by Milt Mays
She thought of the Statue of Liberty, the very words the General had paraphrased in many of his speeches:
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
But the General had an ulterior motive that bastardized the rest:
For you will fight our wars, you will kill our enemies, you will serve our purposes, the higher calling. And if you are very, very good, we will dissect you, you will make the ultimate sacrifice for your nation. You will make better soldiers. You will join the few, the proud, the less- than-one percent that allows the other ninety-nine percent to live in their protected bubble.
So what the hell was she doing? Why had she chased Jabril to keep him from spreading these GMO foods? If she let the General do his bidding, maybe the ninety-nine percent would finally wake up.
She caught sight of her daughter, her lovely Alexis with glazed eyes and bared fangs. She had done it for her. And now, barely sixteen, Alexis was lost.
“Rachel?” The General’s voice was insistent.
Screw him.
Pain! It hit her like a machete. A hand, Jabril’s filthy paw, now large and coated with hair, squeezed her left shoulder and let go.
“You know where he is,” she said. “Your mutant soldier, Jabril, shot him. Alex is dead in that house of funny foods back there.”
“Dead?” The talking head on the screen frowned. It looked better than his smile. There was concern in his voice, though it was touched with anger. If Alex was dead, the General could not study him. She didn’t want Alex dead, but God, yes, she did.
The General’s face relaxed. “No. Jabril would not kill him.”
She wanted a gun, a big one, .357 Magnum, or that Krill machine pistol the cop had in Milwaukee. She wanted to kill the General, kill Jabril, take her daughter, find Alex, go back to the Sierras. Never come out again. Live on the land like Alex had wanted to from the start. Why the hell had she stayed with this ridiculous job modifying viruses and bacteria and, yes, food? Why? Why, why, why?
The answer was staring at her. She could never let people like General Hanson rule the world. She had always wanted to save Jabril. There were poor people out there who needed special GMO foods that actually worked and gave them sustenance, not death. But over the last fifteen years, the Army and Ambrosia had wallowed in greed and power. She had gotten caught up in the day-to-day of life, had been busy with Alexis and her job—or at least that had been her excuse for ignoring it. And now the General, Ambrosia, and Jabril were here to destroy everything, including Alex and Alexis.
Not today.
“You’re an idiot,” she said. “Jabril always wanted to kill Alex. He tried once, and he’ll keep trying. Now it’s done. Sit on that and rotate ’til you’re raw, you fucking asshole.”
“Such language from a woman? I’m disappointed.”
Jabril’s hand squeezed her shoulder. Pain gnawed—consuming, lancinating, hot pain—infiltrating her arms, her legs, her skin, her hair, the very air she breathed. Nothing else mattered. She tried to wriggle free, to master it. Son of a bitch. It got worse.
Everything went out of her. Nothing left. So tired. Give up. Stop it, Stop it, STOP IT!
“I feel him, General,” Jabril said. “He is alive and coming here.”
Though her vision was fading, she saw the General’s sneering smile return. “Show us the codes, Rachel, and we will let him live.”
The hand released.
Her head drooped. God, yes. Rest. Away from pain.
“Mother,” said Alexis, “you must help us. If you help us, we can join Daddy and everything will be fine. We will be a family again.”
Rachel snapped her head up and stared at her daughter. How could Alexis be with them? How could she do these things? She had been kind and tender and she had always engendered love with her very touch. Oh, God. Her DNA must have changed already. Jabril must have raped her.
Rachel’s head dropped and she wanted to vomit.
“She knows,” Jabril said. “She ate the food and now she knows. If you help, it will be over. No more pain. You can have your daughter, your husband, your life. It will be over once you show us the codes.”
Rachel looked at Jabril, then at the General. Could it be? Not raped.
“You fed her GMO foods?”
The General’s sneer broadened. “One never knows what a brain like Jabril’s will come up with. As it turned out, a stroke of genius. Though, he ensured other means.”
Her mind raced. Her heart bounded again into the sun. Not raped! The foods had done it. Not permanent, she hoped.
