The Methuselah Gene Page 19

  “Am I? Look around you. Open your eyes, Chief.”

  I felt numb. “Who else is behind this?”

  “Who else?” Walter pointed toward a sixth car behind me, which I hadn’t noticed. It was parked in an alley, with only the trunk and bumper showing. A dark blue Cadillac El Dorado, with a license plate the same color as the state of Virginia’s. “He’s on a little cross country road trip, thought he’d stop by since you were here. Never met him in person, myself, until today. Interesting day, by the way. ‘Bout time to wrap up now, though.”

  “Winsdon?” I asked.

  “That would be telling. And no one ever tells the truth. Not even Congress.”

  “Why? Why do it this way?”

  “You’d have to ask him, but I think he only wants to see you dead.”

  “Like Jim Baxter, you mean? Like he killed Jim?”

  Walter made a clucking sound. Cody took two more steps toward me, and now his face became intense and strained. I gazed jealously down at the pistol near my foot. I thought about the virus, and who might want it now. When they saw what it did, maybe they’ll all want it. Every fanatic with a cause. Especially if the spooks had switched back to don’t ask/don’t tell as modus operandi.

  Walter turned toward his accomplice at the camera. “Are you getting this, Sean?”

  The other man didn’t answer. Because a third figure had just joined them on the roof. It was a man, approaching them from behind. A black man in a shirt and tie, carrying a sheaf of papers.

  Please . . . oh God, no . . .

  I squinted into the light to hear a voice that sliced into my soul like a laser through fog. “Sean,” the voice hailed, with a familiar timbre as distinctive as a signature. “You gave me these research notes . . . but I’m a hacker, not a chemist, so I don’t understand them, really.”

  Sean’s voice registered confusion as his shadow turned. “What?”

  Both of them now focused their attention on Darryl, as did I. It was an impossibility more riveting to me than if a black hole had opened in space, and a hand had emerged from it to beckon me in. These three on the roof . . . this unsuspected Trinity of deception . . . what kind of deal had they made? What unholy alliance had been forged, and—

  “And then there was this too,” Darryl announced unexpectedly. In amazement, I saw his hand drop the white sheaf of papers, which fluttered like doves from a cloud, leaving only a surprise silver lining—the barrel of a gun. A gun that was leveled at Walter. “But maybe this explains it,” Darryl said, as though in answer to my question.

  I was experiencing a mixture of confusion, hope, and consternation when a sudden gun blast discharged nearby. I jumped in my skin, and whirled to see the Sheriff aiming his revolver upward, now. Smoke from the barrel wafted out like an exhaled breath on a snow-blind day. And when I looked back up at Darryl, he no longer held his pistol, but instead clutched his side in stunned incredulity.

  “No!” I yelled. I fell on the gun at my feet as Walter drew his own. I pulled the trigger once, twice, three times before my own revolver finally fired, and hit Walter in the back.

  Too late.

  Walter shot Darryl first.

  It was a gut shot. Darryl fell to his knees and then toppled forward in agony as Walter crumpled backward, the life in him wrenched more quickly away—like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

  The next blast from Cody’s gun exploded my hand as though a cherry bomb had gone off inside it. I spun to gape at the Sheriff, who was now aiming at my head as the pain in my hand finally widened my mouth into a scream. I rolled as Cody’s gun roared again, the bullet this time just missing my face. I continued to roll, yelling against the pain, until I was out of his line of fire. Then, from behind the El Dorado in the alley, I clutched the bloody pulp of my hand and waited for him to come for me. Waited for the approaching steps. Waited for the end.

  But Cody didn’t come.

  I peered beyond the bumper to see with surprise that he was gone. Then I looked up at the roof above me again to witness Sean picking up Darryl’s dropped gun as Darryl moaned beneath him. Sean aimed the gun directly down at where Darryl must have been. But then he paused, as if he couldn’t bring himself to shoot a man point blank. When he saw me in peripheral vision, though, he fired four times rapidly in frustration and anger. I ducked just in time as the shots ricocheted off the wall behind me. I tried the Caddy’s door, but it was locked.

