Roused but not startled, I blinked my eyes at the dark figure before me, a figure who had interrupted my slumber once before, months ago on Halloween morning, on my last day at Valhalla Acres. It was my long-lost bodyguard, Agent Mella Orange, and she was in no kind mood.
She clapped her hand around my mouth, rather dramatically I thought, as if I might cry out or scream. Although that is the cinematic reaction to being awakened by a stranger, all I experienced was an irritated and perplexed speechlessness.
“Shh,” she warned as she slowly removed her hand. She needn’t have, for as I’ve said, I was stunned into silence anyway. “Do you know who I am?” she whispered.
Still speechless, I squinted at her. She was certainly a bit more unkempt, and her eyes were so heavy it looked like she had dreadlocks for eyelashes, but her daunting beauty was unmistakable. I nodded.
“Listen very carefully. The release of the virus was intentional. General Kiljoy orchestrated it. I acted under his orders, but I didn’t know what it was that I was doing. He gave me a device a month before we ever came down here. He ordered me to arm it and to activate it on his command. He gave the order on Halloween, apparently just before the four of you went up to Tynee’s office. The device created a fifteen-minute deviation from this compound’s automation routines. It darkened this entire compound except for a network of passages leading from the observation lounge to the garage exit, and ordered the subjects out. As far as I can tell, the deviation is completely invisible, both in the data records and video recordings. I think that’s why Kiljoy eliminated Captain Down. As the administrator of this compound, he was a loose end. He knew too much about how the system worked, and Kiljoy had to be certain his tracks were covered. As for me, I was just supposed to be killed in the sterilization of this compound.”
“How did you manage to avoid that?” In my grog, I failed to comprehend the enormity of the conspiratorial information just relayed to me, preoccupied instead with irrelevant tangents.
She clapped her hand over my mouth again, just as I was yawning. “Shut up and listen. I was suspicious, so I crawled up the elevator shaft to investigate. I was on top of the elevator during the sterilization.”
I pushed her hand away from me in defiant drowsiness. “Why are you telling me this?”
She slapped her hand over my yap once more. With her other hand she held up a disk. “Your journal, Doctor. I’ve read it.”
Astounded, I forcefully pulled her paw off my chops. “What did you think?” I asked eagerly, blind to any ulterior motives. I had written these memoirs, after all, in a literary desert, and had developed a powerful thirst for feedback.
She shrugged and dumped her pail of water at my sand-burned feet. “A little self-indulgent.” She waved the disk in front of me. “The point, Doctor, is that I am in possession of a copy of your little diary. I could very easily make it so the others happen across this if you don’t do exactly as I say. Do you understand? This is blackmail.”
I was insulted by her review of my masterpiece, so I snapped at her. “If you’ve read it then you know I’ve already attempted suicide. Why should I care?”
“I also read what you wrote yesterday. You’re not suicidal. You’re ‘enthralled,’ Doctor.” She paused, nymphs and imps frolicking about the corners of her mouth. “By the way,” she allowed a cagey smirk. “That passage wasn’t half bad.”
If her half compliment was intended to soften my defenses, it worked. After all, a parched man will chew another’s dirty toenails for less than a drop of contaminated water. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”
“About that passage?”
“About anything!”
“You don’t.” She shrugged. “And keep your voice down.”
“Oh. But didn’t you dislike following orders from General Kiljoy without knowing what you were doing? Are we to perpetuate this pattern of abuse? Is this to be some kind of hazing?”
She placed her hand over my mouth yet again, though this time very softly. “Save the diatribes for your opus and listen. I’m not motivating you solely through the threat of punishment, I’m offering you the promise of a reward as well.” She put the diskette inside her jacket pocket and pulled out a remote control in its place. “This replicates some of the codes on General Kiljoy’s remote.” I blinked stupidly, and she continued impatiently. “Do you understand? If you do as I say, this is the key to—what did you call it? ‘The escape demanding that you pay him heed.’”
“Escape?” I snorted in dismissal. “Escape to what? The virus is loose, don’t you understand? It’s no longer contained. It’ll take over this entire continent before the new year. It’s a weapon of mass incapacitation.”
Agent Orange flicked the tip of my nose with her middle finger and leaned toward me. “You despise these people around you, and the weapon backfired. You’re delighted with this turn of events. You think the virus liberated the human spirit, that it freed those people from what was shackling them all along, and I think you’re right. I’ve read your book, Doctor. What I’m offering you is what you’ve been pining for.” She stepped back and held me in skeptical regard. “But you’re all talk, aren’t you? You’re weak. You’re a coward. You’d like to get on the bus, but you hide at the bus stop. You want to join the party, you want to dance, but when your chance comes you duck out. Maybe you’d like to think you want to dance, but given the opportunity you’d rather stay constipated, living off the rotten food in these caves because that’s secure. Or you’d kill yourself before trying for a better life.”
