“So they’re recruiting for their church?” Wendell asked.
She looked up at Wendell again. “Boy, you must be lost. If you don’t know them, then this ain’t your city.” She smiled, which on her face almost looked painful. “You best be on your way. I don’t mind you, but they,” and she looked out at the men, “they see things different.”
“But I haven’t done anything.”
“Don’t matter. You look at that guy up front,” she said, “the one with that bullhorn. You see that strained and constipated face? You got a man there that needs him some bran. They all aggressive, ready to fight, blaming everybody but the people in this city. And the way you look, you gonna get yourself some blame, if you stick around.” She leaned back and took another sip of coffee. “But in the end, they a death rattle, and this city is what’s dying.”
As the man in the street talked, the crowd grew more agitated, with more fist pumping and shouts. Wendell knew he had to leave.
“We don’t seek to demonize,” the man continued, “but the truth is, they’re out there watching, sipping their drinks by their pools, on the phone with their Jewish bankers, buying their box seats and BMWs, trading in lies and theft, and we’re all here, suffering and starving in the streets! The money they make is money they take,” he said, a line he delivered while smiling broadly, knowing it would be a crowd pleaser, something quick and clever and easily repeatable that he and his associates had written earlier, destined for a thousand posters. The man nodded his head, slapped the side of the bullhorn with his free hand. “But we got what you need,” he added. “Just stick around and y’all will get what you need. We got the answers to the questions y’all are asking.”
The crowd ate it up, with everyone all smiles; ironic, Wendell thought, as the faces of the men in the street were now all hard, fierce. Still, the speaker’s vituperation, with a distinctive edge that hinted at a future for violence on the streets—directed at that great and evil they, Wendell thought—kept the crowd rapt. It was as if the crowd had been awakened from an artificial slumber on that street in the gray slurry of the late morning, to feed off a bilious brew of militancy and resentment. The heat of the day was no match for what stirred in those bowtied men, eyes lit with a strange fire, content not with finding apathetic hands to take their pamphlets, but hands to hold placards, or even grab bricks. Wendell worried that things could get dangerous quickly. But no one was yet eyeing him suspiciously; a few of the men forming the human line, though, kept returning their glances to him.
“We will rise up,” the man yelled through the bullhorn, “rise up together in the liberation struggle, defend ourselves and take what’s ours. Because in the end, y’all don’t need to be listened to, y’all need to be feared.”
The crowd roared. Wendell started to walk away.
“Drugs’ll kill you, boy,” the woman said. Wendell stopped and turned to her. She was looking intently at his face.
“No, I’m not—”
“That face of yours says it. Cracks and scabs. Them teeth too. They worse than mine, and that’s saying something.”
Wendell touched his face, but the gloves prevented him from feeling any changing contours in the skin.
“If you don’t blow yourself up with it,” she added, “that meth’ll rot you from the inside out.”
“Look, I’m no…”
“It’s a hillbilly death sentence. That’s what they say on the 60 Minutes. You hillbillies blow yourselves to pieces with that stuff.”
“It’s not drugs.”
“But it’s something. Normal people don’t look like you.”
Wendell stepped past the woman, as his head began to swim, with the crowd in the street now seeming to tilt slowly on its own independent axis. Wendell reached out to the liquor store wall for balance.
“Drugs,” he heard the woman say, now behind him and fading into the increasing din on the street, “them drugs’ll end you. Ended my two boys. They daddy had the bottle, but it’s them drugs…” and her voice disappeared. In the coming days, passing dreams had Wendell seeing a dark skeleton, on the porch of a deserted house, rocking expectantly in a rocking chair, chewing on a drug store pipe.
