The Eden Plague

by David VanDyke

  Then I did as Elise had said, sort of. I drove to the second-nearest drugstore to my house in case they had been listening, and bought a disposable phone with cash. It was all cash from now on.

  Back in the van, I drove out of town on the main road heading west as I waited for the half hour mark. I pulled over into a gas station and filled up. As soon as I was done, I drove around a corner onto a side street, parked, and then dialed the number.

  “Yeah,” I heard Elise’s voice.

  “It’s me. I’m mobile, I got money and some supplies.” I could hear traffic sounds behind her. I figured she was at a pay phone. Not many of those around anymore.

  “All right. You know the Iron Saddle?”

  “Biker bar, on Route One south of Quantico.”

  “Yeah. Meet me there, one hour.”

  “Roger wilco.”

  She hung up, and I started wending my way south, then back eastwards to pick up US-1 at Dumfries north of Quantico Marine base. I was glad to stay in Virginia, where it was legal to carry around loaded firearms.

  I laughed to myself, humorlessly. I was a recent murderer, or at least a manslaughterer, and no matter how justified it seemed, I had lost control and I was guilty, but I didn’t want to become a guest of the state just yet. And maybe I could do something to make up for it later. Some kind of penance.

  Right. I kept trying to convince myself too. The serpent didn’t believe it either.

  -5-

  I passed the Marine Corps museum in the dark, the blazing spire on the roof reminiscent of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima. My grandfather had been there; Gunnery Sergeant Donald James Markis, USMC. I suppressed a strong impulse to turn into the parking lot. To put off this rendezvous for as long as I could. Driving south on US-1 through the cold quiet in my familiar musty van, time seemed suspended for a little while.

  I wished I had a cigarette. Since I didn’t, I tortured myself by imagining I did. I thought of the last time I’d smoked one, with Gramps as he was dying of emphysema in hospice. I’d helped him out of the oxygen rig and onto the balcony, to suck down one last forbidden coffin nail before I said good night.

  I should have said goodbye.

  My eyes watered, and I squeezed them with thumb and forefinger. Goodbye, Gramps. Maybe I’ll see you soon.

  I realized I hardly cared at this point. I didn’t think I had much to live for. My brain was messed up, like my life. I barely held onto my job on Fort Belvoir, trying desperately to keep up with even the light workload they gave me. Hanging out with the other retired shooters and door-kickers, green and maroon and black berets and tabs and coins sitting in their sterile cubes and offices, marking time, milking our security clearances for a few more bucks. Staring at my own beret perched on the shelf above my computer screen, the Pararescue flash with its guardian angel, cradling the world in its arms, a symbol of what I was and never would be again. Reminiscing war stories. Trying to keep my hand in.

  Trying to starve the serpent.

  Trying to look myself in the mirror every morning, knowing I was useless. They wouldn’t let me put my hands on a patient, wouldn’t let me practice. I couldn’t even drive an ambulance, much less work trauma. Just push papers. Be a consultant.

  A man who couldn’t do his job wasn’t a man.

  But I had done the job today. I had taken a shooter down like the pro I used to be, and if she had been human, I could have patched her up too, if I hadn’t killed her. Only I hadn’t killed her, I’d killed the suit, and I couldn’t patch him up from dead.

  My stomach clenched. No excuse for that. I’d crossed the line from watchdog to wolf. I’d bitten the hand that fed me, no matter how much that hand stank. I’d murdered a duly appointed representative of the United States government, and they never forget that.

  They would never let me rest.

  I could imagine what my father would say. Come on, Dan, pull your head out. You have a vehicle, you have an ally, you have a mission – and you have resources as yet untapped.

  Now all I needed was to care. That was the hard part.

  The Iron Saddle came up on my right, a big parking lot filled with bikes surrounding a faux-western building with an enormous roof extension to the front, providing a covered space. Even tonight, temperature in the forties and a bit of a breeze, there were ten or twenty bikers and their camp followers outside, under the roof or sitting on the bikes, knocking back a few. Most of them would be inside, though it shouldn’t be too busy, being Wednesday night.

