The Blood Artists
- Автор: Хоган Чак
- Год: 1998
- Язык: английский
- Год: William Morrow
- ISBN: 978-0-688-15622-0
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «The Blood Artists». Краткое содержание книги:
Melanie smiled haltingly in defense of the human race. “But nobody could really believe that. Not even you. Look at the environment. The more we learn about the earth, the better we behave.”
He waved it all away. “Folly. Like bees getting together and deciding not to pollinate. Like termites voting whether or not to chew through wood. Man will consume his environment. Every form of life from the smallest to the largest contributes something to the earth’s ecology, repaying the overall system, except for two species: rats and man. Man is a thief, a scavenger, a hunter-gatherer — a survivor. That is all.”
“Then why do you fight for him? Why defend and preserve the species at all if as you say it will endure of its own, I don’t know, villainy?” He said nothing, and she came upon the answer herself. “Because you are the ultimate man. You are the ultimate consumer. You think you’re different, but in fact, you are the ultimate survivor.”
He stared at her, and a glimmer passed across his face — as though he were remembering suddenly that he was impaired and that things might not be necessarily as they seemed. He turned to face the lounge again. He said, “That’s the sort of thing Stephen would have said.”
“You said that before. What does that mean? That I’m like him? Or that I’m not like you? Because I can tell you for a fact: I am not like you.”
But he wasn’t listening to her. Melanie heard their flight being called overhead, and she turned and looked out across the tarmac to the giant airplanes lifting off into the night, chasing the sunset that no one feared. She dreaded their return to Atlanta.
Maryk stiffed himself awake just after takeoff, as sour jet air coursed through the cabin. The wider seats of first class did little to ease his claustrophobia but the cascade had passed and his thinking was again clear.
A flash outside drew his eye to the window. He watched as a flutter of light suffused the dark membrane of clouds below. A similar burst throbbed miles away and was answered by another closer to the airplane. Then it was as though a fuse had been lit. A succession of eruptions like flashbulbs beat all.along the silent plain of the sky. Maryk leaned into the window and watched as the atmosphere below him erupted. They were flying over a fierce electrical storm. He looked down and thought of synapses pulsing over the one-celled earth.
He felt the need to share this with someone. He looked back to Melanie on the other side of the empty seat separating them. She was wrapped shoulders to feet in a thin blue blanket. He could see the outline of her crossed arms rising and falling steadily. She was asleep. He instead reached over and eased her chair into a reclining position. She mumbled and turned over to face him but did not wake. He looked back out the window and the sky beneath the airplane was only intermittently bright as the last silent bursts of light faded behind the tail.
His tablet toned on the empty seat. He opened it and Reilly appeared in a window from somewhere inside the BDC. His image was distorted by the electrical activity. He said something and Maryk asked him to repeat it.
“Director Pearse escaped B4,” Reilly said.
Maryk was a long moment digesting this. “How?” he said.
Stephen had requested a contact suit earlier in the day. It was one of a half dozen items Reilly and Boone had imported into B4 for him. He walked out wearing it one hour after their shift ended and surprised the BioCon agent posted at the elevator. He was wearing the contact suit and walking with his cane. He asked her to step away before he took her tablet. The guard at the gate recalled a suited man driving a light green car but had not recorded the license plate. Seeing a man in a contact suit leave the BDC was like seeing a man in uniform leave an army base.
“He took nothing else?” Maryk said.
“We’ve been through B4 top to bottom.”
“Neither one of you thought to ask him what he wanted a suit for?”
“Our instructions were clear: Anything Director Pearse wants, Director Pearse gets. We told you he was getting weird. I thought it was maybe his mind starting to go. Now I think he was onto something.”
“Tap into the B4 drives. I want a rundown of anything he was looking into.”
Reilly said, “Already started that. I’ll post it as soon as it’s done.”
Maryk’s thoughts ran wild. Stephen had taken the extraordinary precaution of putting on a suit. But a suit is only meant to protect the person inside. He was a walking viral bomb and still toxic to anyone unprotected in a confined space.
He had walked off in violation of federal quarantine and had recently been acting suspiciously. Maryk knew the bizarre things that Plainville could do to the mind.
All this came to a head as his tablet toned again with another incoming message. This one was text only and the sender was Stephen Pearse. The message had been posted from a location one hundred and eighty miles south of Atlanta. It read PETER COME AT ONCE.
The Swamp
The Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and Wilderness Area ranged more than four hundred thousand acres. It was the largest and most primitive swamp in North America. Maryk’s tablet trace showed that Stephen was six miles in. A road ran most of the way.
He waited next to Melanie while the BDC helicopter rounded the northern tip of the swamp. She still wore scrubs and sneakers and was staring out her window into the Georgia dawn and the vast swamp undulating below.
“Why would he leave,” she said, “knowing he is contagious?”
“I don’t know.”
“What are you going to do if he doesn’t want to come back?”
He found her naiveté no longer amusing and recently declined to respond.
Maryk had received Stephen’s computer searches. Stephen had downloaded forty years of voting registers for the town of Plainville, Massachusetts. He had also downloaded ten years of so-called annual manifestos put out by the Rainforest Ecology Conservation International in Africa. Nothing was highlighted on either document. Stephen had also accessed a January 2012 issue of Audubon Magazine and sent off a request to the MacArthur Foundation for information on the current address of one of its fellowship recipients.
They set down upon a local highway on the edge of the refuge and transferred into three waiting Park Services Jeeps. The road deteriorated inside the swampland and ended altogether at a state park, where Freeley was waiting with a BioCon unit. They had matched the license plate of a car in the parking lot to a vehicle missing from the BDC fleet. She was pulling on a contact suit as Maryk approached.
“I didn’t think he could even walk,” she said.
Maryk said, “He walks fine.”
“What if he had gone to an airport?”
“He didn’t.”
“It’s a trap.”
Maryk was impatient. “Then I guess I’m falling for it.”
A ranger’s assistant warned of swamp vegetation rivaling that of a South American jungle. One recent hiker who violated the No Camping rule had been missing for more than six weeks. The terrain was full of sawgrass and cutting underbrush too dangerous for contact suits. Freeley and BioCon had to wait for path-clearing tools.