by J. Bryan
“If that’s what you want.” He gazed at her for another long moment before turning toward the horse.
She touched her lips. Her hand was shaking.
As they rode on, she held tight to him, but reminded herself that she’d only just met him. She couldn’t trust him, not yet, no matter what intense feelings he brought up inside of her. He’d helped her, but she began to realize that he was also the only person in the world who could hurt her. Without the demon plague, she was defenseless against him. The thought was scary but thrilling.
The horse walked into the fairgrounds just before dawn, and they stabled him with the Wild West horses. Inside Juliana’s tent, she heaved the blankets from her cot onto the canvas floor, and they lay together. Juliana knew it wasn’t proper, but she was far too tired to find him a different spot. Fortunately, he was far too tired to try anything, if he’d intended to.
She slept with her back against him, his arm around her, and his hand just happened to lay across her breasts as he fell asleep. She smiled to herself.
Chapter Eight
Dr. Heather Reynard worked late in her office. It would cost more with the babysitter, but budget committees needed their reports. Life in academia wasn’t exactly the pastoral, leisurely life she’d imagined when she’d left the Centers for Disease Control, but there was a lot less flying into war-torn regions to live in a tent surrounded by the sick and the starving. Everything had its trade-offs.
She emailed the report to her department head, then stood and stretched, ready to jump into Atlanta traffic for the slow ride home. She’d been extremely fortunate to get a post at Emory University, not far from her home in the Virginia Highlands, even if it was only a part-time associate professorship. Her commute ranged from three minutes to half an hour, depending on the time of day and the never-ending road construction.
She glanced out the window and smiled at the sight of a boy and a girl next to each other on the grassy lawn below. Studying their biology texts while thinking about each other’s personal biology.
The door to her office opened. A man in a black suit entered without knocking, and despite the smile on his face, something about him chilled Heather. He was in his late forties or early fifties, his dark hair graying and cropped close and neat, military-style. His dark green eyes seemed to glow with a wicked mirth.
“Dr. Heather Reynard.” He looked over her crowded bookshelves and saw her Newton’s Cradle, each ball painted a bright pattern of purples, red, oranges, and greens. They were meant to represent different icosahedral viruses, like influenza and rotavirus. A gift from Dr. Schwartzman, her former boss at the CDC, on her last day there after resigning.
Her visitor raised the ball at one end and released it, letting the row of them clack back and forth.
“I’m sorry, can I help you?” Heather remained where she was, standing behind her desk.
“I believe so.” He advanced into her office, his smile as warm as winter in Siberia. “We need to talk, Dr. Reynard.”
“You know, I have an appointment right now, actually,” Heather said. “So maybe you can call our receptionist tomorrow, set up a time for a meeting.”
“Appointment?” The man held up what looked like a Blackberry phone. “No, I don’t see anything here. You made a note to pick up eggs and milk, don’t forget that.”
“You hacked my phone?” Heather glanced at the bottom desk drawer, which held her purse. “Who are you?”
“I’m the man you’ve been waiting for.”
“Excuse me?”
“Surely you’ve been expecting someone to come along, one day or another. There are a few too many loose ends, aren’t there, Dr. Reynard?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Heather reached for her drawer. She wanted access to both her phone and her pepper spray. “I really have to get going.”
“Fallen Oak,” he said. “Over two hundred dead. Extreme symptoms of biological illness, but with no known source, no known vector. No virus or bacterium ever isolated. All evidence incinerated. On your recommendation, Dr. Reynard.”
“I’m not free to discuss specific cases or investigations,” Heather replied. “You’ll have to contact the CDC public information office.”
“Don’t be absurd. I’ve already read all your reports, patchy and inconclusive as they are.”
“And who are you, again?”
“Why don’t we sit down?” he asked.
“Why don’t I call campus security?” she replied.
He smirked. He was jaw was squarish, his lips bloodless and thin. He almost had a case of missing mouth syndrome, until he bared his teeth in a smile.