I cringed at her evaluation of my character and remained silent a long while, defenseless against her coercive compassion. She was right, of course, but I had my own fears of the Pied Piper virus. The original subjects, the death row inmates, went unmistakably insane, and in a hellish bad way. That was also the apparent fate of the one-tenth of the city’s population that didn’t survive the initial outbreak. Yes, the majority of the city not only survived but blossomed into something better, into boundlessly confident telepaths or some divinely foolish thing. But where would I fit in? I was a bootlicker of bureaucracy, a tool of technological stupidity, and a minion to my own self-importance. I was an ethical flunky. I knew my weaknesses and sins, and I was well-acquainted with my demons. I was afraid that I wouldn’t make the Pied Piper’s cut. I was afraid I’d end up on the losing team.
Agent Orange knelt down before me, wearing a shrewd smile. Her eyes glowed like a comfortable and confident campfire, crackling with a fierce warmth. She palmed the crown of my bald head to stop me from shaking it to and fro. “Doctor,” she whispered, her eyes flaming with intimidating sexuality. “Would you care to dance?”
137 Agent Orange’s calculated coquetry was entirely effective at mowing down my resistance. In fact, it was probably overkill, for I didn’t have much of a center from which to resist in the first place. In any case, her sly flirtations overrode my typical timid aloofness. It was her style, I think. She made me feel pleasantly combative. She didn’t cast sheep eyes, she flashed coyote eyes. She didn’t play footsie, she played shove-sie. It was all deliberate and measured, but I didn’t care. Let her play the svelte Svengalette and I’ll play the pathetic patsy. I enjoyed the attention. She knew I knew she was vamping, but it didn’t matter to her either. It was a fair trade, and much more effective than threats or blackmail. It was a comfortable dynamic, and we both knew that it worked.
“Why haven’t you left?” I asked, pointing to the remote. “You have the means. What do you need me for?”
“Escape is not my present objective.” She pursed her lips in determination. “I followed my orders in good faith, and that bastard Kiljoy sent me in to die and made me into a scapegoat. I’m not expendable in anyone’s equation but my own.”
“Revenge?”
“I’ll turn the other cheek until someone tries to kill me, Doctor. Then all bets are off, and I take karma into my own hands. I have to be sure he gets what’s coming to him.”
“I don’t know why you doubt it. That’s standard operating procedure in weapons development. We’ve tested thousands of chemical weapons and mind-control agents on our own soldiers and citizens. We’ve injected them with radioactive isotopes just to see what would happen. When the Manhattan Project achieved its objective, the planners went ahead and tested the first atomic bomb over the Nevada desert, even though the physicists weren’t certain that it wouldn’t ignite the planet’s atmosphere. Then they field-tested it over the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
“But there’s no vaccine. Why test a biological weapon on domestic soil when there’s no cure?”
“Impatience. He’s dying.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I’ve seen his medical record. His heart is on its last few pumps. He’s had two heart attacks already, and he was scheduled for open-heart surgery in mid-November. I don’t think he expected to survive to see the completion of the project.”
I looked at her dubiously.
“I’m a spy,” she said. “I don’t just spy on who they tell me to. I cover my ass. I’m telling you, he orchestrated the release of the virus so he could see a field test of Operation Small Change before he died.” She drew close to me. “Think about it, Doctor. He’s been directing this project for the last thirteen years. Testing the virus on prisoners was only the beginning of the human trials, and as you’ve seen, they weren’t terribly predictive about its field utility. He’s dying, and he needed to know that he did something meaningful. He figured it would work, and he’d get his satisfaction.”
“At the cost of thousands of lives?”
“I was expendable,” she shrugged. “So were the subjects, including your best friend. It doesn’t matter if it’s one, two, or thousands. You give the authoritarian mind far too much credit, Doctor.”
“What about you?” I challenged her. “Volt was apparently expendable for your purposes.”
Agent Orange pointed her finger at me. It was threatening and not at all playful. “Understand one thing, Doctor. Kiljoy murdered Volt. I didn’t even know what was happening at the time. After Kiljoy gave me the order to activate the deviation device, I drugged Volt. That’s why he had the hiccups when Tynee called to tell him to pick up the four of you at his office, and that’s when I started to feel suspicious. I left Volt tied up outside the limousine and went to investigate what the hell was going on. I did not know the compound was going to be sterilized.”
I apologized for my implication, and she nodded severely.
“If you wish to escape, leave a pencil on your desk pointed toward the door. I’ll contact you. Otherwise, stay the hell out of my way, and I advise against any dumb ideas you may have of thwarting me.” She turned and walked toward the door. “You had a good dog, Doctor. Kiljoy slaughtered him, too. What more proof do you need?”
She slipped silently behind the door, exactly as a spy should, and left me profoundly stupefied. I sat motionless, paralyzed by implications and possibilities. I only snapped out of my daze when my gaze happened to focus on my right hand lying listlessly on my lap. I looked at it a good long while before I was flabbergasted by the sudden recognition that I was inexplicably clutching the very disk with which Agent Orange had threatened to blackmail me five minutes ago.
138 Despite my rude awakening and subsequent confrontation with my own cowardice, sleep returned quickly to me and offered me peace in its gentle embrace. I must have dreamed madly the rest of the night. I remember none of it, but I awoke feeling fully refreshed and possessed of a clarity of thought I had not experienced since before I ever noticed its absence. The first thing I did was walk over to my desk and clear its surface of everything but a pencil pointed directly toward the door. I was busting the hell out, come what may. Que será, será, as my father used to bellow as he made me Italian toast.
