In Constant Fear (14 page)

“Why?” I asked, though of course I knew.

“Just in case,” he said, plainly trying hard not to sound too worried.

“But . . . we'd
know
, surely?”

Jimmy paused for a moment, looking that bit squeamish. “You know that stuff that oozes outta them?”

“The green slime?”

“I think it's a kinda lubricant.”

Yet again I was reduced to staring at him, wondering what the hell he was gonna say next.

“It's also got anesthetizing properties,” he continued. “They could slide in anywhere in your body and you wouldn't know a thing about it.”

“
Oh Jeez!
” I groaned.

He went quiet for a few moments, maybe giving me time to absorb what he'd said, and to tell the truth, I
was
kinda overwhelmed by the immensity—and yeah, I'll admit it—even the damn ingenuity of it. What chance did we have up against something like that?

We had to go and tell the others, gather them around the kitchen table and explain it to them and, let's be honest, break their damn hearts for them. It was all over. Our utopia was hopelessly compromised. Nora Jagger was probably on her way at that very moment.

Delilah was more horrified by
how
a weevil might've got inside her than if she had one or not. “You mean that thing might've crawled up—”

“Lile!” Jimmy interrupted. “That ain't helping.”

“While I was sleeping!” she continued, refusing to be silenced.

“Stop it, will you?”

“Yeah, right!” she sneered, “typical man. Don't give a damn we girls've got more openings to worry about.”

This time general howls of protest, sheer weight of numbers, made her reluctantly give way.

Lena was quietly sitting at the table with Thomas in her arms. “Clancy?” she called, like she was cutting through a storm or bobbing over waves.

“He's fine,” I reassured her, immediately knowing what was on her mind.

“You sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“What happens if one of us
has
got a weevil inside them?” Hanna asked.

“It turns into an implant, stupid,” Gigi sneered. “Weren't you listening?”

“No, I mean, what happens to the person who's got it?”

Yep, damned if she hadn't done it again: that girl always came up with the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question that no one wanted to try to answer. I turned to Jimmy and the little guy made this helpless face, like that was a whole other subject.

“No one has,” I declared confidently.

“But if they do,” Hanna persisted. “If it can do what Jimmy says—track people, influence them, make them do stuff—are they going to stay here?”

“Maybe we shouldn't do this,” I muttered to Jimmy.

“Clancy,” Lena interrupted, “we've got no choice.”

I turned and, as always, she felt my eyes on her and gave this slight shake of the head. She was a mother now, and protection of her child was her prime concern. It also went through my mind again about when I woke up with those things in my mouth—did I really manage to spit them all out?

We all traipsed over to the barn, Gigi and Gordie bickering about which one of them was going to go first, both trying to prove they were the toughest and meanest of us, that nothing worried them, 'til finally Jimmy decided we'd do it in alphabetical order, which of course meant me going first.

I had to take my shirt off, and despite the situation that was an invitation Lile simply couldn't resist, asking me if I was “just gonna leave it at that?” Thankfully there was little other appetite for humor, and Jimmy told the others to go and wait at the far end of the barn.

He ran this thing over me, a kind of a metal pad, studying his screen while I just silently looked away and treated it as if I was having a jab or something.

“Okay, Big Guy,” he eventually said, indicating I could put my shirt back on.

I waited but he didn't say any more.

“Well?” I asked.

“I'm just gonna scan first,” he replied. “The computer'll interpret it afterward.”

“Right,” I grunted, discreetly withdrawing when I saw it was Delilah's turn next.

Gigi followed, complaining she wasn't stripping off in front of no old man, not for any reason, so Jimmy had to erect a curtain and instruct Delilah what to do while he checked the images on his screen.

One by one we went through the process 'til eventually we were left with the final person: our son, our little miracle, Thomas.

