“You don’t play murder in soft words,” Simon intoned, actually sounding like Orson Welles. Colm laughed.
David listened, too fuzzy to add anything to the conversation. He propped his elbow on the table and his head in his hand and closed his eyes, but he let their words, their thoughts, their memories keep soaking into him.
When Bekah brought their plates, the smells of food made him faintly nauseated, but he’d take this wallop of an aftermath over three bedridden weeks. He tested a bite of toast, nibbled until he finished it, let his stomach settle. Then he dug into his Philly cheesesteak omelet. After a few bites, he was able to broaden his focus from the food to the guys around him, the clinking of their forks, the ease of their quiet. He met Colm’s eyes. The man had been watching David eat. He tilted an eyebrow, and David nodded. Colm returned the nod and started on his own breakfast.
David sipped his coffee and glanced around the table, stopping at Zac. “You said there are organisms in my—our—blood.”
“Have you ever looked at your blood through a microscope?”
“Of course.” Back before he’d given up solving the riddle of himself.
“I mean a high-powered one.”
David salted his hash browns. “It’s been awhile, maybe thirty years.”
“Sometime we’ll have to show you what you missed back then. For a long time technology wasn’t advanced enough to see them.”
“I’ll look into that.”
“Too bad I don’t have a microscope in the RV.” Zac paused with a forkful halfway to his mouth. “Should’ve planned ahead. Just in case I meet John Russell in Arizona, what’ll I need to bring along? Then again, figured you knew this stuff.”
That nettled. David didn’t bother answering.
“Cut him some slack,” Colm said. “How many decades did it take the four of us to figure it out? And we had the common denominator right in front of us.”
Four, right. Moira in Europe.
Simon pushed aside his half-cleared plate and propped his elbows on the table, steepling his fingers. “You know the planarian.”
David nodded.
“Well, in essence, we were gifted a mutated, microscopic version that gradually permeated our blood cells and became sort of a second nucleus in both platelets and hemoglobin. They are antiaging obviously, but that’s not all. They have a hyperhealing ability that activates when they sense the host organism is near death.”
They let him sit a minute, processing that, while he finished his omelet and slathered his other slice of toast with strawberry jam. The planarian he knew of could be up to an inch long. This must be an altogether different organism. Microscopic … worms. Undying worms. In his blood cells. He shook his head, and the room stayed put this time.
“Yes,” Simon said. “You’ll never see them with a cheaper microscope, but they’re there.”
“Where did they come from?”
“Our theory is that they originated in a pond on the outskirts of our old town. No way of knowing if they exist in multiple places, but I keep track of the science journals, eyes open for a discovery of them. Nothing so far.”
“Who discovered them, then? Who did this to us, who—who did this to—?” He took in a silent breath and steadied himself. “Do you know who’s responsible?”
“We do,” Colm said.
From across the restaurant a new group arrived. Five college-aged girls, laughing and shoulder-bumping, escorted to a table across the aisle. Zac repositioned his chair, back to the girls, and Simon gave a loud sigh.
Zac smirked. “Someone’s got to walk the rocky road of fame.”
“Until your clumsiness, you were best known to females aged sixteen to thirty.”
“Do you have fans, Simon?”
Simon leaned back in his chair, arms folded.
“Then don’t dis mine.”
“You did not just use that word.”
“Haters gonna hate.”
Colm laughed.
The ease among them pinched in David’s chest. He cleared his throat.
Zac sobered. “Let’s finish this away from here.”
“Just tell me,” David said.
“Really, man. The rest needs to be discussed in private.”
They finished eating in relative silence and paid their checks. Bekah’s face was flushed when she brought back the receipts. Zac had been the only one to pay with a card, and her hand might have trembled as she returned it.
“Here you are, Mr. Wilson.”
The smile he gave her was less cocky than kind. “Thanks, Bekah.”
“I can’t believe it. I knew you looked like him under that hat, but I can’t believe it.”
