by Josh Law
“Army…” She choked on his name as he sat down.
“Rusty Nail for me thanks.” Army winked at the bartender and sat down, leaning over his hands to look into Marilyn’s face.
“It’s been too long…” His voice was satin. She swallowed the sting of the years. He smiled as the drink was set in front of him, threw a handful of bills on the counter and turned back to her with tender eyes and drawing a long drink.
Drifting to them from somewhere behind the counter, the sad riffs of the Eagles “Desperado” began to play. Marilyn swallowed and watched as Army pulled a Hemingway from his shirt pocket and cut the cap with a lady’s nail file. She felt her throat get tight as she gaped at the bad boy in front of her remembering why he was so attractive to her in long gone days. He plucked a match out of his wallet and lit it against the brickwork of the counter, lighting the cigar’s foot as his eyes twinkled in the flame.
“You called me pretty broken up. Yeah, I know this stuff with Nicky is seriously warped. Trust me, it wasn’t my idea. I was trying to save him.”
Of course, she didn’t believe him. No man allows his child to be turned into Frankenstein’s monster because he was “trying to save him”. It was sick and against the laws of nature. She felt rage foaming like rabies in the pit of her stomach.
“Don’t lie to me, you sultry SOB. I read you like tabloids and what I see is just as cheap. You did it because you profited from it somehow. You’ve always been interested in speed, Prescott. Fast women, fast cash, fast cars, and no consequences. Oh, you’re a beautiful sinner, there’s no question of that. How much did you sell our son for, huh? How many thousands?” She smiled as her eyebrow curled. His nose twitched.
“Don’t talk down to me, Avalon. You didn’t exactly come here to pass out Bibles, did you? Fine, so I had my own kid iced for medical research. It’s not like I’d been to his soccer games or anything. How does it make it any better just because his sister died right after she was born, huh? You’re still selling her body for research. That’s really no better than medical prostitution if you want my opinion.”
Marilyn clenched her teeth. She just had to pretend this was Texas Hold ‘Em. With one massive swallow, she plucked a shoe box from her coat.
“So, I’m no saint either. I lied. I’ve cheated and I steal. I’ve done something far worse this time. It was so bad I couldn’t keep the other baby. So bad that I couldn’t tell you, even though I felt like telling you about your son would make you want to come back.” Marilyn tilted her head to the side. Of course, this was all a bluff. There had never been another baby. This was her play. The wicked plan she’d made in the midst of the forest fire. She’d used parts from the Camaro wreck and Renee’s critique to make it convincing too.
“She was stillborn. They usually give you the baby to bury or whatever. Well, I pretended to bury her, but it was really one of those freakishly creepy life-like dolls in the coffin. This box contains her real body. I had her taxidermied. There was a man, a really good taxidermist who wanted to try it on a human. It worked horribly as human skin just isn’t made for stuffing…I kept her even like this at the foot of my bed. In this box all this time. It was the sick fetish of a confused, alcoholic woman! Apparently the Devil wouldn’t leave it alone. Now here she is. Preserved with some embalming techniques that have kept her spinal fluid, her hair, and everything. The thing is though the reason she was still born is the doctor’s believed there were some very peculiar anomalies with the development of her heart and adrenal glands. She had renal failure in utero and hyperkalemia as a result of this. Your guess is as good as mine, Cassanova. But you can take her. I don’t want a dead baby if I could have a living son! Take the baby and give Nicky back to me! Go back to your sick science kitchen and leave my boy alone!”
Her performance should have won her an Oscar. He’d bought it. Hook, line and sinker. She could tell by the green that stretched up his cheek and splashed across his temples.
Laughter coursed through him and he slapped his knee down, spilling the Rusty Nail all over the counter. Matty the bartender spun on her boot heel, irritated. She swatted a rag and began to clean it up.
That moment he’d slapped his knee was all it had taken. Marilyn gingerly slipped the cuffs out of her pocket and clicked one end of them around his wrist. She clicked the other around hers while he was wheeze laughing to tears and couldn’t even hear it.
