by Tanya Huff
Celluci flinched. “At the university? Why at the university?”
“You said it yourself, science. It’s hardly going to be someone at the fucking grocery store.” She knuckled her glasses again, then bent forward and swept her notes off the coffee table, the force of the blow scattering them as far as the apartment door. Her voice, in contrast, had gained rigid control. “This changes everything. We can find her now.”
Reluctantly, Celluci released her hand; she’d accepted all the comfort she was going to. He watched in silence as she pulled a blank sheet of paper toward her, wanting to shake her but not entirely certain why.
“All right. We know the body is still in the city, so we know where to look for the lowlife, sons of bitches who’ve done this to her.” The pencil point snapped off against the paper, and she fought against the urge to drive it right through the table. “She’s in the city. They’re in the city.”
“Vicki.” Henry crossed the room to kneel by her side. “Are you sure you should be doing this now?” When she raised her head to look at him, the hair on his arms lifted with the tension in the air.
“What am I supposed to do? Go to sleep?”
He could hear her heart pounding, hear the effects of the adrenaline pumping through her system. “No . . .”
“I need to do this, Henry. I need to put things together. Build some sort of a structure out of this. I need to do it now.” The alternative was implicit in her tone. Or it will eat away at me until there’s nothing of me left.
The hand that settled on his, just for an instant, was so hot it nearly burned. Because he could do nothing else, Henry nodded and moved to the rocker by the door, from which he could watch her face. For the moment, he would let her deal with her horror and her anger in her own way.
He found it interesting that Celluci looked no happier about it than he felt. We want to ride to her rescue and instead we find ourselves allowed to help. Not exactly a comfortable position for a knight errant to be in. But then, Vicki wasn’t exactly a comfortable woman to love.
“All right, shifting the emphasis from finding my mother’s body to finding the people who did this to her, what are we looking for?” With a new pencil, she etched “What?” across the top piece of paper. “Someone who can raise the dead. Discounting the Second Coming, as I doubt it was as simple as pick up your bed and walk, we turn to science.” She wrote “A scientist” under the heading, then shuffled out a fresh page and wrote “Where?”
Celluci leaned forward, old patterns winning out over his concern. “All signs point to the university. One, it’s where you find scientists. Two, who can afford a private lab these days, especially containing the equipment they’d have needed to . . .”
“Three,” Vicki interrupted. The last thing she wanted to deal with right now were the details of what had actually been done.
“Not the last thing, ” said a little voice in the back of her head.
“Three,” she said again, slamming it over the certain knowledge that somehow, if she’d just answered the phone, all of this could have been prevented. “We’ve already determined it had to be someone who knew she was going to die. She worked at the university. Her friends were at the university. She had tests done at the university. Four, the campus is less than ten blocks south on Division Street. We’re close.” Her laugh held more hysteria than humor. “Even a dead woman could walk it.”
“And five,” Henry added softly, while Vicki fought to bridle her reactions again and Celluci’s arm hovered helpless behind her back, certain that she’d refuse sympathy, unable not to offer it. “There is another, and it was on the campus tonight.”
Vicki’s chin came up, Henry’s reminder that it wasn’t strictly personal helping her to regain a little distance. Celluci’s arm dropped back to his side. She wrote down his words verbatim, took another sheet, wrote “Why?” and had to fight for distance again. “At least we know what they wanted the body for. But why my mother? What was so special about her?”
“They knew she was going to die.” Celluci couldn’t find a way to finish the thought that wouldn’t rub salt in emotions already raw and bleeding, so he drew in a fortifying breath and said instead, “Vicki, why don’t you let me deal with this?”
“While I do what? Pour ashes on my head? Fuck you, Celluci. They knew she was going to die and they needed a fresh body. There. It’s been said. Now let’s go on.”
His own nerves rubbed raw, Celluci shot a glance across the room at someone who might understand. I didn’t want to hurt her!
I know. Henry’s gaze flicked to Celluci’s left and back, adding as clearly as if he’d spoken aloud, And she knows.
“There wasn’t an autopsy done.” Vicki’s pencil began to move again. “I expect that if you’re going to get the body up and around, that’s important. With a diagnosis of death in six months from heart failure, there’d be no need to do an autopsy when my mother had her heart attack. I wonder.” She looked up and frowned. “Did they wait around for this other guy to die as well? We can check personnel, find out who else died recently, see if there’s a connection to my mother, and trace it back.”
With one hand she fanned the three sheets of paper. The other bounced the eraser end of the pencil on the tabletop. “Okay. That’s what, where, why . . .” The pencil stilled. “I don’t think we need to worry about how.”
A body stretched out on a slab, its grotesque shadow thrown upon a rough, rock wall. In the background, strange equipment. In the corners, darkness, broken by the faint gray tracery of a spider’s web. Up above, a Gothic dome open to the night. Thunder cracks and lightning arcs down from the heavens. And Death is pushed aside.
“Vicki?”
“What!” She whirled on Celluci, eyes wide.
