The Methuselah Gene

by Jonathan Lowe

  24

  They say there is only so much shock a mind can take before it shuts down on overload and refuses to take on any more. I didn’t know what my personal limit was, but after searching the other rooms in the house for Julie, I left by the door I had entered with the next-to-last remaining beer I’d taken from the refrigerator. The first I had chugged already, heedless of the foam that ran down my shirt. I doubted that the Briscoe family of four, including two teenage boys, would miss the beer. Whoever had murdered them execution style with shots to the back of their heads had then flopped them onto the king-size bed in the master bedroom like overcoats at a party. Motive had not been robbery, for sure. The scenario I was trying to get my mind around involved Julie approaching them for help, and Sheriff Cody being dispatched to the rescue. Or perhaps it had been some of Walter Mill’s goons . . . maybe even the same suits who’d come to Julie’s house in the wee hours that morning. But if Julie had used the Briscoe’s phone to call Des Moines, as she would have known to do, how could it have happened this way?

  The phone.

  That was the key, I realized. If the Briscoe family phone no longer worked that meant the call had been rerouted somehow, perhaps to a Zion switchboard monitored by the CIA. Or maybe Walter had figured out how to control the area’s phone lines by hacking into them. It would explain how a follow up call might come, and then the line shut down remotely. Perhaps someone pretending to be the Des Moines police had talked to Mr. Briscoe, or to Julie. The call had been traced, and someone had been sent to clean up the situation. Cody was out on patrol, and there would be others out here too, especially if the CIA was involved. But where exactly was here? I thought we’d escaped this control area, this lab rat maze. Except for the fact that whoever had come had been so quick that Julie didn’t even have time to come for me, and wake me up. Was she now in Cody’s holding cell, as I had been? And was Walter watching, his gun aimed at her head, as she drank an entire quart of tainted water?

  I found one of the Briscoe’s spooked horses sidled up against a fence one hundred yards from the ranch house. It was a beautiful chestnut-brown animal, twitching nervously. It whinnied at my approach, though, and moved away. I tried to coax it, breaking the news gently about the situation we were both in, as Robert Redford did in The Horse Whisperer, but still it wouldn’t come. Dumb animal. Or very smart. Either way, I soon suspected that I had less chance of success in riding it than I had in hot-wiring Wally’s truck. Even if it had been dressed with reins and a saddle—which it was not. Regardless, the more clicking and whistling sounds I made the more the confused creature became agitated and suspicious of me. And when I considered going back to the house to see if I could find a carrot in the refrigerator, it seemed to read my thoughts, and promptly bolted out of sight.

  Giving up, I climbed over the fence once again, and began to walk.

  I struck off due east, away from the setting sun. I strode as quickly as I could, ignoring the dull ache in my thigh and the constant sensation of having just been slapped by someone wearing a coarse sandpaper glove. The few dirt roads that I came to I crossed with suspicion. I was especially wary of patrolling cars or crazed maniacs experiencing brain inflammation. An odd advisory, for flyover country in the middle of nowhere. But then Los Angeles wouldn’t soon become the headline story in every newspaper in America, either, and I wondered what dark humor Jay Leno would eventually make of that, and of Zion. Something about friendly country folk giving each other high fives, the new teenage slang for HIV? Or would the joke be about God returning from vacation to discover that Satan had settled in, while His luggage was diverted to Devil’s Hole, Wyoming?

  It was dusk when I came over a rise to see the lights of a town ahead, beyond a field of high corn. The moon was low and brightening, like a shuttered fog lamp at a celestial traffic stop. From this distance the town appeared to have a short main street like Zion’s, although it seemed to be much more brightly lit behind a saw tooth row of dark buildings.

  Finally.

  I descended and ran through the corn, the stalks whipping at my face and causing me to sneeze as I lurched and bulled my way forward with a renewed sense of hope for Julie’s rescue, and for some resolution to the day’s horrific revelations. My left foot repeatedly struck clumps of soil due to the stiffened gait of my injured leg, but the possibility that Julie might still be alive drove me further with an adrenaline rush, and I soon felt my heart surging in my chest, goaded by hormonal chemistry.

