Directive 51 (29 page)

He turned to face the room of engineers and scientists, many of them in sweatpants, raggy T-shirts, and other night clothing; it looked like none of them had combed their hair, ever, but then they
always
looked that way. Not a pretty sight, but it was probably the best collection of brains on the planet, and considering Weisbrod had only called him an hour and a half ago, this was pretty damned good.
The things we do for our old teachers.

Cicolina said, “All right, this is going to be tougher than we thought. Let’s see what we can do; we always knew we might have to save the world.”

They applauded. He thought,
Hey, as a motivational speaker, I guess I’m better than I thought I was
. Then the lights went out.

By the time they made it up the staircase to ground level, by the emergency light, the mood was shot; everyone wanted to go home to family and friends.

He thought he’d lost them till they discovered all the flat tires in the parking lot, and that a good third of their cars wouldn’t start, with great wads of nasty white stuff under the hood. For some reason, that pissed them all off, and they started dividing into teams to work on the problem of how to do a “cold start” on advanced civilization.

As he looked at the swarm of men and women bent in little knots around whiteboards and notepads, hastily relocated to the sunny second floor on the south side of the building, Cicolina said, “Reminds me of what the old-timers, back when I was just starting project management, said the Manhattan Project had been like.”

“Yeah,” Roseann, his assistant, said. “Except, you know, they had electricity and phones for the Manhattan Project.”

Heather was so much bigger than Lenny that it had been easy for her to position an arm and a thigh to support his different, asymmetric body, and to sleep with his slight weight resting partly on her. When she woke to the soft chime of her phone, she moved Lenny to a more convenient position, careful not to bend anything that didn’t seem like it should bend. He mumbled, and she squeezed his shoulder affectionately.

She made sure the phone was definitely
not
on video, and whispered, “Yeah, Arnie?”

“Norcross is going on the air any second. Considering the impact he had last night, and the way the media have been running excerpts from that speech all night long, I thought you’d want to tune in.”

Lenny, beside her, was stretching and using his good hand to rub some of his back muscles. “I’m awake,” he said.

She said “Voice identify and open,” and an image of her computer desktop appeared on the room’s ceiling. “Find Norcross press conference today not yesterday soon not past,” she said.

“On forty-six channels.” Icons appeared on her ceiling.

“Select Spanfeed.”

“Hey, we’re both Spanfeed people. We’re even more compatible.” Lenny turned to put his head on her shoulder; she reached over him, her hands exploring his back, working muscles that were tight, and he sighed like Fuss did when she found the right places.

The image on the ceiling was almost life-size, as if they were looking through a glass wall into the meeting room at the Dubuque Radisson; Norcross appeared to emerge prone from a door about forty feet above Heather’s ceiling and walk down the wall to the podium. “At least he’s not walking in over the swimming pool.”

Heather snorted. “Laugh while you can. One more speech like the one last night, and Mr. Jesus is probably the President of the United States.”

Norcross announced his campaign would be aiming to win the presidency by the “shortest possible route,” because it was now his duty to win the election and put matters right, and so he had calculated a pathway of appearances that would take him through the set of states he judged himself most likely to win—all the traditionally solid Republican states plus Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Missouri, Maryland, and Colorado. He admitted how hard it might be, but he added, “We need a President. I am qualified and ready to be one. The other side is not offering that, and we
have
to have it.”

Simple as Norcross’s message was as a text, the subtext was even simpler: I am religious, not a nut; I would not have done anything so stupid, and stupidity must be punished; I realize that you don’t care for my policies, but I am your alternative, so I will be moderate domestically if you’ll let a grown-up take over national security.

“Phew. He’s the next president, all right,” Heather said, as the network logo popped up with a picture of the Dubuque Radisson and the caption
Decision in Dubuque
.

“Yeah. Can the Democrats even replace Pendano on the ticket?”