“Oh, darling! You think I’d actually buy that bill of goods? Even if you’re telling the truth, which you’re totally not because you, darling, totally suck at the Poker face…Why would I accept a butchered dead baby over a living, strapping, healthy teenaged guinea pig boy?”
“Ah, well, see about that. I didn’t need you to buy it. I just needed to sell it. Which is exactly what I just did. Got your whole voice-over right hear. Pretty as a Nashville record. Let me say it for the tape, though. The contents of this box are not human remains. This is the small fetus of a chimpanzee that was donated to the medical center for pathologist interns to practice on. It was found in the Camaro wreck 6 miles from Lake Nighthorse on the western half of the Lake and should be filed under evidence from the wreck if anything has survived the fire.”
Marilyn punched a button on her cell phone. Army could clearly see from the screen that his confession had just been recorded. Of course, leave it to a private investigator to pull some kind of stint such as this.
“Now, ahem, you remember that little favor you promised to do for 20 bucks?” Marilyn turned to Matty laughing and slapped a bill on the table.
Matty swung herself up on top of the counter. She plucked a 45 cal from where it leaned against her side of the fence and loaded it with graceful fingers and a wink at Army.
“That was just a joke, lady. Hang around Durango for a little while longer and you’ll see. This is the West, darlin’. We do these kinds of favors for free!” Matty affected her accent a little to tease Marilyn. She hopped down from the counter and trained the rifle’s barrel to the back of Army’s head.
“You might not have known this, mister, but I’m the bartender, bouncer and dishwasher all rolled into one. It’s time for you to beat it.” She whistled through her teeth with a hard laugh.
They lead Army outside the both of them singing “Rawhide” just to annoy him. Renee sat in her Datsun listening to an old 3 Doors Down CD that Alex had left in the player.
“Wassup! Bagged that rattler did ya? Alright! Let’s take him downtown. Besides, Alex tipped me off anyway. There’s something you got to see!” Renee’s eyes were blazing as she turned over the key. Marilyn forced Army into the back and chained him to another chain that was woven up through a hole in the trunk and was wrapped around 6 concrete blocks that were inside the trunk.
“Yeah, we thought about you trying to slip your chains. We took steps where it won’t happen. Now, stick a sock in it.” Marilyn shoved a knot made of Alex’s discarded socks into Army’s teeth. Renee cranked the radio and they shot off into the gathering dark.
Chapter 12
Alex stood in the woods, dancing to shift the cold in his feet. He’d used his GPS and Mathlete computation skills to figure out his exact coordinates. Marilyn, Renee, and his captive dad should be here any minute, the police in their wake.
It had been a simple realization of the Wandering Hot Potato. Despite their masks and military coats, he had a maturing boy’s eyes. He could spot the female figure from a mile away. Thus, Alex Prescott had concluded that the entire nursing staff of Durango general hospital were accomplices to Dr. Lucien Swift’s crime. Playing on his conclusions, he had sent a blanket text to everyone on Lucien’s contact list (which he had stolen by hacking into his email).
All he could do now was watch and wait. Wait to be caught between the scalpels of crazed physicians and the teeth and inhumanly strong hands of the angry risen dead.
From where he stood, Alex smelled fire. He could see the tongues off it licking up from the center of a stump that Nicky was standing on.
Nick stood with his arms spread in the Crucifix position. His eyes were gleaming in the glow of the embers that burned around his ankles. From where he stood, Alex could feel the rage that echoed into the deepest circle of his brother’s tormented soul. To have been called back from his blood-drenched grave only to become the most sought after lab-rat of the Century was beyond demeaning. Knowing now that he was not the only one was empowering. He stood to incite rage in those dredged from the dust.
