Amanda's Story

by Brian O'Grady

  Their second encounter was initiated by Bennett. Amanda felt his mind reach for hers; it was as if his lingering mental presence coalesced into a metaphoric tap on her shoulder and her mind reflexively turned towards it. In an instant Amanda was swept up into the strange blending of their identities, but this time she was able to maintain a small degree of mental cohesion. She flowed through him with a distinct awareness of her own individuality, and then he suddenly severed their link, leaving her breathless and mildly disoriented.

  She recovered much faster that time and marveled at the power of their connection. She had just experienced what it was like to be William Bennett in high definition, and began to wonder if the intensity was unique to them or if it was the natural state. Bennett was attracted to her, and in her own way Amanda was attracted to Bennett. Did that influence the power of their connection? Or more basic still, was the desire to merge, to lose oneself in another, unique to them as a couple, or the natural reaction any mind had when the confining barriers were removed? That was a more interesting question. If all the barriers were removed, and everyone could do what she could do, what would become of humanity?

  Her mood immediately darkened with the thought that others might learn to duplicate her secret. It was hers, and hers alone, and she did not want to share. She enjoyed her secret intrusions.

  Bennett’s mind tapped her on the shoulder again, and she felt his presence stream through her body and soul. It beckoned to her and initially she resisted its pull, but he was insistent. Her mind kept slipping towards his and then righting itself. Their tug of war continued until Amanda reached a flash point. A swell of emotional energy surged through her, and the idea of hurting Bennett was suddenly very appealing. Amanda let go and shot into his mind. Immediately a whirlwind threatened her identity, but anger insulated her. She sliced through Bennett’s thin layer of conscious thought and dove to his core. She had never been this deep before, and like a thief in the night she explored the inner workings of another human being.

  She had no expectations but was quickly disillusioned. On the surface, William Bennett was calm, cool, and collected, but beneath it he was a raging tempest of sublimated memories, thoughts, and ideas. Amanda began to feel betrayed as Bennett’s deepest instincts and repulsive desires flowed over her and made her face burn. Everything about him was a lie. The foundation his life had been built upon was nothing more than a sewer, and his handsome smiling face, his simple morality, his chivalrous behavior, were all affectations, parts of a facade that hid the filth beneath.

  Afraid that Bennett’s perversions would somehow contaminate her, Amanda pulled back into herself but didn’t completely leave his mind. She knew that she could do more than just sift through the life and times of William Bennett. She was a physical presence, and like a computer virus in a mainframe she could wreak havoc. She had the ability to control him or to hurt him. One of her own deepest and darkest desires began to pulse with life, and she realized that she wanted to control Bennett. She wanted to hurt him. She tried to resist the seductive step away from sanity and to dispassionately examine her motivations, but her reasoning powers had been corrupted. She wanted to hurt Bennett because she could, because it would be fun, because she wanted to. Her desire grew into a need that demanded release. Pressure to hurt the man began to build in Amanda’s mind but she couldn’t release it. She couldn’t pull the trigger that would give her blessed relief. A single thought restrained her.

  Despite what’s beneath, William Bennett is a good man.

  Most of her mind wouldn’t recognize, much less acknowledge, that inconvenient fact. The compulsion to control, punish, and inflict pain strained against that single truth, but it was unbreakable. The moment passed and a slightly disappointed Amanda retreated back into herself.

  An hour later she sat in her bed, her mind in neutral and thoughts of William Bennett turned down low. The realization that she had the capacity to commit unwarranted acts of extreme violence was causing surprisingly little emotional dissonance. She had in the end controlled the seductive desires. She refused to explore the logical extension of her rationalization and instead waited for Nathan Martin. Bennett had been ordered to protect her, but she didn’t think it would be necessary.

  CHAPTER 23

  “I’m glad you’re here, Colonel—oh sorry,” Leo Arguerra said as Bennett walked into the monitoring room. His comment was cut short as Dr. Martin followed.

  “Leo, right?” Bennett asked the CDC employee.

