by J. R. McLeay
Eva began to piece together the seemingly disconnected events of the last few weeks.
“Just like the tampering of the juvenile patch?” she asked, wondering how deep Calvin’s plan went. “Do you have any idea how many millions of people you’ve harmed and potentially condemned to death from your selfish act of vandalism?”
“I had nothing to do with that—though that too would have been easy for me, since one of my lieutenants is highly placed within the Endogen corporation. Of course, I’m not at all unhappy about that turn of events. I’ve been warning for years that this juvenile longevity plan was doomed from the start. But don’t worry about your unfortunate friends—they’ll soon be going to a better place. All they have to do is repent and ask God’s forgiveness—which they will do in due course, because everybody wants to be immortal.”
Calvin threw his head back and cackled loudly.
“You beast!!” Eva screamed, trying to twist out of Calvin’s arms. “If you and your God were so righteous, you wouldn’t kill people in order to demand their loyalty.”
“Life and death is the way of the world, my dear,” Calvin said, tightening his grip around Eva’s midsection. “We simply need to accept that—and enjoy life’s ephemeral pleasures to the fullest.”
As Calvin leaned in to kiss Eva’s neck, his soiled hand clutched her bare breast under her nightgown.
“I’ll kill myself before I let you take me again, you pig!” Eva screamed, as she flexed her lower leg behind her and found Calvin’s testicles with her heel.
Calvin bent over and winced, but managed to maintain his grip on Eva.
“I like your fire and fortitude, Eva,” he panted, violently swinging Eva around and ripping open her negligee. “Our children will have strong bodies and strong minds. Just what they’ll need to take over the world.”
As Calvin began unbuttoning his pants and dragging Eva toward the bed, he stopped abruptly when he heard a strange scratching sound coming from the small window by the lavatory. Cocking his head for a moment, he strained to listen to the curious noise. Deciding it was just a loose branch scraping against the side of the cabin from the force of the howling wind outside, he resumed his advance toward the bed. But when the strange noise was followed up by an unusual clicking pattern, he temporarily dropped his grip on Eva and moved toward the rear of the cabin to investigate.
Precisely at the moment he turned away, Eva noticed a small flashing light coming from the window on the opposite side of the cabin. Moving tentatively towards the strange glow, she suddenly noticed Jennifer’s face through the foggy pane, motioning frantically just outside the glass. Catching her breath, she quickly glanced over at Calvin, who was still peering through the lavatory window at the rear of the cabin to see if he could ascertain the source of the earlier sound. Hurriedly darting her eyes back to Jennifer, Eva saw her pointing to the door with one hand while making an unlatching motion with the other. Instantly recognizing Jennifer’s meaning, she moved to the front door where she quickly unlatched the heavy wooden beam that blocked the door’s forward entry.
Just as she lifted the plank, Calvin swung around and realized he’d been intentionally distracted. As he lunged across the floor, the door swiftly swung open, and he saw Rick standing on the threshold, illuminated by the cabin’s gaslight streaming out into the pitch darkness. For a few seconds, neither said a thing, as they quietly appraised each other through the open doorframe. Suddenly, Eva made a motion to escape, but Calvin grabbed her arm and threw her violently back against the wood stove. The hulking cult leader now stood defiantly between Eva and Rick, glaring at his nemesis. Noticing some movement in the shadows behind Rick, Calvin shifted position to see who else was with him, and Jennifer emerged from beside the cabin to join her boyfriend.
Calvin stared at the two juveniles inquisitively for a moment, then a large sneer slowly formed on his long, bearded face.
“Don’t tell me you two came up here alone, Dr. Ross?” he chortled. “Let me guess—no one else would believe you when you told them Eva had been taken to some lonely mountaintop in the California wilderness? Did you really think you and your girlfriend would be able to take me single-handedly?! I think it’s finally time I taught you a fundamental biology lesson, and show you who the alpha male is in this environment.”
