Eden Plague - Latest Edition (31 page)

I sat back down and sipped, feeling the cold sweet run down my insides. It steadied me a bit. I took a deep breath. “Okay, talk.”

He smiled, smarmy, superior. “Just like that. The secrets of the universe?”

The serpent and I kicked him under the table, hard, somewhere near his left knee.

He convulsed forward, dropping the cigarette and clutching for the pain, and I reached over, put my left hand on his head and mashed his face into the table. With my right I used the magazine extension of the automatic to grind out the burning cigarette. “Now you owe me for a new tablecloth.”

With my weight still on his head, I put the pistol down out of his reach, picked up the still-smoking butt and dropped it in the bowl. I scooped up the gun again.

“You can’t play conversation control games with me, you stupid
suit
.” I made that word into an epithet. “I’ve been through every resistance training course, every combat psych and psy-ops and mind-freak exercise, and you are in
my house now
.” I felt violated, and it fueled me, and what control I had left drained away like water through a colander of pasta.

The serpent egged me on.

“MY HOUSE!” The snake and the dexedrine seized control, the worm in my hindbrain that I prayed about and tried so hard to keep caged every day since the IED and the brain damage, my nemesis, that God-damned satanic serpent, forgive me Lord. This idiot, this
suit
, was a child playing with blasting caps and batteries in a toybox full of explosives and he might die, right here, right now, for that ignorance and stupidity. I was on the edge of a whiteout, and the snake longed for it, longed to throw itself and me into that bright hot place where all I had to do was destroy. Annihilate every threat, kill everyone that wasn’t on my side, and
this fool
, the serpent screamed, was
NOT
ON
MY SIDE.

I wrapped my fingers into his hair and dragged him to his feet, moving around the table. I was a hair under six feet, 200 pounds and muscular, but the beserkergang closing in made me shake him like a rag doll, lifting him onto his toes with one hand. Nose to nose, the muzzle of the XD jammed hard into his solar plexus, I screamed into his face, “I just killed one person, and I
just
.
Might
.
Kill
.
You
.
Too
.
So
.
TALK
!”

I threw him into his chair. He almost went over backward, but caught himself, and I stood over him, shaking. We were both shaking, me with barely-suppressed chemical rage, him with dawning fear.

Finally afraid. “You can’t kill me,” he said, shuddering.

Wrong thing to say.
Oh, so very, very wrong.

A silent explosion in my head, and the serpent took me, wrapped me up and dragged me under.

I watched my hand move of its own volition, watched myself as I shot him twice in the chest.

It felt so good.

The serpent writhed in ecstasy.

He gaped at me, then looked down. Touched the entry wounds. Tried to speak. Slumped and was still.

Crap
.

The house was silent as I stood there, and I suddenly felt dizzy, ice cold, drenched in sweat. Numbly I reached over, bumped the thermostat up a couple of degrees, then leaned against the wall, sweating. Listened to the silence. Mostly silence. The serpent still gibbered in my hindbrain. Too many chemicals, I knew. Steroids and painkillers and speed, and they had betrayed me this time.

But I heard something else. A rushing sound, not the forced air of the heating system either. Water. It sounded like a shower. It sounded like the shower in the basement was on. Had a pipe broken? Did one of my rounds damage something?

I reloaded automatically, ensuring I had the full sixteen and one up the pipe, then retraced my steps back down to the basement. No way that guy – sorry, that girl – got up. No way, after the mess I made of her. The serpent slithered forward again.

I edged around the bottom of the stairs; I glided forward with all the stealth I could muster, and slipped back to my position in the unfinished part of the basement, behind the thin wall with its sixteen or so holes. Yes, the shower was running, and something moved within. Several of the rounds had gone right through the shower and now the water was soaking through, drizzling through the holes.

What on God’s green Earth?

I waited, took up a position behind the crack of the door, and waited some more. It took several minutes but finally a figure came out of the shower, out of the bathroom. It looked like she had showered with her clothes on, to get rid of the blood and filth, but she was up and walking around. Toweling off. Not fast; she moved haltingly, like an old woman, or a hurt one. She was holding an exotic-looking weapon by the barrel in one hand, with a Kevlar helmet under the same arm. She had mangled body armor on, too. I could see five or six scars where my rounds had hit the vest and helmet and not penetrated.

