by Cach, Lisa
“The frogs? Are they endangered?” Angelica asked, but even as she spoke she realized that that wasn’t what this was about. A tingle of goose bumps rose on her arms, despite the humid heat. “The Phi-Tox. You think he’s making it from the poison dart frogs’ toxin!”
“‘Phi’ as in am-phi-bian. Most animals that produce toxins don’t do so in captivity,” he explained quickly, as he put the pieces together. “Usually they get their toxins by eating insects that produce certain alkaloids, and the insects in turn get their alkaloids from processing the plants they eat. It’s a multi-step chemical process, not well understood, and difficult to reproduce in the laboratory.”
“So Velazquez re-created the natural laboratory,” Angelica said. “He’s letting the jungle do the work for him.”
“Right.”
“Does the jungle also produce an antivenom?” she asked, fearing the answer might be no.
“The poison dart frog has one predator in the wild, an animal that is immune to its toxins. By regularly eating the frog, this animal’s blood has developed antibodies to fight the venom.”
“What animal is that?” Angelica asked, even as a feeling of foreboding crept over her.
“That.” Tom flashed the light onto the yellow snake.
“No,” she begged, shaking her head.
“It may be your salvation—”
Her knees went weak. “No! Not the snake!”
Tom took a step toward the snake, dragging her along with him. “We’ve got to catch it and--”
“Tom, no!” she whined as he dragged her closer and closer. The snake seemed to expand in size as they approached; its yellow eye opened and seemed to gaze right at her with soulless hunger. Terror made Angelica’s brain go blank. “No, no! Don’t make it bite me! No…” she moaned.
“Bite you?”
“No….!”
“Angelica, I don’t mean for it to bite you! I mean we should get some of its blood and separate the serum from the red blood cells. There’s no antivenom in the snake’s own venom.”
His words sank through her haze of terror. “Oh? Oh!” She stood up straighter, strength returning even as her cheeks flamed in embarrassment at her error. “Then we should look in the lab first!” she babbled, ecstatic to have an excuse to get away from the snake. “Maybe Velazquez has an antivenom on hand for himself! You can give me an injection!”
Tom stopped. “You’re right.”
He changed direction and hurried her toward the lit door, holding her up as her feet tripped over the steel grating of the catwalk. Relief rushed through Angelica as they pushed through the glass door and into another antechamber, leaving the snake safely behind.
The exit door from this antechamber was translucent white, but not transparent. What they’d thought might be the white of a laboratory was, instead, this. “Now, what has Velazquez hidden behind Door Number Two?” Tom mused.
“Better not be more snakes,” Angelica muttered.
Tom chuckled, then cautiously pushed open the door a crack and peered through.
“What do you see?” Angelica whispered.
“I think it’s an art gallery.”
“Really? Let me see.”
He let her take his place. Angelica put her eye to the crack and saw the edge of a statue on a plinth. “Sculpture.” She pushed the door open slightly wider, and saw that the statue was of a naked woman. Her eyes skimmed past it to the wall behind the art. “I see a door just off to the left; maybe it goes to the lab.”
Tom pushed open the door and they stepped out into the gallery. It called to Angelica’s mind the sculpture galleries she’d seen in museums, where a long white space was lined with Greek or Roman statues of men and women standing on plinths. Velazquez’s statues were all of nude women, created in a medium that Angelica could not immediately identify. Resin? Wax? They’d obviously all been made by the same artist, as their style was identical: proportioned like Playboy bunnies, realistic down to the hair that flowed over their shoulders, and colored to mimic life. Several had flesh-toned bandages stuck on their bodies, and one of them looked a lot like Kelsey Magnuson. The statues all seemed embarrassingly real and vulnerable in the bright lights of the gallery.
Angelica squinted up at the lights affixed to the ceiling near the night-dark skylights. “Thishhh looksh like full shpectrum lighting,” she slurred, her tongue suddenly thick in her mouth.
“What was that?”
