Fears surfaced, with far more intensity than she’d expected.
The cápsula reached the top of the steep incline, and Meredith looked back. Her stomach felt suddenly empty, as if its contents had been jettisoned. It was a long way down. They picked up speed, curved around a section of track and went down a little, then up, less steeply than before. The lights of the domed city glimmered all around.
Having finished his first beer, Riggio stared out the window, not saying anything. He slid the second glass closer to him, but did not sip from it yet. He seemed to be especially unhappy about something.
The cápsula whipped around turns and went through the first loop. True to the waiterbot’s promise, nothing spilled. But Meredith had lost her sense of direction.
Nervously, she shoveled appetizers into her mouth and tried not to look outside or think about the ride. She attempted to imagine that she was back on terra firma, in a normal cocktail lounge.
Meredith took a big sip of her drink, trying to numb her senses. It didn’t work. She closed her eyes. The dining compartment was going through a huge loop. They came out of it, and she breathed a deep sigh of relief. She wondered how long the ride was, then realized the cápsula seemed to be going over track they had already covered in the last few moments, perhaps from a track switching mechanism. The impish designer of this ride was keeping them on the high section, going back and forth.
The roller coaster car plunged off the edge of the high platform, onto a track that seemed to go straight down. Nonetheless, the table and pair sitting at it remained upright.
They sped through another tunnel, with fireworks sparking on all sides, then roared around the top of the roof of the entertainment complex and down steeply, almost vertical.
They came to a smooth stop at the bottom, where their waitress opened the door of the cápsula and bowed. “Would you like to see our aperitif menu?” she inquired.
“No thank you,” Meredith said. “We have to get back.” Her stomach felt queasy, but she had not gotten that sick.
As she and Riggio disembarked, other patrons left their cápsulas as well, and Meredith was amazed that no one seemed ill. Eating and drinking on a wild ride didn’t seem compatible, but apparently the designer of this ride had discovered a way of accomplishing the task.
Perhaps it was similar to experiments she’d heard about with high speed trains, in which the passenger compartments were maintained perfectly level while the rest of the train banked for turns and made other movements. In those experiments, passengers did become sick during test runs, because their movements didn’t track with what they saw on the horizon. To correct for that, the technical wizards made adjustments, so that the experimental passenger compartments moved a little.
The engineers of this ride must have done something like that, and they might have slipped something calming into the snacks and drinks as well—or perhaps something special was in the air of the compartments, some kind of tranquilizer gas.
While waiting for the elevator, Meredith looked sidelong at Riggio, and thought again of using him as a character in one of her stories. He seemed to be deeply sad, in an arcane, unfathomable realm. Yet she didn’t want to intrude on his thoughts and feelings unless he confided in her.
He might be worrying about General Neron’s investigation, and much more—with the addition of his memory gaps, he had a lot to worry about. She thought back on story notes she had entered in her computer at home, and found herself convinced more than ever that he would make an interesting character. But in what plot?
Often in the past she had bounced her writing ideas and manuscripts off her former husband for feedback, but this option was no longer available. She missed being with him.
Meredith tried to put the longing aside, because it only gave her pain. She resolved to add more notes on Riggio to her computer file at the first opportunity, and to change his name. She was considering the name Charlton for this character.
She didn’t have a plot worked out yet, only bits and pieces of a story that had been whirling around in her mind like spinning jigsaw pieces, not falling into place. She sensed a good story there, though, one in which she could insert social commentary with the prose, but not too much. She had learned in a writing class that preaching would turn off her readers, so only sprinklings should be included.
The core of her new story would be the flirtatious Riggio-character, Charlton, a lothario who thought he is was God’s gift to women. Cliché, Meredith, she thought. Avoid it! Even so, she could use the concept in a title: God’s Gift.
A plot began to take shape in her mind.
Through an overabundance of hormones, Charlton sought to forget his troubles, the missing parts of his past and his memories, by bedding all the attractive women with whom he worked.
As a distraction from his problems, he sought to make every woman want him. Then he met the love of his life, and wanted to change, and love only her. But she had seen his bad behavior, and for a time she stayed away from him. That, of course, would have to change.
A novelette, perhaps, for the romance market. Any story she wrote about Riggio should be sexy. That was his most distinctive physical characteristic, but he was much deeper than that, with mysteries in his mind that even he did not seem to understand.
~~~
In his hotel room that evening, Riggio had trouble falling asleep. He kept drifting off, but for only a few minutes before waking up and worrying about everything. Most of all, he didn’t want the General to blame Meredith for anything Riggio had done wrong, and with his lapses of memory he had no understanding of the details of his past. Just sketchy, troubling images that came and went. After lying awake he would drift off, and wake up again.
He felt out of sync, increasingly despondent as he worried not only about getting Meredith in trouble, but about harming her himself, with his own hands. She didn’t deserve any of the horrors that had been running through his mind, and he’d been fighting off. The terrible, inexplicable urges.
