COSMOS magazine

Wednesday, July 24

"She's back!" Alex squealed. "Oh, oh, she's back." He hunched over his gadgets and started to cry with relief, like a child.

Wednesday, July 24

Treadwell looked about her in momentary confusion, clutched for an instant at her nakedness, flung herself without warning at Blick. The IV line pulled its stand across the examination table, upsetting its sterile fluid bag and squirting blood in a red splash across the white linen. Her right fist struck his face mask, sent it clattering across the tile floor. Blick recoiled. Voices shouted. The pathologist was on the far side of the table; he watched dumbfounded as one of the scrub nurses, a sinewy Filipino, caught the dead woman's arm and twisted it behind her back.

"What the devil—"

"Hold her down, damn it!"

The second nurse took Treadwell's other arm, and they wrestled her back to the table. Her strong legs slammed up and sideways, catching Blick in the belly. He stumbled, staggered back against the wall, watched with his white capped teeth bared.

"Tie her down."

"We don't have any—"

Blick found a heavy-duty electric drill, hefted it in his gloved hand, and cold-cocked her, striking her brutally across the roof of the skull. She sagged and did not move.

"Good god, man, that wasn't necessary!"

He stepped back, holding his weapon, looked from one to the next.

"Now we're going to kill her again," he said savagely.

"What!"

"We're going to keep killing her until we find the limits of this thing. If there are any limits. And if there are none, we'll take her to pieces, limb by organ, and watch what happens." He was exultant, as he had been when he slew her. When the bitch had the audacity to threaten him with her rifle. "We've moved from medicine into the territory of myth, gentlemen. Put aside your scruples. This is the dawn of a new age."

Wednesday, July 24

Alex screamed in agony. Jill hugged him tighter, heart pounding, shushing him. To Paul she whispered, "This is too much for a child. We need to get him a sedative. Does your lab—"

Her son pulled away, pressed his back to the wall, eyes swollen and red. "No!" he shouted. He was desperate, shivering. "They cut her again. I have to tell Wayne where to find her. No medicine! No medicine, Mommy, please!"

Outside the window with its closed venetian binds, dusk was falling. Perhaps their new neighbours looked up from their dinners in suspicion or concern at the wailing and bursts of sympathetic pain. But no one came knocking at their door.

"I need to compile a bigger transporter," the boy said, struggling from the bed. He threw off his mother's restraining hands. "I have to get help to Wayne. They're killing her all over again."

Wednesday, July 24

Air brakes shrieking, Wayne Elliot veered off the freeway at the Live Oak four-leaf clover loop. The cop channel on the trucker's scanner told him that he'd been made three miles back and the cops were on his tail. Time to drop this white elephant and grab something less conspicuous and more agile.

He thundered into the small shopping centre and slammed on the brakes with the eighteen-wheeler jack-knifed across the street, blocking pursuit. He left the cabin from the right-hand door, slipped along the trailer and strolled in an unconcerned fashion toward a strip mall of cheesy shops. People were standing in amazement, staring at the stalled truck. A few followed him with their eyes in the late afternoon light. Nobody moved to block his path. He entered a women's clothing bazaar, sniggering for a moment at the notion that he might once more dress up in drag and make his escape. The beard would tend to give him away. A stout woman with a tape measure approached him. He veered to the side of the store, looking for a rear exit. Two jaded shop girls at the front ignored him. He pretended to forage in bolts of gaudy cloth, then sidled toward the rear of the store.

"Sir, you can't go in—"

The glowing globe lifted out of his shirt pocket, buzzed his left ear. The store attendant closed her mouth in shock, tottered. She crossed herself.

"Angels unawares," she muttered.

Yeah, right, Wayne thought, and dashed through the unlit rear room for the back door. It was a deadbolt, with a key in it. He pulled out the key, clicked the door behind him, shot into an alley.

A tiny voice told him, Get out into the open. Wait.

He was beyond questioning. Sirens were hooting in the street on the shop-front side of the mall, voices raised. He ran full pelt for the end of the alley, rounded it, found a grassy lot with a square of stained concrete poured as a foundation for a house that had never been built. He stood on it looking around, starting to shake with unused adrenaline.

A faint light in the south caught his eye. It approached with surprising speed. Not a police chopper. Light brightened above his head. Open-mouthed, Wayne stared upward. A spiral of electric blue light dropped, hung ten feet from his face. Not a spiral, a helix. It came down like a cloak of light and closed about his shoulders and arms.

"Hey! What the fu—"

Like a fun fair ride, or the very fast elevator that took him down in a daze to the street from an appointment in Dr. Rutherford's office, it left him weightless and momentarily dizzy. This time, though, he was going up. The light plunged down the spectrum to cobalt, then to black. He could see nothing, felt wind blowing hard in his face and against his hands. His shirt loosened at back and front and made a drumming sound like a flag in a gale.

