to Berkeley, readying him for a project that would require a brilliant, deeply embedded engineer. Embedded? That wasn’t even the right word. Steve had been born right here, in Benton Harbor. He was as American as those girls, and yet he longed to serve a country he had never seen.

  A lifetime of waiting for a chance to serve his people, his heritage, and now — perhaps — his moment had finally come.

  He just hoped no one would get hurt.

  DUTY

  Sitting on the couch in her living room, Margaret felt newly aware of how much she had fallen apart.

  Clarence sat on her left, as he if were really still by her side. That made him a liar. She wanted to hate him. He’d tightened the tie, dabbed the forehead, and once again looked like he’d just stepped out of the pages of Government Agent Quarterly.

  In a chair across from them sat Murray Longworth, director of the Department of Special Threats. Or, as people in the know tended to call it, the second-most-powerful agency you’ve never heard of.

  A black cane lay across Murray’s lap, the handle atop it a twisted, brass double helix shape of DNA. Murray Longworth hadn’t aged well. He looked frail, as if somehow he’d bathed in Detroit’s nuclear glow and was slowly melting like a candle left sitting on a heater. His dark-gray suit was a little too big; Margaret guessed it had been tailored for him several years ago, several pounds ago.

  A thick man in a black suit — a suit so indiscernible from Clarence’s the two men might as well have been wearing matching uniforms — stood behind Murray’s chair. A flesh-colored coil ran from a tiny, hidden earpiece to somewhere behind his neck. The man stared straight ahead, seeing everything and looking at nothing.