CounterProbe

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  He didn’t answer.

  Chapter Forty-two

  * * *

  Déjà vu.

  The words echoed in Kevin’s head as he drove the dark winter road. He was in a van again, with Jane again. With two Janes.

  They were on the run again.

  Just like old times.

  Jane lay on a pallet of fur behind the front seats. She seemed tranquil. Not dead. Only sleeping. His hand kept reaching down to her face, the backs of his cold fingers warmed by the flush of life still pulsing in her capillaries.

  The van was new, equipped with state-of-the-art surveillance gear Kevin knew nothing about. He remembered its exhaust huffing into the midnight darkness as the engine had rolled over in the presence of the other Jane’s concentrated regard. Now, it drove like a dream through the dream landscape.

  “Highway one-sixty-nine,” Jane on the front seat sang out. Her voice grated on his nerves, but he’d asked her to report any road signs she saw.

  “You ever see a state map?” he asked now, his voice still hoarse. Nordstrom had half strangled him.

  “Map—?”

  “Of Minnesota. When you… she… did all that speed reading at the university library, did she ever see a map of Minnesota?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. Remember it. Take me to Crow Wing.”

  “Back again?”

  “Back again,” he said. “Don’t tell me you don’t feel a pull—a ‘Call’? Isn’t your automatic alarm clock buzzing? Aren’t ‘those gentle voices singing,’ calling you home again now that your mission’s accomplished?”

  “Why are you so angry?”

  “I love her, and she’s dying! She’s my patient, and I can’t save her.”

  “But I’m here. I… love you, Kevin.”

  “You’re a record album. A compact disc. Perfect reproduction, but not the real thing. You can’t help it.”

  “Maybe… they don’t want me anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “I… feel unanchored. I always felt anchored before. Now I feel cast loose. In some ways, I like it.”

  “‘You like, you love’—what a… travesty of life. Just be quiet and tell me when there’s another road sign. Any sign.”

  Her silence might have signaled hurt, but Kevin doubted it. The mere existence of a duplicate of Jane reminded him of how easy it was to mimic humanity. An awful lot of humans were good at it, too. The time he and Jane had spent together had evoked too much humanity in her. In his own way, Kevin had made her as much as the aliens had.

  He had made her vulnerable, he saw that now. They had equipped her to survive. He had taught her to think and feel. She was no match for the Jane a harsher reality had shaped. Neither was he.

  “Deer crossing,” that Jane announced obediently.

  “You remember that map yet?”

  She nodded in the fleeting brightness of a highway light. “I’ve been there before. Just follow this road. I’ll tell you where to turn. I can find where you want to go, Kevin.”

  “Two stars to the left and straight on till morning,” he mumbled.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  Roadside trees rushed by, fading hitchhiker-fast behind the van. Occasional oncoming headlights probed the darkness, enlarging and then popping past without challenge.

  Only red taillights gleamed in the rearview mirror, shrinking to dying embers of light.

  A roadside sign flashed by cue-card quick: “Crow Wing, 17 Miles.”

  He wondered why such signs always marked awkward distances—“64 Miles,”

  “128 Miles.” Why couldn’t miles count off in neat decimal-system blocks, like decades of the rosary? Fifty. Ten. Five. Bingo!

  The van fishtailed as he rounded the first corner in Crow Wing. Brakes squealed. Beside him, Jane clenched her hands on her seat cushion. Behind him, Jane rolled limply with the motion.

  He charged the sleek, ice-blanketed road leading to the top of the bluff, gunning the gas at any hesitation, forcing the heavy vehicle up the empty, unwelcoming incline.

  It was quiet up top. Bushes wore unshaken bonnets of snow. Only the henscratchings of birds scarred the smooth, winter-whitened surface.

  Kevin stopped the van and jumped out, sinking into drifts to his knees. There had been much less snow when he’d last brought Jane here. He wrenched open the van’s side door and bent to examine her in the dim overhead light.

  She was still alive—a little. Conscious—just barely. Kevin picked her up and waded into the whiteness that capped the bluff in winter.