Wendell staggered along, his vertigo drawing his path left and forcing him to stop, take a deep breath, and try to walk normally again, or at least as normal as possible. He bumped past a few people in the crowd, but no one seemed to notice. The crowd thinned, with a few latecomers running toward the action like firefighters to a fire. With a quick glance behind him, Wendell scraped his shoulder along a brick wall as he walked, following the sidewalk, watching it lift out of the ground and rotate before him, his brain telling his body to move in the opposite direction to balance things out. But balance was impossible and Wendell went to his knees, his stomach now heaving. He held his head in his hands, closed his eyes, and waited for the wave to pass.
And in a flash, he saw her again, his mother. Her papier-mâché face, that arm raised, he a child, up against the wall. She was going to hit him.
Eyes opened. The street looked paler, more washed-out. Perhaps his eyes were deteriorating now as well. But Wendell forced himself up, forced himself to walk, even as another wave of vertigo threatened to take him back to the ground. Still he continued on, knowing he needed to make more distance. There came a hodgepodge of commercial and residential buildings, like the city zoning board had used whiskey and darts to plan the streets. A tall apartment building stood as a sentry to the entrance to a treed pancake of fenced lots, some with houses, others without. All of it kept that otherworldly, apocalyptic air, with its few men and women scurrying about like the remaining victims of a plague. One home, surprisingly painted and manicured to a level unseen in that neighborhood for years, stood at a street corner, as if it had emerged on that spot magically but unfortunately. It had American and Marine Corps flags flying together from the porch, windows intact, and a grinning Rottweiler like a fanged horse sitting at the chain link fence, waiting for a junkie to devour. More life, Wendell thought, albeit curious, even bizarre, considering its context.
The Rottweiler barked, and immediately Wendell’s vertigo merged with another explosive headache. Again he held his head in his hands and shuffled past the Marine Corps house. Blue spots appeared and then melted like snowflakes in his vision.
Another block. An overturned sandwich cart. Two children standing and watching. Wendell stumbled.
Two more blocks. He felt like crawling. There came the distinct feeling that he was being followed.
Just stop, just close your eyes and—
One final block, pushing himself along against the concrete wall of an abandoned warehouse. Eyes open, seeing blue spots and furious yellow lightning bolts, but eyes open, holding out hope that in one more city block he’d be dropping into a verdant lawn or a sparkling pond.
Eyes open.
Just close them. Be done with it.
Just a little fight left.
There it was, in front of him, a line of train tracks—
It’s over, all over.
—with a passenger car, rusted in place on the tracks, like an ancient gray whale.
Feet failed. To his knees.
And then the noise of someone stopping behind him.
The blue spots would swell, blinding him, then fade to reveal the train car.
Someone laughed.
Wendell fell to his elbows, and let his eyes close.
They called his name. He awoke.
The headache promised to split his head open and pour out onto the ground whatever had been growing in it. The sun reflected off the passenger car’s silver exterior and into Wendell’s eyes.
They called again. They. Wendell feared turning around and seeing them, the nurses with hairy and knotted forearms and guns on their hips, bearing down on him. His gloves were off and he scratched at the ground; whatever fingernails had remained were now off, taking pieces of skin with them. He wanted to scream in pain, his back full of daggers, b
ut nothing came out.
“Wendell…”
“What do you want?” he whispered.
It came from the train.
Yes, the train. He would get on it, take a seat, relax, and wait for the willow trees and red barns, lemonade stands and flea markets. On that train, rusted in place, like it had been built on that spot, like it had never intended on going anywhere. The sun retreated behind the clouds, and Wendell looked up, at the row of windows, and saw them.
