“Everybody out!” the driver commanded. “Stay together and everything’ll be fine.” Susan opened her door, shifted her weight to get out, and felt her foot slide on the floor. She looked down, and the carpet under the shoe she’d stepped on the gum with had a hole dissolving in it, and she was sliding in a gooey mess. She lifted her foot out and found that the entire bottom of her shoe—her favorite dressy high heels! —was completely gone, the heel flopping loose, her bare sole on the asphalt. She turned and stepped each foot in turn up into the van, unstrapping her shoes and leaving them behind, while the Germans clambered out.
The men stood in an uneasy cluster. Susan stood on the pavement, eyeing the glints of broken glass on the shoulder with trepidation. She noticed Joseph scraping his sole on the ground, lifting his foot to inspect it. Jacob, the driver, had his hand in his pocket, holding something that looked heavy for its size. “This ain’t the best neighborhood. Stay together and we’ll be fine.”
Susan wasn’t too worried. Six big men, even if they did look like Twinkies in a tray of Yodels, wouldn’t look like easy pickings. She looked left and right. It looked like most of the drivers of disabled vehicles were vacating the interstate as individuals or in small groups. The drivers whose cars still ran were driving doggedly along in the far-left lane. One had four flats but was still grinding down the road at 25 or 30 mph.
Jacob led them towards the nearest exit, the one they’d just passed. Susan, barefoot, shortest of them all, and overweight, slowed them down, but the men didn’t complain. They were overtaken by a pair of teen boys, sagging, loc’d, and speaking a dialect of English that Jacob knew fluently, Susan could just make out, and the Germans barely recognized every tenth word of.
“You be with them?” one of the boys asked Jacob.
“I be driving them. Uber, man. You hear me?”
“They be foreign?”
“They be German. But she from here.”
“Terence. Shug. You hear me.”
“Jacob.” Fist bumps. Nods to Susan and the Germans.
“Watch yourselves, cousin.”
“You too, how.”
The lean young men strode off. Their group followed at their retarded pace. They passed a pair of police cars, lights flashing. Two cops were leaning into an empty vehicle, two were waving flashlights at the oncoming traffic. Why that vehicle, of all the dozens stopped along that stretch? Who knew? The police looked as confused as they were. Susan walked towards one of them, “What’s happening?”
“No information for you, ma’am. Keep moving along, get off the freeway. It’s dangerous.”
They crossed an overpass, and the neighborhood below arrayed itself in all its seedy glory: convenience stores, vape shops, bars, pawnshops, all lighted and glowing beneath the street lights, flashing traffic signals, strobe lights in windows of head shops and strip clubs.
As they reached the head of the ramp, the overhead freeway lights suddenly cut off all at once. They blinked in the darkness. One of the cop cars passed them, going the wrong way on the divided highway, siren screaming, lights flashing, weaving its way from the shoulder to the traffic lane among as cars pulled over between disabled vehicles to let it pass. The second police car followed shortly thereafter, lights flashing, but hobbled by two flat rear tires. As its lights faded in distance and the other car’s siren became a distant whine, the first sounds of breaking glass came to them. A passing car’s headlights caught the German’s uneasy glances at each other. A lawyer, an accountant, two junior executives, a QC analyst, and an IT consultant, some of them gym-fit, but Susan was willing to bet none of them had been brought up on mean streets.
A couple of them had keychain flashlights. “I’ll save my phone battery just in case,” Susan said. She took her phone out to switch it off. “Hm. No signal. Here we are in the middle of a big city and there’s no signal.” None of them had any cell signal, though their GPS still worked. They switched their phones off one by one.
Jacob led the way, Susan in the center of the group of Germans. As they reached the bottom of the ramp, they heard the chilling sound of woman’s screams. The shrieks went on and on, punctuated by abrupt interruptions that could only mean a hard blow to the face.
“None of our business,” Jacob advised. “Stay back until they’re done.”
The six foreigners glanced at each other, glanced over at the underpass where the screams were coming from. Maniacal male laughter echoed between the woman’s shrieks of pain and rage. The visitors moved together towards the ramp, Susan lagging behind.
