The Keeper

by Barr, Clifford

He was quieter, though, and Becca could see a change in his demeanor. How many times can you come back from the dead and still be the same as you were before?

  The radio started to flicker.

  “Everyone,” Kent’s voice said. “Doctor McCarthy would like to see all of you at the McCarthy house.”

  “Aw man,” Danni said, “I was really looking forward to destroying some trees right now.”

  “I’m sure there will be a forest when you get back,” Peter said.

  All of them walked back to the house. People were laughing and smiling, having fun.

  It was the last time that all of them would be happy.

  ****

  “Cell decay,” Robbie said.

  The words were like a hammer, striking everyone in the head. Everyone sat in the living room. Matt and Jolie were sitting on the couch, Danni and Peter next to them. Her mother was standing.

  “I spent the last six months in a chair,” Carol said one day, “and I don’t want to ever have to sit down again.”

  She stood near the doorway, next to her husband. Kent and Nigel were in the back, looking inward at the rest of them.

  “What?” Nigel asked.

  Becca had seen almost every side of her father in her relatively short life. She had seen him at his highs, and unfortunately, at his lows. She had seen him ecstatic when he got a promotion, to struggling to hold a cigarette because of his Parkinson’s. However, she saw something far worse than that on her father’s face that afternoon.

  “When I injected Carol with the NaU, I didn’t know what I was doing,” Robbie said. “It was more or less a Hail Mary. She was going to die, so I thought why not try and use the NaU to bring her back. I had been denied trials on mice, but I felt confident that it could work. A clump of nanites within someone that banded itself to their DNA and removed anything that compromises the DNA or the organism itself wasn’t as safe as I first thought.

  “So when Carol went into cardiac arrest, I decided to try and see what would happen. I injected her with the prototype NaU, which activated itself within her body. What I didn’t count on was it spreading.”

  One second, they were all staring down at Carol’s light-filled body; the next was pure darkness as they all were knocked out on the ground. Becca fell unconscious like the rest of them, even though there was no NaU within her.

  Days afterward, the powers started to emerge, and that’s how they found themselves in the living room at that moment.

  “What do you mean by cell decay, though?” Nigel said.

  Getting powers had done nothing to change or alter the man’s attitude. Becca could admire his stubbornness and persistence, if she was only slightly annoyed at his demeanor.

  “I’m getting to that,” her father said. “When I first thought up the NaU, it was only supposed to fix people’s bodies and health, nothing more. However, as I’m sure all of you can see, each of us has a different rendition of the NaU.

  “Carol has the ability to shoot bright energy breaths from her mouth. Matt has the ability to feel the things around him and move them. Peter can recover from any injury. Danni has super strength. Jolie can conduct energy and fly. Nigel can construct objects out of thin air. And I can re-distribute kinetic and other energy forces.

  “All of them are unique and were never part of the original code of design. However, I fear that they are each coming with their own problems.”

  He motioned to Peter.

  “Peter, would you like to speak now?”

  Peter stood up.

  “A few weeks ago, after the car accident,” Peter said. “I approached Doctor McCarthy with my concerns about our powers. While I physically felt all right, my brain has been feeling fuzzy lately. It takes me longer to think things through. I forget where I am. I lose track of who I am sometimes.”

  “I took his concerns at being limited to only him,” Robbie said. “It would make sense that someone coming back from the dead more or less would have some mental issues.

  “However, I took a longer look at the NaU and all of us. Jolie, you’ve been reporting to have nausea of late, and Matt informed me that you had a seizure last night. Is that correct?”

  Jolie shot Matt a death glare, but he only stared back at her.

  “I would need to do further tests to be sure,” Robbie said. “But, I’m afraid that our NaUs are negatively affecting our bodies even as they help us.”

  “Dr. McCarthy,” Kent said.

  Kent rolled back his sleeves. Shining pink veins reached down his arms and legs. The skin around them seemed, not to be rotting, but drying out.

