The Repossession (13 page)

‘Son, Genie saw something at Synchro Research

plant. She claims she met one of the kids there. I know you don’t believe in “phenomena” but she says she saw Denis Malone and I believe her.’

‘Malone? Dad, listen to yourself. Malone is dead and buried. You know that. If she saw a ghost, well OK, let her believe it, but I know the Malone kid is dead.’

‘Son, one day something will happen to make you see what’s really going on. Someone is using these runaways, experimenting on them, and I’d hate it if those two kids were a part of that. Genie mentioned something about a chat forum? You know these things better than me. Something about a suicide help link and offering two grand to take part in experiments in BC.’ He held up his hands. ‘I’m not saying people at the Fortress are trying to attract loners and misfits, but . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Ask around. If one kid knows, others do.’

Miller nodded. ‘I’ve heard stuff like that. We’ve got a cyber-crime officer in Hope I could talk to. She could try to trace that. There was rumour about an influenza research centre offering money. Never found it, but I had some parents insisting their kids had gone there. That’s the Web for you. Everything’s rumours and scams.’

‘Follow it up. Has no one found any traces of these other kids?’

Miller shook his head. ‘Not a one. And it won’t get easier. Have you any idea how trashed Spurlake is right now? We had a major flood, Dad. There’s two hundred dead, maybe more. Whole streets went underwater.

As if the business climate wasn’t bad enough for the town, now this. I just came to see you to make sure you’re OK at least.’

‘I’m fine. I just wish those kids hadn’t run. As unhappy as they may have been at home, nothing is worse than what will happen to them at the Fortress.’

Miller grabbed his coffee. ‘You don’t even know they’re headed there. And let’s not argue about all that again. You said yourself that all that stuff you researched was never likely to happen in my lifetime.’

‘You can’t ignore that over thirty-four or more kids have gone missing from around Spurlake and there’s the fact of the Fortress experimenting with transmission of matter. I think someone there has crossed a line.

Someone should investigate. I just don’t want those kids to wind up there, that’s all.’

‘I’m not arguing about the Fortress again. They pay their taxes, they’ve contributed a lot of money to help build shelters after this flood, they are good corporate citizens. I’ll look for the kids, but if they’re in the forest at night, they’re lost, Dad. They won’t get far. I’ve got

to head back anyways. The bridge is out and it’s a two-hour trip to get here now.’

‘That’s another thing. I told them the bridge was in the wrong place when they were building it.’

‘Well you can tell them again when they start repairs.

By the way, you know there’s a pig out there? When did you start with pigs?’

Marshall grinned.

‘Should be good for some quality bacon a few months from now.’

Miller picked up his hat. ‘Flood took out more than a hundred and fifty homes in the town. We’ve got a make-shift camp up by Princeton Park and they’re flying in tents and stuff. About five hundred people displaced and who knows how many missing. Your runaways were lucky, now I think about it. The part of Maple Street the girl lived on was torn apart. We’ve got mud and debris everywhere. The trailer parks by the river were just completely trashed. Flooded your favourite coffee shop too.’

‘McBean’s?’ Marshall was quite disappointed. It was the oldest pastry shop in Spurlake. He’d eaten there as a boy when it was called Schram and Swelter’s Continental Coffee Parlour.

‘They’re fixing it up as fast as they can. Many of the

historic buildings in town stand, but everything’s knee high in mud. The new civic offices took a real beating.

Floodwaters just sliced through them. Gonna take a while to get straight and the insurance people are claiming “Act of God” so no payouts. The Premier has allocated emergency funds to clear it up, but people are angry.’

‘Same flood happened in ’77,’ Marshall remembered.

‘That’s why I told you to buy up on the ridge. Just because it hasn’t flooded for thirty years, doesn’t mean it won’t. No one remembers anything, no one learns anything. I told the mayor, you need brick and stone at street level in Spurlake, not glass.’

‘Well, thank God I listened to you, for once.’ Miller grinned and drank his coffee quickly. ‘Better check out the forest. If they’re smart, they’ll find a hollow and huddle up. You’re right, going to be a cold one tonight. What the hell happened to our summer? Shortest ever.’ He looked back at his dad and smiled. ‘And no, I don’t want another lecture on climate change. Take it easy, Dad.

