7 Sykos

by Marsheila Rockwell

  The young man, his face a prairie dog town of acne, looked at Davidson uncertainly.

  “Don’t look at me, Private!” he barked, much to his credit. “I’m not the one who asked you a question.”

  “Yes, sir!” the private answered, so green and flustered that he forgot that, as a corporal—­she was pretty sure that’s what the two stripes on Davidson’s shoulder meant, anyway—­her new handler wasn’t an officer; he worked for a living. The young man looked back at Fallon, his face flushing. “No, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am. It hasn’t been delivered yet.”

  Fallon nodded, accepting his apology. It wasn’t like she wasn’t used to blatant sexism in the scientific field; the military was only marginally worse.

  “Good. When do you expect it?”

  “It’s already an hour late, so any minute now, ma—­”

  Just then, the door opened, letting in a blast of oven-­hot air and a young man carrying two boxes.

  “Lunch?” Fallon asked him, and this one, apparently a little more experienced than the pimply-­faced guard, nodded and yes ma’amed her. “I’ll take them, then.”

  She didn’t begrudge him his look over at Davidson, and neither did the corporal, seemingly, because his reply was considerably quieter this time.

  “Do as the doctor says, Private.”

  “Yes, Corporal.”

  The private dutifully handed the boxes over to Fallon, saluted Davidson, did an about-­face, and headed back out into the heat. Fallon handed the top box to the other private and opened the bottom one. It contained a paper-­wrapped sandwich, a bag of potato chips, an apple, a cookie, and a carton of milk. Far better fare than most prisons served.

  “This is perfect,” she said. She looked at the private. “You can take that one to Light. I’ll take this one to Warga.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Oh, and can you get me a chair while you’re at it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  As he scurried off to do her bidding, Davidson looked at her.

  “Should I even ask?”

  “Only if you really want to know the answer.”

  He grimaced.

  “That’s a ‘no,’ then.”

  “Exactly.”

  The private returned fairly quickly with a folding chair, which he handed to Davidson.

  “Okay, Corporal,” Fallon said. “Let’s go. But stay out of sight. This won’t work as well if Warga thinks we’re not alone.”

  “Guess you should carry this, then,” he replied, handing her the chair.

  She walked down the hallway toward Warga’s cell, Davidson several feet behind her. The sound of the air-­conditioning was louder here than in any of the other newly erected buildings—­Fallon figured the Army might not have spent quite as much money or effort on insulating it, considering the ­people it housed.

  When she reached Warga, she greeted the murderer cordially.

  “Hello, Randy,” she said as she unfolded the chair and set it down, facing toward the bars. Then she sat on it, the box on her lap.

  “Couldn’t stop thinkin’ about me, huh, Doc?” He leered at her from his bunk.

  Fallon ignored him, taking the top off the box and setting it on the floor beside her, making sure she tilted the bottom up as she did, so that Warga could see the contents.

  “Hey! Is that my lunch?”

  She pretended not to hear as she started unwrapping the sandwich noisily. It was just peanut butter and jelly—­grape, which she hated—­but her mouth started watering anyway. She really needed to stop skipping breakfast.

  She lifted the sandwich to her mouth, took a bite, chewed and swallowed, all while Warga looked on hungrily.

  “I’m sorry, Randy, what was that?”

  “Bitch. What the hell kind of game are you playing now?”

  Fallon feigned surprise.

  “No game, Randy. Just a reminder.”

  His eyes narrowed. He’d gotten up from the bed and crossed over to the bars, his hands grasping two of them tightly. He was probably imagining they were her neck.

  “A reminder of what?”

  Fallon took another bite before answering, then set the sandwich down on its wrapper and grabbed the milk. Opening it, she took two long gulps, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She placed the empty carton back in the box, stood, and walked toward Warga. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Davidson tense, but she ignored him. When she was just beyond Warga’s reach, she stopped and crouched, placing the box on the floor.

