Текст книги "Darwin's children"

Автор книги: Грег Бир

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Middleton worked to rearrange accommodations so that they could set up a morgue in the main gymnasium, adjacent to the infirmary. By eleven, the bodies had been removed from the parking lot and placed out of the sun.

Augustine estimated they had perhaps ten or fifteen hours before the dead would become a horrible nuisance, and twenty before they became a health hazard.

At noon, Augustine fell over after stumbling, half-blind with exhaustion, between a row of inmate tents. The children carried him back to the infirmary, with the help of DeWitt.

There, DeWitt fed Augustine a little canned soup, gave him some water. He said he was feeling better and went back out with the rested first team.

All through the morning and afternoon, their labors were watched by rows of stone-faced National Guard troops patrolling beyond the razor wire perimeter fences.

At two in the afternoon, Augustine was compelled once again to go up to the office and lie down. Dicken emerged from the research lab with another bag full of specimen kits and met him there.

Four children who had worked with the teams slept in the corner, arms around each other, snoring lightly.

Dicken looked down on his former boss. Augustine was trembling, but his face had lost that distant, defeated look.

“You are a surprising fellow, Mark,” Dicken admitted.

“Not really,” Augustine croaked. He touched his throat. “Sorry. My voice is shot. How's the lab work going?”

“Your turn,” Dicken said, and bent down to draw blood. When he was finished, he had Augustine scrape a plastic depressor on his tongue, and sealed that into a little plastic bag.

“Anything conclusive?” Augustine asked.

“Still getting specimens from the staff.”

“What next?”

“I'm going out into the field with Toby. Carry on while you rest. Can't let an old bastard like you act the humanitarian all by your lonesome.”

Augustine nodded. “Conversion of Saul. Go forth,” he advised piously, and crossed the air between them.

Dicken stretched. His whole body felt stiff.

Augustine rolled on his side. “I'm not doing this out of pure charity, I confess,” he murmured. Dicken bent over to hear the soft words. “I have done a nasty thing, Christopher. I have played a card I vowed I would never play, to give my enemies—our enemies—the rope I need to hang them all.”

“What card?” Dicken said.

“I'm still a bastard. But I do begin to understand them, Christopher.”

“The children?”

“All our sweet little albatrosses.”

“Good for you,” Dicken said, his neck hair prickling, and turned to leave.

48

PENNSYLVANIA

The sun was high in the sky when Kaye raised her head. She might have slept for another hour or two; she did not remember.

She rolled over on the dock.

It's gone,she said. It was a dream. Or worse.

She stood and brushed off her jeans, prepared to feel a resigned sadness. I should get a checkup. There's been so much stress . . .Her nose and forehead still felt stuffy. Was that a symptom of embolism or a burst aneurysm? Had wires crossed in her head, pouring signals from one side of the brain to the other? A short circuit?

She turned to look back along the dock at the house, took a step . . .

And let out a squeak like a surprised mouse. She stretched out her arms.

The presence was stillwith her. Quiet, calm, other; patient and real. At the same time Kaye was relieved and terrified.

She ran to the cabin. Mitch knelt on the floor beside Stella. He looked up as she came through the porch door. His hair was tousled and his face looked like a rumpled rag.

“Her fever's gone, I think,” Mitch said, searching Kaye's features. His brows twitched. “The spots are smaller. The spots on her butt are gone.”

Stella rolled over. Her cheeks had regained more of their color. The sleeping bag was gone, and in its place Mitch had laid out an air mattress covered with a bright yellow sheet and a lime green blanket.

Kaye stared at them both. Her hands hung by her sides, her shoulders slumped.

“Are you all right?” Mitch asked.

Stella rubbed her eyes and reached out to Kaye. Their fingers touched and Kaye moved in and gripped her hand.

“You smell different,” Stella said.

Kaye bent down and hugged her daughter as fiercely as she dared.

“She's asleep again.” Mitch rejoined Kaye in the cabin's small, neat kitchen. “She looks better, doesn't she?”

“Yes. Much.” Kaye bit the inside of her lip and glanced at her husband. “The Mackenzies laid in a wide selection of teas,” she said. She opened the box of teabags, confused, desperate.

Mitch returned her look, patient but tired. “Does she need more medicine?”

“Her neck doesn't hurt. Her head doesn't hurt. She's not feverish. I removed the needle because she drank some orange juice. I don't think she'll need any more antiviral.”

“She wet the sleeping bag.”

