The Methuselah Gene Read online

  I lay beside her, panting in the waist-high wheat. With futile resolve she tried to pull some of the grasslike stalks around us with one arm. I listened for Cody, but could only hear her words reverberate in my memory. If you can’t run, you hide. It had been her mantra, I realized.

  At last we heard the sound of a car door opening. Then a huffing sound, as if Cody was frustrated with himself, or perhaps clearing an obstruction in his throat. Next, the door slammed again. Angrily, it seemed. A shuffling, a circling examination. Then distinctly, a distant gunshot. Had Wally found the gun I’d forgotten? Was he now dead of a self-inflicted wound?

  At the gun’s report Cody bellowed: “Hey youuuuuuu!” And he shot into the air in reply.

  At that closer blast, I jumped in my skin, clutching Julie to me. Our faces touched, her breath and mine mingling in a warm, hushed tempo of fear.

  Then silence again.

  And finally, more shuffling . . . away.

  We both turned slowly onto our backs to stare up at the silver ghost of a moon there high above us, barely visible, like the grin of a vengeful God whose patience had at long last expired.

  19

  We crawled for what seemed like a quarter mile before getting the courage to stand and walk again. When we finally came to another dirt road, I asked Julie if it led back to Cody’s roadblock somehow. I wondered if I was just being paranoid, or if there was actually another town somewhere beyond the low rolling hills in what seemed to be a new direction. And if all would be right with the world again soon.

  “No, and yes,” she replied, as if reading my mind.

  “No what? And yes, what?”

  She pointed at the road. “No, I don’t think Cody is in that direction, and yes, there is a town, but it’s eight miles away too. I think. Not sure where we are, exactly. At the moment.”

  “What?”

  “Zion is in the middle of nowhere, you know. That’s why I’m here.”

  “It’s not going to be the middle of nowhere for long,” I said, adding, “which means you’ll need to tell the moving van people how to get here from Des Moines, you know.”

  “I’ll move myself,” Julie declared. “I won’t trust anyone with my keepsakes. Not even you, lover.” She smiled, tentatively, but when she pinched my ass I realized that ours wouldn’t be one of those lifeless marriages, marking time. Not if we survived.

  We continued unsteadily but with learned determination until my head began to pound like a bass drum in rhythm with each swing my leg made onto the hard packed dirt. When she witnessed my discomfort, Julie hesitated. “You’re not pulling my leg about that, are you?” she asked.

  I tried on the smile she’d attempted. “Got a hack saw?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Band saw, at home. Are you bleeding?”

  “No, I’m lucky so far. Although infection may have its way with me yet.”

  Coming on a rise, we paused to view, with surprise and relief, a farm house in the distance. The rustic old white house had a porch and a front slanted roof.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said.

  “It’s luck,” Julie reminded me, using the word as if for the first time. “Luck, remember? Don’t forget that. Luck. Say it.”

  “Luck,” I said, and continued, quickening my pace in anticipation of some measure of that unknown substance. I tried to ignore the electric throb in my leg by envisioning a working telephone, and maybe getting through to the Des Moines National Guard.

  It was Julie who saw the man first. A farmer, riding on his old red tractor in the field some distance behind the white farmhouse. She pointed the figure out to me. He was circling slowly, purposefully. “Crop circles,” she suggested, the words sounding cryptic. The steady rumble of the tractor’s engine reached us faintly across the still morning air.

  “You know him?” I asked.

  “I don’t even know you,” Julie said. “Yet.”

  We approached the porch of the house from the front, down a gravel drive from the dirt road. The inner front door was open, revealing a dark space behind the screen. “Wait here.”

  “Why?”

  I wasn’t sure, couldn’t say. But not once during our approach had the farmer looked in our direction, so intent was he on holding the turn that his tractor made endlessly, round and round, like a phonograph needle stuck in a groove. And thankfully Julie did wait on the porch, looking out at the circling farmer with curious detachment, as I went inside.

