“That’s not for kids!”
Ricky started to cry, clutching his stomach. “Unnhh.”
“Please, Cass, trust me! It’s what he needs. Zeke must have given him the cure before he…before he got hit. It burns energy and food.”
Cassandra made her decision to trust Larry, grabbing the can and opening it with the flip-top. She put it to Ricky’s lips.
He grabbed the can with both hands and guzzled it down.
“His hands are strong! That’s amazing, just yesterday he would never have been able to pick up that can!”
“I know,” Larry said. “It’s a miracle, a God-blessed miracle. I’m so sorry about Zeke. But this stuff…it’s gonna fix Ricky and it’s gonna fix Beulah and a lot more people in the world. We’ve got this place in the hills, you’ll see it soon…” He went on explaining, bringing her up to date on what had happened.
She listened with half an ear and half her mind, lost in the wonder of her son’s recovery.
-19-
Elise and I met them at the cavern with all the vehicles, what we called the Motor Pool. I knew there was something seriously wrong when I saw the expressions on their faces as the two men in the Cherokee got out.
“Weren’t you guys supposed to take off?” I saw the Land Rover but I didn’t see Zeke. By the time I had looked around, they had opened the back of the SUV and hefted his body onto the cold cavern floor.
I stared at it. At them. “How?”
Elise clutched my hand.
“Unlucky shot. They had four guys on the house. We only spotted two. The other two must have been a reaction force. They opened fire on us and we took them out. But Zeke…” Skull waved vaguely, a helpless thing. More emotion showed on his face then than I had ever seen before: grief, anger, bitterness.
I wanted to make some kind of gesture. If it had been Larry I might have hugged him. I settled for putting a hand on Alan’s shoulder. “Thanks for bringing him back.”
He shrugged my hand off, spat on the ground at my feet.
I could smell his buried rage. Maybe that was a good thing; maybe rage meant he wasn’t sociopathic, just…angry.
We took Zeke’s body and put it on ice in the bunker’s morgue. The scientists wanted to make sure they had the cadaver to study later. That was what Zeke would have wanted, I was sure. We got the family settled into quarters and turned in.
My sleep was troubled with images of death and horror.
The next morning brought relief. I was delighted to see Ricky walking and eating. I hadn’t been sure the Eden Plague would work on him. I found him shoveling canned ham and eggs into his mouth, with Cassie and Millie next to him, eating more sedately. I got a plate of breakfast and sat down with them.
“How you doin, sport? You remember me?”
He shook his head.
“That’s all right, it was five years back or so.” I looked at Cassie. “Sorry to be such a stranger. And I’m sorry to have brought this on you and your family. If I’d have known…”
“None of us can know, Dan. We’re in God’s hands.”
That made me angry, though not as angry as I might have been before the Plague. “How can you believe that? With all this crap going on, how can you believe God cares?”
“Maybe because I think things would be a lot worse if He didn’t.”
“Then why doesn’t he clean the world up? Why just keep things not too bad and not too good?”
“Maybe He expects us to do our part. Make our own mistakes. Take responsibility. Maybe He doesn’t want to be our nanny. And maybe he works through people – people who make things like the Eden Plague.”
I nodded reluctantly, holding up a surrendering hand. “Okay, okay. That’s as good an answer as any, I guess. He did get me out of some jams, I think. But Zeke…”
She reached across the table to put her hand on my arm with earnest, tear-filled eyes. “My heart aches for Zeke, but he died doing what he wanted to. Protecting people. Saving people. Saving us. He passed this Eden thing on to Ricky and saved his life. Elise treated Beulah and she recognized me this morning! We have to hold on to the good he did. And I was talking to Elise…this is so amazing! This whole thing. It will change the world.”
“Yeah. But for the better? It could be a wrecking ball.”
Spooky caught my eye from across the room.
“I have to do something. I’ll see you later.” I walked over to the Vietnamese man.
