Tunnel Vision (34 page)

“Evil? Like supernatural?”

He nodded. “Sarah, my mind feels violated, like I’m psychically bonded to a psychopathic killer.”

“But that’s impossible.”

“Is it? You all said I experienced transcendence, right?”

“Yeah, clinically. But—”

“And my blood showed spikes of rage?”

“Well, the adrenaline—”

“And that I merged with another mind?”

“Possibly.”

“What if that other mind is my dead father?”

“What?”

“I know how crazy that sounds,” he said. “But what if I crossed over and released his spirit, and it’s hot with vengeance, and he went after those bastards. And somehow I mind-linked with him. I’ve been feeling his presence since that first day in the lab.”

“You mean his ghost came back and killed them?”

“Got a better explanation?”

“No. And I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Neither did I, and now I’m afraid of them.”

“Zack, even if ghosts exist, I doubt they can overpower a weightlifter or drive a car.”

“If I didn’t do it myself, then what the hell am I picking up?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t believe you killed them.”

“That’s a relief.” She didn’t want anything, but he went over to the refrigerator for another glass of milk.
Milk,
he thought as he stared into the glass.
So innocent and ordinary.
It wasn’t long ago when his own life was innocent and ordinary. “So, if it wasn’t me, how the hell did I see those murders?”

“I don’t know. I can’t even explain transcendence, and every metric says your mind left your brain. But I can’t tell you how.”

Zack sipped his milk. “I feel like that kid in
The Sixth Sense
. He sees dead people. I watch them die. It’d be funny if it weren’t so friggin’ real.”

She thought for a moment, then looked up at him. “Maybe you really did have a paranormal experience. Really.”

“That works in books and movies, but how do you explain telepathy or astral projection or whatever the hell in rational terms?”

“Something I’ve been wondering since I started. But if you picked up someone else’s sentience, it has to be through one of the four known force fields—nuclear, atomic, gravity, or electromagnetic. The first two don’t count—the ranges are too small. And as far as we know, gravity doesn’t carry information. That leaves EM waves.”

“Like light and radio waves.”

“Yeah, but to pick up thoughts of someone five miles away, you’d need a power source that would cook your brain. And Gretch was in Connecticut.”

“So how do you explain it?”

“I can’t, but Elizabeth would say you experienced the supernatural.”

“But what do you think?”

She shook her head. “I’m still a skeptic. Either an unknown medium—something we’ve never seen before. Or we’re missing something in the diagnostics. Don’t get excited, but the only way to know for sure is more suspensions.”

“Well, that’s not going to happen.”

“Can’t say I blame you.”

“But what if she’s right? What if there’s a whole other level of awareness—what mystics have been talking about forever? Some kind of mind pool I tapped into.” He finished his milk and walked to the sink. “My head feels haunted. And it’s been this way since I started these friggin’ tests.”

“Did you ever, you know, ever have psychic experiences before?”

He could hear the guardedness in her voice. “Once.” And he told her about the night at the Foxwoods Resort Casino.

“How come you never mentioned that?”

“Because I thought it was nothing but a weird coincidence.”

“I don’t know. Maybe you made a freak connection or something. That’s something you should have told Elizabeth and Morris.”

“Elizabeth and Morris have done enough damage.” He moved to his desk and removed some papers and handed them to her. “Three homeless people were found dead with tetrodotoxin in their bloodstreams over the last two years.” He poured himself another glass of milk and warmed it in the microwave while she read the articles. “Each of them died bizarre deaths. One guy was mercy-killed with a baseball bat. Another threw himself under a truck. The third, a woman, rammed a screwdriver through her ear into her brain.”

“What?”

“According to friends, each complained of headaches and bad visions. One guy claimed he was possessed by demons. Another said bugs were eating out his brain. Whatever, they were tormented to death because of their suspensions.”

Sarah continued reading.

“The kicker is that each of them had tetrodotoxin in them—nothing the police had seen before.”

“Because it’s a research drug.”

“That’s my point.”

Her face clouded over. “All our drugs are under lock and key, and we’ve never had a break-in. ’Least not while I’ve been there.”

“I think they were test subjects before you came aboard.”

“No way. If subjects complained of a side effect, they’d stop the tests. Besides, volunteers came from local colleges, not homeless shelters.”

“But you’ve only been there a few months.”

“So?”

He turned one of the articles toward her. “The guy who threw himself under a truck had a friend who said he began to complain about beetles and terrible pain in his head after some scientist guy offered to pay for sleep tests.”

She read where he pointed. “This doesn’t have to be us.”

“How many labs you think are doing sleep tests using tetrodotoxin?”

She stared at the paper. “I don’t believe this.”

“Tell me about it. Since you started, how many subjects have you suspended?”

“I don’t know, maybe fifteen out of a hundred interviewed.”

“You know how many since they started?”

“I never checked the records.”

“You might want to, because I think you’ll find a bunch of illegal aliens and bogus names.”

65

Sarah left, saying that she would drive to the lab first thing in the morning to check the records.

Meanwhile, Zack took two sleeping tabs and turned off the light, hoping to shut his mind off from speculating on the hideous options. Like Sarah, he did not believe in ghosts. And his mind refused to accept insanity or the possibility that he had murdered three people and repressed the acts from conscious memory. That left some psychic awareness he had tapped into—some alien sentience that had left his mind feeling contaminated.

