Vitals Read online

  “Sorry.”

  She shook her head. That was long past and very far away.

  At some point I thought it was appropriate to ask, “What next?”

  “You’re going to stay here,” she answered.

  “All right.”

  She looked at me. “You know what’s happening?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you care?”

  “Not really. Not yet, anyway.”

  “You should care.”

  “Why don’t you just plug me?” I pointed my finger and clucked my tongue.

  “That isn’t the way we do things. Nobody enjoys just killing people, not if there’s another way.” That sounded funny, coming from a woman who had so coldly and quickly blown away the guy in the herringbone suit.

  “Making other people kill people, that’s better, cleaner,” I said, just to keep up the conversation. “No doubt about it.”

  She lifted her eyes to the horizon. Sun going down fast, rocks all around.

  “If somebody’s going to shoot me, I’d rather you do it,” I said.

  “You really haven’t a clue what’s happening, do you?”

  “Well,” I said, and stared at the last of the sun, then at her, also luminous and beautiful, “you’ve rubbed me with something from your skin and body. Your oils and juices. They probably have special bacteria mixed in, from the skin cream in the bottle . . . a heavy-duty dose. You didn’t use soap.” Too bad I hadn’t assembled all these observations earlier. A freshly fucked man, etc. “They’re putting out their special peptides and such, keeping me happy, but . . . somehow I’m still protected against being made into a zombie. Maybe it’s the treatment I gave myself. Or the antibiotics. I really don’t know.”

  “Integumycin is designed to stay in the body and not leak out through the skin,” Lissa said.

  “Is that a fact?”

  “So you are vulnerable, more than you know. But I won’t make you kill somebody else, if that’s any consolation,” she said. “Whom do you think I work for?”

  “Nobody,” I said, lying with a smile. “I think you’re beautiful.”

  “I belong, heart and soul, to Silk, and so does my trainer.”

  “Not surprising,” I said.

  “Why isn’t it surprising?”

  I thought it over, trying to round up all my free-range thoughts. “I suppose they find it useful to track people doing research in, you know, longevity, and those in the forefront merit special attention. A wife, maybe, to keep tabs on them, report on progress, work them if need be.” I frowned. “But I’m not clear on one thing. How do they program you?”

  “They don’t, not that way,” she said. “I’m an orphan. They found me in Budapest.” She pronounced it Booda-pesht.

  “What about the parents you introduced to Rob and me?”

  She shook her head.

  “They’re Silk, too? Wow. Must be pretty widespread.”

  “Bigger than you want to imagine,” she said.

  The evening was getting on nicely. The air, easily a hundred degrees in the late afternoon, was now cooling into the low eighties. We were having a very nice chat.

  The man in gray must have been sweltering in the Toyota, but he didn’t move.

  “Could you take me back into our room and rub me some more?”

  “You don’t need it,” she said.

  “Why don’t the bacteria affect you the same way?”

  “I carry cultures tailored to make Rob happy,” she said. “What he was doing, his research, blocked some of their effects, and after a while he got suspicious. He wouldn’t make love anymore. Then he left me.”

  “You really are very, very attractive.”

  “In a few more hours, you’ll want to be around me all the time, like a lover or a wife,” Lissa said.

  “Puppy obsession,” I said.

  “Don’t get me wrong. I will let you die.”

  “I don’t doubt it for a moment.”

  “Don’t think you’re James Bond and I’m going to fall in love with you, too.”

  “I won’t think that, I promise. Not if it makes you unhappy.”

  She got up and took my face in her hands. “You aren’t half the man your brother was. I won’t be sad when you die.”

  “You had to be in love with Rob to do your job convincingly,” I said.

  “It was something like love,” Lissa said.

  “Maybe you inspired him,” I said.

  “You each had half the secret, but you never put the two halves together,” she said. “You were stupid, quarreling brothers. It’s a nasty little secret, anyway, you know? You have no idea how nasty.”

  “So tell me,” I said. “Why doesn’t Silk target drug dealers? Tyrants? Serial killers? Really bad people. You should work to improve society, rather than going after arrogant scientists.”

