Firechild (20 page)

Vic!

Alive! That was what she thought for one happy instant, till she knew it couldn’t be. The dear Vic was sadly and forever dead. Yet the man in the car shone like Vic, bright with kindness, luminous with the same gift for love. She heard the car stop. Eagerly, she crawled to meet the sound.

The car door clunked. She heard his feet, and the scraps of torn metal clattering under them. She hurried toward him, and stopped when she saw how different he was. He was taller than Vic. His skin was darker and his hair was thicker. He wore no glasses. Yet still he felt like Vic, and suddenly she knew he must be Sax.

Saxon. The brother Vic had told her about, one long night when they had been alone together in the lab and he was trying to tell her what he was, because he wanted to help her understand what he hoped she would be. That was back before she even knew what a brother was. He must have sensed her trouble understanding, because he stopped to explain about the life that came from nature and the life like hers that had to be engineered.

That was hard for her to grasp, but she had understood enough to be saddened again, knowing she would never have a brother like Vic’s human brother, Sax, to teach her and help her and defend her. Vic had helped her bear the sadness while he was with her in the lab, but now—

The dark shock of grief dazed her again, till she saw Sax coming on through the ruin. Closer, he felt more and more like Vic, and that good feeling lit a spark of hope in her. She moved on toward him. He had seen her. He stopped to speak. His voice felt as warm and kind as Vic’s. He lifted her in his hand the way Vic had done. She felt the glow of love beginning in him, reflecting her own.

He carried her out of the burning dust and took her into his car. He sheltered her from the Dusek who stopped them at the bridge and shrank away from her with no spark of love at all. Sax gave her water and food and an echo to her love that made her want to keep on living. He kept her safe through another night, till day came again, dreadful with the redness of danger. When she knew she must leave him, he opened the door to let her escape.

Hiding, wandering alone with nowhere to go, she went into the water because she was thirsty. Floating in it, letting it carry her farther from the dust and the danger, she found Panchito. Love had been dead in him when she came upon him lying flat to drink from the little river.

Yet she felt no redness in the air around him, and she was not afraid. Lonely and hungry, she leaped to kiss his chin. When he saw her creeping out of the water, he had no fear of her. He took her in his hand, and a bright spark was born.

Panchito learned to love her, nearly as tenderly as Vic. He sheltered her and found food and taught her all he could, but now he, too, was gone. Once more, lying here under the sun-hot shell of the old
carretilla
with the redness dimming everything around her, she had been left all alone.

Yet she must not die. For the dear Vic’s sake, she must stay alive. She must learn what he had shaped her to do. She must get it done. If Panchito had come to love her, there might be love from others. Others, too, might teach and help her. If she could only escape the hunters in the sky and stay alive to seek more good people, they might be open to her love.

Night was a long time coming, but at last the old iron cooled and the beat of the choppers seemed farther away. She came out in the dusk to fill her lungs with fresher air, but still the warning redness hazed everything. Southward, where the city had been, it seemed thicker. Low in the north, the darkening sky looked almost clear. That was the way she must go.

First she went back to empty house. The gringos had broken doors, but they hadn’t harmed the kitchen. Missing Panchito, she found the food he had ready for trouble, parched
maiz
and frijoles
fritos
wrapped in cold tortillas. She ate all she could and stuffed what was left into a plastic bag.

Missing Panchito to guard her and cheer her, to teach her what he could and carry her when she needed to be carried, “she left the house in the red-dyed dark, walking north. Her sense for danger helped. It made a dull crimson glow all across the south, and it ringed the high-sailing choppers with small red halos, yet it couldn’t reveal smaller things waiting to hurt her. Though it let her see the hostility and hatred in living minds, it didn’t show the sticks that tried to trip her or the rocks that bruised and cut her naked feet.

Many times she stumbled and fell. Most of the night was gone, and she was scratched and battered and very tired before she came to the fence. It was a tall barbed-wire barrier, just beyond a new road cut through the empty pastures inside it. The wires glowed red because they were electric and meant to kill.

She crossed the road and found a hollow where she could crawl under the wires. Though she tried not to touch anything, the wires shone suddenly redder. She squirmed on through and ran on across the dark field beyond. Once it must have been a farm, but it was abandoned now, slashed with deep gullies where the soil was gone, scattered with rocks and clumps of brush and broken machines that tried to strip her.

