Xeno Sapiens (22 page)

“
I’ll have you shot on sight,”
Merrifield threatened. “I’d relish the chance.”

“
I’m sure you’d do it yourself, but I
don’t think you will. Not unless you want to murder the people I’ll
be bringing with me. God has told me the world will be a better
place without you and your little heathen, Ingrid
Milner.”

“
If God wanted to make the world a
better place, He would turn you into a pillar of salt.”

“
You won’t get away this time.” Hall’s
voice was as cold-blooded and full of bite as a winter wind. “Once
the country knows of your deliberate insurrection of God’s plan,
the people will spear you on a rail and run you out on
it.”

“
Can the crap, Josh,” Merrifield said.
“We both know what you are.”

“
We played the game for fifteen
years,” Hall said. “Now you’ve taken the bit in your teeth, haven’t
you?”

Merrifield went cold all over. “You’re
not making sense, Josh. Not that that’s anything
unusual.”

“
I won’t come at you directly,” Hall
said. “I want to ruin you piece by piece. It’s God’s will for you
to suffer. I’ll take great pleasure in knowing I brought about your
downfall. I’ll
laugh
while you suffer.”

“
You won’t be laughing alone,”
Merrifield said viciously, “because you’ll bust hell wide open with
me.”

He slammed the phone down, irritated it
wasn’t one of the old types where the bells would clang. His breath
came laboriously and he rubbed his eyes with his palms. What a
goddam mess this was turning out to be. It seemed his life was
turning into some Calvinistic fable.

He went to the cabinet in the corner of
his office and pulled out his bourbon. He tipped a long shot
straight from the neck of the bottle, draining it by a
third.

The alcohol burned his gullet and
Merrifield’s face screwed up into that of a war hag. Much as he
would like to believe Hall was jumping at shadows, he knew it
wasn’t true. Hall had not survived countless covert missions by
being stupid. He was crazy, sure. Not stupid.

For fifteen years Jon Merrifield had
brought his case to the brass hats in the pentagon and for fifteen
years been shown the door. Now that Hall had amassed a considerable
following and gained political clout, they had finally opened their
eyes.

The perfect human created here would
also be the perfect assassin. This was a piece of information given
no-one but Merrifield himself, though he thought Clifton had the
brains to figure it out on his own.

One other piece of information- one
that Jon had insisted on as a precondition for his working in the
project- was that Josh Hall’s name was at the top of the assassin’s
list.

Had Hall never heard of the project or,
more importantly, the specifics, all would have been well. It
wasn’t a long stretch for a man of Hall’s intuit to figure out what
his old enemy had planned.

The question was, could he wreck the project by exposure?
And if he couldn’t, would he take the tiger by the balls himself?
He
could
do it, he was crazy enough.

But would he? For that matter,
Merrifield wasn’t sure if it was Hall’s play, or if he had a
backer. It could be anybody. The Russians, the Israelis, Iranians,
CIA, even some oil billionaire or high powered money trust. All
that really mattered, he supposed, was that the ball was now in
play, no matter who was paying the bills.

Jon’s brain had numbed a little with
the alcohol. The warmth in his guts made him feel cleansed as if by
a purifying fire. It would do no good to worry now. Josh Hall was
no problem until tomorrow at the earliest. He couldn’t get in
tonight if he had a stack of bibles and Deacon Lee in
tow.

Merrifield tottered from his office and
swaggered unsteadily to his quarters. He had some trouble producing
the right sequence of numbers for his personal entry code. He had
only one more stab at it before the doors locked down tight to
prevent entry.

He started his final try at the lock
when the hair at the back of his neck stood in a sudden surge of
groundless fear. Some invisible terror had bled from the walls
behind him like poison gas from a swamp. It loomed behind him, its
huge shadow swallowing his own. It’s sour breath was hot and hungry
on his neck. Merrifield stood paralyzed, listening to its grating
respiration. Its fevered body gave off heat in baking
waves.

Merrifield spun around drunkenly. The
shadow vanished. There was no sound of breathing, no sense of the
stifling heat. Merrifield stared into a blank wall on the opposite
side of the hallway. Sweat oozed into his eyes and he blinked to
clear them. His eyes darted left and right like the beads in a
perpetual motion machine.

Merrifield felt small and puny, dwarfed
to Lilliputian size by the lifeless building that stretched away in
all directions to some never land. He felt trapped by his own
insignificance, a tiny speck in the greater scheme of what was
happening in this place.

He turned back to his door and
carefully entered his access code. The door clicked open and he
stepped inside, looking back once more to make sure he really was
alone.

Seth lay quietly in the infirmary like
a stone icon. Once in a while he moved an arm or leg like a man
trying to scale a great precipice. After a time, one huge eyelid
rolled up to reveal an onyx eye as large as a tennis ball. The eye
would roll in its socket with excruciating slowness, looking at he
door, then close for a few moments before opening again. The
intervals between the times the eye opened and closed became
progressively shorter until, at three am, he was completely awake,
the narcotics fully metabolized.

The guard outside the infirmary paced
up and down the corridor, sometimes stopping to put his ear to the
door. He had heard nothing tonight, not even breathing. The
whispers and padding footsteps had ceased completely around two
thirty, a half hour before. He no longer heard any soothing sounds
of human habitation. He didn’t count what was in the infirmary as
human, though he had never seen Seth. Rumors of the construction of
a super human being in a laboratory had come to him. A quasi-human
ChromoCop with capabilities far beyond those of ordinary men. He
knew enough to discount most of the talk as overblown bullshit
propagated by rumormongers determined to convince the listening ear
they spoke edicts from God.

But he had seen the truth among the
workers.

