Lock In (24 page)

“I have my glasses,” Vann said, but we went into the living room anyway, fired up the monitor to the news channel, which had a copy of Rees’s video. In the video she talked about the injustice of Abrams-Kettering, how it was causing suffering among so many of her clients, and how everyone was to blame. “There are no innocents among the non-Hadens,” she said. “They allowed this to happen. Cassandra Bell said it, and I believe it: This is a war on a disabled minority. Well, I am now a soldier in this war. And for me the battle starts tonight.”

“Do you believe this?” Vann asked me, as we watched the video again.

“Hell, no,” I said.

“You caught the reference to Cassandra Bell.”

“I did. Another act of violence, ostensibly perpetrated at her behest.”

“Anyone killed tonight?” Vann asked.

“Aside from Rees?” I asked. Vann nodded. “No. There were some people who were stampeded and other injuries, and property damage from the grenade. But the only person she shot at was you.”

“And you,” Vann said.

“I got hit,” I said. “But that was because I was protecting you.”

“And that would go against her story anyway,” Vann said. “So you and I know she was gunning for me but her story will muddy up the waters. When the morning shows go live tomorrow, they’re going to tie this into the Loudoun Pharma attack.”

“That sounds about right to me,” I said.

Vann didn’t say anything to this, but touched the monitor to bring up the latest news. The top story aside from Rees’s attack was the shooting at my parents’ house. Vann pulled up the story and watched it.

“A burglar,” Vann said, after the report ended.

“That’s what I told my parents to say.”

“Think it will float?”

“There’s no reason for it not to,” I said.

“How are your parents?” Vann asked.

“Now that they’ve got their people and responses in place they’ll be fine,” I said. “Dad’s in shock a little. Killing a man ends any thought of him running for Senate.”

“A man defending his home doesn’t play so poorly in most parts of Virginia,” Vann said.

“No, but it’s balanced out by the image of a really big angry black man with a shotgun,” I said. “Even Mom’s ancestors being gun runners for the Confederacy isn’t going to make up for that. So I’m pretty sure a party rep is going to come around tomorrow and tell him they would be delighted for him to endorse the candidacy of someone else.”

“Sorry.”

“It’ll be fine,” I said. “Eventually. Dad’s probably got a week of think pieces and commentary about him and the shooting to get through before he can do anything else. A normal person would be able to get through it in private. Dad has to worry about what it means for his
legacy
.”

“And the ‘burglar,’” Vann said.

“A Navajo named Bruce Skow,” I said.

“And he’s like Johnny Sani.”

“As far as we can tell so far, probably,” I said. “We’ll need to get into his head to confirm.”

“Another remote-controlled Integrator,” Vann said.

“Looks like,” I said.

Vann sighed and then pointed at the liquor store bag I still held in my hand, containing a bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon and a package of Solo cups. “Pour me some of that,” she said. “Make it a tall one.”

“How tall?” I asked.

“Don’t get me drunk,” Vann said. “But just short of that would be fine.”

I nodded. “Why don’t you head up to my room,” I said. “I’ll bring it up to you in a minute.” I pointed in the right direction and then went into the kitchen, which was a characteristically bare Haden kitchen, save for the pallets of nutritional liquid.

Tayla, whose room was on the first floor, saw me go in and followed. “You’re getting her a drink,” she said.

“The alternative to getting her one here was getting her one at a bar,” I said. “At least here I can cut her off if she gets sloppy.”

“What she really needs at this point is some sleep, not bourbon,” she said, pointing to the bottle.

“I’m not going to disagree with you on that,” I said, opening the bottle. “But she’s not going to do that at the moment. In which case I might as well make her comfortable because we need to do some work.”

“And how are you doing?” Tayla asked.

“Well, you know,” I said, opening the Solo cup package. “Today I fought with a ninja threep, saw two women view the last video from a dead relative, had a woman explode twenty feet from me, and watched my dad kill an intruder with a shotgun.” I took a cup and poured the bourbon into it. “If I had any sense I’d take this bottle and attach it to my intake tube.”

“I’ve seen people do that, actually,” Tayla said.

“Yeah?” I asked. “How does it work for them?”

