Orpheus: Homecoming (The Orpheus Trilogy Book 2) (18 page)

Orpheus walked down the long, empty corridor to the auto shop. Jen had called him and asked to see him as soon as possible. As he hadn't heard from her for days, he assumed that it was something of import. He didn't necessarily rush through the morning briefing, but he didn't stay to grabass, either. He dismissed everyone and headed immediately to her.

The route to the shop was just shy of abandoned. There were sentries posted, and he could see the two at the corners readily enough, but a quick turn of the head and he could convince himself that he was absolutely alone.

There was a small stuffed penguin hanging from the doorknob. Orpheus left it hanging there, wondering what it meant. He knocked on the door, but got no answer. He didn't like that, not after being invited, so he rushed in and nearly went sprawling over a milk crate full of auto parts. "Goddammit! Jen!" Still, he got no answer.

He jogged further into the auto bay. If he didn't know any better, he'd say that he was in his local body shop. He passed a Hyundai, still on the lift, and saw Torres, as feisty as ever. Orpheus made it a point to avoid looking at the man, and turned away.

He saw Jen, motionless on a couch. He said her name, nothing. He dropped next to her and began to shake her shoulder, saying, "No, Jen, don't do this to me." He was closer than he should be, but his instincts were on high alert, waiting for any sign.

Her eyes fluttered open, and she smacked her lips together to deal with the dry mouth. "Oh, hey. Sorry, I tried to wait, but I thought I could catch a little nap."

He helped her sit up. "Is that all it is? Fatigue?"

"Trust me. I even ran my own blood work. I've barely been sleeping, trying to figure this out."

Orpheus couldn't help but feel more responsible with every one of her yawns. She was completely wiped out.

"But I might have something. Maybe. And I thought that you'd like to be the one to know." She tried to rub the sleep out of her eyes. "The only one to know." She tried to stand and comically fell backwards. "I might need a sec."

Orpheus spied the coffee maker. Beneath was a small trash basket that was filled with used filters, coffee grounds, and energy bars. "Let me put on a pot and you can shake it off."

She pointed a finger gun at him and made a clicking sound before letting gravity take her head back down to the pillow. She was snoring within ten seconds. He checked his watch. It was early, and he could give her a little more shuteye. At the very least, he could have a fresh cup of coffee in peace. Even Torres had calmed down. Either he was unaware that he still had company, or his body had somehow told him to save his energy for another time. Orpheus put a macho amount of coffee in the filter, filled it from one of the gallons of spring water laying around, and hit the button. He zoned out for a moment and came to when the first drips of coffee started to fall.

He figured he had about ten minutes of nothing to do or drink, so he wandered over to Jen's desk to surf the morning news sites. He got as far as opening the browser before coming to the realization that he just didn't want to read anything about himself anymore. He closed the browser and fiddled with the stuff at Jen's desk. All along the back edge were knickknacks similar to the penguin on the doorknob, and he put two and two together.

Fish ...
Fish
... was leaving his girlfriend love tokens. It was touching. It had to be difficult for the kid to know that his girlfriend was right down the hall but didn't have time to see him.

His gaze dropped to a yellow legal pad that was crammed with a haphazard assortment of notes. He assumed that she could read it, but it was a mess to him. Then a single word jumped off of the page at him.

"CATALYST."

That made him look closer at the notes. It was slow going, but he thought he was getting at least a piece of the picture.

The blood work on Falcone confirmed that he had the same strain of virus, as did Torres. Even though it brought on a whole lot of questions, Orpheus found that to be a tremendous relief.
Better the devil you know
, he thought. The reason that Falcone's symptoms more closely resembled the flu instead of what Orpheus had seen in the past? According to his medical history, the guy just never got sick. He had a high natural immunity, so the virus had to work harder to take him down. More good news, in a way.

The coffee finished brewing, and Orpheus treated himself to a cup before sitting back down at the desk. Jen was still out cold. If the smell of freshly-brewed dark roast at point-blank range didn't wake her up, she really was fried. He dove back in.

Her notes left no doubt that she had copied Vincent's antidote to 100% accuracy. Was that where a catalyst came in? One of Orpheus's theories after Falcone had gotten infected was that Vincent had somehow been screwing with him from beyond the grave. Now it didn't seem silly at all, except he knew that it had nothing to do with him. He was pretty sure that guys like Dr. Vincent were beyond concepts like revenge. But Jen was convinced that something was missing, and now Orpheus was convinced that Vincent was holding something back from his employers. He could almost picture Vincent handing his antidote and notes over to his employers and explicitly telling them that if anything happened to him (which it likely would, after they had what they needed), that they'd have a big fat bag of nothing. He might even run a test right there in front of them, confidently telling them that, no, they'd never be able to find the catalyst, because he was smarter than any of them.

It would be a pretty damn good insurance policy. Of course he was dead now, and it ended up biting Orpheus in the ass.

God, he knew at the moment that Marty had tossed the doctor from a helicopter that he'd screwed up, and that was proving prophetic.

So what did they have?

A mystery of how a guy caught the virus, not that it mattered much, because they also had a cure that didn't work.

Orpheus drummed his fingers against his lips. "Aw, what a cock up."

"I didn't write everything down," Jen said from right behind him.

Orpheus whirled in his chair and almost went ass over teakettle. "Jesus Christ! You're gonna give me a heart attack!"

"Quit being a baby. I've seen your last physical. Your heart's in great shape."

"Okay, how about people need to stop sneaking up on me or I start shooting?"

