Dead On Arrival

by Matt Richtel

  “You’re not going to shoot me, are you, Lyle?” It sounded flirty. “C’mon.” She gestured with her hand for him to follow. She disappeared down the stairs.

  He led with the gun. Cautious steps. Down the stairs he went until he came to a bend in the well. He started to turn the corner and he saw the device in her hand. The last thing he said to himself was “Taser.”

  Everything went black.

  Forty-Nine

  “I made us dinner,” Jackie said. The words reached Lyle through a miasma as he was coming to.

  “Have some water.” Jackie held a glass to his lips and, in spite of himself, he sipped. “There you go,” she said gently. “Relax, Lyle. It’s over.”

  Jackie backed up and she sat down across from him at a square worktable. In front of each of them sat a plate with a burrito on it. Next to her plate sat a wireless keyboard. A little farther left on the table loomed two large computer monitors. One showed a live video stream, people milling about, police, a crowd of sorts. At the bottom, a caption explained the event taking place on the live stream but Lyle couldn’t focus on it sufficient to read it. On the other monitor was a clock counting backward and several boxes that looked like command lines.

  “I’m just kidding about making dinner,” Jackie said. “Cheap microwave burritos. Not the kind of circumstances that lend themselves to cooking.” She looked at him and smiled. His head still hung to his chest. He lifted it as things came into focus. She had an oddly radiant look about her, triumphant and somehow nurturing. He gently lifted his arms from the armrests and moved his legs. It surprised him that he was unfettered, not chained. Then again, the door was behind her. He realized she had a Taser and the gun tucked on her side of the table.

  She followed his gaze to the computer monitor.

  47:21

  47:20

  47:19

  “You’ll be out of your haze soon enough. You want more water?”

  He shook his head and blinked. Could he overpower this woman?

  “No, Lyle. No, you’re not going to overpower me. You don’t even want to, do you? Y’know what I actually think you’re feeling? I think you’re feeling gratitude. Certainly on some level.”

  “You don’t have a limp,” he said.

  “Of course not.”

  He nodded. She’d faked that nicely in Steamboat.

  “Maybe you don’t remember how I found you, how far I’ve brought you,” she said.

  “I don’t know what you’re . . .”

  “Shh. Listen, let me refresh your memory while you get your wits about you.”

  She told him the story of finding him in his office, drunk, dark, mired in self-hatred. She’d promised him, and herself, she’d figure out how to pull him out of that place. “Now you’re alive again, inspired, hunting, discovering. Look at you.

  “Don’t get me wrong. This is not all about you,” she continued. “I’d hate to start our relationship, or this stage of it, with that kind of imbalance. Leads to crazy stuff down the road.”

  “There’s no down the road, Jackie,” he managed. “There’s no relationship.”

  Another smile from her, caring in its own way, the look of a lover who realizes her partner doesn’t fully get yet what’s right for him.

  “On the relationship count, I can tell you one hundred percent that you’re wrong. I honestly feel like no one has ever seen me as clearly as you see me.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Fair enough. I guess we can say that point has yet to be fully determined. But my gut tells me it’ll play out that way. It’s rare my gut ever tells me anything I can trust this much. In any case, I feel even surer that no one has ever seen you as clearly as I can see you.”

  Lyle stared at this crazy person before him and considered which strategy, if any, might reorient her.

  “Melanie, maybe, saw certain things about you,” Jackie continued. “Eleanor may imagine she sees things in you, but now I’m digressing and that poor torpid bitch isn’t really worth talking about. My point is that what we have is the very essence of a relationship.”

  “I do see you, Jackie.”

  “Thank you, Lyle.”

  “I don’t think I like what I see.”

  “No, that’s not what you mean.” Her voice rose. “I’m sorry.” She cleared her throat. “What you mean is that it’s hard for you to reconcile the way I’ve made you feel about yourself with some of the other things you see going on.”

  He looked at the screen with the live TV feed. Now he could make out the words at the bottom: National Mall; Million Gun March. Under an Hour. Will There Be Bloodshed?

  Lyle looked at the countdown clock.

  38:16

  38:15

  “Help me reconcile it, Jackie,” he said. He needed to buy time. His plan looked very much like it was not taking shape.

  “Would you like some wine, Lyle?”

  “Sure.”

  She poured him some red into a plastic cup.

  “Let’s talk about you first. When I found you, you were all but dead. Now you are revived. Will you grant me that?”

  “It’s a stretch, Jackie. I was in a bad place, and now I’m in a worse place.”

  She laughed gaily.

  “I think we might say the same for humanity. I want you to think in a very clear-eyed way about how the world is transforming and where it finds itself. It is on the brink of coming apart. Look at them.” She jutted her chin in the direction of the video screen. “It’s exactly—exactly—what made you so angry when things collapsed with Melanie and with that ridiculous Dean Thomas and your job.”

  “I’m sorry, Jackie, I’m having trouble following.”

  “I doubt that. Maybe it’s the Taser. You do realize that it was becoming very, very hard for you to defend your life choices as a doctor, to continue to get the energy to try to protect humanity. It was getting very hard to figure out what was the right thing to do. Do you remember?”

