Firechild (44 page)

“He must have brought the notion with him when he came to EnGene. He had his problems there. I wonder if Meg wasn’t engineered to carry on a project the military wouldn’t let him complete. He must have designed her—her body—to become a laboratory in which that virus might be perfected.”

Anya stared, lips parting wider.

“When we watched Meg’s body melting, I think it must have been dissolving into that benign virus. Spreading into the atmosphere as that shining pool evaporated. I think we’re infected now, carrying the virus, doing our own bit for Vic.”

“If that’s true—” He saw Anya shiver. “It’s too big for me to believe.”

“We have another test in progress.” He squinted at Gibson and the photographer. “If they wake up changed—”

The photographer still lay snoring. Gibson had stirred, murmuring something in his sleep, but before they woke, Pancho Torres came stalking out of the tunnel. Almost a scarecrow, drawn gaunt, clad in tattered rags, but grinning with pleasure when he found them. His torn face had grown whole again.

“Tres veces!”
He turned to look back into the dark behind him.
“Tres veces!
Three times I have died, and
La Maravilla
has restored me.”

He came on to stand over them.

“Amigos míos.”
As if in solemn reproof, he shook his wild-haired, blood-grimed head. “I see sorrow on your faces. You should be rejoicing. Perhaps you think you saw
La Maravilla
dead. I remain to testify that she lives. As she will live forever. Today we have witnessed a holy miracle. The blessed angels came to reward her loving goodness. They have taken her alive into heaven.”

He lifted a bare-boned, red-streaked hand as if to challenge doubt.

“I was never a believer. Not until the holy
Maravilla
lifted me high, to let me see the true glory of heaven. A stranger place, and far more splendid, than the priests have ever proclaimed. Its shape is a great, blazing rainbow around a black and dreadful pit that must be hell itself, because she says it devours stars.

“She took me to meet
los
ángeles.
The very angels! Me, Pancho Torres, who had lain in prison, without hope or love, awaiting a death I had truly earned for killing. These were real and living angels, flying on shining wings, living in floating palaces of rainbow fire. I saw that they love her. She loves them. She is happy that her work for her
querido
Vic can now be left for us to finish, and she says we must not weep for her.

“I begged her to take me there with her, but she says we must stay. To complete the holy task Vic made her for—though she never told me what that is.”

“I think I know,” Belcraft told him. “I think we have already begun it.”

51

Omega

P
ancho Torres remained behind when they left the mine.
La Madre de Oro
had become a sacred place, a shrine to
La Sagrada Maravilla.
She must be remembered, and he had made a vow to stay here forever, tending the site of her miraculous transformation and relating the wonders of her life to the pilgrims who would come.

Gibson and the photographer had recovered as suddenly as they had been stricken, the photographer apologetic about his needless panic flight and almost abjectly grateful to Gibson for staying to videotape the transformation and rescue his abandoned camera. Gibson shrugged and said it was nothing. Cheerily humming an old Serbo-Croatian dance tune his grandfather used to whistle, he helped stow the cameras in the Ford. The virus had left them both declaring they’d never felt better.

Gibson gave Torres the camping gear and supplies he had bought. The photographer found a jacket he said he didn’t need. Belcraft left his spare clothing and his shaving kit. Pancho thanked them in
La Maravilla’
s holy name and stood alone in the dark tunnel-mouth to wave his
adiós.

Back in the hot car with Anya, Belcraft found his awe-struck elation fading into troubling tension. Herself transformed, she looked lovelier than ever, as innocent as Meg had been, infinitely desirable. He yearned for the love he had lost—but she had never loved him, merely used him to guide Harris here.

He felt her own troubled glances at him, but he kept his eyes on the road.

“Sax …” Her slow whisper was nearly too faint for him to hear. “Do you hate me still?”

“No!” The violence of his own tone startled him. “But there are things I can’t forget. Things that hurt too much.” He looked at her and flinched away. “The virus may have changed me, but there are things it can’t erase.”

He heard no answer. Tense and trembling at the wheel, he drove on.

