The Four Fingers of Death (71 page)

The sirens in the fields of cholla and saguaro were drawing ever nearer, and Rafferty had to make a decision on what he could spirit away. The computer systems looked mostly intact, and these he placed in the back of his truck. The material was dangerously hot, from the reentry, from the fire, nearly scalding him right through his heat-resistant gloves. He swept his flashlight around the debris to look for anything else, and it was only when he decided he had finished the job that he thought he
heard
something in the midst of the debris. Not that there wasn’t a lot of rustling in the desert at night, what with the rats and coyotes and peccaries. But he would have been surprised if there were an animal that wanted for the smarts necessary to get the hell
away
from this particular reentry zone. He chased after the rustling with the beam of his flashlight, and that was when he saw something. Something gory, red, and foul that seemed to have come down with the wreckage—and that was a severed human arm.

An arm. A human arm. An awfully hairy arm, the arm of a really hairy guy, some guy with really unflattering, bristly black hair up and down his arm. The arm was severed at the elbow, or just below, and a bit of bone protruded from the end, as if to remind Rafferty that there had once been even more at the other end of the thing. Oddly enough, meanwhile, the hand at the end of the arm was missing a finger. Not from impact, he suspected, because the missing finger had healed over. The middle finger. This simian guy from space had been missing a finger for a while. And the fourth finger had a ring, a standard-issue gold band. White gold, Rafferty surmised, because he knew his precious metals. Rafferty began broadcasting the light from his deluxe flashlight, looking for other pieces of the body that he now associated with the Mars mission. But he could see nothing else, not in this cursory examination.

A pivotal and reckless idea then came to him rather suddenly, and that was the idea that he might
take
the arm. Before the military arrived. It would go well with some animal trophies he kept, for example, and it would be an indisputable conversation starter if, someday, he felt he could allow it out into the light. Maybe it was the chemical reagents talking, but he liked the idea of having the arm, having the souvenir. Or maybe the decision was much more primitive than this. Maybe it was just that the arm was so rich with implications. Maybe it somehow seduced him into caring for it. Whatever the particulars of this decision, Rafferty managed to wrap the arm in an old advertising circular from the Rio Blanco free paper, and set it on the passenger seat in the cab of his truck.

He was still standing there, looking neighborly, when the fire trucks arrived on the scene.

Of great interest to epidemiologists and medical historians later was this question: How much could the severed limb know on its own? Sundered from its nerve center, in much the way that the ERV was sundered from NASA at the crucial moment of its own descent, in much the way that the Earth, that orbiting hunk of cosmic rock, was flung off from the maelstrom of gases and clouds that formed the universe, the arm was no longer in possession of the story of its origin. It didn’t know where it was, it didn’t know what it was, it didn’t know when it had known these things, if ever. The arm could smell nothing, taste nothing, see nothing, hear nothing. It had no concrete memory of what these other senses, with which it once acted in concert, did. It would be easy to compile a list of negations as to the skills and abilities of the severed arm. It would be easy to forecast what it could not or would not be able to do, without brain or blood supply. But that would be to overlook evidence of its unsettling accomplishments.

Historical accounts suggest that in fact the arm, the hand, the
thing
, to give it the name that people who stumbled on it gave it under most circumstances, had, despite appearances, a reservoir of desire. The arm, and the hand connected to it, had muscular recall, and the muscular recall was of certain kinds of activities once performed routinely, such as grasping, releasing, drumming fingers, snapping fingers, practicing pianistic scales, exposing fingernails for cursory examination, shaking of hands, making a thumbs-up gesture, making an A-okay gesture, signing the deaf signing alphabet, clapping, waving, catching objects, throwing objects, caressing objects, depressing buttons, unlatching latches, turning doorknobs, writing things, cleaning the outer part of the ear canal, picking the nose, scratching the posterior, pouring things, picking up silverware, cracking knuckles, and so forth. These muscle memories are too many and varied to list beyond this partial catalogue, but they were all there, and the arm knew how to perform them, and more than knowing how to perform these muscle memories, the arm delighted in performing them; it lived (after a fashion) to perform them, especially now in the twilight of its being, and thus, whereas a conventionally severed arm, a severed arm in the limited bioethical atmosphere of the planet Earth, is known to do nothing at all (it may flop for a couple of seconds before coming to rest), the severed arm from Mars, the one infected with a certain pathogen, continued to experience its muscle memory, and experienced an almost frenzied need to act in the dreamy thrall of these memories. This is a kind of desire. The arm longed, that is, for its past, for a time of action, when it had more opportunities. In an absence of stimulus, it began to run through many of its former activities, trying to find something, some way out, some other way of being. Anything but dormancy.

