The Methuselah Gene

by Jonathan Lowe

  Just fired.

  At the barred cell window I looked out at what I could see of Zion, but there wasn’t much to see. The scrub field leading up to the treeline and water tower was there. To the right, partly hidden beyond a rolling field of corn, I could see the roof of what I imagined was a two story boarding house run by some kindly but far-sighted soul named Mabel, and nicknamed the ‘Black Flag.’ To my left I could see the back half of the Shell station, where Wally’s tow truck was now parked. And more corn. I imagined I heard laughter drifting on the heating air, too, and I smelled the faint aroma of fried meat, probably coming from the Slow Poke. For one Hallmark moment I thought about asking Sheriff Cody if I could just bunk out in his cell for a year or two. Maybe put in an air conditioner, and a stereo to pick up country music. And a dartboard set. To earn my keep I could sweep the sidewalks of Main Street, Windex the windows, and make sure everyone’s toilets were spotless. On the plus side of that idea, I wouldn’t have to work for Hepker, or—more likely—Acme Exterminating. Also, there was Edie and Paul’s homemade applesauce meatloaf, scratch cloverleaf dinner rolls, cornbread with fresh butter, yam-marshmallow casserole, and mince meat pie . . . to name a few of the other items I’d seen on the menu.

  My moment of wishfulness vaporized with the loud fart I heard in the other room. Sheriff Cody did not bother to apologize, either.

  “Can I use the phone now?” I called in to him for the fifth time.

  He came back to me at last, and appraised me. His look suggested his thoughts—that, should I escape, I’d probably attack the President, or worse, the Grand Poopaw of the Creston Lodge. “Only one call, long distance,” he informed me. Then he took a key ring down from the other side of the wall, and withdrew the revolver from his belt.

  “Any luck with Tactar?” I asked.

  “Not yet. So not for you either, son.”

  Son. I was by now somewhat tiring of that designation. Everyone thought I was their son here, it seemed, except my real father, who’d dismissed everything and everybody. Cody was annoying, but otherwise he seemed normal again, an indication that the effects of whatever was influencing him came in waves, depending somehow on how much water he drank. A fact that puzzled me.

  Wary of movement, Cody kept back from me as I walked out and ahead of him into the office. I dialed eleven digits on the black rotary phone, which seemed to take forever. Just as the ringing started at the other end of the line, the front door opened and a pretty young woman entered. I continued to wait, listening to the distant ringing, as the Sheriff attended to her. But I couldn’t stop looking at her, all the same.

  “I can come back,” the woman said, seeing me on the phone.

  “No, that’s all right,” Cody told her, his smile maintaining its borderline hold on sanity. “This is the man I wanted to know if you’ve seen before.”

  The lady and I exchanged looks, something I didn’t mind at all. She was a natural beauty, and wore no makeup. Didn’t need it. Her long chestnut brown hair had a luster to it, and she had perfect but pale skin, too, as if she hadn’t been out in the sunshine much. But her deep brown eyes studied me warily, while her brave innocence reminded me of actress Madeleine Stowe in The Last of the Mohicans.

  “I’ve never seen him before,” she told Cody, her eyes never leaving mine.

  “Well, that’s good news. Good. Can I get you some coffee, Julie?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Water?”

  “No!” I almost shouted.

  They both looked at me as though I’d just belched, long and loud. Then at the tenth ring, an answering machine was activated, and my connection was made. “This is Darryl,” a doubly distant voice I recognized announced. “At the tone you know what to do.”

  But you can’t convince me you’re not involved in this, buddy, I realized, if you’re not even home. And I really don’t know what to do, in point of fact.

  There was a beep. But after a moment of ubiquitous panic, I instinctively hung up. Just before regretting it.

  “No one home,” I told Cody.

  Cody didn’t seem to hear me. His back was to me. “Okay, thanks for stopping in,” he said. “Thank you so much.”

