Waiting by Erin Dennington ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chapter 46 Christina stared at the screen, stunned by the implication of it all. She couldn't see anything through the blurred curtain of her tears, but she held them back, refusing to let any fall. She should have seen it coming; she used to have a keen mind, sharp at picking up on hidden details, but in her depression, she had let devotion blind her. Worse than the betrayal she felt deep inside her core was the feeling of guilt she harbored over her unwitting help in it all. Already she had suffered in the morning's accident, but it was plain to see that she was not the first, nor would she be the last. Although Christina knew that the only physical sign she had proof of was the car accident that morning, she knew that there were other warning signs that this had been building for a long time. Signs that she had ignored over the years, contributing to her bouts with mental illness. Now that she thought about it, there were many things that did not quite add up. There were the countless "check-ups" people in authority felt inclined to exercise over her, where she was forced to recite every thing she did and every place she went. There were the times she had been given medicine to combat her depression and been forced back into the hospital, because the medicine did nothing but pollute her mind. There was even the work she had been handed at Kramer Institutes. The work she had been told was merely research, nothing done for anything but the world of science. She wondered if Matthew knew anything about what had really been going on or if he had been in on the conspiracy from the beginning. He also worked at Kramer, and when she had been forced to leave, he had remained, telling her that he'd continue their work. Now she wondered. Had he had remained there out of a willingness to contribute to what was beginning to unfold in their own city, or a willingness to do purely scientific work? Christina had left out one crucial detail in her statement with the police -- a detail about the insects that she had kept secret. She had recognized a miniscule symbol on their wings, a symbol she had seen daily for many years. What she did not understand at the time was where the bugs had come from and where they had gone. She yearned to get her hands on one to study to understand how they disappeared and reappeared seemingly out of nowhere, but doubted she would have the chance. If what she guessed was correct, something would happen in the next 24 hours. She didn't know where it would happen or whom to warn, but she figured that maybe by the time Davis' interview started, she would know what to do. Maybe she could use his interview time to get a message across, but she knew that she'd have to be crafty -- if what she now guessed was indeed true, her life was in direct danger. There had to be a way around the pledge she'd signed when she left Kramer -- the pledge to hold top secret her work there for penalty of going to jail. She sighed. The only problem, of course, was that the clock had already started for the biological war that she knew to be inevitable. Time was running out. The clock on the computer switched over from 4:34 to 4:44 and she quickly cleared the Internet history and cache and shut down the computer. In her hurry to leave the room, though, she didn't notice a bug crawling against the computer monitor's rapidly darkening screen. Nor did she notice how it flew after her and was soon joined by another. 22:28 - 11.13.02 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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