COSMOS magazine

Friday, June 27

Nearly a full week after he disappeared, the police had told Maureen regretfully they did not expect to find Drew alive. Angrily, she had denied them. She had refused to give up hope. Until now.

Dispassionately, gazing at the waxy body that lay on its back, plastered arm elevated, chest moving rhythmically at the command of a respirator, she said aloud, "This is not Drew."

The Methodist Hospital emergency room resident frowned.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Chang, I realize this is difficult for—"

"We're not married. I'm Maureen Baumgarten." she told him.

"Miz Baumgarten, Dr. Chang's employer made a positive identification this morning. This is definitely—"

"That's not what I mean." The monster who did this had taken away the most important parts of her beloved Drew—his sharp intelligence, his love of life. She remembered his amazing ability to make people laugh even when they were feeling blue. To make her laugh.

"Oh, I see." He obviously didn't have a clue. His fresh-faced competence infuriated her; he looked about 15. But then so did Drew, sometimes, in the mornings, with his tousled black hair and almost no need to shave. Tears, stinging, filled her eyes again. It felt as if she'd spent the whole week crying.

"It looks as if everything is intact," the resident said, coming to stand beside her, making a notation in his chart at the foot of the bed. "All his major organs are functioning properly"

"Except for his extraordinary brain," she cried.

"We can't be sure of that yet. He apparently called out for help when he was found and even though he's remained unconscious while he's been under our care, I can tell you that his cranial wounds are healing normally. We had to re-fracture his arm to reset and pin it correctly, but he should make a complete physical recovery."

His words turned into meaningless mush, like the hushing repetition of the respirator. I need to accept that he's gone forever, she told herself. Even if he regains consciousness, he'll never again be the man I love.

Someone entered the room, a short middle aged woman with stylishly tinted reddish hair. Alyssa Chang, Drew's mother. With an effort, Maureen composed herself. They'd only met once before, when Drew received his doctoral degree, and hundreds of families and friends buzzed about smiling and chatting and taking pictures. They had talked on the phone a couple of times, but she knew the woman disapproved of her son going with a non-Chinese. It was bitterly awkward, being here when Alyssa Chang saw her son like this for the first time.

Alyssa, she saw, shrank with grief as she took in the mass of tubes and wires, the machines with their blinking lights, the pale, still figure they tended. One hand reached out toward him, was withdrawn without contact, as if she were afraid she might harm him further with her lightest touch.

"Oh Maureen, I can't believe this is happening!" she said, voice breaking. Without quite knowing how, Maureen found herself in Alyssa's arms.

At last, Maureen said, "You must be tired, Alyssa, driving all this way. Won't you sit down?"

"But that's your chair, my dear—"

"No, no, I've been sitting here for hours, it'll do me good to stand."

"Ki was in Colombia when we heard. Couldn't get a flight out until tomorrow." Alyssa sank onto the chair, visibly gaining control of herself. "You look exhausted yourself, honey. Do you want to go home and get some rest? I'll sit right here and call you the moment there's some improvement in his... condition."

Friday, June 27

Wayne propped his head on a pale yellow evening gown and stretched out on the pallet he'd made from other clothing he'd found on one of his exploratory trips through the tunnels. A flight of stairs had opened into the backstage area of a large auditorium. Through an unlocked door, he'd found a roomful of costumes.

"You got to get off your butt and do something about that follow-up shot," his father's voice said, insistently.

He didn't know whether he'd been here for hours or days listening to that voice, his father's voice speaking through Wayne's body, sometimes in words, more often chunks of memories, or sometimes only small fragments, no more than an impression of a face, or a single sentence spoken by someone from his past. Mama calling out to Daddy, "I put 'em with the dirty laundry." Payback/Wayne lying flat on his stomach, the raised pattern of the bedspread digging into his face, listening to Neil Diamond on the radio. Inconsequential moments in the grand scheme of things, but they were his.

"Goddammit, asshole, why can't you get it through your thick skull? We're both gonna die if you don't listen to me and do what I say."

