ViraVax Page 10

  Shutting down the entire lab for thirty-six hours a week is a major pain, she thought.

  Casey went so far as to require the on-duty security squad to walk the perimeter every Saturday. He would not allow them to work inside his compound. Marte wondered what they were supposed to do if they found anything suspicious.

  Marte had studied everything she could find related to Joshua Casey. She had accepted his invitation with hopes that ViraVax meant a step towards her own lab near some great university in some great city. She had arrived in Costa Brava by private carrier with an overnight bag and the clothes on her back, expecting to install the prototype of her system and get an occasional weekend on the beach—anything to get out of the snake pit that the United States had become. She got her chance and instant isolation at the same time.

  Shirley taught her everything about coordinating incoming data files from the eleven satellite clinics that fronted for Casey’s research—nursing homes, a couple of VA hospitals, prisons, a trauma victim center, a school for the retarded and one fully active Central American army. The school for the retarded had been a clandestine clinic under Casey’s direction for two decades.

  “They vaccinate the retarded students into becoming universal donors,” Shirley explained. “When transplanted, their organs will never be rejected.”

  “You mean, it’s an organ farm?”

  Shirley’s blue eyes widened. “Oh, no,” she said, “it’s not like that. It’s just to demonstrate that this vaccine is extremely versatile and it doesn’t harm humans. Did you think we went in there and harvested those organs?”

  “Oh, no,” Marte reassured her. “No, of course not. I’m just. . . unaccustomed to the idea of experimenting on human beings.”

  “It’s not like that,” Shirley insisted, “really, it’s not. For one, they’re kind of like vegetables themselves, you know? And they’re none of them Christian souls. . . .”

  “But they’re humans, Shirley. . . .”

  “Well,” Shirley said, sitting up straighter, “you’ve been here long enough to see what we’re doing. You’ve never seen us doing anything to people, have you?”

  “No, but. . . ”

  “But what?”

  Marte thought of the two dozen bunkers and outbuildings that made up the Level One compound. Of that two dozen, she had toured the four that made up the ViraVax labs and administrative sector, and one half of Level Five.

  What’s in those other levels, she wondered, tractors?

  Marte laughed a little, nervous laugh. “Nothing. I guess I’m getting claustrophobic here. It’s like living in a submarine, or on an Antarctic research station, except outside it’s so beautiful.”

  “Working out helps,” Shirley chuckled. Her hand went to her chest when she laughed, as though her small breasts would get out of control. “I use the gym a lot. Sometimes I’m the only one in there and it really helps me work off some of this stress. The missionaries like it, and they’re on two-year contracts, too.”

  “Yeah,” Marte said, “but it’s always the same people I work with, eat with, breathe filtered air with. I’d give a month’s pay right now for a weekend on one of those sunny beaches right over there.”

  She pointed to what she thought was west, towards the legendary Costa Bravan beaches that were only fifty klicks away.

  “There are ‘field trips,’ as Dr. Casey calls them, for the occasional contractor, like you.”

  “Right. Same bunch of people, with our security escorts, no contact with anyone from the outside. . . .”

  Shirley frowned, put a nail to her mouth and then pulled it away.

  “Use the gym,” she suggested. “Use the pool, use the counselor. That’s what it’s all here for. Pretend you’re on a drug treatment program and the outside is your drug. You simply have to do without it. You knew that when you signed on.”

  “I’m sorry,” Marte said. “I didn’t realize that talking about it would get you depressed, too. You’re right. The opportunity I have here with my work is unequaled in the world. I should be thankful for that.”

  “And to be at the heart of the Children of Eden,” Shirley said. “Don’t forget that.”

  “That’s right,” Marte said.

  She gathered some artificial enthusiasm for Shirley’s benefit, and smiled. “It’s a privilege to be on the ground floor of a new order.”

  “That’s a good one, Marte.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The ground floor of the Garden of Eden. . . .”

  Shirley laughed, and it was an obvious attempt to put Marte at ease.

  “My subconscious is quicker than my conscious,” she said.

  “You don’t have to be a hermit, either,” Shirley said. “Come to the gym in the morning, after readings.”

  Marte smiled, glad that someone here had feelings for something more than work. “Deal.”

  “At one time, there weren’t any women here,” Shirley offered. “Not even Innocents. You would think that would be an advantage for a single girl, but not this place.”

  “I thought you weren’t interested.”

  “I’ve had my daydreams. Like you, everybody’s so involved in their projects. Besides, Dr. Casey’s rules are so strict—no fraternizing, all women in the lab must be on birth control, as if there were enough free time that you might need it.”

  Marte swallowed hard, then asked the hard question.

  “Has there ever been a contamination situation?”

  “No.” Shirley laughed, but her expression hardened. “No, never.” Her glance flicked to one of the ever-present security monitors in the back corner of the room, and she repeated, “Never.”

  “If there were a contamination, would you know about it?”

  Shirley blushed all the way to the rim of her red hair.

  “Probably. . . I don’t know.”

  She picked up her tray and inclined her head towards the door.

  “C’mon,” Shirley said, “I’ll show you some special tricks on that computer.”

