by Gary Braver
Nothing. Nobody was there. A couple of sets of headlights came down the road, and he lowered the gun so he wouldn’t draw attention.
The cars passed and he stood there in the silent black, a flash in one hand, the pistol in the other. The only sound was that of the crickets. He sprayed the trees again with light. Nothing.
Your imagination, he told himself. He was tired and edgy from a long day, sore and pissed from having to crawl in the dirt to fix a muffler pipe.
But he hadn’t imagined the car being lowered on him.
He inspected the jack. It was still in place, but the tire iron was gone. He had used it to crank up the car and thought he had left it on the ground by the jack. But it wasn’t there. Maybe he’d brought it with him when he slid under the car. He dropped to one knee and shone the flash under the car. No tire iron.
As he pulled himself up, he heard that whispery voice again. “Mitchell.”
By reflex, he shot in that direction. The explosion filled the night air, and in the flash of the gun, he saw a hooded figure like the Grim Reaper.
“Wh-who are you?”
“Go to hell, asshole.”
In a flicker of light, a blackened figure stood with the raised tire iron in hand. Before Mitch could scream, it crashed down on his head.
59
“Okay, time to wake up.”
“That’s it. Open your eyes.”
“Can you tell me your name?”
Disembodied voices through the fog.
He could not answer. He cracked open his eyes against the bright ceiling lights. He rolled his head, taking in stacks of electronic equipment, computer monitors, the desks, shelves of books. Faces of the lab scientists and technicians. But across his mind flashed images of a black metal tire iron smashing the head of some faceless guy in the shadows.
In disconnected image bursts, he saw the curved bend of steel whack the man on the crown, then again on the back of the neck, then the man crumpling to the ground like a broken marionette.
Someone said something to him, and he stooped over the man’s body and smashed him again on the shoulder and his rib cage until he no longer moved.
“Zack, are you all right?”
He didn’t answer but kicked the man so that he rolled over, one knee raised to his chest, the other leg broken at a weird angle on the ground.
“Would you like to sit up?”
He shook his head and stomped on the guy’s chest … again and again until he felt the rib bones crack into his lungs and blood spurted from his mouth and nose.
“I think you’re still a little foggy from the drug.”
He touched his left side where the bullet had entered. It was still tender in the area of his liver. But remarkably, there was no blood.
“Does your side hurt?”
He did not respond, but the gunshot rang in his head.
Somebody handed him a bottle of water. The pretty woman with the short auburn hair. He drank from the bottle and looked around the room stupidly at all the equipment and the four people glaring at him.
Another woman asked him his name. He couldn’t remember. He was too intent on getting away.
Once again he heard the older woman say, “Do you remember your name?”
And he heard himself whisper, “I don’t know.”
“Your name is Zachary Kashian. Remember?”
Zack. Zachary Kashian.
For maybe a full minute in real time, he stared at nothing. His head was clearing of the attack. He drank more water, hoping to flush away recall.
Then the moment came back to him.
Yes, Zack Kashian.
The brightly lit room—the people, computers, beeping monitors, IV drips, oxygen tanks, cabinets, defibrillators, medical cabinets, shelves. He looked at them, the fading images leaving him spent and trembling.
“You were in suspension, remember?” Sarah said. Sarah Wyman.
He nodded.
They had put him under again. They had flatlined him and sent him someplace awful that left his mind full of venom and his side aching.
“Want to go home.” His voice was a jagged whisper.
“Of course, but we’d like to ask you a few questions first.” The older woman. Dr. Luria.
Call me Elizabeth. The one with the dead kid she wanted him to find. Questions. She always stoned him with friggin’ questions.
“Only because the experience may still be fresh in your mind.”
Sarah brought him a bolster, and he lay back on it. He felt too spent to protest.
Dr. Luria pulled a chair beside the gurney while Dr. Cates turned on the video camera.
“Zack, do you remember anything from being under? Anything at all? Where you were? What you were doing? Who was with you?”
“No.”
“Do you remember where you were? Any sense of place?”
“No.”
“Or what you may have been doing?”
Go to hell, asshole. He could still feel the rasp of those words.
He shook his head. He could see from the expression on Dr. Luria’s face that she was not happy with his responses.
“Take your time and think. I know you’re still a bit foggy. But relax and search your memory.”
He closed his eyes as if he were rummaging through his memory banks. That was the last thing he wanted—to be back on that night road. All he wanted was for this to be over so he could leave and never come back. They were screwing up his brain.
Sarah could see him struggling and suggested that he go to the restroom to change and freshen up. She helped him off the gurney, and he headed for the toilet with his clothes.
When he returned he felt better, his mind less raw. He decided to play dumb so they’d let him go. But Luria and Morris Stern were waiting for him, like twin vultures on a tree branch. Sarah handed him a mug of coffee.
Luria sat at her desk and Stern next to her by the computer monitor. The others were standing on the sidelines. Zack took a seat to face them.
“Feel better?” Luria asked.
