The Zen Gene

by Mains, Laurie

  “No. I was Military Police for five years with a few courses on anti-terrorism tactics but nothing undercover,” he said.

  Good, she thought. His answer was honest and not the balls swinging GI Joe crap she usually got from career soldiers. It looked like Western had picked a good man for the job.

  “We’ve been assigned to do surveillance on a sixteen-year-old underachiever named Tyler Worthy. How does that sound?” she said.

  He glanced at her to see if she was serious.

  “Working for the Canadian Armed Forces I accept there is no assignment too menial or operational directive too insane for the elite higher-ups, in their finite wisdom, to request of the junior ranks,” he said. He was treading dangerously close to the acceptable limit of disrespect but when she laughed he knew she worked her way up through the ranks and earned her commission. He relaxed now that he knew they shared common ground. It was obvious she retained the innate distrust the lower ranks held for command.

  “The boy is intellectually challenged which is pc for retarded these days. My boss believes he may be in cahoots with his father a French national named Julian Froste. Froste is an immediate apprehend for visa violations,” she said.

  She held up a photo for him to look at and Nichol glanced at it.

  “He looks too young to be the father of a sixteen-year-old,” he said.

  “It’s an old photo. He is thirty-eight and heavily involved in bio-terrorism. He went underground and no one has laid eyes on him since the late nineties. Basically our job is to sit on this kid for a week or longer to see if Froste turns up. The kid’s photo is from school and is believed to be accurate,” she said and held up Tyler’s grade five class photo.

  “Handsome kid, he doesn’t look retarded,” he said as they drove towards the city, “where do you want to start?”

  “We will find our baby but first I need some coffee,” she said.

  Nichol signaled a left and turned onto Weston Avenue and drove up to Tim Horton’s and got in line at the drive-thru.

  “Dan I thought we were going to get along,” she said.

  “What? You don’t like Timmy’s,” he said genuinely surprised.

  “I said I need coffee Sergeant. I know you can do better and don’t try to foist Starbucks on me either it could result in a reduction in rank,” she said.

  A woman who knows what she likes, he thought, this might be fun after all.

  The Factory

  All the seams around the door into laboratory four were sealed with shiny grey duct tape. Sergeant Nichol aimed his flashlight playing the light along the seam whistling softly.

  ”They must have used a whole roll. They obviously don’t want anyone to get inside,” he said.

  Hunter was standing behind him when he reached out to try the door handle.

  “Wait Sergeant,” she said. “There might be another reason it’s sealed like that, maybe they don’t want something to get out?”

  Nichol reflexively yanked his hand away from the door handle.

  ”Let’s keep looking,” she said, “it’s obviously not in daily use so we can come back to it later if we need to.”

  He was happy to keep moving. He was not particularly freaked out by germs but he knew nothing about biological weapons except for what he saw in combat training films from the Vietnam era. One memorable scene showed a naked Vietnamese girl writhing in the dirt with her skin bubbling and boiling off her face and body. There was no sound track to that part of the film but you did not need sound to hear her screams. Horrific sights like that early in his military career made a lasting impression. He dedicated his time in the military to avoiding unnecessary risks especially when it involved things he knew nothing about. Chemical and biological warfare were two of those things and so far that policy had worked well.

  He was happy to follow Hunter’s lead as they continued to explore the ruined factory. they followed a rough pathway through the debris past a row of labs. None of the lab doors were locked and when they looked inside they saw dusty empty rooms until they came to number eight. The first thing he noticed was the floor in front of the door to lab eight was clean down to the bare concrete and a pathway had been cleared to a doorway marked basement.

  She nodded and he reached out and gingerly tried the door knob and was relieved to find it locked. He ran the beam of his light all along the seam of the door but there was no duct tape. He noticed the male and female ends of an electrical cord jutting out from under the door. They looked newer than anything else they saw inside the factory.

  “I’ll bet this is where they… do... whatever it is…they do,” he finished lamely.

  She gave him a look and almost rolled her eyes but smiled instead and gently nudged him out of the way. She was trying to kick the eye-rolling habit it was fine at thirteen but did not play well as an adult.

  He watched her kneel down before the door handle. It took her less than a minute to efficiently pick the lock. Her ‘cred’ rose considerably in his mind along with the unhappy realization she was way out of his league. When he heard the lock release he moved forward to open the door.

  She held up a hand to stop him as she removed a P232 Sig Sauer pistol from a waist holster and chambered a round. He watched her walking ahead of him for the last half hour and did not realize she had a weapon stowed on board. She clicked the safety off and looked at him and nodded for him to open the door. He held his breath reached out and pushed it open. There was a bit of resistance from the snug rubber seals around the door. There was no one in the room and he resumed breathing when he realized the door was not booby trapped.

