by Martin Rose
I don’t have time to protest. She dumps me in. The shock of the cold water should have brought my fever down. I melt the ice and the water comes to room temperature in minutes. I feel funny inside my chest where I press my fingers.
I remember her hands, gripping the edge of the tub. Her knuckles are white as she watches me, and she’s got a thermometer in her hand. She tries to get my attention so she can slip it under my tongue.
“Honey,” I said. “I can’t feel my heart.”
But the words come out in a whisper. She leans close.
It is so hard to make the words. Between the frigid bathtub and the last hour, it had become harder to concentrate, to piece together events in a linear time frame. And I hear her heart, but I can’t hear mine. It pulses steady as a snare drum, and I smell her sweat, I inhale and taste the aroma that is uniquely my wife’s—her blood smells like iron.
I open my mouth. Words stumble, stall, press slowly out.
A veil descends.
Nothing makes sense after that. Everything jitters into a series of out-of-order images, like a movie where the frames have been swapped and inter-stitched.
What I can piece together are only fragments of the last seconds of my humanity, and the new beginning of my monster life. I feel the turning in my blood.
I remember her wrist. I taste perfume in my mouth, the perfume she used to spray on her wrists every morning. I remember a flying curl of hair from a turning head. There are distorted sounds locked in my confused memories, and some of them are screams, hers and mine, in eerie harmony. I remember bloody bathwater. Ice cubes floating in coagulating red.
The rest is darkness.
*
In four other homes across the country, four soldiers were doing the same thing. The military disposed of them, sending out their elite to enter the suburban tracts, breaking down doors and gunning my comrades down.
The same fate was reserved for me. Death writ my appointment on his balance sheet and reaped with all fury; I should have been cut down with the same surgical precision as the others. I resented the special treatment Jamie took advantage of all through our lives to advance himself with promotions he had not earned; my brother chose to trade in hard work for the privilege of riding the coattails of our distinguished father. I was different. I lived to spite the old man, and from day one I made Jamie swear never to tell the wily gray fox of my whereabouts, and Jamie agreed with reluctance and disdain for my stubborn pride. He saw my desire to earn something on my own power and by my own intellect as infantile and naïve. The sort of fool Machiavellians like himself scoffed at.
You’ll never settle it between you and the old man, will you? You could have had everything. Anything.
Fuck him, I cursed.
Jamie knew the score, knew I didn’t take special favors. I started at the bottom in the infantry and I went to Kosovo without the magical shield of our affluent and well-placed father and survived. Until now.
My brother knew this; we had a deal. If I dangled above the mouth of trouble and the fates cut me loose, he should let me go.
And the bastard went back on his word. Jamie pulled strings he had no business pulling, he made calls to phone numbers that didn’t exist, and, with diplomatic urging, planted the suggestion into the ears of the powerful that I had more value undead than permanently dead. I could better serve my country as an experimental subject than from six feet underground. He chivvied his agenda through lines of command in the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency and every acronym whose standing armies were composed of black-suited men with dead eyes.
He sold me like a pitch to a corporation. Jamie made me his mission. Restricted to a medical capacity, he tread dangerous waters by interfering on my behalf; he arrived at my house armed, prepared to turn against his own country and kill the mercenaries in tow if they dared lay a finger on me. The way he told it, he was not going to allow a few scared soldiers to put me down, but in my private moments between movie marathons and trash television, I asked myself if he didn’t come there ready to bury me if the trouble outweighed his bottom line. Or if he just wanted to see and measure, in his own scientific fashion, the effects of a bullet on a determined corpse.
He was convinced I could be saved. The government bought his pitch and now they were invested in profiting from the fruits of this experiment—a soldier who cannot die is a valuable commodity, after all. In the end, they gave him permission to bring me back and continue “experimentation.”
Jamie broke into the house and found me with their bloody carcasses, gnawing on their bones, my eyes blood red, covered in gore. If there was anyone who could say if my son had survived—if he had gotten away, it would be Jamie.
