Sycamore Bluff

by Jude Hardin

  His leg was starting to hurt severely again, and the dizziness and blurred vision had returned. The medicine Diana had given him was wearing off. He drew his pistol and took aim, but he was afraid to shoot, afraid that he might accidentally hit his partner. She had retreated ten feet or so from her original position, but she was still in Colt’s line of fire. She stood there and watched as the sloffs gathered at the bottom of the stairs, all ten of them, and started dancing like savage natives from a Tarzan movie. They hooped and hollered and chanted in unison: “Aba-sha, aba-sha, aba-sha…”

  Diana was much closer to the mob than Colt was, but they didn’t seem especially interested in her. Not until she started mowing them down with the Uzi. That got their attention.

  Blood and tissue splattered against the wall behind them, and human body parts flew from their hands and plunked to the floor like pieces from a jigsaw puzzle. Like some sort of macabre version of a Mr. Potato Head set.

  One by one, the entranced crazies crumpled to the floor, moaning and seizing and coughing up blood. They were mortally wounded, it seemed, yet they somehow managed to scoot around on the glossy hardwood planks. They migrated toward each other until they were balled together in a gruesome orgy of carnage.

  In what appeared to be a show of solidarity, the fallen sloffs continued their rhythmic gibberish: “Aba-sha, aba-sha, aba-sha…” They had lived together—if the existence they shared could even be called living—and now they intended to die together.

  Diana was well on her way to eradicating the entire crew when she ran out of ammunition.

  Three of the sloffs were still standing.

  And they weren’t smiling anymore.

  They turned and started shambling Diana’s way.

  Colt drew a bead on the one to Diana’s left, but he was still afraid to pull the trigger. His vision had gotten worse. Everything was hazy and distorted. It was like looking through a pair of eyeglasses that had been smeared with Vaseline. He needed to get Diana out of the way.

  “Get down,” he shouted.

  Diana dropped to the floor and rolled toward the wrought iron railing, the only barrier between her and a twenty-foot drop to the first floor. Colt fired twice. The sloff on the left went down like a duck in a shooting gallery.

  One down, two to go.

  Colt shook his head and blinked furiously, trying to clear his vision. It helped some, but not much. He hobbled forward and aimed at the one in the middle. He fired twice again, but this time the sloff just stood there and glared at him with a blank expression. Neither shot had found its mark.

  Colt’s left thigh felt as though someone had driven a rusty railroad spike into it with a sledgehammer, and his foot on that side had started to go numb. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could remain standing, and he wasn’t sure how many bullets he had left. He didn’t want to keep squeezing the trigger from this distance and hope to get lucky again. He needed to get closer, but every step was a major challenge now. Every inch forward seemed like a twenty-six mile marathon.

  Diana reached for her pistol, but she couldn’t get to it in time. The two snarling sloffs grabbed her by the ankles and yanked her away from the railing. They started pulling her legs in opposite directions. It was as if they were engaging in a tug of war, using Diana for a human wishbone.

  “Aba-sha,” one of them said.

  “Aba-sha,” the other replied.

  “Aba-sha, aba-sha, aba-sha…” they said together, over and over and over, as if the nonsensical syllables empowered them somehow, as if they were channeling superhuman strength from an unseen force.

  Colt wanted to shoot at them, but he didn’t dare. From this distance, he was just as likely to hit Diana as he was one of them. Still, he couldn’t just stand there and watch them rip her apart. He mustered every ounce of his remaining strength and limped forward. With every step, the sledge drove the spike a little deeper. It was an engulfing, nauseating pain, starting at the site of the bullet wound and spreading through his entire body like an acid spill.

  The sloffs pulled. Diana screamed.

  “Aba-sha, aba-sha, aba-sha…”

  Colt was only ten feet away now. Diana howled in agony as the crazies stretched her hip joints apart, the tendons and ligaments surely on the brink of tearing and separating. Colt decided it was now or never. He had to take a shot. He might hit Diana, but it didn’t matter. She was going to die for sure if he waited any longer.

