Page 53 of The Bad Weather Friend

Mrs. Baneberry-Smith snapped her whip, snapped it again, as if trying to make the terrible memories relent, but she could not lash them away. “During those three months in hospital and three more in rehab, none of the shit-for-brains doctors were sure what they were treating me for or how to treat it. As I gradually repaired myself, I came to understand that I’d been attacked by a being that was the only survivor of a crashed vessel, and it too had then died. Along with all the knowledge its species had acquired, I’d been injected with an imperative to use their science to populate Earth with their kind, and with the precise location where I could find a secreted capsule containing their DNA. Well, to hell with that. My willpower is greater than the imperative they implanted in me. This is my world now, and I’ll do with it what I want.”

When the headmaster’s wife snapped her whip twice again, Benny realized that she wasn’t trying to lash away terrible memories, but was declaring her mastery over all things and her intention to rule with merciless fervor. The sympathy he felt for her began to ebb.

“It’s what all of us want,” Kimball said. “The way you want to shape the world is the way the ISA and people like me intend it to be shaped. It’s the way the parents of the boys we’ve brought toyou want it shaped. They want it so intensely that they’ll sacrifice the free will of their sons to see your vision fulfilled.”

Jurgen’s and Mengistu’s hands tightened almost painfully on Benny’s arms.

“With all due respect, Cathy,” Kimball continued, “we only wish you could master this alien science somewhat faster.”

“Damn you, don’t pressure me, Kimball. I won’t tolerate it. I’ll deal ruthlessly with insubordination. I possess the knowledge, but it’s complex beyond your feeble ability to comprehend. I’ve got to be careful in the application of it. I’ve given you a few things of great value in the area of weaponry. I’ve altered hundreds of young men from elite families, hollowed them out, so they can be elevated rapidly into the social order and used by us as if they were sock puppets. But I’ll move at a pace that I—and only I—determine to be prudent.”

“You halted the aging process in yourself eight years ago, when you were just thirty-two. Look at you—timeless. Yet you won’t share with us how that can be done, how we can live three or four hundred years. Your refusal has caused anger in the ranks. We need to feel we’re in this together.”

“Feel what you feel. It doesn’t matter to me. I’ll share that miracle when I’m confident my position is unassailable. Perhaps within a year.”

Kimball said, “If we brought in other scientists—”

“No.”

“—and you shared a fraction of your knowledge from the Regulus civilization—”

“No.”

“—and assigned them projects, we could advance our cause so much faster.”

“Knowledge is power, Kimball, especially knowledge as absolute as this. I’m as averse to sharing power as you’d be in my position. I’ll give you miracles from time to time, miracles of my choosing, only when I wish to grant them.”

“But—”

“Enough. Don’t hector me. I’m the only doorway through which you can receive any of the knowledge you covet. I can shut you out. And never forget—I can kill you and everyone who knows about me, kill all of you faster than you can sayPlease let us live.”

After a silence, as if wounded, Kimball said, “Cathy, all that we once were to each other ... doesn’t that matter to you?”

Her voice sounded so cold that Benny imagined snow crystallizing from the breath she expelled with her words. “What we were isn’t what we are now. What I will become is nothing you can ever be. Know your place, presume nothing, and never dare touch me.”

A new voice said, “We bagged Hawthorne. Pretty sure we didn’t miss any pieces.”

The three agents and Mrs. Catherine Baneberry-Smith departed, their lights dwindling into the darkness quicker than the sounds of their passage faded into the silence of the post-midnight forest.

Jurgen and Mengistu let go of Benny’s arms. They didn’t speak, as if they weren’t convinced they had escaped discovery, as though Mrs. Baneberry-Smith would at any moment whisper their names and part the foliage and lash out at them with arms that had become whips.

For fifteen minutes or longer, they sat wrapped in the foliage of the mountain pieris, each lost in his thoughts.

Benny ruminated about all the people he’d expected to kill him but who had not done so. His father. Grandma Cosima, who no doubt murdered two husbands. His tutor, Mordred Merrick. Bugboy. A person couldn’t expect to glide through life, good luck always breaking his way, the worst kind of bad luck befalling only other people. Sooner or later, you had to take it in the shorts, as they say, bite the bullet or maybe even bite the dust. A moment of grave misfortune must be near at hand.

(Additional note to readers’ groups: The line immediately above is another, subtler form of foreshadowing, like the lines previously drawn to your attention by Spike. Just sayin’.)

“I believe,” Mengistu said at last, “that it is now safe to come out of hiding. Even with their grisly burden, they have surely progressed far enough that we will not be heard or seen making our way back to Felthammer House.”

“Let’s wait a little longer,” Jurgen said.

“I quite agree,” Mengistu said.

Perhaps five minutes passed before Benny said, “What if it’s not as dead as they thought?”

Jurgen said, “They must’ve pumped like a hundred rounds into the damn thing, blew it to bits, all that slime, it just can’t be anythingbutdead.”

“Yeah, but you know how it is in the movies,” Benny said. “Just when they think the monster is dead, the thing comes at them one more time.”

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