by Martin Rose
And I heard it, deep in the hollow of her rib cage, that miracle that stops and starts and stops again, does it over and over, perfectly and without fail. The sound we come to life with, the sound we are ushered out with. I shuddered and felt her arms on my bones, registering as an insistent pressure.
“Vitus,” she whispered. Then, again: “Vitus.” Not a question. An assertion and a name.
“Yes,” I whispered, and released her.
She pulled away, and then I felt her lifting my head and setting a pillow beneath me. I wondered if she had done this sort of thing at the Lazar House in Hawaii, that she did it with such patience, without revulsion, without shame. Had she done it for her mother?
I did not know, and I did not ask.
These were the last seconds. My life ebbing like a tide. I turned my skull to see the clock above the door, to note the time as I heard her delicate fingers rattle the scalpel against the tray: 9:36 in the morning. I had always thought I would have met a murderous end on a dark night. It pleased me to believe that I would die while the sunlight poured in from the small windows. I turned back and looked at the armor laid out on the gurney like the bones of an ancient dinosaur, waiting to be reconstructed.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
Her voice was flat. She covered it well, but I could see the glistening line of a single salt tear from her eye, down to her throat, where it disappeared beneath the collar of her jacket. I wished I could have followed it all the way to her warm center and become nothing, nothing at all, but a part of her.
“I’m ready,” I whispered.
Goodbye to the world, goodbye to these bones; goodbye to Niko with her sad memories of the Lazar House in Hawaii, of palm trees and absent digits, empty spaces where fingers should be. Goodbye to the son I should have had, goodbye to the son I killed. Goodbye to bad memories and cancer sticks and criminals and betraying brothers and apathetic scientists and old gray foxes and forgotten mothers in nursing homes. Goodbye.
Vitus Adamson is finished with life and death, and at this last, I offer no prayers to Heaven and Hell, but one—that there be neither—and when I am dead, I may be nothing at all.
A syringe appeared in her hands, the needle a sliver of light dripping serum; I felt the pressure of the sharp tip penetrate between the vertebrae of my neck and skull, through the tender spinal nerves beneath.
PART 4
GOODBYE TO THE BONES
Thump-de-thump.
Thump-de-thump.
Thump-de-thump.
Heaven sounds like a heart.
Thump-de-thump.
My fingers moved. Cotton beneath their tips. For a long time there was no thought in my head, only the steady beat of a heart in the background of my thoughts. My ears filled with the ocean-sized sound of rushing blood. All these sensations so old they feel brand new. Sensations carried with us from the cradle to the grave, so common and shared and universal we fail to notice them. Not until they are gone from us.
Then, you notice. You notice the silence of your every wasting day and you feel the sensation of rot and corruption bloom from within to steadily consume and replace your heart. Filling it with darkness and mold.
But that was long ago and far away. Far away from the clean cotton beneath my fingers. Individual hairs that made up my eyelashes whispered over my cheek bones, and then they lifted and the darkness was gone. I stared at the ceiling, prostrate on a soft mattress, covered with clean sheets that smelled like baking soda and laundry detergent.
I smelled flowers. I turned my head and white roses were arranged in a vase beside me.
It’s my funeral, I realized. I’m in a coffin.
I lifted my head to gaze down at myself, but there was no coffin. I lay in a bed dressed in a white shirt. No fluid stains, no mold decorated the surface.
Beneath the shirt, my chest rose and fell and hypnotized me with steady motion.
This is so strange, I thought. Slowly, I rose. My every motion measured and cautious, because I expected to render the moment asunder, that everything would fall apart to reveal the illusion, the joke. Am I dead, am I alive? Heaven or Hell, or a waiting room for either?
I reached for my Glock, but I wasn’t wearing the holster. I glanced to the side of me, an end table. My wallet, my keys, spare change, and the gun with the holster. A pair of handcuffs. I picked them all up, stuffed the handcuffs into my back pocket, and felt the heavy weight of the weapon in my hand. I studied the lines of my fingers, the wrinkles in the peach-toned flesh of my skin against the cold metal.
