Zippered Flesh 2: More Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad (35 page)

Pain and what?

Before he could begin to wonder, Byron found himself immersed in blinding white light that blotted out the grotesque workroom and its contents. When the light receded he was no longer in his friend’s basement. He was ...
somewhere else
.

The first thing Byron noticed was the intensity of the sunlight, bright beyond description, followed immediately by a dry, scorching heat that hurt his skin. In front of him, people were running and objects were raining down on them—
on him, too!
—falling from the sky like a hellish shower. But everything seemed to be in some kind of slow-motion. A plume of stinking black smoke curled up from the vicinity and obscured Byron’s vision on and off. He wobbled, unsure of what bound him in place. Sand crunched beneath his feet, but he gained little traction.

He looked down, blinking furiously. A shattered human body lay supine. A soldier’s body. It was Rick Dempsey, ripped apart, flesh and bone rent asunder and blood splatters spread out on the sand beneath him. Not far away, the hulk of some kind of vehicle burned, intense flames licking the air sluggishly. Debris still rained all around him, slowed so he could see each individual metal particle, some of them red-hot.

He understood, vaguely. Somehow Byron was in Dempsey’s memories. In his near–death. He was
there
, feeling it all with his own senses.

Byron could hear people yelling, screaming, but the voices were muffled and drawn out in the frozen-time moments. He heard a siren wailing, its sound more in time with him than the surrounding scene. But it wasn’t a siren, it was a voice—someone screaming. Byron looked down at Dempsey’s ruined body. It wasn’t him shrieking. Someone else, stepping gingerly through the slow-motion crowd, was screaming.

Then Byron was once again submerged in the brilliant white light, so brilliant that he almost fainted at its intensity. Then his sight returned and the details of the basement walls came flooding back.

He stared into Dempsey’s face. The boy had his mouth open in a scream but no sound emerged from his open mouth. Below that, his uncovered neck gaped where shrapnel had destroyed his vocal cords.

Jesus, could Byron have heard him screaming here, while he’d been in that other place?

He became aware that his hand was still jammed into Dempsey’s head, his fingers submerged in the pink fluid that leaked around them now. He also became aware that his body felt electric, sensitive to each particle of air that swirled around the close basement atmosphere.

And he became aware that, impossibly, he had an erection.

His skin tingled, in fact
all
his skin, and his clothes had become scratchy and constricting.

In what seemed like a nightmare fueled by some kind of bizarre drug cocktail, Lindstrom pulled Byron’s hand from inside Dempsey’s skull and led him away. It was as if a life-giving tether, an IV of blood replacing empty veins, had been ripped from his flesh. It was as if life itself had been interrupted like the pulling of a plug from a wall outlet, except that it was his flesh that now lost power and ...
what else?

Byron’s knees sagged and he felt the wet concrete hug him as he reached out for it. He grabbed it and felt nothing even as as his fingertips scrabbled uselessly on the rough floor, his nails splintering.

When he awoke, he was sitting half-propped on a stool at the basement bar with Cedric, a glass of Scotch in his hand. His fingers ached and he spied blood dripping on the glass. The pads of his fingers burned.

“You saw, didn’t you?” Cedric asked.

Byron swallowed the complaint that bubbled to his chapped lips. He nodded.

“Did you understand what you saw?”

Byron’s bleeding hand trembled, making it difficult to take a healthy gulp of single malt, but he gave it his best effort. “What the hell just happened?” he asked when he’d swallowed the burning liquid. His whole body felt on fire. His groin ached.

“I don’t really know,” said Lindstrom. “On surface, it’s some kind of projected memory loop, starting right at the moment Dempsey was wounded. The scene doesn’t change, but every time you go back new details emerge. Until something else ...”

“
Every time
you go back? Jesus, Cedric, what are you doing?”

“We can’t let him go, Byron. There’s too much at stake,” Lindstrom said. The physician’s hand fumbled with something on the bar. “It’s not just the time and space movement, whatever it is that allows you to experience the explosion.
That’s only the beginning!
Then there’s a different experience. The more you go in ...”

“You’re damn right, there’s too much at stake!” Byron erupted. “This is a young man’s life we’re talking about, Cedric! If we’re gonna do research let’s do it right, at a real facility, with permission from the goddamned patient and his family!”

Lindstrom didn’t answer, but something made a
thump
on the bartop.

Byron’s eyes widened. It was a large-frame nickel-plated revolver that Lindstrom was cupping beneath his right hand, a glass of Scotch in his left. Both his hands were steady.

“I tried, Byron. He wants it removed.”

“Huh?”

“He wants the shrapnel removed from his brain. At all costs. Even if it kills him.”

“So ... so you kidnapped him?”

“Listen, Byron, this is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. I’m not entirely talking about a scientific discovery; I’m talking about a spiritual awakening. Didn’t you feel it, the super reality beyond this simple physical reality? The rush of discovering senses you didn’t even know that you had?” Lindstrom caught himself and paused. Then he whispered, “Byron, wasn’t it like the best high you’ve ever had? Like a drug-induced high mixed with the best orgasm of your life, except multiplied tenfold?”

Byron paused. He had felt
something—
even
now it was stirring inside him, stirring in his groin, a feeling that he wanted to continue—an opening of his consciousness, and a desire to return to that place had started to burn. Not the physical place of Dempsey’s loop—he understood that the loop was the soldier’s own, and Byron had merely gone along for the ride, but the feeling that
all
his senses would open and there would be more to his life, his life that suddenly seemed so miserably bland and ...
closed
. But then his conscience spoke up. “There has to be another way, Cedric,” he said weakly.