  I walked into the foyer, hearing nothing but the slow tick of a grandfather clock in the hallway ahead.

  “Hello?” I called out. “Anyone home?”

  No answer.

  I spotted a telephone on a small table beneath an antique framed reproduction of a famous Renoir—a green pond with water lilies and an arched walkway bridge. I rushed forward, picked up the receiver, and listened.

  No dial tone. The phone was dead.

  “Luck,” I muttered to myself. Then much louder, again, “Anybody here?”

  Avon calling.

  Still no reply. But as I set the phone back into its cradle I observed what looked like shreds of blue cloth on the hallway floor. Torn fragments of not designer clothing led like a trail toward a well lighted kitchen at the end of the hall. My view of that kitchen was limited by the angle where I stood. But, despite an escalating sense of foreboding, an exponential quickening of dread, I followed that trail. And as my view widened, I saw what was there, on the Formica floor in the kitchen. It was next to the table, with its checkerboard cloth pattern, and beside a massive white refrigerator.

  A dead woman.

  She came slowly into view as I neared. Her face was purplish, as though she had choked on a chicken bone. Or had been strangled.

  If only she had been that lucky.

  The faint stench of decay had already begun, because blood also clotted the long red hair splayed out above her head, tingeing it a darker shade of crimson than any hair coloring formula. In a swatch along one side, her head resembled a tainted blotter. Her feet were bent unnaturally, as though wrenched around in a vise, and the femur of one broken leg showed through the skin. But even this was not what made me turn away, or caused my stomach to clutch and send a spasm of acid to my throat. It was not the thing that ultimately made me stumble outside for air, gasping as though from the heavy smoke of a house fire. No . . .

  It was the fork. A common kitchen utensil that is also used in five star restaurants across the more civilized world . . . one of which now projected, and was stuck, in the one eye the dead woman had left.

  I shut the front door, and held Julie away. Seeing my face, she asked me what was wrong, but I couldn’t speak. Not quite yet. Even when a catbird complained to me, with an excited high chittering sound as it arched up toward the solitary cloud that had drifted in front of the sun, darkening the sky. Even when the bird’s cry died and was replaced by the faint, incessant rumbling of the tractor. Still, I only shuffled my way behind the house, toward where Julie then looked with apprehension. My feet felt leaden, and weighted by offense, as a dizzy, giddy sense of unreality seized me. Like what a teen feels getting drunk for the first time. By the time I came to the edge of the field, to stare numbly at the farmer still riding his old red tractor, scarcely thirty yards away, the world had changed forever for me, too. I wasn’t quite as innocent, anymore. Not quite.

  He was a balding man with a neat rim of dark hair and a graying beard, wearing a worn green shirt rolled up over prominent biceps. His blue jeans were held up with suspenders. He seemed frozen at the wheel, as if in a trance, although he never strayed from his groove—that perfect circle amid the wheat that he’d flattened. And at the apex of that circle toward which he approached for the hundredth or perhaps the thousandth time I could see something crushed into the dirt. A dark stain, like a halo, soaked the soil around what violated fabric remained of a small blue shirt and pants. One ragged tennis shoe protruded from the soil, there. But the head was gone, buried face down. The space around wh
ere it had vanished bore the darkest halo like stigmata.

  I couldn’t force myself any closer. Instead, I kept Julie away, fearful of her losing her innocence too. Then, as the heavy knobby tires of the tractor rolled toward the spot again, I turned away, and guided Julie away. But this time I could not stop the surge that filled my throat in two sick waves that bent me over at the waist. Yet even as I stumbled away, with Julie’s help, the farmer never looked up or acknowledged our presence. Not once.

  We rejoined the road, leaving the man still circling round and round, as though asleep at the wheel. When I looked back one last time, just before the horrific scene mercifully went out of view, I had to blink through tears to focus on a final revelation that suddenly seemed the most bizarre and chilling of all . . .

  The farmer was now wearing a cap.

  “You’re hurting my arm,” Julie remarked, of my grip.

