Immune (13 page)

She hadn’t moved. As Jack bent to examine her, the sound of her breathing hurt his ears. No longer was her chest rising and falling with a weak regular rhythm as her breath sighed out. Now her breathing rattled deep in her chest. He touched her cheek with his fingertips, an action that left pale indentations that refused to pink out again.

Jack moved to Janet’s pack, rummaging around inside until he found three syringes and a needle. Although he didn’t care to think about what he was going to try, he had made his decision. It might kill her, or he might have to kill her even if it worked, but Jack wasn’t going to let her lie there drowning in her own fluids.

The vials were labeled with a blue alcohol marker. Priest. Driver. Guard. The blood inside had long since thawed. Three different vials. Probably three different blood types. Each one massively infested with the Rho Project nanites.

Most likely the nanites had long since become inoperative, the blood in the vials rancid. Even if this worked, the stuff would probably leave Janet as insane as Priest had been. As Jack attached the needle to the first of the three vials and slid it into a vein in Janet’s arm, he took a deep breath. It didn’t matter. He would give her this one last chance at life.

~ ~ ~

Far down the canyon, the sound of the scream brought Tall Bear to an abrupt halt. On and on it went, the sound magnified by echoes from opposing canyon walls. As he listened, the small hairs along the base of his neck rose up. He had heard that same scream last night from the Navajo people in his dream.

For a long moment, he stared back in the direction he had come from. Then, with a shake of his head, Tall Bear turned away, continuing his journey back to the truck. The girl was Gregory’s problem, only one of many. But, having looked into the man’s strange eyes, Tall Bear had a feeling Jack Gregory could play whatever hand he was dealt.

As he crested a rise to see the old Jeep Cherokee where he had left it, Tall Bear paused for one more look back up the canyon. Life on the res had just gotten a whole lot more interesting.

A dull throbbing pulsed through the cave, accentuated by the changing intensity of the magenta glow from the alien ship. Reclined on one of the command deck couches, completely immersed in the holographic experience as her mind probed the onboard computer systems, Jennifer didn’t notice. Neither did she notice when she rose from the couch and began climbing down through the hole between decks.

Reaching the room she thought of as the medical lab, Jennifer moved directly across to the door that blocked access to the inner part of the ship, the door they had never discovered how to open.

Jennifer stopped, her unseeing eyes staring straight ahead, her arms hanging limply at her sides, her head tilting slightly to the left, as if some part of her subconscious was aware of the problem the door presented. Suddenly, she stepped forward again, passing through the wall as if it had no more substance than the holographic field that cloaked the cave entrance.

The room was smaller than the medical lab, crowded with glowing transparent tubes of varying thickness, like the tentacles of some psychedelic sea anemone. Each of the tubes pulsed with flowing, multicolored globules of light. Thousands of the plasma globules climbed and danced atop each other where the tubes connected together, like a great hive of bees rubbing together in a dance of communication.

Amidst the forest of plasma tubes, a lone central couch, a larger replica of the tentacle couch in the medical lab, awaited. Jennifer moved forward, settling into the couch as easily as if she were sliding into her own bed. And as she settled in, tiny tendrils sprouted from the surrounding tubes, each feeling its way across her body toward the desired nerve ending that would form its connection. The tendrils continued to multiply until there were thousands of them, millions, each lit with its own internal light.

As the last of these came to rest, a new pulse rippled through the room, the light rising in intensity several orders of magnitude greater than before. Deep within the confines of the couch, Jennifer’s small body convulsed.

Ten miles away, stretched out in their own beds, Heather’s and Mark’s bodies shook their bed frames hard enough to rattle the floor. But not hard enough to dispel the dream.

Dr. Stephenson might be brilliant, but his skills as a surgeon were rudimentary, at best. It was now clear why he didn’t attempt surgery directly on the brain. Even with his knowledge of the alien technology, he needed nerve endings that did not require superior surgical technique to reach. As Raul stared down at the tangled mess of connecting alien tubes and conduits, a sharp pang of regret pounded his brain like a five-pound sledgehammer. Stephenson had removed his legs at the hip, leaving him connected to the alien wiring harness in such a way that he could only squirm along the floor on his belly, hunching himself forward with his hands and arms, the bundle of tubes dragging along behind.

Not that it mattered. Raul only had a couple dozen meters of slack in the tubes that formed his wormy rear end. He could slither back and forth through that amount of open space before their connection to the great central machinery brought him up short.

It allowed him to travel far enough to reach the corner where Stephenson had stacked his supplies. There were enough cases of the military “Meals Ready to Eat” to feed him for a year, along with a matching quantity of gallon-sized plastic water jugs. In addition, his space had the luxury of a camper’s portable toilet, little more than a folding chair with a toilet seat and plastic bags that attached to catch your business.

The most fascinating part of the waste disposal process was what he thought of as the “garbage disposal.” In reality, it was a matter reprocessor that separated its contents into their elemental components, then transferred that matter to the ship’s fuel storage, for later conversion into raw energy. Nothing was wasted. Everything became fuel: trash, human waste, everything.

Considering Raul’s physical limitations, that was a blessing.

At least he still had his upper appendages. Why the good doctor hadn’t yet taken his arms, Raul didn’t know. The mere thought of the loss of his remaining ability to move about horrified him more than the pain and deformities he had already endured.

Raul didn’t yet know precisely what Dr. Stephenson hoped to accomplish by connecting more and more of the alien machinery to new nerve endings in his body, but he was starting to get an inkling. Stephenson was attempting to create an advanced interface to the damaged shipboard computing systems.

