7 Sykos

by Marsheila Rockwell

  When she stood in front of him again, she cocked her head to one side.

  “Why’d you kill her?”

  Light looked surprised, then puzzled, which might not actually have been feigned. She hadn’t been very specific, after all.

  “The woman in the ER at St. Luke’s. She was dead already. If not from her wounds, then when those brain-­eating crazies got done with the bodies that could move and started in on the ones that couldn’t. What did you gain? Compared to what you could have lost, taking those few extra seconds to kill her instead of fleeing?”

  She knew, of course. He gained the knowledge that it was his choice when the woman died, not nature’s or some Infected’s, or even that of some doctor or insurance company. Or the woman’s herself.

  His decision to allow her those last moments, or to steal them away. Him, the only god who could answer or ignore her prayers as the light faded from her eyes.

  Ultimate control over another person’s fate. There was no headier ambrosia for the psychopath.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “No? Maybe this will refresh your memory.”

  She tapped a few icons on the screen for real this time and brought up the video of Light kneeling next to the woman in the ER. She turned the tablet so he could see the screen, let it run once, then played it again, watching his reaction.

  He couldn’t keep his eyes off it. If anything, he paid more attention the second time than the first. She wondered if he was becoming aroused. Many serial killers used murder as a substitute for sex, often because they lacked the capacity to achieve satisfaction any other way.

  She made as if to play it a third time, watching his eyes follow her finger. His fingers flexed unconsciously at his sides, and he swallowed.

  Definitely aroused.

  Instead of playing the video again, she turned the iPad back around and gave him a quick, tight smile when his eyes flew up to meet hers. Letting him know she’d seen and knew his secret. Anger flashed in his blue eyes for an instant, then he had control of himself again.

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “Lawyer’s not going to do you any good. You’re not walking away from this one, and now that they’ve discovered your little predilection for playing God, your life is going to be under a microscope all the way back to the womb. It won’t be long before they pin a half a dozen or more murders on you. And, since you’re fairly new to the Grand Canyon State, you may not know that we’re big on capital punishment here. Can’t imagine you’re going to like it too much when the roles are reversed, and you’re the one lying there, helpless, with the moment of your death being determined by someone else’s whim.”

  Light smiled, an expression that didn’t reach his eyes.

  “I don’t think I stuttered.”

  Fallon shrugged. “Suit yourself. But you have to know you’ll be better off if you cooperate.”

  “I . . .”

  Fallon kept talking. “You can’t think they’d have hauled you out here and trussed you up like Hannibal Lecter just because of some woman in an ER.”

  “ . . . want . . .” Light enunciated the words carefully, every syllable sharp enough to slice a throat.

  “Or even a dozen women in a dozen ERs.”

  “ . . . a . . .”

  “You have something they want. If I were you, I’d be thinking about how to capitalize on that.”

  Fallon thought she detected the briefest hesitation before Light finished up, the cold smile never leaving his face.

  “ . . . lawyer.”

  She shrugged again.

  “Suit yourself,” she repeated, turning away, hiding a smile of her own as she did.

  She’d planted the seed. It wouldn’t be long before it sprouted and bore fruit.

  CHAPTER 7

  94 hours

  Fallon found General Robbins waiting outside, the old jeep backed just far enough into one of the open garage bays to provide shade for him and his driver. The engine was running. At her approach, the driver got out and opened a door for her. Robbins waited in the backseat, one greying eyebrow arched in anticipation. “Well?”

  “He wants a lawyer.”

  Robbins let out a laugh. “He’s a little late. Due process went out the window about three days ago.” Addressing the driver, he added, “Let’s go, Jerry.”

  The driver gave a sharp nod and stepped on the gas. The vehicle lurched from the bay and out into bright sunlight. “Why the antique?” Fallon asked.

  “The jeep? She’s been with me a long time.”

  “Since the Spanish-­American War, from the looks of it.” Fallon couldn’t bring herself to speak of the thing using the feminine pronoun.

  Robbins laughed again, then fell silent. Fallon gave him several seconds, to see if he would volunteer any more information about the vehicle. Or anything else. When he didn’t, she brought up something that had been nagging at her. “You mentioned earlier that the virus was called ‘Crazy 8s’ because of some plan?”

  “CONPLAN 8888,” he said quickly.

  “Which is what?”

  “You’ll laugh.”

  “Trust me, General. I’m not finding much of anything funny today.”

  “No, I suppose not. CONPLAN stands for ‘Concept Plan.’ You probably know how we military types love our acronyms.”

  “I’ve heard.”

  “Trust me, you don’t want to know the full title. But the part that comes after the quadruple-­eight is ‘Counter-­Zombie Dominance Operations.”

  “General, I don’t know who you think—­”

  “I’m serious, Doctor. That’s the name. It’s a contingency plan to preserve non-­zombie humans from threats posed by a zombie horde. I think that’s verbatim, or close to it. You can look it up, it’s unclassified.”

  Fallon stared at him, trying to see if there was a twinkle in his eye or the hint of a smile around his lips.

