Firechild (43 page)

“Tonight—the fact seems too cruel to face, but this will be the final night for all of us here at EnGene and many thousand others. I’m driving out to Maxon to get this letter into the morning mail. That’s upwind and nearly twenty miles away, well outside the probable lethal zone.

“I can’t stand to see Jeri again. There’s nothing I can say or do to help her now. I’ll get a snack at the truck stop—can’t remember when I last ate—and come on back in time to say good-bye to Meg. A hard thing, because she won’t understand. I must try to explain what she is and she was made for, but I know she’s still far too young to get it all.

“Tomorrow morning, Lorain will be calling the team together for our daily planning session. We’ll all be there, the half dozen of us they’ve had to trust with Lifeguard know-how. It’s my turn to make the coffee. I’ll put half a milligram of Deathguard cells into the pot and drink the first cup myself.

“The stuff will probably be tasteless, but that shouldn’t matter. My fellow engineers of Armageddon may have time enough to guess what’s hit them, but all they can do is to let those synthetic macromolecules replicate themselves until their internal clocks turn them off.

“That’s the story, Sax—

“I’ve taken too long to tell it, but I had a lot to say. You may hate me for laying such a hard burden on you. It’s a poor return for all you used to do for me. I always loved you, Sax, most of all for your everlasting tolerance and for everything you taught me. Believe me, I sometimes even thought of saying so. I never did, never could. Because, I guess, I couldn’t bring myself to admit how much I needed you.

“Forgive me, Sax!

“I hope you’ll be the first know the truth. I’m trusting you to get it out to all the world, in the surest way you can. Be careful! There are people in the Pentagon and out of it who’d do anything to stop you. Plan against them, and do what you can to play things safe.

“This will be the Deathguard test Ryebold wanted me to make. If you’re reading this, you’ll know my molecular clock was able to turn the virus off. I’ve said all I dare tell about EnGene. Whatever may have happened here while this confession is in the mail, I hope you can use it to warn the world against the sort of thing we’ve done.

“God help you get the warning out, and God forgive me!

“So long, Sax.”

50

The Shining

Virus

A
hot gust blew through the open doors of the Buick, sharp with alkali dust and the pungence of creosote brush. The heat had left Belcraft sticky with grime and sweat. Yet, passing Anya the last page of Vic’s letter, he shivered. A hard lump ached in his throat. Staring off at the yellow dust-devils dancing across the brown mesa and the far black fleck of the tunnel shimmering in the heat, he found everything blurred with tears.

Anya finished the letter, and he saw her cracked lips quivering.

“I didn’t know—” she whispered. “I couldn’t know—”

“Nobody—” He gulped at the lump in his throat. “Nobody could.”

It took a long time for him to shake off his pain. The letter had left him crushed under the weight of his brother’s hard ordeal, left him wounded as Vic had been by the ruthless necessity to sacrifice Jeri, to kill his fellow researchers and condemn the innocent city, to lose everything but Meg. And now—

“If she’s dead—”

His aching throat had closed.

“We don’t know.” Anya tried to cheer him. “Not till we get there.”

Moving to break that cruel spell, he started the car. Anya leaned out to wave at Jim Gibson. The blue Ford followed them, lurching and jolting and grinding up the one-time road toward
La Madre de Oro.

Outside the tunnel, a shelf had been bulldozed and blasted into the mountainside. Pancho’s battered pickup truck stood parked there, half camouflaged with juniper branches. Belcraft found a flashlight in the glove compartment of the Buick and led the way inside.

Damp with sweat, he shivered. The tunnel was a dim pit, sloping unevenly down into the mountain as if the miners had been trying to follow a vanishing vein. Parts of it were timbered with rough logs. Decay had broken many of them, letting boulders fall from the roof. Somewhere ahead, he heard the drip and ripple of an underground spring. ‘

Anya kept close to him. Both of them taut with a mix of dread and lingering hope, they spoke seldom and only in whispers. Maybe even more uneasy about what they might find, the photographer had taken a long time to gather up his gear, and Jim Gibson stayed to help him carry it.

The tunnel was dark ahead of them until they came to a pile of fallen rock. The sound of water was louder beyond it, and they came upon a pale glow of light. The floor here had flattened, and the glow led them to a pile of sharp-scented juniper twigs laid to make a bed.

“Nyet!”
Anya breathed. “No! No!”