“Fffffull shhhhpectrum. Like daylight. Expen-shive.” During art school she’d learned to see the difference between the various types of artificial lighting, as each type of light affected how the eye read colors. Bulbs that truly mimicked daylight in color temperature and color rendering were rare and expensive.
“Why’d he leave them on, I wonder?” Tom asked, while taking Angelica’s grocery bag of syrup from her and opening a bottle. He held it out to her, and when she was slow to respond he wrapped her hand around the bottle and eased it to her lips.
Angelica drank, and felt only a slight tingling of improvement in her body as the Karo went down her throat. Something was wrong; more wrong, rather, than it had been. Her eyes slid away from Tom and to the statue behind him. Her eyes went wide, and she gagged on the syrup, coughing and sputtering.
Tom slapped her back. “You okay?”
“Unnn!” Angelica grunted, and lifted one heavy hand to point behind him.
Tom turned. “What?”
“The ssshtatue!”
“What about it?”
“Isssh not a shhhtatue!”
“It’s not a statue? What do you mean, it’s not a statue?”
“Issssh woman!”
“Yes, I see that.” He frowned at her. “Are you upset that she’s nude?”
Angelica thumped her hand against his chest in frustration. “Tom! Isssh living woman!”
Tom goggled and spun around. “Christ almighty!”
The eyes of the naked woman were slowly opening. Her lips parted. A breath eased out between them, carrying a whisper of sound. “Helllllp…”
“Oh my god,” Angelica gasped. “Faaaace in newshpaper.”
“Face?”
“Her,” Angelica said, pointing at the living statue. “Misssshing woman!”
Comprehension hit Tom, and he looked down the length of the gallery in obvious horror. “The missing women! These are them! The goddamn asshole has paralyzed them and put them on display.”
“He shhaid he wassssh an artisht.” Her mouth barely managed the words; she’d been doing well in the atrium, but out here under the full spectrum lights she felt like she was quickly turning into one of these statues. “They are hisssh art.”
“God damn him!”
“Tom,” she said weakly.
His voice cracked in anger and what sounded like tears of outrage. “God damn him to hell!”
“Tom, da lightshhhh…”
“When I get my hands on him, he’s going to pay!”
“Tom!”
He looked at her. She weakly pointed upwards. “Lightssshhh baaaaad.”
Understanding lit his eyes. “Phototoxity! We’ve got to shut the lights off!”
A popping thwup sound suddenly cut the air, and a thin dart with a wad of white cotton at the end appeared in the side of Tom’s neck. “What the?” Tom said, reaching for his neck.
Thwup! Another dart appeared, this one in his forearm.
“Tom!” Angelica screamed.
Thwup! Thwup! Thwup! Three more darts hit his body.
Tom’s lips parted as if to speak, and then his eyes crossed. He swayed before his legs gave out beneath him and he crumpled to the floor, his eyes open and dead.
Angelica felt as if her heart had stopped in her chest. Tom! No! She remembered his words about the dart frogs: one frog could produce enough toxin to kill several people. Her heart couldn’t bear the thought. No! Not Tom!
Footsteps were approaching behind her, easy and slow. She turned. Dr. Velazquez was walking towards her
, a long wooden blowgun resting in the crook of his arm. He was dressed in black tie, his hair perfectly coiffed, his face filled with quiet confidence. “There is more than one way to ‘turn out the lights,’” he said, and smiled at his witticism.
“Issssh he deeeead?”
“Unless he’s a superhero, yes, I imagine so. But you won’t be.” He pulled a dart from his breast pocket and tucked it into the mouthpiece of the blowgun. “Hold still, my dear. This won’t hurt a bit.”
Angelica tried to dodge, but it was no use. Velazquez raised the blowgun to his lips, and with a soft thwup she, too, was stuck with a dart in the neck. She stood for a few seconds, feeling the toxin spreading its numbing force through her body, and then she dropped to the floor, the world spinning around her as she fell.
