Taji's Syndrome (49 page)

Ace wanted to find the words that would purge Mason of his anguish, but he could think of none; he knew before he spoke that he had no real solace to offer the boy. “I’m listening, Mason,” was all he was able to say.

“Thanks.” He was staring into the distance again, seeing other times and places now. “Kevin died so slowly. It was like watching something in slow, slow motion. And then the others started to die, too. That made it harder to take. By then TS had a name and you could feel how frightened everyone was of it.” He continued to kick the water at a steady walking pace. “No one’s ever going to forget. Not ever. It’s like that lady, the one that
Alice in Wonderland
was written for. Even when she was real old, that’s what people remembered about her, that she was this little kid. That was just a book. TS kills people. No one’s going to forget that.”

“It’ll get better,” Ace said, hoping it might be true.

“When I’m an old, old man; then I’ll be a curiosity, a little old man who was a deadly kid, like some kind of mass murderer who got away with it.” He leaned back, braced on his elbows. “That’s the whole future, isn’t it?”

It was all Ace could do not to agree. “It might go that way, but it doesn’t have to. There are measures we can take?”

“You mean like the protected witness thing, where they change your identity and move you across the country? That kind of measure? How long would that work? It’s not gangsters that we’re talking about, it’s Taji’s Syndrome.” He turned on the tape recorder.

“—and they wanted us to try to work together, to make things move, always bigger and bigger. They didn’t care that it exhausted us, or that we were all getting over a bad, bad illness. They only wanted us to do the mind trick. After a while I wanted to have a stroke, or a heart attack, or something to stop it for—”

“You see? That’s why no one will forget. Because there’s always going to be someone who wants one of those PK guys. It isn’t only the military. It might have been that way at first, but by now, you know that there are politicians and corporations who are itching to offer those survivors all kinds of goodies if they’ll do a few tricks.” Mason was quiet. “I’m going to bed.”

Ace sighed with relief. “You want to talk some more, you give me a call. I’ll be in the lab until five A.M. and then I’m going to get some sleep myself.”

“Oh?” Mason did not bother to towel his legs as he stood up. “Maybe I’ll talk to you tomorrow night. If it’s like this again, I’ll probably be up.”

“Give me a little warning, and I’ll arrange for a snack.” Ace thought about giving Linda Harris a call; she was the new psychiatrist assigned to the carriers.

Mason gave a slight, brief smile. “That sounds too much like a schedule. Everything here is on a schedule.” He started away from the pool toward where his quarters were. “No matter how you slice it, Ace, it started with us.”

“It started with an altered gene,” Ace corrected him. He decided he had better write up the gist of his conversation with Mason; Linda Harris would want to have a report on it.

“In us.” The door of his apartment opened.
“G’
. . .
i.”

“Yeah, good-night,” called Ace as the door slammed.

It was almost dawn when Mason’s body was found in the pool.

—Laurie Grey—

IT WAS
chilly; a low fog hugged the ground, seeping into everything and sapping its warmth. Laurie had put on her heaviest britches and a down vest over her sweater and still she was shivering as she lifted the saddle onto Sampson’s back.

“You’re up early, missie,” said the stablehand as he came out of his quarters.

“Nothing else to do and I’m fidgety,” she said as she buckled the girths.

“You pick out his hooves?” the old hand asked.

“Of course,” snapped Laurie.

“Right,” said the old man before heading off for his morning coffee.

Sampson sidled in the crossties; Laurie gave him a slap and an order to move over. She secured the breastplate to the D-rings and took his bridle from its rack. “Just a couple more minutes.” These days she spent most of her free time with the horses. She was becoming an expert rider, which pleased her. At first she had ridden out of loneliness, then out of the realization that she would never give a horse TS. None of the horses was afraid of her.

In the covered arena, she spent five minutes with Sampson on the lunge, warming up the leggy black gelding. Then she vaulted into the saddle and gathered up the reins. After half an hour she and the horse were doing the low jumps, lifting and falling, rising for a brief soaring flight. It let her escape.

It helped her to forget she was no longer dancing.

—Adam and Axel Barenssen—

On the floor between them lay what was left of a chicken. Feathers drifted around them and the scent of bloody innards was heavy in the closed room. Adam, his dark blue eyes glowing, bowed his head to the inverted cross on the wall and began to chant the Lord’s Prayer backwards. Beside him, Axel held up the chicken’s head.

“We forsaken children come before you, Mighty Lord Satan, Ruler of Hell, Master of Destruction. We who were made in Your Malign Image offer up the symbols of our mortality.”

“Satan is Mighty,” Axel declared.

