Chapters 47 though 49

Chapter Forty-Seven

We were back at F.B.I. headquarters in another of their endless conference rooms.  When I got there, they already had the police chief in the room.  He had been left in the custody of Wanda and Maurice.  The police chief without his uniform wasn’t impressive at all.  He sat at the table with his hands in his lap and his head down.  The sweats he was wearing belied the obvious.   He had not been to a gym nor worked out in a very long time.  

I optioned to cheer him up.

“How’s it going, Chief?”  I gave him one of my brightest smiles. 

Instead of replying, he responded to my inquiry after his welfare by raising his head and inspecting me.  He looked over at Wanda who had taken a chair along the wall.  Maurice was standing.  I was seated in the only other chair in room.

When the Chief looked at Wanda, he shook his head. I wasn’t sure what that meant.  Might have had something to do with his own people, detectives who once answered to him, holding him in their custody.  But then it might also have been a silent indictment of the ludicrousness of my question.  I adjusted my tactics.

“Chief, we need to talk.  And you need to listen closely.  I’m going to repeat a legal proverb I’m sure you’ve heard before.  The train is at the proverbial station, and I have the proverbial ticket.  I’m going to offer the ticket to you.  But you only get one chance. The train is departing, and you are either on it or not.  This is a way out for you.  I suggest you take it.”

He sat for a few moments.  All the while staring at Wanda and not looking at me nor acknowledging what I had said.  I waited.  I had been in these situations before with clients.   I had sat silent as the offers were tendered from prosecutors. I knew how difficult the decision was.  It had always been my practice to leave it up to the client if they wanted to turn States’ Evidence.  They seldom needed to be told of the dangers of doing so.  They were involved in the criminal activity after all.  And, of course, the prosecutor could by counted on to take pains to insure my client was informed of the dire legal consequences if they turned down the offer of leniency.   Many of the more practiced prosecutors were very adept at how they presented the “facts of life” to an informer.  In fact, I had just adapted some of their spiel into my offer.  I remained patient while the Chief turned the matter over in his mind.

“And what is it you want?”  He turned back to me.  I was ready with an answer I had purloined from one of the prosecutors I worked with and who had, like me, a dramatic bent.  

“I want it all.  You don’t get to decide.  You answer all my questions fully and don’t hold anything back or the deal is off, and you are back to square one.  Understand something here.  I don’t give a shit about you.  You can hang as far as I’m concerned, but you have something I want and I’m willing to give you a break to get that.  But I’m not fucking around here.  I’m a busy man and you’re taking up my time.  Give it up or not, it’s up to you.”

There was no defiance in his eyes.  I concluded he had been a beaten man before we ever arrived.  Maybe he effaced a modicum of resentment, but he wasn’t going to fight it out.  He was ready to turn.

He looked down.  He was going to give me what I wanted.  I was the Alpha, and he wasn’t going to challenge me with his eyes.  I rather liked being an Alpha.  I trusted I would not be too overbearing.  I could be merciful.

I glanced at Wanda.  She was studying me with a bit of a smirk on her face.   Feeling masterful, I thought I might have to smack her around a little later. That thought passed quickly.  That was never going to happen.  She might, being the good sport, play along with a little pitty-pat but she would pound me mercilessly if I ever thought about dominating her physically.  

“What do you want to know?” the Chief asked.

“Don’t you even want to know what the deal is?”

“What’s it really matter?  I don’t have a real choice here, do I?”

“No, you don’t.”  It was Wanda speaking up for the first time. 

She stood, effortlessly lifted the chair she had been sitting on in one hand and came over to the table and sat down with us.  She pointed her finger at the Chief.  “You are going to tell us everything.  I owe some people a little pay back and you are going to help me deliver it.”

He nodded his head.  It became very apparent to me right then that he knew what had happened to Wanda and may have had something to do with it and he also realized she knew he had a role too.  And it scared him.  

It would scare me too.

Chapter Forty-Eight

“Where do you want me to start?”

I opted to eschew the obvious response and get specific.

“Who is in charge?”

“In charge?”

“Yeah, in charge” Wanda’s tone was angry and impatient.  I wondered if it was fake.    “You’re a police chief, damn it!  Somebody’s got to be in charge.  Tell him who.”

“I guess it was Don Babcock. He gave the orders. The rest of us might suggest something, but usually what he decided is what we ended up doing.”

“All of you?” I asked.  “How about the teacher?  She’s got to be the one with the brains considering the overall intelligent quotient of your little group.”

He ignored my insult. 

“Yes.  She was pushy all right, real pushy.  None of us got along with her that well. But Mr. Babcock, well, he seemed to have something, some authority over her.  She might start in on one of us but if he spoke up, she always quieted down.  At least for a while.”

“How about the changes?  Whose idea was it to change people?”

He paused for a moment.  I watched closely looking for the tell-tale signs of mendacity.  

“You know, that started before I got involved.  There was a group of them.  All her students, you know.  Even Don Babcock.  He had once been her student.”  

I remembered, but he hadn’t been one of the small cadre always hanging out in her room.  

The Chief kept talking.  “You know, I think that’s how you got picked.  I heard them talking about it before we came up to you at the reunion.  It was considered a big deal, you know, significant, that you had been in her class in high school. Maybe they thought you had a relationship with her too.”

“Relationship?”

“Yes, relationship.”  For the first time he sounded irritated.

“You said it,” he looked over at Wanda, “I’m a Chief of Police.  I’ve been around.  I can spot connections too.  She had a connection, a physical connection with some of them.”

