by David Zeman
There is something pathetic about her bound posture, but also something provocative. Her pelvis is the center of focus. The gradual upward thrust of the back leads to it, as does the vertical line of the thighs. The curve of her buttocks is given optimum shape and tension by her bound posture. She looks like a princess, but not one garbed in silk and brocade. Hers is the nobility of nudity.
There is movement, there is sound. A shadow approaches from the right, moving slowly. The girl sees nothing. As the shadow comes closer there are calls from the distance, and laughter. She does not hear. Or rather, if she hears she does not move a muscle to show that she hears.
The shadow is next to her now, a hand outstretched. The music builds toward its crescendo. The voices call out urgently.
Now the hanging cord is seen, dangling from the other hand. Slender, tufted at the end, it moves along the wall, swinging slightly as it approaches her. The voices call out encouragement. Uncertain, hesitant, the shadow dangles. Then it falls over the naked buttocks. The girl’s empty eyes do not say whether she is aware of the approach or not. Is it obliviousness or terror that freezes her?
The shadow swings this way and that. The voices call out. The female flesh waits passively.
Suddenly everything stops. The poised shadow does not move. The girl is a statue. The voices are cut off. The hanging tail is an inch from her crotch. But nothing moves. All is still.
A sound is heard. A gasp, perhaps a cry of anguish.
Darkness falls. Girl, shadow, wall, disappear like magic.
The scene is ended, until next time.
13
—————
Sydney, Australia
November 27
KAREN EMBRY’S plane landed at four-thirty in the morning, Australia time, after a total of twenty-three hours spent in the air.
It had taken lengthy politicking with her agent to get him to agree to this journey. She had told him much—but not all—that she had learned about the mystery illness. Sensing a book in the offing, he had finally given in.
Karen could not sleep on airplanes. By the time she arrived she had not slept in a day and a half. She had powerful uppers in her purse, given to her by a fellow reporter who was a speed addict. But she hadn’t taken any. So far the scent of a story was enough to keep her alert.
She took a local flight to Perth, and then a chartered Cessna into the outback, landing on an airstrip seemingly a thousand miles from nowhere.
According to the reports she had read, the mystery disease had gone undiscovered for a couple of months or more. It had not spread beyond the small tribe of Aborigines, but it had killed most of them and incapacitated the rest. There were only about fifteen survivors, most of them quarantined in a health clinic.
The reports about the illness were garbled, no doubt because of the remote location and the victims’ suspicion of the authorities. However, in one somewhat obscure report an Aborigine from a neighboring village had said, “When the people neared death, their feet and hands became hard and large, like the hoofs of animals.” This had made Karen decide to see the syndrome for herself.
This would make a tremendous feature story, she thought. She could scale it up for the scientific journals, and simultaneously hype it with more dramatic wording for the popular media. If it was true that the disease involved bizarre deformities, the story could be important.
In the Land Rover Karen gazed for a few moments at the vast expanse of scrub land, punctuated by eucalyptus and occasional acacias. Then she opened the report, which included the testimony of the neighboring villager.
“The people became silent and rigid. Those who were standing up remained standing until they fell. Those who were sitting did not move until fatigue and weakness made them fall over. They would not speak. They seemed stubborn and did not move. Then they became sick.”
Karen furrowed her brow in concentration. She twirled a strand of her dark hair with a finger. She barely noticed the exotic scenery around her, or the bumps and lurches of the Land Rover on the dirt roads.
The driver dropped her at the tiny hospital where the sick Aborigines were being treated. It was a battered old frame building that huddled under a shabby growth of gum trees. Emus languidly patrolled the scrub in search of small rodents. It was incredibly hot.
The doctor in charge was a tired-looking man in late middle age. His name was Dr. Roper.
“Thank you for seeing me,” Karen said. “I hope my timing isn’t too terrible.”
“I’m glad you got here quickly,” he said. “I’m afraid there isn’t much time left. Of the fifteen villagers we brought in, twelve are already dead. The three still living are critical.”
“Can I see them?” Karen asked.
“Sure. But you’ll have to put on a hot-zone suit. We’re still not sure whether the disease is communicable, and we’re not taking chances.”
He sent her to a nurse who helped her put on a decontamination suit. She accompanied the doctor to a quarantined ward where the three remaining patients were being kept. All were attached to life-support systems, tubes connecting them to electronic machines of surprising sophistication for this remote region.
“They’re completely comatose and unresponsive,” the doctor told her. “They were that way when they came in. The vital signs have been steadily weakening. We’ve been concentrating on keeping them breathing and supporting the heart rate, but there’s nothing more we can do. They’re simply dying.”
The faces of the three Aborigines, one woman and two men, were wasted. Their dark skin seemed gray as death approached.
“As far as we can tell,” the doctor said, “the progress of the disease was much faster in the children than in the adults, and slightly faster in the women than in the men. But it’s hard to speculate with any accuracy. No one reported the outbreak until almost everybody was dead.”
Karen was looking at the sheets covering the hands and feet of the dying Aborigines. They were suspiciously distended.
