“So far we’re doing pretty good tonight,” Scott said. “How many more do you think we’ll get?”
James tilted his head up toward the sky, washing his face in the faint moonlight. He watched the gray and white blinking lights of the jetliner, then said, “Oh, I don’t know. At least one more. Maybe two.”
“You sound pretty confident. How much do you want to bet?”
The zombie brought its head back down, and the bill of the baseball cap darkened his smile. “You never pay me when I win.”
Scott said, “What would you do with money anyway?”
James smiled, shook his head, and started off toward the opposite side of the park. Scott and Brooks immediately followed, Scott veering off to the left, Brooks veering off to the right.
Conrad and Garry waited another a few seconds before they moved. Garry headed off toward the left, but Conrad stayed. Garry didn’t say anything. Conrad guessed the man knew what it was like just starting out as Tracker, all those confusing answers to all those confusing questions, the need to make the unbelievable believable.
Conrad walked over to the place beneath the slide. He bent down and touched the wet earth right beside the electronic device. He held his hand there for a good thirty seconds, a good minute, but as always, he felt nothing.
On the way
back to Living Intelligence, still in the city, they passed a black Humvee going the opposite direction and Conrad turned quickly in his seat, watching it, wondering who was in there right now. Four Hunters at least, maybe more, all those new men transferred to Olympus from all over the world, and while they were out hunting zombies they had no clue a SUV had just passed them with a zombie in it.
It made Conrad pause then, thinking about it, realizing that he’d no doubt passed other Trackers and zombies in the night, both of them working toward the same goal.
They’d just gotten on the Shakespeare when a call came in from Living Intelligence. It went to Scott, who listened for a moment, then passed the message on to Conrad.
“The doc wants to see you when we get back.”
And so that’s where he found himself forty minutes later, having checked in, having showered and changed, not on his way home like he’d planned but standing in the corridor just outside Dr. Hennessey’s office. But the doctor didn’t seem to be in. The door was locked and there was no answer when he knocked. He decided he was just going to go home after all, talk to Albert later, when he heard the light whine of an electric wheelchair coming his way.
“My apologies,” said the Director of Living Intelligence, rolling toward Conrad at a quick pace. “I actually didn’t expect you back so soon.”
“That’s okay.”
“So,” Albert said, smiling up at him, “how are things going? You are getting well adjusted?”
Conrad nodded.
“And your sessions with Gabriel—are they going well?”
Conrad nodded again, this time hesitantly.
“I know it’s difficult, Conrad. Especially for someone who’s been trained all his existence to hunt down and kill the living. But you’re just going to have to get over it.”
“So what can I do for you, Dr. Hennessey? Scott said you wanted to see me.”
“Please, please”—Albert now maneuvering the wheelchair into a three-point turn—“follow me. I’d like to show you something.”
They headed down the brightly lit corridor and a minute later came to a closed door. Albert started to press the button on his wheelchair to open the door but paused. He looked back up at Conrad.
“Let me ask you a question. Have you figured out yet what really goes on here?”
Conrad scratched the back of his head. He felt a few pieces of hair come off and had to think fast, wipe them on the back of his shirt before bringing his hand back out from behind his head.
“Well, I think it’s pretty obvious that Tracking is only a small part of it.”
Albert smiled his usual stiff smile. He pressed the button on his wheelchair, the door opened, and they entered. Here they found three scientists doing work on a young zombie no more than twenty years old.
“This living’s name is Eric. He is not one of the living we use for Tracking. He is solely used for the purposes of our research.”
At the moment Eric was running on a treadmill. He wore only shorts and sneakers and the sweat on his living flesh glistened in the stark white of the fluorescents. All kinds of wires were attached to his body: on his chest, his arms, his legs, even his head. When he saw Albert he raised a hand in greeting before dropping it back down to maintain his pace.
