by Peter Liney
“Absolutely.”
“Thank God,” I said, kissing Lena on the forehead, but her mind had already traveled on elsewhere.
“What about Clancy and Miriam? What’s going to happen to them?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll have to give them a more detailed scan.”
“Then what?”
The Doc paused, looking that bit lost. “I don’t know . . . I might try freezing.”
“What good’s that gonna do?” Nick asked.
“If we can get the implant in a defined state, stop it metamorphosing, it might make it easier to remove.”
There was a long chunk of silence, no one looking sure what to think. Part of the trouble was, like it or not, we had to trust the Doc, to believe what he was telling us; he could’ve been stalling, playing for time—maybe there was no hope? Or maybe the removal was simple and he could do it then and there, but by hanging around he’d get to see more of Lena and Thomas, maybe even conduct a few tests of his own?
It was only later, after catching up on a couple of hours’ sleep, Lena gently dozing beside me, that I remembered about my conversation with Nick. I blearily struggled up, again feeling like death, that maybe that damn thing inside me was poisoning my whole metabolism.
“You okay?” Lena whispered, not wanting to disturb Thomas.
“Just gonna have a word with Nick.”
“Clancy?”
“Yeah?” I replied, my hand on the door handle.
“It’ll always be us,” she told me. “You know that, don’t you? I’ll choose you over everything.”
I went back and kissed her, then made my way outside. I found Nick around the side, occupying himself by splitting a few logs.
“Trouble?” I asked, his expression telling me he’d been waiting for me.
He sighed then shook his head, as if he could acknowledge what he was about to tell me, but sure couldn’t believe it. “Miriam tried to kill me.”
I stared at him. What the hell was he talking about? She barely moved apart from when she was eating.
“I know, I know,” he said, as if he could read my mind, “but she did.”
“Miriam?” I repeated, not getting it at all.
“I usually stay with her ’til she falls asleep, then go to bed myself. Occasionally, if I’m really tired, I nod off on the edge of her bed.” He paused for a moment, like he couldn’t bear to go on. “The night you left . . . I awoke feeling something really tight around my neck—I tell ya, I couldn’t believe it!—she was trying to strangle me with the cord of her bathrobe.” Again he paused, as if still deep in shock. “She’s barely moved in years. I wouldn’t’ve thought she’d have the strength, but it was all I could do to fight her off.”
I didn’t know what to say—partly ’cuz I couldn’t believe Miriam was physically capable of such a thing, but also ’cuz—well, why would she do that to Nick? I couldn’t imagine how he must be feeling. Taking care of her all those years, attending to all her needs, never getting a thing in return—damn it, dragging her in a bed halfway across the country—and for that, she tried to kill him?
Nick slumped forward, his face in his hands, and I noticed how his gut had shrunk. “Something else,” he said eventually, looking up at me with reddened eyes.
“What?”
“I been thinking . . .” Again he paused, looking like someone who’d rather pull out his own teeth than drag out the thoughts he had in his head. “Maybe George killed his brothers?”
I never commented, immediately knowing he was going somewhere with this and trying to work out where. He met my gaze full full-on, urging me to say it, to save him the trouble, but it was no use.
“Maybe that’s why it’s not important everyone gets an implant,” he ventured at last, “’Cuz those who do, kill those who don’t.”
If I hadn’t been sitting down, I reckon I might well have fallen. Immediately I knew there was something in what he was saying, that that was the answer to Jimmy’s little mystery, why it wasn’t important that the weevils implanted everyone.
Just like with the shadow-growlers, Nora Jagger’s plans had reached a point where if you weren’t with her, you had to be eliminated. George must’ve had an implant and once it’d been keyed, set about killing anyone who didn’t, including his brothers—and Lena. That was the missing piece of the jigsaw—why he’d ignored me and kept trying to get past me to Lena. Same with Miriam: something in that thing gave her not just the impulse, but the strength to try to kill the nearest non-imp—even if he loved her more than anyone on this earth. And then . . . Oh, Jesus! . . . and then finally I saw how all that related to me, and gave out with this loud, almost sickened, moan.
Nick immediately patted me on the back; I guess he’d been ready and waiting for me to reach that point.
“Am I gonna try to kill Lena and Thomas?” I cried.
“No,” he replied, “the Doctor’ll get that thing out. Don’t you worry.”
“Jesus, noooo!” I moaned, barely able to believe the cruelty of it. I loved those two more than I ever imagined I’d be capable of loving anyone. The thought of harming them in any way made me want to strike myself from the face of the Earth. “No!”
“Clancy! It’ll be all right!” Nick tried to tell me, but I leapt up and set off for the barn as fast as I could, rushing in to find the Doc studying his computer, plainly not welcoming my interruption but stopping when he saw the expression on my face.
“I gotta get this thing outta me,” I told him.
“I know,” he replied, immediately resorting to his professional bedside manner.
“I’m gonna try to kill them.”
“Who?” he asked, plainly mystified.
“Lena and Thomas.”
Suddenly I had his full attention and his scrubbed and moisturized brow tangled into a frown. “What are you talking about?”
