Burn (21 page)

Chapter 31

When your thinking rises above concern for your own welfare,
wisdom which is independent of thought appears.

—Yamamoto Tsunenori

Harry Toledo tried to sleep, but after what he’d heard out at ViraVax his mind still wouldn’t let him rest. He’d thought the real threat was over, that the Deathbug, whatever it was, had been buried forever. The embassy shrink had been sympathetic, but sympathy didn’t stop the nightmares. And Harry didn’t want to take any drugs that might slow him down.

They rotted, dissolved, burned themselves up.

All of those things. Now it wasn’t just ViraVax, but people in downtown La Libertad. No doubt the U.S. would be off limits for any flights from Costa Brava. When the international word got out, there wouldn’t be an airport in the world that would let them in.

And now this thing’s behind us!

Behind, and possibly surrounding. Harry sat up and rubbed his eyes in frustration. Only four people had made it out of ViraVax alive, and Harry was one of them, tossed like a bag of coffee onto the deck of the plane.

And we’re still alive,
he thought.

Marte explained to him that even the most devastating viral pandemics left about twenty percent of the infected population alive.

But those are natural viruses.

“This one might be too fast for its own good,” Marte had told him. “I hate to say it, but infected people may not have the time to travel far enough to spread it. And the mitochondria is a tougher little critter than Mishwe gave it credit for.”

Small comfort to those people who were now a black smudge on the breeze.

This afternoon as they prepared to lift from ViraVax, Harry’s father had taken him aside for the one moment they’d been permitted together.

“You see my situation,” Rico said, tapping his canes onto the fresh concrete. “Scholz and I are working every angle we can think of, but I might not be able to move fast enough. You get yourself and Sonja out, any way you can. Understood?”

“But what about you, and Mom, and Marte Chang?”

“Help them if you can,” he said, “but don’t look back if you can’t. You’re no good to anybody if you stick around and get dead. Scholz and I, we’re working on an angle of our own with Spook. We’ll try to get everybody out together. But if an early bus comes along, you get on it, understood?”

“But I . . .”

“No heroics here,” Rico said. “The important thing is isolation. If you risk yourself, you risk everybody else, too. I saw you make your move on that chopper, and I was rooting for you, believe me.”

At least Mom and Nancy Bartlett made it back from church,
Harry thought.
The whole country’s getting pretty wild.

Harry had lived through several insurrections in Costa Brava, but this one was different. This time the real enemy didn’t wear a mask and carry a gun.

Harry lay back down and tried to relax. The recurring movie behind his eyelids always started the same: Marte’s black hair whips the breeze as she runs towards him like she did that day at ViraVax, except this time she melts down and burns like all the rest, her scream and her beautiful brown eyes the last to go.

This he saw nightly in the reverie before sleep, in that gray dusk when his guard was down, just before the twitch. Harry had taken up daydreaming about Dr. Chang, and this new hitch in his nightmare made him think about her even more.

Marte.

She’d made him stop calling her “Dr. Chang.” The two of them worked night and day to wring out codes from a data cube; then he’d worked day and night unraveling the files that those codes unlocked from hidey-holes throughout the electronic universe. Two days’ time seemed like years, and in that time, they met in person once at a debriefing that the Defense Intelligence Agency held at El Canada for all survivors.

“Witnesses,” Marte had said at the meeting.

The briefing officer raised his eyebrows.

“Dr. Chang?”

“A survivor is a victim,” she’d said. “I’d prefer to be called a witness. I’ve
seen
the victims.”

Harry and Marte couldn’t keep their gazes apart and, while Harry had memorized her face long ago, what attracted him the most about her when she testified was her hands. When she talked, her slender fingers moved to the rhythm of her voice and played out some secret tune on the tabletop in front of her.

So when he thought of her at night he pictured her sensitive hands dancing their subtle semaphore, as though they worked her gloveware or played a small keyboard. And if that got him through the next image of her burning alive, then he’d won the privilege of sleep, and the plane-crash dream.