“Do not do it, you idiots!” Jacob implored them. “You don’t know. You gonna regret it. Damn it! Come back here!” They ignored him. Jacob had pulled his firearm, flicked off the safety, and was following reluctantly at a distance. “Fucking cops see a nigger with a gun they’re gonna shoot me and sort it out later, fuck.”
Joseph and Friedrich, the two youngest and fittest, broke into a jog and reached the tunnel first. Friedrich had a flashlight and its faint beam showed a woman, now just sobbing hoarsely, on her stomach on the sloped concrete embankment. A number of youths, five or seven, he couldn’t count, stood around watching one of them rape her. The flashlight allowed someone to draw a bead on him; a shot ricocheted off the ground near Friedrich. The cowards then ran off squawking and hooting like the animals they were.
Friedrich stood frozen. Joseph glanced at him questioningly as the other four caught up. “Ich habe mich angepisst,” Friedrich whispered.
Joseph laughed loudly. Jacob gave him the stink eye and walked over to the woman, raising herself to her hands and knees now, still racked with sobs.
“Hey, you’re okay now.” Jacob said. He stashed his gun in the small of his back, took off his sweat jacket, and held it out to her to cover herself. She took it without looking at him, shrugged into it. Once she’d zipped it around her tiny bleeding frame, she looked up.
“Thanks.”
“It’s nothing. Can I do anything else for you, sister?” She shook her head, knees drawn up, wiped her bloody nose on the sleeve of Jacob’s hoodie, realized her hair was a mess and tried to shape it with her palms.
“She should come with us, don’t you think?” Susan whispered.
Jacob nodded, glanced at the Germans gleaming blondly in the darkness. “Yeah.”
Susan held out her hand and the woman took it, rose to her feet. “My name’s Susan.”
“Maya.”
“Maya, lovely name. Are you hurt, Maya?” Susan lifted her little keylight and inspected the girl’s face. An eye was starting to swell shut and the scrapes warned of purpling bruises getting ready to rise under her caramel skin. She swept the light down and the girl’s knees were raw meat, a gruesome caricature of a child who’s skinned her knees skating. The color soaking through the sleeves of the grey sweatsuit suggested her forearms were the same. “Can you walk?”
“I can walk. I think my wrist might be broken.” She held out her left arm to show a hand pointing off at an unnatural angle.
“Hospital six blocks north. Safer there.” Jacob took the lead again and the group set off again, hampered by the limping barefoot women and Friedrich’s newly spraddled gait.
XIX.
Hey Now, You’re a Rock Star!
The next day, DD rose with the sun, tossed the Chinese food containers in the trash can by the curb, and drove to the Circle K on the corner for a coffee. The movers were due at 7:30, so she sat on the steps and waited, enjoying the birdsong outside and watching the morning walkers and joggers.
Her phone rang just as the moving truck pulled up. She checked the screen: her new boss, Dr. Jack Herbert. Not a scientist, but a man who’d spent his career wrangling scientists for various corporations, mediating between their rarefied world and the more pragmatic world of business.
“Hello?” She answered.
“Hi, DD?” Asked Jack.
“Yes. Hi, Jack! What can I do for you?”
“DD, I just wanted you to know: we had t
he first actual field usage of p davisii today. So far, the results are great!” He trilled the R the word “great” in a jovial way that reminded DD of the old Tony the Tiger commercials.
“Really? I didn’t think the lab staff would have the cultures cranked up already! That’s fantastic!”
“Still used to the academic pace of life, aren’t you? We don’t let grass grow under us at Amrencorp!” Jack chuckled.
“Where was the spill?” DD asked.
“In the Gulf near Houston. We’re 24 hours out from the initial introduction and the oil in the samples is 20% below your projections.”
“Twenty percent? Hot damn! I hope you’re following my sampling protocols closely, so I can look at the numbers when I get there!”
“Of course, DD! You’re a rock star around here now. What baby wants, baby gets!”
