Eden Plague - Latest Edition (21 page)

Cassandra growled with frustration, muttering under her breath, “Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch! Help me get him in. We’re not leaving him.” She forced down her grief.

Together they rolled Zeke in a blanket, then manhandled his body into the back of the SUV. Larry drove them away from the scene as rapidly as he could without attracting attention.

“What was that?” asked Spooky over the radio.

“They got Zeke. Lucky head shot. He’s gone,” Larry answered miserably.

Silence. Then, “Shit.”

“Meet at the ORP. We still have to get Zeke’s mom.”

“What?” asked Cassandra. “Why? She’s in a facility. What can we do?” Her face was a frozen mask of iron control.

“Because we can cure her Alzheimer’s, we think. It’s a new thing. But if we cure her we have to take her with us because if they find out we did, they will turn her into a guinea pig in a lab somewhere.”

Cassandra digested this as they met at the ORP. “All right, I’ll tell you where to go. Do you think they’ll be watching her?”

“We have to hope not. They can’t be everywhere.”

Twenty minutes later they pulled into a complex labeled ‘Green Pastures Managed Care facility.’ They took her out the back way in a wheelchair, dodging a sleepy staff, and got her into the vehicle.

The return trip to the bunker was a smooth surreal nightmare. Ten bags of truck stop ice packed Zeke’s body in the back of the Cherokee; still no one could forget what had happened. Larry drove the Land Rover, silent, bleak. Zeke’s mother Beulah sat buckled into the front seat, humming softly to herself for a while before falling asleep. Cassandra sobbed from time to time, an arm around each of her children in the back seat. Millie slept most of the way, which was a relief; it wasn’t real to her.

About two hours out, Ricky spoke up. “I’m hungry, mama.” He reached up to grasp her arm.

“Ricky!” She took his hand in hers, feeling the strength of his grip.

“Mama, I’m hungry. I’m really hungry.”

“Cass,” Larry said. “Cass, he has to eat. It’s really important. Here.” He rummaged in a cooler between the seats. “Have him drink this protein shake.”

“That’s not for kids!”

Ricky started to cry, clutching his stomach. “Unnhh.”

“Please, Cass, trust me! It’s what he needs. Zeke must have given him the cure before he…before he got hit. It burns energy and food.”

Cassandra made her decision to trust Larry, grabbing the can and opening it with the flip-top. She put it to Ricky’s lips.

He grabbed the can with both hands and guzzled it down.

“His hands are strong! That’s amazing, just yesterday he would never have been able to pick up that can!”

“I know,” Larry said. “It’s a miracle, a God-blessed miracle. I’m so sorry about Zeke. But this stuff…it’s gonna fix Ricky and it’s gonna fix Beulah and a lot more people in the world. We’ve got this place in the hills, you’ll see it soon…” He went on explaining, bringing her up to date on what had happened.

She listened with half an ear and half her mind, lost in the wonder of her son’s recovery.

Elise and Daniel met them hand in hand at the cavern with all the vehicles, what they called the Motor Pool. Elise knew there was something seriously wrong when she saw the expressions on their faces as the two men in the Cherokee got out.

“Weren’t you guys supposed to take off?” She saw the Land Rover but didn’t see Zeke. By the time she had looked around, they had opened the back of the SUV and hefted his body onto the cold cavern floor.

Daniel stared at it in shock. At them. “How?” Elise clutched his hand, her eyes pouring tears.

“Unlucky shot. They had four guys on the house. We only spotted two. The other two must have been a reaction force. They opened fire on us and we took them out. But Zeke…” Skull waved vaguely, a helpless thing. More emotion showed on his face then than Daniel had ever seen before: grief, anger, bitterness.

Daniel wanted to make some kind of gesture to Skull. If it had been Larry, he might have hugged him. He settled for putting a hand on the bald man’s shoulder. “Thanks for bringing him back.”

Skull shrugged his hand off, turned away. Daniel could smell his barely-buried rage. Maybe that was a good thing; maybe rage meant he wasn’t sociopathic, just…angry.