The three scientists in the room were working at different computer consoles. According to Albert, one was tracking Eric’s heart rate, another Eric’s breathing, and the third Eric’s brainwaves.
They watched Eric for a while, watched the scientists, before Albert motioned for them to leave.
Back in the corridor, the scientist said, “I’m going to tell you something about Eric, and I want you to be one hundred percent honest with me. Can you do that?”
Conrad nodded.
“We made Eric.” Albert waited a moment for that to sink in, then said, “Eric was originally dead. His mother was going to abort him. We stepped in and offered her quite a bit of money to bring him to term. We more or less adopted him, put him up in a place out in the country with a family we could trust, these older pair of farmers, and at the age of ten Eric sensed the Pandora we’d buried nearby in the woods, went looking for it, and turned. We were watching him the entire time, and the moment it happened, we had our men come in and grab him, bring him back here to Living Intelligence where he has been ever since. So tell me, Conrad, was what we did wrong?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Aren’t you?”
Conrad shook his head.
“It bothers me sometimes,” Albert said. “Not just what we did to Eric, but what we’ve done to a number of other living here and across the globe. I’d even say it makes me sad but of course I cannot feel true sadness. But it cheats the entire process. Those children, while in a way we saved them, we also didn’t give them the chance they truly deserved. We … we manipulated them,
manufactured
them, and that I have never felt right about.”
They started down the corridor again.
“The reason I wanted to show you Eric was twofold. First I want you to understand there are no secrets among the staff here at Living Intelligence. Everything we do here is for the good of our humanity, to keep us animated, and so yes, sometimes we are forced into desperate measures—such as infecting that boy with parasites, to keep our secrets. And second … well, Norman told me about your son.”
Conrad faltered in his pace.
Albert slowed his wheelchair and glanced back at him. “Are you all right?”
He sped up again. “Yes. I’m fine.”
“Your son turns ten in another five days, and you’re worried. Aren’t you?”
Conrad didn’t answer.
“Well?”
“I am.”
“Would you like him protected?”
“How?”
“In the past we have done favors for employees of LI who have had the very same concerns. I can have a special detail put on your son so he is watched twenty-four-seven.”
They came to Albert’s office and went inside. In the corner, in the bubbling fish tank, the dead tropical fish swam lazily back and forth. Conrad sat down in one of the two chairs as Albert moved behind his desk. He wasn’t sure what to say yet. This was exactly what he’d been meaning to bring up, some kind of way to protect his son.
Once Albert was situated behind his desk, he said, “Conrad, please tell me this. What worries you more—the idea of your son becoming one of the living, or the idea of what will happen after he turns?”
Conrad ignored this, instead asked how they would go about doing this special detail.
“We can do it immediately,” Albert said. “But I must warn you, it comes with a price.”
“How much?”
“Because with this detail we’d be using a lot of man hours. We would have to take them away from our usual operation, which means we might fall back a day or two.”
“How much?”
“Then again, it might also be possible to—”
“Dr. Hennessey, how much?”
Albert’s stiff face became even stiffer. He leaned forward, placed his hands on the desktop, and quoted the price.
Conrad was silent for a moment. Then he said, “That’s almost half my salary.”
The scientist didn’t respond.
Conrad swallowed. “Can I think about it?”
“Of course.” Albert sat back, turned to his computer, and started typing on the keyboard. “Now, the other reason I wanted to see you was because I still have something else to show you.”
Conrad barely heard him. He had slumped down in his chair, his gaze focused on the floor. He thought about his wife and son, how Denise was pregnant with twins, how Kyle would turn ten in less than a week.
“Do you remember what I’d mentioned before, a possible threat concerning the Pandoras? We call it the Ripple Effect.”
He had always been able to provide for his family, to give them everything they always needed. But soon Kyle would turn ten, and recently he’d been acting strange, hearing things—
I thought I heard something
—and before while it had sent up a black flag in Conrad’s mind, now he knew more, so much more that—
it sounded like … I don’t know—it sounded weird
—that if anything were to happen to his family, to Denise or Kyle or even the unborn twins, Conrad knew he would instantly expire. His hair, his skin, his bones, his dead body parts, they would all decay into nothing.