  “Dear God,” Carol said.

  Robbie turned pale.

  “So, what are you trying to say?” Nigel said, standing up.

  “I’m saying,” Robbie said, “that I think all of us are dying.”

  The room was quiet enough to hear a pin drop.

  Suppose it’s a good thing I didn’t get powers, after all, Becca thought. It made her feel slightly better, but the ground had still opened up beneath her, and she felt her mind falling and tumbling down into the darkness and depths below.

  ****

  Becca sat on the fire escape outside her window.

  The leaves had already fallen off all the trees around their house, and there was a cool breeze and chill in the air. There wasn’t any snow yet, but they were forecasting a large blizzard in a week.

  The school year had been a pleasant one so far. The classes were incredibly easy, the people mostly boring. Becca spent most of her time reading in between each class and during lunch. Her brother and his friends were supposedly having a good year, though superpowers can do that to a person. Make them feel invincible, which they were, at least for a while. Now though, things were different.

  People were fighting downstairs. Even from outside the house, Becca could hear her father and Nigel going at it with one another. Nigel, who had praised Robbie when he brought Carol back from the dead, was now yelling at the man, calling him some sort of mass murderer. Her father was yelling back that it was a theory, and that there was still time to come up with a cure.

  Over by their car, Danni and Peter were talking. If Becca had a NaU, then perhaps she could hear them, but she didn’t besides, as nosy as she was when people on death row were having intimate conversations, she didn’t want to interrupt. Besides, she had been the blessed one, after all, the one without any powers.

  “Hey.”

  Becca looked to her right.

  Matt was levitating there, looking over at her. She desperately wanted to fly with him to go somewhere else. But she couldn’t. Maybe this is how Matt used to feel when he was in the wheelchair.

  “Hey,” she said.

  Her brother moved over toward her.

  “Your father is a little angry,” she said.

  “So is yours,” Matt said, smiling a little, the kind of smile people make when they aren’t exactly happy or sad at the moment.

  Jolie had gone to the bathroom after hearing the news. Becca didn’t know what for, but she felt the desire to leave. Besides, it wasn’t like they were talking about her death as well. That was an exclusive club that she couldn’t join, through luck or plain happenstance.

  Matt looked over the trees with her. In the distance, the sun was going down. It was a school day the next day, but Becca didn’t think any of the parties involved were thinking about school at the moment. Death had a way of taking over people’s thoughts, mostly when it was so near and dear to their hearts, or rather, their lives.

  “Do you think it’s true?” Matt said.

  “I know you do,” Becca said. “Why else would you have told Robbie about what happened to Jolie?”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  Becca’s heart sank. She whirled her head around to look at her brother.

  “What?” she said.

  “To be fair, it was before the NaU,” Matt said. “About a month or so before.”

  “But how can you—”

&nbs
p; “Are you seriously asking your brother about how babies are made?”

  Becca didn’t know what to say. Jolie must be a couple of months by now, and that meant that—

  “Yeah, we’re planning on keeping it,” Matt said.

  “But, you guys are going off to college.”

  “We’ll make it work,” Matt said. “Or rather, we had planned on making it work. Your father’s announcement might have ruined our plans for the future.”

  Becca thought about Matt as a father. Of course, the new Matt was obviously more capable of such a feat, but even if he hadn’t been blessed/cursed with the NaU, Becca could imagine her brother as a good dad.

  “Don’t get your hopes up now, Becca,” Matt said.

  A few last remaining leaves fell from the trees around them to the ground, disappearing amidst all of the others.

  “Everything has a cost,” Matt said. “It looks like this NaU wasn’t the miracle we all thought it would be.”

  “My dad will think of something,” Becca said.

  “I don’t doubt Robbie’s commitment to all of us,” Matt said. “Nor his intelligence. He has done something truly remarkable. But like I said, everything has a cost. And the bill is coming due very soon.”

  The front door opened.

