"Maybe we'll just kill him first," he said, seeing their devotion to each other. "If you don't do what I tell you to do, I'll shoot him right now."
"Do that and I'll definitely have no reason to live," she said with such firmness, the smile left his face again. "You had better decide really soon," she added.
"Time is not on your side. You're hyperventilating. You'll probably go into cardiac arrest any moment and I won't be giving you any CPR. That's for sure." He tilted his head as if he were listening to another voice again.
"Okay," he said smiling and nodding slowly. "You," he told Curt, "get out. Drive away."
"I won't do it," Curt said, more to Terri than to him.
"You've got to, Curt. He'll kill us both for sure." He studied her a moment. This wasn't just a sacrifice. She had some plan in mind. He had to trust her. Her eyes were pleading for it. He debated with himself. If he left and she failed, he would feel terrible, but if he stayed, what would he accomplish? Only their certain deaths.
"Okay," he said. He looked at the clone. "If she does die," he said, "I'll be coming for you."
"Or we'll be coming for you," he countered, the smile still there. Curt glanced at Terri again. She nodded and mouthed, "I love you." He turned and walked to the door. There, he hesitated, looked back, and then walked out.
"When he starts the engine," she said quickly.
They stood facing each other and waited. The automobile was started. She lowered her hand and he rushed at her, seizing her wrist and twisting it until she released the knife. He held onto her and looked into her face. She thought his eyes were two balls of ice.
"To the bedroom," he said. "Lead the way." He released her wrist and she walked ahead of him. When they reached the bedroom, he closed the door behind them and locked it.
"Now," he said, "you will truly fulfill your oath and benefit your patient. You diagnosed us. Now, let's cure us."
"This isn't going to help you," she said. "It will be only temporary. Look at what's been happening to you. You need to replenish your nutrients more and more frequently. It's only a matter of time before it doesn't work at all and you'll die a horrible death. Go back to the laboratory."
Stall him, she thought. His onslaught of wet beriberi was coming faster and faster. The symptoms were clicking off in her mind. The vein pulse in his neck was rising. He was having more trouble breathing. The resistance between the arteries and veins dropped further and further, his blood flowing round his body more rapidly. His heart was struggling to maintain this higher output.
"I can give you this shot to tide you over and then you can..."
"Get undressed," he screamed. "Now!"
She backed away. He won't shoot me, she thought. He knows that would mean his own death as well. She shook her head.
"You're not living up to the deal. You're cheating."
"If you listen to me
He roared with rage and somehow gathered the strength to literally leap at her, his feet leaving the ground, his hands landing on her neck. He threw her down on the bed with such force that he nearly knocked the breath out of her. Why wasn't he weaker?
She struggled, trying to keep his hands from tearing at her clothing and then, he brought his mouth to hers and pressed down with such determination and desperation, she was caught with surprise. She felt her own eyes bulging as if he was blowing air into her skull and pushing them out of their sockets. Then his tongue latched to hers and struggle as she would, she could not free it. She began to gag. Her arms weakened. He pushed them to the side as if they were broken and began to undo her jeans.
She jerked her torso in a vain effort to toss him off. His hands were on her naked buttocks. She felt her eyes going back in her head. This wasn't a rape as much as a ravishing, she thought. She was blacking out. Her final act of resistance was an attempt to clench her teeth. He put his finger into her mouth, beside his own tongue, and easily forced it open.
Moments later, she went unconscious.
Meanwhile, Curt drove as far as he thought would convince that creature he was fleeing for his life. He pulled over just after the end of the driveway and doubled back to the lake house. He knew he wasn't nearly a 100 percent recuperated yet from his minor concussion. This tension and terror, the effort to get back quickly, already had taken quite a toll on his physical stamina. He was breathing hard and his head was pounding.
