Eden Plague - Latest Edition (3 page)

She was standing, she was walking. Somehow. Woman or not, she had fired a very deadly firearm at him.
The gun didn’t care who used it, and dead was dead.

Wasn’t it?

The serpent in Daniel’s head was not pleased.

“Turn right, go up the stairs. Don’t think about it, just do it. Up, up!” He followed her ascent, déjà vu, just like with the suit. He marched her through the kitchen and told her to sit next to the suit’s body.

The woman looked at the dead man, at the entry wounds, and made a choking sound. Her hair was long and wet, her face ugly with bruises and what looked like a shot through her cheek.

He snarled, “I tried to talk to him. He gave me the wrong answers. Take that vest off.”
Cute, she may be but she tried to kill me and I’m in no mood to be nice.

She took it off, painfully slow.

He watched her, tried to be dispassionate, but still liked what he saw. She was average in build but fit and perfectly proportioned. His eyes traced the contours of her form and something stirred in him as his baser instincts threatened to take control.

The serpent was pleased.

Daniel shook himself.
What’s wrong with me?
He struggled. Reaching inside for the anger, he used it to regain his balance.
Remember, this woman tried to kill me.
The body reaches for sex after violent action, the urge to procreate, but I swore off all of that when
…he pushed painful thoughts away again and concentrated.

 He knew it was useful in a field interrogation for the subject to be afraid, to keep from recovering composure. He figured he needed to push this woman through that window. Besides, she had genuine reason to fear him. The serpent hovered behind his eyeballs, threatening to take over again at any moment.

Daniel spoke. “So tell me, and make it fast. I
really
want to shoot you again.” It came out in a croon, husky, like a lover.

He placed his finger on the trigger again and the serpent danced in the dexe-codone fog.

“Okay, okay, please don’t,” she tried to reason with him. “We’re here to help you. Recruit you! Come on, Daniel, throttle back!” She shivered from the cold and the fear and more.
 Something’s not right here, he shouldn’t be this keyed up. I’ve got to reassure him, convince him I’m not his enemy.

 “How do you know me?” he growled.

She spoke quickly, hoping to keep him distracted until he relaxed. “Jenkins had your file! It’s true! You fit the profile, all the skills, high moral index, ruthless but not corruptible, the Company wants you. But it’s going to be harder now.” She hooked a tentative thumb at the dead man beside her, avoiding looking. The thought of him lying there made her stomach churn.

 
“
The
Company” is what the CIA’s employees called it, like it isn’t even part of the government.
Maybe it isn’t, really,
Daniel thought.

“Please, we can help each other.” She wasn’t sure she believed that anymore but still held a fragment of hope. Taking a deep breath, she tried to calm herself.

He saw she was settling down; he needed to keep her momentum going in the direction of explanations. He gestured with the gun. “Keep talking. What was the plan?”

She responded quickly, trippingly. “Jenkins was in charge – I had no choice. I was just supposed to provide the demonstration, which I did, as you see. I couldn’t kill you anyway, even if I wanted to, but you were supposed to think so, to get your attention.”

He wondered what she meant by “couldn’t kill” him.
Seemed like she could have if I’d been in front of the shotgun.

She reached across with her right hand to scratch vigorously at her left arm, where one of the bullets had taken out a chunk of flesh. She looked pleadingly at Daniel, willing him to understand, to give her a break.
Be the one I need
, she prayed to herself. “I tried to talk him out of it but he was an arrogant son of a bitch and he wouldn’t listen.”

Which reminded him. “So how come you aren’t dead, or at least bleeding out on my bathroom floor? How come you’re still on your feet?” This whole conversation was surreal, but he couldn’t argue with his own two eyes so he figured he might as well just go with it until he figured it out. “Are you some kind of vampire? Werewolf? Immortal? Alien? Zombie?” He ran out of possibilities.

She continued her explanation in spite of the growing pain in her gut.  “It’s a new thing. A kind of healing booster. Do you have anything to eat?” Daniel noticed she was looking sallow, white almost, and shivering. It seemed like she was getting sick, and her veins and muscle definition were showing through paper-thin skin. “I’m starving,” she pleaded.

