Two Weeks' Notice

Bryn walked over to a quiet space, and took the call. “Mrs. Renfer?”

“Bryn?” The relief in the woman’s voice was as tragic as it was obvious. “Bryn, I know you told me not to call all the time, but this is important. I think—my husband knows something. I cut my hand yesterday, a bad one, and he knows it healed up.”

Same song, second verse. “Lynnette, you haven’t told him? Why not? Didn’t we talk about that in the group?”

“Yes, but—but I just can’t. I can’t tell him the truth yet. What if I tell him…something else?”

“Like what?”

“I’m—a—a fast healer?” It was funny, but the desperate panic in Lynnette’s voice wasn’t. Bryn was just about out of patience with the woman; there had been at least ten of these calls now, and a whole lot of meetings, and Lynnette was stubbornly stuck in place, unwilling to move forward. Maybe having her husband actually see something that tipped the scales was a good thing, ultimately. It took away any chance of Lynnette avoiding the crash.

“You know that’s nonsense,” Bryn said. “Just tell him. Take him to Pharmadene and educate him. Please.”

She hung up on Lynnette’s standard Reasons Why That Can’t Happen, and went back to Carl, who was still staring into his no-doubt-gone-cold coffee as if it held the answers. “Was that, ah, one of us?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Not everybody deals with it well. Carl, I’m not kidding. It’s very important that you not stay where you are right now emotionally. It’s not a good place. Your family can help you, and you need to read them in on this as soon as you can, okay? Promise me you will.”

He nodded, but it was more of a mechanical action than agreement. “What about the shots?” he asked. “I hear you have someone else you get them from instead of the government. Should I do that? I mean, if there’s a choice, I’d rather not have the FBI looking down my throat, you know?”

“I know,” Bryn said. “But the fact is, my guy can’t manufacture enough to support everyone who needs the drug, and the other option I know about is worse than the FBI. Trust me.”

Carl laughed, a little hollowly. “What’s worse than being owned by the government?”

“Being owned by a madman who wrings you dry,” she said. “Don’t go looking for that, Carl. This is early days. Things will change, and maybe they’ll get better, but for now, play it safe. And get your wife into this. I mean it.” When he stayed silent, Bryn said, “Do you have kids?”

“Two,” he said. “A nine-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl.”

Her heart broke a little—not just for him, but selfishly on her own account. She’d wanted children, but in that vague, rosy-future sort of way that she’d assumed would eventually come into focus when she met the right person.

She’d met the right person, she thought. But there was no future of babies. Not for her.

Bryn smiled and said, “Pictures?”

He looked startled at that, but of course he had them, snapshots on his phone at least. He passed it over, and she paged through the photos. “Wow,” she said. “Great-looking kids. What are their names?”

“Robert and Josie,” he said. “What am I supposed to tell them? They’re going to grow up, and my wife is going to get older, and I’m going to just…be this. Every day, the same. I don’t get older. I don’t change. I just…exist.”

“Some people pay good money for that,” Bryn said. She was going for a joke, but he didn’t smile, not even a little.

“We’re never going to change,” he said. “Until we rot away. How do I explain that?”

There it was, naked and panicked in his eyes, the same feeling Bryn faced, and pushed down, at least once a day. As far as she knew, they all felt it, the same shadow stalking them, relentless and dark.

She reached out and touched his hand, and felt him flinch. “I don’t know,” she said. “We’re all making this up, Carl, every day. But you have to start with your wife. It’s your only real choice.”

She talked to him a little more, but it was just noise, really; he wasn’t hearing her, and she had to resign herself to the fact that Carl, like Lynnette, just wasn’t ready yet. He’d get there. He’d have to.

Easy for you to say, part of her mocked. You don’t have to explain things to your kids. Except that she forced that out of her mind, too, every day…that she’d never have kids to explain it to, never hold her own baby, never see her child grow up. That had been taken from her, along with her life, in the basement of Fairview Mortuary, and she’d never get it back. The nanites coursing through her bloodstream could keep her walking, talking, doing almost everything the living could do…but not that.

The door was closed.

Carl walked out ten minutes later, and she sat for a while, sipping the last of her drink and feeling a little comforted by the busy, self-absorbed bustle of those around her. Like Carl, she felt like a ghost, an alien, a fake. And they come to me for help, she thought. As if I had any idea what I was doing.

Her phone rang. Oh God, it was Lynnette, again. Damn. Bryn felt a bright, sudden burst of fury, and answered. “Mrs. Renfer, I mean it. You need to stop calling—”

A scream exploded out of the phone, wordless and full of horror, and Bryn almost dropped it. “Lynnette?” She stood up, shoving the table back as she did so. Her almost-empty cup tipped over and spilled milky fluid. “Lynnette! What’s going on?”

It was chaos on the other end of the phone, screaming, shouting—a man’s voice—Lynnette begging don’t, don’t, don’t…

And then an ear-shattering blast of sound.

Lynnette’s screaming stopped.

Bryn stood very still, unable to breathe. She could still hear the man’s hoarse, half-sobbed curses.

And the sound of children crying.

And then two more quick blasts.

Only the man’s sobbing now.

And then one more blast.

And silence.

Bryn numbly hung up the call, stared at the phone a moment, then dialed Patrick McCallister’s number. He answered on the second ring.

“Lynnette Renfer,” she said. “Meet me at her house. Pat? I think it’s bad.”

He didn’t ask. He just said, “I’m on my way.”

Bryn made it to Lynnette’s small suburban home on the northern outskirts of San Diego in ten minutes, but she didn’t remember the drive. All she could hear was the sound of the crying, the shots, the silence. When she pulled in at the curb, she saw that Patrick McCallister had arrived ahead of her, in a nondescript dark sedan.

There was another car already there—like Patrick’s, it was a dark sedan, and it had a government plate on the back. Bryn wasn’t too surprised to see the front door open and Riley Block step out. “You’d better come inside,” she said to them. “This isn’t a discussion we should have in front of the neighbors.”

“Police?” Patrick asked as they crossed the threshold.

“Called off,” Riley said. Up close, Bryn could see the lines of stress around her eyes, her mouth, although she was doing a good job of holding her poker face. “It’s just us chickens. Come on. She’s going to wake up soon, and I’ll need some help.”

Riley had brought along another FBI agent Bryn didn’t know, but he was clearly read in on Pharmadene or he wouldn’t be here. He looked up and nodded as the three of them entered the Renfers’ living room, and Riley went to talk with him quietly in a corner.

Bryn didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see, but she forced herself to do it. Two small bodies lay near the sofa. Lynnette was dead on the blood-soaked cushions, the phone still clutched in her hand.

The husband, unrecognizable, lay with the shotgun fallen next to him. The place smelled like fresh hot blood, loosened bowels, gunpowder, and…obscenely…fresh cinnamon.

“He saw her cut herself and heal,” Bryn said. “Last night. She told me. I kept telling her she had to bring him in. I told her that…” She felt…well, she didn’t particularly feel anything, at the moment. Just revulsion, with an edge