Lindstrom leaned closer, placed his Scotch carefully on the bar, still holding the revolver loosely. “But don’t you see that something’s unlocked in that boy’s brain, an opening to
somewhere
, that we don’t yet understand? You realize what else might be there that we can’t even imagine? Don’t you want to know what happens when we die? Don’t you want to know what lies beyond the pearly gates?”

Byron snorted. “Be honest, what you really like is the boner it gives you! You like it just as you liked cocaine back in college. Admit it.”

“I did. I do. It’s like some kind of
crack
no one’s ever discovered, Byron. It’s like a potent mix of crack, heroin, testosterone, and ... and ... a sexual elixir, all in one.”

“But it’s not
yours
, Cedric. It’s not your head you’re defiling. And he wants the shrapnel out, you said so yourself.”

“So, you think I should go into that boy’s head and remove what may be the key to unlocking dimensions beyond the three simple ones we know, most likely killing him in the process? And then what? See if I can get permission to potentially lobotomize hundreds or thousands of volunteers in hope that we might find it again? Who’s going to allow that, Byron? Is that really a better option?”

Byron was thinking about the sand, and the too bright sun, and the smell of burning flesh. Even sitting here at Cedric’s basement bar he could feel the hot breeze against his skin. But then his thoughts turned to the amazing feeling of the
high
that had been there too, the sense-awakening electric jolt through his system that had given the experience its exhilaration. It—the memory of it coursing through him—was making him wish he could feel it again.

No, it was making him
crave
it.

But the boy—Lord, hadn’t he been through enough? He’d lost everything, just to end up being tortured by an insane doctor who should have been treating him with compassion?
Two
insane doctors! Byron forced himself to focus. He made his decision and turned to face Lindstrom. “I can’t let you do this, Cedric. I have to tell the authorities.”

Without a word, Lindstrom swung the pistol and aimed it at Byron. But Byron had been expecting the move. He blocked Lindstrom’s arm from locking and then punched him with his other hand over and over in the face, until Lindstrom collapsed, unconscious and bloody. His head hit the concrete with a wet
smack
.

He left Lindstrom sprawled out on the floor and hurried back to Dempsey in the workshop. When he entered, the boy was again passed out, strapped to the angled bench. Byron moved quickly. His hands were on the restraint securing Dempsey’s upper left stump, when he looked down at the boy’s face, which was so scarred that he seemed barely human. But Dempsey looked strangely peaceful in his sleep.

Byron took his hands from the restraint. What would it hurt to
go back
one more time before freeing the soldier? What would it hurt to feel the brain-crack moving through him, pumping through his veins and tendons? Even if he had to relive the soldier’s experience ... Lindstrom had said it was just the beginning, that it would change, evolve somehow. Byron wanted to learn about that change, and he wanted to feel the jolt again.

Lindstrom was knocked out in the other room, the boy was asleep.

No one would
know.

Byron touched Dempsey’s head lovingly, caressing his scalp until he located the soft spot in the soldier’s skull. He took a deep breath, guilt pricking his conscience. Then he jammed his thumb into the hole again and rotated it, twisting it into the open incision. The squishy inside reminded him of a gutted fish.

White light flashed like a photographer’s strobe, filling the room before making it disappear. Then Byron was in the desert, sun and sand making his skin sizzle. Ahead of him, people ran through the thick, slow-moving time, while pieces of the exploded vehicle floated down around him like feathers drifting in the wind, only seeming to gather speed when they speared human flesh.

The explosion seemed to echo continuously and Byron felt the sound waves rippling through the air. Now beside him lay Dempsey’s wrecked body, the scent of blood so pronounced that Byron tasted it. He could smell other things too: sweat, urine, feces, burning fuel, and barbequed human flesh. His senses were primal.

He looked up into a sky that was perfectly blue. Massive, oily-black-winged serpents—
could
they be the size of jumbo jets?
—wheeled in jagged orbits through the cloudless sky. Across from where he and Dempsey lay, Byron saw tall black figures ... impossibly tall, featureless figures with oily black skin like that of the serpents glistening in the sunlight. These figures stood still, staring directly at him through the haze of the explosion. The other people who scattered at molasses-speed away from the explosion didn’t seem to notice these tall figures, nor did they notice Byron, as if Byron and the dark figures were in a separate part of space-time, observing a prerecorded section of some other reality. Byron counted a dozen, but there might have been more. They approached him, moving in real time through the crowd, avoiding the slow-motion figures still fleeing the explosion. The figures dodged the crowd with the grace of panthers stalking through the jungle.

Though his rocked senses were overloading, Byron could see that the figures’ skins actually moved like continuous curtains of thick fluid flowing over their skeletons. They had no eyes or mouths, or distinctive features of any kind.

Byron was in the throes of the brain-crack high and felt no fear, despite the fact that they towered over him, bending down to examine him (and Dempsey, presumably). He felt himself grinning idiotically in trippy fascination, his groin awake as if they were beautiful human celebrities rather than grotesque alien beings.

The things gathered over Private Dempsey’s shattered frame and the private screamed in terror. He was conscious, his one remaining eye pleading with Byron while the other wept a black viscous liquid onto his cheek. The soldier reached out to him with an arm that ended in shredded flesh and bone.

A sharp pain stabbed the back of Byron’s head.

“When I awoke in that godforsaken basement, I could taste blood on my lips. At first I thought it was my blood, but then I lifted my head off of the floor and saw Dempsey and Cedric Lindstrom’s bodies.”

“And you called the police?” Chambers said.

“Yes.”

“You realize that version is, uh, different than what I have here in the official account.”

“Yeah, well ... my lawyer advised me to leave out the crazy parts.”