The Eden Plague, Page 2

  I reloaded automatically, ensuring I had the full sixteen and one up the pipe, then retraced my steps back down to the basement. No way that guy – sorry, that girl – got up. No way, after the mess I made of her. The serpent slithered forward again.

  I edged around the bottom of the stairs; I glided forward with all the stealth I could muster, and slipped back to my position in the unfinished part of the basement, behind the thin wall with its sixteen or so holes. Yes, the shower was running, and something moved within. Several of the rounds had gone right through the shower and now the water was soaking through, drizzling through the holes.

  What on God’s green Earth?

  I waited, took up a position behind the crack of the door, and waited some more. It took several minutes but finally a figure came out of the shower, out of the bathroom. It looked like she had showered with her clothes on, to get rid of the blood and filth, but she was up and walking around. Toweling off. Not fast; she moved haltingly, like an old woman, or a hurt one. She was holding an exotic-looking weapon by the barrel in one hand, with a kevlar helmet under the same arm. She had mangled body armor on, too. I could see five or six scars where my rounds had hit the vest and helmet and not penetrated.

  So I had tagged her, but not killed her after all? But I had fired sixteen rounds, and I had smelled the stink of the body letting go, which normally only happens at the moment of death. At least some of her legs and arms should be out of commission, but she was using all of them. One, two, three, four. Yup, all four limbs operating.

  Weird.

  I stepped out from behind the door while her back was still mostly to me. “Freeze, you.”

  Like I said, I’m not that creative with my one-liners.

  She dropped the gun and helmet onto my old blue basement rug, held her hands up away from her body. “Don’t shoot, please. It hurts.”

  “I bet. Turn around. All the way around, keep turning.”

  I inspected her. No visible weapons, and just that vest. Besides that, just torn up slacks and a ragged button-down blouse, business casual, holes and rips and still some blood, and angry red wounds on her arms and legs, at least five that I could see. Spreading purple bruises. But she was standing, she was walking. Somehow. Woman or not, she had fired a very deadly firearm at me. The gun didn’t care who used it, and dead was dead.

  Wasn’t it?

  The serpent was not pleased.

  “Turn right, go up the stairs. Don’t think about it, just do it. Up, up!” I followed her up, déjà vu, just like with the suit. I marched her through my kitchen and told her to sit next to the suit’s body.

  The woman looked at the dead man, at the entry wounds, and made a choking sound. Her hair was short and bloody, her face ugly with bruises and what looked like a shot through her cheek.

  I snarled, “I tried to talk to him. He gave me the wrong answers. Take that vest off.”

  She did, painfully slow.

  It’s useful in a field interrogation for the subject to be afraid of you, to keep him or her from recovering composure. I needed to push her through that window. Besides, she had genuine reason to fear me. The serpent hovered on my shoulder, threatening to take over again at any moment.

  “So tell me, and make it fast. I really want to shoot you again.” It came out in a croon, husky, like a lover.

  The serpent danced in the dexe-codone fog.

  “Okay, okay, please don’t. We’re here to help you. Recruit you! Come on, Daniel, throttle back!”

  I had placed my finger on the trigger again.

  “It’s true! You fit the profile, all the skills, high moral index, ruthless but not corruptible, the Company wants you. But it’s going to be harder now.” She hooked a thumb at the dead suit beside her, avoiding looking.

  ‘Company’ was what the Agency’s employees called it, like it wasn’t even part of the government.

  Maybe it wasn’t, really.

  She was settling down; I needed to keep her momentum going in the direction of explanations. I gestured with the gun. “Keep talking. What was the plan?”

  She talked, trippingly. “Jenkins was in charge – I had no choice. I was just supposed to provide the demonstration, which I did, as you see. I couldn’t kill you anyway, even if I wanted to, but you were supposed to think so, to get your attention.”

  I wondered what she meant by ‘couldn’t kill’ me. Seemed like she could have if I’d been in front of the shotgun .

  She went on, “I tried to talk him out of it but he was an arrogant son of a bitch and he wouldn’t listen.” She reached across with her right hand to scratch vigorously at her left arm, where one of my bullets had taken out a chunk of flesh.

