Greg Bear - Darwin's Children

“Haven’t we been expecting this?” Tucker was asking. “Isn’t this why we’ve agreed to put the children in these special schools?”

“The footage you’ve just shown, of parents dropping off their children, finally coming forward and cooperating, is very encouraging—” the doctor said.

Tucker interrupted with a stern expression. “You left your post this morning. Were you afraid?”

“I’ve been helping explain the situation to the president’s staff. I’m going back this afternoon to resume my duties.”

“The scientists we’ve interviewed on this show insist that the children could pose a severe risk to the population at large if allowed to roam free. And there are still tens of thousands of them out there, even now. Isn’t it—”

“I cannot agree with that characterization,” the doctor said.

“Yes, well, you left your school, and that says it all, don’t you think?”

The doctor opened and closed his mouth. Tucker moved in, eyes wide, sensing a kill. “The public can’t be fooled. They know what this is about. Let’s look at our forum instant messages and what the public is telling us right now.”

The figures came up on the screen.

“Ten to one, they want you to arrest parents who don’t cooperate, get all the children where we can watch them, and do it now. Ten to one.”

“I do not think that is even practicable. We don’t have the facilities.”

“We built the schools and support your work with taxpayer dollars. You are a public servant, Dr. Levine. These children are the result of a hideous disease. What if it spreads to all of us, and there are no more normal children born, ever?”

“Do you advocate we should exterminate them, for the public good?” Levine asked.

Mitch watched with grim fascination, jaw clamped, as if witnessing a car crash.

“ Nobody wants that,” Tucker said with an expression of affronted reason. “But there is an imminent health risk. It’s a matter of survival.”

The doctor put his hands on the rosewood counter. “No illness has spread to staff in any of the schools I’m aware of.”

“Then why aren’t you in the school now, Dr. Levine?”

“They are children , Mr. Tucker. I will be going back to them.”

Mitch clenched his fists until his fingernails dug into his palms.

Tucker smiled, showing perfect white teeth, and turned to the camera, which zoomed to a close shot. “I believe in the people and what they have to say. That is the strength of this nation, and it is also the Fox Media philosophy, fair and balanced, and I am not ashamed to agree with it. I believe there is an instinct for preservation at work among the people, and that is news . That is survival . You’ll catch more details here, Fox Multicast, and touch your screen to check our expanded coverage on the Web—”

George turned off the TV. His voice was thin and choked. “Neighbor must have seen you arrive. He told me he’s going to turn us in for harboring a virus child. A sick child.” He held up and jangled three keys on a ring. “Iris and I have a cabin. It’s about two hours from here, up in the mountains. On a small lake. Real nice, away from everybody. There’s food for at least a week. You can mail back the keys. Your girl is doing better. I’m sure of it. The crisis is past.”

Mitch tried to figure out what their options were—and how adamant Mackenzie was. “She’s not breathing right,” he said.

“I’ve been out of work for five months,” George said. “We’re running out of money. Iris is on the edge of a breakdown. We can’t be a safe house anymore. This neighborhood is like Sun City for the wealthy. They’re old and scared and mean.” George looked up. “If the feds come here and find you, they’ll put your daughter someplace where the care is worse than you can imagine. That’s where our child is, Mitch.”

Kaye stood behind Mitch and touched his elbow, startling him. “Take the keys,” she said.

George suddenly fell back into a chair and shook his head. “Stay here until dawn,” he said. “The neighbors are asleep. I hope to God everybody is asleep. Get some rest. Then, I’m sorry, you have to leave.”

OHIO

The Special Treatment center occupied a long, flat, single-story building with reinforced concrete walls. Dicken and DeWitt walked around the empty school trailers and crossed the asphalt square in the brilliant glow of a dozen intense white security lights.

The door to the center hung open. A tangle of sheets and rubber mats had been tossed out like a filthy, lolling tongue. Two iron-barred and wire-reinforced windows gleamed like flat, blank eyes on either side. The building looked dead.

Inside, the air was cooler but not by much, and stank. Beneath the cacophony of stench wavered a weak chord of Pine-Sol. Dicken did not pause, though DeWitt held back and coughed under her mask. He had smelled worse; the professional refrain of a virus hunter.

Beyond the security office and the open double gates of the checkpoint, the doors to all the cells stretched down a long corridor. About half, in no particular order, had been opened. No nurses or guards were in sight.

The body of a boy of eight or nine lay on a mattress in the corridor. Dicken knew the boy was dead from several yards away. He put down his bag of specimen kits, knelt with difficulty beside the soiled mattress, examined the boy with what he hoped was clear-eyed respect, then pushed on the floor and one knee and got up again. He shook his head vigorously at DeWitt’s offer of assistance.

“Don’t touch anything,” he warned. “Yolanda said there were nurses.”

“They probably moved the children into the exercise area. The center has its own yard, at the south end.”

They checked each room, peering through the observation slit or pushing open the heavy steel doors. Some of the rooms held bodies. Most were empty. A black line drawn on the floor marked the division between rooms equipped for children who need restraints or protection: the padded rooms. All of the doors to these rooms had been opened.

Two rooms contained bodies lying on cots in restraints, one male, one female, both with abnormally large heads and hands.

“It’s a condition unique to SHEVA children,” DeWitt said. “I’ve only seen three like this.”

“Congenital?”

“Nobody knows.”

Dicken counted twenty dead by the time they reached the door at the end. This door was a rolling wall of steel bars covered with thick sheets of acrylic.

“I think this is where Jurie and Pickman ordered the violent children kept,” DeWitt said.

Someone had jammed a broken cinder block into the track to prevent the door from automatically closing, and a red light and LED display flashed a security warning. Behind thickly shaded glass, the guard booth was empty, and the alarm had been hammered into silence.

“We don’t have to go through here,” DeWitt said. “The yard is that way.” She pointed down a short hall to the right.

“I need to see more,” Dicken said. “Where are the nurses?”

“With the living children, I presume. I hope.”

They squeezed through the narrow opening. All the doors beyond were locked by a double bar system, one lateral, one reaching from the ceiling to the floor and slipping into steel-clad holes. Each room held a lone, unmoving child. One stared in frozen surprise at the ceiling. Some appeared to be asleep. It did not look as if they had received any attention. There were at least eight children in these rooms, and no way to confirm they were all dead.

None of them moved.

Dicken stepped back from the last thick view port, shoved his back against the concrete wall, then, with an effort, pushed off and faced DeWitt. “The yard,” he said.