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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

DAY THREE

I
AM NOT A MAN,
W
ENDELL
wrote, onto the wooden table in angular scrawls with a pencil too small for his hands. He repeated it, in a long column down the table.

I am not a man

not a man

not a

He stopped, seeing his fingers pressed into the painted wood of the pencil. It was only Monday, only three days since his escape, but his nails were already darker. He dropped the pencil, and brought his hand up in front of his face. The fingers had narrowed, as if the muscles had become desiccated, leaving knuckles thick like acorns. He brought his face closer.

“Blood,” he said. Yes, the nails were darker, but at the edge of each was something dry, flaky, rust-colored. He turned his hands over, then examined his arms for scratches or wounds scabbed over. Nothing. It wasn’t his.

“Then whose is it?”
Wendell asked himself, but he wasn’t sure. He remembered running through cold hallways, and then the pitch black of the woods. Between darkness and light there were rows of houses, wet streets and the looming mass of the city skyscrapers. There had been a few stray dogs and a deer, but they had all caught his odor and fled in the opposite direction. And there was the woman in the kitchen of the house where he stole his clothes, but it wasn’t her. He had watched her washing dishes from his position behind an alley dumpster, waited for her to turn to the cupboards, then dashed to the clothesline in the yard where a gray t-shirt and jeans had been carelessly left on the line during the rain. Wendell remembered turning from the house and running towards an adjacent abandoned lot, so it couldn’t have been her. After the woman, he didn’t remember encountering anyone else. He left the abandoned lot for a dumpster two blocks down the street, where he tossed his hospital-issued terrycloth slippers, sopping and mossy, and found a pair of threadbare canvas sneakers two sizes too small. He had fallen asleep in the dumpster, waking to the rain drumming against the plastic half top that was his roof. Peering out, he remembered the faded smudge of sun sitting near the horizon and fighting against the clouds. The streets had been empty. From there, his memory had gone dark.

“But maybe, there was…”

Somewhere there had been a shape, darker than the darkness, standing in his way. It approached, and Wendell—

“No, I didn’t.” His hands trembled. No hammer, no baseball bat, no knife or long sliver of glass. He patted down his pockets, knowing they were empty. He hadn’t brought any weapon into the apartment with him, nothing that he remembered, at least. Which brought him back to his hands.

It’s all just starting
, he thought. It had in fact started much earlier; he was now just seeing the physical changes. He made a fist, heard the knuckles crack, then dropped both hands into his lap.

“I’m not a bad man,” Wendell said, sounding desperate, now that he knew where all of this was headed. “I couldn’t do… I’m not a
bad man
.”

not a man
, the table read.

And he wasn’t a man, at least not as he once was. Slowly, but with chilling certainty, he was changing into something not human. The embryo of something unnatural grew inside of him, fermenting with an alien urgency. Unnatural to him, but certainly not to the men who put it there. He couldn’t see it clearly, not yet, except in subtle ways—like in his hands. But there it was, fibrillating just beneath his surface, promising to grow, racing through arteries like freeways and pouring itself into bones and organs. What he saw in the bathroom mirror was only the ghost of Wendell Mackey; what had begun to die during his captivity was replaced with an imposter, a quickly deteriorating shell protecting something new.

The sneakers were pinching his toes. Too small to begin with, collecting water like sponges and then drying when he reached his mother’s apartment sucked them even closer to his feet. He reached down and untied each, needing to wiggle and pry to get the canvas to budge. Finally the right popped off, then the left. He tossed them against the wall next to the front door, and then looked down at his feet. They ached, and with good reason. Long dark bruises ran down both feet, tracing the lines of bones, each terminating at a blackening toenail like an angry exclamation point. The once pink skin was darkening, hardening. Wendell reached down to touch a foot, saw his hand next to it, and straightened up.

not a

Like the line of words on the table, he was disappearing.

“What did they do to me?” Wendell whispered.

They.

The trouble was that they didn’t have horns. Evil was supposed to
look
evil, but there was no waft of sulfur following them as they entered the room, no cloven hooves or forked tongues. Theirs was a world of mathematical purity, the ones and zeros and clockwork rigidity of scientific laws, with all the outward banality of an abacus. All of which didn’t immediately call to mind evil. But in the ordinary hid a frightening impulse. At the base of their inquiry was a hunger, a lust, to not merely open new scientific doorways, but to control them, to bend laws of nature to their whim

They worked in a drab building at the far corner of a lot, deliberately left alone like an unmarked gravestone. His mother had suggested the job to him, an opening she said was advertised in a local job flyer. Not likely, Wendell thought, knowing that what happened there didn’t lend itself well to the potential public scrutiny of job postings. It was more likely that Maggie, the county nurse who coaxed her way into his mother’s apartment once a week, had mentioned it, some sort of insider medical information, a kind gesture for someone in need. But even placid little Maggie, able to absorb Diane Mackey’s barbs like a saint, probably knew little about it. All the better for her, Wendell thought.