He realized it would make no sense to just go bursting through the front door. He couldn't directly confront a man with a gun, especially a man who had no hesitation about using it. He went around the side of the house instead, and, staying close to the building, looked through the window into the living room. He saw Will Dennis's body, collapsed in the chair, but no one else. Then he moved around the corner of the house and came along the back to the window of the bedroom he and Terri were using. Slowly, he brought himself up to look in. At first he didn't see anything. Then he saw her, her clothes torn off her body, her arm dangling over the edge of the bed. Her hand moved with some weak effort to reach something.
The slam of the front door froze him. He listened until he heard the sound of Will Dennis's car engine being started. After a moment he went around the other side of the building and came out front just as the car started away. Without any pause, he rushed the entrance of the house and charged through the living room. When he entered the bedroom, he found Terri had fallen to the floor.
"Terri!" he screamed and rushed to her. He held her in his arms. She was gasping, her eyes bulging, her skin looking like a fire had been started inside her and was climbing up toward her brain. She gagged, grunted, and swung her head to the right. He followed her gaze and saw her doctor's bag. Quickly he lowered her to the floor and seized the bag, opening it.
"What?" he cried.
She closed her eyes with the effort to speak.
"B," she said and he scoured the bag, pulling out medicine bottles until he saw the one labeled B-complex. He unwrapped a syringe and inserted the needle. As he filled it, he looked at her and she nodded. He kept filling it until there was no more room and then he injected it into her arm.
She closed her eyes and for a long moment, he thought it was too late. She did indeed appear to have stopped breathing. His mind raced and he began CPR. A good two minutes into it, she coughed, opened, and closed her eyes, and then took a deep breath and managed a small smile.
"Not bad for an attorney," she said in a loud whisper. He couldn't help it.
He started to cry, the tears flowing freely as he reached down to embrace her and hold her closely like someone who would never let go.
When he saw their car parked at the end of the driveway, he went into another rage. The bastard hadn't run for his life after all. He had gone back. He pulled alongside the car and thought. This was an opportunity to make it a clean sweep, not an opportunity to pass up.
He looked in the rearview mirror and saw his second self sitting there.
"We don't want to give them any head start to come after us, do we?"
"No," he replied.
He turned off the car engine and got out. Clutching his pistol, he began to stride back to the house.
Inside, Curt lifted Terri and placed her gently on the bed, covering her with the blanket. He caressed her face and kissed her cheek.
"Some water," she said, "cold water."
"Right. Then I'd better get on the phone."
She nodded and he went out to the kitchen. He had just filled the glass and turned when he heard the footsteps behind him and looked into that maddening face, only now it was vibrant and healthy.
He shook his head.
"You surprised me," he said. "You never left. Love is really weakness because it keeps the individual from doing the things that will protect it. If there was ever a lesson to be learned about survival..."
"What are you surviving for?" Curt asked him.
"Pleasure," he replied. "Now what I will do here after I kill you is make it look like you shot Will Dennis. That w
ill confuse them for quite a while. You might have slowed me down if you had kept going and reported all this. Thanks for being a fool," he said and raised his pistol.
Before he could fire it, however, Terri, who had come up behind him quietly, the fishing knife in her hand, drove it down with medical expertise, cutting deeply through the medulla and severing that part known as the pyramid. His eyes went up with surprise, and he managed to begin a turn. When he saw her, the shock was as much responsible for his total collapse as the loss of his motor functions. The gun bounced on the floor.
Terri hovered over him, breathing hard, struggling to keep herself from falling. Curt charged forward and grabbed her. They both looked down at him, watching him die. His eyes were open. The light in them dwindled into tiny sparks that faded.
"The only thing that frightens me now," Terri hoarsely whispered, "is that somewhere back there, there might be another."
The ambulance took both bodies away after the medical examiner was done. Curt sat out on the porch, dictating events as he recalled them. There were six sheriff's deputies, the sheriff himself, two county detectives, and a state BCI investigator, a real one, all gathered as his audience. Terri, exhausted still, remained sleeping in the bedroom. The skeptical and incredulous looks on the faces of the law enforcement officers amplified with every reference to the science Curt made. He did the best he could, but he could see he wasn't being very convincing.
