by Eric M Hill
First gear. Conventional thinking.
The T-cells of the human immune system were natural killers of cancer cells and they were fanatical about it. What if he found a way to dramatically increase their ability to identify, track, and bind to cancer cells, thus deactivating them? He could edit the instructions within the T-cell itself.
Second gear. Unconventional thinking.
What if he found a way to “communicate” with cancer cells? Perhaps he could direct them to stop ignoring signals that told them to stop dividing. As a treatment, however, that would only slow down the growth. But what of healthy people? What if he created a biological communication for healthy people that would talk a new cancerous cell out of multiplying? That would stop the disease dramatically sooner in the growth process.
Anderson felt his mind shift upward into third gear. Hyper-unconventional thinking.
Suddenly, dots that weren’t there began to fade in. Involuntarily, they began to connect to form wild questions. What if cancer cells had emotions? What if they were emotions? What if they had personalities? What if they were like people? A myriad of differences that made each one unique, although there were obvious characteristic similarities? What if the differences could be exploited and factional divisions created? If cancer cells had emotions, maybe they could be manipulated like people. Could they be made too happy to multiply or to eat healthy cells? Too sad? Sad enough to kill themselves, or to offer themselves to be killed by T-cells? Or angry enough to kill one another? Or…?
What if it were possible to…?
His thoughts were ridiculous. Laughable. Without basis and totally unscientific. Worthy of scorn and derision. Definitely third level—staggering breakthrough territory.
A persistent sound cut through his thoughts. He snapped angrily with a grimace. “What?” It was his phone.
Guilt washed over him. He had done it again. Zoned out. The very reason why he had two wonderful ex-wives and a daughter who would barely speak to him. I’m going to do better, he thought. I’ll call her right after this and take the jet tonight. That way maybe we can have breakfast together. He knew he’d have to get on that jet immediately or it wouldn’t happen. He took the phone out and tapped the screen with a puzzled look.
“Chief King, to what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked, ignoring the sense that a cloud was about to obstruct a beautiful sunset.
“Dr. Anderson,” he said, ignoring Anderson’s many invitations to call him by his first name, Kyle, “I think we ought to go video. And you probably ought to take a seat.” The chief’s voice was heavy.
Dr. Anderson went to video, but he didn’t sit. He was like a boxer who saw the punch coming, but was incapable of stopping it. Emerald lived in Austin; King was chief of police in Austin. Why else would he call with such a grave expression? It had to be Emerald. “Yes, Chief?”
“Something terrible has happened to your daughter, Dr. Anderson.”
Anderson swallowed dryly and willed his backbone and legs to not collapse.
“She went shopping at Diavanni’s and was attacked in the parking lot?”
“Attacked?” A hundred scenarios went through his mind. All of them horrible. “What was the nature of the attack?” Then he asked the question that had already been answered by the chief’s somber face and tortured voice. “Was she killed?”
“Yes, sir, I’m afraid so. She was robbed and strangled. The perpetrator beat and stabbed her, too.” The chief started uhhing. “And, sir, she was sexually assaulted.”
Anderson was surprised. This didn’t fit with the theory that was causing him to boil with thoughts of revenge even as he tried to keep from passing out. “Raped? My little girl was raped and murdered.”
“Yes.”
Silence.
Dr. Anderson said, “But they have outstanding security in that shopping district,” he said, like a desperate man trying to use new evidence to talk a judge into reversing his death sentence. “Guards and cameras everywhere. And sniper towers. Everyone knows they shoot predators over there. How could something like that happen in the Queens shopping district? It doesn’t make sense.”
What he really meant was this sounded like one of Cuning’s convenient coincidences. But would he do such a thing at Queen’s? If his theory was correct, and the president had gone crazy and ordered a hit on his daughter to beguile him into trying to find a cure for human evil, it wouldn’t be done in a place where they’d be so easily discovered.
They knew he had the resources to check the video, audio, computer, and vehicle telemetry for a full square mile around the shopping district. They’d have to know that he’d find out if it were them. And they’d have to know that this would push him over the edge and make him go after them in ways he’d never contemplate under normal circumstances. They’d have to know he’d down that entire corrupt administration!
“We’re going to catch him, Dr. Anderson. We got excellent video of the perp.”
Again, a surprise. “You do?”
Chief King regretted informing him of the video, but he couldn’t keep it from a man like this. “Yes, we do,” he said, uneasily. “The whole thing’s on video.” The chief saw the question. “Ordinarily this guy would’ve been stopped, but there was another one of those OC mobs…orchestrated mobs. Fifty or a hundred criminals go into the store wearing one set of clothes. They go into the restroom and take off the top layer of clothing. They don masks and run through the place with guns out taking whatever they want.
“It seems that while that was going on inside, this scumbag was in the parking lot assaulting your daughter. This is the first time that Queens has been hit by an OC mob, but we’ve been having them all over Austin.”
“Can I see the video?” asked Dr. Anderson.
“Yes.”
Dr. Anderson pushed the top screen left with his thumb. Its contents flowed to the bottom screen, and the thin top layer showed the video.