“We go now. Skull and me. Better that way. You want to reach me, you talk to Van Vinh.”
“What about…what about Alan?”
“I don’t know. He love Zeke. He very angry. Maybe he stir up the hornets. What can we do? No man can live in another’s heart.”
I licked my lips. “You still have that other syringe?”
“Yes.”
I stared at him, willing him to understand.
His eyes widened fractionally. He nodded, slowly. “Only if I must.”
“It’s better than killing him. At least then he has a chance to change. Maybe the Eden Plague will help him heal some of his pain.”
“But you say with the psycho, they maybe turn very evil.”
“That’s just a guess. We have no evidence or proof of how any of this works. I just know we have to give him a chance. What you do is on your own conscience.”
He looked at my face for a few more seconds. Searching. For what, I don’t know; certainty perhaps, but he wouldn’t find it. He swallowed, then bowed, formally. “Goodbye, Daniel Markis. I think you are the Colonel Zeke now.”
I bowed to him, shaken. Master Sergeants don’t become Colonels overnight; I guess now I had no choice. I sure didn’t feel ready. I pushed the thought aside and watched him walk down toward the motor pool.
Good luck, Spooky.
***
A week of being buried alive here in Sosthenes made me realize the idea about quarantining myself wasn’t going to work. Physically I was not limited; it was the oppression of the mountain above me, the damp cold air anywhere not heated by machinery, and the lack of open spaces that was getting to me.
I drove myself hard, to keep the oppression and the black thoughts of Zeke’s fate away. I spent as much time with Elise as I could spare, and with Millie and Cassie and Ricky, trying to make up for the Zeke-shaped hole in their lives.
Cassie bore up well, and she quickly established herself as the master of our spycraft, what is called tradecraft by those in the business. She spent long hours with Vinh, who ate up the knowledge and reveled in his job as gopher, supply specialist and intelligence operative. She soon had him taking trucks to various towns and cities, never the same place twice, selling currency and coins to private collectors and shops and jewelers, buying loads of electronics, spare parts, cabling, fresh food, everything that the bunker needed.
Vinny and I set up several satellite and microwave dishes and other antennas on the mountaintop, under cover of the trees and some extra radar-scattering netting strategically placed to mask any overhead surveillance. The bunker entrance nearby was one of a dozen or so that led to various points on the mountain, providing access or escape for people on foot. By midweek everyone was taking sunlight breaks at least once a day at the nearest hatchway.
We also got all the internal telephones working, at each entrance and in all of the main rooms and offices. They weren’t connected to the outside world but they were useful for our work.
By the end of the week the lab equipment started arriving. I risked going outside driving one of two trucks, following Vinh to pick up several large crates in Richmond. It was a great relief just to be up in the sunlight and out in the open, bouncing along the country roads down to the freeway feeders to the Virginia capital and back. I thought if I could do that once a week I might be all right.
Larry had taken off on his own the day after Zeke died, heading back to Atlanta. That gave Cassie enough time to set up a rudimentary anonymous webmail system with him, using free accounts for communicat
ion. As long as everyone stayed away from certain keywords like ‘Eden’ or ‘Plague’ or ‘Markis,’ everything should be fine. Computers might be able to look at every e-mail in America, but people couldn’t: they could only see what the software flagged. That was how to stay below the radar of the creeping Big Brother that America’s government was becoming since 9-11.
We decided to keep to a more or less similar week to the outside world, work five or six days but for sure take Sunday off. Everyone was pushing too hard. So it was on a Sunday afternoon right after the barbecue outside our best hatch that I found Elise.
She was sitting against the mountainside a couple of hundred yards up on a granite ledge that I remembered she liked. She gave a little wave when she saw me hiking up but didn’t smile.
“Elise…I need to talk to you.” Awkwardly. It seemed like she had been a bit standoffish for the last week or so. Or maybe it was me.
“I know. I mean, okay. Let’s talk.”
