Immortality (55 page)

Lightning flashed to the ground in the distance. Sarah frowned. Something was making her feel ill, almost faint. She adjusted the vent controls to draw in outside air. Wind blowing over her face chilled the perspiration that was beading up across her skin. Without warning, a violent shiver overwhelmed her. As the tingles dimmed, everything became clearer. She was aware of a mild premonition feeling which must have been there all along. The small ball of fear was growing inside her. She knew what was coming.

Wet scenery rolled by the windows. Off to the left, she saw the glow of a town. The light formed a kind of halo within the mist. She was vulnerable on this empty road. She sensed lethal energy building somewhere off in the cradle of the night. The danger was like a storm within a storm. The feeling grew into a sense of foreboding. The killer towered over her in the distance. Its presence was like an immense electrical potential. In that dark moment, she wished the killer down on Captain Dupont and Alex and all the others. What was running through her mind was only a wish. She couldn’t control this thing. She knew when zones would occur and sometimes where, but nothing more. One was out there prowling in the darkness before her; that’s all she knew. She felt guilty for the vengeful wish but thought it again, just the same.

A kill zone whisked through the Richmond area a few hours after nightfall. The zone moved south like a breeze of death across the land. The shadow passed through refugee camps, small towns and wilderness. Unlike flesh and blood that could be stopped by razor wire, the lethal signal passed through the I64 line without the slightest resistance. The signal radiated along a path almost parallel to the highway Sarah had traveled. At its weakest, the signal triggered no kill zones and left no damage. Where its strength was greatest, men and women died. The ignition signals, relayed from seed to seed, soon passed beyond the target zone and lost their deadly effect in areas that were not primed to kill. People littered the ground while many more were spared to wander in shock.

Alex was in the Twilight Café having dinner with Theresa and Sergeant Hunt. He’d been on an extended patrol and had just come off duty. He felt depressed about Sarah but was convinced getting her out of his life was for the best. He ate another slice of the open faced turkey sandwich and then followed it with a fork full of peas and tiny cubed carrots.

He knew Sarah had problems. She’d become spooky. The decision had been difficult; but if he hadn’t pushed her, she might have stayed; and that would have meant watching her grow more scary and depressed with every passing day. He couldn’t handle what he saw in her eyes; and anyway, she deserved better and would find it somewhere. He set down his fork. His appetite was gone.

“You did the smart thing,” said Theresa.

“I could have been straight with her.”

The zone passed through buildings, trees, and hills as if they were ghosts instead of solid forms. The signal washed through the plate glass windows of the Twilight Café. Alex watched in disbelief as a woman fell off a counter stool. Outside, a patrol car rolled into a parked van, glanced off its side, and came partway through the front of the diner. Cinderblocks crumbled. Alex felt a tightening in his left side. Theresa’s face dropped into her plate of food. Alex’s pacemaker was unable to manage the load. He stood up gripping his shirt. He was amazed at realizing this was his death.

Artie looked down at the stained wooden floor of the hospital tent. His sneakers were spattered with blood from the men he’d killed. He thought about the police at the I64 line who tried to shoot him instead of helping. He looked at Suzy who was sleeping off the effects of anesthesia and brutality. His head ached from what had turned out to be a bullet graze. His life had become a senseless blur of violence.

Suzy had been in the mobile surgical unit for over an hour. Emergency surgery had been performed to repair internal damage to her ovaries and small intestine. They’d lost their child, and the doctor said they wouldn’t be having any more; but Suzy was going to be alright. She had to be. Artie would not allow any other possibility.

Artie looked up as a nurse came over to check Suzy’s vital signs. The nurse crumpled to the floor. Artie stared dumbfounded. He was unable to accept what he was seeing. The nurse was clearly dead. There was a crash outside. The lights flickered and then went out. He could sense patients and medical staff dying silently all around him. It was as if their ghosts were swirling in the air. Artie found Suzy’s hand and gripped it. Her fingers slightly curled around his. He was grateful that she was asleep. There was nothing he could do. He cursed god and pleaded for Suzy to be spared.

