Sighing, she said, “Okay, so if the government knows it can't persuade me, why's it issuing warrants on a bunch of trumped-up charges and putting so much manpower into the search for me?”
“They want to kill you,” Ben said bluntly.
“What?”
“They'd rather get you out of the picture and deal with Eric's partners, Knowls and Seitz and the others, because they already know those men are corruptible.”
She was shocked, and he was not surprised by her shock. She was not unworldly or terribly naive. But she was, by choice, a present-focused person who had given little thought to the complexities of the changing world around her, except when that world impinged upon her primary desire to wring as much pleasure as possible from the moment. She accepted a variety of myths as a matter of convenience, as a way of simplifying her life, and one myth was that her government would always have her best interests at heart, whether the issue was war, a reform of the justice system, increased taxation, or anything else. She was apolitical and saw no reason to be concerned about who might win — or usurp — the power flowing from the ballot box, for it was easy to believe in the benign intentions of those who so ardently desired to serve the public.
She gaped in astonishment at him. He did not even have to see that expression through the flickering light and shadow to know it held tenancy of her face, for he sensed it in the change in her breathing and in the greater tension that suddenly gripped her and caused her to sit up straighter.
“Kill me? No, no, Benny. The U.S. government just executing civilians as if this were some banana republic? No, surely not.”
“Not necessarily the whole government, Rachael. The House, Senate, president, and cabinet secretaries haven't held meetings to discuss the obstacle you pose, haven't conspired by the hundreds to terminate you. But someone in the Pentagon or the DS A or the CIA has determined that you're standing in the way of the national interest, that you pose a threat to the welfare of millions of citizens. When they weigh the welfare of millions against one or two little murders, the choice is clear to them, as it always is to collectivist thinkers. One or two little murders — tens of thousands of murders — are always justifiable when the welfare of the masses is at stake. At least, that's how they see it, even if they do pretend to believe in the sanctity of the individual. So they can order one or two little murders and even feel righteous about it.”
“Dear God,” she said with feeling. “What have I dragged you into, Benny?”
“You didn't drag me into anything,” he said. “I forced my way in. You couldn't keep me out of it. And I've no regrets.”
She seemed unable to speak.
Ahead, on the left, a branch road led down to the lake. A sign announced: lake approach — boat launching facilities.
Ben turned off the state route and followed the narrower gravel road down through a crowd of immense trees. In a quarter of a mile, he drove out of the trees, into a sixty-foot-wide, three-hundred-foot-long open area by the shore. Sequins of sunlight decorated the lake in some places, and serpentine streams of sunlight wriggled across the shifting surface in other places, and here and there brilliant shafts bounced off the waves and dazzled the eye.
More than a dozen cars, pickups, and campers were parked at the far end of the clearing, several with empty boat trailers behind them. A big recreational pickup — black with red and gray stripes, bedecked with gobs of sun-heated chrome — was backed up near the water's edge, and three men were launching a twenty-four-foot twin-engine Water King from their trailer. Several people were eating lunch at picnic tables near the shore, and an Irish setter was sniffing under a table in search of scraps, and two young boys were tossing a football back and forth, and eight or ten fishermen were tending their poles along the bank.
They all looked as if they were enjoying themselves. If any of them realized the world beyond this pleasant haven was turning dark and going mad, he was keeping it to himself.
Benny drove to the parking area but tucked the Ford in by the edge of the forest, as far from the other vehicles as he could get. He switched off the engine and rolled down his window. He put his seat back as far as it would go in order to give himself room to work, took the shotgun box on his lap, opened it, withdrew the gun, and threw the empty box into the back seat.
“Keep a watch out,” he told Rachael. “You see anybody coming, let me know. I'll get out and meet him. Don't want anybody to see the shotgun and be spooked. It's sure as hell not hunting season.”
“Benny, what're we going to do?”