At first, not counting the pain, Raul had experienced no response to the wiring that had been inserted into his eye socket. It was only after several hours, when the screaming in his head had quieted, that he had observed the anomaly. He almost thought he had imagined it, that it was a by-product of the madness into which he felt himself sinking.

It was only a shadow of movement at the edge of his vision, an alien something that dissipated as he attempted to focus on it. Then it reappeared, gradually approaching more closely, as if it gained confidence as it probed, skittering around the dark recesses of his mind, refusing to submit to direct observation.

But it had not been until after the amputation of his legs that the dreams had started. Vivid didn’t even begin to describe them. They made no sense; they were merely a sequence of incredibly vivid shapes in colorless gray scale. Raul could feel the scenes, almost as if they were extensions of his own body. Sometimes the dreams continued after he had awakened, their weird images and feelings blending with his surrounding reality.

Perhaps madness had already claimed him. But if that was the case, why did Dr. Stephenson seem so pleased with his progress?

Raul pulled himself to the end of his tether, feeling the tension in his arm muscles as he lifted his torso up off the floor. They were getting stronger. At least the confining stasis field was gone. He paused for several seconds, then turned, his arms propelling him back in the other direction like a misshapen lion pacing slowly back and forth in its cage.

Stasis field or not, Raul wasn’t going anywhere.

Freddy Hagerman kicked the chrome trashcan hard enough to send it spinning end over end, spewing its contents across the kitchen and into the living room of his East River apartment. He hadn’t wanted to kick the garbage can. He had wanted to kick the flat-panel TV set. But even with his newfound notoriety and big job with the
New York Times
, he couldn’t afford to be doing that.

Shit. Now he’d have to clean up the fucking mess.

His gaze returned to the television screen as the president continued his press conference. Freddy watched as the man worked his way through his talking points and then began taking questions. Unbelievable. After the press feeding frenzy that had engulfed the White House these three weeks, you would think the entire executive branch would be making plans for life after a failed and foreshortened presidency.

After all, Freddy’s story had nailed their collective asses to the wall, exposing the ill-conceived and illegal testing being conducted on the alien nanotechnology. Then the botched FBI raid in Los Alamos had produced the single worst day in FBI history. Although they had managed to kill several of the rogue agents, the leader of the group and his female accomplice had disappeared. Although the FBI director had been promptly sacked, the president’s already battered image had worsened, something that didn’t break Freddy’s heart, not one little bit.

Freddy shook his head. He should have known some shit like this was bound to happen. Everything had been going a little too perfect. Stepping over a trail of coffee grounds, Freddy picked up his cell phone and pressed five on his speed dial.

His boss’s high voice sounded smug. “Hello, Freddy. I guess you’ve got your TV on.”

“Yeah, Charlotte, I’m watching it.”

“Sort of throws the conclusion from your big story into question.”

“Not at all. I know bullshit when I smell it. This is a cover-up.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. The president’s people have cooked this whole thing up.”

“Good luck proving it.”

“I’ll be needing travel authorization.” Freddy ignored the editor’s annoying chuckle. “I’ll be leaving tomorrow for California. I want to take a look into that clinic in Santa Barbara. After that I’ll be heading back to Los Alamos.”

The silence from the far end of the line lingered, but Freddy waited. He knew this power trip. First one to speak loses.

Charlotte’s voice broke the tension. “Okay, Freddy. But I stuck my neck out giving you this job ahead of some damn fine reporters. If you don’t come up with something good, don’t bother coming back.”

The line went dead before he could respond. The bitch.

Stepping across the refuse trail, Freddy paused just long enough to give the garbage can one more good kick, then walked into the bedroom to pack his suitcase.

Heather awoke with a start. In the darkness that surrounded her, the room seemed vaguely unfamiliar. For several seconds she struggled to recognize where she was, her fading dreams tugging at the corners of her consciousness. This was her bedroom. The dim outline of her dresser and her small desk were separated by a yawning darkness that had to be her closet.

There it was again—the distant buzzing in her head, vaguely familiar, although she couldn’t quite place it. The harder she thought about it, the more it retreated from her observation until it disappeared. Now there was only stillness.

That in itself was odd. Normally there was some sound in the old house, even if she awakened in the middle of the night. Perhaps she was still asleep. Dreams of awakening had plagued her in the past, so perhaps this was one of them. Equations cascaded through her mind, resolving to a probability so close to zero that it was negligible. Something about the way the numbers made sense to her savant brain reassured her amidst the surrounding strangeness.

As Heather thought about walking down the hallway and checking on her mom and dad, the buzzing returned, growing stronger as she focused her thoughts. Despite her growing unease, Heather followed this train of thought, letting herself visualize her parents’ bedroom, imagining them both sleeping soundly in their king-sized bed.

The buzzing became a vibration reminiscent of when she had first tried on the alien headset in the starship, filled with a confusing blitz of sounds, imagery, and feelings, so rapid and distorted that a wave of dizziness assailed her. Then it was gone, like a cell phone dropping its signal.

Heather waited, a slow dread that the buzzing would start up once again making her pull her covers up under her chin. Gradually, as the minutes passed with no reoccurrence, the dread and the accompanying feeling of strangeness dissipated, leaving her feeling relieved and more than a little ridiculous. Talk about overreacting. She had even considered turning on her bedroom lights to check the closet.

Rolling onto her side, Heather curled back into her blankets, but sleep was a long while coming.