“Better money than what you’re getting right now,” his mother had told him over the phone. “School kids’ll get you sick.” As an assistant groundskeeper for the Kenniport Charter Schools, the only students Wendell ever encountered were those cutting class as he mowed the campus lawns. But his experience—after his abortive attempt at community college—meager though it was, had been enough to secure the groundskeeper’s position at the institution.

The institution. They had paid him cash under the table, alluring at first, as it accommodated Wendell’s desire for anonymity. And the increased wage, far more than Kenniport had ever paid him, allowed him the dream of eventually moving out of the city. But never having a check with the organization’s name on it, or a W-2, or even a parking permit, became problematic in short order, as the drab building awoke to him. All he had was the lonely walk to the end of the lot, to the building that daily shed small chunks of its brick skin, like something slowly rotting. But money was money, and for the brain-dead tasks of riding a mower around the building, repainting the parking lot lines, or replacing the dead bulbs in the sidewalk lights, things couldn’t have been simpler.

“Shoulda stayed in community college,” Wendell mumbled.

He looked back down at his hand, turned the palm up. He slowly curled his fingers in, like paper curling in a fire. He thought back to the beginning, to the mowers and paint brushes, and the short-lived satisfaction of a move up the custodial ladder. It was only on Wendell’s third day of work at the institution that the facilities manager had tasked him and two other men to set up a barricade of white fencing out by the main road leading to the parking lot. He remembered the three of them moving the institution’s pickups to the back corner of the lot, where a low line of nondescript brick buildings that constituted the physical plant stood. They dragged the fences from a garage, loaded them onto the trucks, and made the trip back to the main road before the sun had risen.

At the entrance a crowd had already begun to gather.

“Crowd control,” said one of the men, named Laughlin, to a quizzical Wendell. “Happens from time to time. Usually when one of them Hollywood celebs needs something to cry about.” Laughlin drove the pickup towards the crowd and stopped before two women drawing slogans onto placards with red markers. “We’ll set up here.”

The white pieces of hard plastic fencing fit together to make a broad semi circle around the growing group of protesters. They weren’t the black turtlenecked youths with scrub beards and dreadlocks that Wendell had seen on the news. These were largely well-dressed, young and clean and lacking the ideological fury spread like war paint on the faces of the anarchists on television. They smiled at Wendell, but their faces hardened as they turned to Laughlin.

“Last time,” Laughlin said, “I got in one of their faces. Got some air time. Got me suspended. Swear the guy spat at one of the docs coming in for work. Swear it happened. So I grabbed the guy, shook him a little, and dropped him. Nothing big, you ask me. The only reason I didn’t get fired was because of that doc. Went to bat for me. Nice guy, he was.” Laughlin turned to Wendell and slapped him on the arm. “Gotta stick together here, you know?”

The third man of their crew, a part-time grad student named Connor Darby, approached with a cell phone. “The boss says the cops’ll get here in about fifteen. So we gotta stay until they show up.”

“What do we do till then?” asked Wendell.

“Play cops,” answered Laughlin.

“And don’t get too close,” said Connor. “These’ll bite.” He stuck his thumb over his shoulder at the growing crowd and flashed a gummy grin.

“Just toss these remaining sandbags on the feet of the fences,” Laughlin told Wendell. He pulled one off the pickup and heaved it to Wendell. Wendell began to walk them two by two over to the semicircle fence.

One protester was trying to get his attention, lightly lifting his hand in a hesitant attempt at a wave.

“It’s not what you think,” the protestor said.

Wendell kept his eyes down.

“I said it’s not what you think. Hello?”

“Just doing my job,” Wendell responded, looking up at a young man, on his toes and leaning against the fence, his glasses too big for his face.

“It’s not what you think. Do you know what they do in there?”

“Like I said… Plus, I just started working here.”

“They make poison.” The young man pushed his head forward. “All those lab coats, those so-called experts. You think they’d know better.”

“Don’t lean on the fence.” Wendell dropped the sandbags and went back to the truck for more. On returning, the young man was still there, eager to make himself known.

“Look, I just figured you should know. We just want to help. I figure we can help you too.”

“What, you gonna pay my rent?” Wendell said. “I gotta work, just like everybody else.”

BOOK: The Death of Wendell Mackey

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