Blood Born

by Matthew Warner

  “Containing what?”

  “Embryonic stem cells whose DNA I’d modified through transfection with a specialized retrovirus. These stem cells grafted themselves in vivo onto Frederica’s immature embryo. They influenced the remainder of its development and created inheritable attributes.” He looked at her expectantly, but Randall just stared at him in shock. “My method was really quite revolutionary, you know. A breakthrough. For a transgenetic change like this to be successful, modified stem cells must normally be introduced at the blastocyst stage. This happened quite beyond that.”

  “You . . . created the bigfoots. Is that right?”

  Her passenger made an impatient huff. “Haven’t you been listening?”

  “Oh my god.”

  “But hear me, Detective. I never meant for any of this to happen. Frederica was supposed to have given birth nine months later—or perhaps three months, depending on some computer simulations—to a physically superior being. My design was the product of years of research into the effectuation of specialized knock-out and knock-in characteristics. I based it on painstaking analysis of the DNA sequences identified in the Human Genome Project.”

  She sluggishly tried to keep up with him. My god, he created . . .

  What came out of her mouth was thankfully more coherent. “The Genome Project. That’s the thing where scientists spelled out all of our genes. Is that right?”

  His face lit up with pleasure. “Exactly. The HGP was a vast, multi-year undertaking in which researchers sequenced all of our chromosomes. If our genome were printed, it would fill two hundred phone books each a thousand pages long. We can finally read the names and numbers, so to speak. The only trouble is that we still don’t know who most of the names are. Apparently, less than one seventy-second of the entire genome is related to the growth of a human being. The rest of it is ‘junk DNA’—a mishmash of things such as unused remnants from earlier stages in our evolution. There’s also a host of ancient parasites that infected us. They encoded themselves into our DNA and were unable to leave.”

  Randall held up a hand. “All right, I get the picture.”

  “I was concerned with the genetic remnants,” Schaefer went on, “those traits, such as great strength and agility, that CalPark has proprietarily identified as originating when we were ancient hominids or when we existed as even earlier forms—like the small, tailed mammals that survived the downfall of the dinosaurs. In most instances, I merely eliminated the silencer genes that suppressed the expression of those traits. And in other cases, I imported whole sequences from other species such as felines.”

  Randall’s body had gone cold. “But you fucked up.”

  “Yes.” Schaefer swallowed and rubbed his neck. “Frederica didn’t show up for her next appointment, just as I told the police. The only reason I . . . didn’t tell the whole truth was because I didn’t want them to discover my illegal experiment.”

  “But you knew she was dead, didn’t you?”

  “No, but I . . . I suspected. I didn’t know for sure until the first reports emerged of the bigfoots. When I saw them on the TV, I knew it must have started with her.”

  “What did you tell Frederica the experiment was for?”

  “Almost exactly what I told you—that the injection was to enhance the strength and agility of her baby. I promised to adopt the infant from her and to pay her a quarter million dollars.”

  “She didn’t have any reservations about that?”

  “No. She thanked me, actually.”

  Randall watched him carefully, looking for the telltale mannerisms of a lie—such as a glance at the ceiling, or a nod of the head at the same time he said “no.” But Schaefer kept himself rock-steady and looked directly at her.

  “What’s your connection to Margaret Connolly?”

  He blinked and appeared confused. This also appeared genuine. “Who? Oh, the fertility doctor. She works in the clinic downstairs.”

  “Did she help you with these experiments?”

  Schaefer snorted a laugh. “You must be joking.”

  A bright light suddenly flooded the car. A National Guard truck with multiple spotlights pulled alongside them. Christ, she was losing her edge; she didn’t even see it approaching.

  The spotlights were diverted away from her eyes as she rolled down her window.

  “Ma’am, do you require assistance?” a voice said.

  “No sir, we’re wrapping up here getting ready to head back to the station.” She leaned out and saw a half dozen soldiers peering down at her from the back of the truck.

