Invasion (26 page)

“My God, Candee!” Jonathan blurted. “Where have you been? I’ve called twenty times.”

“Jonathan,” Candee said happily. “I’m so glad to see you. I’ve missed you.”

“You have?” Jonathan asked. He couldn’t help notice how fantastic Candee looked. She was wearing a miniskirt over a tank top body suit. Every curve of her tight, lithe body was there to see and appreciate.

“Oh yes,” Candee said. “I’ve been thinking about you lots.”

“How come you haven’t been at school?” Jonathan asked. “I looked for you.”

“I’ve been looking for you as well,” Candee said.

Jonathan managed to coax his eyes to travel northward to Candee’s elfin face. When he did he noticed her smile. There was something abnormal about it even though he couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

“I wanted to tell you that I was wrong about my parents,” Candee said. “Totally wrong.”

Before Jonathan could respond to this shocking reversal, both of Candee’s parents rounded the end of the aisle and came up behind Candee. Her father, Stan, put his hands on Candee’s shoulders and beamed.

“Now this is one cute chick, wouldn’t you say?” Stan said proudly. “And as an added inducement, there’s good, healthy genes in these ovaries.”

Candee glanced up into her father’s face and gave him an adoring look.

Jonathan averted his eyes. He thought he might puke. These people belonged in a zoo.

“We’ve missed you at the house,” Candee’s mother, Joy, said. “Why don’t you come over tonight. Us adults will be having a get-together, but it doesn’t mean you two youths can’t spend some quality time together.”

“Yes, well, that sounds great,” Jonathan said. He felt a mild degree of panic since Joy had moved to his side, hemming him in against the shelving. Candee and Stan were blocking his way forward.

“Can we count on you?” Joy asked.

Jonathan let his eyes streak past Candee’s face. She was still smiling that same smile, and Jonathan realized what it was that was abnormal about it. It was fake. It was the kind of smile people made when they tell themselves to smile. It wasn’t a reflection of inner emotion.

“I got a lot of homework tonight,” Jonathan said. He started to back up his shopping cart.

Joy gazed into Jonathan’s cart. “You certainly are a busy little shopper. Are you having a meeting at your house as well? Perhaps we should all come over there.”

“No, no,” Jonathan said nervously. “Nobody’s coming
over. Nothing like that at all. I’m just picking up some TV munchies.” Jonathan wondered if these people somehow knew about their little group.

Another glance at their fake smiles gave Jonathan a shiver of fear and propelled him to “make tracks.” Abruptly he yanked his cart backward, turned it around, yelled that he had to be going, and rapidly headed toward the check-out lanes. As he walked he could feel the Taylor family’s eyes on his back.

“THIS IS THE STREET,” PITT SAID. HE WAS DIRECTING
Nancy to his cousin’s apartment where they’d all agreed to meet once again. Sheila was in the backseat of the minivan clutching a sheaf of papers.

It was already dark and the streetlamps were lit. As they approached the proper garden apartment complex, Nancy slowed.

“Seems to be a lot of people out tonight,” Nancy said.

“You’re right,” Pitt said. “Looks like noontime in the city center rather than evening in the suburbs.”

“I can understand the ones with dogs,” Sheila said. “But what are these other people doing? Are they just walking aimlessly?”

“It’s weird,” Pitt admitted. “No one seems to be talking to anyone, yet they are all smiling.”

“So they are,” Sheila said.

“What should I do?” Nancy asked. They were almost to their destination.

“Drive around the block,” Sheila suggested. “Let’s see if they notice us.”

Nancy took the suggestion. As they came back to where
they’d started, none of the many pedestrians appeared to look in their direction.

“Let’s go in,” Sheila said.

Nancy parked. They all alighted quickly. Pitt let the women go ahead. By the time he got to the common entry door, the women were already heading up the interior stairway. Pitt looked back out to the street. He’d had the distinct feeling as he’d come up the path that he was being watched, but as he scanned the area, none of the people were looking in his direction.

Cassy opened the door in response to Pitt’s knock. Pitt’s face brightened. He was relieved to see her. “How’d the trip go?” he asked.

“Not so good,” Cassy admitted.

“Did you see Beau?”

“Yes, I saw him,” Cassy said. “But I’d rather not talk about it now.”

