Her mind, strangely enough, concurred. For maybe the first time in her admittedly short memory something actually felt right. She had come to find the Source of the Epidemic. The energy that kept her from dying like she ought to. She was one hundred per cent sure that this ethereal light that radiated right through the trees was it, the Epicenter, the Source.
She got back to her feet and started walking. Climbing, in places, her hands clumsy but strong enough to grab at rocks and exposed tree roots. Her feet dug into the slippery ground, kicking through a rime of years-old snow, through the accumulation of fallen pine needles beneath and into frozen dirt under that. She hauled herself bodily up slopes, then ran, headlong, recklessly, down the other sides. She clambered over ridges of bare rock carved knife-thin by eons of wind. She crouched under endless tree branches and smacked her forehead on those she didn’t see and had bushel after bushel of freezing snow dumped down the back of her thin cotton shirt.
She should have been exhausted after the first quarter mile. Every step should have been harder, a brand new agony. But it wasn’t. If anything the mountaineering got easier. Her body felt better, stronger, healthier with every step she took. At one point she felt her neck spasm and shake and she thought maybe physical collapse had finally caught up with her but no. It was the bullet, the bullet the Indian soldier had fired at her on the prison’s rooftop. Underneath it the muscle fibers and nerves and blood vessels wriggled as they wove themselves back together. The inert leaden mass of the bullet popped out of her neck with an agonizing little sputter and fell to smack her hard on the bones of her wrist. She yanked her arm back in pain but even the pain disappeared after a second.
The light that came through the trees—it was better than heroin. It was better than sex with a loving partner. It was better than a drink of water after three days of wandering in the desert. She could even vouch personally for that last one.
It was nearly morning when she came out over a final lip of rock and saw the valley below her and the Source beneath it. Cold blue light the color of hallucinations lit up the sky over Bolton’s Valley, the place Captain Clark had shown her in a photograph. The place Jason Singletary had shown her with his mind.
She wasn’t the only dead person to have found the place. A crowd of them—maybe two hundred in all—stood below the ridge. Their battered and torn bodies looked relaxed there. Their ragged faces were turned upward to catch the light. It was tempting to join them. It was even more tempting to move closer, to go into that flaring beacon.
Nilla found herself elbowing through the crowd without really thinking about it. When one of the corpses coughed and cleared its dry throat she wasn’t even surprised.
“Lass. Please don’t go any farther.”
Nilla turned to face what had been a middle-aged woman. She had been plump, with chin-length hair pulled back in a simple black band. She had very little skin left on her face and no eyes in her skull. Nilla understood, looking at her, that she could still see the light of the Source.
It was Mael who spoke through the woman, of course. “Why?” Nilla demanded. “Are you worried that I’ll go up there and turn this thing off, like Clark wanted? I haven’t actually decided what I’ll do yet. I haven’t decided who I am. Good Nilla, bad Nilla. I kind of want to find out, though.” Nilla closed her eyes and felt rays of sparkling warmth shoot through her, healing her, feeding her. Oh, she wanted to find out so very much. “I’ve got more important things to do.”
“Indeed, lass? And what’s more important than the end of the world? Answer me that. Or don’t. I’ve little left to teach you, but there’s this: don’t go another step.”
“Christ, next you’re going to tell me your God doesn’t want me up there.”
The woman shook her head. “Teuagh is no god. He is my father. He is the father of us all. When I was alive children did what their fathers told them, without question. I used to think I was like a father to you.”
“Really? Because I thought we had more of a love-hate romance thing going. Wow, now that I think about it that’s kind of creepy. Well, listen, you can’t stop me. If I want to go up there I will.”
“You don’t ken it yet, Nilla. I’m not trying to stop you because I’m afraid of what you’ll do. I’m simply afraid you’re going to hurt yourself. There’s so few of us now. You, some fellow in New York who figured it out on his own. A lad in Russia who doesn’t even know where he is. I’m just trying to protect a very scarce resource, that’s all.”
