by Schow, Ryan
After administering the shot, Gerhard closed and sealed the canister’s lid. He pushed a button, and fresh, pink-colored fluid rushed in the container. When it was full, he rotated the unit to a vertical position and there Rebecca remained, unconscious, her heart rate strong.
“Has anyone ever lived through this before?” Georgia asked.
“No,” he replied. “Neither mother nor child.”
“So this is some kind of miracle then?” Brayden asked.
“Of science, yes,” Gerhard replied. “The first of its kind.” He picked up the dead child, turned it over in his hands and studied it quietly. He furrowed his brow, then he turned to Abby’s canister and he studied that, too. Whatever thought might have drawn hope and life into his eyes faded, tempering his attitude as well. Her heart rate monitor still showed no pulse. Abby was dead like the baby in his hands.
Dead two days now.
6
Georgia wanted to know what this new version of Dr. Gerhard was thinking, if he was considering the deaths in this room as tragic, if he was still contemplating a way back for Abby.
Strange as it was, Abby’s outer wounds were healing, including the bullet holes in her head, but she was completely absent of life. They both stood there, looking at Abby.
How is this happening? Georgia wondered. Is this…reverse decay? But what did the healing matter if there was no brain function taking place? What did it matter if the heart wouldn’t beat?
“Her wounds are healing,” Brayden said, echoing Georgia’s thoughts. “How is that possible?”
Gerhard flinched like he hadn’t even realized the boy had come to join them, that’s how spent he was, how completely exhausted this last day left him. He looked in his arms and realized he still had the dead child. He made a look like he didn’t want it anywhere near him, but he held it anyway.
“I don’t know.”
“Can she really be healing and not…alive?” Brayden asked.
“I am still learning about the Fountain of Youth’s effects in matters of mortality.”
“Does that mean she might be able to live again?” Netty asked.
“On a regular dead person, hair and nails seem to grow after a body has expired, but that’s not it. That’s just the skin tightening. Not the body living on. The way the tightened skin seems to push these things out—almost like they’re still alive—it’s a perfectly natural occurrence. With Abby, I don’t know what is natural and what isn’t. With her, nothing is certain.”
“This isn’t hair or nails,” Brayden said, the slightest bit of hope leaking into his voice, “it’s her body repairing mortal wounds. I’ve watched this happen to her on more than one occasion.”
Gerhard turned and gave Brayden a doleful look, as if to say, no duh.
“The exit wounds,” Georgia said, “are they healing, too?”
Exit wounds were always more gruesome. Gerhard walked behind the glass canister, examined the other side. The baseball sized holes that were there when he put her in stasis were shrinking in size.
“Yes, but that’s to be expected,” he said, something in him shifting the slightest bit.
Georgia thought he was holding something back. Like maybe what he saw aroused him, but not enough to inspire false hope. Or perhaps he saw something entirely different. Like Georgia, Abby was one of his dolls, one of his more successful experiments. And what was Abby but another experiment? Could his serum truly restore life? Was it even possible?
Georgia wanted to know what Gerhard thought because what she wondered, and what he might say, they could be two entirely different things.
“It is safe to say she will not be coming back,” he finally announced, “but if she does, I will let you know. For now, it’s time to go. There’s been enough excitement for all of us.”
“What about the babies?” Netty asked.
“I’ll take care of them.”
“You don’t strike me as the maternal type,” she challenged.
“I am perfectly capable, thank you.” He set the stillborn child on the gurney, then reached out with both hands and took the baby from Netty’s arms. The baby started crying.
“What about Rebecca?” Brayden asked.
“Thank you for your help,” he said. “And like I said, I’ll let you know if I figure anything out.”
“What if you don’t figure anything out?” Georgia challenged, although she didn’t do this on purpose as much as she was logically weighing the odds.
“I did with you, didn’t I?”
Georgia had no words. He looked at her and she looked at him; neither blinked. He was rocking the baby, almost automatic; she was as still as the dead. The baby’s crying stopped.
Netty broke the uncomfortable silence. “We’re coming by tomorrow,” she said, insistent.
“I don’t give a shit what you do,” he replied, not even looking at her.
Wet Noodle
1
When the babies were asleep in a nest of blankets, the new and improved Dr. Wolfgang Gerhard drained Arabelle’s tank and hauled her soggy, fart smelling corpse out of the canister and finagled it on its back atop a gurney. He wheeled her out of the lab, into the incinerator room, the gurney’s hard black wheels rolling and wobbling along the concrete floor.
Looking down at her, at the face and body that once held a soul he adored, he was stopped by a memory, one of her looking up at him, smiling. A shock of dizziness struck him, a wave of sadness, an unfulfilled longing. He staggered back a step, his breath hitching in his throat.
What is this? he wondered in horror.
His skin prickled.
Vertigo snapped.
He dragged his eyes off her, not wanting to…feel. He was not comfortable with…vulnerability. The last thing he wanted was that kind of weakness festering inside him.
For all the things he didn’t understand, what he did know, and he knew this quite clearly, was he could not look at her, this woman he used to know. It spurred too much emotion. No, he told himself, not a woman—
A corpse.
A now dead…thing.
