The straining jiggles the old man, who grabs her by the shoulders as though offering solace. “Easy … easy there. We’re going to get through this together. But it won’t help to struggle. Trust me on this. It merely makes the device tighten.”
Lilly lets out a shriek of rage. The raw, naked scream in the room makes the chemist wince and cover his ears with his hands. Lilly wrestles wildly with the bonds to no avail. She starts to well up with tears. The last thing she wants to do is cry but she can’t stop the tears and snot from rolling down her face. The old man lowers his hands and watches with the look of a person at a wake or sitting shivah, waiting for a loved one to cry out their grief.
* * *
Over the next few seconds, Lilly makes several observations and deductions—even while fighting her tears—that could very well be of paramount importance to her survival. Lightning returns, flickering in the room, and Lilly sees streaks tracing across her field of vision. She feels strange, buoyant, like she just chugged a gallon of alcohol and the effects are mere seconds away, and she remembers the early stages of a Nightshade high. At least the pounding in her head has quieted down, the pain in her joints calming slightly. But not a single one of these realizations seems as critical as the faint sensation of her sweat-slick right wrist slipping ever so slightly within the knotted coils of rope binding her hands behind her back. At first, she’s worried that she simply imagined it. While staring at the old man, defiantly refusing to look away, she discreetly tries a second time to slip rope farther toward her hand but the restraint holds tight. Her hands have no sensation left, the blood cut off. Lilly remembers studying the life of Houdini in high school, and reading about his technique of escaping the inescapable through a disciplined system of tensing and relaxing, tensing and relaxing, so she starts doing exactly that with the wrist restraint.
A moment later, her tears dry on her face. She swallows coppery blood in her mouth from biting her tongue and gets her thoughts together. She takes another moment before speaking. “Please, please … tell me what you’re doing. You owe me that much.”
The old man lets out a sigh. “In point of fact, I’m seeing through the penultimate stage of the human trials I started in earnest one year ago.”
She stares at him. “There are no human trials, we both know that.”
“Lilly—”
“You can stop the routine, your cover is blown. You’re sick. Mentally ill. Deeply fucking deranged. You don’t need to complete any trials, you need medication and a long stay in the funny farm.”
He cocks his head at her as though sizing her up. “May I show you something without eliciting another outburst?”
She shrugs.
He reaches down to the hem of his soiled undershirt and pulls it up over his belly. Lilly stares. At first uncertain as to what she’s supposed to be seeing, she notes the surprising girth of the man’s gut. It hangs over his belt like a massive loaf of uncooked bread, hairy and stretch-marked. Nalls says in his feeble, croaking voice, “As you can see, my time is limited.”
“What?” Lilly is confused. “What am I supposed to be looking f—”
She stops. She sees the marks. Below his left armpit, an inch outside his nipple, they are faintly visible in the dying beam of the flashlight, which still sits on the workbench across the room. “Alas … it’s the scarlet letter of this age,” Nalls comments sadly. “The two-way ticket, the return trip no one wants to take.”
Lilly moves her mouth but can’t summon any words. She feels the cable hugging her. It feels hot, as if the old man’s fever is being conducted through the wire and penetrating her. “When did…?”
He waves her question off. “It occurred in the corridor not long before you awakened.”
She stares at the bite marks. Tiny sutures form little x’s on each gouge. She can’t get a full breath into her lungs. She utters, “How did you…?”
“I stitched them up myself, a few were deep enough to involve an artery.”
Lilly feels light-headed, wobbly, nauseous, like she’s floating. The faint light coming from the workbench turns golden and warm in her line of sight. She can’t think properly. She struggles against the restraints for a moment, almost involuntarily. The cable rattles against the wall. “Don’t do this.” She changes her tone with him, speaks evenly, softly, as though to a child. “Don’t go out like this. Senseless. Heartless.”
“Ahhh. To quote the bard…” He lowers his T-shirt, and coughs again between his words. “‘Therein lies the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.’” He smiles at her again, and for the first time, Lilly sees the extent of the madness crackling behind his eyes. “It makes a tremendous amount of sense, Lilly. Believe me. You will paint your name in blood on the roll call of history. Your essence is the essence of the Overmind, the Christhead, the road to the vaccine.”
She notices a syringe on the floor not far from where they sit. “You gave me another dose of that drug, Nightshade, didn’t you? Was that to keep me docile for the big finale?”
The old man breathes deeply as though weathering a surge of pain. He ignores her questions. “We did not have time to determine the genetic markers in your cells … but sometimes science is less a science than an art. One must employ intuition. I believe your blood will provide the missing ingredient for an antidote.”
Lilly’s head begins to spin, her stomach clenched with nausea, her vision streaking with optical fireworks. But at the same time, her brain registers another scintilla of slippage around her right wrist. “I don’t understand.”
“Yes, Lilly, I believe you do. I believe you understand perfectly.”
“Listen to me. I’m sorry you’re going to die but this is all a product of your sickness, your mental illness. I will stop you. I will put you down. I promise you, I will end you if you carry this through.”
“On the contrary, you will join me.” His smile makes the flesh on her neck bristle. “I will turn, and we will become one in a baptismal font, and the conjoining of our genetic material will yield the cure.”
