Immortal

by Gene Doucette

  Throw into that the unfortunate possibility that the very richest among us—the ones who can afford the special gene therapy treatment—also never happen to die. As I’ve said before, death is just about the only constant in my immortal life, and while I might complain about it from time to time, I think that happens to be a pretty good arrangement. Because whether you’re a Hitler or an Alexander, eventually the universe will do away with you just as it did for Jesus and Gandhi. Death is the great leveler.

  Maybe I’m being selfish about my own personal immortality. Maybe I just don’t want to share it. But I also haven’t abused it—much—and I certainly haven’t done any world conquering and mass slaughtering. I frankly don’t think enough of my fellow man to believe others, when handed the same gifts, will act as wisely.

  So, where Viktor, who is the worst kind of idealist, sees a future with less pain and suffering, I see only chaos and class warfare and murder and war. He calls me a pessimist and maybe he’s right. But assuming the worst of people has gotten me pretty far.

  Since I’ve failed to convince him that he’s managed to create the worst kind of weapon, I’m going to have to deal with the problem directly. Provided I ever get out of my cell.

  * * *

  Which brings me back to the keyhole. It is not your everyday keyhole, unless you happen to live every day in the nineteenth century. All the doors in the inner compound have an outsized keyhole to fit the outsized keys that are currently on a large ring attached to Ringo’s belt. They had to be big because demons are not known for their fine motor coordination. This is why they typically break down doors to get through them. It’s not necessarily belligerence—although one must never discount belligerence in a demon as a motivating factor—so much as that most keys are simply too small for their fingers to manipulate. I’ve been told some of them can’t even work doorknobs.

  Though unusually large, the keyholes are still entirely too small for a human to jam his finger into. (I’ve tried and have two formerly sprained pinky fingers to show for it.) But they’re plenty big enough to accommodate a pixie’s arm.

  Just so you know—in case you ever want to try—it’s a hell of a thing to teach a pixie how to pick a lock. It’s not so much that they don’t understand how locks work; it’s that they don’t know what locks are. They don’t even have clothing, for Baal’s sake. So just explaining the basic principles took a week. And without a lock for Iza to practice on—other than the one for my cell door, which I don’t want her opening prematurely—I had to enlist Clara’s help. Which is another thing I’ve relied on my Judas to do for me. No, I’m not comfortable about this at all.

  I’m staring at the keyhole because any minute now Iza is going to be unlocking the door. I hope. I gave her the word that tonight is the night about two hours ago, (or however long I’ve been staring) and she flitted off to inform Clara that she needs to ready herself. I did this because this afternoon on my last trip to the lab, Viktor was kind enough to inform me that the tests are over. He now has everything he needs from me and Eve to finish his work. Which means sometime in the next couple of days, Robert Grindel will be arriving to, as he once put it, “discuss compensation” for my time. I fully expect this compensation to prominently feature a bullet in the back of the head.

  You may be wondering why I waited this long. If you had an escape plan that was as likely to get you killed as mine, you’d wait, too. What I’ve been waiting for is anybody’s guess. A miracle, I suppose.

  The way the plan works, Iza is supposed to wait until Ringo checks out. I had her observe the actions outside my cell for about a week and report her findings, which is how I learned that I’m not being guarded a full twenty-four hours a day. Ringo goes to bed (I assume demons sleep) right around the same time the team from the lab exits for the evening, which is generally sometime after sunset.

  After getting me out, Iza will open Eve’s cell and then the lab, where the two of us will be hiding out—possibly having a decent conversation in a place where Eve can’t disappear on me—while Iza completes phase two, which is the part of the plan where lots of people die. Everything after that is kind of dicey.

  But first comes getting my door open. I’m beginning to worry that that isn’t going to be happening.

  Scratch that. I hear a click. The lock is being manipulated. I jump to my feet and am about to cross the distance and pull open the door—Iza isn’t strong enough to actually do it herself—when the door swings open on its own.

