Eden Plague - Latest Edition (5 page)

A man who can’t do his job isn’t a man
.

But he had done the job today. He had taken a shooter down like the pro he used to be, and if Elise had been human – normal? – he could have patched her up too, if he hadn’t killed her. Only he
hadn’t
killed her, he’d killed the suit, and Daniel couldn’t patch him up from dead.

His stomach clenched. No excuse for that. He’d crossed the line from watchdog to wolf. He’d bitten the hand that fed him, no matter how much that hand stank. He’d murdered a duly appointed representative of the United States government.

They never forget that. They will never let me rest.

He could imagine what his father would say.
Come on, Dan, pull your head out. You have a vehicle, you have an ally, you have a mission – and you have resources as yet untapped. Stick and rudder, boy. Take control and fly.

Now all he needed was to care. That was the hard part.

The Iron Saddle came up on his right, a big parking lot filled with bikes surrounding a faux-western building with an enormous roof extension to the front, providing a covered space. Even tonight, temperature in the forties and a bit of a breeze, there were ten or twenty bikers and their old ladies outside, under the roof or sitting on the bikes, knocking back a few. Most of them would be inside, though it shouldn’t be too busy on a Wednesday night.

He steered the van sharply to the right, went around the building, parked nose-out in the left rear corner, under a hanging tree limb. Easy to see out of, hard to be seen. He sat there for a minute, checked the dive watch on his wrist. 300M, it said to him, and 18:56. Four minutes to seven.
Close enough, and better to be early than late.

He used the time to settle his pistol in a belly holster, threading the clip holder onto his belt. Then he got out, crossed the parking lot warily toward the back door, the Ritalin still singing in his veins, though he knew it wouldn’t last.

Just then the back door flew open and Elise burst through.

She was running flat out and a man stepped into the doorway beyond with something big and gunlike in his hands. BOOM, BOOM, like a shotgun but twice as loud, and Elise staggered and fell down, off to Daniel's left. Strangely, he felt like it was him that got hit, though at a distance, like a fistful of rocks thrown at him.

The serpent hissed in his hindbrain and he drew his gun to lay down covering fire in the direction of the lighted doorway while he crabbed sideways toward his fallen comrade. He figured that was what she was now. He grabbed the back of her jacket collar with his left hand and dragged her behind a convenient Harley trailer, popping off a couple more shots at the doorway. There was blood all over her, again, and all over his hand and arm now. It shook him more this time.

Real men don’t shoot women. Not intentionally anyway. Bastards.

“Daniel,” Elise gasped, “get out of here. Leave me. I’ll be fine, they just want me back on the leash. Here…” She reached up with one hand to grab his wrist.

She pulled it down toward her face.

Bit him.

He jerked his hand out of her mouth with a reflexive yelp. “What the –” He throttled a curse. The serpent thrashed, demanding to be set free.

“Just
go
. You’ll understand soon enough. It’s all I can do. Now get away. We’re both still alive, you’re free. Stay that way! Go! Go!” Her eyes were liquid with tears, confusing him.

Right now,
he thought,
the capture team is probably working their way around both sides of the building, with one guy covering the door that they sure aren’t going to come through again. She’s right; I have to get out right now.

“Thanks anyway, and you’re welcome,” he hissed angrily.
Crazy bitch. I was just starting to like her.
He shook his bitten hand in disgust, then backed up low, keeping the trailer between himself and the building. He moved behind the scrubby line of pine trees, then ran to the back of the van and climbed in the rear door.

Through the windshield he could see one man coming around the right end of the building, with that big shotgun-thing in his hands. It looked like a grenade launcher, one of those rotary kind with a dozen shots, like a huge revolver.
Probably loaded with flechette, something to take down a super-healer.

The front parking lot of the building was filled with activity as bikers roared off or spread out to watch from a distance in about equal numbers. The ones with no record or warrants outstanding stayed for the fun, and to prove they weren’t afraid.