“Okay,” Pitt said supportively. He was concerned. He could tell Cassy was truly troubled. He followed her into the living room.

“I’m glad you all are finally here,” Eugene said. His blue chambray shirt was open at the neck and his knitted tie was loosened. His dark eyes darted from person to person. He was wired: a far cry from his bored condescension the evening before.

Sitting around the coffee table were Jesse, Nancy, and Sheila. On the table was the Tupperware container with the two black discs along with an assortment of potato chips from Jonathan’s shopping foray. Jonathan was at the window intermittently peeking out. Pitt and Cassy took chairs.

“You know there’s a shitload of people wandering around outside,” Jonathan said.

“Jonathan, watch your language,” Nancy scolded.

“We saw them,” Sheila said. “They ignored us.”

“Can I have everyone’s attention,” Eugene said. “I’ve had an interesting day to say the least. Carl and I threw everything we had at this black disc. It is incredibly hard.”

“Who’s Carl?” Sheila asked.

“My Ph.D. assistant,” Eugene said.

“I thought we agreed to keep all this among ourselves,” Sheila said. “At least until we know what we’re dealing with.”

“Carl’s fine,” Eugene said. “But you’re right. Maybe I should have been working by myself. I have to admit I was skeptical about all this, but I’m not now.”

“What did you find?” Sheila asked.

“The disc is not made of any natural material,” Eugene said. “It’s a polymer of sorts. Actually more like a ceramic, but not a true ceramic because there’s a metallic component.”

“It’s even got diamond in it,” Jesse said.

Eugene nodded. “Diamond, silicon, and a type of metal that we have yet to identify.”

“What are you saying?” Cassy asked.

“We’re saying that it’s made of a substance that our current capabilities could not possibly duplicate.”

“So say it in English,” Jonathan voiced. “It’s extraterrestrial, that’s what it is.”

The reality of the confirmation stunned everyone, even though everyone except Eugene had expected as much.

“Well, we’ve made some progress today as well,” Sheila said. She looked at Nancy.

“We’ve tentatively located a virus,” Nancy said.

“An alien virus?” Eugene asked, turning pale.

“Yes and no,” Sheila said.

“Come on!” Eugene complained. “Stop teasing us. What are you suggesting?”

“From my initial investigations,” Nancy said, “and I have to emphasize initial, there is a virus involved, but it hasn’t come in these black discs. At least not now. The virus has been here a long time: a long, long time, because it’s in every organism I tested today. My guess is that it is in every earthly organism with a genome large enough to house it.”

“So it didn’t come in these little spaceships?” Jonathan asked. He sounded disappointed.

“If it’s not a virus, what’s in the infectious fluid?” Eugene asked.

“It’s a protein,” Nancy said. “Something like a prion. You know, like what causes Mad Cow disease. But not exactly the same because this protein reacts with the viral DNA. In fact that’s how I found the virus so easily. I used the protein as a probe.”

“What we think is the protein unmasks the virus,” Sheila said.

“So the flulike syndrome is the body reacting with this protein,” Eugene said.

“That’s my guess,” Nancy said. “The protein is antigenic and causes a kind of overcharged immunological insult. That’s why the lymphokines are produced in such abundance, and it’s the lymphokines that are actually responsible for the symptoms.”

“Once unmasked what is this virus doing?” Eugene asked.

“That’s a question that’s going to take some work,” Nancy admitted. “But our impression is that unlike a normal virus which only takes over a single cell, this virus is capable of taking over an entire organism, particularly the brain. So just calling it a virus is misleading. Pitt had a good, suggestion. He called it a mega-virus.”

Pitt blushed. “It just came to me,” he explained.

“This mega-virus has apparently been around way before humans evolved,” Sheila said. “Nancy found it in a highly conserved segment of DNA.”

“A segment that researchers have ignored,” Nancy said. “It’s one of those noncoding segments, or so people thought. And it’s big. It’s hundreds of thousands of base pairs long.”

“So this mega-virus has been just waiting,” Cassy said.

“That’s our thought,” Nancy said. “Perhaps some alien viral race or maybe an alien race capable of packaging itself in a viral form for space travel visited the Earth eons ago when life was just evolving. They planted themselves in the DNA like sentinels that waited to see what kind of life might develop. I suppose they could be intermittently awakened with these little spaceships. All they need is the enabling protein.”

