“Exit stage left,” Durant said, and they went out.
The bird bobbed, its plastic beak dropping lower each time, aimed perfectly at the ignition button, thanks to Durant’s diligence. Peyton was on the floor, stunned by so much pain so fast. He tried to stagger to his feet, but the world tilted out of control and he landed hard on the floor. He began to crawl, gagging on fumes, dimly knowing what was about to happen. In the corner of his vision he could see the bird, pretty little bird, a gift from Julie many years ago, about to touch off a spark and ruin everything for which he had worked for so long.
He made it to the table. He tried to grapple his way up, but his mangled fingers only slid across the polished steel. The bird bobbed. Peyton gave in to a sudden urge, and passed out.
After that there was only noise and fire.
8
Peyton
THE FORCE OF the explosion shot Peyton and most of his equipment skyward. The equipment, test tubes, glass beakers, petri dishes, a discarded pizza box, as well as the dead Yakky, were hurled nearly forty yards. The equipment chattered down on the foul-smelling river, sinking instantly. The pizza box became a distant kite, blowing in the breeze. Fire belched out of the laboratory, a giant mushroom made of orange and red.
Peyton landed in the river, just beyond the pier. So did Yakky, and a remarkable amount of glass and metal.
Yakky sank immediately. Peyton performed one of the world’s biggest belly flops, smashing hard onto the brown surface of the river, tearing his clothes to shreds. He floated facedown, nearly dead, riding with the current. He came awake long enough to raise his head. There was not much to see: a burning building with no roof, a decaying pier, a tremendous fireball.
He groaned, then sank deep into the water.
9
Julie
PEYTON WAS OFFICIALY buried three days later, on an autumn afternoon. Multicolored leaves swirled down and a brisk breeze hinted at the winter to come. He was nestled inside the world’s smallest coffin; all they could find was an ear. It was a bit ragged around the edges, but the coroner’s report confirmed that yes, it had indeed belonged to Peyton Westlake. Of Yakitito Yanagita they could find nothing. The police decided that the explosion was a freak laboratory accident, and shut down their investigation. The laboratory was cordoned off, awaiting city demolition crews. The ear was given to Julie. She had it buried with full honors.
Pappas and Swain gave her two weeks off to do her grieving. It was not a good idea; too much painful time to endure. She phoned Peyton’s mother in Indiana with the terrible news. Peyton’s father had died some six years ago, and Mrs. Westlake was not well enough to fly out and participate in the funeral. She had cried on the phone, which sent Julie into an emotional tailspin. At the funeral it was Julie alone. The temporary marker at the head of the grave read simply, PEYTON WESTLAKE. The monument sculptor said it would take three weeks to get the real one done. He charged six hundred dollars.
While she waited, she cleaned out the catastrophe that was Peyton’s apartment, and it went up for rent again. She cried as she lugged the boxes that were the remains of Peyton’s earthly possessions to her own apartment; she cried as she sifted through the soggy black junk that had been his research equipment. Most of it was salvageable, but not many people were interested in buying unrecognizable burned machines that looked as if they had been to the moon and back.
Before she left the lab for the last time, she took the strip of carnival photos out of her purse, the ones they had paid a dollar for so long ago when the future was bright and there was still laughter in the world. She stared at them for a long time while hot tears coursed down her cheeks, the pictures of her and Peyton kissing and clowning around, the pictures of them in love. She shoved them into the crude slot Peyton had cut into the side of the computer.
She did not know why. It seemed fitting somehow. In a world full of senseless death and hideous surprises, it seemed somehow all right, the final act of a romance that had come close to being a marriage.
Yet perhaps, or perhaps not, for the simple reason that if there were computers in heaven, then Peyton would surely get the message.
