The Methuselah Gene Page 17

  Only to find that it was locked.

  22

  Pounding at the metal door, I yelled Julie’s name, and was about to put my shoulder into it when I thought to check the locking mechanism. Unless it included a double-keyed deadbolt, there should be a switch on the lockset, even though it wasn’t self-canceling by turning the knob from inside.

  I found the switch, and twisted it left against its internal spring. Then I gripped the knob with my other hand and turned it to the right. Miraculously, the door opened, and I kicked it aside. It responded by rebounding back into my face. Now I heard something approaching from behind me, from the darkness, and I quickly shambled out of the door’s path to slam it home again. There was a collision against both door and frame that rattled the entire corrugated metal side of the building. A prolonged and guttural cry radiated from inside, but whether of pain or rage or disappointment I couldn’t tell. Much louder and closer than the bellowed chorus that accompanied it, the cry finally subsided into unmistakable disdain. I tried the doorknob again and found it locked, as I suspected it would be.

  “Julie, where—”

  I had turned toward where I’d last seen her, only to find Julie missing. She was nowhere in sight.

  “Julie, where are you?” I called as loudly as I could muster, although my voice sounded strained and seemed to waver at the end as the words became ‘where are you’ instead of ‘where were you.’

  I heard a distant gunshot, followed by three more that seemed to get ever closer. Then suddenly a green Jeep passed along the road where we had been walking, traveling fast as it billowed up a dust cloud in its wake. In the open, I slumped to the ground. But the driver and the passengers, whoever they were, did not appear to look in my direction.

  Julie, no . . .

  I struggled back to my feet and began to stumble through the drying muck back toward the road. I imagined Julie lying to the side of the Jeep’s tracks, just out of view. Dead, or dying.

  Then came a sound from behind me, but from a new direction. It was a door slamming shut. I whirled to see Julie standing just outside the side door of the farm house a hundred yards away, off to the right. Both of her hands rose to her face, and she came forward, limping with short, stiff steps, as though being animated by an inexperienced puppeteer. I stumbled to meet her, noticing as I drew closer that she was in shock.

  “What’s wrong?” I said. “What is it?”

  She did not respond except by collapsing into my arms, as exhaustion overtook her. I held her against me like dead weight, feeling her heavy, labored breaths against the side of my throat.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. “Are you injured?”

  She never cried. Just when I thought she might, there was a hint of change inside her, as if a secret store of energy was summoned by my question, or the marionette strings were again pulled taut. She stiffened slightly, and almost straightened.

  “I’ll be . . . okay,” came her weak reply, at last. “Just let me . . . let me rest?”

  I helped her walk over to sit on the same rock as she had before, although I was wary for any other traffic along the road. I kneeled beside her. “Better?”

  “I heard gunshots,” she commented, almost casually.

  I nodded. “Someone in a Jeep roared by. Shooting at something.”

  “Or someone?”

  “Maybe. I thought it might be you.”

  Julie shook her head once, looking toward the road. “The hog, probably,” she suggested.

  “What?”

  “That’s where it went.”

  “It—you saw a—where did it come from?”

  “The hog?” She pointed almost casually back toward the metal building. “Not an easy fit, through that small door. Didn’t you see it?” She looked beyond my shoulder, as if in memory. Her eyes seemed to widen as the image returned to her, recreated in her mind. The thing must have been insane, too, meaning there was more than one of them on the loose.

  “Is that why the door shut?” I asked.

  She looked at me, her eyes going vacant again. “Door?”

  “Is that why you went to the farm house?”

  She looked away, finally closing her eyes tightly. Her head even bowed slightly, as though she didn’t want to remember what happened next.

  “Who’s in there, Julie?”

  “No one, anymore,” she responded.

  “What do you mean, ‘anymore?’” I paused. “Did you try the phone?”

  “Dead,” she said, and then looked up at me steadily, her eyes reanimated by a new nightmare. “All dead.”

  Okay, Alan?

  I glanced back toward the house and the corrugated building, wondering what to do. “Must be a car, a truck, something,” I said aloud, although mostly to myself.

