Stella knew only a little about RSV, or any of the other mutagenic viruses which caused cancer in some animals as a by-product of infection. But Stephen hadn't given Seth Napier cancer. "How do you mean?"
"They're almost more like airborne gametes, only they spawn cancer. They infect their host and immediately set about playing havoc with tumor suppressors and oncogenes in any and all tissue they encounter, and the result is swift, terminal cancer. But in subjects like Mr. Napier, who already had cancer, the effects are much more pronounced. It's somatic-cell cloning. We think he's gone into this phase because his body thinks he's the last one left. He could infect an entire city."
"Why is he…twitching like that?"
"We think they do it whenever they're under stress, or it could be because he was an accident, not properly altered. We just don't know enough, yet. Everything we learn, we're going to learn from that."
Stella felt sick. Mrachek stood between her and anyplace to sit, so she slumped against the wall. "How long have they been here?"
"Less than a week. They were altered shortly after midnight on the Fourth of July. But we knew they were coming. This was the result of a generational human-breeding program, among other things. We had to wait until we knew, because we couldn't kill innocent human beings. We tried to stop it, but now we have a narrow window of opportunity to stop them before they spread. And they will." Mrachek then did something Stella had suffered almost no one to do to her, let alone a captor. She wrapped her arms around Stella and Stella sagged against the woman's compact bulk. At least she wouldn't let herself cry.
"Do you see now why they have to be destroyed?" Mrachek asked.
"What do you care what I think? I'm just a guinea pig, aren't I?"
"Who told you that?"
"I've got ears. If I didn't have cancer myself, what good would I be to you? I'm going to be part of some experiment…" And she was crying now, the hell with it.
"I—I didn't want to tell you, before, but truth to tell, I didn't care for you all that much. But—yes, I would like you to participate in an experiment, when it's time."
Stella ripped free and shoved past Mrachek, bolted for the door. She was being handled, like the social workers who placed her with the hitters and the neglecters, because this was the best they could do, and if she'd just try to get along…
"Fuck you, fat white bitch," Stella hissed over her shoulder.
"I think you may want to participate," Mrachek cooed, undeterred by Stella's hostility. The dartgun was nowhere in sight, but Stella didn't want to touch the doctor long enough to hit her, anyway. She kept walking away, but she stopped dead in her tracks when the import of Mrachek's last, soft remark hit home.
"With what I can learn from the unfortunate Mr. Napier, I'll be able to cure your cancer, Stella. Without altering you. You'll be human. And alive."
"Keep your Nazi Frankenstein claws off me, fat white dyke." Stella went out the door and directly into her own cubicle across the corridor. She collapsed onto her cot and cried, and hammered her fists against the wall until they were numb and bloody. When she finally slipped into sleep, she dreamed of swimming in a sea of cancer that ignited into a fire of nerves when she dove in, a fire of fleshy wires that ate her up and made her new.
23
Storch's first clear thought upon waking this time was not of fear or despair or the loneliness he'd tried to bury when Buggs left. It was almost worse. He felt a vast and exhausting sense of disappointment, that the one person in this tired old world that he could count on had let him down yet again. He'd been captured. For the fourth time in as many days, Sgt. Zane Ezekiel Storch, Special Forces commando and unsung hero of the Gulf War, had been knocked down and hogtied like a second-rate Sam Spade knockoff in a hack detective yarn.
This time, they weren't taking any chances. His arms were cuffed behind his back and his feet shackled, and the two were bound by a chain sheathed in a steel bar that kept him from reaching the tools in his bootheels. He lay on his side on a cold metal bench. The metal vibrated against his cheek, telling him he was in another truck, but the steadiness and the higher pitch of the engine told him this time he was in the back of a van, or a delivery truck.
Or a paddy wagon. Don't forget the police. You're still a wanted cop-killing felon, for all they know. But somehow, Storch didn't think he was lucky enough merely to have been arrested. He knew he hadn't just fallen asleep at his post in the Motel 6, and his pants were still unsoiled, so the EMP weapon the militia used on him was out. His stomach felt like a pilotless ship on a stormy sea, and his mouth was as dry as cotton batting, so he'd probably been gassed, this time. Or drugged. Whatever the cause, whoever had him, he wasn't planning on being there when they arrived. He blinked his eyes rapidly, trying to discern some form to the darkness around him, but he may as well have been blindfolded.
