Carrion Comfort (95 page)

S
aul was watching Natalie and Justin in the park and listening to their conversation via the microphone she had clipped to the collar of her blouse when the computer gave its shrill alarm. His eyes flashed to the screen of the portable computer on the passenger seat of the station wagon, thinking for a second that it must be a failure of the telemetry pack, sensors, or the battery pack in the backseat rather than the event both of them dreaded. One glance told him that it was not equipment failure. The theta rhythm pattern was unmistakable, the alpha pattern already showing the peaks and valleys of rapid eye movement. At that second he found the answer to a problem he had been wrestling with for months and at the same instant he realized that his life was in imminent danger.

Saul looked out and saw Natalie turning in his direction even as he grabbed the dart gun and rolled out his door, scuttling away from the station wagon, trying to keep it and the other vehicles between Natalie, the boy, and himself.
No, it’s not Natalie
, he thought and slid to a stop behind the last car in the lot, twenty-five feet from the station wagon.

Why had the old lady decided to Use Natalie now? Saul wondered if he had done a poor job of following them. He had been forced to stay close— the microphone and transmitter they had added to Natalie’s belt of devices had a range of less than half a mile— and the traffic had been light. They had grown overconfident as a result of last week’s successes and their expedition to the island the previous day. Saul cursed softly and crouched to peer through the window of a white Ford Fairmont as Natalie strode toward the station wagon.

The boy advanced fifteen paces behind Natalie, carrying a branch he had picked off the grass. In that second Saul felt an overwhelming urge to kill the child, to empty the entire magazine of the Colt automatic in his jacket pocket into that small body, to drive the demons out by death. Saul took a deep breath. He had lectured at Columbia and other universities on the peculiar and perverse strain of modern violence in such books and movies as
The Exorcist, The Omen
, and innumerable imitations, going back to
Rosemary’s Baby
. Saul had seen the rash of demonic-children entertainments as a symptom of deeper underlying fears and hatreds; the “me-generation’s” inability to shift into the role of responsible parenthood at the cost of losing their own interminable childhood, the transference of guilt from divorce— the child is not really a child, but an older, evil thing, capable of
deserving
any abuse resulting from the adult’s selfish actions— and the anger of an entire society revolting after two decades of a culture dominated by and devoted to youthful looks, youth-oriented music, juvenile movies, and the television and movie myth of the adult-child inevitably wiser, calmer, and more “with-it” than the childish adults in the house hold. So Saul had lectured that the child-fear and child-hatred becoming visible in pop u lar shows and books had its irrational roots in common guilts, shared anxieties, and the universal angst of the age. He had warned that the national wave of abuse, neglect, and callousness toward children had its historical antecedents and that it would run its course, but that everything possible must be done to avoid and eliminate that brand of violence before it poisoned America.

Saul crouched, peered through the rear window at the loathsome sight of the small thing that had been little Justin Warden, and decided not to shoot him. Not yet. Besides, gunning down a six-year-old in a park on a Sunday afternoon was not the best way to assure their continued anonymity in Charleston.

Natalie walked around the station wagon and peered in, bending slightly to look in the rear seat, her back to Saul. At that second the boy turned to watch people at a nearby table. Saul rose, braced the dart gun on the roof, fired, and dropped out of sight.

For several seconds he was sure that he had missed, that the distance had been too great for the tiny gas-propelled dart, but then he caught a glimpse of the red tail feathers on the back of Natalie’s blouse an instant before she fell. He wanted to run to her then to check that she had not been injured by the drug or the drop to the pavement, but Justin looked back his way and Saul dropped to all fours behind the Ford, fumbling out the small box of anesthetic darts and breaking the pistol open to load a second one.

Two short, bare legs came to a running stop six feet from Saul’s face. He jerked his head up in time to see a boy of about eight or nine retrieving a blue kickball. The boy stared at Saul and the air pistol. “Hey, mister,” he said, “you gonna shoot somebody?”

“Go away,” hissed Saul. “You a cop or something?” asked the boy, his face interested.

