The Susquehanna Virus Box Set

by Steve McEllistrem

  “For God’s sake, Jones,” Marschenko said, “I can’t take it anymore. I’ll be dead in a couple days. I need those hormones to survive. You gotta let me out.”

  “Sure, Jack.” Jeremiah leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He softened his voice: “Just tell me about my son.”

  “I can’t, Jones, I can’t. You’re dead. You hear me? When I get outta here, you are so dead. I’m gonna kill everyone in your family too. Understand? I’m comin’ after all of ‘em. Any other kids you got—dead. Your wife—dead. Your parents—dead. There’s gonna be nothin’ left when I get through with you.”

  Jeremiah smiled grimly. He didn’t tell Marschenko there was no one left to kill, no one left to care about. He said: “You still don’t get it, Jack. You don’t leave until you tell me what you know.”

  Marschenko’s legs gave way as he began blubbering. Hanging by his arms, he cried and snuffled. “Okay…I left him, yeah…Disney World…Okay? Last I saw him…Mickey Mouse roller coaster…Okay? Now…let me go.”

  Jeremiah shook his head at the obvious lie. “Why’d you take him?”

  Marschenko took in a great gulp of air. “Don’t know…orders.”

  “Who ordered it?”

  Marschenko began shaking his head. “No, no…idea. Let me out, Jones…Let me out…you goddamn son of a bitch!”

  Marschenko found his legs again, continuing to thrash and lunge, twisting, pulling, screaming, his voice hoarse with effort. As he moved, his right leg hit the toilet hard. Jeremiah winced in sympathy, but Marschenko ignored it in his fury. The big Elite Ops trooper already had a bad bruise on his left leg, where he must have slammed it against the toilet earlier, either in the throes of withdrawal or a fit of rage.

  After a few moments Marschenko calmed down again. His head drooped and he began murmuring to himself quietly.

  “Listen to me, Jack,” Jeremiah said. “Listen to me.”

  Slowly Marschenko lifted his head, his eyes gradually focusing on Jeremiah.

  “I’m leaving town for a while. I’ll be gone at least a few days, maybe longer. There’s a possibility I won’t be back. You understand, Jack?”

  “What?”

  “This might be the last time you see me, Jack. This might be your only opportunity to tell me the truth. I don’t want to hurt you, Jack. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just want my son back. If you had a son, you’d know how I feel. So just tell me what you know.”

  Marschenko’s lips trembled; his mouth opened. For a second it looked like he might say something. Then he slammed his jaws together and dropped his head.

  “If I don’t come back,” Jeremiah said, “you die.”

  “I don’t know squat, Jones. I don’t know anything.”

  “Goodbye, Jack. Keep drinking that nutri-water if you want to live.”

  Marschenko shook his head, his eyes tightly closed, tears leaking out as a low rumble built inside his gut. “Nooooo…”

  * * *

  Jeremiah drove onto the tollway, the scanner at the entrance reading his vehicle’s designation and automatically billing CINTEP for the mileage. Lendra watched him from the passenger seat, waiting to brief him as he eyed the surrounding traffic, running scans on each vehicle. After he ensured they were not being followed and set the autopilot to a steady cruising speed, Lendra said, “Do you want me to tell you what little we know about Devereaux’s bio-weapons?”

  “No. Tell me about Devereaux.”

  Lendra looked straight ahead, her gaze unfocused as she pulled details from her interface. She said, “Walt Devereaux is brilliant. He was a child prodigy. His parents were quite religious, but after his book The Ladder came out, his mother committed suicide. Seven years ago.”

  Jeremiah thought of Catherine and suppressed a shudder. Why did you give up, he wondered silently. There’s still a chance I’ll find Joshua. And as long as there’s a chance, I’ll never give up.

  “His father,” Lendra continued as she fingered her necklace: a glass bulb at the end of a delicate chain, “died in a car accident when he was fourteen—malfunctioning auto-pilot. As for Devereaux, he understood complex mathematical formulas at age five, tested out of college physics at nine. Had more trouble with the social sciences but still managed to graduate from Oxford at age thirteen.”