  Which reminded me. “So how come you aren’t dead, or at least bleeding out on my bathroom floor? How come you’re on your feet?” This whole conversation was surreal, but I couldn’t argue with my own two eyes so I figured I might as well just go with it until I figured it out. “Are you a vampire? Werewolf? Immortal? Alien? Zombie?” I ran out of possibilities.

  “It’s a new thing. A kind of healing booster. Do you have anything to eat?” I noticed she was looking sallow, white almost, and shivering. It seemed like she was getting sick, and her veins and muscle definition were showing through paper-thin skin. “I’m starving.”

  My stimulated mind raced. I threw mental rocks and the serpent reluctantly slouched back toward his cave.

  Healing booster, super-healing. When she said starving, she meant literally starving. From my extensive medical training I figured that her body was already catabolizing itself, cannibalizing at the cellular level, trying to heal those wounds. Can’t outrun biology, healing takes energy and materials, no matter how advanced the drug or technique. And I needed this woman for answers, and maybe to keep me out of an Agency cell. I’d brushed up against the spooks Over There, and I had no desire to be ‘rendered.’

  Funny, how similar the two meanings of that word ended up being. One, to be boiled down to fatty paste. Two, to be given over to a foreign country to be tortured.

  So I got her some food. A big bag of lunchmeat, a package of cheese slices, mayo, mustard, a loaf of bread, apples, paper plates, and a plastic spoon. A plastic cup for orange juice. No metal. Dad didn’t raise no dummy. Used right, a metal spoon could kill a man.

  “Make me a sandwich too,” I said. I didn’t want to put down the gun. “And keep talking. What’s your name, anyway?”

  “Elise. Elise Wallis.” She lined up six pairs of bread slices with shaky hands and started to construct sandwiches, after stuffing a piece of the loaf into her mouth like a slumdog orphan. She took a moment to choke it down dry, then continued. “It was just supposed to be a demonstration. You were supposed to shoot me, of course. Not quite so many times. And I didn’t really shoot at you, did I? Those rounds I had were filled with salt. Not even rock salt, just table salt. Nasty within five feet, but after that it just stings.” She sounded whiny, defensive. Querulous.

  I laughed tightly. “Well, that didn’t work out so well. And now some poor arrogant tailored-suit schmuck is dead. I guess he didn’t have the super-healing. Why not? Experimental? Some kind of side-effects? Doesn’t work on everyone?” My mind was racing now, the adrenaline and the problem keeping me on track. It felt good, to be firing on all cylinders again.

  Outrunning the serpent.

  “Yeah, there’s a downside, mostly for the Company.” She finished making the sandwiches, pushed one across the table to me, and demolished another in four bites.

  I had to wait for her to keep talking so I took a cautious bite of mine. Too much mustard.

  She looked into my eyes then, with a kind of haunted compassion or…something. Something hard to pin down. Maybe pity. I didn’t much like it, and I wasn’t going to fall for some cheesy womanly wiles, but there was still something in her eyes that I liked. Maybe it was because she had guts. In some other circumstances…

  She kept eating.

  I dragged my mind back to
now, and barked, “Come on, talk between bites.”

  “All right. Just let me tell it my own way, okay?”

  Another quarter of a sandwich went down her throat. She finished a cup of juice, poured herself some more. “I was a terminal patient. Cancer. Hodgkin’s. I had maybe two weeks to live. I was already in hospice, doped up. The Company made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Be a test subject for a new cure, they said. Of course I said yes.”

  She paused to eat another sandwich, and I fidgeted impatiently. She was looking much better now, and her wounds were visibly shrinking. The bruising was getting smaller, the holes were closing, everything. Unbelievable. But I had to believe it. It was right in front of me.

  I took the last bite of my sandwich and the woman across from me sighed, as if regretting something. The next second I found myself falling over backward as my dining room table flew up in my face. I forced my finger not to pull the trigger in reflex, and by the time I disentangled myself from the chair, table, tablecloth and sandwich makings, she was gone.