I took a deep breath, then sat down beside her, not touching. Staring out into space. “I need to know something first.”
“Sure.” She didn’t sound sure.
“Can the EP be fixed? Really? Can the conscience-enhancing portion be overcome?”
She did a kind of double-take, as if I had asked her a completely unexpected question.
I wondered what she had thought I would say.
Then her face relaxed. “Not easily. Not soon. It repairs cells. It repairs a lot of things. It balances processes. If you tell it not to change brain cells – theoretically, I mean – then it won’t repair nerve cells either, which will preclude a lot of other injuries getting fixed. But it’s more than just brain cells or neurons or axons or whatever. It’s the regulation of hormones and a thousand delicate neurological processes. The fact this thing works at all is a miracle, testimony to the Russians’ work. They did amazing things with primitive technology.”
“So the improvement in, well, let’s call it ‘virtue,’ is intrinsic. Impossible to separate from the advantages. That’s good.”
“I’m not so sure it’s good, if we can’t defend ourselves. I think this imperfect Eden Plague will push some people into being puritans and pacifists and Pharisees. It’s falling off the horse the opposite way. You feel it yourself, don’t you? You risked lives back there on the island because you used nonlethal ammo, when one shot to the brain would have put Rogett down for good. But you couldn’t do it. Is that good or bad? What’s the lesser of the evils?”
“I don’t have easy answers. We have to operate within the parameters we have right now. Maybe later you can tweak the virus to keep the reluctance-to-kill virtue without making it a vice.”
“Maybe.”
I rubbed my eyes, thinking. “Okay, then what about the hunger? The food needs? The excessive fertility?”
She let out a breath, as if she had been holding it. “That can be improved a lot easier, I think. Just time and money and research.”
I nodded, thinking. I sat back against the granite, watching the puffy clouds, feeling the breeze through my thin jacket, smelling the sweet pine. I opened up a bag of trail mix and M&Ms, what backpackers called ‘gorp’, and set it on the rock between our thighs. A handful went into my mouth with a practiced flick. I took a deep breath.
“Elise…” I froze.
“Yes. Go on, it’s okay.” Her voice was gentle, but this was a moment every man fears, before he commits and risks rejection.
“Elise, I care for you. I could call it something else but maybe it’s too soon. I think you care for me. But I think I’m in charge of this thing now and I need to think about bigger things than just the two of us. That means I need to…to put aside at least that much turmoil. Oh, I’m not saying this very well, I’m making it sound like it’s a coldblooded decision.” I turned to her, to look in her searching eyes. “I just mean –”
Her lips reached for mine, suddenly, and relief flooded through me. The kiss was magical, electric. I felt connected to her in a physical way, like there was a joining of our nervous systems. I knew in that moment that I could reach out my hands to her body right there on that breezy chilly mountainside, and it would be wonderful.
But something stopped me, the thing that had begun to get in the way between us. A desire to do it better, or more officially or something like that. To not screw this up the way I had screwed up my other relationships. I hadn’t given Elise and me, given the ‘us,’ nearly as much thought as I had about the world-shaking implications of the EP, and I felt embarrassed to have put her in second place. But dammit, wasn’t all of mankind more important than any two people?
I gently broke the embrace, still holding her head in my hands. “Elise, we need to –”
“Shut up, Dan, and take me here,” she whispered huskily. “Right here and now. I can’t think of a more glorious place.”
I groaned, my eyes squeezed together. “Elise, I want you too, so much. But I want to do it right.”
“Oh, we’re going to do it right all right.” She stared at me wide-eyed when I only chuckled, pained. “Okay. Do what?”
“You know. I mean…if we’re in love…if we love each other…”
“I do love you,” she said.
“I know. I mean, I mean, we should…make a commitment. Make it official.”
She sat back, stunned but smiling with confused joy. “You mean like, uh, married? Sure, I assumed we would, eventually. But a moment like this only comes along once in a while. Let’s take it while we can.”
