The front parking lot of the building was filled with activity, as bikers roared off or spread out to watch from a distance in about equal numbers. Probably the ones with no record or warrants outstanding stayed for the fun, and to prove they weren’t afraid.
The lights and activity provided a backdrop and enough confusion that I wasn’t worried they would see me here in the back seat of my van, watching from around the front headrest. They might think it was Elise that had fired at them. It didn’t really matter what they thought, though, as I could hear sirens in the southern distance. Someone had called 911 and Stafford County’s finest were on their way.
I was right; they grabbed her and dragged her off, three of them, big men in ill-fitting dark suits. A fourth opened the door to the black Suburban at the edge of the front parking lot, and the thinning crowd of bikers parted like the Red Sea as the three men walked through waving their cannons. A moment later they were gone northbound in a screech of tire smoke.
I followed discreetly, heading north too, trailing behind. I wanted to duck into Quantico Marine Base rather than risk getting pulled over by the sheriffs’ department and answer their questions. I’d risk the slight possibility of a search at the Marine gate. Usually the faded windshield sticker with Senior Master Sergeant’s stripes, and my retired ID card, were good for a wave-through with hardly a look.
I got in all right, in the commissary gate, to relative safety. Whatever you can say about the Agency, they did not like to tangle with the Department of Defense without all their ducks in order. DOD didn’t much like them either, and Defense was the 800-pound gorilla of the US Government.
The county sheriffs’ department, on the other hand, had no problem busting service people on their own turf. Lawyer’s fees, court costs and fines kept them in shiny new cop equipment.
I pulled into the on-base McDonald’s drive-through and got two Big Mac meals. I was hungry, what with having eaten nothing but a ham sandwich in some very strange circumstances since coming home less than three hours ago. Was it only that long? My whole world had turned upside down in those three hours.
I sat in the parking lot, with the van’s rear against the dumpster-corral wall, watching and thinking. I doubted they knew where I was, or they’d have had me by now. They must have been tracking Elise, though. Some kind of bug, like the bloodhound modules we used in the sandbox for certain ops. About the size of a pack of cigarettes, a little antenna, a strong magnet, turn it on, stick it under an enemy bumper and as long as the battery lasted you could track him, intel or drone fodder.
I crammed burger into my mouth, sucked down the first Coke in one long pull. I ate the entire first large fries in three big bites, then slowed down to work on the second meal, and kept thinking.
There was still the mess at my house, unless they cleaned it up. They probably would. And since they had avoided the sheriffs, they didn’t want involvement with local law enforcement. They would want to keep looking for me themselves, I figured.
Well, I’d do my best not to be found.
After I finished off the food and my belly felt comfortably distended, I looked at my left hand and the human bite Elise had bestowed on me. Had she lost it? She didn’t seem out of her head. What had she meant, “You’ll understand?” It wasn’t severe, just a few blood spots where her canines had cut, and some generalized bruising that was fading already.
I pulled out my aid bag and unrolled it to access my equipment. I poured some disinfectant on my hand, wrapped it in some gauze, tied it off awkwardly with my teeth and forgot about it.
It was about twenty hundred, eight PM. The Marine Corps Exchange was still open and it was right over my shoulder, a hundred yards across the parking lot. All right, time to improve my supply situation.
I drove over and parked just on the side of the enormous building. Then I grabbed a cart and went shopping. An ice chest, always useful. A two-gallon water jug. Some MREs. Field gear. A few other odds and ends, another two prepaid disposable phones and a pack of batteries for them. I would have to make some calls sometime. I paid cash again, loaded my purchases in the van, then drove off down a side-street and parked next to a pair of battered white base engineer work vans, blending right in.
Then the serpent and I turned in, exhausted.
-6-
My sleep was a big black scary thing, where I pumped round after round into Men In Black. They either wouldn’t go down, or the bullets would exit the gun with a little pop and bounce off their chests, and I would end up in a fistfight where I’d punch and punch and I couldn’t hurt them and they would laugh. Then it would turn into something else, something from my past, like dragging my dead best buddy Hector Koltunczyk into a hollow in the dirt, trying to plug the leaks in him with my fingers, but he sprouted fountains of blood like one of those flexible hose sprinklers where the water came out the holes.
