Infinite Doom

by Brian Bowyer

  “She hasn’t,” Dr. Singh said.

  Meyer shrugged. “Well, someone has definitely been in here before.”

  “There’s too much blood,” Singh said. “I need a cleaner view.”

  Kelly Winslow handed him a bipolar coagulator, and Singh used the electrical currents that ran through the two-pronged instrument to seal off the blood vessels that had been severed in Meyer’s efforts to reach the skull. After he finished, Kelly squirted saline solution over the area, cleaning the wound and removing the excess fluid with a suction device.

  Meyer said, “Now do you see what I mean?”

  Singh nodded. The muscle beneath Cassandra’s scalp should have resembled raw red meat. Instead, it was gray and laced with trails that looked like a road map.

  “Scar tissue,” Singh said. “She’s never been opened before, but this is clearly scar tissue. It makes no sense.”

  “Shall I continue?” Meyer said.

  “Yes,” Singh said. “By all means. Proceed.”

  The sound of Meyer’s craniotomy drill filled the room. Soon thereafter, white chips of bone misted the air as the drill bit revolved into Cassandra’s skull.

  Five minutes later, Meyer stood back and they all surveyed his work. A hole in the skull about one inch in diameter exposed the dura, a leathery membrane that was the last defense of Cassandra’s brain. As a resident, this was as far as Meyer was permitted to go.

  “Excellent work,” Singh said. He moved into position. “I’ll take over from here.”

  Singh cut into the dura and peeled back the protective membrane. Then he used a retractor to raise the twin halves of the cerebellum, revealing the nerves at the base of the brain.

  “Microscope,” Singh said.

  The circulating nurse began moving the large surgical microscope that loomed above them.

  “Let me help you with that,” Meyer said.

  The microscope was placed into position behind Singh’s head. Through the twin lens of the microscope, both he and Meyer had a clear view of Cassandra’s brain. “Turn the lights off,” Singh said.

  The circulating nurse turned the lights off. The darkness that descended over the room was accentuated by an oasis of light surrounding the operating table.

  As Singh and Meyer peered into the eyepieces of the microscope, the students gathered closer around their video screen. A red-and-white image of Cassandra’s brain greeted them.

  “The patient moved,” Meyer said.

  Singh froze. He spoke to the anesthesiologist while keeping his eyes on the microscope: “Doctor Graham, what’s happening?”

  “She’s stable,” Graham said.

  Meyer said, “I’m telling you that I see movement.”

  “It’s not her!” Graham said. “It’s something on her brain that’s moving!”

  “Jesus Christ!” Meyer said. “I see it! What the hell is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Singh said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. But it’s alive. And it’s moving.”

  Kelly Winslow said, “I hope you’re joking.”

  Moans of horror and shock rose from the students around the video screen.

  “He’s not joking,” Graham said. “This is like something from a nightmare.”

  “I need forceps,” Dr. Singh said.

  Kelly handed him the forceps as Meyer repeated: “What the hell is it?”

  Singh didn’t know. He had seen parasites like tapeworms, roundworms, and even fly maggots in human brains before, but he had never seen anything like whatever this was that had taken up residence in Cassandra Fox’s skull. It was maybe five inches in diameter, with slimy black tentacles that were entwined in the folds of the brain matter. Parts of its body were flat and others were bulging. It had a long narrow head with two blood-red eyes and a mouth filled with vicious-looking teeth. Graham had been right: it was like something from a nightmare.

  “I don’t know what the hell it is,” Singh said, “or how it got in there, but I’m going to get it out.”

  Singh entered the skull, and the creature—perhaps sensing danger—moved, but the surgeon moved faster. He clamped down on the writhing creature. The black tentacles twisted around the forceps. The head opened its mouth and bit into the steel. With brutal efficiency, Singh tore the creature out of the skull.

  Immediately after he did, Cassandra opened her eyes.

  Singh—holding the writhing creature between the prongs of the forceps—shouted: “Graham! You’ve lost her!”

  “Grab her hands!” Kelly said.

  The circulating nurse grabbed Cassandra’s hands. Cassandra began thrashing and her head shook in the vise.

  Meyer said, “She’s ripping arteries!”

  Blood erupted from the skull and gushed onto the floor.

  Singh told Kelly, “We need another unit of blood.” Then he turned to Graham, who was increasing the flow of anesthesia. “Get her under control.”

  “I’m trying!” Graham said. “But she’s fucking dying!”

  Singh turned to Meyer and held out the forceps—from which the writhing creature was struggling to escape. “Take this. I’ll try to stop the bleeding.”

  Meyer took the forceps, but Singh was unable to stop the bleeding.

  Two things happened simultaneously: Cassandra Fox died on the operating table, and the creature went limp between the prongs of the forceps.

  • • •

  Sophie greeted Brad at the door, tail wagging. Then she cocked her head, apparently confused by Cassandra’s absence.

  “Mommy died in surgery,” Brad said. “Mommy’s gone, and she’s not coming back.”

  Sophie looked dejected and her tail stopped wagging, as if she had understood the meaning of his words.

  “Come on,” Brad said. “Let’s go potty.”

