“But they’ll come,” Wendell said. “She’s dead, but they’ll come.”
He stretched out on the floor, looked up at the ceiling, thought of his father, and let himself slowly drift to sleep.
The fading light through the drapes signaled dusk. Wendell felt his fingers tapping on something hard, and opened his eyes to find himself sitting back at the wooden table in the kitchen. The light over the table was still on, swinging back and forth slightly, as if moved by a mysterious breeze.
Fingers tapping, working with a mind of their own.
Wendell picked up his head, seeing the words “Not Safe” scrawled out in pencil under his moving fingers. He turned to the door. Still closed. And then the windows. Still nailed shut with blinds drawn.
“What am I doing here?” he asked himself. He didn’t remember leaving the bedroom floor and coming back into the kitchen. Parched, Wendell leaned back in his chair and licked his lips. His heartbeat had quickened, and he felt his pulse in his scalp. No headache, just a rhythmic beat, keeping the tempo for whatever was going on under his skin.
The door to his mother’s bedroom was closed. The amputated knob still sat wedged between the refrigerator and the door. Wendell looked around. There were no signs that anyone had entered the apartment. He stood and walked to the refrigerator, feeling on the top for the key, which was still where he had placed it. Over in the living room—or living space, as one great room encompassed kitchen, dining area, and the space for a couch, chair, and television—a thin layer of dust covered the floor, undisturbed by footsteps. The squat round TV table where once sat a small television was covered in magazines and books. The pile looked exactly the same as when he had last been to the apartment, a mound of health-related magazines, the type sent “in appreciation” for a robust donation to some sort of cash-strapped cause. Topping those were the unreturned library books, diverse in their coverage, with titles on diabetes prevention, crystal healing, cancer research and therapeutic touch. The whole space appeared dipped in amber, saved from a previous world and left untouched. No one had been there.
So he must have moved himself. He couldn’t remember any of it, but there was no other way. And with that realization came a headache, blunt and thumping, throwing itself against the inside of his forehead. He stood, steadying himself as his head swam for a moment, turned and walked, not to his mother’s bedroom, but to the other closed door at the far end of the great room. This had been his room. He opened it, and the sudden rush of air caused a few spider webs to dance in front of him. Wendell flicked the light switch on; the bulb in the lamp on the night stand blinked and sputtered, and then shone its yellow light on the bedroom, or what was left of it.
“Like I was never here,” he said. Every time he opened that door, he felt a tinge of surprise, though he shouldn’t have. This was, after all, how she worked. Still, in seeing it, and knowing how it had once looked, the surprise always felt fresh. He cursed under his breath. “It’s not like she had to keep it untouched, but…”
There was still a bed, and a nightstand, even a dresser, but they had all long ago lost their original functionality, and now acted as stacking pallets for Diane’s obsessive collections of health literature, home remedies—most still in their shipping boxes—and curious curatives, amassed from television shows, mail-order catalogs, and her travels through every holistic healing center, Christian Science reading room, herbal café, and New Age vegan bar in the city. It had become her own pharmacy and shaman’s tent, and with at least half of the materials still unopened, it made Wendell wonder whether or not his mother had actually accepted her terminal cancer. Doubtful, he thought, since this kind of work had been years in the making, and admitting defeat meant giving up control, ceding her condition to fate, or worse yet in his mother’s mind, to God. And that was not Diane Mackey.