  “Yes, sir,” he addressed the colonel and nervously nodded at Martin, his boss. “I think the monitors are broken,” he said, and moved to one side, letting the two new arrivals have a clear view of the three monitors that recorded Amanda’s activities.

  “They seem to be working just fine,” Martin said gruffly. A different perspective of Amanda Flynn filled each screen.

  “Just wait,” the second tech said, without turning away from the monitors. The four men watched for almost a minute before Amanda turned and faced one of the cameras directly. After a moment, the middle screen turned blue and a message appeared: “No Input.” Ten seconds later, Amanda reappeared, her back against the wall and her legs stretched the length of her bed. She smiled and turned to the second camera and the monitor to the right flashed, went blue, and then an image reappeared seconds later.

  “This is starting to get real creepy,” the second monitor tech said.

  “It’s been doing this since we turned them back on,” Arguerra said.

  “Turn them off,” Martin said dismissively, and started towards the stairwell and the isolation room.

  “It’s okay; turn them off. Give us ten minutes, gentlemen, then resume your duties.” They stared at Bennett for an instant and then left quickly, neither wanting to be privy to the inevitable confrontation.

  The metal stairway clattered as first Martin and then a moment later Bennett descended to the observation room. Martin walked to the window and stared at Amanda, who seemed to be staring right back. “Colonel, do you know who Mary Mallon was?”

  “Typhoid Mary? Your justification for what you’ve done and are about to do is Typhoid Mary?” Bennett turned and faced the smaller man, who continued to study Amanda.

  “I’m not justifying anything. I am simply having a conversation while we wait for the secretary to order the general to let me do my job.”

  “Your job does not include purposely infecting an American citizen with a known lethal pathogen.”

  “Mary Mallon infected 53 people with Typhus. Three of those people died. The State of New York felt that she posed such a danger to the health and welfare of the people that they deprived her of her liberty for the rest of her life. Now, instead of Typhus, imagine if she carried EDH 1, a pathogen thousands of times more infectious and lethal. This one individual could potentially kill millions, possibly more.”

  “Mary Mallon refused to be tested, and when she died was found to have active bacteria in her gallbladder. Amanda Flynn has done nothing but cooperate. You have put her through 89 different studies, and each one has been negative. Eighty-nine,” he repeated slowly. “There is not a physician or a court in this land that would believe that she poses a risk, and you know it. This is all a pretext to justify re-exposing her.”

  “I think I see the problem here. You have made the assumption that I am going to re-expose her to the EDH 1 virus,” Martin said, as if he genuinely believed that their disagreement was based solely on a misunderstanding. “I would never think of exposing her to such a risk. What I have here is a nascent vaccine. We have removed all genetic and infectious material and have only the viral coat proteins. Her immune system will respond to them as it would if this were the real virus, giving us the opportunity to define her resistance.”

  “Is that how you sold this?” Bennett was incredulous. “That what you’re doing poses no threat?” Martin had finally turned towards Bennett, who fought
to restrain himself. He wanted to rip the case from Martin’s hand and inject him with his nascent vaccine.

  “The threat is negligible and justified,” Martin said smugly, and now Bennett wanted to simply punch him in the face.

  “Listen, you can lie to whomever you want, but don’t lie to me. You have no idea what’s in your nascent vaccine, and we both know that preserving the viral proteins while eliminating any infective material is an impossibility. If any genetic material was missed the viral particles will auto-assemble and you will be injecting her with live virus.”

  “I have more faith in our ability to separate proteins from nucleic acids.”

  “That is bullshit and we both know it. Did you run this by Stanley Cripps?”

  “My predecessor is no longer involved in this case.”

  “So you got rid of anyone who would know better. Did you test this in culture or any animal testing?”

  “I do not answer to you, Colonel, but in the spirit of cooperation I will tell you that we have done both, and this vaccine has proven to be safe.”

