The Immortalists

by Kyle Mills

  “Go! Go!” he shouted. “They’re coming after us!”

  But the sedan took a hard right and disappeared through the demolished gate—probably in answer to an SOS from Karl and Xander.

  Richard gripped the seat as Carly swung the vehicle onto a wider, less secluded road. No one followed, and within a few minutes they were mixing with other cars, passing pedestrians, barns, and tractors. The real world. He’d almost forgotten it existed.

  69

  Central Laos

  Seven Years Later

  The woman’s voice rose to a near screech, her words coming in a desperate, unintelligible flood. Richard Draman sat down on a stool fashioned from a tree stump and signaled for calm as he formed the sentence “He’s going to be fine” in the local language.

  A familiar expression of confusion appeared on the woman’s face for a moment as she attempted to decipher what he’d said, and then she returned to her panicked diatribe.

  He leaned back against the grass wall of the hut and looked down at the infant lying on a blanket spread out on the floor. The infection wasn’t serious, but his mother’s fear was understandable. In this part of the world, Monday’s mild fever often deteriorated into Friday’s funeral.

  “OK, OK,” he said, enunciating carefully, as though that would somehow make her understand English. “Just wait here for a second.”

  He walked to the door and looked down at a teenage girl lying in the shade of a flowering tree. Seven years of unlicensed doctoring in rural Laos and he could still barely communicate on the level of a two-year-old.

  “A little help?”

  She raised herself up on her elbows and frowned at him, dark hair falling across a round face marked by just a few pimples. “Mom says you’re using me as a crutch. She says I shouldn’t reward that kind of behavior.”

  He thumbed to his ancient Range Rover. “It’s a long walk home, Susie.”

  She considered his point for a moment and then stood, slapping dust from the plaid skirt and white blouse that was the uniform at her school.

  She was a beautiful girl but didn’t seem to notice. After growing up with the pitying and shocked stares of nearly everyone she came in contact with, she would have been grateful for simple anonymity—something hard to come by for a five-foot-nine-inch white girl living in the Laotian countryside.

  Susie bowed politely when she entered the hut, her easy smile soothing the woman noticeably.

  “Tell her that her son’s going to be fine.”

  Susie translated in what people assured him was perfect Lao, and he held out a small bottle of pills. “She needs to crush one of these up in his food every day. And he needs to take them all— even if he’s feeling better before they’re done.”

  When Susie finished explaining, the woman grabbed his hand, shaking it violently and continuing to talk in rapid-fire Lao.

  “She says she has some nice silk she’s woven. Or a chicken. You get your pick.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’d go for chicken tonight. Mom could make that really spicy pepper sauce.”

  “Yeah…the pepper sauce is good, isn’t it?”

  His medical fee squawked loudly as he shoved its wicker cage in the back of the Range Rover. One of the beers rolling around on the floorboard caught his eye, and he popped it open, taking a grateful swig of the hot liquid.

  “Can I drive, Dad?”

  He shook his head. “Remember what happened last time?”

  “That was a freak accident. You can’t hold that against me.” She pointed to the can in his hand. “Drinking and driving kills.”

  He thought about it for a moment and then climbed reluctantly into the passenger seat. A moment later, they were fishtailing off in a cloud of dust.

  “Just because we live in the third world doesn’t mean we have to drive like we’re from here, Susie.”

  “What are you talking about? I am from here.”

  He didn’t respond, instead taking another pull on his beer. It was essentially true. While he was little more than a trapped tourist, she had lived half her life in Laos.

  There was no reason to believe that Karl and August Mason would ever give up trying to track them down, and they’d needed to get permanently lost. Where better than the mountains of Southeast Asia?

  Of course, he and Carly had considered going to the authorities, but quickly decided against it. Even if they had been able to find a government agency that Mason’s people couldn’t influence, where would it have left Susie? At best, word would get out, and she’d become a reluctant celebrity with something everyone wanted. At worst, she’d become a guinea pig, an unwilling religious figure, or a lightning rod for jealousy and hate. Maybe all of the above.

  After everything she’d endured, she deserved a normal life. Or at least as normal as he could provide.

  “When are we going to go back, Dad?”

  “What do you mean? Back where?”

  “To America.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about Europe?”

  He turned in his seat to face her. “Why the sudden interest?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen any of it. You tell stories, and I watch movies, but that’s different.”