  When I finally broke free of the green guardians of the town to trudge the clumpy grass toward salvation—feeling like I’d just emerged from a washing machine—I found myself gazing with a curious foreboding at the silhouettes of the buildings ahead. Now lit by an unnatural brightness in the deepening night, the street I glimpsed between the spaces seemed impossibly familiar in a way that favored me with the crawling skin of deja vu. I stared with growing panic as I plodded forward, blinking against the stinging tears of sweat that clouded my eyes. Then, as consternation eclipsed all confusion, I heard myself breathe a single word, “No,” with the shallow huffing sound of a condemned man approaching his execution table. The word became a gargle in my throat as it caught and spasmed: “Nooo—oo . . .”

  And the street replied. Yes, said each dark building that now locked into place, shape to shape, in a recognized jigsaw of memory . . .

  YES.

  I was back in Zion. Full circle, somehow, to return from the other side. In our terrified flight we had erred. Crawling through wheat, stumbling through corn and soybeans, bisecting unmarked dirt roads across rolling farmland, we had strayed, with our lives in jeopardy. And now, in one final, desperate, and ironical twist, I had gotten it right at last, heading due west, just as we would have done had we brought a compass with us. Without such a compass, my direction held straight and true as a hunter’s arrow at sunset—directly back to where we began.

  I tottered forward beside the Slow Poke café, staring in disbelief. There were now bright lights atop the buildings on the other side of the street ahead. Movie lights that suddenly swivelled to shine on me too, and with the unearthly radiance of the face of God on Judgment Day. I put up one hand against that x-ray bath of radiation to see two figures on top of the Sheriff’s office, next to a tripod bearing a camera. Below them, in the street, were five bodies.

  Dead men. And beside them, one dead woman.

  I should have retreated, but instead I staggered forward, impelled to see . . .

  “Well, well, look who it is,” the voice above me boomed. “The instigator of all this mischief, here in the flesh. And it’s fitting, too, for him to come back and see the final results of his misbegotten experiments firsthand. So . . . what have you got to say for yourself, Chief?”

  Seeing that the female body laying in the dirt was not Julie, I blinked up at the shapes behind the flooding brightness over me. “Who are you?” I asked. But my voice now sounded high and strained, as though I’d inhaled helium.

  A berating cackle was returned to me from the sick film’s director. I looked at the vehicles in the street to my right. There were five of them, too. Battered and positioned haphazardly, as though a demolition derby had just concluded and no one had survived. Four of the cars had flat tires and fragmented windscreens. The burgundy Mercury sedan nearest me had a deeply dented door, behind which a motionless driver seemed impaled. His head was unnaturally canted against a bleary red starburst on the side window. A blue Ford pickup truck—bearing more bodies stacked like cordwood in back—had collided with Cody’s police cruiser head-on. But only a hand was visible in the police car, clutching the hub of the steering wheel. The sole sound that lingered amid the carnage was the one from above: the faint whirr of a camera motor as final feet of unexposed film shot past a lens which was now focused down on me.

  “Are you thirsty?” the voice above me asked. “Want a drink of water?”

  The calf of my right leg charley-horsed into a excruciating knot, leaving my left knee t
oo weak to keep me standing. I slipped to my knees and squinted up at Walter, standing at the edge of the roof in front of one of the floodlights. He seemed supernaturally lit, hands on his hips, as though looking down from heaven into hell, and asking one of the doomed below how it felt. What I felt beyond my physical and mental torment was his grin, although I couldn’t see it. The bright halo around him magnified his stature but left his face in shadow.

  “Why?” I said, my voice partly twisted in pain. “Why . . . are you doing this?”

  “This? Wasn’t in the script, I can tell you that.”

  “Who’s paying you?” My question sounded like a plea.

