The Methuselah Gene

by Jonathan Lowe

  Out of sight from below, at the apex of the water tower, I lifted the revolver above my head and fired once toward the south. Not trying to hit anything, I just wanted to make certain whoever it was knew I was armed. Maybe the sound would attract someone from town to investigate, too. At least I hoped it would.

  I slipped the gun in my waist belt, and rolled painfully over onto my back. Breathing rapidly, I put the back of one hand over my eyes to shield out the sun. With my other hand I kept pressure on the flesh wound inside my upper thigh. Listening intently for any sound coming up to me from below, all I could hear was the faint, distant barking of the same dog I’d heard earlier, only more persistent and frequent, now. That, and the birds, and . . .

  Something else.

  I strained, listening.

  Far off, carried on the hot, still air, came the sound of voices. Singing voices. A choir of voices, in synch, in harmony.

  As I lay there, sweating and already beginning to feel thirsty atop a tainted water tower in the middle of nowhere—and with a killer somewhere in the trees below perhaps now aiming at the ladder I must eventually descend—I could now hear the faint chorus of a church choir carried to me as if from heaven to hell.

  I began to laugh.

  It was ludicrous, my predicament. Ironic. The gunman below had trapped me, I realized, and would simply wait me out.

  14

  Whether I kept my eyes open or closed, it didn’t matter. The water tower seemed to turn beneath me like a carrousel all the same. An hour passed in this limbo as I listened for footsteps on the rungs leading up to where I lay. I wasn’t certain of time anymore. My watch was somehow broken, its crystal smashed. But at least my bleeding had stopped. The fabric of my pants felt matted beneath my hand. If the bullet had ripped its way through me several inches in either direction, there would be no arresting the bright red leak. Something my sniper was no doubt hoping had happened.

  While the world spun beneath me, I soon felt like I’d been skewered on its axis. And I knew the pain from my flesh wound would only become worse. Thirst already filled my mouth with cotton, and considering the irony of where I lay, only tortured my mind further. I thought about what had trapped me, and how much more ironic it would be if it ended like this, in ignorance and stupidity. All I really had were unanswered questions about who, why, when, and where. Was it industrial espionage that had led to this? Aftermath of some lost merger deal, perhaps, after other successful mergers like the multibillion dollar Pfizer/Warner-Lambert merger? It seemed unlikely, and bizarre. But the pharmaceutical companies were growing and acquiring more power all the time, and it was at least remotely possible that a clandestine official at some conglomerate had decided it was easier to steal what they wanted rather than to merge and acquire the deadwood too. It would certainly look better on their quarterly report that way, with new R&D potential interesting the stockholders again after so many profitable patents had expired, and with the government targeting them as greedy regarding senior citizens. But why risk discovery over unproven research? Why bet the farm on an unknown entity, however promising, with the possibility of lawsuit and real jail time if you got caught? It was absurd. Ergo, it wasn’t happening. I was missing something. It wasn’t Tactar, or any other pharmaceutical company, doing this. But who, then?

  Terrorists?

  I considered that, and not for the first time. Would terrorists go through the trouble and risk of testing out what they’d stolen here? Why Zion? The giddy laugh trembling on my lips felt like gallows humor. Go ahead, I wanted to shout, shoot me now, before I find out.

  I closed my eyes as if already dead, imagining my sniper climbing a tree for a gander at me. I listened for the crackling sound of branches bearing weight, or breaking. Even for the sound of snickering as the demon boxholder known to me only as Sixteen reckoned he might blow off my balls with a nine millimeter at better than a hundred yards. But the only sound I could actually hear was a mockingbird that taunted me in descriptive soliloquy. No heavenly choir. No junkyard dog. Just that one bird—annoying, raw—to accompany the throbbing in my head, telegraphed by the throbbing near my groin.

  Against my better judgment, I risked rising up on my elbow to use the binoculars. Still, the only objects to look at were maple leaves and the tops of evergreen trees. Several sparse openings in the branches afforded a peek through to the scrub field below—one of them off toward the rooming house to the south. But that was all. Julie had probably already taken the path I saw down there. She was probably already home, having concluded that Rebecca Crim really had found religion, and that my theory was equivalent to claims of sighting Nessie’s cousin in Lake Icaria, west of Creston.

