Second Chance

by Chet Williamson

  Keith laughed, walked through the door into the empty hall, and turned left toward the rest rooms. He had chosen this time because during the last two hours of the marathon shift, most people were either relaxing around the lab tables or working like hell trying to finish what they had put off for too long. No one, at any rate, was in the storage area.

  Keith took one more look down the hall, then pushed open one of the double doors and slipped in. He went directly to the rack of vials marked ZF723, took four of them, and slipped one into each pants pocket. Then he turned around and walked out again.

  He knew there would be no check when they left the complex later that afternoon. There was no need for any, Hastings had told him when he had asked at the end of his first two week shift. "We're not like those South African niggers smugglin' out diamonds up their assholes. If Christian white men can't trust each other, well then I don't know what."

  Keith left the storage room unseen, and walked back into the lab. He worked until a quarter of four, then cleaned up and went with the other men whose shift was over to the living area and grabbed his duffel.

  When the elevator door opened, Hastings, Keith, and several others waited until their replacements got off. Hellos were exchanged, and as they rode up to the first floor, Hastings shook his head. "Poor fucks," he said.

  "What?"

  "Yearly inventory," Hastings said.

  Though it hit Keith like a hammer, he showed no reaction other than to ask, "Inventory?" disinterestedly.

  "All the supplies, raw materials, storage stuff, alla that shit."

  Storage stuff.

  "Even test tubes and petri dishes. It's bullshit, but the old man has a fly up his ass about it. His daddy did it, so he does it. Waste of time and energy, you ask me. Least this year it's two-three shift has to do it and not us."

  "They don't . . . work at all?"

  "Oh yeah, they'll start the inventory end of their first week probably. Way we've done it before."

  End of the first week. That meant they could find the four vials missing as early as the 19th, and since Keith's shift wouldn't start until the 23rd, it would be impossible to replace the empty tubes.

  Another complication. Besides what he had to do with the vials, he now also had to come up with an explanation for their disappearance.

  As they walked to the parking lot, Hastings said, "So when you leaving for your wilderness trek?"

  "Soon's I can get home and pack up."

  "Tonight, huh? That means we won't be seein' you at Red's?"

  "Nope."

  "Sally's gonna miss you somethin' awful."

  "You'll just have to keep her company then, won't you?”

  “Sounds like you're givin' me permission."

  "We ain't married. Sally's a free woman. She wants to mess around with polecats, that's her lookout."

  "Don't you worry, Pete ol' boy. I'll keep them polecats away from her."

  Yes, Keith thought as he drove through the gates of Goncourt Laboratories, the vials pressing against his hips, I think I can find a way to explain their disappearance all right.

  Back in his apartment, he removed a piece of quarter round from one wall of his bedroom, and took out four vials of insulin and a plastic bag of disposable syringes, which he had bought two weeks before with a forged prescription at a pharmacy in Lufkin. Using one of the syringes, he withdrew the insulin from the bottles and squirted it down the drain. Then he opened the vials from the lab and, with a second syringe, drew out the ZF723 serum and injected it through the rubber caps of the sealed insulin bottles.

  He packed everything he would need in his nondescript duffel, wrapping the vials carefully in his socks. Then he took a plastic pint bottle of rubbing alcohol, poured it down the drain, refilled it with chloroform, closed it tightly, and added it to the bag. He had the prescription for insulin and syringes in his wallet, just in case anyone from airport security asked for it.

  Diabetes was the perfect cover. It explained the bottles of serum, the syringes, and the alcohol bottle, used to sterilize a diabetic's injection sites. Security people would be far more likely to give him sympathy than a hassle.

  He wrapped the empty vials from the lab in a t-shirt which he rolled inside a sleeping bag, then carried the bag and the duffel, both fitted into a backpack frame, down to his car and put them in the trunk. If anyone from the lab was watching, it would appear that he was off on his camping trip.