She feels the rage building within her, but it’s dampened by the drug or compound or whatever the lunatic sitting across from her has administered. “You’re a crazy old man who’s lost his mind.”
“Be that as it may—”
“YOU FUCKING LUNATIC, LET ME GO!” She struggles and writhes and yanks on the cables, making a racket that blends with another salvo of thunder. The rope around her greasy wrist holds tightly. In the flicker of lightning, she howls at the old chemist. “LET ME GO, GODDAMN IT!—LET ME GO!—LET ME GO YOU FUCK! LET ME GO! LET ME GO!!”
The lightning sputters away. The sound of rain now coming down in sheets outside drowns the noise of the swarm. In the darkness, the old man’s face is reduced to a silhouette. “Join me, Lilly.”
Her tears come again but this time she giggles stupidly through them—a desperate, frantic laughter. The batteries in the flashlight are almost gone. She shakes her head as if trying to rid herself of a cloud of gnats or mosquitos, hoping she can ward off the effects of the Nightshade through sheer will, through sobering rage. She gets her breath back and finally manages to say, “Please do me the courtesy of being honest … if I’m gonna die, please, just be honest with me.”
The old man gives her a look, a faint expression of resentment. “I am being honest.”
“There never were any breakthroughs, were there? You were chasing your tail, delusional, playing make-believe.”
He purses his lips. The storm throbs outside as it approaches. Lightning flickers, once again illuminating the pale, deeply lined face of a dying old man. “I will admit that we encountered … no pun intended … many dead ends. But I had always believed in the advent of a universal donor, and a very special combination of genetic materials introduced into the reanimated cells of those who had recently turned.”
“But the thing is, you’re insane … which is a major roadblock to any kind of progress or achievement, if you think about it.
You realize that, don’t you?”
“Copernicus … Columbus … Louis Pasteur … were they not thought to be insane?”
“Okay … you know what?” Once again Lilly feels the knot of rope around her right wrist give slightly. She works harder at it now. She tries to keep him talking. “You can dispense with the delusions of grandeur. It’s falling on deaf ears. What I want to know is why you think this is going to lead to anything other than two people dying, reanimating, then sitting here and gnawing on each other for eternity?”
The old man nods. “I admit it’s a primitive method of conjoining two samples. We attempted a few … conjunctions … while you were under … all to no avail.” He coughs, wheezes, and takes a ragged breath. His eyes bug out with pain and yet he keeps speaking, keeps justifying his actions. “But I truly believe that the m-moment your DNA hits m-my infected system we will—”
He stops abruptly, interrupted by another cough, a bone-deep, congested bark. The coughing escalates into another convulsive fit.
Lilly can see the blood spewing from his mouth in delicate strands, spattering the collar of his undershirt. Across the room, the flashlight beam is so drained of power now, so feeble, that the backstage area is plunged into shadow. In the half-light, Lilly can see the old man gasping for breath, his droopy eyes rimmed in red.
The roar of the storm rises. It sounds as though it’s directly overhead, the rain strafing down across the roof of the theater with the force of a Gatling gun. The drumming of thunder resolves into a brilliant display of lightning, the room exploding with artificial daylight for a few fleeting seconds as Nalls coughs and coughs. Soon he is choking. His face furrows with agony, then changes color and goes icy still. He tries to breathe but can only gasp for air in a creaking death-rattle.
A moment later, the old man expires in the flickering light like a character making their exit from a silent movie. In fleeting, flash-frame glimpses, he coughs up blood, hands clawing at his throat as he hemorrhages, convulsing, asphyxiated on his own bodily fluids.
Finally, his head lolls forward, his downturned face going as blank as stone. He looks like an emaciated nursing home patient who’s gone to sleep in front of the TV. He twitches for a moment, residual nerve activity … then nothing but stillness.
Across the room, the flashlight has now faded to a pinhole of amber light inside its lens like a lizard’s eye, and then even that smolders out, plunging Lilly and everything else into absolute darkness.
TWENTY-ONE
The incubation period between the time of death and the moment of autonomic resurrection varies wildly from subject to subject. Lilly remembers hearing stories of the recently deceased taking hours to reanimate. But with each documented case, an average transition length has emerged. The best estimates currently put the turn rate at around ten minutes. But right now, Lilly figures she has far less than that amount of time to somehow “Houdini” herself out of the wrist restraints, deal with the old man, and manage to escape the cable truss tethering her to oblivion. And the worst part—the part that is so overwhelming it’s now threatening to paralyze her with inaction—is the fact that all this will have to transpire in total darkness.
She gives the immediate area a quick scan. The darkness is so opaque, so dense, so impenetrable, that it seems to have palpable weight, like some sort of soupy, inky liquid, or some kind of tide pool that has suddenly flooded the backstage area and now holds Lilly and the dead chemist in its black thrall. It is the darkness that eradicates size and shape and time and context. Lilly and the corpse to which she is attached might as well be microscopic. Or they could be the size of celestial bodies, planets gripped in each other’s gravitational field. The darkness that engulfs them is the darkness of deep, deep space. It is the darkness in the back of a child’s closet in the dead of night. It is the darkness inside a coffin long after burial, after the mourners have departed, and the grass has grown over the site. It is absolute and void of matter. It is impossible and inevitable.