  Nigel walked over toward his car. The man’s face was as red as a tomato. He got into his car and drove off.

  “Your father didn't look happy,” Becca said.

  “He rarely ever does,” Matt said, “but he won’t do anything outrageous.”

  “Do you still hate him?” Becca said.

  “I can’t,” Matt said. “He’s my father. He’s all I have. Robbie is nice, but he likes you more than me. It only seems right. Like I’m sure my father likes me more than he likes you.”

  “My father said that he poisoned you,” Becca said. “I think your father is capable of doing something outrageous.”

  “As outrageous as injecting a dead woman with experimental nanite clusters,” Matt said.

  The two of them had a quick laugh at that, but there was a thorn in the side of it.

  “Don’t worry,” Matt said. “I know you don’t want me to die.”

  “You still don’t know if that will happen.”

  “I have a pretty good guess,” Matt said. “You were claiming that your father was a genius a couple of minutes ago. Are you going to say that he’s wrong about his prognosis?”

  Becca rolled her eyes.

  “Now you’re just annoying,” she said.

  “I’m dying,” Matt said. “Humor keeps me warm.”

  The two of them talked a bit longer after that, but Becca wouldn’t remember most of it. Instead, her mind was thinking about something else, about the doors, many that there were, all of which were now closed off to her and her family. There would be no family get-together with Jolie and Matt, no seeing her herself go off to college.

  All because her father couldn’t let his wife die.

  ****

  Nigel came back a few days later.

  By then, Greendale was covered in a few inches of New England snow, and the air had a cold crispness to it, the kind that stole away your breath and choked your lungs whenever you tried to run or walk too fast in its presence. All of the leaves had fallen under the trees, leaving the skeletons of trees. The leftover remains of a hurricane down south that coming into contact with the colder temperatures of the north, along with the shifting jet stream, made a recipe for a blizzard, the likes of which the people of Greendale were prepping for. And amongst all of that prep, as the electricians were making sure the poles were safe, as the plumbers were checking people’s pipes to make sure none froze in the coming cold. Nigel Torres had been busy.

  There had been talk all throughout town that he had been around asking people things, asking them about Robbie and the McCarthys in general, along with all of Matt’s friends. Becca heard rumors that the man was asking the police department about the lab that Robbie and his friends were using up in Argyle. What was it exactly that they were doing? Human experiments? Negligence and bad treatment?

  Her father had told her and Carol that the man was harmless. All he was doing was causing a ruckus and, in truth, not an illegitimate one.

  “I’ve killed him,” Robbie said to Carol and her daughter one night. “Or at least partially.”

  By then, the only potential cures had been weak ones at that. It seemed that when Robbie McCarthy had been able to etch together this miracle of science known as the NaU, he had done too well of a job in one area, that being the kind that made sure the NaU was attached forever to the person that is inhabited. There seemed to be no real way to remove the NaU.

  Kent was the most affected. All of them were starting to have problems. Jolie seemed to be racked with seizures. They were growing more severe as her nausea turned into something different and deadly.

  Matt wasn’t home the night his father died.

  He was off with Jolie, doing God knew what.

  Miles away from the McCarthy house in the middle of a snow-laden cornfield, Danni was currently shoving her fist through Peter’s head. Her mind was in a rage, the likes of which could only be attributed to her NaU. Becca wouldn’t learn of that until later, so she was thinking of other things when Peter died.

  But three miles away from that, at the McCarthy house, Nigel arrived.

  He got out of his car and walked right up to the house. Becca was in her room, reading a book and trying not to think about her parents’ upcoming deaths. They might not, since her father had come up with a temporary cure. If one concentrated the use of a CAT scan machine, over the period of a few hours, then the NaU could be brought to one part of the body, and then it became dormant. It was still killing them, but at a slower pace. They were still dying, but slower, and now they couldn’t use their powers anymore. Robbie was thinking of trying to use this method on Matt and his friends before the rot got too bad. Kent had already lost both of his legs. He was up at the Argyle lab. As far as his mother was concerned, he was helping out at the lab these last couple of days.