As Calvin clenched his fists and began moving menacingly toward Rick, Jennifer suddenly lunged in front and thrust a small aerosol can toward Calvin’s face with her outstretched arms. She pressed the actuator button on top of the can frantically, but nothing came out—the freezing temperatures had apparently jammed the mechanism.
Calvin paused briefly, as if momentarily threatened by the improvised weapon, then let out a sinister laugh.
“Is that the only weapon you brought to this engagement?” he sneered. “How pathetic. Haven’t you two learned by now? The hand of God will never be vanquished.”
As Calvin resumed his advance toward the open door, Rick looked around and saw a snowshoe resting just inside the door frame. Pushing Jennifer behind him, he quickly picked it up and held it threateningly over his head like a baseball bat.
“Do you think you’re going to stop me with a shoe?” Calvin mocked, pausing only briefly. “After I beat you senseless with that thing, I’m going to make you watch while I have my way with both of your women. Then you’ll see what it really means to be a man.”
In a burst of speed, Calvin lunged toward Rick and flicked the snowshoe out of his hand, as if batting a fly. Grabbing Rick fully around the neck with one giant hand, he struck Jennifer with the other as she rushed forward protectively, instantly knocking her unconscious.
“Prepare to meet your maker, Dr. Ross!” Calvin seethed, as he tightened his grip around Rick’s neck. “Your time, as everyone’s must in due course, has finally come. You’ve only a few seconds left to ask for God’s grace, so you’d better do so quickly.”
As Calvin pressed his thumbs against Rick’s trachea and began to cut off the air supply to his lungs, Rick kicked and flailed, attempting to strike Calvin in the shins—but this only heightened the cult leader’s rage. Lifting the much smaller juvenile off the floor with outstretched arms, Calvin began shaking and squeezing Rick until he turned blue in the face. Just as he was about to lose consciousness, Rick suddenly saw Calvin’s eyes fly wide open and he heard him utter an unearthly bellow, as he loosened his grip around Rick’s throat and dropped him to the ground. Gasping for air, Rick looked up and saw Calvin slowly topple over him through the open door, landing face down in the cold, hard snow just beyond the threshold.
Embedded deeply in Calvin’s back, directly between his shoulder blades, was a still smoldering fireplace poker, shimmering in the cold, dense moonlight. Glancing behind him, Rick saw Eva—shaken and furious—standing over Calvin with dark, soot-covered hands.
53
The morning after his return from California, Rick placed an electronic tablet displaying the front page of The New York Times on his kitchen table, where Jennifer was sipping her morning coffee. Prominently displayed on the front page was a large picture of the two of them beside Eva, as they triumphantly emerged from the jetway upon their return to LaGuardia airport. Boldface headlines trumpeted the resolution of the Endogen tampering case and the Queens’ assassination, as new information uncovered by the FBI in its ongoing investigation and by Eva during her week-long captivity in the White Mountains spilled out the sordid details.
Almost lost among the celebratory headlines was a shorter story further down the page detailing the deteriorating condition and rising death toll among the world’s rapidly aging adolescents, and a much smaller picture of Tian Yin. Looking thin and drawn, she was announcing at a U.N. press conference the results of the juvenile patch tender process—and her resignation as Secretary-General.
Concurrent with the licensing of five newly authorized vendors, Endogen’s contract was being canceled amid revelations that its CEO, Roland Jamieson, had been found to be the ringlead
er in the tampering of its e-patches. His accomplice, Endogen’s quality control manager, was apprehended by FBI agents on a yacht off the coast of the Canary Islands, after Jamieson revealed his plans to start a charter boat company and Interpol traced the owner of the newly registered vessel to a deceased individual whose identity the manager had assumed.