  I steered the van sharply to the right, went around the building, parked nose-out in the left rear corner, under a hanging tree limb. Easy to see out of, hard to be seen. I sat there for a minute, checked the dive watch on my wrist. 300M, it said to me, and 18:56. Four minutes to seven. Close enough, and better to be early than late.

  I used the time to settle the XD in a belly holster, threading the clip holder onto my belt. I reloaded with the rest of the hollow-points and finished the magazines off with ball ammo from the box. If it seemed likely I would have to shoot any of Elise’s super-healers, I had the 12-gauge and the M-4 assault rifle.

  I got those ready too, and by that time it was four minutes after, so I slid the long guns onto the floor, threw an old sleeping bag over them, and got out of the van. I crossed the parking lot warily toward the back door, the Ritalin still singing in my veins, but I knew it wouldn’t last.

  I shouldn’t have taken those extra minutes. My obsessive desire to be prepared had betrayed me, those eight precious minutes, as the back door flew open and Elise burst through.

  She was running flat out and a man stepped into the doorway beyond with something big and gunlike in his hands.

  BOOM, BOOM, like a shotgun but twice as loud, and Elise staggered and fell down, off to my left. Strangely, I felt like it was me that got hit.

  The serpent hissed and I drew the XD and laid down covering fire in the direction of the lighted doorway while I crabbed sideways toward my fallen comrade. I figured that was what she was now. I grabbed the back of her jacket collar with my left hand and dragged her behind a convenient Harley trailer, popping off a couple more shots at the doorway. There was blood all over her, again, and all over my hand and arm now.

  “Dan,” Elise gasped, “get out of here. Leave me. I’ll be fine, they just want me back on the leash. Here…” She reached up with one hand to grab my wrist. She pulled it down toward her face.

  Bit me.

  I jerked my hand out of her mouth with a reflexive yelp. “What the –” I throttled a curse.

  The serpent thrashed, demanding to be set free.

  “Just go. You’ll understand soon enough. It’s all I can do. Now get away. We’re both still alive, you’re free. Stay that way. Go. Go!” Her eyes were liquid with tears, confusing me.

  Right now the capture team was probably working their way around both sides of the building, with one guy covering the door that they sure weren’t going to come through again. She was right; I had to un-ass the AO right now. That means “get out,” in civilian talk.

  “Thanks anyway, and you’re welcome,” I hissed angrily. I shook my bitten hand in disgust, then backed up low, keeping the trailer between me and the building. I moved behind the scrubby line of pine trees, then ran to the back of my van and climbed in the rear door.

  Through the windshield I could see one man coming around the right end of the building, with that big shotgun-thing in his hands. It looked like a grenade launcher, one of those rotary kind with a dozen shots, like a huge revolver. Probably loaded with flechette, something to take down a super-healer.

  The front parking lot of the building was filled with activity, as bikers roared off or spread out to watch from a distance in about equal numbers. Probably the ones with no record or warrants outstanding stayed for the fun, and to prove they weren’t afraid.

  The lights and activity provided a backdrop and enough confusion that I wasn’t worried they would see me here in the back seat of my van, watching from
around the front headrest. They might think it was Elise that had fired at them. It didn’t really matter what they thought, though, as I could hear sirens in the southern distance. Someone had called 911 and Stafford County’s finest were on their way.

  I was right; they grabbed her and dragged her off, three of them, big men in ill-fitting dark suits. A fourth opened the door to the black Suburban at the edge of the front parking lot, and the thinning crowd of bikers parted like the Red Sea as the three men walked through waving their cannons. A moment later they were gone northbound in a screech of tire smoke.

  I followed discreetly, heading north too, trailing behind. I wanted to duck into Quantico Marine Base rather than risk getting pulled over by the sheriffs’ department and answer their questions. I’d risk the slight possibility of a search at the Marine gate. Usually the faded windshield sticker with Senior Master Sergeant’s stripes, and my retired ID card, were good for a wave-through with hardly a look.

