Fear Nothing (45 page)

“Your shift over already?” I asked, although I knew it wasn’t.

Instead of answering me, he said, “I hope you’re not expecting beer, tamales, and Jackie Chan movies at this hour.”

“I just stopped by to say hello to Toby if he happened to be between jobs.”

Manuel’s face, too worn with care for his forty years, had a naturally friendly aspect. Even in this Halloween light, his smile was still engaging, reassuring. As far as I could see, the only luminosity in his eyes was the reflected light from the studio window. Of course, that reflection might mask the same transient flickers of animal eyeshine that I’d seen in Lewis Stevenson.

Orson was reassured enough to ease out of his crouch. But he remained wary.

Manuel exhibited none of Stevenson’s simmering rage or electric energy. As always, his voice was soft and almost musical. “You never did come around to the station after you called.”

I considered my answer and decided to go with the truth. “Yes, I did.”

“So when you phoned me, you were already close,” he guessed.

“Right around the corner. Who’s the bald guy with the earring?”

Manuel mulled over his answer and followed my lead with some truth of his own. “His name’s Carl Scorso.”

“But who is he?”

“A total dirtbag. How far are you going to carry this?”

“Nowhere.”

He was silent, disbelieving.

“It started out a crusade,” I admitted. “But I know when I’m beaten.”

“That sure would be a new Chris Snow.”

“Even if I could contact an outside authority or the media, I don’t understand the situation well enough to convince them of anything.”

“And you have no proof.”

“Nothing substantive. Anyway, I don’t think I’d be allowed to make that contact. If I could get someone to come investigate, I don’t think I or any of my friends would be alive to greet them when they got here.”

Manuel didn’t reply, but his silence was all the answer I needed.

He might still be a baseball fan. He might still like country music, Abbott and Costello. He still understood as much as I did about limitations and still felt the hand of fate as I did. He might even still like me—but he was no longer my friend. If he wouldn’t be sufficiently treacherous to pull the trigger on me himself, he would watch as someone else did.

Sadness pooled in my heart, a greasy despondency that I’d never felt before, akin to nausea. “The entire police department has been co-opted, hasn’t it?”

His smile had faded. He looked tired.

When I saw weariness in him rather than anger, I knew that he was going to tell me more than he should. Riven by guilt, he would not be able to keep all his secrets.

I already suspected that I knew one of the revelations he would make about my mother. I was so loath to hear it that I almost walked away. Almost.

“Yes,” he said. “The entire department.”

“Even you.”

“Oh,
mi amigo,
especially me.”

“Are you infected by whatever bug came out of Wyvern?”

“‘Infection’ isn’t quite the word.”

“But close enough.”

“Everyone else in the department has it. But not me. Not that I know. Not yet.”

“So maybe they had no choice. You did.”

“I decided to cooperate because there might be a lot more good that comes from this than bad.”

“From the end of the world?”

“They’re working to undo what’s happened.”

“Working out there at Wyvern, underground somewhere?”

“There and other places, yeah. And if they find a way to combat it…then wonderful things could come from this.”

As he spoke, his gaze moved from me to the studio window.

“Toby,” I said.

Manuel’s eyes shifted to me again.

I said, “This thing, this plague, whatever it is—you’re hoping that if they can bring it under control, they’ll be able to use it to help Toby somehow.”

“You have a selfish interest here, too, Chris.”

From the barn roof, an owl asked its single question of identity five times in quick succession, as if suspicious of everyone in Moonlight Bay.

I took a deep breath and said, “That’s the only reason my mother would work on biological research for military purposes. The only reason. Because there was a very good chance that something would come of it that might cure my XP.”

“And something may still come of it.”

“It was a weapons project?”

“Don’t blame her, Chris. Only a weapons project would have tens of billions of dollars behind it. She’d never have had a chance to do this work for the
right
reasons. It was just too expensive.”

This was no doubt true. Nothing but a weapons project would have the bottomless resources needed to fund the complex research that my mother’s most profound concepts necessitated.

