by Jon Land
“It started many months ago, half a year maybe,” Marna began, and almost immediately her voice matched the boy’s so that his words seemed to emerge in English. “There were only a few of the men at first, but then more came. They said they could help us. They said they had a way to make our crops grow faster, stronger, and more plentiful, so the weather wouldn’t affect them as much and they wouldn’t need as much water.
“The village elders agreed to let them help us, and more men followed in many trucks with much equipment and bags and bags of special seeds. Our old crops were destroyed and the land tilled over. The new seeds were planted immediately. The crops began to sprout the next day or the day after. They were full grown in—”
The boy kept speaking but Marna stopped.
“What’s he saying?” Dogan asked her.
“It can’t be right,” she said, her face suddenly pale.
“What did he say?” Dogan repeated. The boy was silent now.
Marna took a deep breath. “That the new crops were ready to be harvested in only three weeks.”
“Tell him to go on,” Dogan instructed.
“But three weeks, Ross! Doesn’t that—”
“Just tell him to go on.”
Marna complied reluctantly and started translating again, her voice nervous now. “The elders started asking about the harvest. In time, in time, the men said. But the crops had reached full growth. Only three weeks, but they were ready for harvest. Everyone could tell. But the men would not allow us to touch them. The village grumbled. Our food supply ran low and there was little to replenish it. We were not even allowed to leave the town. Guards were posted everywhere with big guns. People became angry and scared. Many would sit all day watching the crops that had taken only three weeks to grow to perfection. But we couldn’t touch them. It was like a dream. You can see, but not taste or touch. The elders, some of them, protested. They … disappeared.”
Dogan could see the boy was holding back tears. He could almost hear the youth urge himself to be brave, to act like a man. He had seen enough death for any thousand men, though. He had the tears coming to him.
“More men with guns began to arrive, a whole truck full. Suddenly we were treated like sheep. The entire town was herded into the church and ordered to eat and sleep there. We were allowed to wash or use the toilet only in shifts. They started feeding us well, though, and most people relaxed and stopped worrying. Others, the smart ones, feared the worst was coming.” The boy gulped some air and swallowed hard. “My father was one of these. One night he awoke the four of us very late when the crickets’ chirp was at its loudest. There were only two guards and neither paid much attention. We crawled across the floor past all the sleeping bodies into a secret room behind the altar. The room had a trap door in it leading into a tunnel. And the tunnel led outside to the hillside on the edge of town.” The boy was crying now, not bothering to hold back. “He made us go! We didn’t want to but he made us! He said he’d follow as soon as he could but for now he had to stay with the rest of the family. The guards would miss adults, he said, but four children could slip by them.”
The boy broke down and smothered his head in his hands, squeezing his knees to his chest. He steadied himself as best he could and spoke again through sobs and whimpers.
“The next morning a jeep arrived carrying two men. One was dressed like a soldier but he didn’t look like one. With him was a giant with slanted eyes and a white suit. The giant lifted a steel box from the back of the jeep. The new man talked with the leaders of the troops who had become our jailers. A little after that another man came out of the building dressed like a spaceman in a gray outfit that shone in the sun. He was carrying a funny-looking spray gun and he pulled a can from the steel box and stuck it in the back of the gun. Then the spaceman moved off into the fields. He stood where the new crops started and sprayed a gray mist from inside the gun. He sprayed for just a few seconds. Then—”
The boy kept speaking. Once again Marna had stopped.
“Marna,” Dogan prodded.
She rubbed her face with her fingers. They were trembling. “I misheard what he said. I’m going to ask him to repeat it.”
She spoke to the boy in Spanish. He nodded and did as she told him.
Still Marna remained silent. “I’ve got to be hearing this wrong,” she said finally.
“What did he say?”
“He said a few minutes after the mist was released, the crops started … dying, crumbling into the ground. Ross, what the hell’s going on?”
Dogan fought back the chill of fear. “What else? What else did he say?”
“They fell row by row, one after another,” Marna continued, “like something under the dirt was yanking them back down.” Her eyes flashed wildly. “Ross, you’ve got to tell me what’s going on!”
“Oh, my God,” Dogan muttered, rising to his feet. It was worse than he possibly could have imagined, much worse. The missing piece had finally been added. Not only had the Committee discovered a way to genetically alter crop growth, they had found a means of killing crops on contact. The boy said the destruction started after only a slight amount of the gray mist had been sprayed. It was incredible. No wonder San Sebastian had to burn. All evidence of what the Committee had done there had to be wiped out. Suddenly the massacre made very clear sense. Everything made sense.
The Committee was going to kill all of the U.S.‘s crops and replace them in the marketplace with genetically accelerated crops grown on the South American lands they now owned!
Just considering the prospects brought the chill of fear back to Dogan, and this time he couldn’t suppress it.
“Have the boy go on,” he told Marna.
“Ross, it’s true what he said, isn’t it? You’ve got to tell me what’s going on down here.”
“Later,” Dogan said firmly, sitting back down. “I’ve got to hear the rest of his story.”