  More laughter, instead of an answer. “There’s a price on your head now too, Chief.”

  I blinked up against the brightness, extending my palm with fingers splayed to shield out some of the light. The shadow that was his head turned toward the right. I tried to follow his line of sight, but saw only dead cars there. “This isn’t a game,” I croaked.

  “Oh, you’re right about that, Dyson. But it is kinda like a movie, or maybe what you’d call a docudrama. An independent little number, true, but with a huge potential.”

  “Who’s the audience?” I asked. “Terrorists? Or is it the CIA?”

  Walter slowly clapped. “Bravo. Good guess. And you’re right—the spooks have been lending a hand here, too, but even the Studio wants out now.”

  “The Studio?”

  “Nickname for a little CDC outfit that’s been here for years.”

  “The Centers for Disease Control? They’re behind this?” I was aghast.

  My tormentor chuckled. “Until things got out of control with the special effects. The side effects, shall we say. Kinda made this way over budget. Am I speaking your language now, Chief? I heard you’re into movies. Too bad the second unit bungled the little side experiment they had going . . . the one to test some anti-inflammatories. They regret funding that part now, after the mosquitos spread it to humans.”

  I nodded in consternation and confirmation. “You mean after breeding in what the hogs defecated in their observation yard? That’s why they needed the DDT and the helicopter?”

  The shadowed head above me nodded. “They sprayed the whole town at night, but it was too late to stop it. People have sex too, you know. Except for you, of course, from what I hear.”

  I tried to shake away the pounding in my head. Tried to piece together all the theories I’d entertained. “Side experiment . . . so what was the main experiment? Secret trees being watered using the tobacco etch virus?”

  Walter shook his own head slowly, but in amazement. “I’ll be damned, you’re not as dumb as we thought, Dyson. And you’re right again. But I bet your life you can’t figure out why.”

  “No, I can’t,” I admitted, considering Jim’s research was a failure, too. “What kind of trees are they?”

  “Apple trees. Wanna know where from? Can you guess?” He paused. “Okay, I’ll be generous, then. I’ll give you a hint. Ever heard of an archaeologist named Zarins?”

  “Jules Zarins?”

  “Bingo. He had a theory about the location of an ancient site being under the waters at the head of the Persian Gulf. He used LANDSAT images taken from space to trace the connection of a fossil river to the Gulf, after he learned that the Sumarians claimed their ancestors came ‘out of the sea,’ as they retreated from rising waters. The area that was still underwater, despite Saddam’s draining projects earlier.”

  “I read about that too,” I said, “years ago.”

  “Really? Well, did you read that a secret underwater expedition was mounted in December of ‘99 which had some success back on Millennium Day? Did you read a private salvage company, kinda like ours, excavated a sealed clay tube containing seeds of an extinct tree, embedded inside some herbal material? I’ll bet you didn’t read that, Chief.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying those seeds were DNA sequenced, and although they were degraded, they were cloned.”

  I was stunned by the implication. “Meaning the trees up there are . . .”

  “That’s right. Are from the Garden of Eden.” He paused again, as I squinted up at him, unable to move. “It did exist, by the way. But not in the way you might think. According to references previously deciphered from a cuneiform tablet, the seeds were collected by a Sumarian hero named Gilgamesh, who’d been searching for the ‘tree of life.’ Zarins also believes that Gilgamesh was Adam, because there’s reference to a snake. Possibly one who ate some of his seeds while he slept. Except that it wasn’t a snake, but a creature with feathers, now extinct. One that the Assyrians depicted in reliefs. Of course Jules doesn’t know anything about this private expedition, or what the Studio is doing here.”

  For a moment I couldn’t speak, as the jigsaw pieces fell silently, one by one, to form a picture like a Rorschach ink blot. I looked down at the dirt beneath me. The soil. I imprinted it with my hand, then scooped it, and let it filter through my fingers before looking up again. “The DNA sequence had been degraded, you said, and so . . . and so there was something missing. A gene?”