Alphamega and Pancho Torres lay together across the crude bed. The light came from her body, which shone now like the body of that luckless bicyclist Bel-craft had seen overtaken by the advancing dust of Enfield. Her fine gold hair was already gone. Her thin little body was naked, the delicate limbs all turned luminous. The fine-boned head was bent grotesquely aside, and his flashlight glinted on the blade of the knife Harris had dropped beside her.

Torres must have been holding her in his arms when the killer surprised them, wrapped perhaps in the worn blanket which lay near her now. He had toppled backward against the boulder pile from another cave-in. A worn 30.30 rifle with a broken and black-taped stock had fallen on the rocks beside him. The flashlight showed half of his gaunt, stubble-bearded face torn away where the bullets had struck.

Silently, they shrank away together. Anya gripped Belcraft’s hand, and he felt her shiver. The dank air was suddenly hard to breathe. Falling water clinked and tinkled in the darkness farther on. Behind them, the photographer slipped on a rock and cursed.

“I’m sorry,” Anya whispered. “Please, Sax! You’ve got to believe—”

His throat closed, he could only squeeze her hand.

The others arrived, Gibson lugging a heavy still camera and its tripod. The photographer set them up and took flash shots of the bodies and the knife and a flat-topped boulder where Torres had stacked his meager supplies—a few cans of food, paper sacks of beans and rice and ground corn. He set up a battery lamp and mounted a video camera on the tripod.

Belcraft heard him gasp.

“The damn stiff! Look at the stiffs!”

The flesh had begun to flow away from Meg’s slender bones, turned to a luminous fluid that spread slowly to bathe the juniper brush and gather in a moon-glowing pool on the rocky floor.

“It’s slower-acting than the Enfield organism,” Bel-craft told them. “Maybe different enough to save us. I was there to watch the city dying. I saw a boy on a bicycle, trying to outrun the dust. He lost the race. I saw his body dissolve into the same kind of shining stuff—”

“My God! Let’s go.”

The photographer snatched his still camera and ran, yelling back for Gibson to bring the video gear. Gibson stayed where he was, frowning at Belcraft.

“Doctor, what do you think?”

“I don’t know what to think.” Belcraft found Anya’s trembling hand in his. “The Enfield organism consumed nearly everything except stone and soil and metal. This isn’t attacking the brush or the blanket. Nothing so far except Meg’s body. I don’t know why. If it’s anything infectious to us, we don’t know a cure. It’s time to run if you want to run, but I’m not sure running would save you.”

“So?” Standing fast, Gibson grinned at Anya.
“Nichevo.”

Edging with her toward the tunnel wall, Belcraft heard him start the video camera. They stood transfixed, eyes on what had been Meg. Slowly turning to molten silver, her flesh ran off her bones. Not quite human bones, they were drawn too thin, shaped a little oddly. For a time they remained intact, a delicate fretwork of palely incandescent metal. Then they, too, began crumbling into that slowly spreading liquid pool.

It reached Torres and flowed over the body, spreading like the liquid helium he had once seen climbing out of a beaker in a cyronics laboratory. It covered the tattered clothing, the unshaven face, the gaping mouth and the grinning teeth and the ugly wound the bullets had torn, until the body became a figure of desperate agony, cast in glowing silver.

But it did not dissolve.

“There!” Pointing, Anya clutched his arm. “The fluid —it’s evaporating!”

He saw a bright mist rising from the brush where Meg had been, from all the glowing pool. In a moment he caught its odor, a penetrating pungency, a little like ether, really like nothing he had known.

The whir of the camera had stopped.

“Tape’s used up.” Gibson took it off the tripod. “I’m getting out.”

They followed him around the tunnel bend. The bright sky in view, Belcraft heard Anya breathing hard. He reached to catch her hand.

“Get back!” she gasped. “Stay away! I think—”

She reeled against the tunnel wall. He caught her in his arms and felt her shivering against him as if from a chill. The warmth and the scent of her body brought him a fleeting recollection of their nights together back at Enfield when he hadn’t yet known she was an agent of the KGB. And he caught something different, a hint of the ether-sweetness that had risen from Meg’s molten flesh.

Ahead of them, Gibson had come upon the fugitive photographer, sprawled on the rocks, snoring and unconscious. He carried the man out into daylight and came back for the camera gear.

