The Immortalists (27 page)

The air was warm and still as Burt Seeger hobbled down the RV’s steps carrying a collapsible wheelchair. He unfolded it next to a picnic table, pausing every few seconds to look around at the activity in the surrounding sites.

He’d parked as close to the center of the campground as he could, making it nearly impossible for an assault team to get to him without being noticed by his new neighbors, many of whom tended to stay up all night drinking.

Susie was still in the RV, sprawled across the bed with two sleeping bags piled on top of her. The IV he’d cobbled together had done its job rehydrating her, and she woke up a few times a day now, always hungry and always cold. He’d bring her favorite—mac and cheese—and get a few spoonfuls into her mouth before she lost consciousness again. There was no recognition in her eyes anymore. Maybe her brain had been damaged by what he’d given her. Maybe he’d destroyed what made her who she was.

Seeger went back up the steps and pulled the sleeping bags off her, immediately adding a down parka and stocking cap to the fleece tracksuit that had failed so miserably to keep her warm. She felt almost weightless as he carried her down the stairs and eased her gently into the wheelchair.

The sun dispersed the clouds hanging on the horizon as he pushed her onto a path that led into the rolling grassland that surrounded the campsite. He knew she should be in bed, but it was so hard to see her lying in the musty old vehicle day after day.

There was a soft crunch behind him, and he spun, reaching for the gun in his jacket before realizing it was just a young couple out for a jog.

“Sorry! Didn’t mean to scare you,” the girl said, her polite smile turning a little sad when she looked down at Susie.

He watched them recede, cursing himself. They’d made it to within twenty feet before he’d realized they were there. The older he got, the deafer he got, and the more he found himself lost in his own mind. It was only a matter of time before his luck ran out. One day very soon they’d find him. And it would be over before he even knew it had started.

The quality of the trail deteriorated, and Susie slumped right as the chair got hung up in a set of rocky ruts. Her eyes fluttered open, and he pointed to a squirrel standing on its hind legs watching them.

“Look who’s come out to say hello,” he said, carefully propping her back upright.

A week ago, her ancient face would have been transformed by childlike wonder. Today she just clawed clumsily at the snaps on her jacket, not bothering to lift her gaze from the ground.

He touched her forehead, and it felt hot, but not the burning heat of the fever she’d been running. Maybe the fresh air and sun had finally driven away the chills that had been plaguing her.

“Let’s leave the coat on a little longer, sweetheart. We’ll start with taking your hat off and see how that goes.”

He pulled the knit cap from her head and was about to stuff it in his pocket when he froze. The sweat broke across his lip, and he wiped it away as he stared down at the top of her head. It was an illusion, he told himself—a combination of old eyes and angled sunlight.

Seeger wasn’t sure how long it took him to muster the courage to reach out and run a hand across her scalp, but when he did, he discovered it wasn’t a mirage. It was real.

He laughed out loud, tears welling up in his eyes as he caressed the downy fuzz of sprouting hair where before there had been nothing.

“I told you to get rid of them!” Xander said.

The guard just stood there, pistol dangling uselessly from his hand. The sound of a muffled gunshot drifted through the open door, but he didn’t react other than to squint back toward the hallway as though he were trying to catch a glimpse of the bullet.

Richard didn’t know how long the confusion would last, and he lunged, slamming him against a wall and grabbing for his gun hand. He heard Carly yelp in surprise, but she regained her composure quickly, getting hold of the man’s other hand and sinking her teeth into his wrist.

He let out a strangled wail and collapsed to the ground, releasing the gun and putting his arms protectively in front of his face. Richard grabbed the weapon and swung it in the direction of Karl and Xander.

But they were gone.

“What the hell’s wrong with him?” Carly said as the powerfully built man cowered in the corner.

Richard pulled her into the hallway. “I’ll explain later.”

They ran back the way they’d come, listening to the shouts of people in other parts of the house mingle with the sound of gunfire and howling dogs. He slowed when they neared the stairs leading to the ground floor, putting a cautionary hand out and peering down at the entry hall. A man with a blond crew cut had taken cover behind a flipped table and was crying inconsolably as he watched the escalating chaos over his pistol sights.

“You!” someone behind them shouted, and they spun in the direction of the voice.

The man was running at them full speed, and Richard pulled his wife into an empty room. She slammed the door behind them and tried to twist the lock knob but was a fraction too slow. It flew open with the sound of cracking wood, and she sprawled backward, pedaling her feet on the polished floor in an effort to get away. Richard managed to get hold of a floor lamp, and he swung it like a baseball bat at the man charging into the room, catching him square in the face.