People have said that the arm knew what it was doing when it began its destructive spree, but these people were and are wrong, because the arm was just an arm, and an arm, no matter how animated with a space-borne pathogen, cannot be a brain. And yet despite its uncertainty about what it was doing, it still had an agenda, and that agenda involved making use of its range of motion in order to express its catalogue of memories. Sometimes this longing was so intense, so excruciating, that it was intolerable for the arm. Or that is the theory. Other times, fresh from some recent activity, the arm, exhausted perhaps, rested, becoming to the casual eye a severed arm of the routine sort.

Because the arm could not tell specifically what happened in most cases when it was left alone with various persons, it is impossible to re-create beyond reasonable doubt what took place in these instances. Except under circumstances where a person was involved briefly with the arm and managed to escape to alert others, there is little information. In the case of the miner called Bix Rafferty, there were no witnesses. And yet in all likelihood, we can ascertain the outline of the story. Rafferty, after his encounter with the military at the ERV debris site, climbed into the cab of his truck. Of the dialogue just preceding this moment, as given by the personnel from the base, we have highlights. The military personnel indicated to Rafferty that the spot where he was parked was now going to be redesignated a completely secure possession of the federal government of the United States, and that his lease from the Bureau of Land Management would be subject to review. This area, he was told, was no longer safe. He needed to evacuate to a perimeter of at least three miles. When the preliminary cleanup was completed by the Hazmat-suited military professionals, Rafferty would be contacted, and a thorough discussion of the value of his business would be undertaken. In the meantime, Rafferty needed to evacuate. Oh, and he was asked by a certain captain who was present there whether he had
found
anything at the site that was of interest to him. Would he please, at this juncture, return the item or items.

The implication was twofold. On the one hand, this was a heavily armed (with uranium-tipped explosives and armor-piercing bullets, Tasers, proton disrupters, and every other kind of infernal killing device) military detachment that was not to be trifled with; on the other hand, the captain and Rafferty had achieved an understanding. The substance of the understanding was that the federal rules did not apply. The ability of the government to enforce its dictates was understood to be limited. The government could threaten. But in the desert a certain casual feeling about the rule of law
was
the law, and order was best maintained through a system of mutual interdependencies, these being based upon a seesawing of trust, distrust, and money.

Rafferty, understanding the request, immediately hauled one of the computer chassis out of the back of his truck, set it at the feet of the captain, and remarked that he’d kind of been hoping “to put the thing on the wall” in his trailer. Some busted-down private shone a lamplight in the truck and plucked out some wiring. The men then had a laugh, before the captain reminded Rafferty that he had been ordered to evacuate and that this order was serious, given “the nature of what we’re dealing with.”

“Which is what?” Rafferty said.

“You’re liable to find out before long, and that’s all I can say to you at present. But I’m asking you to observe this request, seriously, because it’s not only for yourself, but for all the people who live here in the valley. We don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with yet, but we have a large population in this county, and a very fluid one, and we don’t want whatever was in this crash site getting out into that large population. Your silence on the subject is also appreciated. Now, I don’t have to worry any further, am I right?”