  “A truck,” Julie said, so low now that I almost didn’t hear her.

  “What?”

  “A white pickup, in back. But it has four flat tires.”

  “Four? You mean, like from gunshots?”

  There was a long pause before she whispered, “That’s what I mean,” and then she suddenly took my hand, leaning into me so I wouldn’t see her face.

  It was another awkward moment. I put my other hand on the back of her head. Her hair felt hot, as though from a fever. “You don’t have to tell me,” I said. “I don’t have to know. Let’s go, Julie. Let’s get out of here!”

  I helped her up, and was about to lift her when she clutched my arm. “Wait,” she said. “I saw a can. A big can out back, there. Ten gallons, maybe, but empty. It had a name on it. Dichloro . . . diphanal . . . something. What’s it mean?”

  “Diphenyl trichloroethane?”

  “That’s it. How did you know?”

  “It’s DDT,” I said.

  “Oh.” She indicated that she’d try to walk, just using me as a crutch. We hobbled unsteadily back to the road, but before we continued on it she asked, “What’s happening to us?”

  I wasn’t sure she wanted an answer, even if I had one. So I said nothing. But I suspected she wouldn’t be asking me again what happened in the other farm building—the nightmare setting I’d entered prior to her own experience. Wanting to put whatever was happening behind us, we hurried over the next rise, hopefully beyond whatever influence those in Zion still had over the area around Jensen’s Hog Farm. Half an hour later, limping and hobbling all the way, we finally came to the end of the dirt road. The sound of the hogs had long since dwindled by this point, as the silver moon slid down the bowl of sky behind us like melting ice.

  23

  Julie seemed to be in somewhat more pain, even with one arm around me for support. I had become exhausted too. Now we stared at a short barbed wire fence beyond where lay at least fifty bales of bundled hay. A few of them appeared to have been pulled apart. The ground around the massive pile was mostly grassy, an area several hundred yards square, and at the end a tall redwood fence encircled a corral of hard packed dirt. No horses were visible though, and, thank God, no other animal sounds drifted to us on the hot but quiet air.

  “A pair of horses would be nice,” Julie noted. “Saddles or not.”

  “I’d ride a cow, if there was a normal one somewhere,” I told her, truthfully. “Or a bucking bull, all the way to Macksburg or Atlantic or wherever.”

  “Not a hog?”

  I gave her a cautionary askance look, then eyed one of the straw bales. “I really need to rest. Right there would be nice, too, don’t you think?”

  “We shouldn’t,” Julie replied, but her response was halfhearted.

  “We have to. Or rather I do.”

  We climbed over the fence with some difficulty, but I was determined after her mentioning of hogs again. Julie tore the fabric of her jeans in the process, and an eye-sized patch of skin soon winked from her upper thigh as the pulled flap fluttered. I made for the low bales of straw, judged their dryness and firmness, then fell back onto them as though they comprised a feather bed. The feeling of relief was without pe
er. The sweet scent of the hay and surrounding grass was as fragrant as any perfume, and the sun against my closed eyelids felt like the layering of warm, pink orchid petals at a desert health spa.

  Julie lay beside me, putting her head on my chest. I laced my fingers into her soft hair, feeling her breathing below my neck. Would a waiter soon arrive with our poolside pina colada cocktails? For the moment, it felt possible, as the urgency of our situation seemed to dissolve like Alka Seltzer into water. The question Julie asked me next, although as a whisper, came at the expense of our impromptu siesta. “You want to know my real name?” Her head lifted slightly when I didn’t reply. “Alan? I said—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I told her, my voice already sounding weak and dreamy. “I know who you are. Rose.”

  I felt rather than heard her brief chuckle, and then she lowered her head back down onto my chest. “I’ll tell you anyway, if you want.”

  “Put it on our marriage license,” I said, and my words seemed so natural and free of jest in the quiescent stillness. “Until then, Rose . . .”