“Just what we planned to do,” he said, using one of the car keys to slit the shrink-wrapped plastic in which the shotgun was encased. “Follow the directions Sarah Kiel gave you, find Eric's cabin, and see if he's there.”
“But the warrants for our arrest… people wanting to kill us… doesn't that change everything?”
“Not much.” He discarded the shredded plastic and looked the gun over. It came fully assembled, a nice piece of work, and it felt good and reliable in his hands. “Originally we wanted to get to Eric and finish him before he healed entirely and came looking to finish you. Now maybe what we'll have to do is capture him instead of kill him—”
“Take him alive?” Rachael said, alarmed by that suggestion.
“Well, he's not exactly alive, is he? But I think we're going to have to take him in whatever condition he's in, tie him up, drive him someplace like… well, someplace like the offices of the Los Angeles Times. Then we can hold a real shocker of a press conference.”
“Oh, Benny, no, no, we can't.” She shook her head adamantly. “That's crazy. He's going to be violent, extremely violent. I told you about the mice. You saw the blood in the trunk of the car, for God's sake. The destruction everywhere he's been, the knives in the wall of the Palm Springs house, the beating he gave Sarah. We can't risk getting close to him. He won't respect the gun, if that's what you're thinking. He won't have any fear of it at all. You get close enough to try to capture him, and he'll take your head off in spite of the gun. He might even have a gun of his own. No, no, if we see him, we've got to finish him right away, shoot him without any hesitation, shoot him again and again, do so much damage to him that he won't be able to come back again.”
A panicky note had entered her voice, and she had spoken faster and faster as she strove to convince Ben. Her skin was powder-white, and her lips had acquired a bluish tint. She was shivering.
Even considering their precarious situation and the admittedly hideous nature of their quarry, her fear seemed too great to Ben, and he wondered how much her reaction to Eric's resurrection was heightened by the ultrareligious childhood that had formed her. Without fully understanding her own feelings, perhaps she was afraid of Eric not merely because she knew his potential for violence, and not merely because he was a walking dead man, but because he had dared to seize the power of God by defeating death and thereby had become not simply a zombie but some hellborn creature returned from the realm of the damned.
Forgetting the shotgun for a moment, taking both her hands in his, he said, “Rachael, honey, I can handle him; I've handled worse than him, much worse—”
“Don't be so confident! That's what'll get you killed.”
“I'm trained for war, well trained to take care of myself—”
“Please!”
“And I've kept in top shape all these years because Nam taught me that the world can turn dark and mean overnight and that you can't count on anything but yourself and your closest friends. That was a nasty lesson about the modern world that I didn't want to admit I'd learned, which is why I've spent so much time immersed in the past. But the very fact that I've kept in shape and kept practicing my fighting skills is proof of the lesson. Tip-top shape, Rachael. And I'm well armed.” He hushed her when she tried to object. “We have no choice, Rachael. That's what it comes down to. No other choice. If we just kill him, blast the sucker with twenty or thirty rounds from the shotgun, kill him so bad he stays dea
d for good this time — then we have no proof of what he did to himself. We just have a corpse. Who could prove he'd been reanimated? It'd look as if we stole his body from the morgue, pumped it full of buckshot, and concocted this crazy story, maybe concocted it to cover the very crimes the government is accusing us of.”
“Lab tests of his cell structure would prove something,” Rachael said. “Examination of his genetic material—”
“That would take weeks. Before then, the government would've found a way to claim the body, eliminate us, and doctor the test results to show nothing out of the ordinary.”
She started to speak, hesitated, and stopped because she was obviously beginning to realize that he was right. She looked more forlorn than any woman he had ever seen.
He said, “Our only hope of getting the government off our backs is to get proof of Wildcard and break the story to the press. The only reason they want to kill us is to keep the secret, so when the secret is blown, we'll be safe. Since we didn't get the Wildcard file from Eric's office safe, Eric himself is the only proof we have a chance of putting our hands on. And we need him alive. They need to see him breathing, functioning, in spite of his staved-in head. They need to see the change in him that you suspect there'll be — the irrational rages, the sullen quality of the living dead.”