"Don't try to move," a voice, a man's voice, said close to his ear.
"Are you fucking kidding?" he asked, and a clammy palm clapped over his mouth.
He could feel breath against his ear now, could feel a fine mist of spittle as the speaker leaned in closer still and said, "Keep quiet. Don't make them come back here. Don't make them—" As Storch's senses started to sharpen up to his normal capacity, he noticed a mushiness to the voice, as if it issued from a mouthful of broken teeth.
No wonder you don't want them back here. So why aren't you tied up?
Storch nodded vehemently to indicate that he understood, and wanted the stranger's hand off his face. It was all he could do not to bite that hand. "Who's they?" he whispered. "And who the hell are you?"
"You don't know? Aren't you one of them? If you crossed them, they wouldn't keep you alive. You must be awfully important to them, for them to take you alive. We—he—he never wanted to hurt anybody before, you know? He was—he changed, I guess…"
"For the last fucking time," Storch said, sounding as unlike a helpless prisoner in shackles as he possibly could, "who are they?"
"They're the Radiant Dawn. Or, like, they're the new Radiant Dawn. They're different, but more like themselves than they ever were," a mirthless chuckle of pain and irony. "I was—I'm—"
And it clicked in Storch's head. "You're Sperling."
"Yes. Yes, that's—How do you know me?"
"I've been looking for you. I'm the one who found your daughter."
"You're the one who called me?" Sperling spat, ignoring his own warning. "Then this is all your fault. If you wouldn't have called me, they would've left me alone—" hyperventilating, face purpling, "was almost free—got me at the airport…" The weakness, the shrinking, self-pitying tone of Sperling's voice made Storch want to break him in half. Then he settled back on a bench across from Storch and drew his knees up, wrapped them in his skinny arms, caught his breath. "Oh, bullshit. I knew someday they'd come for me. Quesada never wastes anything."
"Who's Quesada?"
"He's probably using another name, now. But that's who he was when I—when my wife and I—" his words broke up into hitching sobs. Storch tried to maintain his own self-control long enough to get answers out of the man.
"This Quesada, he ran Radiant Dawn, the cult in the Seventies?"
"He—yes, he was the leader. Our father, we called him. Our radiant father."
"And he took Sidra from you nine years ago."
"Yes, but—"
"And you let him keep her. You didn't tell the police."
"It wasn't like that. You don't—please try to understand, it wasn't how it looked. We couldn't—" Sperling reached down into himself and pulled out a cloak of eerie calm. If Storch had been a policeman instead of a soldier, he would have recognized the sublime, almost blissful state that overcomes a fugitive when at last the time has come to confess.
"He was able to keep it all submerged—out of the news, and so far down in our heads, that we'd never remember. He had this way of looking into you that just blew everything you thought you wanted for yourself right out of your head, everything you thought you were. After Sidra was taken, we started to remember. He preached Tantric sex, and made us have orgies in front of x-ray machines, microwave ovens, and do shit I couldn't begin to describe. He wanted us to be bathed in the radiance when we procreated, so that while our spirits intertwined with the infinite and came unhinged from our bodies, the radiation would reshape our bodies, moving them up the ladder towards perfection, until we would no longer need bodies. Then one day, he told us he was finished, and threw us out. Don't look at me like that, you have no idea what it's like until you've been inside it, until he's been inside you."
Because Storch was a soldier, and a soldier hogtied in the back of a truck, he couldn't find the velvet glove he needed to stroke Sperling. He wanted to kill him more than ever. "You're a piece of shit. How could you let somebody else degrade you like that, and then give him your only child? What did you think you were going to get out of it?"
"
My
child? Why didn't we go to the press after he threw us out? Why didn't we sue him or have him arrested when most of us were diagnosed with terminal cancer within a few years of leaving? Wouldn't you? Well, we didn't. We did everything we did for the good of the species. We believed we were changing ourselves for our children's sake. And when the time came, those of us who survived were glad to give up our kids, because they were his, too." He sat back and let the words rattle around the space between them, as if it should've made sense to Storch, should've silenced all his accusations, cut his judgment down to size.