  “I don’t know,” Lissa said.

  “Was my wife part of Silk?”

  “No.” Then she added, “I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t think she was, either. She wasn’t like you at all. Not nearly so beautiful.”

  “Silk gives that to us. Not that I was an unpretty child.”

  An unpretty child. I rolled that around, savoring it. “You swallow Mudd’s little sparkly pills and you’re suddenly lovely?” I asked.

  She brought her brows together, narrowed one eye. She didn’t get the reference. A woman marries a scientist but doesn’t watch Star Trek? No wonder Rob had become suspicious. “We are very healthy,” she said. “No diseases.”

  “Still, you’re going to get old and die,” I said, and suddenly wished I could take it back. A horrible thought. Beauty fading.

  “The other way is madness.”

  “What about Golokhov?” I asked, innocently enough. “Is he going to live forever?”

  Lissa slapped me hard. She grabbed me under my arms and dragged me into the motel room, which was still hot, and pushed me back on the bed. “I won’t allow someone to come in here and hurt you,” she said. I saw tears on her cheeks. “But it will make me happy if you hurt yourself. It will make me very happy. I have to leave now. Go to sleep.”

  I plumped a pillow and tried to do as she asked, but it was too hot. Through slitted eyes, I watched her gather up her luggage, go outside, and close the door.

  Heard the lock click.

  Lissa and the man in gray engaged in a heated exchange outside the room. Something about “transition” and “all finished.” They were really going at it, but after the first couple of sentences, I didn’t understand a word. They were speaking Hungarian, maybe, or Russian.

  I tried hard to sleep. Glanced at the alarm clock by the bed: 10:00 p.m. I had slept a little. My body felt as if it was coming down with something. Shivery warmth. Could be a gross bacterial infection. Maybe Lissa had pathogenic bacteria in her mix, as well as persuasive ones. Little flesh-eaters. Wouldn’t that be a kick?

  “What kind of retirement plan do you have, sweetie?” I shouted into the dark, hoping she would hear and come in and slap me. All sorts of little concerns drifted through my head, especially when I saw that another hour had passed and I still hadn’t heard a peep outside. Was it okay if I got off the bed?

  “Do you sleep in dormitories, communally?” I called out. “Or is it a little, you know, Shaker village sort of thing? Not celibate, that’s for sure. Are you celibate with your family? You did say you have family, but you’re an orphan, from Booda-Pesht. All sorts of beautiful women back there. In the former Soviet Union and Hungary and Romania and Czechoslovakia. They want to come here and find rich husbands.”

  The door did not open. Perhaps I could make her pay attention if I did something rash. I looked around the room, got up, and switched on all the lights. Peeled off my clothes except for my briefs. Examined the electrical cords to the lamps. One was frayed. I applied the bare wire to some white stuffing creeping out of the cheap quilted bedcover. Nothing happened.

  I wandered around restlessl
y, thinking about what Lissa had said. She wouldn’t make me hurt someone else. Maybe she couldn’t. I had felt the touch of Silk’s bacterial persuasion in the DSV, in the hotel room with Banning in San Francisco. I was feeling it now. But I could not be turned into an assassin. That made me glad. The saucy little widow of my twin could not make me kill somebody else. That was significant.

  You both have half the secret.

  I looked on the dresser, then on the nightstand in the corner. Lissa had left little matchbooks around the room with their covers open. How accommodating. She would probably return to the room and check on me if I started a fire. At any rate, she would approve.

  I pulled a match from the nearest book and struck it, then dropped it into a metal wastebasket. The little doily at the bottom of the basket caught fire and started smoking. Curious, I looked up at the smoke detector. Not a peep. Batteries dead, probably. Cheap hotel. Frame and wallboard, with a continuous attic, great for sucking air and spreading flames. Burn fast and hot like a cracker box.

  I pulled out bathroom tissues and set them around the room, wondering all the while what little areas of my brain Silk’s bacteria were activating. Through my skin. In my nose. On my cock? Up in my urethra? The salty coffee. In my gut again. Something to do with dopamine and adenylate cyclase inhibitors, activated G proteins, cyclic AMP. A little symphony orchestra of subtle effects, direct and indirect.