  He was too weary to lift his legs, but pushed them through the drifts, making a jerky set of deep tracks. Jane’s fur coat, gaping open, trailed like wings on either side of his footprints, brushing delicate almost-Oriental characters over the surface snow.

  A waning moon hung askew in the west, its Bing Crosby profile beaming vacuously. Its light threw a Rinso-white blue cast on the snow. A ring of ice crystals throttled the moon. Drifting clouds formed another, less geometric ring around the moon.

  Kevin drove his way to the bluffs center and stared up at the sky.

  “Kevin? Kevin, it’s cold.”

  She stood on the edge of the empty circle of snow, near the van, her hands in her jean pockets, her shoulders hunched. Like himself, she had no outerwear. She must have been cold, but Kevin had forgotten how to be cold. He felt only fire inside; flames of inner denial snapped sky- high at the moon.

  “Kevin—?”

  She was treading in his drunken tracks now, coming behind him. He wished she’d stay away.

  “What are you doing?” she wanted to know.

  He stared up at the heavens.

  They would come, whatever they were. They had meddled from the beginning and they would be unable to resist doing it again now. Especially now, when they had not only her, but him.

  “Kevin, please…”

  She was circling him, a shivering snowbound gnat. She paused to stare into Jane’s milk-white face as it lolled against his shoulder.

  “I could try—” she offered.

  “No.” He spun so she could no longer see Jane’s face, or see his own. Still he looked up. “It’s too late for what you or I could try. There’s only one thing that can save her—what they can do.”

  “Do you think they know?” She looked up.

  “Know? Of course they do! They set it all in motion. They keep records. They… grow… people. They splice genes and play tiddlywinks with DNA—they know.”

  He ranged in a circle, half to keep watch, half in hopes that motion would keep him from falling.

  “This time,” he murmured, “they can have her. Maybe I was wrong to keep her from them. Now, I don’t have any choice. They’ve won. You hear that?” He shouted to the starry night sky, to the sunken-cheeked moon. “You can have her. Come on! Come on! Even an immortal can run out of time. This unit needs fixing—this unit is too valuable to lose. Come on; you’ve won. I admit it. Take her!”

  His words, the effort of speaking, had driven him to his knees in the drifted snow, Jane sinking with him. He seemed to hold her up in water, atop the thin crust of the snow. She seemed to float on it, almost weightless. He couldn’t feel his arms and legs.

  Something churned through the drifts to his side.

  “Kevin. I don’t… sense… anything. There’s nothing there this time. My voices are silent.”

  He stared at the embodiment of Jane beside him. “They’re there! They have to come. I’ve… given in. I’m doing what they wanted in the first place. They can have it all—you, her—me. I’ll go with them. New blood for old bodies. A live, unaltered specimen must be worth something—”

  “Kevin. They’ve withdrawn. Left. Left us alone.”

  “What do you know? You’re programmed to think what they want, say what they want.”

  “I don’t think they want anything of us anymore.”

  “Don’t think!” he said savagely, twisting so s
he couldn’t see Jane past the shield of his shoulder.

  If Jane couldn’t see Jane, he reasoned with ritual superstition, perhaps both did not exist. Perhaps only one did. The right one.

  “Kevin—”

  “What?” he shouted.

  This time Jane herself spoke, her lips barely moving. Her eyes glimmered through the spikes of her lashes.

  “What?” he whispered, bending close. She sank as his strength failed. Jane sank into snow, her weight bearing his arms down to the hard earth below. “What?”

  “I don’t want to go with them,” she said.

  “Then let them… fix you. We’ll make them free you again—”

  “They never freed me in the first place.” She spoke calmly, and her sentences were whole again.

  She stretched out an arm, brushed her naked hand softly through the snow, her fingers driving faint furrows in the sparkling surface.

  “They can save you,” he argued. “Call them. Ask them. Beg them.”

  “I am tired,” Jane said, looking up at the empty sky. “Too tired to open doors in hopes that there is something better behind them.”

  “You could,” he accused. “You could help yourself; call them.”

