“He ran into Mr. Jaborski and the scouts,” Elliot said.
“And by then he was able to pass the disease on to them,” Tina said as she finished bundling Danny into the blanket.
“Yeah,” Dombey said. “He must have reached the scouts five or five and a half hours after he was infected. By then he was worn out. He’d used up most of his physical reserves getting out of the lab reservation, and he was also beginning to feel some of the early symptoms of Wuhan-400. Dizziness. Mild nausea. The scoutmaster had parked the expedition’s minibus on a lay-by about a mile and a half into the woods, and he and his assistant and the kids had walked in another half-mile before they encountered Larry Bollinger. They were just about to move off the road, into the trees, so they would be away from any sign of civilization when they set up camp for their first night in the wilderness. When Bollinger discovered they had a vehicle, he tried to persuade them to drive him all the way into Reno. When they were reluctant, he made up a story about a friend being stranded in the mountains with a broken leg. Jaborski didn’t believe Bollinger’s story for a minute, but he finally offered to take him to the wildlife center where a rescue effort could be mounted. That wasn’t good enough for Bollinger, and he got hysterical. Both Jaborski and the other scout leader decided they might have a dangerous character on their hands. That was when the security team arrived. Bollinger tried to run from them. Then he tried to tear open one of the security men’s decontamination suits. They were forced to shoot him.”
“The spacemen,” Danny said.
Everyone stared at him.
He huddled in his yellow blanket on the bed, and the memory made him shiver. “The spacemen came and took us away.”
“Yeah,” Dombey said. “They probably did look a little bit like spacemen in their decontamination suits. They brought everyone here and put them in isolation. One day later all of them were dead… except Danny.” Dombey sighed. “Well… you know most of the rest.”
Chapter Forty
The helicopter continued to follow the frozen river north, through the snow-swept valley.
The ghostly, slightly luminous winter landscape made George Alexander think of graveyards. He had an affinity for cemeteries. He liked to take long, leisurely walks among the tombstones. For as long as he could remember, he had been fascinated with death, with the mechanics and the meaning of it, and he had longed to know what it was like on the other side — without, of course, wishing to commit himself to a one-way journey there. He didn’t want to die; he only wanted to know. Each time that he personally killed someone, he felt as if he were establishing another link to the world beyond this one; and he hoped, once he had made enough of those linkages, that he would be rewarded with a vision from the other side. One day maybe he would be standing in a graveyard, before the tombstone of one of his victims, and the person he had killed would reach out to him from beyond and let him see, in some vivid clairvoyant fashion, exactly what death was like. And then he would know.
“Not long now,” Jack Morgan said.
Alexander peered anxiously through the sheeting snow into which the chopper moved like a blind man running full-steam into endless darkness. He touched the gun that he carried in a shoulder holster, and he thought of Christina Evans.
To Kurt Hensen, Alexander said, “Kill Stryker on sight. We don’t need him for anything. But don’t hurt the woman. I want to question her. She’s going to tell me who the traitor is. She’s going to tell me who helped her get into the labs even if I have to break her fingers one at a time to make her open up.”
In the isolation chamber, when Dombey finished speaking, Tina said, “Danny looks so awful. Even though he doesn’t have the disease anymore, will he be all right?”
“I think so,” Dombey said. “He just needs to be fattened up. He couldn’t keep anything in his stomach because recently they’ve been reinfecting him, testing him to destruction, like I said. But once he’s out of here, he should put weight on fast. There is one thing…”
Tina stiffened at the note of worry in Dombey’s voice. “What? What one thing?”
“Since all these reinfections, he’s developed a spot on the parietal lobe of the brain.”
Tina felt ill. “No.”
“But apparently it isn’t life-threatening,” Dombey said quickly. “As far as we can determine, it’s not a tumor. Neither a malignant nor a benign tumor. At least it doesn’t have any of the characteristics of a tumor. It isn’t scar tissue either. And not a blood clot.”
“Then what is it?” Elliot asked.
Dombey pushed one hand through his thick, curly hair. “The current analysis says the new growth is consistent with the structure of normal brain tissue. Which doesn’t make sense. But we’ve checked our data a hundred times, and we can’t find anything wrong with that diagnosis. Except it’s impossible. What we’re seeing on the X-rays isn’t within our experience. So when you get him out of here, take him to a brain specialist. Take him to a dozen specialists until someone can tell you what’s wrong with him. There doesn’t appear to be anything life-threatening about the parietal spot, but you sure should keep a watch on it.”
Tina met Elliot’s eyes, and she knew that the same thought was running through both their minds. Could this spot on Danny’s brain have anything to do with the boy’s psychic power? Were his latent psychic abilities brought to the surface as a direct result of the man-made virus with which he had been repeatedly infected? Crazy — but it didn’t seem any more unlikely than that he had fallen victim to Project Pandora in the first place. And as far as Tina could see, it was the only thing that explained Danny’s phenomenal new powers.
Apparently afraid that she would voice her thoughts and alert Dombey to the incredible truth of the situation, Elliot consulted his wristwatch and said, “We ought to get out of here.”
“When you leave,” Dombey said, “you should take some files on Danny’s case. They’re on the table closest to the outer door — that black box full of diskettes. They’ll help support your story when you go to the press with it. And for God’s sake, splash it all over the newspapers as fast as you can. As long as you’re the only ones outside of here who know what happened, you’re marked people.”
“We’re painfully aware of that,” Elliot acknowledged.
Tina said, “Elliot, you’ll have to carry Danny. He can’t walk. He’s not too heavy for me, worn down as he is, but he’s still an awkward bundle.”