Death Sentence td-80

by Warren Murphy

  "That's Washington's cover story," Naomi countered. "I personally flew to Yuma to interview some of the eyewitnesses, and they described to me a lone man who tore tanks apart, bested squads of heavily armed Japanese troops, and virtually lifted the siege of Yuma with his bare hands. Before the Rangers parachuted in."

  "One man?" Mearle said skeptically.

  "One unarmed man. A man who, by all accounts, was six feet tall and weighed no more than one hundred and sixty pounds. What we anthropologists call an ectomorph."

  "I'll look it up."

  "No need. An ectomorph is a thin person. An endomorph is a fat person. And a mesomorph is a normally muscled person."

  "Which am I?"

  "A biped. Barely."

  "I'll look it up."

  "Do." Naomi smiled fiercely. "This man was a casuasoid. Slim. Obviously not the weight-lifter type. Yet he bent gun barrels in his fingers. Bullets could not stop him."

  "They're supposed to bounce off Superman."

  "I have no reports of such a phenomenon. He evidently avoided them by pure reflex."

  "Adrenaline or sugar?"

  "Neither. This man sustained these impossible activities. Adrenaline is good for twenty-minute stretches. This man-this seemingly ordinary man-systematically dismantled the Japanese army in the course of a long day of hand-to-hand fighting. The reports described him as unremarkable except for two distinguishing features that stuck in the minds of the people who witnessed his destructive power. He had unusually thick wrists. And his eyes were dead."

  Mearle gulped in spite of himself. "Dead?"

  "Flat. Lifeless. Devoid of emotion. That kind of dead."

  "I don't get it."

  "There's more. Before I flew to Yuma to check out these reports firsthand, I collected all the Yuma reports and checked for similar reports elsewhere. I found them. Clipped from obscure newspapers and journals. Some of the sources were pretty disreputable. Fate magazine. The Fortean Journal. Publications that revel in ghosts and UFO's and Bigfeet."

  "Foot. Bigfoot. Actually, I did a poll on UFO's. Do you know that over seventy-seven percent of Americans believe in flying saucers?"

  "You people actually conducted a nationwide survey?"

  "No," Mearle said casually. "We sampled an Akron neighborhood and extrapolated from there."

  "That's statistically unsupportable!"

  Mearle shrugged. "It sold papers."

  "I'm sure that it did," Naomi said acidly. "In any case, I found other reports of incredible feats. All of them had one thing in common. The man who performed them had thick wrists and dark dead eyes. Sometimes he was not alone, but was accompanied by an enigmatic Asian. I don't understand that part myself. I doubt they could be related or even part of the same gene pool. Yet both performed similar extraordinary feats. And these reports come from all over America."

  "This is great. This is wonderful," enthused Mearle, for the first time checking his tape recorder to see if it was running. It was.

  "You see what I am leading up to?"

  "Yeah! Space aliens. They're probably after our sugar."

  "I am not talking about aliens," Naomi snorted. "I was trying to communicate to you that the next stage in human evolution has appeared in our society. In America. Now. The man who will lead humanity into the twenty-first century. The man who, once he begins to sow his seed, will usher in a new race of men, making all of us poor ethnocentric Homo sapiens as obsolete as Australopithecus."

  "He's a farmer?"

  "I had another kind of seed in mind. Sperm."

  "Now I get it. He's a menace. Are you saying he should be destroyed before he breeds?"

  "No, never. If this man is the next step in evolution, it will be up to us, as the former dominant species, to step aside, just as the Neanderthal man stepped aside for Cro-Magnon."

  "That's crazy!"

  "To the contrary. Evolution is wonderfully sane. And so am I. In fact, I would volunteer in a moment to bear the child of this next stage of Homo sapiens. It would be a privilege."

  Mearle blinked. "That's what you want me to write? That you're looking for a date?"

  Naomi's shark-fin face grew sharper. "That was very crudely put," she said primly. "This is science. This is the future."

  "No," returned Mearle, shutting off his tape recorder as he got to his feet. "This is the front page of our next issue."

  "Wait! Don't you want to hear the rest of my hypothesis?"

  "Later. My editor is sure to want follow-up. Right now, I've got more than I need."

