Second Chance (38 page)

"No. No, I'll come in. Maybe I could get the day of the funeral off."

"That's no problem now. We're changing things. Dr. Goncourt thinks maybe these two week shifts aren't such a good idea. Might cause a kind of cabin fever or something. Might even be why Bob . . . did what he did. We're on three day shifts now, not two weeks. Yours will start tomorrow, if that's okay."

"Sure. That's fine."

"Changing security too. Going to put in metal detectors next week, and we'll be doing actual
patdowns
as the men leave the lab. It's just too easy to hide a vial, and after what happened, we can't take any chances." He hawked and spat into an ironed, white handkerchief, which he replaced in his hip pocket. "I mean, my gosh, consider what might happen if somebody would get it into their head to take out the virus."

"You're right," said Keith, the knowledge of what he would have to do now clear as breath. "That would be . . . disastrous. Better safe than sorry. I won't mind, and I don't think the others will either, after what . . . what Bob did." His voice choked, and he began to cry. There were no audible sounds, but tears streamed down his cheeks. Freeman saw them, Keith was sure of it.

Chapter 34

The next morning, when Keith went back to the lab, Tracy Robinson was at Woody's bedside when he opened his eyes for the first time since the night she had found him screaming by the side of their bed, a kitchen knife piercing his leg.

She was reading a magazine, and he tried to speak, but his mouth was too dry. His leg ached terribly. He licked the inside of his mouth, then his lips, looked around and saw that he was in a hospital room. IV bottles hung at his side, and he felt a pressure in his penis. He dared not move, but he was able to say, "Hey," loud enough for Tracy to hear and look up, startled.

"Hey," he said again.

"Oh God," she said, somewhere between shock and delight. "Oh God, you're back with me . . .” She moved toward him as if to hug him, then stopped, and gave him a small kiss on the cheek. Then, as if thinking of something momentous, she pressed the call button by the bed.

"My leg hurts," he said. "And my
dick
," he added quietly.

"That's a catheter. I knew you weren't going to like it."

"But you let them do it." He smiled. "I can't see. Is my leg still there?"

Tracy nodded and took his hand, squeezed it hard. "It'll be fine. You went into shock, and by the time the ambulance got there you were in a coma."

"How long? I'm really hungry. And thirsty."

"A little over three days. They said you'd come out of it, but I . . . I wasn't sure. Oh, Woody . . ." She cried and he held her until she straightened up again. "What happened? What were you doing? Were you . . . on something?"

"What, you mean drugs?"

"They found a needle mark on your arm."

He looked up at the ceiling, understanding. "That's how then, how he did it."

"Woody?"

He looked at her and his face trembled from the fear of what had visited him and the relief that he had not heeded it. "It was Keith. He was in the house. He must have drugged me or something. He wanted me to . . . to kill you." He didn't tell her about killing the children. He couldn't bear to say the words, and didn't want to terrify her further.

"I was standing over you, and I had to bring the knife down, I just had to. But I couldn't hurt you. He couldn't make me do
that
. So I stabbed myself instead. And the pain drove him away, drove the need out of my head." He held out his arms and she embraced him. "I never would have hurt you, Tracy. Never. No matter what. He couldn't make me do it."

A nurse came into the room then. Her surprised smile made her seem more attractive than she really was. "All right, Mrs. Robinson," she said with a laugh, "don't bruise the groceries. Glad to have you back with us, Mr. Robinson. Now you can sign my cassette."

It was another fifteen minutes before a doctor came in to examine Woody. He told him that the wound was healing nicely, but that they wanted him in the hospital for two more days. After that, he could go home, but would have to stay off his feet for another week.

"I'd be interested," said the doctor, "in knowing just exactly how you did it." He looked at Tracy. "Your wife tells me it was a bat."

Woody looked at Tracy. There hadn't been time for her to give him her story, so, as ever, he improvised. "That's right. One got in the house. I was trying to slap it down with a towel, but it always got right back up again. So I ran down to the kitchen and got a knife. Damn thing sat right on the edge of the bed. When I swung at it, it took off at my face, scared the hell out of me, and before I knew what happened, I had a knife in my leg. Pretty stupid."

The doctor nodded. "Do you ever indulge in recreational drugs, Mr. Robinson?"

"No," Woody answered with a firm shake of his head that made his neck ache. "I did the usual stuff years ago—grass, hash—but not for a long, long time. That's not part of my life."

The doctor nodded again. Woody thought he'd look perfect on the back ledge of somebody's car. "I had to ask. There were no drugs found in your blood or urine samples. But there was a needle mark. Left a pretty nasty bruise on your arm." He pointed to Woody's left arm, and Woody pushed up the short sleeve of the hospital gown to reveal a dark blue, mottled spot.

"I don't know how that happened," he said with a flatness intended to assure the doctor that further questioning would be futile. "I have no idea at all."

Chapter 35

Rose
Parmalee
had begun to feel sick.

It wasn't just the dopiness, the sense of lassitude that had bound her ever since she had been placed in the glass cage, ever since the men had caught her, stripped her, raped her over and over again. It wasn't due to that humiliation, or the assurance that she would never leave this place, whatever this place was, alive. It was even worse than that.

She had felt listless, her muscles refusing to obey her. Her appetite for the barely edible food they gave her diminished until she ate nothing at all, yet bloody diarrhea dripped from her, her sphincter muscles too weak to contain it. Lesions had broken out over her flesh, red blotches that opened if she so much as touched them, oozing a thin, pale yellow pus followed by blood. She knew she was dying, and it seemed so unfair.

