Try as she might, she couldn’t knock him down. She was too achy and sore, too exhausted, and sick!
So she let it all go! Her insides, her sickness, her nausea. Gross times two!
Whatever she’d eaten at the summer house: cold beef stew, chocolate-chocolate-chip ice cream, lots of milk that smelled a
little sour, ham and provolone cheese and red pickle relish without any bread, whatever she’d found in the fridge—she returned
the favor.
She threw up on the guard. All over his face and his dumb Colorado Rockies ball cap. His hands shot to his eyes. He probably
didn’t know what had hit him. He dropped his gun and let out a loud yell.
Max winged past him. She disappeared amid the maple and fir trees and thick brush. She was safe. She didn’t get shot. She
screamed
Yessss, yessss!
She was flying again, remembering how much she loved this.
Just let me fly for sixty more seconds, she made a wish.
Just let me fly one more time.
I
WOKE with my face inches from Kit’s, and I liked being there, close to him like this. I was pressed against his body, holding
him tightly. Strange, but it was the first morning in a long time that I hadn’t come awake in the middle of a terrifying nightmare.
But of course, I really had.
He was awake. Kit was looking at me. His blue eyes were more dazzling than ever up close. How unexpectedly sensitive and sweet
he had turned out to be. How easy to be with.
I’ll bet you were a really, really good father.
“Hi,” I whispered, and smiled, and felt warm and fuzzy for the first time in ages.
“Hi, back at you. I guess it wasn’t a dream that we made wild and passionate love last night.”
Suddenly everything seemed so simple and right and the irony of it just killed me. Kit and I were falling in love, or maybe
we had already fallen. Our situation couldn’t have been any worse. Our chances of surviving were nonexistent. We were witnesses.
We had seen the atrocities committed at the School.
There was a light tapping at the door. We looked at each other. Was this it? Had they come for us? Thomas and his band of
goons.
Kit and I exchanged looks again. We heard a key slowly sliding into the lock, metal against metal. We climbed out of bed and
hurried into some clothes.
The door opened, and I couldn’t believe who it was.
“Hello, Aunt Frannie. It’s me, Michael. I came to rescue you.”
T
HERE WAS SOMEONE ELSE THERE, too. A man in a blue summer suit stepped into the room right behind Michael. He had a semiautomatic
in his hand and the gun was aimed at Kit. Inexplicably, he smiled.
“I came to rescue you, too,” he said. His voice was soft. Very quiet. It really made you pay attention.
“Who are you?” I asked. I’d never seen him before. I was pretty sure he wasn’t from Boulder Community Hospital. I didn’t think
he was one of the guards either.
Kit spoke up. “His name is Peter Stricker. He was my boss at the FBI, the regional head. Peter ordered me off this investigation,
said it was going nowhere. He threatened to fire me when I wouldn’t give up the case. And now, here he is. Hello, Peter. I
see the case finally has your attention.”
Stricker was tall and well muscled; he had slicked-back, light blond hair. He was a smug-looking yuppie, if ever there was
one, with an easy, well-oiled smile.
“Who can you trust these days?” Stricker said in his whispery voice. “Nobody, I guess. Not your closest friends. Not even
some of your old buds at the FBI.”
“Does that mean there are still
some
people I can trust at the Bureau?” Kit asked.
“Oh sure. A few dinosaurs here and there. The Director happens to be one of them. Actually, only a couple of us are lucky
enough to be involved in this. Plus a few very trusted stalwarts from the army. Everybody who found out about this wanted
a piece of it. It’s the American Way. You were right, though. This is big stuff. The biggest I’ve ever seen.”
“Does this mean the U.S. government is involved?” I asked.
“No, let’s not get carried away. No need for too many paranoid fantasies or conspiracy theories. Certain people in the government
are aware of what’s going on here in Colorado, and before that in San Francisco and Boston. We’re involved as private citizens
only. There are only about fifty of us and we have a great deal at stake. There was a little insurrection among a few of the
doctors, attacks of conscience, but we’re past that now. We eliminated the problem.”
“You’re greasing the way for progress, and being paid for your efforts?” Kit said. “That
is
the American Way.”
