“Meaning I must be one too,” Alex managed.
“It’s different for you. You’re a guy.”
“That would make you a girl.”
Spoken as if he just realized it.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked her.
“What, like you’re an alien or something?… Sorry, that wasn’t funny.”
“Only because it’s true.”
Her expression changed, more what he was used to seeing from her. “Then why don’t you look any different from anyone else? I mean, I understand DNA, but, hey, we’re only a bit off from the great apes as human beings and we look totally different.”
“You forgetting the CAT scan that found something in my head? You forgetting all the shit Dr. Chu figured out about me from just a blood test?”
“Neither of those have anything to do with your appearance.”
“You mean, like I’ve got two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears, two feet, two hands, two—”
“You can stop there. And the answer’s yes. The entire study of astrobiology postulates that alien life would develop according to its native environment, potentially so different from us that we wouldn’t even recognize or identify it as life.”
“So what’s your point?”
“I just made it. The odds that an alien species could develop along parallel or identical lines to our own would be off the charts.”
Alex rolled his eyes. “I’m guessing the odds of ever finding alien life of any kind would be off the charts. And you’re missing the real point, anyway.”
“What’s that?”
“Go back eighteen years, Sam. Somebody from that other world hid me here and made sure no one could follow. Raiff’s been waiting the whole time in case the ash man and these drones got wise to my presence. And if I’ve got something the bad guys want, it stands to figure it can help the good guys.”
“Which still leaves us with a big question,” she told him.
“What’s that?”
“Just who are the good guys?”
His expression tightened. “Your parents, Sam, and you need to call them. They’ll be going crazy now.”
“Call them with what?”
“We’ll buy one of those throwaway phones.”
“With what?”
“Haven’t figured that out yet, but I will.” He tried to smile, came up just short. “I’m the savior, remember?” A faraway look suddenly filled his sandy brown eyes. “Some savior. I couldn’t even save my own mother and father.”
“One thing’s for sure,” Sam told him, trying to bring him back. “We’re not going to find the answers we need in these woods.”
“I was thinking more like someplace that isn’t there anymore.”
“What’s that?” Sam asked.
“Laboratory Z.”
70
MARSHALING THE FORCES
RATHMAN FOUND LANGSTON MARSH in his Memory Room, polishing the wreckage of his father’s plane with a rag dipped in solvent that smelled like fresh lacquer.
“What do you remember most about your father, Colonel?” Marsh asked him, without turning from his toils.
“Getting smacked when he came home drunk.”
“For misbehaving?”
“For happening to be there.”
Marsh finally looked his way. “Unhappy memories, then.”
“I don’t think about it much, sir. Not at all, really, anymore.”
“They’re memories all the same,” Marsh said, backing away and regarding the wreckage as if to inspect his own handiwork at keeping the metal as pristine and shiny as he could. “I have very few of my father and that number seems to shrink each year. One stands out, though, one that will never slip away.” Still regarding the wreckage, perhaps seeing the plane as whole again, he said, “Not long before that night, he took me flying. Just the two of us. Strapped me into the cockpit in the seat behind his in an old de Havilland Hornet F.1 he’d restored himself and kept hangared at the base. It had that famous Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. It was my first time flying. I remember being scared at first, but I was with my father and so long as I was with him, nothing bad could happen. I’m sorry it wasn’t the same for you, Colonel.”
“It was a long time ago, sir.”
Marsh’s eyes remained fixed on the wreckage. “It wasn’t long after my maiden flight that my father was shot down. I remember thinking it would never’ve happened if I’d been with him, because he never would have let anything bad happen to me. I blamed myself, Colonel.” Marsh looked Rathman’s way, his gaze curious. “Did you blame yourself when your father beat you?”
“I blamed the fact that he was an asshole, a lush, and a loser.”
“You joined the army to get away from him,” Marsh said, in what had started out as a question.
“I joined the army so I could come back one day and square things. My father was a big man too, sir, a dockworker and longshoreman who’d put any number of men in the hospital he took on in bar fights. Those were the nights he was the nicest, having already got it out of his system. He beat me because it was convenient.”
“And did you?”
“Did I what?”