Eden Plague - Latest Edition (52 page)

Larry put the sedan into reverse, backing into a position away from the fence but facing down the long perimeter road. “I know he said to leave right away, but I ain’t gonna miss this.”

“It will not make us happy. We cannot interfere.”

“I know.”

So they had a front-row seat for the DJ Markis road rally. They cheered as he started the sprayer and crashed through the fence; they pounded the dashboard as he cut off the pursuit and kept the mist going; they groaned when the truck rolled, and the helicopter landed. And they sweated as they watched the blue-wrapped bundle carried on a stretcher into the helicopter, both men wondering to themselves whether Markis was alive or dead.

Infection Day minus one.

Cassandra Johnstone steered the bulk milk truck down the gravel track under the trees that line the little landing field outside of Athens, Georgia. She checked her watch. Ten minutes to go. She didn’t want to be too early; the less time sitting around, the less time for people to question her presence.

She pulled the truck over before the rough road broke out of the tree line. She was at the downwind end of the runway. Hopping out of the cab, she made a final check of the hose, the pump, and the fittings.

She looked up from her check as a single-engine, low-winged airplane roared overhead and landed lightly on balloon tires. It turned around and taxied toward her. She jumped back in the truck and drove out to the end of the runway, meeting the aircraft as it turned around and lined up for takeoff. As she pulled up, she looked over the plastic tanks, tubing and brass nozzles of the crop-duster.

David Markis waved at her as he climbed down from the cockpit. His expression was anything but happy, however, as he reached back in to drag a struggling figure out of the second seat. It looked like a woman, her mouth, hands and feet taped and her eyes wild with fear and anger.

“Sorry, I had to take her with me. She was too suspicious about me wanting to rent the plane.”

“It’s all right, I’ll deal with her.” At the bound woman’s muffled shriek, Cassandra reassured her. “You won’t be harmed, miss. And neither will anyone else. You probably think we’re terrorists but this stuff won’t hurt anyone. And I’m sure you’d love to argue about it but I don’t want to hear it right now.” She dragged the prisoner over to the truck cab and boosted her gently into it. From there she started the pump.

The senior Markis hooked up the hose fitting and quickly transferred the full capacity of five hundred gallons to the plane. As soon as he had it in, he unhooked and leaped back into the aircraft, taking off into the puffy clouds of the burning Georgia summer sky.

Once she had parked back in the trees, Cass looked over at the bound woman. “Look, I know you’re scared, but really, there’s nothing to worry about. If I take that tape off your mouth will you behave?”

She nodded, wide-eyed.

Cass’s phone beeped at her. She looked at the incoming text, nodded in satisfaction. She worked the tape gently off of the younger woman’s face, revealing a strong chin and defiantly furrowed brow. They stared at each other for a long moment.

“What’s your name, hon?”

“Janet Bills. You don’t look like a terrorist.”

“What does a terrorist look like?”

She squirmed uncomfortably. “I don’t know. Crazy eyes? Crazy talk?”

“Well, you happen to be right. I’m not a terrorist, we’re just doing something illegal. But it won’t hurt anyone, so don’t worry about it. In a couple of hours I’ll let you go and everything will be fine.”

“Where’s he going?”

Cass pondered this for a moment, then decided it didn’t matter if she told her. Besides, it was going to be a long vigil if they couldn’t talk about something. “Sanford Stadium. Athens. There’s a big Prosperity Gospel revival thing going on, all those suckers that think they can name it and claim it so God will give them a new Mercedes and a new bass boat. Lots of offering plates pouring money into the preachers’ coffers, just proving how much money God is giving the faithful. Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy – for the preachers. About seventy-five thousand people. And they paid ninety bucks a head for the ‘seminar,’ not counting the concessions. You do the math.”

“My father’s a pastor, and he said those people aren’t following God.”

Cass nodded. “I have to agree with you there, honey. Sounds like your father’s a good man.”

“So what is he going to do? What’s in the tanks?”

“What do you think it is?”

Janet thought for a moment. “I dunno…skunk stink? Some kind of dye? Like throwing blood on people that wear furs? I can’t think of anything else that wouldn’t hurt people.”