Wendell walked into the room, feeling the temperature drop, and reached for the first catalog he found. Isis Heals, it said, and on its cover was a woman sitting in the lotus position, a look of dull-witted passivity on her face, and a radiating light, like a starburst, coming out from the top of her head. He thumbed through it, seeing write-ups on amethyst pendants, animal-headed statuaries, scrying mirrors, and damiana leaves sold in bulk. He tossed it into the closet, now doorless and full of plastic bags tied shut. Next to the closet and mounted to the wall like a spice rack was a box with four narrow shelves, each holding brown glass bottles, some labeled and some not, filled with tablets, capsules, and fluids, some topped with droppers, some with safety caps, and others—like remnants from some medieval apothecary—with mushroomed corks. When he was a child, his wooden train set, complete with coils of wooden tracks fitted together like puzzle pieces, would sit in the middle of the carpet, possessing him for hours. And at the end of each night, without prompting it went back into the original box and slid next to the wall under the standing lamp. Now, that corner of space held an odd collection: standing there was a family of six waist-high, silver cylinders labeled with large diamond-shaped stickers. Each sticker was yellow, with a black stenciled flame in the middle and the word “OXYGEN” in black at the bottom. Wendell never remembered his mother having breathing problems, but somehow she had gotten her hands on a treasure trove of pulmonary therapy equipment. Diane was exceedingly deceptive, able to get what she wanted by lying, begging, even bribing. Wendell assumed she wasn’t even above stealing them from a hospital supply truck herself if it served her purposes. Sitting precariously on top of two of the cylinders’ nozzles were two statues, one a blue-skinned, multi-armed deity, facing a bare-breasted and winged female, as if the two vied for control of a privileged position. The room was theirs, as lifeless and hollow as the painted smiles on their faces.
Not safe, Wendell thought, and he stepped back into the doorway. He could only guess what that woman drank, swallowed, inhaled, smoked, lathered on or even injected in her last days. Whatever cocktails she had created in there, their storage all in one place, with that survivalist packrat mentality that had clearly consumed her, looked like a tinderbox, or a chemical waste dump, or both. He closed the door slowly, watching his fingers wrap around the doorknob, turn, and release. He turned back to the kitchen. There were police sirens in the distance.
Wendell clenched his teeth until they hurt and wondered about the gun.
The gun.
“It’s never gonna be safe here,” he said.
All the more reason for the gun.
Dad’s gun, he thought.
The gun that his father let him hold as a child. The gun that dispatched the rabid coyote at the old house. The gun that had spent years hidden away in some dark corner of the apartment.
.22, .38, he didn’t remember. It didn’t matter. He just remembered it heavy in his hands as a boy, and knowing that it was there, just in case.
Lotta good it did, he thought. I was little back then, but I could have held it, could have pointed and fired. It was probably in the foot locker all along. I could have gotten it and changed things.
And then he thought of that doctor with the black toupee standing at his locker in the institution, with the smile that looked like it had been poured across his face. In his mind, Wendell pointed the pistol at the doctor’s forehead. Trigger squeezed. Hammer fell. Done.
“Gun’ll be just in case. If they come, is all.”
If they come, he thought. Of course they’ll come. You think they’ll just let it all go? Ain’t gonna happen.
And then, an intruding thought: You won’t need the gun.
“Probably still in the foot locker.”
You won’t need it. You know why.
He thought of his father, cleaning it at the kitchen table in the old house. Crinkling one eye closed to look down each clean cylinder bore. Like he was aiming. Like he was readying to squeeze that trigger.
You won’t need it and you know why.
Wendell knew. At least, he was afraid he was beginning to understand. In his hand was either a revolver or a to
rn doorknob, and the latter revealed a weapon far greater.
“No, this isn’t right. That’s not what’s happening. This isn’t right…” The headache grew, now fierce and tenacious. “Stop it,” Wendell told himself, walking to the table and sitting down, “just stop it, all of this. Just relax. Just take it easy.” He tried to slow his breathing as his fingers massaged his temples, moving then to his forehead. He turned to the windows, still nailed shut. They may have helped his mother sleep better at night, keeping the street rats at bay, but glass could still break. The apartment door was metal and had a dead bolt, but it was old and sounded weak when it closed, and hinges could only take so much punishment. They would get through that in seconds. Which was why he needed the gun.
Won’t work.
He only worried that when they came, his hands might not be able to work it properly.
Won’t matter.
The fingernails weren’t just blackening, they were loosening. If he played with them too much, more would come right off.
Is that blood on them? It’s gotta be blood.
