SHEVA + 12
“America's a cruel country. There's a whole lot of people would just as soon stomp you like an ant. Listen to talk radio. Plenty of dummies, damned few ventriloquists.”
“There's a wolf snarl behind the picnics and Boy Scout badges.”
“They want to kill our kids. Lord help us all.”
—Anonymous Postings, ALT.NEWCHILD.FAM
“Citing ‘severe threats to national security,’ Emergency Action this week has requested of the U.S. Justice Department the authority to hack and shut down SHEVA parent Web sites and even e-journals and newspapers guilty of spreading inaccurate information—’lies’—against EMAC and the U.S. government. Some parent advocacy groups complain this is already the norm. Mid-level Justice Department officials have passed the request along to the office of the attorney general for further legal review, according to sources who wish to remain anonymous.
“Some legal experts say that even legitimate newspaper sites could be hacked or shut down without warning should approval be granted, and the granting of such approval is likely in itself to be kept secret.”
—Seattle Times-PI Online
“God had nothing to do with making these children. I don't care what you think about creationism or evolution, we're on our own now.”
—Owen Withey, Creation Science News
SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY, VIRGINIA
Morning lay dark and quiet around the house. Mitch Rafelson stood with coffee cup in hand on the back porch, dopey from just three hours of sleep. Stars still pierced the sky. A few persistent moths and bugs buzzed around the porch light. Raccoons had been at the garbage can in back, but had left, whickering and scuffling, hours ago, discouraged by lengths of chain.
The world felt empty and new.
Mitch put his cup in the kitchen sink and returned to the bedroom. Kaye lay in bed, still asleep. He adjusted his tie in the mirror above the dresser. Ties never looked right on him. He grimaced at the way his suit hung on his wide shoulders, the gap around the collar of his white shirt, the length of sleeve visible beyond the cuff of his coat.
There had been a row the night before. Mitch and Kaye and Stella, their daughter, had sat up until two in the morning in the small bedroom trying to talk it through. Stella was feeling isolated. She wanted, needed to be with young people like her. It was a reasonable position, but they had no choice.
Not the first time, and likely not the last. Kaye always approached these events with studied calm, in contrast to Mitch's evasion and excuses. Of course they were excuses. He had no answers to Stella's questions, no real response to her arguments. They both knew she ultimately needed to be with her own kind, to find her own way.
Finally, too much, Stella had stomped off and slammed the door to her room. Kaye had started crying. Mitch had held her in bed and she had gradually slipped into twitching sleep, leaving him staring at the darkened ceiling, tracking the play of lights from a truck grumbling down the country road outside, wondering, as always, if the truck would come up their drive, come for their daughter, come to claim bounty or worse.
He hated the way he looked in what Kaye called his Mr. Smith duds—as in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He lifted one hand and rotated it, studying the palm, the long, strong fingers, wedding ring—though he and Kaye had never gotten a license. It was the hand of a hick.
He hated to drive into the capital, through all the checkpoints, using his congressional appointment pass. Slowly moving past all the army trucks full of soldiers, deployed to stop yet another desperate parent from setting off another suicide bomb. There had been three such blasts since spring.
And now, Riverside, California.
Mitch walked to the left side of the bed. “Good morning, love,” he whispered. He stood for a moment, watching his woman, his wife. His eyes moved along the sleeve of her pajama top, absorbing every wrinkle in the rayon, every silken play of pre-dawn light, down to slim hands, curled fingers, nails bitten to the quick.
He bent to kiss her cheek and pulled the covers over her arm. Her eyes fluttered open. She brushed the back of his head with her fingers. “G'luck,” she said.
“Back by four,” he said.
“Love you.” Kaye pushed into the pillow with a sigh.
Next stop was Stella's room. He never left the house without making the rounds, filling his eyes and memory with pictures of wife and daughter and house, as if, should they all be taken away, should this be the last time, he could replay the moment. Fat good it would do.
Stella's room was a neat jumble of preoccupations and busyness in lieu of having friends. She had pinned a farewell photo of their disreputable orange tabby on the wall over her bed. Tiny stuffed animals spilled from her cedar chest, beady eyes mysterious in the shadows. Old paperback books filled a small case made of pine boards that Mitch and Stella had hammered together last winter. Stella enjoyed working with her father, but Mitch had noticed the distance growing between them for a couple of years now.
Stella lay on her back in a bed that had been too short for over a year. At eleven, she was almost as tall as Kaye and beautiful in her slender, round-faced way, skin pale copper and tawny gold in the glow of the night-light, hair dark brown with reddish tints, same texture as Kaye's and not much longer.
Their family had become a triangle, still strong, but with the three sides stretching each month. Neither Mitch nor Kaye could give Stella what she really needed.
And each other?
He looked up to see the orange line of sunrise through the filmy white curtains of Stella's window. Last night, cheeks freckling with anger, Stella had demanded to know when they would let her out of the house on her own, without makeup, to be with kids her own age. Her kind of kids. It had been two years since her last “play date.”
Kaye had done wonders with home teaching, but as Stella had pointed out last night, over and over again, with rising emotion, “I am not like you!” For the first time, Stella had formally proclaimed: “I am not human!”
But of course she was. Only fools thought otherwise. Fools, and monsters, and their daughter.
Mitch kissed Stella on the forehead. Her skin was warm. She did not wake up. Stella as she slept smelled like her dreams, and now she smelled the way tears taste, tang of salt and sadness.
“Got to go,” he murmured. Stella's cheeks produced waves of golden freckles. Mitch smiled.
Even asleep, his daughter could say good-bye.
Center for Ancient Viral Studies, United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases: USAMRIID
FORT DETRICK, MARYLAND
“People died, Christopher,” Marian Freedman said. “Isn't that enough to make us cautious, even a little crazy?”
Christopher Dicken walked beside her, tilting on his game leg, staring down the concrete corridor to the steel door at the end. His National Cancer Institute ID badge still poked from his jacket pocket. He clutched a large bouquet of roses and lilies. The two had been engaged in debate from the front desk through four security checkpoints.
“Nobody's diagnosed a case of Shiver for a decade,” he said. “And nobody ever got sick from the children. Isolating them is politics, not biology.”
Marian took his day pass and ran it through the scanner. The steel door opened to a horizontal spread of sunglass-green access tubes, suspended like a hamster maze over a two-acre basin of raw gray concrete. She held out her hand, letting him go first. “You know about Shiver firsthand.”
“It went away in a couple of weeks,” Dicken said.
“It lasted five weeks, and it damned near killed you. Don't bullshit me with your virus hunter bravado.”
Dicken stepped slowly onto the catwalk, having difficulty judging depth with just one eye, and that covered by a thick lens. “The man beat his wife, Marian. She was sick with a tough pregnancy. Stress and pain.”
“Right,” Marian said. “Well, that certainly wasn't true with Mrs. Rhine, was it?”
“Different problem,” Dicken admitted.
Freedman smiled with little humor. She sometimes revealed biting wit, but did not seem to understand the concept of humor. Duty, hard work, discovery, and dignity filled the tight circle of her life. Marian Freedman was a devout feminist and had never married, and she was one of the best and most dedicated scientists Dicken had ever met.
Together, they marched north on the aluminum catwalk. She adjusted her pace to match his. Tall steel cylinders waited at the ends of the access tubes, shaft housings for elevators to the chambers beneath the seamless concrete slab. The cylinders wore big square “hats,” high-temperature gas-fired ovens that would sterilize any air escaping from the facilities below.
“Welcome to the house that Augustine built. How is Mark, anyway?”
“Not happy, last time I saw him,” Dicken said.
“Why am I not surprised? Of course, I should be charitable. Mark moved me up from studying chimps to studying Mrs. Rhine.”
Twelve years before, Freedman had headed a primate lab in Baltimore, during the early days when the Centers for Disease Control had launched the task force investigating Herod's plague. Mark Augustine, then director of the CDC and Dicken's boss, had hoped to secure extra funding from Congress during a fiscal dry spell. Herod's, thought to have caused thousands of hideously malformed miscarriages, had seemed like a terrific goad.
Herod's had quickly been traced to the transfer of one of thousands of Human Endogenous Retroviruses—HERV—carried by all people within their DNA. The ancient virus, newly liberated, mutated and infectious, had been promptly renamed SHEVA, for Scattered Human Endogenous Viral Activation.
In those days, viruses had been assumed to be nothing more than selfish agents of disease.
“She's been looking forward to seeing you,” Freedman said. “How long since your last visit?”
“Six months,” Dicken said.
“My favorite pilgrim, paying his respects to our viral Lourdes,” Freedman said. “Well, she's a wonder, all right. And something of a saint, poor dear.”
Freedman and Dicken passed junctions with tubes branching southwest, northeast, and northwest to other shafts. Outside, the summer morning was warming rapidly. The sun hung just above the horizon, a subdued greenish ball. Cool air pulsed around them with a breathy moan.
They came to the end of the main tube. An engraved Formica placard to the right of the elevator door read, “MRS. CARLA RHINE.” Freedman punched the single white button. Dicken's ears popped as the door closed behind them.
SHEVA had turned out to be much more than a disease. Shed only by males in committed relationships, the activated retrovirus served as a genetic messenger, ferrying complicated instructions for a new kind of birth. SHEVA infected recently fertilized human eggs—in a sense, hijacked them. The Herod's miscarriages were first-stage embryos, called “interim daughters,” not much more than specialized ovaries devoted to producing a new set of precisely mutated zygotes.
Without additional sexual activity, the second-stage zygotes implanted and covered themselves with a thin, protective membrane. They survived the abortion of the first embryo and started a new pregnancy.
To some, this had looked like a kind of virgin birth.
Most of the second-stage embryos had gone to term. Worldwide, in two waves separated by four years, three million new children had been born. More than two and a half million of the infants had survived. There was still controversy over exactly who and what they were—a diseased mutation, a subspecies, or a completely new species.
Most simply called them virus children.
“Carla's still cranking them out,” Freedman said as the elevator reached the bottom. “She's shed seven hundred new viruses in the last four months. About a third are infectious, negative-strand RNA viruses, potentially real bastards. Fifty-two of them kill pigs within hours. Ninety-one are almost certainly lethal to humans. Another ten can probably kill both pigs and humans.” Freedman glanced over her shoulder to see his reaction.
“I know,” Dicken said dryly. He rubbed his hip. His leg bothered him when he stood for more than fifteen minutes. The same White House explosion that had taken his eye, twelve years ago, had left him partially disabled. Three rounds of surgery had allowed him to put aside the crutches but not the pain.
“Still in the loop, even at NCI?” Freedman asked.
“Trying to be,” he said.
“Thank God there are only four like her.”
“She's our fault,” he said, and paused to reach down and massage his calf.
“Maybe, but Mother Nature's still a bitch,” Freedman said, watching him with her hands on her hips.
A small airlock at the end of the concrete corridor cycled them through to the main floor. They were now fifty feet below ground. A guard in a crisp green uniform inspected their passes and permission papers and compared them with the duty and guest roster at her workstation.
“Please identify,” she told them. Both placed their eyes in front of scanners and simultaneously pressed their thumbs onto sensitive plates. A female orderly in hospital greens escorted them to the cleanup area.
Mrs. Rhine was housed in one of ten underground residences, four of them currently occupied. The residences formed the center of the most redundantly secure research facility on Earth. Though Dicken and Freedman would never come any closer than seeing her through a four-inch-thick acrylic window, they would have to go through a whole-body scrub before and after the interview. Before entering the viewing area and staging lab, called the inner station, they would put on special hooded undergarments impregnated with slow-release antivirals, zip up in plastic isolation suits, and attach themselves to positive pressure umbilical hoses.
Mrs. Rhine and her companions at the center never saw real human beings unless they were dressed to resemble Macy's parade balloons.
On leaving, they would stand under a disinfectant shower, then strip down and shower again, scrubbing every orifice. The suits would be soaked and sterilized overnight, and the undergarments would be incinerated.
The four women interned at the facility ate well and exercised regularly. Their quarters—each roughly the size of a two-bedroom apartment—were maintained by automated servants. They had their hobbies—Mrs. Rhine was a great one for hobbies—and access to a wide selection of books, magazines, TV shows, and movies.
Of course, the women were becoming more and more eccentric.
“Any tumors?” Dicken asked.
“Official question?” Freedman asked.
“Personal,” Dicken said.
“No,” Freedman said. “But it's only a matter of time.”
Dicken handed the flowers to the orderly. “Don't boil them,” he said.
“I'll process them myself,” the orderly promised with a smile. “She'll get them before you're done here.” She passed them two sealed white paper bags containing their undergarments and showed them the way to the scrub stalls, then to the tall cabinets that held the isolation suits, as glossy and green as dill pickles.
Christopher Dicken was legendary even at Fort Detrick. He had tracked Mrs. Rhine to a motel in Bend, Oregon, where she had fled after the death of her husband and daughter. He had talked her into opening the door to the small, spare room, and had spent twenty minutes with her, unprotected, while Emergency Action vans gathered in the parking lot.
He had done all this, despite having already contracted Shiver from a woman in Mexico the year before. That woman, a plump female in her forties, seven months pregnant, had been severely beaten by her husband. A small, stupid, jackal-like man with a long criminal record, he had kept her alone and without medical help in a small room at the back of a shabby apartment for three months. Her baby had been born dead.
Something in the woman had produced a defensive viral response, enhanced by SHEVA, and her husband had suffered the consequences. In his darkest early morning vigils of pacing, tending phantom twitches and pains in his leg, alone and wide awake, Dicken had often thought of the husband's death as natural justice, and his own exposure and subsequent illness as accidental blow-by—an occupational hazard.
Mrs. Rhine's case was different. Her problems had been caused by an interplay of human and natural forces no one could have possibly predicted.
In the late nineties, she had suffered from end-stage renal disease and had been the recipient of an experimental xenotransplant—a pig kidney. The transplant had worked. Three years later, Mrs. Rhine had contracted SHEVA from her husband. This had stimulated an enthusiastic release of PERV—Porcine Endogenous Retrovirus—from the pig cells. Before Mrs. Rhine had been diagnosed and isolated at Fort Detrick, her pig and human retroviruses had shuffled genes—recombined—with latent herpes simplex virus and had begun to express, with diabolical creativity, a Pandora's box of long-dormant diseases, and many new ones.
Ancient viral tool kits, Mark Augustine had called them, with true prescience.
Mrs. Rhine's husband, newborn daughter, and seven relatives and friends had been infected by the first of her recombined viruses. They had all died within hours.
Of forty-one individuals who had received pig tissue transplants in the United States, and had subsequently been exposed to SHEVA, the women at the center were the only survivors. Perversely, they were immune to the viruses they produced. Isolated as they were, the four women never caught colds or flu. That made them extraordinary subjects for research—deadly but invaluable.
