Darwin's Children (3 page)

Browning took control from the remoter truck and sent Little Bird down the road, buzzing quietly a discreet distance behind Stella Nova Rafelson. “Don’t you think Kaye Lang should have kept her maiden name when she married?”

“They never married,” Augustine said.

“Well, well. The little bastard.”

“Fuck you, Rachel,” Augustine said.

Browning looked up. Her face hardened. “And fuck
you
, Mark, for making me do your job.”

4

MARYLAND

M
rs. Rhine stood in her living room, peering through the thick acrylic pane as if searching for the ghosts of another life. In her late thirties, she was of medium height, with stocky arms and legs but a thin torso, chin strong and pointed. She wore a bright yellow dress and a white blouse with a patchwork vest she had made herself. What they could see of her face between gauze bandages was red and puffy, and her left eye had swollen shut.

Her arms and legs were completely covered in Ace bandages. Mrs. Rhine’s body was trying to eliminate trillions of new viruses that could craftily claim they were part of her
self
, from her genome; but the viruses were not making her sick. Her own immune response was the principle cause of her torment.

Someone, Dicken could not remember who, had likened autoimmune disease to having one’s body run by House Republicans. A few years in Washington had eerily reinforced the aptness of this comparison.

“Christopher?” Mrs. Rhine called out hoarsely.

The lights in the inner station switched on with a click.

“It’s me,” Dicken answered, his voice sibilant within the hood.

Mrs. Rhine decorously sidestepped and curtsied, her dress swishing. Dicken saw that she had placed his flowers in a large blue vase, the same vase she had used the last time. “They’re beautiful,” she said. “White roses. My favorites. They still have some scent. Are you well?”

“I am. And you?”

“Itching is my life, Christopher,” she said. “I’m reading
Jane Eyre.
I think, when they come here to make the movie, down here deep in the Earth, as they will, don’t you know, that I will play Mr. Rochester’s first wife, poor thing.” Despite the swelling and the bandages, Mrs. Rhine’s smile was dazzling. “Would you call it typecasting?”

“You’re more the mousy, inherently lovely type who saves the rugged, half-crazed male from his darker self. You’re Jane.”

She pulled up a folding chair and sat. Her living room was normal enough, with a normal decor—couches, chairs, pictures on the walls, but no carpeting. Mrs. Rhine was allowed to make her own throw rugs. She also knitted and worked on a loom in another room, away from the windows. She was said to have woven a fairy-tale tapestry involving her husband and infant daughter, but she had never shown it to anyone.

“How long can you stay?” Mrs. Rhine asked.

“As long as you’ll put up with me,” Dicken said.

“About an hour,” Marian Freedman said.

“They gave me some very nice tea,” Mrs. Rhine said, her voice losing strength as she looked down at the floor. “It seems to help with my skin. Pity you can’t share it with me.”

“Did you get my package of DVDs?” Dicken asked.

“I did. I loved
Suddenly, Last Summer
,” Mrs. Rhine said, voice rising again. “Katharine Hepburn plays mad so well.”

Freedman gave him a dirty look through their hoods. “Are we on a theme here?”

“Hush, Marian,” Mrs. Rhine said. “I’m fine.”

“I know you are, Carla. You’re more sane than I am.”

“That is certainly true,” Mrs. Rhine said. “But then I don’t have to worry about
me
, do I? Honestly, Marian’s been good to me. I wish I had known her before. Actually, I wish she’d let me fix her hair.”

Freedman lifted an eyebrow, leaning in toward the window so Mrs. Rhine could see her expression. “Ha, ha,” she said.

“They really aren’t treating me too badly, and I’m passing all my psychological profiles.” Mrs. Rhine’s face dropped some of the overwrought, elfin look it assumed when she engaged in this kind of banter. “Enough about me. How are the
children
doing, Christopher?”

Dicken detected the slightest hitch in her voice.

“They’re doing okay,” Dicken said.

Her tone became brittle. “The ones who would have gone to school with my daughter, had she lived. Are they still kept in camps?”

“Mostly. Some are hiding out.”

“What about Kaye Lang?” Mrs. Rhine asked. “I’m especially interested in her and her daughter. I read about them in the magazines. I saw her on the Katie Janeway show. Is she still raising her daughter without the government’s help?”

“As far as I know,” Dicken said. “We haven’t kept in touch. She’s kind of gone underground.”