  He raised the pistol and pulled the trigger, but nothing happened.

  Colt was out of ammunition.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Colt stood there for a second, wondering what he should do next. There was really nothing he could do, other than watch the last couple of sloffs—Sloff One and Sloff Two—rip Diana to pieces. She was moaning, and they were chanting. It was only a matter of time until the connective tissue in Diana’s legs and hips gave way to the stress, and there seemed to be no way for Colt to prevent it from happening. He felt totally helpless.

  Then he remembered.

  He reached into his right front pants pocket and pulled out the single 9mm cartridge he’d put there when he and Diana first landed. Out there on the cold dark desolate bluff in the Huey from Grissom. It was his Barney Fife bullet, the one Diana had teased him about. He held it between his thumb and forefinger and guided it into the pistol’s chamber. He aimed and fired.

  It was not a great shot, but it was good enough.

  The bullet clipped the right side of Sloff One’s neck. A fountain of bright red blood squirted out and showered everything in the vicinity, including Diana Dawkins and Sloff Two. A few droplets even made it over to Colt, dotting the arm of his jacket like paint slung from a brush.

  Sloff One released his grip on Diana’s leg. He grunted frantically and pressed his hand against the side of his neck, but there was no stopping the flow. The bullet had torn through the carotid artery, and the damage was way beyond repair. Sloff One’s blood gushed out in pulsating bursts as he launched himself over the railing and fell twenty feet to the first floor.

  “Uhhhhh,” Sloff Two said. He still had hold of Diana’s ankle, but it wasn’t the ankle her gun was strapped to.

  She drew the pistol and fired.

  The shell casings ejected rapidly and brassily, clattering to the floor beside her as she squeezed the trigger again and again and again, blasting holes through the face and body of the monster until every last cartridge was spent.

  Sloff Two was dead before he hit the floor.

  “Are you all right?” Diana shouted, obviously deafened from the din of the gunfire.

  Colt responded in kind. “No,” he said. “But I’m alive.”

  Diana scooted over to her backpack. Colt couldn’t see well enough to tell what she was doing, but a minute or so later he felt the pinch of the needle as it pierced his skin and the hot flash of the medicine as it coursed through his veins.

  “I gave myself a shot first,” Diana said. “This was the last of it, so we need to get out of here while we still have the strength.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  They headed toward the stairway to the roof, Diana leading the way.

  The first thing Colt noticed was the sky, which had turned a hazy shade of gray. He figured anyone with asthma or any other lung condition was having a rough time of it. Probably even the healthiest residents were coughing and wheezing.

  The helicopter’s engine was still running, but Diana had to pry the pilot’s hands from the controls before she could climb into the cockpit. It was a particularly distasteful task, Colt thought, because the pilot’s hands were no longer attached to his arms. In fact, the rest of his body was missing in action.

  Colt limped to the other side of the copter and heaved himself into the copilot’s seat. He gave the interior a quick survey before strapping on the safety harness. There were two Uzi submachine guns in the rear compartment. Apparently the band of sloffs hadn’t been interested in them, opting instead to carry away piec
es of the deceased. There was blood everywhere, and tissue from a variety of vital organs.

  Diana donned her helmet, and Colt did likewise. Now they could hear each other through the built-in headsets.

  “This is disgusting,” Colt said.

  “We could always wait for the supply helicopter.”

  “It’s not that disgusting. Once around the park and then home, James.”

  The helicopter lifted off, and from the air Colt could see the black and gray smoke rising from dozens of sources. Hundreds, actually. As the town faded into the distance, Diana called The Director on her cell and gave him a full report. She talked to him for at least ten minutes, maybe a little longer. Colt held the phone to her ear while she used both hands to fly the copter.

  When she finally finished and disconnected, she said to Colt, “He’s going to arrange for the National Guard to be sent in. They’ll help put out the fires. They’ll restore order in the town, and they’ll take care of any other sloffs that might be left. Then they’ll start evacuating people out. The experiment is obviously over.”

