Dead on my Feet - The Halflife Trilogy Book II

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  “For health reasons,” I concluded. “So, what the hell are you doing walking through the flu ward?”

  “There’s an experimental vaccine—we’ve all been given precautionary dosages. And I only walked down the hall, I didn’t enter any of the rooms.” Her voice was unsteady and she stopped and looked up at me. “I’m sure this is what killed my father, Mr. Haim. His autopsy was done before we really knew what to look for but I’d bet my career on it!”

  “Would you bet your life on it?”

  “Don’t you see?” Her green eyes were large and nearly luminous with a sheen of moisture that leaked around the edges. “I have to help! I can’t—” She turned abruptly and started walking again.

  What could I say? What could I do to comfort her? Nothing, really, except change the subject.

  “So,” I said, “how about all those old white people?”

  “They’re mine,” she said unevenly. “I’m supposed to be looking for the Fountain of Youth.”

  It wasn’t hard to figure her bitterness and frustration. While she was helping a bunch of old honkies live longer, her own people—old, young, children—were dying one floor down.

  * * *

  The two things their research projects had in common, she explained back down in her lab, were genetics and viral triggers. That’s what helped her maintain a sense of equilibrium when the urge to run downstairs and do anything—even empty bedpans—became overwhelming. “And any breakthrough in extending the human lifespan helps all people . . . my people . . . your people . . .”

  Briefly I wondered who “my people” were these days. Dracula and Pagelovitch and Erzsébet Báthory? I repressed a shudder.

  “At this stage of the project, they’re having me focus on telomeres.” She gave me a sideways look. “I suppose you know all about telomeres?”

  I gave her The Look back. “You must be kidding.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Telomeres,” I continued, “are the end caps on the chromosomes that are involved in adding new DNA to the chromosome when a cell divides. Some scientists like to compare them to aglets.”

  “Aglets?”

  “The little plastic or metal caps on the ends of shoelaces that keep them from unraveling. Telomeres are like that. The problem is, every time a cell divides, the telomeres shrink a little. Obviously, this means a finite number of cell divisions before the chromosomes turn into old shoelaces. Are you working on the oncology angle?”

  Her mouth was open and she was giving me that same look she had tossed out the day before in the hospital nursery.

  “Most tumor cells,” I elaborated, “switch on a gene for telomerase, a protein that manufactures the telomeres. Cancer cells work hard at being immortal and they proliferate all out of control because their telomeres don’t burn out at the same rate as a normal cell. I rather imagine the trick is to apply the telomerase enzyme without letting the cells go into some biofrenetic rampage that is typical of the cancer process.”

  Her mouth was still open but no sound was coming out.

  “Like I said, I’ve read a number of medical papers over the past year.”

  She finally found her voice. “I would love to see your bookshelves some time.”

  I smiled. “How about I show you something that will knock your socks off.”

  “Somehow I don’t think there’s anything you can tell me now that will surprise me more that you have these past two days,” she answered in a sultry, flirty voice as she pulled up her office chair.

  Of course she was dead wrong.

  Chapter Ten

  The needle slid into my flesh as though skin and muscle were pretty illusions, distractions from the truth of vein and artery. As my blood welled up in the VacuTex tube, I told her the story of a man who spent most of his life being a pretty ordinary guy. Grew up normal in Middle America, went to school, bungled his first year in college and dropped out to do a hitch in the Navy. Picked up some training in radio communications and a Ph.D. in the school of Man’s Inhumanity To Man.

  I didn’t go into the details of a Mississippi manhunt that became a jurisdictional dispute with the Coast Guard and ended up with my being loaned to a special ops group run by the Feds—a bollixed operation that went terribly wrong and gave new meanings to the words “collateral damage.” The subsequent courts-martial were something I had tried to forget—with the blessing of my dear old Uncle Samuel, who had warned everybody involved against telling old stories that should stay dead and buried. It was my first real lesson in how evil can taint even the innocent despite its best efforts to do the right thing and that telling the truth is rarely expedient. . . .

