Charles Sheffield - Aftermath

“I don’t know.” Dana looked forward. The glass partition between the front and back of the car was intact, and the driver was unlikely to hear her even if she screamed. Even so, she lowered her voice. “We can’t just let him go. We’ll have to turn him in to the authorities.”

“I agree. But what will Oliver Guest have to say about that? He must have thought about it. He knows that whether he helps us or not, his only real hope is to escape and hide. We can’t protect him forever. He may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. I’m beginning to think we were crazy, waking him up.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“A couple of things. First of all, I don’t want you there when I go to my house. Suppose that Oliver Guest went there with Seth, then found some way to overpower him? He could be there now, waiting to dispose of us, too.”

He knew before he finished speaking that he had made a mistake. Dana’s face changed from concerned to furious.

“What century do you think you’re in, Art Ferrand? You’ve got this poor helpless little female, so the big strong man has to make sure she stays out of danger. Is that it? Well, your way of thinking was old-fashioned before I was born — before you were born. You’re not Sir Galahad, and I’m not the Lady of Shalott.”

“Sir Lancelot. You’re mixing knights.”

“Fuck the knights. You know what I mean. I had as much to do with pulling Oliver Guest out of cold storage as you did. If there’s danger ahead, I helped make it.”

“All right.” Art held up his hands. “I surrender. It’s just that I care what happens to you. I’ve got a personal interest in seeing that parts of you don’t get damaged.”

“That’s fair. It works both ways. I’m not finished with you, either. But it doesn’t mean you protect me. It means we share dangers, and protect each other.”

“I think it means we try to avoid danger. When we can’t, you want to be in with me every step of the way. I accept that — even if I don’t really like it. But I still don’t want to head straight to my house. We might find out when it’s too late that Oliver Guest has killed and eaten Seth and has a booby trap waiting so we can be dessert.”

“So what’s the answer? Do you have one?”

She was much calmer. Art risked a hand (friendly, not protective) on her knee, and it wasn’t smacked away. “Funnily enough I do have an answer, though I didn’t two minutes ago. We don’t go straight to my house.”

“Where do we go?”

“Somewhere close by. And we enlist reinforcements.”

Joe Vanetti and Ed O’Donnell were surprisingly restrained in their reactions. Joe, at one point in Art’s description of his actions over the past two weeks, said, “You dumb shit.” Ed confined himself to shaking his head and staring at Dana’s calves. They were spattered with mud from the mile walk along a sticky dirt road, but Art didn’t think that the mud was the main object of interest.

He was almost done with his story — minimizing the dangerous and experimental nature of the telomod therapy itself — when Ed’s wife, Helen, appeared. She greeted Art, was introduced to Dana, and rounded on Ed. “They’ve been here an hour, and you’ve never offered them a bite to eat?”

“They’ve got a drink.”

“And you think that’s the same thing, you drunken Irish sot? Come on, dear” — to Dana — “we’ll be through to the back kitchen, and leave these daft devils to talk. They’re worse than animals. When there’s women around the men won’t feed themselves, and if we don’t feed them they turn on us.”

Ed waited until they were gone, then said, “That’s it. Your friend’s in for the third degree. By the time Helen’s done with her, Dana’s back teeth will be counted and numbered. She won’t have a secret mole or birthmark left.”

“He knows where those are already.” Joe nodded toward Art. “Look at the man. Did you ever see such a picture of mindless sexual satisfaction?”

“Ah, don’t be hard on him. It’s been a long time coming.”

Ed and Joe, not for the first time, spoke as though Art were not in the room.

“Only he’s trying to make up for it all at once,” Ed went on. “It’s a miracle he’s not gone blind.”

“She must be the blind one.”

“Not only that, you can see that it agrees with him. He looks healthier. How long’s it been since you had your leg over, Art?”

“What do you think of Dana?” Art, with mass murderers half a step behind or maybe ahead of him, interrupted with a more important question.

“She’s great,” Joe said. “Sweet and sexy and sensible. Just what you need — what you’ve needed for all these years. Though I can’t think what she’s doing hanging around with you.” Ed nodded agreement, and Joe went on, “And why you’d talk a nice, sane woman like that into the maddest scheme I’ve ever heard of, that’s beyond me. Oliver Guest, for God’s sake. And by the sound of it, your friend Seth Parsigian’s as bad or worse. Why didn’t you go the whole way and take Frankenstein along to wake up Dracula?”

No point in telling Joe and Ed that Dana had been as keen on the idea as he was — or that Seth had pushed both of them. No point in mentioning that nothing in the past couple of weeks had been normal, not even here. On the trek up to the house, Art had noticed three ominous crosses on top of piles of dirt, a few hundred yards off the main road. Catoctin Mountain Park seemed quiet, but Supernova Alpha had left its marks of violence everywhere, not just in the cities.

“All right, so I was an idiot.” Art refused the offer of another drink. “I can admit that, and it doesn’t help me. Here’s my problem: I don’t know if Seth and Oliver Guest are dead or alive. I don’t know where they are, and I don’t know what they’re doing. What I do know is that Seth has my address. He got that, and the location of my house, from one of the maps I had. I want to go to my place and find out if they’re already there. If they’re not, I’ll stay in my house—”

“Terrible idea,” Ed said, and Joe nodded agreement. “Suppose Oliver Guest has done away with friend Seth,” Ed continued, “and he arrives in the middle of the night. Don’t you think, to make sure you don’t cause trouble, he’d decide it’s simplest to blow you and your whole house away?”

“He has no way to do that.” But Art knew that was a poor assumption. He didn’t know what Guest might be able to do. Or Seth, for that matter.

“You check the place,” Ed went on, “and you keep it under observation. But you don’t leave yourself a sitting duck.”

“But I have to stay—”

“Here. You and Dana have to stay here.”

“No. I don’t want you involved. It could put you in danger.”

“Then you shouldn’t have come here at all.” Ed stood up. “Let’s go over to your place, see what’s happening there. Joe?”

“What do you think? Rifles?”

“I guess so. Shotguns have too much spread. Semiautomatics, I’d say.” Ed turned to Art. “See, we don’t want to spoil your need to look brave and manly to your girlfriend. You can go up to your house by yourself. But we’ll keep you covered.”

“What about Dana?”

“She’ll stay here, of course, safe with Helen.”

“You think so?” Art stood up also. “Fine. I’m going to let the two of you explain that to her.”

The approach to Art’s cabin revealed no sign of a wheeled vehicle and no footsteps. The ground was drying, but any car or a person of normal weight would have broken through the thin crust of dried mud.

That was only partial reassurance. You could get to the building a hundred different ways, straight across the fields and up the hill, or down from the mountain park. Art walked cautiously toward his own front door. He had left it just a couple of weeks ago, two weeks going on years.