  “That the creature comforts you enjoy so much come at a price.”

  The veins in his hands stood out as he clutched the bars, and his face almost matched his prison jumpsuit. Fallon thought she could even hear his teeth grinding, but that was probably just wishful thinking.

  “Yeah? And what price is that?”

  She gave him a friendly smile. “Let’s talk about the comforts first, shall we?”

  “You mean like my lunch?”

  She shrugged.

  “Well, sure. Food,” she said, nudging the lunch box with her toe, “water, sunlight. A bed. All things you have access to now that could easily be taken away from you. But I was thinking bigger. Like, say, temporary freedom.”

  That caught him off guard.

  “Say what?”

  “Freedom. No more cell, here or back in Florence.”

  He frowned suspiciously.

  “How temporary?”

  Fallon shrugged again.

  “Depends on you, really. How soon you do what you need to do, how well you do it. Might not even be temporary, if you’re successful.”

  “And what is it I need to do, exactly?” he asked. His hands were still on the bars, but they’d relaxed enough that she could see the bandage on the right one. He’d almost gone for the shiny lure. She just needed to wiggle it a little more, and he’d bite.

  “Remember those three ­people who attacked you in the other building?”

  Warga rubbed the spot on his cheek where one of them had torn away a small chunk of flesh, held together now by two butterfly bandages.

  ­“People? You mean things. That you let attack me.”

  Fallon held up a hand. “That was not my idea. But it did help us gain some valuable information.”

  She was close enough she could see the slight widening of his eyes at the word “valuable.”

  Wiggle, wiggle, she thought.

  “Such as?”

  “Well, Randy, it appears that you and ­people like you—­you know, murderers, rapists, and other flavors of psychopath—­are immune to whatever it is that’s turning ­people into those things you fought. So you’re being offered the rare opportunity to serve your country in exchange for all those creature comforts you love so much.”

  “What, like, in Armageddon? So I won’t have to pay taxes anymore?”

  “That can probably be arranged.”

  “And what’s the catch? They had to become astronauts and go out into space and most of them didn’t make it back. Is it going to be like that?”

  Fallon hid a smile as she starting reeling in her catch.

  “Something like that, yeah. You’ll go in with a team of . . . like-­minded individuals . . . and retrieve the source of the virus—­a meteor, or part of it, anyway—­which we’ll then be able to use to formulate a vaccine.”

  It wasn’t that simple, of course, but details would only confuse the issue. Especially since they hadn’t all been hammered out yet.

  “So we’ll be heroes.”

  “Yes, I suppose you will.”

  “Chicks dig heroes.”

  Fallon stopped herself from rolling her eyes in disgust, but just barely.

  “Some of them.” The ones with death wishes, if Warga was their idea of a hero.


  He smiled, a predatory smirk that Fallon wanted to claw off his face.

  “Okay, Doc. Sign me up. When do I leave?”

  “Tomorrow, probably.” She used the side of her foot to shove the box of food across the floor, where it fetched up against the bars. “In the meantime, enjoy your lunch.”

  Light had finished his lunch by the time Fallon and her shadow made it down to his cell, on the opposite side of the corridor from Warga’s, the last one in the row.

  “Hello, Clarice,” he said when she walked into view.

  Fallon almost chuckled at that. “Hello, Light,” she said instead. “Turns out you won the lottery—­you do, in fact, have the brain structure of a psychopath. Not that there was really even any doubt.”

  “That’s what I have that the feds want? It’s not my stunning good looks or off-­the-­charts IQ?”

  “ ’Fraid not.”

  “So, what—­they want me to turn me into some kind of covert assassin?”

  Fallon did laugh this time.

  “You watch too much TV. No, they want you to go back into Phoenix—­”

  “Back in there? You’re crazier than I am!”

  “—­with a team of other psychopaths and recover some fragments of a meteor that fell on the east side. It’s the source of the virus that’s causing everyone to go crazy and bash each other’s heads open. A virus that your brain structure apparently makes you immune to.”