“Nothing.” Now that he had her attention, he wasn’t sure what to do with it. “You just looked a little . . .” haunted. He closed his teeth on the last word.
“Tired.” Henry stepped smoothly into the pause. “Don’t you think you should get some sleep?”
“No. We’re not done. I’m not going to sleep until we’re done.” She knew she sounded a bit frantic, but she’d gone past the point where she cared. “So, what do we have for who. A scientist, or a group of scientists, at the university, who knew my mother was going to die, who has the knowledge to raise the dead and the arrogance to use that knowledge.”
“Most criminals are arrogant.” Celluci sagged back against the sofa cushions. “It’s what makes them criminals. They think society’s laws don’t apply to them.”
Vicki shoved at her glasses. “Very profound, Detective, but this is hardly like ripping off a corner store for beer money. We need a motive.”
“If you had the ability to raise the dead, wouldn’t that be motive enough?” Henry asked, his eyes suddenly very dark. “They’re doing this because they can do it. They probably don’t even see it as a crime—this godlike ability puts them above such petty concerns.”
“Well,” Celluci snorted, “you should know.”
“Yes.”
The single syllable lifted the hair on the back of Celluci’s neck and he realized, belatedly, that no one understood the abuse of power quite so well as those who shared the potential.
Vicki ignored them both, shuffling her notes into a tidy pile, her movements jerky. “So we’re looking at the university for an arrogant scientist with a medical background who knew my mother was about to die. That’ll be like finding the needle in the proverbial haystack.”
Celluci fought his attention free of Henry Fitzroy and back to the matter at hand. “What about your mother’s boss?”
“Dr. Burke? I don’t think so. My mother said she was the most gifted administrator she’d ever worked for, and that doesn’t leave a lot of time to put into raising the dead.”
“So? If she signed the death certificate she must be a medical doctor, whatever else she is. She knew your mother was going to die and, as department head, she’s sure as shit in a position to a
cquire equipment for a secret lab.” He shoved both hands up through his hair and tried to force his tired brain to function for just a while longer. “She’s a place to start.”
“I have an appointment to see her in the morning. I’ll see what I can find out.” Her tone made it clear she didn’t expect to discover much.
“We’ll see what we can find out.”
“No, Mike.” She shook her head, and wished she hadn’t as the room spun. “I want you to tie up a few loose ends with Mr. Chen.”
“Vicki, Tom Chen is a dead end.”
She swiveled around to face him, bracing herself against the back of the couch. “He still may be the only end we’ve got. I don’t need you with me, Mike.”
“You shouldn’t be doing this alone.”
“I’m not. Unless you want to go home.”
He looked across the room at Henry. Who was no help. “Of course I’m not going home,” he snarled. Surrender might be his only option, but nothing said he had to do it graciously. “So what do we do now?”
To his surprise, it was Henry who answered. “We sleep. I have no choice. It’s very nearly dawn. I can feel the sun. You, Detective, have been up all night. And, Vicki, I can smell the drugs in your system—you need to sleep to clear the clouding from your mind.”
“No I . . .”
Henry cut her off with the lifting of an imperious brow. “A few hours will make no difference to your mother and a great deal to you.” Crossing the room, he extended a hand. “I can make you forget for a time, if you like.”
“I don’t want to forget, thank you.” But she took his hand and pulled herself to her feet, a piece of broken china shattering further under the sole of her shoe. His fingers were as cool as Celluci’s had been warm. An anchor of a different sort. “And, in spite of what both of you think, I’m fully aware that self-abuse will contribute nothing at all toward finding the shit eaters who did this. I will sleep. I will eat. And then . . .” Anger and exhaustion, equally applied, destroyed the rest of the thought before she had it barely formed. She gripped Henry’s arm and stared intently into his face. “I won’t be able to wait for you. Sunset’s just too damned far away.”
He touched her cheek with his free hand and repeated, “Too damned far away. I couldn’t have said it better, myself. But be careful while I’m not with you.” His gaze lifted over her shoulder to meet Celluci’s. “Both of you be careful.”
Donald secured the slide, stared down at the spread of purple stain for a moment, sighed, and turned. “Cathy, I don’t like what we’re getting into here.”
“Trouble with number eight?” Catherine glanced up from her dissection, brow furrowed, hands buried under one of number eight’s decomposing organs.
“Number eight’s past the point where it can give us any trouble,” Donald snorted. “I’m more concerned with the dynamic duo over there.”
Puzzled, Catherine peered over her mask at the two working isolation boxes. “I’m sure all the damage they took last night was superficial. You stitched number nine’s lacerations closed. We both checked for mechanical overload. I adjusted their nutrient levels to compensate for the strain on the bacterial restructuring . . .”
“That’s not what I meant.” He ripped the paper off a candy, balled it up, and threw it in the general direction of a waste basket. “Don’t you think those two have gone just a tad outside the parameters of the experiment?”