I had come to the realization long ago that not even the new, Pararescue-trained me of several years after could have saved Hector, but if there was any one thing that drove me to leave the Army Airborne and try out for PJ, it was that incident where he died in my hands in Mogadishu.
It had taken a boatload of pushing, a break in service, giving up my stripes and starting over to make the move to the Air Force Pararescue program. The Army hated it when people didn’t re-up, and they dangled goodies, choice assignments and choice jobs, in front of me. But I’d wanted to learn to save lives as well as take them, and they couldn’t guarantee me Special Forces Medic, which was the only other possibility I’d considered.
So I went PJ. That’s the nickname, from “parajumper.” Despite the odds of about ninety percent washout, I’d not only qualified, I’d excelled at it all the way through the Pipeline. Seventeen months of training just to graduate, ‘That Others May Live.’ That was our motto.
At the end of it I was one of fewer than three hundred of the very best combat lifesavers in the world, cross-trained with a variety of special ops expertise. Small arms, water operations, light aircraft, survival, mountaineering, demolitions, you name it, I had done it in sixteen years in the PJs. Some of my Army buddies had thought I was a pogue or some kind of traitor for going green to blue, but none of my real friends did. And nobody that met a PJ at work ever thought so either.
That Others May Live. That’s why I did it.
I was elite of the elite, back then. I was a sky-god in a blood-red beret, before that IED took it all away from me, leaving me a bum knee and a bad back and a serpent in my brain.
I realized I had gone from dreaming to drowsy reminiscing somewhere along the line, as dawn was breaking over Quantico. I could hear the sounds of morning PT off in the distance, and a five-ton truck drove by my parking place with a rattle.
I sat up, sucked down a half-liter bottle of water, then slipped out the side door and took a leak between the vans. I was hungry again, really hungry, so I went to the Mickey Dee’s one more time and ate my fill. Nobody seemed to be looking for me, and with my hair cut high and tight I blended in pretty well here, though my shave was a day old.
I was halfway through my third McMuffin when it hit me. No headaches this morning. And the serpent was hiding.
Usually I woke up with a near-migraine that took four ibuprofen and a triple espresso to tamp down to a manageable level. Sometimes vicodin or some other opiate, though I tried to keep that to a minimum. And my knee should be locked up stiff, and my back hurting. But right now I was pain-free for the first time in a long while. Since Afghanistan. And jones-free too, for that matter.
I looked at the gauze on my hand. On impulse I unwound it to check the wound. I rubbed at the dried blood, then finished the sandwich and got up to go into the restroom. I washed my hand, and then stared at it.
Nothing there.
No bite, no bruise, smooth pristine skin. And I felt good. Better than I’d felt in a while. I stared at myself in the scratched-up mirror for a while, until someone else came in to use the toilet. I shook out of the reverie an
d went back to my breakfast, my pancakes and hash brown patties and coffee and large orange juice.
I sat and thought about super-healing. Stupid, pulp-sci-fi name, but what else should I call it? X-factor? Sounded like a TV talent show. Wolverine, like that comic-book guy? Maybe H-factor. Or XH, experimental healing. Because it had to be experimental. The government could never keep secrets for long, no matter what the conspiracy nuts thought. The government was made up of people, good people and bad people and heroes and stupid arrogant people like Jenkins who lost control of missions and secrets. But what was the secret this time?
The obvious answer was it was a kind of drug. Shoot you up, accelerate the body’s natural healing, instant cure. But you couldn’t pass on a drug with a bite. Because that was what I thought had happened. Elise had bit me, deliberately, and said I’d understand. So she passed it to me, at least some of it. I was already grateful to her for that.
