Soldiers of Fame and Fortune Full Series Omnibus: Nobody’s Fool, Nobody Lives Forever, Nobody Drinks That Much, Nobody Remembers But Us, Ghost Walking, 12 Book series...

by Michael Todd

  He opened the office door and stood aside while the two women preceded him and seated themselves in the two chairs in front of his desk. Holly shifted a little uncomfortably while he closed the door and walked around, sat, and leaned back. “This room is completely soundproof and has no audio surveillance. You can say whatever you want in here and literally, no one outside this room will be able to hear you.”

  Holly nodded. “Okay. Cool.”

  Salinger leaned forward and put his hands together and his gaze flicked from one to the other. She wasn’t sure what to say at that moment and he could clearly tell. “How is JB?”

  She was shocked. “Uh…he’s doing okay.”

  How the fuck does he know about JB? She thought about it for a second before finally, it clicked. Hickok had told her that she had a contact whom she’d connected with. Amanda had obviously also brought her there. Salinger chuckled at her facial expression. “Yes, I know. We’ve thought about this kind of stuff for a long time, you know. About the parts of the Zoo that can actually help us instead of harming us.”

  Holly realized right then and there that he knew about the goop, but she wasn’t sure how much. She cleared her throat. “I’ll cut directly to the chase, then. If you know about JB then you know that there isn’t much time. I have done as much research as I can and I’ve come up with some samples beyond the minimal serum I give him to keep him going. But I’ve hit a brick wall at this point.”

  He looked thoughtfully at her. “What kind of brick wall?”

  She chewed on the inside of her mouth and shifted her gaze to the pictures on the wall behind him. “Well, I have come up with some possibilities that I think might be promising but I have no idea how to test them. I don’t want to simply give them to JB and have him either drop dead or end up as some fucking Zoo monster. I can make predictions using the theories I have constructed, but that isn’t enough for me to feel comfortable enough to actually test it on a live person.”

  Salinger rubbed his chin. “Do you have a testable sample?”

  Holly fixed him with a speculative look, not sure how much she should reveal. He smiled and nodded. “Or you can simply talk the science with me, how about that?”

  Amanda slapped her hands against the chair arms and smiled. “This is my cue. I’m gonna go work on some stuff. Will you show her to the room when you are done?”

  He nodded. “Of course.”

  The armorer patted her on the arm and left. Holly shifted in her chair, slightly ill at ease. “Okay. The science of it all. If you know about goop—and since you are a scientist yourself—you must know that it’s comprised of substances very different to what we find on Earth. In fact, all of them have a different makeup, some down to a cellular level.”

  Salinger shook his head. “Right. but many of them have similar but not identical makeups. You can therefore compare different species from the Zoo and pair them with what they are most similar to from Earth. That allows you to have some idea of how they will react with each other.”

  Holly blinked but reminded herself that with his scientific background, his understanding was only to be expected. “Correct. And by knowing these things, you can test different combinations and use them on organisms like insects, plants, and even mice to test their purity and effects.”

  He smiled. “Right. Tests that I have done in the past.”

  She had been apprehensive, at first, and reluctant to share any of the information she had with him. But if he had already run tests of his own, he very well might be the person who knew the answers she so desperately needed. She hesitated for only a few seconds before she removed the chain from around her neck and handed him the drive.

  Salinger smiled and retrieved a non-connected computer from the drawer. She nodded, glad that he knew to use that. “That is my research. If you search under yesterday’s date, you will see the tests and outcomes that I have so far.”

  He pulled the information up and read through it in silence. Holly looked at her lap and hoped that she hadn’t made any really terrible mistakes. For some reason, she felt like a first-year in the presence of her science idol professor. He looked at her and smiled. “I have to admit that we have had a few plants to work with over the years, either from pulling them or buying them. We’ve been able to work through some really good tests. I haven’t personally been hands-on as much as I wanted to be once things picked up for Heavy Metal, but I’ve stayed abreast of every piece of research that has come out of that lab. It was kind of my baby—my project—when we got set up. I’m sure you’ve heard a story or two, especially if you know JB.”

  Holly chuckled. “Yeah, he is an amazing storyteller.”

  Salinger turned the computer and pointed to the data. “You are definitely on the right track. There is no doubt in my mind that if you worked on this for another week or so, you would come to the right conclusion, but you would need better tests in order to do that.”

  Her shoulders sagged slightly and before she could say anything, he continued. “However, I know that time is of the essence here. I’ve been told that JB’s treatment at this point is simply maintenance and there will come a point where his body is immune to the serum that simply keeps it at bay. So, I will show you the few things in here that you need to change in order to create the right concoction. It’s literally a small shift in how you splice and combine the ingredients.”

  Holly straightened instantly and her heart thudded. “Really?”

  He chuckled and turned the computer to face him, then typed into the document. She waited nervously for him to finish but grinned when she realized she was actually in what might be a mild state of shock. He showed her the screen once more. Her mouth fell open as she read through the data he had entered. “This…this will work. Thank you.”

