“Open it now!” Kaye shouted, pushing through. Her fingernails raked Fred Trinket’s cheek. He recoiled, dropped the key and squealed in protest.
Kaye tried to reach Stella through the mesh. The distance between the two doors separated them.
“Lord almighty,” the younger trooper said. Mitch scooped up Trinket’s key and tossed it to Kaye, then grabbed the man and held him. The big trooper stood back. Kaye opened the mesh gate and then the inner gate and grabbed Stella.
“Get the others,” Stella said.
“How many?” the big trooper asked Trinket.
“Five,” Trinket said.
“Sir, it’s our duty to assemble and transport all virus children,” the stocky collector asserted, shouldering into the first room. Her tall, thin colleague remained outside, staring at the ground, the steps, anything but what was happening within the long building.
Kaye, Mitch, and the big trooper walked down the hall. Stella followed her mother closely. Mitch gave his daughter a squeeze around the shoulders and she hugged him close. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
Mabel and Kevin sat on the couch. Will stood by Elvira. The television blared an old episode of I Love Lucy. Kaye bent beside the prone girl and examined her, face wrinkling in pity. She saw the bloody crust under the girl’s nose, turned her head gently, found more crust behind her ears, felt the lumps under her jaw and in her armpits.
“How long?” Kaye asked Stella.
“Five, six minutes,” Stella said. “She just coughed real bad and lay still.”
Kaye looked over her shoulder at Mitch and the big trooper. Trinket winced but wisely kept quiet.
“Let me see,” the stocky collector said. She knelt briefly beside the girl. Then she pushed to her feet with a whuff of air and a sharp look at the others and stumbled hastily back down the hall.
“Is she sick?” Trinket asked. “Can you help her?”
“What the hell do you care?” the big trooper asked.
Kaye heard the collector calling for the first aid kit. “It’s too late,” she murmured.
“You a doctor?” the big trooper asked, bending low over Kaye and the girl on the floor.
“Close enough,” Kaye said.
“Get your daughter out of here,” he said.
“I might help,” Kaye suggested, looking up at the big trooper’s jowls, his intense blue eyes.
Mitch let go of Trinket and pulled Stella close.
“Just get her out of here,” the trooper repeated. “We’ll take care of this. Go far away. Stay together.”
“Can Will and Kevin and Mabel come?” Stella asked.
Will regarded them all with slit-eyed defiance. Kevin and Mabel focused on the television, their cheeks gold and pink with fear and shame.
“I’m sorry,” Kaye said.
“Mother…”
“We have to travel light and fast,” Kaye said. And they might all be sick.
Stella pulled loose from Mitch and ran to Will. She grabbed Will’s shoulders and they stared at each other for several seconds.
Kaye and Mitch watched them, Mitch twitching, Kaye oddly calm and fascinated. She hadn’t seen her daughter with another Homo sapiens novus in two years. She was ashamed it had been so long, but ashamed for whom, she could not say. Maybe for the whole troubled human race.
The two separated. Kaye took Stella by the hand and gave her the secret signal that she had taught her daughter years ago, a scrape of her pointing finger across Stella’s palm that meant they had to go now, no questions, no hesitation. Stella jerked but followed.
“Remember the woods,” Will sang out. “Woods everywhere. Woods for the whole world.”
As they ran down the asphalt road to the truck, they heard the trooper arguing with Trinket and the collectors. “We don’t take kindly to child theft, not in this county.”
He was buying Stella and her parents time.
So was the dead girl.
Mitch drove around the van. The hedge scraped Kaye’s door. “We should take them with us, all of them!” she cried, and hugged Stella fiercely. “God, Mitch, we should save them all.”
Mitch did not stop.
24
WASHINGTON, D.C., OHIO
At Dulles, Augustine’s limo was flagged through and driven directly to the waiting government jet, its engines idling on the tarmac. As he boarded, an Air Force staff officer handed him a locked attaché case. Augustine asked the attendant for a ginger ale then took his seat midplane, over the wing, and buckled himself in.
He removed an e-sheet from the attaché case and folded the red corner to activate it. A keypad appeared in the lower half. He entered the code of the day and read his briefing from the Emergency Action Special Reconnaissance Office. Interdictions were up 10 percent in the last month, due in large part to Rachel Browning’s efforts.
Augustine could no longer bear to watch TV or listen to the radio. So many loud voices shouting lies for their own advantage. America and much of the rest of the world had entered a peculiar state of pathology, outwardly normal, inwardly prone to extraordinary fear and anger: a kind of powder keg madness.
Augustine knew he could take responsibility for a considerable share of that madness. He had once fanned the flames of fear himself, hoping to rise in the ranks to director of the National Institutes of Health and procure more funds from a reluctant Congress.
Instead, the president’s select committee on Herod’s issues had promoted him laterally to become czar of SHEVA, in charge of more than 120 schools around the country.
Parent opposition groups called him the commandant, or Colonel Klink.
Those were the kind names.
He finished reading, then crimped the corner of the e-paper until it broke, automatically erasing the memory strip. The display side of the paper turned orange. He handed the attendant the scrap and received his ginger ale in exchange.
“Takeoff in six minutes, sir,” the attendant said.
“Am I traveling alone?” Augustine asked, looking around the back of his seat.
“Yes, sir,” the attendant said.
Augustine smiled, but there was no joy in it. His face was lined and gray. His hair had turned almost white in the past five years. He looked twenty years older than his chronological age of fifty-nine.
He peered through the window at the welcome storm blowing in fits and starts over most of Virginia and Maryland. Tomorrow was going to be dry once again and mercilessly sunny with a high of ninety-three. It would be warm when he gave his little propaganda speech in Lexington.
The South and East were in the fourth year of a dry spell. Kentucky was no longer a state of blue grass. Much of it looked like California at the end of a parched summer. Some called it punishment, though there had been record corn and wheat crops.
Jay Leno had once cracked that SHEVA had pushed global warming onto a back burner.
Augustine fidgeted with the clasp on the attaché case. The plane taxied. With nothing but raindrop-blurred runway visible outside the window, he pulled out the paper edition of the Washington Post. That and the Cleveland Plain Dealer were the only two true newspapers he read now. Most of the other dailies around the country had succumbed to the deep recession. Even the New York Times was published only in an electronic edition.