When she came to rest, her eyes were still open, and she could hear Velazquez approaching. “Don’t worry,” he said, towering above her. “You’re finally going to get those implants you need. With a little work, you too can be a work of living art in my Hall of Beauty.” He picked up her feet and started to drag her across the smooth floor to the door in the side of the gallery. “Aren’t you the lucky one?”
As he pulled her through the doorway, Angelica caught a glimpse of Tom’s body crumpled at the feet of a statue. Tears spilled from her eyes. She had been the lucky one; she had had Tom. He’d offered her love and devotion, and a chance to live the life of her dreams. If only she had been willing to take that chance…
But no, she’d been too wrapped up in being responsible, and too fearful to take the bounty that life had offered her in the shape of one fearless, glorious man. And what had all her caution gotten her? Tied down in the laboratory of a madman, about to be cut up and made into a living statue. If she had it all to do over again, she would grab Tom’s hand and run with him to the farthest corner of the globe, and never look back or regret.
The door shut on her view, and her heart folded in on itself. All those possibilities were over now forever, dead along with the man who had given his life for her. The pain of it was too much to bear. She shut her eyes.
If only.
Chapter Ten
Tom listened to Velazquez telling Angelica the horrors he was going to inflict on her body. Tom’s whole soul screamed out against such atrocities, but his body lay paralyzed, not able to so much as lift a finger to defend the love of his life.
From the corner of his vision he saw Velazquez drag her away, hauling her by her feet as if she were a deer he’d run down with his car. He heard the door shut, and the sound acted as a starting gun in his head. The race was on between his paralyzed body and Velazquez’s scalpel. As long as there was breath in his body, he would not let harm come to Angelica. If he had to pull himself forward with his lips, he would fight his way there and find a way to save her.
A single blink of his eyes was his first victory against the paralytic toxins coursing through his bloodstream. His eyelids slowly shut, bringing blessed moisture to his dry eyes. It was marginally easier to open them. Close, open. Close, open, faster each time. It was as if that one small neurological pathway was cleared of toxin by repeating the movement.
Next was his neck. Through force of will he made his head turn slowly to the right, where he’d heard Angelica’s bottle of Karo roll when she dropped it. Millimeter by millimeter, his muscles obeyed his command until his cheek was pressed against the cold, sticky floor.
Sticky. The Karo had spilled!
He reached out with his tongue and dabbed its tip in the syrup. His tongue seemed to revive under the taste and take on a life of its own, lapping at the floor. His whole body tilted toward the syrup, his mouth opening to suck it off the floor like a dog in a dirty kitchen.
Sparkles of sensation filtered through his inert limbs, and before he knew it he was dragging himself to the fallen grocery bag and opening another bottle.
He should have been dead from all those darts. Velazquez had thought he was, and about the only thing Tom would trust the doctor on at this point was his ability to kill someone. He could only think that the dozens of times he’d been bitten or stung by animals while diving had resulted in a partial immunity, like that of the yellow snake in the atrium. He knew of a species of fish that built immunity to sea anemone toxins so that they could live within the tentacles. The same thing must have happened with him. The excruciating box jellyfish stings had been worth it, if it meant he had a chance to save Angelica.
A few minutes later he was on his hands and knees, crawling toward the light switches on the wall near the entrance to the atrium, having remembered what Angelica tried to tell him about the lights. He was moving so slowly he would have lost a race with a snail. He felt like he was slogging through mud, his limbs like anchors trying to hold him to one spot.
If he was going to save Angelica, he was going to need more than Karo syrup to fuel her rescue. What was worse, he didn’t know if he’d be able to do it alone.
He looked over his shoulder at the gallery of frozen women. The one who’d asked for help was staring at him, an intense, unreadable expression burning in her blue eyes. He wasn’t alone! He had a whole zombie army to help him, if only he could help them, first.
*
Velazquez was humming under his breath. It drew Angelica out of her grief, firing her soul with angry annoyance. She wanted to cry, goddamn it, and think about Tom, but that humming was getting in the way. What was worse, she recognized the tune but couldn’t immediately place it.
