End Time (22 page)

One of Wen Chen's subfiles was called Skeeterbug. The contents of the subfile Skeeterbug were an innocuous bundle of documents from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Press releases, obscure projects under consideration, expense reports from civil servants with their names blacked out for security reasons; at first glance mere detritus, a file of Big Government minutiae. But on one CDC document Chen had collected, the word
Skeeterbug
was scrawled in pencil on the minutes of an operational meeting relating to organizational funding.

So that's what Tassology chose to pluck out of cyberspace. An otherwise obscure moment in the history of CDC bureaucracy which someone inside the CDC had released onto the Internet without comment. And slavish Tassology expanded its search ever outward in the general realm of “unknown entity.”

Skeeterbug.

“What the hell is that?” Lattimore leaned over Jasper's shoulder to stare at the curious graphic on one of the man's screens.

“They call it Skeeterbug.”

“Who calls it?”

Jasper didn't answer, but pointed to the hologram of a mosquito; partly manufactured was the easiest way of looking at it.

A cyborg/insect hybrid.
An enhanced, flying, stinging bug
.

Same size as a mosquito but reengineered from the inside out. Special modifications: molecular-reinforced polymer-based wings, a reinforced stinger, and enhanced eyes. Living plastic. The brain wasn't any bigger than a mosquito's brain, but this was no nitwit. Even if the brain was the size of a period.

A close-up of the insect's head showed some drastic changes. No longer merely a receptor for chemical traces or infrared imaging which leads the bug to a tasty prospect, the brain had been altered. A nexus of molecular synapses, lit up like tiny stars. Enhanced cognizance.

“They? Who are they?” Jasper cleared his throat. “A USAF subcontractor. Real small outfit; no name, just a designation:
π
r
2
, with links to a disease-control annex office in Ohio. They do something in the field of animal husbandry, or reproduction.” Jasper shrugged in frustration. “Anyhow, that's who made Skeeterbug.”

“
π
r
2
, Pi R Squared,” Lattimore repeated. “They name the place after a formula. How to determine the area of a circle … Catchy.”

After a moment Lattimore posed a question, though he already sensed the answer. “So why make it? If this was your baby, what would you do with it?”

Jasper took off his granny glasses and polished them for a moment.

“If it was me?” The IT chief smiled. “Me, with an unlimited cache of memory and processing power, say a tiny government contractor that can bill the DOD so small they stay under the radar, say fifty or sixty million dollars, buried in some three-thousand-page appropriations bill…” He put his glasses back on. “I'd use it as a DNA/biological retrieval and catalogue system. Everybody gets bit by a mosquito once in a while. Heck, this little bugger is probably immune to DDT.”

Lattimore got up from his chair and stared out across the standing stones, the megaliths of his servers and power towers. Then felt a psychosomatic itch that wasn't really there. He scratched it anyway.

“But it could go both ways, wouldn't it? The damn bug could infect everyone in the world. Pick your disease. Pass it around.”

Jasper snorted.

“Why not? Suddenly everybody gets an itch they wanna scratch.”

*   *   *

Back east, not Fairfield—this time Middletown, CT.

A thousand miles and a thousand different problems away.

Eleanor was in the nuthouse. Temporarily committed by her sister in the absence of her husband; now awaiting evaluation at Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown. An institution on the National Register of Historic Places—no surprise really since the place was first built in 1867.

A daunting six hundred acres with nearly eighty brick and brownstone buildings in styles ranging from Second Empire to Queen Anne and even Jacobean and Colonial Revival. Shew Hall, the original hospital, merely served as the administrative building. The unimposing Stanley Hall, where they used to keep the criminally insane, was not so impressive—just a big ugly rectangle, vacant. Not where they stuck anybody anymore, thank God.

But when it came to putting a relative in a state facility, if you couldn't afford a private rest home, how much choice did you really have? Not much. Thank heaven conditions had improved a lot since the nineteenth-century nightmare of loony bins. Instead of padded rooms, restraints, and invasive cranial surgery, time marched on; the 1940s brought the practice of electroshock, and finally toward the end of the twentieth century, care of the crazy had graduated to colored pills, a kind of chemical lobotomy. Less fuss, less muss.

The mental hospital still used a few of the old-fashioned methods, of course, but only in the worst cases, which the staff called the Ravers. And Eleanor didn't count as one of those. Moreover Eleanor Singh née Whitcomb wasn't criminally anything, just very confused; and she showed no inclination to perform another auto-abortion. Sometimes lucid, sometimes not. So the authorities prescribed a low dose of Lithium and not Risperdal or any of the other brain-bangers.

Eleanor occupied a private room in a nice colonial, her new home. No bed restraints, but the door did lock from the outside. She could open the screen windows about eight inches but not crawl outside. And the place cost $700 a day. A nice hotel might have done the same job. And now the bills were going to the Human Resources Department of Lattimore Industries for claims and payment.

Eleanor stared out the window of her room at the nighttime sky. She'd taken her Lithium from the little paper cup, but for some reason it had almost no effect on her. Like taking sugar pills: a touch of sweetness, then gone. Clouds veiled the moon. As she stared at the night sky the clouds seemed to go away—the moon shining into her room.

Even with her room lights off she could clearly see the vase with dried bulrushes on the dresser. Her clothes hanging in an open closet like limp ghosts. She gazed upward; a band of stenciling ran around the upper portion of the walls: bright tulips in blue and pink and yellow like the “Dance of the Flowers” in
Fantasia
. But as she stared harder in the dark at the stenciled band along the walls, the flowers seemed to change.

