Darwin’s Children

Augustine knew he could take responsibility for a considerable share of that madness. He had once fanned the flames of fear himself, hoping to rise in the ranks to director of the National Institutes of Health and procure more funds from a reluctant Congress.

Instead, the president’s select committee on Herod’s issues had promoted him laterally to become czar of SHEVA, in charge of more than 120 schools around the country.

Parent opposition groups called him the commandant, or Colonel Klink.

Those were the kind names.

He finished reading, then crimped the corner of the e-paper until it broke, automatically erasing the memory strip. The display side of the paper turned orange. He handed the attendant the scrap and received his ginger ale in exchange.

“Takeoff in six minutes, sir,” the attendant said.

“Am I traveling alone?” Augustine asked, looking around the back of his seat.

“Yes, sir,” the attendant said.

Augustine smiled, but there was no joy in it. His face was lined and gray. His hair had turned almost white in the past five years. He looked twenty years older than his chronological age of fifty-nine.

He peered through the window at the welcome storm blowing in fits and starts over most of Virginia and Maryland. Tomorrow was going to be dry once again and mercilessly sunny with a high of ninety-three. It would be warm when he gave his little propaganda speech in Lexington.

The South and East were in the fourth year of a dry spell. Kentucky was no longer a state of blue grass. Much of it looked like California at the end of a parched summer. Some called it punishment, though there had been record corn and wheat crops.

Jay Leno had once cracked that SHEVA had pushed global warming onto a back burner.

Augustine fidgeted with the clasp on the attaché case. The plane taxied. With nothing but raindrop-blurred runway visible outside the window, he pulled out the paper edition of the Washington Post. That and the Cleveland Plain Dealer were the only two true newspapers he read now. Most of the other dailies around the country had succumbed to the deep recession. Even the New York Times was published only in an electronic edition.

Some wags called the online journals “electrons.” Whereas paper had two sides, electrons were biased toward the negative. The online journals certainly had nothing good to say about Emergency Action.

“Mea maxima culpa,” Augustine whispered, his nervous little prayer of contrition. Infrequently, that mantra of guilt changed places with another voice that insisted it was time to die, to put himself at the mercy of a just God.

But Augustine had practiced medicine, studied disease, and struggled in politics too long to believe in a kind or generous deity. And he did not want to believe in the other.

The one that would be most interested in Mark Augustine’s soul.

The plane reached the end of the runway and ascended quickly, efficiently, on the wind from a rich bass roar.

The attendant touched his shoulder and smiled down on him. Augustine had somehow managed a catnap of perhaps ten minutes, a blessing. He felt almost at peace. The plane was at altitude, flying level. “Dr. Augustine, something’s come up. We have orders to take you back to Washington. There’s a secure satellite channel open for you.”

Augustine took the handheld and listened. His face became, if that was possible, even more ashen. A few minutes later, he returned the phone to the attendant and left his seat to walk gingerly down the aisle to the washroom. There, he urinated, bracing the top of his head and one hand against the curved bulkhead. The plane was banking to make a turn.

He was scheduled for an emergency meeting with the secretary of Health and Human Services, his immediate superior, and representatives from the Centers for Disease Control.

He pushed the little flush button, zipped up, washed his hands thoroughly, rinsed his gray, surprisingly corpselike face, and stared at himself in the narrow mirror. A little turbulence made the jet bounce.

The mirror always showed someone other than the man he had wanted to become. The last thing Mark Augustine had ever imagined he would be doing was running a network of concentration camps. Despite the educational amenities and the lack of death houses, that was precisely what the schools were: isolated camps used to park a generation of children at high expense, with no in and out privileges.

No peace. No respite. Only test after test after cruel test for everyone on the planet.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Spotsylvania County (#ulink_12ce5a65-3177-593c-82f3-a7d882446c40)

Stella watched her parents strip the house. She wept silently.

Kaye dragged a wooden box stacked high with the computer and the most important of their books and papers out to the Dodge. Mitch burned documents in a rusty oil drum in the backyard.

Kaye tersely told Stella to throw the clothes she really wanted into a single small suitcase and anything else into a plastic garbage bag, which they would take if there was room left in the car.

“I didn’t mean to do this,” Stella said softly. Kaye did not hear or, more likely, did not think it best to listen to her daughter now. Louder, Stella added, “I like this house.”

“So do I, honey. So do I,” Kaye said, her face stony.

In the kitchen, Mitch smashed the cell phone and pulled out the little plastic circuit boards, then jammed them in his pocket. He would throw them out the window or drop them in a garbage can in another state. He then smashed the answering machine.

“Don’t bother,” Kaye said as she lugged the plastic bag full of clothes down the hall. “We’re probably the most listened-to family in America.”

“Old habit,” Mitch said. “Leave me to my illusions.”

“I’ve made trouble and I’m putting you in danger,” Stella said. “I should just go away. I should just go into a camp.”

“Us, in danger?” Kaye stopped and spun around at the end of the hall. “Are you testing me?” she demanded. “We are not worried for ourselves, Stella. We have never been worried about ourselves.” Her hands moved in small arcs from hips to shoulders, and then she crossed her arms.

“I don’t understand why this has to happen,” Stella said. “Please, let’s stay here and if they come, they come, all right?”

Kaye’s face turned white.

Stella could not stop talking. “You say you’re afraid for me, but are you really afraid for yourselves, for how you’ll feel if—”

“Shut up, Stella,” Kaye said, shaking, then regretted the sharp words. “Please. We have to get out of here quickly.”

“I’d know others like me. I could find out what we really need to do. They have to accept us someday.”

“They could just as easily kill you all,” Mitch said, standing behind Kaye.

“That’s crazy,” Stella said. “Their own children?”

Mitch and Kaye faced off against their daughter down the length of the hall. Kaye seemed to recognize this symbolism and turned halfway, not looking directly at Stella, but at the plasterboard, the cornice, the paint, her eyes searching these blank things as if they might be sacred texts.

“I don’t think they would,” Stella said.

“That is not your concern,” Mitch said.

Stella desperately wrinkled her face in what she hoped was a smile. Her tears started to flow. “If it isn’t my concern, whose is it?”

“Not yours, alone, not yet,” Mitch said, his voice many degrees softer, and so full of painful, angry love that Stella’s throat itched. She scratched her neck with her fingers.

Kaye looked up. “Damn,” she said, reminded of something. She stared at her fingers and her nails and rushed into the bathroom. There, she lathered and rinsed her hands for several minutes.

Steam billowed from the sink as Stella stood by the door.

“Fred stuff?” Stella asked.