  Lendra stared ahead as she searched her database again. “Oh, and here’s something interesting. His maternal grandfather was one of two sculptors who worked on the ‘Emerging Man’ statue.”

  “Really? That certainly lends credence to the theory that Devereaux is in Crescent Township.”

  Jeremiah spotted a strange energy dispersal configuration on his scanner. “Hold on a second,” he said. He recalibrated the scanner, noting that the configuration was well behind him.

  “Are we being followed?” Lendra asked.

  “Yes.”

  Lendra grabbed the bulb of her necklace and turned to stare through the rear window, as if she might somehow be able to detect their pursuer among the many vehicles in sight. “How can you tell? Which car is it?”

  “You won’t be able to see him.” Jeremiah tapped a display on the dashboard, where a series of dashes and dots indicated tractor-trailers and smaller vehicles. He put his finger on a group of hazy-looking dots that had melded into a large blot. “The guy’s using a scatterer, diffusing energy and bio readings, but he’s about three miles back.”

  A frown wrinkled Lendra’s forehead. “So what should we do?”

  “For the moment, nothing. It’s possible Eli put him on our trail.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  Jeremiah said, “He might have sent a backup, but doesn’t want me to know he doesn’t trust me to get the job done. It’s been four years, after all, since I was in the field. Or maybe he’s testing me to see if I can spot the tail. Or possibly it’s someone else. This is supposed to be a top-secret mission, so I imagine there are lots of people who know of it. That’s just the way Washington works.”

  “Well, shouldn’t we lose him? I mean, after all, you’re a ghost.”

  “So?”

  “I thought you could disappear in a puff of smoke or something?”

  “I don’t know what kind of stories you’ve heard. But I was just a field agent. Nothing special.”

  “Oh, come on.” Lendra’s mouth widened in a smirk. “I’ve heard you and the other ghosts pulled off some amazing jobs.”

  “I wouldn’t trust Eli’s stories. He’s prone to exaggeration.”

  “Trogan Brosk told me a few too.”

  “Trogan Brosk has a big mouth. That’s one of the reasons he was downgraded to an office job.”

  “He said you were the best.”

  Jeremiah shook his head. “Julianna was the best.”

  He adjusted the scanners, hoping to find a frequency or an energy signature that would allow him to identify his pursuer, but after a few minutes of fruitless effort, he gave up.

  “What more can you tell me about Devereaux? I know he received a special exemption to become Secretary General of the U.N. And he won the Nobel Peace Prize.”

  “He earned several PhDs, including one in epigenetics.”

  As Lendra recited Devereaux’s history, Jeremiah snuck occasional glances her way. She really did look a lot like Catherine. Her eyes. Her cheekbones. Her nose. Not her lips: they were fuller and redder. She gazed into the distance, scanning the data in her interface, a small frown creating a line between her eyebrows. The interface—a small, flesh-colored device attached to her left temple—made her appear almost inhuman. If he concentrated on that, Jeremiah could convince himself she looked nothing like Catherine. But even as he watched her, she caught him staring. Jeremiah turned back to the windshield.

  Without looking at her, he sensed Lendra studying him. He wondered what her game was. He felt drawn to her and wondered how much of
that was simple loneliness.

  Lendra continued: “Devereaux won the Nobel for his stint as Secretary General of the U.N., where he stopped twelve escalating conflicts over economic or geographic issues. Twelve of them. However, he considered himself a failure because the religious wars continued.”

  Jeremiah spotted the exit for I-70 up ahead. He disengaged the autopilot and took the steering wheel, maneuvering the van under the scanner that would log him off the tollway. Now the road would start to get bumpy. He slowed down, engaged the van’s heavy-duty suspension, keeping an eye on their pursuer via the scanner, but he knew the guy wasn’t likely to lose him at this point.

  “He was asked to run for President of the United States after leaving the U.N., but he refused. Said he was a citizen of the world—not a Democrat or Republican—though it was the Greens and the Doves who really kept after him, pushing him to accept. After turning them all down, he turned from genetics to philosophy, and eventually he concluded there was no God. That’s when he conceived of the ladder of enlightenment, which focuses on self-actualization without reference to a higher being. Some schools even teach his ladder now.”

