by Sweet, Dell
She had still been Molly then, but she had dumped Molly for Rebecca when she had made the change to television. Rebecca suited her better. The new her had come to channel eight as the weather girl a few years back and worked her way up to co anchor with Cindy's help. Last week some images of Bob in bed with Bethany, the old co anchor, had made their way around the station: Eventually ending up in the lap of the station manager, Tad Edwards. Edwards had kicked it up to the new station owner, Susan Isley. Although everyone knew that Bob had been banging Bethany, knowing it and then seeing pictures of it were two different things. Today Bob had resigned.
"You are the new anchor," Cindy said. "You."
It still made her heart beat fast. She had handled it alone tonight for the early news and she would again for the late edition. The ratings had been high. Next week they'd be interviewing for a co anchor. Cindy had told her to insist on a man even if they offered her a woman, which they weren't likely to do, but who knew? No more competition. Choose a guy who looked good because he'll make you look good, Cindy had said. Let people think things, just don't let there be anything. Cindy would be sitting in on the interviews. Rebecca had asked for that and had gotten it, along with a promotion for Cindy to her personal assistant; which she had unofficially been for nearly a year anyway. She had walked Rebecca through her career moves. Cindy was smart and Rebecca trusted in her sense. So Cindy would sit in on the interviews and Rebecca would go with her choice.
"Did you do it?" Rebecca asked Cindy. "The pictures I mean?"
"I think I love you," was all Cindy said.
"We have an hour before we have to be back," Rebecca said. She loved Cindy's body. Short, dark hair to her own blond, almost 20 years older than Rebecca too: Until Cindy she hadn't even known she liked women like that. She had thought it would be a mutual climb up the ladder together, but it been more: Much more. She let her fingers trail over the side of Cindy's hip.
Poza Rica, Mexico
Evening
Billy Jingo
Billy sat on the deck and looked out over the gulf. There were no other houses for a few miles except Doug and Mayte's place. Poza Rica was the closest town and that was not really close. He liked it that way.
A small fire burned nearby to take the chill out of the gulf air. He opened his wallet and took out two creased strips of photos and looked at them. Time spun away and he sighed as he began to shove the photos back down into his worn wallet, but his hand froze as his eyes caught the fire. A second later he was watching the edges of the strips of photos began to curl as the flames caught and took them.
Most days he didn't think of his old life and what had brought him here at all, but when he did it wasn't with regrets. The hardest thing of all had been shooting Nikki. When she had said she had killed April, he had remembered that a body had been found the day before. He just hadn't connected the two things. And it would've made no connection in his head anyway. He hadn't known April Evans. Nikki Moore had become April Evans to him. He would never have known the difference.
What he had known was that she had not been entirely honest with him. He had caught her more than once doing things that were stupid, outright dangerous when they had been on the run. And she would play stupid when he would catch her. You can't be stupid one minute and smart the next. The skill as a makeup artist had thrown him, but he just hadn't been able to believe she only learned it in school from a onetime class: And there was always that thing about her that made her appear older or maybe more mature to him than a girl that age would be. He had even mentioned it to her and she had laughed it off.
He had stopped trusting her the second she had insisted on trying to make the deal even though their faces had been on TV, and the next morning when he had seen the paper and compared the faces he wondered. She looked so different. Again she laughed it off: Said it was an old junior high school picture.
She had left the car to use the ladies room and he had checked the guns. He knew then that something was wrong. She had them parked in an enclosed area: There would be no place to run if something went wrong, and one of the guns had an empty clip. They were the same model, one chrome one blued-steel. The clips mounted exactly the same. So he'd switched the clips. It made the gun with the full clip heavier, but he doubted that she would notice. She knew which gun she had put the empty clip into.
She had already been talking about calling the cop, and he couldn't reason it. He didn't feel like giving up, and he didn't care what the radio said about him he wouldn't give up, and he didn't believe she would either. He had been hoping she'd simply screwed up with the guns, but when she had looked at them both before she handed him the one that had been empty, he had known then she either meant to kill him or have him killed.
He didn't feel guilty about it at the time, only sad: Now he didn't even feel sad, only grateful that her plans had fallen through.
Doug had a small fishing boat. They went out most days and fished, selling their catch in Poza Rica. Life couldn't be better or more laid back: The house on the beach. The way time seemed to stand still, even so he was going.
The word had come to him late last night that La Policía were looking for him, and not the local Policía, these guys were rumored to be dressed in military garb and carrying automatic weapons. The Federales, Dougie had said: All kinds of bad; especially for an American in the country illegally.
He had been expecting it, just hoping it would hold off a while longer. He had briefly wondered what had led them to him, but in the end it hadn't mattered. He had purchased an old truck in town. Rolled a thirty gallon drum into the bed and chained it down. He had filled it with gasoline and once the sun set he would be on his way through the desert. California... Texas if that didn't work out: Or maybe he'd work his way up the west coast and head for Alaska. There were a million places there to disappear.
"Second thoughts?" Dougie asked. He wore a funny little half smile on his face.
