The Burning Road Read online

  Because if someone just entered her name into the database and got all the information she was about to request, it would absolutely frost her. Of course, someone surely had, perhaps many people had, for reasons she would find disturbing. But she didn’t wish to dwell on that.

  C’est la vie, she forced herself to think. But just once, if I could just let myself be a bad girl …

  Abraham Prives—the name flashed on successive screens as his data file was compiled. How cold and impersonal it all looked as it stacked itself electronically. Janie touched the screen when a photographic image of him came up, to pause the progress. She saw a still photo of a sweet-looking boy who might have been ten or eleven when he’d smiled for the camera. The large brown eyes hinted at intelligence, but there was a certain reticence in them. Janie wondered if Abraham was perhaps a bit shy.

  Yet he was not so shy that he wouldn’t play a team sport. Janie was reviewing his file in the first place because he’d had an accident while playing soccer, a simple collision with another player that somehow resulted in Abraham lying flat and immobile in a hospital bed at Jameson Memorial Hospital, with two vertebrae shattered into splinters like a dropped crystal wineglass. The shards of bone had caused hideous damage to his spinal column. It was a puzzling and incongruous injury, considering the common nature of the accident itself, and that abnormality had prompted someone from the Jameson Trauma receiving area to contact the New Alchemy Foundation, where Janie worked as a research associate.

  The file would be transferred to her data dump at the foundation, where she would later retrieve and examine it in unhurried detail. But before doing so and closing out of Big Dattie’s operating system, she took a brief cruise through the information on Abraham, in the hope of forming a more complete idea about him. The database told her that he was in the ninety-fourth intelligence percentile, fully immunized, that his father had died in the Outbreaks but his mother had survived. He played sports and studied Russian in school. A nice, well-rounded, post-Outbreak thirteen-year-old.

  He’d broken a bone before—his wrist, the previous year. It had been a messy break, one that confounded his orthopedist and then took an inordinately long time to heal. The orthopedist had tested him for osteogenesis imperfecta, a long shot—but that rare bone disorder usually surfaced shortly after birth, and Abraham’s results were, as expected, negative.

  The boy had been back on the soccer field for only a month when the spinal tragedy struck.

  He went down like a sack of potatoes and he couldn’t move anything, the coach had told her when she contacted him. I just don’t understand.…

  Janie did understand, especially the sack of potatoes part. The bad news is … she thought as she pressed the screen icon that would transfer the file to her computer.

  On her list of Abraham Prives things-to-do was to speak with the person at Jameson who’d initially called the foundation. But when she’d asked around at the hospital for the person’s name, no one at Jameson seemed to know him. She decided her supervisor must have remembered it incorrectly, and was annoyed with him, not an unusual state in their strained relationship. But it didn’t matter in the long run who’d called—just that the call had been made. She was not in the business of shooting messengers.

  Before closing out of Big Dattie, she looked at the messengers of doom—the disease counters—and experienced a great longing to shoot them. It was pretty much what she expected—tuberculosis was down slightly, pneumonia up just a tad, HIV, as always, insidiously rising. But when she moved down the list to DR SAM, Big Dattie advised her that the counter for that particular disease was temporarily disabled.

  It always came down to money. That much hadn’t changed, and probably never would.

  “Look, it’s an interesting case, and I understand your eagerness to take it on, but I don’t have the budget,” Chester Malin said.

  “Then why did you send me over there?”

  “Somebody called, remember? What was I going to do, just ignore it? We have to look at these potential candidates. But we don’t have to decide to take them.”

  Janie often wondered how this man had become a supervisor. Now he crossed his arms over his ample belly and tipped his chair back so it balanced on two legs. As always, the sleeves of his shirt were rolled up, revealing hairy forearms, one of which sported a tattoo of crossed guns. Monkey Man, his coworkers had nicknamed him behind his back, a moniker he unknowingly encouraged by scratching his dry scalp with one hand when he was thinking about something.

  And though he’d come on to her on more than one occasion, he was a charter member of Janie’s personal Last Man on Earth Club.

  She tried to ignore his oddities—there was too much convincing to be done. “Oh, come on, Chet—someone thought this case would fit the profile. And I had a call yesterday from Northern Hospital in Boston that I haven’t followed up on yet, but it sounds similar. These kids both have such clear spinal involvement that we almost have to include them in our project—or someone’s going to ask why we didn’t. We might get accused of trying to skew the results. And two cases—doesn’t that seem a little odd? What if we have an emerging disease here? Think what that would mean for this place. The reputation enhancement would be just incred—”

  “It’s not an emerging disease,” he said sharply. “From what I saw in the viewer, it’s just a particularly nasty broken back. Maybe his soccer coach is trying to cover his own ass for letting the kid get in a dangerous situation.”

  “I called a couple of people who saw it happen—the coach gave me their names. And they confirmed what he told me—that it wasn’t a rough collision, or anything out of the ordinary. Apparently it was the kind of thing where the kids usually get up and brush themselves off and keep playing. Which is what the other player did. But not the Prives boy. I just wonder why.”