  Instead I skipped ahead and over the return to collegiate life, the examined life and a masters degree in English Lit, the pretty coed who became a lovely wife, then mother, and cut straight to the chase of a family vacation gone just as wrong as that Naval assignment fifteen years before.

  How a chance detour and the instincts of a good Samaritan at a house fire in Weir, Kansas, got me overpowered in a moldering barn, knocked on my back, and forced to give blood to a burned corpse that should have been dead but wasn’t.

  To this day it seems an equitable exchange to Prince (never “Count") Vladimir Drakul Bassarab V: the unholy transfusion that revived his undead flesh also gifted me with one-half of the combinant virus that transformed the dead into the undead. Since I wasn’t dead and never received the other combinant half of the super virus that resided in the vampire’s saliva, the results were unforeseen but immediately catastrophic: I blacked out afterward and drove into the path of an eighteen-wheeler.

  The virus had already mutated my biochemistry, enabling me to cheat Death.

  My wife and daughter had no such advantage.

  Chalice filled three glass ampoules and withdrew the needle. The puncture resealed itself before she could cover it again with the cotton swab.

  “Now what?” she asked, not quite meeting my eyes.

  “Now you spend a little time running tests on those samples,” I said. “After you’re convinced that I’m telling you the truth, you decide the next step.”

  “The next step?”

  “For treatment. I want to be cured. I want the effects reversed. I want to be human again.”

  “S-sure,” she said, a little shakily. Humor the psycho until you can safely call down to security.

  “Oh,” I said, “and Chalice . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Look at what’s happening to my eyes.”

  She looked, of course.

  And that’s when I gave her the rest of her instructions.

  * * *

  I left Chalice in her lab, figuring I’d find my own way out. She was engrossed in running the first of many tests on my blood samples and hardly noticed my departure. I didn’t know how much of that was my post-hypnotic conditioning and how much was her obsession with what she had just glimpsed under the microscope.

  My greater concern was how circumspect she might be while running those tests. It was one thing to plant subconscious commands to keep my test results a secret. While she might be mentally blocked from telling anyone about my condition, I couldn’t completely guard against my blood samples being inadvertently seen by others. I could only cross my fingers and trust in those opportunities being reduced by Chalice working the night shift.

  And I had to take some chances if I was to take advantage of the BioWeb facilities in the time I had left.

  As I retraced a portion of my tour on the way out, I ran into one of the security guards making his rounds. It was no big deal to leave him without any memory of having seen or spoken with me. I could have avoided running into him altogether by heading directly for the exit but there were several rooms I had missed on the original walk-through and, like Charlie Rich, I wanted to know what went on behind closed doors.

  There were storage rooms and utility closets behind most of them but I hit pay dirt on the third floor. I opened a door designated Gen/G
EN and walked into an Antarctic whiteout.

  It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the white-on-white-on-white furnishings without risking retinal burns. Everything was white from the carpeting to the ceiling, with counters and cabinets and monitors and keyboards and banks of computer casements that were distinguished here and there by a black line, a colored LED, or a chromed edge.

  “Looks like a Clean Room,” I murmured, considering the shelves of paper booties, hair caps, and plastic gloves inside the doorway.

  “No,” said a voice, “by Clean Room standards this is actually a rather grubby room.” A portly bald man emerged from behind a bank of monitors. “May I help you?” Imagine Santa Claus without the beard. Wearing a lab smock like Delores Hastings wore a muumuu.

  “Samuel Haim,” I said, shaking his gloved hand. “Oops, sorry.”

  “Not to worry, I’ve finished running tonight’s samples.” He stripped off the plastic gloves and deposited them in a slot in the wall. “Are you here for the story?”

  Was I? This was too easy!

  “I’m Spyder Landon.”

  “Spyder?” I asked. He didn’t look like a “Spyder.”

