The Burning Road

by Ann Benson

  “The night is young, Dr. Crowe, very young. Please don’t be fooled. Now, we’re going to have to take a different tack, I think. We have the list of boys who have this problem. But we don’t have the camp’s records, so we can’t make a comparison to see if there’s any overlap.”

  “What about that other Web site—the one about the camper who wanted to hear from other campers. Maybe he has heard from some. He’d have an e-mail list, maybe.”

  There was a momentary pause. “We could contact him, I suppose. But we’d prefer not to involve any of the children themselves in this process unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “Why?”

  Kristina Warger used a quiet voice when she said, “They don’t react well when you tell them to put their affairs in order. But if we have to do it, we have to do it, that’s all.”

  Michael Rosow missed the days in England when he would get up and go to work dressed in a three-piece pinstripe with the standard issue black umbrella hooked over his right arm, in the time before guns became mandatory. Damned inconvenient, he remembered thinking when he’d been forced to switch his umbrella to the left side to accommodate the firearm. And he’d just gotten accustomed once again to wearing a suit as one of the privileges of lieutenancy when DR SAM first emerged from Mexico, and he, along with every “expendable” British cop of any rank, was reassigned to Biopol. “Just for the duration,” they’d been assured, but the duration had turned out, as they all expected it would, to be forever. Because with each little resurgence of DR SAM, the fear of the general Outbreaks happening all over again came back. Michael no longer believed that the fear would ever really dissipate among those who’d been through it.

  He’d been surprised, when he transferred to U.S. Biopol, to discover that reassignment had been “voluntary” in the United States. “We had a good union,” one cop had told him. “We also have a Bill of Rights,” another said. “So we couldn’t be forced into anything. At least at first.”

  You also had the slowest governmental response to the Outbreaks, and the highest death rate in the civilized world, he recalled thinking at the time.

  He hated the weird, crinkly, blindingly green self-contained garments known as biosuits. And when the bullets in his sidearm were replaced by chemical pellets, he hated that even more, though he would be the first to admit that the “no blood” policy was sensible, if cumbersome to enact. But he loved the other toys associated with being a biocop with an undeniable passion, and relished using them. It had been on the screen of a bioimager that he’d first seen Caroline, and his obsession with her had been born.

  So when he went to the chief investigator in the death of the assistant basketball coach and fished for details, he expected to be told about the findings of the victim’s postmortem bodyprint, the contents of the bag of evidence that had been sucked up at the scene, the computerized analysis of the scene photos.

  “My wife knows someone who knows the deceased,” he said to his colleague, who questioned why Michael was interested. “Word is, the gent was a thoroughly decent chap. Bit of a flirt, but that’s not worth getting killed for, what?”

  “We’d all be dead if it was,” the investigator said. “Look, I was just about to go over to the lab. The guy’s going to be printed in a little while.”

  “That hasn’t been done yet?”

  The other cop glanced around nervously. “They’re a little backed up,” he confided. “Had a few cases come in from the outlying areas. They don’t have the same kind of equipment we do.”

  Michael didn’t ask what sort of cases the man was referring to; he almost didn’t want to know.

  “Hey,” the other cop said suddenly, “you want to come along, see for yourself?”

  “Smashing idea.”

  They rode over together in a Biopol van equipped with all the latest toys, and as the other cop drove, Michael examined the investigative paraphernalia with enthusiastic glee, comparing it to what he’d had in his previous post. It was all bigger, shinier, mightier, and newer than what he’d had in England.

  “It’s the American way, I guess, all these goodies,” he said to his van-mate. “But let me tell you, in jolly old England our weaponeers are bloody top-notch. I’ll just have a look-see at your little water pistols here.”

  He opened the weapons cache, expecting to find the usual assortment of sidearms and rifles, and a few empty slots where the chemical rifles rested in Outbreak times. But in this van those slots were filled. He stared at the weapons for a moment, recalling the last time he’d used one in England, on a hapless guard in a laboratory incident, a man who’d died unnecessarily because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In his forebrain he could see the man clutching the back of his neck where the bullet had hit, and crumpling within seconds to the ground, his body already reacting to the poison. They were little different from the dart guns of feral tribes, but their toxic payload was delivered with guaranteed force and unfailing accuracy. And at the height of DR SAM’s reign, troubling frequency.

  He hadn’t seen them in the near-year since he’d left England. But here they were again. He closed the cabinet and went forward to the passenger seat.

  “I see you’re carrying chemical rifles.”

  “Yep,” the other cop said quietly. “They refitted all these units again a couple of days ago.”

  Why had he not been told? “Anyone say why?”

  “No. And I didn’t ask.” They came to a stoplight and he looked away from the road, directly into Michael’s eyes. “Tell you the truth, Lieutenant, I don’t want to know. I’ll just do what they tell me to do if the time comes. But until then, quite frankly, I don’t want to think about it.”

  The light changed; they drove on in silence for the rest of the route to the forensic facility.