“Not a word?” He gave a sidelong glance at the table across the aisle, where the girls still perused their menus.
Simon coughed.
Bekah didn’t notice him or Colm or David as they all tossed cash tips onto the table, stood, and pushed in their chairs. She hardly blinked as long as Zac held her eyes. “Not a word.”
“Thanks,” Zac said.
She all but ran from their table. David eyed Zac’s pen as he scribbled down a 1,000 percent tip. The guy might be about 70 percent ego, but he wasn’t a jerk. He straightened and grinned.
“Let’s get out of here.”
SEVEN
They’d barely stepped into the RV when Colm announced the discussion was on hold until he took a shower. He disappeared before anyone could protest.
Simon shook his head. “He’s been like this since the invention of the shower.”
“I’ll take us back to the vehicles. It’ll take him that long to come out of there.” Zac went up to the front.
He was right. They didn’t have far to drive, less than fifteen minutes, and the water was still running when Zac pulled off the highway and parked beside Simon’s car and his own.
In a few minutes, Colm emerged from the shower. “Anyone else who cares about cleanliness.” He gestured toward the bathroom.
David glanced down at himself. His blue crewneck shirt was rumpled enough to look slept in.
Zac flopped onto one of the couches. “If you want to clean up, your gear’s in my car.”
“What?”
“I went back for your bags. You probably don’t remember.” He stood and grabbed keys from the counter beside the stove, offered them to David.
“I’m fine. But thank you.”
Zac shrugged and put back the keys.
David sat up straight in one of the padded kitchen chairs, resolve steeling his spine against the weariness. He’d clean up later today, after the answers had all been given. The others claimed seats as well, Simon last, perching on the edge of the couch where David had slept. He still watched David with something like disbelief. Hard to blame him.
“Tell me who did this,” David said.
“Okay,” Zac said and then didn’t continue.
Simon steepled his fingers, elbows on knees. “You remember the town of Fisher Lake.”
A name, like John Russell, he’d never thought to hear again. His heart rate increased. Their expressions shifted, all three of them watching him more closely. His face must be giving all of it away.
“I never saw the lake.” His voice steadied by the end of the sentence.
“Well, as previously described, it’s more of a pond,” Simon said.
“You’re from Fisher Lake?” Nods around the circle. “All of you?”
“And Moira,” Colm said.
The origin of his curse. Not a quid pro quo of the Almighty after all, healed for a cost: healed forever. So long he’d wondered, and now here the blame was placed not on God, not on David, but on …
“Dr. Leon.” They didn’t deny it. “He did something to me. And to you?”
“To save our lives,” Zac said. “He didn’t know the side effects of his project. He died not knowing. He believed he’d given us a onetime superhealing serum, but he never used it on himself.”
“Why not?”
“He contracted TB. And he had no idea the serum would do something against disease. He used it on fatal injuries.”
They’d experienced something, each of them. They’d been dying, and then not dying, perhaps as unaware as David had been of the consequences. What had happened to each of the men here with him? A tiny jolt traveled his limbs. No telling when he’d last been curious about someone else. Well, someone who wasn’t Tiana.
He had to fly out tonight. Get back to the store, to his life, to Tiana, but these men, this knowledge, all of it …
They watched him, waiting for him to put something together. He shook his head, and the motion seemed to dislodge his thoughts from their tiredness.
“You knew my face,” he said to Zac, who nodded. “You’d seen me before. You were there? In the road? You took me to the doctor.”
“No,” Zac said. “But we studied Leon’s work for a long time, after he was gone, and … well, you were the first of us. The first to be given the serum. His notes on you are copious.”
Notes … “And a photograph?”
Zac rose and disappeared into the bedroom, returned in seconds with a laptop he was already booting up. “Showing’s better than telling in this case. Just give me a minute here.”
Silence reigned while Zac tapped to open folders and files. David wasn’t the only one affected by this moment. Anticipation warred against something else inside him, heavy on his shoulders and tight in his stomach.