I could barely stand to watch it felt so wrong, so damned invasive, but I had to explain to Lena what was going on. Our baby son
was lying there looking so small and vulnerable, threatening to cry at the coldness of the pad, the sternest of frowns on his bewildered little face. Jimmy went over him really carefully, I guessed for that reason—'cuz he was so defenseless. Or maybe it was 'cuz it was that much more difficult to scan such a tiny body.

When he finally finished, Delilah complained that he hadn't done himself, but Jimmy told her he had earlier; that that was how he'd tested the equipment.

He immediately started switching things around, unplugging this, sliding in that, 'til finally he had his computer set up to read the scans. No one said a word, just stood there watching as he tapped and swiped, working his favorite arena like a pro, bringing up file after file.

“Come on, Jimmy!” Delilah complained.

“Okay, okay,” he replied, obviously having seen all he needed. “I'm not enjoying this, Lile.”

“Has anyone got an implant?” she persisted.

“'Course they haven't!” I growled. “Come on, Jimmy, stop milking it, man.”

But instead of giving us the all-clear, of assuring us that it'd just been a false alarm, he'd got that look about him, embarrassed and shifty, and I knew he had some bad news for someone, and I had a fair idea who it might be.

“Sorry, Big Guy,” he muttered.

There was a momentary silence, Lena gave this little moan and came and put an arm around me, holding Thomas with the other.

“I got one?” I asked Jimmy. “You sure?”

“It's pretty clear once you know what you're looking for.”

“One of those things is inside me?”

This time he didn't say anything—and nor did anyone else.

“It won't change anything,” Lena said in little more than a whisper. “It's always going to be you and me.”

I turned and looked into her face, those sightless eyes imploring me the way they sometimes do. The only thing was, she was wrong and had to know it. It
did
change things—it changed everything. If
what Jimmy had said was true, that it could be used to track me down or dictate my behavior, I was gonna be one helluva liability around here.

“Thing is,” Jimmy said, trying to dispense a few odd crumbs of comfort, “they can't track you, can't do anything, without some kind of monitoring source. It's too far out for a Dragonfly, a fixed-wing ain't sufficiently maneuverable in the mountains—we haven't seen anything else.”

I paused for a moment, not wanting to say anything but feeling I had no choice. “You sure?”

He knew immediately what I was talking about. “Come on!” he scoffed. “What did ya see?”

“Something was there,” I insisted.

He shook his head, like he wasn't prepared to even consider it, that it had no part in this discussion, and turned his attention back to the screen. “Tell you what, as much as it hurts to say it . . . it's damn smart.”

“What is?” I asked.

“This,” he said, with reluctant admiration.

“Whose side are you on?”

“Think about it,” he said. “A lotta people have gone missing in the country. She could spend forever hunting them down—a few here, a few there—why would she bother? But once people get established, once there's a decent-sized group—enough to be a threat—they're gonna get organized, and what's the first thing they're gonna need? . . . Food! So they develop this seed with its own built-in parasite: an implant weevil. People think they're building a new future, becoming self-sufficient, when in fact, they're implanting themselves and dedicating their future to her . . . Not cool, I know, but shit, it's damn smart.”

“What about the animals that got burned?” Delilah asked, not fully following. “George's dog, the wolves—where do they fit in?”

“And those two guys,” Gigi added.

“I guess the weevils were implanting
all
living creatures. Maybe it was a prototype that went wrong,” Jimmy suggested, but Hanna had other ideas.

“They were all killers,” she said, her voice so soft we almost missed it.

I turned to her, at first thinking it was a little out there even for her, but then began to see what she was saying,
and
that she was right. “Jesus, yeah!” I gasped. “That dog of George's was forever killing rats, the wolves were about to kill the deer, and those guys had been about to kill me. Even the bird was some kinda hunter—
that
was the connection. All of them must've had punishment implants.”

“What about Clancy?” Lena asked Jimmy. “Is his implant functioning?”

“Not properly. Not yet,” he replied. “It seems to be configuring itself in some way, but I reckon it has to be turned on, keyed in some way, before it's fully operational.”

