Tunnel Vision

by Gary Braver

  He could hear the guardedness in her voice. “Once.” And he told her about the night at the Foxwoods Resort Casino.

  “How come you never mentioned that?”

  “Because I thought it was nothing but a weird coincidence.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you made a freak connection or something. That’s something you should have told Elizabeth and Morris.”

  “Elizabeth and Morris have done enough damage.” He moved to his desk and removed some papers and handed them to her. “Three homeless people were found dead with tetrodotoxin in their bloodstreams over the last two years.” He poured himself another glass of milk and warmed it in the microwave while she read the articles. “Each of them died bizarre deaths. One guy was mercy-killed with a baseball bat. Another threw himself under a truck. The third, a woman, rammed a screwdriver through her ear into her brain.”

  “What?”

  “According to friends, each complained of headaches and bad visions. One guy claimed he was possessed by demons. Another said bugs were eating out his brain. Whatever, they were tormented to death because of their suspensions.”

  Sarah continued reading.

  “The kicker is that each of them had tetrodotoxin in them—nothing the police had seen before.”

  “Because it’s a research drug.”

  “That’s my point.”

  Her face clouded over. “All our drugs are under lock and key, and we’ve never had a break-in. ’Least not while I’ve been there.”

  “I think they were test subjects before you came aboard.”

  “No way. If subjects complained of a side effect, they’d stop the tests. Besides, volunteers came from local colleges, not homeless shelters.”

  “But you’ve only been there a few months.”

  “So?”

  He turned one of the articles toward her. “The guy who threw himself under a truck had a friend who said he began to complain about beetles and terrible pain in his head after some scientist guy offered to pay for sleep tests.”

  She read where he pointed. “This doesn’t have to be us.”

  “How many labs you think are doing sleep tests using tetrodotoxin?”

  She stared at the paper. “I don’t believe this.”

  “Tell me about it. Since you started, how many subjects have you suspended?”

  “I don’t know, maybe fifteen out of a hundred interviewed.”

  “You know how many since they started?”

  “I never checked the records.”

  “You might want to, because I think you’ll find a bunch of illegal aliens and bogus names.”

  65

  Sarah left, saying that she would drive to the lab first thing in the morning to check the records.

  Meanwhile, Zack took two sleeping tabs and turned off the light, hoping to shut his mind off from speculating on the hideous options. Like Sarah, he did not believe in ghosts. And his mind refused to accept insanity or the possibility that he had murdered three people and repressed the acts from conscious memory. That left some psychic awareness he had tapped into—some alien sentience that had left his mind feeling contaminated.

  After several minutes, he slipped into a drowsy twilight, feeling himself fading into a dreamless void. He didn’t know if at first he was imagining it, but he thought he heard something outside his bedroom door.

  His first thought was Sarah. Maybe she forgot something. Or maybe her car didn’t start. He called her name. Nothing. Then he reached over to turn on the light when a bright flash went on in his eyes and a hand with a white towel clamped down on his face.

  As he thrashed against the pressure, harsh chemical fumes filled his head. Chloroform. He recognized the odor. He also recognized the bald-headed male as his body pressed across his own, the towel smothering his face.

  But before he could connect it, his mind faded to black.

  “He’s coming to.” A male voice.

  Zack squinted at the bright light. The sky, he thought. Bright white sky.

  But then taking shape was the textured, translucent panel that covered the fluorescent lights recessed into the ceiling of the lab. He tried to move, but his hands and feet were restrained, and he was wired up with contacts to his chest and an IV line in his arm.

  Standing beside Elizabeth Luria in street clothes were two men. One had a hairless domed head and fleshy pink face. A face he had seen before. The other was thin, with glasses and dark hair.

  “I’m sorry, Zack,” she said. She was standing on the other side of the gurney.

  He tried to say something, but she depressed the plunger, and he was gone.

  THREE

  66

  “You knew about these deaths. You were there.”

  Morris Stern was at his desk in his office at the Tufts University School of Medicine, hunched over a cup of coffee he had been sipping before Sarah pushed her way in. But for the twitching tic of his left eye, he stared blank-faced at the photocopied articles of street people found dead.

  “They could have come from any number of other labs.”

  “What, the Zombie Research Center?”

  “That’s not particularly funny.”

  “Neither is your stonewalling, Morris.”

  The teeth in her words surprised even her. Morris had been her favorite professor and thesis adviser. Moreover, she looked up to him as a father figure, someone she could confide in. When her mother had died two years ago, it was Morris who gave her comfort, who helped make funeral arrangements. “I was flattered when you asked me on. Privileged to be working on a great cutting-edge project. But you used these people, Morris. You suspended them and dropped them off on some park bench. No follow-ups. No checking for bad side effects. You used them like lab rats.”

  “These people were homeless,” he said, stabbing his finger on the article and squinting at her in a pretense of outrage. “You know as well as I do that all our volunteers are college students and closely monitored during and after.”

  “Now they are. Before that you bought people off the street—people no one would miss.”