Now the flowers were red ants, red ants marching one by one
hurrah
. She turned her eyes away in dismay—no, she didn't like the red ants marching along the wall.

What else was there to look at?

TV held little or no attraction. The cable service showed only a prescreened choice of shows: Animal Planet without the wild stuff, mostly
Puppy Olympics,
Antiques Roadshow, Say Yes to the Dress
—but nothing suspenseful, nothing violent; so no History Channel, no
UFO Hunters
or
Barbarians
. And generally few news programs. Still she left it droning in the background. It reminded her of Bhakti, how they'd keep the TV on at night in their bedroom like a kind of lullaby.

But something different was happening on the TV now.

On the cable shows—CNN, Fox, MSNBC—the service kept flipping back and forth,
blip
-
blip-blip
! The top stories of the day: blizzards and floods; soldiers in firefights; huge street protests; bloated politicians pompously talking; the newscasters' faces concerned, incredulous, or smug—just a big mishmash.

What held the confusing flickering clips together was the red warning ticker sliding along each cable channel. As though it didn't matter what the actual stories were, when you could read the underlying narrative scrolling along at the bottom of the screen in high crisis red, punctuated by annoying beep-tones. And this she could see quite clearly:

This is a test. This station is conducting a test of the Emergency Braincast System. This is only a test. The federal, state, and local authorities have developed this system to keep you informed in the event of an emergency. If this had been an actual emergency, this system transmits official information, news, or instructions. This concludes this test of the Emergency Braincast System.

Braincast? Did she really read that word? That wasn't what the authorities called it these days; they called it Emergency Alert System or words to that effect.

The cable service flickered, abandoned the news, and settled on the Discovery Channel; the segment was on the meadow spittle bug,
Philaenus spumarius—
king of the meadow jumpers, leaping away at the first sign of a predator, leaving a slime of excrescence behind. Some entomologist was blatting on about how this clever insect may have developed this ability to escape predatory males after long bouts of reproductive sex.

Eleanor felt a twinge in her leg—a kind of numbing as if she was about to lose the use of it again. Oddly, or not so oddly, her bouts with Bhakti hadn't been that “long”—just enough to cripple her. Maybe she should have jumped up afterward—and this almost made her laugh. She could even hear Bhakti's smiling voice chasing her: “Going so soon?”

Reluctantly, her eyes strayed to the stenciled border around her room. This time the ants were gone. In their place little black stick figures marched one by one
hurrah.
Little human stick figures. And she was immediately reminded of Sherlock Holmes and “The Adventure of the Dancing Men”:

But these men were moving, walking and jumping and dancing along the border of the wall. She shut her eyes to push the little silently moving figures away and tried to remember what the story was about. A secret code, a cypher written to a woman who had tried to escape her sordid past—that's all she could remember. Still, she couldn't tear her eyes away from those little dancing figures. They seemed to mock her like glib little ninnies.

Her leg tingled again and she rubbed it; then got up from bed to move around, terrified she might not be able to walk again. That this new ability would be snatched from her. The hospital room's wood floor was cold on her bare feet, and she shuffled over to the oval hook rug. Better there. Not so clammy.
I got better when I got sick,
she murmured to herself. I got better when—

When Janet vanished. She came and my leg died; she went away and my leg came back. What a horrible, horrible thought. And then she was back in their Van Horn house standing at the window as Bhakti stumbled into the living room. She knew then—yes, even then. An electric mother/daughter psychic hotline had told her Janet was gone for good, grabbed at the railroad tracks—but she made Bhakti look anyway, texting him confused ramblings, on the slim hope—

Sure, he'd be all right, keep it together, but Chen would crack. The best she could do, because another force was ripping her apart, a much stronger force that came out of nowhere.

Something—some
thing
—had dragged her from the wheelchair. Not just the knowledge that her baby was gone—that was a black abyss in her body—but an outside force like stiff wires jammed up her anus and into her spine, forcing her to rise.

Bhakti came and went, came and went.

She stared at the flames in the house across the street.

The flames died and Bhakti went to bed.

That's when she knew the
other women
were leaving—all the women on their street getting ready to get in their cars and quietly drive off. The hot wires made her want to go with them. She found her car keys, took some money, went to the garage. The garage door was even open like some kind of invitation. Yes, go!

*   *   *

The line of cars from the Van Horn subdivision rolled along Interstate 20 east, then headed north toward Oklahoma and Interstate 44 like a convoy. The first lap of the ladies' chicken run over seven hundred miles—and it required the convoy stop for gas three times. Three times in Texas—Odessa, Abilene, and then finally Wichita Falls on the Oklahoma border. Along the way two of the cars broke down—one overheated, the other blew an engine—but it didn't matter.

At the first sign of car trouble, the car's flashers lit up; the failing car was left by the roadside, and everyone packed in together. Twelve hours from their start in Texas, the remaining vehicles rolled into Tulsa, Oklahoma, about four in the afternoon. Mrs. Biedermeier and Mrs. Stanton had squeezed into Eleanor's Honda Prius two hundred miles ago, neither of their cars making it past Wichita Falls.

The women sat silently the whole way, neither looking out the window nor speaking; the blousy Mrs. Biedermeier plopped in the back like a sack of potatoes, the rigid Mrs. Stanton in the front passenger's seat sitting with her hands folded in her lap. Like Eleanor, the women had left the subdivision in whatever they were wearing at the time. In Mrs. Biedermeier's case a fawn-colored plush leisure suit and a fake alligator fanny pack. In Mrs. Stanton's case her Vermont Country Store blue seersucker patio dress, a small lamé silver purse with a wrist strap, and a gold cross at her neck. Silence consumed the car, not even the radio turned on.