  On the way out of town he stopped at Sally's trailer. Joey was playing with G. I. Joe figures on the tiny porch, and he stepped over the boy and walked into the trailer. Sally was fixing dinner and watching Entertainment Tonight on a small black and white TV that sat on the counter between canisters. She looked up as he came in.

  "You're really goin'?" she said.

  He nodded. "Just gotta get away for a while."

  "All right," she said. "I know how you are." Then she smiled. "I know how men are. Long's you come back."

  "I'll come back," he promised, meaning it.

  "Ain't you awful horny after two weeks, though?" she asked him, cocking her head.

  "Yeah, a little," Keith said, "and you look awful cute in that pretty apron."

  "You gotta go right now? This minute?"

  He shrugged. "Won't you burn your supper?"

  "Not if I turn off the stove for a while," she said, and reached out and did just that.

  He got on the road a half hour later, a ham sandwich on a paper plate on the seat next to him. He headed southwest on US 59, but didn't turn off at the exits for Sam Houston National Forest, since no one had been tailing him. Instead he drove on, and arrived at Houston International just before nine o'clock. He parked, took the duffel off the pack frame, and shuttled to the terminal, where he paid cash for a ticket on the 11:30 flight to Atlanta.

  There were no problems at the security gate, and he slept during the first half of the flight, waking up at the stopover in New Orleans. From there to Atlanta, he thought about Judy McDonald. And he wrote about her in his mind.

  ~*~

  September 13, 1993:

  I have to rationalize her destruction. Hers and the others I can reach in these few days. For only by securing their ruin can I ensure that I will remain free to finish my mission. Paranoia? Perhaps. But only paranoia, a constant state of awareness of every danger, has kept me alive this long.

  I owe them my life, I know that, and it seems the height of ingratitude to destroy them. But perhaps their destruction will help to further steel me for what I have to do, help me find the ruthlessness that is required.

  Besides, I have no choice. And it isn't as though it's murder. Their murders would only arouse suspicion. No, they'll be the ones to do the killing. All I'll be doing is releasing what's already there inside them, triggering the anger that lies in everyone's mind. Let them talk then. Let them tell as much as they want to about Keith Aarons, for who will believe the ravings of violent psychotics?

  Still, I have to rationalize her destruction, and it's hard. I loved her in college as a brother loves a sister. We were both imbued with revolutionary ideals, and we expressed them as effectively as we knew how. She did it with her art.

  Looking back, her technique was naïve. But there was a purity about her canvases, with their great slashes of orange and red and yellow, and the faces we saw in them. The longer you looked, the more faces you saw, Vietnamese faces, tortured by Amerikan flames. It was as though Amerika wasn't content with torturing its own people with the filth it spewed into the air, but it had to go to untouched places as well and spew napalm into it, destroy its forests and jungles and birds and animals, and Judy knew that. That was what her paintings said.

  But between then and now, what happened? I can't believe that she simply forgot. I think she was given a choice between holding on to her ideals and making things better for the world, or making things better for herself. She chose the latter, and became a whore. I know. I found out all about her. I found out all about my old friends
—Judy and Alan, who sold out, and Woody and Sharla, the two I loved most.

  But Judy is the one now who I have to think about. Judy, who became not an artist, but a seller of art, who pays the people of the mountain cheap and sells to the people of the city dear. Someone who masks the dangers by saying, Look, your life isn't ugly—it can be beautiful. Pretend that things haven't changed. Lie to yourself. Pretend it's a hundred years ago when people hand crafted tools from wood, when women quilted every day, when artists did no more than proclaim how wonderful was the world and God's creations.

  Ignore the filth, the pollution, the destruction of the earth, the things of which art can speak and scream.

  Because things like that don't sell, do they, Judy? No, truth doesn't make you money.

  Well, it's time to get your spirit back. Time to find your soul again.

  Time for golden oldies.

  Chapter 28

  Frank McDonald was feeling hassled even before Woody Robinson called him and told him that he was sure that Keith Aarons was the terrorist known as Pan. Judy was late getting home, the kids were tearing around the house like banshees, the dog had just thrown up a whole bowl full of Kibbles 'n Bits on the dining room carpet, and he just realized that he had forgotten to put the chicken in the oven at 4:00, as Judy had instructed.

