Chapter 19
Donovan stood in the early morning San Francisco fog, on the corner of Powell and Pine, with no idea what to do next. He shuffled aimlessly up the block, looking for a coffee place that had a good supply of bottled water. A cuppa joe to clear the cobwebs. That would help.
He had spent the last two days trying to find her again, track her down. Idiot.
He’d never gotten her new phone number. She was not listed with 411. She’d never given him her address or even told him what town she lived in now. All that he knew about her from before was wrong and useless. Wrong phone number, wrong address, wrong email. Wrong everything. It was like she no longer existed, the Cathren he used to know.
He roamed around downtown, randomly making lefts and rights, trying to think like her. Would she go shopping? No way, she was too distraught. Out of town, to her parents’ place maybe? Wherever the hell that was. Most likely, she was holed up with a girlfriend, getting sicker, hiding from ATELIC.
As Donovan walked along, he was suddenly aware that anyone watching him would be hoping he would lead them to Cathren. It struck Donovan that he was being paranoid. But then again, after all he’d been through recently, it was better to be ready for anything. Because something was going to happen.
He would go everywhere that, to his mind, Cathren would not go. He didn’t know her well enough to know her habits and her usual haunts. But he figured, she was a woman and might know people who work at boutiques. Easy to stay away from those. Home furnishing places, too. Sephora. The Gap. What else? Damn, probably coffee shops. Like the very one he was about to enter.
Now that the grossly sick, or the walking dead, or whatever they were, had evidently moved on, people were beginning to emerge from the buildings. They all looked frightened and shell-shocked, but at least they were outside again. Donovan looked up and noticed helicopters high overhead, approaching from the east.
One thing he was sure of was that he wasn’t sure of anything. He was exhausted, hungry, and disoriented. To the point of where he was nearly hallucinating. Forget it. He’d head back home. There was simply nothing else he could do.
The place was just as it was the night Cathren had run out and disappeared. He straightened out the coffee table, picked up the melted icepack and the towel that were still on the floor, and considered the place good to go.
He went to the refrigerator and grabbed a beer and a package of deli meat. Then, slowly, he collapsed onto the couch. His head was still spinning, but not as badly now. Felt more like a hangover, something with which he had a long, love-hate relationship. In fact, out of desperation and an attempt to get his life on the right track, he was sipping an O’Doul’s. No chance of a hangover developing from indulging in non-alcoholic beer.
Donovan didn’t care that she was sick; they’d get through it together. He was, he suddenly realized, in love. At least, if this was what love felt like (because he’d never felt it before), then this was what he was in. Donovan hoped she felt the same.
He put his feet up on the coffee table and closed his eyes. He started to drift off when he imagined that Cathren, as if in a dream, stood in the room before him. He knew it was impossible, but he smiled at the thought of her being there anyway. There was something about that girl. He smiled, and then, eyes still closed, took another sip of his alcohol-free, flavor-free beer. He shook his head slowly back and forth as he began to fall asleep, chuckling softly but out loud.
“What is so damn funny?”
Donovan opened his eyes and there she stood. He closed his eyes again, took a deep breath, and opened his eyes once more.
Cathren, like an angel, seemed to hover there before him.
“Yeah, I’m real,” Cathren said, a smile escaping her lips, her strawberry blonde hair flowing like a bright cloud over her shoulders. She looked into Donovan’s eyes, then looked away, her eyelids closing halfway.
“Well,” Donovan said, trying to catch the breath Cathren’s sexy look had seduced out of him. “Looks like we have a lot to talk about!” He gave Cathren his winningest smile. Donovan’s head was spinning, from love he’d like to think. But he knew it was partly because of the hallucinogenic, waking nightmare of the past forty-eight hours.
“Don’t talk,” she said, throwing her purse on the coffee table. They kissed in a rare pool of warm, fleeting sunshine. When they pulled apart, they just looked at each other and smiled.