Mrs. Rhine was a virus hunter's dream, and whenever Dicken did dream about her, he awoke in a cold sweat.
He had never told anyone that his approach to Mrs. Rhine in that motel room in Bend had had less to do with courage than with a reckless indifference. Back then, he simply had not cared whether he lived or died. His entire world had been turned upside down, and everything he thought he knew had been subjected to a harsh and unmerciful glare.
Mrs. Rhine was special to him because they had both been through hell.
“Suit up,” Freedman said. They took off their clothes in separate stalls and hung them in lockers. Small video screens mounted beside the multiple shower heads in each stall reminded them where and how to scrub.
Freedman helped Dicken pull his undergarment over his stiff leg. Together, they tugged on thick plastic gloves, then slipped their hands into the mitts of the pickle-green suits. This left them with all the manual dexterity of fur seals. Fingerless suits were tougher, more secure, and cheaper, and nobody expected visitors to the inner station to do delicate lab work. Small plastic hooks on the thumb side of each glove allowed them to pull up the other's rear zipper, then strip away a plastic cover on the inner side of a sticky seam. A special pinching tool pressed the seam over the zipper.
This took twenty minutes.
They walked through a second set of showers, then through another airlock. Confined within the almost airless hood, Dicken felt perspiration bead his face and slide down his underarms. Beyond the second airlock, each hooked the other to their umbilicals—the familiar plastic hoses suspended on clanking steel hooks from an overhead track.
Their suits plumped with pressure. The flow of fresh cool air revived him.
The last time, at the end of his visit, Dicken had emerged from his suit with a nosebleed. Freedman had saved him from weeks of quarantine by diagnosing and stanching the bleeding herself.
“You're good for the inner,” the orderly told them through a bulkhead speaker.
The last hatch slid open with a silky whisper. Dicken walked ahead of Freedman into the inner station. In sync, they turned to the right and waited for the steel window blinds to ratchet up.
The few incidents of Shiver had started at least a hundred crash courses in medical and weapons-related research. If abused women, and women given xenotransplants, could all by themselves design and express thousands of killer plagues, what could a generation of virus children do?
Dicken clenched his jaw, wondering how much Carla Rhine had changed in sixth months.
Something of a saint, poor dear.
Office of Special Reconnaissance
LEESBURG, VIRGINIA
Mark Augustine walked with a cane down a long underground tunnel, following a muscular red-headed woman in her late thirties. Big steam pipes lined the tunnel on both sides and the air in the tunnel was warm. Conduits of fiber optic cables and wires were bundled and cradled in long steel trays slung from the concrete ceiling, and away from the pipes.
The woman wore a dark green silk suit with a red scarf and running shoes, gray with outdoor use. Augustine's hard-soled Oxfords scuffed and tapped as he trailed several steps behind, sweating. The woman showed no consideration for his slower pace.
“Why am I here, Rachel?” he asked. “I'm tired. I've been traveling. There's work to do.”
“Something's developing, Mark. I'm sure you'll love it,” Browning called back over her shoulder. “We've finally located a long-lost colleague.”
“Who?”
“Kaye Lang,” Browning replied.
Augustine grimaced. He sometimes pictured himself as a toothless old tiger in a government filled with vipers. He was perilously close to becoming a figurehead, or worse, a clown over a drop tank. His only remaining survival tactic was a passive appearance of being outpaced by young and vicious career bureaucrats attracted to Washington by the smell of incipient tyranny.
The cane helped. He had broken his leg in a fall in the shower last year. If they thought he was weak and stupid, that gave him an advantage.
The maximum depth of Washington's soulless vacancy was the proud personal record of Rachel Browning. A specialist in law enforcement data management, married to a telecom executive in Connecticut whom she rarely saw, Browning had begun as Augustine's assistant in EMAC—Emergency Action—seven years ago, had moved into foreign corporate interdiction at the National Security Agency and had finally jumped aisle again to head the intelligence and enforcement branch of EMAC. She had started the Special Reconnaissance Office—SRO—which specialized in tracking dissidents and subversives and infiltrating radical parent groups. SRO shared its satellites and other equipment with the National Reconnaissance Office.
Once upon a time, in a different lifetime, Browning had been very useful to him.
“Kaye Lang Rafelson is not someone you just lure and bust,” Augustine said. “Her daughter is not just another notch on the handle of our butterfly net. We have to be very careful with all of them.”
Browning rolled her eyes. “She's not off limits according to any directive I've received. I certainly do not regard her as a sacred cow. It's been seven years since she was on Oprah.”
“If you ever feel the need to learn political science, much less public relations, I know of some excellent undergraduate courses at City College,” Augustine said.
Browning smiled her patent leather smile once again, bulletproof, certainly proof against a toothless tiger.
They arrived at the elevator together. The door opened. A Marine with a holstered nine millimeter greeted them with hard gray eyes.
Two minutes later, they stood in a small private office. Four plasma displays like a Japanese screen rose on steel stands beyond the central desk. The walls were bare and beige, insulated with close-packed, sound-absorbing foam panels.
Augustine hated enclosed spaces. He had come to hate everything he had accomplished in the last eleven years. His entire life was an enclosed space.
Browning took the only seat and laid her hands over a keyboard and trackball. Her fingers danced over the keyboard, and she palmed the trackball, sucking on her teeth as she watched the monitor. “They're living about a hundred miles south of here,” she murmured, focusing on her task.
“I know,” Augustine said. “Spotsylvania County.”
She looked up, startled, then cocked her head to one side. “How long have you known?”
“A year and a half,” Augustine said.
“Why not just take them? Soft heart, or soft brain?”
Augustine dismissed that with a blink revealing neither opinion nor passion. He felt his face tighten. Soon his cheeks would begin to hurt like hell, a residual effect from the blast in the basement of the White House, the bomb that had killed the president, nearly killed Augustine, and taken the eye of Christopher Dicken. “I don't see anything.”
“The network is still assembling,” Browning said. “Takes a few minutes. Little Bird is talking to Deep Eye.”
“Lovely toys,” he commented.
“They were your idea.”
“I've just come back from Riverside, Rachel.”
“Oh. How was it?”
“Awful beyond belief.”
“No doubt.” Browning removed a Kleenex from her small black purse and delicately blew her nose, one nostril at a time. “You sound like someone who wants to be relieved of command.”
“You'll be the first to know, I'm sure,” Augustine said.
Rachel pointed to the monitor, snapped her fingers, and like magic, a picture formed. “Deep Eye,” she said, and they looked down upon a small patch of Virginia countryside flocked with thick green trees and pierced by a winding, two-lane road. Deep Eye's lens zoomed in to show the roof of a house, a driveway with a single small truck, a large backyard surrounded by tall oaks.
“And . . . here's Little Bird,” Browning's voice turned husky with an almost erotic approval.
The view switched to that of a drone swooping up beside the house like a dragonfly. It hovered near a small frame window, then adjusted exposure in the morning brightness to reveal the head and shoulders of a young girl, rubbing her face with a washcloth.
“Recognize her?” Browning asked.
“The last picture we have is from four years ago,” Augustine said.
“That must be from an inexcusable lack of trying.”
“You're right,” Augustine admitted.
The girl left the bathroom and vanished from view. Little Bird rose to hover at an altitude of fifty feet and waited for instructions from the unseen pilot, probably in the back of a remoter truck a few miles from the house.
“I think that's Stella Nova Rafelson,” Browning mused, tapping her lower lip with a long red fingernail.
“Congratulations. You're a voyeur,” Augustine said.
“I prefer ‘paparazzo.’ ”
The view on the screen veered and dropped to take in a slender female figure stepping off the front porch and onto the scattered gravel walkway. She was carrying something small and square in one hand.
“Definitely our girl,” Browning said. “Tall for her age, isn't she?”
Stella walked with rigid determination toward the gate in the wire fence. Little Eye dropped and magnified to a three-quarter view. The resolution was remarkable. The girl paused at the gate, swung it halfway open, then glanced over her shoulder with a frown and a flash of freckles.
Dark freckles, Augustine thought. She's nervous.
“What is she up to?” Browning asked. “Looks like she's going for a walk. And not to school, I'm thinking.”
Augustine watched the girl amble along the dirt path beside the old asphalt road, out in the country, as if taking a morning stroll.
“Things are moving kind of fast,” Browning said. “We don't have anyone on site. I don't want to lose the opportunity, so I've alerted a stringer.”
“You mean a bounty hunter. That's not wise.”
Browning did not react.
“I do not want this, Rachel,” Augustine said. “It's the wrong time for this kind of publicity, and certainly for these tactics.”
“It's not your choice, Mark,” Browning said. “I've been told to bring her in, and her parents as well.”
“By whom?” Augustine knew that his authority had been sliding of late, perhaps drastically since Riverside. But he had never imagined that Riverside would lead to an even more severe crackdown.
“It's a sort of test,” Browning said.
The secretary of Health and Human Services shared authority over EMAC with the president. Forces within EMAC wanted to change that and remove HHS from the loop entirely, consolidating their power. Augustine had tried the same thing himself, years ago, in a different job.
Browning took control from the remoter truck and sent Little Bird down the road, buzzing quietly a discreet distance behind Stella Nova Rafelson. “Don't you think Kaye Lang should have kept her maiden name when she married?”
“They never married,” Augustine said.
“Well, well. The little bastard.”
“Fuck you, Rachel,” Augustine said.
Browning looked up. Her face hardened. “And fuck you, Mark, for making me do your job.”
MARYLAND
Mrs. Rhine stood in her living room, peering through the thick acrylic pane as if searching for the ghosts of another life. In her late thirties, she was of medium height, with stocky arms and legs but a thin torso, chin strong and pointed. She wore a bright yellow dress and a white blouse with a patchwork vest she had made herself. What they could see of her face between gauze bandages was red and puffy, and her left eye had swollen shut.
Her arms and legs were completely covered in Ace bandages. Mrs. Rhine's body was trying to eliminate trillions of new viruses that could craftily claim they were part of her self, from her genome; but the viruses were not making her sick. Her own immune response was the principle cause of her torment.
Someone, Dicken could not remember who, had likened autoimmune disease to having one's body run by House Republicans. A few years in Washington had eerily reinforced the aptness of this comparison.
“Christopher?” Mrs. Rhine called out hoarsely.
The lights in the inner station switched on with a click.
“It's me,” Dicken answered, his voice sibilant within the hood.
Mrs. Rhine decorously sidestepped and curtsied, her dress swishing. Dicken saw that she had placed his flowers in a large blue vase, the same vase she had used the last time. “They're beautiful,” she said. “White roses. My favorites. They still have some scent. Are you well?”
“I am. And you?”
“Itching is my life, Christopher,” she said. “I'm reading Jane Eyre. I think, when they come here to make the movie, down here deep in the Earth, as they will, don't you know, that I will play Mr. Rochester's first wife, poor thing.” Despite the swelling and the bandages, Mrs. Rhine's smile was dazzling. “Would you call it typecasting?”
“You're more the mousy, inherently lovely type who saves the rugged, half-crazed male from his darker self. You're Jane.”
She pulled up a folding chair and sat. Her living room was normal enough, with a normal decor—couches, chairs, pictures on the walls, but no carpeting. Mrs. Rhine was allowed to make her own throw rugs. She also knitted and worked on a loom in another room, away from the windows. She was said to have woven a fairy-tale tapestry involving her husband and infant daughter, but she had never shown it to anyone.
“How long can you stay?” Mrs. Rhine asked.
“As long as you'll put up with me,” Dicken said.
“About an hour,” Marian Freedman said.
“They gave me some very nice tea,” Mrs. Rhine said, her voice losing strength as she looked down at the floor. “It seems to help with my skin. Pity you can't share it with me.”
“Did you get my package of DVDs?” Dicken asked.
“I did. I loved Suddenly, Last Summer,” Mrs. Rhine said, voice rising again. “Katharine Hepburn plays mad so well.”
Freedman gave him a dirty look through their hoods. “Are we on a theme here?”
“Hush, Marian,” Mrs. Rhine said. “I'm fine.”
“I know you are, Carla. You're more sane than I am.”
“That is certainly true,” Mrs. Rhine said. “But then I don't have to worry about me, do I? Honestly, Marian's been good to me. I wish I had known her before. Actually, I wish she'd let me fix her hair.”
Freedman lifted an eyebrow, leaning in toward the window so Mrs. Rhine could see her expression. “Ha, ha,” she said.
“They really aren't treating me too badly, and I'm passing all my psychological profiles.” Mrs. Rhine's face dropped some of the overwrought, elfin look it assumed when she engaged in this kind of banter. “Enough about me. How are the children doing, Christopher?”
Dicken detected the slightest hitch in her voice.
“They're doing okay,” Dicken said.
Her tone became brittle. “The ones who would have gone to school with my daughter, had she lived. Are they still kept in camps?”
“Mostly. Some are hiding out.”
“What about Kaye Lang?” Mrs. Rhine asked. “I'm especially interested in her and her daughter. I read about them in the magazines. I saw her on the Katie Janeway show. Is she still raising her daughter without the government's help?”
“As far as I know,” Dicken said. “We haven't kept in touch. She's kind of gone underground.”
“You were good friends, I read in the magazines.”
“We were.”
“You shouldn't lose touch with your friends,” Mrs. Rhine said.
“I agree,” Dicken said. Freedman listened patiently. She understood Mrs. Rhine with more than clinical thoroughness, and she also understood the two feminine poles of Christopher Dicken's busy but lonely life: Mrs. Rhine, and Kaye Lang, who had first pinpointed and predicted the emergence of SHEVA. Both had touched him deeply.
“Any news on what they're doing inside me, all those viruses?”
“We have a lot to learn,” Dicken said.
“You said some of the viruses carry messages. Are they whispering inside me? My pig viruses . . . are they still carrying pig messages?”
“I don't know, Carla.”
Mrs. Rhine held out her dress and dropped down in her overstuffed chair, then brushed back her hair with one hand. “Please, Christopher. I killed my family. Understanding what happened is the one thing I need in this life. Tell me, even the little stuff, your guesses, your dreams . . . anything.”
Freedman nodded. “Good or bad, we tell her all we know,” she said. “It's the least she deserves.”
In a halting voice, Dicken began to outline what had been learned since his last visit. The science was sharper, progress had been made. He left out the weapons research aspect and focused on the new children.
They were remarkable and in their own way, remarkably beautiful. And that made them a special problem to those they had been designed to replace.
SPOTSYLVANIA, VIRGINIA
“I hear you smell as good as a dog,” the young man in the patched denim jacket said to a tall, slender girl with speckled cheeks. He reverently set a six-pack of Millers on the Formica countertop and slapped down a twenty-dollar bill. “Luckies,” he told the minimart clerk.
