The Prometheus Man

by Scott Reardon

  The skin crawled across his back and arms.

  He turned around and swept the light behind him, looking for a light switch. Something else caught his eye. Three metal cans of acetone. Acetone was one of the most common accelerants used in arson. They were planning to burn the place down.

  He found the light switch, but when he tried it, nothing happened. He checked the lock on the door. Manual, not electronic. He could get in if he wanted to.

  Do you want to?

  He shined the light into the far end of the lab, trying to make out what was back there. Shadows moved in the opposite direction of the light, and he kept stopping because he thought he saw something. The room was filled with medical equipment. IV stands littered the floor. Hospital gurneys were shoved together in a corner like bumper cars.

  There was something at the far end of the room that he couldn’t quite see—something large and wrapped in clear plastic.

  He unlocked the door. The bolt shot out of the lock, and the sound cracked through the room. Karl froze, ready to throw the lock back. But the lab was as it had been: completely still.

  Gently he eased the door open. His hearing was so intense it became a kind of vision. He took a step inside. The acoustics of the room not only magnified each sound but moved it as well. He heard a footstep to his left and whirled around on empty space.

  The lab was cold, almost freezing. His body wanted to shiver. Before he went farther, he checked the corners of the room with the flashlight. The thought of anything getting between him and the door was too terrible to think about.

  He took a few more steps inside, and his footsteps followed him in echo. He walked around a red biohazard bag. Syringes poured out of it, hundreds of them. A few feet away, there was a pile of black hoods. He noticed blood on the floor.

  As he approached the clear plastic on the ground, he saw a head of hair. Then he saw more.

  There was a moment where fear almost had him.

  They’d all been packaged together in clear plastic sheets like sausages. The bodies of thirteen men. They’d been stacked so each one leaned on the one behind him. Some of their faces were bloated. Others watched him. Their mouths hung open, like they had a secret to tell.

  A gust of wind hit the barn, and the front door shook on its hinges.

  Some of the men’s arms and legs were missing. One man had a butcher’s cut up his back where his spine had been removed. The skin puckered in around the incision. To a man, they were perfectly cut up.

  Whatever they’re doing, it’s bigger than you thought.

  He knew why they’d been killed. The stem cells hadn’t worked, at least not as intended. And they’d been cut up so that someone could figure out what had gone wrong. Karl stood there, watching the men, wondering whether they were innocent. Whether he should feel anything for them.

  The death of thirteen people should always be a tragedy, he thought. But he knew better than that.

  He looked down and saw outlines on the floor where large machines had been recently removed. All of the men had condensation on them.

  They were thawing.

  He saw there was still one refrigerator left. Someone would be on his way back here for it, and whoever it was, he was going to burn the men along with the barn.

  After locking the lab, Karl stopped at the desk and rifled through the drawers. There were armfuls of papers. He took his time, flipping through them all. At the bottom of one drawer, he found a prescription pad. The name on it was Dr. Alexander Nast. He almost wasn’t surprised, or maybe he was too tired to be.

  Afterward he sat in the dark with his gun on his lap, waiting for the sound of someone pulling into the driveway. He sat for an hour, maybe two, listening to his breaths.

  When he left, he stopped and looked at the acetone cans. No one could ever find this place.

  From a quarter mile away, he watched the burning orange structure collapse under the tree line. He waited for hours for someone to come. But no one ever did.

  CHAPTER 26

  People in surgical masks and gowns were standing around him. Tom tried to move, but he was on his back, restrained on something. When he realized what it was, the horror set in. He was on an operating table.

  He’d just woken up, but he got the feeling that wasn’t supposed to happen. One of the people in the masks was staring at him.

  Then he saw the drill.

  It was tiny but also seemed huge attached to a massive machine, and it was pointed straight at him. He fought the restraints and tried to crane his head to see the tip of the drill. For some reason he had to know where it would go into his body.

  He started screaming.

  Or maybe he had been the whole time and only now was becoming aware of it.

  The people in the surgical masks were moving quickly but with professional calm. He screamed for them to stop, but his voice was so alien-sounding even he couldn’t make out the words.

  They weren’t listening, so he started negotiating.

  —Will you wait a minute?

  —Why can’t one of you just talk to me?

  —Sir, I’ll do whatever you want. Just wait one minute. One minute.

  Why was he saying sir?

  —What do you want? I’ll give you anything. Please.

  Then he felt a prick on his arm, and the world around him snuffed out.

  Tom realized he was standing in his motel room. For a second he thought he’d just yelled out, but the room was quiet.

  The dream had started two years ago and become more detailed each time. This one had been the worst.

  He turned. Someone was sitting on the dresser, feet hanging over the edge, gently bumping the drawers.

  The feet froze.

  Tom looked up, and there was Eric. He was barely fifteen feet away but still somehow too far to approach. His face twisted. It wasn’t a continuous movement. Each change snapped onto his face, like he was under a strobe light. Then Tom recognized the expression on his brother’s face.

  He was worried.