Alex held his breath. This had been the terrible thing he had seen and had tipped Renee off to at the bar. The forests surrounding Lake Nighthorse had become a garden of harvested corpses. Dracula could have done no better. They hung from trees, some only partially reversed from their natural decomposing and still by definition dead. Then some of them hung healed of decomposing and were reviving slowly from the extract. Then there were those who hung from the trees gasping for reanimated breath. They were writhing incessantly mid-air, trying to free themselves of the nylon ropes that suspended them from branches in “X” shapes.
These that were awake had their eyes wide open and their heads fully turned to Nick where he stood in the midst of the smoke.
He picked up a piece of cardboard he’d leaned against the trunk and had written on with a permanent marker. The Hanging People twisted around to read his sign:
This is the Forest of Toys for the God-players. Abandon hope all that enter here.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” Nick’s voice echoed off the trees and drowned out the whimpering of a once-teenaged girl that had just revived.
“Can everyone hear me? Are you awake yet? Feel like you’ve been asleep for centuries? For some of you, this is actually true.”
A man that was hanging in the rotten clothes of a historical cowboy choked audibly, astounded by Nick’s implication.
“Listen to me all of you. My name is Nicolas Avalon. Over half a year ago I was killed in a traffic accident. I was murdered by people my own father had solicited for the sake of medical research! Then by some divinely successful stroke of that same research I revived. Again I was drowned in the Lake, not 10 miles from here. Again, I was revived.
I have come forward to campaign for you, ladies and gentlemen, citizens of the Grave. I don’t know how long this scientific phenomenon will sustain us. Could it be that it is temporary and we will return to the casket linens shortly? I have no idea. Or shall we live our lives again to full ripe age? I don’t have an answer for this either. Is this a blessing or a curse? It’s beyond me.”
He swallowed, knowing what he was saying was a difficult sermon to hear. But he needed to say it. For the sake of his own free moral agency, he needed to preach his conviction to these people.
“What I do know for absolutely certain, ladies and gentlemen, is that a great wrong has been done to us all. We are just warm-blooded dolls with respiration in the games of these God-players. What we are isn’t natural. Didn’t we have the right to rest in peace? Is it morally right or actually ethical to disturb our Eternal rest and submit us to these excruciating examinations? My good citizens of the Grave, the answer is no! This thing that has been done to us is intolerable!”
There were murmurs of almost unanimous agreement among those who were awake. One small boy was curiously eyeing one of the hanging cadavers as his own lips turned a bright lime green. The others saw his horror and the atrocity was driven home. It was the farthest thing from natural. It was unacceptable.
“All I feel is pain, from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. Pain and excessive hunger! It’s like I have billions of tiny nails being driven into me with little chisels. Chipping me away, filling me with an emptiness that can’t be appeased. A disease that can’t be cured! My heart beat is agonizing. With every beat, I feel like I am being sprayed with bullets! You feel it too! I have no doubt!” Nick tore at his clothes. He was unable to control the quivering in his voice.
“I am not going to just lay down and let them kill me and then zap me back awake! Over and over again. Like I was some kind of frog to be dissected! I don’t know what the rest of you are going to do. But I’m going to stand up to these God-players! I’m going to fight back. If I have to live against the natural grain of my life that’s already over, then they will too! There will be fire. We will roast this place off the map. You could see it from Jupiter!”
Now there was a shout from the Waking Ones. Their cry was one battle anthem. A provoked fury rising from the mortal ice. The Dead had been displaced. They would not be quick to forgive.
Alex held his breath. Behind him, he heard the engines of the police squad cars coming to the Calvary. He heard the rumbling of mobile Lab truck engines.
It was all falling into place now. News cameras and vlogger sensations tuning into every corner of the Internet. The world was ready to see the great battle for the sanctity of Human will. The corruption of Human life. The deciding battle of the ‘Science of Resurrection.’
Chapter 13
“Prisoner’s in the car. His statement’s on tape.” Marilyn hopped out of the Datsun’s shotgun seat and tossed Chief Riggs her phone.
“I don’t hand out the props over easy, Avalon. Gotta say it now. Good job.” The Chief tipped his hat to her.
Renee hopped out of the driver’s seat and looked into the misty evening forest. Her eyes popped when she saw the smoke and Nicky standing in the center of the fire.