Saul shook his head. “That an Uzi pistol or somethin’?” asked the boy, tucking the ball under his arm. “It sorta looks like an Uzi with a silencer on it.”

“Piss off,” whispered Saul, using the favorite phrase of the British soldiers in occupied Palestine when they were confronted with street urchins.

The boy shrugged and ran back to his game. Saul lifted his head in time to see Justin also running, his back to the parking lot, stick waving in his right hand.

Saul made a quick decision and walked quickly toward the picnic area, away from the cars. He could see the tan fabric of Natalie’s skirt where she lay on the pavement. He walked quickly, keeping the trees between himself and Justin. No one in the park seemed to have noticed Natalie yet. Two motorcycles pulled into the parking lot with an explosion of noise.

Saul walked briskly, getting forty feet closer to where Justin stood with his back against the fence above the river. The boy had a fixed, unfocused stare. His mouth hung open and there was a trickle of saliva running to his chin. Saul leaned his back against a tree, took a breath, and checked the CO
₂
charge in the handle of the weapon.

“Hey,” called a nearby man in a gray Brooks Brothers summer suit, “that’s pretty neat. You have to have a license to carry one of those?”

“No,” said Saul, glancing around the tree to confirm that Justin was still staring sightlessly. The boy was fifty or sixty feet away. Too far.

“Neat,” said the young man in the gray suit. “It fires .22s or pellets or what?”

Graysuit’s partner in conversation, a young blond man with a mustache, blow-dried hair, and a blue summer suit said, “Where can you buy one of those, fella? K-Mart have them?”

“Excuse me,” said Saul and stepped around the tree and walked in plain sight to the fence. Justin’s head did not turn toward him. The boy’s blank gaze was fixed on some spot above the roof of the cars in the lot. Saul kept the pistol behind him as he walked along the fence toward the frozen figure of the six-year-old. Twenty paces away he paused. Justin did not stir. Feeling like a cat stalking a toy mouse, Saul covered the last fifteen paces, brought the pistol around, and shot the boy on his bare right leg with a blue-tipped dart. When Justin fell forward, still rigid, Saul was there to catch him. No one appeared to have noticed.

He restrained himself from running back to the parking lot but still moved at something better than a brisk walk. The two longhaired men who had come in on motorcycles were on the sidewalk staring down at Natalie’s limp form. Neither had made a move to help her.

“Excuse me, please,” said Saul, squeezing past, stepping over Natalie, tugging the left rear door of the station wagon open, and gently setting Justin next to the battery packs and radio receiver.

“Hey, man,” said the fatter of the two bikers, “she dead or what?”

“Oh, no,” said Saul with a forced chuckle, grunting with the effort of lifting her onto the front seat and shoving her as far to the right as he could. Her left shoe slid off and fell to the pavement with a soft sound. He picked it up, smiling at the staring bikers. “I’m a doctor. She just has a little problem with
petit mal
seizures induced by neurologically deficient cardiopulmonary edema.” He got into the station wagon, dropped the dart gun on the seat, and continued smiling at the bikers. “So does the boy,” he said. “It . . . ah . . . runs in the family.” Saul shifted into gear and backed out, half expecting a car filled with Melanie Fuller’s zombies to intercept him before he made it to the street. No car appeared.

Saul drove around until he was sure that they were not being followed and then returned to the motel. Their cabin unit was almost out of sight of the road, but he made sure there was no traffic before he carried them in, first Natalie and then the boy.

Natalie’s EEG sensors were still in place, hidden in her hair but functional. The microphone and telemetry pack were still working. Saul paused a minute before disconnecting the computer and carrying it in. The theta rhythm was gone, the REM peaks absent. The EEG readout was consistent with a deep, dreamless, drug-induced sleep.

After carrying in the equipment, Saul made Natalie and Justin comfortable and checked their vital signs. He activated the second telemetry pack, attached electrodes to the boy’s skull, and keyed in a code to initiate a program that would display both sets of EEG data on the computer screen at once. Natalie’s continued to show a normal deep sleep pattern. The child’s showed the traditional flat lines of clinical brain death.