  The silence continued as he watched the deceased’s stiff body being hoisted onto the horizontal body-printer. Technicians seated the corpse on the lower bed of sensors with care and precision. They inserted the probes in all the appropriate places, then brought down the upper module of sensors, with its tens of thousands of receptors, each one as fluid in placement as the undulating spines of a sea urchin. There was a flash, and then another, as light and electricity were fed into the minuscule receptors, which radioed back the separate tiny images to a central computer for reorganization into a complete three-dimensional image.

  “Well, it was a clean print,” Michael’s colleague said when the technician handed him a readout and a disk a short while later, “but on a quick glance, I’d have to say the results are pretty slim.”

  He handed Michael a single sheet of paper that was barely a third full. “Shame. Just when the basketball team was finally getting good again too.”

  Michael had expected three, maybe four sheets of data. “This is all they got?”

  “Hey, it’s right there, you saw them do the print. It was a solid read.”

  Michael frowned at the slim offering of evidence. “What about at the scene? Did you have any better luck?”

  The cop shrugged. “We sucked up everything that was there. We got basically nothing.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  “My sentiments exactly. This case gets weirder by the minute.” After a thoughtful pause, he said, “You know, if I didn’t know better I’d say that someone got there ahead of us and sucked up all the evidence before we could. We shoulda gotten five hundred human positives from the sucker. This was a public bicycle path—how many people do you suppose biked or ran on that path and dripped a little sweat while they were at it? Christ, the President jogged on that path. I heard he sweats like a pig. But we got borscht.”

  “What about questioning his friends and family?”

  “We did, and according to everyone I talked to, he was the all-American boy. Highly regarded at work, well liked in his apartment complex. He wasn’t some right-wing nut or a pedophile, none of the things you’d look for in someone who died funny.”

  “Nothing c
ollected from the exterior body search?”

  “Nothing but his own signatures. No pubic hairs, no perfume residue, no dander under the fingernails. I’ll tell you one thing I know about this victim, though, and it’s not for public consumption.”

  “No, of course not,” Michael said.

  “Because the basketball program has an image to protect.”

  “Indeed. I’d never breathe a word of it.”

  The investigator leaned closer and whispered, “There wasn’t a trace of female DNA anywhere on his person. This guy had to be a complete loser with women. Either that, or someone cleaned him up real good.”

  He rode back to the station in a rather contemplative state, and went immediately to his own vehicle for the drive home. There was no record of his palmbook having entered Big Dattie, for which he was grateful. Janie had done the dirty deed correctly.

  Michael asked Caroline later if she’d touched the man in any way.

  “We shook hands.”

  “Hmm,” he said quietly. “There wasn’t one molecule of trace tissue.”

  Children don’t react well to being told to put their affairs in order, Kristina had said, so in consideration of this rather obvious bit of wisdom, Janie refrained from acting on her first impulse, which was to contact the wheelchair-bound boy on the Internet and ask for a list of those camp alumni who’d gotten in touch with him. Instead she tried Mrs. Prives, who was as cheerfully cooperative as possible, if still somewhat distracted.

  She listed what names she could remember. “I have some of the addresses at home,” she told Janie, “but I keep in touch only with a couple of the other families. Abraham might have a few, but I don’t know where he would keep them.”

  “It’s all right,” Janie said. The names alone would be enough. “This is a big help.”

  Get a new computer, she ordered herself as she looked at the short list. She could start on the desktop machine in her office, which had all the necessary sorting, collating, and evaluation capabilities, but it would be terribly frustrating to continue it there, attached as she would be by an electronic umbilicus to the foundation’s servers. But the foundation’s computers did have a few unique capabilities, high among them the ability to “watch” for something to fall “outside the limits of expected and tolerable variability.” The first time Janie had seen that phrase, she’d fallen in love with it and made it her own. It became her new goal to find someplace “outside the limits,” and it often made her sad to think how very inside she’d become in the course of solving her life’s dilemmas, despite a clear and conscious opposite intent. She had been in the outside state when she’d noticed the Camp Meir boys and recognized the significance of their situation.

  When she completed her manual checklist, she was able to see that without exception, all of the Camp Meir boys were on the general list of bone-shattered boys.

  Well, she thought, if there was ever really any doubt, it’s been laid to rest now.

  Kristina would want to see this.

  Long time no see, she e-mailed Wargirl.

  Kristina showed up at Janie’s home that night, just as Janie was making her own dinner of brown rice, tofu, and broccoli, though after a brief, earlier conversation with Michael she had little appetite.

  Kristina, in contrast, looked positively starved. “Grab a chair,” Janie told her, “there’s plenty for both of us.”

  “Thanks,” Kristina said. “I could eat twenty-four hours a day.”

  Janie regarded Kristina’s thin frame. “Right,” she said cynically.

  “I can’t seem to gain any weight, though.”

  “I know someone else like that. You both annoy the hell out of me.”

  “You should try having my metabolism for a day or two before you say that.”

  Janie had noticed that Kristina was a fidgety young woman, one with a temperament that might once have been described as “spirited” or even “nervous.” She had a level of energy that seemed enviable on the surface. But Janie wondered, as she watched Kristina eat, looking way too much like what Betsy might have looked like at that same table, how Kristina’s mother had coped with a child so full of the devil as this one obviously was.

