Second Chance

by Chet Williamson

  "Like with the woman?"

  Freeman frowned. "Yes, like with that woman. I don't really approve of that. I don't like seeing people, even people like her, suffer needlessly."

  "What is it," Keith said tentatively, "that you're working on exactly? I saw the glass cells, and Bob said something about airborne. So is it true? Did you really develop an airborne AIDS virus?"

  "Well . . ." Freeman stretched the word out for a long time. "It's not exactly AIDS. Not anymore. We started with the virus, got hold of it about twelve years ago, and been playing around with it ever since. It's been dangerous, and we've paid a price. Lost two of our boys to AIDS back at the beginning before everybody knew how it spread. Accidents. I mean they weren't homosexuals or anything like that. We check our people out pretty good. But we paid our dues. They were good men, but they died like homos, heck, some folks in town thought they were homos. It was an ugly time."

  "You said you started with AIDS. What do you mean? What do you have now?"

  "Well, we mutated it. You know the incubation period for AIDS is long—you can get it and carry it around for years before it starts kicking up its heels. In '86 we finally figured out how to speed that up, and now it's got an incubation period of just a couple weeks. Once it's in the bloodstream, you've got a month at best, probably less."

  "Before the symptoms show?"

  "Before you're dead. As soon as it's in there, the virus starts gobbling up T-lymphocyte cells like there's no tomorrow, helpers and suppressors both. Even if you went into a plastic bubble, the germs already in your body'd kill you. Which is why we're so dang careful with this thing. Those cells are airtight, with sealed ventilation systems. Once the subjects are inoculated, the boys have to go in to draw blood and get some cell samples—you'll be doing that too—but they wear sealed suits with tanks, and go through airlocks. You follow procedure correctly—and there are always two men to make sure that one doesn't get sloppy—and there's no risk of contracting the stuff."

  "Then you've actually made it airborne."

  "Mmm-hmm." Freeman nodded. "Stays alive four hours outside of a host. The airborne thing took us less time than anything else, except of course for what we're working on now. There hasn't been all that much work done in genetic virology. Heck, there hadn't been anything done in mutating blood-borne viruses into airborne either. Who'd want to do that in the first place? But we found it was pretty easy." He chuckled, a sound like shotgun pellets on a tin roof. "Better not tell Saddam about that."

  Keith rubbed his chin with a fist. "But what if it would get out? If there was an accident?"

  "Never happen. The virus is aspirated directly into the air of the subjects' cells. If they die, and that's been the only outcome so far, the air's filtered and replaced before the bodies are removed, and after we take tissue samples they're immediately cremated in a closed system. But if the airborne virus did somehow escape, we have a way to shut this lab off from the rest of the world." Freeman took a deep breath. "Unfortunately it'd be the tomb of anybody who was inside at the time. But it won't happen, believe me."

  "So it's deadly, and it's airborne," said Keith. "Where are you now?"

  "I'm kind of curious. What did you hear as far as where we are now—what we're working on?"

  "I heard you were trying to tailor a virus to spare whites. And I heard about the possibility of it being airborne too, but really didn't give that much credence." He smiled. "It seems I underestimated you."

  Christ, did I ever, Keith thought. For this relatively small staff to do what they had done was astonishing. Perhaps, he thought, strong minds and wills were enough to accomplish what unlimited money and manpower could not. He was proof of that himself, having brought more attention to the environment with his solitary acts than the large and well-financed organizations that tried to do the same thing.

  "Well, we've done the best we know how for the best cause we know," Freeman said with an affecting modesty. "As far as what we're doing now, it's what we've been doing for the past couple years, and that's trying to develop a racially selective strain, one that infects negroes, Hispanics, Orientals, but doesn't touch Caucasians. And that's tough. What we have now infects every single racial type, with no exceptions.

  "So what we've been trying to do get this thing to narrow its sights. First we tried to get the virus to attach to certain genes—sickle cells in blacks to start—but that was a bust. So recently we've been isolating genes that we think might be unique to Caucasians, and then telling the virus to react to it as an antibody. We thought we had a breakthrough about six months ago, but the white subject died." He shook his head. "I feel awful sorry about having to use white folks, but it can't be helped. There's no way animals can begin to give us the kind of results we need. We just do our best and try to find white people who are hurting the cause. In the cities. Poor sections. Lots of junkies, or kids."

  "Kids? You don't mean—"

  "No no!" said Freeman, waving a hand to dismiss such a thought. "Not little kids. More like nineteen or twenty. Trash, you know. Only thing going for them is that they're white. Other than the color of the skin, they might just as well be negroes. Born to be frybabies."

  Keith didn't understand the word and looked at Freeman.

  "Doggone," he said, chuckling. "I'm sorry. That's what the boys call the subjects . . . afterward. You know, when they're taking them to the crucible to burn."

  "Frybabies," Keith repeated, the word tasting bitter, childish, stupid in his mouth. Frybabies on their way to the crucible. Or the ovens. Funny, mused Keith, how Nazis were always true to form, whatever their nationality.

