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  “You’ve watched Prinn on the newslinks,” Harmon said as he started from his office, waiting for her to pass in front of him as one of the tall doors silently opened. By her smile, he could tell that she appreciated his consideration. Amazing, how women thought about these things. Letting the lady go first meant that he was able to enjoy the view.

  “Yes,” she said, looking over her shoulder.

  That hair, halfway down her back, and so black and soft and smooth.

  “What do you think of the man?”

  “I think he’s like the guy who said he found a rat in his Coke,” Julie said.

  Harmon laughed. “Exactly.”

  “So,” she said, “we have a new hometertainment system for the family, a complete set of the original character dolls for the little girl, and the home décor choice kit for mother.” She paused in the hall. He came close enough to her to catch the bare scent of her perfume: something of spice, and perhaps gardenias.

  “Very good,” he said. “I’ve got this.” He slipped the DisLex Platinum card from his pocket and flashed it at her.

  “I don’t even have one,” she said, her brow furrowing.

  He smiled. “You will.” Then he added, “This one is charged for a year. They’ll have everything free.”

  “I think that should win them over. It was all an unfortunate error — imagine those bugs in the program,” she said in her light, soft voice. How hard she had worked to eliminate her Chicana accent; to speak as well as anyone on the newslinks.

  Imagine that, Harmon thought. Bombs away. What a bad boy I am. Then, imagine you in my arms and us inside of each other.

  “There’s the other matter,” he said.

  “Yes?” She raised one fine dark brow.

  “The freak,” he said, hardening his voice. The worst part of the whole mess was that the two families had been “saved” by the mutant pig man, who should never have been in the Magic Kingdom at all. It was too late to pass him off as some type of aberration; the independent newslinks were featuring story after story of people who’d also seen mutants at the Magic Kingdom. Been accosted by them, hit up for money — or worse.

  Not that Harmon believed any of it, but the truth didn’t count on the news; not even DisLex news. The Board insisted that there be “controlled chaos,” which meant “let the reporters do what they want.” Tradition. Journalistic privilege. Whatever. Right now, it was a worse problem for the company than even the PerfectTown mess. Freaks, in the Magic Kingdom. People wouldn’t want to expose their children to that type of thing on a thousand-dollar family trip. But Harmon had a plan. He’d coopt the Prinns. Maybe they’d even have a friendly reunion with the pig man, a deformed, infected vagrant named Tommy Lee Tucker, now safe and sound at Harmon’s other PerfectTown: Camp Roberts. Which wasn’t exactly a camp.

  “Him,” she said. Her gloved hand went to her neck.

  “Give me your glove,” he said, suddenly. He didn’t know why he said that. Suddenly he thought about his other assistant, his best man Dick. And Dick was turning his back. Go away, he commanded. Dick obeyed.

  “You don’t need the gloves when you’re with me,” Harmon said. “I’m safe. You’re safe.”

  He watched her lower lip tremble. Kiss it, he thought. He heard himself saying more things, comforting things. Things of confidence and safety.

  She would not give him her glove. He could hardly continue to insist. Later, he thought. A little later.

  And he changed once more. “I’ve had the pig man interviewed,” he said. “He’s been taken to Camp Roberts, and he’ll be perfectly safe. Perhaps he’ll even be cured.”

  “What?” she said, starting to laugh nervously. “Camp Roberts? Is this a new resort?”

  “It’s another project,” Harmon said. “Out of your area. Camp Roberts is just the start.”

  Julie’s dark eyes narrowed. “Maybe we shouldn’t fly down so quickly,” she said. “How can I know what to say if there’s this much that I haven’t been briefed on?”

  “I’ll tell you on the way,” Harmon said. “In one way, it’s a whole world for you to discover. In another way, I can tell you in a few minutes.”

  They had been walking slowly, and between one step and the next, she stopped, crossing her arms.

  She took a deep breath. An expression came over her delicate face, one that he couldn’t quite decipher. Then, she spoke.

  “I... I’m not comfortable with this. What if they have questions? I might say something wrong. There’s so much I don’t know — the pig man being taken to this camp? Why? How?”

