by Scott Britz
He charged as if he could outrun the Grand Marquis as it barreled toward the plane. His feet were pistons. Cracked ribs be damned—his lungs were bellows, blasting out huge breaths of superheated air. Meanwhile the car was moving so fast it seemed to be hydroplaning on the smooth-packed dirt. It didn’t slow a whit as it got near the Cessna. It kept going and going, crazily, like a cannonball to its target, as if it had every intention of smashing the thing to bits.
Then, at the very last moment, it swerved into an irrigation ditch, crashing onto its side with a huge jangling whump and plowing up a wall of dust.
“Cricket!” Hank shouted, almost in despair.
Seven
CRICKET WAS SO DAZED FROM THE air bag that she was scarcely aware when Gifford grabbed her and pulled her up through the passenger’s side door. She came to on her feet, to find herself being dragged running through a muddy ditch, with rows and rows of tongue-leaved plants beside her. She vaguely remembered having tried to crash the big white car into the airplane, and Gifford jerking the steering wheel from her at the last second.
“Keep your head down,” shouted Gifford. Cricket was dimly aware that the firecracker-like popping sounds coming from behind her were dangerous. Oh, fuck. They’re shooting at us.
And something else, too—in the distance, a familiar voice, shouting amid the gunshots: “Stop! For God’s sake, you’ll hit her!”
Hank? What’s he doing here?
She felt a tug on her wrist pulling her up an embankment, where a blue-and-white airplane shaped like a shark stood slightly askew on a narrow dirt road. She saw half a dozen policemen racing toward her. Gifford thrust her onto the wing before leaping up himself and popping open the gull-wing door.
“Get in! Now!” he shouted.
On hands and knees, Cricket scrambled over the bucket seats. With a thud and a click the door came back down. The red-and-white ice chest rattled as it bounced onto the backseat. Gifford flicked several switches, then pressed the ignition. The plane shook as the massive turbocharged engine came to life.
Meanwhile, Cricket saw policemen running in from all sides. One climbed up onto the dirt road in front of the plane, shouted unintelligibly, and made a cutting motion across his neck as he pointed at the propeller.
“Give up, Charles,” said Cricket. “You’re surrounded.”
“Oh, really?” The plane lurched forward, sending the policeman dashing for the ditch that ran along the left-hand side of the road. With a deft play of the twin brake pedals, Gifford steered the plane off the road and into the field on his right. Tobacco leaves rained through the air as the propeller shredded everything in its path. Cricket’s head bounced more than once against the ceiling. She glimpsed a white farmhouse a few hundred yards away, swarmed by police cars with flashing blue lights. Then Gifford made a sharp U-turn, taxiing at breakneck speed back toward the dirt road. In a moment he had swung up in a cloud of dust back onto it, with the plane now pointing opposite from its original direction. In the distance Cricket saw a police car athwart the road, its rear end awkwardly elevated and its front wheels dangling over the ditch.
“The short-field takeoff distance for the Corvalis is 1,975 feet,” Gifford said. “I’d say that’s just about what we have. Give or take a yard.”
Holding both feet firmly on the brakes, Gifford turned his ear and listened to the engine as he slowly pulled out a red knob on the console marked MIXTURE. Satisfied with the sound, he took hold of the black throttle knob and pulled it out all the way. The cockpit trembled as the engine began to roar.
Cricket felt her heart pounding. If this plane takes off, I’ll never set foot on earth again.
Police were taking up positions along the dirt road ahead. Every one of their guns was trained on the cockpit. But then she saw them distracted by something to her left. Hank came running up onto the road, waving his arms and shouting—interposing his own body between the bullets and the plane.
Cricket gasped. That damn fool’s going to get himself shot.
But the cops lowered their weapons.
Gifford chuckled. “Now I know who to thank for our little escort.”
It gave Cricket such a relief just to see Hank—standing like an oak tree with his hands on his hips, his gaze riveted on hers, his battered jaw set like an outcropping of granite—that her eyes welled up with tears.
“If I live through this day, I’m going to give that man another chance.”