The ranking officers present as well as the enlisted men all remember the conversation as recounted here, and so there can be little doubt. Rafferty was warned. Rafferty, with the sangfroid of a seasoned low-stakes gambler, had turned back some computer junk to the personnel involved in the salvage operation with the intention of keeping the severed arm, which was, as yet, wrapped in the old advertising circular and lying, at this moment, in the foot well of his flaking, rusting pickup truck.

It is reasonable to surmise that Rafferty chuckled to himself upon climbing back into the front of the truck and turning on the satellite radio, which he had dialed to a station that played country and western and Native American music. He threw the vehicle into drive. He looked down at the arm and repeated aloud his belief, in his impaired state, that he
had heard the arm
moving earlier, though it now seemed quite still.

The drive across the prairie in the direction of the Forsaken Mining Corp. and its attendant home office, which Rafferty had no intention of evacuating, was a short one, since the operator was running the vehicle on algaenated fumes. And yet it was even shorter than usual. For it was only seconds after Rafferty took his eyes off the arm that it began using a creeping technique that involved
grasping
with its rather long fingernails for surfaces onto which it could find a secure handhold, moving up onto the seat and toward Rafferty; that is, the arm ventured across the bench-style front seat of the cab of Rafferty’s pickup truck (more than 200,000 miles on the odometer), and its arachnid-style scuttling was slow and circumspect at first, as if it might possibly have understood that it needed to move imperceptibly to avoid detection. It dug in its nails, into the vinyl surface of the banquette—plainly evident to forensics experts upon the scene later—and in this way it propelled itself quietly forward, leaving behind a drizzled trail of caked, congealed blood.

Rafferty was wearing, that night, a heavily stained mechanic’s jumpsuit, one he may have purchased secondhand at one of the many used-clothing outlets of Rio Blanco. He had nothing on underneath except a T-shirt. There were some old black work shoes found on the body later, and some grimy athletic socks. The arm, through dead reckoning, launched itself on the nearest fleshy site, and that was the right thigh of the miner, the thigh that was, at the moment of the assault, controlling the accelerator of the truck. Apparently, the arm had no idea of the import of its actions, because jeopardizing the operation of the truck, in which the arm was itself carried, right alongside Bix Rafferty, was not something that was in the arm’s interest. And yet the arm went straight for the thigh, and even more the arm seemed intent, according to the forensics experts, on passing over the thigh, traversing the thigh, on the way to harrying the unprotected groin of Bix Rafferty. The arm clawed at the leg of Bix Rafferty, who was driving, and who was whistling along with some country and western song about lost women and found whiskey, and Rafferty, at that blinding moment, took his eyes off the dirt track. And he saw that the arm was now
upon him
. With an arm of his own, he attempted to seize the bloody stump end of the severed arm and to fling it from him. Rafferty, in a condition of mortal dread, his veins now sluices of adrenal fluid, was powerfully alert to the necessities of self-preservation. And yet the severed arm too was breathtakingly strong. The severed arm had no purpose but its intention to
grasp
, and so it had no reason not to give this task its personal best. When it dug its longish nails into something, it really dug them in, and in this case, the nails were puncturing the jumpsuit, pinching the inner thigh of Rafferty, and attempting, moreover, to make probing, stabbing motions in the direction of his genitals, and he was kicking wildly and screaming and attempting to dislodge the arm, to no avail, and now the arm was attempting to
climb the front
of Rafferty, up along the rusty zipper of the jumpsuit, as though the zipper were one of the freight rails that bisected Rio Blanco and the arm were intent on walking alongside it. The variety of curses uttered by Rafferty would be too numerous to include, and a catalogue of these oaths would distract from his understanding of the danger he was in. In effect, the arm sobered him, cleared his head, so that he could see what a mistake he had made by spiriting away the arm, and perhaps this was his last thought, before the truck, which had long since left the comfort of the unpaved road that led to Rafferty’s operation and was now teetering in a wash, encountered a toppled saguaro or rock, lifted up on one side, and then rolled. The truck went twice over in the wash.