Hellbound Hearts (25 page)

Then he looked at me one last time. “Are you sure you would not like to play?”

I shook my head and backed away, and the leader began cackling. Behind him his brethren demolished the last of Gordon, even though his head, lanced on a hook but still intact, managed to scream in pain.

I turned and ran, feeling the house rumble and the electricity suddenly coming back on. I didn't yet fully realize what had happened and just scrambled for the door, but as I reached it, I turned back and saw the leader standing alone with the box.

Gordon was gone. Only his blood remained.

The leader had stopped laughing, but the smile of pain lingered.

I didn't get it until the lights flickered on and the alarm system that had been silenced came back to life with a slowly winding screech.

I looked one last time at the leader, who seemed to be fading into the light, and the smile was gone. Instead he looked at me with a sort of pity, like I was the fool who had played a game I didn't understand and thought I'd won.

I didn't even try running. I walked out of Harden's mansion with my hands raised in the air as police cars screamed through the gates and up the horseshoe driveway.

Behind me was unimaginable carnage, a safe with my prints all over it, and I had a pocketful of stolen drugs.

The leader was a clever one. I had to give him that. Even with a searing anger welling inside, knowing I'd been fooled, knowing I'd played his game despite imagining I'd played by my rules, I had to give the mutilated man his credit.

I'd be blamed for all the crimes, and the death of Gordon—
second biggest scumbag in the world, and the only person I had personally sent to Hell, condemning myself as well.

I thought about what had happened as the cops surrounded me, pointing guns and yelling the things cops yell. I had never touched the box, and I certainly wasn't the one who'd opened it, but I now understood.

I thought I was so smart, and I had played right into the leader's hands. It wasn't just the handling of the box that allowed them access to my life; it was my interaction with him. I had entered their world, with their rules, before I even knew what was happening.

I'd played his game, thinking I wasn't, and I lost regardless.

Now I knew why the leader laughed as he had. I'd thought it was a communion of souls facing off, but the leader had simply played me as Gordon had the box, and both of us had lost our souls—one in Hell and the other on Earth.

Well played.

Sarah Langan

A lot of thoughts crossed Absalom's mind when he discovered that his pregnant wife had left him. As he confronted his Mr. Coffee machine, bewildered by its myriad buttons, he wondered: Was it his halitosis? Was she a spy for ExxonMobil? He'd known her less than a year, and back then she'd had a man (or woman) on the side, so was the child even his? He looked at the refrigerator, where the kid's sonogram was taped like an edible fetus, then around the empty kitchen. His wife was nowhere in sight.

He found her note on the passenger seat of their blue Saab. A tribute to the obvious:

I'm sorry. It's getting too dangerous.
All My Love,
Mireille

On the radio, some NPR dipshit reported on Stanford University's renegade black hole. The EPA had evacuated the entire campus and would soon do the same with all of Southern California. It was spreading too fast to contain. A nuke was the only way to hasten its collapse, but so far nobody wanted to suggest it.

As warmth poured through the vents that cold winter morning, he blew on his hands to get his fingers moving again, then set Mireille's note ablaze with the car's cigarette lighter. It didn't crackle as it burned. Instead, it singed. His parents, his little brother, his college professors, his contemporaries, even his protégés—they'd all betrayed him. Stolen his work, lost faith, mocked his ambitions, taken jobs in other countries just to get away from him. Why had he expected that Mireille would be any different, just because he'd paid for her?

He looked up at their old colonial as he pulled from the driveway, and imagined that she was trapped inside the master bedroom while a voracious fire burned. Would she scream? Or would she maintain an infuriatingly stiff upper lip as the flames licked her cheeks? He hoped to find out.

The Servitus Labs were a three-block radius of sprawl surrounded by barbwire and armed guards. Six years ago, its CEO recruited Absalom to manage the Dark Materials Project, and every day since then, the saboteurs had gotten bolder. Eco-terrorists, anti-eugenicists, university competition, random crazies who needed a cause—they all flocked to Winchester, Massachusetts, sandwich boards and spray paint in hands like they'd discovered the new Roswell. They wanted either to halt the project or to have a piece of it. Sometimes both, so long as it gave them a few seconds of fame.