Eva’s exposé of Calvin’s organization structure and the plans he shared with her at the cabin had led the FBI back to Nathan Taylor, who eventually confessed his and various other Garden of Eden church members’ complicity in the planning and execution of the Queen’s kidnapping, the destruction of the egg supply, and the assassination of the other Queens at the Lincoln Center Gala. Eva, Rick, and Jennifer had been treated for minor bruises and concussions after their return from Calvin’s cabin, but all three were issued a clean bill of health and were resting comfortably after their mountain ordeal. Now all that remained to be resolved was the critical matter of the rapidly aging adolescents.
“The conquering heroes return, huh?” Jennifer commented upon seeing the picture on the front page.
“So it appears.”
“Crazy, isn’t it,” she remarked, reading the lead headline about Jamieson’s arrest. “Who would have thought Endogen’s CEO was behind the patch tampering? What was he thinking?”
“Obviously, he wasn’t thinking very clearly. Desperate men are driven to desperate measures.”
“All because of the prospect of losing the U.N. contract?”
“Not entirely. That set in motion an unfortunate sequence of events that led to the pummeling of his company’s stock, and he was so heavily invested and leveraged that he apparently saw no other way out of his personal financial predicament.”
“But how did he stand to gain from driving his own company to financial ruin? And how did he manage to hide his actions from the financial authorities?”
“He was very clever. Instead of directly shorting the company’s stock, which would have immediately raised the attention of securities regulators on the New York Stock Exchange, he purchased put options on the more obscure Chicago Board Options Exchange, and hid his ownership of these positions in a complex nest of numbered companies.”
“Put options?” Jennifer asked.
“It’s a security which provides the owner the right to sell the underlying stock of a company—in this case, Endogen—at one fixed price, and profit when he buys it back at a much lower price. It allows the holder to magnify the gains he would normally get from shorting the stock, by investing far less capital up front and assuming a much bigger stake in the downward fall of the shares. He would have made out quite handily had he not been caught.”
“Except they always get caught,” Jennifer mused, “—just like Calvin. Unfortunately, he paid a far higher price for his misadventure.”
“He did. Although he might have gotten away with his plan too, at least for a while, if we hadn’t gotten lucky.”
“Yes,” Jennifer admitted sheepishly, “it turns out you were right about the connection between the burning wood scent at Calvin’s church and the source of that wood in the forest atop the White Mountains. But how did you know he had a cabin up there?”
“I didn’t. It was just a gut feeling, and I decided to run with it. The FBI certainly wasn’t getting any closer to finding her—and we had nothing to lose.”
“Except our lives. We came pretty close to losing those!”
“Yes,” Rick admitted, “I suppose we got a bit lucky there too.”
“What were you thinking going up there without any weapons or backup?” Jennifer teased, not wanting to pass up an opportunity to rib Rick one last time. “I told you it was a crazy idea!”
“Well, if you remember, I initially intended to see if we could simply confirm Eva’s location, then call in the police when we had irrefutable evidence. It wasn’t until I saw Calvin intending to rape Eva, that we had to act quickly.”
“It certainly went down pretty fast after that,” Jennifer remarked. “I still think it’s a miracle we all survived. It seemed for a moment like that cult leader truly was possessed by a supernatural power.”
“He certainly overpowered us easily enough,” Rick admitted. “I think even if your mace can had worked properly, it mightn’t have been enough to stop him in time. Where did you get that stuff anyhow?”
Rick knew there was no longer any reason for juveniles to carry protection against violent offenders, and consequently few stores carried the product due to the extremely rare instance of these kinds of offenses.
“It was actually bear repellent. I picked it up at a mountaineering shop at the airport when you went to the restroom. I wanted to have a backup plan in case we got into any trouble.”
“It certainly did get us into trouble—it almost got you killed!”
“I was trying to save your fanny, remember?” Jennifer chided. “Thank heavens for Eva—I think she’s the real hero in all this. How’s she doing anyway?”
“She’s still a little shell-shocked from the incident and experiencing some post-traumatic stress from Calvin’s treatment of her, but she’s glad it’s finally over.”