  “Hello, Adam,” says the figure in the door.

  She steps into the light and I wonder for a second whether Iza simply misunderstood the plan. Otherwise, how could Eve be standing in front of me?

  Chapter 26

  About three seconds pass before I figure out what’s actually happening. All it takes is for Bob to step out from behind Eve, revealing the handgun he’s got pointed at the back of her head.

  “Glad to see you’re still awake,” he says to me. “It’s time we settled that matter of compensation.”

  Now I’m thinking I did put off the escape plan a tad too long.

  * * *

  With Bob Grindel, and his handgun, standing behind us next to the ever-present Brutus, Eve and I are marched through the compound in a direction that indicates we’re heading for the outer perimeter fence.

  “I did promise you’d have an opportunity to meet, Adam,” Bob says, coming off as unspeakably smug. He reminds me a bit of Caligula. Not the movie, the guy. “You can’t say I’ve been dishonest.”

  “No, Bob, I guess I can’t.”

  Definitely out of the inner compound. We’ve already passed two inner circle buildings that had previously only existed in the map in my head. If I have it figured right, in another fifty paces we’d be passing through the outer ring.

  Just looking around, I can tell why it is Bob decided to do this tonight. It’s the last night of a new moon. Visibility stinks, especially since most of the lights in the place are extremely localized, concerned primarily with keeping front stoops lit. The two exceptions are the center of the compound (the midway point between the administrative building and the lab) which is perpetually lit by spotlights atop a centrally located light stand, and the perimeter fence, which has a light stanchion every twenty yards. All provided Clara’s map is accurate.

  I keep glancing at Eve to my right. She’s dressed in the same sort of generic white cottons I’d been handed the day I first checked in, but somehow she manages to look simply amazing in it, carrying herself with a certain grace that makes me wonder if her feet are actually touching the ground. I fall in love again five or six times.

  Unfortunately, since her initial greeting, she hasn’t said a word. This is not the kind of conversation I had in mind.

  “She doesn’t talk much,” Bob says, noting my interest. “I should have mentioned that earlier.”

  “Maybe she just isn’t interested in talking to you,” I offer.

  Still a good distance from the fence, I manage to pick up the telltale buzzing noise of an adult pixie in flight. If asked to describe the noise, I’d say it falls somewhere between the sound of the wind through a pine tree and the low rasp of corduroy pant legs rubbing together. It’s the sort of thing you have to know you’re hearing in order to catch it, and I’m fairly confident Bob and Brutus don’t. Eve does. She shoots a sidelong glance at me and I can swear I see the barest traces of a grin.

  “So tell me, Bob,” I say, a bit louder. “Now that you’ve gotten the first phase of this little project out of the way, when do you go to phase two?”

  I sincerely hope Iza hears the last part of my sentence and puts it into the proper context. As pixies are not known for being able to follow conversational threads very closely, it’s a good hope.

  “Phase one, as you put it, isn’t completed yet,” Bob says. “First I have to eliminate the remaining liabilities.” That means us, presumably. “This technology is very much desired by a number of multinational consortiums. I expec
t to do rather well for myself.”

  “Of course you do,” I say. “And the rest of the world be damned, right?”

  I can no longer hear Iza. Either she’s lost interest and is now flying back to Clara, or she caught my request. I would find out fairly soon.

  “It’s true that there may be some unexpected political consequences,” Bob agrees. “But that’s inevitable in the face of progress. Might as well do the best I can financially.”

  “Sure,” I say. “And when one of your interested parties decides to unleash a biological weapon, you’re going to say what? ‘Oh well’?”

  “Yes,” he agrees. “That’s exactly right. Now stop. This is close enough.”

  We had walked south, through the unused end of the camp. Human security is supposed to patrol this section, but I haven’t seen anybody, so I’m guessing Grindel told them to stay away for a few hours.