  Harmon smiled, holding her eyes with his for a long moment. He read many things there: apprehension, uncertainty, and quite a bit of fear. Also fascination.

  Just kiss her, he thought.

  Inside his head, Dick the imago spoke a single word. “Animal.”

  Harmon forced Dick’s imago away once again, but he did not kiss Julie. Instead, he put his bare hand on her arm and gripped, not too hard, feeling the warmth of her skin through her sleeve.

  “We’re changing things, Julie. The world as you know it is no longer there. All that you see,” he said, continuing to look steadily in her eyes, then breaking the contact when he thought the moment was right, “is veneer. Like a layer of mahogany on a cheap pine table. Tissue-thin, covering something very different that lies beneath.”

  “Sir,” she said, her voice cracking. She looked at his hand on her arm, but she did not pull away.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

  Her eyes went wide.

  “Take off your gloves,” he said.

  He felt electric. Trust me, he thought. Let me tell you. Let me love you. Be inside my body. I want to be inside yours. The scent of her perfume hit him. He stood in the moment, and caught a bare tendril of her skin and the fear on her. And the excitement.

  I don’t have to say I’m a God for you to believe it, he thought.

  She pulled her arm away, but gently. Then, she slipped one glove from her hand, her fingers slender and the color of pale creamed coffee beneath. He took the glove, then he took her bare hand in his, and he kissed it, smiling up into her eyes. He let his lips linger on her warm skin.

  “You’re safe,” he said. “There is no virus here, nor anywhere I go.”

  She gasped.

  “You will always be safe with me.”

  “Mister...” she said.

  “Harmon,” he told her.

  She was silent. She began to speak, but he lifted her hand and pressed her fingers to her lips.

  “I’ll tell you everything,” he said. “And you’ll meet my other assistant, Dick. You and he are the two halves,” he said.

  “Halves?” she whispered.

  “Body and soul,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she said, and other things of astonishment, and backing away.

  But Harmon had already taken her bare hand. And he had kissed it. The sense of it still burned on his lips.

  In the Learjet, she busied herself with the list of gifts for the Prinn family. Harmon sat silently watching her, making no pretense of work.

  “I do trust you,” he said at last. “You’ll make a marvelous impression on the family. Remember,” he said, smiling slightly at her. “They should believe that you and I are the best of friends.”

  She looked up from her computer with an expression he could not decipher. “My husband might not care for that,” she said. The words hung in the air-conditioned cabin. Harmon preferred never to think of her husband Frank, that wetback beaner in a thousand-dollar suit. He said nothing. After a moment, she continued. “There’s a new item here.”

  “Yes?” Harmon said in a mild voice.

  “A house. In Palos Verdes.”

  Harmon nodded. “Corporate property.”

  “Mister...”

  “Harmon,” he said. “That’s one of our model homes. Safe, gated and virus-free.”

  She nodded. “I’m familiar with that program. This is a ve
ry generous gift. With the other items, we are now up to about half a million dollars in —”

  “Money’s not the issue,” he said. “Confidence is.”

  “Our customers.”

  “And you. Look down there.” He indicated one of the jet’s windows with his finger. Julie rose and went to the window. “Do you see?”

  “I see something down there. Buildings. Looks like a lot of wilderness. A lake. Are we south of Monterey and Carmel?”

  “Yes,” Harmon said. “Just north of San Luis Obispo. That’s Camp Roberts.”

  “That’s where you mentioned — where the pig man who rescued the Prinns is,” she said. “It doesn’t look like a camp. It looks like some kind of —”

  “It was an old military base. We’ve taken it over. Exclusively for victims of the Human Mutational Virus. They’re safe there, and they’re being helped.” He grinned at her.

  “I had no idea,” she said. “They have places to live there? Work?”

  He nodded. “We’re working on a cure,” he said. “We can rewrite their genetic structure, given enough time and enough research on the proper models. That’s where the PerfectTown comes in.”

  “Harmon,” she said. He liked that she was trying his name out in her mouth, even if she sounded very uncomfortable. “I had no idea. But how can the computer do —”

  “Later,” he said. “If you look down there, you’ll see what an ideal environment it is. Natural beauty, great weather, even their own water supply.”

