Unkillable

by Dean C. Moore

  Klepsky looked away, doing a good job of looking guilty and ashamed, Adrian thought. But it also gave him a great chance to snatch a prayer candle holder for the wife; it was a real ripe opportunity for a kleptomaniac. Who knows how long it would take him to restock the inventory even now that she’d stopped beaning him over the head? And once that was accomplished, there were the flea market sales to consider to help pay for the alimony.

  “What do we do about the birds?” Klepsky asked when he finally turned back around.

  “Let ’em be, for now.” Adrian glanced at them standing at the ready and glaring at the three humans talking. Another scene straight out of The Birds. “Their expiration date may just be a little longer than our CEO’s here, being as they are lower order animals. For now, I want you to check further into Brent Thomas. I’m curious to know, for instance, what happened to all his ill-gotten gains? Were they returned to the public trust? Might tell us more about our killer’s true range of aptitudes, and his actual agenda. Besides, you have nothing better to do until the next body turns up.”

  “Why you so sure there’s going to be a next body?” Klepsky asked.

  “No one makes sculptural masterpieces like this if all they’re going to do is one. Could Picasso have stopped painting after that first canvas?”

  “No, I guess not,” Klepsky said, making a sour face as if he didn’t appreciate the news. That had to be a lie for everyone’s benefit, maybe even his own. Adrian new deaths were good for his ambitious, ladder-climbing agenda, providing the murders got solved. The bigger and the more important the case, the more likely Klepsky would remain in the limelight. Another good reason to stow his suspicions about Adrian a while longer.

  “Yeah,” Klepsky said. “I’ll have my people look into that and any disgruntled employees Brent Thomas had working for him, or people he was outsourcing work to. It’s possible one of them just working on one of the puzzle pieces figured out what the big picture was actually about, and decided to seize control of the project from Brent.”

  Adrian waited long enough to see Brent Thomas’s face oozing down from his forehead like lava moving in slow motion, then started marching towards the exit. “Where are you going?” Klepsky barked after him.

  “Yeah, talk about leaving me standing at the altar, Adrian,” Celine carped.

  “Don’t hold up the ceremony on my account,” Adrian quipped without slowing down or turning around. “You and the golem are made for each other, what with the kind of body heat you throw off.”

  “Where are you going, I said!” Klepsky barked louder.

  “To see my shrink.”

  Klepsky was late coming in on cue. “Definitely a good idea,” he finally shouted after him.

  “Oh, and put a tap on all my calls, coming and going,” Adrian remarked, again without turning around or slowing. He just kept raising his voice the closer he got to the door. This was a big church, and it was a long ways away still. “If this guy calls I want you to run a voice analysis, make sure it’s not me, not even if I had the acting range of a Marlon Brando.”

  He could hear Klepsky muttering, “Like I needed to be coached to do that.”

  “Why do you think he’s going to call?” Celine asked, throwing her zipped up bag and its contents over her shoulder, judging from the sounds Adrian was decoding behind his back.

  He stopped finally and turned back to them. “By now he’s got to figure I’m losing my mind with worry thinking I did these murders. My guess is he doesn’t want me to snap just yet. He isn’t done with me, and whatever he’s got planned for me, and he’s certainly not finished with my torture. Hard to torture someone further who’s already gone over the edge. So he’ll need to give me some kind of evidence that will rule things out one way or the other that’ll hold up to any number of tests. Could be a phone call, could be anything. With that in mind, monitor everything, Klepsky, every grocery and mail slot delivery, everything.”

  Klepsky swallowed hard and lowered his eyes. He looked like he might just be feeling guilty that his one and only friend was having to think his own way out of this pickle because he just wasn’t smart enough to do it for him. That and there was his split loyalties to consider. Yeah, sure, no more Adrian meant no more blockbuster crime solves, but if he got to reel in the biggest whale of all, surely that might just trump all the smaller fish.