  He remembered. He didn’t want to admit it to her right now because his growing skepticism from three years ago bore no relation to this monster in the black dress and red lipstick.

  “Suit yourself, Lyle. You know it’s true, though. Of course, you were cynical. You’d fought on the side of people. But you eventually discovered that the viruses, the evil bacteria and disease, were so much more, well, frank. You knew where they were coming from. They declared their purpose. On the other hand, the people, humanity, what a disingenuous lot, right?”

  “No, that’s not—”

  “Okay, maybe a bridge too far saying that. But confusing, at least. People are confusing, at least, sending mixed messages. People put you in a difficult position, impossible positions.” She saw that he was trying to understand and she took it as encouragement. She thought of her parents, putting her in an impossible position, not knowing what to do, then her sister whom her inaction failed to save, and Denny, using her, abusing her trust. She’d had no time to figure things out, the world moving so fast. She winced and brushed away those memories. It was a new time.

  “Lyle, were you supposed to treat people, help them, let them kill themselves or each other? What the hell were you supposed to do?”

  Lyle felt the power of the moment. She was telling him something.

  “Do people put you in a difficult position, Jackie?”

  She smiled, shrugged, like Of course, aren’t we all speaking the same language here?

  “Did someone in particular put you in a difficult position, Jackie?”

  She gritted her teeth. He’d not move her into those terrible memories, and, besides, this wasn’t about Jackie; no, to her, this was now about everyone. Even someone as sane and wonderful as Lyle understood what it was like to be put in a terrible position, to not know what to do as violence, danger, terror loomed.

  “These people, look at them”—she looked at the computer—“in Washington, at the mall, one self-righteous group of police is going to go to war with another self-righteous grou
p of gun owners. Each certain they are saving humanity, and each about to destroy it.”

  Lyle tried to latch on to the change in direction, keep her going, buy time. “We’re speaking about differences of opinions, the working out of ideas. That is politics, cooperation, compromise.”

  “No! The opposite!” She slapped the table. “We’re talking about not listening. We’re talking about . . .”

  “What, Jackie. What are we talking about?”

  “We’re talking about giving people some time so that they can figure out what’s right? We’re slowing the world down. Don’t you see how important that is?”

  He pulled backward at the intensity. This was what it was all about for her, and he suddenly totally grasped that basic idea. It was all moving too fast for her. She didn’t feel heard and she couldn’t hear herself.

  “Let’s take our time with it, Jackie. I’m listening.”

  “I know you are. You are the first person who ever really saw me. You met me in Nepal, you . . .” She grinned, so sincerely. “You don’t remember, do you? Oh, Lyle, of course you need to know this.” She reminded him, seeing he had a vague recollection of helping a young backpacker. “And then, years later, in the back of class, you heard me even before you actually saw me. You heard me, which is even more powerful. Then when you looked at me, you understood. Just the way you diagnosed people and what ailed them. It is such a powerful gift and I want you to know that I see you, too; I hear you. I heard you calling and I came.”

  On the live video stream, there was a flash of light.

  “It’s starting,” she said.

  “You did that?” he asked.

  “No. No. I mean that one of the nut cases on one side or another has started the violence. Honestly, I can’t tell which is the immune system anymore and which the disease—whether we’re defending or attacking ourselves. I guess maybe that’s how you felt when you got depressed. But the thing is, Lyle, the thing that I think you’ll be most proud of is that I figured out a painless way to stop things.” Before she could elaborate, the pair of them looked at the screen and the scrambling of footage as reporters and cameras jogged around. Several shots rang out loud enough to overcome the extremely low volume on the TV.

  “How does it work?” Lyle asked.

  “Quite effectively. Before you know it, everyone at the mall, everyone in the world, will be on pause. No more violence, no more”—she looked for the words—“crimes of passion.” She paused. “Then when they come out of it, if they come out of it, they’ll have forgotten what got them so incensed in the first place. Think of it, Lyle! A reboot for humanity.” She knew that wasn’t the question he was asking. “We’ve got a few minutes. I’ll bring you up to speed on the process.”

  From the way they were talking, Lyle couldn’t tell if she felt he was softening to her, or whether she thought he remained her sworn foe. In any case, she was still keeping him in a physically inferior position. She wasn’t going to give him a chance to extricate himself or stop her, if he could even figure out how to do that. He tried to think about what he would do if she were a deadly virus. In such a case, he’d try everything to hold the disease at bay—through fluids and managing infection spread—until the body came and healed itself or he could figure out another solution, a medical miracle. His original plan looked like it was going to fail, miserably. She was going to destroy the entire planet. He could imagine her hitting the proverbial green button and everyone heading into some strange seizure and crashing their cars, falling down and splitting open their skulls, failing to turn off their ovens and having fires burn down the world.

  18:16

  18:15

  18:14

  “Is it a channelopathy?” he said. “Or more seizure?”

  She perked up at the question. She loved his engagement with her, as peers, as equals.

