Immune (The Rho Agenda #2)(29)
“Well, Jim,” Jack continued, “it took balls tracking me like this, and you got my attention about the guards’ blood. Doesn’t mean I trust you.”
“Okay.”
“Tell you what. Bring some supplies back here tomorrow evening, just before dark. I’ll consider your offer.”
“What about the information I need?”
Jack motioned with the barrel of his weapon. “Tomorrow.”
With a shrug, Jim Pino turned, walking away without a backward glance. Jack watched him until he had disappeared around a bend in the canyon. Then Jack began the climb back up the steep slope to the spot he had left Janet.
She hadn’t moved. As Jack bent to examine her, the sound of her breathing hurt his ears. No longer was her chest rising and falling with a weak regular rhythm as her breath sighed out. Now her breathing rattled deep in her chest. He touched her cheek with his fingertips, an action that left pale indentations that refused to pink out again.
Jack moved to Janet’s pack, rummaging around inside until he found three syringes and a needle. Although he didn’t care to think about what he was going to try, he had made his decision. It might kill her, or he might have to kill her even if it worked, but Jack wasn’t going to let her lie there drowning in her own fluids.
The vials were labeled with a blue alcohol marker. Priest. Driver. Guard. The blood inside had long since thawed. Three different vials. Probably three different blood types. Each one massively infested with the Rho Project nanites.
Most likely the nanites had long since become inoperative, the blood in the vials rancid. Even if this worked, the stuff would probably leave Janet as insane as Priest had been. As Jack attached the needle to the first of the three vials and slid it into a vein in Janet’s arm, he took a deep breath. It didn’t matter. He would give her this one last chance at life.
~
Far down the canyon, the sound of the scream brought Tall Bear to an abrupt halt. On and on it went, the sound magnified by echoes from opposing canyon walls. As he listened, the small hairs along the base of his neck rose up. He had heard that same scream last night from the Navajo people in his dream.
For a long moment, he stared back in the direction he had come from. Then, with a shake of his head, Tall Bear turned away, continuing his journey back to the truck. The girl was Gregory’s problem, only one of many. But, having looked into the man’s strange eyes, Tall Bear had a feeling Jack Gregory could play whatever hand he was dealt.
As he crested a rise to see the old Jeep Cherokee where he had left it, Tall Bear paused for one more look back up the canyon. Life on the res had just gotten a whole lot more interesting.
25
A dull throbbing pulsed through the cave, accentuated by the changing intensity of the magenta glow from the alien ship. Reclined on one of the command deck couches, completely immersed in the holographic experience as her mind probed the onboard computer systems, Jennifer didn’t notice. Neither did she notice when she rose from the couch and began climbing down through the hole between decks.
Reaching the room she thought of as the medical lab, Jennifer moved directly across to the door that blocked access to the inner part of the ship, the door they had never discovered how to open.
Jennifer stopped, her unseeing eyes staring straight ahead, her arms hanging limply at her sides, her head tilting slightly to the left, as if some part of her subconscious was aware of the problem the door presented. Suddenly, she stepped forward again, passing through the wall as if it had no more substance than the holographic field that cloaked the cave entrance.
The room was smaller than the medical lab, crowded with glowing transparent tubes of varying thickness, like the tentacles of some psychedelic sea anemone. Each of the tubes pulsed with flowing, multicolored globules of light. Thousands of the plasma globules climbed and danced atop each other where the tubes connected together, like a great hive of bees rubbing together in a dance of communication.
Amidst the forest of plasma tubes, a lone central couch, a larger replica of the tentacle couch in the medical lab, awaited. Jennifer moved forward, settling into the couch as easily as if she were sliding into her own bed. And as she settled in, tiny tendrils sprouted from the surrounding tubes, each feeling its way across her body toward the desired nerve ending that would form its connection. The tendrils continued to multiply until there were thousands of them, millions, each lit with its own internal light.
As the last of these came to rest, a new pulse rippled through the room, the light rising in intensity several orders of magnitude greater than before. Deep within the confines of the couch, Jennifer’s small body convulsed.
Ten miles away, stretched out in their own beds, Heather’s and Mark’s bodies shook their bed frames hard enough to rattle the floor. But not hard enough to dispel the dream.
26
Dr. Stephenson might be brilliant, but his skills as a surgeon were rudimentary, at best. It was now clear why he didn’t attempt surgery directly on the brain. Even with his knowledge of the alien technology, he needed nerve endings that did not require superior surgical technique to reach. As Raul stared down at the tangled mess of connecting alien tubes and conduits, a sharp pang of regret pounded his brain like a five-pound sledgehammer. Stephenson had removed his legs at the hip, leaving him connected to the alien wiring harness in such a way that he could only squirm along the floor on his belly, hunching himself forward with his hands and arms, the bundle of tubes dragging along behind.