“Here.” He showed her a laminated badge with the seal of the Department of Defense—a golden eagle clutching arrows and an American flag shield—and his own photograph. According to the badge, his name was Ward Kilpatrick, and he was a lieutenant general.
“Then you should know that the details of Fallen Oak have been classified by the Department of Homeland Security. You’ll have to speak with them.” Heather pulled her purse over her shoulder and stepped around her desk. Ward stood between her and the door, blocking her way with the help of Heather’s own bookshelves, boxes, and clutter. “If you’ll excuse me,” Heather added.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Reynard. You won’t be leaving yet.” Behind him, in the hallway, two more men emerged from either side of her door. They were much younger, dressed in dark suits and sunglasses, clearly his assistants, or his muscle. “Close the door, Buchanan. We’re having a private conversation.”
One of the men shut Heather’s door without saying a word. They would remain outside, but clearly, Heather wouldn’t get far if she tried to leave. Her heart pounded in her ears. She was trapped.
“Dr. Reynard,” he said. “Because of your years of federal service, I’m going to level with you. I’m currently the director of a defense intelligence agency whose name you would not recognize, nor could you find it in any official budget or organization chart. We have been here since the earliest days of the Cold War, watching, studying...Our focus is on identifying threats and opportunities that lie outside the typical military paradigms. Homeland Security? To us, they’re just the courtesy officer tooling around your local mall in a golf cart.”
“They have all the information,” Heather said. She was scared, but she made an effort to look calm. She didn’t want him to see her tremble.
“Why did you resign from the CDC?”
“I was tired of being away from my family all the time.”
“Oh, yes.” Ward took a framed family picture from her desk. “Liam. And little Tricia, five years old. She was dying of leukemia, wasn’t she? Until, one day, she wasn’t.”
“She’s in remission.”
“Oh, no. We’ve reviewed her records. She’s cured. Like she never had it at all.”
“No one’s ever really ‘cured’ from cancer. There’s always the possibility—”
“Nobody except your daughter and several other children on the same ward, at the same time,” he said. “Miraculous, isn’t it?”
“We’re very grateful for her improvement—”
Ward smashed the family picture on the corner of her desk, and Heather jumped as fragments of glass sprayed everywhere. He threw the broken frame on the floor.
“Don’t give me that,” he growled. His green eyes burned bright. “The probability is off the charts. What happened at the hospital that night?”
“It must have been God,” Heather said. “That’s what everybody tells me.”
“God.” Ward smirked at her. “I don’t believe in God, Dr. Reynard. But I believe in the devil. I believe he’s in all of us, that he is us...” He stalked closer to her, and Heather backed up until she bumped against her desk. His voice dropped to a whisper as he leaned in close, his breath hot and sour on her cheek. “Tell me, Heather. What is the source of Fallen Oak syndrome? Why did you want every victim, and every inch of that old mansion, incinerated?”
“The pox,” she said. “It had to be stopped. It could have become an epidemic overnight. Virulent. Contagious. Airborne.”
“No,” he said, stepping even closer, until she could see nothing in the world but his face. “I want the whole story.”
“Get back,” Heather whispered. She eased her hand toward her purse. Three-star general or not, he was going to get eyeballs full of pepper spray if he didn’t step out of her personal space.
He grabbed her head in both hands and stared into her eyes. Heather’s hand dove inside her purse, but then she felt like she was twisting and falling, suddenly lost in her own memories. She could feel him penetrating deep inside her brain, and she had no way of stopping it.
She flashed through her initial epidemiological investigation of Fallen Oak, the interviews with Darcy Metcalf and other locals, the tissue samples....Then she saw the true source of the outbreak, a small, sad-looking girl named Jennifer Morton....Not an immune carrier, as it turned out, because there was no biological vector. Combined with the zombies caught on video in a Charleston morgue, Heather was reluctantly realizing that the situation had to be supernatural, contrary to all her own beliefs....