“Hank? He’s a pathetic failure.”
“No, you’re the failure, Charles.”
“Me? A failure?” Gifford scoffed. “Have you forgotten Subject Adam? The race with Korongo?”
“The Methuselah Vector was never about Subject Adam.”
“Read the New York Times, woman. I’ve given mankind—”
“Fuck mankind.” Cricket glared at him. “I know you. There was only one thing you ever wanted. And you missed it by years.”
Gifford slowly, dubiously raised the gun. “What? What was that?”
Cricket swallowed a lump of dry spittle. “To save Doreen,” she said, almost in a whisper.
Gifford’s expression went cold. “You have no right to speak her name.”
“Would she be proud to see you now, Charles?”
“Leave her out of this.”
“If she saw the blood on your hands? If she knew you were a fugitive from the police?”
He menaced her with his glowing, Mephistophelian eyes. Naked muscles were twitching all over his face.
I’ve touched a nerve. I’m an inch from getting a bullet through my skull—but it’s my last chance. She’s the only thing he’s ever cared about more than the Methuselah Vector. “Do you know what your face looks like, Charles?” she said caustically. “Do you think Doreen would fancy it? Would it turn her on? Would she want to fuck a man with a face like that?”
Gifford jammed his gun against Cricket’s forehead. “If you say one more word about her, I’ll shoot you where you sit. I’ll splatter your brains all over this cockpit.”
“If only she could hear you say that. How dashing! How brave!”
Cricket heard a click as the hammer cocked back. “I’m . . . I’m warning you!” Gifford shouted. His hand was shaking—shaking even as his finger gripped the trigger.
“Doreen met her death with dignity. She didn’t run from it.”
“Enough! Enough!”
“You are dying, Charles. Will you die worthy of her love? Will you match her gentleness? Her courage?”
Gifford lowered the gun. His gaze dropped to the floor between his knees. Not just his hand but his whole body was shaking. He was weeping. Bloodred rivulets streaked down his cadaver’s cheeks. He was crying—crying real tears of blood.
It was the moment she had waited for. On the backseat lay the red-and-white cooler. This is what matters. This is more important than Charles or me. Beside her she glimpsed a red tab—the door latch? Instinctively she batted it and gave the door a shove. It flew upward, flooding the cockpit with sunlight and engine noise.
Before Gifford could look up, Cricket had rolled out of her seat, jamming her right knee into his lap and pinning his gun hand between his thighs. A shot went off as he struggled to push her away. By then she had already reached between the seats, grabbed the cooler, and flung it with all her might through the open door. It broke open as it bounced against the wing of the plane, scattering plastic tubes and smoking dry-ice pellets onto the ground below.
“Are you insane?” Gifford cried. Again he tried to throw her off, but she had braced her foot against the dashboard. In the struggle, his feet lost contact with the brakes. The plane lurched forward, its nose wobbling back and forth over the road.
“Give up!” Cricket gasped. “It’s over.”
She saw his gun hand working itself free. Gripping the two front headrests, she raised herself and ramme
d her knee back into him, adding the strength of her arms to her body weight. But she miscalculated. Her knee missed his crotch and landed with full force against his lower abdomen, just above the crest of the pelvic bone.
It was where he had been shot.
He screamed—out-roaring the roar of the engine. In an enraged spasm he threw her off him. Her arms and legs cracked like whips as she tumbled over the seats and out the door. Up and down—sky and earth—twirled about her crazily. For an instant her hands grasped vainly at a smooth metal surface—the wing of the plane. Then she slammed, still rolling, onto the road, coming to rest with her face buried in gravel.
Pushing herself up on her arms, she saw Gifford leaning out the doorway with his gun aimed directly at her. Her heart stopped, as if bracing for the bullet. He looked at her with eyes as red as coals from hell. Slime dripped from his chin and mouth. His pearly teeth glinted at her in a cold grimace. But no shot came. Slowly, pensively, he lowered the gun, then flung it over her head, into the field far beyond the irrigation ditch. With a loud click, the door of the plane came down and the latch caught tight.