The boy was trembling harder but still he went on. “Less than an acre of the crops was still standing when the trucks arrived.” His voice became frantic. Marna struggled to keep up with him. “Men climbed off, soldiers with heavy guns. They took them from their shoulders and spread out. The people inside the church were forced outside. I remember seeing them shield their eyes from the sunshine. I tried to pick out my parents but everyone was dressed almost the same. I tried and tried. It was so important to me but I couldn’t find them.
“More of the soldiers came down the street pushing the townspeople who had wandered off or tried to hide maybe. People were screaming and crying. It was horrible, horrible!
“The soldiers fired their guns over and over again. All I could hear were gunshots. The people kept screaming but the screaming made less and less noise as they fell dead and the blood ran everywhere. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. It felt like I was forgetting how to breathe. They left the bodies piled on top of each other. Some of the bodies fell off the top, and it was then that …”
The boy stopped suddenly. His eyes grew glazed and distant. When he continued, his voice had turned maddeningly calm.
“… I saw my parents. They were lying next to each other, their arms touching. Their eyes were open but they couldn’t see me. I made myself be brave like my father would have wanted and took the others far up the hillside, as more of the soldiers soaked the fields and the town. They were going to burn everything, I knew it, so I led us high up into the wind so the fire would stay away. It burned for three days, turning our skin red and hot. But then the rains stopped it and we built this shack farther down the hill so we could see the place where our town had been.” He took a deep breath, started shaking all at once. “Their eyes were open but they couldn‘t see me!”
The boy’s voice had turned hysterical and so loud that Dogan barely heard the gunshot fired through an opening in the shack. It splintered wood just above his head and he spun quickly toward Marna, thinking of his pistol still tucked in her belt.
She already had her own gun ou
t and was firing from a crouch when three bullets pounded into her, shredding her chest and turning her face into pulp with a huge crater where the nose and eyes had been. She rocked backward to the floor, writhing in death throes.
Dogan felt a scream of rage rising in him as he dove across the room, reaching for Marna’s belt and his P-9. A bullet exploded in the area he had vacated and the boy screamed in agony. Dogan feared he was dead too. The other children were screeching now, drowning out the other shots that sent dirt and wood chips everywhere. Dogan gripped the P-9 hard and, still rolling, came up to his knees in firing position facing the area the shots were coming from.
A flurry of bullets punctured the wall, and a large figure smashed through behind them. Dogan pumped three bullets into him. Two more figures rushed forward. Dogan took the first out with a head shot and the second with a bull’s-eye to the heart. The two bodies toppled over backward, their blood splattering the walls.
Dogan held the P-9 steady, calculating how many bullets he had left. He stayed there for several long seconds, the exact number he didn’t know or care. The children were still screaming. The boy Juan was moaning softly on the floor, a neat red splotch widening on the rag he wore for a shirt, mixing with the dirt. Dogan started to move for him.
The woman crashed through the hole in the wall and fired before her aim was clear. The bullet whistled by Dogan’s hair. She was tumbling, spinning on the floor, a blur before his eyes. Dogan might have been able to take her out easily if he hadn’t chosen instead to move sideways to shield the boy’s body with his own. He got off one shot, a hit but a poor one, and before he could get off another the woman had grabbed the oldest girl and shrank down behind her, using her thin body as a shield.
Dogan raised his gun. The woman raised hers. A stalemate. He could see where she was wounded. Left shoulder, just a nick but she was losing lots of blood.
She backed up toward the hole in the wall, yanking the girl with her.
“You won’t get away,” she growled.
“You’re the last one who can stop me,” Dogan said, still trying to figure out who had sent her and the others. Was it the Committee or SAS-Ultra? “Tell me who sent you and I’ll let you live.”
The woman’s response was to squeeze her pistol against her hostage’s head. “You’re in no position to issue ultimatums.”
“The Committee or Masvidal?”
The woman just looked at him, breathing heavily.
“It was the Committee, wasn’t it? SAS-Ultra couldn’t possibly have known I was here and they wouldn’t have reason to—” And then Dogan realized. “Wait a minute, you didn’t come here to kill me, you came to kill the children! You fucking bastards!”
“More children than these will die,” the woman said with strange calm, blood and sweat staining her face. “All the world’s children if that’s what it takes.”
“The Committee wouldn’t have much of a world to own then.”
Her eyes flickered. “The Committee is changing and there is nothing you can do to stop it. It’s too late. You can’t fool me with your words. I know they sent you.”
Pistol hand trembling, the woman kept inching toward the window, lowering herself even further behind the girl, free hand draped over the child’s neck, obviously confident that if the man was going to chance a shot, he would have done so already.
“It’s as good as over,” she taunted.
“Absolutely,” Dogan muttered, and fired the P-9 from his hip.
The bullet ripped into the woman’s neck and tore most of it away, pitching her backward through the remnants of the wall. The child she’d been holding cowered screaming on the floor.
Dogan moved back for the boy but his eyes strayed to Marna’s corpse first and he felt the tears welling in his eyes.
He was Grendel, named for the monster who ate human flesh.
And he was crying, the rest of the world be damned… .
