“I’ll believe you a whole lot more if you tell your boys to lower those guns.”
“Do you like them? The outside is vintage 1928AC, the inside is pure plasma.”
“Impressive. Planning to use them?”
“We’ll see how the evening develops.”
As if on cue, the security men moved forward in lockstep. The snouts of their Tommy guns raised to chest level.
She’d heard us talking. Enough, at least, to know we’d discovered Retrozine.
“Don’t do anything rash, Nicole.”
“Sorry, baby, can’t hit the brakes now. Pedal to the metal, that’s my motto.” She withdrew a cigarillo from an enameled case and lit it with a matching lighter. The smoke hung next to her like a thought balloon. She was debating her options.
So was I. I didn’t like any of them.
Then she noticed Crandall staring vacantly into the air, his tangled eyebrows working up and down like he was factoring pi to the twentieth decimal. “What’s the matter? You get buggy in the wall, Doctor? Am I going to have to re-socialize you?”
“Paul Donner,” he said. “Memory’s not what it used to be. Why is that name—”
Panic swept across Nicole’s cheeks so abruptly it made her maroon lips go white. The scientist’s face had also gone ashen. His smugness shattered off him.
“Elise Donner’s husband. You hired Elise Donner’s husband to find me! He came back, and you hired him.” He cackled wildly. “Oh God, you crazy bitch.”
And like that, the world tilted. There was thundering in my ears. The lab twisted sideways. I knew a train was coming, and in a moment it would roar over me, reducing me to pulp. I felt the vibration of its approach.
“Whoa,” came Maggie’s voice, from Pluto. “Plot twist.”
My palms found the desk edge, clutching. It was suddenly too hot, too dry.
Nicole had recovered admirably. She flicked lint from her lapel. “You have a big mouth, Morris. I don’t know why I tell you anything.”
“I had nothing to do with it!” he said to me. “It was before my time!”
“I do wish you’d shut up,” said Nicole.
My voice was a despair-shredded thing. “What does Elise have to do with all this?” My feet were moving toward her. My eyes were so locked on Nicole that I didn’t see the goon sling his weapon and raise the blackjack.
Then the train rushed forward again and I was gone.
***
I’m carrying a bouquet of blue roses and whistling. The sight of me is enough to make anyone who sees me grin. The guard grins as I sign for my temporary pass. The elevator passengers grin as I downshift politely from whistling to humming. And the receptionist on the 23rd floor grins as I ask for my wife.
I think she can spare a few minutes, she says, giggling.
I check my hair in the glass partition between reception and the offices. The glass reads:
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Office of Research Integrity
I navigate down the hall past the workers that are buzzing in and out of cubicles, stealing momentum from their smiles.
I reach the last door in the hall and push it open.
Elise’s back is to the door. She’s immersed in some document on her monitor. I feel a thrill as soon as I see the copper hair on her shoulders.
Uh, excuse me, I say nasally, I, um, invented a new kind of tomato that’s twenty feet high and, um, makes everybody who eats it vote Republican. Is this where I show it to the government and get rich?
That’s the FDA, she says, still staring at the screen.
What about Democrat?
She swivels, a wry smile on her face. The next thing I know she’s flown around the desk at me. The impact knocks me back a step.
Uff! Hey, watch the flowers!
She snatches them up. What’re these for?
I open my mouth, but she holds up a finger. Let me guess. Another of your made-up anniversaries. Let’s see… first date?
My eyes roll. Nothing as pedestrian as that.
First carriage ride in Central Park? No. First time we ate Thai food? No.
Okay, I give up. I whisper in her ear. She slaps my arm. I don’t think there’s a Hallmark card for that. She takes the flowers to an empty vase. Blue, she says. They’re beautiful.
I register the stacks of paperwork with dismay. Any chance of you blowing this pop stand early?
Oh, honey, I’m sorry. I’ve got a biotech company that’s not playing by the rules.
Gonna slap ’em on the wrist?