Finally he managed to fall asleep, but found himself trapped in a nightmare. Now he wanted to awaken, but couldn’t.
He was floating in a fluid, immersed in a strange darkness. There were others like him, floating beside him. He could not see them in the blackness but they kept bumping into him, and he kept pushing them away, but they always came back.
Suddenly, for a few seconds, an eerie green illumination permeated the fluid, and he saw four creatures, all turned toward him, but they were badly deformed, with missing arms, featureless faces and partially formed, misaligned eyes.
They looked like... fetuses, but three of them had not formed correctly. They swam toward him, accompanied by another fetus that looked more complete... all of them together, coming after him.
Riggio awoke, and found himself in a cold, dripping sweat.
CHAPTER 24
It was Agent Jantz’s first day back in her office, after trips to cities around the United States to inspect murder scenes connected with Dr. Kato Yordanius and the killer he had created in his laboratory. There were seventeen murders now that were linked to one perpetrator by DNA, fingerprints, and other evidence. She suspected it was just the tip of the iceberg, and that many more victims would be discovered. Out of the seventeen, eight were linked by DNA as well as fingerprints, while the other nine had only fingerprints that were good enough for basic identification, but not good enough to extract DNA information.
The demented Yordanius—physically a mutant, had tampered illegally with human genetics!—and might even have created more than just the one known murderer. The scientist had escaped the raid on his laboratory, eluding the FBI and taking hundreds of experimental fetuses with him. According to testimony from people who worked in his lab, he had generated a wide range of human embryos by every known method, and had then done additional things to them, creating unknown “humans”—actually, unknown creatures. What if all of them had grown up to be murderers? The thought chilled her.
&nb
sp; The one slayer she knew about so far was a modern-day Houdini, a serial killer who was able to escape from crime scenes no matter how close the police were behind him. He seemed to have a preternatural ability, a sixth sense that enabled him to get away.
It was as if this particular laboratory-bred murderer even knew when a police officer or FBI agent made computer inquiries about him, suggesting that either he had paranormal abilities or an inside-law-enforcement connection. Thus far no officers of the law were implicated. None were known victims of this killer that Jantz had been pursuing, either, and she didn’t want to be the first.
Everyone else in the Washington, D.C. headquarters office had gone home, and across the wide expanse of this floor only dim lights were on, except for sensor bulbs that had brightened over her section.
Her fingers danced over the keys of her computer as she entered information on the case, summarizing her findings. She preferred this method to voice activating the computer or using a psi-link connection, so that she could just think the words she wanted typed.
A red and gold sticker over the screen read:
FBI
188th ANNIVERSARY
On a nearby wall an immense black and white photograph of J. Edgar Hoover looked down on a reenactment of G-men shooting John Dillinger in front of the Biograph Theater.
All by herself in the office, Jantz suddenly worried that a Yordanius lab-bred killer might have found its way through the security of the Federal Office Building and the FBI. Was the creature on this floor right now, creeping toward her in the shadows?
Apprehensively, she looked through the glass partitions of her office into the outer office, with desk after desk and cubicle after cubicle, and offices like hers along the walls. She detected no sign of movement, but even if a killer was not here physically, she felt his presence anyway, just beyond her reach. She patted a lump under her coat, a Templar automatic pistol in a shoulder harness. A smaller automatic was strapped to one of her paralyzed legs, beneath her slacks.
She also had a deadly cartridge gun in her desk. With a quick, efficient movement she brought out the weapon and inspected its digital settings, which controlled a powerful arsenal that could be discharged in rapid fire—ion blasts, tranquilizer darts, poison projectiles, and even trip wires to be fired at fleeing suspects. All of the settings were correct.
Still holding the weapon, she activated her exosuit, so that she could stand up and look more closely in all directions. The pale orange glow of the suit surrounded her crippled lower body. Even with only a little movement on her part, rising from her desk and looking warily across the office, she heard the energy field crackling around her.
With a deep sigh she sat back down and deactivated the suit, and placed the cartridge gun on top of her desk, where she could get to it quickly if necessary. Jantz realized that her imagination was running a little wild, perhaps because she needed to catch up on her sleep. One of the qualities that made her a top investigator was an imagination in which she thought of scenarios that others missed—a useful character trait that she combined with insight and the instinct of a top cop. She got to know fugitives so well that she began to think like them, began to anticipate their actions. It had saved her life in the past; she had sensed things before they occurred.
But not this time. She didn’t have a feeling for this case, didn’t have a grip on it. With this particular serial killer she couldn’t get a reading, couldn’t pick up a scent, couldn’t figure out what he was thinking. Although she had pored over case studies on psychotic and sociopathic behavior and was a student of the most innovative methods of criminal investigation, she couldn’t interpret or predict the behavior of this perpetrator, and it scared the hell out of her.
A couple of the known facts: He was male, and a lady-killer, in more ways than one. All of the known victims were attractive women.
On the computer screen Agent Jantz brought up a national map of his known travels. Punching two keys she zoomed in, one by one, on the street maps of cities lit up where bodies had been found, along with evidence that the same killer had been involved. The crime scenes were all over the country, and not only in cities. Bodies had also been found alongside highways.
