Hybrid (27 page)

“Is it neoplastic, maybe some kind of lymphoma of stem cells?” Melissa offered.

“No, it’s not a tumor. The organization is too complex.” Phil rubbed his eyes. “This is something that I’ve never seen before.”

“We have slides from two other cases that came in today, both presumed suicides. Dr. Faraday was going to review them in the morning, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you looked at them tonight.”

“It’s after seven,” Phil said.

Melissa glanced up at the clock, and it was long after seven. “This is important,” she said. “Besides, I’ve got no one waiting on me at home, except for a very lazy border collie.” She left to get the other slides.

Phil wondered why she had no one at home. Maybe she was married and her husband was out of town, or working late. Maybe she was a widow. Maybe she had never married at all. Melissa had worked for the coroner’s office for eleven years, longer than he had been there, and he was surprised by how little he knew about her. He should have picked up more about her personal life just through overheard casual conversations. So why didn’t he know even the most basic information about her? He waited for an answer, but none of his Monsters, not even the smart, small voice, responded. He knew the answer, of course, but he shrank from it. Melissa wasn’t important to him; she wasn’t a part of the small and carefully maintained Phillip Rucker universe. She was a functionary, no more critical to him than this microscope. At an abstract level, he knew that she was more important than a microscope, but he didn’t—he couldn’t—live in an abstract world. His behavior and thoughts were ruled by the concrete codes of Personal Responsibility and The Routine.

Phil stood and stretched his sore, stiff back; at least that hadn’t changed. It dawned on him that this was the second time that day that he had found himself exploring beyond the borders of the Phillip Rucker universe, and he was surprised by how far he could venture beyond the usual narrow range of safe-thought without reprisal.

Melissa returned. “Here is the first set,” she said and placed a rack of slides next to his microscope. Phil noticed a small stripe of lighter skin on her left fourth finger.

Two possibilities
, he thought.
She’s married and has taken
off her wedding ring, probably for safe keeping while she works
,
or she once wore a ring, but doesn’t now.

“The second rack needs to be restained. I didn’t like the way it came out,” she said, obviously covering for the shoddy work of one of her junior technicians.

“Thank you,” Phil said stiffly, trying to reestablish their normal boundaries. He reached for the first slide in the rack as Melissa left to restain the second set of slides. Phil quickly scanned the twenty-eight slides from the two patients, and again found exactly what he had found in Peter Bilsky’s brain: large cells lining both victims’ ventricles.
Stem
cells
, he thought. Somehow, the virus had reactivated the long-dormant process of cellular differentiation. The implications were incredible. If the lethal aspects of the virus could be eliminated, this virus would be a medical miracle. Strokes, brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, leukemia, almost every degenerative process could be reversed. Phil’s powerful mind began to reel with possibilities.

Melissa had returned with the second rack, and as she was retrieving the original set of slides, her hand accidentally brushed his.

Phil’s next conscious thought was:
Where am I?
He was on his back with several faces staring down at him. The ground seemed to be moving, and so was the ceiling.
A stretcher
, he thought. His arms were tied down, and an oxygen mask covered his face. People were talking to him, but a pain in his head prevented him from hearing them. “My head,” he said through the mask, and his head lolled to the right. He spotted Melissa among the various legs and torsos. She had her own facemask, and some stranger was pushing down on her chest. “What happened?” he asked her, his words slurred. His vision began to blur as well, and then she was gone, along with everything else.

“Someone will always need to rule, “Pushkin finished.

“Then it will be the most capable, the most powerful mind.” Reisch answered.

“And if that turns out to be Amanda, or someone like her, how will you respond?” The car stayed very quiet for a very long time. “Are you leaving or are you going to stay around for the fireworks?” Pushkin wisely changed subjects.

“I’m leaving,” Reisch finally responded. “The signal is not due for another fifty-five hours, and it can be sent from anywhere.”

“Wake me when we get there,” Pushkin said as he dissolved into passenger seat.

Reisch checked the satchel again; it was back where he had put it before the Russian had returned. He was glad for the silence and solitude. Pushkin had always been able to twist Klaus’s ideas back on to themselves; it had started out as a lesson in logic, but over the decades it had turned into a game, a game Reisch rarely won.

As he negotiated the turn south Reisch questioned whether Pushkin was worth the trouble.
Probably not
he concluded, but he did owe the Russian his life.

Thirty years earlier, a newly graduated Klaus went to Amsterdam for a weeklong vacation, and then decided to stay permanently. The permissive society was ideal for his sociopathic abilities, and he frequently exercised them. He was content for the first time in his life until he had some bad luck that dramatically altered the course of his young life. Finding himself low on funds, he attempted a simple transaction with an elderly woman and her purse. As it turned out she was quite fond of her purse, and when Klaus tried to run with it, he found that she was still attached. He dragged the screaming woman a full block before being tackled by an American tourist, who beat him into unconsciousness. The entire affair was caught on tape by the American’s wife, and a sanitized version aired repeatedly on CNN for the next week. When Klaus faced the magistrate, he was arguably the most hated man in all the Netherlands. His bandaged face and broken ribs did nothing to lessen the sentence of three years.

A month later Reisch was back before the same magistrate after killing another inmate. The man, twice the size of Klaus, had been terrorizing the young German since his arrival, seemingly with the tacit approval of the guards. His assailant had every physical advantage, but Reisch had patience and endured, waiting for his opportunity. It came one afternoon when his tormentor lunged for Klaus’s lunch tray; he stepped away from his attacker, swept his legs from beneath him, and then crushed the man’s throat with his boot. He stood over the dying man as he suffocated. In fairness, the guards also watched the man die before intervening and subduing Reisch. His sentence was changed to thirty years in a maximum-security prison. After attempting to kill the magistrate in the courtroom, he once again was subdued and latter hospitalized.

