by Jon Land
“And if it already has?”
“Then I don’t think anybody can.”
“Stace, I think I’m in love.”
Sal Belamo watched in utter amazement as another of the park’s cameras picked up the T. rex walking down the middle of the street leading from the grassy bank to Liberty Square and the water. It seemed to be picking up speed, didn’t look lumbering or mechanical at all. Though it walked with the hunch typical of a real T. rex, it nonetheless measured over thirty feet from head to ground. Its forepaws flapped as it moved, tail sweeping from side to side.
“You making it do that?” Sal asked Stacy.
“It’s doing that on its own in order to maintain balance.”
“Just like with the real thing …”
“Closest thing to it we’re ever gonna see on this earth, in our lifetimes, anyway.”
Sal switched his attention to the view as seen from the creature’s perspective. The eye-mounted cameras had been installed with built-in stabilizers, so the picture remained still even when the T. rex’s head bobbed up and down in rhythm with its pace.
Stacy changed the angle of its head to better display the last bit of land leading to the water.
“Going’s gonna get a little slow briefly. Each command’s got to be separate since the ground’s not flat.”
Sal’s mind was elsewhere. “Tell me something, Stace, how sharp are its teeth?”
“They’re coming down!” the sniper team leader’s voice exploded over Fuchs’s walkie-talkie.
“Can you see the vial?”
“Negative. But I have direct shots. Repeat, direct shots!”
“Where is the vial?”
“Out of sight right now. Do we have clearance to fire?”
“Negative. We’ve got to be sure the vial is secure.”
“They’re on the ground. Shots still clear. I can drop them now. Take them in the head. No chance either of them could open anything.”
“No! Not until we’re sure,” Fuchs ordered.
The door to the gate opened. Fuchs watched McCracken emerge with the boy close beside him cradling the vial in his hands, only its very top exposed.
“I’d back off if I were you, Colonel,” Blaine told him.
“Well done, Mr. McCracken. See how far a little trust can go?”
“I said back off.”
“Hand me the vial, please.”
“Can’t. I don’t have it.” Blaine cocked his head toward trees where Fuchs’s snipers were placed. “Wasn’t hard fooling them. The vial’s still inside the fort.”
“What?”
“Hidden and rigged to go off if your men try to find it. Setting it was like working a trip wire. You know, just the right amount of pressure, getting the timing right. Cap’s screwed off, gravity all that’s holding it in place. Weight shifts and down it goes. Bad idea to send anyone in looking. One of your men steps wrong somewhere and, well, you get the idea.”
Fuchs realized the object in the boy’s hand was a watch, the glass of its face having fooled him. His voice turned unsure. “What do you expect to gain from this?”
“I expect you to let the woman and the kid out of here.” Blaine’s eyes found Susan, who was still being held by a pair of Fuchs’s men. “Once they’re out of the park and with the Indian, I tell you where the vial is.”
“How will they find this … Indian?”
“He’ll find them. You’ll provide a walkie-talkie so he can make the call.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“Try me.”
“I’ll want to search you, both of you.”
“Go ahead.”
Fuchs signaled a pair of men forward. One held a gun on McCracken, while the other began the process of a methodical frisk. Blaine raised his hands in the air. The man frisking him checked his hips, then eased up past his waist, his own jacket opening in the process. Blaine noted the presence of a gun the man had neglected to remove before approaching.
“What the fuck is going on here?”
The eyes of Fuchs and everyone else turned to the edge of the clearing, where Turk Wills stood menacingly still, a blue-steel revolver in his hand half raised.
It came up a little more. “You crossed the line, Mr. Washington.”
Fuchs stood there, silent. No one else moved except McCracken. He seized the moment of hesitation by snapping his right hand out and grasping the guard’s pistol, shooting him first before it had cleared the holster all the way. His second bullet dropped the man holding the gun on him from the front, and then the four men on either side of Susan. Fuchs was his next priority, but the colonel had already dived to the side, scrambling away, his voice blaring into his walkie-talkie.
