Текст книги "The Eden Plague"

Автор книги: David VanDyke

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

“Oh.” A look of horror came over her face. “Do you really think so? But it would be free to everyone! Even now, it could be passed from person to person. It’s only contagious through bodily fluids...”

He went on, relentlessly. “But people in the government would want to control anything so valuable. Sell it, keep it for themselves or their own citizens first, or blackmail others with it…or finish developing it as a super-soldier serum. No matter how you slice it, it’s power. And word of it would wreck the medical establishment overnight. No need for doctors or hospitals or drug companies anymore, when perfect health is free. Millions thrown out of work, trillions of dollars of value lost, the stock markets crashing, economic depression.”

“But it will free up mankind to do so much more!”she cried.

“Not until after a lot of chaos. And how about overpopulation?” asked the team’s resident pessimist, Skull. “If everyone is healthy and no one dies…”

“Yes, that’s a problem,” Arthur interjected. “The perfected Eden Plague would probably lower fertility, but not the version we have now. Quite the opposite, in fact, because healthy men and women will likely have more children.”

A nagging in the back of Daniel’s head finally came to the fore. “Wait a minute…this is the downside to society, to public disclosure, uncontrolled information. But Elise, you said there was a downside for the company. What is it?”

“You haven’t figured it out yet?” she asked him.

“I think I have part of it…it’s about the mental health, isn’t it? And conscience?”

“Exactly. The longer you have it, the more emotionally stable and also altruistic you seem to become.This version of the virus causes what we call the ‘virtue effect.’ Many people that get it will not be able to even contemplate making offensive war, or committing violent crimes. Even emotional violence or oppression will become harder and harder. It doesn’t inhibit abstract thinking, as far as we know. It just creates an overactive conscience. Probably too much of one.”

“And –” Daniel broke in excitedly, “– and with people’s fear of disease and violence removed, people who don’t have the Eden Plague will find it hard to oppress or bully people either. But the bigwigs won’t want to give up their status, their ability to oppress people or order them around. And a world full of Edens wouldn’t be intimidated or controllable. It would be the end of the power structure as we know it! Even if it was kept secret. In fact, it’s a ticking time bomb. Eventually it will come to light, if they keep it around. Someone will talk, or use it to cure someone they love, or take it for themselves…and anyone that does becomes the enemy of the power structure. Automatic excommunication.”

“Ahem…” Roger cleared his throat. “That is correct. I believe carriers will be treated with jealousy, suspicion, hatred and fear. They will be targets of oppression, quarantine, imprisonment and perhaps extermination. The four infected people here may be the only carriers left in the entire world. Perhaps there are others, hiding somewhere, in Russia or other parts of Asia. Or perhaps the Soviets wiped it out, all but those samples that someone probably stole during the chaos when their protocols and controls collapsed.”

“That will happen if only a small number of people have it. If millions have it…they can’t quarantine and oppress everyone!” said Elise passionately.

“They’ll try. It threatens the established order,” Roger answered dispassionately, then fell quiet.

They sat there in silence for a time, listening to the rushing of air and the humming of wheels on the highway. They were nine people in a moving convoy connected by radio and by the enormity of what they possessed. They might hold the salvation of humanity inside their bodies. Or perhaps its ruin.

Daniel realized he didn’t want that responsibility. He also realized that he didn’t have any alternative.

-15-

After a while Daniel asked. “You said four people? What about you two, Arthur and Roger? Why don’t you have the Eden Plague?”

“We didn’t infect ourselves because we didn’t want to be as restricted as Elise was. We also didn’t want to have everyone carrying it in case we had to do something ruthless. It is ironic. And there still might have been some unknown problem. What if some years from infection, it suddenly made a horrible left turn – aging, cancer, immune system breakdown. Who could know?”

“But that’s all just guesses. What’s wrong with it for sure? Why isn’t it perfected?” Larry asked. “And can I still…you know…with a woman?”

Elise laughed. “Haven’t you been listening? Yes, and you’re fertile, too, if you want kids.”

Daniel sat bolt upright, an expression of wonder on his face.

Elise looked at him curiously. Her hand had crept back into his, and now she gripped it hard, concerned.

