Flawless

by Joshua Spanogle

  “Well, we don’t have much time, then. Stand,” she said to Dorothy.

  “What are you going to do, Alex?” I asked.

  “Stand up!” she yelled.

  Dorothy did.

  “You ruined everything,” Alex said. “All of you. All of them. Move to the corner.” Alex flicked the gun toward Dorothy’s left. Dorothy shuffled to my side. Tony moaned quietly in his chair.

  “They got too greedy,” she said. “They wanted too much and they were so stupid about things and now I have to deal with the mess.”

  “Alex—” I said.

  “Shut! Up!”

  Without warning, she lowered the nose of the gun, shifted it to the right, and pulled the trigger. The bullet tore into the blind man’s gut. A yell ripped from his lungs and he fell out of the chair and began to thrash on the floor. Alex stepped forward, lowered the barrel. Fired again. This time the bullet smashed into Tony’s chest. The body quivered, then fell limp.

  Dorothy let out a tiny moan. Tim stared, frozen.

  “What are you doing?” I screamed, dreading what would happen next.

  For a moment, Alex did not move. Her eyes were wide, as if she had trouble comprehending what she’d just done.

  Next to me, I could hear Dorothy murmuring, “No, no, no.”

  “Alex!” I shouted.

  “Start with the hardest first,” she whispered, and swung the gun toward Tim. Uncle Tony, I guessed, didn’t even count. When he saw what was happening, Tim screeched, dropped from his chair, and began crawling fast along the back wall of the room.

  “No,” I said. “Think about this.”

  Tim had pushed himself into the corner between the wall and the stand holding the microscope’s video setup. The stand shifted as he pushed himself hard into it.

  “I have to do it,” she said, moving to get clear sight lines to the crouching boy.

  “Mommy,” Tim wailed.

  “Alex,” I said, inching toward her. “They’re coming. It’s over.”

  Suddenly, Alex swung the gun at me, and I froze. “You stay there or I will shoot you right now. God help me, I will shoot you.”

  I met her gaze. From the corner of my eye, I saw the kid cowering. “Then do it,” I said.

  The beautiful face held still for a second, then seemed to fracture. She swung her head and the weapon back toward the boy. I heard a tortured “ahh” escape from Dorothy’s lungs.

  “I have to do this,” Alex said faintly, and I got the sense she was talking more to herself than to us. She stiffened her arm.

  Suddenly, there was a blur to my right—Dorothy darting across the room. She launched herself at Alex, her arm sweeping toward the weapon.

  I reached to grab her, but momentum carried Dorothy into the other woman.

  Their bodies collided.

  Then, a shot.

  123

  BRIGHT ARTERIAL BLOOD SQUIRTED FROM the jagged tear in the left side of Alex’s neck, spattering her clothes and the floor. Darker venous blood oozed. Frantically, she pushed herself into a half-sitting position and slapped her hand to her neck. The blood pulsed through the fingers, gliding down her chest and bisecting the V made by her unbuttoned shirt.

  Panicked, she started scrabbling at the floor around her. I stepped forward, kicked the gun away.

  Dorothy was in the corner, cradling her son.

  I knelt in front of Alex. As I opened my mouth to speak, a low voice rumbled from the corner of the room. “Let her bleed.” Dorothy.

  Let her bleed. The easiest thing to do. From the differing hues of blood, from the volume, I knew the bullet had torn through carotid and jugular. This woman—an architect of so much misery—was bleeding to death before my eyes.

  Alex sagged against the wall. Her movements were slower now, as she lost more and more blood volume. “My…my…” she sputtered. Her hand slid around her wound as she tried to apply pressure. But her strength ebbed, and her arm fell to her side. She raised it again.

  “I know,” I said.

  “Let her bleed.” Wedged in the corner, Dorothy pulled her son firmly to her breast, as if she wanted to take him into her. There was something wild about her look: the clenched jaw, the scowl that stretched the tumors in odd directions. For the first time since I met her, she truly looked ugly. “She—” Dorothy glanced toward the inert body of her uncle, wrapped her fingers around her son’s head, “she did this.”

