The Demon Plagues (39 page)

Elise took it gently out of Daniel’s hand and
read:

To DJ or whoever reads this: Sorry to change
the rules again, but it’s what I’m best at. Huff won’t hurt your
children. He’s not a psycho, he’s just a self-interested son of a
bitch and not as crazy as he puts on. I told him if he harms one
hair on their heads Spooky will kill them slowly. Nguyen’s a name
to conjure with in the special ops community and probably the only
one they’ll respect. I’m betting my life everything will work out
fine. If not: sorry about that.

Raph and I are taking a little trip. With
your usual short-term thinking you forgot about that Meme scout
ship that launched the Demon Plagues. Do you really think germs are
all they got? Were you really going to just let a working alien
spaceship sit in a South African hangar instead of fighting for
Earth’s survival? I bet you were. You weren’t even exploiting the
ship for its technology. Looks like I’m going to have to save your
sorry self-righteous ass again. It’s getting tiresome, so I think
this will be the last time. Goodbye, DJ.

-Skull

P.S. Hate me if you must but don’t hate what
I’ve done. It’s all for your better world.

-48-

Christine Forman read the handwritten note
one more time, the one that had come in an envelope with no stamp,
just ‘MPS’ for Military Postal System and no postmark, which meant
it had been dropped directly into the base post office, to be
sorted and delivered to her in the mail.

Christine,

John Thomas Tyler is a Psycho. He sent
Fortress Team One to kidnap the alien and kill DJ Markis. I’ll do
my best to find a way out.

He has suborned the Secret Service and the
President with addictive nanites. He must be stopped. The Eden
Plague might cure it. As far as I know, General Tyler is clean.
It’s all in your hands. Good luck.

–
Skull.

P.S. You look good in a bathrobe. Sorry I
couldn’t stay.

She laughed, rueful, head shaking and
wondering how much to believe. Skull had complete faith in his own
opinion, something Christine did not. She had confidence in neither
his assessment, nor in her own.
Only fools think faith brings
the clarity of black and white; in reality, it’s always fifty
shades of grey. Is he manipulating me?

She decided it didn’t really matter. While
her time with the Underground Railroad had hammered discretion into
her, a secrecy different from that of the ministry, she hated every
bit of it, hated the duplicity forced upon her by evil men and evil
circumstance and the Spirit of Evil behind it all.

Only one thing to do now, and that was
turn it over to a higher power
. She laughed to herself.
Besides God, I mean
. She picked up her bugged phone, then
put it down. Even an innocuous message might tip someone, the ones
watching – JT or the Secret Service or whomever he had in his
pocket – so she decided to just take a stroll.

Fifteen minutes later she waved her keycard
in front of the reader and nodded to the guard as she entered the
main administrative building that housed the General’s office.
Dressed in official Navy physical training gear, she looked a bit
out of place but not so much as to invite comment. On the weekend
uniform standards were relaxed, especially for those working long
hours. She recalled an old joke about hardworking military officers
–
How can you tell that the Commander is on vacation? He comes
in to work in civilian clothes.

She rapped on General Tyler’s open door,
watching him as he signed a paper then closed a folder. Some things
still had to be done in hardcopy; she thought she saw the telltale
form of a fitness report, those sacred determiners of promotion or
passover.

“General. Care to take a walk with me?”

He looked her up and down as if in slight
disapproval of her PT uniform. “Do Edens even have to work out?” he
asked as he stood.

She took the question as acquiescence, with
tremendous relief. Had he not followed her lead she wondered what
she would have done. “Of course, if they want to pass a PT test.”
She put brightness into her voice, and he looked sharply at her as
she allowed a tiny pleading look to cross her face.

He nodded and rose.

Outside he set a brisk walking pace, crossing
though courtyards and between buildings, a deliberate attempt to
foil anyone listening through a directional microphone or simply
following. It emboldened her to think that he took elementary
precautions even on his own base where he should reign absolute. It
showed her that he understood there were other players in the
game.

