The Methuselah Gene (12 page)

“Who?”

“Yeah, you know who.”

Wally's eyes lost their trapped animal look.
 
His lips curled slightly in a preflight posture.
 
But with that one bullet left in the gun, I slapped it shut.
 
Then I pointed it at Wally's very real legs.
 
“Let me explain this real slowly, Wally.
 
The reason I'm here has nothing to do with mob hits or made-for-TV movies or Fear Factor or even the Easter bunny, okay?”

“Stolen drugs?” Wally guessed.

I paused longer than I should have.
 
Seeing my astonished reaction, Wally brightened, and cut me off.

“That's it, ain't it?
 
Somebody stole yer stash.
 
And they're here, ain't they?
 
An' yer gonna
kill'em
.”

“No,” I said.
 
“No, you're wrong about that too.”

“Am I, now?”
 
He almost sneered, then made a little connect-the-dots motion with one hand.
 
“
Ya
better get yer story straight for Sheriff Cody.”

He nodded toward Main street, where—sure enough—a man was getting into what resembled a police car in the distance, confirmed when the flashing lights came on.
 
I turned back to find Wally a few steps closer to me, freezing only as I lifted the revolver higher, toward his chest.

He looked from the barrel to my face.
 
“Give it up, partner,” he suggested, just full of advice.

“Give
what
up?” I asked.

It must have seemed like a rhetorical question, because he had no answer for it.
 
I left him there, and ducked out behind the service station in a sudden panic as the Sheriff neared, siren wailing now.
 
Angling left, I ran straight into the field of corn, letting the tassels whip at my face, soon feeling an odd commingling of exhilaration and dread.
 
And soon enough I heard a voice from somewhere behind me, ordering me to stop.
 
But it sounded distant, and seemed almost unreal as I tried to escape back into a corner of my mind that remembered sanity and comfort.
 
A warning gunshot brought me back from my illusion of safety, and then I realized I still had Wally's revolver.

Damn.

On impulse I tossed the thing aside, then angled back to the right again, just in case I was being followed.
 
When I finally stopped five minutes later, and out of breath, I listened to the night.
 
I could hear nothing except my own panting, now.
 
The Shell station was gone.
 
The town was gone.
 
Only the corn surrounded me, faintly lit by starlight.

What now?
I thought, helplessly.
 
Any suggestions, Rachel?

Reaching out, I felt for a young ear of corn.
 
I touched it like a blind person might, measuring its thickness, its firmness.
 
I imagined the possibly genetically modified kernels inside that very ear one day being trapped in a
can on
aisle 6 at the
Piggly
Wiggly in Beaufort, South Carolina.
 
Or would it be aisle 7 at the Safeway in Bullhead City, Arizona?
 
And what impoverished mother or beer-gut redneck needing a side veggie to go with their pulled pork sandwich would make the purchase?
 
Maybe the TV would be on as they ate, too, blaring another SUV commercial during half time on Monday Night Football.
 
One thing was certain to me: even if folks ate Franken-corn without complaining, they would never take a modified HIV virus willingly, even if it proved to possess longevity as a side effect.
 
Not anymore than third-world dictators would want their burgeoning populations to take it.
 
Especially not those who breathed polluted air like our urban cowboys did, while soccer moms at the mall breathed the prayer
Holy Mary, full of grace, let me find a parking space.

No
sir'ee
,
Boba-krishna
.

A water tower figured in the nightmare from which George woke me sometime in the middle of the night, as he crept past my casket.
 
“Don't mind me,” he whispered, although it was the light he'd switched on that had done the damage.

I sat up slowly, and stared at his back as he went into the bathroom.
 
Then I lay back and stared at the ceiling, and sure enough, a roach was up there.
 
As I watched it, I felt an ironic smile form on my lips.
 
If I ever did manage to get back to sleep now, I knew I'd be dreaming that things were crawling on me as well.
 
And maybe they would be, even though this wasn't Mabel's.

“Hey, George,” I said.
 
“You know everybody in town too?”

“Just about, why?”

“Know a recluse, a loner . . . a guy who doesn't mingle much, walks around at night?”

George flushed.
 
I sat up again to see him fill a glass with water from the sink.
 
“That would be me,” he admitted, and grinned.
 
“Or you?”

In the mirror I watched George drink.
 
I blinked several times, imagining each time that George's face was others I'd seen—Wally, the postmaster, Edie, the Sheriff.
 
Everyone drinking the water.
 
The entire town, drinking water from the town's ugly frog tower up there on that hill among the evergreens.
 
A connection solidified.
 
But was it only my imagination?
 
I tried to tell myself that M-Telomerase couldn't be disseminated through a water supply, even if Zion didn't use chlorine, or someone managed to neutralize it somehow.
 
But the images that invaded my mind wouldn't stop, nor would the bizarre idea that now infected me, born of paranoia: what if Jim Baxter had succeeded where I'd failed?
 
What if a means of keeping the altered HIV virus alive through digestion had been discovered in his notes on the plant virus, and that's why he'd been murdered?
 