Zac handed him the laptop. “This is how I knew you.”
He’d opened a folder called John Russell within a folder called … “Longevite Data?”
“Zac’s nickname for us.” Colm tugged his hair. “We haven’t broken him of it yet.”
“As in longevity?”
A hint of smugness lifted the corners of Zac’s mouth. “Less arrogant than ‘immortal,’ you know? And more accurate, we can assume.”
Probably.
“If we’re ever an acknowledged part of history,” Zac said, “I hope no one has the audacity to coin something else.”
David scanned the folder bearing his name. Scans saved as PDF files. He looked up.
“I was his patient for less than two days. Stayed in town until the wagon was repaired, but I didn’t see him again.”
“Take a look.” Zac nodded to the laptop.
David opened a few of the document scans and found minute script over yellowed pages, a few of them cracked down the center or disintegrating from the corners inward. Scanning them had been wise, yet they were in better condition than he’d have expected from a medical journal kept in the 1880s. The pages had been preserved with great care. He reached out one finger to the laptop screen and touched his name, written in the careful, ink-blotted hand. His pulse thrummed as he read sections of the text.
17 March 1883, Patient brought to me before dawn this morning, gravely injured …
… crushed thorax region including left lung and all bones of the chest and rib cage, abdominal cavity distended with rapid bleeding, patient choking on blood, incoherent but conscious … death was imminent …
… administered serum and beg now Almighty God and His Son, for no other thing can be done. Though patient remains in dreadful pain, he yet breathes. I write these words at the bedside and shall not leave it until such time as he improve or pass on.
David looked away. This was history, old history, but he couldn’t meet the eyes of men who had known since meeting him about this, the second most physically painful event of all his years. Dr. Leon had begged God for his life while David had begged for death.
He closed the document. Opened an image. Caught his breath.
Leon was a skilled sketch artist. The page’s edges were a little tattered, a medium-distance rendering of him lying in the patient bed, his face smooth in sleep. The exact face he saw in the mirror today. Zac didn’t work hard to recognize him, though David’s eyes were closed in the picture.
He opened a second image—his bare torso and shoulders. The bruises covered him, starker in black and white, blackest at his abdomen and left ribs. Chest and sides sunken, crushed. Here, now, his lungs shut down. No one who looked at this image would see a patient. They would see a corpse. David fought a wave of memory. The moment he knew he couldn’t correct the skid of the wagon. Cut the horses loose, spare the horses and then more urgently jump, jump clear. But there hadn’t been time, everything moving so fast, rain dripping over the brim of his hat, driving at his usual speed though he should have slowed in that weather, on a road he didn’t know well. Thrown and falling and the explosion of pain as the wagon crushed him. To death.
He spread his hand over his eyes, shut them tight.
“Yeah,” Colm said quietly, but David couldn’t focus on his voice.
A woman wept. The weight on him lifted. Hands raised him from the mud. Somewhere in the back of his darkening brain he wondered why no one helped the man who was screaming.
“Come back, man.”
David shook his head, lowered his hand from his eyes. The picture still filled the screen—black hemorrhaging and smashed bones beneath the skin. He shut the laptop. Looked up. Simon had wandered to the kitchen, but Zac and Colm still sat with him.
“Happens to all of us sometimes,” Colm said.
No. David shoved to his feet and pushed past Colm. He tugged open the door and stepped into the desert, into heat like a wall. He walked until sweat poured down his back and chest. Until weakness leached into him, the fuel of one meal and three hours’ sleep used up. Full recovery would require more time. His legs folded, and he sat on the ground, knees bent, arms wrapped around them. He scuffed one shoe over the top of the sand, drawing a wide line. Moment of truth. Yes, there was a lure to all of it. For the first time since he’d been with Sarah, he wouldn’t have to hide the dichotomy.