“You were good friends, I read in the magazines.”

“We were.”

“You shouldn’t lose touch with your friends,” Mrs. Rhine said.

“I agree,” Dicken said. Freedman listened patiently. She understood Mrs. Rhine with more than clinical thoroughness, and she also understood the two feminine poles of Christopher Dicken’s busy but lonely life: Mrs. Rhine, and Kaye Lang, who had first pinpointed and predicted the emergence of SHEVA. Both had touched him deeply.

“Any news on what they’re doing inside me, all those viruses?”

“We have a lot to learn,” Dicken said.

“You said some of the viruses carry messages. Are they whispering inside me? My pig viruses . . . are they still carrying pig messages?”

“I don’t know, Carla.”

Mrs. Rhine held out her dress and dropped down in her overstuffed chair, then brushed back her hair with one hand. “
Please,
Christopher. I killed my family. Understanding what happened is the one thing I need in this life. Tell me, even the little stuff, your guesses, your dreams . . . anything.”

Freedman nodded. “Good or bad, we tell her all we know,” she said. “It’s the least she deserves.”

In a halting voice, Dicken began to outline what had been learned since his last visit. The science was sharper, progress had been made. He left out the weapons research aspect and focused on the new children.

They were remarkable and in their own way, remarkably beautiful. And that made them a special problem to those they had been designed to replace.

5

SPOTSYLVANIA, VIRGINIA

“I
hear you smell as good as a dog,” the young man in the patched denim jacket said to a tall, slender girl with speckled cheeks. He reverently set a six-pack of Millers on the Formica countertop and slapped down a twenty-dollar bill. “Luckies,” he told the minimart clerk.

“She doesn’t smell
good as
a dog,” the second male said with a dull smile. “She smells worse.”

“You guys cut it out,” the clerk warned, putting away the bill and getting his cigarettes. She was rail thin with pale skin and tormented blonde hair. A haze of stale cigarettes hung around her coffee-spotted uniform.

“We’re just talking,” the first male said. He wore his hair in a short ponytail tied with a red rubber band. His companion was younger, taller and stooped, long brown hair topped by a baseball cap.

“I’m warning you, no trouble!” the clerk said, her voice as rough as an old road. “Honey, you ignore him, he’s just fooling.”

Stella pocketed her change and picked up her bottle of Gatorade. She was wearing shorts and a blue tank top and tennis shoes and no makeup. She gave the two men a silent sniff. Her nostrils dimpled. They were in their mid-twenties, paunchy, with fleshy faces and rough hands. Their jeans were stained by fresh paint and they smelled sour and gamy, like unhappy puppies.

They weren’t making much money and they weren’t very smart. More desperate than some, and quick to suspicion and anger.

“She doesn’t look
infeckshus
,” the second male said.

“I mean it, guys, she’s just a little girl,” the clerk insisted, her face going blotchy.

“What’s your name?” Stella asked the first male.

“I don’t care you should know,” he said, then looked to his friend with a cocky smile.

“Leave her be,” the clerk warned one more time, worn down. “Honey, you just go home.”

The stooped male grabbed his six-pack by its plastic sling and started for the door. “Let’s go, Dave.”

Dave was working himself up. “She doesn’t fucking
belong
here,” he said, wrinkling his face. “Why in shit should we put up with this?”

“You stop that language!” the clerk cried. “We get kids in here.”

Stella drew herself up to a lanky five feet nine inches and extended her long-fingered hand. “Pleased to meet you, David. I’m Stella,” she said.

Dave stared at her hand in disgust. “I wouldn’t touch you for ten million dollars. Why ain’t you in a
camp
?”

“Dave!”
the stooped fellow snapped.

Stella felt the fever scent rise. Her ears tingled. It was cool inside the minimart and hot outside, hot and humid. She had been walking in the sun for half an hour before she had found the Texaco and pushed through the swinging glass doors to buy a drink. She wasn’t wearing makeup. The others could see clearly whatever the dapples on her cheeks were doing. So be it. She stood her ground by the counter. She did not want to yield to Dave, and the clerk’s halfhearted defense rankled.

Dave picked up his Luckies. Stella liked the smell of tobacco before it was lit but hated the burning stink. She knew that worried men smoked, unhappy men, nervous and under stress. Their knuckles were square and their hands looked like mummy hands from sun and work and tobacco. Stella could learn a lot about people just by a sniff and a glance. “Our little radar,” Kaye called her.