10
Robinson
DR. PHILLIP ROBINSON was a very happy man on this Monday. The clouds in the sky were coalescing into black anvil shapes, promising rain. As chief resident of Whicock County Hospital, it was his pleasure to guide the four young interns new to the hospital as they began their careers. It did not bother Robinson that he had graduated from med school twenty years ago, or that medicine had made so many advances that his schooling had become archaic. He read the medical journals on a regular basis and considered himself up-to-date. He had even published an article or two in the Journal of American Medicine, articles that dealt with the treatment of radically burned patients. It was his specialty, his obsession. If two or three weeks passed without a single new patient in the burn ward, he became morose and irritable.
But three days before, a certain John Doe was admitted, a hideously burned man fished out of the river by a couple of teenage boys looking for crawdads. An ambulance had picked him up after the boys called, and he was put under Dr. Robinson’s care as a ward of the state. To Dr. Robinson’s way of thinking, it would have been better for the man to have drowned. He had not seen burns like this since Vietnam, where he had been in a MASH unit near Saigon. Back then it had been napalm. This time it was anybody’s guess. Robinson suspected electrocution, judging by the condition of the man’s hands (seventy percent exposed bone) and his face (now a charred skeleton head). This John Doe looked even worse than the crispy critters the soldiers occasionally dragged in from the field, victims of napalm, charred almost to the bone, weighing little more than a feather.
On this Monday, Robinson was making his rounds with the four interns following him like obedient ducklings. He could hardly wait to get to the burn ward, where John Doe was being dunked in a saline solution in preparation for the removal of the dead skin. Seeing this process for the first time, the interns would doubtless be shaken, perhaps ill. The screaming used to be the worst part, but this was a new age in burn treatment and the patients screamed no more; a new technique had been invented that prevented this: the Rangeveritz Process. Robinson had implemented this technique under orders from the chief of physicians, against his will. His mother had told him once that as a young boy he had loved matches. She had also told him that when he was seven, he’d doused a cat with gasoline from the lawn mower and set it afire. “Spanked you good,” she had said. “You always were a firebug.”
Robinson was paying his debt to cats, and society in general, by saving the lives of burn victims. The fact that his own mother burned to death in her bed did not alter his love of burns. Poor unfortunate lady.
“Burn ward,” he crowed now to his four charges. “Hold your noses.”
None of the four laughed. None even smiled. Robinson didn’t care one iota. He pushed the double doors open and ushered them in, where the aroma of alcohol competed with the faint stench of burned things that Robinson so loved. Today John Doe was strapped to a huge metal plate, a hydraulically powered, multi-axled burn platform upon which the patient could be rotated and turned to any position the nurses and the doctor wanted. This eliminated the unbearable pain that accompanied movement of limbs gone stiff with incinerated skin and bleeding crust.
Robinson ushered his ducklings to Mr. Doe, who seemed to have passed out from the saline bath and the commotion. His head was fully encased in gauze, nearly as large as a basketball, with slits for eyes. His hands had become white boxing gloves. The good doctor fished in a pocket and withdrew a small chrome wand. With a flick of a button it extended itself to eighteen inches. “Here we have a thirty- to thirty-five-year-old male, no ID, no medical history. Found the guy on the riverbank south of the city. There is a sizable number of homeless and indigents there. We get an average of three no-names like this every week or so. Nobody does anything about the homeless until they become human wre
ckage, like Mr. John Doe here. He has burns covering about forty percent of his body. The hands and face are the most severe.”
A nurse sauntered over and worked the hydraulics, turning the hapless Mr. Doe upside down for a moment. The leather wrist and ankle restraints held him tight. She stuck an IV tube in his neck, adjusted it, then wandered away.
“Ten years ago,” Robinson said, “pain from these burns would have been unbearable. This man would have spent many many years screaming in agony. Now we use the Rangeveritz Process. Simply put, we sever his nerves within the spino-thalamic tract.”
He tapped his wand on Doe’s head, just behind the spot where an ear should have been.