Wisteria Jane (Milbury) Snow was a theoretical geneticist. This means that she did the heavy thinking while other scientists did the heavy lifting. She didn’t spend much of her time in laboratories or even working in the virtual lab of a computer. Her lab was her mind, and it was extravagantly equipped. She theorized, and with guidance from her, others sought to prove her theories.

I have said that she was brilliant but perhaps not that she was extraordinarily brilliant. Which she was. She could have chosen any university affiliation in the world. They all sought her.

My father loved Ashdon, but he would have followed her where she wished to go. He would have thrived in any academic environment.

She restricted herself to Ashdon because of me. Most of the truly great universities are in either major or midsize cities, where I’d be no more limited by day than I am in Moonlight Bay, but where I’d have no hope of a rich life by night. Cities are bright even after sunset. And the few dark precincts of a city are not places where a young boy on a bicycle could safely go adventuring between dusk and dawn.

She made less of her life in order to make more of mine. She confined herself to a small town, willing to leave her full potential unrealized, to give me a chance at realizing mine.

Tests to determine genetic damage in a fetus were rudimentary when I was born. If the analytic tools had been sufficiently advanced for my XP to have been detected in the weeks following my conception, perhaps she would have chosen not to bring me into the world.

How I love the world in all its beauty and strangeness.

Because of me, however, the world will grow ever stranger in the years to come—and perhaps less beautiful.

If not for me, she would have refused to put her mind to work for the project at Wyvern, would never have led them on new roads of inquiry. And we would not have followed one of those roads to the precipice on which we now stand.

As Orson moved to make room for him, Manuel came to the window. He stared in at his son, and with his face more brightly lit, I could see not a wild light in his eyes but only overwhelming love.

“Enhancing the intelligence of animals,” I said. “How would that have military applications?”

“For one thing, what better spy than a dog as smart as a human being, sent behind enemy lines? An impenetrable disguise. And they don’t check dogs’ passports. What better scout on a battlefield?”

Maybe you engineer an exceptionally powerful dog that’s smart but also savagely vicious when it needs to be. You have a new kind of soldier: a biologically designed killing machine with the capacity for strategizing.

“I thought intelligence depended on brain size.”

He shrugged. “I’m just a cop.”

“Or on the number of folds in the brain surface.”

“Evidently they discovered different. Anyway,” Manuel said, “there was a previous success. Something called the Francis Project, several years ago. An amazingly smart golden retriever. The Wyvern operation was launched to capitalize on what they learned from that. And at Wyvern it wasn’t just about animal intelligence. It was about enhancing human intelligence, about lots of things,
many
things.”

In the studio, hands covered with Kevlar gloves, Toby placed the hot vase into a bucket half filled with vermiculite. This was the next stage of the annealing process.

Standing at Manuel’s side, I said, “Many things? What else?”

“They wanted to enhance human agility, speed, longevity—by finding ways not just to transfer genetic material from one person to another but from species to species.”

Species to species.

I heard myself say, “Oh, my God.”

Toby poured more of the granular vermiculite over the vase, until it was covered. Vermiculite is a superb insulator that allows the glass to continue cooling very slowly and at a constant rate.

I remembered something Roosevelt Frost had said: that the dogs, cats, and monkeys were not the only experimental subjects in the labs at Wyvern, that there was something worse.

“People,” I said numbly. “They experimented on people?”

“Soldiers court-martialed and found guilty of murder, condemned to life sentences in military prisons. They could rot there…or take part in the project and maybe win their freedom as a reward.”

“But experimenting on people…”

“I doubt your mother knew anything about that. They didn’t always share with her
all
the ways they applied her ideas.”

Toby must have heard our voices at the window, because he took off the insulated gloves and raised the big goggles from his eyes to squint at us. He waved.

“It all went wrong,” Manuel said. “I’m no scientist. Don’t ask me how. But it went wrong not just in one way. Many ways. It blew up in their faces. Suddenly things happened they weren’t expecting. Changes they didn’t contemplate. The experimental animals and the prisoners—their genetic makeup underwent changes that weren’t desired and couldn’t be controlled….”