Harry’s real memory of his second plane crash in two days blurred behind the heavy dose of trank that his father had shot into his thigh. He had been conscious, but helpless, when the Mongoose pancaked into a jungle hillside. That awful helplessness scared Harry the most.

Helplessness was not new to Harry Toledo. His father beat him, but not anymore. His mother stuck a pair of scissors into his father’s neck one night to stop him, and now the whole
country
knew what happened. Harry needed to be in control, even if it meant doing the wrong thing. That’s why he hated flying, something he couldn’t explain to Sonja.

She lives to fly.

Sonja hadn’t been out of her room except for the quick trip to ViraVax since the Agency grounded them and locked up her new plane upon return to Casa Canada. “For your own protection” was getting to be a stale old lie. Harry thought it was pretty chickenshit himself, but he had to admit it’s what he would have done if
he
were in charge. The deathbug had everybody ultra-paranoid, and their own bodies could be secret weapons now, for all they knew.

He and Sonja were the world’s only
in utero
clones, and everybody would want a peek and a poke, so he tried to be thankful for the temporary privacy. Harry was sure that, unless they escaped, the two of them would never see privacy again.

The Agency shrink explained that the nightmares always picked up on his fear of helplessness.

“You’re vulnerable when you sleep,” Dr. Olsen told him. “And in sleep your body goes numb, like it was on the lift pad that day at ViraVax. Like it was when your father beat you.”

Each time the dream began the same way. A horde of Innocents, the
deficientes
that ViraVax manufactured for themselves, surrounds the Mongoose. Harry is strapped inside, but through the magic of dream he can see Innocents all around the plane. They all want out of ViraVax. They’re reaching towards Harry and crying as the engines wind up, but Harry’s paralyzed. Harry can see the back of a bald head at the controls. Not Sonja. It’s the dzee that kidnapped them, that virologist who “made” them, Dajaj Mishwe!

Harry tries to shout, to get Mishwe to shut down the engines, but Mishwe laughs and revs them higher, until the Mongoose trembles and its landing gear tapdances in place. Gravel ricochets off the fuselage as the Innocents melt from their bones amid screams and that rotten, burnt-hair smell. Harry’s dream paralyzes him as they writhe beneath the wings, slopping their dead sludge over the concrete. As always, they flicker with the clean blue flame of death as the Mongoose lifts off.

Harry didn’t feel like going through the whole program tonight. He kicked off his sweaty sheet and gave up trying to sleep.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll take Dr. Olsen up on that sleeping pill,
he thought.
If we’re still here tomorrow. If there’s a Doctor Olsen tomorrow.

His experience at ViraVax had soured him on any kind of medication, particularly the kind that made him helpless. And it was nearly impossible for him to think about the future.

He slipped out of bed quietly, though the household had been designated a communications center and the noise level was uncharacteristically high. Still, he would leave the few sleepers nearby to whatever rest they could find. Each of them: Harry, Sonja, Sonja’s mom, Harry’s mom—and the other survivors in La Libertad—had lived through hell, and it wasn’t over yet. The faint electrical switching of muffled security tracks patrolling the farm roads was reminder enough. But Marte Chang had discovered some disturbing possibilities in her search for what ViraVax had done to Harry, his father and Sonja Bartlett. The Agency suspected something, too, because they all were under some kind of house arrest, though even Colonel Scholz denied it.

Marte was right; we’re witnesses, not survivors. The survival part isn’t over yet.

Harry strapped on his Mosquitex, pulled on a shirt and shorts, then slipped into the shadows of a banana tree outside his bedroom.

Three meteors carved their silent streaks through the warm Costa Bravan night. He wished that Marte were here to see them with him. A couple of times he’d caught himself daydreaming about Dr. Chang, but he always stopped himself because all dreams these days ended the same: the ground racing to meet him, or her beautiful face melting from its bones. The Agency had sequestered her in La Libertad, so he’d been working with her by sat-link, and even
that
was exciting. But he wanted to hear the
hiss
of her clean black hair shifting across itself and he wanted to . . .

“Pilot to navigator,” a voice whispered. “Where the hell are we?”

Harry spun around.

“Mom!” he said, his heart racing. “You scared the hell out of me!”