“Unfortunately, it’s not yet over for the millions of aging adolescents,” Jennifer said, scanning the other story on the front page of the paper. “What will become of them, and of the Global Longevity Initiative, now that all the eggs have been destroyed?”
“We’ll just have to begin rebuilding the protective stores of eggs using our one remaining Queen, assuming Eva is still up to the task. Conceivably, we could replace the other queens by using her newly harvested eggs to create new mature females, assuming the will is still there to do so. As for the future of the GLI, we’ll just have to hope that another random ecological intervention doesn’t throw us out of equilibrium.”
“Or human intervention,” Jennifer said, referring to the tampering incident.
“Or divine intervention,” Rick suggested, recalling Calvin’s final invocation to him at the cabin.
“Let’s hope all that intelligent design nonsense finally fades from public discourse, now that its chief proponent has perished.”
“Well there’s no denying that the design of this sophisticated ecosystem is indeed intelligent—even if it’s simply from the invisible hand of evolution, systematically weeding out less intelligent or capable organisms not as well equipped to compete in the ever-changing landscape. Either way, it all comes back to the notion of chaos theory: small unpredictable changes in the static environment lead to extraordinary changes and mutations in that environment over time—over which we have little control.”
“What about those unfortunate individuals who weren’t so lucky to escape this latest disturbance—what will become of the rapidly aging adolescents?”
“I’m afraid there’s no hope for them now,” Rick said, offering his grim prognosis. “The genetic anomaly is thoroughly embedded on a cellular level and impossible to remove now. As horrible as it sounds, it’s nature’s cruel way of culling the herd. The sick and non-reproductive ones are simply getting in the way of the survival of the fittest—it’s an inevitable fact of the natural environment. We can only trust that nature is once again doing what’s best for the whole.”
“Another example of your rule of antagonistic pleiotropy?”
“Yes—unfortunately, what’s good for the individual is usually bad for the whole species. And vice versa.”
Rick glanced down at the picture of Tian peering sadly out from the front cover of the newspaper.
“Except in this case, we’re talking about individuals we know and love.”
Epilogue
On a cold February afternoon, Rick stood on a knoll on the south edge of Green-wood Cemetery overlooking New York Harbor. Not far from Elias’s burial site rested the simple headstone marking the fresh grave of Tian Yin. She had just been buried in a grand ceremony attended by hundreds of dignitaries.
Tian had requested to be buried in her newly adopted countr
y, in this spot with a view across the ocean to her homeland. It was a clear day, and Rick could see for miles across the sun-dappled bay, past the majestic Statue of Liberty raising her arm as if in salute. He thought it was a fitting resting place for the luminous leader who had so elegantly bridged the two worlds.
The epitaph on her tombstone simply read:
Tian Yin, 2060-2110. Somewhere between heaven and earth lies the promise of rebirth, for the acts of this life lay the seeds for the next.
The mourners had long since left the burial site, but Rick lingered afterward until the cemetery workers had covered the grave with fresh soil. He wanted to give Tian something he had long ago promised her. Bending down, he took a small glass jar from the pocket of his overcoat, and carefully removed a tiny seedling. As large fluffy snowflakes began to fall from the bright sky, he planted his newly sprouted Methuselah seedling in the loose dry soil in the shadow of Tian’s headstone. Kneeling over her grave, he paused for a moment to say goodbye to his dear friend, then gently patted the earth around the tiny green shoot.
As he stood to leave, he felt the pager in his pocket vibrating. Squinting to read the display in the bright sunlight, he saw it was a message from Eva.
Just discovered I’m pregnant. Have decided to keep the baby—it’s a girl! E.
Rick smiled as he headed toward the ancient Gothic spires of the cemetery’s exit gate.
So the cycle continues. Perhaps Tian said it best: all that is guaranteed in this world is that in death, lay the eternal seeds for renewal.
Other Books by J. R. McLeay:
Everyone has to come out in the open eventually.
About the Author