Eternal Life Inc.

by James Burkard

  “I also told her about the Valkyrie we lost in Las Vegas and why they were there and asked her to keep her eyes open.” She shook her head. “She was so excited about finally getting to meet the great and powerful Rielly that I doubted she was even listening.

  “She liked the earrings, though,” Diana said as she fastened the other one to her ear. “And she must have been listening, because she did use them, and without that we never would have known what happened to her in Las Vegas. She certainly wasn’t in any shape to tell us when she got out.”

  She opened her notebook. “I took the liberty of downloading and editing what Isis put on the Vampire,” she said and began hitting keys. “It starts with her first meeting with Rielly. I’ll network it through your truck stop windows.” She nodded at the scene of the Ryoanji Gardens.

  The wind had died down and the rain was a thin veil of drizzle below the lowering clouds. In the next instant, it was all swept away along with the rain-streaked, truck stop windows.

  27

  A Boy and His Dog

  A white, sandy beach rolled down to the edge of the scuffed, green, linoleum truck stop floor. The line where the two met was as straight and sharp as a razor’s edge. There was no sign of a wall or window frame. The image filled the whole space from edge to edge.

  The beach sloped up for almost a quarter of a mile to a serrated row of low sand dunes that rolled away towards a distant blue-green jungle. Overhead, fat cumulus clouds, like cotton candy mountains, sailed across the sky. The clouds chased their shadows up the beach, across the dunes, and northward over the jungle, where they began to pile up, climbing higher and higher into distant thunderheads on the horizon.

  The camera panned around past an idling grav-car to where the gentle swells of the sea rolled in, staining the white sand with a dark, wet metallic sheen. The waves cut soft furrows through the sun-glittered sea, and Harry picked out a scattering of islands and a dark volcanic plume to the southwest that told him approximately where he was even before the voice-over cut in.

  “We’re standing on the edge of the Mexican Break, Arizona territory, not far from the spot where the Empire defeated the Seraphim Jihad at Winding Rock,” the voice said and for a second Harry thought it was Diana’s voice. Then he realized it was her sister’s.

  “Rielly Logan said that he would meet us here and personally escort us to Las Vegas,” Isis continued. Harry could hear an undertone of excitement in her voice as the camera continued to pan around and came to a stop, focusing once again up the beach to the distant jungle. After a moment, it started panning slowly back and forth across the beach.

  There was a breeze blowing in off the sea, and Harry could see how it sent streamers of sand skittering up the beach and bent the saw grass growing along the tops of the dunes. Absently, he studied the storm clouds piling up over the mountains on the northern horizon. The dark, swollen cumulonimbi billowed high into a purple stratosphere threaded with quick flares of lightning.

  Once again he marveled, as he had done so many times before, at how much the earth had changed since the Crash. The Mexican Break that connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans had once been an enormous land bridge connecting the northern and southern continents. The great Slaver islands of the Burn were all that remained of that land bridge now. What was left of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas was now covered with lush, tropical jungle where before there had been nothing but deserts and drought. The heavy moisture-laden clouds blowing up from the Break carried their life-giving burden far into the jungles of the southern Nevada Quarantine and even further north, transforming the bone dry Great Basin into rolling savannah where great herds of buffalo, antelope, and wild horses roamed.

  Jericho noticed him studying the horizon and said, “That storm front is probably over the southern Nevada Quarantine by now. The lightning you see there is nothing compared to when the storm moves north of Las Vegas and hits the area around the old American nuclear test sites at Frenchman’s Flats, then you’ll see a show. There are electrical discharges in the upper atmosphere that can be seen all the way from New Hollywood. According to the Church, they tear down through the stratosphere and pit the ground with blast craters like the face of the moon.”

  “That information is purely speculative and more than two years old,” Diana said casting a warning glance at Jericho.

  “Uh oh, what Schrodinger’s cat did Jericho let out of the box this time,” Harry wondered.