  “We’ll stay here till you leave, ma’am.”

  That’s fine, she thought and dropped her car into gear. I’ve heard about all I can stomach.

  She waved thanks to the soldiers and accelerated back to headquarters.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Back in the safety of the police parking lot behind the McLean station, Randall opened the rear door so Schaefer could climb out.

  “Turn around and place your hands on the car,” she said.

  “Oh, so now you’re arresting me after you’ve detained and questioned me. I can’t wait to see my lawyer.”

  He was right. She’d done this ass-backwards, and it would be difficult to get anything he’d already said admitted as evidence.

  “Just turn around and do it,” she said.

  Then again, Schaefer seemed proud enough of himself that he might be willing to admit everything all over again, even after he’d been read his rights.

  After patting down his pockets and finding nothing but a money clip, Randall pulled one wrist and then the other behind the man’s back and handcuffed him. The parking lot was being used as a staging area for both civilian and military vehicles, and within moments another officer spotted them and jogged over. Randall asked for help escorting the prisoner into the station. They each took an arm and began walking.

  “Mr. Schaefer, you are under arrest,” she said as they moved. “You have the right to remain silent. If you give up that right, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law . . .”

  She tried to remember the name of the federal appeals court decision from 1999 that said a suspect’s voluntary confession prior to receiving a Miranda warning would no longer automatically be kicked out of evidence.

  “You have the right to an attorney and to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided to you at no cost. . . .”

  A couple of paces short of the station’s back door, Schaefer stopped walking. Randall interrupted herself to say, “Come on.” She tightened her grip on his arm and tugged him.

  “No,” Schaefer said.

  His voice had acquired a strange edge—a low, guttural rumble, like a growl. Randall turned to him and glanced at his face. He was smiling. His eyes were yellow. His pupils . . .

  His pupils were vertical slits.

  The handcuffs snapped apart as he brought his hands forward. Randall shouted in surprise as he pushed her and the other cop away. She fell to the parking lot, skinning her palms on asphalt.

  Other cops in the lot were already reacting—drawing their guns, running toward the commotion.

  “Stop him!” Randall shouted.

  But it was too late. Still smiling, Schaefer crouched down, then sprang up far into the air. Officers reached them an instant too late. They stared dumbly as Schaefer landed on the roof of the police station.

  Schaefer laughed at them—it sounded more like a snarl—before running out of sight toward the other end of the roof.

  By the time the police could circle around the building, he was gone.

  Chapter 15

  Baker saw two ways to look at his current duty assignment: the glass-half-full way or the glass-half-empty way.

  The glass-half-full way said he was Detective Charles Paisley Baker, the third, Fairfax County Police homicide squad, who was now his organization’s official liaison to the Department of Homeland Security. H
e had been hand-picked by Sergeant Weston Lively, on the authority of higher-ranking officers, to function as a special advisor to the DHS’s regional operations coordinator, Lucien Gastineau. At least that was the way Sergeant Lively presented the job before ordering him into the black van idling behind police headquarters. Baker complied, of course, swinging himself between crutches, his right leg below the knee immobilized in a hard cast. His ankle’s nerves buzzed like tuning forks although he’d taken two Percocets with lunch—one of which even stayed down long enough to be digested.

  The glass-half-empty way, however, said Lively was happy to escape the job himself and that he was glad to get rid of Baker. Give the useless, broken-ankled man something constructive but menial to do, Lively must have thought. If this were true, Baker felt like a geriatric with fifty years of experience behind him but who was now relegated to the humiliation of collecting shopping carts from a Wal-Mart parking lot.

  Sure, I know the score, Detective Baker told himself as he crutched down a corridor of the DHS’s Homeland Security Operations Center. But who cares what that uppity nigger thinks anyway? Lively’s nobody. The real gentleman to impress is walking in front of me.

