A wife, he asked himself? The women's clothes bothered him. He couldn't put it together in his head with what he knew about Neo. It had to be something else, a wife just didn't fit. And where was she now? Had she been here when the kids came here, if it was the kids? Was it her, the mystery woman?
Long hairs in the bathroom waste bag: Black; the same in a hairbrush he had found in the top dresser drawer in the bedroom along with several drawers full of clothes. If she had been here, why did she leave it all? Had she taken only what she needed and left the rest? After all, much of it had been pulled out and there did appear to be empty spots on the closet rod where hangers had been. Or maybe he just wanted to see it that way. Just because there was a bare spot didn't mean there had been something there. He had not found any spare hangers, in fact, so if she had taken clothes she had taken the hangers too.
He came out of the house and pulled the car around front. The back of the house was designed to bring nearly anything in or out of the house without detection. Neo had planted dense shrubbery and built an overhang that lead directly into the garage. Nearly the entire narrow entrance was also hidden from view by trees and a six foot tall wooden privacy fence. So he had loaded the body and a garbage bag full of stuff from the house at the back of the house. He had decided to remove all the women's clothes. No rhyme or reason, just a feeling that they shouldn't be there when the cops came to check the place, and he was sure they would be here eventually.
He looked across the street: A blind kept moving on the second floor of the house over there. An old brownstone apartment building. Second floor, front right apartment. Okay, he told himself. He hated loose ends. He pulled out, drove down the block and around the corner. He pulled to the curb, got out and fed the meter. A ticket at this point wouldn't do. He locked his car and walked to a pizza shop on the corner.
Marion
Marion watched the man in the car pull away.
"Fred, I tell you, something is not right. This guy I've seen over there before. But he's never pulled around back like that, like he owns the place," Marion said.
"I wouldn't worry about it," Fred said. "Probably hot for each other. Probably just careful. Drugs make you do funny things," he said. He had allowed himself a second drink for the afternoon: He turned back to the football game he had been watching.
"I don't know," Marion said. She came over to the couch and was about to sit down when someone knocked on the front door.
"Your friend Art, probably," Marion said as she got up and walked to the front door.
"Who's there?" she asked through the front door.
“Pizza delivery, Ma’am. Apartment Two A, right?" The voice asked.
Fred shook his head. "I didn't order one behind your back," he said.
"We didn't order a pizza," Marion yelled through the door.
"But it's Two A... It's paid for," the voice said.
"Well for Christ's sake if it's paid for open the door, Marion," Fred said.
She frowned. "You did order it. You know you're not supposed to have pizza," Marion chastised as she threw the dead bolts and opened the door.
Jimmy smiled, the pizza box balanced on one hand. He handed the box to Marion and she smiled back. He reached behind himself, pulled his silenced 9 mm and shot her in the forehead. It chuffed, nearly silent, Marion folded and dropped to the floor with a heavy thump. He stepped quickly into the room and shot Fred as he was getting up out of his recliner to see what the racket was about. Fred collapsed back into his chair.
Problem over, Jimmy thought. He bent down, picked up the pizza, which didn't seem any worse for the wear, and stepped back out of the apartment. He closed the door behind him. He whistled as he hit the sidewalk, opened up the box, took out a piece of pizza and ate it on the way back to his car.
Just before he turned the corner a city police car came up the street and pulled into Neo's driveway.
Tight, Jimmy thought as he tossed the pizza on to the passenger side of the front seat. That was too fuckin' tight.
Watertown New York
Jefferson County Transfer Station 2
Sergeant Alice Tetto
Alice backed the car around to the open container, late afternoon was a perfect time. The county residents not in evidence: The large trucks done with their routes for the day. The dump about to close down for another day. Whenever she had something to dispose of and she needed privacy, she timed it so that she was here in the late afternoon just as she was now.
Sergeant Smith had met her on a back road on Fort Drum. That was not as risky as it seemed. Fort Drum had been a small winter camp back in the early 1900 hundreds: When it had expanded the first time from Pine Camp to Camp Drum it had incorporated the small village of Leray. The whole township: Farms, streets, the Leray Mansion, fields. At the third expansion, when it became Fort Drum most people had forgotten about the old township and its farms and roads rotting away on the reservation.
When Alice had come to work for Major Weston at Bluechip she had come from Drum. Re-assigned to bridge a gap, so she had thought. She had found out after that Weston had requested her specifically. Probably after reading her personnel file.
She had a certain propensity for violence. Her psychological evaluations showed an aptitude for following orders without question, and a certain flexibility of morals that some would find alarming, but which the government had already used her for more than once. Killing didn't seem to affect her the way it did others.
She had served in Afghanistan and watched fellow soldiers fall apart when it came to killing. It didn't bother her at all. Killing was part of the job. That was how she looked at it then: That was how she had explained her lack of apathy to the shrink that had debriefed her when she had been reassigned after the second tour to Drum. It was nothing special, it was how she was built.