I told him the whole story, partly ’cuz I wanted to get it out, but more ’cuz I was hoping he’d dismiss it, but one look at his face was enough to realize it wasn’t gonna happen; that Nick was right.
“You gotta get it out of me,” I repeated. “I don’t care what damage it does.”
“I’m trying,” he assured me, gesturing at his computer.
For a moment there was silence, both of us obviously working through what it meant.
“What are you going to do?” he eventually asked.
“What d’you mean?”
He gave this kinda helpless shrug. “If you present a danger—to your partner and child, to all of us . . . with the best will in the world, Clancy, you can’t stay here. You’re a big guy who used to live his life through violence.”
It’s funny, I used to be so proud of that. Like I told ya, it got me what I saw as respect. Now I was ashamed: I was an obsolete liability, a weapon from an old war. Others had taken over now, new ways of fighting where you destroyed the enemy by getting them to turn on each other, where this dumb old big guy could be made to kill those he loved more than anyone in his life. The Doc was right: I had to go. I could no longer protect my family from the enemy. I was the enemy.
“Are you getting anywhere at all?” I asked him, unable to keep the desperation out of my voice.
“It’s finding other people’s parts of the jigsaw,” he sighed. “And I can’t stay much longer—she’ll get suspicious.”
“Forget about her,” I told him.
“You know what she’s capable of,” he reminded me.
“I don’t give a rabbit’s fuck!”
He went silent, plainly intimidated by my anger, but there was a much greater force at work here than me and we both knew it.
“So at some point in the next few days I might try to kill Lena and Thomas?” I said, as if recapping.
“Not necessarily.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s not as straightforward as that; there’re a lot of things that can influence the outcome, affect the timing. It can vary depending on what type of implant i
t is, the character of the host, how long you can fight it. Once you’re keyed though . . . then it is over.”
“And no one knows how that works?”
“Except her.”
I paused, wondering whether to tell him, in the end seeing no harm in it. “There’s something—I don’t know what it is—flies around here. You never get to see it, but I swear it’s there.”
He shrugged, as if I was a patient telling him one symptom too many—that might confuse the diagnosis. “It’s possible; all I do know is that whatever’s used, she’s personally involved, so maybe she activates the program herself.”
I left him a few minutes later. To his credit, I gotta say, he had looked genuinely upset. Sitting there deep in thought, even distracted from his computer, conscience and guilt maybe churning over, that age-old realization that by doing nothing he’d allowed Evil to flourish. Or who knows? Maybe that was giving him far too much credit?
How I could possibly tell Lena, I didn’t know, but what the Doc’d said had been right: I couldn’t stay; it was far too dangerous. With the exception of Miriam, I was the only one with an implant—I might try to wipe out the whole lotta them.
I paced around the yard for a while, kicking and cursing, trying to come up with another way, but eventually accepted there wasn’t one. Like it or not, I had to go and tell Lena.
I found her in the bedroom, sitting in the chair feeding Thomas. She knew something was wrong the moment I walked in. Not that it made it any easier to come out with it.
I sat on the arm of the chair and stroked the little guy’s soft downy head, that defenselessness that usually made me feel so protective toward him sending a real chill through me.
As much as Lena’d changed me, I had the feeling that Thomas’d changed her more. She had another responsibility now, a really big one, and occasionally seemed that much more serious ’cuz of it. I was no longer always number one, not the way I used to be. I guess we guys don’t understand that sometimes. We think things should more or less stay the same. Some even get jealous (of a little baby, for chrissake!), especially if there isn’t the same amount of fooling around going on—which most times there isn’t. But it wasn’t simply a case of us two becoming three; there’d been three things in that relationship for a long time: Lena, me, and the love we felt for each other. Now that love had an expression and needed to be shared around a little more, but that didn’t mean it was no longer there, that in a time of crisis it wouldn’t rear up ready to fight whatever was coming our way.
At first she simply couldn’t take it in. She might’ve believed it of others, of George—she’d suffered that firsthand—but the thought that I might try to kill her and Thomas? Everyone on the farm? That was too much. I had to keep explaining it, even though I knew she’d understood the first time. Why I had to leave, why I had to get as far away from them as I could. Over and over she said it wasn’t necessary, that we’d manage somehow, that we’d always seen things through before, but this was different and she knew it. There was no other way. No matter how much she told me she’d be careful, that she wouldn’t leave me alone with Thomas—or maybe because she said she wouldn’t leave me alone with Thomas—I knew I had to go.
Of course, I tried to sugar-coat it, telling her there was every chance the Doc would come up with something, that the implant still had some time before it would be fully functional, but her smile was every bit as hollow as my words.
That evening, over dinner—with the Doc still out in the barn—I informed the others, though of course Nick already knew. Their reactions were pretty much the same as Lena’s: they couldn’t believe it, wouldn’t accept it, said it would never happen—and yet a couple of times I caught a glimpse of something else. As much as they tried to hide it, their expressions were underwritten by a degree of concern, a fear that I might well run amok, slaying them all like some old-time horror movie, and I found myself endlessly repeating that I’d go, that there was no way I’d stay and risk harming them.