  The gentleman in question, Mr. Gastineau, was leading the group of visiting police officers through the curved underground corridors of the DHS bunker. He supported his portly frame with a brass-handled cane—my lands, the man has style—and strolled with the self-assurance of a lifetime of past achievements. There were the figureheads in DC, and then there were those like Gastineau, the real wielders of power. The others in the group seemed to sense this and so gave the old man a wide berth, noting every twitch of his goateed chin and cringing when he peered at them over his bifocals.

  Perhaps these other representatives from local law enforcement—from Arlington County, Washington, Montgomery County, Prince George’s County, and the Virginia and Maryland State Police—were realizing, like Baker had, how insignificant they were in this setting. Good gracious, they’d even had to wear blindfolds on the trip here—blindfolds, like in some bad movie—so they wouldn’t later betray the exact location of the DHS’s ultra-sophisticated command and control center.

  Their presence here was supposed to be advisory and to promote communication. Following this tour, they would each be given a “communications station” in another room and expected to be on standby as “ambassadors” to their departments. It was complete hogwash, of course; the DHS could route messages far more efficiently through e-mail bulletins than “ambassadors.”

  Baker suspected his true reason for being here was political. The president, ensconced in the safety of his “undisclosed location” while DC was under siege, was trying to make himself feel better about federalizing local law enforcement. At the same time, however, the president hoped to forestall criticism about failing to exert proper control during the crisis. Baker didn’t see how the man could have it both ways. In any case, he knew this assignment promised to be a multi-day one, and worst of all, an overnight one. He could only imagine what kinds of bunking arrangement awaited him in this windowless submarine of a place. The department better pay him time-and-a-half for this, by God.

  Gastineau paused before a set of double metal doors and faced the group. “Now, gentleman, what you’re about to enter has been seen by few civilians without ‘secret’ security clearances. You’ve been granted this short visit to impress upon you that we have this situation well in hand. Soon, order will be restored and police power returned to you. In the meantime, I ask you to note carefully the valiant efforts of our staff, and of course—” he smiled as he pushed through the doors, “please don’t touch anything.”

  Detective Baker gaped as he crutched into a huge war room straight out of a NASA mission control center. They ascended into the center of a gigantic donut made of computer screens as tall as he was. Most of the screens were showing feeds from traffic cameras, local news stations, and topographical maps overlaid with dozens of moving GPS icons. Baker stared at one of these maps and blinked when he realized it was three-dimensional. Damn, and he wasn’t even wearing those red-and-green glasses like at the movie theater. Scores of work stations filled the center of the donut. Each was manned by officers wearing a type of blue uniform he’d never seen before.

  “Ahem,” Gastineau said.

  Baker realized the old man was waiting for him to join the group. They were standing at a railing that overlooked a bank of wall-sized computer screens. Baker’s face burned with embarrassment as he hurried to catch up.

  “As I was saying,” Gastineau continued, “this is our All-Emergency Room. From here, we coordinate all levels of local and federal anti-terrorist activities nationwide. But fully eighty percent of our resources at the moment are focused on the UPA threat to the nation’s capital.”

  He pulled a remote control from his pocket and clicked at the nearest monitor. The screen filled with a grainy image of someone’s headlong flight through foliage. The greenish tint told Baker that it was taken with a night vision camera.

  “This is a feed from one of our Guardsmen’s helmet cameras,” Gastineau said. The other police representatives murmured as they crowded closer to the observation railing. “It’s a live picture, showing a seek-and-destroy operation now in progress.”

  From ahead of the camera came glimpses of a soldier in tactical gear moving at a full run.

  “Seems like they’re onto somethin’,” Baker said, eager to have Gastineau’s attention—but in a good way this time.

  “Indeed.” The old man’s gaze never left the screen. “I believe this is in your jurisdiction, Detective Baker. Burke Lake Park?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s in my county.”

