How the World Ends (27 page)

It occurs to me that this can only end in bloodshed, and I decide to act in order to minimize that certainty. I step out from behind my tree.

“I am Jonah Truth!” I call out, thrusting my arms in the air.

The man struggling with Chapin releases him with a push to the ground and points the barrel of his pistol directly at me. Then, speaking to one of the men off to his right, he says, “Test him.”

The other, a much smaller man who has been holding back a bit and is not visibly armed, pulls a small spray bottle from his backpack. Holding it at arms’ length, he fires a quick spray of it into the grass beside him. The result is enough to shock every one of us into further submission and disbelief.

The growth is completely obliterated from the ground. What is left behind can’t even be called soil – since it appears that the capacity for life has been driven from it completely. Even worse, the condition seems to spread to the surrounding area. It draws near to the area where a few children are huddling together in a tight circle. Steven steps over to pull them away. The little man holds his spray bottle at shoulder height and raises an eyebrow. Everything stops, nobody even breaths. The only sound is a slight hiss as the dead circle and its absence of life stretch closer to the small battered shoes of the orphans.

“Bleed for us, Truth,” the man with the gun says to me.

I step over to the smaller man and hold out my arm, expecting him to slice my skin with a knife. He smiles at me and shakes his head.

“It must be self inflicted,” he says to me quietly. “And you must have love in your heart when you do it.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what your brother wrote on the instructions for use. Personally I think he was full of shit, but my opinion doesn’t count.”

I almost lose faith then and there – I can’t see any method of resolving this situation. I have been through many like it, but in those times the shoe was on the other foot, and it I didn’t have to believe in anything but my own fighting skills. And I have never taken a child hostage. And I have never used a chemical or biological agent against my enemies. In fact, I have never even seen
anyone
as my enemy – not really – not like this.

I feel a great pity rise in me then, as I begin to realize that these men are driven by fear much more than any hatred or even malice against us. They are afraid of what it might mean if they do not capture Jonah Truth. I look from face to face among our captors and my friends. My vision blurs and I realize, for one brief moment, what it must like to be Jonah – how
he
must feel when people look to him for guidance, and he has nothing to give. My pity and grief well up in a flood of tears that I struggle to hold back for fear that I might let loose a torrent of emotion.

I am not Jonah Truth, but I can bleed just the same as he can, I think to myself. He is my blood brother, no?

I pull my k-bar from its sheath on my leg and draw its tip across my flesh. The red fluid slips out from beneath my skin and leaks out onto the grass in an almost viscous sprawl of verve. It mesmerizes the whole group for an instant, and for a few brief seconds there is nothing on this earth except us. We stand and watch as the newly dawned sunlight catches on the green grass and the flashes of red wetness on the edge of the black circle of dead nothingness.

The hissing noise stops and the day is silent. The deadness at the centre stays just the same, but at the edges it seems the mere presence of the blood is enough to stop the spreading of it.

“Not quite what I was expecting,” says the man beside me quietly.

“No,” says the one over by Lewis. All of the violence has left him – his weapon hangs loosely by his side and he seems somewhat disappointed. “It was supposed to be a complete reversal.”

“Why are you doing this?” I ask the man beside me. “Some orders aren’t meant to be followed.”

He turns to me and says, “You don’t understand – you’re immune to the effects of this stuff. This isn’t the only version. Your brother has been concocting this crap for years and testing it out wherever he could. Geron is only trying to reverse the process.”

…

Ruben

The future is ever a beacon of light, even if at times is it only a faint flicker. And yet the past from whence it sprang is forever gloomy and filled with regret. Until, that is, it has been re-shaded with the desired amount of nostalgia. Only then does the spirit of the past moments, when hope burned most brightly, return with vigour.

The past will capture us all if we attempt to escape from it.

The door to the lab opens and my heart jumps into my chest. I quickly lock my computer, as I am always careful to do, and the screensaver pops up.

My guest walks across to my desk and sits down. We both sit staring for a moment at each other before he speaks.

“We are pulling your funding.”

The words a scientist doesn’t dare to think about, yet the ones that keep clinging to the edge of consciousness until they erupt into reality like a bout of nasty chicken pox.

“You can’t pull the funding.” I try to keep my voice calm and level, despite my racing heart.

“We are.”

I wait for a second. He doesn’t blink. Damn it all to hell. I jump right to my last resort, knowing full well that anything in between will be ineffectual.

“If you cut the funding, I will publish everything. It is my intellectual property. That was always the deal.”

“You won’t publish anything. You’ll be dead.”

“I’d like to see you kill me before I press three keys on this laptop.” This is always a funny bluff, because the amount of time it would take me to compile all of my research would easily take me quite a bit more time than that. But it doesn’t matter, because a know-it-all like this idiot across the desk will assume that anyone he knows is smarter than himself will be capable of technological wonders beyond belief. “That’s all it will take to send everything across the internet.”

“You’re right. We couldn’t kill you,” he says, blinking twice. I hate that. “But we could kill Aeron before you made it across the room to open the door.

Touché.
I know it’s a bluff, though. Aeron is totally off the radar. He’s just quit school and is probably hitchhiking his way across the country. Ironically the safest thing he could possibly be doing at this moment. Yet something in his eye gives me pause.

“Why do you want to cut the funding?”

“We don’t trust you, obviously,” he begins. “And with the latest round of tests it has become clear that this formula should not be allowed to go to the next level of potency. It would not be ethical.”

“But the opportunity is limitless! The consequences are frightening, yes, but the chance to do something powerful, something truly, unequivocally good on this earth… That is not a chance I can pass up.”

“
I
don’t care.
I
am cutting your funding unless you can prove to us that this technology won’t be abused.”