His stimulated mind raced. He threw mental rocks and the serpent reluctantly slouched back toward its cave. 
Healing booster, super-healing. When she said starving, she meant literally starving.
From his extensive medical training he figured that her body was already catabolizing itself, cannibalizing at the cellular level, trying to heal those wounds.
Can’t outrun biology, healing takes energy and materials, no matter how advanced the drug or technique.
And he needed this woman for answers, and maybe to keep him out of an Agency cell. He’d brushed up against the spooks Over There, and he had no desire to be “rendered.”

Funny, how similar the two meanings of that word ended up being. One, to be boiled down to fatty paste. Two, to be given over to a foreign country to be tortured.

So he got her some food. A big bag of lunch meat, a package of cheese slices, mayo, mustard, a loaf of bread, apples, paper plates, and a plastic spoon. A plastic cup for orange juice. No metal.
Dad didn’t raise no dummy. Used right, a metal spoon can kill a man. I’ve already seen she’s dangerous, no matter how beautiful she might be.
Even with that wet stringy hair he couldn’t stop thinking about her eyes. “Make me a sandwich too,” He said gruffly. He didn’t want to put down the gun. “And keep talking. What’s your name, anyway?”

“Elise. Elise Wallis.” She lined up six pairs of bread slices with shaky hands and started to construct sandwiches, after stuffing a piece of the loaf into her mouth like a slumdog orphan. She took a moment to choke it down dry, then continued. “It was just supposed to be a demonstration. You were supposed to shoot me, of course. Not quite so many times. And I didn’t really shoot at you, did I? Those rounds I had were filled with salt. Not even rock salt, just table salt. Nasty within five feet, but after that it just stings. Special ammo. It’s in his pocket in a plastic bag.” She sounded whiny, defensive. Querulous.

Daniel laughed tightly. “Well, that didn’t work out so well. And now some poor arrogant tailored-suit schmuck is dead. I guess he didn’t have the super-healing. Why not? Experimental? Some kind of side-effects? Doesn’t work on everyone?” His mind was racing now, the adrenaline and the problem keeping him on track. He felt good, to be firing on all cylinders again.

Outrunning the serpent.

“Yeah, there’s a downside, mostly for the Company.” She finished making the sandwiches, pushed one across the table to him, and demolished another in four bites.

He had to wait for her to keep talking anyway, so he took a cautious bite.
Too much mustard
.

She looked into his eyes then, with a kind of haunted compassion or…something. Something hard to pin down. Maybe pity. He liked the eyes but he didn’t much like that expression, and he resolved he wasn’t going to fall for her sneaky womanly wiles, but there was still something in her eyes that he liked. Maybe it was because she had guts. In some other circumstances…

She kept eating. Kept staring at him.

He dragged his mind back to now, and barked, “Come on, talk between bites.” He still felt on the ragged edge of control, and his weapon hand started shaking.

She stared at the gun and those shakes and said, “All right. Just let me tell it my own way, okay?”

Another quarter of a sandwich went down her throat. She finished a cup of juice, poured herself some more. “I was a terminal patient. Cancer. Hodgkin’s. I had maybe two weeks to live. I was already in hospice, doped up. The Company made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Be a test subject for a new cure, they said. Of course I said yes.”

She paused to eat another sandwich, and as she did she watched him fidget impatiently, watched his flickering eyes.
Not good. He’s losing it.

He thought she was looking much better now, and her wounds were visibly shrinking. The bruising was getting smaller, the holes were closing, everything. His eyes moved all over her body, watching it happen.
Unbelievable
. But he had to believe it. It was right in front of him.

He took the last bite of his sandwich and the woman across from him sighed, as if regretting something. The next second he found himself falling over backward as the dining room table flew up in his face. He forced his finger not to pull the trigger in reflex, and by the time he disentangled himself from the chair, table, tablecloth and sandwich makings, she was gone.

Story of my life. The good ones always leave.

Staring down the barrel of Daniel Markis’ gun wasn’t Elise’s idea of a good time. There was no guarantee he wouldn’t snap and shoot her like he shot Jenkins, so as soon as she had enough calories in her to survive, she’d gotten the hell out.