  The door slammed after him, stirring the mousy tendrils of hair that framed Naomi Vanderkloot's narrow forehead like venetian-blind cords.

  "I hope I haven't made a big mistake," she muttered under her breath. "I'm up for tenure next year...."

  Buddy Newman was expecting the gray man.

  On the third Tuesday of every month, the Sak-N-Sav where Buddy was a cashier ran a two-for-one special on certain slow-moving products, among them Flako Magic Potato Mix. It was the Flako that brought the gray man into the store, where once a month he invariably stocked up, buying as many as six boxes at a time.

  After three years of ringing up the gray man's third-Tuesday purchases-all on sale and most unfit for discriminating stomachs-Buddy Newman looked forward to seeing the gray man the way he looked forward to registering for the draft. Not as bad as a root canal, but it was no walk in the park either.

  So when the gray man came in through the photoelectric doors and made a beeline for the sale aisle, Buddy Newman groaned inwardly.

  Buddy thought of him as the gray man even though he knew his name was Smith. Buddy knew that fact because he lived on the same street as the man, in Rye, New York. The front-door nameplate of the Tudor-style house said: Smith. That was as much about him as Buddy Newman knew or wanted to know.

  Smith was not exactly the kind of person you'd invite over for a barbecue. He was a dry, lanky cut of a man who always wore a gray three-piece suit and the same striped school tie. His hair was the dirty white of a thin stormcloud. His eyes were gray. Even his skin was gray. That was the truly unappetizing thing about the man, that lizardy gray skin.

  As the gray man named Smith emerged from the aisle, hugging exactly eight boxes of Flako Magic Potato Mix under his bony Adam's apple, Buddy Newman gave out a little groan.

  There were six cashiers at the Sak-N-Save, and Buddy had the express aisle. Eight items or less. He sighed.

  The gray man set the boxes down on the conveyor belt and reached into his pocket, extracting a worn leather wallet. Buddy began running the boxes past the optical bar-code reader, knowing that even before his register totaled up the amount, the gray man would have arrived at the correct figure mentally. Buddy knew this because the man invariably counted out the exact change before Buddy had a machine total. Once the man had insisted that Buddy's cash register was in error. Buddy politely told him that the bar-code reader did not make mistakes.

  The gray man had insisted in a lemony voice and Buddy had had to call the manager. It was Buddy's first month on the job and he hadn't yet learned how to deal with troublesome customers. He hoped that the manager would toss the gray man out into the parking lot.

  Instead, the gray man pointed to a flawed bar code on one box and impatiently stood by while the manager entered the cost by hand. He then reprimanded Buddy for not having the sense to simply hit the repeat key after the scanner picked the price off the first box.

  Buddy actually turned beet-red at that, his first reprimand. He never again forgot to use the repeat key.

  But this time Buddy deliberately didn't hit the repeat key. Let the guy suffer, he thought, just as he himself suffered every time the gray man pulled out his red change holder and counted out exact change with maddening care. That was the thing that drove Buddy crazy. Anyone else would be content to slap down two or three quarters and accept the change. The man insisted on counting out every last penny, no matter how much he had to scrounge in that ridiculous plast
ic change holder.

  So this time Buddy took his time totaling the bill. Maybe the gray man-whose skin looked even grayer than usual today-would take his purchases to another register next time.

  The man clutched his change in hand while Buddy pretended to have trouble with the scanner. He knew from long practice how to hold the box so that it would misread. He did this repeatedly.

  "Hold the box flatter," the gray man suggested in a voice that sounded as if it had been squeezed from a lemon peel.

  "Sorry, sir," Buddy said, secretly glad that he had touched a nerve. He fussed with the box, noting the thinning of the man's bloodless lips. He noticed again the flat grayness of his skin. Normally it was the color of fish skin. Tonight it resembled pencil lead.

  As the gray man squirmed impatiently, his eyes wandered to the magazine rack, where the latest editions of the women's magazines and various tabloids screamed their coverlines.

  The gray man did a comical double-take. One gray hand reached out for the latest Enquirer with shocking urgency. He took in the cover with eyes that showed white all the way around behind the transparent shields of his rimless glasses. He tore the paper open, searching for something. When he found what he sought, his skin went even grayer, if anything, and his eyes wider.