It feels real, I thought, hefting the weight. It feels real. More real than real.
The thought carried with it a growing urgency. I strapped on the holster, and nearly stumbled out of the bed. The sensation of feet that don’t squish or rattle with each step took me by surprise. I felt the muscles and tissues layered against the bone. I felt . . . healthy. Alive. Vital. Cohesive.
I felt alive.
I could hear my heart.
Thump-de-thump.
So long desensitized and dead, all my latent feelings coming to life, sending my nerve endings afire. Information processed through me with lightning speed, with no purpose or reason, overwhelming me with observations both trivial and immense.
Light poured in from the nearby window where the end table glowed with oaken warmth; hardwood under my toes, and my toes were naked. The nails at the end of my toes fascinated me, the grain of the surface where it layered over the skin, the coldness of the floor beneath. I shivered with the delight of the draft creeping through the building itself and the clean undershirt stretched over my carriage. My body felt proud and graceful as a lion rising from the Serengeti. I burst into laughter that bubbled up through me until I was effervescent with light and weightlessness. My god, what is this, what is this feeling?
I knew the truth, the revelation, before I thought it.
I am alive.
Thoughts of how, why, what, crowded in on me, but I worked with a paucity of facts. I did not even know where I was. I opened the door to my bedroom. This is not my house, I thought, but that’s not true. Everything here is familiar but strange. My vision reported brighter images than I had seen since my eyes went dim ten years ago. Everything stood out in hyper-contrast. Someone had taken the time to insert brand new lightbulbs into all the sockets I had emptied when I first died so the world stood brand new and awash in light.
It is like standing in the middle of the sun.
I reached up and touched my face. Stubble beneath my palm. I gasped with the freshness of it, a grin spreading beneath my fingers as though I had never smiled in my life, as though I could hold it and keep it with me always. A supernova in my chest, a heaviness; I chased the breath, hyperventilating and falling back onto the bed with an arm outstretched as though I could hold the air itself for support.
This was my marriage bed. The whole room had been cleaned and stripped and old items of Jessica and Clay’s packed and carted away. The sheets new, the mattress new. The place alive and transformed with the touch of someone who loves and cares for the man inside of it.
Maybe it’s the past, I thought. Maybe this is a flashback.
But it’s no distant memory come to life. I tasted wood fire on the air and lemon polish, the glass of water on the end table.
I got up again, thrilled with the sensations as they came and went and relentlessly continued. Every strand of hair on my body stood on end as though they could reach out and touch and feel the world around me. I looked for a mirror, but there was none. I passed out of the room and into the hallway. Closer to the heart of the house, I heard small sounds in the kitchen, and I recognized her figure, the clean lines of her back encased in a long, black dress. Trickles of her black curls ran down her back.
Niko.
I wanted to say her name, and my lips parted. I touched my face again to confirm that I was not a zombie, not a pre-deceased. I did not want her to know I watched her, only remain here and steal the moment
in secret. She cleaned a dish in the sink. Water lapped against her hands as she lathered them with soap. The motion caused her hair to shimmer as it moved, the curves of her body like a fine instrument that invited to be played by an expert.
Barefooted, I stepped quietly over the hardwood floor, creeping up on her with military precision. My toes reported the chill surface, but I didn’t care; the cold was delicious in this skin.
I touched her on the shoulder with my fingertips. She startled, raven hair falling over her side as her electric blue eyes met mine. Her expression fascinated me, the turn of her nose, the shape of her full mouth, but mostly the look behind her eyes, the look of assessment, judgment, consideration, and appreciation.
Attraction.
Yes, I thought, without hesitation, I cupped a palm to her cheek. Her hands were still wrist deep in dishwater, and I pulled her away. White suds fell from her fingertips in clumps like snow. She pressed a foamed hand against my chest, and the pressure delighted me, every nerve skin tight as a snare drum. My heart thudded against her palm.
I leaned in and kissed her.
She wanted more. Her mouth pressed insistently against me, her lathered hands pushing across my chest until she maneuvered me against the counter. If this was a dream, I liked where it was heading.