“I know. Thank you for changing it.”

“You were on the dock. You were asleep.”

Kaye looked out the kitchen window at the dock, now bright in the full sun. “You should have awakened me.”

“You looked peaceful. I'm sorry if I said anything strange last night.”

“You?” She laughed and fumbled the box of tea bags, picked up the spilled ones, then took down two mugs from a rack over the kitchen window. One mug said Kiss a Clown, You Know You Want to.The other was from Smith College, gold emblem of a gate on dark blue. “Not at all,” Kaye murmured, and filled a kettle with water. Somewhere, a pump started chuckling, and the water jerked from the tap, finally flowing in a steady stream. She swished her hand back and forth, fingers spreading through the coldness.

Not at all the same.

“How are we, Kaye?” Mitch asked, standing beside her at the sink.

“Stella is going to be fine,” Kaye said before she could think.

“How are we,Kaye?”

Kaye reached out and gripped Mitch's hand on the counter. She had not spent much time lately simply touching her husband. He had been gone so much, and so often, of course.

She must have looked miserable and lost. But what she felt was very, very physical.

Mitch pulled her close. He was always the one to make the first move; except that she had made the move that had produced Stella. Mitch had held back, worried about Kaye, or perhaps just scared at the thought of being a parent to a new kind of human being. They had been so in love, and the problem was, Kaye could not answer Mitch's question now, not truthfully, because she did not know.

There was still love. What kind of love? “We are going to be better,” she said into his shoulder. “There is certainly better to be.”

“They shouldn't hound us,” he said with the boyish sternness of the night before.

“I don't think we have any control over that.”

“We won't stay here long,” he said, and glared out the window at the woods, the dock, the sunshine. “This place is too nice. I don't trust it.”

“It isnice. Why not stay a while? The Mackenzies would never tell anyone.”

Mitch brushed her cheek with his palm. “Their son is in a camp. The children in the camps are getting sick.”

Kaye drew her eyebrows together. She could not follow this line of reasoning.

“Mark Augustine has been looking for you, for us. He's been waiting for the right moment to reel us in. The illness is scaring people badly. This is his moment.”

Kaye squeezed his forearm hard, as if to punish him.

“Ow,” he said.

She loosened her grip. “We need to keep Stella quiet and calm. She needs to rest for a few days at least. She can't rest in a bouncing Jeep.”

“All right,” Mitch said.

“We'll stay here,” Kaye said. “Will it be okay?”

“It'll have to be,” Mitch said.

Kaye leaned her head against Mitch's chest. Her eyes lost focus and then closed. “Is she still asleep?” she asked.

“Let's check,” Mitch said, and they walked together into the living room.

She was. Kaye took Mitch's hand and led him into the bedroom. They took off their clothes, and Kaye pulled back the covers on the bed until the bottom sheet was completely revealed.

“I need you,” she said.

Her fingers on his lips smelled of tea leaves.

49

OHIO

Dicken had prepared and racked up his seventy specimen sets. He used a Kim Wipe to take the sting of sweat out of his eyes. His sense of urgency was extreme but counterproductive. He could work no faster than produced good results. Anything less would be worse than not having worked at all.

He had labored nine hours straight, first separating and classifying the specimens based on his labels and field notes, then preparing them for the automated lab equipment. Most of the manual labor involved preparing specimens and racking them up for runs through the instruments.

PCR instruments had been the size of large suitcases when he had been a student. Now he could hold one in the palm of his hand. The racks carried what had been the equivalent of a whole building full of equipment fifteen years ago.

Oligos—small but highly specific segments of DNA mounted in each tiny square cell of the whole-genome array chips—attached themselves to complementary segments of RNA expressed by the cell, including viral genes, if any, and labeled them with fluorescent markers. Scanners would count the markers and approximate their positions in the chromosome sequence.

From a prepared set of serological fractions, the sequencers would amplify and analyze the exact genetic code of any viruses in the samples. The proteomizers would list all proteins found within the targeted cells—both viral and host proteins. Proteins could then be matched by the Ideator to the open reading frames of the sequenced genes.

All this would give him a road map of the disease at the cellular level.

He tapped commands into the server controlling the lab machines. Fortunately, the code gaining entry to this computer had been simple to guess. He had tried combinations of JURIE and ARAM and, finally, ARAMJURIE#1, and that had worked.