Discounting the supernatural – and I wasn’t, not completely, but my mind shied away from that for now – it would have to be some kind of parasite or bacteria or virus, that was able to spread from person to person and help them out. Or maybe…what about nanites? Like in science fiction, like those Borg things that injected you and took over your body and mind with germ-sized machines. But no matter what, it had to be something small, and self-replicating, self-sustaining.
I wondered how much the XH could cure. Obviously gross injuries were possible. And cancer, if I could believe Elise. What about AIDS? What about aging? Life extension, even immortality? Did they even realize what they had? My mind whirled with the possibilities.
If it conferred youth and immortality, it would change the world like nothing ever. The rich would pay anything, and people would kill for it. People would go to war for it. In fact, it might win wars, making soldiers into fearless super-warriors. And who would decide who got it?
But Elise had said something about a downside, some kind of disadvantage…maybe some kind of burnout? Maybe instead of immortality it used up the bearer, ate up his life so the more healing he had to do, the shorter his life was. Maybe. But Elise had looked younger than I was, twenties maybe. And cute and gutsy, under all that blood and stress.
She said she had been an analyst before dying of cancer, that she had worked for them a couple of years…seemed about right. And what had she said – “Yeah, there’s a downside, at least for the Company.” Not for her, but for the Company. So it couldn’t be a shortened lifespan, I thought. Maybe it had no effect on lifespan. Maybe it froze your age just as you were, like in a vampire story. That might be nice, if you got it young.
I sighed, rubbed my face. Too many questions, too many possibilities. And I needed answers, because whatever it was, it was inside me too.
I had no way to contact Elise, so I would just have to hope she was all right and could get in touch with me sometime. I just had to put her out of my mind for now. I didn’t owe her anything. Leave her to rot.
My conscience sharply disagreed with me. Kind of funny, because the serpent had held my conscience captive for quite a while. Maybe the XH was healing some brain damage. And if the XH healed my body too, got rid of the headaches and brain damage and bum knee and aching back and the persistent spiral fractures from too many hard landings and everything else, even if that was all it did, I guess I owed her a lot.
But paying that debt would have to wait. First I wanted to get an idea of what was happening at my house.
I drove to a beer joint I knew of in Quantico Town. This was a unique little municipality, a tenth of a square mile, entirely enclosed by Quantico Marine Base. Residents got passes to come and go, all five hundred of them or so. But what was even more unique, the unusual thing that I needed, was the pay phone inside. Not too many of those around but things didn’t change very fast in quaint old Quantico Town.
I ignored the “closed” sign on the door of the Forward Observer pub and went on in. If you looked like you belonged, Felix the owner would ignore the archaic eighteenth-century law still on the books that said you can’t sell alcohol before noon. That’s why the door wasn’t locked, that and they made a few bucks in the mornings selling coffee and smokes and breakfast sandwiches and day-old donuts to guys on their way to work. Fortunately, Felix wasn’t in to recognize me, just a chesty young thing with a wedding ring, in too-tight jeans and a tee shirt, makeup over acne, probably the teen wife of a teen Marine, making a few extra bucks.
“Whatcha want?” she said with that fake brightness servers put on. She stood hipshot, pointed with one long nail over her shoulder at the menu chalked on the wall. Ah, the confidence of the young.
I didn’t sit down. “Three ham cheese and egg bagels, large coffee to go.” I pulled a gallon of milk out of a fridge. “This too. The head that way?” She nodded, and I went back in the direction of the facilities, which happened to be where the phone was too.
My first call was to my next-door neighbor Trey, a friendly Creole from Louisiana who’d married a nice German girl on a tour in Bitburg and eventually settled down in Virginia after retiring from the Army. Even in the twenty-first century, a black man bringing a white girl home to “Nawlins” was a tough row to hoe.
“No, nothing unusual going on, Dan, what’s up?” he asked.
“Nobody in my driveway, no visitors, nothing like that?” We kept an eye on each other’s houses, because there were four schools in the area and a few kids always had sticky fingers.
“Nope. Why, something wrong?” he pried gently.
