I waited for him to continue. One of the guards cleared his throat, expectantly. My father glanced at the clock and waved his hand dismissively.
“But it didn’t work, Max. And good Lord, how I wished it had.” I walked closer to the screen and looked carefully at the man’s body. On closer inspection his muscles were sculptor perfect, but his skin was a patchwork of burned blacks and browns. His face, torso, limbs . . . all were covered with scars that looked like the legacy of infected sores or lesions.
“At first I thought he had died—of the virus, I mean. He exhibited all the gruesome symptoms of Ebola you’ll have heard about, and then his vital signs gave out. He was less than a minute away from incineration when I saw his hand twitch. That happened in Liberia, too, and more than once, by all accounts. But they didn’t come back. He did. And so you see,” my father continued, “out of that, that failure, rose, well, a miracle. A horrible, bloody miracle. Max, do you remember the stories I used to read to you when you were a boy about the Irish hero Cú Chulainn? Do you remember how on the battlefield he would spin into a battle rage, transformed by a warp-spasm that made him undefeatable?” He was speaking in Irish now, and with increasing passion again, as if the mention of Cú Chulainn were infusing him with the legendary warrior’s spirit itself. “Or the Viking berserkers? Odin’s men rushing forward without armor, mad as dogs, biting their shields, strong as bears! Do you remember being amazed at how they could kill with a single blow, and how ‘neither fire nor iron told upon them’?”
“Yes,” I said. “I remember.” But I wasn’t thinking of the myths and legends he’d fed me as a child at bedtime. I was thinking of Sonny Boy, and Colombia. And then I did remember. Not just the stories, but the pictures they’d painted for me in my imagination as a boy. “Odin, the one-eyed dancer. Last night . . . up there, in the Cyclops mask. That . . . that was you?”
“All war is theater, Max, all victory psychology. You cannot defeat a man unless you defeat his spirit. And you cannot defeat his spirit unless he chooses to be defeated.” His voice rose. His eyes flashed. “Men are vanquished by what is within them, not by what is brought to bear against them. Fear, Max. Fear is the weapon. Not fear of the enemy, but fear of oneself.”
He stopped, exhausted. Spittle formed in little white blooms at the sides of his mouth. Beads of sweat pricked his forehead. The bright surgical lights drained his face of color, rendering him apparition-like in the cool swirl of the artificial peppermint breeze.
He looked, simply, insane.
“Nazis,” I said. “I remember the stories you told me about the Nazis, too. The evil men like Mengele you despised, the opposite of everything you told me you’d strived for. And this?” I waved my arm in front of the glass screen. I shook my head, and the room spun. “How did you ever convince yourself this was OK? Look at yourself. This is murder, pure and simple.”
“Murder? No.” His voice was calm again, measured. “You’ve earned the right to kill me, Max. But not to accuse me. You want to know why you are here? Then look, and listen. The vaccine didn’t work because it was too strong, the sequencing wrong. I won’t bore you with”—he waved his hand again— “the detail. Suffice to say it changed him. No! No, more than that: it evolved him. At first I thought I’d infected him with the original virus, because it was a live vaccine. But I hadn’t, and the consequences were as spectacular as they were unpredictable. Spectacular, and very valuable. Chasing discoveries less than this has made fortunes and bankrupted nations. And I knew immediately they would try to take it away from me, pervert it for their own petty politics.
“Are you following me? They happen, mistakes like that. Especially out here, in the field. Usually these tests take years—decades even. And look at this place—just look at it. The chemistry sets I bought you when you were a kid were better equipped.” He clenched his fists and his eyes flashed. “But here, right here, in this dank little cave and against all the odds, I created something, Max, the likes of which the world hasn’t seen for a millennium!”
I struggled to focus. I was losing my bearings in the madness of his brainstorm.