No words were exchanged. Her lips traced the slope of my neck to the shoulder, smearing red lipstick on the collar of my undershirt. I tore at the shoulder of her dress, revealing a bra strap that quickly followed suit. Her hands fumbled at the waistband of my pants and I lost my purpose as I felt the cold draft and her slick fingers take me in hand. Dish detergent and baking soda and soap bubbles.
God, I had forgotten. Ten years is too long.
“Now,” I gasped, swallowing air and yanking her dress so hard it ripped with a squealing tear. I didn’t care. I’d become an animal in my desire to recover all I had lost, to reclaim my right to the human race, to reassert my place, to satisfy this hunger. Our coupling was furious. I hoisted her onto the counter with a growl and I heard her gasp and felt her shudder, my insistent fingers digging into her shoulders to keep her steady as I thrust up and into her. We did it without thought, without consideration, though I imagined I would have stopped at her urging, but she pressed on me with as much force as I exerted on her.
She moaned into the ceiling with her hair snarled over my encircling, strangling arms. Sweat dripping down my temples, slicking my hair. I opened up the front of her dress to reveal a pair of perfectly formed breasts and bowed to anoint the center crease with tongue and saliva, taking a nipple into my mouth like the bud of a rose. I could not close my eyes, but watch her and shudder and tremble in time with her.
I tasted her skin and was not hungry.
I tasted outside wood fires and the soap she bathed with. She moved with helpless gasps, her eyes closed, her mouth open, her breath rushing like a bellows. I studied her face, transfixed by her flesh and all the ways that it moved, flesh I had once envied and coveted and wished for my own. Flesh I now had.
And I would never be hungry again.
The moment arrived, culminating in a climax that ached and hurt with its desperation. Just as swiftly the moment passed, her ragged breath intermixing with the sounds of my own. I felt stunned and overwhelmed and drunk on the experience as I pulled away from her, bare feet slipping against the floor. I pulled my clothes back over my skin, mesmerized by the sight of my own dick. I’d lost it years ago, signed it off and forgot about it. Here it was, renewed, a fleshy beast of hungry dimensions. I tucked it out of sight and braced myself against the cabinets, every limb and cell inside me shaking.
She smoothed out the lines and wrinkles of her dress. I stared without shame or care while she did it. She put herself back together, piece by piece, pulling up underwear that had been discarded across the burner in the heat of the moment, brushing back hair matted with sweat. I cast my glance around the room, and there were no mirrors.
That’s odd, I thought. I never liked them much, sure, but there was at least one or two . . .
I turned back and discovered Niko staring at me. Her eyes were huge, frightened. We were both glassy eyed and coming down from our climactic high with terminal velocity.
I cleared my throat. “Do you have a mirror?”
Niko bit her lower lip, and said nothing.
I tilted my head, and if the gesture was condescending, it was meant to be, because after all, what girl doesn’t carry a mirror with her?
“Niko,” I said.
“I don’t have one,” she insisted. Anxiety needled up my spine. She didn’t want me to see. And in an instant, a thousand images detonated into my mind, like a two-ton weight impacting on my skull, sending an information rampage cascading down every nerve ending in my body. I remembered Jamie, Niko, Owen, every small image and inconsequential moment magnified, connections drawn between all of them and everywhere.
“Niko.”
There was a darkness in my voice I thought I had left behind with those useless bones I had once been. This was not a dream anymore; it was turning in a nightmare, a nightmare propped up on top of other nightmares, and Niko was hiding it from me. Hiding everything she could reveal with a circle of mirror.
When she did not move, I was electrified with rage, a bitterness that I had forgotten in the brief minutes of this new life, all the old memories of my world before infecting and infesting me. I snatched her purse from the counter and with one swift motion upended it all over the kitchen, items scattering everywhere, tissues and receipts, makeup, movie tickets, her driver’s license and crumpled bills. A makeup case with a vanity glass.
