Fight or Flight

by Natalie J. Damschroder

  Jeanne gasped softly at the word. “What happened?” she asked. Despite her appearance as a kick-ass military officer, she sounded like a grieving mother. “We never knew…the details.”

  The telling had become easier now that Regan had done it once. She finished with, “He died in my arms.”

  “Did he—” Jeanne pressed her hand to her mouth. Ben rubbed her back gently while she regained her composure. “Did he say anything?”

  Regan’s eyes stung in response. “He said ‘they’ wanted the baby, and I needed to run. That ‘they’d’ tried to kill him. And he said he loved me. Loved us.”

  Jeanne sobbed into her hands, and Ben’s eyes shimmered.

  “He did love you,” he said, his voice rough. “It was obvious long before he came home and told us he was going to be a father. But he almost burned with it that weekend.”

  “What did you say to him?” Regan pleaded. “What scared him so much we were going to run?”

  Ben sat forward and rested his elbows on his knees. He stared at his hands, which he rubbed together, slowly, back and forth. He didn’t address her question directly, but Regan remained silent, listening.

  “Scott arrived home Friday evening, about to burst with happiness. He couldn’t even wait until dinner, or until he unpacked. He sat us down. And he told us he was going to be a father.”

  “As his mother, I was devastated, of course,” said Jeanne, who’d plucked a tissue from the box on the table next to her and now looked like she hadn’t been crying at all. “But there were so many other…factors.”

  “We had nothing against you,” Ben assured Regan. “We always liked you. But no parent wants their son to be a teenage father.”

  “So what did you tell him?”

  “We made…suggestions.”

  Regan didn’t need him to spell out what those were. She would have done the same had Kelsey come to her with similar news. She couldn’t blame him, though knowing what it would have meant to her life, to her daughter, made her sick to her stomach.

  “I was afraid he was going to hate us by the time it was over,” Jeanne said. “So we told him the truth. He was furious with us. I didn’t want to let him go, but we couldn’t exactly lock him up. And we didn’t understand what the truth really meant.”

  “He missed his call-in,” Ben continued before Regan could ask what truth. “He was supposed to call when he got back to school. He didn’t answer his phone in the dorm, and you didn’t answer yours. So we called campus security—”

  “They’d just found him.”

  Regan cringed inside, waiting for Jeanne to lay into her for leaving her son lying in his own blood, but she didn’t.

  “You know who killed him,” Regan accused.

  They both nodded.

  “Who?”

  “We have to back up again,” Ben said. “The information is still classified—”

  “Screw classified!” Regan clenched her fists and forced herself to remain still. “You’re not going to hide behind that.” Her hand tightened on the pistol.

  “No, of course we’re not,” Ben scoffed. “I’m simply trying to impress upon you the need for secrecy.”

  Regan rolled her eyes. “Okay, I’ll scrap my plan to run out to the media.”

  “Twenty years ago Jeanne and I worked on a project. Despite appearances—” Ben motioned to his wife’s attire, “—we are less fighting soldiers than scientific explorers. The program was benign. We were seeking a way to boost soldiers’ immunity without requiring complicated immunization plans or forced exposure to dangerous illnesses. Increased immunity would allow the body to fight a wide range of pathogens, including those we had no immunization for. It would make our military less vulnerable.”

  “And like any such program,” Jeanne took up, her eyes sparking with obvious passion for the subject, “it had vast non-military applications, as well. Decreasing frequency of illness in a population would also decrease health care costs and pressure on the medical system, as well as increasing productivity and competitiveness in business and other arenas.”

  Despite herself, Regan was fascinated with the idea. “Did it work?”

  “We’d succeeded in developing a compound that had promise, but its duration was too limited. We believed a second-generation product could provide near-immediate and lasting effect.”

  “How do you develop a second-generation product?” Regan wasn’t surprised to see guilt color both the Harrisons’ faces. She hadn’t finished high school or gone on to college, so the science of such a thing was well beyond her. But with what she did know, horror began to fill her before Ben made his admission.

  “It varies, but in this case you use the first generation product on a live subject. His offspring’s blood should contain the elements needed to process the new compound.”

  “Oh my God.” Regan stared at him. It was worse than she’d ever expected. “You planned all this?”

  “No!” Jeanne burst out. “No, none of it! Scott was given the compound simply to keep him healthy. Schools are always so full of pathogens,” she explained weakly, as if knowing how ridiculous she sounded. “I know it sounds stupid to use something so new on your child, but we wanted what was best for him.”

  “But when he got me pregnant, you decided it was the perfect time to try phase two,” Regan said bitterly. She realized she’d wrapped her finger around the trigger of the pistol and eased it out to rest along the guard.

  “No, that’s not it at all.” But Jeanne’s guilty expression deepened. She glanced at her husband, who nodded.

  “We didn’t have time to decide anything, Regan,” he said. “But there was a lot more going on. Just days before Scott arrived home, we’d learned some disturbing news about our partner on this project. He believed he could reverse the effect of the compound to create an undetectable killer. The implications of such a thing were against everything Jeanne and I believe in—”

  “You were working for the military!” Regan cried. “That’s what the military does! It kills!”