Forcing his attention elsewhere, desperately working to dampen that torturous ache expanding inside him, he pressed the red button on the outside of the gigantic metal incinerator. The burners whooshed to life. Long rows of bright blue flames now glowed under the incinerator’s sliding rack. The room seemed to close in on him. He put a hand on the wall to sturdy himself, refused to look at the oven or Arabelle. The sight of the incinerator alone dredged up memories of Auschwitz, but instead of seeing faceless Jews being pitched into the fires, he saw Arabelle and knew she would soon be reduced to ash.
This felt so much worse than Auschwitz.
If he could have felt love, it would be for her. This wasn’t love, though. At least that’s what he told himself. It was something different. Something deeper than that. Looking away was not the same as unwinding his emotions. This cancerous wound continued to spread its fingers of disease inside him, weakening him, making him feel like all he wanted was to lie beside Arabelle and slide into the flames with her.
He rubbed circles into his temples. Steadied his breathing. He was no Romeo; she was no Juliet.
Gerhard was incapable of love. His mother told him so until the day she passed, and so he believed her. Even after she left him and moved on, even after that ugly, hate-spewing stink hole of a mouth was no longer around to speak, he believed her.
He was just a boy back then. An innocent. Back then he was not yet aborted from humanity. Not yet immune to decency. He was not a whore to science and genetics, a father to mind control, one of the century’s most notorious mass murderers: the Angel of Death. No, before his mother had left the world behind, he was none of those things. Merely a child who meant nothing to the world.
But he was impressionable.
This, of course, was before Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, before his time at Auschwitz, before the name Josef Mengele came to stand for everything vile and perverted
and sick in humanity. He was just a boy whose mother not only abused him but detested his very existence.
When she said he would never love, that he would never in life be loved, he believed her because she tried to her last breath to grant him asylum from such a terrible poison. Perhaps this was her gift to him. Perhaps this pain he was feeling was indeed the same poisonous love his mother never wanted for him. Yet somehow he must have loved Arabelle, because losing her was him experiencing a merciless run of grief. Unlike his mother, however, he wouldn’t die. He couldn’t.
He would only be left to suffer.
The backs of his eyes prickled, like stabbing needles in his flesh; the room swam beyond the moisture building in his eyes. Goddamn it, he thought, will I ever stop this incessant sobbing?
Already he knew the answer, and already he felt a deep and personal shame for this behavior. Tears were a device of the weak.
With the heels of his hands, he started double pounding his temples, relentless, violent, as if to knock the memories and emotions back into hiding. As if to pull the tears back inside his body where they belonged. When the uncooperative memories refused their banishment, he turned and screamed at Arabelle’s corpse. Not words, just guttural, animal-like screams of rage, hurt and frustration. His throat grew hoarse. Still he spewed his hatred at her corpse the way he remembered his mother had spewed her hatred at him.
He slunk down against the wall, tried to comprehend the emotional mess he was becoming. He was usually so composed. Now, some small, nearly insignificant voice in his mind was telling him he was going crazy, that he was no better than a child in full tantrum, that his spine was soft and unworthy.
I’m not insane, he thought. Something must have gone wrong with his genetic formula. Or was it something about the clones? Were they not screened properly? Was this simply a coding error, one that turned him from a monster into a giant, sobbing vagina? A substantial clicking sound told him the incinerator was ready.
“Finish what you started,” his mouth said. His voice; his mother’s words. He took a breath, nodded his head. “Okay, mother,” he replied.
The new Gerhard with the brand new body, the fucked sideways Alice in Wonderland brain and an unstable, almost nuclear smattering of emotions got to his feet, went to the gurney holding Arabelle and nearly lost himself at the sight of her. He owed her this final look. Between them, there was a rich history he would miss. In his own way, he loved her. There was no other explanation for his behavior.
Traitorous tears dribbled from his ruined eyes, drifting mercilessly down his face. He swiped at them. More came. Defeated, Gerhard lifted Arabelle’s wet body onto the incinerator’s rollout rack and arranged her limbs: hands by her sides, legs perfectly straight, head looking straight up. When Arabelle was ready, he slid the tray back into the incinerator and shut the industrial-grade door bearing the thick glass window.
Pawing at the unending stream of tears from his eyes, embarrassed despite being alone, Gerhard pressed a smaller, green button and watched in horror as the oven’s flames engulfed her. Her skin went from pink to black. It bubbled and charred in giant patches. The smoking of the flesh and the burning of the hair was another reminder of his days in Auschwitz and how cooking the dead had been a twenty-four hour endeavor.
Never before had he felt so helpless.
His brain was switching gears again, too quickly for him to comprehend. Gerhard couldn’t stop the onslaught of emotions. This twisted riot of memories—these ashy, Auschwitz memories—they had a permanent place in that brain of his. The hateful things in his head, it was his past unfolding.
Behind his eyes, visions of those days bloomed bright and clear, and they stunk of indecency.