DD smiled. “OK, well the movers just got here. I need to go. Keep me posted if anything else exciting happens!”
“Will do. Bye, DD.”
“Bye, Jack.” She almost did a little dance. Not just because the tests were succeeding, but because she was getting positive feedback in a way that never happened among scientists. In her old world, she’d have had to spend months writing up the results and preparing them for publication, justifying every protocol and process to peer reviewers, before getting even the most guarded recognition. She was self-motivated and cerebral, or she wouldn’t have lasted so long in academia. And she'd certainly had her share of insincere flattery flung her way in other contexts. But this praise, backed up by action as it was, felt surprisingly good.
DD put her phone away and eyed the moving crew hopping out of the truck. Six men, from teens to mid-20’s, all in superb condition, and all already shirtless because of the heat. Nice! Now, behave. They’re here for manual labor, not entertainment. But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy watching them load up…
She greeted the boss, older and with a pot belly, the least attractive of the men. Fortunately, he was wearing a shirt. They went inside to look over her furniture and boxes.
XX.
My Stuff!
DD slipped on her sunglasses as she turned back onto I-10, this time headed west. One more trip on this straight stretch of highway, surrounded by piney woods and cattle fields, with populated exits few and far between. Vast stretches of nothing to break the flat monotony, until Pensacola. DD gave a sigh. Just knowing she couldn’t move around made her muscles jump. She tried to find the most comfortable position to spend the next few hours in. That was one thing she definitely would not miss about Tallahassee: despite its being the state capital, it was at least a three-hour drive from there to anywhere. Well, two, if you counted Jacksonville.
She sucked a few gulps of diet drink through a straw from a giant Styrofoam cup and parked it in the cup holder. She popped her phone cable into the stereo and started her playlist of Blues, Dixieland, and Country. The miles started to slip by. One hour passed, then two.
Just after the first exit for Pensacola, she saw a big yellow truck ahead.
That truck sure looks familiar, but it can’t be.
It was! It was her own moving truck! Stopped on the shoulder by the side of the road! She recognized the way the knots of red and blue rope were crocheted around the handle of the sliding rear door. She took her foot off the gas.
She passed it and saw the driver sitting behind the wheel, talking on his cell phone, with the door propped open. She continued ten miles to the next exit and got off, drove across the overpass, then re-entered the freeway headed east. She passed the moving truck again, going east on the other side of the divided highway. The driver was nowhere to be seen, but he’d set up hazard reflectors behind the vehicle. She reached the first Pensacola exit and re-entered. When she spotted the triangles way ahead, she immediately slowed, putting on her flashers, and then pulled in ahead of the stopped truck.
She waited for a break in the traffic roaring by before opening the car door, and then got out and walked back. The driver had been standing in the shade, leaning on the side of the truck away from the road. He’d been one of the crew at her old house, and when he saw who she was, he walked to the front of the truck to meet her.
He was a lanky, dark black man with a trimmed beard and light brown eyes. His skin gleamed like bittersweet chocolate and his muscles bulged under the sleeves of his T-shirt. Damn. Down, girl!
“What happened?” DD asked.
“I don’t know. I’m not much of a mechanic, I guess,” he said, with a shrug and a fresh sweet smile. “The engine just started bucking real bad and so I pulled over. Now it won’t start.”
“Oh, no,” said DD. “My stuff!” She pitched her head back in mock dismay.
“I know,” he said. “We’ll get it sorted out. The company said they have someone on the way. He should be here soon.”
“You want a ride? There’s a truck stop at the next exit; you could at least get something cold to drink.” At least. He’s not that young. He’s got to be thirty.
“No, I’m okay. I’d better stay with the truck until they get here.”
“OK. Do you think I should stay too?” One more try. “You could sit with me in the car, where there’s AC.”
“No, you go on ahead, ma’am. Matt’s Movers is a good company. We’ll get your things to you. They’re bringing another truck.”
Ma’am? Ma’am, indeed! Hmph. Suit yourself. “Suit yourself. Thanks, um…”
“…Jordan.”