She swallowed hard. She nodded. “All right. Okay. But I'm so scared.”
“You can be strong; you have it in you.”
“I know I do. I know. But…”
He leaned forward and gave her a kiss.
Her lips were icy.
* * *
Eric groaned and opened his eyes.
Evidently he had descended once more into a short period of suspended animation, a minor but deep coma, for he slowly regained consciousness on the floor of the living room, sprawled among at least a hundred sheets of typing paper. His splitting headache was gone, although a peculiar burning sensation extended from the top of his — skull downward to his chin, all across his face, and in most of his muscles and joints as well, in shoulders and arms and legs. It was not an unpleasant burning, and not pleasant either, just a neutral sensation unlike anything he had felt before.
I'm like a candy man, made of chocolate, sitting on a sun-washed table, melting, melting, but melting from the inside.
For a while he just lay there, wondering where the weird thought had come from. He was disoriented, dizzy. His mind was a swamp in which unconnected thoughts burst like stinking bubbles on the watery surface. Gradually the water cleared a bit and the soupy mud of the swamp grew somewhat firmer.
Pushing up to a sitting position, he looked at the papers strewn around him and could not remember what they were. He picked up a few and tried to read them. The blurry letters would not at first resolve into words; then the words would not form coherent sentences. When at last he could read a bit, he could understand only a fraction of what he read, but he could grasp enough to realize that this was the third paper copy of the Wildcard file.
In addition to the project data stored in the Geneplan computers, there had been one hard-copy file in Riverside, one in his office safe at the headquarters in Newport Beach, and a third here. The cabin was his secret retreat, known only to him, and it had seemed prudent to keep a fully updated file in the hidden basement safe, as insurance against the day when Seitz and Knowls — the money men behind his work — tried to take the corporation away from him through clever financial maneuvering. That anticipated treachery was unlikely because they needed him, needed his genius, and would most likely still need him when Wildcard was perfected. But he was not a man who took chances. (Other than the one big chance, when he had injected himself with the devil's brew that was turning his body into pliable clay.) He had not wanted to risk being booted out of Geneplan and finding himself cut off from data crucial to the production of the immortality serum.
Evidently, after stumbling out of the bathroom, he had gone down to the basement, had opened the safe, and had brought the file up here for perusal. What had he been seeking? An explanation for what was happening to him? A way to undo the changes that had occurred — that were still occurring — in him?
That was pointless. These monstrous developments had been unanticipated. Nothing in the file would refer to the possibility of runaway growth or point the way to salvation. He must have been seized by delirium, for only in such a state would he have bothered to pursue a magic cure in this pile of Xeroxes.
He knelt in the scattered papers for a minute or two, preoccupied by the strange though painless burning sensation that filled his body, trying to understand its source and meaning. In some places — along his spine, across the top of his head, at the base of his throat, in his testicles — the heat was accompanied by an eerie tingle. He almost felt as if a billion fire ants had made their home within him and were moving by the millions through his veins and arteries and through a maze of tunnels they had burrowed in his flesh and bone.
Finally he got to his feet, and a fierce anger rose in him for no specific reason, and with no particular target. He kicked out furiously, stirring up a briefly airborne, noisy cloud of papers.
A frightening rage seethed under the surface of the mindswamp, and he was just perceptive enough to realize that it was in some way quite different from the previous rages to which he had succumbed. This one was… even more primal, less focused, less of a human rage, more like the irrationally churning fury of an animal. He felt as if some deeply buried racial memory were asserting itself, something crawling up out of the genetic pit, up from ten million years ago, up from the faraway time when men were only apes, or from a time even farther removed than that, from an unthinkably ancient age when men were as yet only amphibian creatures crawling painfully onto a volcanic shore and breathing air for the first time. It was a cold rage instead of hot like the ones before it, as cold — as the heart of the Arctic, a billion years of coldness… reptilian. Yes, that was the feel of it, an icy reptilian rage, and when he began to grasp its nature, he recoiled from further consideration of it and desperately hoped that he would be able to keep it under control.
