Extremis

by Marie Jevins

  “Mallen, you sure you’re up for this?” Beck hesitated.

  “Just do it,” snarled Mallen, more fiercely than he’d intended. He knelt on the concrete floor.

  Nilsen towered in front of Mallen, placing a steadying hand on either side of Mallen’s head. Mallen focused on the big man’s beer belly, which poked out under a black T-shirt. Nilsen had tried to cover it up as always, under an oversized olive-green zippered hoodie. But there was no missing the gut at the moment, since it was all Mallen had to look at if he didn’t want to stare right into Nilsen’s eyes while his life transformed.

  Beck fixed the jet injector against the back of Mallen’s neck, just between Mallen’s brown hair and the tan leather jacket he’d worn steadily for the last decade, even in the summer.

  Beck applied pressure to the trigger with his index finger. Pssssht. The liquid squeezed through the injector’s tip, past Mallen’s pores, and then on into his bloodstream.

  “Aaoooww!” Mallen jumped as the serum mixed with his blood, delivering what felt like a tingling electric shock. The shock grew stronger, until Mallen could barely stand it. His eyes bulged, and he bared his teeth as he lunged away from Beck. Nilsen let go of Mallen’s head and jumped clear.

  Mallen fell to his knees, spitting with surprise.

  “Hnf!” He couldn’t speak. Both his hands involuntarily went to the spot on his neck where the serum had entered his bloodstream.

  Take it out. Stop it. Hurts. Mallen seized up, clenched, and then slumped over like a dead man.

  For a long moment, Mallen couldn’t move or hear. Then a buzzing began. Where was the buzzing? His own head, he realized. The noise slowed, became his thudding pulse. Then, from a distance, he heard Nilsen, his voice muffled as if he were in the next room.

  “Nothing’s happening, Beck. Something should be happening.”

  Mallen coughed, moved slightly, and cleared his throat. He started to sit up.

  “Hgk.”

  “Listen,” said Beck. “I, uh, I guess we were sold a dud. Get your breath back, Mallen. We’ll get back in Nilsen’s van and, y’know, start again. It’s not over yet.”

  “Hgkk.” Mallen swore as he struggled to rise, his hand covering his eyes.

  Then Mallen felt the serum in every molecule—in his head, his limbs, his guts. And it hurt. He was on fire inside, in wrenching pain.

  “HHHEEEGGHH!” He howled, his face con torted, veins bulging, eyes full of blood and fear. His guts were melting, he was sure of it, his organs collapsing and liquefying—turning into a thick black liquid, which he violently retched on to the cold-room floor.

  Beck bolted. He was halfway to the exit before Nilsen stopped gaping and raced to follow him. Mallen heard the steel door slam shut, the brace slide into place, the sounds of footsteps receding back toward the Econoline. And then he heard nothing else over the escalating thumping in his head.

  Mallen was alone, locked in the abandoned slaughterhouse.

  He shuddered, gasped, and collapsed. Warm liquids streamed from his nose, mouth, and ears. His mouth felt full and tasted bitter, metallic. Blood, he thought, tastes like dirty pennies.

  Lying on the cold concrete of the slaughterhouse, Mallen’s violent body contractions and spasms slowly passed. His head still hurt like hell, but he no longer heard his pulse, and his breathing had gone from quick and shallow to barely perceptible. Was this death? How could it not be? He lay silently in a pool of his own steaming, liquefied innards.

  Smells like hell, he thought. Should’ve asked Beck to make sure the rats are really gone.

  He convulsed one last time and passed out.

  O N E

  “MISTER STARK.”

  Tony rolled over as the deafening, crackling electronic voice boomed through his garage.

  “MISTER STARK. WAKEY-WAKEY, RISE AND SHINE.”

  Tony groaned and sat up on his cot, pushing his blanket aside as he searched for the source of the voice. He spotted it, then halfheartedly tossed a sweat-stained pillow at the wall speaker. It fell short of its target.

  “Go easy on the reverb, will you? I’m trying to sleep here.”

  “Do you know who this is, Mister Stark?”

  “No.” Tony scowled with irritation.

  “This is Mrs. Rennie. I’m your temporary personal secretary. Do you know who you are?”

