“Regeneration,” Ben said thoughtfully.
At the window, Rachael stopped pacing, cautiously drew back the drape, and peered out at the night-cloaked motel parking lot.
She said, “God knows, I'm no expert in recombinant DNA. But… well, they hoped to develop a benign virus that'd function as a 'carrier' to convey new genetic material into the body's cells and precisely place the new bits on the chains of chromosomes. Think of the virus as a sort of living scalpel that does genetic surgery. Because it's microscopic, it can perform minute operations no real scalpel ever could. It can be designed to seek out — and attach itself to — a certain portion of a chromosomal chain, either destroying the gene already there or inserting a new one.”
“And they did develop it?”
“Yes. Then they needed to positively identify genes associated with aging and edit them out—and develop artificial genetic material for the virus to carry into the cells. Those new genes would be designed to halt the aging process and tremendously boost the natural immune system by cuing the body to produce vastly larger quantities of interferon and other healing substances. Follow me?”
“Mostly.”
“They even believed they could give the human body the ability to regenerate ruined tissue, bone, and vital organs.”
She still stared out at the night, and she appeared to have gone pale — not at something she had seen but at the consideration of what she was slowly revealing to him.
Finally she continued: “Their patents were bringing in a river of money, a flood. So they spent God knows how many tens of millions, farming out pieces of the research puzzle to geneticists not in the company, keeping the work fragmented so no one was likely to realize the true intent of their efforts. It was like a privately financed equivalent of the Manhattan Project — and maybe even more secret than the development of the atomic bomb.”
“Secret… because if they succeeded, they wanted to keep the blessing of an extended life span for themselves?”
“Partly, yes.” Letting the drape fall in place, she turned from the window. “And by holding the secret, by dispensing the blessing only to whomever they chose — just imagine the power they'd wield. They could essentially create a long-lived elite master race that owed its existence to them. And the threat of withholding the gift would be a bludgeon that could make virtually anyone cooperate with them. I used to listen to Eric talk about it, and it sounded like nonsense, pipe dreams, even though I knew he was a genius in his field.”
“Those men in the Cadillac who pursued us and shot the cops—”
“From Geneplan,” she said, still full of nervous energy, pacing again. “I recognized the car. It belongs to Rupert Knowls. Knowls supplied the initial venture capital that got Eric started. After Eric, he's the chief partner.”
“A rich man… yet he's willing to risk his reputation and his freedom by gunning down two cops?”
“To protect this secret, yeah, I guess he is. He's not exactly a scrupulous man to begin with. And confronted with this opportunity, I suppose he'll stretch his scruples even further than usual.”
“Okay. So they developed the technique to prolong life and promote incredibly rapid healing. Then what?”
Her lovely face had been pale. Now it darkened as if a shadow had fallen across it, though there was no shadow. “Then… they began experiments on lab animals. Primarily white mice.”
Ben sat up straighter in his chair and put the can of Diet Coke aside, because from Rachael's demeanor he sensed that she was reaching the crux of the story.
She paused for a moment to check the dead bolt on the room door, which opened onto a covered breezeway that flanked the parking lot. The lock was securely engaged, but after a moment's hesitation she took one of the straight-backed chairs from the table, tipped it onto two legs, and braced it under the doorknob for extra protection.
He was sure she was being overly cautious, treading the edge of paranoia. On the other hand, he didn't object.
She returned to the edge of the bed. “They injected the mice, changed the mice, working with mouse genes instead of human genes, of course, but applying the same theories and techniques they intended to use to promote human longevity. And the mice, a short-lived variety, survived longer… twice as long as usual and still kicking. Then three times as long… four times… and still young. Some mice were subjected to injuries of various kinds — everything from contusions and abrasions to punctures, broken bones, serious burns — and they healed at a remarkable rate. They recovered and flourished after their kidneys were virtually destroyed. Lungs eaten half away by acid fumes were regenerated. They actually regained their vision after being blinded. And then…”
Her voice trailed away, and she glanced at the fortified door, then at the window, lowered her head, closed her eyes.
Ben waited.
Eyes still closed, she said, “Following standard procedure, they killed some mice and put them aside for dissection and for thorough tissue tests. Some were killed with injections of air — embolisms. Killed others with lethal injections of formaldehyde. And there was no question they were dead. Very dead. But those that weren't yet dissected… they came back. Within a few hours. Lying there in the lab trays… they just… started twitching, squirming. Bleary-eyed, weak at first… but they came back. Soon they were on their feet, scurrying about their cages, eating — fully alive. Which no one had anticipated, not at all. Oh, sure, before the mice were killed, they'd had tremendously enhanced immune systems, truly astonishing capacity to heal, and life spans that had been dramatically increased, but…” Rachael raised her head, opened her eyes, looked at Ben. “But once the line of death is crossed… who'd imagine it could be recrossed?”
Ben's hands started shaking, and a wintry shiver followed the track of his spine, and he realized that the true meaning and power of these events had only now begun to sink in.
“Yes,” Rachael said, as if she knew what thoughts and emotions were racing through his mind and heart.
