Firechild (17 page)

“Sir!” Belcraft nerved himself to protest. “Coming from you, that surprises me. It puzzles me. But it doesn’t sound like anything I want to join.”

“Better think about it.” The general’s tone grew colder. “Membership can give you rewards that most men never even hope for. I can’t define them now, not until you have been inducted. However, there is something else I can tell you.” His long pause seemed deliberately ominous. “If you refuse to join, we’ll make you regret it.”

Trembling, Belcraft wished he had been allowed to sit. He heard the rasp of wrath in the general’s voice, and saw that crimson birthmark turning darker.

“However,” he heard himself saying, “I do refuse.”

“Fool!” The general came upright. For half a minute he stood trembling, big fists clenched. At last, jaws set, he sank slowly back into his chair. “You’ve had your chance. Don’t forget it!”

“I’m not likely to forget.”

“Your best chance.” The general scowled and shook his head, his emotion almost controlled. “That’s all I can say about our secret group, but I can brief you on two very public organizations that share some of the same high objectives. Those two are Bioscience Alert and Task Force Watchdog. I like to call them the armies of God. Called to battle in a holy Armageddon to stamp out the madness that destroyed the city of Enfield.”

His voice had assumed an oratoric roll.

“Belcraft, we serve a sacred cause! A desperate campaign that I had to lead alone for too many years. A year and more ago, I came here to warn your brother and his fellow madmen what their Satanic work could lead to. They laughed at me and returned to their black blasphemy. You have seen the frightful consequences.”

The general paused with a savage little grin.

“I hope you don’t approve of them!”

“Sir! Please—”

“Your brother!” The general mouthed the word like something foul. “Your brother and those others should have been destroyed like the fiends of hell they are. And they could have been—but for the tragic circumstance that we must also wage another holy war.

“That is our unending campaign to save the freedom and the soul of mankind from the atheistic blight of Marxist communism. The Soviets have their own devil’s nests of genetic engineers—most of them, so I understand, unwilling slaves toiling under torture in the prison labs—toiling to perfect genetic horror bombs with which the Kremlin plots to overwhelm the world. Your brother’s crew begged for research funds, promising that they could give us a genetic defensive capacity.

“The debate was secret—as it must remain!” The general stabbed a warning finger at him. “But the weapon-makers won. Your brother and his fellow demons were allowed to brew their broth of hell, the genetic terror that wiped out Enfield! I’m delighted that they have met their own divine atonement. A forgiving God has apparently erased the plague they engineered, all but that single demoniac creation.

“Your own pet monster!” His tone turned harsh with accusation. “A literal demon, I believe, conceived in hell and left on Earth to spread the plague again. I am told that it bewitched you, Doctor. True?”

“I never felt bewitched.” Almost overwhelmed by the general’s air of righteous might, Belcraft shook his head. “The creature did appeal to my emotions. It seemed helpless. Pathetic. I know—I’m certain it is absolutely harmless.”

“Hah!” An indignant snort. “It’s a child of Satan, left here among us like the serpent in Eden. It has tempted you and escaped to mock us. But it has to be hunted down. It has to be exterminated, like the devil’s spawn it is.” A raw violence shook his voice. “Crushed like a venomous spider! Burned with holy fire. Its foul dust cursed forever!”

“You’ll have to find it first.”

“You—you
are
bewitched!” The handprint burned redder, and the general’s savage thunder made him almost sorry for that impish interjection. “But I warn you, Belcraft! Your brother and his friends have created death and desolation. They themselves have perished for it, and their evil creations shall not prevail. Almighty God has struck them down and quenched their hellish fire. And His work is not yet done.

“Look at me, you infidel!” The general clenched a hairy hand. “Look at the hard fist of God! Raised to smite these infernal engineers and win our Armageddon. I warn you, Belcraft!”

The general dropped his voice and leaned across the table.

“I warn you not to speak of what I’ve told you here. Not to anybody, not for any reason—you don’t know who our agents are, but they will follow you. They will see to it that you keep silent. And, in time to come—” The general shook his head in mock regret. “You’ll repent the witchcraft that has led you to deny the righteous cause of God!”