  Yes, I thought, she did. And she deserved to burn in the same circle of hell as Paul Murphy.

  But not today.

  I brought my hand to the gash in Alex Rodriguez’s neck and pressed my fingers into the thumping artery.

  124

  FINALLY, THE PARAMEDICS CAME, BOTH fresh-faced white guys who looked like ex-military: all buzz cuts, stocky builds, and precise movements. Dan Missoula was behind them, and bumped into their rear guard when they stopped to assess the scene. Even for hard-bitten medics, the view must have been a doozy: a bloody, eyeless man on the floor in front of them, a woman slumped against the wall to their left, dumping blood over her blouse, me, the floor. The boy in the corner clutching a woman whose face looked monstrous.

  After the initial shock, the paramedics got down to business with clipped questions. I answered. The man on the floor is dead, I said. The woman here has lost a lot of volume. The woman in the corner has a severed finger. The child is unhurt.

  Dan Missoula had disappeared.

  While one of the paramedics cleared Dorothy and Tim from the room, the other—Robinson, his nametag said—took my place at Alex’s side. He ripped open a package of gauze and pressed it hard to her neck.

  “There’s some left,” he said.

  I looked at him, not comprehending.

  “For you to clean up,” he told me.

  The gauze was sopping with blood by the time I dropped it on the floor.

  The other half of the team came back into the room and began preparing fluids to dump into Alex’s veins. I took the plastic cup with Dorothy’s finger and left.

  More first responders—mostly police—collected in the hallway. I told one of the uniformed cops about the bodies in the loading dock and about the hazardous-materials situation over there. This set off a flurry of radioed calls, and I could feel the chaos rise. Since no one seemed to be in charge, the whole thing threatened to devolve into a total cluster fuck, for a little while, at least. I couldn’t really deal with that, so I cut the officer off mid-sentence with a “Thank you” and turned to walk down the hall, through the double doors, through the blast of air in the foyer, through the second set of doors, and out of the animal facility.

  Dorothy pressed against the wall in the blank corridor. Tim leaned against her. Her right hand rested on his shoulder; her left was pulled against her belly, the blood-spattered cloth balled in her hand.

  I handed her the cup with her finger. “Keep it with you until you get to the hospital.”

  She took it.

  “You two should go upstairs,” I said. “Wait for the other ambulance.”

  Dorothy raised her eyes to me. “Will she live?”

  “Probably,” I said.

  Dorothy nodded slowly; I couldn’t tell if she was pleased about this news or not.

  I looked down at Tim. I wanted to touch him—tousle the hair, cup his cheek—but blood still covered my hands. He stared forward blankly.

  “You did a great job. You protected your mom and me.”

  Tim said nothing.

  For some reason, I felt I needed to get through to the boy, to hear the voice of the person who loved The Hobbit. I needed to know that he hadn’t been bent and warped as I had. Violence is searing, kid. The unbendable bends. The unscorchable burns. Ask Uncle Nate. Do not let it touch you, Tim. Wrap yourself in the knowledge that you did right. Know that you had no other choice. Forget this and go back to dwarves and dragons. Go back to being eight, to your mother, to your budding interest in path-o-gens.

  Do not follow me, Timothy Kim, into self
-doubt and recrimination. Do not follow me into bitterness.

  “It’s over, Tim,” I said. “You can—”

  “Nate,” Dorothy said. She tried to smile at me, but couldn’t manage it. I waited for the comforting phrase, the explanation. Instead, she said, “Come on, Timothy. Mommy has to go for a ride in an ambulance. I need you to ride along.”

  Tim peeled himself silently from his mother, and began to walk down the empty corridor. He did not move like an eight-year-old. Dorothy hesitated, stuck to the wall, a crestfallen look on her face.

  “Tim,” I said, shuffling along until I caught up with him. I touched the top of his head to stop him. “You’re going to be okay. Look at me.” He did. “What’s going on up here?” I mussed his hair, dropped my hand from his head.

  He shrugged.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what should be going on. You should be thinking you’re the bravest, smartest kid in the world.”