  “That must drive the religious types crazy.”

  “He claimed his purpose was to push humankind to evolve. After publication of The Ladder, he became almost a god to some, a devil to others. He’s probably the most loved and most hated man in the world. Have you read his book?”

  Jeremiah nodded.

  “It’s brilliant,” Lendra said. “It’s too bad so many religious people close their minds to his ideas. Why can’t they accept that morality needn’t be based on a deity? Why shouldn’t people find their own meaning in life? Why do they have to follow rules prescribed by some ancient prophet who claims to know God’s will?”

  “Most people need something greater than themselves,” Jeremiah replied.

  For a while he concentrated on the road. Although I-70 wasn’t in terrible shape, it received only patchwork repairs year in and year out. There never seemed to be enough money in the budget for an overhaul of the transportation system. And given the price of fuel, most people didn’t travel that far anyway.

  Jeremiah surveyed the surrounding countryside. There were still quite a few people dwelling here, eking out a living away from the protection of the city. The brave. The foolish. The poor. He knew the number of houses would drop significantly in a few miles. People tended to cluster into big cities these days, leaving the rural areas for the corporate farms, the radicals and those who had nowhere else to go.

  The traffic lightened until only a few dozen dots and dashes remained on his scanner. But the fuzzy group three miles back stayed constant. An airship passed over the van on its way west, its massive size seemingly far too heavy to stay aloft. How could anyone be comfortable traveling that way? Or even in a plane? Or a jet-copter?

  Jeremiah said, “Tell me about the Escala.”

  Lendra nodded. “Also sometimes called pseudos, usually as a disparagement. They were enhanced with animal DNA to enable them to survive on Mars. But they also have increased speed and strength, endurance and healing ability. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the genetic surgery. The Escala became easily enraged and irrationally violent.”

  “And yet they follow Devereaux’s teachings. Peace and cooperation.”

  “Apparently the rage only shows itself at times. Also, the Escala are essentially Devereaux’s children. Their very existence is a result of his research, but we don’t really know much about them post-surgery. They had an altercation with the Elite Ops that resulted in a draw.”

  Jeremiah whistled softly.

  “Anyway, since then the Escala have been hiding out in Rochester, where the Mayo Clinic used to be.”

  “Where the Susquehanna Virus escaped from?”

  Lendra nodded. “About twelve years ago. Susquehanna Sally claimed she’d released it as a warning to change our unsustainable ways, but she’s made only a few appearances since then and we’ve never been able to confirm that she was behind the virus. Its release might have been accidental. At any rate, it wiped out a large portion of the population. The city was largely abandoned. That’s why Rochester was chosen for the Mars Project surgeries, which were top secret. A lot of that information is still classified.”

  “And the virus?” Jeremiah said. “Still active?”

  “Yes. And the virus is the main reason the Elite Ops weren’t sent in to Rochester to wipe out the Escala—”

  “I would have guessed that the Elite Ops weren’t sent in because the government feared the Escala would unleash Devereaux’s bioweapons on humanity.”

  “That position may have some merit,” Lendra conceded, “but there’s no proof the bioweapons exist. The Susquehanna Virus, however, does. It’s suspected that the Escala are immune to it. The Elite Ops are not. And the fear is that the Escala would use the virus as a nuclear option against the Elite Ops. Richard Carlton claims they threatened to do so. Anyway, as long as the Escala haven’t tried to fight their way out, they’ve been allowed to stay confined to that area.”

  “Are Devereaux’s bioweapons something like the Susquehanna Virus?”

  “We don’t know,” Lendra said. “He only had one brief conversation with President Davis. He hasn’t spoken to President Hope about them at all. He told Davis that the ideas just popped into his head in the middle of the night.”

  “You believe that?”

  “With somebody as bright as Devereaux, it’s certainly possible. At any rate, all we really know is that Devereaux’s conceived of these weapons and that he’s had time to build them.”

