Genesis - Keith R. A. DeCandido [33]
But then, she'd been so distracted the last few days…
A third possibility was that Alice herself had betrayed Lisa.
Before a fourth possibility could even occur to her, she heard a nasty hissing sound. Within seconds, the air around her seemed to shimmer.
"Halon!" she cried, even as the gas started to burn her throat.
With each passing second, it became more impossible to breathe. Her fellow workers banged at the Plasti-Glas door in a futile effort to get out.
Lisa herself screamed, "Stop it!" at the Red Queen's security camera—the same one that Alice had shown her a recording from in the park days ago. The hypothesis that the brat had gone nuts was now foremost in what was left of her thoughts, and she wondered if indeed it had been her fault. Her mind hadn't really been on her job lately.
Right now, her mind was only on trying and failing to take another breath. "Stop it!" she cried again, more hoarsely, even as she collapsed to the floor, her legs suddenly unable to support her own weight.
The gas permeated the room, making it impossible to see.
All week, she'd been thinking about ways for the plan to go wrong, but this hadn't even made the list.
From the beginning, she knew that this endeavor might result in her death, but not this way. Not dying from a goddamn computer malfunction.
She tried to yell, "Stop it!" one last time, but she couldn't draw enough breath to formulate the scream. She did manage to say, "I'm sorry," though. Whether it was to her coworkers, Matt, Alice, Fadwa, or Mahmoud, she couldn't say for certain. Maybe it was to all of them.
Unable to hold her eyes open, unable to stand, unable to breathe, she collapsed.
She thought about Fadwa.
After that, nothing.
Ten
MAJOR TIMOTHY CAIN DIDN"T TAKE ANY SHIT. He was born with a different name in Berlin back when the city was separated by a large wall. The third of four children, and the youngest boy, he had the misfortune to be on the wrong side of it. Shortly after Mother died, when he was sixteen, Father managed to secure a way for them to emigrate to the United States. Upon arrival, Father declared their name to be Cain—an Anglicization of their name in German—and gave all his children new names. They were now Michael, Anthony, Timothy, and Mary, because those, Father said, sounded like American names. Any time they used their old German names, Father would hit them until they stopped. Not being fools, all the children learned quickly to think of themselves with their new identities.
In gratitude to his new home, Timothy enlisted in the Army on his eighteenth birthday. Shortly thereafter, he was sent overseas to fight in the Gulf War. Father was happy that his son did so. Michael, who was three years older than Timothy, had moved to Chicago and become a police officer, Anthony had moved to San Francisco and lost touch with the rest of the family. As for Mary, though women could serve, she had no interest in doing so, preferring a career in business.
Timothy Cain became alive for the first time in the desert. He had always succeeded academically, but mostly by rote. He was a fast learner, but he never had much enthusiasm for it. The two years of school he'd attended since immigrating were difficult, as Timothy spoke with a thick German accent, which made him the target of teasing by his peers, and made it difficult to derive any kind of enjoyment from the learning experience.
Combat, though, he took joy in that, especially when that combat was against the enemies of the United States of America. And in the desert, nobody cared about his accent, except for a few idiots, and they all shut up once they saw Timothy Cain in action.
It didn't take long for him to distinguish himself, work his way up the ranks. He was leading his fellow soldiers into combat after only a few weeks, and his men would