Elise nodded. “I think so…it’s all theory right now.”

“Another downside. We’re playing with dynamite here.” Daniel mused aloud. “So we could end up with some kind of amoral superman in charge of the uninfected fearful masses, claiming to ‘protect’ them. That’s always the way people accumulate power. They claim patriotism; they say they are providing security. Play on people’s fear. Stalin did it, Hitler did it, and Mao. Though they didn’t follow it up with mass murder, McCarthy did it in the fifties and Cheney did it after 9/11. And whoever arises would be a true believer! Maybe someone who really thought he was helping people by enslaving them, and killing us Edens. With all the EP’s physiological advantages. Self-righteous psychopaths…it could make the Holocaust look mild by comparison.”

Elise looked into Daniel’s eyes, deliberately reached out to take his hands in hers. She shook them in time with her words. “I don’t know. I just – don’t – know.” Her eyes flicked toward Skull, in the front seat.

He forced his own away. Skull had been a sniper. Not that they were all bad, or even most, but a significant minority of snipers had serious problems coming back from war. Drawing a cold bead on enemy combatants, ending life after life from an impersonal distance, had to take a toll…unless he was already suited for it by a certain personality quirk. Unless he secretly liked it. Skull had wanted to execute the INS security, he’d wanted to liquidate the scientists…and he’d put a gun to Daniel’s chest.

Daniel wondered what would happen if Skull got infected. Which way would his tightly-wound psyche turn? How long would he keep following Zeke’s orders? What if he decided Zeke wasn’t himself anymore, with the Eden Plague in him?

It was the same excuse uninfected humanity would use for wiping them out, or cutting their brains up, he realized. They would say the infectees weren’t human anymore, and that would justify a whole legion of new Doctor Mengeles, the Nazi concentration camp experimenter. The others would say their will was not their own, that they were some kind of monsters, when in reality, they were the monsters.

All you had to do was take a visit to Dachau or Auschwitz or Srebrenica to see what kind of monsters humans could be. Humanity had always been brutally selfish; one slip, trip and fall away from lynch-mob violence, from downright evil. It wouldn’t take much of a breakdown in society to push them all across that line.

Because the non-Edens were now the weaker species, so they would be afraid of Plague carriers, he realized. That fear would push them into it. When people feared something they hated it and wanted to destroy it.

Daniel didn’t think the Eden Plague compromised his free will. It didn’t stop him being human. No more than being in love – with Elise? – or hating someone or being afraid or winning the lottery did. It was just one more piece of life. But once they got where they were going, things in their makeshift army might fall apart. The center might not hold. The fate of humanity might rest on just how this little group, these nine people, handled the next few days.

Daniel looked in Elise’s eyes and saw she was thinking thoughts in line with his.

Just then a cell phone rang.

Everyone looked around in confusion. A babble of voices came over the net.

“Shut up!” Zeke roared. “Where is it?”

Elise pulled the offending instrument out of a pocket. “I took it off of Karl…the guy that tried to shoot us.” She looked apologetic. “I’m sorry, I forgot until now!”

Daniel grabbed it, still ringing. He looked at the incoming number, pulled out a marker, and wrote it on his arm. Then he opened it up, pulled the battery and sim card out. “Just a minute…” He wiped their prints off it, then waited for the next overpass. Then threw the whole mess out and down at speed.

“Vinny, I took the caller’s number. If I use a disposable phone to call it, and they have a trace ready, how long do I have?”

Vinny answered, “At least thirty seconds, maybe a minute. After that, they will know what wireless cell you are calling from, which will snapshot our position within a couple of miles.”

“Thanks.” Daniel put the battery in his last disposable phone, sat there thinking about what to say. Then dialed. “Someone call out at five second intervals please.”

Ring.

“Jenkins.” A middle-aged male voice, rich, self-assured.

Daniel’s brain stuttered. He swallowed. He hoped he was wrong.

“Mister Jervis Andrew Jenkins the Third?” He asked.

“FIVE.”

“Yes. Who is this?”

“Sir…I’m sorry about your son. I apologize for my part in his death.”

A silence.

“TEN.”

“Markis? Daniel Markis? You have to come in. Everything depends on it.”

“Mister Jenkins, we have the Plagues. Both of them. Leave us alone. I can’t let them be used for what you want.”

“FIFTEEN.”

“What is it that I want?” he asked with forced amusement.

He’s stalling.

“The Plagues are ticking time bombs, and only my restraint will keep them from exploding. Leave us alone.”

“TWENTY.”

“We recovered enough from the lab to restart the research.”

“It will be too late. I’m hanging up now, before the trace. I truly am sorry about your son.”

“TWENTY-FIVE.”

Jenkins’ tone changed then, chill and vicious. “You son of a bitch, I’ll hunt you down for Andy’s sake, I swear to God I will –”

Daniel hung up. Took the battery out. Handed it to Elise. “Throw this away, will you?” He massaged his throbbing temples. He had no doubt Jenkins would try to do as he said.

***

A little while after they crossed into West Virginia they made a last stop for gas and food, then turned northward onto a nondescript two-lane that looked like it had last been repaved in the Eisenhower administration. It wended its way up into the central Appalachians, through towns with names like Cornstalk and Trout and Cold Knob, where bony women in faded pioneer dresses or worn jeans and tee shirts put their hands with cigarettes on their hips and stared suspiciously at them; where hard-eyed men in John Deere and Caterpillar caps spat tobacco juice from their rocking chairs on their front porches or out of their pickup truck windows; where every rickety house had an American flag on an angled pole nailed to the front post, and every store, no matter what kind, added “Bait and Tackle” and “Guns and Ammunition” and “Beer and Cigarettes” to its signage.

West Virginia was the only state to actually secede from the Confederacy to the Union, and they took their patriotism seriously. So did every one of their band, though Daniel was sure they all had their own ideas about how to apply it. He studied each of the men in turn.

This Appalachian backwater was a far cry from the thin splash of freeway suburbia along the interstate, where smiling cashiers fat with fast food asked, “Would you like fries with that?” in deliberately flattened accents. They almost expected the sound of banjos to come wafting through their opened windows.

Driving at mountain road speeds, twenty to forty, they turned off on an unmarked gravel track, still more or less northwards by the angle of the chill sunlight.

They passed by beautiful, rugged woodland with patches of snow lingering in the shady spots. They were glad of their high clearances and four wheel drives when they had to cross a shallow but swift stream of snowmelt that cut the road. Larry had to be shown how to engage his 4WD on the Escalade. To Daniel it didn’t look like he’d ever used it in urban Atlanta.

After another hour and progressively worsening terrain, they climbed a short way up a steep mountainside on what looked like a logging trail until they abruptly broke out onto a very wide, well-graded gravel highway. Turning sharply left, they climbed a couple of hundred yards more onto – into – an otherworldly landscape, a different world.