  The foliage abruptly cleared as the soldier came upon a playground. Swing sets and metal kiddie horses glowed green in the night vision view. Two blobs arced into the frame and landed among the equipment. They could have been stones, for all Baker could tell. Clouds of gas immediately came hissing out of them—at least he assumed they were hissing since the picture had no sound.

  “Tear gas grenades?” someone asked.

  “Not tear gas, but we modified the same type of device.” Gastineau abandoned the railing to lean on his cane with both hands. “The gas cloud you see is an aerosolized leutinizing hormone. LH is the substance we believe the creatures taste for in a woman’s blood to determine if she’s fertile and therefore worth raping. Our tactical teams received the grenades today. Their orders are to use them to draw the creatures out into the open.”

  As the group watched the screen, Gastineau went on to detail the pharmacological processes used to replicate and then convert the hormone into a weapons-grade form. It was easier to follow the camera action now that the soldiers had stopped moving—what action there was, at least. A huge cloud of gas obscured all but a bench in the foreground. From the bottom of the screen pointed the viewpoint soldier’s rifle.

  After more time passed, the visitor from the Virginia State Police cleared his throat. “So, why did they choose this particular park for this operation? Were there some UPAs nearby?”

  Gastineau frowned as he stared at the image. “I had assumed so.”

  An aide approached and whispered into his ear. Gastineau nodded and then followed him to a work station.

  Meanwhile, the group continued to watch the green image of billowing smoke. Baker couldn’t see any of the other soldiers but imagined they had surrounded the clearing, lying in the woods with guns aimed, waiting for a curious bigfoot to appear and start sniffing around the whirl-a-wheel.

  Lord, this was boring. He needed to sit down and rest his aching ankle, but there wasn’t a free chair in sight. The tops of his crutches were chafing his armpits, so he leaned against the railing as he watched.

  Nothing but a green, static screen.

  He could’ve used one of those night vision gadgets the other night, by God. It might have saved him from stepping into that sinkhole in the woods behind Fairfax Hospital. His ankle had sna
pped like a tree branch. The pain had been so bad that if he had seen a bigfoot coming for him, claws extended to rip out his throat, he wouldn’t have cared. Worse, he lost one of his expensive Brunori shoes into that hole. And worst of all, he imagined Detective Randall had laughed her pretty ass off at the news, the damned hussy.

  And all for nothing. They didn’t find the girls kidnapped from the hospital—Sandy Giddes, Jan Lee, and Daniella Connolly—and now that the command structure had changed, there were no plans to renew the search. The priorities were seek-and-destroy missions and looting prevention. Oh well, those girls were all probably dead now, anyway. Just before he entered the black van to come here, in fact, he learned that the Giddes girl had been found in a church parking lot. Her naked body—or what was left of it—was missing both breasts and half of her face. A bloody umbilical cord hung from her vagina.

  Baker glanced over his shoulder. A second aide had joined Gastineau in the huddle. They continued to cast nervous glances at the camera feed. The old man’s expression was grave as he asked a question. The only words Baker could make out were: “. . . the correct hormone? Get him on the phone for me.”

  Hah. Apparently, it all wasn’t peaches and cream down in Savannah. That would teach those smug assholes to act like they knew everything. He couldn’t wait until he had a chance to prove himself to Gastineau and become his trusted advisor, maybe even second-in-command. The first thing he’d tell that old man to do would be to clean house. Get rid of the dumb niggers like Lively—he’d say it more delicately, of course—and get rid of what he called the BWBs, Bitches With Badges. Detective Randall would be the first BWB on his shit list, by God.

  I’d like to wipe my ass with that bitch, that cunt, that life support system for a hole.

  Goddamn her. He was the one in charge of the Cassandra Elliott homicide case, not her. And yet Randall disrespectfully contaminated that crime scene with her interfering little fingers, not even taking a note before touching the body, not even pausing to reflect in that empty head of hers that maybe she didn’t belong there because she wasn’t on the dad-blasted homicide squad.