Xeno Sapiens (25 page)

Josh Hall to speak at
Sedgefield Auditorium Tonight.

The nationally known evangelist, Josh
Hall, is scheduled to bring his crusade to Winfield tonight at
eight pm.

There was some scrambling to get the
auditorium ready for the surprise engagement, but all loose ends
have recently been tied. All citizens of Winfield and surrounding
areas are cordially invited to attend. Admission is
free.

Hall has been comparatively silent
since his last dustup with the media four years ago with his
negative views and opinions on the experiments concerning genetic
recombination performed by Ingrid Milner at a Tampa, Florida
University. Ms. Milner herself has fallen silent and inquiries into
her whereabouts have drawn a blank. The original verbal barrage
between the two began when Milner succeeded in exchanging genetic
patterns between two unlike species of rodents...

“
It’s not mandatory you let us in,
Jon, no. But it would sure smooth things out for the rest of
us.”

Jason Lewis was a whip-thin man with a
nose as ridged and uneven as an artichoke. Lush, red gin blossoms
bloomed on it. His gaunt shoulders bore a light blue windbreaker.
The westerly wind snapped his collar against his neck like an
untethered flag.

He had arrived at the Alamo at nine am
the morning after Seth’s escape, accompanied by Josh Hall, and a
reporter from the local rag, the Winfield Tribune, Ronnie
Walton.

Merrifield had been up all night. He
went over the night’s tally in his mind. Two dead, one injured. A
total of three casualties from a highly-doped, semi-comatose,
unarmed being. His suit was rumpled and his large belly, which he
usually kept pretty well sucked in, hung over his belt and pushed
its way ahead of his unbuttoned jacket like a bucket of lard.
Ingrid had been all over him since seven o’clock. The search for
Seth had been a waterhaul. The only thing he had to show for his
night’s efforts was one horribly injured father, and one hysterical
son, both innocent victims.

“
I don’t want to trample on your, uh,
imprimatur, Constable,” Merrifield said. He was being as diplomatic
as his weariness and agitation would allow. “But this is a
restricted facility. Only visitors with special authorization are
allowed inside. As far as you go, Constable, you have official
business and an exception will be made. The other...gentlemen, Mr.
Hall and...” Merrifield squinted at the young reporter behind Hall,
“...and Mr...Who is this egg, anyway?” Merrifield asked, dropping
diplomacy for the moment.

“
Mr. Walton,” Lewis supplied. “He’s a
reporter for the Trib.”

“
Oh, yes,” Merrifield said,
remembering a rough ticker from the AP machine one of his cohorts
had thrust under his nose that morning. “I should have
known.”

“
If you’re dead set against it,
Jon...” Lewis began.

“
You don’t have anything to hide, do
you, Jon,” Hall interrupted. He spoke softly, but he was looking at
Merrifield like a leopard with a monkey in his sights. “Surely
you’re not worried about a man of the cloth,” Hall went on. “I’ve
had some unkind things to say about genetics in the past, but this
is a drug manufacturing facility, isn’t it? That’s what the chief
here told me. I like to know a little something about the towns I
preach in.” Hall smiled, but it was a paper mask.

Merrifield stared at him with wrathful,
unblinking eyes.

Lewis seemed surprised. “You two know
each other?”

“
We’ve met,” Merrifield said curtly.
He never took his eyes from Hall’s smug face.

“
I have no objection to your coming
into the facility with me, constable,” Merrifield said. “The other
gentlemen will have to wait in the reception area for the
moment.”

“
Wait a minute,” Walton broke in. “I
came up here to find out more about the guy who escaped last night.
I need some answers.”

“
From you,” Merrifield said
murderously, “I don’t have to take any lip. Wait in the reception
area, or wait out here at the gate. If you want answers, you’ll get
them from me and no-one else. Got that?”

On top of everything else, all
Merrifield needed was some goddam T-hound fresh out of journalism
class trying to walk all over him.

“
Can it, Ron,” Lewis told him. “All of
us will get our answers soon enough. Mr. Merrifield and myself
haven’t had the luxury of a full night’s sleep like you have.” He
spoke to Jon. “We can’t keep them from reporting the news. I just
wish we could control the bullshit that falls out of their mouths
sometimes.” He looked apologetically at Hall. “Sorry,
Reverend.”

Hall nodded absently, still studying
Merrifield. Jon hadn’t changed much from days of old. Hall imagined
the wheels turning, the cogs clicking, the scrutiny of new elements
being introduced into a scenario.

“
If you’ll follow me,” Merrifield
said, reopening the gate and ushering them into the compound. The
hayseed reporter hadn’t even commented on the lack of a guard. He
foresaw no problems with him.

The last of the clouds had cleared
during the night and the early morning mist was all but burned away
by the sun which had topped the mountain crests. The four men felt
its heat like a clear, defined beam as they trudged up the gentle
slope to the entrance of the Alamo proper. None of them spoke until
they were all inside.

“
If you gentlemen will sit here,”
Merrifield said, motioning Walton and Hall to a coffee table with
chairs set around it. “The constable and I will go to my office and
discuss our missing person.” He spoke to a receptionist behind a
glass cage. “Bring these gentlemen some coffee, Kay. Whatever they
want. I’ll be back in a few minutes to make a statement to
the...
press
.”

Kay took the men’s orders quickly. Only
Ron Walton noticed she failed to make eye contact with any of
them.

Merrifield and Lewis disappeared
through another door. The sound of their clicking heels on the
unseen hallway sounded like the hollow vibrations of footsteps in a
morgue. Considering the plastic-wrapped bodies of the dead soldiers
secreted in the large, walk in freezer, it wasn’t far off the
mark.