Nilla opened her mouth to rebuke him but then she saw charred corpses in the broken field ahead of her. She took a step closer and felt the warmth of the Source grow hot. Another step and it was painful. “Oh,” she said. She understood immediately. The same energy that fed her could burn her to a crisp if she got too close. Yet moving forward meant getting closer.
But then she just had it, as if her body knew what to do even if her mind was oblivious. She banked her energy—subtracted her darkness—made herself invisible. The one thing she could do that nobody else could manage. The one thing that set her apart. Instantly the warmth was gone. She stepped forward, and again, until she was even with the burnt and disfigured bodies sprawled across the rocks.
Nothing happened.
Singletary had been right. She was the only one who could go to the Source, out of all the dead. She started to climb.
It was a far easier ascent than what had come before, though every step knocked loose showers of pebbles and dirt, eroded bits of hillside that went skittering down, pattering, pittering away from her. The handholds were stable, if the footing wasn’t. In a few minutes she had reached the top of a ridge. A green-painted stegosaurus stood watch there, sculpted out of concrete. Just as Singletary had shown her.
Dinosaurs. Statues of dinosaurs. A tyrannosaur loomed over the site, while human-sized velociraptors leered out from around corners. In the middle of it all stood a dilapidated building with a sign posted next to its door.
DINOSAUR EXPERIENCE
-HALL OF FOSSILS-
PROPRIETOR DR. N. VRONSKI
OPENING OCTOBER 2006
The door opened and a man stepped out. A living man. He was mostly bald, with tiny, intense blue eyes. Nilla walked over to him and took the hand he extended. He had no trouble seeing her, even though she was invisible. She must be invisible—if she let her energy show, even for a moment, she would have been incinerated. But he could see her, just as Jason Singletary could.
She understood, then. The vision Singletary had shared with her hadn’t just come full-formed out of the ether. It had been a communication, live and in real time, between this new man and the psychic. He had called out for her. He had summoned her.
“I never truly imagined you would actually come,” he said, because he could read her mind. He didn’t seem as sensitive to her thoughts as Singletary had been. “Please. We should go inside.” He lead her into a dark building full of glass display cases. Some of them were empty and collecting dust. Others held dark fossils half-buried in matrices of brown or red stone. Educational plaques hung on the walls.
“Are you Dr. Vronski?” Nilla asked.
“I was,” he told her. “I mean… I was a paleontologist, before all this, well, you know, started. I’m the one, by the way. I’m the moron who killed off the human race.”
Nilla didn’t know how to reply to that. “You’re psychic,” she said.
“Not originally. I had to become certain things—I had to make certain changes to myself, to complete my work. Come on, please, this way.” He frowned. His eyes fixed on her and moved slowly from left to write as if he were reading something written on her face. “It’s funny. I can’t seem to figure out what you want here.”
That made two of them.
“But you’re going to kill me, right? Kill me and eat me? It’s far less than what I deserve. Here.” He lead her to the top of a stairwell. “Maybe you’d like to see it first, though. The, um, the eruption. Or maybe… something to eat.”
Nil
la looked down the stairs. There was someone else down there—or maybe two people, standing very close together. They moved into the light and her mouth fell open in true horror.
“This is my wife, Charlotte.” He looked at her eyes and whispered, “please don’t say anything about her appearance. She’s very sensitive.”
Unexpected side effects, all over the news I… I did this? I can’t believe it spread so far… I did this? I did it for her, only for her… forgive me… [Lab Notes, 4/2/05]
“I’m sorry that it’s dead. I know you would prefer it alive.”
Vronski put down a plate in front of Nilla. A dead rat lay on its side there, one glazed eye pointed in her direction. She ate it without thinking too much about it. She was too busy trying not to look at Charlotte.