  The urge to join mob action? More likely the urge to please a powerful woman, to please my mother, my wife. Women have such a strong influence on young men. Pyro boy locked in hotel room pining for a good rubdown, baby won’t you light my fire.

  The tissues I arranged on the worn carpet burned like little campfires. I imagined myself looking down on Sherman’s troops camped around Atlanta, waiting to torch the whole city. The city, of course, would have to be the bed. I set to work ripping the mattress, impressed by my cleverness.

  I have half, Rob had half. Put them together . . . All the little pathways line up, and we’re in it for the Long Haul.

  The doorknob turned. I stood back from my labors, curious about the noise. I was wearing only jockey shorts and my watch. I was ready for Lissa if she wanted another session.

  A little swearing, a low deep voice, barely audible. Scratching. All right, this was the guy who was coming to kill me. If Lissa had lied, had actually gone out to arrange for my murder, rather than let me burn up in a fire, that was fine. Less cruel, actually.

  The door burst open with a bang and the old heater behind it rattled and dropped some screws internally. A big shadow stood there against the night, six feet at least, bulky, with a glint of streetlight on a balding head.

  “Hal Cousins?”

  “That’s me,” I said, turning to make a better target.

  “You look just like him.” The silhouette’s shoulders drooped, and I heard him let out his breath. “You’re a mess.”

  “I am in proper attire.”

  “We’re hauling your ass out of here, understand?”

  “Not unless that’s what Lissa wants.”

  “Fuck Lissa.”

  It was beneath me to discuss such things.

  “Who are you?” I asked, dropping back seductively on the bed. Everything was so sexy.

  The big guy stomped out the little tissue campfires. He pulled me off the bed and stood me up. “You stink,” he said.

  “I smell like tea and sandalwood, don’t you think?”

  “Hell no. You smell like water-buffalo shit.”

  He propelled me by the shoulders into the bathroom and opened the shower-stall door. I stepped in, smiling. Without closing the door, he turned on the water—a blast of cold, quickly turning hot—and grabbed a couple of toy bottles of shampoo from the counter. Then he palmed a wet washcloth and lathered me all over, scrubbing me in quite intimate ways, which I enjoyed.

  My skin felt scalded. He shut off the water with a bang of old pipes and pulled me out of the stall. I turned coyly for his inspection.

  “Where’s your stuff?” he asked. I had brought nothing with me, not even Rob’s papers. They might have been in Lissa’s car, but they certainly weren’t in the hotel room. Or had we left them in the office building to burn?

  I could not remember.

  “The papers,” I said, with sudden concern.

  “Put on your clothes,” he ordered.

  “I’m wet.”

  “Do it.”

  I dressed, pulling sleeves and pant legs over wet skin, jerking them into place seductively. While I was buttoning my shirt, he slung me over his shoulder and hauled me roughly through the narrow door to the parking lot.

  The lot glowed an unreal orange under the streetlights. The whole neighborhood was quiet, waiting. “It sure is spooky,” I said, looking up and around from my slumped vantage.

  The car was a Mercedes S-class, very nice, dark red that looked black.

  He put me down on my feet on the asphalt beside the car. Someone opened the driver’s side door and stepped out as if to help.

  It was Banning.

  “Rudy!” I said.

  “That,” said Banning, without a touch of humor, “is a disgustingly sloppy grin.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Saving your life,” Banning said. “Please hurry.”

  I wove back and forth like a drunk to get a closer look at the big guy. He was in his early sixties, with big round shoulders and hairy hands. He lugged a solid beer belly.

  The big guy opened the back door and pushed me in. I sat.

  “How wonderful for you, Rudy,” I said. “Nice German car.”

  Banning stared fixedly through the front windshield.

  The big guy sat in front and passed me a gallon plastic milk container. “Drink this,” he said. “Drink all of it. It will make you sicker than a dog, and you’ll spew from both ends. Let us know when the rumbling starts.” He looked at his watch. “Might take an hour.”