  The camera, panning slowly back and forth across the beach, suddenly jerked to a stop, swung back, and focused on a distant row of dunes bordering the edge of the jungle. A line of horsemen was just climbing into view over the crest of one of the dunes. They spread out along the low summit and stopped, looking down, facing the camera.

  Harry could hear the hissing beat of waves against the shore and the soft sough of the wind whipping whirls of sand into small dust devils that danced up the beach and burst like dry bubbles. Then he heard the camera whir, and the riders suddenly jumped into a close up view that left him gaping in surprise. Diana froze the frame.

  There were six Norma-genes sitting astride streamlined, futuristic horses that looked as if they had been aerodynamically designed in a wind tunnel. The beasts were as thin as greyhounds with long spindly legs and powerful shoulder haunches. Their pointed muzzles and swept-back, sandblasted-smooth features, that rose to a high dolphin-like cranial bulge, reminded Harry of something but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. What really got his attention, though, were the colors. He’d never seen blue, green, or fire engine red horses before. He glanced over at Diana. “Do the horses really have those colors?”

  She nodded. She was watching his reactions closely.

  He turned to Jericho. “Even given the accelerated rates of mutation in the Quarantine, how long would it take for something like this to evolve?” he asked.

  “Not long enough,” Jericho said with grim certainty.

  “So where does that leave us?”

  “Take a closer look at the Norma-genes,” Jericho suggested.

  Harry’s first impression was of pale Indians out of an old Hollywood shoot-um-up. They wore moccasins, buckskin breeches and were either bare-chested or wore fringed buckskin vests. Their blonde hair, bleached to an almost silver transparency by the sun, was tied back with leather thongs. Some had feathers and beads threaded through them.

  Except for the characteristic constellation of star-shaped scars that covered their pale bodies, they looked to be in perfect condition. They were young, lithe, and muscular and sat astride their mounts with a relaxed ease and a supreme confidence that bordered on arrogance.

  Harry thought of the deformed, suffering wrecks that he had seen as a young man growing up in New Hollywood and tried to square this with the reality of what he was seeing now. “Remades?” he asked.

  Jericho nodded. “Ten years ago I’d have said this was impossible. As far as we knew then, in any random group of Norma-genes, you had something like a million to one chance of getting one with a pure strain of the disease. But here you’ve got six perfect specimens without any other grosser genetic defects. And Rielly’s got a whole army of these guys.”

  “So he can really do it, remake them I mean?”

  “Oh yeah, there’s no doubt about that.”

  Harry looked up at the riders on the hill. Then he slid out of the booth and stood up so that he was on eye level with them. He leaned over the table and studied them closely. He thought a couple of them resembled old Hollywood movie stars, an Errol Flynn, maybe a Cary Grant. He couldn’t be sure.

  Despite their primitive, noble savage appearance, they were all well-armed with an eclectic collection of weapons ranging from what looked like antique pump-action shotguns, to the most modern military pulse rifles. One of them even carried a light plasma canon resting easily in the crook of his arm.

  But it was the last Norma-gene that caught his eye. He sat astride a magnificent, machine-tooled, gun-barrel blue stal
lion. As far as Harry could see, he was unarmed except for a sheath knife and what looked like a long neural whip coiled around the pummel of his saddle. There was something in the way he stood slightly aside and in front of the rest of the group, something in his air of casual authority that marked him as a leader. And there was something else…Harry leaned closer studying the still…something about those piercing, ice blue eyes.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” he said, looking down at Jericho. “But I think this,” he pointed to the Norma-gene astride the blue horse, “is the same guy I met outside of the Eternal Life Building and who appeared outside Chueh’s garden.”

  “Are you sure?” Doc asked.

  Harry looked at the still again and shrugged, “No, not completely.”

  “Just a minute,” Diana said and fast-forwarded so that the horsemen suddenly galloped full speed down the face of the dune, and disappeared behind another line of dunes only to instantly reappear, galloping over the crest and racing down the last quarter mile of flat beach in no time.