  “Damn!” Sean cursed. He came to the edge of the roof to look for me, but I kept my head down. “You’re dead,” he said, as if that would keep me down. And then he returned to Darryl, who I couldn’t see. He stood over the same spot once again, and seemed angry, pointing his pistol, and waving it around before he said, “Close your eyes.”

  Darryl’s voice was very weak. “Whaaat?”

  “Close your eyes and say good night.”

  Still, Darryl must not have done it, because Sean closed his own eyes and pulled the trigger.

  A click. His gun was out of bullets. As was mine.

  “Shit!” Sean opened his eyes again, tossing Darryl’s gun aside in disgust. Then he walked over to Walter’s body, near the front of the roof, to get Walter’s pistol. But as he rose with it he saw something that froze him. I turned to see where he looked. It was the Sheriff, who had reappeared and was waiting to draw on someone from the street. As Sean started to lift his weapon, Cody outdrew him to place a shot right in the middle of his forehead. The hollow point burst through Sean’s brain with a whiplash, and he pitched forward off the roof, dead instantly.

  “Good . . . night,” I heard Darryl utter, as he had been told.

  It was an intermingling of pain and irony that twisted his strained words.

  And upon hearing it, I witnessed the mad smile reform itself on Sheriff Cody’s bloody face.

  25

  After a time I managed to get up and stumble back to the rear of the building, where upon the camera tripod now stood alone. When I found a wrought iron ladder that afforded access to the roof, I climbed with tremendous effort, my good hand clutching each rung, my good leg wanting to fold beneath me at every exertion.

  On top of the roof, I saw Darryl stretched on his back, looking up at the stars. I approached, limping unsteadily, from behind floodlights that were angled away from us, down into the street below. Darryl’s breathing was heavy, his face clammy with sweat.

  “Darryl?”

  “Alan,” he said. His voice was thick. He turned his head painfully in my direction. He wore a dark shirt with a silver silk tie, but the bottom half of the tie was stained with blood.

  “I thought you were one of them,” I confessed, collapsing beside him onto my knees.

  “Thought about it,” Darryl breathed, “for ten seconds there.” He tried to smile, then was suddenly struck by pain.

  After the moment subsided, I asked, “What about the letter? You sent Walter Mills a letter.”

  “Application to join . . . a group . . . of hackers.”

  “You’re in a—”

  “Vice presi . . .dent.” He flashed a brief grin, which was contorted away. “I got you a . . . a date, too. A date with that . . . supermodel. She’ll be . . . waiting for your call, buddy, when . . . when you get back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Looked like you found someone else, though . . . when I saw you . . . on the road earlier?”

  “Julie,” I confirmed. I imagined Darryl flying into Des Moines, then also getting lost in the yellow rental sedan we’d run from, back on the farm road, to finally approach the blockade at the edge of Zion. I imagined Sean telling him to keep out, and that a movie was being filmed ahead. Maybe he mentioned the hacker application he'd mailed as a ruse to get in, but now I saw that the scattered papers around us were blank. Just blank typing paper, probably pilfered from Cody’s stock.

  “You came here to help me, didn’t you?” I said, realizing the truth.

  He gave me a single nod, then. “I thought I could help,�
� he whispered. Then he looked back up at the stars with a tortured resignation. “Sorry.”

  “Sorry,” I repeated, in disbelief. “It’s me who’s sorry, buddy.” I put my good hand over his own two, which had clutched at his stomach but now slowly relaxed as the pool of red widened beyond him to flow in a channel toward the storm gutter.

  When his hands finally opened, I reached over and gently closed his eyes. Then I looked up at the brightest of the solitary stars above me, barely visible beyond the light pollution. Like a sign of Darryl’s passing, a brief but faint luminous streak crossed a wedge of space up there. For a moment I stared at the space where the meteor had disappeared, and whispered a prayer. But it was a prayer for revenge, this time.

  In Darryl’s wallet, I found a card with the words Hackers Anonymous, and the name Clifford Seagraves, President. Washington DC. There was an e-mail address, but no phone number.