“She doesn't smell good as a dog,” the second male said with a dull smile. “She smells worse.”
“You guys cut it out,” the clerk warned, putting away the bill and getting his cigarettes. She was rail thin with pale skin and tormented blonde hair. A haze of stale cigarettes hung around her coffee-spotted uniform.
“We're just talking,” the first male said. He wore his hair in a short ponytail tied with a red rubber band. His companion was younger, taller and stooped, long brown hair topped by a baseball cap.
“I'm warning you, no trouble!” the clerk said, her voice as rough as an old road. “Honey, you ignore him, he's just fooling.”
Stella pocketed her change and picked up her bottle of Gatorade. She was wearing shorts and a blue tank top and tennis shoes and no makeup. She gave the two men a silent sniff. Her nostrils dimpled. They were in their mid-twenties, paunchy, with fleshy faces and rough hands. Their jeans were stained by fresh paint and they smelled sour and gamy, like unhappy puppies.
They weren't making much money and they weren't very smart. More desperate than some, and quick to suspicion and anger.
“She doesn't look infeckshus,” the second male said.
“I mean it, guys, she's just a little girl,” the clerk insisted, her face going blotchy.
“What's your name?” Stella asked the first male.
“I don't care you should know,” he said, then looked to his friend with a cocky smile.
“Leave her be,” the clerk warned one more time, worn down. “Honey, you just go home.”
The stooped male grabbed his six-pack by its plastic sling and started for the door. “Let's go, Dave.”
Dave was working himself up. “She doesn't fucking belong here,” he said, wrinkling his face. “Why in shit should we put up with this?”
“You stop that language!” the clerk cried. “We get kids in here.”
Stella drew herself up to a lanky five feet nine inches and extended her long-fingered hand. “Pleased to meet you, David. I'm Stella,” she said.
Dave stared at her hand in disgust. “I wouldn't touch you for ten million dollars. Why ain't you in a camp?”
“Dave!” the stooped fellow snapped.
Stella felt the fever scent rise. Her ears tingled. It was cool inside the minimart and hot outside, hot and humid. She had been walking in the sun for half an hour before she had found the Texaco and pushed through the swinging glass doors to buy a drink. She wasn't wearing makeup. The others could see clearly whatever the dapples on her cheeks were doing. So be it. She stood her ground by the counter. She did not want to yield to Dave, and the clerk's halfhearted defense rankled.
Dave picked up his Luckies. Stella liked the smell of tobacco before it was lit but hated the burning stink. She knew that worried men smoked, unhappy men, nervous and under stress. Their knuckles were square and their hands looked like mummy hands from sun and work and tobacco. Stella could learn a lot about people just by a sniff and a glance. “Our little radar,” Kaye called her.
“It's nice in here,” Stella said, her voice small. She held a small book in front of her as if for protection. “It's cool.”
“You are something, you know it?” Dave said with a touch of admiration. “An ugly little turd, but brave as a skunk.”
Dave's friend stood by the glass doors. The sweat on the man's hand reacted with the steel of the handle and reeked like a steel spoon dipped in vanilla ice cream. Stella could not eat ice cream with a steel spoon because the odor, like fear and madness, made her ill. She used a plastic spoon instead.
“Fuck it, Dave, let's go! They'll come get her and maybe they'll take us, too, if we get too close.”
“My people aren't really infeckshus,” Stella said. She stepped toward the man by the counter, long neck craned, head poking forward. “But you never know, Dave.”
The clerk sucked in her breath.
Stella had not meant to say that. She had not known she was so mad. She backed off a few inches, wanting to apologize and explain herself, say two things at once, speaking on both sides of her tongue, to make them hear and feel what she meant, but they would not understand; the words, doubled so, would jumble in their heads and only make them angrier.
What came out of Stella's mouth in a soothing alto murmur, her eyes focused on Dave's, was, “Don't worry. It's safe. If you want to beat me up, my blood won't hurt you. I could be your own little Jesus.”
The fever-scent did its thing. The glands behind her ears began to pump defensive pheromones. Her neck felt hot.
“Shit,” the clerk said, and bumped up against the tall rack of cigarettes behind her.
Dave showed the whites of his eyes like a skittish horse. He veered toward the door, giving her a wide berth, the deliberate smell of her in his nose. She had snuffed the fuse of his anger.
Dave joined his friend. “She smells like fucking chocolate,” he said, and they kicked the glass doors open with their boots.
An old woman at the back of the store, surrounded by aisles jammed with puffed bags of potato chips, stared at Stella. Her hand shook a can of Pringles like a castanet. “Go away!”
The clerk moved in to defend the old woman. “Take your Gatorade and go home!” she barked at Stella. “Go home to your mama and don't you never come back here.”
The Longworth House Office Building
WASHINGTON, D.C.
“We've been over and over this,” Dick Gianelli told Mitch, dropping a stack of scientific reprints on the coffee table between them. The news was not good.
Gianelli was short and round and his usually pale face was now a dangerous red. “We've been reading everything you sent us ever since the congressman was elected. But they have twice as many experts, and they send twice as many papers. We're drowning in papers, Mitch! And the language.” He thumped the stack. “Can't your people, all the biologists, just write to be understood? Don't they realize how important it is to get the word out to everybody?”
Mitch let his hands drop by his sides. “They're not my people, Dick. My people are archaeologists. They tend to write sparkling prose.”
Gianelli laughed, stood up from the couch and shook out his arms, then tipped a finger under his tight collar, as if letting out steam. His office was part of the suite assigned to Representative Dale Wickham, D., Virginia, whom he had faithfully served as director of public science for two of the toughest terms in U.S. history. The door to Wickham's office was closed. He was on the Hill today.
“The congressman has made his views clear for years now. Your colleagues, scientists all, have hopped on the gravy train. They've joined up with NIH and CDC and Emergency Action, and they pay their visits mostly across the aisle. Wilson at FEMA and Doyle at DOJ have undercut us every step of the way, squirming like puppies to get their funding treats. Opposing them is like standing outside in a hail of cannonballs.”
“So what can I take home with me?” Mitch asked. “To cheer up the missus. Any good news?”
Gianelli shrugged. Mitch liked Gianelli but doubted he would live to see fifty. Gianelli had all the markers: pear shape, excessive girth, ghostly skin, thinning black hair, creased earlobes. He knew it, too. He worked hard and cared too much and swallowed his disappointments. A good man in a bad time. “We got caught in a medical bear trap,” he said. “We've never been prepared. Our best model for an epidemic was military response. So now we've had ten years of Emergency Action. We've practically signed away our country to Beltway bureaucrats with military and law enforcement training. Mark Augustine's crew, Mitch. We've given them almost absolute authority.”
“I don't think I'm capable of understanding how those people think,” Mitch said.
“I thought I did, once,” Gianelli said. “We tried to build a coalition. The congressman roped in Christian groups, the NRA, conspiracy nuts, flag burners and flag lovers, anybody who's ever expressed a shred of suspicion about the guv'ment. We've gone hat in hand to every decent judge, every civil libertarian still above ground, literally and figuratively. We've been checked every step of the way. It was made very clear to the congressman that if he threw up any more dust, he, personally, all on his lonesome, could force the president to declare martial law.”
“What's the difference, Dick?” Mitch asked. “They've suspended habeas corpus.”
“For a special class, Mitch.”
“My daughter,” Mitch growled.
Gianelli nodded. “Civil courts still operate, though under special guidelines. Nothing much has changed for the frightened average citizen, who's kind of fuzzy about civil rights anyway. When Mark Augustine put together Emergency Action, he wove a tight little piece of legislative fabric. He made sure every agency ever involved in managing disease and preparing for natural disaster had a piece of the pie—and a very smelly pie it is. We've created a new and vulnerable underclass, with fewer civil protections than any since slavery. This sort of stuff attracts the real sharks, Mitch. The monsters.”
“All they have are hatred and fear.”
“In this town, that's a full house,” Gianelli said. “Washington eats truth and shits spin.” He stood. “We can't challenge Emergency Action. Not this session. They're stronger than ever. Maybe next year.”
Mitch watched Gianelli pace a circuit of the room. “I can't wait that long. Riverside, Dick.”
Gianelli folded his hands. He would not meet Mitch's eyes.
“The mob torched one of Augustine's goddamned camps,” Mitch said. “They burned the children in their barracks. They poured gasoline around the pilings and lit them up. The guards just stood back and watched. Two hundred kids roasted to death. Kids just like my daughter.”
Gianelli put on a mask of public sympathy, but underneath it, Mitch could see the real pain.
“There haven't even been arrests,” he added.
“You can't arrest a city, Mitch. Even the New York Times calls them virus children now. Everyone's scared.”
“There hasn't been a case of Shiver in ten years. It was a fluke, Dick. An excuse for some people to trample on everything this country has ever stood for.”
Gianelli squinted at Mitch but did not challenge this appraisal. “There isn't much more the congressman can do,” he said.
“I don't believe that.”
Gianelli reached into his desk drawer and took out a bottle of Tums. “Everyone around here has fire in the belly. I have heartburn.”
“Give me something to take home, Dick. Please. We need hope,” Mitch said.
“Show me your hands, Mitch.”
Mitch held up his hands. The calluses had faded, but they were still there. Gianelli held his own hands beside Mitch's. They were smooth and pink. “Want to really learn how to suck eggs, from an old hound dog? I've spent ten years with Wickham. He's the smartest hound there is, but he's up against a bad lot. The Republicans are the country's pit bulls, Mitch. Barking in the night, all night, every night, right or wrong, and savaging their enemies without mercy. They claim to represent plain folks, but they represent those who vote, when they vote at all, on pocketbooks and fear and gut instinct. They control the House and the Senate, they stacked the court the last three terms, their man is in the White House, and bless them, they speak with one voice, Mitch. The president is dug in. But you know what the congressman thinks? He thinks the president doesn't want Emergency Action to be his legacy. Eventually, maybe we can do something with that.” Gianelli's voice dropped very low, as if he were about to blaspheme in the temple. “But not now. The Democrats can't even hold a bake sale without arguing. We're weak and getting weaker.”
He held out his hand. “The congressman will be back any minute. Mitch, you look like you haven't slept in weeks.”
Mitch shrugged. “I lie awake listening for trucks. I hate being so far from Kaye and Stella.”
“How far?”
Mitch looked up from under his solid line of eyebrow and shook his head.
“Right,” Gianelli said. “Sorry.”
SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY
The old frame house snapped and popped in the morning heat. A moist breeze blew through the small rooms in lazy swirls. Kaye walked from the bedroom to the bathroom, rubbing her eyes. She had awakened from a peculiar dream in which she was an atom slowly rising to connect with a much larger molecule, to fit in and complete something truly impressive. She felt at peace for the first time in months, despite the barbed memory of last night's fight.
Kaye massaged the fingers of her right hand, then wriggled her wedding ring over a swollen knuckle into its familiar groove. Bees droned in the oleanders outside the window, well into their day's work.
“Some dream,” she told herself in the bathroom mirror. She pulled down one eyelid with a finger and stared at herself speculatively. “Under a little stress, are we?”
A few freckles remained under each eye from her pregnancy with Stella; when she was upset, they could still change from pale tan to ruddy ocher. Now, they were darker but not vivid. She splashed water on her cheeks and clipped her hair back, preparing for the hot day, ready to face more difficulties. Families were about staying together and healing.
If the bees can do it, so can I.
“Stella,” she called, knocking on her daughter's bedroom door. “It's nine o'clock. We slept in.”
Kaye padded into the small office in the laundry room and switched on the computer. She read the lines she had written before the squabble last night, then scrolled back through the last few pages:
“The role of SHEVA in the production of a new subspecies is but one function performed by this diverse and essential class of viruses. ERV and transposons—jumping genes—play large roles in tissue differentiation and development. Emotion and crisis and changing environments activate them, one variety at a time, or all together. They are mediators and messengers between cells, ferrying genes and coded data around many parts of the body, and even between individuals.
“Viruses and transposons most likely arose after the invention of sex, perhaps because of sex. To this day, sex brings them opportunity to move and carry information. They may have also emerged during the tumultuous genetic shuffling of our early immune system, like soldiers and cops running wild.
“Truly they are like original sin. How does sin shape our destiny?”
Kaye used a stylus to circle that last awkward, overreaching sentence. She marked it out and read some more.
“One thing we know already: We depend on retroviral and transposon activity during nearly every stage of our growth. Many are necessary partners.
“To assume that viruses and transposable elements are first and foremost causes of disease is like assuming that automobiles are first and foremost meant to kill people.
“Pathogens—disease-causing organisms—are like hormones and other signaling molecules, but their message is challenge and silence. Our own internal lions, pathogens test us. They winnow the old and weak. They sculpt life.
“Sometimes they bring down the young and the good. Nature is painful. Disease and death are part of our response to challenge. To fail, to die, is still to be part of nature, for success is built on many failures, and silence is also a signal.”
Her frame of mind had become increasingly abstract. The dream, the drone of the bees . . .
You were born with a caul, my dear.
Kaye suddenly remembered the voice of her maternal grandmother, Evelyn; words from nearly four decades ago. At the age of eight, Evelyn had told her something that her mother, a practical woman, had never thought to mention. “You came into this world with your tiny head covered. You were born with a caul. I was there, in the hospital with your mother. I saw it myself. The doctor showed it to me.”
Kaye remembered squirming with delicious anticipation in her grandmother's ample lap and asking what a caul was. “A cap of loose flesh,” Evelyn had explained. “Some say it's a mark of extraordinary understanding, even second sight. A caul warns us that you will learn things most others will never comprehend, and you will always be frustrated trying to explain what you know, and what seems so obvious to you. It's supposed to be both a blessing and a curse.” Then the older woman had added, in a soft voice, “I was born with a caul, my dear, and your grandfather has never understood me.”
Kaye had loved Evelyn very much, but at times had thought her a little spooky. She returned her attention to the text on the monitor. She did not delete the paragraphs, but she did draw a large asterisk and exclamation point beside them. Then she saved the file and pushed the chair under the desk.
Four pages yesterday. A good day's work. Not that it would ever see the light of day in any respectable journal. For the last eight years, all of her papers had appeared on clandestine Web sites.
Kaye listened closely to the morning house, as if to measure the day ahead. A curtain pull flapped against a window frame. Cardinals whistled in the maple tree outside.
She could not hear her daughter stirring.
“Stella!” she called, louder. “Breakfast. Want some oatmeal?”
No answer.
She walked in flapping slippers down the short hallway to Stella's room. Stella's bed was made but rumpled, as if she had been lying on it, tossing and turning. A bouquet of dried flowers, tied with a rubber band, rested on the pillow. A short stack of books had been tipped over beside the bed. On the sill, three stuffed Shrooz, about the size of guinea pigs, red and green and the very rare black and gold, hung their long noses into the room. More cascaded from the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. Stella loved Shrooz because they were grumpy; they whined and squirmed and then groaned when moved.