“With Donnie?” I asked.  I couldn’t keep a little incredulousness from creeping into my voice. 

“Yeah.  With him too.  You know, I had the feeling he was disgusted with her. But there was still that connection.  I know it when I see it.”

“Okay.  What about these conversions or whatever they were?” I asked.  Wanda held up her hand as if to slow me down.  

She interposed a question.

“Let’s be specific.  First do you know what he is asking?”

The Chief nodded his head.  He knew what I meant.

“Who is the first person you were involved with?”

“Look, I knew about the others.  But you were the first I actually saw, you know, was around when it was done all the way through.  Complete.”  He was looking at Wanda.

Her jaw was clenched.  She put one of her big paws on the table and unconsciously tapped her finger against the top.  I thought I better handle this part.

“Tell us about that.”

“Yeah, Chief,” Wanda chimed in, “Tell us about that part.”

Chapter Forty-Nine

“They had a machine.  I knew about it, but I hadn’t ever seen what it did.  But, you know, it wasn’t just the machine. There were drugs, I.V.s, chemistry things, like you see in a chem class.  Beakers, test tubes, heat elements.”

I know I was frowning.  I almost flunked chemistry.  

“And then there was this big tube, they put the babies in.  Had to be six feet by eight feet.  At least”

“Huh? Wait, what babies?” I asked.

“Well, babies and little kids, children.”

Wanda said, “Tell him what happened when they put the children in there.”

The Chief paused for a moment and put his head down.  He mumbled something but with his chin on his chest, I couldn’t quite make it out.  

“Say that again.  What did you say?  I couldn’t hear you.”

“He doesn’t want you to hear.’” She reached over and squeezed his bicep.  Hard.  “Do you, asshole?”

Wanda was angry.  I hadn’t expected that.  I had been around her quite a bit the last few weeks.  She could be tough and hard-nosed. Even loud and obstreperous, but I hadn’t seen her on the edge of losing her temper before.  I decided it was not something I cared to see again.

“Speak up, Chiefy boy.”  Tell him.”  She moved her hand up and actually pinched his ear.  I winched.

“They changed.  The children.  Very quick.  They changed into a big person, sometimes an adult.”

“Huh, how?”

“How should I know?  They did it.  They smeared them with something, like a gel.  Then they shot some drugs into them with hypodermics, hooked them with I.V.s, dripped stuff in their arms from these bottles of liquid.  It was blue like Windex.  I remember thinking that.  It looks like Windex.”

“And?”

“And nothing.  They started with the rotation of the tube.  Lots of light inside it, very bright.  It gave off a lot of heat.  Very hot.  And, well, I guess you could say they cooked them a new person.”

“Out of the kid?”

“Yeah, out of the kid.  If it worked anyway.  Sometimes anyway.  Oh hell, half the time, it didn’t work.”

“Didn’t work?”

“Sometimes what they cooked in there didn’t come out right.  Sometimes it took a couple of three efforts.”

We all paused as the next question occurred to each of us, but neither of us wanted to ask.

I felt it was my role.  I asked.

“Other kids?   More kids?”

He nodded his head.  For the moment he looked truly contrite.  I wasn’t buying it and I was sure Wanda wasn’t.  Maybe it was the sneer that gave her away.  Whatever it was, we didn’t think he was so contrite as to shed a tear for the murders and the victims who had been murdered.   Nor was he racked with guilt for the role he obviously played in the murder of children.  I took it on. 

I asked, “What happened to the kids?”  

There was no pause.  He immediately answered.

“Gone.  Gone as kids.  Gone as to who they were.  What was left in that tube was what was left of them.  The rest of them was gone. Taken over, you know?”

We waited. 

“Well, you know whatever, whoever came out that had been them.”

“Like with me?” Wanda asked rhetorically.

“Sure.  The other Wanda at least.  She had been a little girl.  Then they did their stuff, their work, and she was you.  Like that.  Well, not you, but like you, the way they thought you should be.”

I still couldn’t get my head around what he was saying.  I started to ask another question, but Wanda stepped in and answered for him.

“Yeah. They needed a host to grow a new person fast.  So, they took my DNA. They played around with it.  Just a few chromosomes, but they know which ones to manipulate. And they change the sequence and put it in her.  They have a few cute little additions to the strand.  As they grow a new and improved me, they replace what of the little girl had been on the DNA strand.  By the time it’s me there is no more her.  She’s gone.  Forever.”

I sat there.  Before I could ask my next question, she turned to me and continued.

“I know what you were going to ask.  It was something to do with growth.  See there is a trigger for that in our DNA.  It tells our body when to grow and how fast. But it’s not just one trigger.  It’s a bunch of switches that must be flipped in just the right order.  They found out how to control that, to speed it up.”  

I looked at the Chief.  He was nodding. He knew about this part too.

Wanda continued using the same diminutive I had started using for her counterpart.  

“Little Wanda said Vuitch told her that’s the really hard part.  It’s a whole bunch of chromosomes need to go off, like fire off, at once, and it has to be done over and over, to speed the growth to where they wanted it.  As fast as they wanted it.”

“And how fast?” I asked.

“Seven days.”  

I looked at her.

“Full grown in seven days, one little week,” she said.

“And what if it didn’t work right?”

We both turned to the Chief for the answer.  He looked at Wanda.  She nodded her head in assent to him answering.  

“Dead.”  

“Or?” she asked. 

“Monsters.”

For earlier chapters of The Alumnus and other writings by Phil Cline, visit my FB page at PhilClinePage or web site at philcline.com