More like shut the bastards down, if they’re doing what I think they’re doing. But first I have to prove it.
Sounds big.
Big enough to lead the national news.
I whistle. My little private eye.
No, sweetie, that’s your fantasy. I just want to make sure the next bio-engineered tomato we eat doesn’t kill us because somebody skipped important parts of the research process.
You’d think they’d learn.
She sighs. Time is money. Why waste years on animal studies when you can fake the data and go right to human testing?
And we already have such great tomatoes.
She smiles, but with weariness. I wish this was just about tomatoes. Human gene therapy is a hell of a lot more dangerous. She looks at her watch. One of their people’s coming by. I’m giving them a chance to explain themselves before I drop the hammer.
Always the fair one.
She pecks me on the cheek and turns me around, pushing me toward the door. Thanks for the beautiful flowers. Now scat!
Just promise to get home as soon as humanly possible.
My right butt cheek receives a playful squeeze. Cross my heart and hope to die.
I saunter back toward reception quite pleased with myself, the very model of the thoughtful modern male.
I register the other woman as she passes, in that reflexive cop way, the auburn hair, the furious, purposeful strides as she approaches Elise’s door, the dark skin…
And the strange veil obscuring her features.
***
For a while, there was only nausea and colors and grunting like an animal. A smell. Something rotten. I summoned my will and lifted my head. Bright needles jabbed my brain, and my gorge lurched threateningly, but I hung on until my eyes could focus. I touched the back of my head and my hand came away sticky.
I was no longer in the lab.
“Maggie,” I whispered.
“Your girlfriend flew the digital coop.” She held up Maggie’s globe. “Poof!”
I squinted and the light resolved itself into a couple human-shaped blobs. There was a drain in the center of the floor. A wall with a long observation mirror.
Nicole toyed with a diamond at her throat. “You got sapped,” she said. “You looked like you were rushing me and one of my overeager bodyguards stepped in.”
I licked my lips. Like licking asphalt.
“Doctor, get him some water, would you?”
Crandall, who’d been in the shadows, grunted and went out the door.
C’mon, Donner. Put on the tough. So you got your brains rearranged a little. Suck it up.
“Stinks.” I tried to straighten myself in the chair and my head went off like a claymore.
“Take it easy.”
Crandall returned with the water. I took an experimental sip. My stomach didn’t object to the point of open rebellion, so I took a little more.
“Better?” said Nicole.
Then the dream, the memory, came back, just like that. Visiting Elise, hearing about the genetics firm conducting illegal research, then passing that woman in the hall with the veil…
“What?” she said.
“Forty years ago, in the hall. Elise’s office. You… you…”
Nicole’s face lit with delight. She turned to Crandall. “Doctor, give us a moment.”
Without a word, he left the room.
“Finally! I thought you’d nev
er remember. What do you think, baby? Was it destiny?”
“Tell me,” I said.
“We were just beginning our bio research. Your wife had the unfortunate job of enforcing the government’s laws concerning scientific experiments.” She snorted in disdain. “Those first years of the new millennium, everyone was terrified. No cloning, no stem cells! My god, the mountains of red tape and restrictions!”
“You faked data to get permission to do human studies.”
“Time is money.”
Elise had said that. A whole new kind of pain surfaced. “She sniffed you out,” I said.
“That day, after you and I passed each other in the corridor, I tried to explain to her the value of our work. She wouldn’t listen. There’d be an investigation. She’d hold us up in court for years. I couldn’t allow that. She gave me three days to come clean on my own before she filed the injunction. It was a window of opportunity.”
And then it hit me, the whole package, a sledgehammer between the eyes.
“Elise was the target,” I said. “This was never about me at all. In the bodega—you were after Elise.”
“But you were there, too. Just as well. You’d never have rested until you found me. I hired a nasty man named Ewan McDermott to arrange it.” The man with the scar. “Quite a psychopath. I believe he met his maker a few years later in Bolivia.”
