by Blou Bryant
“We can’t get in,” Wyatt protested, giving her a tug to keep up. “We’ll come back. Whoever it is… will still be there.” A squeeze on his hand was the only reply.
Halfway up the hall, he saw three people appear at the other end. They stopped, and one of them ran forward.
“Emm,” said Teri.
Wyatt looked down at the small teenager. “You could have told me,” he said, but there was no recrimination to it.
She shrugged and pulled him back in the direction of the door at the end of the hall. Looking back at Emm gaining quickly on them, he gave in and followed Teri back down the hall.
“What’s the emergency?” Emm asked, huffing from the run down the hallway.
“Got a door to open.”
“That’s it?”
“You wanted more?”
“Not really, but Ira said that Teri had pathed a sense of urgency… danger even.”
The teenager was out in front and didn’t look back. “Kids today, always dramatic,” Wyatt said.
“You’re such an old man,” Emm replied.
“I’m only twenty-two,” he replied.
“Outside, sure, you look like a young guy, but we both know that inside, you’re a cranky old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn.”
Wyatt grumbled at that, but wasn’t at all offended, in fact, he sorta liked it. “The door at the end of the hallway, it’s locked and has a scanner. Teri says someone is inside that we need to see.”
“In a good way?”
“Dunno, she’s not sure. But she’s insistent.”
“Well, that fun. There’s a locked door at the end of a hall with someone good or evil behind it.”
Arriving at the door, he pointed to the reader and said, “So, what we need you for…”
“I figured that out, thanks,” she said sarcastically and placed her hand over the reader, her eyes closed.
Wyatt hardly had time to fret about how long she’d take when her eyes opened.
“Wow, what crappy coding,” Emm said, and placed her palm flat on the reader. The door clicked open.
“Now you’re on record as having opened it,” protested Wyatt.
“No, someone named Jeff Guetta is, whoever that is. I accessed the palm records and switched mine with him. And I’ve given you access as well, under a different name.” She pointed at the door, and said, “Shall we?”
Wyatt glanced at Teri. Despite her earlier haste, she wasn’t rushing in either, and was now staring up at him. She motioned to the door and then at him. “Go on,” she signed.
He turned the handle and pushed the door open to reveal a white room that featured nothing other than a second door and another palm reader. No chairs waited for visitors and no art graced the walls.
The girls joined him, letting the other door close behind them. As he moved to put his palm on the reader, Emm reached out to stop him. “Wait, there’s electronics at work here.”
“AI?” asked Wyatt.
“No, but…” she said, and put her palm on the wall to the left of the door. It shimmered briefly and turned into a window onto a large lab. Rows of medical and computer equipment were interspersed with surgical tables. A tall, thin figure in a Hawaiian t-shirt was working at a machine at the far end of the room.
Wyatt gaped at the figure, not sure what to say or think.
Teri only said one word, “Esaf!” and ran to the door. “Open, open, open,” she said.
Chapter 23
Wyatt had no sooner than tested Emm’s claim to have switched his palm print for someone else then Teri had opened the door and ran into the room. He followed, dazed at the sight of a man he had thought was long dead.
“Esaf!” Teri exclaimed again, running through the lab.
Raising one eyebrow, Esaf stood and stared back at Teri and Wyatt. “Why?” was all he said.
Teri slammed into him and wrapped her arms around him. He didn’t immediately respond, and when he did, it was with several gentle taps on the back. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Nice to see you too,” said Wyatt, walking between surgical tables, Emm behind him.
“How did you get in here?”
“That’s your question? We haven’t seen you in three years. Last I remember, you were being attacked by vampires. Hannah said you’d been shot.”
“I was,” he said, his voice as high, soft and reedy as Wyatt remembered. “I survived.”
“That’s it? How’d you get here?”
Teri reached a hand up to touch Esaf’s face. “Are you okay?” she asked, worry lining her young face.
Gently, Esaf took her hand and pulled it down from his face. “You can speak now?” he asked.
She signed something that Wyatt couldn’t see from his position behind her.
Esaf replied, “I’m good, I’m good. Yes, happy to see you. It’s just…” he winced and sat down quickly. “It’s dangerous here.”
“Here? God, this is the safest place we’ve been in years,” said Wyatt.
Esaf stared at the ground for a time, and then softly moved Teri away from him. While Wyatt had only known him for two days, years before, he wasn’t surprised at the behavior. The man was terminally awkward, quiet and introspective from the first moment they’d met. A discredited doctor, he’d worked for the Dogs and anyone else who would help fund his experiments. He’d died—or so they thought—helping Teri escape.
Glancing up and making eye contact with Wyatt for the first time, he nodded in Emm’s direction. “Who is the girl?”
She walked forward and put out a hand, which he ignored. “I’m Emmelyn. I got them in here.”
“How?” he asked, avoiding looking directly at her.
“Implants,” she said, waving her hands at him. “I can sense wireless signals, and can connect with networks even when they’re not wired. I unlocked the doors.”
“Oh,” was the reply, and this time he looked up, hesitantly, at Teri again. “You shouldn’t be here,” he repeated.