  “We worked for the military,” Jeanne informed her, “because they have the resources to do the research and development that was so important to us. We never worked on weapons.”

  “It didn’t matter, because your research could be used to create them, anyway. Especially if Archie had no such principles.” She looked from one to the other. “Am I right? This Archie you mentioned earlier? He was your partner?”

  “Yes,” Ben said. “And yes, he could have gone on to develop the weapon under the Air Force’s aegis. But he wanted more.”

  Jeanne went on, “He tried to convince us we could all be hugely rich if we developed the reverse compound independently of the government and sold it commercially.”

  “You mean, to terrorists and opposing governments,” Regan said.

  Ben nodded. “We would have no part of it and reported him. He was removed from our project. I thought the Air Force was detaining him, but at some point he escaped custody. He had to have someone inside. Here. And we think that person intercepted our son.” His voice cracked, and they sat in silence for a minute.

  It was a fantastic tale, but Regan couldn’t disbelieve any of it. The worst part was…it had worked. She had always thought it beyond lucky Kelsey never got sick. As a baby she escaped the usual ear infections, colds, fevers and flus that plagued other families. Even when she started kindergarten and was exposed to so many more germs, she never got sick. She had perfect attendance all through school, and if she hadn’t been so normal in her development and everything else, Regan would have worried.

  It had never occurred to her it might have been deliberate.

  She swallowed against an increasingly dry throat. She’d expected to feel different after learning the truth. As if understanding why Scott died, why someone tried to take her baby, would fill some hole inside her, one carved by the years of fear and precaution. But she felt as empty as ever, and realized that no words, no intentions, could ever make up
for the lives they’d been forced to live. Bitter as it was, it was more important to accept it and move on.

  “What happened after Scott died?”

  Suddenly, Jeanne seemed unable to look at Regan. Ben didn’t avoid her gaze, but did appear more discomfited than before.

  “We assumed Archie had something to do with Scott’s death, but he disappeared. We knew he’d go after the baby.”

  “I disappeared, too.” Regan knew it was stupid as soon as she said it. “Those were your men? Who came for Kelsey?”

  Ben shook his head. “We tracked you down and as soon as the baby was born, sent someone to protect you. But we were too late. They got to you first.”

  “Too late!” Regan couldn’t believe it. “Why the hell didn’t you just call me?” Except she hadn’t been able to afford a phone back then. And the hovel she lived in, at the back of a house not designed for its one-room “apartments,” wasn’t conducive to reliable mail delivery.

  “Look,” Ben said defensively, “I’m a scientist. This entire situation was out of my realm. The government wasn’t going to help us, and I was afraid if we tried to get them to, it would lead Archie to you more easily. When we found out those men had tried to take Kelsey, we decided it was safer for you if we didn’t contact you directly.”

  “It doesn’t seem out of your realm now.” Regan looked at Tyler, then up at the cameras she’d identified in the corners of the room. “In fact, you seem very well-equipped and well-staffed.”

  “For the same reason you are so well-trained and knowledgeable.”

  Regan gave him points for that. “Reactive security?”

  Ben nodded. “You kept running, of course, and we couldn’t find you immediately. Archie went underground, as far as we could tell. He had no equipment or samples, no facilities or staff, so we let it go. We focused on building our defenses and protecting you.”

  “How?”

  “The key to disappearing, we learned, is misinformation. The more false leads the searcher has to track down, the more time and money they waste. So we laid trails, updating them over the years, giving your enemy enough false information to keep his investigators busy for years.”

  “But if he wasn’t looking…”

  “We didn’t know he wasn’t,” Jeanne said. “There was no evidence he was working on his project, but we couldn’t be sure. And if he didn’t have the resources to develop the compound, he had no need for you or Kelsey. So we set up utilities and leases and video rental accounts in your name, all over the country, at different times and far away from where you really were.”

  “You knew? The whole time?” She didn’t know what to think. It had been bad enough to fear she might have kept Kelsey from her family needlessly, but to know they could have made contact at any time and hadn’t? Hadn’t they wanted to know their granddaughter?

  “Most of the time, we knew,” Ben confirmed. “We lost you several times. Most recently about ten years ago.”

  Regan reflexively looked at Tyler. That was how long he said he’d been working for the Harrisons. He sat ramrod straight on his chair and looked at no one, but again she could see behind the mask. He looked—afraid.

  And that made Regan afraid.

  “Unfortunately, we lost you at the same time we got intelligence that Archie had resurfaced.”

  “How did you manage to do all this?” Regan asked. “It had to be outrageously expensive.”

  “We sold the patent for one of our creations, which allowed all this—” Jeanne waved a hand to indicate the house, “—and the development of a security team and the resources to track and protect you. When we retired from the Air Force and went private sector, our finances were well secured.”

  She smiled, but Regan could tell she wasn’t sure how her next words would be received.

  “It allowed us to finance a scholarship for Kelsey’s education.”