Then they came.
Two FBI investigators.
They pulled the sheriff and the BCI detective aside, and when they were finished, the sheriff told his officers to get back to their regular tours and forget what Curt had said.
"I'll deal with the press," he insisted. The BCI man looked happy to have any responsibility at all lifted from his shoulders.
That's the way it's going to be, Curt thought. No one wants to deal with this. And that's why, he thought as well, it will continue.
He went back inside to check on Terri.
Despite her condition, which was mainly severe fatigue from the trauma of experiencing the first stages of beriberi and all that followed, she insisted he take her home.
"To our house," she said.
He loaded the car and literally carried her to it. She closed her eyes and lay back when he lowered the front seat as far as it would recline, and then they left the cabin and started for his home.
Curt called Hyman Templeman and he came over to examine Terri. Afterward, while she rested, he and Curt had tumblers of single malt scotches and sat in the living room. He listened to Curt's retelling of the chilling events.
"I saved her life and she saved mine," he concluded.
"Not a bad way to start a marriage," Hyman quipped, and Curt smiled. They both looked up when Terri entered, wearing her robe and slippers.
"Just like men. You go to the booze to comfort yourselves," she said. "And don't offer me any," she added.
"A mere cc of that will knock you for a loop in the condition you're in," Hyman said.
"What's so bad about that?" she countered.
Curt looked at Hyman and he shrugged.
He rose, poured her a short shot on the rocks, added some water, and gave it to her. She sat, sipped a little, and then looked at Hyman.
"You know," she said, "a part of me was fascinated with all this when I heard what had been done. There is such promise in the future, especially the work with stem cells."
He nodded.
"Unfortunately," he said, "it's like every other major discovery from the wheel forward. The bad almost outweighs the good ... gunpowder, rockets, nuclear energy... I guess there was good reason to prohibit Adam and Eve from biting into the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge."
"Maybe, but it's too late now," Curt said.
They looked at him.
"Mankind will spend the rest of its history trying to get back into Paradise," he added.
Hyman smiled.
"Well," he said rising, "I'll leave it up to you two to continue the effort." He gazed around and nodded and then smiled at them.
"From the looks of it, you have a little bit of paradise to share already. You're still on vacation, young lady," he said sternly to Terri, "so don't even entertain the notion of returning to work."
She laughed.
He kissed her on the cheek, and then Curt walked him to the door and thanked him for coming over.
For a long moment he stood there, watching him drive off. Terri was suddenly at his side, holding his arm and resting her head against his shoulder.
"I remember Gramps coming in from the field. I could see he was tired, but it was a satisfactory exhaustion. He looked like he had accomplished something. Then he would see me standing here and his face would brighten with laughter and joy and the fatigue would fly off his face. I wasn't that small then, but I would run down to him and he would lift me with such ease, I thought he was the strongest man in the world and always would be.
"Grandma would yell at him for carrying a boy my size back to the house, especially after a day's hard labor, and he would shake his head and say, 'He's not heavy. He's just a thought, a dream, the future.'
"It's nice to be thought of as the future, don't you think, Doc?"
"Yes," she said. She lifted her face to kiss him. "No matter what, that's good. And they with all their science and experimentation will never take it away from us if we just hold on to our humanity."
"Funny thing for a doctor to say."
"Maybe I'm more like Hyman than I care to admit."
"That's not so bad.
"No, I guess it isn't," she said.
They kissed and turned to go back inside.
He paused and she looked off into the distance with him. She saw his eyes narrow and for a moment become the eyes of a young boy again. She could hear the words he wanted to speak.
It was on her lips to say it, too.
I see him.
I see him coming home, the future in his arms.
About the author
Andrew Neiderman is the author of numerous novels of suspense and terror, including The Devil's Advocate which was made into a major motion picture by Warner Bros. Mr. Neiderman lives in Palm Springs, California, with his wife, Diane.
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