Seeing his own blood had always made him squeamish. Seeing someone else’s—like a bloody nose on the playground, or blood drawn from an arm on television—curdled his stomach. He was shy to a fault, every bully’s whetstone, never having done more than stomp an ant, but his eyes weren’t lying, and blood on his nails meant that he had the ability to spill it. Wendell began to wonder how many people he had left writhing on the floor during his escape. He remembered at least one, the lab tech, the last person to speak to him in the institution. He cringed to remember it, his arms moving as if taking instructions from another brain. But had there been more? And had there been blood? No scratching, no tearing, at least not with the lab tech, but still, his eyes weren’t lying.
Three days out, he thought. Tomorrow there could be changes in his skin, his chest, his skull, anything. Or there could be nothing. Or he might not wake up at all. And the thought of death was somehow comforting. At least in death there was a guaranteed outcome. There was finality. There would be no worries, no pain, no one chasing him. Bliss in darkness. There would be nothing.
He picked up the pencil from the table. Nothing, he wrote, letting the pencil trail off down the table after writing the g.
Wendell stared at the pencil trail meandering down from the g. He heard the clock above the sink ticking as minutes became an hour. Then two.
Not waking up, he thought, I can’t bank on that. Wishful thinking. Of course, I could…
No. Healthy people didn’t think about that, didn’t even let that enter their heads. But he did.
But I could…
He shook his head. No, it couldn’t happen. He couldn’t let it happen. Still, the idea persisted:
I could make sure I didn’t wake up, he thought.
But doing that, ending it all, meant never learning why it had all happened to him in the first place. And it meant no vengeance delivered to those who had done it, duly earned by him.
Vengeance would come. They would get theirs. But finding the why, the purpose for it all, was almost too difficult to fathom. He snickered, thinking it all ridiculous. Mad scientists had squirming eyes, facial tics, and labored away in dungeons. But Wendell wondered if that was all that separated the mad from his former employers. Theirs was just a different kind of madness. And ultimately, it all led to nothing. There was no purpose.
Still, would they have invested money, time, and manpower for nothing?
They, he thought. Unit 200.
He first saw the title—he assumed it was their title, Scotia and the others that he was encountering daily—while being wheeled on a gurney out of one of the institution’s elevators and onto a new floor. Unit 200. It was printed on yellow signs with black lettering that hung on both sides of the hallway, a hallway that looked too long to have ever fit into the institution’s building, which brought to mind the terrifying possibility that he was now on one of the underground levels. On that first visit, the nurses wheeled him into an examination room where Dr. Scotia and Dr. Thane gave him a once over, peering into his eyes and ears, feeling his glands with their hands, examining and writing on his chart, and then curtly motioning for the nurses to wait outside.
“Why are you doing this?” he remembered asking them. “Why me?”
They stared down at him with antiseptic eyes, curious at the question. Or surprised, as if they had just heard their frog speak up from the dissection tray.
“Here there is no reason why, Mr. Mackey,” said Dr. Thane.
“But what did I do?”
“You’re looking too deeply at the situation Mr. Mackey,” followed Scotia. “Just relax. You, your neighbor, your mechanic, the man whose locker is next to yours, it doesn’t matter. Randomness, Mr. Mackey, the nature of nature.”
Their answer was that there was no answer, which was unacceptable to Wendell. There had to be a reason why they chose him. But Scotia and the other doctor remained tight-lipped, calling for the nurses, whispering to them, and then watching as they wheeled Wendell out of the room and down the hall into another room, as cold and uninviting as the first. An injection followed. Then dizziness. Strong hands moved him to another bed. Wrists tied down. Metal collar on the neck. A waist belt cinched tight. A hard piece, like a horse’s bit, jammed between his teeth. Electrodes on the forehead, collarbones and sternum. Then came the pain, metallic and electric, sucking his eyes deep into their sockets.
