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She shrugged. “I’m not sure and neither is Gates. But one thing’s for sure, it’s our minds that they want, our intellects they need. They are of a single mind, a single consciousness, a hive mentality. That is exactly what they intend for us to be. For us to be them but in human form.” She scrolled through a few pages on her laptop. “According to Gates, they’ve bred certain characteristics into us. There are probably latent gifts we all carry in our minds, our carefully engineered minds, that they will now exploit. They’ll reawaken faculties that we’ve long forgotten about, but have been buried in us all along . . . “

“Like what?”

“Abilities they planted in us long ago. Abilities that would make us like them. Mechanisms seeded in our brains, special adaptations that have been passed on through our genes . . . wild talents that occasionally make themselves known like telepathy, telekinesis, prophecy . . . talents that, when the time was right, would make us like them — a single, ominous hive mind. That coupled with an overriding instinct, a blind compulsion to serve them. An all important seed they would have planted in our primitive brains and is still there today.”

Cutchen said, “So everything we are, our entire history and even our destiny . . . these Old Ones were the architects of it? We’re . . . synthetic?”

“Yes and no. Our culture, our civilization is our own, I think. Though much of it might be based upon archetypes imprinted upon our brains eons ago. Even our conception of a god, a superior being, a creator . . . it’s no doubt based upon some aboriginal image of them placed into our subconscious minds. They would have seen themselves as our gods, our masters . . . then and now . . . and we, in essence, were designed to be their tools, an extension of their organic technology, to be used for what plans we could never even guess at. But it might be in us, that knowledge, lying dormant in our brains until they decide to wake it up. And when that happens . . . when that happens, there will be no more human race, Cutchy.”

Cutchen’s face was beaded with sweat, his eyes were wide and tormented. “We have to stop this, Elaine. We have to stop this madness.”

“If we can. If we can,” she said, her voice filled with a bitter hopelessness, a dire inevitability. “Lord knows what they planted in us, what buried imperatives and controls that they might be, right now, getting ready to unlock on a global scale to bring us to our ultimate destiny.”

“Which is?”

But Sharkey could just shake her head. “I don’t know and I don’t think I want to find out.”

“We’re fucked, Elaine. If Gates is right, we’re fucked.” Cutchen kept trying to moisten his weathered lips, but he was all out of spit. “I really hope Gates is a lunatic. I’m really hoping for that.”

“I don’t think he is,” Sharkey told him. “And the scary part is, nobody’s heard from him in over forty-eight hours now.”

33

The way Hayes was seeing it, he’d paid for this dance and LaHune was going to have a cheek-to-cheek waltz with him whether he liked the idea of it or not. And LaHune most certainly did not like the idea. But he knew Hayes. Knew trying to get rid of the guy was like trying to shake a stain out of your shorts.

Hayes was tenacious.

Hayes was relentless.

Hayes would hang like a tattoo on your backside until he got exactly what he wanted. No more. No less. But LaHune, of course, had had his merry fill of Jimmy Hayes and his paranoid bullshit. Had it right up to his left eyeball and this is what he told Hayes, not bothering to spare his feelings one iota. In his opinion, Hayes was the rotten apple in the storied barrel. The bee in the bonnet. And the cat piss in the punch.

“I’ve had my fill of you, Hayes,” LaHune told him. “I’m so sick of you I could spit. Just the sight of you roils my stomach.”

Hayes was sitting in the administrator’s office, his feet up on his desk even though he’d been warned a half dozen times to get his dirty, stinking boots off of there. “Are you trying to tell me something, Mr. LaHune? Because I’m getting this funny feeling in my gut that you just don’t like me. But maybe it’s just gas.”

LaHune sat there, really trying to be patient. Really trying to hang onto his dignity which had been chewed up, swallowed, and shit on by this man from day one. Yes, he was trying to hang onto his dignity and not come right over the desk at Hayes, that smarmy, bearded dirtball.

“No, you’re reading me fine, Hayes. Just fine. And get your goddamn feet off my desk.”

Hayes crossed one boot atop the other. “You saying it’s over between us, then? No more quickies behind the oil tanks in the generator shack?”

“You’re not funny, Hayes.”

“Sure I am. Ask anybody.”