The End Came With a Kiss (6 page)

Ashlyn’s squinted eyes dance back and forth between us.

"Betty died in the test chamber, and for the most part, she was fine being in there, but every once in awhile she would begin a long dark growl."

"It was scary," adds Lau.

"She would begin a long dark growl," I repeat slowly. "So we did some research and found out that she had a dog in her apartment. We thought maybe she was worried about him, so we brought him in and put him in the chamber with her. It worked. The growling stopped."

"So what set her off this time?" she asks.

We both turn and look at Lau.

His skin looks pale. There is a distinct flicker of terror in his eyes.

"I think they’re getting hungry."

6

Ashlyn is beside herself. "You locked her in there and you didn’t
feed
her?"

"They don’t eat," stutters Lau.

"Of course they eat!"

"We fed the dog," he says, with conciliation, pointing to the dish in the middle chamber.

There is an unquenchable fire in Ashlyn’s eyes, so I step in to save him. "All right, mistakes were made. Now we have to fix them. What are we talking about? Is the whole city going to start eating each other?"

More perspiration is blossoming on Lau's forehead and upper lip. He isn't good under pressure. I once watched him vomit into a wastebasket before a presentation to overseas clients. When Lau gets nervous, it is best to keep a safe distance.

"Just calm down and tell me what's going on. Everything will be okay," I say. But, honestly, I'm not feeling it.

"Well as you know—or maybe you don't know—your body is a habitual eater. If you eat too little, or too much, your body adapts. If you eat lots of little meals, your body never feels like it has to store fat, because you're always giving it something to eat, but if you eat one meal a day you're going to get fatter even if you eat the same amount."

"We're not looking to go on a diet, Lau," I say gently. "Try to stay focused here. Okay, pal?"

He wipes his forehead with his sleeve and clears his throat nervously. "Well, if you go without food for a week or so, your body stops feeling hungry because it adapts to you not giving it the food it needs to make energy. Because you're not giving it food to turn into energy, it starts eating fat cells to get the energy it needs. This state is called ketosis. Your body can live in that state for a long time—you know—just eating itself. But eventually it runs out of cells to eat, and that's when the hunger returns. With a vengeance. ‘Cause you're starving."

"Why don’t their bodies just make more fat cells?"

"The body doesn’t make fat cells. It can regenerate muscle and tissue, but it needs food to make fat cells."

"O-kay," I say, drawing a deep breath and pushing it out. "So, we need to come up with a plan."

"What can we do, feed the whole city?" His voice shrills. "We can't feed the whole city!"

"Maybe we won't have to. Maybe they'll feed themselves."

"That's what they've been doing! And clearly, they suck at it!"

"All right, so maybe they'll just eat each other."

Ashlyn wretches.

"I’m not saying that’s what I want. I’m just saying maybe they'll take a few bites out of each other and be okay. They can heal up. Right?"

Lau looks at me like I have antlers. "If you were hungry, would you want to eat someone else who's starving?"

"Well, they don't
look
like they're starving!" I say, waving toward Betty.

"Most likely, they’ll eat pets first," he says, ignoring me. "Then wild animals they can outrun. I doubt they'll figure out how to adapt to using a can opener, unless it’s part of their usual loop. Without their motor memory, they're just about useless. No matter what, eventually, they're going to start going nuts like Betty did, and when one goes berzerk, the rest join in."

The thought of the entire building going into a frenzy causes a chill to run up my spine. There’s no way we can stay here. They’ll rip the building apart.

"All right. So we can’t stay here. It won’t be safe. We’ll have to pack up and move the lab to my place."

"Yeah," he says, with a crazy look. "We’ll just throw the hyperbaric chamber in the trunk of your car—hold on—let me grab a couple beakers and the centrifuge." The sarcasm rolls off his tongue, unimpeded. For a nervous guy, you’d think he would control his belligerent tendencies.

"You know what," I say, pointing my finger in mock warning, "that's not helping."

Ashlyn folds her arms. "Do you argue like this all the time?"

Her observation causes me to sigh. "She's right. We sound like fools."

Lau slumps in dejection.

"Are you any closer to a solution on how to reverse this thing?" I say, turning to look through an unbroken portion of the glass at Betty, still sitting on the floor covered in blood, still staring vacantly in front of her. She does appear slightly gaunt in the face, but I thought the supermodel look was just her thing. Katherine doesn’t look like that, her skin is full and firm. My wife! What will happen to her if they all go crazy and start eating each other? How will I protect her?

Lau's voice interrupts my thoughts. "It's not like fighting a virus. I can't give you a progress report. I either have a new positive mutagen or I don't." This isn't the first time he's said this. He says it practically every day.

"You know what I mean. Have you found anything promising?"

"I found these," he says, pulling a plastic pill container from his lab coat.

I take them from his hand. "An oral version of the compound?"

"No. Sleeping pills."

I snap him a look.

"I tried everything I can think of scientifically, and since I was sure we didn’t do anything to alter the compound Mr. Cartwright gave us, I started thinking maybe he switched the compound."

"Seriously?"

"I didn’t know for sure, so I took some of these experimental pills so I could go back and take a look at the original compound. They are definitely different."

I shake my head. "Hold on a second. You took sleeping pills to do what?"

"These are from a project I was working on with Dr. Robertson. They don't just put you to sleep, they induce lucid dreaming. The mind remembers everything we've ever done in explicit detail. But that information is inaccesible to our conscious mind. With these pills I was able to step into those memories and bring them back to the surface. It’s a lot like time travel."

