His parents’ hardened hearts slowly broke when Charlie was diagnosed with leukemia. It didn’t matter that Mike had fully recovered, they couldn’t count on him the way they might once have—he was already fragile and damaged. Charlie was their last hope at an unblemished child, and once he became scheduled to die, Mike’s parents died too.
After the funeral, Mike knew his mother was already dead. She spent the first half of each week lost in depression, not bothering to dress or even leave her bed. For a while, his father made a good show of resuming a normal life. He kept his job, kept the bills paid, and kept the family going. But when Mike’s mother collapsed with pneumonia, and then drifted off to death, Mike’s dad started down the same slope.
Mike turned thirteen as an orphan. His grandparents took him in and raised him to value education and hard work above all else. It was also on his thirteenth birthday that Mike vowed to one day help find the cures for diseases like the one that had taken Charlie and the soul of his small family. When Mike first heard Charlie’s voice through the static on the radio, he also committed himself to furthering the research of paranormal phenomenon.
Now, just a couple years away from his fortieth birthday, Mike had lost his job helping people with genetic disorders, and had failed at paranormal research. It didn’t occur to him until just that moment, but he was almost exactly as old as his father had been when his father had died.
Is there still time? he wondered. Mike had never placed a high priority on relationships, getting married, or having kids. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he always thought there would be time later for those considerations; after his scientific discoveries, renown, and financial success. He counted back on his fingers—his last girlfriend had been seven years before.
Sandy had left him over an argument about his priorities. She said that he cared more about maintaining his house as a shrine to his dead grandparents than her. He attempted to argue that point, but knew he was on shaky ground. In fact, between his job, his paranormal hobby, and keeping his house exactly as his grandparents had left it, he didn’t seem to have much time for Sandy. When it came to things that she wanted to do, he participated begrudgingly, or not at all.
Mike slid off the hood of his car and glanced at his watch, startled by the time. He must have been sitting in that same spot, thinking about his life, for hours.
I’ve got to think of a way to combine my interests, he thought, then they won’t always compete.
Mike walked around the side of the car and stopped in his tracks, dropping his keys in the gravel. A new thought formed in the wreckage of his failed ambitions. Connections swirled in his mind. He didn’t need to combine his interests—they were already tied together.
He realized everything in a flash—the case that Ken had called him to consult on, the one about the boy, and the creature he had been chasing were part of the same puzzle. He had nearly described the entire thing to Ken at lunch, completely ignorant of how correct he had been.
The last piece fell into place in his mind.
“Oh shit,” he said aloud. The sound of his own voice snapped him into action and he bent over to grab his keys from the gravel. He fumbled for a few seconds, but then jumped in the car and started the engine. His latest realization was something that the creature and the boy already knew: the rogue and the extinction vector were on a collision course. If his latest theory was correct, the rogue wasn’t headed for the dam at all. The creature’s real destination would be wherever the boy called home. Since there wasn’t much land to the east of where Mike stood, it most likely meant that the boy lived west. The creature had already shown the ability to cover ground quickly, and that meant the boy’s life was in immediate danger.
Mike put his car in reverse and gunned the engine, sending gravel flying. After he backed around, he dropped the transmission into drive and took a deep breath. Getting himself killed in a car accident wasn’t going to help the kid, and he had to find a phone so he could alert Ken to the danger.
It wasn’t until he was back on the main drag, scanning for a pay phone and cursing himself for letting his cell phone expire, that he realized that he didn’t even have a home number for Dr. Ken Stuart.
Mike focused back on the road in front of him and sped up; he would have to visit Ken at home to deliver the news.
THE DOORBELL HAD NO LIGHT, and even when he pressed his ear to the door, he couldn’t hear the bell ringing inside. Mike resorted to knocking. On his third rap, the door fell away from his knuckles. The porch light came on as the door cracked open.
“Mike?”
“Hey Ken, I’ve got to talk to you about something. Can I come in?”
“Sure,” said Dr. Ken Stuart, opening the door to reveal his foyer. He stood in front of Mike in a full-length robe and bare feet.
“Did I wake you?” asked Mike. “What time is it?”
“It’s ten, but no, I was just about to go to bed,” said Ken.
“Everything okay?” a woman’s voice called from the top of the stairs. She poked her head and robed shoulders around the corner to look down the stairs.
“Yeah,” Ken called back. “It’s my friend Mike.”
“Hey, I’m really sorry.” Mike leaned towards Ken as he apologized. “This is really important. You’ll understand when I tell you.”
“No biggie,” said Ken, waving his friend into the living room. “Have a seat. Are you okay, man? You look kinda terrible.”
“I’m fine,” Mike said, running his fingers through his hair. “I’ve just been on the road a bunch today, but I’m seriously fine.”
“Okay,” said Ken.
Ken waited a few seconds before prompting Mike again—“So what’s up?”
“Okay,” said Mike, showing Ken his palms and leaning forward. He sat back and then leaned forward again. Ken fidgeted too, in response to Mike’s nerves. “You remember that thing I was telling you about the other day?”
“Which thing? The diagnosis?”
“No, not exactly,” said Mike. “Well, almost, but not really." Mike began another round of twitches.
“What is going on?” asked Ken, crossing his legs and tucking his robe modestly around them.
“I’m sorry. It’s just, I know how this is going to sound. If I had known your phone number and called you when I first thought of it, I would have sounded perfectly natural, but on the way over here I started to think about what I would say and how it would sound.”
“I’ve known you forever, Mike. Just say what you came to say.”
“Okay, okay. The other day at lunch I told you about the rogue mutation. At the restaurant, remember?”
“Yeah, the thing about beached whales? That was kind of interesting.”
“Yeah, yeah, it is. The whales are more the general case, though. I was talking more about a specific subset of cases. This subset is like the whales that commit mass suicide in that you start with a doomed branch of a family tree that culls itself for the good of the race, but in this fringe case one of the members survives.”
“Okay?” Ken prompted.
“So, you’ve got this one survivor—I call it the rogue mutation—and it lives only to pick off other inferior members of the race. Eventually it dies out and everything goes back to normal.”
“Right. I remember. It sounded far-fetched. Why does that bring you here?” asked Ken.
“It is far-fetched. In fact, it’s incredibly rare. The reason it brings me here is because of the other side of the equation: the extinction vector.”