Already, the pain began to subside. He was fortunate to have received every Sustain update currently marketed by LyfeGen, except, of course, the most recent iteration, the one that had contained the genes designed to kill him.
One of the updates included advanced neurotransmitter function, improving endorphin responses to pain. But he wasn’t foolish enough to think that reduced pain meant reduced damage. He wanted to talk to Erik, to Kyle, just in case.
Preston reached into his pocket for his comm card.
“I told you not to move.” Jacqueline looked up from the bag she was packing. “I don’t want to have to shoot you again.”
“I just want to talk to my husband and son.”
Jacqueline shook her head. “I can’t take that chance.”
With a slow wave of comprehension, he stared at her. His arm was completely numb, the intense pangs of pain just a dull memory. “I’m not going to call the police. And, besides, if you’re innocent, why would you be worried?”
Jacqueline closed the portable incubator, throwing a strap over her shoulder. “The police?” She frowned. “I have no idea who you’re working with and I don’t want to know right now. This is all going to end soon enough.”
“You’re delusional,” Preston said as Jacqueline wrapped her coat tightly around her bloodstained shirt. “You can’t get away with this.”
She threw her hands up in frustration, the incubator slung at her side waving precariously. “Why the hell do you think I would do something like this?”
“I’m sorry about your son,” Preston said. “You’re probably right: we are partially to blame.”
“Damn it.” Jacqueline stomped toward him, shaking her head. The bag across her back, the portable incubator, and the transport liquid nitrogen container full of tissue samples smacked against each other. “Screw you and what you think.”
As the door to the stairwell shut behind her, her footsteps echoed up and into the lab. Her shoes clacked against the floor in a rapid rhythm until the door finally squeezed itself shut.
Preston took a deep breath, inflaming the pain in his shoulder. At least it was just his shoulder. No vital organs. He could see Erik and Kyle again. Maybe soon.
A loud explosion tore up through the stairwell.
The two-foot-high window at the top of the stairwell appeared to be a doorway to hell. Flames licked against the window and heat rushed through the small gap between the door and floor, bathing Preston in an uncomfortable swelter. Under the intense heat and fire, his hopes of reuniting with his family evaporated.
Chapter 43
Hannah Boyd
December 4, 2063
Hannah could no longer wait for God to enact His will. He had not delivered any good fortune, despite her devotion to Him. And, still, she prayed for His forgiveness for enacting His justice. She was only human. A descendant of Eve, sin was natural to her. She fought it and realized she had lived in it when she fled to Chicago with Brian. Living with him had resulted from a selfish desire to feel an emotional, physical bond with another human being. It had not brought her any closer to God, and she had neglected His word.
Yes, going to prison for her “crimes” could be justified. She satisfied herself with the notion of penance. In prison, she would devote her time to studying the Bible and praying and living for Him. In “freedom,” she had burned herself into the ground working for a clothing store that sold sexuality and materialism. Nothing about her work spoke of God’s purpose for her. She wished she had seen it sooner.
God had tried to speak to her, but she didn’t listen. When Father Cooney delivered his sermons about men trying to become gods, about men corrupting their God-given bodies, their souls, God was speaking.
But Satan also spoke to her. Satan was a charming woman. A charming woman with dark brown curls and a slight southern drawl, welcoming Hannah into her arms and her love. Just like Brian.
Hannah’s weakness was attention. Selfish attention. She was no better than Mary Magdalene, living as a whore. But Jesus had welcomed Mary to redeem herself with Him. To bathe and kiss His feet.
She must do the same to right herself with God. But she couldn’t wait for an agonizingly slow realization from Him, again. Maybe He had said enough and she already knew all that she would know from Him.
Unclasping her hands and rising from the kneeler, she stood up. No one had yet come to bother her or the deceased Pastor Gray.
She should stop calling him Pastor. He had no right to give himself the title of a man of God, acting as a shepherd of lost lambs. Pastor Gray was a wolf, pretending to be a shepherd. No righteous man would order the death of innocents.
