“Hello,” a voice said from his living room.
Phil nearly dropped the glass he was washing, and a moment later, the air around him started to hum with static electricity. A small discharge shocked him as his hand brushed the faucet. He turned to see a snowy Amanda Flynn track wet footprints across his immaculate entranceway floor.
“Good morning. Sorry about popping in on you unexpectedly, and about the mess.” She said with a smile; she stripped off her jacket and more snow fell to the floor. She was dressed in a faded pair of jeans and a sweater that would make a high school boy lose sleep.
“Good morning,” he stammered, reacting more to her figure and the mess she was making than to her sudden appearance. Not knowing what to do next, he simply stared, a wet glass in one hand and a towel in the other.
She took a step into the kitchen and Phil stepped back. The air between them hummed like a power line. “We have some logistics to work out,” she said. “If you stay there, I can swing around you and sit over there.”
Amanda motioned to his dinette set, but there was at least ten feet of clean floor between her muddy boots and the chair. “Okay,” he said, and closed his eyes as she walked around him. When he opened them, there were six new boot prints on his kitchen floor.
“You did well in Los Angeles,” she said while slowly lowering herself into one of his polished kitchen chairs. She stretched out and Phil split his gaze between her long legs and the puddle that was forming under her boots. “Have you heard about Rodney Patton?”
“He’s pretty bad; his size makes it more difficult,” he said slightly distracted.
“When do you get out of here?” Amanda said, looking around his pathologically clean house.
“I’m not infectious anymore, so I suppose when they let me,” Phil said automatically, but he was struck by the realization that he could come and go just as easily as Amanda did.
“I’m trying not to read you, but some thoughts I just can’t avoid.” She still was smiling, but her face had become a little more serious. “We’re going to need a whole new set of rules, aren’t we?”
“There are others besides us,” he stated the obvious.
“I know. A generation of mutants, sort of like the movie X-Men.”
Phil hadn’t seen a movie in decades. “Yes,” he said. She made him feel awkward; it was one of his own personal emotions, and in a strange way, it comforted him. Unconsciously, he had started to borrow emotions from the minds around him, but Amanda’s presence triggered the old familiar clumsy feeling.
“I would like to try something,” she said, and Phil’s heart was suddenly in his throat, afraid of what she would say next. She had sealed off her thoughts completely, but he wasn’t so sure that he was as successful in hiding his own embarrassing thoughts. “It involves some risk.”
“All right,” he answered.
“I would like you to walk over here and take my hand. I’ve worked something out and I want to test it.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea, my skin is already tingling.”
“Take a step, a single step, and see what happens,” she encouraged, and an unfamiliar feeling stirred inside him. He suddenly wanted to impress her; he was a thirty-seven-yearold man, and she made him feel like the twelve-year-old boy he never was, puffing out his chest as the pretty girl walked by.
He took a step and the tingling in his exposed skin didn’t change. The last time she had been this close, it wasn’t a tingling he felt: it had been a stinging, burning sensation. He took another, and still nothing changed. “All right, what’s different?”
He was only about four feet from her, and although the air was still charged, it wasn’t dangerous.
“Keep coming,” she prodded sweetly. He took another step and they were within easy reach of each other. Phil looked down and realized that he still was carrying the glass and kitchen towel; he quickly transferred the glass into his left hand. “Give me your hand.”
If anything the tingling had abated some, and the only uncomfortable sensation Phil was experiencing was desire. He was starting to breathe faster, but it wasn’t out of fear. “Are you sure about this?”
“No,” she said and reached for his free hand. There was a slight snap when they made contact, but neither let go.
Phil had braced himself for the searing pain he had felt with Reisch, but with Amanda, all he felt was warmth. It wasn’t uncomfortable; in fact, it was rather pleasurable, very pleasurable. He began to experience her physically; the smell of her hair, the curve of her hips, the weight of her breasts. The same primal instinct that had nearly driven him to kill Izhan Ahmed resurfaced. He began to run his hand up her arm; a sudden desire to take her body and possess her soul overwhelmed him. He took a step closer to her and then was flung backwards into his refrigerator. He landed hard and for a moment couldn’t breathe.
Amanda had gotten up and the humming of the air resumed.
“Oh my goodness, I am so sorry Amanda!” Phil said gasping for air.
“It’s all right, Phil. I’m used to a little sexual tension; that was a little more than I was comfortable with though.” She waited while Phil climbed painfully back to his feet, glass and towel still firmly in his hand. “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” shame radiated from Phil. “It’s a natural human reaction, but you can’t let it take control. We have a mutual physical attraction, that’s obvious, but that doesn’t mean that we have to act on it.” Amanda returned to her seat and the humming in the air diminished.
“What just happened, with your, our hands?” Phil stuttered.
“That’s what I was trying to test.” She looked down at her hand and began opening and closing her fingers. ”I think if we anticipate contact, or proximity, and accept it, we pull back into ourselves. Somewhat like a cat and its claws. It’s a conscious act, though, because our natural state is to have our claws out.” She smiled and Phil could detect the faintest blush in her cheeks. “I sound like an expert, but all of this is just speculation.”