“Donovan, I—”
She fell into his arms, blood running from the corner of her mouth.
“Cathren!” Donovan shouted, falling to his knees with her in his arms. Her eyes slowly shut, and her skin chilled in that warm California sun.
* * *
Her facial wound had returned, and worse than before. Now, half her face was peeling off, as if she’d been sprayed with Napalm or a flamethrower. One of her eyes was starting to fall out of her skull, and there was something oozing out of her left ear. Donovan could see straight through one side of her cheek to her molars. She was missing a clump of hair in the middle of her head. Cathren stared at Donovan with hollow eyes.
“Holy shit.”
There was a sudden knock on the door. “Yo, what’s up?”
Donovan recognized Rudra’s voice.
“Hold on.” He looked at Cathren. Her skin was going gray and she appeared to be losing weight. Her breasts, once so full and round, had shrunk. Her full lips were now shriveled, her hair thinning. Donovan bit his thumbnail and stood up to let Rudra in.
Rudra stepped in and immediately pointed to Cathren lying on the floor.
“What the hell happened to her?” He put his hands up defensively. “She looks like a fuckin’ corpse.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know,” Donovan said. “She just fell like that. One minute she was Cathren, then the next minute—that.” Shame filled his stomach like lead over being repulsed by Cathren, the girl he thought he really loved. Could he be so shallow? She was still the same girl, only something terrible was happening to her. “I think she just needs to rest,” he said to Rudra. “Help me put her on the couch.”
“Hell, no!” Rudra stepped forward. “She has to go to the hospital. Like now.”
Donovan looked at Cathren. She was fading away before his eyes.
“You’re right, of course,” he said. Tears stung his eyes and a great sadness weighed on his heart.
Only he couldn’t say if it was for Cathren, or for himself.
Chapter 20
Please, go on, Dr. Portanova.
Thank you. After weeks, we found that one of the chemicals in the bath had the wrong proportions as well as the wrong strength. Once we discovered and corrected this problem, the experiments continued. The good news was, the brains now were no longer dead.
And the bad news…?
Well, in every other way the experiments proved inconclusive. As with the chimp brain results, we found that we could reanimate the human heads to a certain degree. We recorded some brain activity, but the brains were never, by any real definition of the term, alive.
What happened next?
We made some new modifications to the bathwater, increasing certain chemicals based on the recommendations found in the tweaked computer models.
We also reduced or, in some cases, even eliminated other substances. Finally, after months and months of nothing, and more months of modest success, we achieved a milestone.
The frozen brains placed into the bathwater started to behave in a somewhat normal way. More importantly, we found brain activity in the parietal and temporal lobe.
Would you please explain?
Yes, of course. This brain activity told us the brain was responding to stimuli. It was beginning to perceive, in some way, the world around it.
We also found activity in the frontal lobe, specifically the hippocampus. This told us that the brain was beginning to relive past memories.
Fascinating stuff, just fascinating. We’ll be right back.
Chapter 21
Donovan
rode in the ambulance to the hospital with Cathren while Rudra drove his car. The medics had tried to resuscitate her at the apartment, but they were unable to get a pulse. They made a decision right away to get her to the emergency room.
They raced through the streets of San Francisco, past Karl Malden Square. As they sped along, Donovan spotted a large number of cops, military, and SWAT teams. With trucks, tanks, helicopters, and tear gas. They were shooting anything that moved. Well, more correctly, anything that moved in a stumbling, shuffling, water-drinkers way.
Donovan cringed at the sporadic grenade blasts from somewhere off in the distance. He exhaled loudly. The world he once knew was falling apart completely.
Including Cathren.
They pulled up to the hospital. The EMTs flung the doors open and swept Cathren out of the back of the ambulance. They raced the gurney though the corridors to the ER.
The intercom was blaring something about some code. At the next intersection, an association of medical types greeted them. Nurses, doctors, technicians, like birds of prey, they swooped in to attack the carrion-rich carcass, which, in this case, was Cathren’s seemingly lifeless body.
