The Methuselah Gene

by Jonathan Lowe

  A sudden voice called from somewhere below the man at the base of the tower. His flashlight swung, its beam dissecting the treeline near me, and then whipping to the other side. As if the man wasn’t certain of the voice’s origin. But then I couldn’t tell the direction, either. I couldn’t be certain even of the name the second man had called. Until the voice called again, and then I knew.

  “Sean,” it said distinctly on the cool quiet air.

  Sean.

  “Over here,” the man with the flashlight confirmed, shining his flashlight downward to the other side of the low hill.

  I heard movement in the brush over there.

  “Ready?” the man identified now as Sean asked.

  The second man said something in reply that I couldn’t catch, but one of the words sounded like damn. That word was repeated several times in the same sentence.

  The flashlight clicked off. Sean picked up the toolbox—or whatever it was—and strode down to meet his ally, his accomplice. I started forward, trying to glimpse something, if only a silhouette. Was the second man Walter Mills? Or was Walter’s name really Sean?

  My foot found a dry branch in the dark, and partly cracked it, adding a whipping sound as it twisted to fan the earth. I very nearly slipped and fell. The flashlight came on again suddenly over there, as if about to nail me. The sword of light angled through the trees above, then it went off just as quickly, almost deliberately. Even the crickets fell silent for that moment.

  We all waited, listening.

  I was the third man—the one who wasn’t supposed to be here.

  Or was there more than just two of them?

  At last a whispering beyond the dark wall of foliage, somewhere. Then rustling, movement. Toward me, or away from me, I couldn’t tell. I remained frozen, blood pulsing like a thickness in my tongue, pounding behind my eye sockets, gifting me flashes of phantom light. Soon the sound seemed to be widening, circling. When I turned, about to run, it stopped again. And when I once more heard the same sound, it seemed to be weaker, and further away. They were leaving. Thank God.

  A nearby cricket startled me with its sudden, steady wail. My heart went into full arrest for a moment, then beat abnormally fast before finally settling down once more into a normal rhythm. I waited until the other crickets resumed their insect chatter from the direction of the water tower, and then I walked carefully back in the direction I had come. Back, toward the Shell station, which was still bright against the eerie country night.

  8

  My Taurus was now parked to one side of Wally’s station, repairs complete. I spotted Wally inside the office, counting his receipts. His head was down, as if in concentration, and he wore a clean white shirt now. I crossed behind the station, and walked into the bay from the other side, looking for some defense against the bigger man, if it came to that. Desperately, I eyed a wrench. The fake legs were propped against the tall red Craftsman tool cabinet where the wrench protruded. Its feet were up and stretched apart, like half a corpse left bobbing by a shark.

  I picked up the wrench gently, but some tool below it shifted slightly, and made a metallic tapping sound. I was about to slip the wrench into the belt behind my back when I saw Wally’s reflection in a fisheye mirror positioned to hang outside the front office door, presumably so that Wally could view the area fronting the bays while working in his office. As I moved back behind the tall red cabinet, shielding myself from the doorway between the bays and the office, I stared at the warped mirror. Wally appeared to be removing something slowly from his drawer. Something dark and hand-sized.

  A revolver.

  He got up cautiously and moved slowly toward the opening separating us, the weapon extended in his hand. When he entered the bay, he scanned in a quick circle, looking finally toward the fake legs standing on the other side of the cabinet. When I saw that he was going to move in my direction, while looking toward the other side of the bay, I hunkered down. When he came within range, I sprung out and used the wrench on his extended gun hand. Wally yelped in pain, dropping the gun. I scrambled to pick it up, keeping my back to him as he kicked at me. Then I stood with my prize. Wally began to back away from me. Toward the doorway. His eyes were wild, now, and they widened. His mouth formed an O.

  “Is my car ready, Wally?” I asked him.

  “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “I told you my name already.”

  “Ya lied. Rental slip says yer somebody else. Sheriff’ll know who by morning.”

  “You broke into the trunk?”