  I lay back again onto the warm, gun-metal gray surface of the tower, and considered the odds that the man who’d shot me had fled when I blindly fired back. There had been no sound from below since. Was he really sitting underneath the tower and waiting me out as I imagined . . . or were he and the one named Sean already enjoying chicken fried steak and home fries at the Slow Poke? I tried to imagine them there, exchanging banter with the likes of Edie, Earl, and Sheriff Cody. But I couldn’t. What I could imagine was Sean being deputized, maybe even being given a key to the gun rack, from where he withdrew a Remington 12 gauge pump shotgun. As for my man Sixteen, alias Walter Mills, alias Who-In-God’s-Name-Am-I, he was nowhere to be seen. But just let him climb up here and try to pop one in my brain pan with the bullet that had my name on it, though, and I’d favor him with smooth hollow point for his.

  Welcome to the Great Beyond, buddy, where the devil may care who you are . . . or may not.

  “Hey!” I called out, surprised at the twisted timbre of my own voice, in a spontaneous burst of frustration and thirst. “How about we make a deal?”

  I sat slowly up and looked around at the trees again, listening intently for some response. For a rustling movement. For anything. The rush of blood from my brain prematurely dimmed the late afternoon sky for a moment, but when the roar in my head subsided, even the mockingbird fall silent. The air was dead calm now. Funereal calm, as though my mourners had just left the cemetery, and the only thing left was for my lost and lonely soul to finally quit my body and drift high up past the circle of evergreens and away.

  Having heard no answer, I worked my way toward the access hatch, a square metal protrusion eight feet away. The hatch had been forced, I could see, but I was reluctant to touch it and disturb any evidence. I took a photo of it instead. It felt mostly futile, doing it, but at least it beat waiting for answers from St. Peter.

  That accomplished, I lay back again, careful not to dislodge the clot at my thigh. I closed my eyes once more and tried to visualize Julie’s face, but what came to me first were other faces, as if in montage for a final memory sequence—a flashback jigsaw that might finally let me see the whole picture, just in time to make some sense of my life. I saw Rachel’s face, her soft olive skin, her inquisitive brown eyes trying to hold mine, to understand why I’d been so evasive, so alone. Not seeing me, really, but warm with the affection of familiarity. Dad’s face was there too, with the only sad smile I could remember him possessing, as though the fates had conjoined to bequeath us bad luck from the foundation of the earth, amen. That weather-beaten face, resigned to Mother’s decrees, once bore the half smile I now sometimes found on my own face, after its original owner escaped to God’s waiting room—as George had put it—to live the bawdy, bohemian life of an eccentric. Then there was the subtle worry of Mother’s face, suspecting she’d been right about Dad. Animated by the realization of her failure to convert him, she’d constantly used his name in lieu of a curse word thereafter, as though Rachel might somehow hear the mantra and make it her own. Even from the grave, her lips seemed to move in memory. And now, against my closed eyelids, her mouth appeared to form the words of guilt and betrayal soundlessly, incessantly.

  Other faces came and went more quickly. Emily Danville’s, the moment before she turned away from me in tears on the
beach that night. David Thorne’s above a white lab coat, as he stopped me in the hallway at Tactar. Darryl’s above a lime green silk tie, Winsdon’s above a narrow gray one. Jeffers, as he studied one of his cruise brochures. Kevin Connolly, as he stared over folded hands across a mahogany conference desk. Even Jim Baxter’s face from my nightmares. And then Wally’s, Tom’s, Edie’s, Earl’s, and even George’s placidly transformed smile. Sheriff Cody’s sweaty face was next, and then Sean’s enigmatic one. And finally, Julie’s . . . Her simple smile rose into my mind like an exclamation point, erasing all the others. But then her face metamorphosed into terror. Her moving lips seemed explicit in warning.