Again there was silence, the immensity of it, how quickly things had changed, almost too much to cope with, and finally I asked the question I'd wanted to ask from the moment he first told me.

“Can it be removed?”

“I dunno . . . Maybe. I'm no doctor.”

I don't think it was exactly his intention, but his words gave me the faintest cause for hope, the thought that there was something I could do.

I put my arms around both Lena and Thomas and joined her as she went to leave, the others tagging on behind, feeling it was time to go away and digest everything that'd been said.

But Jimmy hadn't quite finished. “Sorry, guys . . . Sorry—” he called, before we reached the door. “There's one other thing.”

We paused, waiting for his postscript, a summing-up, but he had that squirming uncomfortable look about him again, and this time I knew it was gonna be a whole lot worse.

“Someone else's got one, too.”

For the first time since Thomas was born, Lena cried openly, in fear and concern. Out here, in the middle of nowhere, and without any sign of trespass, our lives had been stolen from us. Bad enough
I
had an implant in me; but little Thomas as well . . . ?

I was so sure I'd protected him, that none of those damn things had got through, but sometimes blind faith isn't enough. Lena and me spent that night tossing and turning on a bed of nails, echoing each other's words of futile remorse. Meanwhile, the little guy was sleeping unusually peacefully, unaware that he'd been invaded, that he had this parasite going about his tiny body. He wasn't exactly sick, but I guess we felt that terrible dragging helplessness that every parent does when their child's in danger and there's nothing they can do about it. Over and over I kept telling Lena it would be all right, that we'd come up with something, but it was just noise and she knew it as well as I did.

Jimmy would do everything he could; we knew that, but we also knew that for once maybe even he was out of his depth. If those things kept changing all the time, one moment a tiny capsule lodged in a minor crevice of your brain, the next a liquid oozing its way around the streams and canals of your body, what chance did anyone have?

“What are we going to do?” Lena asked for the umpteenth time.

“I dunno,” I told her. “Jimmy wants to scan me and Thomas again tomorrow, maybe get some ideas. You know what he's like,” I said, trying to sound encouraging.

“Yeah, and I know what
she's
like,” Lena replied.

I never said anything; after spending some time as Infinity's prisoner, she was better placed to talk about them—and, in particular, Nora Jagger—than I was.

“What if you and Thomas
can
be tracked?”

“I dunno,” I said, after yet another helpless pause.

“Are you willing to take the risk?”

I knew what she was getting at: was I prepared to chance leading the Bitch there, to maybe getting everyone killed—or at the very least, implanted?

“Let's see what Jimmy comes up with,” I told her.

For some time we both lay in stillness and silence, all talked and worried out, 'til finally her breathing became heavier and I realized she'd fallen asleep. It didn't take me long to appreciate that there was
no chance of me following her, not with all the stuff I had pinballing around in my head, and I gently pried myself out of her arms and slid out of the bed.

I emerged out onto the porch that bit warily, making sure there were no weevils around, but I guessed they'd done their work already. Mind you, only Thomas and me had implants—would they keep coming back 'til they finally got one in everyone? How would it work otherwise, some with, some not? Was there some provision for that?

I couldn't stop thinking about what Lena'd said: was I prepared to take the risk of bringing Nora Jagger here? If only Thomas hadn't got an implant. If it'd been just me, yeah, it would've broken my heart, but I could've taken off on my own. As it was, knowing Lena as I did, I suspected it would be all three of us or no one at all.

It's truly amazing how light Hanna is on her feet. Admittedly I was lost in thought, staring blankly out at the mountains, but the first I knew that she was up and about was when she appeared at my side.

“Jesus! You frightened the hell outta me,” I complained.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Can't you sleep?”

“Not really.”

I paused for a moment, returning my gaze to the mountains. There was no point, nor need, for any pretense. We both knew how serious the situation was.