Second Chance (32 page)

That is the chance I cannot take. For that creates the possibility of my never having existed beyond 1969. My death then means the death of the earth. And it is a possibility. No one except my mother knew me better than they did, and no one would have a better chance of tracking me down.

I have to do something. Tomorrow I return to Goncourt. Perhaps I shall find an answer there.

~*~

Al Freeman leaned over Keith
Aarons's
table and stared down at the agar plates as though he could see the teeming bacterial colonies with his naked eye. "How's it going, Pete?"

Keith nodded. "Same old thing. You give me the recipe, I try and mix it, and let you cook it. Gettin' any desserts?"

"We may be on to something with that gene we isolated earlier this week, but we want to make a few more tests before we try it out on her."

"How much time?"

"Three, four days maybe. Then we'll see. It's happened like this before, though. Looks great theoretically, but when we infect subjects, kills them deader than dirt. We'll hope for the best."

Bob Hastings came over and sat in the chair next to Keith. "Good to see you're finally
takin
' a break, Pete.
Lookin
' down so long I thought you had a crick in your neck."

Freeman smiled. "Don't you knock this boy for being a good worker. It'll be no fault of his if we don't succeed with this project." He turned to Keith. "You've been doing a
helluva
job. Probably the fastest cook we have."

Keith grinned. "Not that much difference between genes 'n beans."

Freeman laughed. "So what are you up to in your week off?"

"
Goin
' out into the fresh air.
Backpackin
' up in Sam Houston—just some grub, a
sleepin
' bag, and a few books."

"You going along?" Freeman asked Hastings.

"No way, Jose. He ain't invited." Keith chuckled. "After two weeks cooped up with this ugly bastard, I
wanta
get as far away as I can from him.
Nup
, just clean air and deer and bunnies."

"And what's your woman say about that?" asked Hastings.

"Sally?" Keith said, frowning. "Hell, she understands."

"Man's
gotta
do what a man's
gotta
do," Hastings said with a barely recognizable John Wayne drawl. "Don't worry, though. I'll keep the women folk company."

“Just bet you'll try," Keith said, slipping a dose of venom in his words.

Bob Hastings had been coming on to Sally more and more. On their week off, which had ended two weeks ago when the current shift began, Sally told Keith that one night at Red's when Keith went to a movie, Hastings seriously asked her to come home with him. When she laughed it off, he waited until Mae took her break, then followed Sally into the kitchen, pressed up against her, and tried to make her kiss him. He had his hand under her skirt when Red came in to see where the hell Sally was, and told the two of them to quit fucking around, and gave Hastings a shove.

"I thanked him later," Sally told Keith. "Red knew what the problem was. Bob had too
goddam
much to drink or I don't think he
woulda
tried
nothin
'. But he tries it again and so help me I'll knee him in the balls."

"That's my girl," Keith said. "Want me to say
somethin
' to him? Tell him to keep the hell away from you?"

"Nah. You two
gotta
work together. It ain't worth the hassle. You know you're the one." And she had kissed him hard.

He knew all right. He liked Sally. She was honest and open and friendly and as uninhibited in bed as any woman he ever knew. Joey, her little boy, was in second grade, and a nice kid, as spunky as his mother, but not at all mean with the meanness a lot of poor kids had. His mother had taught him right from wrong, good from bad, and punished him when he needed it, without hitting. There were even times when Keith saw the appeal in being a real, living person, married to a wife you loved and who loved you, bringing up kids, doing work you liked.

But then he remembered what he had to do, remembered that Sally and Joey would have to die with all the others, and the sweet thoughts went away, the reality of the lab and what went on
there
returned.

Keith glanced up at the wall clock and saw that it was nearly two in the afternoon. The shift ended at four, and with both Hastings and Freeman in the lab, now would be a good time to take what he needed.

"Well, boys," he said, standing, "time to drain the vein and release the grease."

"Jesus, Pete," said Hastings, "you are one piss elegant
sonovabitch
."

Keith laughed, walked through the door into the empty hall, and turned left toward the rest rooms. He had chosen this time because during the last two hours of the marathon shift, most people were either relaxing around the lab tables or working like hell trying to finish what they had put off for too long. No one, at any rate, was in the storage area.

Keith took one more look down the hall, then pushed open one of the double doors and slipped in. He went directly to the rack of vials marked ZF723, took four of them, and slipped one into each pants pocket. Then he turned around and walked out again.

He knew there would be no check when they left the complex later that afternoon. There was no need for any, Hastings had told him when he had asked at the end of his first two week shift. "We're not like those South African niggers
smugglin
' out diamonds up their assholes. If Christian white men can't trust each other, well then I don't know what."

Keith left the storage room unseen, and walked back into the lab. He worked until a quarter of four, then cleaned up and went with the other men whose shift was over to the living area and grabbed his duffel.

When the elevator door opened, Hastings, Keith, and several others waited until their replacements got off. Hellos were exchanged, and as they rode up to the first floor, Hastings shook his head. "Poor fucks," he said.

"What?"

"Yearly inventory," Hastings said.

Though it hit Keith like a hammer, he showed no reaction other than to ask, "Inventory?" disinterestedly.

"All the supplies, raw materials, storage stuff,
alla
that shit."

Storage stuff
.

"Even test tubes and
petri
dishes. It's bullshit, but the old man has a fly up his ass about it. His daddy did it, so he does it. Waste of time and energy, you ask me. Least this year it's two-three shift has to do it and not us."

