by Rachel Caine
“But I don’t want to reconcile to it. I want it to stop. There has to be a way—”
“There isn’t,” she said flatly. “Look, I went through this, Carl, and I’m still dependent on the government program to some extent. I’ve consulted experts. I’ve done everything I can to make this go away, but it doesn’t. There isn’t a cure. There’s just…living, day to day. And I’m sorry, but you need to accept that before you get yourself into trouble. If there aren’t con artists preying on your desperation yet, it’s only a matter of time before one figures out there’s an opportunity. You need to be pragmatic about this if you want to survive.”
“I haven’t told my wife,” he said, and looked down. “I don’t know how to even start doing that. How did you…?”
“I’m not married,” she said. “And I can’t tell you what to do, Carl, but you can’t hide this from her. She needs to understand why you can’t go on vacation for a weekend, or miss a day at the office, or…whatever the situation might be. Not telling her is only going to get harder. The counselors at Pharmadene have training for this.…Take your wife in with you, sit down with them, and talk it all out. She’ll have to sign the government agreements and accept being monitored twenty-four/seven—not that she isn’t already. She’ll be shocked, and angry, and betrayed that you lied to her for this long, but it’s better if you do it in a situation where others can support what you’re saying.…” Her cell phone buzzed for attention, and Bryn pulled it from her pocket and checked it. “Sorry. Hang on a minute.” She recognized the caller ID.
Bryn walked over to a quiet space, and took the call. “Mrs. Renfer?”
“Bryn?” The relief in the woman’s voice was as tragic as it was obvious. “Bryn, I know you told me not to call all the time, but this is important. I think—my husband knows something. I cut my hand yesterday, a bad one, and he knows it healed up.”
Same song, second verse. “Lynnette, you haven’t told him? Why not? Didn’t we talk about that in the group?”
“Yes, but—but I just can’t. I can’t tell him the truth yet. What if I tell him…something else?”
“Like what?”
“I’m—a—a fast healer?” It was funny, but the desperate panic in Lynnette’s voice wasn’t. Bryn was just about out of patience with the woman; there had been at least ten of these calls now, and a whole lot of meetings, and Lynnette was stubbornly stuck in place, unwilling to move forward. Maybe having her husband actually see something that tipped the scales was a good thing, ultimately. It took away any chance of Lynnette avoiding the crash.
“You know that’s nonsense,” Bryn said. “Just tell him. Take him to Pharmadene and educate him. Please.”
She hung up on Lynnette’s standard Reasons Why That Can’t Happen, and went back to Carl, who was still staring into his no-doubt-gone-cold coffee as if it held the answers. “Was that, ah, one of us?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Not everybody deals with it well. Carl, I’m not kidding. It’s very important that you not stay where you are right now emotionally. It’s not a good place. Your family can help you, and you need to read them in on this as soon as you can, okay? Promise me you will.”
He nodded, but it was more of a mechanical action than agreement. “What about the shots?” he asked. “I hear you have someone else you get them from instead of the government. Should I do that? I mean, if there’s a choice, I’d rather not have the FBI looking down my throat, you know?”
“I know,” Bryn said. “But the fact is, my guy can’t manufacture enough to support everyone who needs the drug, and the other option I know about is worse than the FBI. Trust me.”
Carl laughed, a little hollowly. “What’s worse than being owned by the government?”
“Being owned by a madman who wrings you dry,” she said. “Don’t go looking for that, Carl. This is early days. Things will change, and maybe they’ll get better, but for now, play it safe. And get your wife into this. I mean it.” When he stayed silent, Bryn said, “Do you have kids?”
“Two,” he said. “A nine-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl.”
Her heart broke a little—not just for him, but selfishly on her own account. She’d wanted children, but in that vague, rosy-future sort of way that she’d assumed would eventually come into focus when she met the right person.
She’d met the right person, she thought. But there was no future of babies. Not for her.
Bryn smiled and said, “Pictures?”
He looked startled at that, but of course he had them, snapshots on his phone at least. He passed it over, and she paged through the photos. “Wow,” she said. “Great-looking kids. What are their names?”