“Elise, I…I…I made a deal with God. To be a better person. I keep my deals. And I mean, I’m not a religious guy or anything but I just think…I want to be married to you before we…you know.” My voice dropped to a miserable whisper. “Maybe I won’t screw it up this time.”
She reached up to take my hand in both of hers. It felt warm inside her flesh. “Oh, you dear sweet, virtue-ridden man.”
“It’s not just the Eden Plague! That would mean it’s not really me. But after my divorce…I promised God I’d do everything I could right with the next woman in my life.”
“Well, I have to admire and respect you for sticking to your beliefs and promises.” Her eyes crossed slightly, which meant she was thinking hard. “There won’t be any official marriage certificates or anything like that, right? We’re off the grid. So a marriage is just our commitment to each other.”
“It’s a commitment in front of witnesses.”
She sat back in defeat. “Damn you, I was going to construct a nice little argument for saying our vows right here and now and then doing it like bunnies.”
I laughed, a great belly laugh of relief that lasted a long time, leaving my eyes and nose running. “I love you too, you know.”
“I know. Okay, mister goody-two-shoes. Let’s go get married. Today.” She leapt to her feet, pulling me with her down the trail.
We tried. It turned out that the rest wouldn’t let us. After the girlish shrieking and the backslapping, and confused looks from Ricky, they made us wait until the next day. But we insisted we have the wedding outdoors in the sunlight, in the sight of God and everyone. It was a short, moving ceremony.
Then we walked up the mountainside to the ledge and did it like bunnies.
“Stick that in your image enhancers, satellite-watchers,” I muttered as I stared up at the twilight sky from inside the double sleeping bag. I turned to wrap myself up in my wife. If this was the EP’s doing, I’d given up on my doubts, and on fighting biology.
-20-
It was days later, after bouts of dreamy pleasure and sessions of hard work for the both of us, that I finally made time for the conversation I had been trying to have before. I dragged Elise back up to our ledge with a picnic lunch and the sleeping bags and a licentious look that she took with good cheer. But once we’d gotten there and set out the food, I said, “I need to talk to you about something.”
She looked worried for a moment, then sat back, picking up an apple and taking a c
runchy bite. Her freckles danced as her strong jaw worked. I pushed aside the distraction of her simple natural beauty and plowed on.
“Remember what we were talking about here before? When we had the conversation?”
“About doing it like bunnies?”
We laughed.
“Okay, yes. About the EP and fixing it?”
“Yes. I’ve decided something. I’m sorry if it sounds like I left you out of the decision, I don’t mean to,” I put on my most determined expression, “but I really believe it’s the right thing to do.”
“Do what?” she asked.
I licked my lips. “To start the plague going. As soon as we can.”
She sat back, still chewing apple, crossing her eyes slightly. She ate the whole thing, including the core, except that little stem they always leave on to ensure you know it’s really from a tree, I guess. No digestive upsets with EP, and we always felt like we needed every calorie.
I sat and let her think.
“You know, if we had a few months, we could probably make it airborne. Graft in some highly infectious influenza. That would be pretty simple, I think. The work is all out there, in the public domain, although most of it is about reducing rather than enhancing transmissibility. One good thing is, it appears the virus is designed to survive in all sorts of media – blood, saliva, salt water, even chlorinated water doesn’t faze it. And once it’s ingested, it’s very infectious. Kind of like Ebola.”
“That’s good news. You know, they’re going to be watching for people pulling research off the web.”
“I’ll work with Vinny and Cass to make sure we don’t get traced.”
“So…you agree with my plan?”
“Sounds more like a goal than a plan, but yes…I always did.”
“Even if it causes chaos.” My tone of voice made it a statement, not a question.
She sighed. “Yes. Horrible as it might be, it will make a better world.”
I felt a twisting in my gut. Where had I heard that phrase, ‘A Better World,’ before? “I bet Oppenheimer said the same thing.”
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