  Salinger grinned and leaned back in his chair. Holly could see his age, and although he was in his thirties, he looked more like a young twenty-year-old with the excitement and curiosity that gleamed in his eyes. Behind that, though, lurked wisdom and sadness that she didn’t quite understand.

  He rested his hands together in his lap and looked at the ceiling. “Decisions, decisions. That is what it always comes down to.”

  Holly tilted her head. “I don’t follow you.”

  He turned his attention to her, his expression serious. “Decisions that you will have to make.”

  She shook her head. “I will give JB the serum to save his life.”

  “And then you need to decide whether or not to unleash Pandora’s box into the world.”

  Chapter Seven

  Salinger dragged in a deep breath and stood. He meandered the office and studied the pictures on his wall. There were a ton of them with him and various teammates, a couple inside the pit of a mech, and several of him, Madigan, and Courtney. All of them looked like post-Zoo trips, but always with a smile.

  He tapped his fingers on his side and turned to Holly. “It’s true that the majority of mercs do this solely for the money, and I can’t say I don’t. But part of me is still a scientist and with that, we are faced with moral and ethical questions.”

  A somewhat nostalgic smile crossed his face when he tapped his finger on a picture of a young version of him, obviously pre-Zoo, standing in what looked like New York. “The challenge is that if you release an anti-aging formula—which is essentially what this is—it will most likely end up in the hands of the wrong people. What do you do then? Do you allow a person to live beyond their defined age?”

  Holly leaned forward, her suddenly stiff posture a sure sign that she didn’t like where this conversation would go. “JB isn’t meant to die yet. Something outside our environment sentenced him to an early death. This isn’t cancer, heart problems, or old age. It’s poison. I can’t turn my back on him simply because I fear the ethical dilemma afterward.”

  Salinger shook his head. “I’m not talking about JB. He gets the serum and he gets his life back. I’m talking about after that. What about a Hitler you bring back fr
om the dead? What about a Stalin? What about a Jeffrey Dahmer or a Hannibal Lecter? What if, for the right price, a dictator is able to cheat death? A billionaire, with all of that wealth and power, is able to start fresh at twenty-one?”

  She sighed. “This isn’t about JB, then. Okay, you named all those horrible people. But what about children? What about a single mom who is taken away from her child? What about those who could be saved, who could offer the world a plentiful bounty of knowledge and information, but are too poor to find treatment for what ails them? There are plenty of bad people, but I can promise you there are as many, if not more, good people out there. People who deserve the opportunity to live strong and prosper.”

  He folded his arms over his chest and smiled. “And that is why I ask if you are ready to play God. Are you ready to decide who gets to live and who dies? Are you ready to take that burden on your shoulders when the good becomes the evil? Are you ready to have that kind of power at your fingertips and never waver because of your own personal feelings for someone?”

  “I don’t know. That’s a really heavy thing to think about.” Holly looked down at her hands to avoid his clear, challenging gaze.

  Salinger sat in chair the beside her. “I know it is. Trust me, I know.”

  She dragged in a ragged breath and looked around the room. “Then what are my options?”

  He smiled. “That’s a good question. I’ve thought a lot about this. So, your first option is to simply keep the information secret. Save JB and either stash that information somewhere or refuse to hand it to anyone else. You keep it secret to your grave and then you take it with you into the ashes.”

  Holly looked wildly at him. “I think that would be harder than anyone could imagine. Think about having the cure to anything in your brain. You would have to look at your loved ones dying and let them die. You would have to fight through the desire to help when you knew you could save everyone and everything. And then you have to ask yourself, would you use that serum to save yourself?”

  Salinger nodded. “And that is when people start to notice. Companies and countries around the world would immediately take an interest. You would be their entire focus. People would offer huge sums of money, beg, try to steal it, or somehow to pry it out of you by legal means.”

  She scoffed. “Not to mention the darker side where people try to take my blood and figure out exactly what it was that did it. I would never be safe, no matter where I went. I wouldn’t even be fully safe with the people I knew the best. Because one day, they would face death, and they would expect me to give them what I gave myself. They would expect me to save their lives.”

  He leaned back and his expression was a little sad. “That’s right. And then a whole slew of new problems opens up. Unless you decided to never give it to yourself or anyone else, you could never keep it a total secret from the world. And I’m not sure that you would want to.”

  Holly shook her head. “I mean, I’m tough, but I have to admit, I’m not that fucking tough. I am not watch people die tough. I don’t even know if I would be tough enough in the face of my own death to stop myself from taking it. That would be a very uncertain path. It would be something that would haunt me for the rest of my life on this planet.”

  Salinger tapped his thumbs together. “And you would still play God, only in this scenario, you would damn every human on earth to never evolving and never moving past the inevitable destruction of the cells that are programmed to die in our body.”

  She groaned. “The cells that should continue to grow and multiply but somewhere in their makeup, the lines were crossed and instead, we begin to die when we have only started to taste life.”

  “So, the next option. You keep the serum. You know how to make it, how to administer it, and what it does. Then you wield the power. You hold the staff of God and weigh in on the people of this planet.”