  The mysterious young woman smiled politely and then exited as quickly as she’d entered. Something about that seemed like deja vu. Like some kind of recognition I couldn’t define, although I was sure I’d never seen her before. I wanted to label it physical attraction, to explain it, but that didn’t let me escape it. I stared after her in odd fascination, considering the possibility that maybe I’d never found the perfect, unassuming woman because she was living in a tiny town on the edge of nowhere. Plus I got the impression she was hiding from people like me.

  “Who was she?” I asked the Sheriff in the silence that followed.

  “That’s not for you to know, son.”

  “Son,” I repeated, feeling the irony. “Do you have a son, Sheriff? Never mind. Just tell me what you are going to do about what I said, okay?”

  “Now I’m going to call your boss,” he announced.

  “I thought you tried already.”

  “Getting to him is not easy. But they were kind enough to give me his home phone number.”

  “Kind?” I said with incredulity. “Whose home phone number?”

  “A gentleman named Carson Jeffers.”

  Oh my God. “Let me do it, I can do it.”

  The Sheriff drew his gun once again from its unbuttoned holster. “You’ve had your turn. Now please be nice and return to your cell.”

  “Nice?” I said. “You’re so nice to me, Sheriff. It must be the new you talking.”

  On the way back I found myself looking for something to use to surprise Cody with. The gun rack we passed was locked. Cody retrieved the cell’s key ring once more from the hook beside it, and we entered the back room. I walked to the back of the open cell as I was told, although I felt preeminently more anxious about being locked inside it, the more I considered the consequences.

  “Just relax, now, and this’ll all be over soon,” Cody reassured me, perhaps sensing my rising anxiety with his new empathic faculties. “Everything will be fine, you’ll see.”

  “Right,” I said, “nice and peachy.”

  Instead of returning the key to its hook on the other side of the wall, next to the gun rack, Cody dropped the key ring on a chair outside the door in passing. As if he’d be coming back to me soon—possibly for my execution, if the virus affecting him obeyed Murphy’s Law of Hydrodramatics. Then he walked directly back to the phone. But it rang before he could pick it up. Unrelated business.

  I went to the cell window just in time to see Julie walking away from the building, down a path in the direction of the distant boarding house. My call to her was more like an intense whisper. “Hey, over here. Julie. Julie!”

  In peripheral vision she saw my arm waving from the cell window. She turned, and I beckoned her to come back. Her look was one of puzzled wariness.

  “Please,” I mouthed. “Please.”

  Against her better judgment, she seemed to let curiosity get the best of her. She came toward me with experimental steps, stopping just within whisper range. A breeze tossed her hair around and into her face. She put up one hand to keep it back. Involuntarily, I swallowed the lump in my dry throat, and kept my voice low, occasionally looking over my shoulder toward Cody, who was busy on the phone.

  “Julie, my name is Alan,” I said, keeping my voice low. “I work for a pharmaceutical company in Virginia. Tactar Pharmaceuticals. A virus was stolen from my plant, and whoever stole it has put it in your water supply to test it.”

  She backed away involuntarily at my words, as if the slight breeze held deeper sway over her spontaneous but fragile trust.

  “Have you seen anyone reacting strangely, like George at the drug store?” I asked. “I think it was done last night, or maybe earlier, at the water tower.”

  “Water tower?” she asked, tentatively.

  “
The Sheriff is under the influence too. Haven’t you noticed? Oh, and by the way, have you had any water yourself this morning? Iced tea? I’ve had coffee, but that’s okay, because heat renders any virus harmless. Let’s hope this breeze dies, so that water tower up there gets hot enough.”

  She’d begun to turn her shoulders away from me, although her eyes lingered on mine. If I allowed any pause to last for long, I knew she’d be gone forever.

  “It’s called M-Telomerase,” I added, although my words, forced from desperation, supplied a name to the fear I knew she now felt. “It’s made with a genetically altered retrovirus and a gene from the bristlecone pine tree.”

  At that, she turned back slowly to face me full on. Her hand dropped as she hung back, until only her hair moved about her shoulders and face. “You’re serious?” she asked, but with obvious hesitation, as though dreading any confirmation.