The force of the blow lifted him off the ground and he landed hard on his back. Richard stood over him with the lamp raised, but the man lay motionless, blood gushing from his nose and a lip held on only by a narrow flap of skin.

Carly crawled to the door and shoved it closed, putting her back against it as a gunfight erupted downstairs. “What the hell did you do?”

“Acid,” Richard responded, edging toward the window and looking outside. Directly below them a Doberman was chasing its tail while two others lay motionless in the grass. Their handler, who apparently had let them get into his leftover stew, was perched in the branches of a pine tree.

“LSD? You had me put LSD in the food?”

He nodded, watching Xander’s security force continue to disintegrate. “Like you said, tranquilizing them wouldn’t work—the later shifts would notice and some of them don’t eat. I needed something that didn’t have an obvious onset and that would keep the people who didn’t get a dose busy.”

“LSD,” she repeated, a hint of admiration in her voice. “I would have never thought of that.”

She got on all fours and opened the door just enough to peek out. The gunfire downstairs had gone silent, but the shouts and screams hadn’t.

“So what’s the plan? Are we going to climb out the window? It’s pretty far, but—”

“You’ve never dropped acid have you, Carly?”

“No.”

“Well, I have, and I don’t think we want to be climbing down the side of the building with a bunch of tripping mercenaries below us.”

“Why am I suddenly getting the feeling you haven’t fully thought this through?”

“The guards’ reaction was too unpredictable to work out anything detailed. But we’ve got a chance. All we have to do is walk out of here.”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t look at anybody, don’t make any sudden moves. Just walk.”

“That’s your plan? We just leave?”

He didn’t answer, instead pulling the broken door open and heading back into the hallway. She started to run to catch up, but he waved a hand behind him, and she slowed to a more or less natural gait.

“Richard,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “We can’t just—”

He put a finger to his lips, silencing her. “No talking.”

The alarm began to sound just as they started down the stairs, but he kept going, ignoring its deafening wail and the men faced off below.

“There’s someone at the bottom,” Carly said quietly.

The man was lying on the marble floor, his face covered with his hands. Richard kept moving, slipping the gun he’d taken from his waistband. If the man noticed them stepping over him, he gave no indication.

They’d almost made it to the front door when a shot sounded behind them and exploded into the plaster to their left.

“Freeze!”

The man stumbled forward and fired another round, obviously having trouble aiming. This one shredded the edge of a portrait depicting Xander in much younger days.

Richard lined up his own pistol and fired back, but his military school had wisely drawn the line at training its misfit students on concealable weapons. The shot went wide.

He abandoned his effort to keep them invisible and started to run, dragging his wife along behind. They came out into an enormous circular driveway and charged toward a black SUV parked at its edge. Carly yanked the passenger door open and jumped in, sliding over the console into the driver’s seat. “The keys are in it! Get in!”

The sound of a window breaking above caused Richard to duck involuntarily. A moment later, a man bounced off the vehicle’s front fender and hit the pavement hard enough to collapse the right side of his head.

Richard looked down at him—at the lifeless eyes half open, at the blood matting his hair. The other reason he’d chosen LSD was that it was impossible to overdose on. He hadn’t wanted to kill anyone.

“Richard! What are you doing?” Carly shouted as she started the SUV’s engine. “Get in the damn car!”

The man who had shot at them inside the house finally made it to the driveway and this time took careful aim. Richard tensed as he pulled the trigger, but instead of an earsplitting crack, there was a quiet click.

“Richard!” Carly shouted again, and he jumped in. The door nearly slammed on his legs when she floored the vehicle through an elaborate flowerbed and aimed it at the iron gate leading to the road.

“Air bags!” Richard shouted, and she spun the wheel, drifting the vehicle one hundred and eighty degrees. She threw it in reverse and sped backward toward the gate, wrenching it from the stone fence with a deafening crash and a shower of sparks.

Richard turned in the seat as she launched the SUV up the road, looking through the spider-webbed rear windshield at a black sedan squealing away from the curb and accelerating in their direction.

“Go! Go!” he shouted. “They’re coming after us!”

But the sedan took a hard right and disappeared through the demolished gate—probably in answer to an SOS from Karl and Xander.

Richard gripped the seat as Carly swung the vehicle onto a wider, less secluded road. No one followed, and within a few minutes they were mixing with other cars, passing pedestrians, barns, and tractors. The real world. He’d almost forgotten it existed.

The woman’s voice rose to a near screech, her words coming in a desperate, unintelligible flood. Richard Draman sat down on a stool fashioned from a tree stump and signaled for calm as he formed the sentence “He’s going to be fine” in the local language.