  "Well," said Freeman, standing quickly, as if embarrassed by what he had just said, "if you don't have any more questions, let's step out to the lab, and I'll show you where to start."

  “Just one. Have you developed any kind of antidote for this virus. Any cure?"

  Freeman looked at him kindly, and his voice was soft, as if explaining to a child. "Son," he said, "down here we're not in the business of curing."

  Chapter 23

  July 16, 1993:

  The work is mind numbing, so simple that they could get high school seniors with a high boredom threshold and good eyesight to do it. I spent most of the day cloning selected genes, washing paper with bacterial cultures on it, then putting x-ray film over it to find the colonies with the DNA they need for further experiments.

  The four others in the lab, Hastings among them, laugh and joke and tell stories as they work, and though I talked a little, I had to concentrate too hard on my handiwork to join in their idea of fun. This bed feels wonderful, and after I record this, I'll fall asleep quickly, exhausted by the fine detail of my labors.

  It doesn't matter, though. It's worth the effort, worth as long as I have to stay here, now that I've found out it's true.

  The virus exists. It's here. And so am I. My whole life, everything that's ever happened to me, everything I've ever done and seen and heard has led me here.

  Freeman mentioned a very great mission. A great destiny. And he was right. But it wasn't his mission of white supremacy that will be fulfilled here. It's my mission. My destiny. It took me so long to realize it. I went down so many false paths, wrote so many red pages in the book of my mind, before I realized the truth.

  No matter what I did, it didn't matter. Nothing mattered, until now.

  ~*~

  In 1984, Keith Aarons assassinated Warren Anderson shortly after the toxic gas disaster at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India. He managed to get into the corporate president's hotel suite posing as a room service waiter, and quickly dispatched a bodyguard with a pistol hidden in a tray. Then, holding Anderson at gunpoint, he took from beneath the room service cart a small tank of natural gas. A hose led from it to a breathing mask.

  When Anderson saw the device, he tried to run for the door, in spite of the gun, but Keith tripped him and then hit him until he was helpless enough to tie up. Then he pulled him back to the tank, hel
d the mask over Anderson's nose and mouth, and told him, "Here's a goodbye kiss from Kali." Anderson lived for only a few seconds after Keith turned on the gas.

  It was a dramatic gesture, but the fact that he had been able to get into the suite so easily resulted in tighter security on all of Union Carbide's officials, including the new president. Pan was blamed, since Keith had contacted all the proper sources in advance, and left a note taped to the gas tank, a note that ended with Pan's symbolic signature.

  From 1985 to 1992, as environmentalism became more of a political and social issue, Keith waged a saturation campaign, emblazoning the name of Pan across the nation. He targeted major developers who were destroying wetlands, derailed freight trains carrying coal, killed mine owners, corporation CEOs, even corporate lawyers who defended polluting companies. As conditions grew worse, the tempo of his crimes increased.

  And things were, he felt, growing worse. Admittedly, there were a few improvements. Legislation made some controls stricter. But the passages of important government acts were still held up by bipartisan politics and pork barrel thinking, by politicians who did only what was best for the financial well being of their more powerful constituents, and not the nation—and certainly not the earth—as a whole.

  Worst of all, the voters of America seemed to see no need to change things. They promised to recycle their beer bottles and aluminum cans, but that was merely a concession. Most of them still drove the three blocks to the convenience store in their gasoline burning cars, they still bought Exxon gasoline (despite Keith's execution of Exxon's president eight months after the Valdez oil spill), and they nodded in agreement when President Bush said that economic impact would have to be taken into account before any further anti-pollution legislation could be passed.

  Economic impact. It made Keith laugh grimly. How much would they think about economic impact ten or twenty years from now when their skins were furrowed sheets of carcinoma? Would economics be South America's prime concern when the fatal tumor born of poverty had choked the lungs of the earth, and there was nothing in the rain forests but dry brush? Would the congressmen think about farm subsidies when no sunshine touched the few fields that were left unpaved?

  Eastern Europe was already suffocating, the world's forests were being defoliated, the lakes and rivers poisoned their denizens, and the only chance that Keith Aarons saw for survival came from the tortured words of a white supremacist gunsmith, words that would eventually bring him to Bone, Texas.

  ~*~

  September 4, 1989:

  The earth is dying. Dying. It's that simple. But men refuse to stop the bleeding. And that bleeding can't stop tomorrow, it has to stop today.

  But it won't. There is no way it will happen. I suppose it really should have stopped yesterday, but it's too late for that now. In order for the ecology of the planet to survive, organisms have to adapt. But technology ran ahead too fast for humanity to keep up. There's been no chance for adaptation, no chance for genetic transition to occur. Maybe in ten thousand years we could have evolved tougher layers of skin, or lungs that could safely breathe the particles in the air. Maybe filtration systems of some sort. But there's no time left. And we won't just kill ourselves. We'll take everything else too—the vegetation, the birds, the animals, the things in the sea.

  Sometimes I think the best thing for me would be to die and end my struggles against a world that neither understands nor appreciates what I'm trying to do. Maybe man is just meant to be a suicidal, short-lived species. Stubborn. So damned stubborn and selfish.