  She didn’t answer at first. “It’s warm in here,” Jane said, I “warmer than it’s ever been before. I can hear my blood sing. I can see the moon at the back of my eyes.”

  “Jane… for God’s sake! Don’t talk like that.”

  He shook her, the crazy, insane fool he was shook her. “I told you that someday I could go so far away I could never come back. The doors are closing, Kevin.”

  “You’re letting it happen!”

  “I’m not stopping it I’m tired of stopping it. I’m tired of acting always on my I-ness. What of their they-ness? Don’t you ever wonder about that? I’m tired of I’s and they’s. And of cold. It’s a cold place you live in, Kevin.”

  “Death is the coldest season of all. Jane, fight it!”

  She sighed.

  “You can’t choose not to be!”

  “Kevin, you said I can choose anything.”

  “Except that.”

  Her lips curved, then relaxed. Her eyes flared wider. Jane smiled at him, past him. “I was right. I do have a sister.” Kevin stared at the other Jane. She looked as flat and surreal as the altered photograph of Lynn Volker.

  “She’s not real; she’s not you.”

  “I have an infinity of sisters,” Jane said, and shut her eyes.

  She was warm in his arms. The cold came and wooed away her body heat. It went willingly. Her slack limbs grew chill, then frigid. Finally stiff.

  The sickle moon grinned, sinking farther down in the sky but never when anyone was watching it. No one watched it. Kevin didn’t look up anymore. No one— nothing—came.

  Jane’s body grew heavy. He pulled his arms out from under her. They were numb, as were his legs; he could finally feel at least that much, that not-feeling. Much later, he stood and lifted her again. This time he walked to the edge of the bluff.

  Just beyond the lip of wind-curled snow at its rim, a small ledge protruded into the dark below. Kevin jumped down to it, reaching up to pull Jane’s dead weight down beside him. He shook a small avalanche of snow from the bushes clinging to the bluffs side, shook them snow-free down to their dark narrow bones, then climbed up again and pushed more snow over the edge.

  The dark figure in the snow—Jane in a shroud of fur—gradually disappeared.

  Kevin straightened, feeling like hell. He drove his legs through the drifts again, back to the empty center of the bluff. An impression remained there at the hub of his track marks—an impression something like a swollen snow angel.

  He looked up to a limpidly black night sky, knowing he’d never look up and wonder—or hope—again. Now, he knew.

  He moved in the direction of his previous tracks. Behind him came the silent figure that had followed him through every ritual. It followed him, like a moon its planet, and he could do nothing about it.

  Some sound began churning in the distance, echoing from the base of the bluff. Gradually, his ears ascertained their associations, his brain deigned to name what his senses perceived.

  Car wheels grinding up the slick slope. A lot of car wheels—four-by-fours, and plain front-wheel drives. To his own kind, at least, he was still eminently predictable.

  He froze in the freezing cold, and waited. Headlights popped over the horizon line like hot, greedy moons—two, four, six, eight, ten…

  The vehicles revved over the brow of the bluff, drove through the drifts, formed a grinning circle blocking the one road down.

  Kevin stood pinned by the lights, blinking at the diamonds glinting off the snow. A shadow stood beside him. He didn’t—couldn’t—look at it, but he knew it was there. He knew it would always be there.

  This time, he was not going anywhere quietly.

  ’‘All right,” he said, addressing the shadow he could not face. “You put the lights on once; let’s see what you can do to put some lights out.”

  One by one, traversing the automobile grilles from right to left, the headlights began winking out in chorus-line sequence.

  Epilogue

  April 11

  Before

  In the center of the clearing, twin patches of barren brown ground poked through the dissipating snow like eye sockets in a skull.

  The snow itself was mushy; their boots pressed it into mud.

  “This is crazy.” Kevin stopped walking to look back where a parked van tilted on the highway’s edge. No cars Came by.

  He stuck gloveless hands in his jacket pockets. He wasn’t wearing a cap, and the raw wind tousled his hair. He did wear a beard—an untrimmed lumberjack frizz that brushed the zipper pull at his throat.