  He couldn’t hold her gaze and dropped his eyes to the clippings. “They could have gotten the drug anywhere—another lab, the black market, whatever. So don’t come accusing me of unethical practices before you know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “It says that scientists paid them to take sleep tests. That’s the same pitch you put up on student bulletin boards all over town. And I checked with the state health agencies—no other research institution has used tetrodotoxin for years. Only Proteus.”

  “I’ve heard enough from you.” He stood up. “This conversation’s over.”

  “You don’t even care, do you? Two committed suicide, another had his friend bash his head in. And who knows how many others. They were plagued with horrible visions, and you people didn’t care.”

  “Sarah, this has turned into an interrogation, and I resent it.”

  “Would you prefer the police?”

  His eye spasmed. “Is that a threat?”

  “What you people did is criminal.”

  “You have no proof and no right accusing me. Now get the hell out of here.”

  She could hardly believe that he was the same man she had adored—a man of high-minded ideals, a man who had seemingly dedicated his science to raising the quality of life, who had taken the Hippocratic Oath. Suddenly he was a cowardly, pathetic old man denying he was a murderer. Before she left, she removed a wide folder from her briefcase and dropped it before him.

  “What’s this?”

  “One of your skeletons.”

  He didn’t touch it. “I said to get out of here.”

  She flipped open the folder to reveal downloaded neuroelectrical images taken from the lab archives. “Look familiar?” she asked.

  He glanced at the imaged configuration and the name in bold on the sticker.

  “You used him, too,” she said. Then she turned on her heel toward the door. “Mayb
e you’re right after all: There is no God, only man.”

  67

  George Megrichian loved surf casting. He had been doing it most of his fifty-six years.

  He had fished everywhere, but this was his favorite spot because no one was around and because the sand was shoring up. In fact, this beach was the only one on the Massachusetts Bay that was growing in volume, because the lower Cape was eroding and sending all its sand to this sandbar. Twenty years ago, the beach was segmented every hundred yards by stone breakwaters that stood so high in high tide that kids would jump off the ends into deep water. Now, not a single granite boulder was visible in the five-mile stretch. Two decades and millions of tons of sand had been washed onto the shoreline, pushing the sandbar maybe a full quarter mile into the surf. He joked that were he to live another thousand years, he’d be able to walk to Portugal.

  Because it was a private beach, you’d never find more than twenty people on the stretch of sand, even this week of the Fourth of July. Of course, more than a mile to the east was Scusset Beach, which was public and packed on summer weekends. But not here. And no matter which way you looked, not another soul was in sight.

  The tide was in and the sun had just broken the bank of clouds hanging over the horizon.

  He cast his line into the gentle surf and stuck the grip end of the pole into the holder buried in the sand. Then he sat in his folding chair with a mug of coffee and stretched his bare legs to take in the rays of the morning sun. Out at sea, sailboats cut across the horizon, their jibs bellying against the wind and glowing against the azure blue. This is as good as it gets, George thought. What heaven must be like.

  Suddenly something moved out of the corner of his eye. He looked to the right. It was just above the storm line, where a continuous brow of seaweed had been pushed back during winter storms, now sun-dried to black.

  His first thought was that it was a trick of the rising sun. But the surface of the sand seemed to be moving. Crabs. Except crabs didn’t live in high, dry sand, only the wet stuff.

  As he sat up to see better, a hand pushed its way into the air.

  “Jesus Christ!” George cried. He scrambled out of his chair, knocking his mug over. A moment later, a second hand pushed its way out. Then arms. Suddenly the top half of a man rose out of the sand, rubbing his face and spitting sand.

  For several seconds, George was too frozen with horror to move—too stunned by what his eyes were registering. The man rolled to his side to free his legs, then pushed himself onto all fours, drooling sand and gulping in air. He was wearing shorts, but no top or shoes. George gasped as he watched.

  The hole was maybe two feet deep—far too deep for the sand to have covered him naturally, like if he got drunk the night before. He had been buried.

  The guy struggled to push himself to his feet, wavering and spitting and looking like one of those movie zombies. At one point, he clamped his hand to his side and groaned as he nearly doubled over. Then he checked his hand as if looking for blood.

  Then before George knew it, the guy began to stumble toward him. George yelped and grabbed his pole to defend himself, gripping it like a baseball bat. But the guy shuffled by him down the beach, rubbing his face and hands, moving at a weird angle as if he had a stitch in his left side.

  He headed toward the wooden set of stairs that led up to the top of the Manomet cliffs. He said nothing, nor did he look back, just climbed the steps one by one to the top, where he disappeared, leaving George wondering how he would explain this to his wife.

  68

  “They were all premonitions,” Zack said. “I kept seeing myself being buried alive.”

  Sarah looked at him. “But how could you see something in the future? That’s impossible.”

  “I don’t know how. I don’t understand any of this, except the bastards flatlined me, then dumped me in a hole on that beach.”

  It was nearly noon, and he had stumbled up to the White Cliffs complex of condos and golf course. In his print boxer shorts, he looked as if he had just come up from sunbathing. At the top, he found a greenskeeper and asked if he had a cell phone he could borrow. Two hours later, Sarah picked him up on Route 3A.