  Something shifted in the mirror behind Eric’s shoulder. Tom spun around. A man was leaning on one knee over the bed. His hands were around Silvana’s neck, and he was putting all his weight onto them.

  Tom started for him. But the man stopped, cocked his head in the air. Tom froze. He didn’t know why, but he was terrified. The man started turning toward him, and when he was halfway around, Tom saw there were no whites in his eyes. They were all black—

  He was looking at himself.

  He looked back at Eric, but he was gone. And when he turned back to the bed, there was no one leaning over it. Bile swam up his throat. He looked at his hands. They were beyond shaking. His fingers arched and clenched. He tried to will them to be still before he went over and touched Silvana’s arm.

  Still warm.

  He went into the bathroom and filled a glass of water. His hands were still going. He calmed them by making fists and taking deep breaths. After he drank the water, he stared into the mirror and watched Silvana on the bed. She’d kicked the covers down to her ankles and spread her legs half the length of the bed, so her body formed a big Y. He tried to smile. Because it was kind of funny the way she imposed herself on the bed.

  He hadn’t been dreaming earlier, he realized, because he hadn’t been asleep. He’d been standing up when he came to. Which meant he’d been hallucinating.

  He’d started seeing things two years ago, little things he knew a second later hadn’t been there. He’d pass someone he suspected was watching him, but when he turned around, there was nothing—just an old man walking his dog. He’d never had a hallucination where he hurt someone before, though.

  He wondered why someone had done this to him. Then he thought about how Eric might fit in and had to close his eyes. Most of the time when his thoughts turned to his brother, he was fine. But sometimes this sick feeling jagged up his face and emptied around his eyes. He didn’t move until it went away. Then he looked at himself in the mirror.


  He shut off the light. Because he didn’t like how bright it was.

  And he told himself that whatever other changes happened, he’d just have to deal with them. Because this was his life now.

  Bogasian woke with a start.

  His hands were going again. For a second, through the grogginess, they didn’t seem like actual extensions of his body. The fingers flexed and curled like insects. They disgusted him.

  He thought he was going to throw up.

  He lunged for a glass of water and knocked it onto the floor. He rolled off the bed and padded into the bathroom and filled another glass. As he drained it, he studied himself in the mirror. He ran his fingers over the face that studied him back. He’d had a face women found attractive once. Unlike most large men’s, it had fine features, not the broad slopes of a car windshield. There was still a trace of his old self in there, but now the skin was so thickened it looked like it’d been slapped on his face and massaged over his skull like raw hamburger.

  Several months ago he’d been shopping for clothes and had made a mildly suggestive joke to a saleswoman. In his old life, it might have resulted in a drink together or at worst a conversation that went nowhere. But she looked at him as though he’d just jiggled a pair of handcuffs and suggested a drive to the woods.

  Then she smiled so hard he could feel the effort it must have taken, and she escaped to the back room. Five minutes later, in men’s coats, he felt the eyes of the other salespeople on him. Every pair of eyes seemed to raise his body temperature a degree, and his hands started shaking. He wasn’t aware of being embarrassed. He told himself he couldn’t possibly be uncomfortable about something like this. But he left and never went back.

  Never went out again unless he had to.

  Sometimes he imagined there was a signal everyone else could hear. And due to what had been done to him, he could no longer hear it. And because he’d lost it, there was no way to reach out to anyone. No way to get it back.

  He turned off the light. The glare hurt his eyes.

  And he stopped thinking about the way things used to be. Because those things weren’t his anymore.

  CHAPTER 27

  Karl was on the dirt road on his way back into town when he saw headlights through the trees. He kept driving toward them and then realized they were no longer moving. He pulled to a stop and listened. Generic sounds of the forest. Crickets chirped, wind blew, and unseen animals made noises.

  He crept out of his car.

  The other car still hadn’t moved. Its headlights shot beams of light out from around the tree trunks. Karl ran deeper into the forest and then circled around to the side of the car. As he got close, he could hear the engine. He tried to see if there was someone behind the wheel, but it was too dark. In situations like this, situations where someone might be trying to use uncertainty to kill him, Karl found it useful to try to figure out what the other person wanted him to do, and then not do it. In this case, the only way to see if someone was sitting in the car was to get closer, where Karl would make himself a better target. That was what the other person wanted, and so Karl started to turn around.

  There was motion in his peripheral vision.

  He didn’t waste time by trying to turn and look. He just dove behind a tree. Something that sounded like a fist-size mosquito went screaming past his ear. Then he heard the gun itself as the shooter kept firing.

  Karl spun around the other side of the tree and fired at the area where he thought the shooter was. His rounds hit nothing. They just disappeared soundlessly into the dark. He turned and fired into the front tire of the car. The right side sank. He shot out the nearside headlight too.

  Then he walked in the direction the shooting had come from. The woods were quiet. Only the sound of the car engine covered his approach. He thought he heard something. When he turned, he saw a man kneeling out from behind a tree trunk. He aimed a handgun at Karl and started firing. Karl ducked behind another tree and fired back.