Or had Jamie lied? Had they found my son and whisked him away?
I pondered all these possibilities. Sometimes, the surest path to an answer is to ask the source directly.
*
Disguise is everything, not only because of my line of work, but because when pieces of your face fall off on a regular basis, it makes simple tasks, like going to a bank or discussing stock options, difficult.
The military base and its hospital was a half-hour from my secluded ranch in the suburbs. Conspiracy theorists joke about the black helicopters, but here they were an everyday reality and made their practice runs over barren pine lands and forgotten suburbs that collapsed with the economy.
I thought about taking my 2002 Ford Thunderbird onto the freeway and into an emergency room. A few blood tests would blow the lid off Jamie’s pet project. They’d ask my status, and I would explain that I had died July 25, 1999. Did they have anything I could take for an acute case of death? It would amuse me, to shake the jar and watch my brother run in circles to keep the lid on.
The worst thing about the emergency room is they frown upon smoking.
I sighed and dialed 9-1-1.
*
Jamie showed up in an ambulance.
I sat on the porch steps, hat on my blistered, peeling skull. I never would have worn such a thing in my living life, but hats shield one’s rotting corpse from the sun. So hat it is.
I kept my Glock in my holster, against my skin. Of all the people I did not trust in the world, the one I trusted the least was my brother.
Jamie pulled into the driveway in the ambulance, flashing lights dying in the hot sun. The box truck came to a stop, “Jersey Medical” emblazoned with red decals on the surface. After a long moment, while smoke rings wreathed the air between us, the door cracked open and my brother exited the truck.
Once, he’d been as thin and rakish as I was, my doppelgänger, so alike we were often mistaken for twins. But the resemblance had died the same time I had. I wondered, if I had continued living, would I have gone to seed, developed a softness that spoke of languorous meals and expensive living?
Light bounced off the Rolex on his wrist. He came dressed in his medical whites, lab coat and civilian clothes beneath. They looked rumpled, a man too lazy to iron. His late thirties, I decided, did not suit him, and I liked that. Very much.
“Vitus,” he said.
His voice was heavy, my name fraught with meaning.
“Jamie,” I returned. “Sit a spell beside a corpse, will you?”
“I prefer to stand,” he said. He put one polished shoe on the front step. I studied it through a veil of smoke and considered the lack of scuff marks and the fresh tread and thought, Here was the portrait of a man who never leaves his desk.
Hard to believe that the man standing inches from me shared the same bloodline. Jamie had always been analytical, logical, dispassionate; I was his hot-blooded shadow. While he brought home awards and scholarships, I brought back broken noses and cuts on my face from punch-outs and knife fights. He went to college, I enlisted, and despite that divergence in paths, we still met at the center of this dirty military secret. Strung together by the old man, that gray fox. Reading Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power by the firelight until he got up and
left the damn thing on his chair and I threw the book into the fire. You’ll have plenty of time to read in Hell, old man. May the Devil take you.
We never saw the old gray fox anymore. Yet Jamie could return home to his wife and child. I could only visit the graves of my own, left to envy my brother’s contented life from afar.
“How’s the family?”
Jamie shrugged with a pull of his shoulders, a muscle in his jaw tightening.
“How old is that boy of yours, now? Must be graduating high school by now. Ames, I think his name is—”
“Amos. And he’s interested in pursuing a military career.”
“That must make his old man proud,” I replied with a touch of acid.
“Actually,” Jamie snapped, “it’s because of you.”
I quirked an eyebrow in his direction.
“You heard me right. When we held the funeral for . . .” he coughed, to fill the space for the names of my wife and child—names he could not bring himself to say. “When we held the funeral, he would not stop asking about you. He begged me to tell him again and again how his uncle was a soldier, so I spent every night for far too many years giving my son a bedtime story about a guy named Vitus and the sacrifice he made.”
