Nanowhere | Page 8

if he'd live or die.
Until then, he'd count.
He had been hiding for as many days as seconds that had passed. He hadn't shut himself off from the world, but the world from him. He diligently read the blogs and newsfeeds. The Net was rife with Straff sightings and inside stories of his escape from justice. They placed him in secret Montana bunkers, masterminding worldwide extermination. They blamed him for natural disasters and species deaths, everything from producing destructive hurricanes to causing declines in penguin populations.
He was the nanotech god after all. He could have changed his appearance, his fingerprints, "his DNA"--as some of the tabloids put it. He could be among us, selling your kids candy, mowing your lawn, playing for the Oakland A's.
Straff snorted at the thought. (He was a Red Sox fan from way back). He also knew who was still out there. He knew exactly who he was hiding from. The really dangerous ones, not the public. All the public would do was kill him speedily. Most would anyway. There were a few million odd vengeful people who'd kill him slowly and feed his remains to scavenging animals, but these were the more assertive members of the public, and he didn't know their names.
Others he knew well, and in the past had been pressed into service by them. They had deceived him, and he'd let himself be deceived. He had done horrible things for them. Millions died because of what they made him do. President Zoerner, the head of the Purists had gone to his death, but the rest of his regime, without the head, remained intact: the shoulders, the neck, the lower parts of the brainstem. Straff knew very well who would want him alive.
Straff's stomach rammed into the roof of his mouth as the gunship dropped from the sky, braked a meter off the pad and then landed like a few tons of hot armor-plated machinery on concrete. A heavy door rolled open. One of the soldiers snipped the ties, ripped the rough fabric hood from his head, tearing away a few irreplaceable strands of gray hair with it, and shoved Straff into the twilight.
Straff's body was bent as if he carried the accumulated weight of the corpses he'd produced, millions of them by most estimates--and that wasn't counting the ciphers, which was a Rost Institute specific project that took the toll into tens of millions.
He kept the guilt at bay by keeping his mind busy. He had to keep his thoughts in motion just to remain conscious, doing things like count the seconds since they'd caught him. The burden of guilt stooped his shoulders, buckled his spine and would crush him flat if he allowed it out of his periphery and into focus.
He staggered a little, rubbing his wrists, straightened up as much as he could, and walked away from the gunship between four of the troopers who'd captured him. They towered over him, a moving wall of gray camo rippling over muscles, escorting him up the walk.
Dr. Straff looked exactly as he had always looked. He was a short stocky sixty year old, nearly bald, with a plump nose and fuzzy white eyebrows. He looked as if he should be wearing glasses but he wasn't. In his wrinkled blue labcoat he could have been an elderly small-town GP from some past era, back when worried mothers rushed their kids to the family doctor for sprained ankles, chickenpox and temps over a hundred, and the doctor fixed everything with gentle concern, handing out lollipops afterward.
That image of the charming family doctor had been purged from the culture by Ernest Straff. He had killed the medical profession. If not directly, it had all been done in his name.
Straff was the reason people hated hospitals. It was his fault that at the sight of any doctor, people ran for their lives, or shrank in fear with murmurs of, "Don't make eye contact."
When manufactured viruses swept through cities, and riots broke out, Straff's advanced medical agency stepped aside and let it happen. When Americans thought of Dr. Ernest Straff, they thought of bodies stacked next to dumpsters in alleyways, EKG alarms blaring from crowded hospital rooms, technicians draining corpses into blood-type bags and selling them off to high-bidders. They couldn't shut their eyes against the palsied hands of an intoxicated surgeon demanding clamps, rails and the bone saw, they couldn't turn away from floodlit operating rooms that smelled like sewers, damp with death.
Ernest Straff didn't bother looking around at the cluster of buildings that made up the Rost Institute. He knew where he was. Why the hood then? Why the silence? He glowered at the nearest jumptrooper.
"You think I'd misplace upstate New York?"
The trooper ignored him, although the man was so geared up it was difficult to