She zoomed back to the national map, studied the dates of each crime. The most recent had been in Denver, and the killer’s car had been found in Seattle. Yet, there was no evidence that he had harmed anyone in Seattle, at least not yet.
This monster was incredibly elusive, like the crazed scientist who created him, able to either sense pursuit or predict how he would be chased, so that he could make clever escape plans. As just one example, when the bastard was stabbing Mrs. Baldwin in Denver, she set off an implanted panic alarm, the type sold to women for personal protection. It emitted a powerful GPS signal, and police tracked it quickly, arriving at the upstairs bedroom of the sorority house only four minutes after the silent alarm went off.
But they found no suspect on the premises, and no one had been seen leaving through the only exit. Did the killer have wings? Could he make himself invisible? Somehow, neither seemed impossible.
The local cops rounded everyone up for questioning. Jantz had been to Denver, had seen the local reports, knew all the names. At least a dozen witnesses described the murderer—a handsome young man with black hair and striking, sea-blue eyes—and they had a composite drawing of him that lay on the desk in front of Jantz. But even knowing what he looked like, or close to it, he was nowhere to be found. He had disappeared into thin air, and even managed to spirit away the dead woman’s car. He was like a faceless ghost.
It gave Agent Jantz the chills.
This killer didn’t seem to care if he left some physical evidence at his grisly crime scenes, didn’t seem to think anyone could catch him. Jantz thought it conceivable that even if a law enforcement officer witnessed one of the murders, the man-devil could find a way to escape.
Since Jantz couldn’t predict his actions, nothing would surprise her. She half expected to receive a letter from him with a taunting message. He was probably laughing at her right now, and so was his puppet master, Dr. Kato Yordanius.
~~~
In his hidden laboratory, Dr. Yordanius thought of Agent Sariah Jantz, and regretted what had happened to her, the grievous injury she suffered when she led the ill-fated FBI raid against him. The FBI should never have done that, because they completely misunderstood the doctor’s intentions, even though he had sent numerous letters and documents to them trying to explain the altruistic nature of his researches, and the new species of peaceful human he sought.
But the injustice of the raid did not alleviate his conscience, not in the least; he still felt sorrow over the injury, wished it had never occurred. This morning, the sadness and remorse had been weighing on him more than usual, and he reminded himself of the important work at hand.
He walked forcefully down one corridor after another in the huge subterranean facility, where numerous experiments were taking place. He paused and stood for a long time gazing intently at a large room visible through a glass window, where his favorite lab assistant, Andok Helato, was talking to a group of mothers who were seated in rows of chairs. They were on an expanse of what looked like grass, with artificial plants around them.
These were women that Yordanius had grown and then impregnated, using a variety of artificial insemination methods. Some were carrying babies now, and others were not. None of the mothers had once been original fetuses, but were instead the children and grandchildren (and even great grandchildren) of the originals, all grown as seeds and “cuttings” from one original under an accelerated hormone program, maturing from baby to adult in only two years. In the process each of them also received customized traits and skills, so that they could serve the specific purposes he needed.
All of them had individual personalities, but because of the intricate gene mixing he’d done, they were as docile as cows. They were mellow by nature, designed to carry babies to term and deliver them, w
ithout getting in the way afterward, without trying to demand the traditional rights of mothers. Through informational downloads into their minds, he’d made certain that all of them understood the importance of what they were doing, and how critical it was for them to sacrifice their personal rights for the sake of the common good.
Yordanius had been kind and compassionate to them; he’d even provided them with educational materials to stimulate their minds. Touching a button by the door, he listened in. Andok was discussing world history with them. Other sessions involved science, mathematics, history, politics, philosophy, and even religion. The women, aside from being non-assertive, were quite well-informed, and could carry on intelligent conversations with anyone. Sometimes Yordanius liked to talk with them at length, but today he was not in the mood for that. He turned off the sound, and continued down the corridor to another glass door.
For a moment his gaze settled on a beautiful woman with long black hair, and perhaps the most perfect figure he had ever seen... even though he had not created her himself. This was Einell Demónt, who years ago had been implanted with the lab-grown embryo of Riggio Demónt, and had given birth to him, as well as to other children. Functioning as a surrogate for Yordanius’s experiments, she was one of a handful of volunteers, women who had been abused by men in society and had been rescued by his lab-children.
Even in her fifties, Einell was still fertile, and always said she wanted to carry more babies, but in view of the problems with Riggio the scientist had stopped using her for that purpose, wanting to find out what the problems were with that lineage before creating more of them. All of her offspring, some still children, and others who had grown into adults, were under full control in the cryogenic storage facility. He had extracted cellular material from each of them, and—when he had time—he’d been doing deeper analysis of that group, to see if Riggio was an aberration, or if something was wrong with that entire strain. Thus far he did not have enough information to say, one way or another.
The Unborn Page 14