  I opened my eyes wide, shocked alert again. Then I could hear something approaching, I was certain of it. Something getting bigger, with a beating sound. A whirling. A windy yet distinctive rotoring. When I caught sight of it between two tall trees, I began to roll myself toward the ladder in a panic, and in the process lost my pistol. It slid to the very edge of the parabola as pain shot up and down my leg with an electric charge. I gripped a hand hold and started to descend the rungs to reach the gun when the thing finally came into view overhead, hovering above me.

  A black helicopter.

  I stared at it numbly, frozen for one amazed and amazing moment. Like it was the last thing I would ever see. And what a surprise, at that. A bulbous high tech marvel, a black widow in the sky, but without any markings around its smoke tinted plexiglass. Not a police helicopter, this one. It belonged to some other agency. A shadow agency, or private security force?

  I stretched for my gun too late. As the widow-maker hovered over me, its downdraft sent the pistol sliding over and away. I snatched a rung in desperation, and swung out in pain as the clot at my thigh pulled free. I screamed up into the column of roaring hot air, and wrapped my good leg around the ladder below. Then I pulled myself around to descend, hand under hand. I was almost to the sliding portion of the ladder, when my arms gave out. I dropped nine feet to the ground, and rolled. Sharp, hot needles shot through both legs, my left leg now awash in blood. Hurting like hell.

  The copter drifted off, no doubt looking for a place to land. I pulled myself up onto my useless legs, using the center structure. Breathing heavily, I looked behind me, expecting to see a silenced automatic taking aim at my head. But there was no one.

  I was alone.

  My legs didn’t feel broken. What they felt was abuse. Dull pain, plus ripping knifelike pain, plus numbness—all these were combined and layered. I staggered forward experimentally, away from the support, like a newly dropped farm animal taking its first steps. When I made it to the gun, I had to sink down, buckling at the last. Then I slid the pistol into my belt, and waited for the strength to get up again. As I waited I saw a hose that I hadn’t noticed before, snaking down from the base of one of the support beams, leading down into the trees below, on the side opposite the town. The hose was thick and tan, and I followed it upward with my eyes until I saw that it connected to a valve near where the support connected to the belly. A bleeder valve, or a fresh tap? I couldn’t tell, but it was too late now to investigate. An ominous silence had returned. The spider had landed somewhere below. It was now hatching, giving birth.

  I struggled back up to my feet with intense effort, taking deep breaths so as not to black out. I stumbled toward the trees to the south, in the opposite direction from where the copter had disappeared. Only when I’d made cover, and begun to slide down the slope on the other side, did I realize that I’d left my binoculars and camera atop the water tower.

  After half an hour hiding in the corn below the hill, I sensed the impending sunset, as high clouds directly overhead caught their first reflected color. I felt weak and nauseous, and didn’t know if I could walk, but had to try. Luckily, my bleeding seemed to have stopped again, perhaps because no major vein or artery had been severed, and because the clot had partly reformed. The helicopter did not reappear as I expected, to catch me in the open, so I stumbled painfully south in a direct line for Mabel’s boarding house, afraid to look behind me. Even when I thought I heard movement in the trees on the hill, I kept my head low . . . much like the ostrich which sticks its head in the sand, thinking that because it can’t see the farmer approaching with the axe anymore, there aren’t restaurants out there willing to pay top dollar for exotic meats.

  I came to a dirt road past a scrub field. I hobbled along it toward a two-story structure flanked on the one side by some kind of low bunched crop I couldn’t identify in the dim light of dusk. A hundred yards before I got there was a row of rusting mailboxes. I paused to read the names while they were still visible.

  There were four. One had been bashed in. Another read Mabel Carstairs. Another Jim Crowther. The final one read: J. Durham.

  Julie?

  I realized Julie never said she lived at Mabel’s boarding house. It now seemed unlikely that she would, anyway. I’d only seen her walking in this direction. She might have been going to her own home. And sure enough, a narrower dirt road lead off from the one I was on, further south, toward what I could see were two other houses lit against the deepening night. I dropped to one knee at the fork with some difficulty and examined the sandy lane for footprints. There were several sets, both coming and going, amid and atop the tire tracks. The shoe size of the freshest set was smaller than mine. A woman’s shoe. Did Julie not even own a car? I felt like the lost adventurer who stands before two doors, one of which hides a lady and the other a tiger. I chose the path less traveled by, as the saying goes. I followed the prints.

