David Dun - Overfall

Sam looked to Anna, shaking his head, wondering what was next.

“The activator cell receptors and the suppressor cell receptors are sensitive only to juvenile insect hormones. Each to a different hormone. They got part of the DNA sequences for the receptor molecules from insects and mass-produced the hormones in the lab.”

“This is sick,” Anna said.

“Yeah. So they can install receptors that make the calm person nervous by making activator cells more sensitive. To counteract the effect you introduce the hormone that sensitizes the suppressor cells to make the subject calm again. To make him very calm you just superboost the suppressor cells.”

“Or you could do the same thing in reverse,” Sam said.

“Right. We could stimulate the activator cells and do nothing to the suppressor cells and create hyper-paranoia. But the hormones have no effect on someone with normal DNA.”

“The applications for this are almost unlimited,” said Sam.

“Right. They have a profile known as the Soldier profile. On demand they hyperstimulate fear-suppressor cells as well as activator cells associated with extreme aggression. They also stimulate suppressor cells related to remorse. In sum they can create fearless, aggressive killers with absolutely no remorse.”

“Why haven’t we heard about this for gene therapy for healing applications?”

“They cured the so-called bubble children with DNA fixes to the immune system using retro viral vectors to place genes in the bone marrow and altered the DNA that way. The problem with vectors is the human immune system. It tends to attack foreign bodies and a vector is a foreign body. With the bubble children there was no immune system and hence nothing to fight the vector as a foreign body. We know that Grace somehow solved the problem with the immune response because Jason was not a bubble boy and had a fully intact immune system. Jason didn’t steal that file.”

The French fighters from the rooftop flashed in Sam’s mind.

“They take an ordinary individual, alter his DNA, and apply hormones to make him an ultrasoldier,” Sam recapped. “When they want him normal again they wait the twenty-four hours or so until the hormone dissipates or they create the opposite reaction with other hormones. And I heard you say this: To accomplish a permanent alteration of a subject’s DNA, all it takes is for the subject to inhale a real good dose of the vector. But how about discipline, intelligence, strategy, and so on? For soldiers?”

“Don’t know.”

“I faced a group of fighters that had no fear. Now I have a theory about them.”

“I doubt they had the full pop that we’ve been reading about or you wouldn’t be here. You’ve heard about the 110-pound woman who lifted a car off her kid? That’s what you’d be dealing with. There is one more thing I want to tell you, especially Anna.

“All of earth’s life, plant life, mammals, invertebrates, single-celled organisms, is ultimately made from a DNA blueprint. All life is controlled by its DNA. DNA, you may know, is just nucleic acid molecules strung together in pairs. There are only four nucleic acid molecules. Just four. And the order of them in strings is what controls life. We humans have three billion nucleic acid base pairs in our string of chemical beads. It’s the order of the base pairs that makes us human.

“Jason believes that Nannites live in the DNA and that all of life on earth is for the purpose of hosting DNA. That’s the Nannite strategy. Somebody monkeyed with his DNA and since he believes the Nannites have their abode in DNA, he ascribes his troubles to them.”

“I like my mother’s Christianity better,” Anna said.

“Well, I’d like to think I’m not a Nannite sanctuary. I hope Jason is wrong. Otherwise we’re nothing more than good hosts for DNA.”

“So that’s what you know that you can readily explain to the likes of us,” Sam said.

“That’s it.”

“You have discovered plenty, and we appreciate it. Somehow we’ll try to sleep.”

Sam felt close to her, perhaps closer than he had ever felt with a woman. And it happened so fast he didn’t know what to make of it. When they came down the hall from the conference call, she followed him into his bedroom. There was a love seat and some overstuffed chairs around a coffee table.

She sat on the love seat and patted the spot next to her.

He sat. “How are we doing?”

“I’m okay,” she said. “All that matters to me now is that we have Jason, and we understand the antidote.”

“We’re also leaving here soon,” said Sam. “But say nothing.”

“And I imagine you don’t want to tell me where?”

“It’s far from here. Knowing where is only a burden. What if you were captured and I got away with Jason and Grady?”

“I see what you mean.” She took his hand. “I don’t want to die never having made love to you.”

She untied the belt of her robe, and as the knot loosened, he began helping with the buttons. Her scent and the intimacy of her eyes and the fingers on her clothes aroused him.

Then he watched her as she stood and dropped the robe, and with his eyes he told her what he was starting to feel.

Her nightgown was a beautiful blue and left her form partially revealed. Across her chest it lay open to display a gentle cleavage at her breasts. And the swell of them and the dark of the nipples barely visible beneath the gown made a tightness in his groin. Slowly she lifted the nightgown until she slipped it over her head. She wore slim blue panties with white lacy trim. Her breasts were a dark red at the aureoles and petite. Firm. Something about the way they turned out and pointed enthralled him. There was faint coloring at her neck, where the sun had caught her and freckled her, that contrasted with the paleness around her breasts.

Sam stood and picked her up, slight and easy in his arms. As he walked to the bed he could feel himself start to harden and the flush spread over his own chest. When he put her on the bed she lay back to watch him undress. He did not hurry with his shirt and T-shirt, and she seemed to warm at the look of him. She came up to her knees to do his jeans and put her hand over the mound at his fly, watching his eyes as she gently rolled over him with her fingers. Then she slipped down his jeans. When he put his hands on her shoulders to come over her, she resisted with a whisper, “I want to play,” and peeled off his underpants. Using her hands and lips, she did things so exquisite that he wondered at the delicious agony.

Then he lifted her up and stripped off her panties, fascinated at the reddish tinge in her pubic hair and the perfect form of her thighs.

He buried his face in her; she was rich with scent, her sweet perfume mingled with the musk of her body. Gently he teased her with his tongue until he felt her swell. Then he kissed at her breasts, bringing the nipples full and engorged.

“Oh, dear God, Sam,” she whispered at the cooperation between his tongue and fingers.

They lay down and he moved inside her. She held him close, her arms tight on his ribs, and she fit herself to him and he let her find her rhythm until he could hear the tune in her soul and feel the beat of it. He pressed himself to her and kissed her, and in those moments he could feel a renewal of his hope and knew that for him the world could, after all, be reborn and his heart pulled from its slumber.

There was a brief respite in their movements while she let her body hold him and he felt her insides squeezing down on him. There was a feeling in her body through his fingertips that told him she was gathering herself. His eyes locked on hers and explored the life in them, and tried to discern the emanations and the unusual brightness that spoke to him of eagerness and hope.