Lights and activity provided a backdrop and enough confusion that Daniel wasn’t worried they would see him here in the back seat of his van, watching from behind the front headrest. They might think it was Elise that had fired at them. It didn’t really matter what they thought, though, as he could hear sirens in the southern distance. Someone had called 911 and Stafford County’s finest were on their way.

It turned out Daniel was right; they didn’t hurt Elise, just grabbed her and dragged her off, three of them, big men in ill-fitting dark suits. A fourth opened the door to the black Suburban at the edge of the front parking lot, and the thinning crowd of bikers parted like the Red Sea as the three men walked through waving their cannons. A moment later they were gone northbound in a screech of tire smoke.

Daniel followed discreetly, heading north too, trailing behind. He wanted to duck into Quantico Marine Base rather than risk getting pulled over by the sheriffs’ department and having to answer their questions. He’d risk the slight possibility of a search at the Marine gate. Usually the faded windshield sticker with Senior Master Sergeant’s stripes, and his retired ID card, were good for a wave-through with hardly a look.

He got in all right, in the commissary gate, to relative safety. Whatever you could say about the Agency, they did not like to tangle with the Department of Defense without all their ducks in order. DOD didn’t much like them either, and Defense was the 800-pound gorilla of the US Government.

 The sheriffs’ department, on the other hand, had no problem busting service people on County turf. Lawyer’s fees, court costs and fines kept them in shiny new cop equipment. So he was glad to get on base where they couldn't reach

Daniel pulled into the on-base McDonald’s drive-through and got two Big Mac meals. He was hungry, what with having eaten nothing but a ham sandwich in some very strange circumstances since coming home less than three hours ago. Was it only that long? His whole world had turned upside down in those three hours.

He sat in the parking lot, with the van’s rear against the dumpster-corral wall, watching and thinking. He doubted they knew where he was, or they’d have had him by now. They must have been tracking Elise, though. Some kind of bug, like the bloodhound modules used in the sandbox for certain ops. About the size of a pack of cigarettes, a little antenna, a strong magnet, turn it on, stick it under an enemy bumper and as long as the battery lasted you could track him, intel or drone fodder.

He crammed burger into his mouth, sucked down the first Coke in one long pull. He ate the entire first large fries in three big bites, then slowed down to work on the second meal, and kept thinking.

There was still the mess at his house, unless they cleaned it up. They probably would. And since they had avoided the sheriffs, they didn’t want involvement with local law enforcement. They would want to keep looking for Daniel themselves, he figured.

Well, he’d do his best not to be found.

After finishing off the food and his belly felt comfortably distended, he looked at his left hand and the human bite Elise had bestowed on him. Had she lost her mind? She didn’t seem out of her head. What had she meant,
“You’ll understand?”
It wasn’t severe, just a few blood spots where her canines had cut, and some generalized bruising that was fading already.

He pulled out his aid bag and unrolled it to access the equipment. He poured some disinfectant on his hand, wrapped it in some gauze, tied it off awkwardly with his teeth and forgot about it.

It was about twenty hundred, eight PM. The Marine Corps Exchange was still open and it was right over his shoulder, a hundred yards across the parking lot.
All right, time to improve my supply situation.

He drove over and parked just on the side of the enormous building. Then grabbed a cart and went shopping. An ice chest, always useful. A two-gallon water jug. Some MREs, meals ready-to-eat. Field gear. A few other odds and ends, another two prepaid disposable phones and a pack of batteries for them. He’d have to make some calls sometime. Paying cash again, he loaded his purchases in the van, then drove off down a side-street and parked next to a pair of battered white base engineer work vans, blending right in.

Then Daniel and the serpent turned in, exhausted.

Elise sat crunched between two big men, Karl and Miguel, and kept her mouth shut. They weren’t the type of guys to fall for feminine wiles or pleas for sympathy. They knew what she was and so their ruthlessness was unbridled. Short of killing her or maybe amputating something, they knew they could damage the goods any way they wanted and get away with it. And she didn’t liked the way Miguel looked at her, as if he’d like to handcuff her to her lab bench and give his lusts free rein. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t, not really, for fear of contracting the virus and giving up his love of cruelty.