Look after yourself better, please.’

The cough was getting worse. Genie could feel it building.

Walking in a cold forest probably wasn’t the best way to beat this thing. Rian wasn’t doing well either, his fever had returned. They had been gone just an hour by her reckoning, but neither one of them could walk much further and they hadn’t made much progress. It was really dark. Rian had sworn there was a track but they hadn’t seen anything of it and he felt annoyed with himself for being so stupid. Genie was just disappointed about leaving the house without a plan. They were plain lost.

‘We don’t know where we’re going, do we?’

Rian said nothing. He was shivering, regretting leaving the house, regretting a lot of things.

‘We could go back,’ Genie said. ‘We could go back and—’

‘We can’t go back, Genie. We can’t. They’d take you.

I can go home. You . . .’ He coughed. His chest sounded real bad.

Genie remained silent for a while. It was freezing and the forest seemed to have closed in on them. The weather seemed to have gone from summer to fall in one day.

‘Besides,’ Rian added a moment later, ‘I’ve no idea which way we came from, let alone which way to go forward. I’m sorry, Gen, I just can’t think.’

Genie took his hand. She had no words of comfort.

They had gotten themselves into this mess.

‘We have to go back. Get warm, Ri. We’re still sick.’

‘We can’t, we . . .’

That’s when they heard a dog barking. Rian felt his heart miss a beat. Police dog. He’d let Genie down. They would be found, be separated again. He’d done everything wrong, made Genie’s life worse, not better. He felt like he was standing on the edge of a great canyon, about to fall to his death.

‘We’ve got to move.’

‘Where? I can’t see anything but one tree ahead. You said there was a track but . . .’

‘I lost the track. I’m sorry. I lost the track,’

Rian mumbled.

‘We could climb?’

‘Dog will just sit and wait for the cop to arrive.’

‘Then what?’ Genie heard the desperation in her own voice.

The dog was suddenly on them. It jumped up on Genie. It seemed real pleased to see her. ‘What? Hey boy?’ Genie was thinking that this was one hell of a tame police dog. Weren’t they supposed to bite you or pin you to the ground?

‘Hey, it’s Moucher,’ she exclaimed, bending down and hugging it. ‘You found us.’

Rian was puzzled.

‘That you, Genie?’ Marshall shouted from out of the darkness. He flipped on his flashlight, flooding the area with light. He stood some twenty metres away.

‘You might also want to give me a hand getting back.

Not easy walking for me out here. Next time you run off into the woods, take the firebreak. You’re both headed for the ravine and it’s a hundred-metre sudden drop hereabouts.’

Rian glanced at Genie. They could run but it would do them no good. Look stupid running from a man with a tin leg.

‘My son, Max, has gone. He’s a cop in Spurlake, visits every week. Genie, got to tell you that your house was badly damaged in the flood. Seems you were very lucky Rian broke you out of there when he did.’

‘Ri’s sick, Marshall. I think he’s got a chill.’

‘Don’t surprise me one bit. We got ourselves an

early frost on the way. Good for the apples, but little else.

Come on. I’ve got a fire burning and there’s a chicken in the oven that needs eating.’

‘What about us?’ Rian asked, sneezing violently.

‘First you both got to get well. Let’s get you out of this damn forest. You didn’t happen to notice how cold it is out here? Don’t they teach you city kids anything? Never leave home without a flashlight and a compass.’

They reluctantly followed him out of the forest. The track was apparently a hundred metres to their right. If they’d found it they’d have been a long way away by now or more likely dead at the bottom of the ravine.

Fate makes plans for you and never consults.

‘Moucher found you both with no trouble at all. Think he’s fallen for you, Genie.’

‘I was planning to kidnap him first chance I got,’

Genie replied. ‘Trade him for the pig.’

‘That would be fair,’ Marshall replied, chuckling to himself.

Marshall felt Rian’s forehead as he drew alongside.

‘You’ve got a fever, Rian. You can’t just outrun sickness y’know. You have to give your body some time to build up strength.’

‘Why are you helping us?’ Genie asked, as they started towards the house.