Kaye searched the big backyard, tall brown grass faded into ivy and kudzu under the big old trees at the edge of the property. She could not afford to let her attention lapse even for a minute.
Then she returned to the house and Stella's bedroom. She got down on her knees and peered under the bed. Stella had made a scent diary, a small blank book filled with cryptic writing and dated records of her emotions, scents collected from behind her ears and dabbed on each page. Stella kept it hidden, but Kaye had found it once while cleaning and had figured it out.
Kaye pushed her hands through the balls of dust and cat toys beneath the bed and thrust her fingers deep into the shadows. The book was not there.
Peace the illusion, peace the trap, no rest, no letting down her guard. Stella was gone. Taking the book meant she was serious.
Still shod in slippers, Kaye pushed through the gate and ran up the oak-lined street. She whispered, “Don't panic, keep it together, God damn it.” The muscles in her neck knotted.
A quarter of a mile away, in front of the next house down the road in the rural neighborhood, she slowed to a walk, then stood in the middle of the cracked asphalt road, hugging herself, small and tense, like a mouse waiting for a hawk.
Kaye shaded her eyes against the sun and looked up at bloated gray clouds advancing shoulder to shoulder along the southern horizon. The air smelled sullen and jumpy.
If Stella had planned this, she would have run off after Mitch left for Washington. Mitch had left between six and seven. That meant her daughter had at least an hour's head start. That realization shoved an icicle down Kaye's spine.
Calling the police was not wise. Five years ago, Virginia had reluctantly acquiesced to Emergency Action and had begun rounding up the new children and sending them to camps in Iowa, Nebraska, and Ohio. Years ago, Kaye and Mitch had withdrawn from parent support groups after a rash of FBI infiltrations. Mitch had assumed that Kaye in particular was a target for surveillance and possibly even arrest.
They were on their own. They had decided that was the safest course.
Kaye took off her slippers and ran barefoot back to the house. She would have to think like Stella and that was difficult. Kaye had observed her daughter as a mother and as a scientist for eleven years, and there had always been a small but important distance between them that she could not cross. Stella deliberated with a thoroughness Kaye admired, but reached conclusions she often found mystifying.
Kaye grabbed her handbag with her wallet and ID, pulled on her garden shoes, and exited through the back door. The small primer gray Toyota truck started instantly. Mitch maintained both their vehicles. She ground the tires down the dirt driveway, then caught herself and drove slowly along the country lane.
“Please,” she muttered, “no rides.”
Walking along the dirt margin of the asphalt road, Stella swung the plastic Gatorade bottle, rationing herself to a sip every few minutes. An old farm field plowed and marked for a new strip mall stretched to her right. Stella tightrope-walked a freshly cured concrete curb, not yet out of its mold boards. The sun was climbing in the east, black clouds stacked high in the south, and the air spun hot and full of the fragrances of dogwood and sycamore. The exhaust of cars going by, and a descending tail of carbon from a diesel truck, clogged her nose.
She felt at long last that she was doing something worthwhile. There was guilt, but she pushed aside concern for what her parents would think. Somewhere on this road she might meet someone who would not argue with her instincts, who would not feel pain simply because Stella existed. Someone like herself.
All her life she had lived among one kind of human, but she was another. An old virus called SHEVA had broken loose from human DNA and rearranged human genes. Stella and a generation of children like her were the result. This was what her parents had told her.
Not a freak. Just a different kind.
Stella Nova Rafelson was eleven years old. She felt as if she had been peculiarly alone all her life.
She sometimes thought of herself as a star, a bright little point in a very big sky. Humans filled the sky by the billions and washed her out like the blinding sun.
Kaye swung left just beyond the courthouse, turned the corner, drove half a block, and pulled into a gas station. When she had been a child, there had been little rubber-coated trip wires that caused a bell to ding whenever a car arrived. There were no longer any wires, no bell, and nobody came out to see what Kaye needed. She parked by the bright red-and-white convenience store and wiped tears from her eyes.
She sat for a minute in the Toyota, trying to focus.
Stella had a red plastic coin purse that held ten dollars in emergency money. There was a drinking fountain in the courthouse, but Kaye thought Stella would prefer something cold, sweet, and fruity. Odors of artificial strawberry and raspberry that Kaye found repugnant, Stella would wallow in like a cat in a bed of catnip. “It's a long walk,” Kaye told herself. “It's hot. She's thirsty. It's her day out, away from mom.” She bit her lip.
Kaye and Mitch had protected Stella like a rare orchid throughout her short life. Kaye knew that, hated the necessity of it. It was how they had stayed together. Her daughter's freedom depended on it. The chat rooms were full of the agonized stories of parents giving up their children, watching them be sent to Emergency Action schools in another state. The camps.
Mitch, Stella, and Kaye had lived a dreamy, tense, unreal existence, no way for an energetic, outgoing young girl to grow up, no way for Mitch to stay sane. Kaye tried not to think too much about herself or what was happening between her and Mitch, she might just snap, and then where would they be? But their difficulties had obviously had an effect on Stella. She was a daddy's girl, to Kaye's pride and secret sadness—she had once been a daddy's girl, too, before both her parents had died, over twenty years ago—and Mitch had been gone a lot lately.
Kaye entered the store through the glass double doors. The clerk, a thin, tired-looking woman a little younger than Kaye, had out a mop and bucket and was grimly spraying the counter and floor with Lysol.
“Excuse me, did you see a girl, tall, about eleven?”
The clerk raised the mop like a lance and poked it at her.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
A tall, stooped man with thinning white hair sauntered into the office carrying a worn briefcase. Gianelli stood up. “Congressman, you remember Mitch Rafelson.”
“I do, indeed,” Wickham said, and held out his hand. Mitch shook it firmly. The hand was dry and hard as wood. “Does anybody know you're here, Mitch?”
“Dick snuck me in, sir.”
Wickham appraised Mitch with a slight tremor of his head. “Come over to my office, Mitch,” the congressman said. “You, too, Dick, and close the door behind you.”
They walked across the hall. Wickham's office was covered with plaques and photos, a lifetime of politics.
“Justice Barnhall had a heart attack this morning at ten,” Wickham said.
Mitch's face fell. Barnhall had consistently championed civil rights, even for SHEVA children and their parents.
“He's in Bethesda,” Wickham said. “They don't hold out much hope. The man is ninety years old. I've just been speaking with the Senate minority leader. We're going to the White House tomorrow morning.” Wickham laid his briefcase down on a couch and stuck his hands in the pockets of his chocolate brown slacks. “Justice Barnhall was one of the good guys. Now the president wants Olsen, and he's a corker, Mitch. We haven't seen his like since Roger B. Taney. A lifelong bachelor, face like a stoat, mind like a steel trap. Wants to undo eighty years of so-called judicial activism, thinks he'll have the country by the balls, six to three. And he probably will. We're not going to win this round, but we can land a few punches. Then, they'll lash us on the votes. We're going to get creamed.” Wickham stared sadly at Mitch. “I do love a fair fight.”
The secretary knocked on the door jamb. “Congressman, is Mr. Rafelson here?” She looked right at Mitch, one eyebrow cocked.
Gianelli asked, “Who wants to know?”
“Won't use her name and sounds upset. System board says she's on a disposable cell phone using an offshore line. That's no longer legal, sir.”
“You don't say,” Wickham said, looking out the window.
“My wife knows I'm here. No one else,” Mitch said.
“Get her number and call her back, Connie,” Wickham said. “Put it on the puzzler, and route it through, oh, Tom Haney's office in Boca Raton.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wickham gestured toward his desk phone. “We can link her line to a special scrambler for congressional office communications,” he said, but tapped his wristwatch. “Starts and ends with garbage, and unless you know the key, it all sounds like garbage. We change the key every call. Takes NSA about a minute or so to break it, so keep it short.”
The secretary made the connection. Mitch stared between the two men, his heart sinking, and picked up the receiver on the desk.
SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY
Stella sat in the shade of an old wooden bus shelter, clutching her book to her chest. She had been sitting there for an hour and a half. The Gatorade bottle was long since empty and she was thirsty. The morning heat was stifling and the sky was clouding over. The air had thickened with that spooky electric dampness that meant a big storm was brewing. All of her emotions had flip-flopped. “I've been really stupid,” she told herself. “Kaye will be so mad.”
Kaye seldom showed her anger. Mitch, when he was home, was the one who paced and shook his head and clenched his fists when things got tense. But Stella could tell when Kaye was angry. Her mother could get just as angry as Mitch, though in a quiet way.
Stella hated anger in the house. It smelled like old cockroaches.
Kaye and Mitch never took it out on Stella. Both treated her with patient tenderness, even when they clearly did not want to, and that made Stella feel what she called steepy, odd and different and apart.
Stella had made up that word, steepy, and lots of others, most of which she kept to herself.
It was tough to be responsible for a lot, and maybe all, of their anger. Hard to know she was to blame for Mitch not being able to go dig up pottery and middens, old garbage dumps, and for Kaye not being able to work in a lab or teach or do anything but write articles and books that somehow never got published or even finished.
Stella knit her long fingers and raised her knee, filling the hollow of the fingers and tugging her arms straight. She heard a vehicle and pushed back into the shadow of the enclosure, lifting her feet into the gloom. A red Ford pickup drove slowly by, clean, new, with a smooth white plastic camper on the back. The camper had a square shiny little door made of smoky plastic in the rear. It looked expensive, much nicer than the little Toyota truck or Mitch's old Dodge Intrepid.
The red truck slowed, stopped, shifted smoothly into reverse, and backed up. Stella tried to squeeze into the corner, her back pressed against splintery wood. She suddenly just wanted to go home. She could find her way back, she was sure of it; she could find it by the smell of the trees. But car exhaust and pretty soon rain would make that harder. The rain would make it much harder.
The truck stopped and the engine switched off. The driver opened his door and got out on the side away from Stella. She could only see a little bit of him through the truck's tinted windows. He had gray hair and a beard. He walked slowly around the truck bed and camper, the shadows of his legs visible under the frame.
“Hello, Miss,” he said, stopping a respectful four or five yards from where she was trying to hide. He put his hands in the pockets of his khaki shorts. In his mouth he clenched an unlit pipe. He adjusted the pipe with one hand, removed it, pointed it at her. “You live around here?”
Stella nodded in the shadow.
His goatee was all gray and neatly trimmed. He was potbellied but dressed neatly, and his calf-high socks and running shoes were clean and white. He smelled confident, what she could smell behind thick swipes of deodorant and the rum-and-cherry-scented tobacco tamped into the pipe.
“You should be with your family and friends,” he said.
“I'm heading home,” Stella said.
“Bus won't come by again until this evening. Only two stops a day here.”
“I'm walking.”
“Well, that's fine. You shouldn't take rides with strangers.”
“I know.”
“Can I help? Make a phone call to your folks?”
Stella said nothing. They had one secure phone at home, strictly for emergencies, and they bought disposable cell phones for occasional use. They always used a kind of family code when they talked, even with the disposables, but Mitch said they could identify your voice no matter how much you tried to change it.
She wanted the man in shorts to go away.
“Are your folks at home, Miss?”
Stella looked up at the sun peeking through the clouds.
“If you're alone, I know some people who can help,” he said. “Special friends. Listen. I made a recording of them.” He dug in his back pocket and pulled out a small recorder. He pressed a button and held out the machine for her to listen.
She had heard such songs and whistles before, on TV and on the radio. When she had been three, she had heard a boy sing songs like that, too. And a few years ago, in the house in Richmond, the big brick house with the iron gate and the guard dogs and four couples, nervous, thin people who seemed to have a lot of money, bringing their children together to play around an indoor swimming pool. She vividly remembered listening to their singing and being too shy to join in. Sweet interweaves of tunes, like meadowlarks singing their hearts out in a berry patch, as Mitch had said.
That was what she heard coming from the recorder.
Voices like hers.
Big drops of rain left crayon-jabs of wetness on the road and in the dirt. The sky and trees behind the man with the goatee flared icy white against the charcoal gray of the sky.
“It's going to get wet,” the man said. “Miss, it isn't good to be out here by yourself. Heck, this shelter could even attract lightning, who knows?” He pulled a cell phone from his back pocket. “Can I call someone for you? Your mom or dad?”
He didn't smell bad. In fact, he did not smell of much at all except for the rum-and-cherry tobacco. She had to learn how to judge people and even take chances. It was the only way to get along. She made a decision. “Could you call?” Stella asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Just tell me their number.”
LEESBURG
Mark Augustine placed his hand on the back of Rachel Browning's chair. The room was quiet except for the hum of equipment fans and a faint clicking noise.
They were watching the plump man in khaki shorts, the red truck, the lanky, awkward girl that was Kaye Lang Rafelson's daughter.
A virus child.
“Is that your stringer, Rachel?”
“I don't know,” Browning said.
“A good Samaritan, maybe?” Augustine asked. Internally, he was furious, but would not give Browning the satisfaction of showing it. “He could be a child molester.”
For the first time, Browning revealed uncertainty. “Any suggestions?” she asked.
Augustine felt no relief that she was asking his advice. This would simply involve him in her chain of decisions, and that was the last thing he wanted. Let her hang herself, all by herself.
“If things are going wrong, I need to make some calls,” he said.
“We should wait,” Browning said. “It's probably okay.”
The Little Bird hovered about thirty feet above the red truck and the bus stop, the paunchy middle-aged man and the young girl.
Augustine's hand tightened on the back of the chair.
SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY
The rain fell heavily and the air got darker as they climbed into the truck. Too late Stella noticed that the man had stuffed waxed cotton up his nose. He sat on the bench seat behind the wheel and offered her a mint Tic-Tac, but she hated mint. He popped two into his mouth and gestured with the phone. “Nobody answers,” he said. “Daddy at work?”
She turned away.
“I can drop you at your house, but maybe, if it's okay with you, I know some people would like to meet you,” he said.
She was going against everything her parents had ever told her, to give him the house number, to sit in his truck. But she had to do something, and it looked as if today was the day.
She had never walked so far from home. The rain would change everything about the air and the smells. “What's your name?” she asked.
“Fred,” the man answered. “Fred Trinket. I know you'd like to meet them, and they surely would like to meet you.”
“Stop talking that way,” Stella said.
“What way?”
“I'm not an idiot.”
Fred Trinket had clogged his nose with cotton and his mouth sang with shrill mint.
“Of course,” he said reasonably. “I know that, honey. I have a shelter. A place for kids in trouble. Would you like to see some pictures?” Trinket asked. “They're in the glove box.” He watched her, still smiling. He had a kind enough face, she decided. A little sad. He seemed concerned about how she felt. “Pictures of my kids, the ones on the recorder.”