  I nodded slowly. “I don’t claim to understand why they’re testing it here, or how they got it to live in your water supply, unless they replaced all the water or otherwise neutralized the chlorine. I don’t even know how it can infect people who drink the water, because usually a virus will die when ingested, due to stomach acids. Unless maybe massive amounts were used. But something is happening here, and right after I saw two men up at that water tower last night.”

  I indicated the wooded hill, but after looking she remained turned away from me. “I don’t know,” she said. “How dangerous is this virus, and why did Cody lock you up?”

  “I had to pretend to be someone else, is why. And I don’t know how dangerous. I’m looking for these men. One in particular, went by the name Walter Mills. Ever heard of him? He could be using the name Sean, now. It’s important, because this virus could be more dangerous than they may have known at the time of its theft, whoever they are. At least I’m hoping they didn’t know, because if they did . . .” I left the sentence unfinished, and looked up at the trees that partly hid the tower.

  She turned and took two steps closer to me, her eyes brightening with what I hoped was genuine concern, linked to belief. “What happens to people who drink the water?”

  “That may depend on the dosage and what else they might have done to it. Someone is testing that here to find out. Can you help me? If the Sheriff calls this in prematurely, they’ll blame me just for talking about it, and whoever’s doing this may escape. I didn’t know the Sheriff would lock me up for coming in with the truth. And I’m telling the truth, Julie. I don’t want anyone else to get hurt.”

  “Else?” She looked away suddenly, back toward the rolling green hills beyond where I suspected she lived. “I don’t know, I—”

  “I know this guy named Sean or Walter pretended to be someone else on the Internet. Got my notes somehow, then destroyed them with a computer virus. That same night someone broke into the plant, right after I was followed.”

  “Followed?” Julie rocked her head slowly, now, as conflicting thoughts confused her. If my revelation had been about a UFO abduction, the effect might have appeared the same. She began to step back again. “Really, this is just too—”

  “Please, he’s got a post office box here. Box sixteen. It’s why I’m here.”

  She stumbled slightly over a stone. She steadied herself, coming back to the reality that she was talking to a stranger behind bars. She held up one hand as if to fend off a phantom, turning away. “I’m sorry, I . . .”

  “They thought I was a hit man,” I said, just blurting it out. “Because I lied about who I was. Were you in a mob trial or something?”

  She stopped cold, staring down at the ground, but this time she didn’t turn back to me.

  “Witness protection program?” I asked, before realizing my question had been a mistake. That I’d crossed the line.

  She started walking away with determination now, decision made.

  “Please!” I called. “That’s none of my business, really.”

  Too late. She continued away from me, even faster.

  “Who you talking to out there?” Sheriff Cody interrupted. I turned to see him standing in the doorway behind me.

  “Please, you’ve got to listen to me. For the town. You have to believe something I’m saying here, or you’re—” I stopped, focused on Cody’s face.

  It looked as if a cartoonist had drawn it. Droplets of sweat now glistened on his wide forehead. His lips stretched up and gelled into a grin that seemed about to be stitched into place. “I want to believe,” he claimed, “but then you should tell me something I can believe, shouldn’t you, son?”

  He did a clumsy pirouette, turning on his heel like a mechanical soldier, and almost marched back to the phone. He thought he was doing his duty, I realized. That sense overpowered others, at least for the moment. So hysterics would be of little use in trying to manipulate him.

  “I tell the truth, and where does it get me?” I called after him, anyway, and then sat back down on my holding cell cot to look up at the barred window. The frustration was real, if nothing else was. Nothing to do now but to wait for the end. In the office, the Sheriff was gathering his questions, readying to dial Jeffers. I ran my fingers through my hair, and imagined working for JC Penney in the shoe department, and walking door to door for the Census Bureau to make ends meet. Then I heard the front door open out there, and a familiar voice that sounded like an angel from heaven.

  “Sheriff, are you busy?” Julie asked.

  I rose in disbelief to see her approaching the Sheriff in the other room. A phrase from the Bible also rose in my mind like long forgotten mantra: The truth shall set you free.