  Holly chuckled, but it sounded oddly brittle. “I feel like that would take a really long time.”

  He shrugged. “You would reach whom you could. The rest would be out of luck. You would sit and share the limited amount of formula you make with the moms you decide deserve it the most. Then you decide which dads can have it.”

  She shook her head and scrubbed a hand over her face. “But then what about beloved grandfathers? What about childless aunts and uncles? What about abandoned children with no parents? Children stuck in the system?”

  “That’s right. You would have to sift through the billions of people that are truly deserving to figure out who was the most deserving of all.”

  The agony of that choice made her wince. “But then the danger creeps in. You are offered money, bribes, goods, and you can be swayed to give the serum to people who are none of those. And you end up right back where you started, resurrecting the billionaires and dictators of the world while the mothers, fathers, and children die.”

  Salinger put his hands out in a gesture that indicated futility. “Oh, the dilemma. Sometimes, being a genius who discovers the huge things is not a blessing in the least.”

  A little agitated, Holly pushed from the chair and paced the room. She paused at the bookcase and traced her fingers over the book spines. “Being human in this equation is the biggest weakness of all. It’s not the goop or the ethical dilemma. It’s the heart, the emotion. It’s the very thing that makes us human to begin with, and those human traits are what makes it impossible to choose.”

  He shook his head with surprising certainty. “That’s where you’re wrong. It is never impossible to choose. It’s merely impossible to imagine yourself making those kinds of choices. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t capable of it. You have to make the choice you think you are most capable of. I would never be able to hide it forever. Not for myself, but because of the people I love. And I would never be able to choose who lives and who dies, my moral compass is not that strong. No matter how hard I look at it, I cannot separate the humanity from a human. I cannot make a purely scientific decision, especially if I have to look them in the eye and tell them I will not save their life.”

  Holly grimaced and realized her mind still searched for a solution. “So, do it by paper. Do it by application.”

  “Don’t you think that’s cheating?” Salinger smirked. “If you rob someone of their life, you should look them in the eye to do it. Otherwise, you become no better than the corporations. Which brings us to the next option. Tell me, if you no longer had to work and could do whatever you wanted to do—if money was endless—where would you go?”

  “Well, I think I would retravel the world. I would go to all the places I went when I was working but I would make the time to really see them. I’d climb the mountains, go to the festivals, sit in the holy places, and take in everything that makes up this world. Then, when I was done with that, I would buy a house in the islands and spend my time relaxing on the beach drinking cocktails and being fanned by muscular men with giant leaves.”

  Salinger threw his head back and laughed. “It looks like you have that in common with a lot of ladies. It does sound nice though. So, you give in. You relinquish the burden of having to choose. You sell the information to the highest bidder, become filthy rich, retire, and completely wash your hands of the whole thing.”

  She wrinkled her nose in immediate protest. “That one has the most appeal, I won’t lie. But can you really wash your hands of the whole thing? Can you really sit on your beach or visit the Tibetan monks and not think about how you held the secret to everlasting life in your hands and gave it to the rich simply to become one of them?”

  He chuckled wryly. “I know a lot of people who could do that in a heartbeat. It would be a no-brainer for them. That’s for sure. But I see the dilemma for someone like you. There is a restlessness in the back of your mind that no amount of cocktails, hot men, or travel plans could settle. And on top of that, you would have to seriously protect yourself. Everyone would know that you were the one who figured it out. They would know that even though you sold the de
sign, you knew how to create an elixir that would keep them alive for a very long time.”

  Holly rolled her eyes. “Great. So, you become rich, but you have to live inside a compound, walled away from the world out of fear. All the money in the world wouldn’t fix that. You could make a really big compound, but in the end, you are still in a prison.”

  Salinger tapped a steady tattoo on the chair arms. “A prison in your own mind, and a prison in your own life. Although I have to admit, having anything I wanted in that prison might make it a bit more bearable.”

  “And you would never know if people were your friend for you or for the information you had stored in your mind.”

  He pointed his finger at Holly. “And the elixir stored in your safe. Because you better believe I’d get some of that shit and not pay for it. It would be part of the contract. I’m living forever, bitches.”

  Holly giggled spontaneously and then sighed deeply and dropped her arms to her sides. “Is that it? Are those my only choices? Play God, play God secretly, or simply let the rich have their way and live in exile because of it? I wish I’d never picked up the fucking lab equipment.”

  She plopped down in the chair and pouted. He smiled and patted her leg. She found the simple gesture oddly reassuring. “But then you wouldn’t have saved JB’s life. So there is a silver lining to you finding this. And…I think there is one more option, but it’s a little out there.”

  He stood and walked around his desk, turned his back to Holly, and stared at the pictures. She narrowed her eyes and shifted to the edge of her chair. “What is the other option?”

  Salinger turned with his hand on his chin. “Instead of playing God, you could play superhero.”

  Holly raised an eyebrow. “You mean like squeeze this ass into spandex and hustle around the world, jab people full of serum when they aren’t looking, and vanish into the night?”