  “That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “And yet, it’s the offer I’m making, so trust that it’s real.”

  “And what if I refuse?”

  “Stay here and rot. Hope this place isn’t overrun by Infecteds in the meantime, or that someone remembers to move you when they decide to drop the nukes.” She nodded toward the box on his cell floor, empty now except for the trash. “Though judging by how late that was, I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”

  “Nukes?”

  Fallon nodded.

  “That’s the only other option. You bring the meteor back so we can make a vaccine, or they’re going to turn the Valley of the Sun into a parking lot.”

  “Not much of a bargaining position, Doc.”

  “Never said it would be.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow, most likely.”

  He pretended to think it over. It wasn’t like he had much of a choice.

  “Okay, I’ll do it. On one condition.”

  Fallon blinked.

  “Okay, I’ll bite. What condition?”

  “Since it’s likely to be my last meal, I want steak tonight.”

  Fallon cast a glance over at Davidson, who nodded.

  “I can probably make that happen. How do you want it?”

  Light smiled, showing perfect teeth.

  “Bloody, of course.”

  CHAPTER 17

  57 hours

  The helicopter kicked up dust and grit that stung Fallon’s cheeks and nearly blotted out the track lights filling the infield with artificial daylight. She squinted and looked away, but too late; her left eye felt like a pebble had lodged in it. Or a boulder. She blinked, hoping she’d tear up and wash it clean in a hurry. Meeting a psychopath while looking like you’d been crying was never a good idea. They thrived on human weakness and exploited it at every opportunity. The “something in my eye” routine—­even when true—­wouldn’t fly.

  “This is Antonetti,” Thurman announced. He was standing still, feet spread apart, spine rigid. If the mini-­haboob bothered him at all, he didn’t show it. “You’ve met him, right?”

  Fallon nodded. “I know Gino. The warden at Menard let us take a mobile MRI scanner in and study some of the inmates. Paolo was the one we really wanted, but Warden McCall insisted that we scan some others, too, or it would look like Paolo was getting preferential treatment of some kind. Gino was one of the extras.”

  “Shame we couldn’t get Paolo.”

  “That would’ve been . . . difficult.”

  “To say the least.”

  Eleven years earlier, Gino Antonetti and his cousin, Paolo Pittarelli, had terrorized two southern Illinois counties, killing fourteen ­people over a six-­week period. Paolo—­six years older than Gino, an ex-­Marine with a long record of violence—­had an old, grey Nissan Sentra that looked like ten thousand other cars on the road. He had taken out the rear seats and cut a hole through the back of the trunk, then a smaller one from the trunk to the outside. Gino had been nineteen, skinny, and when he lay on the floor, upper torso through the hole into the trunk, he could aim a sniper rifle through the smaller hole. Paolo threw a dark blanket over him, once he was in position, so even if someone glanced into the car, they wouldn’t see Gino.

  Paolo parked at different places—­a highway rest stop, a ­couple of mall parking lots, a rise overlooking residential streets, across the road from gas stations with convenience stores—­and Gino shot at whoever caught his attention. Only one shot in any given location, and during the inevitable chaos that followed a hit, Paolo drove away. If no one was hit, sometimes nobody even noticed that a shot had been fired at all. Still, they took off, casually, no more than five miles per hour over the speed limit. Playing it safe.

  Finally, a convenience-­store clerk spotted the car and reported it, and three days after that, a police officer on patrol saw it on the road. By the time Paolo stopped the Sentra, there were eight law-­enforcement vehicles behind it. He drew a .38 and bolted from behind the wheel, firing, trying to make a run for it. He took three bullets, shattering his pelvis and punching a hole in his gut. He survived, but physically was never quite the same.