  “Well, of course, you’ve got the basic PR packet and human resource materials. I guess you’ll write me up as Walter Landon.”

  I nodded sagely—hoping to look as if I knew exactly what he was talking about.

  “I’m afraid this is a little unexpected,” he went on. “I mean, I’ve been asking for five years now when we’re going to go public with the Genetics/Genealogical project, but I expected a little more warning.”

  “Well,” I said, “you know how it is.”

  He nodded. “I wasn’t expecting you until next month but I guess they want to get something out to coincide with the big bash.”

  I shrugged. “They don’t tell me the whys and wherefores anymore than they do you.”

  He grinned. “I’ll bet. You’re new aren’t you? How long have you been with the PR Department?”

  “Uh—a week.”

  “I’ll bet it took them six months to get your security clearances, though.”

  My turn to nod. “I’m having to run to get caught up.”

  “So that’s why you’re here on the graveyard watch: getting additional background. I figured Dr. Coane would be the only source quoted.”

  “Dr. Coane?”

  “Well, Phillip is the project head, after all. And then there’s the matter of security clearances for certain areas of information. Can’t just go printing all of the dirty doings behind the scenes, can we?”

  “Well,” I said, “of course not. But they told me not to worry. They’ll run my article through Security and censor anything that seems unseemly before sending it out.” Then I told him to tell me about the project as if I didn’t already have the background materials filed away in my cubicle downstairs.

  “Why don’t we start with a little demonstration,” he suggested, handing me a set of gloves, booties, smock, and paper hat. “Put it all on: it’s still a grubby room but we do use some Clean Room technologies to keep surface and airborne contaminants down.”

  I looked around the room trying not to fall over while I slipped the paper coverings over my shoes. “Very impressive.”

  “Impressive? Hah! This is just the tip of the iceberg. The terminals and the sequencers are connected to other labs and a series of Crays in the basement. But this is where you see magic performed. Remember the Human Genome project a few years back?”

  I nodded, adjusting the cap over my hair.

  “BioWeb completed the sequencing seven years before the others. You didn’t read about it because it was all hush-hush government business.”

  “Amazing,” I murmured.

  “Not really,” he said dismissively. “We had a head start, better equipment, faster computers, and an unlimited budget. Let me show you something that’s really amazing.” Landon opened a cabinet and retrieved a foil strip. Opening the foil revealed a plastic swablike apparatus. “Do you mind working up a little spit?”

  “You’re going to run my DNA?”

  “I’ll do better than that, Mr. Haim: I’m going to run your family tree. Open wide.”

  I almost refused. Signing the mortuary’s guest book had been a serious security blunder. Giving out DNA samples was better than sending the FBI my fingerprints. But I had come here to see what BioWeb had to offer in decrypting my unique condition. I wasn’t going to get very far if I suddenly got shy about running tests. I opened wide and Landon took a saliva sample with some mouth scrapings.

  “Now forget everything you’ve seen about gene sequencers,” he said, crossing the room and selecting a series of buttons on one of the cabinets, “they are sooo last millennium.” A panel slid up and he placed the swab in a tray and pressed another series of buttons. The tray retracted and the door slid shut.

  “Over here, now.” He led me to a series of monitors and activated two of them. “In a moment we’ll have your genetic profile sequenced and catalogued.” As he spoke, the first monitor began to fill with numbers and strings of code.

  “Damn, that’s impressive!” I said, meaning it this time.

  “No, it’s just fast. Faster than anything else the rest of the world has right now. What’s impressive is what happens next.”

  The second monitor began to run a list of names and dates. There were locations mixed in and cross-referencing codes as well.

  “What is it doing now?’

  “Who has the most complete genealogical library in the world?” he counter questioned.

  “That’s easy,” I said, “the Mormons.”

  He shook his head. “The government does. The Mormons don’t realize it but their Salt Lake City data banks have been tapped for years and we have everything that they have and then some.”