  He was silent.

  “You should be thinking you’re braver and smarter than Bilbo even,” I said, struggling to connect. “I don’t think he could’ve done what you did today.”

  “Thorin,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I want to be Thorin.”

  “Kiddo, you’re just as brave as Thorin.”

  Tim sighed, a small whispery thing that seemed very age appropriate. His eyes had lost their steel. “Are you going to see us again, Uncle Nate?”

  Upon hearing that sentence, I nearly lost it. “Of course,” I said, trying to keep my voice from cracking. “Uncle Nate cares about you very, very much.”

  Dorothy was now at my side, her good hand lightly touching my hip.

  “Let’s go, Timothy,” she said.

  The boy reached up and took his mother’s hand.

  I listened to the swish of their feet on the concrete. It was over, I felt, without being over. There would be more cutting, more splitting of flesh. Razor blades would yield to scalpels, blood-drenched bedrooms and living rooms would become brightly lit operating suites. The hand with the knife would be that of a surgeon, not of a butcher. The flesh to be removed was corrupted, not virgin. Still, it was not over.

  The scars etched in Dorothy Zhang’s face would endure, and there would be new scars on new faces. That bitch Beauty would continue her siren song, spurring the pack in its rabid pursuit of the perfect skin, the perfect contours.

  Before reaching the elevators, Dorothy stopped and looked back at me. She smiled.

  This time it was I who tried to smile, but could not manage it.

  Alone now, despite the crescendo of activity at Tetra, I found myself standing in the doorway to the conference room. Alex had been whisked away, and the room was quiet. I stared, unable to move my gaze from Tony on the floor. His arms were splayed wide, his fingers contracted like claws.

  A voice came from behind me. “What happened?”

  Tony’s mouth gaped, the lips retracted over the teeth. Where his eyes had been were now clotted, mangled holes. The previously white shirt was a sheet of dark crimson.

  I fixed on his face and became faint. I leaned against the doorjamb, slid down to the floor, my knee erupting in pain as I did so.

  “You want to tell me what happened?” the man asked. I finally recognized the voice of Jack Tang. “You want to get to the hospital?”

  What had I become? I wondered. A killer? A torturer? Events had twisted me so that I could hardly recognize my two hands—lined in crimson—lying like dead things in my lap.

  Tang was saying something to me, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  Tony seemed to be staring at the ceiling. He seemed to be screaming.

  No, I wasn’t to blame. Events had done this, I told myself. Others had done this. Michael Kwong, Uncle Tony. Alex Rodriguez and, worst of all, Paul Murphy. They had taken someone who wanted to do something for the world—who became a goddamned doctor so he could throw his hat in with the good guys—and they had warped him into an ugly thing. The blood was on their hands, not yours. You, good citizen, just wanted some justice. You, good doctor, just wanted to stop people from getting sick, to protect them from their pain.

  You did the best job you could.

  “Nate.” Tang stood directly in front of me, and I could not ignore him. “We need to get you to the hospital.”

  I looked up at him, then back at my hands, my eyes fixing on the lattice of scars on the left, the ring of blood at the wrist. And crimson covering everything like paint.

  “We want to get you out of here before the local detectives come,” Tang said. “You’ll be here for a week answering questions.”

  I tried to hide my hands in my lap.

  “Come on, Nate. You okay?”

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  Both of us knew that was not true.

  125

  ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL. This didn’t really, so it wasn’t really, get it?

  It had been a week since I’d driven a needle into Michael Kwong and a thumb into Uncle Tony. Seven days in which to lick my wounds, physical and spiritual. I spent the first forty-eight hours post-Tetra in the hospital, where the plastic surgeons wired the left side of my face back together. My knee was healing, my hand, my wrists. All in all, my body was on the mend. But my soul…well, let’s just say the course of treatment I chose for spiritual healing wasn’t the most effective.

  It was eleven o’clock in the morning, and I sipped coffee in a shop a few blocks from the bare-bones weekly rental that I’d picked up. Brooke was out of the hospital by that time, but said she wasn’t quite ready to see me yet, much less have me skulk around her home. Couldn’t blame her, really. I knew too well what I’d done to her. So did she.