All at once, another volley of thunder and lightning erupts outside.
The silver daylight—as bright as a camera strobe—illuminates the death scene for a single instant, and Lilly blinks, trying to take it all in. In one brilliantly lit tableau, she sees the dead body lashed to her via rusty cables, the ancient figure slumped before her, its head drooped across its chest, face downturned, shoulders as still as a statue. In the remaining nanoseconds of that silver flash, Lilly absorbs as much of the scene as possible: the metal clamp-like device locking the cable around each of them, the broken vials of drugs scattered across the floor, and even the far reaches of the room.
Then the light winks out, and darkness returns to the room like a flood tide.
Lilly blinks again, a strange retinal afterimage glowing on the backs of her eyes. Hypersensitive to the faintest illumination, her perception bolstered by the drugs spreading through her system, she can still see—even in total darkness—a milky photographic negative of the space around her, the old man’s body, the restraints. She begins to let out bursts of inappropriate giggling, her mind swimming with both panic and fascination. She feels light-headed with adrenaline and yet delighted with this discovery—a way to extend the illumination of the lightning.
The glowing negative across her field of vision finally fades.
In the darkness, her brain splits into two halves. One half floats on a cushion of narcotic ennui, the other working like an engine to escape this inextricable trap. She increases the pressure of her right hand on the rope restraint, wriggling as hard as she can against the knotted, oily, sweat-slick rope binding her wrists together. She can feel the perspiration dripping off her fingertips. The rope has slipped a couple of additional centimeters but it still binds her, shackling her wrists so tightly that her shoulder blades ache. She can feel the presence of the dead chemist inches away from her.
How long has it been? Five minutes? Ten minutes? If it takes the average amount of incubation time for him to turn, she has mere minutes left, maybe more if he’s on the high side of the bell curve, but it could happen earlier.
She wrestles and wriggles and worries her wrist back and forth within the restraint, the warm grease of her sweat now streaming down her forehead, dripping off her nose. She can feel sweat running across her forearm and dripping off her elbow. The pain intensifies, a burning sensation now in her wrist, and Lilly realizes that it’s not sweat but blood that’s flowing from her wrist. She senses the old man, still silent and motionless in front of her. She smells traces of his musky body odor as though the ghost of his living self still clings to him. He is a ticking time bomb. She giggles. Inside her, in that other part of her brain, she feels like screaming. She struggles to pull her wrist free.
Outside, thunder booms, and the rain furls and drones against the rooftops.
* * *
In some deeply buried compartment of Lilly’s brain, she remembers the old childhood adage that during a storm you count from the moment the thunder fades to the first flicker of lightning, and that resulting number is the distance between you and the lightning bolt. She never really believed this wives’ tale, or at least figured it was decidedly inexact, but some part of her took comfort in it. She remembers lying in bed as a kid, frantically counting, taking solace in the fact that the lightning bolt was usually miles away.
She feels her wrist slipping a few extra centimeters, lubricated by her blood. Not much farther now. She yanks and tugs and struggles until the pain shoots up her tendons and explodes in the rotator cuff portion of her shoulder. The pain is massive, a dagger thrust through her back, and she lets out a yelp.
Another salvo of thunder rumbles overhead, rattling the gantries and reverberating through the heavens.
Lilly grunts with effort, frantically twisting and yanking on the shackle, her hand slipping another centimeter, spurring her on as she counts in the after-echo of the thunder: one … two … three … four … five … six … FLASH! Lightning erupts outside the windo
ws and above the transoms, filling the theater with another surge of magnesium-bright day.
The old man hasn’t budged an inch, his lifeless body still sitting cross-legged on the floor, his shoulders still slumped, his eyes still tightly shut, his head still downturned, face as blank as a mannequin’s. Lilly breathes a sigh of relief as the lightning flickers out. But it’s only momentary relief. As the afterimage lingers on the backs of her eyes, she makes mental notes: the position of the pressure clamp, the razor-sharp frayed wire on the end of one of the cables, the distance between her and the old man’s face, and then she increases the pressure on the wrist restraint.
By this point, the pain has worsened, turning into a numbing cold spreading through her. The Nightshade has fully kicked in. She has a serious buzz going, and she hallucinates microscopic artifacts in the dark—tiny streaks of colored light and little curlicues of impossible Day-Glo creatures swimming through the deep oceanic void. She can’t help but giggle at such terrifying visions, which strike her as straight out of Nalls’s notebooks.
At the same time, she works madly on the restraint, her wrist continuing to slip ever so slightly toward freedom. The grease of her blood is helping her, as is the numbness. Her brain works to find purchase in the dark, her scrambled thoughts bouncing off each other like pinballs.
Thunder crashes overhead, now closer than ever, shaking the foundation.
Lilly jumps. Her central nervous system crackles in a tug of war between the narcotic buzz of the Nightshade and the sheer terror of the ticking time bomb slumped cross-legged inches away from her.
Search and Destroy Page 24
