14
LIKE A NIGHT BIRD
Leaving two men behind at Rachael Leben's house in Placentia — where the crucified corpse of Rebecca Klienstad had finally been taken down from the bedroom wall — and leaving other men at the Leben house in Villa Park and still others at the Geneplan offices, Anson Sharp of the Defense Security Agency choppered through the desert darkness with two more agents, flying low and fast, to Eric Leben's stylish yet squalid love nest in Palm Springs. The pilot put the helicopter down in a bank parking lot less than a block off Palm Canyon Drive, where a nondescript government car was waiting. The chuffling rotors of the aircraft sliced up the hot dry desert air and flung slabs of it at Sharp's back as he dashed to the sedan.
Five minutes later, they arrived at the house where Dr. Leben had kept his string of teenage girls. Sharp wasn't surprised to find the front door ajar. He rang the bell repeatedly, but no one answered. Drawing his service revolver, a Smith & Wesson Chief's Special, he led the way inside, in search of Sarah Kiel who, according to the most recent report on Leben, was the current piece of fluff in residence.
The Defense Security Agency knew about Leben's lechery because it knew everything about people engaged in top-secret contract work with the Pentagon. That was something civilians like Leben just could never seem to understand: Once they accepted the Pentagon's money and undertook highly sensitive research work, they had absolutely no privacy. Sharp knew all about Leben's fascination with modern art, modern design, and modern architecture. He knew about Eric Leben's marital problems in detail. He knew what foods Leben preferred, what music he liked, what brand of underwear he wore; so of course he also knew every little thing about the teenage girls because the potential for blackmail that they presented was related to national security.
When Sharp stepped into the kitchen and saw the destruction, especially the knives driven into the wall, he figured he would not find Sarah Kiel alive. She would be nailed up in another room, or maybe bolted to the ceiling, or maybe hacked to pieces and hung on wire to form a bloody mobile, maybe even worse. You couldn't guess what might happen next in this case. Anything could happen.
Weird.
Gosser and Peake, the two young agents with Sharp, were startled and made uneasy by the mess in the kitchen and by the psychopathic frenzy it implied. Their security clearance and need to know were as high as Sharp's, so they were aware that they were hunting for a walking dead man. They knew Eric Leben had risen from a morgue slab and escaped in stolen hospital whites, and they knew a half-alive and deranged Eric Leben had killed the Hernandez and Klienstad women to obtain their car, so Gosser and Peake held their service revolvers as tightly and cautiously as Sharp held his.
Of course, the DSA was fully aware of the nature of the work Geneplan was doing for the government: biological warfare research, the creation of deadly man-made viruses. But the agency also knew the details of other projects under way within the company, including the Wildcard Project, although Leben and his associates had labored under the delusion that the secret of Wildcard was theirs alone. They were unaware of the federal agents and stoolies among them. And they did not realize how quickly government computers had ascertained their intentions merely by surveying the research they farmed out to other companies and extrapolating the purpose of it all.
These civilian types just could not understand that when you bargained with Uncle Sam and eagerly took his money, you couldn't sell only a small piece of your soul. You had to sell it all.
Anson Sharp usually enjoyed bringing that bit of nasty news to people like Eric Leben. They thought they were such big fish, but they forgot that even big fish are eaten by bigger fish, and there was no bigger fish in the sea than the whale called Washington. Sharp loved to watch that realization sink in. He relished seeing the self-important hotshots break into a sweat and quiver. They usually tried to bribe him or reason with him, and sometimes they begged, but of course he could not let them off the hook. Even if he could have let them off, he would not have done it, because he liked nothing more than seeing them squirm before him.
Dr. Eric Leben and his six cronies had been permitted to proceed unhampered with their revolutionary research into longevity. But if they had solved all the problems and achieved a useful breakthrough, the government would have moved in on them and would have absorbed the project by one means or another, through the swift declaration of a national defense emergency.
Now Eric Leben had screwed up everything. He administered the faulty treatment to himself and then accidentally put it to the test by walking in front of a damn garbage truck. No one could have anticipated such a turn of events because the guy had seemed too smart to risk his own genetic integrity.
Looking at the broken china and the trampled food that littered the floor, Gosser wrinkled his choirboy face and said, “The guy's a real berserker.”
“Looks like the work of an animal,” Peake said, frowning.
Sharp led them out of the kitchen, through the rest of the house, finally to the master bedroom and bath, where more destruction had been wrought and where there was also some blood, including a bloody palmprint on the wall. It was probably Leben's print: proof that the dead man, in some strange fashion, lived.
No cadaver could be found in the house, neither Sarah Kiel's nor anybody else's, and Sharp was disappointed. The nude and crucified woman in Placentia had been unexpected and kinky, a welcome change from the corpses he usually saw. Victims of guns, knives, plastique, and the garroting wire were old news to Sharp; he had seen them in such plenitude over the years that he no longer got a kick out of them. But he had sure gotten a kick out of that bimbo nailed to the wall, and he was curious to see what Leben's deranged and rotting mind might come up with next.
Sharp checked the hidden safe in the floor of the bedroom closet and found that it had been emptied.