“May I look?” she asked.
“Get ready for a shock,” the doctor said. “This isn’t easy to look at.”
He pulled back the sheet from the female patient. The hands were grossly distended and distorted. It looked as though the fingers had fused together in a gelatinous mass. But when Karen touched the left hand on the invitation of the doctor, it was hard. It had the appearance of amber, but darker, more opaque.
“We’ve done biopsies,” the doctor said. “It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before. The cell structure looks human, but the tissue is a morphological monstrosity.”
He pulled back the sheet to show Karen the foot. It was even more distorted than the hand. The toes were fused, and the front of the foot had pulled back toward the heel, creating a bizarre hooflike impression.
“Apparently the distortion comes on not long before death,” the doctor said. “Those who died the quickest had less deformation than those who lasted longer. Whatever the cause and mechanism are, we haven’t got a clue. My colleagues are talking along the lines of Elephant Man’s disease, acromegaly, things like that.”
Karen was looking more closely at the distorted foot. “Or some sort of scleroderma,” she said. “Or perhaps one of the collagenous tissue diseases like dermatomyositis or even lupus erythematosus.”
The doctor raised an eyebrow, impressed by Karen’s knowledge.
“Are you a physician yourself?” he asked.
“No.”
He took her to a makeshift pathology lab in an adjoining building. There were bodies of several villagers there, women and children as well as men. The macabre hooflike fusion and distension of the hands and feet were obvious in all the cases. In the two children it looked particularly cruel and unsettling.
“Were there other physical changes?” Karen asked. “Internally, I mean.” Karen knew enough physiology to know that a change as bizarre as the distorted extremities of these victims had to be accompanied by some sort of massive anomaly at the ce
llular level.
“We’re not equipped to deal with that here,” the doctor told her. “The pathologists in Adelaide are working on the two patients we sent there. I’ll give you their names. They’re doing complete autopsies with cell studies. They may have something for you.”
Back in his office the doctor showed Karen a strange object, apparently fashioned out of clay. It was a doll or talisman in the shape of a person with enlarged hands and feet.
“This was made by the medicine man,” he said. “It was found by one of the health officers in the village. We think it represents the illness. Apparently the medicine man tried to use the icon to propitiate the gods.”
Karen held the object in her hands. Though crudely designed, it radiated a sort of force, born obviously of the medicine man’s intense faith. The creature held out its oversized hands as though in a gesture of acknowledgment, or perhaps prayer.
“Have you ever seen an icon like this before?” she asked.
The doctor shook his head. “Never.”
He wrote down the names of the physicians in Adelaide who were working on the bodies. Karen thanked him and went to a small lodge that catered to hunters, hikers, and the occasional brave tourist who came to this remote area. On the way the driver pointed out a wombat that Karen was not quick enough to see as it waddled out of sight in the brush. Rock wallabies, some carrying infant joeys in their pouches, were surprisingly plentiful.
Her exhaustion and jet lag were catching up to her now. She had difficulty filling out the guest form. By the time she reached the little cabin where she was to sleep, she was moving slowly and her eyelids were drooping.
She left her overnight bag and briefcase unopened on the floor and lay down on the bed. The old comforter that covered it smelled of mothballs and stale food, but to Karen it felt wonderful. The minute she closed her eyes dreams began to crowd against the conscious thoughts in her mind. She breathed deeply, floating mentally over the impressions of the last ten days. It had been a busy time, full of breaking stories, garbled rumors, and well-kept secrets.
A distant motor coughed into life. A dog barked. The calls of strange birds sounded far away. Dream thoughts transported Karen to the bed of her childhood, with its colorful afghan and stuffed animals. She reached out reflexively for the blue teddy bear that no longer existed.
She plummeted quickly toward deep sleep. Her dreams took her further and further from this time and place, as though she were on a magic carpet. But something woke her up suddenly. She lay rubbing her burning eyes and looking at the unfamiliar room. What had awakened her?
Hands and feet.
She got out of bed with a sigh and went to her briefcase. She took out the portable computer and turned it on. She clicked through the various folders, searching for something she could not quite remember. She cursed herself for not finding better titles for her icons. It was time consuming to open them one by one, searching for a mere hint or an overheard clue.
Then, fighting off sleep, she remembered. She closed a folder, opened another one, and found the icon she was looking for.
“Jesus,” she said.
She called the airline, made a reservation for tomorrow night, and made a note of it on her computer’s desktop.
She would go to Adelaide first thing tomorrow morning and see what she could learn from the pathologists there.
Then she would fly to New Hampshire.
After looking at her watch she lay down under the comforter and closed her eyes. There was time for a few hours’ sleep.
Hands and feet,she thought.Hands and feet .
Exhaustion put her under before the thoughts in her mind could produce insomnia. But the dreams that filled her sleep were cruel and frightening.
14
—————
Atlanta, Georgia
November 27
DAMIAN LIGHTFOOT was cleaning up the trash.