A familiar expression of confusion appeared on the woman’s face for a moment as she attempted to decipher what he’d said, and then she returned to her panicked diatribe.

He leaned back against the grass wall of the hut and looked down at the infant lying on a blanket spread out on the floor. The infection wasn’t serious, but his mother’s fear was understandable. In this part of the world, Monday’s mild fever often deteriorated into Friday’s funeral.

“OK, OK,” he said, enunciating carefully, as though that would somehow make her understand English. “Just wait here for a second.”

He walked to the door and looked down at a teenage girl lying in the shade of a flowering tree. Seven years of unlicensed doctoring in rural Laos and he could still barely communicate on the level of a two-year-old.

“A little help?”

She raised herself up on her elbows and frowned at him, dark hair falling across a round face marked by just a few pimples. “Mom says you’re using me as a crutch. She says I shouldn’t reward that kind of behavior.”

He thumbed to his ancient Range Rover. “It’s a long walk home, Susie.”

She considered his point for a moment and then stood, slapping dust from the plaid skirt and white blouse that was the uniform at her school.

She was a beautiful girl but didn’t seem to notice. After growing up with the pitying and shocked stares of nearly everyone she came in contact with, she would have been grateful for simple anonymity—something hard to come by for a five-foot-nine-inch white girl living in the Laotian countryside.

Susie bowed politely when she entered the hut, her easy smile soothing the woman noticeably.

“Tell her that her son’s going to be fine.”

Susie translated in what people assured him was perfect Lao, and he held out a small bottle of pills. “She needs to crush one of these up in his food every day. And he needs to take them all— even if he’s feeling better before they’re done.”

When Susie finished explaining, the woman grabbed his hand, shaking it violently and continuing to talk in rapid-fire Lao.

“She says she has some nice silk she’s woven. Or a chicken. You get your pick.”

“What do you think?”

“I’d go for chicken tonight. Mom could make that really spicy pepper sauce.”

“Yeah…the pepper sauce is good, isn’t it?”

His medical fee squawked loudly as he shoved its wicker cage in the back of the Range Rover. One of the beers rolling around on the floorboard caught his eye, and he popped it open, taking a grateful swig of the hot liquid.

“Can I drive, Dad?”

He shook his head. “Remember what happened last time?”

“That was a freak accident. You can’t hold that against me.” She pointed to the can in his hand. “Drinking and driving kills.”

He thought about it for a moment and then climbed reluctantly into the passenger seat. A moment later, they were fishtailing off in a cloud of dust.

“Just because we live in the third world doesn’t mean we have to drive like we’re from here, Susie.”

“What are you talking about? I
am
from here.”

He didn’t respond, instead taking another pull on his beer. It was essentially true. While he was little more than a trapped tourist, she had lived half her life in Laos.

There was no reason to believe that Karl and August Mason would ever give up trying to track them down, and they’d needed to get permanently lost. Where better than the mountains of Southeast Asia?

Of course, he and Carly had considered going to the authorities, but quickly decided against it. Even if they had been able to find a government agency that Mason’s people couldn’t influence, where would it have left Susie? At best, word would get out, and she’d become a reluctant celebrity with something everyone wanted. At worst, she’d become a guinea pig, an unwilling religious figure, or a lightning rod for jealousy and hate. Maybe all of the above.

After everything she’d endured, she deserved a normal life. Or at least as normal as he could provide.

“When are we going to go back, Dad?”

“What do you mean? Back where?”

“To America.”

“I don’t know.”

“What about Europe?”

He turned in his seat to face her. “Why the sudden interest?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen any of it. You tell stories, and I watch movies, but that’s different.”

“We’ll plan a trip.”

She knew a lie when she heard one, and he watched her expression turn sullen. She was growing up so fast. They wouldn’t be able to put off what he and Carly had dubbed “the talk” for much longer, though he still wasn’t sure what they were going to say.

The truth was that he didn’t know what was going to happen to her. It was possible that Mason’s serum did nothing but cure her progeria. In that case, she would grow old and die just like everyone else.

On the other hand, she might just continue to mature normally until she was thirty or so and then stop and stay that age forever.

He didn’t have the equipment to look deeply into her altered genome, but based on what tests he had been able to do, she was in no way an ordinary girl anymore. In fact, there were probably significant enough genetic changes to make the average taxonomist consider categorizing her as a subspecies. At this point, he didn’t even know if she’d be able to have viable children with an unaltered male.