  The lane took me to a rustic old house with shuttered windows, surrounded by a redwood fence. Through the slats I could see a light on in there, but there were no cars. The other house, some distance further, was brightly lit and had a pickup and a Jeep in front of it. So this had to be it, if I was right about the name on the mailbox.

  I found the gate leading to the walkway locked. I rattled it, and called. “Julie!” My voice seemed weak to me, and I got no response. So I picked up a clump of hardened dirt, and taking aim, did my best to hurl it at the front door. It spattered across the teardrop glass panels near the top. “Julie!” I yelled again, as loudly as I could.

  Another light came on inside. Then the outside light. I squinted at the face that silhouetted one of the upper panes. I waved, then stumbled and fell forward onto the gate. When I heard the door open, I looked up to see Julie standing framed in the doorway, a rifle gripped in both hands.

  “Alan?”

  She rushed out to me, and unclasped the gate’s lock. I fell forward onto the walkway, then tried to stand up again. I couldn’t, though. Not quite. She helped me with her free hand.

  “What happened?”

  “Got shot,” I announced, almost in apology.

  “What? Where?” Her searching gaze stopped at my crotch, where the dark stain had spread. Then I saw her eyes widen with the realization of what—by being here—I was asking her to do.

  15

  We did it in the kitchen. I kept my underwear on. It was not fun. I wanted to scream at one point, but for the most part she was gentle. Good with a needle and thread too, which would have to do for a while.

  Luckily, the wound was not serious. More of a grazing than a deeper puncture or bone shot. A bit ragged, but with a nice makeshift bandage wrapped around my left leg after a sterile cleaning I was able to give myself a sponge bath, and slip into the thankfully oversized robe that Julie produced as if by magic. While my clothes were being machine washed in the laundry room, she prepared me a sandwich, too. I watched her in the kitchen from a couch in the adjacent living room, the door open between us.

  “They say knowledge is power,” I told her. “I suppose that’s why I’m feeling so powerless right now. I don’t even know who they are.”

  She turned for a moment from her cutting board to give me a quizzical look. “I’d say you feel powerless from a loss of blood,” she proffered.

  “Right, right. Sorry about this
. I can’t believe this is happening to me.”

  “Or me,” she added.

  “Yes. Or you. Or Zion.”

  “Who do you think they are?”

  “In the black helicopter I saw? Spooks from Langley, maybe. Or maybe it’s Maybelline. I think I can rule out my company, or any other known pharmaceutical conglomerate. I can’t imagine those fashion conscious boys from Eli Lilly coming here from Trenton, New Jersey to set this up, can you? By the way, you wouldn’t happen to have any Vicodin or Darvon, would you?”

  “What?”

  “Percodan? Codeine?”

  What she brought me were two aspirin, plus a ham and cheese sandwich on rye, with a glass of milk. The dinner plate bore the blue design of a kid carrying a sled toward a snow drift. It reminded me of the movie Citizen Kane.

  “Rosebud,” I said, faintly recalling a plot about lost youth.

  She leaned over me, her penetratingly sexy eyes bearing a worried look. “What?”

  “Nothing. Just thinking about what could be motivating our Walter Mills. What am I missing? Any clues at the town meeting?”

  “Yeah, a couple peculiar things happened. Although Cody and that stranger didn’t show up while I was there, thank God, and there was no talk about the water until I brought it up.”

  “What was the purpose of the meeting, then?”

  “There’s going to be a movie filmed in Zion. A made for TV kind of thing, for Showtime or HBO, I can’t remember. A cable movie. Felsen said there’d be some disruption, but the town would get some money out of it, too. He said there was a scout in town looking at locations, and wanted to know what people thought about the idea, and if there were any objections.”

  “Why would Reverend Felsen be . . .”

  “Conducting town business? He’s also the mayor, is why.”