  He didn’t answer me. The phone rang, startling us both. Wally kept his eyes focused on the gun in my hand as he backed into the office. I followed. “Ya better go quick,” he suggested. “Keys on the desk.”

  “How much do I owe you?” I asked, annoyed by the loudness of the old phone, the abnormal brightness of the office.

  “How ‘bout forty years?”

  I glanced at the Nebraska Cornhuskers calendar on his wall, above a symmetrical stack of oil cans. I imagined the room as my prison cell, the cans used as a ring toss game to pass the time, if I didn’t get out of town quick. I withdrew my wallet, fished out three twenty dollar bills. It was all the cash I had left, after paying George. I laid the money on the desk, and picked up the car keys.

  “That should cover it, Wally,” I said, putting some emphasis on the word should. “This isn’t like what you’re thinking, either. You naturally suspicious, or is there a killer out there, and you think I’m him?”

  “I dunno, an’ I don’t wanna know,” Wally confessed.

  The phone finally stopped ringing. I started taking the bullets out of his revolver, one by one. “There’s nothing to know, except I’m not the criminal here.”

  “So ya ain’t a mobster?”

  “A what?” I stopped, leaving one bullet in the gun. “Come again?”

  Wally blinked at me rapidly, a dozen times, from across the small room. “Ya said you were lookin’ for a guy, but maybe it’s a woman yer after.”

  I shook my head in confusion. “What do you mean? It is a man. Of course it’s a man! I thought it was a woman at first, but now I know at least that much. I just don’t want him to know I’m looking for him, okay?”

  “Yeah? An’ where’s yer own gun? Hit man usually carries one.”

  I laughed in disbelief. “Hit man? Who said I was a hit man?”

  “Deputy Sheriff Cody.”

  I shook my head. “You been watching too many B movies, Wally. Out here in the sticks with the rednecks and geezers.”

  “Right. So ya know about the cable guy, too? You sayin’ yer with him, now?”

  “Who?”

  “Yeah, you know who.”

  Wally’s eyes lost their trapped animal look. His lips curled slightly in a preflight posture. But with that one bullet left in the gun, I slapped it shut. Then I pointed it at Wally’s very real legs. “Let me explain this real slowly, Wally. The reason I’m here has nothing to do with mob hits or made-for-TV movies or Fear Factor or even the Easter bunny, okay?”

  “Stolen drugs?” Wally guessed.

  I paused longer than I should have. Seeing my astonished reaction, Wally brightened, and cut me off.

  “That’s it, ain’t it? Somebody stole yer stash. And they’re here, ain’t they? An’ yer gonna kill’em.”

  “No,” I said. “No, you’re wrong about that too.”

  “Am I, now?” He almost sneered, then made a little connect-the-dots motion with one hand. “Ya better get yer story straight for Sheriff Cody.”

  He nodded toward Main street, where—sure enough—a man was getting into what resembled a police car in the distance, confirmed when the flashing lights came on. I turned back to find Wally a few steps closer to me, freezing only as I lifted the revolver higher, toward his chest.

  He looked from the barrel to my face. “Give it up, partner,” he suggested, just full of advice.

  “Give what up?” I asked.

  It must have seemed
like a rhetorical question, because he had no answer for it. I left him there, and ducked out behind the service station in a sudden panic as the Sheriff neared, siren wailing now. Angling left, I ran straight into the field of corn, letting the tassels whip at my face, soon feeling an odd commingling of exhilaration and dread. And soon enough I heard a voice from somewhere behind me, ordering me to stop. But it sounded distant, and seemed almost unreal as I tried to escape back into a corner of my mind that remembered sanity and comfort. A warning gunshot brought me back from my illusion of safety, and then I realized I still had Wally’s revolver.

  Damn.

  On impulse I tossed the thing aside, then angled back to the right again, just in case I was being followed. When I finally stopped five minutes later, and out of breath, I listened to the night. I could hear nothing except my own panting, now. The Shell station was gone. The town was gone. Only the corn surrounded me, faintly lit by starlight.

  What now? I thought, helplessly. Any suggestions, Rachel?