Stella felt intensely curious. “Like me?” she asked.
“Just like you,” Fred said. “You're sparking real pretty, you know that? The others spark the same way when they're curious. Something to see.”
“What's sparking?”
“Your freckles,” Fred said, pointing. “They spread out on your cheeks like butterfly wings. I'm used to seeing that at my shelter. I could call your house again, see if somebody's home, tell your daddy or mama to meet us. Should I?”
He was getting nervous. She could smell that much, not that it meant anything. Everybody was nervous these days. He did not want to hurt her, she was pretty sure; there was nothing horny about his scent or his manner, and he did not smell of cigarettes or alcohol.
He did not smell anything like the young men in the convenience store.
She told herself again she would have to take chances if she wanted to get anywhere, if she wanted anything to change. “Yes,” she said.
Fred pushed redial. The cell phone beeped the tune of the house number. Still no answer. Her mother was probably out looking for her.
“Let's go to my house,” Fred said. “It's not far and there are cold drinks in the ice chest. Strawberry soda. Genuine Nehi in long-necked bottles. I'll call your mama again when we get there.”
She swallowed hard, opened the glove box, and pulled out a packet of color photos, five by sevens. The kids in the first photo, seven of them, were having a party, a birthday party, with a bright red cake. Fred stood in the background beside a plump older woman with a blank look. Other than Fred and the older woman, the kids at the party were all about her age. One boy might have been older, but he was standing in the background.
All like her. SHEVA children.
“Jesus,” Stella said.
“Easy on that,” Fred said amiably. “Jesus is Lord.”
The bumper sticker on Fred's truck said that. On the tailgate was glued a golden plastic fish. The fish, labeled “Truth,” was eating another fish with legs, labeled “Darwin.”
Fred turned on the motor and put the truck in gear. The rain was falling in big hard drops, tapping on the roof and the hood like a million bored fingers.
“Battle of the Wilderness took place not far from here,” Fred said as he drove. He turned right carefully, as if worried about jostling precious cargo. “Civil War. Holy place in its way. Real quiet. I love it out this way. Less traffic, fewer condo-minimums, right?”
Stella leafed through the pictures again, found some more stuck in a plastic pocket. Seven different kids, mugging for the camera or staring at it seriously, some sitting in big chairs in a big house.
One boy had no expression at all. “Who's this?” she asked Fred.
Fred spared a quick look. “That is Will. Strong Will, Mother calls him. He lived off snakes and squirrels before he came to our shelter.” Fred Trinket smiled and shook his head at the thought. “You'll like him. And the others, too.”
The red truck pulled up to a two-story house with tall white columns. Two long brick planters filled with scrawny, dripping oleanders bordered the white steps. Fred Trinket had done nothing overt to upset Stella, but now they were at his house.
“It's about lunchtime,” Trinket said. “The others will be eating. Mother feeds them about now. I eat later. It's my digestion. None too good.”
“You eat oatmeal,” Stella said.
Trinket beamed. “That is right, young lady. I eat oatmeal for breakfast. Sometimes a single slice of bacon. What else?”
“You like garlic.”
“For dinner, I have spaghetti with garlic, that's right.” Trinket shook his head happily. “Marvelous. You smell all that.”
He opened his door and came around. Stella got out and he pointed up the porch steps to the house. A big white door stood there, solid and patient, flanked by two tall, skinny windows. The paint was new. The doorknob reeked of Brasso, a smell she did not like. She did not touch the door. Trinket opened it for her. The door was not locked.
“We trust people,” Trinket said. “Mother!” he called. “We have a guest.”
Mitch pulled into the dirt driveway beneath a sodden gray sky. Kaye was not in the house when he arrived. She honked at him from the road as he came out after searching the empty house. His long legs took him in five quick strides to the old truck.
“How long?” Mitch asked, leaning in. He touched her wet cheeks through the driver's side window.
“Three or four hours,” Kaye said. “I took a nap and she was gone.”
He got in beside her. Just as she put the truck in gear, Mitch held up his hand. “Phone,” he said. She cut the engine and they both listened. From the house came a faint ringing.
Mitch ran to the house. The screen door slammed behind him and he picked up on the fourth ring.
“Hello?”
“Is this Mr. Bailey?” a man asked.
That was the name they had told Stella to use.
“Yeah,” Mitch said, wiping rain from his brow and eyes. “Who's this?”
“My name is Fred Trinket. I did not know you were living so near, Mr. Bailey.”
“I'm in a hurry, Mr. Trinket. Where's my daughter?”
“Please don't be upset. She's in my house right now, and she's very worried about you.”
“We're worried about her. Where are you?”
“She's fine, Mr. Rafelson. We'd like you to come and see something we think is interesting and important. Something you may very well find fascinating.” The man who called himself Trinket gave directions.
Mitch rejoined Kaye in the truck. “Someone has Stella,” he said.
“Emergency Action?”
“A teacher, a crank, somebody,” Mitch said. No time now to mention the man knew his real name. He did not think Stella would have told anyone that. “About ten miles from here.”
Kaye was already spinning the truck around on the road.
“There,” Trinket said, putting away the phone and drying his short hair with a towel. “Have you ever met with more than one or two of the children at a time?”
Stella did not answer for a moment, it was such an odd question. She wanted to think it over, even though she knew what he meant. She looked around the living room of the big house. The furniture was colonial, she knew from reading catalogs and magazines: maple with antique print fabric—butter churns, horse tack, plows. It was really ugly. The wallpaper was dark green flocked velvet with floral patterns that looked like sad faces. The entire room smelled of a citronella candle burning on a small side table, too sweet even for Stella's tastes. There had been chicken cooking in the past hour, and broccoli.
“No,” she finally said.
“That is sad, isn't it?”
The old woman, the same as in the photos, entered the room and looked at Stella with little interest. She walked in rubber-soled slippers with hardly any sound and held out a long-necked bottle of Nehi strawberry soda, brilliant red in the room's warm glow.
Trinket was at least fifty. Stella guessed his mother might be seventy, plump, with strong-looking, corded arms, peach-colored skin with only a few wrinkles, and thin white hair arranged neatly on a pallid, taut scalp, like the worn head of a much-loved doll.
Stella was thirsty, but she did not take the bottle.
“Mother,” Trinket said, “I've called Stella's parents.”
“No need,” the woman said, her tone flat. “We have groceries.”
Trinket winked at Stella. “We do indeed,” he said. “And chicken for lunch. What else, Stella?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“What else do we have to eat?”
“It's not a game,” Stella said huffily.
“Broccoli, I'd guess,” Trinket answered for her, his lips forming a little bow. “Mother is a good cook, but predictable. Still, she helps me with the children.”
“I do,” the woman said.
“Where are they?” Stella asked.
“Mother does her best, but my wife was a better cook.”
“She died,” the old woman said, touching her hair with her free hand.
Stella looked at the floor in frustration. She heard someone talking, far off in the back.
“Is that them?” she asked, fascinated despite herself. She made a move toward the long, picture-lined hall on the right, following the sound of voices.
“Yes,” Trinket said. He shot a quick glance at the book in her hands. “Your parents kept you secluded, didn't they? How selfish. Don't we know, Mother, how selfish that would be for someone like Stella?”
“Alone,” his mother said, and abruptly turned and set the bottle down on the small table beside the candle. She rubbed her hands on her apron and waddled down the hallway. The combined sweetness of candle and Nehi threatened to make Stella dizzy. She had seen dogs whining to be with other dogs, to sniff them and exchange doggy greetings. That memory brought her up short.
She thought of the two men in the Texaco minimart.
You smell as good as a dog.
She shivered.
“Your parents were protecting you, but it was still cruel,” Trinket said, watching her. Stella kept her eyes on the hallway. The wish that had haunted her for weeks now, months if she thought back that far, was suddenly strong in her, making her dull and steepy.
“Not to be with your own kind, not to bathe in the air of another, and not to speak the way you all do, such lovely doubling, that is painfully lonely-making, isn't it?”
Her cheeks felt hot. Trinket studied her cheeks. “Your people are so beautiful,” he said, his eyes going soft. “I could watch you all day.”
“Why?” Stella asked sharply.
“Beg pardon?” Trinket smiled, and this time there was something in the smile that was wrong. Stella did not like being the center of attention. But she wanted to meet the others, more than anything on Earth or in the heavens, as Mitch's father might have said.
Stella's grandfather, Sam, had died five years ago.
“I do not run an accredited school, nor a day care, nor a center of learning,” Trinket said. “I try to teach what I can, but mostly I—Mother and I—create a brief refuge, away from the cruel people who hate and fear. We neither hate nor fear. We admire. In my way, I'm an anthropologist.”
“Can I meet them now?” Stella asked.
Trinket sat on the couch with a radiant grin. “Tell me more about your mother and father. They're well known in some circles. Your mother discovered the virus, right? And your father found the famous mummies in the Alps. The harbingers of our own fate.”
The sweet scents in the room blocked some human odors, but not aggression, not fear. Those she would still be able to smell, like a steel spoon stuck in vanilla ice cream. Trinket did not smell mean or fearful, so she did not feel she was in immediate danger. Still, he wore nose plugs. And how did he know so much about Kaye and Mitch?
Trinket leaned forward on the couch and touched his nostrils. “You're worried about these.”
Stella turned away. “Let me see the others,” she said.
Trinket snorted a laugh. “I can't be in a crowd of you without these,” Trinket said. “I'm sensitive, oh yes. I had a daughter like you. My wife and I acquired the masks and knew the special scents my daughter made. Then, my wife died. She died in pain.” He stared at the ceiling, his eyes wet pools of sentiment. “I miss her,” Trinket said, and slapped his hand suddenly on the bolster of the couch. “Mother!”
The blank-faced woman returned.
“See if they've finished their lunch,” Trinket said. “Then let's introduce Stella.”
“Will she eat?” the older woman asked, her eyes unconcerned either way.
“I don't know. That depends,” Fred Trinket said. He looked at his watch. “I hope your parents haven't lost their way. Maybe you should call them . . . in a few minutes, just to make sure?”
Kaye pulled the Toyota truck to the side of the rutted dirt road and dropped her head onto the wheel. The rain had stopped, but they had nearly gotten their wheels stuck in mud several times. She moaned.
Mitch threw open the door. “This is the road. This is the address. Shit!”
He flung the crumpled piece of paper into a wet ditch. The only house here had been boarded up for a long time, and half of it had slumped into cinders after a fire. Five or six acres of weed-grown farm ground surrounded them, sullen behind a veil of low mist. Streamers of cloud played hide-and-seek with a watery sun. The house was bright, then dark, beneath the coming and going of those wide gray fingers.
“Maybe he doesn't have her.” Kaye looked at Mitch through the open door.
“I could have transposed a number,” Mitch said, leaning against the cab.
His cell phone rang. They both jerked as if stuck with pins. Mitch pulled the phone out and said, “Yes.” The phone recognized his voice and announced that the calling party's number was blocked, then asked if he would take the call anyway.
“Yes,” he said, without thinking.
“Daddy?” The voice on the other end was tense, high-pitched, but it sounded like Stella's.
“Where are you?”
“Is that you? Daddy?” The voice went through a digital bird fight and steadied. He had never heard that sort of sound before and it worried him.
“It's me, honey. Where are you?”
“I'm at this house. I saw the house number on the mail box.”
Mitch pulled a pen and pad from his inside coat pocket and wrote down the number and road.
“Stay tight, Stella, and don't let anyone touch you,” he said, working to steady his voice. “We're on our way.” He reluctantly said good-bye and closed the phone. His face was like red sandstone, he was so furious.
“Is she okay?”
Mitch nodded, then opened the phone again and punched in another number.
“Who are you calling?”
“State police,” he said.
“We can't!” Kaye cried. “They'll take her!”
“It's too late to worry about that,” Mitch said. “This guy's going for bounty, and he wants all of us.”
So many pictures in the hall leading to the back of the house. Generation after generation of Trinkets, Stella assumed, from faded color snapshots clustered in a single frame to larger, sepia-colored prints showing men and women and children wearing stiff brown clothes and peering with pinched expressions, as if the eyes of the future scared them.
“Our legacy,” Fred Trinket told her. “Old genes. All those arrangements, gone!” He grinned and walked ahead, his shoulders rolling with each step. He had a fat back, Stella saw. Fat neck and fat back. His calves were taut, however, as if he did a lot of walking, but pale and hairy. Perhaps he walked at night.
Trinket pushed open a screen door.
“Let me know if she wants lunch,” the mother said from the kitchen, halfway up the hall and to the left. As Mrs. Trinket dried a dish, Stella saw a dark, damp towel flick out of the kitchen like a snake's tongue.
“Yes, Mother,” Trinket murmured. “This way, Miss Rafelson.”
He descended a short flight of wooden steps and walked across the gravel path to a long, dark building about ten paces beyond. Stella saw a doghouse but no dog, and a small orchard of clothes trees spinning slowly in the wind after the storm, their lines empty.
Along would come Mother Trinket, Stella thought, and pin up the laundry, and it would be clothes tree springtime. When the clothes were dry she would pull them down and stuff them in her basket and it would be winter again. Expressionless Mother Trinket was the seasonal heart of the old house, mistress of the backyard.
Stella's mouth was dry. Her nose hurt. She touched behind her ears where it itched when she was nervous. Her finger came away waxy. She wanted to take a washcloth and remove all the old scents, clean herself for the people in the long outbuilding. A word came to her: prensing, preening and cleansing. It was a lovely word and it made her tremble like a leaf.
Trinket unlocked the door to the rear building. Inside, Stella saw fluorescent lights sputter on, bright and blue, over workbenches, an old refrigerator, stacked cardboard boxes, and, to the right, a strong wire mesh door.
The voices grew louder. Stella thought she heard three or four. They were speaking in a way she could not understand—low, guttural, with piping high exclamations. Someone coughed.
“They're inside,” Trinket said. He unlocked the wire door with a brass key tied to a dirty length of twine. “They just finished eating. We'll fetch the trays for Mother.” He pulled the mesh door open.
Stella did not move. Not even the promise of the voices, the promise that had brought her this far, could persuade her to take another step.
“There are four inside, just like you. They need your help. I'll go in with you.”
“Why the lock?” Stella asked.
“People drive around, sometimes they have guns . . . take potshots. Just not safe,” Trinket said. “It's not safe for your kind. Since my wife's death, I've made it one of my jobs, my duty, to protect those I come across on the road. Youngsters like you.”
“Where's your daughter?” Stella asked.
“She's in Idaho.”
“I don't believe you,” Stella said.
“Oh, it's true. They took her away last year. I've never been to visit her.”
“They let parents visit sometimes.”
“I just can't bear the thought of going.” His expression had changed, and his smell, too.