  “A gene,” Walter repeated. “Bravo, Chief, you’re right on the money once again! Look at you. You finally figured out the big project here. You must be proud. It’s one that a few enterprising scientists like yourself have been working on for years. Too bad your gene was a failure, too, despite any delivery method. Not very fruitful, I’m afraid, if you catch my drift.”

  “No apples?”

  “No apples. Not even a bud. And everybody was so hoping we’d all get to live long, long lives like they did back in Genesis times. What was it, now . . . eight hundred years? Can you imagine how much a drug to do that would cost? I wouldn’t mind living at least four hundred, personally. Question now is, how long do you think you have left to live, with your talent for figuring things out too late?”

  “I still haven’t figured out who you are, yet,” I said, half to myself.

  “No? Well, we should probably leave one question for you to carry to your grave.”

  Walter looked to his right again, and as if on cue there came the sound of a car door opening. A sound that drew my attention too. When Cody rocked forward out of his patrol car, his forehead was blotched red, decorated with a carnation of blood. His eyes were alive and now focused on me. He straightened and turned, slamming the car door behind him with his left hand. Then his fingers flexed near his holster, as though about to draw on me, like in a western movie. His expression remained unreadable, but his eyes were wide and deadly crazy.

  “See what I mean about a price on your head?” said Walter, pleased at this scenario. “The price of dead or alive?”

  I turned my palms toward the Sheriff, extending my empty hands. Then I struggled to my feet, fighting the cramp jumping in my right calf.

  Suddenly a pistol landed in front of me, dropped from above. I stared down at it in disbelief, then backed up to see the silhouettes of both Walter and Sean standing beside the camera tripod, filming me.

  “There’s one bullet left,” Walter announced. “And your last decision is who you’re gonna shoot—him or me.”

  Cody seemed to be looking at the gun at my feet too, and he also smiled. Then he took two steps forward, his fingers clenching and unclenching on cue.

  “They were hoping for success this time,” Walter continued. “The Satan bug, as you call it, might have been a useful tool for the military, too. Don’t you think? Something entirely new, and more effective than anthrax, if it could be controlled.”

  “I thought we destroyed all our biological weapons.”

  Walter laughed, then wagged his finger in front of the light, sending a magnified shadow whipping across the dark, shattered windows of the Slow Poke café. “No, no. Didn’t I just tell you? This was unforeseen. A failed experiment, just like the other failed experiments here in the past. And in the Middle East. What’s happened in Zion this time? Let’s just say it was too much, e
ven for them. So they pulled out. After all, they’re not even supposed to operate here.”

  “And where are they now?”

  Walter made a vague gesture. “Does it matter? Important thing is that they left damage control to us. Okay? Means we’re on our own here . . . another failed trial done under the protection of people who just can’t be linked to this.” He sighed. “So I guess we’ll keep their million in clean up money, and try again somewhere else, in some other small town, when we’re hired again.”

  “When you’re—”

  “Hey, I know a million sounds like chicken feed. The cast members of Friends each probably snagged that for every episode of their last season, remember? But those who hired us are good for more, and think of us as friends. Even paid us in drug money. Isn’t that a kick? Fresh, clean bills. Of course after we clean up here, it’s gonna be you who caused all the mess, not us. But not to worry. No one will ever know your real motives. So now just wave to the camera, and go for your gun, Wyatt. It’s time for the money shot.”

  “What about Zion . . . the other townspeople?”

  “We’re shooting a movie here, partner, haven’t you noticed? Folks have graciously agreed to stay off the streets. Those who didn’t cooperate are in church, at a . . . a rather special prayer service, shall we say.”

  I could hear a faint sound now, like distant talking, coming from the direction of a light I could see in the church window down the street. “What about Julie?” I demanded. “Where is she?”

  “Your ex-lover? She’s with Earl and George, now. She said you took off without her. That true?”

  I reeled, struck by his words. “You’re lying.”