by A. L. Jambor
When one trial revealed that the structure of the poison broke down when exposed to saltwater thereby losing its toxicity, George concluded that the only deterrent to the poisons survival was saltwater. In a worst case scenario, a whole continent of human beings and animals could be wiped out within a matter of days, but once the poison hit the ocean, it would simply die.
When George reported his findings to Matthew Wilmer, Matthew was elated. George told him that he’d been working alone on the project. He hadn’t trusted anyone else to handle the test tubes as it took only one broken test tube to wipe out the whole country.
Matthew decided that the 6 test tubes that had been created so far would have to be frozen and placed in the vault at once. He told George to keep the plants in the vault as well, and to lock up his research records.
The promises made to Maggie were forgotten, save for a standing order to send supplies to the rainforest once every month. He was so enthralled by his creation that he completely disregarded her threat of a curse. George would be famous, if only among ammunition manufacturers, but famous nonetheless.
George wanted to share his news with someone, but he was a single man and lived alone. He had no one to tell, so he put on his coat and drove to the little diner he ate in every night to see pretty, sweet Alice, who would smile at him and pour his coffee. Alice, with her auburn hair and bright green eyes, would bring him his apple pie. Alice would let him tell her his news.
Chapter 15
George and Alice had been married for 10 years. They had three kids, a boy and two girls. They lived in one of the small stucco houses Wilmer Chemicals had built for its employees in Los Arma, and there they raised their small family. George continued to work for Wilmer, which had recently changed its name to Wilmer and March Pharmaceuticals. George wasn’t happy with the change, but he'd been given a raise and was still able to research to his heart’s content.
Alice began feeling ill. She went to see Dr. Eisner and he found a serious mass on her left lung. She chose not to tell George right away. She felt it was nothing and would go away on its own, despite the doctor’s admonition that it most definitely would not. But Alice didn't want to upset George, and she couldn’t imagine dying with three small children to raise.
When Alice became unable to get out of bed in the morning, George contacted Dr. Eisner, demanding to know why he'd not been able to diagnose his wife’s malady. Dr. Eisner told George that Alice had been told months ago about the mass but had chosen not to enter into treatment. George was angry at both of them.
Alice was sweet and pretty, but she didn’t have a brain in her head. What had attracted George to her had lately begun to irritate the hell out of him. And now she was going to die and leave him with three small children to raise!
Try as he might, George found it very hard not to go into the bedroom and give her a piece of his mind. Instead, he went to the local bar where he had a few drinks and calmed down. After that day, George would stop there for a few drinks every day before coming home.
He arranged for a nurse to stay with Alice and to help with the children. When Alice died, George was having a drink with a young lady he’d met the week before at that very same bar.
When he got home that evening and the nurse gave him the news, George wrote her a check and thanked her for her service. He then called his sister in Toms River, New Jersey, and arranged for his children to live with his sister and her husband while he “sorted out some things.” After the funeral, he and the children boarded a train to Atlantic City.
*****
1985 was not a good year for George Ranier. He was 65 years old, and he was being asked to start thinking about retirement. Helmut March had died 5 years before and his son had assumed the position as head of the chemical discoveries division. This gave him authority over George.
Matthew Wilmer had also died recently, and his son Jacob, who had been running the Wilmer and March operations in New Jersey, didn't have the same respect for George’s value that his father had. Yes, Jacob knew that George had saved his father’s life, but that didn't amount to dollars and cents, and that was what the company was about now.
George Ranier had outlived his usefulness to Wilmer and March, and his ultimate weapon lay frozen in the freezer vault, never to be used by any government. George’s weapon had proved to be too powerful. The government officials who researched his findings decided that the weapon was uncontrollable and had the potential to wipe out the entire United States within a matter of days.
The officials advised Wilmer and March to destroy it, safely, and never produce it again. If it landed in the hands of enemies, it could prove disastrous. So Wilmer and March did the only thing it could do; the company placed the test tubes in the freezer vault and forgot about them. The research had cost them a pretty penny, and they weren't about to destroy years and years of work.
For thirteen years, the tubes languished at the back of the freezer, but they remained front and center in George's memories. Those test tubes were his babies. If George had to go, then his babies would go with him.
George prepared a place in his home freezer for the test tubes. He took his lunch box to work the next morning. George was friendly with the security guards who watched the video screens overlooking the vault. When he came to work that morning, he casually asked who would be working that night, just in case George had to work late. The guard at the desk looked up the schedule and told him Jerry would be working the late shift. George had cut a break. Jerry would be easy to distract with a Playboy and a beer.
As a senior staff member, George had the code for the vault. He also knew that security rarely checked the items that had been frozen over five years, and would have no reason to check on his babies. George was confident he could get into the vault and take his babies home without anyone ever knowing.
He left at his usual time of 5 p.m. He saluted the guards and walked to his car. He had left his lunch box in his office. He ate dinner at local Mexican restaurant and then went to a movie. By the time the show let out, it was close to 11.