The lab filled with humming and faint clicking, first to his right, then to his left. Dicken stood up and checked the progress of the little plastic tubes marching in their metal tracks one by one into the prissy little mouths of the white-and-silver machines. He had to admire the way the doctors had set up the lab. It was economical, the equipment neatly arranged, with good flow-through from task to task.

Jurie and Pickman had known their business.

Still, virus hunters who fled at the first signs of a disease were not highly regarded by their peers. Very likely, Jurie and Pickman had never chased down viruses in the field. They had behaved more like lab lizards, pale from lack of tropical sun, utter cowards when confronted by their real prey.

For a moment, Dicken felt a chill. How dumb of him not to think of it earlier. Jurie and Pickman had already done the work, discovered the results; that was why they had run away. The results had been very bad.

But Dicken had found no sign of specimen kits anywhere in the lab. The equipment had barely been used, it was so new.

The chill passed, but slowly.

An hour later, he tapped the space bar on the keyboard to turn off the screen saver. A flashing green bar with “Eureka!” written across it told him he had results. The results were displayed first as thumbnails on a grid, then, at his command, as a slide show.

With grim satisfaction, Dicken saw that he had isolated a recombined variety of unencapsulated RNA virus from the blood and sputum of all the afflicted children, in titers sufficient to suggest massive infection. No other titers were so prominent.

From the beginning, seeing the buccal lesions and stomatitis, Dicken had suspected coxsackie A, known to cause most of the symptoms in the sick SHEVA children. But this strain was seldom associated with fatal illness. Coxsackie B, however, sometimes produced myocarditis, inflammatory heart disease, in infants and children. According to Dr. Kelson, myocarditis was a possible cause of death in the outbreak. Kelson had said, “There's massive tissue damage. The heart just stops.”

Coxsackie A and B typically spread by fecal contact or exchange of saliva. He did not know of any historical instances where it had spread by skin contact or in aerosols—droplets of moisture from breath or sneezing—or through residues left on surfaces, yet those kinds of transmission were necessary to explain the outbreak's rapid and pervasive expansion.

Something had changed. Coxsackie A or B, or both, had suddenly become easier to spread, and targeted to a particular population not heretofore known to be vulnerable to most common childhood viruses.

Now that he knew the type of virus, he could focus on the origin of the disease and its etiology—how it had mutated, how it spread, and where it would be expected to spread next.

Dicken typed in a request for numerical results from each set of specimens, with identification of individuals and their circumstances. The computer prepared a table, but it was complicated and unintuitive.

Dicken took out a piece of paper and began organizing the results in his own favored plot. Using a small marker, he drew three large circles on the paper. Within the first circle he swooped a C, representing the children. Inside he drew a smaller circle, labeled IC for Infected Children. Outside the first, he drew a second large circle and labeled it BT for brave teachers and staff, those who had remained.

The third circle he labeled Tr, for traitors, those who had fled.

He picked up a red felt-tip pen and began categorizing the specimen ID numbers and marking them + or – for their viral status. He then recorded them within the appropriate circles. Two of the circles rapidly filled with numbers and status marks. For now, there were no numbers in the Tr circle—he was leaving that open in case information from outside became available.

He now had points of proximity or actual contact and, presumably, opportunities for viral transmission. The pattern he saw emerging was already clear, but he refused to jump to conclusions. He did not trust either intuition or instinct. He trusted hard facts, indisputable associations, and repeated correlations.

He drew the results a second way, in columns and rows. When he had completed his chart, he drew a new table, reversing the order, and filled the boxes with the categorized numbers.

Dicken cleaned up his work and tapped the plastic end of the pen on the columns, marching down, climbing back up, sweeping the marker to the right across the rows, color-coding the associations.

Any way he drew it out, the pattern was clear.

Within the special treatment center, children who had had no contact with teachers or other students for more than three days had not contracted the virus. Eight children had been in isolation cells and had been abandoned when the staff evacuated. Three had died, but all of their specimens tested negative.

Five hours ago, Middleton had phoned the lab to tell Dicken that one of the rescued children had fallen ill, and Kelson said she was likely to die. That child had almost certainly been exposed after her “rescue.”

Dicken had taken specimens from six children who had been locked in a shower room by a fleeing teacher, and not found until late yesterday. One had died from lack of special medication. None had had any contact with teachers or staff for the past forty-eight hours. Their specimens tested negative.

DeWitt and Middleton had identified fifty children whom they knew had had close contact with teachers and staff in the past sixty hours. Of these, forty had fallen ill, and twenty had died. All of their specimens tested positive. Somehow, ten had managed to avoid exposure.

