Immortality (17 page)

~

Mark was alone for the first time in his temporary office. He pushed down on a lever to lower the height of his chair. Perfect. He opened the center desk drawer. There were signs that someone had recently vacated. A few dry pens were in a tray along with some unused tea bags, a lottery ticket from last month, and a small bottle of aspirin.

It would be at least another hour before his Chromatium samples were ready. The lab was having problems getting unshriveled samples of Chromatium into the TEM. The animals shriveled while being prepared for mounting. It was unusual that they were so easily damaged. If the bulge was a sign of injury from freezing and thawing, then all their Chromatium samples might have the same problem. The techs were trying different chemicals to prepare the specimens. They needed to find a technique that would completely solidify the Chromatium’s structure from the inside out before they shriveled.

Mark woke the computer monitor from its screen saver sleep. After several minutes of exploring, he opened a window with a view of the lab. A series of software buttons and knobs were just below the window. One of them was labeled volume. He grabbed it with the mouse and rotated it higher. Voices started coming from the computer’s speakers. The back and forth conversations were the same intercom traffic he’d heard in the ready room. He recognized Kathy issuing a rapid-fire barrage of orders. He was surprised that she was in the lab. As he listened, he realized that she must have gone in to personally supervise the preparation of his specimens after the problems had started piling up.

He wondered if he should share with Kathy his theories of COBIC-3.7 and its possible connection with mass extinctions. For now, it didn’t seem wise. In all likelihood, whatever was going on right now had no connection to past extinctions or COBIC’s connection to them. There was no value in scaring people needlessly over an unproven theory that might not be relevant even if true.

Mark located some pre-recorded images of shriveled Chromatium that Kathy had told him about. The images had been recorded four days ago in the TEM. He might as well get a head start looking at the shriveled model. The way things were going, it might be a long time before he had a side by side comparison with the fully inflated version.

Mark focused in on the nucleoid. The volume of DNA material inside it seemed to be a little less than what he’d normally expect to see. Also, there was no lower density area in the nucleoid to explain the hollowness he had seen in the living samples. He tried to increase the magnification but found the view was already as digitally enlarged as possible for this recorded image. He examined what he could of the animals’ other structures. Except for the differences in the nucleoid, it looked like his COBIC in every way.

Mark looked at the stack of optical disks he’d brought with him from California. The full DNA sequence of COBIC-3.7 was on them. Why was he digging around the edges of this question? Either this was COBIC or it wasn’t. The time had come to take a thorough look at the DNA. He’d been distracted by structural and behavioral oddities long enough. He wondered if those detours were just ways of postponing the inevitable. Half of him wanted the DNA to conclusively match, while the other half feared that it would. He did not want COBIC-3.7 to be connected with so many deaths. Extinction had been only an academic mystery when he was studying COBIC’s connection with the end of the age of dinosaurs. This was very different.

After digging through some online manuals and calling the help desk twice, Mark finally had DNA sequences from the suspect Chromatium and COBIC-3.7 loaded into a Department of Defense supercomputer that the lab timeshared. He wished he had his custom software here. Almost everything at the BVMC lab was years ahead of what he had at UCLA, except for his genetics software. He watched as the system did best-fit comparisons of the long key sequences of DNA that he had tagged. The supercomputer was shockingly fast. The results were done in minutes. The outcome was as close as matches got in genetics. All the key sequences that he’d published – and those that he’d kept secret – had been found in the right locations. Nucleoid bulge or not, this animal was COBIC-3.7. He felt dizzy and switched off the screen. He couldn’t bear to look at it any longer.
And so it begins
, he thought.

Kathy was in her office reading a lab report on the Guatemalan kill zone. She’d had a fruitless afternoon trying to mount unshriveled Chromatium samples for Mark. He’d gone back to his hotel looking disturbed. The lab was still trying. She was fighting against eyes that wanted to close. Just a little longer and she’d be finished. Her eyes refused to pull the words from the screen. She tried rereading the sentence; but by the time she reached the end, she had forgotten the beginning. Grudgingly, she decided to rest for a few minutes. The moment her head touched her folded arms, she was asleep on her desk.