“Robert and Josie,” he said. “What am I supposed to tell them? They’re going to grow up, and my wife is going to get older, and I’m going to just…be this. Every day, the same. I don’t get older. I don’t change. I just…exist.”
“Some people pay good money for that,” Bryn said. She was going for a joke, but he didn’t smile, not even a little.
“We’re never going to change,” he said. “Until we rot away. How do I explain that?”
There it was, naked and panicked in his eyes, the same feeling Bryn faced, and pushed down, at least once a day. As far as she knew, they all felt it, the same shadow stalking them, relentless and dark.
She reached out and touched his hand, and felt him flinch. “I don’t know,” she said. “We’re all making this up, Carl, every day. But you have to start with your wife. It’s your only real choice.”
She talked to him a little more, but it was just noise, really; he wasn’t hearing her, and she had to resign herself to the fact that Carl, like Lynnette, just wasn’t ready yet. He’d get there. He’d have to.
Easy for you to say, part of her mocked. You don’t have to explain things to your kids. Except that she forced that out of her mind, too, every day…that she’d never have kids to explain it to, never hold her own baby, never see her child grow up. That had been taken from her, along with her life, in the basement of Fairview Mortuary, and she’d never get it back. The nanites coursing through her bloodstream could keep her walking, talking, doing almost everything the living could do…but not that.
The door was closed.
Carl walked out ten minutes later, and she sat for a while, sipping the last of her drink and feeling a little comforted by the busy, self-absorbed bustle of those around her. Like Carl, she felt like a ghost, an alien, a fake. And they come to me for help, she thought. As if I had any idea what I was doing.
Her phone rang. Oh God, it was Lynnette, again. Damn. Bryn felt a bright, sudden burst of fury, and answered. “Mrs. Renfer, I mean it. You need to stop calling—”
A scream exploded out of the phone, wordless and full of horror, and Bryn almost dropped it. “Lynnette?” She stood up, shoving the table back as she did so. Her almost-empty cup tipped over and spilled milky fluid. “Lynnette! What’s going on?”
It was chaos on the other end of the phone, screaming, shouting—a man’s voice—Lynnette begging don’t, don’t, don’t…
And then an ear-shattering blast of sound.
Lynnette’s screaming stopped.
Bryn stood very still, unable to breathe. She could still hear the man’s hoarse, half-sobbed curses.
And the sound of children crying.
And then two more quick blasts.
Only the man’s sobbing now.
And then one more blast.
And silence.
Bryn numbly hung up the call, stared at the phone a moment, then dialed Patrick McCallister’s number. He answered on the second ring.
“Lynnette Renfer,” she said. “Meet me at her house. Pat? I think it’s bad.”
He didn’t ask. He just said, “I’m on my way.”
Bryn made it to Lynnette’s small suburban home on the northern outskirts of San Diego in ten minutes, but she didn’t remember the drive. All she could hear was the sound of the crying, the shots,
the silence. When she pulled in at the curb, she saw that Patrick McCallister had arrived ahead of her, in a nondescript dark sedan.
There was another car already there—like Patrick’s, it was a dark sedan, and it had a government plate on the back. Bryn wasn’t too surprised to see the front door open and Riley Block step out. “You’d better come inside,” she said to them. “This isn’t a discussion we should have in front of the neighbors.”
“Police?” Patrick asked as they crossed the threshold.
“Called off,” Riley said. Up close, Bryn could see the lines of stress around her eyes, her mouth, although she was doing a good job of holding her poker face. “It’s just us chickens. Come on. She’s going to wake up soon, and I’ll need some help.”
Riley had brought along another FBI agent Bryn didn’t know, but he was clearly read in on Pharmadene or he wouldn’t be here. He looked up and nodded as the three of them entered the Renfers’ living room, and Riley went to talk with him quietly in a corner.
Bryn didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see, but she forced herself to do it. Two small bodies lay near the sofa. Lynnette was dead on the blood-soaked cushions, the phone still clutched in her hand.