“The guy’s in the white van,” said the chief, trying to lessen some of the shock to Dr. Anderson. “She beat the hell out of him until he…” The chief’s voice trailed off.
Dr. Anderson watched his daughter walk toward her attacker. The doctor found that his legs would no longer support him. The weight of his guilt crumpled him to the floor beside the wall of one of his home offices. Each one of his daughter’s steps toward the van wrenched his heart until he felt as though he were about to have a heart attack.
He watched his daughter put packages in the back seat. A man jumped out of the van. She turned and came up from the seat with an upward palm strike to the attacker’s chin, snapping his head back. His eyes showed thorough shock. Then his eyes showed pure agony when she crushed her fist with her body weight into his groin. He dropped, but not all the way to his knees. Emerald leapt into the air and came down hard with a pointed elbow to the crown of the attacker’s head. He fell to his hands and knees to the right. She turned and reached for the front door. Almost free.
Criminal adrenaline gave the attacker a quickened recovery. He stretched forth a long arm and grabbed her jacket from behind and yanked her to the ground. The tide changed fatally against her.
As painful as it was, to turn away seemed like yet another incident of him abandoning her. Dr. Anderson watched to the end.
“Dr. Anderson, sir,” said Chief King.
“Yes?” said a numbed Anderson.
“We got him. Just got word. We got the man who did this?”
Dr. Anderson was shocked. “Alive?”
“For now. I don’t know how long he’ll be alive, though. There’s a lot of cops out there who are grateful for all you’ve done for the Austin police department.” He looked at Dr. Anderson and said, “That gratitude goes a long way, sir.” The implication was clear. All he had to do was say the word and the animal who raped and killed his daughter would be administered justice, Austin, Texas style in the year 2050.
If he were a federal agent, he’d be either a ghost or dead already. And he wouldn�
�t have been beaten up like that by a woman if he were a professional killer.
“Texans take care of Texans,” said the chief.
“Do you know who he is?” asked Anderson.
“Yeah, Carl Winters. Murderer, rapist, robber, you name it, he’s done it. Escaped from prison a couple of days ago.”
“So my daughter was robbed, raped, and murdered by a common criminal,” he mumbled.
“Looks that way, sir,” the chief said, grimly.
“Make sure he isn’t harmed,” said Dr. Anderson. “Will you do that for me? I want to talk to this man.”
The chief looked like he thought his own idea was a whole lot better. “If that’s what you want.”
“It’s not what I want.” His voice was even. “What I want is to fill his worthless body full of hot lead. It’s what I need.”
“Okay, I’ll make sure he doesn’t leave this earth of unnatural causes while he’s in our custody. But I cannot promise he’s not going to wish he were already in hell.”
“I’d appreciate that very much. I’ll be there tomorrow.”
Dr. Anderson ended the call. Everything about his daughter’s brutal murder pointed to a random crime. But he was a scientist. He didn’t believe in randomness. And it seemed preposterous to believe that such a random crime that would strengthen the president’s cause so perfectly was not by design.
***
The next morning Dr. Anderson boarded his private jet to head to Austin. All thoughts of a possible desperate presidential conspiracy to murder his daughter to get him to work for him went out the window when his pilot, who did not yet know of Emerald’s death, said, “Have you heard about the guy who heads up the Department of Violent Crime Eradication? His wife was shot. Some guy robbed her. She gave up everything, but she wouldn’t give him her wedding ring. He shot her. They say she’s in critical condition. What does that say about the country if the guy who’s in charge of getting a handle on violent crime can’t even protect his own wife? I don’t know how much longer this country’s going to last.”
Dr. Anderson checked the validity of the news, then put a call in to the man he despised. “Hello, Mr. President.”
“Dr. Anderson?” The president sounded surprised.
I’m in.”
Chapter 15
It had been like the inside of a freezer when he had gone to the morgue to see his daughter. It wasn’t the room’s temperature that had chilled him, however. It had been the coldness of the finality of death. It had been the brutal disregard that death has of anyone’s hopes, dreams, and plans. Death was rude. Death was crude. And in this case, death was lewd. For it had molested his little girl and had left her lifeless, partially nude body on the asphalt ground of a public shopping center.
Hundreds of millions of dollars a year in grants to Austin and he couldn’t keep his little girl out of the hands of a killer.
The video would forever be a part of the remainder of his life in much the same way a pair of rounded scissors left in his body after surgery would remain with him. Invisible, yet impossible to ignore and causing extreme discomfort.
Nothing would ever cause as much pain to him as watching his little girl desperately and unsuccessfully fight for her life. But seeing the medical examiner pull out a drawer that contained her beaten, stabbed, strangled, and forever dead body came close.
He wished he could have halted the memories. It would not have removed the knife from his soul, but it would have stopped the twisting of the blade. He recalled how he had felt when he first felt her move against her mother’s belly. It had been magical feeling his wife’s skin bounce suddenly beneath his hand. A little life announcing her presence. A living being that he had helped create.
But the magic of that moment was snatched away from him. And rightfully so. He had no rights to such a fond memory when he had given his dead daughter so few. He had stood before her cold body acutely aware that he had given about as much life to her when she had been alive as he was able to give to her now that she was dead.