  Buddy Newman was so surprised at this uncharacteristic behavior that he actually stopped working and looked at the man in wonderment. It was the shortest-lived expression that Buddy Newman ever had on his face.

  For the gray man suddenly clutched at his chest, the pages of the Enquirer scattering like origami pigeons. His mouth went wide. His lips and fingernails seemed almost blue. His eyes strained from their sockets like hard-boiled eggs from a clenched fist, and the gray man folded like a lawn chair, landing on the conveyor belt. He was carried along until he jammed up against the coupon shelf in a welter of limbs.

  Buddy Newman recognized the signs of a heart attack from his CPR class and hit the manager's bell. Without waiting, he flipped the gray man around so that he could get to his face. It was as gray as a corpse's face now.

  Buddy pinched off the nose and pried open the man's gasping mouth, checking first to see that he hadn't swallowed his tongue. He hadn't. It lay in his mouth, a fat gray slug. Steeling himself for the distastefulness of his task, Buddy pressed his mouth to the gray man's lips. They were turning a grayish-blue. He exhaled forcefully, withdrew, then repeated the procedure.

  The manager hurried up and Buddy shouted to him, "Call an ambulance! He's dying!" Then he put his lips to those of the gray man named Smith. Smith's lips were cold as fresh cod. And just about as tasty. Buddy forced more air into the unresponsive lungs, hot tears in his eyes.

  After the ambulance attendants had wheeled the gray man out the electric doors, Buddy sat on the conveyor belt that normally carried apples and doughnuts and pork chops to their ultimate destiny and listened silently to the manager's distant but reassuring voice telling him that he would probably receive some kind of commendation from the chain, if the customer survived.

  Buddy didn't think the man would survive. The cold taste on his lips made him feel as if he'd kissed a corpse.

  Finally, after Buddy had calmed down, the manager sent him home early. Buddy took with him a copy of the Enquirer.

  There were several headlines, Buddy saw as he walked to his house. One of them, he felt, had caused the man to have a heart attack.

  Buddy instantly dismissed the top headline, which informed the world, STARTLING NEW EVIDENCE! SAME ASSASSIN KILLED ROY ORBISON, LUCILLE BALL, AND AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI!"

  There was a box item that promised to reveal the secret of the Enquirer All-Pizza Weight-Loss Program. Smith hadn't looked as if he'd ever eaten a pizza in his life.

  That left only one other story. The headline read: AMAZING TRUTH REVEALED. EVOLUTIONARY SUPERMAN LOOSE IN U.S.!

  Below that was an artist's rendition of a man's cruel face. He had high cheekbones and the deadest eyes Buddy had ever seen. Even in the sketch, those eyes seemed to bore through Buddy's shaken soul like drill bits.

  He opened to the inside page and by the lights of passing streetlamps read about the being whom the reporter had dubbed "Dead Man," who, if the reports could be believed, roamed the streets of America committing actions of indescribable violence. It sounded to Buddy like someone's idea for a bad comic book. Then he looked back at the dead eyes that stared out from the cover and shuddered uncontrollably.

  No wonder Smith had keeled over. The guy looked like death personified.

  Convinced he had solved the mystery of Smith's apparent heart attack, Buddy Newman hurried to his parents' house and had nightmares in which the express-line conveyor belt was choked with corpses who clutched alien coins while Buddy frantically tried to bag them before they died on him.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo and the sound of the buzzer snapped him from sleep.

  He lay there, letting his slow-to-focus brown eyes take in the unfamiliar surroundings. He didn't recognize the ceiling. It was too white. He blinked, and sat up slowly. His head hurt. There was a dull pain in back of his deep-set eyes. It felt like the optic nerves had been seared and not quite healed.

  He rolled to the side of the lumpy cot and took his head in his hands. When he lifted his face, he looked around the cell, which was illuminated by the strong light from outside the bars.

  It was a bare cell. The walls were pink-painted cinder block and in one corner was a stainless-steel toilet with a broken sink atop the water tank. Other than the cot and the toilet, the cell was as barren as a bald man's scalp. And just as pink.