“About as well as you’d expect,” Tayla said. “Haden bodies are sedentary and in general have low alcohol tolerances to start. Our digestive systems are used to taking in nutritional liquids, not actual food and drink. And then there’s the fact that the disease changes our brain structure, which for a lot of Hadens increases the propensity for addiction.”

“So they’re all fucked up, is what you’re saying.”

“What I’m saying is there’s nothing as fucked up as a Haden alcoholic.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said.

“You need sleep too,” Tayla said. “Professional opinion.”

“I’m not going to disagree with you on that, either,” I said. “But for all the reasons I’ve just outlined, I’m a little wired right now.”

“Is it always like this?” Tayla asked.

“My job?”

“Yes.”

“This is my first week on the job,” I said. “So, so far? Yes.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Like I wish I had decided to be the typical rich kid and been a sponge on my parents,” I said.

“You don’t really mean that,” Tayla said.

“No,” I said. “But at the moment I really want to feel like I did.”

Tayla came over and rested a hand on my arm. “I’m the house doctor,” she said. “If you need help you know where I am.”

“I do,” I said.

“Promise me you’ll try to get some sleep tonight.”

“I’ll try.”

“Okay.” She turned to go.

“Tayla,” I said. “Thanks for tonight. It means a lot to me that you helped my partner.”

“That’s my job,” Tayla said. “I mean, you saw me help a man who two minutes earlier was planning to bash my head in with a bat. I wouldn’t do any less for someone you care about.”

Chapter Twenty

“Y
OU TOOK YOUR
time,” Vann said, as I walked into the room.

“Tayla wanted to talk,” I said, walking the bourbon over to her. “She’s worried about the both of us.”

“Seems fair,” Vann said, taking the cup. “Both of us survived an assassination attempt tonight. I’m worried about the both of us too.” She took a sip from the cup. “Now,” she said. “I’m going to tell you a story.”

“I thought we were saving story time until after the march,” I said.

“We were,” Vann said. “But then your friend Tony showed up with his discovery, and then someone tried to put a bullet into my head. So I’ve decided that sooner is better than later for story time.”

“All right,” I said.

“This is going to wander a bit,” Vann warned.

“I’m all right with that,” I said.

“I’m forty,” Vann said. “I was sixteen when I got sick. This was during the first wave of infections, when they were still figuring out what the hell to do about it. I lived in Silver Spring and there was a party I wanted to go to with friends in Rockville, but Rockville was quarantined because there was a Haden’s outbreak. I didn’t care, because I was sixteen and stupid.”

“Like any sixteen-year-old,” I said.

“Exactly. So me and my friends got into a car, found a way in that didn’t have a roadblock on it, and went to the party. No one at the party looked sick to me when we got there, so I figured it wouldn’t be a problem. I finally got back home around three and my dad was waiting for me. He thought I was drunk and asked me to breathe so he could smell my breath. I coughed on him like an asshole and then I went to bed.”

Vann paused to take another sip out of her cup. I waited for what I knew was coming next.

“Three days later I felt like my entire body had swelled. I had a temperature, I was raspy, my head hurt. Dad was feeling the same way. My mother and my sister felt fine, so my dad told them to go over to her sister’s so she wouldn’t get sick.”

“Not a good idea,” I said. They had probably been infected but weren’t showing symptoms yet. That’s how Haden’s spread as far as it did.

“No,” Vann agreed. “But this was early days so they were still trying to figure these things out. They left and Dad and I watched TV and drank coffee and waited to feel better. After a couple of days we both thought the worst was over.”

“And then the meningitis hit,” I said.

“And then the meningitis hit. I thought my head was going to explode. My father called 911 and told them what was going on. They came to our house in hazmat suits, grabbed us, and sent us over to Walter Reed, which is where second-stage Haden’s victims were sent. I was there for two weeks. I almost died right at the beginning. They pumped some experimental serum in me that gave me a seizure. I tensed up so hard I ended up breaking my jaw.”

“Jesus,” I said. “What happened to your father?”