Dr. Anderson had looked down at his little girl with eyes full of sadness, but no tears. It had been as though God was saying he didn’t deserve the relief that tears could bring. The guilt of a heart that had been forever cold to his little girl had frozen his tears solid.
Emerald, you never got what you deserved, he had thought while at the morgue. But the man who did this to you, he will get what he deserves. Then God relented. A single tear found passage down his hardened cheek. The bereaved father felt the rolling of the tear and vowed, And so will every murderer and rapist.
Chapter 16
Austin City Chief of Police Barry King walked beside Dr. Anderson down the long corridor of steel cages. That’s what they were: cages not cells. Cells held people; cages held animals. And that’s what were behind each of the steel doors they passed. Predatory animals who saw people as prey.
The thick cage doors had three possible openings. A narrow opening at the bottom that the guard used to slide in food. A narrow opening at waist level used to handcuff prisoners prior to removing them from their cages. A narrow opening near the top for looking into the cage, and for talking to the prisoner.
The middle cage opening, however, wasn’t used for animals. In Austin, if you went to a city jail for a Top Four crime—murder, rape, robbery, or aggravated assault—you never came out of your handcuffs. Surprisingly, or not surprisingly, depending upon just how cynical you were, there were still people in Austin who thought Top Four prisoners had rights and should be treated as people. And even more surprising was that there were a lot of them. Their cry was Don’t let crime turn you into an animal!
But Austin had changed dramatically since the Great Crime Spike. Most Austinites were disillusioned and angry. Angry enough to now believe that the only viable answer to the Top Four wolves that victimized them was to become a bigger wolf.
Austinites expressed this militant, Take my eye, I take two of yours! attitude in another less bloody way. They fought hard to not let the criminals turn out Austin’s cultural lights. To this end, there were still the things that made Austin special. They had managed to proudly hold onto its claim as The Live Music Capitol of the World. For instance, the Austin City Limits Music Festival was still thriving.
And they had stubbornly held onto other traditions and outward appearances that projected a defiant normalcy. A normalcy that sharply contrasted with other cities like Los Angeles and New York City and Atlanta. These cities and hundreds of others had all the dread and gloom and darkness of post-apocalyptic societies.
Yet to Austinites, this stark contrast wasn’t a mysterious social phenomenon to be hypothesized and ignorantly discussed on television shows by airhead PhDs, pontificating politicians, and ratings chasing hosts. All anyone had to do was to honestly look at Austin’s response to Top Four criminals—and cities like it—and admit that the days of Miranda rights, and placing your hand on the back of the head of violent criminals and tucking them safely into the police car was over! We wouldn’t want them to bump their heads, now would we?
No, times had changed and violent crime was now like the weather. If you managed to not be murdered, raped, robbed, or beaten during the night, you knew that it would be waiting for you the moment you stepped outside in the morning. No one was immune to the weather; and no one was immune to violent crime. It was always just a matter of time before a lightning bolt of murder suddenly fried you on the spot, or a tornado of rape or robbery laughed at your efforts to hide as it announced its destructive arrival with a roar.
Chief King and other Austinites like him had long ago rationalized a radical change of perspective and pragmatic resolve. Under normal circumstances, yes, the Bill of Rights was sacred. People were innocent until proven guilty, and human collateral damage was unacceptable. It wasn’t the American way.
But that kind of thinking only worked when they had been fighting crime. They weren’t fighting crime any longer. He and the five thousand and twelve swo
rn law enforcement and support personnel who protected Austin were literally fighting for their lives, and the lives they were sworn to protect.
So Austin’s leaders, along with Dr. Anderson’s annual grant of six hundred million dollars, declared war on violent criminals. To hell with their rights! You beat, robbed, raped, or killed someone in Austin, you had the right to be shot. Plain and simple. And if the highest form of Austin justice could not be meted out for some reason, then the perp by default would be granted the right to a critical care beat down.
This was the reason Austin was criticized so vehemently by some in the national media as a place where the police force acted as judge, jury, and executioner. But it was also the reason why, although still extremely dangerous, it did not look like the killing fields of Los Angeles, New York City, or Atlanta. Simply put: Austin had become known as one of the most dangerous places in America for violent criminals.
It was also one of the most physically restraining for those who landed in their city jails.
The twenty-four-hours a day, seven days a week, handcuff policy of Chief King, with the blessing of Mayor Roussard and most of the city council, had been shot down by a federal judge as unconstitutional. That had caused a much publicized stand-off between Texas and the federal judiciary when the governor and state attorney general backed up Chief King and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Washington D.C. rumor mill had it that the Supreme Court was going to rule against the city of Austin and the state of Texas. Then another rumor began to circulate. One with corresponding actions that gave everyone reason to believe it was fact rather than rumor.
The rumor was that if Austin lost the ruling, Texas would defy the ruling. How far would they go in defying a Supreme Court decision? The governor removed the question mark from the mystery. He gave a speech in front of the Texas Peace Officers Memorial Monument located on the northeast grounds of the Texas capitol.