...and then Seth Barrett, healing Tricia’s leukemia. And then Heather standing by the blazing ruin of Barrett House, promising to help Jenny and Seth, to report them dead and strongly recommend that everything be incinerated...And the next day, Heather watching from a truck as men in biohazard suits loaded corpse after corpse into an incinerator truck. The demolition of the burned-out old mansion, the earth scorched with flamethrowers.
“Jennifer Morton,” Ward said. “And she’s still alive. Where?”
Heather gasped as the man stabbed deep into her brain, scouring it for information that wasn’t there.
“Where?” he shouted again, shaking her. “Where?”
“I don’t know!” Heather screamed.
Ward released her and stepped back as Heather sank to the floor, weeping uncontrollably. Her brain felt like someone had torn through it with a claw hammer. Her head would ring and ache for days.
“Thank you, Dr. Reynard,” he said, adjusting his tie. “I suppose that was as helpful as you could be. Should you get the urge to tell anyone about my small, unimportant visit, I’ll remind you that you falsified your reports on this matter and helped a mass murderer escape. We’ll be monitoring your communications to ensure you remember to keep quiet. A little added service from me.” He winked as he opened the door. “Have a pleasant evening, Dr. Reynard.”
Heather remained sitting on the floor while she watched him leave, her skin crawling with horror. She barely understood what had just happened, but she felt painfully violated.
When he walked out into the hall, Heather crawled across the carpet, slammed the door, and turned the lock. She leaned against the door and tried to get herself together. It was a long time before she felt safe leaving her office and walking to the parking deck.
Chapter Nine
In Fallen Oak, the front gate to the Barrett House property was secured by lengths of chain and padlocks. Ward’s assistants, Buchanan and Avery, made short work of them with bolt-cutters, and then pushed open the heavy steel gate doors, which were flanked by very old stone lions.
Ward walked along the brick driveway, followed by the two younger men. Beyond a few ancient, mossy oaks near the front of the drive, the place looked like a wasteland. A huge amount of earth had been scorched black, any trees or grass long gone. In the year since Homeland Security had razed the place, spindly purple and pink flowers had colonized the vast burn scar.
The house itself was nothing but rubble, but from the few blackened hunks of brick wall that remained, Ward could see it had been an impressive structure at one time.
“They worked it over pretty good,” Ward said, kicking a cracked piece of the driveway. “Didn’t leave much for us to find, did they?”
“Sir,” Avery said, “As far as we can tell, the boy’s parents are at their house in Saint Augustine.”
“I know,” Ward told him. “The bad news is that his mother’s name is Iris Mayfield Barrett, the niece of Senator Junius Mayfield, who sits on the Armed Services Committee. That could get tricky. Good news is the senator just recently had a stroke and he’s in critical condition. If the old bastard would hurry up and die, we’d have less to worry about.”
“Should I put in a call?” Avery asked.
“Avery...” Ward sighed and shook his head. Buchanan had half a brain, but Ward just regarded Avery as extra muscle. “I will never tell you to make a call like that about a person like that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’re going to focus on softer targets for now,” Ward told them. “The Morton girl’s father, and any other witnesses who might have something useful. I don’t think we’ll find much here...” Ward looked at a distant brick structure on a low hill, back behind where the house had stood. “What is that?”
“Looks like a walled garden, sir,” Buchanan said, squinting his eyes.
“It’s the only thing standing. Might as well check it out. We’re not going to find anything in this rubble.” Ward led the way around the foundation of the house and on through the torched remains of what might have been an orchard or a stand of decorative trees. Large slabs of dark gray granite led up the hill to a tall wrought-iron gate, which stood wide open. They had to step high, as if the stairs were meant for larger beings than humans. They reminded Ward of old megalithic structures he’d seen on the History Channel, where some moron was always claiming Stonehenge was built by aliens.
