Death and The Divide (3 page)

When the meeting ended, Jack made his way to Linc’s side, pausing to speak to members and answer questions as he came.

“So what do you think?” he asked in a low voice when he made it through the gauntlet.

“Carlton, Bill, and Jimmy,” Linc replied.

Jack nodded. “I’ll set up a meeting with them next week. We need everyone of the same mind when we activate the plan.”

“Good. How do you think President Jackson will react?”

His friend’s brow wrinkled. “Ed’s a good man. We were together in military school. But with the congress overwhelmed by special interest groups, they have him by the balls. I have a feeling he’d want some of the changes we do, but he won’t commit political suicide.”

“So he won’t veto the new donations bill?”

“No way. Wealthy corporations and individuals would crucify him in the media. Upping the levels of donations will supply them the power they need to further influence congress.”

Linc had to bite his tongue to say what he really thought about the additional burden this bill would place on the poor and middle class. Another reason to move forward with the IPP plan. “What do you need me to do?”

“Nothing yet. I’ll receive our detailed plans sometime in the next month. Then I’ll need you and the other lieutenants for a strategy session on implementing our state’s portion.”

“I’ll be ready,” he said, but he worried that the incident with the whales might expand into something bigger and he’d be hip-deep in a marine biology crisis. Still, fixing the Republic’s broken political system had to take priority. So many aspects of the future would change for the better if they succeeded.

His phone beeped and he took it from his pocket. A glance at the screen showed a message from his team supervisor.
New Orleans reports a private shrimp boat found adrift with shrimpers aboard savagely murdered. Appears they killed each other.

Chapter Three

Annaria loaded a new set of tissue samples into the scanner and set parameters for the study into its control panel. So far, their guerrilla-killing parasite was winning the analysis war, as well. No cut and dry case here. She studied the previous report. It appeared to be a completely new mutation of
Trichostrongylus
sp. What the hell?

She glanced at her wrist-comm. Nearly noon. She wondered when Carol would call. Their conversation yesterday had left her on edge. Intuition regarding these events generated an ominous undercurrent in her psyche.

Unfortunately, she hadn’t found any past information on parasites causing seagulls or dolphins to violently attack each other in such numbers. There must be some other reason for the anomaly.

Dr. Manson strolled in and stopped to read the gorilla report on the tech-pad she handed him. He grunted and handed it back to her. “You’re repeating the study, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Mutation of that sort is suspicious.”

“I agree.”

“Did you see the news from Mobile, Alabama?”

“I haven’t seen anything this morning. I’ve been busy here.” As if he didn’t already know that. He’d asked her to come in at six to look at the preliminary results of the gorilla study. She’d only had time for a couple cups of coffee.

“You should take a look. Might have some bearing on your seagull and dolphin stories from yesterday.” He continued to his desk.

She scrolled the British news site and discovered a frightening story. Fifty whales had apparently attacked each other and died, then washed ashore in Mobile, Alabama yesterday. Marine biologists from the state’s unit at the University in Birmingham had investigated the occurrence but hadn’t released any revelations to the cause. The report went on to describe the grisly scene - normally peaceful whales had ripped each other apart, covering the beach with blood and flesh. No one would speculate on why.

She shivered at a posted picture of the mutilated corpses littering the beach. No one could mistake the fins and tails protruding from gaping mouths. She copied the piece and forwarded it to Dr. Manson. Did these events tie together? Cross-species madness leading to mass murder?

“Dr. Manson?” she called, hoping he’d shed some of his genius on this situation and give her some ideas she could pass on to Carol.

“Focus on the gorillas, Miss Moralez. As long as this stays in the South, it’s none of our business,” came his gruff reply. “On the other hand, the government of Rwanda is paying us a great deal of money to stop the untimely deaths of their precious mountain gorillas. Stick to the relevant matter.”

She let out a silent sigh. Until the scanner spit out its report in two hours, she had little to do for the mountain gorillas of Rwanda. If these strange massacres were related and she proved a parasite as the cause, it would be a fantastic discovery. Such a study would make a tremendous PhD paper and put her name on the map of famous parasitologists. She had dreamed of this sort of break. A way to leave the comfortable nest of basking in Dr. Manson’s famous glow. And yet, putting forth her own theories frightened her. What if she made a mistake and caused more harm than good? Maybe she’d accomplish more as an assistant. She shook off that doubt and pushed it to the back of her mind. She could at least poke around in previous research and current news stories for more information.