  “What is it, Julie?” Sheriff Cody inquired pleasantly, setting down the receiver he’d lifted.

  “I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you. I saw some strange men. Strangers, I mean.”

  “Strangers?”

  She hooked her thumb in my direction. “I think I just saw them again.”

  The Sheriff stood and moved steadily closer to her, sounding concerned. His entire demeanor metamorphosed within seconds into a fatherly protective state. “Following you?”

  “No, walking around up at the water tower. Just now. Two of them.”

  At the cell window I peered up at the treeline where the bulky silhouette of the water tower was mostly hidden. I saw no one, and no movement. Had she lied for me? If so, it either meant that she believed me, or that she intended to test the waters of my seemingly preposterous postulation.

  I turned back to see the Sheriff adjusting the holster across his paunch. He moved toward the front door, guiding Julie away from the desk with his hand. “Would you point them out to me?” he requested. “It would be so good of you.”

  Julie glanced back at me just before they exited, and I saw anxiety in her eyes. “Are you feeling all right, sir?” she asked Cody. “You seem . . . different, somehow.”

  “Different?” Cody inquired.

  Cody used the set of keys from his pocket to lock up the office, leaving the other cell key ring on the chair where he’d dropped it. I stared at the key ring for a moment, as a scene played out in my mind—a scene from an old Brando film. Then I turned back to the window. When they came into view behind the building, walking toward the water tower, I overheard more of their conversation.

  “What is that man in jail for, Sheriff?”

  “For lying. But I’ll get to the bottom of it, don’t worry. Now, you saw two men, up there?”

  “Yes, two.”

  “What would they be doing?”

  Julie seemed even more worried when she glanced back over her shoulder to see me watching from the cell window.

  I waited until they disappeared into the treeline at the base of the distant hill. Until I thought I saw movement on the tower, up there, between the trees. Was there really someone else up there, climbing the tower? The one named Sean?

  When I left the window, I turned my attention back to the key ring on a chair in the other room, ten feet away. I reconsidered what Marlon Brando had once
done in One Eyed Jacks. Could I repeat the maneuver? In the movie The Edge it was Anthony Hopkins himself who’d said what one man can do, another can do.

  I took off my belt, experimentally. Then my pants. I began to unravel the threads of the cuff and the seams, and curled my fingers around the frayed edge. Finally, I ripped a long strip up the leg.

  Was I really doing this? And once free, what would I use for clothing?

  More strips followed. Frantically, I tied together the strands that I’d ripped, and then tied the belt at the end of it. I took off my shirt and tied the sleeve through the buckle of the belt. I stared longingly at the distant key on the chair.

  Come to papa.

  On the very first try the fabric almost parted. I pulled the heavy end back gingerly on its connecting tendril. Retrieving the length of it, I strengthened the weak link with knots, and tried again. On the fifth throw, I managed to catch the back of the chair, and pulled it over. The key ring fell with it, and was partly caught under the seat frame. But on the eighth toss I got enough purchase to overcome the chair’s weight. I pulled it steadily almost all the way to me.

  Almost.

  Another section near the chair tore into a ribbon that finally broke.

  Damn.

  On my belly I reached through the bars, straining my fingers outward to touch one wooden leg of the chair. I turned it painfully with the tip of my forefinger until it was almost close enough to pinch my index finger and thumb down on it.

  Not quite.

  I tried to use my forefingers instead, going from side to side and pulling with each turn like a ratchet, to try and overcome the weight and keep the inertia. But it didn’t work. The chair wouldn’t come any closer.

  I sat up, rolling my shoulder to work the stiffness out of it.

  Relax, I remembered Cody telling me, and this will all be over soon.

  I cursed, then almost immediately laughed at myself.

  I knotted the fabric I had left, and easily looped it around the crosspiece between the legs. Then I pulled the chair the rest of the way to me. Seconds later the key was in my hand. But as I turned it in the lock, I looked up to see someone standing at the front door, looking in fear through the glass at me.