He just grunted.
She nodded, then kicked into interrogation mode. “Zack, let me go back and start again. Do you recall any sense of the locale?”
“No.” Something flitted across her face, as if she knew he was lying.
“Were you outside? On a beach? In a room? Woodlands? Just some sense of the setting?”
He shook his head and felt a twinge on his left side.
“Okay. Any sense of the presence of other people?”
“No.” He could hear the hollowness of his own response.
“Don’t rush your answers. Think, try to relax and recall the experience.”
He looked at Sarah, whose eyes were large and glaring at him. The same with the others. The room seemed to be holding its breath. He nodded at the computers. “What does it show?”
Stern and Cates looked to Luria to take the question. “It shows heightened sensory stimulation coming from the outside.”
“Like the last time,” Stern added. “The activity in the limbic area was wild.”
“I don’t remember.”
Luria’s eyebrow shot up like a polygraph needle. “You don’t remember. Well, frankly, I find that hard to believe. Your blood chemistry was teeming with cortisol and epinephrine. Your brain was in fight-or-flight response. How can you not remember anything?”
His heart was pounding so hard that his diaphragm throbbed visibly. This was like a psychic striptease. They knew he was lying.
“I’ll ask you again,” Luria said, her eyes black and intense. “Do you recall anything from suspension? Any sense of activity, of emotions—fear, anger? Of another’s presence?”
The pain in his side kept flaring at him. Again he checked it.
“Are you okay?” Sarah asked.
He nodded. The skin wasn’t broken, no bruises. But it felt as if the bullet were lodged inside.
Before Luria could launch into him again, Morris Stern cleared his th
roat. “Zack, a couple of weeks ago we explained how the machine can detect individual neuroelectrical signatures. Remember? Well, your brain contains one hundred billion neurons, so it’s like listening to conversations of every person on the planet fifteen times over. From all that chatter, complex algorithms help us eliminate those common to all other people from your own discrete signature. Okay?”
Zack made no response, but Stern went on as if he had.
He turned the computer monitor so Zack could see multicolored scintillations and patterns. “This may mean nothing to you, but that’s the axonal electrical activity in a region of your parietal lobe. Just before we woke you, we recorded a sudden change in patterns. We need to analyze more of the data, but preliminary results indicate an anomaly.”
The patterns flickered and changed color and meant nothing to Zack.
“These splotches flashing across your hippocampus indicate that the visual cortex and sensory centers were being flooded with data from the outside. In short, you were not manufacturing a near-death experience, you had one.”
“You said that the last time.”
“Not me, because I wasn’t convinced, but now I am. Your mind left your brain and took in an experience of its own. There’s more data to analyze, but we’ve got enough for confirmation.”
“Confirmation of what?”
Stern pushed up the glasses on his nose and looked directly at him. “That you merged with another mind.”
“What?”
“Like the last time. We finished those analyses, and found a signature that’s not yours—that belongs to another entity. Frankly, this is phenomenal.”
“In addition to that,” said Elizabeth, “your blood analysis shows spikes in adrenaline commensurate with the intense activity in the rage center of your brain. What you experienced was violence—like the last two times.”
A rat uncurled in Zack’s gut. I’m not buying this, he told himself. It was just a bad trip, a 3-D nightmare. The tetrodotoxin crap caused hallucinations. It was like what Stern said the other day—his brain put together scraps of memory, some wish fulfillment things from the day, and produced another killer flick inside his head. “If anything comes back to me, I’ll let you know.”
“You’re lying,” Luria said. “You are bloody lying. I can see it in your face. Tell me the truth, goddamn it. What did you experience?”
The others froze in place, but he could see Sarah wince in anticipation.
“I killed a man.”
“What?”
“I killed a man. I beat him to death with a tire iron while he was fixing his car.”
Sarah looked horrified. Luria’s face was a blank of itself. “You killed a man?”
“He was under his car fixing something. I waited until he crawled out, then smashed in his skull. And the last time I strangled a guy lifting weights. And before that I ran a woman down with a car.” He got up to leave.
“Wait, please,” Luria pleaded. “Do you know these people or why you attacked them?”
“No. And I don’t want to. You’ve fucked up my head something wicked.”
“Please don’t go just yet,” she begged.
“Lady, I may have permanent brain damage. You got that? I’m fucking out of here.”
“Fine, fine,” Morris Stern said. “You’ve been through enough.”
Sarah agreed. Dr. Luria glanced at the others. “Okay.” She took Zack’s arm. He could feel trembling but couldn’t determine if it was him or her. “Why didn’t you tell us before?”
He pulled his arm free but didn’t answer her.
“I’m very sorry. We can give you something to help you sleep peacefully. I promise. But you have made an extraordinary breakthrough. You—”
He headed for the door. Sarah caught up to him. “Sorry, Zack.”
He pulled out his wallet and laid Luria’s $10,000 check on her desk, then passed through the door.