  He took her outside. The night was young. He walked her up the sidewalk that ran along the street in front of the house.

  On the way back, he encountered a woman at the edge of the driveway. She was dressed in black. She had long black hair and blazing blood-red eyes.

  “I know who you are,” Brad said. “You’re the woman from Cassandra’s dreams. Cassandra told me all about you.”

  She approached him. “And now I’m going to tell you a little secret.” She leaned close enough to whisper into his ear, but instead she bit him on the neck.

  Brad shoved her away, still holding Sophie’s leash.

  The woman in black laughed. Her blood-red eyes glowed like burning coals. Drops of his blood were smeared across her lips. “Soon you’ll be dead just like Cassandra.” She turned and started walking toward the lights of the city.

  Brad took Sophie inside. He looked at himself in a mirror. He had two puncture wounds on his neck.

  The puncture wounds healed a few days later. Then his pain and the nightmares began.

  FOREVER SEVENTEEN

  Christina had always believed that true love only existed in movies, and nowhere else. True love only belonged to the beautiful people who lived happily in their fake forever-afters. It was only a dream, a fiction, and there were certainly no heroes walking the streets of her hometown. That was what she had always believed.

  And then she met Jimmy.

  • • •

  She met him at The Pit, a death-metal club on what her father called the wrong side of the tracks. Christina had been there with a guy she knew from high school, who wanted to be her boyfriend but never would be, and who played bass in a thrash band called Catastrophe. They were playing three sets at The Pit that night. Christina went along because she had nothing better to do on a Saturday night during the summer break between eleventh grade and her upcoming senior year. She didn’t like Catastrophe, and she didn’t really like their bass player, either, but she agreed to go with him because her father had been drinking whiskey when she left. Christina’s mother was dead, and her father liked to beat her and rape her when he was drinking whiskey.

  She noticed Jimmy after the beginning of Catastrophe
’s second set. He was leaning with his back against the bar, smoking a cigarette. No one was supposed to smoke inside The Pit, but people did and the owners never said anything. His arms were crossed and the cigarette dangled from his lips. He had thick dark hair and he was wearing a black leather jacket. Christina thought he was more beautiful than any movie star.

  He looked to be about her age. Christina was seventeen, which—technically—was too young to even be in The Pit, but (like the smoking) the owners never said anything about underage drinking in the club.

  Christina looked away, toward the stage, at Catastrophe. The music they played was loud and aggressive. The two guitar players were frantically banging their heads. The bass player was swirling his head on his neck and his hair made circles in the air. The drummer’s movements were so fast that he appeared to be a blur of perpetual motion. The singer’s voice sounded like an animal growling in a cage.

  And then Jimmy was standing right beside her. “I’m Jimmy,” he said. “What’s your name?” He was tall, probably about the same height as her father. He brushed hair from his face and she looked up into the brightest and bluest eyes she had ever seen.

  “Christina.”

  He smiled. “It’s nice to meet you, Christina.”

  She returned his smile. “Likewise.”

  “I only stopped in here to get a drink,” Jimmy said, “and you look like you’re enjoying this band even less than I am. What do you say we go to another place with better music?”

  Christina, still smiling, nodded. “I say let’s do it.”

  • • •

  Jimmy drove a car that was obviously some kind of a vintage hotrod. As black as his leather jacket, and with thick shiny chrome, it looked as if it had just rolled off a showroom floor from another era. He took her to Basil’s Cocktail Lounge on the other side of town. The high-class side. On the right side of the tracks, as her father would say. Jimmy swept her inside to a table with a candle on top of it, and the shadows around them moved in time with smooth piano music.

  Like Christina, Jimmy was seventeen, but they both had fake IDs and drank until the club closed. Then they turned the hood of Jimmy’s car into a paradise until the sun rose.

  After that, they were inseparable.

  • • •

  Days of passion; nights of desire. They crashed into each other’s lives with involuntary abandon. Christina always felt breathless whenever Jimmy was around.

  She ran her fingertips down the edges of his jawline. “You know I’ve fallen in love with you, Jimmy.”

  They were lying on some sand beneath a boardwalk. The setting sun was turning the nearby waves gold and pink.

  “You have?”

  “Absolutely. I am madly, head over heels in love with you.”

  He reached up and touched her hair. “I love you too, Christina.”

  She leaned down and kissed him. “I never want to be without you.”

  “Then never leave me,” he said. “If you never leave me, I will always be right here by your side.”

  Christina shook her head. “I will never leave you.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then say it.”

  She looked into his eyes. “I will never leave you, Jimmy. I promise you that I will never leave you.”

  He smiled. “Then I promise that I will always be right here by your side.”

  • • •

  Days of poetry; nights of music and invention. Jimmy bought her an acoustic guitar and started teaching her how to play. They took turns playing it on the shore at night while campfires burned and they passed bottles of liquor back and forth.

  Christina had a good ear for music. She was an excellent singer, too. Soon she was playing guitar as good as Jimmy ever could and they spent most of their time writing songs when they weren’t making love. She suspected that she would one day look back on this summer as a period of magical transformation. She was happier than she had been at any point since back when her mother was alive.