“He didn’t get any better,” Vann said. “The meningitis stage fried up his brain. He went into a coma a couple of days after we got to Walter Reed and died a month later. I was there when we unplugged him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks,” Vann said. She took another sip. “What really sucks is that my dad was one of those people who made a big fuss out of wanting to donate his organs when he died. But when he died, we weren’t allowed to donate any of his organs. They didn’t want someone to get his kidneys and the Haden virus too. We asked Walter Reed if they wanted to use his body for research, and they told us that they already had more bodies for that than they could use. So we ended up cremating him. All of him. He would have hated that.”

“What happened to your mother and sister?” I asked. “Did they get sick?”

“Gwen had a low fever for about three days and was fine,” Vann said. “Mom never got sick at all.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah,” Vann said. “So, then I spent my next three years being self-destructive and in therapy, because I felt guilty about killing my dad.”

“You didn’t kill your dad,” I said, but Vann held up her hand.

“Trust me, Shane,” she said. “Anything you’d say on the topic I’ve already heard a couple thousand times. You’ll just annoy me.”

“All right,” I said. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Just let me tell the story.” Another sip. “Anyway, somewhere in all of this they discover that some of the people who survived the second stage of Haden’s without being locked in can integrate—can use their brains to carry around someone else’s consciousness. Walter Reed has me on file so they contact me and ask me to come in and get tested. So I do. They tell me that my brain is, in the words of one of the testers there, ‘absolutely fucking gorgeous.’”

“That’s not bad,” I said.

“No,” Vann agreed. “And they ask me to become an Integrator. And at the time I’m at American University, ostensibly majoring in biology but actually mostly just getting high and screwing around. And I think, Why not? One, if I become an Integrator the NIH will pick up the rest of my college and pay off half of my existing student loans. Two, when I complete training I’ll have a job, which at the time was something that was getting harder to come by, even for college graduates, and it was a job that wasn’t going to go away. Three, I thought it’d be something that would make my dad proud, and since I killed him, I figured I owed him.”

She looked at me to see if I was going to say anything about her killing her dad. I didn’t.

“So I finish up my degree at American and while I’m doing that I get the neural network installed in my head. That gave me a panic attack because for the first few days it was giving me these massive headaches. Just like the ones I got with the meningitis.” She motioned to her head in a circular motion. “It’s those goddamn wires moving into position.”

“I know,” I said. “I remember it. If you’re a little kid when they install it, you get the joy of feeling it move around as you grow.”

“That sounds like a nightmare,” Vann said. “They told me when they were installing it that there are no nerve endings in the brain, and I told them that they were high, because what was the brain but one massive nerve.”

“Fair point.”

“But then the headaches go away and I’m fine. I go in to Walter Reed every couple of weekends and they run tests and condition my network and generally compliment me on my brain structure, which they say is perfectly tuned to receive someone else’s consciousness. Which I figure is a good thing if this is going to be my line of work. Then I graduate and I immediately start work on the Integrator program, which is more testing and studying the underlying brain mechanics of how integration works. They’re of the opinion that the more you understand it, the better you’re going to be as an Integrator. It won’t be a mystery or magic to you. It’ll just be a process.”

“Are they right?”

“Sure,” Vann said. “Up to a point. Because it’s like everything, right? There’s the theory of it, and then there’s the real-world experience of it. The theory behind integration didn’t bother me at all. I understood the thought mapping and transmission protocols, the concerns about cross-interference between brains and why learning meditation techniques would help us be better receptacles for our clients, and all that. It all made perfect sense, and I wasn’t stupid and I had that gorgeous brain of mine.”

Another sip.

“But then I did my first live integration session and I literally shit myself.”

“Wait, what?” I said.

Vann nodded. “For your first integration session, they have you integrate with a Haden they have on staff. Dr. Harper. It’s her job to integrate with new Integrators, to walk them through the process. Everything she does, she explains as she does it. The idea is no surprises, nothing wild. Just simple things like raising an arm or walking around a table or picking up a cup to drink some water. So I meet her, and we shake hands and she tells me a little bit about what to expect, and she says that she knows I’m probably a little nervous and that’s perfectly normal. And I’m thinking, I’m not nervous at all, let’s just get on with it.