The husband, unrecognizable, lay with the shotgun fallen next to him. The place smelled like fresh hot blood, loosened bowels, gunpowder, and…obscenely…fresh cinnamon.
“He saw her cut herself and heal,” Bryn said. “Last night. She told me. I kept telling her she had to bring him in. I told her that…” She felt…well, she didn’t particularly feel anything, at the moment. Just revulsion, with an edge of horror that only sliced when she looked at the bodies straight on. So she focused on the walls. Safe enough, until she saw the big, framed formal portrait photo. Lynnette and her husband, sitting with hands clasped. The two little girls in their laps.
A simple, adorable family, glowing with happiness.
The breath went out of her in a rush, and she felt her knees start to give. Patrick’s hand was right there when she needed it, bracing her elbow, giving her an anchor to cling to as the world began to drift dizzily away.
“I was on the phone with her,” Bryn said softly. “When this happened. She was begging him not to…Why? Why would he do this?”
She thought it was a rhetorical question, but Riley answered it. “He wrote a note on his laptop, time-stamped about thirty minutes ago. According to him, this was the only way. He thought some kind of demon had taken over his wife,” Riley said. “He didn’t want it to get into him and his girls. He was so scared he thought death was better.”
For a long moment, nobody spoke, and then Patrick said, “She’s going to come around soon. It shouldn’t be here, looking at her kids.”
Bryn moved in to help. She was politely but firmly pushed back. Riley and the nameless FBI agent picked Lynnette up by the shoulders and feet and carried her off to another room—the bedroom, hopefully.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Pat said, and Bryn looked up at him, startled. “You should go. The FBI can handle this.”
“No,” she said. “Pat, I was talking to her. And he killed her. He killed himself. He killed their kids.”
“And there was nothing you could have done to stop it,” he said, and took her in his arms. She hadn’t even known she was shaking until she felt the warmth of his body against hers, and his hand cupping the back of her head. She squeezed her eyes shut and buried her face in the soft material of his suit jacket. “Lynnette was supposed to tell him, but she didn’t. You tried to help her, Bryn. Some people—some people just won’t listen.”
She nodded, and after that precious moment of letting herself feel safe, she pushed back. She didn’t feel like crying, oddly enough; there were no tears in her, not for this. Just…silence. And a heavy feeling of inevitability.
“She’s going to come back any minute now,” Bryn said. He was watching her with a complicated mixture of worry and exasperation.
“You don’t have to be the one to tell her they’re gone,” he said. “Let Riley.”
“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s just that Riley doesn’t understand how it feels to wake up…like this. It’s not the same.”
She walked into the bedroom, and Pat didn’t try to stop her, even though she could tell he was tempted. Riley was sitting on the side of the bed, sponging blood from Lynnette’s face with a damp cloth; her eyes looked darker now, and the lines around her mouth deeper. The other agent had backed away to lean against the wall next to a dresser. A clumsy papier-mâché plaque behind him had two sets of small handprints, with names doodled on them in awkwardly shaped letters. That hurt so much that Bryn felt short of breath.
She waited with Riley as the seconds ticked by, and suddenly, Lynnette’s bloody body convulsed, thrashed, and she took in a breath so deep it seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the room.
And then she shrieked.
It was a familiar scream; Bryn heard it in her head every day, that waking-nightmare sound they all made when they woke from death. Like the cry of a newborn, but filled with horror none of them could explain.
It faded, and Lynnette opened her eyes. Riley put the cloth aside. There was still a wound in Lynnette’s head, but it was closing fast now, and Bryn could almost see the silvery flash of the nanites weaving together tissue and bone.
Lynnette asked, “Ted? Where’s Teddy?”
Bryn said, “He’s in the other room, Lynn.” She kept her voice low, warm, soothing. “Give it time. Try to stay calm.”