“The ballot slot technically belongs to the party, not the person, in all the states, ever since that Caroline Kennedy uproar. Theoretically, the DNC
could
just tell everyone ‘a vote for Pendano is really a vote for this other person.’ But who do they have who could possibly win?”

Lenny Plekhanov said, “President Norcross. We’ll have to get used to—”

Her phone beeped, and an ID appeared on the screen on the ceiling. “Confirm no video.”

“Confirmed.”

“Pick up phone.”

“On line.”

“Hey, Cameron,” she said.

“I’m glad you got a chance to sleep,” he said. “We’re having a meeting of everyone working on the Daybreak problem, with Secretary Ferein and several other bigwigs, at one o’clock this afternoon. The meeting before the meeting will be lunch at eleven, and here’s the address. Can you pass that on to Lenny Plekhanov? He’s invited to both meetings.”

“I’ll be there,” Lenny said.

Heather snorted. “You know,
some
people would
object
to your tracking our whereabouts? I mean just hypothetically and all. Thought I’d mention that.”

Cam said, “Sorry about the intrusion—”

“I was yanking your chain, Cam, I really shouldn’t do that.”

“You might as well, everyone else does.”

She grinned and rolled her eyes at Lenny; Cameron Nguyen-Peters had been known to everyone at the FBI Academy as “Eeyore.” “Unofficially, how is the
real
president this morning?” she asked.

“Sedated. Graham Weisbrod had to talk him into that, too. As for the
Acting
President, and by god
that’s
a good term, he’ll be at the one o’clock meeting—along with President-Damn-Near-Certain-To-Be-Elect Norcross.”

“Oh, you saw that speech too,” she said, smiling. “Okay, Cam, see you at eleven.”

“Well,” Lenny said, working through the complicated, awkward process to move from bed to wheelchair, “it sounds like you and Cameron have a history.”

Smiling, she came around and knelt beside him so he could use her as a stabilizing rail. With his fused hand braced on her shoulder, and his good hand on the armrest, he easily slipped back into the chair. She said, “Let me make a guess. Does
your
history happen to include being dumped a lot?”

“Can’t be dumped
a lot
if you aren’t picked up much,” he pointed out, sullenly.

“Yeah. True. Okay, well, if my love life was a bridge, it would have holes in the deck, towers leaning every which way, and no one in their right mind would venture onto it. Mixture of poor construction and too much traffic, you know? So . . . I was Cameron Nguyen-Peters’s one and only friend at the FBI Academy because, well, Christ, somebody had to be. A couple weeks before graduation, on the strength of its having been a while, my appreciation for his loyalty, and a few tons of plain old desperation, I went out with him. Once. He made the most gentlemanly and discreet pass I’ve ever seen in my life; the pass was an incomplete, because the receiver was by then not the least bit interested; he did not attempt a punt, end run, or field goal; and the game was called on account of he doesn’t have a damned clue about human beings, and I’ve known warmer snowmen.

“Ever since, whenever we’ve worked together, he has been cordial, friendly, and a good old friend, and he sometimes asks my opinion about things because for reasons not totally clear to me he values my judgment just as if I had any. Oh, and now and then, when he’s doing something really buttheaded, I tell him so.” Still kneeling, she was below Lenny’s eye level, and she leaned forward. “Now kiss me, dammit.”

He did, and seemed to relax. She decided it wouldn’t hurt to drive the point home. “Since that date, which I point out was around thirteen years ago, when he was merely a knee-jerk conservative, Cameron Nguyen-Peters has become a complete right-wing nut of the type that thinks this country is about the flag, God, and the Army, and so I wouldn’t be able to listen to him talk politics for three minutes without strangling him. He is a cold fish emotionally and admits, himself, that he needs massive coaching in order to express the feelings he probably doesn’t have. He is so irritating that every time he swims in the ocean, he causes pearls to grow in oysters a thousand miles away. He has several good qualities, such as being a pretty good sport about being teased, being an Angels fan, regular flossing, and the way he keeps his shoes shined. I’ve honestly dated worse, though not twice.”