“You're lying,” Stella said. She could feel her glands working, itching. Stella could not smell it herself, could not in fact smell anything her nose was so dry, but she knew the room was thick with her persuasion scent.
Trinket seemed to deflate, arms dropping, hands relaxing. He pointed to the wire mesh door. He was thinking, or waiting. Stella moved away. The key dangled from the rope in his hand. “Your people,” he said, and scratched his nose.
“Let us go,” Stella said. It was more than a suggestion.
Trinket shook his head slowly, then lifted his eyes. She thought she might be having an effect on him, despite his nose plugs and the mints.
“Let us all go,” Stella said.
The old woman came in so quietly Stella did not hear her. She was surprisingly strong. She grabbed Stella around the ribs, pinning her arms and making her squeak like a mouse, and shoved her through the door. Her book fell to the floor. Trinket swung up and caught the key on its string, then slammed and locked the gate before Stella could turn around.
“They're lonely in there,” Trinket's mother told Stella. She wore a clothespin on her nose and her eyes were watering. “Let my son do his work. Fred, maybe now she'd like some lunch.”
Trinket took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, expelling the plugs. He looked at them in disgust, then pushed a button mounted on the wall. A lock clicked and buzzed and another wire door behind her popped open. Stella faced them through the mesh of the first door. She could not make a sound at first, she was so startled and so angry.
Trinket rubbed his eyes and shook his head. He gave a little kick and spun her book into the far corner. “Damn,” he said. “She's good. She almost had me. Hellish little skunk.”
She stood shivering in the little cubicle. Trinket turned out the fluorescent lights. That left only the reflected glow from the rooms behind her.
A hand touched her elbow.
Stella screamed.
“What?”
She backed up against the mesh and stared at a boy. He was ten or eleven, taller than her by a couple of inches, and, if anything, skinnier. He had scratches on his face and his hair was unkempt and tufty.
“I didn't mean to scare you,” the boy said. His cheeks flushed in little spots of pink and brown. His gold-flecked eyes followed her as she sidled to the left, into the corner, and held up her fists.
The boy's nose wrinkled. “Wow,” he said. “You're really shook.”
“What's your name?” she asked, her voice high.
“What sort of name?” he asked. He leaned over, twisted his head, inhaled the air in front of her, and made a sour face.
“They scared me,” she explained, embarrassed.
“Yeah, I can tell.”
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Look,” he said, leaning forward, and his cheeks freckled again.
“So?”
He looked disappointed. “Some can do it.”
“What do your parents call you?”
“I don't know. Kids call me Kevin. We live out in the woods. Mixed group. Not anymore. Trinket got me. I was stupid.”
Stella straightened and lowered her fists. “How many are in here?”
“Four, including me. Now, five.”
She heard the coughing again. “Somebody sick?”
“Yeah.”
“I've never been sick,” Stella said.
“Neither have I. Free Shape is sick.”
“Who?”
“I call her Free Shape. It's not her name, probably. She's almost as old as me.”
“Is Strong Will still here?”
“He doesn't like that name. They call us names like that because they say we stink. Come on back. Nobody's going anywhere soon, right? They sent me out here to see who else old Fred snared.”
Stella followed Kevin to the back of the long building. They passed four empty rooms equipped with cots and folding chairs and cheap old dressers.
At the very back, three young people sat around a small portable television. Stella hated television, never watched it. She saw that the television's control panel had been covered with a metal plate. Two—an older boy, Will, Stella guessed, and a younger girl, no more than seven—sat on a battered gray couch. The third, a girl of nine or ten, curled up on a blanket on the floor.
The girl smelled bad. She smelled sick. She coughed into her palm and wiped it on her T-shirt without taking her eyes away from the television.
Will pushed off the couch and stood. He looked Stella over cautiously, then stuck his hands in his pockets. “This is Mabel,” he said, introducing the younger girl. “Or Maybelle. She doesn't know. Girl on the floor doesn't say much. I'm Will. I'm the oldest. I'm always the oldest. I may be the oldest alive.”
“Hello,” Stella said.
“New girl,” Kevin explained. “She smells really shook.”
“You do,” Mabel said and lifted her upper lip, then pinched the end of her nose.
Will looked back at Stella. “I can see your freckle name. But what's your other name?”
“I think maybe her name is Rose or Daisy,” Kevin said.
“My parents call me Stella,” she said, her tone implying she wasn't stuck with it; she could change the name anytime. She knelt beside the sick girl. “What's wrong with her?”
“It isn't a cold and it isn't flu,” Will said. “I wouldn't get too close. We don't know where she comes from.”
“She needs a doctor,” Stella said.
“Tell that to the old mother when she brings your food,” Kevin suggested. “Just kidding. She won't do anything. I think they're going to turn us in, all at once, together.”
“That's the way Fred makes his moochie,” Will said, rubbing his fingers together. “Bounty.”
Stella touched the sick girl's shoulder. She looked up at Stella and closed her eyes. “Don't look. Nothing to see,” the girl said. Her cheeks formed simple patterns, shapeless. Free Shape. Stella pushed harder on the girl's arm. The arm went limp and she rolled onto her back. Stella shook her again and her eyes opened halfway, unfocused. “Mommy?”
“What's your name?” Stella asked.
“Mommy?”
“What does Mommy call you?”
“Elvira,” the girl said, and coughed again.
“Ha ha,” Will said without humor. That was a cruel joke name.
“You have parents?” Kevin asked the girl, following Stella's lead and kneeling.
Stella touched Elvira's face. The skin was dry and hot and there was a bloody crust under her nose and also behind her ears. Stella felt beneath her jaw and then lifted her arms and felt there. “She has an infection,” Stella said. “Like mumps, maybe.”
“How do you know?”
“My mother is a doctor. Sort of.”
“Is it Shiver?” Will asked.
“I don't think so. We don't get that.” She looked up at Will and felt her cheeks signal a message, she did not know what: embarrassment, maybe.
“Look at me,” Will said. Stella got to her feet and faced him.
“You know how to talk this way?” he asked. His cheeks freckled and cleared. The dapple patterns came and went quickly, and synchronized somehow with the irises of his eyes, his facial muscles, and little sounds he made deep in his throat. Stella watched, fascinated, but had no idea what he was doing, what he was trying to convey. “I guess not. What do you smell, little deer?”
Stella felt her nose burn. She drew back.
“Practically illiterate,” Will said, but his smile was sympathetic. “It's the Talk. Kids in the woods made it up.”
Stella realized Will wanted to be in charge, wanted people to think he was smart and capable. There was a weakness in his scent, however, that made him seem very vulnerable. He's broken, she thought.
Elvira moaned and called for her mother. Will knelt and touched the girl's forehead. “Her parents hid her in an attic. That's what the kids in the woods said. Her mom and dad left for California, and she stayed behind with her grandmother. Then the grandmother died. Elvira ran away. She got caught on the street. She was raped, I think, more than once.” He cleared his throat and his cheeks were dark with angry blood. “She had the start of this cold or whatever it is, so she couldn't fever-scent and make them stop. Fred found her two days after he found me. He took some pictures. He keeps us here until he has enough to get a good bounty.”
“One million dollars a head,” Kevin said. “Dead or alive.”
“Don't be dramatic,” Will said. “I don't know how much he gets, and they don't pay if we're dead. If we're injured, he could even go to jail. That's what I heard in the woods. The bounty is federal not state, so he tries to avoid the troopers.”
Stella was impressed by this show of knowledge. “It's awful,” she said, her heart thumping. “I want to go home.”
“How did Fred catch you?” Will asked.
“I went for a walk,” Stella said.
“You ran away from home,” Will said. “Do your parents care?”
Stella thought of Kaye waking up to find her gone and wanted to cry. That made her nose hurt more, and her ears started to ache.
The wire mesh door rattled. Will pointed, and Kevin left to see what was going on. Stella glanced at Will and then followed Kevin. Mother Trinket was at the cage door. She had just finished shoving a cafeteria tray under the mesh frame. The tray held a paper plate covered with fried chicken backs and necks, a small scoop of dry potato salad, and several long spears of limp broccoli. The old woman watched them, eyes milky, chin withdrawn, strong mottled arms hanging like two birch logs.
“Yuck,” Kevin said, and picked up the tray. He gave it to Stella. “All yours,” he said.
“How's the girl?” Mother Trinket asked.
“She's really sick,” Kevin said.
“People coming. They'll take care of her,” Mother Trinket said.
“What do you care?” Kevin asked.
The old woman blinked. “It's my son,” she said, then turned and waddled through the door. She closed and locked it behind her.
The girl, Free Shape, was breathing in short, thick gasps as they carried Stella's tray into the back room.
“She smells bad,” Mabel said. “I'm scared for her.”
“So am I,” Will said.
“Will is Papa here,” Mabel said. “Will should get help.”
Will looked miserably at Stella and fell back on the couch. Stella put the tray on a small folding table. She did not feel like eating. Both she and Kevin squatted by Elvira. Stella stroked the girl's cheeks, making her freckles pale. They remained pale. The patches had steadied in the last few minutes, and were now even more meaningless and vague.
“Can we make her feel better?” Stella asked.
“We're not angels,” Will said.
“My mother says we all have minds deep inside of us,” Stella said, desperate to find some answer. “Minds that talk to each other through chemicals and—”
“What the hell does she know?” Will asked sharply. “She's human, right?”
“She's Kaye Lang Rafelson,” Stella said, stung and defensive.
“I don't care who she is,” Will said. “They hate us because we're new and better.”
“Our parents don't hate us,” Stella ventured hopefully, looking at Mabel and Kevin.
“Mine do,” Mabel said. “My father hates the government so he hid me, but he just took off one day. My mother left me in the bus station.”
Stella could see that these children had lived lives different from her own. They all smelled lonely and left out, like puppies pulled from a litter, whining and searching for something they had lost. Beneath the loneliness and other emotions of the moment lay their fundamentals: Will smelled rich and sharp like aged cheddar. Kevin smelled a little sweet. Mabel smelled like soapy bathwater, steam and flowers and clean, warm skin.
She could not detect Elvira's fundamental. Underneath the illness she seemed to have no smell at all.
“We thought about escaping,” Kevin said. “There's steel wire in all the walls. Fred told us he made this place strong.”
“He hates us,” Will said.
“We're worth money,” Kevin said.
“He told me his daughter killed his wife,” Will said.
That kept them all quiet for a while, all but Free Shape, whose breath rasped.
“Teach me how to talk with my dapples,” Stella asked Will. She wanted to take their minds off the things they could not hope to do, like escape.
“What if Elvira dies?” Will asked, his forehead going pale.
“We'll cry for her,” Mabel said.
“Right,” Kevin said. “We'll make a little cross.”
“I'm not a Christian,” Will said.
“I am,” Mabel said. “Christ was one of us. I heard it in the woods. That's why they killed him.”
Will shook his head sadly at this naÏveté. Stella felt ashamed at the words she had spoken to the men in the Texaco minimart. She knew she was nothing like Jesus. Deep inside, she did not feel merciful and charitable. She had never admitted that before, but watching Elvira gasping on the floor taught her what her emotions really were.
She hated Fred Trinket and his mother. She hated the federals coming for them.
“We'll have to fight to get out,” Will said. “Fred is careful. He doesn't come inside the cage. He won't even call a doctor. He just calls for the vans. The vans come from Maryland and Richmond. Everyone wears suits and carries cattle prods and tranquilizer guns.”
Stella shivered. She had called her parents; her parents were coming. They might be captured, too.
“Sometimes when the vans come, the children die, maybe by accident, but they're still dead,” Will continued. “They burn the bodies. That's what we heard in the woods.” He added, “I don't feel like teaching you how to freckle.”
“Then tell me about the woods,” Stella said.
“The woods are free,” Will said. “I wish the whole world was woods.”
The rain came back as drizzle. Kaye pulled off and parked just north of the private asphalt road that led to the big, white-pillared brick house and outbuildings. The sky was dark enough that the occupants of the house had turned on the interior lights. The black steel mailbox, mounted on a chest-high brick base, showed five gold reflective numbers.
“This is it,” Mitch said. He peered through the wet windshield and rolled down his window. A red pickup and camper had been parked in front. There were no other vehicles.
“Maybe we're too late,” Kaye said, fighting back tears.
“It's only been ten or fifteen minutes.”
“It took us twenty minutes. The sheriff might have come and gone.”
Mitch quietly opened the door. “If I can grab her, I'll come right back.”
“No,” Kaye said. “I won't be left alone. I don't think I can stand it.” Her fingers gripped the steering wheel like cords of rope.
“Stay here, please,” Mitch said. “I'll be okay. I can carry her. You can't.”
“You'd be surprised,” Kaye said. Then, “Why would you have to carry her?”
“For speed,” Mitch said. “For speed, that's all.”
He opened the glove box and took out a cloth-wrapped bundle, pulled open the cloth, smelling of lubricant, and removed a pistol. He tucked the gun into his suit coat pocket. They had three handguns, all of them unregistered and illegal. Getting charged with gun possession was the last thing Mitch and Kaye lost sleep over. Nevertheless, they both looked on the guns with loathing, knowing that weapons give a false sense of security.
Mitch had cleaned and oiled all three last week.
He took a deep breath and stepped out, walking to the rear of the truck. Kaye released the brake and put the truck into neutral. Mitch pushed, grunting softly in the drizzle. Kaye stepped down and helped, steering with one hand, and together they rolled the truck up the asphalt road, stopping about halfway to the house. Kaye spun the wheel and turned the truck until it blocked the way. Hedges and brick walls lined the drive, and no vehicle would be able to get around the truck going in or out. She sat in the cab. Mitch took her face in his hands and kissed her cheek and she squeezed his arms. Then he walked toward the house, shoving his hands into the pockets of his slacks. He never looked comfortable in a suit. His shoulders and his hands were too big, his neck too long. He did not have the face for a suit.
Kaye watched with heart pounding, her mind a thicket.
The pillars and porch stood dark, the door closed. Mitch walked up the steps as softly as his hard-soled shoes allowed and peered through the tall, narrow window on the right.
Kaye watched him turn without knocking and descend the steps. He walked around the side of the house, out of sight. She started to sob and jammed her knuckles against her teeth and lips. They had been standing on tiptoes for eleven years. It was cruel, and whenever she felt she was used to the extremes of their life together, as she had this morning, almost, so close to feeling normal and productive and contented, working on her scientific paper, napping in front of her computer, she would come up short with some spontaneous vision of how they could lose it all. They had been lucky, she knew.
But rarely did her worst visions meet the level of this nightmare.
Mitch walked along the neatly trimmed grass margin, crouching below the windows along the side of the house. He heard a rasping, flacketing buzz, like a big insect, and glanced up with a scowl into the stormy gloom. Saw nothing.