  I released her. “Sorry,” I said, hearing the tremulous timbre of my own voice.

  “What is it? Why won’t you tell me? What’s wrong?”

  “Everything. Everything is wrong.”

  I don’t know how long I walked stiffly along the dirt road beside her, lost in dark thoughts. I tried to project my mind outside into the bigger world, somehow past a persistent image which lingered—that of Grant Wood’s American Gothic, the farmer in the famous painting now standing alone in front of his farmhouse, with only his pitchfork. But I failed.

  After some time Julie asked, “Are you okay?”

  I said nothing for a moment, then I stopped walking.

  “What is it?”

  “Listen,” I told her.

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  I didn’t hear anything either. That was just it. The farmer’s tractor had stopped. Had he run out of gas? Was a gunshot coming next?

  I slipped to my knees, and cupped the palms of my hands over my ears, not wanting to hear it. As though hearing it would bring me near some internal precipice, and mean a kind of breakdown, like what Dad had experienced prior to Mother’s death. But then Julie knelt beside me, and put her arms around me, leaning into my shoulder. “Are you okay?” she asked me again.

  “No,” I said. “Thanks for asking, though.”

  I held her, kissed her forehead gratefully. A few of my tears must have slicked down onto her own nose because they were there when she looked up at me. Thankfully, she didn’t ask me to explain. Instead she wiped my cheek with her fingers, then took my trembling hand, and kissed it tenderly. At that moment I imagined a different future than the image which threatened my sanity. Like a reversed deja ‘view’ into that future, I envisioned the possibility that no matter what happened, she might always be there, too. An odd thought, considering a past where no one had been able to reach into my solitary world, and bring me out of it. But here she was, with one simple gesture pulling me out of the worst of it, and freeing me from my sense of guilt by association. A second miracle.

  I got up and continued walking, regaining some measure of resolve. But in the process of redirecting my mind, I found myself reconsidering the implication of Darryl’s theory. What if some agency like the CIA really was in Zion to test the virus, and for the reason he intimated? Might that explain the grove of trees Julie had seen? I thought about Jim’s tobacco etch virus, as a transport mechanism for the gene. Was a reversal possible? If so, why the rush to test it now? Certainly refugees from an increasingly hostile world might want to escape the unstable and crowded conditions of their own countries. But overall, population growth was beginning to stabilize, except in India, and in isolated areas of Indonesia, Africa, and Latin America. And so the numbers just didn’t add up. Unless . . .

  Unless those numbers were dollars, not head counts.

  Then it made sense.

  Because with fewer dollars coming in from earning taxpayers in the States, the future for much in the way of foreign aid looked bleak. Then the Boomers wouldn’t just bust Social Security, they’d bust World Security, while sprouting more terrorist cells, perhaps even capable of nuclear atrocities. Forget about pollution, then, or bizarre weather phenomena destroying bioengineered crops. The real problem would be paying for all the new prescription drug benefits out of funds from the Department of Defense. And while all the geezers watched football on TV there’d be a—

  “Alan,” Julie suddenly alerted me. “Alan!”

  “What?” I replied, coming out of my reverie of supposition.

  An old blue Ford pickup truck with dirty windows appeared, approaching us from ahead. Trundling along, and trailing a backwash of dust and white smoke, the truck resembled something out of the movie Road Warrior. But Julie waved at it to stop.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, with alarm.

  As though prompted by our distress, the truck seemed to weave, then suddenly sped up, heading straight at us. I snatched Julie’s arm, and jerked her out of its way, into the field, just in time. The truck raked a clump of packed sand at the ditch with its wide chrome bumper in passing, and I caught a glimpse of the driver in the side window. An older man with a hawkish face, he continued to stare straight ahead as he drove, weaving as though against his will, straining to hold a line, and finally straightening again. He never stopped or looked back, provoking me to recall the movie Dawn of the Dead this time.

  “Is everybody crazy?” Julie wondered, frustration edging her voice.

  “Yes,” I answered her. “It’s the virus. Psychosis, delusions. God . . . damn this!”