Daniel squeezed back and broke out in a big smile. “Never mind…it’s all good.” He relaxed back in the seat. He wasn’t going to talk about personal plans in front of seven extra people, but the thought kept going around and around in his head. If it healed everything else…it should have healed that too. We could have kids. A son to carry on my name, and the tradition of service.

He couldn’t stop grinning.

“It’s not perfected because it’s not,” Arthur spoke up, sounding a bit cross. “Genetic engineering is complex and difficult. And I have to pee. Can we take a break?”

“Next truck stop,” answered Zeke.

Thirty minutes later everyone had had a break and a takeout meal and were back on the road. Daniel readied his next question, one he’d had from the start. “So Elise…why me, anyway?”

She laughed wryly. “Why anyone? It had to be someone. You had been in the special operations community. You still had your clearances. You had no family other than your father left alive. Only child, highly motivated, high moral index. And ruthless when the mission called for it, but you didn’t enjoy killing; you were a combat lifesaver. And I was their first human test subject, but I wasn’t any kind of soldier. They wanted someone tough that could follow orders, but that wouldn’t go rogue. They wanted someone driven and ruthless because they thought the conscience problem could be overcome. At least, they wanted to test its limits. And you lived nearby. You popped out of the database. That’s pretty much it.”

“What database? The Air Force Personnel database would only show my service record and my retirement. You said ‘high moral index’ at my house too…”

Then it came to him.

“Oh, that slimy bastard. My shrink, Benchman. He collaborated. Turned over my medical records – broke his oath and my confidentiality. I should never have trusted him, I should have done what everyone in the service that wants to avoid trouble does, stay away from the psychiatrists. And…you saw my psych record too, didn’t you?” He suddenly knew he was right – knew now why she seemed to know him back then.

She hung her head. “Yes, I saw your file. I’m sorry, it wasn’t like I could refuse their orders. I just know they picked you out of some kind of pool of candidates. Then Jenkins said he’d do the recruiting, claimed he had the perfect approach. He came and got me, twisted my arm, you know the rest.”

“That approach got him killed.” Daniel mulled that over, ran the checklist of open items in his mind. “Hmm…back to what you said earlier. How could they overcome the conscience ‘problem’?” He asked this with faint sarcasm.

Elise pulled her hand away and crossed her arms before answering. “Doctor Durgan had some ideas. He got drunk and bragged to me once. Electroshock. Brain surgery. Personality conditioning techniques, drugs…it might be possible. Eden Plague is subtle and gentle by comparison. It shapes you with a kind of aversion therapy. The more harmful you yourself believe what you are doing is, the harder it will be to do. It’s based on your own basic beliefs about right and wrong. So you can perform surgery if you believe you are helping someone, but you can’t make those same cuts if you believe you are killing them. Unless you think the killing is morally right. Sincerely righteous.”

He thought for a moment, then asked another question. “One of you said most people infected would act better with emotional and mental health improvement…what about the other fraction?”

He felt Elise tense up beside him, and he looked at her. She dropped her eyes. “There are genetic wild cards, unpredictable effects. The EP isn’t perfect, and…maybe even a perfected EP wouldn’t fix everyone. Human brains and minds are just too complex. Our models predict some people, maybe people who are already mentally ill, psychopaths or sociopaths, wouldn’t be cured. The ones with no sense of right and wrong at all. Very few, but if millions were infected…”

Daniel went cold as he digested that. “So…if you genuinely believe killing someone was good for everyone…even the target…you could do it? Like a jihadist who believes he’s doing God’s will?”

Elise nodded. “I think so…it’s all theory right now.”

“Another downside. We’re playing with dynamite here.” Daniel mused aloud. “So we could end up with some kind of amoral superman in charge of the uninfected fearful masses, claiming to ‘protect’ them. That’s always the way people accumulate power. They claim patriotism; they say they are providing security. Play on people’s fear. Stalin did it, Hitler did it, and Mao. Though they didn’t follow it up with mass murder, McCarthy did it in the fifties and Cheney did it after 9/11. And whoever arises would be a true believer! Maybe someone who really thought he was helping people by enslaving them, and killing us Edens. With all the EP’s physiological advantages. Self-righteous psychopaths…it could make the Holocaust look mild by comparison.”