  Bennett knew that Martin was probably not lying completely. It was likely that some form of testing had been done, but it was equally likely that those tests had not had enough time to prove that the vaccine was unequivocally safe. He would have more respect for Martin if he openly admitted that he wasn’t certain that the vaccine was safe, but that it was a calculated risk. Amanda’s immune system had already faced the mature and deadly form of the virus and had somehow contained or destroyed it. In all likelihood it would respond vigorously when re-exposed to the virus or even to its proteins. In theory, Amanda’s cells would destroy EDH 1 just as effectively as they would a common flu virus.

  But there were a thousand “what-ifs” that normally gave pause to an ethical researcher. What if injecting the virus, instead of contracting the infection through touch or respiration, allowed the infection to spread faster than her immune system could mount a response? What if she had never been infected in the first place and had simply been a statistical anomaly? What if she had only limited immunity, like some develop with the chicken-pox virus? Re-exposure would then be lethal. What if Martin’s reconstituted virus had mutated and her previous immunity offered no defense? What if they were incapable of determining her resistance? What if her resistance was idiosyncratic, unique to her and not applicable to others? He could stand here and rattle off a dozen other possibilities that had already been given the official brush-off. His only hope, short of physically barring Martin access to Amanda—a thought that prompted a smile—was that General Dixon could talk some sense into Martin’s boss’s boss. As if on cue, his phone began to vibrate.

  “Sorry Bill; it’s a no-go. The Secretary, the head of the CDC, everybody agrees with Martin. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has ordered that you stand down.”

  “General, begging your pardon, but you, the Chairman, even the Secretary, have no idea what he intends to do, or why he’s doing it.”

  “Bill, this is not my first rodeo. Martin is replacing a legend, and he wants to pull an Aaron Rodgers. He wants to one-up Professor Cripps, and he sees Mrs. Flynn as his ticket. I think everyone knows that, but his point that she could help a lot of people is rather compelling.” Bennett silently cursed. “They’ve taken it out of my hands, Bill. They wanted you replaced, but I think they’ll accept you taking a vacation, at least until all of this is over.”

  It dawned on Bennett that maybe the Director of the CDC and the Secretary of Health and Human Services weren’t so naïve. Martin had played his role well; he maneuvered anyone who could offer any resistance off into the wings and then promised his masters that he could deliver the medical breakthrough of the century, with all the attendant acclaim. All they had to do was to run interference for him as he performed a harmless medical procedure on a woman who by all accounts should have already died. The unspoken bonus was that if there was an adverse outcome there was no one left to say that it wasn’t from her initial exposure. It was all so nice and tidy, with Bennett as the single loose string. “So you want me to hand over the keys to the place and go to the beach.” He had taken several steps away from Martin and kept his voice low.

  “Basically,” Dixon answered ruefully.

  “General, we didn’t build this program just to turn it over to some amoral asshole out to make a name for himself.” Bennett’s voice was beginning to rise and he no longer cared if Martin heard him.

  “I understand that, Bill, and I am in your corner. The problem is that I don’t have enough stars on my shoulder. I am asking you as a friend and ordering you as your commanding officer to walk away. Let this one go.”

  “So you are ordering me to allow a government employee to administer a potentially lethal injection to a US citizen without her knowledge or consent.”

  “This isn’t my order, Colonel.” The discussion took a decidedly formal turn. “It is the order of our Commander in Chief.”

  “It is an illegal order, General, and you know it.”

  “Every soldier must make that determination for themselves, and I would recommend that you make it quickly.” Dixon’s tone had a subtle undercurrent of conspiracy.

  Bennett was about to respond when the sound of boots on the metal stairway made him turn his head. He watched as his chief of security approached, the weight of the world balanced on his shoulders.

  “I am sorry, sir, but you will have to come with me.”

  “I’m sorry, Bill. I didn’t think they would move so quickly,” General Dixon spoke into Bennett’s ear.

  “Captain Lewis, why have you brought a firearm into my facility?” Bennett addressed the base’s chief of security as if he were a raw recruit.