Wyatt watched the interaction, not sure how to proceed, still shocked to see the man alive, and here, of all places. Well, perhaps locked away in a refuge from society wasn’t a surprise. Of all the crazy DNA hackers in the world, he was the one most likely to be allowed in a facility like this. “The virus is mutating,” he blurted out. “I’m getting sick.”
His eyes locked on the ceiling, Esaf shook his head. “It doesn’t protect you from being sick. You’re immune to it.”
“No, it’s mutating me.”
“How? How do you know?”
“I blew up a bulldozer.”
Teri signed furiously. Wyatt didn’t catch a word of it.
Taking a tablet from the table next to him, Esaf wrote notes as she talked, nodding occasionally. “There are others?” he asked at one point, glancing towards Wyatt, “who’ve been changed?”
“When I pass on the virus, often it heals, but sometimes—rarely—it also changes people. Two can see in the dark, one had his skin turn to scales as hard as rock, another could fade from view and go almost invisible. He’s no longer with us.”
“Have you been tested? Have any of them?”
“Right, like I’m going to go to a hospital and ask for a checkup?”
“Don’t be rude. Have there been adverse effects?”
“Scales aren’t adverse?”
Esaf shook his head, still staring at his tablet, scribbling away. “They’re in the code.”
Teri put a hand back up towards Esaf’s face, and he leaned away. “Please, no.”
“What’s going on, Esaf?” asked Wyatt, confused at the reaction from the man.
“I’m working.”
“So?”
“You don’t understand…” he said and grimaced again, as if in pain. “I can’t talk about my work.”
“Who do you work for?”
The tall man sat back down and looked through his microscope, making notes. “I’m in the middle of something. I need to finish it.”
“No, you need to talk to us, tell us what’s going on… what went on, how you got here, what you’re doing.” And you need to examine me. Draw blood, run tests.
“You don’t understand,” Esaf repeated.
Teri signed at him and he signed back, Wyatt catching “Not now, later. I need to think. The girl needs to go.”
“Emm?” Wyatt asked. “You want her to leave?” He turned to her as he said it and felt bad when her face dropped. “Would you mind?” he asked her.
She clearly wasn’t happy at the thought, but was a trooper. “I can… you’re safe, right?” she asked, favoring Esaf with a sideways glance.
“Thank you, yes, we’re safe with him,” he said and walked her to the door.
Back in the entry room, the two watched Esaf and Teri sign, through the large one-way display. “He’s strange,” Wyatt said.
“That’s an understatement. Is he really the guy I’ve heard so much about? The DNA hacker, drug cooker and craziest doctor since Frankenstein?”
“That’s about the sum of it, yup, he is. And I have no clue how he got here or what he’s doing, but he might open up more with me and Teri, if you’re not here. He’s not exactly the most outgoing guy.”
“Hell no, he makes you look like a social butterfly. And the way he holds his head and avoids looking people in the eye, he’s got one of those social things… disorders.”
“Probably,” said Wyatt. As he watched Teri and Esaf sign, he decided not to rush his way back in. Perhaps it wasn’t just Emm that made the man uncomfortable. He let out a long sigh.
Emm had turned to leave and stopped. “What?”
“Hrm?” he said.
“You sighed.”
“So?”
“It’s not you… you’re so closed off, not really the type to show feelings.”
“I’m really happy he’s here,” said Wyatt, and he was. But at the same time, as he watched the two sign to each other, he did feel a bit tired. Esaf liked strange things, he lived to change people. That’s how Teri had ended up the way she was, a failed genetic experiment. “It’s just….”
Emm waited, patiently.
Wyatt thought about how he felt. She was right, somewhere along the way he’d started coming out of his shell, and was getting more comfortable talking about his feelings. “He wants people to evolve, to change.”
“And you want to be normal?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Because I keep having implants put in me?”
Wyatt chuckled. “That and you’ve got more holes in you than an old sweater, and more jewelry than Liberace.”
She laughed out loud at this. “This is my normal. Each of us must find their own. Yours involves… well, being buff and boring. I do understand.”
“Boring?”
She shrugged. “So, don’t let him do anything to you that you don’t want him to.”
“It’s not that easy. You know why he lost his medical license?”
She shook her head. “Nobody ever mentioned that.”
“Well, something to do with experimenting on people in comas without approval.”
“Nobody objected, I suppose.”
Wyatt chuckled at that. “True enough. Okay, go let Ira and Ari know we’re fine. We’ll meet up with you later. Tell the gang they can stop looking, we found our DNA specialist. Don’t tell them who we found though.”
“He’s a secret?”
“Esaf was always a secret, and he’s acting strange… even for him. Yes, let’s keep it quiet. This would be easier if we all had phones. Has anyone checked? Do they work here?” He assumed they didn’t.
Emm tapped her head. “You don’t need phones, you’ve got me. There is limited wireless here. I get a signal now and then, but mostly not.”
“It’s okay, we’ve got our special connections. Perhaps we should split up Ari and Ira, use them to transfer messages. And Teri… she seems to do the same thing.”
“I’ll tell them. One last thing, the wireless here is… weird, something going on with it. In that room, there were signals that I couldn’t read.”