His heart almost stopped when he realized the cell phone was still on. He reached into his left pocket and switched it off.
A gravel path reached from the back porch out to a long frame outbuilding behind the house. He avoided the path and the scrunching sound his shoes would make there, and walked along the soft margin, stepping from the grass, patchy and dead, onto the outbuilding's concrete stoop. He peered through the small, square window set into the steel door. Why a steel door? And new, at that.
In the room beyond the small window he saw a heavy mesh gate. He quietly tried the doorknob. It was locked, of course. He stepped backward, dropped his heel in a depression in the grass, caught his balance with a hop, then walked around the side, quickening his pace. The sheriff might arrive any second. Mitch preferred recovering Stella without official help. Besides, he knew Kaye could not hold out much longer. He had to finish his reconnaissance in a hurry, locate his daughter, and decide what to do next.
Mitch had never been one to make quick decisions. He had spent too many years patiently scraping and brushing through packed layers of soil, uncovering millennia of silent, unwritten history. The peace that had filled his soul on those digs had turned out not to be a survival trait.
He had thrown that peace away, along with the digging, the history, and almost all of his past life, and replaced it with a desperate and protective fury.
LEESBURG
Mark Augustine twitched his lips at the arrival of the man and the woman in the old truck. Little Bird gave them a series of clear, frozen pictures, at the ends of blurry swoops, the pictures cameoed on the big screens in blue-wrapped squares.
Two names came up on the last screen. Facial matching had led to an identification that Augustine did not need. The man walking around the house was Mitch Rafelson. The woman in the truck was Kaye Lang Rafelson.
“Good,” Browning said. “The gang's all here.” She looked up at Augustine.
Augustine pinched his lips. “Enforcement is hardly an exact science,” he said. “Where are the vans?”
“About two minutes away,” Browning said. Once more, she was completely in control and confident.
SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY
Kaye heard engines. She looked over the hedge to the road and saw two blue-and-white Virginia State Police patrol cars coming from one direction and from the other, no sirens or flashing lights, a long, blocky white utility van, like a cross between a prison bus and an ambulance. She could not see Emergency Action's red-and-gold shield on the side, but she knew it was there.
She stood quietly as the patrol cars slowed and then nosed off with the van to see who would turn first into the private road.
“No snooping,” the old woman said. “You with the gas company?” The woman was forty feet away, nothing more than a frizz-headed silhouette. She had come out of the house very quietly as Mitch had transited the back of the long building. She was carrying a shotgun.
Mitch turned and looked up the right side of the long building, facing the back of the house. He had made his circuit and found no other entrance.
“Don't be silly,” he called, trying to sound amiable. “I'm looking for my daughter.”
“We don't have parties,” the woman said.
“Mother!” A man slammed open the screen door and stood beside her on the back porch. “Put that damned gun away. There are troopers out front.”
“Caught him,” the woman said. She pointed.
“Come right on up here. Let me see you. You with the troopers?”
“Emergency Action,” Mitch said.
“That's not what he said,” the woman commented, lowering the shotgun.
The man took the gun away from her with a jerk and stepped back into the house. The woman stood staring at Mitch. “You come to get your daughter,” she murmured.
Mitch walked warily around her, then to the left, seeing the headlights of a car and a van at the end of the road behind their old truck.
“Damn it, you've parked all wrong,” the man shouted from inside the house. Mitch heard feet stamping on wooden floors, saw lights go on and off through the rooms, heard the door open on the front porch.
As Mitch came around the corner, a plump, active man in shorts stood on the porch between the pillars, hands up as if surrendering. “What are they up to?” the man muttered.
Mitch's hopes were very low. He could not find Stella without making a lot of noise, and there was no way now he could imagine getting her away from the house even if he carried her. The woods behind the house and across a field looked thick. Bugs were humming and chirping all around him now that the rain had let up. The air smelled dusty and sweet with moisture and wet grass and dirt.
Kaye faced the main road and the newly arrived vehicles. Two men in two-tone gray uniforms got out of the patrol cars and walked toward her. The younger man cast a confused backward glance at the van.
“Did you call us, ma'am?” the older trooper asked. He was large, in his late forties, with a deep but crackling bull voice.
“Our daughter's been kidnapped. She's in there,” Kaye said.
“In the house?”
“We just got here. She called us and told us where to find her.”
The troopers regarded each other briefly, faces professionally blank, then turned toward the two figures emerging from the van: a tall, cadaverous male in a shiny black jumpsuit and a stocky female in plastic isolation whites. They slipped on gloves and face masks and approached the troopers.
“This is our jurisdiction, officers,” the thin man said. “We're federal.”
“We have a kidnapping complaint,” the older trooper said.
“Ma'am, what's your business here?” the woman asked Kaye.
“Show me your ID,” Kaye demanded.
“Look at the damned van. They aren't cheap, you know,” said the thin man in the black jumpsuit, his voice haughty. “You the mother?”
The troopers stood back. The big one scowled at the thin man.
“You are here to pay bounty,” Kaye said, her voice scratchy. “I have no idea how many kids are here, but I know this is not legal. Not in this state.”
The big trooper stood his ground with arms folded. “That true?” he asked the woman in the plastic suit.
“We have jurisdiction. This is federal,” the tall man repeated. “Sherry,” he called out to his partner, “get the office.”
“Maryland plates,” the younger trooper observed.
Kaye studied the big trooper's face. He was red-cheeked and his nose was a swollen network of broken veins, probably from rosacea, but it could also have been drink.
“Why are you outside of your county?” the big trooper asked the pair from the van.
“It's federal; it's official,” the stout little woman said defiantly. “You can't stop us.”
“Take off that damned mask. I can't understand you,” the big trooper said.
“It's policy to leave the mask on, officer,” the woman announced formally. Her outfit rustled and squeaked as she walked. There was an air of disarray about the team that did not inspire confidence. The big trooper's uniform was pressed and fit tightly over a strong frame going to fat. He looked sad and tired, but strong on self-discipline. Kaye thought he looked like an old football player. He was not impressed. He turned his attention back to Kaye. “Who called the state police, ma'am?”
“My husband. Someone snatched our daughter. She's in that house.”
“Are we talkin' about virus children?” the trooper asked softly.
Kaye studied his expression, his dark eyes, the lines around his jowls. “Yes,” she said.
“How long you been living here?” the big trooper asked.
“In Spotsylvania County, almost four years,” Kaye said.
“Hiding out?”
“Living quietly.”
“Yeah,” the trooper said with somber resignation. “I hear that.” He swung around to the Emergency Action team. “You got paperwork?” He waved his hand at his partner. “Check out the house.”
“My husband is armed,” Kaye said, and pointed toward the house. “They kidnapped our child. Please, he won't shoot at you. Let him surrender his gun.”
The big trooper unclipped his pistol with a swift motion of both hands. He squinted at the big pillared house, then saw Mitch and the old woman walking up the side yard.
His partner, younger by at least ten years, stooped and immediately drew his own pistol. “I hate this shit,” he said.
“Let us do our work,” the stout woman demanded. The mask slipped and she looked even more ridiculous.
“I haven't seen any paperwork, and you are out of your jurisdiction,” the big trooper growled, keeping his eyes on the house. “I need to see EMAC documents authorizing this extraction.”
Neither responded at once. “We're filling in for the Spotsylvania County team. They're on another assignment,” the thin man admitted, some of his bravado gone.
“I know the ones,” the big trooper said. He looked sadly at Kaye. “They took my son four years ago. My wife and I haven't seen our boy once, not once, since then. He is in Indiana now, outside Terre Haute.”
“You're brave to still be together,” Kaye said, as if a spark had passed and they understood each other and their troubles.
The big trooper dropped his chin but still watched everyone with beady, alert eyes. “Don't you know it,” he said. He waved his hand at his partner. “William, retrieve the father's little pistol and let's check the house. Let's see what you all have got going here.”
Mitch slung his gun by its trigger guard on his pointing finger and held it high up in the air. He regretted carrying it at all now; he felt foolish, like an actor in a cop show. Still, the thought that Stella was inside the house or the long building or somewhere else on the property made him feel volatile and dangerous. Anything might provoke him, and that was frightening. The intensity of his devotion was like a blowtorch in his head, brilliant and blinding.
It had always been that way. There would never be any escape.
The younger trooper slogged across the wet grass in his boots.
The plump man in shorts finally decided to speak. “How can I help, officer?” he asked.
The younger trooper took Mitch's gun and backed away. “Are you holding children on these premises?” he asked the man in shorts.
“We are,” the man said. “Strays and runaways. We protect them until the truck comes and takes them to where they can be taken care of. Where they belong.”
Mitch looked at the trooper from beneath lowered, bushy brows. He had always possessed what amounted to a single eyebrow over his eyes and with age, the woolly caterpillar of hair had thickened and gone wild. At the best of times, he looked formidable, even a little crazy. “Our daughter is not a runaway,” he said. “She was kidnapped.”
The big trooper approached with Kaye and the two collectors close behind. “Where are the children?” he asked.
“Round back,” said the man in shorts. “Sir, my name is Fred Trinket. I'm a longtime resident, and my mother has lived here all her life.”
“To hell with that,” the big trooper said. “Show us the kids, now.”
Something whickered over their heads like a big insect. They all looked up.
“Damn,” the younger trooper said, flinching and dropping his shoulders. “Sounds like federal surveillance.”
The big trooper drew himself up and circled his eyes warily around the dark skies. “I do not see a thing,” he said. “Let's go.”
LEESBURG
The arrival of the troopers did not please Rachel Browning.
“I think we should alert the Frederick County office,” she said. She blew her nose again. “And let's get the state's attorney general in on this. She'll want to know what her people are up to.”
“There won't be time,” Augustine said. “It's Virginia, Rachel. They don't like the feds telling them what to do. And the situation is highly irregular, even for an official kidnapping.”
Browning tilted her head to one side, jerking her gaze between Augustine and the displays. “I didn't hear what the big guy said.” The Little Bird had backed off about fifty feet and was hovering. Its little fuel cell would be depleted soon, and it would have to return or be retrieved by the command vehicle.
“The trooper said his son was taken,” Augustine told her. “He is not likely to be sympathetic.”
“Shit,” Browning said. “You're happy about this, aren't you?”
Augustine did not smile, but his lips twitched.
“I will not take responsibility,” Browning insisted.
“Your own machines are recording everything,” Augustine said, pointing at the console. “Better whisk Little Bird out of there, and quickly, if you want to escape a district court spanking.”
“You're as culpable as I am,” Browning said.
“I've never authorized bounty,” Augustine reminded her. “That's your division.”
The phone on the desk wheedled.
“Whoops,” Augustine said. “Someone's been tuning in.”
Browning answered. She covered the mouthpiece and looked up desperately at Augustine. “It's the surgeon general,” she said, eyes wide.
Augustine expressed his sympathy with a lift of his brows and a sigh. Then he turned and walked toward the door. The rubber tip of his cane made squeaking noises on the hard floor.
SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY
Fred Trinket gently pushed his mother aside as he led the group around the right side of the house. Mitch hated this place, the plump man in khaki shorts, the collectors. His head was like a balloon filled with gasoline waiting to be torched off.
Kaye felt his anger like heat from a stove. She gripped his arm. If Stella was harmed, in any way, then . . . If their daughter was harmed, then . . .
She could not finish that sequence of thoughts.
“We've fed the runaways a chicken lunch, very nutritious,” Trinket explained. His face was like blotchy marble and he was sweating like a stuck pig. He was beginning to realize the big trooper did not like the way Trinket made money.
Mitch made a jerk in Trinket's direction. Kaye drew him back and squeezed his arm until he winced. He did not object, just looked at the gray, square board face of the long building behind the house, the asphalt shingled roof, the steel door with its tiny window and concrete stoop.
“We keep good, clean facilities,” Trinket said. He had moved ahead of Mitch and Kaye and flanked the big trooper. The younger trooper and the collectors took up the rear. “We've had a number of runaways through here,” Trinket continued, louder now with the distance to the door decreasing, his secret soon to be revealed. “We're a conscientious clearing house. We take good care of them.”
“Shut up,” Kaye demanded.
“Keep your temper, ma'am, please,” the big trooper requested, but his own voice was shaky.
Stella heard the lock in the big steel door and rushed from Elvira's side down the hall to the inner cage gate. She stood there as the lights came on in the first little room, with the boxes, and saw a big man in a leather jacket and a khaki uniform and behind him, Fred Trinket.
Stella smelled Kaye and Mitch almost immediately.
“Mommy,” she said, as if she were three years old again.
“Open that door,” the big trooper ordered Trinket. There were tears on the trooper's cheeks. Stella had not seen many police officers in her life, and she had certainly never seen one cry.
Trinket mumbled and drew the brass key on its string.
“Mommy, she's dead!” Stella cried. “She just died, just right now/ We couldn't do anything!” Her voice split and she spoke in two high-pitched, singing, weirdly beautiful streams, as if two young girls stood by the mesh gate, one inside the other. Kaye could not understand, but her heart almost exploded with joy and grief.
“Open it now!” Kaye shouted, pushing through. Her fingernails raked Fred Trinket's cheek. He recoiled, dropped the key and squealed in protest.
Kaye tried to reach Stella through the mesh. The distance between the two doors separated them.
“Lord almighty,” the younger trooper said. Mitch scooped up Trinket's key and tossed it to Kaye, then grabbed the man and held him. The big trooper stood back. Kaye opened the mesh gate and then the inner gate and grabbed Stella.
“Get the others,” Stella said.
“How many?” the big trooper asked Trinket.
“Five,” Trinket said.
“Sir, it's our duty to assemble and transport all virus children,” the stocky collector asserted, shouldering into the first room. Her tall, thin colleague remained outside, staring at the ground, the steps, anything but what was happening within the long building.
Kaye, Mitch, and the big trooper walked down the hall. Stella followed her mother closely. Mitch gave his daughter a squeeze around the shoulders and she hugged him close. “I'm sorry,” she whispered.
Mabel and Kevin sat on the couch. Will stood by Elvira. The television blared an old episode of I Love Lucy. Kaye bent beside the prone girl and examined her, face wrinkling in pity. She saw the bloody crust under the girl's nose, turned her head gently, found more crust behind her ears, felt the lumps under her jaw and in her armpits.
“How long?” Kaye asked Stella.
“Five, six minutes,” Stella said. “She just coughed real bad and lay still.”
Kaye looked over her shoulder at Mitch and the big trooper. Trinket winced but wisely kept quiet.
“Let me see,” the stocky collector said. She knelt briefly beside the girl. Then she pushed to her feet with a whuff of air and a sharp look at the others and stumbled hastily back down the hall.
“Is she sick?” Trinket asked. “Can you help her?”
“What the hell do you care?” the big trooper asked.