  “You—” It was all she could manage, with her jaw hanging halfway to her chest. The scholarship was from them? Gratitude twisted around resentment, but the huge unimportance of it—at least for now—let her shove it aside. Still, curiosity had her asking, “What was it? The patent?”

  Ben smiled proudly. “A treatment for erectile dysfunction.”

  Her mouth dropped again. They’d sent their granddaughter to college on… “Viagra?”

  “No, but a similar idea. And many other things since. But it’s not really relevant.” He looked at Tyler. “Perhaps you’d like to take up the tale.”

  Tyler’s jaw flexed. He turned to Regan, who felt pressure in her chest she recognized as apprehension. She trusted him. Had put herself and her daughter fully in his hands. If he hadn’t been straight with her, she didn’t want to know any more.

  “I came to the Harrisons deliberately,” he admitted. “They didn’t simply hire me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I told them about Archie.”

  She couldn’t catch a breath. Her body knew what her brain didn’t want to grasp. “What about him?”

  “He’d reached a point in his research where he was ready for the next stage. The stage where he—”

  “Needed Kelsey.” Regan got that part, it fit with the rest. But what she didn’t get was, “How did you know?”

  Before Tyler could answer, the room exploded in showers of glass.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Kelsey never stopped fighting.

  She’d learned from pretty much every instructor she’d ever had, from her mother to her teachers to her soccer coach, the only way to get anywhere in life was to set goals.

  Her first goal was to get the people in the house away from her friends without them being discovered or hurt. She assumed they only wanted her, and if she could lead them away, she’d meet her goal.

  She crouched behind the barn door, focusing intently on keeping her breathing inaudible and listening to her pursuer. Her hand cramped around the barrel of the gun and she carefully loosened it. The brush of footstep on dirt. A shadow. And then…

  The first guy crept around the edge of the barn door. Kelsey pounced, clocking him hard across the face with her gun, gritting her teeth against the impact that reverberated up her arm. Exhilarated when he rocked back, his hand automatically going to his jaw, she shoved him backwards and stepped on him. He’d be down for at least a few minutes. She thought. But hot fingers closed around her ankle and she crashed to the ground. She sucked back a scream, her mind on Van and Tom. The impact knocked the air from her lungs and the gun from her hand, but she scrambled to recover both quickly. He hung on to her leg, his grip sending snakes of disgust and panic writhing through her belly. She had to get away, get them away from her friends! Bending her knee hard to pull her foot out of his grasp, she immediately drove her toe downward into his stomach again. This time he didn’t grab her.

  But he’d slowed her down. Two more men ran out of the house and across the lawn by the time she got to her feet. Her heart went into overdrive. She started to run to her right, but another guy came around the side of the house. Shit, how many had they brought?

  Now she was trapped with the barn behind her, one recovering attacker on her left, and three spreading in a semicircle to cut off her options as they approached her.

  “She’s got a gun,” one of them said.

  Kelsey waved it, grinning. “I do. And I know how to use it. Wanna see?” She squeezed off a shot, aiming high but sweeping the gun so they’d all duck. She darted around behind the barn and took off across the field, cursing the turned soil that made running difficult. Assuming they were behind her, she zigzagged across the field. On one zig she glanced back, dismayed to see only two pursuing her. The others were probably looking for her friends, hoping to use them to lure her back. Well, screw that. She reversed direction and angled for the far corner of the field, arcing her way back to the house.

  She widened her stride, but her right foot landed on a clod and twisted, sending her stumbling and a zing of panic into her
brain. A few steps proved there was no damage to her ankle, thank God, but she took a hit on her speed. The gap between her and her pursuers closed quickly, forcing her to fire another shot over their heads. This trigger pull was easier, and her aim better. They hit the dirt and she sped on. They shouted for their companions, who emerged from the barn, spotted her, and joined the chase. She went around the house to the open front door, darted through, and crouch-walked to the back door to watch what happened next.

  “Yesss!” she hissed when all four shapes converged, then parted to go around both sides of the house and meet in the front. She went out the back door into the center of the yard, and…crap. She’d underestimated them—only two guys had gone around to the front. The other two hovered in the shadows, watching. She’d barely registered this when the one on her right raised his gun and fired.

  The bullet snagged her hair, then went through the door of the barn. Kelsey froze in shock, practically departing from her body for an instant while her brain processed what had just happened. One second later, every nerve ending screamed move! and she reversed back to the house, ducking inside.

  “What the hell are you doing?” the other guy screamed. “You can’t hurt her, asshole!”

  “Good to know,” she muttered, heart pounding, brain scrambling. Coming back was a foolish move, since it trapped her again. But her mother’s training triumphed. When guy number one came in the front and number two in the back, she rolled over the back of the couch and let them collide where she’d been standing, giving her enough space to get out the front. Three and four were on either side of the porch, but she was too fast for them and flew up the driveway before they could reach her.

  Score one for soccer. Playing intramural at school this year was paying off in speed and stamina.

  When she was a hundred yards up the drive she looked back. All four were chasing her now, her friends apparently forgotten.