I waited a moment, but he apparently wasn’t prepared to tell me more. I pressed him: “A monkey escaped. A rhesus. They found it in Angela Ferryman’s kitchen.”

The searching look that Manuel turned on me was so penetrating that I was sure he had seen into my heart, knew the contents of my every pocket, and had an accurate count of the number of bullets left in the Glock.

“They recaptured the rhesus,” he said, “but made the mistake of attributing its escape to human error. They didn’t realize it had been let go,
released.
They didn’t realize there were a few scientists in the project who were…becoming.”

“Becoming what?”

“Just…becoming. Something new. Changing.”

Toby switched off the natural gas. The Fisher burner swallowed its own flames.

“Changing how?” I asked Manuel.

“Whatever delivery system they developed to insert new genetic material in a research animal or prisoner…that system just took on a life of its own.”

Toby turned off all but one panel of fluorescents, so I could go inside for a visit.

Manuel said, “Genetic material from other species was being carried into the bodies of the project scientists without their being aware of it. Eventually, some of them began to have a lot in common with the animals.”

“Jesus.”

“Too much in common maybe. There was some kind of…episode. I don’t know the details. It was extremely violent. People died. And all the animals either escaped or were let out.”

“The troop.”

“About a dozen smart, vicious monkeys, yes. But also dogs and cats…and nine of the prisoners.”

“And they’re still loose?”

“Three of the prisoners were killed in the attempt to recapture them. The military police enlisted our help. That’s when most of the cops in the department were contaminated. But the other six and all the animals…they were never found.”

The man-size barn door opened, and Toby stepped into the threshold. “Daddy?” Shuffling as much as walking, he came to his father and hugged him fiercely. He grinned at me. “Hello, Christopher.”

“Hi, Toby.”

“Hi, Orson,” the boy said, letting go of his father and dropping to his knees to greet the dog.

Orson liked Toby. He allowed himself to be petted.

“Come visit,” Toby said.

To Manuel, I said, “There’s a whole new troop now. Not violent like the first. Or at least…not violent yet. All tagged with transponders, which means they were set loose on purpose. Why?”

“To find the first troop and report their whereabouts. They’re so elusive that all other attempts to locate them have failed. It’s a desperation plan, an attempt to do
something
before the first troop breeds too large. But this isn’t working, either. It’s just creating another problem.”

“And not only because of Father Eliot.”

Manuel stared at me for a long moment. “You’ve learned a lot, haven’t you?”

“Not enough. And too much.”

“You’re right—Father Tom isn’t the problem. Some have sought him out. Others chew the transponders out of each other. This new troop…they’re not violent but they’re plenty smart and they’ve become disobedient. They want their freedom. At any cost.”

Hugging Orson, Toby repeated his invitation to me: “Come visit, Christopher.”

Before I could respond, Manuel said, “It’s almost dawn, Toby. Chris has to be going home.”

I looked toward the eastern horizon, but if the night sky was beginning to turn gray in that direction, the fog prevented me from seeing the change.

“We’ve been friends for quite a few years,” Manuel said. “Seems like I owed you some pieces of the explanation. You’ve always been good to Toby. But you know enough now. I’ve done what’s right for an old friend. Maybe I’ve done too much. You go on home now.” Without my noticing, he had moved his right hand to the gun in his holster. He patted the weapon. “We won’t be watching any Jackie Chan movies anymore, you and me.”

He was telling me not to come back. I wouldn’t have tried to maintain our friendship, but I might have returned to see Toby from time to time. Not now.

I called Orson to my side, and Toby reluctantly let him go.

“Maybe one more thing,” Manuel said as I gripped the handlebars of my bike. “The benign animals who’ve been enhanced—the cats, the dogs, the new monkeys—they know their origins. Your mother…well, maybe you could say she’s a legend to them…their maker…almost like their god. They know who you are, and they revere you. None of them would ever hurt you. But the original troop and most of the people who’ve been altered…even if on some level they like what they’re becoming, they still hate your mother because of what they’ve lost. And they hate you for obvious reasons. Sooner or later, they’re going to act on that. Against you. Against people close to you.”