My upbeat and confident mood was at considerable odds with that of everyone else that morning in the observation lounge. I mirrored their grim faces well, I thought. Their faces were so unsmiling that it would not have been hard to convince me that they had never grinned in their entire life. I, on the other hand, quite enjoyed myself, parodying their behavior for no one’s amusement but my own.
To be certain, they had more than ample cause to be upset. All contact with the world outside of the cozy dungeon had been lost. According to the trembling General Kiljoy, who seemed to have turned into a feeble old man overnight, this in all likelihood implied that the Pied Piper virus was running rampant across the country and the continent.
“Wasn’t there any contingency planning for this?” Tynee asked. “I mean, they had to have realized that escape was at least a remote possibility.”
“What about internationally?” Miss Mary added. “Is the rest of the world going to declare North America a no-man’s-land?”
“Negative.” General Kiljoy shook his head. “They weren’t blind to the possibility of escape, but their primary response was offensive. A permanently incapacitating biological agent was released on domestic soil. For all they know, for all we know, the virus was released as a terrorist attack against our nation.”
“What kind of a counterattack could they possibly launch if they don’t even know who the perpetrator is?”
“The only counterattack possible when playing with ultimate weapons.”
Tynee paused. “MAD? Mutually assured destruction? Are you kidding me? Did they let other nations know this?”
“Other nations would assume it. The United States of America is not about to just vanish from global geopolitics without a fight. If we go down, the enemy goes with us, whoever the hell and wherever the hell they may be. That’s the way the game is played. As far as the Pentagon is concerned, the release of this virus constituted the first shot of World War III. Agents were immediately dispatched to every nation on Earth with copies of the virus to be released in the event of containment failure. Containment failed. It’s unmistakable.”
“What are you saying?” Miss Mary coughed to cover up a hoarse giggle. The grim-grin phenomenon reared its goofy face. I saw Tynee smirk as well. I let an honest snicker escape my own lips.
General Kiljoy’s mouth bounced into an enormous grin, then back to a bulldog frown, and back into a grin again, snapping up and down like a flexible yardstick. “Well,” he shrugged limply, choking back a chuckle and swallowing some tears. “It’s the end of the world as we know it.”
139 There we were, talking about the day’s news, the end of the world as we know it, the collapse of civilization, Armageddon or what you will. General Kiljoy hobbled to the bathroom to retch some more as soon as he spoke the words. Tynee couldn’t accept it, scratching his head and counting his fingers. Miss Mary pillaged the cabinets, counting her remaining stash of cigarettes. Ratdog yawned and lay down. I poured myself a drink, rum, thick and rich. It was the first thing in the morning, but what the hell, it seemed appropriate to the occasion. I tried to think of a toast to share with me and myself, but all I could think of was Blip’s favorite cheerio, “To excellence in human communication.”
And how, old friend. Bottoms up.
140 I poured myself another and, wanting to check on the status of my pencil, excused myself to my laboratory. I was immensely pleased to see that she had received the message. This was apparent because she left the pencil balanced on its eraser, pointing straight up. This clandestine communication gave me immeasurable satisfaction. Topic aside, the process gratified some part of me that fashioned secret agent fantasies and then presented them to my consciousness in daydreams. There had certainly been plenty of this sort of activity around me lately, but that was exactly the problem. It was around me, poking at me like a cattle prod while I cowered and jumped and rubbed my smarting ass. This time, with this pencil, I knew the
code. I understood the subtext. I was in on the secret. The bus was coming, and I knew the driver.
I was sipping my rum in a euphoric haze of self-congratulation when the door was flung open. In marched Tynee, and he wasted no time getting to the point.
“Have you made any progress at all in your assignment?” His demeanor suggested that he thought we were back in his office, and I was his underling.
“Nope.” I drained the rest of my glass and paused as the alcohol washed over my brain like the first warm breeze of an ersatz springtime. “It’s impossible. It took years to create it, and it would take at least as long to develop a vaccine, and that’s with an entire research team.”
He ignored me and changed the subject. “General Kiljoy’s lost it,” he said, pointing to the door. “What are we going to do?”
“We?”
“This could be the end of the world, Fountain! We need to pull together.”
“It is the end of the world, Tynee. And they have pulled together.”
This gave him brief pause, but he quickly pushed reality out of the way. “I have to see things with my own eyes. I’ve suggested to General Kiljoy that we take a little field trip upstairs. The limousine is practically indestructible, and it’s hermetically sealed. We’d be perfectly safe inside.”
“General Kiljoy agreed to this?”
“As much as he was able.”
“And Miss Mary?”
He nodded.
“Why are you inviting me to come along?”
“The four of us need to stick together. This situation is,” he paused, “unprecedented.”
I didn’t know what Tynee expected to find upstairs, but I was more than willing to get out of this dungeon. I shrugged. Perhaps this would be my chance to escape.
Just a Couple of Days Page 29