  ***

  Having phoned in his request to Gorman to look into Brent Thomas on his way over to the FBI Futurist Division, the FBI-FD for short, Klepsky was not surprised to find his phone ringing before he could park the car at One World Trade Center. You could say a lot of things about Gorman, one of them was not that he was inefficient at his job. Klepsky let the phone ring until he was in his slot, then he slammed the car door behind him and reached for his cell.

  He paused at the foot of the parking garage stairwell before hitting receive. Depending on what Ed had for him that flight up was either Mt. Everest or a walk in the park. Klepsky put the phone to his ear. “Thomas’s money hasn’t been touched,” Ed said without preamble. “I know, it’s weird. As for disgruntled employees, there is no shortage of those, but none with the chops to pull this off.”

  Klepsky hung up the phone. Mt. Everest it was.

  ***

  Adrian stopped off at home before visiting Dion to pick up the surveillance tapes they had on him. His life was an open book, literally. But he couldn’t just make his apartment a live feed to Dion’s office. The Feds were very insistent on having a time delay so they could filter the footage for themselves, make sure he wasn’t sneaking out private communiqués to some equally ingenious accomplice. No doubt those video tapes of him futzing around his apartment, replete with audio, had been gone over by the best code breakers in the country several times over. They’d proven worthless to the FBI, but they still might be of some use to Dion with regards to seeing further into his tormented psyche, and what he might be hiding even from himself.

  Strangely, he didn’t feel imprisoned as many men would be under this kind of scrutiny. He didn’t feel the oppressive weight of a Big Brother society breathing down his neck. Left to him, everyone would be able to spy on everybody. Not just the people on top spying on the people on the bottom. Nothing like living a fully transparent life to keep everyone honest. It was one of the more conservative things about him. The fact that he could survive a regressive, fascist state so perfectly, sent chills up his spine sometimes. But better that than these poor bastards who couldn’t. And better that than the world of chaos they were heading into with everyone rocking jacked-up minds and no way to keep a lid on all that genius out there, any one of those upgraded-humans able to wipe out the entire planet. Yeah, he got that more top-down spying just bred more jihadists. It was a bit of a Catch-22. A paradox he was content to let other feds navigate for now.

  What did unsettle Adrian was not his everyday life situation. It was the voice waiting for him on the answering machine when he got home. Yes, he was the one person on the planet who still had an answering machine. And not because he was all that backwards looking. Because he rather liked having a voice to come home to. Made him feel less alone. Made him feel that someone not only cared enough to leave a message, but cared enough to wait for a reply. In this world of instant gratification, it would have been all too easy to keep going down the line until the person on the other end got someone to pick up right away, without delay.

  Only this time, the person on the other end of the phone was the killer.

  This time, his rare gift of 20-20 foresight wasn’t enough to prevent the chills from running up and down his spine as if someone were playing it like a harpsichord.

  From what the killer said, and from what he kept saying on replay, the bastard had him under surveillance, and not just at home, but in his car, and at his gilfriends’ places of residence. Adrian was angry for them if not for himself that their spaces had been so violated.

  The voice just said this: “You’re not the killer, Adrian. Your g
irlfriends are right; you’re just not that interesting. But you will be when I’m done with you.” The killer clicked off the line.

  ACT TWO

  WHAT’S MY LINE?

  SEVEN

  Adrian took the call on his cell from Klepsky on his way over to Dion’s office. One of these days he should think seriously about getting a driverless car. They were all the rage. And while he was hardly the trendy type, perhaps some efforts to get over himself to avoid being a menace on the road were in order. While blondes might be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, he wasn’t sure he could drive and talk on a cell phone at the same time. At least spring for the Bluetooth to allow you to talk to your car without having to hold the phone to your ear, Adrian.

  “What is it, Klepsky? I’m driving. You trying to get me killed?”

  “Not any more. Not since we got the analysis back on the killer’s voice he was kind enough to leave you on your answering machine.”

  “I gather you ran it past Celine and her DARPA people?”

  “Yeah. They have tech I can’t begin to understand, and when they open their mouths to explain I don’t feel any smarter. But they all insist it’s not you. So long as you refuse to add my wife to your list of girlfriends, that’s good enough for me.”