  Remo stood up in his boxer shorts and relieved himself into the lidless toilet. He stared at the wall as if trying to comprehend it. After he buttoned up, he found his blue work uniform folded on the floor, his leather state-issue shoes resting on the neat pile. He put on the pants first and then laced his shoes. They were new and felt like diver's weighted shoes when he took a tentative step around the six-by-nine cell.

  Down the corridor he heard the sound of men, like himself, stirring in their confined spaces. A black voice cursed the new day bitterly. A younger voice simply broke down and sobbed. Jeers replied with a callousness that beggared understanding.

  And mixed in with those rude sounds were those of footsteps. Booted feet. Free feet. Feet walking the corridor unfettered and heading in his direction.

  "Head count!" an authoritarian voice barked. "Sound off."

  "Fuck you, man!" another voice challenged. The booted feet stopped. There was a pause. Then the same voice answered again, this time more submissively: "Number Eighty."

  Other voices called out: "Number Fifty-five."

  "Number Thirty-seven."

  "Number one-eighty-one." Finally, as Remo buttoned his short-sleeved workshirt, the feet stopped at the bars of his cell.

  There were two sets of them. The two men wore identical gray uniform shirts with black epaulets and pocket trim. Their pants were black, with charcoalgray stripes running down the outer seams. Their Smokey the Bear hats were black and shaded hard mean eyes.

  "How was your first night, Dead Man?" the taller of the two correction officers asked without looking up from his clipboard.

  "Bend over and I'll show you," Remo snarled. Their accents were all wrong. Too southern. And the uniform colors were not right either. The thought sank into his mind slowly, like a water lily losing its buoyancy.

  "Yeah," the second C.O. said. He was nearly as wide as he was tall, and he was not tall. "I heard you were a tough SOB."

  "The name is Remo."

  "You mean Convict Number Six."

  "That's not my number."

  "Up in New Jersey, maybe. But down here, you're Number Six. Now, stand back from those bars, boy. The warden wants to see you."

  Remo let go of the bars and stepped back as the C.O. called down to the watch commander to rack Cell Number Two.

  The electronic cell door buzzed as it rolled back. The pair of C.O.'s quickly step
ped to either side of him and one knelt to attach the leg irons while the other stood with his clipboard at his side and the other hand resting on his gun butt.

  Once the leg irons were in place, the C.O. rose, carrying the handcuffs linked to lengths of chain. The cuffs encircled his wrists and pinched off skin. "Dammit," the squat C.O. muttered. "What is it?" the other demanded.

  "Just look at this guy's wrists. They're thick as suspension cables. The cuffs don't fit."

  "Make 'em fit."

  Remo held his wrists out, his hands balled into fists. The C.O. struggled to lock one cuff over his right wrist. The tongue fell short of the locking mechanism by a half-inch.

  "Try the other wrist," the tall C.O. said impatiently. "He's probably right-handed. The left wrist will be thinner. And snap it up. The warden's waitin'."

  The other handcuff also fell short of its task by a good half-inch.

  "What do we do?" the squat C.O. asked in exasperation. "I never saw a con with wrists like these." Remo shot the guards a dark-eyed grin.

  "What if I do this?" he suggested, unclenching his fists.

  The C.O. squeezed the cuffs. They clicked into place.

  "Cute," he said, giving Remo a shove. "Very cute. Let's take your little magic act to the warden.

  As he stepped from his cell, Remo was urged to the right.

  "Don't look back, boy. You don't want to see what's back the other way."

  A long row of cells stretched before him. Hands, some folded, others limp-fingered and bored, hung out the bars all along the line. The corridor was beige cinder block, and terminated in a black electronic door with a square glass window.

  "Walk four steps behind me and hug the wall," the tall C.O. said, leading the way. The other one fell in behind them. "Stay on the yellow line."

  Remo started walking heavily. As he passed the line of cells, hard unfamiliar faces peered out from between the green-painted bars.

  "Hey, Sleeping Beauty! I'm Prince Charming."

  "Say, what's your name, cutie?"

  There were catcalls, a few wolf whistles. A washed-out con with a gold ring in his ear wondered aloud if Remo was a virgin. Remo stopped in front of his cell and fixed him with his dead-looking eyes. The con shrank back from the bars involuntarily.