********************

They seated themselves on opposite
sides of the desk in Merrifield’s office. Lewis’s Smoky the Bear
hat was thrown carelessly atop a pile of hastily stacked papers on
Merrifield’s desk. Lewis slumped wearily in his chair and blew out
a sigh of relief.

“
My Christ,” he said heavily. “Am I
glad to be away from that crew.”

“
How did Elmer Gantry out there get to
tag along up here with you,” Merrifield fumed. He was like a tea
kettle seconds from the boiling point.

“
You mean Bible Joe out there? Just
bad luck,” Lewis said after consideration. “We knew he was coming,
we found out late last night. But he came blowing into the station
this morning and demanded to be brought here. Probably heard about
your escapee on the radio.”

“
He has no authority over
you.”

“
Not personally, no,” Lewis said. “But
we’re in the first hole of the Bible Belt. It may seem we have
nothing but a bunch of grasping capitalists in town, but the
majority are good Christians. One day a week, anyhow.”

“
That doesn’t give him the right to
meddle in police business.”

“
Jon,” Lewis said patiently. “I’ve got
to look after my town. I’ve worked with you. I’ve looked the other
way many times, but something goddam screwy is going on up here and
it’s getting harder to hide it. I’ve got a cub reporter following
up everything I do, ready to tell the electorate how cozy the two
of us are. I can live with that. No-one in town knows exactly what
it is you do up here, including Walton, but everybody knows for
damn sure you’re not making drugs, and the town council certainly
isn’t going to complain about the money that flows out of this
place. But something’s been brewing up here for a year and a half,
and people are starting to talk.”

“
Up until last, night we haven’t hurt
a thing as long as we’ve been here,” Merrifield said. “It was an
unfortunate occurrence. What I need is cooperation, not that
fucking bible basher fouling things up.”

“
It was my call, Jon. He dropped a few
juicy hints about what he knew about this place, what could happen
if he didn’t see you. He said it would be a lot better on everyone
involved if he were allowed to speak with you. I couldn’t see the
harm. I know the kind of hell the man can raise. We don’t need that
kind of blabbering. Walton is another matter. I was hoping you
could give him enough to keep him out of our hair until we can get
this Scoggins guy. Once he’s salted away, Walton will lose interest
and start puppy dogging me again. I want this guy caught before he
can do any digging.”

“
Let him dig,” Merrifield said
expansively. “He won’t find anything.”

Lewis rolled his eyes.

“
You’re a real pill, Jon. It’s no
coincidence Hall is here. You acted like you were half-expecting
him. Don’t jack me around. What am I to think about a young woman
who comes into town a couple of times a week, has dinner with your
right hand man, and doesn’t talk to anybody? That’s a woman who
doesn’t want to be known. I know Ingrid Milner is stashed away up
here, and that gives me a pretty good idea of what you’re really
doing. I think your mad escapee last night
was
coincidence, but it ties in somehow with
Milner, and Hall’s visit.”

Merrifield was hardly shocked at
Lewis’s conjecture that Ingrid was on his payroll. Lewis had shown
himself to be shrewd and canny in the past simply by keeping the
townspeople off of his back about the place. It was nearly
impossible to put anything over on him.

“
If she is here,” Merrifield
countered, “it doesn’t mean we’re doing anything arcane. The
production of drugs and chemicals, especially the newest ones,
requires the best in molecular biology.”

“
That may be so, but whatever the
reason
Milner’s
here, that’s why
Hall
is here. I don’t know from Shinola about genetics,
but you can bet your sweet white ass Hall is creaming in his
Armani’s to get something on this place. If you can’t put him off,
he’ll make something up just to queer you.”

“
Who else knows Milner is here,”
Merrifield asked, dropping all pretense of denial.

“
Just me, I think. I’ve kept it under
my hat. She’s hardly a criminal, so I’ve got no reason to say
anything. Unless you can convince Hall nothing out of the ordinary
is going on, he’s going to blow the lid off the whole stinking
brew, whatever it is.”

“
There’s nothing to concern him here,”
Merrifield said convincingly. He looked at Lewis very
openly.

Lewis tilted his head back and looked
at the ceiling for a few seconds, then back at
Merrifield.

“
If there’s nothing of concern going
on, maybe you can explain why it’s like a fucking graveyard in this
place. Every warm body I passed on the way in looked like they had
just sat through a screening of ‘1001 Maniacs’. Half of ’em look
like they haven’t slept in a year, and the other half has clammed
up so tight you couldn’t drive a pin up their ass with a
sledgehammer.

“
And maybe you can explain why the
lights in town keep going out. The goddam power company can’t give
me an answer. All they can do is wring their hands and mumble some
shit about power surges and ball lightning.”

“
I don’t know anything about that,”
Merrifield said. “We’ve had a few brief outages, but the lights
came right back on. Maybe it’s UFO’s.”

“
Well, if our assault victim from last
night is to be believed, there’s already a fucking alien running
around.”

“
Cancer patient,” Merrifield said. “He
lost his hair from the chemo.”

“
Yeah. Well, it’s getting to be goddam
spooky in town,” Lewis said dejectedly. His tone was that of a man
who had exhausted all rational explanations. “I’ve lived here all
my life. I’ve heard my share of monster yarns. The Brown Mountain
Lights, the ghosts of the Kron gold, all of it. Every little burg
has its local color. But when the lights in town go out, everybody
looks up here on the hill and see this place blazing away like a
lighthouse, and they’re afraid. Something up here is different and
people know it.

“
Now we’ve got a
real
terror out of this place, not just a
vapor or a rumor. This Scoggins has already attacked one citizen
and I have a sneaking suspicion he got a couple up here on the way
out. What happened to the guards that are usually at the
gate?”