Leaving Gosser behind to house-sit in case Leben returned, Sharp took Peake along on a search of the garage, expecting to find Sarah Kiel's body, which they did not. Then he sent Peake into the backyard with a flashlight to examine the lawn and flower beds for signs of a freshly dug grave, though it seemed unlikely that Leben, in his current condition, would have the desire or the foresight to bury his victims and cover his tracks.
“If you don't find anything,” Sharp told Peake, “then start checking the hospitals. In spite of the blood, maybe the Kiel girl wasn't killed. Maybe she managed to run away from him and get medical attention.”
“If I find her at some hospital?”
“I'll need to know at once,” Sharp said, for he would have to prevent Sarah Kiel from talking about Eric Leben's return. He would try to use reason, intimidation, and outright threats to ensure her silence. If that didn't work, she would be quietly removed.
Rachael Leben and Ben Shadway also had to be found soon and silenced.
As Peake set out on his assigned tasks — and while Gosser waited alertly inside the house — Sharp climbed into the unmarked sedan at the curb and had the driver return him to the bank parking lot off Palm Canyon Drive, where the helicopter was still waiting for him.
Airborne again, heading for the Geneplan labs in Riverside, Anson Sharp stared out at the night landscape as it rushed past below the chopper, his eyes narrowed as if he were a night bird seeking prey.
15
LOVING
Ben's dreams were dark and full of thunder, blasted by strange lightning that illuminated nothing in a landscape without form, inhabited by an unseen but fearful creature that stalked him through the shadows, where all was vast and cold and lonely. It was — and yet was not — the Green Hell where he had spent more than three years of his youth, a familiar yet unfamiliar place, the same as it had been, yet changed as landscapes can be only in dreams.
Shortly after dawn, he came awake with bird-thin cries, full of dread, shuddering, and Rachael was with him. She had moved from the other bed and had drawn him to her, comforting him. Her warm tender touch dispelled the cold and lonely dre
am. The rhythmic thumping of her heart seemed like the steady throbbing of a bright lighthouse beacon along a fogbound coast, each pulse a reassurance.
He believed she had intended to offer nothing more than the comfort that a good friend could provide, though perhaps unconsciously she brought the greater gift of love and sought it in return. In the half-awake state following sleep, when his vision seemed filtered by a semitransparent cloth, when an invisible thinness of warm silk seemed to interpose itself between his hands and everything he touched, and while sounds were still dream-muffled, his perceptions were not sharp enough to determine how and when her offered comfort became offered — and accepted — love. He only knew that it happened and that, when he drew her unclothed body to his, he felt a rightness that he had never felt before in his thirty-seven years.
He was at last within her, and she was filled with him. It was fresh and wondrous, yet they did not have to search for the rhythms and patterns that pleased them, because they knew what was perfect for them as lovers of a decade might know.
Although the softly rumbling air conditioner kept the room cool, Ben had an almost psychic awareness of desert heat pressing at the windows. The cool chamber was a bubble suspended outside the reality of the harsh land, just as their special moment of tender coupling was a bubble drifting outside the normal flow of seconds and minutes.
Only one opaque window of frosted glass — high in the kitchenette wall — was not covered with a drape, and upon it the rising sun built a slowly growing fire. Outside, palm fronds, fanning lazily in a breeze, filtered the beams of the sun; feathery tropical shadows and frost-pale light fell on their nude bodies, rippling as they moved.
Ben saw her face clearly even in that inconstant light. Her eyes were shut, mouth open. She drew deep breaths at first, then breathed more quickly. Every line of her face was exquisitely sensuous — but also infinitely precious. His perception of her preciousness mattered more to him than the shatteringly sensuous vision she presented, for it was an emotional rather than physical response, a result of their months together and of his great affection for her. Because she was so special to him, their coupling was not merely an act of sex but an immeasurably more gratifying act of love.
Sensing his examination, she opened her eyes and looked into his, and he was electrified by that new degree of contact.
The palm-patterned morning light grew rapidly brighter, changing hue as well, from frost-pale to lemon-yellow to gold. It imparted those colors to Rachael's face, slender throat, full breasts. As the richness of the light increased, so did the pace of their lovemaking, till both were gasping, till she cried out and cried out again, at which moment the breeze outside became a sudden energetic wind that whipped the palm fronds, casting abruptly frantic shadows through the milky window, upon the bed. At precisely the moment when the wind-sculpted shadows leaped and shuddered, Ben thrust deep and shuddered too, emptying copious measures of himself into Rachael, and just when the last rush of his seed had streamed from him, the spill of wind was also depleted, flowing away to other corners of the world.
In time he withdrew from her, and they lay on their sides, facing each other, heads close, their breath mingling. Still, neither spoke nor needed to, and gradually they drifted toward sleep again.
He had never before felt as fulfilled and contented as this. Even in the good days of his youth, before the Green Hell, before Vietnam, he had never felt half this fine.
She slept before Ben did, and for a long pleasant moment he watched as a bubble of saliva slowly formed between her parted lips, and popped. His eyes grew heavy, and the last thing he saw before he closed them was the vague — almost invisible — scar along her jawline, where she had been cut when Eric had thrown a glass at her.
