She came down the wooden steps, taking measured strides toward him as he loped up the rustic drive.
“This is a surprise. What are you doing here?” she called, her brow furrowed, a scrunching that Jeffrey found instantly endearing.
“Your grandfather didn’t tell you?”
“My grandfather doesn’t tell me anything.”
“I called and spoke with him yesterday for a while. On your phone.”
“I leave it inside so if he needs to use it, he can.”
“Well, he did. We were talking about the virus, the delay in the flu shot program, and we got to discussing other stuff. He wanted to know what I was planning on doing next, and I told him I didn’t know – that I didn’t have any immediate ideas.”
“What about your job?”
“I quit. It wasn’t working. I don’t want to be a corporate cog, no matter how well paid.”
“So the question still stands. What are you doing here?” she asked again.
“Why is it that every time we meet, you’re pointing a gun at me?”
“Just lucky, I guess,” she said, waiting for an answer.
Sam’s voice boomed from the entryway. “Jeffrey! You’re here. Come up to the house. Kaycee. You know Jeffrey. You don’t need the shotgun.”
“We were just discussing that,” Jeffrey said with a small smile.
Kaycee sheepishly realized that she was still pointing the gun at Jeffrey. She lowered the weapon and held it easily at her side. “What’s this all about, Grandpa?”
“Jeffrey here is going to be staying for a little bit. That’s all. Nothing to worry about,” Sam explained, and then turned to go back inside before calling over his shoulder. “Kaycee, go unlock the gate so he can pull his car in. It’ll be dusk soon, and I’m sure he’s tired after being on the road.”
She studied Jeffrey’s face for any clues, then shook her head. “I’ve got to get the gate key. I’ll meet you down there. I’m sure there’s a story behind this.”
“It’s pretty simple. You have to go back to New York soon. Your grandfather isn’t really in any condition to be here alone, at least not until he’s fully recovered. And I’m going through a mid-life crisis before I hit thirty. It just seemed like I could use some time out in the woods to figure things out, you know? Pull a Walden. Get away from it all while I decide what I want to be when I grow up. Your grandfather mentioned that he had a spare bedroom that wasn’t being used, and that he could use someone to play chess with that he can beat – apparently he’s bitter that you’re better than him. So anyway, he offered, I accepted, and here I am.”
“Just like that.”
“Yup.”
“I’ll get the key, then,” she said, then spun and returned to the house, Jeffrey’s admiring gaze following her she made her way up the stairs. He grinned as he exhaled, then moved back down the drive to the waiting car, a new page turned in the adventure that had become his life; no firm plans, only a heavy fatigue that felt older than his tender years, like he’d been endlessly pushing a boulder up a hill.
A blue jay fluttered overhead with a squawk, and Jeffrey looked up, his eyes shielded from the fading glare, watching as the bird soared and then rode a gust of wind to the far side of the field, intent on some fleeting objective. The car sat like a lonely vagrant, dejected at the side of the road, and he decided that it was the perfect vehicle for him, accurately capturing his mood and sense of…apathy.
Then he heard footsteps trotting down the drive behind him, and felt a lightness in his chest at the thought of Kaycee coming to open the gate, admitting him into her home and her family’s life. For the first time in years he had no sense of direction, no real purpose, and he decided that while it would take some getting used to, it felt positive, if alien.
For now, he’d take it one day at a time.
Which was, in the end, the only way he could.
FORTY-SEVEN
Happily Ever After
The sun was baking the work area, summer now rapidly approaching, the trees in full leaf, not a cloud in the sky. Jeffrey had settled into a familiar routine after three months, running errands in the morning, sitting with the professor in the afternoons, playing chess and discussing the wicked ways of the world. Sam had mended and was as strong as could be expected, but he hadn’t mentioned anything about Jeffrey moving on, and neither had Jeffrey. Sam seemed to enjoy the younger man’s company, and Jeffrey found him a fascinating and erudite companion – a treasure trove of encyclopedic arcania.
True to her word, Jodie had sold the condo in no time, and after paying her commission Jeffrey had wound up with two hundred fifty thousand dollars in his pocket. The estate had settled and he’d liquidated his brother’s portfolio, so he now had a tidy half million dollar war chest to tide him over until he figured out what he wanted to do. That part of his sabbatical from the real world had been tougher than he’d thought it would be, and it had only been lately that an idea had begun to gel for his life moving forward.
Living at the house had been an adjustment at first, with no internet or television. Jeffrey had finally convinced Sam to get a phone, and had only shamed him into it by offering to pay for it himself. His offers of rent had been rebuked by the old man, who merely grunted and waved him away when discussions of anything resembling finances came up.