“Smart girl. Would you like a drink?” Cass hoped Janet wouldn’t notice she hadn’t actually confirmed her guess.

“Sure.”

Cass opened the juice bottle, and Janet drank with her taped-together hands.

“So how did you get into flying?”

“I just always wanted to fly, so in high school…”

Cassandra kept her talking until David came back. Then she cut the tape binding Janet’s hands and hopped out of the milk truck. When she had climbed into the second seat of the plane, she threw the truck keys down to the waiting woman.

“There’s an envelope under the drivers’ seat with some money for the plane. You might not get it back. Have a nice drive, and sorry to inconvenience you. Oh, it kind of sticks in second.”

Janet nodded and waved.

They took off, winging their way northeastward. “I think I got a Stockholm buddy.”

“What? Oh, you mean like Stockholm Syndrome? You held her hostage and now she likes you?”

“Yep.” A pause. “So how did it go?”

“Seventy-five thousand new converts. Just not quite the religion they expected,” laughed Markis.

“Yes, and tonight and tomorrow they’ll pass through the Atlanta airport and go back home to a thousand different places and then there’s no way they’ll be able to squash it.”

“Lord willing and the crick don’t rise. But they’ll try.”

***

I woke to the smell of disinfectant and lanolin. My cell was dim and clean, my narrow bed’s covers of ragged rough green wool with “US” printed here and there on them. I’d seen the same blankets in a few old barracks back when I’d been in the Army, though these days they had mostly migrated to the surplus stores. There was a naked steel toilet with no seat, and a sink with only one tap; no hot water. A roll of paper, in an incongruously cheerful green wrapper

I struggled to a sitting position, finding myself unable to straighten up. My right arm and shoulder were pain-free but twisted like a lightning-struck tree trunk. I stared at the strange crook in my forearm, shoving aside the surreal feeling. The limb was useless; the muscles were so misaligned I could barely close my hand. It reminded me of someone with cerebral palsy; I was half of Steven Hawking. I tried to remember if he was still alive, and I said a little payer that the Eden Plague would find him and free that amazing mind from the prison of his crippled body.

My left side, hand and arm were more or less useable, though my ribs were a bit compressed. My spine must have been broken as well, and healed in this hunched-over position. Fortunately my legs seemed to function reasonably well, so I struggled to move over onto the toilet. I was clothed in orange pajamas, with a convenient elastic waistband.

The necessaries finished, I drank from the faucet and lay back down on my bunk, on my side in a semi-fetal position, and tried to ignore the cat-claws in my gut. The Plague wanted to be fed.

Booted feet tramped outside my door. The little window opened, then shut, and the locking mechanism opened with a heavy clunking sound. The door slid back, then sideways on rails, and three men in blue hazardous material suits, filter masks and face shields came in.

Two of them had those huge-barreled revolver-blunderbuss things. The enormous tubes pointed my direction, naked threats. The other man carried a stainless steel chair.

The two guards took positions in the corners to the left and right of the door, and the man in charge sat down on the chair across from my bunk, in front of the door.

“It’s not airborne, you know,” I said without moving. “And I’m hardly in a position to jump you.” I held up my twisted arm.

“It’s just precautionary,” a familiar rich voice said, and my fears – my expectations rather – were fulfilled. It was Jenkins, the Third.

“I’ll say it again, Mister Jenkins. I am sorry about your son. I take full responsibility, and I’ll say so in front of any court or tribunal you care to convene.”

He laughed, a deep, cruel sound. “You’re never going to see the inside of a courtroom. You’ve just become a lab rat. A guinea pig. You’re going to bless the days when it’s just my scientists experimenting on you, because the other days, I’m going to test the limits of your suffering.”

“It’s our suffering that defines us, Mr. Jenkins.”

“What?”

“C. S. Lewis. Loosely quoted.”

“Then you are about to be defined quite vigorously.” He laughed again, a naked, evil thing.

“It sounds to me like you’re afraid. What is it that scares you?”

“If I fear anything, it’s the wanton disruption of the American way of life that you are trying to bring about. Have you thought about the chaos you might have caused had we not caught you in your little scheme?”