It didn’t mean she felt good about it.

Everything in her wanted to stay with him, to explain what was going on, to hold his hand and ease the confusion in his tortured eyes. She could see the pain underlying the bravado, with compassion hidden behind his need to control an uncontrollable situation.

But as a scientist, she knew there were just too many variables.

So she ran.

But she didn’t want to.

She’d driven Jenkins’ SUV to Markis’ neighborhood, so she had the keys. Where the usual controlling jerk would have insisted on driving, Jenkins’ privileged upbringing meant he liked to be chauffeured.
Serve me
had been the subtext of his every move. Just like his father, who was far more powerful, and frightening.

They’d parked around the corner and out of sight. She ran to the vehicle, hoping that Daniel wasn’t so out of control that he’d try to chase her down with a gun in his hand in the broad daylight in a suburban neighborhood. She hoped he’d just accept what happened and calm down.

I have a plan,
she thought.
Or the beginnings of one, if only he’ll cooperate.
He was exactly the man she needed. Her mind flirted with what that might mean for the future, then forced it away.
No time for such thoughts, Elise. Not now.

She drove away briskly, checking the rear view mirror, seeing nothing following. A mile later she pulled into the back of a strip mall and changed out of her rags and into the nondescript clothes she had brought for that purpose. She looked over at the crisp suit hanging there on the back seat hook and a wave of nausea swept over her.
Thank God it wasn’t me that killed him, but Lord forgive me, I’m glad he’s gone and can’t hurt me anymore.

She laughed at herself.
I guess I’m not much of an atheist after all.

***

In Daniel’s teens, when he was young and foolish, he’d thought war would be fun, or would make him a man, when he went to Gulf One. In his twenties he went to Afghanistan to get some back for the Twin Towers, when Bin Laden seemed so near, just over the next mountain, and everybody in a turban might be Al Qaeda and he thought who cares, shoot them all anyway, let God sort ‘em out.

If you listened to his shrink at Walter Reed, Dr. Benchman, you'd think he’d be having flashbacks right now. The doctor had convinced himself Daniel J. Markis was a full-blown PTSD case, a danger to himself and society, and nothing Daniel could say could convince him otherwise.

He had had to start seeing the shrink because he’d clocked a Marine lieutenant who started mouthing off about Air Force “blue-suiters.” They’d both been drunk, and it had been a mistake, but it sure felt good at the time.
About broke my hand along with his pretty jaw,
he thought
. Of course, I never told Benchman about the serpent in my head. Thank God he never thought to try to get my carry permit revoked.

Daniel was lucky, really, because he’d had more than nineteen years in, and by the time the whole JAG process was done, what with his lawyer successfully drawing it out and staving off the threat of a court-martial, he was happy to make a deal, sign that Article 15 and get his retirement orders. Twenty years, thirteen days, but it was enough to qualify, and life was much better as a retiree with fifty percent disability than as a disabled vet with nothing but the VA to help out.

He sat there at the righted table and tried to concentrate on the present. The fog was closing down again, because the speed was wearing off. He wanted a drink. He wanted a nap. He was staring at a dead man leaking all over his old wall-to-wall carpet, and the body wasn’t going to resurrect itself if it hadn’t already, he was pretty sure.
Elise, if she was telling the truth, had said Jenkins didn’t have the healing drug, or whatever it was.

But at least there were no sirens racing for his house, so no one had reported the gunshots or anything unusual. The basement walls were thick, cinder block set mostly below ground.
I guess no one heard the two extra pops when I…
his mind shied away
.

On the other hand, Elise was probably already reporting to her Agency masters and there would soon be a cleanup team on the way. They might make it all go away, or they might set it up to implicate him, or they might come try to recruit him using a different approach - something a lot more certain. Like eight Men In Black with body armor and tranquilizer darts and beanbag rounds. He tried not to imagine, tried to stay on track, tried to stick to the facts.

Instead, he sat there staring at the body.

Should I call the cops?
Was it easier to deal with the local authorities, claim a righteous shoot in his own home? But he’d have to rearrange the scene, because he’d simply executed Jenkins. No matter how you sliced it, he’d killed him in hot blood, without just cause.