  He’d stopped us facing the perimeter fence, just beyond two vacant huts. At the foot of the fence a very deep hole has been dug in the sand, which must have been a challenge to accomplish given the concrete quality of the ground. Probably took Brutus all afternoon.

  It’s a new first for me. I’ve never stared into my own grave before.

  “You have two minutes, Adam,” Bob says.

  “Excuse me?” I ask, turning.

  “I’m giving you the face time you’ve been waiting for.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes. Now quit stalling before I change my mind.”

  Bob takes two gracious steps backward in the interest of giving us some privacy. I’d have preferred he take forty or fifty steps, but whatever.

  I look Eve in the eye, and she looks back. Which is the closest thing to a meaningful conversation we’ve ever had. As always, her expression reveals nothing to me.

  “I thought you were dead,” I say to her, after deciding she wasn’t going to be speaking without a prompt.

  She smiles. Apparently nobody told her we’re on a clock here.

  “Do you have anything to say?” I ask.

  She looks quizzically at me, the pale white of her skin contrasting remarkably with her red hair in the half-light.

  “Why are you here?” she asks finally. She has a very musical cadence to her speech that would give a linguist fits in trying to place. I recognize it as the rhythm of a language that died before the written word. I just can’t quite figure out which one.

  In answering, I could have explained that I’d come to save a woman I thought was in serious danger, but who turned out to have deliberately tricked me into following her—and who might even have tipped off Bob that I was planning on making a break tonight, thus putting the two of us in this position—when I should have followed my instinct and bolted, remembering that I’m not the hero, that the hero eventually ends up dead, and the person who put that notion in my head in the first place is the selfsame traitorous woman.

  But that would take too long. Instead I say, “I’m here to rescue you.”

  “I see,” she says. “How ironic.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I knew you would turn up in this place. Even against your own better judgment. It’s why I chose to stay.”

  An alarm from the center of the camp startles us both, and more importantly, prevents me from asking her just what in the hell she means. Implicit in being a prisoner is that one doesn’t simply decide to stay. Unless there’s a get-out-of-jail pass nobody told me about.

  The alarm catches the attention of both Grindel and his large demon bodyguard. Brutus looks especially tense, which isn’t something you see all that often in his species.

  “It’s for the cage,” Brutus says.

  “The cage? Who could have opened that?” Grindel asks.

  “I did,” I say, even though nobody is talking to me.

  “Really? How did you… Never mind.” He brings his handgun to bear. “Sorry, Adam. The two of you have run out of time.”

  Pointing his gun at my head causes the ground at his feet to erupt. It takes a second to register, but evidently somebody’s shooting at him. He jumps backward, and fortunately, doesn’t pull the trigger himself.

  “Let her go!” someone shouts.

  Clara?

  Bob looks around, trying to pinpoint the source of the voice. It came from the corner window of the hut to Bob’s right, but he can’t seem to figure this out.

  “Miss Wassermann,” he shouts, turning in a slow circle, arms raised. It’s an invitation to take another shot. “You shouldn’t involve yourself in something you don’t understand.”

  There’s a moment when he leaves himself exposed, but Brutus steps between us before I can do anything, so I just stand still and hope Clara knows what the hell she’s doing. Because when this is over I’m going to have to ask her why she’s more interested in saving Eve than in saving me, and that will be a lot easier if both of us are still alive.

  “I understand plenty, Bob,” Clara shouts back. “Now walk away.”

  Bob spins around and shoots three times in the direction of the voice. He had been baiting her into talking some more, which should have been obvious.

  We’re all treated to a lengthy silence, and for a second I worry he’s gotten lucky.

  “Nice try,” Clara says finally. “The fuck, you think I’m stupid?”

  “What are you waiting for?” I shout. “Shoot him!”

  Bob stares at the side of the building he’s just riddled, then declares, “She can’t. She’s bluffing.”