“If you aren’t an expert, then who is?” He meant it as a compliment, but it fell flat as the name Klaus Reisch hung in the air. “What happened to him?”
“I don’t know,” she said simply. “I would like your help in finding him; that’s really why I’m here.”
“He has more of the virus, more than all the others combined. He plans to . . .” Amanda began to nod her head. “You know this already.”
“After he attacked you, we had an encounter. I saw everything that you saw.”
“I think he left some of himself inside me.” It was a revolting, horrible thought, and it was the first time Phil had admitted it to anyone, including himself.
“Perhaps, or he may have simply awakened something inside you.”
“That makes it much worse,” said Phil, as that uncomfortable thought circled in his mind.
“No, it doesn’t, it makes you human. We’re all very messy inside Phil, even me. We all have dark and secret desires that we would never admit, much less let others see. And for me, that helps put things in perspective.
“What makes Reisch different is that he believes that his infection gives him license to act on those dark desires.”
Phil nodded in agreement. “Before he was infected, Reisch was a strongly disciplined man; he resisted those impulses.”
“The infection strengthens them. All of us at some point are faced with the decision to resist or succumb.”
“Are you a good mutant or a bad mutant?” Phil said, paraphrasing the line from the Wizard of Oz. “So, what are we going to do about the bad mutants?”
“We can’t concern ourselves with them until after Reisch is dead.”
“He’s gone, out of our reach,” Phil said. “Or at least out of my reach.”
“Greg thinks he may have a lead on him. Are you up for a little fresh air?”
“That is a Hispanic male; five foot five, at most,” Ron Benedict said, pointing to a satellite photo of a farmhou
se in eastern New Mexico. Greg and Amanda both nodded. Don Weiland had proven to be exactly correct. The factory-installed navigation system in Corrina Turner’s stolen Audi A8 was dead, but the after-market GPS transponder quietly answered its call.
Amanda stared at the blurry image and accepted on faith that Benedict and his photo analysts knew what they were talking about. “So that’s not Reisch,” she said not feeling even a trace of his mental signature.
“No,” Benedict answered. Phil chose to remain seated while the other three huddled over Benedict’s desk. “Do you want to see these?” the assistant director asked Phil.
“No,” he said simply. Amanda’s “fresh air” had turned out to be a six-minute ride in her Jeep followed by a meeting with twenty federal and local officials in the old courthouse building.
Benedict shrugged and turned to Amanda. “Here is the vehicle,” and he pointed to a small grey dot on a two-lane road that sliced through emptiness. “On this magnified view you can see that he’s changed license plates.”
Greg stared and finally picked up the photograph. Unlike the previous three pictures, this was amazingly clear. “Those are Denver plates; see the registration sticker.”
“So we’ve found the car, and know that he’s being careful.” Ron nodded to one of the technicians who placed a large poster-sized view of the area on an easel. “This is the car,” he hadn’t needed to point because a red circle was drawn around a small grey dot and labeled suspect’s vehicle.
“As you can see, there are thirteen occupied residences within a five-mile radius. We can take number eight off the list, because of our Hispanic male. We doubt he would leave any occupant alive.” Benedict paused and turned to Amanda. “Can you tell us anything from this?”
“Nothing,” she said, and everyone looked at Phil.
“I have no idea which house he’s in,” Phil said from the safety of his chair. The air in the room buzzed with his proximity to Amanda, but it was tolerable. “How do you know he’s even there? Why couldn’t he have moved on to another vehicle?”
“He may have,” an agent of Homeland Security said. “But we’re hoping that because he didn’t swap out the license plate he decided to hold up for awhile.”
“He may have swapped out with a different set of plates. He had to know that eventually we would find that car with satellite or just a cop driving by. He didn’t even bother trying to hide it,” Phil argued.
“We think that the engine failed, there’s engine coolant around all four tires, so he would have needed help to get it under cover,” Benedict said.
“I think he’s in one of these houses,” Amanda said suddenly, ending the debate. “It is a calculated risk. He’s pulled back inside of himself because he knows I’m looking for him, in fact, he told me to come and find him. If he kept going, eventually he would run across a police roadblock or a military patrol; under normal circumstances, he would simply disguise himself as an ambulance or some other authorized vehicle, but then I would see him. He’s not afraid of you, he is afraid of me.”
“So what do we do now?” Benedict asked the room.
For a minute, Amanda simply listened to the options running through the heads of the government officials. “Stop, all of you,” she demanded. “No low-yield tactical nukes, or cruise missiles, or any other military responses. We aren’t even sure he’s there. Yes, I have a suspicion he’s in one of these houses, but that’s hardly definitive enough to kill dozens of people and lay waste to an entire area.”
“He has another vial . . .” said the Homeland Security officer.
“I know exactly what he has,” Amanda responded sharply. “He’s alone in the desert, and very much alert. If any of you got within fifty miles of him, he would know it in an instant. He would destroy your missiles in the air, or worse, redirect them.”
“Do you have any suggestions?” Greg asked, subtly shifting his weight and inserting himself between Amanda and the men behind him.
“Send Phil in,” she answered. ”Alone.”