Jen smiled. She was in the process of putting her hair back in a ponytail. She looked somewhat refreshed, which was impossible, because he'd only let her nap for maybe twenty minutes. He looked at his watch out of force of habit. He'd been there for over two hours, poring over her notes, theorizing, and killing the pot of coffee. "Holy shit."

"Not going to lie. That was a nice nap. But we have to talk."

"I'm all ears."

"How much did you get from my notes?"

He gave her the rundown of what he'd read and what he thought he meant.

She nodded and said, "Not bad. I came to the same conclusion. Vincent kept an ace up his sleeve. That has to be it."

"So we're dead in the water on the cure."

"Well, I can't trace it. I consulted every relevant journal and spoke to one of the best researchers in North America. Nothing. So unless Dr. Vincent comes back from the dead and tells me what he used, it's a dead end. No pun intended."

She gave Orpheus a moment to process that. His safety net was gone. The job just got more dangerous, and the potential ramifications of another outbreak just got catastrophic.

"So what's the bad news?"

"Well, if you liked that theory ... which I can almost support ... I have another one that's even more creative."

"I don't like the sound of that."

"It gets better." She put on her coat. "Did you bring one?"

"Thermals. I'll be all right. Where are we going?"

"To the fridge." She picked up her radio and asked the guards outside to step in and watch their guest while she showed the captain something. Once they were at their post, she hit a button and the giant bay door rolled up. The crisp air felt refreshing on Orpheus's face.

They walked forty yards to a large storage container. Jen punched in a key code and removed the lock. Orpheus threw the heavy iron arm and opened one of the doors. The air conditioning unit at the far end hummed. It had to be just above freezing.

Jen produced a flashlight from her coat. Orpheus pulled out his own, a compact 300 lumen LED light. It went everywhere with him. The flashlights provided plenty of light to navigate by, but they cast a decidedly eerie glow inside the drab metal container. Once Orpheus had figured out what he was there to see, it got eerier.

Jen looked at a clipboard hanging at the end of a sheeted table. "Barr, the guard. He died right away, too fast for the virus to take over and bring him back. I don't want to sound callous, but I got nothing from him. He can be released, although I recommend getting his next of kin's permission to have him cremated here. "

"Can we even do that?"

"I already checked. There are at least three funeral homes with crematoriums on the island. You do your thing and secure whichever place, then I'm sure we can figure it out."

"Noted."

"So, nothing I can use from either the zombified Torres or Barr, because he died a natural death. Well, not natural, I mean, he was murdered, but you know what I'm trying to say."

"Keep going."

She sighed. "Well, I had three specimens, two of which were of no use. If this wasn't what it was, if it wasn't as ... huge, I would've been annoyed. But this is a potential world-killer. Some of us know for a fact that there were simultaneous outbreaks. As far as I know, we've never talked about it in any depth. It's just kind of a dirty little secret. But after what I found, we have to address that."

She pulled the sheet back on Falcone. Orpheus took a minute to process the catastrophic damage that he'd caused to the man's head. What made it something close to bearable is the work that Jen had done on him. His head was clean. And now bald.

"The first thing I did was pull his brains before they fell apart any further." She used her flashlight to spotlight an opaque bag on a shelf. "I didn't exactly have to determine cause of death, and I'm no neurosurgeon." She seemed almost defensive.

When Orpheus said nothing, she continued. "So I was pretty desperate to find something. I did everything I could think to do. I searched his entire body for clues, and came up with nothing. No bites, no open wounds, no injection sites. Like I said, I wasn't looking for cause of death. If I was, I would've stopped long ago."

Orpheus interrupted. "But you knew that there was still something to find, and you took that personally."

Even in the dim container, her eyes lit up. "
Yes.
You get me so much. I considered doing horrible things to him, just to get an answer. Pulling toenails, teeth, skinning him. The fatigue and the desperation made me a little psychotic, so I stepped away from it and took a walk. I needed sleep, but I needed to clear my mind even more."

"Uh, huh." Orpheus wished that she would just get to it, but he gave her a lot of rope. He was betting that she'd earned it.

"Do you know how many bald guys you brought with you on this mission?"

"That's a pretty random question, Jen, but no."

"Me neither. But out of the five or so guards that I encountered on my walk, three of them were bald or close enough to it. I started thinking about hair, and then I remembered how Lena had hidden the microSD card.

She'd taped it to her head, underneath a lot of curly locks.
He was interested now.

Jen leaned forward and turned Falcone's ruined head. She grabbed his earlobe and gently pulled on it so she could expose the spot where the ear met the jaw. "Look here. It's small." She pulled a magnifying glass out of her pocket and offered it to him.

"My eyes are still 20/20, thanks." He focused his flashlight beam on the spot she indicated. He couldn't see it at first, and he began to wonder if his vision was still as good as he thought. He changed the angle of the flashlight so he could soften its impact.

He saw the incision. It was only a few millimeters. "Son of a bitch."

"Right? Whoever did it, they did it well. It probably never even bled, and Falcone would never, ever have seen it."

"Could this be anything, I don't know, routine? A common procedure?"

"I haven't confirmed this, but I'd bet my life that there's no medical procedure in the world that entails an incision this small in this particular spot."

"So what else did you find?"

She shook her head. "That's just it. I found nothing. I'd already removed the brain, so I looked at it from the inside. I couldn't find a thing, other than matching scar tissue."

"So it's nothing."

She showed the first signs of frustration. The old Jen would have turtled and gotten much more passive. But she was different. "I wouldn't have pulled you all the way out here like a damn spy for nothing. Whatever it is isn't there, but it's not nothing. It's every fucking thing."

He held his hands up and smiled. "Fish has been a terrible influence on you. Maybe I should've let you nap longer."