The paleontologist had prepared a Lean Cuisine for himself. Apparently Charlotte didn’t eat anymore. Instead he had placed a vase full of cut flowers where her plate should go. As Nilla tried not to watch Charlotte slowly and methodically tore the petals off the flowers and crumpled them between her fingers.
Charlotte was still alive. Vronski had assured Nilla of that fact. It was hard to believe him. Boils and eruptions covered the skin of her one remaining arm which emerged from under a pendulous roll of ill-defined flesh. When she moved Nilla could almost make out the shape of a human woman in the mass.
The paleontologist’s wife had been a lawyer, once, he had told her. Now she was an abomination. Pancreatic cancer had blossomed inside of her, spreading to every part of her body. It should have killed her. Vronski had kept her alive at the cost of apocalypse, but he couldn’t make her healthy again. The Source had been created to keep her going, to give her body the strength to fight off the tumor. Unfortunately it didn’t discriminate. It made the tumor unnaturally healthy as well. The two of them lived on, in their way, even as the world died.
The cancer outweighed what was left of Charlotte, probably by a factor of three to one. Its abstract tissue draped over her back and down her sides. It dragged on the floor behind her. It obscured her breasts and hips and it completely hid her face. It mostly looked like fat tissue covered in thin, translucent skin but in places it had tried to form itself into pieces of a human being. A row of forty or fifty perfectly-formed teeth emerged from the smooth expanse where Charlotte’s shoulder must be. Patches of hair had broken out here and there on her back and there were fingernails growing in places that weren’t fingers. A single closed eyelid could be seen on her stomach. It never opened but sometimes it twitched as if there was an eye underneath trapped in the endless swimming motion of REM sleep.
A thick bundle of black cables drooped from under the roll of flesh and snaked its way out of the room. It connected Charlotte’s nervous system directly to the Source. Without those cables, Vronski explained, she would die instantly. The energy had to be introduced directly to her various bodily systems. The tumor seemed to draw its energy right from the very air around them.
“I kept her alive,” he said, over and over. “She didn’t die.” She was the culmination of his life’s work.
He had tried his best to give her back a face. To this end he had bought a porcelain domino mask—the kind found in little girl’s bedrooms around the country—and tied it around where her head should be with a length of pink ribbon. From time to time it would begin to slip down and Vronski would patiently get up and readjust it.
He had not bothered to put any clothes on her, though Nilla imagined it would take a tent’s worth of cloth to cover her swollen bulk.
“Is she even aware of us?” Nilla asked, dragging her gaze away from Charlotte to look at the thing’s husband. “Can she smell us or something?”
“Please don’t start,” he hissed.
After dinner he agreed to take Nilla down to look at the Source. On the way she passed quite close by Charlotte. She noticed the mask had been broken at some point and very carefully glued back together.
Vronski lead her down two flights of stairs into a room at the very bottom of the museum. It had been used once as a workshop and laboratory and it was still full of crates full of carefully-packed fossils. Vronski offered to show her his best specimens—he claimed to have a nearly intact archaeopteryx—but Nilla was far more interested in the room’s other contents. Namely, the Source.
Various items surrounded it. What looked like tikis carved out of wood and shrunken heads mounted on sticks formed a circle around it, while boxy scientific apparatus blinked and buzzed and hummed in the corners of the room. A complicated looking device collected the energy of the Source and sent it through the black cables to where Charlotte waited upstairs. Vronski tried to describe how that worked but Nilla didn’t care at all. The Source demanded all of her attention.
It was difficult to say how large it might be—it radiated life energy so strongly that when Nilla closed her eyes it looked like a blazing star. She could feel its power, quite literally—it pushed at her. It blew her hair back. It was beautiful, far more beautiful than a dead thing like herself deserved. Probably it was more beautiful than anything on Earth deserved. It was constantly in motion, its shifting, shimmering rays twisting through the air as if they were threads of gossamer billowing in a pleasant breeze.