A chopper was suddenly roaring low behind her, coming fast along the fence. Red mist wrapped it, and the redness thickened around her. A strange light that was no light, it didn’t help her see which way to go. She fell into a gully. Dazed and aching, she struggled for her breath and fumbled for the precious bag of food. It was gone, lost in the clotting redness.

The chopper thundering near, she dragged herself out of the gully and stumbled on. It followed, as if the gringos aboard it could see her in the dark. Blinded by the redness, she tripped and fell again, and crawled on stinging hands and knees into a dark mass of brush. Groping, she felt a hollow in the rocky ground.

Perhaps—perhaps it could hide her.

She slithered into it, and suddenly fell. It had no bottom. She slid down past narrow rocky walls into chilling dampness and the suffocating dark.

25

Better than

Human

D
reaming again, yet somehow aware that it was more than just a dream, Belcraft became one with Alphamega. In flight from the gringos, he shared her grief for Vic and cringed when she felt Panchito’s pain. The red-haloed chopper roaring close behind, he crawled with her under the fence and tumbled with her into the arroyo. They hid together in the clump of brush, scrambled together into the little cave.

Together, they dropped into the pit. It was narrow and bottomless, cold and wet and black and dreadful, and the rough walls shrank around them as they fell. It snagged and scratched and bruised them, squeezing closer till it stopped them cruelly, held so tight they could barely breathe.

He woke in the hospital bed, chilled with the sweat of her terror, ‘gasping for his own breath. He must have made some outcry, because a nurse hurried in to feel his pulse and ask what was wrong.

“Just dreaming,” he told her. “Jittery, I guess, from that explosion.”

But the thing had been too real for a dream. Meg had been her paradoxic self, her trouble desperate. Vic dead, Panchito wounded and probably under sedation in some Army hospital, he was the only friend she could reach. However she had reached him—he tried not to wonder about that.

She had to be helped.

As soon as he could get there. A whole day and more must have passed since she fell into what she called
el hoyo.
An abandoned well, perhaps, which should have been plugged or covered. Wedged there, hurt, barely able to breathe. How long could she live?

He had no notion. Vic had equipped her with resources no merely human being had ever possessed. Her survival in the dust was proof enough of that. Yet, clearly, she had come to the end of what she knew how to do for herself. When the nurse was gone, he looked at his watch. Four-eighteen. He dialed Billy Higgs. The phone rang a long time before he heard Billy’s groggy-sounding voice.

“Sax? What the hell?”

“Billy, I hate like everything to wreck your sleep at this time of night.” He tried to sound sane. “But something has come up. Terribly urgent. Can you get down here? PDQ!”

“Can’t it wait till morning?”

“Please, Billy. I need help—bad! Nothing I can try to explain on the phone. Just get into your duds and come on down.”

“Sax, old man, I had a late night—”

“Listen, Billy! If I ever needed you, it’s now!”

“Okay,” Billy muttered. “But you’d better make sense.”

He washed his face and got into the clothing Miss Hearn had brought. He was sitting by the bed when the nurse let Billy follow her in. Unshaven and puffy-eyed, he looked as if his night had been far too late.

“What’s up, Doc?” He managed a feeble grin for the nurse. “An OB emergency?”

Belcraft waited for the nurse to go.

“A pretty grim emergency,” he said then. “Back near where Enfield was. I’ve got to get there as fast as I can. Billy, I want to borrow your car—”

He saw Billy’s startled dismay.

“They say the fire totaled mine. I need the car and whatever cash you happen to have on you. You know I got out of the house in just my pajamas. Wallet gone. Credit cards. Everything.”

“Driver’s license?”

He had to nod.

“Really, old man—” Billy stopped to frown as if he had been a difficult witness on the stand. “I can’t guess what’s got into you, but you sure as hell ain’t fit to drive again. Not without a license. Or unless you can do some pretty tall explaining.”

“Sit down, Billy. Please!” He gestured at the other chair. “It’s nothing you’ll want to believe, but here’s why I’ve got to get there. You see—You see—”

He had to search for some sane way to say it.