Wayne would have run away from the increasingly urgent words if they had not been coming from his own mouth. He tried to space out, sink far down into the peaceful hiding place he had made for himself inside his head.

That won't work any more, dumb ass.

This time the voice spoke only inside his head, slowly, calmly as if it did not want to frighten him.

I'm stuck with you and you're stuck with me, no matter how much we wish it wasn't so. You gotta listen to me, Wayne. Be quiet and listen.

Wayne saw himself in memory, holding a gun, ordering people around; felt a little thrill of power. They were afraid of him, doing what he told them to do.

"Pay attention to this part," his father's voice ordered, speaking aloud this time. A man in a white lab coat was saying something important. "... too many brain cells... pruning them back like brambles... without the regulator injections..."

"We'll die," his father's voice said aloud. "Our brain cells will keep growing and growing until our fucking head explodes. I can feel it happening already." Wayne touched his head, massaged his temples. The blood pounded there. Yes, he thought, alarmed; it ached, it felt tight, as if the bones of his skull were pushing outward.

"What the hell can I do? The police are looking for me." He found himself on the verge of angry sobs. "Because of what you did."

"No point blaming me. We're in this together. If you'll listen to me, I'll tell you what to do. Just shut up and listen. I saw the bitch's address."

Monday, June 30

A half hour's walk around Jill's neighbourhood paid off for Wayne. During the day, university students parked their cars along the side of Fruth. There was a constant flow of people coming and going. The apartment complex opposite her house was large and anonymous; Wayne noticed that most of the occupants walked past each other with at most a nod. Few people seemed to know each other by name. No one paid the slightest attention to the middle-aged woman sitting against a concrete column in the covered parking area, reading a book. Just another student, older than average maybe, but there were plenty of older people going back to school these days. Wayne had felt horribly self-conscious at first, going in public dressed as a woman, but after a couple of hours he settled into his role. He even had to admit that the A-line skirt was more comfortable than trousers.

By the end of the third day, he had learned that Jill and the kid were no longer living in the house, although once they had come by and carried away some clothes and stuff. The kid was in the back yard by himself while the mother was inside. Wayne had almost made a move this morning when she put the kid in the car and ran inside. But she was back out again before he got across the street. Damned high heeled shoes. Never mind. Time was on his side.

Sitting there all day gave him plenty of time to think, to capture more of the bits and pieces of his shattered life, try to fit them together like a four-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. He had become more adept with practice and was able to view his life almost like a movie.

At first, revisiting his nightmares had been too terrifying—a dark haired woman lying on the bed, the skin on her abdomen peeled back, blood seeping onto the yellowed sheets. Slowly he grew bolder, dared to view the scene from beginning to end. Yet whenever he tried to move forward or backward from that horrific scene, he slammed into a blank wall.

By the afternoon of the third day the headache had bloomed into a vicious pounding that subsided for short periods of time and came back worse than before. The slightest movement of his head brought on waves of nausea. I'm going to die, he thought. I'm going to die right here in this parking lot. They'll find out who I am, they'll call Fern. She'll think I was a transvestite. That's the way they'll remember me in Delmar forever. Wayne Elliot, Mike and Denise's son, the cross dresser. The headache tore back in full force again, and he wished he could die right now, anything to stop the agony. Through the relentless pain, he saw himself, a younger version of himself. Twenty-three or four, maybe. He sat in a room with dull metallic walls. Big, comfortable chair, one arm stretched out straight in front of him. He got the impression he'd been sitting like that for quite a while, wondered how his arm was able to float effortlessly like that. Was this what they called hypnotism?

"Let your arm float down now. I'm going to read you something from the newspaper, Wayne."

That's right, another person was in the room with him, a big, robust man with a handsome face and neatly combed hair. White lab coat over a dark suit.

Wayne saw his younger self slide down a little in his chair. The arm drifted down, rested lightly on his thigh.

"Sit up. Listen closely. You need to pay attention," the other man said. "This is a newspaper article from the Houston Chronicle, September 5, 1992:

WOMAN DIES IN TRAILER BLAZE

Delmar, Texas

Harris County fire fighters pulled the body of an unidentified young woman from the blackened interior of a mobile home that burned Monday near Delmar.