Her dreams were confused. She was in grade school, but was thirty years old. All the kids from her past were there, and oddly that felt normal. The uncomfortable part was that the school was the BVMC lab and the children were all lab techs. They were teasing her, calling her Moron Morris.
She’d show them, she’d show them all
.
She’d become a famous doctor. They would read about her in the papers and see her on television.
The school bell rang. It was a strange sound, more like an electronic chirping than a metal school bell. All the kids started to pile into the airlock. The sterilization liquid splashed around them, raising a mist. The bell continued to ring... the bell.

Kathy woke. She was disoriented for a moment.
She’d show them..
. The bell was still ringing. The phone! She snatched up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Dr. Morrison?”

“Uh huh”

“This is Dr. Nancy Potter. I’m the senior agent on the EIS team working Brazil. We have sort of a developing situation here. I sent out teams of agents to check into rumors we’ve been hearing from locals about undiscovered kill zones. The locals hadn’t seen anything – they were just reporting what other villagers had told them. Well nothing turned up for a while; but a few hours ago, I got confirmation of a previously unknown kill zone; then things started piling up. So far we’ve found fourteen KZ’s and counting... All of them are tiny, a hundred feet in diameter or less. Apparently this thing has been at work for some time. One of the villages might have been hit as long ago as six months. So far, the total number of deaths has jumped to four thousand.”

“Do you have documentation on this?” asked Kathy.

“Sure do, including full field reports. I already sent it to your e-mail address.”

“Okay, good... I don’t know what to tell you at this point. I need to go over the reports.”

“I understand. How are you folks doing on the research end? We got an update the other day that a Nobel Prize winner has been called in to help.”

“Yeah, that’s true. He just got here today and is settling in. Seems like a brilliant guy. Don’t worry, Dr. Potter. We’re on top of this and we’ll find an answer soon. You just keep up the great work you’re doing.”

“We will. Thank you Dr. Morrison.”

“Goodnight.”

Kathy hung up the phone. Her eyes were wide open. Her fight against sleep was just won. Her hands were clammy and the psychosomatic tingle in back of her neck had returned. Four thousand dead. Yesterday the number for South America was in the hundreds. She wondered how many more hidden kill zones they’d find. Were there small outbreaks in the United States that no one had noticed? Anchorage was a media circus, but who would have covered the deaths of a few campers in the middle of nowhere?

The clock read four a.m. Sarah Mayfair sat bolt upright in her bed. Her pulse was racing. Her fingers were hooked into the sheets, nails grated across the fabric as she squeezed. She was repeating the words to herself like a mantra.

“All dead... everyone dead…”

This was the second time she’d had the nightmare in as many days. Prior to last night’s dream, it had been over six months since the recurring nightmares had troubled her. Seeing the psychiatrist had worked. She’d thought the horror was over, gone forever; but now it was back and far worse than before.

Her boyfriend Kenny stirred next to her and then settled back into his sleep. She had been dreaming of a subterranean ocean as still as a pool, but this water lived and hated and schemed. It had swallowed Kenny alive. She could still see his lifeless body drifting down into the blackness of that yawning cistern to meet hundreds of thousands of other bodies collecting into a landscape of horror at the bottom. Everyone she knew, and in turn everyone they knew, and so on, and more, all the people from this part of the world, all were dead at the bottom of that still ocean. She could feel Kenny’s last thought, a single question whispered in darkness, “
Why?
” Earlier, she remembered knowing the answer, but now she could no longer grasp it. The idea was too large to fit into her head. “
Why?
” His last thought was like acid, burning that single question deeper into the flesh of her memory with every passing second. She rubbed tears from her eyes. She had gotten control of the nightmares before and been rid of them. She would master them again.

A shiver passed through her. Her skin was clammy with sweat. The shivers came again, this time harder and longer. She sensed a malevolence prowling below her bed, below the floorboards, deep underground. Through a forgotten way, she perceived subterranean water flowing in the darkness of rock and gravel thousands of feet below her.