Unfortunately, when the beep of the scanner interrupted her private research two hours later, she had little more than when she started. Whatever was happening had occurred independently and abruptly. All the more frightening.

Her comm buzzed, vibrating against her wrist. Her mother.

“Hey, Mom.”

“Ria, have you heard from Lola this afternoon?”

“No, why?”

“She called me this morning and said she might need me to meet Conner at the after school pick up. She never called back, and now I can’t reach her.”

“You know how absentminded she can be. She probably forgot. If the school didn’t call one of us, I’m sure everything is all right. They have our links as backups.”

Her mother’s sigh drifted through the connection. “I hate to say it, but you’d be a better mother to that boy than she is. I think she acts like he’s her little brother. Sometimes when she takes him out, I’m afraid she’ll get distracted and lose him.”

Ria couldn’t laugh. That had actually happened one time, but she hadn’t told her mother. She’d picked Conner up at a restaurant where he’d patiently waited after Lola went to the restroom then forgot he was with her and left. He had the staff call Ria to pick him up. Thank goodness even at eight years old he was a smart and resilient kid.

“I know, Mom, but she is his mother, so that’s not up for discussion.”

“You should have your own child, Ria. You know they’re talking about having a stricter allocation policy soon. At least look for a boyfriend so you can head in that direction.”

Here we go
. Ria gritted her teeth. Her mother never lost a chance to rub in her single, childless state. She loved Conner so much and wanted more grandchildren. Ria’s career path hadn’t allowed much time for personal pleasure, however. Until she had her PhD and a decent job, she didn’t want to think about such things. She’d experience her maternal fixes through interaction with her nephew.

“I have to go, Mom. I’ve completed my current project and have to send it out before Dr. Manson yells at me.”

“That man! He doesn’t know how lucky he is to have you.”

“Right, Mom. I’m sure he does. Say hello to Dad for me.”

“All right, sweetie. Call me later.”

She and Dr. Manson wrapped up the final analysis of the gorilla parasite, scanned it, and sent the package via SatNet to their contact with the Rwanda government. The constantly threatened mountain gorillas would be saved one more time, and she actually got a pat on the back from her grumpy boss. A successful end to the day.

As she turned off her computer, she realized Carol had not called. She checked her desk comm for messages. Nothing. Strange. Her friend had sounded desperate for information yesterday. She reached for the call button then withdrew her fingers. It would cause problems if she contacted a person in the South with the trackers on. Maybe her friend had gotten busy in her investigation and would call tomorrow.

She reached her apartment building and rode the turbo lift to floor one-twenty-one with her mind bouncing between worry for her friend and ideas for what had caused the animal massacres. Every path her mind traveled seemed to hit a roadblock of biological impossibility. And yet something had cause the aberrant behavior.

“Stop it, Mom. You’re cheating,” Conner’s high-pitched voice met Annaria when she opened the door to her unit.

Her nephew and his mother punched the air in a holo-simulated game of Puzzle Pow. Ria shook her head. They really did act more like siblings than parent and child. It appeared Lola had spent another day at home, not looking for a job. But she always had a good excuse.

“Hey, Ria,” her sister said, laughing as she hopped around looking for projected red balls to bop with her fist.

Conner had green, but his mother would block his movements occasionally, making him miss. Nothing new there. Lola was a big kid at heart and never recognized her selfishness.

“Aunt Ria, I got an excellent score on my math game today at school.” Conner gave Lola a playful shove and turned off the simulator. “That’s enough, Mom. I hate playing with you.”

She kissed the top of his head, laughed, and flopped onto the chaise by the picture window, breathing hard. “You hate losing. But I still love you.”

Conner grinned, but rolled his eyes, and ran to hug Annaria.

“No luck today in the job hunt?” she asked her sister, then bent to kiss her nephew’s cheek as he wrapped his arms around her hips.

Lola grimaced. “The one I told you about at City Center has been filled.”

Ria started to say that if she’d looked into it a week ago when it was posted, that wouldn’t be a problem. But she’d learned to keep her comments to herself or endure a week of Lola’s hurt tears, with calls from their mother admonishing her to support her sister and not criticize.