  "What the hell are you talking about?" was his first reaction, as he held the phone with one hand and, with the other, picked up chunks of vomit with a paper towel. "You told me about this before, Woody. You were full of shit then and you're full of shit now. Keith was dead then, he's dead now."

  "No he's not. The body was a kid named Ben Wallace.”

  “Horseshit. He ran off to the coast."

  "And never turned up again? I also learned that Keith was identified after one of the killings—by an Iselin graduate, who later died mysteriously."

  "How mysteriously?"

  "A car crash."

  "Oh yeah, real mysterious. Probably drunk—that's why he kept seeing dead guys."

  "It was a she, and she wasn't drunk. And there's another thing—"

  "What?"

  "Oh, I just got some dog barf on my fingers. What's this other thing?"

  "In one of his notes, Pan paraphrases Steppenwolf.”

  “So?"

  "That was Keith's favorite book."

  "Shit, that was a lot of people's favorite book. It doesn't mean a damn thing."

  "Not until you remember that Pan wasn't in our other life, Frank—and then it means everything."

  Frank wedged the phone between his ear and shoulder and dropped the mess he had cleaned up into the waste can. "Well, hell," he said cavalierly, "maybe it's this Ben Wallace you're talking about. Maybe he's Pan."

  "If he is, that only means that bringing Tracy and Dale back—but Tracy specifically—still created Pan, whether it's Ben Wallace or Keith."

  Frank sighed and sat on the kitchen floor, his back against the cabinets. "Look, pal. You've got Tracy, you've got your kids, and that's great. Eddie and Dale have got each other, and that's great. We also have Pan, and that's not so great. But it's life. It's real. It's the way things are in this world, and it's the way they've always been to everybody but eight of us. So don't kill yourself with this. What's done is done, and it can't be changed back to the way it was before."

  There was a long silence on the other end. "Can't it?" Woody finally said.

  "No, it can't. Now look, I'd love to feel guilty with you some more, but I just heard the car pull in. Judy's got an opening tomorrow, she's wired as hell, and I've got no time to commiserate about metaphysics."

  "But, Frank—"

  "Enjoy what you have, my friend. God's been good to you, huh? He gave you a second chance. Don't crap all over it because you're too happy. Forget it, Woody. Just forget it and enjoy, okay?"

  "Christ, I've tried to. I've known this for two weeks, Frank, and I've tried to forget about it, just hold it in until it dissolves or goes away or something. But it doesn't go away, and I had to talk to somebody who'd understand."

  "I don't understand, Woody, and I don't want to. I don't even want to think about it—"

  "Frank, do you know how many people have been killed by—”

  “No, man, and I don't want to know!"

  The back door opened and Judy came in, her attaché case under her arm. Frank thought she looked puzzled.

  "Hey," he said into the phone, "I gotta go. Now just relax, will you? And forget it, huh?" Woody said nothing. "There's no trying involved, man. Just do it. Forget."

  "Okay." The voice sounded weak, farther away than California. "Yeah."

  "That's my man. Give my love to Tracy. Bye." And he hung up.

  "Woody?" said Judy.

  "Yeah. He's still whacked out. I don't know if he can't deal with happiness or what." He kissed his wife lightly. "So where've you been so late?"

  She gave a little laugh. "I . . . don't know. It's like I lost some time somewhere."

  "What? First Woody, now you?"

  "No, it's . . . I mean, I was on the elevator in the parking garage, and I stepped off, and the next thing I knew I was sitting in the car. And at least twenty minutes had gone by."

  "Well, are you all right? Somebody knock you out or what?”

  “No, no, I'm fine."

  "You still have your money?"

  "Oh yeah. I don't remember seeing anyone. But all of a sudden there I was behind the wheel, and it was twenty minutes later."

  "Dammit, Jude, you've been working too hard. I told you, you need to take a break, a week off. Trish can run the gallery by herself."