Certainly, those worshiping the false gods of biotechnology, of Joel Cobb and Anil Nayak, of the god organ, deserved a mortal sentence. Still, even if she convinced herself their deaths were acceptable, Hannah couldn’t reconcile the deaths of reporters, of bystanders and tourists.
God had given mankind free will and free will led to manipulation and lies. Satan had spoken through Gray. He had promised her the device would impart revelations, the Word of God, and the voice of thousands from around the world. She had assumed the device was a transmitter, a Net-link, an enormous holodisplay that would disrupt the media circus.
Not a bomb. Not a crude weapon of terror.
For a moment, Hannah considered her decision to kill Pastor Gray and Charlotte. They were human and it wasn’t right of her to judge them.
But the notion couldn’t be borne. Satan and his angels were not human. They should be sent back to hell, back to where God had sent them long ago.
***
Hannah walked down to the church’s basement. Only the red glow of the two emergency exit signs lit the pathway. She opened the door to Gray’s office. His body lay splayed across the floor. The color had drained from his skin, replaced by a cold blue pallor. She touched the man’s forehead. His skin had cooled while she had prayed.
She pushed Gray’s heavy body against the desk and reached into his pocket. Her fingers groped around for his keys. She asked for God’s forgiveness for touching the man’s corpse so intimately and retrieved the old-fashioned brass keys. She rolled them around in her hand, admiring the cool metal, the faded bronze and the metallic taste when she kissed them. In a world filled with automation and electronic commands, the little antiques hanging limply from the silver ring possessed a fantastical quality.
Turning away from Gray, she knelt down behind his desk and opened the false wooden shelf from which she had seen him retrieve the parts for the bomb.
Undoubtedly, Gray had expected her to die in the blast. He hadn’t counted on the sheer magnitude of the crowd frightening her and sending her fleeing as soon as she had done her part.
The click of a key sliding into the slot of the iron safe behind Gray’s desk provided a strange satisfaction. She unlocked the small, surprisingly heavy door, and peered in at the devices inside. The whole safe was no larger than a couple of shoeboxes at G&N, but its contents were worth more to her than the entirety of the G&N franchise.
An innocuous plastic bag contained several small devices disguised as comm cards. Hannah slid one of these cards into the pocket of her jacket, then probed a couple of inches deeper and pulled out a black package half the size of her fist. The improvised explosive device fit snugly into a small paper coffee cup, which she knew from experience. This time, she didn’t disguise the device’s protruding wires and or attempt to obscure its metallic smell. That would be unnecessary.
After rotating the device in her fingers, she pocketed it. She stood, pushing Gray’s body against the torn false shelf and exposed safe. Sitting down in Gray’s worn leather chair, she wondered where Charlotte had disappeared to. The woman had gone suspiciously silent after had Hannah acted out “God’s word.” Damn the devil and all his devices. Hannah wouldn’t accept Charlotte’s silence as defeat.
She fiddled with her comm card and scrolled through the applications and direct feeds she subscribed
to, ranging from daily scriptures streams to updates from Usverse.
With a flick, she opened the Usverse application. A brilliant globe projected itself in front of her. She zoomed in on her location, and the projection supplied a three-dimensional image of St. Gemma’s fading exterior, cracked stained-glass windows and all.
As she zoomed out from her location, several dots on the map showed the current location of her friends. Of course, she had not talked to Eva Vasquez since she dropped out, nor had she ever seen Beth White outside of her work hours at G&N. Nonetheless, she was friends with them on Usverse and they had accepted public permissions to display their up-to-the-minute locations to their Usverse friends.
Hannah performed a quick search for another friend.
Strangely, Charlotte wasn’t in Chicago at all. Instead, she was in Foxwood, miles outside of the city. Hannah had never been to Charlotte’s home, so it was certainly plausible that that was where the woman lived. Zooming in, she saw that Charlotte’s location wasn’t a home at all, but an office building. A link popped up offering a brief history of the building. It used to be owned by ProlifiTEC, but was now a subsidiary of LyfeGen.