He looked over the results for twenty-two teachers, staff, and security officers. All had had continuous contact with infected children for the past forty-eight hours. They were exhausted, stressed, worn down. Six of these—four nurses from the main pool and one teacher from the special treatment wing, and the counselor, Dewitt—tested positive for the virus, but in low titers compared to infected children. None showed symptoms of infection.

Neither he nor Mark Augustine tested positive.

Dicken held up his chart once more. The conclusions were compelling.

Only infected SHEVA children showed symptoms.

SHEVA children lacking recent adult contact tested negative for the virus and showed no symptoms.

Contagion did not spread from the children to adults with much efficiency, if at all; and if it was passed on, did not cause illness in adults.

Contagion probably didspread from child to child, but the chain always began with children who had had recent contact with adults.

He had not gathered specimens from every child, alive or dead, or from all the adults that had been at the school; it was possible that an asymptomatic child was the source; it was also possible that exposed adults would get ill, eventually.

But he doubted it. The children were almost certainly not the source. And adults did not get sick. The river flowed in only one direction, downstream from teachers and staff, adults, to the new children.

The computer chimed again. Dicken looked at the screen. The Ideator had identified a sequence from its standard human genomic library. He touched a box on the screen. It expanded outward, showing a gene map for an obscure and defective HERV. Coxsackie viruses—for that matter, the superfamily of Picornaviridae—had never been known to recombine with legacy retroviral genes. Yet he was looking at a protein traced to a gene from the suspect virus, and it was very similar—90 percent homologous—to a protein once coded for by an ancient human endogenous retrovirus found in two chromosomes.

The presence of the protein converted a relatively benign RNA virus into one that killed, in large numbers.

He typed in another search. The Ideator scanned the Genesys bank for a match within the 52-chromosome genome of the new children. According to the Genesys bank, that particular defective primordial HERV did not exist in any SHEVA child.

Both of its copies had been discarded during the supermitotic splitting and rearrangement of the old chromosomes.

Dicken stared at the screen for several minutes, thinking furiously. His vision blurred. He grabbed the crumpled wipe and dabbed again at his face. His left leg cramped. He pushed away from the bench and walked around the small lab room, bracing on tables, equipment.

What Augustine and the Emergency Action people feared most had happened. Ancient viruses had somehow self-corrected and contributed one or more novel genes to a common virus, producing a deadly disease. But the recombination had not taken place in SHEVA-affected children.

It had begun in adults.

Adults were creating viruses that could infect and kill the SHEVA children. Those same viruses did not harm the adults. Dicken could yet be sure, but he suspected that the viral protein took advantage of yet another protein expressed only in the children—two units not in themselves toxic, but lethal in combination.

A new role for viruses: agents of a species-level immune response. Biological warfare, one generation against another.

An old species trying desperately to kill the new? Or just an awful mistake, a slip-up with deadly consequences?

He secured the samples, backed up the computer files, made a set of printouts, locked up the lab, and brutally shoved the outer door of the research building. It slammed open, and he walked out into the glare of the afternoon sun.

50

PENNSYLVANIA

Mitch had put on one of George Mackenzie's white terry robes to check on Stella. He now lay on the bed beside Kaye, the robe ridiculously short over his long legs. His breathing was even. She could feel his hand, large and wide, with long, thick fingers, resting on her arm.

Kaye rolled over and put her head on his chest, where the robe had pulled open. “Have I been acting a little crazy?” she asked.

Mitch shook his head. “Defensive.”

“Do you remember before we were together? You were doing archaeology. I was working away madly, and confused.”

“I wasn't doing much archaeology,” Mitch said. “I've been out of action for longer than I've known you. My own damned fault.”

“I loved your rough hands. All the calluses. What would we be without Stella?”

Mitch's eyes narrowed. Wrong question.

“Right,” Kaye said. She lay back on the pillow. “I insisted. We don't have any other life now.”

“I helped,” Mitch said.

“I've neglected you. In so many ways.”

Mitch shrugged.

“What do you want for Stella?” Kaye asked.

“A reasonably normal life.”

“What will that be? She isn't like us, not really.”

“She's more like us than she's different.”

Kaye wiped her eyes with the back of her hands. She could still feel the caller, and when she touchedit with her thoughts, waves of comfort surged through her and her eyes flowed over. She could not understand this feeling of glorious ease in the midst of their fear.