  “You put me in a difficult position, Klepsky. If I say I wouldn’t touch your wife if you held a gun to my head, you could take that the wrong way, and then we’d be on the outs again.”

  Klepsky chuckled. “Nah, that’s the only way I can get her to have sex with me.”

  “You’re not a wife abuser, are you?”

  “I think you have that backwards. I was speaking tongue-in-cheek.”

  “I’m sure you’d prefer to speak tongue-in-twat so, based on that, I’ll fire up the appropriate empathy synapses in back of my brain.”

  Adrian took the right turn at a speed approved for seniors, careful not to cause a multi-car pileup and a string of deaths now that he’d finally gotten his name in the clear for murder. “Why are you really phoning? You could have kept me dangling on the hook a while longer, just for fun. We both know it’s the kind of sick shit you’re into.”

  “The killer called to invite us to a showing in…” Adrian could imagine him checking his watch, “just under ten minutes. It’s an 8th Avenue address. I’m texting it to you now. How far out are you?”

  Adrian checked his phone’s display the first chance he got to avert his eyes from traffic. “Just under ten minutes.”

  Klepsky sighed on the other end of the phone. “So he’s watching you. Why am I not surprised?”

  “Hang up, Klepsky, so I can avoid killing scads of people trying to get to a crime scene concocted by someone who’s past saving.”

  “Yeah, I can appreciate the irony.”

  Adrian heard the line go dead at the other end. And he folded his phone away, slipping it into his trench coat pocket.

  ***

  As a matter of geography, 8th Avenue bordered the theater district. The address they’d been given pretty much put them equidistant from Central Park South and West 40th Street. The area was also chock-full of art galleries. One was in the very same building.

  The flat in the tower they’d been pointed to turned out to be an unfurnished apartment with a small bathroom and kitchenette. There was one wall-table with an attached mirror and some drawers. Maybe the last tenant to move out just couldn’t find room for this final piece of furniture in back of the trailer.

  Though Adrian imagined the real reason the room looked like this was to better showcase the latest crime. As before, there was a mutilated body carved up into oh so many parts. If the ravens were responsible, they were nowhere to be seen. Their cries could not be heard in the distance beyond the window teasingly to suggest they had been here. Otherwise, the only difference from the prior murder was that this time Adrian and Klepsky arrived after the body had been segmented into quite a lot of pieces. Pieces, mind you, which couldn’t be further apart if a bomb had gone off in here.

  Adrian was feeling very anticlimactic about this second murder before Celine showed up. But by then he barely took note of her. Of course, by then, the body parts were sprouting spider legs and crawling back to one another.

  “Fuck me!” Celine said.

  “I saw this in a John Carpenter movie,” Klepsky said, “The Thing. Not a bad film. Went down well with about a dozen beers.”

  “Not quite,” Adrian said. “In that movie the individual pieces became complete monsters in their own right. Look what’s happening to these guys.”

  “They’re reattaching themselves to the body,” Celine said. “The golem’s taking shape as before, just the method has changed.”

  “Maybe not just the method,” Adrian coaxed. “Why don’t you take a closer look, Celine?”

  “Screw that. This is close enough. When he’s back together again, we can talk then.” Celine hadn’t flushed with terror, exactly. She was prone to Vitiligo during moments of emotional duress, so right now her skin looked blotchy and riddled with white spots.

  Adrian smiled absently; sheer terror was his baseline.

  The room was crawling with these “spiders” creeping along the walls and ceiling, strolling in from the kitchen and the bath, all determined to meet in the middle. They weren’t exactly going about it in a coordinated fashion. They’d meet up with one another, feel each other out to see if they belonged together, before moving on to find their perfect mate.

  Klepsky had turned to stone, except for his hand, holding a twenty-four ounce Styrofoam cup of coffee. The hand was shaking so bad it was acting like a lawn sprinkler, squirting coffee in strands past the hole in the lid.