Tyler gave Christine an inquisitive look. In
response, she handed him the note. He read it, then handed it back
mutely, shifting his eyes to the fore, lifting his feet up to cross
curbs and low planters by instinct as they walked. After a moment
he said, “I guess this is the break point. I’ve been hoping, maybe
fooling myself, but it’s obvious I’ve let the situation run on too
long.”

“Your son?” Christine asked in sympathy,
hearing the pain in his voice.

“Among others. But he’s the lynchpin. I
needed to find out what his scheme was. But what can you do, being
an Eden and, pardon me, a particularly righteous one at that?”

“What can I do? What do you
need
me to
do? I brought this to you hoping you had power and a plan. Everyone
I know says you are a good man. I’ll do anything that I can, short
of murdering someone.”

Tyler snorted. “This Eden thing…I used to
think it makes us into sheep. I want to believe it can make us into
sheepdogs, still able to use our teeth.”

“What does it matter if you’re not an
Eden?”

“Because I’ll be one soon. I see the writing
on the wall. I’m just not ready to have my fangs pulled.” He
laughed without humor, turning left onto an access road that wended
its way away from the compound into the arid space between the
buildings and the fence line. The wind whipped desert dust across
their path.

She followed at his side. “I don’t know that
you have to worry so much, General. In my experience, the Eden
Plague doesn’t limit you as much as it enhances your own
self-defined limits. Otherwise we wouldn’t have Psychos.”

“Like JT, you mean? I was wondering when you
would get to that.”

She sighed. “There’s no other explanation.
That’s what Skull’s note says. He contracted the Eden Plague, it
defines him as a Psycho, now he can’t use the nanites like he wants
to, until the lab comes up with something that’s compatible. Then
when they do, you give it away to Markis. That must have sent him
through the roof. But what’s his next move?”

“Get rid of me, somehow. Sideline or kill me.
I’m the only thing standing between him and control of the Tiny
Fortress program. If he had that, he could direct development of
any kind of nano he wanted. He’s trying for complete control
through McKenna, if these addictive nanites Skull talks about are
real. I wonder –”

Tyler abruptly pitched forward, a spray of
blood washing across Christine as he fell heavily against her. Her
mind registered the report of the shot as she dropped him to the
sand and threw herself beside him. His eyes turned to her,
pleading, burning, and she reacted the only way she could, seizing
his flaccid arm and biting it viciously. She slopped saliva into
the wound, praying and willing the Plague to take hold, praying and
willing Tyler’s wound to be survivable,
dear God save him for
he’s our best hope.

Several more shots peppered the sand nearby
but with all good fortune they had gone to ground in a slight
hollow, the kind that saves footsoldiers and bedevils snipers, and
her hopes and prayers lifted skyward to encompass the base’s
reaction forces.
They had to have heard, or had reported to
them, the loud reports of shots fired by a high-powered rifle. We
only have to survive for a few minutes and they will come.

She heard the crackle of radio voices,
realizing that Tyler had a ‘brick’ along, a heavy clunky walkie
with surprising range and power, a symbol of command in this modern
age as much as the .45 on his hip. She reached for the device,
yelling for help into its face, launching her words into the
ether.

Later, in the ambulance as she held the
General’s hand and attendants pumped fluids and solutions into his
veins and she saw that he would survive, her supplications turned
to thanksgivings. She stayed with him to explain to the MP major
what had happened, enough to widen his eyes and anger him at this
violation of his domain and his commander, and told that she had
been forced to make him an Eden. She reminded him that this changed
nothing about his chain of command. “The General is still the
General.”

The man raised his chin and accepted her
words, especially as she bolstered his duty with his respect for
her commissioned rank, a stability helpful in dealing with
shattered subordinates. He marched off resolutely, glad of orders,
righteous fire in his eyes.