“No, I was just thinking about how lucky I've been... Hope it holds out.” He took a deep drink from his beer, draining it. Dougie handed him another, but he refused it. The sun was right on the edge of setting and he wanted to be a far way into the great nothing before the moon came up.
He left the deck and walked across the sand to the old truck. It would be a wonder if it didn't leave him stranded somewhere in the desert, but he couldn't chance taking the Suburban. He climbed in, shut the door with a rusty screech and raised one hand to Dougie and Mayte as he started the truck. They waved back, and a few seconds later he dropped the old truck and gear and lumbered off into the desert.
Eternal Rest Lawns
New Paltz, New York.
Tommy Murphy
The room was dark. He had dozed off... Dozed off and... No good. He couldn't bring it back. He had dozed off, that much was true. He had felt bad, ill... The virus was taking a toll on him, or the medication, both, so he had dozed off and slept for a while: Apparently a long while, and apparently deeply. Lita must have turned down the lights and pulled the heavy drapes, but he could not recall her doing that. He could not even recall her leaving him. It was something she rarely did, and it shocked him now to find that she might have.
The living room where she had set up the hospital bed was entirely dark. Not a sign of light anywhere. He moved his hand; the thought was to bring it to his face to see if it could be seen. This seemed to be the darkest room he had ever experienced in his life.
In his life, he found himself repeating as his hand banged into something substantial and stopped suddenly. Too suddenly: Had he rolled closer to the inside edge of the bed? The rail? Something like that? Pinned his arm? He rolled to the right to correct it, sure that was the problem, but he met with no success at all. The same hard structure stopped him, or seemed to.
He blinked, squinted and tried to see better. No good, pitch black, and although he was a man who had little natural fear he had begun to panic right then.
He had found that fear had become a near consta
nt visitor with him over the last few months. And he had come to find that fear was not the thing that most people thought it was, fear was something else entirely. Fear was everything in the rational world that you did not understand. Every battle you had refused, run away from: And fear was the great unknown. The things that you could only know with any degree of certainty after you were dead: And then only if there could even be such a thing as knowledge after you had passed from life. He doubted there was. He had not always doubted there was, but he did now.
He tried to sit up: His body was weak, but he managed to get it to start to rise when his head had slammed into the same immovable surface. Hard, iron hard, unmoving. In a near full blown panic, he raised his hands as slowly as he could from his side and felt at his surroundings. The shape was not familiar, but in another way, on a subconscious level, it seemed completely familiar to him: The shape, the volume, the texture of slippery satin against his fingers, the hard surface beneath the satin. A recessed seam running across, side to side, another, longer seam traversing the sides that he could not bend his hands into any sort of shape to follow. He continued along, feeling, probing, when he suddenly realized that he had forgotten to breathe. He had been so caught up in discovering this mystery that he had completely forgotten. He had never heard of anything like this happening to anyone, but he had no doubt that it had just happened to him. He was not breathing. He had not taken a breath in... He had no idea, a while.
He tried to open his mouth and then the real panic set in. He could not open his mouth. His lips seemed joined together, unable to part. He put a little extra effort into it and felt them part with a hard, low ripping sound. Flesh stripped from flesh, like when your lips had dried out and then stuck together...
Okay... Okay, don't panic, it's all fixable. He had probably just pulled a great deal of skin from his lips, but it would be fine. It would be...
His fingers felt at his lips: It was not going to be fine. There were chunks and pieces of his lips attached to both lips. Thread woven from one to the other had held them together. Some ones idea of a joke: The thought had flashed across his mind, but even as it did he knew it to be untrue. No one would play that trick, not on him. Lita would never allow anyone to get that close to play that trick even if they had thought to.
The truth of the situation hit him just that fast and he began to claw and tear at the satin lining. He tried to scream, but he could pull no air into his lungs. He felt his nails digging at the slippery satin, catching on the wood just below the surface and breaking, snapping off as the panic took over completely and he tried even harder to fight his way out of the casket.
Project Bluechip: Watertown, NY
Complex C: Patient Ward
Test Subject: Clayton Hunter
Compound SS-V2765
Gabe Kohlson moved away from the monitors. “Heart rate is dropping, don't you think...” He stopped as the monitor began to chime softly: Before he could get fully turned around the chiming turned into a strident alarm that rose and fell. “Dammit,” Kohlson said as he finished his turn.
“What is it,” David Johns wheeled his chair across the short space of the control room. His outstretched hands caught him at the counter top and slowed him at Kohlson's monitor.
“Flat lined,” Kohlson said as he pushed a button on the wall to confirm what the doctor’s one level up already knew. Clayton Hunter was dead.
“I see it,” Doctor Ed Adams replied over the ceiling speakers. The staff called him Doctor Christmas for his long white beard and oversize belly. “Berty and I are on the way.”
“Lot of good that will do,” Johns muttered.
Kohlson turned to him. “Go on in... Do CPR if you want... They don't pay me enough to do it. I don't know what that shit is. Look at the way the Doc suits up. Clayton Hunter will be in rigor before anyone gets in there at all.”