  Reaching out, I felt for a young ear of corn. I touched it like a blind person might, measuring its thickness, its firmness. I imagined the possibly genetically modified kernels inside that very ear one day being trapped in a can on aisle 6 at the Piggly Wiggly in Beaufort, South Carolina. Or would it be aisle 7 at the Safeway in Bullhead City, Arizona? And what impoverished mother or beer-gut redneck needing a side veggie to go with their pulled pork sandwich would make the purchase? Maybe the TV would be on as they ate, too, blaring another SUV commercial during half time on Monday Night Football. One thing was certain to me: even if folks ate Franken-corn without complaining, they would never take a modified HIV virus willingly, even if it proved to possess longevity as a side effect. Not anymore than third-world dictators would want their burgeoning populations to take it. Especially not those who breathed polluted air like our urban cowboys did, while soccer moms at the mall breathed the prayer Holy Mary, full of grace, let me find a parking space.

  No sir’ee, Boba-krishna.

  A water tower figured in the nightmare from which George woke me sometime in the middle of the night, as he crept past my casket. “Don’t mind me,” he whispered, although it was the light he’d switched on that had done the damage.

  I sat up slowly, and stared at his back as he went into the bathroom. Then I lay back and stared at the ceiling, and sure enough, a roach was up there. As I watched it, I felt an ironic smile form on my lips. If I ever did manage to get back to sleep now, I knew I’d be dreaming that things were crawling on me as well. And maybe they would be, even though this wasn’t Mabel’s.

  “Hey, George,” I said. “You know everybody in town too?”

  “Just about, why?”

  “Know a recluse, a loner . . . a guy who doesn’t mingle much, walks around at night?”

  George flushed. I sat up again to see him fill a glass with water from the sink. “That would be me,” he admitted, and grinned. “Or you?”

  In the mirror I watched George drink. I blinked several times, imagining each time that George’s face was others I’d seen—Wally, the postmaster, Edie, the Sheriff. Everyone drinking the water. The entire town, drinking water from the town’s ugly frog tower up there on that hill among the evergreens. A connection solidified. But was it only my imagination? I tried to tell myself that M-Telomerase couldn’t be disseminated through a water supply, even if Zion didn’t use chlorine, or someone managed to neutralize it somehow. But the images that invaded my mind wouldn’t stop, nor would the bizarre idea that now infected me, born of paranoia: what if Jim Baxter had succeeded where I’d failed? What if a means of keeping the altered HIV virus alive through digestion had been discovered in his notes on the plant virus, and that’s why he’d been murdered? If he’d been murdered at all, of course, and if my reasoning wasn’t as illogical as Wally mistaking me for a hit man, instead.

  “Small town,” I heard myself say. “I was thinking it would be a good place to hide. Like maybe someone who testified in a trial somewhere?”

  George’s face seemed to stiffen in the mirror over the sink. He dropped his water glass, and it shattered with a metallic pop.

  “You okay?” I asked, momentarily.

  He didn’t want to turn around, but stared down at the jagged fragments of glass in the sink. “Slipped,” he explained. Then he scooped up the glass slowly, using a paper towel. He carried a handful of shards past me to drop them into the waste basket near the bolted rear stockroom door. There they rattled loudly.

  “Name Walter Mills ring a bell?” I asked him.

  George shook his head mechanically, but he still didn’t look at me, his fish scale eyes moving rapidly from side to side. “Buzzer either. Who is he?”

  “Private dick my ex-wife hired to find me.”

  He nodded as if he’d been told to. “It’s hard to keep secrets in this town. If he’s here, he’ll find ya. You owe alimony?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m honest about money.” As opposed to everything else?

  “What’s she want with you, then?”

  “What’s any woman want?”

  George turned toward his room. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “You ever been married?”

  “Me? Ha.”

  “Wonderful thing, if you get a lobotomy first.”

  “Where’s your ring?” he asked, without even looking.

  “Don’t have one in my nose either, anymore,” I lied.

  The muscles in George’s shoulders seemed to loosen. “See ya in the morning,” he told me.

  “Night.”