The emaciated bodies standing outside in the snow in long lines, he made them stand there. His mind’s eye recalled their greyish skin. How it stretched loose in some areas and pulled tight over brittle bones and wispy hair in other areas. These Jews and their sympathizers became walking corpses, meant by him for a life of hard labor and starvation. The way their heads and backs bowed, the way their eyes had that vacant, thousand yard stare, the wills of each and every one of them had been broken. If only they could die, perhaps they might smile again. But he didn’t allow that. Not right away.
As the head doctor of Auschwitz near the end of World War II, he had a penchant for torture. He kept the detainees alive only to work. He was proud of his sadistic skill set. Now, however, with a new run of DNA, he no longer wanted these memories in his head. But they kept popping up, like little Jack-in-the-box’s at anything reminding him of his sordid past, and it was maddening.
He snapped his eyes shut and in the recesses of his mind, he heard phantom German Shepherds barking, felt them tugging on invisible leashes. He had an indomitable love for the ferocious creatures, how the sharpness of their bark inspired so much fear, how they commanded immediate compliance. The prisoners feared them to the point of pissing their trousers, a sight that—back then—never failed to amuse him. He had even thrown a screaming baby into the fires. Oh what a day that had been! Even now, despite his internal struggles, an unconscious smile found its way to his new and improved face.
Auschwitz.
What a lovely, hateful place.
Then his smile dropped flat as the thought of all those old men in oversized suit coats and slacks heading into the fields to work while their wives and children were being gassed in the showers and then stuffed into ovens just like the one Arabelle was in.
The new version of him decided he hated that place; yet he couldn’t help thinking it was also a veritable Wonderland.
Arabelle…she was so beautiful to him, an angel he never deserved. Saving her was the only right and decent thing he had ever done in his life.
Unable to look anymore at her burning body, he left the incinerator room and his fiery angel behind, stumbling his way into the bathroom where he splashed cold water in his face. He went from grief stricken to enraged in the blink of an eye. A kind of manic one-eighty. He locked eyes with his reflection.
You miserable prick, he thought.
The startling perfection of his new face deepened his anger. Why should he be so beautiful and Arabelle be so very, very dead?
“You are a product of your own science,” his mouth said.
Asshole.
Everything from his short blonde hair, to his impossibly blue eyes, to skin that glowed with a sort of otherworldly beauty, was extraordinary. Too perfect. It brought bile to his throat, the very sight of his manufactured face. With a genuine revulsion, his eyes feasted upon an engineered perfection that looked too good to be authentic.
Until the teeth.
Those ugly little square things.
He parted his lips and stared at the mouthful of familiar teeth, at the very obvious gap in between the front two. He left this “defect” in the genetic code to remind himself of who he’d been, of how he’d lived, and his contributions—as well as his devotion—to science and genetics. But the updated version of his brain was smarter than the last, and if he was certain of anything, it was that he did not want the thoughts or memories of his previous brain anymore. What he especially hated, though, was the ugly gap between his teeth. It reminded him he was both Frankenstein and the monster. A reality that now made him cringe.
Unable to peel his eyes away from his reflection, grinding his molars at the very sight of himself, he felt a slithering, almost greasy sensation squirming through the holes in his mind. The agitation he felt was insanity brewing, the metal on metal of grinding gears. It became a screaming, grating, gnarled sound of things inside him going very wrong.
His head wasn’t right or whole. It was a mixture of all the wrong chemicals. He was fractured, functioning erratically, and it hurt. It hurt like a son of a bitch. All he wanted to do was turn beautiful things sour.
In the madness, in the throes of it, he became obsessed with the idea of carving out his own brain and studying it. Was it just to see what fucked up anoma
lies were growing in there? He didn’t know. It could be something else entirely. Energy prickled inside his head. It crackled and stung. He wondered, what is this? How was he overcharged and drained at the same time?
Is this the final plunge into lunacy? he wondered. The idea had him laughing hysterically in his head while his mouth only grimaced. Rationality had no place here.
Only impulse.
The new and improved/devolved Gerhard punched his reflection in the mirror, smashing it into a couple dozen shards. A hot, pointed sensation flared in his cut up knuckles. Blood boiled up from the wounds in little red beads, but he was like Abby, like Heim. Rather, they were like him: regenerators.
Anomalies of science and genetics.
He shook his hand, flinging the spilled blood in thin ribbons of red on the fragmented glass. For some unknown, almost frightening and out of control moment, his brain flipped on some crazed switch and he instantly fell into fits of dark, hysterical laughter. Laughter that now left his mouth. The laughter quickly turned to sobbing, which then returned to rage.
He grabbed fistfuls of his new hair and yanked hard. He slapped his face red, jerked and tore the flesh of his ears, cursed and screamed, and then he stopped and stood there, exhausted, out of breath, a veritable mess.
Radiant heat warmed his brainpan, then it became the dry chill of ice and sharp, sharp pains. He clawed at the things inside his head, slowly at first then in fits, and then he tore open the bathroom door and stormed out into the lab where he began cursing and breaking things.
2
The lab was officially ransacked. Drunken teens could not have done this much damage. The tides of emotion inside him shifted once more, making him think what he had done was foolish and destructive. Coming down off that wicked adrenaline high wasn’t the same as coming down off heroine, but it was no walk in the park either. Shame hangovers weren’t pretty. What the hell was wrong with him?
