Ante Mortem (9 page)

Lacey started toward the exit. Brautigan caught her arm. “You’re safer here than out there.”

“
Let go of me,” she snapped, and wrenched herself free. He nearly fell over.

“
Lacey!”

She looked back. “You need to get to a hospital.”

“
Won’t be safe there either,” he said. “The panic’s going to be worse than the catalyst. We’ll just stay here.”

A gunshot rang out in the street. “Please!” Brautigan cried. “Don’t be stubborn now.”

“
You should get out of the city,” one of the club owners called. “We have to stay,” said the other. “But you better get the hell out of here.”

Lacey nodded. To her father, she said, “You can stay, or you can come.”

Every bit of logic, every scrap of instinct, told him it was wrong. But she’d just extended an olive branch, thin and brittle as it was, and he took it.

Her car was parked in the back. Brautigan stared at her as she fished through the pockets of her jeans for the keys. “What?” she demanded.

“
Can’t use the roads,” he said. “The only way out is on foot.”

She swore softly. “You’re right.” At the sound of another gunshot, she glanced worriedly at Brautigan, and for a moment she was the little girl he’d walked out on.
God, it was that same face, that same exact face, silently begging him to make it better.

“
We ought to stick to the back streets,” he advised. She nodded, and they began their slow, uncertain jog. Glimpses of the main thoroughfares yielded only sheets of flame. The city’s arteries were clogged with the ruin of smashed cars and mangled bodies. There was the occasional gunshot, and a recurrent thump that might have been distant explosions. Other than that, it was oddly silent. No sirens, no choppers, no chatter. How quickly it had all happened.

“
We have to cross 35th to reach the expressway,” Lacey told him. “Then it’s not far to the suburbs. I know people there.”

People my age,
Brautigan hoped, and wondered why this epidemic of suicides was confined to that particular age group.
Couldn’t be a virus, could it? Some neurological agent targeting the brain chemistry of developing youths, maybe? But how could something like that strike simultaneously worldwide?
He wouldn’t even consider the metaphysical. Besides, there wasn’t any scripture on Earth that laid out the end in this manner.

Father and daughter stepped out onto 35th Street. A utility worker’s blackened corpse swung nearby, hands fused to a severed power line. The street itself was a maze of compacted wreckage. That thumping noise was close. Any one of these twisted and bleeding vehicles could explode at any moment. “We’ve gotta move fast,” he said to Lacey. “Now.”

They ran into the street, weaving around columns of hot metal, ignoring the sounds of scratching and what could have been moaning from within the steel. Brautigan wanted to clap his hands over Lacey’s eyes and ears, if only he could still wrap her up in his arms.

A muffled thump came from the right. Brautigan threw himself at Lacey, driving her to the sidewalk on the other side of the street. “What is it?” she screamed.

“
I don’t know.” It definitely hadn’t been any sort of explosion. He looked to his right then, and saw what it had been, what all those noises had been.

A boy of about fifteen lay crumpled in the center of a cratered Mazda.
He’d jumped.
Most of the cars along the curb, Brautigan now saw, were littered with bodies shattered by freefall.

A wail sounded overhead. He looked up and saw an open window several stories up. The boy’s mother was there. Her hands clutched at the air.

Brautigan turned Lacey’s face away from the sight and ushered her toward the expressway ramp. She winced as he urged her along, and he saw that his fingers were digging into the flesh of her arms. Pulling his hands away, he saw there the mother’s mad, grasping claws.

“I know where we should go,” Lacey said, and pointed east toward a horizon of sloping hills.

The sky had turned gray and the air cloyingly damp. It would rain soon, and wash the blood from the expressway. Brautigan forced his focus from the ruddy asphalt to the hills and said, “Where?”

“
It’s the hospital where I was. Last year.”

“
No, I said hospitals are no good.”

“
It’s not that kind of hospital.” Lacey lowered her eyes . “I had a breakdown. I spent two months there.”

“
Months… why? Drugs?” He immediately regretted saying it.

She glared at him. “No, not fucking drugs. I just lost it. I was fucking miserable.”

“
I never knew. Your mother never told me.”

“
I didn’t want her to.”

“
Why not?”

“
Because it’s not any of your business.” She stopped there on the roadside and shouted over the crackling of flames. “I’m not your business. You shouldn’t have come here! You unloaded me eleven years ago, remember? What brought you back? Ditching the wife and kid didn’t turn you into a rock star?” She spat at his feet and started off at a brisk pace. “You know what,
Dad?
Fuck you! Just go save yourself like you always do!”

“
I know I can’t fix anything!” Brautigan yelled after her. “I can’t go back, I know…”

She turned and stared icily at him. “You were going to get up on stage with me, weren’t you? In front of everyone. Fucking coward.”

He stood there and watched her walk away; gave her a generous berth before starting after her. She glanced back a few times, but didn’t say anything else. Kept up her pace, arms swinging. Pulled off her boots and hurled them skyward and then went off-road into the grass. He followed suit. The rain began to come down.