Mitch touched her cheek. His finger gently dabbed the wet corner of one eye.

“What's it like to have a stroke?” she asked. “Or a seizure?”

“You're the doctor,” Mitch said, taken aback.

“Sam had a stroke,” Kaye said. Sam was Mitch's father.

“He went down like a tree,” Mitch said.

“He was paralyzed and he died in a couple of hours.”

“It was fast. What are you getting at?”

“Do people have seizures that make them feel good? They wouldn't go to the doctor for that, would they?”

“I've never heard of such a thing,” Mitch said.

“But it wouldn't be reported, would it, unless they happened to catch it . . . on an MRI or CAT scan or something. The brain is so mysterious.”

“What brings this on?” Mitch asked. “We make love and you talk about having good strokes.” He tried to smile. “It's called having an orgasm, little lady.”

Kaye lifted her head and rolled over to face him, refusing to be amused. “Have you ever felt something or someone touch your thoughts? Approving of everything about you, filling you with understanding?”

“No-o-oo,” Mitch said. He did not like this conversation at all. There was a glow about Kaye's face that reminded him of when she was pregnant, a soft and intimate light in her eyes.

“Is it rare? What do people do, who do they talk to, when it happens that way?”

“What way?”

Kaye sat up and put her hands on his shoulders, staring at him imploringly, helpless. “Is that what makes people religious?”

The look on Mitch's face was so serious, she had to smile. “Maybe I'm becoming a priestess. A shaman.”

“Generally,” Mitch began, putting on a professorial tone, “shamans are a little crazy. The tribe feeds them and puts them to work. Shamans are more entertaining than reading entrails or tossing knucklebones.”

Kaye clenched her jaw. “I'm trying to understand something.”

“Out on the dock, did you feel like you were having a stroke?” Mitch asked, unable to keep the concern from his voice.

“I don't know.” She smiled as if at a pleasant memory. “It's still with me.”

“You're pregnant again, morning sickness?”

“No, damn it,” Kaye said, poking his arm. “You're not listening.”

“I'm not hearing anything I can understand. Tell me, straight . . . did it feel like an episode, a breakdown? We've been under a lot of stress.” He stood up by the side of the bed, leaving the short robe behind. Kaye watched him, his forearms and chest and the tops of his shoulders covered with coarse hair, and her gaze dropped to his genitals hanging at postcoital parade rest, waving with the nervous swing of his arms.

She laughed.

This stopped Mitch cold. He stood like a statue, staring down on her. He had not heard Kaye laugh like that, at him, at the ridiculousness of life, in well over a year, maybe two; he couldn't remember the last time.

“You sound happy,” he said.

“I'm not happy,” Kaye insisted indignantly. “Life's a bowl of shit, but our daughter . . .” Her face crumpled. Through her fingers, she sobbed, “She's going to live, Mitch. That's a blessing, isn't it? Is that what I'm feeling—thankfulness, relief?”

“Thankful to what?” Mitch said. “The god who gives little children nasty diseases?”

Kaye spread out her arms, gesturing with her fingers at the bedroom, the lace coverlet, wood-paneled walls, pressed flowers under glass in ornate gold frames, the decorative water pitcher on the little white wicker table by the nightstand. Mitch watched her puffy eyes and red face with real concern. “We areluckier than others,” she said. “We are so lucky our daughter is alive.”

“God didn't do that,” Mitch said, his voice turning sour. “We did that. Godwould have killed her. Godis killing thousands like Stella right now.”

“Then what am I feeling?” Kaye asked. She held out her hands and Mitch gripped them. A blackbird sang. Mitch's eyes went to the window.

“You're bouncing back,” he said, his anger smoothing. “We can't feel like shit all the time or we'd just give up and die.” He pulled her up on her knees on the bed, and expertly hugged her until her back popped.

“Ow,” she said.

“That did not hurt,” Mitch said. “You feel better now.”

“I do,” Kaye affirmed, arms around his neck.

Stella pushed through the door. “I've got this thing on my wrist,” she said, tugging at the medical tape. “My skin hurts.” She stared at them, naked, together. There was no use keeping secrets from her; she could smell everything in the room. Stella had seemed to instinctively understand the whys and wherefores of sex even as a toddler. Nevertheless, Mitch released Kaye, swung his body away, and reached for the robe.

Kaye pulled the coverlet into a wrap and went to her daughter. Stella leaned into her arms and Kaye and Mitch carried her back to her bed.

