Strange Robby (48 page)

"Don't you shush me, girl! Where's your lover boy?"

"Rudy . . . Robby's in the FBI. No one's supposed to know that he was here on an assignment . . . "

"Oh, God, Helen! When are you ever going to learn? Some pretty boy comes in here with a line you could hang clothes on, and you're in love," Rudy said sympathetically.

Helen started to get mad at him, but his conclusion was not entirely without justification. Helen did have a history of falling for the wrong kinds of guys. But this time Rudy was wrong.

"Why would he leave the day before payday? He was after those SWTF creeps, and you know something went down over there last night," she whispered.

Rudy laughed. "And you think that had something to do with lover boy? Come on, Helen . . . "

"OK, OK. Let's just say you're right. But for my sake could you not mention that he's gone when we have customers?" Helen asked. "They might think I know something, and I could be in big trouble. You know how those guys are."

Rudy nodded and sighed. "OK, Helen." He shook his head. "But you gott ah know that this guy fed you a load of crap."

"I'll do the dishes till you get someone else, if you just please . . . "

"I said I'd keep it on the QT, and I will. Rudy Hardly is nothing if not a man of his word."

As the SWTF personnel started filing in, Helen noticed two things. First, many familiar lunchtime regulars were missing, and second, they weren't talking much. The slices of conversation she did catch sounded like they had just been through a war instead of a day's work.

"We're picking up shit," one was whispering. "We lift up this huge piece of the ceiling, and under it there's like four guys—all dead."

"Shush!" the guy he was talking to ordered.

Helen put the menus and water in front of them and smiled. "Be back in a minute." She hurried away to wait on another customer.

Everything she overheard was in the same vein. This one was dead, or that one was dead. This part of the building was totaled. Estimates on times and amounts of money it would take to repair the damage, etc., etc. But the most interesting piece of conversation had come from a couple of scientists sitting at one of the corner booths.

"My point is," the one said to the other, "that the suits can only protect you from their psychic power. It can't protect you from things they can do with it. Like jerking guns out of your hand, starting the hallways on fire or caving the roof in."

Either these guys had all seen the same sci-fi flick, or something really destructive had taken place at SWTF headquarters last night.

Helen drove by the complex on her way home from work. A paving crew was working on the driveway, and another crew was installing new gates.

When Robbie had said goodbye she'd hoped that he really was feeding her a line, and that he would be back later that night. But he hadn't come back, and he hadn't called, and he didn't come in for work. Now something had definitely happened at the SWTF complex.

She wondered if Robby had been able to get his friend out. Wondered if he was still alive. For the thousandth time she wondered what the hell the SWTF really was.

 
"Lo, this only have I found, That God has made man
upright; but they have sought out many inventions."
Ecclesiastes 7:29

 

He knew they called him the oldest living Nazi war criminal. He didn't really care. It wasn't true, of course. He was a scientist, not a thug. He'd never gotten his hands dirty, not in Germany, and not here in the States. The government asked him to do a job; he did it and did it well. Hans Schultz couldn't help it if everyone else in this organization was an incompetent buffoon.

He moved away from the window and sat down at his desk. They were right about one thing, though. He was old, very old. Shooting himself with alien DNA every few years had slowed down the aging process, but had by no means stopped it. While his mind was still sharp as ever, his body was slowly falling apart.

He knew his remaining time on earth was short, and now at a time when he should have been able to sit back and enjoy the work of his hands, what happens? These idiots jeopardize the entire future of the project.

Every time he turned around they were killing someone else to cover up their incompetence. And every time someone died, more questions got asked and more people got closer to finding out the truth. Therefore, more people had to be killed, causing more questions, getting an army of people ever closer . . .

It was a vicious cycle. Once it got started, like a tidal wave there was no stopping it till it destroyed everything in its path. Damn it! They were so close! So close to having the perfect being. The people they made were smarter, faster, stronger, healthier, and the powers of their minds were unfathomable.

But he hadn't bred them to fight an alien invasion. Nor had he bred them to be used in a war as common soldiers. Hans had a theory that mankind had started out smart and wound up stupid. He theorized that the Aryan world had started out as a hybrid, and had become stupider as it became more and more interbred with the ancestors of the mud races.

For this reason he had very carefully allowed only whites in his breeding program. When the computer found an alien hybrid that was of another ethnic origin, he had it destroyed usually before the "parents" could take it home.

Hans had wondered why the aliens bothered to impregnate inferior people, and now he knew why. Apparently, when you crossed the superior intellect of an alien with the inferior intellect of a mud race, the hybrid could inherit all of its genes from the father, the superior genes of the father canceling out the genes of the inferior mother.

Either that, or he was wrong, and there were no inferior people. Which would mean that when you mixed two things that didn't match, you could wind up with just about any combination of the two. Hans shook the insane thought from his head. He was tired, that was all. He needed a nap. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

"Sir?" a voice at the door said.

"What the hell is it!" Hans said, hammering on his desk with his fist. "Can't you see I need some rest?"

"You sent for Brawn, and he's here, Sir," his secretary said after clearing her throat.

"Ah! Good! Send him in." Hans sat up straight in his chair, suddenly feeling revitalized.

The man walked in. He was so huge that he seemed to fill the room. "Sit! Sit, my son," Hans said.

Brawn sat in the chair Hans indicated. "You sent for me, Father?"