The mirror.
He was certain that changes had taken place in him while he had been unconscious on the living-room floor, and he knew he should go into the bathroom and look at himself in the mirror. But suddenly he was shaken anew by fear of what he was becoming, and he could not find the courage to take even one step in that direction.
Instead, he decided to employ the Braille approach by which he had previously discovered the first alterations in his face. Feeling the differences before seeing them would prepare him somewhat for the shock of his appearance. Hesitantly he raised his hands to explore his face but did not get that far because he saw that his hands were changing, and he was arrested by the sight of them.
They were not radically different hands from what they had been, but they were unquestionably not his hands anymore, not the hands he had used all his life. The fingers were longer and thinner, perhaps a whole inch longer, with fleshier pads at the tips. The nails were different, too: thicker, harder, yellowish, more pointed than ordinary fingernails. They were nascent claws, damned if they weren't, and if the metamorphosis continued, they would probably develop into even more pointed, hooked, and razor-sharp talons. His knuckles were changing, too — larger, bonier, almost like arthritic knuckles.
He expected to find his hands stiff and less usable than they had been, but to his surprise the altered knuckles worked easily, fluidly, and proved superior to the knuckles out of which they had grown. He worked his hands experimentally and discovered that he was incredibly dexterous; his elongated fingers possessed a new suppleness and startling flexibility.
And he sensed that the changes were continuing unchecked, though not fast enough for him to actually see the bones growing and the flesh remaking itself. But by tomorrow his hands would surely be far more radically changed than they were now.
This was electrifyingly different from the apparent
random, tumorlike excrescences of bone and tissue that had formed across his forehead. These hands were not just the result of an excess of growth hormones and proteins. This growth had purpose, direction. In fact, he suddenly noticed that on both hands, between thumb and forefinger, below the first knuckle of each digit, translucent webs had begun to fill in the empty space.
Reptilian. Like the cold rage that he knew would (if he let it) erupt in a frenzy of destruction. Reptilian.
He lowered his hands, afraid to look at them anymore.
He no longer had the courage to explore the contours of his face, not even by touch. The mere prospect of looking into a mirror filled him with dread.
His heart was hammering, and with each thunderous beat, it seemed to pound spikes of fear and loneliness into him.
For a moment he was utterly lost, confused, directionless. He turned left, then right, took a step in one direction, then in another, the Wildcard papers crunching like dead leaves under his feet. Not sure what to do or where to go, he stopped and stood with shoulders slumped, head hung low under a weight of despair—
— until suddenly the weird burning in his flesh and the eerie tingle along his spine were supplemented with a new sensation: hunger. His stomach growled, and his knees grew weak, and he started to shake with hunger. He began to work his mouth and to swallow continuously, involuntarily, hard swallows that almost hurt, as if his body were demanding to be fed. He headed toward the kitchen, his shakes getting worse with every step, his knees growing weaker. The sweat of need poured from him in streams, in rivers. A hunger unlike anything he had ever known before. Rabid hunger. Painful. Tearing at him. His vision clouded, and his thoughts funneled down toward one subject: food. The macabre changes taking place in him would require a great deal more fuel than usual, energy for tearing down old tissues, building blocks with which to construct new tissues — yes, of course — his metabolism was running wild, like a great furnace out of control, a raging fire, it had broken down and assimilated the Farmer John sausage-and-biscuit sandwiches that he had eaten earlier, and it needed more, much more, so by the time he opened the cupboard doors and began pulling cans of soup and stew from the shelves, he was wheezing and gasping, muttering wordlessly, grunting like a savage or a wild beast, sickened and repelled by his loss of control but too hungry to worry about it, frightened but hungry, despairing but so hungry, hungry, hungry…
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