He was overcome by a strange mixture of terror, awe, and wild joy: terror at the idea of anything, mouse or man, returning from the land of the dead; awe at the thought that humankind's genius had perhaps shattered nature's dreadful chains of mortality; joy at the prospect of humanity freed forever from the loss of loved ones, freed forever from the great fears of sickness and death.
And as if reading his mind, Rachael said, “Maybe one day… maybe even one day soon, the threat of the grave will pass away. But not yet. Not quite yet. Because the Wildcard Project's breakthrough is not entirely successful. The mice that came back were… strange.”
“Strange?”
Instead of elaborating on that freighted word, she said, “At first the researchers thought the mice's odd behavior resulted from some sort of brain damage — maybe not to cerebral tissues but to the fundamental chemistry of the brain — that couldn't be repaired even by the mice's enhanced healing abilities. But that wasn't the case. They could still run difficult mazes and repeat other complex tricks they'd been taught before they'd died—”
“So somehow the memories, knowledge, probably even personality survives the brief period of lifelessness between death and rebirth.”
She nodded. “Which would indicate that some small current still exists in the brain for a time after death, enough to keep memory intact until… resurrection. Like a computer during a power failure, barely holding on to material in its short-term memory by using the meager flow of current from a standby battery.”
Ben wasn't sleepy anymore. “Okay, so the mice could run mazes, but there was something strange about them. What? How strange?”
“Sometimes they became confused — more frequently at first than after they'd been back with the living awhile — and they repeatedly rammed themselves against their cages or ran in circles chasing their tails. That kind of abnormal behavior slowly passed. But another, more frightening behavior emerged… and endured.”
Outside a car pulled into th
e motel parking lot and stopped.
Rachael glanced worriedly at the barricaded door.
In the still desert air, a car door opened, closed.
Ben sat up straighter in his chair, tense.
Footsteps echoed softly through the empty night. They were heading away from Rachael's and Ben's room. In another part of the motel, the door to another room opened and closed.
With visible relief Rachael let her shoulders sag. “Mice are natural-born cowards, of course. They never fight their enemies. They're not equipped to. They survive by running, dodging, hiding. They don't even fight among themselves for supremacy or territory. They're meek, timid. But the mice who came back weren't meek at all. They fought one another, and they attacked mice that had not been resurrected — and they even tried to nip at the researchers handling them, though a mouse has no hope of hurting a man and is ordinarily acutely aware of that. They flew into rages, clawing at the floors of their cages, pawing at the air as if fighting imaginary enemies, sometimes even clawing at themselves. Occasionally these fits lasted less than a minute, but more often went on until the mouse collapsed in exhaustion.”
For a moment, neither spoke.
The silence in the motel room was sepulchral, profound.
At last Ben said, “In spite of this strangeness in the mice, Eric and his researchers must've been electrified. Dear God, they'd hoped to extend the life span — and instead they defeated death altogether! So they were eager to move on to development of similar methods of genetic alteration for human beings.”
“Yes.”
“In spite of the mice's unexplained tendency to frenzies, rages, random violence.”
“Yes.”
“Figuring that problem might never arise in a human subject… or could be dealt with somewhere along the way.”
“Yes.”
Ben said, “So… slowly the work progressed, but too slowly for Eric. Youth-oriented, youth-obsessed, and inordinately afraid of dying, he decided not to wait for a safe and proven process.”
“Yes.”
“That's what you meant in Eric's office tonight, when you asked Baresco if he knew Eric had broken the cardinal rule. To a genetics researcher or other specialist in biological sciences, the cardinal rule would be — what? — that he should never experiment with human beings until all encountered problems and unanswered questions are dealt with at the test-animal level or below.”
“Exactly,” she said. She had folded her hands in her lap to keep them from shaking, but her fingers kept picking at one another. “And Vincent didn't know Eric had broken the cardinal rule, I knew, but it must've come as a nasty shock to them when they heard Eric's body was missing. The moment they heard, they knew he'd done the craziest, most reckless, most unforgivable thing he possibly could've done.”
“And now what?” Ben asked. “They want to help him?”
“No. They want to kill him. Again.”
“Why?”
“Because he won't come back all the way, won't ever be exactly like he was. This stuff wasn't perfected yet.”
“He'll be like the lab animals?”
“Probably. Strangely violent, dangerous.”
Ben thought of the mindless destruction in the Villa Park house, the blood in the trunk of the car.
Rachael said, “Remember — he was a ruthless man all his life and troubled by barely suppressed violent urges even before this. The mice started out meek, but Eric didn't, so what might he be like now? Look what he did to Sarah Kiel.”
Ben remembered not only the beaten girl but the wrecked kitchen in the Palm Springs house, the knives driven into the wall.
“And if Eric murders someone in one of these rages,” Rachael said, “the police are more likely to learn he's alive, and Wildcard will be blown wide open. So his partners want to kill him in some very final manner that'll rule out another resurrection. I wouldn't be surprised if they dismembered the corpse or burned it to ashes and then disposed of the remains in several locations.”
Good God, Ben thought, is this reality or Chiller Theater?