  There wasn’t.

  “You think I’m full of it,” he said. The jeep had pulled to a stop beside the grandstand with the converted suites above, but Robbins made no move to get out. Jerry sat behind the wheel, trying hard to pretend he wasn’t listening.

  I think you’re as crazy as your plan’s name. “Something like that.”

  “The basic thrust is that we needed a plan to respond to some sort of invasion or other unrest. The goals were to protect the civilian population by maintaining a defensive perimeter, conduct combat operations to eradicate the threat, and help civilian authorities restore order. Starting to sound familiar?”

  “The first part, yes. I just can’t quite see the top Pentagon brass sitting around talking about zombies.”

  “Look at it this way. If they put together a plan that named a particular enemy force—­Iraqis, Russians, whoever—­and that plan leaked to the public, there would be an outcry that we were making secret war plans against whatever country we put in the document. And leaks happen. A lot. By using zombies, we aren’t creating any expectation of combat operations against any given population.”

  Fallon thought it over. “I guess that makes sense.”

  “Of course, at the time, nobody knew the first time we implemented the plan, it would be against real—­well, you know. Infecteds.”

  “I’m sure they didn’t.”

  “But it’s a good plan. What we’re doing here will help ­people, Dr. O’Meara. It really will.”

  “Let’s hope,” Fallon said.

  Robbins touched his door, and Jerry sprang into action. He opened both doors, and Fallon and Robbins climbed out. “Stay close,” Robbins said as he passed the driver.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The general led her back up to the conference room. Some of the ­people had changed positions at the table, but the cast remained the same. Fallon’s chair was unoccupied
, so she took it again, and Robbins resumed his place at the table’s head. “Dr. O’Meara has had a brief conversation with the subject,” he said. With a wry smile, he added, “Man wants a lawyer.”

  “What do you think?” Ramirez asked. “Is he a psychopath?”

  Fallon wanted to be tread carefully. She still wasn’t certain what the agenda here was, or if different players had different ones in mind. Making casual statements that she couldn’t back up seemed as ill-­advised here as it would be in a courtroom. “I can’t make that determination after just a few minutes,” she said. “He presents as one, yes. Depending upon how informal a definition you want to use, he probably is. But psychopathy is a spectrum, not an either-­or. I couldn’t say whether he is clinically psychopathic without a more extensive examination. And I don’t think he’s inclined to allow that.”

  “Do you need his cooperation?” Robbins asked. “Can’t you study him anyway? What if we sedated him?”

  “That would make it harder, not easier,” Fallon replied. “It’s important to engage a subject in a dialogue. And sedation might dampen some of the brain activity I’d be watching for. If he were sufficiently restrained, maybe . . .”

  “We can restrain the hell out of him,” Ramirez said. She appeared almost gleeful at the prospect.

  Fallon took a deep breath, buying herself a few moments to consider. She was no squishy civil libertarian. She believed in the law, in the fundamental fairness of the American system of justice. But she was also a scientist whose work brought her into proximity with the fruits of that system, so she knew it was far from perfect.

  And performing medical procedures on ­people against their will, even ones that weren’t physically invasive, felt not too far removed from the human experimentation that the Nazis did. The United States had a Constitution that theoretically prohibited such practices, in sense if not in precise language. There was much the framers couldn’t have anticipated, including machines that could scan ­people’s brains and determine the extent of their pathologies, but it wouldn’t take a huge leap of logic to know what they’d have thought.

  She glanced around the table, at the expectant faces looking back at her, awaiting a response. What was happening in Phoenix was unprecedented in human history, and if left unchecked, could bring about global catastrophe. Ebola was a summer cold by comparison. If she could do something—­anything—­to help avert that, didn’t she have to try?

  Besides, she was kind of fond of Phoenix—­though she would be less so as summer dragged on—­and she didn’t want the Valley nuked. The fact that Elliott Jameson was presumably somewhere inside the quarantine zone was an argument in favor of mass destruction, except he had their only functioning prototype with him.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll do a full workup. I’ll warn you, there is no guarantee that his brain structure will show any abnormalities. The psychopathic brain, as a general rule, has pronounced differences from yours and mine, but that’s not true in every case.”

  Well, not mine, anyway, she thought but couldn’t say.

  A test run of the MEIADD prototype on herself and Elliott had shown surprising results, particularly in her case: Her brain structure mirrored the “typical” psychopathic brain in almost every respect. That discovery had been life-­changing; ever since, she’d been using the prototype on herself, and her relationship with Jason, at least, had never been better. Not even Elliott knew.

  She didn’t want to think about what these government stooges would do with that information.

  “Not everyone we think of as a psychopath has that structure,” she continued. “The more pronounced it is, though, the more an individual is likely to lean in that direction. It’s an indicator, from which we can make certain generalizations, but it’s important to remember that those generalizations are not true at all times for all ­people.”

  “What are the other factors?” one of the assistant SecDefs asked. She had long since forgotten which was which.