They took Zeke’s body and put it on ice in the bunker’s morgue. The scientists wanted to make sure they had the cadaver to study later. That was what Zeke would have wanted, they were sure. They got the family settled into quarters and turned in. Elise stayed with them, and even though they’d only just met, the two women clung to each other in sisterly comfort. The children accepted her naturally as a second mother, or at least an older sister. Eventually they all slept.

Elise’s sleep was troubled with images of death and horror, of bodies lying asleep and she couldn’t wake them. She woke in the middle of the night, thinking,
it wasn’t supposed to happen this way! Eden Plague carriers don’t die! He had a thousand years of life in front of him!

But they did, she knew. They still died.

The next morning brought some relief. Elise was delighted to see Ricky walking and eating. They hadn’t been sure the Eden Plague would work on him.

When Daniel got to breakfast he found Ricky shoveling canned ham and eggs into his mouth, with Cassie and Millie and Elise at the table with him, eating more sedately. He got a plate of breakfast and sat down with them. He spoke to the boy. “How you doin, sport? You remember me?”

Ricky shook his head.

“That’s all right, it was five years back or so.” He looked at Cassandra. “Sorry to be such a stranger. And I’m sorry to have brought this on you and your family. If I’d have known…”

“None of us can know, Dan. We’re in God’s hands.”

That made Elise angry, though not as angry as she might have been before the Plague. “How can you believe that? With all this crap going on, how can you believe God cares?”

Cassandra turned to the other woman. “Maybe because I think things would be a lot worse if He didn’t.”

“Then why doesn’t he clean the world up? Why just keep things not too bad and not too good?”

“Maybe He expects us to do our part. Make our own mistakes. Take responsibility. Maybe He doesn’t want to be our nanny. And maybe he works through people – people who make things like the Eden Plague.”

Daniel held up a placating hand. “Please, let’s not have my two favorite women in the world fighting.”

“We’re not fighting, we’re arguing.” Elise looked petulant, irritated.

“Either way. We’re all friends here, we’re just under a lot of stress.”

Cassandra reached across the table to put her hand on Elise’s arm with earnest, tear-filled eyes. “My heart aches for Zeke, but he died doing what he wanted to. Protecting people. Saving people. Saving us. He passed this Eden thing on to Ricky and saved his life. We treated Beulah and she recognized me this morning! We have to hold on to the good he did. And this Eden Plague is so amazing! This whole thing. It will change the world. He was willing to die for that.”

Daniel said, “Yeah. But will it change the world for the better? It could be a wrecking ball.” He exchanged glances with Elise. She nodded.
Peace
. Then Spooky caught his eye from across the room.

“Excuse me a minute.” Daniel walked over to the Vietnamese man.

“We go now. Skull and me. Better that way. You want to reach me, you talk to Van Vinh.”

“What about…what about Skull?”

“I don’t know. He love Zeke. He very angry. Maybe he stir up the hornets. What can we do? No man can live in another’s heart.”

Daniel licked his lips. “You still have some Eden Plague in that other syringe?”

“Yes.”

Daniel stared at him, willing him to understand.

His eyes widened fractionally. He nodded, slowly. “Only if I must.”

“It’s better than killing him. At least then he has a chance to change. Maybe the Eden Plague will help him heal some of his pain.”

“But you say with the Psycho, they maybe turn very evil.”

“That’s just a guess. We have no evidence or proof of how any of this works. I just know we have to give him a chance. What you do is on your own conscience.”

He looked at Daniel’s face for a few more seconds. Searching. For what, Daniel didn’t know; certainty perhaps, but he wouldn’t find it. Spooky swallowed, then bowed, formally. “Goodbye, Daniel Markis. I think you are the Colonel Zeke now.”

Daniel bowed to him in return, shaken.
Master Sergeants don’t become Colonels overnight
. He guessed now he had no choice. He sure didn’t feel ready. Pushing the thought aside he watched Spooky walk down toward the motor pool.

Good luck, Spooky.

***

A week of being buried alive here in Sosthenes made Daniel realize the idea about quarantining himself wasn’t going to work. Physically he was not limited; it was the oppression of the mountain above him, the damp cold air anywhere not heated by machinery, and the lack of open spaces that was getting to him.

He drove himself hard, to keep the oppression and the black thoughts of Zeke’s fate away. He spent as much time with Elise as he could spare, and with Millie and Cassie and Ricky, trying to make up for the Zeke-shaped hole in their lives.