I’d love to have told him, the way I was feeling right now, but he was a neighbor, a fellow vet but not really a brother in arms. I could probably trust him to a point, but I didn’t want to involve him if I didn’t have to. So I dissembled, though it was painful to do so. “No, just missed a meeting with a friend, wondered if he came by there.”
“Okay…well, you let me know if I can do anything.”
I could tell he didn’t buy it, but I stuck to my plan. “Thanks, Trey. Hey I might be out of town for a week or two, could you pick up my mail and keep an eye on the place for me?”
“Yeah Dan. Sure.” He sounded hurt.
Man, I hated that.
“Look – Trey, I can’t talk about it right now, okay? You know how it is. But I’ll tell you when I can.” With that half-lie and half-promise, I hung up. Then I called my work, told them I was really sick and wouldn’t be in for a week. In that time it probably either wouldn’t matter or it would be all over.
I thought of calling my dad, who was a good guy to have with you in a situation. David Jonah Markis, Chief Warrant Officer Four, US Army retired. He’d fought in Vietnam, driving Hueys, and had been wounded a bunch of times flying guys in and out of hot landing zones. Purple Heart with oak leaf clusters, and a Silver Star for the time he went down and carried his wounded copilot seven miles through enemy territory to the nearest US firebase, with an AK round in his left lung. He lived in South Carolina now, had sixty acres and his own grass airstrip south of Blacksburg, and an old but airworthy Piper Cub to keep him busy. But if they knew who I was, they knew him too and might be watching him. If I wanted to talk to him I’d have to figure out a way to do it without bringing the trouble to him.
But there were some guys that they didn’t know about, I hoped. They couldn’t cover everyone. No one had unlimited resources, not even the Agency. And they had limited powers inside the US anyway; they had already broken any number of laws and while a certain amount of that could be covered up, it became more and more risky the more they did. I had to depend on them not knowing I had the XH in me, that I was just a missed opportunity and they wouldn’t frame a federal charge to get the FBI and every other law enforcement agency in the country looking for me.
I got out my beat-up Army-issue green memo book that I’d had forever, that I’d carried to the Gulf and back. It had long since been laminated and converted into my home address book and retired to a drawer, but I had grabbed it on the way out of my house and now I
looked up Ezekiel “Zeke” Johnstone’s number. I had to risk it, and since I hadn’t contacted him since forever, I hoped they hadn’t connected him to me.
I called, and got a screening service. Right, this number wasn’t on his safe list. I said “720th” at the beep, waited through “Please Enjoy The Music While We Reach Your Party,” and I almost gasped with relief when I heard Zeke’s voice. “Yeah?” he said, his voice neutral.
“It’s me, man. DJ. Think a few years back. 720th, Kandahar. I can’t say any more, they might have a keyword trace.”
“Yeah man, I got it. Let me call you back on a better line.”
I could hear a woman’s voice, a shriek of childish mirth in the background. I closed my eyes as he hung up. Damn, I hated to drag him into this.
A minute later the pay phone rang and I picked back up.
“All right, I’m on a one-off. You sure they ain’t got your end?”
“Not a hundred percent, but ninety-nine-point nine. It’s a pay phone and if they knew where I was they’d already have picked me up.”
“All right. What you get into this time? Another loan shark?”
I used to gamble, and lose. It was one risk of being an adrenaline junkie – when ops slowed down, you had to find something for a jolt. Some guys drank too much, chased women, or took up high-risk sports. Skydiving, that was a given. Bungee jumping, jet-ski, flying, racing…I did all of that, especially the drinking…I had also played craps. A lot. I had gotten stuck. The inevitable mathematics of the house odds had eventually got me, and I borrowed from the wrong people. Zeke and some of his guys had helped me out with that. I’d paid him back and I’d been clean ever since.
“No, nothing so simple. This is something big, something black, blacker than black. Man, I hate to involve you, what with Cassie and the kids, but it’s either you or run for the border. I don’t want to run yet.”
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