When the men came in, wrapped in their suits of what looked like thick plastic, their heads encased in flat-topped hoods, she asked them why they were doing this to her, what was happening, how much longer it would go on. But their eyes, barely visible through the darkly transparent panels of glass that covered them, gave no answer, and their voices never spoke. If they did, the words never escaped the confines of their shroud-like garments.

They touched her with heavy gloves, lifted her arms to take her blood, wiped her filthy buttocks, held plastic mouthpieces over her mouth and nose to steal her breath, forced open her mouth and pressed swabs against her cheeks and tongue. Nothing was her own. Everything her body produced was theirs, and they took it as though it was their right. Everything but her tears, for she had no strength and no heart left to shed them.

She had wanted to kill herself, but she had not had the strength to smash her head against the glass walls, and they kept her nails cut too short for her to try and rip open her own throat, or claw at the veins in her wrists. When the sores began, she rubbed at them in the hopes that she would bleed to death, but when they saw what she was doing, they strapped her down. They would not even let her die.

"What did you do?" she asked them every time they came in. "Why did you do it?"

Goncourt. Goncourt was the name that she remembered with her mind that was gradually fragmenting, splitting apart under the torture, the disease, whatever they had done.

She remembered caring, centuries ago, about something other than death. The earth, and making it pure again. A silly and stupid dream, it seemed now. Nothing was clean, nothing was pure. The earth was a glass lined cage, and inside it everything was sickness and filth, and only death could end that. Only death could stop the pestilence. In her shattered, decaying mind, the cage was the earth, and the earth was a cage, and the only freedom was in death.

And when she had decided that, she tried to embrace the men who came into her cage, tried to lift her arms and tug off their hoods and take their flesh in her corrupted hands, breathe her fatal breath into their lungs, kiss and slay her slayers. But her hands, bound, would not rise. She had such a sacred gift to grant, but she could not, and the frustration chipped away even more of her sanity.

Until one day, when she heard a voice other than her own asking for answers, for reasons, for death. It sounded muffled, as if from far away, and her short-term memory bore the sensation of intrusions, her mouth and vagina and buttocks and flesh recalled recent violations of smooth metal and glass that felt as rough to her tattered skin as sisal.

And suddenly the voice became a sound she had not heard for so long that at first she thought she was dead and dreaming. It was a voice other than her own, and she was hearing it clearly, without the filter of heavy plastic, the muffling of ghostly hoods.

And the voice said her name, said
Rose
, and she worked and worked until she was able to open her eyes, the dry inner surfaces of her lids scraping the eyeball so that she would have screamed if she had the breath. Then she saw, through a red haze, his face.

She knew it, though the name that went with that face no longer lived in her rotting brain. She equated warmth and love and tenderness with the face, and thought that now, at last, this was death, and in another moment she knew it as his beautiful face became larger, swam into her sight like a bright planet, like the earth gleaming blue now, no longer red, and the sweet coolness of its seas touched her face, and its soft winds blew into her mouth and blew back out again, taking her breath, her life, her very soul, so that as she died she knew that she had saved it after all, that by taking her life, the sweet earth would live.

~*~

Keith knew he should put his headgear on quickly in case Billy
Magruder
re-entered, but he could not. He stood over her, entranced, breathing in the vile odor of her body, her last breath from riddled lungs, and found in it such ineffable sweetness that tears came to his eyes.

She knew. Somehow she knew why he was there, what he had come to do. He still tasted the bitter dryness of her lips on his own, and thought he could feel the virus dance joyously as it swirled into his lungs, swam into his veins, burrowed in his cells, claiming him. And its joy became his own as well, and he knew that what he had done was right. It meant his death, and the deaths of billions, but life for something far greater.

Keith pulled on the hood, turned it so that he could see through the transparent plastic plate, and connected the seals. He had purposely left the blood collection tube in the supply room, and when he and
Magruder
discovered it was missing, he had gestured to
Magruder
that he should exit the cell, remove his suit in the airlock, get the tube, and place it in the airlock for Keith.
Magruder
had shrugged in agreement, far from anxious to go through the complicated airlock procedure twice, especially since the end of their three-day shift was only an hour away. Strict procedures went by the board when it was time to punch out, and Keith knew that
Magruder
was one of the least punctilious of Goncourt's staff.

So he had been left alone for priceless and fatal minutes with Rose
Parmalee
, just long enough to take her blood and her kiss out into the world that was waiting for its deadly salvation.

The airborne virus had been introduced into her cell two weeks before, and the onset of illness, much to Freeman and Horst's dismay, had been immediate, her decline rapid. The selected gene had either failed to act as an antibody, or the virus had once again refused to obey the genetic commands imprinted upon it.

Whatever the reason, the search for the unique gene would have to be continued. This attempt had been a total failure, leaving the germs free to tear through her body like fire through dry grass. Never had a subject sickened so quickly. They took tests and samples every six hours, in order to trace the path of the illness, find the weakest breaches in the defense.

But now, thought Keith as he followed the painstaking procedures in the airlock, it didn't matter any longer. All the tests, all the cloning, all the experiments, none of it meant a thing.

He smiled as the tainted air was drawn from the chamber, and the bath of water washed his garb until nothing clung to the smooth plastic. Then the lock filled with filtered air, and the light went on, signaling that it was safe to remove the suit, which would be sterilized. He took it off and put it into the container, left the lock, dressed in his clothes, and carried the blood sample into the lab.

Magruder
came up to him and said softly, "Dumbass. Freeman
woulda
checked on us while you were in there alone, we'd be dead."

We'd be dead
.

Keith laughed gently, so much aware of the air leaving his lungs that he could almost see it as a pale cloud drifting toward
Magruder's
frowning face, surrounding the man's mouth and eyes, vanishing as
Magruder
breathed in Keith's breath, and the deadly things that flew on it.