  The boy was poised to lose his arms by the end of the week.

  Becca heard the front door slam open. She put down her book and exited her room.

  “Hello, Robbie.”

  “Nigel, I don’t have time—” A pause. The house was as silent as most houses are in upstate New York when it snows outside. “What happened to you?”

  “Oh, wouldn’t you like to know? Or rather, you already do,” Nigel laughed then, his laugh seeped and greased the air with the sound of hysteria and desperation.

  “You did this to me,” he said. Becca heard the sound of Nigel activating his NaU. The house smelled like ozone.

  “What about you two?” Nigel said. “You seem pretty healthy. I thought all of us were dying, Robbie.”

  “We are,” Carol said. “We found a way to minimize the damage for a bit.”

  “I’m guessing you were going to tell others about this cure,” Nigel said. “Weren’t you?”

  “It isn’t a cure,” Robbie said. “It’s only a way of slowing down the illness. We’re dying the same as you.”

  “Oh, I very much doubt that.”

  Becca started to walk down the stairs. All she had for possible defense was a pencil that she kept hidden underneath her sleeve.

  Nigel looked different.

  He looked like he hadn’t showered in a week, and the clothes he was wearing hadn’t been washed in an even longer time. But that wasn’t what attracted Becca’s eyes.

  The man had a rash.

  This wasn’t the typical type of rash that people got when they were allergic to cats or dogs, and one of those cute little human companions comes up and licks them, nor was this the sort of rash one might get when they eat something that they are allergic to. No, this was something else, something more severe.

  Half of the man’s face had sunken in.

  The skin was red and spotted. Becca thought she could see bone under
neath it. His left eye was deflated, peeking out of the eyelids, now looking more closely attuned to a curtain then a part of the human anatomy. Through it all, were white veins as well, stretching all along his face and arms. Part of his mouth seemed to be missing, causing Becca to see the man’s teeth even when he wasn’t talking. A small amount of drool was seeping out of that mouth and slowly dripped down onto his shirt.

  The man didn’t seem to notice her, his back being to her, or at least, part of his back. If he could still see out of his deflated eye, then perhaps he could have seen her. But as it were, the man remained ignorant of the thirteen-year-old girl with a pencil behind him.

  Neither one of her parents made any move to signal her, even though they could both see her and him.

  “Where’s my son?” Nigel said.

  “Our son is—” Carol said.

  “No, no,” Nigel said. “None of this ‘our.’ In all of the years we were together, you were looking for the first attempt to jump ship. You hated Matt for not being good enough, and you hated me, didn’t you, you bitch? Harboring your resentment so that the first chance you got, the first time a college boy swooped down into town, you pounced on the opportunity to get rid of Matt and me. I was the one who helped him use the bathroom. I was the one who washed his clothes. Sure, I wasn’t able to give you the strong, healthy boy you wanted, but Matt is still important—to me at least. I made him stronger with that belt, made sure he knew that he could overcome any pain, any obstacle. I’m not convinced that you and I aren’t in the same boat of that accord.”

  “I was trying to—” her father said.

  “Oh shut up, Robbie,” Nigel said. “You weren’t trying to do anything for my son or my ex-wife. You were trying to come up with a cure to your own illness so that the only thing you and Michael J. Fox had in common was hair color and bad acting. You were sick, and you couldn’t handle it, so you used Carol as a test to see what would happen, and lo and behold.”

  Giant blades shot out of Nigel’s arms. They were almost a yardstick in length.

  “This is what happened,” he brought one of the blades close to his face, the light illuminating his scarred face. “But this happened as well.” He was showing off his scarring. “No one has seen Kent in a while. Whatever happened to that boy, or is he in your basement or cellar, slowly rotting away with the nanites that you put inside of him?”