The Devil_s Workshop

Chapter 36

Max was a hero," Stacy said. "He went to Fort Detrick and found out about all this, and he tried to stop it. It's exactly the kind of thing he would do. He would risk everything, even his life, if he saw injustice or deceit. It's why they killed him." She whispered these words as if in church, kneeling in the gravel beside the SP tracks, bathed in moonlight.

They were a quarter mile east of Sugar Shack Jungle waiting for the ten-p. M. priority train carrying automobiles, which Cris had found on the Yardmaster's line-up sheet. The night was warm, and a few hundred yards up the grade they could see a cluster of hobos crouched below the tracks, also waiting to catch out, their voices rattling on the wind like water-churned rocks.

"Sometimes I think I'm going crazy, I miss him so much," she added.

Cris nodded his head. Her memories of Max brought back his own thoughts of Kennidi. He could feel his daughter's remembered warmth touching him, her child's breath on his cheek, her arm around his shoulder as she nuzzled up against him. The memory of her painful death couldn't destroy these tearful recollections.

"The thing about Max was he just seemed to understand. He could read your thoughts like a Gypsy. He would always know what frightened you, and then would find a way to help."

Cris looked over at her, struck by both her strength and beauty. The subtle moonlight lay in the shallows of her cheekbones, like pools of liquid silver, as she looked down the track for the freight.

After hearing Stacy describe her husband, Cris wondered why Max Richardson would work at Fort Detrick with such evil company. It didn't add up. "Why did Max go to study with Dexter DeMille?" he finally asked.

"Max had become extremely worried about Prions," she answered. "He told me that he felt they represented one of the most dangerous and potentially deadly situations in the global environment. He felt outbreaks like mad cow disease could be just the beginning. Mad cow was badly mishandled by the Brits in the early eighties. They didn't believe it would jump the species line, but it did, infecting sheep and cattle. The Brits have now identified over ten cases of human infestation, proving that Prions can also jump to Homo sapiens. These human cases of mad cow disease behave just like the Aboriginal Kuru that Dexter DeMille helped Carleton Gajdusek isolate in the seventies. Kuru was caused by a bizarre religious custom the Abos had of eating the brains of their dead relatives, so with both Kuru and mad cow, ingesting the rogue Prion is what passed it on. Max thought science was not equipped to deal with Prion sickness if it got out of control. Right now, in its pure state, it's slow-acting. We haven't seen too many human cases, but Max felt there could soon be a wave of human disease caused by infected beef. This was why Max wanted to work with Dr. DeMille-to find a cure and to understand how it spreads, and how long it incubates in humans before signs of the early stage of the disease show up, marked by mood swings and rages."

Cris was watching her closely, and she seemed to be kneeling at the altar of science.

"The problem in England was exacerbated because the government didn't fully subsidize the farms. If a farmer discovered a downer cow that he suspected had died of mad cow, the government only paid a tenth of the value of the carcass. Max said the result was that the farmer wouldn't report a diseased cow, but would sell the carcass to a feed company for full price without warning the chopping house of the cause of death. The feed company would grind it up and turn it into bonemeal and it would be used as food for other cattle. The Prions would survive in the bonemeal and would be passed to whole herds. Max was also studying the ease with which it jumped the species line. Wendell and Max ran a lab study last year and found that even vegetables fertilized with infected bonemeal carry the rogue Prion. Those vegetables could conceivably pass it to people if ingested. Not to be ultradramatic, but a case could be made that unchecked Prion disease could poison the whole earth, killing all mammalian species on the planet."

They were silent for a long moment.

"Max died trying to stop this," she went on. "We've got to get the Pale Horse Prion away from Kincaid before he further pollutes the bio-stream. The weapon that DeMille designed seems to run its course in hours, not years. That means DeMille and his team at the Devil's Workshop have juiced it up somehow. At Vanishing Lake it acted very quickly. A bio-weapon with a two-year lag time would be worthless. I know this sounds over-the-top, but if Kincaid tries to use these targeted Prions against large segments of society, he could perpetrate an event that would substantially alter the evolutionary process of mankind. If people with specific genes were eliminated, survivors who were not killed outright might share linked but weakened genes. In fifty years, who knows what downstream effect this could have on human development? We've got to prove that those bastards at the Devil's Workshop are actually developing this shit, and if we're going to get anybody's attention, we need a sample so we can choke Admiral Zoll on the evidence."