“No argument,” Johns said. He wheeled back to his own monitor, called up an incident sheet and began to type.
“Me too,” Kohlson agreed. “Preserve the video, med and monitor data.” He punched a few buttons on his console and an interface for the medical equipment came up. He saved the last 48 hours of data, and then began to fill out his own incident report. These reports might never be seen by more than one person, maybe two if you counted the person that wrote it, Kohlson thought, but it would always be there. Classified: Top secret for the next hundred years or so. And he wondered about that too. Would it even be released after a long period? He doubted it. The shit they were doing here was bad. Shit you didn't ever want the American public to know about. This incident report, along with the one Johns was doing, would probably get buried deep under some program listing that no one would ever suspect to look into. Or, maybe, it would get burned right along with Clayton Hunter's body. He glanced up at the clock and then went back to typing.
“Uh... Call it 4:32 PM?” He asked.
“Works for me,” Johns agreed.
“I got 94 for the body,” Johns said.
“Yeah... Yeah, me too. That's a fast drop, but we both got the same thing. 94 it is... No heart, no respiratory, dead as dog shit.”
“Dog shit,” Johns agreed. They both fell silent as they typed. A few moments later the doors to the observation room chimed, the air purifiers turned on with a high pitched whine, and they could both feel the air as it dragged past them and into the air ducts. The entire volume would be replaced and the room depressurized and then re-pressurized before the doors would open. And that would only happen after the air was tested and retested. A good twenty minutes away before anyone would step foot into the room with Clayton Hunter.
Complex C, Autopsy Room
Ed Adams and Roberta Summers had dissected Clayton Hunter's body methodically. The autopsy had been painstaking. It had to be, it was recorded in detail and some General somewhere, hell, maybe even the president, would be looking that video over in the next few days: Maybe even watching live now. They had that capability. There was nothing to see. He had suffered a major heart attack. The heart had a defect. No history: One of those things that just came along and fucked up your two billion dollar research project all at once.
“Coronary Thrombosis,” He spoke in a measured voice. “It appears to be after the fact. The artery looks to be mildly occluded... The myocardial infarction appears to be caused from a congenital defect... Specifically an Atrial Septal Defect... Berty?”
“I concur. Easily overlooked. The lack of sustenance put a higher demand on the subject's heart; the defect became a major player at that point... Bad luck for us.”
“Uh, bad luck for Clayton Hunter,” Ed Adams added.
“Of course. Bad luck for the subject, Clayton Hunter. I simply meant bad luck for a research volunteer to be defective in such a way that in effect it would compromise a project of this magnitude so badly.” She turned her eyes up to one of the cameras she knew to be there. “This in no way paints a true picture of V2765. We should proceed, unsatisfying as these circumstances might be, we should proceed with subjects 1120F and 1119X... Same compound.” She turned back to the corpse on the table. “You want me to do the brain biopsy,” She asked Ed.
Ed frowned as he made eye contact with her. They had decided, at least he had thought they had decided, not to mention brain biopsies. Three times now he had discussed the importance of not focusing on the changes that V2765 made to the brain. Anything that altered the brain could alter financing, funding, lab time. Even the government didn't like changes to brain matter.
“Are you thinking there could have been an embolism?” He asked.
'Well I,” she sputtered away for a second before Ed rescued her.
“I think all we would see is evidence of the embolism that occurred near the heart. We could search out areas of the body and most likely find more than one occurrence of embolism. Well thought, but I believe we will take a look at the brain later in the week. Right now I want to focus on the enzymes, proteins, blood work and readying the other two for
a conclusion of this trial.”
“Yes, I agree entirely,” Doctor Adams.
“You have your samples?”
“Yes of course, Doctor... Rex?”
Ed frowned hard and shrugged his shoulders in the direction of the thick glass. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “None down here... That was stupid, Berty.”
“What was that,” Kohlson asked Johns in the control room.
“What?” Johns asked.
“That... Whisper, I guess,” Kohlson said.
“Oh... That. You know those two got it bad for each other. Probably making little remarks you don't want to hear. Besides which, you make a report on that and we all have to deal with it: Them, sure, but us too because the bosses will be pissed off about it. Best to let that shit slide: If the boss wants to know he will. He looks at all of this shit in depth.”
Kohlson looked about to say more when Doctor Christmas began talking once more in the autopsy room.
“Let's close him up,” Ed Adams said. He stepped on a switch set into the floor, paused, and then spoke again. “Lower the air temperature in here. We intend to keep him a few hours while we attend to other parts of the autopsy... No one in here for any reason.”
Out in the control room Johns keyed his mic button. “Will do... How low, Doc.?”
“I guess about 34 Fahrenheit will do... Just to slow it all down for a while.”
“Done,” Johns agreed. He adjusted a temperature graphic on a nearby monitor via his mouse.
Kohlson leaned over across the short distance. “So we got to look at that shit for a while? Great.”
“They're gonna sew him up, so it won't be so bad.”
“Yeah... That's like; I got a mild case of flu. It's still gonna suck, because every time I look anywhere I'm gonna feel compelled to look at it.”