  “It’s nature and nurture,” Fallon explained. She didn’t want to go into full-­on lecture mode, but there was a limit to how concise she could be and still hit the main points. “Someone with a textbook psychopathic brain structure who’s raised in a loving household, with no personal experience with violence, who has a circle of supportive friends—­maybe a successful romantic relationship, children, grandchildren down the line—­might live a long and happy life without ever experiencing what we would think of as psychopathic tendencies. None of the various triggers would have been pulled.

  “On the other hand, someone without the brain markers that I study, but who’s raised by parents who beat and abuse him, who confuse his gender identity and ignore his education—­this person might never learn empathy. He might drop out of school at sixteen, find himself unemployable, drift into crime, become a con artist and a user, sexually and socially disconnected. Before too long, he might have racked up a significant body count. You would certainly categorize him as a psychopath, even if his brain showed only a few of the markers we look for. Brain structure is a piece of it, but it’s not the only piece.”

  “What we need to know,” Robbins said, “is whether Hank Light is one, and if so, why? Is it his brain structure? Something else? What differentiates him from other ­people that would make him immune? We’ve got other experts investigating different avenues, but so far, the idea that his immunity might be related to some abnormal brain structure is the best lead we have. And since we don’t have the luxury of time, all this research has to be done concurrently. So while those other tests are being conducted, we want you to learn what you can, within your specialty.”

  Fallon had resigned herself. “Wrap him up, and I’ll get him into my lab and see what I can find out.”

  “He can’t leave the compound,” the Department of Homeland Security man said. Burt Ehlers, she thought his name was. Something like that. Name tags would have been nice.

  “Then I can’t—­”

  “We’ll bring a lab to you,” he said. “Give us a list of what you need. We’ll get what we can from your lab, and what we can’t take out, we’ll acquire.”

  “New?” she asked.

  “Of course. I don’t need to remind you, Doctor, that we’re dealing with a national emergency here. The cost of some lab equipment is nothing compared to the cost of the economic disaster we’re facing. Not to mention the human factor.” The way he said it, Fallon got the impression humans were no more than an afterthought.

  “No, sir,” she said. “No, I think I’ve grasped that pretty well. Can I get some of my ­people brought over?”

  The general fielded that one. “Out of the question,” he said. “I’m sorry, Doctor. If you need trained personnel, we’ll provide them from the military community.”

  “Fine.” In that case, she might ask for a few extras. The pad was still on the table in front of her. She drew it closer and began to write.

  CHAPTER 8

  91 hours

  Ehlers had taken her list and gone off someplace to make it all happen. The meeting was adjourned, at least for the moment, and Fallon sat in a grandstand seat, sun beating down on her, thinking about the last time she had been here. The incessant roar of the cars competing with the din of the crowd must have shaken the angels in heaven. Here in the grandstand, the smells of burning rubber, sunscreen, and beer battled for all-­out supremacy. A day at the track was an exercise in extreme overstimulation, causing Fallon to want to spend the next day in dark, quiet isolation. Maybe the next week.

  “There you are.”

  She twisted in her seat to see Jack Thurman coming down the steps toward her. He had taken off the blazer he’d been wearing inside and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He wore his usual easy smile, and it was only when he got closer that she could see the weariness in his blue eyes. He looked like he’d been chewing on his lips, too. “How are you, Jack?”


  “Been better.” A glance toward the fence separating the raceway from the Valley told her why.

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Pretty impressive bunch of ­people here,” Thurman said. “And on the ground. Do you have any idea how hard it is to fence in an entire valley of this size in a few days? The logistics involved?”

  “Hadn’t really thought about it. Hard, I imagine.”

  “And then some. If the place hadn’t already been descending into chaos, it would have caused a panic. As it was, the Valley’s inhabitants barely noticed.”

  “A great relief to them, I’m sure.”

  Thurman ignored the comment. “Fallon? Who would you say—­within a radius of a hundred miles or so—­would most closely fit your ‘classic’ psychopath mold, based on your studies? Brain structure and any other genetic criteria included?”

  Besides me? she thought. Again, it was not something she dared voice out loud. Beyond that, she had to consider for a long moment. “I guess Randy Wayne Warga,” she said finally. “Randall, officially.”

  “Why him?”

  “He’s probably committed at least a dozen murders. He’s down at the Arizona State Prison Complex, in Florence. He was convicted on thirteen charges of second-­degree homicide and sexual assault, but I’m sure he’s done more than that. He’s a sexual sadist of the first order, and I suspect he’s been raping and killing for years.”

  “Warga?” He spelled it out.

  “Right.”

  Thurman raised his left hand in the air. Immediately, Fallon heard boots hurrying down the concrete steps and turned to see two police officers coming toward them, in full tactical gear. When they were close enough, Thurman said, “Randall Wayne Warga. ASPC-­Florence, Central Unit.”

  “Got it, sir,” one of the officers said. They about-­faced and rushed toward an exit.

  “What was that all about?” Fallon asked when they were gone.