  His brain still felt fuzzy and slow, and his side ached, although there was no wound or bruise. “What about Stern?”

  “He denied everything. He just stood there and lied point-blank. I still can’t believe it.”

  “Because it’s the truth and he’s scared shitless.”

  “But he wasn’t at the lab last night, was he?”

  “I didn’t see him. Just Luria and Gladstone’s choirboys. But he may know they came after me. He no doubt called Luria about your visit, which means she’s probably at the lab erasing the evidence.”

  “Or at her office at school,” Sarah said. “We have to go to the police.”

  “It’s our word against theirs,” he said, thinking how he wanted to get Elizabeth Luria alone.

  “Maybe not,” she said.

  After leaving Morris Stern’s office, she told him, she had called several of the local hospitals to inquire about any patients who had had bloodwork showing signs of tetrodotoxin. She fabricated a claim that some of the compound was missing from their lab following a break-in and that she was working with authorities from the State Medical Board to help locate victims. Claire Driscoll, an old friend from nursing school who worked at Jordan Hospital, called back to say that a nurse colleague might have some information for her. Sarah then called the woman, who said to come in anytime today. Her name was Karen Wells.

  “I think we may have something to show the police. But first we have to get you some clothes.”

  * * *

  They drove to Independence Mall in Plymouth, where Sarah ran into Sears and bought Zack some jeans, a top, and shoes. Also muffins, juice, and coffee. He ate and changed in the car. His head still buzzed, and he felt slow and heavy. He was anxious to file a police report against Elizabeth Luria, but he consented to go along with Sarah, who was convinced that this might be more evidence to build a case. And Jordan Hospital was on the way.

  They found Nurse Wells at the desk of the emergency room. She was a pleasant-looking woman around fifty with quick intelligent blue eyes and a take-charge demeanor. Sarah introduced herself and Zack and reiterated what she had said on the phone.

  Nurse Wells had a folder on the John Doe in question. “I have to tell you it’s a first,” she said. “I’ve been here for almost twenty years, and never did we have a misdiagnosed death. We had a whole triage team on him and still got it wrong.”

  “So, you’re saying that it actually was a misdiagnosis,” Zack said.

  “That or the guy was a zombie.”

  “So how did he show up here?”

  She checked her folder. “An ambulance unit brought him in around three A.M.”

  “What date was that?”

  “May nine, 2008. They picked him up on a 911 call. I guess some people returning home from a party found him under their bushes.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Plymouth County, just south of the White Cliffs in Manomet.”

  “Manomet. That’s near Sagamore Beach.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was his condition when they brought him in?” Sarah asked.

  “Dead. No BP, no pulse, temp at eighty-two. But the paramedics said he had a pulse when they found him. We tried to revive him with CPR and defibrillators, but those didn’t work. Then we injected him with resuscitation drugs, but that didn’t work either. So we officially declared him dead.”

  “How do you explain his getting up and leaving on his own?”

  “Beats me, because I can tell you we didn’t fail in our diagnosis. We had all the monitors on him and the guy was flatlined.”

  “Any chance we can see the security video?” asked Zack.

  “I pulled it out, in fact,” she said. “Because we never got an ID on him, there’s no breach of patient confidentiality. Besides, it’s too grainy to
make out his face.”

  She led them into a small office with video equipment and closed the door behind them. “Like I said, it’s absolutely creepy,” Karen continued. “The guy was dead on arrival.” From a plastic case she removed a DVD and inserted it into a computer monitor. She made some adjustments, then sat back so Zack and Sarah could watch.

  On the screen a nurse with a clipboard walked down a quiet corridor. Karen fast-forwarded to where paramedics burst through a door wheeling a man into one of the bays.

  “Okay, I’m going to jump a couple hours,” Karen said.

  The same ceiling shot of the corridor running the length of patient cubicles. Nothing moved but for an orderly pushing a cart. After a few seconds, a man emerged from one of the cubicles. His face was aslant from the camera, and he was naked from the chest up. Round monitor electrodes were pasted to his shoulders and chest. He moved unsteadily in bare feet down the corridor, disappearing through the exit.

  “I really can’t explain it, but there you are,” Karen said.

  “Did you order a blood test for toxicology?”

  “Yes, but since he was misdiagnosed, we didn’t bother to do a follow-up.” She pulled a pad out of her pocket. “As it turned out, he had no alcohol or standard drugs in his system, but he did show traces of ketamine and that tetrodotoxin you asked about.”

  Sarah shot a look at Zack, who was still staring at the monitor.

  “Ketamine we use all the time. It’s a sedative for patients undergoing surgery. It reduces the trauma and helps them forget the ordeal. But frankly, I’m not familiar with tetrodotoxin, at least I wasn’t until you called.”

  “It’s the so-called zombie drug,” Sarah said. “What voodoo priests use in Haiti to fake people’s deaths, then revive them hours later.”

  “Which may explain why we couldn’t get a pulse or heartbeat.”

  “The right dosage lowers body temperature and reduces the pulse, heart rate, and blood pressure to a minimum—probably below what your machines could detect.”