After several minutes, he slipped into a drowsy twilight, feeling himself fading into a dreamless void. He didn’t know if at first he was imagining it, but he thought he heard something outside his bedroom door.

His first thought was Sarah. Maybe she forgot something. Or maybe her car didn’t start. He called her name. Nothing. Then he reached over to turn on the light when a bright flash went on in his eyes and a hand with a white towel clamped down on his face.

As he thrashed against the pressure, harsh chemical fumes filled his head. Chloroform. He recognized the odor. He also recognized the bald-headed male as his body pressed across his own, the towel smothering his face.

But before he could connect it, his mind faded to black.

“
He’s coming to.
” A male voice.

Zack squinted at the bright light.
The sky,
he thought.
Bright white sky.

But then taking shape was the textured, translucent panel that covered the fluorescent lights recessed into the ceiling of the lab. He tried to move, but his hands and feet were restrained, and he was wired up with contacts to his chest and an IV line in his arm.

Standing beside Elizabeth Luria in street clothes were two men. One had a hairless domed head and fleshy pink face. A face he had seen before. The other was thin, with glasses and dark hair.

“I’m sorry, Zack,” she said. She was standing on the other side of the gurney.

He tried to say something, but she depressed the plunger, and he was gone.

THREE

66

“You knew about these deaths. You were there.”

Morris Stern was at his desk in his office at the Tufts University School of Medicine, hunched over a cup of coffee he had been sipping before Sarah pushed her way in. But for the twitching tic of his left eye, he stared blank-faced at the photocopied articles of street people found dead.

“They could have come from any number of other labs.”

“What, the Zombie Research Center?”

“That’s not particularly funny.”

“Neither is your stonewalling, Morris.”

The teeth in her words surprised even her. Morris had been her favorite professor and thesis adviser. Moreover, she looked up to him as a father figure, someone she could confide in. When her mother had died two years ago, it was Morris who gave her comfort, who helped make funeral arrangements. “I was flattered when you asked me on. Privileged to be working on a great cutting-edge project. But you used these people, Morris. You suspended them and dropped them off on some park bench. No follow-ups. No checking for bad side effects. You used them like lab rats.”

“These people were homeless,” he said, stabbing his finger on the article and squinting at her in a pretense of outrage. “You know as well as I do that all our volunteers are college students and closely monitored during and after.”

“Now they are. Before that you bought people off the street—people no one would miss.”

He couldn’t hold her gaze and dropped his eyes to the clippings. “They could have gotten the drug anywhere—another lab, the black market, whatever. So don’t come accusing me of unethical practices before you know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“It says that scientists paid them to take sleep tests. That’s the same pitch you put up on student bulletin boards all over town. And I checked with the state health agencies—no other research institution has used tetrodotoxin for years. Only Proteus.”

“I’ve heard enough from you.” He stood up. “This conversation’s over.”

“You don’t even care, do you? Two committed suicide, another had his friend bash his head in. And who knows how many others. They were plagued with horrible visions, and you people didn’t care.”

“Sarah, this has turned into an interrogation, and I resent it.”

“Would you prefer the police?”

His eye spasmed. “Is that a threat?”

“What you people did is criminal.”

“You have no proof and no right accusing me. Now get the hell out of here.”

She could hardly believe that he was the same man she had adored—a man of high-minded ideals, a man who had seemingly dedicated his science to raising the quality of life, who had taken the Hippocratic Oath. Suddenly he was a cowardly, pathetic old man denying he was a murderer. Before she left, she removed a wide folder from her briefcase and dropped it before him.

“What’s this?”

“One of your skeletons.”

He didn’t touch it. “I said to get out of here.”

She flipped open the folder to reveal downloaded neuroelectrical images taken from the lab archives. “Look familiar?” she asked.

He glanced at the imaged configuration and the name in bold on the sticker.

“You used him, too,” she said. Then she turned on her heel toward the door. “Maybe you’re right after all: There is no God, only man.”

67

George Megrichian loved surf casting. He had been doing it most of his fifty-six years.

He had fished everywhere, but this was his favorite spot because no one was around and because the sand was shoring up. In fact, this beach was the only one on the Massachusetts Bay that was growing in volume, because the lower Cape was eroding and sending all its sand to this sandbar. Twenty years ago, the beach was segmented every hundred yards by stone breakwaters that stood so high in high tide that kids would jump off the ends into deep water. Now, not a single granite boulder was visible in the five-mile stretch. Two decades and millions of tons of sand had been washed onto the shoreline, pushing the sandbar maybe a full quarter mile into the surf. He joked that were he to live another thousand years, he’d be able to walk to Portugal.

Because it was a private beach, you’d never find more than twenty people on the stretch of sand, even this week of the Fourth of July. Of course, more than a mile to the east was Scusset Beach, which was public and packed on summer weekends. But not here. And no matter which way you looked, not another soul was in sight.

The tide was in and the sun had just broken the bank of clouds hanging over the horizon.

He cast his line into the gentle surf and stuck the grip end of the pole into the holder buried in the sand. Then he sat in his folding chair with a mug of coffee and stretched his bare legs to take in the rays of the morning sun. Out at sea, sailboats cut across the horizon, their jibs bellying against the wind and glowing against the azure blue.
This is as good as it gets,
George thought.
What heaven must be like.