Life Among the Dead (Book 4): The End (6 page)

15

Dashing through the city, on a one horse open sleigh, Luke once again must pull back on the reigns to halt his ride. Handling the horse drawn carriage is much harder than he ever could imagine, it takes some coaxing to get the thing turned around so he can detour whenever the road ahead is blocked. What should have been a quick jaunt uptown is taking him longer than he likes. Gunfire pops off, echoing in the night. The constant strobes of the responding vehicles is joined in the night sky by the glare of fires that light up the plumes of smoke they cause as they devour buildings. The city seems to be at war with itself and all Luke can think about are his grandsons, hoping to get to them before it’s too late and the battle spreads to where they are.

####

“Did you hear something?”

“That was me. I need to use the bathroom,” assures a voice in the dark.

“Not you,” the younger of the two dismisses. “From downstairs.”

“Probably just Mrs. Krantz. Go back to sleep.”

Half-brothers, separated in age by five years, share a room in their suburban home. Though the house has three bedrooms, their father claimed one as his office. He insisted that sharing a room would build character. Neither boy has complained much yet, but Killian is twelve, getting to be that age where he wants a little more privacy. He’s going through changes and has urges he’d rather not talk about let alone be witnessed.

“Wait,” the youngest, says. “I gotta go too.”

“Hippo,” Killian groans his brother’s nickname in protest, hunching over as if his stomach hurts to hide his need to be alone. “Can’t you wait?”

“No, it’s dark.”

Killian would protest but the longer he stands the less urgent his need for privacy becomes until he’s left with only the need to pee. “Come on,” he tells his brother.

It was Killian’s biological father that had first coined the nickname the youngest goes by, short for Hippocrates. The child hated it at first, almost as much as he dislikes the longer version, until Oz told him that hippos are actually the most dangerous animals in the Amazon, taking more lives than lions and crocodiles combined. The hall the boys enter is dark except for the light coming up from downstairs, Hippo places a hand on his brothers back and stays behind him as they creep towards the bathroom together.

16

The Physicians’ Desk Reference is a formulary, every known pharmaceutical is listed within the thick tome’s pages along with the indications and contraindications for prescribing each drug. All the legally mandated information needed when prescribing each entry from its possible side effects and adverse reactions, even the chemical structures is included.

“Mechanism of interaction not fully understood,” Price reads yet again and begins his search for the next Wilkes Pharmaceutical. “If we don’t even know how or why our stuff works, how can we expect people to take it?”

The pages of the book are exactly what a consumer receives as an insert when they pick up their prescription, the tightly folded bundle of paper they often ignore. Price is frustrated by having no clue as to how the Wilkes drugs work so miraculously, though entries from his own company often only offer the same vague reasoning. The PDR is financed and annually updated by the drug companies, they only share what they have to by law, or what they know. Oddly, there are countless medicines that science has no clue as to why they do what they do, often the drugs are manufactured for another reason and it’s their side effect that leads them to use for another ailment.

“Good evening,” a voice says again in the dim space.

“Oh, Nina!” Price is surprised by the arrival of his lab assistant. “You’re here.”

“You called me,” she chuckles.

“Right. I have something to show you,” he says. “I made coffee.”

“I can see that.” About to set her purse on the counter near the lab’s entry she is glad she looked first. Her boss had indeed started the coffee machine, he added water and grounds, but neglected to remove the old coffee from the pot. The result is a mess that runs down the counter’s edge like a waterfall.
He’s in ‘Absent-Minded Professor’ mode,
she realizes.
I hate ‘Absent-Minded Professor’ mode.

Price runs to a counter of microscopes those in his employ usually use during normal work hours. Nina finds a dry place for her things at the end and ventures slowly to him. “Aren’t you going to say ‘You didn’t have to get all dressed up on my account’?”

So engrossed in his own thoughts, he hadn’t realized until that moment that she is wearing a very flattering evening dress that leaves her olive arms bare, displaying the tattooed lines of archaic alchemy symbols that run from her wrists to her shoulders. “Sorry if I ruined your night. This is important.”