  “Physiologically, you’re probably better equipped to analyze the mechanism. But, to answer your question, somewhere between the two, seizure and channelopathy, but with much longer lasting effects. Indefinite, as far as I can tell.”

  “It’s why I saw an immune response in Steamboat.”

  “Right. That was so exciting to watch. Your gift emerging again. Anyhow, yes, to stay on point: the electrical signals evidently stimulate an immune response, the body recognizing something alien.”

  She pointed over Lyle’s shoulder and he looked into a room that he hadn’t even realized was behind him. It was on the other side of a two-way mirror. And there sat a woman slumped in a chair. “Lyle, meet Alex. Alex has been rather unresponsive for days.”

  Lyle grimaced and turned back. “Let me help her.”

  Jackie just laughed again, as if to say Give me a break, Lyle.

  “If you ask me, and you did, I think that all our heavy use of devices is predisposing us to this seizure state, this syndrome. It’ll be interesting to see when I flip the giant switch in the sky, whether everyone succumbs or just big groups of people. You can’t really know until you try.”

  “Big switch?”

  “Proverbial. I’ve already programmed it to push the algorithm through to every major transmitter in . . .” She looked at the countdown clock. “Fifteen minutes or so. No switch that needs flipping. I can’t believe it’s really here.”

  “You said they might come out of it.”

  She shook her head, not understanding his comment.

  “Earlier, you said they would come out of it, if they come out of it. Will they come out of it?”

  “If I reverse the frequency process. I did it in Steamboat. No harm no foul.”

  “After people crashed their cars and died and who knows what else.”

  “Small price to pay to save the world from itself.”

  “How do we stop it, Jackie?”

  She just shook her head. “I’d hate to discover you were someone who wanted to fight, not listen.”

  Her eyes were wet.

  “No more time. You have to decide now, Lyle. Save ’em or join ’em.”

  She clicked along on the wireless keyboard and a second window opened on the monitor with the countdown clock. Lyle recognized Jackie’s intensity as the sort that might overtake him when he was in the midst of discovery. He didn’t feel seen by her, as she insisted, but he could acknowledge distant similarities. Not sufficient to have him accede to whatever she was asking him to decide in her favor. He was waiting to find out what that might be.

  The clock said eight minutes and thirty seconds.

  In the second window, an image appeared. It was a green field with a path cut through it leading to a mountain where aspen trees grew. It dissolved and there was an image of Melanie climbing into bed with the father of her child. It was on video feed. Lyle was watching his ex-wife climb into bed with the man she’d cheated with.

  “Stop it, Jackie.”

  “Fair enough, I’ll spare you the gory details.”

  She closed the window. “Which world do you want to live in, sweetheart?”

  He didn’t speak.

  “The one where we must constantly fight to curtail the worst parts of humanity, or the one less traveled? I’m not so stupid, so naive, as to think a world on pause is a perfect world. I’m not insane, not that insane.” She laughed. She didn’t think herself nuts at all. “It’s just a world we haven’t tried yet. A world of two, for the time being at least.

  “Will you join me?”

  She held out her hand. It struck Lyle he might grab and yank it.

  “I made this world for you, Lyle. To awaken you, and then to take away all the pain of indecision: What’s right? What’s wrong? Are people good or bad? They’re on hold, at least until we can figure out what we want to do.”

  “I have a question first.”

  6:56

  6:55

  “If I join you, if we take the road less traveled, and it doesn’t work, will you wake everyone up? Can we return to the way it was?” Lyle asked.

  She shrugged. “It’s a relationshi
p. We’ll work it out.” A nonanswer.

  “How would we do that?”

  “Work it out? We’d talk and we’d listen.”

  “No, how would we return it to the way it was, the way it is?”

  She smiled. “Are you really still trying to figure out how to reverse this?”

  “I’m a doctor, Jackie. I never quit trying to figure out how to kill the disease.”

  “You are a doctor, Lyle. You never stopped being one. I know that. I love that about you. So I’ll answer, in general terms. It’s a password, of course, that I’ve no need to tell you about at this point. So, what’s it going to be?”

  5:27

  “You know I can’t do this, Jackie.”

  She looked at him, curious, shaking her head.

  “It’s a chance to make something beautiful and pure.”

  “You’re on your own, Jackie. I’ll go down with the ship.”

  “I’m so disappointed to hear that.”

  “How does that work? Do I go outside?”

  “Yes, that’s one way. But I prefer something more intimate,” she said, tears in her eyes. “I’ll need you to go into that room there, behind you. It will get the signal. I will be spared it in here. You can sit, and I can watch as you fall into a stasis state. I hope the bears don’t eat you.”

  “What?”

  “Kidding, Lyle. If I let bears eat you, then how would I be able to enjoy looking at you now and again.”

  4:47

  It’s not working, he thought, the plan has fallen apart.

  “Up you go,” she said.

  Lyle stood. He looked at the woman on the other side of the mirror, her body inert, as Lyle’s was soon to be. He turned back to his captor.

  “Jackie, would you offer me any final thoughts?”