She pulled away when his jacket fell over her shoulders, but didn’t shrug it off entirely, and said nothing as he adjusted it. “Where are we going?” he asked quietly.

Her hair was dark red now, plastered to her face like blood. Despite that, he thought he probably looked worse. “Gallows Hill,” she said. “Doctor Lundgren.”

“
She took care of you?”

“
He
– and he did. I still see him from time to time. He might even know what’s going on.”

Brautigan doubted that, but said nothing.

Gallows Hill was a Victorian manse rising from a wooded summit. Rain ran down the barred windows and cobbled walkways to the gate, where a guard stood with shoulders slumped. Brautigan offered a wave. “We’re here to see Doctor Lundgren.”

“
I know him,” Lacey said, and called, “Marc?”

The guard didn’t move. As they drew closer, they saw why. He had wrapped an extension cord around his neck and tied it off at the top of the gate. His face was blue and bloated. Brautigan placed a hand of Lacey’s shoulder, but she only said, “That’s not Marc.”

The gate swung open without resistance. They walked to the entrance and pushed open the double doors.

The interior had a more modern feel, despite the fact that the lights were out, and everything was cloistered in shadow. Brautigan’s socked feet slapped against the tile floor of the lobby. “Anyone here?”

“
Lacey?” A haggard-looking man in a white coat emerged from the darkness. He was about Brautigan’s age, and kneaded his hands as he slowly crossed the room. “What brought you here?”

“
I didn’t know where else to go,” Lacey said.

Doctor Lundgren nodded. “We went into lockdown two days ago. Patients were throwing themselves at the windows, beating their heads against the walls… then the staff as well.” He mopped sweat from his brow with a kerchief. “Those who are still alive are under restraint. But they won’t eat.”

He glanced past them, through the open doors and the storm, and frowned at the dead guard. “He was thirty.”

“
What?” Brautigan’s heart leapt into his throat.

“
It’s happening to older people now,” Lundgren muttered.

“
Why?” Lacey asked. And Lundgren actually had an answer.

“
The only thing I can think of—although it doesn’t entirely bear out under scrutiny—is a dormant gene. Activated first in pubescent youths, which has somehow triggered a systemic response in older generations. I’m still trying to work out the mechanics of it.” He wiped his forehead again. “But I can almost certainly tell you why it’s happening now.”

This time it was Brautigan who pressed him .”Why?”

“
I’ve studied the human condition my entire adult life,” Lundgren said. His hands went back to kneading one another. “We’re the most evolved, the most aware—and the most irrational, the most self-destructive. I’m hardly the first to point that out, but few have advanced the theory that we’ve hit an evolutionary wall—that Nature, of which we are part, will not only turn in on and consume us, but cause us to consume ourselves.” He looked hard at Brautigan. “Do you understand? I don’t mean that the external, Mother Earth, is attacking us.
Our own genes
are rebelling against the mind, the ego, some might even call it the soul.

“
Come with me,” the doctor said then, and led them through a door into a long hallway. It was lined with doors containing caged portholes, and Lundgren glanced through each as he led Lacey and Brautigan deeper into darkness.

“
Oh, God! Mister Gray!” Lundgren fumbled through a collection of keys and unlocked one of the doors. Brautigan stepped into the room after him and saw that it was padded floor to ceiling—and that the straitjacketed patient within had crammed his head into the corner and suffocated himself.

“
How old was he?” Brautigan cried. “How old?”

“
Fifty-two,” Lundgren breathed. “I don’t know, he might have done it on his own. I don’t know…” He stared oddly at Lacey. “Doctor Wolfe.”

The girl gasped. Brautigan whirled and saw her in the grip of a female doctor, who had planted a hypo in the base of Lacey’s neck.

The world fell into slow motion. Brautigan started forward, throwing his hands out. Lundgren caught one. The other closed into a fist, and Brautigan spun to throw all his weight into Lundgren’s jaw; but then the needle struck his neck and warmth radiated through his head. He stumbled sideways, hit the padded wall, rebounded and collapsed at Mister Gray’s feet. “
Lacey!
” he groaned. Her name echoed through his head, then receded into darkness.

“Do you want to see her?”

He was vaguely aware of having been conscious, and in conversation—then Lundgren’s face came into focus. Brautigan tried to say something, but it only came out as a low growl.

“
You’re in a straitjacket right now,” the doctor told him calmly. “In a bed next door to your daughter. I’ve taken the same precautions for her. We’re going to get an IV line going to keep each of you nourished. I don’t want to fail Lacey, you understand. I’m taking these measures to keep you both alive.”

Lundgren rummaged through a sheaf of papers lying on Brautigan’s stomach. “You might go through the change at any moment. We’ll observe you both closely—having subjects of your disparate ages, related at that, might lead to a breakthrough.”

He glanced toward a window at the foot of the bed. The sky outside was still a murky gray. “
We
won’t be observing you,
I
will be. Doctor Wolfe drowned herself in the shower. I’ve tried to contact the local authorities, but there’s no answer. I don’t know that they could do much better than I, anyway. All I can do is keep you safe while I look for answers.”