She started typing on the keyboard. The General’s face disappeared and the Stratos logo appeared. This was her best shot. If she got in, maybe she could help Alexis. When she and Alex had developed those codes, those mistakes, two years ago, they had contingency backdoors to destroy them, in case. In case the wrong person got the codes. She should have destroyed the bad codes immediately after Jabril had been placed in hypothermia. But the General had taken away access. She got the access back whenever Jabril had escaped. Should have destroyed the codes then. But there was a part of her that wanted to get it right, make those GMO foods correctly, make them right so the poor could have them. Yet now she wondered if it was ever really possible to get a GMO food right? Perhaps GMO foods would never be right. It didn’t really matter. She had to destroy the bad codes, now, or GMO foods would mean the end of mankind.
If she could only get in and distract Jabril with the codes and . . .
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll help you if you release Alex and Alexis and we can leave. Deal?”
She stopped typing. Jabril did not move. The computer screen stared at her.
The General’s voice came from the computer. “Deal.”
Was it true? Would he allow them to go free? No. Pure bullshit. At one time the word of an army general had meant something. Now they were all politicians, lying to get more power. Fuck the little guy. Piss on the private, corporal, sergeant, colonel, or even any other general. A lowly civilian? Fuck him, or in this case her, sideways.
She started typing again. Why was Jabril in bed with the very guy who’d authorized torturing him for the last fifteen-and-a-half years? And how did Alexis change over so quickly to become his helper? Surely not merely from a few GMO foods. There had to be something else.
She paused. Never had she thought Alexis weaker from her mutation. Now . . . ? Had Jabril found her weakness?
Jabril walked to a closet in the room, opened it and got a rifle and a small briefcase out. She had used a similar gun years ago. In fact, it looked like the same tranquilizer rifle they’d used on Fang in the Amazon lab: typical rifle stock, but a more delicate barrel. Why would Jabril need this gun? For that matter, how the hell did he know to get it from the closet?
He was busy opening the briefcase, so she got into Stratos quickly and found the area for the GMO sequences. The colorful genome flower came up and rotated on the screen every few seconds to give the viewer a good look at all the sequences. There was a tiny dash on the right lower corner, so small if you didn’t know about it you would never see it. The backdoor.
Out of the corner of her eye she noted Jabril loading the dart rifle with a cartridge, which looked like a biopsy dart. There was also a tranquilizer pistol in the briefcase.
She turned her attention back to the screen, clicked on the one area of the GMO genome flower and a table of codes replaced the flower. The dash was still there in the lower right corner. There was a set of codons, only three of the three bases, nine total, the area of interest.
The mistake. The exact location had been indelibly etched in her memory. The mistake was like the code for any other trait, only it gave the foods the tainted ability to cause a bleeding disorder in over half the people who ate them, a bleeding disorder that would initially make them nauseous from the blood in
their stomach. It would start that way. They would vomit blood, then their internal organs would start to ooze, and in less than an hour they would die from internal hemorrhaging.
What a curious wonder was the coding for DNA. Change three measly base nucleotides and the entire organism becomes a killer instead of a lifesaver.
She glanced at Alexis. No vomiting. No hemorrhage. Glazed eyes and obedience to Jabril. If it were only GMO foods, it didn’t make sense.
Jabril picked up the dart pistol, stuffed it in his pants, then aimed the rifle at the area of the wall they had broken through. She returned to typing on the computer. She had to hurry. Alex must be coming and Jabril was going to get what the General wanted. Alex would be his total soldier slave, exactly like Jabril. Who would have thought Jabril would ever be a compliant slave to the General?
“You are only a slave, you know,” she said.
Jabril cocked his head at her.
“Once, Alex and I wanted to save you from your torture. But every time we tried to crack the code and get you released, the General kept us out. He’s the one who tortured you for all those years, not us. And now you’re helping him. You’re nothing but his own personal robot, a moronic, soldier slave.”