“This can’t be true. You’re as young now as you were then. Forty years ago, the drug didn’t exist. And the Shift hadn’t happened yet.” Nicole didn’t reply. “Answer me!” I screamed.
Crandall and the Tommy gun goons burst back in. Nicole waved them off in irritation.
“I will someday, if you cooperate. I still need your help, Donner.”
“Someone’s killing your people.”
“So it seems.” She went to a chair and sat, making a lot of business of arranging herself into it. “Help me stop these murders and I will set you up in luxury for life—a life that will be considerably longer than you could imagine.”
Another piece fell into place. “Jesus, you know who’s killing your people, don’t you? You’ve always known.”
A nerve in her cheek gave me my answer.
I leaned over and spit. There was blood in the phlegm. It hit the tiled floor and I saw for the first time the remains of something awful there, like fungal gelatin. I looked back at her. Nicole’s face changed subtly, hardening, and like that, she was no longer beautiful. Hers was the symmetry of a dime store mannequin. Beneath it, she was all monster.
“It always comes back to time, doesn’t it?”
“And now with Retrozine, it’ll be your servant. Then the world’s your oyster, huh?”
“Uh-huh,” said Nicole, coming forward, all grace again and promises of sinewy delight. “So what do you say?”
“I’ve got nothing to lose,” I replied.
Nothing to lose at all.
Crandall saw it and opened his mouth in warning, but I was already in motion, reaching for the guard’s weapon with one hand while my elbow made contact with his combat visor. I snatched it out of his astonished hands and swung it toward Nicole, finger settling on the trigger.
She was fast. She managed to crab sideways, just enough. The shot sizzled past her.
It hit Crandall, churning right through his chest. The plasma hit the mirror behind, which exploded like a bad memory. Crandall dropped, a mass of cauterized flesh. I tried to roll out of the chair, but my legs didn’t cooperate. I thumped heavily onto my side. I twisted to the left, looking for the other guard. The man had already lowered the Tommy gun, his shot lined up. I dropped my weapon. Time, always about time. Another fifteen minutes and my body might’ve worked right.
Two more guards rushed in. They kicked me for a while. Then dragged me over to Nicole, dumped me at her feet. The world was a bloody red haze. I tried to raise onto my arms, but there seemed to be serious problems with my bones.
Nicole looked at Crandall’s smoking corpse. “Goddamn it,” she said. “Always the hard way.” She grabbed my hair and descended on me in a violent kiss.
“What a shame,” she sighed. “So yummy.” She picked up the fallen weapon, checked the clip.
“Nicole,” I said.
She pointed the weapon at me.
“Who’s killing your scientists?”
She fired.
I had just enough time to think about how beautiful the plasma looked. Then the flesh of my body burned, and the synapses in my brain screamed in searing agony.
And for the second time in my life, I died.
(INTERLUDE ONE)
DONNER
Donner’s body lay naked in a part of the Bronx that had been a no-man’s land even before the Shift. Here, block after desolate block was filled with the shells of burnt-out buildings and the carcasses of autos. No one lived here, the police didn’t patrol here. So his body, wedged between a crumbling wall and a fence, went unnoticed.
By people, that is. Almost immediately, houseflies, blue bottle and blowflies swarmed it. The insects pasted eggs in the still-moist corners of his eyes and mouth. Rove and hister beetles gorged themselves on his wounds. Ants and wasps added themselves to the opportunistic menagerie, making his form seem to crawl and writhe.
The build-up of lactic acid stiffened the muscles in rigor mortis. Donner’s pancreas, packed with digestive enzymes, began digesting itself. Neighborhood cats made swift work of his eyes and tongue.
During the second and third days, Donner’s skin became green and blistered from the internal chemical reactions. The unfettered bacteria in his gut produced huge quantities of methane, hydrogen sulfide, and other gasses. He bloated. Frothy fluids ran from his mouth and anus. His putrefaction was characterized by a horrible, skunk-like smell.