A man in a red-and-green flannel shirt came running pell-mell up the road.
“No, Hank!” she shouted. “Keep away! I’m contaminated. Nemesis—”
Hank ignored her warning and scooped her into his arms. He held on to her so greedily she could scarcely breathe. “Oh, Cricket! Cricket!”
“No, Hank! Don’t—”
He silenced her with a kiss, pressing his swollen, bloodied lips against hers. It was useless to resist. Their fates were already joined.
An enormous buzz now cut through the air. The plane shot forward. Hank shoved Cricket back to the ground and rolled with her into the irrigation ditch as the cops on the road scattered into the tobacco fields. The plane was already doing thirty as it passed the Grand Marquis. Then fifty miles an hour. Seventy. Gunshots were ringing out from every direction. At a hundred miles an hour, Gifford seemed to be heading dead on for the police car lying across the road. Cricket braced for an explosion. Then, only feet from impact, the plane abruptly lifted. She heard a bang as the landing gear grazed the roof of the car, showering the area with glass and metal shrapnel. But the plane stayed aloft. It rose, higher and higher, just clearing a copse of trees before it disappeared from view.
Eight
GIFFORD WAS IN A FAST CLIMB—INDICATED airspeed 110 knots, engine roaring at 2,600 rpm, throttle and propeller knobs all the way out. He knew that his landing gear was gone. He knew that the police were shooting at him from below. But he felt calm. Nothing can harm me now. You cannot harm what is already dead.
Cricket was right. He was dying. He felt his strength slipping away. Weariness had taken over every muscle. A strange, visceral sadness—of the body, not of the mind—came over him. If she was right about this, then she was right about everything.
He banked hard left and circled back, still climbing, over the rolling hills of Loscalzo’s farm. The flashing blue lights of a dozen police cars were scattered between the gray-roofed farmhouse and the fields. Next to the irrigation ditch, he saw Cricket and Hank, like tiny figures from a toy-train set, locked in an embrace.
Theirs is a world I no longer know. He thought of the smell of the earth that morning—the manure; the damp, black soil; the broad tobacco leaves just washed by the rain. All gone now. The sky is all I have left.
The Methuselah Vector had betrayed him. It had conspired with a dark residue of his past to destroy not only him, but the dreams that had given his life meaning. Herpes. That’s what Cricket said it was. An infection he had caught one spring in high school. From a girl . . . What was her name? He had kissed her on the steps behind the library. Zooey. The Greek word for “life.”
Only seventeen years old. Kissing Zooey behind the library. And everything after that was just a countdown.
He had almost reached the cloud ceiling. High enough. After easing down the wing flaps, he pushed the throttle down to 85 percent and switched the fuel mixture from full rich to lean. His heading was south, toward Long Island Sound. A map of the coastline came up on the multifunction display. He ignored it and trained his eyes on the ground below. No instruments—he wanted to fly by instinct.
He suddenly became aware of pain—a deep, dull internal pain from his side, where Niedermann had shot him. No sooner did he notice it than he became its slave. It stiffened the muscles of his abdomen and lower back, turning every movement into agony.
“God, what a mess I’ve made,” he sighed.
He was startled to realize that he wasn’t talking to himself. In the copilot’s seat next to him sat a woman with impeccably coiffed gray hair, wearing a pearl necklace and a blue-and-eggshell-white print dress. Her gaze was fixed on the blue water in the distance.
“Doreen!”
He didn’t believe in anything after death. He knew that his oxygen-starved brain had created her. Yet she was more real to him than the whole world beneath him, or the wings and struts that held him aloft.
“Does my appearance frighten you? My face—” He raised his hand to cover the side closest to her. But his hand was mutilated as well.
No, it’s not the physical decay that repels her. It’s the decay within. “I killed a man this morning, Doreen. I shot a policeman, too, though I don’t know whether he will live or die. I won’t pretend that I did either in self-defense. It was arrogance. Their lives didn’t count for me.