  “Will the remaining residents still get paid for all those years they spent there in isolation?” Colt said.

  “I’m sure they’ll get paid, but I doubt if they’re even thinking about that right now. Those people are going to have a lot of issues. They’ll have to be monitored, for one thing, maybe for the rest of their lives, to make sure they don’t turn into sloffs.”

  “Maybe there are more people like Barry Westinghouse,” Colt said. “People who secretly refused to take the vitamins. Those people should be okay, right?”

  “If there are more people like that, they probably won’t admit that they didn’t take the pills. That would void their contracts, and then they wouldn’t get paid.”

  Colt didn’t say anything for a few minutes. His leg felt better, and his head felt better. He was practically comfortable now. The shot Diana gave him had worked wonders. He closed his eyes and had nearly nodded off when he remembered that Diana had some sort of secret she was going to tell him.

  He asked, and Diana told him what Lenny had told her, about the comatose monkeys, and at that moment he knew that he wouldn’t be able to sleep again—at all—until a decision was made. And he knew it would be the biggest decision of his life.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Four weeks and two days later, on Wednesday, February 27, at 1:34 in the afternoon, Jesse Eduardo Colt was brought into this world via Cesarean section. The doctor who performed the procedure said that little Jesse was one of the prettiest babies she had ever delivered. Colt figured she said that to all the parents, but in this case it was true. Jesse was an exceptionally beautiful boy.

  They had delivered him a few weeks early, fearing that Juliet might not make it much longer. He would need to stay in the neonatal intensive care unit for several days, mostly as a precaution, and after that Colt would be able to take him home.

  Colt had decided that Jesse deserved the chance to know his mother. It was a major decision, one that might have severe repercussions a few months down the road, but he thought it would be worth the risk. He had done the math, using Sycamore Bluff as a Petri dish, and he figured there was, at most, a three percent chance that Juliet would turn into a murderous bloodthirsty cannibal. That meant there was a ninety-seven percent chance she wouldn’t.

  And those odds were good enough for Nicholas Colt.

  Diana Dawkins was the only person on the planet who knew that Colt had kept the bottle of pills from Sycamore Bluff, the one he’d discovered in the pocket of the blond sloff. No capsules were found among any of the surviving residents, and every bit of the stock in The Factory had been destroyed by the explosion and subsequent fire there. Apparently, Leonard W. Daehl had never written the exact formula down anywhere. He’d kept that bit of knowledge to himself, and he’d taken it with him to his grave. Colt was in possession of the only evidence that U-3, Lenny’s revolutionary treatment for neurological and psychiatric disorders, had ever existed.

  Colt knew there would be sleepless nights. Tense, apprehensive, sweaty nights, lying awake and wondering if this would be the hour that Juliet would turn. Wondering if she would roll over and tear into him with her teeth. Wondering if she would kill him or the baby first. Or maybe a stranger at the grocery store. If it happened, it could happen at any time, any place. The window for safety seemed to be three to six months. After that, Colt could relax some. Not totally, but some. There was no way to predict what the long-term effects might be. Colt knew all that. He knew he might live to regret the decision, but he had to give Juliet a chance at living again. He had to give her a chance, despite the potentially dire consequences.

  Friday morning, he left Jesse in the good hands of the NICU nurses and took the elevator down to the third floor. The surgeon who removed the bullet from his leg had prescribed a cane for six weeks, and for once Colt was following doctor’s orders. He was complying with the regimen, but he refused to use the aluminum job they had presented him with at Walgreens. Instead, he dug out the handmade hickory walking stick he’d been given years ago from a voodoo practitioner down in New Orleans. It was a piece of art, with intricately carved faces at the top near the handle, and it was supposed to bring good luck.

  So far, so good.

  He walked to Juliet’s room and pulled the door closed. He stood there and looked at her for a minute. This was hard. Maybe the hardest thing he’d ever done. He set the cane in the corner. He took one of the gray capsules from the Nutritional Supplement 14 bottle, broke the seal by twisting the two ends, and dumped the white powder into a Styrofoam cup. He poured a few ounces of water into the cup and stirred the solution with a drinking straw.