  They entered and he held the light for her as she checked out the lab. He was not in a hurry to discover any deadly bugs he was happy to let her do the exploring. She was leaning over and looking through a stack of boxes with her mini flashlight in her mouth when he remembered the plug that was sticking out from under the door. She did not need his light for the moment and he stepped back outside the lab to examine it. Someone had neatly cut the seal away from the doorway just enough to let the cord ends through. Without thinking he plugged the two ends together. They both jumped when the large fan in the corner of the lab roared to life.

  “That’s interesting, a positive airflow set up,” she said giving him a long look to see if he had done it on purpose. “Please don’t touch anything else Sergeant Nichol,” she said. The tone of her voice and the use of his last name made it abundantly clear it was not simply a request.

  She wasn’t a scientist but she was thinking a lab this complex could not be set up by a mentally challenged sixteen-year-old. Someone, presumably the kid’s father, had the knowledge necessary to build a biology laboratory. Neither she nor Nichol had much beyond basic high school science but they agreed this looked like an active working lab.

  That knowledge did not make her feel any better about what they might find in the lab with the duct-taped door. She took a small camera from her jacket pocket and shot photos of everything while touching nothing. She glanced at her watch and decided they were there long enough. She did not want the boy or his father to catch them inside the building. They were about to leave and relock the door when she spotted a video cable plugged into the computer and wondered where the camera was located. She found a power bar under the countertop and clicked it on.

  Some dim low voltage lighting came on immediately and the monitor began to flicker. She had not planned to boot the computer in case it was checked to see when it was last used but this was too tempting. She hit the power button on the old IBM desktop computer and waited while it booted. It took a long time but it came to life and requested a password. She took the key-shaped thumb drive from her pocket and inserted it into a USB port.

  The computer rebooted but this time without a password request. She found the icon for the video camera and clicked it. When the video feed came online they both stared at the mostly dark screen trying to figure out what they were looking at. Then she got an idea. She told Nic
hol to go back to lab four and shine his flashlight at the frosted window on the door. When he did she saw flashes of light on the screen.

  “Stop moving,” she yelled to him through the open door. “Okay now move slowly to your right.”

  He complied. “Now down a little,” she said.

  He complied and the dim image on the screen brightened and inky shapes became clearer and she watched as something on the lab floor congealed into a meaningful shape.

  “Oh oh what’s this,” she said.

  Chapter 9

  The Truth Hurts

  6:30 pm

  They were in the kitchen when he decided it was time to come clean and tell her why he was there. It was a confession he was not looking forward to making but he knew it would be worse if he let the deception continue.

  “There is something I need to tell you. It’s about today. I didn’t run into you by accident,” he said.

  She was already upset and she physically recoiled when he said this backing away from him with a look of shock on her face.

  “I’m here because Tyler is in trouble,” he said.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” she said.

  The look of shock was turning to fear.

  “I was contacted by the Canadian Forces Military Intelligence unit in Esquimalt. They are convinced Tyler is involved in some kind of terrorist activity,” he said.

  Andi stopped with her arms folded across her chest facing him across the room.

  ”Is that supposed to be funny? I think you better leave,” she said.

  “Andi, this isn’t a joke. It’s serious. I’m here to help Tyler,” he said.

  “Help Tyler?” she said angrily. “You told me you didn’t know I had a son. Those were your exact words and now you tell me you’re here to help him?”

  “You don’t understand,” he said.

  ”You lied to me today and now you’re telling me you work for Military Intelligence and Tyler’s in trouble. You call that helping?” she yelled.

  “No, Andi you don’t understand. I don’t work for them. I’m an instructor at Lakehead College. They came and got me. My name came up in relation to you because we knew each other in Toronto. I agreed to come here to convince them that you and Tyler have nothing to do with it. There is no other reason. When they told me your name I knew I needed to help you. Colonel Western told me Tyler was involved in some kind of bio-terror attack on his troops,” he said.

  “What are you talking about? What does Tyler have to do with bio-anything?” she said. She was angry but at least she was listening.

  “They think he is somehow involved in terrorism,” he said lamely.

  “Terrorism, what kind of idiot would think that? He’s sixteen years old and failing grade eight. What kind of terrorist does that make him? Does this have anything to do with him being on the computer all the time? Has he talked to someone online? Is that it?” she said.

  “No. This is more serious than that,” he said.

  “Why are you doing this? What’s in it for you?”

  The hurt sound of accusation in her voice cut him deeply.

  “Nothing, there is nothing in it for me. What should I have done? Walk away? Ignore the whole thing? I know what these guys are like, they believe Tyler is involved in something.”

  “I would have told you!” she said.

  “What was I supposed to tell you? That the Canadian Government thinks your son is a bio-terrorist? I would certainly believe that if it came from an old boyfriend who shows up out of nowhere. I was just going to forget the whole thing and tell Western to piss off but after I talked with Tyler I realized that he knows quite a lot about genetics and knowing that Julian Froste is his father….well I wasn’t sure what to think. Maybe Tyler is being used by him or… I didn’t know what to think,” he said.

  Andi looked at him with tears in her eyes.

  “His father?” she said and wiped them away before she continued. “You are his father.” There was hurt in her voice as she said it and she turned away from him and ran to her bedroom slamming the door behind her.