  “An old military base,” she said. “I think maybe I have heard of it.”

  “Possibly,” he said. “I’m sure you’ve driven past it.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I believe that I have. You say they work down there, get exercise and so-on?” Then she smiled at him, and Harmon felt warmth in his chest, and in other places.

  “Oh yes,” Harmon said. “They’re running all the time. Things like that.”

  The jet flew south, and Camp Roberts faded into the distance.

  Chapter Three

  Tommy Lee Tucker the pig man was Camp Roberts’ seventh runner. Under the knife-bright Central California sun, three DisLex guards squinted through their mirrorshades while Tommy broke from Dorm B jogging group. He veered past the pea green barracks, straight toward the electrified fence.

  Tommy was fifteen yards from the fence when the nearest guard raised his Remington 870 twelve-gauge and took aim at his back.

  “Hey, man, he’s headed for the fence!” called another guard.

  Tommy didn’t turn. His ankle gave as he hit a ragged chunk of cement, hidden amid the tall spears of sawgrass near the fence. Time seemed to stretch as he fell to one knee. The internees watched: fish twins barely out of their teens, the three other pig men, the bear man who liked to brag he’d been a technodance dee-jay, and the dozen other freaks of assorted sizes, shapes and colors who occupied the bunks in Camp Roberts Dorm B.

  The guard in the tower slammed the alarm button and screamed down at the others, “Stop the runner!” One guard, open-mouthed, stared at the tower instead of Tommy. One who had been trotting broke into a full run.

  He paused and brought his hand to his mouth. “Damn it, he’s gonna fry!”

  Tommy was on his feet again, limping. He turned back, eyes like black olives in his fleshy pink face, and held up his right arm, fingers forming a “v.”

  That night, when the XO debriefed the security staff, the guard who’d trotted after Tommy, a forty-five year-old divorcee named Karl Hehle, insisted that Tommy had flipped everyone off. Meantime, in Dorm B, the freaks whispered in their bunks, evenly divided as to whether Tommy had given a peace sign or a victory sign. No one was going to ask them for their opinion, but they argued anyway.

  Karl Hehle was within twenty feet of the running pig man. He stopped, went to one knee, and took aim with his twelve gauge. It was a riot gun and he was armed with it in case the freaks got out of hand and decided to charge. It wasn’t the kind of gun anyone was supposed to fire at a running target. Running away, at any rate.

  “Hey, freak,” he yelled. “The fence is on.” Then, he squeezed the trigger and discharged a sandbag. The sandbag hit Tommy square between his shoulder blades. Tommy’s arms flew up and his chest slammed into the fence. Some of the freaks said later that a blue spark shot from the back of his head. Not everyone saw that, but everyone saw the flash. Everyone heard the sick, crackling sizzle. Tommy’s sneakers smoked as he jerked like a dancing puppet. The freaks made a few steps forward, but everyone knew not to touch him.

  Raymond the dog man started to cry.

  “Fried shit,” said Karl Hehle, cradling his weapon.

  The tardy guard who’d been gaping at the tower arrived and took out his comm. “Runner on the fence,” he said. “Sector five jogging track. We need the truck.”

  Three miles away, the comm roused the Camp Roberts paramedics from their backgammon game. The tallest of them swore under his breath as he crumpled his can of Sunkist Orange and tossed it through a miniature Lakers hoop into the recycling bucket.

  “Another three-pointer,” he said. They were still laughing about the lucky shot as they climbed leisurely into the truck and pulled on their gloves and masks.

  “You know what’s the worst?” the driver said as they bounced along the one-lane ribbon of asphalt toward the jogging track. “They stink so damn bad.”

  Yeah, yeah, the others agreed. Lewis Starr, Jr., the tall paramedic who’d made the three-pointer, was wishing he had another Sunkist Orange. “Like barbecue,” Lewis said, staring out the window at the rolling green hills. Come summer, the grass would be golden brown. The fires would begin. Lewis Starr was from South Carolina and he’d eaten a lot of barbecue. The favorite meat there was pork, cooked for hours with brown sugar and vinegar and a touch of crushed red pepper. They called it chop meat or pulled meat. People drank Pepsi while they ate it on a squishy white bun with coleslaw on top. When it got seared in the pot with some melted Crisco it smelled just like one of the runners did after they got racked up on the fence. Lewis Starr kept his thoughts about pulled meat and barbecue to himself.