  “I have been ordered to escort you to your office, sir.”

  Martin turned to face Bennett. “For what it’s worth, I do admire your ideals. It’s sad that there is no real world application for them.”

  Bennett took a breath and turned towards Amanda. Once again she seemed to be staring right back at him, almost through him. “Thank you, General,” he said, and closed his phone abruptly. A strange sense of calm descended as Amanda’s crystal-blue eyes seemed to fill his mind. “Captain, a moment please,” he said, briefly turning to the security chief and then back to Martin. He had a hundred things he wanted to say, but rejected them all. From two feet away Bennett’s right fist shot into Martin’s upturned chin. The smaller man’s head snapped back with enough force to propel him backwards into the corner sink. The porcelain struck him mid-back, arcing his spine until the back of his head struck the wall with a resounding thud. On the way to the floor, his head caught the edge of the sink, whiplashing his chin into his chest.

  “That’s going to leave a mark,” the captain said with a deadpan expression.

  “I expect you to report exactly what you saw, Captain.”

  “I saw Dr. Martin slip on the polished floor, striking his head on the sink, sir.” He smiled at his colleague. “I must say, sir, you really laid him out.”

  “Never do anything halfway.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Martin spat his bloody words at Bennett as he tried to scramble to his feet.

  “I warn you, Martin, this floor is very slippery. You could slip again. Now, you just sit there and wait while I go find you some medical attention. It shouldn’t be more than an hour.” He turned to Captain Lewis. “Do you have a detail upstairs?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Bring someone down here and have them watch the doctor. I believe that he may have sustained a head injury and shouldn’t be allowed to walk.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Amanda had witnessed the entire encounter from Bennett’s perspective. She had wanted him to hit Martin from the instant she felt his mind draw near, and was fairly certain that she had nudged Bennett in that direction. She rubbed her right hand and the lingering sting that she shared w
ith Bennett. She couldn’t remember ever striking someone in anger, and the experience left something to be desired. For one thing it hurt, and even Bennett, his mind receding into the distance and into the white noise of a hundred other minds, was wondering if he had cracked a metacarpal on Martin’s chin. For another, it did nothing to relieve the pressure that was once again building inside her—the same pressure that had nearly compelled her to hurt Bennett. Martin saw her as an expendable asset, a thing to be used for his advantage. His very presence stoked a firestorm of emotions that needed to be vented, and she wanted to lash out. She indulged herself as wonderfully violent images played through her mind.

  Make it happen, a voice, the very essence of seduction, whispered from the darkness. It wasn’t the first time the alien voice had offered advice. Amanda had heard its whispers for weeks now. Lose yourself. As much as she wanted to deny it, the darkness and its voice were and had always been a part of her. It wasn’t alien; it was homegrown. More than twenty years of societal pressures and learning how to be a “good girl” had silenced it, but now it had recovered its voice and strength. But it was still innocent, still a small child. It had encouraged her to hurt Bennett only because it didn’t know better. She had to teach it, direct it, and when appropriate, use it.

  “Not yet,” Amanda whispered to herself.

  After Bennett had left, Amanda’s view of the observation room became poor. The strong emotions that fueled and emanated from the darkness in her mind obscured its vision. She tried to find Martin in the chorus that sang in her head, but her energized mind lacked the focus. It kept defaulting to Bennett, whose voice was remote but recognizable. She closed her eyes and willed herself to focus, but her mental stream kept diverting down the well-worn groove to William Bennett. After countless futile efforts she finally relented, and his familiar mind seemed to flow around her. Hoping that her mental spelunking would slow her racing thoughts, she decided to camp out in his mind, but the memory of Emily Larson suddenly flooded her thoughts. In details too real for life, she saw her aunt’s university photograph on Bennett’s desktop computer and heard her strained voice in his ear. He had talked with her and she was coming. The possibility that this nightmare could be over so suddenly added to her emotional energy, and she very nearly missed Nathan Martin opening the outer airlock.