  I can't help but think that whatever I've done is of no use, that all my efforts have been futile, that the only way to save life on the earth is to kill all the people on it.

  That's a fine irony, isn't it? Like that officer in Vietnam who had to destroy the village to save it. Nevertheless, it seems to be true.

  But how? How do you assassinate an entire species, a species spread throughout the world in all lands and climates?

  Nuclear war is one way, of course, but that means nuclear winter as well, the ultimate pollution. Every living creature dies, not just man. Besides, how could I start a nuclear war? It's so impossible it's laughable.

  Disease is the only other way. This secret lab that the gunsmith talked about may offer something in that direction. The odds are long that it even exists, and longer that I could find it, but at this point it seems to be the only effective option.

  In a way, I hope it doesn't exist. Supposing it did, and that it really had within it the seeds for the destruction of mankind? Could I bring myself to do it? Every man, woman, and child of a species that has created such beauty and joy along with such death and destruction, that knows love as well as hate? Could I completely eradicate them all?

  ~*~

  And that question was one he now struggled with four years later, when the phantom laboratory had taken on a crude if efficient reality.

  ~*~

  July 16, 1993:

  The question remains, if I am able to find a way—and I'm sure I can, else why would fate have brought me here?—can I bring myself to do it? The physical ability is one thing, the mental another.

  Some would survive, at least there is that. If the virus is able to live outside a host for four hours, that means that isolated pockets would survive—Indians in the Amazon and New Guinea, Eskimos, primitive African tribes, South Pacific islanders, Australian bushmen, all people who live on the land and respect it, poor bastards who have been screwed ever since the white men hit their shores.

  Odds are that after everybody else is dead and technology fades, the surviving tribes will still have their own little wars. But they'll be fought with bows and slings, not with tanks and planes and bombs. The clock will be turned back, that's all, and poor old Earth will have a chance to breathe fresh air again, and drink clean water.

  And I can do it. An airborne virus, released among the general population—in no time at all, the earth would be depopulated. Just as in Steppenwolf.

  I know the way. Now all I have to do is find the means.

  And one more thing—the motivation. I am not sure that if I was handed a tank full of virus-laden air that I would be able to release it. I've steeled myself to do many things in the past, but they've always been impersonal—people I didn't know, or people who, for one reason or another, deserved to die.

  But how do you rationalize killing everyone, guilty and innocent alike? For I'm not so far gone that I don't realize there are those who are innocent.

  Flow do you rationalize becoming the greatest mass murderer in history?

  Or doesn't it really matter, since history dies as well?

  And if history dies, to whom will I ever read or dictate this book of my mind?

  It doesn't matter. Nothing matters except saving what can still be saved, and maybe the survivors will be wiser than the rest of us, and save what was worthy in history and culture, and discard the rest, all the lies that brought us to this sad end.

  I haven't much time. I must learn more, establish trust, find a way to take the virus out.

  And then I must find within myself the strength and the will to release it.

  Part III

  Chapter 24

  Woody stared into darkness. He wanted to turn on the bed stand light, but Tracy would not release him long enough.

  “Just hold me," she whispered. "Just let me know you're here . . . that I'm here . . ."

  He had woken her less than a minute before. She had been moaning in her sleep, and sweating through the oversized t-shirt she preferred to nightgowns. The nightmare recurred every few weeks.

  "Same dream?" he said gently, and felt her head nod against his shoulder.

  The same dream she had told him about before, the dream of being with Keith in darkness, except for one little beam of light, a beam that danced on the boards of a wooden floor, and she could feel her hair long over her shoulders, touching her upper arms, so she knew that she was young again, and Keith saying somethi
ng that she couldn't understand, telling her to take something and not touch something else, but she didn't know what, so she took something and he told her to hold this, but don't do something else and she was angry and wanted to scare him and moved her hands together and Keith saying no

  —and then the world hot and bright and pain she had never dreamed of, pain that stopped time and burned her, kept burning her with white steel heat until

  —Woody woke her up, shook her until she stopped moaning and started to cry from the relief that she was here, alive, and that the dream had been both less and more than a dream, a memory of another life, a life that had never been.

  Her tears stopped, and she said, "Yes, I'm sorry, turn on the light. I want to see you." He did as she asked, dimly illuminating the bedroom in their Russell Hotel suite, and she touched his face and said, "Oh yes, my sweet boy, you're here, and I'm here."

  "And everything's all right," he said, touching the back of her hand, pressing it against his cheek for her to feel the corporeality of his flesh, the reality of his love.

  "Why do I keep seeing it?" she asked. "Keep reliving it?”

  “You've got to remember that all it is is a dream, a dream of a past that never was."

  "It was for you," she said. "And for me too. Somewhere else. Some other time." She looked away from him. "Maybe it won't let me go. Maybe it's what should have been, and that's what the nightmares are trying to tell me."

  That's stupid was his first response, but he didn't say it. Instead he held her again. "What should be is what is and what was. This life was what you've always known. It's what's real."

  "But you knew another life."