He remembered almost constant pain after that—peppered throughout with periods of complete exhaustion and drug-induced lethargy—which didn’t allow him the time to consider their reasons for choosing him. But now, sitting anxiously in his mother’s apartment, Wendell’s fear of returning to the institution brought it to the fore. Whatever their ultimate goals, he had made himself an easy target, perhaps out of his timidity, his anonymity, his preternatural ability to blend into a dull wall like an even duller shade of paint. They chose him because he was someone who wouldn’t be missed. And if he didn’t want the torture to start again, he’d have to run, or fight back.
“They’re too strong, and I’m just…”
Just nothing, he thought. He looked down at the word nothing that he wrote on the table.
“No, I gotta get outta here, gotta run, or fight, or something.” If not, Wendell knew they would come, and it would all start again. He looked up, and thought back.
Every test they performed was followed by copious notes, and a gaggle of doctors would whisper about the results in the hall. He remembered overhearing one doctor calling Scotia on his cell phone:
“We were a bit overambitious at the beginning, I’ll admit. But this won’t be like the others, of that I’m sure. Full transformation will take time, perhaps more than we initially intended, but it should arrive nonetheless.”
Transformation was a broad term. Maybe he was a secret military test subject. Or perhaps they were trying to give human evolution a kick start. But the specifics didn’t matter. What mattered was the end result: they were turning him into some sort of creature.
“Why me?” became the end punctuation for each test. But eventually even their responses stopped. Of course, the tests continued unabated.
Gas tests.
Pressure tests.
Injections. In the arms, the neck, the base of the spine.
He shuddered to think of what happened while he was heavily sedated, which was common, or while completely unconscious.
And then there were the surgeries.
Unit 200 was, among other things, the institution’s surgical center. The Unit consisted of at least two floors, Wendell determined, both underground. Its surgical floor was Sub-1 and held a few offices, what looked to be a test animal room with rows of small cages (which were always empty), and an assortment of examination and testing rooms, with which he was all too familiar. Sub-2 held more elaborate testing rooms and equipment, and a line of empty rooms that Wendell could only guess were once patients’ quarters.
But surgery was Unit 200’s primary focus. Wendell would see some of the unit’s doctors and nurses on other floors and in other capacities, even visiting him in his room on one of the higher levels. He even remembered some of the unit’s OR nurses from the NAB, which convinced him that the NAB was just a false front, nothing more than the entryway into the institution’s heart. But never did any of them look more comfortable than when hovering over an operating table in their blue scrubs and masks. After a month or two, being wheeled down Unit 200’s bright and lonely Sub-1 hallway usually meant that the IV line was already in his forearm and the iodine swabs and scalpels were soon to follow.
There were matching scars, one on each side of his torso just below the ribcage. They were the results of some of the early surgeries, and the ridged purple lines and tiny rows of suture holes like centipedes had already begun to fade to white. Then there was his back. At first it would throb and then fade into a soreness that set in like rust on metal. But over the past week the backaches had become crippling, with spasms that felt like the muscles were tearing themselves apart. Wendell reached back with his left hand and scratched at his scapula, feeling something next to it.
“What is…what is that?”
Wendell stood up and walked to the bathroom next to his mother’s bedroom. He flicked on the light which bathed gray tile in bilious light. There was the bathtub with a brown ring, the toilet seat missing one of its hinges, and the white—or once white—linoleum peeling at the edges. The white pedestal sink rose up from the linoleum like a cheap china mushroom, and above it and mounted to the wall was the medicine cabinet with a mirrored door. Wendell stared at himself in the mirror. His mat of brown hair, greased and clumped together, had been pushed to one side and frozen in place, probably the result of falling asleep at the kitchen table. His eyes were ringed with red, eyes once blue but now a leaden mix, something between green and gray. Each sclera was yellowed. And under his few days of stubble were sunken cheeks the result of hungry days, and months of a diet laced with pharmacological party mix. Still, his small frame was not completely emaciated, with his arms covered in small but wiry muscles. He took off his t-shirt, and turned his back to the mirror.
The Death of Wendell Mackey Page 4