The Prometheus Man

by Scott Reardon

  He looked at her.

  “What are you going to do to me?” she said.

  “Take you to Berlin.”

  “Is something going to happen to me there?”

  He started to answer her—

  “Who would hurt me?” She swallowed. “Who the hell would want to hurt me?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll get you to a safe place, and then we can be done.”

  “A strange man at a truck stop just tried to kill us in a public bathroom. So please—pretty please—tell me what me being here with you means.”

  She watched him. She was scared of him before, when she thought he was just a guy who’d killed a bunch of people outside Nice. But now it wasn’t the fear in her eyes that worried him.

  “I’m in more danger now, being here with you, than I ever was before. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” He started to say something else.

  “And what? You’re sorry.”

  “No.”

  Her eyes widened at this, and the look of hatred on her face deepened.

  “I can’t be sorry because the truth is: I’d do it all over again. I can only tell you that I hated doing this to you, and whatever you think of me, I deserve it.” There was a part of him that wanted to tell her everything, but he couldn’t do that.

  “How did that man do that to the door?” she said. “That was impossible, you know?”

  “I know.” Tom checked the rearview mirror again.

  “So how did you do it? I saw what you did to the doorknob.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Pull over.”

  “We need to put as much distance between us and—”

  “Pull over.”

  He looked at her. “You know I can’t.”

  “How. Did. You. Do. That?”

  “Look, I don’t know, okay?”

  “Bullshit.”

  She unlocked her door and shoved it open. They were going eighty miles per hour. Wind hit Silvana’s face and whipped her hair back. Tom pulled off the highway and, once they couldn’t be seen from it, stopped the car.

  She got out and walked off, never looking back.

  “Wait.” He said it over and over until she got so far away he was shouting. She stopped at the top of a small rise and stood without turning around.

  He looked back down the road. There were no cars, but he watched the horizon, knowing something was coming for them. He waited for it to solidify out of the blur.

  Eventually she came down the hill.

  “You’re not telling me everything,” she said.

  We want the girl.

  “Are you telling me everything?” he asked.

  “I am.” She looked down at her feet. “I mean, I even told you about my brother.”

  Watching her stand like that, all he wanted was to put his arm around her.

  “Okay,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

  “Why did you kill those men?”

  He looked away.

  “I deserve to know.” She fixed her eyes on him and slowly nodded her head. And the way she did it, the dignity of it, left him with no choice, at least not one he wanted any part of.

  “A few years ago I visited my brother in Paris,” he said. “The night before I flew home, he and I went out. The next morning, I had no memory of how I got back to his place. He was acting like something was wrong. By the time I got home, he’d just vanished. Six months later he was dead.”

  She searched his face, deciding whether to believe him. Whether to feel for him.

  “After a few months, I noticed something was different. I was different.”

  “Different how?”

  “I was stronger, faster, different.” He looked at her. “But there are side effects. I see things sometimes. And it’s getting worse.”

  “That man at the autohof, is he like you?”

  “Sarmad told me there’d been a stem cell experiment. But I think whatever was done to me isn’t as…it’s a light version of whatever they did to the other people, and I think that man back there was the only one to survive.”

  “What are you going to do if he finds us again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Silvana looked away. “Do you think your brother did this to you?”

  “No, he would never.”

  She got closer. “Can you really know?”

  He looked down. “Eric…was just one of those people. He could never have done something like this.”

  “Okay,” Silvana said, and the way she said it was soft, like she understood.

  They both watched each other.

  “And what are you here for?” she said.

  “Four men killed my brother, and one of them is still out there.”

  He checked the horizon again. Now that his adrenaline had dumped, he could feel his exhaustion. It hung on him, pulling down with the ceaselessness of gravity.

  He noticed a drainage pipe in a ditch. For a second he had an insane urge to crawl inside it with Silvana and sleep for a day.

  “Did you kill those men in Paris?” Silvana asked.

  “No.”

  “Was it you I saw at my brother’s house that night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you…did you kill my brother?”

  “No.” Now he fixed his eyes on hers. “But I wanted to.”

  She watched him for a long time and then slipped back into the passenger seat. He got behind the wheel.

  “Let me take you to Berlin,” he said. “I’ll get you to your parents.”

  He put his hand on her forearm.

  She recoiled.

  Not much. Maybe half an inch.

  Silvana’s eyes went to his, like she hadn’t meant to do it. And he realized now he’d been right: it wasn’t her fear that should worry him.

  It was uncanny valley.

  Uncanny valley was a robotics theory Eric had told him about. People prefer objects similar to people. They will feel affection for something that has a face, like a teddy bear, but not for something that doesn’t, like a rock. As an object becomes more human-like, people’s positive feelings toward it spike. But there’s a dead zone where if something becomes too human-like without actually being human, those positive feelings suddenly reverse and crash—into uncanny valley. It was why nobody in middle school wanted to sit next to the kid with the prosthetic hand.