“The nerve cluster here transmits neural impulses of pain and vibratory sense to the brain, as you surely know. Because the brain can no longer receive impulses of pain, you can stick him with a pin . . .” He unwrapped a sterile hypodermic needle that he had been keeping for this, the fun part of the show. He jammed it deep into Doe’s knee. “. . . and Mr. Doe feels nothing.”
The interns gasped. Robinson worked the needle around, drawing blood but giving no pain. He plucked it out in one practiced motion. Doe slept on. “For better or for worse, however, there are some serious side effects from this procedure. When the body ceases to feel, when so much sensory input is lost, the mind grows hungry. Starved of its regular diet of input, it takes the only stimulation it has: the emotions. It amplifies them to a sometimes dangerous degree.”
He pressed another button on his magic wand. It sucked back in, now only four inches long. He hoped the interns were admiring his favorite toy.
“The result is alienation, loneliness, and uncontrolled rage,” he went on. “Thus the patient must remain under supervision for the rest of his or her life, as the procedure is not reversible. This is sometimes difficult, because the procedure often causes increased activity of dopamine receptors in the brain, which in turn stimulates the adrenal gland, giving the patient extraordinary strength. For this reason we have John Doe, here, wearing leather restraints.”
One of the interns raised a hand.
“Open for questions,” Robinson said.
“Yes.” The young man frowned. “Wouldn’t it be preferable to endure the pain until the healing process takes place?”
Robinson smiled. The youngsters always asked this. “Doctor,” Robinson said in a very grandfatherly way, “have you ever burned your finger?”
His head bobbed up and down. “Who hasn’t?”
“Did you like it?”
“Not much.” The others twittered, amused by this.
“In your case I would say the burns were first or second degree. Even a good sunburn is nearly excruciating. John Doe, here, has third-degree burns. If you could see his hands and face, you would recommend Rangeveritz immediately. I guarantee it.”
That seemed to satisfy everyone. Robinson rested a hand on Doe’s shoulder. “What we’re encouraged to do here is remain optimistic. When he is able, we will discuss rehabilitation and plastic surgery, if feasible. Just between us, though, I rate the guy about nine or ten on the buzzard scale. He’ll never look human again.”
He stuck his fancy pointer in a pocket. “Now, on to the fourth floor, where we’ll investigate the biological nature of mental illness, particularly depression and anxiety. Ever heard of imipramine?”
He led them into the corridor.
John Doe’s eyes shot open, blue and keenly aware. He had heard it all. His head ached with almost senseless rage. A crazy urge to kill the ostentatious doctor surfaced in his mind, blotting out reason. With difficulty he reigned in his feelings. The doctor was not the enemy. The enemy was the five or six gentlemen who had put him here.
He concentrated on snapping the leather restraints, one part of his mind swearing that it would be impossible, another part insisting that he was no longer Peyton Westlake and could do as he damn well pleased.
But if he wasn’t Peyton Westlake, exactly who was he?
The restraints broke as if made of cardboard. There was a window nearby. Peyton crashed through it, leaving wires and tubes dangling. A nurse screamed and ran for an intercom. As Peyton recovered and hobbled across the hospital’s lawn and parking area, a dark afternoon sky opened up and doused him with rain. Peyton would have hated that.
The creature he had become didn’t mind at all.
11
Peyton
NIGHT.
A strong easterly wind was blowing through the city, flinging the curtain of rain into whipping sheets, an early-autumn downpour that was cold and miserable. Dead brown leaves flowed into the gutters with the rain, the rain carrying its load of dirt and paper and cigarette butts to a netherworld where light was alien and the air was poison. In a dark, filthy alley stood a battered blue dumpster with no lid on it, partially filled with stinking junk and week-old garbage. The rain splashed on the potholed pavement and spatted on the steel hide of the dumpster. Even the rats had deserted in favor of a dry place.