“DD.” She shook his solid hand. “I guess I’ll see you in Houston.”
“Soon, I hope, Ms. DD.”
She got in her car and drove on.
On the road to Texas, she noticed five or six more stopped vehicles, mostly cars, with the hoods up and frustrated drivers on their phones. It seems like a lot of people are delaying maintenance nowadays due to this endless recession that we’re not having.
XXI.
See What’s on the Slab
Once she reached Houston, she headed straight for the lab. It was obvious there was no point in going to her new apartment, since it was empty and her stuff wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow, if she was lucky. She’d have to stay at a hotel tonight. She found a shaded parking spot in Amrencorp’s vast lot, cracked the windows slightly so nothing in her suitcases would melt, and walked inside. She pulled on a neat summer-wool blazer as she walked across the lot, and sleeked her hair back into a ponytail at her nape; she’d slipped off her flip-flops and put on loafers with her jeans.
She walked through the automatic sliding glass doors into the sleek marble lobby. One entire wall was a fountain, with water running down a glass sheet etched with the Amrencorp logo, a capital “A,” italicized almost beyond recognition, with a flower-petal sun bursting up out of it.
There was a uniformed guard, barely old enough to shave, at the big black semicircular desk. His vest had the Amrencorp logo on it too.
“Hi! I'm DD Davis,” she introduced herself.
“Doug.” They shook hands.
“Do you have my badge, Doug? They said it would be ready today.”
Doug looked in a big paper notebook on the counter, found her name, and used a key on his belt to unlock a drawer under the desktop. He asked for DD’s driver’s license before passing her the badge, then whipped out a glass touchpad and registered her right index fingerprint as well.
“You can scan in with the badge or the fingerprint.” He pointed at a panel beside the doorway to the lab. “Give it a minute or so for the system to refresh.”
“Very secure. That’s great!” said DD. Up-to-date technology! It made her feel better about the probable need of working late or working weekends, which might leave her here by herself at times. She inspected the badge, with its hologram logo and her photo side-by-side. She entered the first hallway to the right of the desk, using the badge.
She was used to the perpetual budget starvation of academia, where the football coach lived in a mansion and drank aged single-malt Scotch whi
le reviewing game tapes with the governor on his floor-to-ceiling TV, and everyone else learned to clip coupons and amuse themselves at free concerts in the park. She strode down the hall to the door of her new lab and stuck her finger against the square inch of glass in the scanner by the door. The LED turned green with a beep and the lock clicked open. Cool.
She stepped inside and puffed up with pride as her eyes swept over the gleaming lab counters, the sleek steel incubators, and the laminar-flow cabinet hoods with their UV glow. She relished the sight of spectrometers, cabinets full of virgin petri dishes, beakers, loops and swabs, and the goggled lab techs busy at work. She cleared her throat.
All five of the techs glanced up at once and stood a little straighter at their work. One, a pretty girl with dyed red hair in a long braid, (What was her name again?) was standing at a counter making notations on a sheaf of printouts clipped with a giant binder clip. She picked up the printouts and walked over to DD.
“Dr. Davis, hi, I’m Abby.” She offered one of the printouts. “Would you like to take a look at these growth rates? They’re way out of line above what we expected.”
“Yes, I remember you from the other day, Abby.” DD smiled, took the printouts and leafed through them. “Whoa! This is incredible! This is almost pure exponential growth! What happened?”
“I don’t know, Dr. Davis…”
“…Call me DD.”
“DD.” Abby smiled. “I was just looking over the nutrient specs for the different batches and I can’t find anything different. Were these cultures the same organisms the original studies used?”
“Absolutely. I had my assistant, Tim, check the lot numbers for the original cultures, and I personally supervised the hybridization process. The seals on the boxes were unbroken when I opened the shipment at this end.”
A few minutes’ silence as they stood, flipping through the printouts together. DD stole a glimpse at Abby. About Jessica’s age. Jessica was so smart, this could have been her. Jessica had a full-ride academic scholarship coming, too, before she disappeared the first time.
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 7