“My date didn’t like my dress much either,” she says. “He might have if he was feeling better. He groaned all through dinner, and then keeled over just before dessert taking the table and my tiramisu with him. Actually, you saved me the pain of waiting at the hospital.”

“Uh-huh,” Gil replies with disinterest as he peers down the twin eyepieces of one of the many microscopes. His focus is on what he searches for on the slide and not the slender exotic woman that leans on the counter close to him.

“It was hell getting a cab,” she goes on. “Have you seen what’s going on out there? You owe me forty bucks and an amazing tip, the driver had to take pretty much every turn and every street just to get me here…” Price has stopped pretending to listen. “All right, out with it. What’s eating you?

“Huh?” A jab from Nina sits him up right, the man stares into space while his eyes adjust to the poorly lit world around him. “Nothing’s ‘eating me’.”

“Something’s up,” she insists. Around the man are the Wilkes Pharmaceuticals that Mercott & Price secretly keep on hand for comparison. “You can’t just be here, at this hour, trying to see why choosy moms choose Jiff.”

Price leans back in the high swivel chair, rubbing his eyes to let them rest. “You never told anyone about us, did you?”

“Is that what this is about?” she asks. “I was on a date! Trust me, I am so over you!”

He believes her. The mafia man had to have found out some other way. “So, your date, he’s dead?”

“Or dying…” she answers with a shrug, “he was old. So, to answer your question, no. I never told anyone about our, as you put it in your bullet-pointed break-up memo, ‘poorly timed indiscretion’—‘See you on Monday’.”

“Ok.”

“Why are you asking?”

“No reason.”

“Bullshit.”

He has no response, and doesn’t look like he’ll be forthcoming with one anytime soon. He just returns to the microscope. Nina gives up “What are you looking for?”

“Trends in the composition. Recurring elements. Foreign substances,” he tells her. “The PDR is no use.”

“Well, no. They just print the same stuff we do: Mechanism not fully understood. Patient may experience; headache, upset stomach, purulent bowel discharge, and sometimes death. It’s a wonder people actually take this stuff.”

“I was just thinking that,” he smiles, taking a sip from his long cold mug of coffee. He slides a cigarette from his cheap pack, happy to find one without a factory defect. Half of the cigarettes in the pack have a hole where the filter meets the rest, he’ll be able to take full drags without holding his finger over the breakage. There are many in the ashtray he had neglected to smoke, now just lines of ash.

“I called you here tonight, hoping that since you actually have…” Price starts to say.

“Experience with the Wilkes formulary,” she finishes his statement, knowing full well by now that is why she was summoned. “I wasn’t with Wilkes that long.”

“Please, Nina, I need you.”

“Yeah, for my mind,” she scoffs.

“Will you help me?” he asks sounding pitiful.

“Yes,” she surrenders.

The man leaps up, elated. He hugs his assistant and takes her by the hand to another part of the lab. She carefully keeps up with him on her high heels all the way to the isolation room where dangerous materials are used and studied.

Nina watches Price as he prepares an experiment within the room. Upon the table within he places a vile of some unknown green substance and clean instruments that they will need to examine the stuff once they open the glass tube under controlled conditions.

“Where did you get this?” she asks.

“I’d rather not say,” he answers. Price stands in the small room for a moment, making sure he has everything he will need since reopening the booth would not be a wise move once he gets started. Techs are usually on hand to anticipate his needs and enact any and all safety measures required. “Let’s just say, this may be what makes Wilkes Wonder drugs so wonderful.”

“Or, it’s snot,” she counters.

“Let’s try to be positive, shall we?” he asks, going back through the mental checklist of items in his head.

“I’m just saying, you get what you pay for.”

Price pauses in his tracks. He slowly turns to her and looks at her through the glass partition. “I never said I paid for this.”

“I… I just assumed,” she stammers, giving herself away.

“You?” the man looks at her, hurt. “You were working with the mob?”

“Well…”

“How long?” his hurt becomes anger.

“Do you remember when I applied here?” she tries to use levity to diffuse the situation.

