Hybrid (5 page)

She let the Jeep coast into the lot and it finally come to rest in front of a tree that was perched precariously over the narrow gorge. By all rights, she should have this place to herself; she shouldn’t have to listen to the sounds of yelling and laughter while she faced her past. It was not quite dawn so no one had entered the rapids.
It wouldn’t take much to make
them leave
, she thought. She could feel the six people crawling through the trees down to the water’s edge; they were so full of life and excitement in a place where she had only known death and misery. She climbed out of the car and walked out to the road and up to the bridge. She saw the kayakers carefully climbing down the path, each carrying a small boat and dressed in a thick wet suit.

Her father had died at this very spot almost thirty years ago. He had been a small, mean-spirited man whose attitude permeated their tiny house like a bad smell. One of her earliest memories was of him towering over her screaming that she was a burden he had never asked for. He died the day after her ninth birthday; the official story was that he had been changing a tire when a half-drunk lawyer plowed into the back of his car, apparently throwing him into the river below. It took them three days to find and recover his body. Amanda never believed the official story. Somehow, she knew that her father had jumped into the river long before the drunk ever showed up, and that the only time in his life he had ever been lucky was after he was dead.

Amanda noticed that the group of kayakers had stopped on the path and were staring up at her. Her first thought was to scare them back to their cars so that she could be alone in this terrible place, but after a moment of contemplation, she turned away and walked further up the bridge. The last time she had been here, there were police crawling down that very same path. The memory teased at her, but she wasn’t ready to relive that evening; still, the face of an impossibly young state trooper, and the images of flashlight beams whipping through the air, seeped through her mental walls. It had been more than a month after her husband and son’s funeral, and she had resolved to join them, but a despondent farmer with his own impossibly heavy burden had gotten to the bridge before her.

The pain of their loss could only echo in her empty heart; a distant reminder of a life she had once lived. A life that now she both cherished and reviled, a life stolen by nothing more significant than a flu virus. A simple set of proteins and a strand of DNA had hollowed her out and remade her into something she had never imagined, or wanted. Something that for the last six years she had kept hidden from the world, and herself.

She watched the water cascade off the large rocks below for another five minutes before the first kayaker entered the water with a triumphant yell. She took that as her cue to leave. This place had no memory of her, her father, her family; it was nothing more than a metal bridge and a small, inconsequential river.

The blisters were back; they always came back when he was frustrated. It had been over six weeks since he had arrived in this frozen corner of hell, and he had almost nothing to show for it. Time wasn’t running out anymore, it had already run out. Klaus was more than two weeks overdue, but he couldn’t make himself leave.

It doesn’t really matter
, he thought.
What are they going
to do, start without me?
The thought made him laugh.

They could try to kill me
. That thought didn’t make him laugh. They had made it quite clear that while they did need him, they didn’t necessarily need him alive. But trying to kill him would be a major inconvenience, and he was balancing that against extra time. Soon, however, the balance would tip.

The professional inside told him to leave—to pack up, and slip away before anyone even knew that he had been there. He had already completed his primary objective, and his remaining responsibility could be completed anywhere. He knew that the risk of discovery, capture, and failure grew with each passing moment, but still he stayed. He had to find her. He had to know who Amanda Flynn was, and what she had become.

From the moment he learned of her existence, the significance of Amanda grew in his mind; he tried to convince the planners that she posed an unacceptable risk to the mission, but no one listened. He was told that she would die along with everyone else, and that he should let them worry about the overall strategy. For the first time in his professional life, he seriously considered using his considerable talents against those who had engaged him. The only thing that stopped him was the undeniable and inconvenient truth that, for a while, he needed their logistical support. They were fools, but well funded and organized fools. He turned his back to the shaded window and tried to suppress his growing anger. When all of this was over, he would pay them a visit and extract from their flesh the three weeks he had wasted trying to find Amanda.

They weren’t really fools; he admitted after his frustration began to ebb. They were simply focused on the singular opportunity that had fallen into their collective laps, and they would not tolerate any distractions. He couldn’t fault them for not seeing Amanda’s unique potential, or threat; it required his particular, unique perspective to fully appreciate it. Maybe, for a while, he would spare them. Still, they could have helped him; they had the resources, and with just a little assistance both of their objectives would have been completed by now. The thought of their intransigence forced his anger to the surface again. Maybe a visit to their dirty smelly homes was in order, but only after he found Amanda.

His problem was that he had no idea how to find someone who did not want to be found. He had never been an intelligence officer. His instructors had taught him a hundred different ways to kill a man, but not a single way to find this very special woman. All he had was a name, a ten-year-old address, and a vague description. The name turned out to be wrong, probably misspelled somewhere down the long line of information. Amanda Lynn was actually Amanda Flynn. It had taken him two weeks to find that simple error; somebody who knew what he was doing would probably have picked it up in a day. The address he had been given was now an office building. Her old house had become a victim of something the newspapers had called the Sunshine Project, urban renewal by any other name. The description was equally unhelpful, fitting about every third woman in Colorado Springs. His only lead was a dangerous one: Greg and Lisa Flynn, Amanda’s in-laws.

He had watched the Flynns for weeks now and couldn’t find an opening. He was certain that they knew where Amanda was, or at the very least how to contact her, but he didn’t know how to enlist their cooperation, something he would need if he proved to be correct. It would have been so much easier if he could just break in and take what he needed from them, but if he did that, one, if not both of the Flynns, would have to die, and that would ruin everything. All he wanted was to spend a moment with their daughter-in-law. That’s all he would need, just one moment, and then he would know.