“I created a berserker, Max. An actual, human berserker. Not just a wild fighter but a shapestrong, an úlfhéðinn, a shape-shifter, a hamrammr. In Russian I call them Spyashie: Sleepers—men waiting to be awoken. Do you understand, Max? This man, this ordinary man, was transformed, re-created, changed utterly, and by what? Accident? No, Max, this is fate: a pure, biddable warrior who fights without prejudice, without malice, without opinion. So, no, not an evil man, but a weapon, a superhuman weapon. Controllable by his creator but fundamentally and unthinkingly neutral. He follows orders in the same way a bullet follows the barrel: perfectly.”
My vision was blurring, sense of space and balance faltering.
“You unleashed them? You experimented on live human beings and then you unleashed them? Have you seen what they do?”
The face of the dead soldier in the village outside Kabala was etched into my memory. And now I knew: it was not as if some depraved scientist had created the essence of fear and given it a human face—it was my father who had done it. “You know, don’t you? You do know.”
I was speaking in English. Behind me I heard the guards adjust their rifles. The technician looked up and studied me carefully. Sweat dripped from my brow; the remnants of my tattered fatigues were soaked through. My teeth began to chatter.
He replied quietly, carefully.
“Yes. Yes, I’ve seen the horror they wreak. Of course I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it and I’ve lived it. And so have you. But I’ve seen something else, Max. I’ve seen the living you leave behind, those your government condemns to a living death, the survivors whose mothers live without their sons, the bereaved for whom the sun never rises. You can’t hide behind your guns, Max. They don’t fire themselves. But”—he turned to face the cataleptic behind the glass—“he is pure, as a newborn is pure. Reborn—without fear, or regret or judgment. His mind may seem uncommunicative, but it exists. He thinks. They all think. They are cognitive beings. They may not speak, but they have language. I said I evolved him. But that’s not true. I have achieved something even more remarkable. I regressed him, devolved him to an original state, our original state. They stand on the threshold of free will—still obedient to their creator, unconscious of good and evil, ignorant of guilt. It cost half a million Russian souls to defeat the Nazis in Stalingrad. It would have taken just a few hundred of him to crush them.”
I doubled over and tried to focus. Sweat rolled off me. An intense, grinding pain awoke behind my eyes, blotting out thought. I heaved and vomited bile. My ribs felt like they would cleave from my chest.
“So what do you think I called him, Max, this man still a man, you understand, who is unrestrained by his own humanity?”
“I don’t know,” I said. But my answer was as much a general statement to everything around me as an answer to his question.
“The only name worthy of a true prelapsarian, of course!”
I fell to my knees and spread my hands on the floor to steady myself. I vomited again. A string of bloody mucus forced its way up my gullet. The smell of iron fused with the reek of peppermint.
“Adam!” he said, triumphant. “I called him Adam.”
I collapsed onto my side. Blood seeped from my nose. Then I understood.
“You’re all immune,” I said. And they had to be. No one wore masks. No one was decontaminated as they entered or left rooms. There was freedom of movement in the whole of the biohazard area. Everyone in my father’s perverse Garden of Eden was immune.
Everyone except me.
I remembered the mouthful of brains I’d spat out earlier, the puncture wound in my cheek and tongue from the rebel’s shattered skull.
The guards laughed and walked over to me and bent down to pick me up. They’d taken my SIG, but they hadn’t found the little black lock knife.
I balled up and drew my knees to my chest, and my right hand found the handle tucked into my boot top. My thumb pressed the silver button by the hilt, and the blade swung out and locked. I drove it sideways into the nearest guard’s ankle. The point went in below the bone, glancing backward. It severed his Achilles tendon and he buckled. The second guard lunged for me, but his wounded partner fell and crashed down on top of me, faceup. I let go of the knife, which was embedded in boot leather and gristle, and drew the pistol from the open holster on his belt. I fired two rounds into the side of his torso and a third into the other guard as he fumbled for his rifle. He fell. I twisted and got to my knees. The room slid away from me. I spat blood and tried to stand. I raised the pistol and fired into the fallen guard again, found my balance for a moment and then lurched hard into a wall cabinet. A bottle fell and smashed. Stainless-steel instruments clattered to the floor. I steadied myself and wiped blood out of my eyes. The echo of the gunshots rang in my ears.