  Shirley introduced Marte to some of the social features of Jaguar Mountains’ computer system. With the proper set of codes, access to the outside world was unlimited. It was access in that was the problem. Shirley herself carried on an active correspondence, much of it frankly sexual.

  “You just have to remember that everything coming in or going out is monitored,” she said. “But if you want to visit with a real person in the outside world, with a human who doesn’t know the first thing about viruses or Costa Brava. . . well, there are millions of them out there.”

  Marte showed herself to brighten a little.

  “I used a couple of networks when I was in school,” Marte said. “I wouldn’t mind visiting with some of those people again.”

  “Well, it’s not all that easy. You have to be sure they don’t know who you are or where you are or what your work is.”

  Marte laughed. “You’re kidding—isn’t that what most people talk about? Themselves, their work, their community.”

  “We aren’t most people,” Shirley warned. “I just make up a person, a job and a place. Then for an hour a day I become that person. It’s like. . . like being in a movie, or something. Try it. I bet it’ll help.”

  Chapter 14

  Harry Toledo jockied the beat-up Lada taxicab across La Libertad’s industrial zone towards his father’s girlfriend’s place. Heavy rain made the going slick across the metal-deck bridges. Night closed in hard, and the army was setting up the evening checkpoints. He had to be back at Casa Canada before curfew. In Costa Brava, anybody on the streets after curfew was a target, and the shooting, pretty good. Each morning the bodies on the streets proved that point, though the lesson behind the point was never clear.

  Harry had only driven a few times by himself on the back roads of Casa Canada, and he had never driven at night. The one wiper smeared mud a little thinner on his side of the windshield, and he counted on rain gusts to clear it.

  The
evening traffic bore him along in an increasingly frantic pace. Some people, including Harry, had a long way to go to beat the curfew home. Besides, if driving took too long, Harry knew that his father would be passed out drunk and this ride to a showdown would be for nothing.

  He had picked up a Maya family, hitchhiking to the bus depot. The two youngest children were deficientes, carried in backpacks by their parents. The two older children carried large carved crucifixes over their shoulders for the coming Holy Week ceremonies. Since dropping them off a few minutes ago, Harry felt very much alone. Now he had to think about his father.

  Harry had been afraid of his father for as long as he could remember, but in the past two years the fear had congealed into terror. This weakness humiliated him, even though he kept the weakness and the humiliation well hidden. Now his anger overrode that fear, and he wanted to face down his father before he lost the edge.

  “Someday you’ll understand,” he tells me, Harry thought. Like I don’t understand already that a home with him in it is more dangerous than the goddamn streets.

  The driver behind him hit the horn and nudged him. The light was red but there were no police, so it was merely a suggestion. Harry held his breath and dashed on through.

  Less than a kilometer to go and the traffic didn’t let up, not even in the stretch along Central America Park. Harry felt the first fingers of fear scratching at his anger.

  Even if he kills me now, Harry reminded himself, it’s better than waiting for him to do it later.

  The Colonel had made it clear from the start that they couldn’t hide from him. Today’s visit was just a punctuation mark on an old message.

  This morning the Colonel hadn’t beaten anyone up, but he had punched out all of their kitchen cabinets and ripped a door off its hinges in his fury. Their divorce was nearly final, expedited by the embassy and an eager stateside lawyer. Divorces in Costa Brava were rare and far from easy.

  I don’t see why he was so pissed-off, Harry thought. He’s already moved in with Rachel.

  Rachel Lear, a receptionist at the embassy’s Civilian Services desk, wasn’t even ten years older than Harry. Rachel was easy to spot anywhere in a crowd with her red mane of hair, and Harry had spotted her a number of times, always with a different man.

  Now the Colonel was on “extended leave” from the Agency and Harry could tell he was getting bored and restless. The Colonel drank a lot—anybody connected with the embassy seemed to do that—but he drank prodigiously when he was bored.

  Boredom would frustrate his father, and Harry hoped that Rachel Lear knew what she was up against, living with his father when he was frustrated.

  I guess she’s got the frustration cure, Harry thought.

  Harry wished he could cure his frustration of living so close to Sonja, who stayed so far out of reach.

  She lives in that airplane, he thought. That, or on the webs.

  The Colonel had found Harry as soon as he signed onto the information networks, and followed him no matter how often he changed his password. The message was always the same: “Someday; understand.”

  Harry didn’t understand yet. He saw a counselor three times a week at University of Central America in the city. He spent his days on the university network, through his machine at Casa Canada, accumulating as many credits as quickly as he could. Life was pleasant at Casa Canada, and it was made more pleasant by his daily contact with Sonja Bartlett. But he could not hide at home, doing nothing, and wait for his father to destroy them again.

  “What do you want to do with your life?” his counselor asked him yesterday.

  “I want to erase every border from the map of the world,” Harry had answered.

  “Well, you’re young,” the counselor said, “you have plenty of time.”

  This morning, the Colonel had intercepted Harry on his way up the front steps of the university. At eight-thirty in the morning, in the middle of the sidewalk, the Colonel stood, unshaven, drunk and very loud.

  “You listen to me!” he shouted, but then he didn’t say anything. When Harry turned to go, the Colonel shouted again.

