Brian O'Grady - Hybrid

Her father had died at this very spot almost thirty years ago. He had been a small, mean-spirited man whose attitude permeated their tiny house like a bad smell. One of her earliest memories was of him towering over her screaming that she was a burden he had never asked for. He died the day after her ninth birthday; the official story was that he had been changing a tire when a half-drunk lawyer plowed into the back of his car, apparently throwing him into the river below. It took them three days to find and recover his body. Amanda never believed the official story. Somehow, she knew that her father had jumped into the river long before the drunk ever showed up, and that the only time in his life he had ever been lucky was after he was dead.

Amanda noticed that the group of kayakers had stopped on the path and were staring up at her. Her first thought was to scare them back to their cars so that she could be alone in this terrible place, but after a moment of contemplation, she turned away and walked further up the bridge. The last time she had been here, there were police crawling down that very same path. The memory teased at her, but she wasn’t ready to relive that evening; still, the face of an impossibly young state trooper, and the images of flashlight beams whipping through the air, seeped through her mental walls. It had been more than a month after her husband and son’s funeral, and she had resolved to join them, but a despondent farmer with his own impossibly heavy burden had gotten to the bridge before her.

The pain of their loss could only echo in her empty heart; a distant reminder of a life she had once lived. A life that now she both cherished and reviled, a life stolen by nothing more significant than a flu virus. A simple set of proteins and a strand of DNA had hollowed her out and remade her into something she had never imagined, or wanted. Something that for the last six years she had kept hidden from the world, and herself.

She watched the water cascade off the large rocks below for another five minutes before the first kayaker entered the water with a triumphant yell. She took that as her cue to leave. This place had no memory of her, her father, her family; it was nothing more than a metal bridge and a small, inconsequential river.

The blisters were back; they always came back when he was frustrated. It had been over six weeks since he had arrived in this frozen corner of hell, and he had almost nothing to show for it. Time wasn’t running out anymore, it had already run out. Klaus was more than two weeks overdue, but he couldn’t make himself leave.

It doesn’t really matter , he thought. What are they going to do, start without me? The thought made him laugh.

They could try to kill me . That thought didn’t make him laugh. They had made it quite clear that while they did need him, they didn’t necessarily need him alive. But trying to kill him would be a major inconvenience, and he was balancing that against extra time. Soon, however, the balance would tip.

The professional inside told him to leave — to pack up, and slip away before anyone even knew that he had been there. He had already completed his primary objective, and his remaining responsibility could be completed anywhere. He knew that the risk of discovery, capture, and failure grew with each passing moment, but still he stayed. He had to find her. He had to know who Amanda Flynn was, and what she had become.

From the moment he learned of her existence, the significance of Amanda grew in his mind; he tried to convince the planners that she posed an unacceptable risk to the mission, but no one listened. He was told that she would die along with everyone else, and that he should let them worry about the overall strategy. For the first time in his professional life, he seriously considered using his considerable talents against those who had engaged him. The only thing that stopped him was the undeniable and inconvenient truth that, for a while, he needed their logistical support. They were fools, but well funded and organized fools. He turned his back to the shaded window and tried to suppress his growing anger. When all of this was over, he would pay them a visit and extract from their flesh the three weeks he had wasted trying to find Amanda.

They weren’t really fools; he admitted after his frustration began to ebb. They were simply focused on the singular opportunity that had fallen into their collective laps, and they would not tolerate any distractions. He couldn’t fault them for not seeing Amanda’s unique potential, or threat; it required his particular, unique perspective to fully appreciate it. Maybe, for a while, he would spare them. Still, they could have helped him; they had the resources, and with just a little assistance both of their objectives would have been completed by now. The thought of their intransigence forced his anger to the surface again. Maybe a visit to their dirty smelly homes was in order, but only after he found Amanda.

His problem was that he had no idea how to find someone who did not want to be found. He had never been an intelligence officer. His instructors had taught him a hundred different ways to kill a man, but not a single way to find this very special woman. All he had was a name, a ten-year-old address, and a vague description. The name turned out to be wrong, probably misspelled somewhere down the long line of information. Amanda Lynn was actually Amanda Flynn. It had taken him two weeks to find that simple error; somebody who knew what he was doing would probably have picked it up in a day. The address he had been given was now an office building. Her old house had become a victim of something the newspapers had called the Sunshine Project, urban renewal by any other name. The description was equally unhelpful, fitting about every third woman in Colorado Springs. His only lead was a dangerous one: Greg and Lisa Flynn, Amanda’s in-laws.

He had watched the Flynns for weeks now and couldn’t find an opening. He was certain that they knew where Amanda was, or at the very least how to contact her, but he didn’t know how to enlist their cooperation, something he would need if he proved to be correct. It would have been so much easier if he could just break in and take what he needed from them, but if he did that, one, if not both of the Flynns, would have to die, and that would ruin everything. All he wanted was to spend a moment with their daughter-in-law. That’s all he would need, just one moment, and then he would know.

He shivered under the thick blankets as much out of frustration as fever. It was always the same, first the blisters, then the fever, and finally the madness. He could live with the blisters and fever, but when the madness came, it enveloped him completely, obliterating any sense of purpose or urgency, and he could ill afford that now. Over the years, he had learned how to control it; delay it would be a more accurate description. The problem was that every time he denied the madness, it only came back stronger. He tried to clear his head, but it resisted. Flashes of his parents assaulted his mind: his mother beating him after he had been expelled from school because he had hurt another student; his father unceremoniously dumping him on a train that would take him to the military school that would “straighten” him out. The images of his early years flowed through his mind and he smiled, wondering if that foolish man and his wife ever realized what type of creature they had brought into this world. Maybe on their deathbeds, they had been graced with the knowledge that they had played a part in creating the most powerful being that had ever inhabited this planet.

Another spasm wracked his body. He had to empty his mind to control the madness, but the unbidden review of his early life was proving to be wondrously indulgent. The metal archway that lead to the Honnecker School for Military Studies flashed through his mind. It was a brutal, primitive place that changed little while the world beyond its stone walls experienced cataclysmic change, but Klaus Reisch had found himself there.