Down on the mesa rim, he saw muddy tracks where a vehicle had gone off the road. He stopped the car and climbed out to follow them down into a deep arroyo. The black van lay there upside down, the top caved in. The doors were open, nobody inside. The driver and the Mexican cop had vanished, along with the body of Harris.

When he got back to the car, Anya stood waiting silently. With only an uneasy glance, he beckoned her into the car and drove on again.

“They must have wrecked when the virus put the driver to sleep.” He tried not to listen when she spoke. “The colonel must have stopped to do what he could for them.”

He dodged a boulder and flinched again when the lurching car tossed her against him. Every word and every chance touch stirred emotions hard to control, even when he told himself that the past had closed behind him. Meg was dead forever, beyond human help. Anya herself had been transformed—

Yet he couldn’t help the chill around his heart.

A few miles farther on, they met Colonel Quayle’s minibus. The man at the wheel stopped it on the road and got out to flag them down. Headquarters wanted an update from Anya. He let them both into the vehicle. Anya spent two hours in a tiny phone booth, while the technician sat frowning over his instruments, keeping her in contact.

Waiting, Belcraft thought of the letter, aching again for all Vic had suffered. He lived again through all they had seen in the tunnel, dazed again by the puzzling wonder of Meg’s transfiguration into something still beyond understanding. He felt drained and numb. Too much had come too fast, and Anya’s role in it still tore him.

Though he didn’t want to look, her pale-haired head was visible through a glass window in the little booth, huge headphones over her ears. Hating himself for the ice in his heart, he found no way to warm it. She came out at last, with a wan glance at him and a grateful nod when the technician gave her a cold Carta Blanca.

“I’ve reported to Clegg.” She spoke to the technician more than to him. “I talked to Sam Holliday. Talked to the Pentagon. Talked to the White House. I’m told that the President has been on the hot line to the Kremlin, explaining the little he knows about Alphamega and trying to convince them that she was never a military threat.”

She shrugged and sipped the beer.

“Nobody understands what she was, or wants to believe anything I say. The President and the general secretary have agreed to send teams of experts to collect the evidence and question witnesses and look for confirmation they don’t expect to find.”

“They’ll find it.” Belcraft found himself speaking to the technician, not to her. “Whenever their experts begin meeting carriers and picking up the virus.”

Following the minibus on down the road, they found Colonel Quayle with a little group of men sitting out of the sun under a bluff, gathered around his private ice chest to make a picnic on sandwiches and beer. The colonel looked tanned and fit again. Scanning the others, Belcraft blinked and shook his head.

Mickey Harris!

Quite alive again, though he had lost the mirror sunglasses. His dark face had been half-washed, but mud and clotted blood still caked his hair. The bullet wounds had closed. Waving a bottle of Tecate in a cheerful invitation for them to join the picnic, he stood up and came to Anya’s side of the car.

“Hiya, Sister Anya!” He grinned at her genially, not visibly contrite. “They tell me I was dead. I never thought I’d let a woman knock me off. I’m glad to say I forgive you, no matter what you done. Sister, I’ve seen the light.”

He brushed at the flies crawling over his matted hair.

“Believe me, Sister, I know I’ve got a lot to answer for, because I’ve let the devil rule me nearly all my wicked life. I hate to think back to all my hellish sins. Ungodliest of all, the ugly way I meant to kill you if you hadn’t got me first.

“But I’ve got great news for you, Sister.

“I’ve known the glory! I’ve learned to bow my head in humble prayer. I’m born again, and all my sins have been erased. It’s true I’ve been laughing all my life at the priests and the preachers and what I thought was their crazy blather about salvation. But my soul has been redeemed. The eternal glory of the gracious Lord dawned on me while I lay knocked out or dead—whatever it was—back there in the bottom of that ravine. Christ came to me, and I was reborn into His holy fold.

“Praise God!” He leaned toward her earnestly. “Sister, are you saved?”

Anya flushed and bit her lip, but she answered evenly, “I’ve seen miracles today, and they have changed me.”

She nodded stiffly at Belcraft, and they drove on.

“The virus seems to hit us differently.” He heard her thoughtful murmur. “Look at Jim Gibson. An evil animal back when he used to be the Scorpion, deadly as a snake. He seems decent now. He looks and talks and even walks like a different man. But Mickey—”

She made a face.

