The Immortality Virus (10 page)

A virus. He had infected the entire human race. He had not given anyone a choice in the matter. Much of the sympathy Grace had felt for him earlier began to fade as she thought about it. How dare he mess with people’s will like that? How dare he play God?

Grace winced at her last thought. How many times had people accused Natural Life of the same thing–wanting to play God? So many claimed to speak for Him, saying that God, whoever He was, wanted this or did not want that. He seemed to speak His intentions to certain lucky people, and His intentions managed, remarkably, to reflect precisely what the lucky people wanted.

Now here was Grace, becoming one of those people. Hypocrite, she chided herself.

But she wouldn’t have chosen this life. And she wanted that choice. She could have had Sam forever.

“Search complete,” Newton said, cutting into the silence in a way that made her jump.

“Display records.” Grace set aside the diary and headed over to the console.

Though the easiest and most logical place to begin, net searches rarely provided useful information about the people she needed to find. She had a little more hope than usual this time, because Jordan was an old timer, and back before The Change the nets had included information on practically everyone. When the new system came online three hundred years ago, they had uploaded the old information, so it remained intact.

New information, on the other hand, could be difficult to find. Only people who had a job or went to school had any record on the net. As for old timers–well, their information tended to be centuries out of date. Houses, addresses, and entire streets had changed since then.

But she had a feeling she would find something on Jordan. Nothing recent, but something to give her a clue who he had been.

At the top of the search results was a newspaper headline she had expected to find, dated February 28, 2050.

Brilliant Scientist Goes On Shooting Rampage

Yesterday morning at the Medicorp Plaza, eight brilliant young people were killed in a violent workplace shooting the likes of which have not been seen in over a decade. The team had been working on a cure for Alzheimer’s, which affects some twenty-four million people worldwide.

Evidence today suggests that the team leader, Jordan Lacklin, may have been the man responsible for the shooting. Police Chief Daryl Richardson said, “The gun used in the shootings was registered to Jordan Lacklin, and his fingerprints were all over it. Unfortunately, we can’t find him to question him since he seems to have fled after the shootings.”

Christina Atkins, the one member of the team who escaped the shooting, says the team leader, Jordan Lacklin, had been under a lot of strain lately. His own wife, Margaret Lacklin, suffered from the very disease he hoped to cure, and Jordan would work late into the night, often keeping his team up with him around the clock. “He was passionate about this,” Ms. Atkins said late yesterday afternoon. “I never saw a man work so hard, but I have to wonder if that’s why this happened.”

Ms. Atkins managed to escape the slaughter because she had to pick up her five-year-old son from school. He was sick with the flu.

Authorities are asking for your help to find Jordan Lacklin, who is considered armed and dangerous. If you see him, contact the Kansas City Police Department.

No, she couldn’t picture the author of that diary picking up a gun and shooting all his co-workers. Why would he, when he still had not found the cure his wife needed?

Or had he? He must have done, or The Change would not have happened.

Something strange had happened in those two days, and Grace wanted to know what. Who was Jordan, anyway? Before she could find him, she needed to learn more about him. Brilliant scientist? Hopeless romantic? Mass murderer? Somehow, it didn’t fit.

But there was Alex, his grandson, who he had loved and who Matt thought would be a good place to start.

“Newton, new search. I want you to find Jordan Lacklin’s descendants, including current addresses and vidphone channels.”

“Working!”

“Newton, display the rest of the results for the search of Jordan Lacklin,” Grace said.

Newton had them ready, so they were practically up on the screen before she finished issuing the command. Most of the records were innocuous and completely out-of-date. There was a record of his years of service in the army corps of engineers with a note that most of the details of his time there were classified. There were records of his graduation from the University of Illinois with a Ph.D. in biochemistry. There was a marriage certificate on record with the state of Kansas, though Grace had already known his wife’s name from the diary.

Jordan’s name had also been mentioned in his wife’s obituary, dated a few months after the shootings. The obituary did not mention that terrible event; the only thing it had to say about Jordan was he had been Margaret’s husband.

Margaret had been put in the ground, something they used to do a long time ago. The ancient cemeteries still existed, but only because people were funny about the dead. They didn’t want to touch them or disturb their resting places.

It occurred to Grace to wonder about the woman Jordan had loved. His romantic ramblings were too idealistic–they did not describe a real woman. The paper had included a picture of Margaret in her obituary–one clearly taken before the illness had ravaged her. She had sparkling green eyes, a pointed nose, and a tiny, smiling mouth that made her look like a person to trust.

Why would Jordan have gone on a shooting rampage while his wife needed him so badly? Why would he have killed the people helping him to find a cure? He had loved her. Truly loved her.

“Only when life is short can one imagine that love lasts forever.” Sam had told her that once, during their long and arduous breakup. That had been the night she’d stopped believing in love.

“Newton, I’m away. Save results of current search to my password and voice print.”

With that, Grace grabbed her coat and backpack and headed out the door, towards the graveyard where Margaret Lacklin rested.

Overland Park had been an upper crust suburb at one time, but Grace only knew this from information she had on the history of the Kansas City area. Jordan’s salary and position had corroborated that information. Now, not a single one of those homes remained. Instead, there stood row upon row of community apartment complexes, like the one Sam had remembered Grace living in. Every floor had a single, shared bathroom and every resident had a single, ten by fifteen square foot room to do with as they pleased.