That made him grin. "You goddamn little scamp," he said. "Hey, this is way better than a chopper any day." The darkness cleared, like a cloth scrubbing dust from a TV screen, and he was looking down thirty or forty feet. The concrete clover loop was at his back, the last of the rooftops of Live Oak below; he was moving faster than he'd ever pushed a car, maybe a hundred twenty, still accelerating across the fields.

He dropped ten feet, spun, steadied.

"Jesus! What are you doing to me?"

"Sorry, I'm still learning to drive this thing. I've only just invented it, after all."

"Great! And you're ten years old and way too young to be flying a plane, let alone a freakin' fluorescent lamp."

"Tell me if we're going to run into a plane or anything, okay?"

"Hey!"

"Just kidding."

The thing flung him through the dimming light and increasing chill. Something puzzling struck him.

"Why are you fooling with me, partner? Can't you just fly in and grab Roberta with this nifty gadget?"

There was silence. "Oh. I never considered that, Wayne. I guess I think of you as the tough guy. You can deal with Blick."

Deal with him? he thought, filled instantly with bile. I'll tear the son of a bitch's balls off. He squeezed his eyes tight, tried to calm himself in the way that poor schmuck Nathan Pritchett had tried to teach him. "Is she still alive?" he asked, then. City lights were coming on ahead. New Braunfels, maybe?

"Barely," the kid's voice said in his ear. "Paul's treatment isn't a miracle. They want to kill her!" The kid's tone, Wayne observed, expressed the kind of profound and cynical shock of detachment that precedes a cool assessing awakening into adult maturity. Then he asked himself: Where did that come from? You bastard, Gibson, he thought with a rueful smile. You've changed me, you and your damned shots. He wriggled his new fingers. Maybe everyone will wake up, he thought, once this thing catches on. I hope so. He closed his eyes against the rush and cold tang of the dusk air. I hope so. It was almost a prayer.

Wednesday, July 24

Maureen opened her wet eyes. Enya's voice floated from the sound system in a blue Celtic dream. Beside her, Drew lay on his back, breathing hard. She touched his dear face, felt sweat.

"You stink," she told him. "We both stink."

"I love making love in summer afternoons, love," he murmured, turning to kiss her fingers.

"That's a lot of love, love," she said teasingly.

He rolled on to his side, propped up on an elbow. He touched her belly, still only slightly swollen.

"Last of the old-style humans."

"He'll catch it from us," she said. "Won't he?"

"Might even pass through the placenta. Lord, I hope this thing we've unleashed really isn't a time bomb."

She traced his train of thought as if it were her own; they had spent hour upon hour agonizing over the ethics of what he and Paul had released into the wild, into the world. "Silent Spring," she said softly. Her own hand reached down protectively to cover her womb. "No, I can't believe that. This is a good thing you've done."

He said nothing for a time. Celtic woodwinds moved in the air. He said then, "Silent world, perhaps. No warmth, no laughter."

"No," Maureen said fiercely, and sat up. "That's your mother speaking. That's Alyssa's superstitions. Don't give in to that silliness now, lover. The auxosome means more life, not less. You and Paul told me that a hundred times, and you're both right. Hey, know what else? Wonderful news from Mexico!"

Drew quirked his lips. He knew when he was beaten. "Tell me."

"Jill was scared the auxosomes had made her sterile. I mean, sheer phobia, the Terminator code hadn't even... Anyway. See, she hasn't had a period for—"

He covered his face in mock alarm in the lacy-edged pillow. "Hey! Too much information."

"No, you idiot. I said this is good news. Jill's pregnant too!"

Wednesday, July 24

The thing wrapping Wayne Elliot in its levitating embrace dropped him in a series of small jolts to the sidewalk outside some darkened university building. San Marcos was a small university city, he'd heard, a place of college footballers and smiling, prancing cheer-leaders. Once or twice, passing through, he'd driven Fern's blue Impala into the pretty green park that cupped the clear water of Spring Lake. Cypress and pecan trees were dark against the darkening sky. He looked for street signs. Sessom and Comanche. To the... south?... a large building was marked as the Joann Cole Mitte Art Center. What the hell kind of name was that? A teenaged student hurried past, talking on his cell phone. "No, babe, I am happy. Really. It's just that..." His voice faded.

"Which way, partner?"

The tiny voice said, "She's near you, that's all I know. I should have this thing set up for video but I didn't have time." The boy sounded guilty and tremendously anxious.

"Hey, calm down. This is my end of the job, okay?" Inwardly he was starting to seethe again, as finally he closed in on his prey. This was the beast who smashed his mind, who sent him clawing through memories and delusions, who treated him as nothing more than a tool to be used foully and discarded. He found that he was panting in his rage. He tried to calm himself. He looked north, swinging his eyes along the curve of Sessom. There it was. Two stories of windowless black evil.

"I have it."

As he crossed the street, a car did its best to run him down. What the fuck! He gave the asshole the finger, didn't even get the satisfaction of an angry honk in reply..

"Roberta's in pain," the boy said. He seemed at the edge of exhaustion. "Find a way in. Quick."

"They're going to have surveillance six ways from Sunday, Alex."

"Nobody can see you. The shell is warping the light around you."