  I tried to focus on the page from an alternative weekly paper I’d been perusing, my brain twirling from the surfeit of painkillers I’d downed two hours before. Therefore, the coffee: to counteract the OxyContin. So, things were not ending well for me. And they weren’t ending well for a few dozen others who’d been shot full of Beautiful Essence and were unlucky enough to be Wei-jan Fang’s half-percent.

  In the Bay Area, there were thirty-three cases of what the medical profession was now calling “iatrogenic aggressive-form dermatofibrosarcoma protuberans–fibrosarcoma,” or “IADFSP-FS.” Quite a mouthful, but don’t trust doctors to be wordsmiths. The New York Post caught wind of the story, as had every other news outlet in the world. The Post was the least medically accurate, perhaps, but by far the most colorful: “Exploding Faces in San Francisco” was their headline. I detected a bit of schadenfreude in that first article. Not so three days later when the Post proclaimed “Cosmetic Exploding Face Case Found in Queens.” Wei-jan Fang and Tony, it seemed, had opened a whole box of Pandoras; in addition to San Francisco and New York, cases had turned up in LA, Vancouver, Seattle, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sydney. There were at most sixty people in the other cities, but the worry was that Beautiful Essence would continue to circulate on the black market. “The results are just too good,” one health official from CDC was quoted as saying.

  Though the highest concentration of cases was in the San Francisco area, public health had, thankfully, gotten a head start here. With the help of the media and files found at Fang’s home, the thirty-three cases—twenty-eight women and five men—had been identified within days. Ravi got his time in the spotlight and, all my expectations to the contrary, looked professional and composed on TV. Still, if you looked hard enough, you could almost see his head expanding in front of the cameras.

  Unfortunately for the afflicted, this flavor of fibrosarcoma had a higher rate of metastasis than its cousins. About fifty percent was the guess. So, in addition to being locally aggressive and destructive, it tended to migrate to other parts of the body, set up shop there. Eyes would be lost, faces mauled by surgery, bodies wracked by chemotherapy. People would die. But if I’m counting blessings—and boy, was I counting blessings—I guess I should have been happy that it wasn’t invariably fatal. I guess I sho
uld have been happy we found it as early as we did.

  I guess I should have been happy, too, that some justice had been served. Dustin Alberts was in jail, cooling his heels with Jonathan Bly and a few of Uncle Tony’s associates. There were still bad guys to be found, though, and law enforcement in half a dozen states and as many countries were keeping themselves busy with the search. The California Department of Health was on the hunt, too, for the mole who’d tipped off Uncle Tony and his clan about the Mings and the poor bastard from Kaiser and whatever else. Despite Ravi’s confidence—“We’ll smoke the fucker out”—I figured the mole was safely back in his or her cubicle, counting down the days until the weekend, the years until the pension.

  Renegade bad guys and renegade cancer didn’t stop the march of business, and Tetra’s board was busy dismantling the company, hocking its assets and intellectual property at fire-sale prices. Last word was that nobody had bid on Regenetine yet, but I assumed the vultures were circling, waiting for the price-drop deeper into the toilet. Despite the governmental scrutiny that would invariably follow Regenetine wherever she went, economics would ensure that she someday found her way into a syringe, into a face. The results were, indeed, too good; the market too big.

  I closed the alternative newspaper, the only periodical I bothered to read these days. I’d been through the articles—the newest bands, the hottest bars, the five-thousand-word feature about the Native American lesbian poet whose free-verse rants had gotten her onto MTV—more times than I could count. I avoided other news outlets. “Dr. Nathaniel McCormick” had been splashed over the more mainstream papers. The words and phrases they used next to my name—“courageous,” “hotshot investigator,” “respected physician”—seemed to describe someone else. A respected physician wouldn’t be pulling a pill crusher from his jacket in a coffee shop, would he? A respected physician wouldn’t grind two OxyContin to dust under the table, then drop the powder into a cup of water, then shoot it down, would he?