Luria ran to him, begging him to take it. “Please, Zack. Take a week off to rest. But please let us continue. Please. We’re almost there.”
He didn’t know what she meant and didn’t care. “Leave me alone.”
“But you made contact with another sentience.”
“I made contact with hell and I’m not going back.”
60
Roman played the Warren Gladstone video for the third time.
The guy had a big cartoon happy face, and he was making claims about the Day of Jubilation as if it were the second coming itself. He carried on about a whole new way of life for the world—a way of life that would unite people of all faiths and of no faith; a day when there would be no more fear of death. No more fear of hellfires.
A day of rejoicing. A day that will live forever and ever, world without end.
The guy sounded pretty convincing—so much so that Roman felt a little tickle of inspiration.
But there were dissenters—bloggers railing against him for going “soft on sin” and reducing the gospel to a lot of left-wing self-help bullshit.
Making God an extension of New Age desires trivializes His divine sovereignty and fails to explain the place of good and evil in His divine plan. He teaches people to believe that with God you can do anything you want. God helped them win the lottery, get a job, afford a new car. But that trivializes God to handouts.
What snagged Roman’s attention was what one commentator said about near-death experiences:
Some claim they’ve encountered a being of light that was Jesus. Appealing as that may sound, this is a false Jesus who teaches that death is good; that sin is not a problem. That there’s no hell to worry about since all people go to heaven, regardless of whether one has faith in Christ … that all religions are equally valid.…
The only conclusion is that this “Jesus” is the lying spirit warned against in the Book of John. And those who believe are the devil’s dupes.
Remember that Satan can appear as an “angel of light” and “servant of righteousness” (2 Corinthians 11:14–15). His goal is to mimic Jesus and to lead people away from the true Christ of scripture.
Beware! Such claims of tunneling into the afterlife are the work of Satan’s henchmen.…
And at the bottom of several blogs was the name of the same organization, one he had never heard of: the Fraternity of Jesus.
He logged off as the words echoed and reechoed in his head: Devil’s dupes. Satan’s henchmen.
61
Zack was shaking uncontrollably by the time Sarah dropped him off. Very little was said during the ride. She apologized several times, and he nodded acceptance. But it wasn’t her fault.
Nor was his mind on resentment or anger or disappointment. He wanted to say something conciliatory, sensing that she felt blameworthy. But it wouldn’t come out, constrained by the singular emotion that made his chest pound and his ears click and his mouth turn spitless with dread. He muttered a good night and jumped out of the car.
And he knew why.
And like a force of gravity, that knowledge yanked him out of the car and up the stairs to his apartment.
He tried stalling the pull by drinking a glass of warm milk and slipping into bed. He even fingered what was left of the Lunesta and Haldol in the dark, his body feeling as if it had turned into a giant cardiac organ, throbbing wildly.
Why are you stalling? Get up and get it over with.
He shook away the voice and popped the pills with the milk. Then he rolled over and tried to shut down his mind.
Impossible.
He tried to focus on absurd things like floating through the air, sailing across Boston. He ran pi to fifty places twice. Nothing. It was still there, pulling at his brain like a bungee cord. And he knew it wouldn’t let up until he knew for sure.
God, I don’t want this, he thought. I don’t want to know.
But it was now or tomorrow or the next day. Might as well get it over with, he told himself. Might even be wrong.
He threw off the covers and padded out of the bedr
oom and into the other room, where he stumbled to his desk and flopped into his chair.
Years ago, when he got his driver’s license, his mother had said that she had to go to Mount Auburn Hospital for a procedure. He’d pressed and pressed until she’d revealed that she had a lump in her breast. For days he’d prayed that it not be malignant. As he sat in the dark, all that rushed back.
“Don’t let it be,” he said to the dark. Then he turned on his laptop.
Shaking, he clicked on Google and wrote in the name. He got two dozen hits. But at the top was an item from the Hartford Courant that he read as if in a premonition:
The body of Mitchell Gretch, 34, of Cedar Road, Manchester, was buried yesterday in Cedar Hill Cemetery in Manchester. He was found bludgeoned to death four days ago on Bolton Road, lying in a pool of blood. He had apparently been attacked with a tire iron while fixing a broken muffler pipe on his automobile.…
Gooseflesh shot up his torso and across his scalp.
Thirteen years ago, Gretch was exonerated from a murder charge of Jacob Kashian, from Carleton, MA, but that case was dismissed by the judge for insufficient evidence.
Coincidentally, his alleged accomplice in that homicide, William Volker, died last week from an accident in his home in Waltham, Massachusetts. Local police have ruled out foul play.
Manchester police believe that Gretch was murdered by an unknown assailant who used the tire iron from Gretch’s 1992 Mitsubishi sports car.
Police have named no suspect or suspects and say they are continuing to investigate the circumstances of Gretch’s death.…
As if on autopilot, he Googled William Volker. Instantly a dozen hits came up, at the top of which was an article from The Boston Globe: “Freak Weightlifting Accident Claims Life of Waltham Man.”