  There was a flanged plastic water bottle and a 50ml syringe on Juliet’s bedside table. The nurses used the setup to mix Juliet’s oral medications and administer them into her gastrostomy tube. Colt had watched them do it a hundred times. He drew the milky white liquid from the Styrofoam cup into the big syringe, pressed the HOLD button on the electronic feeding pump, and slowly pushed the concoction directly into Juliet’s stomach.

  The effects were almost immediate.

  Juliet opened her eyes. “Nicholas. Is that you?”

  “Oh my god,” Colt said, tears streaming down his face. “It worked. It really worked. You’re awake. Oh my god. This is incredible.”

  He felt like jumping up and down and shouting for joy, but he didn’t want to alert the nursing staff to what had happened. Not yet. There would be dozens of people in the room soon. Doctors, nurses, clergy people, reporters from all branches of the media. Everyone in the world would soon know that Juliet Dakila-Colt was awake now, conscious and perfectly alert after being in a deep coma for six months. It wasn’t something that happened very often, and when it did people usually referred to it as a miracle. And maybe it was a miracle, Colt thought. Maybe there was such a thing as destiny after all.

  At any rate, he wanted some time alone with his wife. Just a few minutes before all the craziness got started.

  “I thought you were dead,” Juliet said.

  “You thought I was dead?”

  “Another one of my visions. I’m so happy it wasn’t true this time. I love you, Nicholas. Do you know how much I love you?”

  Colt lowered the side rails, knelt down, leaned into the bed and put his arms around her.

  “I love you too,” he said. “I have so much to tell you, Jules. We have a baby. Can you believe that? His name is Jesse, and he was born—”

  “I know. And his middle name is Eduardo. After my father. Thank you for that.”

  Her voice was raspy, and she was having some difficulty getting the words out. Understandable, after not being able to speak for so long.

  Colt gave her a sip of water. “How did you know?” he said.

  “I’ve been aware of everything that has gone on in this room. It was so strange, Nicholas, and so scary. I was in a dark hole, and I couldn’t move. But I could hear everythin
g. I never want to go back there again. Please promise me I won’t have to.”

  “I promise.”

  Suddenly, a concerned expression washed over Juliet’s face.

  “What happened to your nose?” she said.

  “It got burned. I’ll tell you about it, but not right now. Okay?”

  She nodded. “I feel so weak. I want to hold you, but my muscles just feel so tired.”

  “It’ll get better,” Colt said. “It might take a few weeks to get your strength back, but it’ll get better. Everything’s going to be fine. I promise.”

  “I want to see the baby,” Juliet said. “A mother should be able to see her baby.”

  “He’s up in the NICU. They’re not going to let me bring him down here, and I’m pretty sure they’re not going to let you go up there. Maybe in a couple of days.”

  “At least let me see a picture. Please?”

  Colt thought about that. Brittney, his and Juliet’s adopted daughter, had driven up from the University of Florida campus in Gainesville yesterday and had taken dozens of pictures of Jesse with her digital camera. She was supposed to email them to Colt, but she hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

  “I’ll go up to the fourth floor and take a snapshot with my phone,” Colt said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “No. Don’t leave me.”

  “I thought you wanted to see the baby. It’ll only take a minute.”

  “Okay,” Juliet said. “But I’m going to miss you. Kiss me before you go.”

  Colt leaned over and kissed her on the lips. Her breath was horrible, but it didn’t matter. It was the sweetest kiss of his life. He told her again that he loved her, and then he grabbed the wooden cane and walked out of the room.

  One of the patient care associates told him hello as he passed the nurses’ station. She asked about his leg, and he said it was an old football injury. Colt had been visiting Juliet on the neurological unit almost every day for several months, and the entire staff knew him by name. He knew most of their names as well. They were fine people, and he’d started to think of them as family. He could only imagine the rejoicing that would follow when they found out Juliet was awake now.