He said, “They want to kill you because you know about Wildcard?”
“Yes, but that's not the only reason they'd like to get their hands on me. They've got two others at least. For one thing, they probably think I know where Eric will go to ground.”
“But you don't?”
“I had some ideas. And Sarah Kiel gave me another one. But I don't know for sure.”
“You said there's a third reason they'd want you?”
She nodded. “I'm first in line to inherit Geneplan, and they don't trust me to continue pumping enough money into Wildcard. By removing me, they stand a much better chance of retaining control of the corporation and of keeping Wildcard secret. If I could've gotten to Eric's safe ahead of them and could've put my hands on his project diary, I would've had solid proof that Wildcard exists, and then they wouldn't have dared touch me. Without proof, I'm vulnerable.”
Ben rose and began to move restlessly around the room, thinking furiously.
Somewhere in the night, not far beyond the motel walls, a cat cried either in anger or in passion. It went on a long time, rising and falling, an eerie ululation.
Finally Ben said, “Rachael, why are you pursuing Eric? Why this desperate rush to reach him before the others? What'll you do if you find him?”
“Kill him,” she said without hesitation, and the bleakness in her green eyes was now complemented by a Rachael-like determination and iron resolve. “Kill him for good. Because if I don't kill him, he's going to hide out until he's in better condition, until he's a bit more in control of himself, and then he's going to come kill me. He died furious with me, consumed by such hatred for me that he dashed blindly out into traffic, and I'm sure that same hatred was seething in him the moment awareness returned to him in the county morgue. In his clouded and twisted mind, I'm very likely his primary obsession, and I don't think he'll rest until I'm dead. Or until he's dead, really dead this time.”
He knew she was right. He was deeply afraid for her.
His preference for the past was as strong in him now as it had ever been, and he longed for simpler times. How mad had the modern world become? Criminals owned the city streets at night. The whole planet could be utterly destroyed in an hour with the pressing of a few buttons. And now… now dead men could be reanimated. Ben wished for a time machine that could carry him back to a better age: say the early 1920s, when a sense of wonder was still alive and when faith in the human potential was unsullied and unsurpassed.
Yet… he remembered the joy that had surged in him when Rachael had first said that death had been beaten, before she had explained that those who came back from beyond were frighteningly changed. He had been thrilled. Hardly the response of a genuine stick-in-the-mud reactionary. He might peer back at the past and long for it with full-blown sentimentalism, but in his heart he was, like others of his age, undeniably attracted to science and its potential for creating a brighter future. Maybe he was not such a misfit in the modern world as he liked to pretend. Maybe this experience was teaching him something about himself that he would have preferred not to learn.
He said, “Could you really pull the trigger on Eric?”
“Yes.”
“I'm not sure you could. I suspect you'd freeze up when you were really confronted with the moral implications of murder.”
“This wouldn't be murder. He's no longer a human being. He's already dead. The living dead. The walking dead. He's not a man anymore. He's different. Changed. Just as those mice were changed. He's only a thing now, not a man, a dangerous thing, and I wouldn't have any qualms about blowing his head off. If the authorities ever found out, I don't think they'd even try to prosecute me. And I see no moral questions that would put me on trial in my own mind.”
“You've obviously thought hard about this,” he said. “But why not hide out, keep a low profile, let Eric's partners find him and kill him for you?”
She
shook her head. “I can't bet everything on their success. They might fail. They might not get to him before he finds me. This is my life we're talking about, and by God I'm not trusting in anyone but me to protect it.”
“And me,” he said.
“And you, yes. And you, Benny.”
He came to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, beside her. “So we're chasing a dead man.”
“Yes.”
“But we've got to get some rest now.”
“I'm beat,” she agreed.
“Then where will we go tomorrow?”
“Sarah told me about a cabin Eric has in the mountains near Lake Arrowhead. It sounded secluded. Just what he needs now, for the next few days, while the initial healing's going on.”
Ben sighed. “Yeah, I think we might find him in a place like that.”
“You don't have to come with me.”
“I will.”
“But you don't have to.”
“I know. But I will.”
She kissed him lightly on the cheek.
Though she was weary, sweaty, and rumpled, with lank hair and bloodshot eyes, she was beautiful.
He had never felt closer to her. Facing death together always forged a special bond between people, drew them even closer regardless of how very close they might have been before. He knew, for he had been to war in the Green Hell.
Tenderly she said, “Let's get some rest, Benny.”
“Right,” he said.
But before he could lie down and turn off the lights, he had to break out the magazine of the Smith & Wesson Combat Magnum that he had taken off Vincent Baresco several hours ago and count the remaining cartridges. Three. Half the magazine's load had been expended in Eric's office, when Baresco had fired wildly in the darkness as Ben attacked him. Three left. Not much. Not nearly enough to make Ben feel secure, even though Rachael had her own thirty-two pistol. How many bullets were required to stop a walking dead man? Ben put the Combat Magnum on the nightstand, where he could reach out and lay his hand on it in an instant if he needed it during what remained of the night.
In the morning, he would buy a box of ammunition. Two boxes.
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