The ball of fear had waned some time ago, leaving only a hollow spot inside her. Sarah was driving rapidly through the darkness. Bad weather was making the going hazardous. Warning signs for I-40 had started to appear. I-40 could take her west all the way to California. The intersection came sooner than she’d expected. She looked at the ramp, which lead off into a bank of mist. Her foot eased off the accelerator. On the seat next to her was the CDC application that Dupont had written up just to degrade her.
Laboratory test rodent
– he’d rubbed it in as a final way of gloating how he’d taken everything from her; but in his revenge, he’d inadvertently offered something real while trying to shred the last bits of her self-respect. Helping the CDC was something she could do that would make a difference. The highway she was on led to Atlanta and the CDC, but there was I-40 coming into view; she thought about the freedom of the west coast, the beaches, the people. Would her past catch up with her there? Her jaw tightened in defiance of what that snake had done and tried to do. Going to the CDC would probably mean more to her than to the doctors who almost certainly didn’t need one more medical subject. The car almost refused to go in one direction or the other. With a feeling of guilt, she took the ramp onto I-40: the images of freedom had a more powerful draw.

Close to an hour later, Sarah passed from beneath the canopy of thunderclouds. Stars were everywhere. She had mapped the entire route to California in her mind. For an instant, a hospital tent and a nurse crumpling to the ground flashed vividly though her mind. Sarah knew the nurse had been caught in a kill zone. The experience was like Virginia Beach, but different, weaker, almost like an echo of something bad that was already passed. She tuned the radio, searching for news. An old rock and roll station came in over the static. She searched farther on the dial. A road sign floated by in the darkness: twenty-six miles to the Tennessee border. While paused on a country station, the music stopped mid-song and an announcer came on to deliver breaking news.

“
A kill zone has swept through Richmond, Virginia. Initial reports indicate hundreds of people killed. Riots have broken out on the north side of the I64 quarantine line. There has been little or no police response. National Guard and Army units have been called in...”

Sarah slowed to a stop, barely onto the shoulder of the interstate. All the people she’d been living and working with were dead. She had no question about their fate. She was as certain as if she’d been there to witness it. The remainder of the news went on without her hearing a word. A pair of pickup trucks drove by, blaring their horns at each other. The commotion didn’t touch her. Her thoughts were in an airtight cocoon. With spite in her heart, she had wished that horror down on them, down on Alex, and it had happened. She looked at her palms. Her hands wouldn’t stop trembling. The sensible part of her argued it was crazy to think she’d actually caused this; but even if she was innocent of the actual crime, she was certain now that she’d known in some darkened repressed thought where death was heading and done nothing to warn them. They wouldn’t have believed her anyway. No, that wasn’t true. Alex would have believed her. He knew. She closed her eyes. Was it true that she had let them die? Had she become that much of a monster? Tears ran out from under her closed lids.

~

Sarah was sitting on the ground by a campfire. The smell of burning wood was thick in the air. Heat from the fire buffeted her face. She didn’t remember much of her drive. She’d been down country roads and freeways, through turns without thinking. She had long gaps of missing time. It had been like drug-induced amnesia. At some point, she had stumbled upon another highway heading west but had no idea which one. She could barely remember pulling into this rest area. Lights from the campfires had attracted her. She’d been like a moth hungering for solace in the flames and oblivion of self-destruction.

Her cheeks burned from salt. She vaguely remembered eating something that people had given her. If only she could stop the other memories. She was acutely aware of every detail of her repeated journeys into the hellish centers of kill zones. She had relived those memories over and over again and had come to the conclusion she’d been left unharmed because she was somehow part of what was causing it. She was like a loaded gun lying in a field where children played. Someone innocent would always die.