  Hackers Anonymous. Was it only a ruse?

  I found the switch and turned off the floodlights. Then I looked up again at the stars, which seemed to come alive, millions of them. A sudden muffled blast reverberated below me, accompanied by the shortened flash of a muzzle. Startled, I fell and flattened myself onto the roof. I had not been hit, but lay quietly waiting, trying to interpret another sound I’d heard as well—the one just after the blast. Had I imagined it, in the echo of a somehow muffled gunshot? It had been like the sound a sack of potatoes made when dropped into the corner of a pantry. A sound after that, then, perhaps like what a cantaloupe made when it accidentally fell from a kitchen table onto the hard linoleum floor.

  I crawled to the edge of the roof, and peered down cautiously to focus and squint at what I saw there. It was Sheriff Cody, lying face up against the sidewalk and curb in front of his office below. His sightless, liquid eyes stared vacantly up at me with the silver sheen of reflected light from the church down the street. A red halo spread from where he’d shot himself in the head.

  Turning over and gazing up at the stars again, I felt both physical and mental exhaustion overwhelm me. I let it happen because my mind and body said it was time. I don’t know how long I lay there, stunned and breathing deeply and evenly like they say you should do when inexplicable tragedy strikes, but I was in the middle of considering what Walter said about a special church service when I suddenly remembered Julie . . . and at the same instant also realized that the dampness where I lay was from Walter’s blood.

  26

  There was a light on in the back of George’s drug store, but in order to get inside and check it out I had to first pick my way through shattered glass. “George?” I called, tentatively.

  No answer. I lifted Cody’s reloaded revolver, which I had pried from the Sheriff’s dead fingers. Then I edged my way inside and back to the rear rooms. Cautiously, I stepped over various store items that now lay scattered on the floor—bags of corn chips, envelopes, feminine napkins, cans of shaving cream.

  “Anybody here?”

  Still hearing no response, I approached the stock room, but then froze in the doorway as I caught sight of George’s body lying slumped against the back wall. He was dead. I could see that. Smell it, too. His throat had been cut, but there was no blade in his hand.

  Then I heard a thumping sound coming from inside the casket. A muffled voice seemed to talk to itself: “Help me, oh God, oh Jesus, help me.”

  Julie’s voice.

  Unable to restrain myself, I entered the room. And that’s when Earl attacked me. It was not an ambush from behind the door. He simply came out of the bathroom, a straight razor held high in one hand as he advanced. Shocked by the sight of him—totally nude and smeared in places by blood he’d been unsuccessful in washing off—I lifted my gun too late. He caught my rising arm, and swung the razor at my face. I lurched backward instinctively, allowing him to wrench my revolver away, but delivering a kick to his groin in the process. He doubled over and dropped the gun, which went off with a deafening blast in the small space. Then we were suddenly both scrambling for it, bumping heads and groping frantically, each of us yelling, except that his bellowing held something more than the pain that animated mine. Something like madness. Our shrieks were joined and then almost eclipsed by Julie’s screams from inside the casket where she lay imprisoned.

  I lunged for the revolver, reaching it at the same moment as Earl. But it skidded beyond our grasp. Earl gave up the effort and turned on me. That was when I found and grabbed something else. Something soft, pliable, and oh so sensitive. I seized it, cupping an entire tidy handful that Earl might have hoped Julie would soon be handling, albeit much more gently. Then the squeeze with which I closed my bloody hand on the two oval shapes I felt inside that hairy sack of skin was attenuated by a ratcheting twist that put a new scream on both our lips. I gripped down as hard as any vise, and in a rage jerked with all the strength I had left. Something in there—inside of him—snapped, and was ripped away like a sinewy stretch of gristle pulled from an uncooked chicken. The shrill wail that rose from Earl’s throat was then wrenched away too. He was beyond expressing the pain he felt, now. He was speechless.

  I stood stiffly, and almost casually picked up the gun. Then I went to the casket, and unlatched it, left Earl on the floor behind me in a fetal position.