  I got in all right, in the commissary gate, to relative safety. Whatever you can say about the Agency, they did not like to tangle with the Department of Defense without all their ducks in order. DOD didn’t much like them either, and Defense was the 800-pound gorilla of the US Government.

  The county sheriffs’ department, on the other hand, had no problem busting service people on their own turf. Lawyer’s fees, court costs and fines kept them in shiny new cop equipment.

  I pulled into the on-base McDonald’s drive-through and got two Big Mac meals. I was hungry, what with having eaten nothing but a ham sandwich in some very strange circumstances since coming home less than three hours ago. Was it only that long? My whole world had turned upside down in those three hours.

  I sat in the parking lot, with the van’s rear against the dumpster-corral wall, watching and thinking. I doubted they knew where I was, or they’d have had me by now. They must have been tracking Elise, though. Some kind of bug, like the bloodhound modules we used in the sandbox for certain ops. About the size of a pack of cigarettes, a little antenna, a strong magnet, turn it on, stick it under an enemy bumper and as long as the battery lasted you could track him, intel or drone fodder.

  I crammed burger into my mouth, sucked down the first Coke in one long pull. I ate the entire first large fries in three big bites, then slowed down to work on the second meal, and kept thinking.

  There was still the mess at my house, unless they cleaned it up. They probably would. And since they had avoided the sheriffs, they didn’t want involvement with local law enforcement. They would want to keep looking for me themselves, I figured.

  Well, I’d do my best not to be found.

  After I finished off the food and my belly felt comfortably distended, I looked at my left hand and the human bite Elise had bestowed on me. Had she lost it? She didn’t seem out of her head. What had she meant, “You’ll understand?” It wasn’t severe, just a few blood spots where her canines had cut, and some generalized bruising that was fading already.

  I pulled out my aid bag and unrolled it to access my equipment. I poured some disinfectant on my hand, wrapped it in some gauze, tied it off awkwardly with my teeth and forgot about it.

  It was about twenty hundred, eight PM. The Marine Corps Exchange was still open and it was right over my shoulder, a hundred yards across the parking lot. All right, time to improve my supply situation.

  I drove over and parked just on the side of the enormous building. Then I grabbed a cart and went shopping. An ice chest, always useful. A two-gallon water jug. Some MREs. Field gear. A few other odds and ends, another two prepaid disposable phones and a pack of batteries for them. I would have to make some calls sometime. I paid cash again, loaded my purchases in the van, then drove off down a side-street and parked next to a pair of battered white base engineer work vans, blending right in.

  Then the serpent and I turned in, exhausted.

  -6-

  My sleep was a big black scary thing, where I pumped round after round into Men In Black. They either wouldn’t go down, or the bullets would exit the gun with a little pop and bounce off their chests, and I would end up in a fistfight where I’d punch and punch and I couldn’t hurt them and they would laugh. Then it would turn into something else, something from my past, like dragging my dead best buddy Hector Koltunczyk into a hollow in the dirt, trying to plug the leaks in him with my fingers, but he sprouted fountains of blood like one of those flexible hose sprinklers where the water came out the holes.

  I had come to the realization long ago that not even the new, Pararescue-trained me of several years after could have saved Hector, but if there was any one thing that drove me to leave the Army Airborne and try out for PJ, it was that incident where he died in my hands in Mogadishu.

  It had taken a boatload of pushing, a break in service, giving up my stripes and starting over to make the move to the Air Force Pararescue program. The Army hated it when people didn’t re-up, and they dangled goodies, choice assignments and choice jobs, in front of me. But I’d wanted to learn to save lives as well as take them, and they couldn’t guarantee me Special Forces Medic, which was the only other possibility I’d considered.

  So I went PJ. That’s the nickname, from “parajumper.” Despite the odds of about ninety percent washout, I’d not only qualified, I’d excelled at it all the way through the Pipeline. Seventeen months of training just to graduate, ‘That Others May Live.’ That was our motto.