  He points the gun at me again, and now I’m wondering if there’s any place convenient to jump. Just before he fires, say. People in the movies can dodge bullets, so why not me? I don’t get a chance to ascertain the feasibility of this plan, which is good as I really don’t think it’ll work. A shot rings out, but again it isn’t Bob shooting. And this time Clara hasn’t aimed at his feet.

  The bullet glances off the side of his shoulder, and the impact causes him to drop the handgun. I dive for it, snatch it up and scramble to my feet, but of the two of us, Brutus is a good deal quicker. He picks up his wounded boss, pulls him into a hug, and starts running back toward the center of the compound. I don’t even get a shot off.

  But Clara does. Quite a few shots. Bullets are flying all over the place and at first I’m thinking she’s just shooting indiscriminately, but no. She’s hitting her target. The lead is just bouncing off Brutus’s tough hide.

  With friendly fire all around us, I dive at Eve—who hasn’t moved at all during any of this—and carry her into our erstwhile grave until the shooting stops.

  Long silence. Except for the siren, which is still wailing away in the distance.

  “Are you wounded?” I ask Eve once I’m finally certain Clara’s finished.

  “No,” she says, adding, “please get off of me.”

  I pull myself out of the hole, then reach down and give her a hand out. She looks a touch perturbed by the whole thing, which just annoys me. I wasn’t coming on to her. I was trying to save her life.

  The alarm has been joined by the far-off reports of automatic gunfire and the occasional piercing scream. It’s begun. And I’m about as far away from the lab as I can be while still inside the fence. Not good.

  “Okay, what the hell is going on?” Clara asks, lowering herself to the ground from the roof of the hut with what looks to be an M-16 on her back.

  “Rampant chaos,” I say. “And if we’re lucky, it’s going to get worse pretty fast. When did you learn how to throw your voice?”

  She lands clumsily, then pulls herself to her feet and ambles over. I notice she’s wearing the same kind of uniform the security team wore the last time I saw one of them. Not sure what’s stranger, seeing her in a uniform or seeing her in any clothes at all.

  “When did I what?” she asks. “Oh.” She holds up a radio. “I set it to an unused frequency and put another one in the window.”

  “Smart girl,” I admit. But Clara isn’t paying attention to me any lo
nger. She’s too busy staring at Eve. “All-mother,” she says reverently.

  Tchekhy’s warning about militant feminists springs rather suddenly to mind. That, coupled with the realization that I’d have saved myself a bunch of trouble if I’d asked him to hack into the All-Mother website, is enough to make me nauseous.

  “Child,” Eve says. “Tell me you didn’t come all this way…”

  “Of course. I’m here to save you.”

  “Uh, hello?” I interrupt. There would be time for this later. “Ladies, we’re a bit exposed out here.”

  Clara, still entirely ignoring me, genuflects at Eve’s feet. What the hell, I ask myself, is going on here?

  “Oh, my dear. Get up, please,” Eve says. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I was never in any real danger.”

  We are saved further elaboration on the matter of Eve’s apparent inability to comprehend a life-threatening situation by a scream from the center of camp. A terribly loud, achingly horrible scream that one cannot help but to turn toward. Which I do.

  “What was that?” Clara asks quietly, getting to her feet and looking in roughly the same direction. I think she’s finally getting it through her head that we’re in a spot of trouble. Plus, she’s acknowledging my existence again, which is nice.

  “Something I haven’t heard in a very long time,” I say, which is true. Not something I’m bound to forget, either. “We have to hurry. Eve, if you…” I trail off, as it appears Eve is no longer standing right next to me. And, when one finds out one is talking to an empty space rather than a person, one is disinclined to finish one’s sentence.

  “Where’d she go?” Clara asks, turning.

  We’re standing in an open area fifty feet from any building and with a clear view of the lit perimeter road a hundred feet in either direction. Straight ahead, the other side of the chain link fence offers a view of the desert that extends nearly that far before fading into darkness. (The fence is entirely too tall to scale anyway, and topped with barbed wire that actively discourages any bold attempts to do so.) Eve is nowhere.