“I never paid much attention to money when I was younger, and I’m not about to start worrying about it now,” was Sam’s usual response, and Jeffrey had eventually learned not to bother him with it, choosing instead to buy the week’s groceries and consistently forget to take the money that rested, like a green stain, on the dining room table. Sam had given up insisting, and they’d reached an uneasy truce, preferring to spend their time in more productive pursuits than bickering over a few dollars.
Besides chess, both men enjoyed a glass of good Scotch in the evenings, and without distractions like computers or TV, they whiled away the hours after dark arguing or trading stories. Sam had learned the hard way about Jeffrey’s remarkable memory, and they spent long nights discussing the ramifications of a society that was out of control, where special interests and powerful elites could bring the world as close to the brink as it had so recently been. The fatalistic conclusion they arrived at, time after time, was that they as a species were largely powerless to do anything about it, and that they were on as disastrous a course as if a huge meteor was hurtling toward the Earth – that the inevitable was a matter of timing, not of outcome.
In spite of the depressing talk, Sam was upbeat since he’d learned the truth about his conspiracy suspicions, and the vindication of having been right breathed new life into him, if not new purpose. Jeffrey had even coaxed him into moderate exercise, which he’d eschewed for years before the accident.
Jeffrey was outside, swinging an axe, splitting wood for the fireplace, sweat rolling down his tanned, bare chest, the muscles in his arms now more defined than ever before, the outdoor life agreeing with him. He heard gravel crunching beneath tires down around the bend, and he paused, ears straining for any further signs of visitors. A muffled car door closed, and he moved over to the side of the garage and retrieved the shotgun. Sam insisted that he take it with him whenever he was outside, and Jeffrey had seen enough of the world to take his warning seriously. There probably was no danger any longer, but it was better to be safe…
Kaycee moved into view, her long legs making short work of the track, her thicket of blond locks shimmering like a halo. Jeffrey drew a sharp intake of breath at the sight of her – she’d visited on a few weekends, but it had been a month since her last trip and her sudden appearance took him by surprise. He was constantly unbalanced by the powerful reaction she caused in him, and he always felt self-conscious around her, even though he did his best not to show it. Suddenly aware of his bare chest, he untied the flannel shirt from around his waist and pulled it on as she drew near.
“Howdy, stranger,” she said, in an exaggerated drawl.
�
��Is that your Australian accent? It’s very convincing.”
“Thanks. Nice to see I can impress you.”
“That’s never been a problem,” Jeffrey said easily, and they both smiled. “What are you doing here? Is it the weekend already?”
“What, it has to be the weekend for me to come see my two favorite bachelors?”
Jeffrey noted that her teeth were even whiter than he remembered, and her eyes more captivating. It might have been the angle of the sun, he reasoned, or her tan…
“No. Of course not. It’s…it’s just nice to see you again. I mean, it’s good that you made it up,” Jeffrey said, kicking himself for his fumbling words. Good that you made it up? Really, counselor? That’s the best you can do?
“Do you have the gate key? I want to pull my car in. And I could use a hand with my bags.”
“Sure. In my pocket.” He patted his jeans.
“Where’s Grandpa?”
“Inside. Reading. I bought him a Kindle. He refused to use it for a week, and now I swear he’s burning the screen out.”
“That was sweet of you.” Another beaming smile from her, and a small part of his core quivered.
“Can’t believe everything you hear about lawyers. I mean, you can, but not this one.”
“I keep forgetting you’re an attorney. I keep thinking of you as a ranch hand or something.”
“Sounds like way too honest work for me.”
They made their way down towards her car, and he saw as he neared that the back seat was filled with bags and boxes.
“Bringing supplies?” he asked.
“No, I moved out. Quit my job.”
“Really? I thought you loved it.”
“I do. But I can do freelance work and make a good living without the pressure and the rat race. Plus, the whole virus thing got me thinking about what’s important. And I realize that my granddad’s not getting any younger, and my priority should be to maximize my time with him while he’s still here. There are no guarantees, and every moment is precious…”
“So you’re moving back in?” Jeffrey said, trying to keep the delight out of his voice.
“If he’ll have me. I can help you with him. Assuming you’re sticking around for a while. To chop wood and all.” Her eyes seemed to dance with amusement at his expression.
“I probably will be, at least through the summer.”
“Have you decided what you’re going to do? What you’re going to be when you grow up?” she asked, rounding her fender and opening her car door.
“I’m toying with the idea of hanging out a shingle in town. Do wills, contracts, that kind of thing. I’m starting to like the rural lifestyle after having grown up a city boy.”
“Why, Jeffrey Rutherford! Country attorney? Will you wear overalls and a straw hat?”
“When I wear anything at all.”