Weston had embraced that side of her, and the old farms and fields hidden in the lost recesses of the base had become the perfect place for her to dispose of problems for him.
Unfortunately, the base was used more and more lately as a training facility. Because of that it had become somewhat unpredictable for her to dispose of problems there. The last two times she had nearly been caught, and that had forced her to adapt to a different strategy. The transfer station had proven to be the perfect alternative when there were large troop placements training or on maneuvers at the base.
Alice shut down the car and walked around to the back, looking in all directions, trying not be obvious as she did it: There was no one around.
The sexual relationship with Weston had simply happened. Another moral flexibility she had acquired in service to her country. Sometimes sex was also part of the job if you were a woman. An asset was an asset. Weston was not unattractive, but it hardly mattered. What did mater was that he found her desirable.
She had been summoned to General Wesley Lee's office twice now. Both times under the guise of monthly training that was required for her security level. Not even Weston knew who his real boss was, but she did.
The first time had been two years before, just weeks after she had started her new job. The last just a few weeks before. The General had not known what was missing, he had simply called her in to encourage her to see the job to the end. That end was coming fast, he had told her. Nothing more. Just a pep talk, she had decided, to keep her in the loop. It had been so long at that point since she had seen him that she had begun to wonder if she was still working for the General at all. The summons had solved that issue completely.
She keyed the trunk lock and the lid rose slowly.
There was an end to her time with Major Weston. It was coming soon. The General hadn't been more specific, but he hadn't needed to be, she had already known. Maybe more than the General himself did, and Alice was not the sort of soldier to question orders from the chain of command. She had briefly wondered if it meant she would need to terminate Major Weston herself: If it was required, she would. She saw no real problem with it. The question in
her mind was what might be next.
She looked down into the trunk. Smith had been easy. Bluechip was a small facility. Even with Drum nearby it was under its own command, not a sub command of the nearby base. There were a few hundred soldiers assigned there, and they all tended to socialize with each other, shunning the soldiers from the nearby base. If asked she would not have been able to put the reasons for that into words. Pride? A sense of place in the scheme of things? The elevation that the sense of working on something apart: Something special, afforded you? It was all of those things and more. And she knew, even when most of those who worked at the facility didn't know, what was so special about Bluechip. Every problem she took care of knew something. And every one of those problems had given up their information before she had allowed them to die.
Two weeks before it had been a reporter from Syracuse. He had gotten a little too close: Spooked Weston. Weston had put her on him. She had taken him out after meeting him in a bar. Men could be so easy like that. He had followed her back to what he thought was her hotel room for a fun time. It was her hotel room, but rented only to do a job. A few hours later he had gone out to her car in her luggage. The next afternoon he had come here.
She knew about the meteor DX2379R. She knew it would probably hit instead of miss: And if it did miss it would not be by enough to matter at all. She knew all about project Bluechip's real underlying mission, development of the SS-V2765 virus. She knew what it had been developed to do, and she knew all the problems that the General did not know about: She knew what it did do. She knew how Gabe Kohlson had been able to smuggle it out of the facility. She knew that the new Challenger he had been driving should have been a big tip off to Weston, but somehow he had overlooked it. She knew how he had sold the idea of stealing it to a local bookie he had been in deep with.
A drug developed to allow soldiers to live longer in combat, it had an unforeseen benefit. It would not allow you to die: You could live forever. She was sure he had downplayed just exactly how that second life would be lived.
The bookie, she assumed, had passed the message on quietly: Was it worth the relief of a five thousand dollar debt? Ten thousand? Whatever it had been that Gabe Kohlson's gambling habit had racked up, it had been wiped out and there had been at least enough left over for the Challenger: Whoever held the real reigns on those debts had forgiven it. Kohlson had delivered and then, somehow the whole thing had gone bad.
Jimmy West worked for that person, whoever it was: If forced to guess, she would say Tommy Murphy. He was the biggest and the baddest: The most likely to be able to capitalize on information and a product like that.
She didn't like to guess though, and that part of it had nothing to do with her at all. The truth was that even though Weston could not see it, it didn't even matter. The end was coming. If the General pulled the plug first or the meteor hit, or the scientists were right and even a close pass by that meteor would set off a sequence of destruction that would end society as they knew it: It didn't matter. It was over already, one way or the other; just nobody was laying down yet. Nobody was calling it quits yet. Her included, so, she supposed she was no better than Weston, or the General for that matter.
She looked down into the trunk at the bundled and bagged remains of Sergeant Smith, lately of the Quartermasters office at Bluechip.
He had met her on one of those back roads. It was a good place to meet even when there were maneuvers going on, and there had been.
Maneuvers meant gunfire, even live rounds. The whole area was off limits during maneuvers and training sessions, but she could have cared less about that. He had met her in a small clearing just off a one lane blacktop that had been chewed to bits over the years by tank treads, on the promise that she needed to show him something very important. She had taken him around to the trunk. He had been eager. The lid had risen to a plastic lined interior and she had shot him twice in the temple as the puzzled look had still been riding on his face. There had been no need to question him: There was nothing he knew that she needed to know: He had simply been unfortunate enough to be the author of the report listing the missing virus.