“Hey!” Turk Wills blared, gun still poised on Fuchs. “Hey!”
“Kill them!” the colonel ordered. “Shoot them!”
A bullet from the ensuing fire took Wills in the leg and dropped him, in the process giving Blaine the time he needed to find the snipers posted somewhere in the trees above. He spun.
And froze.
In the woods fifty feet away, a Tyrannosaurus rex had captured two adjacent trees in its huge mouth and was shaking them determinedly. McCracken saw the snipers fall out and drop forty feet.
“Get down!” he yelled to Susan as he leaped upon Josh and brought him to the ground behind the cover of a rock just ahead of the barrage of gunfire from Fuchs’s ground-based troops. The kid wailed as the bullets bore down on them, forming an eerie crescendo to the rock splintering away as Blaine covered him with his body. McCracken drained the rest of the clip from the pilfered gun, then judged his chances of retrieving the rifle from the other man he had felled nearby.
Not good, Blaine had just deemed, when the T. rex entered the clearing.
“No one’s ever going to believe this one,” Sal Belamo said to himself, grinning broadly. “No one’s ever going to fucking believe it.”
Stacy Eagers positioned the T. rex directly in front of McCracken for cover and kept it moving forward. It was snorting and bellowing now, head lopping from side to side as if in search of fresh prey. The cameras in its eyes showed some of the gunmen actually turning to flee from its path. Stacy spun it back around enough to view McCracken.
He had managed to snare a rifle and fired on those troops the T. rex had not chased off before moving to check on Susan Lyle.
Stacy spun the head again.
“Hold it!” Sal Belamo ordered. “Go back!”
The camera eyes showed Colonel Lester Fuchs steadying a discarded rifle he must have salvaged from the ground on McCracken.
“You fuck!” Belamo screamed at him, and watched as Stacy’s hands flew across the keyboard. “Get that bastard! Better yet …”
Sal crouched and shoved her fingers off the keyboard, replacing them with his own.
“Hey!” she protested, recoiling.
Sal had studied her every move, effectively memorizing the command sequence and activators, so he knew exactly what to do. There would have been no time to relay the instructions to her anyway. The T. rex responded by twisting its upper body and lurching its head downward with jaws open. Bringing the rifle up had blocked Fuchs’s view of it so he saw nothing until those jaws dropped over him and snapped almost all the way shut.
“Oops,” said Sal, realizing he had pressed the wrong key.
He hit another sequence and the T. rex lifted its vanquished prey into the air and began shaking its head from side to side. Only Fuchs’s legs were visible between its teeth and they shook horribly for a brief time before going still altogether.
“I think it’s stuck,” Belamo said of the T. rex, which kept shaking its head in spite of Sal’s command to stop.
EPILOGUE
Less than a day later, tests supervised by Susan Lyle confirmed that the spread of CLAIR had thus far been confined to the Ozark Mountain range. That gave them all the time they needed to enact Josh’s plan.
Following the boy’s instructions, the first step wa
s regular airdrops of liquid oxygen over the infected area. Exposure to the much warmer air temperatures created a vapor cloud which shrouded the mountain in a frigid blanket, effectively immobilizing the deadly CLAIR. This gave Josh, working with Susan and other CDC technicians, the time they needed to identify the genetic markers responsible for the mutation and develop an enzyme capable of eradicating them. Five days after the explosion that had destroyed the Mount Jackson containment facility, CLAIR had been effectively neutralized and was left to filter harmlessly through the air.
“Doesn’t look like that was enough for you, Indian,” McCracken said after delivering the news to Johnny Wareagle.