Wyatt had turned back to watch the two signing away. “So? You can’t always read it, can you?”
“Nope, but signals have their own feel, and this was strangely familiar, like there was a signature I’d seen before.”
Wyatt wasn’t fully listening. “I’m going back in now. See you soon,” he said, and pressed his palm against the reader.
Esaf and Teri continued talking when he joined them, so he simply waited and tried to follow along. He didn’t get it all, but managed to figure out that she wanted to talk about her school work, but Esaf kept returning to her—and Wyatt’s—powers. No surprise, it was the science that interested him.
“And you?” he said.
“Me?” asked Wyatt.
“Your changes. Tell me about them.”
“Not much to tell. I can infect others with the virus, like you figured. It passes through my hand—it’s never healed—and works differently on everyone, but usually it is positive, like Hannah’s ability to heal, just stronger.
“She can heal too?”
“Yes, but with her it’s more like a super boost to the immune system. Cuts heal fast. Colds go away.”
“And with you?”
“It’s things the body doesn’t normally heal itself. Cancer, that sort of thing.”
“The body can cure anything. We just don’t know why it happens in some people, and not in others.”
“And genetic diseases, I can cure them.”
Esaf took notes as they talked. “No, you don’t cure them. You infect them with a virus that alters their DNA, that’s what cures them.”
“Whatever.”
“You want to get better and figure this out? Be specific. It’s not whatever.”
“Fine, what more do you want to know?” asked Wyatt. Teri had pulled up a seat next to him and patted him on the back of his hand. “Yes, I know I’m frustrated,” he said. She had the queer ability to know when he was about to get angry… and to turn the rage down.
“Teri tells me she can control electrical fields, and you mentioned a bulldozer.”
Wyatt took a breath and thought about how to honestly share what he’d been feeling.
“Just say it, don’t think about it.”
About to say ‘whatever’ again, instead Wyatt just let it out. “I got angry, things went red, and then it burst, an explosion of energy.”
“That’s better,” said Esaf. He pushed the pad back and walked to a back counter. “I need blood. Roll up a sleeve.”
Finally. Tests, and maybe solutions.
First, he drew some blood from Teri, and then from Wyatt.
“What now?”
“Now I do my work.”
“And me?”
“You wait for me to do my work.”
Chapter 24
Dismissed, the two left the room and walked down the hallway, hand in hand. If anyone could save him, it was Esaf. It was like a weight had lifted from his shoulders.
The Zone was still under attack—or likely was—but once Jessica realized that Wyatt had left with all the people he’d altered, she’d leave them alone. She might be a crazy psychopath, but she wasn’t going to waste time on a bunch of poor people.
“It’s all going to be fine,” he said to Teri, giving her hand a squeeze as they exited the scientific wing.
She shrugged and scrunched up her face.
“Oh, come on, we’re as far off the grid as you can get. She won’t find us here.”
Click, click.
He stopped at this. “It’s over,” he said, but it was more of a question than a statement.
She shrugged again.
“What do you sense?” he asked.
“Tickle,” she signed.
“Just a tickle?”
“It’s like feeling like someone’s watching you.”
There wasn’t anything he could do about that. It w
as a feeling, okay, but, what was he supposed to do? Without details, it was useless. Instead of probing further, he led them around the second floor, overlooking the main atrium. There were scattered groups, but he didn’t see any Dogs. “Let’s head back to the rooms, see what everyone else is up to. And then lunch. I’m still hungry.”
As he considered a nap and a meal, he relaxed even further. This was far from the cabin in the woods he’d dreamed of, but it was far enough away from the real world that he could get used to it. They gotta have consoles here. I could put in some serious time gaming. Offline only, of course. I’m not going online ever again.
Down below, small groups congregated, a few heads swiveling to follow his path around the second floor.
He didn’t know how long they would need to be there. Once Esaf rid of him of the virus, he’d need to get details to Jessica and Joe, and they’d no longer be interested in him.
It took ten minutes to get to the green hall and their rooms. The silence of the hallway broke when they entered as the sound of conversation—happy conversation—washed over them. It was a relief. Someone had brought food and drink, and the entire group gathered in the large living room and kitchen, talking about their new digs.
Wyatt wandered between people for a while, perhaps thirty minutes, enjoying the conversation for once, and luxuriating in the happiness of his friends. Here and there, someone asked about the Zone, but there was no news. Ari and Ira were in a pair of chairs by a fake fireplace, and both greeted him with broad smiles.
“Is it true?” asked Ari. “You found a guy?”
“Not just a guy, the guy. And he thinks he can cure me… all of us.”
“Good for you,” said Ira, but she looked dubious. “All of us?”
“You too, everyone.”
“I’m not changing back.”
“But… don’t you want to be normal?” Wyatt asked, pulling up a chair, keeping his voice low. “No more Jessica and Joe following us around. No more violence and no more worrying about who we will become.”
Her face set. “I’m not worrying about who I am or who I will be.” She leaned forward and whispered, “You heal people. Look around the room. Most of the people here would be dead without you and that virus you hate so much.”