By day four, the developing fly larvae broke through the abdominal cavity, releasing the gasses. The body deflated back to something approximating its original girth. The stench and the clouds of flies went unnoticed. No one around.
By day five, the maggots had formed into packs and were swarming through the chest and abdomen like troops in a conquered city. Over the course of the next few days, the body appeared to liquefy as fluids and semisolid tissues flowed into the dirt. By day seven, his remains were already in an advanced stage of decay. Most soft tissue had disappeared. The smell had faded into a lingering ammonia odor. New species like the cheese and corpse fly were now attracted as the drier corpse provided a different kind of meal.
The maggots, having harvested all they could, began leaving en masse. Their departure was so abrupt, so violent, that it dragged the body two feet through the grass. The beetles, lying in wait, fed on them.
A week and a half after Donner’s death, his odor had shifted to something a lot like wet fur and old leather.
Having left nothing for scavengers of any kind, the corpse settled in for the final stage of decomposition, a slow molder that would take four or five weeks. If uninterrupted, in a month there would be nothing left but hair, bits of skin, bleached bones, and teeth.
PART TWO:
THE UNDERNEATH
I said to Life, I would hear Death speak.
And Life raised her voice a little higher and said,
You hear him now.
—Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam
(INTERLUDE TWO)
BRIAN
Brian Trask was fifteen and wondering if he was going crazy.
Could kids go nuts? Somehow he’d thought true insanity was reserved for adults. Sure, there was Samantha Bowen’s famous meltdown in Locker Room B, when she’d smashed Liz Franklin’s head against the coach’s office window until there were bright smears of blood on it. According to Coach, Samantha would get better, even though she’d be home-schooled. Did that mean crazy? The girls said Samantha sure looked bonkers when she attacked Liz, her eyes bugged out, her hands turned into claws.
The incident’s lunch-time postmortem only confused Brian more. Over mystery meat and apple crisp, Shaun Gretske declared
he’d talked to Samantha and that she was only “hormonal.” Then Bill Loogman (called “Loogey,” but never to his face, since at fourteen he could bench press 220 pounds) wrinkled his mug in a scholarly way and opined that proved she was crazy.
“What do you mean?” Brian asked.
“Insane people never think they are.”
“Are what?”
“Crazy!”
“Says who?”
“My Dad. He says if you’re worried you’re going crazy, that means you’re okay.”
“Is your Dad worried he’s going crazy?”
Loogey darkened. “Hell, no!”
Shaun grinned. “So that means he’s crazy!”
Loogey introduced apple crisp into Shaun by way of his nostrils, ending the conversation.
So now, sitting in his bedroom on a cool fall evening, Brian was no closer to figuring things out than before. He thought about checking out psych sites on the Conch. But the Conch was sentient. While it wasn’t supposed to monitor what you surfed, the idea of anything getting back to Brian’s parents made his fingers freeze over his smartscreen. Damn it! It made him wish for “the good old days,” when the Conch was just millions of individual websites that nobody monitored. Brian could hardly imagine that lovely anarchy. But that wasn’t now. No, the very last thing he could allow was for these sudden doubts about his sanity to get back to his folks.
Because his parents were at the root of his dilemma.
Brian shut off the desk light, plunging the room into darkness. Sitting like that was comforting. He could lie on his bed and look out the window at the shimmer of electric rain through the Blister and pretend that he was just a floating mind, free of all worry. Or a hunter on the Blasted Heath, tracking runaways with the green crosshairs of his plasma rifle. It didn’t always help. Sometimes it did nothing to diffuse the dread. And more recently, the surges of rage that overtook him.
Brian’s family lived in a condo on East 68th Street near the park. Brian loved this apartment, the building…in fact pretty much everything about his Manhattan life. His father was Robert Trask III, a partner at Smith, Croup, Trask and Ketterman, a prestigious boutique firm that catered to what was left of the city’s old money. Once he told Brian that some of his clients could trace their ancestry back to the Old World. When he was younger Brian had thought his dad meant Brooklyn, where everything looked like it was falling apart.
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