“It’s like dropping a stone in the middle of a placid pond,” Albert said. “Once it starts, it’s impossible to stop it, and that’s why we need to take great caution.”
The price to save his son was an extremely large amount, so much so he had no idea how his family could afford to continue living like they did. They would have to sell the house, move into the city, maybe rent a condo. How would things be between him and Denise then? How would his son see him?
“What I failed to mention before regarding some of our experiments is … well, let’s say that if one in a thousand children actually manage to find a Pandora and the energy inside is absorbed into their bodies, one in one
hundred
thousand manage to find a Pandora but are stopped before they have the chance to turn. These children, they can never go back into normal society. They have … crossed a line. What should happen is they should be expired immediately (with a story given to the parents about parasites), but the Government has decided they will serve a greater purpose.”
The price was the problem, Conrad knew this, but at the same time how could he possibly put a price on his son’s well being?
“And the greater purpose is that they help us understand more about these Pandoras. We hold these children, not as prisoners so much but as unwilling volunteers, and we test what kind of results happen between them and the Pandora that has now become their own. Remember, once a child has touched a Pandora, that Pandora somehow becomes that child’s. The energy inside cannot be released by anyone else. But after that window of two months passes, that child is no longer affected by the energy inside. He or she can hold the cube for hours, but the energy inside will not be absorbed. However, if there are
other
Pandoras close by …”
There were more questions he could ask himself, more questions regarding his wife and son, but beyond all that he heard the faint echoes of Kent Moss’s screams as Philip began cutting off pieces of living flesh.
“Here,” Albert said, evidently finding the file he wanted, swiveling the flat-screen monitor in Conrad’s direction, “watch this.”
He heard Eugene Moss begging and begging for Philip to stop.
“Conrad? Are you watching?”
Conrad blinked. He looked up and on the monitor saw a young man approaching a table. On the table was a Pandora, the dark crystal cube shining in the light. Around the table were other Pandoras, maybe twenty or thirty. The room appeared to be made of steel, and slowly the young man approached, almost entranced, as if he could actually hear the pulse coming from the rock.
“Now here,” Albert said in an almost whisper, as if the man inside the computer monitor might hear him, “once he picks up the Pandora a slat will open and a rabbit will be pushed into frame. Here it comes …
there
.”
And just like the scientist said, the young man picked up the Pandora and at once a gray rabbit appeared, dead as the day it was animated. The young man glanced up at it quickly, startled, and he almost set the Pandora back down. But he hesitated, holding the cube, and closed his eyes.
In the young man’s hands, the cube began to glow.
“Now watch carefully,” Albert said. “See what’s happening to the Pandora? It’s because the energy inside is fluctuating. It knows this young man, somehow senses him. But again, his body cannot absorb the energy. The only way to release that energy is what we have managed to establish over years of research. And as you will see very soon, the young man will follow through with what was asked of him. He will smash it.”
As if on cue, the young man raised the Pandora over his head—the rock glowing even brighter now—and threw it down to the floor. It broke apart, shattered, and at once the Pandoras around him took on a sudden, blinding glow. But it was only for a moment, a half-moment, and then the twenty or thirty Pandoras were gone, all having dissolved … and the rabbit that had been dead its entire existence was now living.
“But do you see our test subject here? He’s still dead. He’s not affected, but the rabbit is.”
The scientist rewound the file only a couple seconds, to the spot right before the young man threw the Pandora at the floor. Then he let it play out and Conrad witnessed it all again—the shards of quartz, the glowing Pandoras, the rabbit becoming all at once living.
“Do you see?” Albert said, and there was something like childlike glee in his voice. “Do you see? Do you see?”