If extraterrestrials were visiting the planet, Ward’s agency would have known about it. The Anomalous Strategic Threat Research and Intelligence Agency (ASTRIA) was not known to the public. Their mission, dating back to the Eisenhower administration, had generally been to focus on “unknown unknowns,” in the words of a more recent Secretary of Defense. Originally founded in response to reports that the Soviet Union was investigating the use of psychics for intelligence-gathering and other strategic purposes, ASTRIA had looked into matters ranging from the supernatural to the extraterrestrial...almost never finding anything of importance to national security. Almost.
They walked through the open gate. Inside, there tall blocks of dark granite, arranged in rows, many of them inscribed with names but not dates. Each row had a generation of people named JONATHAN SETH BARRETT, followed by a Roman numeral. The most recent date that had been carved belong to the boy for whom they were searching: JONATHAN SETH BARRETT IV. It had a birth year, but no death year. Next to it was CARTER MAYFIELD BARRETT, born a few years before Seth, dead at the age of fourteen.
“What is this place?” Ward muttered.
“Looks like a graveyard, sir,” Avery replied.
“I can see that. Looks like a graveyard for generations of people who haven’t been born yet. Fucking rich weirdos,” Ward muttered.
The earth in front of Carter’s grave was churned up like something had dug its way in or out. As Ward continued walking, he saw all of the graves with death dates were like that.
“What the hell happened here?” Ward asked. “Don’t see why Homeland Security would dig up all these graves.”
“Maybe they didn’t, sir,” Buchanan said. “It could be like the security video from the morgue in Charleston. The walking dead, sir.”
“The walking dead.” Ward frowned. They even had the “zombie master” on video, for what it was worth. A grainy image of a tall guy in dark sunglasses with longish hair. “How many paranormals are we talking about now? The little diseased girl, the healing rich kid, and some zombie master guy? I believe we have stepped into some shit here, gentlemen.” One of the dark granite slabs near the back was labeled JONATHAN SETH BARRETT. “This must have been a hell of a guy, this first Jonathan Seth Barrett. They planned to name unborn generations after him. What kind of freaks are we dealing with?”
Buchanan wore a thoughtful look. Avery blew his nose into a handkerchi
ef.
“Getting a cold, Avery?” Ward asked.
“Must be allergies, sir.” Avery wiped his eyes.
“Get it together, Avery,” Ward said. He looked around the churned-up graveyard one more time. “There’s nothing for us here. Let’s move on to the next objective.”
They returned to their black Chrysler 300C sedan, which was modified with armored plates inside the body panels and bulletproof glass for the windows. It was faster and quieter than when it had arrived from the factory, and loaded with heavily encrypted communications equipment that was a bit more advanced than what was available on the open market. Despite all this, it looked like a perfectly normal car, at least to the casual observer.
They crossed through the decaying, boarded-up town. The largest remaining employer in the area, Winder Timber Processing, had shut down a year earlier. It had belonged to the mayor of Fallen Oak, who had died along with his wife and daughter the day little Jenny decided to kill a crowd of people. The records showed Mayor Winder’s relatives had inherited the business, taken one look at the books, and closed it down and sold off the machinery. Fallen Oak’s population was shrinking rapidly now. Ward doubted if anyone would still live here in ten years, except maybe a handful of elderly types with Social Security checks and nowhere to go.
The sedan’s information system had a few features that OnStar didn’t, including instant access to anyone’s financial, medical, criminal, and military records. It guided them to the red-dirt driveway of a rickety old house half-hidden in the woods outside town. A rusty dodge Ram squatted in the driveway. Darrell Morton was home.
“So this is where our little monster grew up,” Ward said from where he sat in the back seat. Avery and Buchanan were up front. “What a pathetic hellhole.”
Avery hurried to open Ward’s door. Ward led the way to the sagging boards of the front steps, automatically glancing in every direction, including up at the roof, watching for any sign of danger, anyone who might be hiding among the dense autumn leaves of the branches overhead. This was second nature to him. The leaves crunched under their shoes—otherwise, it was a quiet afternoon.