Chapter 10 - RAMPAGE

RAMPAGE

Elza’s face kept swimming out of darkness, into focus, then I would fade back to Tel Aviv, reliving the worst time of my life in every dreadful detail. It seemed like weeks of nightmares, but it was less than a day.

I was in my room, surrounded by images from the Louvre. Watteau’s Jupiter and Antiope, Regnault’s The Three Graces, Corot’s Woman with a Pearl, and Gericault’s terrible The Raft of the Medusa. That one persisted, all the dead and dying.

Elza had just given me a shot, and she was cutting away a tape that bound my left wrist. My right one was sore.

“You’ll be all right now?”

“What’s . . . the wrists?”

“You were hurting yourself. Pulling out hair.”

My hand went to my head. Almost bald, sore in places.

“All that loose hair in zero gravity. It was a mess; I used the vacuum razor. You’re a little bit tranquilized. I didn’t think you wanted to sleep anymore, though.”

“No. Please.” I felt my head. “The razor with the vacuum attachment?”

“It looks nice. Evened up.”

“Was everybody . . . no. Other people can’t have been affected as strongly as I was.”

“Nobody. Well, you can’t tell about Moonboy. But nobody else passed out. It could be your age.” She caressed my head. “Spy supposedly didn’t know what caused it, but it wasn’t just a human thing. Both the Martians were uncomfortable.”

I took a squeeze from her water bottle. “Memories. I felt trapped inside memories.”

“You have some sad ones. Worse than the rest of us.”

“Not sadness.” I had to be honest with her, of all people. “It was guilt. Murder.”

She was quiet for a moment. “You mustn’t feel guilt for being a soldier. We’ve gone over that pretty well.”

“Not that. Long after that. I . . . never told you.” I hesitated, aware that the drugs were loosening my tongue. Then it came out in a rush.

“It was right after Gehenna; right after I found my mother dead. I raced back into Tel Aviv, putting a list together in my mind.

“My Working Group Seven had been formed in response to a persistent rumor that a large-scale act of terrorism was imminent, one that couldn’t be traced to a single political or geographical entity because it was not centralized at all. We had a couple of chemically induced confessions that indicated the group was large but divided into small independent cells.

“Anti-Semitism doesn’t have borders, and in fact some of the people we were looking at were Jews themselves, with strong opposition to the current power structure. Current at that time, liberal.