Elise looked into Daniel’s eyes, deliberately reached out to take his hands in hers. She shook them in time with her words. “I don’t know. I just – don’t – know.” Her eyes flicked toward Skull, in the front seat.

He forced his own away. Skull had been a sniper. Not that they were all bad, or even most, but a significant minority of snipers had serious problems coming back from war. Drawing a cold bead on enemy combatants, ending life after life from an impersonal distance, had to take a toll…unless he was already suited for it by a certain personality quirk. Unless he secretly liked it. Skull had wanted to execute the INS security, he’d wanted to liquidate the scientists…and he’d put a gun to Daniel’s chest.

Daniel wondered what would happen if Skull got infected. Which way would his tightly-wound psyche turn? How long would he keep following Zeke’s orders? What if he decided Zeke wasn’t himself anymore, with the Eden Plague in him?

It was the same excuse uninfected humanity would use for wiping them out, or cutting their brains up, he realized. They would say the infectees weren’t human anymore, and that would justify a whole legion of new Doctor Mengeles, the Nazi concentration camp experimenter. The others would say their will was not their own, that they were some kind of monsters, when in reality, they were the monsters.

All you had to do was take a visit to Dachau or Auschwitz or Srebrenica to see what kind of monsters humans could be. Humanity had always been brutally selfish; one slip, trip and fall away from lynch-mob violence, from downright evil. It wouldn’t take much of a breakdown in society to push them all across that line.

Because the non-Edens were now the weaker species, so they would be afraid of Plague carriers, he realized. That fear would push them into it. When people feared something they hated it and wanted to destroy it.

Daniel didn’t think the Eden Plague compromised his free will. It didn’t stop him being human. No more than being in love – with Elise? – or hating someone or being afraid or winning the lottery did. It was just one more piece of life. But once they got where they were going, things in their makeshift army might fall apart. The center might not hold. The fate of humanity might rest on just how this little group, these nine people, handled the next few days.

Daniel looked in Elise’s eyes and saw she was thinking thoughts in line with his.

Just then a cell phone rang.

Everyone looked around in confusion. A babble of voices came over the net.

“Shut up!” Zeke roared. “Where is it?”

Elise pulled the offending instrument out of a pocket. “I took it off of Karl…the guy that tried to shoot us.” She looked apologetic. “I’m sorry, I forgot until now!”

Daniel grabbed it, still ringing. He looked at the incoming number, pulled out a marker, and wrote it on his arm. Then he opened it up, pulled the battery and sim card out. “Just a minute…” He wiped their prints off it, then waited for the next overpass. Then threw the whole mess out and down at speed.

“Vinny, I took the caller’s number. If I use a disposable phone to call it, and they have a trace ready, how long do I have?”

Vinny answered, “At least thirty seconds, maybe a minute. After that, they will know what wireless cell you are calling from, which will snapshot our position within a couple of miles.”

“Thanks.” Daniel put the battery in his last disposable phone, sat there thinking about what to say. Then dialed. “Someone call out at five second intervals please.”

Ring.

“Jenkins.” A middle-aged male voice, rich, self-assured.

Daniel’s brain stuttered. He swallowed. He hoped he was wrong.

“Mister Jervis Andrew Jenkins the Third?” He asked.

“FIVE.”

“Yes. Who is this?”

“Sir…I’m sorry about your son. I apologize for my part in his death.”

A silence.

“TEN.”

“Markis? Daniel Markis? You have to come in. Everything depends on it.”

“Mister Jenkins, we have the Plagues. Both of them. Leave us alone. I can’t let them be used for what you want.”

“FIFTEEN.”

“What is it that I want?” he asked with forced amusement.

He’s stalling.

“The Plagues are ticking time bombs, and only my restraint will keep them from exploding. Leave us alone.”

“TWENTY.”

“We recovered enough from the lab to restart the research.”

“It will be too late. I’m hanging up now, before the trace. I truly am sorry about your son.”

“TWENTY-FIVE.”