  I stared at him. “You’re stealing data from the Mormons?”

  “No. A certain agency of the United States government steals data from the Mormons. And not just the Mormons, I might add. And then a member of that agency makes the data available to us. To which we add genetic information to as many listings as we can.”

  “You’re telling me you’re building a genetic database on American citizens?”

  “No,” he said. “We’re building a database on the human race. Past and present, with an eye to the future. And we’re not using the information to harm anyone. It’s purely for research.”

  I almost said: “That’s purely bullshit.” If the government was involved in gathering genetic information on people it was bound to be misused, no matter the original motive. But I kept my mouth shut: I wasn’t going to maintain a low profile by arguing with the BioWeb staff and I certainly wasn’t going to change corporate policy on this visit. “I still don’t see how it’s possible,” I said grudgingly. “Even if you could get a sample from everyone alive today, you couldn’t do profiles on people who’ve already died.”

  “Why not? It’s been publicly done on the corpses of recent murder victims and on remains as old as forty-thousand-year-old mummies.”

  “But the logistics—”

  “Of exhuming every grave in every cemetery in the country?” He nodded. “Unlimited court orders and an army of backhoes wouldn’t make The Project practical in anyone’s lifetime. Fortunately, there are shortcuts.”

  “Shortcuts?”

  “A little EPA Trojan horse legislation about thirty years ago. Required testing for cemetery groundwater contamination. Over the years we’ve refined the design but the original concept is pretty much the same: a mini core-sampling auger that drills down four to eight feet and collects samples at the appropriate depth.” He grinned. “Oops! If anyone actually exhumes a coffin and discovers a hole, well, that’s fairly rare and—hey—accidents do happen, you know. One man with one of our present rigs can sample ten bronze or steel caskets in an hour, upwards of thirty if they’re the older wooden models.

  “Here, let me show you one of the latest shipments.” H
e got up and walked to the back of the room. He pressed a button and the rear wall slid open like something from an old Matt Helm movie.

  Behind the sliding panel were stacked racks of finger-sized glass vials, maybe three or four hundred in all. “I’ll have to run these babies through the sequencer and database before sending them down to the vault. Of course, we can only store about fifty thousand of these samplings on site. Every month they move several hundred lots from the vault to a gargantuan storage facility back east.”

  “You were sampling DNA before it was anywhere near decoded?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “The Powers That Be knew it would just be a matter of time. They wanted to be ready when—” He stopped and gave me another look. “How much are you actually cleared for?”

  “I’m cleared,” I said. With a little, reassuring push. “I’m just playing Devil’s Advocate for the purpose of story perspective. How complete is your database?”

  “Depends. There are millions, if not billions, of samples yet to be collected. But the database is actually functional thanks to a pattern-sequencing system that analyzes DNA patterns in genealogical cascades and can fill in the gaps with ninety-two-percent accuracy.”

  I waved my hands. “Wait a minute, wait a minute! Let me get this straight. You’re saying that you’ve got software that takes the genetic profiles already in the database and—and uses those known patterns to figure out what’s not been catalogued? I mean, it guesses what the missing samples should look like?”

  He puffed up a little and an expression of annoyance flickered across his ruddy features. “I would hardly call data extrapolation ‘guessing’! Most of the existing computer programs run statistical models based on samplings from one region of each DNA sample—the mitochondrial DNA that is passed from the mother to subsequent generations, for example. Even the GEODIS program developed by Templeton only analyzes DNA from ten locations in each genetic sample for biological population studies.

  “Our program, on the other hand, actually studies twenty-two different sites per sampling. We will continue to gather DNA samples to verify and complete the existing gaps, but the database can extrapolate variations in DNA patterns based on earlier and later configurations within a genealogical line. For example, your DNA has already been decoded and the computers are now running your sequences for matches with other related patterns in the database. In a few minutes we should be able to look at your family tree, going back at least twenty generations.”