But he might not remember how to stop hiding it. And he might not want to. The way things were now … solitary, sure, but safe too. Not that safety had ever been his final determiner before.
Or his excuse.
He sat awhile in the sand. A lizard skittered from behind a rock, leaving tiny footprints as it fled in an arc away from David. He squinted at the blue expanse above him. Halfway to the horizon, a hawk circled. Cars passed on a highway half a mile away.
He pushed to standing and spread his feet until his head cleared. He plodded back to the RV and made decisions. The cool air from inside hit him as he opened the door, habit keeping him to one side of the doorway, giving him a second’s pause before he ducked inside.
“I think it was a chance for a ratings spike.” Simon’s words bit the air with a false calm that crackled.
“I’m not a TV show,” Zac said.
“You’re not a household name, either—or rather, you weren’t until this week. It irked you and you decided to do something about it.”
“By smashing every bone in my body? Do you think I’m pathological?”
“It’s crossed my mind.”
After the glare of the sun, David’s eyes had to adjust. He shut the door behind him as the sweat cooled and dried on the back of his neck. He shivered.
Colm lounged in the driver’s seat, feet on the dash. He found David over his shoulder. “Ten more minutes and we were coming after you.”
David leaned against the door. Zac’s laptop sat beside him on one couch, and Simon paced in front of him.
“You have to stop,” Simon said. “You’re going to end up dead or, worse, in a hospital somewhere, and we’ll have to steal your blood samples like sidekicks in a spy movie.”
Zac leaned back against the couch and watched Simon’s strides try to carve a rut in front of him. “And you call me dramatic.”
“You know how it works, Zac.”
“Whatever happens to me or Colm or Moira, you’ll go on undetected and unaffected. Go to work in your lab, pick up your white coats from the cleaner’s, monitor the science journals.”
Simon halted in front of him, jaw clenched, fists lo
oking as if they itched to deck Zac. A one-two punch would knock his head into the wall. Up front, Colm was reading Dashiell Hammett, so absorbed David almost believed he didn’t know how the novel ended. The dog-eared pages throughout hinted otherwise.
Simon stalked to the pegboard over the kitchen counter, where several sets of keys hung. He snagged one and turned to face them all.
“My flight’s leaving at six, and there’s no point in continuing this.” His gaze met Zac’s.
Zac shrugged, the slant of his shoulders somehow indicating the door.
Simon jingled his keys. “David. It was good to meet you at last.”
“Likewise. And thank you for your help.”
“Seems to have turned out all right.” The man’s mouth tilted. Another nod, and he headed out the door.
“See you at Thanksgiving,” Colm said as the door shut.
“Thanksgiving?” David said.
“You’re invited, obviously. Tradition. We spend Christmas wherever we are, but Thanksgiving and Fourth of July are …” He shrugged.
“Are longevite holidays.” Zac stood, smirking. “You’ll meet Moira too.”
It was too easy. The integration. The welcome. Perhaps it made sense, only five of them in the world, and their four a solid group. The disagreement just now had felt worn, old words like old clothes.
Colm swung his feet to the floor. “I guess rock climbing’s out of the question.”
“For the new guy? Yeah.” Zac shut the laptop and tucked it under his arm.
“Figured you wouldn’t go for it either, at least for a few weeks.”
“Oh, that. I’m healed up. Hundred percent. Beat you to the top.”
“If you’d return me to my hotel first?” David said.
Zac and Colm set a time and place to meet, and before Colm left he shook David’s hand.
“Hope to see you around.” Colm didn’t wait for David to commit to anything, just smiled and went to his car. It was a bright green Honda that shouted his presence twice as loudly as he did himself. Dust trailed his departure, dissipated until the car turned onto the empty highway and vanished into the horizon.
Zac locked up the RV and left it. David got into the passenger seat of the red sedan. His bags were indeed on the back seat. Thoughtful. Zac stowed his laptop at David’s feet, though there was room in the back for it.
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