The technician stood up, clutching a syringe. My father cautioned him to wait.
“No syringe,” I coughed. I aimed at the technician. “What . . .” The words in my head would not form in my mouth.
“It’s all right, Max,” my father said. “This man is going to help you.”
“No.” That was all I could manage. The technician threaded his way carefully between the bodies of the dead guards. “No!” But he kept coming. I shook my head and vomited again, a stream of pure blood this time. When he was within touching distance, he reached out with the syringe. I fired as he did so. The bullet went through his throat. Arterial blood erupted from the wound. He first dropped to his knees and then keeled over onto the floor. I bent down and scooped up the plunger and needle from his hand and stumbled toward my father. His back was pressed to the glass screen that separated us from “Adam.” He had nowhere to go.
The lab had been turned into an abattoir.
I caught him around the waist in a clumsy, bloody grapple. He gasped as I knocked the wind out of his bullet-damaged lungs. I could sense the door opening behind me. Boots on concrete. Metal moving against metal. I clawed my way up him, pushing him hard against the window onto his first patient’s resting place. My eyes filled with blood. My brain throbbed with pain so acute that I could see color pulsing and exploding in my head around the smooth black mask of the original berserker, who remained undisturbed by the struggle playing out across the divide.
I brought the barrel of the pistol up under my father’s jaw and dug it into the top of his windpipe. Men were shouting in Russian behind me. I leaned against him, exhausted, delirious. I brought the syringe up, too, gripped in my fist, thumb on the plunger. My legs began to give way. My forehead smeared against his. I looked him in the eyes. Blood cascaded from my nose, drenching us both. I could feel myself fading into a confusion of pain and disassociation. My hands were alien to me. My legs absent. Cramps tore at my stomach.
My father wrapped his hand around mine, enclosing my thumb and the plunger. The needle tip dug into my chest. My cheek pressed against his.
“Why . . . ,” I rasped through the blood in my throat, “am I here?”
“This,” he said in Irish as the needle went deep into my chest, “is why.”
His hand contracted. The serum forced into my muscle. I looked at the fading image of the man behind the screen. The lights of the laboratory flickered. I squinted into the glass and saw the reflection of my own eyes staring back at me. I swallowed hard. The room went black, and my feet gave way under me.
As I lost consciousness, the voice I heard was neither my father’s nor that of any of the men closing in around me but the memory of General King pondering the things “that might be achieved with a hundred men like that.” It was a brutal, searing truth: Sonny Boy hadn’t lost his mind because he’d been infected; Sonny Boy lost his mind because he’d gazed upon the face of the enemy and seen not a monster, but a mirror.
27
Nothing.
Pure, absolute void.
No shadow.
No echo.
An eternity of emptiness in endless gray.
It’s not that I can’t remember. I haven’t forgotten. I was neither unconscious nor dead.
I just simply wasn’t: being without agency.
Perhaps that’s how we live in the womb until we are ripped into the world, awoken by human voices, drowning in the oxygen of existence.
Sound first.
The last sense to leave, the first to return. And I heard, as if it were the noise of thunder, a rolling, rhythmic drumming.
Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump.
The noise came from within me, from around me. It went through me, wrapped me tight and held me fast. Deep, resonant vibrations that began where I ended and circled around to end where I began.
I struggled to get free. And as I struggled, I knew there was a division. There was me, and there was everything else.
My eyes were open. But I saw nothing.
Silence.
Back into the void. No struggle. No memory.
Pain.
Bright, crisp, clear pain. Pain like noise, rising and falling with the ebb and flow of my heart.
Shape and form, too. Light, building and dying. Shifting. Pulsing.
I was. My hands, feet, outstretched, tied. I worked my jaw, but it was blocked.
And then a rushing of air in my mouth as if my throat had been uncorked. The taste of blood. And the weakest, faintest trace of peppermint.
The void again.
I opened my eyes. Above me a silver light drew into focus. A focal point in the vacuum that expanded into the blackness above and beyond it.
A laboratory ceiling? The hospital? No—the moon. A lopsided, ill-formed moon, bright enough to navigate by.
