Elise pondered this for a moment, then decided it didn’t matter if she told her. Besides, it was going to be a long vigil if they couldn’t talk about something. “Sanford Stadium. Athens. There’s a big Prosperity Gospel revival thing going on, all those suckers that think they can name it and claim it so God will give them a new Mercedes and a new bass boat. Lots of offering plates pouring money into the preachers’ coffers, just proving how much money God is giving the faithful. Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy – for the preachers. About seventy-five thousand people. And they paid ninety bucks a head for the ‘seminar,’ not counting the concessions. You do the math.”
“My father’s a pastor, and he said those people aren’t following God.”
Elise nodded. “I have to agree with you there, honey. Sounds like your father’s a good man.”
“So what is that guy going to do? What’s in the tanks?”
“What do you think it is?”
Janet thought for a moment. “I dunno…skunk stink? Some kind of dye? Like throwing blood on people that wear furs? I can’t think of anything else that wouldn’t hurt people.”
“Smart girl. Would you like a drink?” Elise hoped Janet wouldn’t notice she hadn’t actually confirmed her guess.
“Sure.”
Elise opened the juice bottle, and Janet drank with her taped-together hands.
“So how did you get into flying?”
“I just always wanted to fly, so in high school…”
Elise kept her talking until David came back. Then she cut the tape binding Janet’s hands and hopped out of the milk truck. When she had climbed into the second seat of the plane, she threw the truck keys down to the waiting young woman.
“There’s an envelope under the drivers’ seat with some money for the plane. You might not get it back. Have a nice drive, and sorry to inconvenience you. Oh, the truck kind of sticks in second.”
Janet nodded and waved, half a smile on her face.
They took off, winging their way northeastward. “I think you got a Stockholm buddy,” David said.
“What? Oh, you mean like Stockholm Syndrome? I held her hostage and now she likes me?”
“Yep.”
A pause. “So how did the spraying go?”
“Seventy-five thousand new converts. Just not quite the religion they expected,” laughed Markis.
“Yes, and tonight and tomorrow they’ll pass through the Atlanta airport and go back home to a thousand different places and then there’s no way they’ll be able to quarantine it.”
“Lord willing and the crick don’t rise. But they’ll try.”
Elise did not respond, lapsing into silence. She stared out the scratched and dirty cockpit as her thoughts closed in. Now that their task was over her husband was all she could think about. No matter how much he had protested and placated, she knew he did not expect to get away after his own piece of the plan in Los Angeles. If he did not show up at the rendezvous…well, she was no soldier, but the rest were. She told herself the men were frighteningly competent, and they would be able to rescue him.
If not now, then later. After the chaos. After tomorrow.
After Infection Day.
-25-
Daniel woke to the smell of disinfectant and lanolin. His cell was dim and clean, the narrow bed’s covers of ragged rough green wool with “US” printed here and there on them. He’d seen the same blankets in a few old barracks back when he’d been in the Army, though these days they had mostly migrated to the surplus stores. A naked steel toilet with no seat beckoned, and a sink with only one tap: no hot water. A roll of paper, in an incongruously cheerful green wrapper
Daniel struggled to a sitting position, finding himself unable to straighten. His right arm and shoulder were pain-free but twisted like a lightning-struck tree trunk. He stared at the strange crook in his forearm, shoving aside the surreal feeling. The limb was useless; the muscles were so misaligned he could barely close his hand. It reminded him of someone with cerebral palsy; he was half of Steven Hawking. He tried to remember if Hawking was still alive, and he said a little prayer that the Eden Plague would find him and free that amazing mind from the prison of his crippled body.
Daniel’s left side, hand, and arm were more or less useable, though his ribs were a bit compressed. His spine must have been broken as well, and healed in this hunched-over position. Fortunately his legs seemed to function reasonably well, so he struggled to move over onto the toilet. He was clothed in orange pajamas, with a convenient elastic waistband.
The necessaries finished, he drank from the faucet and lay back down on his bunk, on his side in a semi-fetal position, and tried to ignore the cat-claws in his gut. The Plague wanted to be fed.
Booted feet tramped outside his door. The little window opened, then shut, and the locking mechanism opened with a heavy clunking sound. The door slid back, then sideways on rails, and three men in blue hazardous material suits, filter masks and face shields came in.
Two of them had those huge-barreled revolver-blunderbuss things. The enormous tubes pointed his direction, naked threats. The other man carried a stainless steel chair.
The two guards took positions in the corners to the left and right of the door, and the man in charge sat down on the chair across from Daniel’s bunk, in front of the door.
“It’s not airborne, you know,” Daniel said without moving. “And I’m hardly in a position to jump you.” He held up a twisted arm.
“It’s just precautionary,” a familiar rich voice said, and his fears – his expectations rather – were fulfilled. It was Jenkins, the Third.
“I’ll say it again, Mister Jenkins. I am sorry about your son. I take full responsibility, and I’ll say so in front of any court or tribunal you care to convene.”
Jenkins chuckled, a deep, cruel sound. “You’re never going to see the inside of a courtroom. You’ve just become a lab rat. A guinea pig. You’re going to bless the days when it’s just my scientists experimenting on you, because on the other days, I’m going to test the limits of your suffering.”
“It’s our suffering that defines us, Mr. Jenkins.”
“What?”
“C. S. Lewis. Loosely quoted.”
“Then you are about to be defined quite vigorously.” He laughed again, a naked, evil thing.
“It sounds to me like you’re afraid. What is it that scares you?” Daniel tried to hold the man’s eyes.
“If I fear anything, it’s the wanton disruption of the American way of life that you are trying to bring about. Have you thought about the chaos you might have caused had we not caught you in your little scheme?”
“What part of today’s ‘American way of life’ do you love so much? What part did the Founding Fathers sacrifice so much for? Is it our citizens dying of cancer? Heart disease? Or just traffic accidents? Is it the rampant violent crime, or alcoholism, or the PTSD of veterans like me? The drug use and mental illness that caused me to lose control and kill your son? We can get rid of all that if you just stop fighting it.”
Jenkins snorted. “Listen to yourself! You want to surrender the destiny of the human race to an untested virus that might mutate and wipe us all out. Or this thing could be a Trojan Horse designed by aliens or the godless communists to destroy the Free World. What if everyone welcomes it, and after a certain amount of time, or the deployment of some trigger mechanism, kablooie! Everyone infected with it dies or goes crazy, and the old Soviets win the Cold War from their graves while the Russians and Chinese and Al Qaeda laugh and cheer.”
“Plausible. Plausible, Mr. Jenkins, but I don’t think so. If you cared so much about your country you would have informed our elected leaders when you discovered it. There would be a multibillion-dollar program to deconstruct the virus already in place, to defend against misuse of it, and to genetically engineer it so it could be used for the good of everyone, under controlled circumstances, as a cure. Instead, you kept it hidden on an island, owned by a shell company, run by your own personal mad doctor and secured by amoral thugs who kept their own researchers prisoner. So even if I didn’t get half of Los Angeles infected, now it’s too big for just INS, Incorporated. You had to call in Homeland Security. People will talk. There’s nothing more of an oxymoron than a ‘government secret’ in the age of the internet.”