Not physical trash, of course. Damian was a computer technician hired by the Corporation to assay and discard the vast amounts of unneeded and out-of-date files that collected in the company computers. It had to be done carefully. Ninety-five percent of the time the files and documents earmarked for trashing by the various research departments were useless. But once in a while a file or group of files found its way into the trash by accident and had to be double checked with the department concerned. More than once a crucial bit of research had been saved in this manner, either by Damian Lightfoot or by his predecessors.
The trash-management job was not very high paying, and was certainly not fun. It was pure drudgery. You assayed the vast quantities of trash, looking for markers that had been agreed upon in the current quarter to identify outmoded files to be trashed. When you found a file that wasn’t clearly marked you saved it in a special quadrant and queried the departments involved. Usually it took them days to answer you, for the scientists looked upon the computers as their slaves, and the computer techs as idiots. Sometimes you had to send a dozen memos before they bothered to acknowledge you.
Of course you had to clear every major decision with Security. The Corporation faced stiff competition from other companies around the country and overseas. The research files were a key target, and computer invasion was the preferred line of attack. A computer security firm revamped the entire system every three months, and their staffers were always available for advice or clarification.
Damian was drinking his ninth Coke of the day and listening to Metallica through his earphones when he found the file with the strange name. Project 4. He had never seen it before.
He held the file and tried searching through various sectors of the database for the name. A drug? A chemical? No dice. No trace of it anywhere.
He didn’t trash it. He was paid to always hold back until he got confirmation.
Out of curiosity he tried to open the file. A message appeared on the screen: THE FILE YOU HAVE TRIED TO OPEN REQUIRES SECURITY CLEARANCE. PLEASE TYPE IN YOUR NAME AND DESIGNATION.
Shrugging, Damian did as he was told.
PLEASE WAIT FOR SECURITY ACKNOWLEDGMENT, said another message.
Damian turned up the music and waited, sipping at his Coke. It was lunchtime, and he was hungry. He had a date to go out for lunch with one of the girls from the front office, a girl who was too new to know about Damian yet. Had she had one more week she would have been warned off him, but he had gotten to her while she was new.
Personally he didn’t think he was that strange. True, he had certain tastes in food and music that made others uneasy. But he led a comparatively normal life, and he didn’t want anything sexual that was different from what anybody else wanted. He still didn’t understand why that girl Cynthia, from accounting, had taken such a dislike to him on their one date. She had bad-mouthed him to everybody within shouting distance. In a company of this size, that was quite damaging.
He waited in front of the screen, sighing, listening to his stomach grumble. This had to be an error. They had probably misnamed the file.
He finally decided to get a bag of potato chips from the machine next door. He would simply leave the computer waiting. It would only be a minute or less.
He got up, still wearing his earphones, and went to the door. It opened before he could touch the knob. A man in civilian clothes—dark suit, tie, brown shoes—stood in the doorway.
The man said something, but Damian couldn’t hear him because of the music.
“What?” Damian asked, pulling one of the buds from his ear.
“Are you Damian?” asked the man. Damian noticed now that he wasn’t wearing a company badge.
“Yeah. What can I do for you?”
“You found a file?”
“Yeah.” Damian turned to gesture at the screen. “Can’t open it. Never saw the name before. Are you security?”
“Yes.”
The man had closed the door with a glance into the corridor.
“Show me,” he said.
“Here.” Damian leaned over the scre
en. “Look for yourself. It’s not in any of the directories.”
The man leaned over Damian’s shoulder. He gave off a faint scent of aftershave and tobacco. The name “Project 4” was in the middle of the screen.
“Are you sure?” the man asked. “Did you try QPC?”
Damian laughed. “What’s QPC?”
But the man’s arm had curled around Damian’s neck while he was turning to ask the question. The breath was squeezed out of Damian’s body. He felt his muscles tense, his arms and legs flailing this way and that. Then there was a sharpcrack! as the arm broke his neck, and a spreading red wave swept over his vision, blinding him.
He was dead before he hit the floor.
15
—————
November 28
THE SUBJECT was in a traditional hospital bed set up in a special room full of monitors, not terribly different from a room for a patient on the critical list in any modern intensive care unit. Monitors for the usual vital signs—blood pressure, respiration, pulse rate, and so on—were against the walls, connected to the subject by wires. In addition, however, there were more sophisticated machines that monitored less obvious physical processes. There were also video cameras timed to keep a constant watch on the subject’s physical appearance.
Two men in white coats were standing beside the bed. Both wore stethoscopes. The younger man had surgical gloves on.
“How are we doing?” the older man asked.
“Vital signs slowly decreasing,” the other man said. “He’s in coma now. Respiration shallow, heart rate uneven. I suspect heart failure may be the proximate cause of death.”
“Other vital signs?”
“Liver and kidney function well below normal. Hematocrit reflecting cellular and other changes.”
“What about the EEG?”
The younger man held up a printout. “Brain waves are our best signature,” he said. “The spikes and valleys form a definite pattern that never seems to vary. It’s clearly not a healthy pattern, yet it’s quite consistent.”