  I drifted away on a pink wave, holding onto the side of the straw bale with one hand as the world began to turn beneath me. It was a pleasant sensation, like one I remembered as a child, laying on a playground carrousel while the smoothly weathered saucer of rickety boards turned, and as the warm filtered sunlight gently fluttered against the closed eyelids of my upturned face. Time, trouble, or destination did not exist, then. All motion had been circular and hypnotic, inviting me down deeper and then deeper still into a perfect world where guilt, shame, and all the other consequences of aging and adulthood were total unknowns.

  When I returned to consciousness, the memory of a peculiar dream distilled into my reasoning mind. My sister and even my deceased mother had been in the dream as observers sitting in a baseball stadium gallery, amid countless thousands, all to watch me hit plastic wiffle balls with a plastic bat. I tossed the balls up one at a time, and hit them out toward a man who stood at the edge of a corn field beyond the outfield. It was not like in the movie Field of Dreams, though, and the man did not resemble Kevin Costner. Instead, there were crows above this man, who looked more like Kirk Douglas at the end of Lust for Life. And then I saw that the man was actually Dad, and as the crowds around me vanished, the field of dreams magically changed into an ocean. Dad sat alone on the beach, then, looking out at the water as though waiting for me to join him. And I had felt fear, watching him while the crows above him became gulls. Fear, but of what? Of what he had become?

  What’s happening to us? Julie’s voice again reverberated inside me.

  When I opened my eyes I remembered the dream vividly at first, but then it began to fade as consciousness intruded. I tried to hold onto the images I’d seen, to interpret them, but once my willing firmed, they evaporated with the same haphazard diminution with which an elderly bachelor forgets a phone conversation he had the day prior. I was left with a sense of smallness, of brevity, as though my illusions had only briefly parted to allow me a glimpse of the truth, whatever it was. Bereft, now, I felt no weight beside me. No sound either. Only a quiet stillness, as though waking to another dream in which I’d always been alone. It was late afternoon in this new dream world. My face here felt burned on one side, as if someone from an earlier nightmare I couldn’t remember had held a torch to my face during the transition. I sat up, and started to call Julie’s name, but stopped myself when I considered the possibilities indicated by the hours that I’d been allowed to sleep. Had she heard something and gone to investigate, perhaps surprising someone or being surprised? Maybe she’d slipped again and really broken her ankle this time, and was now in agony, unable to return to me.

  Dreading the answer, I left the hay bales and walked toward the deserted corral, its tall redwood boards faded and peeling, its nails weeping stains of rust. Beyond the rugged oval of tramped dirt, amid the evergreens and cherry trees, a barn abutted a low ranch-style house, partly hidden by shrubs and a massive oak.

  “Julie?” I called with an intense whisper, as though in another dream. But there was no response.

  I entered the barn, expecting to see some horrendous scattering of dead horses, with Julie sitting at the edge of a pool of bloody ichor, head in hands. But the stalls inside the barn were empty. Walking through, I passed them toward the house that was framed in the opening on the other side. The ground was footprinted with a random patterning of boots here, and with the faint imprint of horseshoe tracks. Something more, there were scraping or dragging marks of some kind. A rake, a pruning saw, push broom, and a weed whip hung on pegs along one wall. Cryptically, a wooden bristle brush lay atop an overturned wash tub near the entrance. And an earthy odor permeated the enclosure, with the recent memory of animal sweat.

  Crossing the open space between the barn and house, I noticed that the side door was ajar. Wary of windows, I approached cautiously, and then listened intently for any sounds within, but it was like listening for breathing at the mouth of a tomb.

  I pushed on the heavy door, and it creaked wider open. I was now looking into the kitchen, where a large black pot sat on the stainless steel stove. Resisting the appropriate urge to call out before entering, I waited a moment longer, and then slipped inside. As I did, the refrigerator hummed to life, and I noted a pyramid of at least a dozen shucked ears of corn, and also two unopened cans of Del Monte young peas beside a wooden chopping block where an onion lay. Seeing the cans made me recall the phrase Visualize Whirled Peas that I’d once seen as a bumper sticker on Darryl’s green Lexus. Crossing the kitchen, I could smell no odors coming from the pot, though, and then realized that there was only water inside, as though someone had been interrupted in preparing a meal and so turned off the heat. I dipped my finger into the water, and discovered it to be lukewarm. Whether the water had ever come to a boil or not, it was impossible to say. But certainly it had not been hours ago.