The man-made ponds still existed, but layers of unidentifiable muck now infested the once smooth waters. What had once been one of the nicest sections of town was now one of the worst. Grace spotted several vagrants dipping cups into a mucky pond. She shuddered and tried not to look.

Why had she come here? She knew, of course, that Jordan’s home no longer existed and no clues remained to show her his path through four hundred years of running from the law. Not that the police department of today would care about those old murders. At some point, he probably could have stopped running. She wondered if he knew that.

No, she hadn’t come to investigate. She had come to find the final remains of Margaret Lacklin, once the center of Jordan’s universe. She had come to marvel at that love and wondered if Jordan still felt the same today. Maybe he had even come back to visit her over the years.

She shuddered at the thought.

Sentimentality aside, she couldn’t help but wonder what kind of people buried their dead beneath the ground. It was such a waste of space and resources. Many believed the spirits of the dead haunted those graveyards.

Not Grace, of course. She didn’t believe in souls or spirits or even God, but it did not keep her from getting an eerie prickling sensation as she approached the cemetery.

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Grace told herself over and over again as she neared the graveyard entrance, but she couldn’t help but notice how much thinner the crowds became as she approached. At first she noticed she almost had elbow room, then she could walk without touching anyone, and finally she had a space several feet wide.

Space enough to see a man handing out pamphlets near the graveyard entrance. He shoved one at her as she walked by:

Only God can make us truly immortal!

Accept Jesus into your heart or you, too, will die forever beneath the ground.

“Repent, sinner!” the man said as Grace passed.

What made him think she was a sinner? And what made him think these flyers actually worked? Grace answered by not meeting his eyes and shuffling past as quickly as possible.

“Evil lies in that graveyard,” the man said as Grace crossed the threshold.

“It lies out there, too,” Grace replied.

It was like a different world. No one had taken care of it and no one lived there. No one at all. Grace had never been in such a big, open space with no people. There were no security guards here and no guns.

The pavement here was cracked and broken. Grass and weeds grew in those cracks up to Grace’s waist. Statues of angels and crosses loomed over her from either side, protecting their decaying charges as they stood against time.

Some of the angels looked like children. Grace saw the dates on one, “July 2, 1980–March 10, 1984.” Angela Cooper had not even been four years old before she had been cast beneath the dirt, her flesh kept from rejoining Mother Earth by an old-fashioned coffin.

Row after row, acre after acre, each gravestone told the story of a different life. Some must have ended tragically, like Angela Cooper’s, but others, like Madeleine Vance, had lived a long life for the time. Madeleine Vance had been almost as old as Grace when she had died.

So why didn’t Grace feel as if she had lived a full life yet? What made a life full? What made it different for her? Why did she get an extra century or two to get it right? How many years would it take before Grace would have that full life? Somehow, she did not think a thousand would be enough.

“Who’s there?”

Every hair on Grace’s body stood up as she jumped and whirled to face the other occupant of this forlorn place. No one came to the graveyard. The ageless, grungy looking man waving a shovel at her simply did not belong. He had long, black hair and mad, green eyes. The shovel made him look dangerous and ridiculous at the same time, but since he continued to wave it without actually attacking, she decided that any danger from him was not imminent.

“My name is Grace.”

“So?”

“So I’m looking for an old relative of mine,” Grace said. “I’m doing some family history.”

“In a graveyard? No one ever comes by a graveyard.”

“You’re here.”

“It’s the only place where I can be alone,” he said. “Everywhere else I got to fight for air. But no one else ever comes in here. You all think the ghosts will come and steal your souls.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts or souls,” Grace said.

“You’re a fool, then.”

Grace opened her mouth to say something, but a gust of wind hit her a glancing blow, and she felt a moment of fear at the possibility of tiny souls carried on that breeze.

“We’re all a bunch of idiots nowadays,” the man said. “We either don’t believe in God anymore or believe He’s some kind of vindictive deity who waves the hand of death over our heads.”

“Was it ever any different?”

“How the hell should I know? Who’d you say you were looking for?”

“I didn’t,” Grace said. “I’m looking for Margaret Lacklin.”

The man tapped a long finger against his temple and muttered. “Lacklin, Lacklin… I don’t think I know that one.” He reached into a worn pocket and pulled out a piece of paper folded over and over. He scanned through it for a time, muttering, “L…L…Lacklin…” Then he stabbed his finger at the map. “Found it. It’s in the newer part of the graveyard. How you related to her?”

“She’s a great-great-great-great-great…I lost track...grandmother.”

“So why does that make you want to meet with her?” he asked. “I’m sure all the people in here have lots of descendants. None ever come by to have a look.”

“I’m sentimental. What is your name, anyway?”

“Jason. I’m the curator.”

“They pay you to watch the cemetery?”

“They don’t run me off,” Jason said.

“Where can I find Margaret Lacklin?” Grace asked.

He brandished the map at her as if it were a weapon, pointing and waving his arms as he spoke. “You go up this road until you get to the mausoleum, then you go right, then left at the crooked cross, then left again at the–aw hell, I’ll just take you there.”

Jason hoisted his shovel over his shoulder and marched in front of Grace, leaving her to follow him as she chose. He was not much for conversation as they walked. He would mutter to himself from time to time, but mostly he just kept marching with a purpose, taking Grace past sections of increasingly newer and newer headstones–although the newest were still four hundred years old. Many of the less expensive headstones were hidden beneath the grass or even cracked. For a fleeting moment, Grace’s imagination started running wild, showing her daydreams of spirits seeping out through those cracks, but then she came to her senses.