Forman left Tyler there in the hospital bed,
surrounded by his loyal men, or so she hoped, praying for the man’s
son and his suborned henchmen to remain a few more minutes in the
shadows. She ran at a sprinter’s pace the few hundred yards to her
apartment and to her ace in the hole.

Six hours later Tyler was back on his feet,
issuing long-delayed orders to Fortress Team Two in Cheyenne
Mountain.

-49-

Relieved to be once more in uniform, Gunnery
Sergeant Repeth crept forward toward the side door of the New White
House, not so white really but a mixture of white accents and sandy
Southwest tans looking like blurs of grey in the fading light. The
muzzle of her suppressed PW10 sniffed forward, her every sense
fox-sensitive.

Already she had gently gunned down three
Secret Service agents, the coughing of her weapon sounding like a
desert bird or perhaps an echo from a mistuned motor engine,
something passed by as ambient noise. The Needleshock combination
she was using included an additional soporific; she hoped she would
have at least two hours before any of them woke up.

The knob turned but the door did not budge,
as expected. Nothing for it, really, this was the moment she had
anticipated but delayed as long as possible. Readying a pair of
Needleshock grenades, filled with tiny unitary capacitor module
shrapnel, she took a deep breath and then reared back, slamming her
booted foot mule-style into the door.

It popped open with just one bang, a better
result than she had hoped. She pushed through it as it came back at
her on its hinges and she ran, crouching, pinless grenades in one
hand, PW10 tight to her shoulder in the other.

The first figure she saw went down in a
coughing burst of ‘Shock, sprawling in the middle of an anteroom
with three more exits. She slid forward along the wall and tossed
the explosives through the two open doors and kicked the third with
her booted foot.

It resisted stubbornly, three blows, then
finally splintered on the fourth. She fell deliberately to the
ground and rolled to the side as high-powered pistol rounds zipped
and popped through the opening, followed by the chattering of
heavier bullets from an assault rifle. A ricochet stung her calf
but she ignored it.

Scrambling to the door-frame she slid the
muzzle of the PW10 around the corner and thumbed it to full
automatic, sending a long spray of needles ricocheting around the
President’s office. She followed this in a roll, dropping a
magazine and reloading as she moved. Two pistol-wielding Secret
Service agents lay sprawled in states of embarrassment, bloodied
but destined for Edenhood. The door across the room slammed
shut.

Cursing under her breath, she threw a
shoulder painfully against the barrier, feeling its solidity and
lack of give.
Safe room
, she thought,
an armored refuge
of last resort. I have to hope it is proof against comms
transmissions as well, that the last Secret Service agent remains
incommunicado inside with the President. Time to cut my losses and
run.

She heard alarms beginning as the Executive
compound woke up, and she estimated she had three minutes before
the whole of the reaction force would come down on her like an
avalanche of bricks. Reaching into a cargo pocket, she pulled out a
hard case with rounded edges and placed it on McKenna’s desk.
Who looks at all the pen cases, cigar cases, and mementos on
someone’s desk?
She had to hope the President would notice it,
as others might not, and read the note. She had to hope he would
use what was inside to free himself from the addictive nanites. And
she had to hope the syringe of Eden Plague, made from her own
blood, would even work.
That’s a lot of hopes. Better than being
a White House slave
.

Back out the way she came, this time running
fast, bullets licking her heels she sprinted, first hurdling the
low wall then reaching up to grasp the points of the wrought-iron
fence, flipping herself up and over in a gymnast’s dismount,
ignoring the shredded palms of her gloves and hands alike. She
landed on her feet and somersaulted back up into a run, this time
flat out, her hands reaching for the sky in front of her as her
stride lengthened to an Olympic dash, ten seconds of life instead
of glory, unto welcoming darkness.

-50-

JT Tyler stood on his father’s darkened
front porch, sipping fine Scotch with his left hand, watching the
stars. They twinkled, mocking him, jeering him, like the rest. He
was tired of it, tired of it all, the duplicity of those who would
not follow him and the stupidity of those who could not see his
vision and the lack of discipline of those who surrounded him.