Drifting down into a restful darkness, Ben almost felt sorry for Eric Leben, because the scientist had never realized love was the closest thing to immortality that men would ever know and that the only — and best — answer to death was loving. Loving.
16
IN THE ZOMBIE ZONE
For part of the night he lay fully clothed on the bed in the cabin above Lake Arrowhead, in a condition deeper than sleep, deeper than coma, his body temperature steadily declining, his heart beating only, twenty times a minute, blood barely circulating, drawing breath shallow-ly and only intermittently. Occasionally his respiration and heartbeat stopped entirely for periods as long as ten or fifteen minutes, during which the only life within him was at a cellular level, though even that was not life as much as stasis, a strange twilight existence that no other man on earth had ever known. During those periods of suspended animation, with cells only slowly renewing themselves and performing their functions at a greatly reduced pace, the body was gathering energy for the next period of wakefulness and accelerated healing.
He was healing, and at an astonishing rate. Hour by hour, almost visibly, his multitude of punctures and lacerations were scabbing over, closing up. Beneath the ugly bluish blackness of the bruises that he had suffered from the brutal impact with the garbage truck, there was already a visible yellow hue arising as the blood from crushed capillaries was leeched from the tissues. When he was awake, he could feel fragments of his broken skull pressing insistently into his brain, even though medical wisdom held that tissue of the brain was without nerve endings and therefore insensate; it was not a pain as much as a pressure, like a Novocaine-numbed tooth registering the grinding bit of a dentist's drill. And he could sense, without understanding how, that his genetically improved body was methodically dealing with that head injury as surely as it was closing up its other wounds. For a week he would need much rest, but during that time the periods of stasis would grow shorter, less frequent, less frightening. That was what he wanted to believe. In two or three weeks, his physical condition would be no worse than that of a man leaving the hospital after major surgery. In a month he might be fully recovered, although he'd always have a slight — or even pronounced — depression along the right side of his skull.
But mental recovery was not keeping pace with the rapid physical regeneration of tissues. Even when awake, heartbeat and respiration close to normal, he was seldom fully alert. And during those brief periods when he possessed approximately the same intellectual capacity he had known before his death, he was acutely and dismally aware that for the most part he was functioning in a robotic state, with frequent lapses into a confused and, at times, virtually animalistic condition.
He had strange thoughts.
Sometimes he believed himself to be a young man again, recently graduated from college, but sometimes he recognized that he was actually past forty. Sometimes he did not know exactly where he was, especially when he was out on the road, driving, with no familiar reference points to his own past life; overcome by confusion, feeling lost and sensing that he would forever be lost, he had to pull over to the edge of the highway until the panic passed. He knew that he had a great goal, an important mission, though he was never quite able to define his purpose or destination. Sometimes he thought he was dead and making his way through the levels of hell on a Dantean journey. Sometimes he thought he had killed people, although he could not remember who, and then he did briefly remember and shrank from the memory, not only shrank from it but convinced himself that it was not a memory at all but a fantasy, for of course he was incapable of cold-blooded murder. Of course. Yet at other times he thought about how exciting and satisfying it would be to kill someone, anyone, everyone, because in his heart he knew they were after him, all of them, out to get him, the rotten bastards, as they had always been out to get him, though they were even more determined now than ever. Sometimes he thought urgently, Remember the mice, the mice, the deranged mice bashing themselves to pieces against the walls of their cages, and more than once he even said it aloud, “Remember the mice, the mice,” but he had no idea what those words meant: what mice, where, when?
He saw strange things, too.
Sometimes he saw people who could not possibly be
there: his long-dead mother, a hated uncle who had abused him when he had been a little boy, a neighborhood bully who had terrorized him in grade school. Now and then, as if suffering from the delirium tremens of a chronic alcoholic, he saw things crawling out of the walls, bugs and snakes and more frightening creatures that defied definition.
Several times, he was certain that he saw a path of perfectly black flagstones leading down into a terrible darkness in the earth. Always compelled to follow those stones, he repeatedly discovered the path was illusory, a figment of his morbid and fevered imagination.
Of all the apparitions and illusions that flickered past his eyes and through his damaged mind, the most unusual and the most disturbing were the shadowfires. They leaped up unexpectedly and made a crackling sound that he not only heard but felt in his bones. He would be moving right along, walking with reasonable sure-footedness, passing among the living with some conviction, functioning better than he dared believe he could — when suddenly a fire would spring up in the shadowed corners of a room or in the shadows clustered beneath a tree, in any deep pocket of gloom, flames the shade of wet blood with hot silvery edges, startling him. And when he looked close, he could see that nothing was burning, that the flames had erupted out of thin air and were fed by nothing whatsoever, as if the shadows themselves were burning and made excellent fuel in spite of their lack of substance. When the fires faded and were extinguished, no signs of them remained — no ashes, charred fragments, or smoke stains.
Though he had never been afraid of fire before he died, had never entertained the pyrophobic idea that he was destined to die in flames, he was thoroughly terrified of these hungry phantom fires. When he peered into the flickering brightness, he felt that just beyond lay a mystery he must solve, though the solution would bring him unimaginable anguish.
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