“And now we’ve finally evolved into something that they want to inhabit,” Eugene said. “Maybe that’s what that blast of radio waves was the other night. Maybe these discs can communicate back to wherever they come from.”

“Wait a sec,” Jonathan said. “You mean that this alien virus is already inside me, like in hibernation?”

“That’s what we believe,” Sheila said, “provided our initial impressions are correct. The virus’s potential to express itself is in our genomes, sort of like an oncogene has the power to express itself as a cancer. We already know that bits and pieces of regular viruses are nestled into our DNA. This just happens to be a humongous piece.”

For a few minutes the room was dominated by an awed silence. Pitt took a potato chip. His chewing sounds seemed abnormally loud. He glanced at the others when he became aware they were staring at him. “Sorry,” he said.

“I have a feeling that these so called mega-viruses are not content just to take over,” Cassy said suddenly. “I’m afraid they have the power to cause organisms to mutate.”

All eyes turned to Cassy.

“How do you know that?” Sheila asked.

“Because I went to see my fiancé, Beau Stark, today,” Cassy admitted.

“I hardly think that was wise,” Sheila said angrily.

“I had to,” Cassy said. “I had to try to talk to him and get him to come back and be examined.”

“Did you tell him about us?” Sheila demanded.

Cassy shook her head. Thinking about her visit, she fought against tears.

Pitt got out of his chair and sat on the arm of Cassy’s. He put his arm around her shoulders.

“What made you think about mutation?” Nancy asked. “Do you mean somatic mutation, like his body changing?”

“Yes,” Cassy said. She reached up and took hold of Pitt’s hand. “The skin behind his ear has changed. It’s not human skin. It’s like something I’ve never felt.”

This new revelation brought another period of silence. Now the threat seemed even greater. There was a monster lurking in everyone.

“We have to try to do something about this,” Jesse said. “We have to do it now!”

“I agree,” Sheila said. “We don’t have a lot of data but we have some.”

“We’ve got the protein,” Nancy said. “Even if we don’t know much about it yet.”

“And we have the discs with the preliminary analysis of their composition,” Eugene added.

“The only problem is we don’t know who is infected and who isn’t,” Sheila said.

“We’ll have to take that chance,” Cassy said.

Nancy agreed. “We don’t have any choice. Let’s put all our data together in a more or less formal report. I want to have something in hand. A good place to do it is in my office at Serotec. We won’t be bothered, and we’ll have access to word processing, printers, and copiers. What do you all say?”

“I say time’s a’wasting,” Jesse remarked and got up from the couch.

Eugene put the Tupperware container with the two black discs into a knapsack that also contained printouts of the various tests he’d run. He slung it over his shoulder and followed the others outside.

Everybody squeezed into the Sellerses’ minivan. Nancy drove. As they pulled away from the curb, Jonathan looked out the back window. A few of the many pedestrians were watching them but most ignored them.

Within an hour the entire group was hard at work.
They divided the task up according to abilities. Cassy and Pitt were busy typing on computer terminals with Jonathan’s technical assistance. Nancy and Eugene were making copies of their test results. Sheila was collating the patients’ charts of hundreds of flu cases. Jesse was on the telephone.

“I think you should be the one to speak,” Nancy told Sheila. “You’re the medical doctor.”

“No doubt about it,” Eugene said. “You’ll be much more convincing. We can back you up by providing details as needed.”

“That’s a lot of responsibility,” Sheila said.

Jesse hung up the phone. “There’s a red-eye to Atlanta that leaves in an hour and ten minutes. I booked three seats. I assumed that just Sheila, Nancy, and Eugene were going.”

Nancy looked over at Jonathan. “Maybe Eugene or I should stay here,” she said.

“Mom!” Jonathan whined. “I’ll be fine.”

“I think it is important that both you people come,” Sheila said. “You’re the ones who have done the tests.”

“Jonathan can stay with us,” Cassy said.

Jonathan’s face brightened.

SEVERAL CARS PULLED UP TO THE FRONT OF THE SEROTEC
building. Pedestrians stopped their wanderings and walked over. They helped open the doors. From the first car emerged Captain Hernandez. His driver got out on the other side. It was Vince Garbon. From the car behind emerged plainclothes officers as well as Candee and her parents.