  As I lifted the lid, Julie cringed before she saw it was me. Eyes wide and strained, she gasped. Then she began to cry, clutching my shoulders at last. When I saw that my injured hand was bleeding all over the ripped shirt on her back, I pushed away. Then I saw that her head was matted with blood, and there was a bruise on her forehead.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  She looked beyond me—blinking past the tears that broke from her—at Earl drooling on the floor. “Give me the gun,” she said, her voice thick with determination. She said it as though fighting further damage to her psyche, fearing some long-expected total collapse.

  “What? No. Let’s go. We’ll . . . we’ll leave him, okay?”

  I helped her out of the casket. As I did, a large cockroach scuttled out of it with her. It raced up onto the lid, where it froze and seemed to observe us, feelers twitching. I didn’t point it out. Maybe she already knew. Next I noticed that her pants had been torn too, like her shirt. They were ripped along one side and in tatters, with the front button missing. As we left the room she spat at Earl. She said nothing as explanation, and I didn’t ask.

  What’s happening to us? she’d asked. I didn’t know, but I didn’t like it, whatever it was.

  After swabbing our wounds with peroxide, we used cotton and medical tape to bandage my hand. I downed half a dozen acetaminophen tabs with a Miller Lite, and then, warily, we stepped through the broken glass back outside.

  Zion’s main street was now a junkyard—a graveyard in the dim silver light. Nothing moved. I gazed past the hulks of cars with their burst tires toward the Cadillac, which was mostly hidden in the alley. As I squinted toward the car’s license plate, Julie noticed where I was looking. She was still trembling from her encounter with Earl, but she pulled free of my arm to walk several steps out into the road in the car’s direction, nonetheless.

  “No,” I warned, stopping her. “It’s dangerous.”

  “Whose is it?” she asked, coming back to me.

  “I’ve got my suspicions, but I’ve been wrong before. I tried the door when I was next to it, but it was locked. Probably has a car alarm activated too.”

  “So we can’t use it to . . . to get out of here?”

  “Not unless you know how to bypass an alarm and hot-wire an engine.”

  Julie shook her head slowly, in disappointment. I thought about blowing out the Caddy’s tires, but I turned toward the church instead, where another faint hymn could now be heard. This new one sent a chill across my otherwise fevered skin. It was the same song I remembered hearing with my mother in the First Baptist Church at age ten:

  We’re Marching to Zion.

  “Why?” Julie asked in perplexed astonishment, hearing the
song too. “Who?” Then: “How . . . can it be?”

  “I don’t know. But I think this is where I face the music. Meet the devil himself, and offer to send him back to hell, if I can.”

  Julie’s eyes widened. “And what about me?”

  “You’ve been through enough hell because of me.”

  “So you want me to wait for Earl in the Slow Poke? Or in the street? Or maybe in that Cadillac, with the radio playing Love Me Tender?”

  I saw her point, but considered whether it might be better than facing whatever insanity was happening in the church. “Are you saying he raped you?”

  “Tried to. But he . . . couldn’t. Maybe it’s another side effect of your virus. Opposite of Viagra.” She paused, turning away as her eyes welled at another memory.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s the other two. The ones dispatched to the ranch house.”

  “Did they rape you?”

  “They started to, until I encouraged it, saying to go ahead.”

  “Then they stopped?”

  “Suspected I had HIV. They didn’t have condoms, so they raped the mother, instead. Karen. Her name was Karen. They took turns, made us all watch. When one of the sons tried to stop it, he got shot in the head. He was the first one killed. His name was Mike. Mike Briscoe.”

  “Were they the same men who entered your house this morning?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. They weren’t wearing suits, and one had blond hair. Wanted me to watch as they executed the family, but when I became hysterical, they hit me here.” She touched the bruise on her forehead.

  I leaned into her, and kissed her hair. “I’m sorry. So they believed you when you said I left you?”

  She nodded. “After a quick search, yeah. Maybe because of the HIV thing, I don’t know. And by the way, I don’t have it. HIV.”

  “I know,” I said. “Not even mine.”

  “What?” She seemed confused. “What did . . . how did you know that I—”

  “Because you would have told me.”