  “Well, I hate to tell you this, but you’re not going to find out. It’ll cost too much money.”

  “For an opportunity like this there must be some contingency funding—and we’re already giving expensive care to the current project participants—one more certainly isn’t going to be noticed.”

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “Those are eagles roosting upstairs, not chickadees. They notice everything.”

  She frowned. “So you don’t think they’ll go for it?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “And you won’t support me.”

  “Not unless you can give me a much better reason to, no.”

  As Janie was leaving his office in a huff, Chet opened up the personnel program on his computer. He tapped in a few words and closed it again.

  She hadn’t seen her former academic advisor in a few months, and Janie was surprised when she called John Sandhaus to find that he’d moved from his spacious house on the outskirts of town to the residence apartment in one of the dormitories at the nearby university.

  “Hey,” he said with a smile when she came in the door, “it’s great to see you.”

  “Yeah,” Janie said, hugging him. “We need to be more careful about staying in touch.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “My life just keeps going by faster and faster, it seems.”

  “I know the feeling.” She gestured around his apartment. “But this is all new for you.”

  “I’m getting used to it,” he said. “I think I might actually like it. Cathy does, at least. I was looking out the window one day last fall, watching the leaves come down,” he said, “and it hit me like a ton of bricks: I’ve probably spent six months of my life raking leaves. And it was in that exact moment that I realized I couldn’t rake another one. Ever. Falling leaves became the symbol of my entrapment in the rigid behaviors of modern society. And I, the human schmuck, was spending a lot of time trying to make nature behave. So we moved. And now we have a built-in supply of baby-sitters, guaranteed to self-renew every September.”

  “And a steady flow of beer-sodden adolescents, also guaranteed to self-renew. Problem is, you won�
��t be able to spank them.”

  “Yeah? Watch me. But it’s been okay so far. We’re liking it. I probably wouldn’t have taken a spot in one of the new dorms—too sterile. This one’s nice, though. Reminds me of an apartment building I used to live in when we were in Cambridge. And the rent is right, that’s for sure.”

  “You got a decent price on your own house, I hope.…”

  Mezzo, mezzo, he motioned with one hand. “Reasonably good. The market’s still pretty flooded. Frankly, I was just glad we were able to sell it.”

  “I’m never going to move again. They’ll have to scrape me off the kitchen floor of my house.”

  “Well, you have a lot of memories tied up in it. For us, it wasn’t so bad.”

  “You were very lucky.”

  “Yes, we were.” A moment of silence passed. “Come on,” John said to break it, “I’ll show you around.”

  After the tour they sat down at a table in the dining area off the kitchen and continued to exchange the details of the last few months.

  “That girl who worked for you in England …” John said.

  “Caroline.”

  “Yeah. How’s she doing now?”

  “Much better. In fact, she just got married a couple of months ago.”

  “No kidding! That’s great.” He paused briefly. “I remember you were telling me she had this English cop who was hot for her. That the guy?”

  “The very one. He’s now a lieutenant in the western Massachusetts division of Biopol.”

  “Whoa,” John said. “That’s impressive. But what I wanted to know was about her, uh—”

  “Condition,” Janie said with a smile. “She’s getting better all the time. Her toe is pretty well healed. It flares up every now and then—I don’t precisely know why, and she doesn’t want to go to any other doctor about it.…”

  “Understandable.”

  “Yeah, I guess. But she’s doing pretty well. She was determined to walk down the aisle without a limp, and by God, she did it. Took a lot of effort on her part. And I’m not sure her psyche is ever going to be completely healed. Fortunately, Michael’s very understanding.” She paused for a second. “For a biocop. She was the last person I’d match up with someone so official. But they’re truly in love, from all appearances …”

  “Hey, that’s all that matters, right? Even cops can fall in love. I sometimes forget that there are real humans inside those suits. Glad we’re not seeing too many of them lately.”

  A question flashed through Janie’s mind when John said that: Or are we seeing more of them? It seemed that way sometimes.

  “It was a tough thing, what she went through,” John continued. “You too.”

  “Yeah, it was. I think we’re both still going through it, in some ways.”

  “Just try to remember, it could have been worse. A lot worse. Hey, what about that guy you met over there? Are you still trying to get him out?”

  She lowered her gaze as if she were contemplating the handle of her coffee mug. “Yeah, I am, but it’s a frustrating process. I’m making my lawyer awfully rich.”

  “Tom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What does he say about the chances?”

  “Not very good, unfortunately. What makes it hardest to take is that Bruce is a U.S. citizen. He’s been a resident of England for twenty years, but he’s still got his U.S. passport.”

  “What was the problem, then?”

  “He set off all these bells and whistles when they scanned his passport.”

  “And you didn’t.”

  “No. Amazingly enough, I didn’t.”

  “The luck of the long-legged, I guess. Well, you never know, things may change and he’ll be able to get in.”

  “I’m not holding my breath.”

  John smirked. “None of us are, these days. Now, you said when you called that you wanted to pick my brain.”