Kaye heard the collector calling for the first aid kit. “It's too late,” she murmured.
“You a doctor?” the big trooper asked, bending low over Kaye and the girl on the floor.
“Close enough,” Kaye said.
“Get your daughter out of here,” he said.
“I might help,” Kaye suggested, looking up at the big trooper's jowls, his intense blue eyes.
Mitch let go of Trinket and pulled Stella close.
“Just get her out of here,” the trooper repeated. “We'll take care of this. Go far away. Stay together.”
“Can Will and Kevin and Mabel come?” Stella asked.
Will regarded them all with slit-eyed defiance. Kevin and Mabel focused on the television, their cheeks gold and pink with fear and shame.
“I'm sorry,” Kaye said.
“Mother . . .”
“We have to travel light and fast,” Kaye said. And they might all be sick.
Stella pulled loose from Mitch and ran to Will. She grabbed Will's shoulders and they stared at each other for several seconds.
Kaye and Mitch watched them, Mitch twitching, Kaye oddly calm and fascinated. She hadn't seen her daughter with another Homo sapiens novus in two years. She was ashamed it had been so long, but ashamed for whom, she could not say. Maybe for the whole troubled human race.
The two separated. Kaye took Stella by the hand and gave her the secret signal that she had taught her daughter years ago, a scrape of her pointing finger across Stella's palm that meant they had to go now, no questions, no hesitation. Stella jerked but followed.
“Remember the woods,” Will sang out. “Woods everywhere. Woods for the whole world.”
As they ran down the asphalt road to the truck, they heard the trooper arguing with Trinket and the collectors. “We don't take kindly to child theft, not in this county.”
He was buying Stella and her parents time.
So was the dead girl.
Mitch drove around the van. The hedge scraped Kaye's door. “We should take them with us, all of them!” she cried, and hugged Stella fiercely. “God, Mitch, we should save them all.”
Mitch did not stop.
WASHINGTON, D.C., OHIO
At Dulles, Augustine's limo was flagged through and driven directly to the waiting government jet, its engines idling on the tarmac. As he boarded, an Air Force staff officer handed him a locked attaché case. Augustine asked the attendant for a ginger ale then took his seat midplane, over the wing, and buckled himself in.
He removed an e-sheet from the attaché case and folded the red corner to activate it. A keypad appeared in the lower half. He entered the code of the day and read his briefing from the Emergency Action Special Reconnaissance Office. Interdictions were up 10 percent in the last month, due in large part to Rachel Browning's efforts.
Augustine could no longer bear to watch TV or listen to the radio. So many loud voices shouting lies for their own advantage. America and much of the rest of the world had entered a peculiar state of pathology, outwardly normal, inwardly prone to extraordinary fear and anger: a kind of powder keg madness.
Augustine knew he could take responsibility for a considerable share of that madness. He had once fanned the flames of fear himself, hoping to rise in the ranks to director of the National Institutes of Health and procure more funds from a reluctant Congress.
Instead, the president's select committee on Herod's issues had promoted him laterally to become czar of SHEVA, in charge of more than 120 schools around the country.
Parent opposition groups called him the commandant, or Colonel Klink.
Those were the kind names.
He finished reading, then crimped the corner of the e-paper until it broke, automatically erasing the memory strip. The display side of the paper turned orange. He handed the attendant the scrap and received his ginger ale in exchange.
“Takeoff in six minutes, sir,” the attendant said.
“Am I traveling alone?” Augustine asked, looking around the back of his seat.
“Yes, sir,” the attendant said.
Augustine smiled, but there was no joy in it. His face was lined and gray. His hair had turned almost white in the past five years. He looked twenty years older than his chronological age of fifty-nine.
He peered through the window at the welcome storm blowing in fits and starts over most of Virginia and Maryland. Tomorrow was going to be dry once again and mercilessly sunny with a high of ninety-three. It would be warm when he gave his little propaganda speech in Lexington.
The South and East were in the fourth year of a dry spell. Kentucky was no longer a state of blue grass. Much of it looked like California at the end of a parched summer. Some called it punishment, though there had been record corn and wheat crops.
Jay Leno had once cracked that SHEVA had pushed global warming onto a back burner.
Augustine fidgeted with the clasp on the attaché case. The plane taxied. With nothing but raindrop-blurred runway visible outside the window, he pulled out the paper edition of the Washington Post. That and the Cleveland Plain Dealer were the only two true newspapers he read now. Most of the other dailies around the country had succumbed to the deep recession. Even the New York Times was published only in an electronic edition.
Some wags called the online journals “electrons.” Whereas paper had two sides, electrons were biased toward the negative. The online journals certainly had nothing good to say about Emergency Action.
“Mea maxima culpa,” Augustine whispered, his nervous little prayer of contrition. Infrequently, that mantra of guilt changed places with another voice that insisted it was time to die, to put himself at the mercy of a just God.
But Augustine had practiced medicine, studied disease, and struggled in politics too long to believe in a kind or generous deity. And he did not want to believe in the other.
The one that would be most interested in Mark Augustine's soul.
The plane reached the end of the runway and ascended quickly, efficiently, on the wind from a rich bass roar.
The attendant touched his shoulder and smiled down on him. Augustine had somehow managed a catnap of perhaps ten minutes, a blessing. He felt almost at peace. The plane was at altitude, flying level. “Dr. Augustine, something's come up. We have orders to take you back to Washington. There's a secure satellite channel open for you.”
Augustine took the handheld and listened. His face became, if that was possible, even more ashen. A few minutes later, he returned the phone to the attendant and left his seat to walk gingerly down the aisle to the washroom. There, he urinated, bracing the top of his head and one hand against the curved bulkhead. The plane was banking to make a turn.
He was scheduled for an emergency meeting with the secretary of Health and Human Services, his immediate superior, and representatives from the Centers for Disease Control.
He pushed the little flush button, zipped up, washed his hands thoroughly, rinsed his gray, surprisingly corpselike face, and stared at himself in the narrow mirror. A little turbulence made the jet bounce.
The mirror always showed someone other than the man he had wanted to become. The last thing Mark Augustine had ever imagined he would be doing was running a network of concentration camps. Despite the educational amenities and the lack of death houses, that was precisely what the schools were: isolated camps used to park a generation of children at high expense, with no in and out privileges.
No peace. No respite. Only test after test after cruel test for everyone on the planet.
SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY
Stella watched her parents strip the house. She wept silently.
Kaye dragged a wooden box stacked high with the computer and the most important of their books and papers out to the Dodge. Mitch burned documents in a rusty oil drum in the backyard.
Kaye tersely told Stella to throw the clothes she really wanted into a single small suitcase and anything else into a plastic garbage bag, which they would take if there was room left in the car.
“I didn't mean to do this,” Stella said softly. Kaye did not hear or, more likely, did not think it best to listen to her daughter now. Louder, Stella added, “I like this house.”
“So do I, honey. So do I,” Kaye said, her face stony.
In the kitchen, Mitch smashed the cell phone and pulled out the little plastic circuit boards, then jammed them in his pocket. He would throw them out the window or drop them in a garbage can in another state. He then smashed the answering machine.
“Don't bother,” Kaye said as she lugged the plastic bag full of clothes down the hall. “We're probably the most listened-to family in America.”
“Old habit,” Mitch said. “Leave me to my illusions.”
“I've made trouble and I'm putting you in danger,” Stella said. “I should just go away. I should just go into a camp.”
“Us, in danger?” Kaye stopped and spun around at the end of the hall. “Are you testing me?” she demanded. “We are not worried for ourselves, Stella. We have never been worried about ourselves.” Her hands moved in small arcs from hips to shoulders, and then she crossed her arms.
“I don't understand why this has to happen,” Stella said. “Please, let's stay here and if they come, they come, all right?”
Kaye's face turned white.
Stella could not stop talking. “You say you're afraid for me, but are you really afraid for yourselves, for how you'll feel if—”
“Shut up, Stella,” Kaye said, shaking, then regretted the sharp words. “Please. We have to get out of here quickly.”
“I'd know others like me. I could find out what we really need to do. They have to accept us someday.”
“They could just as easily kill you all,” Mitch said, standing behind Kaye.
“That's crazy,” Stella said. “Their own children?”
Mitch and Kaye faced off against their daughter down the length of the hall. Kaye seemed to recognize this symbolism and turned halfway, not looking directly at Stella, but at the plasterboard, the cornice, the paint, her eyes searching these blank things as if they might be sacred texts.
“I don't think they would,” Stella said.
“That is not your concern,” Mitch said.
Stella desperately wrinkled her face in what she hoped was a smile. Her tears started to flow. “If it isn't my concern, whose is it?”
“Not yours, alone, not yet,” Mitch said, his voice many degrees softer, and so full of painful, angry love that Stella's throat itched. She scratched her neck with her fingers.
Kaye looked up. “Damn,” she said, reminded of something. She stared at her fingers and her nails and rushed into the bathroom. There, she lathered and rinsed her hands for several minutes.
Steam billowed from the sink as Stella stood by the door.
“Fred stuff?” Stella asked.
“Fred,” Kaye confirmed grimly.
“You took a good swipe,” Stella said.
“Mom cat,” Kaye said. She scrubbed back and forth with a stiff little bristle brush, then looked up at the ceiling through the steam and the lavender of the soap. “I'm going to wash that man right off of my hands,” she sang. This was so close to the edge, so fraught, that Stella forgot her guilt and frustration and reached out for her mother.
Kaye knocked aside her daughter's long arms.
“Mother,” Stella said, shocked. “I'm sorry!” She reached out again. Kaye let out a wail, slapping at Stella's hands until Stella caught her around her chest. As mother and daughter slumped to the ragged throw rug on the bathroom floor, too exhausted to do anything but shake and clutch, Mitch sucked in his breath and finished the work. He loaded a second suitcase with clothes, zipped it shut, and tossed it into the trunk of the Dodge along with the garbage bag. He imagined himself a rugged frontier father getting ready to pull out of the sod house and hightail it into the woods because Indians were coming.
But it wasn't Indians. They had spent time with Indians—Stella had been born in a reservation hospital in Washington state. Mitch had studied and admired Indians for decades. He had also dug up ancient North American bones. That had been a long time ago. He didn't think he would do that now.
Mitch was no longer a white man. He wanted little or nothing to do with his own race, his own species.
It was the cavalry that he feared.
They took the Dodge and left the old gray Toyota truck in the dirt driveway. Kaye did not look back at the house, but Stella, sitting beside her mother in the backseat, swung around.
“We buried Shamus there,” she said. Shamus had come into their lives three years ago, an old, battered tomcat with a rope looped around his neck. Kaye had cut off the rope, sewn up a slashed ear, and put in a shunt to drain a pus-filled wound behind one eye. To keep the orange tabby from scratching out the stitches, Mitch had wrapped his head in a ridiculous plastic shield that had made him look, Stella said, like Frankenpuss.
For a half-wild old tom, he had been a remarkably sweet and affectionate cat.
One evening last winter, Shamus had not shown up for table scraps or his usual siesta on Kaye's lap. The tom had wandered off into the far corner of the backyard, well away from Stella's sense of smell. He had pushed his way under a swelling lobe of kudzu, hidden from crows, and curled up.
Two days later, acting on a hunch, Mitch had found him there, head down, eyes closed, feet tucked under as if asleep. They had buried him a few yards away wrapped in a scrap of knitted afghan he had favored as a bed.
Mitch had said that cats did that, wandered off when they knew the end was near so their bodies would not attract predators or bring disease to the family, the pride.
“Poor Shamus,” Stella said, peering out the rear window. “He has no family now.”
They drove. Stella remembered many such trips. She lay in the backseat, nose burning, arms folded tightly, fingers and toes itching, her head in Kaye's lap and when Kaye drove, in Mitch's.
Mitch stroked her hair and looked down on her. Sometimes she slept. For a time, the clouds and then the sun through the car windows filled her up. Thoughts ran around in her head like mice. Even with her parents, she hated to admit, she was alone. She hated those thoughts. She thought instead of Will and Kevin and Mabel or Maybelle and how they had suffered because their parents were stupid or mean or both.
The car stopped at a service station. Late afternoon sun reflected from a shiny steel sign and hurt Stella's eyes as she pushed through the hollow metal door into the restroom. The restroom was small and empty and forbidding, the walls covered with chipped, dirty tile. She threw up in the toilet and wiped her face and mouth.
Now the backs of her ears stung as if little bees were poking her. In the mirror, she saw that her cheeks would not make colors. They were as pale as Kaye's. Stella wondered if she was changing, becoming more like her mother. Maybe being a virus child was something you got over, like a birthmark that faded away.
Kaye felt her daughter's forehead as Mitch drove.
The sun had set and the storm had passed.
Stella lay in Kaye's lap, face almost buried. She was breathing heavily. “Roll over, sweetie,” Kaye said. Stella rolled over. “Your face is hot.”
“I threw up back there,” Stella said.
“How far to the next house?” Kaye asked Mitch.
“The map says twenty miles. We'll be in Pittsburgh soon.”
“I think she's sick,” Kaye said.
“It isn't Shiver, is it, Kaye?” Stella asked.
“You don't get Shiver, honey.”
“Everything hurts. Is it mumps?”
“You've had shots for everything.” But Kaye knew that couldn't possibly be true. Nobody knew what susceptibilities the new children might have. Stella had never been sick, not with colds or flu; she had never even had a bacterial infection. Kaye had thought the new children might have improved immune systems. Mitch had not supported this theory, however, and they had given Stella all the proper immunizations, one by one, after the FDA and the CDC had grudgingly approved the old vaccines for the new children.
“An aspirin might help,” Stella said.
“An aspirin would make you ill,” Kaye said. “You know that.”
“Tylenol,” Stella added, swallowing.
Kaye poured her some water from a bottle and lifted her head for a drink. “That's bad, too,” Kaye murmured. “You are very special, honey.”
She pulled back Stella's eyelids, one at a time. The irises were bland, the little gold flecks clouded. Stella's pupils were like pinpricks. Her daughter's eyes were as expressionless as her cheeks. “So fast,” Kaye said. She set Stella down into a pillow in the corner of the backseat and leaned forward to whisper into Mitch's ear. “It could be what the dead girl had.”
“Shit,” Mitch said.
“It isn't respiratory, not yet, but she's hot. Maybe a hundred and four, a hundred and five. I can't find the thermometer in the first aid kit.”
“I put it there,” Mitch said.
“I can't find it. We'll get one in Pittsburgh.”
“A doctor,” Mitch said.
“At the safe house,” Kaye said. “We need a specialist.” She was working to stay calm. She had never seen her daughter with a fever, her cheeks and eyes so bland.
The car sped up.
“Keep to the speed limit,” Kaye said.
“No guarantees,” Mitch said.