Wood snapped in the fire. The circle of rock surrounding the flames was jagged and reminded her of glowing teeth. The circle was like the open maw of some hellish snake. She glanced at a man sitting next to her. His hand was on her knee. The other people had gone off somewhere. She remembered there had been two women, another man, and a young girl. She couldn’t remember this man’s name but knew he was the leader and that he was a full-blooded Indian from an Arizona tribe. He was handsome in a rough way, with salt and pepper hair. He had asked her questions about what it had been like to stand in the center of death. She had answered candidly. She no longer felt any need to conceal her past. He’d said he wanted sex as part of the deal they’d made. The sex had something confusing to do with sharing her experiences of the murderous spirit. She agreed as casually as if he’d asked her name, which he hadn’t. Nothing mattered. She was a castaway drifting though a world that was no longer real. She looked off at the passing traffic; the headlights, burning paths through the night, left colored trails in her vision. He unbuttoned her shirt. She said, “No,” and moved his hand away. She remembered taking long gulps from a bottle of something to wash down the drugs. She had swallowed over a dozen small capsules of psilocybin. She had been told the capsules were filled with powdered psilocybin mushrooms, a powerful drug used by his Indian tribe for religious ceremonies. She had been told that one capsule was enough. She had traded this man a case of Marlboros and herself for a small, Ziploc bag that was half full of capsules. Sarah knew she was overdosing and didn’t care. She didn’t believe the drugs could kill her, but maybe it would erase her mind. Oblivion was what she wanted and what she craved. The little girl had been watching her earlier. Where had the child gone off to – like an Alice in Wonderland? Vague, drug-induced thoughts moved through her mind like pieces of flotsam drifting through the depths of a bottomless lake. The psilocybin was beginning its hallucinogenic work on her.

“The plague is a thinking machine,” she said from nowhere. “Not a god, but a living organic machine.”

How had these words come from her lips? Was it the psilocybin? She recognized the idea was not from her own thoughts, even though the idea felt like it had been part of her memory for a very long time. Images like some kind of schematic diagram had been part of the idea. The man removed one of her arms from her clothing, then the other.

“Each bacterium by itself is nothing more than a vessel, but all of them collected together are something.” She frowned. “Couldn’t the bacteria be like the cells of a body, each just a small part of something much bigger?”

The man removed more of her clothing along with some of his own. She was experiencing this new idea in her mind as if it were a forgotten memory, which it was not. The false memory expanded to encompass all her senses. Soon she was deep within the movie replaying in her mind. At moments, the recollection was like a computer simulation of reality; at other times, it was more like a dream. She saw floating at the bottom of a sea, a gelatinous creature like a great, round jellyfish. From her memories, she knew the creature was a mass of congealed bacteria tethered to the seabed with tendrils of the same substance as its body. All of it was made of thinking material that worked like a human brain, only vastly larger and far more advanced.

“How large would this thing have to be to end up as wise as a god?” she asked the night.

The man started working on her jeans. He leaned her backward so that he could tug them off. She kept talking as if she were still clothed. The cold air raised goose flesh across her skin. She felt almost nothing. She stopped talking as the man’s weight pushed down onto her. Leaves and grits of dirt pressed into her back. She was now miles away in a different world conjured by the hallucinogenic forces of a psilocybin overdose. She suspected this god-machine was the source of all her false-memories of ideas and diagrams. She wondered how she could be psychically linked to this global colony of machine bacteria. Did it live inside her too, like a glimmer of alien light?

~

In the middle of the night, Sarah awoke from dark hallucinations. She couldn’t remember much. She was clothed. The man was gone. He’d left her a tattered blanket and a foggy mind. Dried leaves had blown into her face and hair. She dimly knew he’d gone off to sleep with his wife. She sat up and wrapped the red wool blanket around her shoulders. There was a vague smell of something stale from the blanket. The fire was smoldering but still giving off heat. The coals were fanned bright orange by a gust of wind. Some of the embers blew off into the night air spiraling into the sky. She was surprised at being awake and able to think at all. Her brain felt sore and confused. She could still feel the psilocybin working deep inside her body. She had to have taken enough to send her on a one-way mental journey. Why was she back?