Second Chance (26 page)

Inside were row upon row of metal shelves on which sat containers. Some were liter sized, but most were smaller. The vast majority were in test tubes, each carefully labeled with numbers and code letters that meant nothing to Keith. "What is all this stuff?" he asked Hastings.

"Most of
it's
government work. Along with the pharmaceuticals, a real profitable part of the business is putting together stuff for government."

"I thought our government had its own people doing that."

Hastings chuckled. "I didn't say
our
government, did I?"

"That's pretty un-American, isn't it?" Keith frowned. "Supplying foreign governments with chemical weapons?"

"Not weapons. More for intelligence use. Hypnotics, truth serum . . ." He picked up a vial from several labeled ZF723. "Now this little baby, for example, is a suggestibility drug. You nail somebody with a hypo full of this, just suggest that they do something, and if they've ever had a thought about doing it or anything like it, they will. Removes the inhibitions."

"Dispenses with morality," said Keith.

"Hmm. Never thought of it like that, but I guess it's as good a way to say it as any."

"You formulate it here?"

Hastings nodded. 'Ted Horst. About two years ago. Can hardly keep up with demand."

"So who do you sell all these to?"

"Little countries. Mostly Latin American and African, though we did cut a deal with the Serbs last year. We could care less if the niggers and the
beaners
use them to kill each other with, long as they're willing to pay for them. Hell, they're supporting the R&D that's ultimately going to wipe them off the face of the earth. Come on, let's see the animals."

Hastings led the way between the shelves until they reached a large double door. "Wild Kingdom," he said, chuckling, and pushed it open.

Keith followed him into a room filled with several dozen cages. Rabbits and rats were in many of them, and in the rest guinea pigs squealed and ran about in circles at the sudden disturbance. Some of the containers were made of glass with covered tops, and respirators made a sighing counterpoint to the rodent's cries.

"Cute little buggers, aren't they?" Hastings said. "The ones in the glass we're using for airborne experiments."

"Any simians?"

"Simians. Hell, yes. Right over here. Now this we
do
keep locked," he said. "But not to keep us out. It's to keep
them in
. You got a key. It's the big silver one. Go ahead."

Keith took the key ring from his pocket and unlocked the door. When he opened it, the sharp tang of urine and feces made him wince. There were four compartments in the room, all glassed, but they didn't contain animals. Instead Keith could make out human figures lying on cots in three of the four cells. They were naked. None of them moved, but he could see their eyes were open.

"The Airborne Rangers, we call them. Gotta be isolated from us, otherwise who knows what we'd pick up?"

"Jesus Christ," whispered Keith. "People . . ."

"Yep. Human guinea pigs. It's a
helluva
lot more efficient when it gets past the rodent stage. There's another reason too. You have any idea how much research chimps are? At least fifty K each, and the price goes up every year. Frankly, we can't afford 'em. But
these
little beauties are absolutely free in nearly any city. Come on and meet the gang, even though they can't hear us to say howdy."

Hastings pointed to the six inch wide tubes going into each cell. "Each one has its own ventilation system, filtered to the max. We go in to take blood and tissue samples, but we always wear sealed suits. Knock 'em out too, so they don't try anything funny. This one's
Remus
, least that's what we call him. His real name doesn't matter anymore."

Keith looked through the glass at the black man lying on the cot. He didn't look back, but kept his eyes on the glass ceiling of his cell, blinking occasionally.

"
We'da
kept Harrison if we didn't already have this guy. Now over here is Big Wang. You can see his name doesn't fit him real well."

The cell across from the black man held an old oriental man whose penis, as Hastings had suggested, was just as shriveled as the rest of him. "Damn," said Keith. "How do you know this one isn't dying already? He looks ancient."

"The older they are, the easier they are to catch." Hastings laughed, and Keith laughed a little too. "But don't worry about that. We can isolate the infection, no matter how old they are or what else is wrong with them. All they got to be able to do is breathe."

Hastings stepped in front of the sealed door of the next cell. "Now here's as close to a looker as we ever get in here. White woman. Killed two birds with one stone on this bitch. Little old outside agitator snooping around, followed one of our trucks when it made its delivery to the river. One of the boys came up behind her in a car, saw her taking pictures of the dumping. She was all alone, so we had a new lab rat. Hard to get white ones, 'cause we feel too damn guilty. But this bitch was a different story. Check her out."

He flipped a switch and the cell was flooded with light. The woman, naked as the men, pressed her eyelids shut and started to throw up a hand, but the effort was too great, and the arm fell back to her side, so that Keith was able to see her face. It took all the self-possession he had not to let the recognition show. Next came the urge to back away, so that she could not see him, but her lassitude allowed her no curiosity about who had disturbed her.

"What's the matter with them? They all drugged?"

"You bet. Keeps them nice and calm. Just slip a little into the ventilation system, and they're gentle as kittens. And speaking of pussies, pretty nice, huh? A little older than I like them, but not bad."

Keith nodded, remembering warm New Orleans nights in the arms of the woman who now lay naked on the cot.

"We all had a field day with her, I don't mind
tellin
' you. Popped her myself. Got a little rough, but she deserved it."

He nodded again, thinking of her spirit, her sincerity, her
naïve
need to do something for the earth.

"Made her squeal like one of those guinea pigs, boy."

Keith kept nodding, seeing himself taking Bob Hastings's head and twisting it until he heard the neck crack.

"Too bad you're too late for a piece, but she's isolated now. You'll just have to wait two weeks for Sally."

Then Keith turned and smiled at Bob Hastings. "She's worth waiting for," Keith said. "Rather wait for her than screw some commie, nigger-loving, save-the-earth whore."

Hastings's smile faded. "Uh . . . yeah. Okay then. Let's go see Freeman, right?"