It had been the most agonizing week of Klaus’s life, and now his hosts were beginning to get on his nerves as well. The Theimes didn’t believe in creature comforts, but they did supply him with a television; and with their satellite connection, he had been able to experience the twenty-four-hour news cycle for the first time. He was amazed at how many different ways the announcers could repackage what little they knew and then represent it as ”news.”
There was little news, however. At this point, if everything had gone according to plan, the American government would have to admit to the growing death toll; it would have been impossible for them to hide the deaths of millions of its citizens. And even if they had managed to completely stifle the domestic sources, there were still international news organizations that would jump at the chance to report on another American tragedy. And then there was the Internet. Certainly, someone, somewhere in the world, would have caught a whiff of what was going on.
Reisch covered his nose; he was going to have to deal with Elmer and Rose Theimes. He had managed to restrain himself for almost two days; it was his way of repaying them for taking him in. But his patience had its limits.
He turned the television off with the remote. CNN was replaying the American president’s speech; Klaus had already listened to it three times and didn’t want to hear his cautious, but triumphant, tone again. Jeser had failed, and he was beginning to accept that fact. Avanti had anticipated the quarantine and had been certain that it would have only a modest short-term effect, but no lasting impact. Once the virus had been complexed with the microcapsules, it was incredibly stable, and would disperse on the wind, dust particles, or even droplets of water; it would find almost everyone, no matter where they hid. What he hadn’t anticipated was that the Americans would find the eleven before they had a chance to disperse their virus.
He carefully put the remote down; the desire to throw and smash things was under control, and he began to feel like his old self. He got up and bumped his head on the exposed wooden beam. Mr. and Mrs. Theimes lived in what some would call a modest house; Reisch called it something different. It was tidy, but cluttered with so many pictures and mementos that he was convinced that they were the main structural support for the ancient house. It had been the family home for five generations, but all eight of their children had moved away. Rose Theimes had assaulted Reisch with stories and photographs of her children for nearly two full days, but now, she was silent. Her silence would force him to leave soon; the curfew was lifting in a matter of hours, and at least one family member would be checking in to see why Elmer and Rose had stopped answering their phone.
Despite the fact that the president’s speech referred to him indirectly, he was still pleased with his decision to stay in the United States; he probably could have slipped into Mexico without alerting Amanda or anyone else, but then he would have missed the perfect opportunity to reverse Jeser’s error. They hadn’t failed entirely; they had created the right conditions for Reisch to succeed. The world had closed its borders to the United States, and after a week locked inside their houses, the populace was eager to get outside. For a while, suspicion would be running high, but it would take a good deal more than suspicion to stop him.
It had started to rain and the sky crept closer to the desert floor; the late afternoon started to look more like dusk and Klaus wondered if he should leave under the cover of the rare thunderstorm. He had planned on waiting until it was fully dark, but if he left now he could stick to the back roads and still be in Dallas for the morning commute.
The experts said that it would take less than a thousand infections in six major cities to create a self-sustaining epidemic; Dallas would be the first. New York, Chicago, and L.A. would be next. He would spend one to two days in each place and then disappear like a ghost. He hadn’t yet decided on his last two cities, but he would before he finished in Los Angeles; right now, he was toying with the idea of Washington DC, followed by Miami. Then,
at least he could find a boat and make it to Cuba.
He stretched his long arms and listened as the rain pelted the metal roof. He yawned and made the decision to take the small risk and leave before it was dark. The back roads would be patrolled by the local or state police, not by the military, and would be relatively easy to handle. He gathered his things and carried them into the small-attached garage. The Theimes owned a Ford F150 pickup that was made in the last century, but despite its age, was in excellent condition. The thirty-gallon gas tank was always filled, a fact that Elmer had shared with Reisch the day before he died, so his range was easily five hundred miles. More than enough. He opened the single garage door, bid Elmer and Rose a final farewell, and backed their truck onto the gravel driveway. The rain was coming down in sheets, which presented Klaus with a dilemma; leaving the garage door open would be a sign to anyone who happened along that something was wrong. Closing the garage door meant that he would be soaked and driving for hours in wet clothes, something that was very unappealing to the fastidious German. He looked around the small cab for an umbrella and found nothing. He waited a minute for the rain to ease up, but the steady drumming continued. It wasn’t a small point; someone, either the sheriff or a family member would be checking on the Theimes soon, and if they found the garage door open and their truck missing, they would be rightly suspicious. However, if they knocked, and no one answered they would check the garage, see that the truck was gone and would have an explanation as to why Elmer and Rose hadn’t been answering their phone. He looked at his watch and decided that he would give the rain exactly three minutes to let up and then he would be forced to close the door.
“We have a heat signature,” the analyst announced. The keyhole satellite platform had just cleared the horizon and turned every instrument it had on a twenty-five mile radius of eastern New Mexico; its infrared sensors had found a small gap in the cloud cover and downloaded the images to a ground station in North Carolina. “Small engine, probably a car. Give the computers a few more minutes and we’ll have a better image.” The senior analyst reviewed the live feed and agreed. It took less than a minute to relay the message to Ron Benedict.
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