“What part of today’s ‘American way of life’ do you love so much? What part did the Founding Fathers sacrifice so much for? Is it our citizens dying of cancer? Heart disease? Or just traffic accidents? Is it the rampant violent crime, or drug use, or the PTSD of veterans like me? The drug use and PTSD that caused me to lose control and kill your son? We can get rid of all that if you just stop fighting it.”

He snorted. “Listen to yourself! You want to surrender the destiny of the human race to an untested virus that might mutate and wipe us all out. Or this thing could be a Trojan Horse designed by aliens or the godless communists to destroy the Free World. What if everyone welcomes it, and after a certain amount of time, or the deployment of some trigger mechanism, kablooie! Everyone infected with it dies or goes crazy, and the old Soviets win the Cold War from their graves while the Russians and Chinese and Al Qaeda laugh and cheer.”

“Plausible. Plausible, Mr. Jenkins, but I don’t think so. If you cared so much about your country you would have informed our elected leaders when you discovered it. There would be a multibillion-dollar program to deconstruct the virus already in place, to defend against misuse of it, and to genetically engineer it so it could be used for the good of everyone, under controlled circumstances, as a cure. Instead, you kept it hidden on an island, owned by a shell company, run by your own personal mad doctor and secured by amoral thugs who kept their own researchers prisoner. So even if I didn’t get half of Los Angeles infected, now it’s too big for just INS, Incorporated. You had to call in Homeland Security. People will talk. There’s nothing more of an oxymoron than a ‘government secret’ in the age of the internet.”

“You know Daniel, I let you blather on because it amuses and gratifies me to see you lying there like a twisted freak.”

“So you must trust these men implicitly? You’re not afraid of them hearing anything you say?”

“They are utterly loyal to me.”

I glanced at them, seeing nothing to contradict what he had to say. Still, the longer I kept him talking, the more time the other parts of the plan had to succeed. Maybe I might even get through to one of his minions.

“Did you tell them it will cure
anything
? And give you functional immortality? Live a thousand years like a man of twenty? Never have to watch what you eat, or worry about all the pains of growing old? Do they think a couple of grunts like them will get a piece of that? That it won’t be reserved exclusively for the rich and powerful?”

“They will get it, just as soon as I do. As soon as the bugs have been worked out. They don’t want to end up in a pathetic situation like you are now.”

I chuckled. “Just a little longer, and everyone will have a better world, right? It’s always a little bit longer, until they find a cure for cancer, or nuclear fusion gives everyone clean energy, or we balance the budget. But those things never come, Jenkins, because the rich and powerful don’t want them to come. If they did, the little people wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore, and people like you would have no leverage. Nothing to hold over their heads. But the Eden Plague can free them now, and we can still work on making the virus better as we go along.”

I wasn’t sure how convincing I was, or how much of this I even believed my own self, but I had committed myself to the course and I wasn’t going to back out now. And maybe this was penance for my crime, even if it accomplished nothing else.

“You think I’m evil, Markis? You’re a pie-in-the-sky raving lunatic. You want to just roll the dice on a slice of Soviet-designed biological warfare and hope it all turns out all right.”

I shrugged, as well as I could. “At least I put my money where my mouth is. What have you risked, Jenkins?”

“As little as possible. That’s how great things are achieved.”

“Really? I think truly great people would say just the opposite.”

Jenkins stood up. “We’ll just have to see who achieves greatness, then,” he sneered. “Good luck from that position.” He picked up the chair, backing out of the room. The other two followed.

“I could use some food, if you want more than a corpse to torture later.”

He laughed. “I think I’d rather see you suffer some more the way you are. Bon app?tit.”

The door shut with a heavy slam. Bon app?tit’s cat-claws ripped at my guts.

Eventually I slept.

Infection Day.

Jervis A. Jenkins III sat in the command vehicle half a mile from the terrorist’s underground lair. Outside, C Squadron, Special Forces Detachment – Delta, commonly known as Delta Force, deployed across the mountainsides. Measurement and signals intelligence, MASINT, had identified the hidden entrances using infrared and radar imagery comparisons, and each was being covered by a squad of elite special operators.