Winchester was prettier than most suburbs, full of colonial mansions, kids' parks, and independently owned boutiques selling high-priced crap like antique Underwood typewriters that didn't type and sterling silver jewelry crafted by hippies with rich parents. The town was far enough away from Boston to keep the operation secure, but close enough to lure the top scientists. You could raise a family here, which, until recently, had been part of his plan.

At the first checkpoint, he rolled down the window so the infrared laser could scan his retina. Upon recognition, the gate lifted, and George and Juan waved him through with the butts of their semiautomatics. He'd always gotten the impression that neither of them
liked him. But that was fine. They were rent-a-cops, and he was on track for a second Nobel Prize.

“It's a mess,” Dan Stephens announced as the second Absalom walked through the third security door. A missing wife, and no morning coffee. He had to agree: it was a mess.

“The chimps. The dogs. Even the fucking rabbits,” Dan said. He was a lanky guy who wore cheap Men's Wearhouse suits to work every day, even though he could afford better. A geek, like everybody else here.

“More mania?” Absalom asked. They were standing in the hallway. Ionized, filtered air hissed through the vents. It smelled sweet.

“Two of the chimps bashed their heads against their cages last night. They killed themselves.” Dan pinched the skin between his eyes and took a couple of gasping breaths. “Animals don't commit suicide. They were scared of something!” Dan's eyes got misty. He was unmarried, and called the chimps his babies.

This entire Winchester Complex, which Absalom managed, was devoted to the discovery and study of Shadow DNA; dark matter. Blue eyes, wide smile, agility of synapses: all were determined by run-of-the mill chromosomes. Humans have twenty-three pairs; chimps, twenty-four; fruit flies, four; E. coli, one. Shadow DNA were more sophisticated. Personality, sense of humor, moral compass, human soul—these variables existed outside the parameters of the double helix. There was a reason that, until now, no geneticist had accurately predicted their expression, even after the entire human genome was decoded: they were determined by Shadow DNA.

A decade ago, Absalom was the only scientist in the world who'd anticipated that the dark matter attending all mass also existed in the human genome. What he hadn't guessed, and the reason it had taken so long to find the stuff, was that only mammals possessed it. The rest—bacteria, fruit flies, lizards, even sharks—none were complex enough to warrant the extra genetic material.

Shadow DNA's commercial potential was huge. Parents could special order the best and brightest children. Medicines could be targeted against mutated Shadow genes, so that humorless duds
suddenly became prom kings. In another generation, this society could clone itself, and no one would ever have to die.

In college, while every other wannabe MD had gotten laid by promising his money-hungry girlfriend a white picket fence, Absalom had sat in his dorm room, gazing at a poster of the double helix while jerking off, convinced that something so perfect proved God. He'd worked his whole life. Forty-two years old, and his back was crooked from leaning over a desk eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. But now he headed the most important project in history, and raked in millions. He'd been able to buy a Porsche, a summer house on the Cape, present Mireille with a fucking ruby tiara and tell her she was his queen the night they got hitched. Five years ago,
Time
magazine had called him the smartest man in the world.

“I'm worried. I'm not sure we should keep doing this,” Dan the geek announced. “Something's not right.” Above them the fluorescent lights blinked, and the vents hissed.

“I hired you to do this. It's your job,” Absalom answered.

Dan was the head animal behaviorist. As Shadow DNA codes were cracked, it was his job to juxtapose them against discrete animal behaviors. So far, he'd discovered that those animals with thin dark matter base clouds were hostile, while those animals with thicker bases tended toward more rational thought.

Last month, Absalom's team had finally cracked the chimp code. It made an elegant picture: a double helix surrounded by a spinning cloud of nucleic acid strands thin as cobwebs. On the computer screen, it looked a little like a sandstorm. Not long after Dan began mapping the cloud, and tacking it against these animals' souls, the chimps had begun to act strangely. Cannibalism. Self-mutilation. Devouring their own offspring when not fed on time.

“You're almost done, aren't you?” Absalom asked.

Dan wiped his eyes. Tears of indignant rage. “It's hurting them. It'll hurt us, too. You need to shut the project down.”