He shivered under the thick blankets as much out of frustration as fever. It was always the same, first the blisters, then the fever, and finally the madness. He could live with the blisters and fever, but when the madness came, it enveloped him completely, obliterating any sense of purpose or urgency, and he could ill afford that now. Over the years, he had learned how to control it; delay it would be a more accurate description. The problem was that every time he denied the madness, it only came back stronger. He tried to clear his head, but it resisted. Flashes of his parents assaulted his mind: his mother beating him after he had been expelled from school because he had hurt another student; his father unceremoniously dumping him on a train that would take him to the military school that would “straighten” him out. The images of his early years flowed through his mind and he smiled, wondering if that foolish man and his wife ever realized what type of creature they had brought into this world. Maybe on their deathbeds, they had been graced with the knowledge that they had played a part in creating the most powerful being that had ever inhabited this planet.

Another spasm wracked his body. He had to empty his mind to control the madness, but the unbidden review of his early life was proving to be wondrously indulgent. The metal archway that lead to the Honnecker School for Military Studies flashed through his mind. It was a brutal, primitive place that changed little while the world beyond its stone walls experienced cataclysmic change, but Klaus Reisch had found himself there.

Unconsciously, he began to rub the small tattoo on his right wrist. In faded black, the words
ex chaos ordo
were into his skin.
Out of chaos, order.
He had done it himself, and the beating he received because of it only made him all the more proud. It was the school motto, and it had taken him more than three years to fully understand its meaning; a moment of epiphany prompted by public humiliation. His philosophy professor had asked him to explain the phrase’s apparent contradiction in the context of the ancient Greek belief in a god of order and a god of chaos. Klaus couldn’t remember his response only that it caused his teacher to launch into a tirade that somehow ended with Klaus being removed to the disciplinary cells. Hours latter, as he sat in the dark on the cold concrete bunk, his thoughts of revenge and violence slowly being consumed by a growing exhaustion, his mind began to clear and an understanding crept into the void: he was completely alone. He had no family; by mutual consent he hadn’t seen his parents in years. His schoolmates feared more than respected him, and he was fairly certain that most of the faculty held the same opinion. He had no one to trust, no one to tie him to a society that he found both restricting and absurd. If he was going to survive, he would do it alone. From the chaos that threatened to stifle and control him, he would create his own order. It was in this moment that Klaus Reisch was born.

For the next six years Reisch reworked himself. In public he fought to control the innate abilities that were viewed by others as antisocial, but in private he honed them to a fine edge. When he was sixteen, on a school trip to Berlin, Klaus killed a man simply because he felt that the experience would be beneficial. His victim wasn’t important. Death was a personal and special event for the individual involved, but Klaus was only interested in generalities. He stalked several people before he found his test subject, a middle-aged man who had the misfortune of turning, at the wrong time, into a dark alley to urinate. Klaus stabbed him in the back four times and then quickly turned the slumping body over so he could watch the man’s dying face. All Klaus saw was a pained look of surprise as the man bled to death. No soul left the body; no great insight was muttered with a dying breath. The man gasped, then shuddered a little and was dead. Moments earlier this decaying mass had been a living breathing human being, with thoughts, desires, a future, maybe even a family, and Klaus had taken all that away with the slightest of actions. A very small part of him reveled in his power, his ability to effect great changes with the smallest of actions, but a greater part of him was disappointed. Human life was so fragile, so easily extinguished, and so inconsequential. Where was the dignity, the sanctity of human existence?
Perhaps
, he thought,
it’s
only reserved for a select few, a very select few
. Klaus left the body and found his group at the hostel. No one had missed him, and life went on exactly as it had all his sixteen years.

A snowplow rumbled down the street below Reisch’s room, its blade scraping snow and pavement and grating his nerves. He opened his eyes and cursed; the reminiscent spell broken, he was left with only the shaking chills and the imminent madness. He crawled out of bed and pulled back the curtains of the hotel room intent on killing the driver of the plow, but the truck had already turned the corner. It had snowed again. God, how he had learned to hate snow; as a child, it was one of the few things that he had loved, but after six weeks of watching it fall unceasingly, he could die quite happy if he never saw it again.

It was still dark but close to dawn, and a handful of people filed into the large church across the street; for a moment Klaus watched them. He felt the smallest measure of kinship with those poor souls. They sought understanding in a world filled with chaos, and prayed for transformation, not just for themselves, but for society as well.

“Fools,” he said. The order they sought was false, artificial. They denied their true selves, sacrificing in the name of a greater good. God, society, it didn’t matter what they called it; all they accomplished was to contribute to the very chaos they feared. Human society was the greatest force of disorder ever devised, and religion was its most potent weapon. Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Buddha were all agents of chaos. Each of them, in their own way tried to supplant the natural, universal order with their own perverted version.

Klaus let the curtain fall; it was cold and he had to start moving. There would be no stopping the madness now, it had a hold on him; he could already feel the gnawing inside his belly. “An incomplete immunity,” the virologist had told him long ago, “similar to shingles.” Reisch rubbed the blisters and the usual yellow fluid ran down his hand. The image of Jaime Avanti floated through his mind; the virologist had helped to save his life seven years ago, and up until the end, had a pivotal role in the overall plan, at least until he had tried to betray it. He would be with the Americans now, unless he was dead.