“Very well paid. But don’t forget, our work is important. I stopped you from interfering, didn’t I? Did my part for the Cause.
I happen to believe in it, by the way. I think Dr. Peyser’s work is critical for us all.”
“So, are you here to shoot us yourself?” I asked Stricker. “Are you the one?” As I spoke I moved a step or two away from Kit.
Put a little distance between us.
“That wasn’t my plan when I came down here. Of course it could change at any moment. Don’t do that, Dr. O’Neill. Not a real
good idea.”
I kept moving laterally. “What isn’t a good idea?”
“You never were a field agent,” Kit said. “Never got your hands dirty, Peter. Stayed behind a desk all these years. That’s
why I wouldn’t have promoted you to the regional job.”
“All right! Stop right there.” Stricker finally raised his voice and shifted the gun until it was pointed at my chest. “I
can do dirty work just fine, Tom. Watch me.”
Kit took a lightning-fast step in and threw a hell of a punch at Stricker’s jaw. It was a crushingly hard shot and the agent
went down hard on one knee.
But he came bounding right back up. That surprised me. Stricker was stronger and a lot tougher than he looked.
Kit came back with a short, powerful uppercut. A haymaker, I guess you’d call it. He knocked the smug and satisfied look right
off Stricker’s face. I almost cheered.
Then he crunched another quick, hard shot into Stricker’s stomach. Kit was tougher than he looked, too. A whole lot tougher,
and Kit
looked
tough to begin with. I knew nothing about the Golden Gloves, and whatever time Kit had put into amateur boxing, but it was
paying huge dividends now.
He fired another lightning-fast punch that landed right between Stricker’s eyes, smashing his nose at the bridge. The agent
went down, and this time he didn’t get up. He was out cold on the floor.
Kit reached down and took the handgun. He wasn’t even out of breath. Clearly, he’d enjoyed the one-sided fistfight. Me too.
“Let’s get out of here.”
Michael had been watching with rapt attention. “That was real good,” he said. “Wow. That was cool. You’re a good fighter.”
“Thanks, Michael. Now show us where Oz and Icarus and the twins are,” I told him.
The next step in human evolution grinned, just like any other four-year-old would. He even took my hand.
“I know where they are, Aunt Frannie. I’ll show you the way.”
M
ICHAEL WAS MY HERO. He led the way for us. We hurried down a short corridor that ended at a foreboding-looking metallic-gray
door. I prayed the other children hadn’t been hurt, or put to sleep.
“End of the road?” Kit muttered, as we came to the door. “Where to now, Michael?”
“We can go this way. It’s faster,” Michael said. “Don’t worry, I’m smart for my age.”
“You sure are. Here we go then,” said Kit. He shoved open the heavy-looking door, and we entered a large lab that took my
breath away, shattered what was left of my senses.
Lab equipment was lying out everywhere. Graduated cylinders. Pasteur pipettes. Microcentrifuge tubes with a vortex mixer.
Rockers—machines that shake test-tube racks because certain bacteria needs to grow while being shaken. There were incubators
the size of washing machines. I had no idea what they were here for, but they were scary. An autoclave was built into the
wall to sterilize whatever needed it.
Three young women were lying on hospital beds on the far side of the room! It was obvious that each of the women was pregnant,
probably past eight months. Close to term.
A tall, well-built male nurse saw us enter and hurried our way. He looked concerned, maybe angry, maybe both. “Are you here
for the inspection? The tour of our facilities? You know, you can’t be down here unescorted,” he said.
Kit never said a word. He just hit him with a right uppercut that came looping from around his knees. The big thug didn’t
have a chance against Kit. He hit the floor with a heavy thud. His large head bounced off concrete, then rolled to one side.
Michael said, “We should get out of here. Please?”
Michael was right, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the pregnant women as we hurried through the room. They looked to be in
their teens and early twenties. Good healthy specimens. What were they doing down here? What kind of babies were they carrying?
Silently, they watched us, and I finally saw the leather straps on their legs. The women were secured to their beds, tied
down, bound. They couldn’t get up and leave.