Jabril gazed at her with flat, stone eyes.
Had she gone too far? Would he decapitate her, too?
He stepped toward her.
Chapter 61
It was apparent to Dan that Jeff would be helping no one. After he vomited bright red blood, he’d leaned his back against the front fender of the truck and slid ever so slowly down to sitting on the ground, mumbling, “I feel like shit.”
Alex stared at Jeff, his eyes showing concern, yet he turned away, obviously wanting to go and save Rachel and Alexis. Dan understood this perfectly. He wanted to go back with Marci and Adam right now. Jeff was going to die. Sam would follow. Why should Dan stay here with a dead son and these other people he never knew? Let them fight their stupid fights with the mutant werewolf inside the ranch. He would wait until Alex left, pull his son inside the truck and drive down the highway like a bat out of hell.
“Probably the GMO foods he ate,” Alex said. “You can hook him up to an IV in the camper? There’s saline and all the equipment. You know how to start an IV, right?” He looked at the ranch, then back at Jeff who was moaning.
“Oh crap. I’ll help you.” Alex walked to Jeff, sidestepping the pool of bloody emesis. He slung the carbine over one shoulder and slipped one arm under Jeff’s knees, another under his shoulders, then hefted him into the camper. Dan followed. It had been 1091.3467 days since he’d started an IV. Alex was right: He needed help. But he didn’t want it.
“I can do this,” Dan said. “You get him in the truck. I’ll start the IV. You should go to Rachel and Alexis.” The sooner Alex left, the sooner Dan could put the pedal to the metal.
The back door of the camper was narrow. Alex carried Jeff in, angling his head first, then legs. He laid him on the bed on his left. Dan tripped on the steps leading up to the camper door, but caught himself on the frame and stuck his head inside. Sam was on the couch to the right. The place reeked like someone had mixed diarrhea in a pile of rotten fruit. He pulled his arm up, covering his nose with the crook of his elbow, inspecting the camper contents over his arm. An IV was hanging from a bent wire hanger, hooked in the ceiling over Sam. Sam was breathing, but shallowly, and a one-foot-wide swath of what looked like a black plastic garbage sack was wrapped around his middle.
Alex rummaged through a closet to the right.
“Please, Alex. You should go. Get out the equipment and I’m good.”
Alex found what he wanted and raised an eyebrow at Dan. “I got it.” Not a tone that invited disagreement.
Dan wanted to shoulder in and push Alex out the door. He stepped inside, then stopped and backed up, trying to squeeze into the right corner between Sam’s bed and the stove. Alex already had the IV in Jeff’s hand. Dan could be driving away quicker if he just let Alex do it and be done.
Alex hung the bag of clear fluid on a hanger in the ceiling. He started injecting something in the IV port close to Jeff’s hand.
“What’s that?” Dan asked.
“It’s Vitamin K. It helped with others who had the hemorrhage from GMO foods. I think the foods are like rat poison and cause bleeding due to inhibiting clotting factors. There’s also a problem with platelets, so I’ve hung type AB plasma and a platelet pack. They’re the universal donor, since I don’t know Jeff’s blood type. The saline is going in at about two-hundred-cc’s an hour. You might slow it down in twenty minutes.”
He glanced at Sam. “He needs blood but I haven’t got any to give. I already gave him one bag of plasma and there’s one more in there.” He pointed at the fridge. “You might hang it to buy us a little more time.” Alex started toward the door.
“Wait. I thought type O was the universal donor.”
“That’s for anything with red blood cells. Plasma and platelets are the opposite.”
Dan wanted to look it up on the computer to double-check. What did Alex know? Probably a druggie, with that long hair.
Alex went out the door, then stuck his head back in. “Here.” He tossed keys and Dan caught them. Not bad for a geek.
Alex pointed at the front of the camper. “You’ll need to turn the truck on to warm it up in here. If they get cold, it’ll make their shock from blood loss much worse. But don’t leave. Please. I know you want to, but stay here. We might need your expertise on the computer and with nanotech stuff.”