Absalom took a breath, stared at Dan, hard. Mireille, holding that fat stomach, had voiced the same concern. Anecdotal evidence.
Random coincidence. Bad press. Just as easily, it was Stanford's black hole making the animals nervous, or the radiation from that spill in Alaska.

He'd put his heart into this project. Sacrificed his wife for it. Fired his closest friend, who'd leaked the animal mania results to the press. He'd given up his health. His eyes were 40/40, and he got so dizzy from all the numbers spinning in his head that when he was alone, he talked to himself. He wasn't about to stop now, when he was so close. If this thing worked out like he hoped, in another couple of years, he'd have a new body. A new life. A whole new Mireille, if he wanted.

“Pack your desk,” Absalom said.

Dan gasped, and began to wail. The sight was ridiculous. “Don't be a pussy,” Absalom spat, then headed for his lab, his stride fast and furious.

Coffee was waiting for him at the lab. Black with three sugars, just how he liked it. His desk was perched a few steps above the thirty-man workstation like a throne. Below, the world's top statisticians and geneticists typed madly, calloused fingers click-clacking. Their faces glowed green from the reflected lights of their computer screens.

He sighed. Sipped his coffee. At least here, he was happy. He belonged. In truth, he never should have married Mireille. He wasn't the marrying kind. He'd never been home for dinner, or taken her out for a night on the town. No honeymoon. Then again, that's no reason to leave in the middle of the night, and steal the Porsche and jewelry. At eight months along, she must have greased herself with Crisco to fit behind that wheel.

Clack-clack, typing away. The sound was like music. On the large console, percent complete figures ran for each individual sequence. Everybody except Phil was ahead of schedule.

Absalom's heart warmed. He picked up the phone and dialed. A mistake, surely. The rash behavior of women. He'd give her another chance. She worked one building away, in public relations. They'd met last year, when he'd discovered the first evidence of Shadow
DNA in the brown rat. She'd composed the press release, and coached his staff on how to handle reporters. As soon as the story broke, Winchester was swarmed with media. Stanford, MIT, and every nickel-and-dime pharmaceutical corporation in the country tried to reproduce his team's findings. None of them succeeded, and so long as the federal order to reveal their methods remained pending in court, they never would. Stanford had screwed up the most egregiously by toying with dark matter electrons. A black hole swallowed their entire astrophysics lab, and now everybody was pointing fingers. Absalom's photo had been on the cover of the
New York Times
with the caption “Hero or Traitor?” Through it all, Mireille had been his rock.

Then again, last week her ex-boyfriend had visited from Boston. His junk-heap Plymouth had been parked in the driveway like it belonged there.

After the third ring, Mireille's voice mail picked up. “This is Mireille Vitols. I no longer work at Servitus. Please direct your call to reception.”

So she'd given notice. She'd planned this. He clenched his fist and imagined her skin peeling from her bones. Even last night, a hot dinner had been waiting for him in the oven, his suits dry-cleaned and filed in his closet like charts. The sneak.

He hung up the phone just as Phil from the cubicle in the back row stood. “This is suspicious,” Phil said. Phil was convinced that everything was suspicious; he had a severe case of paranoid schizophrenia. A lot of the crazies were good at math.

Absalom looked at the bottom of his empty cup. “Somebody get me more,” he called, then descended the steps like a king and entered the lab. The series on Phil's screen wouldn't stop running, even though there were only 250 million base pairs to quantify—they'd isolated the distinct genes that coded for suppressed memories. But the screen registered 511 million base pairs. It was at 302 million and counting. Adenosine-Thymine, Guyanine-Cytosine: AAAAGGGCCCAAAGT. Like souls possessed, the screen was a series of letters and statistics, running fast as blurs.

“It's not looping back from the beginning, is it? What's it sequencing?” Absalom asked. As he watched, the screen blinked. He thought of Mireille, and the first time he'd reached across her desk and touched her. The kid couldn't be his. The ex-boyfriend, the kid at the 7-Eleven, the guy at the car wash. Any of them. All of them. He'd seen how they looked at her. He should have fucked her up the ass like he'd always wanted. He should have kicked her in the gut the second she'd shown him that pink stick.