The shadow of the mountain had crept across that boulder shelf outside the tunnel. Belcraft laid Anya there on the ground and knelt to examine her. She was unconscious. Her body felt hot, with four or five degrees of fever. The shivering had stopped. Her pulse was slow, but it seemed regular and strong. The pupils were dilated when he opened her eyes, but they contracted normally.

“Alive,” he told Gibson. “She’s still alive.”

“So’s he.” Gibson nodded at the photographer. “But he’s got that funny smell. Like the child’s when the flesh was running off her bones.”

The body was hot as Anya’s, when he examined it. Pulse slow but normal. Pupillary reflex normal.

“What do you think?”

“We’ll have to wait.”

“Whatever.” Gibson shrugged. “You know, Doc, somehow I can’t feel much afraid. I was dying, back there when the plane went down. Alphamega brought me back to life—and I’ve been different since. I don’t know what she is or how she does it, but I just can’t believe anything from her could really hurt me.

“Though—”

He looked suddenly around him and found a place to sit on one of the fire-stained foundation rocks. Shivering, he grinned wryly at Belcraft.

“I guess I’ll soon be finding out.”

The shadow of the mountain seemed suddenly cold. Reeling giddily, Belcraft lay down beside Anya, his arm beneath his head. The weakness, the fever, the infection from Meg—it was hitting him. Yet, like Gibson, he couldn’t feel afraid. What he felt, instead, was a trembling awe.

Meg had been a wonder to him since the day he found her in the ashes of EnGene, but a loving wonder. He felt strangely certain that nothing from her would harm him now. He nestled himself into a little hollow in the ground, waiting with a warm expectation for whatever came. When he woke, perhaps he would know—

“Sax?” Anya was kneeling over him. “Are you okay?”

He sat up, feeling oddly as if a long time had passed, perhaps many days. The shadow of the mountain, however, had moved only a little. Gibson lay among the foundation stones where he had been sitting. The snoring photographer hadn’t moved.

“All right. In fact, very well.” He caught a deep breath, peering uncertainly at Anya. “How are you?”

“Fine.” She looked radiant. “Never better. But …” Her smile became a puzzled frown. “Different.” She peered into the tunnel, shaking her head. “Something has happened to me, Sax. It’s … it’s hard to explain.”

“I think … perhaps … perhaps I understand.” His voice had fallen to a whisper. “Meg has touched me before. She always left me feeling lifted, cleansed, happier—in a way I never understood. This time, lying here, I thought I felt her touching me again.”

Still on her knees, Anya looked at him searchingly, her face grave with amazement. It must have tanned while she slept. The pink flush of sunburn was somehow gone, and the cracks in her lips had healed. She caught her breath. He waited for her to speak.

“Sax—” Emotion had hushed her voice, and she paused again. “I tried to tell you what I am. What I was. I knew you hated me, but I couldn’t feel ashamed of anything. Not then. I thought I’d had to do whatever I had done. I was proud to think myself a loyal soldier of my country. I even felt I’d been right, using you to lead that killer here.

“But I wouldn’t do it now.” He saw tears welling out of her greenish eyes. “Not any of it. I do feel ashamed—”

“Don’t!” His own eyes filling, he reached to seize her hand. “This—whatever it was—it has left me different. I’m ashamed, myself, of the way I hated you. Enough to kill you, if I’d felt able. Ashamed of the way I remember sometimes treating Vic—as if he had been no more than the spoiled brat I always thought he was.

“If I’d realized what he was going to do, if I’d encouraged him and worked with him, everything might have been different. He might have been alive today. Meg might have lived to become what he wanted her to be. But even as things are—”

Turning to peer into the tunnel, he pulled himself straighter before he came back to her.

“Don’t grieve.” He grinned at her. “Meg wouldn’t want us grieving. You know—” Frowning, he stopped to organize his thoughts. “I woke up with a notion. About what has happened. About what Meg was, or maybe what she is. I think Vic planned her for this.”

She waited, green eyes wide and lips a little parted, so lovely since she woke that awe caught his voice.

“Vic used to talk, but I never imagined …” He paused to get his breath and put it into words. “That scrawny little kid, full of ideas too big for him. He was going to create a good virus. A notion he kept nursing as he learned more biology. It was to be an artificial microorganism designed to heal. Engineered to infect everybody, repair damaged or defective cells, transform us into something closer to what we should have been. Once he called it a gene for goodness.