LyfeGen would be a fitting association, a perfect stage for the devil-woman. If she aspired to tempt humans and skew the word of the Lord, there wouldn’t be a more fitting company.
She tapped at the comm card, seeking the nearest train out to Foxwood. As she stood, she accidentally stepped on Gray’s hand, crunching his fingers under her boots. She cringed at the sound.
As she exited, she took another glance back at the body, hidden behind the desk. Dark red footsteps followed her out of the office, so she grabbed Gray’s coat, slung on the coat rack by the entrance to the office. She wiped off the bottoms of her boots and mopped the floor, smearing the blood across his jacket and the dingy tiles. Then she ran out of the church.
***
The train ride offered Hannah more than enough time to imagine all the ways in which she would watch Charlotte burn for her sins. She planned on placing the bomb under Charlotte’s car and waiting for the woman to return, then watching her come to a fiery end.
Afterwards, Hannah wouldn’t bother to hide; the police would find her easily enough and she would accept whatever punishment the American justice system imparted on her. It wouldn’t compare to the sacrifice that Jesus Christ had made for her, but it would be her own cross to bear. To suffer for God’s will, for righteousness—it was more than she had imagined in her lonely existence over the past several years.
When the train stopped at Foxwood, she strode off. She carried herself with as much pride as she could muster, her back straight and teeth gritted. Shoving a hand into her pocket, she toyed with the plastic covering of the bomb and traced her fingers along its wires. Gripping the device instilled in her an air of confidence and righteousness.
Her fellow passengers dispersed in the parking garage. A lone police officer patrolled the entrance of the garage.
Hannah’s pulse quickened when she saw him. She avoided eye contact with the man and strode by, then followed the sidewalk out from the concrete structure and consulted her comm card for directions to Charlotte’s location. The policeman hadn’t followed, so she broke out into a jog.
As she ran down the empty sidewalks, a cramp seized her abdomen and her lungs burned with overwork. G&N required minimal physical activity and her overall inactivity didn’t bode well for this sudden burst of athleticism. She trudged on, refusing to slow, striding past a line of small storefronts bathed in darkness. The storefronts gave way to heavy glass-clad buildings that might have been classified as high rises, though they stood like toddlers in comparison with the grand skyscrapers that were a train ride away in downtown Chicago.
Parking lots with only a smattering of dark cars accompanied these buildings. Few lights glowed from within the buildings. Hannah scanned the parking lots as she drew closer to Charlotte’s purported location, looking for any sign that might confirm the devil’s presence.
Sure enough, when Hannah’s representative marker on the comm card map coincided with Charlotte’s, a cherry-red Honda sat nearby, parked in a lot.
She craned her neck upwards, looking at the building, seeing the movement of shadows against the glass. Backing up, she squeezed between the cars parked on the side of the street to get a better look but still couldn’t identify to whom the shadows belonged.
While she recognized Charlotte’s vehicle, there was also an unfamiliar silver car in the parking lot. She didn’t recognize the make or model, but the sleek shape and aggressive curves in its silhouette made her suspect that it was expensive.
Hannah looked up again. Shadows danced across the windows. She crept up to the building.
There were others here with Charlotte. They might have been innocent, but if they were working with that woman, it was more likely that they weren’t.
Hannah pulled the bomb from her pocket, rotating it in her hand, awaiting an answer.
A muffled bang brought her attention back up to the window. A flash of light accompanied a second report. The devil’s work.
Hannah scanned the parking lot and the neighboring buildings, but nothing else appeared amiss. Cars slept with their engines off and no lights came on in either of the neighboring buildings. The apartments just a block over appeared too far away for their occupants to react to the stifled noises coming from the former ProlifiTEC headquarters.
It was up to her. God had left her to act appropriately. She paced in front of the entrance. Moving into the shadows at the side of the building, she walked along the brick exterior.