Saul checked the boy’s pulse, heartbeat, and retinal response, took his blood pressure, and tried sound, scent, and pain stimuli. The computer continued to indicate no higher neurological functions whatsoever. Saul switched telemetry packs and sensors, checked the transmitter’s power cells, reverted to a single-display mode, and used more electrolytic paste and two additional electrodes. The readings were identical with the first. Six-year-old Justin Warden was legally brain dead, literally nothing more than a primitive brain-stem that kept the heart pumping, the kidneys filtering, and the lungs moving air through a husk of mindless meat.

Saul lowered his head to his hands and stayed in that position for a very long time.

“What do we do?” asked Natalie. She was on her second cup of coffee. The tranquilizer had kept her out for just under an hour, but it took her another fifteen minutes before she could think clearly.

“We keep him sedated, I guess,” he said. “If we let him come out of deep sleep, Melanie Fuller may regain control. The little boy who was Justin Warden— memories, loves, fears, everything that is human— is gone forever.”

“Can you be sure about that?” asked Natalie, her voice thick.

Saul sighed, set down his own cup of coffee, and added a small measure of whiskey. “No,” he admitted, “not without better equipment, more complicated tests, and observation of the boy under a much wider range of conditions. But with indications that flat, I would say that the odds are overwhelmingly against him recovering anything close to human consciousness, much less memory or personality.” He took a long drink.

“All those dreams of releasing them . . .” began Natalie. “Yes.” Saul slapped down the empty cup. “It makes sense, when you think about it. The more conditioning the old lady has carried out, the less chance of a personality surviving. I suspect that the adults function with a residue of their identities . . . personalities . . . certainly it would do no good for her to have kidnapped medical personnel the way she did if they had no access to their former skills. But even there, extended mental control . . . this mind vampirism . . . must kill the original personality after awhile. It is like a disease, a brain cancer, that grows over time, bad cells killing good ones.”

Natalie rubbed her aching head. “Is it possible that some of her . . . her people . . . have been controlled less than others? Are less infected?”

Saul opened the fingers of one hand in a quizzical gesture. “Possible? Yes, I suppose. But if they are conditioned— tampered with— enough for her to trust them as servants, I fear that their personalities and higher-order functions have been seriously damaged.”

“But the Oberst Used you,” said Natalie without any emotional overtones. “And I’ve been leeched onto twice by Harod and at least as many times by this old witch.”

“Yes?” said Saul, removing his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose.

“Well, have they harmed us? Is the cancer growing inside us right now? Are we different, Saul?
Are we?
”

“I don’t know,” said Saul. He sat motionless until Natalie looked away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just so . . . awful . . . having that scaly old witch in my mind. It’s the most helpless feeling I’ve ever had . . . it must be worse than being raped. At least when someone violates your body, your mind is still your own. And the worst part . . . the worst part is . . . after it’s happened once or twice . . . you . . .” Natalie could not go on.

“I know,” said Saul, holding her hand. “A part of you wants to experience it again. Like a terrible drug with painful side effects, but as equally addictive. I know.”

“You never talked about . . .”

“It is not something one wishes to discuss.”

“No.” Natalie shuddered. “But that is not the cancer we were discussing,” said Saul. “I feel certain that addiction comes with the intense conditioning these things carry out with their chosen few. Which leads us to another moral dilemma.”

“What?”

“If we follow our plan, it will require weeks of conditioning for at least one person— perhaps more— an innocent.”

“It wouldn’t be the
same
. . . it would be temporary, for a specific function.”

“For
our
purposes it would be temporary,” said Saul. “As we now know, the effects can be permanent.”

“Goddamnit!” snapped Natalie. “It doesn’t
matter
. That’s our plan. Can you think of another?”

“No.”

“Then we go ahead,” Natalie said firmly. “We go ahead even if it costs us our minds and our souls. We go ahead even if other innocents have to suffer. We go ahead because we have to, because we owe it to our dead. Our families and the people we love have paid the price and now we go ahead . . . make their killers pay . . . there can’t be any justice if we stop now. No matter what the price we have to go on.”