“Still a slimy bastard! I think I liked him better the way he used to be.”

Belcraft tried to keep his eyes on the flood-ruined road. The rocks and ruts and gullies claimed most of his attention, but she was hard to ignore. When those hazards let him, he couldn’t help another glance. The virus had left a radiance in her, shining in her beryl-green eyes and her perfect skin. Though the sweetish reek of the virus was gone, he couldn’t help catching her own clean human scent, couldn’t help a pang of bitter longing whenever the car jolted her against him.

“The virus.” When she spoke again, her tone had a tentative warmth. “Though I couldn’t convince the White House or the Pentagon, it really has begun to spread. Even to the cop and the colonel, who had never been inside the tunnel. Which means it can change everybody, everywhere. Forever!”

“I hope so,” he told her.
But if I’m changed, I’m not changed enough.

She kept on talking for a time, groping to picture the world as it might become. If enough people were transformed, transformed far enough, wars could be impossible. Pain and sickness could be ended. Everybody could be happy. Could he imagine that?

Silently, Belcraft shook his head. His mood was too bleak.

Of course it would all take time. There might be conflicts and misunderstandings, but perhaps there were ways they could aid the change. If she. could get funding and freedom tb make the Roman Foundation the agency for international understanding old Jules had planned, perhaps it could do useful scientific studies of the virus and its effects. She wondered if he would want to help.

“Not yet!” His voice came harsher than he expected. “I’m not ready.”

“Sax …” She drew suddenly farther from him. “I don’t understand you!”

Eyes on the hummocks and pits of a mudhole ahead, he found no answer. He felt her searching stare, but she said no more. The slow sun sank. Darkness fell. As silent now as he, she rummaged through their supplies to share a scanty supper of cold tortillas and canned sardines.

He kept on driving, longing to escape her tantalizing nearness, to end the pain. He wished—almost wished— that she had chosen to stay behind with the colonel and his crew. Midnight had come before the nearly empty gas tank and his own fatigue forced him to stop at a dark adobe building behind a Pemex pump. He parked in the muddy court and clambered stiffly out of the car.

“One room?” he asked her. “Or two?”

“Nichevo.”
She shrugged as if she didn’t care, but her voice had a brittle snap. “Whatever you say.”

He hammered on the door. When a sleepy woman cracked it open and shone a flashlight into his face, he asked for two rooms. There was only one, for many pesos. When he had counted out pesos enough, she lit a candle to lead them back to a hot little room that reeked of garlic and pot and mescal.

The narrow bed was still warm, as if just vacated. They got into it, naked in the dark. Lying sleepless beside her, listening to her breathing and feeling all her restless movements, he tried again and failed again to swallow that bitter clot of hate.

“Sax!” Her sudden outcry echoed his own pain. “You know I’m changed. I said I’m sorry. What’s wrong?”

“Everything!” He tried to soften his voice. “I’m not Mickey. Not born again. I can’t forget.”

“Oh, Sax—”

That was almost a sob, and she said no more. They lay a long time there in the stale-odored heat. Her rigid limbs were hot when they came against him, and he caught her own sweet scent. Tormented, he tried to shrink away, but he was already on the edge of the lumpy bed. At last her breathing slowed. He felt her body relaxing. He thought she had fallen asleep, until he felt her fingers.

Playfully, teasingly, they brushed his arm, caressed his chest, crept down to his belly and on below. Taut, breathless, he endured it all until she found his strutted penis. Emotion exploded in him then. Suddenly, savagely, he was upon her.

“So, Sax!”

Though he had crushed out half her breath, she was laughing at him. Her strong arms slid around him, pulled him hard against her—and thrust him abruptly away.

“So that’s how you hate me?”

Out of control, he grappled her, dragged her to him. Her writhing flesh was hot against him for a moment, her scent intoxicating, but then he felt her arm twist out of his grip. Clutching, he felt it tightening. The edge of her flattened hand struck behind his ear. Paralyzing pain rang through his skull. Aware again, he found himself sprawled and gasping beside her, gone limp, half off the bed.