51

OHIO

“Our last link to the outside world,” Augustine said, holding up a satellite phone. “Secret Service, bless them. But I had to think of it. They're hiding out in their cars, and they did not volunteer.” He climbed the flight of steps to Trask's office. Dried vomit—not his own—ran in streaks down his leg.

Dicken sidled up the steps behind Augustine. “The school has a secure server. I have Jurie's password for the lab computers, but not the password to go outside the school.”

“I know. What are we looking at, anyway?”

“Coxsackie, a new strain,” Dicken said. “The children have hand, foot, and mouth disease.”

Augustine pushed the door to the office open. “Like the cattle?”

Dicken shook his head. “You're tired. Listen to me. Not foot and mouth, it's HFMD. Hand, foot, and mouth. Common childhood viral infection.”

“Recombined?” Augustine sat behind the desk and propped the phone on the desk. He punched a number, got a rasping and wheedling noise, then swore and punched another.

“Yes,” Dicken said.

“With old endogenous viruses?”

“Yes.”

“Shit. How is that possible?”

“It's a mechanism I haven't seen before.”

“Then why bother to call?” Augustine stopped in mid-dial, disgusted. His fingernails were black with dirt and secretions. “It's all over.”

“No, it isn't. The recombined genes can't possibly be from the children,” Dicken said. “They don't have them. They were excised and discarded when their chromosomes reformed during supermitosis.”

Augustine raised his chin. “ Wehelped the virus recombine?”

Dicken nodded. “It may have traveled in us and mutated silently for years. Now it's making its move—against the children.”

“Proof?”

“Proof enough,” Dicken said. “Most of what we need, anyway. We can send in my results. The CDC just needs to do their own analysis, compare my findings with their own. I'm sure they'll match. Then, we tell Ohio to back off and get Emergency Action to calm down. This is not a killer plague—not for us.”

“Will anyone listen?” Augustine asked.

“They have to. It's the truth.”

Augustine did not seem convinced that would be enough to turn the tide. “Who's the best contact at CDC?”

Dicken thought quickly. “Jane Salter. She's in charge of statistical analysis at National Center for Infectious Diseases. She never did put in with the Emergency Action people, but they respect her judgment. She's trusted and objective.” He took the handset from Augustine and dialed Salter's direct number in Atlanta.

They were in luck, finally. The call went through, and Salter answered in person.

“Jane, it's Christopher.”

“The famous Christopher Dicken? Long time, Christopher. Forgive me, I'm a little loopy. I've been up for days, crunching numbers.”

“I'm in Ohio, at the Goldberger School. I have something important.”

“About a certain recombined Coxsackie virus?”

“That's the one. Population dynamics, virus flow, analysis,” Dicken said.

“You don't say.”

“You'll want my results.”

He heard a click.

“I'm recording, Christopher,” Salter said. “Make it quick. There's a key meeting in five minutes. Go or no go, if you know what I mean.”

Augustine looked up at a distant roaring noise. He walked to the window and looked across the traffic circle, beyond the main gate. “What the hell is that?” He swung up a pair of binoculars from the windowsill and peered through them. “Helicopters.”

DeWitt stamped up the stairs, screaming, “Helicopters are coming!”

“Troops moving in?” Dicken asked.

“They wouldn't dare. We're in quarantine.” Augustine tried to hold the image steady. “They're civilian. Who in hell would fly them down here?”

“Someone bringing in supplies,” Dicken suggested.

“Is that possible?”

“Someone rich who has a kid here,” Dicken said.

“There's two of them,” Augustine said. “Not nearly enough.” Then, his voice breaking, “Goddamn. I don't believe it. They're shooting. The troops are shooting at them!”

“What's happening?” Salter asked on the phone.

“Just listen to me,” Dicken said. He could hear the crackle of assault weapons on the school perimeter. “And for God's sake, work fast.”

He began reading her his results.

52

PENNSYLVANIA

The air was cooling and clouds were sliding in above the trees. Mitch sat on the dock. Kaye was in the house, sleeping beside Stella in the big bed, which Stella preferred now that she was feeling a little better.

It could be days before she could travel, but Mitch knew their time would come sooner than that. Somehow, though, he could not bring himself to roust them and pile them in the back of the Jeep.

It wasn't just Stella's health that concerned him.

There was something else, and small as it might seem in retrospect, it disturbed him, the way Kaye had looked, talking about what she had felt on the dock. If after all these years, his partner, his wife, was faltering . . .