  Jane stomped around the clearing, leaving mud-brown prints behind her. “I think this is it.”

  “How could it be?” he said. “You never saw it. You never were here even if this is it. You don’t even have an innate attachment to… the damn thing! Our so-called sessions have proven that.”

  “I tried.” She had stopped to study him instead of the landscape. “And I have this… feeling… that I can find it again.”

  “Not again.” The edge had returned to his voice. “You’re not her.”

  “I’m like her.”

  When he was silent she came back to him, treading carefully in her own footsteps.

  “Kevin.”

  He shut his eyes. She was sorry. In the cloud-hazed daylight, his eyes had looked very blue. A brushstroke of new gray cut an off-center swath through his dark brown beard.

  She waited until his eyes met hers again.

  “Kevin. I know I can do it.”

  “It’s impossible. Worse than that, it’s unimportant!” He eyed the van, jittering on his feet. “And I don’t like us playing sitting duck for nothing.”

  “Kevin, please.” Her hand left her pocket to reach for his face. He shifted away.

  “All right,” he said, not looking at her. “Poke around. Satisfy yourself. You won’t find anything.”

  She immediately turned back to the clearing, starting at dead center and scribing wider and wider circles in the melting snow that thinned like spent soapsuds on dirty dishwater.

  Kevin crossed his arms to watch her, ashamed of his own remoteness and angry at her insistence. His anger was irrational, for there was so little she insisted upon.

  He glanced back at the truck, always anticipating the suspicious vehicle stopping behind it, the highway patrolman pulling over. In its back window, he could glimpse a placard bearing the temporary license number issued to new vehicles.

  He’d been lucky to lift a truck license from the Chevy in Swan River. Even luckier, the Chevy already wore new plates, so the owner wouldn’t report the loss of the temps. And the van was fresh enough to cruise for months under a brand-new guise.

  “Kevin. Look.”

  She was standing on the clearing’s southwest side
, holding up a small purple flower.

  “It’s a crocus. Sun must’ve hit there.”

  “Pretty,” she tried.

  He grunted, and she went back to circling the clearing.

  Kevin surveyed the sharp pine tops. This could be the place. So could any of hundreds of clearings along Highway 61. Even he didn’t remember where they had stopped. Zyunsinth had truly found an unmarked grave.

  He watched her pursue her quest, feeling like a bored parent humoring an even more bored child.

  They had lived in the wilds all these weeks—months, it was, he guessed, since the Crow Wing bluff top. In his dreams, he could still see the darkened government cars spinning helplessly apart like record albums as he gunned the van down the open road, a Jane of sorts beside him.

  If Turner still followed, he had never found them. Kevin had learned how to steal more than temporary license placards, and to stay away from people. He’d even learned to camp out. Wilderness living proved no problem for… her. She could tune her metabolism for any climate. Sometimes, he got damn sick of the cold.

  Still, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area at the top hook of Minnesota was ideal terrain for hide-and-seek—isolated and underpopulated. Kevin had found and broken into Neumeier’s abandoned cabin. He’d ruthlessly raided it for supplies, even ripping the quilt off the bed in which Jane and he had slept the first time Jane had heard… the Call. Kevin didn’t want to think about the Call.

  He’d also scavenged decent sums of money—rolls of bills tucked in the bottom of coffee cans and under floorboards. Professor Neumeier had seemed too sophisticated an old lady to have squirreled money away like a kid, but Kevin assumed that precaution was a legacy of surviving the Holocaust.

  Another legacy of the Holocaust was living off the dead, which Kevin supposed he was doing, in his own way, just as Nordstrom had in his.

  He pictured Neumeier squinting until the lines in her face became grooves as she drew on one of her Lucky Strikes and said indulgently, “Spoiled Child of Untold Postwar Affluence, don’t be an ass. Take it all.”

  Kevin looked around for his charge. She was kicking at the snow now, her dark head down. The snow had melted enough to reveal instantly what she sought if it was there. She was walking in circles in more ways than one.