  I extracted the longest knife I could find from the holder behind the chopping block, took a deep breath, and then edged my way into the windowless dining room beyond. There, a dusty chandelier of smoky glass fluting overhung an oval wooden table. The bulbs inside the lamp buzzed with the faint sound of a partially activated rheostat, dimly illuminating the place settings beneath it, which numbered four.

  Four. Not a lucky number, if I were wrong about my assumptions.

  The living room was next, and ahead. I paused in indecision on the darkly tiled floor, wary of any sound. But there was no sound except the hum of the refrigerator behind me. And then the distant cry of a hawk had me imagining talons penetrating the heart cavity of a scurrying rabbit. Goaded into action—fight or flight—I took a reckless step forward into a room where a large ochre leather sofa hunkered in front of a wide screen TV with a satellite hookup and DVD player carrying a movie box: The Punisher. I detected that the taut skin of the sofa still had the faint impressions of the three people who were once seated there. Beside a can of Budweiser I could see the telltale rings and spilled droplets from two other cans on the long glass coffee table. Further down, the table was graced with a stack of magazines, although no Playboy.

  I crossed to the TV, and put my hand to the back of it to find a still detectable trace of heat, just above room temperature. Had three men been watching a game while another prepared to cook, and was the fourth person perhaps a woman? The place settings with a meal almost in progress seemed to suggest a woman’s presence. But the mystery was why they would suddenly vacate the house, leaving the door open. The fact that Julie was missing too suggested they’d gone with her somewhere. To Des Moines, perhaps, to get help? But why wouldn’t she wake me up to tell me, or to take me along?

  She would have, I realized. She would never have just left me.

  Never.

  I parted the front curtain and looked out at the gravel drive that snaked off toward the dirt road we’d walked along earlier. There were no cars out there now, just a semicircular fishtailing track, as though some heavy
vehicle had pulled out in a hurry, leaving a swath of sprayed gravel in its wake.

  They’d captured Julie, and had taken her somewhere. They were not drinking water, but beer. They were boiling their water.

  They. The paranoid them. I turned toward the bedroom, and as I did the impossible happened next.

  The phone rang.

  Blood surged like heat through my swollen tongue and into my jaw. I waited for the second ring as if the first had been a freak accident caused by a phantom electrical pulse.

  It rang again.

  My heart beat became erratic, unsure of its rhythm. I took a step toward the bedroom from where the ringing had come, and stopped as I stared at the closed bedroom door. Would someone answer?

  A third ring.

  I tried the bedroom’s doorknob. It was locked.

  A fourth ring.

  I pounded on the door. “Open up! Answer the phone!”

  No one did. A fifth ring. An unaccountable hysteria swept me, flooding my bloodstream with adrenaline. I put my shoulder into the door, savagely. Then I kicked at the knob.

  No use. A sixth ring.

  I backed and then attacked the door, putting my whole weight into it, yelling out in a primal venting of all the frustration that had built inside me. The frame cracked and split with a burst. I fell through the upper panel. Scrambling up just as the seventh ring began, I snatched the receiver from the phone on the dresser before me.

  “Hello! Hello!”

  There was a click, then a dial tone. I slammed the phone down, and snatched it up again.

  This time it was dead.

  I closed my eyes tightly. The breath that caught and compressed inside the pressure cooker of my lungs came out as a fluted hiss between my teeth as I gripped the receiver in a spasm of anger and disbelief. Then I let the phone drop from my hand, and gripped my forehead instead, as if there were some way to ease the remaining pressure and frustration inside my skull. I heard rather than saw the phone’s receiver swing to scrape the dresser’s mahogany finish in a diminishing arch. Only after silence had returned to the house did I open my eyes and turn toward the bed to see the four dead bodies lying there.