  • • •

  Days of dreaming on the beach; nights of making love on rooftops beneath the stars and making plans for the future.

  • • •

  One night in late June he took her back to Basil’s Cocktail Lounge. They shared a bottle of sweet champagne and then Jimmy stepped away from their table. He walked over to the piano player and whispered something into his ear. The man nodded and smiled and began playing a melody that to Christina was instantly recognizable. Then Jimmy grabbed a microphone and pointed right at her from his place in the spotlight. “This is for my girlfriend,” he said.

  All eyes turned to Christina. She smiled, and wondered if Jimmy could see her eyes watering in the candlelight. He called me his girlfriend, she thought. Maybe one day he’ll call me his wife.

  The song he sang was an old one that she had told him was one of her favorites.

  • • •

  On the fourth of July they took a bottle of liquor to the city fairgrounds and watched a fireworks display. When it was over they went to a cemetery with another bottle that he had been keeping in the trunk of his car.

  She led him to a tombstone in the moonlight. “Here,” she said. “Let’s sit down here and drink.”

  Jimmy saw the name on the tombstone. “Your mother’s grave?”

  Christina nodded.

  Then he looked at the dates. “She died young. Not even forty. And she’s only been dead for a year.”

  Christina nodded again. “She was thirty-eight.”

  They sat down and drank on her mother’s grave. The night was young and people were still setting off fireworks elsewhere in the city.

  Jimmy lit a cigarette. “So how did she die, anyway?”

  Christina took a drink, and then handed the bottle to Jimmy. “Car accident,” she said. “Her brakes failed, and then her car crashed into a bridge abutment. Although technically I suppose you could say my father killed her when he told them to take her off life support.”

  Jimmy took a drink. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Christina shrugged. “In my father’s defense, she was on a ventilator, and they told us that her brain was already dead. I just wish he would have waited a day or two, at least. To see if maybe a miracle happened, or something. Do you know what I mean?”

  Jimmy blew a smoke ring. “Yes. I know what you mean.”

  “Are you an organ donor?”

  He took a last drag off his cigarette and then flipped it aside. “I don’t remember.”

  “My mother was an organ donor.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes. A team came in and started harvesting her organs right after my father said to pull the plug. I read some reports from the transplant center later. Her corneas went to a blind girl in New York. Her kidneys went to a teenager in Wisconsin. Her liver went to a schoolteacher in Minnesota. There was more, of course, but I don’t remember the rest. The reports only provided vague demographic and geographic information.”

  Jimmy took a drink and then handed the bottle to Christina. “Well,” he said, “your mother certainly doesn’t need those organs wherever she is now.”

  Christina took a drink. “Wherever she is now? What the fuck are you talking about? We’re sitting right on top of exactly where she is now.”

  Jimmy shook his head. “No. Those are just her bones in the box below.”

  “So what are you saying? You think my mother died and went to Heaven?”

  “I don’t know where she went. But she definitely went somewhere.”

  Christina took another drink and then handed the bottle to Jimmy. “So you believe in souls?” she said. “Human spirits?”

  “Of course.”

  “What about haunted houses, and stuff like that? Do you believe in ghosts?”

  “Of course I do. Don’t you believe in ghosts?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen a ghost. Have you?”

  Jimmy took a drink. “I’ve been s
eeing ghosts my entire life.”

  “Do you see any here tonight, in the cemetery?”

  “No.” He put the lid on the bottle and leaned it against the tombstone. “The only thing I see tonight is you.”

  They kissed and began removing each other’s clothes. Then they made love on her mother’s grave.

  • • •

  July gave way to August. They spent their days in the shade beneath the boardwalk and their nights drinking liquor on rooftops and in cemeteries all over the city. They took the acoustic guitar with them and wrote songs everywhere they went. They didn’t sleep much, but when they did, it was usually in Jimmy’s car.

  • • •

  “Some nights,” Christina said, “only songs by dead musicians will suffice.”

  They were parked in front of an old abandoned warehouse in the city’s industrial district. They were sharing a bottle of liquor and chain-smoking cigarettes. They were listening to music on Christina’s phone because the stereo in Jimmy’s car had a radio only. According to Jimmy, the car was over fifty years old and had once belonged to his grandfather.

  Jimmy had told her that he was not from around there. That he was just passing through. That his whole family had been dead for many years. Jimmy didn’t work, but he always had plenty of money for alcohol, cigarettes, and gasoline. Christina never asked him where he got his money. Maybe his family had left him some money when they died. Or maybe he was a drug dealer. Or a bank robber. Or an assassin. It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was: “You’ll take me with you when you leave here, won’t you, Jimmy?”

  “Of course I will, Baby. Anywhere you want to go.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise. I already told you that I’ll always be right here by your side.”

  Christina flipped her cigarette out the window. “My mother once told me that burdens, eventually, make life easier. That they’re heavy at first, but over time, they become lighter. And then one day, the burden is no longer even a burden, but simply one of the things that made you strong.”

  “Sounds like your mother was a strong woman.”

  “She was,” Christina said. “I’ve decided to forgo my senior year.”

  “Seriously?”