  Joyfully, she decided.

  “So,” she said, after casting off the Betsy-spell, “we have the beginnings of a list. Abraham’s mother gave me some names. I found them all on the bone-trauma list I got out of Big Dattie. Which leads me to another thought. I think you’re right that we shouldn’t contact the boy on the Web site. But maybe we should try his mother or father.”

  It was easy enough to get the phone number—he’d posted his parents’ names on his site, which she’d printed and kept. And those parents, when given the Giardia scare story, had more names. By the time Janie was through talking with them, she had a third of the names on the list checked off.

  “Well, that pretty much settles it,” Kristina said as they went over the results of their evening’s efforts. “I’m just surprised no one else has seen this.”

  “No one had a reason to look.”

  “So now we move to the next phase, I guess,” Kristina said.

  “Which would be?”

  “We have to make complete files on all these boys. Then maybe when we sort the data, we’ll be able to see some sort of pattern. If we can’t find anyone official to tell us anything, we’ll just have to see it for ourselves.”

  Janie looked around with a helpless expression. “I miss my computer. I’m going to have to get out and buy another one before we can do any more of this.”

  “Oh, goodness, I forgot,” Kristina said. She got up quickly from the table. “Wait right here.”

  She returned from her tiny car a few moments later carrying a securely taped box that was suspicious in its absence of exterior markings. She set it down carefully on the kitchen counter.

  “Is that for me?” Janie asked with mild surprise as she watched Kristina pull tape off the box.

  Kristina smiled and nodded, then started pulling wads and wads of bubble wrap out of the box. And just when it began to seem that the box had to have been packed with nothing but stuffing, Janie saw her gently lift a notebook computer out. The young girl carried the small computer reverently to the table and placed it in front of her hostess.

  “Dr. Crowe, meet Virtual Memorial. A little present from us.”

  “The picture is pretty good,” one of the watchers said.

  “Are you sure this is the right time to give her that unit?” the other asked. “I worry that it might be too soon.”

  “I worry that if we don’t give it to her now, we’ll lose the perfect opportunity. She’s like a mother hen with no eggs—if you give her an unfamiliar one, she’ll sit on it just to keep herself occupied.”

  “Does it bother you, though, to be using someone from the outside? It does me.”

  “No. Not at all. In fact, I think it’s wise—it creates a certain amount of insulation. I don’t like having Kristina so exposed. But what does bother me, an awful lot, is that this particular woman is outside. She should be in here with us.”

  “So there must be others all across the country, then,” Janie said to Kristina, “others just like me.”

  “And some of them,” Kristina said, “the ones who are in the right places, are looking after other boys on the list, just like you are with Abraham. We have a lot of supporters across the country, mostly in positions similar to yours, where they have access to patients, the Mednet, computer systems … but they aren’t official caregivers. Lab technicians, midlevel administrators, research people who can look in and touch base and ask questions, but don’t leave unexpected footprints. But they’ll be different from you in one regard.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’ll be telling them what to do.”

  Janie was quick to react. “No. I can’t. I’m not the boss type.”

  Kristina stifled a little laugh. “That’s not what we’ve heard.”

  “What you’ve h
eard?”

  “Dr. Crowe. Please don’t pretend you don’t understand why we enlisted you. It was because we watched you and liked what we saw.”

  Janie spent a few silent and uncomfortable moments deciding how she ought to react. “I think you’re confusing boss with bossy,” she finally continued. “Bossy I’ll give you. But not boss. I’ve made it through a lot of years without holding any kind of administrative position and I intend to make it through the rest of my natural life in that state. It’s just not my style to oversee other people. Too much interaction, of a kind I especially dislike.”

  “I think you’re underestimating yourself. You’d be very good at it.”

  “I don’t think so. And another thing—it would be very difficult for me to get away right now because—”

  “Don’t worry about that. You won’t be doing any traveling at all,” Kristina said, as if the matter were settled, as if Janie’s opinion or preference carried absolutely no weight.

  “I’m going to Iceland, quite soon, as a matter of fact.”

  “We’re aware of that, but that’s not the kind of travel I mean. You won’t have to travel for this work. And no one seems to think that your trip will disrupt the work you’re doing for us. It probably won’t ever be so time-sensitive that a few days’ delay will screw things up. Unless, of course, something urgent comes up in the meantime.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then we’ll figure out what to do.”

  “I’m going to be away for five days.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem. However, if you get very involved with all this and you want to postpone that trip, no one would object.”

  Janie gave it a moment’s thought, and then felt slightly perturbed at herself for having done it. “I haven’t seen my man in four months.”

  “We know. And you should see him. You’ll feel better if you do, perform better. And as far as the boss thing is concerned, your only interaction with the others out there will be electronic. You’re the central clearinghouse for everything they gather. That’s what we mean by ‘boss’—you’ll be telling your contacts if you need more data or if the data they’ve sent don’t make any sense. Just like you do now for the foundation. Except now you’ll be able to do everything from right here,” Kristina went on, “and the only person you’ll have to interact with is me.” She patted the little computer, then let her hand rest on its closed top. “And Virtual Memorial, here.”