  "I don't know," Judy said. "Maybe you're right."

  Frank was amazed to get that much of a concession out of her. Usually when he criticized her workaholic nature she shot him down immediately.

  "After the opening tomorrow," she said, "I'll take a week. Maybe I'm just tired. I mean, I feel tired tonight . . ."

  They went to bed earlier than usual, and Judy complained, just before she fell asleep, of an ache in her arm. When Frank examined it, he thought he saw a small mark, but couldn't be sure.

  ~*~

  September 14, 1993:

  I think she recognized me, just for an instant as she turned, before I slapped the chloroform over her face. It didn't matter, though. I told her to forget, just as I told her to forget everything else I said until 5:00 tomorrow afternoon, an hour after the opening. I injected her as carefully as possible. I didn't want her to hurt, to be concerned, to go to a doctor. I want what happens to be a total surprise, for her and for everyone else.

  Now on to Cleveland, and Sharla. Sharla, who I loved. I never found another woman with her strength of will, with such purity of purpose. She believed in her people, but not to such an absurd extent that she shut others out. Her lover, after all, was a white boy.

  But she turned her back on her people. Taught a few years in the inner city, then maybe couldn't take it anymore, turned her back and went and taught good little white children from good white families.

  When I saw her lying there that night at Woody's party, I felt as though time had really turned back. But now there was something about the way she wore the clothes that she believed in back then, something that said she believed no longer, that it was just a costume, that she could as easily have dressed up like a princess or a fairy or a majorette or something else equally white. And then when I found what she was doing, who she was teaching, I knew that she had sold out too.

  Thus my rationalization for what I must do. Now she pays, and by making her pay I not only protect myself, but I thicken my skin even further, forge upon my flesh another layer of that armor of ruthlessness.

  ~*~

  The show at the Buckhead Folk Art Gallery was the season opener, so Frank McDonald understood his wife's tension. Its title was "The Fall Sampler," since it showed several of the best pieces of the artists who were due to have their own shows later in the year Last fall's sampler had been a huge success, with front page c
overage in the Constitution's Style section. It had greatly expanded the mailing list, and the gallery's sales had increased by 150% over the previous year.

  This fall, Judy had added five new artists to the gallery. She had discovered two at rural craft fairs, and had lured two from other galleries, but her prize was Bridie Finch. Bridie was a robust, heavyset woman from McCaysville, a small town on the Tennessee border. Frank had liked her the first time he met her, several weeks ago, when she drove her husband's pickup truck, its bed stacked with quilts under a plastic tarp, to the McDonald's house.

  Bridie was the real McCoy, a mountain woman born and bred, who used traditional patch designs because she knew no others, and fabric left over from dresses and blouses and yes, quilts that her aunts and her mother and grandmothers had made.

  Judy had found Bridie Finch three months before, shortly after returning from the party in Iselin. She was driving to a flea market and craft show near Blue Ridge, but had taken a wrong turn and had to ask for directions at a general store with gas pumps outside. The man she assumed was the owner told her how to get back to Route 5, and she was just about to pull away when she saw a small, hand lettered 5 x 7 inch card in the window. She was barely able to make out the word QUILTS, for the sun had bleached the letters to nearly the same shade as the yellowed sign.

  Judy joked later that the odds were that whoever had put up that sign was long dead, but she rolled down the window and asked the man, who turned out to be Bridie's husband Arthur, if he did indeed have any quilts for sale.

  "Bridie does," the man said, pointing a grimy finger into the woods behind the store. "In the house."

  The whole place looked, Judy told Frank, like something out of Deliverance. Old cars were up on blocks, gaunt dogs lay in the shade as though they were dead, or snuffled amid piles of boards and sticks, as if hoping to drive out something they could eat. She felt certain that if she got out of the car and walked up to the house, she would never be seen again, and the Volvo would be up on blocks and rusted in a month or two.

  But QUILTS was the magic word that would send Judy through a legion of chainsaw-wielding rednecks, so she parked, walked up the dirt trail to a small one-story cabin, and knocked.