  “Not a clue.”

  He thought momentarily of ways to take revenge on Pepper for hiring this retired Brooklyn high-school algebra teacher over the former Rockette from the temp agency.

  “It’s time for you to come out of that disgusting garage and greet the world, Mister Stark.”

  Tony wrinkled his forehead and considered getting up, but he’d become quite fond of his garage, not to mention his cot. How, he wondered, had Mrs. Rennie patched herself into the surround-sound intercom system? He glanced at his phone on the floor, a few feet away from the cot, nearly lost among a jumble of wires, devices, socks, and chargers. Ten missed calls from Mrs. Rennie this morning alone, all within the last half-hour. Ah. Desperation, then.

  He responded with eloquence befitting the moment. “Bite me.”

  “Young men like you used to respect their elders, Mister Stark.”

  “Two thousand years ago, we used to send our elders into the desert to die when they started bugging us.” Tony swung his bare legs off the cot and on to the garage floor. He caught an alarming whiff of himself. How long had he been wearing this black T-shirt and boxers?

  “And now we have salaries and Winnebagos. Life is tough.” Mrs. Rennie turned down the reverb to talk business. “You have that ridiculous interview set for ten.”

  Tony groaned and put his forehead into his hands. He thought about potential ways out of this, came up with none, then looked back up.

  “Bellingham? Already?”

  “You made the appointment weeks ago, Mister Stark. I did suggest you avoid it and attend a board meeting instead.”

  Weeks. He’d been in here for weeks. The garage had no windows, and he’d lost track of the transition from day to night as he’d alternately slept and tinkered. How many carry-out food containers sat over there next to the server array? How much Chinese food had Happy brought him? How many shawarmas? Where was Happy? Wasn’t it time for breakfast?

  Tony stood up. He wanted to meet Bellingham—a legend among do-gooders and documentary filmmakers—for personal reasons. Time to emerge.

  “Okay. What’s the time?”

  “Eight a.m., Mister Stark.” Mrs. Rennie was gloating with triumph now.

  “Eight. Eight in the morning.” Tony was silent a beat. There was no reason he had to be up this early. “You sadist.”

  “Terrible things happen to those who don’t respect their elders, Mister Stark.”

  “But you started…”

  He saw an alert pop up on his laptop, across the room on the steel workbench. Pepper was IMing from Kinshasa. But he was avoiding Pepper. He’d sent her out of the country to research his confidential project, sure, but also because he didn’t want her to hear about the crass—and presumably false—allegations made by the gossip columnist at World-Star magazine. But maybe it was time—time to get up, shave, catch up on the status of the multinational corporation that bore his name, check on the legal team’s progress on stopping World-Star, and emerge from his garage-cocoon. At least then he could stop avoiding talking to Pepper. He missed her cheerfulness and her honesty, though he liked it when she became uncharacteristically angry with him, as she was bound to be when she learned he’d been hibernating, hiding from the world.

  At least then he’d have her undivided attention.

  “Okay, Mrs. Rennie. Have some fresh clothes and coffee sent to the garage. The gallon-drum of coffee. And possibly some kind of intravenous drip.” Tony leaned back, stretching his shoulders and listening to his neck crack as he swiveled his head from side to side.

  She’d better not make it decaf. That would be just like Mrs. Rennie to pretend she hadn’t un
derstood his directive.

  The alert on his laptop vanished as he crossed the room and headed to the shower.

  Tony shaved and carefully groomed his vandyke—that combination of beard and mustache that the kids had taken to calling a “Tony Stark” ever since the day he’d impulsively admitted to the world that he was Iron Man. He chuckled, then caught a glimpse of himself laughing in the bathroom mirror. He winced, squinted, and turned sideways. He tried to remember what it had been like to see a suave player in the mirror—a brilliant, self-absorbed billionaire that women wanted. But all he saw was the worried face of regret on a man who had ruined thousands of lives with his weapons, a man who didn’t deserve to still be alive after so many others had died from his inventions.

  A man deserving of scorn.

  He looked down quickly, then slowly lifted his head again.

  “What’re you looking at?” He stared hard at himself, willing the brash and brilliant Tony Stark of old to possess him, at least long enough to get through this interview.