"I have a bit of a problem, Son," Hans said. "Americans are incompetent. I don't have to tell you that. They are foolish and sentimental. So there are leaks, and I want you to stop them. There are some troublesome people, and I want you to kill them."

Brawn smiled for the first time since he had entered the room. "It will be my pleasure."

Tommy was hoeing in his garden. He was starting to see what he was sure were seedlings, and he pointed them out to Laura.

"Do you see?" he asked pointing.

"No, not really," she said.

"Right there, see?"

Laura shrugged. It looked like dirt to her. "Sorry, Baby."

"Well, it is. I know it is." He continued to hoe the weeds he didn't want out of his garden, carefully preserving the weeds he did want. Mostly, he was trying to loosen up the soil so that it would soak up water better.

"Don't you ever wonder what's going on out there, Tommy? The President could have been assassinated and we wouldn't even know about it."

"Yes we would. We listen to the radio every night for fifteen minutes. We hear the news," Tommy said.

"Don't you miss the people you work with?"

"Most of them are turds. They don't like me, and I don't like them. I miss Spider, but who knows where she is right now?"

"We don't know because we haven't been home . . . "

"I told you that Carrie said Spider disappeared," Tommy said.

"I wonder what my parents are thinking. I miss my friends at work. I miss Carrie. I miss the toilet. Tommy, I want to go home," Laura said.

Tommy sighed. She did this almost every day now. "Laura, I told you. We can't go back. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Why can't you just enjoy being here and put everything else out of your head?"

"Because there is nothing to occupy my brain, Tommy," Laura said. "I had one book and I've read it six times. Should I count rocks, or take up a hobby collecting strange looking pieces of moss? Come on, Tommy. We can't continue to live like this!"

"I can't believe that you would rather go back there and die than be bored. Besides, it's your own fault that you're bored. I'm not bored, because there are lots of things to do."

"All the things there are to do here are things that I hate to do," Laura said matter-of-factly. "Let's go out there. Change our names. Go to a new town. Start over again. Like the witness protection program, thingy."

"Oh! That would be a lot of fun. I could pump gas for a living, and you could get a lovely job in fast foods. We could live in a fucking trailer court and eat TV dinners. Besides which, where the hell am I going to get the paperwork? I don't have any connections, and you can't do shit any more without ID. Why can't you be reasonable?"

She started crying and ran towards the cabin. He let her go. The first ten times she had done this he had gone to her and apologized. Now he was tired of it. Why couldn't she just get it through her head that this was the way things had to be—at least for now—and learn to enjoy it?

Something fell into the middle of his garden and rolled up to his feet. He looked down at the baseball for a second, then grabbed his gun and scanned the area. From across the camp Spider grinned back at him, waving a baseball mitt in the air.

"Wanna play catch?" she yelled.

Tommy ran, jumped his makeshift fence, and raced the full length of the camp. He jumped on Spider and tackled her to the ground. Then he kissed her whole face. He finally got off her and hauled her to her feet.

"Spider, I . . . " he hugged her.

"Yeah, me, too." She smiled and hugged him again.

Laura heard the commotion and came out of the cabin. When she saw what all the ruckus was about, she ran down to greet Spider as well.

"How the hell did you find us?" Tommy asked.

"You told me about coming here all the time when you were a kid. How secluded it was. I figured you'd come here."

That didn't exactly answer Tommy's question. "But how did you find us?" Tommy asked again.

"The library. Reading Is Fundamental, don't you know," she said. "I knew you grew up in Oxburg. I knew you said it was in the area, so I drew a circle on the map. Then I looked for national forests. Then I looked up old WPA and CCC sites in the area. When I overlaid those, it was easy. Once we found the car all I had to do was use my extra sensory perception to feel you out."

Tommy laughed. Then he stood back and looked at her. She looked bad. A black eye, bloodied lip, skin and bones, and tired. Her eyes lacked their usual gleam. "You look like you've been through hell," he said gently.

She almost smiled. "At least."

"Come on, I'll get you something to eat . . . "

"I'm not alone," she said.

Tommy's guts rolled. "Someone followed you . . . "

"No. I brought people with me."

"Carrie?" Laura said hopefully. Tommy had no idea when she had gotten there.

"I wish," Spider said. "Robby, come on in!" she yelled.

Then she said to Tommy. "I was afraid you might shoot first and ask questions later, so I came on in alone."

Tommy watched as three figures walked out of the woods. He recognized the man from one of their interviews. "Him! The garbage man is the Fry Guy?"

"Yes," Spider said.

"You!" Laura screeched. "You knew who the Fry Guy was. You . . . you brought him up here!"

The man was pushing some kind of wheelbarrow looking thing. There was a boy with him, and a woman who had been handcuffed with one of those cheap jobs you could pick up at a gas station.

It only took them a few minutes to catch up to them. Tommy watched with curiosity as the boy walked immediately up to Spider and took her hand, almost hiding behind her. Either there was some genetic link between Spider, the Fry Guy, and this kid, or he had just landed on the planet of the big-handed people.

"Tommy, you've kind of met Robby. This is Mark, and the woman is a So-what-if fuck and our prisoner."

"Her name is Francis," Robby supplied.

"You have a prisoner!" Tommy said, shaking his head in disbelief. "Why do you have a prisoner?"