  “I’ll take my blender drink with a mix of low-glycemic fruits,” Adrian quipped.

  Klepsky got a load of his hand and said, “I’m fine, I tell you.” He switched hands, and the sprinkler routine started up in the other hand.

  When a couple body pieces made the mistake of attaching themselves to Klepsky, Stone Man looked like he was doing a ceremonial Native American rain dance on the floor, stomping and chanting loudly enough to also sound like a man burning alive. Finally, he shook the “spiders” loose and they went about their merry way. Looking at Adrian and Celine guiltily, he said, “It’s part of my cardio routine. I have poor circulation in my feet.”

  Adrian bit off his smile. Decided he could do with a calming cigarette himself. Lit one up.

  About an hour later the body was resurrected. The spider legs that sprouted from each of the body parts had been folded back into the body by becoming both the needles and the threads. By then Klepsky had gotten coffee for everyone from Ninth Street Espresso, including a replacement cup for himself. Their energy levels had taken a nosedive after that much sustained flight-or-fight response, and they needed a recharge. Of course, earlier he’d also disappeared into the kitchenette. Possibly to address those kleptomaniac cravings.

  “Maybe you wouldn’t mind getting closer now?” Adrian cued.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Celine said, handing him her coffee which she’d sipped down to about the halfway mark on the twenty-ounce cup. He couldn’t speak for Celine, but Adrian could safely say you haven’t lived until you’ve sipped espresso out of a twenty ounce cup. Forget the typical two ounce demitasse.

  She no sooner crouched over the guy than his eyes popped open and he gasped his first breath. The sound more than the sight drew Adrian, who was now standing over her and the body. Klepsky joined the twosome, though he couldn’t be bothered to stop sipping his coffee.

  “I’m a child molester,” the resurrected man said, talking in the same strained manner as the first golem, only sounding a tad more coherent. “I molested seventeen children. Here are their names.” He recited the entire list as if he were reading from a script.

  Klepsky had finally set down the coffee and was taking notes of the names. When the recitation came to an end, he said, “Any more details you can give us?”

  The resurrected man
’s eyes finally turned towards Klepsky, just a few beats off cue. “Here are the locations of the bodies.” Another recitation. More notetaking on Klepsky’s part. Finally, Klepsky closed the notebook when the golem was done reciting. “Thanks, buddy, you can get back to dying now. The sooner the better.”

  Instead the golem resumed the recitations, from the beginning. “I’m a child molester…”

  “He’s like one of those windup dolls from the seventies,” Klepsky said.

  “Looks like the killer is evolving his unkillable man concept. He’s able to keep them alive longer and boost the mental activity.” Celine confirmed as much with her multiple-scanners-in-one device Adrian had seen her use at the last crime scene. She handed Adrian the scanner so he could see for himself she wasn’t lying. As if he could read the thing. Maybe with a little more presence of mind, but he was more rattled right now than he was letting on.

  “How long before he’s dead again?” Adrian asked.

  “This one should live hours instead of minutes by the rate of cellular decay, which is identical to what I saw in the last victim, only proceeding more slowly.” She turned away from the resurrected man to look up at Adrian. “You appreciate the irony, right? You try to capture or kill your murderer before he’s done perfecting his prototype, my people at DARPA will have your head, literally. They’ll shoot you to keep you from shooting him. Once they have what they need, by all means, feel free to rid the world of this scumbag.”

  Adrian made a sour face. “I may just have to get exceedingly clever about dodging my surveillance team. Something tells me the world isn’t ready for this, I don’t care whose hands it falls into.”

  He grabbed her upper arm when he saw her getting lost in the golem’s eyes, her empathy responses kicking in. He may have been a monster even before someone turned him into a golem, but she was a doctor, and her instincts were to preserve life, not judge. He squeezed to get her to shift her attention to him. “How is it none of this accelerated cellular decay showed up at the morgue when I brought the ear to you? Probably should have asked back at St. Patrick’s but I can excuse the oversight owing to the sheer shock value of the scene.”