  “You listen to me!”

  Again, Harry waited. Again, his father said nothing. A knot of curious students lounged on the steps instead of going inside. A pair of Hacienda Police began to swagger down the sidewalk towards them.

  “You’re embarrassing me.” Harry said.

  He felt his cheeks blaze red when his father mimicked his words silently, then spat at his feet.

  “Someday you’ll understand,” he slurred.

  “You said that before.”

  “Your mom thinks I’m crazy,” he said. “Well, I’ve had people trying to kill me all my life. That changes your perspective. That’s a word you’d like, ‘perspective.’ I just don’t want you to hate me.”

  Harry didn’t answer.

  It’s too late, he thought.

  Harry looked past his father to the heavy metal doors where some of the students had stalled on their way to class. A few of them glanced at Harry and his father, whispering. Harry didn’t know anyone on campus except his counselor, Jesus, and Cesar, one of the librarians. He’d learned to take his mind off his father by diving into the terminals. “Putting on the right blinders,” his mother called it.

  “Do you hate me?”

  His father weaved a bit, his boilermaker breath too close for comfort.

  “Yes.”

  It came out with a croak.

  The Colonel blinked, pulled his shoulders back and sneered.

  “Well, you go ahead and hate me. What you hate isn’t even me. It’s you. You’ll understand that when you get older.”

  The Colonel’s voice had risen again and more students gathered around to see what would happen. The guardias had recognized the Colonel and now they whispered between themselves at a distance.

  “I think that the problem is, you hate me” Harry said.

  “You get this from your counselor?”

  “I’ve got to go,” Harry said, and started up the steps.

  “Got a pressing engagement?” his father sneered again. “Or turning your little yellow tail to run?”

  Harry pulled free and turned his back again. His father gave him a shove between the shoulder blades that sent him on a tuck-and-roll across the stone steps. As Harry gathered his books and fought down the stinging leap of tears, Cesar rushed out the security doors and hollered, “Hey, you! What’s going on here?”

  The Colonel simply flipped him the finger and walked away.

  Harry had caught the late afternoon bus to the gate at Casa Canada. When he got home he found his mother in the wreckage of their kitchen, sitting at the table, sobbing.

  The sonofabitch did it again!

  For Harry, it was as though he’d been asleep for the past few weeks. Now he woke up, and he woke up swinging. He wanted to ride his anger this time, ride it right down his father’s throat. He jumped into the taxi and raced back to town, not caring for once whether curfew caught him in the streets.

  Harry was sweating heavily when he knocked at his father’s girlfriend’s gate in Zone Three. A wall of cinder blocks protected Rachel’s little house, but it was too close to the door so Harry stood in the street. Rachel’s was an inelegant door in an inelegant neighborhood.

  A heavy mist laced with charcoal clung to him outside and a rivulet of sweat traced a shudder down the back of his shirt. Harry knocked again, louder, and Rachel opened it. Behind her, the opening theme of Jaguar blared from the TV. Somewhere further back, his father shouted “Shut up!” at a yapping dog.

  “Come in,” she said.

  Her smile, though timid, seemed genuine. Her small, round face was pale and her blue eyes framed in dark circles. Her nipples were a distraction against the thin yellow fabric of her low-slung blouse.

  “No, thanks,” Harry said.

  Harry’s throat was tight and his message came out in a rush.

  “Tell Colonel Toledo I want to see him outside.”r />
  “He’s not a colonel anymore.”

  “Tell him his son wants to see him outside.” Harry turned from the doorway and walked to the taxi parked in a slew of garbage. He felt safer with more room and some darkness to run to.

  Colonel Toledo filled the doorway and didn’t say a word. He wore a fatigue T-shirt with a tear just below the neckline. His gray eyes drilled that famous cold stare into Harry’s. The Colonel was most deadly when he was quiet, a lesson Harry had learned young. The glare from the living room light accentuated the jagged scissors scar that Harry’s mother had carved into Harry’s father’s neck that night nearly two months back. Harry took a deep breath.

  “Don’t try to look us up anymore,” Harry said. “You scare Mom so bad she cries for days. It would be better for everybody if you didn’t come over.”

  This was the most Harry remembered saying to his father on a single occasion in years. The last of it came out in a rush because he was trembling so bad that he felt his voice tightening up, ready to crack.

  Colonel Toledo shut the girlfriend’s door and stepped outside into the yard.

  “Who’s going to stop me?”

  This was the question Harry knew he would ask. Harry’s heart beat so hard he could barely catch his breath.

  His father’s fists scrunched down in their pants pockets, sagging the cuffs around the tops of his bare feet. Harry had seen the lightning-quickness of those feet when his father took him to the base for workouts.

  The Colonel’s shoulders hunched against the post-rain mist in the slouch of the army boxing champ, ex-totterer of nations, ex-husband, spoiler. He was drunk again, and unshaven, waiting.

  There was only one thing Harry could tell him.

  “I will.”

  The Colonel’s right shoulder leaned towards him and Harry expected the snake’s head of its fist to snap out and sting him right to sleep. He expected the usual beating, but this time he meant to give some of it back before he saw stars.