The conversation slowly scratched and scraped its way to silence. I mean, what could anyone say? Though Jimmy did finally come up with the one question that did have to be asked. “Are you sure that guy’s telling the truth?” he said, plainly still with a score to settle.
“I don’t trust him,” Gordie chipped in.
“Why would you?” I commented. “But we can’t take the chance.”
“It’s true,” Nick assured them, making a rare contribution to the conversation. “Believe me.”
He then gave them the briefest account of what’d happened with Miriam. He had to stop a coupla times to compose himself. The mood was noticeably darkening as everyone suddenly turned back to me.
I kept it as matter-of-fact as I could, telling them I’d head out in the morning, just until I knew how I’d react to the implant, then, all being well, hopefully I’d be able to return.
“Where you gonna go, Clancy?” Hanna asked.
“I dunno,” I answered, sadness already beginning to invade me. “Just . . . away.”
Later that evening I returned to the barn. Something had occurred to me and I needed to talk to the Doc again. I found him still busily working away on his laptop, though by the look of him, the frustration hardening on his face, he hadn’t made a great deal of progress.
“Anything?” I asked.
“These things take time,” he sighed.
I nodded, actually, as pressing as that was, I had other things on my mind. “Are all your operations on there?” I asked, gesturing at his computer.
“Yes.”
“Even Lena’s?”
He stopped for a moment, looking almost as if he’d been waiting for this conversation. “We don’t have time, Clancy.”
“But if something happens to me—would you?”
“If it’s possible. If I get the chance.”
“She’s gonna need to be able to see. Tell her.”
“Doesn’t she want the operation?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I’ve got to have her consent, Clancy.”
“I know, but . . . try and persuade her, will you?”
I stayed there for a few more minutes, neither of us speaking, and then, slightly embarrassed by the conversation, I left him to it.
The thing was, Jimmy was right, everyone was right: I still didn’t know if I could trust the guy. I was grateful he couldn’t communicate with anyone, that without aerials or satellites he couldn’t get a signal over the mountains, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t something else organized. I guess the truth was, as it always had been, that I had to trust him, at least to some degree. I was leaving him with the two most valued treasures of my life, and even though I knew the others would be watching every move he made, I was still a long way from comfortable about it.
That night was torture from the moment Lena and me went to bed ’til the moment we got up, mainly ’cuz we were trying so hard to play the whole thing down, to pretend it was just a precaution, that I’d soon be back with her, when really we didn’t have a clue. Was I gonna turn into a monster, like in another of those books I read out on the Island: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Did the implant change your whole character so that you became nothing but a killing machine searching out non-imps, or was it more of a programmed response to some kind of stimulus? Not that it mattered much; whether of its own accord or after being keyed, sometime in the next few days that thing inside me was gonna turn me into a killer again, just like in the bad old days with Mr. Meltoni, only this time I’d be taking my orders from the Bitch, and my victim wouldn’t be someone who’d got a bit too big for their boots, but maybe my lover, our child, all our friends.
We tried to make love, more, I reckon, ’cuz we thought we should, that it would help, but we were both so sick with worry we couldn’t manage it. I mean, no matter how positive we were trying to be, how much we reminded ourselves about the insurmountable odds we’d conquered in the past, this was different.
; This time, though I’d never have admitted it to her, or anyone else, it felt a bit like the end.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I can’t tell you how odd the atmosphere was the following morning, what with me packing up what I thought I’d need as if I was going away on a trip. No one quite knew what to say, how to approach it. Hanna put her arms around me, as if she feared it might be the last time, as if she wanted me to know that she’d forgive me no matter what I did, which damn near broke me up. Jimmy and Delilah tried to act as normally as they could but still had that look about them, like they were about to let a wild animal go free that they’d only just tamed.
At one point Nick gestured for me to join him out in the yard so he could have a quiet word, those circles around his eyes now so dark they were like smeared ashes.
“Clancy, if this thing does take a hold of you, if it brings you back here and you end up . . .” He paused and took a deep breath. “Kill her too, won’t you?”
“Nick!”
“She won’t be able to exist without me.”
“I’m not killing anyone,” I told him. “I’d rather kill myself. Anyway, she’s an imp.”
“That’s why you have to kill her.”
“No one’s gonna die, not if I can help it.”
“But—”
“No one’s gonna die!” I repeated.
I gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder, then led him back inside, feeling a little guilty that I was making promise after promise that I wasn’t sure I could keep. I glanced at Miriam as I passed her bed, for some reason imagining that implant inside her gradually subverting what was left of her mind.
Taking Lena and Thomas into the bedroom to say goodbye was one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life. No matter how much we tried to pretend it was merely a precaution, that everything would soon be back to normal, we knew it wasn’t true, that we were drowning in uncertainty. My conversation with Nick had upset me more than I’d let on; the realization that like it or not, we’d all have to consider extraordinary measures.
I’d collected one of the lasers Jimmy had mended and now placed it in Lena’s hand, hoping that would be explanation enough, but she just stood there staring into deepest nothingness.