  Remember who you were before Afghanistan. Strong. Capable. Free of self-doubt, until your eyes were opened to the tragedy your profiteering had wrought upon others.

  You were superficial, he reminded himself.

  And so he lost the staring contest with his own reflection. It wouldn’t agree to his delusions of grandeur, no matter how temporary. He turned away.

  “I hate it when you look at me like that,” said Tony over his shoulder.

  He emerged an hour later, crossing the courtyard from his garage to the rear service entrance of the main Stark Enterprises Coney Island headquarters.

  As Tony entered the reception area off the lobby, Happy looked up, startled, from playing a word game on his phone. Had he been here the whole time Tony had been holed up? Was that why his chauffeur had always been available to pick up his meals? Tony nodded to Happy.

  “Nice of you to make an appearance, Mister Stark.” Mrs. Rennie pushed her dollar-store reading glasses down her nose and peered at Tony. She had been snarling into her phone, but had hung up when she saw an opportunity to berate Tony, which was much more fun than planning conferences.

  Tony started to reply, then spotted a crowd of demonstrators outside the window, past the perimeter fence. When they saw him, they held up signs, but he couldn’t quite make out the distant writing.

  “What are they doing here? I thought they quit protesting when we got out of the weapons business.”

  “Protesting? No. They want to see your counterpart, your so-called Iron Man. That irate mob, Mister Stark, they are your...” She shuddered. “... admirers.”

  A broad smile spread over Tony’s face. He had fans. Of course. Or did Iron Man have fans? He thought for a second, trying to differentiate between fans of Iron Man and fans of Tony Stark. Ah, same thing. He was Iron Man now, ready to help the world, defend the helpless, and make up for years of weapons profiteering. His earlier moment with the mirror was forgotten now. Of course they love me. What’s not to love?

  But more important, he had an opportunity here. One he couldn’t pass up.

  “How did they know I was here?”

  “Might I suggest that the next time you aim for anonymity and discretion, you do not first pose for dozens of cell-phone photos with the Coney Island Sideshow’s acrobatic-mermaid weekend burlesque squad?”

  “Mrs. Rennie, even half-fish women deserve to be treated with a bit of respect. How long have my adoring fans been waiting to see me?”

  “They are here daily, Mister Stark. They’ve been here since you holed up in your filthy man cave. I don’t know where they sleep, or even if they sleep.”

  “Well, get them port-a-potties! Get them water and snacks! Don’t just leave them standing there waiting to see me.”

  “Oh, I didn’t.” She smiled. “I had Happy walk around the lobby in an Iron Man Halloween costume.” Happy suddenly became very absorbed in his word game.

  “Nice work. But there’s something else I want to do for them.”

  He waited a moment, so his next directive would have maximum effect. He smiled sweetly at Mrs. Rennie, and she tensed up.

  “Here’s two hundred bucks.” Tony pulled two crisp bills from his wallet. “Be a peach and take them all on the Wonder Wheel, would you? Tell them it’s courtesy of their brilliant pal, Tony Stark. Nono, make that Iron Man.”

  Mrs. Rennie glared at Tony and did not reach her hand out. He dropped the money on to her keyboard and smiled as big a smile as he could muster.

  “Buy them some funnel cake, too, my dear. Or corn on the cob if they don’t do gluten. Is there gluten in funnel cake? Happy, can you look that up? No, call Pepper. Ask her if there’s gluten in funnel cake. And if it’s called funnel cake in Coney Island, or if Mrs. Rennie should order it by saying zeppole. Use the Stark satellite line—Pepper’s in Kinshasa this morning. Be sure to ask her if they have funnel cake in Kinshasa, too. We’ve got to make sure she’s taking care of herself by snacking once in a while.” He turned back to Mrs. Rennie. “Thanks so much. You’re fab. I hope Pepper never comes home so that we can continue to have these warm and tender moments together.”

  Over in the corner, Happy snorted coffee out of his nose. Mrs. Rennie glared at him icily. “Mister Hogan,” she said. “For those who cannot consume gluten or corn, you are tasked with winning them stuffed bears at the archery shoot. If there are no stuffed bears, I will supply you with the necessary materials to sew them yourself.”