  -4-

  In my teens, when I was young and foolish, I had thought war would be fun, or make me a man, or something, when I went to Gulf One. In my twenties I went to Afghanistan get some back for the Twin Towers, when Bin Laden seemed so near, just over the next mountain, and everybody in a turban might be Al Qaeda and who cares, shoot them all anyway, let God sort ‘em out.

  If you listened to my shrink at Walter Reed, Dr. Benchman, you'd have thought I'd be having flashbacks right now. He'd convinced himself I was a case of full-blown PTSD, a danger to myself and society, and nothing I could say could talk him out of it.

  I’d had to start seeing him because I'd clocked a Marine lieutenant when he started mouthing off about blue-suiters. He’d been drunk, I’d been drunk, and it had been a mistake, but it sure felt good at the time. About broke my hand along with his pretty jaw. Of course, I never told Benchman about the serpent in my head. Thank God he never thought to try to get my carry permit revoked.

  I was lucky, really, because I'd had more than nineteen years in, and by the time the whole JAG process was done, what with my lawyer successfully drawing it out and staving off the threat of a court-martial, I was happy to make a deal, sign that Article 15 and get my retirement orders. Twenty years, thirteen days, but it was enough to qualify, and life was much better as a retiree with fifty percent disability than as a disabled vet with nothing but the VA to help out.

  I sat there at the righted table and tried to concentrate on the present. The fog was closing down again, because the speed was wearing off. I wanted a drink. I wanted a nap. I was staring at a dead man leaking all over my old wall-to-wall carpet, and he wasn’t going to get any better if he hadn’t already, I was pretty sure. Elise, if she was telling the truth, had said Jenkins didn’t have the healing drug, or whatever it was.

  But at least there were no sirens racing for my house, so no one had reported the gunshots or anything unusual. The basement walls were thick, cinder block set mostly below ground. I guess no one heard the two extra pops when I…my mind shied away.

  On the other hand, Elise was probably already reporting to her Agency masters and there would soon be a cleanup team on the way. They might make it all go away, or they might set it up to implicate me, or they might come try to recruit me using a different approach - something a lot more certain. Like eight Men In Black with body armor and tranquilizer darts and beanbag rounds. I tried not to imagine, tried to stay on track, tried to stick to the facts.

  Instead, I sat there staring at the body.

  Should I call the cops? Was it easier to deal with the local authorities, claim a righteous shoot in my own home? But I’d have to rearrange the scene, because I’d just executed Jenkins. No matter how you sliced it, I’d killed him in hot blood, without just cause.

  With Miss Wallis, had she stayed dead, I’d have had justification. She’d had a weapon, she’d fired on me. In fact, the weapon should still be down there, all the proof I needed. Elise had bolted out my still-open side door. She’d had no time to detour to the basement.

  No, I had to either deal with the Agency, or I had to run.

  Flight was an option. Disappear, get out of the country. Slip across to Mexico before the alarm went out, from there to points south. Take a tramp freighter to South Africa maybe, sell my skills. Private security firms there like guys with combat experience. They’d get me a new identity, if I was willing to be one of their quasi-mercenary security contractors and kick back part of my pay. I’d made some good contacts in the Green Zone in Baghdad. The Zone had been a patchwork of embassy territories then for a while, with South Africans, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Philippinos, even Gurkas providing security for each little walled compound.

  I shook myself out of the fog of reminiscence. I had to do something, I had to act, or I was going to be acted upon. But I didn’t want to run. It was not in my nature.

  My phone rang.

  I stared stupidly at it for a couple of rings. Nobody called my home phone but telemarketers and work, and I didn’t have the kind of job that called you after hours. I heaved myself up and grabbed the handset, looked at the number. I didn’t recognize it but it was 703. Local, Northern Virginia. Telemarketers had other numbers, 866 or 877 or weird ones from foreign countries that tried to scam people.

  I decided to answer it. Maybe they wanted to talk, whoever ‘they’ were. Maybe I wanted to listen. Maybe there was some way out of this mess.

  “Hello?”

  “Dan?” It sounded like Miss Wallis.