So I had tagged her, but not killed her after all? But I had fired sixteen rounds, and I had smelled the stink of the body letting go, which normally only happens at the moment of death. At least some of her legs and arms should be out of commission, but she was using all of them. One, two, three, four. Yup, all four limbs operating.

Weird.

I stepped out from behind the door while her back was still mostly to me. “Freeze, you.”

Like I said, I’m not that creative with my one-liners.

She dropped the gun and helmet onto my old blue basement rug, held her hands up away from her body. “Don’t shoot, please. It hurts.”

“I bet. Turn around. All the way around, keep turning.”

I inspected her. No visible weapons, and just that vest. Besides that, just torn up slacks and a ragged button-down blouse, business casual, holes and rips and still some blood, and angry red wounds on her arms and legs, at least five that I could see. Spreading purple bruises. But she was standing, she was walking. Somehow. Woman or not, she had fired a very deadly firearm at me. The gun didn’t care who used it, and dead was dead.

Wasn’t it?

The serpent was not pleased.

“Turn right, go up the stairs. Don’t think about it, just do it. Up, up!” I followed her up, déjà vu, just like with the suit. I marched her through my 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 short and bloody, her face ugly with bruises and what looked like a shot through her cheek.

I snarled, “I tried to talk to him. He gave me the wrong answers. Take that vest off.”

She did, painfully slow.

It’s useful in a field interrogation for the subject to be afraid of you, to keep him or her from recovering composure. I needed to push her through that window. Besides, she had genuine reason to fear me. The serpent hovered on my shoulder, threatening to take over again at any moment.

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

The serpent danced in the dexe-codone fog.

“Okay, okay, please don’t. We’re here to help you. Recruit you! Come on, Daniel, throttle back!”

I had placed my finger on the trigger again.

“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 thumb at the dead suit beside her, avoiding looking.

‘Company’ was what the Agency’s employees called it, like it wasn’t even part of the government.

Maybe it wasn’t, really.

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

She talked, 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.”

I wondered what she meant by ‘couldn’t kill’ me. Seemed like she could have if I’d been in front of the shotgun .

She went on, “I tried to talk him out of it but he was an arrogant son of a bitch and he wouldn’t listen.” She reached across with her right hand to scratch vigorously at her left arm, where one of my bullets had taken out a chunk of flesh.

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

“It’s a new thing. A kind of healing booster. Do you have anything to eat?” I 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.”

My stimulated mind raced. I threw mental rocks and the serpent reluctantly slouched back toward his cave.

Healing booster, super-healing. When she said starving, she meant literally starving. From my extensive medical training I 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 I needed this woman for answers, and maybe to keep me out of an Agency cell. I’d brushed up against the spooks Over There, and I 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 I got her some food. A big bag of lunchmeat, 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 could kill a man.

“Make me a sandwich too,” I said. I 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.” She sounded whiny, defensive. Querulous.

I 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?” My mind was racing now, the adrenaline and the problem keeping me on track. It 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 me, and demolished another in four bites.

I had to wait for her to keep talking so I took a cautious bite of mine. Too much mustard.

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

She kept eating.

I dragged my mind back to now, and barked, “Come on, talk between bites.”

“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 I fidgeted impatiently. She was looking much better now, and her wounds were visibly shrinking. The bruising was getting smaller, the holes were closing, everything. Unbelievable. But I had to believe it. It was right in front of me.

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

In my teens, when I was young and foolish, I had thought war would be fun, or make me a man, or something, when I went to Gulf One. In my twenties I went to Afghanistan 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 who cares, shoot them all anyway, let God sort ‘em out.

If you listened to my shrink at Walter Reed, Dr. Benchman, you'd have thought I'd be having flashbacks right now. He'd convinced himself I was a case of full-blown PTSD, a danger to myself and society, and nothing I could say could talk him out of it.

I’d had to start seeing him because I'd clocked a Marine lieutenant when he started mouthing off about blue-suiters. He’d been drunk, I’d 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. 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.

I was lucky, really, because I'd had more than nineteen years in, and by the time the whole JAG process was done, what with my lawyer successfully drawing it out and staving off the threat of a court-martial, I was happy to make a deal, sign that Article 15 and get my 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.