“I told you. This has gone beyond the realm of what is and what never should be…” Alex was invisible in the shadow of the trees. His voice trembled with rage beyond relent.
“Taking it you’ve found out more than you let on over the phone, kid.” Chief Riggs stepped deeper into the shadows and drew back astonished. Something wasn’t right with Alex.
“Some things you have to do in person. In private preferably, but that’s not really an option this time. I saw something in the forest. It might be the end of me. But I had to. I was the one they wanted to do tests on next…My brother has suffered enough.”
Alex stepped out of the shadows. Renee covered her mouth.
Having plucked his coat off, they could now see that the boy was wearing a body armor vest that was affixed with 6 additional hearts each matched with 6 adrenal glands.
“I’m sorry to have to be the one to solve the mystery. Really, I am. It’s not the story I’d like to tell. Yes, I’m pretty good at Hot Potato. You know the saying that words have power? Words took me down like a fighter jet. I had to make a choice. It was either add one more heart to this vest or wear it myself. See, I love my brother. You have no idea what it’s like unless you’ve got one of your own. I couldn’t let him die again. Sorry…I don’t know how to explain…Let me explain.” Alex coughed and held up his hand. His eyes were squinted almost entirely closed pained by even the dim light.
Renee felt herself break into tears. She was amazed that he could have hidden his agony so well when they were standing outside of the bar.
“My dad was pretty high up the totem pole of military rank before he was honorably discharged for critical wounds he got in an Afghani firefight. When he came home, Mom always said he was obsessed with medical research. It wasn’t just his own recovery that interested him either. When he was in the hospital, he found himself totally wrapped up in a project that meant to study battlefield resuscitation processes and rapid wound closing. My dad submitted his own blood samples to the supposedly good cause.
They say that bad company ruins good morals. Looks like whoever coined that one got it right, huh? Lucien Swift was a pediatric surgeon that worked under the same research hospital umbrella my father was treated by. That’s how they met each other. It was Lucien’s gung-ho involvement in the study and research of my Dad’s “evolutionary adrenal anomalies” that finally influenced him to become the guinea pig for the test himself. The United States government funded the research program with the intention that it would eventually produce them with “self-resuscitating hybrid soldiers”. GI prodigies that had the abi
lity to adapt the size of their adrenal glands and to make extra of muscle function helping chemicals-like potassium- to actually resuscitate themselves naturally. A harnessed version of what’s called Lazarus syndrome. Like Darwinism meets Zombie Sparta or something, I don’t know.
Certain members of our government abused their power and used personal funding from the culprits’ individual bank books, and founded Santa Bianca’s Children’s Home here in Durango about 22 years ago. It was meant to be a satellite foster home they could dump all the offspring of Test Subject# 1(my Dad) off to and harvest for the research work. See, every kid that lives or has lived in Santa Bianca’s is actually my dad’s biological kid. As part of the program, my dad had to donate sperm for loads of women to be artificially inseminated with so there could be as many potential subjects as possible. He was also under strict orders to experiment with different substances and to have sex with as many women as he could seduce, assuming that eventually babies would come out of all of it. They needed to see if any of the factors of biochemical substances or the process of physical intimacy would alter the test subjects.”
Alex looked down at his chest. Now he was shaking, about to be sick.
“It turns out that my Dad has so far had exactly 8 kids that were a result of these ordered love affairs. I’m one of them. Nicky is another. These guys’ organs here were our 6 brothers…”
Alex looked to the sky tears forming in his eyes. He grit his teeth as the vest obviously caused him extreme pain.
“A corrupted team of Black Ops officials were under orders. The test subjects themselves were to be strategically assassinated under varying circumstances to see how resuscitation would work under every kind of death. My brothers here were killed in a car wreck about 4 years ago. They tried and failed to cause the Lazarus syndrome in them. That’s why their organs were deposited for the study of using another subject’s organs to regulate this stimulated resuscitation or whatever.