Cassie bore up well, and she quickly established herself as the master of their intel field work, what is called tradecraft by those in the business. She spent long hours with Vinh, who ate up the knowledge and reveled in his job as gopher, supply specialist and intelligence operative. She soon had him taking trucks to various towns and cities, never the same place twice, selling currency and coins to private collectors and shops and jewelers, buying loads of electronics, spare parts, cabling, fresh food, everything that the bunker needed.

Vinny and Daniel set up several satellite and microwave dishes and other antennas on the mountaintop, under cover of the trees and some extra radar-scattering netting strategically placed to mask any overhead surveillance. The bunker entrance nearby was one of a dozen or so that led to various points on the mountain, providing access or escape for people on foot. By midweek everyone was taking sunlight breaks at least once a day at the nearest hatchway.

They also got all the internal telephones working, at each entrance and in all of the main rooms and offices. The phones weren’t connected to the outside world but were still useful for their work.

By the end of the week the lab equipment started arriving. Daniel risked going outside driving one of two trucks, following Vinh to pick up several large crates in Richmond. It was a great relief just to be up in the sunlight and out in the open, bouncing along the country roads down to the freeway feeders to the Virginia capital and back. He thought if he could do that once a week he might be all right.

Larry had taken off on his own the day after Zeke died, heading back to Atlanta. That gave Cassie enough time to set up a rudimentary anonymous webmail system with him, using free accounts for communication. As long as everyone stayed away from certain keywords like ‘Eden’ or ‘Plague’ or ‘Markis,’ everything should be fine. Computers might be able to look at every e-mail in America, but people couldn’t: they could only see what the software flagged. That was how to stay below the radar of the creeping Big Brother that America’s government had become since 9-11.

They decided to keep to a more or less similar week to the outside world, work five or six days but for sure take Sunday off. Everyone was pushing too hard. So it was on a Sunday afternoon right after the barbecue outside their best hatch that Daniel found Elise.

She had been sitting against the mountainside a couple of hundred yards up on a granite ledge. He must have remembered she liked it there. She gave a little wave when she saw him hiking up, but he didn’t smile.

“Elise…I need to talk to you.” Awkwardly.

It seemed like he had been a bit standoffish for the last week or so. She thought she knew why. “I know. I mean, okay. Let’s talk.”

He took a deep breath, then sat down beside her, not touching. Staring out into space. “I need to know something first.”

“Sure.” She didn’t sound sure, even to herself.

“Can the EP be fixed? Really? Can the conscience-enhancing portion be overcome?”

Now where did that come from?
She did a kind of double-take, since he had asked her a completely unexpected question. She could see him wondering what she had thought he would say.
He-thought, she-thought,
she thought.

So she thought about the question for a minute. “Not easily. Not soon. It repairs cells. It repairs a lot of things. It balances processes. If you told it not to repair brain cells or processes – theoretically, I mean – then it wouldn’t repair nerve cells either. That would preclude a lot of other injuries getting fixed. But it’s more than just brain cells or neurons or axons or whatever. It’s the regulation of hormones and a thousand delicate neurological processes. The fact this thing works at all is a miracle, testimony to the creators’ work. They did amazing things with primitive technology.”

Daniel nodded. “If the Russians really did it. I’m still wondering about alien influence.” He let a long breath out. “So the improvement in, well, let’s call it ‘virtue,’ is intrinsic. Impossible to separate from the advantages. That’s good, I think.”

Elise replied, “I’m not so sure it’s good, if we can’t defend ourselves. I think this imperfect Eden Plague will push some people into being puritans and pacifists and Pharisees. It’s falling off the horse the opposite way. You feel it yourself, don’t you? You risked lives back there on the island because you used nonlethal ammo, when one shot to the brain would have put Karl down for good. But you couldn’t do it. Is that good or bad? What’s the lesser of the evils?”

“I don’t know. I’m glad I didn’t have to kill him, and I’m glad he didn’t kill anyone else. I don’t have any easy answers. We have to operate within the parameters we have right now. Maybe later you can tweak the virus to keep the reluctance-to-kill virtue without making it a vice.”