George went into a small local drug store and bought a Playboy magazine. The store didn't have beer, so he settled on a bottle of Coke, anything to get Jerry into the bathroom. George then headed back to Wilmer and March.
Jerry was sitting at the security desk when George arrived. They exchanged pleasantries and then George offered Jerry the Playboy saying he had finished it and also gave him the coke. Then George headed for his lab.
Since the lab guys were always going in and out at odd hours, Jerry didn’t think anything of George’s being there. Also, as a senior staff member, George didn’t have to clock in to show he’d been in the building. So, with Jerry happily gulping down the Coke, George waited. About an hour later, Jerry got up from his post, took the Playboy, and headed for the bathroom.
George quickly grabbed his lunch box, went to the vault, punched in the code, and opened the door. He went to the back of the vault to the freezer. He opened the freezer and moved the front items out of the way. There in the back, covered with layers of ice, were George’s babies.
George noticed that the ice was stuck to the back of the freezer. He went back to the lab and got some warm water. He then went back to the freezer and used the water to melt the ice until he could gently pry the tubes away from the wall without breaking them.
George carefully placed the tubes in his insulated lunch box, secured the latch on the lunch box and placed it outside the vault. He then closed the freezer and the vault and headed back to his lab.
He collected his coat and left the lab, lunch box in hand. He passed the security desk and noticed that Jerry was still absent. He left the facility and took his babies home.
When George got home, he placed the tubes in his freezer in the specially prepared spot. He checked the seal on the freezer and decided he would have to get a generator that would kick off in the event of a blackout. He then turned off the lights and went to bed.
&nb
sp; George had never stopped to think about what he had done. He only thought about his life’s work being shut up in a vault, unappreciated and unloved. He never realized that he was also thinking about George Ranier.
George retired shortly after the daring rescue of his babies. Wilmer and March closed the Los Arma facility and left New Mexico. For a time, George worried that someone would notice his babies were missing from their inventory. He spent many a sleepless night during the facility’s shut down, sure that someone would find the tubes listed somewhere. Everyone George had worked with on the project was dead, so when the final truck pulled out of Los Arma without so much as a knock on his door, George relaxed.
George had bought the house he’d been living in from Wilmer and March when they closed the Los Arma lab. He met a nice woman named Sylvia, whom he married in 1990. With his pension from Wilmer and March, George had a comfortable retirement. He had invested well and was careful with his money.
Sylvia was also well off, and they kept their finances separate. She would often ask George why he was so picky about the freezer shutting off. By now, George had graduated to a stand-alone freezer with a generator attached that would switch on if the power went out. George would simply say it was a quirk of his, but he wouldn't allow her to put anything in that freezer.
The freezer had a lock on it, and the key was in a safe deposit box. It had a special custom made seal to keep anything outside out and anything inside in. George was taking no chances of his babies escaping their frozen home.
Sylvia tried to get George to move away from Los Arma. Sylvia wanted to move to Albuquerque. She pushed and prodded George until he finally put his foot down. He told her that they would never move to Albuquerque. Sylvia had had enough. She didn't want to live in the sticks with an unreasonable man. She left George a year after they married and never saw him again.
George’s children rarely spoke to him. Since he had deposited them on his sister’s doorstep, they’d found they didn't need the company of their father, preferring that of their aunt and uncle. One of his children had died, but the others did send him cards for birthdays and Christmas. Other than that, there was little contact. His grandchildren followed suit.
His great-grandchildren, however, were a little more interested in their great-grandfather, especially with the advent of Ancestry.com. His granddaughter Becky came out to New Mexico to meet her great-grandfather, whom she insisted upon calling Pop Pop. It was to differentiate him from her other grandfathers.
She and George got on famously, not only because of her resemblance to Alice, but also because she was charming. One day, Becky decided to move to New Mexico to keep Pop Pop company.
*****
The day after his birthday, George flipped through the channels. He stopped on the news and heard that the last of the nation's nuclear power plants had been shut down as the new amendment banning nuclear energy went into effect. He watched the smiling anchors talking about an accident on I-25. Suddenly he saw a picture of the Wilmer and March laboratory. The old building was being razed to build a highway that would run past George’s house.
George had been feeling more useless than usual. The news about Wilmer and March and the impending highway didn’t make him feel any better. He was 91, he had no friends, could no longer drive, was taking medication to allow him to do the most personal things, and the only contact he had with the outside world was with his doctor and his great-granddaughter.
George would never hurt Becky for the world, but he was tired. He had lived long enough. He decided to stop taking his medications. George knew that if he stopped taking them, he would eventually die. So, after hearing the news, he stopped taking his pills.
A few days went by and George didn't feel any different. He began to think that maybe he could just go on and on, that the medication hadn't been necessary after all.
A week went by before George began to feel a little funny. He was growing weaker. His head pounded from his blood pressure soaring. Without his diuretic, his feet were swelling.