Pushkin found the broken and bandaged Reisch in an Amsterdam hospital a month later. “I see nothing in you to justify my eight-hour flight,” he said after appraising the young man. “You are a common criminal unworthy of my time or assistance.”

“Then why are you bothering me? Can’t you see I have things to do?” Reisch waved a shackled and casted arm.

Pushkin laughed only for an instant and then became deadly serious. “I am here to take you away, which will fulfill a promise I made a long time ago. Before that happens, however, you must understand one thing: you mean nothing to me. Your life is mine, and if I, for what ever reason decide to take it, I will.” Reisch drove the back roads of Colorado wondering who his real benefactor had been.

Twenty minutes later, the unbroken fields of snow began to give way to small tracts of homes as he approached a small town. Streetlights and sidewalks appeared next, and then a red light forced him to stop for the first time in two hours. Three of the four street corners had houses on them, but at the fourth corner, there was a convenience store with gas pumps. A police cruiser sat empty just in front of the doors. For an instant, Reisch wondered if Colorado had enough resources to stake out every gas station in the state. It was a ridiculous thought, but the unaccustomed fear rising in his chest somehow made it sound reasonable.

The light changed, and he slowly drove through the intersection. He brushed up against the mind of the officer inside the store, but the contact was so brief that he couldn’t be sure they weren’t looking for him.

The residential area gradually became industrial. Silos and railway cars lined the highway. He drove two more miles and suddenly realized that he was outside the town limits. The streetlights and sidewalks had disappeared, and vacant wheat fields stretched before him. He slowed the SUV and then turned it back towards town.

He made the first left he came to, and the industrial landscape quickly changed to commercial. A large supermarket appeared to his left and a Walmart to his right. The usual complement of fast-food restaurants and video stores came next, and among them, he found a busy gas station. He swung the Mercedes in and coasted in front of one of the sixteen pumps. As he climbed out of the truck, he was happy to see that his right leg was almost back to normal. He fumbled with his wallet, since his right hand was still clumsy, but he managed to pass the attendant two twenty-dollar bills without calling too much attention to himself. It took him several minutes to fill the tank and not a soul noticed him. He began to relax slightly. He was just another mindless American filling up his oversized foreign car with overpriced foreign gas.

Just before climbing back in, he let his mind open up. Dozens of dull, undisciplined minds assailed him. He sifted through them quickly, but none of them had any interest in finding him. His mental search area was only a couple of square blocks, at best, but it was good enough to convince him to stay the night. He climbed back into the Mercedes and drove further up the street. A Motel 6 beckoned, and he drove into the large crowded parking lot. There were a few dark and secluded parking spots in the back, and he nosed the Mercedes into the darkest one and turned off the engine. He waited, listening with both his ears and his mind. Nothing. He climbed out and quickly walked away from the vehicle. It was unlikely that the SUV would have been reported missing this early, but of late, luck had been working against him.

The office was locked, and a small sign told him to ring the bell. He brushed off the small accumulation of snow and pressed the buzzer. He felt a mind stir and a mumbled curse. A moment later, the handle buzzed, and Reisch pulled open the glass door.

“Evening,” said the portly, balding man in a blue T-shirt, with about as much interest as someone scheduling a dental appointment. He collected some papers and pushed them towards Reisch as he stepped up to the desk. “One night?” He had a large anchor tattooed across his left bicep. It covered a once well-muscled arm, which now sagged as much as his belly.

“Yes,” answered Reisch. Brevity served his purpose as well. He quietly filled out the reservation form. His right hand had recovered enough to use the pen that was chained to the desk, but the going was slow. The fat man watched impatiently with bored eyes. Reisch almost laughed out loud when his mind saw the TV dinner and the game show that waited for the surly clerk in the next room.

“Sixty-two fifty,” the man said, taking the forms that Reisch had filled out. He accepted the money from the German and quickly gave him his change and a key. “Room 127. Out the door, turn right, halfway down.” He stacked and filed the papers, and then as an afterthought said, “Checkout is at eleven.” Before Reisch could turn, the man had disappeared behind the office door.

Room 127 was exactly what he had expected. Threadbare carpet, cheap furniture, a smell of industrial-strength disinfectant, and an overly hard mattress. The television worked, and he turned it to the network news. Most of the bulletin was about the assassination of the governor. Reisch stripped the bed linen and lay fully dressed on the mattress while waiting for the local news. Twenty minutes later, the local news from Denver began. Again, it was almost all about the dead governor, but near the end of the allotted thirty minutes, the beautiful brunette newscaster switched to something more of interest to Reisch.

“There was other news today. An elderly man was found dead outside of his Colorado Springs home early this morning. Eighty-two-year-old George Van Der was discovered by neighbors just before seven. The police have described the circumstances surrounding his death as suspicious.”

Reisch was impressed with the woman’s ability to look both serious and seductive while describing murder.

“Since the first of the year, there have now been thirty-one murders in and around Colorado Springs. In a related story, a man is being sought for questioning in connection with the death of Mr. Van Der, as well as for an assault on a Colorado Springs patrolman.”

Two black and white sketches filled the screen, and with little surprise, Reisch recognized his own face. The image on the right showed him in a hat with dark glasses, but the one on the left was a dead-on likeness.