  “Yeah. Elise?”

  “Yes Dan. We have a little time. They don’t know what happened yet. When they do, they will probably want to clean up and they’re going to insist you join up. If you don’t play ball, they’ll either do you the hard way, frame you or disappear you.” She had a trace of Texas in her voice now, if I knew my Westerns.

  “About like I thought. What are we gonna do about it?” I suddenly had a feeling she was in a tough spot, too, having failed and lost her boss. Or maybe she wanted out of their grip. She said she’d had no choice.

  Or maybe it was all a crock of bull.

  “I want to talk with you, but not on an unsecure line, and not at the wrong end of a gun. Something a bit more friendly.”

  “How do we do that? You could be armed next time, and I can’t come back from the dead.”

  “I didn’t do that, I wasn’t dead. I can be killed. It’s just harder. And it still hurts to be shot.”

  “So you say. How and where? And don’t you think they are listening right now?”

  “Possibly.” She sighed, audibly. “Look, I’m sick of being their slave. I have to get out from under, no matter how dangerous it is. So we have to meet, and we have to do it soon, before they can keep me from giving you everything. And I need your help too. You must have contacts. You spec ops guys always keep in touch.”

  “Maybe. So if they are listening, why don’t they cut this line?”

  “You know, it’s not like on TV. They can do a lot but they’re only human. Don’t give them too much credit.”

  “Or too little.”

  “Yeah. And even if they could, they would want to hear where we are going to meet. They'll be waiting if they can.”

  “Well, you’re the secret agent,” I said sarcastically. “How do we do it without getting caught?”

  “Dan, I’m just a research analyst that happened to get cancer. I’m not a field operative. But I picked up a few things in the last couple of years, so here’s what we’re going to do. Go to a nearby shopping center drugstore. Don’t tell me which one. Go buy a fresh prepaid cell phone. Call this number.” She rattled off a phone number. “Add the number of shots I fired at you to the digit in that position. Get it?”

  "Got it." Right, I thought. Add four to the fourth digit. I wrote it down on a scrap of paper, stuck it in my pocket. I couldn’t trust my memory.

  “Call that number in half an hour exactly. First and last nu
mber you ever dial on that phone. We should be able to talk freely on that connection for long enough to arrange a meet. As soon as we have, you stomp on the phone and throw the pieces into the nearest storm drain. Got it? And do the same with your own cell phone, right now. They might be able to track it.”

  “Okay…”

  “And don’t go home after that. Take anything valuable you can carry, but somewhere along the line you will have to ditch your own vehicle. I don’t think they have a tracker on it but they will eventually. And get as much cash as you can out of just one ATM near the drugstore. Then drive away and make that call.”

  “Got it.” I think. Keep my focus. It was getting hard. My head hurt. She hung up.

  I slammed an energy drink and dropped two black-market but genuine Ritalin. I stuck the bottle in my pocket, grabbed an old ruck and started packing. Magazines and ammo, a box of granola bars, three bottles of water, the other two cans of energy drink, my work badge and ID, and my runaway packet containing twenty grand cash in several foreign currencies and two passports, one mine, one Canadian with a different name.

  I may not be a covert field operative but any special ops guy learns a few things in the black world, and I wouldn’t visit that ATM. I grabbed my travel Bible, tossed it into the rucksack. I might need it, and I was sure to need the twelve hundred bucks I kept zipped inside it. It made me feel better anyway. Sorry, Lord, and please help me out of this one.

  I threw in a few other things I thought I might want.

  I put on a hoodie, then a windbreaker. It was still cold on the East Coast, especially at night, and the sun was going down. I threw my laptop into the ruck, too. Then I booted up my desktop computer and put in a suicide code, watched the special software start to burn my hard drive one sector at a time. They wouldn’t get anything off that. Then I smashed my cell phone.

  I also grabbed my M4 in its case, ten full magazines, my Remington 870 pump shotgun, and my Army surplus ammo box, heavy with boxes of cartridges. The last thing I tossed into my van was my aid bag. Everything imaginable from band-aids to Benzedrine, scalpels to syringes.