Lenny was laughing by that time, and said, “Is it really so terribly obvious how insecure I am?”

“They’re detecting it with obsolete barometers in Maine, dude.”

He kissed her again.
Well, at least he kisses like the question is settled.

Kai-Anne hadn’t slept very much that night; the back yard was warm enough with her sweatsuit and blankets, but she’d kept waking up to find Greg still gazing up at the sky. Then she’d rub his neck and shoulders, he’d say he loved her, she’d kiss his forehead like she was tucking Bryan in, and then he’d tell her to go back to sleep. She wasn’t sure how many times she did that before dawn; three or four maybe.

Just as the sun was coming up, he turned, hugged her, and said, “I think I can sleep now. Let’s go inside.”

“What do you think about while you’re watching the sky?” she asked, as they dragged their blankets and pillows back into the house.

“Same as always. That the stars are far away and don’t seem to be interested in us. That there’s got to be a better way than killing people. And that I’m glad I’ve got you and Harris, Chloe, and Bryan. Sometime after the sun comes up, it always makes enough sense for me to sleep.”

“Yeah. I guess I can see how that would work.”

They didn’t bother making the bed; they just stretched out and dragged the blankets, still damp from the yard, over themselves, and kept warm by holding each other.

The trucker had been working his satellite two-way connections, and Jason had been checking the Internet, and all the news was bad. “Buddy,” the trucker said, “I hate to tell a man what to do but if I was you I’d get a haircut and shave
real
soon.”

“Planning on it,” Jason said.

All over the countrythere were reports of vigilante actions;people discovered their cars were dead, their kitchens were not working, the food in their refrigerators was spoiling—in short, that everything was going wrong—and remembered the long-haired guy down the street who nagged them about recycling, or the girl in the long skirt at the coffeehouse who always gave them a little lecture about using sugar instead of organic honey in their morning latte. People like to have someone to be angry with when there are too many small annoyances in life, and the first day of Daybreak comprised myriad small annoyances for which the Daybreakers really
were
responsible. Most of the people they were catching were not Daybreakers, but punching out the sanctimonious Green neighbor, or humiliating the preachy coworker, were pleasures not to be missed on a day so full of irritation.

“Hey,” the trucker said, and turned up the volume.

The news from Tres Piedras was that the local people had thought they had found a nest of Daybreakers outside town, and the sheriff had declared that he didn’t have the resources to deal with the situation. There weren’t many details but a trucker driving through town had said he’d seen a mob with guns heading up the hill.

Jason knew he must look sick, but he hoped it would look like he was shocked at the news of violence rather than terrified for his friends and Beth. Kindly, the trucker said, “Buddy, if you want, you can stay in the truck—I’m going right through and we’ll go all the way to Phoenix if the tires hold. Or if you really have to be there, maybe we should let you out someplace where you can walk?”

“I know a trailhead on the highway near town,” Jason said, feeling his mouth moving as if it belonged to someone else. “You can drop me there, and I can walk in, no prob, there’s a trail right to the public park.”
But I’ll take the one that goes uphill. Five and a half miles and it’s kind of a climb to the commune, but maybe I won’t be too late.

Tiff was shaking him. “Honey, you gotta wake up, I’m sorry, it’s Teddy.”

Zach sat up in bed. “What’s wrong?”

“His asthma’s worse than I’ve ever heard it, and the inhaler—” She held it out to him; the plastic cartridge had ruptured; it stank like sour milk. “All our crates of them, they’re all bursting and they all smell wrong—”

“That biote wasn’t one of mine,” he said, stupidly, feeling like
Lord, Lord, if it can just not be my fault . . .
He started getting dressed. “The Walgreens we have the prescription at is twenty-four-hour, phone them and—”

“No phone. Our landline is down, and on the cell the store’s line just comes back with a busy—”

Louder gasping from Teddy’s room. Tiff rushed back to him; Zach grabbed his wallet and keys.