"They don't
 
. . . work at all?"

"Oh yeah, they'll start the inventory end of their first week probably. Way we've done it before."

End of the first week. That meant they could find the four vials missing as early as the 19th, and since Keith's shift wouldn't start until the 23rd, it would be impossible to replace the empty tubes.

Another complication. Besides what he had to do with the vials, he now also had to come up with an explanation for their disappearance.

As they walked to the parking lot, Hastings said, "So when you leaving for your wilderness trek?"

"
Soon's
I can get home and pack up."

"Tonight, huh? That means we won't be
seein
' you at Red's?"

"Nope."

"Sally's gonna miss you
somethin
' awful."

"You'll just have to keep her company then, won't you?”

“Sounds like you're
givin
' me permission."

"We ain't married. Sally's a free woman. She wants to mess around with polecats, that's her lookout."

"Don't you worry, Pete
ol
' boy. I'll keep them polecats away from her."

Yes, Keith thought as he drove through the gates of Goncourt Laboratories, the vials pressing against his hips, I think I can find a way to explain their disappearance all right.

Back in his apartment, he removed a piece of quarter round from one wall of his bedroom, and took out four vials of insulin and a plastic bag of disposable syringes, which he had bought two weeks before with a forged prescription at a pharmacy in Lufkin. Using one of the syringes, he withdrew the insulin from the bottles and squirted it down the drain. Then he opened the vials from the lab and, with a second syringe, drew out the ZF723 serum and injected it through the rubber caps of the sealed insulin bottles.

He packed everything he would need in his nondescript duffel, wrapping the vials carefully in his socks. Then he took a plastic pint bottle of rubbing alcohol, poured it down the drain, refilled it with chloroform, closed it tightly, and added it to the bag. He had the prescription for insulin and syringes in his wallet, just in case anyone from airport security asked for it.

Diabetes was the perfect cover. It explained the bottles of serum, the syringes, and the alcohol bottle, used to sterilize a diabetic's injection sites. Security people would be far more likely to give him sympathy than a hassle.

He wrapped the empty vials from the lab in a t-shirt which he rolled inside a sleeping bag, then carried the bag and the duffel, both fitted into a backpack frame, down to his car and put them in the trunk. If anyone from the lab was watching, it would appear that he was off on his camping trip.

On the way out of town he stopped at Sally's trailer. Joey was playing with G. I. Joe figures on the tiny porch, and he stepped over the boy and walked into the trailer. Sally was fixing dinner and watching
Entertainment Tonight
on a small black and white TV that sat on the counter between canisters. She looked up as he came in.

"You're really
goin
'?" she said.

He nodded. "Just
gotta
get away for a while."

"All right," she said. "I know how you are." Then she smiled. "I know how
men
are. Long's you come back."

"I'll come back," he promised, meaning it.

"Ain't you awful horny after two weeks, though?" she asked him, cocking her head.

"Yeah, a little," Keith said, "and you look awful cute in that pretty apron."

"You
gotta
go right now? This minute?"

He shrugged. "Won't you burn your supper?"

"Not if I turn off the stove for a while," she said, and reached out and did just that.

He got on the road a half hour later, a ham sandwich on a paper plate on the seat next to him. He headed southwest on US 59, but didn't turn off at the exits for Sam Houston National Forest, since no one had been tailing him. Instead he drove on, and arrived at Houston International just before nine o'clock. He parked, took the duffel off the pack frame, and shuttled to the terminal, where he paid cash for a ticket on the 11:30 flight to Atlanta.

There were no problems at the security gate, and he slept during the first half of the flight, waking up at the stopover in New Orleans. From there to Atlanta, he thought about Judy McDonald. And he wrote about her in his mind.

~*~

September 13, 1993
:

I have to rationalize her destruction. Hers and the others I can reach in these few days. For only by securing their ruin can I ensure that I will remain free to finish my mission. Paranoia? Perhaps. But only paranoia, a constant state of awareness of every danger, has kept me alive this long.

I owe them my life, I know that, and it seems the height of ingratitude to destroy them. But perhaps their destruction will help to further steel me for what I have to do, help me find the ruthlessness that is required.

Besides, I have no choice. And it isn't as though it's murder. Their murders would only arouse suspicion. No, they'll be the ones to do the killing. All I'll be doing is releasing what's already there inside them, triggering the anger that lies in everyone's mind. Let them talk then. Let them tell as much as they want to about Keith Aarons, for who will believe the ravings of violent psychotics?

Still, I have to rationalize her destruction, and it's hard. I loved her in college as a brother loves a sister. We were both imbued with revolutionary ideals, and we expressed them as effectively as we knew how. She did it with her art.

Looking back, her technique was n
aïve
. But there was a purity about her canvases, with their great slashes of orange and red and yellow, and the faces we saw in them. The longer you looked, the more faces you saw, Vietnamese faces, tortured by
Amerikan
flames. It was as though
Amerika
wasn't content with torturing its own people with the filth it spewed into the air, but it had to go to untouched places as well and spew napalm into it, destroy its forests and jungles and birds and animals, and Judy knew that. That was what her paintings said.

But between then and now, what happened? I can't believe that she simply forgot. I think she was given a choice between holding on to her ideals and making things better for the world, or making things better for herself. She chose the latter, and became a whore. I know. I found out all about her. I found out all about my old friends—Judy and Alan, who sold out, and Woody and
Sharla
, the two I loved most.