breeze would become a wind and obliterate our trail.
In a few hours, we had seen more than we could process, analyze, and
apply to our problem things that we ardently wished we’d never seen.
We would have preferred to avoid another sortie onto the base, but until
we found Jimmy Wing and Orson, duty required us to revisit this nest of
nightmares.
We were leaving now because we were temporarily at a dead end, not sure
where to continue the search, and we had to strategize. Besides, more
than two of us would be needed to comb even the known warrens of wern.
In addition, dawn was little more than an hour away, and I had not worn
my Elephant Man cloak, with hood and veil.
The Suburban, which the kidnapper had parked at the fence, was gone. I
was not surprised to see that it was missing. Fortunately, I had
memorized the license-plate number.
Bobby drove to the snarl of driftwood and tumbleweed that lay sixty feet
from the fence. I retrieved my bicycle from concealment and loaded it
into the back of the Jeep.
Passing through the dark tunnel under Highway 1, without headlights,
Bobby accelerated. Engine noise, like barrages from ack-ack guns,
rattled back to us from the concrete walls.
I remembered the mysterious figure that I had seen earlier on the
sloping buttress at the west end of this passage, and my tension grew
rather than diminished as the farther end became the nearer end.
When we raced into the open, I tensed, half expecting an assault, but
nothing was waiting for us.
A hundred yards west of the highway, Bobby braked to a halt and switched
off the engine.
We had not spoken since the corridor outside the egg room. Now he said,
“Mystery Train.”
“All aboard.”
“Name of a research project, huh? ”
“According to Leland Delacroix’s security badge.” I fished that object
from a jacket pocket, fingering it in the dark, thinking about the dead
man surrounded by photographs of his family, the wedding ring in a
votive-candle holder.
“So the Mystery Train project was what gave us the troop, the
retrovirus, all these mutations. Your mom’s little tea-and-doomsday
society.”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then what? ”
“She was a theoretical geneticist, right? ”
“My mom, apprentice god.”
“Virus designer, creature creator.” I “Medically valuable little
creatures, benign viruses, ” I said.
“Except for one.”
“Your folks are no prize, ” I reminded him.
With a note of insincere pride, he said, “Hey, they would’ve destroyed
the world long before your mom ever did, if they’d just been given a
fair chance.” They owned the only newspaper in the county, the Moonlight
Bay Gazette, and their religion was politics, their god was power.
They were people with a plan, with an unlimited faith in the
righteousness of their beliefs. Bobby didn’t share their spooky vision
of utopia, so they had written him off ten years ago. Apparently, utopia
requires the absolute uniformity of thought and purpose exhibited by
bees in a hive.
“The point is, ” he said, “that wacko palace of the weird back there.
.. They weren’t doing biological research, bro.”
“Hodgson was in an airtight suit, not tennis shorts, ” I reminded him.
“He was in typical bio-secure gear. To protect him from being infected
by something.”
“Totally obvious, yeah. But you said yourself, the place wasn’t built
for mucking around with germs.”
“Not laid out for essential sterilization procedures, ” I agreed.
“No decontamination modules, except maybe for that one airlock.
And the floor plan is too open for high-security bio labs.”
“That madhouse, that hyped-up lava lamp, wasn’t a lab.”
“The egg room.”
“Call it what you want. It was never a lab with Bunsen burners, petri
dishes, and cages full of cute little white mice with scalp scars from
brain surgery. You know what that was, bro. We both know.”
“I’ve been brooding about it.”
“That was transport, ” Bobby said.
“Transport.”
“They pumped mondo energy into that room, maybe a nuke’s worth of
energy, maybe more, and when it was fully powered, really revving, it
took Hodgson somewhere. Hodgson and a few others. We heard them