“It’s nice in here,” Stella said, her voice small. She held a small book in front of her as if for protection. “It’s cool.”

“You are
something
, you know it?” Dave said with a touch of admiration. “An ugly little turd, but brave as a skunk.”

Dave’s friend stood by the glass doors. The sweat on the man’s hand reacted with the steel of the handle and reeked like a steel spoon dipped in vanilla ice cream. Stella could not eat ice cream with a steel spoon because the odor, like fear and madness, made her ill. She used a plastic spoon instead.

“Fuck it, Dave, let’s
go
! They’ll come get her and maybe they’ll take us, too, if we get too close.”

“My people aren’t really
infeckshus
,” Stella said. She stepped toward the man by the counter, long neck craned, head poking forward. “But you never know, Dave.”

The clerk sucked in her breath.

Stella had not meant to say that. She had not known she was so mad. She backed off a few inches, wanting to apologize and explain herself, say two things at once, speaking on both sides of her tongue, to make them hear and feel what she meant, but they would not understand; the words, doubled so, would jumble in their heads and only make them angrier.

What came out of Stella’s mouth in a soothing alto murmur, her eyes focused on Dave’s, was, “Don’t worry. It’s safe. If you want to beat me up, my blood won’t hurt you. I could be your own little Jesus.”

The fever-scent did its thing. The glands behind her ears began to pump defensive pheromones. Her neck felt hot.

“Shit,” the clerk said, and bumped up against the tall rack of cigarettes behind her.

Dave showed the whites of his eyes like a skittish horse. He veered toward the door, giving her a wide berth, the deliberate smell of her in his nose. She had snuffed the fuse of his anger.

Dave joined his friend. “She smells like fucking
chocolate
,” he said, and they kicked the glass doors open with their boots.

An old woman at the back of the store, surrounded by aisles jammed with puffed bags of potato chips, stared at Stella. Her hand shook a can of Pringles like a castanet. “Go away!”

The clerk moved in to defend the old woman. “Take your Gatorade and go home!” she barked at Stella. “Go home to your mama and don’t you
never
come back here.”

6

THE LONGWORTH HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING

WASHINGTON, D.C.

“W
e’ve been over and over this,” Dick Gianelli told Mitch, dropping a stack of scientific reprints on the coffee table between them. The news was not good.

Gianelli was short and round and his usually pale face was now a dangerous red. “We’ve been reading everything you sent us ever since the congressman was elected. But they have twice as many experts, and they send twice as many papers. We’re drowning in papers, Mitch! And the
language
.” He thumped the stack. “Can’t your people, all the biologists, just write to be understood? Don’t they realize how important it is to get the word out to everybody?”

Mitch let his hands drop by his sides. “They’re not my people, Dick. My people are archaeologists. They tend to write sparkling prose.”

Gianelli laughed, stood up from the couch and shook out his arms, then tipped a finger under his tight collar, as if letting out steam. His office was part of the suite assigned to Representative Dale Wickham, D., Virginia, whom he had faithfully served as director of public science for two of the toughest terms in U.S. history. The door to Wickham’s office was closed. He was on the Hill today.

“The congressman has made his views clear for years now. Your colleagues, scientists all, have hopped on the gravy train. They’ve joined up with NIH and CDC and Emergency Action, and they pay their visits mostly across the aisle. Wilson at FEMA and Doyle at DOJ have undercut us every step of the way, squirming like puppies to get their funding treats. Opposing them is like standing outside in a hail of cannonballs.”

“So what can I take home with me?” Mitch asked. “To cheer up the missus. Any good news?”

Gianelli shrugged. Mitch liked Gianelli but doubted he would live to see fifty. Gianelli had all the markers: pear shape, excessive girth, ghostly skin, thinning black hair, creased earlobes. He knew it, too. He worked hard and cared too much and swallowed his disappointments. A good man in a bad time. “We got caught in a medical bear trap,” he said. “We’ve never been prepared. Our best model for an epidemic was military response. So now we’ve had ten years of Emergency Action. We’ve practically signed away our country to Beltway bureaucrats with military and law enforcement training. Mark Augustine’s crew, Mitch. We’ve given them almost absolute authority.”