“Sir, you’re dead wrong—”

No longer listening, the general bent to touch a button on the table. The black sergeant came to take him back to the jeep. He was astonished next morning when Dusek returned his billfold and his keys, with the news that he was free.

“To go?”

“Wherever.” Dusek shrugged. “Orders from the general. I’m to see you out of the perimeter. No stops inside.”

As much puzzled as relieved, he started the car and pulled away from the Enbard Mo el. Dusek followed him in the jeep, out beyond the general’s commandeered hilltop mansion to a new chain link fence, barbed wire strung along the top and guards on duty at the gate. The guards frowned at him and questioned Dusek and phoned headquarters and finally let him out.

With an uneasy glance behind, he started back toward Fort Madison.

21

A Dream of

Alphamega

G
oing home!

Dusek and General Clegg and number nine left behind him, Belcraft rejoiced in the speed and power of the car. It drove well, and he rolled a window glass down to relish the rich scents of summer. The day was splendid, bright and windless, not yet too hot, a few small puffs of cumulus budding white against the milky blue.

Getting back at last to pick up his neglected practice. Back to look for Vic’s letter and whatever it might reveal. His own man again—or was he, really?

The car swayed from a rough spot in the pavement. Eighty miles an hour. He squinted into the rearview mirror. The guarded gate was already far behind, diminishing fast, and he saw no pursuit.

Slowing to a. careful fifty-five, he tried to imagine what might lie ahead. That wasn’t easy. The ashes of Enfield were too hard to forget. The pink thing stuck in his mind, a riddle never solved. What had she been meant to be?

Awe brushed him again. If she was really Vic’s creation, the seed of a wholly new tree of life, engineered to bear more perfect fruit than the human—what might she mean to the human future? Should he want her to live? Or was she in fact the insidious serpent in Eden, somehow bewitching him into betraying his kind?

He shrank from the thought, shivering a little, but still he longed to know how she had fared since he had watched her crawl away into the weeds. Whatever she might become, he couldn’t help hoping that her unknown gifts had been great enough to keep her alive.

Longing to know, hoping for news, he tried the radio. Washington authorities had confirmed more ugly details of what they had at last begun to call the Enfield catastrophe. Just this morning, General Clegg had allowed the first camera crew inside the quarantine perimeter, far enough to see the strange gray killer-dust that science was still unable to explain.

“Thirty thousand killed,” the surgeon general had reported. “All that remains is the ashy residue into which the unidentified lethal factor crumbled all organic matter it had touched. Collected specimens now appear totally inert, with no pathogen discoverable. Until the unknown fatal vector can be understood and controlled, we must take every possible precaution against reactivation.”

Martial law remained in effect around the disaster area, General Adrian Clegg in command. At his insistence, both the FBI and the CIA had been shaken up, new directors appointed. Four different congressional investigations were in progress, none with findings ready to report.

Once again, the President had repeated his expressions of bewilderment and grief, offering heartfelt sympathy to surviving relatives and friends, trying to restore the courage of the shaken nation. “Though such losses are painful, we have kept the rest of America safe. We’ll continue to keep it safe.”

Nothing new. Uneasily, he kept looking into the rear-view mirror. At first the road was empty, but presently a light-blue car crept up as if to pass and then lagged back again. He slowed to fifty, and still it didn’t pass. He pushed the car to seventy and beyond, and still it stayed in the mirror. Finally, he pulled into a Chevron station that shone with the same bold red and white and blue he recalled, shining in the dust.

The blue car went on by. He glimpsed a frowsy-looking woman at the wheel. A heavy bald man sat slumped down beside her, apparently asleep. They didn’t slow or glance at him, yet he kept on wondering.

His abrupt release was still a puzzle. Refusing to join Clegg’s super-secret group had certainly earned him no favors. If the lethal vector was still unknown, the pink thing still at large—why had they let him go?

He shrugged and pulled the car toward a no-lead pump. If they had no convincing reason to turn him loose, they had none to hold him—not since they had found him uninfected. Nor any cause to follow, so far as he could imaging. Anyhow, whatever the reason, he was on the way.