“Teddy had a gun,” Lynnette said. “Is he okay? Is everything okay?” She reached out and grabbed Bryn’s hand with sudden strength. “Please tell me everything’s okay. I promise, I’ll talk to him. I’ll tell him everything.…”
It was too late for that, and Bryn suddenly, horribly wanted to blurt that out. She was angry, she realized. Angry with Lynnette for bungling this, and angry at Teddy for descending into this hellish cauldron of lunacy. Maybe he’d been on to something about the demon possession, because she wanted so badly to lash out at those who couldn’t defend themselves.
She fought back those cruel impulses, but it was tough, really tough, and she had to clear her throat before she said, “Lynn, just take a deep breath. Please. Just let the nanites work. You’ll be all right in a few minutes. Stay still. Riley’s going to give you a shot now to help you.”
Riley already had the syringe lying out on the bed, uncapped, and now she picked it up and administered the dose of Returné with an expert flick of her wrist. It took only a second.
Then she picked up a second syringe and injected Lynnette with that, too. Lynnette’s eyelashes fluttered, and her eyes rolled up to show the whites, and she stopped breathing.
Dead, again.
Riley nodded to her subordinate. “Get her stripped and in the shower. I’ll get some clothes for her. We have about ten minutes before she comes around again, and I want her clean, dressed, and in the car by then.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Bryn blurted. The other agent pushed her out of the way, scooped Lynnette up, and took her into the bathroom. “Riley!”
“She can’t stay here,” Riley said. “She’s going back to Pharmadene, where she can get the treatment she needs.”
“And the bodies? You called off the cops, didn’t you?”
“This will all be handled, Bryn. Now, you both need to go. I don’t have to tell you that this is a national security matter, do I?”
“You can’t just cover this up and make her disappear! You can’t—”
“I can,” Riley interrupted her, “and I have. This entire neighborhood is being evacuated right now for a gas leak. In twenty minutes, this house is going to blow sky-high. The only casualties will be the Renfer family.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Patrick said, from the doorway, “You mean, including Lynnette. Right, Agent Block?” He had that flat, cold look in his eyes Bryn knew meant trouble. “She’s an inconvenient survivor, and you can’t depend on her to
keep her mouth shut. What’s her future—quick decapitation? Fast-burning furnace? Or just let her decompose in the white room so you can chart her process?”
If he was planning to ruffle her calm, he was disappointed. “She goes back to Pharmadene,” Riley said, without much emotion. “And you’re right. She can’t leave there again; she’s too high a risk. If she decides she wants to end her drug regimen, or chooses another method of…termination, that is entirely her choice; it’s one we give all the addicts. Frankly, if it was me in this situation, I wouldn’t want to go on.” She looked up then, but not at Pat—at Bryn, who felt a chill ladder up her spine. “Would you?”
Bryn didn’t reply, but she knew if she’d been forced to do so, she would have had to confess that dying, however horrible, might have been better than living the rest of an immortal life with the burden of this on her conscience.
The shower cut off in the bathroom. Riley went to the closet and combed through clothes (How do you choose an outfit for a time like this? Bryn wondered) and handed underwear, pants, and a shirt off to her colleague. “You should leave,” Riley said to the rest of them. “The clock’s ticking. You should be able to go without any questions being asked, but if you’re stopped at the cordon, give them my name.”
Bryn said, “You can’t just—”
“Can’t just what?” Riley snapped, and for a moment her shell of calm cracked through to white, furious rage. “Can’t clean up this mess? That’s all I do, Bryn. It’s my fucking job. Day after day. Night after night. I see the wreckage that Pharmadene left us with, and I get to sweep up the broken glass. So either get out of the way or grab a broom.” She paused for a second, shut her eyes, and then looked at Pat. “McCallister, get her the hell out of here. Now.”
He stood still for so long that Bryn was convinced he’d do something, stop what was happening, try, but instead when he did move, he only crossed to Bryn and took her hand. “We need to go,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do.”
“We can’t let them just abduct her—”
“Bryn, we’re on thin ice as it is. You can’t fight this. Listen—listen to me!” She was trying to pull free of him, and get to Lynnette, and he grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. Hard. “You exist on the government’s sufferance, and that can end anytime they want. Don’t fight them on this. Don’t. There’s nothing we can do for her!”