  “We’ll plan a trip.”

  She knew a lie when she heard one, and he watched her expression turn sullen. She was growing up so fast. They wouldn’t be able to put off what he and Carly had dubbed “the talk” for much longer, though he still wasn’t sure what they were going to say.

  The truth was that he didn’t know what was going to happen to her. It was possible that Mason’s serum did nothing but cure her progeria. In that case, she would grow old and die just like everyone else.

  On the other hand, she might just continue to mature normally until she was thirty or so and then stop and stay that age forever.

  He didn’t have the equipment to look deeply into her altered genome, but based on what tests he had been able to do, she was in no way an ordinary girl anymore. In fact, there were probably significant enough genetic changes to make the average taxonomist consider categorizing her as a subspecies. At this point, he didn’t even know if she’d be able to have viable children with an unaltered male.

  And that’s why “the talk” always seemed like something for tomorrow. He suspected that discussions starting with “your mother and I aren’t sure you’re technically human, and there are a bunch of incredibly powerful men who will hunt you until the end of time” rarely ended well.

  Richard settled back in his seat and went to work on his beer again, remaining quiet as Susie’s driving became increasingly reckless. She had every reason to be angry.

  Thirty minutes of silence later, they pulled up to the old French colonial house he’d purchased when they’d arrived in the country. The roof was bowed, the paint was peeling, and there was no electricity. On the other hand, the breeze blew through the open windows year-round, and flowering coffee plants still covered the hills surrounding it.

  It wasn’t really how he’d pictured his life turning out, but in many ways, it was better. He lived in one of the most beautiful places in the world, his daughter was healthy, his family was intact, and he helped people every day. One at a time, of course, but there was a certain pleasure in it that couldn’t be duplicated in a lab.

  Susie leapt to the ground, and he jogged up behind her as they went through the house’s open front door. Carly and Burt Seeger were sitting on a bench in the shabby grandeur of the foyer when they entered. Richard had convinced the old soldier to escape with them, and he’d quickly become just another part of the family. Susie started calling him Grandpa when she was nine, and at some point Carly had started calling him Dad. It just seemed natural.

  Richard’s eyes adjusted to the shadow of the room, and he suddenly could see the fear in their faces. He grabbed Susie by the shoulder, dragging the surprised girl back toward the door.

  “Too late,” an unfamiliar voice said.


  Three white men emerged from the arch leading to the kitchen. The two carrying assault rifles took up positions at the edges of the room while the third walked unsteadily to its center. He was probably in his mid thirties, but pale and completely bald. His thin frame was noticeably bowed, and he leaned heavily on a cane for support.

  “It’s been a long time,” he said. “I believe the last time we saw each other, you had just given my men a massive dose of LSD.”

  Richard’s breath caught in his chest, and he pulled Susie the rest of the way behind him.

  “I’m sorry,” Seeger said, as Carly patted his hand. “I’ve gotten so goddamn old.”

  “It’s OK,” Richard replied. “It’s not your fault.”

  “What’s going on, Daddy? Who are these people?”

  “Don’t worry about it, honey. This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

  Xander locked his eyes on her, squinting through the gloom at her unlined face. “She doesn’t know? You haven’t told her any of it?”

  “Nothing,” Carly said. “So there’s no reason for you to hurt her.”

  Xander waved a hand dismissively and eased himself into a chair. “You’re hard people to track down. My compliments.”

  Richard looked at the two armed men and then behind him at Susie. She was scared, but also curious. She remembered her former life, her disease, her old last name. She’d always known there was something they weren’t telling her.

  “There aren’t many of us left,” Xander said. “Ironic, isn’t it? Karl was the first to get cancer. In his kidney. They removed it, but the cancer came back in his bones, and that was the end of him. Then the others started getting it. Some survived the first, even the second bout, but remission never lasted long. When they discovered it in Mason, it was in his pancreas. He didn’t last three months.”

  “And you?” Richard said.

  “Lungs. Funny, huh? Never smoked a day in my life. They say I’m going to live. This time.”

  Xander motioned to his security men, and they filed out the door, leaving them alone. “Mason thought he had the cancer problem beat. Turns out he was wrong.”

  Seeger’s attention moved to a rifle hanging on the wall, and Xander immediately noticed.