  “I’ll warn you,” I said earnestly.

  I started drinking. It was not milk. It tasted awful, like very sour yogurt laced with Angostura. I did what they told me, not because I was compelled to, but because a fresh, frightened, but still-small voice told me that I had almost killed myself, and that these were friends.

  The big guy watched me drink. “Let’s go before they come back to check on you.”

  Rudy swung a quick look around the parking lot, put the Mercedes in gear, and drove away from the strip motel with old-world ease.

  “We’re taking you to a plane,” the big guy said. “Then we’re going to New York. I’ve already been there.”

  “I know Rudy, but who are you?” I asked between gulps.

  “I’m the bastard who shot your brother,” he said, with a bitter twist of his face.

  PART FOUR

  BEN BRIDGER

  32

  JUNE 20 • MANHATTAN

  “It’s got to be like moving chess pieces by walkie-talkie with someone wearing kitchen mitts,” Rob said, as the Amtrak pulled into Penn Station. He had just come out of a heavy snooze, with loud and liquid snoring. His eyes were dreamy as he goggled at the stone and brick walls outside the train. He looked terrible. “Hands-off, three and four removed, waiting, hiding out . . .”

  I asked him what he was talking about.

  “Silk,” he said.

  “They’ve stomped us so far,” I said. We stepped off the Amtrak, crossed the platform, and hauled our two bags—LA thrift-store cheapies—up the stairs to Pennsylvania Avenue. I looked for a taxi.

  “Don’t take a cab that’s waiting,” Rob said. “Don’t take a cab if they seem to be looking for us. In fact, let’s walk a few blocks.”

  It was a sensible precaution. “You sure you’re okay?”

  Rob was pastier than ever and unsteady on his feet. “We’re two-footed lab rats,” he murmured, weaving through the crowds, trying to avoid any physical contact. “I’m okay. Just walk, all right?” This, in reaction to my trying to carry his sui
tcase. “I’ve got it, really,” he insisted. “God, I feel so stupid. I thought there were limits. I should have read your books more closely.”

  “You should rest. We’ll sit in a hotel lobby, have some bottled water.”

  “Did you hear? Someone’s spiking bottled water all over the three boroughs.”

  “Yeah, but it’s ammonia and bleach,” I said. “Garden-variety sicko.”

  “How do we know it isn’t a cover?”

  I shook my head. We didn’t. We didn’t know anything. We had been working and traveling for a week. We were half-dead from exhaustion, Rob’s left arm was bandaged from a flying splinter, I had cuts on my scalp—covered by a baseball cap.

  I looked up at the Empire State Building. Still impressive, still New York. I had a sudden shivering sense of place. This was the real world; out west it was twilight crazy-time, bugfuck nonsense.

  But bugfuck kills. We had been the lucky ones.

  The basement had partially fallen in, trapping Rob and me for a while. Tammy crawled out through a hole in the floor. We heard her walking overhead, shouting, then another round of cannon fire.

  While I pulled aside rubble and used a two-by-four to prop up a piece of floor blocking the exit, Rob grabbed an ice chest from under a fallen beam and went through what was left of the lab. He filled the chest with jars and little plastic dishes.

  We found Tammy bleeding and screaming and walking around the front yard, stretching out a mangled hand. I did what I could, holding pressure points, scrounging through a first-aid kit to put together a bandage.

  Rob searched through the leaning walls and collapsed rooms and found Marquez in the shambles of the den. There was blood and glass and broken model airplanes all over and Elvis had very obviously left the building.

  The dogs in the kennels had fallen silent, lying on their tummies, ears laid back, eyes big.

  The house was burning fiercely. There wasn’t much time.

  Police cars, ambulances started rolling in. We helped Tammy get to the paramedics and decided we couldn’t do any more there. We rode the elevator down to the second house, which had only been lightly damaged. There we found a red Mercedes S320 with the key in the ignition. The garage door opened and we departed the scene before fire trucks and other vehicles could block off the lower streets.