She shivered, remembering just how vulnerable she was.
Super-healing should give me an advantage, but all I can think about is being trapped as a combination researcher and laboratory subject. Studying myself. That’s irony for you.
She’d rolled the dice and lost, this time, but she’d given what she could to Daniel and she had to hope that would be enough.

Sinking down into the seat as the Suburban shot northward to the next interstate feeder, she concentrated on not feeling the despair, or hunger. She looked at her skeletal hand in the flickering light, feeling the cramping in her guts. Maybe… “Hey, Karl,” she said softly. “Do we have any food in here?”

He ignored her. She could tell he felt personally betrayed by her attempt to escape, since he’d always been respectful of her. Or perhaps it was because they’d lost the younger Jenkins. Yes, that must have been it. He must feel like he failed in his duty.

“Look,” she reminded them, “you know my caloric needs. You know how valuable I am to the program. My body weight is under a hundred pounds and falling right now.” She held up her papery-skinned hand for his inspection. “By the time we get back to the lab there might be irreversible damage.”

“Should have thought about that before you tried to run,
puta
,” snarled Miguel.

“She’s right, though,” responded Karl, resigned. “If we bring her in damaged it will just be worse. There’s some kind of burger drive-through up there, pull in.”

“You buy the food, then,” grumbled Miguel. “I gotta take a piss.” He hopped out as they pulled up to the microphone.

“Thanks,” Elise said.

“Shut up,” Karl said flatly. “I’m not your buddy, and even if I was, buddy’s only half a word.”

She wondered what he meant.
Some kind of military thing,
she thought.

She occupied herself thinking about Daniel, about his tortured eyes, eyes she had to run from out of necessity, but eyes that perhaps could be part of someone that would – what? Save her? If she read his file right, he would. That’s why she had tricked Jenkins into choosing him.

At least it was a chance.

***

Sleep was a big black scary thing inhabited by dreams where Daniel pumped round after round into Men In Black. They either wouldn’t go down, or the bullets would exit the gun with a little pop and bounce off their chests, and he would end up in a fistfight where he’d punch and punch and couldn’t hurt them and they would laugh. Then it would turn into something else, something from his past, like dragging his dead best buddy Hector Koltunczyk into a hollow in the dirt, trying to plug the leaks in him with his fingers, but Hector sprouted fountains of blood like one of those flexible hose sprinklers where the water came out the holes.

He had come to the realization long ago that not even his new, Pararescue-trained self of several years after could have saved his friend, but if there was any one thing that drove him to leave the Army Airborne and try out for PJ, it was that incident where Hector died in his hands in Mogadishu.

It had taken a boatload of pushing, a break in service, giving up his stripes and starting over to make the move to the Air Force Pararescue program. The Army hated it when people didn’t re-up, and they dangled goodies, choice assignments and choice jobs, in front of him. But he’d wanted to learn to save lives as well as take them, and they couldn’t guarantee him Special Forces Medic, which was the only other possibility he’d considered.

So he went PJ. That’s the nickname for “parajumper.” Despite the odds of about ninety percent washout, he had not only qualified, but had excelled at it all the way through the Pipeline. Seventeen months of training just to graduate, “That Others May Live.” That was the Pararescue motto.

At the end of it Daniel was one of fewer than three hundred of the very best combat lifesavers in the world, cross-trained with a variety of special ops expertise. Small arms, water operations, light aircraft, survival, mountaineering, demolitions, you name it, he’d done it in sixteen years in the PJs. Some of his Army buddies had thought he was a pogue or some kind of traitor for going green to blue, but none of his real friends did. And nobody that met a PJ at work ever thought so either.

That Others May Live.
That’s why he did it.

He was elite of the elite, back then. He was a sky-god in a blood-red beret, before that IED took it all away from him, leaving him with a bum knee and a bad back and a serpent in his brain.

Daniel realized he’d gone from dreaming to drowsy reminiscing somewhere along the line, as dawn was breaking over Quantico. He could hear the sounds of morning PT off in the distance, and a five-ton truck drove by his parking place with a rattle.