“All of it!” he barks. “Everything? It was all leading to this?”

“Not all of it was bad, right?” she says with sincerity. “The stuff between us was actually my idea. HE needed a way to get you to meet with him. I was, and still am, very fond of you.”

“So, you know what this is?” Price asks, still staring daggers at her through the glass.

“I had heard about it, seen it before. I wasn’t in on their use of it, but had an opportunity to snag some.”

“How the fuck do you ‘snag’ something like this?” he incredulously inquires.

“Right place at the right—er, more accurately, wrong time,” she tells him. “There was an accident six years ago, I was working on another project, but was close by when everyone started running to help.”

Price turns, runs his fingers through his hair at a loss as to what else to do at the moment. His mind races without end, his emotions flare without meaning.

Nina continues, “I had seen you speak at a symposium in Waterloo, I knew if anyone other than Wilkes could crack this it would be you… I really wanted to be with you when you did, a part of your eureka moment… I guess I won’t be getting any of the credit for this, huh?”

“Oh, no, you are very fired,” Price laughs at the absurdity. “Don’t expect a reference from me, or any further money from the wiseguy you work for.”

“Why is that?”

“He’s dead,” Price reports. “I’ve got the money, the sample, and most importantly, I have a wife at home that loves me who isn’t a conniving cunt.”

“You forgot vindictive,” Nina adds. She seals the isolation room with her former boss and lover inside.

“What the hell are you doing?” instantly alarmed, he asks her through a speaker that makes his voice tiny.

“Giving you what you paid for,” she tells him. Samples in the room can be handled using thick gloves that are attached to the glass partition, Nina quickly slips her hand into one of them and grabs the glass vile. Even with safe guards techs have to use extreme care when handling substances inside this room, the angry woman smashes the glass tube against the counter like and egg.

The green ooze inside the vile begins to expand once air touches it. It grows exponentially to Price’s alarm, he beats on the glass to be let out. Nina watches for a moment, listening to the man’s pleas. She switches off the intercom, cutting his screams short. The doomed man thrashes futilely against the glass as Nina turns her back. She snatches his keys from the coffee flooded counter on her way out.

Price’s car is a definite upgrade from the Impala she had left at home, the suitcase in the back is much larger than she expected when he told her he still has the money, it’s her favorite feature of the new ride. She is surprised to see a gun on the passenger seat and wonders if he had really driven all the way here with it out in the open, with all the police activity. “Idiot.”

The woman wishes to open the suitcase behind her, feel the money, but she knows she can’t linger. She has to get out of here before someone sees her. She switches on her headlights revealing figures in the lot.

“Shit!” she curses, she has been seen. Dozens of people are walking her way. It’s an eerie sight as they slowly converge. She had worried the moment she laid eyes on them, but realizes they can’t possibly know what has happened tonight. The folks surround the car, Nina reverses away from them.

The slack faced figures are everywhere. The woman has to negotiate slowly around them in reverse for fear of striking one of them fatally, thus making an already bad situation worse. She’s effectively killed one man tonight, she doesn’t wish to add to the body count.

Left with little recourse, Nina gently bumps the people out of her way. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she asks them as they recover from their meeting with the luxury car’s fenders. She assumes they are drunk by the way they stagger, focused on her. The inebriates slap their palms against the windows as if they are trying to get their hands on her.

Her desperate need to escape the lot of Mercott & Price takes her full attention. She doesn’t hear the bag behind her move, or the teeth of its zipper coming apart.

###

Price remains locked in the isolation room with the growing ooze. It has covered the counter and started spilling to the floor. He has backed as far as he could to get away from it, only prolonging the inevitable. The substance he had acquired this very night will take up every last square inch of space within the booth, he will drown in his purchase, the thing that was supposed to take his company to new heights.

He had tried to break the glass though he knew full well that it was a waste of his final moments. The partition was designed to withstand accidental combustive reactions, all he was able to accomplish was a thin fissure with the heavy base of the microscope. Even if he could get out in time, the building’s safe guards would lock the whole place down. All he can do is watch the sample grow.