“I found a—found a little being there in the dust of Enfield that had survived after everything else was dead. Something—well, synthetic, though the word seems too cold for her. She’s a creation of genetic engineering. There’s evidence that the engineer was my brother.”

Billy’s eyes had narrowed critically.

“My kid brother, Victor.”

“I never heard of him.”

“Guess I never talked about him. We weren’t close, not in recent years. But I did have a brother. We both studied medicine. Brought up to it. But Vic never practiced. Went into molecular biology. Following a crazy dream that he could create better kinds of life than nature did.”

“Or God?”

“He never put it quite that way, but General Clegg does.” Jarred off the track, he had to recover himself. “Vic was never satisfied with what we are. Dreamed of something that might repair all our defects, make us better than we are. One notion was a benign Virus. An artificial organism that would repair defects, heal every illness. Maybe even reverse the decay of age. He was at EnGene for years. Too busy, I guess, to keep in touch with me.”

Billy was frowning, gingerly shaking his hung-over head as if the shaking hurt it.

“Anyhow, there’s this new being—” In the face of that stubborn doubt, he had to collect himself again. “No way to tell you what she is until you’ve known her, but she’s different in a lot of ways from any natural being I know about. In some ways at least, certainly superior. Whatever hit Enfield didn’t touch her. She called me for help just now, across a good many hundred miles—don’t ask me how.”

Looking blank, Billy grunted.

“Call her Meg. Vic named her Alphamega. Not human at all, but maybe—maybe better. You have to feel what she is. Good—the first thing you feel is a sort of warm, total goodness. Intelligent. Lovable—really lovable. And in dreadful trouble now.”

“Huh?” Billy squinted blearily. “What sort of trouble.”

“You see, the military connects her with whatever wiped out Enfield.” He looked into Billy’s unbelieving face and slowed his voice, trying hard to make some kind of sense. “General Clegg wants to get his hands on her because he thinks she could be the key to a biological super-weapon. She does have powers—gifts I don’t understand. But they aren’t enough to save her now.”

“What’s all this got to do with you?”

“I’m a suspect, because I brought her out of the ruins and then let her go. Not that I’m sorry I did it, because they’ll kill her in the lab if they ever catch her. Cut her up and analyze the tissues, trying to find out what she is.

“She has been hiding somewhere inside the military perimeter. Night before last she got out. Crawled under the fence. Running from a chopper, she dived into a hole that turned out to be an abandoned water well.”

“Sax, you haven’t been drinking?”

“Not here.”

“If you expect anybody—” Billy shook his head, scowling like a judge on the bench. “If all this happened after you left, how do you keep up with—whatever you say she is?”

He had to shake his head.

“I wish I could explain. I guess I could say telepathy, but I never took much stock in Joseph Rhine and all the claims for ESP. Now I just don’t know. It is some sort of mental contact. Seems to happen only when I’m asleep. But, Billy—” He wanted to grab Billy Higgs, shake out the disbelief. “It’s real. She used it last night to save my life.”

“If all this happened while you were asleep—”

“Listen, Billy! I wouldn’t be here if that hadn’t happened. Meg knew—I can’t imagine how, but she knew the house was going to burn. She warned me—in what did seem like a dream—to get out fast. I woke up, and knew it was more than a dream. I got out, barely in time. One more reason I’ve got to help her now.”

“Why you?” Billy stabbed a knobby finger at him. “If you say she has fallen in a well, why can’t you get somebody on the spot to pull her out? Be reasonable, Sax. Get on the phone. Call the local sheriff. The state police. The fire department. Whoever—”

“Billy!” He tried to smooth his desperation. “I can’t do that. Not .with Clegg hunting her. He has already called in the FBI and the local cops and everybody else. She’d rather die in the well than let him butcher her. You are the only person I feel like trusting.”

“Don’t trust me too far.” Billy stiffened. “I’m your attorney. No co-conspirator. I’m sorry, Sax, but if I thought all this was something more than the shock of whatever happened to you in Enfield and the effects of that blast and the drugs they’ve had you under—” He squinted like an unconvinced judge. “If you don’t realize what you’re asking, any aid to you in this time of emergency could be construed as conspiracy to commit high treason.”