“It’s only a sacrifice when you know you’re giving it for the greater good, Jamie. I didn’t exactly sign on for zombification to contribute to world peace.”
I hadn’t seen Jamie’s child since the funeral, and all I found were blurry half-memories in the dim corridors of my mind. The event itself was difficult to remember, and I found trace images of Jamie’s boy lurking in the background—we’d taken the boys to the beach once, and Clay ate sand while five-year-old Amos held him in his lap and tried to teach him how to make castles. I imagined what kind of impression that left in the mind of a child, to have a cousin living one second, dead the next.
I was uncomfortable with the idea of Jamie telling his child about me, as though the events of my life were on equal footing with a bastardized Grimm’s fairytale. And now the boy thought I was a hero and wanted to follow in my footsteps—not his own father’s.
That must rankle, I considered, staring at Jamie with a new assessment. He must have thought that by telling my sordid tale to his son he was paying penance for his scientific mistakes, his unbridled aspirations to meddle with a nature that refused to bend to his will and expectations.
Jamie sent me invites to barbecues, family reunions now and again. Our father never came and I didn’t miss him. Before Kosovo, there was the mess of Sarajevo, and it was always between us. I never responded. I was left to imagine what kind of life our families might have enjoyed together—camping trips, picnics, games. My son and his son together, in the same way he and I had been as brothers before things became strained and our father’s presence provided an ever-widening gap, sowing rivalry. Now Jamie’s family only highlighted everything I had lost, and I could not bear to face them.
“Is there something you need?” he cut into my thoughts.
“A brother can’t call a brother for sentimental reasons?”
“I’ve had all the sentiment I can stand.”
“Ah, ah, ah,” I said, holding up a finger. “That’s not very nice. You turn me into a pre-deceased corpse with your military cocktail, and this is how you repay me? You had your chance to kill me then, and you refused.”
I casually lifted the Glock from the holster, standing up to hand it to him, butt-first. Sweat collected on his upper lip in dirty droplets as he stared at the handle, silent and still.
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Because what you’ve done to me is so much better.”
“What do you want, Vitus?”
“But that’s your secret, Jamie. You can go home at night. The sound of your heartbeat will lull you to sleep. I’ll never hear that sound again. What do you think an infant hears, the very first sound in its insignificant life, as it sleeps in the womb?”
“A heartbeat.”
“That’s right,” I smiled, reholstering the gun. “And when you do go home and listen to your living heart, I’m not around. I’m out of sight, out of mind. But I have to live with this every day of my life—the constant reminder of the brother who doesn’t have the balls to kill me.”
“What’s stopping you?” he hissed.
“The fact that you brought me back in the first place is what stops me. So I think you owe me some fucking respect, don’t you?”
Cicadas droned in the overwhelming heat. August dog days dragged on. He stared off to the side, as though something fascinating was roosting in the bushes that demanded his attention.
“What if there was a way to return you to who you used to be?”
I snorted derisively and he continued relentlessly.
“Do you really think I enjoy watching you, my brother, suffer this long, slow death? Do you think our sibling rivalry extends so far that I will never, ever stop feeling broken over what happened? That I wouldn’t give everything to reverse it?”
“Reverse it? And here I thought you might have learned a lesson in all your scientific dabbling. Come up with a cure, reverse my condition—I’d jump at the chance. But at what cost? You scramble to fix the mistakes of the past and everything you do has a consequence that destroys more than it repairs. It’s not worth the risk, Jamie.”
“You’ll never forgive me, will you?”
“Is that why you think I called you here? Oh, Jamie. Ever the optimist. I wanted to ask you about July 25.”
He flinched.
“I need to know about my son.”
“This is ridiculous, Vitus. You need to lay them to rest.”
“Did you find his remains?”
“We buried Clayton, Vitus. Buried him and Jessica.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“How in the hell could I be sure!” he snapped, irritated. The heat was getting to him and the ocean humidity sent sweat down his face in slug trails. Breathing labored. “You don’t want to know.”