George was just sitting down in his chair to take a nap when the thought struck him that if he died, his babies wouldn’t be safe, nor would anyone else in the world. George had to get rid of his babies.
He decided to dig a hole, a deep hole in the back yard, away from the house. It had to be very deep. Oh, if only he could drive. He could go miles into the desert. But he was stuck here on the outskirts of Albuquerque, and he couldn't tell a soul what he had done.
George slowly made his way to the shed. He put down his cane and picked up a shovel. The dust was thick on the old shovel. George used it like a cane to walk out a ways from the house. He stamped the dirt to find a soft spot. He then began very slowly to dig small shovelfuls of dirt.
The sun was hot and George was feeling the heat. He had actually been able to dig down quite a ways. The hole had to be deep, not wide, so it wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be, but he realized he’d better get out of the sun before he passed out.
George stayed in the house for a little while, cooling off. He was feeling a bit dizzy from the digging. He wanted to get his babies into the ground before dark, or he wouldn't be able to find the hole.
George went into the attached garage where he kept the freezer. A couple of weeks ago, he’d been in town with Becky and without her knowledge, had retrieved the key from the safe deposit box. He also took out his will and some jewelry he’d kept there. Then he closed the account for the box.
Now as he stood in front of the freezer, he wondered at the divine providence that had made him get that key. He hadn't been thinking about doing this at the time. It must be fate.
At that moment, George remembered the curse Margaret DeMorte had talked about. He thought about Alice, about his children, and about his lonely life and wondered if Margaret had found out what he was doing with her Mortevida plants. Maybe she had a native fulfill her promise of a curse. Maybe that's why George was so miserable and why he’d been such a terrible husband and father.
George opened the latch on the freezer and saw the insulated lunch bag. The bag was stuck to the ice. George opened it and removed his babies. They were frozen solid. They had been in that bag for 22 years. He shuffled to his kitchen table and placed them in the center. He put the napkin holder on one side and the salt and pepper shakers on the other so that if they tilted they wouldn’t fall down.
George felt dizzy and weak and tried to sit down. He didn't make it to the chair. He collapsed onto his knees and then fell over.
Becky found him in that position when she came by that weekend. George had had a massive stroke that killed him instantly. As she was rolling him over, his body pushed the table, knocking the babies over, causing them to roll to the floor where they broke into a million pieces. Becky fell like a stone as the poison entered her brain through her nose, killing her instantly.
*****
Within days the population of New Mexico was decimated, with other states going down fast. One by one, state after state fell in the wake of George’s babies. There was no panic because people died so suddenly. Relatives separated by miles didn't know anything had happened to their loved ones as they too succumbed to the aggressive poison. No news anchors were left to report about it. People would be out shopping and drop where they stood. Bodies littered the streets and shopping areas. Office buildings were full of rotting corpses.
Soon, there was no one left in the continental United States. Within days of removing them from their safe hold, George’s babies had ended all life in North America save for group people in a Florida biosphere, a bug-eyed terrier, and several very special children.
Chapter 16
The Wilmer Biosphere, Palm Harbor, Florida
Mindy ran through the “city” looking for Mark. She hadn’t seen him at breakfast or in the library. She had looked in the store and had even gone to the field. Now she was headed for his house. She stopped for Baby Girl to give the dog some exercise.
As th
ey approached Mark’s house, Mindy looked around to see if anybody was watching. The girls didn’t know about her relationship with Mark and she didn’t want them to tease her. When she was sure no one was around, she went to his door and knocked. There was no answer. She turned the knob. The door opened, and she and Baby Girl went inside.
Mark wasn’t there, but his bed was messed up. Mindy looked in the bathroom and found towels all over the floor.
"Slob,” said Mindy out loud. Baby Girl wagged her tail in agreement. But it did look like he’d taken a shower that morning.
Mindy walked to the kitchen. There were no dishes in the sink, just lots of snack wrappers in the trash bin. Wherever Mark had gone, he was full and clean.
"Well, Baby Girl, I think I have to do this by myself. I think we should go find a grown-up.”
Mindy and Baby Girl left Mark’s house and walked toward the cafeteria. She saw Andrew sitting on a chair in the cafeteria drinking coffee and reading a magazine he had picked up on one of his runs. All items brought back had to go through the decontamination chamber, so the magazine was all wrinkled. Mindy slowed down as she approached him.
She had never talked to Andrew before, but Mindy knew he’d been one of the men who found her. She knew she shouldn’t like him for that reason alone, but Andrew was always playing with the kids and he seemed really nice. She just couldn’t bring herself to dislike him.
"Andrew,” said Mindy. Andrew looked up from his magazine and smiled.
“Hi,” he said.
His smile seemed to light up his whole face. “You’re the little girl with the dog. What can I do for ya?”
"I was wondering.” Mindy held her hands behind her back and looked upward. She bit her lower lip, rolled her eyes, and then looked at Andrew. “I wanted to know, well, do you think you could show me the outside?”