  The door closed. I went to the sink and turned on the water faucet. I put my hands under the water and stared at the flow. I cupped it, and sniffed at it. Then I saw another roach scuttle up onto the edge of the toilet bowl. I shuddered, and instinctively tossed the water cupped in my hands onto the roach. It fell into the bowl, and did a little roach dance before it turned, legs down, and began to swim from side to side, seeking a way out of its own dilemma. Tiny waves radiated outward from the roach’s tiny legs, like a buzz. I flushed the toilet, and covered the sink drain with a stopper. Then I returned to my vampire’s bed. This time I left the light on, deciding to put a pillow over my eyes to help me sleep. I also popped a pill, swallowing it dry. I hadn’t known what to expect in Zion, but I did imagine needing Xanax to sleep. Now I couldn’t imagine sleeping here without it. How could I sleep even in a regular bed—much less a coffin—until I uncovered the truth? Unthinkable. So I needed Xanax to calm down and stop thinking so damn much. To relax, to let go. Just a little prescription drug . . . not a crutch, like for so many other people. Except I’d gotten mine by forging a prescription blank from Dr. Bischoff’s office. That made it an illegal drug. Not that Bischoff would have minded. Tactar’s clinical investigator and outside consultant had maintained an office next to mine before Hepker got my ass. When I went in to take Bischoff’s order for Kung Pao chicken one day, I’d spied the blank pad he used in private practice, and tore off an extra sheet or three. The Xanax wasn’t wasted, now . . . thanks, Doc . . . but for extra measure and peace of mind I used the pillow to ward off the light.

  The light I left on to ward off the roaches.

  9

  Morning brought a new wrinkle to the twisted whorls of my already conflicted mind. For his part, George proved unusually sympathetic in letting me sleep late. While the razor I glimpsed in his hand when I opened my eyes was obviously intended for the boxes he needed to slice open in order to stock his shelves, it still took a moment for that realization to register on my nervous system.

  “Morning,” he announced in oddly cheerful good humor.

  I sat bolt upright in my casket, eyes wide. Sure enough, there was a beatific smile on George’s face that didn’t seem quite sane, somehow. The pupils of his eyes appeared to be slightly dilated, too. Obviously, I didn’t know him well enough to judge his possible moods shifts, but pathological reactions were something else again.

  “Talk to m
e, George,” I said slowly, and with suspicion.

  “’Bout what?” His exuberance faded a bit into a look that could only be described as innocence. The thing that made babies so attractive because we’d long lost it ourselves. Yet it was disconcerting to compare it to the night before. Here was a new man, a person of different temperament than the one I’d observed only hours before.

  I climbed out of the bed that entombed me to stand before him. “Tell me how you feel, George. Right now, I mean. Are you taking any medication?” I studied his eyes closely.

  “Medication? No. And I feel fine. I feel . . .” He stopped, as though considering a new experience for the first time. In my own memory I shuffled the images of previous drug test subjects, some of them with this same look—what we called the placebo look. The non-reactive response prior to any display of measurable side effects. But this was not my test subject. If he was anyone’s, he was perhaps Sean’s or Walter’s or whoever the hell else had been skulking around Zion’s water tower in the night. “I feel . . . great,” George concluded.

  “Like you usually feel in the morning, you mean?”

  He looked right at me, the jade green irises around his dilated pupils sprinkled with tiny flecks of gray, as if he’d just emerged from a tornado that had sucked up sand from a riverbed. His cheeks flushed as he spoke. “I feel . . . alive,” he said, simply. “Don’t you?”

  “No, not really, George. I haven’t been drinking the water. At least not cold.”

  “What do you mean?” His perplexed alien eyes searched for clues in a face I kept as calm as I could manage.

  “I don’t know, but listen to me, George. Try not to overreact to things today, okay? Remain calm and observant. Do your job, and don’t drink any more water unless you heat it first.”

  “Why? Where are you going?”

  “I’ve got to go see the Sheriff, okay? It’s something I should have done the minute I got here yesterday, but I’m going to straighten everything out now.”