  Tom didn’t look any different, but he was different. And he was sure he’d seen it in her face, that nanosecond of revulsion.

  He looked away and started the car, ending the moment between them. He had to. The part of him that was still normal—still only recently a teenager—would have died a little if he’d stayed in that moment.

  “Tom . . .”

  It was the first time she’d ever used his name. But all she did was shake her head and look out the window.

  CHAPTER 32

  The skin had bruised immediately after he hit the door at the truck stop. Now it was almost black.

  Bogasian sank back in the motel tub, down to his nostrils, to let it soak. Every once in a while, he poked at the bruise, and a thin worm of blood was birthed into the water. After a few minutes, he stood up. He poured rubbing alcohol down his arm where the skin had split and shook from the pain. After he got dressed, he sat at his computer.

  He should have known better than to sit still like that.

  They crept up on him. First, darkness seeped into his eyes. Then a white streak blotted out his vision, so bright it hurt. It was gone in less than a second.

  Another white splice lit up his eyes, hitting them like lightning.

  More splices. They joined together into images. Then the images expanded into scenes. It was never people he’d killed, but people he’d seen on his way to kill.

  —The woman in Moscow who glanced at him from a nearby taxi and froze. Time marched on, but she was paused, expressionless, as her whole body pointed at him. And he was scared because it wasn’t the woman
looking at him but something else using her eyes to see.

  —The boy who almost hit him with a bike. The boy cowered on the ground and put his hands up as Bogasian stood over him. But underneath those shaking arms, there was a face that wasn’t afraid, that saw him for what he was.

  —The waitress from the last restaurant he’d ever been to. As she took his order, a bullet hole in her forehead dribbled blood onto her uniform, and she just stood there with an apple-pie smile while blood ran into her eyes and mouth.

  In the lab, they’d told him about the attacks he’d get during long periods of downtime. A doctor explained that his increased metabolism seemed to cause a “slight increase” in anxiety, and that without something productive to “crowd it out,” he’d have a problem.

  And the little dickhead had been right.

  Once tasked, Bogasian could keep the splices and the darkness on the edges. But in moments like this, they gained on him. They were always gaining on him.

  As a kid, he and a friend had gone on an amusement park ride called the Teacup. People spun around in gigantic cups and saucers that rotated on a carousel. Except he and his friend found they could get their cup to spin faster by twisting the stationary wheel bolted into the middle of it. So they twisted and twisted. It was slow at first. Then they really got it going. And still they twisted and twisted—until they’d gone too far. It wasn’t ordinary dizziness that they felt. They were past that inside of five seconds. Then the g-forces had them.

  They both grabbed at the wheel.

  Then they were clawing at it.

  But the Teacup weighed a couple hundred pounds. They couldn’t slow down. His friend was sobbing. He’d deflated in his seat, eyes to the sky. Prone, like an offering to God. But Bogasian realized if he kept his eyes closed, the dizziness was tolerable. He just couldn’t ever open them. As soon as he did, everything turned and turned—up, down, left, right—until the world was carving itself to pieces right in front of his eyes. Until he would have done anything to make it stop.

  Now he had the same problem. Eventually the splices would never stop or the darkness would snap across his eyes like a curtain. And then—

  He’d be back on the Teacup.

  And he didn’t know how long he could stay on. Or what things he would do to get off.

  Tom and Silvana.

  They were his lifeline. He’d spent the previous hour dialing hotels, trying to find a reservation under Adrien Michel. He would spend the next hour doing the same.

  Tom had been a surprise. The way he’d been able to bend the knob on the door, it was obvious he’d been worked on. Other than himself, Bogasian had never known of anyone who had gotten injected and survived.

  He went to the window and watched the lights dotting the horizon. At this safe distance, this late hour, he could finally look directly at them.

  After two long hours, a message came. His computer screen went dark, and white letters emerged:

  —You were to follow, not engage.

  Bogasian typed: He has Sarmad’s files.

  —We need him alive.

  Suddenly he understood. Whatever had been done to Tom wasn’t as bad as what they’d done to him. And now that they’d seen Tom, they just had to have him.

  —Find, follow, and await tasking. Berlin is now the priority. There’s a new target.

  Bogasian went to get up. But another message appeared.

  —You’re zero fail on this.

  And Bogasian could breathe again. He was back in motion.

  He was one step ahead of the Teacup.

  CHAPTER 33

  Tom stood outside a little market in the dim area between the streetlights. Silvana was inside. He watched her dump an armful of groceries on the checkout counter, then run back for a few more things. She kept turning around and making comments to the clerk, and whatever she was saying, it was cracking him up.

  For now, what happened at the truck stop almost seemed behind her. Or at least, for a moment, it didn’t have her by the throat. She was alive in that moment.