A camouflaged rain suit had slipped right over her own uniform, and she had gone to work with an ax and a sharp knife that had been laying on the floor of the trunk waiting. By early afternoon the bagged remains had been resting in her trunk and she had been on her way to the transfer station.
She reached down, hefted the first bag out of the trunk and launched it into the huge steel container. Five minutes later she was finished and had paid her dumping fee as she left, smiling up at the woman in the office as she passed over the scales and drove out the gate.
Cleveland Ohio
Billy Jingo
The tire came apart on highway 90 just outside Cleveland Ohio. It took Billy most of an hour to get the space saver spare on and then get the Jeep back onto the ground. He drove off the interstate and into Cleveland. It took some turning around, but he finally made it onto a feeder strip that took him out and around the city. They stopped at a burger place, already sick of cold food; picked up lunch and then Billy pulled into a mall parking lot and April went to work on him.
She put Ben Neo's driver's license next to his own face and then started with the hair. She used a razor to take Billy's hairline back to match Ben Neo's own receding hairline. She used the eye shadow to make the skin under his eyes look a little more baggy. And she bought a cheap pair of plastic reading glasses in a mall store that looks similar to Neo's glasses. She combed his hair straight back and into a small ponytail at the base of his skull and examined her work. A little more eye shadow under his chin, just below his lip, made his chin seem bigger. She looked him over.
"It's pretty good," she said at last.
"Yeah?" Billy asked. She handed him the mirror.
"Whoa," he said, looking side to side in the mirror. "It doesn't even look like me."
"It's not supposed to. You look really good. You look a lot like him... We're gonna do it now?" April asked.
"We may as well," Billy said. "We had to stop, so we may as well. We'd just have to do it later anyway," he said.
They drove to the first dealership they saw: If this one didn't work out the road was crowded with them farther down.
Billy found a used Chevy SUV: Low miles, big price tag, but in a city this size he didn't think anyone would scoff at a large cash transaction.
He spotted the salesman as the salesman spotted him.
"Ray," the salesman told him as he walked up and offered his hand.
"Ben," Billy told him. He shook his hand and then turned back to the SUV.
"Nice truck,” Ray told him, launching straight into his spiel. “Best on the lot. Close to new. In fact the only way I could do better for you would be to sell you a new one." Ray smiled.
"I don't know about that," Billy said. “I don't know if I have the credit for something like that."
"Easy enough to find out. I can run it in just a few minutes," Ray told him. He turned back to the dealership as if he really could just walk back and retrieve Benjamin Neo's information. Like it was sitting on his desk just waiting for him to come and get it. He turned back and smiled at Billy, and then turned once more. His eyes urging Billy on.
"Really?" Billy asked.
"Really... Let me go see. Find out where you stand. Go and look around... The new trucks are over on the other side. Go take a look, I'll be right back." He left with Ben Neo's driver's license and social security number he had jotted down on a small pad he carried in his shirt pocket. Probably for just that sort of thing too, Billy thought. Maybe it was as simple as a quick walk back inside. Maybe it was very nearly sitting on his desktop, or would be soon enough. So soon that it wouldn't matter that it hadn't been.
Billy walked around the lot and looked at some new vehicles. He would've liked to walk over and talk with April where she had parked in the Burger Joint lot next door, but they had decided not to be seen together just in case. The sale
sman came back just a few minutes later.
"Ben. I see no problem. You paid off the house on Lake Avenue?" he asked.
"Yes, yes I did," Billy said, hoping it was true.
"So your credit report is good right now. Nothing outstanding except your other car, the Ford Taurus. And that's almost paid off... Same employer?" he asked.
"Yeah," Billy said, "same. Guess I don't change too much."
"And that is why your credit rating is so good and your score is so high. What exactly were you looking for?" Ray asked him.
"Well I'm looking for something four wheel drive. That's why I looked at the blazer. I'm going to do some traveling. I'm going all the way out to California to look at property," Billy lied. "Maybe I'll be spending a little time on the desert too while I'm there."
"Have you thought GMC Suburban? It's a bigger vehicle, but so much nicer. Let me show you one. I ordered it special: Captains chairs, dual AC, then the guy couldn't make the loan happen. This truck is nice, Ben, very nice," Ray said.
Ray sold him on the GMC. He also lined him up with a local agent who took cash and wrote an insurance policy for the truck. The loan was approved with no problem. Billy had been prepared to put several thousand dollars down, but Ray had told him with all the incentives and rebates he wouldn't have to put any of his own money down at all.
Two hours after he had pulled onto the lot he drove the suburban off the lot, licensed, insured and with a full tank of gas. They unloaded the commander; locked it up and left it sitting in the mall parking lot, the keys resting on the top of the roof like the owner had forgotten them.
April took over the driving, enjoying the way the big suburban felt on the highway.
Earth's Survivors Box Set [Books 1-7] Page 154