He turned and walked toward the door. Keith followed, but not before turning out the light in the woman's cell, so that it would no longer hurt her eyes.

When he saw her victimized on the cot, he knew that he might actually have loved her when they had been lovers. What went through him was more than pity. That she should have been investigating Goncourt came as only a mild surprise. Eight years ago he had seen the desire for more than activism in her, with her sympathy toward the more radical end of the environmental spectrum. And Texas was, after all, not that far from Louisiana. She had probably come west to wage some other ecological battle, heard rumors that Goncourt was dumping illegally, and decided, while she was in the area, to try and prove it.

She went out alone, intending to return a hero, and she was caught. Caught by a band of
rednecked
bastards who resembled not so much Dr. Strangelove as Dr.
Mengele
.

Naked people in glass cages? Gang rape? Racial experiments on human beings? Jesus. This was sick, neo-Nazi behavior all the way. Keith strongly suspected that these people weren't scientists, but sadists, using science as a mask behind which they could get their jollies abusing women and minorities. He had seen the look on Goncourt's face when he shot Harrison, and damned himself for doing it. It wasn't the killing that bothered him as much as it was the reason he had had to kill—to get some crippled old bigot off.

It made him sick, especially when he thought of the hopes he had had for the lab and what he might find there. Still, he would give it a little time, wait and see if these inbred cretins might actually have stumbled on some of the things they had been credited with by the gunsmith. There were, after all, the behavioral drugs Hastings had just showed him. Keith was already thinking of ways he might be able to use the suggestibility drug he had been shown, so the effort wouldn't be totally in vain.

Hastings led him into Freeman's office, a small, closet-like space created by walling off a corner of one of the labs. There was only one chair beside Freeman's, so Hastings excused himself and left. Freeman smiled at Keith as gingerly as if he felt his face might crack.

"What do you think, Pete?"

"Pretty impressive," Keith lied.

"Not what you expected?"

"Well, the . . . the cages were . . ." He let it trail off. "I didn't expect that."

Freeman nodded soberly. "It's hard sometimes to accept that the ends justify the means, but we think they do. Otherwise we wouldn't be down here at all. We feel we have a very great mission, a great destiny. We hope that out of this humble laboratory will come the technology to save the white Christian world, Pete." He tried to smile again. "That sounds pretty high-
falutin
', but it's true. I know sometimes the boys get a little carried away."

"Like with the woman?"

Freeman frowned. "Yes, like with that woman. I don't really approve of that. I don't like seeing people, even people like her, suffer needlessly."

"What is it," Keith said tentatively, "that you're working on exactly? I saw the glass cells, and Bob said something about airborne. So is it true? Did you really develop an airborne AIDS virus?"

"Well . . ." Freeman stretched the word out for a long time. "It's not exactly AIDS. Not anymore. We started with the virus, got hold of it about twelve years ago, and been playing around with it ever since. It's been dangerous, and we've paid a price. Lost two of our boys to AIDS back at the beginning before everybody knew how it spread. Accidents. I mean they weren't homosexuals or anything like that. We check our people out pretty good. But we paid our dues. They were good men, but they died like homos, heck, some folks in town thought they were homos. It was an ugly time."

"You said you started with AIDS. What do you mean? What do you have now?"

"Well, we mutated it. You know the incubation period for AIDS is long—you can get it and carry it around for years before it starts kicking up its heels. In '86 we finally figured out how to speed that up, and now it's got an incubation period of just a couple weeks. Once it's in the bloodstream, you've got a month at best, probably less."

"Before the symptoms show?"

"Before you're dead. As soon as it's in there, the virus starts gobbling up T-lymphocyte cells like there's no tomorrow, helpers and suppressors both. Even if you went into a plastic bubble, the germs already in your
body'd
kill you. Which is why we're so dang careful with this thing. Those cells are airtight, with sealed ventilation systems. Once the subjects are inoculated, the boys have to go in to draw blood and get some cell samples—you'll be doing that too—but they wear sealed suits with tanks, and go through airlocks. You follow procedure correctly—and there are always two men to make sure that one doesn't get sloppy—and there's no risk of contracting the stuff."

"Then you've actually made it airborne."

"
Mmm
-hmm." Freeman nodded. "Stays alive four hours outside of a host. The airborne thing took us less time than anything else, except of course for what we're working on now. There hasn't been all that much work done in genetic virology. Heck, there hadn't been anything done in mutating blood-borne viruses into airborne either. Who'd want to do that in the first place? But we found it was pretty easy." He chuckled, a sound like shotgun pellets on a tin roof. "Better not tell Saddam about that."

Keith rubbed his chin with a fist. "But what if it would get out? If there was an accident?"

"Never happen. The virus is aspirated directly into the air of the subjects' cells. If they die, and that's been the only outcome so far, the air's filtered and replaced before the bodies are removed, and after we take tissue samples they're immediately cremated in a closed system. But if the airborne virus did somehow escape, we have a way to shut this lab off from the rest of the world." Freeman took a deep breath. "Unfortunately it'd be the tomb of anybody who was inside at the time. But it won't happen, believe me."

"So it's deadly, and it's airborne," said Keith. "Where are you now?"

"I'm kind of curious. What did you hear as far as where we are now—what we're working on?"

"I heard you were trying to tailor a virus to spare whites. And I heard about the possibility of it being airborne too, but really didn't give that much credence." He smiled. "It seems I underestimated you."

Christ, did I ever
, Keith thought. For this relatively small staff to do what they had done was astonishing.
Perhaps
, he thought,
strong minds and wills were enough to accomplish what unlimited money and manpower could not
. He was proof of that himself, having brought more attention to the environment with his solitary acts than the large and well-financed organizations that tried to do the same thing.