  Tony waved enthusiastically through the window to his fans, who pushed and jostled each other to get a better view of their hero.

  Tony snapped his fingers and pointed with both hands at the crowd, smiling broadly. He winked at Happy, who was trying hard to recover his composure.

  Tony whirled around and strode purposefully through the sliding elevator doors. As they closed behind him, he laughed and relaxed—the look on Mrs. Rennie’s face!—then remembered the surveillance camera on the elevator ceiling. He mouthed the words “Good morning, Mrs. Rennie” at the camera, then slowly, deliberately scratched his chin with his middle finger.

  Meanwhile, in Austin, Texas, Dr. Aldrich Killian sat at his brown desk in a drab room. Why, he wondered, had Futurepharm opted for such a bland office, out here in this boxy two-level pre-fab building in a generic office park? They were dependent on erratic contracts, certainly, and that in itself had exiled them north of Parmer Lane, halfway to Pflugerville, to a discounted non-neighborhood far from shops and restaurants. But surely paint didn’t cost more if it had a bit of color in it. Dr. Killian spent most of his waking hours in this beige box, working feverishly against the clock to come in under impossibly tight budgets while scoring moderately successful medical breakthroughs. He’d had to make sacrifices enough in his personal life. Would it have killed Futurepharm to add a bit of cozy pleasantness to the spot in which he seemed to spend his entire life?

  “Yes, the special-projects vault has been compromised.” Dr. Killian heard his colleague, Dr. Maya Hansen, speaking to a Statesman reporter on the phone in the next boxy office. “Yes, we’re working on that now, as I told your colleague at the Chronicle. Yes, I understand you are from a different newspaper, but I still have to refer you to General Fisher as we have protocols to maintain. No, no, Dr. Killian is coordinating efforts from this end.”

  Maya was snapping at the journalist, speaking sharply while anxiously trying to get off the phone. She had even less patience with the media than Dr. Killian did. Like him, she put in long hours here at Futurepharm. And the whole team was short-tempered at the moment, after the events of the last few days.

  “They know Extremis has been extracted from the vault.” Dr. Killian went back to a Word document he’d begun typing last night. “It’s chaos outside my blessed door. This place is so badly organized; no one seems to know what has been stolen or what to do about it.”

  He paused now, wrinkled his brow, tapped a finger on his desk, and contemplated his next words. He wished he had a cig
arette. Long before Maya Hansen had joined Futurepharm, when she was still a college student dazzling biology professors and thinking about a career in science, Dr. Killian had quit smoking under pressure from the board during the AeroVapor emphysema research trials. He’d used electronic cigarettes for months to wean himself off tobacco. At least with those, he hadn’t had to go stand outside in the sun every time he wanted a smoke. He wished he had one now to calm his nerves and help shut out the angry sound of Maya barking at the journalist, even though he knew logically that it wouldn’t have worked.

  Maya was a young and attractive woman, but also brilliant and opinionated. Dr. Killian wasn’t as smart, even with decades more experience and wisdom, and that bothered him. But Maya had few peers. Just as well, he thought. She’s got no time for peers, friends, or relationships. Maybe no patience for us lesser humans, even. It’s got to be tough to be that brilliant. Her contributions had rocketed Extremis ahead by a decade. They’d be nowhere near it working, certainly not approaching its release, if she hadn’t been head researcher on the project team. Without Dr. Hansen’s innovative approach and unique research, Extremis would be little more than a concept that Killian tinkered with on weekends.

  “Maya Hansen was in here earlier,” typed Dr. Killian. “She was shouting at me. She always shouts, never happy.

  “It’s only a matter of time before the thief is discovered and interrogated. I know I won’t make it through an interrogation. I can barely get through sitting at lunch in the cafeteria without blurting out the truth to the person next to me. Or to the dishwasher. The cashier. To anyone. I know that I loosed something terrible.”

  Dr. Killian could see his reflection in his computer monitor. He looked tired, old, worn out. He still had all his hair, and it wasn’t gray all over yet—it was beige, like everything else in the room. But his years of practically living in the lab—from grant to grant, project to project—had left his face lined and exhausted.