Wayne stopped stock still. He felt for a moment that he might just let the accumulating shock overwhelm him, drive him into a crouch on the sidewalk.

Instead he drew in a shuddering breath and stretched out his arms. Yes, something uncanny still surrounded him. It felt like... like waxy crayon, the kind he'd used in kindergarten as a child. A phantom smell filled his nostrils. Those had been happy days. And later, when for the first time he'd been with Melody, and—

"Wayne! Wayne! What's up, partner?"

Shivering, he walked with a thick taste in his mouth toward the dark building. He found a small notice: CLINICAL SCIENCES SUPPLIES. Christ! Hidden in plain sight. But in a town like this, beautiful and inoffensive as it was, plain sight was not very visible. He pressed against the door, hard. Cold, unyielding as steel. He looked for the cameras, found three small lenses guarding the front approaches.

"Trying the rear," he whispered. "You hear me, boy?"

"Yes, but please hurry!"

A large black van was backed up to a loading apron, behind fencing that was surely electrified.

"Lift me up and over," he whispered. "Okay, now just drift me forward a tad. And down."

He ran quickly to the apron, slapped his hand hard on the van. Hooting burst out, the moronic yapping of a vehicle alarm system. Spot lights splashed instantly. Invisible but unable to believe it at the gut level, he held himself motionless like a trapped animal, all his instincts telling him he was a dead man. He swallowed a guffaw, bitter. A dead man was what he was in truth, and now alive again. You can kill me, he thought ferociously, but you can't hide.

The door opened and a lean man with a rifle stepped out, looking carefully and without panic from side to side. Wayne bitch-slapped him upside the head, saw him topple with an incredulous cry over the lip of the apron. The door was still closing; invisible Wayne was through it in two steps, shut it tight.

He ran toward stairs, checking locked doors. No lights shone under them. Which way? How could he tell? All hell was about to break loose.

"Warmer," the tiny voice said. "Your resonance and Roberta's, they're... merging. I think she's higher up than where you are."

He tore up the stairs in two-step bounds. A nurse was entering a room, carrying a tray of medical instruments. He slammed her against the wall, realized as he did that this was the stupidest thing he could have done. She couldn't see him! Her shriek told everyone in the building that he was inside and on the attack. Idiot! Idiot! He burst through a second door into the room. Air pushed in after him. Puzzled eyes stared through him. A table. Naked woman with... dear Lord, they'd cut her abdomen open. Roberta. He thought of June beetles and shuddered. She was unconscious. A doctor in green, face masked in plastic sheeting. Nurses, running at the door. Blick. The man had stood behind Rutherford, in the darkness, at the edge of the light.

Dear sweet Jesus God. It was his tormentor, suit marked with drying blood, plastic mask covering his face. The man looked ill. He seemed to be having trouble breathing.

It was the blood, Wayne understood in a burning instant of insight. Blick was doused in blood teeming with auxosome. And not just from this vile torture he had inflicted on Roberta Treadwell. The crusted stuff on his suit and shirt was dried. Wayne took this in like a photograph of a lightning flash, instantly and terribly. Blick was infected with deathlessness.

Payback woke.

He hurled aside the crayon-stench magic shell that held him from his persecutor's gaze. With one out-flung arm he struck a brown-skinned nurse into unconsciousness. The other he felled with a vicious upward blow of his knee, driven into the man's crotch. The doctor was cowering away from his onslaught, hiding behind the surgical table. Only Blick held his ground. He reached into his pocket and held his gun at Payback, who did not pause for an instant. They crashed together, and the weapon hissed. Not a gun, a tranquilliser. The needle jet entered the fleshy pad of his outstretched hand, rushed into his blood stream, coursed quickly to his heart and flung him to the floor in a hopeless daze.

Green light buzzed in his eyes.

"Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!"

Blick looked down upon him, eyes bloodshot, wheezing with the healing illness of the auxosome. His hand shook, and light shattered from it. The scalpel was edged with blood.

"You creature," Bruce Blick said. "You unspeakable thing. How dare you enter in here and disturb me?"

Robbie was drowning. Roberta lay dying again on the bloody sheets. Blick cut him, deeply, and again. There was no pain, just the pressure of the blade. He lay on the tiles and his own blood pulsed out. He took in one long, suffering breath and lunged his face at Blick. His teeth closed on the man's cheek, locked into the aging sour flesh, pulled him close. Blick screeched, a pain in Payback's ear that echoed to his soul. It was the sound of joy. It was the trumpet blare of vengeance. His right arm, heavy as molten iron, rose from the floor and his hand found the back of Blick's bald head. His left hand found the jaw, lightly bristled. His fingers closed tight. He took his teeth out of the man's flesh and twisted once, then once more, the way Rutherford had taught him. Blick's body fell against him in spasm.

Payback, too, fell like a stone from a high place, into Wayne. He lay face down against cold tile and tried to laugh despite the locking paralysis of the tranquilliser.

Dead, finally, you evil son of a bitch.

But not necessarily for long, god damn it.