I try not to pause at the change from “we” to “I” and the implications of that.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, prove to me that this formula can be controlled by someone other than yourself. I know you’re smarter then anyone around here, Ruben, but all that really does is make what you’ve created less accessible and therefore more dangerous.”

He stops to give me one of his smiles, and I know I am well and truly in deep trouble right then and there. I know he’s about to drop the bomb and my life is over and done with. His smile seals the deal and I start planning my end-game right then and there.

“You see Ruben, I’ve hired some independent help and we’ve ascertained some interesting results with a reverse engineering of your formula.”

Oh dear sweet Jesus, no.

“We’ve found that we cannot reproduce exactly what you have been attempting to achieve with your formula. No. It seems that is a secret that will have to be sacrificed for the time being. But that is not important. No. What is important is that your formula, when reverse engineered and re-manufactured with some of the missing pieces substituted, and applied directly to the affected areas, can be very potent indeed.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Geron? What does this have to do with my funding?” And what in the name of death and disaster can you mean by an
affected area?
I think to myself, trying to contain my thoughts as never before.

“It means that you’re time is up. We have restructured the team. We have a new focus now.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Oh Ruben, if only you had the imagination that I do…” he trails off. “But never mind, it can’t be helped – and there’s no point trying to fix a problem when it could more easily be eliminated, don’t you agree?”

I simply stare at him, my thoughts a few steps ahead, planning my next steps, trying to think how close to three keystrokes I could get it. It wasn’t really possible though. I couldn’t publish everything – not in its entirety. There was only one person that could be trusted with even a fraction of what I have uncovered.

“Good-bye, Ruben.”

Geron Petreson stands up from my desk, his gloating complete, and saunters back to the door, closing it behind him. Outside it has somehow grown quite dark.

I think back to a few weeks before, when the two of us had been in the mayor’s office, securing the government funds which were meant to bolster the money provided by Geron and whomever he represented. In a flash, we had secured a ridiculous amount of cash – enough to support the research through to the end – with proper testing and time enough to cover all the possible angles. Except the one that I hadn’t seen – an end-run directly around me – taking me right out of the loop while at the same time using my relationship with the mayor as leverage to cripple the city while they drained it of life.

I close my eyes and try not to picture the future in such clarity, but I can’t help it. It’s the kind of vision a man might imagine he ought to have as his life flashes before him. It’s like a veil is drawn back for a moment on all the things I have been blind to that have shaded me from a true vision like this in the past.

Of the future, of the results of a man’s actions.

When his life is about to end.

When the world is about to end.

A few minutes later, they come for me.

Chapter Eight – Prisoner

Bill

I am alone with my thoughts. They have left me here in this dark room after walking me blindfolded through a winding series of passageways after travelling on paved roads for at least an hour. It seems funny to have to switch to thinking about how far a vehicle can travel from thinking about how far you can walk. To return to thinking about the word
fuel
as gasoline to put in a truck instead of as food to put in our bodies.

The sweat drips from my head to the back of my neck and dribbles down my spine. Everything itches at me to struggle against the plastic ties around my hands, but I know better than to weaken myself. It is hot in here, and I haven’t eaten yet today.

I try to picture the world outside, for I am certain I’ve been here before. It won’t be long before they figure out that I’m the sergeant who deserted after shooting that scientist back when we were supposed to capture Truth the first time. Back when I woke up from all this crap and started seeing things from the inside out, or maybe the outside in, depending on how you look at it. I wouldn’t mind being outside now – it was shaping up to be a nice day before all this started. Why couldn’t they just leave us alone?

There’s a sound at the door, and then a bright shaft of sunlight blinds me momentarily. A man stands in the doorway. I can tell by the amount of sunlight coming through that he’s about five foot eight, and around a hundred and sixty five pounds: average. Get him a few feet closer and I can kick the living daylights out of him, no matter being tied to a chair with plastic bands. Anything is possible when you’re mad enough.

“Your brother spoke very highly of you, Jonah.”

He thinks I’m Jonah – probably because of the blood thing. I can’t decide right away whether this misconception is a good or bad idea, but I decide not to react.

“Yet he never had a picture of you, nor his son, nor the mother of his son,” the man slides another chair noisily across the cement floor of the room. “On his desk.”

He sits down backwards in the chair, facing me, about forty-six inches away. “Why is that? Who was the mother?”

I just stare back at him. Ten inches closer, and I’m looking at a dead man. Or nearly dead, until he talks, and then all the way dead, unless his throat is less tough than the average human that he is. I am willing to take that chance, but he isn’t moving, and I need him to move into range. He’s sitting right there out of reach, waiting for Jonah Truth to tell him where all of his family is. Why? The blood. It has to be the blood. There must be some part of it that stops that formula from working.

“It doesn’t matter that you published Ruben’s work, Jonah,” he continues. “We’ve had it for quite some time, and frankly, I’ve given up on the idea that it would be useful, even if we could make it work.”

But something works. I’ve seen it – I’ve seen a hundred thousand oak trees grow up through the streets of a city – growing eighty feet tall and ten feet across in a matter of minutes. That seemed to work pretty well. I say nothing, trying to keep my poker face silent to the thoughts in my head. I blink to relieve the pressure.

“You see, Jonah, my interest was never to play God.” He smiles a faint and faraway smile that is probably meant to frighten me. All I notice is that he leans forward. Six more inches, you bastard, and I will whip this chair a hundred and eighty degrees and end this conversation faster than you can breathe. I promise you that.

“No. I intend to destroy Him.”

And we are both silent. I try not to think about anything except those six inches. I don’t think about what he just said, or what it might mean, or whether I can do anything about that. I only think about six inches, and whether I can stretch my elbows backwards far enough to swing the chair six inches further than I think I can.