And that’s why “the talk” always seemed like something for tomorrow. He suspected that discussions starting with “your mother and I aren’t sure you’re technically human, and there are a bunch of incredibly powerful men who will hunt you until the end of time” rarely ended well.

Richard settled back in his seat and went to work on his beer again, remaining quiet as Susie’s driving became increasingly reckless. She had every reason to be angry.

Thirty minutes of silence later, they pulled up to the old French colonial house he’d purchased when they’d arrived in the country. The roof was bowed, the paint was peeling, and there was no electricity. On the other hand, the breeze blew through the open windows year-round, and flowering coffee plants still covered the hills surrounding it.

It wasn’t really how he’d pictured his life turning out, but in many ways, it was better. He lived in one of the most beautiful places in the world, his daughter was healthy, his family was intact, and he helped people every day. One at a time, of course, but there was a certain pleasure in it that couldn’t be duplicated in a lab.

Susie leapt to the ground, and he jogged up behind her as they went through the house’s open front door. Carly and Burt Seeger were sitting on a bench in the shabby grandeur of the foyer when they entered. Richard had convinced the old soldier to escape with them, and he’d quickly become just another part of the family. Susie started calling him Grandpa when she was nine, and at some point Carly had started calling him Dad. It just seemed natural.

Richard’s eyes adjusted to the shadow of the room, and he suddenly could see the fear in their faces. He grabbed Susie by the shoulder, dragging the surprised girl back toward the door.

“Too late,” an unfamiliar voice said.

Three white men emerged from the arch leading to the kitchen. The two carrying assault rifles took up positions at the edges of the room while the third walked unsteadily to its center. He was probably in his mid thirties, but pale and completely bald. His thin frame was noticeably bowed, and he leaned heavily on a cane for support.

“It’s been a long time,” he said. “I believe the last time we saw each other, you had just given my men a massive dose of LSD.”

Richard’s breath caught in his chest, and he pulled Susie the rest of the way behind him.

“I’m sorry,” Seeger said, as Carly patted his hand. “I’ve gotten so goddamn old.”

“It’s OK,” Richard replied. “It’s not your fault.”

“What’s going on, Daddy? Who are these people?”

“Don’t worry about it, honey. This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

Xander locked his eyes on her, squinting through the gloom at her unlined face. “She doesn’t know? You haven’t told her any of it?”

“Nothing,” Carly said. “So there’s no reason for you to hurt her.”

Xander waved a hand dismissively and eased himself into a chair. “You’re hard people to track down. My compliments.”

Richard looked at the two armed men and then behind him at Susie. She was scared, but also curious. She remembered her former life, her disease, her old last name. She’d always known there was something they weren’t telling her.

“There aren’t many of us left,” Xander said. “Ironic, isn’t it? Karl was the first to get cancer. In his kidney. They removed it, but the cancer came back in his bones, and that was the end of him. Then the others started getting it. Some survived the first, even the second bout, but remission never lasted long. When they discovered it in Mason, it was in his pancreas. He didn’t last three months.”

“And you?” Richard said.

“Lungs. Funny, huh? Never smoked a day in my life. They say I’m going to live. This time.”

Xander motioned to his security men, and they filed out the door, leaving them alone. “Mason thought he had the cancer problem beat. Turns out he was wrong.”

Seeger’s attention moved to a rifle hanging on the wall, and Xander immediately noticed.

“Make a move, old man. I guarantee you won’t get three feet.”

“Everyone just relax,” Richard said. “What do you want, Andreas?”

“What do I want? You know goddamn well what I want.” He pointed to Susie. “She’s next, you know. Maybe not this year. But next year or the year after that. You’ll watch her die in agony. Just like I watched the others.”

“Daddy?”

“It’s OK, honey,” he said.

“Your father’s lying to you, Susie. He’s been lying to you all along. It’s not OK.”

“Shut up!” Richard said.

“Spare me the drama,” Xander responded. “I’m here to offer you a chance to save her. You’re a brilliant scientist with a background in cancer research. You know the therapy exists, and I can get you all of Mason’s data. You can figure this thing out and still keep everything quiet.”

“Why keep it quiet?” Richard said. “Seems like you’d do whatever you had to in order to stay alive. If there’s anything I remember about you, it’s that.”

The familiar anger flashed in Xander’s young eyes, but he managed to control it. “I don’t suppose there’s any reason at this point for me to bullshit you, Richard. In order to maintain our anonymity and power base, we’ve been forced to do things that…let’s just say they wouldn’t be appreciated. I’ve got a long life to live, and I’d rather not spend it in prison.”

“So I should save you?”

Xander shook his head and pointed to Susie. “You should save her.”