“Aunt Ria, I have to do a report on the history of The Divide. Will you help me? Mom says what happened that long ago isn’t important.” Conner followed her to the galley where she punched in a vend order for a cup of hot green tea.

“Sure.” She smiled and leaned over to whisper in his ear. “It’s a very important part of our history. Your mom is wrong.”

He grinned back. “I know. She’s usually wrong about school stuff.”

“Grab your tech-pad so you can make notes. What do you want to know?”

He went to the booth and scrambled onto one of the seats. “I looked up the basic history on SatNet. That’s mostly just facts on a timeline about when stuff happened. I don’t understand what really caused it.”

She took her cup and joined him. “Well, it was a lot of things. To make it as simple as I can, I’d say people in the old United States separated into two groups with different beliefs. They hated each other so much they had a war, and the only way to stop the killing was to erect a huge fence through the center of the country and create two countries. People went to live on whichever side most shared their own beliefs. I’ll give you some links to SatNet sites you can study.”

“So how did we come to live in the North?”

She took a deep breath. This topic was more difficult. “Your great grandmother was black. She originally lived in the south. When the differences grew more open, and race was one of those issues, she came north.”

“Great grandpa was white. He didn’t care what color she was.” He stared up at her with innocent eyes.

Her heart warmed. Maybe new generations would put aside petty issues like race and see each other based on their internal merits. It would be a blessing for these issues to fade into non-existence. She hoped he never grew jaded by hate. “”That’s right, and your grandfather is from Mexico. We’re a mix of a lot of colors.”

“Are people in the South mean then?”

She bit her bottom lip, thinking of her great-grandfather who lost his life to a terrorist bomb from the South. He’d had a farm that bordered The Divide. Constant bombings after the war had devastated that area, and now no one lived there. But she couldn’t allow herself to judge all of them based on that. “No. They just have different beliefs than people in the North.”

He frowned and cast a sideways glance at her, one brow raised.

She finished her tea. “That’s enough for now. I need to complete some research and so do you. Have you done your other homework modules?”

“Yes. I’m going to start working on this report. It’s interesting, but I still don’t understand a lot of stuff about why people couldn’t get along.”

She had a hard time understanding it, too. “Okay, kiddo. Make a list of questions and we’ll talk more later.”

Lola wandered in and ordered a glass of white wine from the Servo vend. “Why do they still teach that stuff from the past? It’s morbid. I think we should forget the division and then maybe we could heal. I can’t stand thinking about it.”

Annaria hit the connector button on her tech pad to link to the more powerful home computer. Her sister was super sensitive. She couldn’t even kill an insect if it invaded their home. “History is important so we understand how everything developed. Maybe we won’t make the same mistakes again.”

Lola gave a sharp laugh. “Ria, this was the second civil war here. I don’t think we’re learning much.”

She couldn’t argue with that.

“I don’t want to remember. Reminds me of grandpa.” Lola leaned against a wall, her dark, silky hair hanging over one shoulder.

Ria had always wanted straight hair like that instead of her springy black curls that never went where she wanted them. Her sister was thin like their father, whereas Annaria had inherited her mother’s curves. Lola’s long-sleeved tunic looked two sizes too big for her, with its droopy shoulders and the way her hands disappeared up the sleeves. It was the right size. It looked that way because Lola always retracted into herself, like a homeless waif. She’d spent her entire adult life trying to escape unpleasant issues. When their parents argued, she clamped her hands over her ears and ran to her room to shut out the sounds of conflict.

“It is sad, but children need to know the truth of their past. Maybe this time it will keep such a tragedy from happening again.” She gave her sister a smile. “Don’t let it disturb you. I know you can’t deal with such topics. I’ll help Conner with this project.”

“Thanks, sis. I’m glad you understand.” Lola sipped her wine, after a few moments, a smile curved her lips. “I’m going to ride in with you tomorrow.”

Annaria paused in surprise. “Oh?”

“There’s a position in the art department at the university. One of the professors needs an assistant. I’d like a job that involved in art.”

“That’s awesome, Lola. You’d be great at that.” She started to ask questions about the position, but stopped. Her sister acted like a skittish fawn when it came to work. If she asked her sister about a job or pushed her, she ran the other way. “I’ve got a new project starting tomorrow.”