“Of course not.” Catherine set a kidney down on a sterilized tray. “We’re going to need tissue samples from the others for comparison.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’ll break out the biopsy needle in a minute, but first we’re going to have a chat about last night’s little walkabout. It had nothing to do with Organ Regeneration through Tailored Bacteria or even Reanimation of the Human Body by Tailored Bacteria and Servomotors.”
“What are you talking about? If last night wasn’t animation I don’t know what is; you want them any more animated, you’ll have to call in Disney.”
“Was that a joke?” Donald demanded. “Because if it was, it wasn’t very funny. She,” he pointed at Marjory Nelson’s box, “wasn’t supposed to go home and he . . . well, he wasn’t supposed to go anywhere.”
Catherine shrugged, her hands once again buried to the wrist. “Obviously, feeding her own brain wave patterns through the neural net stimulated buried memories. Considering that when she was alive she walked home from the Life Sciences building every night for years, it was only logical that she follow that programming. We should’ve anticipated it happening and taken precautions.” Her voice dropped into a fair approximation of Dr. Burke’s lecturing cadence. “The more impulses are sent along a given memory trace, the easier it becomes for later impulses to follow the same circuit. And considering the pains we’ve taken to teach number nine to follow us, I should think you’d be pleased that he followed her. After all, you’re the one who said he wasn’t learning anything.”
“Yeah, well, I’m also the one who says he doesn’t like this.” He bit down hard on the candy in his mouth and it crunched between his teeth. “I mean, suppose we’re not just re-creating physical responses.”
Catherine laid the second kidney beside the first. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about souls, Cathy!” His tone grew a little shrill. “What if, because of what we’ve done, Marjory Nelson has come back to her body?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We’re not bringing back an old life, we’re creating new ones, like—putting new wine in old skins.”
“You’re not supposed to do that,” Donald pointed out acerbically. “The old wine taints the new.” He swiveled around on his stool and bent over the microscope. He could see there was no point in discussing this; souls had no place in Cathy’s world. And maybe she was right. She was the certified genius, after all, and it was her experiment. He was just in it for curiosity’s sake—and for the final payoff, of course.
Still, he mused, the edge of his lower lip caught between his teeth, uncomfortably conscious of the questions that lay in the isolation boxes behind him, I’d be happier if I knew we were remaking Frankenstein instead of Night of the Living Dead. A moment’s reflection reminded him that Frankenstein had not exactly had a happy ending. Or a happy middle, for that matter.
He could hear voices. Her voice and his voice. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he could hear the tone.
They were arguing.
He remember arguing. How it ended in hitting. And pain.
He often argued with her.
Number nine didn’t. . .
. . . didn’t . . .
. . . didn’t like that.
“Good morning, Dr. Burke. The coffee’s ready.”
“Good.” Dr. Burke dropped her briefcase at the door to the inner office and circled back to the coffeepot. “You are a lifesaver, Mrs. Shaw.”
“It’s probably not as good as when Marjory made it,” Mrs. Shaw sighed. “She always had such a way with coffee.”
Her back to the room, Dr. Burke rolled her eyes and wondered how long the melodrama of office grieving would continue. Two days of every report, every memo, every little thing delivered with a eulogy was about as much as she could take. She lifted her mug off its hook and dropped three heaping spoonfuls of sugar into the bottom of it. If the university would just come through with the promised temporary—or better still, a permanent replacement for Marjory Nelson’s position—she’d tell Mrs. Shaw to take a few days off. Unfortunately, Dr. Burke topped up her mug and glared down into the dark liquid, the wheels of academia grind geologically slow.
Behind her, Mrs. Shaw turned on the radio. The Village People were just finishing up the last bars of “YMCA.”
Dr. Burke turned and transferred her glare to the radio. “If they’re doing another ’70s retrospective, we’re changing stations. I lived through disco once, I shouldn’t have to do it again.”
“This is CKVS FM, it’s nine o‘clock, and
now the news. Police still have no leads in the vicious murder last night of a QECVI student on the Queen’s University campus. The only witness to the crime is under observation at Kingston General Hospital and has not yet been able to give police an accurate description of the murderer. While the young woman was not physically hurt in the incident, doctors say she is suffering from shock. Both police and medical personnel report that until she was sedated she continued to scream, ‘He looked dead. The guy looked dead.’ Anyone with information concerning this tragic incident is asked to contact Detective Fergusson at Police Headquarters.
“Elsewhere in the city . . .”
“Isn’t it awful.” Mrs. Shaw dabbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. “That poor young man, cut down in his prime.”
The guy looked dead. Dr. Burke’s fingers tightened around the handle of her mug. The girl obviously has an overactive imagination. This has nothing to do with . . .
“The other stations had a much more complete report. She said that he lurched when he walked, that his skin was gray and cold, and that his expression never changed even while he was strangling her boyfriend. Terrifying. Just terrifying.”
It was impossible. “Did she say what he was wearing .”
“Some kind of athletic clothing. A tracksuit I think. Dr. Burke? Where are you going?”