Firechild (12 page)

What now?

He sat sweating in the car for half a minute, then climbed gingerly out into ankle-deep dust. The new-paint reek rose strong around him, the stink of starkest tragedy. This dismal ruin marked his brother’s grave. The tomb, he thought, of all the EnGene staff—if Task Force Watchdog had found survivors, it would hardly be raking the dust so avidly for clues no longer likely to exist.

Certainly, he had seen no hint of any answer. Yet this was the spot where the disaster had begun. If any evidence of the killer’s origin did remain, here was his chance to be first upon it.

He caught a breath that almost choked him and plodded toward a gap in the shattered wall. A louder drumming checked him, and a rush of burning wind. A chopper floated closer, blinding him with dust. He bent to a spasm of sneezing. With a handkerchief to his nose, he pushed on—and saw a flash of pink.

Something moving!

Something small, slowly crawling, searching its way out of a mountain of shattered mortar and broken concrete blocks. The handkerchief slipped out of his fingers. Dazed by the thing’s total strangeness, he stood watching while it squirmed across a scrap of fire-scarred metal. Pausing at the edge as if to look ahead, it dived out of sight into the rubble.

Life!

How could anything be still alive, here in the killer’s very cradle? Gasping, trembling, he recovered the handkerchief and blew his nose and stumbled closer. There! He found it crawling over a broken brick. It paused, almost as if it had perceived him. The head end rose toward him. In a moment, it came on.

They met. He knelt in the ashes to peer down at it.

The blunt pink head appeared as if to look up at him, though it had no eyes that he could see.

“In God’s name, what are you?”

In all he knew of zoology, there had been nothing like it. The skin was slick and bright, unbroken anywhere. It had no legs or wings or antennae, no appendages at all, no apparent sense organs, yet he knew it was aware of him.

He reached for it, and it leaned to rub against his fingers like a friendly cat. When he spread his hand, it curled into his palm. Its skin was warm and dry, and he felt it throbbing like a purring kitten. He stood up and held it close to study it again. It looked featureless as a pink sausage.

“What are you?” he muttered again. “How’d you stay alive?”

Its blunt head moved as if to study him, but it made no other response. Squinting at it, he recalled that long-gone night with Vic in Cincinnati after their father’s funeral, recalled Vic’s crazy-seeming dream of writing a new genetic code to create a new family tree engineered to grow something better than humanity, perhaps closer to divinity. Was this small thing the first fruit of that new tree, shaped of something different from any familiar natural protoplasm, its laws and limits unknown?

He shivered at the notion—but only for an instant. For he liked it, in spite of its shape and its strangeness. He trusted it without needing to know why.

“Whatever—” He shrugged, grinning down at it. “You’re okay, but still I’d like to know—”

He started walking with it back into the tangled ruin, trying to follow the wavering track it had left in the ashes. It moved on his palm, shrinking back toward him as if it didn’t want to return, but he went on until he lost its trail at that gap in the wall.

It had come out of the blackened wreckage beyond, a jungle of broken masonry and tangled steel too thick for him to penetrate. Fallen beams, shattered concrete and brick, burned wire, torn and flattened air ducts, twisted pipes and burned metal fixtures, all were covered with actual ashes darker than the dust, the bitter stink of recent fire sharper here than the new-paint reek.

Born of fire?

The notion stuck in his mind, not quite rational yet oddly appealing. Its actual womb must have been some test tube or petri dish now shattered and fused and forever lost, but its survival seemed to hint at some remarkable immunity to flame and chaos. He peered through the gap, wondering if it had endured the explosion in some basement space too deep for blast and heat to reach, but any search for such a site would have to wait for bulldozers.

It squirmed and shivered in his hand. He found the chopper roaring close behind him, kicking up a suffocating cloud that rolled in around him. Two men with binoculars leaned out to study him. He gasped and wiped his stinging eyes. Trying desperately with his free hand to wave them off, he shielded the pink thing against his chest and stumbled back to the car.

Keeping too close, flying too low, the chopper followed him back out of the ruin, back to the highway. He found a National Guard jeep parked on the bridge. A man in Army camouflage got out as he neared it, one hand lifted to stop him, a pistol ready in the other.