A nurse pulled up alongside Donovan like a motorcycle cop. “You the husband?”
“What? Not really. I mean, no.”
The nurse shrugged her shoulders and said, “This is far enough.” She stopped in front of Donovan, all blank stare, tanning-booth brown skin, and pasta flab. Donovan tried to push past her, tried to look over the woman’s spiked and shining gray-yellow hair to see the gurney, but it had blasted through a pair of swinging doors and disappeared.
“Crap! I don’t have time for this. She needs me,” Donovan said, looking the woman straight in the eyes. “Let me through or, I swear—”
“Well, no one’s goin’ in that operating room. ’Cept doctors, nurses, and anesthesia. And me,” she said. “Here. Fill these out.”
“Why?” Donovan said, struck by the inanity of it all.
“Because it’s clear that your wife is in no shape to do it herself.” She stuffed a clipboard of forms into Donovan’s hands.
“What the hell is all this?” Donovan said.
“Insurance forms. HIPPA. Personal information. Next of kin. The usual...”
“I don’t have any of that information.”
“Well, she does have insurance I hope, otherwise—”
“Yeah, yeah, of course. She works for a living.”
“Doing what?”
“She works for, well...”
“Yes?”
“For, um. Oh hell. She works ATELIC Industries.”
“All right, then. That wasn’t so bad, was it?’
Donovan stared at the woman. Either she’d never heard of ATELIC, or she was as stupid as she looked.
“Just fill in what you can,” she said. “Her odds aren’t good, anyway, from what I saw, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”
Donovan could feel his blood boil. “How do you know what her odds are? Are you a doctor?”
“I see this kind of thing all the time, honey. You get to know who’s got a fighting chance and who don’t. She don’t.”
“Well, you’re wrong,” Donovan said through gritted teeth. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She stared at him. “Sure, buddy,” she said, snapping out of her disapproving trance. She smirked, turned, and—making the talk-to-the-hand gesture—walked away.
Chapter 22
With the paperwork filled out as best he could and submitted, Donovan sat alone in the waiting room. Rudra had checked in and tried to console him. But he had to eventually move on, leaving Donovan by himself, waiting on news of Cathren.
Donovan squeezed his eyes shut and reopened them. He was groggy, anxious. What was happening? No one was telling him anything and he’d stopped trying to get answers.
He was left only with his own questions. He breathed deeply, trying to regain his composure. Unfortunately, he breathed in too deeply the scent of disinfectant, disease, and death. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and coughed repeatedly, nearly gagging. When the coughing fit was over, he leaned back and tried to rest.
I don’t really know her, not at all. And here I am her only “family.” Pathetic. I don’t know how to contact her real family, her parents, her—God!—next of kin. I don’t even know how I feel about her. Fuck me, I’m one selfish, self-centered fuck. I knew exactly how I felt about her two days ago. When she was hot—and now that she’s not….
Donovan sighed and looked around. The place was empty. Just him and, at about a mile and a half away at the other end of the room, the nurse/admin. She had started her shift about an hour ago. Donovan hung his head again and closed his eyes.
I don’t know anything about anything. I don’t even know my own feelings. I thought, for sure, this time, that Cathren was the one. Now, I don’t know what to think. It doesn’t matter, I guess. Not anymore.
Footsteps echoed down the hall, louder with each moment, until they thumped right up to Donovan and halted. He lifted his head and opened his eyes. Standing in front of him was a ghost, a wraith, the Angel of Death. Donovan blinked. Scratch that. It was a doctor. He was about thirty-five, black, and his splotchy green scrubs strained against his six-foot, two hundred pound frame. He wore glasses with blue metal frames, which he removed and tucked along the collar of his shirt.
“I’m Dr. David Samach, Head of Surgery.” He cleared his throat while extending his hand to Donovan. Donovan stood and shook his hand. “Mr. Whitney?” he continued.