His father was in the window on the far left, then his mother just to his right, then a man Wendell didn’t recognize, and finally Drake. Drake turned and waved vigorously, as if in Wendell he saw the long lost friend waiting for him at the train station to return home. He was a child in a man’s body, overeager and ridiculous. The unknown man kept his eyes away from the windows, looking straight ahead as if nothing were happening outside the train. Wendell’s mother stared out, looking for someone but seeing no one. And Wendell’s father looked out and was the only one to see him, to actually see Wendell, a little boy, his little boy, who had become a man and who was now becoming something else, seeing him with long dead eyes and a peculiar look of concern across his face, like he knew Wendell was in danger, like he could see past that moment and into the future to what his little boy would soon become, a lab-borne chimera, a monstrosity. He was wearing the same polo shirt he had on when he died, blue with white horizontal stripes, but gone was the foolishness of a man who saw the city, their apartment, their new life, as just another opportunity to start over and make it big. He knew what was to happen, and his face showed it. He spoke, but Wendell could only see his lips move.
He’s warning me.
“Wendell. Mr. Mackey.”
From behind him this time. Wendell turned.
It was Dr. Scotia, wearing a red cassock and alb, a black stole over his shoulders with unknown symbols at the ends, thick black cincture around his waist, and black miter on his head adorned with more bizarre symbols and letters. He swung an incense burner by his side, issuing blue clouds of smoke that encircled him and Dr. Thane behind him, who was dressed in a black cassock and black skull cap, hunched over and shuffling his feet like a giant beetle. Bastardized bishops, they trailed a line of doctors in white coats, heads bowed like defrocked priests. The blue smoke settled and swirled at their feet like early morning fog as they moved towards Wendell. Wendell’s eyelids hung heavily, and he knew that this was his father’s warning. If only he could have heard him.
Eyes closed, then opened, and they were closer. Again, and they were almost on him. Smiling, excited. And behind them all was another man, standing at the street corner, watching.
Wendell was being followed.
He smelled the incense. Saw their hands moving. But they were too late. He closed his eyes one last time, and felt his cheek smack into the ground.
It’s gonna hurt. It’s gonna hurt real bad. She’s gonna—
But his mother disappeared from view, and images flickered by as he opened and closed his eyes, like a TV remote control changing channels. The yellow house; Sister Agatha; the oxygen tanks in his room; his hands; spiders; Agatha again, now lifeless on the floor in the apartment; a man, standing over him, backlit by the sun; his father; bloodstains; a duck pond. It went on for a few minutes, and Wendell felt himself getting to his knees. The images faded, and the muddy sky returned to cast a copper pallor on the city. Wendell was alone. The passenger car was empty.
Surveying his surroundings, his tongue felt a gap in his mouth. Looking down, Wendell saw a pool of blood, clearly his own, in the middle of which sat two teeth. He picked his gloves up off the street and slipped them back on his hands, afraid to look at them and see how mangled they were. Hands now gloved, he rubbed his aching chin, likely the source of the blood, he thought. Looking to his left, he saw more blood, and a brown boot, sitting up as if its owner had dashed off so quickly he had stepped out of it without a thought. Wendell stepped towards it, but stopped.
You look in it, he thought, and you’ll see a foot.
“No, I didn’t…”
His chest cratered and his back heaved and Wendell vomited into the street. There was little in his stomach, but still enough to produce a puddle, with a few bright red rivulets in it. He retched until there was nothing but dry heaves, his back screaming and his skull ready to explode. The blue spots reappeared in his vision, but Wendell still stood up and began to walk, fearful and directionless. One street blended into another; at times the sky would darken, as if the sun itself had extinguished behind the clouds, but it would only be another fainting spell, dropping Wendell to the ground again. He would come to, sprawled out on the pavement and thankful for the lack of traffic, get up and continue on.
But soon the sky yellowed, the clouds bluing and narrowing like gun barrels and running across the sky. Now the homeless men skulking in the corners of burnt-out buildings weren’t men but monsters, with glowing eyes and furry necks. Wendell looked to the yellow sky and saw flying beasts, once people, but now horrifying creatures, with leather skin and pointed jaws. The skyscrapers in the distance—yet somehow closer than they were before—melted like candle wax, and low-hanging tree limbs became arms scraping against the pavement.