Alex left.
Dan stared at the empty doorway. A cold breeze blew inside. He wanted to reach out and pull the door closed; he should do it to make it warmer, to help Jeff and Sam. But the fresh air helped rid the inside of that foul odor. Jeff moaned. Sam panted.
How the hell did Alex know he was going to leave? He could still do it. No one to stop him. But if he did, Jeff and Sam and the IVs would be jeopardized. He went to the sink and splashed water on his face and dried off with the towel hanging from the rung. He looked at himself in the mirror of the medicine cabinet above the sink. He had to leave. If he stayed here, that monster Jabril might come back. Jeff was okay now. Sam was still breathing.
He hung up the towel and looked at Jeff and went out the door, closing it behind him.
Chapter 62
Rachel’s fingers trembled on the keys. Jabril took another step toward her, the dart gun in one hand, the other probably starting to grow those razor-sharp claws. She was utterly powerless if he wanted to behead her. He stopped two feet from her. “I am Jabril El Fahd, the Sword of Gabriel, and no one controls me.” He reached toward his left ear—
The howl was animal, throaty and gurgled. It made her jump. His face twisted in a cruel agony, hatred, then pain, then finally a sad resolution ending with dropping his hand. She wanted to reach out and help him, despite all his prior horrors.
After that, his actions seemed robotic, calm and deliberate, but without emotions. And his features began to change, away from the animal and back to the man.
He turned his attention back to the broken wall. Her trembling fingers typed and entered into the virtual trap.
He started loading a biopsy cartridge into the rifle. The special needle would on impact instantaneously biopsy a tiny sample of skin and subcutaneous tissue and mix it with preservative, likely for a DNA sample. She figured this was plan B, the backup, if Jabril killed Alex. The General would at least have a sample of Alex’s fresh DNA. But she was sure the General wanted to keep Alex alive. Hence the tranquilizer loaded in the pistol. They could have him for as long as they wanted, torture him like they had Jabril for sixteen years, or longer.
She hit the last key and the computer trap was set. Two more keystrokes and the important DNA sequences would disappear.
Jabril had completely changed back to the thin Arab. Why? He could easily overpower Alex if he stayed in that monstrous form. Maybe the General controlled that, too, and didn’t want
to risk Jabril killing Alex.
He aimed the rifle at the large rent in the wall they’d come through. He glanced at her. Was he nervous? She had never seen that look. He winced in pain and took his left hand off the barrel as if he wanted to scratch something, but seemed to change his mind. He re-gripped the barrel and sighted over the top.
She stared at him, feeling her eyes widen. A metallic disk glinted in his scalp behind his left ear.
Was there a button in Alexis, too? Alexis was facing her, so she couldn’t see the back of her head. Her eyes stared and did not appear to see, as if in a trance. She had to have a disk. The General must be controlling both of them. Brain implants. But how did Jabril get one into Alexis so fast, and in the exact area of the brain needed to control her? The General had years to perfect Jabril’s implant. Even had time to thaw and awaken Jabril many times to test it. But Alexis? It was the only way, though. Had to be. How could eating the GMO foods change her so drastically? Maybe the General had perfected the implant so well, Jabril speared it into the right area in seconds. Or perhaps it worked on the surface, emitting electronic signals from the surface. He probably did it when Rachel had been unconscious. Rachel’s heart skipped a few beats and her mouth got dry. Not raped but maybe worse.
She had to get into the Army computer site, find out how the General controlled Jabril and Alexis, take over control of Jabril and release Alexis. And, destroy the whole program.
But she had no idea how to get into that site.
She thought of Dan Trotter. Needing that spineless wonder? Her dry tongue felt like putrid dust had been sprinkled on it. Her head drooped and she wanted to put her hands up and tell Jabril to kill her, now. End the misery.
But no, she would make Dan Trotter help her, even if she had to shoot his kneecaps.
Right now she had to do something to distract Jabril. Alex would be coming soon. She had to stop him, warn him. How?