  They dismounted in front of the camera, and milled around in juddering fast-forward. Isis entered the frame, shaking hands and talking animatedly. The camera angle jerked and jumped to keep her centered. She must have had a grav-cam slaved to her, Harry thought. Finally, the fast-forward froze on a close up of the Norma-gene in question, standing beside Isis.

  They stood close to each other, smiling for the camera, his arm resting easily across her shoulder. Isis had exchanged her tight, buttoned down academic look from the holo-locket for heavy hiking boots, khaki shorts, and a work shirt under a faded army field jacket with the sleeves cut off. She also wore a pair of silver crescent earrings that were twins to the ones Diana wore.

  Harry looked closely at the Norma-gene. “Bingo,” he said. There was no doubt about it. It was the same guy that had taken him to Susan and had been outside Chueh’s garden. That intense gaze and mocking twist of a smile were embedded like a thorn in Harry’s memory. And yet…

  Harry looked up at Doc. “I’m sure this is the same guy, but look at how he’s dressed,” he said pointing to the buckskin breeches and the open vest he wore over his bare chest. “The guy I met in New Hollywood was dressed for the arctic as if his inner thermostat was on the blink. Even outside of Chueh’s garden he was wearing what looked like a heavy woolen monk’s cloak in a thirty-eight degree heat wave.”

  “Maybe a disguise,” Doc suggested. “Showing us what we expect to see. As I said before, a pure strain Norma-gene is extremely rare and might draw a lot of unwanted attention.”

  “Oh, and floating above Chueh’s wall and disappearing into thin air wouldn’t?” Harry said sarcastically. He was tired of never getting straight, conclusive answers to anything.

  Diana tapped a key on her notebook and the freeze frame came to life again. The wind blew the sand hissing across the beach. It lifted Isis’ hair that had grown to almost shoulder length since the holo in the locket had been taken. Her hair was still a hard-edged platinum blonde, and Harry realized for the first time just how much it made her look like a Norma-gene. Just chance, he wondered, or maybe Diana’s sister was a closet, Norma-gene groupie.

  Then Isis turned from the camera and looked up at the Norma-gene beside her, “This is Rielly Logan,” she said, her voice had a far away, tinny quality as if the mike was suddenly having trouble picking it up. “He’s the leader of the Norma-genes in their Nevada Quarantine homeland. His people call him ‘Rielly Laughing Wolf’, and he’s going to be my guide.”

  The way she said, “my guide” and looked up at him with a smile that had enough wattage to light up a small city reminded Harry of the idolizing groupies that used to wait outside his stage door…or maybe it’s just a woman very much in love, he thought.

  He set that aside and looked at Jericho. “Did she say ‘Laughing Wolf’?” he asked.

  “If you liked that, you’re going to love what comes next,” Jericho said with a thin, humorless smile as the camera pulled back and revealed what the close-up had concealed.

  Harry felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “Holy shit!!” he exploded. A huge, black timber wolf lay on the ground beside Rielly who knelt down and rested his hand affectionately on its neck. The wolf looked into the camera, its eyes hooded, its mouth slightly agape, its tongue lolling.

  “Where the hell did that come from?” Harry said.

  “We think it wandered in from off-camera,” Jericho said. “Probably from down the beach while everything was focused on the dunes.”

  The wind was still blowing sand around. It ruffled the wolf’s black pelt, and Rielly shifted position slightly, looking down to keep the dust out of his eyes. The wolf looked away from the camera and rested its head on its paws. In the background, Harry could hear the high-pitched whinny of one of the horses. It sounded like a woman screaming.

  Suddenly, he knew what those horses reminded him of. He’d had a glimpse of it as he fell into the spin-generator at Eternal Life and just managed to throw off the wolf that was trying to claw its way into his ka. In the second or two before it was caught in the event horizon and swept away, the thing lost its wolf form and he saw its sharp, swept-back, aerodynamic head rising to a high cranial bulge like the horses’ except that it looked more like a hard insect’s carapace then a horse’s soft flesh. It was also tiger-striped in black and white, but the stripes bleached away down the rest of its body which was the color of old bones or dead fingernails.