Jenkins’ tone changed then, chill and vicious. “You son of a bitch, I’ll hunt you down for Andy’s sake, I swear to God I will –”

Daniel hung up. Took the battery out. Handed it to Elise. “Throw this away, will you?” He massaged his throbbing temples. He had no doubt Jenkins would try to do as he said.

***

A little while after they crossed into West Virginia they made a last stop for gas and food, then turned northward onto a nondescript two-lane that looked like it had last been repaved in the Eisenhower administration. It wended its way up into the central Appalachians, through towns with names like Cornstalk and Trout and Cold Knob, where bony women in faded pioneer dresses or worn jeans and tee shirts put their hands with cigarettes on their hips and stared suspiciously at them; where hard-eyed men in John Deere and Caterpillar caps spat tobacco juice from their rocking chairs on their front porches or out of their pickup truck windows; where every rickety house had an American flag on an angled pole nailed to the front post, and every store, no matter what kind, added “Bait and Tackle” and “Guns and Ammunition” and “Beer and Cigarettes” to its signage.

West Virginia was the only state to actually secede from the Confederacy to the Union, and they took their patriotism seriously. So did every one of their band, though Daniel was sure they all had their own ideas about how to apply it. He studied each of the men in turn.

This Appalachian backwater was a far cry from the thin splash of freeway suburbia along the interstate, where smiling cashiers fat with fast food asked, “Would you like fries with that?” in deliberately flattened accents. They almost expected the sound of banjos to come wafting through their opened windows.

Driving at mountain road speeds, twenty to forty, they turned off on an unmarked gravel track, still more or less northwards by the angle of the chill sunlight.

They passed by beautiful, rugged woodland with patches of snow lingering in the shady spots. They were glad of their high clearances and four wheel drives when they had to cross a shallow but swift stream of snowmelt that cut the road. Larry had to be shown how to engage his 4WD on the Escalade. To Daniel it didn’t look like he’d ever used it in urban Atlanta.

After another hour and progressively worsening terrain, they climbed a short way up a steep mountainside on what looked like a logging trail until they abruptly broke out onto a very wide, well-graded gravel highway. Turning sharply left, they climbed a couple of hundred yards more onto – into – an otherworldly landscape, a different world.

The road had leveled out and they drove through an unnaturally flattened plateau, with odd-shaped, artificial-looking hills scattered around. It appeared that a giant boy had played with his toy earthmovers, making arbitrary excavations and dumping dirt into cone-shaped sand-castle mounds, all sharp angles and straight sides. The whole thing was about a mile across, overgrown with a thin veneer of scrubby grass and thistle, and the gravel road they were on turned black. It put Daniel in the mind of a fantasy book he’d read as a boy, where the hero would shift through the thin shadowy layers between strange worlds with his mind, past an evil black road.

“Mountaintop removal mining,” Zeke remarked. “Blast off the top of the peak, scoop up the material and process it for coal or whatever other ore is in it. Repeat as necessary. Not very pretty, but efficient. And our salvation.”

He led the way in the Land Rover, turning off the black road that crossed the plateau toward the only remaining natural feature, a rising piece of the mountain that had not been removed. It loomed more than a thousand feet above, showing a covering of thick, undamaged natural forest. It was as if the miners had excavated up to the perimeter of this peak and decided to stop. Or maybe something convinced them to stop?

Zeke pulled the Land Rover to a halt, still well within the dug-out mining zone.

The rest of them pulled up in a line, getting out and stretching after the long drive. The men moved away from the lone woman in the group to pee behind the last SUV. Like so often happened, the lady was going to have to wait or squat behind a bush.

Daniel looked at Elise and smiled, shrugged sympathetically.

She had lifted her eyes to the sky, sneezed, then seemed to notice his gaze. A smile broke out warm on her face. “I hope wherever we’re going, we’re close,” she said, stepping over to him, and he embraced her.

Everything smelled of mountains. Clean. The afternoon sun felt warm but the air was biting with the chill of late winter. An eagle screamed high above, making lazy circles among the turkey buzzards riding a thermal over the warmer, exposed ground. Daniel held her closer.