They spoke in hushed tones among
themselves and glanced suspiciously at anyone not directly involved
in hands on procedures. Suppressed anxiety hovered over them like a
storm cloud. The guard had seen the icy reception given the man
from Skinner labs. The guard had heard what had happened to
Clifton, but when Merrifield had fetched him inside, he had seen
Clifton, whole and unimpaired. The only odd thing was he
continually flexed the fingers of his right hand, the one that
shouldn’t have been there. Clifton had seemed like a ghost, and
that brought back the guard’s memory of the strange light and sense
of some monstrous force that had been thwarted at the eleventh
hour. Far too many things were unsettling at this place. Many times
the soldier had felt some kind of energy field. Not precisely
something alive, but nevertheless real: energy so powerful it could
fold the facility in on itself like a paper cup. Had the guard and
Merrifield been on friendly terms, they would have understood each
other perfectly.

The soldier peered down the labyrinth
of corridors. They were empty as sin, a checkerboard of light and
dark. He fished a cigarette from his pocket and lit it. Smoking
wasn’t allowed near the infirmary, but his nerves were spinning
their wheels in overdrive.

He cupped the cigarette in his hand and
dropped the ashes in his pocket, keeping a watchful eye out for
anyone who might come snooping. He listened closely for footfalls,
and that’s when he heard the sound of metal clanging softly inside
the infirmary.

He sucked in his breath with a gasp and
held it, the smoke burning his lungs. He heard a sound like
rustling linen and what could have been a footstep. Not a sound the
floor would produce, but the sound of a little used joint creaking,
straining its sinews. The guard softly exhaled the smoke. It stung
and clouded his eyes. It was hard to hear anything over the blood
thudding in his ears.

There was nothing for a time. The guard
had begun to feel like the class fool when he heard the soft rustle
of a bare foot sliding across a tile floor, the faint ding of
stainless steel armatures being brushed, the hollow sound of
medicine bottles clinking together. The sound of respiration,
regular and steady, came nearer the door.

He backed away to the opposite wall of
the corridor, drawing his weapon. The slide action of the .45
snapped a tinny echo through the motionless air. He stood with his
pistol pointed at the door, his fumbled cigarette smoldering on the
floor. He adopted a spread-legged stance with a double handed grip
that was a little shaky. He eyed the door with an unnamed fear so
great it dried the moisture from his mouth and tensed the muscles
of his back. From beyond the door came the hypnotic sounds of deep
breathing.

The overhead fluorescents flickered,
dark bands scurrying along the lengths of the lights like shadows
chasing each other. Off in the distance, too far away to be of any
help, the soldier heard what sounded like somebody snorting muffled
laughter at a funny story.

The lights flashed off and the quiet
hum of the facility’s machinery died like a dwindling generator.
Within five seconds the lights blazed to life again, unnaturally
bright as if from a power surge. For the instant it would take to
cost him his life, the guard’s attention wavered from the
infirmary.

A sudden, grinding crack smashed into
the stillness of the Alamo as the infirmary door blasted off its
hinges and hurtled from the door frame like an artillery shell. The
soldier was able only to get his arm up before the door plastered
him against the wall like an insect against a windshield. The back
of his head flattened on impact, shattering his skull and driving
shards of bone into his brain. He slumped lifelessly to the floor
as the door rebounded and clattered away several yards down the
corridor. The soldier’s face was bloody and smashed as flat as the
face of a Pug dog. Two of his broken upper teeth protruded through
his upper lip like grisly fangs.

Seth filled the shattered doorway,
standing in what appeared to be gloating triumph, staring down at
the mangled soldier with eyes that had lost the sheen of narcosis.
Finely attuned nostrils flared in the sterile atmosphere of the
facility. Seth stepped into the hallway and past the battered, rag
doll body of the soldier.

The floor was cold on his feet in this
alien place. He padded down the corridor, stooped to keep his head
from brushing the seven and a half foot ceilings. The lightness of
his step seemed impossible for his size. His eyes trailed back and
forth, searching frantically for a way out.

He turned down unfamiliar hallways and
loped by closed doors. Something was trying to pry into his head,
waking up a kind of third ear in his brain, delving into the mass
of still drugged gray matter like a faulty radio signal.

“
...what the hell was
that...”

“
...Sounded like it came
from...”

“
...the infirmary, yes, I
think...”

“
...that fucking monster of
Merrifield’s...”

“
...has got loose. Could that
be...”

“
...true?”

He heard the sounds in his head
clearly, but had no idea what they were. They were an
unintelligible garble, but filled with a sense of quick purpose and
organization that was frightening. He had been found out. He could
stay no longer.

He saw a red symbol with an arrangement
of obtuse angles that seemed to denote speed above a different
door. With the instinctive reasoning abilities so carefully bred
into him, he followed the pointing red arrow with the word “Exit”
printed beneath it.

********************

The gate guard thought little of the
sounds coming from inside the Alamo. For all he knew or cared, the
staff was having a wild office party.

Outright fatigue had eventually
overcome his fear and he had come close to nodding off once or
twice with no conversation to keep him alert. Only the memory of
how strange an experience he had lived through at this place kept
him awake. The hooting of the owls had disturbed him at first, but
they had fallen silent moments ago and no longer bothered
him.

He snuffed out his ever-present
cigarette and started a good, long stretch. He raised his arms and
knotted the muscles running down either side of his spine. The
vertebrae cracked, loosening joints that had been bound all
night.

From atop the hill at the building
proper, the soldier heard a sudden, loud buzzing. It was the alarm
going off as a fire door was opened. Seconds later, the telephone
inside the guard shack buzzed urgently.