“We accept Your burden of Sin and Death. We welcome it. We know we are outcasts and we bow before You, giving this life and the countless other lives—human lives—we have taken to You, for homage.”

“Satan is Mighty,” Axel repeated.

“We who have sinned beyond all forgiveness come to You as instruments of Your Power.” Adam held his arms out to the side, a small knife in one hand, a riding crop in the other. “We give you our pain and our deadliness.”

Axel pulled off his shirt and lay prone between the inverted cross and his twin brother, waiting for the new tokens of his devotion. As the first blow struck him, he called out Satan’s name. In two more blows fresh blood ran over old scars as the twins chanted the Doxology backward.

—Steven and Irene Channing—

“Will Dale be here at Thanksgiving?” Steven asked as he built up the fire in the wood stove.

“I don’t know yet,” Irene answered. She was quite thin now, and when she painted, her manner was hectic, fervid.

“Do you think he will?” Steven persisted.

“I hope so. I miss him. Living out here, it makes it difficult, sometimes.” She was being evasive and both of them knew it.

“Does he mind my being here?” He closed the door against the renewed blaze. “I’ll clean out the ashes in a while.”

“Thanks.” She was staring at her latest canvas, not sure it conformed to her inner vision. The trouble with painting, she told herself as she had been doing increasingly of late, was that it lacked real depth. There was only the illusion of depth, and no longer satisfied her.

“What about Brice? Will he be here?” Steven took great care not to sound excited at the prospect of seeing his younger half-brother again.

“Oh, yes. That’s certain.”

“Good,” said Steven. He had grown in the last year and was close to six feet tall. He looked more like an adult than many other teenagers, but that was the result of his somber manner rather than anything outwardly obvious. “I miss him.”

“So do I,” said Irene. “I miss so many things, so many people. But I have a second chance that most never got, and I’ve acquired another . . . talent. I suppose that’s something.”

Steven said nothing.

“You know,” Irene went on as she sank down in the old armchair near the fireplace, “Dale got me through everything. He was as staunch and true as you could want anyone to be. He helped me, Steve. God knows what would have happened to me without him. But now,” she said, her face showing her sadness, “he can’t help me any more, and . . . I don’t think he knows how to deal with that.”

Steven stacked the rest of the wood in a metal bin beside the stove. “You’ll work things out, Mom.”

“I suppose so,” she said. “One way or another. At least as long as President Hunter keeps his word and we’re left alone.”

“You don’t think we’re going to have more trouble, do you?” Steven asked, trying to be shocked.

“Not for a while. But eventually, I think . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“We’ll handle it, Mom.” Steven wanted to shake her, but he knew she was speaking the truth.

“Um-hum,” said Irene, though neither was convinced.

—Gail Harmmon—

For the last year, Gail had been obsessed with the lute. She had three now, and twice a week her instructor drove out from Atlanta and worked with her, bringing her more music and making occasional recommendations.

“I thought I’d try some of those late Renaissance dances,” Gail said to Wendy Tyler early one windy afternoon.

“I’ll bring some,” said Wendy who, at fifty-three, had long since outgrown her first name. “There are some interesting Hungarian dances from that time.”

“Anything,” said Gail. Her hair was getting long and the shape of her body was changing. “I’m getting bored with these English things. I need something else.”

“The English pieces are very demanding work,” said Wendy.

“They’re dull.” Gail picked up her best lute and plucked out the melody of the Dowland madrigal she had learned recently. “Listen to that. Dull.”

“Whatever you say,” Wendy responded, feeling sympathy for this pretty teenaged girl who was kept in such strict isolation.

“And I want to see if you can find one of those old kind of lutes, with the extra drone strings. You know the ones I mean.”

“A theorbo,” Wendy guessed.

“That’ll do,” Gail said. “One of those. And the music to go with it. I need to learn something new.”

“Something new?” Wendy echoed.

“Yes!” She flung her hand toward the window. “I sure as hell can’t swim in this weather, and there’s no one I can swim with in any case. What else can I do?”

Wendy had no immediate answer. “Surely one of the others would—”

Gail shook her head in scorn. “Them! What do I care about them. I care about my lutes. So bring me something new.”

“If you like,” Wendy said, and was puzzled when Gail started to laugh loudly.

—Harold Porter—

He found a phone booth in a small town more than thirty miles away from the Control Facility, and when he was certain no one was watching him, he entered it. “I want to place a collect call to Alexa Porter in Golden, Colorado,” he told the automated operator. He gave the number and waited while the phone rang and rang. He always gave it twenty rings before he hung up. This time he gave it twenty-four. As he left the phone booth, he promised himself he would try again later that night. “She’s probably not home from that show in Flagstaff yet,” he said to himself.

