Jackson exchanged looks with Vicki, lifted the car, and flew back. During the short ride they watched Donald Thomas Serrano capture virtually every vote. Everybody voted early, like dutiful citizens. Jackson landed the car beside the reporters’ vehicles; no one paid any attention until Lizzie emerged. She ignored all questions and comments, running toward the front door. Jackson and Vicki trailed behind, stony.
The door was locked.
Lizzie spoke the overrides and flung herself inside.
“Lizzie!” Annie said. “Why you running, you? What happened?” Annie clutched Dirk, who began to wail.
“What happened?” Lizzie cried. “Shockey’s losing! Nobody’s voting for him.”
Annie took a step backward and dropped her eyes. Annie… who always met insubordination with frowns and commands. She shifted Dirk upright to her shoulder. The baby saw his mother and Vicki and quieted, until he glimpsed Jackson. Immediately he began to cry again, burying his head in Annie’s shoulder.
Vicki said evenly, “Annie, did you vote?”
Annie shrank back and mumbled, “Yes.”
“Did you vote for Shockey?”
Mutely, in distress, Annie shook her head no.
Lizzie cried, “Why not?” while Dirk continued to wail every time he raised his head from his grandmother’s shoulder and caught a fresh glimpse of Jackson.
Annie tightened her grip on the baby. “I didn’t… Shockey ain’t, him… I’m sorry, honey, but it’s just too… we’re better off, us, with somebody who knows, them, what they’re doing.”
Jackson stood very still. Annie’s manner reminded him of something, something he was too confused to get into focus. In a minute he would remember. Across the vast communal area, now empty of voters, Billy Washington emerged from his and Annie’s cubicle. The stately old man took a few hesitant steps, stopped, looked at Annie, took a few steps more, and dropped his eyes. Jackson saw his hand tremble, saw him force himself to move forward.
Theresa. They were all—Billy, Annie, even Dirk—acting like Theresa.
Even Shockey. Today crouching in his lawn chair, nervous and afraid; yesterday full of swaggering innocent corruption, fucking the slumming donkey girl in the woods…
The donkey girl sniffing at her inhaler.
“Get out,” he said rapidly to Vicki and Lizzie. “Now. Get out of the building right away. Vicki, take Annie.”
She looked startled but didn’t protest: it must be his tone. Vickie grabbed Annie by the arm and hauled her toward the door. “No, no,” Annie said. “No, please. I don’t want to go out there, please…”
“Come on,” Jackson said, grabbing Annie’s other arm and hauling her along.
Lizzie said, “What? What is it?” but she followed.
Outside Dirk looked over Annie’s shoulder at the outdoors and screamed louder. Lizzie snatched him. Jackson hustled them all, Annie coatless, through the rain toward his car. Robocams descended and reporters in their vehicles, watching the election results, looked up. Jackson shoved Annie into the car and lifted it.
“Okay,” Vicki said. “What was it?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Jackson said. “A neuropharm, I think. Gaseous. Only…” Only Annie’s Cell Cleaner should now be working overtime, clearing her body of foreign molecules as soon as she was no longer breathing them in. Instead Annie continued to shrink and tremble, and Dirk to scream and cling to his mother. And if the neuropharm was in the building, he and Vicki and Lizzie would have breathed it. But Lizzie looked furious, Vicki alert, and Jackson himself didn’t feel trembly or anxious. So if not in the building…
He landed the car and twisted to look at the rear seat. “Annie, did you have breakfast in the feeding ground?”
Annie shook her head and folded her hands together tightly. Her eyes darted from side to side, and her chest rose and fell rapidly.
“Did Billy breakfast in the feeding ground?”
“He… he went there, him, to bring in some fresh soil for us… privacy…”
“But you never went in the feeding ground this morning?”
Annie drew a deep breath. “I… later. When no reporters there, and everybody else gone inside, them… the sun came out a bit and… Dirk needs sun, him. We just sat there, us, with our clothes on… we didn’t…” She trailed off and looked out the window, her pretty plump face terrified. “Please, Doctor, take… take me home…”
Like Theresa. Jackson said, “Breathe steadily, Annie. Here, put on this patch.”
“No, I… what is it?” Annie shook her head.
Jackson said, “Vicki, put the patch on her.”
He watched closely. Annie—Annie!—didn’t struggle.
She cringed against the car window, and put up one hand in a feeble, warding-off gesture that Vicki, wide-eyed, ignored. Vicki slapped the patch on Annie’s neck. Annie whimpered.
After a few minutes, she sat up a little straighter, but her hands remained clasped tightly together, her body tense. “Now can we go home? What’s going on here, Doctor? Please… take us home!”
Jackson closed his eyes. The patch was one he carried for Theresa, who would never use it. It triggered the release of biogenic amines that prompted the body to create ten different neurotransmitters. Those neurotransmitters calmed anxieties about, and lowered inhibitions to, stimuli perceived as threatening. The patch was moderating Annie’s symptoms a little—but it was not eradicating them.
He said, “Vicki, put a patch on Dirk. No, wait—don’t.” Dirk’s blood and brain should by now be clear of anything he’d breathed in at the camp, but he nonetheless continued to act like a severely inhibited baby in the throes of full-blown stranger anxiety. And Dirk was not usually shy. Why wasn’t the neuropharm wearing off?
Vicki said, “It was in the feeding ground, wasn’t it? Lizzie, did you go in there this morning?”
Lizzie demanded, “What’re you talking about, you? Did somebody do something to Dirk?”
Vicki said, “I didn’t feed at the other tribe, either. Too excited. Why isn’t the Cell Cleaner undoing the effects on Dirk?”
“I don’t know,” Jackson said, at the same moment that Lizzie cried, “What effects? What happened to my baby?” and Annie reached across the seat to tap Jackson’s shoulder and say tremulously, “If anybody hurt this child, them…”
Vicki ignored them all and flicked on the terminal.
POPULAR VOTE
WILLOUGHBY COUNTY DISTRICT SUPERVISOR—
SPECIAL ELECTION
SUSANNAH WELLS LIVINGSTON: 104
DONALD THOMAS SERRANO: 1,681
SHOCKEY TOOR: 32
“Donald Serrano,” Vicki said. “He found a way to win the election, without anybody thinking that it was anything but the material bribes they’ve been spreading around.”
“No,” Jackson answered. “We don’t know how to do this.”
“Do what?” Lizzie cried.
He raised his voice to answer over Annie’s fear, Lizzie’s alarm, Dirk’s fussing. “How to create neuropharms that aren’t cleared immediately by the Cell Cleaner. The medical journals, my med-school friends who went into research… everybody’s looking for that. A patentable hallucinogen or synthetic endorphin or other pleasure drug that doesn’t have to be inhaled every few minutes… For God’s sake, get out of the car, Vicki. I can’t hear myself think.”
Jackson and Vicki climbed out. Jackson locked the doors against Annie’s fearful questions, Lizzie’s attempts to follow. He stood in the drizzle, water trickling down the back of his neck, and tried to organize his thoughts. “Nobody in the medical establishment is anywhere near that kind of breakthrough. And if they were, it wouldn’t be used on a penny-ante election like this. It would be worth billions.”