  Julie now looked at me with a new dread in her eyes. But after cursing I felt oddly better. Her returning frustration had sparked my own back to life, and this beat out shock, too. I was back at last, to some degree, which was good because I needed to act before it was too late.

  We started walking again with renewed determination, back on the road. We hadn’t walked long toward a dirt crossroad before another vehicle appeared, this one a yellow compact sedan.

  “Look,” Julie said.

  I tried to look, but sunlight heliographed off the car’s windshield, as if it were signaling to us. I felt momentarily hopeful, but then observed it with suspicion, and stepped backward, off the road. As Julie followed my lead, she tripped in a rut of clumped mud, and twisted her ankle. Her yelp of pain was real.

  “Come on!” I urged, and nabbed her flailing arm.

  I pulled her up. She leaned against me for support, hopping on one foot, and out of the way. We started for the corn beyond, where it was safer. Then I saw that I was mostly dragging her forward, and that her pain was intense. So I picked her up, instead, and carried her. The car beeped behind us, giving several long sustained bursts, as if signaling to Cody beyond the hill. But I didn’t stop or turn around.

  Fool me twice, shame on me.

  20

  Once hidden deeper into the corn, I made a space and laid her down. “How bad is it?” I whispered.

  “Ouuuuu!” she replied. Her face contorted as I tested her ankle.

  “You’ve pulled a tendon.”

  “Feels broken. What time is it?”

  I checked my watch. “Almost noon. Are you hungry?”

  “No! How can you ask me that now?”

  “Sorry.”

  “And stop saying that, please.”

  Sorry, I thought. Then, looking at her foot, I said, “You can’t put weight on this. Looks like I’ll have to carry you to . . . wherever. Piggyback.”

  “But how can you, with your leg wound?”

  “I’ll manage. You’re as light as . . .” I paused, listening to what I thought was movement in the corn far away. We hunkered silently for a full five minutes before Julie chanced a whisper.

  “As a feather? Is that what you were going to say?”

  “What?”

  “As light as a feather?”

  I stared at her in disbelief at her question. It was commensurate with asking for a refill of ice water to be served on the tilting deck of the Titanic. But then I saw her motive in mimicking me, which h
ad to do with coping, with survival. “Not exactly.” I forced a smile. “I don’t know. A pile of feathers? The nice, soft, cuddly kind?”

  She favored me with an ironical smile, against her own pain, while I considered the prospect of carrying her again. “Do you even know which way to go, Sir Lancelot?”

  “Can’t you tell me, Gwen? And is that your name, by the way?”

  “No. And hey, how would I know what direction, anyway? I was following you.”

  I chuckled in astonishment. “Me? But I’ve never been out here before.”

  “Neither have I, actually.”

  “But you said—”

  “What did I say? I said it was eight miles to either town, as the crow flies.”

  “You said nothing about crows,” I contested. “You pointed at the road.”

  “Well, if I did, I . . . well, I’m sure I meant it’s easier to walk on the road, where there’s less chance to twist an ankle.”

  “Huh?” I felt my bemusement evolving into exasperation. A burn on my neck was revived by the heat of the sun. “You mean you’ve never been down the roads we were just on?”

  She shrugged, staring at her ankle. “I don’t get out much. What can I say?”

  “How about explaining why we didn’t bring a map or a compass—can you say that?”

  “Why would we need a compass, when we could follow the sun?”

  “It’s noon,” I pointed out. “It’s summer. The sun is right above us. I can feel it, believe me. And anyway, we’re heading east, not west. But even if we were following the sun, using your logic, where would you propose we follow it to, anyway—the planet Mercury?”

  For a moment she was silent. No way out, logically. But she was a woman. Very definitely a woman. So she lifted one hand, and pointed. “That way,” she announced.

  I turned and looked over the neck-high stalks in the direction she indicated. Then I sneezed, and followed that with a slow three-sixty. It was the same in all directions. Low rolling hills of farmland, beyond which might be anything.