Now they were all following him, all watching him, waiting for him to change into one of them, to join, to swallow rats whole and lick the dog blood from the culverts. He would wait in dark corners for the children returning home from school. He would escape the sewers at night to prey on winos and hookers, and scrape his claws against window panes to frighten housewives. He would exit humanity, and then terrify it. Rule it.
Lights out. Sun gone. Again he collapsed to the ground.
Don’t do it, he thought, don’t think about it, the yellow house, the old life, because you don’t go back. Probably got demolished a long time ago anyway, or burned to the ground, with something new built on top of it, some strip mall or nightclub, so when I die, then everything in my past is gonna die with me, and it’s all gonna be snuffed out like a match, and it’ll be like none of it ever existed in the first place.
Wendell tried to get to his feet, but found that crawling on his knees and elbows was the best that he could muster. It didn’t last long. He crawled to a stop sign, huge and seeming to hover in the sky over him like a bleeding moon. He grabbed at its pole for support, stared up, and watched the stop sign bend, lean down to address him, somehow alive. Its white letters S-T-O-P dripped away, replaced with U-N-I-T 2-0-0.
Wendell let go of the pole and felt himself slip down into a ditch.
Voices. It was the flying beasts, coming to peel the rest of his skin off his body, to hurry along his transition.
No, not the beasts. These were human voices, one of them female.
“Over here.”
“What?”
“Over here. He’s over here, in the ditch.”
“It’s him? Oh thank God. Be gentle with him Santos.”
“Yes ma’am.”
A shadow overtook Wendell, who was now staring up at the yellow and blue paisley sky. And then he was floating, or being carried.
“We got you, Wendell. You’ll be okay.” He recognized the voice.
The shadow set him down in the back seat of a car. The engine started, and he heard the two voices whispering in the front seats. Everything went dark.
Then came a low, metallic hum, and another recognizable voice, this one Scotia’s. The darkness receded, and Wendell’s vision settled on the doctor. Wendell was back in the institution, and the white neon lights above Scotia buzzed.
I’m dreaming, Wendell thought, though it all felt too real.
“You know,” said Scotia, “you’re the first of your kind, Mr. Mackey.”
If that were the case, Wendell wondered what it was that lived on the lower levels, that thing that he would hear moaning and screaming through the vents.
“A new…Adam, perhaps,” Scotia said, “if you’re of that persuasion. But not from the earth, nothi
ng so mundane. No, from the best minds on the earth. The first of your kind.” Scotia looked proud of himself, his head turned to one side slightly, like the carved bust of a triumphant general. “A new creation.”
“Head hurts.”
“Just the medication. It’ll pass.” Scotia leaned over Wendell, pulled a pen light out of the breast pocket on his lab coat and shone it in Wendell’s eye, pulling the lid up with his thumb and forefinger. “You’re recovering well.”
“From what?”
Scotia smiled. “Just a slight procedure. Quite minor. One of our therapies caused a small amount of swelling, so there was a need to correct it. All like new. Better than new, in fact.”
“What are you doing to me?” Wendell smacked his lips, letting his head roll to one side.
“It’s all about improvement.”
“I…I don’t understand.”
Wendell expected nothing. No response, as had been the case in the past. Certainly no clear, direct answer. But this time was different.
“We’re testing the limits,” Scotia responded. Such vagaries were usually the best that he could expect. But then, Scotia added, “We’re transcending humanness. We’re accelerating evolution, but ameliorating it as well, adding a human touch to human evolution.”
“So…I am…”
“Fortunate, Mr. Mackey. Because you’re a pioneer. Well, we all are, but not like you. You’re the first to see the Pacific, or to walk on the moon, or Mars and beyond. You’re the first to feel, to live, in a hyper-human state.”
Now the pain was becoming real. There was no need to fake it. It was liquid, pouring down from his head and neck, pooling and burning in the center of his back, and rushing with a mad tenacity down his limbs into his hands and feet. His body shook.
The Death of Wendell Mackey Page 15