I want to address the absurdity that it is anything like time travel, but there are more pressing questions. "Can you take what we have and recreate the original compound?"

"I’m trying, but it would be a lot faster if we could find the original samples Mr. Cartwright gave us."

"I can’t believe Cartwright could have done this."

"Maybe he didn’t—but someone did. The compounds are completely different. This wasn’t an accident. This was intentional."

"So what are you suggesting? The mainframe is down and all available power from the solar panels and basement generators are being used to power this lab. There’s no way to access the computer logs to track down the transit orders."

Lau’s face grows childlike. It is an expression I have seen many times. He is going to ask me to do something—and I’m not going to like it. "If you were to take the pills and go back..." His hand flies up. "Before you say no, hear me out."

I fold my arms.

"We have some of the most stringent protocols of any company I know of. Mr. Cartwright couldn’t have taken the original samples out of the building without clearance, even if they were his. So he had to have hidden them somewhere inside."

"Even if he did, I didn’t see him do it."

"Maybe you did, but you just didn’t think it was suspicious at the time."

I hate to admit it, but his case sounds solid.

"If you go back in time and see something, we could investigate it now, in the present."

"Okay. Let’s say I do this, what’s the risk to reward ratio? We don’t have time to mess around with something experimental. The loopers are going to start popping, and we need to feed them, at least the ones on this floor. And I have my wife to think about."

Ashlyn pulls her eyes away from staring at Betty. "I’m with Ben. We need to feed them."

Lau swallows. "Well, most of them have been feeding themselves a little. Betty is different. She’s been in the holding cell this whole time, so we might have some time."

"But they’re starving," says Ashlyn, noticeably increasing her grip on the shotgun in her hands.

Driven by some unknown compulsion to always be right, worsened by an inability to know when to keep his mouth shut, Lau proceeds to put his foot farther in his mouth. "What do you want to do, drive around the city and hand out turkey sandwiches?"

"You people are unbelievable!"

"All right. Everyone cool down," I say, stepping between them. "No one wants them to go hungry. We’re just thinking of logistics here. There is no way we can feed them all."

Ashlyn’s anger isn’t complete. There is a trace of something else in her countenance. Is it fear? No. That’s not it. It’s more like desperate concern.

"Are you worried about your family?" I say, holding a calming hand toward her. The last thing we all need is for her to go off half cocked and start shooting up the place.

She looks startled by my question.

"If you need us to help, we can. We can bring them food and make sure they’re safe."

Her chin wrinkles. Her arms let the shotgun sink down. "And how do I do that?" she says. "They’re all over the place."

"I’m sorry, Ash. I don’t know what to tell you."

"They’re all going to die, aren’t they?" The anger melts away entirely. "It’s hopeless."

"But they’re already dead," says Lau.

"I mean dead-dead, like, not-moving, dig-a-hole-for-them, dead."

"I’m confident that their cell regeneration makes that quite impossible," he says with passive aggressive arrogance.

"But you don’t know for sure."

"The word confident means..."

"I KNOW WHAT CONFIDENT MEANS!"

"Enough!" I scream. "This isn’t helping anyone."

The sound of my voice causes Lau to jump back into his timid hole. He can get out of hand, but is easily reined back in. Overall, he’s not a bad guy. Sure, he’s an opinionated know-it-all germ-o-phobe, but he’s always been a dedicated employee willing to go the extra mile to get the job right. Since all this began he has been working long grueling hours trapped in this lab, trying to save the human race, though he’s never really felt like part of that race.

"Look," I say. "They’re not in any danger yet. Betty was one of the first infected, and we didn’t feed her at all."

"We fed her some," says Lau, sheepishly.

"Okay, but she’s probably the worst case. So we have a little time. How long does this pill take to do its job?"

"It’s experimental. The times vary. But you probably won’t be under for more than an hour."

I look at Ash. "What do you think? Can you hold up for an hour and let me see if I can figure something out?"

She shrugs. "What does it matter either way?"

"If we can find the original compound, we might be able to heal people. It’s a start anyway."

"While you’re under," offers Lau, I’ll continue to analyze the data and see if I can figure out the difference between the two compounds. The original wasn’t designed to spread and I’m guessing it wasn’t designed to kill people either. It might restore people in its natural form."

"So we have a plan. It’s not much of a plan, but it's a start."

7

I hear Lau’s words in the back of my head, "Don’t think of it as dreaming. Think of it as time travel." I’m standing in front of my house. This is where my mind has dropped me. This must be as significant for me as it is for Katherine. I see her running toward me. She stops, chest heaving, tears streaming down her cheeks, dragging the mascara from the corners of her eyes. But before she can say the words I have heard in my head so many times, everything begins to change.

We are no longer standing. I am sitting, and she is in my arms looking up at me. The dark black streaks of her makeup are longer now. Her tears twinkle in the light of the setting sun streaming in through the back porch window.

Why did it shift so quickly?

A distant voice says, "Don’t think of it as dreaming. Think of it as time travel."

Time travel? What day is this? Is this the day my wife dies? My stomach tightens and my face hardens. I don’t want to be here. But I miss her so much I will endure this pain to hear the sound of her voice again, to feel the warmth of her skin and her breath on my face. Even as I think it, I feel her chest rising and falling against my belly. Alive in my arms, my precious Kate is here with me. I am unable to reconcile the joy as it mixes with sorrow. I never thought I could love so deeply. A part of me is dying. The loveliest part. The better part.