I snatched at it and she jumped as though she had thought to step in and take it from me. Her mouth opened, but she closed it and forced herself to stillness. She stared at me with an intensity I found unnerving.
I opened the case and looked at myself.
But I did not see myself.
I saw Owen.
*
Owen. Self-proclaimed son of my flesh, my doppelgänger. My haunted eyes stared out from his flesh, my breath leaving my lungs in one explosive gasp. I strangled the urge to draw the Glock and shoot the mirror, blast it into smithereens all over the kitchen floor.
I looked up at Niko. My hand with the mirror in it trembled, and then went as steady as a flatline.
“This is not natural,” I whispered. “This smells like Jamie. This smells military.”
She flinched. Confirmed.
“Talk. Now. Explain this.”
Her mouth opened, a round, empty hole, and then closed again. She lifted a hand to wipe at her lips as though she could nudge the words back inside her mouth.
“I’m not angry,” I assured her, taking a deep breath to demonstrate my equanimity over the secret tumult inside. “But I think I deserve the truth, don’t you, Agent?”
She hitched in a breath. “It’s not like that, I didn’t know—”
“Spare me the details. I’m waiting for your answer. I’m supposed to be dead. I asked you to kill me and that was the agreement we had, and yet, here I find myself alive, improved, and you’re cooking in my kitchen. Hmmm? I’m waiting.”
She tried again, a flush creeping into her cheeks.
“Jamie knew all along that Jessica had never died,” she whispered. Her head hung, her chin leaning against her collarbone in her despondence. “They monitored her from afar, for a long time. Years.”
I dared not interrupt her. Inside, a flood of protests stoppered within me. Why, Jamie, why? Why didn’t you put her out of her misery? What motivation was there to let a zombie wander among society unchecked? And they had let her do it.
“He didn’t tell me too much about that, only that they knew, and I guess because she was, y’know, different, they wanted to see how it would ‘play out.’ That’s how he put it. Play, like something children do, you know? Medical research. Scientific data. You were the experiment for Atroxipine. Jessica . . . she was the control.”
She shuffled her feet and crossed her arms, sneaking a glance at me from beneath the black fringe of her hair.
“Owen had been doing undercover work in the cult compound. Once the Rogers made their first visit to you, all the stops were pulled out and Jamie’s been in town ever since, calling me into active duty. He said . . .”
I cut her off, sickened. “I know what he said.”
Owen had been an operative all along. And yet, something uncanny about that connection stayed with me, knocking against my brain. Operative? Within the compound?
What operative starts at such a tender age? There was nothing legal about recruiting kids to serve . . . unless he’d been recruited after the fact, long after he’d been abducted by Jessica and then fled on his own. They could have approached him at any time after he’d cut his ties to the cult, and he’d have been a perfect person to use to infiltrate. As one of them, he could move among them easily, and report everything back.
And yet . . . the information hummed inside me, demanding my attention.
“Niko, where’s Owen?”
Better yet, who was Owen?
Her eyes were wide and huge.
After a long moment, she began to tell me.
*
Owen left the Thunderbird in the parking lot to funeral home. From any distance, he might have been a high school kid waiting for friends before he ducked inside, scoping the empty tarmac with a level of penetration no high school kid possessed. When he was satisfied that he was alone, he slipped inside, past the lobby.
Static electricity built up beneath his feet as he stopped, feet away from the door that led to the intake room. Past the empty space where the knight would have been. He could see through a square of glass set in the door, a long line of gurneys. Vitus in his armor sat in the middle, with Niko bent down before him. Through the glass, Owen’s eyes met Niko’s, and the moment gave him the impetus he needed to hurry on past, over to the back room the funeral director used to balance the accounting and do paperwork and soothe the bereaved.
Niko entered a few moments later. She brought strange underworld scents of her funerary tasks with her, exhausted by the constant pressure of her many secrets. They rode her thin and ragged like wild horses, keeping her up at all hours, tossing and turning with all the things she wanted to do but could not, wanted to change but remained helpless to do so. She had been putting off this moment as long as possible, and now they were alone together in the room.