  “Well, let’s stop for a short break. After we’re back on the road, you can research Devereaux’s followers and his organization. I want to know everything. The tiniest detail might lead us to him.”

  “There’s a lot of information out there. And ninety-nine-point-nine percent of it is worthless.”

  “We’ve got time. We won’t be in Minnesota until tomorrow.”

  “What about our tail?”

  “He won’t bother us yet,” Jeremiah said, hoping he was right. “He’ll know we’re aware of him. And he can’t get close without giving himself away. So he’ll keep his distance.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “It’s what I’d do. And from his equipment, he’s no amateur. Stopping will be good. He won’t expect that.”

  * * *

  While Lendra researched Devereaux’s followers and his large, loosely affiliated organization, Jeremiah fiddled with his scanner. Their pursuer closed to a mile behind. But no matter how Jeremiah modified his scanner he couldn’t get a complete lock on the guy. His only consolation was that, with his random variable shielding, the guy couldn’t get a good lock on him, either. As Jeremiah was adjusting the biometric component of his scanner, he noticed a sharp spike in their pursuer’s electrical output.

  The van lurched under a power surge. The electrical systems flickered. Jeremiah, his heart suddenly pounding, reached down and flipped the auxiliary battery control. He also shut down all non-essential systems, including his shielding. It had been too long since he’d been under attack. This shouldn’t have bothered him as much as it did.

  “What was that?” Lendra asked. “I just got disconnected.”

  “Our friend.” Jeremiah pointed his thumb to the back. Up ahead a car slowly pulled to the side of the road. In the rearview mirror a truck did the same. Jeremiah wondered how many vehicles had just been disabled by that pulse.

  “Are we under attack?”

  “A small test.”

  “What kind of test?” Lendra asked.

  “To see if he could strand us. Take us down at his leisure. He knows I’m on to him, so he decided to take an easy shot.”

  Lendra’s voice shot up half an octave, her eyes wide with fear. Once again she grabbed the glass bulb
of her necklace, gripped it fiercely. “Well, shouldn’t we go after him? Stop him somehow? Are we going to let him come after us all the way to Minnesota?”

  Jeremiah kept his voice even—reassuring: “I shut down all our advanced systems. I modified our electrical output to make us look like every other vehicle on the road. That eliminates our defenses but makes us essentially invisible to his scanner.”

  Lendra’s voice dropped back into something approaching her normal range. “How can you be so calm?”

  “Panicking won’t help.”

  Lendra’s lower lip quivered. She nodded. “I guess I should call Eli back.”

  “You can try, but I think you’ll need to reboot your system after that power surge.”

  Lendra’s attempts to restart her interface failed. She reached up and pulled it away from her head, then held it out for Jeremiah to see, and said, “I need to fix this, but I can’t do it in a moving vehicle.”

  Jeremiah stared at her left temple. He knew there was a port connector there just under the surface of her skin, but he couldn’t see any sign of it. He said, “We’ll stop for the night in a little while. I’ll give you a hand. Should have you back up and running in no time.”

  Lendra looked back, frowning.

  “Don’t worry,” Jeremiah said. “He’ll have to check out everybody who stopped—make sure he didn’t disable us. By the time he realizes we’re not back there, we’ll be fifty miles away.”

  “But he could get us in our sleep.”

  “Trust me, Lendra. He’s not foolish or desperate enough to make a frontal assault. Besides, it’ll take him hours just to find us again.”

  Chapter Four

  When the front door of the Tessamae Shelter crashed open and soldiers burst into the lobby, shattering the calm Minnesota night, Sister Ezekiel hurried from her office. Why, she wondered, did they always break down the door, and why did they always come in the night?

  As the soldiers pushed their way inside the shelter, the homeless men who came here for sanctuary tried to push their way out, but they were no match for the heavily armed troops. Sister Ezekiel was jostled along with her unfortunate guests—helpless to restore order. She looked through the door, which dangled from twisted hinges, and saw more soldiers in their ponchos, glistening in the rain. Thunder lent fear to the tension. There was no escape.