  Gino had stayed in the car until the police surrounded it and showed his hands when they commanded. He’d said that it had all been Paolo’s idea—­some half-­formed notion of teaching ­people that life was cheap, or precious, maybe both at once—­but Gino hadn’t needed much convincing, and he never showed an instant’s remorse. The scans had shown a severely underdeveloped limbic system. Based on his brain structure and a violent, impoverished upbringing, Fallon was sure he would have shown homicidal tendencies sooner or later, even without Paolo’s help. But although Gino had done the shooting, she’d asked for Paolo to be brought in. Despite a limp and some lingering abdominal issues, he was in reasonable health, and his brain was considerably more classically psychopathic than his cousin’s. When Book had inquired on her behalf, though, he’d learned that Paolo had been killed by a ­couple of prison guards after a ruckus in the yard. With no living relatives besides Gino, his personal effects had been sent along, to be given to Gino when he arrived.

  As the blades slowed and the prop wash settled back to the ground, Thurman stepped forward. Fallon kept pace, blinking and rubbing at her eye. No relief yet.

  Then the copter’s door opened, and there was Gino Antonetti, looking older than Fallon remembered—­then again, she no doubt looked that way to him—­but otherwise the same. Still skinny; obviously weight training hadn’t been as appealing to him as it was to many inmates. His hair was black and wavy, his face jowly, hangdog. He always looked sad; even when he smiled, it came across as phony and made him seem more pathetic still. His hands were cuffed behind him, and a burly soldier held on to his arm until another soldier rolled steps up to the helicopter’s door. Which, Fallon figured, was probably a hatch or a point of egress or something, in military speak. To her, a door was a door.

  Antonetti paused before stepping out of the chopper. His eyes darted this way and that, as if scanning for threats. Maybe he had been locked up so long that big, open spaces scared him. Then his gaze touched upon Fallon and stopped. That smile—­still as convincing as a salesman’s handshake—­appeared. “Hey, Doctor,” he said. “Nobody told me you’d be here.”

  “Did they tell you anything?” she asked.

  “Not much. Said I was taking a trip. Put me o
n an airplane, then on this whirlybird, and here I am. Ahhh . . . where, exactly?”

  “Arizona, Gino. Outside Phoenix.”

  “This is what the desert looks like? I thought there’d be camels, you know. Sand dunes.”

  “Not in this desert.”

  “I never been west of Kansas City, what do I know?”

  “I’m sorry about your cousin, Gino.”

  His face softened, and his shoulders slumped. “Yeah, so am I.”

  She wasn’t surprised by his reaction; Paolo had been the dominant partner in their murderous relationship, and Antonetti had looked up to him. Even psychopaths could have what passed for human attachments.

  Like a mother and her child, for instance.

  “Were you there?” she asked. “When it . . . ?”

  “They kept us pretty separate.”

  A soldier stepped out of the helicopter, carrying a clear plastic bag. “They sent Paolo’s things,” Fallon said. The soldier handed it to her, and she held it up, peering inside. “Looks like a wallet, some keys. Dog tags. A ­couple of other things. The gum’s probably a little stale.”

  “All I care about’s the tags,” Antonetti said.

  “I’ll see that you get them.”

  The soldier gripping his arm gave a tug, and Antonetti stumbled down the steps. “Move it.”

  “Easy with him!” Fallon said.

  “He’s just a murdering scumbag,” the soldier snapped.

  “He’s our murdering scumbag,” Thurman said. “And we need him in one piece.”

  The soldier dropped his hand from Antonetti and stood up straighter, as if Thurman’s words carried more authority than hers did. Which was true, she supposed, but she’d never seen this soldier before, that she knew of, and she didn’t think he knew her. He had probably accompanied Antonetti all the way from Illinois.

  Antonetti’s head swiveled as he looked from Fallon to Thurman and back again. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Why am I here?”

  “You’re here because I had you brought here,” Fallon said. “As for why, that’s going to wait until the others get here. I’ve already explained it more times than I care to.”