“I wish that were the worst I’d done. I destroyed Yolanda, a beautiful young woman. Her children are now orphans. I brought about the death of a good man, Mr. Thieu. And Cricket . . . you remember Cricket . . . I may have killed her as well. I should have listened to her, Doreen. She tried to warn me. I was too proud. Too certain.”
Beneath him lay a long, narrow inlet of the sea, flanked on either side by tangled mazes of streets dotted with little white houses and hoary maples and oaks.
He knew there would be nothing more ahead but the wrinkled, gray sea, so he advanced the throttle and headed up into the clouds. As all his memories disappeared into a haze of white, he found himself thinking with unprecedented clarity.
Where did I go wrong?
I was conscientious. Obsessively so. Experts the world over cajoled me for moving too cautiously. I could have released the Methuselah Vector two years earlier if I had cut corners.
It worked—without question.
It was a momentous advance for mankind.
But Cricket was right. When a thing is that important, it tempts you to think that failure is impossible. You lose the capacity to question your own assumptions. You start to play God.
Then any voice that opposes you becomes the devil.
He turned and was surprised to see Doreen looking at him and not at the distant sea. A silvery tear ran down her cheek.
Suddenly it was all sun and blue sky about him, as the droning plane broke through the clouds at fourteen thousand feet. The brilliant white light seemed to chase away his pain. Instead, his entire body began to feel cold—not shivery, but cold with the extinction of suffering and desire.
Doreen was still looking at him. Only she was a young woman now, in a red sundress, with blue eyes, impossibly dark eyelashes, and straight auburn hair down to her shoulder blades. It wrenched his heart to see how beautiful she was.
“Come home, Charles,” she said. Or sang.
“Home? Where is home?”
She pointed to the sun.
Gifford smiled. Gunning the throttle, he put the wing flaps down, forcing the nose sharply upward. Within seconds the plane reached the critical angle of attack—fifteen degrees—and the stall warning began to go off. Still he veered higher, closer and closer to the vertical, flying straight for the sun.
The cockpit shimmied and rumbled. He was lying on his back, with the nose of the plane pointing straight upward. Without the lift of the air
foil, he knew that the propeller would be too feeble to keep him from plummeting into the sea.
Not Prometheus. Icarus.
So be it.
The light—!
SATURDAY
Two Weeks after Lottery Day
CRICKET LAY ON THE COT IN Bay 8 of the BSL-4 laboratory, her home for the past two weeks, and listened to the Bach Chaconne in D Minor. The solitary violin wove a line alternately rising and falling, laughing and crying, shrill and softly reassuring. Four bars endlessly repeating, yet never alike, with a pulse that ebbed and flowed like the primal rhythm of nature herself.
For many years the haunting loneliness of the piece had captivated her. One performer, one bow gliding over one string at a time, creating a three-dimensional world of harmonies out of a slender arabesque of single notes in succession. To her it proved the possibilities of One. The power of Self, unaided and alone. But now something had changed. She ached to hear another voice wrap itself around the lone violin—a piano, a harp, a guitar—anything to relieve the burden of solitude.
A gust of air whooshed past her as the rubber seal of the laboratory door broke and the outside atmosphere rushed into the negative pressure of the room. Cricket yanked out her earbuds and sat up on the edge of the cot. Through a gap in the folding screens that gave her privacy, she saw Erich Freiberg, the new acting director of Acadia Springs, standing by the doorway, with Wig Waggoner peering from behind him. Neither was wearing the mask and white paper jumpsuit in which she had gotten used to seeing them.
“Good morning, my dear Cricket,” announced Freiberg. “Dr. Waggoner has some marvelous news for you.”
Waggoner looked as if he had slept in his Coldplay T-shirt and corduroy pants. “All of your tests have come out negative. PCR, ELISA, antibody titers—there’s not a trace of Nemesis in your system.”
Freiberg grinned as he pushed one of the screens back against a counter to make room beside the cot. “Fifteen days have passed. According to the protocol you yourself worked out with the CDC, I now have the pleasure of declaring you officially infection-free. Your quarantine is lifted. You may reenter the world of the living.”