  His thoughts grew even worse when they got to Tommy Lee Tucker and Lewis Starr saw that he was a pig man.

  They had finally turned the fence off and Tommy Lee Tucker’s charred corpse lay crumpled in the grass. When Lewis Starr bent down, he saw that the pig man’s orange polyester coveralls had burned clear through to his broad chest, and the fabric and flesh had sealed together in a blue-black welt. Karl Hehle stood by, gabbling about how he’d tried to stop the disaster. Lewis couldn’t read the pig man’s I.D. off the coveralls. It had been blackened away, except for the last two numbers.

  “It was Tucker,” Hehle said. “I saw his face. Man, he was the one that rescued that family. I saw him on the news.”

  “They’ll make certain tonight when they count heads,” Lewis replied. The pig man’s face was turning purplish. He looked like a black hog. Maybe a little like a black man. The one who rescued the family? Yeah, Lewis guessed he had heard something about that.

  Back in South Carolina, they didn’t have many freaks. Nothing like California. When he’d left Carolina, Lewis had felt no misgivings about going out West and taking the job at Camp Roberts. DisLex paid well, and Lewis needed the money to get through medical school. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, even though before he had left Greenville, his oldest auntie had asked him whether or not he felt right being around all those “ugly niggers.” That was how all the church ladies of a certain age referred to the freaks; Lewis guessed it was because most of them were dark, or had dark fur.

  Lewis Starr would never eat pulled meat again. Not with cole slaw, not with anything else.

  The surviving freaks from Dorm B crowded around as Lewis and the others lifted Tommy Lee Tucker’s body onto the stretcher and wheeled it toward the truck. They knew Tommy Lee was dead but they still stared, some with angry glares, others with expressions of sympathy or sadness on th
eir godawful faces.

  “He shot him,” Raymond the dog man said, pointing at the guard Karl. “Then he hit the fence.”

  “Damn murderer,” said one of the fish boys under his breath.

  Lewis searched their faces. Then, he looked at Karl Hehle. Shiny mucus ringed Hehle’s mouth and there were flecks of food on his chin. A few paces away, Lewis spotted the mess where the guard had lost his breakfast. It looked like something a puppy might do.

  It wasn’t Lewis’ business to ask anything, but he caught Hehle’s eye. “He was heading for the fence?”

  “Yeah,” the guard said. “Everybody was hollering at him.” He looked at Tommy Lee Tucker’s body, then back at Lewis. “The stupid shit flipped me off.”

  “Man, if they’re gonna do it, they’re gonna do it,” one of the other paramedics said.

  Lewis cinched a black woven strap across the body. “Did you try to stop him?” Lewis knew the answer. Like all the freaks, the pig man was hot with HMV, the human mutational virus that made people pray for AIDS instead; worse than any killer out of Africa or Asia.

  “Hell, yeah!” Hehle crossed his arms, indignant. The man reminded Lewis of his middle school football coach, only his crewcut was shorter, the skin showing bluish white beneath the bristly hair. There were liver-colored moles here and there on his scalp. Lewis figured that if the guard’s barber shaved too close, he’d cut one of those moles clean off. Maybe he had. There was a crusty scab above Hehle’s right temple. HMV insinuated itself right through torn skin. A little gob of spit from the dead man’s cheek could get on the guard’s fingers, then the guard might rub his head. Not that Hehle or any of the others would have thought that far ahead, or in that much detail. Hehle just wouldn’t have touched the pig man if he could help it.

  One of the twin fish boys stepped forward. “It ain’t right,” he said in the wet, mucousy voice all the fish people had. Lewis had to avoid looking straight at the fish boy, because his narrow, almond-shaped eyes were not at all human. The pupils were too big, not quite round. Periodically, a bluish, filmy membrane would slip up like a window shade, obscuring both iris and pupil.