Shift: A Shadow World Novel

Prologue

Prologue

Elks Ridge, Alaska

Christmas Eve

 

Dr. Ben Marshall couldn’t stop looking at the door and it wasn’t because he was expecting Santa. He knew they were coming for him, it was only a question of when. Today or tomorrow or, if he were lucky, the upcoming holiday might prevent them from noticing his absence for another day or two. But eventually, inevitably, they would notice. Then they would get suspicious and search the laboratory, at which point they would realize he had taken the boy with him. 

And when they did they would kill him.

Ben glanced nervously around the small cabin that had been his home for the past year. Located about five miles outside of town, it was what he liked to describe as simple. By which he meant that it ran on a generator and didn’t have most of the modern conveniences associated with “comfort.” It was far less impressive than his expensive colonial in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and yet it held a certain charm for him, despite the fact that he had been lonely—desperately lonely—for the past 11 months. A Christmas tree stood in one corner of the living room, lit by the glow of a crackling fire. At the opposite end of the cabin a little boy sat coloring at the kitchen table. His dark hair fell across his eyes but he didn’t look as if it bothered him.

Who would have guessed such a cute kid could cause so much trouble? Certainly not Ben. Not in the beginning anyway. When Ben had first arrived at Elks Ridge he had been thrilled at the prospect of having virtually unlimited resources to pursue his own research. For one year he wouldn’t have to worry about balancing his teaching load at Harvard with his own work, nor would he have to waste precious time applying for grants and filling out endless paperwork. For most of his career he had been forced to limit the scope of his research to such an extent that he had come to feel like a glorified paper pusher. Before he’d even attempted to test his serum on monkeys he had spent four years administering miniscule doses to lab rats. Then, last fall, when he’d finally been on the brink of introducing the serum to human subjects the rug had been pulled out from under him. His request for funding was denied outright by the government because it was deemed “too risky.” Sure, he could go on performing tests on lab rats for the next five or ten or twenty years. As for anything more than that it didn’t look good—at least not according to Ben’s department chair, who diplomatically suggested he “shift his focus.”

He couldn’t shift his focus. It wasn’t possible, because for Ben Marshall stopping his work on the entelechon antidote would mean giving up on the most important thing in his life. It would mean giving up on Haley. And on Kelly too, he supposed, since he wasn’t sure his wife would be able to survive Haley’s death. Though Haley seemed healthy at birth, not long afterward she’d been diagnosed with Hacklin’s disease, a rare blood disorder that would eventually kill her. Ben had promptly dropped everything in order to pursue a cure, despite near impossibility of success. It had taken him four relatively fruitless years at Harvard and an additional eleven months at Arcticon. Now, finally, he had the cure.

The only problem was he had to destroy it.

The boy finished coloring the picture of Rudolph he had been working on and held it up proudly for Ben to see. The records at Arcticon said his name was Cody but Ben had known almost from the start it wasn’t his given name. It had taken more than a little detective work on his part to track down the boy’s mother but he had finally done it. A week earlier he’d taken two days off and hired a bush pilot to fly him to a remote fishing village set at the state’s northernmost tip. The woman’s eyes had filled when he showed her a few recent photos of the boy, who disappeared a year earlier, shortly before Ben’s arrival at Arcticon. Even then Ben hadn’t been sure. What grieving mother wouldn’t cling to any shred of hope that her missing child might be found? But she had willingly agreed to give him a blood sample and within 24 hours Ben knew that she was definitely Cody’s mother. Despite the changes in the boy, the DNA match was beyond question. Now all he had to do was wait for her to show up.