‘Because I don’t want you to end up like all the other kids on my wall.’

‘Your son think they ended up at the Fortress too?’

Rian asked, his voice a croak now.

‘My son thinks I’m crazy and I should mind my own business.’

Genie linked her arm through Marshall’s to help him along (and steal some of his heat).

‘We have to help them, Marshall,’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘The kids. I know you don’t believe me or understand, but they’re alive. I just know they’re alive.’

It had been three days since they’d returned to the house after their embarrassing episode in the forest. Three days of Ri coughing and being sick with a high fever. It was a mean virus. The antibiotics were taking their time to fix him. Marshall wanted him to see a doctor but Ri refused. He just had to sweat it out. Genie was pretty clear of it now. Whatever the pills didn’t do for Ri, they had beaten it off in her.

She had found pens and a notebook and started sketching again. It comforted her to draw, although Moucher was a terrible fidget. She worked on getting Ri’s frown just right as he slept too. She didn’t know if she was any good, but it made her happy.

Marshall had been working on his truck for a couple of days as Genie nursed Rian and she’d kept him going with snacks. She’d been trying to get his house straight –cleaning stuff that hadn’t been touched for years. He never said anything but at least there was light coming through the windows now and she’d put lots of linen

and sheets out on the bushes for airing since he didn’t possess a line. Just because you only had one leg it was no excuse to ignore dirt and fresh air.

They were drinking coffee in the afternoon. Marshall had been trying to explain the science behind the Fortress to Genie and she was having a hard time understanding.

Genie had fed the pig, who’d taken to coming around every day and rubbing up against the swing chair on the stoop to get her attention. She absently watched it eat slops as she drank the coffee.

‘I don’t get where the Swiss came in. I think I got lost there.’

Marshall tried again. ‘There’s a huge multi-billion dollar project they built over in Geneva called CERN where they built this Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator that is sort of looking for the source of the universe. It generated so much data, they had to build a new kind of data storage system that could cope with it. They call it the Grid. It’s superfast, generates fantastic parallel processing power, using fibre optics to connect between centres. Some people from Switzerland joined the Fortress project about three years ago and they rebuilt it up from scratch using the Grid processing system. There’s nearly a hundred thousand servers involved using dynamic switching to talk to each other; the energy they use is just unimaginable.

To get an idea, it’s more than ten thousand times faster than the internet people use at home. And this is what they think will make it possible to process the data fast enough to digitize DNA and transmit it from one place to another without dropping an atom. Without the Grid they would be nowhere. And this is only the beginning, right?

It can only get faster.’

Genie rolled her eyes. ‘I think I got it. The bigger and faster it is, the more stuff they can get through it. You think they will make it work?’

‘None of this would have been possible unless we knew how to map the human genome. Genome holds the code for all the hundreds of thousand differing proteins and billions of molecules a body needs. Something like six billion “bases” per person. That was my job, building the sequence and making sure it came out the same way it went in. That’s the tough part of the science. One day, everyone will have their genome data on backup some place and if you lost an arm or leg or if a liver malfunctioned, we would be able to rebuild it using your own data. That’s what everyone wants a piece of here. The real problem comes with who owns your DNA – who owns that arm or leg once it’s built?’

Genie just shook her head. Like she was supposed to understand what the hell he was talking about.

Marshall stood up and walked over to his truck. He pointed to the linen and the sky.

‘Wind’s coming up. Get this packed away, Genie.

Got an experiment I want to try. We can pick up my mail on the way.’

Genie put her mug down. She was surprised he wanted to go anywhere. She quickly grabbed the linen off the bushes and folded them. She was puzzled. What exactly was he going to do?

‘We be gone long? I’ll put some water by Ri’s bed maybe.’

‘Couple of hours at most.’

‘Where we going?’

‘You’ll see.’

Ri was asleep when she went up. She mopped his brow, freshened his water and kissed his forehead. She whispered in his ear.

‘Please get better soon, babe. I need you back.’

Marshall got into the truck and started her up. She purred into action and he looked happy for once. ‘My Dad bought this truck new two hundred thousand Ks ago. Back in ’68. They used to make stuff that lasted back then.’