“No,” I said, stepping closer to him.
He stepped back, keeping the distance between us.
“I don’t want to know, Jamie. But I have to know. Are you sure that what you found in the house was my son? Are you 100 percent sure?”
He sighed. “There were . . . pieces everywhere. You know as well as I do there is no 100 percent without proper identification. We found scraps. Christ, Vitus, why are you asking?”
I exhaled smoke. I debated telling him the truth, but there was no point. My brother was a thirty-two-year-old ancient man who looked years away from a heart attack. Bags under his eyes suggested he slept as little as I did—his guilty conscience working overtime.
“Nothing, little brother,” I said. “Go back to the hospital. And let Megan know I said hi. You hear from the old man at all?”
“We’ll hear from him when he’s damn good and ready. You know how he is. You’ll never forgive him for Sarajevo, will you?”
I bared my teeth.
*
Beep-beep.
Time for candy. I dry swallowed the dose with an automated motion.
I took out the picture of Owen Rogers/Clay Adamson, gap-toothed, smiling boy, and stuck it on my empty fridge with a single magnet. I called the Rogers an hour ago, and for people living in a burned-out husk of a house, they were pleased as punch to hear from me. They didn’t feel inclined to mention their real address, so I informed them I had some questions and information, would they kindly come by for a visit? I’d love to chat with them.
In the meantime, I pondered the picture in silence until I heard the sound of the car pulling into the driveway. With a sigh, I holstered the Glock, lit a fresh cigarette, and watched the couple exit the car; if I didn’t know better, I would think they hadn’t changed clothes from the last time I saw them.
Clearly, I didn’t know better.
I chain-smoked with abandon and, when I heard their feet coming up the steps, I opened the door, thr
owing it wide. Early morning air heavy with dew flowed past my dead skin, and Mrs. Rogers smiled her tired, eerie smile as she came up the steps first, Mr. Rogers trudging behind her.
Then, her head was gone.
*
The cigarette in my mouth sizzled as Mrs. Rogers’s blood and brain matter extinguished the glowing ember, my face slick with her fluids and pulverized skin. Her body stood bolt upright, ending abruptly at the neck, where parts of her fleshy throat remained, like a flower in bloom, pieces of her skeleton jutting out of the red center. Shattered bones.
Her legs continued to walk forward without the rest of her, like a chicken after execution. Her sensible pumps marched right on to my deck until, finally, the legs crumpled from under her just before she reached me, the body collapsing to the floor. Blood jetted onto the wood boards in a thickening pool.
Mere seconds elapsed. Mr. Rogers, who looked as though he had eaten urine-soaked cereal that morning, had not noticed. His gaze remained focused on his shoes as he came up the stairs.
I pulled out the Glock and jerked out the magazine from my side pocket. Urgency pressurized the air and I loaded the magazine with the echoing thwack! of metal into the dense polymer frame. First round chambered.
“Suzanne?” Mr. Rogers whispered, looking up for the first time and seeing his wife. The gap in his cognition as his senses gained parity with real time recalled me to ancient hurts when I had been standing in his blood-soaked shoes. I experienced a moment of regret for all my criticism and narrow judgments of before. The moment was brief. Was my sociopathy a function of my compromised brain matter or the collateral damage of the heart beneath, unable to feel after being tasked to feel far too much? There was no time to get existential about it and, in one second following another, I went from a sad bastard to just a mean bastard.
All color left his face, leaving him as white as a bleached bone. He stared at the body on the porch, frozen in his tracks.
“You’d better get up here now,” I suggested, scanning the street.
I calculated the shooter’s distance, his weapon, his plan of action. Nothing was visible out on this quiet, suburban drive where polite WASPs continued their business of tending their lawns and ignoring each other. For all they knew, they lived cheek to jowl with pedophiles and zombies and serial killers. As long as the lawns were mowed and kept, no one cared about moral integrity.