  For a moment, he looked into its huge multifaceted insect eyes that glowed with the pale green phosphorescence of an old radium watch dial and radiated enough raw hatred to strip-mine an atomic core. Then it was swept away; its dead white body stretching like spun toffee as it whipped around the event horizon. In the end as the thinning strands of its body tore apart, he heard it scream like one of those horses, like a woman screaming.

  He was still standing up and put his hands flat on the table and leaned over and closed his eyes for a moment. In the background he heard Isis’s voice-over. “Rielly Laughing Wolf says that he would prefer not to be called the leader of the Norma-genes,” she said, “but rather their guide. His people call him the “Opener of Ways”, and this is his tame, hunting wolf, Nubis.”

  Harry opened his eyes and looked up.

  At the sound of his name, the wolf’s head shot up, his movements almost too fast for the camera to follow. One moment he was lying with his head on his paws, the next he seemed to be lunging right at the camera, lips pealed back, yellow fangs snapping and snarling, eyes burning with demonic frenzy.

  “Jesus Christ on a stick!” Harry shouted and jerked back so far he almost fell out of the booth.

  Rielly grabbed hold of the wolf’s neck hair and tried to pull it back. It shook it head trying to get free, snarling and slobbering as Rielly tried to calm it down with a series of barking, yapping growls interspersed with mewling hisses that sounded like nothing Harry had ever heard before. Slowly, the wolf settled back down and once again rested its head on its paws and stared into the camera with its mouth slightly agape and its tongue lolling. Rielly knelt beside it crooning softly in its ear and stroking it gently.

  Harry ran shaking fingers through his hair and down the back of his neck that was suddenly knotted with tension. Just a boy and his dog, he thought, and gave a sharp, corrosive howl of laughter.

  “Harry, are you okay?” Doc asked, his face furrowed with worry.

  Harry fought for control and at last managed to put a lid on his hysterics and nodded. “It just took me by surprise, that’s all,” he said. “Just one wolf too many today, I guess.”

  He glanced at Diana who was watching him closely. He cast a crooked Harry Neuman grin in her direction. “But I have to admit that last one took the prize.”

  “Yeah, a real blue ribbon winner,” she answered dryly and once again their eyes met in a tangle of voiceless intimacy before she broke off contact with a look of angry confusion.

  She’s not the o
nly one who’s confused, Harry thought, and not just about Rielly Logan and his wolf. He had to admit he was attracted to her; more than attracted. He hadn’t felt anything like this since…since Susan, he admitted. But why did she have to be Jaganmatri Valkyrie? He must be nuts. She was one of the most frustrating, irritating, attractive women he had ever met. Leave it alone, he finally told himself. There’s no future in it.

  He looked back at the holo-screen where the sequence had been jumped forward to where the six Norma-genes were now riding away from the camera, following the shoreline eastward. Rielly was in the lead and Isis shared the back of his saddle with her arms wrapped around his waist. The black timber wolf trotted beside them. The old man who had accompanied her from New Hollywood was riding double behind another rider. Gradually, they angled north toward the distant jungle and the bruised wall of rainclouds roiling into the stratosphere somewhere over the Nevada Quarantine. A thread of lightning flared through the distant clouds as the riders topped a line of dunes and disappeared down the other side.

  Harry watched the windblown sand skitter across the empty beach. For some reason, it reminded him of the beach in the iconic closing scene of Planet of the Apes.

  28

  Dark Interlude

  Diana froze the image of the empty beach and looked up. Her gaze was once again cool, calculating and in control. No sign of tangled intimacy or angry confusion here, Harry thought, and the thought frustrated the hell out of him.

  Her lips quirked in a fleeting smile. Harry wondered if she could read his frustration in her Valkyrie way and found it amusing.

  “This sequence you just saw, and the two you are about to see, are all Isis brought back from Las Vegas. Everything else, all her research, all her records and holos, were destroyed. She only got these out because she hid them on the vampire after it was too late to save anything else. I’ll let her explain,” Diana said and hit a key on her notebook.