  At the end of it I was one of fewer than three hundred of the very best combat lifesavers in the world, cross-trained with a variety of special ops expertise. Small arms, water operations, light aircraft, survival, mountaineering, demolitions, you name it, I had done it in sixteen years in the PJs. Some of my Army buddies had thought I was a pogue or some kind of traitor for going green to blue, but none of my real friends did. And nobody that met a PJ at work ever thought so either.

  That Others May Live. That’s why I did it.

  I was elite of the elite, back then. I was a sky-god in a blood-red beret, before that IED took it all away from me, leaving me a bum knee and a bad back and a serpent in my brain.

  I realized I had gone from dreaming to drowsy reminiscing somewhere along the line, as dawn was breaking over Quantico. I could hear the sounds of morning PT off in the distance, and a five-ton truck drove by my parking place with a rattle.

  I sat up, sucked down a half-liter bottle of water, then slipped out the side door and took a leak between the vans. I was hungry again, really hungry, so I went to the Mickey Dee’s one more time and ate my fill. Nobody seemed to be looking for me, and with my hair cut high and tight I blended in pretty well here, though my shave was a day old.

  I was halfway through my third McMuffin when it hit me. No headaches this morning. And the serpent was hiding.

  Usually I woke up with a near-migraine that took four ibuprofen and a triple espresso to tamp down to a manageable level. Sometimes vicodin or some other opiate, though I tried to keep that to a minimum. And my knee should be locked up stiff, and my back hurting. But right now I was pain-free for the first time in a long while. Since Afghanistan. And jones-free too, for that matter.

  I looked at the gauze on my hand. On impulse I unwound it to check the wound. I rubbed at the dried blood, then finished the sandwich and got up to go into the restroom. I washed my hand, and then stared at it.

  Nothing there.

  No bite, no bruise, smooth pristine skin. And I felt good. Better than I’d felt in a while. I stared at myself in the scratched-up mirror for a while, until someone else came in to use the toilet. I shook out of the reverie and went back to my breakfast, my pancakes and hash brown patties and coffee and large orange juice.

  I sat and thought about super-healing. Stupid, pulp-sci-fi name, but what else should I call it? X-factor? Sounded like a TV talent show. Wolverine, like that comic-book guy? Maybe H-factor. Or XH, experimental healing. Because it had to be experimental. The government could never keep secrets for long, no matter what the conspiracy
nuts thought. The government was made up of people, good people and bad people and heroes and stupid arrogant people like Jenkins who lost control of missions and secrets. But what was the secret this time?

  The obvious answer was it was a kind of drug. Shoot you up, accelerate the body’s natural healing, instant cure. But you couldn’t pass on a drug with a bite. Because that was what I thought had happened. Elise had bit me, deliberately, and said I’d understand. So she passed it to me, at least some of it. I was already grateful to her for that.

  Discounting the supernatural – and I wasn’t, not completely, but my mind shied away from that for now – it would have to be some kind of parasite or bacteria or virus, that was able to spread from person to person and help them out. Or maybe…what about nanites? Like in science fiction, like those Borg things that injected you and took over your body and mind with germ-sized machines. But no matter what, it had to be something small, and self-replicating, self-sustaining.

  I wondered how much the XH could cure. Obviously gross injuries were possible. And cancer, if I could believe Elise. What about AIDS? What about aging? Life extension, even immortality? Did they even realize what they had? My mind whirled with the possibilities.

  If it conferred youth and immortality, it would change the world like nothing ever. The rich would pay anything, and people would kill for it. People would go to war for it. In fact, it might win wars, making soldiers into fearless super-warriors. And who would decide who got it?

  But Elise had said something about a downside, some kind of disadvantage…maybe some kind of burnout? Maybe instead of immortality it used up the bearer, ate up his life so the more healing he had to do, the shorter his life was. Maybe. But Elise had looked younger than I was, twenties maybe. And cute and gutsy, under all that blood and stress.