  He was stunned. Emotion welled within him at this startling revelation. It started with disbelief, moved to wonder, and finally acceptance as the obvious truth of her words crystallized in his mind. The surprise of her revelation slowed his ability to comprehend the entirety of its meaning though he knew intrinsically, at a deep level, it was true. There was something familiar about Tyler, he felt it the moment he saw the boy.

  A moment ago he understood his life completely. He knew the safe bounds of the loops and paths on which his life moved. It took only four words to shatter that illusion and slam him headlong into a new reality. It felt as though up to this point in life he had been living in slow motion and now, jolted awake, he arose from long stupor.

  He drifted through the house to her bedroom door and stopped pale and shaken before it. His logical mind desperately fought to explain it away. This can’t be right, his brain argued, it makes no sense. If I am his father why didn’t she tell me? Before he had completely formed the question in his mind his heart revealed the answer. He whispered to the closed door reflexively holding onto the last shred of his former life.

  “They told me his father was Julian Froste.”

  His voice trailed off. The words he spoke served only to repeat what he now realized was a lie. He could not have named the exact emotion he was experiencing at that moment, but thinking about it later, he realized it was all of them.

  He opened the bedroom door.

  Chapter 10

  The White Van

  7:30 pm

  Zen stormed around her bedroom picking things up and throwing them down again. She was looking for her blue and white top. She knew it was there somewhere in the tangle of clothes on the floor. She was increasingly frustrated looking for it and now in a full-on rage she was throwing anything she put her hands on. It was when she threw the iPod her grandpa gave her for her birthday on the floor that she gave up and flung herself onto the bed and began screaming into her pillow.

  When she stopped she was surprised she felt better even if it was total drama queen stuff. She realized she was not upset about the missing top it was Tyler she was upset about. She had been frantic worrying about Katie until she got home and remembered seeing her at the mall recently. She was no longer concerned about her being sick but it bothered her that Tyler would do that to her.

  She was not exactly sure what he did but it was probably dangerous and definitely wrong of him to do anything to anyone. She knew herself well enough to know it would drive her crazy if she did not do something about it but the only thing she could think to do was talk to Tyler. She could not tell Andi about it because she would go nuts on him and he would never trust her again for ratting on him. It was frustrating trying to have a conversation with him but she knew she had to try. She wanted to talk him out of doing any more of his weird experiments before he made someone sick or got into real trouble. She was so angry it made her cry to even think about him; she was angry and worried something bad will happen to him.

  This couldn’t wait. She pulled her blue hoodie on and stormed out the back door. There were no lights on in his room in the basement and she didn’t bother to check upstairs. She didn’t want to talk to Andi. The lights upstairs were off and she figured she stayed late to work overtime and that was why he was able to go out in the first place.

  She leaned over the fence and scanned the backyard but she did not see his bike anywhere. Grabbing her bike off the back porch she rode to the old factory figuring he might be there playing with his germs. She rode fast spurred on by equal parts anger and worry for him. She rode past the fence behind Layton’s Junkyard and shook her head at her silly mistake. It was dark he wouldn’t be there.

  She set off for the old factory dreading the idea of entering it through the vent. She decided to pound on the door until he answered. When she crossed over the train tracks across from the factory she stopped dead.
A white van was parked outside the building and two people in green coveralls and clear plastic facemasks where carrying Tyler’s things out of the building. She dropped to the ground with her bike and squatted low in the weeds. She watched as they loaded lab equipment into the van.

  “Holy shit.”

  She assumed they were the police, though she could not see any markings on the van. She waited for the moment when they were both inside the building and crept forwards to look for his bike where he usually stashed it. She was relieved to see it was not there, but she was too afraid to look inside the van to see if they had him locked inside. She crept back to her bike and dragged it along the ground until she was around the corner of the next building. She rode back to his house praying he had returned home.

  She was worried about the police and what kind of trouble he might be in. Seeing those people in coveralls and facemasks scared her and she was panicked wondering where he was. She could not stop herself from imagining him locked up in the white van and she was sobbing by the time she rolled through the front gate of his yard.

  Bad Choices

  Andi’s bedroom was unlit she was sitting on the edge of her bed with a wad of tissue in her hand. Her nose was red and eyes puffy.

  “I wanted to tell you,” she said her voice soft; calm now her anger replaced by sadness, “it was all wrong, the wrong time… for everything,” she sobbed into the clump of tissues.

  “What was more important than telling me I was a father?” he said.

  His voice was low; the words he spoke held no judgment in them. There was no anger or accusation in the question he simply wanted to know what it was about him that made her decide not to tell him about his son.

  She shrugged her shoulders. She felt stupid and worthless in his eyes. Looking back now it was easy to see that she made bad choices and reacted badly to the whole thing. She was twenty-one when she got pregnant and she believed that having a baby would destroy both of their lives. If she had the baby, and they stayed together because of it, she knew they would end up hating each other just like her parents.