Some wags called the online journals “electrons.” Whereas paper had two sides, electrons were biased toward the negative. The online journals certainly had nothing good to say about Emergency Action.
“Mea maxima culpa,” Augustine whispered, his nervous little prayer of contrition. Infrequently, that mantra of guilt changed places with another voice that insisted it was time to die, to put himself at the mercy of a just God.
But Augustine had practiced medicine, studied disease, and struggled in politics too long to believe in a kind or generous deity. And he did not want to believe in the other.
The one that would be most interested in Mark Augustine’s soul.
The plane reached the end of the runway and ascended quickly, efficiently, on the wind from a rich bass roar.
The attendant touched his shoulder and smiled down on him. Augustine had somehow managed a catnap of perhaps ten minutes, a blessing. He felt almost at peace. The plane was at altitude, flying level. “Dr. Augustine, something’s come up. We have orders to take you back to Washington. There’s a secure satellite channel open for you.”
Augustine took the handheld and listened. His face became, if that was possible, even more ashen. A few minutes later, he returned the phone to the attendant and left his seat to walk gingerly down the aisle to the washroom. There, he urinated, bracing the top of his head and one hand against the curved bulkhead. The plane was banking to make a turn.
He was scheduled for an emergency meeting with the secretary of Health and Human Services, his immediate superior, and representatives from the Centers for Disease Control.
He pushed the little flush button, zipped up, washed his hands thoroughly, rinsed his gray, surprisingly corpselike face, and stared at himself in the narrow mirror. A little turbulence made the jet bounce.
The mirror always showed someone other than the man he had wanted to become. The last thing Mark Augustine had ever imagined he would be doing was running a network of concentration camps. Despite the educational amenities and the lack of death houses, that was precisely what the schools were: isolated camps used to park a generation of children at high expense, with no in and out privileges.
No peace. No respite. Only test after test after cruel test for everyone on the planet.
25
SPOTSYLVANIA COUNTY
Stella watched her parents strip the house. She wept silently.
Kaye dragged a wooden box stacked high with the computer and the most important of their books and papers out to the Dodge. Mitch burned documents in a rusty oil drum in the backyard.
Kaye tersely told Stella to throw the clothes she really wanted into a single small suitcase and anything else into a plastic garbage bag, which they would take if there was room left in the car.
“I didn’t mean to do this,” Stella said softly. Kaye did not hear or, more likely, did not think it best to listen to her daughter now. Louder, Stella added, “I like this house.”
“So do I, honey. So do I,” Kaye said, her face stony.
In the kitchen, Mitch smashed the cell phone and pulled out the little plastic circuit boards, then jammed them in his pocket. He would throw them out the window or drop them in a garbage can in another state. He then smashed the answering machine.
“Don’t bother,” Kaye said as she lugged the plastic bag full of clothes down the hall. “We’re probably the most listened-to family in America.”
“Old habit,” Mitch said. “Leave me to my illusions.”
“I’ve made trouble and I’m putting you in danger,” Stella said. “I should just go away. I should just go into a camp.”
“Us, in danger?” Kaye stopped and spun around at the end of the hall. “Are you testing me?” she demanded. “We are not worried for ourselves, Stella. We have never been worried about ourselves.” Her hands moved in small arcs from hips to shoulders, and then she crossed her arms.
“I don’t understand why this has to happen,” Stella said. “Please, let’s stay here and if they come, they come, all right?”
Kaye’s face turned white.
Stella could not stop talking. “You say you’re afraid for me, but are you really afraid for yourselves, for how you’ll feel if—”
“Shut up, Stella,” Kaye said, shaking, then regretted the sharp words. “Please. We have to get out of here quickly.”
“I’d know others like me. I could find out what we really need to do. They have to accept us someday.”
“They could just as easily kill you all,” Mitch said, standing behind Kaye.
“That’s crazy,” Stella said. “Their own children?”
Mitch and Kaye faced off against their daughter down the length of the hall. Kaye seemed to recognize this symbolism and turned halfway, not looking directly at Stella, but at the plasterboard, the cornice, the paint, her eyes searching these blank things as if they might be sacred texts.
“I don’t think they would,” Stella said.
“That is not your concern,” Mitch said.
Stella desperately wrinkled her face in what she hoped was a smile. Her tears started to flow. “If it isn’t my concern, whose is it?”
“Not yours, alone, not yet,” Mitch said, his voice many degrees softer, and so full of painful, angry love that Stella’s throat itched. She scratched her neck with her fingers.
Kaye looked up. “Damn,” she said, reminded of something. She stared at her fingers and her nails and rushed into the bathroom. There, she lathered and rinsed her hands for several minutes.
Steam billowed from the sink as Stella stood by the door.
“Fred stuff?” Stella asked.
“Fred,” Kaye confirmed grimly.
“You took a good swipe,” Stella said.
“Mom cat,” Kaye said. She scrubbed back and forth with a stiff little bristle brush, then looked up at the ceiling through the steam and the lavender of the soap. “I’m going to wash that man right off of my hands,” she sang. This was so close to the edge, so fraught, that Stella forgot her guilt and frustration and reached out for her mother.
Kaye knocked aside her daughter’s long arms.
“Mother,” Stella said, shocked. “I’m sorry!” She reached out again. Kaye let out a wail, slapping at Stella’s hands until Stella caught her around her chest. As mother and daughter slumped to the ragged throw rug on the bathroom floor, too exhausted to do anything but shake and clutch, Mitch sucked in his breath and finished the work. He loaded a second suitcase with clothes, zipped it shut, and tossed it into the trunk of the Dodge along with the garbage bag. He imagined himself a rugged frontier father getting ready to pull out of the sod house and hightail it into the woods because Indians were coming.
But it wasn’t Indians. They had spent time with Indians—Stella had been born in a reservation hospital in Washington state. Mitch had studied and admired Indians for decades. He had also dug up ancient North American bones. That had been a long time ago. He didn’t think he would do that now.
Mitch was no longer a white man. He wanted little or nothing to do with his own race, his own species.
It was the cavalry that he feared.
They took the Dodge and left the old gray Toyota truck in the dirt driveway. Kaye did not look back at the house, but Stella, sitting beside her mother in the backseat, swung around.
“We buried Shamus there,” she said. Shamus had come into their lives three years ago, an old, battered tomcat with a rope looped around his neck. Kaye had cut off the rope, sewn up a slashed ear, and put in a shunt to drain a pus-filled wound behind one eye. To keep the orange tabby from scratching out the stitches, Mitch had wrapped his head in a ridiculous plastic shield that had made him look, Stella said, like Frankenpuss.