He stopped and rolled down the glass. On the seat beside him, the pink thing nestled against his hip as if to hide. He felt it shuddering.

“Halt!” A brittle-toned command. “Identify yourself.”

“Belcraft,” he said. “Dr. Saxon Belcraft. I practice general medicine in Fort Madison, Iowa.” He climbed out of the car. “Who are you?”

“Fair enough.” A tight-lipped grin. “Lieutenant Joseph Dusek, US Army. On temporary duty with Task Force Watchdog. My orders now are to find out what you’re doing here.”

“I came here to Enfield to see my brother. He is—or was—employed here at EnGene labs. A state cop kept me out of town, but I was caught inside your quarantine line.”

“You’re lucky to be alive. I doubt the cop is.” Impatient accusation sharpened Dusek’s voice. “You’re a trespasser here. Don’t you know that?”

“I picked up a leaflet.”

“You were seen picking up something else.” Dusek stepped closer. He hadn’t shaved. He smelled of sweat. His eyes were black-rimmed and bloodshot, as if he hadn’t slept. “Just now. In yonder.” His gun gestured. “What was it?”

“If you want a look—”

He reached for the pink thing. It recoiled, but he slid his hand under it and lifted it out of the car. It shuddered away from Dusek, trying to crawl up his sleeve. Dusek gaped at it, backing away with an equal aversion.

“What the hell?”

“I found it crawling out of what used to be the En-Gene labs. That’s all I know.”

“It was alive in there?”

“Evidently.”

“Could it—” Dusek shrank farther. “Could it carry the plague?”

“The plague—the lethal effect, whatever it was— seems to have stopped.” He lifted the pink thing higher. “It seems harmless. Affectionate, in fact.”

“You’re crazy!” Dusek blinked at him glassily. “Where are you going with it?”

“For now, “back to that motel.” He drew the pink thing back away from Dusek, and it snuggled gratefully into his palm. “Afterward—” He shrugged.

“Stay there!” Dusek waved the gun. “Keep your monster with you. Away from anybody else, in case it is the killer. Watchdog will want to see it.” Retreating toward the jeep, he paused to add: “If you try to claim you didn’t know, just remember the contaminated area is under military law. I could kill you for trespassing. I won’t do that, but you are under house arrest. Stay in your room till Watchdog comes.”

He paused, scowling and backing farther from the pink thing.

“Got that?”

“I’ve got it.”

Dusek backed the jeep off the bridge, beckoned him across, and followed him back to the motel. He parked outside number nine. Dusek stopped on the road, shouting into a mobile phone. Inside the stifling room, he heard the jeep roar and burn rubber, getting away.

The pink thing wrapped itself around his forefinger when he tried to lay it on the unmade bed. He pushed it off gently. Starting to the bathroom, he heard a faint squeak and looked back to find it squirming off the bed.

“Dry?”

It shrilled again, and he saw a tiny mouth open now in the middle of its head. He picked it up and brought it with him. Whistling eagerly, it leaned toward the lavatory. When he opened the dripping faucet, it dived off his hand into the basin.

“You were dry!”

It played five minutes in the water, swimming and leaping and diving again before it climbed to the basin rim and raised its tiny mouth to whistle at him, he thought happily. He carried it back to the bed and left it there while he looked for a beer. Three cans were left from the six-pack. He opened one. When the warm beer spewed, the pink thing whistled, leaping eagerly toward the spray.

“If you want a drink—”

Its eyeless head turned alertly to follow while he filled and offered the water-stained glass. It stretched for the frothy beer, sucking thirstily.

“Hungry?”

He dug again through the box the chopper had dropped and found a can of tomato soup. No opener had been included, but he split the top of the can with his pocket knife and poured cold soup into the glass. Tentatively, he offered a drop of it on the tip of his finger. The pink thing leaned daintily to taste and squealed for more. It had sucked up almost half the can before it drew lazily away to pipe a tiny note of what he took for contentment.