“Codell. Donovan Codell. I’m just a friend.”
“Oh, my apologies.” He cleared his throat again. “You may want to sit.”
“I’m fine.”
“Right. Well. There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just come out with it. I’m afraid your friend, Cathren Whitney, did not make it.”
“Excuse me—say again?”
“Ms. Whitney has passed. I’m sorry. She’s dead.”
Donovan stood completely still, unable to process this information. He stared straight ahead while the doctor went on.
“We did everything we could, of course.” Dr. Samach stood there in silence with Donovan for a moment. Then he said, “Well...” He coughed, cleared his throat again, and walked away.
Donovan sat back down in his chair like he was being lowered into a grave. But he couldn’t sit still. Couldn’t even think about her being gone. When Donovan had collected himself, he got up and went in search of Cathren. Or at least her body.
Unable to find his way to the morgue, he found the nearest nurses’ station. And was unable to speak.
“Can I help you?” one of the nurses asked him, after a couple of moments of awkward silence. She had a nice smile and looked like someone’s pleasant mom in her SpongeBob Squarepants smock and red lipstick.
“Yes, um, I’m Cathren’s... I’m with Cathren Whitney?” Without meaning to, Donovan’s statement sounded more like a question.
“Just a sec,” the woman said, typing into her computer. “Hmmm...,” she said. “Did you say, ‘Whitney’?”
“Yes, Whitney. Cathren. C-A-T — “
“We have a Donald Whitney, heart attack.”
“No, no. It’s Cathren. Cathren Whitney.”
She looked away from Donovan and went back to her computer screen. She typed in some additional search parameters. “No, I don’t see anyone here with that name,” she said, turning the smile on again. She played with one of her earrings, waiting for Donovan to say something. When he didn’t, she said, “Are you sure it’s Saint Mary’s? Could she be in another hospital, perhaps California Pacific?”
“I’m sure, yes,” Donovan said softly, growing more tired and impatient.
“Okay. Hmmm. W-H-I-T-N-E-Y. Nothing but Donald again. Let me try W-H-I-T-T-N-E-Y. Still nothing. Oh, here she is. Cathren Witney. They left off the “h.” Let’s see… time of death 9:16:42 p.m. Complications follow
ing surgery. Interesting, though, they listed cause of death as ‘unknown.’”
Donovan just stared at the woman. He felt like either strangling her with his bare hands or falling against her bosom and crying like a baby.
He did neither.
He simply said, “May I see the body?” And then, in a whisper, “Please?” Donovan felt a hundred years old and like dying himself.
Chapter 23
So, Dr. Portanova, in your opinion, what was the cause of the eventual catastrophe?
Well, there were problems we, as a team, were ignoring. First of all, all of the electrical activity was wrong. It was like it was upside down. We didn’t realize it at the time, but the activity closely matched the brain activity found in serial killers.
So, in other words, while these frozen heads were coming alive, they were becoming serial killers? Is that what you were thinking?
Right. Of course, none of our findings, or even that the results of these experiments existed, was ever communicated to the authorities. Not to the local overseeing bodies, or national, or CDC.
Why? That makes no sense—the secrecy.
Why? Because Burkhart Egesa was truly thinking he was God now. As far as he was concerned, he didn’t answer to anyone.
Chapter 24
“Here we go,” the receptionist said, pushing open a large set of doors.
Donovan stepped into a slightly chilly, slightly dark room. Tile shrouded the floor, ceiling, and walls. Drains strategically dotted the floor. Two sets of hoses, one on the left wall and one straight ahead, hung like red rubber nooses. Donovan felt as if he’d fell into the deep end of an empty, abandoned city pool.
Only a single corpse, covered by a sheet, lay on a stainless steel table. Three other polished and empty tables lined the walls. The light over the body, a large round metal cone, was off. Only a single row of fluorescent tubes in the ceiling near the door illuminated the room. Donovan took a tentative step forward to the occupied table.
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