Through the fog of his headache, Wayne watched himself in memory. It was like light bursting through a sudden opening in a sky covered by black clouds. When the pain eased, when he could think clearly again, he stated it to himself in words: They made me do it. Dear Lord in Heaven, I wanted so badly to pay those fucking doctors back, get even with them for what they did to Melody. He shook his head in denial. But I never would've done it... Maybe I didn't do it, he told himself desperately. Maybe it was just garbage they fed me under hypnosis, like in all those movies. They brainwash you, everyone knows that.

He started to unravel, sitting there in the street in women's clothing, and spun into the past.

"Wayne, you need to get out more, circulate. Melody wouldn't have wanted to see you this way." Wayne's old school buddy... what's his name? Ted, right?

The thought of her last days takes him to the brink of tears. He jerks his mind away; can't let Ted see him cry like a woman.

"Go to the lake, man. It'll do you good." Ted sounds genuinely concerned.

"Can't. Workforce commission bitch lined me up for this research project. They're interviewing this weekend."

"I saw that. Some pharmaceutical firm. Hey, man, that's risky shit. You wanna be a lab rat for a few bucks?"

"See, maybe I can get a reference from them later. Help me get back into school." Melody's funeral used up all the money he'd saved. The thousand bucks BlickPharm is offering volunteers could make the difference between school and the street.

Could that be it? He'd forgotten the drug tests completely. They did something to me, he thought. Maybe I didn't do... that... after all. Dear Lord in Heaven, could it all have been a fabrication? Suppose someone at BlickPharm mindfucked him into believing he committed those unspeakable crimes. Who could have done that? And why would they? Rutherford, he thought.

—Blank.

"Maybe I didn't do it," he said aloud, hoping desperately it was true, terrified it wasn't, weeping. A passing kid looking at him in fright, ran past. "I didn't do any of that."

He recalled the other one, then: the young scientist, Drew Chang.

Payback waits patiently for the young woman to wake. Lying there asleep, she looks more like a schoolgirl than a scientist. But appearances can be deceiving. Dr. Rutherford showed Wayne the article in that journal. Payback will not begin until she is ready to understand what is happening to her. And why.

She stirs, touches her forehead, moans softly.

"Well it's about time. You'd think I gave you a whole bottle of sleeping pills, 'stead of a little tap on the head."

The young woman opens up her eyes.

Payback shows her the knife before he uses it. Wayne's daddy's hunting knife, nice and sharp. She tries to writhe away from him, but he has her tied down good and tight. He passes the blade over her abdomen, lightly the first time, then with more pressure. Blood oozes from the cut. Payback peels back the skin, exposing the shiny abdominal lining. What was it Wayne's fancy books called it? The peritoneum or something like that. He slices through, and the intestines spill out. Payback is a little surprised to note that human insides look about the same as an animal's. Glancing up at the woman's face, he sees with disappointment that she has passed out.

Wayne sat up with a start. The same terrible nightmare, and Fern was not here to soothe him back to sleep. It wasn't a nightmare. It really happened. Sitting there, jolt after jolt of uncovered memory coursed through him like poison. Killing his father—No, no, he was still alive in LaGrange, that had been Dr. Rutherford. Then that poor feeble schmuck Nathan Pritchett.

Sick with remorse, his first impulse was to take his own life before this thing growing in his head killed him. He acknowledged now that he had been pushed and prodded and deformed and programmed by that devil Rutherford, but after what he had done he didn't deserve to live. And now there was the poor fool scientist that Payback had taken to the old workshop. Surely he'd be dead by now.

If there's even the smallest chance he's alive, Wayne told himself, in his own voice, I have to go back there and... Christ help me! I'm dying myself, and the police are looking for me. I have to get that shot. Maybe I could just call this Paul guy. No. He'd report the call to the police. Maybe they'd have his phone under surveillance.

I have to take the kid. It's my only hope.