He was only about four feet from her, and although the air was still charged, it wasn’t dangerous.
“Keep coming,” she prodded sweetly. He took another step and they were within easy reach of each other. Phil looked down and realized that he still was carrying the glass and kitchen towel; he quickly transferred the glass into his left hand. “Give me your hand.”
If anything the tingling had abated some, and the only uncomfortable sensation Phil was experiencing was desire. He was starting to breathe faster, but it wasn’t out of fear. “Are you sure about this?”
“No,” she said and reached for his free hand. There was a slight snap when they made contact, but neither let go.
Phil had braced himself for the searing pain he had felt with Reisch, but with Amanda, all he felt was warmth. It wasn’t uncomfortable; in fact, it was rather pleasurable, very pleasurable. He began to experience her physically; the smell of her hair, the curve of her hips, the weight of her breasts. The same primal instinct that had nearly driven him to kill Izhan Ahmed resurfaced. He began to run his hand up her arm; a sudden desire to take her body and possess her soul overwhelmed him. He took a step closer to her and then was flung backwards into his refrigerator. He landed hard and for a moment couldn’t breathe.
Amanda had gotten up and the humming of the air resumed.
“Oh my goodness, I am so sorry Amanda!” Phil said gasping for air.
“It’s all right, Phil. I’m used to a little sexual tension; that was a little more than I was comfortable with though.” She waited while Phil climbed painfully back to his feet, glass and towel still firmly in his hand. “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” shame radiated from Phil. “It’s a natural human reaction, but you can’t let it take control. We have a mutual physical attraction, that’s obvious, but that doesn’t mean that we have to act on it.” Amanda returned to her seat and the humming in the air diminished.
“What just happened, with your, our hands?” Phil stuttered.
“That’s what I was trying to test.” She looked down at her hand and began opening and closing her fingers. ”I think if we anticipate contact, or proximity, and accept it, we pull back into ourselves. Somewhat like a cat and its claws. It’s a conscious act, though, because our natural state is to have our claws out.” She smiled and Phil could detect the faintest blush in her cheeks. “I sound like an expert, but all of this is just speculation.”
“If you aren’t an expert, then who is?” He meant it as a compliment, but it fell flat as the name Klaus Reisch hung in the air. “What happened to him?”
“I don’t know,” she said simply. “I would like your help in finding him; that’s really why I’m here.”
“He has more of the virus, more than all the others combined. He plans to. .” Amanda began to nod her head. “You know this already.”
“After he attacked you, we had an encounter. I saw everything that you saw.”
“I think he left some of himself inside me.” It was a revolting, horrible thought, and it was the first time Phil had admitted it to anyone, including himself.
“Perhaps, or he may have simply awakened something inside you.”
“That makes it much worse,” said Phil, as that uncomfortable thought circled in his mind.
“No, it doesn’t, it makes you human. We’re all very messy inside Phil, even me. We all have dark and secret desires that we would never admit, much less let others see. And for me, that helps put things in perspective.
“What makes Reisch different is that he believes that his infection gives him license to act on those dark desires.”
Phil nodded in agreement. “Before he was infected, Reisch was a strongly disciplined man; he resisted those impulses.”
“The infection strengthens them. All of us at some point are faced with the decision to resist or succumb.”
“Are you a good mutant or a bad mutant?” Phil said, paraphrasing the line from the Wizard of Oz. “So, what are we going to do about the bad mutants?”
“We can’t concern ourselves with them until after Reisch is dead.”
“He’s gone, out of our reach,” Phil said. “Or at least out of my reach.”
“Greg thinks he may have a lead on him. Are you up for a little fresh air?”
* * *
“That is a Hispanic male; five foot five, at most,” Ron Benedict said, pointing to a satellite photo of a farmhouse in eastern New Mexico. Greg and Amanda both nodded. Don Weiland had proven to be exactly correct. The factory-installed navigation system in Corrina Turner’s stolen Audi A8 was dead, but the after-market GPS transponder quietly answered its call.
Amanda stared at the blurry image and accepted on faith that Benedict and his photo analysts knew what they were talking about. “So that’s not Reisch,” she said not feeling even a trace of his mental signature.
“No,” Benedict answered. Phil chose to remain seated while the other three huddled over Benedict’s desk. “Do you want to see these?” the assistant director asked Phil.
“No,” he said simply. Amanda’s “fresh air” had turned out to be a six-minute ride in her Jeep followed by a meeting with twenty federal and local officials in the old courthouse building.
Benedict shrugged and turned to Amanda. “Here is the vehicle,” and he pointed to a small grey dot on a two-lane road that sliced through emptiness. “On this magnified view you can see that he’s changed license plates.”
Greg stared and finally picked up the photograph. Unlike the previous three pictures, this was amazingly clear. “Those are Denver plates; see the registration sticker.”
“So we’ve found the car, and know that he’s being careful.” Ron nodded to one of the technicians who placed a large poster-sized view of the area on an easel. “This is the car,” he hadn’t needed to point because a red circle was drawn around a small grey dot and labeled suspect’s vehicle.
“As you can see, there are thirteen occupied residences within a five-mile radius. We can take number eight off the list, because of our Hispanic male. We doubt he would leave any occupant alive.” Benedict paused and turned to Amanda. “Can you tell us anything from this?”
“Nothing,” she said, and everyone looked at Phil.
“I have no idea which house he’s in,” Phil said from the safety of his chair. The air in the room buzzed with his proximity to Amanda, but it was tolerable. “How do you know he’s even there? Why couldn’t he have moved on to another vehicle?”
“He may have,” an agent of Homeland Security said. “But we’re hoping that because he didn’t swap out the license plate he decided to hold up for awhile.”
“He may have swapped out with a different set of plates. He had to know that eventually we would find that car with satellite or just a cop driving by. He didn’t even bother trying to hide it,” Phil argued.
“We think that the engine failed, there’s engine coolant around all four tires, so he would have needed help to get it under cover,” Benedict said.
“I think he’s in one of these houses,” Amanda said suddenly, ending the debate. “It is a calculated risk. He’s pulled back inside of himself because he knows I’m looking for him, in fact, he told me to come and find him. If he kept going, eventually he would run across a police roadblock or a military patrol; under normal circumstances, he would simply disguise himself as an ambulance or some other authorized vehicle, but then I would see him. He’s not afraid of you, he is afraid of me.”
“So what do we do now?” Benedict asked the room.
For a minute, Amanda simply listened to the options running through the heads of the government officials. “Stop, all of you,” she demanded. “No low-yield tactical nukes, or cruise missiles, or any other military responses. We aren’t even sure he’s there. Yes, I have a suspicion he’s in one of these houses, but that’s hardly definitive enough to kill dozens of people and lay waste to an entire area.”