“We are really beyond hicksville,” Larry remarked. It broke the mood as Daniel realized they had an audience, polite and benevolent, but even so…they pulled apart.

Daniel guessed Larry must be feeling invincible after coming back from those injuries. He knew better. No plague in the world would bring you back from a bullet to the brain, or one that tore through the heart. It wasn’t magic.

Opening up the back of the Jeep, Daniel reaching into an ice chest he’d packed full of food, and slapped together a sandwich, popping open a soda can. He left the chow out for other hungry people, making a gesture of invitation. Then he went over to see what Zeke was doing.

He watched as Zeke opened up a case and laid a topographical map on the hood of the Land Rover. Zeke took a lensatic compass out of his pocket and started doing a resection. Daniel realized that he was trying to locate something specific, old-school, without the GPSs they had dumped for fear of being traced.

Zeke took sightings on known points, in this case mountaintops, plotted the azimuths back from those points on the map, and found their exact position at the intersection of the plots. Once he had done that, he used a thin clear plastic military protractor to draw a line between their position and a point already marked on his map, measuring the angle. He then lifted the compass to his eye and sighted along it, turning until he was looking exactly along that bearing. He stared at something there for about fifteen seconds, fixing it in his mind. Then he turned back to the group, which by this time had formed a rough semicircle around him, watching. He rolled up the dummy cord attached to the compass, putting it in his pocket.

“Let me tell you a story,” Zeke began dramatically. “One day about ten years ago I got a funny call at my desk in the Pentagon. I was doing my hated staff tour and I really don’t know how the call got routed to me, but a lot of weird calls come to the Pentagon from concerned citizens about everything from UFOs to unexploded ordnance. This one was from a manager at a mining company who had run across some kind of old underground government installation in the course of their operations.” He pointed with an outstretched arm at where he had been looking just a moment ago. “Right there.”

“What is it?” Elise queried.

With the air of a showman, he responded, “I was hoping you would ask. I’ll show you. Follow along, kiddies, and don’t wander off.”

Zeke climbed back behind the wheel of the Land Rover, and the rest of them piled back into the other trucks. He led the way directly across the plateau, powering over head-high thistles and through brambles, the only things that would take root in the mine tailings and basalt, a thin layer of green. After about three hundred yards they approached the untouched mass of older-growth forest. Majestic evergreens, ash and oaks rose abruptly at the dividing line, with lots of snow patches on the ground where the sun touched only weakly.

Looking back under the trees, they could see a dilapidated cyclone fence, with rusted and unreadable signs hanging every ten yards or so on it. Some lay on the ground where they had fallen off. The Land Rover drove leftward along the tree line for a few seconds, then abruptly veered right, onto a barely-visible remnant of a concrete road. Thirty yards in, they came upon a still-standing steel-poled gate. The sign on this barrier was newer, and contained official warning phrases: “Restricted Area” and “Use of Deadly Force Authorized.”

Zeke hopped out, unlocked the new, heavy padlock on the chain that held it shut, then drove through. He must have been here before. Maybe the lock was his. They paused to let Spooky lock it up again.

There was some chatter over the net, but Zeke kept his mouth shut, probably enjoying the sense of mystery he had created. Daniel was curious, but then, he liked a mystery when nobody was trying to kill him because of it. He just kept his eyes open and tried to figure it out on his own.

They drove up the road, two hundred more yards of still-serviceable but overgrown concrete, until they came to an enormous set of double doors in the mountainside, hidden by trees that had grown up. The opening would be big enough to drive a five-ton military truck straight in if the doors were thrown back. Daniel figured Zeke wouldn’t have led them up here if he didn’t know how to get in.

The doors had a large wheel mechanism, like a ship’s pressure hatch, holding them shut, and a big handle next to a hooded boxy metal fitting. It looked like it would take two men to move the wheel, if it would turn at all in its current state of disrepair. Apparently someone had slapped a coat of paint on the door and mechanism a few years back and there was another of the steel warning signs bolted to the front.

When everyone had dismounted from the trucks in front of the doors, in the twilight under the trees, Zeke called out in a loud announcer’s voice, “Welcome to the Bunker: code name Sosthenes.”