Seize the Night

strategize. Besides, more than two of us would be needed to comb even the known warrens of Wyvern.
    In addition, dawn was little more than an hour away, and I had not worn my Elephant Man cloak, with hood and veil.
    The Suburban, which the kidnapper had parked at the fence, was gone. I was not surprised to see that it was missing. Fortunately, I had memorized the license-plate number.
    Bobby drove to the snarl of driftwood and tumbleweed that lay sixty feet from the fence. I retrieved my bicycle from concealment and loaded it into the back of the Jeep.
    Passing through the dark tunnel under Highway 1, without headlights, Bobby accelerated. Engine noise, like barrages from ack-ack guns, rattled back to us from the concrete walls.
    I remembered the mysterious figure that I had seen earlier on the sloping buttress at the west end of this passage, and my tension grew rather than diminished as the farther end became the nearer end.
    When we raced into the open, I tensed, half expecting an assault, but nothing was waiting for us.
    A hundred yards west of the highway, Bobby braked to a halt and switched off the engine.
    We had not spoken since the corridor outside the egg room. Now he said, “Mystery Train.”
    “All aboard.”
    “Name of a research project, huh?”
    “According to Leland Delacroix's security badge.”
    I fished that object from a jacket pocket, fingering it in the dark, thinking about the dead man surrounded by photographs of his family, the wedding ring in a votive-candle holder.
    “So the Mystery Train project was what gave us the troop, the retrovirus, all these mutations. Your mom's little tea-and-doomsday society.”
    “Maybe.”
    “I don't think so.”
    “Then what?”
    “She was a theoretical geneticist, right?”
    “My mom, apprentice god.”
    “Virus designer, creature creator.”
    “Medically valuable little creatures, benign viruses,” I said.
    “Except for one.”
    “Your folks are no prize,” I reminded him.
    With a note of insincere pride, he said, “Hey, they would've destroyed the world long before your mom ever did, if they'd just been given a fair chance.” They owned the only newspaper in the county, the Moonlight Bay Gazette , and their religion was politics, their god was power.
    They were people with a plan, with an unlimited faith in the righteousness of their beliefs. Bobby didn't share their spooky vision of utopia, so they had written him off ten years ago. Apparently, utopia requires the absolute uniformity of thought and purpose exhibited by bees in a hive.
    “The point is,” he said, “that wacko palace of the weird back there … They weren't doing biological research, bro.”
    “Hodgson was in an airtight suit, not tennis shorts,” I reminded him.
    “He was in typical bio-secure gear. To protect him from being infected by something.”
    “Totally obvious, yeah. But you said yourself, the place wasn't built for mucking around with germs.”
    “Not laid out for essential sterilization procedures,” I agreed.
    “No decontamination modules, except maybe for that one airlock. And the floor plan is too open for high-security bio labs.”
    “That madhouse, that hyped-up lava lamp, wasn't a lab.”
    “The egg room.”
    “Call it what you want. It was never a lab with Bunsen burners, petri dishes, and cages full of cute little white mice with scalp scars from brain surgery. You know what that was, bro. We both know.”
    “I've been brooding about it.”
    “That was transport,” Bobby said.
    “Transport.”
    “They pumped mondo energy into that room, maybe a nuke's worth of energy, maybe more, and when it was fully powered, really revving, it took Hodgson somewhere. Hodgson and a few others. We heard them screaming for help.”
    “Took them where?”
    Instead of answering me, he said, “ Carpe cerevisi .”
    “Meaning?”
    “Seize the beer.”
    I took an icy bottle from the cooler and passed it to him, hesitated, and then opened a beer for myself.
    “Not wise to drink and drive,” I reminded him.
    After taking a long swallow, I said, “I bet God likes beer. Of course, He'd have a chauffeur.”
    The twenty-foot-high levee walls rose on both sides of us. The low and starless sky appeared to be as hard as iron, pressing down like a kettle lid.
    “Transport where?” I asked.
    “Remember your wristwatch.”
    “Maybe it needs repair.”
    “Mine went nuts, too,” he reminded me.
    “Since when do you wear a watch, anyway?”
    “Since, for the