He opened a can of corned beef to make himself a sandwich that he ate with another tepid beer. Escaping the hot room, he went out into the building’s slightly cooler shade and sat on the step with the little creature on his knees. It snuggled toward his body and lay still, coiled like a small pink snake.

Its mouth had vanished. Its purring throb slowed and ceased, as if it had gone to sleep. Its scent rose around him in the humid heat, faint but clean and pleasant. Vaguely like fresh-cut hay, he thought, but really like nothing he knew.

He thought it had to be a product of genetic science, probably Vic’s own creation, yet it remained a tantalizing riddle. If it really belonged to another kind of life, engineered from a new protoplasm never known on Earth—what could it unfold, for biology, for medicine, perhaps for future history?

He shivered again, a little in awe at all its unknown potentials, but more afraid for its own future. For Dusek would be reporting it. Men from Watchdog would soon be here to take it for examination. It wouldn’t want to be examined, and suddenly he felt certain he didn’t want to give it up.

He watched the road the jeep had taken. Nothing came back along it. All he could hear was the unending beat of the searching choppers, half a dozen of them low in the east, forever crossing and recrossing the ash and dust of Enfield.

Toward sunset, another arrived from toward the perimeter. It circled the motel and settled over the parking lot, so low its hot engine fumes took his breath. A crewman leaned out with binoculars focused on him and the pink thing. Aroused, the little creature raised its head and shuddered against him until the chopper lifted.

“Better watch “em.” He stroked its quivering coils. “They could hurt you.”

He heard the TV thump. The air conditioner came on, and the room was cooling when he came inside. The KBIO newsroom had vanished from the tube. He twisted the dial, searching for news. A blast of rock music. A feminine hygiene commercial. Finally a special documentary, the title just fading. BIOGENETIC BLACKOUT.

A network anchorman came on with a roundup of what he called official information sources, though he had gotten very little actual information. Washington was denying a rumor that Enfield had been devastated by the accidental malfunction of a secret military biological. Though the Secretary of Defense remained unavailable, State had issued a white paper formally denouncing all biological warfare.

“With no accusations stated or implied, and regardless of anything known or suspected about the intentions and capacities of other nations, the American government has solemnly and repeatedly assured the world that it never had and never would undertake any preparations whatever for genetic aggression.”

The White House had condemned all such weapons. The President described them as “demoniac inventions, devised to turn the most secret and sacred forces of life against themselves.” Although interrupted communications were yet to be fully restored, civil defense officials still insisted that the “Enfield incident” had been, in fact, merely a needless panic due to baseless rumors and unfounded media speculation.

The documentary continued with shots of sleepy people in airline terminals waiting for canceled flights to be resumed; shots of National Guardsmen called up without notice to serve on the quarantine perimeter; shots of indignant congressmen demanding information.

In reply to questions about yellow rain in Asian wars and a rumored anthrax epidemic in the USSR due to experimental mischance, unnamed spokesmen had denied knowing of genetically engineered weapons under development anywhere. The American government had no connection whatever with EnGene.

The corporation was privately held. Attorneys defended the innocence of the unidentified owners, claiming that EnGene had been totally devoted to the creation of new lifesaving pharmaceuticals. Nothing under development there had any possible military use.

That was all.

The night sky was alive with throbbing choppers when he looked outside. Searching now, he supposed, with infrared detectors. Discovering nothing. They never would.

Waiting for Watchdog to come for the pink thing, he opened the last warm beer. It made that tiny mouth again to share it with him. Relaxed with that, it coiled in his lap and seemed to sleep. He laid it on the bed and lay back beside it, uneasy for it but uncertain how to help.

Its small whistle woke him.

Gray daylight filtered through the dingy curtains, and another chopper was roaring low outside. The pink thing shrilled again. Blinking groggily, he found it at the door, its eyeless head turned hopefully back to him.

“If you think you can get away—”

He stumbled to open the door.

16

La Pendeja

P
ancho Torres spent most of that hot night on the windmill tower, lying flat on the high platform under the broken wheel, watching Enfield burn. There was no moon till midnight, but towers of flame and red-lit smoke revealed the fire. Steadily it spread, a bright streak running far along the horizon, the nearer trees and buildings standing black against it.