When she looked back up, there were no more moving shadows. The lights were still on, but nothing alive taunted her through the windows. Her heart raced, and she feared that she had missed her moment.
She saw movement across the parking lot. It was yet another shadow silhouetted on the asphalt from the lights within the building.
A shape rushed down the stairs in the glass enclosure, the source of the shadow. Long hair bounced as the person bounded down the stairs, someone with an unnaturally large upper body.
No, not a large upper body. The person was carrying something. Bags.
Hannah ran to the glass door at the bottom of the stairwell, watching as the person came down the last flight of stairs and ran right into the door, shoving it open.
At that moment, Hannah’s eyes opened wide and she drew herself up.
Dark hair. Blue eyes that shone in the glimmering lights of the parking lot. Charlotte.
Hannah charged the woman, knocking her back into the stairwell. The woman toppled backwards, striking her head against the cement stairs with a sickening thud.
“May God judge you rightly.”
Charlotte’s eyelids closed as she groaned. Hannah wished she could look into those eyes one last time. She would show the woman that there would be no more manipulation, no more hell on earth.
Charlotte appeared motionless, teetering on the edge of unconsciousness.
Hannah reached into her pocket and tossed the bomb into Charlotte’s lap. She closed the exit door.
Sprinting away, she waited for the devil-woman to get up, but Charlotte remained splayed on the stairs. Hannah confirmed that no one else had entered the stairwell. She backed up behind the expensive-looking silver car, her eyes glued on Charlotte’s jumbled form.
Now thirty yards or so away, Hannah reached into her pocket and pulled out the fake comm card. She scrunched up her nose and squinted as she repeated the code that she had typed into another fake comm card that morning.
With the final tap on the comm card, an explosion erupted from Charlotte’s body. Glass shards shattered and melted. Red, smelted globs flew across the parking lot. Fire singed the grass. Flames engulfed the entire staircase as the hands of Satan reached up toward the sky, grappling for God, for Heaven.
Finally, the fingers retreated back onto the ground. Only a backbone of concrete stairs remained. Curled metal frames that
had supported the glass enclosure stuck out from the building like so many broken bones.
Hannah walked back into the middle of the parking lot and knelt. She prayed until the fire trucks and the cops came. She prayed until strong arms and loud voices tugged her from the ground. She prayed as they shoved her into the back seat of a car, her eyes closed and her purpose fulfilled.
Chapter 44
Monica Wolfe
December 4, 2063
“He’s not picking up. You can put it back away.”
Monica removed the comm card from Audrey’s ear. The journalist’s skin appeared tender and raw. Though the medication seemed to soothe most of the woman’s pain, Audrey’s winces when she bent her arm at the elbow were enough to convince Monica that the reporter could use some help. “Do you want to try again?”
“He must be busy.” Audrey’s eyes narrowed. Certainly, if she hadn’t been bandaged, her forehead would have been creased as she thought for a moment. “He’ll probably call back as soon as he sees the missed calls.”
Monica opened her mouth, hesitated, and then shut it again.
“Go on,” Audrey said.
Briefly, Monica looked away, her eyes darting across the floor. “Do you think Preston’s okay?” She suspected the thought had already crossed Audrey’s mind.
Audrey sighed. “I hope so.”
Monica wanted to press her to call someone else, anyone else at LyfeGen. They needed to confirm her suspicions about Whitney Brayson’s involvement in the Sustain sabotages. While there was enough circumstantial evidence to mark Brayson as a suspect, she lacked hard evidence to incriminate the woman. To top it off, she had not yet concocted a valid motive for the engineer to murder her significant other, Dave Stemper, and subsequently cause the collapse of her own company.
Audrey’s eyes slid closed, and Monica watched the rise and fall of her chest. She admired Audrey’s tenacity and her fervor in spite of everything that had befallen her. The journalist had promised to write Monica’s story and to do everything in her power to shed light on both the Sustain saboteur and the methods by which LyfeGen had failed to protect the their customers’ DNA.
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