  Through the strobing from the muzzle flashes, Karl watched the man stand up and retreat behind the tree and begin firing from around the other side. Karl kept shooting. For ten seconds, the only sound was their weapons.

  Then there was darkness and silence.

  Karl heard breathing. It sounded like air being sucked through a wound. He walked toward it and saw the man lying faceup. There was a bullet hole right below his trachea where his collarbone had been shattered. A combination of bone and blood seemed to be obstructing his airway. Another bullet had torn through the man’s mouth and exited out his cheek. Half of one of his molars was stuck on the outside of the hole like a piece of food.

  “Who are you?” Karl asked.

  The man would die soon, but his eyes hadn’t glossed yet. They watched Karl with a brain still functioning on the other side of them. There was another wound on the man’s thigh. Karl stepped on it.

  “Who are you?”

  The man whimpered. It was a horrible sound. Wet. Like he’d swallowed a tablespoon of water and it was drowning him to death. He couldn’t speak if he wanted to. Karl trained his gun on the man’s face and then looked to see what his answer was. The man nodded, and Karl shot him through the forehead.

  The man’s face snapped from life to death so fast it was hard for Karl to believe he was looking at the same person. One moment, the face was flesh. The next, wax. Karl stood watching him. It was one of those things you almost couldn’t help but do.

  He searched the man for ID. He found a Swiss passport, probably a fake, and pocketed it. There was nothing else of value on the man. He checked the car. Nothing there either. He went back to the man’s body and used the fingerprint scanner on his phone to take all ten of his fingerprints. Then he sent them to James and asked him to run them through all the databases.

  12 hours, James wrote back.

  Karl looked once more at the man on the ground. He was well dressed and had an intelligent face. Some people were criminals because they were stupid or because they lacked the impulse control to do anything else. But this man looked like he had options, which in turn meant he’d chosen this. Whatever this was.

  Karl opened the man’s wallet again and thumbed through the cash inside. There were euros, British pounds, Swiss francs, and US dollars. None of the bills were new, but they were reasonably crisp. All except for a twenty-dollar bill in the back. It was older than the others and frayed. Like it’d been in the wallet for a long time. Karl looked over the dead body and frowned because he didn’t want it to be true.

  You’re an American.

  CHAPTER 28

  The alarm on the phone started bleating, gently at first, but the intensity would rise. Tom reached over and poked the keypad before the sound could run jagged through the room. Then he rolled onto his stomach and looked out the window. The horizon was purpling. The threat of day.

  Silvana was lying on the bed like she’d been dropped on it from the ceiling. As Tom picked himself up off the floor, he was hit by how exhausted he was. Everything was sore, and his body was so stiff it hurt to move.

  He took Sarmad’s black bag and slipped into the bathroom. He pulled out more pictures of men who had that military look. He saw maps and invoices from medical equipment companies. There was too much to sort through before 6:00 AM.

  He stopped on a surgical atlas. Some of its pages were dog-eared. The first page showed a procedure called a craniotomy. On the diagrams of the human brain, someone had penciled in notes. They were unreadable. Doctor’s handwriting.

  He went to another dog-eared page. This one showed a skull with dots made in red ink: two on top and one several inches above the right ear. He checked the front and back covers to see if a surgeon had written his name on them. According to a buddy of Eric’s who was in med school, surgeons liked to sign their names on everything, even their anesthetized patients. Not here, though.

  He picked up the photos of the man with the Marine haircut. In the ones where he was smiling for the camera, the “bef
ore” pictures, there didn’t seem to be any marks on his scalp. Tom flipped to the photo of him lying on a gurney. A few inches above his ear, where his head was shaved to the scalp, there was a small purplish mark.

  Tom ran his fingers over his scalp, pulling the hair apart. His fingers were shaking. Somehow he knew he would find it right away.

  And he did.

  A little knot of thickened purplish skin sat two inches above his right ear.

  He clamped his jaw shut and gritted his teeth and started shaking. There was a moment where he imagined himself smashing everything in the room until the cops came. He stood there breathing, trying not to tap into what he actually felt—because if he let in even just a little bit of that, he’d go to pieces. He knew in some distant academic sense he ought to find out what had been done to those men, because it had also been done to him. But what he’d seen was horrifying in a way he’d never experienced before. It was like looking at your own dead body.

  That led him to the other thing he knew.

  He could never look at those photos ever again.

  Bogasian only slept an hour or so, but it was enough to reset. He showered, brushed his teeth, did everything to start a new day and not just continue the one before it.

  Tom and the girl were most likely bedded down along the highways leading north to Germany. They wouldn’t be within the city limits because they’d want to be able to leave quickly, which meant not driving all the way through Nice. And so, starting at 5:00 AM, Bogasian stopped in motels along the way, flashed his Interpol ID, and then showed the pictures of Tom and Silvana.

  An hour into it, he pulled into a place called Le Grande. The main office was lit up, but no one was inside. He hit the bell on the front desk and waited. Finally a woman came out of a dark office, straightening her clothes.

  “We’re closed,” she said in French.

  He opened his wallet to the Interpol ID and slid it across the counter. “You speak English?”