"We were all sterile," he went on at last. "He was their father. Our wives were the mothers, and radiation was the midwife. Not a single birth defect, you know. Picture of health, every one of them. We never contacted each other after he threw us out, but I think everybody kept track of everybody else. When he came for them nine years ago, we each handled it our own way. Marie and I told as much of the truth as we had to, that our daughter was gone. She was his child, they were all his kids, and he was welcome to them."
"I don't want to hear any more," Storch cut in. "Help me get free, and I'll get you out of here."
Sperling's laughter was louder, if not cheerier, than before. "There's no escaping. The children—children of the Dawn—the Moon-Ladder…"
"Shut up and open the heel on my right boot. I'll get us out of here, and you can go to Mexico, or lay down and die, whatever the hell you want." Storch didn't like the way his own voice sounded, now. Wheedling. He felt like one of those desperate animatronic pirate convicts on the Pirates Of The Caribbean ride at Disneyland, trying to coax the little dog with the keyring in its mouth to come closer before the burning stockade collapsed. It wasn't a position Storch had ever thought he'd be in.
"Lay down and die," Sperling repeated, as if he was saying, he'd like to go to Hawaii and spend the rest of his life drinking coconut milk and shagging hula girls. "What I wouldn't give to be dead right now."
"That can be arranged, too," Storch said. "If you open the heel on my right boot, I'll give you the quickest, cleanest death you could ever ask for." What the hell was he saying?
Sperling sat there, balled up and hating himself for an unguessable time. Storch didn't like himself a whole lot either, at the moment, and couldn't bring himself to sweeten the offer anymore. He almost thought Sperling had gone to sleep for awhile and set to trying to wriggle free of the cuffs. If he dislocated the wrist of his bad hand—
A hand touched his ankle. Storch kicked out at it, an impotent gesture that did nothing more than rattle his shackles a little. The hands returned, fumbling at the heel of his boot. "I can't figure it out—it's useless…"
"Goddamit, feel along the back, there's a catch. Push it in and pull out the wire."
"What good's wire going to be?"
"Do it."
The hands clumsily fiddled around with his foot for what felt like hours. Storch suffered the hands touching him for as long as he was able, then hissed, "Let go, asshole, if you can't—"
"There. Is this what you wanted?" The clammy hands touched his, and the spool of cutting wire was pressed into his palm. He could feel Sperling hovering over him, feel his sour breath on his face and smell the rank flop-sweat oozing from his yellow pores. "Get the fuck away from me, will you? Can't concentrate."
"Sorry," Sperling mumbled, and backed away.
Cursing his numb fingers, he pulled one end of it out and wrapped it around the linking chain between the cuffs. It was considerably blunter since he'd used it on the cargo container, but in about five minutes, the chains jingled and fell away. Instantly, liquid fire poured into his arms. Storch suppressed a shriek as his circulation resumed, wiggling the arms, like floppy dead things that had been stapled to his torso by an inept meatball surgeon. After a time, when the pain subsided, he sat up and started to work on his leg shackles, but the tool was almost useless after cutting through the chain that bound them to the handcuffs. Now his legs sang grand opera for awhile and he used the time to slide the steel bar off the chains and pull the little stabbing knife out of his left boot. The T-shaped handle fit into his fist so that the three inch blade stood out between his index and middle fingers. It was hardly lethal in and of itself, but in Storch's hands it was more than adequate for cutting vital plumbing.
Storch stood, getting his sea-legs, breathing deep and slow until the last agonizing tingle of sleep flowed out of his limbs. In the darkness, he could barely make out the hunched ball of Donald Sperling, now regarding him with a black spot in the bottom of his face that had to be his slack, open mouth.
"How many of them are there?" he asked Sperling, and the man's mouth clamped shut. "Two," he said after a moment.
Just two? Who did these stupid assholes think they were dealing with, here?
Storch had never been overly proud of his killing skills, and he'd always abhorred bragging: There's those that do it, and those that talk about it. But sending two people for him, to knock him out with gas and truss him up in his sleep?
And it worked!
This new outrage pushed him over the top. These people's faces would not haunt him, and if they did it would be a sweet dream indeed.