  “Make a move, old man. I guarantee you won’t get three feet.”

  “Everyone just relax,” Richard said. “What do you want, Andreas?”

  “What do I want? You know goddamn well what I want.” He pointed to Susie. “She’s next, you know. Maybe not this year. But next year or the year after that. You’ll watch her die in agony. Just like I watched the others.”

  “Daddy?”

  “It’s OK, honey,” he said.

  “Your father’s lying to you, Susie. He’s been lying to you all along. It’s not OK.”

  “Shut up!” Richard said.

  “Spare me the drama,” Xander responded. “I’m here to offer you a chance to save her. You’re a brilliant scientist with a background in cancer research. You know the therapy exists, and I can get you all of Mason’s data. You can figure this thing out and still keep everything quiet.”

  “Why keep it quiet?” Richard said. “Seems like you’d do whatever you had to in order to stay alive. If there’s anything I remember about you, it’s that.”

  The familiar anger flashed in Xander’s young eyes, but he managed to control it. “I don’t suppose there’s any reason at this point for me to bullshit you, Richard. In order to maintain our anonymity and power base, we’ve been forced to do things that…let’s just say they wouldn’t be appreciated. I’ve got a long life to live, and I’d rather not spend it in prison.”

  “So I should save you?”

  Xander shook his head and pointed to Susie. “You should save her.”

  EPILOGUE

  Near Munich, Germany

  25 Years Later

  “Your meeting with the architects doing the expansion of the genetics lab has been moved to three, and I’ve rescheduled your interview with Time magazine for after.”

  Richard Draman tapped his temple with an index finger. “No problem, Greta. I’ve got it all in my head.”

  His secretary scowled in a way that only Germans could—a veritable treatise on his inefficiency and absentmindedness. And she was probably right. She usually was.

  “One last thing,” she said. “Your wife called and said she’ll be a few minutes late for lunch. Traffic, apparently.”

  Richard gave her the thumbs-up, prompting another scowl before she turned on her heels and marched out of his expansive office. He reached for his keyboard with the intention of finally getting around to the overdue budget reports, but instead opened an encrypted photo of Susie, Carly, and Burt Seeger. It had been taken the day they left Laos on Xander’s private jet. Almost twenty-five years ago now.

  Susie stared out from the screen with a mix of excitement and apprehension, everything in her life having just been turned upside down. She’d eventually travel the globe and collect the experiences of ten lifetimes over the course of just a few years.

  A fight with melanoma at eighteen had hardly slowed her down. She’d even found time to fall in love with the son of a South African diplomat—a wonderful kid who had stuck with her until she finally succumbed to leukemia at the age of twenty-two. Seeger had followed a year later, and though he normally didn’t believe in such things, Richard suspected it was from a broken heart.

  His gaze shifted to Carly, but it was hard now to put the woman in the photo together with his wife. Xander’s surgeons had altered their appearances before creating elaborate new identities for them. And then, of course, there were the years.

  He spun his chair to face the glass wall behind his desk and looked out on the grass-covered research campus below.

  Xander hadn’t been as durable as he’d given himself credit for, dying a few months after he’d created the Cancer Venture and installed Richard as its director. Strangely, that was less an end than a beginning. He’d left not only his money to the Venture, but the money that he had inherited from his group of would-be immortals. Richard now controlled billions of research dollars and was the driving force in the world’s still unsuccessful quest to cure cancer.

  He heard the door behind him open, and a moment later Carly leaned over the back of his chair and wrapped her arms around him.

  “You left before I woke up this morning,” she said.

  “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “It’s always that way, isn’t it? You always get so melancholy on your birthday. You know what they say. Seventy is the new fifty.”

  “Is that really what they say?”

  “As far as you know.”

  He smiled and ran a hand slowly along her arm. “Do you ever wonder, Carly?”

  “Wonder about what?”

  “What it would be like to be young again?”

  He watched her reflection in the glass as she considered the question.

  “Never.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Kyle Mills is the New York Times bestselling author of eleven political crime thrillers. The initial inspiration for his novels was his father’s career as an FBI agent and director of Interpol, and it is that connection with international law enforcement that lends such striking realism to his work. He and his wife are avid rock climbers, skiers, and mountain bikers, happy to call Jackson Hole, Wyoming, home for almost twenty years.

  www.kylemills.com