What was it?
Oh good Lord. “You Are So Beautiful.”
The motherf-----r.
“D, or full D?” Velazquez said, appearing in her line of sight with a silicone implant in each gloved hand. “Ten inch breasts, or ten and a half inch breasts?”
She was lying strapped to a gurney in an operating room off his lab, naked except for several lines drawn on her skin with marker to help guide Velazquez as he operated. At the moment she also had a small paper surgical blanket over her loins, a small concession to modesty that would last only until it was time to liposuction her thighs.
The doctor had changed out of his tuxedo and into scrubs. His coiffed hair was hidden beneath a paper cap. She supposed she should be grateful that he was at least practicing good hygiene.
“Full D?” He held the implant slightly above her bare chest.
No! She didn’t want implants! She wanted her breasts just the way they were, just the way Tom had loved them! He’d loved every part of her, exactly as she was.
“I know, you’re worried about implant rejection, aren’t you?” Velazquez said conversationally. “I’ve been working on an anti-rejection drug cocktail that is showing some promising results. It’s been three days since any of my artwork in the Hall of Beauty has rejected an implant. That, my dear, is progress.”
Angelica gurgled.
“What was that? You’ll have to enunciate if you wish to be understood.”
“Wwwwhy?” she whispered.
“Why am I doing this? I should think the answer is obvious.”
“Mmmmmoney?”
“Money?! Dios, no. Do you take me for a greedy philistine? My family left me more money than I could ever need. No, I do this for the betterment of the world.”
She stared at him. In what crazy world could anything he was doing be seen as betterment?
Velazquez set the implants on a tray and arranged surgical equipment nearby. He’d already told her that he was going to do everything under local anesthetic; it was too risky to put her under completely while he was working alone. The horror of being awake during plastic surgery was too terrible for her mind to take in. If she could keep him talking and delay that first incision, she would.
“Hhhhow behhhhtter?”
Velazquez paused. “How do my efforts better the world; is that what you’re asking? It’s quite simple. I make women far more beautiful than any of them are naturally, which you must agree is a great gift to the planet. More importantly, part of this bea
utification is through Phi-Tox, which as you may or may not have figured out by now is derived from a variety of poison dart frog native to the rain forests of Costa Rica. As soon as the FDA approves the toxin, and I am able to sell it openly, I will make billions of dollars. Billions! And it can all go to saving the rain forests. It’s a beautiful circle, isn’t it? The frogs make the toxin, women pay to be made beautiful with Phi-Tox, the money from the drug goes to preserve the jungle and the frogs. It’s elegant in its simplicity. It’s perfect.”
“I know some women who beg to differ,” a deep voice said from outside Angelica’s field of vision. Her heart tripped. It sounded like—
Velazquez spun around and then gasped. “You!”
Angelica’s soul sang with joy. It was Tom!
“You‘re dead!” Velazquez gasped.
“And yet, here I am.”
“But how…? I gave you enough to kill five men! Only a, a, a… zombie could be up walking again!”
Yes, how? How? Angelica wanted to know
“There’s no way,” Velazquez insisted. “No human could have survived.“ His voice lowered in dread. “What are you?”
Tom spoke slowly, his voice as deep and sure as a superhero’s. “I have always told myself to be the jellyfish. But tonight… Tonight, I AM the jellyfish!”
Velazquez gaped. “A jellyfish?”
“The Jellyfish,” Tom corrected.
“You’re insane.” Velazquez fumbled for a syringe on the instrument tray, and as his hand wrapped around it his confidence seemed to grow. He moved toward Tom. “The toxins must have damaged your brain.”
“Loooook out!” Angelica croaked.
“You’re probably barely able to stand,” Velazquez continued.
Tom snorted. “The Jellyfish is immune to your pathetic amphibian toxin.”
“You can’t be,” Velazquez said, faltering.
“Thanks to that fridge full of antivenom in the lab, there are some women who are also shaking off the effects of Phi-Tox. Ladies?”