If he'd been murdered at all, of course, and if my reasoning wasn't as illogical as Wally mistaking me for a hit man, instead.

“Small town,” I heard myself say.
 
“I was thinking it would be a good place to hide.
 
Like maybe someone who testified in a trial somewhere?”

George's face seemed to stiffen in the mirror over the sink.
 
He dropped his water glass, and it shattered with a metallic pop.

“You okay?” I asked, momentarily.

He didn't want to turn around, but stared down at the jagged fragments of glass in the sink.
 
“Slipped,” he explained.
 
Then he scooped up the glass slowly, using a paper towel.
 
He carried a handful of shards past me to drop them into the waste basket near the bolted rear stockroom door.
 
There they rattled loudly.

“Name Walter Mills ring a bell?” I asked him.

George shook his head mechanically, but he still didn't look at me, his fish scale eyes moving rapidly from side to side.
 
“Buzzer either.
 
Who is he?”

“Private dick my ex-wife hired to find me.”

He nodded as if he'd been told to.
 
“It's hard to keep secrets in this town.
 
If he's here, he'll find
ya
.
 
You owe alimony?”

“No,” I said, “I'm honest about money.”
 
As opposed to everything else?

“What's she want with you, then?”

“What's any woman want?”

George turned toward his room.
 
“I wouldn't know about that.”

“You ever been married?”

“Me?
 
Ha.”

“Wonderful thing, if you get a lobotomy first.”

“Where's your ring?” he asked, without even looking.

“Don't have one in my nose either, anymore,” I lied.

The muscles in George's shoulders seemed to loosen.
 
“See
ya
in the morning,” he told me.

“Night.”

The door closed.
 
I went to the sink and turned on the water faucet.
 
I put my hands under the water and stared at the flow.
 
I cupped it, and sniffed at it.
 
Then I saw another roach scuttle up onto the edge of the toilet bowl.
 
I shuddered, and instinctively tossed the water cupped in my hands onto the roach.
 
It fell into the bowl, and did a little roach dance before it turned, legs down, and began to swim from side to side, seeking a way out of its own dilemma.
 
Tiny waves radiated outward from the roach's tiny legs, like a buzz.
 
I flushed the toilet, and covered the sink drain with a stopper.
 
Then I returned to my vampire's bed.
 
This time I left the light on, deciding to put a pillow over my eyes to help me sleep.
 
I also popped a pill, swallowing it dry.
 
I hadn't known what to expect in Zion, but I did imagine needing
Xanax
to sleep.
 
Now I couldn't imagine sleeping here without it.
 
How could I sleep even in a regular bed—much less a coffin—until I uncovered the truth?
 
Unthinkable.
 
So I needed
Xanax
to calm down and stop thinking so damn much.
 
To relax, to let go.
 
Just a little prescription drug . . . not a crutch, like for so many other people.
 
Except I'd gotten mine by forging a prescription blank from Dr. Bischoff's office.
 
That made it an illegal drug.
 
Not that Bischoff would have minded.
 
Tactar's
clinical investigator and outside consultant had maintained an office next to mine before
Hepker
got my ass.
 
When I went in to take Bischoff's order for Kung
Pao
chicken one day, I'd spied the blank pad he used in private practice, and tore off an extra sheet or three.
 
The
Xanax
wasn't wasted, now . . . thanks, Doc . . . but for extra measure and peace of mind I used the pillow to ward off the light.

The light I left on to ward off the roaches.

Morning brought a new wrinkle to the twisted whorls of my already conflicted mind.
 
For his part, George proved unusually sympathetic in letting me sleep late.
 
While the razor I glimpsed in his hand when I opened my eyes was obviously intended for the boxes he needed to slice open in order to stock his shelves, it still took a moment for that realization to register on my nervous system.

“Morning,” he announced in oddly cheerful good humor.

I sat bolt upright in my casket, eyes wide.
 
Sure enough, there was a beatific smile on George's face that didn't seem quite sane, somehow.
 
The pupils of his eyes appeared to be slightly dilated, too.
 
Obviously, I didn't know him well enough to judge his possible moods shifts, but pathological reactions were something else again.

“Talk to me, George,” I said slowly, and with suspicion.

“'Bout what?”
 
His exuberance faded a bit into a look that could only be described as innocence.
 
The thing that made babies so attractive because we'd long lost it ourselves.
 
Yet it was disconcerting to compare it to the night before.
 
Here was a new man, a person of different temperament than the one I'd observed only hours before.

I climbed out of the bed that entombed me to stand before him.
 
“Tell me how you feel, George.
 
Right now, I mean.
 
Are you taking any medication?”
 
I studied his eyes closely.

“Medication?
 
No.
 
And I feel fine.
 
I feel . . .”
 
He stopped, as though considering a new experience for the first time.
 
In my own memory I shuffled the images of previous drug test subjects, some of them with this same look—what we called the placebo look.
 
The non-reactive response prior to any display of measurable side effects.
 
But this was not my test subject.
 
If he was anyone's, he was perhaps Sean's or Walter's or whoever the hell else had been skulking around Zion's water tower in the night.
 
“I feel . . . great,” George concluded.