Something thumped inside. A bandaged hand, sopping wet and dirty now, clamped itself to the rim of the dumpster. Another hand popped up, this one clutching a shapeless black rag. A head followed, a modern mummy pushing garbage aside. The man who had been Peyton crawled out of the dumpster and thumped to the asphalt, where he lay breathing hard among the cans and rotting lettuce, the air pumping up and down in his scorched lungs, making them wheeze and groan asthmatically. In his fist he held the prize he had searched for in his delirium: a torn and ratty raincoat, a bit of dignity in a world that had suddenly become vile and cruel.
He clawed his way upright and sagged against the dirty brick wall of an abandoned building that had once been a soap factory. This part of town, seedy and decaying, was, for the most part, deserted. Three- and five-story tenement buildings and factories squatted row upon row on either side of the street, built so close together that only a few ragged weeds had room to grow in the dead, trash-littered space between. Rusting fire escapes adorned sooty brick walls emblazoned with colorful graffiti; unused television antennas grew from roofs in skeletal disarray. Windows were mostly cardboard or waxed paper here; broken glass sparkled dirtily on the cracked sidewalks. Peyton pushed himself away from the wall, determined to walk and walk until this nightmare ended and reality began, but his tortured mind insisted with every step that no, this was no dream, and yes, he had been burned and a part of his brain had been carved out. Not only was he no longer Peyton Westlake, he was no one at all.
With difficulty he put on the raincoat and cinched it tight with the tattered remains of the built-in belt. The gauze that wrapped his legs and feet had slowly surrended to gravity and was coming unwound, trailing sluggish, wet streamers five feet behind him. A look at his naked toes gave him a bit of reassurance, for though they were red and blistered from the explosion, they were still in one piece. Perhaps the doctor’s slipshod remarks had been for the interns’ benefit only.
He picked at the ball of gauze that enclosed his right hand, managing to split it wide enough to see a fingertip. His heart seemed to skip a beat, then race faster as he stared at the exposed thing that should have been a finger.
Yellowish bone, a slender twig. Crisped skin stuck to it, some of it sloughing off even now. A white string of tendon.
He jerked his hand away from his eyes with nausea crawling up his throat, his eyes squinching shut against reality and the horrible thing he had seen. Jesus, what had the doctor said, that his face and hands were the worst?
No. Dear God, no.
Against his will he began scraping and pawing at the gauze that covered his face. It was wet and heavy but not about to tear. He searched for a fastener or a loose end, growing frantic, a scream of desperation gathering strength in his throat. What did he look like? Skin bubbled and blackened, scar tissue forming bizarre shapes beneath it? Hairless, scarred forever, a real-life Freddy Krueger?
He stopped, aware that he was breathing too fast, able to see dots and shadows swimming throu
gh his vision. Classic hyperventilation. He ducked into the nearest alley and forced himself to sit. With effort he slowed his breathing. His head sagged back against the wall. He was staring up at the sky, where clouds the color of soggy ashes trundled past on their endless journey to the east. Peyton was lost in a strange borderline state between panic and despair. Once again he lifted his hands and tried to strip the mask of gauze from his face and head, but his gauze mittens were too bulky.
He struggled to his feet, thinking deliriously that he must find a pair of scissors in order to free himself. His lab was not that far away, and Yakky would be there to . . .
Yakky?
He remembered with terrible clarity the look of terror on Yakky’s face as he tried hard to breathe inside a plastic bag. He remembered some nervous young fellow with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a pistol in the other. The back of Yakky’s head had exploded, a fist-size chunk of brain and blood that the bag had captured and retained. Maybe, from the look of things, it was better for him to have died so swiftly.
That left Julie. Sweet, gentle Julie. She would cuddle him and protect him and make all the hurt and loneliness go away. He would find his way to her house and she would cut him free of this load of horror and gauze. She would weep over his blistered face and apply just the right amount of love and burn ointment. If he was to have scars, she would see to it that he got plastic surgery. Perhaps things weren’t so terrible, after all.
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