Johnny turned to face McCracken from the edge of the hillside overlooking the Oklahoma reservation where he had grown up. He had already discarded the surgical collar recommended for his badly wrenched neck and traded it for one of Will Darkfeather’s herbal pastes. A thick bandage covered the portion of his cheek where Krill’s teeth had made their mark. The scar wouldn’t bother him. Down below, somewhere, Joshua Wolfe was getting settled into his new home. Blaine knew the boy needed to disappear, cease to exist. He was too valuable a commodity to allow for any semblance of normalcy in his life. Group Six would not be the only ones after him, vying to reap the benefits of his intelligence.
“I am convinced this is what you must do, Blainey, what we must do. I am not convinced we will not be sorry for it later.”
“Chief Silver Cloud didn’t express any reluctance. I think Will Darkfeather even liked the idea of having an apprentice.”
“Both gave their support because they understood the alternative, as much as anything else.”
“All the same …”
“All the same, we know the boy possesses an unstable personality. He has embraced your plan for the time being, but down the road, either long or short, he could change his mind. He could run as he has done before, and next time we may not be the ones who find him.”
“He won’t run.”
“You cannot be sure.”
“I have to try.” McCracken followed Johnny’s gaze down the hillside.
“This place is the kid’s only chance. I figure he deserves that much.”
An ironic smile crossed Wareagle’s lips. “Strange how we have come to evaluate our lives. No matter how many we save, what decimation we prevent, we continue to define ourselves in terms of the next life that crosses before us.”
“That’s what keeps us going, Indian.”
“It also takes its toll, Blainey. Fighting the world’s battles is sometimes easier than fighting a single person’s.”
“As in this case.”
“If we have to hunt the boy down again, things will not end pleasantly.” McCracken spotted Josh’s figure as he gazed far below at the world Wareagle had grown up in. “This is his home now, Johnny. He’s not going anywhere.”
“Unless someone comes to take him.”
“It’s gonna be tough,” Joshua Wolfe told Blaine before McCracken took his leave,”giving it all up. The work and all. The science, computers—that sort of stuff. I can’t remember a time when it didn’t dominate my life.”
“And screw it up royally.”
“You’re right, but it’s all I’ve ever known. Not easy turning away. You should know.”
“I’ve never had to face that, not yet, anyway.”
“Lucky for me.”
A mere day in the sun had darkened the color of Josh’s face. The taut nervousness had vanished from his expression. He looked like someone ready to learn how to smile, but he wasn’t smiling now. True to his word, Blaine had said nothing to him about Harry Lime being in the Magic Kingdom or his complicity in the plan that had nearly destroyed the boy.
“Given a little more time, I really thing I could have done it. Wiped out air pollution, I mean, and that’s just for starters. I don’t know from where, but I get these ideas. They could be great things, wonderful things.”
“And what happened in Cambridge, what Group Six wanted you for, shows how close that line is to the one marking disaster. Thing is, kid, somebody’s always watching just in case you cross it. They want you to cross it, because then they’ve got you.”
“Did that happen to you?”
“For a while.”
“You broke away.”
“I got smarter than them.”
Josh thought about that. “I could, too.”
“You offer too much more. I’m an asset. You’re a resource.”
“Is there a difference?”
“Assets fight battles. Resources win them.”
“And it’s all about battles … .”
“These people live to fight them. That’s how they justify their existence and that’s why nothing will stop them from coming after you if you don’t lie low. You can’t be exactly who you want to be, but it beats being who they want you to be.”
“Makes sense.”
“As much as anything.”
Josh shifted uneasily. “I owe you a lot.”
“You can repay it all today. Help yourself out in the process.”
“Just name it.”
“I know I told you you had to give it all up, but there’s one more thing you’ve got to do for me first.”
“I know this is the best thing for him,” Susan Lyle said to Blaine as they drove off the reservation. Her parting with Josh had been difficult, especially since both knew it would not be safe for them to meet again for some time. “But I still can’t accept it.”
“Because it means he can’t be with you helping to find the cure for cancer?”
“I don’t know. It just seems like such a waste.”
“The alternative is to have Sal, Johnny and me rotate watches for the rest of his life. And even at that we couldn’t stop someone from getting to the kid sooner or later.”