Grace Toledo stepped out of the hedge of bougainvillea that skirted his room and gave Harry a hug. She wore shorts and a T-shirt, too, and in spite of the warm night her skin felt cool. A slight dampness slicked her cheeks. She had been shorter than Harry for a couple of years, now, but tonight she felt small, frail.

“I like it when you call me ‘Mom,’” she said.

“You
are
my mom.”

Grace let go the hug and patted his arm. Harry’s night vision was one of his augmentations, one more proof of his tampered genetics, and he saw the sad shake of her head.

“ViraVax even took
that
away from me,” she said. “Their Artificial Viral Agents destroyed your father, our marriage, and now . . .”

“You carried me for nine months, Mom,” he said. “You’ve taken good care of me for fifteen years. And you saved my life when Dad . . . you know. What does a little hitch in genetics mean after all that?”

She sniffed, fumbled for a tissue and blotted her nose.

“It means that the part of you that’s supposed to be
me
isn’t,” she said. “I know that’s small of me, and I know I love you no matter what genetic stew they gave you. But I still feel
robbed,
you know?”

“Burgled,” Harry corrected. “Robbed means they did it face to face.”

“Whatever!”

They stood, side by side, listening to the night sounds swell to fill their silence. Harry heard the electric tracks of the patrols as they crisscrossed the gravel roadways of the coffee farm around them. The coffee workers’ housing had been taken over by security, and he heard the
slap
of playing cards down there, and the occasional laughter.

Patrols had tripled since the Archbishop’s office in La Libertad leaked a few of the terrible facts about ViraVax, then tripled again when the Deathbug hit the Gardeners in some kind of suicide pact. Only this suicide was designed to take everybody else with them. They had engineered the sterility of millions throughout the world, focusing on Catholics, Mormons and Muslims. They had manipulated tens of thousands into giving birth to Down syndrome babies, then supplied “homes” for the children through their “Down’s-Up” program. These “homes” provided ViraVax with a malleable labor force, human stock for experimentation and plenty of organs for transplant. And now, a vector for horror and death.

“What are you doing with that Chang woman?”

Harry had known that his mother would ask this.

“Helping her on the web,” he said. “She found evidence that ViraVax developed several versions of the Meltdown virus. It could be dormant in any one of us that they tinkered with—including you. I want to know what I’m made of before . . .”

Grace interrupted, “What do you mean, including me? I’ve never even been to that facility.”

Harry could tell by the strain in her voice that she was scared—a lot more scared than she’d ever been at the hands of his father. He told her what he knew, what he’d learned from Marte.

“They could alter you the same way they got me,” he said. “Through Dad. They tagged his sperm with a couple of AVAs so that they’d get a new, improved clone of Dad instead of a normal child. You could have anything ticking inside you. Marte wants to find out what went where so that we can shut it off.”

“I see. So it’s ‘Marte’ now?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you like her?”

“I like her a lot, Mom. She’s
really
smart. . . .”

“And nearly twice your age. What does Sonja think about all this?”

“She’s only ten years older,” Harry corrected, “and I don’t know what Sonja thinks. She seemed cheerful enough at the pour, but since the Agency grounded us she stays in her room.”

“I thought you two were a number.”

“We were
bred
to be a number, Mom,” Harry said. “How would that make
you
feel? To find that you’d been . . . engineered . . . to be the ideal breeding pair? It doesn’t feel very good to me.”

“But you two have been inseparable, long before you knew. You make a great team; look what you did to ViraVax. Before you knew what they did to you. . . .”

“That’s it, Mom,” Harry interrupted. “Everything in life now is divided into Before and After. Before we knew, and After we found out. Like it or not, everything’s changed. Most people won’t associate with us, you know. Even security’s scared we’ll breathe something terrible on them.”

Grace Toledo heaved a great sigh for such a small woman and patted his arm again.

“I really wish I had a cigarette,” she said.

“You don’t smoke.”

“Maybe it’s time to start. They’re moving some embassy personnel and equipment out here by morning. Your friend, Dr. Chang, will be coming with them. Maybe even your father and Colonel Scholz.”