As a child, she remembered having grandpa’s gift of finding water with a sapling branch. They were a family of water-witches, going back for generations. People used to pay grandpa to dowse for drinking wells. Grandpa had been gone now for many years.

Her night chills came again, this time thankfully weaker. The shivers faded to a dim electric tingle. She knew it wasn’t the underground waters themselves that were evil. It was something that existed in the water that scared her. Like a poison, death was flowing in the currents. She pushed the idea from her mind and refused to think about it. She scorned superstition and knew her thoughts were childish – but she couldn’t shake the belief that just thinking about this evil might summon it to do terrible things.

Kenny murmured in his sleep. Sarah touched his cheek lightly with her fingers. She could feel the soul that animated his flesh. She wanted him to wake. She wanted him to hold her and comfort her and say that everything would be okay, but that wouldn’t be fair. He worked hard and needed his sleep. Construction work was a difficult living; and besides, what she was feeling was crazy. There were no such things as water monsters or telepathy or clairvoyant dreams. She knew that her memories of Grandpa were just a child’s way of seeing things. The dowsing couldn’t have been real. The memories were just of a game Grandpa had taught her. If they found water, it was luck. There had to be millions of underground streams in New Jersey, with all its rivers and marshes. Maybe she never even walked around with a twig in her hands looking for water with Grandpa? It could have all been a child’s make-believe.

Sarah quietly got up and went into the bathroom. She clicked the door shut and found the dangling light chain. The harshness of the light blinded her for a moment. As she washed her face, her toes sought out the familiar cracks in the tile floor. The water was bracing. Patting her skin dry, she stared at her image in the mirror. She was twenty-three years old. Her honey colored hair was a tangle of wavelets. Her skin had a light olive complexion. She angled her head a little to one side. Her eyes were her best feature. They were a startling emerald green. She would have considered herself pretty if it hadn’t been for that nose.

The nose was a gift from something swimming in her father’s gene pool. The shape was the same as his. She smiled. She often thought of herself as the perfect mutt. Tracing her ancestry was a complicated thing. She was part Jewish, part Catholic, part English, part Indian, part Moroccan, and the list went on. Her ethnicity was often mistaken by the eyes of the beholder: Italians thought she was Italian, Middle-Easterners thought she was Middle-Eastern, Indians thought she was Indian, and Brits thought she was British. Staring at the lines of her face, she wondered about the future tribes of man. If terrorists didn’t poison or blow the whole mess up, she was probably the way people would look in a dozen generations. No more races, just one family of women and men, one tribe. Sometimes, she was troubled thinking about how America had continued changing from a melting pot of immigrants into a collection of tribes all wanting to be set apart for special treatment. The racial and class frictions were growing, the fuses burning. During work each day, she witnessed the escalating violence. She prayed that the American experiment would turn around and that its current failures were not a sign of things to come.

~

The morning sun was casting dusty shafts of light across the bedroom. Classic rock was playing from the clock radio on her dresser. Sarah had been unable to get back to sleep. The breakfast of oatmeal with bananas and yogurt was a pleasant lump in her belly. Ralph, a huge Rottweiler, was curled in front of her shoes. In a full-length dressing mirror, she adjusted the visor of her cap to form a perfectly straight line with the bridge of her eyes. The emblem of the Morristown Police department was polished to a flawless shine. Her image made her proud. She was a three-month rookie in what she considered the best police department in New Jersey.

A gust of wind sent tree branches of dried leaves chattering and whistling. Sarah looked through the parted curtains. Outside, fall was progressing toward winter. Piles of leaves were everywhere. She intimately sensed the cycles of nature and felt them working deep inside her body. Small animals were out collecting food to last through winter. Newborns from months ago would be facing their first cold. This cycle was the alchemy of life, fall flowing into the ritual death of winter; and then with eyes closed, all would wait for the rebirth of spring. Sarah was fascinated with how the works of nature formed patterns within patterns, small cycles of dependency that, when broken, could destroy so much more than the small part that had suffered the original damage.