“And here?”
“You can see people coming from a long distance away.”
“A view you must be familiar with.”
“Only one I know,” Blaine told her. “I got to thinking about that, about Josh. Kid’s different. Kid doesn’t fit in. All the kid wants is to make the world better and put himself ahead. And all that gets him is being manipulated, exploited. Not for who he is, for what he can do. Sound familiar?”
Susan looked at him, eyes acknowledging.
“Call him dangerous. Call him a rogue. Call him a weapon. I know the terms well. Then all of a sudden I’m on the other side, chasing a mirror. Who was I chasing, Doctor?”
“Psychology’s not my field.”
“Mine neither. It comes down to chances. How many do you get? How many do you deserve? I’ve been lucky with chances. I figured the kid deserved the same. I figured the kid deserved something I don’t have.”
“Home,” said Susan, in what had started out as a question.
“Place to go back to when things get finished, call it whatever you want.”
“But things never get finished for you, do they? Tomorrow, maybe the day after, you go back to it all over again.”
“It’s what I am, what I’ve got.”
“Does that bother you?”
“No.”
“It bothers me, Blaine. It bothers me because I’m not locked in to any one road. I can walk away from this. Maybe I’ll even help find the cure for cancer myself. But you and Josh, your roads are never going to change. You can’t get off them, and there isn’t any end.”
“If there was, it wouldn’t be pleasant.”
“And Josh’s road still has a formidable block straight ahead.”
“Haslanger …”
“He’s the last person left who knows everything.”
“Not quite. There’s someone else who needs to be paid a visit.”
“But Haslanger created Josh, probably still feels the boy belongs to him.” Susan tightened her stare. “He’ll be coming after him. You know that.”
Blaine’s eyes turned to black ice. He smiled, slightly and surely. “There’s always
tomorrow, maybe the day after.”
Livingstone Crum switched on the tape recorder, so not a single facet of the new recipe he was creating would be lost. He found taking notes much too cumbersome and distracting. With the tape recording his every word and move, he was assured his genius would be preserved.
“Today,” he began, “I am working on my own version of Braciolette Ripiene, or stuffed veal rolls.” He catalogued the contents already laid out for him upon the kitchen counter and island just to his rear. “Twelve small slices of veal cut from the leg, twelve small thin slices of lean ham, three tablespoons of pine nuts, one cup chopped parsley, two tablespoons raisins, two tablespoons each of grated Parmesan cheese, olive oil, butter …”
Crum stopped suddenly and turned. A small swarthy man with a twisted nose stood behind the center island, holding a helping of the fat man’s nuts in one hand, a silenced pistol in the other.
“And two bullets in the brain,” said Sal Belamo between chews before he pulled the trigger.
On the whole, things could not have worked out any better for Erich Haslanger. The full blame for the disaster at the Magic Kingdom had fallen on the late Colonel Lester Fuchs. Haslanger had been fully exonerated of any wrongdoing. Group Six would continue, because the country needed it, and he would remain at Group Six, because General Starr needed him.
He had already destroyed Fuchs’s personal file on him. With all accurate records altered inside the computer banks, the long-ago past had ceased to exist. His life didn’t even begin until he joined Group Six and that was all whoever took over as Fuchs’s replacement would care about.
There would come a day when Joshua Wolfe would work by his side. There would come a day when the boy realized this was where he belonged. Oh, he might need some coaxing, but Haslanger would give it time. There was no rush. For him there were twenty-four working hours in every day.
Haslanger filled a large glass with water from his office cooler and sat down behind his desk. Project work inside Group Six had been temporarily suspended, pending a full investigation of the events leading up to the disastrous night in the Magic Kingdom. The investigation was window dressing, all coordinated by Starr, the blame already apportioned by the men who made reports, not wrote them. But the corridors of the complex were strangely quiet, the labs abandoned save for experiments where cessation of work would mean deterioration of materials under production.