When she finished, Cris was again swept by a sense of his own inadequacy. "Stacy, I'm not sure I have what it takes. I'm not a hundred percent. Things have changed for me. I'm not like I used to be. I'm just not sure I can do it."

She looked at him, and wished Max were here. Max would take the challenge no matter the outcome. The ex-Marine kneeling beside her was no substitute for her dead husband, but with Buddy gone he was all she had. She couldn't let him quit. She finally reached out, took his hand, and squeezed it. "I know," she said softly. "I feel the same way, but we have to try. Too much is at stake."

"I'm still shaky," he confided. "And I still crave alcohol. Sometimes it's all I can think about. I'm not sure I can even stay sober. Buddy took the guns, and we're outnumbered thirty or forty to one. We need a plan, and I haven't a clue"

When she looked over at him, for the first time she could see the Marine in the picture behind his father's bar. Cris's youthful intensity burned in blue eyes that reflected moonlight. Then, just as quickly as the vision materialized, it was gone.

Suddenly, a light appeared against a line of trees in the distance. Then the wide yellow-and-red nose of a five-thousand-horsepower MK5 engine came around the curve 150 yards away. The headlights now turned toward them and zigzagged figure eights across the rails as it rumbled slowly in their direction. The night birds and the distant hobos fell silent as the creaking, groaning monster moved up the tracks, straining to pull a hundred loaded stack cars up the 2.3 percent grade.

The engine moved past, followed by two B-unit power packs and a second MK5 hooked backward. As the four-piece multiple unit locomotive lumbered by, they felt the ground shaking. The hot wind from the blower duct that cooled the traction motor rippled their clothes like a desert wind. Then, for as far as they could see, there were car carriers. Three decks high, the multicolored Japanese, German, and American cars creaked and rocked on their chained-down axles. Shimmering acrylic rainbow colors glistened in the moonlight like endless iron necklaces.

"Now!" Cris shouted, as he grabbed Stacy's hand. They ran up alongside one of the car carriers. The train was moving only five miles an hour up the two-mile grade, and it was easy to get alongside the car Cris had chosen.

"Grab the front handle. Watch your feet!" Cris yelled, as he sprinted alongside the car. Then he jumped for the foot stirrup, caught hold of the side grab-iron on the car, and swung aboard. Once he cleared the space, she also lunged for the handle, catching it and jumping up onto the slow-moving foot stirrup.

The car they were on rumbled past a second group of hobos, who were now also running beside the train, trying to catch a ride a few cars back. The rattling, rocking freight now swayed energetically under their feet.

"Where do we sit?" she asked, her heart beating with exhilaration.

"Follow me," he said.

They began to climb a small red ladder, the metal wheels rumbling and growling on the steel rails below them.

"Be careful-don't slip. It's a Cuisinart under there," he warned.

They climbed up to the top of the train, where a line of new Mercedes were rocking on their axle chains. He edged along from car to car until he was at the front of the carrier. Then Cris took a pocketknife out of his pants, popped the chrome strip off the door of a white Mercedes sedan, reached through the crack, and released the lock. He opened the door and got in, sliding across the German leather to make room for Stacy behind the wheel. She joined him in the front seat and closed the door. He opened the ashtray and pulled out the keys.

"Let's get it going," he said, handing her the keys. She turned on the engine. He leaned over and checked the gas gauge. "Half a tank." He nodded in satisfaction, then turned on the climate control, setting it at seventy-two degrees. "Welcome to the hobo Dome Liner. What kinda music do you like?"

"Pop… or R and B," she smiled.

He found a station and set the volume low. Then he reclined the seat.

"And I thought this was gonna be a grim, dirty ride," she said.

"Every occupation has its points of craft, even hoboing, but there's also a practical side to this. We've got a three-mile tunnel up ahead, which would asphyxiate us if we were outside. In here we'll be fine."

They sat back and listened to the music, as the East Texas landscape floated past under a cloudless, moonlit sky. Half an horn-later they flashed into the blackness of the long tunnel, and, as Cris had promised, they rode through the deadly diesel fumes breathing cool air-conditioning.

After they came out of the tunnel they rode in comfortable silence. Stacy glanced at Cris, who was pensively looking out the window at the passing scenery. "It must have been horrible losing your daughter like that," she suddenly said, reading his thoughts as accurately as Max used to read hers. "I can imagine how much you must miss her." She waited for his reply.

He bit his lip but didn't answer. Words couldn't possibly express Cris's true feelings.