  Janie sat up straight; her expression brightened. “And your computer’s, if you don’t mind.”

  “I charge a million bucks to touch a computer.”

  “I don’t mean you should actually touch it yourself, John, I mean, God forbid you should slime yourself … I just need to know where to go for something, that’s all.”

  “What could I possibly know about where to go on a computer that you don’t?”

  “I need to find out what sort of grant money is out there. You always seem to have such great sources, and I’ve been out of that loop for a while … you’re really sort of the Grant King, aren’t you? Or have you been losing your touch?”

  “Oh, come on, Janie.”

  “No, really. You always know how to get money. You’re like a money magnet.”

  “What do you need money for?”

  “This kid was referred to the foundation’s spinal regeneration study, but my supervisor is giving me a hard time about bringing him in. And there might be another similar case in Boston that I’d want to include. The foundation apparently doesn’t have the money.”

  John gave her a curious look. “Sure it does. With that endowment? If it were a profit company, you couldn’t afford the stock.” He stirred his coffee and tapped the spoon on the edge of the cup. “They just don’t want to spend it. I hope you’re not surprised by that.”

  “I guess I’m not, really … disappointed, of course, but probably not surprised.”

  “Good. My high opinion of you would be lowered if you were.”

  “But there’s another reason …”

  She explained what Tom had said about her relicensing. “The more I learn about this boy, the more I think there’s something unique there.”

  “But he broke a bone … that’s not neurological.”

  “His spine is heavily traumatized. That is neurological. Look, I know it’s not your field, so you might not see it the way I do. But trust me, there’s something unique there. Maybe unique enough to get me relicensed, if I poke around enough.”

  “Is it that important to you?”

  “I hate what I’m doing now. It’s meaningless. I feel like I’m some kind of milkmaid; all I do is move buckets of information from one place to another so they can make it look like their drugs are effective.”

  “Well, are they?”

  “Maybe. A couple are promising. And now they’ve got so much money and staff tied up in making something work, they’ve got to keep everything going. Otherwise the investments they’ve already made will just go down the tubes. Which is another reason there should be money available to bring this kid in.”

  “You never know why these organizations do what they do. They have a board of directors, just like other big companies. That’s really what they all are, big companies that claim they aren’t going to make a profit. The government lets them get away with it for some reason. Too much politics, not enough science.”

  “I hate to think of it that way. Makes me feel like such a—whore, almost. But I suppose it’s true. I mean, I took the position with the foundation because I really wanted to get back to work. I needed to work, to keep my mind off … things, but also because it seemed like there was a conscience there. At least it did at the time. Now I guess I wonder.”

  John chuckled ironically. “That’s what I thought when I first started here—and now I find myself looking the other way all the time. The Ivory Tower—I wouldn’t be just another corporate hack schmoozing my way to the golden handshake. But I am. The only real difference is that I have tenure. So what are you gonna do? That’s the way the world works these days.” He shrugged and smiled. “We can only do what we can, right?”

  “Right. So you can look through some grant lists for me.” She smiled.

  It was always in the evening, when he was asleep in England and she was awake and lonely in Massachusetts, that Janie most fervently wished Bruce had managed to make it into the country. She’d spent only a few quiet evenings with him in London the year before; except for the very beginning, their entire association over there had been one diffi
culty after another. But she’d acquired a taste for such evenings rather quickly, and now her mind conjured up this safe and appealing image of the two of them spending comfortable time together, like a pair of childhood sweethearts who’d been a couple for years, who knew and forgave each other’s foibles. In reality, there was a lot of uncharted territory between them, and much still to discover.

  And though Tom was relatively certain that Janie would not have to go through anything further in connection with the “problem” she’d had in England, for Bruce the dangers still persisted. He still lived there and was still under investigation, though he hadn’t been charged with anything, and probably wouldn’t ever be—the British biocops who had him in their sights had found no way to make anything more damning than sleeping with a Yank stick to him yet. But they knew of his involvement in a certain difficult affair, and they were making his life as miserable as possible to compensate for their own ineptitude.

  Janie found herself wallowing in the strange and unfamiliar miasma of self-pity as she watched the sun set over her beloved garden. Shake it off, she told herself. You’re tougher than that. And it was true—she was resilient and resourceful. It was just that, lately, the self-preservation skills didn’t seem quite so sharp anymore when she called on them.

  She was beginning to think she was perhaps a little depressed. No wonder—I hate my work, and the man I love is on the other side of a very big ocean. She took a cleansing breath and turned her attention to the item on her lap. Though it was no worse for its ocean crossing wrapped in her sweaty T-shirt, the journal was obviously ancient and very fragile. From the cracks in its leather binding when it came into her hands, and by the worn condition of its parchment leaves, Janie was certain that it had been a working book, one that had been handled regularly, perhaps as often as daily, by a long series of owners throughout its history. Each one had left an unmistakable mark on the journal—writings, translations, a scratch here, a smudge there, the occasional dog-eared corner—from the photograph of the last owner before herself all the way back to the faded and spidery scrawl of the man for whom this journal had originally been bound.