“We’ll get help for them,” Kit whispered at my side. “Let’s go, Frannie.”
“We’ll bring help. I promise,” I told the women. There was no way we could bring them with us now.
Michael was pulling me forward, toward another steel door in the rear. “We’ll come back for you,” I promised a pregnant woman
who couldn’t have been more than eighteen.
“I think I’m going into labor,” she said fearfully.
Human experiments.
M
OST HUMANS are like stones along the ground, useless to themselves and others, waiting for the next sixty seconds to reveal
itself,” Gillian said in soft, confident tones. “Fortunately, that depressing description doesn’t fit any of us. Welcome to
all of you. This small, very select group is incredibly important to mankind. We are ushering in a new era today. I promise
you that, and I shall deliver on the promise.”
Gillian and Dr. Anthony Peyser stared out at the audience from a long work table positioned at the front of the conference
room.
Dr. Peyser spoke without rising from his chair. “It’s just eight o’clock in the morning, and everything is proceeding on schedule.
Everything is going just about perfectly, I would have to say. Clearly, what we have assembled here are the shining stars
of genetic engineering.
“As you can see, news of my departure from our planet is a bit premature. As you can also see from my ‘tremble,’ I had a stroke.
I’m healthy now. Actually, I’ve found a way to add ten, maybe even a dozen years to my miserable life span. More on that later
in the proceedings. Believe me, it’s a mere footnote compared to what else we have in store for you this morning.”
There were nods and faint smiles from the seventeen men and women who had been invited to the inspections and now… the most
important auction of all time.
An auction.
Each of the seventeen represented a major biotech company, or, in some cases, a country. One wealthy individual had come prepared
to finance a major new corporation, based on the morning’s results. These “stars of genetic engineering” seemed reluctant
to look into each other’s eyes. They were there to bid competitively on the most spectacular scientific discoveries in history
and appeared afraid or ashamed to reveal their common lust. Truman Capote had once called J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn “killer
fruit.” If so, these were “killer nerds.”
Dr. Peyser continued to address the group. “You’ve all read the dossiers and previewed the lots. Each experiment, each miraculous
child is unique and valuable beyond measure. All the documents and data relating to the ‘provenance of the lots’ will be provided
to the actual buyers. We have established a reserve or minimum figure at which we will sell each lot. This is also known as
an ‘upset price,’ probably because we will be upset if we have to sell at it. Anyway—if there are no further questions, we’ll
start the bidding process now.”
Gillian rose from her seat. She offered a polite smile, then placed a sheaf of papers before her on the table. She adjusted
the wire-rimmed glasses that helped give her the look of a successful woman CEO. The world was changing, after all. Oh yes,
the world was changing faster than any of these self-important executives could ever guess.
She finally announced, “The auction is officially begun. From this moment, no one else will be allowed to enter the bidding.
There will be no telephone bids, no sealed bids. The winner shall be indicated by the simple fall of the gavel.”
One of the competitors, a slope-shouldered, balding man in a dark pinstriped suit, leaned forward. He had a sharp, upturned
nose and a pugnacious lower lip. He was from New Jersey, a wealthy suburb near AT&T headquarters. “Can we take possession
of the lots right away?” he asked. “And the scientific papers?”
“Yes, of course you can. Do you wish to open the bidding, Dr. Warner?”
“What about the increments?” came another voice, an impressive-looking man with a sandy-brown Dutch boy haircut. “What are
the bid increments?”
“The bids, Dr. Muller, shall be in multiples of one hundred million dollars,” Gillian announced.
There was a flurry of discussion, mild protests, fear that one competitor or another might have just gained some advantage.
“Gentlemen, ladies.” Gillian banged her gavel once. “These proceedings will be civilized.”
The bidders settled down. They were well-mannered, polite. Good citizens, one and all.
Gillian ran her eyes down the list of lots and back up to the spellbound audience again. The room remained silent, the competitors
poised as if at an unseen starting gate. She paused briefly, as if she were considering something that she’d forgotten to
tell them.
Actually, she was playing with their heads, toying with their overinflated egos. She thought that this must be how Prometheus
felt right after he had stolen fire from the gods.