“Thank you,” Marty said, feeling consciousness slip away and wanting to express his gratitude while he still could.
“Hey, we’re still not out of the woods yet,” Clocker said.
When Marty regained consciousness, he wasn’t sweating or shivering, but he still felt weak.
They were in a car, on a lonely highway at sunset. Paige was driving, and he was belted in the front passenger seat.
She said, “Are you okay?”
“Better,” he said, and his voice was less shaky than it had been for a while. “Thirsty.”
“There’s some apple juice on the floor between your feet. I’ll find a place to pull over.”
“No. I can get it,” he said, not really sure that he could.
As he bent forward, reaching to the floor with his right hand, he realized that his left arm was in a sling. He managed to get hold of a can and yank it loose of the six-pack to which it was connected. He braced it between his knees, pulled the ring-tab, and opened it.
The juice was barely chilled, but nothing ever tasted better—partly because he had managed to get it for himself without help. He finished the entire can in three long swallows.
When he turned his head, he saw Charlotte and Emily slumped in their seatbelts, snoozing in the back.
“They’ve hardly gotten any sleep for the last couple of nights,” Paige said. “Bad dreams. And worried about you. But I guess being on the move makes them feel safer, and the motion of the car helps.”
“Nights? Plural?” He knew they had fled Mammoth Lakes Tuesday night. He assumed it was Wednesday. “What sunset is that?”
“Friday’s,” she said.
He had been out of it for almost three days.
He looked around at the vast expanse of plains swiftly fading into the nightfall. “Where are we?”
“Nevada. Route Thirty-one south of Walker Lane. We’ll pick up Highway Ninety-five and drive north to Fallon. We’ll stay at a motel there tonight.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Wyoming, if you’re up to it.”
“I’ll be up to it. I guess there’s a reason for Wyoming?”
“Karl knows a place we can stay there.” When he asked her about the car, which he had never seen before, she said, “Karl again. Like the sulfa powder and the penicillin I’ve been treating you with. He seems to know where to get whatever he needs. He’s some character.”
“I don’t even really know him,” Marty said, reaching down for another can of apple juice, “but I love him like a brother.”
He popped open the can and drank at least one-third of it. He said, “I like his hat too.”
Paige laughed out of all proportion to the feeble humor of the remark, but Marty laughed with her.
“God,” she said, driving north through gray, unpopulated land, “I love you, Marty. If you had died, I’d never have forgiven you.”
That night they took two rooms at the motel in Fallon, using a false name and paying cash in advance. They had a dinner of pizza and Pepsi in the motel. Marty was starved, but two pieces of pizza filled him.
While they ate, they played a game of Look Who’s the Monkey Now, in which the purpose was to think of all the words for foods that began with the letter P. The girls weren’t in their best playing form. In fact, they were so subdued that Marty worried about them.
Maybe they were just tired. After dinner, in spite of their nap in the car, Charlotte and Emily were asleep within seconds of putting heads to pillows.
They left the door open between the adjoining rooms. Karl Clocker had provided Paige with an Uzi submachine gun which had been illegally converted for full automatic fire. They kept it on the nightstand within easy reach.
Paige and Marty shared a bed. She stretched out to his right, so she could hold his good hand.
As they talked, he discovered that she had learned the answer to the question he’d never had a chance to ask Karl Clocker: Why did it look like me?
One of the most powerful men in the Network, primary owner of a media empire, had lost a four-year-old son to cancer. As the boy lay dying at Cedars-Sinai Hospital, five years ago, blood and bone-marrow samples had been taken from him because it was his father’s emotional decision that the Alpha-series clones should be developed from his lost boy’s genetic material. If functional clones could be made a reality, they would be a lasting monument to his son.
“Jesus, that’s sick,” Marty said. “What father would think a race of genetically engineered killers might be a suitable memorial? God Almighty.”
“God had nothing to do with it,” Paige said.
The Network representative assigned to obtain those blood and marrow samples from the lab had gotten confused and wound up with Marty’s samples instead, which had been taken to determine whether he would be a suitable donor for Charlotte if she proved in need of a transplant.
“And they want to rule the world,” Marty said, amazed. He was still far from recuperated and in need of more sleep, but he had to know one more thing before he drifted off. “If they only started engineering Alfie five years ago ... how can he be a grown man?”
Paige said, “According to Clocker, they ‘improved’ on the basic human design in several ways.”
They had given Alfie an unusual metabolism and tremendously accelerated healing power. They also engineered his phenomenally rapid maturation with human growth hormone and raised him from fetus to thirtyish adult with nonstop intravenous feeding and electrically stimulated muscle development over a period of less than two years.
“Like a damned hydroponic vegetable or something,” she said.
“Dear Jesus,” Marty said, and glanced at the nightstand to make sure the Uzi was there. “Didn’t they have a few doubts when this clone didn’t resemble the boy?”
“For one thing, the boy had been wasted by cancer between the ages of two and four. They didn’t know what he might have looked like if he’d been healthy during those years. And besides, they’d edited the genetic material so extensively they couldn’t be sure the Alpha generation would resemble the boy all that much anyway.
“He was taught language, mathematics, and other things largely by sophisticated subliminal input while he was asleep and growing.”
She had more to tell him, but her voice faded gradually as he surrendered to a sleep filled with greenhouses in which human forms floated in tanks of viscous liquid . . .
... they are connected to tangles of plastic tubing and life-support machines, growing rapidly from fetuses to full adulthood, all doubles for him, and suddenly the eyes click open on a thousand of them at once, along rows and rows of tanks in building after building, and they speak as with a single voice: I need my life.
8
The log cabin was on several acres of woodlands, a few miles from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which had yet to enjoy its first snow of the season. Karl’s directions were excellent, and they found the place with little difficulty, arriving late Saturday afternoon.
The cabin needed to be cleaned and aired-out, but the pantry was stocked with supplies. When the rust had been run out of the pipes, the water from the tap tasted clean and sweet.
On Monday, a Range Rover turned off the county road and drove to their front door. They watched it tensely from the front windows. Paige held the Uzi with the safety off, and she didn’t relax until she saw that it was Karl who got out of the driver’s door.
He had arrived in time to have lunch with them, which Marty had prepared with the girls’ help. It consisted of reconstituted eggs, canned sausages, and biscuits from a tin.
As the five of them ate at the large pine table in the kitchen, Karl presented them with their new identities. Marty was surprised by the number of documents. Birth certificates for all four of them. A high school diploma for Paige from a school in Newark, New Jersey, and one for Marty from a school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. An honorable discharge from the United States Army for Marty, issued after three years of service. They had Wyoming driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, and more.