  She came out of the market cradling a bloated grocery bag. As soon as she saw him, she cocked her head at the bag, indicating the feast they were going to have, and smiled. She was too far away for him to say something but too close not to look at.

  He liked that, waiting for her like this.

  Back in the motel room, booked with the Sorbonne student’s ID, they sat at the desk and ate their dinner. In between dangerously enormous bites of food, Silvana told him stories about her friends and asked him at least twenty questions about what he did for fun. (At least ten of these took some form of: “Well, there must be something?”) He asked her about her brother, and all she said was, “There’s nothing really there to talk about, I guess.” She didn’t bring up the rest stop, but she asked him more about his brother. What was he like? Then she perked up. “No, tell me something weird about him.”

  “You want to hear something weird about Eric?”

  “Yes.”

  He thought about all the things Eric had given up to take care of him, how much time and energy it took to include your kid brother in every single thing you ever did as a twenty-two-year-old. Still, at times, Tom got a glimpse of the young man Eric would have been under different circumstances.

  “He had a thing about doll hair,” Tom said.

  “Doll hair?”

  “It disgusted him. Like he couldn’t eat if there was anything with doll hair in the room.”

  “What?” She was grinning.

  “And feathers too. If a feather came out of a cushion and he was eating, you could actually see the moment where he’d stop chewing and just sit there, staring at it.”

  “Tell me you used this against him in some way.”

  “Well, naturally his college friends found out. One night he goes on a date with this girl Sarah Patino, who everybody was in love with. Before Eric went out, his buddies are asking him how he got a date with her, and this devolves into him giving everyone this lecture on the importance of personal hygiene and actually listening when a girl is speaking. Then he mentioned he’d probably be bringing her back, and he’d appreciate it if there was no leering at or attempted touching of his date. And, you know, everyone was sort of suspiciously accepting of all this. They’re all like: Of course we’ll behave. In fact we’ll even clean up a little.”

  “Oh god.”

  “So, by the time Eric comes back with her, we’re all outside looking in the windows, and there’s feathers everywhere. It was like someone had thrown a chicken coop into an industrial fan. He tries to laugh it off, but after a few seconds we see he’s sweating. And every time Sarah isn’t looking at him, he starts sneaking this tissue out of his pocket and wiping his forehead.

  “They walk to the kitchen to get to Eric’s room in the back, so we all run to the other window, and we see Eric is just standing there, staring at it: on the counter, there’s a raw steak with doll hair sprinkled on top. This thing…it was like something an artist in Germany came up with. I mean it made me sick. Sarah asks him about it, except Eric isn’t really saying much at this point. He’s just planted there, looking at it like it’s a human head.”

  “What happened?”

  “He puked. And then she puked. And then she never went out with him again.” Tom started laughing.

  Silvana stared at him. “Men are animals. I really mean that. You’re like crocodiles with a human face.”

  “That was a week before he graduated,” Tom said, and he got quiet. “He left for Europe two years later, almost to the day.”

  For the rest of the evening, he sat talking and listening but mostly watching her. He’d never thought or cared about a life after finding the men he was looking for. It would be unreasonable to expect to survive this. But if he did somehow get a life, and if that life was filled with things half as nice as the woman across from him, it would be a good one.

  He was brushing his teeth when she appeared outside the bathroom door. She was in
her underwear, her legs barely covered by an extra-large T-shirt she’d bought at the convenience store.

  She held up her toothbrush, and he made room for her. As she bent over the sink to wet her toothbrush, the shirt hitched up to the area where her legs turned into hips. Then they stood together, mouths open, their brushing the only sound in the room. He sensed she was watching him.

  “So what does it feel like?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “You said your body wasn’t the same. What’s it feel like?”

  He didn’t know what to make of her question, not after what had happened in the car.

  “Do you feel things more?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She bobbed her head, satisfied. He lost his concentration for a second, and his eyes ticked down to her legs. He never would have guessed they’d be that tan.

  Her toothbrush stopped.

  When he looked up, she was watching him again. She reached across his body to get a tissue, and her hip brushed against his. He waited until she was done and went to rinse his toothbrush. She spat a mouthful of toothpaste right as his hand moved under the faucet. The gob of blue yolk slid off the back of his hand.

  They looked at each other.

  “You didn’t give me any warning,” she said.

  He rinsed it off.

  “I’m sorry about what happened in the car earlier.”

  He nodded.

  “It’s just that, you know, what you did was…”

  He kept nodding, hoping she would drop it.

  “Not normal,” she said. “I mean I was scared of you before you bent a doorknob like that. So…”

  “You don’t have to explain yourself.”

  “But I want to.”

  He dried his hands for what seemed like a long time.

  “Look,” he said. “I know what I am is…I mean I guess I’d feel the same way if I were in your position.”

  A funny look flashed across her face.

  “I think you’re underestimating me,” she said.

  To avoid her stare, he took his time folding the hand towel until it was perfectly symmetrical.