After buying a cheap dinner in a small cafe, he went out to the main road, walking slowly, thumb out, waiting for a ride heading west. He was colder than he wanted to admit, and his fleece-lined denim jacket did not keep him as warm as it was supposed to.

As he walked, he thought about the Control Facility. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the place, he reminded himself, but he had always hated being cooped up. And those other kids—Jesus, they were weird. Especially the twins, with their prayers and the crazy things they said. Laurie only cared about horses, and the other girl was so angry at everyone that there was no talking with her at all. It was time to get away for a while, to go see his Mom on her ranch, help her with the ponies for a while, get a little time on his own. And Thanksgiving was coming up soon—it was time he went . . . home.

He was so lost in reverie that he paid little attention to traffic, so that when he finally noticed the half-ton pickup driven by a high school junior who was on his fourth beer, he had neither the time nor the space to avoid it.

The bumper and headlight smashed into him, tossing him onto the hood, where he bounced once, scaring the living shit out of the driver. By the time he hit the pavement, both his back and skull were broken; he had been dead for five seconds.

—Jeff Taji and Weyman Muggridge—

When Weyman and Sylvia finished their guided tour of their new house, they were back in the lanai which opened onto a wide patio filled with large semi-tropical plants. This afternoon the glass doors were closed against the first spitting of rain.

“We hope it clears up in time for the wedding,” Weyman said to Jeff.

“If you’re determined to get married in the garden, I can see why,” Jeff said, looking around almost wistfully. “It’s lovely here.”

“We like it,” said Weyman. “I told Sylvia when we found it last March that I’d move back to Atlanta if she didn’t agree to buy it.”

Sylvia took a playful punch at his arm. “You mean I said I’d send you back there if you didn’t agree to buy it.”

“We miss you in Atlanta,” said Jeff thoughtfully. “It isn’t as much fun with you gone.”

“You mean that no one has learned how to handle Drucker yet?” Weyman asked in mockery.

“Dien does a pretty good job. And there’s always Susannah when Drucker gets out of hand. But it’s not the same.” He caught sight of his reflection in the windows, as insubstantial as a ghost. His hair was white now, and his face was very lean.

“So leave NCDC-ED and take a job here with PHES, or work in the NCDC regional office. Drucker would probably be delighted to transfer you.” Weyman grinned easily. “Let up on yourself a little, Jeff.”

“I can’t, yet,” said Jeff. “We’re still getting reports of TS in third world countries and . . . you know.”

“You feel compelled to go there and tend to them. I know.” Weyman looked at his friend in sympathy. “Just because the shit has your name doesn’t mean you’re responsible for it.”

Jeff nodded. “It’s”—he sighed—“complicated. I know I’ve botched being a father. Looking back, I probably wasn’t much of a husband. I don’t want to waste . . .” His voice trailed off.

Weyman was about to say something, but Sylvia stopped him. “You can’t take on the world by yourself, Jeff. You’ve done so much already. You’ve paid your dues.”

“Have I?” He watched the raindrops spatter on the glass and slide down, spangled by the light inside the house. “And what about next time?”

“Hey,” said Weyman, getting up and going to the bar to open a bottle of Pinot Noir, “you can’t do that to yourself. You can’t spend the rest of your life waiting for something else like TS to happen.” He sniffed the cork. “Heaven.”

“I’m afraid it won’t take the rest of my life, that’s the trouble.” He looked from Weyman to Sylvia. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be dwelling on this with your wedding two days away.”

“And you the best man,” Sylvia chided him affectionately.

“Quite an event. We’re thinking of hyphenating our names, so she won’t have to give hers up. Kostermeyer-Muggridge. You got to admit it has a ring to it.” He poured the wine and gave the first glass to his bride.

“Muggridge-Kostermeyer,” she corrected him, laughing.

Jeff tried to shake off the gloom that enveloped him. “It smells wonderful,” he said as he took the wineglass.

Weyman lifted his glass to propose a toast, but stopped himself. “Jeff, it was a million to one chance, that altered DNA doing what it did to those kids. The chances of that happening again are . . . well, astronomical.”

“I know.” He tried to smile. “I don’t mean to be the spectre at the feast.”

“To tomorrow; may each one be sweeter than the one before.” Weyman chuckled as the wineglasses touched.

“Happiness to both of you,” Jeff added, with an extra salute to his friends.

Weyman clapped his free hand on Jeff’s shoulder. “We’re through the worst of it, Jeff. Remember that.”

“Are we.” Jeff looked away, past the bright rain on the lanai window to the oncoming dark.