It was the beginning, the start of all things. You could feel as much, if you reached out a hand toward it. It made you. It shaped you. From a center that was also an edge it reached out to every cell, to every twisted coil of protein. It spoke the language of chemicals binding together and combining, recombining, a language that was more sung than spoken, and more imagined than sung. It knew your thoughts. It gave you your thoughts and your feelings.
“I’m sorry,” Vronski said.
She looked up at him. “For what?” she asked.
“It’s just—you’ve been standing there for fifteen minutes now and I’d kind of like to get on with things. If you don’t mind. You can go back to looking at it after you’ve killed me.”
Fifteen minutes? There had been no time when she was gazing on the Source.
“I’m still considering what I should do,” Nilla said. And she was. She had choices, or at least a choice, for the first time since… well, the first time she could remember. She could kill the man who had started the Epidemic. In the process she would insure that nobody else could ever take the Source away from her—that her unlife would go on forever. Mael would like that. Alternatively, she could do what Captain Clark had wanted. She could shut this thing down. That would end her own existence, certainly. It would end all the death and pain and horror too.
She thought of the creature upstairs that Vronski called his wife. Vronski had started the Epidemic in order to prolong her life, long past the point where anyone would think she would want to keep it. Nilla’s choice was sort of the same. Prolong her own, largely miserable, existence, or choose death. Actual death.
She stalled. “What is this?” She asked. “How did you make it?”
“It’s a field, a kind of biological field. It’s similar to the Earth’s magnetic field. Life couldn’t exist without it. I didn’t make it. It was always there, I just let the Genie out of the bottle.”
She glared at him. “You can give me the grown-up version,” she said.
He nodded apologetically. “It’s sort of like the Earth’s magnetic field, except this is a biological field. The energy, the life force, is everywhere, all the time. It’s in every cell of every living thing. What you think of as the golden energy.”
He was reading her mind again. It didn’t bother as much as when Singletary had done it. “Go on,” she said.
“That energy is what makes cells divide. It’s what makes organisms want to reproduce. It makes DNA strands spiral around each other and it carries some of the pattern of living things. It’s the force that drives evolution. Without it living things would just die. Scientists have been trying to find that energy for centuries with no success. It’s too subtle. You need other methods to see it—methods scientists, including
myself, generally frown upon. Once you know it’s there, however, you can feel it all the time. You can touch it—and you can mold it. I liberated some of the energy from that system, to keep Charlotte’s body from failing. Unfortunately I liberated too much. You, and the others like you, are the result. The excess energy can’t just dissipate into space. It has to go somewhere. It looks for things it can animate, things with nervous systems it can flow through. Dead things.”
“I can’t believe this. You fucked with the life force? Talk about playing God. What are you, some kind of mad scientist?”
Vronski shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t think ‘scientist’ is the right word for what I’ve become. You have to understand, though. I kept her alive. She’s still alive.” He raised his hands and lowered them again. “I would have killed myself a while back. I know what I did, and how wrong I was. But then who would look after Charlotte? She’s always bumping into things and cutting herself by accident and she needs someone to tend to her little boo-boos. One time she fell down an entire flight of stairs. Back when she still had a mouth she almost ate some drain cleaner because she couldn’t see what she was doing. I love her, you see. I love her so very, very much. I can’t stand the idea of her going away.”
He looked less human in that moment than his wife. He looked like a part of a person, an idea that never got thought over. A fragment of intention with nothing to back it up. He was a mad scientist alright, but not in the traditional sense. He wasn’t some latter-day Prometheus plumbing the very depths of the secret cosmos. He was a scientist who was also mentally ill. That was all.
“Okay, enough.” Nilla had made her decision. “I understand. But it doesn’t matter—this can’t go on. You and I are going to shut this thing down. I don’t care how difficult that is or what it will do to her. Just show me how.”
He looked up with a strange expression on his face. Incomprehension, coming from a man used to understanding things intuitively. “Shut it down?”
Three Zombie Novels Page 56