The attendant eyed him warily.

“Mister, where you from?”

“Back toward Enfield.”

“Sorry, sir.” The attendant backed way. “Fresh out of no-lead.”

“May I use your phone?” He nodded at the curbside booth. “I need to call home.”

“Out of order.” The attendant waved him toward the road. “Sorry, sir. Uh—a funeral coming up. Got to close the station.”

He drove on. At the next town he circled a block to be coming from a different direction when he pulled into another Chevron station, and got gas with no questions. He found another phone and dialed his office number. No answer.

Which was no real surprise. Driving out of town that morning before he thought Miss Hearn would be awake, he had stopped by the office to leave her a note.

Unexpected trip to Enfield to see my brother there. Cancel everything through Wednesday. Will call tomorrow.

That was long months ago. With never a chance to call, he was doubtless on the “missing” list by now, his office probably closed. With no word from him, nor any pay, Miss Hearn had likely found another job.

Trouble behind him. More ahead, even at home. He couldn’t help brooding, petty as he told himself his private worries were. He had doubtless been replaced on the hospital staff. Too many bills were far past due. Many of his patients must have gone to other doctors. When people learned he had been shut up inside the perimeter, a suspected carrier, they might become as skittish as that gas pumper. Not that he could blame them.

Night was near before he saw the Mississippi. It lay wide and bright beneath the peaceful-seeming dusk, a long string of grain barges creeping around the bend to meet a white-painted tourist stern-wheeler that might have steamed out of Mark Twain’s age. That glimpse of the river gave him more comfort than the President’s promise, transforming old Fort Madison into an islet of enduring stability, securely remote from invasion by any monstrous biological creation.

Pulling off the highway onto an empty street, Enfield far behind, he felt a moment of elation. That good moment faded when he saw the tall white columns of the house Midge had loved. Empty now and silent, probably smelling of its own long decay. A pang of loneliness stabbed him. Suddenly dreading the place, shrinking from all its silent reminders of happier times gone forever, he turned abruptly to drive to his office and look for Vic’s letter.

The office was hot, the air conditioner off. It had a faint, stale scent of disinfectants and dusty emptiness, but Miss Hearn had left his desk neatly in order. The in basket held a stack of mail she had left for him to read, a sheaf of unpaid bills, announcements of professional meetings. He found a postcard from Midge, now with her mother in California. Signed “With love.”

If he had somehow given her more time—but all that was gone. He shrugged and searched again. Nothing at all from Vic.

He phoned Miss Hearn.

“Doctor—” A muffled crash, as if she had dropped the receiver. “I thought—we were afraid you’d been caught in Enfield.”

“A close call,” he told her. “I was trapped inside the perimeter. Held in isolation till they were certain I hadn’t been infected. I’m back at the office now. Looking at the mail. I was hoping for a letter from my brother.”

“From Enfield?”

“He died there. I think he had written me.”

“Doctor—” Something made her hesitate. “A letter did come from Enfield. The same week you left. A thick brown envelope, marked personal. No return address, but I made out the postmark.”

“Where is it?”

“Taken in the robbery—”

“What?”

“I never had a chance to tell you. The office was ransacked the next Saturday night. Professionals, the police think, from the way the lock was picked. Somebody looking for narcotics. Frightened off before they found anything. All the drug samples were dumped on the floor, though little or nothing was actually missing. Except that letter. I looked everywhere. The letter was taken—I can’t imagine why.”

“I—I see.”

“Doctor, I tried hard to locate you.” Her voice was distressed. “There was no way. Phone lines were out. When I finally got through to the task force people, they said they had no record of you. If your brother—” Her voice caught. “If your brother was there in Enfield, I’m terribly sorry. I know the letter would have meant a lot. I’ve kept checking with the police, but they say they don’t have a lead.”

“Thanks,” he muttered. “I know you’ve done all you could. Glad to find everything else okay.”

But nothing was okay. He felt almost afraid to wonder who could have known about the letter, or what might come of its loss, but a thin, cold blade of dread had stabbed him deep.