The boy was whimpering now and Dogan hurried over, lifted him gently from the floor into his arms. There was a lot of blood but he judged that the wound had missed all vital organs. The boy might live.
“It hurts! Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!”
“I’m here,” Dogan soothed, cradling the boy close and wishing he could have been there for Marna as well. “I’m here.”
But only for now, he thought to himself. The words of the woman he had just killed fluttered through his consciousness. What did they mean? He was in no condition to figure it out now but there would be plenty of time later. Yes, plenty. Much traveling lay ahead of him. There were scores to be settled, a vent to be found for the anger and rage that swelled within him. Violence would be met with violence.
Death with death.
Part Seven:
Rome and London, Wednesday Morning
Chapter 23
LOCKE BARELY SLEPT all night. The doctor set the cracked bones as best he could and used layers of adhesive tape and a pair of Ace bandages to hold his work in place. Without proper hospital treatment, which Chris refused, the doctor said he could not guarantee the fingers would ever work properly again. Locke shrugged him off. He did accept painkillers, but they made little dent in the constant ache that gave way to a blast of pain whenever he moved the hand wrong or put any pressure on it.
He stared at the ceiling in the dark room, flirting with sleep but never quite passing over.
After his fateful call to Burgess’s contact exchange, Chris had dialed his home number in Silver Spring. Precautions were clearly useless now. The opposition had Greg. Burgess’s protective arm had not been long enough. Chris felt the knots of anxiety tighten in his stomach more with each of the three rings it took before the phone was answered.
“Hello,” said a male voice he didn’t recognize.
He pressed the receiver closer to his ear.
“Hello?” the voice repeated.
Locke hung up the phone struggling for breath. A stranger had answered his family’s phone, a stranger with an American accent. If it wasn’t one of Burgess’s men, then who was it? In that moment Chris wanted so much for this mess to be over so he could go back home again. But home would never be the same, not ever again. And now he had to consider the possibility that home didn’t even exist anymore. The Committee could have his entire family by now. Greg’s finger might have marked only the beginning of their madness. Whom could he turn to?
Uncle Colin has gone fishing.
They had gotten to Burgess. The big Brit had proved no match for the power of the Committee. But the girl was still alive, which meant her house in Falmouth might still serve as a refuge for him. As of now, Locke had no other destination available. Once in Falmouth he would begin to make new arrangements. The American Embassy offered an alternative, and what other did he have? He’d make sure more than one man was present in the room when he told his story. Someone would listen, someone would act. The Committee couldn’t possibly have gotten to everyone at the embassy, Chris thought, trying to convince himself.
His only other option was to stay in Rome and wait for Dogan. But that was out of the question with the dark man still lurking about. He had to leave the country as soon as possible and make contact with Dogan later, as Forenzo had suggested.
The hotel manager had obtained a return ticket on a charter to London and arranged for a car to take him to the airport in time for its departure the next morning. Forenzo had also given him an American passport with a picture that didn’t even resemble his face. It was just something to hand cursorily over to Customs officials in Rome. London would be another matter.
Locke reached the airport with his single bag in tow. The condition of his left hand had made taking a shower a difficult task and shaving not much easier. Accordingly, Chris felt grimy, and the tension that might have unwound in his neck and shoulders beneath the hot needle spray had stiffened into steel bands under his flesh.
He moved rapidly through the international terminal toward the charter’s departure gate, as pl
anned with little time to spare. That meant little time to be spotted. But still he was alone, a single man with a bandaged hand easy to pick out of a crowd. En route to the gate he fell in stride with a number of other passengers who apparently were heading for the same flight. Locke tried to mix with them, doing his best to appear part of their conversations without drawing too much attention.
A girl in jeans up ahead was carting too many bags, and one slipped from her hand. Its contents spilled all over the floor, souvenirs by the look of it.
“Damn.” She moaned, dropping the rest of her bags in frustration.
She had started to gather up her spilled belongings when Locke drew up even with her.
“Need some help?” he offered, trying to make a much-needed friend for the moments ahead.
“Sure.” The girl glanced up. She looked to be in her mid-twenties with sandy hair that danced about her shoulders. She had radiant blue eyes and was stunningly attractive. Chris felt himself taken aback.
He did the best he could at retrieving her souvenirs of Italy with his one good hand.
“Hey, what did you do to yourself?”
“Fell down some stairs,” Locke explained, trying to look embarrassed.
“We got insurance for that kind of stuff. It says so in the brochure.” She started to reach inside her handbag. “I’ve got one here somewhere.”
“Don’t bother, please. It’s already been taken care of. Right now the only thing I want to do is get home to my own doctor.”
He dropped the last of the souvenirs back into the bag.
“Home sounds like it’s America for you too,” the girl told him.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry I ever left,” she said somberly. And Chris realized he had fallen in quite naturally with her step as she moved for the gate. “Europe sucks. Boring as hell, if you ask me.” They had almost reached the perfunctory Customs station. “Hey, what’s your name?”
“Chris.”
The girl stuck out her right hand and the bag of souvenirs almost went tumbling again. “Chris, I’m Nikki. Got anyone to sit next to on the flight?”