She popped the lock on the passenger door and rolled down the window. “Hop in, Hoss.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jeffrey said, and for a second the tableau froze in his mind, the soft tall grass rippling from a light breeze, Kaycee sitting behind the wheel of her car looking like every fantasy he’d ever had, moving back into the house, where they would be together day and night, only a slim slab of wall between them at night…
For a brief eternity, the ugly reality of a world gone mad receded, and there was only the two of them, the sun warming her toned skin as their eyes met, and she grinned.
And life was good.
Epilogue
Two figures moved out of the level four biosafety laboratory towards the showers and UV light room, their baby-blue ILC Dover Chemturion positive pressure suits rustling as they moved, looking more like astronauts in a science fiction film than research scientists working in one of the only privately owned level four laboratories in the country. The multiple airlocks were electronically controlled, designed to prevent accidental contamination from the lab into the outer world, and the safety procedures to enter and leave were redundant and stringent.
Part of a larger complex in Virginia on the grounds of a major military contractor’s facility, the series of reinforced concrete chambers had been built two decades earlier, and were constantly updated with state-of-the-art technology. No expense had been spared in outfitting the secret laboratory, whose personnel were all assigned top security clearances and employed by the Department of Defense, paid out of a dark pool of deniable funds that were administered in conjunction with the CIA.
It was the end of another long day, and the pair had put in seven hours working with pathogens that were being synthetically modified to be resistant to existing antiviral agents. That their work was illegal under international law didn’t bother them a bit – they were both old hands, and had long ago lost any moral qualms about doing their jobs.
The lights in the laboratory extinguished once they were in the first containment chambers, where the tedious routine of multiple showers and airlocks were familiar precautions. As they stood in their respective rooms, the glow of dim LED lighting emanated from behind a locked steel door at the far end of the lab, past the row of Class III biological safety cabinets, where the most dangerous of the pathogens were kept – technology that had been perfected in the seventies after furious development activity in the sixties.
Inside the temperature- and humidity-controlled chamber, which had its own airlock entry, sat a row of vials in lab trays, the small canisters surprisingly innocuous, offering no hint of the destructive capacity of the agent stored inside – an agent that had been refined and modified to ravage the immune system in a matter of days, its infective capacity at the extreme end of the spectrum, a virus that had already proved devastating in its first-generation form and was now far more deadly and contagious in its latest iteration.
A tag labeled the tray as well as the tubes, laser-printed in black on a stark white plastic background. Row after row of deadly cargo, waiting, the modifications finally complete, the clandestine testing in the Congo at an end, the corpses burned, the data accumulated and tallied, the limited outbreaks carefully orchestrated and contained before they could go full-blown. And of course, a limited quantity of antidote that would be distributed to the ruling elite safely stored in another facility, ensuring the best minds were spared the ravaging that would destroy civilization, enabling them to create a new, improved order, having learned the lessons of uncontrolled population growth and unrestricted freedom.
In the artificial glow, the script looked like an ancient Roman curse, the innocent combination of letters barely hinting at the nightmare that rested inside, indestructible: a real-life portal to the underworld, the biological equivalent of an eternity in hell. One of the two scientists had just finished painstakingly affixing the decals after creating two dozen with the same name embossed in tiny letters, the name of the pathogen clearly legible through the double-paned glass window in the cool greenish light: EBOV.
<<<<>>>>
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An excerpt from Ramseys’s Gold,
an exciting new adventure series from Russell Blake,
follows the Afterword supplement.
Afterword
Upon a Pale Horse is a work of fiction, and the depictions in it are fictitious. There are, however, sections that are based on scientific fact, much of which goes unreported in the U.S. press. Contrary to perception, where science and medicine are the stewards of empirical truth, the reality is that both are fraught with bias, favoring the interests of money, power, and secrecy, and those at the top of the p
ower pyramid in any of the disciplines determine what lines of inquiry are acceptable, and which are effectively taboo. AIDS research is no different, and the fact that so many of the most influential authorities have clear ties to the military-industrial complex has no doubt colored the dialogue, as well as which “facts” are reported as gospel by a credulous media and which are dismissed out of hand, often in favor of theories that have no basis in reality.
What follows is a list of data that was gathered as part of my research for this novel – information that should give any thinking person pause and sponsor further inquiry and, hopefully, a long-overdue public discourse on the possibility of the man-made origins of HIV, be it from accidental vaccine contamination due to preparation of the original vaccines in diseased chimps, or a more damaging hypothesis involving deliberate contamination.
1) HIV occurs in several strains – M, N, and O. M is the most common, and is further divided into eight subtypes. Of these eight, subtype B is the most common subtype in North American and European cases, whereas subtypes A, D, and C are found in Africa and Asia.
2) The subtypes found in Africa are different from the one found in North America. This should raise an obvious question: How could the view that HIV originated in Africa and was brought to America withstand any serious inquiry, when they are completely different subtypes? Would it not be logical that if they were from the same place, they would be the same subtype? If not, why not?
Upon A Pale Horse Page 28