More lights—flickering, dirty, orange flames that sent shadows licking the ground beneath me. I was suspended above the ground by my own limbs. I tried to lift my head. Someone was screaming. A deep, guttural howl. I lifted my chin and felt the force of the cry. It was me. I was screaming. I tried to choke it back, to swallow the noise. My head snapped back and forth. Around me faces ebbed and flowed in the firelight. Four beasts swayed and stomped. Feet beating time to the wild, rolling thunder ripping through me, through us. Grotesques in the half-light ululating through mad metal trunks.
I clenched my jaw, and the scream stopped.
I shut my eyes and saw the memory print of the scene around me. The void had vanished. And then I remembered: the cross, the drum, the one-eyed dancer. A sharp blow caught me across the jaw, and I opened my eyes. He was there, his bone-mouth grinning, mad eye flashing in the half dark. The elephant men stilled. The dancer held aloft the fly whisk, the cutlass already dropped to his feet. As the red-masked man shuffled a dusty two-step around the rusty blade, he brought the horsehair whisk down across my head and hissed in Russian: “Vy svoboden.” You are free.
His mud-smeared hand reached up to my chest and pulsed hard four times against my heart. I screamed. And I saw.
The world came back into sharp, unforgiving focus. My mind filled with thought and feeling and memory like a valley engulfed beneath a burst dam, the gray void of nothing flushed away by a flood of being.
My father’s hand fell away from my chest. I spoke without thinking.
“Blagodaryu.” Thank you.
* * *
• • •
THE FOUR MEN who had carried me cut me loose. I was wrapped in the skin of a hyena and layers of pain: my neck, my ribs, my head. It felt as if someone had taken an ax to my skull. I doubled over and dry heaved into the dust—whether from the pain or from the infection, I neither knew nor cared.
No blood. No bile. I retched again and straightened up.
My father stood there, unmasked now, robed head to foot in red, mud daubed on his arms and feet. The crossbearers had
gone, the elephant men, too. It was just me and my father. He held a single torch that both lit us and blinded us, deepening the black of night so that not even the moon could penetrate the gloom around us.
“You wanted to know what your mission was, Max.” I nodded, coughed. Words formed but stuck in my throat. The echo of the drums still pounded in my ears, my chest. “One man sent you to kill me, another to save me.” He looked into the gloom and waved the torch from side to side and shuffled in the dust. “But that was not your mission.”
He reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. The ceremony had exhausted him. Even in the ruddy glow of the torchlight, his face was ashen. His features were drawn tight, his breath short, but his eyes flashed as he spoke, filled with inspiration, insanity.
“All these years I wanted to do what was right. Your mother, too. We picked a side. We fought. And we were wrong. What Russia was and what Russia became, that was the greatest betrayal of all. It was a poor excuse for losing her, an even poorer one for leaving you.” Tears clogged his eyes. His breath rasped short in his lungs. “By God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Not a day passed that I didn’t regret every choice that took me away from you. But the fight was all I had. It became everything, the only thing that remained. And now, now there’s a chance.” He gripped my shoulder hard. “Now there is something truly worth fighting for. I was never the mission, Max. You are.”
I stared at him, uncomprehending.
“I don’t understand,” I said, forcing the words out. I reached across my chest and took his hand from my shoulder. “We just need . . . to go.”
“There is nothing to understand, Max. It is finished. The terrible, unforgivable beauty is born, and I have given it all to you.” He freed his hand and laid it across my heart. “Here. In you, in your blood, is everything you need to create Adam, and to destroy him. I have perfected the virus and the vaccine in secret. For forty days they will remain live. These greedy fools underground”—he stamped lightly in the dust of the parade ground—“and those fools in London are ignorant, stupid people, interested only in what my creation can do for them. But you, my boy”—he brought his hand up to my face—“my beautiful boy, are the future. The house, the money, the title—use everything I left behind and use it to fight. Fight for what is left to save and make your mother proud. Use your fearúlacht and do what she and I never could. Fight, but fight and win.”
The Break Line Page 23
